This is an expurgated review of my later impressions of Butte and a few crudely-drawn contrasts between the me that was and the me that is.

I, of womankind and unpleasingly more than nineteen years, will now take the Evening News and the hybrid Butte public some three thousand words deep into my confidence. I am the Mary MacLane of purple memory whom, slam me though it did, Butte will never, never forget. I have proofs of that on me - some in my two hands and some in the top of my stocking.

Seven years ago I left this weird little town. I left it while myself in a blaze of notoriety made of tinsel and brass, and yet in its own way deep and far-reaching. It went half across the world, did the thing of brass and tinsel, and, too, it clings to me yet. I love my notoriety more, oh, much more than if it were pale, solid gold. It has given me such a run for my money - it has brought me close, close to human realities. I have sat all these seven years, not in a shadowy literary niche, but have gone down into the seething market-places. I have felt the hot pulse and tasted the red blood of the cruel and adorable world. Seven years ago I left little old Butte far behind me. And now that the seven years have slipped away I'm here again and for the first time. It's to me a situation piquant and picturesque. I lived in Butte, but little more than seven years ago, the obscurest of shy maids. Butte now looks upon me as a returned and limelighted prodigal, a woman with a past, and an insolent young jade withal. It is wondering divers things about me as it sees me in its midst - if I've spent all my money, why I put on so much complexion, where I acquired my taste for cocktails, and whether I'm still single-hearted. Butte takes note of all these changes in me and shows a tendency to give me a gladdening hand. Well, though I know Butte for exactly what it is, I have none but a joyous hand for it. Butte is sordid, beastly and time-serving - but withal full of romance and poetry and the wideness of the West. It is fascinating and picturesque, which is all I ask of anything. Morals are nothing but boresome trifles, and art is too often like a nightgown on a hot August night by the sea - superfluous. But the fascinating and the picturesque are never lost.

The Mary MacLane who rose to a so-sudden and somewhat terrific notoriety in 1902 was pre-eminently a Butte product - a shy and delicate creature born of this convulsive desolation. And when at nineteen my head broke out in brains and I wrote my wail of adolescence, with damns and devils and little knocks at Butte, Butte promptly gave me a curse, a blow upon the heart, also on the point of the jaw - a few surreptitious curses, and saw me slip away into the glooms and terrors of the many-pitfall'd world. I went away eagerly enough, but in all the seven years something in Butte subtly called me. I have heart-feelings for it. These barren hills saw my mind's awakening. I once walked over them in the loneliness of nineteen, or sat on some granite boulder with my hands about my knees, and watched the lights of the horizon, and realized the half-sullen, half-brilliant depths in me. I even thought I had a soul in those days (see the red Mary MacLane book) and a heart, of sorts. But the soul I have since passed up as a bore and an uncertainty (it is buried deep in the said red book), and the heart is now - battered and parched from the salt of dried tears. But the mind of black-and-white brilliance remains - and largely I thank Butte for it. A certain deadly thrall hangs over this little place, which impregnates one's mind, if one happens to possess one - they're rare - and brings to it a reckoning and an accouchement.

I had an incomparable thrill at my first glimpse of the town, a week or two ago, when I watched it from the windows of the night train sliding slowly in around the mountainside: a million starry gems scintillated on a black hill as if fallen from the spangled blue, and just above them the large deep-gold evening star hung low with down-dropping, glowing-wire rays. Nothing was there but the black hill and the countless diamonds, the silence and the evening star. It was mysterious and enchanting. "And that," I thought to myself, "is the pungent little place which saw the sudden jerking of me from the quietest obscurities into the glaringest limelights - and itself did it." It added depths to the thrill.

The next day I walked into its narrow highways and looked hard at it. It has an exquisite forlornness on it, with the deadly thrall: it is elementally the same little old Butte.

Since then I have done the highways daily and I've become used to the thrall and the forlornness. I am becoming once more a citizen of Butte.

