DEAR MISS MANNERS: My husband's sister just came into a great deal of money, and to celebrate, she and her husband invited my family to join them on a trip to Disney World -- their treat. We all had a marvelous time.

At the airport on the way home, the airline offered free airline tickets to anyone who would give up their seat on our flight for a later flight that day. I opted to give up my seat. My in-laws dropped my husband off on their way home (we live 10 minutes apart), and I drove our car home from the airport.

Later, I felt that taking advantage of this offer may have been rude -- that I was getting even more free stuff from the generosity of my in-laws.

Should I have flown home with the group? Should I offer my free airline ticket to my in-laws? (It is transferable.)

GENTLE READER: Miss Manners may have a better idea than you do of what is bothering you. It is not exactly the money, and (you may be relieved to hear) she doesn't believe that giving away the ticket is the solution.

What your sister-in-law bought with her windfall was time with you and your family. What you sold for your extra airplane ticket was time with your family.

Granted, being together on an airplane is not exactly quality time. Nevertheless, you did leave them prematurely -- and for a free ticket, at a time when you hadn't even finished using their free ticket.

What your in-laws need from you is not an airplane ticket, but the assurance that you value your time together as much as they do. You should state this and initiate plans to see them, not worrying that an invitation to dinner or a proposal for an excursion to the zoo costs less than the trip. The way to use the airplane ticket to re-enforce this is to say, "I felt bad about leaving you, but I want this toward our all taking another trip together."

DEAR MISS MANNERS: Whatever do you do when a person from your long-ago past unexpectedly confronts you with, "Do you know who I am?"

This is really confounding, particularly when you are at a social gathering, with others around you, enjoying the joke on you.

It happened again yesterday when a woman whom I had not seen in over 25 years, whom I did not then know particularly well, and who is not aging with much grace, confronted me, as I was at a function, chatting with some recently met acquaintances.

"No, you look too old and too fat for me ever to have paid attention to you" came to mind, but I didn't want to be that rude. As I am now in my 70th year, with all my faculties good and sound, I sound like a stumbling idiot as I stand there, fumbling with what to say. What should I say?

GENTLE READER: "How could anyone forget you?"

Should the lady be so rash as to pass up the opportunity to accept this gracefully and ask, "Well, then, who am I?" Miss Manners gives you leave to say gently, "Surely you can tell me."

Your only error is to feel foolish when approached by foolish people.

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DEAR MISS MANNERS: Recently I contracted with a company to do some work in my home, and was dissatisfied with the work performed. In response to my letter of complaint, I received a hand-written "Thank You" card (gold lettering on the front), in which I was addressed by my first name. It was a letter of apology, with an assurance that my suggestions would be attended to in future business.

I appreciated the content, and the handwriting, but was annoyed by the assumed familiarity. Since the note did not respond to my request for a partial refund, I had occasion to write again, and sent a typewritten letter on business-size paper. Was this proper?

As my original complaint centered on the lack of professionalism on the part of this company (on a scale much larger than that of correspondence and modes of address), I fear the subtlety of maintaining my distance may be lost on them. Is there anything else I can do (within the bounds of etiquette, of course) to dissuade them from unwanted "intimacy" in the future?

GENTLE READER: Don't hire them again. That way, they will never get anywhere near you.

Miss Manners does not advise this merely to punish the company for annoying you with an all-too-common transgression of etiquette. Saying, "I'd prefer that you call me Ms. Humblethwaite," pleasantly but directly, should be all that is needed to alert someone who means to be polite to you how to do so.

But you are talking about a company that doesn't have enough pride and responsibility about its own work to do it properly, nor make restitution after admitting that it did not.

Yes, a typewritten letter on business-size paper is proper for a business letter. Miss Manners just has a hard time picturing the recipients saying, "Look at this. Why don't we write dignified professional letters like this?"

