People with children are most often the food-offenders.  Any number not only let small children eat continuously so that the car is filled with food odors, but occasional mothers have been known to let a child with smeary fingers clutch a nearby passenger by the dress or coat and seemingly think it cunning!  Those who can afford it, usually take the drawing-room and keep the children in it.  Those who are to travel in seats should plan diversions for them ahead of time; since it is unreasonable to expect little children to sit quietly for hours on end by merely telling them to “be good.”  Two little girls on the train to Washington the other day were crocheting doll’s sweaters with balls of worsted in which were wound wrapped and disguised “prizes.”  The amount of wool covering each might take perhaps a half hour to use up.  They were allowed the prize only when the last strand of wool around it was used.  They were then occupied for a while with whatever it was—­a little book, or a puzzle, or a game.  When they grew tired of its novelty, they crocheted again until they came to the next prize.  In the end they had also new garments for their dolls.

=LADIES DO NOT TRAVEL WITH ESCORTS=

In a curiously naive book on etiquette appeared a chapter purporting to give advice to a “lady” traveling for an indefinite number of days with a gentleman escort!  That any lady could go traveling for days under the protection of a gentleman is at least a novelty in etiquette.  As said elsewhere, in fashionable society an “escort” is unheard of, and in decent society a lady doesn’t go traveling around the country with a gentleman unless she is outside the pale of society, in which case social convention, at least, is not concerned with her.

Ladies are sometimes accompanied on short, direct trips by gentlemen of their acquaintance, but not for longer than a few hours.

If a lady traveling alone on a long journey, such as a trip across the continent, happens to find a gentleman on board whom she knows, she must not allow him to sit with her in the dining-car more often than a casual once or twice, nor must she allow him to sit with her or talk to her enough to give a possible impression that they are together.  In fact she would be more prudent to take her meals by herself, as it is scarcely worth running the risk of other passengers’ criticism for the sake of having companionship at a meal or two.  If, on a short trip, a gentleman asks a lady, whom he knows, to lunch with him in the dining-car, there is no reason why she shouldn’t.

=THE YOUNG WOMAN TRAVELING ALONE=