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Words: 57714 in 32 pages
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admire my own sombre beauty. I let my hair fall in a black cloud over my shoulders, then I braid it slowly with bare arms lifted in graceful poses. I sway my hips like Carmen, I thrust red flowers into my bosom. I move my head languidly, letting my white teeth gleam between red lips. I study my profile with a hand glass, getting the double reflection. I smile and beckon with my eyes. Yes, I am a beautiful woman--primeval, elemental--I was made for love."
Again I wrote, showing that I half understood the perils that beset me:
And again:
No wonder that, with such thoughts and inclinations, I was always more or less under temptation with men, who were drawn to me, I suppose, just as I was drawn to them. And I tried to excuse myself in the old way, as here:
"It is certain that some women have strong emotional desires, whereas other women have none at all or scarcely any. This fact has an evident bearing upon the question of women's morality. Some women must be judged more leniently than others. I have wondered if there are similar differences in men. I doubt it!"
Of course I had agitating experiences with men because I half invited them. It seemed as if I could not help it. As I said to myself, I was a moth, I wanted to play with fire.
On the next page I find this:
"Seraphine disapproves of my attitude towards men. She gave me a great talking to last night and said things I would not take from anyone else. Dear old Seraphine, she is so fine and kind! She says there is nothing in my physical makeup that compels me to be a flirt. I can act more discreetly if I wish to. It is my mental attitude toward romantic things that is wrong. Thousands of women just as pretty as I am never place themselves in situations with men that are almost certain to lead them into temptation. They will not start an emotional episode that may easily, as they know quite well, have a dangerous ending. But I am always ready to start, confident that my self-control will save me from any immediate disaster. And so far it always has."
I am horribly sad tonight--lonely--discouraged. The doctor wants to know about my married life, about my husband. Why was I unhappy? Why is any woman unhappy? Because her love is trampled on, degraded--the spiritual part of it unsatisfied. Women are made for love and without love life means nothing to them. Women are naturally finer than men, they aspire more strongly to what is beautiful and spiritual, but their souls can be coarsened, their love can be killed. They can be driven--they have been driven for centuries into lies and deceits and sensuality or pretence of sensuality.
The great tragedy of the world is sensuality, and it may exist between man and wife just as much as between a man and a paid woman. I don't know whether the Bible condemns sensuality between man and wife, but it ought to. I remember a story by Tolstoy in which the great moralist strips off our mask of hypocrisy and shows the hideous evil that results when a man and a woman degrade the holy sacrament of marriage. That is not love, but a perversion of love. How can God bless a union in which the wife is expected to conduct herself like a wanton or lose her husband? And she loses him anyway, for sensuality in a man inevitably leads him to promiscuousness. I know this to my sorrow!
Perhaps I am morbid. Perhaps I see life too clearly, know it too well. I do not want to be cynical or bitter. Oh, if only those old days of faith and trust could come back to me! When I think of what I was before I married Julian I see that I was almost like a child in my ignorance of the animal side of man's nature....
Dr. Owen thinks my trouble is shell shock, but he is mistaken. I have taken care of too many shell shock cases not to recognize the symptoms. Can I ever forget that darling soldier boy from Maryland who mistook me for his mother? "They're coming! They're coming!" he screamed one night; you could hear him all over the hospital. Then he jumped out of bed like a wild man--it took two orderlies and an engineer to get him back under the covers. I can see his poor wasted face when the little doctor came to give him a hypodermic. There he lay panting, groaning: "Oh those guns! Oh those guns! They break my ears!" Then he sprang up again, his eyes starting out of his head: "Look out, there! On the ammunition cart! Look out, Bill! Oh my God, they've got Bill--my pal! Blown him to hell! Oh, oh, oh!" and he put his head down and sobbed like a woman. That is shell shock. I have nothing like that. I know what I am doing.
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