I looked up Douglas at once.  He was making some headway at the practice of law, but his energies, for the most part, were absorbed in perfecting the organization of his party.  He was putting together a compact machine.  He was on the very edge of being the leader of the Illinois Democracy.  What infinite details there are to any given end!  If it is the building of a house, tools must be bought, trees felled, foundations dug.  A carpenter’s finger must be bandaged so that he can go on with the work.  Cloth must be found for the bandage and a string with which to tie it.  And so Douglas was engaged in infinite talks on the corners, at the newspaper office; he was making short trips; he was writing dozens of letters, he was inserting editorials in the newspapers.  But he had time for the gayeties of the season.

He was always the gallant, the amusing wit, the ready raconteur.  We were such friends!  Again Miss Walker had both of us for attendants; but upon such widely different footing.  I was a suitor with many doubts.  Douglas was not a suitor at all.  He came to her to enjoy the keenness of her mind.

But as I was English, and as Miss Walker thought herself the next thing to it, she took me aside as an understanding confidant as to the life around us.  Springfield was almost a mudhole.  She was offended by it, but also she found much in it to make her laugh.  There were the gawks; the sprawling ill-bred men; the illiterate young women; the mushroom life; the haste, the crudities of living; the ugliness and the disorder; the unsettled, ever restless, patchy catch as catch can existence; the attempt, in a word, to make life, to build a town, a capital.  All this shocked or amused her.  Did I not see it with English eyes used to tranquillity and order?  She wondered why Douglas had left the East.  He could have risen there in time; and when he should have done so it would have been an eminence.  Had he not acquired brusqueness, vulgarity since coming west?  A man of undoubted gifts, she conceded—­yet.  Perhaps I was her favorite after all.

To test her out, I put my own story around the life of a friend, telling her of a man who had married an octoroon, leaving a daughter of color and a son by a previous marriage with a white woman; also describing the consequences that had ensued.  Miss Walker heard me with interested attention.  She admitted that the complications were serious.  Undoubtedly, many women in the West would care nothing about such a relationship, there was so much indifference here to form and breeding; anything for a husband, anything to get along in the world.  Well, if Miss Walker from Connecticut could see my relationship to Zoe in such a light, could I blame Dorothy from Tennessee for judging it more seriously?  Perhaps after all this was a woman’s reaction to my story.