The rest of the “team” came in then, Sahwah and Gladys and Hinpoha, all three arm in arm, and Migwan behind them, pushing Sylvia in her rolling chair. They settled in a circle before the fireplace, and the talk soon drifted around to Uncle Jasper and his blighted romance. Indeed, Hinpoha had done nothing but talk about it all during dinner. Sylvia, too, was completely taken up with it.
“I love Sylvia Warrington!” she exclaimed fervently. “I am going to have her for my Beloved. I’m glad she had black hair. I adore black hair. And I’m so glad my name is Sylvia, too. I’ve been pretending that she was my aunt, and that I was named after her. I’ve been pretending, too, that she taught me to sing, ‘Hark, hark, the lark!’ Now, when I sing it I always think of her. Wasn’t it beautiful, what Uncle Jasper said about her? ‘She is like a lark, singing in the desert at dawning!’ Oh, I can see it all, the desert, and the sun coming up, and the lark soaring up and singing. I just can’t breathe, it’s so beautiful. And my Beloved is like that!”
A radiant dream light came into her eyes, and she seemed suddenly to have traveled far away from the group by the fire and to be wandering in some far-off land.
“Sylvia is a beautiful name,” said Katherine. “For whom are you called? Was your mother’s name Sylvia?” It was the first time any of them had spoken of Sylvia’s mother, who they knew must be dead.
Sylvia’s eyes lost their dreaminess and she looked up with a merry smile.
“I made it up myself,” she said. “I don’t know what my first real name was, but when Aunt Aggie got me she named me Aggie, after herself. But Aggie is such a hopelessly unimaginative sort of name. It doesn’t make you think of a thing when you say it. You might just as well be named ‘Empty’ as ‘Aggie.’ Then once we lived in the same house with a lady who sang, and she used to sing, ‘Who is Sylvia?’ It was the most tuneful name I’d ever heard, and I wondered and wondered who Sylvia was. But I guess the lady never found out, because she kept right on singing, ‘Who is Sylvia?’ So one day I said to myself, ‘I’ll be Sylvia!’ Don’t you think it’s a fragrant name? When I say it I can see festoons of pink rosebuds tied with baby ribbon. I made people call me Sylvia, and that’s been my name ever since.”
“Oh, you funny child!” said Nyoda, joining in the general laugh at Sylvia’s tale of her name.
“But Sylvia,” said Sahwah wonderingly, “you said you didn’t know what your first real name was before you came to live with your aunt. Didn’t your aunt know it?”
“No,” replied Sylvia. “You see,” she continued, “Aunt Aggie isn’t my real aunt. She adopted me when I was a baby.”
“Oh-h!” said the Winnebagos in surprise.