FullReads

“You will make your party abominably genteel and stupid,” groaned Timmins. “Why don’t you ask some of our old friends? Old Mrs. Portman has asked us twenty times, I am sure, within the last two years.”

“And the last time we went there, there was pea-soup for dinner!” Mrs. Timmins said, with a look of ineffable scorn.

“Nobody can have been kinder than the Hodges have always been to us; and some sort of return we might make, I think.”

“Return, indeed! A pretty sound it is on the staircase to hear ‘Mr. and Mrs. ‘Odge and Miss ‘Odges’ pronounced by Billiter, who always leaves his h’s out. No, no: see attorneys at your chambers, my dear–but what could the poor creatures do in OUR society?” And so, one by one, Timmins’s old friends were tried and eliminated by Mrs. Timmins, just as if she had been an Irish Attorney-General, and they so many Catholics on Mr. Mitchel’s jury.

Mrs. Fitzroy insisted that the party should be of her very best company. Funnyman, the great wit, was asked, because of his jokes; and Mrs. Butt, on whom he practises; and Potter, who is asked because everybody else asks him; and Mr. Ranville Ranville of the Foreign Office, who might give some news of the Spanish squabble; and Botherby, who has suddenly sprung up into note because he is intimate with the French Revolution, and visits Ledru-Rollin and Lamartine. And these, with a couple more who are amis de la maison, made up the twenty, whom Mrs. Timmins thought she might safely invite to her little dinner.

But the deuce of it was, that when the answers to the invitations came back, everybody accepted! Here was a pretty quandary. How they were to get twenty into their dining-room was a calculation which poor Timmins could not solve at all; and he paced up and down the little room in dismay.

“Pooh!” said Rosa with a laugh. “Your sister Blanche looked very well in one of my dresses last year; and you know how stout she is. We will find some means to accommodate them all, depend upon it.”

Mrs. John Rowdy’s note to dear Rosa, accepting the latter’s invitation, was a very gracious and kind one; and Mrs. Fitz showed it to her husband when he came back from chambers. But there was another note which had arrived for him by this time from Mr. Rowdy–or rather from the firm; and to the effect that Mr. F. Timmins had overdrawn his account 28L. 18s. 6d., and was requested to pay that sum to his obedient servants, Stumpy, Rowdy and Co.

*****

And Timmins did not like to tell his wife that the contending parties in the Lough Foyle and Lough Corrib Railroad had come to a settlement, and that the fifteen guineas a day had consequently determined. “I have had seven days of it, though,” he thought; “and that will be enough to pay for the desk, the dinner, and the glasses, and make all right with Stumpy and Rowdy.”

III.

The cards for dinner having been issued, it became the duty of Mrs. Timmins to make further arrangements respecting the invitations to the tea-party which was to follow the more substantial meal.

These arrangements are difficult, as any lady knows who is in the habit of entertaining her friends. There are–

People who are offended if you ask them to tea whilst others have been asked to dinner;

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?” (the dear reader may fill up the —– to any strength, according to his liking)–or, “Upon my word, William my dear, it is too much to ask us to pay twelve shillings for a brougham, and to spend I don’t know how much in gloves, just to make our curtsies in Mrs. 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.