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More "Conventional" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... the Caucasus, here in the very centre, as it were, of the world's business, traffic, and pleasure; one might as well have expected to find a haloed saint in the whirl of a carnival masquerade! Incongruous? Out of keeping?—Yes, certainly he was,— for though clad in the plain, conventional garb to which the men of the present day are doomed by the fiat of commerce and custom, the splendid dignity and picturesqueness of his fine personal appearance was by no means abated, and it was just this that marked him out, and made of him as wonderful a figure in London as though ...
— Ardath - The Story of a Dead Self • Marie Corelli
... betrayed more than conventional impassivity, for Evarin smiled. "Now you know, Rakhal, why I am called Toymaker. Is it not strange—the masterpriest of Nebran, a maker of Toys, and the shrine of the Toad God a workshop ...
— The Door Through Space • Marion Zimmer Bradley
... his lips. He was taller than his friend, and although well-formed and graceful, was slim and evidently not in robust health. His voice, as he spoke in acknowledgment of the introduction, was low and musical, but touched with a mournfulness that was apparent even in the few words of conventional courtesy that he pronounced. ...
— Fort Lafayette or, Love and Secession • Benjamin Wood
... of social miracle happened. The fact was that Mrs. Van Stuyler had never before had her early coffee brought to her by a peer of the British Realm. She thought it a little humiliating afterwards, but for the moment all sorts of conventional barriers seemed to melt away. After all she was a woman, and some years ago she had been a young one. Lord Redgrave was an almost perfect specimen of English manhood in its early prime. He was one of the richest peers in England, ...
— A Honeymoon in Space • George Griffith
... such towns in the north were wild and almost lawless places, abounding in desperate characters, ready to shoot on the slightest provocation. But here all was order, and it was little different from one of the many small conventional towns in Eastern Canada. There were several up-to-date stores, a large post office, bank, churches, and comfortable dwelling houses, though many of the latter were built of logs. The Royal Northwest Mounted Police had their large ...
— Glen of the High North • H. A. Cody
... and conventional it may sound, it is the literal fact that young Scott Brenton was led into the ministry by the prayer of his widowed mother. Furthermore, the prayer was not made to him, but offered in secret and in all sincerity ...
— The Brentons • Anna Chapin Ray
... The Sajo was an officer, not of very high rank, apparently always of Gothic nationality, who was charged with executing the King's mandates. Perhaps our word 'henchman' would be the best translation of his title. His conventional attribute was 'devotio.' See Dahn, 'Koenige der Germanen' iii. 181-186, and my 'Italy ...
— The Letters of Cassiodorus - Being A Condensed Translation Of The Variae Epistolae Of - Magnus Aurelius Cassiodorus Senator • Cassiodorus (AKA Magnus Aurelius Cassiodorus Senator)
... face eagerly. Had she spoken the tongue of flattery, or of the mere conventional? He saw she had not, and he began to regard her with something more than the mere curiosity with which he had anticipated ...
— The Mark of the Beast • Sidney Watson
... she possesses the lyric gift, and she works with care and finish. Miss Fauset is especially adept in her translations from the French. Georgia Douglas Johnson is a poet neither afraid nor ashamed of her emotions. She limits herself to the purely conventional forms, rhythms and rhymes, but through them she achieves striking effects. The principal theme of Mrs. Johnson's poems is the secret dread down in every woman's heart, the dread of the passing of youth and beauty, and with them love. An old theme, one which poets themselves have often wearied ...
— The Book of American Negro Poetry • Edited by James Weldon Johnson
... Byzantine conventional ornament appears to be of two types,—the one usually used in mosaics, of thin scrolls, terminating in flowers or symbols, displayed upon a ground which is much greater in quantity than is the ornament; the other, usually confined to sculpture, an intricate interlace ...
— The Brochure Series of Architectural Illustration, Volume 01, No. 04, April 1895 - Byzantine-Romanesque Windows in Southern Italy • Various
... with "refined" ears. The slangs in English in this translation were taken from an American magazine of world-wide reputation editor of which was not afraid to print of "damn" when necessary, by scorning the timid, conventional way of putting it as "d—n." If the propriety of printing such short ugly words be questioned, the translator is sorry to say that no means now exists of directly bringing him to account for he met ...
