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He pronounced the church-letter, though quite outside of his own church, a document of the highest respectability, and he listened with patient deference to the autobiography which Mrs. Lander poured out upon him, and her identifications, through reference to this or that person in Boston whom he knew either at first or second hand.
It was a thing unheard of, and unpardonable in his eyes, for a private soldier to assert, in his presence, his honour and his respectability in extenuation, even while admitting the justice of a specific charge; and when he remarked the Court listening with that profound attention, which the peculiar history of the prisoner had excited, he could not repress the manifestation of his anger.
There were a good many well-dressed people scattered through the grounds, young men and girls, husbands with their wives and children, nursery-maids and little babes playing about in the grass. Anybody might have entered the gardens, I suppose; but only well-dressed people were there not, of the upper classes, but shop-keepers, clerks, apprentices, and respectability of that sort.
There is a general effort, more particularly amongst the middle and upper classes, at seeming to be something that they are not. They put on appearances, live a life of sham, and endeavour to look something superior to what they really are. "Respectability" is one of the chief aims. Respectability, regarded in its true sense, is a desirable thing.
It was pretty to see Lord Ongar and the self-satisfaction which he enjoyed at this time. The world was becoming young with him again, and he thought that he rather liked the respectability of his present mode of life. He gave himself but scanty allowances of wine, and no allowance of anything stronger than wine, and did not dislike his temperance.
How many settlers in New Jersey, New York, Pennsylvania, and Maryland also were recruited from it, I know not; but the reader may have it at second-hand from me, as I had it at firsthand from my genealogist, that some Virginian names of the first quality originated in Whitechapel, which, in the colonizing times, was a region of high respectability, and not for generations afterwards the perlieu it became, and has now again somewhat ceased to be.
But never mind. The thing must be right, for some of the directors are eminent for respectability. You say it is certainly important that there be some land out of which the oil is to be obtained. Oh! no. Why be troubled with any land at all? It is an expense for nothing.
The conception of life-long continence as an ideal has also gone; at the best it is regarded as a mere matter of personal preference. And the conventional simulation of universal chastity, at the bidding of respectability, is coming to be regarded as a hindrance rather than a help to the cultivation of any real chastity.
Politics were low and corrupt; politics were not for "gentlemen"; they were the business and pastime of liquor-dealers, and of the degenerates and loafers who frequented the saloons, of horse-car conductors, and of many others whose ties with "respectability" were slight.
And if it came to a retired missionary I was perfectly willing. But the cousins and their respectability are of the passive order, whereas to manage Aunt Jane demands aggressive and continuous action. Hence the bolt from the blue above alluded to. I was swinging tranquilly in the hammock, I remember, when Bess brought my letters and then hurried away because the baby had fallen down-stairs.
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