Nor am I satisfied like the meek and lowly with my midnight supper of Cold Boiled Potato: damn the meek and lowly. It’s a satanic delight I take in it. It’s a sly private orgie I make of it: a pirate’s banquet, a thieves’ picnic, a pagan rite, a heathen revelry, a conceit all and unhallowedly my own. My thoughts as I nibble are set mostly on my villainies. No food I eat brings me so broad a license of feeling--a sense of freedom--as a Cold Boiled Potato at midnight. On a Cold Boiled Potato at midnight I am lightly valorous: call me a trickster and I’ll call you a rotter: call me a liar and I’ll call you a traitor: call me a coward and I’ll call you another: not pugnaciously but gayly and serenely. I am then in my most bespeaking mood. Anyone who met me standing nibbling in a pantry doorway at midnight would be charmed. I would talk with a dainty ribaldry and offer to share the feast. For shadow-things piled too near God compensates me in unexpected midnights with a Cold Boiled Potato: along with it a pantry doorway to stand in and a little glass salt-shaker to hold in my other hand. _The strange braveness_ To-morrow If God has human feelings he must often have a burning at the eyes and a fullness at the throat at the strange Braveness of human people: their Braveness as they go on in the daily life, with aching dumbish minds and disgruntled bereft bodies and flattened pinched gnawed hearts. The easy human slattern way would be to sink beneath the burden. Instead, people: I and Another and all others--seamstresses and monotonous clerks and lawyers and housewives: sit upright in chairs and talk into telephones and walk fast and eat breakfasts and brush hair: all the while marooned in a morass of small wild unexciting tasteless Pain. Of others--what do I know? But I might say, ‘Look, God, I am not fallen on the ground, from this and that--utterly lost and down. But sitting, drooping but strong, in a chair, mending a lamp-shade--neat, orderly and at-it in my misery.’ _Just beneath my skin_ To-morrow This I write is a strange thing. So close to fact: so far from it. So close to truth: so surrounded by lies. It does not contain lies but is someway surrounded by a mist of lies. A strange thing about it is that it _is_ expressing the Self Just Beneath My Skin. That Self is someways trivial and outlandish and mentally nervous, flightly, silly--silly to a verge of tragicness. I know that to be true from a long acquaintance with me. It is oddly intriguing to read over some chapters and find it _shown_. Some unconscious exact photography aids my writing talent. Some chapters are bewilderingly and mysteriously true to life.