After a cracking bout with scarlet fever (it really was scarlet fever, believe me), in which the fight was stopped in the fortieth round by that canny referee, the trained nurse, lo, here am I, M. MacLane, once more slinging my purple emotional ink for the benefit of my foes and friends, the citizens of Butte: to whom, as always, my loves and greetings!

I have been quarantined and guarded ad infinitum and nauseam these many, many days. I have lain for awhile hard upon the borderland of Nirvana, that plain of infinite peace. I have lain passive in the deadly hug of a scarlet terror. For days I felt the things of this world slipping, slipping away, and the cool young happiness of death begin to whisper round me. But the restless fingers of the world woke me, and the restless voices of the world called me, and a thousand magnetic phantom hands beckoned me back. I opened wearied and lack-luster eyes once more upon my cruel and adorable world, and found it good. Its color again gleamed out - at first faintly, then softly aglow, then brilliant, then, as ever before, dazzling and luring me back to be again fascinated and undone by its delectable falsehoods, its luscious lies, its jonquil-grown pitfalls.

So here I am. No matter how much you may say you hate me, citizens of Butte, you're glad it's so; you're tickled to death. For so long as I'm alive and in Butte, and so long as I write for the Evening News, I am something to be talked about in tones delicately tinctured with venom, something to be picturesquely traduced by a million-tongued rumor, without which, in Butte, we faint, we stagnate, we languish.

Scarlet fever is a funny thing. After the scarlet and the fever have both left you, you find your slim young body in a condition of infinite weakness and lassitude, and your erratic mind in a state of indescribable alertness and aliveness to all the things in life. Pictures from the childhood-past flit across it with startling vividness. Forgotten details of incidents and events rush into it with the revealing glare of lightning on a pitch-black night. Facts in the present cut into it with the precision of a tempered blade upon one's flesh.

The first picture my unfevered mind became aware of was of the nurse, bending over me, a comely young woman in her white, stiff-starched uniform, not a detail of whose outward seeming failed to instantly record itself upon my brain. Her personality was like a printed page, mine for the reading - or more like a wireless message, mine without even the reading. So alert was my mind that I needed not to analyze her to ascertain whether I was to be bored by a banal and colorless inanity, or buoyed up and charmed by a human being. The fates were kind, I may add - she was what is technically known as a live wire. During the weeks we were caged in together, I worried, harried, and shocked her, which latter is said to be a difficult feat to perform with a trained nurse - and it was - but her game and light-hearted laughter rings pleasingly yet in my ears. It as much as anything kept me from going down to the darkness and the worms.

There's nothing in all the world so incomparably fascinating as a human personality. And the joyous part of it is, they are all around us - they are thicker than the melting golden stars in a mid-summer night, and I, with an intuition that's a gift from the gods, can find the lilies and the roses and the dead-sea fruits that grow in them all. Countless thousands are there who go down the world in a futile and irrational pursuit of art or literature or science alone with, belike, no results but the dryness of dust and ashes upon their lips - whilst all about them are the red-blooded realities, the warmth of flesh, the beating of hearts, the infinite intricacies of human equations. Thus it was that even my scarlet fever, itself a bitter curse, meant to me yet another human experience, and a trained nurse (I once thought them ghastly inventions) and I became friends and pals. Allah go with her for the light-hearted laugh that penetrated my most fevered dreams!

One's slim young body being kept in its lassitude on a deadly diet of milk, with the occasional addition of an innocent egg, aided and abetted by brackish mixtures out of bottles, one's erratic mind continues to be abnormally and electrically alive. And then it was in my case that million-tongued rumor began to sift in through the quarantine and I, prone upon my narrow bed, began to realize the powerful inventive imagination, the rich verbal ferulity of the citizens of Butte. Yes, though I grieve to have to confess it, it really was scarlet fever. I recognize that by every tenet of romance and gay adventure, I should have been beaten and cut into ribbons by a broken bottle - or was it a horsewhip? - in the hands of some lady of undoubted female persuasion and vivid reputation, at her domicile among the hop-fiends - or was it the Three-and-a-Half-Mile House? But grim reality will step in and rob this sordid world of its romance. The hands of what's-her poetic name have never been raised against me, nor even clasped mine in the throes of friendship. And my brief sojourn in the Three-and-a-Half-Mile House was notable chiefly for its deadly peace and quietude. Also it touched my proper pride that the Butte public would so readily believe me worsted. Should any lady, be she bantam, feather, light, or welter, become so blind to her own interests as to set upon me with a bottle used in the way, shape, manner, or form of a club, believe me, in but a brief interval of time she would e'en be taking the count.

