much consideration; but if they did, it is highly unlikely to have occurred to them that they were too good for their environment.  Yet in a manner they were.  It was a matter of quality, of spiritual and mental fabric; they were hardly aware that they had it, but it marked them with a difference, and a difference is the one thing a small community, accustomed comfortably to scan its own intelligible averages, will not tolerate.  The unusual may take on an exaggeration of these; an excess of money, an excess of piety, is understood; but idiosyncrasy susceptible to no common translation is regarded with the hostility earned by the white crow, modified among law-abiding humans into tacit repudiation.  It is a sound enough social principle to distrust that which is not understood, like the strain of temperament inarticulate but vaguely manifest in the Murchisons.  Such a strain may any day produce an eccentric or a genius, emancipated from the common interests, possibly inimical to the general good; and when, later on, your genius takes flight or your eccentric sells all that he has and gives it to the poor, his fellow townsmen exchange shrewd nods before the vindicating fact.

Nobody knew it at all in Elgin, but this was the Murchisons’ case.  They had produced nothing abnormal, but they had to prove that they weren’t going to, and Stella was the last and most convincing demonstration.  Advena, bookish and unconventional, was regarded with dubiety.  She was out of the type; she had queer satisfactions and enthusiasms.  Once as a little girl she had taken a papoose from a drunken squaw and brought it home for her mother to adopt.  Mrs Murchison’s reception of the suggested duty may be imagined, also the comments of acquaintances—­a trick like that!  The inevitable hour arrived when she should be instructed on the piano, and the second time the music teacher came her pupil was discovered on the roof of the house, with the ladder drawn up after her.  She did not wish to learn the piano, and from that point of vantage informed her family that it was a waste of money.  She would hide in the hayloft with a novel; she would be off by herself in a canoe at six o’clock in the morning; she would go for walks in the rain of windy October twilights and be met kicking the wet leaves along in front of her “in a dream.”  No one could dream with impunity in Elgin, except in bed.  Mothers of daughters sympathized in good set terms with Mrs Murchison.  “If that girl were mine—­” they would say, and leave you with a stimulated notion of the value of corporal punishment.  When she took to passing examinations and teaching, Elgin considered that her parents ought to be thankful in the probability that she had escaped some dramatic end.  But her occupation further removed her from intercourse with the town’s more exclusive circles:  she had taken a definite line, and she pursued it, preoccupied.  If she was a brand snatched from the burning, she sent up a little curl of reflection in a safe place, where she was not further interrupted.