Free The Imperialist by Sara Jeannette Duncan

performed lightly at thepiano; Miss Filkin dipped into
Selections from the Poets of the Century
, placed as remotely as possible from the others; Mr. Milburn, with his legs crossed, turned and folded a Toronto evening paper. Mrs. Milburn had somewhat objected to the evening paper in the drawing-room. “Won’t you look at a magazine, Octavius?” she said; but Mr. Milburn advanced the argument that it removed “any appearance of stiffness,” and prevailed. It was impossible to imagine a group more disengaged from the absurd fuss that precedes a party among some classes of people; indeed, when Mr. Lorne Murchison arrived – like the unfortunate Mrs. Leveret and Mrs. Delarue, he was the first – they looked almost surprised to see him.
    Lorne told his mother afterwards that he thought, in that embarrassing circumstance, of Mrs. Leveret and Mrs. Delarue, and they laughed consumedly together over his discomfiture; but what he felt at the moment was not the humour of the situation. To be the very first and solitary arrival is nowhere esteemed the happiest fortune, but in Elgin a kind of ridiculous humiliation attached to it, a greed for the entertainment, a painful unsophistication. A young man of Elgin would walk up and down in the snow for a quarter of an hour with the thermometer at zero to escape the ignominy of it; Lorne Murchison would have so walked. Our young man was potentially capable of not minding, by next morning he didn’t mind; but immediately he was fast tied in the cobwebs of the common prescription, and he made his way to each of the points of the compass of the Milburns’ drawing-room to shake hands, burning to the ears. Before he subsided into a chair near Mr. Milburn he grasped the collar of his dress coat on each side and drew it forward, a trick he had with his gown in court, a nervous and mechanical action. Dora, who continued to play, watched him over the piano with an amusement notuntinged with malice. She was a tall fair girl, with several kinds of cleverness. She did her hair quite beautifully, and she had a remarkable, effective, useful reticence. Her father declared that Dora took in a great deal more than she ever gave out – an accomplishment, in Mr. Milburn’s eyes, on the soundest basis. She looked remarkably pretty and had remarkably good style, and as she proceeded with her mazurka she was thinking, “He has never been asked here before: how perfectly silly he must feel coming so early!” Presently as Lorne grew absorbed in talk and forgot his unhappy chance, she further reflected, “I don’t think I’ve ever seen him till now in evening dress; it does make him a good figure.” This went on behind a faultless coiffure and an expression almost classical in its detachment; but if Miss Milburn could have thought on a level with her looks, I, for one, would hesitate to take any liberty with her meditations.
    However, the bell began to ring with the briefest intermissions, the maid in the cap to make constant journeys. She opened the door with a welcoming smile, having practically no deportment to go with the cap; human nature does not freeze readily anywhere. Dora had to leave the piano; Miss Filkin decided that when fifteen had come she would change her chair. Fifteen soon came, the young ladies mostly in light silks or muslins cut square, not low, in the neck, with half sleeves. This moderation was prescribed in Elgin, where evening dress was more a matter of material than of cut, a thing in itself symbolical if it were desirable to consider social evolution here. For middle-aged ladies high necks and long sleeves were usual; and Mrs. Milburn might almost have been expected to appear thus, in a nicely-made black
broché
, perhaps. It was recognized as like Mrs. Milburn, in keeping with her unbending ideas, to wear a dress cut as square as any young lady’s, with just a little lace letin, of a lavender stripe. The young men were nearly all in the tailor’s convention for their sex