He rose from the table convinced "that it is very possible for a woman to be totally ignorant of the ordinary but indispensable duties of common life without knowing one word of Latin."
Next he goes to dine with his father's friend, Sir John Belfield, in Cavendish Square. All is delightful here, conversation and everything else, till dessert, when in rush all the children, to be petted and flattered and fed, little to their own benefit, and greatly to the discomfiture of the guest, who finds rational talk impossible.
Then follows a visit to one of those ladies whose form of piety has somewhat gone out of fashion, who avows that, since grace alone is efficacious, it was not worth while to attend to the religious training of her daughters, but to leave them to be converted. Another family disgusts Cœlebs by their more than toleration of a man of fashion of bad character, and so do a pair of young ladies by their heartless coquetries.
With the Belfields he is happier, but they are too easy-going, and think "things may be carried too far" when the standard of the Gospel is suggested. Their house becomes a sort of home to him, and he gets the opportunity of seeing the lady who is a slave to fashion, and the lady whom we should now term a frisky matron, but who was then "a modish dowager." Certainly types repeat themselves: Lady
