I look on myself as the more fortunate.—John Keats!
A woman so drunk as to fall and reel about is always an exquisitely shameful thing. And when I think of how she’s tossed into the wagon—to mention but one item—
But it’s a matter of the human equation. Doubtless it is all relative. The Finn woman is not aware of how she is knocked about, and if she were she would not regard it with any of my imagination. So what matter?
A likeable and admirable person is Josephina. A so strong fine businesslike worker, a so thoroughbred sport, a so splendid drunkard, and asking no odds of God or man. In her stolid Finn fashion she likes me as she has proven, and I like her though she makes me feel inferior.
—if Josephina could and would write her inner isolated world of thoughts—the saga of her one horrid gown! There would be a book. All blacks and carmines—all stolidly sober and brilliantly drunk—all dingily bathless: deeply savagely quietly human.
It would be a book savoring not of white alcohol but of the salty unshed Tears, the dry artistic Griefs of Josephina.
[Beneficent bedlam]
To-morrow
I HAVE been so long Sane it would be gay and sweet and resting to go Mad.