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 ordinary sense. And many good people visioned a writing career for me. It has a vapid taste, just to recall it. My flawed life has that to felicitate upon—that I have not spent it in fat lumps of writing, magazine tales and sex-novels. In the days, and later, when my demi-vierge book made its success I was besought by publishers to write others—to go on, to reap and garner. I pushed all that away with a preoccupied hand, not as part and parcel of my wastrel living but in my assured Artist-temper. I should feel more true-to-form to earn my living by making linen roses in a shop, along with rows of pale women, than by my writing.

My writing is to me a precious thing—and a rare bird—and a Babylonish jade. It demands gold in exchange for itself. But though it is my talent it is not my living. It is too myself, like my earlobes and my throat, to commercialize by the day.

But I can not think of me as an Artist without thinking of me as a Liar. The two are someway related. I am an appalling, an encompassing Liar. I am a Liar by the clock. My life ticks out silent lies as my little clock ticks out seconds. It is a phase hard to put my finger on. I feel it on me the way I feel a headache. I write this book with seriousness and earnestness. It is all a mood of sincerity and despair. But except I give it some backgrounding of