United States or Ecuador ? Vote for the TOP Country of the Week !
The old lady, naturally enough, mistook my confusion for shyness. With perfect tact and kindness she entered into conversation with me.
"You mistake, believe me," interrupted Randal. "You shall not finish your sentence. He is all that you do not yet suppose him; for his shyness, and his very love, his very respect for your superiority, do not allow his mind and his nature to appear to advantage. You, it is true, have a taste for letters and poetry rare among your countrywomen. He has not at present few men have.
Now that they spoke to him of Besworth, assuring him that they were serious in their desire to change their residence, the fit of shyness was manifested, first in outrageous praise of Brookfield, which was speedily and inexplicably followed by a sort of implied assent to the proposition to depart from it.
"You are going to stay for the Willoughbys' ball, aren't you?" Harry Luttrell smiled. "But you despise dancing." "I? I adore it!" She smiled as she spoke, but she spoke with a queer shyness which took him off his feet. He slowly tore the letter across and again across and then into little pieces and carried them to the waste-paper basket.
She paused for a moment at the foot of the stairs and there was a strange longing to pass her fingers over the thick dark hair. The thought passed instantaneously, but there was a new shyness in her manner as she approached. "Hullo," he said, arising as he heard her footfall. "Been watching the people drive by. Pretty smart traps, some of them, too.
While Jim and I were talking, she would come and go with rapid glances at us, leaving on her passage an impression of grace and charm and a distinct suggestion of watchfulness. Her manner presented a curious combination of shyness and audacity. Every pretty smile was succeeded swiftly by a look of silent, repressed anxiety, as if put to flight by the recollection of some abiding danger.
"Courage, boy," said grandmamma in her effort to dispel his shyness, "tell me now straight out without hesitation, was it you who did it?" Peter did not lift his eyes and therefore did not see at what grandmamma was pointing.
Physically they were almost a race apart, and out-of-door work had given them a vigor which, when they got over their first shyness on coming to town, developed into a positive carriage and freedom of movement, and made them conspicuous among Black Hawk women. That was before the day of High-School athletics. Girls who had to walk more than half a mile to school were pitied.
Since the revelation made to her by her own heart, when the heavy tress of hair dropped from her bosom upon the unconscious breast above which she bent, an insurmountable wall of diffidence and shyness upon her side, and of stern, self-concentrated isolation on her husband's, had risen up between them, dwarfing the barrier that was already there.
She chattered of her forlorn childhood, of her mother's woes and her father's iniquities, using the frankest language about these last; then of herself and her troubles. He listened and laughed; his look as she poured herself out to him was in itself a caress. Moreover, unconsciously to both, their relation had changed somewhat. The edge of his first ignorance and shyness had rubbed off.
Word Of The Day