"I don't approve, Ambo," was her comment, "but if you _will_ write nonsense about me, I can't help it. What I can help, a little, is your writing nonsense about yourself or Phil or the rest. It's only fair to let me get a word in edgeways, now and then--if only for your sake and theirs." That is not, however, my own reason for giving you occasional peeps into these notebooks of Susan's. * * * * * "I'm beginning to wish that Shelley might have had a sense of humor. 'Epipsychidion' is really too absurd. 'Sweet benediction in the eternal curse!' Imagine, under any condition of sanity, calling any woman that! Or 'Thou star above the storm!'--beautiful as the image is. 'Thou storm upon the star!' would make much worse poetry, but much better sense.... Isn't it strange that I can't feel this about Wordsworth? He was better off without humor, for all his solemn-donkey spots--and it's better for us that he didn't have it. It's probably better for us, too, that Shelley didn't have it--but it wasn't better for _him_. Diddle-diddle-dumpling--what stuff all this is! Go to bed, Susan." * * * * * "There's no use pretending things are different, Susan Blake; you might as well face them and see them through, open-eyed. What does being in love mean? "I suppose if one is really in love, head over heels, one doesn't care what it means. But I don't like pouncing, overwhelming things--things that crush and blast and scorch and blind. I don't like cyclones and earthquakes and conflagrations--at least, I've never experienced any, but I know I shouldn't like them if I did. But I don't think I'd be so terribly afraid of them--though I might. I think I'd be more--sort of--indignant--disgusted." * * * * * Editor's Note: Such English! But pungent stylist as Susan is now acknowledged to be, she is still, in the opinion of academic critics, not sufficiently attentive to formal niceties of diction. She remains too wayward, too impressionistic; in a word, too personal. I am inclined to agree, and yet--am I? * * * * * "It's all very well to stamp round declaiming that you're captain of your soul, but if an earthquake--even a tiny one--comes and shakes your house like a dice box and then scatters you and the family out of it like dice--it wouldn't sound very appropriate for your epitaph. 'I am the master of my fate' would always look silly on a tombstone. Why aren't tombstones a good test for poetry--some poetry? I've never seen anything on a tombstone that looked real--not even the names and dates. "But _does_ love have to be like an earthquake? If it does, then it's just a blind force, and I don't like blind forces. It's stupid to be blind oneself; but it's worse to have blind stupid things butting into one and pushing one about.