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He had changed his clothes from top to toe. He had on a black frock coat, reddish with long wear, and a white pique waistcoat, upon which a pinch-beck chain meandered playfully; a heavy cornelian seal hung low down on to his narrow black trousers.
Alone in that quiet cabin, his own voice shrill and small the only sound, face to face with the man who had saved Europe once, and must again, a confused and silly story he made of it. Out on the uncritical sea he had almost thought himself a hero: in here, eye to eye with Nelson, he knew himself just a pinch-beck boy. The silence grew upon him.
Full well I saw through his pinch-beck mask. I knew his tricks. In the ab-sence of my em-ployer, he would put up rods, and ever so many more than was wanted, and likely, too, some miser-able trash that would attrack the light-ening, instead of keep-ing it off. Then, as it would spoil the house to take them down, they would be kept, and pay demand-ed.
'Didn't he return you the thirteenpence in copper, and the watch, saying it was only pinch-beck? But his lady rebuked him for a saucy varlet, and turned him out of the room at once, saying to me when he had gone, 'that the fool didn't know what was the meaning of a hundred-pound bill, which was in the pocket-book that Freny took from her.
Other men crowed or fumbled after petty and pinch-beck ends; impossible rhetorical republicanisms; vain senatorial prestiges; or pleasure pure and simple say rather, very complex and impure. Let them clack, let them fumble! Caesar would do things and get things done. He wore the whole armor of his greatness, and could see no chink or joint in it through which a hostile dagger might pierce.
A dear little lady I met the other day, talking about her sister Mem-sahibs, said airily, "Of course we very soon lose complexions, manners, and morals." She could afford to say so, it being so obviously untrue in her case. I think it is just this, that the women who are pure gold grow more charming, but the pinch-beck wears off very soon.
He was rid of his incubus why mince the word now! rid of her gadfly vulgarity, her shallow emotions, her pinch-beck ideals, her hideous selfishness. By her own rash act she had freed him to marry the woman he loved with all his rugged strength the woman who that memorable September day had proved loved him. What was the transient chatter of the world beside this verity!
The lady returns and expresses some little dissatisfaction with her sister and sister-in-law, because they happen to have paid forty or fifty dollars for a fac-simile of her diamond ring a fac-simile made out of real pinch-beck and unquestionable paste.
Thus the cry of "Property in danger" ended, in 1851, in the restoration of open despotism, which every sensible observer of French affairs expected after Louis Napoleon was made President, his Presidency being looked upon only as a pinch-beck imitation of the Consulate of 1799-1804.
The dresses of court and all were a mixture of splendor and tawdriness that exhausted the savings and pilferings of a twelvemonth. Good-natured "missies" often helped make these outfits. They were of velvet, silk, satin, cotton lace, false flowers, the brilliant seeds of the licorice and coquelicot, tinsel, beads, and pinch-beck. Sometimes mistresses even lent firmly sewed fast their own jewelry.
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