They were very sweet about it, quite willing to do whatever we asked, to please us. As to the names, Alima, frank soul that she was, asked what good it would do.
Terry, always irritating her, said it was a sign of possession. “You are going to be Mrs. Nicholson,” he said. “Mrs. T. O. Nicholson. That shows everyone that you are my wife.”
“What is a ‘wife’ exactly?” she demanded, a dangerous gleam in her eye.
“A wife is the woman who belongs to a man,” he began.
But Jeff took it up eagerly: “And a husband is the man who belongs to a woman. It is because we are monogamous, you know. And marriage is the ceremony, civil and religious, that joins the two together—‘until death do us part,’” he finished, looking at Celis with unutterable devotion.
“What makes us all feel foolish,” I told the girls, “is that here we have nothing to give you—except, of course, our names.”
“Do your women have no names before they are married?” Celis suddenly demanded.
“Why, yes,” Jeff explained. “They have their maiden names—their father’s names, that is.”
“And what becomes of them?” asked Alima.
“They change them for their husbands’, my dear,” Terry answered her.