The explanation has struck me as, mostly, that business genial and cheerful and even obstreperous, without detriment to its BEING business, has been poor Father's ideal for his own terrible kind. This ideal is, further, that his home-life shall attest that prosperity. I think it has even been his conception that our family tone shall by its sweet innocence fairly register the pace at which the Works keep ahead: so that he has the pleasure of feeling us as funny and slangy here as people can only be who have had the best of the bargains other people are having occasion to rue. We of course don't know—that is Mother and Grandmamma don't, in any definite way (any more than I do, thanks to my careful stupidity) how exceeding small some of the material is consciously ground in the great grim, thrifty mill of industrial success; and indeed we grow about as many cheap illusions and easy comforts in the faintly fenced garden of our little life as could very well be crammed into the space.
Poor Grandmamma—since I've mentioned her—appears to me always the aged wan Flora of our paradise; the presiding divinity, seated in the centre, under whose pious traditions, REALLY quite dim and outlived, our fond sacrifices are offered. Queer enough the superstition that Granny is a very solid and strenuous and rather grim person, with a capacity for facing the world, that we, a relaxed generation, have weakly lost. She knows as much about the world as a tin jelly-mould knows about the dinner, and is the oddest mixture of brooding anxieties over things that don't in the least matter and of bland failure to suspect things that intensely do. She lives in short in a weird little waste of words—over the moral earnestness we none of us cultivate; yet hasn't a notion of any effective earnestness herself except on the subject of empty bottles, which have, it would appear, noble neglected uses. At this time of day it doesn't matter, but if there could have been dropped into her empty bottles, at an earlier stage, something to strengthen a little any wine of life they were likely to contain, she wouldn't have figured so as the head and front of all our sentimentality.
I judge it, for that matter, a proof of our flat “modernity” in this order that the scant starch holding her together is felt to give her among us this antique and austere consistency. I don't talk things over with Lorraine for nothing, and she does keep for me the flashes of perception we neither of us waste on the others. It's the “antiquity of the age of crinoline,” she said the other day a propos of a little carte-de-visite photograph of my ancestress as a young woman of the time of the War; looking as if she had been violently inflated from below, but had succeeded in resisting at any cost, and with a strange intensity of expression, from her waist up. Mother, however, I must say, is as wonderful about her as about everything else, and arranges herself, exactly, to appear a mere contemporary illustration (being all the while three times the true picture) in order that her parent shall have the importance of the Family Portrait. I don't mean of course that she has told me so; but she cannot see that if she hasn't that importance Granny has none other; and it's therefore as if she pretended she had a ruff, a stomacher, a farthingale and all the rest—grand old angles and eccentricities and fine absurdities: the hard white face, if necessary, of one who has seen witches burned.
She hasn't any more than any one else among us a gleam of fine absurdity: that's a product that seems unable, for the life of it, and though so indispensable (say) for literary material, to grow here; but, exquisitely determined she shall have Character lest she perish—while it's assumed we still need her—Mother makes it up for her, with a turn of the hand, out of bits left over from her own, far from economically as her own was originally planned; scraps of spiritual silk and velvet that no one takes notice of missing. And Granny, as in the dignity of her legend, imposes, ridiculous old woman, on every one—Granny passes for one of the finest old figures in the place, while Mother is never discovered. So is history always written, and so is truth mostly worshipped. There's indeed one thing, I'll do her the justice to say, as to which she has a glimmer of vision—as to which she had it a couple of years ago; I was thoroughly with her in her deprecation of the idea that Peggy should be sent, to crown her culture, to that horrid co-educative college from which the poor child returned the other day so preposterously engaged to be married; and, if she had only been a little more actively with me we might perhaps between us have done something about it. But she has a way of deprecating with her long, knobby, mittened hand over her mouth, and of looking at the same time, in a mysterious manner, down into one of the angles of the room—it reduces her protest to a feebleness: she's incapable of seeing in it herself more than a fraction of what it has for her, and really thinks it would be wicked and abandoned, would savor of Criticism, which is the cardinal sin with her, to see all, or to follow any premise to it in the right direction.
