I walked, with a guilty feeling of too much sentimentality, back into the “stack” at the university library.  I took down book after book of the great English poets, and pressed my cheek to them in long farewell ... first glancing cautiously around, to be sure that no one was near to observe my actions....

I did not say good-bye to Langworth or my other professor friends, as they had already left for their summer vacations.

* * * * *

I sat in Joe Deacon’s room, talking, that last night of my sojourn in Laurel....

“Good old Joe” we called him, because he was possessed of all the old-fashioned virtues, and unassumingly lived up to them.  He was a fellow member of the Scoop Club, an associate teacher in the School of Journalism, and taught during the summer session....

Long, long Joe and I talked ... of everything young idealists discuss or dream of.  We ended with a discussion of the sex question.  I reiterated what he already had heard me say, that I had had so far no sex experience.  He confessed that he, also, had had none ... maintained that a decent man should wait, if he expected a woman to come pure to him....

I spoke ardently in favour of free love.

He assented that, theoretically, it was the thing ... but there were a multitude of practical difficulties that made for favour of the convention of marriage....

“No, if a convention is wrong, it is the duty of everyone who knows the right in his heart, to help smash that convention....”

“You just wait,” I boasted imaginatively, “and I’ll show you!” “Maybe, Joe,” I concluded, for I knew what I said would tease him, “maybe, when I reach the East, I shall break loose.”  Then I added—­and to this day I cannot imagine what put it into my head to say it—­what fantastic curl of thought, unless perhaps a premonition of what was soon to come to pass—­

“Penton Baxter has invited me to pay him a visit at Eden, a Single Tax Colony just outside of Philadelphia, before I go on to Europe via cattleboat ... maybe I’ll take him up, go down there, and run away with his wife ... she’s a mighty pretty woman, Joe!”

Joe was scandalised at my remark—­the effect I had wished for.

* * * * *

But after the uproar broke, Joe stoutly maintained that our elopement had all been a frame-up, alleging his conversation with me as proof ... as who would have not?

* * * * *

Reduced again to my barest equipment, and having left as my forwarding address the office of the National Magazine, in New York, I hopped a freight shortly after dawn.  It was a fast, through freight.  Because of lack of practice I boarded it clumsily, and almost went to my death under its grinding, roaring wheels, there in the Laurel freight-yards.  I sat, trembling with the shock to my nerves, on the bumpers.