deediness

These men, to the number of eighteen or twenty, were not only entirely ignorant of the word "geology," but testified their rustic wonderment that I should spend my time in looking on so eagerly as they drove their wedges into the stony layers, and should watch with such “deediness," as they called it, each fracture they made in the ponderous masses around them.

Occasionally her pretty arm would be waved with the rest of the eager crowd, but it was a gay gesture of jingling bracelets free from smugness or deediness .