=A GUEST CAN LOOK AFTER HIS OWN COMFORT=

The most trying thing to people of very set habits is an unusual breakfast hour.  When you have the unfortunate habit of waking with the dawn, and the household you are visiting has the custom of sleeping on Sunday morning, the long wait for your coffee can quite actually upset your whole day.  On the other hand, to be aroused at seven on the only day when you do not have to hurry to business, in order to yawn through an early breakfast, and then sit around and kill time, is quite as trying.  The guest with the “early” habit can in a measure prevent discomfort.  He can carry in a small case (locked if necessary) a very small solidified alcohol outfit and either a small package of tea or powdered coffee, sugar, powdered milk, and a few crackers.  He can then start his day all by himself in the barnyard hours without disturbing any one, and in comfort to himself.  Few people care enough to “fuss,” but if they do, this equipment of an habitual visitor with incurably early waking hours is given as a suggestion.

Or perhaps the entire guest situation may be put in one sentence.  If you are an inflexible person, very set in your ways, don’t visit!  At least don’t visit without carefully looking the situation over from every angle to be sure that the habits of the house you are going to are in accord with your own.

A solitary guest is naturally much more dependent on his host (or her hostess), but on the other hand, he or she is practically always a very intimate friend who merely adapts himself or herself like a chameleon to the customs and hours and diversions of the household.

=DONT’S FOR HOSTESS=

When a guest asks to be called half an hour before breakfast, don’t have him called an hour and a half before because it takes you that long to dress, nor allow him a scant ten minutes because the shorter time is seemingly sufficient.  Too often the summons on the door wakes him out of sound sleep; he tumbles exhausted out of bed, into clothes, and down stairs, to wait perhaps an hour for breakfast.

If a guest prefers to sit on the veranda and read, don’t interrupt him every half page to ask if he really does not want to do something else.  If, on the other hand, a guest wants to exercise, don’t do everything in your power to obstruct his starting off by saying that it will surely rain, or that it is too hot, or that you think it is senseless to spend days that should be a rest to him in utterly exhausting himself.

Don’t, when you know that a young man cares little for feminine society, fine-tooth-comb the neighborhood for the dullest or silliest young woman to be found.

Don’t, on the other hand, when you have an especially attractive young woman staying with you, ask a stolid middle-aged couple and an octogenarian professor for dinner, because the charm and beauty of the former is sure to appeal to the latter.