Mother Clayton had been long schooled in the questions which vexed the matter of slavery.  She thought Douglas showed great courage in these words, but she was not satisfied with them.  She felt that the South had not been protected in its rights and that Douglas owed it to the South to stand with the southern Senators.  His position was not definite enough to suit her.  He should say that slavery went into the territories by law, or was kept out by law.  Douglas’ thesis might be judicial but it laid him open to doubts.

This was our talk as we walked away from the Capitol.  Dorothy was fatigued by the experience.  She was interested, but the debate exhausted her.  What she wished more than anything was peace for the whole country.

CHAPTER XXXVIII

I had had a delirium in the serious illness through which Zoe had nursed me, in which a blue fly crawling up the windowpane, sliding down the windowpane, buzzing in the corner of the frame where it could neither climb nor get through nor think of returning into the room—­in which this fly took on the semblance of Napoleon.  My imagination was then full of Napoleon; and my father had suffered because of him at the battle of Waterloo.  And as I sat in the gallery of the Senate, Webster, Calhoun, Hale, Cass, and Douglas reminded me of this hallucination.  They seemed to me like flies at the windowpane of Texas and California and Oregon, beating their wings against the dark glass of the future.  They were like insects, caught in the rich gluten of circumstances and buzzing as they sought to make their way.

This winter sad news came to me of the death of my dear grandmother, whom I had planned all along to see again.  Now it could not be.  My life had been hurried forward with such varied events, and with all the rapidity of America’s development.  I had worked with great industry in putting the farm on a paying basis.  I had run at high speed in Chicago.  I was still living fast in plans and activities.  Douglas was full of the subject of railroad extension, and I was drawn into that.  He was trying to formulate a plan for the Illinois Central railroad; and my interests in Chicago drew me to that plan.  He was also talking of founding a university in Chicago.  These were the subjects of our many talks.  Our visits took place at his house or at mine, as he rarely went with me to the places of amusement which I frequented.

A theatrical company had come to Washington from New York which was playing in repertoire, Jack Sheppard, Don Cesar de Bazan, His Last Legs, London Assurance, Old Heads and Young Hearts, and some other dramas.  Dorothy and Mrs. Douglas were devotees of the theater.  I enjoyed Richelieu and Macbeth, and I had seen Forrest as Sir Charles Overreach and Claude Melnotte; but for many of the plays I did not care.  Douglas was indifferent to the theater.  He was himself too much of a player on the stage of American affairs to be illusioned by any mimic representation.