Perfect Behavior: A Guide for Ladies and Gentlemen in All Social Crises

THE PROPOSAL PROPER About the second or third month of a formal courtship it is customary for the man to propose matrimony, and if the girl has been “out” for three or four years and has several younger sisters coming along, it is customary for her to accept him. They then become “engaged,” and the courtship is concluded. CHAPTER TWO: THE ETIQUETTE OF ENGAGEMENTS AND WEDDINGS THE HISTORIC ASPECT “Matrimony,” sings Homer, the poet, “is a holy estate and not lightly to be entered into.” The “old Roman” is right. A modern wedding is one of the most intricate and exhausting of social customs. Young men and women of our better classes are now forced to devote a large part of their lives to acting as brides, grooms, ushers and bridesmaids at various elaborate nuptials. Weeks are generally required in preparation for an up-to-date wedding; months are necessary in recovering from such an affair. Indeed, some of the participants, notably the bride and groom, never quite get over the effects of a marriage. It was not “always thus.” Time was when the wedding was a comparatively simple affair. In the Paleolithic Age, for example, (as Mr. H. G. Wells of England points out in his able “Outline of History”), there is no evidence of any particular ceremony conjunctive with the marriage of “a male and a female.” Even with the advent of Neolithic man, a wedding seems to have been consummated by the rather simple process of having the bridegroom crack the bride over the head with a plain, unornamented stone ax. There were no ushers— no bridesmaids. But shortly after that (c- 10,329— 30 B.C. to be exact) two young Neoliths named Haig, living in what is now supposed to be Scotland, discovered that the prolonged distillation of common barley resulted in the creation of an amber-colored liquid which, when taken internally, produced a curious and not unpleasant effect.