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Since she has come to live at the Hall, however, her head has been a little turned. Being very pretty, and naturally genteel, she has been much noticed and indulged: and being the housekeeper's niece, she has held an equivocal station between a servant and a companion.
This kinsman of mine had been held up to me as a warning from my very childhood, though wherein lay his delinquencies I never did clearly understand, save that he had once been an actor before acting had become genteel.
As for family, who has got anything to say against any genteel American family being good enough to marry dukes, and emperors too, providing they've got money enough? "The woman tired me dreadfully. I was too wretched for any enjoyment of her absurdities, or they might have amused me.
Next to the mansion-houses, came the two-story trim, white-painted, "genteel" houses, which, being more gossipy and less nicely bred, crowded close up to the street, instead of standing back from it with arms akimbo, like the mansion-houses.
They belong to that large world of the intermediates, neither positively good nor bad, who compose the mass of the prosperous and respectable in our genteel civilization. Since they belong to it they cannot lead it. And certainly they who do not know the absolutism of evil cannot very well understand sinners.
"She is in the basement," was the answer. They descended into the area. It was neatly swept, and in perfect order. "It must be a genteel woman who lives here," remarked Mrs. Benton. They knocked. A voice bade them come in. They opened the door and entered. Mrs. Carter was sewing by a table. By her side stood Georgianna, her oldest child, plainly and neatly dressed.
When I meet the father he is shabby to the outer limits of the genteel. His hat has, I am sure, supported the suns and snowstorms of a dozen seasons. There is a threadbare shine on his apparel that suggests a heartache in each whitened seam, but the ladies are mirrors of fashion, as well as moulds of form. What can remain for any creature comforts after all those fine clothes have been paid for?
He has the perfect Parliamentary style, with its virtues and defects, just as another young member of the House Mr. E.J.C. Morton has the perfect platform manner, also with its virtues and defects. Sir Edward Grey speaks with grace, ease, with that tendency to modest understatement, to the icy coldness of genteel conversation, which everybody will recognize as the House of Commons style.
It is a natural faculty that is required; it is not merely having a genteel young woman at a table in a ward. One of the finest nurses I met was a red-faced illiterate old Irish woman; I have seen her take the poor wasted naked boys so tenderly up in her arms. There are plenty of excellent clean old black women that would make tip-top nurses. Feb. 23, '65.
After this was an amusing record of the latest modes and much about gowns, pincushion hoops, and face-patches. "Also the gentlemen of New York wear two watches, which with you is not considered genteel, and the admiral has introduced the fashion of dining by candle-light at four. It is very becoming, I do assure you. "How is the pretty boy-captain? Does he still blush?"
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