But the wears and tears of breathing and the influences of varied life-details and of clothes worn and food eaten start me moving devilishly. Phases of a score of persons, men and women, come to light in me. To be one human being means to be monstrously mixed. I write me out not as I might be, nor as I should be--whatever that may be--: but merely as I am. As, Just Beneath The Skin, I am. So my written account must come out someways dissatisfying and exasperating. Logically dissatisfying and divinely and ethically exasperating. --a passage in Vergil tells of a Mist that is all over and about this world from the human ‘tears that are falling, falling, falling always.’ Something, and it may be that Mist, makes one’s view of everything--everything in life--a little blurred. It may even blur one’s view of oneself. So it may be I do not see myself with entire clearness-- I only know I write me as clearly as I see me, considering the Mist. _A white liner_ To-morrow To-day came the Finn woman and cleaned my blue-and-white bedroom. She comes now and again and cleans excellently. I would like to clean my room myself but lack the strength and skill to do it well. But I stay with the Finn woman and show her how and I watch her work and muse upon her. She would be called in England a charwoman, but in this America of the vast mongrel heterogenesis she is an unclassified laborer. I like to watch her and talk with her a bit and dwell on her mixed potentialities. She contrasts fascinatingly with me. She is a human being and so am I, and beyond and with that there are odd parallels and similarities and distinctions between her and me. Her name is Josephina and she looks as if it might be. Mine is Mary MacLane but I don’t look entirely like it. She lives a lonely life and so do I, differing in sort and circumstance. I am middle-class and American of Canadian reminiscence, and early-thirty. Josephina is Finn and lower-class with a ‘foreign’ look, and she is forty-five and looks sixty and is twelve years out of Finland. I am tallish and slim and weigh nine wavering stone. The Finn woman is short and solid and weighs all of a hundred and seventy pounds. I am slender of flank and ankle, narrow through the loins and bony at the shoulders. The Finn woman is thick everywhere, broad of girth and deep of chest like a Percheron stallion. I am darkish with dusky gray eyes. Josephina is dirty-blond with pale narrow blue eyes like a china doll’s. My sex feels to me like a mysterious sweetness. Josephina’s sex looks porcinely obvious and uninteresting like her large dubious breasts. I am inwardly full of strong-flavored emotions. The one positive outward feeling Josephina manifests is a dull but comprehensive hatred, peculiar to her nationality and station, for everything Swedish. The Finn woman has a husband now and had a different one formerly. I have none and never had.