As for that strange notable, Marie Bashkirtseff, yes, I am rather like her in many points, as I've been told. But in most things I go beyond her.
Where she is wonderful in her intensity, I am still more wonderful in my intensity.
Where she had philosophy, I am a philosopher.
Where she had astonishing vanity and conceit, I have yet more astonishing vanity and conceit.
But she, forsooth, could paint good pictures,--and I--what can I do?
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.
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.
Apart from feeding and clothing me comfortably and sending me to school--which is no more than was due me--and transmitting to me the MacLane blood and character, I can not see that he ever gave me a single thought.
Certainly he did not love me, for he was quite incapable of loving any one but himself. And since nothing is of any moment in this world without the love of human beings for each other, it is a matter of supreme indifference to me whether my father, Jim MacLane of selfish memory, lived or died.
There are with me still a mother, a sister, and two brothers.
They do not understand me any more than if I were some strange live curiosity, as which I dare say they regard me.
I am peculiarly of the MacLane blood, which is Highland Scotch. My sister and brothers inherit the traits of their mother's family, which is of Scotch Lowland descent. This alone makes no small degree of difference. Apart from this the MacLanes--these particular MacLanes--are just a little bit different from every family in Canada, and from every other that I've known. It contains and has contained fanatics of many minds--religious, social, whatnot, and I am a true MacLane.