line and with absolutely distorted points of view. How aggravating. I
feel that in due time I may get to see something clearly (at least
thus far, if I do not see things clearly, I have not been pleased to
see any other way), and I am craving a means of giving out. You will
say I need the persistence to educate myself in the technique of some
mode of rendering my impressions. I suppose it is so. That is what I
have always meant with this desire to 'exhaust' myself. I need to
work. I need to give out or I shall have such a mental indigestion
that I shall no longer be able to form a single thought. As it is, so
many things are fleeting through me in incompleteness, in mere
suggestion and so simultaneously at that, that I am bewildered. O,
for complete cessation of consciousness, since this consciousness is
but that of an amalgamation quantity of incomprehensible suggestions,
or else, for a vent for some of this shapeless, immature acquisition,
so that something at least can complete itself."

Was this just a disturbance of youth, of any youth, not completely
empty-headed, frivolous or superficial, or was this the result of a
distinct inheritance of two very different and opposing
personalities, of so different nationalities and with an addition of
even tartar blood? I don't know. The fact remains that she was
constantly emotionally disturbed and constantly seeking the answers
of life, that so many have done and so few have found.

In the same year, not long before her mother died, she wrote from
Narragansett Pier 1898:

"I am very much puzzled still on individuality, that is, on its
everlasting existence. I do not see at all how it can be, but I am
waiting. Perhaps I can see soon. I have been trying to get a
definition for art and for beauty. I have nothing that satisfies me
yet. Art and beauty: I do not connect them at all in my mind. Art
is based on significance first and this does not depend on beauty.
Beauty is much more difficult to define than art. We have somehow
got the idea that only the beautiful pleases. Can beautiful be
applied to whatever pleases? I don't think so. Beauty is
truthfulness of what? Of the original intention I suppose. Is
beautiful something or is it not? Anyway I detach it from that which
pleases. If beauty is something distinct that which pleases is not
always beautiful. Is beauty independent of taste? It is so hard to
think out. However, I never think anything without knowing it, and I
kn