The first minute of to-morrow she would begin behaving beautifully; as beautifully as she could. They wanted you to; they wanted it more than anything because they were so beautiful. So good. So wise. But three years went before Harriett understood how wise they had been, and why her mother took her again and again into Black’s Lane to pick red campion, so that it was always the red campion she remembered. They must have known all the time about Black’s Lane; Annie, the housemaid, used to say it was a bad place; something had happened to a little girl there. Annie hushed and reddened and wouldn’t tell you what it was. Then one day, when she was thirteen, standing by the apple tree, Connie Hancock told her. A secret... Behind the dirty blue palings... She shut her eyes, squeezing the lids down, frightened. But when she thought of the lane she could see nothing but the green banks, the three tall elms, and the red campion pricking through the white froth of the cow’s parsley; her mother stood on the garden walk in her wide, swinging gown; she was holding the red and white flowers up to her face and saying, “Look, how _beautiful_ they are.” She saw her all the time while Connie was telling her the secret. She wanted to get up and go to her. Connie knew what it meant when you stiffened suddenly and made yourself tall and cold and silent. The cold silence would frighten her and she would go away. Then, Harriett thought, she could get back to her mother and Longfellow. Every afternoon, through the hours before her father came home, she sat in the cool, green-lighted drawing-room reading _Evangeline_ aloud to her mother. When they came to the beautiful places they looked at each other and smiled. She passed through her fourteenth year sedately, to the sound of _Evangeline_. Her upright body, her lifted, delicately obstinate, rather wistful face expressed her small, conscious determination to be good. She was silent with emotion when Mrs. Hancock told her she was growing like her mother. III Connie Hancock was her friend. She had once been a slender, wide-mouthed child, top-heavy with her damp clumps of hair. Now she was squaring and thickening and looking horrid, like Mr. Hancock. Beside her Harriett felt tall and elegant and slender. Mamma didn’t know what Connie was really like; it was one of those things you couldn’t tell her. She said Connie would grow out of it. Meanwhile you could see _he_ wouldn’t. Mr. Hancock had red whiskers, and his face squatted down in his collar, instead of rising nobly up out of it like Papa’s. It looked as if it was thinking things that made its eyes bulge and its mouth curl over and slide like a drawn loop. When you talked about Mr. Hancock, Papa gave a funny laugh as if he was something improper. He said Connie ought to have red whiskers.