The Mary MacLane Project

Following are selected texts from Mary MacLane's letters to Harriet Monroe from 1902 to 1912

[c. August 1902]

[Cambridge, Massachusetts]

Dear Harriet Monroe -

I remember you.

I remember you on a summer forenoon.

You were there and I was there.

We went out to walk by the lake-shore.

The lake-shore was very beautiful.

You were so fascinating that day. You were so strong. You were so true.

Particularly you were so true.

I loved you.

I had infinite faith in you.

And you were kind.

You were kind - so that I felt it without knowing it.

Which is a wonderful thing and goes far.

Surely no Pharisee was ever yet kind like that.

For a summer forenoon:

My love to you - oh, my love to you.

Dear Harriet Monroe -

At any rate - good-by.

Mary MacLane

- My love to you, always. -

[c. August 1902]

[Cambridge, Massachusetts]

Dear Harriet Monroe -

My love reaches out to you. My love reaches you through distance and silence and mystery, and through the inevitable things.

And my love reaches out to you in your dark or your light.

If there is a little dark about you my love will shine clearer to you, but if your light is bright and so fades my love in its reflection, still you will know that it is there. - -

Your friend -

Mary MacLane

August 24, 1902
Hotel San Remo
New York City

My Dear Harriet Monroe -

To tell you that I love you.

Sometimes indeed the thought of you is vaguely maddening in that you have given me a measure which is not my measure.

Straightaway thereafter comes my fair impression of you - my very, very fair impression - that you are altogether kind, that you sound true, that you have given bits of your fine self to me.

My self is not fine but I gave of my intense depths of love to you - my intensity of love, the fire and the utter unreasoningness of it, is a thing you can not measure. It is mine and of me. It is like a line of brilliant sun and deep shadow that runs down the sky.

To tell you that I love you.

I do not write these short abrupt letters to any one whom I do not love. They are vivid and illuminating. Are not they vivid and illuminating?

In the years that are coming you will have many of these from me, dear Harriet Monroe.

[c. September 1902]

[New York City]

Dear Harriet Monroe -

I love Lucy Gray - and she's here.

But I love you so that I think of you in the days.

I wish I were with you - I wish - -

Little MacLane

To tell you that I love you.

[c. October 1902]
Crest Hall
Winthrop Beach, Massachusetts

My Dear Harriet Monroe -

It is mine to ask you to pardon me for neglecting your letters. I did not write to you because I did not want to.

Why should I be a hypocrite also? And so I send no messages of love to those whom I do not love. But I never forget that you have been kind to me - I never forget that you understand much - oh - much. If you stand off and measure me coldly, and see all that is in me to criticize, and find my manifold faults before you find my softer things - it is because you must, doubtless. I can not blame you for that - and I can not love you for it.

But when I read these clever letters of yours, always there comes the thought - "When I have fully repressed <U>myself</U> and become a strange, quiet person Harriet Monroe will smile approval upon me. And since I know that can "not repress myself ever, and that <U>always</U> I shall be this unquiet half-barbarian - then I know also that the approving smile of you will be mine never.

- And to be sure, of what possible use would a smile of approval be to a quieted subdued person? A quieted subdued person would remember, doubtless, how much more need she had of them when life was not quiet, nor yet subdued.

However, a smile of approval is but a poor thing. I find that I care more for love that knows no approving or disapproving - that I care for it more than all things in the wide world.

My Anemone Lady could not approve of me - and she kissed me upon my two lips and passed.

But we love each other - we love each other. She remembers how I gave her the first frantic passion of my heart. And I remember how she came to me in the dark, when I had lived eighteen years of utter aloneness. The Anemone Lady is a beautiful person with the sweetest voice I have ever heard - but of she had been ugly to see I should still have called her the Anemone Lady, since she gave me a measure of fine fair tenderness to me. And I was an uncanny animal whom she knew she would never understand. The Anemone Lady was exquisite then.

It was only after I took the world at large into my confidence that she ceased to approve of me. And having ceased to approve, she kissed me on my two lips - and passed. -

And for you - I shall never forget that you have been kind to me - and that you understand much ....

I have a new friend. Have I told you about my feeling for Maria Louise Pool? Her friend is my friend. On Tuesday I was at their house where she had lived and died. I saw all of her things - and I felt her near me. For three years I have been very near to her - and now she is dead. And her friend is my friend. She is like something I have loved for years. She understands so well that, from reading my letters, she has associated me with Emily Bronte.

I love her so much - her and Maria Louise Pool, who is dead without knowing that I love her - that my heart aches whenever I think of them. It is always so when I love much ....

I remember you for when you were kind to me - and for that you understand. You also said "Emily Bronte."

Mary MacLane

[c. December 1902]
Hotel Bartol
Boston

Dear Harriet Monroe -

I remember you.

My love to you.

You wrote me a good letter. Except that the things of your life were bearing heavily upon you.

Are they bearing less heavily now?

My heart began to ache for you but stopped when it recollected that it could not matter to you.

Once I said to you - when you had related a vaguely pathetic incident of your life - "I feel sorry for you." And you ridiculed the idea of my being sorry for you.

But when you ridiculed the idea, I felt sorrier for you, and sorrier for you than for me.

Which is only a fancy of my own.

My love to you.

I love you to-day.

That I can love a few persons is my one hopeful thing ....

I write every day.

Sometimes I think my writing is a wider and deeper thing than yours.

It is surely intenser.

Often it kills itself by its own intensity. It burns its own meaning out and dust-ashes are left ....

I remember your tiny hands - and your eyes that I have never loved.

Times, I go with you to sit under the blue Chauvannes pictures.

In the book I am writing I write a chapter of them ....

Mary MacLane

Sunday [August 1903]
Hotel Metropole
Denver

My Dear Harriet Monroe -

It is a long time since I have written you?

But I have thought of you a great many times.

I have read a story of yours in the Atlantic. It was like you, and I sat with it in my lap for some half-hours together.

I am waiting for the Houghton-Mifflins to bring out your book of plays.

I find your writing fascinating.

I used to love you.

Perhaps I do, yet. -

Lucy Gray showed me a letter of yours in which you spoke of writing me - and she would not let you send the letter. She said it was not like you.

Next time, don't consult my friend Lucy Gray. Am I so small that I can't be allowed to read anything which does not praise me?

Perhaps I may see you when I stop in Chicago on my way from here to Boston.

I wish all good things to you. - -

Mary MacLane

[December 10, 1904]
10 Bay Street
St Augustine, Florida

Dear Harriet Monroe -

But surely it is a long time since you have written me a letter.

-I sometimes wonder as I go through life why it is you don't write me a letter. -

A letter from you is a valued thing by various tokens.

When I used to have a letter from you I looked long at it, and I said `Perchance she wrote me this letter against her Better Judgment.' And if it were so it were all the more to be valued.

It outrode prejudice.

Nearly all the good things that have come to me - perhaps quite all of them - have come to me from people against their Better Judgment. They come purged. They come free as air.

Free as air. -

It is one of the tokens by which I value a letter from you. -

- Moreover, in reality, I do love you. -

Since last summer I have been reading your books - Valeria, and the book you wrote about your brother.

Your books are wonderfully like you - so compact as to personality, so firm as to lips and as to hands, so full of repressed emotions and of sub- dued brilliances. -

I'm not greatly interested in Mr. Root or in Architecture - I know not either of them - but to me the Memoir-book is quite as much you as Mr. Root.

I had known you but a very few hours when you began to talk about your friend Mr. Root. The while you sifted sand through your fingers, by the lake-shore.

Even in your book you sift sand.

- There is a bay before my eyes which is today so pale and vague and light as ever your lake was.

On it are two white, white sails. And beyond the bay is an island, - and so richly-green and so fair and tranquil is it, lying in the sea and the sunshine, that I never cast my eyes on it without wondering if there's indeed no balm in Gilead.

- I should like to walk with you once by the side of this bay.

Above the bay is the sky - so peaceful, so restful is it that it makes me long for the time when I shall be no longer held fast to the earth, but may rest in the sky if I will. -

- I wish you might walk with me once beneath the sky. -

Moreover, in reality I do love you. I send you still other messages. -

Mary MacLane

[December 20, 1906]
Box 22
St. Augustine, Florida

Dear Harriet Monroe -

I do hope that the memory of me in your mind is sufficiently alluring and picturesque to make this photograph something desirable upon your birthday. I wish it to be so, and I guess it will be if all the thoughts I've sent you, ever and anon, reached you and told you that I keep certain warm tenets of friendship for you always by me. I frequently think thoughts of you - thoughts of various colors. - One being a wish that I knew you more intimately than I've yet been permitted to, what with time and distances and things. I feel that there's much of you that I've not seen and heard. The memory of you that I carry since that wonderful ten days that I had in Chicago with you and Lucy Gray is always alluring and picturesque. - If one loved you a great deal but wasn't fascinated by you at all - wouldn't you rather that she'd love you something less and "be• fascinated? I should myself. -

I don't care at all to be loved by anybody for my good and gentle qualities - (if I had any) - but only because I'm I, and in spite of my manifold wickednesses of temperament, - or, too, maybe because of them. - So I feel always vaguely fascinated by the depths of your personality and all your mental lights (there being astonishingly few persons that have either, I find) - and I hope some day to know more of them. But I love you, withal. -

I'm hoping that you're not still in Vermont, or anywhere else so bleak and barren-sounding - because I want this to get to you for your birthday. -

- These days I'm busy writing something to be called Four Years Later - meaning four years after the Mary MacLane book - for some Sunday newspapers. And I'm writing it in the absolute sincerity of my heart - as much as ever I write in that first book. I'm very anxious to make it a success - both as literature and as a "human document." It's to be an article of about 12,000 words, and I'm allowed about all the latitude in the world. It's intensely interesting to me and for that reason I often fear for its clearness and convincingness. Possibly some of my frankness in the picturing of emotions may be blue-penciled by the Sunday editors, what time they come to read it - but I hope not. - If I can stand it, why not the public? - I hope to finish it in about a month. I work on it daily. -

- I think you owe me a letter of long standing and I want it much. -

- My love and all my good wishes for your birthday. -

Always your friend,

Mary MacLane

I haven't heard from Lucy Gray for months. It worries me. - -

December 30 [1906]
St Augustine, Florida

Dear Harriet Monroe -

The little gray package came Christmas day and brought me pleasure the while. It was nice to have a word from you after so long, and nice to have a real live gift made by your own hands. (I remember how your hands looked making a lamp-shade - small and determined.) I love gifts, and for its own sake I like the little case thing - so softly silken and with colors so softly bright. I'm glad it came from over-seas - the brocade. - I have two collars of rose-point that have long waited for some such resting place as this little case - so I have put them to bed in it. They breathe sighs of content. -

Also, and by itself, I like the green-and-white-and-blue sea poem. I like its rippling waves and laughing water, and its unmistakable savor of you. I've put it with the other three - "The Answer," "The Flower of the Moon" (which is the loveliest of form and face), and "The Model". They're a treasured possession. -

I wonder if my letter and bit of birthday gift reached you in time. I believe I sent them off December 18 - but how little these mail people care birthdays and Christmases. "Stony-hearted" is the word I use in connection with them. -

- You asked me some questions about myself, which certainly I shan't answer at this writing. There is something too chaotic and complex in my mind to admit of short simple answers. I am trying to picture much of me in the bit of writing that I told you of and I think I do. But they are not reassuring and peaceful pictures. I find, as I go on with them, that I'm rather an unpleasant person, - by and large. Only my unrealities, you might say, are real. -

Apart from that however, I wish you many happy New Years. And I'm always your friend.

Mary MacLane

January 14, [1907]

St. Augustine, Florida

Dear Harriet Monroe -

I was glad to know, in your letter which came New Year's day, that the gift which you sent me is a snuff-bottle. That fact sets it forever beyond the pale of vulgar use and preserves its gifthood intact. Because, you see, I don't take snuff ....

