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"We are to have an address by an Indian bishop," she told them. "He is on his way to England by China and Japan, and is staying with our dear rector, Mr Murchison. Such a treat I expect it will be." "What I am dying to know," said Miss Filkin, in a sprightly way, "is whether he is black or white!"
Mrs Milburn sat on a chair she had worked herself, occupied with something in the new stitch; Dora performed lightly at the piano; 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.
Nothing very grand, as I tell my friend, Miss Cham, from Buffalo where the residences are, of course, on quite a different scale; but grandeur isn't everything, is it?" "No, indeed," said Lorne. "But you will be leaving for Great Britain very soon now, Mr Murchison," said Miss Filkin. "Leaving Elgin and all its beauties! And I dare say you won't think of them once again till you get back!"
Lorne sprang to open the window, while Miss Filkin, murmuring that it had been a beautiful day, moved a little farther from it. "Oh, please don't trouble, Mr Murchison; thank you very much!" Miss Milburn continued, and subsided on a sofa. "Have you been playing tennis this week?" Mr Murchison said that he had been able to get down to the club only once. "The courts aren't a bit in good order.
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.
Mrs Milburn then left the room, and shortly afterward Miss Filkin thought she could not miss the bishop either, conveying the feeling that a bishop was a bishop, of whatever colour. She stayed three minutes longer than Mrs Milburn, but she went. The Filkin tradition, though strong, could not hold out entirely against the unwritten laws, the silently claimed privileges, of youth in Elgin.
"I hope I shall not be so busy as that, Miss Filkin." "Oh, no, I'm sure Mr Murchison won't forget his native town altogether," said Mrs Milburn, "though perhaps he won't like it so well after seeing dear old England!" "I expect," said Lorne simply, "to like it better." "Well, of course, we shall all be pleased if you say that, Mr Murchison," Mrs Milburn replied graciously.
No one would have supposed, from the way in which the family disposed itself in the drawing-room, that Miss Filkin had only just finished making the claret cup, or that Dora had been cutting sandwiches till the last minute, or that Mrs Milburn had been obliged to have a distinct understanding with the maid Mrs Milburn's servants were all "maids," even the charwoman, who had buried three husbands on the subject of wearing a cap when she answered the door.
For all the Filkin instinct for the conservation of polite tradition, Dora was probably reading the Toronto society weekly illustrated, with correspondents all over the Province on the back verandah and, but for the irruption of a visitor, would probably not have entered the formal apartment of the house at all that evening.
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.
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