2. A Hint to the Ladies.
Don't make your rooms gloomy. Furnish them for light and let them have it. Daylight is very cheap, and candle or gas light you need not use often. If your rooms are dark, all the effect of furniture, pictures, walls, and carpets is lost. Finally, if you have beautiful things, make them useful. The fashion of having a nice parlor, and then shutting it up all but three or four days in the year, when you have company; spending your own life in a mean room, shabbily furnished, or an unhealthy basement, to save your things, is the meanest possible economy. Go a little further—shut up your house, and live in a pig-pen! The use of nice and beautiful things is to act upon your spirit—to educate you and make you beautiful.
3. Another.
Don't put your cards around the looking-glass, unless in your private boudoir. If you wish to display them, keep them in a suitable basket or vase on the mantle or center-table.
4. An Obliging Disposition.
Polite persons are necessarily obliging. A smile is always on their lips, an earnestness in their countenance, when we ask a favor of them. They know that to render a service with a bad grace, is in reality not to render it at all. If they are obliged to refuse a favor, they do it with mildness and delicacy; they express such feeling regret that they still inspire us with gratitude; in short, their conduct appears so perfectly natural that it really seems that the opportunity which is offered them of obliging us, is obliging themselves; and they refuse all our thanks, without affectation or effort.
5. Securing a Home.
Let me, as a somewhat scrutinizing observer of the varying phases of social life, in our own country especially, enter my earnest protest against the practice so commonly adopted by newly-married persons, of boarding, in place of at once establishing for themselves the distinctive and ennobling prerogatives of HOME. Language and time would alike fail me in an endeavor to set forth the manifold evils inevitably growing out of this fashionable system. Take the advice of an old man, who has tested theories by prolonged experience, and at once establish your Penates within four walls, and under a roof that will, at times, exclude all who are not properly denizens of your household, upon assuming the rights and obligations of married life. Do not be deterred from this step by the conviction that you can not shrine your home deities upon pedestals of marble. Cover their bases with flowers—God's free gift to all—and the plainest support will suffice for them if it be but firm.
6. Taste vs. Fashion.
A lady should never, on account of economy, wear either what she deems an ugly or an ungraceful garment; such garments never put her at her ease, and are neglected and cast aside long before they have done her their true service. We are careful only of those things which suit us, and which we believe adorn us, and the mere fact of believing that we look well, goes a great way toward making us do so. Fashion should be sacrificed to taste, or, at best, followed at a distance; it does not do to be entirely out, nor completely in, what is called "fashion," many things being embraced under that term which are frivolous, unmeaning, and sometimes meretricious.