might have been sitting still if Mrs Leveret hadn't had the spirit to
get up and march out. No thank you. No Milburns for me."

Lorne watched his mother with twinkling eyes till she finished.

"Well, Mother, after that, if it was going to be a sewing circle I think
I'd send an excuse," he said, "but maybe they won't be so mean at a
dance."

CHAPTER VI

Octavius Milburn would not, I think, have objected to being considered,
with relation to his own line in life, a representative man. He would
have been wary to claim it, but if the stranger had arrived unaided
at this view of him, he would have been inclined to think well of the
stranger's power of induction. That is what he was--a man of averages,
balances, the safe level, no more disposed to an extravagant opinion
than to wear one side whisker longer than the other. You would take him
any day, especially on Sunday in a silk hat, for the correct medium:
by his careful walk with the spring in it, his shrewd glance with
the caution in it, his look of being prepared to account for himself,
categorically, from head to foot. He was fond of explaining, in
connection with an offer once made him to embark his capital in Chicago,
that he preferred a fair living under his own flag to a fortune under
the Stars and Stripes. There we have the turn of his mind, convertible
into the language of bookkeeping, a balance struck, with the profit on
the side of the flag, the patriotic equivalent in good sound terms of
dollars and cents. With this position understood, he was prepared to
take you up on any point of comparison between the status and privileges
of a subject and a citizen--the political MORALE of a monarchy and a
republic--the advantage of life on this and the other side of the line.
There was nothing he liked better to expatiate upon, with that
valuable proof of his own sincerity always at hand for reference
and illustration. His ideal was life in a practical, go-ahead,
self-governing colony, far enough from England actually to be disabused
of her inherited anachronisms and make your own tariff, near enough
politically to keep your securities up by virtue of her protection. He
was extremely satisfied with his own country; one saw in his talk the
phenomenon of patriotism in double bloom, flower within flower. I have
mentioned his side whiskers: he preserved that facial decoration of
the Prince Consort; and the large steel engraving that represents Queen
Victoria in a f