One might think that Nature,
having made them her invitation upon the higher plane,
abandoned them in the very scorn of her success to the
warm human commonplaces that do her work well enough with
the common type. Mrs Murchison would have thought better
of them if she had chanced again to overhear.
"I wouldn't advise you to have it lined with fur," Advena
was saying. The winter had sharply announced itself, and
Finlay, to her reproach about his light overcoat, had
declared his intention of ordering a buffalo-skin the
following day. "And the buffaloes are all gone, you
know--thirty years ago," she laughed. "You really are
not modern in practical matters. Does it ever surprise
you that you get no pemmican for dinner, and hardly ever
meet an Indian in his feathers?"
He looked at her with delight in his sombre eyes. It was
a new discovery, her capacity for happily chaffing him,
only revealed since she had come out of her bonds to
love; it was hard to say which of them took the greater
pleasure in it.
"What is the use of living in Canada if you can't have
fur on your clothes?" he demanded.
"You may have a little--astrakhan, I would--on the collar
and cuffs," she said. "A fur lining is too hot if there
happens to be a thaw, and then you would leave it off
and take cold.
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