She had a beautiful face, and I am a plain-featured, insignificant little animal.
She was surrounded by admiring, sympathetic friends, and I am alone—alone, though there are people and people.
She was a genius, and still more am I a genius.
She suffered with the pain of a woman, young; and I suffer with the pain of a woman, young and all alone.
And so it is.
Along some lines I have gotten to the edge of the world. A step more and I fall off. I do not take the step. I stand on the edge, and I suffer.
Nothing, oh, nothing on the earth can suffer like a woman young and all alone!
—Before proceeding farther with the Portraying of Mary MacLane, I will write out some of her uninteresting history.
I was born in 1881 at Winnepeg, in Canada. Whether Winnepeg will yet live to be proud of this fact is a matter for some conjecture and anxiety on my part. When I was four years old I was taken with my family to a little town in western Minnesota, where I lived a more or less vapid and lonely life until I was ten. We came then to Montana.
Whereat the aforesaid life was continued.