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.
