The choir of faint, sweet voices comes to me incessantly out of the blue. My wooden heart and my soul are listening to them intently. The voices are trying hard to tell me, to help me, but I can not understand. I know only that it is about pure, exalted things, and about the all-abiding love that is somewhere; and it is about the earth-love, and about Truth,--but I can not understand. And the voices sing of me the child--a song of the unloved, starved little being; and a song of the unloved, half-grown creature; and a song of me, a woman and all alone--awaiting the Devil’s coming. Oh, my soul--my soul! A female snake is born out of its mother’s white egg, and lives awhile in content among weeds and grass, and dies. A female dog lives some years, and has bones thrown at her, and sometimes she receives a kick or a blow, and a dog-house to sleep in, and dies. A female bird has a nest, and worms to eat, and goes south in the winter, and presently she dies. A female toad has a swamp or a garden, some bugs and flies, contentment--and then she dies. And each of these has a male thing with her for a time, and soon there are little snakes or little dogs for her to love as much as it is given her to love--she can do no more. And they are fortunate with their little snakes and little dogs. A female human being is born out of her mother’s fair body, branded with a strange, plague-tainted name, and let go; and lives awhile, and dies. But before she dies she awakes. There is a pain that goes with it. And the male thing that is with her for a time is unlike a snake or a dog. It is more like a man, and there is another pain for this. And when a little human being comes with a soul of its own there must be another awakening, for she has then reached the best and highest state that any human being can reach, though she is a female human being, and plague-tainted. And here also there is heavy soul-pain. The name--the plague-tainted name branded upon her--means woman. I lifted my head from the breast of the gray rock. The tears had been falling, falling. Tears are so strange! Tears from the dried-up fountain of nineteen years are like drops of water wrung out of stone. Suddenly I got up from the ground and ran quickly over the sand for several minutes. I did not dare look again at the hilltops and the deep blue, nor listen again to the voices. Oh, with it all, I am a coward! I shrink and cringe before the pain of the dazzling lights. Yet I am waiting--longing for the most dazzling light of all: the coming of the Devil. February 1. Oh, the wretched bitter loneliness of me! In all the deep darkness, and the silence, there is never a faint human light, never a voice! How can I bear it--how can I bear it! February 2.