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Whatever Mr. Shaw touches, whether it be the half-hysterical impulse that sometimes passes current for heroism, as in Arms and the Man, or, as in the Devil's Disciple, the conventional picturesqueness of a Don Juan that maker of laws, breaker of hearts, so familiar with the limelight, so unused to the illumination by laughter, who finds himself in the long run deplorably stigmatised as a saint there is a flood of light let in upon all manner of traditional poses, literary insincerities that have crept into life.
This is an outrage, sir an outrage to all of us, and particularly to this frail little wife of mine, already half-hysterical over the ordeal she has endured." "Take your places!" Dundee ordered curtly. After all, there was a limit to the careful courtesy one must show to Hamilton's "inmost circle of society."
On our return home Dilly was snatched away by a cloud of attendant sprites, and we saw her no more until the time came for me to drive her to the church. However, this half-hysterical gaiety came to an end in the face of reality, and in the carriage on the way to church poor Dilly wept unrestrainedly on my shoulder.
She noted with sorrow the strangely excited look in the young eyes, the light, half-hysterical laugh, the changing colour in the pretty face. Lucy's promise of beauty had never seemed to her so characterless, or her words so empty of sense.
They did hold séance that night in a fine spirit of lark, huddled together in the de-luxe sitting room of one of their suites, and little half-hysterical shrieks and much promiscuous ribaldry under cover of darkness. Madame de Butera was of a distinctly fat and earthy blondness, with a coarse-lace waist over pink, and short hands covered with turquoise rings of many shapes and blues.
"What's up?" I cried, with a queer high note getting into my voice somehow. At that the candle on the wardrobe went out, and the one I had relit in the alcove followed. "Steady on!" I said. "These candles are wanted," speaking with a half-hysterical facetiousness, and scratching away at a match the while for the mantel candlesticks.
"Don't be too sure of that," said the consul, with a half-hysterical laugh. "But we won't consider so lamentable a contingency. Come and dine with me, both of you, and we'll discuss the only thing worth discussing, your LEGAL rights, and you can tell me your whole story, which, by the way, I haven't heard."
He could say "No!" neither to man nor woman; borrower and temptress alike found him tender-minded and pliable. Indeed he seldom made decisions at all, and when he did they were but half-hysterical resolves formed in the panic of some aghast and irreparable awakening. The particular weakness he indulged on this occasion was his need of excitement and stimulus from without.
It was courage of a kind that is almost terrible, for it accompanied a highly organised and imaginative temperament, a nervous temperament, be it observed, which implies controlled and ordered, not uncontrolled and disordered nervous power. The half-hysterical persons who class themselves among the possessors of this temperament are apt to overlook that important distinction.
I looked up at my father to see what he would say to the desolation, as I saw the change that had taken place in so short a time, and then, miserably weak and half-hysterical as I was perhaps that was the cause I burst into an uncontrollable fit of laughter.
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