CHAPTER IX
THE DINNER PARTY
THE dinner is the most important and the most delightful of social functions. It is the most civilized of entertainments, and to say of a town that it is a dinner-giving town means that it has arrived socially. This flower of hospitality blooms slowly. In many western places where the reception, the afternoon tea, the theater party and the ladies’ luncheon flourish like a green bay tree, the dinner is an unknown function. A young hostess is often afraid of attempting it, as is also the unaccustomed diner-out. Yet it is not a formidable entertainment, rightly considered, and when happily managed the return it brings far outweighs the outlay of time and trouble.
The dinner, height of hospitality as it is, is yet within the reach of most of us as far as expenditure is concerned. The cost of a dinner may be much or little. The menu may be simple or elaborate. Five courses is enough for a dainty satisfying meal, yet eighteen and twenty are sometimes served. The table decorations may be of the most expensive sort; yet a half-dozen roses and candles in keeping are sufficient to give a properly festive touch.
The number of servants required depends, of course, upon the elaborateness or simplicity of the menu and upon the number of guests to be served. The size of the dinner party is elastic, though eighteen at the table is usually regarded as the maximum.
THE SMALL DINNER
The little dinner party has the advantage of being in some ways a more attractive function than the big one, as well as one in which people of small incomes may safely indulge. When a dinner is so large that general conversation is impossible, it defeats its own purpose. Eight guests are a good number. Why it should be that ten guests are still so few as to form a little dinner party and that twelve guests undoubtedly make a big dinner party is one of those inscrutable truths that it takes something more than arithmetic to explain. But so it is. If the guests are properly chosen for a small dinner there should be in the atmosphere a combination of pretty formality and agreeable familiarity about this function that no other can give in so large a degree.
The choice of guests is, of course, the first and most important consideration. Upon this more than upon any other consideration depends the success of your party. It does not do to invite people together for commercial reasons simply or from any other purely selfish motive. It does not do to go through one’s list and invite people, by instalments, straight through the alphabet. The hostess must exercise all the tact and discrimination of which she is possessed. It is not always necessary that the people chosen should be friends and acquaintances but it is necessary that they have interests, broadly speaking, of the same sort, that they have enough in common to make a basis for easy informal talk. If the people chosen like one another or have the capacity for interesting and diverting one another, the hostess should feel that the weightiest business is off her hands.