ing serious injury to her best dress. When Mrs. Proudie, with her weekly books before her, looked into the financial upshot of her conversazione, her conscience told her that she had done the right thing.
Going out to tea is not a bad thing, if one can contrive to dine early, and then be allowed to sit round a big table with a tea-urn in the middle. I would, however, suggest that breakfast-cups should always be provided for the gentlemen. And then with pleasant neighbors—or more especially with a pleasant neighbor, the affair is not, according to my taste, by any means the worst phase of society. But I do dislike that handing round, unless it be of a subsidiary thimbleful when the business of the social intercourse has been dinner.
And, indeed, this handing round has become a vulgar and an intolerable nuisance among us second-class gentry with our eight hundred a year—there or thereabouts—doubly intolerable as being destructive of our natural comforts, and a wretchedly vulgar aping of men with large incomes. The Duke of Omnium and Lady Hartletop are undoubtedly wise to have every thing handed round. Friends of mine who occasionally dine at such houses tell me that they get their wine quite as quickly as they can drink it, that their mutton is brought to them without delay, and that the potato-bearer follows quick upon the heels of carnifer. Nothing can be more comfortable, and we may no doubt acknowledge that these first-class grandees do understand their material comforts. But we of the eight hundred can no more come up to them in this than we can in their opera-boxes and equipages. May I not say that the usual tether of this class, in the way of carnifers, cup-bearers, and the rest, does not reach beyond neat-handed Phyllis and the green-grocer? and that Phillis, neat-handed as she probably is, and the green-grocer, though he be ever so active, can not administer a dinner to twelve people who are prohibited by a Medo-Persian law from all self-administration whatever? And may I not farther say that the lamentable consequence to us eight hundreders dining out among each other is this, that we too often get no dinner at all. Phyllis, with the potatoes, can not reach us till our mutton is devoured, or in a lukewarm state, past our power of managing; and Ganymede, the green-grocer, though we admire the skill of his neck-tie and the whiteness of
