And one evening between nine and ten, a week ago. I was walking across the broad desert valley east of this Butte. It is late November and the night was stormy. A strong high gale swept the Flat. Presently it rained. I was on my way back with a mile or two to go. It rained harder. Heavy sheets of black water whipped and whirled down on me and wrapped me in their wet wings. I love all weather when it is mild and more when it is rough except when it bears down too hard: then I feel indifferent to it. As I moved along the dark road not hurrying and not loitering I was saying inside me, ‘Why am I going to any shelter out of this heavy wet rain? Why am I not a houseless beggar-woman with nothing gentler in all my life than this November storm? It is not because I deserve gentler things--’ And with a sudden heavy shudder I whispered, ‘I wish I were a beggar-woman! I wish I had no roof to cover me in this cold night-blackness. It would be honest: I should be stripped to my deserts. And I wish it were so--this drenching rain, this strangling wind--nothing but this--shelter, money, comfort, self-satisfaction, however seemingly earned, are dishonest--thieved. I ought to be--ragged beggar--bleared eyes--dirty petticoats--a foul ratty hole to creep into--hunger--bodily misery--all the portion of outcasts-- As God may hear me--I’d eagerly tremblingly change lives this moment with a beggar-woman. I would--I would--!’ It is a piece of clear inside truth about myself. And I know it proves me to be in poor Taste. It is a matter of attitude. Each of those incidents might happen to any woman--except perhaps the last. I have known but one girl who agreed with me in such a feeling. And not quite that feeling. She had married a lot of money with a horrible old gentleman and had wearied of both. But the other two episodes could readily belong to any woman of _esprit_ who might be on the outside both Respectable and Refined: even a woman lawyer. But my attitude in the incident of the strange iron-gray man, though in a bored way I could have viciously knifed him, was not a Respectable attitude. I was bored and fanciful when doubtless I ought to have been breathlessly angry. But my breathless anger is too rare and beautiful an emotion to waste on ridiculous strange iron-gray men.