“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.