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prophesied well of it. That left only five at home, but they always had Abby over in the West Ward, where Abby’s housekeeping made an interest and Abby’s baby a point of pilgrimage. These considerations almost consoled Mrs. Murchison, declaring, as she did, that all of them might have gone but Abby, who alone knew how to be “any comfort or any dependence” in the house; who could be left with a day’s preserving; and I tell you that to be left by Mrs. Murchison with a day’s preserving, be it cherries or strawberries, damsons or pears, was a mark of confidence not easy to obtain. Advena never had it; Advena, indeed, might have married and removed no prop of the family economy. Mrs. Murchison would have been “sorry for the man” – she maintained a candour toward and about those belonging to her that permitted no illusions – but she would have stood cheerfully out of the way on her own account. When you have seen your daughter reach and pass the age of twenty-five without having learned properly to make her own bed, you know, without being told, that she will never be fit for the management of a house – don’t you? Very well then. And for ever and for ever, no matter what there was to do, with a book in her hand – Mrs. Murchison would put an emphasis on the “book” which scarcely concealed a contempt for such absorption. And if, at the end of your patience, you told her for any sake to put it down and attend to matters, obeying in a kind of dream that generally drove you to take the thing out of her hands and do it yourself, rather than jump out of your skin watching her.
    Sincerely Mrs. Murchison would have been sorry for the man if he had arrived, but he had not arrived. Advena justifiedher existence by taking the university course for women at Toronto, and afterward teaching the English branches to the junior forms in the Collegiate Institute, which placed her arbitrarily outside the sphere of domestic criticism. Mrs. Murchison was thankful to have her there – outside – where little more could reasonably be expected of her than that she should be down in time for breakfast. It is so irritating to be justified in expecting more than seems likely to come. Mrs. Murchison’s ideas circulated strictly in the orbit of equity and reason; she expected nothing from anybody that she did not expect from herself; indeed, she would spare others in far larger proportion. But the sense of obligation which led her to offer herself up to the last volt of her energy made her miserable when she considered that she was not fairly done by in return. Pressed down and running over were the services she offered to the general good, and it was on the ground of the merest justice that she required from her daughters “some sort of interest” in domestic affairs. From her eldest she got no sort of interest, and it was like the removal of a grievance from the hearth when Advena took up employment which ranged her definitely beyond the necessity of being of any earthly use in the house. Advena’s occupation to some extent absorbed her shortcomings, which was much better than having to attribute them to her being naturally “through-other,” or naturally clever, according to the bias of the moment. Mrs. Murchison no longer excused or complained of her daughter; but she still pitied the man.
    “The boys,” of course, were too young to think of matrimony. They were still the boys, the Murchison boys; they would be the boys at forty if they remained under their father’s roof. In the mother country, men in short jackets and round collars emerge from the preparatory schools: in the daughterlands boys in tail coats conduct serious affairs. Alec and Oliver, in the business, were frivolous enough as to the feminine interest. For all Dr. Drummond’s expressed and widely-known views upon the subject, it was a common thing for one or both of these young men to stray from the family pew on Sunday evenings to the services of