“Oh!” he exclaimed, with something like a groan in his voice.
“Nobody can help her name,” she complained. “Don’t you like it? I kind of thought it would suit you, because it doesn’t sound like me. Sort of suggests respectability, don’t you think?”
“It was my mother’s name,” he replied tensely, as he walked a few paces away.
Night that comes so fleetly in this country dropped like a veil.
The girl followed him.
“I didn’t steal that—your mother’s name, you know, Kurt,” she said in an odd, confiding voice. “They gave it to me, you see, and maybe it will help that I’ve never been called by it. They used to call me Pen or Penny—a bad penny, I suppose you think.”
“Your name,” he said frigidly, “or at least the one Bender knows you by—the one you went by in Chicago, is Marta Sills.”
She made an articulate sound suggestive of dismay.
“That is one of my names,” she admitted. “I had forgotten I gave that one to Bender.”