Page:I, Mary MacLane (1917).pdf/102

 she does not feel supple, the thin agony of being sweet when she does not feel sweet, the neurotic torture of being seductive regularly—by the night: the more that perchance the struggle always is unconscious. Her brain being required in her body it's to be assumed there's none in her head. But I can deduce a nervous red heart beating illogically somewhere in her being protesting dumbly sometimes against one irking item, sometimes against another, sometimes against all the items in Miss Lily Walker's scheme of life, but beating and beating on, like a little automatic drum wound up tight and tossed into a maelstrom to beat itself out.

I'd like—like with breathless eagerness—to read the analyzed being just beneath Miss Lily Walker's skin.

Everybody—every human being—is wildly Real: radiant and desolate.—

With no amount of temperamental struggling could Miss Lily Walker analyze a psychic emotion of her own and then find the right word-combination to write it in.

With no conceivable effort of mine could I manage to be supple when I do not feel supple.

So Miss Lily Walker and I are quits at this game.

It totals up evenly, all ways around.

Nobody gets through one Real day—though it be a dayful of Real lies—without a demoniacal struggle