The time of the child is a thing apart. It is the Planting and Seed-time. It is the Beginning of things. It decides whether there shall be brightness or bitterness in the long after-years. I have left that time far enough behind me. It will never come back. And it had a Nothingness--do you hear, a _Nothingness_! Oh, the pity of it! the pity of it! Do you know why it is that I look back to the horizon at the figure of an unkempt, rough child, and why I feel a surging torrent of tears and anguish and despair? I feel more than that indeed, but I have no words to tell it. I shall have to miss forever some beautiful, wonderful things because of that wretched, lonely childhood. There will always be a lacking, a wanting--some dead branches that never grew leaves. It is not deaths and murders and plots and wars that make life tragedy. It is Nothing that makes life tragedy. It is day after day, and year after year, and Nothing. It is a sunburned little hand reached out and Nothing put into it. January 26. I sit at my window and look out upon the housetops and chimneys of Butte. As I look I have a weary, disgusted feeling. People are abominable creatures. Under each of the roofs live a man and woman joined together by that very slender thread, the marriage ceremony--and their children, the result of the marriage ceremony. How many of them love each other? Not two in a hundred, I warrant. The marriage ceremony is their one miserable, petty, paltry excuse for living together. This marriage rite, it appears, is often used as a cloak to cover a world of rather shameful things. How virtuous these people are, to be sure, under their different roof-trees. So virtuous are they indeed that they are able to draw themselves up in the pride of their own purity, when they happen upon some corner where the marriage ceremony is lacking. So virtuous are they that the men can afford to find amusement and diversion in the woes of the corner that is without the marriage rite; and the women may draw away their skirts in shocked horror and wonder that such things can be, in view of their own spotless virtue. And so they live on under the roofs, and they eat and work and sleep and die; and the children grow up and seek other roofs, and call upon the marriage ceremony even as their parents before them--and then they likewise eat and work and sleep and die; and so on world without end. This also is life--the life of the good, virtuous Christians. I think, therefore, that I should prefer some life that is not virtuous. I shall never make use of the marriage ceremony. I hereby register a vow, Devil, to that effect.