One of Marie's amorous episodes led her to Detroit, with a "fake" anarchist, of whom there are many. After a week or two of dissipation and disillusionment, Marie returned, very ill, to the "Salon," where Terry received her with his usual stoicism, and acted as trained nurse. Repentant and disgusted, Marie wrote me from her convalescent bed:
"I am still far from well, but am much better. My illness was caused by too much dissipation, which I plunged into for relaxation. For some weeks previously I had got a particularly large dose of my environment. Terry and I live in surroundings which would kill an ordinary person. Our little home is not as bad in the summer time. We can have the windows and doors open, but now in this cold winter we must all live in one room, a very small room, where there is a stove. The dampness penetrates right through the walls and the wind comes through the holes in the window panes. Sundays are the hardest days for me. Then Kate, queen of the kitchen, is here, and she delights in cooking all sorts of things on that day, so for the remaining six days our home smells of her culinary operations—most abominable, this odour of stale cookery! And what a mess our rooms are in on Monday morning! You wouldn't comprehend, even if I told you. I have to clean up all this, and I wish I could fly away every Sunday. At times I get so tired of this way of living. I hope some day I may find a large barn with a hay loft: I would immediately abolish Kate and her cookery and would be comfortable for once in my life.
"So I ran away, for a time, partly for relief, partly because I was rather taken with a Detroit anarchist who was visiting us. Though he was a comrade, he was really a Philistine, which I did not see till afterwards. I saw only that he was young and lusty and wanted a lark, as I did, so I went with him on an awful tear, and returned terribly done up, as you know.
"I have been lying here in this little room for three weeks. I thought surely I should die, and I was neither glad nor sorry. It was curious, this sensation of approaching death. All these days Terry sat opposite me at a table reading or writing. I could see him distinctly at times, at other times everything was misty or completely dark, only his voice reached me from such a long, long distance. He sat there like an implacable fate, with calm, cold eyes, gazing above and beyond me. Between two slow heart beats I felt it was almost a duty to call him and bid him farewell, but some strange sense of shyness held me back. I tried so hard to think of what I might do, and the most grotesque and comical things suggested themselves. At one lucid moment I had the brilliant idea of becoming a jockey!
"Other ways of passing my life revolved ceaselessly in my brain, and now at last perhaps I have found it. Now that I am better I am reading Swinburne aloud, in bed. The sound of my voice carried along with the music of his matchless rhythms is to me a delight and a wonder. I have discovered that the Garden of Proserpine should be read only when one is in a reclining position. Then one's voice conveys more perfectly the weariness of all things mortal and the sweet delight of rest. I find I must practice breathing more deeply, if I wish to render the voluptuous, sinuous lines. Don't you think this is a great ambition, to read Swinburne well? I am so glad to find something to do, something I love to do. Perhaps I may escape from all by this.
"It is now five days since I started to write to you, but I still lie on my back and dream and have not found my place, and never shall. Swinburne's never-ceasing, monotonous rhymes have palled upon me. Even this is sordid, and then, if so, what is the rest?—the daily life filled with brutish and shallow men and women? When I can no longer endure poetry and daily life—it is then that I rush into brutal dissipation, from which I awake sick in mind and body, without hope or desire for anything but sleep: and then, once more, the Garden of Proserpine reveals itself to me, or some other thing of beauty. It is an eternal round.
"I often think that the only way for me to be in harmony with the scheme of things would be to go down into the gutter. Some years ago during my brief period of—prostitution, I suppose—I felt a strange importance. It was death to me, but something real, too. I was fulfilling a need of society, a horrible need, but a need. And then, too, all my men friends often go to these houses. All the nice, intellectual men are to be met there—men from all ranks of life—men a girl like me could never meet in any other way. During that brief time, at moments between a sleep and a drink, I used to have this fancy, which sometimes makes me shudder now, as I think of it, and yet somehow seems such a fine satisfying protest—a feeling that some day I would be seen waddling about the streets of Chicago, known to all the denizens of the under world as Drunken Mary! I saw myself fat and repulsive, begging nickels from the passers-by and perhaps strangled at the end by some passing hobo for the few nickels in my stocking. And am I essentially worse than you, or my lady, or anyone whom Society protects and honours? To me poet and pimp, politician, reformer, thief, aristocrat, prostitute are one. Caste and class distinctions are too subtle for my poor brain and too outrageous for my heart, which still tries to beat with and for humanity."
Terry refers only in a line or two, characteristically, to this adventure and illness of Marie.
"She is seriously ill, the result of a mad adventure. As I exist for others when they are in pain, I am her trained nurse. She is now recovering from the drugs, the debauching, and the raving madness of sleepless nights. I will give you an account sometime of a strange piece of magic charlatanism, practiced under the guise of beautiful art!...
"I think her growing recovery is largely due to the inability to secure a doctor to christen her disease. I feel rather worn with domestic drudgery, cooking, laundering, wrestling with disease without and demons within. Still, as a trained nurse who can go sleepless for three weeks, I do not look upon myself as a failure."