must know it. Why will women waste time in search of a soul they don't possess, when all they need do, to become incandescent, is to hold themselves before the light of a man's soul—the right man! At her best a woman is a vacuum tube reflecting in rays of dazzling violet, the spiritual current passed through her; at her worst: she's a chameleon; when she tries to be the spiritual currents, herself, or the dye-stuffs, she's either a mannish woman, or just a fraud. Good women there are—the world abounds in them—but they smother you. Conscienceless women are fascinating, and if you're not wary you become addicted to them. The others simply pass by in indifferent clothes, indifferently made up.
"The Germaine who has imbibed enough feministic theories to be useless to herself and the world goes daily to the sketch class. The girl who sits polishing her nails in the sun is the real Germaine. I can't be bothered with the former, but I catch myself peeking through my window rather too often for a glimpse of the latter."
"Rue N. D. des C., November 28, 1923.
"It has been a day of little running waves of imaginative pleasure checked and drawn back into the ocean of fact by an undertow of fear. Illness has something to do with the palpitation—but not everything.
"I'm on a threshold and dare not cross it, lest the abode prove dark, cold and bare in contradiction to its alluring exterior. I'm grateful to be able to forestall desolation by stating it in this way. Many people haven't the anæsthetic of words for their aches. While reason points out the circumstances conspiring against an enduring friendship with the woman who obsesses my vision, my emotions are flowing towards it in a cascade, and one might as well try to cure a drunkard as try to cure me of emotional excess. It's useless to offer me the substitute tisane of studio gregariousness and hail-
