Word: peacocking
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...crushing tragedy in the face of which his pragmatism is meaningless and his nihilism a cheerless thing. The agent of his undoing is the narrator of the book, Jacob Horner, one of the most fascinatingly dreadful characters to appear in a long time. He is self-described as "owl. peacock, chameleon, donkey and popinjay, fugitive from a medieval bestiary." In more modern terms, he is also a manic-depressive, and a fugitive from a psychotherapeutic institution called the Remobilization Farm...
...carthorse Juno with a passionate imagination: she could talk for hours on any given subject without pausing to breathe. Her lovers were so numerous that they ran concurrently, like prison sentences. Mme. Récamier, on the other hand, was bright and lovely as a peacock and quick as a lizard at dodging through chinks. "She liked to stop everything in April," said Critic Sainte-Beuve with French delicacy-meaning that Mme. Récamier drove men half-crazy by drawing them hopelessly on with her flowery charms (even Husband Récamier was denied his wife...
...young Episcopal clergyman from Philadelphia, Pierce showed intense ambition from the time he married wellborn, well-educated Cornelia Peacock in 1831. He took her to Natchez, Miss., where he had been offered a parish, preached there four years, then abruptly resigned his pastorate and announced his intention of becoming a Catholic. While admitting misgivings ("I once thought all Catholic priests instruments of the Devil"), Cornelia wrote to her sister: "I am ready at once to submit to whatever my loved husband believes to be the path of duty." The path was clear to Pierce: it led to Rome. Cornelia...
...than the middle and lower classes. The broken, frontier-barred Europe of today is the "legacy'' they left behind; their saddened heirs look back upon them not with the anger of indignation but with the hungry envy that an upright sparrow might feel for a bone-lazy peacock...
Across the Pond. The peacock in its prime is shown by Author Bedford with the brilliance of an artist who can paint both a huge panorama and an Audubon closeup. Julius von Felden, feckless son of an ancient baronial house of Baden, has come to Berlin to marry Melanie. daughter of the Jewish House of Merz-a plutocratic, rock-solid family that lives in a welter of steam heat, massive drapes, and meals so continuous and gigantic that every room contains a deftly hidden mousetrap...