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The color came and went in her cheeks like that tinting of a sea-shell, and her face was flushed as though she had been weeping. But now she walked with a proud air, as though she defied the world to crush her spirit. She had but two maids with her, finikin lasses, with black eyes and broad bosoms, who set off their lady's more delicate beauty well.
When you saw her surrounded by them, working and quarreling with them, talking that horrible polyglot of French, Italian and English, which she slipped into so easily, you realized how exotic the environment of the Dearborn Avenue house must have been to her and how strong a thing her passion for John Wollaston, to enable her to endure five years of it, of finikin social observances, of Aunt Lucile's standards of propriety!
Master Nicholas, the village barber, however, used to say that neither of them came up to the Knight of Phoebus, and that if there was any that could compare with him it was Don Galaor, the brother of Amadis of Gaul, because he had a spirit that was equal to every occasion, and was no finikin knight, nor lachrymose like his brother, while in the matter of valour he was not a whit behind him.
"You embroider cleverly, citoyenne; but, if I am to say what I think, the pattern you have traced is not simple enough or bold enough, and smacks of the affected taste that in France governed too long the ornamentation of dress and furniture and woodwork; all those rosettes and wreaths recall the pretty, finikin style that was in favour under the tyrant. There is a new birth of taste.
"Finikin," added Fourchon, using a nickname which the abbe owed to his prim and rather puny appearance, "might be led into temptation and fall into the power of some sly girl, for he fasts so much. Then if we could catch him in the act and drum him up with a good charivari, the bishop would be obliged to send him elsewhere. It would please old Rigou devilish well.
All their ways are eloquent of condemnation of his tastes. And yet again, while his old skill fails to be understood, and his old outlook to be appreciated, he finds that the behaviour preferred in him is oftener than not a behaviour which his forefathers would have thought silly, to say the least a finikin, fastidious behaviour, such as he would scorn to practise at home.
Fifth and fourth century architecture forbid us to forget the greatness of the Greeks in the golden age of their intellectual and political history. The descent from sensitive, though always rather finikin, drawing through the tasteful and accomplished to the feebly forcible may be followed in the pots and vases of the sixth, fifth, fourth, and third centuries.
Master Nicholas, the village barber, however, used to say that neither of them came up to the Knight of Phoebus, and that if there was any that could compare with him it was Don Galaor, the brother of Amadis of Gaul, because he had a spirit that was equal to every occasion, and was no finikin knight, nor lachrymose like his brother, while in the matter of valour he was not a whit behind him.
"Yes," said Anne; "but Aunt Alice is so finikin and fidgety; she never wets her feet, and can't get over a stile, and is afraid of a cow; and he wants us all to be like her." "And he makes Papa and Mamma mind things that they don't mind by nature," said Susan. "Mamma always tells us to be good, and never play at hockey in the house when he's there," said Anne.
"You have said you would try before." "I know I have," said Ethel, choked. "If I could but " "Poor child," said Dr. May sadly; then looking earnestly at her, "Ethel, my dear, I am afraid of its being with you as as it has been with me;" he spoke very low, and drew her close to him. "I grew up, thinking my inbred heedlessness a sort of grace, so to say, rather manly the reverse of finikin.
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