Still, there was the happy chance, at the time the question came up, that she had retained, on the subject of promiscuous colleges, the mistrust of the age of crinoline: as to which in fact that little old photograph, with its balloon petticoat and its astonishingly flat, stiff “torso,” might have imaged some failure of the attempt to blow the heresy into her. The true inwardness of the history, at the crisis, was that our fell Maria had made up her mind that Peg should go—and that, as I have noted, the thing our fell Maria makes up her mind to among us is in nine cases out of ten the thing that is done. Maria still takes, in spite of her partial removal to a wider sphere, the most insidious interest in us, and the beauty of her affectionate concern for the welfare of her younger sisters is the theme of every tongue. She observed to Lorraine, in a moment of rare expansion, more than a year ago, that she had got their two futures perfectly fixed, and that as Peggy appeared to have “some mind,” though how much she wasn't yet sure, it should be developed, what there was of it, on the highest modern lines: Peggy would never be thought generally, that is physically, attractive anyway. She would see about Alice, the brat, later on, though meantime she had her idea—the idea that Alice was really going to have the looks and would at a given moment break out into beauty: in which event she should be run for that, and for all it might be worth, and she, Maria, would be ready to take the contract.
This is the kind of patronage of us that passes, I believe, among her more particular intimates, for “so sweet” of her; it being of course Maria all over to think herself subtle for just reversing, with a “There—see how original I am?” any benighted conviction usually entertained. I don't know that any one has ever thought Alice, the brat, intellectual; but certainly no one has ever judged her even potentially handsome, in the light of no matter which of those staggering girl-processes that suddenly produce features, in flat faces, and “figure,” in the void of space, as a conjurer pulls rabbits out of a sheet of paper and yards of ribbon out of nothing. Moreover, if any one SHOULD know, Lorraine and I, with our trained sense for form and for “values,” certainly would. However, it doesn't matter; the whole thing being but a bit of Maria's system of bluffing in order to boss. Peggy hasn't more than the brain, in proportion to the rest of her, of a small swelling dove on a window-sill; but she's extremely pretty and absolutely nice, a little rounded pink-billed presence that pecks up gratefully any grain of appreciation.
I said to Mother, I remember, at the time—I took that plunge: “I hope to goodness you're not going to pitch that defenceless child into any such bear garden!” and she replied that to make a bear-garden you first had to have bears, and she didn't suppose the co-educative young men could be so described. “Well then,” said I, “would you rather I should call them donkeys, or even monkeys? What I mean is that the poor girl—a perfect little DECORATIVE person, who ought to have iridescent-gray plumage and pink-shod feet to match the rest of her—shouldn't be thrust into any general menagerie-cage, but be kept for the dovecote and the garden, kept where we may still hear her coo. That's what, at college, they'll make her unlearn; she'll learn to roar and snarl with the other animals. Think of the vocal sounds with which she may come back to us!” Mother appeared to think, but asked me, after a moment, as a result of it, in which of the cages of the New York Art League menagerie, and among what sort of sounds, I had found Lorraine—who was a product of co-education if there ever had been one, just as our marriage itself had been such a product.
I replied to this—well, what I could easily reply; but I asked, I recollect, in the very forefront, if she were sending Peg to college to get married. She declared it was the last thing she was in a hurry about, and that she believed there was no danger, but her great argument let the cat out of the bag. “Maria feels the want of it—of a college education; she feels it would have given her more confidence”; and I shall in fact never forget the little look of strange supplication that she gave me with these words. What it meant was: “Now don't ask me to go into the question, for the moment, any further: it's in the acute stage—and you know how soon Maria can BRING a question to a head. She has settled it with your Father—in other words has settled it FOR him: settled it in the sense that we didn't give HER, at the right time, the advantage she ought to have had. It would have given her confidence—from the want of which, acquired at that age, she feels she so suffers; and your Father thinks it fine of her to urge that her little sister shall profit by her warning. Nothing works on him, you know, so much as to hear it hinted that we've failed of our duty to any of you; and you can see how it must work when he can be persuaded that Maria—!”
“Hasn't colossal cheek?”—I took the words out of her mouth. “With such colossal cheek what NEED have you of confidence, which is such an inferior form—?”
The long and short was of course that Peggy went; believing on her side, poor dear, that it might for future relations give her the pull of Maria. This represents, really, I think, the one spark of guile in Peggy's breast: the smart of a small grievance suffered at her sister's hands in the dim long-ago. Maria slapped her face, or ate up her chocolates, or smeared her copy-book, or something of that sort; and the sound of the slap still reverberates in Peg's consciousness, the missed sweetness still haunts her palate, the smutch of the fair page (Peg writes an immaculate little hand and Maria a wretched one—the only thing she can't swagger about) still affronts her sight. Maria also, to do her justice, has a vague hankering, under which she has always been restive, to make up for the outrage; and the form the compunction now takes is to get her away. It's one of the facts of our situation all round, I may thus add, that every one wants to get some one else away, and that there are indeed one or two of us upon whom, to that end, could the conspiracy only be occult enough—which it can never!—all the rest would effectively concentrate.