"Oh!" replied the Proud Briton, with some embarrassment, "but in all this there is nothing new, you know, nothing unprecedented, innovating, subversive of accepted Social Laws; nothing 'bad form,' that is to say unusual, unexpected, unconsecrated by respectable usage. If there is anything Naughty, it is not New, and what is—possibly—New is not Naughty. Therefore, there is no call for that omnipotent Hiss!"
"Humph! What then would elicit it?" inquired the Perfect Stranger.
"That is a bit difficult to define, off-hand," answered the Proud Briton, hesitatingly. "Say, for example, a natural waist, or absence of corsets, high-dress at a Court function, marriage for love—which in Society or in the tennis-court is equivalent to nothing—wearing an unfashionable hat, or four-buttoned gloves when six are de règle, sounding your g's (when fashion dictates their being dropped), or not sounding your h's (till fashion tells you to drop them), blushing inopportunely—say, at the stare of a duke or the 'suggestiveness' of a millionaire—showing sympathy out of your own 'set,' objecting to tailor-made attire or accepted bathing-costume, discussing questions of sex in a spirit of serious sympathy instead of through some décadent Art-medium; being earnest, original, or spontaneous in any way, and thus defying Society's golden rule, 'Do always as others do.'"
"Is that the Masterful Matron's sole rule?" queried the Perfect Stranger.
"Substantially yes," replied the Proud Briton; "though it is supplemented, perhaps, by the corollary, 'Never be either the first or the last to do a new thing.'"
"Then," commented the Perfect Stranger, "the Matron's Hiss would be silent at the sight of bared shoulders and bust in mid-winter, but would sound with anserine shrillness at the sight of a lady's lower limbs comfortably, and conveniently, and healthily, and decently, but unconventionally, clad in summer on a cycle?"
"Precisely!" said the Proud Briton, though perhaps with less of British pride than usual.
"Then," said the Perfect Stranger, "I think your Hissing Matron is a silly, despotic, cackling old goose, who will never save the social Capitol! But who and what is that?"
That was a portly, florid, and high-nosed elderly dame, of pompous demeanour, and flamboyant raiment, elaborately and obviously cosmetiqued, and arrayed in a startlingly low-cut garment.
"That," said the Proud Briton, with an uneasy smile, "is Mrs. Grundy, the great Goose-Autocrat, the Palladium of Propriety, the Ægis of Social Morality, the very Masterful Matron of whom we have been talking."