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Eileen as plain as possible with a high, black dress, drooped lids, stiffly brushed hair, even eyeglasses perhaps, with a deportment redolent of bread-and-butter and five-finger exercises, could perhaps disenchant him sufficiently to make him moderate his matrimonial ardour, even to hurry off apologetically to his serio-comic Circe round the corner.
There were carpets, rugs, and curtains in great profusion, and a bewildering array of all sorts of bric-a-brac. In time the father asked one of the daughters to play, and she responded with rather unbecoming alacrity. What she played I shall never know, but it seemed to me to be a five-finger exercise. Whatever it was, it was not music.
There is not the slightest tang of it in The Prince's Quest. This long, rambling romance, in ten sections, is as devoid of flavour as a five-finger exercise. It is more than objective; it is somnambulistic. It contains hardly any notable lines, and hardly any bad lines. Although quite dull, it never deviates into prose it is always somehow poetical without ever becoming poetry.
The sound of five-finger exercises would come from the schoolroom overhead, but so soon as four o'clock struck, the Mouse would steal in, in her little white pinafore, and creep on to the corner of the sofa. She and the "strange boy" had made friends at once, and were on the best of terms.
Prettier even than the flowers, however, was the December greenness, especially of the humbler sorts: St. John's-wort, five-finger, the creeping blackberries, whose modest winter loveliness was never half appreciated, herb-robert, corydalis, partridge-berry, checkerberry, wintergreen, rattlesnake-plantain, veronica, and linnæa, to say nothing of the ferns and mosses.
Tamada, binding up the splints professionally, looked at Deming with jetty eyes that revealed no emotion. Lund passed his hand over his face. "I'm some mess myself," he said, stretching his great arms. "Give me a five-finger drink, Rainey, afore I clean up. Some scrap. Hell popping on deck, and a dead man in the cabin! And the gal! Did you see the gal, Rainey?"
But as there are in those same tubes of oozy paint horrific visions like Franz Stuck's "War," or portraits of plutocrats by Bonnat, and as there are in ink-bottles sad potencies of tailors' bills and scathing reviews of this very book, so it is possible under the name of music to write fugues and five-finger exercises, and yet more settings of "Hiawatha," or "Du bist wie eine Blume"
Then she returned to the drawing-room, and sat down at the piano and waited. The instant of arrival approached. Gilbert's punctuality was absolute, always had been; sometimes it alarmed her. She could not have to wait more than a minute or two, according to the inexactitude of her clock.... The bell rang, and simultaneously she began to play a five-finger exercise.
That is why society is so boring. You find people practising mental scales and five-finger exercises at every party you go to. The true artist will never practise.
But because time dragged, Georgina went to her scales and five-finger exercises as usual. With the hour- glass on the piano beside her, she practised not only her accustomed time, till the sand had run half through, but until all but a quarter of it had slipped down.
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