Riders in the Chariot Read Online Free Page A

said to be an investment in itself."
    The wife of Norbert Hare seldom committed herself to positive opinions. Two positives in that relationship would have been intolerable.
    Once, in a fit of rage, the husband accused his wife of having become the mouthpiece of social cliché.
    "But it is what people prefer, Norbert," the poor woman protested, with vehemence for her. "Too much of what is unexpected is too upsetting."
    Before there was any call for it she began to wear, together with her apologetic amethysts, colours which suggested mourning. She would cough thinly, from behind an expression that invited inquiry into the state of her health, and visitors would take the hint, not that they really cared to discover how Mrs Hare's health was poor, but it provided a useful topic with which to hack a way into the tangles of conversation.
    She was not a snob, though there were many who accused her of it. She suffered, rather, from seeing the weak exposed to those whom she considered strong, and so, she would attempt to keep her friends separate, in compartments that she hoped might protect them from one another. She was completely unreal, and would impart temporarily to those of her equals with whom she came in contact something of her unreality. Yet she was not ineffective against the peacock colours of the stage at Xanadu, and provided the perfect, flat foil to her husband's fustian. The one cataclysmic reality to challenge her playing of the part was the presence of her daughter, but that was a fact she had failed from the beginning to embrace, an event the significance of which she had recoiled from relating to the play of life.
    After several years of tedious and frustrated childbirth, Mrs Hare had succeeded in having this little girl. They named her Mary, because the mother, fortunately, was too exhausted to think, and the father, who would have plunged with voluptuous excitement into the classics, or the works of Tennyson, to dredge up some shining name for a son, turned his back on the prospect of a daughter. So, Mary the latter became, but an innocent, Protestant one.
    Mrs Hare had soon taken refuge from Mary in a rational kindness, with which she continued to deal her a series of savage blows during what passed for childhood.
    "My darling must decide how best she can repay her parents for all she owes them," was amongst the mother's favourite tactics. "See all these beautiful things they have put here to be enjoyed, not smashed in thoughtless games."
    And, in answer to a frequent question: "Only our Father in Heaven will be able to tell my pet why He made her as He did."
    Paddling in her own delicious shallows, it never occurred to Mrs Hare to raise her eyes to God, except to call Him as a formal witness. She accepted Him--who would have been so audacious not to?--but as the creator of a moral and a social system. At that level, she could always be relied on to put her hand in her purse, to help repair vestments, or support fallen girls, and her name was published for everyone to read, on a visiting card, inserted in a brass frame, on the end of her regular pew.
    The little girl appeared gravely to accept the attitudes adopted by her mother, but was not genuinely influenced. Unattached, she drifted through the pale waters of her mother's kindness like a little, wondering, transparent fish, in search of those depths which her instinct told her could exist.
    Her father's attitudes were less acceptable than her mother's.
    Once in her presence--or she had been standing, rather, in the drawing-room alcove, apart, touching the waves of an emerald silk with which the day-bed would fascinate the fingers--her father had thrown down his cap with more than his usual violence, and shouted, "Who would ever have thought I should get a red _ girl! By George, Eleanor, she is ugly, ugly!"
    Which--it sounded--was the worst that might be said.
    With more than her usual kindness, Eleanor Hare motioned to their child, and when the latter had