It was dawn when I returned to my tent, pulled the flap aside, fell, exhausted, on my cot in dreamless sleep....
How was it all going to end?
It seemed to me that I had tapped violent, subterranean currents in life and passion, that I had not hitherto known existed....
Free Love, Marriage, Polygamy, Polyandry, Varietism, Promiscuity—these were but tossing chips of nomenclature, bits of verbal welter, upborne by deep terrible human currents that appalled the imagination!
The man who prated glibly of any ready solution, orthodox or heterodox, radical or conventional, of the problem of the relationships between men and women was worse than a fool, he was a dangerous madman!
Hildreth and I, a-field, had found a bed of that exceptionally poisonous mushroom named Pallida something or other ... the book said its poison was kin to that of the poison in the rattlesnake's bite. My eyes met with Hildreth's ... we needed say no word, both thinking the same thought that frightened us!... "how easy it would be—!"