"Of course not, Johnnie ... I think Darrie offered very good advice," she sighed.

Back we turned, by the next day's train, full of a sense of frustration; what an involved, unromantic, practical world we lived in!

* * * * *

Hildreth heaved a sigh of content as we walked into her mother's flat again. Her mother was still at Eden ... alone ... taking care of Daniel, for whom she had a great love.

We had Darrie over the telephone, and soon she was with us, giving us the latest news of the uproar.

The papers were at us pro and con, mostly con.

Dorothy Dix had written a nasty attack on me, saying that I was climbing to fame over a woman's prostrate body ... that, in my own West, instead of a judge and a divorce court, a shotgun Would have presided in my case....

The Globe was running a forum, suddenly stopped, as to whether people of genius and artistic temperament should be allowed more latitude than ordinary folk....

As Hildreth and I rode down Broadway together, side by side, unrecognised, on a street car, we saw plastered everywhere, "Stop That Affinity Hunt," a play of that name to be shown at Maxime Elliott's Theatre....

I must admit that I was pleased with the sudden notoriety that had come to me ... years of writing poetry had made my name known but moderately, here and there ... but having run away with a famous man's wife, my name was cabled everywhere ... even appeared in Japanese, Russian, and Chinese newspapers....

* * * * *

But this was not what I wanted of the papers ... I must use this space offered me to propagandise my ideas of free love....

So I arranged to meet Penton privately in the lobby of the Martinique.

* * * * *

Hildreth and I were there, waiting, before Penton came the next day. Appearing, he wore the old, bland, childlike smile, and he shook hands with us as if nothing untoward had ever taken place.

Someone had tipped off the reporters and they were on time, too, crowding about us eagerly. One young fellow from the Sun, looking like a graduate from a school of divinity, asked a special interview of me alone, which I gave ... afterward ... in a corner.

That Sun reporter gave me the fairest deal I ever received. He talked with me over an hour, without ever setting pencil to paper ... the other interviews were long over, Penton had left, Hildreth sat chafing....

"Come over and join us, Hildreth."

She sat listening in silence while I continued rehearsing all my ideas on marriage, love, divorce ... how love should be all ... how there should, ideally, be no marriage ceremony ... but if any at all, only after the first child had been born ... how the state should have nothing to do with the private love-relations of the individual....

The reporter from the Sun shook hands good-bye.

"But you haven't taken a single note!" I protested.

"I have it all here, in my head."

"But how can you report me accurately?"

"See to-morrow's Sun."

* * * * *

The interview with me was a marvel in two ways: it represented to a hair's breadth everything I had pronounced, transmuted into the reporter's own style of writing ... it curtailed my conversation where I had repeated myself or wandered off into trivial detail.

* * * * *

"I wonder what they'll say back in Kansas!" I had exclaimed to Hildreth, in the hearing of the reporters.

"Oh, bother Kansas!" replied Hildreth humorously.

For a month "I wonder what they'll say back in Kansas" was a catch-word for Broadway and the town.

When the Evening Journal put us in their "Dingbat Family" I enjoyed the humour of it. But Hildreth was angry and aggrieved.

"You and Penton," remarked she, "for men of culture and sensibility, have bigger blind spots than ordinary in your make-up. Why, Johnnie, I believe you enjoy the comic pictures about this business!...

"The only way to conduct propaganda for a cause is through the dignified medium of books, I am rapidly becoming convinced—not through newspaper interviews; which, when they are not silly, are insulting."

* * * * *

Baxter's lawyer soon put a stop to our public amicability ... "collusion," he warned Penton; "they'll call it collusion and you won't get your final decree."

Tad drew cartoons of us ... a cluster of them ... "Silk Hat Harry's Divorce Suit" ... with dogs' heads on all of us ... Hildreth, with the head of a hound dog, long hound-ears flopping, with black jade ear-rings in them ... Penton, a woe-begone little pug....

A box car loomed in the centre of the main picture, "The Affinity Nest of the Hobo Poet," I think it was legended ... then I was drawn standing, one leg crossed over the other, the peak of the toe jauntily resting on the ground, hand-in-breast like an old-fashioned picture. There was a tin can thrown over the shoulder of the tattered bulldog that represented me ... one of my ears went through my hat ... beneath, a rhyme ran:

"I am the hobo poet, I lead a merry life: One day I woo the Muse, the next, Another fellow's wife!"

* * * * *

I brought this up to the cottage we had now procured, down in West Grove, N.J., where we had gone finally to escape the city, and the swarm of reporters that seemed never to cease pursuing us ... for, when we found out that they did not want propaganda, we sought to hide away from them....

Hildreth had been rather gloomy at breakfast that morning, and I thought she would join in a laugh with me over Tad's horse-play. There is a streak in me that makes me enjoy the grotesque slap-stick of the comic artists.

When Hildreth saw the cartoons, she laughed a little, at first; then she wept violently.

Then she wrote a savage letter to Tad, letting him know what she thought of his vulgarity.

* * * * *

"There is one thing in you which I shall never quite compass; with my understanding," she almost moaned, "you express the most exquisite thoughts in the loveliest language ... you enter into the very soul of beauty ... and then you come out with some bit of horse-play, some grotesquerie of speech or action that spoils it all."

Nevertheless, it was the humanness in me that brought all the reporters who came to interview us to sympathise with Hildreth and me, instead of with Penton.

* * * * *

Yes, we had found our dream-cottage ... back in the lovely pines, near West Grove. At a nominal sum of fifteen dollars a month; the actress who owned it, sympathising with our fight, had rented it to me for the fall and winter ... if we could stand the bitter cold in a summer cottage....

There Hildreth stayed, seemingly alone, with Darrie, who had come down to chaperon her. To the reporters who sought her out when her place of retreat became known, she averred that she had no idea of my whereabouts. In the meantime, under the name of Mallory, I was living near by, was renting a room in the house of a Mrs. Rond, whose husband was an artist.

I came and went to and from my cottage by a bye-path through the pines that led to the back door.

Darrie, as we called her, performed the most difficult task of all—the task of remaining friends to all parties concerned.

