Word: placid
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What passions flicker beneath Georgie's grey flannel mortarboard? As the reader meets him, he is preparing to go horseback riding. A shrewd old groom suggests a placid bay, but Georgie rejects his advice and takes a balky black gelding. Of course he is thrown. No student of women's-magazine prose can fail to understand the symbolic significance of this, and it has nothing to do with horseback riding. The groom (servants are as clever as presidential speechwriters in this sort of fiction) is Fate, and Georgie's pettish assertion of masculinity means that...
...Wife's Revenge. Nietzsche was soon tamed. Lou took him on soulful walks through the woods, discussing the great themes of life; but whenever Nietzsche proposed an earthier relationship, Lou balked. She soon left him for the more placid Ree; the embittered Nietzsche, so Peters says, wrote his prose-poem Thus Spake Zarathustra to express his resentment of all womankind. Ree, however, fared no better than Nietzsche. For five years he lived with Lou as "brother and sister" and was known among his friends as Lou's "maid of honor." Nothing better expressed the relationship...
...Street's tone stood more exposed in the large, placid second movement. There it sounded a little thin and tired, and even sagged below proper pitch a bit, But a brilliant third movement, displaying Mr. Street's really startling techniques, resuscitated the work...
Novelist Bell writes this way, and it must have seemed to him that the technique was ideally suited to his scheme, which was to portray a marriage as the turbulent confluence of two mighty streams of lineage. Daniel (Southerner, painter, battler with Furies) and Lucy (descendant of Philadelphians, Quaker, placid repository of honor) have been married for several years when family duty demands a temporary separation. He flies to Mississippi to straighten out the affairs of a dotty aunt; she travels to the bedside of a stern Quaker uncle. The distance between husband and wife and their return to their...
...Walk has very little to do with plot or motivation. She's distraught, she walks; he's calm, he walks; she's placid, suicidal, elated or enraged, she walks. The Walk has nothing to do with getting anywhere-no picnic, party or supermarket is ever set out for, much less reached (in fact, when achieving a destination is of any importance, everyone slips into the nearest sports car or on any available elevator, never attempts to make it on foot...