But then we must remember that they are grown-up, that they have an opinion more or less valuable, and that they have idiosyncrasies to be respected, the while they respect ours, remembering our position towards them, our fuller experience, and our affectionate care for them. As long as the parents live, they should be master and mistress in the house; but the children should be as viceroys, helping their parents in every way that they can in their social duties and in the routine of the house. It is trying, we know, to have the piano going and billiard-balls rolling when we want to read Jones’s speech on Home Rule, or Gladstone’s latest statements; but it is far more trying not to know where one’s children are, and to feel they are happier anywhere else than in their own homes.
It is their home as much as it is ours, and it will be home indeed if by judicious training in their youth we have made friends of our children, if we have given them our confidence, our affection, and our best days, and have not become strangers to them by being perpetually in society when they were as perpetually sent to school; the while we have not become too familiar, and make them old before their time, by taking them with us to gatherings in smart frocks when they ought to have been disreputably shabby in pinafores in the nursery. Then we shall discover that our grown-up sons and daughters are not so many cuckoos pushing us out of the old nest, but intelligent friends and companions—all the more delightful to us because they are quite grown-up.
CHAPTER XIX.
ENTERTAINING ONE’S FRIENDS.
In a small house entertaining one’s friends is too often a most arduous and tiresome business, because we will one and all of us attempt to do a great deal too much, and appear to be able to afford all kinds of luxuries that we cannot possibly manage, and I strongly advise any young bride with small means and a smaller ménage to confine herself entirely to afternoon teas, which require no waiting and cost extremely little, and to refuse on her part to go out to large dinners, which she cannot return, and for which she can neither afford the necessary dress, gloves, flowers, nor cabs, asking her friends to invite her to simpler entertainments boldly, and giving her reasons, which, of course, will be received kindly and in good faith by her friends. I am convinced that this absurd striving after society is at the bottom of the falseness of most of our English entertainments, and I trust some day to see ‘parties’ on a much broader and more satisfactory basis than they are at present, and I therefore beg all young householders to pause before they begin the same old round of costly gaiety, and to consider if they at least cannot bring about a better state of things. I have often in different houses seen with amazement how invitations are issued, and wondered if I am the only person who is thus taken behind the scenes and shown how hollow such invitations often are. Surely I must be, or else the great crushes I read of would never come off, and the dinners I hear about would lack guests, for I have rarely heard invitations talked over without listening to some such conversation as this: ‘Ask the Joneses, Gertrude.’ ‘Oh no, mother! she is such a dowdy, and their last garden party was maddening.’ ‘I can’t help it, my dear. I went to their party, and we must pay them back. And then there are the Brownes; don’t forget the e—ridiculous creatures! It’s astonishing how some people creep up and others go down.’ ‘And he is dreadful, mother;’ and, in fact, I could go on for pages, while other pages could be occupied with descriptions of how the invitation is received at the Joneses’ and the Brownes’, who all go expecting to be bored or starved, and who return home to comment spitefully on an entertainment which, if successful, carries in their minds the donors half-way to the Bankruptcy Court, and, if a failure, is the cause of a good deal of violent abuse and unkind sneers levelled at their hosts. And then the conversation at these entertainments: ‘Have you seen the So-and-so’s lately?’ ‘Oh no; they never go anywhere now. Didn’t you hear about her and So-and-so?’ But really, when it comes to the talk I overhear at balls, dinners, at-homes, or in the Park, I lose my temper, and so will turn at once to other matters altogether.
Afternoon teas, tennis-parties, and little dinners are all possible to the young housekeeper, but the little dinners to be inexpensive must be in the winter, and for them I have written out half a dozen menus which may be of use in the ordinary household, with the ordinary plain cook of the period, whose wages are about 20l. These will be found at the end of the chapter, but to insure even such a modest dinner as one of these makes being a success the mistress must see herself that her glass and silver are spotless, the table well laid, and the flowers charmingly arranged by herself.
The very last fashion (which, however, may change next week, but is worth mentioning because of its simpleness and sense) for table arrangements is to have no dessert whatever on the table, which has a piece of embroidery in the centre of the cloth, and then in the middle of this place a large flat wide-open wicker basket, which you should cover entirely with moss; border it with ivy or berberis leaves, and stand any flowers you may be able to procure in such a way that they appear growing; low groups of flowers are arranged in vases all over the table with growing ferns in pots, and, in fact, the table is made to look as much like a bank of flowers as possible. Candles with shades to match the prevailing hue of the flowers should stand on the table, and the dessert should be handed round after dinner, and should consist of one dish of good fruit and one of French sweetmeats, thus simplifying matters very much indeed.
Flowers should never be mixed; daffodils and brown leaves look lovely together, so do scarlet geraniums and white azaleas, pink azaleas, and brown leaves; wisteria and laburnum, Maréchal Niel roses and lilacs, are all good contrasts, but clumps of yellow tulips, or narcissi or roses, all one colour, are undoubtedly more fashionable than even the small contrasts just spoken of, while Salviati glass is beautiful on a table, and the specimen glasses of that make hold flowers far better than anything else: and should flowers be scarce the centrepiece could be all brown ivy and mosses and evergreens, with just a few flowers in the Salviati glasses only.
But neither food nor flowers, nor, indeed, anything else, will make a party successful if the mistress does not make a good hostess, and exert herself to see her quests are happy. She should take care the right people meet, and nothing should induce her to refrain from introducing her guests; this is a most ridiculous practice, and is simply laziness. A hostess is bound to see all her guests are amused, and this can only be done by personally noticing who is talking to whom, and whether all the people present have some one with whom to converse.
This absence of introductions makes conversation almost a lost art, and has made the ordinary ‘society’ nothing more or less than a bore and a trouble; while, as the ambition of most people is to know more folks than their neighbours and to go to more balls in one night than our foremothers used to see in their lifetimes, entertaining has become a farce and bids fair to die of its own immensity.