It was a relief to Clarice that she had never heard a word of Piers since he left Whitehall. Her work would have been harder if his name had remained a household word. And yet in another sense it was hard never to know what had become of him, whether he were as sad as herself, or had been comforted elsewhere.
Vivian’s manners in public were perfect to every one, and Clarice shared with the rest. In private she was terribly snubbed whenever he was in a bad temper, and carelessly ignored when he was in a good one. The baby daughter, who was such a comfort to Clarice, was a source of bitter vexation to Vivian. In his eyes, while a son would have been an undoubted blessing, a daughter was something actively worse than a disappointment. When Clarice timidly inquired what name he wished the child to bear, Vivian distinctly intimated that the child and all her belongings were totally beneath his notice. She could call the nuisance what she liked.
Clarice silently folded her insulted darling to her breast, and tacitly promised it that its mother at least should never think it a nuisance.
“What shall I call her?” she said to Mistress Underdone and Olympias, both of whom were inclined to pet the baby exceedingly.
“Oh, something pretty!” said Olympias. “Don’t have a plain, common name. Don’t call her Joan, or Parnel, or Beatrice, or Margery, or Maud, or Isabel. You meet those at every turn. I am quite glad I was not called anything of that sort.”
“I wouldn’t have it too long,” was Mistress Underdone’s recommendation. “I’d never call her Frethesancia, or Florianora, or Aniflesia, or Sauncelina. Let her have a good, honest name, Dame, one syllable, or at most two. You’ll have to clip it otherwise.”
“I thought of Rose,” said Clarice, meditatively.
“Well, it is not common,” allowed Olympias. “Still, it is very short. Couldn’t you have had it a little longer?”
“That’ll do,” pronounced Mistress Underdone. “It is short, and it means a pretty, sweet, pleasant thing. I don’t know but I should have called my girl Rose, if I’d chosen her name; but her father fancied Heliet, and so it had to be so.”
“Well, we can call her Rosamond,” comfortingly suggested Olympias.