“Think of what, my dear?”
“Listen!”
Her father leaned his white-haired and heavy head on his hand, while she read from the grey volume, as follows:
“'You have remarked too often “I am as good as you.” It is probable that God only knows whether you are or not. You may be better. I think he knows that you are always either better or worse. If you had remarked “You are as good as I,” it would have represented a more genial frame of mind. It would have rendered your superiority more probable, since whichever remark you make gives, so far as it goes, its own evidence that it is not true. But indeed it is probable that neither your life nor your ideas are admirable, that your one hope of betterment is, not to become convinced that no one is better than you, but to find someone to whom you can honourably look up. I am asking you to look up, not back, nor away among the long dead years for any cause or ideal. I am asking you to search for your leader among your contemporaries, not satisfied until you find him, not limited in your devotion when you have found him, taking his cause to be yours. I am asking you to remember that evil is not social, but human; that good is not social, but human. You have heard that an honest man is the noblest work of God. You have heard of no institution which merits that finality of praise. You have heard that every institution is the lengthened shadow of a man. Is it then in shadows or by shadows that we live?'”
Camilla paused.
“I think your author is in a measure a disciple of Carlyle,” said Champney.
“Are you interested, daddy? See who wrote it!”
Champney took the volume, read, “Chapter Eighth. Whither My Master Went,” and turned back to the title page. “H'm—'The Inner Republic, by Alcott Aidee.' Another discovery, is it?” he asked. “We discover America every other day, my dear! What an extraordinary generation we are!”
Camilla's discovery of her father had been a happy surprise. Happy surprises are what maids in their Arcadian age are of all creatures most capable of receiving. She called him her “graduate course,” and he replied gallantly by calling her his “postponed education.” He had had his happy surprise as well. It was an especial, an unexpected reward for the efforts Champ-ney had made—not altogether painless—to realise the lapse of old conditions, and to pick up threads of interest in the new,—that his efforts had brought him to these relations with Camilla; so that the two were able to sit together of a morning, and talk friendly and long, without patronage or impatience.
To realise the lapse of old conditions, to realise that he was obsolete, that his effective days were over! It was a hard matter. Hard, but an old story now, this struggle to realise this change. The books on his shelves had grown to seem passive and lifeless, since they no longer had connection through himself with the stir of existence.