If the notice says "funeral private" you do not go unless you have
received a message from the family that you are expected, or unless you
are such an intimate friend that you know you are expected without being
asked. Where a general notice is published in the paper, it is proper and
fitting that you should show sympathy by going to the funeral, even though
you had little more than a visiting acquaintance with the family. You
should _not_ leave cards nor go to a funeral of a person with whom you
have not in any way been associated or to whose house you have never been
asked.
But it is heartless and delinquent if you do not go to the funeral of one
with whom you were associated in business or other interests, or to whose
house you were often invited, or where you are a friend of the immediate
members of the family.
You should wear black clothes if you have them, or if not, the darkest,
the least conspicuous you possess. Enter the church as quietly as
possible, and as there are no ushers at a funeral, seat yourself where you
approximately belong. Only a very intimate friend should take a position
far up on the center aisle. If you are merely an acquaintance you should
sit inconspicuously in the rear somewhere, unless the funeral is very
small and the church big, in which case you may sit on the end seat of the
center aisle toward the back.
CHAPTER XXV
THE COUNTRY HOUSE AND ITS HOSPITALITY
The difference between the great house with twenty to fifty guest rooms,
all numbered like the rooms in a hotel, and the house of ordinary good
size with from four to six guest rooms, or the farmhouse or small cottage
which has but one "best" spare chamber, with perhaps a "man's room" on the
ground floor, is much the same as the difference between the elaborate
wedding and the simplest--one merely of degree and not of kind.
To be sure, in the great house, week-end guests often include those who
are little more than acquaintances of the host and hostess, whereas the
visitor occupying the only "spare" room is practically always an intimate
friend. Excepting, therefore, that people who have few visitors never ask
any one on their general list, and that those who fill an enormous house
time and time again necessarily do, the etiquette, manners, guest room
appointments and the people who occupy them, are precisely the same.
Popular opinion to the contrary, a man's social position is by no means
proportionate to the size of his house, and even though he lives in a
bungalow, he may have every bit as high a position in the world of fashion
as his rich neighbor in his palace--often much better!
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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