Life and Death of Harriett Frean | Page 6

"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