Vietnam or Thailand ? Vote for the TOP Country of the Week !
Updated: May 14, 2025
If you could choose this minute you'd take the poorest of those drawing-room marionettes before the finest real man, if he didn't know how to wear his clothes or had trouble with his grammar." She felt that there was more than a grain of truth in this; at any rate, denial would be useless, as his tone was the tone of settled conviction. "We've made a false start," proceeded he.
"I suppose we make our luck. It doesn't depend on our faces, but on ourselves." "Ah, no!" Mrs Goldsworthy received the well-worn platitude with a laugh. "We don't make anything we are made. It is just a dance of marionettes, Debbie. Poor puppets of flesh and blood, treated as if they were just wood and nails and glue! Who set us up to make a game of us like this? Who DOES pull the strings, Debbie?
"Sir," replied the Barnabite, "you know, I suppose, I am a suspect." "I am one too," said Brotteaux, "and my marionettes into the bargain, which is the worst thing of all. You see them exposed under this flimsy cloth to the fine rain that chills our bones. For, I must tell you, Father, that after having been a publican, I now make dancing-dolls for a living."
Through the dimming haze of sleeping sensibility the dancing savages became as marionettes in some cunning puppet show; and the blood stained figures stiffening against their log took shapes less horrifying. 'Twas Dick's voice, coming, as it seemed, from a mighty distance, that broke the spell and brought me back to quickened agonies. He spoke in panting gasps, as the smoke would let him.
Only at last he became religious, and repented of all his sins: the devil was sick, the devil a saint would be.... After all, if we are powerless to shape our own destinies, if what is to be will be, how idle to discuss such a question, to array conscience and inclination against one another, like two sets of wooden marionettes made to advance and retire by pulling at the strings!
Next week Tantora's big circus is to give a private performance for him. There are Marionettes and Punch and Judy shows, and all the doings of the Grand Grignol are beautifully imitated. The royal band plays every afternoon, and at night some one tells him stories of the valorous men who occupied the throne before him.
The bell notes swept through and about us, a hurricane. The crescent strand was once more a ferment. Back, back were the Akka being swept, as though by brooms, tottering on the edge of the ledge, falling into the waters. Swiftly they were finished; and where they had fought was an eddying throng clothed in tatters or naked, swaying, drifting, arms tossing like marionettes of Satan.
"Marionettes," he said, looking up at his wife, his little eyes wide open. "Do you see the marionettes? This is Pulcinella. This is his wife. Do you see how they quarrel? Is it not pretty? I always like to see the marionettes in the streets. Ha! ha! ha! see them!" And he played with his fingers and made them bob and bow, like little dolls. "He is ill," said Matilde, in a low, uneasy voice.
She seemed to have been her young mistress's chief comfort, next to an occasional game of play with her father, or a walk, looking in at the shop windows and watching marionettes, or, still better, the wonderful sports of brown-legged street children, without trying to make her speak French or Italian in her eyes one of the inflictions of the journey, in those of her elders the one benefit she might gain.
The marionettes grew bewildered with their new taking; they did not understand the meaning of all the coarse things they had to do. So in the middle of a play, the little queen would fail now and then in her part, and move awkwardly, wondering what her lover meant when he sprawled to and fro, and seemed trying to find in the air more feet than he had upon the ground.
Word Of The Day
Others Looking