I’m in most ways a devilish person. There’s sevenfold more evil
than good in me. It is evil of a mixed and menacing kind, the kind
that goes dressed in brave and beauty-tinted clothes and is sane
and sound. While the good in me is ill and forlorn and nervously
afraid--a something of tear-blurred eyes and trembling fingers.
Yet God has made many things less plausible than me. He has made
sharks in the ocean, and people who hire children to work in their
mills and mines, and poison ivy and zebras--
--and he has made besides a Wonder of things: Thin Pink Mountain
Dawns, Young English Poets, Hydrangeas in the sudden Blue of their
first Bloom, human Singing Voices,--more things, always more--
When I think of them all a joyous thrill breaks over me like a little
frenzied wave. It is delirium-of-bliss to feel oneself living though
shadows be pitch-black.
God has a Purpose in making everything, I think.
I am half-curious about the Purpose that goes with me. He might have
made me for his own amusement. He might have made me to discipline
my Soul with some blights and goads or to punish it for bacchanalian
ease and pleasure in the long-distant centuries-old past. He might
have made me to season or scourge other lives, as I may touch them,
with Mary-Mac-Lane-ness. He might have made me to point a twisted
moral.