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By Root 1743 0

was, said Mrs. Holmes, and others, too: an uncontainable contagion. It wasn’t some marbles or stones you kept in ajar, but a miasma that would get in everywhere, tainting and destroying everything. All us ladies nodded over our sewing. We agreed that the low sort of life people followed in Missouri—ignorant, dirty, bloody, and slothful—would follow slavery everywhere, like a fever in the wake of a cough, part and parcel of the same disease. "I will die first," said each of the New England ladies, one right after the other, and I said so, too, though I’d lived next to slavery all my life in Illinois. We were all different now, weren’t we?

Now an interesting thing happened. The course that our party followed was one Louisa presented to us late one night. "We should act," she said, "as though we haven’t even seen such a proclamation, have never heard of such a letter. This is what you do with these sorts of men we have in the Washington slavocracy—you keep smiling and going forward and requiring them to show themselves, and when they show themselves sufficiently, others of proper Christian principles eventually recoil from them."

"What do you mean?" said Charles.

"Simply this. General Lane is going to Washington with the constitution for the state of Kansas in April."

"We haven’t enough people for statehood," said Thomas.

Louisa shrugged, her face set in a complacent smile.

"And we haven’t a state constitution," said Charles.

"We will in a few weeks," said Louisa. "As a piece of strategy, this is an act of genius. General Lane was here today, and he told me all about it."

CHAPTER 15

I Warm Up

The number of young women whose health is crushed, ere the first few years of married life are past, would seem incredible to one who has not investigated the subject, and it would be vain to attempt to depict the sorrow, discouragement, and distress experienced in most families where the wife and mother is a perpetual invalid. —p. 5

PRESIDENT PIERCE’S BETRAYAL of everything he was for the sake of southern friendships and southern votes (those few in Lawrence who were themselves from his home state of New Hampshire were the loudest in their indignation toward him) was the primary topic of discussion at the party we went to on Washington’s Birthday, given by Company A of the Kansas Militia. The weather, I must say, was terrible—snow, snow, more snow, and then ice—but Louisa would not be denied. Since it would be cruel to pull the horses out, we walked, wearing our heaviest boots and swathed in shawls and blankets. Thomas and Charles complained the whole way, but once we got there, we saw another of the joys of town life—light and company and food and drink and good fellowship, all together in one room. It looked to me as though most of Lawrence was there, but perhaps that was only because I saw Governor and Mrs. Robinson in the midst of a merry group, and wherever they were, they seemed to outnumber themselves. Louisa kept looking for General Lane, but later we heard two stories—either he liked to avoid gatherings where the Robinsons held sway, or else he was visiting the wife of one of the officers of the company, who was too ill at home to go out in such weather. No doubt both of these stories were true. In K.T., it was often the case that every version of every story was equally true and equally false, owing to the complexity of every set of circumstances. At any rate, in the rivalry that was quickly developing between the two generals—now, since our Free State elections, widely called the "governor" (Robinson) and the "senator" (Lane), to uphold the view that our government was the legitimate one—the Robinsons were much favored by family men and their wives, for they were a pleasing couple and sought to move K.T. forward judiciously, in a manner that would preserve as much as possible of what we all had already. She was, if anything, more talkative and opinionated than he was, a quality Louisa disapproved of. ("She is so public," exclaimed Louisa. "A woman’s influence should be a private one!") I liked her, though,