It might be gathered from the slight tone of patronage in the address of youth to age that the advantage lay with the former; but polite conversation, at best, was sustained with discomfort.

Such considerations, however, were far from operating with the Milburns.
Mrs Milburn would have said that they were characteristic of quite a different class of people; and so they were.
No one would have supposed, from the way in which the family disposed itself in the drawing-room, that Miss Filkin had only just finished making the claret cup, or that Dora had been cutting sandwiches till the last minute, or that Mrs Milburn had been obliged to have a distinct understanding with the maid--Mrs Milburn's servants were all "maids," even the charwoman, who had buried three husbands--on the subject of wearing a cap when she answered the door.

Mrs Milburn sat on a chair she had worked herself, occupied with something in the new stitch; Dora performed lightly at the piano; Miss Filkin dipped into Selections from the Poets of the Century, placed as remotely as possible from the others; Mr Milburn, with his legs crossed, turned and folded a Toronto evening paper.

Mrs Milburn had somewhat objected to the evening paper in the drawing-room.

"Won't you look at a magazine, Octavius ?" she said; but Mr Milburn advanced the argument that it removed "any appearance of stiffness," and prevailed.