I SUPPOSE there's nothing quite peculiar to even my inmost self in what I ponder and what I experience and what I feel.
My only elemental 'differentness' is that I find it and write it.
But I used to think at eighteen—those thrice-fired adolescent moments—that only I suffered, only I reached achingly out into the mists, only I tasted new-bloomed life-petals intolerably sweet and bitter on my lips.
The egotism of youth is merciless, measureless, endlessly vulnerable. Youth plays on itself as one plays on a little dulcimer, with music as sweet, but with a crude cruel recklessness which jerks and breaks the strings.
I have got by that stage of egotism. But I've entered on another wilder, more lawless—farther-seeing if less be-visioned.
While I sit here this midnight in a Neat Blue Chair in this Butte-Montana for what I know a legion-women of my psychic breed may be sitting lonely in neat red or neat blue or neat gray or neat any-colored chairs—in Wichita-Kansas and South Bend-Indiana and Red Wing-Minnesota and Portland-Maine and Rochester-New York and Waco-Texas
