Evening star. [volume] (Washington, D.C.) 1854-1972, 1903-05-16
SOCIAL GROOMING
Helps for the Daughters of
the Newly Rich.
ETIQUETTE TRAINING
CORRECT THING IN CLOTHES AND
HOW TO WEAR THEM.
The Life of Fashionable Schools and
Its Rules of Deport
ment.
Written for The Evening Star.

Written for The Evening Star.
The young woman from Brownsville, Ga.
or Diggins' Corners. Iowa. or Helrs Fork,
Nevada. who is sent to a fashionable fin
fishing school suddenly finds herself pros
Good Form
She realizes that during the grooming
process which must precede her social cam
paign there will be no time for her to con-
suit her monitor in the Talks With Girls
column. which, heretofore, has represented
her sole schooling in etiquette. Neither will
her pride permit her to ask questions on so
delicate and personal a topic as manners.
She must learn by absorption rather than
by precept; and she decides on the instant
that while algebraic principles may be i'm
portant the question of which fork she
shall use for her oysters and which for the
entree is really essential.
Under the old regime of finishing schools
the manners Of the boarding school miss
were stamped with a certain shipper and
affectation. which. presumably: set her
apart from those who were denied the
blessings of eight months or more at THE
Misses Jones' Select School for Young
Ladies'" Today the well-mannered grad
uate of similar institutions is model of
simplicity. Her manners are not gar
ment, but part of herself. Her bearing
must be that of the woman to the man
ner born. and she must not suggest
veneering attained in one term
To gain this end the daily life in the
school is marked by the most rigid adher-
ence to the rules of polite society. The lit
tie elegance of speech and bearing which
the awkward. conscious girl gradually ac-
uuires come from contact. not from lee
lures on how to leave the room and how to
hold your teacup, as might be imagined
from the wild stories printed about the
social training school for daughters of the
newly rich.
One of the First Lessons
One of her first lessons-always by ex
ample-is in the good manners of clothes,
the art of appropriate dressing. She learns
to put the correct value on lines, and re-
duces furbelows to their true rank. She
discovers that a shopping tour church
service is not the occasion for DOMINIC her
most elaborate frock. She is taught that
pedestrian skirt, tailor finished, and tulle
picture hat form a bad combination. The
Importance of dinner bodices is duly i'm
imagines that because she dons a decol
cite waist for dinner she must be booked
for party later in the evening.
The new pupil discovers that while the
chaperon sometimes tempers the joy of
matinee party, she is good form" At the
fashionable church where her principal has
elected that she shall have a pew sit
ting she learns the etiquette of the sacred
edifice-how to pass quietly, transformations
ly down the aisle, to say nothing of the
question of precedence in entering and leay
ing the pew.
During a sudden and inxplicable pause in
the general conversation she hears her own
voice in accents which she realizes are diff
ferent from those employed all around her.
She decides to cultivate the broad ''a." an
adaptation of the correct English accent.
At first she drawls her "a's' after fash
ion that is true burlesque. but in time this,
with other crudities of speech, disappears.
The Shades of Greeting.
She must bow correctly. whether she is
saluting equals or superiors- She finds that
there are dozen shades in greeting, for
the young and the old, the intimate friend
distinction, and the person who is to be
between cordially or graciousness and
"gush" She Is taught above all things that
there is no excuse for the crime Of "tcut-
ting an acquaintance
Just now the correct bow, as taught in
fashionable schools, shows a graceful in
clination of the body, instead of the jerk
OF the head, which. for a time, was consid-
cred good form.
Another bow extensively taught is sug-
gested by the revival of the minuet. Pre-
sumably it Is for the benefit of those girls
who will eventually go abroad and be pre-
sented to royalty.
1t is made by throwing the weight of the
body on the right leg. The left leg is
placed slightly in advance, and kept still
The obeisance Is accomplished by bending
the right leg at the knee and inclinng the
body forward ct the waist. The back is