But it is all there! Behind that unconciliating wall of shyness and reserve, beats and hides the warm, loyal British heart, the most constant heart in the world.
"It isn't done." That phrase applies to many things in England besides offering a light to the Prince, or asking a fellow traveler what those buildings are; and I think that the Englishman's notion of his right to privacy lies at the bottom of quite a number of these things.

You may lay some of them to snobbishness, to caste, to shyness, they may have various secondary origins; but I prefer to cover them all with the broader term, the right to privacy, because it seems philosophically to account for them and explain them.
In May, 1915, an Oxford professor was in New York.

A few years before this I had read a book of his which had delighted me.

I met him at lunch, I had not known him before.

Even as we shook hands, I blurted out to him my admiration for his book.
"Oh." That was the whole of his reply.