Life and Death of Harriett Frean | Page 7

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