They stamped and scraped to get rid of it
in the porch, and hurried through the hall, muffled
figures in overshoes, to emerge from an upstairs bedroom
radiant, putting a last touch to hair and button hole,
smelling of the fresh winter air. Such gatherings usually
consisted entirely of bachelors and maidens, with one or
two exceptions so recently yoked together that they had
not yet changed the plane of existence; married people,
by general consent, left these amusements to the unculled.
They had, as I have hinted, more serious preoccupations,
"something else to do"; nobody thought of inviting them.
Nobody, that is, but Mrs Milburn and a few others of her
way of thinking, who saw more elegance and more propriety
in a mixture. On this occasion she had asked her own
clergyman, the pleasant-faced rector of St Stephen's,
and Mrs Emmett, who wore that pathetic expression of
fragile wives and mothers who have also a congregation
at their skirts. Walter Winter was there, too. Mr Winter
had the distinction of having contested South Fox in the
Conservative interest three time unsuccessfully. Undeterred,
he went on contesting things: invariably beaten, he
invariably came up smiling and ready to try again. His
imperturbability was a valuable asset; he never lost
heart or dreamed of retiring from the arena, nor did he
ever cease to impress his party as being their most useful
and acceptable representative.
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