Rensselaer Republican, Volume 27, Number 33, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 11 April 1895 — Dinner-Party Etiquette. [ARTICLE]

Dinner-Party Etiquette.

A dinner-party is a formal function, and specially demands dignity of manner, writes Ruth Ashmore, in the April Ladies’ Home Journal. If the Continental fashion is followed, and ladies and gentlemen leave the dining-room at the same time, you go out as you came in. If the English fashion obtains, and the gentlemen remain to smoke and talk, rise when your hostess gives the signal, stand quite still until you see vour chaperon, and then fall in line behind her, passing, not too quickly, the gentlemen, who are all standing up and allowing you to walk out before them. Learn to walk well and not to “trot.” A dinner invitation should be acknowledged, and either accepted or declined within three hours, and the changing of one’s mind about it is never permitted. A witty Frenchman said, “Only death is an excuse for not keeping a dinner engagement, and even then a polite man would send the undertaker to apologize for him.” Killing time is the commonest kind of fool suicide,