"Indeed it does, Mrs. Proudie; and is so vulgar too!" those ladies would reply.
But the elder among them would remember with regret the unsparing, open-handed hospitality of Barchester palace in the good old days of Bishop Grantly—God rest his soul! One old vicar's wife there was whose answer had not been so courteous:
"When we are hungry, Mrs. Proudie," she had said, "we do all have sensual propensities."
"It would be much better, Mrs. Athill, if the world would provide for all that at home," Mrs. Proudie had rapidly replied; with which opinion I must here profess that I can not by any means bring myself to coincide.
But a conversazione would give play to no sensual propensity, nor occasion that intolerable expense which the gratification of sensual propensities too often produces. Mrs. Proudie felt that the word was not all that she could have desired. It was a little faded by old use and present oblivion, and seemed to address itself to that portion of the London world that is considered blue rather than fashionable. But, nevertheless, there was a spirituality about it which suited her, and one may also say an economy. And then, as regarded fashion, it might, perhaps, not be beyond the power of a Mrs. Proudie to regild the word with a newly-burnished gilding. Some leading person must produce fashion at first hand, and why not Mrs. Proudie?
Her plan was to set the people by the ears talking, if talk they would, or to induce them to show themselves there inert, if no more could be got from them. To accommodate with chairs and sofas as many as the furniture of her noble suite of rooms would allow, especially with the two chairs and padded bench against the wall in the back closet—the small inner drawing-room, as she would call it to the clergymen's wives from Barsetshire—and to let the others stand about upright, or "group themselves," as she described it. Then four times during the two hours' period of her conversazione tea and cake was to be handed round on salvers. It is astonishing how far a very little cake will go in this way, particularly if administered tolerably early after dinner. The men can't eat it, and the women, having no plates and no table, are obliged to abstain. Mrs. Jones knows that she can not hold a piece of crumbly cake in her hand till it be consumed without do-
