My Two Dresses tell me the scope of my present Mary-Mac-Lane-ness.
Every day they tell me things about myself.
They tell me I’m living in a prison of self, invisible and ascetic
and somberly just.
They tell me I’m living an outer life narrow and broodingly
companionless and that if I were not self-reliant by long habit a
leprous morbidness would rot me in body and spirit.
They tell me because of outer solitude an inner fever of emotion and
egotism and a fervid analytic light are on all my phases of self:
mental, physical, psychical and sexual.
They tell me my way of thought is at once meditative and
cave-womanish.
They tell me I’m all ways the Unmarried Woman and profoundly
loverless.
They tell me I’m like a child and like a sequestered savage.
They tell me I am having no restful unrealities of social life with
chattering women and no monotonous casually bloodthirsty flirtations
with men.
They tell me I walk daily to the edges of myself and stare into
horrible-sweet egotistic abysses.
They tell me I’m grave-eyed and coldly melancholy.
They tell me there’s a bereftness in the curves of my breasts and an
unfulfillment in my loose-girt loins.
They tell me I am barren of sensation and fertile in feeling.
They tell me God has taken away the beer and also the skittles and
left me only pieces of bread and drinks of water.
_A winding sheet_