'Miss Nancy's wonderful like what her mother was, though; isn't
she, Kimble?' said the stout lady of that name, looking round for
her husband.
But Doctor Kimble (county apothecaries in old days enjoyed that
title without authority of diploma), being a thin and agile man, was
flitting about the room with his hands in his pockets, making
himself agreeable to his feminine patients, with medical impartiality,
and being welcomed everywhere as a doctor by hereditary right- not one
of those miserable apothecaries who canvass for practice in strange
neighbourhoods, and spend all their income in starving their one
horse, but a man of substance, able to keep an extravagant table
like the best of his patients. Time out of mind the Raveloe doctor had
been a Kimble; Kimble was inherently a doctor's name; and it was
difficult to contemplate firmly the melancholy fact that the actual
Kimble had no son, so that his practice might one day be handed over
to a successor, with the incongruous name of Taylor or Johnson. But in
that case the wiser people in Raveloe would employ Dr Blick of
Flitton- as less unnatural.
'Did you speak to me, my dear?' said the authentic doctor, coming
quickly to his wife's side; but, as if foreseeing that she would be
too much out of breath to repeat her remark, he went on immediately-
'Ha, Miss Priscilla, the sight of you revives the taste of that
super-excellent pork-pie.
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