I offer this as a humble Scholion upon the Romance-moment of this millennium: after her first and, we are told, immensely blind date with the Once and Future President, "Dr Jill" went home and said to her mother: "Gee, Mom, at last I met a gentleman."
I suppose the locus classicus of the Gentlemanly Suitor in Western Literature is Ovid's account of Apollo's pursuit of Daphne. The god begins by suggesting that she run more carefully lest the thistles and thorns spoil the perfection of her legs. He then adds an inducement: if she will flee more slowly, he will moderate the speed of his pursuit.
This is the sort of thing that keeps us all rereading the Metamorphoses. D'you think Joe and Jill read Ovid together?
But why do the pursued so often make so much noise? In Kai Lung's Golden Hours, Kai Lung wakes in a wood to find two girls watching him. "Kai Lung ... having bowed several times to indicate his pacific nature, stood in an attitude of deferential admiration. At this display, the elder and less attractive of the maidens fled, uttering loud and continuous cries of apprehension in order to conceal the direction of her flight ..."
No wonder Hilaire Belloc so enjoyed Ernest Bramah's rococo ironies.
But there may also be a mystery about the noisiness of the pursuit. Confer this snatch of don-talk at a Common-room dinner in the middle of the Long Vacation: "Did it ever strike you ... what a very singular thing it is that dogs should bark when they are in pursuit of their prey? Very much as if Nature intended that [rabbits] should be given warning of their enemy's approach. Doesn't work, you know, from the evolutionary point of view; in a Darwinian world the dog which barks lowest ought to catch the most rabbits, and so the bark ought to disappear, don't you see? There was a man reading a very interesting paper about that at one of these congresses the other day; and he said, you know, he thought the bark of the dog was intended to drown the squealing of the rabbit, so that the other rabbits shouldn't know anything disastrous was happening ..."
Notanda (1) Even in 1928, Knox is parodying the 'Y'know' bores and bullies.
(2) I bet there isn't a college left that does C-r dinners in the middle of the Long Vacation.
