I, of womankind and something-and-twenty years, have by this time concluded that those gay buccaneers, the citizens of Butte, whose victims are the set-apart individualities in their midst, are going to put their own peculiar construction upon every thing one writes, say what one may to prevent it, which being the case, it's only to let them go ahead and do it. When I find I can not stem a tide I instantly stop trying and move aside with as much of good grace and light-hearted contempt as may be - and I let the wild water rush upon its way. Even though it's a matter one cares about much - still, it's to give but the shrug of a shoulder and to let all effort in the contrary direction die at its birth. When you come right down to it, I am fond of those gay buccaneers, the citizens of Butte. I should prefer that they understood me, rather than to in some ways misunderstand so profoundly as they do. But they never will. No, they never, never will. It's to let it pass. They will in particular misunderstand some things about this article and the side of me it reveals. I care about it, but, well - un haussement de m'epaule, and forever my love to the citizens of Butte. The men I have met and known more or less intimately in my seven years of experience have far outnumbered the women and have been far easier to know and classify and manipulate and manage. But for some inexplicable reasons the women I have known and loved have been the crucial incidents in my life, the real and informing events. They have been alike my staunchest friends and my worst and bitterest enemies - the stars of my night and the murky pools and the pitfalls and snares about my feet. Women have always been, since the days of the Anemone Lady, more interesting to me than men, because they're more complex, more subtle, fuller of delicate incongruities and illusions, harder to understand. Two-thirds of all the women in the world, some consciously and some unconsciously, have the same feeling toward their own kind. There are millions who conventionally marry some worthy and agreeable husband and are happy with him in a perfectly sane and bromidic way - but the while to their woman friends, possibly without knowing it, they give all their poetry, all their imagination, their subtlety, their intricate complexity, their mental concentricity and fascination, and their tenderness of heart. And there are many women who recognize and admit the charmed fact. It is not wonderful. What every woman knows is that each and all of us are cursed with vulnerable fragile bodies, and vulnerable sensitively-sincere hearts which together bring, often and often, an anguished durance so poignantly real as to be the dominating factor of life with us, and yet so remote as to be beyond thought and analysis - beyond everything but feeling, and of which men have not the most shadowy conception. In the plainest language women could tell it in, it will be to men as Greek and Sanskrit; not even the men poets (with - who knows? - the exception of that most wonderful of them all, Robert Browning) know the inner voice of women. Not even Elizabeth Browning, as deeply woman as poet, could write the thing itself, though in her life and in the feeling of her poems it speaks fatally, heartbreaking, albeit with a restrained passion-flower sort of quiescence. It is this thing that to two-thirds of all women is the silent unseen tie that binds.

At that I shall but picture a few hybrid women who have been my friends and half-friends and passing acquaintances in New York of the Treacherous Delights. Women do not come in types except physically and in other outward seeming - each of them is mostly a personality and an individuality unto herself. Outwardly two women, or a dozen, may be of the same type - their bodies may have the same kind of garnishment as to clothes and coiffures and grooming, but inwardly they differ as the poles. One may be a settlement worker and another a kept woman; one may be a cloak model and another a club woman; one may be a plain crook and another a trained nurse - and yet be of one physical and mental caste. Caste - which has nothing to do with class - is possibly the subtlest distinction by which we differentiate human beings, and at first blush we make the mistake of thinking it a matter of breeding and environment and education. It is a long mistake.

It's a fascinating bit of work to determine that subtle distinction of caste among the people one knows, particularly women, and particularly in New York where women are the pervading spirit - the duchesses, the town princesses, the Beloved of the Town; a little nation of Nell Gwynns.

I have not known so many of them as of men, but still, during my last two years in New York, life seethed with women. They were one's companions in the apartment houses where one lived, at matinees, in tea rooms, at the Cafe Martin, in the shops, on Fifth avenue at the ends of the afternoons, on Broadway always, at the apartments of friends - in all the highway and byways. If you're an unattached young woman living alone in New York, and markedly a free-lance, you'll meet up with a million other unattached women. They color up your life and mean adventure - in the day-light and the dark. During my last months in New York I had an apartment - four and a half green-and-white rooms - with a young woman with whom I had once been good friends, but with whom I then maintained but a semi-intimate aloofness suitable for the sharers of apartments. Experienced livers in New York apartments - it's probably of all modes of living the most checkered and highly-seasoned - will tell you that the unwisest thing you can do is to take an apartment with any one you're fond of. My friend, a girl a year or two younger than I, who looked like an angelic child, but was in reality a little demon for tempers and furies, and as variable and false as the shade of the light-quivering aspen, with two divorced husbands and a meteoric career in her offing - had her own friends and I had mine. And the women (to say nothing of the men) who were likely to ring our telephone bell at any hour of the day or night were variegated indeed. When the bell rang for me it might be the Borrower of Two-Dollar Bills, the Logical Thief, the Morose Manicure Girl, the Golden Weeper, the Literary Woman, the Chorus Girl, the Young Russian Anarchist, the High-browed Actress, the Piquant and Passionate Pursuer, the Devilish Sub-Editor of the Woman's Home Companion, the Red-Headed Fisher of Men, the Fluffy Slob, my Friend in the Face-Fixing Business, the Discontented Marryer of Husbands, the Pink-and-Blue Dilettante, - or one of many more. When you consider that they all lived their lives, not as we do in Butte, Montana, with a deadly thrall and a wild-sea-bird shyness upon us, but as they do in New York, with absolute freedom and abandonment of emotion and nerve - you may infer that at least one's life had color. Seventeen minutes being one's time on the stage, one can picture but a few of them.

