gentility

His being a clergyman would be only for gentility's sake, and I think there is nothing more contemptible than such imbecile gentility.

A sort of shivering gentility had kept her aloof from the rest of her fellow-workers, but it took more than a shivering gentility to stave off Polly.

Hitherto, the life-blood has been gradually chilling in your veins as you sat aloof, within your circle of gentility, while the rest of the world was fighting out its battle with one kind of necessity or another.

Her brother and sister were aware of it, and attained a sort of station by making a peg of it on which to air the miserably ragged old fiction of the family gentility. Her sister asserted the family gentility by flouting the poor swain as he loitered about the prison for glimpses of his dear.

But this, to say the truth, is often too dearly purchased; and though it hath charms so inexpressible, that the French, perhaps, among other qualities, mean to express this, when they declare they know not what it is; yet its absence is well compensated by innocence; nor can good sense and a natural gentility ever stand in need of it.

She was ladylike, too, after the manner of the feminine gentility of those days; characterised by a certain state and dignity, rather than by the delicate, evanescent, and indescribable grace which is now recognised as its indication.

The boy, Leonard Bast, stood at the extreme verge of gentility. He was not in the abyss, but he could see it, and at times people whom he knew had dropped in, and counted no more.

Weston was a native of Highbury, and born of a respectable family, which for the last two or three generations had been rising into gentility and property.

I have frequently thought that I must have been intended by nature to be fond of low company, I am so little at my ease among strangers of gentility!"

If you intend to mar my plans for your establishment in life, and the preservation of that gentility and becoming pride, which our family have so long sustained--if, in short, you are resolved to take your own course, you must take it, and my curse with it.

Money must be so subservient to gentility as never to be worth a thought.

"And had he married the valiant matron's daughter, as he promised?" asked Angel Clare absently, as he turned over the newspaper he was reading at the little table to which he was always banished by Mrs Crick, in her sense of his gentility.