are quite as much interested in the play and therefore as attentive and
quiet as you are. A very annoying person at the "movies" is one who reads
every "caption" out loud.


=PROPER THEATER CLOTHES=

At the evening performance in New York a lady wears a dinner dress; a
gentleman a dinner coat, often called a Tuxedo. Full dress is not correct,
but those going afterwards to a ball can perfectly well go to the theater
first if they do not make themselves conspicuous. A lady in a ball dress
and many jewels should avoid elaborate hair ornamentation and must keep
her wrap, or at least a sufficiently opaque scarf, about her shoulders to
avoid attracting people's attention. A gentleman in full dress is not
conspicuous.

And on the subject of theater dress it might be tentatively remarked that
prinking and "making up" in public are all part of an age which can not
see fun in a farce without bedroom scenes and actors in pajamas, and
actresses running about in negligés with their hair down. An audience
which night after night watches people dressing and undressing probably
gets into an unconscious habit of dressing or prinking itself. In other
days it was always thought that so much as to adjust a hat-pin or glance
in a glass was lack of breeding. Every well brought up young woman was
taught that she must finish dressing in her bedchamber. But to-day young
women in theaters, restaurants, and other public places, are continually
studying their reflection in little mirrors and patting their hair and
powdering their noses and fixing this or adjusting that in a way that in
Mrs. Oldname's girlhood would have absolutely barred them from good
society; nor can Mrs. Worldly or Mrs. Oldname be imagined "preening" and