And I've met most of the people with whom I once went to the Butte High School, and most of the people whom I met just after I developed from me into Mary MacLane, and a few more. I do not think the Butte people have changed any since I last knew them. But my attitude has changed toward them as it has toward everything since I wrote my book. So that they all seem different. Seven years ago I took myself and everybody and everything seriously - with nearly always disastrous results. (Do you remember how I "shocked Butte society"?) Now I take nothing seriously. I meet misfortune with an insolent laugh and the malice of my fellows with light-hearted contempt. What I cannot laugh at I pass up. I'll no more of the small tragedies that come from too much faith. They sear and corrode one's heart - they scar one's brain. And so, I've nothing but plaisance for the Butte people; they're all of that for me. In short, we get along fine.

I left Butte crude, innocent, and inexperienced. I return to it in the role of a frazzled old rounder. New York has been my abiding place these many, many moons, and it's been in some ways my undoing. It's a city of a million treacherous delights-and-horrors, and of a thousand grievous slips `twixt the cup and the lip. It is vast and cruel - it devours youth, feminine youth, with the jaws and the palate of a monstrous insatiate demon. I and my folly - for I'm very much of a fool, among other things - were an easy prey. And so I come back to the scene of my youthful faiths with half my bloom irrevocably rubbed away. Still, even more than I love Butte I love New York.

I was at first bored stiff, after the fresh thrill of getting home had subsided, by the ghastly lack of things to do. There's no Rector's to go to after the play and sit drinking that which bubbles long; no Knickerbocker wherein to browse amid the Broadway chorus people with a swissesse beneath one's chin, no Tom Sharkey's wherein to drink beer in delicate abandonment amid the ribald revelry of hilarious sailors, no Cafe Martin wherein to mingle with the absinthe drinkers at four in the afternoon. There's no Maria's and no Jack's, no White Way and no Bowery. But I find there's a hybrid Indian-village sort of imitation of them all. They are live imitations. Butte is the one Indian village that could do it. Butte has gone off and down since I last knew it, and languishes in the clutch of a deadlock. But the glamor of its golden days still lingers on and there is an alcoholic haze to its nights. Moreover, a kindly law of contrast helps things along in my case. Certain men of Butte have taken me to the "Brewery" and Browne's, and out to Jack Reagan's and Billy Smith's and some others whose names I heard too late in the night to recall. We stayed very late in the night, and they introduced everybody to me - bartenders and Chinese waiters and the drivers of deep-sea-going cabs. Everybody seemed pleased to meet me. I seemed to be the only woman the night contained. The next day I went to an afternoon tea amid West Side ladies galore - they were few but select. I enjoyed both those functions. Butte people are very much Butte people, whether lined up in front of the bar at Jack Reagan's or drinking tea in West Granite street. They didn't happen to be the same people, though. At the time I wrote the book which we all thought was so wicked I considered it quite an awful thing for a young woman to go out to the "roadhouses," and I looked upon Mercury street as the haunt of the damned. But I've changed those opinions, partly because I've found by long experience that you can be as virtuous in a roadhouse as in a morgue, and partly because my attitude toward people-at-large has changed and I take nothing seriously: even if you aren't virtuous you aren't necessarily damned. I suppose there may be a lightness of heart, as well as of morals, in Mercury street, and, taken by and large, I fancy life is rather more human there than in Granite. I prefer Granite street, though, because there seem to be cockroaches in Mercury street, and of all things, kind Devil, deliver me from cockroaches. Rather even a cab driver for a husband or a waiter for a lover. More than I like the roadhouses and the afternoon teas I like the people I once went to school with. I like meeting them, shocking them, and having ardent friendships with them. It's fun to be Mary MacLane, a set-apart individuality in any gathering, as marked a woman as Evelyn Thaw or Carrie Nation. And it's pleasing to my vanity to reflect that I was as marked in New York as in Butte.

