No one for a moment suspects
I have any nerves, and least of all what they themselves do to them; no
one, that is, but poor little Mother again--who, however, again, in her
way, all timorously and tenderly, has never mentioned it: any more than
she has ever mentioned her own, which she would think quite indecent.
This is precisely one of the things that, while it passes between us as
a mute assurance, makes me feel myself more than the others verily HER
child: more even than poor little Peg at the present strained juncture.

But what I was going to say above all is that I don't care that poor
Lorraine--since that's my wife's inimitable name, which I feel every
time I write it I must apologize even to myself for!--should quite
discover the moments at which, first and last, I've worked HER off. Yet
I've made no secret of my cultivating it as a resource that helps me
to hold out; this idea of our "holding out," separately and together,
having become for us--and quite comically, as I see--the very basis of
life. What does it mean, and how and why and to what end are we holding?
I ask myself that even while I feel how much we achieve even by just
hugging each other over the general intensity of it. This is what I have
in mind as to our living to that extent by the vain phrase; as to our
really from time to time winding ourselves up by the use of it, and
winding each other. What should we do if we didn't hold out, and of
what romantic, dramatic, or simply perhaps quite prosaic, collapse would
giving in, in contradistinction, consist for us? We haven't in the least
formulated that--though it perhaps may but be one of the thousand things
we are afraid of.

At any rate we don't, I think, ever so much as ask ourselves, and much
less each other: we're so quite sufficiently sustained and inflamed by
the sense that we're just doing it, and that in the sublime effort
our union is our strength. There must be something in it, for the more
intense we make the consciousness--and haven't we brought it to as fine
a point as our frequently triumphant partnership at bridge?--the more it
positively does support us. Poor Lorraine doesn't really at all need to
understand in order to believe; she believes that, failing our exquisite
and intimate combined effort of resistance, we should be capable
together of something--well, "desperate." It's in fact in this beautiful
desperation that we spend our days, that we face the pretty grim
prospect of