I am deadly, deadly tired of my unhappiness.
I wish this Portrayal to be published and launched into that deep salt sea--the world. There are some there surely who will understand it and me.
Can I be that thing which I am--can I be possessed of a peculiar rare genius, and yet drag out my life in obscurity in this uncouth, warped, Montana town?
It must be impossible! If I thought the world contained nothing more than that for me--oh, what should I do? Would I make an end of my dreary little life now? I fear I would. I am a philosopher--and a coward. And it were infinitely better to die now in the high-beating pulses of youth than to drag on, year after year, year after year, and find oneself at last a stagnant old woman, spiritless, hopeless, with a declining body, a declining mind,--and nothing to look back upon except the visions of things that might have been--and the weariness.
I see the picture. I see it plainly. Oh, kind Devil, deliver me from it!
Surely there must be in a world of manifold beautiful things something among them for me. And always, while I am still young, there is that dim light, the Future. But it is indeed a dim, dim light, and ofttimes there's a treachery in it.
So then, yes. I find myself at this stage of womankind and nineteen years, a genius, a thief, a liar--a general moral vagabond, a fool more or less, and a philosopher of the peripatetic school. Also I find that even this combination can not make one happy. It serves, however, to occupy my versatile mind, to keep me wondering what it is a kind Devil has in store for me.
A philosopher of my own peripatetic school--hour after hour I walk over the desolate sand and dreariness among tiny hills and gulches on the outskirts of this mining town; in the morning, in the long afternoon, in the cool of the night. And hour after hour, as I walk, through my brain some long, long pageants march: the pageant of my fancies, the pageant of my unparalleled egotism, the pageant of my unhappiness, the pageant of my minute analyzing, the pageant of my peculiar philosophy, the pageant of my dull, dull life,--and the pageant of the Possibilities.
We three go out on the sand and barrenness: my wooden heart, my good young woman's-body, my soul. We go there and contemplate the long sandy wastes, the red, red line on the sky at the setting of the sun, the cold gloomy mountains under it, the ground without a weed, without a grass-blade even in their season--for they have years ago been killed off by the sulphur smoke from the smelters.