When lifting his hat or bowing.

In a room, an office, or an elevator, when a lady enters.

In any short conversation where he is standing near, or talking with a lady.

If he is seated himself for a conversation with a lady on a veranda, in an hotel, in a private house, anywhere where “smoking is permitted,” he first asks, “Do you mind if I smoke?” And if she replies, “Not at all” or “Do, by all means,” it is then proper for him to do so.  He should, however, take his cigar, pipe, or cigarette, out of his mouth while he is speaking.  One who is very adroit can say a word or two without an unpleasant grimace, but one should not talk with one’s mouth either full of food or barricaded with tobacco.

In the country, a gentleman may walk with a lady and smoke at the same time—­especially a pipe or cigarette.  Why a cigar is less admissible is hard to determine, unless a pipe somehow belongs to the country.  A gentleman in golf or country clothes with a pipe in his mouth and a dog at his heels suggests a picture fitting to the scene; while a cigar seems as out of place as a cutaway coat.  A pipe on the street in a city, on the other hand, is less appropriate than a cigar in the country.  In any event he will, of course, ask his companion’s permission to smoke.

=MANNERS AND BUSINESS=

If you had a commission to give and you entered a man’s office and found him lolling back in a tipped swivel chair, his feet above his head, the ubiquitous cigar in his mouth and his drowsy attention fixed on the sporting page of the newspaper, you would be impressed not so much by his lack of good manners as by his bad business policy, because of the incompetence that his attitude suggests.  It is scarcely necessary to ask:  Would you give an important commission to him who has no apparent intention of doing anything but “take his ease”; or to him who is found occupied at his desk, who gets up with alacrity upon your entrance, and is seemingly “on his toes” mentally as well as actually?  Or, would you go in preference to a man whose manners resemble those of a bear at the Zoo, if you could go to another whose business ability is supplemented by personal charm?  And this again is merely an illustration of bad manners and good.

=AN ADVANTAGE OF POLISH=

One advantage of polish is that one’s opponent can never tell what is going on under the glazed surface of highly finished manners, whereas an unfinished surface is all too easily penetrated.  And since business encounters are often played like poker hands, it is surely a bad plan to be playing with a mind-reader who can plainly divine his opponent’s cards, while his own are unrevealed.