Decorum

 

Decorum

The following is an update of a little sketch I wrote twelve years ago.

Miss Blythe was a genteel woman who spent her spinster days preparing young ladies for their debut into society. These were not the daughters of aristocracy, but rather the children of parents newly come into money and anxious to rise in society.

She showed them how to curtsey and how to maintain perfect deportment. The young ladies pouted and complained as they crossed the room that the books on their heads were too heavy, but Miss Blythe insisted that her method was the only one by which they would achieve poise and elegance, and she was proved correct.

Miss Blythe taught her charges how to dress appropriately for different occasions, and took them through the sometimes confusing array of cutlery and flatware that would greet them at grand banquets. She explained how they should respond to young gentlemen, that is, with a pleasing combination of attentiveness and coyness. She reminded them that, although it was an age in which young women were becoming more assertive, they should pay close attention to her dictums, if they wished to make the desired impression in the right circles.

The ‘right circles’ were those in which their doting mamas hoped their dutiful daughters would attract suitable and suitably rich husbands. It was, for most of them, a vain hope, for aristocracy and ‘old money’ prefer their own kind.

Nonetheless, Miss Blythe performed her duties well. Decorum was everything to her and the ladies who trusted their daughters to her expert tuition were always delighted with her results. Many a duck was transformed, if not into a swan, at least not into a goose.

Sitting demurely was something she insisted on. ’Ankles should be crossed at the ankle, hands folded in laps - there should be no fidgeting,’ she instructed. ‘If you are overheated, employ your fan, but be aware of the language of the fan.'

The young ladies smirked at each other, thinking fans were old-fashioned. They were careful not to let Miss Blythe see, for smirking was a lower-class habit to be discouraged.

At the beginning of each social season, she was pleased to see her protégées depart for their sparkling lives of privilege and comfortable marriage. She thought of her own mother’s exhortations to her as a young woman.

Miss Blythe’s origins were humble in the extreme. Her mother, a washerwoman, had wished great things for her daughter.

‘I don’t want you falling like what I did,’ she said. ‘Just you remember, my girl, keep your ‘and on your ‘a’penny. Save yerself for someone what deserves yer.’

‘Yes, Ma,’ said Ethel and worked hard to discover the correct way of doing things the way the toffs, as her mother called them, did them.

She did well, Ethel Blythe, and though she may never have made the leap across the classes as her mother had hoped, she led a comfortable though husbandless life, nevertheless. As she exhorted her young ladies to sit decorously, her mother’s word often sprang to her lips to be bitten back before expression.

‘A girl’s legs are her best friends,’ her mother always said, ‘And best friends should never be parted.

‘Just once, ‘she sighed, ‘I wonder what it would have been like.’