But I could not tell my one friend exactly what I felt. There was
no doubt in my own mind as to my own perfect sincerity of feeling,
but there was with it and around it this vapor of fraud, a spirit
of falseness that rose and confronted me and said, “hypocrite,”
“fool.”
It may be that the spirit of falseness is itself a false thing--yet
true or false, it is with me always. I have tried, in writing out my
emotions, to convey an idea of this sham element while still telling
everything faithfully true. Sometimes I think I have succeeded,
and at other times I seem to have signally failed. This element of
falseness is absolutely the very thinnest, the very finest, the
rarest of all the things in my many-sided character.
It is not the most unimportant.
I have seen visions of myself walking in various pathways. I have
seen myself trying one pathway and another. And always it is the
same: I see before me in the path, darkening the way and filling me
with dread and discouragement, a great black shadow--the shadow
of my own element of falseness.