anything, deadly sure I—­how does Maria fit on, by consanguinity, to such amiable characters, such real social values, as Mother and me at all?  If that question ceases to matter, sometimes, during the week, it flares up, on the other hand, at Sunday supper, down the street, where Tom and his wife, overwhelmingly cheerful and facetious, contrast so favorably with poor gentle sickly (as we doubtless appear) Lorraine and me.  We can’t meet them—­that is I can’t meet Tom—­on that ground, the furious football-field to which he reduces conversation, making it echo as with the roar of the arena—­one little bit.

Of course, with such deep diversity of feeling, we simply loathe each other, he and I; but the sad thing is that we get no good of it, none of the true joy of life, the joy of our passions and perceptions and desires, by reason of our awful predetermined geniality and the strange abysmal necessity of our having so eternally to put up with each other.  If we could intermit that vain superstition somehow, for about three minutes, I often think the air might clear (as by the scramble of the game of General Post, or whatever they call it) and we should all get out of our wrong corners and find ourselves in our right, glaring from these positions a happy and natural defiance.  Then I shouldn’t be thus nominally and pretendedly (it’s too ignoble!) on the same side or in the same air as my brother-in-law; whose value is that he has thirty “business ideas” a day, while I shall never have had the thirtieth fraction of one in my whole life.  He just hums, Tom Price, with business ideas, whereas I just gape with the impossibility of them; he moves in the densest we carry our heads here on August evenings, each with its own thick nimbus of mosquitoes.  I’m but too conscious of how, on the other hand, I’m desolately outlined to all eyes, in an air as pure and empty as that of a fine Polar sunset.

It was Lorraine, dear quaint thing, who some time ago made the remark (on our leaving one of those weekly banquets at which we figure positively as a pair of social skeletons) that Tom’s facetae multiply, evidently, in direct proportion to his wealth of business ideas; so that whenever he’s enormously funny we may take it that he’s “on” something tremendous.  He’s sprightly in proportion as he’s in earnest, and innocent in proportion as he’s going to be dangerous; dangerous, I mean, to the competitor and the victim.  Indeed when I reflect that his jokes are probably each going to cost certain people, wretched helpless people like myself, hundreds and thousands of dollars, their abundant flow affects me as one of the most lurid of exhibitions.  I’ve sometimes rather wondered that Father can stand so much of him.  Father who has after all a sharp nerve or two in him, like a razor gone astray in a valise of thick Jager underclothing; though of course Maria, pulling with Tom shoulder to shoulder, would like to see any one not stand her husband.