The Tuxedo

The Tuxedo, which is the essential evening dress of a gentleman, is simply the English dinner coat. It was first introduced in this country at the Tuxedo Club to provide something less formal than the swallow-tail, and the name has clung ever since. To a man who can not afford to get two suits of evening clothes, the Tuxedo is of greater importance. It is worn every evening and nearly everywhere, whereas the tail coat is necessary only at balls, formal dinners, and in a box at the opera. Tuxedo clothes are made of the same materials and differ from full dress ones in only three particulars: the cut of the coat, the braid on the trousers, and the use of a black tie instead of a white one. The dinner coat has no tails and is cut like a sack suit except that it is held closed in front by one button at the waist line. (A full dress coat, naturally, hangs open.) The lapels are satin faced, and the collar left in cloth, or if it is shawl-shaped the whole collar is of satin.

The trousers are identical with full dress ones except that braid, if used at all, should be narrow. "Cuffed" trousers are not good form, nor should a dinner coat be double-breasted.

Fancy ties are bad form. Choose a plain black silk or satin one. Wear a white waistcoat if you can afford the strain on your laundry bill, otherwise a plain black one. By no means wear a gray one nor a gray tie.

The smartest hat for town wear is an opera, but a straw or felt which is proper in the country, is not out of place in town. Otherwise, in the street the accessories are the same as those already given under the previous heading.

Formal Evening Clothes for Gentlemen

Your full dress is the last thing to economize on. It must be perfect in fit, cut and material, and this means a first-rate tailor. It must be made of a dull-faced worsted, either black or night blue, on no account of broadcloth. Aside from satin facing and collar, which can have lapels or be cut shawl-shaped, and wide braid on the trousers, it must have no trimming whatever. Avoid satin or velvet cuffs, moiré neck ribbons and fancy coat buttons as you would the plague.

Wear a plain white linen waistcoat, not one of cream colored silk, or figured or even black brocade. Have all your linen faultlessly clean—always—and your tie of plain white lawn, tied so it will not only stay in place but look as though nothing short of a backward somersault could disarrange it.

Your handkerchief must be white; gloves (at opera or ball) white; flower in buttonhole (if any) white. If you are a normal size, you can in America buy inexpensive shirts, and white waistcoats that are above reproach, but if you are abnormally tall or otherwise an "out size" so that everything has to be "made to order," you will have to pay anywhere from double to four times as much for each article you put on.

When you go out on the street, wear an English silk hat, not one of the taper crowned variety popular in the "movies." And wear it on your head, not on the back of your neck. Have your overcoat of plain black or dark blue material, for you must wear an overcoat with full dress even in summer. Use a plain white or black and white muffler. Colored ones are impossible. Wear white buckskin gloves if you can afford them; otherwise gray or khaki doeskin, and leave them in your overcoat pocket. Your stick should be of plain Malacca or other wood, with either a crooked or straight handle. The only ornamentation allowable is a plain silver or gold band, or top; but perfectly plain is best form.

And lastly, wear patent leather pumps, shoes or ties, and plain black silk socks, and leave your rubbers—if you must wear them, in the coat room.

Emily Post Etiquette: The Considerate Guest

Courtesy demands that you, when you are a guest, shall show neither annoyance nor disappointment—no matter what happens. Before you can hope to become even a passable guest, let alone a perfect one, you must learn as it were not to notice if hot soup is poured down your back. If you neither understand nor care for dogs or children, and both insist on climbing all over you, you must seemingly like it; just as you must be amiable and polite to your fellow guests, even though they be of all the people on earth the most detestable to you. You must with the very best dissimulation at your command, appear to find the food delicious though they offer you all of the viands that are especially distasteful to your palate, or antagonistic to your digestion. You must disguise your hatred of red ants and scrambled food, if everyone else is bent on a picnic. You must pretend that six is a perfect dinner hour though you never dine before eight, or, on the contrary, you must wait until eight-thirty or nine with stoical fortitude, though your dinner hour is six and by seven your chest seems securely pinned to your spine.

If you go for a drive, and it pours, and there is no top to the carriage or car, and you are soaked to the skin and chilled to the marrow so that your teeth chatter, your lips must smile and you must appear to enjoy the refreshing coolness.

