o whom she
allows the benefit of every doubt, does damnably boss her.

This is the one case in which she's not lucid; and, to make it perfect,
Maria, whose humility is neither fundamental nor superficial, but whose
avidity is both, comfortably cherishes, as a ground of complaint--nurses
in fact, beatifically, as a wrong--the belief that she's the one person
without influence. Influence?--why she has so much on ME that she
absolutely coerces me into making here these dark and dreadful remarks
about her! Let my record establish, in this fashion, that if I'm
a clinging son I'm, in that quarter, to make up for it, a detached
brother. Deadly virtuous and deadly hard and deadly charmless--also,
more than anything, deadly sure I--how does Maria fit on, by
consanguinity, to such amiable characters, such REAL social values,
as Mother and me at all? If that question ceases to matter, sometimes,
during the week, it flares up, on the other hand, at Sunday supper,
down the street, where Tom and his wife, overwhelmingly cheerful
and facetious, contrast so favorably with poor gentle sickly (as we
doubtless appear) Lorraine and me. We can't meet them--that is I can't
meet Tom--on that ground, the furious football-field to which he reduces
conversation, making it echo as with the roar of the arena--one little
bit.

Of course, with such deep diversity of feeling, we simply loathe each
other, he and I; but the sad thing is that we get no good of it, none
of the TRUE joy of life, the joy of our passions and perceptions and
desires, by reason of our awful predetermined geniality and the strange
abysmal necessity of our having so eternally to put up with each other.
If we could intermit that vain superstition somehow, for about three
minutes, I often think the air might clear (as by the scramble of the
game of General Post, or whatever they call it) and we should all get
out of our wrong corners and find ourselves in our right, glaring from
these positions a happy and natural defiance. Then I shouldn't be thus
nominally and pretendedly (it's too ignoble!) on the same side or in
the same air as my brother-in-law; whose value is that he has thirty
"business ideas" a day, while I shall never have had the thirtieth
fraction of one in my whole life. He just hums, Tom Price, with business
ideas, whereas I just gape with the impossibility of them; he moves in
the densest we carry our heads here on August evenings, each with its
own thick nimbus o