At informal dinners, and even at many formal ones, bridge tables are set up in an adjoining room, if not in the drawing-room.  Those few who do not play bridge spend a half hour (or less) in conversation and then go home, unless there is some special diversion.

=MUSIC OR OTHER ENTERTAINMENT AFTER DINNER=

Very large dinners of fifty or over are almost invariably followed by some sort of entertainment.  Either the dinner is given before a ball or a musicale or amateur theatricals, or professionals are brought in to dance or sing.

In this day when conversation is not so much a “lost” as a “wilfully abandoned” art, people in numbers can not be left to spend an evening on nothing but conversation.  Grouped together by the hundred and with bridge tables absent, the modern fashionables in America, and in England, too, are as helpless as children at a party without something for them to do, listen to, or look at!

=VERY BIG DINNERS=

A dinner of sixty, for instance, is always served at separate tables; a center one of twenty people, and four corner tables of ten each.  Or if less, a center table of twelve and four smaller tables of eight.  A dinner of thirty-six or less is seated at a single table.

But whether there are eighteen, eighty, or one or two hundred, the setting of each individual table and the service is precisely the same.  Each one is set with centerpiece, candles, compotiers, and evenly spaced plates, with the addition of a number by which to identify it; or else each table is decorated with different colored flowers, pink, yellow, orchid, white.  Whatever the manner of identification, the number or the color is written in the corner of the ladies’ name cards that go in the envelopes handed to each arriving gentleman at the door:  “pink,” “yellow,” “orchid,” “white,” or “center table.”

In arranging for the service of dinner the butler details three footmen, usually, to each table of ten, and six footmen to the center table of twenty.  There are several houses (palaces really) in New York that have dining-rooms big enough to seat a hundred or more easily.  But sixty is a very big dinner, and even thirty does not “go” well without an entertainment following it.

Otherwise the details are the same in every particular as well as in table setting:  the hostess receives at the door; guests stand until dinner is announced; the host leads the way with the guest of honor.  The hostess goes to table last.  The host and hostess always sit at the big center table and the others at that table are invariably the oldest present.  No one resents being grouped according to “age,” but many do resent a segregation of ultra fashionables.  You must never put all the prominent ones at one table, unless you want forever to lose the acquaintance of those at every other.

After dinner, the gentlemen go to the smoking-room and the ladies sit in the ballroom, where, if there is to be a theatrical performance, the stage is probably arranged.  The gentlemen return, the guests take their places, and the performance begins.  After the performance the leave-taking is the same as at all dinners or parties.