In " Three Sisters" the gallantry and philosophising of Vershinin, an army officer, are undercut by his blithe neglect of his suicidal wife—who is always offstage.
Meanwhile there had entered to the room below a personage who, to judge from her voice and the quick pit-pat of her feet, was a maiden young and blithe.
Among those blithe souls a city-desk reporter named John O'Reilly, who was admired for his deadpan coverage of human-interest and animal-interest stories, managed to make whimsy a serious beat.
This could easily have been a coincidence and an accident, yet it had every appearance of a blithe game, as though the doves were honeymooners at their palm tree Coney Island.
One leg cleared it in a blithe arc, the other caught midway, the trunk bounced to earth and flew open, Mary screamed, and Mr. Swilley hung dangling, an almost inextricable part of the fence.
Mrs. Dowling's spirits had strikingly recovered even before the pair passed from the corridor: she moved almost bouncingly beside her embittered son, and her eyes and all the convolutions of her abundant face were blithe.
It might seem no hardship to some of us, but to a pretty, blithe young girl, it was not only tedious, but very trying, and the thought of Laurie and his friends made it a real martyrdom.
Phebe was quite herself again; color in the cheeks now; eyes that wandered smiling to and fro; and lips that sang as gaily and far more sweetly than when she kept time to her blithe music with a scrubbing brush.