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This sublimely ridiculous undertaking, half-sport, half-earnest, so fascinated Aurore as to become the most important occupation of her mind! The teaching provided for the young ladies appears to have been of the customary superficial order of everything a little; a little music, a little drawing, a little Italian.
"But, of course," he continued, in a half-earnest, half-jesting tone, "when one considers the wine at the first holy communion, and at the marriage of Cana, and the juice of the grapes King David enjoyed, once lay in Jewish cellars!" Benedict had doubtless expected a smile or approving word from his host, but the smith's bearded face remained motionless, as if he were dead.
It is not like the irony of Timon, which is but the wilful refraction of a clear mind twisting awry whatever enters it, or of Iago, which is the slime that a nature essentially evil loves to trail over all beauty and goodness to taint them with distrust: it is the half-jest, half-earnest of an inactive temperament that has not quite made up its mind whether life is a reality or no, whether men were not made in jest, and which amuses itself equally with finding a deep meaning in trivial things and a trifling one in the profoundest mysteries of being, because the want of earnestness in its own essence infects everything else with its own indifference.
History records a few such defeats which are worth thousands of ordinary victories. Yet the rule is, that precipitation comes of levity. Eagerness is shallow. Haste is but half-earnest. If an apple is found to grow mellow and seemingly ripe much before its fellows on the same bough, you will probably discover, upon close inspection, that there is a worm in it.
Shut up your book; I won't hear another word." She leaned across the table, and, in spite of Thorne's half-earnest protests, took possession of the volume. "Besides," she remarked, "look at poor Jack Pollock; he's been popping corn like a little machine, and he must be nearly roasted himself." Jack turned to her a face very red from the heat of the leaping pine fire.
No power is great enough to bind the mind thought forever escapes. Give civil liberty to all, not by approving all religions, but by permitting in patience what God allows." "You shall go as missionary to these renegades!" was the answer half-ironical, half-earnest. "I will go only on one condition." "And that is?"
From our balcony we saw, standing at the corner of the Calles de la Profesa and Espirito Santo, a little group of officers talking together in that half-earnest, half-distrait manner so characteristic of men newly landed in a town, whose interest in every trifle gets the better of the topic under immediate consideration.
The Governor was the one man who had ever roused in him a deep affection, and the dread of finding that under his flippancy, his half-earnest, half-boyish make-believe devotion to the folk of the underworld, he was really an irredeemable rogue, tortured him. These were disloyal thoughts; he hated himself for his doubts.
"This half-earnest buffoonery produced not the slightest effect upon Gobseck. "'Am I not on intimate terms with the Ronquerolles, the Marsays, the Franchessinis, the two Vandenesses, the Ajuda-Pintos, all the most fashionable young men in Paris, in short? I draw my revenues from London and Carlsbad and Baden and Bath. Is not this the most brilliant of all industries! "'True.
Then there grew up between them an affected opposition and indifference, and a kind of half-sportive, half-earnest wrangling about trifles, which too often grew serious. Mr. Delancy saw this with a feeling of regret, and often interposed to restore some broken links in the chain of harmony. "You must be more conciliating, Irene," he would often say to his daughter.
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