character and motives. It said it would be possible to forgive me if what I had done was "the jealous rage of a male brute infuriated past reason"; but the awful truth was plain—I had done this deed as "publicity work" for the second volume of "Love's Pilgrimage"!
The idea that there lived on earth a human being who could have enjoyed the experience I was then undergoing was one which would not have occurred to me; however, the fact that this newspaper writer could conceive it indicated that there was at least one such person living. I have since heard that certain actors and actresses have increased their fame and incomes by being many times divorced and remarried. But with authors it does not work out that way. Mitchell Kennerley, publisher of "Love's Pilgrimage," had been selling a thousand copies a week of this book, and after the divorce-scandal he did not sell a hundred copies in six months!
I felt in those terrible days precisely like a hunted animal which seeks refuge in a hole, and is tormented with sharp sticks and smoke and boiling water. Under the law it had been necessary for me to obtain certain evidence. I had taken steps to obtain it, and this became a source of mystery as thrilling as a detective-story. For days men followed me every step I took; my mail was tampered with continually, and likewise the mail of my friends. I ran away into the country to hide, I even changed my name for a while, but that did no good—I was found out. Up to this time I had never had a grey hair in my head, but I found many after these months, and have them still.
Among the mass of newspaper items I note one that seems trifling, yet is curiously significant. There appeared in the "New York Times" a telegraphic dispatch from Wilmington, Delaware, to the effect that I was being sued by a store-*keeper in New Jersey for thirty-eight dollars worth of fertilizer. Stop and think a minute how many men in America are sued every day for bills which they refuse to pay, and how seldom does the "New York Times" hunt out such news by telegraph! Often I have tried to get radical news into the "Times," and heard the editors plead space limitations; yet they found room for a dispatch about my being sued for thirty-eight dollars!
Five years before this I had owned a little farm, and had left it in charge of a man who contracted bills in my name.
