Ah, I’m notably Clever!
I write a letter of Clever delicate surprisingness—it is the only Clever writing I do. There are twenty people, now long outside my life, to whom a Mary-Mac-Lane letter is the agreeably-vividest thing that could come into a day. The letter, which is an unapparent cater, is not real Me who am someway a strong and contemptuous spirit—but instead one tinsel facet. And it makes people—people! people!—admire and defer to me in a subtlest human aspect: an unwilling antagonistic homage. It stays me, buoys me for the time.
I am profoundly Clever in that I who am in reality so futile, so wavering, so sensitively lyingly artistic, can still show myself aggressively Clever to other persons. I must, being false, be Clever in order to get by.
It is at its best a trickster’s quality: and so much the more am I Clever in stretching it out over my shaded life like a strong bright cloak-of-mail.
Just to be Mary MacLane—who am first of all my own self!—and get by with it!—how I do that I can not quite make out.
I’m by odds the Cleverest human being I know: more than likely one of the Cleverest who ever lived in this world.
[A familiar sharp twist]
To-morrow
I HAVE—a Broken Heart—