Tad drew cartoons of us ... a cluster of them ... “Silk Hat Harry’s Divorce Suit” ... with dogs’ heads on all of us ...  Hildreth, with the head of a hound dog, long hound-ears flopping, with black jade ear-rings in them ...  Penton, a woe-begone little pug....

A box car loomed in the centre of the main picture, “The Affinity Nest of the Hobo Poet,” I think it was legended ... then I was drawn standing, one leg crossed over the other, the peak of the toe jauntily resting on the ground, hand-in-breast like an old-fashioned picture.  There was a tin can thrown over the shoulder of the tattered bulldog that represented me ... one of my ears went through my hat ... beneath, a rhyme ran: 

  “I am the hobo poet,
    I lead a merry life: 
  One day I woo the Muse, the next,
    Another fellow’s wife!”

* * * * *

I brought this up to the cottage we had now procured, down in West Grove, N.J., where we had gone finally 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.