“... 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 her as you took food and clothing, but not quite knowing what it was, feeling that there was something more in it, some hidden gladness, some perfection that you missed.
Her father had his secret too. She felt that it was harder, somehow, darker and dangerous. He read dangerous books: Darwin and Huxley and Herbert Spencer. Sometimes he talked about them.
“There’s a sort of fascination in seeing how far you can go.... The fascination of truth might be just that—the risk that, after all, it mayn’t be true, that you may have to go farther and farther, perhaps never come back.”