The Borrower of Two-Dollar Bills I met first in the Cafe Martin. I was sitting alone one afternoon behind that interesting door labelled "Smoking-Room Pour les Dames," upstairs, when there ambled over to me a half-beautiful woman of perhaps seven-and-thirty, in a black princess gown of a swagger cut and a black turban of the chicest, but with an indefinable air of subtle vagabondage about her. She had a complexion and skin of a lustrous softness and large sea-green eyes, and dusky hair artistically done, and she was in that state of goodfellowship which betokens recent libation - not too much, but some. "Kiddo," remarked this personage, "do you happen to have an extra Milo on you? I'm dying for a puff." I didn't have a Milo, but I lassoed Felice, the maid, and got her a box - her personality promised entertainment. She sank down upon a divan with one black suede foot on a taboret, and "lit up" - and spoke with a certain lack of reserve. "You're probably thinking, `Gee, what a crust!' but as I said, I'm dying for a puff, and between you and me I'm absolutely strapped - I haven't even the price of one of these." I expressed a proper regret, which led the conversation into how extremely easy it is to be "strapped" in New York. "My God!" said the subtle vagabond, "for eighteen years I've never been able to see an hour and a half into my future, and yet I've lived - and always within a cab-whistle of Forty-second street and Broadway, at that. Me for the Rialto. I started in vaudeville, when vaudeville was punk, and then I did the choruses, and then I understudied Edna May for three years. I've earned the living wage, all right - but what's a living wage in New York? Besides, I've always been too strong on the liquor. Gee, I'm never happy if I'm not half soused all over - and now I've got a profession that almost makes ends meet." "And what's that?" said I. "I live by borrowing two-dollar bills all over the island and Brooklyn and Jersey City, wherever I can. Some days a few and some days a lot, but always some." "But," said I, "I should think you'd soon get to the end of your tether, and the works shut down, sort of." "Oh, not at all," said the Borrower, airily. "New York is a big place. Everybody in New York at two dollars a throw would mean a fortune, wouldn't it? Of course I don't know quite everybody, but at that it's a fertile field. I almost make ends meet. New York's certainly a big place." "But why limit each touch to two dollars?" I inquired. "Kiddo," said the Borrower, "because I don't want the populace forever at my heels. If they threw good money after a bad lady, wouldn't they be apt to follow her up? But who's going to follow up a two-dollar bill? It's a real profession - and let me again remind you, New York's a big place. I'll tell you a lot about it - if you happen to have the price of a couple of drinks on you." Unfortunately I had. It led to an acquaintanceship and almost constant companionship which lasted seven weeks and led me into the twilit mazes of life as it's led by the genus parasite. The Borrower of Two-Dollar Bills was one who lived for her physical senses alone. She had no friendships, though plenty of companions, and her one heart-interest had been years in its grave. She lived but to pamper and satiate her senses - she was held in a desolate bondage of the body which made even me feel like an ethereal sprite from a higher plane. But her effect upon me was like that of a blasting devitalizing south wind. There are many like her in New York.

The Literary Woman - I just knew her in Boston - a friend of mine for years, a girl of about thirty, with a pallid husband who was a secondary interest, her first being her work, which was short stories, for which she had made a distinct market. She was rather beautiful in a foreign-looking way, with a small svelte body, a complexion of rose-and-bronze, and eyes like hazel-colored half-glacial windows to her mind. She had spasmodic warmths of heart (I was, and am, fond of her), but I should hate to be wholly dependent on one of her ilk for the light o' love. This her line of talk: "MacTrey, I don't know just how you look at it, but to me the two most worthwhile things in God's world are Fame and Freedom. If I were to be granted three wishes this instant, this instant I should say: Fame, Freedom, and the ability I feel in me now to appreciate them absolutely to their last pitch. I know I'll never be free - I'll always be held down by a hundred fetters, because I'm afraid. But I fully intend to be famous, if it isn't till I'm fifty. I've made me a short-story reputation in four years, by just keeping on hammering my typewriter and bucking the literary game. As for you, MacTrey, I don't quite get your attitude, and perhaps you'll say it's none of my business, but I can't help thinking you're squandering and dissipating your life on these experiences of yours - you seem to pay so high and to such an insatiate piper. In your place, what wouldn't you do? You've proved you're not afraid of anything the world can hand you and you've got, at an age which seems to me just like being a little girl, your own particular niche of fame. With that you might do anything - you might make even this big flinty New York sit up and rub its eyes and stare till they dropped out - you could put it all over the two million other sulphites. But instead of that you madly flit about after silver-and-scarlet butterflies. For what you have only to stretch out a languid hand and take, I'd give my useless soul for." "Jane," said I, "don't be a bore. Let's go over to Keith's and see Yvette Gilbert, she goes on at three. She has an exquisite French sort of pathos about her which will take your mind off me." "Yes, I want to see her," she replied, "I want to study her type a little. It's distinctly European. But I'd like still more to give you a much-needed spanking." A good sort, the rose-and-bronze, but if you ask me, a sort which misses the pink honey of life. There are many like her in New York.

