Two years later (1902) a Canadian-American girl of twenty-one published _The Story of Mary MacLane_, written as a journal covering three months during her nineteenth year and purporting to be literal autobiography. Like the comparable “Story of Opal,” printed as authentic by the _Atlantic Monthly_ in 1920, but partially “debunked” by discerning critics, it was probably laced with more than a dash of fiction. In its day it created sufficient sensation to be burlesqued in Weber and Field’s revue of that year, and sold well enough to allow its author a half-dozen years in Boston and New York. Conspicuous in its self-revelation is undying hatred of the father whom Mary lost at the age of eight. Apart from feeding and clothing me ... and sending me to school—which was no more than was due me—I cannot see that he ever gave me a single thought. Certainly he did not love me, for he was quite incapable of loving anyone but himself....[7] Of her mother she says later, How can one bring a child into the world and not wrap it round with a certain wondrous tenderness that will stay with it always!... My mother has some fondness for me—for my body because it came out of hers. That is nothing—nothing. A hen loves its egg.[8] Mary feels herself unloved also by the rest of her family—older sister, older and younger brothers, and stepfather—all of whom are “strictly practical and material, seeing close human relations as the stuff of literature, not real life....” She is herself a genius, infinitely apart from the crude barrenness of Butte, Montana, though she owns to keen sympathy for women there who are “outside the moral pale.” All this, of course, is once again the “dark hero complex,” that sense of being outcast but superior, which has since been so well analyzed by Romer Wilson in Emily Brontë and others. For 1902, three decades _before_ the era when parents could do no right, it was fairly strong meat. As for men, MacLane is certain none can ever rouse or possess her except the Devil. “He will be incarnate, but he will not be a man.” He will hurt her, and passion for him will free her from herself, but it will last only three days, and “there must be no falling in love about it.” My shy and sensitive soul would be irretrievably poisoned and polluted. The defilement of so sacred and beautiful a thing as marriage is surely the darkest evil that can come to a life. And so everything in me that had turned toward that too bright light would then drink deep of the lees of death.[9] It was this devil fantasy upon which Weber and Fields seized, and on the stage the Dark Gentleman, played by William Collier, fled in terror before the _enfant terrible_.