When I think of them all a joyous thrill breaks over me like a little frenzied wave. It is delirium-of-bliss to feel oneself living though shadows be pitch-black. God has a Purpose in making everything, I think. I am half-curious about the Purpose that goes with me. He might have made me for his own amusement. He might have made me to discipline my Soul with some blights and goads or to punish it for bacchanalian ease and pleasure in the long-distant centuries-old past. He might have made me to season or scourge other lives, as I may touch them, with Mary-Mac-Lane-ness. He might have made me to point a twisted moral. I muse about it with doubts. But if I knew my Purpose I belike would not swerve a hair’s-breadth from my own course which is an unhallowedly selfish one. If I could myself see a way of truth I would walk in it. I have it in me to worship. I long to worship. And I am game, wearily and coldly game: when I start I go on through to the end. But I see no way of truth--none for me. And God is eternally absent and reticent. So I go on in the way where I find myself. And muse about it. And damn it faintly as I make nothing of it. _Everyday and to-morrow_ To-morrow Aloofly I live in this Butte in the outward rôle of a family daughter with no responsibilities. This Butte is an incongruous living-place for me. And I have not one human friend in it--no kindliness. And Nature in her perplexingest mood would not of herself have cast me as a family daughter. Three things have kept me thus for four years past: that nothing has called me out of it: a slight family pressure like a tiny needle-point which pierces only if one moves: and to stay thus is presently the line of least resistance. Unless impelled to violent action by a violent reason--like love or hatred or jealousy or a baby or humiliated pride or rowelling ambition--a woman follows the physical line of least resistance. I have followed it these years with outward acquiescence and inward rages--languid rages which lay me waste. The years and acquiescences and rages have built up a mood which compasses me, drives me, damns me and lifts me up. It is a forceful mood, though I am not myself forceful. This mood is this book.-- I live an immoral life. It is immoral because it is deadly futile. All my Tissues of body, soul, mind and heart are wasting, decaying, wearing down, minute by minute, hour by hour, day by day: with no return to me or to my life, nor to anything human or divine. It makes me dread my life and myself. I do not quite know why. But to be an ardent pickpocket or an eager harlot would feel honester.