"The fact is," he continued, "that love is a very rare thing, nowadays, and is so very generally an abominable sham that I have often amused myself by diabolically devising plans for its destruction.

There would be fewer despicable shams among them.

With Deliyanni it was an evident sham.

There would be fewer despicable shams among them.

The woods still made a pompous show of leaves, but I knew it to be a hollow sham, a mask of foliage soon to be stripped off by equinoctial fury, a precarious stage-setting, ready to be blown down at the first gusts from the north.

Since then she had passed from the twilight of little society shams and convenient, conventional self-deceivings into the glory where only Truth was visible or audible.

Had her dread of him been fortuitous, his tyranny a mere sham?

You shall find to-day, in any one of the seaport cities or towns of New England, widows and daughters of sea-captains, living, or rather seeming to live, upon the most beggarly incomes, but still keeping up a certain pathetic sham of appearance of being at ease.

It was a 'sham,' I daresay, as they call everything now-a-days: but really, me dear, a pleasant sham is better to live with than an unpleasant reality, especially when it smells of cigars.

This "coyness" is a pure sham.

"My little daughter, he is a sham,a sickly sham!

No pampered royal heiress, either, for whom the world of hard facts had no reality, and the silken shams of a Court constituted the only standpoint, but one who had already with steady eyes looked danger and disaster in the face and knew them for what they were.

And sudden, I leapt unto the right of the man, thinking within me that I did perceive a chance that I should cut him upon that side; but, truly, he was less awearied than I did know; for he came very sharp upon me, and had me between him and the wall of the Rock; and surely I had no room to make escape, and had died in a moment, but that I made a sudden sham toward the left with the Diskos, as that I should leap that way.

If they did they would not cease to be a sham, but at least they would not be a transparent sham.

The most obvious risk is from the counterfeiter,not from the vulgar shams distributed so widely over the world from the well-known manufactories of paintings in France, England, and other parts, which can deceive only the most ignorant or credulous, but from talent itself debased to forgery and trickery.