There were two subjects of which Mr. Lincoln had little understanding.  They were women and finance.  Up to this time his tall, awkward, ill clad figure had been a source of amusement to those unacquainted with his admirable spirit.  Until they had rightly appraised the value of his friendship, women had been wont to regard him with a riant curiosity.  He had been aware of this, and for years had avoided women, save those of old acquaintance.  When he lived at the tavern in the village often he had gone without a meal rather than expose himself to the eyes of strange women.  The reason for this was well understood by those who knew him.  The young man was an exceedingly sensitive human being.  No doubt he had suffered more than any one knew from ill concealed ridicule, but he had been able to bear it with composure in his callow youth.  Later nothing roused his anger like an attempt to ridicule him.  No man who came in his way in after life was so quickly and completely floored as one George Forquer, who, in a moment of folly, had attempted to make light of him.

Two women he had regarded with great tenderness—­his foster mother, the second wife of Thomas Lincoln, and Ann Rutledge.  Others had been to him, mostly, delightful but inscrutable beings.  The company of women and of dollars had been equally unfamiliar to him.  He had said more than once in his young manhood that he felt embarrassed in the presence of either, and knew not quite how to behave himself—­an exaggeration in which there was no small amount of truth.

In 1836 the middle frontier had entered upon a singular phase of its development.  Emigrants from the East and South and from overseas had been pouring into it.  The summer before the lake and river steamers had been crowded with them, and their wagons had come in long processions out of the East Chicago had begun its phenomenal growth.  A frenzied speculation in town lots had been under way in that community since the autumn of ’35.  It was spreading through the state.  Imaginary cities were laid out or the lonely prairies and all the corner lots sold to eager buyers and paid for with promises.  Fortunes of imaginary wealth were created by sales of future greatness.  Millions of conversational, promissory dollars, based upon the gold at the foot of the rainbow, were changing hands day by day.  The Legislature, with an empty treasury behind it, voted twelve millions for river improvements and imaginary railroads and canals, for which neither surveys nor estimates had been made, to serve the dream-built cities of the speculator.  If Mr. Lincoln had had more experience in the getting and use of dollars and more acquaintance with the shrinking timidity of large sums, he would have tried to dissipate these illusions of grandeur.  But he went with the crowd, every member of which had a like inexperience.

In the midst of the session Samson Traylor arrived in Vandalia on his visit to Mr. Lincoln.