ized that in spite of its air of being impossible
to "overtake"--I must, in this connection, continue to quote its
mistress--there was an attractiveness about the dwelling of the
Murchisons the attractiveness of the large ideas upon which it had
been built and designed, no doubt by one of those gentlefolk of reduced
income who wander out to the colonies with a nebulous view to economy
and occupation, to perish of the readjustment. The case of such persons,
when they arrive, is at once felt to be pathetic; there is a tacit local
understanding that they have made a mistake. They may be entitled
to respect, but nothing can save them from the isolation of their
difference and their misapprehension. It was like that with the house.
The house was admired--without enthusiasm--but it was not copied. It
was felt to be outside the general need, misjudged, adventitious; and it
wore its superiority in the popular view like a folly. It was in Elgin,
but not of it: it represented a different tradition; and Elgin made the
same allowance for its bedroom bells and its old-fashioned dignities
as was conceded to its original master's habit of a six-o'clock dinner,
with wine.

The architectural expression of the town was on a different scale,
beginning with "frame," rising through the semidetached, culminating
expensively in Mansard roofs, cupolas and modern conveniences, and
blossoming, in extreme instances, into Moorish fretwork and silk
portieres for interior decoration. The Murchison house gained by force
of contrast: one felt, stepping into it, under influences of less
expediency and more dignity, wider scope and more leisured intention;
its shabby spaces had a redundancy the pleasanter and its yellow plaster
cornices a charm the greater for the numerous close-set examples of
contemporary taste in red brick which made, surrounded by geranium beds,
so creditable an appearance in the West Ward. John Murchison in taking
possession of the house had felt in it these satisfactions, had been
definitely penetrated and soothed by them, the more perhaps because he
brought to them a capacity for feeling the worthier things of life which
circumstances had not previously developed. He seized the place with a
sense of opportunity leaping sharp and conscious out of early years
in the grey "wynds" of a northern Scottish town; and its personality
sustained him, very privately but none the less effectively, through
the worry and expense of it for years