--the same galling torment in all the Rooms. Wherever I run with the echo-echo of steps there are Accusing voices and half-formed Prayer and uncertain Yearning and violent yet dumb and inexpectant Protest and the unfailing Threat of death and destruction: not earth-death but universe-death: death and death and death everywhere coming on and on: myself knowing the just note in it all and from it grown numb with some cold and restless terror. Also I know no door I run through with my panic-feet will ever set me free of the bastile except a death door: the earthly death of this tired life-- But it’s from this maelstrom that the flashing burning sparkling mad magic of being alive leaps out brilliant and barbarous--and throbbing and splendid and sweet. A merely human hunger comes back on me. Then I want all I ever wanted with a hundredfold more voltage of wanting than I have ever yet known. I am all unhopeful, all unpeaceful, all a desperate Languor and a tragic Futileness: I am an unspeakably untoward thing. And already I have been seared and scarred trivially from standing foolishly near some foolish human melting-pots. No matter for any of it. I want to plunge headlong into life--not imitation life which is all I’ve yet known, but honest worldly life at its biggest and humanest and cruelest and damnedest: to be blistered and scorched by it if it be so ordered--so that only it’s _realness_--from the outside of my skin to the deeps of my spirit. It is not happiness I want--nothing like it: its like never existed since this world began. I want to feel one big hot red bloody Kiss-of-Life placed square and strong on my mouth and shot straight into me to the back wall of my Heart. * * * * * I write this book for my own reading. It is my postulate to myself. As I read it it makes me clench my teeth savagely: and coldly tranquilly close my eyelids: it makes me love and loathe Me, Soul and bones. Clench and close as I will the winds flutter and stir and crumple and twist my petals as _they_ will:--as I sit here tiredly, tiredly sane. _A comfortably vicious person_ To-morrow The blue-and-copper of yesterday is dead and buried this To-morrow in a maroon twilight. I this moment saw darkly from my window the somber hills in their heavy spell of pale-purple and grief and splendor and sadness and beauty and wonder and woe. But their color brings no tears to my wicked gray eyes. The passion-edged mood is burnt out. Gone, gone, gone. I listlessly change into the other black dress for listless dinnertime and all my thought is that my abdomen is beautifully flat and that I must purchase a new petticoat. I rub a little rouge on my pale mouth and I idlingly recall a clever and filthy story I once heard. I laugh languidly at it and feel myself a comfortably vicious person.