The funniest thing of all, moreover, is that that effect resides largely in our being husband and wife—­it would be absent, wholly, if we were engaged or lovers; a publicly parading gentleman friend and lady friend.  What is it we can have to say to each other, in that exclusive manner, so particularly, so frequently, so flagrantly, and as if we hadn’t chances enough at home?  I see it’s a thing Mother might accidentally do with Father, or Maria with Tom Price; but I can imagine the shouts of hilarity, the resounding public comedy, with which Tom and Maria would separate; and also how scantly poor little Mother would permit herself with poor big Father any appearance of a grave leave-taking.  I’ve quite expected her—­yes, literally poor little Mother herself—­to ask me, a bit anxiously, any time these six months, what it is that at such extraordinary moments passes between us.  So much, at any rate, for the truth of this cluster of documentary impressions, to which there may some day attach the value as of a direct contemporary record of strange and remote things, so much I here super-add; and verily with regret, as well, on behalf of my picture, for two or three other touches from which I must forbear.

There has lately turned up, on our scene, one person with whom, doors and windows closed, curtains drawn, secrecy sworn, the whole town asleep and something amber-colored a-brewing—­there has recently joined us one person, I say, with whom we might really pass the time of day, to whom we might, after due deliberation, tip the wink.  I allude to the Parents’ new neighbor, the odd fellow Temple, who, for reasons mysterious and which his ostensible undertaking of the native newspaper don’t at all make plausible, has elected, as they say, fondly to sojourn among us.  A journalist, a rolling stone, a man who has seen other life, how can one not suspect him of some deeper game than he avows—­some such studious, surreptitious, “sociological” intent as alone, it would seem, could sustain him through the practice of leaning on his fence at eventide to converse for long periods with poor Father?  Poor Father indeed, if a real remorseless sociologist were once to get well hold of him!  Lorraine freely maintains that there’s more in the Temples than meets the eye; that they’re up to something, at least that he is, that he kind of feels us in the air, just as we feel him, and that he would sort of reach out to us, by the same token, if we would in any way give the first sign.  This, however, Lorraine contends, his wife won’t let him do; his wife, according to mine, is quite a different proposition (much more really hatted and gloved, she notes, than any one here, even than the belted and trinketed Eliza) and with a conviction of her own as to what their stay is going to amount to.  On the basis of Lorraine’s similar conviction about ours it would seem then that we ought to meet for an esoteric revel; yet somehow it doesn’t come off.  Sometimes I think