I know that I am marvelously clever. But I have need of all my peculiar genius to show you my individuality--my aloneness. I am alone out on my sand and barrenness. I should be alone if my sand and barrenness were crowded with a thousand people each filled with melting sympathy for me--though it would be unspeakably sweet. People say of me, “She’s peculiar.” They do not understand me. If they did they would say so oftener and with emphasis. And so I try to put my individuality in the quality of my diction, in my method of handling words. My conversation plainly shows this individuality--more than shows it, indeed. My conversation hurls it violently at people’s heads. My conversation--when I choose--makes people turn around in their chairs and stare and give me all of their attention. They admire me, though their admiration is mixed decidedly with other feelings. I like to be admired. It soothes my vanity. When you read this Portrayal you will admire me. You will surely have to admire me. And so this is life, and everything matters. But just now I will stop writing and go downstairs to my dinner. There is a porterhouse steak, broiled rare, and some green young onions. Oh, they are good! And when one is to have a porterhouse steak for one’s dinner--and some green young onions, one doesn’t give a tupenny dam whether anything else matters or not. March 19. On a day when the sky is like lead and a dull, tempestuous wilderness of gray clouds adds a dreariness to the sand, there is added to the loneliness of my life a deep bitterness of gall and wormwood. Out of my bitterness it is easy for bad to come. Surely Badness is a deep black pool wherein one may drown dullness and Nothingness. I do not know Badness well. It is something material that seems a great way off now, but that might creep nearer and nearer as I became less and less young. But now when the day is of the leaden dullness I look at Badness and long for it. I am young and all alone, and everything that is good is beyond my reach. But all that is bad--surely that is within the reach of every one. I wish for a long pageant of bad things to come and whirl and rage through this strange leaden life of mine and break the spell. Why should it not be Badness instead of Death? Death, it seems, will bring me but a change of agony. Badness would perhaps so crowd my life with its vivid phenomena that they would act as a neurotic to the racked nerves of my Nothingness. It would be an outlet--and possibly I could forget some things.