Twentieth Century Culture and Deportment / Or the Lady and Gentleman at Home and Abroad; Containing Rules of Etiquette for All Occasions, Including Calls; Invitations; Parties; Weddings; Receptions; Dinners and Teas; Etiquette of the Street; Public Places, Etc., Etc. Forming a Complete Guide to Self-Culture; the Art of Dressing Well; Conversation; Courtship; Etiquette for Children; Letter-Writing; Artistic Home and Interior Decorations, Etc.

by Maud C. Cooke

Love Feeds on Love.

Meet in your most attractive habiliments of mind and person. French ladies will see their affianced only when arrayed in their best toilet. Yet mental charms vastly surpass millinery. Neither can render yourselves too lovely.

Express affectionate fondness in your visits and letters; the more the better, so that you keep it a sentiment, not debase it by animal passion. It is still establishing its rootlets, like young corn, instead of growing. Allow no amatory excitement, no frenzied, delirious intoxication with it; for its violence, like every other, must react only to exhaust and paralyze itself by its own excesses.

Affianced young man, life has its epochs, which revolutionize it for good or bad. You are now in one. You have heretofore affiliated much with men; formed habits of smoking or chewing tobacco; indulged in late suppers; abused yourself in various ways; perhaps been on sprees. Now is your time to take a new departure from whatever is evil to all that is good and pure. Break up most of your masculine associations; and affiliate chiefly with your affianced. Be out no more nights. Let your new responsibilities and relations brace you up against their temptations; and, if these are not sufficient, your prospective spouse will help. No other aid in resisting temptation and inspiring to good equals that of a loving, loved woman.

Break off from your cronyisms, clubs, societies, all engagements except such as mean imperative, cold-blooded business. Your new ties furnish an excellent excuse. All your spare time and small change are wanted for her. To give to bad habits the time and money due to her and setting up in life, is outrageous. Bend everything to your new relations, them to nothing. Now’s your time to turn over a new leaf, and turn all the angles, corners and right-about faces needed.

Affianced maiden, you have some departures to take and corners to turn. Your life has till now been frivolous, but has now become serious. You have no more need of toilet fineries; for “your market is made,” and you have work on hand far more important, namely, fitting yourself for your new duties. Find out what they demand of you, and set right about making a premium wife and mother. Both begin life anew. Forgetting the past, plant and sow now what you would gather and become always.