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.

She was appeased more and more by the rhythm of the seasons, of the weeks,
of day and night, by the first coming up of the pink and wine-brown velvet
primulas, by the pungent, burnt smell of her morning coffee, the smell of
a midday stew, of hot cakes baking for tea time; by the lighting of the
lamp, the lighting of autumn fires, the round of her visits. She waited
with a strained, expectant desire for the moment when it would be time to
see Lizzie or Sarah or Connie Pennefather again.