The Six Brands of Week-End Hostesses

It s a Great Life, If You Dont Week-End

FLASHBACK

THE thoughtful hostess is an X extremely popular brand. If it weren’t for her week-end parties, society never could catch up with its correspondence. She isn’t in the least entertaining—she was born that way—and she mercifully doesn’t try to be. She thoughtfully effaces herself, after supplying each guest with crested paper, assorted pens, unused stamps, liveried footmen and individual mail chutes. Spending a week-end at her house is like spending it in the writing room of the Waldorf.

THE absent-minded hostess has X ruined many a promising young week-end by her unfortunate affliction. Her house was just built around house parties, her friends are nearly all regular people, and she has one of the six best cellars,—but she can never quite remember just what people she has asked for the week-end and she will go and ask a bishop, at the last moment Of course, bishops are a splendid institution and you really couldn’t want anything nicer around a cathedral, but at a week-end party, when all the tired business guests are having their relaxation, a bishop is about as welcome as an outbreak of beri-beri.

THE hostess who is so Bohemian is one of those things that we could all get along without She is always exploring among the fauna of Greenwich Village and capturing some particularly wild specimen. Her guests spend the week-end, like Daniel, in a lion’s den. There is no let-up to the atrocities. The guests must sit in silent horror, thinking of all the things they could be doing at Long Beach, while some dank-haired conscientious objector does unmentionable things to a piano and the hostess listens in a blaze of diamonds and benevolence.

THE well-meaning hostess is one of X the lowest forms. She insists upon everybody’s getting together and having a jolly time. She can’t call it a week-end till each of her guests has committed at least one parlor trick. She is here portrayed in her favorite pursuit of dragging an inoffensive guest to the piano, insisting that she just knows he sings, in spite of his agonized protests that he has never been able to utter any sound which could possibly be construed as singing. People spend exactly one week-end at her place; after that, ‘‘very important business keeps them away.’’

THE perfect, or disappearing, hostess X is rare. She always invites the One Person you want to spend the week-end with, and then lets nature take its course. She has a perfectly bearable house surrounded by really wonderful grounds — grounds for everything from breach of promise to separation. This hostess appears occasionally at dinner, but at all other times she vanishes completely, leaving things to the careful supervision of the faithful family gardener, who has probably seen more biological history in the making than has any other man in all the surrounding country.

THE gilded hostess has one of those charmingly rusX tic cottages at Newport, where her guests rough it from Saturday to Monday, surrounded by the pastoral simplicity of vintage champagne, Swiss butlers, liveried footmen and hot and cold running chambermaids. The sketch—from life—shows a guest’s retreat to the city, after a week-end's bridge; note how the footmen have decorated the staircase with palms.