A new name

by Grace Livingston Hill

“I see,” said Murray, with his pleasant, easy smile that took everything for granted. “Then I’m sure I’m one of the things you haven’t taken time for in a good many years. You’ll just give me a little of your time, won’t you? Suppose we go toward the Park, where we’ll have more room.”

While she hesitated he shot his car up a cross-street and was soon whirling on the boulevard toward the entrance of the Park, enjoying the light in her eyes as the car rolled smoothly over the asphalt. It was so apparent that she loved the ride! She looked as she used to look when he brought her over the canary in the gold cage that he had bought with some of his spending money one Christmas. He began to wonder why he had let this delicious friend of his drop out of his acquaintance. Why, come to think of it, he had not seen her since the night his mother made him so mad telling him he was disgracing the family by running to play with little “alley” girls; that he was too big to play with low-born people any more. He remembered how he tried to explain that Bessie did not live in the alley, as his mother’s maid had informed her, but just across the alley, and how he tried to force her to go to the window and look out across the back area, where she could see quite plainly the neat two-story brick, with the white sheer curtains at the windows, and a geranium between the curtains. It had all looked so pleasant to him he felt sure his mother would understand for once if she would only look. He could not bear that she should think such thoughts about these cosey friends of his who had given so many happy hours to him that his mother would have left desolate. But she shook him off angrily and sent him from the room.

That had been the last time he had seen Bessie. They told him the next day that he was to go to a summer camp, and from there he was sent to boarding school in the far West. It had all been very exciting at first, and he had never connected his mother’s talk with his sudden migration. Perhaps the thought only vaguely shadowed itself in his mind now as a link in the chain of his life. He was not given to analyzing things, just drifting with the tide and getting as much fun out of it all as possible. But now, with Bessie before him, he wondered why it was that he had allowed seven whole years to drift by apart from her. Here she had been ripening into this perfect peach of a girl, and he might have been enjoying her company all this time. Instead he had solaced his idle hours with any one who happened to drift his way. Bah! What a lot they had been, some of them! Something in him knew that this girl was never like those. Something she had had as a little girl that he admired and enjoyed had stayed with her yet. He was not like that. He was sure he was not. He was quite certain he had been rather a fine chap in those early days before the evil of life had been revealed to him. A faint little wish that he might have stayed as he was then faltered through his gay mind, only he flippantly felt that of course that would have been impossible as life was.

Bessie was enjoying her ride. She exclaimed over the beauty of the foliage, where some of autumn’s tints were still left clinging to the branches. She drank in the beauty of cloud and distant river, and her cheeks took on that delicate flush of delight that he had noticed in her long ago. He marvelled that a human cheek could vary in its coloring so exquisitely. He had unconsciously come to feel that such alive-looking flesh could only be on the face of a child. Every woman he knew wore her coloring stationary, like a mask, that never varied, no matter what emotion might cross her countenance. The mask was always there, smooth and creamy and delicate and unmoved. He had come to feel it was a state that came with maturity. But this girl’s face was like a rose whose color came and went in delicate shadings and seemed to be a part of the vivid expression as she talked; as the petals of a rose showed deeper coloring at their base when the wind played with them and threw the lights and shadows in different curves and tintings.

Murray as a rule did little thinking, and he would have been surprised and thought it clever if some one had put this idea into words for him. But the impression was there in his mind as they talked. And then he fell to wondering how she would look in beautiful garments, rich silks and velvets and furs. She was simply and suitably dressed, and might be said to adorn her garments, but she would be superb in cloth of silver and jewels. How he would enjoy putting her in her right setting! Here was a girl who would adorn any garments, and whose face and figure warranted the very greatest designers in Fashion’s world.

An idea came to Murray.

They often came that way by impulse, and sometimes they had their origin in the very best impulses. He leaned toward her with a quick, confidential air. They were on their way back now, for the girl had suggested that she had taken enough of his time.

“I wonder if you won’t do something for me?” he said in his old boyish, pleasant tone that reminded her of other days together.

“Why, surely, if I can,” she complied pleasantly.

“You certainly can,” he answered gaily. “No one could do it better. I want you to come with me to a shop I know and help me to select something for a gift for a friend of mine. You are her figure to an inch, and you have her coloring too. I want to see how it will look on you before I buy it.”