"What a nice man it must have been who said that!" exclaimed Mrs. Fielden. "It would be quite easy to do without meat on one's table, but it would be impossible to dine without flowers and dessert."
It must be admitted that Eliza had the last word in the argument after all.
"Just so," she said; "and all life shows just this—that a woman has, with her usual perverseness, chosen a diet of flowers and dessert with intervals of starvation, instead of wholesome meat and pudding."
CHAPTER VI.
"We shall have to ask the engaged couple to dinner," I said to Palestrina one morning a few days later. "And I suppose one or two more of the rest of The Family would like to be asked at the same time."
"I never know in what quantities one ought to ask the Jamiesons," said my sister, "nor how to make a proper selection. It seems invidious to suggest that Kate and Eliza and Margaret should come, and not Maud and Gracie; and yet what is one to do? The last time that you were away from home I wrote and said, 'Will a few of you come?' And Mrs. Jamieson, the Pirate Boy, and four sisters came."
"One feels sure," I replied, "that the Jamiesons thought that was quite a modest number to take advantage of your invitation. One knows that had they been inviting some girls from a boarding-school they would have included the entire number of pupils."
Palestrina protested that as the meal to which our friends were to come was dinner, it would be only reasonable to invite the same number of ladies and gentlemen; and to this I assented. She suggested asking the Darcey-Jacobs, whom we had not seen for a long time.
Mrs. Darcey-Jacobs is a woman who always affords one considerable inward amusement, being herself, I believe, more conspicuously devoid of humour than any one else I have ever met. Mrs. Darcey-Jacobs has never been known to see a joke. That she herself should appear to any one in a humorous light would, I know, appear an inconceivable contingency to her. She has a high Roman nose, and rather faded yellow hair, which was her principal claim to beauty when a girl. It is even now thick and long, and is always worn in a sort of majestic coronet on the top of her head. Her manner is somewhat formidable and emphatic, and the alarm which this engenders in timid or diffident persons is increased by the habit she has of accentuating many of her remarks by a playful but really somewhat severe rap over the knuckles of the person she is addressing, with her fan or lorgnettes. She dresses handsomely in expensive materials somewhat gaudy in colour, and she has an erect carriage, of which she is very proud. Mrs. Darcey-Jacobs has a good deal to say on the subject of the feeble-mindedness of the male sex, and when something has been proved impossible of attainment by them she always says, "A woman could have done it in five minutes."