=NEW YORK'S BAD MANNERS=

New York's bad manners are often condemned and often very deservedly. Even
though the cause is carelessness rather than intentional indifference, the
indifference is no less actual and the rudeness inexcusable.

It is by no means unheard of that after sitting at table next to the guest
of honor, a New Yorker will meet her the next day with utter
unrecognition. Not because the New Yorker means to "cut" the stranger or
feels the slightest unwillingness to continue the acquaintance, but
because few New Yorkers possess enthusiasm enough to make an effort to
remember all the new faces they come in contact with, but allow all those
who are not especially "fixed" in their attention, to drift easily out of
mind and recognition. It is mortifyingly true; no one is so ignorantly
indifferent to everything outside his or her own personal concern as the
socially fashionable New Yorker, unless it is the Londoner! The late
Theodore Roosevelt was a brilliantly shining exception. And, of course,
and happily, there are other men and women like him in this. But there are
also enough of the snail-in-shell variety to give color to the very just
resentment that those from other and more gracious cities hold against New
Yorkers.

Everywhere else in the world (except London), the impulse of
self-cultivation, if not the more generous ones of consideration and
hospitality, induces people of good breeding to try and make the effort to
find out what manner of mind, or experience, or talent, a stranger has;
and to remember, at least out of courtesy, anyone for whose benefit a
friend of theirs gave a dinner or luncheon. To fashionable New York,
however, luncheon was at one-thirty; at three there is something else