As for describing, then, the mere¹ victuals² on Timmins's table, that would be absurd. Everybody—(I mean of the genteel world of course, of which I make no doubt the reader is a polite ornament)—Everybody has the same everything in London. You see the same coats, the same dinners, the same boiled fowls³ and mutton, the same cutlets, fish, and cucumbers, the same lumps of Wenham Lake ice, &c. The waiters with white neck-cloths are as like each other everywhere as the peas which they hand round with the ducks of the second course. Can't any one invent anything new?

 

The only difference between Timmins's dinner and his neighbor's was, that he had hired, as we have said, the greater part of the plate, and that his cowardly conscience magnified faults and disasters of which no one else probably took heed⁴.

 

But Rosa thought, from the supercilious⁵ air with which Mrs. Topham Sawyer was eying the plate and other arrangements, that she was remarking the difference of the ciphers⁶ on the forks and spoons—which had, in fact, been borrowed from every one of Fitzroy's friends—(I know, for instance, that he had my six, among others, and only returned five, along with a battered⁷ old black-pronged plated abomination, which I have no doubt belongs to Mrs. Gashleigh, whom I hereby request to send back mine in exchange)—their guilty consciences, I say, made them fancy that every one was spying out their domestic deficiencies: whereas, it is probable that nobody present thought of their failings at all. People never do: they never see holes in their neighbors' coats—they are too indolent, simple, and charitable.

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