The strain was beginning to tell on Penton. A strange, new, unsuspected thing was welling up in his heart, Darrie averred ... his love for his repudiated wife was reviving so strongly that now he dared not see her, it would hurt him too deeply....

His friends, the Stotesburies, a wealthy radical couple, had let him have a cottage of theirs up in Connecticut, and he was staying in it all by himself, doing his own cooking and hurrying with a new book in order to get enough money to defray the enormous expenses he had incurred by initiating and prosecuting his divorce suit....

And now Daniel joined us. Daniel and I agreed with each other famously. For he liked me. He took walks with me, and we went bathing together after I had done my morning's writing. We crabbed in the Manasquan River, and fished.

Once, when I was galloping along the road in imitation of a horse, with him perched on my shoulders—

"Say, Johnnie, I like you ... I won't call you buzzer any more!"

"I like you, too, Daniel, but don't squeeze me so hard about the neck ... it's choking my wind off."

* * * * *

That was a happy month ... that month of fine, fairly warm fall weather that Darrie, Hildreth, Daniel and I spent together in the little cottage back in the woods, secluded from the road.

The newspapers had begun to let up on us a little. It had grown a bit galling and monotonous, the continual misrepresentations of ourselves and what Hildreth and I were trying to stand for.

* * * * *

Now that I was playing the conventional game of evasion and hypocritic subterfuge, holding a nominal lodging at Mrs. Rond's as one Mr. Arthur Mallory, and explaining my being seen with Mrs. Baxter by the statement that I was a writer sent down by a publishing house for the purpose of helping her with a book she was engaged in writing—

Though everybody knew well who I was, it assuaged the American passion for outward "respectability," and we were left, comparatively speaking, alone to do as we wished....

* * * * *

Hildreth was a spoiled, willful little rogue ... once or twice she tried a "soul-state" on me....

Walking through the pines one day, suddenly she sat down in her tracks, began crying, and affirmed in a tragic voice, that she couldn't stand the strain of what she had been through any longer, that she believed she was going crazy.

I immediately plumped down on all fours and began running up and down through the crashing underbrush, growling and making a great racket. Startled, intrigued, she watched me.

"Johnnie, don't be such a damn fool! What are you doing?"

"I'm going crazy, too, I'm suffering the hallucination that I'm a big brown bear, and you're so sweet that I'm going to eat you all up."

I ran at her. She leaped up, pealing laughter. I began biting at her ankles ... at the calves of her legs ... "oof! oof! I'm going crazy too!" She squealed, delighted, her mind taken off her troubles ... she struck me on the head with her open hands, to keep me off ... I bowled her over with a swift, upward jump ... I picked her up and carried her off, kissing her.

* * * * *

"My darling big rascal ... my own Johnnie Gregory!" She caught me fondly by the hair, "I can't do anything with you at all!"

Once again, waking me up in the middle of the night:

"Johnnie, I—I have a dreadful impulse, an impulse to hit you ... I just can't help it, Johnnie dear! I must do it!" and she fetched me a very neat blow in the face.

"You don't mind, do you ... having your own little girl hit you?"

Now, poor Penton would have spent the remainder of the night taking this "impulse" and the act which followed it as a serious problem in aesthetics, economics, feminism, and what-not ... and the two would have talked and discussed, their voices sounding and sounding in philosophic disquisition ... and, before the end, Hildreth, persuaded to take the situation seriously and enjoying the morbid attention given her, Hildreth would have gone off several times into hysterics....

My procedure was a different one:

"—of course I don't mind you following your impulses ... you should ... but also I have just as imperative an impulse—now that you suggest it—to hit you."

And I was not chary of the vigorous blows I dealt her, a tattoo of them on her back....

"Why, Johnnie," she gasped, "you—hit—me!" and her big eyes, wide with hurt, filled with tears. And she cried a little....

"There, there, dear!" I soothed. Then, with a solemn look in my face, "I couldn't resist my impulse, either."

"You mustn't do that any more, Johnnie ... but,—you must let me hit you whenever I want to."

But she never had that "impulse" again.

* * * * *

But, though we romped a lot, Darrie, Hildreth, Daniel, and I,—and though Hildreth called me her "Bearcat" (the only thing she took from the papers, whose title for me was "The Kansas Bearcat") don't think that this made up all our life in our cottage....

In the morning, after breakfast, which Daniel and I usually ate together alone, we being the early risers of the household—I repaired to the large attic and wrote on my play. Then frequently I read and studied till four, keeping up my Latin and Greek and German, and my other studies.

Darrie also wrote and studied in her room.... Daniel led the normal life of the happy American boy, going where the other boys were, and playing with them—when he and I didn't go off, as I have said, for the afternoon, together, crabbing and fishing.

Hildreth, of course, was working hard at her book—a novel of radical love....

After four was strolling time, for all of us ... along the river, by the ocean beach, further away ... or among the pines that reached up into our very backyard.

When the grocer boy or the butcher boy came, I (for the sake of outward appearances) stepped out of sight, though it irked me, still to resort to subterfuge, when we had launched forth with such a fanfare of publicity....

"Wait till Penton wins the decree, then we can come out into the open and live in a Free Union together—or marry!" Hildreth begged of me ... and I acquiesced, for the time....

* * * * *

Each evening, by the open fire, I read aloud from the poets ... or Darrie or Hildreth did ... happy evenings by fire-light, that shall always live pleasantly in my memory....

We had but few disagreements, and those trifling ones.

Darrie was herself in the midst of a romantic courtship. 'Gene Mallows, the Californian poet, had fallen madly in love with her, having met her during his brief visit to New York....

Every day Darrie received her two, three, even four letters from him, couched in the most beautiful literary phraseology ... and each letter invariably held a sonnet ... and that, too, of an amazingly high standard of poetic excellence, considering the number Mallows was dashing off every day ... many of them were quite lovely with memorable phrase, deft turn of fancy or thought.

* * * * *

Penton recalled Daniel to the city.... Afraid now that the papers might locate him with us....

