Democratic Sentinel, Volume 8, Number 23, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 4 July 1884 — No Apologies. [ARTICLE]

No Apologies.

“We were poor enough in those days,” said an eminent publicist, once, in talking to a friend about his early married life, with its hard struggles, its plain living, and high thinking. “We were Eoor enough, and we lived upon baked eans with no pork. “Some folks didn’t like beans with no pork to season them; but mother” (mother meant his wife) “never made any apologies. When company came, she put on an extra plate, and said dinner was ready, just as cheerfully as if there had been ten courses. “If they liked us well enough to come again they were always welcome. It was a kind of test. If they preferred pork, they stayed where it was plenty.” To our thinking, this frugal housewife proved her claim to be considered a lady more conclusively by making no apologies than she could have done in almost any other way. Does the chronic apologizer ever stop to think how selfish she is, in considering the petty annoyance of being in this or that direction less perfectly appointed than she could wish, rather than the ease and comfort of her guest ? For what guest can be at ease having been made to feel that he has come at an inopportune time—that some other day his hostess would have been more ready and, therefore, more glad to see him? A lady well known to the society of two cities is a chronic maker of excuses. If you go to a large dinner-party at her house you feel by some spiritual magnetism the unrest of her own spirit—the wearing anxiety lest everything should not go off well which makes it impossible for her to be quite at her ease. , “I beg your pardon,” she says, at the end of your prettiest speech, showing that her thoughts have been otherwhere. If you go to a family lunch or dinner, she does wish you had been there yesterday, when the soup was better, or that you had come to-morrow, instead, when some other • dainty would have been attainable. \ “Do you often go to see Mrs. So-and-So?” one friend asked of another, ini our hearing. [ “No, I don’t,” was the answer; “I’m; sorry, too; she is such a kind little woman; but I could not stand her 1 apologies. They always make me feel that I had come at the wrong time.” If the thought could be present to a hostess that to apologize profusely is, inevitably, to make her guests feel that they have come “at the wrong time,” surely she would avoid this error, since the very essence of good-breeding is that genuiue kindness of heart which strives to make people comfortable and not uncomfortable, happy .and not unhappy.—Youth’s Companion.