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Updated: June 11, 2025
One hardly knows which to admire most, the loyalty with which he stuck to the falling house till the moment of its collapse, or the adroitness with which he escaped from the ruins. Censure of his shiftiness is partly disarmed by the fact that there were so many in that troubled and uncertain time who would have acted like him if they had had the skill.
He has triumphed by specializing in his weaknesses and insuring their survival; by disputing the simple laws of biology with interminable banalities labelled from age to age as religions, philosophies and laws. "Unable, despite his shiftiness, to lie the fact of his mortality and decomposition out of existence, he has satisfied his mania for survival by the invention of souls.
There is a poetical side to the commonplace of his incomings and outgoings; study him well, and you may frame an idyl of some sort from his apparently prosaic existence. Our poets, we must needs think, are deficient in that shiftiness, ready adaptation to circumstances, and ability of making the most of things, for which, as a people, we are proverbial.
"Yes, I had a telegram from Jane this morning," she was scanning his eyes once more to see whether there was a shadow of what she called "shiftiness" in them. "Come in," she added grudgingly. He was not led into the dining-room, but seated on one of the best varnished chairs in the "parlor," as they called the little unused front room.
In the middle of the porch was a vertical sun-dial, whose gnomon swayed loosely about when the wind blew, and cast its shadow hither and thither, as much as to say, 'Here's your fine model dial; here's any time for any man; I am an old dial; and shiftiness is the best policy.
Were there a strong man to lead, the shiftiness, treachery, and deliberate neglect practised on the million by those who are now in office, could not possibly last; but where there is no strength, there must be weakness, and where a long career of deceit has been followed, instead of a course of plain dealing, failure in the end is inevitable.
But I think of your one o'clock in the morning of the masquerade ball, and frankly I am afraid. I look at the three without well, with as little prejudice as weak woman may. Mallinson, you know him always on the artist's see-saw between exaltation and despair. Doesn't that make for shiftiness generally?
Those who, like myself, had suffered internment in other camps and who had become thoroughly grounded in Teuton shiftiness and trickery divined that something unusually crafty and cunning was afoot. I might mention that by this time Ruhleben comprised a small town of twenty-three barracks housing a round 4,000 prisoners.
It was their hour to carry out the letters, and thus mechanically they fulfilled their duty. English Government officials have before now been jeered at as men of routine, but the most ancient clerk in Somerset House is a man of wild impulse and boundless expedient compared with the average of functionaries great and small here. The want of "shiftiness" is a national characteristic.
Both parties were naturally jealous of one another, suspicious of underhand dealing and tacit changes of terms, prompt to resent and take offence, and not easy to pacify when they thought advantage had been taken; and Salisbury, either by his own fault, or by yielding to the King's canny shiftiness, gave the business a more haggling and huckstering look than it need have had.
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