After a hall, a dinner, or a concert, you visit during the week.
Pay the first visit to a friend just returned from a voyage.
Annual visits are paid to persons with whom you have a cool acquaintance, They visit you in the autumn, you return a card in the spring.
In paying a visit under ordinary circumstances, you leave a single card. If there be residing in the family, a married daughter, an unmarried sister, a transient guest, or any person in a distinct situation from the mistress of the house, you leave two cards, one for each party. If you are acquainted with only one member of a family, as the husband, or the wife, and you wish to indicate that your visit is to both, you leave two cards. Ladies have a fashion of pinching down one corner of a card to denote that the visit is to only one of two parties in a house, and two corners, or one side of the card, when the visit is to both; but this is a transient mode, and of dubious respectability.
If, in paying a morning visit, you are not recognized when you enter, mention your name immediately. If you call to visit one member, and you find others only in the parlour, introduce yourself to them. Much awkwardness may occur through defect of attention to this point.
When a gentleman is about to be married, he sends cards, a day or two before the event, to all whom he is in the habit of visiting. These visits are never paid in person, but the cards sent by a servant, at any hour in the morning; or the gentleman goes in a carriage, and sends them in. After marriage, some day is appointed and made known to all, as the day on which he receives company. His friends then all call upon him. Would that this also were performed by cards!
CHAPTER VIII.
APPOINTMENTS AND PUNCTUALITY.
When you make an appointment, always be exact in observing it. In some places, and on some occasions, a quarter of an hour’s grace is given. This depends on custom, and it is always better not to avail yourself of it. In Philadelphia it is necessary to be punctual to a second, for there everybody breathes by the State-house clock If you make an appointment to meet anywhere, your body must be in a right line with the frame of the door at the instant the first stroke of the great clock sounds. If you are a moment later, your character is gone. It is useless to plead the evidence of your watch, or detention by a friend. You read your condemnation in the action of the old fellows who, with polite regard to your feelings, simultaneously pull out their vast chronometers, as you enter. The tardy man is worse off than the murderer. He may be pardoned by one person, (the Governor); the unpunctual is pardoned by none. Haud inexpectus loquor.
If you make an appointment with another at your own house, you should be invisible to the rest of the world, and consecrate your time solely to him.
If you make an appointment with a lady, especially if it be upon a promenade, or other public place, you must be there a little before the time.