Affinity

by Sarah Waters

She murmured at last, ‘Give me another name, then, to call you by. Give me any name but “Miss Prior”—which might be the name of a matron, or of any common visitor; which might as well be nothing to me. Give me a name that will be something—give me a secret name, a name that has, not the worst of you, but the best . . .’ She went on like this—until at last, in the same quick, queer spirit in which I had handed her the book, and then the pen, I said: ‘Aurora! You may say then, Aurora! For that is a name—it is a name that—’ I did not of course say it was a name that Helen gave me, before she married my brother. I said it was a name I used to like to call myself, ‘when I was young’. And then I blushed, to hear the foolish thing spoken aloud. She, however, only looked solemn. She gripped the pen again, wrote a line through Margaret, and put Aurora in its stead.