"Yes," said Aldington, "I wish to add my plea too, and against the
slavery of a lot of things: against the slavery of courts and bad laws
and bad thoughts and poverty, and the whole business which we can see
growing up in America, and making laws to stimulate it and protect it."

CHAPTER LIX

I was now more lonely than I had ever been in my life, more lonely than
I was on the farm. Then I had youth and expectation of wonderful things.
I had ebullient spirits which were excited by simple things, the new
country, the prospect of growing rich. Now my spirits were on the level
of the prairie itself and I could look over the whole of life. I had
nothing in particular with which to employ my energies except taking
care of the riches that I had acquired. Riches had no meaning to me now.
They brought nothing that moderate means would not buy. What I needed
was some one in my life. I had lost Dorothy. My boy was away at school.
Isabel was denied me. If she had only rejected me so that my will had
been raised against her. Then I should have had passion for my thought
and action. But it was with gentleness and understanding that she bade
me adieu.

Douglas was left to me, but what could he do for me or I for him? He had
been my friend with that loyalty which characterized him from the time
that he had taken me from the clutches of the law for killing Lamborn.
We had seen much of each other along the way. Did loneliness ever come
over him? He had married again, but was he happy? He was living a life
of much social brilliancy with the new Mrs. Douglas in Washington. But
was he happy? Or was he drowning disappointment, the tragic sense of
life's inadequacy, in abandoned diversions?

Like myself, he had wished for riches and attained them. He had lost his
riches. I still possessed mine. But I was no happier for that. He had
married a woman who was a slave owner. On my part, I had been made
kindred to the slave blood by the marriage of my father. He wished for
land, for wealth, and had taken a purse to marry an octoroon. Douglas
had wished for land for his country and had paralleled the course of the
slavocracy to get it. I had killed a man because of Zoe; then Zoe had
disappeared and a part of the accursed land which had come to me through
my father had passed to the unknown Fortescue, who had appeared and
disappeared from my life like a thief. I had married Dorothy because my
will drove me to it in overcoming her oppositi