ote that on the day of the
hangings "I was in a stupor; a feeling of numbness came over me,
something too horrible even for tears." The very next day, however, she
became imbued with a surging determination to dedicate herself to the
cause of the martyred men, to devote her life to the ideals for which
they had died.

In the meantime, discouraged and lonely, she had welcomed a fellow
worker's show of affection. She felt no love for him and, as a result of
an attempted rape at the age of fifteen, she still experienced a
"violent repulsion" in the presence of men, but she had not the strength
to refuse his urgent proposal of marriage. She soon learned to her
dismay that her husband was impotent and not at all as congenial as she
had thought. However, the very suggestion of a separation enraged her
father, who had recently come to Rochester. After months of aggravation
she did go through the then rare and reprehensible rite of Orthodox
divorce, but she had to leave town to avoid social ostracism. When she
returned some months later, her former husband again pursued her, and
his threat of suicide frightened her into remarrying him.

Emma now felt herself thwarted and trapped. Twenty years old and
yearning to make life meaningful, she chafed at the very thought of her
drab and dreary existence. Her anxiety to elude her father's abuse, to
free herself from a loveless marriage, to escape the dullness of her
oppressive environment, only intensified her longing for freedom and
affection. Consequently she began to nurture her dream of dedicating
herself to the ideal championed by the Chicago martyrs. One day in
August 1889 she broke relations with her husband and parents and left
for New York with money supplied by her ever-devoted sister Helene.

* * * * *

In the metropolis Emma felt herself gloriously free. For the first time
in her life she was completely independent. On the teeming East Side a
new and wonderful world emerged before her, and she embraced it with
passionate abandon. Alexander Berkman, a determined doctrinaire at
eighteen, made her acquaintance the day she arrived and the pair at once
established an intimate comradeship which endured through many
vicissitudes to the day of his death. John Most, the impetuous anarchist
leader, became her lover as well as her mentor and opened new and
fascinating vistas of the mind. "Most became my idol," she wrote. "I
adored him." Under his tut