A gracieuse effect means always deliberate _behaving_. Madame de Something. But people who keep it up can never let thoughts take their course. They must behave to their thoughts as they behave to people. When they are by themselves they can only go on mincing quietly, waiting for their next public appearance. When they are not talking they wait in an attitude, as if they were talking; ready to behave. Always on guard. Perhaps that was what Mr. Wilson meant when he said it was the business of women to be the custodians of manners...... Their “sense of good form, and their critical and selective faculties.” Then he had no right to be contemptuous of them..... “Donald Braden ... _lying_ across the dinner table ... a drink sodden hull, _swearing_ that he would never again go to a dinner-party where there were no ladies” ...... “Good _talk_ and particularly good _stories_ are not expected of women, at dinner tables. It’s their business to _steer_ the conversation and head it off if it gets out of bounds.” .... To simper and watch, while the men were free to be themselves, and then step in if they went beyond bounds. In other words to head the men off if they talked “improperly”; thus showing their knowledge of improprieties .... “tactfully” ignoring them and leading on to something else with a gracious pose. Those were the moments when the improprieties streamed from their hair...... Somebody saying ssh, superior people talking together, modern friends-in-council, a week end in a beautiful house, _subjects_ on the menu, are you high church or low church, the gleam of a woman’s body through water. “Ssh.” _Why?_....... But her impression to himself was good. A _French_ impression; that was the extraordinary thing. Without any consideration that was the impression she had made. Perhaps everyone had a sort of style, and people who liked you could see it. The style of one’s family would show, to strangers as an unknown strange outside effect. Everyone had an effect.... She had an _effect_, a stamp, independent of anything she thought or felt. It ought to give one confidence. Because there would certainly be some people who would not dislike it. But perhaps he had not observed her at all until that moment and had been misled by her assumption of animation.