Cocktail Talk: The Claverings
My love of Anthony Trollope is much documented on the many pages of this blog (so many, many pages). You probably are sick of hearing me go on and on, in my spot as the Trollope standard bearer for this here century. But maybe you aren’t – I’m going to believe that, and drop another Trollope quote in, this time from The Claverings, which, as the back cover tells you, is one of Trollope’s “three faultless books.” They all seem fairly faultless to me (well, okay, maybe that’s overstating), but I do wonder what the back cover blurber thought the other two were? I’ll never know, but I do know that I don’t drink enough port, so if you want to bring me a bottle (as in the below) I won’t turn it down.When dinner was over, Burton got up from his seat. “Harry,” said he, “do you like good wine?” Harry said that he did. Whatever women may say about wild fowl, men never profess an indifference to good wine, although there is a theory about the world, quite as incorrect as it is general, that they have given up drinking it. “Indeed I do,” said Harry. “Then I’ll give you a bottle of port,” said Burton, and so saying he left the room.
“I’m very glad you have come to-day,” said Jones, with much gravity. “He never gives me any of that when I’m alone with him; and he never, by any means, brings it out for company.”
“You don’t mean to accuse him of drinking it alone, Tom?” said his sister, laughing.
“I don’t know when he drinks it; I only know when he doesn’t.”
The wine was decanted with as much care as had been given to the concoction of the gravy, and the clearness of the dark liquid was scrutinized with an eye that was full of anxious care. “Now, Cissy, what do you think of that? She knows a glass of good wine when she gets it, as well as you do Harry, in spite of her contempt for the duck.”
— Anthony Trollope, The Claverings
