Youth_ Its Education, Regimen, and Hygiene - G. Stanley Hall

love to be tortured by him. She holds imaginary conversations with him. If
happiness does not come soon she will commit suicide, and she finds rapture in
the thought of death. In Butte, Montana, where she lives, she wanders among the
box rustlers, the beer jerkers, biscuit shooters, and plunges out into the sand and
barrenness, but finds everything dumb. The six toothbrushes in the bathroom
make her wild and profane. She flirts with death at the top of a dark, deep pit,
and thinks out the stages of decomposition if she yielded herself to Death, who
would dearly love to have her. She confesses herself a thief on several occasions,
but comforts herself because the stolen money was given to the poor. Sometimes
her "very good legs" carry her out into the country, where she has imaginary
love confabs with the devil, but the world is so empty, dreary, and cold, and it is
all so hard to bear when one is a woman and nineteen. She has a litany from
which she prays in recurrent phrases "Kind devil, deliver me"—as, e.g., from
musk, boys with curls, feminine men, wobbly hips, red note-paper, codfish-balls,
lisle-thread stockings, the books of A.C. Gunter and Albert Ross, wax flowers,
soft old bachelors and widowers, nice young men, tin spoons, false teeth, thin
shoes, etc. She does not seem real to herself everything is a blank. Though she
doubts everything else, she will keep the one atom of faith in love and the truth
that is love and life in her heart. When something shrieks within her, she feels
that all her anguish is for nothing and that she is a fool. She is exasperated that
people call her peculiar, but confesses that she loves admiration; she can
fascinate and charm company if she tries; imagines an admiration for Messalina.
She most desires to cultivate badness when there is lead in the sky. "I would live
about seven years of judicious badness, and then death if you will." "I long to
cultivate the of badness in me." She describes the fascination of making and
eating fudge; devotes a chapter to describing how to eat an olive; discusses her
figure. "In the front of my shirt-waist there are nine cambric handkerchiefs
cunningly distributed." She discusses her foot, her beautiful hair, her hips;
describes each of the seventeen little engraved portraits of Napoleon that she
keeps, with each of which she falls in love; vows she would give up even her
marvelous genius far one dear, bright day free from loneliness. When her skirts
need sewing, she simply pins them; this lasts longer, and had she mended them
with needle and thread she would have been sensible, which she hates. As she
walks over the sand one day she vows that she would like a man to come so be
that he was strong and a perfect villain and she would pray him to lead her to
what the world calls her ruin. Nothing is of consequence to her except to be rid
of unrest and pain. She would be positively and not merely negatively wicked.
To poison her soul would rouse her mental power. "Oh, to know just once what
it is to be loved!" "I know that I am a genius more than any genius that has