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+The Project Gutenberg eBook of Life and Death of Harriett Frean, by May Sinclair
+
+This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere in the United States and
+most other parts of the world at no cost and with almost no restrictions
+whatsoever. You may copy it, give it away or re-use it under the terms
+of the Project Gutenberg License included with this eBook or online at
+www.gutenberg.org. If you are not located in the United States, you
+will have to check the laws of the country where you are located before
+using this eBook.
+
+Title: Life and Death of Harriett Frean
+
+Author: May Sinclair
+
+Release Date: September 18, 2003 [eBook #9298]
+[Most recently updated: January 19, 2021]
+
+Language: English
+
+Character set encoding: UTF-8
+
+Produced by: Suzanne Shell, Richard Prairie, David Widger and PG Distributed Proofreaders
+
+*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK LIFE AND DEATH OF HARRIETT FREAN ***
+
+
+
+
+LIFE AND DEATH OF HARRIETT FREAN
+
+1922
+
+By May Sinclair
+
+
+
+
+I
+
+
+     “Pussycat, Pussycat, where have you been?”
+       “I’ve been to London, to see the Queen.”
+      “Pussycat, Pussycat, what did you there?”
+       “I caught a little mouse under the chair,”
+
+Her mother said it three times. And each time the Baby Harriett laughed.
+The sound of her laugh was so funny that she laughed again at that; she
+kept on laughing, with shriller and shriller squeals.
+
+“I wonder why she thinks it’s funny,” her mother said.
+
+Her father considered it. “I don’t know. The cat perhaps. The cat and
+the Queen. But no; that isn’t funny.”
+
+“She sees something in it we don’t see, bless her,” said her mother.
+
+Each kissed her in turn, and the Baby Harriett stopped laughing
+suddenly.
+
+“Mamma, _did_ Pussycat see the Queen?”
+
+“No,” said Mamma. “Just when the Queen was passing the little mouse came
+out of its hole and ran under the chair. That’s what Pussycat saw.”
+
+Every evening before bedtime she said the same rhyme, and Harriett asked
+the same question.
+
+When Nurse had gone she would lie still in her cot, waiting. The door
+would open, the big pointed shadow would move over the ceiling, the
+lattice shadow of the fireguard would fade and go away, and Mamma would
+come in carrying the lighted candle. Her face shone white between her
+long, hanging curls. She would stoop over the cot and lift Harriett up,
+and her face would be hidden in curls. That was the kiss-me-to-sleep
+kiss. And when she had gone Harriett lay still again, waiting. Presently
+Papa would come in, large and dark in the firelight. He stooped and she
+leapt up into his arms. That was the kiss-me-awake kiss; it was their
+secret.
+
+Then they played. Papa was the Pussycat and she was the little mouse in
+her hole under the bed-clothes. They played till Papa said, “_No_ more!”
+ and tucked the blankets tight in.
+
+“Now you’re kissing like Mamma----”
+
+Hours afterwards they would come again together and stoop over the cot
+and she wouldn’t see them; they would kiss her with soft, light kisses,
+and she wouldn’t know.
+
+She thought: To-night I’ll stay awake and see them. But she never did.
+Only once she dreamed that she heard footsteps and saw the lighted
+candle, going out of the room; going, going away.
+
+The blue egg stood on the marble top of the cabinet where you could see
+it from everywhere; it was supported by a gold waistband, by gold hoops
+and gold legs, and it wore a gold ball with a frill round it like a
+crown. You would never have guessed what was inside it. You touched a
+spring in its waistband and it flew open, and then it was a workbox.
+Gold scissors and thimble and stiletto sitting up in holes cut in white
+velvet.
+
+The blue egg was the first thing she thought of when she came into the
+room. There was nothing like that in Connie Hancock’s Papa’s house. It
+belonged to Mamma.
+
+Harriett thought: If only she could have a birthday and wake up and find
+that the blue egg belonged to _her_----
+
+Ida, the wax doll, sat on the drawing-room sofa, dressed ready for the
+birthday. The darling had real person’s eyes made of glass, and real
+eyelashes and hair. Little finger and toenails were marked in the wax,
+and she smelt of the lavender her clothes were laid in.
+
+But Emily, the new birthday doll, smelt of composition and of gum and
+hay; she had flat, painted hair and eyes, and a foolish look on her
+face, like Nurse’s aunt, Mrs. Spinker, when she said “Lawk-a-daisy!”
+ Although Papa had given her Emily, she could never feel for her the
+real, loving love she felt for Ida.
+
+And her mother had told her that she must lend Ida to Connie Hancock if
+Connie wanted her.
+
+Mamma couldn’t see that such a thing was not possible.
+
+“My darling, you mustn’t be selfish. You must do what your little guest
+wants.”
+
+“I can’t.”
+
+But she had to; and she was sent out of the room because she cried. It
+was much nicer upstairs in the nursery with Mimi, the Angora cat. Mimi
+knew that something sorrowful had happened. He sat still, just lifting
+the root of his tail as you stroked him. If only she could have stayed
+there with Mimi; but in the end she had to go back to the drawing-room.
+
+If only she could have told Mamma what it felt like to see Connie with
+Ida in her arms, squeezing her tight to her chest and patting her as
+if Ida had been _her_ child. She kept on saying to herself that Mamma
+didn’t know; she didn’t know what she had done. And when it was all over
+she took the wax doll and put her in the long narrow box she had come
+in, and buried her in the bottom drawer in the spare-room wardrobe. She
+thought: If I can’t have her to myself I won’t have her at all. I’ve got
+Emily. I shall just have to pretend she’s not an idiot.
+
+She pretended Ida was dead; lying in her pasteboard coffin and buried in
+the wardrobe cemetery.
+
+It was hard work pretending that Emily didn’t look like Mrs. Spinker.
+
+
+
+
+II
+
+
+She had a belief that her father’s house was nicer than other people’s
+houses. It stood off from the high road, in Black’s Lane, at the head
+of the town. You came to it by a row of tall elms standing up along Mr.
+Hancock’s wall. Behind the last tree its slender white end went straight
+up from the pavement, hanging out a green balcony like a bird cage above
+the green door.
+
+The lane turned sharp there and went on, and the long brown garden wall
+went with it. Behind the wall the lawn flowed down from the white house
+and the green veranda to the cedar tree at the bottom. Beyond the lawn
+was the kitchen garden, and beyond the kitchen garden the orchard;
+little crippled apple trees bending down in the long grass.
+
+She was glad to come back to the house after the walk with Eliza, the
+nurse, or Annie, the housemaid; to go through all the rooms looking for
+Mimi; looking for Mamma, telling her what had happened.
+
+“Mamma, the red-haired woman in the sweetie shop has got a little baby,
+and its hair’s red, too.... Some day I shall have a little baby. I shall
+dress him in a long gown-----”
+
+“Robe.”
+
+“Robe, with bands of lace all down it, as long as _that_; and a white
+christening cloak sewn with white roses. Won’t he look sweet?”
+
+“Very sweet.”
+
+“He shall have lots of hair. I shan’t love him if he hasn’t.”
+
+“Oh, yes, you will.”
+
+“No. He must have thick, flossy hair like Mimi, so that I can stroke
+him. Which would you rather have, a little girl or a little boy?”
+
+“Well--what do you think----?”
+
+“I think--perhaps I’d rather have a little girl.”
+
+She would be like Mamma, and her little girl would be like herself. She
+couldn’t think of it any other way.
+
+
+The school-treat was held in Mr. Hancock’s field. All afternoon she had
+been with the children, playing Oranges and lemons, A ring, a ring of
+roses, and Here we come gathering nuts in May, _nuts_ in May, _nuts_ in
+May: over and over again. And she had helped her mother to hand cake and
+buns at the infants’ table.
+
+The guest-children’s tea was served last of all, up on the lawn under
+the immense, brown brick, many windowed house. There wasn’t room for
+everybody at the table, so the girls sat down first and the boys waited
+for their turn. Some of them were pushing and snatching.
+
+She knew what she would have. She would begin with a bun, and go on
+through two sorts of jam to Madeira cake, and end with raspberries and
+cream. Or perhaps it would be safer to begin with raspberries and cream.
+She kept her face very still, so as not to look greedy, and tried not to
+stare at the Madeira cake lest people should see she was thinking of it.
+Mrs. Hancock had given her somebody else’s crumby plate. She thought:
+I’m not greedy. I’m really and truly hungry. She could draw herself
+in at the waist with a flat, exhausted feeling, like the two ends of a
+concertina coming together.
+
+She was doing this when she saw her mother standing on the other side of
+the table, looking at her and making signs.
+
+“If you’ve finished, Hatty, you’d better get up and let that little boy
+have something.”
+
+They were all turning round and looking at her. And there was the crumby
+plate before her. They were thinking: “That greedy little girl has
+gone on and on eating.” She got up suddenly, not speaking, and left the
+table, the Madeira cake and the raspberries and cream. She could feel
+her skin all hot and wet with shame.
+
+And now she was sitting up in the drawing-room at home. Her mother had
+brought her a piece of seed-cake and a cup of milk with the cream on it.
+Mamma’s soft eyes kissed her as they watched her eating her cake with
+short crumbly bites, like a little cat. Mamma’s eyes made her feel so
+good, so good.
+
+“Why didn’t you tell me you hadn’t finished?”
+
+“Finished? I hadn’t even begun.”
+
+“Oh-h, darling, why didn’t you _tell_ me?”
+
+“Because I--I don’t know.”
+
+“Well, I’m glad my little girl didn’t snatch and push. It’s better to go
+without than to take from other people. That’s ugly.”
+
+Ugly. Being naughty was just that. Doing ugly things. Being good was
+being beautiful like Mamma. She wanted to be like her mother. Sitting up
+there and being good felt delicious. And the smooth cream with the milk
+running under it, thin and cold, was delicious too.
+
+Suddenly a thought came rushing at her. There was God and there was
+Jesus. But even God and Jesus were not more beautiful than Mamma. They
+couldn’t be.
+
+“You mustn’t say things like that, Hatty; you mustn’t, really. It might
+make something happen.”
+
+“Oh, no, it won’t. You don’t suppose they’re listening all the time.”
+
+Saying things like that made you feel good and at the same time naughty,
+which was more exciting than only being one or the other. But Mamma’s
+frightened face spoiled it. What did she think--what did she think God
+would do?
+
+Red campion----
+
+At the bottom of the orchard a door in the wall opened into Black’s
+Lane, below the three tall elms.
+
+She couldn’t believe she was really walking there by herself. It had
+come all of a sudden, the thought that she _must_ do it, that she _must_
+go out into the lane; and when she found the door unlatched, something
+seemed to take hold of her and push her out. She was forbidden to go
+into Black’s Lane; she was not even allowed to walk there with Annie.
+
+She kept on saying to herself: “I’m in the lane. I’m in the lane. I’m
+disobeying Mamma.”
+
+Nothing could undo that. She had disobeyed by just standing outside the
+orchard door. Disobedience was such a big and awful thing that it was
+waste not to do something big and awful with it. So she went on, up and
+up, past the three tall elms. She was a big girl, wearing black silk
+aprons and learning French. Walking by herself. When she arched her back
+and stuck her stomach out she felt like a tall lady in a crinoline and
+shawl. She swung her hips and made her skirts fly out. That was her
+grown-up crinoline, swing-swinging as she went.
+
+At the turn the cow’s parsley and rose campion began; on each side a
+long trail of white froth with the red tops of the campion pricking
+through. She made herself a nosegay.
+
+Past the second turn you came to the waste ground covered with old boots
+and rusted, crumpled tins. The little dirty brown house stood there
+behind the rickety blue palings; narrow, like the piece of a house that
+has been cut in two. It hid, stooping under the ivy bush on its roof. It
+was not like the houses people live in; there was something queer, some
+secret, frightening thing about it.
+
+The man came out and went to the gate and stood there. _He_ was the
+frightening thing. When he saw her he stepped back and crouched behind
+the palings, ready to jump out.
+
+She turned slowly, as if she had thought of something. She mustn’t run.
+She must _not_ run. If she ran he would come after her.
+
+Her mother was coming down the garden walk, tall and beautiful in her
+silver-gray gown with the bands of black velvet on the flounces and the
+sleeves; her wide, hooped skirts swung, brushing the flower borders.
+
+She ran up to her, crying, “Mamma, I went up the lane where you told me
+not to.”
+
+“No, Hatty, no; you didn’t.”
+
+You could see she wasn’t angry. She was frightened.
+
+“I did. I did.”
+
+Her mother took the bunch of flowers out of her hand and looked at it.
+“Yes,” she said, “that’s where the dark-red campion grows.”
+
+She was holding the flowers up to her face. It was awful, for you could
+see her mouth thicken and redden over its edges and shake. She hid it
+behind the flowers. And somehow you knew it wasn’t your naughtiness that
+made her cry. There was something more.
+
+She was saying in a thick, soft voice, “It was wrong of you, my
+darling.”
+
+Suddenly she bent her tall straightness. “Rose campion,” she said,
+parting the stems with her long, thin fingers. “Look, Hatty, how
+_beautiful_ they are. Run away and put the poor things in water.”
+
+She was so quiet, so quiet, and her quietness hurt far more than if she
+had been angry.
+
+She must have gone straight back into the house to Papa. Harriett knew,
+because he sent for her. He was quiet, too.... That was the little,
+hiding voice he told you secrets in.... She stood close up to him,
+between his knees, and his arm went loosely round her to keep her there
+while he looked into her eyes. You could smell tobacco, and the queer,
+clean man’s smell that came up out of him from his collar. He wasn’t
+smiling; but somehow his eyes looked kinder than if they had smiled.
+
+“Why did you do it, Hatty?”
+
+“Because--I wanted to see what it would feel like.”
+
+“You mustn’t do it again. Do you hear?--you mustn’t do it.”
+
+“Why?”
+
+“Why? Because it makes your mother unhappy. That’s enough why.”
+
+But there was something more. Mamma had been frightened. Something to do
+with the frightening man in the lane.
+
+“Why does it make her?”
+
+She knew; she knew; but she wanted to see what he would say.
+
+“I said that was enough.... Do you know what you’ve been guilty of?”
+
+“Disobedience.”
+
+“More than that. Breaking trust. Meanness. It was mean and dishonorable
+of you when you knew you wouldn’t be punished.”
+
+“Isn’t there to be a punishment?”
+
+“No. People are punished to make them remember. We want you to forget.”
+ His arm tightened, drawing her closer. And the kind, secret voice went
+on. “Forget ugly things. Understand, Hatty, nothing is forbidden.
