Then I come up to my room and sit on the floor by my low bookcase and read some last-century English poets--the Brownings and Shelley and the unspeakable John Keats. The Poets make me a space of incalescent magic and loveliness. They are the beings blest of a flaming Heaven. In the midst of soddenest earthiness their fiery wings ‘pierce the night.’ Then I’m thrilledly tired. I close the books and make ready for my bed in a lyric-feeling languor. A soft soothing unsnapping of whalebone stays: a muffled rhythmic undoing of metal-and-silk-rubber garters: a pushing down and sliding out of daytime clothes and into a thin pale cool silk nightgown: a hurried brushing of hair: an anointing of hands and throat with faint-scented cream: a goodnight to Me in the mirror: a last wave of a fateful thing--my life-essence--casual and determined and contemptuous and menacing--sweeping down over me in an invisible shower: and I’m betwixt smooth linen sheets. In twenty seconds blest, blest sleep. Of such wide littleness is my day made. One day will differ from another in this or that volcanic molehill. And some days I not only wash a great many dishes but do a deal of housework neatly and self-satisfactorily and like a devilish scullery maid. And some days as I move in the petty pace thoughts and feelings sweet or barbarous come and change my world’s face in a moment. Also a casual human being of rabbitish brain and chipmunkish sensibility may stray across my path and gently bore me and accentuate my own paganness. But always the same days in restless dubious To-morrowness. Always immorally futile. And eerily alone. _A mathematic dead-wall_ To-morrow I’m put to it to decide whether God loves me or hates me when he sets me down alone. There are times when my Loneliness is a charmed and scintillant and resourceful Loneliness with a strange and ecstatic gleam in it. The miracle of being a person rushes upon and about and into me ‘with lightning and with music.’ One loses that in a day of many friendships. But oftener are times when the tired, tired heart and the weary, weary brain beat-beat, beat-beat to anguished torturing self-rhythms. The spirit of me closes its eyes in turbulent dusks of wondering and wishing and leans its forehead against a mathematic dead-wall. And it prays--blind useless unhumble prayers which leave it dry and destitute, arid, unspeakably lacking. But when it lifts its head and opens its eyes there are the melting mauves and maroons of a dead sun across the evening sky, and the small far wistful flames of always-hopeful stars. --they make it matter less whether God loves or hates me, but I still wish I knew. _My neat blue chair_ To-morrow I suppose there’s nothing quite peculiar to even my inmost self in what I ponder and what I experience and what I feel.