WHILE Aidee was looking gloomily from his study window on Seton Avenue, the Tillotson coterie were discussing the Wood murder.

“Splendid subject for a poem, Mrs. Tillotson!” cried Ralbeck. “I will put it in music, the schema thus—The wronged cry for justice! They rise! Staccato! Spare not! Fortissimo! Triumph! Victory! Allegro-mezzoforte!”

And Berry rumpled his hair and murmured: “Peace and coffee at Mrs. Tillotson's afterwards. Andante. It's rather nice.”

And Mrs. Tillotson poured coffee from her patent coffee-pot, saying sternly that Mr. Aidee never countenanced crime; she could not bring herself either to countenance crime.

“This is important,” she said. “We must take a position. We must insist to Mr. Aidee on a position.” She drew herself up and paused. “People will ask our position.”

Alberta opened her soft blue eyes widely. “Will you write a poem about Wood and Hicks, really?”

“My dear, what is your opinion?” Mrs. Tillotson asked.

“Scrumptious!” said Alberta.

Mrs. Tillotson hesitated.

“I will consult Mr. Aidee. The Assembly must take a position.”

It was Mrs. Tillotson's latest theory that she was the power behind the throne. Genius must be supported, guided, controlled. She referred to Chateaubriand and Madame RÉcamier, a reference furnished her by Berry.

“Countenance crime!” cried Ralbeck. “Everybody countenances crime.”

Alberta opened her eyes a shade wider.

“Except crimes of technique,” Berry murmured softly. “You don't countenance a man who sings off the key. Curious! I do.”

“Art has laws,” declared Mrs. Tillotson. “Society has laws. Crime is the breach of necessary laws.”

“Necessary, Mrs. Tillotson! You touch the point.” Berry stirred himself. “But we sing in tune or out of tune by nature; just so love and hate by nature. Or if we learn to love, or to sing in tune, it is by example, and not by fear or compulsion, that we learn. Most crimes are crimes of technique, the breach, not of natural laws, but of artificial laws. An unnecessary law is an initial crime. The breach of it is a consequent crime. 'Love one another' is the law most systematic, beautiful, inclusive. Really, all other laws than that are technical.”

“G-gorry!” stammered Ted Secor. “Bu-but, you see, Hicks——”

“Did Hicks love Wood?” said Berry, and fixed on Teddy his glassy-eyed and smiling stare. “He was wrong, Hicks was wrong.”

“G-gorry, no! He didn't love Wood!” Ted Secor found it hard work, this keeping one's gaze fixed on higher things, for the stars all seemed to be erratic stars. He was not clever himself; they were all cleverer here than he. He was nearly as idle as Berry, and more ignorant than Ralbeck, whose knowledge extra-musical was less than moderate; he was as useless as possible; his limbs were large and his head small; Mrs. Tillotson scared him; Alberta ordered and he obeyed; but he had decided instincts, and he knew that Berry was cleverer than Ralbeck, that Mrs. Tillotson posed, that Alberta carried himself around somehow in her diminutive pocket, and finally, that his own staying powers on the whole were rather good.

The trolley car clattered, and crashed past outside, and stopped, and Alberta, looking through the bow-window, cried:

“Camilla Champney! She's coming in!”

While Mrs. Tillotson flushed and saw visions. Camilla was not frequent and familiar in her drawing-room. She had been there but once or twice, and then nearly a year before.

When Aidee entered, Ralbeck, Mrs. Tillotson, and Berry were arguing eagerly on the subject of rituals, Camilla's thrilled and thrilling interest seeming to act like a draught on excitable coals. Mrs. Tillotson appealed to Aidee. Berry argued the softening effect of rituals; they tended to substitute non-combative forces and habits, he said, in the place of combative opinion; the Catholics were wise who substituted ecclesiasticism for theology; opinion was quarrelsome; hence followed anger and hate; a ritual represented order, therefore habit, therefore peace; it induced these qualities in character; he thought Mrs. Tillotson might compose a ritual for the Assembly. Ralbeck shouted his scorn. Mrs. Tillotson did not seem pleased with Ralbeck for his scorn.

Aidee left the house with Ted, Alberta, and Camilla. Presently Ted and Alberta turned north toward Herbert Avenue and the region of large houses and broad lawns, and Aidee and Camilla walked down Franklin Street. The crowds increased as they drew nearer the business section—late afternoon crowds hurrying home.