I've waited all these years for you to send me a photograph of Harriet Monroe ....

I am thankful that the tiny feather fan was in time to blow away the mists and shadows from your birthday. A larger fan would have shrunk from a task so terrific as rescuing a December-23 birthday from the thick-tangled mazes of Christmas. But I fancied that little one might do it. I was careful to send no Merry Christmases with it - on the long slip of paper. -

But I said Happy New Year to you in the ribald rococo letter that I wrote you. - And your letter brought me one. Your wish was that mine should be `outrageously happy' - which is so inspiring a phrase as to be almost its fulfillment. -

My love to you. -

I hope I can see you some day and before errant and wondrous youth has touched us for the last time and fled away.

Your friend,

Mary MacLane

May 24 [1909]
71 Irving Place
[New York]

Dear Harriet Monroe -

I hope you will forgive me for my long, long neglect. Of course I received the poem about the Seasons that you sent me at Christmas. I have read it more than once since then, and with no realizing sense that I had never thanked you for it. I am very sorry about it. I have the same affection for you that I've always had. I think of you frequently - sometimes every day for days there'll be some little vision, a happening that reminds me of you. And occasionally I come upon some of your writing. I remember seeing a poem of yours a month or two ago in Life - reprinted from some other magazine - about the modern hotel and all that makes it. I thought it extremely striking and real, and a wonderful vivid picture. The phraseology and the whole thing were characteristic of you. I have always found New York - any city - seething with poetry, on every sordid street corner, in the shops and subway stations, and all. We wear out our lives rubbing against it all daily - and yet these magazine poets, instead of making pictures of it, persist in doing weak-kneed verses about moons and rivulets and other things infinitely remote. - I say `magazine poets' because you never were one. There is always red blood in your poems, - or, not so much red blood as something suggestive of muscular force and vitality. - I think it's particularly true of this one on the Seasons. And the metre alone has strength. -

You asked about me - and I don't quite know what to tell you. I live in complete, absolute solitude, for one thing - I see nobody that I know from day's end to day's end. And I feel worn, weary, and indifferent to about everything in life. Which latter is due, I believe, to my never having quite enough to eat - some days it's not nearly enough. I don't quite know what I live on - sometimes I think each day will be the end of the tether. There's a man in New York - young Mr. Stone - who owes me about a thousand dollars. And he keeps owing it. I think I keep going chiefly because it's bitter to think of snuffing out and leaving a thousand dollars that belong to me. When I'm not too hungry I write on a book - a real Mary-MacLane book, but I doubt if it's ever finished - and I care little. - My love to you.

Mary MacLane

June 6 [1909]
71 Irving Place
[New York]

Dear Harriet Monroe -

Thank you very much for the check and the letter. I have been in the clutch of a fever in the last week or I should have sent you word sooner. The check was like a gift from the gods. I didn't get food with it because you don't want food when you're feverish - but I used it to pay a bit of rent. It made me solvent, and so, for the time, carefree.

I like your letter, for itself, but I fear it doesn't say the things to me that you meant it should. If I were a normal and even half-way heroic soul I suppose your gray letter would be a spur and an uplift. - But I know myself for what I am, and the main thing in your letter goes by me. I know I'm in most ways abnormal - and a craven soul rather than a heroic, and in many ways perverted. I suppose it fills you with impatience to hear me say so - but why not say what I know to be profoundly true?

It's only in the last few weeks that I've been living in solitude. Before that - since I've been in New York - I mixed with people of all conditions every day and night. I nibbled various forbidden fruits and sounded somewhat frightful depths of vice - New York is such a place for vice of all kinds, around every corner and inside every door - and these seem to be the things that attracted me most. I withdrew from them for the time not at all from morality but from an idea of self-preservation. I have still, I thought, brains and youth and a touch of genius, and I'll not plunge them into the fascinating pit yet. -

I don't want to work on a newspaper - and I have no aptitude for that sort of work - but the book I'm working on has really my heart's blood in it. It's the only sort of thing I can do - and if it mis-carries - if I can't keep going till I get it well advanced - then I'll slip away into the dark. - But I have hope for it. It has a poetry and passion and reality and fantasticness that's just I - and it may yet see the light. -

The Stone says he may pay me my thousand dollars this week - though he has said that before. If he does I'm leaving New York for the present - but not for several weeks.

My love to you. -

Mary MacLane

June 7 [1909]
[71 Irving Place]
New York

Dear Harriet Monroe -

The gray letter and the yellow check was a most grateful surprise this morning. I had absolutely not one copper in the world and the fever that I have just got over left me both weak and ravenous. I hated to have morning come because it meant dragging myself up to a breakfastless forenoon and an interview with that forlorn hope, the Stone. He's never to be seen till eleven. He is up at 29th street (I'm at 18th) and I've grown to loathe the listless and empty-stomached walk from here to there, which too frequently results in nothing. It's never a delightful interview and it's always the last resort with me - when I'm headachy and desperate for want of food. I hated it so much that I pawned all my rings and trinkets, and in fact everything I had that was pawnable, first. But that's a tether that I got to the end of weeks ago. Hunger is a very hard master.

There are not many brands of virtue, I think, that will out-last hunger.

So your check filled me with gratitude and relief. I had to pay out three dollars of it right away for a carping debt - but the other two meant breakfast, and food for quite a long while. I've learned to stretch dollar bills out into long vistas of food. I haven't a great appetite. My poor stomach this morning wanted a warm real breakfast, eggs and things - not just dry biscuits. And I had it. And I felt thankful to you. - I hope there'll be a time when I can give you back your two checks. I deeply appreciate the charitableness of you because I know I don't seem like "the deserving poor" to you. And I am not, indeed I am as forlorn a waif of destiny as the streets of New York can show - and with it, I'm not in the least good. And I'll never be.

- Also I appreciate the kindness of your borrowing money for me - but I can't go back to Butte at present. I want to go there when I've got my money from the Stone and straightened out some affairs - but not till then. I'll starve it out here, if I must - and if it comes to the worst, I'll go under.

- My London plan is open to me indefinitely - and it means all sorts of money for me but, with it, an unhallowed depth of vice. Still, nothing in the world has kept me from taking up with it - in the face of the black woes I have known since I've been here - but that, in the way of my writing, it would be suicidal. I should hate to give that up forever. I know I'm too self-conscious and too introspective a writer to make my darkness seem light - to make anything but distorted pictures if I live a false and perverted life. - At the same time, if I were to give up writing - I should take up with it.

But, as yet, writing holds a thrall for me. I think it always will - I had a cold interview with the Stone today, but he'd heard nothing more from his lawyers. He has hopes, however.

My love to you.

Mary MacLane

August 12 [1909]
[71 Irving Place]
New York

Dear Harriet Monroe -

I was very glad to have a harriet-monroe letter with the last little check. Welcome as the checks are, they aren't subtle - and it's only subtleties that fascinate me. I hadn't set down the silence that accompanied the preceding check to curtness - but to the exigencies of your mountain-y time, and that.

I know you disapprove of me, more or less - but also I know you're too downright to run to cold silences and things. There's Friendship between us - Friendship and friendship - and that never yet throve on cold silences.

- If you ask me, friendships are the most subtle and fascinating things in life. The exchanging of bits of one's personality for bits of some other personality - a personality means such an infinite variety of things to exchange, - and the compelling charm of knowing a complicated human being cares for you and is 'square' with you, and the exhilaration of knowing you can be square - even if you're not by nature - that you've got to be or there's no use - all that to me, with my bit of imagination, is vivid-and-subtle Delight ....

I still have no news of my Stone money - when I do I'll write you again. And I hope there are still to be letters from you.

My love to you.

Mary MacLane

September 10 [1909]
71 Irving Place
New York

Dear Harriet Monroe -

This is to ask you if there are still some more of the little checks to lend me, will you please send me one as soon as you get this? Unless, as I'm hoping, you have sent one that crosses this letter on the way - would you strain a point and telegraph me it? The Stone has kept me very much in the lurch, last week and this - and a matter has come up for which I need ten dollars rather desperately. I can't get it from him - he says there won't be any money for me till the end of next week - and the other people in new York that I can get money from are the sort who ask too much in return. -

Ordinarily I scrape through solvent if poor, and the checks that you have sent me I have mostly used for the unexpected things that crop up. They have proved extremely useful. Food and shelter can always be tem- porized with - but one, times, is confronted by things that can't be. -

The Stone begins to take more than a cold interest in seeing my affairs straightened out. I have hopes of seeing daylight and the narrow road to Butte before many weeks. I want to go to Butte with my book, not, I confess, that it attracts me - but that I know it's the sane and sensible thing to do. I can work better there - and I want to make this book so big a thing that I can come back and not merely look at this New York thing but live in it. The book's got to bring me money and make me my place - a notorious one probably, but, all the same, not cheap or tawdry. New York simply enchants and fascinates me, the more for all its terrors. And I know the terrors will always be in it, for me - even when I come back to it with renewed sinews.

But if one has the wit and the will one can grasp even them in one's two hands. -

I'm just now writing a chapter that I think is the biggest I have done thus far - it's about the worn and tired youth which makes about one-third of New York - the unattached young women who work at different things daytime and pursue pleasure by night, phantom pleasures that are always out of reach, and lead them on, and never wait. It's a maddening and futile chase, but one we think we've got to keep up. It's as hard on feminine youth as the pavements and cobblestones and skyscrapers and the shrieking of wheels. It makes for pallid faces and drooping lips and shadowed eyes - how many thousands of them I've seen! And there's a look that goes with it - aged and hardened youngness. And for all their outward grooming and delicately-wrought complexions - it's a look suggestive of inward bleeding and burning - the beginnings of decadence in worn young bodies. I know all about it myself. It's but one of New York's tragic things.

- I think I am making a vital picture of it. I point no morals and draw no conclusions in any of my chapters. I write what I see, and I portray my own fantastic personality. And I keep as much to terse vivid words and brief sentences as may be.

But I really oughtn't to talk about it. I think it diffuses strength to talk about one's work. It is to keep it all within till it's ripe. -

I should like to talk over many things with you. I look forward to it. -

My love to you.

Mary MacLane

September 18 [1909]
New York

Dear Harriet Monroe -

The check and your good letter came Thursday noon, and I was glad of both. I supposed the non-arrival of the money was due to some contretemps or other, but I felt sure it would come presently, so I ventured to borrow a ten-dollar note on the strength of it. So now I've repaid it, and it's the same as if I had had it from you by telegraph. (In fact, it's better, because I believe it would have cost more than a dollar.) I'm sorry if it gave you any worry, in the midst of your moving and confusion. Having the ten dollars at this juncture meant intense relief and breaking- of-clouds to me. I have deep feelings of gratefulness toward you. - In fact, all these little checks have been, time and again, the saving of slips 'twixt cup and lip for me. I seem peculiarly prone to such slips - though, too, they seem pretty much the portion of all such unattached waifs hereabouts ....

I'm glad of your hope for my book. It can't be all big - it is too much myself, and I'm aware of many shallows among my depths. Still - my idea is, if a thing is human, in art, it's big even in its pettiness. Indeed, I point out that, to me, there is something informing and illuminating in the trivialities and futilities of my own mentality. It's to me a vast and subtle field of thought, - I mean, just that idea of the futilities. -

But my Tired Youth chapter is still the best. - -

My love to you.

Mary MacLane

March 5, 1911
1007 W. Park Street
[Butte, Montana]

Dear Harriet Monroe -

Came your gray letter with the seven little white ivory rapiers ranged soldierly, on a square of darkling blue, bespeaking the Eastern Seas. I insist upon regarding them as rapiers - or poniards (poniard is a nice word), but be they what they will, they're entirely suggestive, in their quaint girlhood, of nobody but you.

