“The Third Lamp man too. There is no criminal class, no corrupt politician class. There are no classes of any kind. I mean to say the classification hinders more truth than it helps. Do you understand me? I'm not a systematic thinker. Shall I confess, Miss Champney? One talks confidently about right and wrong in public. In secret he confesses that he never saw them apart. I confess it to you, that I don't know how they would look apart.” Camilla felt thrilled. It was the word “secret,” perhaps, or, “confession.” Or more with the sense of being present at the performance of a mystery, when a great man, as she thought him--a man new, at least, and original--conceived, created, shaped his thoughts before her, and held them out for her to see. The great men of history, the statesmen, poets, reformers, were vivid to her, to be read and to be read about. Some of them her father had known. They were the subjects of long morning talks in the tall-windowed library. She had a halo ready for any deserving head. She had a halo fitted on Alcott Aidee's, and he was conversationally doffing it, a celestial performance that set her cheeks to flying signals of excitement. Aidee was basking in a vague sense of pleasantness, his sick moodiness soothed away. What did it matter if one had work to do? How noble and lovely and sweet was Camilla Champney! “The man who first invented women,” he went on more slowly, “must have been a lyric poet.” He caught sight of the huge woman on the porch of the shanty, who now rose and bobbed to him vigorously. Aidee returned the salute. Camilla choked a laugh, and Aidee grinned in sympathy, and all seemed well, with a bluebird, the moist April weather, and the cheerful noise of the surrounding streets, and the coming on of sunset. They turned and walked up the slight hill, past the big steepleless church, to Maple Street. “No, she's not lyric,” he said. “She's epic. Her name is Mrs. Finney. I've forgotten how I happen to know. Oh, yes! She and her husband fight, but she always thrashes him.” “How dreadful!” “Is it? But it's good for him to know where he stands in the scheme of things. His hopefulness is wonderful, and then the knowledge that she can do it is part of her contentment. Do you suppose we could get Tom Berry to admit that a combativeness which had a regular recurrence and a foregone conclusion, like the Finneys', might come to have the qualities and benefits of a ritual? It would be a nice question for Mrs. Tillotson's drawing-room.”