“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.

“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.

Camilla lifted her face. Her eyes were wet, and her mouth trembling at the rebuff.

“I didn't think it would seem that way. I thought you might tell me—because you seemed to know, to understand about one's life—because I thought,—you seemed to know so well what I only guessed at. I didn't mean it as if it were nothing to me. I'm sorry.”

Aidee stopped short, they stood in silence for some time by the old fence with its lichened boards enclosing the meagre maples and the grassless space within, where the bluebird's young spring song floated above, “Lulu-lu,” tender and unfinished, as if at that point the sweetness and pain of its thought could only be hinted at by the little wistful silence to follow. Doubtless, among the maple leaves, too, there are difficulties of expression, imprisoned meanings that peer out of dark windows, and the songsters are afraid of singing something that will not be answered in the same key. They sing a few notes wistfully and listen. They flutter about the branches, and think each other's hesitations bewildering. It happens every spring with them, when the maple buds unfold, when April breaks into smiles and tears at the discovery of her own delicate warmth, and the earth feels its myriad arteries throbbing faintly.

Camilla was about to turn to go on, but he stopped her.

“I won't say that I didn't mean that,” he said. “I did. I'm not sorry. Otherwise I couldn't have understood you.”

“I shall make a circus of myself,” he thought. “But she'll look as if she thought it a solemn ceremony. Women can do that. They don't have to believe. And perhaps she would understand.”

“Lulu-lu,” sang the bluebird plaintively, seeming to say, “Don't you understand? This is what I mean.”

“But you do understand now!” said Camilla.

“Yes. I've been moody to-day, and sick of my life here. It was the Wood murder. If I were writing another book now, the smear of the Wood murder would be on it at this point. It would compose an explanatory note. You asked for explanations of my book, and where we have bled we are sore. Well, then, I had a younger brother once, and we loved each other like two rank young wolves, and hung hard together by ourselves some twenty years, and were ragged together, and hungry and cold sometimes. I dragged him out of the gutter and prison, he wrecked me more than once. Then he left me and sank himself somewhere. I don't know if he is dead or alive. He was a thief and a drunkard off and on, and a better man than I in several ways, and more of a fanatic, and very lovable. It tore me in two.

“I'd give ten years to grip his hand again. Is that curious? I've been a schoolmaster and a newspaper editor, day laborer, truck driver, and miner. Now I'm the exponent of an idea. Sometimes I've worked like a dray horse all day and studied all night. Sometimes I've been happy. Sometimes I've had an extraordinary desire to be dead. Do you see about those explanatory notes? Do you think they would help you any? The reviews say my book is morbid, overemotional. Some of them say it's hysteric.”

“I think you're a wonderful man.” She looked up with glowing and frank admiration.

The bluebird flitted past them from one scrubby tree to another, crying softly. The schoolhouse stared down upon them blankly, with its thirty unspeculative back windows. The flabby woman sat down on her porch and folded her fat hands. The turbulent children poked in the refuse heaps and grew imperceptibly dirtier. A factory whistle blew. A nearby street grew noisier with the outpouring of workmen. Aidee leaned against the fence and looked at the thirty windows as if he saw speculation in them.

“Wonderful! No! But you are wonderful, Miss Champney. Wherever you come you bring hope. You have more sympathies than an April day. You are the genius of the spring. The bluebirds are singing to you. You tempt me to be happy. You set me to poetising against the back windows of a schoolhouse where a hundred and fifty innocents are bored to death every day. Tell me your secret, and I'll cure the world. It's sick of an old disease. Old! Some say eternal. But it feels pretty well sometimes, in the spring, or because women are good and beautiful, and tell us that it is impossible not to hope. They seem to tell us to dream on, till we've outdreamed the wrong and so found the right. Wonderful? You are wonderful. The hope of the world looks out of your eyes. I owe you a debt. I owe it to tell you whatever you want to know. I'm as flattered and foolish as you like.”

Camilla laughed happily.

“Then I shall have to ask questions. For instance, I want to know what you think about the man who shot Mr. Wood.”

He glowered a little.

