Few coaches were abroad, for riders in coaches were liable to be suspected, and gentility hid its head in red nightcaps, and put on heavy shoes, and trudged.

I didn't think Miss Creakle equal to little Em'ly in point of beauty, and I didn't love her (I didn't dare); but I thought her a young lady of extraordinary attractions, and in point of gentility not to be surpassed.

I washed my hands and face, to do the greater honour to his gentility, and we walked to our house, as I suppose I must now call it, together; Mr. Micawber impressing the name of streets, and the shapes of corner houses upon me, as we went along, that I might find my way back, easily, in the morning.

At these times, Mr. Micawber would be transported with grief and mortification, even to the length (as I was once made aware by a scream from his wife) of making motions at himself with a razor; but within half-an-hour afterwards, he would polish up his shoes with extraordinary pains, and go out, humming a tune with a greater air of gentility than ever.

They plume them-selves on their gentility there, I can tell you, if that's any satisfaction.'

An indescribable character of faded gentility that attached to the house I sought, and made it unlike all the other houses in the street--though they were all built on one monotonous pattern, and looked like the early copies of a blundering boy who was learning to make houses, and had not yet got out of his cramped brick-and-mortar pothooks--reminded me still more of Mr. and Mrs. Micawber.

By little and little it came out, that, in the competition on all points of appearance and gentility then running high in the Commons, he had spent more than his professional income, which was not a very large one, and had reduced his private means, if they ever had been great (which was exceedingly doubtful), to a very low ebb indeed.

A friend of Poe's years later wrote: "The cottage had an air of taste and gentility...

Antonio wishes to moderate the extremes of both young women's characters, and convert them into a balanced gentility.

In private life he declared she was 'a vulgar idiot; she would talk of her gownd, but when she appeared upon the stage seemed to be inspired by gentility and understanding.'

The book continues in this progression, culminating in the final chapter with stories relating life crisis points; a Dutch reporter illegally traveling to the Turkish-Iraqi border struggles to comprehend her local Kurdish hosts who brave land mines, gunfire, and the circumvention of their strict gender norms to afford her comfort, while in another essay an American Christian missionary in Istanbul decides to abandon her calling after living the extreme gentility of her secular Muslim host family.