te for dinner; have shown a
handsome gown and hat--and perhaps had the former injured in the crush.
One is reminded of Bunthorne's "Hollow! Hollow! Hollow!!"

Real Hospitality.--Quite different is this from what we offer when we
invite our friends to visit us. Here is genuine hospitality--the receiving
and entertaining gratuitously those whose companionship we enjoy. One of
the chief joys of having one's own home is the pleasure of being able to
welcome one's friends and afford them the privilege of enjoying it also.
An invitation of this kind means we are willing to incommode ourselves,
incur expense, and give a measure of our time to the entertainment of
those of our friends whose society we wish to enjoy familiarly. Thus it
seems that an invitation to visit a friend in her home is a compliment of
no mean order, although Nicole says: "'Visits are for the most part
neither more nor less than inventions for discharging upon our neighbors
somewhat of our own unendurable weight."

[MANNERS AND SOCIAL CUSTOMS 709]

Short Visits.--Visits are of much shorter duration than in those "old
times" people talk about so enthusiastically--and would find so tiresome
were they to return again. Then visitors stayed week after week; were
urged to remain longer when they proposed departure. The story goes of a
Virginia planter who invited an old war-time friend to visit him. At the
end of a month the major proposed departure. His host objected so
strenuously that he agreed to stay another month. And so it went on, the
guest regularly proposing to leave, the host hospitably insisting on his
remaining, until in the end the old veteran died in and was buried from
his friend's house. This, however, is an example not to be emulated in
these less hospitable days.

There is a saying, "Short visits make long friends," that is worth
consideration by those who visit. Probably the truth of the saying has
been so often attested that it has given rise to the custom of specifying
the date of arrival and departure of a guest when giving the invitation.
It has become to be understood that the vague, indefinite invitation "Do
come and see us sometime," means nothing. No one would think for a moment
of taking it in good faith. If the giver wishes to entertain her friend
she will ask if it will be convenient for her to visit her at a certain
specified date. Nothing less counts. An understanding of this might save
the unexperienced from the awkwardness o