— Botchan (Master Darling) • Mr. Kin-nosuke Natsume, trans. by Yasotaro Morri
... these events became known in France, the Conventional Assembly, which had then succeeded the Legislature, seeing no hope of reconciliation on either side, knew not what other course to take than to do justice, whatever the consequences might be. They resolved accordingly, in the month of April, that the decree of 1791, which had been ...
— An Account of Some of the Principal Slave Insurrections, • Joshua Coffin
... to be conventional. But the wary Heaven takes care you shall not be, if there is anything good in you. Dante was very bad company, and was never invited to dinner. Michel Angelo had a sad, sour time of it. The ministers of beauty are rarely beautiful in coaches and ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 1, Issue 2, December, 1857 • Various
... charity should be given the more delicate and difficult tasks, such as readjusting the temporarily dependent persons, the care of, in some cases, dependent children and the like, while to public charity should be given the cases which need permanent relief in institutions. This is only a conventional line, however, between private charity and public relief. As has already been pointed out, the state can conceivably, also, undertake the more delicate and difficult tasks of charitable aid, and probably it should do so as rapidly as it demonstrates its fitness to undertake this ...
— Sociology and Modern Social Problems • Charles A. Ellwood
... the conventional query, asking in what class the Captain had been graduated. But while his very voice was asking it, Peter thought what a strange thing it was that he, Peter Siner, a negro, and this lonely old gentleman, his benefactor, were spiritual brothers, both sprung from the loins of Harvard, ...
— Birthright - A Novel • T.S. Stribling
... bitter attack. Henry Reeve, the editor of The Edinburgh at that time, and for many years afterwards, was not himself a scholar, like his illustrious predecessor, Cornewall Lewis. He was a Whig of the most conventional type, regarding Macaulay and Hallam as the ideal historians, suspicious of novelty, and dismayed by paradox. Froude's critic belonged to a more advanced school of Liberalism, and shuddered at the glorification of a "tyrant" like Henry VIII. ...
— The Life of Froude • Herbert Paul
... and more conclusive than repel; one may be repelled by the very aspect of the person whose favor he seeks, but is not repulsed except by the direct refusal or ignoring of his suit. A certain conventional modern usage, especially in England, requires us to say that we drive in a carriage, ride upon a horse; tho in Scripture we read of riding in a chariot (2 Kings ix, 16; Jer. xvii, 25, etc.); good examples of ...
— English Synonyms and Antonyms - With Notes on the Correct Use of Prepositions • James Champlin Fernald
... my option to be personally present there, My relations with Zenobia, as yet unchanged,—as a familiar friend, and associated in the same life-long enterprise,—gave me the right, and made it no more than kindly courtesy demanded, to call on her. Nothing, except our habitual independence of conventional rules at Blithedale, could have kept me from sooner recognizing this duty. At all events, it should ...
— The Blithedale Romance • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... had been a sore trial to her parents, in that she had failed to fit into the conventional ways of polite society. Once she had shocked all Neuilly by donning man's attire and riding horseback astride. A worthy priest who had been her tutor had found her tongue too sharp for his comfort, and had resigned his post in dismay. The Princess argued religion with ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great, Volume 4 (of 14) - Little Journeys to the Homes of Eminent Painters • Elbert Hubbard
... and faith, because the Divine of the Lord is in them. He also said that he did not know what outward holiness is apart from love and faith; and when he thought about it he said that perhaps it is something counterfeiting holiness in outward appearance, either conventional or hypocritical; and that such holiness is kindled and sustained by spurious fire from the love of self and ...
— Heaven and its Wonders and Hell • Emanuel Swedenborg
... how it happened; they never knew how. He turned with a formal conventional bow, And some well chosen words of politeness, to go. Her mouth was a rose Love had dropped in the snow Of her face. It smiled up to him, luscious and sweet. In the tip of each finger he felt his heart beat, Like five hearts ...
— Three Women • Ella Wheeler Wilcox
... jalousies, were green. In the yard, which was kept scrupulously neat, were flowers and plants of every description which flourishes in South Louisiana. Within doors the appointments were perfect after the conventional type. The softest carpets and rugs covered the floors; rich and tasteful draperies hung at doors and windows. There were paintings, selected with judgment and discrimination, upon the walls. The cut glass, the silver, the heavy damask ...
