But her mother wouldn’t listen. “My dear, it would cost a hundred pounds.”
“How do you know what it would cost?”
“Oh,” she said, “I know.” She was smiling above the sheet that was tucked close up, tight under her chin, shutting it all down.
Sir James Pargeter would cost a hundred pounds. Harriett couldn’t lay her hands on the money or on half of it or a quarter. “That doesn’t matter if they think it’ll save you.”
“They think; they think. But I know. I know better than all the doctors.”
“But Mamma, darling——”
She urged the operation. Just because it would be so difficult to raise the hundred pounds she urged it. She wanted to feel that she had done everything that could be done, that she had let nothing stand in the way, that she had shrunk from no sacrifice. One chance in a hundred. What was a hundred pounds weighed against that one chance? If it had been one in a thousand she would have said the same.
“It would be no good, Hatty. I know it wouldn’t. They just love to try experiments, those doctors. They’re dying to get their knives into me. Don’t let them.”
Gradually, day by day, Harriett weakened. Her mother’s frightened voice tore at her, broke her down. Supposing she really died under the operation? Supposing—— It was cruel to excite and upset her just for that; it made the pain worse.
Either the operation or the pain, going on and on, stabbing with sharper and sharper knives; cutting in deeper; all their care, the antiseptics, the restoratives, dragging it out, giving it more time to torture her.