I like food better to imagine than even to eat. If I were hungry I think I could obtain that chaste supper item for item, and eat it: swallow it down magic and all, and thus vanquish it magic and all, and there an end. So I am glad I am not hungry. It is much more delectable to sit here and think that if I were-- _if_ I were-- a Hollow-stemmed Glass of Sparkling Burgundy. two cigarettes. a Bit of Camembert Cheese. two Thin Salted Biscuits. two Slim Onions. two Truffles. two Thin _Foie-Gras_ Sandwiches: Four Grilled Snails: and maybe a Little Alligator Pear. If I were a bit hungry: oh, the idea of a little supper! It would then be blestness, benediction--fruit of the very garden of Paradise! _A mountebank’s cloak_ To-morrow I am so _Clever_. I am the Cleverest human being I know. I have thought my Cleverness an outer quality, a mountebank’s cloak, and as such not belonging in this book of my own self. But there are no outer qualities. Everything in and about me is my own self. My Cleverness is of high quality--even supernatural, I have thought--and is of unobvious tenors. To any essentially false nature, such as mine, a quick and positive Cleverness is its needfulest resource in coping with this pushing world. To any un-sanely sensitive nature such as mine Cleverness is its fender against human encounters and onslaughts. There is no Cleverness in this I write. There is writing skill and my dead-feeling genius. But my Cleverness is beside those points. I use Cleverness when I encounter people. Sometimes I like people and wish to impress them. Always I am vain and sometimes I wish my vanity catered to. And I can get from people whatever tribute I choose. I mostly choose to bewilder and half-fascinate which is easiest: I talk about anything, nothing, everything with a tinsel-bright complexity which captures average intellects. And even very Clever people seem not Clever to me because I feel so exceeding Clever to myself. I am a little more intuitive, a little falser, a little lightning-quicker than the most artistically antic mentalities I have known. I am a lady with the ladies, a woman with women, a highly intelligent writer with writers, a loosed fish with the loose fish: being all the time nothing but my own self, unspeakably incongruent. Having never found anyone remotely matching me in barbaric and devastating incongruity of nature I use in human encounters whatever phase makes the occasion most gently befit me. I cater, or I thrill some bastard dull brain, or I grow roundly versatile: all with a sudden coruscant Cleverness which is not in itself any of Me but is my mountebank’s scarlet cloak.