He tightened his lips....

“If you go up there to join her, remember that I gave you fair warning.”

* * * * *

I could endure it no longer, the torment of not seeing her, of not being with her....

As her favourite sonneteer, Santayana, writes—­lines she often quoted—­

  “Love leads me on, no end of love appears. 
  Is this the heaven, poets, that ye paint? 
  Oh then, how like damnation to be blessed!”

* * * * *

I informed Ruth, Darrie, Penton that I was going to New York in the morning....

Penton immediately whisked out of my sight, full of uncontrollable emotion....

Darrie and Ruth almost fell upon me, trying to persuade me not to rejoin Hildreth.  I evaded by saying that I was now on my way to Europe, that possibly I might see her before I went, but—­

* * * * *

I had an hour till train time.  My MSS. was packed again, my Josephus, my Homer, my Shakespeare, my Keats, my bath robe.

I thought I would escape without saying good-bye.

But Penton came down the front porch, stood in my path.

“Johnnie, a last warning.”

“I want none of your last warnings.”

“Are you going to Hildreth?”

“I’m tired of being a liar.  I’ve never lied so much in my life ... yes, I’m going to Hildreth ... and I’m going to persuade her to live with me, and defy the whole damned world—­the world of fake radicals that talk about divorces when the shoe pinches them, as well as the world of conservatives,” I announced harshly.

“I’ve done all I could!” he responded wearily, “I see you won’t come to your senses—­wait a minute!” and he turned on his heel.  He had asked me to wait with such solemnity that 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.