Proper noun

- - - gentle Sophias milk your cows, and if you ask a pretty smiling girl at a cottage door to tell you her name, the rosy lips lisp out Caroline'. A great number of children, amongst the lower classes, are ' Carolines . That does not, however, wholly proceed from the love of the appellation; though I believe that a queen Margery or a queen Sarah would have had fewer namesakes.

I used to love saying her name. Caroline', with the "i" always long, because to make it short left it sounding like ''crinoline'', a sweat-stained, mothballed Sunday hat pulled from an attic trunk. But '''Caroline with the "i" long created a sound roughly equivalent to the idea of a ''girl . The echo of a song in its three syllables, an age-old lyric not yet faded from memory.