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It is up there that they invent the legends for the crackers, and the wonderful riddles and remarks on the bonbons. No mortal, I am sure, could write them.

I never saw a man in such a state as Fitzroy Timmins in the presence of those ravishing houris. Mrs. Fitz having explained that they required a dinner for twenty persons, the chief young lady asked what Mr. and Mrs. Fitz would like, and named a thousand things, each better than the other, to all of which Fitz instantly said yes. The wretch was in such a state of infatuation that I believe if that lady had proposed to him a fricasseed elephant, or a boa-constrictor in jelly, he would have said, “O yes, certainly; put it down.”

That Peri wrote down in her album a list of things which it would make your mouth water to listen to. But she took it all quite calmly. Heaven bless you! THEY don’t care about things that are no delicacies to them! But whatever she chose to write down, Fitzroy let her.

After the dinner and dessert were ordered (at Fubsby’s they furnish everything: dinner and dessert, plate and china, servants in your own livery, and, if you please, guests of title too), the married couple retreated from that shop of wonders; Rosa delighted that the trouble of the dinner was all off their hands but she was afraid it would be rather expensive.

“Nothing can be too expensive which pleases YOU, dear,” Fitz said.

“By the way, one of those young women was rather good-looking,” Rosa remarked: “the one in the cap with the blue ribbons.” (And she cast about the shape of the cap in her mind, and determined to have exactly such another.)

“Think so? I didn’t observe,” said the miserable hypocrite by her side; and when he had seen Rosa home, he went back, like an infamous fiend, to order something else which he had forgotten, he said, at Fubsby’s. Get out of that Paradise, you cowardly, creeping, vile serpent you!

Until the day of the dinner, the infatuated fop was ALWAYS going to Fubsby’s. HE WAS REMARKED THERE. He used to go before he went to chambers in the morning, and sometimes on his return from the Temple: but the morning was the time which he preferred; and one day, when he went on one of his eternal pretexts, and was chattering and flirting at the counter, a lady who had been reading yesterday’s paper and eating a halfpenny bun for an hour in the back shop (if that paradise may be called a shop)–a lady stepped forward, laid down the Morning Herald, and confronted him.

That lady was Mrs. Gashleigh. From that day the miserable Fitzroy was in her power; and she resumed a sway over his house, to shake off which had been the object of his life, and the result of many battles. And for a mere freak–(for, on going into Fubsby’s a week afterwards he found the Peris drinking tea out of blue cups, and eating stale bread and butter, when his absurd passion instantly vanished)–I say, for a mere freak, the most intolerable burden of his life was put on his shoulders again–his mother-in-law.

On the day before the little dinner took place–and I promise you we shall come to it in the very next chapter–a tall and elegant middle-aged gentleman, who might have passed for an earl but that there was a slight incompleteness about his hands and feet, the former being uncommonly red, and the latter large and irregular, was introduced to Mrs. Timmins by the page, who announced him as Mr. Truncheon.

“I’m Truncheon, Ma’am,” he said, with a low bow.

“Indeed!” said Rosa.

“About the dinner M’m, from Fubsby’s, M’m. As you have no butler, M’m, I presume you will wish me to act as sich. I shall bring two persons as haids to-morrow; both answers to the name of John. I’d best, if you please, inspect the premisis, and will think you to allow your young man to show me the pantry and kitching.”