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These minute symmetrical forms, this wax-like texture, these marvellous rows of coloured, enamel-like encrustation, have been selected from almost endless and limitless possible variations, and have been accumulated and maintained there as they are in all their beauty, by survival of the fittest by natural selection.
Perhaps there is more than a nuance of caricature in the choice of such a name as "Undine Spragg" for the heroine of Edith Wharton's The Custom of the Country. Throughout that book, with its brilliant enamel-like surfaces, there is a tendency to make sport of our national weakness for resounding names. Undine Spragg hideous collocation is not the only offence.
Rising on the other side, cliff above cliff, precipice piled upon precipice, rock over rock, up against sky, towered the most gigantic mountain-wall in America, culminating in a noble pile of gothic-finished granite and enamel-like snow. How grand and inviting looked its white form, its untrodden, unknown crest, so high and pure in the clear strong blue!
The others, which are the true and recognised "toad-stones" or "Bufonius lapis," are circular, slightly convex "stones," of a drab colour, with a smooth enamel-like surface. They are plate-like discs, being of thin substance and concave on the lower surface, which has an upstanding rim.
Was the girl as shallow as she appeared, or was there, beneath her vivid enamel-like surface, some rich plastic substance of character? Was she worth helping, worth the generous friendship that Corinna could give, or was she merely a bit of human driftwood that would burn out presently in the thin flame of some transient passion? "I'll take the risk," thought Corinna.
Women are so vain!" he added, contemplating with rapt attention the enamel-like polish on his finger-nails. "There is a vacancy in the Maison Moliere. Or what might prove more attractive still in connection with the proposed National fete, and the new religion for the people, we have not yet chosen a Goddess of Reason. That should appeal to any feminine mind.
"Ah! how perfect all this is," went on the guest presently, looking about her, "how suggestive, how full of meaning!" She threw back her cloak presently, and Maggie observed that she was busy with various very beautiful little emblems a scarab, a snake swallowing its tail, and so forth all exquisitely made, and hung upon a slender chain of some green enamel-like material.
Does it not break and grind down to powder the ramparts of coral? Clumsy and ill-shaped as it appears to be in other respects, it has jaws of wonderful design, and known to the ancients as "Aristotle's lantern." They are composed of five strips of bony substance, with enamel-like tips overlying each other in the centre of the disc-shaped mouth.
At the north end a flight of four steps, lighted doubtless from the square niche in the west wall, ascends eastwards to the passage behind the 'needle. Of these steps the lowest occupies the whole width of the chamber, while the second, on being cleaned at the time of the excavation above-mentioned, was found to have its upper and western surfaces sunk in the middle and traversed at one end by two parallel raised bands, and to show traces of that yellow enamel-like substance with which, indeed, the whole crypt seems to have been originally overlaid.
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