How wonderful to have been in Moscow! What little I know about it I learned from the young Russian women anarchists that I used to meet in New York. It seemed a place of mystery, tyranny, and semi-barbarism which quite threw back to the Middle Ages. 'Twas passing strange to remember that it and `all the Russias' were co-existent with such things as aeroplanes, graphophones, William H. Taft, and - Akron, Ohio, for instance. (I can think of nothing more disconcertingly modern than a Middle Western middle-sized town, particularly in Ohio. But I like them and the idea of them - for vague reasons.) - Speaking of throwing back, it occurs to me that I throw back, when it comes to letter-writing, to Abigail Adams, Harriet Martineau, and Charlotte Bronte: they all used parentheses. But no one seems to now. -

Since the brief time I had with you and Lucy Gray a year ago and a little more, I have stopped off at the side of the world - where a few ill winds blew about me. I reached Butte on Christmas night, 1909, comprehensively tired, and the altitude of this plateau - and we are set upon the mountains above that - does not let one rest. I had the tiredness of two or three years in me, and the altitude but quickened my heart-beats and wrought up my frazzled nerves the more. All of which culminated when I had been home twenty days in a most accursed calamity - Scarlet Fever. There's a terror in the sound of it for me now. Week after week and week after week again, I lay battling with it - with the nurse, when not spraying me with water and soap, anointing me with olive oil, - from head to foot and without ceasing. And the medicines were legion - there were eight different ones every four-and-twenty hours, and their personnel was changed weekly so that their effect needn't be lessened. "We're keeping you alive," said the nurse and the doctor. And my own food was deadly white milk. There were motes and beams in my vision and after four days my voice sank to a whisper - and was heard no more for twenty-seven days. With all this I had diphtheria, which was indeed but a trifle except that it kept me gasping for breath, and except that it meant anti-toxin which paralyzed my fevered flesh and didn't save my throat from a seething blade at that. - But, well, nobody dies of scarlet fever, though it adds to the ranks of the halt and the blind, and after nine weeks (we were quarantined but seven) I found myself weak and well with but a scar on my neck (where I had to be knived again for a most virulent abscess - but that's better than being left stone deaf) and the rapid losing of my hair, to tell the tale. I regret to confess that the neat brown hair in the photograph that I sent you is all false, root and branch. (Not a wig, but a cunningly placed swatch or two.) I had then only a short fuzzy mop of an unspeakable snarliness and of mouse-colored hue. I quite intended to wear false hair for the rest of my life if that were the best the gods could do for me. My own pre-scarlet-fever hair in its red-and-bronze curliness had been so pretty! - I cursed that red terror again on its account alone. - You love your fingernails and all of your cuticle but of course these come again as good as new. - And now - for three weeks, praise be to Allah - I have discarded the false hair; for my own, if no longer red-and-bronze, has grown in apace, with all the pristine Canadian curliness. And if it's no longer red-and-bronze its equally no longer mouse-colored as in the reconstruction period. It's fascinating to be wearing my own soft hair again with a bunch of curls behind and the prevailing fringe of "bangs," thin delicate bangs de luxe, on my forehead: beneath which seethe the iridescent, unhopeful, somehow disillusioned, but entirely scornful and unafraid thoughts of mid-youth. I have no more strength - and particularly no more vitality and elasticity - in my slim young body than a decadent poet who is nourished on absinthe. But perhaps I shall get out of this altitude which is fit only for the habitation of pigs - and then I shall be strong again. Not that I live on absinthe - far from it. I eat, oh, an astonishing amount of food - red, red meat and countless eggs. But a quaint ghost called mal-nutrition preys upon me. Do what I will - and eat what I will - I can't weigh more than 108, and me a tall rack of bones! And sleep! - I can sleep anytime, anywhere, - standing on a precipice, sitting on a stone step. Nothing - nothing could get me out of my bed before noon every day. I could take a nap - an hour thereafter. - An altitude for pigs.

This is all-too-egotistic - though, at that, I'm a.-t.-e. But if you'll write to me I'll write to you again of other things. I had one or two other things to tell you - but of these anon. I'd like much to hear from you. I've taken to worshipping brains. And you have so much.

My love to you.

Mary MacLane

January 15, 1912
1007 W. Park Street
Butte, Montana

Dear Harriet Monroe -

I have been reading your poem ever and anon, since Christmas day, and thinking of you (but that I have always done, oftener than ever and since we first met) - and I've been glad that at last you touch my life again with those hands of yours. Your touch has always suggested to me something of mingled snow and flame, something only too human shot with strong and determined spirit-things, - and it, like you, at once fascinates and repels me. Possibly "repel" isn't the word - but you take my measure in places where I'm so frightfully lacking, and so acutely conscious of it, that something in me rises up in resistance. - But there's no denying the fascination. - And after all, as to the other, if I should meet and know you now, I should not only resist your measurings - I should combat and challenge them. For I've come back into my own, in ways, and I have "my• triumphant moments of the mind and spirit, when no one can measure me! -

"The Dance of the Seasons" speaks to me of your triumphant moments and for that, and for itself, I love it very much. I have been reading a great deal of poetry in the last year - Keats and Shelley and Elizabeth Browning are the ones. And they illuminate life - everything for me, - as they must have for so many, many others - and will for centuries. It's so wonderful to be they, and still, not to be Keats or Shelley or Elizabeth Browning would I exchange being myself and having them to bloom and glow for me, when I like. Virgil once meant about everything in poetry for me - and the Aeneid has some incomparable bits. - Do you remember something about "The mist which hangs forever over and all about us, from the tears which are falling, falling always"? Those things were my mental awakening in my high-school days. And yet how Virgil lacks the subtleties and intimate shadows, compared with John Keats! Do you know, Harriet Monroe, if ever I go to Rome it'll not be for the Coliseum ruins - and that, but to lay a lily on the grave of John Keats. I could "weep for Adonais." And the Browning woman's Sonnets from the Portuguese - I suppose I've read them a hundred times since the last New Year's time - and each time I have felt them, afresh, with heart and mind and, in a sort of way, with my nerves - they all have touched other poetry, and other things, with new meanings. "The Dance of the Seasons" seems very real, very vital. I love its fleeting pictures and the sweep and hurry of the rhythms. It suggests the maddening flight of time with all the lingering lovelinesses that it leaves on earth as it flies .... I hope that [your poem] will open the way for the others that you speak of - and for all the young poets, with new songs and new messages. I read in some paper that you were to start a magazine of only poetry. It seemed to me a seductive and quixotic idea. - A picture of you headed the paragraph which I cut out and have on my wall among dozens and dozens of women, of widely differing types and personalities, who have been much or little in my life. I have been asking you a great many years for a photograph, - I suppose I shall be asking still many more.

- If I were not absorbed in some writing (which is to mean the crucial turning-point - the cross-roads - in my life) which demands and exacts all my strength and weakness, I should try very hard to inveigle you - though I know your life's all too full - into a bit of correspondence. I'd like to know more - and more deeply and analytically - about your inner life and the trends of it, and more than that, about your human equations from as many angles as might be - than I've been let to know, thus far. You're one of the impregnably reticent sort - and to myself it seems like infinite impertinence to even think of scaling your outer walls - battering them down, rather. But that adds to the fascination - and there is a fascination in you, for me. - Besides, I have so many thing of my own - phases of temperament inexplicable to myself, trends and tendencies which are enthrallingly real to me and yet seem to make for nothing but desolation and futility and ruin - to tell you of. - I should like, in fact, to experience real friendship with you - the subtle enchantments of meeting you and touching hearts and brains and finger-tips, in floods of dazzling sunshine, in the gray-and-gold dusk, in the dark of the moon! We could do all that in letters - and more. - Perhaps, some time, we may. I'd like you to tell me if it sounds of an interestingness to you. -

Except for being a fragile bit of flesh - I weigh but a hundred and twelve which means bones, and having nerves - forever half-fluttering nerves - I'm perfectly well. Every afternoon there's a sunset - of wisteria and amethysts and thrice-fired gold, above the desert and the frowning peaks. For that alone I could live, from day to day, in delectation! - I'm sorry you threw away your Birthday, a year ago. But my love to you - always.

Mary MacLane

November 3 [1912]
[1007 W. Park Street]
[Butte, Montana]

Dear Harriet Monroe -

Your letter has lain near me since it came - too many weeks ago for a letter from you to go unanswered. It has been near me, though - and awaiting only some gleam-mood. But those are elusive things - they mostly brush one, sometimes lingeringly, with their wing-tips as they flit away, and only by that one knows they ever come. Still, I think any mood in which I turn to you must have a bit of gleam in it. The thought of you - your humanness and poetry and brain-power together - lights some tiny deep-flamed torches in me, as if with recognition - and that. -

I feel deeply interested in your poetry magazine - I hope all is going well with it! The whole idea looks so full of lustrous possibilities, to be developed with the years - possibilities for the hungering spirits who will be read and known, and for those to whom the reading will be like eating lotus and gathering-in stars! I'd rather think it was to discover and awaken mute Keatses and Brownings and William Blakes than to establish an American school - do you suppose there could be an American school of poetry? - but it could do both. It's difficult to conceive a soul and brain in this age sufficiently Homeric to do this America-thing into poetry, what with the mixture of races and the sordid, complex non-vision and uninspiredness of it all. `Twould want a seer and prophet as well as poet, to do more than pick out the poignant details. But spirits and hearts are always the same - the only delectation that could be added to the poetry already made for them would be in knowing, while we read, that the hearts that make it are beating now. - For that, and all reasons, the poetry-magazine plan seems to me an intensely interesting and appealing thing. I regret that I can't help it with money - other than a wan subscription-fee. Should one send that now - is the first issue out, or soon to be? You gave me its address in the Fine-Arts building. - I'm too poor to help it with money now and too absorbed in my own kind of work to think of writing a bit for it - even if I weren't rather afraid of myself in verse. Some day, perhaps. -

You asked me about my book in your letter. I changed the entire plan of it some months ago, which is almost the same as abandoning it and writing another. But I at least feel now - though all my thought and feeling about the work itself is a perfect horror of mixed Hope and Despair - that I've got it into the field where I'm strongest. I've but to stick, in absorbed concentration, to see the end, or at least to feel that it's dimly in sight. There are months of work in it yet. And I love it though it's as hard as it is fascinating. There's no royal road, at least there's none for me, in the writing game. It's simply "labor" - travail - to translate the brain and the soul of me into simple scintillant English. And I can't tell you half the feeling of woe and desolation which alternate with only occasional short-lived hope, over it all. - But I must say no more about it now. The only way I can achieve anything is to keep it all inside me, with all my silent forces bent upon it, till it's done. It means everything in life to me. - I've led a very solitary life ever since I've been back in Butte. Beyond a somber sense of fitness that I always feel in my living in the restless gloom of it, and the Tie of Blood (which is only the tie, but I'm not indifferent to it) I loathe the place. It never held any real companionships for me, and in the last year or two I've cut out all, or rather the few, chance people whose trivialities both bored me and would dissipate energy. My chief feeling for the people here is a scornful antagonism - and the antagonism I've always felt from them. But - n'importe! People, for the present, are nothing to me, and I allow myself but few letters. - The western mountains are still shot with gold every day at sunset, and, immediately following, the dusk-and-dun sky is full of rose. It often breathes a calm upon me - and, times, it fills my two gray eyes with tears. - I read mostly the early-nineteenth century English poets. -

Yes, I'm quite recovered from the scarlet-fever after-effects - except for nerves, which I suppose I'll always have. They mean black hours of torment, but one is fortunate not to be left diseased or stone-deaf from that scourge. -

I'm so glad you have a heart-feeling, and some others, in you for me. Let them live - and grow! Even though time crowds you too much to write me, and I can't write you without robbing my brain-child - I shall feel them. And I need them. There are a thousand things in me - oh, ten thousand! - that you would utterly regret and condemn. Without cherishing them I regard and garner them all. But still, more than I ever did, I want to survive with you. - -

My love to you, as always.

Mary MacLane

Please don't be don't be forgetting your photograph!

