"There is one thing in you which I shall never quite compass; with my understanding," she almost moaned, "you express the most exquisite thoughts in the loveliest language ... you enter into the very soul of beauty ... and then you come out with some bit of horse-play, some grotesquerie of speech or action that spoils it all."
Nevertheless, it was the humanness in me that brought all the reporters who came to interview us to sympathise with Hildreth and me, instead of with Penton.
Yes, we had found our dream-cottage ... back in the lovely pines, near West Grove. At a nominal sum of fifteen dollars a month; the actress who owned it, sympathising with our fight, had rented it to me for the fall and winter ... if we could stand the bitter cold in a summer cottage....
There Hildreth stayed, seemingly alone, with Darrie, who had come down to chaperon her. To the reporters who sought her out when her place of retreat became known, she averred that she had no idea of my whereabouts. In the meantime, under the name of Mallory, I was living near by, was renting a room in the house of a Mrs. Rond, whose husband was an artist.
I came and went to and from my cottage by a bye-path through the pines that led to the back door.
Darrie, as we called her, performed the most difficult task of all—the task of remaining friends to all parties concerned.
The strain was beginning to tell on Penton. A strange, new, unsuspected thing was welling up in his heart, Darrie averred ... his love for his repudiated wife was reviving so strongly that now he dared not see her, it would hurt him too deeply....
His friends, the Stotesburies, a wealthy radical couple, had let him have a cottage of theirs up in Connecticut, and he was staying in it all by himself, doing his own cooking and hurrying with a new book in order to get enough money to defray the enormous expenses he had incurred by initiating and prosecuting his divorce suit....
And now Daniel joined us. Daniel and I agreed with each other famously. For he liked me. He took walks with me, and we went bathing together after I had done my morning's writing. We crabbed in the Manasquan River, and fished.