soul without it.'
To which I might answer, with more insolent feeling: 'I don't know anything of that and I don't care for it. I only know I want the Necklace off. To wear it makes me languid and frenzied and worn—full of wild goaded saneness and the wish to go violently mad.'
And God might answer: 'Permit me to express my regrets for those sentiments which, I should add, I neither concur in nor refute nor deny nor share.'
There I might be: conversationally whip-sawed.—God is full of works of beauty, serene and miraculous: Gray Lakes and Blue Mourning Mountains and Deserts beneath the Moon. Those have quietly ravished me many and many a night and day—and will again, and still again, in pacing To-morrows.
But I can't tell What O'Clock it is by them. And if God were by me and I asked him the time the odds are all that he would look at the toy-face of my little ivory toy-clock, which sets on my desk where I can see it myself, and tell me the time by that.
But though he is thus perplexing he knows the right time and could tell me it.
For that restlessly I wish God would make me one brief visit.
I wish that though he should so godlily baffle me and divinely bore me.
