The sons and
daughters, born to different circumstances, evolved their
own conventions, the old people used the ways and manners
of narrower days; one paralysed the other. It might be
gathered from the slight tone of patronage in the address
of youth to age that the advantage lay with the former;
but polite conversation, at best, was sustained with
discomfort. Such considerations, however, were far from
operating with the Milburns. Mrs Milburn would have said
that they were characteristic of quite a different class
of people; and so they were.
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. 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.
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