Following are selected texts from Mary MacLane's letters to Stone & Company and Melville Elijah Stone, Jr. from 1902 to 1911.

April 22, 1902
419 North Excelsior Street
Butte [Montana]

Dear Sirs,

Your favor of the 19th inst. is received. I confess that I am annoyed in learning that your title for my MS. has been retained. I do not fancy that title at all, and I hoped that my communication might reach you in time to have it changed. However, it is a trivial matter, and since your judgment and experience in such things must be superior to mine, I let it pass - particularly as there is no help for it in any case.

I agree with you that the sale of the book might be promoted by interviews with newspaper writers, and I shall receive any that may come. And I think you may rely on me to use discretion in the matter. I shall grant an interview wherever I can see that it will be an advantage to the book, but I shall try to avoid anything like mere cheap notoriety and sensationalism which can only detract from it.

I think the best possible advertisement for it would be a severe criticism in the Bookman or Book-buyer or some equally well known reviewer. I believe if any of them could be persuaded to review it at length, my book would be fairly started on a career of sorts. An exhaustive criticism and an attractive binding must need go far toward the success of any book.

I should like to have a signed copy of the contract. Will you oblige me by sending one?

Believe me, sincerely yours,

Mary MacLane

14 June 1902
Butte [Montana]

My Dear Mr. Stone -

I have your favor of June 11.

About these absurd letters - I think you have taken unnecessary trouble with them. I receive many of them every day which I never think of reading, not only because of their probable character, but because they do not interest me and I have not time to waste upon them. I usually look at the signatures of some of them, to be sure that they are not from persons I know, and then destroy them. Doubtless there are many kind and sincere ones among them - like the one you enclose - but I do not feel called upon to give any attention to these unsought tributes.

I appreciate your motives in opening them, but it is a matter of indifference to me whether I receive them or not.

Sincerely yours,

Mary MacLane

July, 1902
Cambridge [Massachusetts]

My Dear Mr. Stone -

Doubtless your natural kindness of hearty leads you to intercede for the Boston reporters. Certainly the pathetic appeal in your telegram led me to think twice before refusing the next group that appeared. (They appear in groups - bunches, in fact - they are afraid to come singly.)

Still - -

Always I consider my own physical and mental comfort before most things - things such as reporters, publishers' telegrams, my own writer's-interests, and even pathetic appeals of sorts. My physical and mental discomfort upon arriving in Cambridge made the avoiding of interviews a necessity.

However, when your wire came I had begun to receive a reporter now and again. I have given interviews to the Herald and the Globe, and have promised one to the Transcript.

Nothing will induce me to see a reporter from the Post, or from any paper of that ilk. They may make interviews if they will - I shall not be greatly troubled. But, I assure you, it would require a very large number of telegrams from publishers - containing a very large number of pathetic appeals of sorts - to cause me to change my decision.

You, peradventure, are you - whilst I, perforce, am I.

Sincerely yours,

Mary MacLane

July 1902
Cambridge [Massachusetts]

My Dear Mr. Stone,

The reporters are now things of the past, so your letters - with the pathetic appeals in their behalf - come like strains of futile music: sweet but meaningless.

Your telegrams, somewhat less musical, were more piquant, and had a certain effect. -

A person has written to you - or will do so - about a French edition of that little book you brought out this Spring - the Mary MacLane book. I do not care about the person - a sort of inexpensive person, whatever kind of publisher he may be, but I believe that I consented.... But I have not yet signed anything. I shall, doubtless however, just as soon as I see something to sign. The name Mary MacLane looks so neat and picturesque at the end of a document, I think. -

- Miss Corbin tells me that I can not get in at Radcliffe - (not that she said so to any reporters, however). I have not done anything about it yet, but Miss Corbin's inquiries - made before I came - elicited the information that a special course in chemistry required the passing of ten exams in that and kindred subjects. Also these inquiries elicited the interesting intelligence that Radcliffe is not superlatively anxious to receive Mary MacLane - what a peculiarly rare gem this Mary MacLane must be - in any case. This from the secretary of Radcliffe. My decision - to enter Radcliffe if it is possible for me to enter Radcliffe - remains unchanged. I foresaw something of this sort, you will remember.

I have not yet seen the secretary - Miss Corbin says that she is one of the cold, fishy kind. I rather think that it would require more strenuous effort that I care to put forth at present, for me to worm and jolly myself into her good graces.

- And so. If you have some influence to use for me, it had better be used immediately, Charity, which is said to begin at home - and to cover a multitude of sins - can sometimes extend so far as Cambridge, I doubt not. No charity ever begins here, I'm sure.

Sincerely,

Mary MacLane

[c. August 7, 1902]
[San Remo Hotel]
[New York City]

My Dear Mr. Stone,

I have just returned from Newport and the pomps and vanities of this wicked world - and am now at the San Remo Hotel. You must magnanimously forgive me for not wiring you it, but Mr. Hersh of the World is not yet ready to have the snap given away. After Miss Gale's story, however, it will not matter.

I am now in the midst of my Impression of Newport. It has to be turned in by Monday noon for the next Sunday World. I am learning what it is to write when one must write.

Herewith the agreement.

I am willing enough to sign it - no matter what there etc.

Mrs Ayer chaperoned me to Newport but I am alone at the hotel. The World is giving me very good treatment and I think it's worth my while. I wasn't quite satisfied with the agreement you suggested. I want to write only one month for the paper and that while here in New York. I will write one article per week for $150 each and all my expenses paid. That is my contract with them.

- Mrs Ayer and I got along very well together. And I saw things and met people. -

I still wish to enter Radcliffe - though as I've said there's a certain unmistakable prejudice existing there against "Mary MacLane." Miss Corbin advised me not to try it at all - to go to some other college. She thinks the life under those circumstances will be too much. But I can carry that, I think, if I can succeed in getting in. -

Sincerely - and hastily -

Mary MacLane

[c. 8 August 1902]
San Remo Hotel
New York

My Dear Mr. Stone -

Please send me two hundred dollars.

This is New York. Money slips through one's fingers in New York, I find.

Since my expenses are to be paid it will mostly all be given back. But meanwhile - -

Also I find New York not quite Paradise.

About the chaperone matter - I will not have one of the World's appointing. And as the World seems in no haste to appoint one, we seem mutually agreed. It is perhaps not the best thing possible for me - or the book - to live here alone. I am sure it will not be as soon as I am advertised broadcast as I shall be soon now. But I do not care for Mrs Ayer. The visit to Newport was enough for both of us.

If Miss Monroe can come and it will not be asking too much, I can not tell you how glad I should be -

About what I write - I am obliged to cheapen myself - a little, which means a great deal, I suppose. In the Newport article I gave of my very best, as I intended before I left Boston. Mr. Hersh like it very well, but told me plainly that it was not yellow enough. So I added and inserted some inexpensive paragraphs which doubtless will suit the masses. However the good is with the bad. There are some very good things in that Newport article as you may see when it appears, a week from next Sunday. And, good or bad, it's all well done.

I had some pictures taken in boston - good ones. Will the Herbert-S.-Stone-&-Co. firm have any use for any of them? If not I may send you one to hang somewhere in those dingy offices, anyway. I am sending Miss Monroe one of the only good Butte pictures that I had - the same as that you wasted on the Bookman.

Well.

New York is not so cold as Cambridge, at least. It is hard lines for "Mary MacLane" in Cambridge. But this Mary MacLane intends to conquer and live down a few things. Times, it will have a taste of gall and wormwood, however, which is not the point.

Meanwhile, New York.

I am learning to find my way easily, I go about alone, and from here to the World building up-town every two days, or three. - Mr. Hersh comes to take me driving sometimes and to lunch with him - with no chaperone, a shocking thing. But I am not yet known. When the storm bursts, next Sunday - 'twill be "good-bye, lunches."

Sincerely yours,

Mary MacLane

[c. September 1902]
San Remo Hotel
New York

[To M.E. Stone Jr]

My reputation be damned.

The old ladies be damned.

The gossip be damned.

And don't you write me any more letters of virtuous paternal admonition.

Believe me - don't.

I find myself making the best of a bad business - it's enough without letters of virtuous paternal admonition.

Which also be damned.

[unsigned]

Tuesday [c. October 1902]
Crest Hall
Winthrop Beach, Massachusetts

My Dear Mr. Stone -

I shall make an effort to send you a MS. by January - not the first, but perhaps soon after.

I shall make the effort, but I do not expect to succeed.

To produce anything worth-while - from any point of view - in two months seems atrocious to me.

But I will see what I can do - and keep you informed as to the book's progress.

But it is more than likely that April only will see it finished.

I am capable of turning out some very rotten work if pressed too hard.

Yet I have done some of my best, under pressure.

My Gray Dawn was done, against time, in an hour and fifty minutes.

But we will see. -

I have the last check for my weekly money - I neglected to acknowledge it.

- Will you please send me three Mary MacLanes? The Boston book-shops are continually sold-out of it.

Sincerely yours,

Mary MacLane

Wednesday [c. October 1902]
[Crest Hall]
[Winthrop Beach, Massachusetts]

Dear Mr. Stone -

I am very well, thank you.

Also I am glad to know that you agree with me about my work on this new book.

I will get it to you as soon as possible without a compromise in favor of time - (which, indeed, is said to wait for no man).

Your suggestion of an edition of Mary MacLane in paper covers brings to my mind dreadful thoughts of Albert Ross and Bertha M. Clay - but still, I make no objection. And five cents is five cents. And an ad, an ad.

- This second book is, as we agreed in Chicago, a cater. I've no doubt but it will receive plenty of severe criticism simply because its author is the author of Mary MacLane. But even Boston can not object to it on high moral grounds.

In some ways it is even more original - (the critics will probably say "freakish") - than the other - and I think it better work in the main.

And it's a cater.

And in the third, still, I must hand it out. (One must keep them guessing.)

But looking forward always to the time when I may rub it in - I am,

Sincerely yours,

Mary MacLane

Sunday [c. November 1902]
Hotel Bartol
Huntington Avenue
[Boston, Massachusetts]

My Dear Mr. Stone -

The book goes along - sometimes swiftly, sometimes slowly. But always it goes along.

It will not be ready for you for some month yet.

I do not seem to write so easily in this as in the other book.

There are certain advantages to be derived from sand and barrenness when one would write.

Winthrop Beach is boarded up for the winter and I have found a lodging-place at the Hotel Bartol in Boston.

And so - a change of address.

Sincerely yours,

Mary MacLane

Thursday [c. December 1902]
12 St. James Avenue
Boston

Dear Mr. Stone -

Doubtless H.S. Stone & Co. are out of patience with me and my book - and with reason, from their view-point.

I am myself out of patience with it. I should like nothing better in life than to wake some morning and find it finished.

But it will not go rapidly, - it is heavy, up-hill work. Some of the chapters I read over with huge dissatisfaction.

Can't we let it go over till fall? Do you think the public will read me with less avidity for having been kept waiting? I confess that I have long harbored the fond hope that the critics would deal less savagely with this book if it didn't come too hard upon the heels of the first.

The purple memory of Mary MacLane is not yet so dim but that I can afford to be deliberate with my effusions while we know that I am catering to the public as hard as ever - still I think it would be bad policy to let the public know it. It is infinitely preferable to let the public think I am supremely indifferent. It will then knuckle down all the more.

And Mary MacLane is not yet dead. Only last week came two with a standard play saying the held the rights, and would I kindly claim the authorship that money and fame might be mine? And only last month they ceased Mary McPaine at Weber and Fields' in New York.

Still I know I must not stand the public off too long. The public is not to be trusted.

Sincerely yours,

Mary MacLane

Monday [June-July 1903]
[Boston, Massachusetts]

Dear Mr. Stone -

The checks and the contract for My Friend A.L. are here - and shortly I shall see Quebec. At one time I considered the good idea of delaying the book until I could get the Chateau Frontenac into it, but finally decided that the Frontenac would keep.

