United States or Mozambique ? Vote for the TOP Country of the Week !
Underbred people tease their sick and dying friends to death. The chance of a gentleman or lady with a given mortal ailment to live a certain time is as good again as that of the common sort of coarse people.
The men appeared to her all coarse, the women all pert, everybody underbred; and she gave as little contentment as she received from introductions either to old or new acquaintance.
This time in particular there was a freckled underbred young man who handed in what was evidently a carefully prepared memorandum upon what he called "my positions." Apparently he had a muddle of doubts about the early fathers and the dates of the earlier authentic copies of the gospels, things of no conceivable significance.
"I marvel, Sir William," says she, "that you will have your servant ever at your elbow, so that a body hath never a word with you alone. I would not presume to censure, but certainly my father's chaplain does not so intrude himself into company; and 'tis difficult for persons of quality to speak their mind in such underbred society."
And it was then that the great day came, the marvellous day when We-hro discovered his second self, his playmate, his loyal, unselfish, loving friend his underbred, unwashed, hungry, vagabond dog, born white and spotless, but begrimed by contact with the world, the mud, and the white man's hovel. It happened this way: We-hro was cleaning his father's dugout canoe, after a night of fish spearing.
He had imagined her a flashy damsel, underbred, with a vulgar style of beauty, a superficial cleverness, and all those baser arts by which the needy sometimes ingratiate themselves into the favour of the rich. Nothing could be more different from his fancy picture than the girl by whose side he was walking, under that cloudless sky, where the larks were singing high up in the blue.
Feather-headed idiot that she had been! Inconsiderate wretch! How, in Heaven's name, after reminding the man of the perfidy of that underbred passée little person with the passion for French novels and sulphonal tabloids, who had thrown the Doctor over, years before, in favour of his brother the Dragoon how could she have charged him with being a victim to the charms of another young woman?
Search myself through as I may, I cannot tell when the change began, or what the change consists of, or what is the matter with me, or what charm there is in the person who does the mischief. She is the counterpart of dozens of girls; lively, brown-eyed, brown-haired, underbred it is not too harsh to say so underbred slightly; half-educated, whether quickwitted I dare not opine.
I did not for a moment feel confined, and the walls seemed a great waste of stone and mortar. I felt as if I alone of all my townsmen had paid my tax. They plainly did not know how to treat me, but behaved like persons who are underbred. In every threat and in every compliment there was a blunder; for they thought that my chief desire was to stand the other side of that stone wall.
I think it is quite possible that if one had only known Keats slightly, one might have thought him a very underbred young man, as when he showed himself suspicious and ill at ease in the company of Shelley, because of his social standing. "A loose, slack, ill-dressed youth," was Coleridge's impression of Keats, when he met him in a lane near Highgate.
Word Of The Day