eBooks Base 2000

Mrs. Frayling needed no further inducement to exercise her really
considerable powers of verbal delineation. Charging her palette with
lively colours, she sprang to the task--and that with a sprightly
composure and deftness of touch which went far to cloak malice and rob
flippancy of offence.
Listening, Damaris brightened--as the adroit performer intended she
should--under the gay cascade of talk. Laughed at length, letting finer
instincts of charity go by the wall, in her enjoyment of neatly turned
mockeries and the sense of personal superiority they provoked. For
Henrietta's dissection of the weaknesses of absent friends, inevitably
amounted to indirect flattery of the friend for whose diversion that
process of dissection was carried out.
She passed the whole troop in review.--To begin with Miss Maud Callowgas,
in permanent waiting upon her ex-semi-episcopal widowed mother--in age a
real thirty-five though nominal twenty-eight, her muddy complexion,
prominent teeth and all too long back.


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