“Wisdom,” says the man in the street, “is one of those things which do not come to one who sits down and waits.” There was once a persuasion that wisdom would come to nothing else than just such leisure and patient attendance; but the man in the street has made his “hustling” his philosophy, and made the Copernican discovery that the street, and no longer the study, nor yet the hall of legislature, is the centre of the wheeling system. There the main current runs; elsewhere are eddies, backwaters, odd futilities, and these, too, fall into the current eventually and pour on. Life is governed and convinced by the large repetitions of “hunger and labour, seed-time and harvest, love and death,” and of these the first four make their reports in the street.
Only love and death seem to have their still eccentric orbits, not Copernican, and even the street is content to refer them to seven celestial spheres and a primum mobile, and say no more.
CHAPTER III—CAMILLA
SOMEONE once suggested that Camilla was “a type,” and Miss Eunice found comfort in the suggestion. To most of her friends she seemed nothing else than Camilla, a term inclusive and select, meaning something radiant and surprising, valuable for the zest that came with her and lingered after her going. They said that, if she had been born to masculine destinies, she would have been another Henry Champ-ney, a Camillus with
“The fervent love Camillus bore
His native land.”
In that case she would not have been Camilla. Here speculation paused.
In general they agreed that she walked and talked harmoniously, and was lovely and lovable, with grey eyes and lifted brows, stature tall and shoulder carried martially, delicate and tender curves of mouth and throat. Camilla was no accumulation of details either.