notes stand at any rate for my fond fancy of that, and write it here to my credit in letters as big and black as the tearful alphabet of my childhood; let them do this even if everything else registers meaner things.  I’m perfectly willing to recognize, as grovellingly as any one likes, that, as grown-up and as married and as preoccupied and as disillusioned, or at least as battered and seasoned (by adversity) as possible, I’m in respect to her as achingly filial and as feelingly dependent, all the time, as when I used, in the far-off years, to wake up, a small blubbering idiot, from frightening dreams, and refuse to go to sleep again, in the dark, till I clutched her hands or her dress and felt her bend over me.

She used to protect me then from domestic derision—­for she somehow kept such passages quiet; but she can’t (it’s where her ache comes in!) protect me now from a more insidious kind.  Well, now I don’t care!  I feel it in Maria and Tom, constantly, who offer themselves as the pattern of success in comparison with which poor Lorraine and I are nowhere.  I don’t say they do it with malice prepense, or that they plot against us to our ruin; the thing operates rather as an extraordinary effect of their mere successful blatancy.  They’re blatant, truly, in the superlative degree, and I call them successfully so for just this reason, that poor Mother is to all appearance perfectly unaware of it.  Maria is the one member of all her circle that has got her really, not only just ostensibly, into training; and it’s a part of the general irony of fate that neither she nor my terrible sister herself recognizes the truth of this.  The others, even to poor Father, think they manage and manipulate her, and she can afford to let them think it, ridiculously, since they don’t come anywhere near it.  She knows they don’t and is easy with them; playing over Father in especial with finger-tips so lightly resting and yet so effectively tickling, that he has never known at a given moment either where they were or, in the least, what they were doing to him.  That’s enough for Mother, who keeps by it the freedom other soul; yet whose fundamental humility comes out in its being so hidden from her that her eldest daughter, to whom she allows the benefit of every doubt, does damnably boss her.

This is the one case in which she’s not lucid; and, to make it perfect, Maria, whose humility is neither fundamental nor superficial, but whose avidity is both, comfortably cherishes, as a ground of complaint—­nurses in fact, beatifically, as a wrong—­the belief that she’s the one person without influence.  Influence?—­why she has so much on me that she absolutely coerces me into making here these dark and dreadful remarks about her!  Let my record establish, in this fashion, that if I’m a clinging son I’m, in that quarter, to make up for it, a detached brother.  Deadly virtuous and deadly hard and deadly charmless—­also, more than