Father would like to shunt Granny—­it is monstrous his having his mother-in-law a fixture under his roof; though, after all, I’m not sure this patience doesn’t rank for him as one of those domestic genialities that allow his conscience a bolder and tighter business hand; a curious service, this sort of thing, I note, rendered to the business conscience throughout our community.  Mother, at any rate, and small blame to her, would like to “shoo” off Eliza, as Lorraine and I, in our deepest privacy, call Aunt Elizabeth; the Tom Prices would like to extirpate us, of course; we would give our most immediate jewel to clear the sky of the Tom Prices; und so weiter.  And I think we should really all band together, for once in our lives, in an unnatural alliance to get rid of Eliza.  The beauty as to this is, moreover, that I make out the rich if dim, dawn of that last-named possibility (which I’ve been secretly invoking, all this year, for poor Mother’s sake); and as the act of mine own right hand, moreover, without other human help.  But of that anon; the immediately striking thing being meanwhile again the strange stultification of the passions in us, which prevents anything ever from coming to an admitted and avowed head.

Maria can be trusted, as I have said, to bring on the small crisis, every time; but she’s as afraid as any one else of the great one, and she’s moreover, I write it with rapture, afraid of Eliza.  Eliza is the one person in our whole community she does fear—­and for reasons I perfectly grasp; to which moreover, this extraordinary oddity attaches, that I positively feel I don’t fear Eliza in the least (and in fact promise myself before long to show it) and yet don’t at all avail by that show of my indifference to danger to inspire my sister with the least terror in respect to myself.  It’s very funny, the degree of her dread of Eliza, who affects her, evidently, as a person of lurid “worldly” possibilities—­the one innocent light in which poor Maria wears for me what Lorraine calls a weird pathos; and perhaps, after all, on the day I shall have justified my futile passage across this agitated scene, and my questionable utility here below every way, by converting our aunt’s lively presence into a lively absence, it may come over her that I am to be recognized.  I in fact dream at times, with high intensity, that I see the Prices some day quite turn pale as they look at each other and find themselves taking me in.

I’ve made up my mind at any rate that poor Mother shall within the year be relieved in one way or another of her constant liability to her sister-in-law’s visitations.  It isn’t to be endured that her house should be so little her own house as I’ve known Granny and Eliza, between them, though after a different fashion, succeed in making it appear; and yet the action to take will, I perfectly see, never by any possibility come from poor Father.  He accepts his sister’s perpetual re-arrivals,