“'Names are for commoners,' he said; 'kings have none. Know then that the kingdom which I have again made good from the foot, has come down to me from the head, and that the princess's ancestry and mine go back until they meet in the same name. But let her whose name is profaned by all, be ever nameless for me; and lest her maidens again compromise her by assuming it, let them keep it for a surname, and I will couple it with a distinction.'
“Then he named each of them from the name of her province, and their mistress is never spoken of by them but under the title of their queen.”
“Now, Ella,” said Fanny.
“The beginning of Anna's story will do for mine with the change of a word. There was once a brother, the most critical who had ever been seen—”
“It must have been mine,” interrupted Kate.
“Did you ever venture to tell him a story? If you have, you may know how much spirit I must feel at the idea of repeating mine. But as my brother has so large a part in it, I may as well tell you something about him.”
“O,” said Fanny, “if we get on the subject of brothers, we shall never come to your story.”
“But as without mine we never should have come to it at all, as you will see, he is a part which cannot be left out,” said Ella.
“My brother had the gravest way of telling the strangest adventures, as if they had really happened, so that although I might have been taken in by him a thousand times, I invariably yielded the most implicit trust to every new story; while I had such a way of telling real occurrences that no one would believe they were not inventions. If he could tell my stories, I believe they would be better than his; for, telling them in his plausible way, he would need to leave nothing out, as I do, for fear of being laughed at; and they would have the advantage over his, of not only appearing true, but really being so, which is all the praise I can claim for them now. Yet he would insist that he never told any thing but what he had actually seen.
“'Facts for men, fancies for girls,' he would say; for he had a way of setting up one thing against another, as if nothing could stand alone. Thus he would say the oddest things with the gravest face, and would set me crying with a look like a harlequin.