“Could I say without seeing him? But you mean about what he did. I think a man's life belongs to him and shouldn't be stolen. I don't like thievery of any kind. I've been trying to show people that men like Wood were disguised thieves, more or less disguised from themselves. I suppose Hicks is no less a murderer because the thing appeared to him in the disguise of a cause. I don't know. They call him so. Murder is illegal killing. They'll probably put him to death, and that will be legal killing. They'll think their motive is good. The motives of the two killings are not so different. Hicks thought his motive was good. I think no man has a right to kill another, legally or illegally. I don't care for the laws. I'd as lief break them as not. They are codified habits, some of them bad habits. Half the laws are crimes against better laws. You can break all the Ten Commandments with perfect legality. The laws allow you to kill and steal under prescribed conditions. Wood stole, and Hicks killed, and most men lie, though only now and then illegally. It's all villainous casuistry. Taking life that doesn't belong to you is worse than taking money that doesn't belong to you, because it's the breach of a better ownership. But Hicks' motive seems better than Wood's. How can one measure the length and breadth of sin? Wood seemed to me more of a thief than most who are in jail, because I felt clearer as to the rights of public property than as to the rights of private property. But I found him a very human man. Hicks is probably no less so. Wood was a likeable——”

“The Third Lamp man too. There is no criminal class, no corrupt politician class. There are no classes of any kind. I mean to say the classification hinders more truth than it helps. Do you understand me? I'm not a systematic thinker. Shall I confess, Miss Champney? One talks confidently about right and wrong in public. In secret he confesses that he never saw them apart. I confess it to you, that I don't know how they would look apart.”

Camilla felt thrilled. It was the word “secret,” perhaps, or, “confession.” Or more with the sense of being present at the performance of a mystery, when a great man, as she thought him—a man new, at least, and original—conceived, created, shaped his thoughts before her, and held them out for her to see. The great men of history, the statesmen, poets, reformers, were vivid to her, to be read and to be read about. Some of them her father had known. They were the subjects of long morning talks in the tall-windowed library. She had a halo ready for any deserving head. She had a halo fitted on Alcott Aidee's, and he was conversationally doffing it, a celestial performance that set her cheeks to flying signals of excitement.

Aidee was basking in a vague sense of pleasantness, his sick moodiness soothed away. What did it matter if one had work to do? How noble and lovely and sweet was Camilla Champney!

“The man who first invented women,” he went on more slowly, “must have been a lyric poet.”

He caught sight of the huge woman on the porch of the shanty, who now rose and bobbed to him vigorously. Aidee returned the salute. Camilla choked a laugh, and Aidee grinned in sympathy, and all seemed well, with a bluebird, the moist April weather, and the cheerful noise of the surrounding streets, and the coming on of sunset. They turned and walked up the slight hill, past the big steepleless church, to Maple Street.

“No, she's not lyric,” he said. “She's epic. Her name is Mrs. Finney. I've forgotten how I happen to know. Oh, yes! She and her husband fight, but she always thrashes him.”

“How dreadful!”

“Is it? But it's good for him to know where he stands in the scheme of things. His hopefulness is wonderful, and then the knowledge that she can do it is part of her contentment. Do you suppose we could get Tom Berry to admit that a combativeness which had a regular recurrence and a foregone conclusion, like the Finneys', might come to have the qualities and benefits of a ritual? It would be a nice question for Mrs. Tillotson's drawing-room.”

“He talks as he writes!” thought Camilla, marvelling, too interested in marvelling to question if the man could be analysed, and some things found not altogether worshipful—egotisms, perhaps inconsistencies, weaknesses, and tyrannies. Capable of earnestness he was surely beyond most men; capable of sarcasm and laughter. Camilla was occupied in getting the spirit of the grey volume properly incarnated in the man walking beside her, a slender man, tirelessly energetic, whose black, restless eyes glanced under bony brows so intently at whatever for the moment met them, whose talk was so brilliant and electric. This brother whom he was describing so frankly seemed to have behaved more than doubtfully. But Alcott's frank description of his brother and his close love of him both were so clear, and his frankness and his love each seemed to Camilla the more beautiful for the other.

The Arcadian age is not only an age of surprises. It is above all an age of images. All ideas then make haste to shape themselves into persons, into living objects, however vast and vague. In the farthest inland Arcadia, hard by the sources and fountain heads of streams, where everyone has once lived, what unhesitating outstretchings there were, what innocent anthropomorphisms! In our dreams God came into the window and kissed us at night with sweet, fiery lips, as realistic a visitation as ever came to Psyche or Endymion, and the soul swelled up like a balloon, and was iridescent as a soap bubble. Everything was a person then.

