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Updated: May 8, 2025
"Hosts," laconically responded my friend, while listening intently to the words of Brown. "Hosts, say you? Who is he?" I asked of my interesting neighbor. "I know him not." "Doubtless you know Him not," responded the man, evidently annoyed at my interruption and my flippancy. After a moment or two I, desiring to know more concerning the orator, asked: "Robert Brown, say you?"
But though, from these circumstances, the city-beauty had become as wilful, as capricious, and as affected, as unlimited indulgence seldom fails to render those to whom it is extended; and although she exhibited upon many occasions that affectation of extreme shyness, silence, and reserve, which misses in their teens are apt to take for an amiable modesty; and, upon others, a considerable portion of that flippancy, which youth sometimes confounds with wit, Mistress Margaret had much real shrewdness and judgment, which wanted only opportunities of observation to refine it a lively, good-humoured, playful disposition, and an excellent heart.
'I took great pains, he says, 'with my articles, framing my style upon conveyancing and special pleading, so that it might be solid, well-connected, and logical, and enable me to get back to the Paradise of 3l. 10s. an article, from which, as I strongly suspected, my flippancy had excluded me. 'Flippancy' was clearly not in his line.
Yet, having embraced it, he went about it at times with a ghoulish flippancy that was revolting, at times with a detachment that was more revolting still. Their preparations were made quickly and in silence, yet without undue haste or other sign of nervousness on either side. In both men the same grim determination prevailed. The opponent must be killed; there could be no half-measures here.
A hint of flippancy in the speech of his companion seemed to create a barrier between them. "Purposely! Well, yes, I suppose I did. Purpose, intention, design, must, should enter into all earnest preaching, and whatever may be the faults of mine I endeavour at least to be that, to be earnest. But I am glad you were struck with the parallel; not many in that congregation would be at all likely to."
By little and little, however, he threw off his reserve and told, at first with studied flippancy and then with frank bitterness, how "the new Republican broom swept clean," and how he had lost his job because of his loyalty to the Democratic party.
But Nature has another side which experience and sin are not slow in finding out, and it is no flippancy to say of the god Pan that he soon showed the cloven hoof. The only objection to Natural Religion is that somehow it always becomes unnatural. A man loves Nature in the morning for her innocence and amiability, and at nightfall, if he is loving her still, it is for her darkness and her cruelty.
This earnestness is a distinct Spanish, nay, Basque feature in him. There is something of the stern attitude of Loyola about his "tragic sense of life," and on this subject under one form or another, his only subject he admits no joke, no flippancy, no subterfuge.
During all this time Quigley's dislike for Jim was only kept within bounds by the vein of flippancy that ran through Aurora's demonstrations of preference for the younger man. The quarrel was inevitable, however, and it was precipitated by a half-drunken demonstration of affection towards Aurora on Quigley's part, which the girl resented with a savageness that betrayed an unexpected trait.
"Good night," he added, over his shoulder. Gallegher gave a hysterical little gasp of relief as he trotted away from the two policemen, and poured bitter maledictions on their heads for two meddling fools as he went. "They might as well kill a man as scare him to death," he said, with an attempt to get back to his customary flippancy.
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