Word: vein
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...customary jocular vein, the President looked over his conference of newshawks, told them that they looked pale and tired and needed a rest and therefore he was going to order them to take five or six days' vacation in Florida sunshine. Thus he playfully conveyed the information that he himself had decided to take a rest in Florida the end of March...
...were not for his preoccupation with snobbish prose, Author Cabell might be capable of really savage satire. Even in his "habitual vein of romantic irony" he sometimes drops into a phrase that would have given even Jonathan Swift pause, as when he speaks of physical love as "a conjuncture of sewer pipes." But generally Cabell is content to continue astounding the bourgeois by his own superior urbanity. His intelligence and taste alike are now for most readers hopelessly buried under the tricks and oddities of a lush Cabellowing style...
...seem abysmally fatuous. Just as good in their way are the three or four lighter pieces included in the book. Nothing could be funnier than "The little Hours," an account of Mrs. Parker's midnight rendezvous with La Rochefoucauld. The late Elinor Wylie, who sometimes wrote in a similar vein, was apt to betray her consciousness of the aristocratic stylist at work, but Mrs. Parker betrays nothing except her sense of derision...
...mysteries of laudanum, we find the halting periods of Kavanaugh, whose bravery saved the British garrison at Lucknow. The biblical account of the exodus from Egypt offers strange contrast, both in time and in method of approach, to the war diary of a flighty young aviator. In lesser vein are the colorful tales of spies, condemnations, countermands in the nick of time, secret sleigh journeys on the Baltic ice, wolves, and various other escapes from famine, sword and fire...
...vein of mystery and creeping things, granted that you have a liking for a dash of the thrilling with a preference for locality, try Brand's "Death in a Forest" (Kendall, $2.00), which takes you into Central America, or T. Lund's "Robbery at Portage Bend" (Kendall, $2.00) a story of the icebound North and the Canadian Royal Mounted Police. If your taste is less primeval "The Murder of a Banker" (Knopf. $2.00) by J. S. Fletcher should prove diverting...