"I don't like your being false to your convictions. I've one name that I've not denied and that nobody denies me. It's Winnie."
"Winnie it shall be on my lips too henceforth," he answered. "And I thank you."
Respect for his convictions? Yes. But there was more behind her permission, her request. There was a great friendliness, and, with it, a new sense that 'Mrs. Winifred Ledstone' might prove to be a transitory being, that the title was held precariously. Why need her chosen friends be bound to the use of it?
Richard Dennehy was by now one of that small band. He was so loyal and sympathetic, though he was also very cocksure in his condemnations, and terribly certain that he and his organization alone had got hold of the right end of the stick. Yet the cocksureness was really for the organization only; it left him in himself a humble man, not thinking himself so clever as the emancipated persons among whom he moved, rather regretting that such able minds should be so led astray. One habit indeed he had, of which Stephen Aikenhead would humorously complain; he used emotion as an argumentative weapon. There are words and phrases which carry an appeal independent of the validity of the idea they express, a strength born of memory and association. They can make a man feel like a child again, or make him feel a traitor, and either against his reason.
"Spells and incantations I call them," said Stephen, "and I formally protest against their use in serious discussion."
"And why do you call them that?"
"Because they depend for their effect on a particular form of words—either a particularly familiar or a particularly beautiful formula. If you expressed the same idea in different language, its power would be gone; at least it would seem just as legitimately open to question as any profane statement that I may happen to make. Now to depend for its efficacy on the exact formula and not on the force of the idea is, to my mind, the precise characteristic of a spell, charm, or incantation, Dick."
"I dare say the holy words make you uncomfortable, my boy!"
"Exactly! And is it fair? Why am I, a candid inquirer, to be made uncomfortable? Prove me wrong, convince me if you can, but why make me uncomfortable?"
Winnie, an auditor of the conversation, laughed gently. "I think that's what you tried to do to me, coming back from church—when you talked about 'God's good time,' I mean."