“MATE OF THE SPIRIT.”

Taranaki Herald, Volume LXIII, Issue 144670, 3 May 1915, Page 7

“MATE OF THE SPIRIT.”

CURIOUS AMERICAN STORY. SHARING A WIFE’S AFFECTION. The final chapter in New England's remarkable “soul-mate triangle”—the affection of Hartley Dennett, a Boston architect, for Airs. Margaret Chase, with the approval and defence of her .husband, Dr. H. Lincoln Chase, of Brookline —has begun. Dr. Chase has announced to his friends that ha will establish his permanent homo on his farm at East Alstead, N.H., v/licre for the past two years his wife and her "spiritual mate,” Dennett, have been .residing with the two Chase children. *

As a preliminary to this step, Dr. Chase has severed his professional relations in Brookline to take tip the practice of medicine in the town of Alsteud. There he experts to spend the rest of his life, confessedly happy in sharing his wife's affection with the architect, his “best friend.” Tlie well-known doctor’s determination to retire for good to his farm is the result of the “test” to which he and his wife and her “soul-mate” have put some of their theories of life and love for the past six months. According to their friends, tho experiment was entirely successful—so much so that the three are now to live under the same roof, the husband seemingly wholly content in tho roio he will have to play.

HAPPINESS COMPLETE. And the doctor leaves no ground for doubt that bis happiness is complete. Tho drama of bis life has been stranger titan fiction, but through it the doctor and his wife and Dennett have approached their ideal of living, according to their friends. The closing act of this drama comes when the. three—husband and wife and her "mate of the spirit"—begin their permanent life in the same house. Meanwhile the wife, who .divorced Dennett because of bis "spirit love" for Mrs. Chase, is living with her two children in Now Tork. She is Mary Ware Dennett. Mrs. Dennett won her divorce in February, 191 D. and since that time her former husband has been living on the Chase farm at Alstond. According to Dr. Chase, there has been nothing to mar the "ideal serenity of the household" at East Alstoad.

The Chase-Dcnnett domestic drama is probably the- most amazing which has ever stirred tho interest of Dostoniens.

HOW IT BEGAN. Tlio Chases were married in ISO" and the Dennetts. in 1000. Mrs. Chase was Margaret Everett. a teacher in Brookline, when Dr. Chase was on the town Board of Health. Dennett went to Boston from Framingham. and started off his career as an' architect. His plans of building his fortune had a happy interruption' when Oapid entered. Dennett met Miss Mary Ware, a graduate of the Boston Museum Art School, who had rented an attic in Province Court, where she made a speciality of work on Cordovan leather. Dennett, too, wooed, and won. In 1004 he was approached hr Dr. Chase, who sought plans for a home. This was the start of a warm friendship, during which Dennett was taken into the Chase home as a bosom companion. Of course, he met Mrs. Chase. “INTELLECTUAL AFFECTION.” This friendship continued. Then came Mrs. Dennett’s divorce suit, based on her husband’s “intellectual affection” for Mrs. Chase, In awarding the Dennett children to their mother, the referee who heard the icsiimonv ruled that; ‘■Margaret Chase Ims been able by the force of her personality to monopolise the affections of Hartley Dennett, another woman’s husband, and at the same time to retain the affection of her own husband. Hartley Dennett anti .Margaret Ohaf are highly refined, in spite of the fact that they are living under the same roof the people of the town of Als tend hold them in high regard.

“Hartley Dennett, living as ho is with tlio children of another man, and dependent in largo measure upon the bounty of -that man for support, and holding the views as to life and conduct that he does, as disclosed by his acts and hy his testimonies, is not a fit person to have tbo care and custody of his children.”