draw a veil over, to

To conceal; to say no more about something. A cliché from the mid-nineteenth century, this analogy to hiding one’s face behind a veil is often used to gloss over the details of an embarrassing situation. Daniel Defoe, long known as a historian before he turned his hand to fiction, wrote in The True- born Englishman (1701), “Satyr, be kind! and draw a silent Veil! Thy native En- gland’s vices to conceal.”