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264 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 1928
I sport a changing countenance. I am all things to men, and all women's woman. At one moment I am a young and tender girl, with close-held legs, and light bones becoming used to the still, sweet pain that is a girl's flesh, metaphorically speaking, of course. At other times this face, is it not a dowager's? Sometimes I am a whore in ruffled petticoat, playing madly at a pack of ruffians, and getting thrippence for my pains; a smartly boxed ear, or, a bottom-tingling clap a-hind. Yet again, I am a man-with-a-trowel, digging at the edge of my life for the tangible substance of recreation; and once I was a bird who flew down my own throat, twanging at the heart chord, to get the pitch of my own mate-call. And once I was a deer stalking myself, and it was then (I know well the hour when I called myself a dyspeptic), for my son's good, that I thought up a name that would keep him in stomach and make him definitely a child of destiny, giving him, in place of your gift to me (which was a too gentle, twofold, many-sided instability), the appellation of 'Cock o' the Walk' or ***.
Writing fiction, she was a woman applying lipstick again and again to the same place, varying the hue or the emphasis, the shape and size, but larding it on thick whenever she got the chance.