Buoying Aloïse's spirits in these late years was her sister Inez, not just kin but a kindred spirit. Reid relates a charming story of the time he unthinkingly invited the two of them to lunch with a dangerous man—Norman Mailer. But the literary bad boy was a model of courtliness with Mrs. Buckley and her sister, even escorting them home from the restaurant where they had met. Afterwards, a disarmed Mailer exclaimed to Reid, “You conservatives always have a f-----g ace in the hole, don’t you!” Reid regarded Mailer fondly ever after.The moral: manners and charm may be outdated, arbitrary, and in every way contrary to the Left's ethic of rebellion against such stifling and groundless standards, but they are powerful.
Remember the confrontation between an impossibly polite Ray Milland and the obvious scoundrel Anthony Dawson in Dial M for Murder? Milland manages to bully Dawson into murdering Grace Kelly without for a minute breaking character as a paragon on English gentility. In fact, his poise only makes him more intimidating. If the shackles of good breeding are roomy enough to allow a man to plan a murder, they can't be too oppressive, can they?
For more high manners theory, see Eve Tushnet on the subject:
These moral prescriptions (Miss Manners uses the phrase "a duty of mercy" entirely without irony) are frequently presented with tart, champagne-dry humor, and even a little wry Burkeanism. When a gentleman writes in to defend his peculiar way of holding a fork ("To me, the cut-and-shift American way of using a fork is silly and I find the tines-down English way to be ineffective"), she brings out the big guns: "You, sir, are an anarchist, and Miss Manners is frightened to have anything to do with you. It is true that questioning the table manners of others is rude. But to overthrow the accepted conventions of society, on the flimsy grounds that you have found them silly, inefficient and discomforting, is a dangerous step toward destroying civilization."
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