We were entertained by not a few of them. We went to Sunday mid-day dinner with the Earl and Countess of Rumborough, in the parlour behind their shop, over which an aroma of jaded cauliflower lay more in evidence than is customary in the mansions of the great. We drank tea again with the Earl and Countess of Blueberry, and this time the head of the house was present, and treated me with a stately courtesy that impressed me a good deal with the dignity of the family with which I was about to connect myself. I also dined with the Viscount Sandpits, at the mess of his gang, sitting on a plank in the middle of one of the busiest streets in Culbut, and drinking beer out of a tin can.[31] A married sister of Mr. Perry's, not bitten with philanthropic ideas, gave a theatre party for us, and we sat in the front row of the pit, after an agreeable wait of an hour outside the door, and ate oranges between the acts. And we conferred a much-appreciated honour on a rich relation of Mr. Perry's by accepting an invitation to a dinner-party at her house. Her husband had been unfortunate in the coal business, and had sunk from a clerkship in a colliery company to owning the whole concern. Most of our fellow guests were melancholy and rather subservient people who had made a similar mess of their lives, and were pathetically envious of the bright prospects that were opening out before Miriam and me. And finally, Mrs. Claudie Chanticleer, who had turned up one morning at Magnolia Hall, in a bedraggled and hectic state, to take away a few scraps from the dustbin, invited us to a picnic in the country, to meet all that was smartest and dirtiest in the exclusive set of which she was an ornament. We were a little doubtful about accepting this invitation, gratifying as it was. It was Mr. Perry who pressed us to do so. He said that he hated the dirty set and all their ways. It was not through such as they that the regeneration of Upsidonian society would come. At the same time, they included amongst them some of the most aristocratic families in the country, and it would give us a _cachet_ to have our names in the papers as having taken part in one of their entertainments. When we still demurred, he pointed out that my social investigations could not be considered complete unless I mixed with all classes of the community. So at last we accepted the invitation. Mr. Perry refused it for himself, as he said he had a touch of rheumatism and was afraid of the damp grass; but Edward accepted, saying that he had been working very hard lately and wanted recreation; and Mrs. Perry went to chaperon Miriam. Mrs. Eppstein, who had seen the announcement of the coming function in the papers, came round to hear all about it, and said that she had not for a moment expected that Tricky Chanticleer would have asked _her_, although they had been at school together, and in those days nobody thought anything of Tricky, who had always had a red nose.