Sometime in the midst of the brightness of an October I have walked for miles in the still high air under the blue of the sky. The brightness of the day and the blue of the sky and the incomparable high air have entered into my veins and flowed with my red blood. They have penetrated into every remote nerve-center and into the marrow of my bones.
At such a time this young body glows with life.
My red blood flows swiftly and joyously—in the midst of the brightness of October.
My sound, sensitive liver rests gently with its thin yellow bile in sweet content.
My calm, beautiful stomach silently sings, as I walk, a song of peace.
My lungs, saturated with mountain ozone and the perfume of the pines, expand in continuous ecstasy.
My heart beats like the music of Schumann, in easy, graceful rhythm with an undertone of power.
My strong and sensitive nerves are reeking and swimming in sensuality like drunken little Bacchantes, gay and garlanded in mad revelling.
The entire wonderful, graceful mechanism of my woman’s-body has fallen at the time—like the wonderful, graceful mechanism of my woman’s-mind—under the enchanting spell of a day in October.
“It is good,” I think to myself, “oh, it is good to be alive! It is wondrously good to be a woman young in the fullness of nineteen springs. It is unutterably lovely to be a healthy young animal living on this charmed earth.”