I, Mary MacLane/Chapter 37
THE blue-and-copper of yesterday is dead and buried this To-morrow in a maroon twilight.
I this moment saw darkly from my window the somber hills in their heavy spell of pale-purple and grief and splendor and sadness and beauty and wonder and woe.
But their color brings no tears to my wicked gray eyes.
The passion-edged mood is burnt out.
Gone, gone, gone.
I listessly change into the other black dress for listless dinnertime and all my thought is that my abdomen is beautifully flat and that I must purchase a new petticoat.
I rub a little rouge on my pale mouth and I idlingly recall a clever and filthy story I once heard.
I laugh languidly at it and feel myself a comfortably vicious person.
I pronounce a damn on the familiar ache in my beloved left foot and turn away from myself.
I stick out the tip of my forked-feeling tongue at the bastard clock on the stairs. I note the hour on it with a fainness in my spirit-gizzard to dedicate Me from that time forth to a big blue god of Nastiness: Nastiness so restful, humorous, appetizing, reckless, sure-of-itself.
—these hellish To-morrows creeping in their petty pace: they bring in weak-kneed niceness, and they bring in doubts, and they bring in meditation and imagery and all-around humanness, till I'm a mere heavy-heeled dubious complicated jade.