If this second book proves popular I may send forth the third with my friend Annabel Lee again at the fore - only she will be still more fascinating.

As to the agreement - according to the terms of my last contract with you I should be foolish not to stipulate for a single twenty per cent royalty - that being what your friend McClure offered last spring for my second book. And by the said contract you agree to do as well by me as any other publisher might.

Therefore I hereby strike for twenty per cent. -

I expect always to send you my books - if you continue to want them - and especially if my friend Lucy Gray remains always with you.

And my opinion is that no house would have given me quite the good treatment that always the Stones have given. That has been worth several per cent and upwards.

I trust that I am not exorbitant, - and certainly I would be foolish to overlook the advantage your last agreement with me holds out.

Sincerely yours,

Mary MacLane

Sunday [June-July 1903]
[Boston, Massachusetts]

Dear Mr. Stone -

Your letter yesterday with all those percents and statistics I stared at helplessly for some time, and then concluded that this contract would do very well indeed.

As a matter of form I demanded twenty per cent. At the same time I had this signed ready to send.

I knew that I was no match for you.

I even waive the matter of the straight fifteen per cent, which is truly foolish. -

Sincerely yours,

Mary MacLane

Sunday [c. 20 July 1903]
[Montreal, Quebec]

Dear Mr. Stone -

Take heart of grace.

At present writing I've no good reason to think you may not have it before August fifteenth. And it is some better than I have thought it. I work at it not like a genius inspired - but rather like a beaver building a mud-dam. Greetings from Montreal.

M. MacL.-

Sunday [August-October 1903]
Hotel Metropole
Denver, Colorado

Dear Mr. Stone -

Your letter has just been sent on from Boston, and also a check which would have been useful before I left. -

This is no steady job.

I am here but for five or six weeks.

I was in Chicago for a day on my way here - I believe it was last Monday. I stopped on at Eldredge court, in the midst of a drive, but you were not there.

I am sorry about the indifference of the public over my friend Annabel Lee.

Can it be that in my third I shall be obliged to introduce once more the Devil of yore?

We shall see.

A useful Devil, it was, and picturesque. -

The Denver Post does itself proud in its treatment of me and my friend. In some ways it throws the World in the shade as a host.

I have gathered from the Post that it prefers, if 'tis all the same to me, the Mary MacLane of Mary MacLane to her of Annabel Lee.

A judicious mixture will be its. -

Sincerely yours,

Mary MacLane

September 2, 1906
Rockland, Massachusetts

Dear Mr. Stone -

Won't you please tell me what you will do about the money which you owe me? I wrote to you more than a month ago about it, and received no reply. I am in poverty and misery, and it's only charity which keeps me alive. I should like the thousand dollars that you owe me to pay my debts and to go home to Butte.

I shall wait three or four days for an answer to this, before giving it up.

- Mary MacLane

September 12 [1906]
Rockland, Massachusetts

My Dear Mr. Stone -

I presume you will think me unreasonable and unpleasant when a lawyer person presently writes to you anent the money which you owe me. But I share the common prejudice in favor of having my letters answered and of having it explained why money due me is not forthcoming. - And lawyer persons are more successful in bringing that about that I seem to be.

But I hate lawyer persons and I hate writing these gray letters. So it is you who are unreasonable and unpleasant. -

I am about starting on a lonesome life in Boston. I don't just know how it's to be started without the money which you owe me. Why should one begin starving now when one is owed $1,087.66? - And since you don't answer my letters, it's got to be a lawyer person.

Yours sincerely,

Mary MacLane

September 14, 1906
Rockland, Massachusetts

Dear Mr. Stone -

Have you forgotten little Mary? Well, then, little Mary has by no means forgotten you. For one thing you still owe little Mary some money - (money is - so - nice!!) - which she would very much like to have. -

What with 'matching' and playing rouge-et-noir I have managed thus far to eke out 3 ||'s per day, and one or two blue tailor-made suits a year - (what, in short, is called a slender livelihood) - in which I have looked attractive and have appeared, almost, a lady. I have indeed tried many charming and illegal ways of earning my living, even to beating my way about the green, green country, and shoving the queer - in both of which methods I have been somewhat unsuccessful, I must confess. While I'm always aware of my slender livelihood by plain gambling - though to be sure sometimes it's so very slender that you almost can't see it - yet the time comes when the bare necessities pall and one hankers for a day or so of luxurious living, for a change. So I write you this gray-and-purple note to ask you to please pay me some of the money you owe me - if you have any yourself, that is - (of you haven't, won't you go and borrow it?) - so that I can have 2 days or so of luxurious living. - Money is - so - nice! - and so needful. - I have two friends in New York - one of them's a stout woman in the face-fixing business - she enamels people - and the other's a sprightly gentleman who is an editor and writes books, and whose name, if not quite a household word, is at least Known to Many. These two, severally, have asked me to go to New York for 2 days or so - to have a Good Time. - I want awfully to go - it's so long since I've had a Good Time! - but I can't unless you pay me some money. Money is - so - nice! - I am now living in penury and want - in want, at least, of a Good Time - on a lucky shot I made last winter at rouge-et-noir. I put fifteen dollars on number 12 - (usually I lay mine on the color, for even money) and the little white ball actually rolled into the number 12 when the wheel stopped - and I was rich! It gave me the pleasantest sensation! I paid up all my losses and have lived penuriously on the balance up to this time. (I have something less than $9 of it now.) When the lid was finally shut down in St. Augustine I was several hundreds to the good solely as the result of being a Sport and betting at odds of 35 to 1. -

But you see I can't go to New York and have a Good Time on something less than $9. - Let me know soon.

Yours waiting -

Mary MacLane

September 26 [1906]
Rockland [Massachusetts]

Dear Mr. Stone -

Your letter came a few days ago. I have read it a great many times. It refers to money, and money is so - nice!

In accordance with it I have put off going to that Great City, New York to have a good time - a good time - a Good Time, say rather - till after Oct. 1. Then I shouldn't wonder if October 7-8-9, or 8-9-10, - 2 days and a night - saw me on or about that Crowded Thoroughfare, Broadway.

- A Good Time, with me, differs from an ordinary time in that in the latter I'm nearly always Heavily Chaperoned and in consequence demoralized and flighty; whereas in a Good Time one is never chaperoned - and in consequence, if hilarious, level-headed. Chaperoned, you can very easy go to the Demnition Bow-wows, if you ask me, but unchaperoned, you're quite Safe - wherever you go. Unchaperoned I could slink around the Streets of a Great City at Nightfall, picking up things, - but Chaperoned, - what can a Poor Girl do? -

- October 8-9-10: my face-fixing friend, my hard-headed author, and lunch with you. Money is so - nice!

My $9 dwindles sadly.

Truly yours,

Mary MacLane

I'm glad you suggested the name alimony for what you're going to send me - it sounds so much more luxurious than plain money, which however is so - nice! -

P.S. If you send me the money for the Good Time I shall certainly ask you to eat luncheon with me - at my expense - when I get to New York - if you're there. - New York is a large alluring spot. - Would you like that? - M. MacL. -

Tuesday [late September 1906]
[Rockland, Massachusetts]

Dear Mr. Stone -

Thank you very much for the check which, I may say without exaggeration, almost filled a long-felt want.

Will you please send me another next Saturday - to quite fill it?

Yours sincerely,

Mary MacLane

P.S. If you don't send me another check next Saturday I shall be in very deep water. - M. MacL.
October 7 [1906]
Rockland, Massachusetts

Dear Mr. Stone -

You said you were going to begin to be lavish Oct. 1 - and this is Oct. 7!! - I am on pins and tenterhooks. My nine dollars gave out and I had to pawn my gold nugget again. My gold nugget is a relic of Butte-Montana, and it's been useful in the pawning way. Only it's little and has never brought more than $4. - "What shall the owner do to redeem it?" (Did you ever play "Forfeits?") -

And, since I have again slipped out of your reckoning, Oct. 8-9-10 will not see me in N.Y. -

So this gray-and-purple note, to remind you of me and your promise to be lavish. -

Truly yours,

Mary MacLane

November 21 [1906]
Rockland [Massachusetts]

My Dear Mr. Stone -

I've waited a long time for you to do something about the money you owe me. It has occasioned me some suffering. I shall wait four days more, after which I must ask a lawyer person to appeal to you. There's no other way.

I should like $200. I should like it all more still, - but that particularly.

Yours sincerely,

Mary MacLane

November 21 [1906]
[Rockland, Massachusetts]

Dear Mr. Stone -

Yes, thank you, the check of last week stood off the wolf - for a very short time.

My liabilities are such that it partook largely of the nature of a drop in a bucket, though. -

I should like few things better than to have about $200, now.

Yours sincerely,

Mary MacLane

Don't you think Victoria Woodhull must have been a fascinating person in her day?

So do I. -

- Money is so - nice! -

November 28 [1906]
[Rockland, Massachusetts]

Dear Mr. Stone -

Here's another of my charming letters - to use your expression in yours of 27 November. Would Gawd they were less charming and more convincing. For I told you in my last one that I needed $200 bad, but by now it's slipped your mind.

The friend I live with intends to start South Wednesday, a week from to-day, and unless you can pay me some of that indebtedness I suppose I shall be left behind - which will be extremely unpleasant. It's rather cold and rather dismal hereabouts. And I need fully $200 because I've a few liabilities to get rid of before going away. - Will not any of the Duffield people's notes fall due in time for me to go away, on some of the proceeds, next week? If they don't there'll be, for me, quite hell to pay - and not much of anything to pay it with.

What about it?

As to the "Four Years Later" proposition - I believe I can do something with it. 'Tis certainly worth while at the price. How soon would you want it? I couldn't do it decently before the end of December - I mean I couldn't get it in till then, and perhaps not so soon. I want to make something rather good of it. - I'll begin as soon as I get South - if I do get South! - and let you know its import.

Yours sincerely,

Mary MacLane

December 17 [1906]
[St. Augustine, Florida]

Dear Mr. Stone -

I have delayed answering your letter of 30 November in order that I might have something definite to tell you in regard to the time when you may expect the "Four Years Later" articles.

As things are now I shouldn't wonder if I could send off the first one about New Year's. But don't take that as a promise ...

As for the "dams and devils," - I am glad that they're not required or expected of me - 'twould be a good deal of a burden to have to work them in willy-nilly at the end of every 7th paragraph, for instance.... I am writing as I feel in every way - in the sentiment as well as the expression thereof - (it adds incomparably to the value of the story) - and if my emotions prove too lurid for the ASMs you've but to get busy with the blue pencil. - Perhaps it would give the story an added interest, as well as being my best-loved conceit, a Delicate Incongruity - to supplement the title "Four Years Later" with - "Being an Expurgated Sequel to her first Purplish Exploit" - or words to that effect. The word "Expurgated" - in a story of this sort - would land the public about as quick as the word "Unexpurgated."

However, these jests apart, I don't think you will find anything to cut out. I am making it real - which is its first and best point. Its other features are secondary. What I mean is that if I write a sentence that's picturesque, devilish, and true - the picturesqueness and the devilishness are so far subordinate to the trueness that they're quite lost sight of. -

What you suggested in your last letter had already occurred to me - the idea of making notes from the first book and drawing the inevitable 4-years-later comparisons. It's all the more effective for the fact that I hadn't looked into that book for quite 3 years. - What I have done on the articles thus far is rather satisfactory to me but I prefer to say little about its trends and purposes yet. - I've been interrupted by my journey down here and getting settled - but I shall go along with it as steadily as need be now. I'll let you know more about it before very long. - -

The $200 came in time to be very useful. Am I going to have some more - of the old debt - before Christmas? I'd like it. -

Sincerely yours,

Mary MacLane

Shall you want photographs with the story? -

December 19 [1906]
St. Augustine, Fla.

Dear Mr. Stone -

I believe I forgot to give you my address in my letter, - it's Box 22, St. Augustine. Or Just St. Aug. Fla.

