City and town life -- Fiction; United States -- Fiction
Camilla felt a certain vagueness of interest, and vaguely reproached
herself. What was Alcott Aidee doing? Had his brother escaped? What was
this dreadful brother like who would drag him away? But Alcott might
come to the Champney house that afternoon. He might be there now. She
must go back. He did not care for parks and boulevards and bridges.
He loved the people, and sacrificed himself for the people, and he was
going away, and did not know where it all would lead him. What did it
matter whether or not one made a lawn in place of a pasture lot? But it
must be wrong not to be interested in what Dick did and planned, or what
her father said about it. She forced herself to answer and smile. Henry
Champney was too busy unfolding his ideas to notice that her thoughts
were absent. But Camilla noticed how Dick's doings, sayings, and plans
seemed to occupy her father's mind of late.
“A noble thought, a worthy ambition,” Champney rumbled.
So they drove from the Park, Champney muttering and booming, Camilla
wrapped in a crowd of uncertain fears and cravings. Through this cloud
came the half-distinguished pain of feeling that her father could feel
it possible to lean on anyone but herself, and find a wide passage
through someone else than her to his fine victory over old age. It was
through Dick, and of course, that made it more natural, but it hurt her.
She must find Aidee now. If his brother had escaped, it would be in the
afternoon papers.
When they reached home she jumped out and ran up the steps, while her
father drove on to the stable. She picked up the paper that lay on the
porch, thrown in by the passing newsboy, who was skilful to deliver
papers without getting off his bicycle. She went upstairs, and did not
look at the paper till she reached the store-room.
Henry Champney came into the library, where Miss Eunice was sitting. A
half hour slipped by.
“That boy!” rumbled Henry Champney to Miss Eunice in his library; “that
superlative procrastination! that acme of mental, moral, and physical
ineptitude! Ha! Why doesn't he bring my paper? On my word, five o'clock!
Five o'clock! Does he expect me to get up in the middle of the night to
read it? Nonsense! I won't do it!”
Miss Eunice shook her head gloomily, implying that not much was to
be expected of this generation. Richard, she said, had been in to see
Camilla. He had been very unsatisfactory and distrait. He had said that
he would come in again before teatime. No one else had called. She was
of the opinion that Richard was worried. It was not proper for
young people, when their elders were speaking, were giving important
advice--it was not considerate or well-bred of them to look vague, to
answer only that it was four o'clock, and they would come back to tea,
when neither statement was important. The paper boy's rough manner of
throwing the paper on the porch she had never approved of.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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