Page:I, Mary MacLane (1917).pdf/71

 the desire, hot as live embers, cold as hail.

Sex is an odd attribute. It has been to me like a blest impediment and a celestial incumbrance and a radiant curse.—

When I was seventeen I stood on a threshold and peered curiously into a dim-lit strange-scented Room.

It was unknown to me then. My mind alone bespoke it. As I stood at its doorway the air it wafted out touched my sense with only the lightest frayed-cobweb contact, unintelligible and unenlightening. I had lived an emptily alone girlhood. I was icily virginal.

At five-and-twenty I crossed the Room's threshold. I breathed lightly the odd fragrance. I looked curiously around. I touched some amorous-looking grapes and some love-promising apples that lay about: I bit into one and burst a grape with my finger and thumb. I gathered a weak-petaled flower or two. I gauged the Room and its furnishments and was unthrilled by anything in it. Even bodily it left me unthrilled.

Those two memory-mists do not keep me in the now-dusk and in the strength and terror and fire of top-most youth from wanting a sudden Lover with all that's in my Body.

Love has naught to do with it. Love is a flame