Marie continued:
"During this awful time I did not blame Terry, dope or no dope. I considered it all coming to me, and even wished it would keep on coming until it killed. But I made up my mind right then and there that if it was fated that I should keep in the game, there should be no more 'affairs' for me. And so help me God I have not had any from that time—six months ago—till the day Terry left me. And that other man's name has not once passed my lips in Terry's presence, and when it was mentioned by others when he and I were there, I grew dizzy and sick.
"In time, these dreadful things were thought of as little as might be, and Terry and I became excellent, though platonic friends, a novel and fascinating relation, wherein sex had no part. Night after night have we sat around this table, discussing books and people, trying to penetrate the mystery of things strange and new to us. I should rather say that he talked, and I was his eager listener. Often, after tossing restlessly on our pillows, when no sleep would come 'to weight our eyelids down,' the rest of the night would be spent in reciting poetry, the inevitable cigarette in one hand, the other gesticulating in the most fanciful and fervid manner. He would recite in passionate whispers—so as not to awaken Katie—for hours at a time, poems from Shakespeare to Shelley, and Verlaine to Whitman, poems tender and sweet, bitter and ironical and revolutionary, just as the mood suited him. His feeling for poetry and nature seemed to grow as his hope for human society grew less.
"So our relations were ideally platonic—the kind you read about in books. Nevertheless, some of the old bitterness remained in Terry's heart, for at times he became depressed and melancholy and so sensitive about the least little thing that I was nervous and in hot water all the time for fear I might inadvertently say or do something to hurt him or make him angry. I admit I am not as placid as I look, and Katie, too, is very inflammable, so you can understand how tense the atmosphere was at times.
"Not very long ago, at the breakfast table one Sunday morning, I urged Terry to come to a meeting of the 'radicals,' adding that he was becoming a regular hermit and that it would do him good to have more social pleasure. He turned on me savagely, called me a hypocrite, and a contemptible one at that, and made a few more remarks of the kind. After a few days of strained politeness on both sides I made bold to ask him for some explanation—and I have got it coming yet!
"These are just the facts. I don't go into all the little details of our many little vulgar rows, about the most trivial things. I am sure, if Terry writes you about this, that his innate delicacy would never permit him to go into these sordid details, too many of which I have perhaps told you. But I am made of rougher stuff than he. I am never quite as unreasonable as he can be at times, but I am commoner."
Terry did, indeed, express himself in a much more laconic way about the quarrel, than Marie. On the day he left, August thirteenth, he wrote me the following note:
"The premonition in my last letter is fulfilled: the salon knows me no more."
A later talk I had with both Katie and Terry throws light upon the precipitating cause of Terry's departure on the thirteenth of August. It was due to Terry's sensitiveness about his money relationship to Katie. On that morning Terry was asleep on the couch, when Katie got up, made breakfast, and she and Marie asked Terry to join them.
"Not me," said he.