If you propose accepting, your note of acceptance should be sent the day after the invitation has been received. After dining at a ladies’ dinner it is obligatory that you leave your card at the house where you have dined, either the next day or within a day or two. This is called, by the French, a _visite de digestion_. In England, this custom is dying out, for men have not the time to do it. I would here compare society to a series of intersecting circles; each one is a circle of its own, and they all unite in making what is known as general society. Meeting people at a large ball is no evidence of their being received in the smaller circles. What the French call the _petit comité_ of good society is the inmost circle of all, but, naturally, it is confined to a very few. Meeting a person constantly at dinner, at the most exclusive houses, should be sufficient evidence to you that he or she is received everywhere, and if you find people persistently excluded from the best houses at dinners, you may be satisfied that there is some good reason for it. When you introduce a man into the sanctuary of your own family, it is supposed by a fiction to be the greatest compliment you can pay him; but do not be misled by this, for there is nothing more trying to the guest than to be the one outsider. A friend of mine invariably refuses such invitations. “Why,” said he, “my dinner at home is sufficiently good; I am called out with my wife,--both of us compelled to don our best attire, order the carriage, and go to see and be with, whom? A family whose members are not particularly interesting to us.” Men with whom you are only on a business footing you should dine at your Club, and not inflict them on your family. COOKS AND CATERING. CHAPTER XXIII. _Some practical Questions answered--Difference between Men and Women Cooks--Swedish Women the cleanest and most economical--My bills with a Chef--My bills with a Woman Cook--Hints on Marketing--I have done my own Buying for forty years--Mme. Rothschild personally supervises her famous Dinners--Menu of an old-fashioned Southern Dinner--Success of an Impromptu Banquet._