One day Terry paid one of his infrequent visits to his brother's home, and saw the plump and pretty Marie hanging clothes in the yard. He was at once attracted to her, and entered into conversation. He was deeply pleased; so was the girl; and they made an appointment. He soon saw what her character was, and this was to him an added attraction.
"I had been looking for a girl like Marie," he said, "for several years. I had made one or two trials, and they always got me into trouble with my family. But the other girls did not make good. They were too weak and conventional and could not stand the pace of life with me. I had early formed a contempt for the matrimonial relation. Five years I had nursed my rebellion and waited for a chance to use it. As soon as I met Marie I felt I had met one of my own kind. It was partly the fierce charm of a social experiment, the love for the proletarian and the outcast; for I felt Marie was essentially that. This element of my interest in her Marie never understood—this unconscious propaganda, as it were. She thought it was all sex and wanted it so."
Katie saw that Terry was making up to her beloved Marie, and tried to prevent their meetings; but in vain; the attraction was too strong. Katie blackguarded Terry on every occasion, until she finally saw it was hopeless, and then invited him into her house to meet the girl. There he began to go frequently and the intimacy grew. Nick warned Terry against the girl on account of her loose character. "I have often found her," he said, "misconducting herself with some fellow or other. Why, she does so with everybody. Only this evening I found her on the front door-step with young Bladen. She is not the kind for you to be serious about. Everybody knows how common she is."
Nick did not understand that an argument of that kind tended only to confirm Terry in his interest in Marie. Terry answered him laconically: "That's all right, Nick. When you don't want her, just send her to me."
Nick, as we have seen, was jealous of Marie, because of Katie's love for her; so he fomented trouble between the two women. Katie, too, was at this time more exasperated with the girl's conduct than she had ever been before; and they had frequent quarrels. As the result of one of them, Marie went off with Terry to his family flat, where he was living alone at the time—to "have a fish dinner," telling the relenting Katie that she would return in the evening. But she stayed there with Terry all that night, for the first time. In the morning Katie turned up bright and early, burst into the flat, and reproached Terry so bitterly that they almost came to blows. But when Marie took Terry's side, Katie, terribly disappointed and hurt, yet made up her mind that it was inevitable; and Terry and Marie began to live together.
How did Marie feel about all this? What was her condition at the time, and her attitude toward this strange man, so different from every other she had met? In a long letter to me she has given an account of it all.
"I wrote you about my adventure with the club man. Well that was only a single instance of what finally became frequent with me. I had grown so fearfully tired of the life I was leading in domestic service that the only problem for me was how to get away from it all. For a time, I had thought I could get away only by marriage. I was ready to marry anybody who offered me food and shelter, and I had even thought of prostitution as a means of escape from domestic drudgery. I had not the slightest idea of what prostitution in its accepted sense meant. I knew in a vague way that women sold their bodies to men for money, that they lived luxurious lives, went to theatres and balls, wore beautiful gowns and seemed to be gay and happy. I was willing to marry any man who offered me a home, without the least suspicion that in that way, too, I should prostitute myself. But no one at that time offered me this means of escape, so I was quite ready to take the only other way, as I thought, left to me.
"About this time I met an old girl-friend whom I had not seen for several years; she was a domestic servant, too, but was in advance of me in her recklessness. When I met her again she was in the mood to lose all the little virtue left to her. She was quite willing to sell herself: she had done enough for love, she said, marriage was now an impossibility, and she might as well realise on her commercial value. To these ideas I agreed, and we arranged to meet in two weeks from that day and try an experiment. Meanwhile she was to go back to her home, get her belongings, and tell her parents she had secured a place as a servant-girl in Chicago.
"I left my position, and finding things too disagreeable at home where I continually quarrelled with my mother, I went to visit Kate, until my friend should return.
"How my ideas and ideals had changed! When I first began to dislike the work I was forced to do, I dreamed that some charming fairy would come and release me: I had been taught such a view of life from the novels of Bertha M. Clay and E. D. E. N. Southworth. Some rich man, young and charming, possibly the owner of the factory I was working in, would fall passionately in love with me, marry me and carry me away to his palace! Gradually, my ideas came down. I should have been glad to marry a foreman, then some good mechanic, and finally, some workman, however humble, whom I would love dearly. And now I was deliberately preparing for a life of prostitution!