I said to Abigail:  “I have never pretended that Douglas was a scientist or an artist or that he had a philosophical mind, but now that you bring these things to my attention I want to ask you why he is not a first-class disciple of Darwin, since he has advocated the processes of nature in the solution of the slavery question.”

“Nature!  Well, are climate and soil any more nature than thought?  Can’t we use our will and our thought to assist climate and soil, about anything?  But after all I get tired of this emphasis of the one slavery, just as you do.  Why not include some other slaveries for condemnation?  There is Emerson for example.  He didn’t start out with this John Brown idea.  He began with a plea for emancipation intellectually from England; and for emancipation from the slavery of orthodoxy.”

“Yes,” said Aldington, “I wish to add my plea too, and against the slavery of a lot of things:  against the slavery of courts and bad laws and bad thoughts and poverty, and the whole business which we can see growing up in America, and making laws to stimulate it and protect it.”

CHAPTER LIX

I was now more lonely than I had ever been in my life, more lonely than I was on the farm.  Then I had youth and expectation of wonderful things.  I had ebullient spirits which were excited by simple things, the new country, the prospect of growing rich.  Now my spirits were on the level of the prairie itself and I could look over the whole of life.  I had nothing in particular with which to employ my energies except taking care of the riches that I had acquired.  Riches had no meaning to me now.  They brought nothing that moderate means would not buy.  What I needed was some one in my life.  I had lost Dorothy.  My boy was away at school.  Isabel was denied me.  If she had only rejected me so that my will had been raised against her.  Then I should have had passion for my thought and action.  But it was with gentleness and understanding that she bade me adieu.

Douglas was left to me, but what could he do for me or I for him?  He had been my friend with that loyalty which characterized him from the time that he had taken me from the clutches of the law for killing Lamborn.  We had seen much of each other along the way.  Did loneliness ever come over him?  He had married again, but was he happy?  He was living a life of much social brilliancy with the new Mrs. Douglas in Washington.  But was he happy?  Or was he drowning disappointment, the tragic sense of life’s inadequacy, in abandoned diversions?