Camilla said: “You haven't heard a word I've been saying, and it's important!”
Camilla was the second generation to possess the gift of feeling the importance of the immediate occasion. Fair maids are common enough, and yet most of them are extraordinary. But Camilla had the shining eyes, and lift of thick dark hair away from the forehead, that to elderly people recalled Henry Champney of long ago. She had the same intensity and readiness of belief. The manner in which that man of distinction would wrap small issues in the flag of the Republic, and identify a notion of his own with a principle of the Constitution, used to astonish even the constituency which voted him a giant. She seemed to Hennion not less apart from the street than Henry Champney, Miss Eunice, and their antiquities. She belonged to a set of associations that should not be mixed up with the street. In the street, in the clear light and grey dust, men and ideas were shaped to their uses. But Camilla's presence was to him a kind of vestal college. At least, it was the only presence that ever suggested to his mind things of that nature, symbols and sacred fires, and half-seen visions through drifting smoke.
He was contented now to wait for the revelation.
“Have you lots of influence really?” she said. “Isn't it fine! I want you to see Mr. Aidee. He's coming here to-night.”
The revelation was unpleasant. He felt his latent dislike for Aidee grow suddenly direct. When it came to introducing the incongruities of the dusty street and blatant platform to the place where his few silent ideals lay glimmering; bringing Camilla to march in the procession where chants were played on fife and drum, and the Beatitudes painted on the transparencies, so to speak—it was unpleasant.
“I'd rather not see him here.”
“But he's coming!”
“All right. I shan't run away.”
“And he has asked my father——”
Hennion disliked Aidee to the point of assassination.