Miss Waterford, torn between the aestheticism of her early youth, when she used to go to parties in sage green, holding a daffodil, and the
flippancy of her maturer years, which tended to high heels and Paris frocks, wore a new hat.
Nothing could be in worse taste than misplaced
flippancy; and he answered somewhat stiffly: "Yes, you have been away a very long time."
"Don't banter me," she said, wounded at what appeared to be his
flippancy. He did not mind the entreaty, but the tone with its delicate note of pathos was like a reproach.
He pretended not to notice anything, and then in an instant he froze everything with a
flippancy which jarred horribly at the time, but has ever since touched me more than all.
There was never here any of that flashing humour which made the other masters suspect him of
flippancy. Finding time for everything in his busy day, he was able at certain intervals to take separately for a quarter of an hour or twenty minutes the boys whom he was preparing for confirmation.
Indeed, there was too lightsome a tone of
flippancy all through the paper.
It is astonishing what ease and courage their little phrases of
flippancy had given me; the idea by which I had been awed was that the youthful beings before me, with their dark nun-like robes and softly braided hair, were a kind of half-angels.
In the ecstatic solemnity with which she swore her faith to him the ordinary sensibilities of sex seemed a
flippancy. At a pause in the service, while they were kneeling together, she unconsciously inclined herself towards him, so that her shoulder touched his arm; she had been frightened by a passing thought, and the movement had been automatic, to assure herself that he was really there, and to fortify her belief that his fidelity would be proof against all things.
It shows how he yields to temptation and lives for the most part in reckless sin, but at last in spite of all his
flippancy and folly is saved by Perseverance and Repentance, pardoned through God's mercy, and assured of salvation.
with something ludicrously grotesque about them, which might, at any moment, provoke her to such
flippancy as would shock her colleagues for ever.
"Not its
flippancy, father," said Mary, quickly, fearing that her mother would be displeased.
"The
flippancy of the half-educated is more obstructive to science than the obtuseness of the ignorant," said he.
