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Little dancing girls, thirteen and fourteen years old the so-called hangyoku or half jewels accompanied their elder sisters of the profession. They wore very bright dresses just like the dolls; and their massive coiffure was bedizened with silver spangles and elaborately artificial flowers.
And before this monstrous beast, bedizened in his general's frippery, in a reeking tavern-room, stand the noble lady of Savenaye and the young heir of Pulwick. The ruffian's voice rings with laughter as he gazes on the silent youthful pair. "Aha, what have we here; a couple of drowned rats? or have we trapped you at last, the ci-devant Savenaye and her godam from England?
On the walls hung a black board with rows of numbered keys; opposite, a chromo-lithograph of Christ, displaying, with an amiable smile, an underdone heart bleeding amid streams of yellow sauce. But what was chiefly characteristic of this bedizened porter's lodge was a horribly sickening smell, the smell of lukewarm castor oil.
Bedizened and jewelled, in her rustling finery, she paid, with humility of attitude, this prompt tribute to order only to find, however, that she could carry but two of the fragments at once.
But as the niche was illumined only by the tiny oil lamp burning beneath the image of the Virgin, bedizened with flowers and gold and silver tinsel, fastened against the wall, Biberli asked the weary bar-maid for a brighter light. When the girl withdrew he sighed heavily, saying: "O my lord, if you only knew!
All objects, even the most serious, must be capable of such clarity and freedom if they were not bedizened with a merely arrogant dignity, but contained within themselves a true value which did not fear the test.
The step-sister vainly declared that they were the work of her own hands; mother and daughter jeered at her words, and of course gained their cause. When Sunday or Friday came the old woman's daughter was brushed and bedizened as though the calves had licked her.
For the twinkling of an eye I beheld above this rising tide of executioners the imperious dignity of the Emperor, master of the scene, self-confident and certain that all men would approve of his decision, magnificent in his military trappings; the incredulous amazement of Perennis, his pale, watery blue eyes bleared in his lead-colored, bloodless face, as he stood dazed and numb; the horror of his bedizened wife and sister, both fleshy women, dark-skinned and normally red-cheeked, now gray with despair, like the two wretched lads beside them; the cruelly feminine relish, as upon the successful fruition of long and tortuous intrigues, blazoned on the faces of Marcia and of Cleander's wife, a very showy woman with golden hair, violet eyes and a delicately pink and white complexion: a similar expression of relished triumph on the broad, fat, ruddy face of her big husband, who looked just what he had been; a man who had started life as a slave; whose master had thought him likely to be most profitably employed as a street porter, in which capacity he had for years carried packs, crates, bales, chests, rafters and such like immensely heavy loads long distances and had thriven on his exertions; who, whatever brains he had since displayed, however much character and merit had contributed to his dazzling rise in life, had retained and still possessed a hearty appetite, a perfect digestion, mighty muscles, hard and solid, all over his hulking frame, and the vast strength of his early prime; all these chief actors framed against a background of gaudily caparisoned officers and courtiers.
Germain, I have gazed with admiration on the grotesquely bedizened fellows who swallow Swords, Redhot Pokers, and Yards of Ribbon without number, and thought of what invaluable service their Powers of Gullet would be in the rapid and effectual concealment of Documents the which it is expedient to conceal from the eyes of the Vulgar."
Some were corn and wine dealers, or armorers, who wished to obtain contracts for supplying the army; others were usurers, who had money to lend on the costly objects which warriors often acquired as booty; and here, as everywhere, bedizened and painted women were crowding round the free-handed strangers.