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Updated: May 22, 2025
It is that he is so nakedly and undisguisedly English. We never see Englishmen in England. They are too busy, too afraid of Mrs. Grandy, too oppressed with duties and responsibilities and insular respectabilities and home decencies to be really themselves.
There stirred in him an almost impassioned craving for romance, for escape from the interminable respectabilities and domesticities of English middle-class suburban life. He went a step further, rebelling against the feminine atmosphere which surrounded him, in which "feelings" so constantly usurped the place of actions, and suppositions that of fact.
Not Churches, nor creeds, nor rituals, nor respectabilities. Without it we are not friends of Christ, nor co-workers with God. Without it we deepen the channels of human woe, and prop the strong-holds of wickedness. Without it, whatever we may not be, we are Allies of the Tempter.
My friend proposed a visit to Frascati's; but his suggestion was not to my taste. I knew Frascati's, as the French saying is, by heart; had lost and won plenty of five-franc pieces there, merely for amusement's sake, until it was amusement no longer, and was thoroughly tired, in fact, of all the ghastly respectabilities of such a social anomaly as a respectable gambling-house.
Passing the window, she saw the selectmen, in the vehicle known as a long-reach, waiting at the gate. "Hush, Mattie!" said she, "you'll wake him." Mattie, in her ill-assorted respectabilities of dress, seemed to have been involved but recently in some bacchanalian orgie. Her shawl was dragged to one side, and her bonnet sat rakishly. She was intoxicated with her own surprise.
Here he had lived a lonely life, gathering rushes from the pond and weaving baskets out of them, doing a day's work in the fields now and then, setting snares for rabbits, trapping foxes, and killing game a man suspected by the authorities, shunned by the village respectabilities, avoided by even those wilder spirits who met at the "Blue Lion" to talk of bullocks and to drink small-beer.
"Of course it's none of my business how people live as long as they keep up the respectabilities," pursued Mrs. Belloc. "It don't do to inquire into people in New York. Most of 'em come here because they want to live as they please."
Modern readers know the Rev. Dr. Price only from the fulminations of Burke, in whose pages he figures now as an incendiary and again as a fool. He was in point of fact the soul of sobriety and the mirror of all the respectabilities in his serious dissenting world.
Moreover, my uncle, should he ever discover this after-match of my oriental life, was certainly not the man to be seriously scandalised at it, directly he assured himself that "the respectabilities" had not been violated. By-the-bye, I should tell you that was a false alarm I sounded about my uncle! I calumniated him when I believed him to have committed anything so shocking as a double adultery.
Ah! would that I could describe the good gentleman in the manner which he deserves; he has long since sunk to his place in a respectable vault, in the aisle of a very respectable church, whilst an exceedingly respectable marble slab against the neighbouring wall tells on a Sunday some eye wandering from its prayer-book that his dust lies below; to secure such respectabilities in death, he passed a most respectable life.
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