Sylvia snubbed the masculine jays of college partly because it was a breath of life to her battered vanity to be able to snub some one, and partly because they seemed to her, in comparison with the smart set, seen from afar, quite and utterly undesirable.

Most of the men who came to the backwoods to hew out homes and rear families were stern, manly, and honest; but there was also a large influx of people drawn from the worst immigrants that perhaps ever were brought to Americathe mass of convict servants, redemptioners, and the like, who formed such an excessively undesirable substratum to the otherwise excellent population of the tide-water regions in Virginia and the Carolinas.

Not only did he leave his young friend with an eye that compelled the notice, an eye lavishly displaying all the tints yet revealed by spectroscopic analysis, and which by itself would have rendered him socially undesirable, but he bore a swollen nose and a split and puffy lip; bore them proudly, it should be said, and was not enough cast down, in Winona's opinion, that his shameful wounds would deter him from mingling with decent folk.