As to the things the massed Butte public seems to be wondering about me - I'll tell you some of them with a blending of audacity and chaste aloofness that's all mine. As to whether I've spent all my money: well, most of it. There was quite a lot forthcoming from the wicked book and, as I said, I've had a bully run for it. As to why I'm wearing so much complexion, not unnaturally I prefer to be good-looking than otherwise. As to where I acquired my taste for the dry Martini: that's an easy one - on the Great White Way. As I once loved the pallid olive so I now love the dry Martini - all melted gold in a cup of glass. The poetry that lurks in it can be written but scantily. It transfigures one's body as the colorful religion of the Buddhist transfigures the soul and the mind. I shall write more about it one day. As to whether I'm still single-hearted: it's too leading a question to answer. `Twere folly to confess it at this stage, if I were or if I weren't. I maintain many a chaste aloofness that would make very interesting reading if done in plain terms. The best policy to pursue, whether in writing or war or love, is to combine limitless audacity with virginal reserves. I have myself tried it countless times and it never failed me. It is a combine that keeps the human equation perennially guessing. I think it's the policy which God pursues with all of us.

Another thing they're all asking me is what I have done with myself these seven years. I rather like to be asked that because it's so obviously and delightfully none of their business. For which reason I will say a few things about it. I have lived - for one thing, and it's a thing I never did here. I have been in love - or fancied myself so, which is exactly the same thing - not with vapid shadows, but with men. I am thinking at this moment of the little London Jew with whom I plighted troth and to whom I was engaged for the space of one week. He is now four years in the past, but himself and the memory of him still rouse deep-red poetry and passion in the black-and-rainbowed personality of me. He was tender-souled, beautiful to look at, and absolutely "on the level," which latter counts heavily. He was far too good for me, for I was never quite on the level with him. To me he was to be but a poetic incident, though I intended being married to him by a civil contract. He was seductive, but not the conquering devil of my dreams. But, to him, I was to be his wife till the grave yawned for one of us - and that sort of thing. Upon that we disagreed, so he went back to London beyond the sea - after a week of delicate and delicious cross-purpose. No other woman has yet got him for her own, which thought gives me a savage pleasure, and at times, as now, he glows warm in my memory. He was but one of several, but incomparably the most alluring and the only one to whom I waft still-born regrets through fast-darkening distance.

The Devil I once wanted never arrived - him of the steel-gray eyes - but so many imitations of him presented themselves, all with the one crude purpose, that he and his sometimes charm grew a bore and a monotony.

But I've not confined myself entirely to efforts to be gaily led adown the primrose path these seven years. I have gone everywhere and seen everything on the island of Manhattan. I have met fascinating people galore, from Ann O'Delia Dis Debar to Elinor Glyn - and back again, and from Mark Twain to Tom Sharkey in his native gin palace, the odds, as an interesting character, being heavily in favor of Tom. More than prize-fighters and literary people, both of whom I do like, I like vaudeville people on and off the stage. I fall the quickest of all for the people from the London music halls. They are artists on the stage, in their own lines of business - people like Cecilia Loftus, Marie Lloyd, Alice Lloyd, and Vesta Victoria - and off the stage, sitting in Rector's, with a pint of 'alf-and-'alf, they prove to be traditional British types of a most delectable brand. They combine a high-colored and high-seasoned domesticity with the thick local-color of the halls. They earn fabulous salaries over here, for they have a charm we cannot duplicate in America, and as they sit in the gilded thick-padded splendor of New York cafes they'll tell you how they started twenty years ago in the Shoreditch hall at "ten-and-six the night." There is nothing introspective about vaudeville people, nothing shadowy and sinister. They have brains of the sanest and simplest. In short, they are so satisfyingly different from myself, of whom, at times, I'm deadly weary, that I find a deep restfulness in their atmosphere.

Which brings me back to me. The thing I took away with me from Butte seven years ago - a restlessness of spirit, a shadowed and turbulent mentality, a lack of inward peace - is the thing I've brought back with me, and which will follow me to what I trust will be a young grave. I am myself like this little town with its subtle deadly thrall upon it, yet fired with certain headlong madnesses of youth. It is so with many, many others in Butte. Their inward fires glow and smoulder, with a dull personal menace, the more for the outward deadlock of this semi-bewitched Butte.

I have written this article, as I wrote the wicked red Mary MacLane book, as personally, as egotistically, as insolently as it's in me to write - because I know that only so could I picture the human equation. I write as many another feels, as many another is - and with the darksome spirit of Butte-Montana hard and fast upon me.

Because the Evening News seems to me more vividly Butte-Montana than any other sheet in this place I write it for the Evening News.

I am once more a citizen of Butte.

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