“Sometimes in these spring days when I walk miles down into the country to the little wet gulch of the sweet-flags, I wonder why it is that this thing does not make me happy. ‘She is wonderfully, beautifully kind,’ I say to myself--‘and she is the anemone lady. She is _wondrously_ kind, and though she’s gone, nothing can ever change that.’ “But I am not happy. “Oh, my one friend--what is the matter with me? What is this feeling? Why am I not happy? “But how can you know? “You are beautiful. “I am a small, vile creature. “Always I awake to this fact when I think of the anemone lady. “I am not good. “But you are kind to me--you are kind to me--you are kind to me. “You have written me two letters. “The anemone lady came down from her high places and wrote me two letters. “It is said that God is somewhere. It may be so. “But God has never come down from his high places to write me two letters. “Dear--do you see?--you are the only one in the world. “=Mary MacLane.=” April 12. Oh, the dreariness, the Nothingness! Day after day--week after week,--it is dull and gray and weary. It is _dull_, =DULL=, DULL! No one loves me the least in the world. “My life is dreary--he cometh not.” I am unhappy--unhappy. It rains. The blue sky is weeping. But it is not weeping because I am unhappy. I hate the blue sky, and the rain, and the wet ground, and everything. This morning I walked far away over the sand, and these things made me think they loved me--and that I loved them. But they fooled me. Everything fools me. I am a fool. No one loves me. There are people here. But no one loves me--no one understands--no one cares. It is I and the barrenness. It is I--young and all alone. Pitiful Heaven!--but no, Heaven is not pitiful. Heaven also has fooled me, more than once. There is something for every one that I have ever known--some tender thing. But what is there for me? What have I to remember out of the long years? The blue sky is weeping, but not for me. The rain is persistent and heavy as damnation. It falls on my mind and it maddens my mind. It falls on my soul and it hurts my soul.--Everything hurts my soul.--It falls on my heart and it warps the wood in my heart. Of womankind and nineteen years, a philosopher of the peripatetic school, a thief, a genius, a liar, and a fool--and unhappy, and filled with anguish and hopeless despair. What is my life? Oh, what is there for me! There has always been Nothing. There will always be Nothing. There was a miserable, damnable, wretched, lonely childhood. Itself has passed, but the pain of it has not passed. The pain of it is with me and is added to the pain of now. It is pain that never lets itself be forgotten. The pain of the childhood was the pain of Nothing. The pain of now is the pain of Nothing. Oh, the pathetic burlesque-tragedy of Nothing!