“Please don't be troubled about that, Mr. Aidee, because it doesn't matter, and besides—I don't know how to ask you—but there's something I want to find out. I don't know exactly what it is. It's about 'The Inner Republic'!”
She was flushed, hurried, and embarrassed now.
“I thought it was different—from the other books—that is—I thought there was something in it besides what you wanted to prove.”
“The book is more a confession than an argument, do you mean?”
“Not more, but besides.”
“And that is what you want explained? You are perfectly right. A man ought not to spill his blood into a book. It looks smeared. Or else he ought to add explanatory notes. Oh, yes! the book! But the notes you ask for are extensive.”
Camilla dropped her head, and they walked on silently.
They were come into a section of little wooden shanties. There were a few saloons with gilded signs, some grocery stores showing sodden and specked vegetables, and empty spaces here and there, cavernous, weed-grown, and unsightly with refuse. The section was wedged in between the Lower Bank Street neighbourhood, where the well-to-do in Port Argent once builded their residences, and the upper part of the city, whither they had capriciously migrated since. The two noisy thoroughfares of Bank Street and Maple Street came together at one corner of it. A great red-brick ward schoolhouse was backed against an empty space, which was surrounded with a rickety board fence, and therein a few unhealthy trees were putting forth pale spring leaves. The still greater mass of a steepleless church thrust out its apse toward the same empty space.
Aidee had spoken out of the sick bitterness which he had already noted as unreasonable. Miss Champney, he thought, was only reasonable in asking for explanatory notes.
A bluebird on one of the feeble and stunted maples by the schoolhouse began to sing, “Lulu-lu,” pleading, liquid, and faint. A flabby woman at the door of one of the shanties bellowed hoarse threats at some quarrelling children.