Democratic Sentinel, Volume 11, Number 31, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 2 September 1887 — The Formal “CaH.” [ARTICLE]

The Formal “CaH.”

Whatever may betide, men have good cause to rejoice that they bear no part in that crowning bore of all bores known as the “formal call.” That is a feminine institution. It is an invention of the sex, and the sex groans under its yoke. Man smokes his Durham in beatific peace, while the wife and daughters pay tribute to the formal call. He hears the sotto voce prayer that parties will be out, and that the matter can be dispatched with a card. He quietly notes the sigh of relief when the exhausted women return after hours of social distress. He observes the tax of dress incident to the affair, the bad temper it invokes, and the hypocrisy and total absence of any equivalent in the way of pleasure for all this slavish adherence to custom, and then dimly realizes the miraculous felioity of his own escape from such tliralldoin, and it maybe takes comfort in the thought that the whole business falls totally on those who have made him pay the piper for countless other freaks and whims of fashion and caprice. The elasticity of conscience with which the gentle creatures endeavor to mitigate the infliction of the formal call by convenient fibs, furnishes the masculine monster some amusing food for study, and it may be doubted whether he would budge an inch to abolish the formal call. It is diamond cut diamond; women annoying women. In such a transaction the wise man holds aloof and lets the dainty belligerents masquerading as friends manage the hollow and artificial show as suits themselves. It is not often that he has an opportunity of keeping out of a game in which women array their wits against one another instead of against the common tyrant, man. He is at liberty to be judiciously silent and hear the fair prattlers discuss each other in a style utterly unlike the fancy pictures of novelists and poets, and if he doesn’t some wholesome enlightenment he is hopelessly stupid.—Pittsburgh Chronicle-Telegraph.