HYACINTH HALVEY
I was pointed out one evening a well-brushed, well-dressed man in the stalls, and was told gossip about him, perhaps not all true, which made me wonder if that appearance and behaviour as of extreme respectability might not now and again be felt a burden.
After a while he translated himself in my mind into Hyacinth; and as one must set one’s original a little way off to get a translation rather than a tracing, he found himself in Cloon, where, as in other parts of our country, “character” is built up or destroyed by a password or an emotion, rather than by experience and deliberation.
The idea was more of a universal one than I knew at the first, and I have had but uneasy appreciation from some apparently blameless friends.