t Mrs Milburn had been obliged to have a distinct
understanding with the maid--Mrs Milburn's servants were all "maids,"
even the charwoman, who had buried three husbands--on the subject of
wearing a cap when she answered the door. Mrs Milburn sat on a chair
she had worked herself, occupied with something in the new stitch; Dora
performed lightly at the piano; Miss Filkin dipped into Selections
from the Poets of the Century, placed as remotely as possible from the
others; Mr Milburn, with his legs crossed, turned and folded a Toronto
evening paper. Mrs Milburn had somewhat objected to the evening paper
in the drawing-room. "Won't you look at a magazine, Octavius?" she said;
but Mr Milburn advanced the argument that it removed "any appearance
of stiffness," and prevailed. It was impossible to imagine a group more
disengaged from the absurd fuss that precedes a party among some classes
of people; indeed, when Mr Lorne Murchison arrived--like the unfortunate
Mrs Leveret and Mrs Delarue, he was the first--they looked almost
surprised to see him.

Lorne told his mother afterward that he thought, in that embarrassing
circumstance, of Mrs Leveret and Mrs Delarue, and they laughed
consumedly together over his discomforture; but what he felt at the
moment was not the humour of the situation. To be the very first and
solitary arrival is nowhere esteemed the happiest fortune, but in
Elgin a kind of ridiculous humiliation attached to it, a greed for the
entertainment, a painful unsophistication. A young man of Elgin
would walk up and down in the snow for a quarter of an hour with the
thermometer at zero to escape the ignominy of it; Lorne Murchison would
have so walked. Our young man was potentially capable of not minding,
by next morning he didn't mind; but immediately he was fast tied in the
cobwebs of the common prescription, and he made his way to each of the
points of the compass of the Milburns' drawing-room to shake hands,
burning to the ears. Before he subsided into a chair near Mr Milburn he
grasped the collar of his dress coat on each side and drew it forward,
a trick he had with his gown in court, a nervous and mechanical
action. Dora, who continued to play, watched him over the piano with
an amusement not untinged with malice. She was a tall fair girl, with
several kinds of cleverness. She did her hair quite beautifully, and she
had a remarkable, effective, useful reticence. Her father declared
that Dora took in a great