ascinating relation, wherein sex had no part. Night after night have we
sat around this table, discussing books and people, trying to penetrate
the mystery of things strange and new to us. I should rather say that he
talked, and I was his eager listener. Often, after tossing restlessly on
our pillows, when no sleep would come 'to weight our eyelids down,' the
rest of the night would be spent in reciting poetry, the inevitable
cigarette in one hand, the other gesticulating in the most fanciful and
fervid manner. He would recite in passionate whispers--so as not to
awaken Katie--for hours at a time, poems from Shakespeare to Shelley,
and Verlaine to Whitman, poems tender and sweet, bitter and ironical and
revolutionary, just as the mood suited him. His feeling for poetry and
nature seemed to grow as his hope for human society grew less.

"So our relations were ideally platonic--the kind you read about in
books. Nevertheless, some of the old bitterness remained in Terry's
heart, for at times he became depressed and melancholy and so sensitive
about the least little thing that I was nervous and in hot water all
the time for fear I might inadvertently say or do something to hurt him
or make him angry. I admit I am not as placid as I look, and Katie, too,
is very inflammable, so you can understand how tense the atmosphere was
at times.

"Not very long ago, at the breakfast table one Sunday morning, I urged
Terry to come to a meeting of the 'radicals,' adding that he was
becoming a regular hermit and that it would do him good to have more
social pleasure. He turned on me savagely, called me a hypocrite, and a
contemptible one at that, and made a few more remarks of the kind. After
a few days of strained politeness on both sides I made bold to ask him
for some explanation--and I have got it coming yet!

"These are just the facts. I don't go into all the little details of our
many little vulgar rows, about the most trivial things. I am sure, if
Terry writes you about this, that his innate delicacy would never permit
him to go into these sordid details, too many of which I have perhaps
told you. But I am made of rougher stuff than he. I am never quite as
unreasonable as he can be at times, but I am commoner."

Terry did, indeed, express himself in a much more laconic way about the
quarrel, than Marie. On the day he left, August thirteenth, he wrote me
the following note:

"The premonition in my last letter is fulfilled: the s