We had a few warm mid-days of glorious sunshine still, and I often persuaded Darrie and Hildreth to take nude sunbaths with me back of the house ... which we enjoyed on outspread blankets, ever keeping a weather eye for intruders....

As we lay in the sun we read poetry aloud. And I read aloud much of a book that amounted to our Bible, Havelock Ellis's Sex in Its Relation to Society.

I might add, for the sake of the reader who may be prone to misinterpret, that our behaviour was quite innocent, as we lay about in that manner....

* * * * *

Our best friend was the artist's wife, Mrs. Rond ... she was, in her way, herself a character ... the poverty of her family was extreme. She had a numerous menage of daughters; and a horde of cats as pets. Whenever she walked away from her house the cats followed her in a long line, their tails gaily in the air, like little ships sailing.

Mrs. Rond smoked incessantly, rolling her own cigarettes, from packages of Plowboy tobacco....

Her conversation was crisp, nervous, keen. An intellectual woman of the highest type; with all her poverty, she preserved around her an atmosphere of aristocratic fineness (even if she did smoke Plowboy) which bespoke happier days, in an economic and social sense.

She was thoroughly radical, but quiet and unostentatious about it. She looked on me and Hildreth as play-children of the feminist movement.

I think it was the exaggerated maternal instinct in her that moved her to foster and champion Hildreth and me ... an instinct that made her gather in every stray cat she found on the road ... she is the only person I have ever known who could break through the reserve of the cat's nature, and make it as fond and sentimental as a dog is toward its master.

Mrs. Rond knew all the classics, and, in her library, which she never let go, when their economic crash came, were most of the English poets and essayists and novelists from Malory and Chaucer down to William Watson and W.L. George....

She made us welcome at her home. We formed a pleasant group together, the occupants of my little cottage back in the pines, and she, her valitudinarian husband, and her four daughters, the eldest of whom, Editha, was of an exquisite type of frail, fair beauty ... all her daughters had inherited their mother's keen-mindedness ... she had brought them up on the best in the thought, art, and literature of the world....

The relationship between mother and daughters was one more of delightful, understanding comradeship than anything else ... in spite of the fact of Mrs. Rond's over-developed maternal instincts ... a favourite trick of the two youngest daughters being to hide away upstairs and then call out in mock tones of agony, in order to enjoy the sight of their mother, running breathless, up from the kitchen or in from the yard, and up the stairs, pale with premonition of some accident or ill, and crying, "what's the matter? children, what's the matter?"

"Oh, nothing, mother ... we're only playing."

And her relief would be so great that she would forget to scold them for their childlike, unthinking cruelty.

* * * * *

Just before I had left Kansas to come East on my projected trip to Europe, the magazines had begun to buy my poems, the best of them—Now every poem of mine was sent hurriedly back with an accompanying rejection slip.

Yet I was sure that I was writing better than ever before.

Simonds, of the Coming Nation, and the editor of the Kansas City Star were about the only editors who now took my work. I inferred rightly that my notoriety was what was tabooing me. I determined to run up to New York and find out for myself if this was true!

As I rode north along the flashes of sea, marsh, and town, I thought of my little flock that I had left behind for a day, with intense satisfaction and content. They were mine. Hildreth was my woman, Daniel had been my child for the space he was with us. And I held Darrie in friendly tenderness, much as the bourgeois business man holds the supernumerary women of his household, though she was by no means that, nor was she in any way dependent on me....

I was finding it very good to own, to possess, to take root; to be possessed and owned, in turn. I carried an obscure sense of triumph over Baxter.

* * * * *

Darrie, who had been to town the week before, had come back with a report of Penton's unhappiness, his belated acknowledgment that he was still, in spite of his battle against the feeling, deeply in love with his discarded wife. It was not so easy to tear her out of his heart, she had intertwined so deeply there ... eight years with a woman, and one child by her, and affection for her was no easy thing to root up from one's being.

"I sat there a long while with him in Riverside Park," Darrie reported, "it was chilly and he wore an old overcoat because he couldn't afford a new one. His hair was greying at the temples. He looked stooped, aging, frail as if an extra wind might lift him up and carry him away from me....

"He was worried about my having been brought into what he called 'the mess' ... wondered how the papers had not scented 'the other woman' in me, no matter how innocent I was of that appellation.

"He seemed so lonely ... admitted he was so lonely....

"Johnnie, you're both poor, dear innocents, that's what you are—

"But of the two of you, you are the harder, the best equipped to meet the shock of life ... for you will grow wiser, where Penton never will."

"How did Penton speak of me?"

"Splendidly—said he considered that in a way, perhaps, he had worked you a wrong, done an injustice to you."

"Nonsense, the poor little chap!"

"He made me cry, he acted so pathetic ... he seemed like a motherless little boy that needed a woman's love and protection."

"Darrie, why don't you marry him?"

"Now you're trying to do with me as he tried to do with Ruth and you ... marry him ... no ... I'm—I think I'm—in love with 'Gene Mallows."

Penton was pleased to hear, she said, that Daniel and I had got on so nicely together, while he was down at West Grove....

* * * * *

So, as I rode in the dusty, bumping train, my mind reverted to our whole friendship together, and tenderness welled up in my heart for Penton Baxter.

* * * * *

In the office of the New York Independent sat William Hayes Ward, old, bent over, with his triple-lensed glasses behind which his dim, enlarged eyes floated spectrally like those of a lemur.

He greeted me with a mixture of constraint and friendliness.

"Well, my boy, you've certainly got yourself into a mess this time."

"A 'mess,' Dr. Ward?" I interrogated, quoting back to him the word he had used,—with rebuke in my voice.

"How else shall I phrase it?"

"—with the understanding that I expect from an old friend, one who bought my first poems, encouraged my first literary endeavours,—who enheartened and helped me at the inception of my struggle for recognition and fame."

"And now you've won too much of the baser coinage of fame, of a kind that a poet should never have."

"I have a poem with me ... one on the subject of what Christ wrote on the sand—after which he bade the woman go and sin no more ... and he who was without sin should cast the first stone."

Dr. Ward looked over the half-moons of his triple glasses at me ... he reached for the poem and read it.

