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We are frightfully poor," the young girl went on, with the same strange frankness a curious mixture of girlish grace and conscious cynicism. "Nous n'avons pas le sou. That's one of the reasons we don't go back to America; mamma says we can't afford to live there." "Well, any one can see that you're an American girl," Miss Ruck remarked, in a consolatory manner.

As soon as courtesy to my mother made it possible, I got my father aside, and told him that my real purpose in coming was to raise the wind. "I need a lot of money," I said; "sooner or later you'll know why. So I may as well tell you." My father's fine weather-beaten face of a country squire expressed an interest at once frankly affectionate and tinged with a kind of detached cynicism.

He flung himself upon life with the irresponsible ardour of the discoverer of a new continent; shaped and re-shaped it as he chose; carved from it now the cynicism of Measure for Measure, now the despair of Hamlet and of Lear, now the radiant magnanimity of The Tempest, and departed leaving behind him not a map or chart, but a series of mutually incompatible landscapes.

In both schools the speculative interest was feeble from the first, and tended to become feebler as time went on. Both were new departures from pre-existent schools. Stoicism was bred out of Cynicism, as Epicureanism out of Cyrenaicism.

With all his twisted cynicism and perversities of expression, Mr. Masters is a true poet. He has achieved one sinister masterpiece, which has cleansed his bosom of much perilous Stuff. Tomorrow to fresh woods and pastures new. Louis Untermeyer was born at New York, on the first of October, 1885. He produced a volume of original poems at the age of twenty-five.

For six months he had usually spent two or three evenings each week in his friend's library, rehearsing their boyhood days, discussing new books, art and politics, Socialism and religion. Overman's cynicism had piqued Kate's curiosity and opened new views of things she had accepted as moral finalities. At these battles of wit she was always a charmed listener.

Entire streets dispeopled; nonagenarians and girls of sixteen decapitated after a mockery of a trial; death buffeted, insulted, adorned, rejoiced in; executions to music; battalions of children recruited to guard the scaffold; the debauchery, the cynicism, the refinements of an insane satrap; a romance by Sade turned epic; it seems, as we watch the unpacking of these horrors, that a whole country, long terrorised, is at last disgorging its terror and revenging itself for its cowardice by overwhelming the wretch there, the scapegoat of an abhorred and vanished system.

The companions of her earlier girlhood missed her cynicism and complained that brilliance had given way to commonplace but you could not find, in the whole of London, a happier marriage. To Peter she was something entirely new.

She knew he was enamoured of the literary finish of his cynicism, and that at heart he was as humbly and truly grateful as she was for the good-fortune opening to them. Beaton was at his best when he parted for the last time with Alma Leighton, for he saw then that what had happened to him was the necessary consequence of what he had been, if not what he had done.

"'Tis that little child he's adopted," said the old gentleman. "The poor fellow's got something to love. All men need that and even a few women," he chuckled. Mr. Bowdoin was addicted to portentous cynicism against the sex, which he wholly disbelieved in. "The little child yes," said Mr. James, more thoughtfully. "Do you know what he wants?" "He wants?" "She wants, I mean.