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The wedding party started for the post, old mother Tumlin fluttering about the bride as complacently as if the ceremony had been the culmination of the most decorous courtship. The oafish brother drove the bridal party, making crude jests by-the-way, to the frank delight of the prospective groom and the giggling protestations of the bride.
To be the object of the oafish affections of such a creature, even when they are honest and profound, cannot be expected to give any genuine joy to a woman of sense and refinement. His performance as a gallant, as Honor de Balzac long ago observed, unescapably suggests a gorilla's efforts to play the violin. Women survive the tragicomedy only by dint of their great capacity for play-acting.
Every word he uttered was accompanied by an oafish grin, so ludicrously balanced between simplicity and cunning, that Nancy, who had been half her life on the lookout for such a man, and who knew that this indecision of expression was the characteristic of the tribe with which she classed him, now saw before her the great dream of her heart realized.
"Hello, Onan, it is pleasure to meet you," I said, advancing with a proffered hand extended towards him, which I realized belatedly made me appear oafish, but he took it good-naturedly, and with his pleasantness eliminated my unease at shaking the hand of one half my size.
Often, indeed, his vanity leads him to imagine the thing done, and he admits by winks and blushes that he is a bad one. But at the bottom of all that tawdry pretence there is usually nothing more material than an oafish smirk at some disgusted shop-girl, or a scraping of shins under the table.
Thus there are tales enough of the untaught student's perseverance, and of the boy giant's gentleness and prowess; tales, too, more than enough in proportion, of the fun which varied but did not pervade his existence, and of the young rustic's occasional and somewhat oafish pranks.
I felt oafish and awkward, as Jan Lubber Fiend might have done before the King. Many things I might have wished to say and do with that slender figure and lissome waist so near me. But I knew not how to begin.
"Are you ready to make choice, to-night, between young Ulick and his oafish cousin Boris? I have a reason for asking, believe me." Esmay flushed with annoyance. "I will not listen to either of them," she said. "Boris I detest, and Ulick is only a boy, and a silly one; I have told him so a score of times." "I thought as much, but I wanted the confirmation of your own lips, my dear child.
She'd gossip and pray and preach with anybody. And now she'll weep and pine like that till she dies and she isn't sure even about heaven any more and instead of Jamie, she's got that oafish lad, that changeling, hung round her neck to kick her and ill-treat her in another year or two.
What she particularly insisted on was the practice of that graciousness of which she herself afforded so admirable an example. Naturally, like a good mother, she always reproved us for bad manners, or for being unkind to other children, or selfish, or affected, or oafish, or sulky. Her direst thunders, however, were kept for anything which approached ill-breeding.