About this time I began to be more aware of the Something Without, toward which my work tended, just after I had been asleep, as if the self of me had gone on seeking more successfully in the silences. I would arise very early with such a faint consciousness as a vine might have toward the nearest wall, and get up in the blue of the morning to go for long walks through the pleasant, empty streets, sometimes out to the lake shore where the glint of the moving water under the mist, struck faint sparkles from my stagnant surfaces. I would come back from these excursions beginning to faint with the day's heat, to wear through the afternoon with books and long drowses, and then in the cool of the evening It would call me again, and I would seek It until late at night, sometimes in the lit streets, fetid with the day's smells, sometimes on a roof garden or at a park concert, where the lights, the gayety, and the music served merely as a drug to my outer sense, which went on busily at its absorbing quest. Sometimes men spoke to me in these lonely wanderings; I would remember it afterward as one recalls little, unnoticed incidents in the midst of great excitement; but for the most part I was, except for the invisible presence, as unaccompanied as if the city had been quite empty. If I could have laid the anxiety of my diminishing bank account and the dread of not getting an engagement, I should have been almost happy. It was along early in August that Chicago was greatly stirred by the visit of one of the Presidential candidates--for that was a Presidential year--who was also a popular hero. It had come rather unexpectedly and the preparations for it were of the hastiest. There was to be speaking at Armory Hall, and a reception afterward, and I thought I would go and clasp hands with the great man, as if, perhaps, I might find in it, as many of his admirers did, a sort of king's touch for the lethargy of my spirit. The meeting began early in the sweating afternoon and dragged out three heavy hours. Nothing of any importance transpired there until we were moving up the right side of the hall toward the receiving committee. The hall was split lengthwise by a bank of chairs, and down the left aisle the company of those who had already gripped the broad palm of the candidate, had been elbowed to oblivion by the committee. It was in the very beginning of the handshaking and there were not so many of them as of us. They lingered in groups and talked with one another. I was about midway of the aisles and several persons deep in the crush, when I saw him. How well I knew the lock falling over his forehead, and the quick unconscious motion of the head that tossed it back! There was the indefinable air of the outdoor man about him, though he was quite correctly dressed and had a lady's light wrap over his arm.