lly 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, d