our New York bear-garden; but it interests me awfully to recognize that, whereas the kind of association is one I hate for my small Philistine sister, who probably has the makings of a nice, dull, dressed, amiable, insignificant woman, I recognize it perfectly as Lorraine’s native element and my own; or at least don’t at all mind her having been dipped in it.  It has tempered and plated us for the rest of life, and to an effect different enough from the awful metallic wash of our Company’s admired ice-pitchers.  We artists are at the best children of despair—­a certain divine despair, as Lorraine naturally says; and what jollier place for laying it in abundantly than the Art League?  As for Peg, however, I won’t hear of her having anything to do with this; she shall despair of nothing worse than the “hang” of her skirt or the moderation other hat—­and not often, if I can help her, even of those.

That small vow I’m glad to register here:  it helps somehow, at the juncture I seem to feel rapidly approaching, to do the indispensable thing Lorraine is always talking about—­to define my position.  She’s always insisting that we’ve never sufficiently defined it—­as if I’ve ever for a moment pretended we have!  We’ve REfined it, to the last intensity—­and of course, now, shall have to do so still more; which will leave them all even more bewildered than the boldest definition would have done.  But that’s quite a different thing.  The furthest we have gone in the way of definition—­unless indeed this too belongs but to our invincible tendency to refine—­is by the happy rule we’ve made that Lorraine shall walk with me every morning to the Works, and I shall find her there when I come out to walk home with me.  I see, on reading over, that this is what I meant by “our” in speaking above of our little daily heroism in that direction.  The heroism is easier, and becomes quite sweet, I find, when she comes so far on the way with me and when we linger outside for a little more last talk before I go in.

It’s the drollest thing in the world, and really the most precious note of the mystic influence known in the place as “the force of public opinion”—­which is in other words but the incubus of small domestic conformity; I really believe there’s nothing we do, or don’t do, that excites in the bosom of our circle a subtler sense that we’re “au fond” uncanny.  And it’s amusing to think that this is our sole tiny touch of independence!  That she should come forth with me at those hours, that she should hang about with me, and that we should have last (and, when she meets me again, first) small sweet things to say to each other, as if we were figures in a chromo or a tableau vwant keeping our tryst at a stile—­no, this, quite inexplicably, transcends their scheme and baffles their imagination.  They can’t conceive how or why Lorraine gets out, or should wish to, at such hours; there’s a feeling that she must violate every domestic duty to do it; yes, at bottom, really, the act wears for them, I discern, an insidious immorality, and it wouldn’t take much to bring “public opinion” down on us in some scandalized way.