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When their tenders were accepted it was he who superintended the work and schemed how to scamp it, where possible, using mud where mortar was specified, mortar where there ought to have been cement, sheet zinc where they were supposed to put sheet lead, boiled oil instead of varnish, and three coats of paint where five were paid for. In fact, scamping the work was with this man a kind of mania.
From ten to eleven he had gone back to his sermon, and had spent from eleven to one at his church, attending to small matters, writing notices, fixing hymns, holding the daily half-hour Service instituted during wartime, to which but few ever came. He had hurried back to lunch, scamping it so that he might get to his piano for an hour of forgetfulness.
To give anything approaching a full account of all the rest would require a separate volume. As a result of all the hurrying and scamping, every now and again the men found that they had worked themselves out of a job. Several times during the summer the firm had scarcely anything to do, and nearly everybody had to stand off for a few days or weeks.
It was a thin wall, mostly indeed a panelled partition, belonging to an old bit of the house, in which the building was curiously uneven in quality sometimes inexplicably strong, and sometimes mere lath and plaster, as though the persons, building or re-building, had come to an end of their money and were scamping their work.
Twemlow began to make the introductions a long and tedious process, which she performed relentlessly, without haste and without scamping her work. With each member of the aristocracy of his new profession Ashe shook hands, and on each member he smiled, until his facial and dorsal muscles were like to crack under the strain.
It was Crass and these sub-foremen who were to blame for most of the scamping and driving, because if it had not been for them neither Rushton nor Hunter would have known how to scheme the work.
They were the stoutest planks ever put into a ship's bulkhead we thought and then we perceived that, in our hurry, we had sent all the tools overboard. Absurd little Belfast wanted to break it down with his own weight, and with both feet leaped straight up like a springbok, cursing the Clyde shipwrights for not scamping their work.
The scamping business was not confined to houses or properties of an inferior class: it was the general rule. Large good-class houses, villas and mansions, the residences of wealthy people, were done in exactly the same way. Generally in such places costly and beautiful materials were spoilt in the using.
She saw Lousteau working up to the last minute under the most discreditable compulsion, and scamping his work, as painters say of a picture from which sound technique is absent; but she would excuse him by saying, "He is a poet!" so anxious was she to justify him in her own eyes.
"Every night ever since I can remember I've seen mother kneeling by her bed to say her prayers, no matter how cold it was, though she never would buy herself good woollens, and never scamping them to less than five minutes. And what has she got for it? What has she got for it?"
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