"April 11th.--Patch actually called up to-day! and when he forswore me about a month ago he fairly raged out the door. I'm gradually losing faith in any man being susceptible to fatal injuries.
"April 20th.--Spent the day with Anthony. Maybe I'll marry him some time. I kind of like his ideas--he stimulates all the originality in me. Blockhead came around about ten in his new car and took me out Riverside Drive. I liked him to-night: he's so considerate. He knew I didn't want to talk so he was quiet all during the ride.
"April 21st.--Woke up thinking of Anthony and sure enough he called and sounded sweet on the phone--so I broke a date for him. To-day I feel I'd break anything for him, including the ten commandments and my neck. He's coming at eight and I shall wear pink and look very fresh and starched----"
She paused here, remembering that after he had gone that night she had undressed with the shivering April air streaming in the windows. Yet it seemed she had not felt the cold, warmed by the profound banalities burning in her heart.
The next entry occurred a few days later: "
April 24th.--I want to marry Anthony, because husbands are so often 'husbands' and I must marry a lover.
"There are four general types of husbands.
"(1) The husband who always wants to stay in in the evening, has no vices and works for a salary. Totally undesirable!
"(2) The atavistic master whose mistress one is, to wait on his pleasure. This sort always considers every pretty woman 'shallow,' a sort of peacock with arrested development.
"(3) Next comes the worshipper, the idolater of his wife and all that is his, to the utter oblivion of everything else. This sort demands an emotional actress for a wife. God! it must be an exertion to be thought righteous.
"(4) And Anthony--a temporarily passionate lover with wisdom enough to realize when it has flown and that it must fly. And I want to get married to Anthony.
"What grubworms women are to crawl on their bellies through colorless marriages! Marriage was created not to be a background but to need one. Mine is going to be outstanding. It can't, shan't be the setting--it's going to be the performance, the live, lovely, glamourous performance, and the world shall be the scenery. I refuse to dedicate my life to posterity. Surely one owes as much to the current generation as to one's unwanted children. What a fate--to grow rotund and unseemly, to lose my self-love, to think in terms of milk, oatmeal, nurse, diapers.... Dear dream children, how much more beautiful you are, dazzling little creatures who flutter (all dream children must flutter) on golden, golden wings---"Such children, however, poor dear babies, have little in common with the wedded state.