We're really not meek a bit--we're secretly quite ferocious; but we're
held to be ashamed of ourselves not only for our proved business
incompetence, but for our lack of first-rate artistic power as well: it
being now definitely on record that we've never yet designed a single
type of ice-pitcher--since that's the damnable form Father's production
more and more runs to; his uncanny ideal is to turn out more
ice-pitchers than any firm in the world--that has "taken" with their
awful public. We've tried again and again to strike off something
hideous enough, but it has always in these cases appeared to us quite
beautiful compared to the object finally turned out, on their improved
lines, for the unspeakable market; so that we've only been able to be
publicly rueful and depressed about it, and to plead practically, in
extenuation of all the extra trouble we saddle them with, that such
things are, alas, the worst we can do.
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.
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