“IT ISN'T DONE”

Evening Star, Issue 20138, 1 April 1929, Page 1

“IT ISN'T DONE”

' * CRDEALS OF MODERNITY 1 As ivil.li doilies, so—which ts far mom important and regrettable—with food, as anybody knows who lias ever demanded stewed cols in. one of those restaurants where a glass of water costs a shilling a glass and Ihe hc>d waiter owns racehorses. If is ‘‘not done” to eat whitebait, with a spoon, to call tor stout whom riming to music, to employ , tho hands in Ihe compiest chicken hones, or to reipicst a- third helping of anything save bread; whereby we lose. ■ a good deal of the (piict Inn and not

a little nourishment (says K. 1!. (1. Browne, in the ‘Women’s Journal’). 1 have a female cousin—a shy. retiring girl with a nineteenth century horror of publicity who, esteeming oranges above all •dher fruits, dares, not indulge her craving “coram populo,” for the reason that the correct and accepted method of orange eating lias never been revealed to her. In the privacy of her provincial homo she eats oranges persistently in a manner all her own—too plebeian to be described here—but her fear that it is “not done” thus by the best people forbids Iter to repeat; the feat in public. One day, with any luck, she will see a countess eating an orange in a restaurant, and the world thereafter will seem to her a much more pleasant place. Tho path of the ambitious social climber i-. strewn will) similar pitfalls of greater or less importance. To call, a napkin a “serviette” is to sink profoundly in llie estimation of all within cardiol. To visit Deauville in midwinter is to earn a perilous reputation for eeeenlricity. To devour oysters in June is in win the unconcealed contempt of all right-thinking persons.To smoke a pipe in Bond street is to invite the ceii-nre of the Upper Jen. To admit a dislike of Alsatian wolfhounds. dry IMartinis. auction bridge, fox hunting, or the Lido is to proclaim, oneself an untutored P.liilisi ino unfit to mimlle with the great. There is no logical reasoning to he done in such circumstances. It must suffice that such thing" are “not done,”