As to the volume of 1903, it is not only less startling than the first but seems more youthful. The “friend” of the title is a Japanese statuette in which her fantasy sees “a woman of fourteen” who has known love for a week, after which “the strong stranger went away,” leaving life drab. Here is the Devil again, and “Annabel” is obviously no more than Mary’s own _persona_, hard, experienced and self-contained even before adolescence. One wonders whether MacLane may have suffered some early traumatic experience with a man which produced this recurrent fantasy and prompted her sympathy for the déclassées of Butte. As for women, “Annabel” is her only admitted friend. The volume records nothing beyond Mary’s roaming alone in Boston, falling in love momentarily with Minnie Maddern Fiske as the Magdalen, and adoring the Puvis de Chavannes murals in the Public Library—those delicate wraiths so remote from reality. Of human contacts there is no mention; she is solitary and bitterly nostalgic for the Anemone Lady, or, rather, for their mountainside eyrie of her own imagining. Passages in her third volume, _I, Mary MacLane_ (1917) shed some light on her actual experiences at this time, but must await discussion in proper order because the later volume reflects the comparative emotional sophistication which had permeated this country in the intervening years. The next variant item was an historical novel by John Breckenridge Ellis (1902), but precedence will be given to the recently published _Things As They Are_ (1951), written in 1903 by Gertrude Stein, because of its closer similarity to MacLane’s autobiographical volumes. This earliest effort of Miss Stein’s, written when she was twenty-nine, is recognized as very near to her own experience by Edmund Wilson, a long-time student of her total work.[13] It records the emotional entanglements among three young American women over a period of two years, and opens on a transatlantic liner carrying them to Europe. Adele, the central figure from whose viewpoint the whole story is written, is oppressed by exhaustion and “the disillusion of recent failures” in Baltimore, and as Mr. Wilson points out, Miss Stein herself went abroad in the summer of 1902 after having abandoned hope of a degree from Johns Hopkins where she had pursued the medical course for five years. The three girls are characterized at length. Helen is the American version of the English handsome girl. In her ideal completeness she would have been unaggressively determined, a trifle brutal and entirely impersonal; a woman of passions but not of emotions, ... incapable of regrets,[14]