There was a time when a doubt as to the credibility of the book of Genesis or a belief in the book of Darwin made the heretic a lonely man, but nowadays he is hardly likely to go without friends.  Besides, men and women of strong personal character are not usually indiscriminately gregarious.  On the contrary, they are apt to welcome any disparity between them and their neighbours which tends to safeguard their leisure and protect them against the social inroads of irrelevant persons.  I recall the case of a famous novelist, who, himself jealous of his own proper seclusion, permitted the amenities of his neighbours to pleasure his wife who was more sociably inclined, and smilingly allowed himself to be sacrificed once a week on the altar of a domestic “at home” day.  It was amusing to see him in his drawing-room on Fridays, surrounded by every possible form of human irrelevancy—­men and women well enough in their way, of course, but absolutely unrelated, if not antipathetic to him and all he stood for—­heroically doing his best to seem really “at home.”  But there came a time when he published a book of decidedly “dangerous” tendencies, if not worse, and then it was a delight to see how those various nobodies fled his contact as they would the plague.  His drawing-room suddenly became a desert, and when you dropped in on Fridays you found there—­only the people he wanted.  “Is not this,” he would laughingly say, “a triumph of natural selection?  See how simply, by one honest action, I have cut off the bores!”

To cut off the bores!  Yes, that is the desperate attempt that any man or woman who would live their own lives rather than the lives of others is constantly engaged in making; and more and more all men and women are realizing that there is only one society that really counts, the society of people we want, rather than the people who want us or don’t want us or whom we don’t want.  And nowadays the man or woman must be uncomfortable or undesirable, indeed, who cannot find all the society he or she can profitably or conveniently handle, be their opinions and actions never so anti-Grundy.  Thus the one great fear that more than any other has kept Mrs. Grundy alive, the fear of being alone in the world, cut off from such intercourse with our fellows as most of us feel the need of at times, has been put an end to by the ever increasing subdivision of “society” into friendly seclusions and self-dependent communities of men and women with like ways and points of view, however disapproved in alien circles.  What “shocks” one circle will seem perfectly natural in another; and one great truth should always be held firmly in mind—­that the approval of one’s neighbours has never yet paid a man’s bills.  So long as he can go on paying those, and retain the regard of the only society he values—­that of himself and a few friends—­he can tell Mrs. Grundy to go—­where she belongs.  And this happily is—­almost—­as true nowadays for woman as for man; which is the main consideration, for, it need hardly be said, that it has been on her own sex that the tyranny of Mrs. Grundy has weighed peculiarly hard.