A curious subtly pitfalled world: in it my Shape and Size, and my Weight which is also Right, could betray me into being an excellent wife: and by that a lying chattel, an inexpressibly damaged woman. _Ice-water, corrosive acid and human breath_ To-morrow I have love for two towns. One is this Butte that I tiredly love inside me. And the other is New York that I smoothly love with all my surfaces. It is some years--a little lump of years--since I have seen New York: and it is two thousand miles away. So I see and feel its hard sweet lurid magnetism now ten times sharper than when I lived in it. But I felt it sudden and sharp at every turn then. A surface emotion which hits one’s flesh and spreads wide over one’s area is more exciting than a spirit emotion which pierces inward at one tiny point: an ice shower-bath on the white skin is more anguishing than an ice-water drink down the red throat. The spirit emotion lives longer and works more damage and buries itself at last in proud shaded soul-reserves. The surface emotion stays always on the surface and lives actively in the front of one’s senses and musings. The feel of New York is a mixture of ice-water, a corrosive acid and human breath sweeping someway warmish against one’s flesh. It is immensely ungentle, New York: immensely human: immensely intriguing to all one’s selves. It is too big to have prejudices and traditions of locality: so it leaves its dwellers free, by ones and multitudes, to be human beings. In South Bend and Toledo and Beloit and St. Paul and all the tight-built inland towns they murder you with narrowness and harshness and rancorous ill-will: they are scowlingly annoyed with you for making them murder you. In New York they murder you with a large soft wave of indifferent insolence--no annoyance, no friction. New York eats you as it eats its dinner, rather liking you. And my love for New York is made of liking: a plaisance of liking. made of liking: a plaisance of liking. I like New York with a charmed restfulness for varied things in it: subways, and Fourth Avenue, and the River, and Fifth Avenue on a sunny October afternoon, and the statue of Nathan Hale, and old cockroachy downtown buildings, and the soft rich whelming creamy boiling-chocolate fragrance from the Huyler factory in Irving Place. And mostly I like it for the people in it--People--Persons--People: they are human beings. In the inland towns people are half-afraid of thoughts, half-afraid of spoken words, half-afraid of each other, half-afraid of the fact of being human. In New York they are not afraid of any humanness. Even when they are in themselves craven-cowardly, cowardly enough to turn their own stomachs, they still turn their humanness unfearfully face-outward like upturned faces of a pack of cards.