— The Awakening and Selected Short Stories • Kate Chopin
... affections, or fire her with gratitude for the anxiety displayed by this guardian to form her manners and cultivate her intellect. Nay, the result was rather to implant in her a premature dislike and distrust for conventional ideals. From the standard of culture and propriety, from the temptations of social rank and wealth held up for her preference, she instinctively turned to the simple, unrestrained affection of the despised mother, and the greater freedom and expansion ...
— Famous Women: George Sand • Bertha Thomas
... Platt, of Gloucester, consists virtually of a universal joint connecting two shafts whose axes form an obtuse angle of about 157 degrees. It has four cylinders, two being mounted on a chair coupling on each shaft. The word cylinder is used in a conventional sense only, since the cavities acting as such are circular, whose axes, instead of being straight lines, are arcs of circles struck from the center at which the axes of the shafts would, if continued, intersect. The four pistons are carried upon the gimbal ring, which connects, by means of pivots, ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 497, July 11, 1885 • Various
... long form: Czech Republic conventional short form: Czech Republic local long form: Ceska Republika ...
— The 1999 CIA Factbook • United States. Central Intelligence Agency.
... husband, by whom she sits, a high priest of Heliopolis. She is dressed in a long, white smock, in which there is no indication of folds. On her head is a wig, from under which, in front, her own hair shows. Her flesh is yellow, the conventional tint for women, as brownish red was for men. Her eyes are ...
— A History Of Greek Art • F. B. Tarbell
... Orient a ware of common clay over which a simple covering of white had been painted, and this slip or engobe of white gave to the variety the name of Oriental Engobe. This type of ware decorated with a conventional dull-hued design was many years later revived and imitated by Theodore Deck of Paris, one of the great French porcelain makers. But even this was not like the white Chinese ware everybody wanted so ...
— The Story of Porcelain • Sara Ware Bassett
... see that she was very beautiful. Her complexion was light, with a flame upon the cheeks; her hair a chestnut blond; and her large, round eyes were sapphire blue, and seemed to radiate a light of their own. This last statement (about the eyes) must not be taken for a conventional exaggeration, such as writers of fiction employ in describing heroines who never existed. On the contrary, it expresses a literal fact; and moreover, as the reader will see further on, this peculiarity of the eyes was shared, in varying degrees, by all these ...
— A Columbus of Space • Garrett P. Serviss
... both internal and external, is all carried on by barter, as they have not adopted the use of money; and this is regulated by a conventional tariff according to which the values of all articles in commerce are appraised under the name of cullen, or payment. Their external trade is with the Spaniards, with whom they exchange ponchos, or ...
— A General History and Collection of Voyages and Travels, Vol. 5 • Robert Kerr
... Price Ruyler's perturbed mind wandered to that inner self of his to which he once had longed to give a freer expression. It was odd that the conservative training, the rigid traditions of his family, conventional, old-fashioned, Puritanical, as became the best stock of New York, a stock that in the Ruyler family had seemed to carry its own antidote for the poisons ever seeking entrance to the spiritual conduits of the rich, had left any place for that sentimental ...
— The Avalanche • Gertrude Franklin Horn Atherton
... infinitely more malicious than Swann; but the others would all take the precaution of tempering their malice with obvious pleasantries, with little sparks of emotion and cordiality; while the least indication of reserve on Swann's part, undraped in any such conventional formula as "Of course, I don't want to say anything—" to which he would have scorned to descend, appeared to them a deliberate act of treachery. There are certain original and distinguished authors in whom the least 'freedom of speech' is thought revolting because they ...
— Swann's Way - (vol. 1 of Remembrance of Things Past) • Marcel Proust
... on classic busts in general, saying that they were conventional, and not to be depended upon as trite representations of the persons. He particularly excepted none but the bust of Caracalla; and, indeed, everybody that has seen this bust must feel the justice ...
— Passages From the French and Italian Notebooks, Complete • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... man one way or the other. The effort made as the Stoics direct, would mean no yielding to excitement, no poetry, no high-strung devotion, no rapture, no ecstasy, no ardour of love, no earnest rhetoric spoken or listened to, no mourning, no rejoicing other than the most conventional, to the persistent smothering of whatever is natural and really felt, no tear of pity freely let flow, no touch of noble anger responded to, no scudding before the breeze of indignation,—all this, that reason may keep on the even tenour of ...
— Moral Philosophy • Joseph Rickaby, S. J.
