has no patience with
"make-believes" and eyes all innovations with stern disapproval and
distrust. It is pitiful to witness the harmless deceits practiced by
mothers and daughters, the wiles many and varied, by which they strive
to introduce some much-to-be-desired point of table etiquette to which
"Papa is opposed." Sometimes his protest takes the form of a
good-natured laugh and shrug accompanied by the time-battered
observation that "you can't teach an old dog new tricks." More
frequently overtures of this kind are repulsed by the gruff excuse:

"My father and mother never had any of these new-fangled notions and
they got on all right. What was good enough for them is good enough
for me!"

And so paterfamilias continues to take his coffee with, instead of at
the end of, his dinner, eats his vegetables out of little sauce plates
with a spoon, insists that meat, potatoes and salad shall all be
placed upon the table at once, and, if the father and mother than whom
he does not care to rise higher were, in spite of their excellence, of
the lower class, he carries his food to his mouth on the blade of his
knife, and noisily sips tea from his saucer. Evidently he does not
believe in shams, those little conventionalities, nearly all of which
have some excellent cause for existence, although we do not always
pause to examine into their _raison d'etre_. They may be founded upon
hygienic principles, or on the idea of the greatest good to the
greatest number. Many seemingly slight breaches of etiquette, if
practiced by everyone, would create a state of affairs which even the
most ardent hater of _les convenances_ would deplore. If, for
instance, all men were so entirely a law unto themselves that they
despised the rule which commands a man to resign his chair to a lady,
what would become of us poor women? In crowded rooms we would have the
pleasure of standing still or walking around the masculine members of
the company, who would sit at ease. Were the unmannerly habit of
turning the leaves of a book with the moist thumb or finger indulged
in by all readers, the probabilities are that numberless diseases
would thus be transmitted from one person to another.

It argues an enormous amount of self-conceit in man or woman when he
or she calmly refuses to conform to rules of etiquette. In plain
language, we are none of us in ourselves _pur et simple_ so agreeable
as to be tolerable without the refinement and polish of manners upo