But you are reticent and cold-tempered and uninterested. So it seems. The necklace which you gave me so long ago, made of little curses, I wear always round my spirit-neck. It serves some purpose, perhaps, and it answers as a keepsake: so at least I may not forget you whether or not you forget me. I don’t ask any more of your attention nor anything more of you than I would be willing to give you in return. But I wish you would be willing to exchange attention with me. I am lonely. I am terrified. I am frightfully overshadowed by myself and my odd aloofness and my thronging solitary emotions and my menacing trivialities. I am always fearing not that I may be wicked or immoral or allied with evils--I don’t really care a tinker’s curse about that--but that I may be growing petty and trivial and weak. It is horrible, horrible to feel that I may be a weakling--you, God, may not know how horrible to me. It is like black annihilation for all eternity when my Soul longs frantically, desperately to live. I feel weakness to be the only immoralness--hateful and vile in whatever aspect. I want to be strong to endure and to live in noonday lights and to overcome my poorness. I want, though I’m far from it, to be brave and big. What I admire you for, though you’re so far off and strange and inexplicable, is that you are strong. You are Strength, you are Light, you are the Solution and the Absolute. You’d hardly know what weakness is if it did not so crop out in this human race you made. This human race is a faërily beautiful thing: star-flaming poets have sung in it: lovely youth has breathed upon it: happy wild hearts have informed it. But the odd keynote of it all is weakness. And I have felt me tuned overmuch by that keynote. --but I won’t be weak, I won’t be, I won’t be, God! Whether you pay attention or not, whether I breathe only futileness, I will be strong, strong, strong in myself--strong if only in my falseness--strong and strong again-- This would be your chance with me if you cared to take it: because I own now just my plain two dresses. When I grow out of this quiet mood--(if ever I do: I begin to doubt it)--I shall have more dresses, and then I shall think about them, God, and the phases of life they’ll build up around me, and not about you. It’s not that pretty frocks would take my attention away from you if you once claimed it. Once you claimed my attention it would be yours forever. But pretty frocks would mean I am again walking in paved peopled roads. Being there without your attention I shall go where my garments may lead me forgetful of you. One’s life is of the flavor of one’s clothes: ‘the wine must taste of its own grapes.’