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Updated: May 1, 2025
What Lord George Bentinck appreciated most in a parliamentary speaker was brilliancy: quickness of perception, promptness of repartee, clear and concise argument, a fresh and felicitous quotation, wit and picture, and, if necessary, a passionate appeal that should never pass the line of high-bred sentiment.
The Englishman likes a man who is deeply serious without being in the least a prig; a man who is tender-hearted without being sentimental; he likes a rather combative nature, and enjoys repartee more than he enjoys humour.
In the first place there was the language not patois as of habitants and barbers, nor the mode of the occasional caller at our house, whose pronunciation seemed an individual exception; but an entire assemblage holding intercourse in dainty Parisian, exquisite as the famous dialect of the Brahmans. There was the graceful compliment, the antithetic description, the witty repartee.
Priscilla's repetition of it goaded him to a reply which he immediately afterwards felt to be unworthy. "If they do tell me," he said, "I won't tell you." "Then you'll be a mean, low beast," said Priscilla. Frank pulled himself together with an effort. He realised that it would never do to bandy schoolboy repartee with Priscilla. His loss of dignity would be complete.
" I left my jacket in the carriage, and I want you to get it for me." " Well, get it for yourself, do you see? Get it for yourself." Now it is plainly to be seen that no one of the people listening there had ever heard a man speak thus to a woman who was not his wife. Whenever they had heard that form of spirited repartee it had come from the lips of a husband.
His frank, merry ways, obliging disposition, ready wit, and quickness at repartee, soon gained him a host of friends on the playground; while his evident desire to make progress in his studies, wherein he had a stimulus unsuspected by any one but Bill, his sturdy truthfulness, and general obedience to rules and regulations, won him golden opinions from those in authority.
"If so it is certainly a good thing that I have given up repartee for matrimony." "Oh, that is brilliant beside many of your attempts, I assure you. And as for your giving them up I reserve my decision." "You shall see, skeptic," he said lightly. "I expect to change the face of the whole world if necessary."
The only mitigation of his exile, so far as he could see, lay in the fact that he had Pink and the Silent One for companions. It developed that when he would speak to the Silent One, he must say Jim, or wait long for a reply. Also, the Silent One was not always silent, and he was quick to observe the weak points in those around him, and keen at repartee.
In a readiness of repartee, and a certain ease and volubility of conversation, he perceived his deficiency; and though he frequently was conscious that his ideas were more just, and his arguments better, than those of his companions, yet he could not at first bring out his ideas to advantage, or manage his arguments so as to stand his ground against the mixed raillery and sophistry of his school fellows.
Wait till Fossy sees you." "Will he ask me to stick it out?" "Oh, Lord, I wish I had your repartee. But I'm thinking Nelly O'Neill doesn't it give you away a bit?" "Keeps me a bit, too. I shouldn't like to lose myself altogether gain reputation for another woman."
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