“And you shall wear just whatever you like best. But to me you are prettiest in a certain grass-green cotton frock, and a floppety light-blue hat, because then you look like bluebells in a larch-wood”—thus he caressed her, and teased her, and spoke the romantic nonsense her soul delighted in. And thus she was blissfully content—till Willy Percival rolled his ball into their Paradise zone, and came to fetch it, his mother in apologetic pursuit: “Willy doesn’t know yet where he isn’t wanted,” archly; involving much blushing and dimpling and deprecation on the part of Letty, and a rigid “Not at all” from Sebastian, mightily displeased.
“Can’t you stop these people from buzzing and chaffing?” he demanded irritably, when Mrs. Percival had withdrawn her offspring.
And again Letty beat back a wistful impulse to confide in him how all this was really and truly an essential part of the rose-coloured thrill of “being engaged”; how immensely she gloried in the questions and chaff; how any mention of his name, coupled meaningly with hers, caused her to hold her blossom head inches higher with pride; how like music were her father’s jokes on the subject; how she had been overwhelmed in delicious confusion when the blotting-pad, which was common property at the Farme, was discovered scribbled over and over with the mysterious names: Mrs. S. Levi; Letty Levi; and then, unaccountably: Letty Lovell.
And remembering this, Letty resolved now to unburden herself of a weighty proposition that hitherto she had not dared lay before Sebastian, lest it might rub against an unknown rawness in him. She could never quite disabuse herself of the notion that all Jews, even her splendid lover, are necessarily over-sensitive and forever on the wince. “Because I don’t see how they can ever quite forget that they are Jews,” would have been word-translation of her subconscious thought.
“Sebastian,” she caught hold of a lapel of his coat, and snuggled nearer to him, while the garden-roller gave an ominous lurch, “what do you think about changing your name before we get married? would you mind very much?”
“Rather a bother for nothing,” he rejoined lazily. “But if you’re set on it, darling,—what aristocratic title have you prepared for me?”
“Lovell!” ... breathlessly she hung on his decision, blue-grey eyes fixed attentively on his face. “Sebastian Lovell!” she repeated, dangling the combined effect in front of him, as a child might dangle a toy.
“Think I could live up to it?”
“Now you’re being a naughty boy, and teasing me.—But really, Sebastian, I’ve thought it all over seriously, and I chose ‘Lovell’ because it also begins with an ‘L.’ Of course, they say: change the name and not the letter, change for the worse and not for the better; but I believe that’s only for a girl marrying a man. And, anyhow, superstition is only ignorance. And perhaps—no, let me finish, Sebastian, because I’m awfully in earnest about this,—perhaps your father won’t mind, because Lovell is very like Levi, really; it has the ‘v’ in the middle, and all!”