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.
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