Harriett was glad when Lizzie went and left her to Maggie and the house. She always hoped she wouldn’t stay for tea, so that Maggie might not have an extra cup and plate to wash.
The years passed: the sixty-third, sixty-fourth, sixty-fifth; their monotony mitigated by long spells of torpor and the sheer rapidity of time. Her mind was carried on, empty, in empty, flying time. She had a feeling of dryness and distension in all her being, and a sort of crepitation in her brain, irritating her to yawning fits. After meals, sitting in her armchair, her book would drop from her hands and her mind would slip from drowsiness into stupor. There was something voluptuous about the beginning of this state; she would give herself up to it with an animal pleasure and content.
Sometimes, for long periods, her mind would go backwards, returning, always returning, to the house in Black’s Lane. She would see the row of elms and the white wall at the end with the green balcony hung out like a birdcage above the green door. She would see herself, a girl wearing a big chignon and a little round hat; or sitting in the curly chair with her feet on the white rug; and her father, slender and straight, smiling half-amused, while her mother read aloud to them. Or she was a child in a black silk apron going up Black’s Lane. Little audacious thing. She had a fondness and admiration for this child and her audacity. And always she saw her mother, with her sweet face between the long, hanging curls, coming down the garden path, in a wide silver-gray gown trimmed with narrow bands of black velvet. And she would wake up, surprised to find herself sitting in a strange room, dressed in a gown with strange sleeves that ended in old wrinkled hands; for the book that lay in her lap was Longfellow, open at Evangeline.
One day she made Maggie pull off the old, washed-out cretonne covers, exposing the faded blue rep. She was back in the drawing-room of her youth. Only one thing was missing. She went upstairs and took the blue egg out of the spare room and set it in its place on the marble-topped table. She sat gazing at it a long time in happy, child-like satisfaction. The blue egg gave reality to her return.
When she saw Maggie coming in with the tea and buttered scones she thought of her mother.
Three more years. Harriett was sixty-eight. She had a faint recollection of having given Maggie notice, long ago, there, in the dining room. Maggie had stood on the hearthrug, in her large white apron, crying. She was crying now.
She said she must leave and go and take care of her mother. “Mother’s getting very feeble now.”
“I’m getting very feeble, too, Maggie. It’s cruel and unkind of you to leave me.”
“I’m sorry, ma’am. I can’t help it.”
She moved about the room, sniffing and sobbing as she dusted. Harriett couldn’t bear it any more. “If you can’t control yourself,” she said, “go into the kitchen.” Maggie went.