City and town life -- Fiction; United States -- Fiction
“'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 Arcadian age are of all creatures
most capable of receiving. She called him her “graduate course,” and he
replied gallantly by calling her his “postponed education.” He had had
his happy surprise as well. It was an especial, an unexpected reward for
the efforts Champ-ney had made--not altogether painless--to realise
the lapse of old conditions, and to pick up threads of interest in the
new,--that his efforts had brought him to these relations with Camilla;
so that the two were able to sit together of a morning, and talk
friendly and long, without patronage or impatience.
To realise the lapse of old conditions, to realise that he was obsolete,
that his effective days were over! It was a hard matter. Hard, but an
old story now, this struggle to realise this change. The books on his
shelves had grown to seem passive and lifeless, since they no longer had
connection through himself with the stir of existence.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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