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Invited to dinner by Mabel Dodge, Tony told her he could make himself invisible, and that the fire in her grate was a good friend of his. Thereafter Tony brought other Indians to dance and sing at Mabel Dodge's tea parties, became her expert on Indian affairs. Visiting daily at Tony's house, Mabel taught knitting to his beautiful, fastidious wife, who (unlike other Taos Indian women) "had a slightly malicious, sharp humor, but not real warmth." An imitation of Tony's poker-faced expression proved valuable to Mabel when she returned from these visits to face the unIndianlike frowns of her husband, her son and her guests. Tony taught her a system of love signals so subtle that they could be used even in the presence of Maurice, who now "seemed old and spent and tragic, while Tony was whole and young in the cells of his body. ..." When Maurice finally caught on and slapped her face, she decided definitely to ship him back East alone. Meanwhile she determined to keep the "psychic" status quo of her relationship with Tony, who, although he "never spoke of love," showed unmistakably that he could wait. "Indians," says Mabel Dodge, "burn continuously with a hard, gemlike flame but they know how to bank their fires."
While waiting for Maurice to leave, Mabel made rapid progress in being "broken down and made over" by Tony, could soon sum up her past activities in ''a decadent unhappy world" thus: "I had been something like an octopus with many arms, a psychic belly, and a highly developed pair of eyes." She learned "to live in the moment," learned self-sufficiency (except when Tony was out of her sight). Particularly she learned something that made it easy to write her candid memoirs, namely, the Indian belief that "the power goes out of truth as soon as it is told, spoken or written down."
Finishing touch to "curing me of my epoch" was added when Tony gave Mabel Dodge a dose of the Mexican drug peyote as a cure for dysentery. Awake all night, a clairvoyant vision showed her that "all this learning in the brain, and never in the blood was ended." In this mood even Maurice provoked "a tender, soft, sorry feeling"—though she did not relax her determination to kick him out. To make his going easier (for herself), she and Tony absented themselves at a Corn Dance. On their return Tony said, "I comin' here to this tepee tonight, when darkness here. That be right?" "And it was right," says 58-year-old Mabel Dodge, with the pat finality of a romantic novel and a rejuvenated grandmother who claims that her heart has been missing beats ever since.