While waiting for their suitors to return from a nearby visit to Colonel Hunscome's, Caroline Bloomfield offers her “silver étui” to any girl who can create a suitable and entertaining form of distraction.
If you tire (my possible reader) of my prosing about these ‘mirrors of the soul,’ pray forgive me, but take up the study yourself in your leisure house, and you will soon begin to watch all your acquaintances’ visual orbs, as I do mine, not much to the satisfaction of some.
"[16] While each Southern woman appears burdened by marriage, Dora looks "small and graceful as a fairy, and pretty as a dream, exquisitely dressed, with a certain set about her whole person and attire that spoke the admired belle.
Her proffered playthings towards her infant son, Jim, suggest an overabundance of wealth: first Dora "flung him her embroidered handkerchief to tear to pieces," then she is seen "loosing a gorgeous bracelet from her wrist.
"[18] Dora's characterization, behavior, and wisdom complement a brief earlier description of a party scene, in Part II, wherein a "witty Northern belle, of course, attracted the most attention.
None of the characters are necessarily direct translations of real people (although her family's views on King's writing suggests otherwise), but they rather represent the larger spectrum of social dysfunction occurring in early-to-mid 19th-century Charleston.
"Old Maidism," to use a turn of phrase, lifts the veil from the myth of the blissful plantation housewife espoused in Antebellum Charleston society to complicate and confuse its young female readership.
I have seen the unkindest people applauded for their wonderful charity, and I have seen the warmest hearts crushed because they were misunderstood - in a word, I have seen the great spirit of ‘humbug’ which governs society, ride triumphant over honesty and sincerity, and I have long come to the conclusion that the earth would be a fair pace to dwell in, if it were not for the men and women that inhabit it.
King writes: Dickens has a great deal to answer for in inventing Little Nell, for his imitators have since flooded the world with a host of "serious girls," and "prayerful babies," and unnatural infants generally, which will soon induce the readers and admirers of such tales to fancy that, after sixteen years of age, life ends instead of beginning.
Little people who can scarcely talk lisp Methodist sermons, and argue with their elders, and show judgment, tact, and energy which invariably throw into contempt the strongest efforts in the same line of all grown men and women.
They bake, wash, and brew - educate, and care for their fathers, mothers, grandmothers, and grandfathers, to the remotest generation, and naturally, after all this, die of extreme old age at fifteen or thereabouts, leaving behind them reputations of unparalleled magnitude.
Their conversations are of the deepest theological research, though, for the most part, a little ungrammatical; and, in short, were I capable of portraying such monsters, "which the world ne'er saw," my book would always lack one important reader - myself.
"[27] In a review of Lily: A Novel, a critic from The Charleston Mercury remembered Busy Moments for portraying "the outer aspects of fashionable society with grace and spirit.
"[28] Modern critical explorations of Busy Moments have tended to focus on two issues: intertextual comparisons to the more conventional sentimental narrative of the book's novella, "Edith," or interpretations of the aged Mrs. Mordaunt from "An Every-Day Life," seen as the first example of King's older, mentor-woman characters.