Camilla wept with her head on the table. “I'm sorry, Milly. It was a shocking row.” Camilla felt her soul in too great tumult to consider either humour or repentance. Going past the piles of brick, on Lower Bank Street, Hennion felt like shoving them all into the Muscadine, and Aidee and Wood after them. He wanted his private life and work, and Camilla. But Camilla hovered away from him, and would not be drawn nearer. She was a puzzling seraph, and the world was a puzzling world, in whose algebra the equations were too apt to have odd zeros and miscellaneous infinities dropped among them to suit the taste of an engineer. It seemed to be constructed not altogether and solely for business men to do business in, else why such men as Aidee, so irrationally forcible? And why such girls as Camilla to fill a practical man's soul with misty dreams, and draw him whither he would not? “Wisdom,” says the man in the street, “is one of those things which do not come to one who sits down and waits.” There was once a persuasion that wisdom would come to nothing else than just such leisure and patient attendance; but the man in the street has made his “hustling” his philosophy, and made the Copernican discovery that the street, and no longer the study, nor yet the hall of legislature, is the centre of the wheeling system. There the main current runs; elsewhere are eddies, backwaters, odd futilities, and these, too, fall into the current eventually and pour on. Life is governed and convinced by the large repetitions of “hunger and labour, seed-time and harvest, love and death,” and of these the first four make their reports in the street. Only love and death seem to have their still eccentric orbits, not Copernican, and even the street is content to refer them to seven celestial spheres and a primum mobile, and say no more. CHAPTER III--CAMILLA |SOMEONE once suggested that Camilla was “a type,” and Miss Eunice found comfort in the suggestion. To most of her friends she seemed nothing else than Camilla, a term inclusive and select, meaning something radiant and surprising, valuable for the zest that came with her and lingered after her going. They said that, if she had been born to masculine destinies, she would have been another Henry Champ-ney, a Camillus with “The fervent love Camillus bore His native land.” In that case she would not have been Camilla. Here speculation paused. In general they agreed that she walked and talked harmoniously, and was lovely and lovable, with grey eyes and lifted brows, 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.