Then she invents a variation, a nickname within a nickname, and that she keeps to herself, for her own private use.

That's the nickname I am referring to, my dear, when I say it's the very devil." The lady to whom he spoke smiled vaguely and surmised that he might be very right.

For herself, she said, she had invented no nicknames; which was to assert that she had never been in love.

For the practice seems invariable, and probably Dido in times long since gone by had one for AEneas, and Virgil knew all about it.

But since she was a woman, it would be a name at once so absurd and so intimate that it would never have gone with the dignified rhythm of the hexameter.