and simplicity in me that make me love myself. To myself at such times I say strong sweet words.
"I am on a couch by this window and I could ask a woman to come here to lie with me, or a man either for that matter.
"I could take a row of houses standing on a street, tip them over, empty the people out of them, squeeze and compress all the people into one person, and love that person.
"Do you see this hand? Suppose it held a knife that could cut down through all the falseness in you. Suppose it could cut down through the sides of buildings and houses where thousands of people now lie asleep.
"It would be something worth thinking about if the fingers of this hand gripped a knife that could cut and rip through all the ugly husks in which millions of lives are enclosed."
Well, there is the idea you see, a kind of power that could be gentle too. I will quote you just one more of his things, a more gentle one. It is called in the book number eighty-three.
"I am a tree that grows beside the wall. I have been thrusting up and up. My body is covered with scars. My body is old, but still I thrust upward, creeping toward the top of the wall.
"It is my desire to drop blossoms and fruit over the wall.
"I would moisten dry lips.
"I would drop blossoms on the heads of children, over the top of the wall.
"I would caress with falling blossoms the bodies of those who live on the further side of the wall.
"My branches are creeping upward and new sap comes into me out of the dark ground under the wall.
"My fruit shall not be my fruit until it drops from my arms into the arms of the others over the top of the wall."
And now as to the life led by the man and woman in the large upper room in that old frame house. By a stroke of luck I have recently got rather a line on that by a discovery I have made.
After they had moved into the house—it was only last spring—the theatre in which the woman was employed was dark for a long time and they were more than usually hard up; so the woman tried
