The task which we must undertake with our inmost feeling, with all the ardour of our faith, is to find once more the road to peace, to utter the word of brotherly love toward oppressed peoples, and to reconstruct Europe, which is gradually sinking to the condition of Quattrocento Italy, without its effulgence of art and beauty: thirty States mutually diffident of each other, in a sea of programmes and Balkan ideas.

Millville folks were diffident in the presence of these city visitors and while they favored the girls with rather embarrassing stares, their chief interest was centered on the little man in the telephone booth, who could plainly be seen through the glass door but might not be heard, however loudly he shouted.

" "If I presumed that my opinion would decide the point," rejoined he, "I should be diffident about expressing it in a case so important to yourself.

I will admit that the school is not as retiring and diffident as formerly; for we are all ready enough to say that no times are egual to our own times; but I shall strenuously protest against your interpretation of the nature and artlessness of an American girl.

'I feel somewhat diffident at explaining my remedy,' replies the doctor, 'But if I had the time and place, I could ease your fever and cure you utterly.'

But the young man himself had been diffident from the beginning, and at the first hesitation on the other side he had taken it for granted that all was lost.

He was until late in his teens painfully shy with grown people and strangers; even under the eyes of his aunts and with youths of his own age, diffident to awkwardness.