_A lost person_ To-morrow I am wandering about, a Lost Person, wandering and lost. Not magnificently lost in wide Gothic forest closes, with strong great blackish green trunks and branches all around overwhelming and thrilling me. Not dramatically lost on desert reefs with breakers riding up like menacing hosts and joyously drowning me. But lost surprisingly in a small clump of shoulder-high hazel-brush. In it are some wood-ticks, and a few caterpillars, and a few wan spiders which spin little desultory webs from twig to twig and then abandon them for other twigs. Underfoot are unexpected wet places at intervals that my high hard heels sink into exasperatingly. I walk round and round and across in the hazel-brush groping and knowing I’m lost in it but knowing little else of it: knowing no way out of it. The bushes bear green leaves--rather small ones and warped because the clump is in a half-shaded place back of a hill. And they bear hazel-nuts, but not very good ones--mostly shell. _A thin damnedness_ To-morrow I own Two plain black Dresses and none besides. And I need no more. In which two sentences I touch the crux and the keynote and the thin damnedness of my life as it is set: of my life, not of myself, for myself lives naked inside the circle of my life. But my outer life is spaced by my Two plain Dresses. My Two Dresses measure how far removed I presently am from the wide world of things. In the world of things a woman is judged not specifically by her morals: not invariably by her reputation: not absolutely by her money: not indubitably by her social prestige: only relatively by her beauty: and as to her brain or lack of it--la-la-la! She is judged in the matter-world simply, completely, entirely by her clothes. It is tacitly so agreed and decreed all over the earth--wherever women are of the female sex and men pursue them. It is no injustice to any woman. It is the fairest fiat in the unwritten code. Only a few women, the few specialized breeds, can express the fire or the humanness in them by play-acting or suffragetting or singing or painting or writing or trained-nursing or house-keeping. But there’s not one--from a wandering Romany gypsy, red-blooded and strong-hearted, to an over-guarded overbred British princess--who doesn’t express what she is in the clothes she wears and the way she wears them. Her clothes conceal and reveal, artfully and contradictorily and endlessly. It is all a limitless field. No actor could act Hamlet without that perfect Hamletesque black costume. A nun’s staid beautiful habit interprets her own meanings within and without. A woman naked may look markedly pure: the same woman clothed conventionally and demurely may achieve a meanly ghoulishly foul seeming. One either is made or marred by one’s habiliments.