=OBLIGATIONS OF PRESENCE AT FUNERALS=

Upon reading the death notice of a mere acquaintance you may leave your card at the house, if you feel so inclined, or you may merely send your card.

Upon the death of an intimate acquaintance or friend you should go at once to the house, write, “With sympathy” on your card and leave it at the door.  Or you should write a letter to the family; in either case, you send flowers addressed to the nearest relative.  On the card accompanying the flowers, you write, “With sympathy,” “With deepest sympathy,” or “With heartfelt sympathy,” or “With love and sympathy.”  If there is a notice in the papers “requesting no flowers be sent,” you send them only if you are a very intimate friend.

Or if you prefer, send a few flowers with a note, immediately after the funeral, to the member of the family who is particularly your friend.

If the notice says “funeral private” you do not go unless you have received a message from the family that you are expected, or unless you are such an intimate friend that you know you are expected without being asked.  Where a general notice is published in the paper, it is proper and fitting that you should show sympathy by going to the funeral, even though you had little more than a visiting acquaintance with the family.  You should not leave cards nor go to a funeral of a person with whom you have not in any way been associated or to whose house you have never been asked.

But it is heartless and delinquent if you do not go to the funeral of one with whom you were associated in business or other interests, or to whose house you were often invited, or where you are a friend of the immediate members of the family.

You should wear black clothes if you have them, or if not, the darkest, the least conspicuous you possess.  Enter the church as quietly as possible, and as there are no ushers at a funeral, seat yourself where you approximately belong.  Only a very intimate friend should take a position far up on the center aisle.  If you are merely an acquaintance you should sit inconspicuously in the rear somewhere, unless the funeral is very small and the church big, in which case you may sit on the end seat of the center aisle toward the back.

CHAPTER XXV

THE COUNTRY HOUSE AND ITS HOSPITALITY

The difference between the great house with twenty to fifty guest rooms, all numbered like the rooms in a hotel, and the house of ordinary good size with from four to six guest rooms, or the farmhouse or small cottage which has but one “best” spare chamber, with perhaps a “man’s room” on the ground floor, is much the same as the difference between the elaborate wedding and the simplest—­one merely of degree and not of kind.