Page:I, Mary MacLane (1917).pdf/26

 I look in my mirror. Some days I'm a delicately beautiful girl. Other days I'm a very plain woman.

One's physical attractiveness is a matter of one's mental chemistry.

I say to Me in the mirror, 'It's you-and-me, Mary MacLane, and another wasting damning To-morrow.

A haunting decadence is in that To-morrow thought. And always the To-morrow thought comes out of my morning mirror. I dwell on it awhile, till my gray eyes and my lips and my teeth and my forehead are tired of it, and make nothing new of it.

I jerk the flat scollop of hair at one side of my forehead and turn away. I open door and windows wider for the blowing-through of breezes. And I wander. It is half-after nine or half-after ten. I go into the clean empty clock-ticking kitchen and cook my breakfast. It is a task full of hungry plaisance and pleasantness. I make a British-feeling breakfast of tea and marmalade and little squares of toast and pink-and-tan rashers of bacon and two delightful eggs. Up to the moment of broaching the eggs the morning has an ancient sameness with other mornings. But eggs, though I've eaten them every day for quite five-and-twenty years, are always a fascinating novelty.