The octroi would have no sympathy with my loiterings among their wares. It is a fête of my own, indolent and fanciful, unrecognized in commerce. Any article I may put to its forthright use in actuality becomes an idyllic toy when I find it in the Back of a magazine. The desirable Revolvers are not firearms with which to shoot myself and burglars, but only bijous to have and handle and caress. The luxuriant vervain- and violet-scented Soaps are not for my toilet, but something to eat, for my astral body to feed on--nourishing food they make. The lush Cold Creams have no massaging possibilities in them--they are for my thoughts to gambol among, for my meddlesome spirit-fingers to touch and fuss with deliciously, blissfully, transcending all vulgar use. The men’s thin Watches mean nothing to me as Watches: and their Garters--what’s it to me whether no-metal-can-touch-you or no-metal-at-all? My thoughts merely revel and juggle with them, picture and legend--they are pastimes of my child-self. The cream-woven Note Papers are not to write on but wherewithal to imagine how cool and smooth they would feel drawn slowly across my flushed cheek. A sack of Flour--I feel only how I’d like to have it spilled out--eventually-why-not-now--in a thick warm-tinted heap on the blue-velvety floor of my room that I might roll and bathe in it and feel it feathery-fluffy on my skin. So I play with my toys on black-browed Wednesdays. Some Wednesdays even fail to be black-browed because there are Backs to magazines. _The conscious analyst_ To-morrow I don’t know whether I write this because I wear two plain dresses or whether I wear two plain dresses because I write it. My life fell into a lowering mood which calls for but two dresses: which mood compels me to write out these things that are in me as inevitably as heavy gathered clouds come raining to the ground. The mood having overtaken me I can not keep from writing this day after day, more than I can keep from brushing my hair every day, and eating lumps of food every day, and picking up tiny white specks from my blue rug. I love this book and I fear and hate it. I love the writing of it though it is a finical unobvious task--more so than it looks. And often I fear to read it over lest I hurt my own feelings. And I hate it in ways. I am a particularly sane woman when all’s said. And many things I come to in me are grating and inexplicable and incongruous. But also I love it. It is my companion ‘when the world is gone.’ I am as solitary as if I had no human place in this earth. My days are as silent as if I lived in it alone. The few voices that bespeak me in a day or a week stop at my ear-drums and are immensely alien. At times, for weeks on end, I am quite alone in this house and the silence then has a depth and a hollowness. From it I feel not alone in a house but alone in a world: and more when the family is in the house.