There are heraldic worlds of spiritual and emotional aristocracy which have nothing to do with conventional morality, which give to certain acts a quality of noblesse oblige, a faithfulness to the highest capacities of a personality, a sort of life on the altitudes, a devotion to the idealized self. The artists who had overthrown conventions submitted to this code and knew the sadness and guilt which came from any failing in this voluntary standard. All of them suffered at times from a guilt resembling the guilt of the religious, the moralists, the bourgeois, while apparently living in opposition to them. It was the incurable guilt of the idealist seeking to reach an image of one's self one could be proud of.

They had merely created fraternities, duties, communal taboos of another sort, but to which they adhered at the cost of great personal sacrifices.

Djuna did not know how this good self had attained such prominence. She did not know how it had come to be born at all, for she considered it thrust upon her, not adopted by her. She felt much less good than she was expected to be. It gave her a feeling of treachery, of deception.

She did not have the courage to say: I would rather not see Zora, not know your other life. I would rather retain my illusion of a single love.

In childhood she remembered she played dangerous games. She sought adventures and difficulties. She fabricated paper wings and threw herself out of a second-story window, escaping injury by a miracle. She did not want to be the sweet and gentle heroine in charades and games, but the dark queen of intrigue. She preferred Catherine de' Medici to the flavorless and innocent princesses.

She was often tangled in her own high rebellions, in her devastating bad tempers, and in lies.

But her parents repeated obsessionally: You must be good. You must keep your dress clean. You must be kind, thank the lady, hide your pain if you fall, do not reach for anything you want, do not attract attention to yourself, do not be vain about the ribbon in your hair, efface yourself, be silent and modest, give up to your brothers the games they want, curb your temper, do not talk too much, do not invent stories about things which never happened, be good or else you will not be loved. And when she was accused of any of these offenses, both parents turned away from her and she was denied the good-night or good-morning kiss which was essential to her happiness. Her mother carried out her threats of loss into games which seemed like tragedies to Djuna the child: once swimming in a lake before Djuna's anxious eyes, she had pretended to disappear and be drowned. When she reappeared on the surface Djuna was already hysterical. Another time, in a vast railroad station, when Djuna was six years old, the mother hid behind a column and Djuna found herself alone in the crowd, lost, and again she wept hysterically.