The explanation has struck me as, mostly, that business genial and cheerful and even obstreperous, without detriment to its being business, has been poor Father’s ideal for his own terrible kind.  This ideal is, further, that his home-life shall attest that prosperity.  I think it has even been his conception that our family tone shall by its sweet innocence fairly register the pace at which the Works keep ahead:  so that he has the pleasure of feeling us as funny and slangy here as people can only be who have had the best of the bargains other people are having occasion to rue.  We of course don’t know—­that is Mother and Grandmamma don’t, in any definite way (any more than I do, thanks to my careful stupidity) how exceeding small some of the material is consciously ground in the great grim, thrifty mill of industrial success; and indeed we grow about as many cheap illusions and easy comforts in the faintly fenced garden of our little life as could very well be crammed into the space.

Poor Grandmamma—­since I’ve mentioned her—­appears to me always the aged wan Flora of our paradise; the presiding divinity, seated in the centre, under whose pious traditions, really quite dim and outlived, our fond sacrifices are offered.  Queer enough the superstition that Granny is a very solid and strenuous and rather grim person, with a capacity for facing the world, that we, a relaxed generation, have weakly lost.  She knows as much about the world as a tin jelly-mould knows about the dinner, and is the oddest mixture of brooding anxieties over things that don’t in the least matter and of bland failure to suspect things that intensely do.  She lives in short in a weird little waste of words—­over the moral earnestness we none of us cultivate; yet hasn’t a notion of any effective earnestness herself except on the subject of empty bottles, which have, it would appear, noble neglected uses.  At this time of day it doesn’t matter, but if there could have been dropped into her empty bottles, at an earlier stage, something to strengthen a little any wine of life they were likely to contain, she wouldn’t have figured so as the head and front of all our sentimentality.

I judge it, for that matter, a proof of our flat “modernity” in this order that the scant starch holding her together is felt to give her among us this antique and austere consistency.  I don’t talk things over with Lorraine for nothing, and she does keep for me the flashes of perception we neither of us waste on the others.  It’s the “antiquity of the age of crinoline,” she said the other day a propos of a little carte-de-visite photograph of my ancestress as a young woman of the time of the War; looking as if she had been violently inflated from below, but had succeeded in resisting at any cost, and with a strange intensity of expression, from her waist up.  Mother, however, I must say, is as wonderful about her as about everything else, and arranges herself,