This is a hard thing to write about. Of all things it is the most
liable to be misunderstood. You will probably misunderstand it,
for I have not succeeded in giving the right idea of it. I aimed
at it and missed it. It eluded me completely.
You must take the idea as I have just now presented it for what
it may be worth. This is as near as I can come to it. But it is
something infinitely finer and rarer.
It is a difficult task to show to others a thing which, though
I feel and recognize it thoroughly, I have not yet analyzed for
myself.
But this is a complete Portrayal of me--as I await the Devil’s
coming--and I must tell everything--everything.
February 13.
So then, yes. As I have said, I find that I am quite, quite odd. My
various acquaintances say that I am _funny_. They say, “Oh, it’s
that May MacLane, Dolly’s younger sister. She’s funny.” But I call
it oddity. I bear the hall-mark of oddity.
There was a time, a year or two since, when I was an exceedingly
sensitive little fool--sensitive in that it used to strike very
deep when my young acquaintances would call me funny and find in
me a vent for their distinctly unfriendly ridicule. My years in
the high school were not years of joy. Two years ago I had not yet
risen above these things. I was a sensitive little fool.
But that sensitiveness, I rejoice to say, has gone from me. The
opinion of these young people, or of these old people, is now a
thing that is quite unable to affect me.
The more I see of conventionality, it seems, the more I am odd.
Though I am young and feminine--very feminine--yet I am not that
quaint conceit, a _girl_: the sort of person that Laura E. Richards
writes about, and Nora Perry, and Louisa M. Alcott,--girls with
bright eyes, and with charming faces (they always have charming
faces), standing with reluctant feet where the brook and river
meet,--and all that sort of thing.