While Marie was trying to find some trace of Terry, the latter was wandering about the country.
"I have been tramping about the country," he wrote me, "living most of the time in the parks. This life, where you 'travel by hand,' crowds out consecutive meditation, but I like it because I can go away at the first shadow of uneasiness betrayed on either side. My existence now is so responsive and irresponsible that it comes very close to my heart. I am living a life of contrasts: one week I spent with a rare friend who has many good books and admires me for the thing for which all others condemn me. Strange, is it not, that the one thing which redeems me in his far-seeing eyes is what places me beyond redemption in the minds of others. I have spent some sleepless nights in his fine home, kept awake by the seductions of social life tugging at my heart-strings. So one night I stole away from this seduction and slept with some drunken hoboes in the tall soft grass, where I could have no doubt about being welcome. I might as well doubt the grass as those pals, who without question hailed me as an equal. I, having the only swell 'front,' tackled a mansion, and the Irish servant-girl, to whom I told the truth, gave me a whole hand-out in a basket, enough for all of us. My brother hoboes swore I should be the travelling agent of the gang. But a copper gave me the 'hot foot,' while I was 'pounding my ear' in the woods with the other 'boes, so I straightened and hiked to the stock yards, where I feel more at home with the Hibernians.
"Never have I seen Life more triumphant and rampant, more brimming over with hope and defiant of all conditions, hygienic and otherwise. I am rooming with an Irish family whose floor space is limited, so we all have shake-downs, and in the morning can clear the decks for action with no bedsteads in the way. I am very 'crummy,' badly flea-bitten, overrun with bed bugs, somewhat fly-blown, but, redemption of it all, I am free and always drunk. Still, I am really getting tired of playing the knock-about comedian and shall soon 'hit the road.'
"I am willing to do anything for Marie I can, except to love her as I once did, but never shall again. Even spirits die, and the spirit of the salon is so dead that it is beyond resurrection."
Marie, however, would not believe that the spirit of the salon, or at any rate, as much of that spirit as depended on the relation between her and Terry, was dead; she was more conscious than Terry of the ups and downs of the human nerves and heart and the ever-present possibility of change, and she went to work in a wilful attempt to get back her lover. Her next letter was a triumphant one:
"I am a very happy girl to-day, and I must write to tell you so before the mood vanishes, for I have learned that good moods are very fleeting.... The cause of my happiness is, of course, that I have at last met Terry and we have had a long, delightful talk together, and I hope our misunderstanding is all cleared up. Only, now I am afraid I shall begin to pine and fret because we cannot be together always, though reason and philosophy and logic all tell me that the new relation between us two is the very best, noblest, most ideal—or at least they try to tell me so. It very nearly approaches the anarchistic standard, too.
"There is something fascinating in this new state of affairs. It is just like falling in love all over again: the clandestine meetings, with the one little tremulous caress at parting—which is all we are bold enough to exchange—thrill me; it is the mysterious charm of the first love-affair! It makes my blood sing and dance. I lie awake the whole night thinking of our meetings and trying to bring them vividly back to me.
"And, do you know, what makes me supremely glad is the feeling that Terry is going to love me again, that I am going to win him back. He thinks that love is an enslaving thing and harmful to the soul, but my dear lovely idealist and dreamer has loved me once and he must love me again. I am so in love with love and almost as fanatical about it as the ecstatic artist is about art: love for love's sake, art for art's sake. I never did—and hope I never shall—get over that feeling of awe at the mystery and beauty and elusiveness of that great force in life—love. And I have always felt so sorry for people, sincere people, who told me honestly that they have felt that wonder-in-spring sensation only once in all their lives. It made me think that I had at least one thing to be very thankful for, that I was different from them, that I could experience the divine flame, and experience it continually. If you knew how often I have fallen in love with Terry!
"Poor Terry, I feel so sorry for him, too; he has no place to stay, though he could stay indefinitely at three or four houses that I know of, where his friends would feel only too glad to have him. But he says he does not want again to attach himself to any person, place, or cause, because the time would come when he should have to break away, and then he should have to experience death again. So he intends to move about whenever and wherever the whim suits. But I am sure this life will not satisfy Terry for long, for there is really very much of the hermit in him....
"I am going to see him again in a few days, so I have the pleasantest things to dream of. If I am to win Terry back, I must be extremely careful: one false move would be likely to queer the whole thing. Oh, I am tremendously happy, for I am sure I shall win my dear Terry back again!"