Josephina is elemental primeval woman. So am I but terrifically qualified by complexity, incongruity. I have white smooth firm beautiful hands. Josephina’s hands are particularly ugly and have a menacing look. I have quick intelligence. Josephina is markedly stupid. I live in a quiet clean bungalow. Josephina lives in an unusually filthy unrestful little house. I own two dresses whose personnel alters at intervals. Josephina owns one unchanging dress, septic, maculate and repellent. I have a sense of humor vivid and intriguing to myself. Josephina has no more sense of humor than a flatiron. I bathe foamily icily each morning. Josephina would seem never to have had a bath. She cleans windows and floors and rugs for thirty-five cents an hour. She would regard it as a fantastic waste of time and soap to clean herself for nothing. I own in a still flawed life one phase which is an endless treasure of beauty and power and charm and light: my love for John Keats. The Finn woman owns about the same thing in a life which may be more still and flawed than mine: her love for strong drink. There begins a curious line of similitude between us. I feel oddly joyous and light of heart on a solitary veranda corner with the John-Keats poetry book open in my lap. And Josephina has been found many a time by Butte policemen sitting alone joyous and very drunk, in dark alleys with empty pint bottles strewn all about her. In my un-Keats hours I am mostly mournful. And Josephina sober has all the melancholy of her race with an added gloom, as if the acetylene had run out of all her lamps. That my melancholy is more lustrous than hers I lay to her native dullness as against my native braininess, and to alcohol’s having rotting effects on human mental tissues: whilst John Keats to those who drink his poetry is a starry savior. I like to think there’s the same ambrosial food in the Demon Rum for Josephina as in the Grecian Urn for me. There seems no other pleasure in life for her. The limit of her literary pursuit is the reading of a four-page Finnish newspaper full of obituaries. The opalescent enchantments of her inner being mean nothing to her: she wouldn’t know her entity from her duodenum. Her body can bring her no delight: there’s no lightness to it, no tang, no feminine charm, no consciousness to make her love it as the Dianas love theirs. A sunset above the western peaks is less than a setting sun to her. Her food is merely her fodder. Love and Romance pass her by. She and the husband vie with each other for solitary possession of their little nasty house. And her personality is not conducive to lovers. She has nor chick nor child to mother.