You must take the idea as I have just now presented it for what it may be worth. This is as near as I can come to it. But it is something infinitely finer and rarer. It is a difficult task to show to others a thing which, though I feel and recognize it thoroughly, I have not yet analyzed for myself. But this is a complete Portrayal of me--as I await the Devil’s coming--and I must tell everything--everything. February 13. So then, yes. As I have said, I find that I am quite, quite odd. My various acquaintances say that I am _funny_. They say, “Oh, it’s that May MacLane, Dolly’s younger sister. She’s funny.” But I call it oddity. I bear the hall-mark of oddity. There was a time, a year or two since, when I was an exceedingly sensitive little fool--sensitive in that it used to strike very deep when my young acquaintances would call me funny and find in me a vent for their distinctly unfriendly ridicule. My years in the high school were not years of joy. Two years ago I had not yet risen above these things. I was a sensitive little fool. But that sensitiveness, I rejoice to say, has gone from me. The opinion of these young people, or of these old people, is now a thing that is quite unable to affect me. The more I see of conventionality, it seems, the more I am odd. Though I am young and feminine--very feminine--yet I am not that quaint conceit, a _girl_: the sort of person that Laura E. Richards writes about, and Nora Perry, and Louisa M. Alcott,--girls with bright eyes, and with charming faces (they always have charming faces), standing with reluctant feet where the brook and river meet,--and all that sort of thing. I missed all that. I have read some girl-books, a few years ago--“Hildegarde Grahame,” and “What Katy Did,” and all,--but I read them from afar. I looked at those creatures from behind a high board fence. I felt as if I had more tastes in common with the Jews wandering through the wilderness, or with a band of fighting Amazons. I am not a girl. I am a woman, of a kind. I began to be a woman at twelve, or more properly, a genius.