When I was a boy, I was haunted by the uneasy specter of the notion that there was a thing called a gentleman, and that one ought to behave like one. It seemed to have something to do with the notion that one ought to be nice to girls, a notion whose merits I did not really begin to appreciate until about sixth grade. But it also seemed to be rooted in the idea that one should subscribe to good manners and fair play, despite the fact that other people did not always do so. At the very least, the idea was pregnant with some invidious classist assumptions and a certain amount of hypocrisy. But maybe in the twentieth century's headlong rush to abandon it, we lost something along the way.