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Updated: June 17, 2025
But indeed, my good Paetus, I advise you, joking apart, to associate with good fellows, and pleasant fellows, and men who are fond of you. There is nothing better worth having in life, nothing that makes life more happy.... See how I employ philosophy to reconcile you to dinner-parties.
Had it been otherwise he would have again entered the lists and tried to recover the love he had thrown away. Although he occasionally yielded to the entreaties of his sisters and showed himself with them at county gatherings, gave stately dinner-parties at regular intervals, and accepted the invitations of his neighbors, he lived the life almost of a recluse.
Then it was only a kiss of the hand and a hurried remark or two, at a large dinner-party at the Winwoods'. You see, there are such forces as rank and precedence at London dinner-parties, to which even princesses and fortunate youths have to yield. On this occasion, as he bent over her hand, he murmured: "May I say how beautiful you are to-night, Princess?"
Warwick as undermining her supporters, to bring them some day down with a crash! Her 'elect of London' were a queer gathering, by report of them! And Mr. Whitmonby too, no doubt a celebrity, was the right-hand man at these dinner-parties of Mrs. Warwick. Where will not men go to be flattered by a pretty woman! He had declined repeated, successive invitations to Lady Wathin's table.
"But I can't go to dinner-parties with women!" protested Thyrsis. "I don't dress!" Murray took that message; but in a few minutes he called up again. "She says she doesn't care whether you dress or not." "But then, I don't eat!" protested Thyrsis, who had recently discovered Horace Fletcher. "I know that won't count," said the other, laughing. "She doesn't want you to eat she wants you to talk."
His austere but not unhappy life was spent largely among books and in museums; his profound and patiently accumulated knowledge of a number of curiously disconnected subjects which had stirred his interest at different times had given him a place in the quiet, half-lit world of professors and curators and devotees of research; at their amiable, unconvivial dinner-parties he was most himself.
Indeed, I could not wish a very conceited man, of a somewhat grave temperament and distant demeanour, a much heavier punishment than a course of Irish dinner-parties; for even though he should come out scathless himself, the outrages to his sense of propriety, and the insults to his ideas of taste, would be a severe suffering.
Balls are doubtless the same in "society" all over the world; a certain amount of black cloth, kid gloves, white muslin, epaulettes if they can be procured, dancing, music, and ices. Every one acknowledges that dinner-parties are equally dull in London and Paris, in Calcutta and in New York, unless the next neighbour happens to be peculiarly agreeable.
There was the usual round of amusements dinner-parties, amateur concerts, races, flower-shows, excursions to every point of interest within a day's drive, a military ball at the garrison-town twenty miles off, perennial croquet, and gossip, and afternoon tea-drinking in arbours or marquees in the gardens, and unlimited flirtation. It was impossible for the most exacting visitor to be dull.
Sir Bernard Burke writes that Cheslyn "at dinner-parties, at which every portion of his dress was the cast-off clothes of his grander friends, always looked and was the gentleman; he made no secret of his poverty or of the generous hands that had 'rigged him out. 'This coat, he has been heard to say, 'was Radcliffe's; these pants, Granby's; this waistcoat, Scarborough's. His cheerfulness never forsook him; he was the victim of others' mismanagement and profusion, not of his own."
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