You don't give enough thought to her--real thought--from one year's end to another to know whether you think she has an immortal soul or not!' Later Lydia's husband insists that they give a dinner.
It was to be a large dinner--large, that is, for Endbury--of twenty covers, and Lydia had never prepared a table for so many guests.

The number of objects necessary for the conventional setting of a dinner table appalled her.

She was so tired, and her attention was so fixed on the complicated processes going on uncertainly in the kitchen, that her brain reeled over the vast quantity of knives and forks and plates and glasses needed to convey food to twenty mouths on a festal occasion.

They persistently eluded her attempts to marshal them into order.

She discovered that she had put forks for the soup--that in some inexplicable way at the plate destined for an important guest there was a large kitchen spoon of iron, a wild sort of whimsical humor rose in her from the ferment of utter fatigue and anxiety.