a religieuse and I'm like an outlaw.
I have a potent weird sense of humor—a saving and a demoralizing grace.
I have brain, cerebration—not powerful but fine and of a remarkable quality.
I am scornful-tempered and I am brave.
I am slender in body and someway fragile and firm-fleshed and sweet.
I am oddly a fool and a strange complex liar and a spiritual vagabond.
I am strong, individual in my falseness: wavering, faint, fanciful in my truth.
I am eternally self-conscious but sincere in it.
I am ultra-modern, very old-fashioned: savagely incongruous.
I am young, but not very young.
I am wistful—I am infamous.
In brief, I am a human being.
I am presciently and analytically egotistic, with some arresting dead-feeling genius.
And were I not so tensely tiredly sane I would say that I am mad.
So assayed I begin to write this book of myself, to show to myself in detail the woman who is inside me. It may or it mayn't show also a type, a universal Eve-old woman. If it is so it is not my purport. I sing only the Ego and the individual.