... both an ability to write good English and an ability to write good English in the conventional newspaper form. And there is a conventional form for every kind of newspaper story. Many editors of the present day are trying to break away from the conventional form and to evolve a looser and more natural method of writing news stories. The results ...
— Newspaper Reporting and Correspondence - A Manual for Reporters, Correspondents, and Students of - Newspaper Writing • Grant Milnor Hyde
... are confined for a week or more at a time while studies are being made concerning heat and energy yielded by food products. It being inconvenient to analyze such an immense volume of air as would be necessary to keep the room freshened according to conventional ventilation standards, experiments were made to see how vitiated the air could be made without causing ill effects ...
— The Dollar Hen • Milo M. Hastings
... plenty of examples from famous works; but speaking generally of these artistic questions, is it not from Italy that we get those stereotyped conventional forms adopted by so many French composers, resisted by Cherubim and Spontini alone among the Italians, though rejected entirely by the Germans? What well-organized person with any sense of musical expression ...
— Library Of The World's Best Literature, Ancient And Modern, Vol 4 • Charles Dudley Warner
... 'Freedman'—J. Q. A. Ward, A. This picture, no doubt, has its fine points, but to our mind it is rather conventional. Neither does it bear out its allegorical relation to the freedmen of our continent. If the chains of the negro are being broken, he does not appear in the character of a Hercules, but rather as a patient and enduring martyr, awaiting the day of ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol III, Issue VI, June, 1863 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy • Various
... consider the relation of religion to this natural morality. And perhaps you will hardly be ready some of you, at any rate for the statement which I propose to make, that sometimes, in order to be grandly moral, a man must be irreligious. I mean, of course, from the point of view of the conventional religion of his time, he must be ready to be regarded as irreligious. In the earliest development of the religious and moral life of a tribe, very likely, the two went hand in hand, side by side; for the dead chief now worshipped as god would be ...
— Our Unitarian Gospel • Minot Savage
... natural right. I do not believe that society is authorized to impose any limitations upon it that do not spring out of the necessities of the social state itself. Sir, I have been shocked, in the course of this debate, to hear Senators declare this right only a conventional and political arrangement, a privilege yielded to you and me and others; not a right in any sense, only a concession! Mr. President, I do not hold my liberties by any such tenure. On the contrary, I believe that whenever you establish that doctrine, ...
— An Account of the Proceedings on the Trial of Susan B. Anthony • Anonymous
... to know what he thought, and when he came to the White House, reporters speculated about the talk that went on behind the doors of the President's room, and the stock market fluttered. If he desired a law, he paid for it and got it—not in a coarse illegal way, to be sure, but through the regular conventional channels of politics, and if he desired to step on a law, he stepped on it, and a court came running up behind him, and legalized his transaction. He sneered at reformers, and mocked God, did John Barclay in those days. He grew arrogant and boastful, and strutted in his power like a man in liquor ...
— A Certain Rich Man • William Allen White
... credit. Money was essential when production was in many private hands, and buying and selling was necessary to secure what one wanted. It was, however, open to the obvious objection of substituting for food, clothing, and other things a merely conventional representative of them. The confusion of mind which this favored, between goods and their representative, led the way to the credit system and its prodigious illusions. Already accustomed to accept money ...
— Looking Backward - 2000-1887 • Edward Bellamy
... heavy as a red flannel blanket, as a buffalo robe. And when, on the following night, I found the wind-screen was not in the air port, and that, nevertheless, I still was alive, I knew we had passed out of reach of the Equator, and that all that followed would be as conventional as the "trippers" who joined us at the Canary Isles; and as familiar as the low, gray skies, the green, rain-soaked hills, and the complaining Channel gulls that convoyed ...
— The Congo and Coasts of Africa • Richard Harding Davis
... played cribbage with Madame and Alden read the paper. When Madame had won three games, in rapid succession, Edith said good-night. Alden, from the depths of his paper, murmured the conventional response. ...
— Master of the Vineyard • Myrtle Reed
... her brother. Every hour the idea was becoming stronger in her mind that she must in some way separate herself from him. There had come upon him of late a hard ferocity which made him unendurable. And then he carried to such a pitch that hatred, as he called it, of conventional rules, that he allowed himself to be controlled by none of the ordinary bonds of society. She had felt this heretofore, with a nervous consciousness that she was doing wrong in endeavouring to bring about a marriage between him and Alice; but this demeanour and mode of talking had ...
