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 th