" Eve looked up gratefully, for she saw that profound respect for her character dictated the remark; but rising, she observed "This is making a little badinage about our honest, lion-hearted, old captain, a very serious affair.

They took our elegant badinage for our sober and settled opinions, and laughed in the most accommodating manner when we delivered our real and most matured sentiments.

He gave a short mirthless laugh, and I understood that he was trying his hand at a little light social badinage.

Some very pleasant badinage between Lord HUGH CECIL and the HOME SECRETARY as to the relative merits of the words "dwell" and "reside" for the purpose of defining a voter's qualification was followed by an exhaustive and exhausting lecture by Major CHAPPLE on how to tabulate the alternative votes in a three-cornered election.

At any other time I might have found his coarse badinage hard to bear.

The moment he stopped to listen, I assumed a tone of earnest badinage.

His chief merit in literature, apart from his often delicate epigrams, his élégant badinage and his graceful if at times facile verse, lies in the power he possesses, in common with Garcilaso and Spenser, of treating the allegorical pastoral without entirely losing the charm of naïve simplicity and genuine feeling.

It is one thing to introduce the fulsome badinage of compliment with which French tragedy abounds, and another to exhibit the "very ecstacy of love: Whose violent property foredoes itself, And leads the will to desperate undertakings, As oft as any passion under heaven, That does afflict our natures.

I watch him keep a perturbed and restless Major from the line waiting while he finishes his light-hearted badinage with a subordinate.

It began in a jest, as do all the choicest tragedies of the gods,a few lines of idle badinage, meant to spice Solon's column of business locals with a readable sprightliness.

The game should no longer depend for its sparkle on impromptu badinage between the umpire and the wicket-keeper.

" With such lively badinage, occasionally lapsing into more serious discourse, the dinner passed off with a great deal of pleasantness to our young gentleman, who had prepared himself for something prodigiously dull and heavy.

They were obtuse Angles, and when bedtime came and they tried to walk a crack, the historian, in a spirit of mischief, exclaims that they were mostly a pack of Isosceles Try Angles, but this doubtless is mere badinage.

For the moment rid of one annoying question, he was quite his better self, and added his quota in the preliminary badinage of the game.

And it was pleasant to see the stately General on her right bend beside her with that grave gallantry which young girls find more grateful than the privileged badinage of old beaus.

It was distinctly an aristocratic society: elegant in dress, punctilious in manner, exacting in taste, ready to be amused, and not indifferent to criticism when it took the form of sprightly badinage or of keen and trenchant satire.

What with having, on top of her other troubles, to rein herself back from the trough, Aunt Dahlia was a total loss as far as anything in the shape of brilliant badinage was concerned.

He remembered the vivid flush that passed over Rosa's face while her playful sister teased her with that tuneful badinage.

However I take it that the author was anxious that his parody should be as complete in form as possible, and, being rather impressed by the insouciance, not to say insolence, of the Satan of the original, seized his chance of bizarre characterisation and "celestial badinage" and let consistency go hang for the time.

" We broke in upon the Admiral in his office near the shipyards, and he greeted me with cheerful badinage.

" Much more of this childlike badinage followed, and by and by they came around again to the same last statement.