"Oh, nothing," said she loftily, "except that it's so awfully common. Why, there are thousands of Smiths!"
"Common? Well, I'll be jig—" At this point, resentment spurred the ingenuity of the Tyro to a prompt and lofty flight. "If you don't like Smith," he said, "I wonder what you'll think when you hear the awful truth."
"Try me."
"Very well," he sighed. "I suppose it's foolish to have any feeling about it. But perhaps you'd be sensitive, too, if you'd been born to the name of Daddleskink."
"What!"
"Daddleskink," said the Tyro firmly. "Sanders Daddleskink. Suppose you were Mrs. Sanders Daddleskink."
"I shan't suppose any such thing," she retorted indignantly.
"I warned you that you wouldn't like it."
"Like it? I don't even believe it. There ain't no such animile as a Daddleskink."
"Madame," said the Tyro, drawing himself up to his full height, "I would have you understand that, uneuphonious as the name may seem, the Daddleskinks sat in the seats of the mighty when our best-known American families of to-day, such as the Murphys, the Cohens, the Browns, Joneses, and Robinsons, were mere nebulous films of protoplasmic mud."