I am peculiarly of the MacLane blood, which is Highland Scotch. My sister and brothers inherit the traits of their mother’s family, which is of Scotch Lowland descent. This alone makes no small degree of difference. Apart from this the MacLanes--these particular MacLanes--are just a little bit different from every family in Canada, and from every other that I’ve known. It contains and has contained fanatics of many minds--religious, social, whatnot, and I am a true MacLane. There is absolutely no sympathy between my immediate family and me. There can never be. My mother, having been with me during the whole of my nineteen years, has an utterly distorted idea of my nature and its desires, if indeed she has any idea of it. When I think of the exquisite love and sympathy which might be between a mother and daughter, I feel myself defrauded of a beautiful thing rightfully mine, in a world where for me such things are pitiably few. It will always be so. My sister and brothers are not interested in me and my analyses and philosophy, and my wants. Their own are strictly practical and material. The love and sympathy between human beings is to them, it seems, a thing only for people in books. In short, they are Lowland Scotch, and I am a MacLane. And so, as I’ve said, I carried my uninteresting existence into Montana. The existence became less uninteresting, however, as my versatile mind began to develop and grow and know the glittering things that are. But I realized as the years were passing that my own life was at best a vapid, negative thing. A thousand treasures that I wanted were lacking. I graduated from the high school with these things: very good Latin; good French and Greek; indifferent geometry and other mathematics; a broad conception of history and literature; peripatetic philosophy that I acquired without any aid from the high school; genius of a kind, that has always been with me; an empty heart that has taken on a certain wooden quality; an excellent strong young woman’s-body; a pitiably starved soul. With this equipment I have gone my way through the last two years. But my life, though unsatisfying and warped, is no longer insipid. It is fraught with a poignant misery--the misery of nothingness. I have no particular thing to occupy me. I write every day. Writing is a necessity--like eating. I do a little housework, and on the whole I am rather fond of it--some parts of it. I dislike dusting chairs, but I have no aversion to scrubbing floors. Indeed, I have gained much of my strength and gracefulness of body from scrubbing the kitchen floor--to say nothing of some fine points of philosophy. It brings a certain energy to one’s body and to one’s brain.