Doctrines and theories! Do this, and think thus, and believe that which I tell you, and take my medicine for a world diseased! What notional, unsteady things were these, floating things, only on the surface of this muddy stream of life. They had no other foundation than the stream, and the stream drowned them all, in course of time. It drowned all interpretations of itself, in course of time. In East Argent he turned to the right, into Muscadine Street. On one side of the street stretched the P. and N. freight yards by the river, on the other shabby and flimsy fronts, some of wood, some of brick, with shops in most of the ground floors, an inhabited story or two over each. Already Muscadine Street was awake. The freight yards were noisy with cars and hooting engines. The stream whistles of the down-river factories began to blow. The harsh, pitiless iron clangour tortured him and he hurried through a street that seemed to lead away into the country back from the river. He stopped at a discarded horse car, that was propped up in an empty lot, and bore the sign “Night lunches,” and went up the shaky step, through the narrow door. The occupant was a grimy-aproned man, asleep with his head on the counter. Alcott drank a cup of coffee and ate something, he hardly noticed what. It tasted unpleasantly. One corner succeeded another in the long street. Then came empty lots, cornfields, clumps of woods, scores of trestle pyramids of the oil wells. “Lolly! Lolly!” Men and their societies, and all the structures they built, and the ideas that governed them, were monstrous, implacable, harsh, and hard, iron beating on iron in freight yards and factories. Justice! What was justice? One knew the sense of injustice. It was like a scald. It was a clamour and cry, “He has done me wrong, a wrong!” But justice? An even balance? There was no such balance. An eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth? It was revenge. There was no justice but perfect pardon. You must know that uttermost love was justice, and not one iota less than that was justice. Alcott's old doctrines, these. Doctrines only, “floating things on muddy stream.” They seemed to mean to him now only, “I must have Lolly! I must have him!” All that Alcott had built up about himself in four years now seemed suddenly wiped out of his desires. He wanted to take Allen and go away. It seemed a simple thing, not so complicated as the Seton Avenue Assembly, and the Brotherhood of Man. But bars and bricks, metal and stone, and the iron refusal of society, were in the way of this simple thing. Their stolid refusal faced him as well in the woods as in the city. The woods were wet and cool. No sound reached the centre of the grove from without, except the far-off thudding of an oil well. Shy wood birds flitted and twittered. Fragments of twigs and bark dropped from heights where the squirrels were at their thriving enterprises, and the new leaves were growing. CHAPTER XII--AIDEE AND CAMILLLA