— Can You Forgive Her? • Anthony Trollope
... natural course of things; diffusing and diversifying, by gentle means, the streams of commerce, but forcing nothing; establishing, with powers so disposed— in order to give trade a stable course, to define the rights of our merchants, and to enable the government to support them—conventional rules of intercourse, the best that present circumstances and mutual opinion will permit, but temporary, and liable to be from time to time abandoned or varied, as experience and circumstances shall ...
— Life And Times Of Washington, Volume 2 • John Frederick Schroeder and Benson John Lossing
... I know you didn't write it, or it wouldn't have been so stupid. I could stand anything except the charge that I've lost my naturalness and become conventional." ...
— Success - A Novel • Samuel Hopkins Adams
... unmistakable evidences of his success which he did hear would have rendered him a proud and happy painter,—but if he was, all that can be said was that he certainly did not look it. He accepted the most effusive tributes with the same ghastly and conventional smile; from feminine glances of unutterable gratitude and admiration he turned away with an inarticulate mumble and an averted eye; at times he almost seemed to be suppressing a squirm. If expression is any index to the thoughts, ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 102, April 9th, 1892 • Various
... he meant by this, although it occurred to me that it was a pleasant thing to have him speak good, plain English; but the other circumstances were so entirely novel that, instead of opening the conversation with some conventional remark, like a sensible person, I ...
— Daybreak: A Romance of an Old World • James Cowan
... chances in the world they will cease to live merely to please the conventional fancy of men. As long as there was no alternative for women but to marry, it was about as much as any woman's life was worth to be an old maid, and her one idea was to dress and behave so as to escape this fate. ...
— The Life and Work of Susan B. Anthony (Volume 2 of 2) • Ida Husted Harper
... public schools to enter the machinist's trade or the carpenter's trade when nine out of each 10 will in all probability engage in entirely different sorts of future work. The more the figures of the little table given above are studied, the clearer it appears that our conventional ideas about industrial education need critical scrutiny and careful challenge. These 10 leading occupations include only 41 out of each 100 American born men. Moreover, more than half of these 41 are engaged in mental work rather than ...
— Wage Earning and Education • R. R. Lutz
... the ranch, to the disgust of old Mackenzie, who dreaded "women folks," and to Kalman's alternating delight and dismay. That short visit had established between the young girl and Jack French a warm and abiding friendship that in a more conventional atmosphere it would have taken years to develop. To her French realized at once all her ideals of what a Western rancher should be, and to French the frank, fresh innocence of her unspoiled heart appealed with irresistible ...
— The Foreigner • Ralph Connor
... ploughing, planting, and haying. His full animal spirits find relief in such labor. We cannot think of any similar example of such prodigious mental and physical energy. Macaulay was a great parliamentary orator, but he was the most conventional of city men; Burke and Chatham had no strength for such strenuousness after their professional toil. But Webster loved to know and to put his hand to every detail of farming and stock-raising. When he first came to Marshfield the soil was ...
— The Old Coast Road - From Boston to Plymouth • Agnes Rothery
... attitude. The result is that the baby is loved and the mother is usually happily wed to the father of her child. The North Russian villager is an assiduous gossip, but an incident of this kind receives no more attention as an item of news that if its chronology had been thoroughly conventional by American standards. ...
— The History of the American Expedition Fighting the Bolsheviki - Campaigning in North Russia 1918-1919 • Joel R. Moore
... the corporal. Unless courage, and other military qualities, were manifested precisely in the way in which HE had been trained, they were not courage and military qualities at all. Every virtue has its especial and conventional accessories, according to this school of morals; nothing of the sort remaining as it came from above, in the simple abstract qualities of right and wrong. On such feelings and principles as these, do men get to be dogmatical, narrow-minded, ...
— Oak Openings • James Fenimore Cooper
... Blair both are flesh and blood. The Oxford scenes are amusing but exaggerated—the obvious work of a man who supplies the defects of a ten years' memory by deepening the strokes where he does remember. Matthew Wald, which is a novel of madness, has excellent passages, but is conventional and wooden as a whole. Nothing was more natural than that Lockhart, with the example of Scott immediately before him, should try novel-writing; not many things are more indicative of his literary ability than that, ...
