He had been married about three years, when he chanced one evening to be dining in London with an American gentleman.
“Do you know the Stanberys of Chicago?” asked my friend, among other questions.
“O yes! aren’t they delightful people? And what a beautiful girl Irene is--she was married six months ago by the way.”
“What name did you call her?” asked my friend.
“Irene! Why I thought they called her _Ireen_!”
“So they do--but didn’t you know that that is the American way of pronouncing ‘Irene’?”
“Indeed, I didn’t,” gasped my friend, and in his soul he said “O that I had known!”
The moral of which is that it is very hard to lose one’s love through a mispronunciation.
Sid Norton could not recall a time when he had not been in love. From his earliest boyhood, falling in love had been a habit with him; and his heart, if he might be said to retain possession of an organ that was always being lost to some new face, was a sort of sentimental graveyard, a veritable necropolis of dead love-affairs--dead, but unforgotten; for, incorrigible lover as Sid was, his memory would sometimes go flitting from grave to grave, like a butterfly, philandering even with the past.
In spite of these excursions, and in defiance of the apparent paradox of the statement, Sid Norton found himself in love--for the first and last time. This he said of himself gravely, not only in private to the lady who was credited with this marvel but also in public to his intimate friends. He said it, and there was no doubt that he meant it.
Now Rosamund Lowther was an exceedingly clever young woman, an adept in the management of the emotional male, and easily Sid Norton’s match in experienced flirtation. The friends of both watched the progress of their sudden volcanic attachment with cynical expectancy, and when, after six months of a trance-like courtship, during which it might be said that the infatuated pair had never taken their eyes off each other, Sid Norton suddenly sailed for Europe, you can imagine the sensation and comment it caused. Neither vouchsafed any explanation; their engagement remained intact, at all events there was no formal bulletin to the contrary; and the thing was a piquant mystery to all but the two concerned. For them it was their whimsical secret.