Still, she was an honest soul: she
found more fault with what she called Miss Cameron's
"shirt-waists" than with Miss Cameron herself, whom she
didn't doubt to be a good woman though she would never
see thirty-five again. Time and observation would no
doubt mend or remodel the shirt-waists; and meanwhile
both they and Miss Cameron would do very well for East
Elgin, Mrs Forsyth avowed. Mrs Kilbannon, definitely
given over to caps and curls as they still wear them in
Bross, Mrs Forsyth at once formed a great opinion of.
She might be something, Mrs Forsyth thought, out of a
novel by Mr Crockett, and made you long to go to Scotland,
where presumably everyone was like her. On the whole the
ladies from Bross profited rather than lost by the new
frame they stepped into in the house of Dr Drummond, of
Elgin, Ontario. Their special virtues, of dignity and
solidity and frugality, stood out saliently against the
ease and unconstraint about them; in the profusion of
the table it was little less than edifying to hear Mrs
Kilbannon, invited to preserves, say, "Thank you, I have
butter." It was the pleasantest spectacle, happily common
enough, of the world's greatest inheritance. We see it
in immigrants of all degrees, and we may perceive it in
Miss Cameron and Mrs Kilbannon. They come in couples and
in companies from those little imperial islands, bringing
the crusted qualities of the old blood bottled there so
long, and sink with grateful absorption into the wide
bountiful stretches of the further countries.
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