toward justice, toward a better humanity, toward a higher ideal, toward a time when men will be brothers the world over,” Darrow said.4
Sara and Mary could not help but be impressed. “She still believes so entirely in him. And God knows I am glad she does,” Sara wrote Wood, who shared her suspicion that Darrow had conspired to bribe the jurors. “What is the truth—our illusions or our cold and careful speculations and analysis?” Sara wrote. “Who knows?”
“I don’t forgive Mr. Darrow’s wrong to society,” she told her lover, “but I can forgive the man out of which it came because from his composite has come his great good.”5
THERE WAS A lull that fall between the drama of the first trial and the battle that lay ahead. In the interim, Darrow and his friends turned their attention to romantic intrigues and the complications of their free love beliefs. Darrow had made it clear to Mary that he would not leave his wife, despite what Ruby called “our present strained uncertain mental and physical vibration.”
And so Mary found a measure of solace in the arms of Lem Parton, a journalist who courted her in San Francisco, who took her dancing in working-class halls, on hikes through the California foothills, and for long walks along the waterfront. She was, Lem told her, a “little sparkling elf-eyed lady with that dear devilish little pagan smile, which puts the old bunk world to flight.”6 Darrow kept his hooks in Mary from afar. “I do miss you,” he wrote in October, quoting lines of poetry and offering to send her money. “How I wish I were there,” he wrote, several weeks later. “How I will miss you if you are not here.”7
Sara, deeply in love with Wood (and pregnant, for a time, with their child), sought a divorce from her husband, Albert Ehrgott, but he refused to cooperate. Wood had loaned Albert money and posed as his friend, even as he seduced his wife. Now the minister threatened to expose the adulterers. “I warned you a long time ago and begged you to avoid inoculating my wife with your ‘free love’ philosophy,” Ehrgott wrote Wood.8 Sara went to Darrow for help, and he urged her to establish residency in Nevada, where a friend of his was a local judge and would grant her a divorce. Before leaving, Sara crisscrossed the state of Oregon giving speeches and organizing women in that fall’s campaign for suffrage. Oregon voters gave women the vote that year but Sara, physically and emotionally drubbed, ended it in a sanitarium in Pasadena, California, seeking to recover from exhaustion and the onslaught of tuberculosis.
Wood was not ready to leave his comfortable hearth or wife and fulfill his promises to Sara. As a serial adulterer, Wood thought it important, moreover, to settle the terms of his involvement in the freethinkers’ colony—the literary commune—that he and Fremont Older were now organizing near Los Gatos, a village in the foothills of the Santa Cruz mountains. Darrow, Mary, Helen Todd, and Lincoln Steffens had all signaled their interest in joining.9
Wood had concerns. “I want you to understand this is no joke about my being an anarchist and necessarily as such a believer in all freedom including free love,” he wrote to Older. “I despise marriage as an institution. I consider it a superstition and a bond and absolutely hurtful to society and obscuring the true relation of sex—union because of absolute affinity and mutual attraction.
“At my age, I hardly expect to run a red light district or a harem, but if I should be attracted to a woman and desire her as a companion I should not hesitate to put her under my roof, and whether she was my literary companion, my secretary, my cook, my mistress, or all these together I would consider my own affair,” he told Older. “I am not at all sure that the colony would be prepared to go so far in practice though they might in theory. I am very sure Mrs. Darrow would not in either theory or practice.”10
Indeed, Ruby was everyone’s concern. Each couple or individual at “the ranch,” as they called the commune, would have their own home but would share common areas with the rest, the better to inspire thought, debate, and creativity. The chemistry was therefore quite important. Mary was willing to put up with Ruby, but Wood was not. “I hate to seem to pick out one person always as an example, but it has