"Yes, it's a fine poem, with that uniqueness in occasional lines, that occasional touch of power, that marks your worst effusions, Mr. Gregory!... but," paused he, "we do not allow the Woman Taken in Adultery in the columns of the Independent."

"Well," I shot back, pleased with myself at the retort I was making, "well, I'm mighty glad Christ didn't keep her out of the pages of the New Testament, Dr. Ward!"

He barely smiled. He fixed me with a steadfast look of concern.

"Are you still with—with Mrs. Baxter?"

"Yes—since you ask it."

"The sooner you put that woman out of your life the better for you."

"Dr. Ward—one moment!... understand that no woman I love can be spoken of as 'that woman' in my presence—if you were not an old man!—" I faltered, choking with resentment.

"Now, now, my dear boy," he replied very gently, "I am older than you say ... I am a very, very old man ... and I know life—"

"But do you know the woman you speak of?"

"I have met Mrs. Baxter casually with her husband several times." He stopped short. He paused, gave a gesture of acquiescence.

"Oh, come, Mr. Gregory, you're right ... quite right ... I had no right whatever to speak to you as I have—

"But please interpret it as my serious concern over your career as a poet ... it seems such a pity ... you had such a good start."

"You mean?—" I began, and halted.

"Precisely ... I mean that for the next two or three years all the reputable magazines will not dare consider even a masterpiece from your hands."

"In other words, if Shelley were alive to-day and were the same Shelley, he would be presented with a like boycott?"

"If his manner of living came out in the papers—yes."

"And Francois Villon?"

"Undoubtedly."

"I'm in good company then, am I not?"

"You should thank me for being frank with you."

"I do thank you ... that explains why the atmosphere up at the office of the National was as cold as the refrigerator-box of a meat car, when I was up there an hour ago ... but they were not as frank as you ... they acted like a company of undertakers officiating at my funeral."

* * * * *

I was glad to find myself back in my little cottage, that same night—back in my little cottage, and in the arms of the woman who was everything to me, no matter if they said she spelled the ruination of my career.

For any man, I held, and still hold, who lets a woman ruin his career, ought to have it ruined.

I did not tell her of what Dr. Ward had told me. Why cause her unnecessary worry?

* * * * *

After all, the magazine world was not the only medium to present my literary wares to the public. There remained the book world, a less narrow and prejudiced one.

Kennerley had written me that he waited eagerly the completion of my Biblical play.

And Zueblin, of the now defunct Twentieth Century had just sent me a twenty-five dollar check for a poem called Lazarus Speaks.

* * * * *

I brought back with me from New York two books as a present for Hildreth ... Mary Wollstonecraft's A Vindication of the Rights of Woman, and The Life of Mary Wollestonecraft ... these were two books she had long desired. She was thoroughly pleased with her resemblance to the frontispiece picture of the celebrated woman radical, in the Life.

"You possess all her vivacity, all her intelligence ... but you are beautiful where she was plain ... she is like a plainer sister of yours."

* * * * *

While in New York I had also paid a visit to the editor of one of the biggest sensational magazines in the city, and I had arranged with him, acting as Hildreth's agent, for a thousand dollars advance on her unfinished novel. The editor had dictated a letter in which he promised to deliver the thousand on receipt of two-thirds of the book....

Hildreth kissed me again and again when I gave her the letter....

"Johnnie, you really are wonderful ... and quite practical, after all."

* * * * *

"And now, my darling Hildreth, we'll take this old world and shake it into new life, into the vital thing I have dreamed!" I boasted grandiloquently....

"Here in this little sequestered dream-cottage of ours you and I will carry out, popularise, through novels, poems, plays, essays, and treatises, the noble work that Ellis, Key, and Rosa Von Mayerreder, and others, are doing in Europe ... and we ourselves will set the example of true love that fears nothing but the conventional legal slavery."

"It will soon be very cold down here," commented Darrie, irrelevantly, "this is only a summer cottage, and they say—the old settlers—that we are to have a severe winter ... the frost fish are already beginning to come ashore."

* * * * *

It was generally known, sub rosa, that Hildreth and I were living together. But, as long as she pretended it was not so, as long as I lived seemingly in another house, pretending, under another name, to be Mrs. Baxter's literary adviser, the hypocrisy of the world was satisfied.

I was, in other words, following the accepted mode.

It was a nasty little article by a fellow literary craftsman from the Pacific coast, that set me off, brought me to the full realisation that I was but playing the usual, conventional game,—that roused me to the determination that I must no longer sail under false colours.

This writer retailed how, after a brief, disillusioning few weeks together, Hildreth had grown tired of the poverty and spareness of the living a poet was able to make for her ... of how I was lazy, impliedly dirty ... of how, up against realities, we had parted ... I had, he stated, in fact, deserted her, and was now on my way back to Kansas, riding the rods of freights, once more an unsavoury outcast, a knight of the road ... he ended with the implication, if I remember correctly, that the reception that awaited me in Kansas, would be, to say the least, problematical.

Of course this story was made up out of whole cloth.

'Gene Mallows afterward informed me that the big literary club in San Francisco that this hack belonged to had seriously considered disciplining him by expulsion for his unethical behaviour toward a fellow-writer.

* * * * *

But I maintain that it was good that he penned the scurrilous article. For I had allowed happiness to lull my radical conscience asleep. It was now goaded awake. I held a conference with Hildreth.

"There is now only one thing for me to ... to come right out with it that you and I are living here together in a free union, and that the love we bear each other not only justifies, but sanctifies our doing as we do—as no legal or ecclesiastical procedure could....

"That here we are and here we intend to abide, on these principles—no matter what the rest of the world does or says or thinks."

"I admit, Johnnie, that that would be the ideal way, but—" interrupted Darrie—

"But nothing—I'm tired of sneaking around, hiding from grocers and butcher boys, when everybody knows—

"And besides, Hildreth," turning to her, taking her in my arms, kissing her tenderly on the brow—"don't you see what it all means?