+We don’t forbid, because we trust you to do what we wish. To behave
+beautifully.... There, there.”
+
+She hid her face on his breast against his tickly coat, and cried.
+
+She would always have to do what they wanted; the unhappiness of not
+doing it was more than she could bear. All very well to say there would
+be no punishment; _their_ unhappiness was the punishment.
+
+It hurt more than anything. It kept on hurting when she thought about
+it.
+
+The first minute of to-morrow she would begin behaving beautifully; as
+beautifully as she could. They wanted you to; they wanted it more than
+anything because they were so beautiful. So good. So wise.
+
+But three years went before Harriett understood how wise they had been,
+and why her mother took her again and again into Black’s Lane to pick
+red campion, so that it was always the red campion she remembered. They
+must have known all the time about Black’s Lane; Annie, the housemaid,
+used to say it was a bad place; something had happened to a little girl
+there. Annie hushed and reddened and wouldn’t tell you what it was.
+Then one day, when she was thirteen, standing by the apple tree, Connie
+Hancock told her. A secret... Behind the dirty blue palings... She shut
+her eyes, squeezing the lids down, frightened. But when she thought of
+the lane she could see nothing but the green banks, the three tall
+elms, and the red campion pricking through the white froth of the cow’s
+parsley; her mother stood on the garden walk in her wide, swinging gown;
+she was holding the red and white flowers up to her face and saying,
+“Look, how _beautiful_ they are.”
+
+She saw her all the time while Connie was telling her the secret. She
+wanted to get up and go to her. Connie knew what it meant when you
+stiffened suddenly and made yourself tall and cold and silent. The
+cold silence would frighten her and she would go away. Then, Harriett
+thought, she could get back to her mother and Longfellow.
+
+Every afternoon, through the hours before her father came home, she sat
+in the cool, green-lighted drawing-room reading _Evangeline_ aloud to
+her mother. When they came to the beautiful places they looked at each
+other and smiled.
+
+She passed through her fourteenth year sedately, to the sound of
+_Evangeline_. Her upright body, her lifted, delicately obstinate, rather
+wistful face expressed her small, conscious determination to be good.
+She was silent with emotion when Mrs. Hancock told her she was growing
+like her mother.
+
+
+
+
+III
+
+
+Connie Hancock was her friend.
+
+She had once been a slender, wide-mouthed child, top-heavy with her damp
+clumps of hair. Now she was squaring and thickening and looking horrid,
+like Mr. Hancock. Beside her Harriett felt tall and elegant and slender.
+
+Mamma didn’t know what Connie was really like; it was one of those
+things you couldn’t tell her. She said Connie would grow out of it.
+Meanwhile you could see _he_ wouldn’t. Mr. Hancock had red whiskers, and
+his face squatted down in his collar, instead of rising nobly up out
+of it like Papa’s. It looked as if it was thinking things that made its
+eyes bulge and its mouth curl over and slide like a drawn loop. When you
+talked about Mr. Hancock, Papa gave a funny laugh as if he was something
+improper. He said Connie ought to have red whiskers.
+
+Mrs. Hancock, Connie’s mother, was Mamma’s dearest friend. That was
+why there had always been Connie. She could remember her, squirming and
+spluttering in her high nursery chair. And there had always been Mrs.
+Hancock, refined and mournful, looking at you with gentle, disappointed
+eyes.
+
+She was glad that Connie hadn’t been sent to her boarding-school, so
+that nothing could come between her and Priscilla Heaven.
+
+
+Priscilla was her real friend.
+
+It had begun in her third term, when Priscilla first came to the school,
+unhappy and shy, afraid of the new faces. Harriett took her to her room.
+
+She was thin, thin, in her shabby black velvet jacket. She stood looking
+at herself in the greenish glass over the yellow-painted chest of
+drawers. Her heavy black hair had dragged the net and broken it. She put
+up her thin arms, helpless.
+
+“They’ll never keep me,” she said. “I’m so untidy.”
+
+“It wants more pins,” said Harriett. “Ever so many more pins. If you put
+them in head downwards they’ll fall out. I’ll show you.”
+
+Priscilla trembled with joy when Harriett asked her to walk with her;
+she had been afraid of her at first because she behaved so beautifully.
+
+Soon they were always together. They sat side by side at the dinner
+table and in school, black head and golden brown leaning to each other
+over the same book; they walked side by side in the packed procession,
+going two by two. They slept in the same room, the two white beds drawn
+close together; a white dimity curtain hung between; they drew it back
+so that they could see each other lying there in the summer dusk and in
+the clear mornings when they waked.
+
+Harriett loved Priscilla’s odd, dusk-white face; her long hound’s nose,
+seeking; her wide mouth, restless between her shallow, fragile jaws; her
+eyes, black, cleared with spots of jade gray, prominent, showing white
+rims when she was startled. She started at sudden noises; she quivered
+and stared when you caught her dreaming; she cried when the organ burst
+out triumphantly in church. You had to take care every minute that you
+didn’t hurt her.
+
+She cried when term ended and she had to go home. Priscilla’s home was
+horrible. Her father drank, her mother fretted; they were poor; a rich
+aunt paid for her schooling.
+
+When the last midsummer holidays came she spent them with Harriett.
+
+“Oh-h-h!” Prissie drew in her breath when she heard they were to sleep
+together in the big bed in the spare room. She went about looking at
+things, curious, touching them softly as if they were sacred. She loved
+the two rough-coated china lambs on the chimney-piece, and “Oh--the dear
+little china boxes with the flowers sitting up on them.”
+
+But when the bell rang she stood quivering in the doorway.
+
+“I’m afraid of your father and mother, Hatty. They won’t like me. I
+_know_ they won’t like me.”
+
+“They will. They’ll love you,” Hatty said.
+
+And they did. They were sorry for the little white-faced, palpitating
+thing.
+
+
+It was their last night. Priscilla wasn’t going back to school again.
+Her aunt, she said, was only paying for a year. They lay together in the
+big bed, dim, face to face, talking.
+
+“Hatty--if you wanted to do something most awfully, more than anything
+else in the world, and it was wrong, would you be able not to do it?”
+
+“I hope so. I _think_ I would, because I’d know if I did it would make
+Papa and Mamma unhappy.”
+
+“Yes, but suppose it was giving up something you wanted, something you
+loved more than them--could you?”
+
+“Yes. If it was wrong for me to have it. And I couldn’t love anything
+more than them.”
+
+“But if you did, you’d give it up.”
+
+“I’d have to.”
+
+“Hatty--I couldn’t.”
+
+“Oh, yes, _you_ could if _I_ could.”
+
+“No. No....”
+
+“How do you know you couldn’t?”
+
+“Because I haven’t. I--I oughtn’t to have gone on staying here. My
+father’s ill. They wanted me to go to them and I wouldn’t go.”
+
+“Oh, Prissie----”
+
+“There, you see. But I couldn’t. I couldn’t. I was so happy here with
+you. I couldn’t give it up.”
+
+“If your father had been like Papa you would have.”
+
+“Yes. I’d do anything for _him_, because he’s your father. It’s you I
+couldn’t give up.”
+
+“You’ll have to some day.”
+
+“When--when?”
+
+“When somebody else comes. When you’re married.”
+
+“I shall never marry. Never. I shall never want anybody but you. If we
+could always be together.... I can’t think _why_ people marry, Hatty.”
+
+“Still,” Hatty said, “they do.”
+
+“It’s because they haven’t ever cared as you and me care.... Hatty, if I
+don’t marry anybody, _you_ won’t, will you?”
+
+“I’m not thinking of marrying anybody.”
+
+“No. But promise, promise on your honor you won’t ever.”
+
+“I’d rather not _promise_. You see, I might. I shall love you all the
+same, Priscilla, all my life.”
+
+“No, you won’t. It’ll all be different. I love you more than you love
+me. But I shall love you all my life and it won’t be different. I shall
+never marry.”
+
+“Perhaps I shan’t, either,” Harriett said.
+
+They exchanged gifts. Harriett gave Priscilla a rosewood writing
+desk inlaid with mother-o’-pearl, and Priscilla gave Harriett a
+pocket-handkerchief case she had made herself of fine gray canvas
+embroidered with blue flowers like a sampler and lined with blue and
+white plaid silk. On the top part you read “Pocket handkerchiefs” in
+blue lettering, and on the bottom “Harriett Frean,” and, tucked away in
+one corner, “Priscilla Heaven: September, 1861.”
+
+
+
+
+IV
+
+
+She remembered the conversation. Her father sitting, straight and
+slender, in his chair, talking in that quiet voice of his that never
+went sharp or deep or quavering, that paused now and then on an amused
+inflection, his long lips straightening between the perpendicular
+grooves of his smile. She loved his straight, slender face,
+clean-shaven, the straight, slightly jutting jaw, the dark-blue flattish
+eyes under the black eyebrows, the silver-grizzled hair that fitted
+close like a cap, curling in a silver brim above his ears.
+
+He was talking about his business as if more than anything it amused
+him.
+
+“There’s nothing gross and material about stock-broking. It’s like pure
+mathematics. You’re dealing in abstractions, ideal values, all the time.
+You calculate--in curves.” His hand, holding the unlit cigar, drew a
+curve, a long graceful one, in mid-air. “You know what’s going to happen
+all the time.
+
+“... The excitement begins when you don’t quite know and you risk it;
+when it’s getting dangerous.
+
+“... The higher mathematics of the game. If you can afford them; if you
+haven’t a wife and family--I can see the fascination....”
+
+He sat holding his cigar in one hand, looking at it without seeing it,
+seeing the fascination and smiling at it, amused and secure.
+
+And her mother, bending over her bead-work, smiled too, out of their
+happiness, their security.
+
+He would lean back, smoking his cigar and looking at them out of
+contented, half-shut eyes, as they stitched, one at each end of the long
+canvas fender stool. He was waiting, he said, for the moment when their
+heads would come bumping together in the middle.
+
+Sometimes they would sit like that, not exchanging ideas, exchanging
+only the sense of each other’s presence, a secure, profound satisfaction
+that belonged as much to their bodies as their minds; it rippled on
+their faces with their quiet smiling, it breathed with their breath.
+Sometimes she or her mother read aloud, Mrs. Browning or Charles
+Dickens; or the biography of some Great Man, sitting there in the
+velvet-curtained room or out on the lawn under the cedar tree. A
+motionless communion broken by walks in the sweet-smelling fields and
+deep, elm-screened lanes. And there were short journeys into London to
+a lecture or a concert, and now and then the surprise and excitement of
+the play.
+
+One day her mother smoothed out her long, hanging curls and tucked them
+away under a net. Harriett had a little shock of dismay and resentment,
+hating change.
+
+And the long, long Sundays spaced the weeks and the months, hushed and
+sweet and rather enervating, yet with a sort of thrill in them as if
+somewhere the music of the church organ went on vibrating. Her mother
+had some secret: some happy sense of God that she gave to you and you
+took from her as you took food and clothing, but not quite knowing
+what it was, feeling that there was something more in it, some hidden
+gladness, some perfection that you missed.
+
+Her father had his secret too. She felt that it was harder, somehow,
+darker and dangerous. He read dangerous books: Darwin and Huxley and
+Herbert Spencer. Sometimes he talked about them.
+
+“There’s a sort of fascination in seeing how far you can go.... The
+fascination of truth might be just that--the risk that, after all, it
+mayn’t be true, that you may have to go farther and farther, perhaps
+never come back.”
+
+Her mother looked up with her bright, still eyes.
+
+“I trust the truth. I know that, however far you go, you’ll come back
+some day.”
+
+“I believe you see all of them--Darwin and Huxley and Herbert
+Spencer--coming back,” he said.
+
+“Yes, I do.”
+
+His eyes smiled, loving her. But you could see it amused him, too, to
+think of them, all those reckless, courageous thinkers, coming back, to
+share her secret. His thinking was just a dangerous game he played.
+
+She looked at her father with a kind of awe as he sat there, reading his
+book, in danger and yet safe.
+
+She wanted to know what that fascination was. She took down Herbert
+Spencer and tried to read him. She made a point of finishing every book
+she had begun, for her pride couldn’t bear being beaten. Her head grew
+hot and heavy: she read the same sentences over and over again; they had
+no meaning; she couldn’t understand a single word of Herbert Spencer.
+He had beaten her. As she put the book back in its place she said to
+herself: “I mustn’t. If I go on, if I get to the interesting part I may
+lose my faith.” And soon she made herself believe that this was really
+the reason why she had given it up.
+
+
+Besides Connie Hancock there were Lizzie Pierce and Sarah Barmby.
+
+Exquisite pleasure to walk with Lizzie Pierce. Lizzie’s walk was a
+sliding, swooping dance of little pointed feet, always as if she were
+going out to meet somebody, her sharp, black-eyed face darting and
+turning.
+
+“My _dear_, he kept on doing _this_” (Lizzie did it) “as if he was
+trying to sit on himself to keep him from flying off into space like a
+cork. Fancy proposing on three tumblers of soda water! I might have been
+Mrs. Pennefather but for that.”
+
+Lizzie went about laughing, laughing at everybody, looking for something
+to laugh at everywhere. Now and then she would stop suddenly to
+contemplate the vision she had created.
+
+“If Connie didn’t wear a bustle--or, oh my dear, if Mr. Hancock did----”
+
+“Mr. _Hancock!_” Clear, firm laughter, chiming and tinkling.
+
+“Goodness! To think how many ridiculous people there are in the world!”
+
+“I believe you see something ridiculous in me.”
+
+“Only when--only when----”
+
+She swung her parasol in time to her sing-song. She wouldn’t say when.
+
+“Lizzie--not--_not_ when I’m in my black lace fichu and the little round
+hat?”
+
+“Oh, dear me--no. Not _then_.”
+
+The little round hat, Lizzie wore one like it herself, tilted forward,
+perched on her chignon.
+
+“Well, then----” she pleaded.
+
+Lizzie’s face darted its teasing, mysterious smile.
+
+She loved Lizzie best of her friends after Priscilla. She loved her
+mockery and her teasing wit.
+
+And there was Lizzie’s friend, Sarah Barmby, who lived in one of those
+little shabby villas on the London road and looked after her father.
+She moved about the villa in an unseeing, shambling way, hitting herself
+against the furniture. Her face was heavy with a gentle, brooding
+goodness, and she had little eyes that blinked and twinkled in the
+heaviness, as if something amused her. At first you kept on wondering
+what the joke was, till you saw it was only a habit Sarah had. She came
+when she could spare time from her father.
