A person who is unwilling or unable to understand or judge, and is narrowly and self-consciously engrossed in his own mental or spiritual attainments is a blind prig.
As for the lives of one's neighbours, if one wishes to be a prig or a Puritan, one can flaunt one's moral views about them, but they are not one's concern.
Mr. Irwine was deeply interested. He said to himself, " He must be a miserable prig who would act the pedagogue here: one might as well go and lecture the trees for growing in their own shape" .
This servant, for instance, will go and meet M. Valenod there, and the haughty prig will not be a bit offended at hearing himself addressed by Saint-Jean in that familiar way, and will answer him in the same way.
" Then I'm not a 'goody girl, ' for I don't like prigs. I want a gentleman in the best sense of the word, and I can wait, for I've seen one, and know there are more in the world" .
Dear me! thought I, how apt history is to reverse contemporary judgments. Surely only the worst of them were as bad as that. But I must admit that they were mostly prigs, and that they were commercial.