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The only inharmonious note at this time was my intense loneliness. In Chicago, in spite of the gradual breaking up of our home and the disintegration of the family, I had managed to build up that spiritual or imaginative support which comes to all of us from familiarity with material objects. I had known Chicago, its newspaper world, its various sections, its places of amusement, some dozen or two of newspaper men. Here I knew no one at all.

And back in Chicago there had been Alice and N—— and K——, whereas here whom had I? Alice was a living pain for years, for in my erratic way I was really fond of her. I am of that peculiar disposition, which will not let memories of old ties and old pleasures die easily. I suffer for things which might not give another a single ache or pain. Alice came very close to me, and now she was gone. Without any reasonable complaint, save that I was slightly weary, did not care for her as much as I had, and that my mind was full of the world outside and my future, I had left her. It had not been more than four weeks since I had visited her in her little parlor in Chicago, sipping of those delights which only youth and ecstatic imagination can conjure; now I was three hundred miles away from her kisses and the warmth of her hands. At the same time there was this devil or angel of ambition which quite in spite of myself was sweeping me onward. I fancied some vast Napoleonic ending for myself, which of course was moonshine. I could not have gone back to Chicago then if I had wished; it was not spiritually possible. Something within kept saying “On—on!” Besides, it would have done no good. The reaction would have been more irritating than the pain it satisfied. As it was, I could only walk about the city in this chilling November weather and speculate about myself and Alice and N—— and K—— and my own future. What an odd beginning, I often thought to myself. Scandalous, perhaps, in one so young: three girls in as many years, two of them deeply and seriously wounded by me.