Page:I, Mary MacLane (1917).pdf/131

 way bad lot. I know, the same as I know one and one make two, that I've only to be square in the human business of living to get back a square deal, though I'll get badly battered, with it. But it isn't what I mean. Something inside me hungers for answeringness—a Gleam—to make me know the worldly squareness and the battering are worth while beyond themselves: but a detail in the game.

You mightn't guess it but I am diffident about broaching this much that may sound like a plea, so I'll say no more of it.

But before I close the letter I want to tell you that I'm not wanting in gratitude for the terrible beauty of this world. I feel with ecstasy the burning loveliness of the life you give the human race.

I want to tell you thank-you for some things in it. But all that they mean I can not tell in words.

Only yesterday a light at sundown lingered on the hill-tops and on the desert back of the School of Mines in tints of Olive and Copper and Ochre and Rose so delicate, so radiant, so dumbly forlorn that I closed my eyes against it all as I walked along the sand: its aliveness, its realness, its flawless golden dreadful peace tortured and twisted and too-keenly interpreted me.

And one summer day in Central Park in New York I saw a little Yellow-Yellow Butterfly fluttering