Read Online The Imperialist by Sara Jeannette Duncan - Free Book Online

prejudices; the dentist was known as “Doc,” but he was not considered quite on a medical level; it was doubtful whether you bowed to the piano-tuner, and quite a curious and unreasonable contempt was bound up in the word “veterinary.” Any thing “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, renders null andvoid the most unquestionable claims. Any one would think of the Delarues. Mr. Delarue had in the dim past married his milliner, yet the Delarues were now very much indeed to the fore. And, on the other hand, the Leverets of the saw mills, rich and benevolent; the Leverets were not in society simply, if you analysed it, because they did not appear to expect to be in it. Certainly it was well not to be too modest; assuredly, as Mrs. Murchison said, you put your own ticket on, though that dear soul never marked herself in very plain figures; not knowing, perhaps, for one thing, quite how much she was worth. On the other hand, “Scarce of company, welcome trumpery,” Mrs. Murchison always emphatically declared to be no part of her social philosophy. The upshot was that the Murchisons were confined to a few old friends and looked, as we know, half humorously, half ironically, for more brilliant excursions, to Stella and “the boys.”
    It was only, however, the pleasure of Mr. Lorne Murchison’s company that was requested at the Milburns’ dance. Almost alone among those who had slipped into wider and more promiscuous circles with the widening of the stream, the Milburns had made something like an effort to hold out. The resisting power was not thought to reside in Mr. Milburn, who was personally aware of no special ground for it, but in Mrs. Milburn and her sister, Miss Filkin, who seemed to have inherited the strongest ideas, in the phrase of the place, about keeping themselves
to
themselves. A strain of this kind is sometimes constant, even so far from the fountain head, with its pleasing proof that such views were once the most general and the most 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 veryadverse 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 keep to themselves, let them. In this respect Dora Milburn, the only child, was said to be her mother’s own daughter. The shoulders, at all events, testified to it; and the young lady had been taught to speak, like Mrs. Milburn, with what was known as an “English accent.” The accent in general use in Elgin was borrowed – let us hope temporarily – from the other side of the line. It suffered local