is a great ambition, to read
Swinburne well? I am so glad to find something to do, something I love
to do. Perhaps I may escape from all by this.

"It is now five days since I started to write to you, but I still lie on
my back and dream and have not found my place, and never shall.
Swinburne's never-ceasing, monotonous rhymes have palled upon me. Even
this is sordid, and then, if so, what is the rest?--the daily life
filled with brutish and shallow men and women? When I can no longer
endure poetry and daily life--it is then that I rush into brutal
dissipation, from which I awake sick in mind and body, without hope or
desire for anything but sleep: and then, once more, the Garden of
Proserpine reveals itself to me, or some other thing of beauty. It is an
eternal round.

"I often think that the only way for me to be in harmony with the scheme
of things would be to go down into the gutter. Some years ago during my
brief period of--prostitution, I suppose--I felt a strange importance.
It was death to me, but something real, too. I was fulfilling a need of
society, a horrible need, but a need. And then, too, all my men friends
often go to these houses. All the nice, intellectual men are to be met
there--men from all ranks of life--men a girl like me could never meet
in any other way. During that brief time, at moments between a sleep and
a drink, I used to have this fancy, which sometimes makes me shudder
now, as I think of it, and yet somehow seems such a fine satisfying
protest--a feeling that some day I would be seen waddling about the
streets of Chicago, known to all the denizens of the under world as
Drunken Mary! I saw myself fat and repulsive, begging nickels from the
passers-by and perhaps strangled at the end by some passing hobo for the
few nickels in my stocking. And am I essentially worse than you, or my
lady, or anyone whom Society protects and honours? To me poet and pimp,
politician, reformer, thief, aristocrat, prostitute are one. Caste and
class distinctions are too subtle for my poor brain and too outrageous
for my heart, which still tries to beat with and for humanity."

Terry refers only in a line or two, characteristically, to this
adventure and illness of Marie.

"She is seriously ill, the result of a mad adventure. As I exist for
others when they are in pain, I am her trained nurse. She is now
recovering from the drugs, the debauching, and the raving madness of
sleepless nights. I will give you an