Then it’s dinnertime and I perhaps change into the other nunlike dress, and nibble some dinner with no appetite, and talk with the assembled small family in a vein and tone of life-long insincerity. When in family-circle-ness I’ve had to hide my true self as if behind a hundred black veils since the age of two years. It would be a poignant effort now to show any of it at the family dinners, which is the only meeting-time. The one easy way is to be comprehensively insincere at the dinners where with no appetite I nibble. None there wants my sincerity, and so in my Soul’s accounting now it is eternally and determinedly No Matter. It is a little bell which stopped ringing long and long ago. If it rang now it would ring only No-Matter, No-Matter. Then it’s night and I go to take the walk I didn’t take in the afternoon. I walk down long lonely streets. Long lonely thoughts pile into me and through me and wrap me in a nebula that I can feel around me like a mantle. I walk two or three miles of paved streets till I’m very tired. I am lithe but fragile from constant involuntary self-analysis. One may analyze one’s life-experience and life-emotion till physical tissues at times grow frail, gossamer-thin. It is then as if--at a word, a whispered thought, a beat of the heart--one’s Soul might flutter through the Veil, join light hands with the death-angel and flee away. --but I love my life even while I analyze it bit by bit and so hate it. I love it in its grating monotones and its moments of glow and its days of shadow and storm and bitterish lowering passion-- I walk back beneath a night sky of dusky velvet-blue decked with jewels of moon and star and flying bright-edged cloud. The night has a subdued preciousness, like an illicitly pregnant woman’s. It is big with the bastard-exquisite To-morrow. The night air kisses my lips and throat. I pull off my gloves to feel it on my hands. It gives me a charmed and unexciting feeling of being caressed without being loved. I come back to my blue-white room, take off my hat, ruffle my fingers through my hair, look at Me in the mirror and smile the melancholy wicked smile which I keep for Me-alone. It’s an intimate moment of greeting--a recognition of my Familiar on coming back to her. Often when I walk I go without Me, and wander far from Me, and forget Me. Then I sit at my flat black desk and write desultorily for two or three or four hours. Sometimes a letter, sometimes some verses or a hectic fancy in staid prose. But now mostly this. Then I go downstairs to a refrigerator or a cellar-way to find food--a slice off an affable cold joint, some chaste-looking slices of bread, a slim innocent onion. And I eat them, not relishingly but voraciously, reminding myself of a lean foraging furtive coyote. It is two or three or four in the morning. I smoke a quiet cigarette in a cool night doorway and count the nervous gray-velvet moths outside the screen. And all the while I think and think.