“No doubt she'd thought she was doing him a kindness, urging him to kick up his heels and loosen his too-tight cravat and learn to savor careless pleasures. As though he hadn't heard such urgings before, from every feckless acquaintance made uncomfortable by his example of propriety, or every heedless one who sailed through life never noticing that it was vigilant people, the people standing back from the merriment, who stomped out the fiery raisins dropped by others and kept everything from going up in flames.”
―
Cecilia Grant,
A Christmas Gone Perfectly Wrong
