what you are talking about; how to listen “intelligently” and not have the remotest idea what your vis-a-vis is saying to you; you’ll have to join ’steen clubs, and read ten new novels a day; go to every new play; know all about the latest movies; know all the latest ideas of social uplift, study art, the spiritual essence of color, the futurists, and the cubists.  Of course, you’ll study the peerage of England and know all about rank and precedence—­and, indeed, you’ll have your hands and mind so full of things that will make such a hash of life that it will take ten specialists to straighten you out and help you to die forty years before your time.  Hence, if that is the life you intend to live, throw this book into the fire.  It will be wasting your time to read it.

If you don’t belong to the class of the extra rich, but are all the time wishing that you did; that you had their money, could live as they live, and, as far as you can, you imitate, copy, and follow them, then, again, I recommend that you give this book to the nearest newsboy and let him sell it and get some good out of it.  You are not yet ready for it, or else you have gone so far beyond me in life, that you are out of my reach.

If, on the other hand, you belong to the class of workers, those who have to earn their living and wish to spend their lives intelligently and usefully, you can well afford to disregard—­after you have learned to apply the few basic principles of social converse—­the whims, the caprices, the artificial code set up by the so-called arbiters of fashion, manners, and “good form,” which are not formulated for the promotion of intelligent intercourse between real manhood and womanhood, but for the preservation and strengthening of the barriers of wealth and caste.

Connected with this phase of the subject is a consideration of those who are worried lest in word or action, they fail in gentility.  They are afraid to do anything lest it should not be regarded as genteel.  When they shake hands, it must be done not so much with hearty, friendly spontaneity, but with gentility, and you wonder what that faint touch of fingers, reached high in air, means.  They would be mortified beyond measure if they failed to observe any of the little gentilities of life, while the larger consideration of their visitor’s disregard of the matter, would entirely escape them.  To such people, social intercourse is a perpetual worry and bugbear.  They are on the watch every moment, and if a visitor fails to say, “Pardon me,” at the proper place, or stands with his back to his hostess for a moment, or does any other of the things that natural men and women often do, they are “shocked.”

Then it would be amusing, were it not pathetic, to see how particular they are about their speech—­what they say, and how they say it.  As Dr. Palmer has tersely said:  “We are terrorized by custom, and inclined to adjust what we would say to what others have said before,” and he might have added:  It must be said in the same manner.