She had been, Penton informed me, when he handed me her book, one of the famous Bohemians of the San Francisco and Carmel art and literary crowd....

After a brief career of adventurous poverty, she had committed suicide over a love affair.

Her poetry was full of beauty and spontaneity ... a grey mist dancing full of rainbows, like those you see at the foot of Niagara....

I must have read myself to sleep, for the lamp was still lit when I woke up early with the dawn ... it was the singing of the birds that woke me on my second day at Eden....

Working on farms, in factories, on ships at sea, being up at all hours to catch freights out of town had instilled in me the habit of early rising; I would have risen at dawn anyhow without the birds to wake me.

Turning over for my pencil, which I ever keep, together with a writing pad, at my bedside, to catch the fleeting poetic inspiration, I indited a sonnet to Baxter (all copies of which I have unfortunately lost or I would give it here) in which I sang his praises as a great man of the same rank as Rousseau and Shelley.

In spite of the fact that I was fully aware of all his absurdities and peccadilloes, the true greatness of the man remained, and still remains, undimmed in my mind.

* * * * *

High day.  I walked along the path, past the little house where Baxter sequestered himself when he wished to be alone to think or write; it was close to my tent, around a corner of trees.  I tiptoed religiously by it, went on up to the big house where the three women slept, as if drawn to their abode by a sort of heliotropism.

The whole house stood in quiet, the embodiment of slumber.

* * * * *

A lank, flat-chested woman came up the path from the opposite direction ... dressed drab in one long, undistinguished gown like a Hicksite or Quaker, without the hood ... her head was bare ... her fine, brown hair plaited flat.

“Good morning!”

“Good morning,” she replied, a query in her voice.

“I am John Gregory, the poet,” I explained.  “I arrived yesterday on a visit to the Baxters.”

She said she had heard of me ... she opened the door and went into the house.  I followed.

She was the wife of Anarchist Jones, of whom I had already heard the household speak—­as a difficult, recalcitrant member of the colony.

The Joneses were very poor.  They had two children and lived in a mere shack on the outskirts of the community.  Jones was a shoemaker.  His wife came twice a week to clean up and set things to rights in the Baxter menage—­his two houses.  I took care of the tent myself, while I was there....

By this time Darrie, Ruth, and Mrs. Baxter were up.  I sat in the library, in the morris chair, deeply immersed in the life of Nietzsche, by his sister.  Nevertheless I was not so preoccupied as not to catch fugitive glimpses of kimonos disappearing around door-corners ... women at their mysterious morning ritual of preparing themselves against the day.