Their situation, as proletarian interpreters of the working class, enables them to see whatever is true in this view with peculiar vividness. For, of course, it is to their interest to see this truth; for truth is only an impassioned statement of our fundamental needs. The salon was composed of the poor and the criminal, and what kept it together was the human desire to form a society, the norms of judgment of which should give value to the individual members--the deep need of justification. There were fakirs in the salon, unkind people, unjust people, vicious people; there were mere "climbers," persons who saw their only chance for recognition and livelihood in the espousal of anarchistic ideas. But there were also kind people, relatively just people, and moderate ones, honest and strenuous with themselves. There were none perfect, as there are none perfect in any society. We shall see how Terry became disgusted finally with the anarchists themselves, preferring even insanity and probable death to them. And Marie's letters are full of satire of her companions, of the perception of their weaknesses and inconsistencies. She never embraces or rejects them so completely as Terry does, for she sees them more clearly; therefore she sees them more humorously, understands them better. Her letters teem with "psychological gossip," so to speak, in which some of her companions seem portrayed with relative truth. One she wrote me, while I was seeing something in London, of an anarchist named Nicoll, who was a friend of William Morris and still edits Morris's old paper, is full of both appreciation and satire of a number of "radicals": "An old friend of Nicoll's used to talk to me by the hour about him. He, the friend, an ordinary, rather stupid fellow, once helped poor Nicoll, got a room for him and gave him money, after he was released from prison. He felt proud to think that a man like Nicoll would accept hospitality 'from a poor bloke like me,' as he put it. His friendship with Nicoll has been the great event of his life. Whenever anything occurs in the radical movement which recalls ever so slightly the affair of which Nicoll was the scapegoat, his old friend will say, in his funny Jewish Cockney, 'That's always the wey, like Nicoll's kise, for example.' Then he launches forth into eloquent streams of denunciation, for he does not regard Nicoll as at all insane, but on the contrary, 'the finest man ever downed' by aristocrats like Turner and Kropotkin.