‘I want a Lover--some Lover’--I murmured to the shadows beyond my window. I grew breathless. The spirit of my flesh rose like a wind-blown flame. A loud cry rang in my nerve-wilderness. That moment the variant analysis which always rides with me stopped dead. There came instead sheer feeling--the merciless beauty. --a man-person, maybe--the man of happy unanalytic brutality--to be suddenly there with me: to flash into my shadowy solitude like a lightning bolt and burst and break me. --a quarter-hour of exquisite wildness--restlessness, made of Star-flame and Lily-petal and Cloud-burst on Mountain-summits and Sea-waves purple in a Stormy Dawn--an intolerable hunger and ecstasy-- But just gone and I sit writing it in the pale cast of thought. But breathlessly I recall the breathlessness of it. _My shoes_ To-morrow I love my Shoes. I love them because they so guard my feet. I walk many a mile along the stone pavements and into distant odd streets and on open roads at the outskirts of this Butte. And while I walk I think. I think things of a great many kinds--potent and magic and mad. The act of walking starts an engine in my sparkling infernal mind. And the weight and the sting and the hurt and the fascination of my walking thoughts bear down on my slim feet as they carry me along. And the hard-beaten world beneath them feels resentful and uncomplaisant to my soles. And then I look down at my Shoes with their trim tailored vamps and their walk-worthy soles and instantly my feet feel secure against evil, smartly protected from my thoughts and from the world’s surface: my thoughts which shoot down on them out of my devilish brain and the world-hardness beneath them. To-day I was walking along the road that leads up the ever-wonderful Anaconda Hill--a place of stones and sand-wastes and hoists and scaffoldings and mines with ten thousand digging men thousands of feet down in their metallic bowels. Close by were melancholy mulberry-toned mountains at the north-east. They were tragic, triumphant, grief-stricken, terrifyingly beautiful. Purple clouds hung around them like mourning veils. I can’t look enough at those--it is as if there weren’t enough looking-power in my human gray eyes. Presently I came to a small open space as I walked, a toy desert. A toy desert is more like a desert than is a real one. The sand in it is grayer sand. The stones are abrupter. The sun is flatter-looking. The air is less willing to furnish breath to a human being. The best that could be said of this one is that it was intolerably desolate. I looked about and about it. And suddenly I was afraid. Afraid of many things: afraid of grief-stricken mountains: afraid of my life and of Me.