ORDEALS OF MODERNITY

Evening Post, Volume CVII, Issue 56, 9 March 1929, Page 20

ORDEALS OF MODERNITY

■ As- with clothes;; so—which, is far nioro. important and . regrettable—with food, as anybody knows who has ever demanded stewedeels in one of those restaurants where wator'costs a shilling a glass and the headwaiter owns racehorses. It is "not .done" to eat whitebait with a spoon, to call for stout when dining to music, to: employ the hands in the conquest of chicken bones, or to request- a third helping of anything save bread; whereby., we Jose a • good deal of:the quiet fun', and; not, a: little nourishment (says K.-R. G. Browne, in ;the "Women's; Journal"). I have a female cbusinrT-ra shy, retiring girl, with a nineteenth-century horror of publicity, —who, esteeming oranges : above all. other iruits, dares iiot indulge her craving "coram populo," for the" reason that the correct and" accepted method of orange-eating has' never been revealed to- her.. In the privacy- of her provincial home she eats oranges per-, sis'tenly in ■ a manner all her own—too plebiaii to be-described hero—but her fear that.it is "not done" thus by the Best People forbids her to repeat the feat, in; public. One day, with any luck, she will see a countess eating an orange in a restaurant, and tho world therafter will seem to her a much more pleasant. place. _ . The path of the ambitious social climber is strewn with similar pitfalls of greater or loss importance. To call a napkin a "serviette" is to sink profoundly, in the'estimation of all within earshot. To 'visit Deauville in mid-win-ter is to earn, a perilous reputation for eccentricity. To devour oysters in June is to win the unconcealed contempt of all right-thinking persons. To smoke a pipe in Bond street is to invite the censure of the Upper Ten. To admit a dislike of Alsatian wolfhounds, dry Martinis, auction bridge, fox-hunting, or the Lido is to proclaim oneself an untutored Philistine unfit to mingle with the great. There is no logical reasoning to bo done in such circumstances. It must suffice that such things are "not done.".