Maria can be trusted, as I have said, to bring on the small crisis, every time; but she's as afraid as any one else of the great one, and she's moreover, I write it with rapture, afraid of Eliza. Eliza is the one person in our whole community she does fear--and for reasons I perfectly grasp; to which moreover, this extraordinary oddity attaches, that I positively feel I don't fear Eliza in the least (and in fact promise myself before long to show it) and yet don't at all avail by that show of my indifference to danger to inspire my sister with the least terror in respect to myself. It's very funny, the DEGREE of her dread of Eliza, who affects her, evidently, as a person of lurid “worldly” possibilities--the one innocent light in which poor Maria wears for me what Lorraine calls a weird pathos; and perhaps, after all, on the day I shall have justified my futile passage across this agitated scene, and my questionable utility here below every way, by converting our aunt's lively presence into a lively absence, it may come over her that I AM to be recognized. I in fact dream at times, with high intensity, that I see the Prices some day quite turn pale as they look at each other and find themselves taking me in. I've made up my mind at any rate that poor Mother shall within the year be relieved in one way or another of her constant liability to her sister-in-law's visitations. It isn't to be endured that her house should be so little her own house as I've known Granny and Eliza, between them, though after a different fashion, succeed in making it appear; and yet the action to take will, I perfectly see, never by any possibility come from poor Father. He accepts his sister's perpetual re-arrivals, under the law of her own convenience, with a broad-backed serenity which I find distinctly irritating (if I may use the impious expression) and which makes me ask myself how he sees poor Mother's “position” at all. The truth is poor Father never does “see” anything of that sort, in the sense of conceiving it in its relations; he doesn't know, I guess, but what the prowling Eliza HAS a position (since this is a superstition that I observe even my acute little Lorraine can't quite shake off). He takes refuge about it, as about everything, truly, in the cheerful vagueness of that general consciousness on which I have already touched: he likes to come home from the Works every day to see how good he really is, after all--and it's what poor Mother thus has to demonstrate for him by translating his benevolence, translating it to himself and to others, into “housekeeping.” If he were only good to HER he mightn't be good enough; but the more we pig together round about him the more blandly patriarchal we make him feel.