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 entirely escape them.

To such people, social intercourse is a perpetual worry and bugbear.

They are on the watch every moment, and if a visitor fails to say, "Pardon me," at the proper place, or stands with his back to his hostess for a moment, or does any other of the things that natural men and women often do, they are "shocked." Then it would be amusing, were it not pathetic, to see how particular they are about their speech--_what_ they say, and _how_ they say it.
As Dr.Palmer has tersely said: "We are terrorized by custom, and inclined to adjust what we would say to what others have said before," and he might have added: It must be said in the same manner.
I cannot help asking why men and women should be terrorized by custom--the method followed or prescribed by other men and women.