They left the white house with the green balcony hung out like a birdcage at the side, and turned into the cottage at Hampstead. The rooms were small and rather dark, and the furniture they had brought had a squeezed-up, unhappy look. The blue egg on the marble-topped table was conspicuous and hateful as it had never been in the Black’s Lane drawing-room. Harriett and her mother looked at it.
“Must it stay there?”
“I think so. Fanny Hancock gave it me.”
“Mamma—you know you don’t like it.”
“No. But after all these years I couldn’t turn the poor thing away.”
Her mother was an old woman, clinging with an old, stubborn fidelity to the little things of her past. But Harriett denied it. “She’s not old,” she said to herself. “Not really old.”
“Harriett,” her mother said one day. “I think you ought to do the housekeeping.”
“Oh, Mamma, why?” She hated the idea of this change.
“Because you’ll have to do it some day.”
She obeyed. But as she went her rounds and gave her orders she felt that she was doing something not quite real, playing at being her mother as she had played when she was a child. Then her mother had another thought.