g to break away from smoking. Sometimes she feels the restraint
severely, and comes to our house where she knows she can smoke and
express herself. She is in better health, and I think now is in close
enough touch with nature not to want to go back for nourishment to ideas
and the slum."

The latest word I have from Terry shows him faithful to the
end--faithful to his character and his mood:

"There is a rumour that Marie has got a job at general housework. This
gave me the blues--after all our life together, this the end! I'd rather
have her do general prostitution, with the chance of having an
occasional rest in the hospital. But perhaps her drudgery will kill her
enthusiasm for 'vita nuova!'

"I should have answered your letter had I not been suffering from an old
malady of mine which is accompanied by such mental depression that I
could not answer the communication of even a lost soul. I had to seek
surcease in my old remedy of hasheesh and chloroform, which was a change
from suffering to stupidity. But I shall not swell the cosmic chorus of
woe by raising my cracked voice against impending fate. I am more and
more alone, more and more conscious of a growing something that is
keeping me apart from all whom I can possibly avoid."

Terry is nearing his logical end, while Marie is still struggling for
life, life given her in the beginning by this strange man, whose
influence was then to take it away from her; and from this, like the
world, she rebelled. "Anarchism" she embraced as long as it enhanced her
being; as long as this deeply emotional philosophy added to the fulness
of her life, she saw its meaning and its use; when it finally tended to
sterilise her new existence, its "pragmatic" value was nothing.

This is the test of all social theory: How It Works Out. In Marie's
case, as in the case of many proletarians, it worked out well, as a
general civilising and consoling philosophy, for a time, but when
carried to an "idealistic" extreme, it tended rapidly towards general
death--from which all live things react. So it was with Marie: she left
her "poisonous" Terry and sought for another vitalising experience.
Goethe said that the best government is that which makes itself
superfluous. Terry's spiritual influence on Marie, important for her in
the beginning as rendering her self-respecting and mentally ambitious,
had become superfluous. But it had been of great value to the girl. So,
too, with our society. The