Or else, they grasp at sweetmeats, and mock at their
childishness thereby: they cling to their straw of life, and mock at their still clinging to it.
In a word, they are the same folly, the same
childishness, the same ill-breeding, and the same ill-nature, which raise all the clamours and uproars both in life and on the stage.
"I'm a worshipper of the great god Whim too, and close by here I have a little summer-house, full of books and fishing-lines and other
childishness, where, when my whim is to be lonely, I come and play at solitude.
Her resolve, however, had been taken, and it seemed vacillating even to
childishness to abandon it now, unless for graver reasons.
His despair at failing in a Scripture examination, his borrowing money from Gavril to pay a sleigh driver, his kissing Sonya on the sly- he now recalled all this as
childishness he had left immeasurably behind.
The
childishness of her expression, together with the delicate beauty of her figure, made up her special charm, and that he fully realized.
We call this a state of
childishness, but it is the same poor hollow mockery of it, that death is of sleep.
Since you have no desire to keep faith with me by upholding the rules, of which you are quite old enough to understand the necessity, I shall not trouble you with reproaches, or appeals to which I am now convinced that you would not respond," (here Miss Carpenter, with an inarticulate protest, burst into tears); "but you should at least think of the danger into which your juniors are led by your
childishness. How should you feel if Agatha had broken her neck?"
I swore I wouldn't unless you looked round." He laughed as the
childishness of the confession struck him.
A habit in him of speaking to the poor and of avoiding patronage or condescension or
childishness (which is the favourite device, many people deeming it quite a subtlety to talk to them like little spelling books) has put him on good terms with the woman easily.
"I tell you it's 'ot," says he; and I was amazed at the clipping tones and the odd sing-song in which he spoke, and no less at that strange trick of dropping out the letter "h." To be sure, I had heard Ransome; but he had taken his ways from all sorts of people, and spoke so imperfectly at the best, that I set down the most of it to
childishness. My surprise was all the greater to hear that manner of speaking in the mouth of a grown man; and indeed I have never grown used to it; nor yet altogether with the English grammar, as perhaps a very critical eye might here and there spy out even in these memoirs.
'Indeed, my dear, I will,' replied Rosa, in a tone of affectionate
childishness that went straight and true to her heart; 'I will be as good a friend as such a mite of a thing can be to such a noble creature as you.