Genius is an odd thing.
When certain of my skirts need sewing, they don’t get sewed. I simply pin the rents in them together and it lasts as long or longer than if I had seated myself in my stiff-backed chair with a needle and thread and mended them—like a sensible girl. (I hate a sensible girl.)
Though I have never yet hurriedly pinned up a torn flounce or several inches of skirt-binding without saying softly to myself, using a trite, expressive phrase, “Certainly, it’s a hell of a way to do.” Still I never take a needle and mend my garments. I couldn’t, anyway. I never learned to sew, and I don’t intend ever to learn. It reminds me too much of a constipated dressmaker.
And so I pin up the torn places—though, as I say, I never fail to make use of the quaint, expressive phrase.
All of which a reasonably astute reader will recognize as an important point in the portraying of any character—whether mine or the queen of Spain’s.
I had for my dinner to-day some whole-wheat bread, some liver-and-bacon, and some green, green early asparagus. While I was eating these the world seemed a very nice place indeed.
I never see people walking along on the opposite side of the street, as I sit by my window, without wondering who they are, and how they live, and how ugly they would look if their bodies were not adorned with clothes. Always I feel certain that some of them are bow-legged.
And sometimes I see a woman in a fearful state of deshabille walk across the vacant lot next to this. “A plague on me,” I say then to myself, “if I ever become middle-aged and if my entire being seems to tip up in the front, and if I go about with no stays so that when I tie an apron around my waist my upper fatness hangs over the band like a natural blouse.”
And so—I could go on writing all night these seemingly trivial but really significant details relating to the outer genius. But these will answer. These to any one who knows things will be a revelation.