Father would like to shunt Granny—it IS monstrous his having his mother-in-law a fixture under his roof; though, after all, I'm not sure this patience doesn't rank for him as one of those domestic genialities that allow his conscience a bolder and tighter business hand; a curious service, this sort of thing, I note, rendered to the business conscience throughout our community. Mother, at any rate, and small blame to her, would like to “shoo” off Eliza, as Lorraine and I, in our deepest privacy, call Aunt Elizabeth; the Tom Prices would like to extirpate US, of course; we would give our most immediate jewel to clear the sky of the Tom Prices; und so weiter. And I think we should really all band together, for once in our lives, in an unnatural alliance to get rid of Eliza. The beauty as to THIS is, moreover, that I make out the rich if dim, dawn of that last-named possibility (which I've been secretly invoking, all this year, for poor Mother's sake); and as the act of mine own right hand, moreover, without other human help. But of that anon; the IMMEDIATELY striking thing being meanwhile again the strange stultification of the passions in us, which prevents anything ever from coming to an admitted and avowed head.
Maria can be trusted, as I have said, to bring on the small crisis, every time; but she's as afraid as any one else of the great one, and she's moreover, I write it with rapture, afraid of Eliza. Eliza is the one person in our whole community she does fear—and for reasons I perfectly grasp; to which moreover, this extraordinary oddity attaches, that I positively feel I don't fear Eliza in the least (and in fact promise myself before long to show it) and yet don't at all avail by that show of my indifference to danger to inspire my sister with the least terror in respect to myself. It's very funny, the DEGREE of her dread of Eliza, who affects her, evidently, as a person of lurid “worldly” possibilities—the one innocent light in which poor Maria wears for me what Lorraine calls a weird pathos; and perhaps, after all, on the day I shall have justified my futile passage across this agitated scene, and my questionable utility here below every way, by converting our aunt's lively presence into a lively absence, it may come over her that I AM to be recognized. I in fact dream at times, with high intensity, that I see the Prices some day quite turn pale as they look at each other and find themselves taking me in.
I've made up my mind at any rate that poor Mother shall within the year be relieved in one way or another of her constant liability to her sister-in-law's visitations. It isn't to be endured that her house should be so little her own house as I've known Granny and Eliza, between them, though after a different fashion, succeed in making it appear; and yet the action to take will, I perfectly see, never by any possibility come from poor Father. He accepts his sister's perpetual re-arrivals, under the law of her own convenience, with a broad-backed serenity which I find distinctly irritating (if I may use the impious expression) and which makes me ask myself how he sees poor Mother's “position” at all. The truth is poor Father never does “see” anything of that sort, in the sense of conceiving it in its relations; he doesn't know, I guess, but what the prowling Eliza HAS a position (since this is a superstition that I observe even my acute little Lorraine can't quite shake off). He takes refuge about it, as about everything, truly, in the cheerful vagueness of that general consciousness on which I have already touched: he likes to come home from the Works every day to see how good he really is, after all—and it's what poor Mother thus has to demonstrate for him by translating his benevolence, translating it to himself and to others, into “housekeeping.” If he were only good to HER he mightn't be good enough; but the more we pig together round about him the more blandly patriarchal we make him feel.
Eliza meanwhile, at any rate, is spoiling for a dose—if ever a woman required one; and I seem already to feel in the air the gathering elements of the occasion that awaits me for administering it. All of which it is a comfort somehow to maunder away on here. As I read over what I have written the aspects of our situation multiply so in fact that I note again how one has only to look at any human thing very straight (that is with the minimum of intelligence) to see it shine out in as many aspects as the hues of the prism; or place itself, in other words, in relations that positively stop nowhere. I've often thought I should like some day to write a novel; but what would become of me in that case—delivered over, I mean, before my subject, to my extravagant sense that everything is a part of something else? When you paint a picture with a brush and pigments, that is on a single plane, it can stop at your gilt frame; but when you paint one with a pen and words, that is in ALL the dimensions, how are you to stop? Of course, as Lorraine says, “Stopping, that's art; and what are we artists like, my dear, but those drivers of trolley-cars, in New York, who, by some divine instinct, recognize in the forest of pillars and posts the white-striped columns at which they may pull up? Yes, we're drivers of trolley-cars charged with electric force and prepared to go any distance from which the consideration of a probable smash ahead doesn't deter us.”
