stature tall and shoulder carried martially, delicate and tender curves of mouth and throat. Camilla was no accumulation of details either.

At any rate, the world is not so old but a sweet-faced maiden still makes it lyrical. It is a fine question whether she is not more exhilarating than ever.

Camilla seemed to herself identified with her ideas, her energetic beliefs and sympathies. The terms in which she made an attempt to interpret herself came forth partly from cloistral studies in that hive of swarming energies, a girls' college in an old New England town, where ran a swift river, much cleaner and swifter than the Muscadine. She barely remembered when the family lived in the national capital, and Henry Champney was a noted and quoted man. She had but a dim mental picture of an invalid mother, fragile, be-laced, and be-ribboned. Her memories ran about Port Argent and the Muscadine, the Eastern seminary, the household rule of Miss Eunice. They included glimpses of her father's friend, the elder Hennion, a broad-shouldered man, who always had with him the slim youth, Dick; which slim youth was marvellously condescending, and once reconstructed her doll with wires, so that when you pulled a wire it would wave arms and legs in the manner in which Miss Eunice said no well-bred little girl ever waved her arms and legs. He seemed a beneficial person, this Dick. He taught her carpentry and carving. Magical things he used to do with hammer and saw, mallet and chisel, in that big unfurnished room over the mansards of the Champney house, so high up that one saw the Muscadine through the tops of the trees. The room was unchanged even now. It was still Camilla's hermitage. The ranges of trunks were still there, the tool-chest with Dick's old tools, old carvings, drawings, plans of bridges.

He was beneficial, but peculiar. He thought the Maple Street bridge the finest of objects on the earth. He did not care for fairy stories, because they were not true.

Henry Champney kept certain blocks of wood, whereon Camilla at the age of twelve had cut the semblances of faces, semblances of the vaguest, but all hinting at tragedy. Miss Eunice had disapproved of that pursuit.

On the morning after Aidee's visit Miss Eunice sat at the parlour window knitting. Beyond the lawn ran Lower Bank Street; beyond the street and underneath the bluff were the freight-yards, with piles of black coal and brown iron dust, and a travelling crane rattling to and fro, from ship to car. Beyond the yards were the river and the P. and N. railroad bridge; beyond the river the dark chimneys of factories, with long roofs, and black smoke streaming in the sky, and the brick and wood tenements of East Argent. Beyond these, hidden but influential, because one knew they were there, lay the rank, unsightly suburbs; beyond the suburbs, a flat, prosperous country of fields and woods, farm buildings, highways, and trestle pyramids of the oil wells.

Camilla was reading, with one hand plunged in her hair. The river and factories had lain some hours under the shadow of Miss Eunice's disapproval. She turned the shadow on Camilla, and remonstrated. Camilla came out of her absorption slowly. The remonstrance roused her to reminiscence.

"We used to keep our heads in wet towels at college," she said.

Miss Eunice laid down her knitting. Camilla went on thoughtfully:

"Do you know, Aunty, a wet towel is a good thing?"

Miss Eunice sighed. Camilla lingered over her reminiscences. After a time she picked up the books that lay about her, laid them on her lap, and began running through the titlepages.

"They're Mr. Aidee's. Listen! 'The Problems of the Poor,' 'The Civic Disease,' 'If Christ Came to Chicago.'"

"Mr. Aidee lent you such books!"

"Yes, but you need a wet towel with them. 'Socialism and Anarchy,' 'The Inner Republic.' Oh! Why! How fine!" She had slipped beyond the titlepage of a fat grey volume. She was sunk fathoms deep, and soaked in a new impression, nested and covered and lost to conversation. Miss Eunice returned to her knitting, and spread gloom about her in a circle.

It is one of the penalties of stirring times that they open such gulfs between the generations. If the elders have been unplastic, the young have not taken it intimately to themselves that life was as keen to their predecessors as it is to them, that the present is not all the purport of the past. Our fathers did not live merely in order that we might live, but were worth something to themselves. Miss Eunice had had her heartbeats and flushed cheeks, no matter at this late day when or how. No matter what her romance was. It was a story of few events or peculiarities. She had grown somewhat over-rigid with time. That her melancholy—if melancholy it should be called, a certain dry severity—that it gave most people a slight impression of comedy, was perhaps one of the tragic elements in it. As to that long-past phenomenon of flushed cheeks, at least she could not remember ever having allowed herself any such folly over books entitled "Socialism and Anarchy," or "The Civic Disease," or "The Inner Republic." She was glad to believe that Camilla was "a type," because it was easier to condemn a type than to condemn Camilla, for having heartbeats and flushed cheeks over matters so unsuitable.

In the times when carefully constructed curls tapped against Miss Eunice's flushed cheeks, it has been supposed, there was more social emphasis on sex. At least there was a difference. Miss Eunice felt the difference, and looked across it in disapproval of Camilla's reading.

Camilla started, gathered the books in an armful, and flashed out of the room, across the hall to her father's library. She settled in a chair beside him.

"Now! What do you think?"

Several books fell on the floor. She spilled others in picking up the first.

"I think your books will lose their backs," Champney rumbled mildly.

The fire leaped and snapped in the fireplace, and the sunlight streamed in at the tall side windows.

"Think of what, my dear?"

"Listen!"

Her father leaned his white-haired and heavy head on his hand, while she read from the grey volume, as follows:

"'You have remarked too often "I am as good as you." It is probable that God only knows whether you are or not. You may be better. I think he knows that you are always either better or worse. If you had remarked "You are as good as I," it would have represented a more genial frame of mind. It would have rendered your superiority more probable, since whichever remark you make gives, so far as it goes, its own evidence that it is not true. But indeed it is probable that neither your life nor your ideas are admirable, that your one hope of betterment is, not to become convinced that no one is better than you, but to find someone to whom you can honourably look up. I am asking you to look up, not back, nor away among the long dead years for any cause or ideal. I am asking you to search for your leader among your contemporaries, not satisfied until you find him, not limited in your devotion when you have found him, taking his cause to be yours. I am asking you to remember that evil is not social, but human; that good is not social, but human. You have heard that an honest man is the noblest work of God. You have heard of no institution which merits that finality of praise. You have heard that every institution is the lengthened shadow of a man. Is it then in shadows or by shadows that we live?'"

Camilla paused.

"I think your author is in a measure a disciple of Carlyle," said Champney.

"Are you interested, daddy? See who wrote it!"

Champney took the volume, read, "Chapter Eighth. Whither My Master Went," and turned back to the title page. "H'm—'The Inner Republic, by Alcott Aidee.' Another discovery, is it?" he asked. "We discover America every other day, my dear! What an extraordinary generation we are!"

Camilla's discovery of her father had been a happy surprise. Happy surprises are what maids in their