"As long as I pretend not to be living with you I'm considered a sly dog that seduced his friend's wife and got away with it ... 'served him right, the husband, for being such a boob!' ... 'rather a clever chap, that Gregory, don't you know, not to be blamed much, eh?' ... 'only human, eh?' ...—'she's a deuced pretty little woman, they say!'

"Can't you see the sly looks, the nudges they give each other, as they gossip in the clubs?"

"Don't let your imagination get the better of you, please don't!" urged Darrie....

"No," I went on, "I'm going to send right now for Jerome Miller, a newspaper lad I knew in Kansas, who's now in New York on a paper, and give him an interview that will set us right with the stupid world once and for all. Miller was a fellow student of mine at Laurel ... he's a fine, square chap who will give me a clean break ... was president of our Scoop Club."

"Darling, darling, dearest," pleaded Hildreth, "I thought you had about enough of the newspapers ... you've seen how they've distorted all our ideals ... how our attempt to use them for propaganda has gone to smash ... how they pervert ... the filth and abuse they heap upon pioneers of thought in any direction—why wake the wild beasts up again?"

"What's the use believing in anything, if we don't stick up for what we believe?"

"Oh, go ahead, dear, if you feel so strongly about it, but—" and her tiny, dark head drooped, "I'm a little wearied ... I want quiet and peace a little while longer ... I'm getting the worst of it—not you so much, or Penton.

"I'm the woman in the case.

"Remember the invitation the other night, from the Congregational minister—for tea? He invited you for tea, you remember, and left me out?"

"—remember, too," I replied fondly, caressing her head, "how I didn't even deign to reply to the —— —— —— ——!"

"Sh!" putting her hand gently and affectionately over my mouth, "don't swear so ... very well, poke the wild beasts again!... but we'll only serve as sport for another Roman holiday for the newspapers."

I wrote Miller to come down, that I had an exclusive interview for him.

He arrived the very night of the day he received my letter.

Darrie stepped out over to the Ronds', not to be herself brought into what she had so far managed to keep out of.

Hildreth consumed the better part of two hours fixing herself up as women do when they want to make an impression....

"Your friend from Kansas must see that you haven't made such a bad choice in picking me," she proclaimed, with that pretty droop of her mouth.

"No, no! be a good boy, don't muss me up now!"

She wore a plain, navy-blue skirt ... wore a white middy blouse with blue, flowing tie ... easy shoes that fitted snug to her pretty little feet ... her eyes never held such depths to them, her face never shone with such beauty before.

I wore a brown sweater vest with pearl buttons ... corduroy trousers ... black oxfords ... a flowing tie....

A large log fire welcomed my former Kansas friend.

"Well, Johnnie, it's been a long time since I've seen you."

"Jerome, let me introduce you to the only woman that ever lived, or shall live, for me ... Hildreth Baxter."

As Hildreth gave Miller her hand, I could see that he liked her, and that he inwardly commented on my good taste and perhaps said to himself, "Well, Johnnie is not so crazy after all!"

After I had given him the interview, he asked her a few questions, but she begged to be left out, that it was my interview.

"Mr. Miller, you are a friend of Johnnie's ... I have often heard him speak highly of you; can't you dissuade him from having this interview printed ... no matter if you have been sent by your paper all the way down here for it?"

Jerome liked what Hildreth had said, admired her for her common sense. He offered to return to the city, and risk his job by stating that he had been hoaxed.

"I will leave you to argue it out with him, Mr. Miller." And Hildreth excused herself and went off down the path to the Ronds' too.

"Johnnie," my friend urged, putting his hand on my shoulder, "your little lady has a lot of sense ... it will kick up a hell of a row ... it's true what you say about them rather approving of you now, some of them, considering you a sly dog and so forth.... Yes, I'm sorry to say, what you're doing, much of the world is doing most of the time."

"I beg your pardon, Jerome, but there you've made my point ... do you think I want a sneaking, clandestine thing kept up between me and the woman I love?"

"Then why not stay apart till the divorce is granted, then marry her like a regular fellow?"

"Damn it, Jerome, you don't understand, you don't get what we radicals are driving at...."

"I'll take a chance with my job and quash this interview—that's how much I like you, Johnnie."

"Oh, I know you mean well enough ... most of you boys have treated me rather well, according to your lights ... it's the damned lead-writers and re-writers and editorial writers—they're the ones that do the damage."

"You want me to go ahead then?"

"Yes, that is the only way."

"It is a big story, a real scoop." Miller was again the newspaper man who had scored a beat on rival newspapers....

"Can't you stay over night, Jerome? We can make room."

"I must catch the next train back ... I'm off now ... there's the taxi I arranged to have come and take me ... it's out there now ... good-bye, Johnny, and God help you and your little girl."

* * * * *

Hildreth came in soon after Miller's departure, looking like a fresh-faced girl of twelve.

"Did—did your friend think I was good-looking?"

"Yes, I am sure he thoroughly approved of you."

"To-morrow another Roman holiday begins."

* * * * *

The result of that interview was worse than I could have surmised. All the batteries opened fire again. The Kansas papers called me "the shameless tramp" ... reporters spilled from autos and rigs all over the front stoop. After giving a few more interviews in the mad hope that this time they would get it straight, I saw that the harvest was even greater abuse and defamation ... and, as Hildreth had predicted, she came in for more than her share of the moral indignation of people who sold that precious ware at so much a line, or were paid salaries for such work....

We practically deserted our house so the reporters could not find us....

Many of the reporters never came near the house. Instead, lurid stories were concocted in the back rooms of nearby roadhouses. And, failing to find us at home, interviews were faked so badly that they verged on the burlesque ... where not vulgar, they were vicious ... words were slipped in that implied things which, expressed clearly, had furnished ample grounds for libel.

Hildreth and I were pictured as living on frost fish almost entirely; the fish that run along the ocean shore, and, growing numb with the cold of autumn, are tossed up on the sand by the waves....

I was depicted as strident-voiced ... belligerent ... waving my arms wildly. It was said that, full of threats, I had taken a shotgun menacingly from a rack ... that a vicious bull dog lay between my feet, growling ... that I went, sockless, in sandals ... had long, flowing, uncombed hair....

