Sometimes it--it doesn't seem to
convey anything to me either. But"--she looked round with a movement
of seeking help--"I am Mrs. Wilkins."
She did not like her name. It was a mean, small name, with a
kind of facetious twist, she thought, about its end like the upward
curve of a pugdog's tail. There it was, however. There was no doing
anything with it. Wilkins she was and Wilkins she would remain; and
though her husband encouraged her to give it on all occasions as Mrs.
Mellersh-Wilkins she only did that when he was within earshot, for she
thought Mellersh made Wilkins worse, emphasizing it in the way
Chatsworth on the gate-posts of a villa emphasizes the villa.
When first he suggested she should add Mellersh she had objected
for the above reason, and after a pause--Mellersh was much too prudent
to speak except after a pause, during which presumably he was taking a
careful mental copy of his coming observation--he said, much
displeased, "But I am not a villa," and looked at her as he looks who
hopes, for perhaps the hundredth time, that he may not have married a
fool.
Of course he was not a villa, Mrs. Wilkins assured him; she had
never supposed he was; she had not dreamed of meaning . . . she was
only just thinking . . .
The more she explained the more earnest became Mellersh's hope,
familiar to him by this time, for he had then been a husband for two
years, that he might not by any chance have married a fool; and they
had a prolonged quarrel, if that can be called a quarrel which is
conducted with dignified silence on one side and earnest apology on the
other, as to whether or no Mrs.
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