City and town life -- Fiction; United States -- Fiction
“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:
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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