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Burlingame was frittering away the effect of his inquiry by elaboration of details. What he gained by the main startling fact he lost in the details by which the witness scored. He asked another main question. "Why did you leave Ireland?" "To make money." "You couldn't do it there?"
My uncle had a subtle knowledge of character, which was rendered more acute by his long acquaintance with the world; and he did not always turn it to a righteous account. My father was a babe in these matters a cunning child might deceive him. While my uncle had a knack of saving without appearing parsimonious, my father had an unfortunate habit of frittering his money away upon trifles.
How foolish for men to be wearing jewels, anyway. You wouldn't catch him arrayed in a big diamond ring. And the strangest part of it was that the man who was thus frittering away his money did not look at all like a fop but was tall, muscular, and had a scar, not unlike a sword cut, across his right cheek.
You and I, Félix, you and I alone will overturn the whole League! We will show them what we are made of. They think lightly of me. Why not? I never took part with my father. I lazed about in these gay Paris houses, bent on my pleasure, too shallow a fop even to take sides in the fight for a kingdom. What should they see in me but an empty-headed roisterer, frittering away his life in follies?
While our irritable but glorious neighbour France pace tantae gentis! is frittering away her warlike energies in Algeria, and Russia is worried by her unsuccessful and unjust attempts upon Circassia, behold the glorious monarch of this little island, Queen Victoria, roused by indignities and injuries offered to her most distant subjects in the East, strike single-handed a blow there, which shakes a vast and ancient empire to its very foundations, and forces its haughty emperor from his throne, to assume the attitude of a suppliant for peace, yielding her peremptory but just demands, even at the cannon's mouth, and actually relinquishing to her a large portion of his dominions.
"The woman wants then to buy out half of Paris!" said old Tabaret to himself in a passion. "Yes, if Noel committed the crime, it was she who forced him to it. These are my fifteen thousand francs that she is frittering away now. How long will they last her? It must have been for money, then, that Noel murdered Widow Lerouge. If so, he is the lowest, the most infamous of men!
And so it was that the course of Gordon's whole career was suddenly changed into a different channel, at a moment when he was drifting placidly on the stream of a lax conventionality, and was frittering away all his opportunities for sheer lack of anything that would spur him on to a clearer conception of what life means.
More light was turned on and what had been a dim mass of figures became a bright confusion of movement. Some of the people signalled to friends, some crowded down towards the platform to examine the lecturer's apparatus and make notes of his diagrams. But the chuckle-headed lad with the scrub hair wanted no such detailed frittering away of the thoughts that had inspired him.
However, I must not be frittering away the reader's time with these details. I did not intend to go into any detail at all, at first, but it is the failing of the true ceramiker, or the true devotee in any department of brick-a-brackery, that once he gets his tongue or his pen started on his darling theme, he cannot well stop until he drops from exhaustion.
Dennis, there are at least seven of those twenty teachers in my room who ought to be in good, solid, earnest working Bible classes, getting faith for help every Sunday; getting ideas that shall make them of use in the world, instead of frittering their time away on what at best, seems to them but a very mechanical work, teaching some little children to repeat the Twenty-third Psalm, or to say the Lord's Prayer.
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