It is 1659 and Thomas Ellwood has stolen out of the family home to attend a Quaker meeting in secret, spending the night with the Quaker John Rance and his wife. Finding Thomas’s bedroom empty, as Thomas relates in his autobiographical The History of the Life of Thomas Ellwood (1714), his violently anti-Quaker father Walter falls into ‘a Passion of Grief’, weeping and fearing that Thomas has been harmed. The following day, Rance calls at the Ellwood household in Oxfordshire to distract Walter, so that Thomas can slip in at the back door. Walter is annoyed to see Rance, a Quaker, in his home, and to learn that Rance knows Thomas. Just as Walter is showing Rance out, Thomas creeps in and runs straight into Walter. Like any good Quaker, Thomas believes all humans are equal and refuses to doff his hat to anyone, including Walter. A respectable mid-seventeenth-century non-Quaker father, Walter expects his son to doff his cap to him. Thomas writes,

Born in 1639, Thomas is here around 20 years old: between man and boy in Walter’s eyes. Walter sends Thomas to his room; excruciatingly, this occurs in front of Rance.

Thomas’s description of his walk of shame past Rance seems to elongate out of Thomas’s control. The parentheses fail to contain Thomas’s words as distinct grammatical units, suggesting that the walk through the hall under Rance’s gaze felt embarrassingly drawn out. Though Thomas clips Rance into parentheses, the subsequent reference to Rance, ‘he, poor Man’, escapes and exceeds this punctuation.