If you go to stay in a small house in the country, and they give you a bed full of lumps, in a room of mosquitoes and flies, in a chamber over that of a crying baby, under the eaves with a temperature of over a hundred, you can the next morning walk to the village, and send yourself a telegram and leave! But though you feel starved, exhausted, wilted, and are mosquito bitten until you resemble a well-developed case of chickenpox or measles, by not so much as a facial muscle must you let the family know that your comfort lacked anything that your happiest imagination could picture—nor must you confide in any one afterwards (having broken bread in the house) how desperately wretched you were.

If you know anyone who is always in demand, not only for dinners, but for trips on private cars and yachts, and long visits in country houses, you may be very sure of one thing: the popular person is first of all unselfish or else extremely gifted; very often both.

The perfect guest not only tries to wear becoming clothes but tries to put on an equally becoming mental attitude. No one is ever asked out very much who is in the habit of telling people all the misfortunes and ailments she has experienced or witnessed, though the perfect guest listens with apparent sympathy to every one else's. Another attribute of the perfect guest is never to keep people waiting. She is always ready for anything—or nothing. If a plan is made to picnic, she likes picnics above everything and proves her liking by enthusiastically making the sandwiches or the salad dressing or whatever she thinks she makes best. If, on the other hand, no one seems to want to do anything, the perfect guest has always a book she is absorbed in, or a piece of sewing she is engrossed with, or else beyond everything she would love to sit in an easy chair and do nothing.

She never for one moment thinks of herself, but of the other people she is thrown with. She is a person of sympathy always, and instantaneous discernment. She is good tempered no matter what happens, and makes the most of everything as it comes. At games she is a good loser, and a quiet winner. She has a pleasant word, an amusing story, and agreeable comment for most occasions, but she is neither gushing nor fulsome. She has merely acquired a habit, born of many years of arduous practise, of turning everything that looks like a dark cloud as quickly as possible for the glimmer of a silver lining.

She is as sympathetic to children as to older people; she cuts out wonderful paper dolls and soldier hats, always leisurely and easily as though it cost neither time nor effort. She knows a hundred stories or games, every baby and every dog goes to her on sight, not because she has any especial talent, except that one she has cultivated, the talent of interest in everyone and everything except herself. Few people know that there is such a talent or that it can be cultivated.

She has more than mere beauty; she has infinite charm, and she is so well born that she is charming to everyone. Her manner to a duke who happens to be staying in the house is not a bit more courteous than her manner to the kitchen-maid whom she chances to meet in the kitchen gardens whither she has gone with the children to see the new kittens; as though new kittens were the apex of all delectability!

She always calls the servants by name; always says "How do you do" when she arrives, "Good morning" while there, and "Good-by" when she leaves. And do they presume because of her "familiarity" when she remembers to ask after the parlor-maid's mother and the butler's baby? They wait on her as they wait on no one else who comes to the house—neither the Senator nor the Governor, nor his Grace of Overthere!

This ideal guest is an equally ideal hostess; the principle of both is the same. A ready smile, a quick sympathy, a happy outlook, consideration for others, tenderness toward everything that is young or helpless, and forgetfulness of self, which is not far from the ideal of womankind.

Stores and Shops

Lack of consideration for those who in any capacity serve you, is always an evidence of ill-breeding, as well as of inexcusable selfishness. Occasionally a so-called "lady" who has nothing whatever to do but drive uptown or down in her comfortable limousine, vents her irritability upon a saleswoman at a crowded counter in a store, because she does not leave other customers and wait immediately upon her. Then, perhaps, when the article she asked for is not to be had, she complains to the floor-walker about the saleswoman's stupidity! Or having nothing that she can think of to occupy an empty hour on her hands, she demands that every sort of material be dragged down from the shelves until, discovering that it is at last time for her appointment, she yawns and leaves.

