In the afternoon I went for a walk. Down and down, seventeen squares from here, in a quiet neighborhood a strange woman accosted me. She was pale and smartly dressed and quite drunk. She said, ‘Listen--can you remember which of these corners I was to meet a friend at?’ It made me feel annoyed and bewildered and sad and silly. When I came back I read awhile--a story of Guy de Maupassant’s about a little dog named Pierrot, whose owner loved him much but loved money more and could not bring herself to pay a tax of eight francs to make Pierrot’s existence legal. So she threw him into a pit. As heartbreaking a tale as even de Maupassant ever wrote. It made all the loves in this world feel terrifyingly sordid. It made me unhappy. Then I found a poetry-book and read about the Blessed Damozel leaning out from the gold bar of heaven. Always, by her loveliness alone, she stirs me to my still depths of tears. But to-day the song made me feel over-wrought and life-worn. To-night I walked out to a little desert-space west of the town, a very pale, very gray desert, with a sweet wet mist like dissolving pearls swathing it. The million placid stars looked down, remote and hard, as if each one had newly forsaken me. It made me afraid and cold around my heart. Here I sit and nothing in all the world is pleasant or reassuring. That damned Spider. _To wander and hang and float about_ To-morrow My damnedest damningest quality is Wavering--Wavering-- I might say I prefer the dawn to the twilight or the twilight to the dawn. Neither would be true. I love the dawn--I love the twilight. What I unconsciously _prefer_ is the long negative Wavering space-of-day between the two. I might say I prefer heaven to hell or hell to heaven. Neither would be true. My garbled gyral nature, partaking uneasily of both, prefers to wander and hang and float about between the two. I might say I prefer strength to weakness or weakness to strength. Neither would be true. What I prefer is a hellish hovering, an endless torturing Tenterhook between the two. And that Wavering preference is against my will, against my reason, against my judgment, against my taste and liking--against my life, my welfare, my salvation: against the clear lights of my spirit. I know I work intently and industriously at the articles of my damnation in the Wavering--Wavering-- I know it would be better to die at once: failing that, to live but to live positively as a beggar, a whore, a thief or a milliner. Knowing that, I know also I Waver: I know I shall prefer to Waver: I know I shall constantly Waver. I am constant--I am remarkably profoundly constant--in my Wavering.