ariably followed by some
sort of entertainment. Either the dinner is given before a ball or a
musicale or amateur theatricals, or professionals are brought in to dance
or sing.

In this day when conversation is not so much a "lost" as a "wilfully
abandoned" art, people in numbers can not be left to spend an evening on
nothing but conversation. Grouped together by the hundred and with bridge
tables absent, the modern fashionables in America, and in England, too,
are as helpless as children at a party without something for them to do,
listen to, or look at!

=VERY BIG DINNERS=

A dinner of sixty, for instance, is always served at separate tables; a
center one of twenty people, and four corner tables of ten each. Or if
less, a center table of twelve and four smaller tables of eight. A dinner
of thirty-six or less is seated at a single table.

But whether there are eighteen, eighty, or one or two hundred, the setting
of each individual table and the service is precisely the same. Each one
is set with centerpiece, candles, compotiers, and evenly spaced plates,
with the addition of a number by which to identify it; or else each table
is decorated with different colored flowers, pink, yellow, orchid, white.
Whatever the manner of identification, the number or the color is written
in the corner of the ladies' name cards that go in the envelopes handed to
each arriving gentleman at the door: "pink," "yellow," "orchid," "white,"
or "center table."

In arranging for the service of dinner the butler details three footmen,
usually, to each table of ten, and six footmen to the center table of
twenty. There are several houses (palaces really) in New York that have
dining-rooms big enough to seat a hundred or more easily. But sixty is a
very big dinner, and even thirty does not "go" well without an
entertainment following it.

Otherwise the details are the same in every particular as well as in table
setting: the hostess receives at the door; guests stand until dinner is
announced; the host leads the way with the guest of honor. The hostess
goes to table last. The host and hostess always sit at the big center
table and the others at that table are invariably the oldest present. No
one resents being grouped according to "age," but many do resent a
segregation of ultra fashionables. You must never put all the prominent
ones at one table, unless you want forever to lose the acquaintance of
those at every other.

After dinner, t