yet ... wait a minute. Read more of that poem you
began, if only for a blind."

I picked up the book, started reading again ... strangely a rush of
tears flooded my eyes and blurred the type....

I began to sob, heart-sick. I did love the absurd little man. My heart
ached, broken over my lies....

"Oh! Oh!" I sobbed, "Hildreth, my woman, my sweetheart--he trusted me,
Hildreth ... he trusted me!"

I knelt by the bed, thrusting my head into the lap of my First Woman.

She kissed me on top of the head.

"You're both two big, silly babies, that's all you are."

* * * * *

It was dawn when I returned to my tent, pulled the flap aside, fell,
exhausted, on my cot in dreamless sleep....

* * * * *

How was it all going to end?

It seemed to me that I had tapped violent, subterranean currents in life
and passion, that I had not hitherto known existed....

Free Love, Marriage, Polygamy, Polyandry, Varietism, Promiscuity--these
were but tossing chips of nomenclature, bits of verbal welter, upborne
by deep terrible human currents that appalled the imagination!

The man who prated glibly of any ready solution, orthodox or heterodox,
radical or conventional, of the problem of the relationships between men
and women was worse than a fool, he was a dangerous madman!

* * * * *

Hildreth and I, a-field, had found a bed of that exceptionally poisonous
mushroom named _Pallida_ something or other ... the book said its poison
was kin to that of the poison in the rattlesnake's bite. My eyes met
with Hildreth's ... we needed say no word, both thinking the same
thought that frightened us!... "how easy it would be--!"

* * * * *

Now we were plumbing the darker side of passion. Something that
Carpenter does not write of in his _Love's Coming of Age_.

* * * * *

A night of wind, shifting into rain. Hildreth I knew would be afraid,
alone.

I stepped into her cottage, in my bath-robe. She almost screamed at my
sudden appearance. For I came in at the door like a shadow, the wind and
rain making such a tumult that a running horse would not have been
heard.

"Dearest ... you're all wringing wet ... you're dripping all over the
floor. Throw off that robe. Dry yourself--there's a towel there!"

She flung me her kimono. "Here, put this on, till you're comfortable
again."