They were all
hard-working folk together, but they had their little
prejudices: the dentist was known as "Doc," but he was
not considered quite on a medical level; it was doubtful
whether you bowed to the piano-tuner, and quite a curious
and unreasonable contempt was bound up in the word
"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.
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