“Wood, I hear you're a boss.”
“That's it. Fellow told me so this morning. I threw him out of the window and asked him how to spell it. Been figuring on that ever since.”
“Well, I've been reading the New York papers, and they do say down there it ought to be spelled with a brick.”
“Well—now—I learned to spell that way, but the teacher used a shingle mostly. 'Marvin Wood, spell buzzard,' says he, and splits his shingle on my head for dropping a 'z.' Yes, sir, that was fifty years ago, and now every time I write a tough word I duck my head to dodge the shingle, and spell it wrong. I don't know. Maybe a brick would 've been better. Want anything in particular?”
The hardware man wanted to know about the new Third-ward schoolhouse, and when and where to put in a bid for supplying it twelve dozen indestructible desks.
The sparrows in the dark maples in front of Hennion's windows were quiet, because the night was come, wherein no sparrow may quarrel. The issues of their commonwealth were settled by being forgotten. Doubtless, many a sparrow would keep the perch he had pre-empted unrighteously, and in the morning the issues be different, and the victims find their neighbours overnight had tired of their wrongs. Even one's neighbours' sins are not interesting forever, let alone their wrongs.
Hennion dressed and went out, and presently was walking on Lower Bank Street past the broken-up street and the piles of paving brick.
The Champney house was one of those houses that cannot do otherwise than contain four rooms to the floor, each square, high-ceilinged, and furnished more with an eye to the squareness and high ceilings than to the people who might come to live in it, not so angled and elevated. Hennion was not impressionable, but it seemed to him dimly that Camilla ought to sit on a different kind of chair. The house was heavy with the spirit of another generation, as if effectual life in it had stopped short years before. The furniture in the parlour had an air of conscious worth; the curtains hung reminiscently; Webster, Clay, and Quincy Adams occupied gilded frames and showed star-smitten foreheads.
Through the open door across the hall Hennion could see the big white head of Henry Champney in the lamplight, and knew where Miss Eunice sat primly with her knitting and gold-rimmed glasses.
The rush of the day's work was still ringing in his mind, the sense of the flexibleness of men and events, the absence of all form among them, or attitude, or repose. The Champney house with its inmates, except Camilla, seemed to have petrified at its point of greatest dignity.