“veterinary.”  Anything “wholesale” or manufacturing stood, of course, on its own feet; there was nothing ridiculous in molasses, nothing objectionable in a tannery, nothing amusing in soap.  Such airs and graces were far from Elgin, too fundamentally occupied with the amount of capital invested, and too profoundly aware how hard it was to come by.  The valuable part of it all was a certain bright freedom, and this was of the essence.  Trade was a decent communal way of making a living, rooted in independence and the general need; it had none of the meaner aspects.  Your bow was negligible to the piano-tuner, and everything veterinary held up its head.  And all this again qualified, as everywhere, by the presence or absence of the social faculty, that magnetic capacity for coming, as Mrs Murchison would say, “to the fore,” which makes little of disadvantages that might seem insuperable and, in default, renders null and void the most unquestionable claims.  Anyone would think of the Delarues.  Mr Delarue had in the dim past married his milliner, yet the Delarues were now very much indeed to the fore.  And, on the other hand, the Leverets of the saw mills, rich and benevolent; the Leverets were not in society simply, if you analysed it, because they did not appear to expect to be in it.  Certainly it was well not to be too modest; assuredly, as Mrs Murchison said, you put your own ticket on, though that dear soul never marked herself in very plain figures, not knowing, perhaps for one thing, quite how much she was worth.  On the other hand, “Scarce of company, welcome trumpery,” Mrs Murchison always emphatically declared to be no part of her social philosophy.  The upshot was that the Murchisons were confined to a few old friends and looked, as we know, half-humorously, half-ironically, for more brilliant excursions, to Stella and “the boys.”

It was only, however, the pleasure of Mr Lorne Murchison’s company that was requested at the Milburns’ dance.  Almost alone among those who had slipped into wider and more promiscuous circles with the widening of the stream, the Milburns had made something like an effort to hold out.  The resisting power was not thought to reside in Mr Milburn, who was personally aware of no special ground for it, but in Mrs Milburn and her sister, Miss Filkin, who seemed to have inherited the strongest ideas. in the phrase of the place, about keeping themselves to themselves.  A strain of this kind is sometimes constant, even so far from the fountainhead, with its pleasing proof that such views were once the most general and the most sacred defence of middle-class firesides, and that Thackeray had, after all, a good deal to excuse him.  Crossing the Atlantic they doubtless suffered some dilution; but all that was possible to conserve them under very adverse conditions Mrs Milburn and Miss Filkin made it their duty to do.  Nor were these ideas opposed, contested, or much traversed in Elgin.  It was recognized that there was “something about”