147

A WORD WITH THE WOMEN

(By Elia W. Peattie.)

A correspondant wishes to know if it has become obsolete for a married woman to sign her own name, as, for example, Marle Bernard. The custom is, and always has been, to sign Mrs. Henry Bernard to letters of courtesy, and in all formal matters. A married woman signs her Christian name only where some expressfou of individuality or familiarity is required, as for instance, to a letter to a friend, to an original article for publication, to a check or legal document. For all social, polite and formal purposes a married woman employs her husband's name.

The same correspondant questions the propriety of the term "nee," saying that this means "born and that no one is born already equipped with a baptismal name. It is true that the term is not absolutely accurate in its application, but it is convenient and in common use.

Aprepos of names, it is no uncommon thing for a married woman to actually grow homesick for the sound of her own name as she used to hear it when a child. Supposing Winnifred Grey moves to Omaha from Albany N.Y. She has grown up in Albany, and is Winnifred to half the people she knows. She marries, perhaps, a competative stranger--a man she has mel [?] times, and corresponded with a year. They come to Omaha knowing no one. People call. She becomes acquainted and in a short time has plenty of freinds. Some of them are very fond of her. But the days for intimacy passed when she left her girlhood associates. She is Mrs. David Grey to the polite world. No one, perhaps, knows her baptismal name. Her husband calls her Mrs. Gray before others, and when alone calls her "dear" or some other easy [?] equivalent for a name. So, after a time, when the novelty of hearing herself addressed by her husband's name wears off, and when "dear" no longer astonishes her into raptures, she longs and longs for some one to say "Winnifred" in the old familiar way.

I have heard many women confess to this desire out here in the west, and most of us are strangers to all the rest, or only acquainted yesterday. However fond we may come to be to each other, we have no associations in common to interest us. We must make our conversation along abstract or current subjects. And one does pine now and then for some one with whom to discuss the days when one was young.

There is one dark, smart and elegant young society woman who is possessed of an ideal "Beardesly mouth." It is sensuously full, indicative of independence, and perhaps something more, but it is withal, a beautiful mouth and an extraordinary one--one which Beardesly might almost think--if he could see it--that he had made himself.