- "Four Years Later" makes progress daily. It begins to sound like the Story of Mary Mac.L., and I believe it has some of its intensity. It grows intensely interesting to me as I write it, and I'm very anxious to make it a success - both as a 'human document' and as literature. It's got just one "damn" in it thus far - which is so sincere that it ought to be left in. Won't the public stand it - from me? - I hope there'll be no editing. -

- I expect the two articles will be merely one long one - of about 12,000 words, but I'll try to send you half of it before finishing the whole.

Yours sincerely,

Mary MacLane

December 24 [1906]
St. Augustine

Dear Mr. Stone -

Again I take up my refrain: Please pay me some more money. - The 200 went mostly to pay up some liabilities and to get down here - and so now I've gone broke again. -

Your letter of Dec. 19 which was sent to Rockland - asking what about my trip to N.Y. - reached me two days ago. - Grim Penury interfered materially with that contemplated trip. Had I gone to New York Grim Penury had gone with me, ever walking or sitting by my side. What would Broadway and Fifth Avenue be - in the companionship of Grim Penury? Not for mine. -

"Postponed" is the word I use in connection with that trip. -

Meanwhile will you send me some money right away? The Wolf and the Joyous Christmastide are both at my door - at least making for it, with the wolf leading by a nose. In fact the odds are all in his favor - the betting's about 19 to 1. Won't you send me some money so I can put it up on the Wolf and win a Small Fortune? By the time the Wolf reaches my threshold the Joyous Christmastide won't be in sight - I doubt if it gets in at all. I wouldn't play it for a place. -

You see how it is.

Hopefully yours -

Mary MacLane

P.S. - Merry Christmas.

January 6 [1907]
St Augustine, Fla.

Dear Mr. Stone -

Please pay me some money - the Wolf is at the door, painful, persistent, hungry. A drop in the bucket would be a godsend. -

- The 4-years-later story is about a fortnight from its finish. -

- Penuriously but truly,

Mary MacLane

January 17 [1907]
St Augustine

Dear Mr. Stone -

Haven't any of the Duffield notes fallen due yet? - I should very much like to know about them because I have the bad taste to be still broke - exceeding broke. - The Wolf and I are living on Slim Hopes, sometimes in the form of a salad, but more often warmed over and chopped fine. It's a dry fodder. - Hence my refrain. - Please pay me some money.

- The 4-years-later tale progresses daily. It's now about two-thirds finished. I am writing it as one article - of about 12,000 words - but I presume it can be halved into two shorter ones. - I haven't heard from you since I left Rockland, through I've written you several times....

Yours sincerely,

Mary MacLane

January 29 [1907]
St. Augustine, Fla.

Dear Mr. Stone -

I received your letter of January 19 in which you said you were sending a check on account of the of the story - but up to now - which is ten days later - I haven't seen the check. I am extremely anxious to see it. -

The Four Years Later tale goes along well - but some days slowly, its writer being a person of moods. It will probably come out with something over 2,000 words more than the 12,000 you first mentioned: in consequence of which I shall probably demand another $100 for the extra words. 'Twill be better than cutting it down. - Hoping to have the check you mentioned soon, I'm

Yours sincerely,

Mary MacLane

March 22, [1907]
St. Augustine

Dear Mr. Stone -

Do spirits of vengeance and things like that animate the Associates Sunday Magazines? - Because I made them wait a long time for the 4-years-later tale, and now they're making me wait, not only for the payment therefor, but for any word about it whatsoever. If it's vengeance alone which actuates them I can now freely inform them that it's theirs - without making me wait any longer. I sent off the tale March 6, and it's now March 22. I expected it would bring a little frenzied finance in my direction fully eight days ago. But it didn't. And I am bankrupt. For the last eight days I have lived chiefly upon eggs. I cook them on a gas-stove. I boil them hard and I boil them soft - to make them taste different - and I eat them out of their shells with a tin-ish sort of spoon. They are very good eggs but they grow very, very tiresome, and they leave one with a languid feeling. I heat water and drink it and pretend it's coffee, which is ever more tiresome and languid. This is no fancy picture but literal facts. I wouldn't bore you with them were it not that I would fain convince the A.S.M.'s that vengeance is its, without making me wait any longer....

Yours sincerely,

Mary MacLane

April 1 [1907]
[St. Augustine]

My Dear Mr. Stone -

... I expect to go north in two or three weeks - if I have money enough, and I expect to stop a day in New York, at which time I shall expect to perhaps eat a long-lost luncheon with you - also if I have money enough. I think the long-lost luncheon was to be on me.

Hopefully yours,

Mary MacLane

April 10 [1907]
[St. Augustine, Fla.]

Dear Mr. Stone -

Please pay me some money quick. I should like all that you owe me. It is a long time since I have had a square meal. And the irregular-shaped ones which I do have are borrowed ones. They are not pleasant.

Yours sincerely,

Mary MacLane

You don't even write me a letter, which is somewhat insulting.

April 22 [1907]
[Hotel Alcazar]
[St. Augustine, Fla.]

Dear Mr. Stone -

... A glance at my statement of the ancient debt of H.S. Stone and Co. shows me that you still owe me $1,012.66. - If I had that I should positively be solvent once more. It makes me a little bit dizzy to think of it - like drinking a little slim pousse cafe at somebody else's expense, a pousse cafe in red and green and pink and brown and colorless layers....

Yours sincerely,

Mary MacLane

April 22 [1907]
[St. Augustine]

Dear Mr. Stone -

I've just received yours of April 20. - I am pleased to know that you're going to use even half of the MS. - As for my approval of your selections from it, don't bother to send me any proofs - use whatever you like. I had trouble enough with it once, and unless you want me to proof-read it I want no more of it. - I never read the Boston Post, which I hear is to have it - so there's no fear of the tale, in its slashed state, confronting me to my vexation.

Only I should like, let me repeat, to be paid as soon as may be, for as much of it as you do use, in the hard coin of the realm. -

I'll let you know the day I go through N.Y. - the day I stop there - for the long-lost lunch. -

Yours sincerely,

Mary MacLane

Friday [May 2x, 1907]
[Fifth Avenue Hotel]
[New York]

My Dear Mr. Stone -

If you look me up here at 1 o'clock to-day we'll go, withersoever you may lead, to some little table where we may eat, drink, and be merry.

On me.

May there be no word spoken between us that's fit for publication.

- Give this raw lad an answer so that I may know you concur in the matter of time and place. If it will be more convenient for you to meet me at some other than what I've named, you've but to say so. -

Let us only hope that you are not out of town, now when at last I find the way clear to redeem my pledge. -

Yours sincerely,

Mary MacLane

November 6 [1907]
11 St. James Ave.
Boston [Massachusetts]

Dear Mr. Stone -

Your letter and the check reached me in Rockland - and the latter certainly insures me a roof over my head for several weeks, - a fact which materially relieved the tension of my last two days in Rockland. I left there yesterday, for good, my friend having started South on last night's boat. - And I am now very much alone in the world. - Save for the companionship of the fifty dollars which you sent me - and of the six which I had before. - Which is not wholly satisfying, but is somewhat better than being in the streets, or in a morgue, for instance. - I have no great objection to living, when one misery is not too close on the heels of another. -

Yours sincerely,

Mary MacLane

July 17, 1908
11 St. James Ave.
Boston

Dear Mr. Stone -

Do you suppose you could pay me some money as soon as you receive this profane grey note and thus relieve the untoward pressure upon my young woman's body - to quote from a book you wot of - of damned and dingy attendant circumstances: hence the word "damned." I do not swear except when I am obliged to, but I'm obliged to with great frequency.

My profession - as you once fitly termed it - that of extorting money from you, is slightly artistic but not lucrative. I believe it would work better if turned into a trade. If one only knew how!

What I would like is About two Merry Widow hats; what I would like is a blue linen gown; what I would like is several more gowns; and 'broidered blouses, and cloaks and shoes and silken hose. Particularly silken hose. Then what I would like would be one last little trip to New York for one last little old time, and then what I would like would be a journey to Butte-Montana, in company with the gowns and the Merry Widow hats and the silken hose, there to set up for a time as a woman with a past - broken heart, coldly cynical pose, brutal type of conversation - that sort of thing. It would be fun for me. - There is also a gentleman of sorts there whom I have a standing invitation to be married to. I might possibly - but he's neither a Jew nor an Irishman. -

If I had the money due me from H.S. Stone and Company I could carry out that delectable program. It haunts my dreams. -

But any sum, from five to fifty dollars, would relieve the damned and dingy pressure and would also render me grateful. -

I have called off the lawyer man who I hear has harried and been harried in your vicinity for some time past. You don't seem to treat such people well. It's a hell of a way to do. -

I hope you will bear in mind my dinginess and do your best to relieve it. My raiment is unpicturesque shabbiness, my food is dry husks. It is months since I've known a dinner with music and cocktails and red candle shades. Ain't it awful, Mabel?

Sincerely yours,

Mary MacLane

October 5 [1908]
11 St. James Ave.
[Boston]

Dear Mr. Stone -

I have your letter, whose import is somewhat pleasing - but I hope that alimony will begin to come soon. - I am in reduced and straitened circumstances. The out-look for me is gutter-girl-y, and each new day which dawns I say within me - 'It will soon be the ash-barrel for mine.' - This may sound like a fancy picture - but it's so close to the truth that it makes me slightly shudder. - The gutter and the ash-barrel begin to loom so large on the horizon that already they seem stranger than fiction. -

When you've paid up all that you owe me I shall trouble you no more. Is not that a pleasant thought? -

When you've paid me all the money you owe me I will write you one last letter in which is no hint or glint of asking-for-money. - That too is a very pleasant fancy. -

I should like awfully to have it paid me all at once now - but since I can't, the pay-roll method is the next best. -

I am living, dingily, in Boston - but I'm not certain of any address in the city. You may address me at Rockland.

- Waiting at the ash-barrel, I am

Yours sincerely,

Mary MacLane

October 30 [1908]
[Rockland]
Dear Mr. Stone -

The friend with whom I live is leaving here next Thursday, after which I shall no longer be able to stay here as the house is to be shut. My friend is going South and I suppose I shall go to Boston. I have enough money to live perhaps four days in Boston. After that, if I receive no money from you, I shall be entirely destitute, and I think it likely that I may commit suicide. I have no friend in Boston and I do not wish to borrow any more money than I now owe, in any case.

What I owe is chiefly to Mrs. Branson and if my last resort is suicide I shall expect you to pay her. I shall leave a memorandum. And I owe a little to Lucy Calhoun which you must pay. - For the balance, I shall happily be beyond waiting for it any longer. - You told me last fall that you would pay me my money October 1st - and I heard nothing more of it, until you wrote to me this fall, with the same promise. But I can't wait another year, nor any longer than the time I have mentioned. I have no mind to face absolute poverty and absolute friendlessness in Boston at one time.