Once a party of three reporters, from a big metropolitan paper,—two men and a woman, after stopping at a nearby road house till they were well lit,—drove about in a livery rig till they finally located us at the house of Mrs. Rond....

All the old nonsense was re-written ... things we had never said or even had in our thought ... vulgarities alien to Hildreth's mouth or mine....

The final insinuation—a sly touching on the fact that the Rond family was on intimate terms with me, and that the young daughters were attractive-looking, and seemed to favour the ideals I expressed with murmurs of approval ... thus the story afterward appeared....

Mrs. Rond, after a peculiarly impertinent question of the woman member of the party, realised by this time that the three reporters were more than a little tipsy, and ordered these guardians of the public morality out of the house....

In the first place, they had wormed admittance through a fraud to Hildreth and me ... the woman falsely pretended that she was a friend of Hildreth's mother ... a great stroke of journalistic enterprise.

Mrs. Rond's rebuke was so sharply worded that it got through even their thick skins....

I must say, though, that the behaviour of these three was not characteristic ... generally the newspaper men and women were most considerate and courteous ... even when they afterward wrote unpleasant articles about us. And often I have had them blue-pencil wild statements I had made, which, on second thought, I wished withdrawn ... and during all the uproar I never had a reporter break his word, once given.

"Say, Mr. Gregory, that's great stuff, do let us keep that in the interview."

"Please, boys, draw your pencil through that ... it doesn't sound the way I meant it."

"Oh, all right"—a sigh—"but it's a shame to leave it out."

The last and final outrage—perpetrated by the papers by orders from above, I am sure....

Even the second uproar had died down.

Always the "natives" in West Grove and round about, our neighbours, behaved considerately, let us alone ... we were greeted politely wherever we went....

But now, Mrs. Rond informed me, strange men were appearing on the street corners, conducting a regular soapbox campaign against us....

Some of them were seen to get on and off trains going to and coming from New York....

Goaded and spurred by these mysterious outsiders, the village people began to act aloof, and the more ignorant of them sullen toward us ... but as yet it was only in the air, nothing concrete to lay hold of.

* * * * *

Mrs. Suydam had run away with her plumber ... the interviews she gave out showed that it was our case mainly that had impelled her to launch forth in imitation ...

Others, in a wave of sex-radicalism, were running off together all about the country ...

But it was Mrs. Suydam's case that interested me and Hildreth most ... she was a dainty, pretty little slight thing, as Hildreth was—I could judge by her pictures....

"Hildreth," I urged, "let's drop Mrs. Suydam a note encouraging her ... she's probably without a friend in the world, she and her man ... they're trying to oust her from her flat ... she's being hounded about."

"My God, Johnnie dear, let's don't! ... they'll only give our letter to the papers ... let's let well enough alone once more ... the grocer boy passed me in the street to-day and didn't tip his hat to me."

* * * * *

I was sitting at Mrs. Rond's tea-table having afternoon tea with her. She had sent one of her girls over to the cottage to tell me she wished to see me "alone" ... "on a matter of great importance."

The cats, who had trailed her eldest daughter, Editha, across to our place, followed us back again with sailing tails in the air.

Mrs. Rond poured me a cup of strong tea.

"Drink that first, then I'll give you a little information that won't be so very agreeable to you."

The glimmer of satiric yet benevolent humour that was never long absent from her eyes, lightened there again, as she rolled and lit a "Plowboy."

"Have you noticed a change in the weather? A storm is blowing up. I'm speaking figuratively ... I might as well out with it, Johnnie,—there's a report, growing in strength, that a mob of townspeople is scheduled to come your way to-night, some time, and treat you to a serenade of protest and the traditional yokel hospitality of mobs ... a coat of tar and feathers and a ride on a rail beyond the town limits."

"So it's come to that, has it?"

"Johnnie, it isn't the townsfolk that started it ... of that I am certain ... left alone, they would still have been content to mind their business, and accept you and Hildreth on a friendly basis...."

She brought up the story of the strange men haranguing from street corners again....

"It's the New York newspapers, or one or two of the most sensational of them, that are back of this new phase."

"You mean, Mrs. Rond, that they would dare go so far as to instigate an attack on me and Hildreth ... with possibly fatal results?"

"Of course they would ... they need more news ... they want something more to happen ... to have all this uproar end tamely in happy, permanent love—that's what they couldn't endure....

"Well," she resumed after a pause, "what are you going to do? You're not afraid, are you?"

"To tell the truth I am, very much afraid."

"You and Hildreth and Darrie would best take the three o'clock train back to New York then."

"I haven't the least intention of doing that."

"What are you going to do?"

"—just let them come."

"You won't—fight?"

"As long as I'm alive."

"You just said you were afraid."

"Where a principle is considered, one can be afraid and still stick by one's guns."

"You're a real man, John Gregory, as well as a real poet, and I'm going to help you ... if it was the townspeople alone I would hesitate advising you ... but it's dirty, hired outsiders who are back of this feeling. Here!" and she stepped over to the mantel and brought a six-shooter to me and laid it in my hand, "can you shoot?"

"A little, but not very well."

"It's loaded already ... here is a pocketful of extra bullets."

She filled my coat pocket till it sagged heavily. I slipped the gun in my hip pocket.

"You're really going to stand them off if they come?"

"As long as no one tries to break into my house I will lie quiet ... the minute someone tries to break in, I'll shoot, I'll shoot to kill, and I'll kill as many as I can before they take me. I'll admit I'm frightened, but I have principles of freedom and radical right, and I'll die for them if necessary."

Mrs. Rond put her hand on my shoulder like a man.

"You have the makings of a fine fanatic in you ... in the early Christian era you would have been a church martyr."

* * * * *

I held immediate consultation with Darrie and Hildreth and they were both scared blue ... but they were game, too.

Darrie, however, unfolded a principle of strategy which I put into immediate effect ... she advised me to try a bluff first.

When I walked downtown within the hour, to obtain the New York papers, there was no doubt, by the even more sullen attitude of the inhabitants that I passed on the street, that something serious was a-foot....

