Meanwhile the dinner in its earlier stages was dragging its slow length along true to Stirling form. The room was chilly¹, in spite of the calendar, and Aunt Alberta had the gas-logs lighted. Everybody in the clan² envied her those gas-logs except Valancy. Glorious open fires blazed in every room of her Blue Castle when autumnal nights were cool, but she would have frozen to death in it before she would have committed the sacrilege of a gas-log. Uncle Herbert made his hardy³ perennial⁴ joke when he helped Aunt Wellington to the cold meat—“Mary, will you have a little lamb?” Aunt Mildred told the same old story of once finding a lost ring in a turkey’s crop. Uncle Benjamin told his favourite prosy tale of how he had once chased and punished a now famous man for stealing apples. Second Cousin Jane described all her sufferings with an ulcerating tooth. Aunt Wellington admired the pattern of Aunt Alberta’s silver teaspoons⁵ and lamented⁷ the fact that one of her own had been lost.

 

“It spoiled the set. I could never get it matched. And it was my wedding-present from dear old Aunt Matilda.”

 

Aunt Isabel thought the seasons were changing and couldn’t imagine what had become of our good, old-fashioned springs. Cousin Georgiana, as usual, discussed the last funeral and wondered, audibly, “which of us will be the next to pass away.” Cousin Georgiana could never say anything as blunt as “die.” Valancy thought she could tell her, but didn’t. Cousin Gladys, likewise as usual, had a grievance⁸. Her visiting nephews had nipped all the buds off her house-plants and chivied her brood of fancy chickens—“squeezed some of them actually to death, my dear.”

 

“Boys will be boys,” reminded Uncle Herbert tolerantly.

 

“But they needn’t be

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