No thank
you. No Milburns for me."
Lorne watched his mother with twinkling eyes till she
finished.
"Well, Mother, after that, if it was going to be a sewing
circle I think I'd send an excuse," he said, "but maybe
they won't be so mean at a dance."
Chapter VI
Octavius Milburn would not, I think, have objected to
being considered, with relation to his own line in life,
a representative man. He would have been wary to claim
it, but if the stranger had arrived unaided at this view
of him, he would have been inclined to think well of the
stranger's power of induction. That is what he was--a
man of averages, balances, the safe level, no more disposed
to an extravagant opinion than to wear one side whisker
longer than the other. You would take him any day,
especially on Sunday in a silk hat, for the correct
medium: by his careful walk with the spring in it, his
shrewd glance with the caution in it, his look of being
prepared to account for himself, categorically, from head
to foot. He was fond of explaining, in connection with
an offer once made him to embark his capital in Chicago,
that he preferred a fair living under his own flag to a
fortune under the Stars and Stripes. There we have the
turn of his mind, convertible into the language of
bookkeeping, a balance struck, with the profit on the
side of the flag, the patriotic equivalent in good sound
terms of dollars and cents.
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