[The Book of Snobs by William Makepeace Thackeray]@TWC D-Link book
The Book of Snobs

CHAPTER XIX--DINING-OUT SNOBS
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But though you may have your own opinion about the hospitality of your acquaintances; and though men who ask you from sordid motives are most decidedly Dinner-giving Snobs, it is best not to inquire into their motives too keenly.

Be not too curious about the mouth of a gift-horse.

After all, a man does not intend to insult you by asking you to dinner.
Though, for that matter, I know some characters about town who actually consider themselves injured and insulted if the dinner or the company is not to their liking.

There is Guttleton, who dines at home off a shilling's-worth of beef from the cookshop, but if he is asked to dine at a house where there are not pease at the end of May, or cucumbers in March along with the turbot, thinks himself insulted by being invited.
'Good Ged!' says he, 'what the deuce do the Forkers mean by asking ME to a family dinner?
I can get mutton at home;' or 'What infernal impertinence it is of the Spooners to get ENTREES from the pastrycook's, and fancy that I am to be deceived with their stories about their French cook!' Then, again, there is Jack Puddington--I saw that honest fellow t'other day quite in a rage, because, as chance would have it, Sir John Carver asked him to meet the very same party he had met at Colonel Cramley's the day before, and he had not got up a new set of stories to entertain them.

Poor Dinner-giving Snobs! you don't know what small thanks you get for all your pains and money! How we Dining-out Snobs sneer at your cookery, and pooh-pooh your old hock, and are incredulous about your four-and-six-penny champagne, and know that the side-dishes of to-day are RECHAUFFES from the dinner of yesterday, and mark how certain dishes are whisked off the table untasted, so that they may figure at the banquet tomorrow.


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