alon knows me no
more."

A later talk I had with both Katie and Terry throws light upon the
precipitating cause of Terry's departure on the thirteenth of August. It
was due to Terry's sensitiveness about his money relationship to Katie.
On that morning Terry was asleep on the couch, when Katie got up, made
breakfast, and she and Marie asked Terry to join them.

"Not me," said he.

"I think you have been eating on me long enough," rejoined Katie. "It's
time you got out."

Katie had never allowed herself a remark of this kind before. But she
had not found another job and the three had been on edge for some time.

The remark brought about the climax so long preparing.

"I'll go," he replied, "as soon as I have finished this cigarette."

"In the wordy war that followed," said Terry, "we all three went the
limit in throwing things up to each other. I told Katie that if it had
not been for me and Marie she would not have had anybody to steal for;
that I was eating on her stealings and mine, too. And then I left."

Although, as we shall see, this was not the end of the relation between
Terry and Marie, it was in reality the sordid end of the idealistic
Salon.

CHAPTER XII

_Marie's Attempt_

While Marie was trying to find some trace of Terry, the latter was
wandering about the country.

"I have been tramping about the country," he wrote me, "living most of
the time in the parks. This life, where you 'travel by hand,' crowds out
consecutive meditation, but I like it because I can go away at the first
shadow of uneasiness betrayed on either side. My existence now is so
responsive and irresponsible that it comes very close to my heart. I am
living a life of contrasts: one week I spent with a rare friend who has
many good books and admires me for the thing for which all others
condemn me. Strange, is it not, that the one thing which redeems me in
his far-seeing eyes is what places me beyond redemption in the minds of
others. I have spent some sleepless nights in his fine home, kept awake
by the seductions of social life tugging at my heart-strings. So one
night I stole away from this seduction and slept with some drunken
hoboes in the tall soft grass, where I could have no doubt about being
welcome. I might as well doubt the grass as those pals, who without
question hailed me as an equal. I, having the only swell 'front,'
tackled a mansion, and the Irish servant-girl, to whom I told the truth,
gave me a who