I sauntered up to the news stand, took my Times ... hesitated, and then tried the bluff Darrie had suggested:

"Jim," I began, to the newsdealer, who had been enough my friend for us to speak to each other by our first names, "Jim, I hear the boys are planning a little party up my way to-night!"

"Not as I've heard of, Johnnie," Jim answered, with sly evasion, and I caught him sending a furtive wink to a man I'd never seen in town before.

"Now, Jim, there's no use trying to fool me. I'm on!"

The newspaper stand was, I knew, the centre for the town's dissemination of gossip. I knew what I said would sweep everywhere the moment I turned my back.

"As I said," I continued, "I'm on!" And I looked about and spoke in a loud voice, while inwardly quaking, "Yes, I know all about it, and I want to drop just this one hint ... tell the boys they can come. Tell them they'll be welcome ... So far I've had no trouble here ... everybody has been right decent with me," affecting a Western, colloquial drawl, "and I've tried to treat everybody, for my part, like a gentleman,—ain't that true?"

"That's true, Mr. Gregory" (it was suddenly "Mr. Gregory" now, not "Johnnie"). "As I was saying just the other day, there's lots worse in the world than Mr. Gregory that ain't found out."

"I want to leave this message with you, Jim. I'm from the West. I'm a good shot. I've got a six-shooter ready for business up at the cottage. I've got a lot of extra bullets, too. As I've said, I ain't the kind that looks for trouble, but when anybody goes out of their way—Well, as I said before, as soon as the boys begin getting rough—I'll begin to shoot ... I'll shoot to kill, and I'll kill everybody I can get, till someone gets me."

"Yes, Mr. Gregory!"

"Mind you, Jim, I've always considered you as my friend. I mean what I say. I'm a householder. I'm in the right ... if the law wants me that's another matter ... but no group of private citizens—"

"Good-bye, Mr. Gregory."

* * * * *

I walked rapidly back to the cottage. I was thinking as rapidly as I walked. For the space of a full minute I thought of packing off ignominiously with my little household.

But before I stepped in at the door something murky had cleared away inside me.

"Oh, Hildreth! Darrie!"

The women came dragging forward. But with them, too, it was a passing mood.

My indignation at the personal outrage of the impending mob incited me as them ... till I think not one of the three of us would have stepped aside from the path of a herd of stampeding elephants.

"The yokels," and Darrie's nostrils flared, her blue blood showing, "to dare even think of such an action, against their betters!"

* * * * *

We lit a roaring log fire. We sat reading aloud from Shelley. As the hours drew by ... eight ... nine ... ten ... eleven ... there is no doubt that our nerves grew to a very fine edge....

And at twelve o'clock—

Far off, at a respectful distance, a carol of rough, humorous voices sang the song, "Happily Married"!

"H-a-double-p-y," etc.

And we knew that my bluff had worked.

* * * * *

The next day we went through a let-down.

Hildreth was quite nerve-shaken, and so was Darrie.

But I strutted about with my chest out, the cock of the walk.

* * * * *

But, nevertheless, and despite their bravery and the fiasco of the mob's attack, the hearts seemed to have left the bodies of both "my" women.

* * * * *

The cold weather that Darrie and the old settlers had predicted was now descending on the countryside....

* * * * *

One morning Hildreth timidly and haltingly proposed returning to her mother's flat in New York....

I could stay and finish my play and, having disposed of it, come likewise to the city, and rent a flat, and she would come and live with me again. I am sure she was sincere in this. Or I could come to New York, rent a furnished room somewhere, and she would be with me daily, as now....

Darrie seconded Hildreth's proposal.

* * * * *

And yet my heart broke as Hildreth rode off in the carriage that came for her. I kissed her, and I kissed her ... despite the stern, unbending figure of the aged, moral coachman in the seat.

Then, after she had started off, I pursued the carriage, overtook it by a short cut, cried out that I had still something I had forgotten to give her ... it was more kisses ... and I kissed and kissed her again and again.. and we both wept, with aching hearts.

Then the moral coachman unbent.

"—beg pardon," he ventured, "but I'm sorry for you two children ... oh, yes, I know all about you ... everybody knows ... and I wish you good luck."

Darrie stayed over for the night, after Hildreth left, in order to see to packing the latter's clothes in her trunk ... Hildreth had been too upset to tend to the packing....

* * * * *

The next day Darrie left, too.

"You have no more need of your chaperon," she laughed, a tear glinting in her eye....

* * * * *

So now I was left utterly alone....

And a hellish winter descended upon the coast ... bitter, blowing, frosty winds that ate into the very bone and made a fellow curse God as he leaned obliquely against them.

I learned how little a summer cottage was worth—in winter.

Mrs. Rond lent me a huge-bellied stove, the fireplace no longer proving of comfort.

But though I kept the stove so hot that it glowed red, I still had to hug it close, my overcoat on, and a pair of huge, woollen socks that I'd bought at the general store down in West Grove.

But, despite the intense cold, I worked and worked ... my play, Judas was nearing completion ... its publication would mean the beginning of my life as a man of letters, my "coming out" in the literary world.

I ate my food from open cans, not taking the trouble to cook.

At night (I had pulled my bed out close to the stove) I heaped all the blankets in the house over me, and still shivered ... I lived on the constant stimulus of huge draughts of coffee....

"Only a little while longer ... only a few days more ... and the play will then be finished ... and it will be published. And it will be produced.

"Then the woman, my first and only woman, she will be with me again forever ... I'll take her to Italy, away from all the mess that has cluttered about our love for each other."

* * * * *

One day, in an effort to keep the house warm—the one room I confined myself to, rather,—I stoked the stove so hot that the stovepipe grew red to the place where it went through the roof into the attic....

My mind, at the time, was in far-off Galilee. I was on the last scene of the last act of my play ... the disciples, after the crucifixion, were gathered in the upper room again, waiting for the resurrected Christ to appear to take the seat left vacant for Him....

I looked up from the page over which my frosty fingers crawled....

The boards were smoking faintly. If I didn't act quickly the house would catch fire ... I laughed at the thought of the curious climax it would present to the world; I imagined myself among the embers.

