“I don't know how to say what I have to say, Miss Champney,” he said stiffly, somewhat painfully. “I thought you could say anything. That's your gift.”
Camilla was radiant for a moment.
“It is about the other evening. I see it differently. I see that Mr. Hennion was right.”
“Oh!” For another moment she was disdainful. “Women don't want to be men's conventions.”
“Conventions! Berry would say that men are sermons and women rituals.”
“Mr. Berry wouldn't have said that. He couldn't!” She was radiant again.
“Don't flatter me for coining epigrams. They're the small change of Mrs. Tillotson's drawing-room.”
“But I like Alberta!”
She already felt the something discordant in Aidee's mood.
The increasing crowds broke the conversation. They turned to the left through the Court House Square, and passed the old jail with its barred windows and crumbling bricks. Sparrows fluttered and pecked in the wet young grass, sometimes lit on the sill of a barred window and looked into its black secrecy.