various returns Mrs. Finley then read and received in the course of the day. She had made a great effort to assemble a party of fashionable people: she had, to use the current word, cut those of her acquaintance that might be suspected of vulgarity; and she had left her cards at the houses of those who had been all their lives, and their parents before them, in the best society. She was sure Mrs. Kingson, at whose request she had repeatedly subscribed to societies, would accept; and, if Mrs. Kingson accepted, the Misses —— would, and then the Baron de —— would, and then the success of her party was secured. Presuming upon all this, no expense had been spared: the Kendall band had been engaged; and the party was to be as brilliant as music, lights, china, glass, and the luxuries of the season could make it. Finley, whose vanity was his next strongest passion to his cupidity, had been lavish of his money. Every thing his wife asked for he had granted, with one single reservation: he had stood at bay at a paté de foie gras,[1] which his wife maintained to be essential. "What, thirty dollars," he said, "for what was nothing, after all, but a pie of geese's livers!—no, he could not go that!" and Mrs. Morris Finley, more prudent than some wives, never urged when morally certain of urging in vain.
- ↑ As we hope to have readers who never heard of a paté foie gras, we inform them that it is an eatable not very rare at evening parties. It is a pie imported from France, and costing, if we are correctly informed, from twenty to fifty dollars. An unnatural enlargement of the liver of geese is produced by confining the bird, and subjecting it to artificial heat. We hardly know which most to admire,—the mercy of the ingenious gastronomist who devised this luxury, or the taste of its consumers.
