Oh, to leave this house and these people, and this intense Nothingness--oh, to pass out from them, forever! But where can I go, what can I do? I feel with mad fury that I am helpless. The grasp of the stepfather and the mother is contemptible and absurd--but with the persistence and tenacity of narrow minds. It is like the two heavy leaden hands. It is not seen--it is not tangible. It is felt. Once I took away my own silver-handled tooth-brush from the bathroom ledge, and kept it in my bedroom for a day or two. I thought to lessen the effect of the six. I put it back in the bathroom. The absence of one accentuated the significant damnation of the others. There was something more forcibly maddening in the five than in the six tooth-brushes. The damnation was not worse, but it developed my feeling about them more vividly. And so I put my tooth-brush back in the bathroom. This house is comfortably furnished. My mother spends her life in the adornment of it. The small square rooms are distinctly pretty. But when I look at them seeingly I think of the proverb about the dinner of stalled ox. Yet there is no hatred here, except mine and my bitterness. I am the only one of them whose bitter spirit cries out against things. But there is that which is subtler and strikes deeper. There is the lack of sympathy--the lack of everything that counts: there is the great, deep Nothing. How much better were there hatred here than Nothing! I long hopelessly for will-power, resolution to take my life into my own hands, to walk away from this house some day and never return. I have nowhere to go--no money, and I know the world quite too well to put the slightest faith in its voluntary kindness of heart. But how much better and wider, less damned, less maddening, to go out into it and be beaten and cheated and fooled with, than _this_!--this thing that gathers itself easily into a circle made of six tooth-brushes with a sufficiency of surplus damnation. I have read about a woman who went down from Jerusalem to Jericho and fell among thieves. Perhaps she had a house at Jerusalem with six tooth-brushes and Nothingness. In that case she might have rushed gladly into the arms of thieves. I think of crimes that strike horror and revulsion to my maid-senses. And I think of my Nothingness, and I ask myself were it not better to walk the earth an outcast, a solitary woman, and meet and face even these, than that each and every one of my woman-senses should wear slowly, painfully to shreds, and strain and break--in this unnameable Nothing? Oh, the dreariness--the hopelessness of Nothing! There are no words to tell it. And things are always hardest to bear when there are no words for them. However great one’s gift of language may be, there is always something that one can not tell. I am weary of self--always self. But it must be so. My life is filled with _self_.