This time he was making no mistake. Olgivanna- in her country the nickname was a respectful form of address- was not only attractive but shrewd, durable, sensible, and smart. No wonder Wright was enchanted- no two better suited people ever met. Almost from that day, until his death, Olgivanna was to stay at his side; but the years that immediately followed were to be extraordinarily trying, both for Wright and his Montenegrin lady. It must be granted that the flouting of convention, no matter how well intentioned one may be, is sure to lead to trouble, or at least to the discomfort that goes with social disapproval. Even so, many of the things that happened to Wright and Olgivanna seem inordinately severe. Their afflictions centered on one maddening difficulty: Miriam held up the divorce proceedings that she herself had asked for. Reporters began to trail Miriam everywhere, and to encourage her to make appalling statements about Wright and his doings. Flocks of writs, attachments, and unpleasant legal papers of every sort began to fly through the air. The distracted Miriam would agree to a settlement through her legal representative, then change her mind and make another attack on Wright as a person. At last her lawyer, Arthur D. Cloud, gave up the case because she turned down three successive settlements he arranged. Cloud made an interesting statement in parting from his client: "I wanted to be a lawyer, and Mrs. Wright wanted me to be an avenging angel. So I got out. Mrs. Wright is without funds. The first thing to do is get her some money by a temporary but definite adjustment pending a final disposition of the case. But every time I suggested this to her, Mrs. Wright turned it down and demanded that I go out and punish Mr. Wright. I am an attorney, not an instrument of vengeance". Miriam Noel disregarded the free advice of her departing counselor, and appointed a heavy-faced young man named Harold Jackson to take his place. There were three years of this strange warfare; and during the unhappy time, Miriam often would charge that Wright and Olgivanna were misdemeanants against the public order of Wisconsin. Yet somehow, when officers were prodded into visiting Taliesin to execute the warrants, they would find neither Wright nor Olgivanna at home. This showed that common sense had not died out at the county and village level- though why the unhappy and obviously unbalanced woman was not restrained remains a puzzle. The misery of Miriam's bitterness can be felt today by anyone who studies the case- it was hopeless, agonizing, and destructive, with Miriam herself bearing the heaviest burden of shame and pain. To get an idea of the embarrassment and chagrin that was heaped upon Wright and Olgivanna, we should bear in mind that the raids were sometimes led by Miriam in person. One of the most distressing of these scenes occurred at Spring Green toward the end of the open warfare, on a beautiful day in June. At this time Miriam Noel appeared, urging on Constable Henry Pengally, whose name showed him to be a descendant of the Welsh settlers in the neighborhood. A troop of reporters brought up the rear. Miriam was stopped at the Taliesin gate, and William Weston, now the estate foreman, came out to parley. He said that Mr. Wright was not in, and so could not be arrested on something called a peace warrant that Miriam was waving in the air. Miriam now ordered Pengally to break down the gate, but he said he really couldn't go that far. At this point Mrs. Frances Cupply, one of Wright's handsome daughters by his first wife, came from the house and tried to calm Miriam as she tore down a "no visitors" sign and smashed the glass pane on another sign with a rock. Miriam Noel Wright said, "Here I am at my own home, locked out so I must stand in the road"! Then she rounded on Weston and cried, "You always did Wright's dirty work! When I take over Taliesin, the first thing I'll do is fire you". "Madame Noel, I think you had better go", said Mrs.Cupply. "And I think you had better leave", replied Miriam. Turning to the reporters, she asked, "Did you hear her? 'I think you had better leave'! And this is my own home". In the silence that followed, Miriam walked close to Mrs. Cupply, who drew back a step on her side of the gate. Then, with staring eyes and lips drawn thin, Miriam said to the young woman, "You are ugly- uglier than you used to be, and you were always very ugly. You are even uglier than Mr. Wright". The animosity expressed by such a scene had the penetrating quality of a natural force; and it gave Miriam Noel a fund of energy like that of a person inspired to complete some great and universal work of art. As if to make certain that Wright would be unable to pay any settlement at all, Miriam wrote to prospective clients denouncing him; she also went to Washington and appealed to Senator George William Norris of Nebraska, the Fighting Liberal, from whose office a sympathetic but cautious harrumphing was heard. Then, after overtures to accept a settlement and go through with a divorce, Miriam gave a ghastly echo of Mrs.Micawber by suddenly stating, "I will never leave Mr.Wright". Under this kind of pressure, it is not surprising that Wright would make sweeping statements to the newspapers. Miriam had not yet goaded him into mentioning her directly, but one can feel the generalized anger in Wright's remarks to reporters when he was asked, one morning on arrival in Chicago, what he thought of the city as a whole. First, Wright said, he was choked by the smoke, which fortunately kept him from seeing the dreadful town. But surely Michigan Avenue was handsome? "That isn't a boulevard, it's a racetrack"! cried Wright, showing that automobiles were