CHAPTER NINE: THE ETIQUETTE OF DINNERS AND BALLS
Perfect Behavior | ||
ETIQUETTE IN THE SCHOOL
OF course, as the children become older, the instruction should gradually come to embrace all forms of correct behaviour, and the youthful games and rhymes should give way to the more complex and intricate problems
A Problem in Mathematics (7th grade)
A swimmer starts across a stream which is 450 yards wide. He swims
for five minutes at the rate of three miles per hour, and for three
minutes at the rate of four miles per hour. He then reaches the other
bank, where he sees a young lady five feet ten inches tall, walking
around a tree, in a circle the circumference of which is forty-two
yards.
A. What is the diameter of the circle?
B. How fast is the current flowing in the stream?
C. At what point would the swimmer land if there were no current in the
stream?
E. But suppose that he has no bathing suit on?
And so, when the young person has reached the age for his first formal dinner party, he will undoubtedly be able to handle the fundamentals of correct etiquette in a satisfactory manner. But, as in every sport or profession, there are certain refinements—certain niceties which come only after long experience—and it is with a view of helping the ambitious diner-out to master these more complex details, that I suggest that he study carefully the following "unwritten laws" which govern every dinner party.
In the first place, a guest is supposed tacitly to consent to the menu which the hostess has arranged, and the diner-out who makes a habit of saying "Squab, you know, never agrees with me—I wonder if I might have a couple of poached eggs," is apt to find that
Practical jokes are never countenanced at a formal affair of this sort. I do not mean that a certain amount of good-natured fun is out of place, but such "stunts" as pulling the hostess' chair out from under her—or gleefully kicking the shins of your neighbor under the table and shouting "Guess who?"—are decidedly among the "non-ests" of correct modern dinner-table behaviour.
Then, too, it is now distinctly bad form to practise legerdemain or feats of sleight-of-hand at a dinner party. Time was when it was considered correct for a young man who could do card or other tricks to add to the gayety of the party by displaying his skill, but that time is past, and the guest of today, who thinks to make a "hit" by pulling a live rabbit or a potted plant from the back of the mystified hostess or one of the butlers, is in reality only making a "fool" of himself if he only knew it. The same "taboo" also holds good as concerns
It does not "do," either, to "ride your hobby" at a dinner party, and the real truth as to the cause of the sudden social ostracism of young Freddie H—, a New York clubman of some years ago (now happily deceased), is that on one occasion this young fellow, who had developed a craze for marksmanship amounting almost to a mania, very nearly
It might also be remarked that the possession of certain physical gifts—such as the ability to wriggle one's ears or do the "splits"—is in itself no "open sesame" to lasting social success. "Slow and sure" is a good rule for the young man to follow, and although he may somewhat enviously watch his more brilliant colleagues as they gain momentary applause by their ability to throw their thumbs out of joint or squirt water through a hole in their front teeth, yet he may console himself with the thought that "the race is not always to the swift" and that "Rome was not built in a day." The gifts of this world have been distributed fairly equally, and you may be sure that the young girl who has been born a ventriloquist very likely is totally unable to spell difficult words correctly or carry even a simple tune.
CHAPTER NINE: THE ETIQUETTE OF DINNERS AND BALLS
Perfect Behavior | ||