SAY MEH TO THE DRESS (LEAVING IT UP TO YOU)

29th.—The preparations for the marriage have begun. The dressmaker has come to receive her orders. Laura is perfectly impassive, perfectly careless about the question of all others in which a woman's personal interests are most closely bound up. She has left it all to the dressmaker and to me. If poor Hartright had been the baronet, and the husband of her father's choice, how differently she would have behaved! How anxious and capricious she would have been, and what a hard task the best of dressmakers would have found it to please her! 

John Cale: Leaving It Up To You (Link)

Text:  Willkie Collins, The Woman In White (1859-60)

FAINT HEART NEVER

“When the table ‘turns’, don’t get left staring into space.  Turn immediately to the girl on your left.  If she doesn’t turn to you, lean over and say something like this,’How about getting rid of that fascinating fellow on your left and paying a little attention to me?’ Don’t forget, faint heart, never, etc. etc.”

This passage from Walter Hoving’s Tiffany’s Table Manners For Teenagers (1961) has stuck with me all my life, although I can’t say that I’ve ever attended a dinner party where they “turned” the table.  Still, Hoving makes a sound point from which others can be usefully extrapolated.   

Tables are always turning, pennies always dropping and scales falling. Being caught unawares, unprepared, can be dangerous or at least embarrassing.  Just the other week when the Nosferatus dropped by to gorge I found I had nothing to serve, which raised my paranoia level considerably.  

"Faint heart never, etc., etc." is the very best advice.

Upper:  John Singer Sargent; 

Middle:  Jennifer Pochinski;  

Lower:  William Betts

John Cale: Ship of Fools (Link)