Pages 10 through 17 describe this character, but it is a paragraph on page 16 that most effectively allows the reader to understand this character:

"Of course she had her worries, especially David and sometimes the aching sense of a tiny lost talent, but she was loved and loving and had an untroubled conscience and that was quite enough, for one of her temper, for happiness, that deep confiding slow relationship to time. Hers was a sometimes sad but always smiling happiness. She loved her husband and her son and her brother and carried every discontent into the light of that love to be consumed. Sometimes she had a feeling of what she thought of as 'littleness' ('small fryness') when she thought: how I wish I were a great painter or a great something. She had been to art school and had had ambition.But early marriage, combined with the fact that Blaise never took her vocation seriously, had led her to lay aside her brush. She knew that she led a selfish life because all her otherness was so much a part of herself. There was no strain or distance really, even her charities were easy and pleasant and rich in the rewards of gratitude. I am a deeply selfish person, she told herself sometimes, and so I shall never be great, not like men are great, or touched by greatness."

As we have read on, we find Harriet is entirely devoted to her family, (Blaise and David that is). Loving them and being loved by them makes her happy and fulfills her, but she has nevertheless has had to make sacrifices for them: she has put aside her own wants and focused on their needs. She has aimed to give her son and sense of security through a stable family life, and she has strived to make her husband happy. If this is her life, how will she react when she finds out Blaise has been unfaithful?

Harriet suffered a terrible blow when Blaise confessed his infidelity. Nevertheless, she tried to handle the situation. Blaise was all she had, so she forgave him, and tried to make a new start. But when she received a second letter from Blaise, telling her he was leaving her, that he was going away with Emily, her life lost all its meaning. She had devoted all her life to him, and now he had left her.

What was she to do now? She desperately needed someone to love, and offered herself to Monty and then to Edgar. Both men refused her, however, and she turned all her attentions to little Luca, with whom she had already built a promising "mother-son" relationship. Determined to keep him, as Blaise and Emily did not care for him, she even neglects her own son, David, in favor of Luca.