Then four
times during the two hours' period of her conversazione tea and cake
were to be handed round on salvers. It is astonishing how far a
very little cake will go in this way, particularly if administered
tolerably early after dinner. The men can't eat it, and the women,
having no plates and no table, are obliged to abstain. Mrs. Jones
knows that she cannot hold a piece of crumbly cake in her hand till
it be consumed without doing 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 neighbours,--or more especially with a pleasant
neighbour,--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.
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