Try to walk through halls gracefully, without self-consciousness or swinging arms; and when the dinner has begun, enter into the spirit of it, and endeavor to be agreeable to your neighbors, but never forget that you are in a public place, and that at other tables there are strangers whom you do not know, and before whom you certainly do not wish to make yourself of no account. I have seen boy-and-girl parties at restaurants where, if one had not known the names of the actual people, one would have presumed they were a set of young hoydens imagining themselves at a village feast. All noisy or unrestrained behavior is really very vulgar in any mixed company. I am sure you will agree with me about this, Caroline, and, if you will give yourself time to reflect what self-respect really means, you will discover that, if it is innate, it will guide you better than any words of mine; and that even as an acquired quality it makes the only infallible standard to judge the expediency or inexpediency of certain conduct by. You may, if you are petulant, retort, “Goodness gracious, if I have got to be thinking all the time of how I am behaving, I shall be a stuck-up, unnatural thing, and won’t have any fun!” Now, listen, Caroline. We will make the simile that society is an operatic stage, or, to give a still more up-to-date example, the Russian Ballet! A certain organized institution. It could not go on if the dancers had not been taught at all and thought they could cavort about as they pleased on the plea of being natural. The higher the state of their training, the _more perfectly natural_ do their movements appear. So you, before entering society, should learn in such perfection all the technical part of polish that to do the right thing comes naturally to you, and gives you time, so to speak, to encourage your individual talent, and be a Pavlova or a Karsavina. But, if you are only at the stage of the last-joined chorus-girl, you cannot hope to dance the _pas seul_! Should you desire to be so perfectly savage that you need never think if you are doing ugly and unattractive things or not, then you have no business to try to enter society at all, which is admittedly a civilized circle, with standards of behavior which are the result of centuries of evolution. It is not a primeval forest, where you can climb trees and roll on the grass at will! No one forces you to enter society, but for heaven’s sake, if you do, decide to do it well! [Illustration: “_I wonder if you smoke, dear girl?_”]