The Imperialist

t, was well equipped for society; she had exactly those qualities which appealed to it in Elgin, among which I will mention two-the quality o

anner they were. It was a matter of quality, of spiritual and mental fabric; they were hardly aware that they had it, but it marked them with a difference, and a difference is the one thing a small community, accustomed comfortably to scan its own intelligible averages, will not tolerate. The unusual may take on an exaggeration of these; an excess of money, an excess of piety, is understood; but idiosyncrasy susceptible to no common translation is regarded with the hostility earned by the white crow, modified among l

d be instructed on the piano, and the second time the music teacher came her pupil was discovered on the roof of the house, with the ladder drawn up after her. She did not wish to learn the piano, and from that point of vantage informed her family that it was a waste of money. She would hide in the hayloft with a novel; she would be off by herself in a canoe at six o'clock in the morning; she would go for walks in the rain of windy October twilights and be met kicking the wet leaves along in front of her "in a dream." No one could dream with impunity in Elgin, except in bed. Mothers of daughters sympathized in

eneral acceptance, were apt to lag far behind the males. Alec and Oliver enjoyed a good deal of popularity, and it was Stella's boast that if Lorne didn't go out much it needn't be supposed he wasn't asked. It was an accepted state of things in Elgin that young men might be invited without their sisters, implying an imperturbability greater than London's, since London may not be aware of the existence of sisters, while Elgin knew all sorts of more interesting things about them. The young men were more desirable than the young women; they forged ahead, carrying the family fortunes, and the "nicest" of them were the young men in the banks. Others might be more substantial, but there was an allure about a young man in a bank as difficult to define as to resist. To say of a certain party-giver that she had "about every bank clerk in town" was to announce the success of her entertainment in ultimate terms. These things are not always penetrable, but no doubt his gentlema

ng time ago. Such persons would bring their lines of demarcation with them, and in their new milieu of backwoods settlers and small traders would find no difficulty in drawing them again. But it was a very long time ago. The little knot of gentry-folk soon found the limitations of their new conditions; years went by in decades, aggrandizing none of them. They took, perforce, to the ways of the country, and soon nobody kept a groom but the Doctor, and nobody dined late but the Judge. There came a time when the Sheriff's whist club and the Archdeacon's port became a tradition to the oldest inhabitant. Trade flourished, education improved, politics changed. Her Ma

onable contempt was bound up in the word "veterinary." Anything "wholesale" or manufacturing stood, of course, on its own feet; there was nothing ridiculous in molasses, nothing objectionable in a tannery, nothing amusing in soap. Such airs and graces were far from Elgin, too fundamentally occupied with the amount of capital invested, and too profoundly aware how hard it was to come by. The valuable part of it all was a certain bright freedom, and this was of the essence. Trade was a decent communal way of making a living, rooted in independence and the general need; it had none of the meaner aspects. Your bow was negligible to the piano-tuner, and everything veterinary held up its head. And all this again qualified, as everywhere, by the presence or absence of the social faculty, that magnetic capacity for coming, as Mrs Murchison would say, "to the fore," which makes little of disadvantages that might seem insuperable and, in default,

sacred defence of middle-class firesides, and that Thackeray had, after all, a good deal to excuse him. Crossing the Atlantic they doubtless suffered some dilution; but all that was possible to conserve them under very adverse conditions Mrs Milburn and Miss Filkin made it their duty to do. Nor were these ideas opposed, contested, or much traversed in Elgin. It was recognized that there was "something about" Mrs Milburn and her sister-vaguely felt-that you did not come upon that thinness of nostril, and slope of shoulder, and set of elbow at every corner. They must have got it somewhere. A Filkin tradition prevailed, said to have originated in Nova Scotia: the Filkins never had been accessible, but if they wanted to

d Abby sat on the verandah enjoying the Indian summer afternoon; the horse chestnuts dropped crashing among the fallen leaves, the roadside maples blazed, the quiet streets ran into smoky

Lorne should feel especially honoured; but the insincerity was so obvious that it didn't

n't she just write you a little friendly note, or let Dora do it? It's that Ormiston case," she went

s, and stuck his long legs out in front of him. "Oh, I don't know," he said. "Th

as it the Episcopalians began that sewing-circle

in Abby, wit

the Delarues. They were so pleased to be going that they got there about five minutes too soon, and they were the first to come. Well, they rang the bell and in they went. The girl showed them into the front drawing-room and asked them to sit down. And there in the back drawing-room sat Mrs Milburn and

her with twinkling ey

a sewing circle I think I'd send an excuse," he s