“That is a very practical view of it,” Temperance said, laughing. “And rather insightful, I might add.”
“It is the correct view,” Joseph said.
“It is one view,” Temperance said. “There are people who find genuine pleasure in it. Your father, for instance, always looks impeccable, which requires a certain engagement with the question of fashion whether he admits it or not.”
Joseph looked at his father, who suddenly felt as though he had been put under the spot.
“I am not engaged with fashion,” Harper said, rolling his eyes.
“You are always very well dressed,” she said, a rare compliment from her which Harper did not know what to make of.
“That is not the same thing,” he said hastily.
“Yes, you may say that but it requires the same decisions.”
“It requires a tailor and a consistent standard. I would call it maintenance, if anything.”
“Maintenance of what, exactly?” Temperance said, seeming amused. “You can be so stubborn about being labelled, there is nothing bad about being deemed fashionable.”
“Of an appropriate appearance,” Harper brushed it off.
“Appropriate to what?”
Harper paused. He could feel Joseph watching this exchange with the bright, interested attention he brought to conversations he was learning from, and he chose his next words with the awareness of that audience.
“Appropriate to one’s position,” he said. “To the expectations that come with it, looking as though one takes those expectations seriously.”
Temperance considered this, and was quiet for a few moments.
“I understand that,” she said. “I do. But I think there is a difference between taking one’s position seriously and performing it constantly. One can be a serious person without the performance.”
“The performance, as you call it, is what other people see,” he said. “It is how trust is established.”
“Or it is how people learn to judge the coat rather than the person inside it.”
“If you give people the coat,” Harper said, “you give them the least of yourself. The coat is easy but the rest is considerably harder to earn.”
“All I am saying,” Temperance said, setting her fork down, “is that not every rule deserves the respect it receives simply because it has always been there. Some of them would not survive five minutes of honest examination and everyone knows it and no one says so because the examination itself isn’t done.”
“There is a considerable difference between rules that warrant examination and rules that you personally find inconvenient,and you are treating those two categories as though they are the same thing.”
She looked at him, and narrowed her eyes.
“I said unexamined, not inconvenient. Give me an example and I will demonstrate the difference.”
“You give me an example,” he said. “You’re the one making the argument.”
She considered this for approximately one second.
“A woman requires a chaperone to walk in a public park in the middle of a Tuesday afternoon.”
“That exists for her protection,” he said.
“It exists for appearances,” she said, “which is not the same thing and I think you know that. A woman alone in a park on a clear afternoon is in no meaningful danger from anyone or anything. She requires a chaperone because without one people will talk, and people will talk because it simply isn’t done, and it isn’t done because someone decided it wasn’t.”
Harper did consider it genuinely, turning it over in his mind.
“The rule also covers the situations where the protection is actually necessary,” he said. “You are arguing against it on thebasis of the straightforward cases. The rule exists for the harder ones, the ones where a woman alone is not safe and needs the standard to exist regardless of whether a particular Tuesday afternoon warrants it.”
