The psychology of antipathy, if you ask me, is far and away the most subtle and potent branch of all psychology. And in the average mind it's the last and least to be marked and digested. We're far from recognizing that it's the things we don't like, not the things we like, that make up our temperaments. Our personalities and individualities are founded on our hatreds and not on our loves. When you say, "I'm fond of apricots," you're revealing much less of your nature than when you say, "I hate rice pudding." The antipathy is the stronger quality, the combative one - the other is the going with the current. The victorious achievements of the world were conceived and born of dislikes, disagreements, and discontents. The effects of our hatreds on other persons and the effects of other persons' hatreds on us are what set wheels turning and machinery moving in this mooted scheme of things. One might name a thousand instances of that, of a thousand different adaptations, but all to the same purpose. The one which comes to my mind at the moment is this: About thirteen years ago, when I and my family lived over in Great Falls, my sister and I were at the carping half-grown age when sisters, with any spirit in their veins and brains in their heads, some days quarrel long and bitterly for hours over points of the utmost unimportance. My sister and I quarreled with unusual ferocity and tenacity, times - partly because she had more than ordinary brains and imagination, with spit-firey tendencies as well, and partly because I had, at thirteen or thereabouts, what is commonly known as the very-devil-of-a-temper and a contrary self-will which nothing in the world, short of a heavy charge of giant powder - which never was tried on it - could quell. Add to this that we had to wash dishes together three times a day, during those periods between the leaving of one greasy hired girl (all hired girls seem to have been greasy in Great Falls) and the coming of another - and you have more than sufficient data to pre-suppose many a Brutus-and-Cassius tent scene. My sister has since remarked of us that we were "easily dissatisfied." There was one period when for all of eight months no be-greased slave reigned in our kitchen, and during that time it seemed to us that we washed at least a million dishes. We wished a great many things in those days, but chief among them all was the deep desire that our family might go back to a state of Primeval Man, where dishes were not. We agreed on no other point in life where it was possible to disagree, but over dish-washing our feelings were entirely mutual. My sister washed them and I wiped them - a rule which never varied, a sort of unwritten law. Now the point I wish to make is this: On days when we were friends and pals, and tempers were in a quiescent state, and all was serene, we would go into the kitchen after dinner, at about seven in the evening, to begin on the dinner dishes, and we would amble and linger and dally and wander-at-will through our dish-washing, with the utmost nonchalance and abandon. While we washed and wiped we beguiled the time by ripping our friends up the back, in making very indifferent puns, to each of which we paid the tribute of the wild and spontaneous ha-ha, and in singing (with voices more to be pitied than scorned) the deadly popular songs of the day. My sister would warble at me "Two little girls in blue - one was forty before the flood, the other was forty-two," and I would retaliate with, "But I'd rather have the Bowery - Bow-e-ry." Or she would gaily chant, "There's a name that's never spoken, there's a something's heart that's broken, and a picture that is turned toward the wall," and I would trill out in my turn - "Knows the secret, knows it well, but yet I dare not tell, Sweet Mah-ree." After which we would try to sing each other down in one terrific rousing chorus, she with the "Wild Man from Borneo" and I with "Her Golden Hair was Hanging Down Her Back," like the Cherry Sisters singing down an orchestra. (My sister and I might have made a hit in vaudeville at that time, could we but have known it - "The Dishmop Sisters in Their Refined Singing Skit" - something like that.) The consequence of all which was that eight, nine, ten, and sometimes eleven o'clock came, and went, and we were still washing and wiping and driving dull care away in the kitchen with "Girls, quit that nonsense and get through there," or "Whatever in the world are those crazy things about in there," coming ever and anon through the swinging doors. But on the other hand, on days when coldly hated each other, we would begin our dinner dishes at seven o'clock and would go through with them in fifteen minutes. There was no dallying, no sounds of song, pun, backbiting, and revelry. We would quarrel in short, sharp staccato, the while washing and wiping with the passionate quickness of heated tempers. My sister would wash a cup or a plate with lightning rapidity, and I would snatch it up and wipe it almost before 'twas set down. I have seen a stream of saucers slip out of her hands and into mine almost without a pause, and forks and spoons and knives were literally caught and wiped on the fly. And I recollect how she would sort of push the tin pans at me, in a way that was in itself an insult, and I would jerk the them from her in a manner that was another. But the crux of the matter was: we would do up those dishes in fifteen minutes. And it demonstrates my point. Lovingkindness made for dawdling and dalliance - hatred made for strength and achievement.

