When the gentlemen return to the drawing-room, if there is a particular lady that one of them wants to talk to, he naturally goes directly to where she is, and sits down beside her. If, however, she is securely wedged in between two other ladies, he must ask her to join him elsewhere. Supposing Mr. Jones, for instance, wants to talk to Mrs. Bobo Gilding, who is sitting between Mrs. Stranger and Miss Stiffleigh: Mr. Jones saunters up to Mrs. Gilding--he must not look too eager or seem too directly to prefer her to the two who are flanking her position, so he says rather casually, "Will you come and talk to me?" Whereupon she leaves her sandwiched position and goes over to another part of the room, and sits down where there is a vacant seat beside her. Usually, however, the ladies on the ends, being accessible, are more apt to be joined by the first gentleman entering than is the one in the center, whom it is impossible to reach. Etiquette has always decreed that gentlemen should not continue to talk together after leaving the smoking-room, as it is not courteous to those of the ladies who are necessarily left without partners. At informal dinners, and even at many formal ones, bridge tables are set up in an adjoining room, if not in the drawing-room. Those few who do not play bridge spend a half hour (or less) in conversation and then go home, unless there is some special diversion. =MUSIC OR OTHER ENTERTAINMENT AFTER DINNER= Very large dinners of fifty or over are almost invariably followed by some sort of entertainment. Either the dinner is given before a ball or a musicale or amateur theatricals, or professionals are brought in to dance or sing. In this day when conversation is not so much a "lost" as a "wilfully abandoned" art, people in numbers can not be left to spend an evening on nothing but conversation. Grouped together by the hundred and with bridge tables absent, the modern fashionables in America, and in England, too, are as helpless as children at a party without something for them to do, listen to, or look at! =VERY BIG DINNERS= A dinner of sixty, for instance, is always served at separate tables; a center one of twenty people, and four corner tables of ten each. Or if less, a center table of twelve and four smaller tables of eight. A dinner of thirty-six or less is seated at a single table. But whether there are eighteen, eighty, or one or two hundred, the setting of each individual table and the service is precisely the same. Each one is set with centerpiece, candles, compotiers, and evenly spaced plates, with the addition of a number by which to identify it; or else each table is decorated with different colored flowers, pink, yellow, orchid, white. Whatever the manner of identification, the number or the color is written in the corner of the ladies' name cards that go in the envelopes handed to each arriving gentleman at the door: "pink," "yellow," "orchid," "white," or "center table."