To-morrow I SUPPOSE there’s nothing quite peculiar to even my inmost self in what I ponder and what I experience and what I feel. My only elemental ‘differentness’ is that I find it and write it. But I used to think at eighteen—those thrice-fired adolescent moments—that only I suffered, only I reached achingly out into the mists, only I tasted new-bloomed life-petals intolerably sweet and bitter on my lips. The egotism of youth is merciless, measureless, endlessly vulnerable. Youth plays on itself as one plays on a little dulcimer, with music as sweet, but with a crude cruel recklessness which jerks and breaks the strings. I have got by that stage of egotism. But I’ve entered on another wilder, more lawless—farther-seeing if less be-visioned. While I sit here this midnight in a Neat Blue Chair in this Butte-Montana for what I know a legion-women of my psychic breed may be sitting lonely in neat red or neat blue or neat gray or neat any-colored chairs—in Wichita-Kansas and South Bend-Indiana and RedWing-Minnesota and Portland-Maine and Rochester-NewYork and Waco-Texas But though I am of that psychic breed no little tenets war in me. It’s as if a prelate and a wood-nymph had fathered and mothered me: making me of a ridiculous poignant conscience and of no human traditions. I am free of innate conventionalities, free as a wildcat on a twilight hill. I am free of them as I sit here, quiet-looking in my plain black dress. The virile Scotch-Canadian curl is brushed and brushed out of my hair to make it lie smooth and discreet over my ears and forehead. My feet are My gray eyes out-look the wildcat’s on a twilight hill. But—so far as the Sitting goes—I sit here in my Neat Blue Chair the same as they all sit in any-colored chairs in their Wichitas and LaCrosses. |