“I say—did he go on caring for you?”
“Sometimes I think he did. Sometimes I think he hated me.”
“Of course he hated you, after what you’d let him in for.” She paused. “You don’t mind my telling you the truth, do you?”
... Harriett sat a long time, her hands folded on her lap, her eyes staring into the room, trying to see the truth. She saw the girl, Robin’s niece, in her young indignation, her tender brilliance suddenly hard, suddenly cruel, flashing out the truth. Was it true that she had sacrificed Robin and Priscilla and Beatrice to her parents’ idea of moral beauty? Was it true that this idea had been all wrong? That she might have married Robin and been happy and been right?
“I don’t care. If it was to be done again to-morrow I’d do it.”
But the beauty of that unique act no longer appeared to her as it once was, uplifting, consoling, incorruptible.
The years passed. They went with an incredible rapidity, and Harriett was now fifty.
The feeling of insecurity had grown on her. It had something to do with Mona, with Maggie and Maggie’s baby. She had no clear illumination, only a mournful acquiescence in her own futility, an almost physical sense of shrinkage, the crumbling away, bit by bit, of her beautiful and honorable self, dying with the objects of its three profound affections: her father, her mother, Robin. Gradually the image of the middle-aged Robin had effaced his youth.
She read more and more novels from the circulating libraries, of a kind demanding less and less effort of attention. And always her inability to concentrate appeared to her as a just demand for clarity: “The man has no business to write so that I can’t understand him.”
She laid in a weekly stock of opinions from The Spectator, and by this means contrived a semblance of intellectual life.