"I was going to add, however—disagreeable."
"Not that—never that," Says Hardinge.
"You mean to say you really like Perpetua?" her large soft eyes opening with amazement.
"It is a poor word," says he, his tone now very low. "If I dared say that I adored 'Perpetua,' I should be——"
"Oh, you laugh at me," interrupts she with a little impatient gesture, "you know how crude, how strange, how——"
"I don't indeed. Why should you malign yourself like that? You—you—who are——"
He stops short, driven to silence by a look in the girl's eyes.
"What have I to do with it? I did not christen myself," says she. There is perhaps a suspicion of hauteur in her tone. "I am talking to you about my name. You understand that, don't you?"—the hauteur increasing. "Do you know, of late I have often wished I was somebody else, because then I should have had a different one."
Hardinge, at this point, valiantly refrains from a threadbare quotation. Perhaps he is too far crushed to be able to remember it.
"Still it is charming," says he, somewhat confusedly.