"Impossible!"
"You may doubt it—anybody would—but actually, yesterday, talking to Lord Wigton, I was threatened with a fit of prosing! a thing I never was subject to, and I never heard it had been in our family! Whether do you dislike most, a professed wit, or a professed proser, Sir Patrick?"
"My favorite society is any old lady of seventy, who has met with great misfortunes!"
"Well, I am not much upon that pattern, certainly, but fifty years hence, we might make an appointment, perhaps, to meet here again."
"How many succession of visitors will before then have flourished in this house, and vanished. Even after the interval of one season, a visitor's return is like coming back from the grave. Nothing is remembered of either yourself or your cotemporaries. Guests, waiters, landlords, and even boots, have all disappeared."
"Very affecting, indeed," said Mrs. O'Donoghoe; "but half the dinner has disappeared during that long moral discourse of yours, Sir Patrick. Among the transitory things in this house, pray enumerate, another time, the entre-mets and vegetables."
"Pardon me—these dishes re-appear only too often. I have known some of those pies intimately for several days. In our regiment, we called such revivals 'old clothes,' and it really is too bad treating ninety deserving people so ill."
"I should like to live upon the diet of a chameleon! Eating is a vulgar necessity which the mind despises," observed Mrs. O'Donoghoe, helping herself to a pate; "but some of the company here seem ne pour la digestion, talking love and sentiment over a haunch of venison. Mr. Crawford tells me that an Indian dinner party lasts twelve hours, and people who sit down as thin as skeletons, rise from table quite corpulent."
"It certainly does require the aid of refined conversation to keep up our self-respect in a scene of such gormandizing. For my own part, I live upon anti-pastry principles, and am also a no-vegetable man; but I wish haunches of venison had never been invented! I made fifteen mortal enemies by the last I carved in this house, because no one thought I had given him the best slice," observed Sir Patrick. "I wish all men like old Doncaster, who eat more good things in a day than they say in a year, would dine alone."
"But I think," said Mr. Crawford, "that the habit of meeting at meals is one of our most excellent social customs! If each individual in a family were merely to snatch a morsel when hungry, there would be no re-union, and often no intimacy among members even of the same household. I like frequently to trace the usefulness of old established customs, which have been sanctioned by successive generations, because the advantages are always so much greater than they at first appear, that it has now become quite a sufficient reason for me to respect any custom, when I find that it is an old one."