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Reforms in the civil service must go on; but the changes should be real and genuine, not perfunctory, or prompted by a zeal in behalf of any party simply because it happens to be in power. As a member of Congress I voted and spoke in favor of the present law, and I shall attempt its enforcement in the spirit in which it was enacted.
She wore the same black silk dress she had worn the night before, and, though she had now no rouge on her cheeks, there was still about her eyes the black which remained after a perfunctory wash in the morning: it made her look very ill. She was a pathetic figure as she stepped out of the cab with the baby in her arms.
Judge Baker drew his chair beside Paul's, and, taking his cigar from his lips, said, with a perfunctory laugh: "I say, Hathaway, I pulled up just in time to save myself from making an awful speech, just now, to your ward." Paul looked at him with cold curiosity. "Yes. Gad! Do you know WHO was my rival in that necklace transaction?" "No," said Paul, with frigid carelessness. "Why, Kate Howard!
The court, which ended at the gate of the cottage, was fringed for several yards on each side by rows of squalid, wondering children, who understood it that Coroner Whidden was literally to sit on the dead body, Mr. Whidden, a limp, inoffensive little man, who would not have dared to sit down on a fly. He had passed, pallid and perspiring, to the scene of his perfunctory duties.
He was accordingly a party man in philosophy, where partisanship is treason, and opposed the work of reason in the theoretical field, hoping thus to advance it in the moral. Of the moral field he had, it need hardly be added, a quite childish and perfunctory conception. There the prayer-book and the catechism could solve every problem.
The long-haired youth swept the hair from his hot, blue-jowled face in time to catch her, and they stood side by side, she with her thin arms stretched up straight in a gesture of triumph, her lips still parted in that curiously empty, expectant smile. Then it was over. Once the curtain rose to perfunctory applause. People settled back in their seats, or prepared to go.
The women of the church need to use the church as an effective instrument for community betterment not merely material welfare, but actual increase in spiritual worth. Perfunctory church attendance has little part in such a program. It calls rather for intelligent understanding of church problems and an application of spiritual ideals to everyday life.
And with a good reason, for the fact of its being perfunctory goes to say pointedly that the master for whom it is performed is exalted above the vulgar need of actually proficuous service on the part of his servants. They are unprofitable servants, and there is an honorific implication for their master in their remaining unprofitable.
Confidence is like a lute-string, giving forth sweet sounds in its perfection; there are none so discordant as when it snaps. Victoria scarcely heard Austen's acknowledgments of her kindness, so perfunctory did they seem, so unlike the man she had known; and her own protestations that she had done nothing to merit his thanks were to her quite as unreal. She introduced him to the Englishman. "Mr.
If there was a perfunctory note in the invitation to sit down and share the meal, Theron did not catch it. He frankly displayed his pleasure as he laid aside his hat, and took the chair opposite his host. "It is really only a few months since I was here, in this room, before," he remarked, as the priest closed his book and tossed it to one side, and the housekeeper came in to lay another place.
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