belonged as much to their bodies as their minds; it rippled on their faces
with their quiet smiling, it breathed with their breath. Sometimes she or
her mother read aloud, Mrs. Browning or Charles Dickens; or the biography
of some Great Man, sitting there in the velvet-curtained room or out on
the lawn under the cedar tree. A motionless communion broken by walks in
the sweet-smelling fields and deep, elm-screened lanes. And there were
short journeys into London to a lecture or a concert, and now and then the
surprise and excitement of the play.

One day her mother smoothed out her long, hanging curls and tucked them
away under a net. Harriett had a little shock of dismay and resentment,
hating change.

And the long, long Sundays spaced the weeks and the months, hushed and
sweet and rather enervating, yet with a sort of thrill in them as if
somewhere the music of the church organ went on vibrating. Her mother had
some secret: some happy sense of God that she gave to you and you took
from her as you took food and clothing, but not quite knowing what it was,
feeling that there was something more in it, some hidden gladness, some
perfection that you missed.

Her father had his secret too. She felt that it was harder, somehow,
darker and dangerous. He read dangerous books: Darwin and Huxley and
Herbert Spencer. Sometimes he talked about them.

"There's a sort of fascination in seeing how far you can go.... The
fascination of truth might be just that--the risk that, after all, it
mayn't be true, that you may have to go farther and farther, perhaps never
come back."