However, the bell began to ring with the briefest intermissions, the maid in the cap to make constant journeys.  She opened the door with a welcoming smile, having practically no deportment to go with the cap:  human nature does not freeze readily anywhere.  Dora had to leave the piano:  Miss Filkin decided that when fifteen had come she would change her chair.  Fifteen soon came, the young ladies mostly in light silks or muslins cut square, not low, in the neck, with half-sleeves.  This moderation was prescribed in Elgin, where evening dress was more a matter of material than of cut, a thing in itself symbolical if it were desirable to consider social evolution here.  For middle-aged ladies high necks and long sleeves were usual; and Mrs Milburn might almost have been expected to appear thus, in a nicely made black broche, perhaps.  It was recognized as like Mrs Milburn, in keeping with her unbending ideas, to wear a dress cut as square as any young lady’s, with just a little lace let in, of a lavender stripe.  The young men were nearly all in the tailor’s convention for their sex the world over, with here and there a short coat that also went to church; but there some departures from orthodoxy in the matter of collars and ties, and where white bows were achieved, I fear none of the wearers would have dreamed of defending them from the charge of being ready-made.

It was a clear, cold January night and everybody, as usual, walked to the party; the snow creaked and ground underfoot, one could hear the arriving steps in the drawing-room.  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.  His business history