It was generally known, sub rosa, that Hildreth and I were living together. But, as long as she pretended it was not so, as long as I lived seemingly in another house, pretending, under another name, to be Mrs. Baxter's literary adviser, the hypocrisy of the world was satisfied.
I was, in other words, following the accepted mode.
It was a nasty little article by a fellow literary craftsman from the Pacific coast, that set me off, brought me to the full realisation that I was but playing the usual, conventional game,—that roused me to the determination that I must no longer sail under false colours.
This writer retailed how, after a brief, disillusioning few weeks together, Hildreth had grown tired of the poverty and spareness of the living a poet was able to make for her ... of how I was lazy, impliedly dirty ... of how, up against realities, we had parted ... I had, he stated, in fact, deserted her, and was now on my way back to Kansas, riding the rods of freights, once more an unsavoury outcast, a knight of the road ... he ended with the implication, if I remember correctly, that the reception that awaited me in Kansas, would be, to say the least, problematical.
Of course this story was made up out of whole cloth.
'Gene Mallows afterward informed me that the big literary club in San Francisco that this hack belonged to had seriously considered disciplining him by expulsion for his unethical behaviour toward a fellow-writer.
But I maintain that it was good that he penned the scurrilous article. For I had allowed happiness to lull my radical conscience asleep. It was now goaded awake. I held a conference with Hildreth.
"There is now only one thing for me to ... to come right out with it that you and I are living here together in a free union, and that the love we bear each other not only justifies, but sanctifies our doing as we do—as no legal or ecclesiastical procedure could....