under the law of her own convenience, with a broad-backed serenity which I find distinctly irritating (if I may use the impious expression) and which makes me ask myself how he sees poor Mother’s “position” at all.  The truth is poor Father never does “see” anything of that sort, in the sense of conceiving it in its relations; he doesn’t know, I guess, but what the prowling Eliza has a position (since this is a superstition that I observe even my acute little Lorraine can’t quite shake off).  He takes refuge about it, as about everything, truly, in the cheerful vagueness of that general consciousness on which I have already touched:  he likes to come home from the Works every day to see how good he really is, after all—­and it’s what poor Mother thus has to demonstrate for him by translating his benevolence, translating it to himself and to others, into “housekeeping.”  If he were only good to her he mightn’t be good enough; but the more we pig together round about him the more blandly patriarchal we make him feel.

Eliza meanwhile, at any rate, is spoiling for a dose—­if ever a woman required one; and I seem already to feel in the air the gathering elements of the occasion that awaits me for administering it.  All of which it is a comfort somehow to maunder away on here.  As I read over what I have written the aspects of our situation multiply so in fact that I note again how one has only to look at any human thing very straight (that is with the minimum of intelligence) to see it shine out in as many aspects as the hues of the prism; or place itself, in other words, in relations that positively stop nowhere.  I’ve often thought I should like some day to write a novel; but what would become of me in that case—­delivered over, I mean, before my subject, to my extravagant sense that everything is a part of something else?  When you paint a picture with a brush and pigments, that is on a single plane, it can stop at your gilt frame; but when you paint one with a pen and words, that is in all the dimensions, how are you to stop?  Of course, as Lorraine says, “Stopping, that’s art; and what are we artists like, my dear, but those drivers of trolley-cars, in New York, who, by some divine instinct, recognize in the forest of pillars and posts the white-striped columns at which they may pull up?  Yes, we’re drivers of trolley-cars charged with electric force and prepared to go any distance from which the consideration of a probable smash ahead doesn’t deter us.”

That consideration deters me doubtless even a little here—­in spite of my seeing the track, to the next bend, so temptingly clear.  I should like to note for instance, for my own satisfaction (though no fellow, thank God, was ever less a prey to the ignoble fear of inconsistency) that poor Mother’s impugnment of my acquisition of Lorraine didn’t in the least disconcert me.  I did pick Lorraine—­then a little bleating stray lamb collared with a blue ribbon and a tinkling silver bell—­out of