the present.

As for describing, then, the mere victuals 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 fowls 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 heed.

But Rosa thought, from the supercilious air with which Mrs. Topham
Sawyer was eying the plate and other arrangements, that she was
remarking the difference of the ciphers 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 battered 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.