Gone, gone, gone.
I [listlessly] change into the other black dress for listless dinnertime and all my thought is that my abdomen is beautifully flat and that I must purchase a new petticoat.
I rub a little rouge on my pale mouth and I idlingly recall a clever and filthy story I once heard.
I laugh languidly at it and feel myself a comfortably vicious person.
I pronounce a damn on the familiar ache in my beloved left foot and turn away from myself.
I stick out the tip of my forked-feeling tongue at the bastard clock on the stairs. I note the hour on it with a fainness in my spirit-gizzard to dedicate Me from that time forth to a big blue god of Nastiness: Nastiness so restful, humorous, appetizing, reckless, sure-of-itself.
—these hellish To-morrows creeping in their petty pace: they bring in weak-kneed niceness, and they bring in doubts, and they bring in meditation and imagery and all-around humanness, till I’m a mere heavy-heeled dubious complicated jade.
[In my black dress and my still room]
To-morrow