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And a note was written and transported by the page early next morning to the mansion of the Sawyers, in Belgravine Place. The Topham Sawyers had just come down to breakfast; Mrs. Mrs. Topham Sawyer. "Well, upon my word, I don't know where things will end. Mr. Sawyer, the Timminses have asked us to dinner." Mr. Topham Sawyer. "Ask us to dinner! What d impudence!" Mrs. Topham Sawyer.
The Timminses, who give tiresome little dinners which they cannot afford to dull people who don't want them, are still alive and miserably bent on heaping reluctant beneficiaries with undesired favors, and spoiling the simple 'pleasure of the time' with the activities of their fatuous vanity. Or perhaps you think I ought to bring a hopeful mind even to the Timminses?"
"No, I am in no danger of that," the Easy Chair retorted. "The Timminses are no such victims of the conditions. They are of that vast moderately moneyed class who can perfectly well behave with sense if they will. Nobody above them or below them asks them to be foolish and wasteful." "And just now you were making excuses for them!"
"I don't see why not," said the Easy Chair. "They are not the architects of their own personalities." "Ah, take care, take care!" cried the unreal editor. "You will be saying next that we are the creatures of our environment; that the Timminses would be wiser and better if the conditions were not idiotic and pernicious; and you know what that comes to!"
People who are offended if you ask them to tea at all; and cry out furiously, "Good heavens! Jane my love, why do these Timminses suppose that I am to leave my dinner-table to attend their soiree?" Timmins's little drawing-room." Mrs. Moser made the latter remark about the Timmins affair, while the former was uttered by Mr. Grumpley, barrister-at-law, to his lady, in Gloucester Place.
'In the very promise of the year appears the hectic of its decay.... The question that we have to ask, forecasting in these summer days the coming of Christmas which already shines afar off, is this: whether while we praise Christmas as a day of general joy we take care to keep it so.... Thackeray describes a little dinner at the Timminses'. A modest couple make themselves miserable and spend all their little earnings in order to give a dinner to people for whom they do not care, and who do not care for them.... Christmas is made miserable to the Timminses because they feel that they must spend lavishly and buy gifts like their richer neighbors.... You cannot buy Christmas at the shops, and a sign of friendly sympathy costs little.... Should not the extravagance of Christmas cause every honest man and woman practically to protest by refusing to yield to the extravagance? There!" the Easy Chair broke off from quoting, "that was Curtis!
Crowder had got round the room, the hanging-lamp in the dining-room below was stove in, and fell with a crash on the table, now prepared for refreshment. Why, in fact, did the Timminses give that party at all? It was quite beyond their means. They have offended a score of their old friends, and pleased none of their acquaintances.
In his heart he was sick of Christmas: not of the dear and high event, the greatest in the memory of the world, which it records and embodies, but the stale and wearisome Christmas of the Christmas presents, purchased in rage and bestowed in despair; the Christmas of Christmas fiction; the Christmas of heavy Christmas dinners and indigestions; the Christmas of all superfluity and surfeit and sentimentality; the Christmas of the Timminses and the Tiny Tims.
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