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Jim Tenny's affection seemed to be waning, and Eva looked at herself in the glass even when bedecked with tawdry finery, and owned that she did not wonder. She strained up her hair into the latest perkiness of twist, and crimped it, and curled her feathers, and tied her ribbons not as much in hope as in a stern determination to do her part towards the furbishing of her faded star of attraction.
As we ate ice-cold chicken, salad, and chilled wild strawberries of the north, Mrs. James began with a gay perkiness to tease Sir S. about the "grateful model," whose name must surely be Marguerite; but I put a stop to that. The hour after a wedding at Gretna Green is no tune for talk of any woman-thing except the bride; and as I may perhaps never be anybody's real bride, I insisted on my rights.
Hear then how the Boston reviewers who in spite of that snobbish sectarian air of perkiness and pretension which is usually ascribed to them, can now and then do things very handsomely pounce upon their townsmen's morality. "We cannot help expressing our surprise," say they, "that the strange and dishonourable ground assumed in that memorial, has not been more pointedly reprobated.
There were cooking utensils, some on the fire, with corn-pone and meat in them; some where the imperative orders to march found their owners with their breakfasts half-devoured; there were hats clumsily fashioned of wisps of long-leaved pine sewed together; there were caps which had been jaunty red-and-blue "Zouaves" when their owners had mustered around Nashville in 1861, but had been faded and tarnished and frayed by the mud and rain at Donelson, Shiloh and Stone River, and by the dust and grime of Perryville and Chickamauga, until they had as little semblance to their former perkiness as the grim-visaged war had to the picnic of capturing ungarrisoned forts and lolling in pleasant Summer camps on the banks of the Cumberland.
This belief, indeed, in the special fortune that ever awaited the youngest brother, as such, the "Borough-English" of Faery, had been of baleful effect on Harold, producing a certain self-conceit and perkiness that called for physical correction. But even in our admonishment we were on his side; and as we distrustfully eyed these new arrivals, old Saturn himself seemed something of a parvenu.
It is to be regretted that until very lately the terrier character was being gradually bred out of him, and that the perkiness, the exuberance and gameness which once distinguished him as the companion of the Yorkshire operative, was in danger of being sacrificed to the desire for diminutive size and inordinate length of coat.
The practice of cropping, it is true, was even then illegal and punishable by law, but, although there were occasional convictions under the Cruelty to Animals Act, the dog owners who admired the alertness and perkiness of the cut ear ignored the risk they ran, and it was not until the Kennel Club took resolute action against the practice that cropping was entirely abandoned.
Barney Bill cocked his white poll across the table with the perkiness of a quaint bird Paul saw that the years had brought a striation of tiny red filaments to his weather-beaten face and fixed her with his little glittering eyes. "Bill what? You think I'm 'urting his feelings?" He jerked a thumb towards his host. "I ain't.
When Cotterill caught sight of Denry he straightened himself into a certain uneasy perkiness. "Young man," he said in a counterfeit of his old patronising tone, "come in here. You may as well hear about it. You're a friend of ours. Come in and shut the door." Nellie was not in view. Denry went in and shut the door. "Sit down," said Cotterill.
The expression on his face was neither smile nor frown, nor war nor peace, nor any other human expression that had ever puckered there before. "God!" he said. "This gives me the willies!" and strode tempestuously from the room. Out in his own work-shop fortunately, whatever the grotesque new pinkness, whatever the grotesque new perkiness his great free walking-spaces had not been interfered with.
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