Page:I, Mary MacLane (1917).pdf/105

 toward people is like a secret hot sword thrust, and kept freshly thrust, in my flesh. It makes me wild to do the Murder. But it makes me brood over it till the red act is lost in red brooding.

There come also thinkings.

Murder, any Murder, is in its essence cowardly, a slinking meanness. And I am not cowardly and I am not mean. I am above malice and retaliation—all such impoverished impoverishing emotions. A shrug of my shoulders and they are satisfied. The impulse to hit back after a bitter wound is not of vengeance. It is instinct—a 'first law.' But Murder is self-accusingly cowardly and sneakingly human. I can't get away from that. To take away a person's life is like setting fire to his house—an officiously stooping act. It's for me to live my life in aloof self-sufficience. No human malice should reach me in it. Then it's not for me to reach out of it and stain my good fingers with unpleasant sticky blood. I am always in a prison of radiance and gloom.

But the mere habit of being a human being is breakingly insistent—no matter how many or how few frocks one owns. Neither of my two dresses is a protection against humiliation. A thin black serge dress gives me to myself a melancholy cold inert air: but beneath the smooth-fitting breast of it