Others might be more substantial, but there was an allure about a young man in a bank as difficult to define as to resist.
To say of a certain party-giver that she had "about every bank clerk in town" was to announce the success of her entertainment in ultimate terms.

These things are not always penetrable, but no doubt his gentlemanly form of labour and its abridgement in the afternoons, when other young men toiled on till the stroke of six, had something to do with this apotheosis of the bank clerk, as well as his invariable taste in tailoring, and the fact that some local family influence was probably represented in his appointment.

Privilege has always its last little stronghold, and it still operates to admiration on the office stools of minor finance in towns like Elgin.

At all events, the sprouting tellers and cashiers held unquestioned sway--young doctors and lawyers simply didn't think of competing; and since this sort of thing carries its own penalty, the designation which they shared with so many distinguished persons in history became a byword on the lips of envious persons and small boys, by which they wished to express effeminacy and the substantive of the "stuck-up." "D'ye take me fur a bank clurk ?" was a form of repudiation among corner loafers as forcible as it was unjustifiable.
I seem to have embarked, by way of getting to the Milburns' party--there is a party at the Milburns' and some of us are going--upon an analysis of social principles in Elgin, an adventure of difficulty, as I have once or twice hinted, but one from which I cannot well extricate myself without at least leaving a clue or two more for the use of the curious.
No doubt these rules had their nucleus in the half-dozen families, among whom we may count the shadowy Plummers, who took upon themselves for Fox County, by the King's pleasure, the administration of justice, the practice of medicine and of the law, and the performance of the charges of the Church of England a long time ago.

Such persons would bring their lines of demarcation with them, and in their new milieu of backwoods settlers and small traders would find no difficulty in drawing them again.