— Essays in English Literature, 1780-1860 • George Saintsbury
... the glad surprise which a first sight of Sofia gave to me. With the then conventional view of the Balkan states, I had expected, on leaving Buda-Pesth, to cut away altogether from civilisation. Paved streets; solid and good, if not exactly handsome, buildings; first-class hotels and cafes; electric trams and comfortable, ...
— Bulgaria • Frank Fox
... was a dense sense of the conventional—a logical enough birthright—in my make-up. I, who had known him so long, so well, seemed, nevertheless, when he married, to have fancied there was some hocus-pocus in the ceremony, which should make a definite change in a man's character, as well ...
— Told in a French Garden - August, 1914 • Mildred Aldrich
... power is merely a conventional expression for diameter of cylinder and length of stroke, and does not apply to the actual power of the engine. It is found by multiplying the cube root of the stroke in feet by the square of the diameter in inches and dividing the product by ...
— Scientific American, Vol.22, No. 1, January 1, 1870 • Various
... dressing, but many of the other men had done so, and he determined that for her sake he must play the game at least to that extent. Byrd added the scorn of the artist to the constitutional dislike of the average American for conventional evening dress. His, however, was as little conventional as possible, and while he nervously adjusted it he could not help recognizing that it was exceedingly becoming. He tore a tie and destroyed ...
— The Nest Builder • Beatrice Forbes-Robertson Hale
... how those awful days, and more awful nights, passed over. The remembrance is repulsive. I hate to think of them. I was soon draped in the conventional black, with its heavy folds of crape. Lady Knollys came, and was very kind. She undertook the direction of all those details which were to me so inexpressibly dreadful. She wrote letters for me beside, and was really most kind and useful, and her society supported me indescribably. She was odd, but ...
— Uncle Silas - A Tale of Bartram-Haugh • J.S. Le Fanu
... but in vain, concerning this extraordinary being, if the reader requires now to be told, that, untutored as he was in the learning of the world, and simple as he ever showed himself to be in all matters touching the subtleties of conventional taste, he was a man of strong, native, poetical feeling. He loved the woods for their freshness, their sublime solitudes, their vastness, and the impress that they everywhere bore of the divine hand ...
— The Deerslayer • James Fenimore Cooper
... of Buddhism, who retained and respected it as a social institution, it was practically annulled and absorbed in the religious character;—all who embraced the ascetic life being simultaneously absolved from all conventional disabilities, and received as members of the sacred community with all ...
— Ceylon; an Account of the Island Physical, Historical, and • James Emerson Tennent
... which God warns Noah to make an ark to the shipwrights, and of its successor, in which the patriarch appears in the Ark, to the "pessoners" and mariners has an obvious propriety, and must have conduced to the—not historical, but conventional—realism which was the aim of the ...
— The Customs of Old England • F. J. Snell
... recognised conventionally as friendship. In perfection it cannot subsist without perfect mutual knowledge, and only between the good; hence it is not possible for anyone to have many real friends. Of the conventional forms, that which is born of intellectual sympathy is more enduring than what springs from sexual attraction; while what comes of utility is quite accidental. The former may develop into genuine friendship if there be virtue in both parties. Companionship ...
— The Worlds Greatest Books, Volume XIII. - Religion and Philosophy • Various
... thing to childhood now. We were both in certain directions unusually ignorant and simple; we were temperamentally antagonistic, and we hadn't—I don't think we were capable of—an idea in common. She was young and extraordinarily conventional—she seemed never to have an idea of her own but always the idea of her class—and I was young and sceptical, enterprising and passionate; the two links that held us together were the intense appeal her physical beauty had for me, and her ...
— Tono Bungay • H. G. Wells
... By reference to the little chart of lace stitches the distinction will easily be seen, the Valenciennes being much closer and thicker in the plait, and having four threads on each side of its diamond-shaped mesh. Conventional scrolls and flowers were used as designs for the toile, the ground and the pattern being made ...
— Chats on Old Lace and Needlework • Emily Leigh Lowes
... women—a susceptibility which continued always fresh—was tempered and ennobled by the most chivalrous admiration for the sex as a whole. He placed them on an almost romantic pinnacle, and his actions always conformed to his romantic ideal, although in his writings he sometimes adopts the conventional satire which was more common fifty years ago than now. In a letter to Miss Fairlie, written from Richmond, where he was attending the trial of Aaron Burr, he expresses his exalted opinion of the sex. It was said in accounting for the open sympathy of the ladies with the prisoner that Burr had always ...
