"There's so much in a name," he continued meaningly. "Yes, and it's so unlucky, I always think, to change a name," Mary added. "Oh, you think it's unlucky?" Jemmie Alison asked in a gloomy tone. Mac was a success from the moment of his arrival, and Mary was really grateful to her friend--friendship was the relation established between her and Jemmie Alison after several discussions--for the kind thought that made the dog hers. She was glad when the need of exercising Mac took her out into Hyde Park where by now, crocuses, a myriad steady flames, defied the wind and lighted the dim green of the London grass. There were also white and purple crocuses that gave Mary a keener pleasure than the yellow ones, for they seemed to be not so much the first flowers of Spring as the last flowers of Winter, and to express with their cold hues and tranquillity of form the sharpness of life that was there all the time. They reminded her somehow of those lovers who wandered about in the iron chill of that January afternoon, those regardful lovers whose happy indifference to time or weather she had so greatly envied. One morning the sun was so warm that, tired with throwing sticks for Mac, Mary sat down on a chair in the Broad Walk, watching the children bowling their hoops or running about with pink and blue balloons, while with one splay paw upon his mistress's instep Mac sat watching the other dogs. Mary from paying attention to the children and nurses fell to wondering about the fragments of shell that were mixed with the fresh gravel of the path. From what far-off beach had they come, or were they fossil shells from the bed of a long-receded ocean? Whencesoever it came, each fragment had once been part of a living animal. A living animal. Not a hundred years hence, she, or all that part of her beheld now by the passers-by, would seem not more important than one of these shells. Was there not indeed something more permanent than this bodily husk? Grandmamma did not think so. Mary was sure of her unbelief, even if every Sunday morning Grandmamma in sealskin and dove-gray silk did make use of the pew she rented for herself and Mary in St. Peter's, Knightsbridge. "You are seen in church," she told her granddaughter. "One is anxious for you to be seen." With the help of her vinaigrette Lady Flower kept awake during the sermon and congratulated herself upon the charming appearance of Mary, when Mary rose to take her share of singing unto the Lord at Morning Prayer. The notion that her granddaughter was contemplating the serious aspect and expression of religious fervor would have shocked the old lady; the knowledge that she was sitting in Kensington Gardens asking herself what she really was would have made Lady Flower think more earnestly than ever that it was high time her granddaughter was married. "It must be for something," Mary told herself, crushing a tiny scalloped fragment with her toe. "Life must be meant for something."