new ones, that we go and come and talk and pretend, that we
consort, so far as in our deep-dyed hypocrisy we do consort, with the
rest of the Family, that we have Sunday supper with the Parents and
emerge, modestly yet virtuously shining, from the ordeal; that we put in
our daily appearance at the Works--for a utility nowadays so vague that
I'm fully aware (Lorraine isn't so much) of the deep amusement I excite
there, though I also recognize how wonderfully, how quite charitably,
they manage not to break out with it: bless, for the most part, their
dear simple hearts! It is in this privately exalted way that we bear
in short the burden of our obloquy, our failure, our resignation, our
sacrifice of what we should have liked, even if it be a matter we scarce
dare to so much as name to each other; and above all of our insufferable
reputation for an abject meekness. We're really not meek a bit--we're
secretly quite ferocious; but we're held to be ashamed of ourselves
not only for our proved business incompetence, but for our lack of
first-rate artistic power as well: it being now definitely on record
that we've never yet designed a single type of ice-pitcher--since that's
the damnable form Father's production more and more runs to; his uncanny
ideal is to turn out more ice-pitchers than any firm in the world--that
has "taken" with their awful public. We've tried again and again to
strike off something hideous enough, but it has always in these cases
appeared to us quite beautiful compared to the object finally turned
out, on their improved lines, for the unspeakable market; so that we've
only been able to be publicly rueful and depressed about it, and to
plead practically, in extenuation of all the extra trouble we saddle
them with, that such things are, alas, the worst we can do.

We so far succeed in our plea that we're held at least to sit, as I
say, in contrition, and to understand how little, when it comes to a
reckoning, we really pay our way. This actually passes, I think for the
main basis of our humility, as it's certainly the basis of what I feel
to be poor Mother's unuttered yearning. It almost broke her heart that
we SHOULD have to live in such shame--she has only got so far as that
yet. But it's a beginning; and I seem to make out that if I don't spoil
it by any wrong word, if I don't in fact break the spell by any wrong
breath, she'll probably come on further. It will glimmer upon her--some
day when she looks