"To whom? Our friends are not that sort of people."
"How do you know but they may be? How can you tell but the taste or the tendency may be where you least think of it?"
"You don't mean that Mr. St. Leger has anything of that sort?" said Christina, facing round upon her.
"No more than other people, so far as I know. I am speaking in general, Christina. The thing is in the world; and we, I do think, we whose example would influence people,—I suppose everybody's example influences somebody else—I think we ought to do what we can."
"And not have wine on our dinner-tables!"
"Would that be so very dreadful?"
"It would be very inconvenient, I can tell you, and very disagreeable. Fancy! no wine on the table. No one could understand it. And how our dinner-tables would look, Dolly, with the wine-glasses and the decanters taken off! And then, what would people talk about? Wine is such a help in getting through with a dinner-party. People who do not know anything else, and cannot talk of anything else, can taste wine; and have plenty to say about its colour, and its bouquet, and its age, and its growth, and its manufacture, and where it can be got genuine, and how it can be adulterated. And so one gets through with the dinner quite comfortably."
"I should not want to see people who knew no more than that," said Dolly.
"Oh, but you must."
"Why?"