“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.”