Free I Await the Devil's Coming - Unexpurgated and Annotated by Mary MacLane

profanity - over the back-fences. On the corner above there will be a mysterious widow with one child, who has suddenly alighted upon the neighborhood, stealthily in the night, and is to be seen at rare intervals emerging from her door - the target for dozens of pairs of eager eyes and half as many eager tongues. And when the mysterious widow, with her one child, disappears some night as suddenly and as stealthily as she appeared, an outburst of highly-colored rumors is tossed with astonishing glibness over the various back-fences - all relating to the mysterious widow’s shady antecedents and past history, to those of her child, and to the cause of her sudden departure, - no two of which rumors agree in any particular. Across on the opposite corner there will be a company of strange people who also descended suddenly, and upon whom the eyes of the entire block are turned with absorbing interest. They consist of half-a-dozen men and women seemingly bound together only by ties of conviviality. The house is kept closely-blinded and quiet all day, only to burst forth in a blaze of revel in the evening, which revel lasts all night. This goes on until some momentous night, at the request of certain proper ones, a police officer glides quietly into the midst of a scene of unusual gaiety - and the festive company melts quietly into oblivion, never to return. They also are then discussed with rapturous relish and in tones properly lowered, over the back-fences. Farther down the street there will live an interesting being of feminine persuasion who has had five divorces and is in the course of obtaining another. These divorces, the causes therefor, the justice thereof, and the future prospects of the multi-grass widow, are gone over, in all their bearings, by the indefatigable tongues. Every incident in the history of the street is put through a course of sprouts by these same tireless members. The Jewish family that lives in the poorest house in the neighborhood, and that is said to count its money by the hundred thousand; the aristocratic family with the Irish-point curtains in the windows - that lives on the county; the family whose husband and father gains for it a comfortable livelihood - forging checks; the miner’s family whose wife and mother wastes its substance in diamonds and seal-skin coats and other riotous living; the family in extremely straitened circumstances into which new babies arrive in great and distressing numbers; the strange lady with an apoplectic complexion and a wonderfully foul and violent flow of invective - all are discussed over and over and over again. No one is omitted.
    And so this is Butte, the promiscuous - the Bohemian. And all these are the Devil’s playthings. They amuse him, doubtless.
    Butte is a place of sand and barrenness.
    The souls of these people are dumb.

    February 4
    Always I wonder, when I die will there be any one to remember me with love?
    I know I am not lovable.
    That I want it so much only makes me less lovable, it seems. But - who knows? - it may be there will be some one.
    My anemone lady does not love me. How can she - since she does not understand me? But she allows me to love her - and that carries me a long way. There are many - oh, a great many - who will not allow you to love them if you would.
    There is no one to love me now.
    Always I wonder how it will be after some long years when I find myself about to die.

    February 7
    In this house where I drag out my accursed, devilishly weary existence, up-stairs in the bath-room, on the little ledge at the top of the wainscoting, there are six tooth-brushes: an ordinary white bone-handled one that is my younger brother’s; a white twisted-handled one that is my sister’s; a flat-handled one that is my older brother’s; a celluloid-handled one that is my stepfather’s; a silver-handled one that is mine; and another ordinary one that is my mother’s. The sight of these tooth-brushes day after day, week after week, and