And it's ever thus. Five or six years later I, for one, became a young monument of discontent - I hated everything around me. And out of that mental condition I achieved an audacious and original bit of literary success, which meant a lot of money, a wealth of experience, and an entire and absolute change of the face of all my world. Had it not been for the hatreds and malcontents it never would have been.

Which brings me back to what I at first said and will maintain, that our individualities are founded on our hatreds and not on our loves. Which in its turn brings me back to the subject of the Litany in the red Mary-MacLane book. Next to the Tooth-brush chapter, I believe the Litany received the most comment and acclaim. I was portraying a personality in all the chapters, but the Litany, since it chronicled my dislikes, was a nearer view of it than any of the others. I use the Devil but as a makeshift in the following present-day Litany, and because I used him in the first one. The Devil served his turn very well in the book, but he has since mostly outlived his usefulness with me. He was a sort of shadowy love of mine at nineteen - but having since had a young succession of real ones, the Devil's hopelessly outclassed. But to our muttons: First of all, from cockroaches, beyond all things (except one which I can't mention, because the News has to go through the mails - but all my friends know it, anyway): Kind Devil, deliver me.

From union-suits; from red ink; from a black satin petticoat; from the kind of man who calls me cold-blooded because I refuse to sit holding hands with him after I've known him just four minutes; from the people with hankerings for "culture;" from spinach and dandelion greens with sand in them; from incorrect grammar; from the flat Western pronunciation of the letter "a;" from reckless rhetoric; from the hideous and disgusting old foul humor of Rabelais; from a bed or a cocoa nut cake that sinks in the middle; from human beings with malice and cruelty of heart in them: Kind Devil, deliver me.

From scarlet fever; from people who do their thinking on the outside of their heads; from slap-stick comedians; from bent pins and unsharpened lead-pencils; from pikers and hedgers; from a cocktail made with Italian vermouth; from bed-fellows who eat cookies; from cross-eyed butchers; from false teeth, tape-worms, floating kidneys and glass eyes; from the odor of a dead rat behind a wainscoting: Kind Devil, deliver me.

From the feeling of blotting-paper on my finger-tips; from the sound and look of anyone else's finger-tips rubbing across rough paper; from the feeling of a cotton sheet on the tip of my tongue; from the feeling of granulated sugar in the palm of my hand; from the feeling of a bit of card-board against my teeth; from the feeling of a woolen string in the center of my neck; from the feeling of a Wilton carpet on the sole of my foot; from all feelings which horrify the exquisite nerves of me: Kind Devil, deliver me.

From fat men; from a fish in a platter that has been dead o'er long; from the dressmakers mentioned in my first Litany; from short-hipped corsets; from nice young men; from time-pieces that do not record the time; from women who entirely lack virtue and reserve; from women who are all-too virtuous; from cotton stockings; from intoxicated, soused, inebriated, pickled, and drunk men; from songs with monkeys in them; from tight-wads; from perfumed soap; from very curly hair: Kind Devil, deliver me.

From bed-rooms in Atlantic City and Saratoga hotels with too-thin walls; from men I don't care about who insist on kissing me good-night; from a cake flavored with benzine in mistake for rose-water; from easter eggs; from photographs of corpses with their eyes pushed open; from a pillow-slip too tight for its pillow; from a pie with a sodden under-crust; from jealousy which takes the form of tears, poisoned candy, reproach, and dirk-knives; from Turks; from half-baked poets: Kind Devil, deliver me.

From butter-scotch that taste of onions; from cake and people that are cloyingly sweet; from postage stamps with no gum on them; from dainty men; from embarrassing loves; from technical chewers of technical rags; from treachery in the guise of friendship; from the dawn of day before the night is over; from loosely-rolled cigarettes; from a cheap sport: Kind Devil, deliver me.

From cads, bounders, and men who whine; from waiting at an appointed place for a fascinating friend who is late; from things that are plain vulgar; from tiresome affections; from a dusty bedroom; from people who tell me the unpleasant things they hear said about me; from the gnawing pangs of hunger; from high hopes which come to nothing: Kind Devil, deliver me.

