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 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_.