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 at me in her uncomfortable bewildered tenderness, and I almost hypnotize her by just smiling inscrutably back--that she isn't getting all the moral benefit she somehow ought out of my being so pathetically wrong; and then she'll begin to wonder and wonder, all to herself, if there mayn't be something to be said for me. She has limped along, in her more or less dissimulated pain, on this apparently firm ground that I'm so wrong that nothing will do for either of us but a sweet, solemn, tactful agreement between us never to mention it. It falls in so richly with all the other things, all the “real” things, we never mention. Well, it's doubtless an odd fact to be setting down even here; but I SHALL be sorry for her on the day when her glimmer, as I have called it, broadens--when it breaks on her that if I'm as wrong as this comes to, why the others must be actively and absolutely right. She has never had to take it quite THAT way--so women, even mothers, wondrously get on; and heaven help her, as I say, when she shall. She'll be immense--“tactfully” immense, with Father about it--she'll manage that, for herself and for him, all right; but where the iron will enter into her will be at the thought of her having for so long given raison, as they say in Paris--or as poor Lorraine at least says they say--to a couple like Maria and Tom Price. It comes over her that she has taken it largely from THEM (and she HAS) that we're living in immorality, Lorraine and I: ah THEN, poor dear little Mother--! Upon my word I believe I'd go on lying low to this positive pitch of grovelling--and Lorraine, charming, absurd creature, would back me up in it too--in order precisely to save Mother such a revulsion. It will be really more trouble than it will be worth to her; since it isn't as if our relation weren't, of its kind, just as we are, about as “dear” as it can be.