“If the Kaiser and the Crown Prince had been ordinary middle-class folk,” she said, “they would have been in gaol long ago. The father for swindling the public on a grand scale; the son for stealing milk-cans.”
She had met King Constantine, then a thorn in the Allied flesh, whose sufferance for so long on the Greek throne is still a mystery to the plain Briton.
“What a degradation of a name for Constantine the Great,” said Baltazar.
“That’s just it,” she flashed. “His awful wife says ‘In hoc signo vinces,’ and dangles before his eyes the Iron Cross.”
No. Godfrey had never met a woman remotely like her. She was incomparable.
The talk developed quickly from the name of Constantine to names in general. The degradation of names. Uriah, for instance, that of the most tragic victim of dastardly treachery in history, now brought low by its association with Heep.
“I love the old Saxon names,” said Lady Northby, with some irrelevance. “Yours, dear, for instance.”
“It’s a beautiful name,” said Baltazar, “but it’s not Saxon. It’s far older.”
“Surely it’s Saxon,” said Lady Edna.
“Edna was the wife of Raguel and the mother-in-law of Tobias, the son of Tobit, the delightful young gentleman carrying a fish and accompanied by the Angel Raphael, whom you see in the Italian pictures.”