"Call our baby Betsey? Are you crazy?" Archie asked. But Daisy was in earnest, and carried her point, as she always did; and when at Easter Lord Hardy stopped at Stoneleigh, on his way to his home in Ireland, he was one of the sponsors for the child, who was christened Betsey.
"If I dared, I would add Jane to it, for her Ladyship, which would make her Betsey Jane; but that would be too much," Daisy said to Lord Hardy, adding: "We shall call her Bessie, of course, and never Betsey. We only give her that abominable cognomen for the sake of wheedling something out of that old woman in America. Archie is to write and tell her."
So Archie wrote the best letter he could concoct, and said he had named his little daughter Betsey, which he hoped would please his aunt. This he took for approval to Daisy, who said it was very well, but insisted that he should add a P.S. that if his aunt had fifty pounds or so of ready money, he would like to borrow it for a time, as his expenses were heavy, and Stoneleigh needed so much repairing. At first Archie refused utterly; it looked so much like begging, he said, but he was overruled and added the P.S., which made Miss McPherson furious and steeled her heart against the innocent baby who bore her name.
The request for money overmastered every gentler feeling, and the letter was consigned to the flames and never answered.
"Never mind, Archie," Daisy said, as weeks went by and there came no message from America. "The old miser means to cut us off. Well, let her, I can manage without her, and our fifteen hundred pounds will last awhile. After that is gone, trust me for more."
And Archie, who was too indolent to exert himself, did trust her, and, parting with every vestige of manhood and manliness, did what she bade him do and went where she bade him go; sometimes to the most expensive hotels, where, while the money lasted they lived like princes, and when it was gone, like rats in a hole; sometimes to Monte Carlo, where Daisy was generally successful; sometimes to Hamburg and Baden Baden, sometimes to Epsom, where she bet with Lord Hardy on the races, and got her money, whether she lost or won, for the kind-hearted Ted could never withstand her tears; and sometimes into the houses to which she managed to get invited, and where she staid as long as possible, or until some other house was open to her.
Meanwhile little Bessie grew into a child of wonderful loveliness. Possessing her mother's beauty of feature and complexion and her father's refinement of feeling, she added to them a truthful simplicity and frank ingenuousness of manner which won all hearts to her. Much as they might despise her mother, everybody loved and pitied Bessie, whose life was a kind of scramble, and who early learned to think and act for herself, and to know there was a difference between her father and her mother. She learned, too, that large hotels, where prices were high, meant two rolls and a cup of milk for breakfast, a biscuit or apple for lunch, and nothing for dinner except what her mother could surreptitiously convey into her pocket at table d'hote. And still, there was no merrier, happier child playing upon the sands at Aberystwyth than Bessie McPherson on the summer morning when Miss Betsey McPherson first saw her and called out: "Betsey McPherson, is that you?"