- Mary MacLane

21 November [1908]
25 Cortes Street, Suite 5
[Boston]

Dear Mr. Stone -

The time approaches when, if you are still not ready to square your account with me, I should like another check like the first. That one still holds out but the end of it is in sight, and if it's the same to you I should prefer not to reach that end before the other check appears. The shadow of the morgue is none too far off as it is. -

What I should chiefly like is the whole amount of the debt. My wardrobe needs replenishing about as a bad as a wardrobe ever did. Previous to the arrival of your other check I had made preparations for suicide and at the same time raised a little money by selling off all my frocks, except the suit I stand in, to a second-hand Jew. The suit I stand in, and the hat that goes with it, are still the extent of my wardrobe. - You simply do not know what it is to the feminine character to be without clothes. - And the situation is aggravated for me by the fact that I have had more meetings with people and notes of invitation in the last six days than I've ever had before in Boston. One of the papers started a story that I had mysteriously disappeared from Rockland and was hiding in Boston. And that set the reporters to hunting me up - and there have been a great many half-column interviews and photographs since. - Some of the newspaper people were attractive women - and even a cub reporter looks attractive to a woman who has absolutely no one in the whole town to talk to. Three days of solitude in a wilderness of people really seems like rather more than three months. -

One of the newspaper women invited me to Keith's with her one afternoon when the Elinore sisters were doing a turn. The elder Elinore sister has always been to me the most delectable I have seen in her line. I wrote her a note of appreciation, to which she responded with an invitation for me to come around to the stage door the next day. I accepted (in spite of my lack of wardrobe) and met Kate Elinore - a warm-hearted Irish woman, and she introduced me to a throng of "artists" and stage hands who had all heard of me - such is fame. But what I would wish to make plain to you is that I have had several such invitations - which looked interesting to me - all of which I had to let go by me because I had nothing to wear. My one suit and the hat that goes with it are part and parcel of my solitude. You can't wear such things to dinners - nor even to luncheons anywhere but on Hanover street. Moreover I want to replenish my wardrobe for this reason: I am thinking of going to New York, by the advice of a friend there - a young literary woman, and to try to get one of the newspapers. My friend thinks I could hold down a department - in the Ella Wilcox or Beatrice Fairfax way. I don't think I could, but I should like to try. - One thing I'm sure of however; I'm not going to New York without something to wear. I have no desire to try this one suit in the White Way. It's bad enough in Boston. -

So let me ask you again, as many times before, when you can liquidate, to liquidate. - Meanwhile it will soon be a matter of food and drink and room-rent. The end of the check is in sight.

I have moved lately - my address is now 25 Cortes Street - Suite 5. -

Yours sincerely,

Mary MacLane

21 December [1908]
25 Cortes St., Suite 5
Boston

Dear Mr. Stone -

For goodness' sake, how long must a poor girl wait? ...

The simple fact of that matter is this - if your check is not forthcoming this week I shall have to go hungry on Christmas day. I haven't a friend in Boston, and though I have a dozen or so of acquaintances I don't feel quite intimate enough with any of them to ring their bells on Christmas morning and ask them for food - to say nothing of not in the least wanting to. - Eating on the slimmest possible basis I have money enough to take me mid-way through Thursday. - But for Christmas day and thereafter, it's on the knees of the gods.

I wondered what benevolent party could have sent those clothes. They were of no use to me - (my one suit, though plain and tiresome to wear all the time fits, which is the main thing) - but my landlady took them in exchange for a week's rent. That's but four dollars, but as much as a greasy Jew would give. - I think I'm too haughty by nature to wear partly-worn clothes that weren't made for me - and fitted. I seem to prefer the morgue. You see, I'm not in the least the deserving poor. - But I appreciate the kind intent of your friend. And it was a week's rent. I have a very good room on this quiet street for my four dollars. -

If I must starve on Christmas day it will be more agreeable to do it in a warmed room than in a cold one. Though the heat alone, looked at as food, will hardly prove of lasting satisfaction.

What are you going to do about it?

Yours sincerely,

Mary MacLane

December 31, 1908
25 Cortes St., Suite 5
Boston

Dear Mr. Stone -

Your letter with the thin blue check for twenty-five dollars reached me on Christmas eve morning in time to insure me a considerably merrier Christmas than if it hadn't. I had orange marmalade with my breakfast that morning and further lessened the solitude by purchasing a Puck to read with it. I felt something like J.P. Morgan - so rich - (but I hope he's got more than one suit.) -

To-day came your letter with the twenty and the Chance. - I gladly will make a try at Hearst's Evening Journal and his $25 a week. To tell the truth, if I had a blessed thing to live on meanwhile, I should prefer to make the try for a week or two without a salary - merely in order to prove conclusively to Mr. Brisbane and me and the Public whether or not I'm worth that, or nothing, or a hundred, a week, to the paper. - I'm by no means sure of making good - but what I am sure of is that I want to and that I'll do my best. I wish i knew what sort of things I'm to do.

I'll come to New York on next Sunday's Fall River boat as you suggest. Owing to the as-yet-uncertain outcome of the Journal project I shall not give up my lodging here until it's settled. This will be a warm and cheap refuge to flee to in case I fail to 'come through' in N.Y. - and besides, it holds my somewhat cumbersome Lares and Penates: consisting of all the boys' books Trowbridge ever wrote, and twelve large photographs of Alice and Marie Lloyd. - When I find myself really on my job in Park Row, or wherever, it'll be time enough to take a Sunday off and come and fetch them. -

How I loathe the idea of hitting the White Way with but my one faithful suit and my tooth-brush! I shall be awake nights between now and Sunday trying to figure out a way to raise some new clothes in a day. -

I shall be very glad of your chaperonage and advice at the start, and I'll let you know by a line posted Sunday where to look me up Monday forenoon after I've left the boat. I shan't venture to engage so much as that night's lodging in New York until I've seen the Journal people. It may be: back to the woods, on the boat that brought me. - But I hope not. -

Thank you for finding me a job, and Happy New Year. -

Yours sincerely,

Mary MacLane

Sunday, January 3 [1909]
25 Cortes Street, Suite 5
Boston

Dear Mr. Stone -

I found the travel was so heavy on the Sunday night boat that I could get nothing but a 5-dollar stateroom - so I bought my ticket for Monday night instead.... I trust it'll be convenient for you. A young woman friend is coming down to the boat to meet me - (she does awfully good short stories signed Inz Haynes Gillmore) - to releive the loansomeness of the early-morning landing. After which I thought I'd go to the Grand Central station to check my bag - until I should determine my next move. So, will you look my up there at about ten o'clock Tuesday morning? I'll be in that female sort of parlor where the women sit rocking. I'll be sitting near the outer door, and will look for you at ten....

Yours sincerely,

Mary MacLane

January 12 [1909]
24 Irving Place
New York

Dear Mr. Stone -

This is to ask you for some money in the same quaint old fashion to which we are both by now accustomed. - Tomorrow is the day I must pay my rent. If you'll bring me some money in the forenoon, it will be greatly appreciated. Nine dollars will square me up, ten dollars will make me well-fixed, and fifteen will be munificence - beyond the dreams of avarice, and that. - But 9 I've got to have - if not from you I must go and hunt it on the highways. It is needless to say I prefer to have it brought. - I called you up to ask for it - but I didn't leave a message to that effect owing to its having a somewhat courtesan-ish sound through a telephone. -

It's the going to Boston and getting things settled that has been using up one's coin at a so rapid rate. And there'll be nothing doing in the pay-envelope from A. Brisbane - the biggest newspaper man in the world - till next Saturday. - When there is, and when it's up to 50 a week, I'll be in a position to lend you money. It'll be a fascinating novelty. -

I'll keep the Sherry story till you come tomorrow - I expect you to come about 11 - and I'd like you to read it. I've made it terse, flippant, and marymaclanesque - a cater to the 1-cent public.

Truly yours,

The Luckiest Slob,

Mary MacLane

January 19 [1909]
[24 Irving Place]
[New York]

Dear Mr. Stone

I find myself somewhat better this evening - I've been having a fever all day - and I'll be glad to see you tomorrow afternoon. I don't expect to have the Bread Line story finished but you will perhaps have something to tell me about Mr. Brisbane's attitude toward me. - Not that I don't know it, as well as one need - I almost foresaw it from Boston, - but I'd like to know what he said. As I never exactly pinned my affections to Mr. Brisbane I can stand his dictum anent me with heroic calm. - I shall also be glad to see you, for yourself, because I like you. I have no more affections to pin to anybody - you'll think that sounds young - but likes and dislikes certainly cling to one. I like, not blacks, but one aesthetic black. (And I'm almost weary and forlorn enough, with my fever-racked head, to call him up and marry him now. But I may wait till morning.)

My Milbank friend stayed the evening with me, and I did very well, by and large.

Yours sincerely,

Mary MacLane

Friday, January 28 [1909]
[24 Irving Place]
[New York]

Dear Mr. Stone

Do you suppose you could raise twelve dollars for me and send me it before tomorrow noon? - Not that I'd in the least object to a hundred, or two hundred, looked-at as dripping from H.S. Stone & Company's antique debt to me. - But should Company be able to drip off twelve plunks by tomorrow noon, in the form of money that will not be need to be cashed, it will answer nicely and no questions propounded. - I do not know where you get your money and I feel it's better not to. It may be tainted. Ignorance is bliss.

Yours sincerely,

Mary MacLane

I have been strictly following your last injunction, namely to Be Good - not, possibly, so much because it's sound advice, as that having had several rough jolts from you, with it, I've had no heart at all for any of my brands of Harmless Idiocy. "Be good and you'll be happy - but you won't have a very good time" - that's me, all over, these days. Not that it matters. And the jolts - stinging lashes is a properer simile - are probably what is called "wholesome." I think I loathe everything wholesome. Not that it matters.

M. MacLane

February 14 [1909]
24 Irving Place
[New York]

Dear Mr. Stone

Do you suppose you could raise three 10-dollar bills and send me them before tomorrow morning? Life's exigencies demand money. I have been raising it, here and there, in the city of New York since I last saw you - by fair means and foul. Generally foul - such as pawning, and that. - But it's a tether I've about got to the end of, and if you can dig me up three ten dollar notes by Monday noon it will afford me relief. I need it bad....

Yours sincerely,

Mary MacLane

Wednesday [c. February, 1909]
[24 Irving Place]
[New York]

Dear Mr. Stone

I hope you'll send me as much money as you can conveniently - this week's and next week's, if possible - as I saved my bacon today only by borrowing from Peter to pay Paul - or rather, to pay the widow her mites. Peter (in the shape of Gelett Burgess et al.) stipulated for the return of theirs this week - which lets me in, unless you can advance me next week's stipend, too.

Yours sincerely,

Mary MacLane

March 4 [1909]
24 Irving Place
[New York]

Dear Mr. Stone

... And the feeling of never having quite enough to eat, and being owed a thousand dollars, is not pleasant. Neither is the feeling of having to go into 14th street, with the nightly brigade of other half-hungry women, to drag my living from it. I know because I've tried it. I've tried several things since I saw you last. None of them prevents me from wanting my thousand. I ask you again, will you please try to borrow it for me?

Mary MacLane

March 16 [1909]
[24 Irving Place]
[New York]

Dear Mr. Stone

... As for writing - I suppose I may write again some day. But not while my time is so much occupied in foraging for food and in keeping a roof over me. Writing is a slow process of earning your dinner. You write now and it means your dinner next week, perhaps. But you can't wait a week for your dinner. So you lay down your pen and go and forage. - Different kinds of foraging have put me much to the bad - but, n'importe. This is New York, and I'm past caring for much of anything except whether there's food, or there isn't, and whether I'm housed or not. - My question is now, can I keep it up till your events happen and my money is forthcoming. It does not seem like it.

I send you this to remind you of me, and so that you'll perhaps send me mine the first moment you can.

Mary MacLane

March 28 [1909]
[24 Irving Place]
[New York]

Dear Mr. Stone

Thank you for your check.

This is to say that and to ask if you can tell me the name and address of the present Sunday-Magazine editor. I have heard that he has inquired for my address with the idea of having me write an addition to that 5-years after story and bring it up to date. If you can tell me whom to address I'll write him a note and ask him.

Also I wonder if you can find out the Sunday World editor's name for me? I expect to meet Mr. Stanley Ketchell of Butte, Montana soon - he's said to be a remarkably uncultured person and a wonderfully good prize-fighter - and I'd write an interview with him, on the chance of the World's buying it, if the said editor thought it a good idea.

If you will call me up (198-Stuyvesant) some time on Monday, and tell me the names, I should like it.

Mary MacLane

April 15 [1909]
24 Irving Place
[New York]

Dear Mr. Stone

Thank you for the check with you sent last Saturday. May I have another, of somewhat larger proportions, this week - in case the Long-Deferred is still in the offing? - I do not like to encroach in your personal income, believe me - and I assure you it will not be for long, even though the L.D. is still indefinitely deferred.

