e 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.

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
"