The latter portion of Pearl’s second diary closes with a cluster of entries dated from February until June for an unknown year. Thereafter is a smattering of monthly entries.

     “No sadder or lonelier day ever passed over my old head,” Pearl wrote on February 7. “It will long be remembered by me. I never have hardly suffered as I did to day. My very heart was breaking. My yearning for what I knew not.”

     Pearl was obviously inspired to write by some misfortune, although she never specified the source of her troubles.

     “Oh God, what I suffered last night,” she continued the following day. “I cried till I couldn’t cry. No one seemed to notice my sorrow. Physical pain would be better than this some times.”

     Pearl’s happiness was at an all time low.

     “If I could have courage to go through with what I think of doing so often,” she wrote. “It’s a terrible thing to think of doing but I can’t. That would be far better than to suffer for maybe years on this old world of pain and woe. Lord help me to overcome my weakness of courage. Make me, dear Jesus, have something to want to live for. Oh Lord, help me to bear my troubles.”

     It seems, based on the above entry, that Pearl was perhaps contemplating suicide at that point in her life.

     “What a storm is brewing,” she wrote later in February. “The wind is roaring in the trees on top of the hill. The storm is on. The rain is pouring but the tempest out side is not much greater than the tempest in my breast. The storm is over. It is the beginning and ending of everything. Now, if I could only walk, my cup of happiness would be running over.”

     “Oh, the troubled sleep I had last night,” she wrote the following day, on a Wednesday. “The snow is falling so fast and the ground is covered every where. The beautiful snow. This reminded me of a day some years ago, those short fleeing years for me. I was just a kid then and with a kid’s thoughts my future was beautifully paved then but that was short lived.”

     “Today I was sitting alone in the kitchen by the stove with the odor of soup beans going up my nose,” Pearl next wrote in an undated entry. “Mama’s voice floats in on my hearing, singing ‘Shady Grove’ to the baby. Cora is over at Inez’s in bed a groaning with her side. Marg’s wanting a new hat. All of these things is passing through my jumbled up brain. I only wish my good old Friend would come for a talk to me so much. I can’t think.”

     In August 1925, Pearl’s diary resumed, at first with a small upbeat entry.

     “Pearl and I all alone talking our secrets,” wrote sister-in-law Inez Adkins on the evening of August 3. “Best friends on earth.”

     Following this happy note, Pearl’s writings turned depressingly morbid.

     “My last request,” she wrote on August 14. “I don’t feel that I shall be here so very long at the longest. Friends or relatives, when I die, I want to be buried anywhere where the rest of the family is buried. I want a white casket (a coffin will do). Cover it with white satin if you can’t get white. Any other nice white good will do but I would rather have it satin. I want a white shadow lace dress with a narrow white ribbon — not more than four of them. I want a light blue princess slip. If you can’t get the lace dress, get a georgetta crepe. If you can’t get crepe, get white satin. Put two rows of lace up the front and small bows of ribbon up the front too, or you can have streamers at the neck. Get them as near as you can if you are able to buy them. Buy what I said. Buy as near to it as you can. Comb my hair like I wear it in life. Powder me first a little bit. Remember Pearl.”

     Then came one of the more powerful entries in the entire diary.

     “No, there is not the slightest hope I shall ever be any better than I am now. It is not a pleasant prospect. It is just the thought of it at times that makes me worse. There is days and weeks at a time I don’t want to see any one. My sister tells me it is more my temper than my misfortune that afflicts me and perhaps she is right. I hate people because they expect me to see a blessing direct from God. In fact I am nothing more than a miserable clod on the face of the earth. I wish I could have a house all to myself where I could do as I please. None of them don’t seem to understand me or my way and I need some one to stay with me that could really understand me.”

     “We could live an ideal existence,” Pearl continued, shifting the direction of her thoughts toward the object of her affections. “Nothing would please me better. I am sort of death’s head at home. I’m nothing but an annoyance and a burden to mother. I expect they would be glad if I could make a change like that. I could never be with out you. I don’t know how I ever did get along with out you as long as I did. It seems to me my life must have been cruelly empty. I love you very dearly — you have done more for me than talked with me. I think you have very near saved my soul for I was becoming very hard and bitter when you came. God has surely sent us to each other. You must think that my deformety is all I have to bear.”

     “When God made the cripple he made the mistake of implanting in the poor deformed breast a heart like that which other people have — a heart to love,” Pearl wrote. “Hush, that is something that ought to be buried as deeply from sight as the heart itself. I am a fool to even give it a breath of air to feed upon. Does one think there is no design in that? Do you believe that I shut myself in these four walls because I despise all the world for its strength and beauty? I am not quite as bad as that. Perhaps it is my physical condition that makes me so very weak…; but I can not endure to look upon his face, to hear him speak in his kindly tone to me to know that the only feeling in his soul is pity; and but for that I should be less to him than the very dirt beneath his feet. Oh God! Do you think there is nothing in such suffering as mine? Can you see no further into it than the mere pain that rocks my wretched body? I can tell you it is ghostly. I cannot bear even to look into his face because I know that I shall see there the pitying smile that has grown hideous to me. To know that it can never be different! That I must be like an accursed log until I die, arousing nothing more than pity in the breast of any one. I should at least have the memories of the past — happiness to feed my empty heart. I could look back and say, ‘I was happy then.’ Oh it would be so much! So much! My life.”