In the Gray Dawn every hard thing is hidden by a gray mantle of charity, and only the light, vague, caressing fancies are left.
Sometimes I think I am a strange, strange creature—something not of earth, nor yet of heaven, nor of hell. I think at times I am a little thing fallen on the earth by mistake: a thing thrown among foreign, unfitting elements, where there is nothing in touch with it, where life is a continual struggle, where every little door is closed—every Why unanswered, and itself knows not where to lay its head. I feel a deadly certainty in some moments that the wild world contains not one moment of rest for me, that there will never be any rest, that my woman’s-soul will go on asking long, long centuries after my woman’s-body is laid in its grave.
I felt this in the Gray Dawn this morning, but the gray charitable mantle softened it. Always I feel most acutely in the Gray Dawn, but always there is the thing to soften it.
The gray atmosphere was charged. There was a tense electrical thrill in the cold, soft air. My nerves were keenly alive. But the gray curtain was mercifully there. I did not feel too much.
How I wished the yellow, beautiful sun would never more come up over the edge to show me my nearer anguish!
“Stay with me, stay with me, soft Gray Dawn,” implored every one of my tiny lives. “Let me forget. Let the vanity, the pain, the longing sink deep and vanish—all of it, all of it! And let me rest in the midst of the Gray Dawn.”
I heard music—the silent music of myriad voices that you hear when all is still. One of them came and whispered to me softly: “Don’t suffer any more just now, little Mary MacLane. You suffer enough in the brightness of the sun and the blackness of the night. This is the Gray Dawn. Take a little rest.”
“Yes,” I said, “I will take a little rest.”
And then a wild, swelling chorus of voices whispered in the stillness: “Rest, rest, rest, little Mary MacLane. Suffer in the brightness, suffer in the blackness—your soul, your wooden heart, your woman’s-body. But now a little rest—a little rest.”
“A little rest,” I said again.