My Soul is not free: God hung a string of curses, like a little manacling chain, round its neck long and long ago. Always I feel it. My Heart is not free for it is dead: in a listless way and a trivial way, dead. And my Body--it is free but has a seeming of something wasted and useless like a dinner spread out on a table uneaten and growing cold. --but my free Mind-- Though I were shut fast in a prison: though I were strapped in an electric chair: though I were gnawed and decayed by leprosy: I still could _think_, with thoughts free as gold-drenched outer air, thoughts delicate-luminous as young dawn, thoughts facile, seductive, speculative, artful, evil, sly, sublime. You might cut off my two hands: but you could not keep me from remembering the Sad Gray Loveliness of the Sea when the Rain beats, beats, beats upon it. You might admonish me by driving a red-hot spike between my two white shoulders: but you could not by that influence my Thoughts--you could not so much as change their current. I am intently aware of my Mind from moment to moment--all the passing life-moments. The awareness is a troubled power, a heavy burden and a wild enchantment.-- Also what I feel I write. I am my own law, my own oracle, my own one intimate friend, my own guide though I guide me to dead-walls, my own mentor, my own foe, my own lover. I am in age one-and-thirty, a smouldering-flamed period which feels the wings of the Youth-bird beating strong and violent for flight--half-ready to fly away. I am not a charming person. Quite seventy singly-used adjectives would better fit me. But I have some charm of youth, and a charm of sex, and a charm of intellect and intuition, and some charms of personality. I have a perfervid appreciation of those things in other persons. And my steel has sometime struck fire from their flint. But always my steel has turned back drearily yet strongly to itself. _A twisted moral_ To-morrow If I should meet God to know and speak to the first thing but one I should ask him would be, ‘What was your idea, God, in making me?’ I can believe he had some Purpose in it. I’m in most ways a devilish person. There’s sevenfold more evil than good in me. It is evil of a mixed and menacing kind, the kind that goes dressed in brave and beauty-tinted clothes and is sane and sound. While the good in me is ill and forlorn and nervously afraid--a something of tear-blurred eyes and trembling fingers. Yet God has made many things less plausible than me. He has made sharks in the ocean, and people who hire children to work in their mills and mines, and poison ivy and zebras-- --and he has made besides a Wonder of things: Thin Pink Mountain Dawns, Young English Poets, Hydrangeas in the sudden Blue of their first Bloom, human Singing Voices,--more things, always more--