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 new ones, that we go and come and talk and pretend, that we consort, so far as in our deep-dyed hypocrisy we do consort, with the rest of the Family, that we have Sunday supper with the Parents and emerge, modestly yet virtuously shining, from the ordeal; that we put in our daily appearance at the Works—­for a utility nowadays so vague that I’m fully aware (Lorraine isn’t so much) of the deep amusement I excite there, though I also recognize how wonderfully, how quite charitably, they manage not to break out with it:  bless, for the most part, their dear simple hearts!  It is in this privately exalted way that we bear in short the burden of our obloquy, our failure, our resignation, our sacrifice of what we should have liked, even if it be a matter we scarce dare to so much as name to each other; and above all of our insufferable reputation for an abject meekness.  We’re really not meek a bit—­we’re secretly quite ferocious; but we’re held to be ashamed of ourselves not only for our proved business incompetence, but for our lack of first-rate artistic power as well:  it being now definitely on record that we’ve never yet designed a single type of ice-pitcher—­since that’s the damnable form Father’s production more and more runs to; his uncanny ideal is to turn out more ice-pitchers than any firm in the world—­that has “taken” with their awful public.  We’ve tried again and again to strike off something hideous enough, but it has always in these cases appeared to us quite beautiful compared to the object finally turned out, on their improved lines, for the unspeakable market; so that we’ve only been able to be publicly rueful and depressed about it, and to plead practically, in extenuation of all the extra trouble we saddle them with, that such things are, alas, the worst we can do.

We so far succeed in our plea that we’re held at least to sit, as I say, in contrition, and to understand how little, when it comes to a reckoning, we really pay our way.  This actually passes, I think for the main basis of our humility, as it’s certainly the basis of what I feel to be poor Mother’s unuttered yearning.  It almost broke her heart that we should have to live in such shame—­she