From faded violets, from faded orchids and faded daffodils; from the scene of a night's dissipation in the pale morning light; from visions of death among scenes of youth and gaiety; from the ashes of burnt-out fires; from the letters of friends lost and gone and fled away in the gloom; from the shadows of memory; from the ghosts of dead loves; from the lies which once were truth; from the always tragic slips 'twixt the cup and the lip: Kind Devil, deliver me.

From the corrodent, battering, destroying effects of too much emotion upon my slim young body; from the murderous, tormenting effects of grief and loneliness upon my over-wrought nerves; from a revealing of sorrows in my two gray eyes, and of mournfulness in the droop of my two lips; from the least look of resignation and defeat in the inert clasping-together of my hands; from all untoward and bitter things, and the look of them: Kind Devil, deliver me.

From delicate incongruities; from a hat that's been rained on; from a stove that smokes; from a mongrel puppy; from finger-nails too much manicured and finger-nails not manicured enough; from a large, deep, passionate dried-apple pudding; from tooth-brushes in the nude, from a wrinkled skirt; from a newly-prisoned bird; from a cab-driver in the throes of any emotion; from the evidences of a wife and children in a head-waiter; from the tenor in a male quartet; from silver dollars: Kind Devil, deliver me.

From beggar women with dirty faces; from a cape which obviously was plucked from an ash-barrel; from spongy radishes; from mangy muffs; from petty small-minded men; from men who have the unparalleled presumption to hand me advice; from the fuzzy dust that is under a bed; from New York janitors; from the odor of yesterday's cigarettes; from the lingering kiss of one who has been eating garlic; from people who've been hastily put together: Kind Devil, deliver me.

From a slippery bath tub; from Canadian coffee; from a strawberry short-cake with broken glass in it; from an impossible kind of young woman whose specialties are German philosophers, malice, lies, and gossip; from people whose limitations are too obvious; from a newsboy whose logic is that of a decadent hen; from young Italian champagne; from physical discomfort: Kind Devil, deliver me.

From a telephone bell which drags me out of bed at ten in the morning; from the men who are so sure of my moral calibre; from type-writers; from the odor of burning rubber, burning feathers, burning whalebone, and burning bird-seed; from wall-paper with spidery patterns; from false teeth in a glass of water; from people who are prejudiced against the Irish; from June-bugs; from the losing of cherished trinkets: Kind Devil, deliver me.

From the accumulated books which I stole in my youth from Sunday-school libraries; from owing anybody four dollars; from being reminded of letters I haven't answered; from having my fays too much occupied to find time to revel in the fascinations of my own thoughts; from the loss of my youth: Kind Devil, deliver me.

From the astonishing assumptions of people anent me, my home life, my family, and my relationships toward my friends; from newspaper writers in the East who are so sure I hate Butte; from the peculiar likenesses of myself that I find in Duluth, Los Angeles, New Orleans, and Denver publications; from press-clipping bureaus: Kind Devil, deliver me.

From the growing cold of love; from the passing away of friendship; from the dying of "The Flower that once has bloomed;" and again, last of all, from cockroaches: Kind Devil, deliver me.

There may be other antipathies in my makeup - but if there are, they're but few. I don't dislike nearly so many things in this adorable world as I did in the crude young scorn of nineteen, and, at that, with not the same headlong intensity. Yet the foregoing antipathies are extremely real to me and some of them, times, have caused me exquisite agony. Never a pleasure in my life has so wrought upon those cruelly sensitive strings, my nerves, with an alternative pitch of madding joy to match the anguished quiver I have felt at the sudden happening on one of my aversions.

And I am not peculiar in it. We are all made that way, but almost nobody ever analyses it. The coming of a new Affair of the Heart, in all its fascinating intricacies and cross-purposes and subtle delights, brings not one-tenth the emotions of pleasure which the same Affair, when lying withered and dead before us, brings of bitterness and desolation and heartbreak. And let nobody say the detailed antipathies are trifles. Believe me. There is sufficient power in my hatred of cockroaches to change the currents of my being and the tenor of my life. There are sufficient punishments in a day's business, for me, to make up, with usury, for all the forbidden fruits I have ever nibbled. And I must pay, heavily, even for the things which themselves punish me. The things I love and the things I hate - their effects, their battering, searing effects, upon my slim young body are all the same. So it's why, then, to ever refrain - from the Cup, for instance, which clears today of regrets and makes the lowering future to seem to bloom like a golden rose?

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