* * * * *

But this was not what I wanted of the papers ...  I must use this space offered me to propagandise my ideas of free love....

So I arranged to meet Penton privately in the lobby of the Martinique.

* * * * *

Hildreth and I were there, waiting, before Penton came the next day.  Appearing, he wore the old, bland, childlike smile, and he shook hands with us as if nothing untoward had ever taken place.

Someone had tipped off the reporters and they were on time, too, crowding about us eagerly.  One young fellow from the Sun, looking like a graduate from a school of divinity, asked a special interview of me alone, which I gave ... afterward ... in a corner.

That Sun reporter gave me the fairest deal I ever received.  He talked with me over an hour, without ever setting pencil to paper ... the other interviews were long over, Penton had left, Hildreth sat chafing....

“Come over and join us, Hildreth.”

She sat listening in silence while I continued rehearsing all my ideas on marriage, love, divorce ... how love should be all ... how there should, ideally, be no marriage ceremony ... but if any at all, only after the first child had been born ... how the state should have nothing to do with the private love-relations of the individual....

The reporter from the Sun shook hands good-bye.

“But you haven’t taken a single note!” I protested.

“I have it all here, in my head.”

“But how can you report me accurately?”

“See to-morrow’s Sun.”

* * * * *

The interview with me was a marvel in two ways:  it represented to a hair’s breadth everything I had pronounced, transmuted into the reporter’s own style of writing ... it curtailed my conversation where I had repeated myself or wandered off into trivial detail.

* * * * *

“I wonder what they’ll say back in Kansas!” I had exclaimed to Hildreth, in the hearing of the reporters.

“Oh, bother Kansas!” replied Hildreth humorously.

For a month “I wonder what they’ll say back in Kansas” was a catch-word for Broadway and the town.

When the Evening Journal put us in their “Dingbat Family” I enjoyed the humour of it.  But Hildreth was angry and aggrieved.

“You and Penton,” remarked she, “for men of culture and sensibility, have bigger blind spots than ordinary in your make-up.  Why, Johnnie, I believe you enjoy the comic pictures about this business!...

“The only way to conduct propaganda for a cause is through the dignified medium of books, I am rapidly becoming convinced—­not through newspaper interviews; which, when they are not silly, are insulting.”

* * * * *

Baxter’s lawyer soon put a stop to our public amicability ... “collusion,” he warned Penton; “they’ll call it collusion and you won’t get your final decree.”