Manners and Social Usages

by M. E. W. Sherwood

Suppose, as was the case twice last winter, that an engagement of marriage is broken after the cards are out. Who is to repay the bridegroom if he has paid for the cards? Should the father of the bride send him a check? That would be very insulting, yet a family would feel nervous about being under pecuniary indebtedness to a discarded son-in-law. The lady can return her ring and the gifts her lover has made her; they have suffered no contact that will injure them. But she could not return shoes or gowns or bonnets.

It is therefore wisely ordered by etiquette that the lover be allowed to pay for nothing that could not be returned to him without loss, if the engagement were dissolved, even on the wedding morning.

Of course in primitive life the lover may pay for his lady-love, as we will say in the case of a pair of young people who come together in a humble station. Such marriages are common in America, and many of these pairs have mounted to the very highest social rank. But they must not attempt anything which is in imitation of the etiquette of fashionable life unless they can do it well and thoroughly.

Nothing is more honorable than a marriage celebrated in the presence only of father, mother, and priest. Two young people unwilling or unable to have splendid dresses, equipages, cards, and ceremony, can always be married this way, and go to the Senate or White House afterwards. They are not hampered by it hereafter. But the bride should never forget her dignity. She should never let the groom pay for cards, or for anything, unless it is the marriage license, wherever it is needful in this country, and the clergyman's fee. If she does, she puts herself in a false position.

A very sensible observer, writing of America and its young people, and the liberty allowed them, says "the liberty, or the license, of our youth will have to be curtailed. As our society becomes complex and artificial, like older societies in Europe, our children will be forced to approximate to them in status, and parents will have to waken to a sense of their responsibilities."

This is a remark which applies at once to that liberty permitted to engaged couples in rural neighborhoods, where the young girl is allowed to go on a journey at her lover's expense. A girl's natural protectors should know better than to allow this. They know that her purity is her chief attraction to man, and that a certain coyness and virginal freshness are the dowry she should bring her future husband. Suppose that this engagement is broken off. How will she be accepted by another lover after having enjoyed the hospitality of the first? Would it not always make a disagreeable feeling between the two men, although No. 2 might have perfect respect for the girl?

Etiquette may sometimes make blunders, but it is generally based on a right principle, and here it is undoubtedly founded in truth and justice. In other countries this truth is so fully realized that daughters are guarded by the vigilance of parents almost to the verge of absurdity. A young girl is never allowed to go out alone, and no man is permitted to enter the household until his character has undergone the closest scrutiny. Marriage is a unique contract, and all the various wrongs caused by hasty marriages, all the troubles before the courts, all the divorces, are multiplied by the carelessness of American parents, who, believing, and truly believing, in the almost universal purity of their daughters, are careless of the fold, not remembering the one black sheep.

This evil of excessive liberty and of the loose etiquette of our young people cannot be rooted out by laws. It must begin at the hearth-stone, Family life must be reformed; young ladies must be brought up with greater strictness. The bloom of innocence should not be brushed off by careless hands. If a mother leaves her daughter matronless, to receive attentions without her dignified presence, she opens the door to an unworthy man, who may mean marriage or not. He may be a most unsuitable husband even if he does mean marriage. If he takes the young lady about, paying for her cab hire, her theatre tickets, and her journeyings, and then drops her, whom have they to thank but themselves that her bloom is brushed off, that her character suffers, that she is made ridiculous, and marries some one whom she does not love, for a home.

Men, as they look back on their own varied experience, are apt to remember with great respect the women who were cold and distant. They love the fruit which hung the highest, the flower which was guarded, and which did not grow under their feet in the highway. They look back with vague wonder that they were ever infatuated with a fast girl who matured into a vulgar woman.

And we must remember what a fatal effect upon marriage is the loosing of the ties of respect. Love without trust is without respect, and if a lover has not respected his fiance, he will never respect his wife.