ask from her nothing of this--I do the whole
thing with her, as she has to do it with them; and of this, au fond, as
Lorraine again says, she is ever so subtly aware--just as, FOR it, she's
ever so dumbly grateful. Let these notes stand at any rate for my fond
fancy of that, and write it here to my credit in letters as big and
black as the tearful alphabet of my childhood; let them do this even
if everything else registers meaner things. I'm perfectly willing to
recognize, as grovellingly as any one likes, that, as grown-up and as
married and as preoccupied and as disillusioned, or at least as battered
and seasoned (by adversity) as possible, I'm in respect to HER as
achingly filial and as feelingly dependent, all the time, as when I
used, in the far-off years, to wake up, a small blubbering idiot, from
frightening dreams, and refuse to go to sleep again, in the dark, till I
clutched her hands or her dress and felt her bend over me.

She used to protect me then from domestic derision--for she somehow
kept such passages quiet; but she can't (it's where HER ache comes in!)
protect me now from a more insidious kind. Well, now I don't care!
I feel it in Maria and Tom, constantly, who offer themselves as the
pattern of success in comparison with which poor Lorraine and I are
nowhere. I don't say they do it with malice prepense, or that they plot
against us to our ruin; the thing operates rather as an extraordinary
effect of their mere successful blatancy. They're blatant, truly, in
the superlative degree, and I call them successfully so for just this
reason, that poor Mother is to all appearance perfectly unaware of it.
Maria is the one member of all her circle that has got her really, not
only just ostensibly, into training; and it's a part of the general
irony of fate that neither she nor my terrible sister herself recognizes
the truth of this. The others, even to poor Father, think they
manage and manipulate her, and she can afford to let them think it,
ridiculously, since they don't come anywhere near it. She knows they
don't and is easy with them; playing over Father in especial with
finger-tips so lightly resting and yet so effectively tickling, that
he has never known at a given moment either where they were or, in the
least, what they were doing to him. That's enough for Mother, who keeps
by it the freedom other soul; yet whose fundamental humility comes out
in its being so hidden from her that her eldest daughter, t