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He's collecting freaks, too, and I haven't a doubt would be pleased to know you." We parted and I sauntered homeward, cogitating over my strange client, and now and then laughing over the idiosyncrasies of Hamlet's friend the swan-driver. It never occurred to me at the moment however to connect the two, in spite of the link of swan's-down. I regarded it merely as a coincidence.
This impression, for which it must sorrowfully be confessed there was much seeming ground in contemporary events, and the idiosyncrasies of Jefferson and Madison, in their full dependence upon commercial coercion to reduce Great Britain to concede their most extreme demands, contributed largely to maintain the successive British ministries in that unconciliatory and disdainful attitude towards the United States, which made inevitable a war that a higher bearing might have averted.
It is, I know, possible to draw up at any particular period a list of what I may term the idiosyncrasies of any race at that period. A writer in a London newspaper some little time back attempted to do so in reference to Oriental races generally.
It is so frightful to be in an atmosphere of family idiosyncrasies; to see all the hereditary uncomeliness or infirmity of body, all the defects of speech, all the failings of temper, intensified by concentration, so that every fault of our own finds itself multiplied by reflections, like our images in a saloon lined with mirrors! Nature knows what she is about.
It is right to compassionate sinners, to find excuse for the faults of every one but ourselves; but we ought not to love so foolishly and irrationally, that we cannot even bring ourselves to wish our hero's faults away. I confess to feeling the most minute and detailed interest in the smallest matters connected with other people's lives and idiosyncrasies.
One of his idiosyncrasies was to talk wisely to the juniors on the subject of European campaigns and to criticise the moves of generals whose very names and centuries were entangling snares. His own subalterns were, unfortunately for him, at the house when Hayne called, and when he, as was his wont, began to expound on current military topics.
Diana Lytham, spinster, through no want of trying to remedy the defect, expert at bridge, razor-edged of tongue, but still youthful enough to allow the lid of Pandora's casket to lift on occasions, also to be described by those who feared the razor-edge as petulant instead of peevish, and cendrée instead of sandy, passed the tedious moments of waiting in a running commentary upon the idiosyncrasies and oddities of the people and refreshments of the past hours, with a verve which she fondly believed to be a combination of sarcasm and cynicism, but which, in reality, was the kernel of the nut of spitefulness, hanging from the withering bough of the tree of passing youth.
Irving was always the literary man; he had the habits, the idiosyncrasies, of his small genus. I mean that he regarded life not from the philanthropic, the economic, the political, the philosophic, the metaphysic, the scientific, or the theologic, but purely from the literary point of view.
Distinctly, to-night, she was in a new vein, more attractive to Roy than all her feminine crafts and lures. Sitting, friendly and at ease over the fire, they discussed human idiosyncrasies a pet subject with him. Then, suddenly, she looked him in the eyes; and he was aware of her again, in the old disturbing way.
Yes, there was only one club deserving of the name. "Still," said Sir Paul. "They might give us a rest from prunes and rice." "This club," said Mr. Prohack, "like all other clubs, is managed by a committee of Methuselahs who can only digest prunes and rice." And after a lot more talk about the idiosyncrasies of clubs he said, with a casual air: "For myself, I belong to too many clubs."
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