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When to these backwoods innocents was borne from afar the marvelous rumors of the silk-stockinged and lace-ruffled glories, originated during an idle morning in the king's dressing-room, which were to transfigure their forest into trim gardens and smug plantations, surrounding royal palaces and sumptuous hunting pavilions, perambulated by uniformed officials, cultivated by meek armies of serfs, looking up from their labors only to doff their caps to lordly palatines and lily-fingered ladies with high heels and low corsages: when they tried to picture to themselves their solemn glades and shadow-haunted streams and inviolate hills, their eyries of eagles and lairs of stag and puma, the savage beauty of their perilous swamps, all the wild magnificence of this pure home of theirs metamorphosed by royal edict into a magnified Versailles, in which lutes and mandolins should take the place of the wolf's howl and the panther's scream, the keen scent of the pine balsam be replaced by the reek of musk and patchouli, the honest sanctity of their couches of fern give way to the embroidered corruption of a fine lady's bedchamber, the simple vigor of their pioneer parliament bewitch itself into a glittering senate chamber, where languid chancellors fingered their golden chains and exchanged witty epigrams with big-wigged, snuff-taking cavaliers: when they attempted to house these strange ideas in their unsophisticated brains, they must have stared at one another with a naive perplexity which slowly broadened their tanned and bearded visages into contagious grins.
Gigantic trusts had "cornered" all the necessaries of life, and a few lily-fingered plutocrats in their marble palaces dictated to the horny-handed sons of toil the amount of their beggarly wages, and the prices they must pay for every needed article, until every job of work and every bone of charity was fought for by multitudes who mercilessly stabbed each other in their mad fury to assuage the pangs of hunger.
Shelby had reached his last ditch. "You think you're too damned good for it," he broke out. "It's the lily-fingered people of your stripe who make reform a byword and a laughing-stock." Graves's face flamed, and he shrank inwardly with a scholar's repugnance from the rencounter. Outwardly, however, he was truculent. "Such bar-room personalities are characteristic of you," he retorted.
Could I go back there and face those men and say: "Boys, the company's got your claims, and they won't pay for them." Do you think for a minute I'd let a bunch of lily-fingered crooks put anything like that over on simple, square-dealing fellows who were too honest to protect their own interests from sharp practice?
"Hurrah!" cried Ingram, and Lavender blushed like a school-girl; and Sheila, quite naturally and without thinking, shook hands with him and said, "I congratulate you;" and there was more congratulation in her glad eyes than in that simple little gesture. It was a good beginning, and of course the young man was very much pleased to show Sheila that he was no mere lily-fingered idler about town.
And now the lily-fingered and gentle-natured Ogilvie was at Aldershot; while he what else was he than a mere deer-stalker and salmon-killer? "Ogilvie has been very kind to me, mother," he said, laughing.
"Bill, how could you?" she cried. "It's simply disgraceful. Brawling in public like any saloon loafer, and getting in jail and all. Haven't you any consideration for me any pride?" His eyes narrowed with an angry glint. "Yes," he said deliberately. "I have. Pride in my word as a man. A sort of pride that won't allow any bunch of lily-fingered crooks to make me a party to any dirty deal.
Hundreds of boys, who might have become successful farmers and mechanics, are now dissipating in beer shops while waiting in vain for lily-fingered positions as bookkeepers or teachers. In scores of New England towns, one man, employed to fill the heads of a reluctant few with the dead languages, receives more salary than all the other teachers combined.
On the contrary, you would have thought that his hands alone, from which he could never quite free the grease and grit, would have caused some feeling of repugnance among the lily-fingered. But they, somehow, seemed always to be finding an excuse to touch him: his tie, his hair, his coat sleeve. They seemed even to derive a vicarious thrill from holding his hat or cap when on an outing.
As a rule, the rich man will not allow his son to work and his mother! Why, she would think it was a social disgrace if her poor, weak, little lily-fingered, sissy sort of a boy had to earn his living with honest toil. I have no pity for such rich men's sons. I remember one at Niagara Falls. I think I remember one a great deal nearer.
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