Page:I, Mary MacLane (1917).pdf/27

 They are delicious in my breakfast. So are the squares of toast and the bacon-rashers and the tea and marmalade. When I've done with them I lay down my napkin by my cup, light a cigarette, breathe a puff or two from it and feel contentedly aware that my brain has gone to rest in sweet tranquillity with my breakfast. When my brain is in my head it analyzes the soul out of my body, the gleam out of my gray eyes, the savor out of my life, the human taste off my tongue. That post-breakfast moment is the only peace-moment I know in my day and in my life.

Having puffed away the cigarette and read bits of a morning paper I then prove me arrantly middle-class by contemplating washing my breakfast dishes.

I am middle-class, quite, from the Soul outward. But it is not specially apparent—one's tastes and aspirations flit garbledly far and wide. But a tendency to wash one's dishes after eating one's breakfast feels conclusively and pleasantly middle-class. Not that I do always wash them, but always I think of it with the inclination to do it.

I sit on the shaded front veranda in the summer and look away south at the blue Highlands, ever snow-peaked: or east at the near towering splendid grim wall of the arid Rockies which separates this Butte from New York, from London,