+
+Next to Lizzie, Harriett loved Sarah. She loved her goodness.
+
+And Connie Hancock, bouncing about hospitably in the large, rich house.
+Tea-parties and dances at the Hancocks’.
+
+She wasn’t sure that she liked dancing. There was something obscurely
+dangerous about it. She was afraid of being lifted off her feet and
+swung on and on, away from her safe, happy life. She was stiff and
+abrupt with her partners, convinced that none of those men who liked
+Connie Hancock could like her, and anxious to show them that she didn’t
+expect them to. She was afraid of what they were thinking. And she would
+slip away early, running down the garden to the gate at the bottom of
+the lane where her father waited for her. She loved the still coldness
+of the night under the elms, and the strong, tight feel of her father’s
+arm when she hung on it leaning towards him, and his “There we are”
+ as he drew her closer. Her mother would look up from the sofa and ask
+always the same question, “Well, did anything nice happen?”
+
+Till at last she answered, “No. Did you think it would, Mamma?”
+
+“You never know,” said her mother.
+
+“_I_ know everything.”
+
+“_Every_thing?”
+
+“Everything that could happen at the Hancocks’ dances.”
+
+Her mother shook her head at her. She knew that in secret Mamma was
+glad; but she answered the reproof.
+
+“It’s mean of me to say that when I’ve eaten four of their ices. They
+were strawberry, and chocolate and vanilla, all in one.”
+
+“Well, they won’t last much longer.”
+
+“Not at that rate,” her father said.
+
+“I meant the dances,” said her mother.
+
+And sure enough, soon after Connie’s engagement to young Mr.
+Pennefather, they ceased.
+
+And the three friends, Connie and Sarah and Lizzie, came and went. She
+loved them; and yet when they were there they broke something, something
+secret and precious between her and her father and mother, and when
+they were gone she felt the stir, the happy movement of coming together
+again, drawing in close, close, after the break.
+
+“We only want each other.” Nobody else really mattered, not even
+Priscilla Heaven.
+
+Year after year the same. Her mother parted her hair into two sleek
+wings; she wore a rosette and lappets of black velvet and lace on a
+glistening beetle-backed chignon. And Harriett felt again her shock of
+resentment. She hated to think of her mother subject to change and time.
+
+And Priscilla came year after year, still loving, still protesting that
+she would never marry. Yet they were glad when even Priscilla had gone
+and left them to each other. Only each other, year after year the same.
+
+
+
+
+V
+
+
+Priscilla’s last visit was followed by another passionate vow that she
+would never marry. Then within three weeks she wrote again, telling of
+her engagement to Robin Lethbridge.
+
+“... I haven’t known him very long, and Mamma says it’s too soon; but
+he makes me feel as if I had known him all my life. I know I said I
+wouldn’t, but I couldn’t tell; I didn’t know it would be so different.
+I couldn’t have believed that anybody could be so happy. You won’t mind,
+Hatty. We can love each other just the same....”
+
+Incredible that Priscilla, who could be so beaten down and crushed
+by suffering, should have risen to such an ecstasy. Her letters had a
+swinging lilt, a hurried beat, like a song bursting, a heart beating for
+joy too fast.
+
+It would have to be a long engagement. Robin was in a provincial bank,
+he had his way to make. Then, a year later, Prissy wrote and told them
+that Robin had got a post in Parson’s Bank in the City. He didn’t know
+a soul in London. Would they be kind to him and let him come to them
+sometimes, on Saturdays and Sundays?
+
+He came one Sunday. Harriett had wondered what he would be like, and he
+was tall, slender-waisted, wide-shouldered; he had a square, very white
+forehead; his brown hair was parted on one side, half curling at the
+tips above his ears. His eyes--thin, black crystal, shining, turning,
+showing speckles of brown and gray; perfectly set under straight
+eyebrows laid very black on the white skin. His round, pouting chin
+had a dent in it. The face in between was thin and irregular; the nose
+straight and serious and rather long in profile, with a dip and a rise
+at three-quarters; in full face straight again but shortened. His eyes
+had another meaning, deeper and steadier than his fine slender mouth;
+but it was the mouth that made you look at him. One arch of the bow
+was higher than the other; now and then it quivered with an uneven,
+sensitive movement of its own.
+
+She noticed his mouth’s little dragging droop at the corners and
+thought: “Oh, you’re cross. If you’re cross with Prissie--if you make
+her unhappy”--but when he caught her looking at him the cross lips
+drew back in a sudden, white, confiding smile. And when he spoke she
+understood why he had been irresistible to Priscilla.
+
+He had come three Sundays now, four perhaps; she had lost count. They
+were all sitting out on the lawn under the cedar. Suddenly, as if he had
+only just thought of it, he said:
+
+“It’s extraordinarily good of you to have me.”
+
+“Oh, well,” her mother said, “Prissie is Hatty’s greatest friend.”
+
+“I supposed that was why you do it.”
+
+He didn’t want it to be that. He wanted it to be himself. Himself. He
+was proud. He didn’t like to owe anything to other people, not even to
+Prissie.
+
+Her father smiled at him. “You must give us time.”
+
+He would never give it or take it. You could see him tearing at things
+in his impatience, to know them, to make them give themselves up to him
+at once. He came rushing to give himself up, all in a minute, to make
+himself known.
+
+“It isn’t fair,” he said. “I know you so much better than you know me.
+Priscilla’s always talking about you. But you don’t know anything about
+_me_.”
+
+“No. We’ve got all the excitement.”
+
+“And the risk, sir.”
+
+“And, of course, the risk.” He liked him.
+
+She could talk to Robin Lethbridge as she couldn’t talk to Connie
+Hancock’s young men. She wasn’t afraid of what he was thinking. She was
+safe with him, he belonged to Priscilla Heaven. He liked her because
+he loved Priscilla; but he wanted her to like him, not because of
+Priscilla, but for himself.
+
+She talked about Priscilla: “I never saw anybody so loving. It used to
+frighten me; because you can hurt her so easily.”
+
+“Yes. Poor little Prissie, she’s very vulnerable,” he said.
+
+When Priscilla came to stay it was almost painful. Her eyes clung to
+him, and wouldn’t let him go. If he left the room she was restless,
+unhappy till he came back. She went out for long walks with him and
+returned silent, with a tired, beaten look. She would lie on the sofa,
+and he would hang over her, gazing at her with strained, unhappy eyes.
+
+After she had gone he kept on coming more than ever, and he stayed
+overnight. Harriett had to walk with him now. He wanted to talk, to talk
+about himself, endlessly.
+
+When she looked in the glass she saw a face she didn’t know:
+bright-eyed, flushed, pretty. The little arrogant lift had gone. As if
+it had been somebody else’s face she asked herself, in wonder, without
+rancour, why nobody had ever cared for it. Why? Why? She could see her
+father looking at her, intent, as if he wondered. And one day her mother
+said, “Do you think you ought to see so much of Robin? Do you think it’s
+quite fair to Prissie?”
+
+“Oh--_Mamma!_ ... I wouldn’t. I haven’t----”
+
+“I know. You couldn’t if you would, Hatty. You would always behave
+beautifully. But are you so sure about Robin?”
+
+“Oh, he _couldn’t_ care for _anybody_ but Prissie. It’s only because
+he’s so safe with me, because he knows I don’t and he doesn’t----.”
+
+The wedding day was fixed for July. After all, they were going to risk
+it. By the middle of June the wedding presents began to come in.
+
+Harriett and Robin Lethbridge were walking up Black’s Lane. The hedges
+were a white bridal froth of cow’s parsley. Every now and then she
+swerved aside to pick the red campion.
+
+He spoke suddenly. “Do you know what a dear little face you have, Hatty?
+It’s so clear and still and it behaves so beautifully.”
+
+“Does it?”
+
+She thought of Prissie’s face, dark and restless, never clear, never
+still.
+
+“You’re not a bit like what I expected. Prissie doesn’t know what you
+are. You don’t know yourself.”
+
+“I know what _she_ is.”
+
+His mouth’s uneven quiver beat in and out like a pulse.
+
+“Don’t talk to me about Prissie!”
+
+Then he got it out. He tore it out of himself. He loved her.
+
+“Oh, Robin----” Her fingers loosened in her dismay; she went dropping
+red campion.
+
+It was no use, he said, to think about Prissie. He couldn’t marry her.
+He couldn’t marry anybody but Hatty; Hatty must marry him.
+
+“You can’t say you don’t love me, Hatty.”
+
+No. She couldn’t say it; for it wouldn’t be true.
+
+“Well, then----”
+
+“I can’t. I’d be doing wrong, Robin. I feel all the time as if she
+belonged to you; as if she were married to you.”
+
+“But she isn’t. It isn’t the same thing.”
+
+“To me it is. You can’t undo it. It would be too dishonorable.”
+
+“Not half so dishonorable as marrying her when I don’t love her.”
+
+“Yes. As long as she loves you. She hasn’t anybody but you. She was so
+happy. So happy. Think of the cruelty of it. Think what we should send
+her back to.”
+
+“You think of Prissie. You don’t think of me.”
+
+“Because it would _kill_ her.”
+
+“How about you?”
+
+“It can’t kill us, because we know we love each other. Nothing can take
+that from us.”
+
+“But I couldn’t be happy with her, Hatty. She wears me out. She’s so
+restless.”
+
+“_We_ couldn’t be happy, Robin. We should always be thinking of what we
+did to her. How could we be happy?”
+
+“You know how.”
+
+“Well, even if we were, we’ve no right to get our happiness out of her
+suffering.”
+
+“Oh, Hatty, why are you so good, so good?”
+
+“I’m not good. It’s only--there are some things you can’t do. We
+couldn’t. We couldn’t.”
+
+“No,” he said at last. “I don’t suppose we could. Whatever it’s like
+I’ve got to go through with it.”
+
+He didn’t stay that night.
+
+
+She was crouching on the floor beside her father, her arm thrown across
+his knees. Her mother had left them there.
+
+“Papa--do you know?”
+
+“Your mother told me.... You’ve done the right thing.”
+
+“You don’t think I’ve been cruel? He said I didn’t think of him.”
+
+“Oh, no, you couldn’t do anything else.”
+
+She couldn’t. She couldn’t. It was no use thinking about him. Yet night
+after night, for weeks and months, she thought, and cried herself to
+sleep.
+
+By day she suffered from Lizzie’s sharp eyes and Sarah’s brooding pity
+and Connie Pennefather’s callous, married stare. Only with her father
+and mother she had peace.
+
+
+
+
+VI
+
+
+Towards spring Harriett showed signs of depression, and they took her to
+the south of France and to Bordighera and Rome. In Rome she recovered.
+Rome was one of those places you ought to see; she had always been
+anxious to do the right thing. In the little Pension in the Via Babuino
+she had a sense of her own importance and the importance of her father
+and mother. They were Mr. and Mrs. Hilton Frean, and Miss Harriett
+Frean, seeing Rome.
+
+After their return in the summer he began to write his book, _The Social
+Order_. There were things that had to be said; it did not much matter
+who said them provided they were said plainly. He dreamed of a new
+Social State, society governing itself without representatives. For a
+long time they lived on the interest and excitement of the book, and
+when it came out Harriett pasted all his reviews very neatly into
+an album. He had the air of not taking them quite seriously; but he
+subscribed to _The Spectator_, and sometimes an article appeared there
+understood to have been written by Hilton Frean.
+
+And they went abroad again every year. They went to Florence and came
+home and read _Romola_ and Mrs. Browning and Dante and _The Spectator_;
+they went to Assisi and read the _Little Flowers of Saint Francis;_ they
+went to Venice and read Ruskin and _The Spectator;_ they went to Rome
+again and read Gibbon’s _Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire_. Harriett
+said, “We should have enjoyed Rome more if we had read Gibbon,” and her
+mother replied that they would not have enjoyed Gibbon so much if they
+had not seen Rome. Harriett did not really enjoy him; but she enjoyed
+the sound of her own voice reading out the great sentences and the
+rolling Latin names.
+
+She had brought back photographs of the Colosseum and the Forum and of
+Botticelli’s _Spring_, and a della Robbia Madonna in a shrine of fruit
+and flowers, and hung them in the drawing-room. And when she saw the
+blue egg in its gilt frame standing on the marble-topped table, she
+wondered how she had ever loved it, and wished it were not there. It had
+been one of Mamma’s wedding presents. Mrs. Hancock had given it her; but
+Mr. Hancock must have bought it.
+
+Harriett’s face had taken on again its arrogant lift. She esteemed
+herself justly. She knew she was superior to the Hancocks and the
+Pennefathers and to Lizzie Pierce and Sarah Barmby; even to Priscilla.
+When she thought of Robin and how she had given him up she felt a
+thrill of pleasure in her beautiful behavior, and a thrill of pride in
+remembering that he had loved her more than Priscilla. Her mind refused
+to think of Robin married.
+
+Two, three, five years passed, with a perceptible acceleration, and
+Harriett was now thirty.
+
+
+She had not seen them since the wedding day. Robin had gone back to his
+own town; he was cashier in a big bank there. For four years Prissie’s
+letters came regularly every month or so, then ceased abruptly.
+
+Then Robin wrote and told her of Prissie’s illness. A mysterious
+paralysis. It had begun with fits of giddiness in the street; Prissie
+would turn round and round on the pavement; then falling fits; and now
+both legs were paralyzed, but Robin thought she was gradually recovering
+the use of her hands.
+
+Harriett did not cry. The shock of it stopped her tears. She tried to
+see it and couldn’t. Poor little Prissie. How terrible. She kept on
+saying to herself she couldn’t bear to think of Prissie paralyzed. Poor
+little Prissie.
+
+And poor Robin----
+
+Paralysis. She saw the paralysis coming between them, separating them,
+and inside her the secret pain was soothed. She need not think of Robin
+married any more.
+
+She was going to stay with them. Robin had written the letter. He said
+Prissie wanted her. When she met him on the platform she had a little
+shock at seeing him changed. Changed. His face was fuller, and a dark
+moustache hid the sensitive, uneven, pulsing lip. His mouth was dragged
+down further at the corners. But he was the same Robin. In the cab,
+going to the house, he sat silent, breathing hard; she felt the tremor
+of his consciousness and knew that he still loved her; more than he
+loved Priscilla. Poor little Prissie. How terrible!
+
+Priscilla sat by the fireplace in a wheel chair. She became agitated
+when she saw Harriett; her arms shook as she lifted them for the
+embrace.
+
+“Hatty--you’ve hardly changed a bit.” Her voice shook.
