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Even when he brought the murderer Spilmer to dine with him at my place, the thing was condoned as a freakish grotesquerie in one who, of unassailable social position, might well afford to stoop momentarily.
Yet, as the weeks went by the shock of the scene wore off. The scene itself remained clear, with the grinning grotesquerie of the Jack-o'-lanterns lighting it and mocking his simplicity. But the first sharp physical hurt had healed. He was forced to admit that the girl still had power to trouble him. At times his strained nerves would relax to no other device than the picturing of her as his own.
In itself the performance, which he had carried through with skilful cleanness, contained nothing risible; for laughter it depended solely on a personal note of grotesquerie, of exaggerated bewilderment and impatience and of appealingly idiotic self-satisfaction when each impediment was discovered and discarded.
I saw the procession of the Mystic Crew of Comus there, twenty-four years ago with knights and nobles and so on, clothed in silken and golden Paris-made gorgeousnesses, planned and bought for that single night's use; and in their train all manner of giants, dwarfs, monstrosities, and other diverting grotesquerie a startling and wonderful sort of show, as it filed solemnly and silently down the street in the light of its smoking and flickering torches; but it is said that in these latter days the spectacle is mightily augmented, as to cost, splendor, and variety.
Or a grief to booklovers! the same eye is occupied by all the grotesquerie of insect life in the revel over that unhappy tome lurking in the plum tree's crevice of Browning's Garden Fancy, which creeps and crawls with beetle and spider, worm and eft.
And think of it," said he, raising his sparse eyebrows and looking like a marionette moulded to express something and saying it with painful clumsiness, almost grotesquerie, "the ships are bringing human products now. They're bringing us citizens, bone and sinew of the republic, and we cry back to china and bales of silk."
"There is one thing in you which I shall never quite compass; with my understanding," she almost moaned, "you express the most exquisite thoughts in the loveliest language ... you enter into the very soul of beauty ... and then you come out with some bit of horse-play, some grotesquerie of speech or action that spoils it all."
It was accounted simply a piece of grotesquerie intended to frighten the ignorant and superstitious negro.
If the vagaries of his own mind had brought him into such a grotesquerie as this, into what did the vagaries of other men's minds take them? Confident that he was ordinarily saner than most people, he perceived that since he was capable of doing a thing like this, other men did even more idiotic things, in secret.
I saw the procession of the Mystic Crew of Comus there, twenty-four years ago with knights and nobles and so on, clothed in silken and golden Paris-made gorgeousnesses, planned and bought for that single night's use; and in their train all manner of giants, dwarfs, monstrosities, and other diverting grotesquerie a startling and wonderful sort of show, as it filed solemnly and silently down the street in the light of its smoking and flickering torches; but it is said that in these latter days the spectacle is mightily augmented, as to cost, splendor, and variety.
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