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"These other girls, these pretty stuffed dolls who preen themselves and go through their conventional paces like marionettes on a string; they are fitted perhaps to preside at a man's table and hold up the social end of the game, but it is women like you who fire a man's soul as well and drive him to madness! I knew there in Mexico that you were the one woman who would ever be my wife!"
Oh, don't preen yourself, my boy. Your folks were just as bad as mine. But yours lost, and mine won, and so you plow in my potato patch." "I don't see it," Billy contended stoutly. "A man with gumption can win out to-day " "On government land?" Hall asked quickly. Billy swallowed and acknowledged the stab. "Just the same he can win out," he reiterated.
Any one who knows Chicago knows that smoke-blackened pile, the Congress Hotel; and any one who knows the Congress Hotel has walked down that glittering white marble crypt called Peacock Alley. It is neither so glittering nor so white, nor, for that matter, so prone to preen itself as it was in the hotel's palmy '90s.
"Wild cat!" etc., and the rude young bird flew back to her companions. "What I object to most in young birds," said another elderly hen, "is their appearance. Some of them do nothing all day but preen their feathers. Look at the over-studied arrangements of their wing flights, and the affected exactness of their tall feathers!
"I was acquaint wi' her faither, auld Tenshillingland owre at Fechars a grand farmer he was, wi' land o' his nain, and a gey pickle bawbees. It was the bawbees, and not the woman, that Gourlay went after! It was her money, as ye ken, that set him on his feet, and made him such a big man. He never cared a preen for her, and then when she proved a dirty trollop, he couldna endure her look!
At last, as the amateur lecturer was beginning to grow somewhat prolix, a cormorant below created a slight diversion for awhile by settling in his flight on the very highest point of Michael's Crag, and proceeding to preen his glittering feathers in the full golden flood of that bright August sunlight.
Of this atrocity the papists themselves are aware, as they quietly take up their pipes and preen and primp themselves over this doctrine of the intercession of the saints. I will leave this subject for now but you can count on my not forgetting it and allowing this primping and preening to continue without cost.
His touch was like magic, for his Lordship started. "Cedric, I have rid hard and would seek my bed. Come with me and calm thyself. Yonder maid thou shalt have, so sure as thou dost do my bidding; and she will sigh and draw quick breath and preen herself to gain from thee one amorous glance; and will do penance for her untowardness and offer hecatombs as high as zenith will allow."
If their colleagues on the Press, if honest, cultured critics, and the artists on whose backs these harlequins strut and poise themselves, did not put up with it, in silence, from shyness or fear of compromising themselves, or from some shameful anticipation of mutual service, a sort of secret pact made with the enemy so that they may be immune from their attacks, if they did not let them preen themselves in their patronage and friendship, their upstart power would soon be killed by ridicule.
The Dominie rose in his excitement and slammed the table, "My certie, lassie, but it would!" he cried, "Ogilvy looks on the Blackadder as his perquisite, and he's surer of it than ever this year. And there's no doubt but Tommy would carry it. My head to a buckie preen he would carry it, and then, oh, for a sight of Ogilvy's face, oh, for " He broke off abruptly.
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