+
+Poor little Prissie. She was thin, thinner than ever, and stiff as if
+she had withered. Her face was sallow and dry, and the luster had gone
+from her black hair. Her wide mouth twitched and wavered, wavered and
+twitched. Though it was warm summer she sat by a blazing fire with the
+windows behind her shut.
+
+Through dinner Harriett and Robin were silent and constrained. She tried
+not to see Prissie shaking and jerking and spilling soup down the front
+of her gown. Robin’s face was smooth and blank; he pretended to be
+absorbed in his food, so as not to look at Prissie. It was as if
+Prissie’s old restlessness had grown into that ceaseless jerking
+and twitching. And her eyes fastened on Robin; they clung to him and
+wouldn’t let him go. She kept on asking him to do things for her.
+“Robin, you might get me my shawl;” and Robin would go and get the shawl
+and put it round her. Whenever he did anything for her Prissie’s face
+would settle down into a quivering, deep content.
+
+At nine o’clock he lifted her out of her wheel chair. Harriett saw his
+stoop, and the taut, braced power of his back as he lifted. Prissie lay
+in his arms with rigid limbs hanging from loose attachments, inert, like
+a doll. As he carried her upstairs to bed her face had a queer, exalted
+look of pleasure and of triumph.
+
+Harriett and Robin sat alone together in his study.
+
+“How long is it since we’ve seen each other?”
+
+“Five years, Robin.”
+
+“It isn’t. It can’t be.”
+
+“It is.”
+
+“I suppose it is. But I can’t believe it. I can’t believe I’m married.
+I can’t believe Prissie’s ill. It doesn’t seem real with you sitting
+there.”
+
+“Nothing’s changed, Robin, except that you’re more serious.”
+
+“Nothing’s changed, except that I’m more serious than ever.... Do you
+still do the same things? Do you still sit in the curly chair, holding
+your work up to your chin with your little pointed hands like a
+squirrel? Do you still see the same people?”
+
+“I don’t make new friends, Robin.”
+
+He seemed to settle down after that, smiling at his own thoughts,
+appeased....
+
+Lying in her bed in the spare room, Harriett heard the opening and
+shutting of Robin’s door. She still thought of Prissie’s paralysis
+as separating them, still felt inside her a secret, unacknowledged
+satisfaction. Poor little Prissie. How terrible. Her pity for Priscilla
+went through and through her in wave after wave. Her pity was sad and
+beautiful and at the same time it appeased her pain.
+
+
+In the morning Priscilla told her about her illness. The doctors didn’t
+understand it. She ought to have had a stroke and she hadn’t had one.
+There was no reason why she shouldn’t walk except that she couldn’t. It
+seemed to give her pleasure to go over it, from her first turning
+round and round in the street (with helpless, shaking laughter at
+the queerness of it), to the moment when Robin bought her the wheel
+chair.... Robin ... Robin ...
+
+“I minded most because of Robin. It’s such an _awful_ illness, Hatty.
+I can’t move when I’m in bed. Robin has to get up and turn me a dozen
+times in one night.... Robin’s a perfect saint. He does everything for
+me.” Prissie’s voice and her face softened and thickened with voluptuous
+content.
+
+“... Do you know, Hatty, I had a little baby. It died the day it was
+born.... Perhaps some day I shall have another.”
+
+Harriett was aware of a sudden tightening of her heart, of a creeping
+depression that weighed on her brain and worried it. She thought this
+was her pity for Priscilla.
+
+
+Her third night. All evening Robin had been moody and morose. He would
+hardly speak to either Harriett or Priscilla. When Priscilla asked him
+to do anything for her he got up heavily, pulling himself together with
+a sigh, with a look of weary, irritated patience.
+
+Prissie wheeled herself out of the study into the drawing-room,
+beckoning Harriett to follow. She had the air of saving Robin from
+Harriett, of intimating that his grumpiness was Harriett’s fault. “He
+doesn’t want to be bothered,” she said.
+
+She sat up till eleven, so that Robin shouldn’t be thrown with Harriett
+in the last hours.
+
+Half the night Harriett’s thoughts ran on, now in a darkness, now
+in thin flashes of light. “Supposing, after all, Robin wasn’t happy?
+Supposing he can’t stand it? Supposing.... But why is he angry with
+_me?_” Then a clear thought: “He’s angry with me because he can’t be
+angry with Priscilla.” And clearer. “He’s angry with me because I made
+him marry her.”
+
+She stopped the running and meditated with a steady, hard deliberation.
+She thought of her deep, spiritual love for Robin; of Robin’s deep
+spiritual love for her; of his strength in shouldering his burden. It
+was through her renunciation that he had grown so strong, so pure, so
+good.
+
+
+Something had gone wrong with Prissie. Robin, coming home early on
+Saturday afternoon, had taken Harriett for a walk. All evening and all
+through Sunday it was Priscilla who sulked and snapped when Harriett
+spoke to her.
+
+On Monday morning she was ill, and Robin ordered her to stay in bed.
+Monday was Harriett’s last night. Priscilla stayed in bed till six
+o’clock, when she heard Robin come in; then she insisted on being
+dressed and carried downstairs. Harriett heard her calling to Robin, and
+Robin saying, “I _told_ you you weren’t to get up till to-morrow,” and a
+sound like Prissie crying.
+
+At dinner she shook and jerked and spilt things worse than ever. Robin
+gloomed at her. “You know you ought to be in bed. You’ll go at nine.”
+
+“If I go, you’ll go. You’ve got a headache.”
+
+“I should think I had, sitting in this furnace.”
+
+The heat of the dining room oppressed him, but they sat on there after
+dinner because Prissie loved the heat. Robin’s pale, blank face had a
+sick look, a deadly smoothness. He had to lie down on the sofa in the
+window.
+
+When the clock struck nine he sighed and got up, dragging himself as
+if the weight of his body was more than he could bear. He stooped over
+Prissie, and lifted her.
+
+“Robin--you can’t. You’re dropping to pieces.”
+
+“I’m all right.” He heaved her up with one tremendous, irritated effort,
+and carried her upstairs, fast, as if he wanted to be done with it.
+Through the open doors Harriett could hear Prissie’s pleading whine, and
+Robin’s voice, hard and controlled. Presently he came back to her and
+they went into his study. They could breathe there, he said.
+
+They sat without speaking for a little time. The silence of Prissie’s
+room overhead came between them.
+
+Robin spoke first. “I’m afraid it hasn’t been very gay for you with poor
+Prissie in this state.”
+
+“Poor Prissie? She’s very happy, Robin.”
+
+He stared at her. His eyes, round and full and steady, taxed her with
+falsehood, with hypocrisy.
+
+“You don’t suppose _I’m_ not, do you?”
+
+“No.” There was a movement in her throat as though she swallowed
+something hard. “No. I want you to be happy.”
+
+“You don’t. You want me to be rather miserable.”
+
+“_Robin!_” She contrived a sound like laughter. But Robin didn’t laugh;
+his eyes, morose and cynical, held her there.
+
+“That’s what you want.... At least I hope you do. If you didn’t----”
+
+She fenced off the danger. “Do _you_ want _me_ to be miserable, then?”
+
+At that he laughed out. “No. I don’t. I don’t care how happy you are.”
+
+She took the pain of it: the pain he meant to give her.
+
+That evening he hung over Priscilla with a deliberate, exaggerated
+tenderness.
+
+“Dear.... Dearest....” He spoke the words to Priscilla, but he sent
+out his voice to Harriett. She could feel its false precision, its
+intention, its repulse of her.
+
+She was glad to be gone.
+
+
+
+
+VII
+
+
+Eighteen seventy-nine: it was the year her father lost his money.
+Harriett was nearly thirty-five.
+
+She remembered the day, late in November, when they heard him coming
+home from the office early. Her mother raised her head and said,
+“That’s your father, Harriett. He must be ill.” She always thought of
+seventy-nine as one continuous November.
+
+Her father and mother were alone in the study for a long time; she
+remembered Annie going in with the lamp and coming out and whispering
+that they wanted her. She found them sitting in the lamplight alone,
+close together, holding each other’s hands; their faces had a strange,
+exalted look.
+
+“Harriett, my dear, I’ve lost every shilling I possessed, and here’s
+your mother saying she doesn’t mind.”
+
+He began to explain in his quiet voice. “When all the creditors are paid
+in full there’ll be nothing but your mother’s two hundred a year. And
+the insurance money when I’m gone.”
+
+“Oh, Papa, how terrible----”
+
+“Yes, Hatty.”
+
+“I mean the insurance. It’s gambling with your life.”
+
+“My dear, if that was all I’d gambled with----”
+
+It seemed that half his capital had gone in what he called “the higher
+mathematics of the game.” The creditors would get the rest.
+
+“We shall be no worse off,” her mother said, “than we were when we
+began. We were very happy then.”
+
+“We. How about Harriett?”
+
+“Harriett isn’t going to mind.”
+
+“You’re not--going--to mind.... We shall have to sell this house and
+live in a smaller one. And I can’t take my business up again.”
+
+“My dear, I’m glad and thankful you’ve done with that dreadful,
+dangerous game.”
+
+“I’d no business to play it.... But, after holding myself in all those
+years, there was a sort of fascination.”
+
+One of the creditors, Mr. Hichens, gave him work in his office. He was
+now Mr. Hichens’s clerk. He went to Mr. Hichens as he had gone to
+his own great business, upright and alert, handsome in his dark-gray
+overcoat with the black velvet collar, faintly amused at himself. You
+would never have known that anything had happened.
+
+
+Strange that at the same time Mr. Hancock should have lost money, a
+great deal of money, more money than Papa. He seemed determined that
+everybody should know it; you couldn’t pass him in the road without
+knowing. He met you with his swollen, red face hanging; ashamed and
+miserable, and angry as if it had been your fault.
+
+One day Harriett came in to her father and mother with the news. “Did
+you know that Mr. Hancock’s sold his horses? And he’s going to give up
+the house.”
+
+Her mother signed to her to be silent, frowning and shaking her head and
+glancing at her father. He got up suddenly and left the room.
+
+“He’s worrying himself to death about Mr. Hancock,” she said.
+
+“I didn’t know he cared for him like that, Mamma.”
+
+“Oh, well, he’s known him thirty years, and it’s a very dreadful thing
+he should have to give up his house.”
+
+“It’s not worse for him than it is for Papa.”
+
+“It’s ever so much worse. He isn’t like your father. He can’t be happy
+without his big house and his carriages and horses. He’ll feel so small
+and unimportant.”
+
+“Well, then, it serves him right.”
+
+“Don’t say that. It _is_ what he cares for and he’s lost it.”
+
+“He’s no business to behave as if it was Papa’s fault,” said Harriett.
+She had no patience with the odious little man. She thought of her
+father’s face, her father’s body, straight and calm, and his soul so far
+above that mean trouble of Mr. Hancock’s, that vulgar shame.
+
+Yet inside him he fretted. And, suddenly, he began to sink. He turned
+faint after the least exertion and had to leave off going to Mr.
+Hichens. And by the spring of eighteen eighty he was upstairs in his
+room, too ill to be moved. That was just after Mr. Hichens had bought
+the house and wanted to come into it. He lay, patient, in the big white
+bed, smiling his faint, amused smile when he thought of Mr. Hichens.
+
+It was awful to Harriett that her father should be ill, lying there
+at their mercy. She couldn’t get over her sense of his parenthood, his
+authority. When he was obstinate, and insisted on exerting himself, she
+gave in. She was a bad nurse, because she couldn’t set herself against
+his will. And when she had him under her hands to strip and wash him,
+she felt that she was doing something outrageous and impious; she set
+about it with a flaming face and fumbling hands. “Your mother does it
+better,” he said gently. But she could not get her mother’s feeling of
+him as a helpless, dependent thing.
+
+Mr. Hichens called every week to inquire. “Poor man, he wants to know
+when he can have his house. Why _will_ he always come on my good days?
+He isn’t giving himself a chance.”
+
+He still had good days, days when he could be helped out of bed to sit
+in his chair. “This sort of game may go on for ever,” he said. He began
+to worry seriously about keeping Mr. Hichens out of his house. “It isn’t
+decent of me. It isn’t decent.”
+
+Harriett was ill with the strain of it. She had to go away for a
+fortnight with Lizzie Pierce, and Sarah Barmby stayed with her mother.
+Mrs. Barmby had died the year before. When Harriett got back her father
+was making plans for his removal.
+
+“Why have you all made up your minds that it’ll kill me to remove me? It
+won’t. The men can take everything out but me and my bed and that chair.
+And when they’ve got all the things into the other house they can come
+back for the chair and me. And I can sit in the chair while they’re
+bringing the bed. It’s quite simple. It only wants a little system.”
+
+Then, while they wondered whether they might risk it, he got worse. He
+lay propped up, rigid, his arms stretched out by his side, afraid to
+lift a hand because of the violent movements of his heart. His face had
+a patient, expectant look, as if he waited for them to do something.
+
+They couldn’t do anything. There would be no more rallies. He might die
+any day now, the doctor said.
+
+
+“He may die any minute. I certainly don’t expect him to live through the
+night.”
+
+Harriett followed her mother back into the room. He was sitting up in
+his attitude of rigid expectancy; no movement but the quivering of his
+night-shirt above his heart.
+
+“The doctor’s been gone a long time, hasn’t he?” he said.
+
+Harriett was silent. She didn’t understand. Her mother was looking at
+her with a serene comprehension and compassion.
+
+“Poor Hatty,” he said, “she can’t tell a lie to save my life.”
+
+“Oh--Papa----”
+
+He smiled as if he was thinking of something that amused him.
+
+“You should consider other people, my dear. Not just your own selfish
+feelings.... You ought to write and tell Mr. Hichens.”
+
+Her mother gave a short sobbing laugh. “Oh, you darling,” she said.
+
+He lay still. Then suddenly he began pressing hard on the mattress with
+both hands, bracing himself up in the bed. Her mother leaned closer
+towards him. He threw himself over slantways, and with his head bent as
+if it was broken, dropped into her arms.
+
+Harriett wondered why he was making that queer grating and coughing
+noise. Three times.
+
+Her mother called softly to her--“Harriett.”
+
+She began to tremble.
+
+
+
+
+VIII
+
+
+Her mother had some secret that she couldn’t share. She was wonderful
+in her pure, high serenity. Surely she had some secret. She said he was
+closer to her now than he had ever been. And in her correct, precise
+answers to the letters of condolence Harriett wrote: “I feel that he is
+closer to us now than he ever was.” But she didn’t really feel it. She
+only felt that to feel it was the beautiful and proper thing. She looked
+for her mother’s secret and couldn’t find it.
