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 Pennefathers 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 wrote and told her of Prissie’s illness. A mysterious paralysis. It had begun with fits of giddiness in the street; Prissie would turn round and round on the pavement; then falling fits; and now both legs were paralyzed, but Robin thought she was gradually recovering the use of her hands.
Harriett did not cry. The shock of it stopped her tears. She tried to see it and couldn’t. Poor little Prissie. How terrible. She kept on saying to herself she couldn’t bear to think of Prissie paralyzed. Poor little Prissie.
And poor Robin——
Paralysis. She saw the paralysis coming between them, separating them, and inside her the secret pain was soothed. She need not think of Robin married any more.