The pertinent point to which all the foregoing leads is an attachment to a high school teacher of literature first encountered when Mary was eighteen, “the first person on earth who ever looked at me tenderly,” to whom she refers with adolescent sentimentality as the “Anemone Lady.” About this woman she spins passionate reveries, wishing they might live together high on a mountainside away from the world. With the beginning of this friendship “I felt a snapping of tense-drawn cords, a breaking away of flood gates—and a strange new pain ... a convulsion and a melting within.”[10] Nevertheless, caresses went no farther than “your hand in mine,” and the association seems to have lasted but a year. Still Mary says: Sometimes I am seized with nearer, vivider sensations for my friend the Anemone Lady ... I feel a strange attraction of sex. There is in me a masculine element that when I am thinking of her arises and overshadows all the others.... So then it is not the woman-love but the man-love set in the mysterious sensibilities of my woman-nature. It brings me pain and pleasure mixed.... Do you think a man is the only creature with whom one may fall in love?[11] This pseudo-naïveté wakes a suspicion of literary influence which is strengthened by her second volume, _My Friend Annabel Lee_ (1903). Here she proclaims her few early literary loves to have been Poe, the juvenile books for boys of J. T. Trowbridge, and “‘Three Grains of Corn,’ by a woman named Edwards,” and she voices acute loathing for Archibald Clavering Gunter without citing reasons. Mathilda Betham-Edwards was an Englishwoman who lived in France during the late nineteenth century, and the _Oxford Book of Victorian Verse_ includes a sonnet of hers, “A Valentine: The Pansy and the Prayer Book,” ending with the following sestet: The while I knelt, I let a pansy glide Between her grave sweet face and open book And whispered as she turned with chiding look— “Heaven has not willed, dear heart, that aught divide Love pure as ours, nor blames if thought of me Come like this flower between thy God and thee.”[12] This MacLane would have loved, as she would have hated the farcical treatment of variance in _A Florida Enchantment_, and to assume her acquaintance with both would explain her otherwise unaccountable singling out of these two authors alone for special mention. Both of MacLane’s volumes betray a disingenuous effort to present herself as a child genius springing as it were by parthenogenesis from the intellectual wasteland of Montana. It is probable that her reading had been more extensive and had influenced her more than she admitted.