In beginning this record I find that it is no easy matter to feel at home with a clean, blank journal. The possibilities of these spotless pages seem to oppress me, and I am weighted down with the idea that my opening sentences ought to sound brilliant and promising.
With this thought I have started three or four entries on scraps of paper lying here about my desk, but I find that not one of them is the kind of thing which would make you bend over close and knit your brows, thinking you had picked up Plato by mistake.
No matter what lofty sentiments I have in my mind you can always hear the swish of petticoats through my paragraphs and I regret this, for all my life I have longed to write something that would sound like George Eliot. In the world of books she is my idol—my lady idol, I mean, for of course the dearest idols of all are the poets, and they are always men.
"George Eliot is my lady idol and my man one, too," some one said to me once when I mentioned my preference, and this exactly expresses it. When you read what she has written you never stop to think whether it was written by a man or by a woman. Even in these days the women who write anything worth reading do it so cleverly that you never for a moment suspect they clean out their fountain-pen with a hair-pin.
How do they manage it, I wonder, when one adjective too many would brand them as a female?
Yet if the sex does not show in the writing, the writing always shows in the sex. If the most masculine man on earth takes a notion to become a writer his friends all begin strange mutterings behind his back, and before long some one has whispered "Sissy." Ah, and if a woman by any chance decides to use her pen a while, so her tongue can rest, her associates are quick to pronounce that she has grown so masculine since she started this writing business! Verily the pen is mightier than the sword if it can influence sex in a manner that would turn a court physician green with envy.
I should be willing to cut off my hair and call myself George, Henry or even Sam, if I thought it would help me to be a great writer, for, in my soul, I have always longed to write something so great and unfeminine that it would not harm a Trappist monk.
Still, the setting forth of these wishes of mine does not help me to get started comfortably on this new record. Do you notice that I call it a record, and not a diary? This is because I expect to write in it only occasionally—skim the cream of events, as it were, instead of boring you with the details of the daily milking.
If it were January first, now, I could think up any number of inspiring New Year sentiments to get started off with; sermons based on the three R's to be met with most often at this season—Regrets, Resolves and Reforms. Sometimes there is a fourth R which follows quickly on the heels of these—Returns, to the old habits.
Here it is, though, midsummer; and I am sure it would seem to any one looking on that I have no visible means of support for any kind of journal, tucked away as I am in this little town where a girl has not inspiration enough to keep her shirt-waist pulled down in the back.