An engagement to the wealthy lawyer R. S. Spofford is expected and encouraged by her family and friends. Edwin tells some people that she’s already spoken for. To others he says, Don’t believe in this marriage; it will never happen. To all he says, She’s like a sister to me.

Mary doesn’t have Adam Badeau’s education nor his flashy brilliance. Everything about her is muted, not a swan, but a sparrow. And yet, in her quiet way, she’s as smart as he is. She has her own feelings about the new naturalism. She, too, loathes the old histrionics, the ranting, the railing.

But she also feels that naturalism can go too far. No one wants to pay for a performance of everyday life, scenes from the supper table. Her ideal is an elevated naturalism. Lines with cadence, not overpowered by their delivery, but allowed to echo in their own intrinsic power. Scenes and situations with weight and moral significance.

Gorgeous tragedy. Art that inspires. Art that feels like art.

The prejudice against actresses remains strong. Coarse and forward—if not actually prostitutes, they bring prostitutes to mind. Asia, herself about to marry a low comic, is convinced that any association between Edwin and Mary will destroy the good name of the family. It will remind everyone of the days in which Mother was called a whore.

She needs constant reassurance that nothing of the sort will happen, which Edwin is happy to provide. But after a long interval, he appears with Mary again. And then again after that. Now they are corresponding. Still he promises Asia she has nothing to worry about.

There’s nothing coarse about Mary. Her manners are delightful, her innocence palpable. In temperament, she’s Edwin’s opposite—the incarnation of sunshine. Edwin feels the sweetness of that sunshine whenever he sees her. Still his determination not to marry her is unshaken, for her sake if not his own. Would her bright spirits survive his violent melancholia? He can’t think so. Marriage to him would only destroy her happiness.

Such selfless abnegation is irresistible. To Mary, Edwin’s melancholia is one of his most attractive features. In the long tradition of young women and wounded heroes, she aches to heal him with her steadfast love. The poor Byronic lamb.

On some level, Edwin must know this. He’s no fool.

Lincoln Running

I suppose the institution of slavery really looks small to him. He is so put up by nature that a lash upon his back would hurt him, but a lash upon anybody else’s back does not hurt him.

—Abraham Lincoln describing Stephen Douglas

The Lincoln-Douglas debates continue throughout 1858. Douglas is still advocating for popular sovereignty with regard to slavery; he’s been neither converted nor silenced. He argues that this is what the Founders intended, a claim Lincoln devastatingly rebuts, one signer of the Declaration of Independence at a time.