The christening dress is always especially elaborate and beautiful.  Often it is one that was worn by the baby’s mother, father, or even its grand or great-grandparent.  Baby clothes should be as sheer as possible and as soft.  The ideal dress is of mull with much or little valenciennes lace (real) and finest hand embroidery.  But however much or little its trimming, it must be exquisite in texture.  In fact, everything for a baby ought to be hand-made.  It can be as plain as a charity garment, but of fine material and tiny hand stitches.  If the baby is very little, it is usually laid on a lace trimmed pillow. (This lace, too, must be valenciennes.)

The godmother or godmothers should wear the sort of clothes that they would wear at an afternoon tea.  The godfather or fathers should wear formal afternoon clothes.  The other guests wear ordinary afternoon clothes and the mother—­unless on the sofa—­wears a light-colored afternoon dress.  She should not wear black on this occasion.

As soon as the ceremony is performed, the clergyman goes to the room that was set apart for him, changes into his ordinary clothes and then returns to the drawing-room to be one of the guests at luncheon or tea.  The godmother hands the baby to the nurse, or maybe to its mother, and everyone gathers around to admire it.  And the party becomes exactly like every informal afternoon tea.

The only difference between an ordinary informal tea and a christening is that a feature of the latter is a christening cake and caudle.  The christening cake is generally a white “lady” cake elaborately iced, sometimes with the baby’s initials, and garlands of pink sugar roses.  And although according to cook-books caudle is a gruel, the actual “caudle” invariably served at christenings is a hot eggnog, drunk out of little punch cups.  One is supposed to eat the cake as a sign that one partakes of the baby’s hospitality, and is therefore its friend, and to drink the caudle to its health and prosperity.  But by this time the young host (or hostess) is peacefully asleep in the nursery.

CHAPTER XXIV

FUNERALS

At no time does solemnity so possess our souls as when we stand deserted at the brink of darkness into which our loved one has gone.  And the last place in the world where we would look for comfort at such a time is in the seeming artificiality of etiquette; yet it is in the moment of deepest sorrow that etiquette performs its most vital and real service.

All set rules for social observance have for their object the smoothing of personal contacts, and in nothing is smoothness so necessary as in observing the solemn rites accorded our dead.

It is the time-worn servitor, Etiquette, who draws the shades, who muffles the bell, who keeps the house quiet, who hushes voices and footsteps and sudden noises; who stands between well-meaning and importunate outsiders and the retirement of the bereaved; who decrees that the last rites shall be performed smoothly and with beauty and gravity, so that the poignancy of grief may in so far as possible be assuaged.