Page:I, Mary MacLane (1917).pdf/278

 so futile, so wavering, so sensitively lyingly artistic, can still show myself aggressively Clever to other persons. I must, being false, be Clever in order to get by.

It is at its best a trickster's quality: and so much the more am I Clever in stretching it out over my shaded life like a strong bright cloak-of-mail.

Just to be Mary MacLane—who am first of all my own self!—and get by with it!—how I do that I can not quite make out.

I'm by odds the Cleverest human being I know: more than likely one of the Cleverest who ever lived in this world.