Life & Wisdom Quote by Marguerite Gardiner

A “flexible conscience” sounds like moral rot until Gardiner pairs it with “inflexible politeness,” turning the line into a razor: in a world where women’s survival is mediated by men’s appetites, etiquette becomes both armor and muzzle. The wit lies in the contradiction. Conscience, the thing that should be rigid, must bend; politeness, the thing that ought to be situational, must not. That inversion is the point. It’s not just a joke about hypocrisy, it’s an indictment of the social economy that rewards it.

Gardiner, writing in an era when reputation functioned like currency and class respectability was a public performance, understands the escort figure (a courtesan, companion, “kept” woman) as a professional navigating a legal and moral system not built for her. “Chief prerequisite” borrows the language of job qualifications, flattening romance into labor. The escort’s skill set isn’t sex so much as social management: the ability to absorb indignities, evade judgment, and keep the room comfortable for everyone else. Politeness becomes a technology of harm reduction.

The subtext is bleakly pragmatic. Society condemns the woman for the very accommodations it demands she make, then insists she maintain perfect manners while doing it. Gardiner’s line exposes that double bind with icy economy: the escort must be elastic where ethics are concerned because the world leaves her no clean options, and she must be unyielding in civility because the only “respect” available is the kind you can perform on command.