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even planning my actions, I sprang to my feet and put my hands around his neck, wanting with all my heart to squeeze.
    “Wilkes,” Asia yelled, and she jumped to push at my body.
    I came to myself, dropped my hands, and muttered an apology. Asia glared at me, and I could not bear to have her angry with me. “I am truly sorry, old man,” I said to the idiot Clarke. “I suffered a moment of near insanity, Isuppose. . . .” I looked down at the plate full of food in front of me. “Ever since fighting to capture old John Brown, I’ve been a bit unstable on the subject of the South.”
    Asia smiled at me sweetly and put her hand across the table to pat mine. “You should never have gotten involved in a battle, Wilkes,” she said. “Your spirit is too fine, too fragile, for such things.” She turned then to look at her husband. “We won’t let political arguments divide us from family, will we, John?”
    Clarke made a halfhearted attempt to agree with her, but I knew that day that the lines were drawn. The man who had never really been my friend was now my enemy.
    Shortly after South Carolina left the Union, Mississippi, Florida, Alabama, and Georgia followed. I waited almost with my breath held for Virginia to make her move. I believed that my home state of Maryland would do whatever Virginia did.

5
Bella
    HER STORY
    November 6, 1860, was a sad day for Steven and me, and, I think I can say, for the employees at the White House. On that day Mr. Abraham Lincoln was elected president. Our beloved Mr. Buchanan had not even run for reelection, but still we felt somehow that Lincoln would be pushing our president out. Soon there would be strangers living on the second floor, not friendly Mr. Buchanan and his sweet niece Miss Lane.
    Oh, we had heard a plenty about the new president and his family, heard that he was ugly, uneducated, inexperienced, and downright vulgar in manner. We had also heard that Mrs. Lincoln was a sour woman, given to bad tempers and fits of depression. Talk was that most Northerners only voted for him because he wasan abolitionist and would do away with slavery. It was a known fact that because there was no Republican Party in the South, he did not get a single vote in eleven slave states.
    “Imagine that,” I said to Steven. “We are to have a president that not one person in eleven of these United States of America voted for.”
    It was a few days before the inauguration, and we were seated on a bench in the back garden of the White House. Steven broke a twig he had been holding in his hand and shrugged. “Oh, well,” he said. “We aren’t even united now, not with seven states seceded. More of those hotheads are bound to go.”
    I wished I had not brought it up. Generally, I agreed with Steven’s ideas about politics. It was natural that I should. I spent my afternoons with him in the most political home in America, and Steven was always ready to explain his ideas to me. Still, I could not but feel a certain discomfort when people spoke disparagingly of the South. I had only lived in Washington City for two years. Was I not, I wondered, being disloyal to my father, and even to my mother’s memory, to listen to the South being criticized?
    Steven knew me well by this time, and so observant was he of my every expression that I could never hide a feeling from him. “Oh, don’t be glum, Bella. I know you can’t take all love for the South out of you.” He laughed and pulled at one of my braids. “Likely, I wouldn’t muchwant you for a friend if you could forget your home so easy.”
    Even though we knew we wouldn’t like the Lincolns much, we were still excited when Inaugural Day, March 4, came. My grandmother and Steven’s mother were busy in the White House that day, but he and I planned to take in the ceremony.
    We stationed ourselves early along Pennsylvania Avenue to see the two presidents ride by. The crowd was already thick, but we found an empty spot and waited. The March air