And again I said--faintly--everything will become clearer in a few years more, and I will wonder to think how stupid I have always been. But now the few years more have gone and here I am in loneliness that is more hopeless and harder to bear than when I was very little. Still, I wonder indeed to think how stupid I have been--and now I am not so stupid. I do not tell myself that it will be different when I am five-and-twenty. For I know that it will not be different. I know that it will be the same dreariness, the same Nothingness, the same loneliness. It is very, very lonely. It is hope deferred and maketh the heart sick. It is more than I can bear. Why--_why_ was I ever born! I can not live, and I can not die--for what is there after I am dead? I can see myself wandering in dark and lonely places. Yet I feel as if I would like to die to-day. March 13. If it were pain alone that one must bear, one could bear it. One could lose one’s sense of everything but pain. But it is pain with other things. It is the sense of pain with the sense of beauty and the sense of the anemone. And there is that mysterious pain. Who knows the name of that mysterious pain? It is these mingled senses that torture me. March 14. I have been placed in this world with eyes to see and ears to hear, and I ask for Life. Is it to be wondered at? Is it so strange? Should I be content merely to see and to hear? There are other things for other people. Is it atrocious that I should ask for some other things also? Is thy servant a dog? March 15. In these days of approaching emotional Nature even the sand and barrenness begins to stir and rub its eyes. My sand and barrenness is clothed in the awful majesty of countless ages. It stands always through the never-ending march of the living and the dead. It may have been green once--green and fertile, and birds and snakes and everything that loves green growing things may have lived in it. It may have sometime been rolling prairie. It may have been submerged in floods. It changed and changed in the centuries. Now it is sand and barrenness, and there are no birds and no snakes; only me. But whatever change came to it, whatever its transfiguration, the spirit of it never moved. Flood, or fertility, or rolling prairie, or barrenness--it is only itself. It has a great self, a wonderful self. I shall never forget you, my sand and barrenness. Some day, shall my thirsty life be watered, my starved heart fed, my asking voice answered, my tired soul taken into the warmth of another with the intoxicating sweetness of love? It may be. But I shall remember the sand and barrenness that is with me in my Nothingness. The sand and barrenness and the memory of the anemone lady are all that are in any degree mine. And so then I shall remember it.