=THE CONSIDERATE GUEST=

Courtesy demands that you, when you are a guest, shall show neither annoyance nor disappointment—­no matter what happens.  Before you can hope to become even a passable guest, let alone a perfect one, you must learn as it were not to notice if hot soup is poured down your back.  If you neither understand nor care for dogs or children, and both insist on climbing all over you, you must seemingly like it; just as you must be amiable and polite to your fellow guests, even though they be of all the people on earth the most detestable to you.  You must with the very best dissimulation at your command, appear to find the food delicious though they offer you all of the viands that are especially distasteful to your palate, or antagonistic to your digestion.  You must disguise your hatred of red ants and scrambled food, if everyone else is bent on a picnic.  You must pretend that six is a perfect dinner hour though you never dine before eight, or, on the contrary, you must wait until eight-thirty or nine with stoical fortitude, though your dinner hour is six and by seven your chest seems securely pinned to your spine.

If you go for a drive, and it pours, and there is no top to the carriage or car, and you are soaked to the skin and chilled to the marrow so that your teeth chatter, your lips must smile and you must appear to enjoy the refreshing coolness.

If you go to stay in a small house in the country, and they give you a bed full of lumps, in a room of mosquitoes and flies, in a chamber over that of a crying baby, under the eaves with a temperature of over a hundred, you can the next morning walk to the village, and send yourself a telegram and leave!  But though you feel starved, exhausted, wilted, and are mosquito bitten until you resemble a well-developed case of chickenpox or measles, by not so much as a facial muscle must you let the family know that your comfort lacked anything that your happiest imagination could picture—­nor must you confide in any one afterwards (having broken bread in the house) how desperately wretched you were.

If you know anyone who is always in demand, not only for dinners, but for trips on private cars and yachts, and long visits in country houses, you may be very sure of one thing:  the popular person is first of all unselfish or else extremely gifted; very often both.

The perfect guest not only tries to wear becoming clothes but tries to put on an equally becoming mental attitude.  No one is ever asked out very much who is in the habit of telling people all the misfortunes and ailments she has experienced or witnessed, though the perfect guest listens with apparent sympathy to every one else’s.  Another attribute of the perfect guest is never to keep people waiting.  She is always ready for anything—­or nothing.  If a plan is made to picnic, she likes picnics above everything and proves her liking by enthusiastically making the sandwiches or the salad dressing or whatever she thinks she makes best.  If, on the other hand, no one seems to want to do anything, the perfect guest has always a book she is absorbed in, or a piece of sewing she is engrossed with, or else beyond everything she would love to sit in an easy chair and do nothing.