ALOOFLY I live in this Butte in the outward rôle of a family daughter with no responsibilities.
This Butte is an incongruous living-place for me.
And I have not one human friend in it—no kindliness. And Nature in her perplexingest mood would not of herself have cast me as a family daughter. Three things have kept me thus for four years past: that nothing has called me out of it: a slight family pressure like a tiny needle-point which pierces only if one moves: and to stay thus is presently the line of least resistance.
Unless impelled to violent action by a violent reason—like love or hatred or jealousy or a baby or humiliated pride or rowelling ambition—a woman follows the physical line of least resistance. I have followed it these years with outward acquiescence and inward rages—languid rages which lay me waste.
The years and acquiescences and rages have built up a mood which compasses me, drives me, damns me and lifts me up.
It is a forceful mood, though I am not myself forceful.
This mood is this book.—
I live an immoral life. It is immoral because it is deadly futile. All my Tissues of body, soul, mind
