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The ancient Greeks, in despair over the frailties of human emotion and the unbecomingness of worldly conduct, which their brilliant minds enabled them to recognize clearly but which they found themselves powerless to subdue, endowed the gods, whom they worshipped, with all of their own passions and weaknesses, and thus the foolish behavior of the gods consoled them for their own obvious shortcomings.

For, after all, the second glance showed him as so much the same, the same to the unbecomingness of his clothes, the flatness of his features, the general effect of decision and placidity that he always, predominatingly, gave. It was on Franklin's sameness that she leaned. It was Franklin's sameness that was her goal; she trusted it like the ground beneath her feet.

At length, by dint of much wriggling, and loud and incessant expostulations upon the unbecomingness of his hugging a fellow male in that matrimonial sort of style, I succeeded in extracting a grunt; and presently, he drew back his arm, shook himself all over like a Newfoundland dog just from the water, and sat up in bed, stiff as a pike-staff, looking at me, and rubbing his eyes as if he did not altogether remember how I came to be there, though a dim consciousness of knowing something about me seemed slowly dawning over him.

But now there was no longer a grateful life for her white rose-star to brighten; so she sat down, in her loneliness and sombre unbecomingness, between her forlorn counters with their pitiful shows of stock, and let her good looks go by, entertaining only brave thoughts of duty, till she grew pale "and fell into the portion of weeds and outworn faces," so that "how anybody could see the least beauty in that distressing Miss Wimple" began to be with many a sincere and almost reasonable expression of surprise, instead of a malicious sin against knowledge.

She would not have been herself had there appeared any neglect or unbecomingness in her costume, but she wore the least pretentious of morning gowns, close at throat and wrist, which aided her look of mental concentration and alertness. She rose with alacrity, and the visitor, using her utmost keenness in scrutiny of countenance, found that her own eyes, not Sibyl's, were the first to fall.

But Barbara draws back, and our visitor perceives her error. We sit down, but the brunt of the talk falls on Barbara. I am never glib with strangers, and I throw in a word only now and then, all my attention and observation having passed into my eyes. A plain woman, indeed! I have always been convinced of the unbecomingness of church, but now more than ever am I fully persuaded of it.

At length, by dint of much wriggling, and loud and incessant expostulations upon the unbecomingness of his hugging a fellow male in that matrimonial sort of style, I succeeded in extracting a grunt; and presently, he drew back his arm, shook himself all over like a Newfoundland dog just from the water, and sat up in bed, stiff as a pike-staff, looking at me, and rubbing his eyes as if he did not altogether remember how I came to be there, though a dim consciousness of knowing something about me seemed slowly dawning over him.

It is a curious illustration of the strength of the current passion for moral maxims in season and out of season, that one scene which to the scoffers of that day seemed, as it cannot but seem to everybody to-day, a climax of absurdity and unbecomingness, was hailed by the party as most admirable, for no other reason than that it contained a number of high moralising saws.

"What did you ask?" she said. Betty leaned still further forward. "Can you tell me " she began and stopped. A sense of stricture in the throat stopped her, as her eyes took in the washed-out colour of the thin face, the washed-out colour of the thin hair thin drab hair, dragged in straight, hard unbecomingness from the forehead and cheeks.

This accounted for her strange appearance; but Fleming noticed that the girl's manner had not the slightest consciousness of their unbecomingness, nor of the charms of face and figure they had marred. She looked at him curiously. "Hev you got religion?" "Well, no!" said Fleming, laughing; "I'm afraid not." "Dad hez he's got it pow'ful." "Is that the reason he don't like miners?" asked Fleming.