Life and Death of Harriett Frean Read Online Free PDF Page A

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 Penne fathers 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