arpet, coat hanging
racks, ballroom chairs, as well as crockery, glass, napkins, waiters and
food are supplied by hotels or caterers. (Excepting in houses like the
Gildings,' where footmen's liveries are kept purposely, the caterer's men
are never in footmen's liveries.)

Unless a house has a ballroom the room selected for dancing must have all
the furniture moved out of it; and if there are adjoining rooms and the
dancing room is not especially big, it adds considerably to the floor
space to put no chairs around it. Those who dance seldom sit around a
ballroom anyway, and the more informal grouping of chairs in the hall or
library is a better arrangement than the wainscot row or wall-flower
exposition grounds. The floor, it goes without saying, must be smooth and
waxed, and no one should attempt to give a dance whose house is not big
enough.

=ETIQUETTE IN THE BALLROOM=

New York's invitations are usually for "ten o'clock" but first guests do
not appear before ten-thirty and most people arrive at about eleven or
after. The hostess, however, must be ready to receive on the stroke of the
hour specified in her invitations, and the debutante or any one the ball
may be given for, must also be with her.

It is not customary to put the debutante's name on the formal "At Home"
invitation, and it is even occasionally omitted on invitations that
"request the pleasure of ----" so that the only way acquaintances can know
the ball is being given for the daughter is by seeing her standing beside
her mother.

Mr. & Mrs. Robert Gilding

request the pleasure of

[Name of guest is written here]

company on Tuesday, the twenty-seventh of December

at ten o'clock

at the Fitz-Cherry

Dancing R.s.v.p.
Twenty-three East Laurel Street

The hostess never leaves her post, wherever it is she is standing, until
she goes to supper. If, as at the Ritz in New York, the ballroom opens on
a foyer at the head of a stairway, the hostess always receives at this
place. In a private house where guests go up in an elevator to the
dressing rooms, and then walk down to the ballroom floor, the hostess
receives either at the foot of the stairway, or just outside the ballroom.

=THE HOSTESS AT A BALL=

Guests arriving are announced, as at a dinner or afternoon tea, and after
shaking hands with the