The wonders were done:  one hundred and seventy guests plenteously fed at tables across the great Concert Hall, down a length of the conservatory-glass, on soups, fish, meats, and the kitchen-garden, under play of creative sauces, all in the persuasive steam of savouriness; every dish, one may say, advancing, curtseying, swimming to be your partner, instead of passively submitting to the eye of appetite, consenting to the teeth, as that rather melancholy procession of the cold, resembling established spinsters thrice-corseted in decorum, will appear to do.  Whether Armandine had the thought or that she simply acted in conformity with a Frenchwoman’s direct good sense, we do require to smell a sort of animation in the meats we consume.  We are still perhaps traceably related to the Adamite old-youngster just on his legs, who betrayed at every turn his Darwinian beginnings, and relished a palpitating unwillingness in the thing refreshing him; only we young-oldsters cherish the milder taste for willingness, with a throb of the vanquished in it.  And a seeming of that we get from the warm roast.  The banquet to be fervently remembered, should smoke, should send out a breath to meet us.  Victor’s crowded saloon-carriage was one voice of eulogy, to raise Armandine high as the finale rockets bursting over Wrensham Station at the start Londonward.  How had she managed?  We foolishly question the arts of magicians.

Mr. Pempton was an apparent dissentient, as the man must be who is half a century ahead of his fellows in humaneness, and saddened by the display of slaughtered herds and their devourers.  He had picked out his vegetable and farinaceous morsels, wherever he could get them uncontaminated; enough for sustenance; and the utmost he could show was, that he did not complain.  When mounted and ridden by the satirist, in wrath at him for systematically feasting the pride of the martyr on the maceration of his animal part, he put on his martyr’s pride, which assumed a perfect contentment in the critical depreciation of opposing systems:  he was drawn to state, as he had often done, that he considered our animal part shamefully and dangerously over nourished, and that much of the immorality of the world was due to the present excessive indulgence in meats.  ‘Not in drink?’ Miss Graves inquired.  ‘No,’ he said boldly; ’not equally; meats are more insidious.  I say nothing of taking life—­of fattening for that express purpose:  diseases of animals:  bad blood made:  cruelty superinduced:  it will be seen to be, it will be looked back on, as a form of, a second stage of, cannibalism.  Let that pass.  I say, that for excess in drinking, the penalty is paid instantly, or at least on the morrow.’

‘Paid by the drunkard’s wife, you should say.’

’Whereas intemperance in eating, corrupts constitutionally, more spiritually vitiates, we think:  on the whole, gluttony is the least-generous of the vices.’