The General again! But Winnie postponed that question. Her lips curved in amusement. "She calls me 'miss.'"
"Better than that silly 'Mrs. Smith' you said to Bob Purnett. Only unhappy women try to make epigrams. And for a woman to be unhappy is to be a failure."
"Isn't that one—almost—Mrs. Lenoir?"
"Quite quick, my dear!" her hostess commented. "But if it is, it's old. I told Emily you were a second cousin. I never know exactly what it means, but in my experience it's quite useful. But please yourself, Winnie. Who will you be?"
"Did Emily believe what you told her?"
The twinkle came again. "She's much too good a servant ever to raise that question. What was your name?"
"My maiden name? Wilkins."
"I think names ending in 'kins' are very ugly," said Mrs. Lenoir. "But a modification? What about Wilson? 'Winnie Wilson' is quite pretty."
"'Miss Winnie Wilson'? Isn't it rather—well, rather late in the day for that? But, I don't want to be Ledstone—and it's rather unfair to call myself Maxon still."
"Names," observed Mrs. Lenoir, "are really not worth troubling about, so long as you don't hurt people's pride. I used to have a fetish-like feeling about them—as if, I mean, you couldn't get rid of the one you were born with, or, my dear, take one you had no particular right to. But one night, long ago, somebody—I really forget who—brought an Oxford don to supper. We got on the subject, and he told me that a great philosopher—named Dobbs, if I remember rightly—defined a name as 'a word taken at pleasure to serve for a mark.'" She looked across the hearthrug, confidently expecting Winnie's approval. "I liked it, and it stuck in my memory."