The devil she thinks fascinating and strong, with a will of steel, conventional clothes, whom she periodically falls in love with and would marry, and would love to be tortured by him. She holds imaginary conversations with him. If happiness does not come soon she will commit suicide, and she finds rapture in the thought of death. In Butte, Montana, where she lives, she wanders among the box rustlers, the beer jerkers, biscuit shooters, and plunges out into the sand and barrenness, but finds everything dumb. The six toothbrushes in the bathroom make her wild and profane. She flirts with death at the top of a dark, deep pit, and thinks out the stages of decomposition if she yielded herself to Death, who would dearly love to have her. She confesses herself a thief on several occasions, but comforts herself because the stolen money was given to the poor. Sometimes her "very good legs" carry her out into the country, where she has imaginary love confabs with the devil, but the world is so empty, dreary, and cold, and it is all so hard to bear when one is a woman and nineteen. She has a litany from which she prays in recurrent phrases "Kind devil, deliver me"--as, e.g., from musk, boys with curls, feminine men, wobbly hips, red note-paper, codfish-balls, lisle-thread stockings, the books of A.C. Gunter and Albert Ross, wax flowers, soft old bachelors and widowers, nice young men, tin spoons, false teeth, thin shoes, etc. She does not seem real to herself everything is a blank. Though she doubts everything else, she will keep the one atom of faith in love and the truth that is love and life in her heart. When something shrieks within her, she feels that all her anguish is for nothing and that she is a fool. She is exasperated that people call her peculiar, but confesses that she loves admiration; she can fascinate and charm company if she tries; imagines an admiration for Messalina. She most desires to cultivate badness when there is lead in the sky. "I would live about seven years of judicious badness, and then death if you will." "I long to cultivate the of badness in me." She describes the fascination of making and eating fudge; devotes a chapter to describing how to eat an olive; discusses her figure. "In the front of my shirt-waist there are nine cambric handkerchiefs cunningly distributed." She discusses her foot, her beautiful hair, her hips; describes each of the seventeen little engraved portraits of Napoleon that she keeps, with each of which she falls in love; vows she would give up even her marvelous genius far one dear, bright day free from loneliness. When her skirts need sewing, she simply pins them; this lasts longer, and had she mended them with needle and thread she would have been sensible, which she hates. As she walks over the sand one day she vows that she would like a man to come so be that he was strong and a perfect villain and she would pray him to lead her to what the world calls her ruin. Nothing is of consequence