DEAR MISS MANNERS: When eating soup from a bowl on a plate, where is the proper place to set the spoon between spoonfuls and again when finished? Is it the bowl or the plate?

GENTLE READER: Miss Manners is going to drive you crazy on this one. You want a simple answer so you can eat your soup in peace and propriety, and she is about to douse you with technical terms.

Soup may be served in bowls or cups with small plates under them, in which case the spoon is always parked on the underlying plate, whether you are finished or just resting up for the next spoonful. That would be a simple answer if this were all there were to it, but there is more.

At more or less formal dinners, soup is served in a so-called soup plate, which doesn't look like a plate because it is a rimmed wide, shallow bowl, but it is called a plate anyway. It goes on top of the service plate, and both are removed together when replaced with the plate for the fish or meat course.

When a soup plate is used, the spoon is parked in it, not in the flat plate below the soup plate. This is a shock to people who only learned soup-bowl etiquette, and will think you don't know any better, but it is the correct method.

You can achieve an even greater shock with two-handled soup cups, where it is not strictly necessary to use a spoon at all, but permissible to drink from the lifted cup. However, Miss Manners does not consider herself responsible for the consequences of Fun With Soup.

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That will be enough, thank you. Now is not the time to giggle about how prissy and trivial etiquette is, and how ridiculous to imagine it can foist its silliness on real people.

Miss Manners has tried to be a sport while the raffish have their tedious little jokes, but her weak smile has grown ever weaker over the years. Possibly this is because the repertory never varies.

Joke one: Tea parties!

Joke two: White gloves!

Joke three, the one that really propels them into the heights of hilarity: Forks! (Apparently, real people consider their inability to manage their food to be an asset.)

Tee hee.

But it appears that Miss Manners is not alone in deploring the demise of manners in society. It was no surprise to her that a poll undertaken by Public Agenda found that 79 percent of those surveyed declared rudeness to be a major problem.

What does surprise her is that there are still so many people trying to sabotage efforts to fix the problem. Statistically, some of them must be those same people.

What is more, she has seen them in action. These are the folks who deplore the awful behavior of modern children, and then break in, when a parent is instructing a child to say thank you or wait his turn instead of pushing, or stop banging on things, with: "Oh, leave him alone, he's only a child. Let him enjoy himself."

And, of course, everyone is after the ultimate sweet deal -- the freedom to do anything you feel like, no matter how it affects others, along with the requirement that those others treat you with strict politeness. If such a situation were feasible, even Miss Manners might be tempted to go for it, but unfortunately, it doesn't work. The same restraints have to apply to everyone.

So how do the scoffers reconcile the desire for civility with undermining etiquette?

That is where the tea parties, white gloves and forks come in. They define etiquette as consisting of rules they don't know and feel do not affect them (never mind how adversely affected their spouses' appetites may be over the way they eat). They ignore the fact that there are rules they do find important, such as returning a high five, not driving slowly in the fast lane, and being waited on first when they were there first.

Then they declare that while people should be nice and considerate to one another, they should do so naturally, without being bound by any rules.

Didn't we just try that? Didn't we just come through nearly half a century of advocating an etiquette-free society, where people would use their own judgment about how to behave, and not have to follow any rules?

And didn't it work out about as well as if we had abolished the legal system in favor of just telling everyone to please behave morally?

DEAR MISS MANNERS: I will soon have handicap license plates on my car, and I have been warned that as a member of the "invisible" handicapped, I will be the target of much abuse.

What is a mannerly response to the people who will inevitably confront me?

I know this is none of their business, but I am a lady and do not wish to be rude by ignoring these ignorant judges of parking spaces. I would happily change places with them, even for a day, to be pain free and "abled."

GENTLE READER: Miss Manners deeply appreciates your supplying your own answer. This saves her a lot of work. The only addition she needs to make, on her way out to the porch swing with a mimosa and the new Henry James novel, is to caution you to use a pleasant tone when you voice your willingness to change places with the vigilantes.

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