86 IDLEHURST : 



admirer of Alice's, had been so taken with her lady- 

 ship's dignity that he almost grudged to make up 

 the quarrel with Kitty Culpeper. She had told him, 

 while Kitty lingered among the calves, how it all 

 happened. They had been comparing notes about 

 their dolls, and slid from dolls' names to their own. 

 " She said she thought Mildred wasn't at all a nice 

 name for a doll ; so I said, it was a great deal nicer 

 than Kitty. And she said that Katherine was a real 

 lady's name, and nobody who was nice was ever 

 called Alice. So I said, 'Why, "Alice" herself was 

 called Alice, and there couldn't be any one nicer than 

 her, even if she wasn't real. And there was Alice in 

 Dick Whittington, and in the May Queen in the poetry- 

 book ; and I said nobody was called Katherine except 

 Katherine Howard and Katherine Parr, and I'm sure 

 they weren't really what you'd call jolly people.' 

 Then she called me a pig ; and I said I should never 

 speak to her again." 



" I soon smoothed it over," says Gervase ; " but 

 Alice was quite right about her name. It is the great 

 English name ; the classics are full of it. ' Little 

 Alice' in Tennyson's 'May Queen,' and Alice 'the 

 Miller's Daughter,' and Alice in ' Queen Mary,' 

 Coleridge's Alice du Clos, Fayre Alice in ' Willyam 

 of Cloudeslee,' Alice in < Henry the Fifth.' " 



