Olives and radishes are served from the side table, but salted nuts are often put on the dinner table either in two big silver dishes, or in small individual ones.

=HAVE SILVER THAT SHINES OR NONE=

Lots of people who would not dream of using a wrinkled tablecloth or chipped glass or china, seem perfectly blind to dirty silver—­silver that is washed clean of food of course, but so dull that it looks like jaundiced pewter.

Don’t put any silver on your table if you can’t have it cleaned.  Infinitely rather have every ornament of glass or china—­and if knives and forks have crevices in the design of their handles that are hard to clean, buy plain plated ones, or use tin!  Anything is better than yellow-faced dirty-finger-nailed silver.  The first thing to ask in engaging a waitress is, “Can you clean silver?” If she can’t, she would better be something else.

Of course no waitress and no single-handed butler can keep silver the way it is kept in such houses as the Worldlys’, nor is such perfection expected.  The silver polishing of perfection in huge houses is done by such an expert that no one can tell whether a fork has that moment been sent from the silversmiths or not.  It is not merely polished until it is bright, but burnished so that it is new!  Every piece of silver in certain of the great establishments, or in smaller ones that are run like a great one, is never picked up by a servant except with a rouged chamois.  No piece of silver is ever allowed by the slightest chance to touch another piece.  Every piece is washed separately.  The footman who gathers two or three forks in a bunch will never do it a second time, and keep his place.  If the ring of a guest should happen to scratch a knife handle or a fork, the silver-polisher may have to spend an entire day using his thumb or a silver buffer, and rub and rub until no vestige of a scratch remains.  Perfection such as this is attainable only in a great house where servants are specialists of super-efficiency; but in every perfectly run house, where service is not too limited, every piece of silver that is put on the table, at every meal, is handled with a rouged chamois and given a quick wipe-off as it is laid on the dining table.  No silver should ever be picked up in the fingers as that always leaves a mark.

And the way “moderate” households, which are nevertheless perfectly run for their size and type, have burnished silver, is by using not more than they can have cleaned.

In view of the present high cost of living (including wages) and the consequent difficulty, with a reduced number of servants, of keeping a great quantity of silver brilliant, even the most fashionable people are more and more using only what is essential, and in occasional instances, are taking to china!  People who are lucky enough to have well-stored attics these days are bringing treasures out of them.

But services of Swansea or Lowestoft or Spode, while easily cleaned, are equally easily broken, so that genuine Eighteenth Century pieces are more apt to see a cabinet than a dinner table.