"I'll tell you what I really do want," said Fay, taking my arm and dancing beside me like a little girl: "I want a nice, small Prayer Book to use every Sunday in church. And I should like it bound in green, my favourite colour."
"Whatever do you want another Prayer Book for, sweetheart?" I asked, surprised at this strange request. "Our pew is simply paved and panelled with them."
"But I don't like huge things with crests and coats-of-arms on the outside: I can't pray properly out of them. It's like sending one's prayers to heaven in a Lord Mayor's coach instead of on angels' wings. I want a little green Prayer Book of my very own, with a 'Hymns Ancient and Modern' at the end of it: one of those semi-detached sort of affairs, don't you know!—in the same case, but with separate entrances. And I want you to give it me and write my name in it, so that my love for you and my prayers and praises will all be bound up together."
"But it seems such a poor present for me to give you, darling," I objected.
"But it's what I want. Those crested and coat-of-armed Prayer Books in the pew are several sizes too large and too grand for me. And they are so public and general, too: nothing private and personal about them. I don't care for a Prayer Book with the family coat-of-arms on it. And, besides, I don't think coats-of-arms and Prayer Books are in the same dimension, somehow."
"How do you mean, sweetheart?" Fay's ideas—ideas which Annabel would have dismissed as "funny"—were always of absorbing interest to me.
"Crests and coats-of-arms belong to the temporal things, such as carriages and motors and notepaper and silver-plate, and so are suitable ornaments for all these objects; but names and Prayer Books belong to the eternal things, and so are on a different plane altogether. When a baby is baptised a Christian it isn't given a new crest, but a new name: it isn't crested, so to speak, it is christened. And I always love that text in the Bible about him that overcometh being given a white stone with a new name written on it; but you couldn't imagine God giving anybody a white stone with a new crest engraved on it! It would sound absurd. And that is because your name is part of yourself and means you; while a crest is only the sign of your family and signifies your social position and your rank, and all those material, worthless sort of things which the world thinks so much of, but which God really couldn't be bothered with."
Fay stopped for breath, she was chattering so fast, and skipping at the same time. She was so full of life and spirits that she never could walk soberly along like other people. And then she began talking again, and so did I, and we continued the enchanting solitude à deux, which is the especial prerogative of marriage, until it was time to return home to tea and Annabel.
The next morning, when Fay was out of the room, Annabel said to me: "Reggie, I want to ask your advice?"
"Such as it is it is always at your service," I replied; "though I admit I cannot just now recall any occasion when you have availed yourself of it, your own, as a rule, proving adequate for your needs."