considered to be a danger as early as the 1920's. "This is a horrible way to live", Wright went on. "You are being strangled by traffic". He was then asked for a solution of the difficulty, and began to talk trenchant sense, though private anguish showed through in the vehemence of his manner. "Take a gigantic knife and sweep it over the Loop", Wright said. "Cut off every building at the seventh floor. Spread everything out. You don't need concentration. If you cut down these horrible buildings you'll have no more traffic jams. You'll have trees again. You'll have some joy in the life of this city. After all, that's the job of the architect- to give the world a little joy". Little enough joy was afforded Wright in the spring of 1925, when another destructive fire broke out at Taliesin. The first news stories had it that this blaze was started by a bolt of lightning, as though Miriam could call down fire from heaven like a prophet of the Old Testament. A storm did take place that night, and fortunately enough, it included a cloudburst that helped put out the flames. Later accounts blamed defective wiring for starting the fire; at any rate, heat grew so intense in the main part of the house that it melted the window panes, and fused the K'ang-si pottery to cinders. Wright set his loss at $200,000, a figure perhaps justified by the unique character of the house that had been ruined, and the faultless taste that had gone into the selection of the prints and other things that were destroyed. In spite of the disaster, Wright completed during this period plans for the Lake Tahoe resort, in which he suggested the shapes of American Indian tepees- a project of great and appropriate charm, that came to nothing. Amid a shortage of profitable work, the memory of Albert Johnson's $20,000 stood out in lonely grandeur- the money had quickly melted away. A series of conferences with friends and bankers began about this time; and the question before these meetings was, here is a man of international reputation and proved earning power; how can he be financed so that he can find the work he ought to do? While this was under consideration, dauntless as ever Wright set about the building of Taliesin /3,. As he made plans for the new Taliesin, Wright also got on paper his conception of a cathedral of steel and glass to house a congregation of all faiths, and the idea for a planetarium with a sloping ramp. Years were to pass before these plans came off the paper, and Wright was justified in thinking, as the projects failed, that much of what he had to show his country and the world would never be seen except by visitors to Taliesin. And now there was some question as to his continued residence there. Billy Koch, who had once worked for Wright as a chauffeur, gave a deposition for Miriam's use that he had seen Olgivanna living at Taliesin. This might put Wright in such a bad light before a court that Miriam would be awarded Taliesin; nor was she moved by a letter from Wright pointing out that if he was not "compelled to spend money on useless lawyer's bills, useless hotel bills, and useless doctor's bills", he could more quickly provide Miriam with a suitable home either in Los Angeles or Paris, as she preferred. Miriam sniffed at this, and complained that Wright had said unkind things about her to reporters. His reply was, "Everything that has been printed derogatory to you, purporting to have come from me, was a betrayal, and nothing yet has been printed which I have sanctioned". What irritated Miriam was that Wright had told the papers about a reasonable offer he had made, which he considered she would accept "when she tires of publicity". From her California headquarters, Miriam fired back, "I shall never divorce Mr. Wright, to permit him to marry Olga Milanoff". Then Miriam varied the senseless psychological warfare by suddenly withdrawing a suit for separate maintenance that had been pending, and asking for divorce on the grounds of cruelty, with the understanding that Wright would not contest it. The Bank of Wisconsin sent a representative to the judge's chambers in Madison to give information on Wright's ability to meet the terms. He said that the architect might reasonably be expected to carry his financial burdens if all harrassment could be brought to an end, and that the bank would accept a mortgage on Taliesin to help bring this about. Miriam said that she must be assured that "that other woman, Olga, will not be in luxury while I am scraping along". This exhausted Wright's patience, and in consequence he talked freely to reporters in a Madison hotel suite. "Volstead laws, speed laws, divorce laws", he said, "as they now stand, demoralize the individual, make liars and law breakers of us in one way or another, and tend to make our experiment in democracy absurd. If Mrs. Wright doesn't accept the terms in the morning, I'll go either to Tokyo or to Holland, to do what I can. I realize, in taking this stand, just what it means to me and mine". Here Wright gave a slight sigh of weariness, and continued, "It means more long years lived across the social grain of the life of our people, making shift to live in the face of popular disrespect and misunderstanding as I best can for myself and those dependent upon me". Next day, word came that Miriam was not going through with the divorce; but Wright stayed in the United States. His mentioning of Japan and Holland had been merely the expression of wishful thinking. No matter what troubles might betide him, this most American of artists knew in his heart he could not function properly outside his native land. In a few weeks Miriam made another sortie at Taliesin, but was repulsed at the locked and guarded gates.