The immediate effects of Susie's absence from the household at 598 Angell Street were mixed: at times Lovecraft seemed incapable of doing anything because of ‘nerve strain’; at other times he found himself possessed of unwonted energy: ‘I wrote an entire March critical report [i.e., the ‘Department of Public Criticism’ for March 1919] one evening recently, & I am this morning able to write letters after having been up all night’. In a sense, this turn of events—especially in light of Lovecraft's repeated assurances, which he himself no doubt received from Susie's doctors, that she was in no physical danger—may have been a relief, for it definitively moved Susie out of the picture as far as Lovecraft's daily life was concerned.

What exactly was the matter with Susie is now difficult to say, since her Butler Hospital records were among those destroyed in a fire several decades ago. Winfield Townley Scott, however, consulted them when they were still in existence, and he paraphrases them as follows:

The most seemingly spectacular item is the curious mention of a ‘psycho-sexual contact’; but it is surely inconceivable that any actual abuse could have occurred between two individuals who so obviously shared the rigid Victorian sexual mores of the time. There seems every reason to regard Susie's collapse as primarily brought on by financial worries: there was, let us recall, only $7500 for the two of them from Whipple's estate, and in addition there was a tiny sum in mortgage payments (usually $37.08 twice a year, in February and August) from a quarry in Providence, the Providence Crushed Stone and Sand Co., managed by a tenant, Mariano de Magistris.