Crossword-Solution: SCANTINESS 10 letters, 9 clues 🏆 scrabble score: 12

And yet meseems though the years wore, they wore me no older; nay, in the first days at least I waxed stronger of body and fairer than I had been in the King's Palace in the Land of the Tower, as though some foretaste of the Well was there for us in the loneliness of the desert; although forsooth the abiding there amidst the scantiness of livelihood, and the nakedness, and the toil, and the torment of wind and weather were as a penance for the days and deeds of our past lives.

Withal it must be said, that for as little as she knew of courts and war-hosts, she yet seemed to see lands without that hall, and hosts marching, and mighty walls glittering with spears, and the banners of a great King displayed; and Jack of the Tofts and his champions and good fellows seemed but a frail defence against all that, when once the hidden should be shown, and the scantiness of the woodland should cry on the abundance of the kingdom to bow down.

And lastly, although I was not insensible to the restraints of prison or the scantiness of our rations, I remembered I had sometimes eaten quite as ill in Spain, and had to mount guard and march perhaps a dozen leagues into the bargain.

She glanced round that brilliant room filled with men and women, each of them carrying underneath the placidity of stiff evening shirt or the scantiness of audacious evening gown the most fascinating emotions and secrets--love and hate and jealousy, cold and monstrous habits and desires, ruin impending or stealthily advancing, fortune giddying to a gorgeous climax, disease and shame and fear--yet only signs of love and laughter and lightness of heart visible.

She looked at me and then turned and glanced at my arm about her, and then she seemed quite suddenly to realize the scantiness of her apparel and drew away, covering her face with her palms and blushing furiously.