"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. 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.