shall try to put off the day of bankruptcy until I am fifty or more: then liquidate by dying. But you caught me in the first cold experience of being weak and sick and unable to spend prodigally and not feel anything but bulging coffers in the morning: in the first terrible condition of knowing I must work, though work was vile, and that no other work was present for my hands. That, does it explain my sudden horridnesses, my fevers, my cruelties to us both--your word? I am not cruel, Davie, I am full of love. Oh! why won’t you--you and a few blessed others whom I need the knowledge of in this fearful gorgeous world--why won’t you _understand_? Can you not see me going out into the streets of New York--yes, even here in Chicago--full of love for the dull men and the stricken women, ready to give myself to them all, if only they would take me--take me a moment----: full of love for the magic of their flesh and the mystery of their life and the splendor of their anguish? Oh! David, I love so much more than there is in the world willing. I am a sea of love cluttered in a basin. And when I am cried a little welcome, I mess everything up in my attempt to fit to a mortal measure. I have spoken to you--we have even quarreled--about little children. Don’t you see why? Why I was enraged at the idea of your _speculating_ upon whether you wished a child or no? Identification. Suddenly, I am a child, and I do not care a damn about reason, I want only not to be left outside and unalive by my beloved. Often when I speak to a man or woman, Davie, something bleeds in my breast. And then I have headaches, and the wise doctor says: use ‘brakes’--do not give yourself so much--walk the streets _indifferently_. Easy, eh? _Indifferently!_ When all of life floods all my senses like a corybantic passion: a perpetual sea of infinite elements each of which is attached to my nerves and to my heart. I cannot help loving people, so I hate them. For they are not what I would have them be: they are deaf and they do not love me. And children--whose lives go before me out of my hands and my sight like the horizon and the skies--is it a wonder my hands are stretched after them and that I suffer at my impotence? But, Davie, I am not cruel. I love--and I cannot reach what I love. My hard-headed lawyer friends quip me, calling mystic my wandering thoughts--the best of them. But I am filled with a sense of dimensions, flaring and parabolic, and the world their sense is comfortable in, is a strand of what I feel and see: and the magic that draws me to the world is the fact that it careers in an element outside myself. There, perhaps, imprisoned in the flesh of a woman is the thing I love--and I am outside--oh, fatally outside.