Both Uses of
guile
in
A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man
- The last words of Davin's story sang in his memory and the figure of the woman in the story stood forth reflected in other figures of the peasant women whom he had seen standing in the doorways at Clane as the college cars drove by, as a type of her race and of his own, a bat-like soul waking to the consciousness of itself in darkness and secrecy and loneliness and, through the eyes and voice and gesture of a woman without guile, calling the stranger to her bed.†
Chpt 5
- her young blue eyes seemed to him at that instant images of guilelessness,
Chpt 5 *guilelessness = openness (lack of cunning; i.e., not deceitful or shrewd)standard suffix: The suffix "-lessness" in guilelessness means in a state without. This is the same pattern you see in words like fearlessness, powerlessness, and harmlessness.
Definition:
-
(guile) cunning (shrewdness and cleverness) and deceitful