I am middle-class, quite, from the Soul outward. But it is not specially apparent--one’s tastes and aspirations flit garbledly far and wide. But a tendency to wash one’s dishes after eating one’s breakfast feels conclusively and pleasantly middle-class. Not that I do always wash them, but always I think of it with the inclination to do it. I sit on the shaded front veranda in the summer noon-day and look away south at the blue Highlands, ever snow-peaked: or east at the near towering splendid grim wall of the arid Rockies which separates this Butte from New York, from London,--the Spain-castles--the Pyramids--the Isle of Lesbos: or south-west beyond house-tops at some foothills above which hangs a fairy veil made by melting together a Lump of Gold and an Apricot and spreading it thin. Then restlessly I go into the house and up to my room. I put it in order--in prim, prim immaculate order. One marked phase of mine is of some wanton creature--a mænad, a mental Amazon, a she-imp. But playing opposite to that is another--that of a New-England spinster steel-riveted to certain neat ferociously-orderly habits. A stray thread on my blue rug hurts, _hurts_ me until I pick it up. Dust around my room gives me a nervous pain, a piteous gnawing grief-of-the-senses, until I’ve removed it. And my chastened-looking bed--after I’ve turned over its tufted mattress and ‘made’ it, smooth and white and crisp and soft--how the fibers of me would writhe should anyone sit on it. But no one sits on it. And I myself sooner than press one finger-tip down into its perfectness would sell my body to a Balkan soldier for four dimes: it is that way I feel about it. My bed _must_ be kept perfect till the moment I slip into it at night to float under the dream-worlds. Then maybe I pull a soft black hat down over my hair and draw on gloves and go out into the gray-paved streets for a longish walk. Or maybe the day is humidly hot. Then I don’t go but stay in the blue-white room and mend a bit of torn lingerie or a handkerchief or a silk stocking or a petticoat. Or I take books and dig out some Greek--Homer or a Sapphic fragment--very laboriously but marvelling that I can do it at all: the first things one forgets being the last things one learned at school. Or I read an English or a French philosopher, or a translated Tolstoi, or a bit of Balzac novel, or some bits of Dickens-books with which latter I am long familiar and long enamored for the restful falseness of their sentiment and the pungent appetizing charm of their villains. And betweenwhiles I think and think.