and
knows from my manner and face and the way I express myself just how I am
feeling toward any other man. The other day an old lover of mine turned
up in Chicago, and this brought about a scene with Terry.

"To explain this episode I must go back several years. I once knew a
Swiss boy, a typical Tyrolean. The day I met him in Chicago he had just
arrived from his native land, and seemed so forlorn and lonely and
miserable that my heart went right out to him. He was such a big,
handsome child, too, about twenty years old. He could not understand a
word of English, and no one talked to him, but me, who, as you know, had
parents who spoke German. He was delighted and told me his whole life
story, how he became emancipated and one of the Comrades. His eyes
sparkled so and his cute little blond curls jumped all over his head
with the enthusiasm and joy of having found some one to talk to, that I
was quite content to sit and watch and listen. And he thought me the
most sympathetic person in the world.

"Had I only known the result of my impulse to say a few words to a
lonely boy! For he did fall in love with me, and in such sturdy
mountaineer fashion that I very nearly had nervous prostration--and he
too--in trying to get away from his strenuous wooing. For he started out
to win me in the same style that he would have used toward one of the
cow-girls in his native Alps. He waylaid me and followed me around
everywhere, just camped on my trail; wanted to carry me away to some
place out West, where there were mountains. The more I discouraged him,
the more lovesick and forlorn he became, until finally he became the
laughing-stock of the 'movement,' and I was chaffed about it
unmercifully. He knew I had a lover, but that was no obstacle; and he
told me several times with fine enthusiasm that he would not object to
sharing his love with another man! He had read something about free
love, and thought he should like to be an Overman and superior to petty
jealousies.

"Strange to say, my curly-headed Swiss lover did not 'insult' me, as
they call it, though I naturally enough supposed that he wanted to, but
didn't have enough courage. But I was wrong, as I discovered later, when
I grossly insulted him! Perhaps a girl is loved only once in a lifetime
in just that way, perhaps not at all, and I often think I made a mistake
in being so cruel to my boy lover. I might in time have learned to love
him in the right way, but I couldn't at