s?
Personally I cannot doubt for a moment that these names are purely
arbitrary names, assumed as part of some general scheme or joke.
I think it very probable that they were taken from a series of costumes--
that Polly Green only meant Polly (or Mary) when in green,
and that Mary Gray only means Mary (or Polly) when in gray.
This would explain--"

Cyrus Pym was standing up rigid and almost pallid.
"Do you actually mean to suggest--" he cried.

"Yes," said Michael; "I do mean to suggest that. Innocent Smith has had
many wooings, and many weddings for all I know; but he has had only one wife.
She was sitting on that chair an hour ago, and is now talking to Miss Duke
in the garden.

"Yes, Innocent Smith has behaved here, as he has on hundreds of
other occasions, upon a plain and perfectly blameless principle.
It is odd and extravagant in the modern world, but not more than any other
principle plainly applied in the modern world would be. His principle
can be quite simply stated: he refuses to die while he is still alive.
He seeks to remind himself, by every electric shock to the intellect,
that he is still a man alive, walking on two legs about the world.
For this reason he fires bullets at his best friends; for this reason
he arranges ladders and collapsible chimneys to steal his own property;
for this reason he goes plodding around a whole planet to get back to his
own home; and for this reason he has been in the habit of taking the woman
whom he loved with a permanent loyalty, and leaving her about (so to speak)
at schools, boarding-houses, and places of business, so that he might
recover her again and again with a raid and a romantic elopement.
He seriously sought by a perpetual recapture of his bride to keep alive
the sense of her perpetual value, and the perils that should be run
for her sake.

"So far his motives are clear enough; but perhaps his convictions are
not quite so clear. I think Innocent Smith has an idea at the bottom
of all this. I am by no means sure that I believe it myself, but I am
quite sure that it is worth a man's uttering and defending.

"The idea that Smith is attacking is this. Living in an entangled
civilization, we have come to think certain things wrong which are
not wrong at all. We have come to think outbreak and exuberance,
banging and barging, rotting and wrecking, wrong. In themselves they
are not merely pardonable; they are unimpeachable. There is nothing
wicked about