ir and button hole, smelling of the fresh winter air. Such
gatherings usually consisted entirely of bachelors and maidens, with
one or two exceptions so recently yoked together that they had not yet
changed the plane of existence; married people, by general consent,
left these amusements to the unculled. They had, as I have hinted,
more serious preoccupations, "something else to do"; nobody thought of
inviting them. Nobody, that is, but Mrs Milburn and a few others of her
way of thinking, who saw more elegance and more propriety in a mixture.
On this occasion she had asked her own clergyman, the pleasant-faced
rector of St Stephen's, and Mrs Emmett, who wore that pathetic
expression of fragile wives and mothers who have also a congregation
at their skirts. Walter Winter was there, too. Mr Winter had the
distinction of having contested South Fox in the Conservative interest
three time unsuccessfully. Undeterred, he went on contesting things:
invariably beaten, he invariably came up smiling and ready to try
again. His imperturbability was a valuable asset; he never lost heart or
dreamed of retiring from the arena, nor did he ever cease to impress
his party as being their most useful and acceptable representative.
His business history was chequered and his exact financial equivalent
uncertain, but he had tremendously the air of a man of affairs; as
the phrase went, he was full of politics, the plain repository of deep
things. He had a shrewd eye, a double chin, and a bluff, crisp, jovial
manner of talking as he lay back in an armchair with his legs crossed
and played with his watch chain, an important way of nodding assent,
a weighty shake of denial. Voting on purely party lines, the town had
later rewarded his invincible expectation by electing him Mayor, and
then provided itself with unlimited entertainment by putting in a
Liberal majority on his council, the reports of the weekly sittings
being constantly considered as good as a cake walk. South Fox, as people
said, was not a healthy locality for Conservatives. Yet Walter Winter
wore a look of remarkable hardiness. He had also tremendously the air
of a dark horse, the result both of natural selection and careful
cultivation. Even his political enemies took it kindly when he "got in"
for Mayor, and offered him amused congratulations. He made a personal
claim on their cordiality, which was not the least of his political
resources. Nature had fitted him to public uses; the i