Letter XVIII

Dearest: Not having had a letter from you this morning, I have read over
some back ones, and find in one a bidding which I have never fulfilled, to
tell you what I do all day. Was that to avoid the too great length of my
telling you what I think? Yet you get more of me this way than that.
What I do is every day so much the same: while what I think is always
different. However, since you want a woman of action rather than of brain,
here I start telling you.

I wake punctual and hungry at the sound of Nan-nan's drawing of the
blinds: wait till she is gone (the old darling potters and tattles: it
is her most possessive moment of me in the day, except when I sham
headaches, and let her put me to bed); then I have my hand under my
pillow and draw out your last for a reading that has lost count whether
it is the twenty-second or the fifty-second time;--discover new beauties
in it, and run to the glass to discover new beauties in myself,--find
them; Benjy comes up with the post's latest, and behold, my day is
begun!

Is that the sort of thing you want to know? My days are without an
action worth naming: I only think swelling thoughts, and write some of
them: if ever I do anything worth telling, be sure I run a pen-and-ink
race to tell you. No, it is man who does things; a woman only diddles
(to adapt a word of diminutive sound for the occasion), unless, good,
fortunate, independent thing, she works for her own living: and that is
not me!