could take you down the Seine to an adorable place called La Pêche Miraculeuse.”
“What does that mean, Elinor?” Eugene asked again.
“Well, darling,” she said with an air of patient resignation, “if you must have a translation I suppose you’d call it The Miraculous Catch—a fishing catch, you know. Only it doesn’t mean that. It would be sacrilege to call it that. It means La Pêche Miraculeuse and nothing else—it’s quite untranslatable—it really is.”
“Yes,” cried Starwick enthusiastically, “and even their simplest names—their names of streets and towns and places: L’Etoile, for example—how grand and simple that is!” he said quietly, “and how perfect—the whole design and spatial grandeur of the thing is in it,” he concluded earnestly. “It really is, you know.”
“Oh, absolutely!” Elinor agreed. “You couldn’t call it The Star, you know. That means nothing. But L’Etoile is perfect—it simply couldn’t be anything else.”
“Quite!” Starwick said concisely, and then, turning to Eugene with his air of sad instructive earnestness, he continued: “—And that woman at Le Jockey Club last night—the one who sang the songs—you know?” he said with grave malicious inquiry, his voice trembling a little and his face flushing as he spoke—“the one you kept wanting to find out about—what she was saying?—” Quiet ruddy laughter shook him.
“Perfectly vile, of course!” cried Elinor with gay horror. “And all the time, poor dear, he kept wanting to know what it meant…. I was going to throw something at you if you kept on—if I’d had to translate that I think I should simply have passed out on the spot—”
“I know,” said Starwick, burbling with laughter—“I caught the look in your eye—it was really quite murderous! And terribly amusing!” he added. Turning to his friend, he went on seriously: “But really, Gene, it is rather stupid to keep asking for the meaning of everything. It is, you know. And it’s so extraordinary,” he said protestingly, “that a person of your quality—your kind of understanding—should be so dull about it! It really is.”
“Why?” the other said bluntly, and rather sullenly. “What’s wrong with wanting to find out what’s being said when you don’t understand the language? If I don’t ask, how am I going to find out?”
“But not at all!” Starwick protested impatiently. “That’s not the point at all: you can find out nothing that way. Really you can’t,” he said reproachfully. “The whole point about that song last night was not the
