At any rate, the world is not so old but a sweet-faced maiden still makes it lyrical. It is a fine question whether she is not more exhilarating than ever.
Camilla seemed to herself identified with her ideas, her energetic beliefs and sympathies. The terms in which she made an attempt to interpret herself came forth partly from cloistral studies in that hive of swarming energies, a girls' college in an old New England town, where ran a swift river, much cleaner and swifter than the Muscadine. She barely remembered when the family lived in the national capital, and Henry Champney was a noted and quoted man. She had but a dim mental picture of an invalid mother, fragile, be-laced, and be-ribboned. Her memories ran about Port Argent and the Muscadine, the Eastern seminary, the household rule of Miss Eunice. They included glimpses of her father's friend, the elder Hennion, a broad-shouldered man, who always had with him the slim youth, Dick; which slim youth was marvellously condescending, and once reconstructed her doll with wires, so that when you pulled a wire it would wave arms and legs in the manner in which Miss Eunice said no well-bred little girl ever waved her arms and legs. He seemed a beneficial person, this Dick. He taught her carpentry and carving. Magical things he used to do with hammer and saw, mallet and chisel, in that big unfurnished room over the mansards of the Champney house, so high up that one saw the Muscadine through the tops of the trees. The room was unchanged even now. It was still Camilla's hermitage. The ranges of trunks were still there, the tool-chest with Dick's old tools, old carvings, drawings, plans of bridges.
He was beneficial, but peculiar. He thought the Maple Street bridge the finest of objects on the earth. He did not care for fairy stories, because they were not true.
Henry Champney kept certain blocks of wood, whereon Camilla at the age of twelve had cut the semblances of faces, semblances of the vaguest, but all hinting at tragedy. Miss Eunice had disapproved of that pursuit.
On the morning after Aidee's visit Miss Eunice sat at the parlour window knitting. Beyond the lawn ran Lower Bank Street; beyond the street and underneath the bluff were the freight-yards, with piles of black coal and brown iron dust, and a travelling crane rattling to and fro, from ship to car. Beyond the yards were the river and the P. and N. railroad bridge; beyond the river the dark chimneys of factories, with long roofs, and black smoke streaming in the sky, and the brick and wood tenements of East Argent. Beyond these, hidden but influential, because one knew they were there, lay the rank, unsightly suburbs; beyond the suburbs, a flat, prosperous country of fields and woods, farm buildings, highways, and trestle pyramids of the oil wells.
Camilla was reading, with one hand plunged in her hair. The river and factories had lain some hours under the shadow of Miss Eunice's disapproval. She turned the shadow on Camilla, and remonstrated. Camilla came out of her absorption slowly. The remonstrance roused her to reminiscence.
“We used to keep our heads in wet towels at college,” she said.
Miss Eunice laid down her knitting. Camilla went on thoughtfully:
“Do you know, Aunty, a wet towel is a good thing?”
Miss Eunice sighed. Camilla lingered over her reminiscences. After a time she picked up the books that lay about her, laid them on her lap, and began running through the titlepages.