He disappeared into the big house, to re-emerge with, of all things, the coffee percolator!
"Here!" he exclaimed, holding out the object to me ceremoniously and seriously, "you can take this to your goddess, this poison-machine, and lay it on her altar. Tell her I offered this to you. Tell her that it is a symbol of her never coming back here again."
Here was where I too lacked a sense of humour. I struck the coffee percolator out of his hands. I stalked off.
On the way to New York I built the full dream of what Hildreth and I were to effect for the world—a practical example, in our life as we lived it together, of the rightness of free love....
We would test it out, would rent a cottage somewhere, preferably on the Jersey coast near the sea shore ... autumn was coming on, and there would be lovely, crystal-clear weather ... and the scent of pines in the good air.
Perhaps Penton, Hildreth and I could all three join in amicable accord, over the solution of our difficulty, along radical and idealistic lines.
I hurried to the address given me by Hildreth. She was not in, but her mother was ... a plump, rather good looking, fashionably dressed woman. Evidently the mother did not know of the relationship between me and her daughter.