Dinner Favors.
Favors may be simple or elaborate, as the purse of the giver may dictate. Appropriateness and simplicity, however, show better taste than the extraordinary vagaries in which some indulge.
Among the really admirable selections which are offered by dealers of many sorts, nothing is better than the bonbonnieres shown by confectioners of the higher grade. They are delightful in color, exquisite in design, and while they are made into receptacles for sweets for the time being, they can later be turned to a dozen more permanent uses. One design which is, perhaps, the most elegant of all, takes the form of an opera bag. It is made of the heaviest cream-white silk and has embroidered on it in dainty ribbon work forget-me-nots, tiny rosebuds, or jessamine. At the top it is finished with the popular extension clasp of fine burnished gilt, and when in use as a favor is lined with tinted paper and filled with the finest chocolates or with candied violets.
Slippers, too, are seen, and, while not of glass, are suggestive of Cinderella’s tiny foot. They are crocheted of fine colored cord, are stiffened and molded over a form, then fitted with a bag of silk and tied with ribbons of the same shade. Like the bags, they are made the excuse of sweets, and, like them, they add to the decorative effect, for they stand in coquettish fashion before each cover and challenge the admiration inspired in the prince of fairy legend.
Books and “booklets” are much in vogue and make as acceptable favors as any that can be desired if only selected with judgment and with care. Small volumes of verse bound in vellum are always good. Single poems from any one of the recognized poets put up in artistic booklet form are as nearly perfect as favors can be. Book covers, too, are good, and some bookmarks are shown that are excellent both in color and in their evident ability to withstand the usage they are sure to get if they are allowed to do any service at all.
One clever hostess who gave a dinner, and who handles her brush unusually well, devised a book cover and leaflet combined that proved a great success. She had the covers made in the regulation size of pale sage chamois skin and added the decoration herself. She painted each in the flower that the guest loved best, for her feminine friends, and each in some convenient design for the men, and across the corner was the name of each in quaint gold letters. She folded heavy parchment paper in booklet form, and with her brush wrote in silver bronze selections from the wit and wisdom of the ages. Then she slipped the miniature books within the covers and left the brilliant thoughts that they contained to start the conversational ball. Her dinner was pronounced a great success, and it was remarked by many that there was none of that awkward silence which so often precedes the soup.
[Table Etiquette]
The minutiæ of table etiquette offers to onlookers the best evidence of good or ill-breeding, and in the graceful observance thereof is displayed all the “difference between dining elegantly and merely consuming food,” for it is at the table that the ill-bred and the well-bred man are most strongly contrasted.
How to eat soup, or partake of grapes, and what to do with a cherry stone, though apparently trivial in themselves, are weighty matters when taken as an index of social standing. And it is safe to say that the young man who drank from his saucer, or the young woman who ate peas with her knife, would court the risk of banishment from good society.
In regard to the first essentials of table manners we are bound to consider the laying of the table, the manner of being seated thereat, the use of the napkin, the proper handling of those most invaluable implements, knife, fork and spoon, together with a short dissertation on those older implements, “Adam’s knives and forks.”