Life and Death of Harriett Frean | Page 5

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?"