"It is very vulgar to talk about one's business. Only people like stockbrokers do that, and then merely at dinner parties"

Social decorum often draws its lines through the everyday practices of conversation, including the topics we choose to share in company. The assertion that discussing one's business is "vulgar" reflects a particular worldview in which personal or financial matters are regarded as private, and only certain circles or social situations are deemed appropriate for such discussion. By highlighting stockbrokers as an exception, a profession inherently defined by its transactional, financial nature, the speaker implies that conversation about business is permissible only in environments saturated with commerce and only as a matter of professional necessity.

Dinner parties, in traditional polite society, are imagined as venues for refined, often superficial socializing, where deep dives into the mechanics of one’s livelihood are considered indiscreet, even boorish. Thus, the point isn't simply that talking about business is impolite, but that it perhaps signals a lack of social grace or an overly materialistic worldview. The only justification is occupational, stockbrokers, whose lives revolve around financial exchanges, can't fully separate work from social interaction. Yet even here, there is an ironic detachment: even when stockbrokers do broach business matters at dinner parties, it's done somewhat performatively, possibly out of obligation or habit rather than genuine enthusiasm or necessity.

Underlying these lines is a nuanced critique of social class and the boundaries between professional and private life. To be "vulgar" is to breach those boundaries, to ignore the unspoken codes that structure upper-class or aspirational social gatherings. The quote satirically acknowledges that some people cannot help themselves, they carry business with them everywhere, even to spaces supposedly reserved for leisure and pleasure. This emphasis on restraint, on keeping one's commercial undertakings out of polite conversation, gestures toward an ideal of disinterested gentility: true sophistication lies in the ability to compartmentalize, to maintain a tasteful distance between one’s fortunes and one’s social persona.