Taking at random illustrations that crowd in on memories of my own experiences,—let me draw into line the distinguished clergyman who always brought his own bread to the table, informing me that my hot muffins were “rank poison to any rightly-appointed stomach”; another man, equally distinguished in another profession, who summoned a chambermaid at eleven o’clock at night to drag his bed across the room that he might lie due east and west; an author who never went to bed until two o’clock in the morning, and complained sourly at breakfast time that “your servants, madam, banked up the furnace fire so early that the house got cold by midnight”; the popular musician who informed me “your piano is horribly out of tune”; the man and wife who “couldn’t sleep a wink because there was a mosquito in the room”; the eminent jurist who sat out an evening in the library of my country-house with his hat on because “the room was drafty”;—ah! my fellow housemothers can match every instance of the lack of the guestly conscience by stories from their own repositories.
The guest who is told to consider himself as one of the family knows the invitation to be a figure of polite speech as well as he who says it knows it to be an empty form. One man I wot of sings and whistles in the halls and upon the stairs of his host’s house to show how joyfully he is at home. Another stretches himself at length upon the library sofa, and smokes the cigar of peace (to himself) at all hours, an ash-cup upon the floor within easy distance. A third helps himself to his host’s cigars whenever he likes without saying “by your leave.” Each may fancy that he is following out the hospitable intentions of his entertainers when, in fact, he is selfishly oblivious of guestly duty and propriety.
One who has given the subject more than a passing thought might suppose it unnecessary to lay down to well-bred readers “Laws for Table Manners While Visiting.” Yet, when I saw a man of excellent lineage, and a university graduate, thump his empty tumbler on the table to attract the attention of the waitress, and heard him a few minutes later call out to her “Butter—please!” I wished that the study of such a manual had been included as a regular course in the college curriculum.