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.
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