Page:I, Mary MacLane (1917).pdf/55

 hideous altering breaking prepollence of death.

—if my hair, just my hair, had not come back after that red fever I'd have decided—not capriciously like God but determinedly like myself—to have died by my own hand one night. It is no brave thought and it would have been no brave deed. Though it wants a lowering courage to leave life when, despite all, one loves its very textureless color, its bodiless air: not to speak of the yellow hot deathless sunshine that can not reach one in her dark grave—

But the look and feel of my hair are the look and feel of positive life, opposed to death.

To live up to my hair would keep me brave.

But the retrospects, which I can't escape, come and wrap me in the Winding Sheet.