"I must catch the next train back ... I'm off now ... there's the taxi I
arranged to have come and take me ... it's out there now ... good-bye,
Johnny, and God help you and your little girl."

* * * * *

Hildreth came in soon after Miller's departure, looking like a
fresh-faced girl of twelve.

"Did--did your friend think I was good-looking?"

"Yes, I am sure he thoroughly approved of you."

"To-morrow another Roman holiday begins."

* * * * *

The result of that interview was worse than I could have surmised. All
the batteries opened fire again. The Kansas papers called me "the
shameless tramp" ... reporters spilled from autos and rigs all over the
front stoop. After giving a few more interviews in the mad hope that
this time they would get it straight, I saw that the harvest was even
greater abuse and defamation ... and, as Hildreth had predicted, she
came in for more than her share of the moral indignation of people who
sold that precious ware at so much a line, or were paid salaries for
such work....

We practically deserted our house so the reporters could not find us....

Many of the reporters never came near the house. Instead, lurid stories
were concocted in the back rooms of nearby roadhouses. And, failing to
find us at home, interviews were faked so badly that they verged on the
burlesque ... where not vulgar, they were vicious ... words were slipped
in that implied things which, expressed clearly, had furnished ample
grounds for libel.

Hildreth and I were pictured as living on frost fish almost entirely;
the fish that run along the ocean shore, and, growing numb with the cold
of autumn, are tossed up on the sand by the waves....

I was depicted as strident-voiced ... belligerent ... waving my arms
wildly. It was said that, full of threats, I had taken a shotgun
menacingly from a rack ... that a vicious bull dog lay between my feet,
growling ... that I went, sockless, in sandals ... had long, flowing,
uncombed hair....

Once a party of three reporters, from a big metropolitan paper,--two men
and a woman, after stopping at a nearby road house till they were well
lit,--drove about in a livery rig till they finally located us at the
house of Mrs. Rond....

All the old nonsense was re-written ... things we had never said or even
had in our thought ... vulgarities alien to Hildreth's mouth or mine....

The final insinuation--a sly tou