Charles Edward in all truth by failing to take advantage of it, (They have in fact, I should note, one superiority of courage to my own:  this habit of their so constantly casting up my poverty at me—­poverty of character, of course I mean, for they don’t, to do them justice, taunt me with having “made” so little.  They don’t, I admit, take their lives in their hands when they perform that act; the proposition itself being that I haven’t the spirit of a fished-out fly.)

My point is, at any rate, that I designate them as Poor only in the abysmal confidence of these occult pages:  into which I really believe even my poor wife—­for it’s universal!—­has never succeeded in peeping.  It will be a shock to me if I some day find she has so far adventured—­and this not on account of the curiosity felt or the liberty taken, but on account of her having successfully disguised it.  She knows I keep an intermittent diary—­I’ve confessed to her it’s the way in which I work things in general, my feelings and impatiences and difficulties, off.  It’s the way I work off my nerves—­that luxury in which poor Charles Edward’s natural narrow means—­narrow so far as ever acknowledged—­don’t permit him to indulge.  No one for a moment suspects I have any nerves, and least of all what they themselves do to them; no one, that is, but poor little Mother again—­who, however, again, in her way, all timorously and tenderly, has never mentioned it:  any more than she has ever mentioned her own, which she would think quite indecent.  This is precisely one of the things that, while it passes between us as a mute assurance, makes me feel myself more than the others verily her child:  more even than poor little Peg at the present strained juncture.

But what I was going to say above all is that I don’t care that poor Lorraine—­since that’s my wife’s inimitable name, which I feel every time I write it I must apologize even to myself for!—­should quite discover the moments at which, first and last, I’ve worked her off.  Yet I’ve made no secret of my cultivating it as a resource that helps me to hold out; this idea of our “holding out,” separately and together, having become for us—­and quite comically, as I see—­the very basis of life.  What does it mean, and how and why and to what end are we holding?  I ask myself that even while I feel how much we achieve even by just hugging each other over the general intensity of it.  This is what I have in mind as to our living to that extent by the vain phrase; as to our really from time to time winding ourselves up by the use of it, and winding each other.  What should we do if we didn’t hold out, and of what romantic, dramatic, or simply perhaps quite prosaic, collapse would giving in, in contradistinction, consist for us?  We haven’t in the least formulated that—­though it perhaps may but be one of the thousand things we are afraid of.