Sometime I suppose I shall yield to the desire. I merely play at it now--but in an unmistakable manner. Death knows it is only a question of time.
But first the Devil must come. First the Devil, then Death: a deep dark soothing grave--and the early evening, "and a little folding of the hands to sleep."
I am in no small degree, I find, a sham--a player to the gallery. Possibly this may be felt as you read these analyses.
While all of these emotions are written in the utmost seriousness and sincerity, and are exactly as I feel them, day after day--so far as I have the power to express what I feel--still I aim to convey through them all the idea that I am lacking in the grand element of Truth--that there is in the warp and woof of my life a thread that is false--false.
I don't know how to say this without the fear of being misunderstood. When I say I am in a way a sham, I have no reference to the truths as I have given them in this Portrayal, but to a very light and subtle thing that runs through them.
Oh, do not think for an instant that this analysis of my emotions is not perfectly sincere and real, and that I have not felt all of them more than I can put into words. They are my tears--my life-blood!
But in my life, in my personality, there is an essence of falseness and insincerity. A thin, fine vapor of fraud hangs always over me and dampens and injures some things in me that I value.
I have not succeeded thoroughly in analyzing this--it is so thin, so elusive, so faint--and yet not little. It is a natural thing enough viewed in the light of my other traits.
I have lived my nineteen years buried in an environment at utter variance with my natural instincts, where my inner life is never touched, and my sympathies very rarely, if ever, appealed to. I never disclose my real desires or the texture of my soul. Never, that is to say, to any one except my one friend, the anemone lady.--And so every day of my life I am playing a part; I am keeping an immense bundle of things hidden under my cloak. When one has played a part--a false part--all one's life, for I was a sly, artful little liar even in the days of five and six; then one is marked. One may never rid oneself of the mantle of falseness, charlatanry--particularly if one is innately a liar.