"Such a gorgeous, glitt'ring time," said I to the nurse, "as all these wild tales depict of my life since I've been in Butte - and how bored I've been in reality." And I musingly considered what a happy idea 'twould be for me to sit tight and let the citizens of Butte plan out my amusements for me - they whose vivid fancy and deep-reaching invention so far out-strip mine, they in whose hands a drab mole-hill becomes a scarlet mountain.

"Why should I ever do such inane things as spend evenings with a former schoolmate of palpable virtue, eating chocolates out of a box and dealing in airy nothings, when I might be in a gilded haunt of sin being smashed up by some lady or ladies unknown? Why should I ever find fun to sit at home with one foot under me and a volume of Wordsworth or Balzac in my lap, several evenings a week, when I might be tipsily wandering around the backstairs of the "Brewery" (where "the nights shall be filled with music"), astounding the lady orchestra and the hefty chanteuses with my ribald quips? Why should I ever go up the hill to play with my plump and youthful nephews, when I might be in the back rooms of beer-stores, playing with fire?

I have indeed let a lot get by me. 'Tis true, 'tis pity, and pity 'tis, 'tis true. Despite all which, the citizens of Butte are not nearly so much interested in me and my alleged lack of morals as I am fascinated by them and all their traits and attributes. There's something so thoroughly characteristic of Butte in their attitude toward me, and in all their other attitudes - something so subtle and still so crude, so incontinently barbarian and still so New-York-ish. I had the citizens of Butte analyzed to my own satisfaction seven years ago, when every malicious rag of a newspaper in the place was tearing me limb from limb. But in my cold young scorn I failed to do them justice. I could not then quite grasp them in the hollow of my hand. I left out of account their many-hued imagination as well as their incomprehensible softnesses of heart. For they have a heart, have the citizens of Butte, and marvelous to tell, even I am not without its pale. When the scarlet terror was at its worst the telephone bell rang twenty times a day and revealed the human consideration of not just friends and acquaintances, but of strangers - the citizens of Butte. Equally they sent boxes of pale, deep-scented blossoms (so many that had they come in the form of broken columns and gates ajar the body might have been then and there laid out). And there were other evidences. There is more to me in the heart-feeling of Butte than in that of all the other dwelling-places on the hither and thither sides of Manhattan. I know how rare and precarious are the softnesses in the hearts of Butte citizens - and besides that, Butte-Montana is my first if not my last love.

Mild mirth mixed itself with my deadly milk diet at the quaintly paradoxical idea of the citizens of Butte letting their astounding imagination and inventive faculty play lightly around my personality alternately with ringing my telephone bell to leave kindly messages and strewing my germ-laden path with flowers. It was all characteristic of the place, with its delicate incongruities, its utter unthinking youthfulness. It's as if the citizens rose en masse and said, "Kindly refrain from dying yet, Mary - we sadly need something to talk about, and for the present you're it." And such is the heterogeneous nature of my popularity that the message came not from just one caste or class. Oh, no! There was a delightful lack of sameness about the sources whence it came. Milliners and Christian Science people, bartenders (with whom I seem to have suddenly and mysteriously become a popular idol - such is fame!) and grocery clerks, hair-dressing ladies - the kind that sell you switches and are called Madam - and bank clerks, butchers and telephone girls, the entire strength of the glove, shoe, corset, toilet-article, and linen departments at Symons', vegetable Chinamen, dress-makers, an assortment of amalgamated washerwomen, one cab-driver, three lawyers, a notary public - and many, many more. Every vocation in Butte, I think, with the exception of two: the Proscribed of Mercury street and the members of the Butte press, gave evidence that its followers were true citizens of Butte, mixing caresses with curses in a way that's all theirs.

