Page:I, Mary MacLane (1917).pdf/248

From Wikisource
Jump to navigation Jump to search
This page has been proofread, but needs to be validated.

hats—the buoyant worldly insouciance of their ensembles—as their owners walk along on happy errands. As I look I feel Me to be behind prison bars looking out in thin psychic jealousy: regret for a time when I also went thus buoyantly on happy worldly errands and an odd raging silent impatience for a time when I may again. But with it too the wavering acquiescence in this analytic-writing mood.—'pussy-cat-mieow,' I ruminate, 'can't have any milk until her best petticoat's mended with silk.'

—One kind of man I impatiently scorn is the kind that looks bored if I mention Ibsen or ceramics or Aztec civilization but is interested instantly, alertly if I mention my garters. Equally I abhor the type that begrudges me my own private phases of amorousness: not those who condemn me for them: not those who dislike them in me: not those who deplore them: but who begrudge me them.

—Always I come up a stairway softly. Always I close doors softly. I make no noise.

—The quaintest character I have met with in fiction is Huckleberry Finn's father, looked at as a father. Next in quaintness I place Sally Brass, regarded as a human being.

—I like a glass of very hot water and a dish of preserved damson plums on a sultry August day: and another of each on top of that: and another