I had stayed over night at the Phi-Mu House, at Columbia, with Ally. I had stayed up nearly all night, rather, arguing, in behalf of extreme socialism, with the boys ... till people, hearing our voices through the open windows, had actually gathered in the street without.
"You're utterly mad, but we like you!" said one of the boys.
In the morning, before I clutched my suitcase in my hand and started for Perfection City, Ally showed me something that had come in the morning mail, which startled me. It was a clipping from the Laurel Globe—a vilely slanderous article, headed, "Good Riddance."...
And first it lied that I had run away from my "confederates" of the Scoop Club, leaving them to bear the onus of the investigation of the town's morals ... which was, of course, not true ... I had made a special point of going to the sheriff and asking him if I would be needed. If so, I would defer my trip East. And he had replied that it would be all right for me to go....
But the second count—the personal part of the story, was more atrocious ... it intimated that I had, during my sojourn at Laurel, been an undesirable that would have made Villon pale with envy ... an habitué of the Bottoms ... that I had been sleeping with negro women and rolling about with their men, drunk.
I was so furious at this that I dropped my suitcase, clenched my hands, and swore that I was straightway going to freight it back and knock all his teeth down "Senator's" Blair's throat ... the dirty sycophant! The lousy bootlicker! the nasty, putty-bodied slug!
Once more Baxter wrote me, urging me to come to Eden. He told me his wife would welcome me ... and jested clumsily that his secretary would be just the girl to marry me and take care of me....
Jested? I did not know the man yet ... he meant it.