The atmosphere of a luncheon is often formal, but informal luncheons and suppers differ in nothing except day and evening lights, and clothes. Strangers are occasionally invited to informal luncheons, but only intimate friends are bidden to supper.
The table is set, as to places and napery, exactly like the lunch table, with the addition of candlesticks or candelabra as at dinner. Where supper differs from the usual lunch table is that in front of the hostess is a big silver tea-tray with full silver service for tea or cocoa or chocolate or breakfast coffee, most often chocolate or cocoa and either tea or coffee. At the host's end of the table there is perhaps a chafing dish--that is, if the host fancies himself a cook!
A number of people whose establishments are not very large, have very informal Sunday night suppers on their servants' Sundays out, and forage for themselves. The table is left set, a cold dish of something and salad are left in the icebox; the ingredients for one or two chafing dish specialties are also left ready. At supper time a member of the family, and possibly an intimate friend or two, carry the dishes to the table and make hot toast on a toaster.
This kind of supper is, in fact as well as spirit, an indoor picnic; thought to be the greatest fun by the Kindharts, but little appreciated by the Gildings, which brings it down, with so many other social customs, to a mere matter of personal taste.
A ball is the only social function in America to which such qualifying words as splendor and magnificence can with proper modesty of expression be applied. Even the most elaborate wedding is not quite "a scene of splendor and magnificence" no matter how luxurious the decorations or how costly the dress of the bride and bridesmaids, because the majority of the wedding guests do not complete the picture. A dinner may be lavish, a dance may be beautiful, but a ball alone is prodigal, meaning, of course, a private ball of greatest importance.
On rare occasions, a great ball is given in a private house, but since few houses are big enough to provide dancing space for several hundred and sit-down supper space for a greater number still, besides smoking-room, dressing-room and sitting-about space, it would seem logical to describe a typical ball as taking place in the ballroom suite built for the purpose in nearly all hotels.