He stops short, driven to silence by a look in the girl's eye.
"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.
"It is absurd," says Perpetua coldly. There is evidently no pity in her. And alas! when we think what that sweet feeling is akin to, on the highest authority, one's hopes for Hardinge fall low. He loses his head a little.
"Not so absurd as your guardian's, however," says he, feeling the necessity for saying something without the power to manufacture it.
"Mr. Curzon's? What is his name?" asks she, rising out of her lounging position and looking, for the first time, interested.
"Thaddeus."
Perpetua, after a prolonged stare, laughs a little.
"What a name!" says she. "Worse than mine. And yet," still laughing, "it suits him, I think."