For any man, I held, and still hold, who lets a woman ruin his career, ought to have it ruined.

I did not tell her of what Dr. Ward had told me.  Why cause her unnecessary worry?

* * * * *

After all, the magazine world was not the only medium to present my literary wares to the public.  There remained the book world, a less narrow and prejudiced one.

Kennerley had written me that he waited eagerly the completion of my Biblical play.

And Zueblin, of the now defunct Twentieth Century had just sent me a twenty-five dollar check for a poem called Lazarus Speaks.

* * * * *

I brought back with me from New York two books as a present for Hildreth ...  Mary Wollstonecraft’s A Vindication of the Rights of Woman, and The Life of Mary Wollestonecraft ... these were two books she had long desired.  She was thoroughly pleased with her resemblance to the frontispiece picture of the celebrated woman radical, in the Life.

“You possess all her vivacity, all her intelligence ... but you are beautiful where she was plain ... she is like a plainer sister of yours.”

* * * * *

While in New York I had also paid a visit to the editor of one of the biggest sensational magazines in the city, and I had arranged with him, acting as Hildreth’s agent, for a thousand dollars advance on her unfinished novel.  The editor had dictated a letter in which he promised to deliver the thousand on receipt of two-thirds of the book....

Hildreth kissed me again and again when I gave her the letter....

“Johnnie, you really are wonderful ... and quite practical, after all.”

* * * * *

“And now, my darling Hildreth, we’ll take this old world and shake it into new life, into the vital thing I have dreamed!” I boasted grandiloquently....

“Here in this little sequestered dream-cottage of ours you and I will carry out, popularise, through novels, poems, plays, essays, and treatises, the noble work that Ellis, Key, and Rosa Von Mayerreder, and others, are doing in Europe ... and we ourselves will set the example of true love that fears nothing but the conventional legal slavery.”

“It will soon be very cold down here,” commented Darrie, irrelevantly, “this is only a summer cottage, and they say—­the old settlers—­that we are to have a severe winter ... the frost fish are already beginning to come ashore.”

* * * * *

It was generally known, sub rosa, that Hildreth and I were living together.  But, as long as she pretended it was not so, as long as I lived seemingly in another house, pretending, under another name, to be Mrs. Baxter’s literary adviser, the hypocrisy of the world was satisfied.

I was, in other words, following the accepted mode.