With no warning I found myself very near to tears for the pity of it. I laid my cheek on the baby’s head and when I spoke I am not even sure that Hobart Eddy heard all I was saying.
“... ‘in the name of this child,’” I repeated, “was there not something ‘in the name of this child’—something of renouncing—and of not following after nor being led by....”
For a moment he looked up at me blankly, though still with all his urbanity, his conformity, his chivalrous attention.
“I’m not preaching,” said I briskly, “but a gentleman keeps his word, and dies if need be for the sake of his oath, does he not? Whether it chances to be about a bet, or a horse, or—or a sea lion. For my own part, as a woman of the world, I cannot see why on earth he should not keep it about a christening.”
Hobart Eddy turned toward me, seeking to free his fingers of that little clinging clasp.
“Jove,” he said helplessly, “do they mean it that way?”
“‘That way,’” I cried, past the limit of my patience. “I dare say that very many people who are married would be amazed if they were told that their oath had been meant ‘that way.’ But they would sell their very days to pay a debt at bridge. ‘That way!’ Let me ask you, Hobart Eddy, if ‘I will, by God’s help’ does not mean quite as much at a marriage or a christening as it does in society?”
And at that Enid’s baby, missing the outstretched fingers, suddenly leaned toward him, smiling and eager, uttering the most inane and delicious little cries. A baby without genius would simply have paid no attention.
Hobart Eddy took the baby in his arms and looked down at him with something in his face which I had never seen there before. The baby caught at his hand and pulled at the cord of his monocle and stared up at the low blossoming boughs. As for me I fell gathering up stray petals in a ridiculous fashion and I knew that my hands were trembling absurdly.
I looked up as Mrs. Trempleau came toward us. She was dragging a burden of flowering branches and she looked some priestess of the sun gone momentarily about the offices of the blossoming earth.