Mrs Milburn had somewhat objected
to the evening paper in the drawing-room. "Won't you look
at a magazine, Octavius?" she said; but Mr Milburn advanced
the argument that it removed "any appearance of stiffness,"
and prevailed. It was impossible to imagine a group more
disengaged from the absurd fuss that precedes a party
among some classes of people; indeed, when Mr Lorne
Murchison arrived--like the unfortunate Mrs Leveret and
Mrs Delarue, he was the first--they looked almost surprised
to see him.
Lorne told his mother afterward that he thought, in that
embarrassing circumstance, of Mrs Leveret and Mrs Delarue,
and they laughed consumedly together over his discomforture;
but what he felt at the moment was not the humour of the
situation. To be the very first and solitary arrival is
nowhere esteemed the happiest fortune, but in Elgin a
kind of ridiculous humiliation attached to it, a greed
for the entertainment, a painful unsophistication. A
young man of Elgin would walk up and down in the snow
for a quarter of an hour with the thermometer at zero to
escape the ignominy of it; Lorne Murchison would have so
walked. Our young man was potentially capable of not
minding, by next morning he didn't mind; but immediately
he was fast tied in the cobwebs of the common prescription,
and he made his way to each of the points of the compass
of the Milburns' drawing-room to shake hands, burning to
the ears.
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