“I’m sorry if I’ve bored you with a lot of questions, Elinor,” he said.
“But you haven’t!” she protested. “Darling, you haven’t for a moment! I love to answer them! It’s only that I feel so—so incompetent…. But listen, Gene,” she went on coaxingly, “couldn’t you try to forget it for a while—just sort of forget all about these words and meanings and enter into the spirit of the thing?… Couldn’t you, dear?” she said gently, and even as he looked at her with a flushed face, unable to find a ready answer to her deft irony, she put her hand out swiftly, patted him on the arm, and nodding her head with an air of swift satisfied finality, said:
“Good! I knew you would!… He’s really a darling when he wants to be, isn’t he?”
Starwick burbled with malicious laughter at sight of Eugene’s glowering and resentful face; then went on seriously:
“—But their genius for names is quite astonishing!—I mean, even in the names of their towns you get the whole thing…. What could be more like Paris,” he said quietly, “than the name of Paris?… The whole quality of the place is in the name. Or Dijon, for example. Or Rheims. Or Carcassonne. The whole spirit of Provence is in the word: what name could more perfectly express Aries than the name it has—it gives you the whole place, its life, its people, its peculiar fragrance…. And how different we are from them in that respect…. I mean,” his voice rose on a note of passionate conviction, “you could almost say that the whole difference between us—the thing we lack, the thing they have—the whole thing that is wrong with us, is evident in our names…. It really is, you know,” he said earnestly, turning toward his friend again. “The whole thing’s most important…. How harsh and meaningless most names in America are, Eugene,” he went on quietly. “Like addresses printed on a thousand envelopes at once by a stamping machine—labels by which a place may be identified but without meaning…. Tell me,” he said quietly, after a brief pause, “what was the name of that little village your father came from? You told me one time—I remember, because the whole thing I’m talking about—the thing that’s wrong with us—was in that name. What was it?”
“Brant’s Mill,” the other young man answered.
“Quite!” said Starwick with weary concision. “A man named Brant had a mill, and so they called the place Brant’s Mill.”
“What’s wrong with that?”
“Oh, nothing, I suppose,” said Starwick quietly. “The whole thing’s quite