+
+Meanwhile Mr. Hichens had given them six weeks. They had to decide where
+they would go: into Devonshire or into a cottage at Hampstead where
+Sarah Barmby lived now.
+
+Her mother said, “Do you think you’d like to live in Sidmouth, near Aunt
+Harriett?”
+
+They had stayed one summer at Sidmouth with Aunt Harriett. She
+remembered the red cliffs, the sea, and Aunt Harriett’s garden stuffed
+with flowers. They had been happy there. She thought she would love
+that: the sea and the red cliffs and a garden like Aunt Harriett’s.
+
+But she was not sure whether it was what her mother really wanted. Mamma
+would never say. She would have to find out somehow.
+
+“Well--what do you think?”
+
+“It would be leaving all your friends, Hatty.”
+
+“My friends--yes. But----”
+
+Lizzie and Sarah and Connie Pennefather. She could live without them.
+“Oh, there’s Mrs. Hancock.”
+
+“Well----” Her mother’s voice suggested that if she were put to it she
+could live without Mrs. Hancock.
+
+And Harriett thought: She does want to go to Sidmouth then.
+
+“It would be very nice to be near Aunt Harriett.”
+
+She was afraid to say more than that lest she should show her own wish
+before she knew her mother’s.
+
+“Aunt Harriett. Yes.... But it’s very far away, Hatty. We should be cut
+off from everything. Lectures and concerts. We couldn’t afford to come
+up and down.”
+
+“No. We couldn’t.”
+
+She could see that Mamma did not really want to live in Sidmouth;
+she didn’t want to be near Aunt Harriett; she wanted the cottage at
+Hampstead and all the things of their familiar, intellectual life going
+on and on. After all, that was the way to keep near to Papa, to go on
+doing the things they had done together.
+
+Her mother agreed that it was the way.
+
+“I can’t help feeling,” Harriett said, “it’s what he would have wished.”
+
+Her mother’s face was quiet and content. She hadn’t guessed.
+
+
+They left the white house with the green balcony hung out like a
+birdcage at the side, and turned into the cottage at Hampstead. The
+rooms were small and rather dark, and the furniture they had brought had
+a squeezed-up, unhappy look. The blue egg on the marble-topped table
+was conspicuous and hateful as it had never been in the Black’s Lane
+drawing-room. Harriett and her mother looked at it.
+
+“Must it stay there?”
+
+“I think so. Fanny Hancock gave it me.”
+
+“Mamma--you know you don’t like it.”
+
+“No. But after all these years I couldn’t turn the poor thing away.”
+
+Her mother was an old woman, clinging with an old, stubborn fidelity to
+the little things of her past. But Harriett denied it. “She’s not old,”
+ she said to herself. “Not really old.”
+
+“Harriett,” her mother said one day. “I think you ought to do the
+housekeeping.”
+
+“Oh, Mamma, why?” She hated the idea of this change.
+
+“Because you’ll have to do it some day.”
+
+She obeyed. But as she went her rounds and gave her orders she felt that
+she was doing something not quite real, playing at being her mother
+as she had played when she was a child. Then her mother had another
+thought.
+
+“Harriett, I think you ought to see more of your friends, dear.”
+
+“Why?”
+
+“Because you’ll want them after I’m gone.”
+
+“I shall never _want_ anybody but you.”
+
+And their time went as it had gone before: in sewing together, reading
+together, listening to lectures and concerts together. They had told
+Sarah that they didn’t want anybody to call. They were Hilton Frean’s
+wife and daughter. “After our wonderful life with him,” they said,
+“you’ll understand, Sarah, that we don’t want people.” And if Harriett
+was introduced to any stranger she accounted for herself arrogantly: “My
+father was Hilton Frean.”
+
+They were collecting his _Remains_ for publication.
+
+Months passed, years passed, going each one a little quicker than the
+last. And Harriett was thirty-nine.
+
+
+One evening, coming out of church, her mother fainted. That was the
+beginning of her illness, February, eighteen eighty-three. First came
+the long months of weakness; then the months and months of sickness;
+then the pain; the pain she had been hiding, that she couldn’t hide any
+more.
+
+They knew what it was now: that horrible thing that even the doctors
+were afraid to name. They called it “something malignant.” When the
+friends--Mrs. Hancock, Connie Pennefather, Lizzie, and Sarah--called to
+inquire, Harriett wouldn’t tell them what it was; she pretended that she
+didn’t know, that the doctors weren’t sure; she covered it up from them
+as if it had been a secret shame. And they pretended that they didn’t
+know. But they knew.
+
+They were talking now about an operation. There was one chance for her
+in a hundred if they had Sir James Pargeter: one chance. She might die
+of it; she might die under the anæsthetic; she might die of shock; she
+was so old and weak. Still, there was that one chance, if only she would
+take it.
+
+But her mother wouldn’t listen. “My dear, it would cost a hundred
+pounds.”
+
+“How do you know what it would cost?”
+
+“Oh,” she said, “I know.” She was smiling above the sheet that was
+tucked close up, tight under her chin, shutting it all down.
+
+Sir James Pargeter would cost a hundred pounds. Harriett couldn’t lay
+her hands on the money or on half of it or a quarter. “That doesn’t
+matter if they think it’ll save you.”
+
+“They _think;_ they think. But I _know._ I know better than all the
+doctors.”
+
+“But Mamma, darling----”
+
+She urged the operation. Just because it would be so difficult to raise
+the hundred pounds she urged it. She wanted to feel that she had done
+everything that could be done, that she had let nothing stand in the
+way, that she had shrunk from no sacrifice. One chance in a hundred.
+What was a hundred pounds weighed against that one chance? If it had
+been one in a thousand she would have said the same.
+
+“It would be no good, Hatty. I know it wouldn’t. They just love to try
+experiments, those doctors. They’re dying to get their knives into me.
+Don’t _let_ them.”
+
+Gradually, day by day, Harriett weakened. Her mother’s frightened
+voice tore at her, broke her down. Supposing she really died under the
+operation? Supposing---- It was cruel to excite and upset her just for
+that; it made the pain worse.
+
+Either the operation or the pain, going on and on, stabbing with sharper
+and sharper knives; cutting in deeper; all their care, the antiseptics,
+the restoratives, dragging it out, giving it more time to torture her.
+
+When the three friends came, Harriett said, “I shall be glad and
+thankful when it’s all over. I couldn’t want to keep her with me, just
+for this.”
+
+Yet she did want it. She was thankful every morning that she came to her
+mother’s bed and found her alive, lying there, looking at her with her
+wonderful smile. She was glad because she still had her.
+
+And now they were giving her morphia. Under the torpor of the drug
+her face changed; the muscles loosened, the flesh sagged, the widened,
+swollen mouth hung open; only the broad beautiful forehead, the
+beautiful calm eyebrows were the same; the face, sallow white, half
+imbecile, was a mask flung aside. She couldn’t bear to look at it; it
+wasn’t her mother’s face; her mother had died already under the morphia.
+She had a shock every time she came in and found it still there.
+
+On the day her mother died she told herself she was glad and thankful.
+She met her friends with a little quiet, composed face, saying, “I’m
+glad and thankful she’s at peace.” But she wasn’t thankful; she wasn’t
+glad. She wanted her back again. And she reproached herself, one minute
+for having been glad, and the next for wanting her.
+
+She consoled herself by thinking of the sacrifices she had made, how she
+had given up Sidmouth, and how willingly she would have paid the hundred
+pounds.
+
+
+“I sometimes think, Hatty,” said Mrs. Hancock, melancholy and condoling,
+“that it would have been very different if your poor mother could have
+had her wish.”
+
+“What--what wish?”
+
+“Her wish to live in Sidmouth, near your Aunt Harriett.”
+
+And Sarah Barmby, sympathizing heavily, stopping short and brooding,
+trying to think of something to say: “If the operation had only been
+done three years ago when they _knew_ it would save her----”
+
+“Three years ago? But we didn’t know anything about it then.”
+
+“_She_ did.... Don’t you remember? It was when I stayed with her.... Oh,
+Hatty, didn’t she tell you?”
+
+“She never said a word.”
+
+“Oh, well, she wouldn’t hear of it, even then when they didn’t give her
+two years to live.”
+
+Three years? She had had it three years ago. She had known about it all
+that time. Three years ago the operation would have saved her; she would
+have been here now. Why had she refused it when she knew it would save
+her?
+
+She had been thinking of the hundred pounds.
+
+To have known about it three years and said nothing--to have gone
+believing she hadn’t two years to live----
+
+_That_ was her secret. That was why she had been so calm when Papa died.
+She had known she would have him again so soon. Not two years----
+
+“If I’d been them,” Lizzie was saying, “I’d have bitten my tongue out
+before I told you. It’s no use worrying, Hatty. You did everything that
+could be done.”
+
+“I know. I know.”
+
+She held up her face against them; but to herself she said that
+everything had not been done. Her mother had never had her wish. And she
+had died in agony, so that she, Harriett, might keep her hundred pounds.
+
+
+
+
+IX
+
+
+In all her previsions of the event she had seen herself surviving as the
+same Harriett Frean with the addition of an overwhelming grief. She was
+horrified at this image of herself persisting beside her mother’s place
+empty in space and time.
+
+But she was not there. Through her absorption in her mother, some large,
+essential part of herself had gone. It had not been so when her father
+died; what he had absorbed was given back to her, transferred to her
+mother. All her memories of her mother were joined to the memory of this
+now irrecoverable self.
+
+She tried to reinstate herself through grief; she sheltered behind her
+bereavement, affecting a more profound seclusion, abhorring strangers;
+she was more than ever the reserved, fastidious daughter of Hilton
+Frean. She had always thought of herself as different from Connie and
+Sarah, living with a superior, intellectual life. She turned to the
+books she had read with her mother, Dante, Browning, Carlyle, and
+Ruskin, the biographies of Great Men, trying to retrace the footsteps
+of her lost self, to revive the forgotten thrill. But it was no use. One
+day she found herself reading the Dedication of _The Ring and the
+Book_ over and over again, without taking in its meaning, without
+any remembrance of its poignant secret. “‘And all a wonder and a wild
+desire’--Mamma loved that.” She thought she loved it too; but what she
+loved was the dark-green book she had seen in her mother’s long, white
+hands, and the sound of her mother’s voice reading. She had followed
+her mother’s mind with strained attention and anxiety, smiling when she
+smiled, but with no delight and no admiration of her own.
+
+If only she could have remembered. It was only through memory that she
+could reinstate herself.
+
+She had a horror of the empty house. Her friends advised her to leave
+it, but she had a horror of removal, of change. She loved the rooms that
+had held her mother, the chair she had sat on, the white, fluted cup she
+had drunk from in her illness. She clung to the image of her mother; and
+always beside it, shadowy and pathetic, she discerned the image of her
+lost self.
+
+When the horror of emptiness came over her, she dressed herself in her
+black, with delicate care and precision, and visited her friends. Even
+in moments of no intention she would find herself knocking at Lizzie’s
+door or Sarah’s or Connie Pennefather’s. If they were not in she would
+call again and again, till she found them. She would sit for hours,
+talking, spinning out the time.
+
+She began to look forward to these visits.
+
+Wonderful. The sweet peas she had planted had come up.
+
+Hitherto Harriett had looked on the house and garden as parts of the
+space that contained her without belonging to her. She had had no sense
+of possession. This morning she was arrested by the thought that the
+plot she had planted was hers. The house and garden were hers. She began
+to take an interest in them. She found that by a system of punctual
+movements she could give to her existence the reasonable appearance of
+an aim.
+
+Next spring, a year after her mother’s death, she felt the vague
+stirring of her individual soul. She was free to choose her own vicar;
+she left her mother’s Dr. Braithwaite, who was broad and twice married,
+and went to Canon Wrench, who was unmarried and high. There was
+something stimulating in the short, happy service, the rich music, the
+incense, and the processions. She made new covers for the drawing-room,
+in cretonne, a gay pattern of pomegranate and blue-green leaves. And as
+she had always had the cutlets broiled plain because her mother liked
+them that way, now she had them breaded.
+
+And Mrs. Hancock wanted to know _why_ Harriett had forsaken her dear
+mother’s church; and when Connie Pennefather saw the covers she told
+Harriett she was lucky to be able to afford new cretonne. It was more
+than _she_ could; she seemed to think Harriett had no business to afford
+it. As for the breaded cutlets, Hannah opened her eyes and said, “That
+was how the mistress always had them, ma’am, when you was away.”
+
+One day she took the blue egg out of the drawing-room and stuck it on
+the chimney-piece in the spare room. When she remembered how she used to
+love it she felt that she had done something cruel and iniquitous, but
+necessary to the soul.
+
+
+She was taking out novels from the circulating library now. Not, she
+explained, for her serious reading. Her serious reading, her Dante,
+her Browning, her Great Man, lay always on the table ready to her hand
+(beside a copy of _The Social Order_ and the _Remains_ of Hilton Frean)
+while secretly and half-ashamed she played with some frivolous tale.
+She was satisfied with anything that ended happily and had nothing in
+it that was unpleasant, or difficult, demanding thought. She exalted
+her preferences into high canons. A novel _ought_ to conform to her
+requirements. A novelist (she thought of him with some asperity) had no
+right to be obscure, or depressing, or to add needless unpleasantness to
+the unpleasantness that had to be. The Great Men didn’t _do_ it.
+
+She spoke of George Eliot and Dickens and Mr. Thackeray.
+
+Lizzie Pierce had a provoking way of smiling at Harriett, as if she
+found her ridiculous. And Harriett had no patience with Lizzie’s
+affectation in wanting to be modern, her vanity in trying to be young,
+her middle-aged raptures over the work--often unpleasant--of writers
+too young to be worth serious consideration. They had long arguments
+in which Harriett, beaten, retired behind _The Social Order_ and the
+_Remains_.
+
+“It’s silly,” Lizzie said, “not to be able to look at a new thing
+because it’s new. That’s the way you grow old.”
+
+“It’s sillier,” Harriett said, “to be always running after new things
+because you think that’s the way to look young. I’ve no wish to appear
+younger than I am.”
+
+“I’ve no wish to appear suffering from senile decay.”
+
+“There _is_ a standard.” Harriett lifted her obstinate and arrogant
+chin. “You forget that I’m Hilton Frean’s daughter.”
+
+“I’m William Pierce’s, but that hasn’t prevented my being myself.”
