Page:I, Mary MacLane (1917).pdf/70

 It is the tired urge of sex-tissues and nerve-cells: positive, furious, fiery as the bloodiest sun.

It is the same which the heated leopard feels in her sharp immaculate lust. It is quite the same—but it could not move me as I sat alone loverless to the knitting of an eyebrow, to a change of posture, a movement of elbows on the window-sill or of palms beneath my chin. Nor could it, though the potential Lover had stood outside my window.

For any woman of any charm the world is full of Lovers: each and all to be had by the flutter of her finger, the droop of her white eyelids, the trembling of her pink-bowed lips. The world is full of them—facile Lovers, craven, potent and pinchbeck. And it's that kind I want hotly with my Body, coldly with my Mind in dusks of rippling warmth—rippling, rippling warmth—

I want the Lover as the leopard wants hers. But I'm not a leopard: instead, a woman-person of keen sentientness and wild wistful imagination. So I wouldn't so much as crook a finger to call a Lover to me: a curious nervous inertia.

It's only I want the Lover with frantic blind cosmic ardors inside me.

I analyze it in my magic Mind and find I would call no Lover. I analyze farther and find I'd reject all but an impossible one-in-ten-thousand. But remains