That consideration deters me doubtless even a little here—in spite of my seeing the track, to the next bend, so temptingly clear. I should like to note for instance, for my own satisfaction (though no fellow, thank God, was ever less a prey to the ignoble fear of inconsistency) that poor Mother's impugnment of my acquisition of Lorraine didn't in the least disconcert me. I did pick Lorraine—then a little bleating stray lamb collared with a blue ribbon and a tinkling silver bell—out of our New York bear-garden; but it interests me awfully to recognize that, whereas the kind of association is one I hate for my small Philistine sister, who probably has the makings of a nice, dull, dressed, amiable, insignificant woman, I recognize it perfectly as Lorraine's native element and my own; or at least don't at all mind her having been dipped in it. It has tempered and plated us for the rest of life, and to an effect different enough from the awful metallic wash of our Company's admired ice-pitchers. We artists are at the best children of despair—a certain divine despair, as Lorraine naturally says; and what jollier place for laying it in abundantly than the Art League? As for Peg, however, I won't hear of her having anything to do with this; she shall despair of nothing worse than the “hang” of her skirt or the moderation other hat—and not often, if I can help her, even of those.
That small vow I'm glad to register here: it helps somehow, at the juncture I seem to feel rapidly approaching, to do the indispensable thing Lorraine is always talking about—to define my position. She's always insisting that we've never sufficiently defined it—as if I've ever for a moment pretended we have! We've REfined it, to the last intensity—and of course, now, shall have to do so still more; which will leave them all even more bewildered than the boldest definition would have done. But that's quite a different thing. The furthest we have gone in the way of definition—unless indeed this too belongs but to our invincible tendency to refine—is by the happy rule we've made that Lorraine shall walk with me every morning to the Works, and I shall find her there when I come out to walk home with me. I see, on reading over, that this is what I meant by “our” in speaking above of our little daily heroism in that direction. The heroism is easier, and becomes quite sweet, I find, when she comes so far on the way with me and when we linger outside for a little more last talk before I go in.
It's the drollest thing in the world, and really the most precious note of the mystic influence known in the place as “the force of public opinion”—which is in other words but the incubus of small domestic conformity; I really believe there's nothing we do, or don't do, that excites in the bosom of our circle a subtler sense that we're “au fond” uncanny. And it's amusing to think that this is our sole tiny touch of independence! That she should come forth with me at those hours, that she should hang about with me, and that we should have last (and, when she meets me again, first) small sweet things to say to each other, as if we were figures in a chromo or a tableau vwant keeping our tryst at a stile—no, this, quite inexplicably, transcends their scheme and baffles their imagination. They can't conceive how or why Lorraine gets out, or should wish to, at such hours; there's a feeling that she must violate every domestic duty to do it; yes, at bottom, really, the act wears for them, I discern, an insidious immorality, and it wouldn't take much to bring “public opinion” down on us in some scandalized way.
The funniest thing of all, moreover, is that that effect resides largely in our being husband and wife—it would be absent, wholly, if we were engaged or lovers; a publicly parading gentleman friend and lady friend. What is it we CAN have to say to each other, in that exclusive manner, so particularly, so frequently, so flagrantly, and as if we hadn't chances enough at home? I see it's a thing Mother might accidentally do with Father, or Maria with Tom Price; but I can imagine the shouts of hilarity, the resounding public comedy, with which Tom and Maria would separate; and also how scantly poor little Mother would permit herself with poor big Father any appearance of a grave leave-taking. I've quite expected her—yes, literally poor little Mother herself—to ask me, a bit anxiously, any time these six months, what it is that at such extraordinary moments passes between us. So much, at any rate, for the truth of this cluster of documentary impressions, to which there may some day attach the value as of a direct contemporary record of strange and remote things, so much I here super-add; and verily with regret, as well, on behalf of my picture, for two or three other touches from which I must forbear.