+
+Lizzie’s mind had grown keener in her sharp middle age. As it played
+about her, Harriett cowered; it was like being exposed, naked, to a
+cutting wind. Her mind ran back to her father and mother, longing, like
+a child, for their shelter and support, for the blessed assurance of
+herself.
+
+At her worst she could still think with pleasure of the beauty of the
+act which had given Robin to Priscilla.
+
+
+
+
+X
+
+
+“My dear Harriett: Thank you for your kind letter of sympathy. Although
+we had expected the end for many weeks poor Prissie’s death came to us
+as a great shock. But for her it was a blessed release, and we can only
+be thankful. You who knew her will realize the depth and extent of
+my bereavement. I have lost the dearest and most loving wife man ever
+had....”
+
+
+Poor little Prissie. She couldn’t bear to think she would never see her
+again.
+
+
+Six months later Robin wrote again, from Sidmouth.
+
+
+“Dear Harriett: Priscilla left you this locket in her will as a
+remembrance. I would have sent it before but that I couldn’t bear to
+part with her things all at once.
+
+“I take this opportunity of telling you that I am going to be married
+again----”
+
+Her heart heaved and closed. She could never have believed she could
+have felt such a pang.
+
+“The lady is Miss Beatrice Walker, the devoted nurse who was with my
+dear wife all through her last illness. This step may seem strange and
+precipitate, coming so soon after her death; but I am urged to do it by
+the precarious state of my own health and by the knowledge that we are
+fulfilling poor Prissie’s dying wish....”
+
+Poor Prissie’s dying wish. After what she had done for Prissie, if she
+_had_ a dying wish--But neither of them had thought of her. Robin had
+forgotten her.... Forgotten.... Forgotten.
+
+But no. Priscilla had remembered. She had left her the locket with his
+hair in it. She had remembered and she had been afraid; jealous of her.
+She couldn’t bear to think that Robin might marry her, even after
+she was dead. She had made him marry this Walker woman so that he
+shouldn’t----
+
+Oh, but he wouldn’t. Not after twenty years.
+
+“I didn’t really think he would.”
+
+She was forty-five, her face was lined and pitted and her hair was dust
+color, streaked with gray: and she could only think of Robin as she had
+last seen him, young: a young face; a young body; young, shining eyes.
+He would want to marry a young woman. He had been in love with this
+Walker woman, and Prissie had known it. She could see Prissie lying in
+her bed, helpless, looking at them over the edge of the white sheet. She
+had known that as soon as she was dead, before the sods closed over her
+grave, they would marry. Nothing could stop them. And she had tried to
+make herself believe it was her wish, her doing, not theirs. Poor little
+Prissie.
+
+She understood that Robin had been staying in Sidmouth for his health.
+
+A year later, Harriett, run down, was ordered to the seaside. She went
+to Sidmouth. She told herself that she wanted to see the place where she
+had been so happy with her mother, where poor Aunt Harriett had died.
+
+Looking through the local paper she found in the list of residents:
+Sidcote--Mr. and Mrs. Robert Lethbridge and Miss Walker. She wrote to
+Robin and asked if she might call on his wife.
+
+A mile of hot road through the town and inland brought her to a door
+in a lane and a thatched cottage with a little lawn behind it. From the
+doorstep she could see two figures, a man and a woman, lying back in
+garden chairs. Inside the house she heard the persistent, energetic
+sound of hammering. The woman got up and came to her. She was young,
+pink-faced and golden-haired, and she said she was Miss Walker, Mrs.
+Lethbridge’s sister.
+
+A tall, lean, gray man rose from the garden chair, slowly, dragging
+himself with an invalid air. His eyes stared, groping, blurred films
+that trembled between the pouch and droop of the lids; long cheeks,
+deep grooved, dropped to the infirm mouth that sagged under the limp
+moustache. That was Robin.
+
+He became agitated when he saw her. “Poor Robin,” she thought. “All
+these years, and it’s too much for him, seeing me.” Presently he dragged
+himself from the lawn to the house and disappeared through the French
+window where the hammering came from.
+
+“Have I frightened him away?” she said.
+
+“Oh, no, he’s always like that when he sees strange faces.”
+
+“My face isn’t exactly strange.”
+
+“Well, he must have thought it was.”
+
+A sudden chill crept through her.
+
+“He’ll be all right when he gets used to you,” Miss Walker said.
+
+The strange face of Miss Walker chilled her. A strange young woman,
+living close to Robin, protecting him, explaining Robin’s ways.
+
+The sound of hammering ceased. Through the long, open window she saw a
+woman rise up from the floor and shed a white apron. She came down the
+lawn to them, with raised arms, patting disordered hair; large, a full,
+firm figure clipped in blue linen. A full-blown face, bluish pink; thick
+gray eyes slightly protruding; a thick mouth, solid and firm and kind.
+That was Robin’s wife. Her sister was slighter, fresher, a good ten
+years younger, Harriett thought.
+
+“Excuse me, we’re only just settling in. I was nailing down the carpet
+in Robin’s study.”
+
+Her lips were so thick that they moved stiffly when she spoke or smiled.
+She panted a little as if from extreme exertion.
+
+When they were all seated Mrs. Lethbridge addressed her sister. “Robin
+was quite right. It looks _much_ better turned the other way.”
+
+“Do you mean to say he made you take it all up and put it down again?
+Well----”
+
+“What’s the use?... Miss Frean, you don’t know what it is to have a
+husband who _will_ have things just so.”
+
+“She had to mow the lawn this morning because Robin can’t bear to see
+one blade of grass higher than another.”
+
+“Is he as particular as all that?”
+
+“I assure you, Miss Frean, he is,” Miss Walker informed her.
+
+“He wasn’t when I knew him,” Harriett said.
+
+“Ah--my sister spoils him.”
+
+Mrs. Lethbridge wondered why he hadn’t come out again.
+
+“I think,” Harriett said, “perhaps he’ll come if I go.”
+
+“Oh, you mustn’t go. It’s good for him to see people. Takes him out of
+himself.”
+
+“He’ll turn up all right,” Miss Walker said, “when he hears the
+teacups.”
+
+And at four o’clock when the teacups came, Robin turned up, dragging
+himself slowly from the house to the lawn. He blinked and quivered with
+agitation; Harriett saw he was annoyed, not with her, and not with Miss
+Walker, but with his wife.
+
+“Beatrice, what have you done with my new bottle of medicine?”
+
+“Nothing, dear.”
+
+“You’ve done nothing, when you know you poured out my last dose at
+twelve?”
+
+“Why, hasn’t it come?”
+
+“No. It hasn’t.”
+
+“But Cissy ordered it this morning.”
+
+“I didn’t,” Cissy said. “I forgot.”
+
+“Oh, Cissy----”
+
+“You needn’t blame Cissy. You ought to have seen to it yourself.... She
+was a good nurse, Harriett, before she was my wife.”
+
+“My dear, your nurse had nothing else to do. Your wife has to clean and
+mend for you, and cook your dinner and mow the lawn and nail the carpets
+down.” While she said it she looked at Robin as if she adored him.
+
+All through tea time he talked about his health and about the sanitary
+dustbin they hadn’t got. Something had happened to him. It wasn’t like
+him to be wrapped up in himself and to talk about dustbins. He spoke
+to his wife as if she had been his valet. He didn’t see that she was
+perspiring, worn out by her struggle with the carpet.
+
+“Just go and fetch me another cushion, Beatrice.”
+
+She rose with tired patience.
+
+“You might let her have her tea in peace,” Miss Walker said, but she was
+gone before they could stop her.
+
+When Harriett left she went with her to the garden gate, panting as she
+walked. Harriett noticed pale, blurred lines on the edges of her lips.
+She thought: She isn’t a bit strong. She praised the garden.
+
+Mrs. Lethbridge smiled. “Robin loves it.... But you should have seen it
+at five o’clock this morning.”
+
+“Five o’clock?”
+
+“Yes. I always get up at five to make Robin a cup of tea.”
+
+
+Harriett’s last evening. She was dining at Sidcote. On her way there she
+had overtaken Robin’s wife wheeling Robin in a bath chair. Beatrice had
+panted and perspired and had made mute signs to Harriett not to take any
+notice. She had had to go and lie down till Robin sent for her to find
+his cigarette case. Now she was in the kitchen cooking Robin’s part
+of the dinner while he lay down in his study. Harriett talked to Miss
+Walker in the garden.
+
+“It’s been very kind of you to have us so much.”
+
+“Oh, but we’ve loved having you. It’s so good for Beatie. Gives her a
+rest from Robin.... I don’t mean that she wants a rest. But, you see,
+she’s not well. She looks a big, strong, bouncing thing, but she isn’t.
+Her heart’s weak. She oughtn’t to be doing what she does.”
+
+“Doesn’t Robin see it?”
+
+“He doesn’t see anything. He never knows when she’s tired or got a
+headache. She’ll drop dead before he’ll see it. He’s utterly selfish,
+Miss Frean. Wrapt up in himself and his horrid little ailments. Whatever
+happens to Beatie he must have his sweetbread, and his soup at eleven
+and his tea at five in the morning..
+
+“... I suppose you think I might help more?”
+
+“Well----” Harriett did think it.
+
+“Well, I just won’t. I won’t encourage Robin. He ought to get her a
+proper servant and a man for the garden and the bath chair. I wish you’d
+give him a hint. Tell him she isn’t strong. I can’t. She’d snap my head
+off. Would you mind?”
+
+Harriett didn’t mind. She didn’t mind what she said. She wouldn’t be
+saying it to Robin, but to the contemptible thing that had taken Robin’s
+place. She still saw Robin as a young man, with young, shining eyes, who
+came rushing to give himself up at once, to make himself known. She had
+no affection for this selfish invalid, this weak, peevish bully.
+
+Poor Beatrice. She was sorry for Beatrice. She resented his behavior
+to Beatrice. She told herself she wouldn’t be Beatrice, she wouldn’t
+be Robin’s wife for the world. Her pity for Beatrice gave her a secret
+pleasure and satisfaction.
+
+After dinner she sat out in the garden talking to Robin’s wife, while
+Cissy Walker played draughts with Robin in his study, giving Beatrice a
+rest from him. They talked about Robin.
+
+“You knew him when he was young, didn’t you? What was he like?”
+
+She didn’t want to tell her. She wanted to keep the young, shining Robin
+to herself. She also wanted to show that she had known him, that she had
+known a Robin that Beatrice would never know. Therefore she told her.
+
+“My poor Robin.” Beatrice gazed wistfully, trying to see this Robin that
+Priscilla had taken from her, that Harriett had known. Then she turned
+her back.
+
+“It doesn’t matter. I’ve married the man I wanted.” She let herself go.
+“Cissy says I’ve spoiled him. That isn’t true. It was his first wife who
+spoiled him. She made a nervous wreck of him.”
+
+“He was devoted to her.”
+
+“Yes. And he’s paying for his devotion now. She wore him out....
+Cissy says he’s selfish. If he is, it’s because he’s used up all his
+unselfishness. He was living on his moral capital.... I feel as if I
+couldn’t do too much for him after what he did. Cissy doesn’t know how
+awful his life was with Priscilla. She was the most exacting----”
+
+“She was my friend.”
+
+“Wasn’t Robin your friend, too?”
+
+“Yes. But poor Prissie, she was paralyzed.”
+
+“It wasn’t paralysis.”
+
+“What was it then?”
+
+“Pure hysteria. Robin wasn’t in love with her, and she knew it. She
+developed that illness so that she might have a hold on him, get his
+attention fastened on her somehow. I don’t say she could help it. She
+couldn’t. But that’s what it was.”
+
+“Well, she died of it.”
+
+“No. She died of pneumonia after influenza. I’m not blaming Prissie. She
+was pitiable. But he ought never to have married her.”
+
+“I don’t think you ought to say that.”
+
+“You know what he was,” said Robin’s wife. “And look at him now.”
+
+But Harriett’s mind refused, obstinately, to connect the two Robins and
+Priscilla.
+
+She remembered that she had to speak to Robin. They went together into
+his study. Cissy sent her a look, a signal, and rose; she stood by the
+doorway.
+
+“Beatie, you might come here a minute.”
+
+Harriett was alone with Robin.
+
+“Well, Harriett, we haven’t been able to do much for you. In my beastly
+state----”
+
+“You’ll get better.”
+
+“Never. I’m done for, Harriett. I don’t complain.”
+
+“You’ve got a devoted wife, Robin.”
+
+“Yes. Poor girl, she does what she can.”
+
+“She does too much.”
+
+“My dear woman, she wouldn’t be happy if she didn’t.”
+
+“It isn’t good for her. Does it never strike you that she’s not strong?”
+
+“Not strong? She’s--she’s almost indecently robust. What wouldn’t I give
+to have her strength!”
+
+She looked at him, at the lean figure sunk in the armchair, at the
+dragged, infirm face, the blurred, owlish eyes, the expression of abject
+self-pity, of self-absorption. That was Robin.
+
+The awful thing was that she couldn’t love him, couldn’t go on being
+faithful. This injured her self-esteem.
+
+
+
+
+XI
+
+
+Her old servant, Hannah, had gone, and her new servant, Maggie, had had
+a baby.
+
+After the first shock and three months’ loss of Maggie, it occurred to
+Harriett that the beautiful thing would be to take Maggie back and let
+her have the baby with her, since she couldn’t leave it.
+
+The baby lay in his cradle in the kitchen, black-eyed and rosy, doubling
+up his fat, naked knees, smiling his crooked smile, and saying things to
+himself. Harriett had to see him every time she came into the kitchen.
+Sometimes she heard him cry, an intolerable cry, tearing the nerves and
+heart. And sometimes she saw Maggie unbutton her black gown in a hurry
+and put out her white, rose-pointed breast to still his cry.
+
+Harriett couldn’t bear it. She could not bear it.
+
+She decided that Maggie must go. Maggie was not doing her work properly.
+Harriett found flue under the bed.
+
+“I’m sure,” Maggie said, “I’m doing no worse than I did, ma’am, and you
+usedn’t to complain.”
+
+“No worse isn’t good enough, Maggie. I think you might have tried
+to please me. It isn’t every one who would have taken you in the
+circumstances.”
+
+“If you think that, ma’am, it’s very cruel and unkind of you to send me
+away.”
+
+“You’ve only yourself to thank. There’s no more to be said.”
+
+“No, ma’am. I understand why I’m leaving. It’s because of Baby. You
+don’t want to ‘ave ‘im, and I think you might have said so before.”
+
+That day month Maggie packed her brown-painted wooden box and the cradle
+and the perambulator. The greengrocer took them away on a handcart.
