At Squire Cass's family party that day nobody mentioned Dunstan-
nobody was sorry for his absence, or feared it would be too long.
The doctor and his wife, uncle and aunt Kimble, were there, and the
annual Christmas talk was carried through without any omissions,
rising to the climax of Mr Kimble's experience when he walked the
London hospitals thirty years back, together with striking
professional anecdotes then gathered. Whereupon cards followed, with
aunt Kimble's annual failure to follow suit, and uncle Kimble's
irascibility concerning the odd trick which was rarely explicable to
him, when it was not on his side, without a general visitation of
tricks to see that they were formed on sound principles: the whole
being accompanied by a strong steaming odour of spirits-and-water.
But the party on Christmas-day, being a strictly family party,
was not the pre-eminently brilliant celebration of the season at the
Red House. It was the great dance on New Year's Eve that made the
glory of Squire Cass's hospitality, as of his forefathers', time out
of mind. This was the occasion when all the society of Raveloe and
Tarley, whether old acquaintances separated by long rutty distances,
or cooled acquaintances separated by misunderstandings concerning
runaway calves, or acquaintances founded on intermittent
condescension, counted on meeting and on comporting themselves with
mutual appropriateness.
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