"I don't know what Terry is doing, or where he has gone, and I am uneasy. I would not fancy this beautiful bohemian life alone with Katie, and I don't know what to do."
"Terry is still away," she wrote a few days later, "and my horizon looks bleak and lonely. I want to be alone where I can collect my thoughts, but, even when Katie is out, I cannot think, but sit by the window staring at the old women hanging up the clothes which everlastingly flap on the lines tied between the poor old gnarled willow trees. Poor old trees, their fate has been very like that of the old women. They bear their burden uncomplainingly, groan dolefully in the wind, and shake their old palsied heads. Even the sparrows, true hoboes of the air, disdain to seek shelter in their twisted arms. They will die as they have lived, withering away.
"I try to interest myself in household affairs, but that is so stale and unprofitable. Neither can I read: my thoughts wander away and Terry intrudes himself constantly on my mind. I may get so desperate that I will seek a job as a possible remedy: perhaps in that way I could get tired enough to sleep....
"I have been trying to meet Terry, but he is as elusive as any vagrant sunbeam. I feel it would do me a world of good to have a long heart-to-heart talk with him. If I could only see him once a week and have him sympathise with me in a brotherly fashion and hear him say, in his old way: 'Cheer up, Marie, the worst is yet to come,' I should be comparatively happy and satisfied."
Several more days passed, and with the lapse of time Marie's mood grew blacker. Her next letter to me had a deep note of sorrow and regret and remorse:
"Terry has been away since August thirteenth. He came, while I was out, for his things. I fear it is his farewell visit; for he has not shown the slightest disposition to meet me and talk things over. I have tried in every way to see him again, but he has thus far ignored my existence. I had an idea that we two were made for each other, but I have been an awful fool. Last February, as you know, I had an affair, if it may be dignified by even that name, and just for the fun of the thing I went with this light love to Detroit, and came home ill, as you already know. I returned to Terry full of love and regret and most properly chastened by my illness and disappointment; for other men almost always disappoint me. But I found him positively beastly. The way he abused that poor man was terrible, and I had to defend him, for I know that Terry was unjust to him. I begged him to blame me, not the other man, for it was all my doing, but that only made matters worse.
"I know that some people can conceal their obnoxious qualities and show only the sweet and lovely side of themselves. I sometimes like to see the reverse side of the medal, and I expected Terry, as a student of humanity and an anarchist, to welcome any phase of character which might enable him to understand me more completely.
"I must hesitate in attributing Terry's attitude to jealousy, for I have had some affairs before, and he never seemed to care about them in the least; indeed, I often felt piqued, and thought he did not mind because he did not care about me enough. The following two weeks were, I can truly say, the most infernal and awful that ever happened to me, and I wished thousands of times that I might die, and I did come very close to it. I cannot describe that hellish time or give you any idea of Terry's conduct during those weeks. He was no longer the calm, philosophical Terry that you know, but the most terribly cruel thing the mind of man can conceive.
"Now, I know these are strong words, and I don't know if you can imagine Terry that way, or if you can believe me when I say it is so. I have thought of it so many times, and I have come to the conclusion that perhaps while I was away, he and Harris had a great debauch together and that Terry must have taken some dope which unbalanced him for a while."
I do not think it needs "dope" to explain Terry's conduct. Marie, perhaps, could not understand the possible cruelty of a disappointed idealist. When Terry began to see that neither the anarchists nor Marie would ultimately fit into his scheme of things, when his idealistic hope began to break against the hard rocks of reality, he was capable, in his despair, of any hard, desperate, and cruel act.