Of course, on the other hand, there is the genuinely lethargic saleswoman whose mind doesn't seem to register a single syllable that you have said to her; who, with complete indifference to you and your preferences, insists on showing what you distinctly say you do not want, and who caps the climax by drawling "They" are wearing it this season! Does that sort of saleswoman ever succeed in selling anything? Does anyone living buy anything because someone, who knows nothing, tells another, who is often an expert, what an indiscriminating "They" may be doing? That kind of a saleswoman would try to tell Kreisler that "They" are not using violins this season!

There are always two sides to the case, of course, and it is a credit to good manners that there is scarcely ever any friction in stores and shops of the first class. Salesmen and women are usually persons who are both patient and polite, and their customers are most often ladies in fact as well as "by courtesy." Between those before and those behind the counters, there has sprung up in many instances a relationship of mutual goodwill and friendliness. It is, in fact, only the woman who is afraid that someone may encroach upon her exceedingly insecure dignity, who shows neither courtesy nor consideration to any except those whom she considers it to her advantage to please.

Regard for Others

Consideration for the rights and feelings of others is not merely a rule for behavior in public but the very foundation upon which social life is built.

Rule of etiquette the first—which hundreds of others merely paraphrase or explain or elaborate—is:

Never do anything that is unpleasant to others.

Never take more than your share—whether of the road in driving a car, of chairs on a boat or seats on a train, or food at the table.

People who picnic along the public highway leaving a clutter of greasy paper and swill (not, a pretty name, but neither is it a pretty object!) for other people to walk or drive past, and to make a breeding place for flies, and furnish nourishment for rats, choose a disgusting way to repay the land-owner for the liberty they took in temporarily occupying his property.

Emily Post Etiquette: Will You Dine And Go To The Play?

There is no more popular or agreeable way of entertaining people than to ask them to "dine and go to the play." The majority do not even prefer to have "opera" substituted for "play," because those who care for serious music are a minority compared with those who like the theater.

If a bachelor gives a small theater party he usually takes his guests to dine at the Fitz-Cherry or some other fashionable and "amusing" restaurant, but a married couple living in their own house are more likely to dine at home, unless they belong to a type prevalent in New York which is "restaurant mad." The Gildings, in spite of the fact that their own chef is the best there is, are much more apt to dine in a restaurant before going to a play—or if they don't dine in a restaurant, they go to one for supper afterwards. But the Normans, if they ask people to dine and go to the theater, invariably dine at home.

A theater party can of course be of any size, but six or eight is the usual number, and the invitations are telephoned: "Will Mr. and Mrs. Lovejoy dine with Mr. and Mrs. Norman at seven-thirty on Tuesday and go to the play?"

Or "Will Mr. and Mrs. Oldname dine with Mr. Clubwin Doe on Saturday at the Toit d'Or and go to the play?"

When Mr. and Mrs. Oldname "accept with pleasure" a second message is given: "Dinner will be at 7.30."

Mrs. Norman's guests go to her house. Mr. Doe's guests meet him in the foyer of the Toit d'Or. But the guests at both dinners are taken to the theater by their host. If a dinner is given by a hostess who has no car of her own, a guest will sometimes ask: "Don't you want me to have the car come back for us?" The hostess can either say to an intimate friend "Why, yes, thank you very much," or to a more formal acquaintance, "No, thank you just the same—I have ordered taxis." Or she can accept. There is no rule beyond her own feelings in the matter.

Mr. Doe takes his guests to the theater in taxis. The Normans, if only the Lovejoys are dining with them, go in Mrs. Norman's little town car, but if there are to be six or eight, the ladies go in her car and the gentlemen follow in a taxi. (Unless Mrs. Worldly or Mrs. Gilding are in the party and order their cars back.)

Time Of Christening

In other days of stricter observances a baby was baptized in the Catholic and high Episcopal church on the first or at least second Sunday after its birth. But to-day the christening is usually delayed at least until the young mother is up and about again; often it is put off for months and in some denominations children need not be christened until they are several years old. The most usual age is from two to six months.

If the family is very high church or the baby is delicate and its christening therefore takes place when it is only a week or two old, the mother is carried into the drawing-room and put on a sofa near the improvised font. She is dressed in a becoming negligé and perhaps a cap, and with lace pillows behind her and a cover equally decorative over her feet. The guests in this event are only the family and the fewest possible intimate friends.