things of earth. I do not think of you at all, my old
Terry, but I think of you and love and adore you, my new, wonderful
Terry, and I make myself beautiful for you. So, my dear old Terry, I
will leave you to 'lice and liberty,' to your 'hard free life,' and I
will now lave myself with the pure crystal waters and make myself clean
again, and then look on the sun once more and dream again of my own
adorable Terry."

In this letter, Marie said, by implication, a deep truth about social
revolt. She could never have lived her life without him, this strange,
poetic man. He awoke in this outcast, rather vicious girl, a keen
longing for the excellent, for the pleasures of the intelligence and the
temperament; he gave her an assured sense of her own essential dignity
and worth; defended her against the society that rejected her. This was
a truly Christ-like thing to do, and this she could never forget or do
without. So, in her wilderness, she holds fast to her ideal Terry. But
with this idealist she could not live, practically. The growing
irritation felt by him because of his radical mal-adjustment to this
world rendered him step by step more impossible to live with. Harshness,
injustice, became forced upon him as qualities of his acts. How could he
be fair when he had no understanding of the nature of actuality? It is
probable that no woman can ever get so far away from actuality as a few
rare idealists of the male sex. Marie's relative good sense, her
vitality and love of life, finally rebelled against an idealism so
exquisite that it became cruelty and almost madness. And this is the way
with the world. The world cannot, in the end, endure the idealist,
though it has great need of him. The world can endure a certain amount
of irritation, a certain amount of fundamental revolt, but when that
revolt reaches the point of absolute rejection, the world rebels, the
worm turns. Marie represents the world and the worm.

Plato said there should be no poets in his Republic. Poets are too
disturbing, they fit into no social organisation, for the truth they see
is larger and often other than the truth of mankind's housekeeping, of
human society. So they are against society. They are for nature, both
God's nature and man's nature, but man's organisation arouses their
passionate hostility. Therefore, said Plato, let us have no poets in our
Republic. But Plato was a poet, and he probably knew that poets, though
inimical to the actual wor