Page:I, Mary MacLane (1917).pdf/292

 is none the less a clear-visioned mind which rates no thing a truth which it knows to be a lie: though it batten on the lie.

—often here and there around this human world the twisted and perverted and strongly false concepts are the strong actual working facts and the straight road is myth—myth—existent but in visions—

I don't understand why it's so: I know it is so.

Not only so with me: so with millions whose stars jangled.

Not always. But often.—

The deep-dyed Lesbian woman is a creature whose sensibilities are over-balanced: whose imagination moves on mad low-flying wings: whose brain is good: whose predilections are warped: who lives always in unrest: whose inner walls are streaked with garish heathen pigments: whose copious love-instincts are an odd mixture of mirth, malice and luxure.

Its effects in me who am straight-made in nothing, but strongly crooked, is to vivify tenfold or a hundredfold or a thousandfold in my shaded vision the womanness of any woman whose inner or outer beauty arrests and stirs my spirit.

I see in some woman, some girl, any who attracts me—be she a casual acquaintance, or a Victorian poet dead fifty years whose poetry and portrait live,