--This dingy stair ... the factory girls ... you are a factory woman!... O for them true: this horror for them is true. For me? this horror is a tale. It is the words of a song. There is a music ... music. For you and for you and for you, grey shadows dripping from the sun through the encaverned stairs, it is true Horror. It should not be: for it is. For me, it is well.... Fanny Dirk with blue prim frock and the olive throb of my throat ... for it is something else. --My room, so small, is the casing of my body. Shouldn’t it fit? It must fit to keep me whole. Those gloves that were so much too big, how I froze in them last Winter: how the Winter came in to my fingers as I walked, till I had money to buy another pair. Bargain-counter gloves ... the right size-mark ... that girl with eyes like panthers who dared not take them back, that man with eyes like dead fish, who would not! If my room is too big the world will come in like Winter to those gloves: and freeze me and burn me. Dear bare tight room! So much holier and tighter than the one of the Church: that was so big Jonathan could come in. Lies ... drugs ... came in. Here no one. You are my skin. No one dare touch my skin.... Her eyes went up and down about her room: her eyes stood upon its cot, upon its whitewashed walls, upon the paintless table, like the eyes of Fanny Dirk standing within her mirror. --I do look well in black. My face is white and colors on me need just that touch of plumpness I have lost. Black eats away the hollow of my memory of plumpness. My breasts droop: the curve of my thigh is not so lovely now. Black covers me, I used to be gay almost like naked in the blue and the rose. Black wears. My body does not wear. I am wearing out. I don’t know what I’d do without you, mirror! Your brightness is the only laughter in the room. Sometimes your laugh is a mocking. Never mind. I find when I look in your laughter, even if it is a mocking, that I find myself. She laughed aloud.--See what I do when I see myself? Well, friend ... why such a crusty room to case the body of Fanny?... There were soft casings once: little gabled house, garden so brave above the dull black earth, Harry, Edith ... you were all softness Edith my child! Soft hands upon my arms, soft lips upon my mouth biting me with such savage softness. Edith? O my soft love whom I held all about me ... who held me all. You are gone. This hard sharp room that holds me like an iron glove--now I have you alone ... and the mirror that is laughter. * * * * * --I shut my face in my hands and you are about me, my Baby. Only you. Your hands and your hair and your little mouth. Edith, Edith ... what are you now?... The room is truer. Naked, harsh, cruel ... room of emptiness, crushing my flesh ... you will make all of me hard, all of me callous from being cased by a hard whitewashed room: a room with an iron bed. You are truer! * * * * *