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Updated: June 22, 2025
The girl showed them into the front drawing-room and asked them to sit down. And there in the back drawing-room sat Mrs Milburn and Miss Filkin, AND NEVER SPOKE TO THEM! Took not the smallest notice, any more than if they had been stray cats not so much! Their own denomination, mind you, too! And there they might have been sitting still if Mrs Leveret hadn't had the spirit to get up and march out.
Mr Hesketh, however, wore the safe and attractive aspect of a single exceptional instance; there were always sardines enough for him. It will be imagined what pleasure Mrs Milburn and Miss Filkin took in his visits, how he propped up their standard of behaviour in all things unessential, which was too likely to be growing limp, so far from approved examples.
Miss Filkin began to oblige vigorously on the piano, Miss Dora granted Mr Winter's request, which he made with elaborate humour as an impudent old bachelor whom "the boys" would presently take outside and kill. Lorne watched him make it, envying him his assurance; and Miss Milburn was aware that he watched and aware that he envied.
Nevertheless, an uncompromising line came on each side of his mouth with his reply. "As far as I know," he said, "the application was dismissed on its demerits." "Of course it was," said Mr Winter good-humouredly. "You don't need to tell me that. Well, now, this looks like dancing. Miss Filkin, I see, is going to oblige on the piano.
Miss Filkin actually did go, and brought home a great report of it. Miss Filkin would no more have missed a Minister than she would a bishop; but she was the only one. Lorne had prepared for this occasion for a long time.
It was recognized that there was "something about" Mrs Milburn and her sister vaguely felt that you did not come upon that thinness of nostril, and slope of shoulder, and set of elbow at every corner. They must have got it somewhere. A Filkin tradition prevailed, said to have originated in Nova Scotia: the Filkins never had been accessible, but if they wanted to keep to themselves, let them.
All this transpiring while they were supposed to be eating green-gage preserves, and Mrs Milburn and Miss Filkin endeavoured to engage the head of the house in the kind of easy allusion to affairs of the moment to which Mr Hesketh would be accustomed as a form of conversation the accident to the German Empress, the marriage of one of the Rothschilds.
The shutters were opened when Lorne entered, to let in the spring twilight, and the servant pulled a chair into its proper relation with the room as she went out. Mrs Milburn and Miss Filkin both came in before Dora did. Lorne found their conversation enchanting, though it was mostly about the difficulty of keeping the lawn tidy; they had had so much rain.
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.
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