Now a certain decorousness made him reluctant to fully agree.

But there is a conservative decorousness about his work that makes it hard to get excited about.

While retaining its decorousness, the book opens up as these displaced people reveal themselves and act to change their own or others' lives.

And never in his lifetime did he let popularity overtake his artistic decorousness.

The decorousness is about to end.

The film's decorousness also extends beyond the merely scenic, to the point of affecting its fundamental truthfulness.

At its bottom, there is romantic decorousness - an inescapable Ben Webster pedigree.

Suite bergamasque (1890) recalls rococo decorousness with a modern cynicism and puzzlement.

Maylene is witty, with some brittle decorousness.

This sentimental decorousness in the face of death was, in this corner of a foreign field, strangely moving.

Even when delivering the most dire pronouncements, these characters speak with a decorousness that helps to give this pop-obsessed film its distinctly Japanese tone.

Maybe not, but its disregard for the niceties of conventional taste makes one more aware of the decorousness that otherwise prevails.

An odd decorousness had settled over the courtroom: Judge Towle studied nothing in particular, and reporters soberly scribbled notes.

Tidy British decorousness - framed antique prints, a Chippendale desk - is leavened by a soupcon of something courtesan-like, and French.

Oddly, Vapnyar depicts this almost lurid exultation with a decorousness that seems as withdrawn and reluctant as her characters are engaged and inquiring.

"I can't take any more emotion," someone says during this fraught stage of the story, but in fact even the film's most dramatic moments are presented with decorousness bordering on detachment.

Frightfully polite at first, Carol begins losing composure in gradual stages, until she begins having panic attacks that shred the decorousness of her San Fernando Valley life.

On the surface the composers make an odd combination: Mozart, as represented here by the Symphony No. 29 and the "Coronation" Mass, is the picture of decorousness and stylistic consistency.

Masterpiece Theater decorousness sets the tone for "Mrs. Brown," which is, indeed, a Masterpiece Theater co-production with BBC Scotland and Irish Screen.

It was like dragging a hideous shape of death into the cleanly and cheerful space before a household fire, where it would present all the uglier aspect, amid the decorousness of everything about it.

He has a tendency to speak quickly and in paragraphs rather than sentences, while projecting an Old World decorousness more reminiscent of Edith Wharton's New York than of today's Boston.

Today it remains one of Paris's most shabbily atmospheric corners, where the bourgeois decorousness of Haussmannian buildings and boulevards yields to mazelike side streets and thoroughfares lined with ethnic restaurants.

The actors sometimes overstate the comic payoffs in the dialogue, or telegraph emotional notes too obviously; the contrast between the decorousness of the characters' talk and the ruthlessness of their behavior gets a bit blurry.

And Jack's once-peaceable wife, the very model of smiling decorousness in the film's early scenes, is snarling "I don't care what you have to do to get him - just get him" before the film is over.