Manners and Social Usages

by M. E. W. Sherwood

It is the custom at informal dinners for the lady to help the soup and for the gentleman to carve; therefore the important dishes are put on the table. But the servants who wait should be taught to have sidetables and sideboards so well placed that anything can be removed immediately after it is finished. A screen is a very useful adjunct in a dining-room.

Inefficient servants have a disagreeable habit of running in and out of the dining-room in search of something that should have been in readiness; therefore the lady of the house had better see beforehand that French rolls are placed under every napkin, and a silver basket full of them ready in reserve. Also large slices of fresh soft bread should be on the side table, as every one does not like hard bread, and should be offered a choice.

The powdered sugar, the butter, the caster, the olives, the relishes, should all be thought of and placed where each can be readily found. Servants should be taught to be noiseless, and to avoid a hurried manner. In placing anything on or taking anything off a table a servant should never reach across a person seated at table for that purpose. However hurried the servant may be, or however near at hand the article, she should be taught to walk quietly to the left hand of each guest to remove things, while she should pass everything in the same manner, giving the guest the option of using his right hand with which to help himself. Servants should have a silver or plated knife-tray to remove the gravy-spoon and carving knife and fork before removing the platter. All the silver should be thus removed; it makes a table much neater. Servants should be taught to put a plate and spoon and fork at every place before each course.

After the meats and before the pie, pudding, or ices, the table should be carefully cleared of everything but fruit and flowers—all plates, glasses, carafes, salt-cellars, knives and forks, and whatever pertains to the dinner should be removed, and the table- cloth well cleared with brush or crumb-scraper on a silver waiter, and then the plates, glasses, spoons, and forks laid at each plate for the dessert. If this is done every day, it adds to a common dinner, and trains the waitress to her work.

The dinner, the dishes, and the plates should all be hot. The ordinary plate-warmer is now superseded by something far better, in which a hot brick is introduced. The most recherch dinner is spoiled if hot mutton is put on a cold plate. The silver dishes should be heated by hot water in the kitchen, the hot dinner plates must be forthcoming from the plate-warmer, nor must the roasts or entres be allowed to cool on their way from the kitchen to the dining-room. A servant should have a thumb napkin with which to hand the hot dishes, and a clean towel behind the screen with which to wipe the platters which have been sent up on the dumb-waiter. On these trifles depend the excellence of the simple dinner.

CHAPTER XXXVIII. THE SMALL-TALK OF SOCIETY.

One of the cleverest questions asked lately is, "What shall I talk about at a dinner-party?" Now if there is a woman in the world who does not know what to talk about, is it not a very difficult thing to tell her? One can almost as well answer such a question as, "What shall I see out of my eyes?"

Yet our young lady is not the first person who has dilated of late years upon the "decay of conversation," nor the only one who has sometimes felt the heaviness of silence descend upon her at a modern dinner. No doubt this same great and unanswerable question has been asked by many a traveller who, for the first time, has sat next an Englishman of good family (perhaps even with a handle to his name), who has answered all remarks by the proverbial but unsympathetic "Oh!" Indeed, it is to be feared that it is a fashion for young men nowadays to appear listless, to conceal what ideas they may happen to have, to try to appear stupid, if they are not so, throwing all the burden of the conversation on the lively, vivacious, good- humored girl, or the more accomplished married woman, who may be the next neighbor. Women's wits are proverbially quick, they talk readily, they read and think more than the average young man of fashion is prone to do; the result is a quick and a ready tongue. Yet the art of keeping up a flow of agreeable and incessant small- talk, not too heavy, not pretentious or egotistical, not scandalous, and not commonplace, is an art that is rare, and hardly to be prized too highly.

It has been well said that there is a great difference between a brilliant conversationalist and a ready small-talker. The former is apt to be feared, and to produce a silence around him. We all remember Macaulay and "his brilliant flashes of silence." We all know that there are talkers so distinguished that you must not ask both of them to dinner on the same day lest they silence each other, while we know others who bring to us just an average amount of tact, facility of expression, geniality, and a pleasant gift at a quotation, a bit of repartee; such a person we call a ready small- talker, a "most agreeable person," one who frightens nobody and who has a great popularity. Such a one has plenty of small change, very useful, and more easy to handle than the very large cheek of the conversationalist, who is a millionaire as to his memory, learning, and power of rhetoric, but who cannot and will not indulge in small- talk. We respect the one; we like the other. The first point to be considered, if one has no inspiration in regard to small-talk, would seem to be this; try to consider what subject would most interest the person next to you. There are people who have no other talent, whom we never call clever, but who do possess this instinct, and who can talk most sympathetically, while knowing scarcely anything about the individual addressed. There are others who are deficient in this gift, who can only say "Really" and "Indeed." These "Really" and "Indeed" and "Oh" people are the despair of the dinner-giver. The gay, chatty, light-hearted people who can glide into a conversation easily, are the best of dinner-table companions, even if they do sometimes talk too much about the weather and such commonplaces.

It is a good plan for a shy young person, who has no confidence in her own powers of conversation, to fortify herself with several topics of general interest, such as the last new novel, the last opera, the best and newest gallery of pictures, or the flower in fashion; and to invent a formula, if words are wanting in her organization, as to how these subjects should be introduced and handled. Many ideas will occur to her, and she can silently arrange them. Then she may keep these as a reserve force, using them only when the conversation drops, or she is unexpectedly brought to the necessity of keeping up the ball alone. Some people use this power rather unfairly, leading the conversation up to the point where they wish to enter; but these are not the people who need help—they can take care of themselves. After talking awhile in a perfunctory manner, many a shy young person has been astonished by a sudden rush of brilliant ideas, and finds herself talking naturally and well without effort. It is like the launching of a ship; certain blocks of shyness and habits of mental reserve are knocked away, and the brave frigate Small-Talk takes the water like a thing of life.