Abigail was never more gracious than on this occasion, and seemed to understand that I needed to be lifted out of my reflections.  She knew what Dorothy’s invalidism meant to me, and she was sympathetic with my devotion to Douglas, in so far as it was an expression of human friendship.  She had a point of view about everything, which had been developed and clarified by reading and travel.  It came over me that I had been nowhere in Europe, that I had been wandering up and down America.  My life in England was by now almost obliterated from my consciousness.  We were not long in the talk before she said that a man should have more than one interest, that music or some form of art, or a hobby in literature should be taken up as a relaxation from business.  What were politics but the interpretation of business?  She showed me some pictures she had been painting.  A teacher had opened a studio in Lake Street.  Why did I not try my hand?  I would find it a diversion from other things.  I had always loved etchings.  I wished I could do that.  Well, this artist taught etching too.  She inspired me at once to see him.  His name was Stoddard, and she gave me the number.  I conceived an enthusiasm for this new activity, thinking that it would take me out of myself and away from the America that was closing around me with such depressing effect.

Then Abigail and Aldington in supplement of each other began to recall the names of men then living whom they characterized as light-bearers.  “Really,” said Abigail, “there are only a few men of real importance in America to-day.  These politicians and orators—­Seward, Sumner, even the late Webster—­amount to very little after all.  They are even less than Lowell, whom Margaret Fuller recently characterized as shallow and doomed to oblivion.  Longfellow is an adapter, a translator, a simple-hearted man.  Whittier—­well, all of them have fallen more or less under the moralistic influence of the country.”

“That is what I like about Douglas,” I said.  “He is not a humbug.  I like his ironical voice against all these silly movements, like liquor laws; these ideas like God in the little affairs of men; all this barbarism which breaks into religious manias; all these half-baked reformations.  They carry me with him into an opposition to negro equality—­all this stuff of Horace Greeley, Emerson, and in which men like Seward and Sumner, and American writers and poets, big and little, share.”

“Oh, yes,” said Abigail, “but after all you can say Douglas is just a politician.  You do not need to grieve about him.  He is tough enough to stand anything.  He was put down by that mob.  But I dare say he was not as much disturbed about it as you were.  If he should die to-day what would the world lose?  He has no great unfinished books, no half-painted pictures, no musical scores without the final touches.  Look over the world, my friend.  Do you realize who is living in it to-day?  In Russia, Tolstoi and Turgenieff; in