+Through the drawing-room window Harriett saw Maggie going away, carrying
+the baby, pink and round in his white-knitted cap, his fat hips bulging
+over her arm under his white shawl. The gate fell to behind them. The
+click struck at Harriett’s heart.
+
+Three months later Maggie turned up again in a black hat and gown for
+best, red-eyed and humble.
+
+“I came to see, ma’am, whether you’d take me back, as I ‘aven’t got Baby
+now.”
+
+“You haven’t got him?”
+
+“‘E died, ma’am, last month. I’d put him with a woman in the country.
+She was highly recommended to me. Very highly recommended she was, and I
+paid her six shillings a week. But I think she must ‘ave done something
+she shouldn’t.”
+
+“Oh, Maggie, you don’t mean she was cruel to him?”
+
+“No, ma’am. She was very fond of him. Everybody was fond of Baby. But
+whether it was the food she gave him or what, ‘e was that wasted you
+wouldn’t have known him. You remember what he was like when he was
+here.”
+
+“I remember.”
+
+She remembered. She remembered. Fat and round in his white shawl and
+knitted cap when Maggie carried him down the garden path.
+
+“I should think she’d a done something, shouldn’t you, ma’am?”
+
+She thought: No. No. It was I who did it when I sent him away.
+
+“I don’t know, Maggie. I’m afraid it’s been very terrible for you.”
+
+“Yes, ma’am.... I wondered whether you’d give me another trial, ma’am.”
+
+“Are you quite sure you want to come to me, Maggie?”
+
+“Yes’m.... I’m sure you’d a kept him if you could have borne to see him
+about.”
+
+“You know, Maggie, that was _not_ the reason why you left. If I take you
+back you must try not to be careless and forgetful.”
+
+“I shan’t ‘ave nothing to make me. Before, it was first Baby’s father
+and then ‘im.”
+
+She could see that Maggie didn’t hold her responsible. After all, why
+should she? If Maggie had made bad arrangements for her baby, Maggie was
+responsible.
+
+She went round to Lizzie and Sarah to see what they thought. Sarah
+thought: Well--it was rather a difficult question, and Harriett resented
+her hesitation.
+
+“Not at all. It rested with Maggie to go or stay. If she was incompetent
+I wasn’t bound to keep her just because she’d had a baby. At that rate I
+should have been completely in her power.”
+
+Lizzie said she thought Maggie’s baby would have died in any case, and
+they both hoped that Harriett wasn’t going to be morbid about it.
+
+Harriett felt sustained. She wasn’t going to be morbid. All the same,
+the episode left her with a feeling of insecurity.
+
+
+
+
+XII
+
+
+The young girl, Robin’s niece, had come again, bright-eyed, eager, and
+hungry, grateful for Sunday supper.
+
+Harriett was getting used to these appearances, spread over three years,
+since Robin’s wife had asked her to be kind to Mona Floyd. Mona had come
+this time to tell her of her engagement to Geoffrey Carter. The news
+shocked Harriett intensely.
+
+“But, my dear, you told me he was going to marry your little friend,
+Amy--Amy Lambert. What does Amy say to it?”
+
+“What _can_ she say? I know it’s a bit rough on her----”
+
+“You know, and yet you’ll take your happiness at the poor child’s
+expense.”
+
+“We’ve got to. We can’t do anything else.”
+
+“Oh, my dear----” If she could stop it.... An inspiration came. “I knew
+a girl once who might have done what you’re doing, only she wouldn’t.
+She gave the man up rather than hurt her friend. She _couldn’t do
+anything else_.”
+
+“How much was he in love with her?”
+
+“I don’t know _how much_. He was never in love with any other woman.”
+
+“Then she was a fool. A silly fool. Didn’t she think of _him?_”
+
+“Didn’t she think!”
+
+“No. She didn’t. She thought of herself. Of her own moral beauty. She
+was a selfish fool.”
+
+“She asked the best and wisest man she knew, and he told her she
+couldn’t do anything else.”
+
+“The best and wisest man--oh, Lord!”
+
+“That was my own father, Mona, Hilton Frean.”
+
+“Then it was you. You and Uncle Robin and Aunt Prissie.”
+
+Harriett’s face smiled its straight, thin-lipped smile, the worn,
+grooved chin arrogantly lifted.
+
+“How could you?”
+
+“I could because I was brought up not to think of myself before other
+people.”
+
+“Then it wasn’t even your own idea. You sacrificed him to somebody
+else’s. You made three people miserable just for that. Four, if you
+count Aunt Beatie.”
+
+“There was Prissie. I did it for her.”
+
+“What did you do for her? You insulted Aunt Prissie.”
+
+“Insulted her? My dear Mona!”
+
+“It was an insult, handing her over to a man who couldn’t love her
+even with his body. Aunt Prissie was the miserablest of the lot. Do you
+suppose he didn’t take it out of her?”
+
+“He never let her know.”
+
+“Oh, didn’t he! She knew all right. That’s how she got her illness. And
+it’s how he got his. And he’ll kill Aunt Beatie. He’s taking it out
+of _her_ now. Look at the awful suffering. And you can go on
+sentimentalizing about it.”
+
+The young girl rose, flinging her scarf over her shoulders with a
+violent gesture.
+
+“There’s no common sense in it.”
+
+“No _common_ sense, perhaps.”
+
+“It’s a jolly sight better than sentiment when it comes to marrying.”
+
+They kissed. Mona turned at the doorway.
+
+“I say--did he go on caring for you?”
+
+“Sometimes I think he did. Sometimes I think he hated me.”
+
+“Of course he hated you, after what you’d let him in for.” She paused.
+“You don’t _mind_ my telling you the truth, do you?”
+
+... Harriett sat a long time, her hands folded on her lap, her eyes
+staring into the room, trying to see the truth. She saw the girl,
+Robin’s niece, in her young indignation, her tender brilliance suddenly
+hard, suddenly cruel, flashing out the truth. Was it true that she had
+sacrificed Robin and Priscilla and Beatrice to her parents’ idea of
+moral beauty? Was it true that this idea had been all wrong? That she
+might have married Robin and been happy and been right?
+
+“I don’t care. If it was to be done again to-morrow I’d do it.”
+
+But the beauty of that unique act no longer appeared to her as it once
+was, uplifting, consoling, incorruptible.
+
+
+The years passed. They went with an incredible rapidity, and Harriett
+was now fifty.
+
+The feeling of insecurity had grown on her. It had something to do with
+Mona, with Maggie and Maggie’s baby. She had no clear illumination, only
+a mournful acquiescence in her own futility, an almost physical sense
+of shrinkage, the crumbling away, bit by bit, of her beautiful and
+honorable self, dying with the objects of its three profound affections:
+her father, her mother, Robin. Gradually the image of the middle-aged
+Robin had effaced his youth.
+
+She read more and more novels from the circulating libraries, of a kind
+demanding less and less effort of attention. And always her inability to
+concentrate appeared to her as a just demand for clarity: “The man has
+no _business_ to write so that I can’t understand him.”
+
+She laid in a weekly stock of opinions from _The Spectator_, and by this
+means contrived a semblance of intellectual life.
+
+She was appeased more and more by the rhythm of the seasons, of
+the weeks, of day and night, by the first coming up of the pink and
+wine-brown velvet primulas, by the pungent, burnt smell of her morning
+coffee, the smell of a midday stew, of hot cakes baking for tea time; by
+the lighting of the lamp, the lighting of autumn fires, the round of her
+visits. She waited with a strained, expectant desire for the moment when
+it would be time to see Lizzie or Sarah or Connie Pennefather again.
+
+Seeing them was a habit she couldn’t get over. But it no longer gave
+her keen pleasure. She told herself that her three friends were
+deteriorating in their middle age. Lizzie’s sharp face darted malice;
+her tongue was whipcord; she knew where to flick; the small gleam of
+her eyes, the snap of her nutcracker jaws irritated Harriett. Sarah was
+slow; slow. She took no care of her face and figure. As Lizzie put it,
+Sarah’s appearance was an outrage on her contemporaries. “She makes us
+feel so old.”
+
+And Connie--the very rucking of Connie’s coat about her broad hips
+irritated Harriett. She had a way of staring over her fat cheeks at
+Harriett’s old suits, mistaking them for new ones, and saying the same
+exasperating thing. “You’re lucky to be able to afford it. _I_ can’t.”
+
+Harriett’s irritation mounted up and up.
+
+And one day she quarreled with Connie.
+
+Connie had been telling one of her stories; leaning a little sideways,
+her skirt stretched tight between her fat, parted knees, the broad roll
+of her smile sliding greasily. She had “grown out of it” in her young
+womanhood, and now in her middle age she had come back to it again. She
+was just like her father.
+
+“Connie, how can you be so coarse?”
+
+“I beg pardon. I forgot you were always better than everybody else.”
+
+“I’m not better than everybody else. I’ve only been brought up better
+than some people. My father would have died rather than have told a
+story like that.”
+
+“I suppose that’s a dig at my parents.”
+
+“I never said anything about your parents.”
+
+“I know the things you think about my father.”
+
+“Well--I daresay he thinks things about me.”
+
+“He thinks you were always an incurable old maid, my dear.”
+
+“Did he think my father was an old maid?”
+
+“I never heard him say one unkind word about your father.”
+
+“I should hope not, indeed.”
+
+“Unkind things were said. Not by him. Though he might have been
+forgiven----”
+
+“I don’t know what you mean. But all my father’s creditors were paid in
+full. You know that.”
+
+“I didn’t know it.”
+
+“You know it now. Was your father one of them?”
+
+“No. It was as bad for him as if he had been, though.”
+
+“How do you make that out?”
+
+“Well, my dear, if he hadn’t taken your father’s advice he might have
+been a rich man now instead of a poor one.... He invested all his money
+as he told him.”
+
+“In my father’s things?”
+
+“In things he was interested in. And he lost it.”
+
+“It shows how he must have trusted him.”
+
+“He wasn’t the only one who was ruined by his trust.”
+
+Harriett blinked. Her mind swerved from the blow. “I think you must be
+mistaken,” she said.
+
+“I’m less likely to be mistaken than you, my dear, though he _was_ your
+father.”
+
+Harriett sat up, straight and stiff. “Well, _your_ father’s alive, and
+_he’s_ dead.”
+
+“I don’t see what that has to do with it.”
+
+“Don’t you? If it had happened the other way about, your father wouldn’t
+have died.”
+
+Connie stared stupidly at Harriett, not taking it in. Presently she got
+up and left her. She moved clumsily, her broad hips shaking.
+
+Harriett put on her hat and went round to Lizzie and Sarah in turn.
+They would know whether it were true or not. They would know whether Mr.
+Hancock had been ruined by his own fault or Papa’s.
+
+Sarah was sorry. She picked up a fold of her skirt and crumpled it in
+her fingers, and said over and over again, “She oughtn’t to have told
+you.” But she didn’t say it wasn’t true. Neither did Lizzie, though her
+tongue was a whip for Connie.
+
+“Because you can’t stand her dirty stories she goes and tells you this.
+It shows what Connie is.”
+
+It showed her father as he was, too. Not wise. Not wise all the time.
+Courageous, always, loving danger, intolerant of security, wild under
+all his quietness and gentleness, taking madder and madder risks,
+playing his game with an awful, cool recklessness. Then letting other
+people in; ruining Mr. Hancock, the little man he used to laugh at. And
+it had killed him. He hadn’t been sorry for Mamma, because he knew she
+was glad the mad game was over; but he had thought and thought about
+him, the little dirty man, until he had died of thinking.
+
+
+
+
+XIII
+
+
+New people had come to the house next door. Harriett saw a pretty girl
+going in and out. She had not called; she was not going to call. Their
+cat came over the garden wall and bit off the blades of the irises.
+When he sat down on the mignonette Harriett sent a note round by Maggie:
+“Miss Frean presents her compliments to the lady next door and would be
+glad if she would restrain her cat.”
+
+Five minutes later the pretty girl appeared with the cat in her arms.
+
+“I’ve brought Mimi,” she said. “I want you to see what a darling he is.”
+
+Mimi, a Persian, all orange on the top and snow white underneath,
+climbed her breast to hang flattened out against her shoulder, long,
+the great plume of his tail fanning her. She swung round to show the
+innocence of his amber eyes and the pink arch of his mouth supporting
+his pink nose.
+
+“I want you to see my mignonette,” said Harriett. They stood together by
+the crushed ring where Mimi had made his bed.
+
+The pretty girl said she was sorry. “But, you see, we _can’t_ restrain
+him. I don’t know what’s to be done.... Unless you kept a cat yourself;
+then you won’t mind.”
+
+“But,” Harriett said, “I don’t like cats.”
+
+“Oh, why not?”
+
+Harriett knew why. A cat was a compromise, a substitute, a subterfuge.
+Her pride couldn’t stoop. She was afraid of Mimi, of his enchanting
+play, and the soft white fur of his stomach. Maggie’s baby. So she said,
+“Because they destroy the beds. And they kill birds.”
+
+The pretty girl’s chin burrowed in Mimi’s neck. “You _won’t_ throw
+stones at him?” she said.
+
+“No, I wouldn’t _hurt_ him.... What did you say his name was?”
+
+“Mimi.”
+
+Harriett softened. She remembered. “When I was a little girl I had a cat
+called Mimi. White Angora. Very handsome. And your name is----”
+
+“Brailsford. I’m Dorothy.”
+
+Next time, when Mimi jumped on the lupins and broke them down, Dorothy
+came again and said she was sorry. And she stayed to tea. Harriett
+revealed herself.
+
+“My father was Hilton Frean.” She had noticed for the last fifteen years
+that people showed no interest when she told them that. They even stared
+as though she had said something that had no sense in it. Dorothy said,
+“How nice.”
+
+_“Nice?”_
+
+“I mean it must have been nice to have him for your father.... You don’t
+mind my coming into your garden last thing to catch Mimi?”
+
+Harriett felt a sudden yearning for Dorothy. She saw a pleasure, a
+happiness, in her coming. She wasn’t going to call, but she sent little
+notes in to Dorothy asking her to come to tea.
+
+Dorothy declined.
+
+But every evening, towards bedtime, she came into the garden to catch
+Mimi. Through the window Harriett could hear her calling: “Mimi! Mimi!”
+ She could see her in her white frock, moving about, hovering, ready to
+pounce as Mimi dashed from the bushes. She thought: “She walks into my
+garden as if it was her own. But she won’t make a friend of me. She’s
+young, and I’m old.”
