has only got so far as that yet.  But it’s a beginning; and I seem to make out that if I don’t spoil it by any wrong word, if I don’t in fact break the spell by any wrong breath, she’ll probably come on further.  It will glimmer upon her—­some day when she looks at me in her uncomfortable bewildered tenderness, and I almost hypnotize her by just smiling inscrutably back—­that she isn’t getting all the moral benefit she somehow ought out of my being so pathetically wrong; and then she’ll begin to wonder and wonder, all to herself, if there mayn’t be something to be said for me.  She has limped along, in her more or less dissimulated pain, on this apparently firm ground that I’m so wrong that nothing will do for either of us but a sweet, solemn, tactful agreement between us never to mention it.  It falls in so richly with all the other things, all the “real” things, we never mention.

Well, it’s doubtless an odd fact to be setting down even here; but I shall be sorry for her on the day when her glimmer, as I have called it, broadens—­when it breaks on her that if I’m as wrong as this comes to, why the others must be actively and absolutely right.  She has never had to take it quite that way—­so women, even mothers, wondrously get on; and heaven help her, as I say, when she shall.  She’ll be immense—­“tactfully” immense, with Father about it—­she’ll manage that, for herself and for him, all right; but where the iron will enter into her will be at the thought of her having for so long given raison, as they say in Paris—­or as poor Lorraine at least says they say—­to a couple like Maria and Tom Price.  It comes over her that she has taken it largely from them (and she has) that we’re living in immorality, Lorraine and I:  ah then, poor dear little Mother—!  Upon my word I believe I’d go on lying low to this positive pitch of grovelling—­and Lorraine, charming, absurd creature, would back me up in it too—­in order precisely to save Mother such a revulsion.  It will be really more trouble than it will be worth to her; since it isn’t as if our relation weren’t, of its kind, just as we are, about as “dear” as it can be.

I’d literally much rather help her not to see than to see; I’d much rather help her to get on with the others (yes, even including poor Father, the fine damp plaster of whose composition, renewed from week to week, can’t be touched anywhere without letting your finger in, without peril of its coming to pieces) in the way easiest for her—­if not easiest to her.  She couldn’t live with the others an hour—­no, not with one of them, unless with poor little Peg—­save by accepting all their premises, save by making in other words all the concessions and having all the imagination.  I ask from her nothing of this—­I do the whole thing with her, as she has to do it with them; and of this, au fond, as Lorraine again says, she is ever so subtly aware—­just as, for it, she’s ever so dumbly grateful.  Let these