There is not one soul in the world to feel for me and with me--not one out of all the millions. No one can understand--_no one_. You are saying to yourself that I imagine this. What right have you to say so? You don’t know anything about me. I know all about me. I have studied all the elements and phases in my life for years and years. I do not imagine anything. I am even fool enough to shut my eyes to some things until, inevitably, I know I must meet them. I am racked with the passions of youth, and I am young in years. Beyond that I am mature--old. I am not a child in anything but my passions and my years. I feel and recognize everything thoroughly. I have not to imagine anything. My inner life is before my eyes. There is something about me that no one can understand. Can there ever be any one to understand? Shall I not always walk my barren road alone? This follows me incessantly. It is burning like a smouldering fire every hour of my life. Oh, deep black Despair! How I suffer, how I suffer--just in being alive. I feel Infinite Grief. Oh, Infinite Grief---- March 2. Often in the early morning I leave my bed and get me dressed and go out into the Gray Dawn. There is something about the Gray Dawn that makes me wish the world would stop, that the sun would never more come up over the edge, that my life would go on and on and rest in the Gray Dawn. In the Gray Dawn every hard thing is hidden by a gray mantle of charity, and only the light, vague, caressing fancies are left. Sometimes I think I am a strange, strange creature--something not of earth, nor yet of heaven, nor of hell. I think at times I am a little thing fallen on the earth by mistake: a thing thrown among foreign, unfitting elements, where there is nothing in touch with it, where life is a continual struggle, where every little door is closed--every Why unanswered, and itself knows not where to lay its head. I feel a deadly certainty in some moments that the wild world contains not one moment of rest for me, that there will never be any rest, that my woman’s-soul will go on asking long, long centuries after my woman’s-body is laid in its grave. I felt this in the Gray Dawn this morning, but the gray charitable mantle softened it. Always I feel most acutely in the Gray Dawn, but always there is the thing to soften it. The gray atmosphere was charged. There was a tense electrical thrill in the cold, soft air. My nerves were keenly alive. But the gray curtain was mercifully there. I did not feel too much. How I wished the yellow, beautiful sun would never more come up over the edge to show me my nearer anguish! “Stay with me, stay with me, soft Gray Dawn,” implored every one of my tiny lives. “Let me forget. Let the vanity, the pain, the longing sink deep and vanish--all of it, all of it! And let me rest in the midst of the Gray Dawn.”