It doesn’t matter what you do in the bedroom as long as you don’t do it in the street and frighten the horses.

The remark is a wry defense of private sexual freedom paired with a demand for public decorum. By contrasting “the bedroom” (the realm of consenting adults and privacy) with “the street” (the realm of social visibility), it suggests that moral panic often targets what is seen rather than what is done. The punchline—“frighten the horses”—adds Edwardian/Victorian comic color, implying that scandal is less about harm and more about upsetting conventional sensibilities. As attributed to Mrs. Patrick Campbell, it also fits her reputation for epigrammatic, worldly wit: permissive in principle, but sharply aware of how public performance and respectability govern social life.