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I retain a very vivid picture of that walk the ascent of a gentle slope towards a prospect as yet unknown but full of glorious possibilities; the tender dropping light of an autumn sky, slightly filmed with the promise of the future rains, like foreshadowed tears, and the half-frightened, half-serious talk into which Consuelo and I had insensibly fallen.
Their common peril brought the friends together again, into that close bond which had been theirs without interruption until this recent change in the younger had led him to choose paths at variance with the old man's ideas; and now they spoke, heart to heart, in the half-serious, half-jesting ways of old, while beneath each whimsical irony was that mutual love and understanding which had consecrated their partnership.
The jealous, sneering remarks of Rose, and the half-serious, half-jesting utterances of other people, who had been present at the wedding, meant nothing to her; she went about her work all the more diligently and ignored it all. Spring had come again. Amrei was standing beside the flowers in her window when a bee came flying up and began sucking at an open blossom.
At last, when teapots and cups had disappeared, leaving a clear table, and the young women, after grace had been duly sung, sat opposite to one another with a look of amused expectation as to what might be coming next, Thomas rose deliberately from his arm-chair, which he had drawn to the head of the table, and looking round on the young people with a half-serious, half-humorous expression, said: "Well, I suppose, girls, it may be as well if I tell you what I've asked you here for this evening."
Indeed it is a strange and often absurd art the half-serious, half-parodying imitations of Thomson and Walpole and Wieland, this ludicrous caricature Gothic of Strawberry Hill and All Souls, the notion of Gothic architecture as a mass of crockets, battlements, crypts, and dungeons and all in ruins.
"I suppose she thinks she's going to get Lorne," said Stella. Her resentment was only half-serious, but the note was there. "What put that into your head?" asked her mother. "Oh, well, anybody can see that he's devoted to her, and has been for ages, and it isn't as if Lorne was one to HAVE girlfriends; she's absolutely the only thing he's ever looked at twice.
The Colonel made this last remark in a half-serious, half-comic way, that excited my risibilities amazingly, but before I could reply, the carriage stopped, and Jim, opening the door, announced: 'We's h'ar, massa, and de prayin' am gwine on.
"I think," he observed musingly, "that God is more pleased with this incense of mine than with all the prayers of all the Rabbis." This shocked even me, fascinated though I was. Never had I met such a man in all Israel. I shook my head in half-serious reproof. "You are a sinner," I said. "Nay, is not smoking pleasurable? To enjoy aright aught in God's creation is to praise God.
His mode of dressing, and the particular styles that from time to time he affected, had their marked influence on the young exquisites of the Mayfair balls and Pall Mall club windows, who copied him in everything that he did, and tried to reproduce the accidental charm of his graceful, though to him only half-serious, fopperies.
Her humor, her splendid fearlessness, the lightness of her tone, combined with the half-laughing, half-serious look that she swept up at him, to ease the tension of his emotions. For the first time since entering the room, he smiled; then in silence for a time regarded her steadfastly, thinking. So he resembled this burglar, Anisty, strongly enough to be mistaken for him eh?
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