Free Life and Death of Harriett Frean by May Sinclair Page B

upright, and stiff in her white shawl. She apologized for having waited seven years before calling.... "Never go anywhere.... Quite a recluse since my father's death. He was Hilton Frean."
    "Yes?" Mrs. Brailsford's eyes were sweetly interrogative.
    "But as we are such near neighbors I felt that I must break my rule."
    Mrs. Brailsford smiled in vague benevolence; yet as if she thought that
Miss Frean's feeling and her action were unnecessary. After seven years.
And presently Harriett found herself alone in her corner.
    She tried to talk to Mr. Brailsford when he handed her the tea and bread and butter. "My father," she said, "was connected with The Spectator for many years. He was Hilton Frean."
    "Indeed? I'm afraid I--don't remember."
    She could get nothing out of him, out of his lean, ironical face, his eyes screwed up behind his glasses, benevolent, amused at her. She was nobody in that roomful of keen, intellectual people; nobody; nothing but an unnecessary little old lady who had come there uninvited.
    Her second call was not returned. She heard that the Brailsfords were exclusive; they wouldn't know anybody out of their own set. Harriett explained her position thus: "No. I didn't keep it up. We have nothing in common."
    She was old--old. She had nothing in common with youth, nothing in common with middle age, with intellectual, exclusive people connected with The Spectator . She said, " The Spectator is not what it used to be in my father's time."
    Harriett Frean was not what she used to be. She was aware of the creeping fret, the poisons and obstructions of decay. It was as if she had parted with her own light, elastic body, and succeeded to somebody else's that was all bone, heavy, stiff, irresponsive to her will. Her brain felt swollen and brittle, she had a feeling of tiredness in her face, of infirmity about her mouth. Her looking-glass showed her the fallen yellow skin, the furrowed lines of age.
    Her head dropped, drowsy, giddy over the week's accounts. She gave up even the semblance of her housekeeping, and became permanently dependent on Maggie. She was happy in the surrender of her responsibility, of the grown-up self she had maintained with so much effort, clinging to Maggie, submitting to Maggie, as she had clung and submitted to her mother.
    Her affection concentrated on two objects, the house and Maggie, Maggie and the house. The house had become a part of herself, an extension of her body, a protective shell. She was uneasy when away from it. The thought of it drew her with passion: the low brown wall with the railing, the flagged path from the little green gate to the front door. The square brown front; the two oblong, white-framed windows, the dark-green trellis porch between; the three windows above. And the clipped privet bush by the trellis and the may tree by the gate.
    She no longer enjoyed visiting her friends. She set out in peevish resignation, leaving her house, and when she had sat half an hour with Lizzie or Sarah or Connie she would begin to fidget, miserable till she got back to it again; to the house and Maggie.
    She was glad enough when Lizzie came to her; she still liked Lizzie best.
They would sit together, one on each side of the fireplace, talking.
Harriett's voice came thinly through her thin lips, precise yet plaintive,
Lizzie's finished with a snap of the bent-in jaws.
    "Do you remember those little round hats we used to wear? You had one exactly like mine. Connie couldn't wear them."
    "We were wild young things," said Lizzie. "I was wilder than you.... A little audacious thing."
    "And look at us now--we couldn't say 'Bo' to a goose.... Well, we may be thankful we haven't gone stout like Connie Pennefather."
    "Or poor Sarah. That stoop."
    They drew themselves up. Their straight, slender shoulders rebuked Connie's obesity, and Sarah's bent back, her bodice stretched hump-wise from the stuck-out ridges of her stays.
    Harriett was glad when Lizzie went and left her to Maggie and the