Yours sincerely,

Mary MacLane

May 12 [1909]
71 Irving Place
[New York]

My Dear Mr. M.E. Stone, Jr. -

I went to see you today but you were engaged. I begin to feel like Helen Ware in "The Third Degree" - in the second and third acts - she haunts that lawyer's office, but with not one-tenth as strong an incentive as I haunt yours. - I went to inquire if your people had come through with the five-thousand. In case they do before the end of the week will you herald me with the glad tidings? My address is 71 Irving Place, and my telephone's Gramercy-1978. - It would appeal to me, though, if when the Long-deferred finally happened an office-boy, like an angel-of-light, in a taxicab drove up and brought me the news.

Meanwhile I live on what I can pawn. I would willingly pawn my teeth or my hair, at the call of the innards, were they not both securely fastened in and on. - But I can't pay rent that way, and this is to ask you to save a check for me out of the general wreckage of your weekly stipend the larger the better. And before noon on Saturday. I have a landlady of "New Thought" ideas whose room is hung with illuminated signs such as "Fill your Day with Light" and "Be Sunshine for Somebody," but whose real motto is Pay or Git.

So, if you please, the larger the better, and before noon on Saturday.

Yours sincerely,

Mary MacLane

The sisters Elinore are doing their turn this week at the Orpheum Theater in Brooklyn. You had better go to see them. They are not in the least witty or very clever, - they're funny. - Lots of people besides me like them. - I'm hoping the Long-deferred will happen this week partly that they may constitute my first gleam of pleasure.

17 May [1909]
71 Irving Place
N.Y.

Dear Mr. Stone

I send you the copy of a letter which I have just posted to Mr. Heinze. In case you have objections to your name being used as a "security," you can voice them before I get an answer and Mr. Heinze and I "talk business."

As a matter of fact, I doubt if the letter will elicit so much as an answer, let alone the two thousand. In view of the fact that the Heinze is under indictment and out on bail, and all that, and in view of my chief security being nothing more tangible than a book in embryo - I doubt if the letter elicits more than a soft oath or two, - he is noted for the frequency and fitness of his oaths. - Still I thought it worth a try.

And I thought I might as well say two thousand while I'm asking. Then, if you're counted out of my list of securities, and your people pony up this week, and I get the Heinze's two thousand - I'll have upwards of three thousand dollars! I'll be a rich woman. Just thinking about it is pleasant.

Yours sincerely,

Mary MacLane

The Elinore sisters are at the Colonial Theatre up at 63rd St. They'll do your head good.

[May 1909]
71 Irving Place
[New York]

Mr. F.A. Heinze New York

Dear Sir:

You will perhaps think this erratic and none-tenable, but it's in fact a simple matter of business for you to take up or turn down as you see fit.

I write to you for two reasons: because you were once of Butte-Montana, and because I think you may have money to lend. For I, too, was once of Butte-Montana, and I should like to borrow two thousand dollars.

I am a young woman, of whom you perhaps have heard, who wrote a book a few years ago which had a seething notoriety that extended considerably beyond the confines of Butte. In short, it made a hit and brought me a lot of money.

I have left just about a thousand dollars of the money and I'm doing another book of the same sort except that its setting is New York instead of Butte. The aim of my life now is to keep myself alive until I can finish it. I am now quite absolutely broke. My thousand dollars is not in my own hands. It is owed me. There are months of hard work in the book yet, and I figure that it will take two thousand dollars to grub-stake me - as they used to say on the Butte hill.

So I ask you to lend me two thousand dollars on these securities - my note for the amount; on the book which is promisingly started; and a sort of lien on the man who owes me the thousand - he, too, has tied-up resources. He lives in New York and, I believe, is known to you. His name shall be forthcoming if we talk business.

But, take it from me, the book is at once the best security and the best gamble of the three. - I was able at nineteen, in the obscurity and barrenness of Butte, and with next to no knowledge of life, to write a book which drew instant blood from the public, the newspapers, the vaudeville stage, and Anthony Comstock. But I feel myself better able, at six-and-twenty, and hard-by Broadway - the intervening years having been spent in by-no-means wholly easy converse with a tough and fascinating world - to do the trick again.

Yours sincerely,

Mary MacLane

June 10 [1909]
71 Irving Place
[New York]

Dear Mr. Stone

... I've just had a charming letter from Mr. Metcalfe, of Life, in answer to one I wrote him about his vaudeville article. He says he'd like to meet me to talk about it. I really know more about the ethics of vaudeville (it has ethics of a subtle sort) than he does, and I fancy he recognizes the fact. But I don't expect to meet him. I haven't myself been in a music-hall for months. Even the Elinor Sisters got by me.

Another thing - I shrink from mentioning - but I feel in a manner compelled to. The foolish letter which I wrote you I have had two days of poignant regret for - after which I put it out of my mind forever (except for this) on the principle of spilt milk. From one cause or another I regret nine-tenths of all the things I do. The letter was in itself harmless enough - since it didn't go astray and you're not a cad - except for its offense against decency. For that I make you a bit of apology for having sent it you. And may the matter be dead between us.

M. MacLane

June 14 [1909]
[71 Irving Place]
[New York]

Dear Mr. Stone

Manna in the wilderness wasn't more timely than the blue check which blew in on me Saturday morning. I thank you very much, and I trust it didn't reduce your bank-account to atoms. - Solvent as it now makes me I'm obsessed by a feeling that, if your people don't deliver the goods this week, my goose will be about cooked. I shall be, not on, but off, the knees of the gods. - The baffling mystery is how I've hung on for so long.

Three invitations have varied the precariousness of this week. One was for breakfast yesterday morning at the Beaux Arts place with Lucy Gray. She was in town for the Sunday. We had the breakfast together and a conversation, very much at cross-purposes. Another is for luncheon tomorrow with Mr. Metcalfe, of Life - which I expect will come off. I haven't yet met him. - And the third was from young Mrs. Thaw who called me up to ask if I would like to go with her to Pell street to have an opium-pipe, tonight. I should have liked to try a pipe experience, but I have developed a nice vein of snobbishness which caused me to decline to go. (It's not wholly unlikely that I may be, once more, some day, a subject for the yellow papers. In which case I case I hope not to be visited with the added indignity of being pals with Evelyn Thaw. Besides, she's not interesting - a sort of mongrel American, - no particular personality. I've met her but twice.) Had the Elinore Sisters invited me to hit a pipe, now - I should have gone hot-foot. But they would be about as likely to smoke opium as they would be to jump over the moon. A black coffee, after dinner, would be heavy dissipation for them. Vaudeville people are that way.

So no more at present, from

Yours truly,

Mary MacLane

Friday [c. June 25, 1909]
[71 Irving Place]
[New York]

Dear Mr. Stone

As they say in vaudeville, "Professor, do you suppose you can tear me off another yard of that stuff?" In other words, can you send me another blue check tomorrow? ...

Yours sincerely,

Mary MacLane

I had the luncheon with Mr. Metcalfe last Tuesday. A most amazing person. - I wondered afterwards if I mightn't better have taken a chance with Mrs. Thaw and Pell street.

October 15 [1909]
[New York]

Mr. M.E. Stone, Jr.
New York

My Dear Mr. Stone,

In answer to your request, I hereby state that you have never borrowed any money from me and that personally you do not owe me anything. My claim is against the firm of H.S. Stone & Company. You took over this indebtedness voluntarily and, I believe, have done and are doing the best you can to settle it with me. I am appreciative of this fact and I wish no legal or other interference in the matter. I am satisfied that you are now doing, by handing me weekly personal checks, more than you could be compelled to legally as a member of the Stone firm.

Yours sincerely,

Mary MacLane

October 10 [1911]
1007 W. Park Street
[Butte, Montana]

Dear M.E. Stone Jr.

It is in truth a long time between drinks but however, at last, here's regards! - (as they say in Tom Sharkey's) -

I remember when I last took leave of you, on a blow-y December day in 1909, that I promised to write to you - a promise that I fully expected to redeem long ere this. I don't know what effect bad intentions have on the human equation - but good ones, God wot, are absolutely fatal. Hell, they say, is paved with them. - But I've thought of you, ever and anon during this interval and I've read your magazine assiduously. I became particularly interested in it when you broke into print yourself with the "T.R. Please-Answer" articles. They're the only magazine articles I've ever seen that seemed to me to deal entirely in hard facts, and to be written quite without frills and without prejudice - a rarity in these days. Most magazine articles, though they make fascinating reading, contain palpable four-flushing and they're addressed largely to the emotions, - a good lay, at that. But you go them all one better by putting yours over without it, with a sustained interest. Some class to that. I think the whole magazine has acquired an editorial individuality since you took it over - though it's of a sort to appeal more to the high-brows than to the fifteen-cent public. At any rate one felicitates you upon it and your articles.

For myself, none of my lit'ry plans panned out as I had them half-projected when I last saw you. My wits were as good as they ever were, doubtless, but my "woman's body" (to quote from the book that made Chicago famous) was about at the end of its tether. You see, I got home to Butte that time on Christmas night with the tiredness of the journey and also the tiredness of two years on the Island of Manhattan all over me. Add this high-pressure altitude to that, and the excitements of this quaint town to a returned prodigal, and it's not surprising, to me at least, that on the third week after I returned I came down with that scourge, scarlet fever. And I came down with it hard. It was death's door for little Mary - eight weeks lying prone and burning up. But a pair of doctors and a nurse brought me through, a battered piece of wreckage. In the role of a yellow skeleton I spent the following summer on a porch hammock, waited on by my mother and my brother (who are the two best bets of my life). I'm entirely recovered now, and as good as new but for one hell-and-demnition item - "nerves." Cigarettes, which my doctor recommends - as many as I want, and absinthe, which he doesn't absolutely condemn - knowing that I'd take codeine otherwise - are what make long wakeful nights bearable when I'm having nerves. They'll always be on the blink, till I cash in. Still I've got good health. But take it from me: if ever you feel scarlet fever coming on, go and drown yourself. There'll be more fun in it, believe me. Well, all this militated against the book that I had partly written and I gave it up. But I used most of the material in it in a series of articles which I wrote for one of the Butte papers, and which attracted so much attention from the Middle-Western and Coast Sunday papers that I had them syndicated after the first two. Incidentally they revived the sale of the original M.-M. book and the somewhat depleted stock of it was soon exhausted. So then the Duffields wrote me that they had planned a new edition of it and they asked me to write some new chapters for it. So I did - I wrote one long chapter, a sort of epilogue to the book, showing how the leopard had changed her spots - and all that. And it has two later portraits. But possibly you have seen it. The new chapter shows, I think, a somewhat surer talent and a poise - but it lacks whatever charm-of-first-youth that the book had. It was published in July of this year.

I continue to do articles, now and then, for Chicago papers where they seem to make rather a hit. They're always "featured."

But I have in mind a most alluring plan for a book that I fear to mention almost lest my concentration in it be lessened. I begrudge the time I put on any other writing because of it. I've just started now on a series of articles that a Chicago paper wants. But I long to be at the other.

Butte is the same Butte it's always been except for an added deadliness, consequent on copper being "down" and the mines mostly working only half shift and some of them not at all. The colony of fervid millionaires is much smaller than it once was and Butte's once-famous tenderloin is dissipated into darksome byways. The town will come up again when copper does, but meanwhile the deadly thrall pervades it.

I didn't intend to inflict quite all this on you - but there is a charm about writing you a letter which has no 'touching' proclivities. I remember that fifteen per that I used to cop off your 'wages.' I wonder who's touching you now!

My best wishes to you - and in case you have achieved a wife, to her too. And always sincerely

Mary MacLane

This is the last article I wrote, which I rather liked myself except for the drawing of me which looks rather too much like a cutthroat, and the paragraphing of the wooden-headed proof-reader. - If you're not too busy, 'twill perhaps lend a mild interest to the shank of your afternoon - along o' your general interest in my early career.

M. MacL.