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A solitary and deserted log hut, was the only thing in the shape of a human habitation to be seen within the bivouac, and this had been secured as the head quarters of the General and his staff all besides had no other canopy than the clear starry heavens, or, here and there, the leafless and unsheltering branches of some forest tree, and yet, around one large and blazing fire, which continued to be fed at intervals by masses of half decayed wood, that, divested of their snow, lay simmering and dying before it, was frequently to be heard the joyous yet suppressed laugh, and piquant sally, as of men whose spirits no temporary hardship or concern for the eventful future could effectually depress.
The Princess Ulrica soon led the thoughts of the count in another direction, and managed to retain him at her side by her piquant and intellectual conversation; she brought every power of her mind into action; she was gracious in the extreme; she overcame her proud nature, and assumed a winning gentleness; in short, she flattered the ambassador with such delicate refinement, that he swallowed the magical food offered to his vanity, without suspecting that he was victimized.
"You belonged in the majority, then!" said Cigarette, with a piquance made a thousand times more piquant by the camp slang she spoke in. "You should not have had to come into the ranks, mon ami; majorities specially that majority have very smooth sailing generally!" He looked at her more closely, though she wearied him. "Where have you got your ironies, Cigarette? You are so young."
The feeling was rendered still more piquant by a sharp curiosity that had been growing on him for some minutes past. For why was this passage opened to-night? he had never seen it opened before. And why was Jacintha lying sentinel at the foot of the stairs? But this was not all.
She is going to be the piquant young woman who aggravates by indifference, and disdains rank and splendour; the kind of girl who has her innings in novelettes but not out of them. The successful women are those who know how to toady in the right way and not obviously.
He is arrayed in delicate lilac, while the bride is wearing a white silk dress trimmed with flowered lace and has a wreath of orange blossoms in her luxuriant black hair. As a girl friend is talking to her she examines with abstracted attention the pretty little pictures upon her fan, the finest she ever possessed. A very piquant little head she has, with her long lashes and black eyes.
In one instant that mass of motionless statues becomes a flood of lava; down in one terrible sweep it comes, silence behind it and despair before; no one notices the beauty of that brilliant chivalrous array, all else is merged in the fury of the wild gallop; spurs are deep, reins free, blades grasped, heads bent; the excited horse feels the heel no more than he feels the hand; the uneven ground breaks their ranks, no matter, they feel that they can ride down the world: Rupert first clears the hedge, he is always first, then comes the captain of his lifeguard, then the whole troop "jumble after them," in a spectator's piquant phrase.
Flip began a series of distortions with her shoulders, ran on ahead, picked up a few pebbles and threw them into the wood, glanced back at Lance with swimming mottled eyes, that seemed a piquant incarnation of everything suggestive and tantalizing, and said: "That's telling." They had by this time reached the spot where they were to separate.
Instinctively, as a matter of common courtesy to a woman, Hollister took a step forward, picked it up. Quite as instinctively he braced himself, so to speak, for the shocked look that would gather like a shadow on her piquant face. But it did not come. The girl's gaze bore imperturbably upon him as he restored the hand-bag to her hand.
'Past cure: he has the thing he cried for, spoilt boy as he was from his birth. I tell you truth, m' Aminta, I grieve to lose him. What with his airs of the foreign-tinted, punctilious courtly gentleman covering a survival of the ancient British forest boar or bear, he was a picture in our modern set, and piquant. And he was devoted to our sex, we must admit, after the style of the bears.
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