Tears are not common.
I felt my wooden heart, my soul, quivering and sobbing with their unknown wanting. This is my soul’s awakening. Ah, the pain of my soul’s awakening! Is there nothing, nothing to help this pain? I am so lonely, so lonely—Fannie Corbin, my one friend, my dearly-loved anemone lady, I want you so much—why aren’t you here! I want to feel your hand with mine as I felt it sometimes before you went away. You are the only one among a worldful of people to care a little—and I love you with all the strength and worship I can give to the things that are beautiful and true. You are the only one, the only one—and my soul is full of pain, and I am sitting alone on the ground, and my head lies on a rock’s breast.—
Strange, sweet passions stirred and waked somewhere deep within me as I sat shivering on the ground. And I felt them singing far away, as if their faint voices came out of that limitless deep, deep blue above me; and it was like a choir of spirit-voices, and they sang of love and of light and of dear tender dreams, and of my soul’s awakening. Why is this—and what is it that is hurting so? Is it because I am young, or is it because I am alone, or because I am a woman?
Oh, it is a hard and bitter thing to be a woman! And why—why? Is woman so foul a creature that she must needs be purged by this infinite pain?
The choir of faint, sweet voices comes to me incessantly out of the blue. My wooden heart and my soul are listening to them intently. The voices are trying hard to tell me, to help me, but I can not understand. I know only that it is about pure, exalted things, and about the all-abiding love that is somewhere; and it is about the earth-love, and about Truth,—but I can not understand. And the voices sing of me the child—a song of the unloved, starved little being; and a song of the unloved, half-grown creature; and a song of me, a woman and all alone—awaiting the Devil’s coming.
Oh, my soul—my soul!
A female snake is born out of its mother’s white egg, and lives awhile in content among weeds and grass, and dies.
A female dog lives some years, and has bones thrown at her, and sometimes she receives a kick or a blow, and a dog-house to sleep in, and dies.
A female bird has a nest, and worms to eat, and goes south in the winter, and presently she dies.