hat I stuck still in my tracks, waiting.

He disappeared into the big house, to re-emerge with, of all things,
_the coffee percolator_!

"Here!" he exclaimed, holding out the object to me ceremoniously and
seriously, "you can take this to your goddess, this poison-machine, and
lay it on her altar. Tell her I offered this to you. Tell her that it is
a symbol of her never coming back here again."

Here was where I too lacked a sense of humour. I struck the coffee
percolator out of his hands. I stalked off.

* * * * *

On the way to New York I built the full dream of what Hildreth and I
were to effect for the world--a practical example, in our life as we
lived it together, of the rightness of free love....

We would test it out, would rent a cottage somewhere, preferably on the
Jersey coast near the sea shore ... autumn was coming on, and there
would be lovely, crystal-clear weather ... and the scent of pines in the
good air.

* * * * *

Perhaps Penton, Hildreth and I could all three join in amicable accord,
over the solution of our difficulty, along radical and idealistic lines.

* * * * *

I hurried to the address given me by Hildreth. She was not in, but her
mother was ... a plump, rather good looking, fashionably dressed woman.
Evidently the mother did not know of the relationship between me and her
daughter.

"So you are the poet Hildreth has told me about?" after we had
discoursed for upwards of an hour--

"I can easily see how Hildreth has grown so fond of you," and she patted
me on the head as if I were a schoolboy, in motherly fashion.

* * * * *

"Mother's rather stupid and old-fashioned ... there'd be no use trying
to explain the situation to her. The best thing we can do is to persuade
her that Daniel needs her, down in Eden ... that will remove her from
the flat, so we can have it all to ourselves for a few days, in order to
plan what is to be done next."

Next morning Mrs. Deuell, Hildreth's mother, as innocent as a new-born
lamb as to what was up, permitted herself to be shipped off to Eden, to
take care of Daniel.

* * * * *

Instead of planning, however, and marshalling our resources, Hildreth
and I abandoned ourselves to the mutual happiness and endearments of two
love-drunk, emotion-crazed beings on a honeymoon....

*