That they should give me either is also as characteristic of their unrecking emotionalism as anything they have done. Butte is astonishingly young. Several weeks ago I coldly sat down and coldly wrote, for the Evening News, a bit of frank portraiture of what's to me the most interesting thing in the world, my own personality. Did the citizens of Butte take it as coldly, and judge it for what it was, as mere writing? Oh no! The citizens of Butte took it very warmly indeed. They looked on it, not as writing, but, as nearly as one can judge, as something in the nature of a large package of scandal, and they rose like gudgeons to that bait. They rushed at it, tooth and nail, hammer and tongs, and tore, not it, but me, to shreds. Did they credit me with being clever enough to make my portrait so vivid that they couldn't differentiate between the reality and the picture? Oh, no, again! They slammed me for having no morals, or something like that. I have written the same sort of things for New York newspapers, and New York, being a cold worthy old head with a century or two of civilization and ethics behind it, merely bought it and read it and only slammed it where it failed as literature. They know in New York that a revelation of the human equation must reveal something weak, something reckless, something passionate, something full of foibles, and with the very old-fashioned tendency to want what it's supposed not to have - there being about four million of such on and hard-by Broadway - and they would contemn a portrait which lacked them. But Butte in its crass youngness would make a virtue of concealment and would seem, by what one may observe in it, to have for its motto: Go as far as you like, as long as nobody knows it. Be immoral and even degenerate, up to the limit, but keep it hid. It is a juvenile attitude, and Butte has truly all the unreasoning cruelty that goes with juvenility. It would be difficult, even if I took anything seriously, to take seriously the irrational javelin thrusts of the citizens of Butte. To do that were to place oneself on Butte's level and thereby to become infinitely vulnerable.

Once in New York I said to a woman of much heart, much sensitiveness, and much money, who was herself not long ago a citizen of Butte, "Do you never expect to return to Butte to live?" And she replied, with concentrated bitterness, "I left my youth and much of my money there, and had my heart broken in the vile little place, and that's enough for it. It repaid me with slander and lies, and I've done with it forever."

It does have those results, now and then. But for me, to stay in Butte and write things for the News, for the citizens to run and read, has all the charm of playing with matches, or nibbling at forbidden fruit. I never know what they're going to say about my articles, or how they're going to take them, or what brand of little one-ring row their marvelous imagination is going to concoct. It's dull in Butte at best, and if one can so easily stir things up and make things lively - why, how nice it'll be! And what a temptation it's going to be to be very frank, now and then, to be very human, to picture the warm flesh and the beating hearts, and the red blood as they are. The citizens of Butte are themselves as warm of flesh as they of New York, if not warmer (which I'm inclined to think), and as red of blood, if not redder (which, too, I'm inclined to think), but they're shocked to death, or they say they are - it's not quite the same thing - if it's suggested to them in cold print that the world is inhabited by real live people.

If there's an impression prevailing among the citizens of Butte that I advocate immorality and laud the vices, I write it here, with contempt and impatience, that I do no such thing. I have written, and I expect to write many times yet, that morals are of comparatively little moment, and vice, let who will defend or condemn it, will last as long as the race. It touches the highest-browed of us with at least the tips of its fingers. If we cannot rid the world of physical immorality and vice - and why should we, since, if we do, they crop out in some form of mental abscess or other? - let us at least make them poetic and romantic. They're but trifles, anyway. It is not they that count.

But there are such potent things as sincerity, loyalty, and truth - there are such things as charity and kindness of heart - things which do count heavily in the long, long pathway of woe and shadow. Beside them the ethics of the body are but an atom.

But the citizens of Butte open their youthful eyes wide at such heresy - merely because it's written. They stare like amazed children at axioms that held good before Omar's day, before Chaucer's, before Homer's - and beyond that. Yet it's partly for that that they're fascinating.

Meanwhile they do not deter me. The dry Martini still shines goldenly in its cup of glass -

The cup that clears
Today of past regret and future fears.

It is not wise to dwell upon it - it is not wise to drink it. It is only delectable, enchanting, seductive, and bewitching. That for mine always. And to the citizens of Butte I waft, with the blue diaphanous rings from my cigarette, again my loves and greetings. They're a subtle joy. They appeal to half of my senses and all of my brains. They're my own kind, for I, too, am a citizen of Butte. They keep me guessing more than I can possibly keep them. Their curses and caresses lend my days a piquant charm and my nights a thin temptation - incongruous, incontinent, inconsistent, delightful, and adorable citizens of Butte!

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