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"Mary MacLane as a High School Friend Knows Her" Not entirely in her defense (for she knows how to defend herself better than the average woman), but as a matter of simple justice and to dispel many of the popular misconceptions of my old friend and school chum, Mary MacLane and her work, I, also a woman of more than twenty, am tempted to submit a few personal recollections and plain facts to the readers of the News. Mary MacLane as a very young girl went to school in Great Falls. After coming to Butte she distinguished herself by her series of clever articles in the High School Leader, when Adolph Heilbronner was business manager and the publication was a splendid success. At school among her teachers, and in fact everywhere else, where Mary MacLane is intimately known, she has many personal friends. Realizing that she possessed unusual talent and yet hampered by circumstances, and exasperated by the restrictions which surrounded her, Mary wrote her book, with all its varied beauties and all its varied incomprehensibilities. Mary MacLane has come back to Butte for the seclusion offered to write another book - her fifth. The first brought her $28,000 and the second, My Friend Annabel Lee, which was considered a failure, nevertheless netted her $4,000. Two more books, written in the East, after being finished, were not to her liking, and she tore them up. Today Miss MacLane has a royalty, not large but enough to support her, from the now-increasing sales of her first book, The Story of Mary MacLane, written seven years ago. This book has been translated into six languages and may be found on the shelves of booksellers of Vienna, Constantinople, London, Paris, and Berlin. Of the seven years Miss MacLane has been away, only two were spent in New York. She lived much of the time at fashionable watering places, notably St Augustine, Florida and on the New England coast, where she associated herself with little coteries of literary folk and did much hard work. Up to two years ago she never in all that time traveled alone, but invariably with an elderly woman friend. Much of her time in New York was spent with a well-known and wealthy Butte matron with whom she had formed a deep friendship. In Gotham, careless of public opinion, as she has ever been here, she sought local color for her writings and found it. All of her characters are drawn from life: good, bad, and indifferent. Miss MacLane has not dissipated the fortune she made, confining her expenditures largely to the interest from permanent investments. What she has lost, however, she has lost by injudicious loans and investments to people who call, or once called, Butte their home. To those who have never seen her, her own reference to herself is most unjust. Though she says flippantly that she returned to Butte "a frazzled old rounder," those who have met her have met a young woman fashionably dressed with furs of latest mode and a hat for every day of the week. For all her adult philosophy and, Miss MacLane is just as much a girlie girl as any of her age - as sentimental, as merry, as bright, and as womanly as any celebrity to be found anywhere. Her unfortunate habit of telling the truth, of delighting in shocking her friends, of saying charming or alarming things, has made all wonder and many misunderstand and misjudge. The girl is as much a sociological mystery as she is a literary marvel. As a matter of fact she is better known in New York than in Butte, and numbers among her associates there the leading American writers and poets of the day. She made $3,000 more out of her book than did Elinor Glyn out of the sensational Three Weeks. In Butte, Mary MacLane is very generally misunderstood. Butte seemed to resent her reference to it, truthfully expressed in "sand and barrenness." In return, Mary MacLane has never been particularly civil to Butte. No such idiosyncracies as mark her here are known of her in New York among her circle of friends. When her book became a success, Butte society invited her to their tea parties shortly before her departure. She stung them a little in her bitterness, thus adding to her measure of unpopularity. The fact of the matter is, Mary MacLane cares very little for the opinion of Butte. She came home to visit her mother and family, to whom she is deeply attached. It was only after much persuasion that she consented to write for the News. The unfortunate small-town habit of discussing the personality of a writer is, of course, natural to Butte in Mary MacLane's case. That Mary MacLane is a great writer and a stylist without peer in America is admitted by the literary authorities of the continent. Unlike George Sand and George Elliott, talented women who wrote under masculine noms de plume, she was not afraid to use her own name. She had neither the diplomacy to fear the truth, nor the cowardice to indulge in falsehoods. Naturally she is strange to her critics. Mary MacLane has made but her first essay into the field of fame. Butte will yet be glad to boast that she is a Butte product.
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