The Devilish Sub-Editor of the Woman's Home Companion. She and I were pals-at-arms, and occasionally at daggers drawn, for six months. She had black, dead-looking hair, wonderful Nile-green eyes, a battered young body - she was about eight-and-twenty - and a clever and cynical mind. I was first attracted toward her by the delicate incongruity of her being on the staff of the Woman's Home Companion - herself would have fitted into the home-and-fireside with the facility and appropriateness of a billy goat. She was one of the crookedest pals I've ever had (which is putting it strong). She never told the truth when she could get away with a lie, and she drank whisky, she drank absinthe, she "shot" cocaine occasionally, she took a form of deadly nightshade, and she played fast and loose, not only with her own emotions but with other people's. At twenty-eight she looked all of forty, and she had a fancy for dressing like a Lithuanian peasant woman - in a dark green kirtle and skirt with a white bodice. She and I met every noon, on the corner of Thirty-fourth street and Sixth avenue, and walked over to a Turkish Restaurant and had luncheon. "I love this place," said the Devilish Sub-Editor, "for a variety of reasons, and though we discovered it together I shall keep on coming here alone, even after you have begun to hate me, cherie. There's so much about it that's satisfyingly decadent and suggestive of death. This mysterious salad, perchance, is made from the green things which grow on poets' graves, and those white hyacinths - Monsieur the Headwaiter surely purchased them early this morning from one who took them from the dead body of a snow-maiden who died in her innocence. To eat this white, white flesh of the suckling pig is like eating one's own baby garnished with sugared cherries. The coffee is a heavy drug, and this ridiculous wine, for its warm, mild taste and its fiery effects, might be the blood of Sappho. And the people - look at those at that corner table, five of them, with white faces - I'll lay you three bob that the pupils of their eyes almost overlap the irises and are blacker than night - fine people, sitting eating and yet, as they sit, dead - dead. Drink up, MacTrey, and we'll pledge their deadness in another pint." She filled me with mirth as long as her crookedness didn't turn in my direction. But still, as a human being she was not a complete success. There are many, very many, like her in New York.

The Golden Weeper - my friend and daily companion for several months, during which time I had more tears, reproaches, recriminations, threats, jealousies, tempers, and general uproar of emotion spilled over me, like a glittering cascade, than life has contained for me before or since. I was very fond of her, and am yet, for the game abandonment with which she threw herself into all her affections. She was a charming young thing, a year or two younger than I, with golden hair and golden eyes, a slim young body and lips of startling redness. She played a harp in vaudeville and sang in a voice sweet as jessamine, as a vocation, and for pleasure and pastime she made a fine art of friendship. She made it altogether too fine an art - she would split hairs and snatch at straws, and trifles as light as air were things to be argued over for half a week without sleeping. And I - I matched her at it - we waded together in a delightful river of silliness. She lived up at Eightieth street with a most ineffectual mother whom she had completely dominated at the age of two years, and ever after. The Golden Weeper was likely to come to call on me at any hour whatsoever, by preference three in the morning. A ring at our bell some rainy night and I would go to the door (three being the conventional hour than otherwise) to find her standing in the dim light of the apartment-house hall in a pale green evening frock and a white cloak. "You," said I - "all these blocks in the rain! Come in - what is it now?" "No, I can't come in," said the Golden one. "I've come to ask you if you still love me." "You know I do," said I. "In fact I told you so at eleven o'clock this morning. " "But I saw you at four o'clock this afternoon and you didn't say so then, and you looked at me only twice, and your manner was cold at that," said the Weeper. "Because you spent too much time talking to that LeMonte woman," I made answer. "Well, what could I do - you were simply eating that little Lloyd - I had to talk with somebody," said the Weeper. "And I talked to Lloyd," I said, "which is different from eating her, because she was the only one there who was friendly toward me. The rest of them didn't like me, and you joined with them, and yet you call yourself my dearest friend." "I didn't join with them," said the Golden Weeper; "you always say that - but I tell you, once and for all, you'll not have another chance." And, presto! a flood of golden and temporary tears de luxe. "If you think to start anything in the sympathetic line, with me, by weeping," said I, "you're making a deep mistake. You weep a deal too easily and too often." "Have I said I wanted to start anything?" said the Golden one; "and tears of mine have nothing to do with you." And so on and on. The gray dawn crept in at darkling skylights and we would still be standing at the door of the green-and-white apartment engaged in what was to us a fascinating cross-purpose. An ardent child of impulse, the Golden Weeper, and in New York there are many, many like her.

There are many, many of all ilks in New York. They move in deep and shallow waters. But in the deeps or the shallows they are all, and with it all - just human: the same in Butte-Montana.

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