A happy attitude to cultivate is to think in your own mind that new people are all packages in a grab-bag, and that you can never tell what any of them may prove to be until you know what is inside the outer wrappings of casual appearances.  To be sure, the old woman of the fairy tale, who turns out to be a fairy in disguise, is not often met with in real life, but neither is her approximate counterpart an impossibility.

As those who have sent you flowers approach, you must thank them; you must also write later an additional note of thanks to older people.  But to your family or your own intimate friends, the verbal thanks—­if not too casually made—­are sufficient.

=A FEW DON’TS FOR DEBUTANTES=

Don’t think that because you have a pretty face, you need neither brains nor manners.  Don’t think that you can be rude to anyone and escape being disliked for it.

Whispering is always rude.  Whispering and giggling at the same time have no place in good society.  Everything that shows lack of courtesy toward others is rude.

If you would be thought a person of refinement, don’t nudge or pat or finger people.  Don’t hold hands or walk arm-about-waist in public.  Never put your hand on a man, except in dancing and in taking his arm if he is usher at a wedding or your partner for dinner or supper.  Don’t allow anyone to paw you.  Don’t hang on anyone for support, and don’t stand or walk with your chest held in, and your hips forward, in imitation of a reversed letter S.

Don’t walk across a ballroom floor swinging your arms.  Don’t talk or laugh loud enough to attract attention, and on no account force yourself to laugh.  Nothing is flatter than laughter that is lacking in mirth.  If you only laugh because something is irresistibly funny, the chances are your laugh will be irresistible too.  In the same way a smile should be spontaneous, because you feel happy and pleasant; nothing has less allure than a mechanical grimace, as though you were trying to imitate a tooth-paste advertisement.

=WHERE ARE THE “BELLES” OF YESTERDAY?=

In olden days and until a comparatively short while ago, a young girl’s social success was invariably measured by her popularity in a ballroom.  It was the girl who had the most partners, who least frequently sat “against the wall,” who carried home the greatest quantity of the baubles known as “favors,” who was that evening’s and usually the season’s belle.

But to-day although ballroom popularity is still important as a test by which a young girl’s success is measured, it is by no means the beginning and end that it used to be.

As repeated several times in this book, the day of the belle is past; beaux belong to the past too.  To-day is the day of woman’s equality with man, and if in proving her equality she has come down from a pedestal, her pedestal was perhaps a theatrical “property” at best and not to be compared for solid satisfaction with the level ground of the entirely real position she now occupies.