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Updated: September 20, 2025
A soulless, skyless, catarrhal day, as if that bustling dowager, old mother Earth what with match-making in spring, and fetes champetres in summer, and dinner-giving in autumn was fairly worn out, and put to bed with the influenza, under wet blankets and the cold-water cure.
Indeed, the bare simplicity of my menu, had it been previously disclosed, would doubtless have disappointed more than one of my dinner-giving patronesses; but each item had been perfected to an extent never achieved by them. Their weakness had ever been to serve a profusion of neutral dishes, pleasing enough to the eye, but unedifying except as a spectacle.
The jays with peacocks' feathers are the Snobs of this world: and never, since the days of Aesop, were they more numerous in any land than they are at present in this free country. How does this most ancient apologue apply to the subject in hand? the Dinner-giving Snob.
O you misguided dinner-giving Snobs, think how much pleasure you lose, and how much mischief you do with your absurd grandeurs and hypocrisies!
Suppose you pretend to be richer and grander than you ought to be you are a Dinner-giving Snob. And oh, I tremble to think how many and many a one will read this!
We can afford to be very bitter upon them now they are all gone. Now there are no more parties, let us have at the Party-giving Snobs. The dinner-giving, the ball-giving, the DEJEUNER-giving, the CONVERSAZIONE-GIVING Snobs Lord! Lord! what havoc might have been made amongst them had we attacked them during the plethora of the season!
But this rôle of moral amalgam is such a difficult one, it must be performed with such tact and delicacy, that hostesses are justified in employing whatever mechanical aids are at their command. In dinner-giving, the first process of amalgamation is to select congenial people. Dinners are very often flat failures conversationally because guests are invited at random.
One would think that modern luxury had reached its ultimatum in the delicate refinements of dinner-giving, but each dinner-table reveals the fact that this is an inexhaustible subject. The floral world is capable of an infinity of surprises, and the last one is a cameo of flowers on a door, shaped like a four-leaved clover. The guests are thus assured of good-luck.
But this man was a consummate servant, who laid the table and attended it, with an ease and grace that gave his mistress that pleasant feeling of certainty that all would go well, which is the most comfortable of all feelings to a hostess, and without which dinner-giving is annoyance beyond all words.
I might go into Parliament, and make something of a name for myself. I could write books instead of anonymous articles. I should scarcely sink down into an idle mindless existence of dinner-giving and dinner-eating. Yes, I think the best thing that could happen to me would be to marry Adela Branston."
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