AVOID NOVELTIES
When you begin to entertain in your turn avoid, scrupulously, startling effects and novelties of all kinds. Until you are used to the task, be strictly conventional in arrangements for your guests’ reception and pleasure. Let floral decorations and “souvenirs” be modest and tasteful. Mantels banked with orchids, boutonnières of hothouse roses at a dollar apiece, and cases of expensive jewelry as favors, may express a generous hospitality on your part and a desire to gratify the acquaintances you would convert into friends. They will surely be set down to ostentatious display of means that few of the guests possess.
HELP FROM BOOKS
There are manuals of etiquette which will keep you from open solecisms in social usages. Follow their rules obediently, curbing all disposition to originality—for a while, at least. If possible, keep the greedy society reporter at a distance, without angering her. Do not give away the list of those invited, much less the menu. As Dick Fanshawe’s eulogist said of men who “jump upon their mothers,”—“Some does, you know!” Some even send in to the newspapers unsolicited descriptions of their entertainments with lists of guests, to the amusement of the editorial office.
These mistakes give occasion to the aforementioned cartoonists and joke-venders to deride the name of hospitality dispensed by the Newlyrich clan. Let the aforesaid manual of etiquette be followed with obedience, but not with servile and unthinking obedience. Unfortunately, it is true that the person unaccustomed to precise social regulations and to a formal manner of living, is inclined to consider the rules governing such life as arbitrary, inexplicable and mysterious. If the uninitiated woman will disabuse herself of this idea, she has taken a long step in the right direction. Once you accept the fact that there is reason behind the forms employed by society, it will not be long before you will be searching for the reason itself. The laws governing the conventional world will then acquire for you a meaning that will make adherence to them simple and natural, instead of stiff and mechanical.
LEARN TO DISCRIMINATE
The matter of discriminating properly in questions of taste is a thing much more difficult to learn than the set and definite rules governing definite exigencies of social life. Yet taste,—taste in clothes, taste in the objects surrounding one, taste in all matters with which expenditure is concerned,—this is a necessity in the attainment of any social position worthy of the name. In this direction something may be gained by observation, though not until the eye is sufficiently trained to make it a trustworthy guide. The sense of beauty is somewhat a matter of cultivation, and its application to every-day life is the result of experience and judgment. Do not imagine that a color is becoming to you merely because you happen to like it. Do not buy a chair or a couch simply because the one or the other may happen to please your fancy. The color you wear, the furniture you buy must have reference, the one to your appearance, the other to its surroundings.
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