a, and where; how to lose
money gracefully at bridge; how to gabble incessantly and not know
what you are talking about; how to listen "intelligently" and not have
the remotest idea what your _vis-a-vis_ is saying to you; you'll have
to join 'steen clubs, and read ten new novels a day; go to every new
play; know all about the latest movies; know all the latest ideas
of social uplift, study art, the spiritual essence of color, the
futurists, and the cubists. Of course, you'll study the peerage of
England and know all about rank and precedence--and, indeed, you'll
have your hands and mind so full of things that will make such a hash
of life that it will take ten specialists to straighten you out and
help you to die forty years before your time. Hence, if that is the
life you intend to live, throw this book into the fire. It will be
wasting your time to read it.

If you don't belong to the class of the extra rich, but are all the
time wishing that you did; that you had their money, could live as
they live, and, as far as you can, you imitate, copy, and follow
them, then, again, I recommend that you give this book to the nearest
newsboy and let him sell it and get some good out of it. You are not
yet ready for it, or else you have gone so far beyond me in life, that
you are out of my reach.

If, on the other hand, you belong to the class of _workers_, those who
have to earn their living and wish to spend their lives intelligently
and usefully, you can well afford to disregard--after you have learned
to apply the few basic principles of social converse--the whims, the
caprices, the artificial code set up by the so-called arbiters of
fashion, manners, and "good form," which are not formulated for
the promotion of intelligent intercourse between real manhood and
womanhood, but for the preservation and strengthening of the barriers
of wealth and caste.

Connected with this phase of the subject is a consideration of those
who are worried lest in word or action, they fail in gentility. They
are afraid to do anything lest it should not be regarded as genteel.
When they shake hands, it must be done not so much with hearty,
friendly spontaneity, but with gentility, and you wonder what that
faint touch of fingers, reached high in air, means. They would be
mortified beyond measure if they failed to observe any of the little
gentilities of life, while the larger consideration of their visitor's
disregard of the matter, would entire