Good Manners for girls.

Otago Witness, Issue 2685, 30 August 1905, Page 66

Good Manners for girls.

Most of us have a faiily good education in these days ; but a lack of social training is as apparent as a hump or a limp. To be genuine, good manners must come through habitual association with wellbred people, or acquired with dpliberate purpose and persevering practice. To those who have natural refinement, and what the French call the "politeness of the heait," it will be but the simple matter of learning the conventions, as one might the rules of a game. Without that foundation, it is an art almost as difficult to acquire as any of the other fine arts for which one has no natural aptitude. To appear a gentlewoman, one must be one by Nature. — The Lessons of Etiquette. — To such a one it is but the conning of a lesson. She learns, for instance, that, when a man is presented to her, she should bow and smile, but need not rise, unless he is an old gentleman and she a young girl, but when introduced to another woman she rises at once, and may shake hands or not, as she- chooses. She learns that it is her province to a^k her young men friends to call upon her — if they are such as her parents would approve — without waiting for them to ask permission. The custom leaves the decision wholly with the woman as to whom she shall receive in her home, unhampered by requests that are embarrassing to deny. These are things worth learning. It sets one at ease and gives poise and an added self-respect to know what is expected of you. It gives freedom from the sense of being critically regarded, from that miseiable self-consciousness that makes us awkward, from the fear of silence that makes us mute when we are expected to talk, and from agonising dreadi of making a blunder. Then, too, a wellbred ghl attracts a better cla^s of men. Any man with the instincts of a gentleman, when he comes to choose a. wife — the one to whom, his good name is to be confided, and to whom he is to look to make the happiness of his future, to bring up his children, and to do the honours of his home in all social relations — selects the girl who appears like- a lady under all circumstances.