“Yes, just that, shams through and through!  We, you and I are no exceptions to the universal rule of, to quote Mark Twain, ’pretending to be what we ain’t.’  We are polite and civil when we feel ugly and cross; while in company we assume a pleasant expression although inwardly we may be raging.  All our appurtenances are make-believes.  We wear our handsome clothes to church and concert, fancying that mankind may be deceived into the notion that we always look like that.  Food cooked in iron and tin vessels is served in French china and cut glass.  When children sit down to table as ravenously hungry as small animals, their natural instincts are curbed, and they are compelled to eat slowly and ‘properly.’  You see it everywhere and in everything.  The whole plan of modern society, with its manners and usages, is a system of shams!”

In contradistinction to this unsparing denunciation, I place Harriet Beecher Stowe’s idea of this “system of shams.”  In “My Wife and I” she says: 

“You see we don’t propose to warm our house with a wood fire, but only to adorn it.  It is an altar-fire that we will kindle every evening, just to light up our room, and show it to advantage.  And that is what I call woman’s genius.  To make life beautiful; to keep down and out of sight the hard, dry, prosaic side—­and keep up the poetry—­that is my idea of our ‘mission.’  I think woman ought to be what Hawthorne calls ‘The Artist of the Beautiful.’”

Mrs. Stowe is in the right.  In this commonplace, fearfully real world, what would we do without the blessed Gospel of Conventionalities?  In almost every family there is one member, frequently the father of the household, who, like my young friend, has no patience with “make-believes” and eyes all innovations with stern disapproval and distrust.  It is pitiful to witness the harmless deceits practiced by mothers and daughters, the wiles many and varied, by which they strive to introduce some much-to-be-desired point of table etiquette to which “Papa is opposed.”  Sometimes his protest takes the form of a good-natured laugh and shrug accompanied by the time-battered observation that “you can’t teach an old dog new tricks.”  More frequently overtures of this kind are repulsed by the gruff excuse: 

“My father and mother never had any of these new-fangled notions and they got on all right.  What was good enough for them is good enough for me!”

And so paterfamilias continues to take his coffee with, instead of at the end of, his dinner, eats his vegetables out of little sauce plates with a spoon, insists that meat, potatoes and salad shall all be placed upon the table at once, and, if the father and mother than whom he does not care to rise higher were, in spite of their excellence, of the lower class, he carries his food to his mouth on the blade of his knife, and noisily sips tea from his saucer.  Evidently he does not believe in shams, those little conventionalities,