"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.