I must lessen the heat in the stove. I ran and brought in a bucket of water. I pried open the red-hot door of the stove with a stick that almost caught flame as I pried.

With a backward withdrawal, a forward heave, I shot the contents of the pail into the stove....

There followed a detonation like a siege gun.

The stove-lid shot so close to my head it was no joke ... it took out the whole window-sash and lit in the outside snow. The stove itself, balanced on bricks under its four feet, slumped sidewise, fortunately did not collapse to the floor ... the stovepipe fell, but the wire that held it up at the bend also prevented it from touching the carpet ... the room was instantly full of suffocating soot and smoke.

I crawled forth like a scared animal ... found myself in the kitchen. In the mirror hanging there I looked like a Senegalese.

Then, finding myself unhurt, I laughed and laughed at myself, at the grotesqueness and irony of life, at everything ... but mostly at myself.

I righted the stove as best I could, brought the door in again from where it had bitten to the bottom of the snow drift, like an angry animal. It was still uncomfortably hot ... shifting it from hand to hand I managed to manoeuvre it back to a slant position on its hinges....

Before I could light another and more moderate fire, unexpectedly the inspiration for the completion of the last scene of Judas—the inspiration for which I had been waiting and hoping—rode in on me like a wave....

* * * * *

Christ, in the spirit, unseen, comes to his waiting disciples.

Thomas. Someone has flung open the door. The wind has blown out the candles.

Andrew. Nay, I sit next the door. 'Tis closed!

John. He has risen. He is even now among us.

Thomas. Someone sits in the chair. I feel a presence by my side.

Peter. Brethren, 'tis the Comforter of which He spake! [A misty light fills the room.]

John. Ah, 'tis He! 'tis He! He is with us. He has not forsaken us. Verily, He has risen from the dead into a larger life than ever! Dear Lord, Beloved Shepherd of Souls, is it Thou?

Thomas. I believe, I believe! It is past speech! Thy Kingdom comes as I dreamed, but dared not believe!

John. He lives, He lives—the very Son of God!

Behold the Kingdom that He promised us; 'Tis no vain dream, 'tis everlasting truth! He shall bind all the nations into one, The love of him shall flood the world! He shall conquer with love and gentleness, and not with the sword. He shall live again in every heart that loves its fellow men. Peace he will plant where discord grew before. He will save and heal the souls of men forever and forever. Ah, dear Master, forgive us, we beseech Thee, For deeming Thou hadst ever died.

* * * * *

And so, having nearly burnt a house down, and perhaps myself with it, I had written "finis" to my four-act play called Judas.

* * * * *

Hildreth and I had written faithfully to each other twice a day ... the absurd, foolish, improper letters that lovers exchange ... I wrote most of my letters in the cave-language that we had invented between us....

And we marked all the interspaces with secret symbols that meant intimate caresses ... kisses ... everything....

The play brought to a successful end, I realised that for one day no letters had come from Hildreth. And the next none came ... and the next....

I besieged the post office five and six times a day in a panic, till the postmaster first pitied me, then grew a bit put out....

A week, and not a single letter from the woman I loved....

The day before, Mrs. Suydam and her plumber affinity, for whom I felt myself and Hildreth and Penton largely responsible, in the example we had set—the day before these two young people had committed suicide.

As I walked about the cottage, alone, I had the uncanny feeling that the place was haunted ... that maybe the ghosts of these two poor children who had imitated us were down there haunting me ... why had not Hildreth and I written that joint letter to them as I had suggested!

—only a little thing, but it might have given them courage to go on!....

* * * * *

I was at the long-distance phone.

"Hildreth!" I cried, hearing her dear voice....

"Oh, how good, how sweet, my love, my life, it is to hear your voice again ... tell me you still love me!"

"Hush, Johnnie, hush!" answered a far-away, strange voice ... "I'm writing you a long letter ... somebody might be listening in."

"Did you see in the paper about Mrs. Suydam?"

"Yes, it was a terrible thing."

"—if we had only written to them!"

"—that was what I thought!"

"Shall I come to the city now? My book is finished. I'm a real author now."

"The book is finished? That's fine, Johnnie ... but don't come to the city now ... wait my letter."

* * * * *

When the bulky letter came, the roads rang like iron to my step. I wouldn't allow myself to read it in the post office. I hugged the luxury of the idea of reading it by the fire, slowly. I kissed the still unopened envelope many times on the way home.

* * * * *

I broke the letter open ... it fell out of my hands as if a paralysis had smitten me....

No, no, I would not believe it ... it could not be true ... in so short a time ... with hands that shook as with palsy I plucked it up from the chilly, draughty floor again....

"Another man!"

She had met, was in love with, another man!

Oh, incredible! incredible! I moaned in agony. I rocked like an old woman rocking her body in grief.

Now was my time to end it all!

Damn all marriage! Damn all free love! God damn to hell all women!

* * * * *

I thought of many ways of committing suicide. But I only thought of them.

I flung out into the night, meaning to go and tell Mrs. Rond of the incredible doom that had fallen upon me, the unspeakable betrayal.

"Poor Penton!" I cried. "Poor Penton!"

At last I sympathised fully with him.

* * * * *

Ashamed, in my slowly gathering new man's pride, I did not go in to see Mrs. Rond. Instead, I drove past her house with that curious, bent-kneed walk of mine,—and I walked and walked, not heeding the cold, till the ocean shouldered, phosphorescent, in the enormous night toward me.

* * * * *

Home again, I slept like a drunkard. It was broad day when I woke.

I had dreamed deliciously all night of Hildreth ... was strangely not unsatisfied—when I woke again to the hell of the reality her letter had plunged me into.

* * * * *

Mrs. Rond ... of course I finally took her into my confidence, and told her the entire story....

"Not to speak in disparagement of Hildreth, I knew it all along, Johnnie ... knew that this would be the result ... but come, come, you have bigger things in you ... Penton Baxter will win his divorce sooner or later. Hildreth has another man, poor little girl! You have all that God means you to have at present: Your first book!"

* * * * *

THE END