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 qui