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Look here, it is just sixteen feet by fifteen; did any man ever hear of a dining-room of such proportions!” The archdeacon stepped the room long-ways and cross-ways with ponderous steps, as though a certain amount of ecclesiastical dignity could be imparted even to such an occupation as that by the manner of doing it. “Barely sixteen; you may call it a square.” “It would do very well for a round table,” suggested the ex-warden. Now there was something peculiarly unorthodox, in the archdeacon’s estimation, in the idea of a round table. He had always been accustomed to a goodly board of decent length, comfortably elongating itself according to the number of the guests, nearly black with perpetual rubbing, and as bright as a mirror. Now round dinner-tables are generally of oak, or else of such new construction as not to have acquired the peculiar hue which was so pleasing to him. He connected them with what he called the nasty newfangled method of leaving a cloth on the table, as though to warn people that they were not to sit long. In his eyes there was something democratic and parvenu in a round table. He imagined that dissenters and calico-printers chiefly used them, and perhaps a few literary lions more conspicuous for their wit than their gentility. He was a little flurried at the idea of such an article being introduced into the diocese by a protégé of his own and at the instigation of his father-inlaw. “A round dinner-table,” said he with some heat, “is the most abominable article of furniture that ever was invented. I hope that Arabin has more taste than to allow such a thing in his house.”