She was a woman-child, but she was daughter of all women, as her mother before her, and she was the mother of all women to come after her.  She was Sar, the corn-goddess.  She was Isthar who conquered death.  She was Sheba and Cleopatra; she was Esther and Herodias.  She was Mary the Madonna, and Mary the Magdalene, and Mary the sister of Martha, also she was Martha.  And she was Brunnhilde and Guinevere, Iseult and Juliet, Heloise and Nicolette.  Yes, and she was Eve, she was Lilith, she was Astarte.  She was eleven years old, and she was all women that had been, all women to be.

I sit in my cell now, while the flies hum in the drowsy summer afternoon, and I know that my time is short.  Soon they will apparel me in the shirt without a collar. . . .  But hush, my heart.  The spirit is immortal.  After the dark I shall live again, and there will be women.  The future holds the little women for me in the lives I am yet to live.  And though the stars drift, and the heavens lie, ever remains woman, resplendent, eternal, the one woman, as I, under all my masquerades and misadventures, am the one man, her mate.

CHAPTER XXII

My time grows very short.  All the manuscript I have written is safely smuggled out of the prison.  There is a man I can trust who will see that it is published.  No longer am I in Murderers Row.  I am writing these lines in the death cell, and the death-watch is set on me.  Night and day is this death-watch on me, and its paradoxical function is to see that I do not die.  I must be kept alive for the hanging, or else will the public be cheated, the law blackened, and a mark of demerit placed against the time-serving warden who runs this prison and one of whose duties is to see that his condemned ones are duly and properly hanged.  Often I marvel at the strange way some men make their livings.

This shall be my last writing.  To-morrow morning the hour is set.  The governor has declined to pardon or reprieve, despite the fact that the Anti-Capital-Punishment League has raised quite a stir in California.  The reporters are gathered like so many buzzards.  I have seen them all.  They are queer young fellows, most of them, and most queer is it that they will thus earn bread and butter, cocktails and tobacco, room-rent, and, if they are married, shoes and schoolbooks for their children, by witnessing the execution of Professor Darrell Standing, and by describing for the public how Professor Darrell Standing died at the end of a rope.  Ah, well, they will be sicker than I at the end of the affair.

As I sit here and muse on it all, the footfalls of the death-watch going up and down outside my cage, the man’s suspicious eyes ever peering in on me, almost I weary of eternal recurrence.  I have lived so many lives.  I weary of the endless struggle and pain and catastrophe that come to those who sit in the high places, tread the shining ways, and wander among the stars.