She was true to that through all the years after; going to school with Mabels and Ethels and Graces and Ediths,—not a girl she knew but had a pretty modern name,—and they all wondering at that stiff little "Desire" of hers that she would go by. When she was twelve years old, the old lady up in Hanover had died, and left her a gold watch, large and old-fashioned, which she could only keep on a stand in her room,—a good solid silver tea-set, and all her spoons, and twenty-five shares in the Hanover Bank.
Mrs. Megilp called her Daisy, with gentle inadvertence, one day after that. Desire lifted her eyes slowly at her, with no other reply in her face, or else.
"You might please your mother now, I think," said Mrs. Megilp. "There is no old lady to be troubled by it."
"A promise isn't ever dead, Mrs. Megilp," said Desire, briefly. "I shall keep our words."
"After all," Mrs. Megilp said privately to the mother, "there is something quietly aristocratic in an old, plain, family name. I don't know that it isn't good taste in the child. Everybody understands that it was a condition, and an inheritance."
Mrs. Megilp had taken care of that. She was watchful for the small impressions she could make in behalf of her particular friends. She carried about with her a little social circumference in which all was preëminently as it should be.
But,—as I would say if you could not see it for yourself—this is a digression. We will go back again.
"If it were any use!" said Desire, shaking out the deep plaits as she unfastened them from the band. "But you're only a piece of everybody after all. You haven't anything really new or particular to yourself, when you've done. And it takes up so much time. Last year, this was so pretty! Isn't anything actually pretty in itself, or can't they settle what it is? I should think they had been at it long enough."
"Fashions never were so graceful as they are this minute," said Mrs. Megilp. "Of course it is art, like everything else, and progress. The world is getting educated to a higher refinement in it, every day. Why, it's duty, child!" she continued, exaltedly. "Think what the world would be if nobody cared. We ought to make life beautiful. It's meant to be. There's not only no virtue in ugliness, but almost no virtue with it, I think. People are more polite and good-natured when they are well dressed and comfortable."
"That's dress, too, though," said Desire, sententiously. "You've got to stay at home four days, and rip, and be tired, and cross, and tried-on-to, and have no chance to do anything else, before you can put it all on and go out and be good-natured and bland, and help put the beautiful face on the world, one day. I don't believe it's political economy."