A Test of Good Breeding

Traveling is one of the severest tests of good breeding; and whoever leaves home to go to the seaside or the mountains, does well to bear this fact in mind. At the places of summer resort, too, people are more in danger of making disadvantageous or even objectionable, acquaintanceships than they are at their own homes, from the very fact that here all the world appears on a more familiar footing; and as every person is a stranger to every other, people of doubtful character or reputation in their native places, often succeed in passing themselves off for what they are not, in the crowd of a watering place.

All this is so thoroughly recognized at Newport and other large and exclusive summer resorts that a stranger, genteel or otherwise, will find great difficulty in making any acquaintances among the “summer people,” as they are called. If he have no friend to introduce he need not hope to join in the gayety which he sees around him. He is only a spectator and probably leaves his hotel at the end of August, thoroughly disgusted with the invisible but firm barriers which have excluded him from the charmed circle. ~ Demorest’s Monthly

source: The Indiana Progress
location: Indiana, Pennsylvania