+
+She had a piece of wire netting put up along the wall to keep Mimi out.
+
+“That’s the end of it,” she said. She could never think of the young
+girl without a pang of sadness and resentment.
+
+
+Fifty-five. Sixty.
+
+In her sixty-second year Harriett had her first bad illness.
+
+It was so like Sarah Barmby. Sarah got influenza and regarded it as a
+common cold and gave it to Harriett who regarded it as a common cold and
+got pleurisy.
+
+When the pain was over she enjoyed her illness, the peace and rest
+of lying there, supported by the bed, holding out her lean arms to be
+washed by Maggie; closing her eyes in bliss while Maggie combed and
+brushed and plaited her fine gray hair. She liked having the same food
+at the same hours. She would look up, smiling weakly, when Maggie
+came at bedtime with the little tray. “What have you brought me _now_,
+Maggie?”
+
+“Benger’s Food, ma’am.”
+
+She wanted it to be always Benger’s Food at bedtime. She lived by habit,
+by the punctual fulfillment of her expectation. She loved the doctor’s
+visits at twelve o’clock, his air of brooding absorption in her case,
+his consultations with Maggie, the seriousness and sanctity he attached
+to the humblest details of her existence.
+
+Above all she loved the comfort and protection of Maggie, the sight of
+Maggie’s broad, tender face as it bent over her, the feeling of Maggie’s
+strong arms as they supported her, the hovering pressure of the firm,
+broad body in the clean white apron and the cap. Her eyes rested on it
+with affection; she found shelter in Maggie as she had found it in her
+mother.
+
+One day she said, “Why did you come to me, Maggie? Couldn’t you have
+found a better place?”
+
+“There was many wanted me. But I came to you, ma’am, because you seemed
+to sort of need me most. I dearly love looking after people. Old ladies
+and children. And gentlemen, if they’re ill enough,” Maggie said.
+
+“You’re a good girl, Maggie.”
+
+She had forgotten. The image of Maggie’s baby was dead, hidden, buried
+deep down in her mind. She closed her eyes. Her head was thrown back,
+motionless, ecstatic under Maggie’s flickering fingers as they plaited
+her thin wisps of hair.
+
+Out of the peace of illness she entered on the misery and long labor of
+convalescence. The first time Maggie left her to dress herself she wept.
+She didn’t want to get well. She could see nothing in recovery but the
+end of privilege and prestige, the obligation to return to a task she
+was tired of, a difficult and terrifying task.
+
+By summer she was up and (tremulously) about again.
+
+
+
+
+XIV
+
+
+She was aware of her drowsy, supine dependence on Maggie. At first her
+perishing self asserted itself in an increased reserve and arrogance.
+Thus she protected herself from her own censure. She had still a feeling
+of satisfaction in her exclusiveness, her power not to call on new
+people.
+
+“I think,” Lizzie Pierce said, “you might have called on the
+Brailsfords.”
+
+“Why should I? I should have nothing in common with such people.”
+
+“Well, considering that Mr. Brailsford writes in _The Spectator_----”
+
+Harriett called. She put on her gray silk and her soft white mohair
+shawl, and her wide black hat tied under her chin, and called. It was on
+a Saturday. The Brailsfords’ room was full of visitors, men and women,
+talking excitedly. Dorothy was not there--Dorothy was married. Mimi was
+not there--Mimi was dead.
+
+Harriett made her way between the chairs, dim-eyed, upright, and stiff
+in her white shawl. She apologized for having waited seven years before
+calling.... “Never go anywhere.... Quite a recluse since my father’s
+death. He was Hilton Frean.”
+
+“Yes?” Mrs. Brailsford’s eyes were sweetly interrogative.
+
+“But as we are such near neighbors I felt that I must break my rule.”
+
+Mrs. Brailsford smiled in vague benevolence; yet as if she thought that
+Miss Frean’s feeling and her action were unnecessary. After seven years.
+And presently Harriett found herself alone in her corner.
+
+She tried to talk to Mr. Brailsford when he handed her the tea and bread
+and butter. “My father,” she said, “was connected with _The Spectator_
+for many years. He was Hilton Frean.”
+
+“Indeed? I’m afraid I--don’t remember.”
+
+She could get nothing out of him, out of his lean, ironical face, his
+eyes screwed up behind his glasses, benevolent, amused at her. She was
+nobody in that roomful of keen, intellectual people; nobody; nothing but
+an unnecessary little old lady who had come there uninvited.
+
+Her second call was not returned. She heard that the Brailsfords were
+exclusive; they wouldn’t know anybody out of their own set. Harriett
+explained her position thus: “No. I didn’t keep it up. We have nothing
+in common.”
+
+She was old--old. She had nothing in common with youth, nothing in
+common with middle age, with intellectual, exclusive people connected
+with _The Spectator_. She said, “_The Spectator_ is not what it used to
+be in my father’s time.”
+
+
+Harriett Frean was not what she used to be. She was aware of the
+creeping fret, the poisons and obstructions of decay. It was as if she
+had parted with her own light, elastic body, and succeeded to somebody
+else’s that was all bone, heavy, stiff, irresponsive to her will. Her
+brain felt swollen and brittle, she had a feeling of tiredness in her
+face, of infirmity about her mouth. Her looking-glass showed her the
+fallen yellow skin, the furrowed lines of age.
+
+Her head dropped, drowsy, giddy over the week’s accounts. She gave up
+even the semblance of her housekeeping, and became permanently dependent
+on Maggie. She was happy in the surrender of her responsibility, of
+the grown-up self she had maintained with so much effort, clinging to
+Maggie, submitting to Maggie, as she had clung and submitted to her
+mother.
+
+Her affection concentrated on two objects, the house and Maggie, Maggie
+and the house. The house had become a part of herself, an extension
+of her body, a protective shell. She was uneasy when away from it.
+The thought of it drew her with passion: the low brown wall with the
+railing, the flagged path from the little green gate to the front
+door. The square brown front; the two oblong, white-framed windows,
+the dark-green trellis porch between; the three windows above. And the
+clipped privet bush by the trellis and the may tree by the gate.
+
+She no longer enjoyed visiting her friends. She set out in peevish
+resignation, leaving her house, and when she had sat half an hour with
+Lizzie or Sarah or Connie she would begin to fidget, miserable till she
+got back to it again; to the house and Maggie.
+
+She was glad enough when Lizzie came to her; she still liked Lizzie
+best. They would sit together, one on each side of the fireplace,
+talking. Harriett’s voice came thinly through her thin lips, precise yet
+plaintive, Lizzie’s finished with a snap of the bent-in jaws.
+
+“Do you remember those little round hats we used to wear? You had one
+exactly like mine. Connie couldn’t wear them.”
+
+“We were wild young things,” said Lizzie. “I was wilder than you.... A
+little audacious thing.”
+
+“And look at us now--we couldn’t say ‘Bo’ to a goose.... Well, we may be
+thankful we haven’t gone stout like Connie Pennefather.”
+
+“Or poor Sarah. That stoop.”
+
+They drew themselves up. Their straight, slender shoulders rebuked
+Connie’s obesity, and Sarah’s bent back, her bodice stretched hump-wise
+from the stuck-out ridges of her stays.
+
+Harriett was glad when Lizzie went and left her to Maggie and the house.
+She always hoped she wouldn’t stay for tea, so that Maggie might not
+have an extra cup and plate to wash.
+
+The years passed: the sixty-third, sixty-fourth, sixty-fifth; their
+monotony mitigated by long spells of torpor and the sheer rapidity of
+time. Her mind was carried on, empty, in empty, flying time. She had
+a feeling of dryness and distension in all her being, and a sort of
+crepitation in her brain, irritating her to yawning fits. After meals,
+sitting in her armchair, her book would drop from her hands and her mind
+would slip from drowsiness into stupor. There was something voluptuous
+about the beginning of this state; she would give herself up to it with
+an animal pleasure and content.
+
+Sometimes, for long periods, her mind would go backwards, returning,
+always returning, to the house in Black’s Lane. She would see the row of
+elms and the white wall at the end with the green balcony hung out like
+a birdcage above the green door. She would see herself, a girl wearing
+a big chignon and a little round hat; or sitting in the curly chair with
+her feet on the white rug; and her father, slender and straight, smiling
+half-amused, while her mother read aloud to them. Or she was a child in
+a black silk apron going up Black’s Lane. Little audacious thing. She
+had a fondness and admiration for this child and her audacity. And
+always she saw her mother, with her sweet face between the long, hanging
+curls, coming down the garden path, in a wide silver-gray gown trimmed
+with narrow bands of black velvet. And she would wake up, surprised to
+find herself sitting in a strange room, dressed in a gown with strange
+sleeves that ended in old wrinkled hands; for the book that lay in her
+lap was Longfellow, open at _Evangeline_.
+
+One day she made Maggie pull off the old, washed-out cretonne covers,
+exposing the faded blue rep. She was back in the drawing-room of her
+youth. Only one thing was missing. She went upstairs and took the blue
+egg out of the spare room and set it in its place on the marble-topped
+table. She sat gazing at it a long time in happy, child-like
+satisfaction. The blue egg gave reality to her return.
+
+When she saw Maggie coming in with the tea and buttered scones she
+thought of her mother.
+
+
+Three more years. Harriett was sixty-eight. She had a faint recollection
+of having given Maggie notice, long ago, there, in the dining room.
+Maggie had stood on the hearthrug, in her large white apron, crying. She
+was crying now.
+
+She said she must leave and go and take care of her mother. “Mother’s
+getting very feeble now.”
+
+“I’m getting very feeble, too, Maggie. It’s cruel and unkind of you to
+leave me.”
+
+“I’m sorry, ma’am. I can’t help it.”
+
+She moved about the room, sniffing and sobbing as she dusted. Harriett
+couldn’t bear it any more. “If you can’t control yourself,” she said,
+“go into the kitchen.” Maggie went.
+
+Harriett sat before the fire in her chair, straight and stiff, making no
+sound. Now and then her eyelids shook, fluttered red rims; slow, scanty
+tears oozed and fell, their trail glistening in the long furrows of her
+cheeks.
+
+
+
+
+XV
+
+
+The door of the specialist’s house had shut behind them with a soft,
+respectful click.
+
+Lizzie Pierce and Harriett sat in the taxicab, holding each other’s
+hands. Harriett spoke.
+
+“He says I’ve got what Mamma had.”
+
+Lizzie blinked away her tears; her hand loosened and tightened on
+Harriett’s with a nervous clutch.
+
+Harriett felt nothing but a strange, solemn excitement and exaltation.
+She was raised to her mother’s eminence in pain. With every stab she
+would live again in her mother. She had what her mother had.
+
+Only she would have an operation. This different thing was what she
+dreaded, the thing her mother hadn’t had, and the going away into the
+hospital, to live exposed in the free ward among other people. That was
+what she minded most. That and leaving her house, and Maggie’s leaving.
+
+She cried when she saw Maggie standing at the gate in her white apron
+as the taxicab took her away. She thought, “When I come back again she
+won’t be there.” Yet somehow she felt that it wouldn’t happen; it was
+impossible that she should come back and not find Maggie there.
+
+
+She lay in her white bed in the white-curtained cubicle. Lizzie was
+paying for the cubicle. Kind Lizzie. Kind. Kind.
+
+She wasn’t afraid of the operation. It would happen in the morning.
+Only one thing worried her. Something Connie had told her. Under the
+anæsthetic you said things. Shocking, indecent things. But there wasn’t
+anything she could say. She didn’t know anything.... Yes. She did. There
+were Connie’s stories. And Black’s Lane. Behind the dirty blue palings
+in Black’s Lane.
+
+The nurses comforted her. They said if you kept your mouth tight shut,
+up to the last minute before the operation, if you didn’t say one word
+you were all right.
+
+She thought about it after she woke in the morning. For a whole hour
+before the operation she refused to speak, nodding and shaking her head,
+communicating by gestures. She walked down the wide corridor of the ward
+on her way to the theatre, very upright in her white flannel dressing
+gown, with her chin held high and a look of exaltation on her face.
+There were convalescents in the corridor. They saw her. The curtains
+before some of the cubicles were parted; the patients saw her; they knew
+what she was going to. Her exaltation mounted.
+
+She came into the theatre. It was all white. White. White tiles. Rows
+of little slender knives on a glass shelf, under glass, shining. A white
+sink in the corner. A mixed smell of iodine and ether. The surgeon wore
+a white coat. Harriett made her tight lips tighter.
+
+She climbed on to the white enamel table, and lay down, drawing her
+dressing gown straight about her knees. She had not said one word.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+She had behaved beautifully.
+
+
+The pain in her body came up, wave after wave, burning. It swelled,
+tightening, stretching out her wounded flesh.
+
+She knew that the little man they called the doctor was really Mr.
+Hancock. They oughtn’t to have let him in. She cried out. “Take him
+away. Don’t let him touch me;” but nobody took any notice.
+
+“It isn’t right,” she said. “He oughtn’t to do it. Not to _any_ woman.
+If it was known he would be punished.”
+
+And there was Maggie by the curtain, crying.
+
+“That’s Maggie. She’s crying because she thinks I killed her baby.”
+
+The ice bag laid across her body stirred like a live thing as the ice
+melted, then it settled and was still. She put her hand down and felt
+the smooth, cold oilskin distended with water.
+
+“There’s a dead baby in the bed. Red hair. They ought to have taken it
+away,” she said. “Maggie had a baby once. She took it up the lane to the
+place where the man is; and they put it behind the palings. Dirty blue
+palings.
+
+“...Pussycat. Pussycat, what did you there? Pussy. Prissie. Prissiecat.
+Poor Prissie. She never goes to bed. She can’t get up out of the chair.”
+
+A figure in white, with a stiff white cap, stood by the bed. She named
+it, fixed it in her mind. Nurse. Nurse--that was what it was. She spoke
+to it. “It’s sad--sad to go through so much pain and then to have a dead
+baby.”
+
+
+The white curtain walls of the cubicle contracted, closed in on her.
+She was lying at the bottom of her white-curtained nursery cot. She felt
+weak and diminished, small, like a very little child.
+
+The front curtains parted, showing the blond light of the corridor
+beyond. She saw the nursery door open and the light from the candle
+moved across the ceiling. The gap was filled by the heavy form, the
+obscene yet sorrowful face of Connie Pennefather.
+
+Harriett looked at it. She smiled with a sudden ecstatic wonder and
+recognition.
+
+“Mamma----”
+
+
+
+
+*** END OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK LIFE AND DEATH OF HARRIETT FREAN ***
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