When I ask for a garment of a particular form, my tailoress tells me gravely, “They do not make them so now,” not emphasizing the ‘They’ at all, as if she quoted an authority as impersonal as the Fates, and I find it difficult to get made what I want, simply because she cannot believe that I mean what I say, that I am so rash.
When I hear this oracular sentence, I am for a moment absorbed in thought, emphasizing to myself each word separately that I may come at the meaning of it, that I may find out by what degree of consanguinity ‘They’ are related to ‘me’, and what authority they may have in an affair which affects me so nearly.
WALDEN; OR, LIFE. IN THE WOODS
Henry David Thoreau
Dover Publications Inc., New York, 1995