Harriett sat before the fire in her chair, straight and stiff, making no sound. Now and then her eyelids shook, fluttered red rims; slow, scanty tears oozed and fell, their trail glistening in the long furrows of her cheeks.
XV
The door of the specialist’s house had shut behind them with a soft, respectful click.
Lizzie Pierce and Harriett sat in the taxicab, holding each other’s hands. Harriett spoke.
“He says I’ve got what Mamma had.”
Lizzie blinked away her tears; her hand loosened and tightened on Harriett’s with a nervous clutch.
Harriett felt nothing but a strange, solemn excitement and exaltation. She was raised to her mother’s eminence in pain. With every stab she would live again in her mother. She had what her mother had.
Only she would have an operation. This different thing was what she dreaded, the thing her mother hadn’t had, and the going away into the hospital, to live exposed in the free ward among other people. That was what she minded most. That and leaving her house, and Maggie’s leaving.
She cried when she saw Maggie standing at the gate in her white apron as the taxicab took her away. She thought, “When I come back again she won’t be there.” Yet somehow she felt that it wouldn’t happen; it was impossible that she should come back and not find Maggie there.
She lay in her white bed in the white-curtained cubicle. Lizzie was paying for the cubicle. Kind Lizzie. Kind. Kind.