Camilla had still the habit. A face and a voice came to her out of every book. She had already a close acquaintance with a surprising person in the grey volume, one who had varying tones and features, who seemed to reason so closely, so trenchantly, and again to be but a lost and longing petitioner; one who sometimes bitterly denounced, but sometimes spoke humorously and pleasantly enough. A feverish spirit, yet as it seemed to her, beautiful, earnest, daring, searching, and like a ship carrying a mysterious force and fearless prow. She had but pictures and impressions of these things. She was slowly identifying them now with the restless-eyed Aidee, and felt peculiarly happy. How beautiful it seemed that spring had come, and the first bluebird was singing! The impish children on the refuse heaps shouted gleefully. A silky spring haze was in the air, as if risen out of the valleys of Arcadia.

Maple Street was thronged, and mainly with foreign-looking faces, German and Italian, some Jewish, a few Chinese and Negro. Lower Bank Street seemed comparatively quiet and deserted. Black-hulled freight boats, cumbersome monsters, slept at their docks. The glimmer of the white sail of a yacht could be seen far down the river beyond the bridges.

“Cheerful old river!” Aidee remarked.

“I love it.”

“Reason enough for its cheerfulness.”

“I've loved it for ages.”

“But you needn't dodge a tribute,” said Aidee.

“You needn't insist on it.”

“Not if I think it important?”

“Oh, never at all!”

“But a tribute! You might take what belongs to you. I owe you a debt.”

“Better owe it than pay it in small coin.”

“Then I offer a promissory note.”

“You mean—you will tell me more about——” Camilla paused and dropped her voice.

“Whatever you may ask. It's the kind called payable on demand.”

It has ever been noticed, at some point, sooner or later, probably in the springtime, the conversations in Arcadia become singularly light, and small tinklings of wit are thought poetical.

Opposite the P. and N. station were the gangs of Hennion's workmen. The paving job was nearly finished. But something was wrong. The men stood idle. Hennion had his back against a telegraph pole, and talked to Kennedy, as Aidee and Camilla came up behind him.

“Rip it out again, Kennedy,” he said. “Can't help it.”

“'Twill cost the best part of a day,” said the big foreman ruefully.

“Can't help it.”

Kennedy swore stealthily but solidly, and Hennion laughed.

“I'll pay the damages if you'll do the growling. That's all right.”

He turned and met Camilla and Aidee, and the three walked toward the Champney house. Camilla asked imperative questions.

“What is it, Dick? What have you done?”

Hennion glanced at Aidee and thought of their late stormy tilting.

“Oh, I was away to-day, and Kennedy saw the chance to make a blunder with his sand layer. He thinks it won't make much difference, if we forget about it. He's an ingenious arguer. But I hate sloppy work.”

Aidee said nothing. The two men stopped at the Champney gate. Camilla went up the path with her swift, springy step. They turned back to the gangs of workmen.

“You were right about that, the other night,” said Aidee abruptly. “I'm not quite clear how you were right, but you were.”

“Right about the whole business?”

“No, only about my method. I'm still urging you to go in, but I'm adopting your scruples.”

Hennion shook his head thoughtfully. Aidee went on.

“Political power is safest in the hands of those who have to make a sacrifice in order to accept it.” Then he stopped with a short laugh. “I'm a coiner of phrases. It's inveterate. Maxims don't interest you. Would it be any argument for your going in if I engaged to stay out?”

“Why, hardly. I don't know. I don't make you out.”

“Carroll's going to explain me in six paragraphs to-morrow.”

“Carroll doesn't amount to anything. Did you know Hicks at all?” implying that he knew what the paragraphs would be.

“Never saw him that I know of.”

“Well—I don't see where you're concerned.”

Hennion went out into the street among his workmen. He wondered what Aidee meant by “adopting your scruples.” Probably Aidee saw the enormity of dragging in Camilla. It was time he did. Hennion did not find himself liking Aidee any better for his candour, or advice, or conscientious scruples, if he had them. He thought his own scruples about Camilla were not things to be copied or “adopted” precisely by anyone else.

Aidee went back by the schoolhouse. He thought he would like to hear the bluebird again, on the spot where his bitterness and the wound within him had been suddenly-healed by some medicine as irrational as the disease, but the twilight had fallen now, and there was no song about the place. Mrs. Finney and her “man” were quarrelling noisily at their open window.