— Washington Irving • Charles Dudley Warner
... your call, Ivan Ivanitch," I said untruthfully. "Don't be hard on me; I'm a townsman, conventional; I ...
— The Wife and Other Stories • Anton Chekhov
... twosteps and ragtime, or, at the best, simple pieces in the recognized classical forms. But the result of the spread of musical taste through this new instrument is wholly different and wholly novel from the standpoint of conventional musical experience. The public, the great musical public created by an instrument which does away with all considerations of technique and leaves the player free to select what he wants to play, no matter how difficult it may be when played on the pianoforte, sweeps ...
— The Pianolist - A Guide for Pianola Players • Gustav Kobb
... and study. The toil and the delay recommended by critics, can be justly interpreted to mean no more than a careful observation of the inspired moments, and an artificial connexion of the spaces between their suggestions by the intertexture of conventional expressions; a necessity only imposed by the limitedness of the poetical faculty itself; for Milton conceived the Paradise Lost as a whole before he executed it in portions; We have his own authority also for the ...
— A Defence of Poetry and Other Essays • Percy Bysshe Shelley
... had indeed been an unmistakable revelation, and the frank, generous girl waited for no conventional acknowledgment before uttering what was uppermost in ...
— His Sombre Rivals • E. P. Roe
... onerous, and it will need legislative revision to adapt it to the extension of our commerce and to the more intimate intercourse which has been instituted with the Government and people of that vast Empire. China seems to be accepting with hearty good-will the conventional laws which regulate commercial and social intercourse among ...
— The Papers And Writings Of Abraham Lincoln, Complete - Constitutional Edition • Abraham Lincoln
... quite as a matter of course, and as if he were a man. His spirits are prodigious. He continually shakes his legs, and winks his eye. And there is a heavy father with grey hair, who sits down on the regular conventional stage-bank, and blesses his daughter in the regular conventional way, who is tremendous. No one would suppose it possible that anything short of a real man could be so tedious. It is ...
— Pictures from Italy • Charles Dickens
... there are cakes and ale in the life literary, and F. B. may take his walks by the Round Pond. But one never encounters these rarities, and Bungay and Bacon are no longer the innocent and ignorant rivals whom Thackeray drew. They do not give those wonderful parties; Miss Bunnion has become quite conventional; Percy Popjoy has abandoned letters; Mr. Wenham does not toady; Mr. Wagg does not joke any more. The literary life is very like any other, in London, or is it that we do not see it aright, not having the eyes of genius? Well, a life on the ocean wave, too, may not be so desirable as it ...
— Adventures among Books • Andrew Lang
... they were his, and so caused the injurious and wrong appropriation; most of them are exquisite, and many undoubtedly Shakespeare's; some I have said probably by another hand. Critically speaking too, not one of all the one hundred and fifty-four is of the conventional and elaborate fourteen-liner sort, with complicated rhymes; but each is a lyrical gem of three four-line stanzas closed by a distich. Milton's eighteen are all of the more artificial Petrarchian sort; which Wordsworth has diligently made his model in more than four hundred ...
— My Life as an Author • Martin Farquhar Tupper
... making a small boy happy, he was naturally showing her himself precisely as he was. In place of his usual careful manners when in her presence was entire freedom from restraint and therefore an effect uncoloured by conventional environment. The tones of his voice, the frank smile upon his lips, the touch of his hand upon the little lad's—all these combined to set him before Roberta in a light so different from any she had seen him ...
— The Twenty-Fourth of June • Grace S. Richmond
... Sam had joined the party in the bonds of conventional acquaintanceship, having added to the rest of his information the fact that he ...
— John Gayther's Garden and the Stories Told Therein • Frank R. Stockton
... which, for our present purposes, we choose to term an aristocracy of birth, wealth, knowledge, or power, as the case nay be. The word aristocracy, distinctive of these particular classes, we use in a conventional sense only, and beg leave to protest, in limine, against any other acceptation of the term. We use the word, because it is popularly comprehensive; the [Greek: hoi aristoi], distinguished from the [Greek: hoi polloi]: "good men," as is the value of goodness ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, No. 327 - Vol. 53, January, 1843 • Various
... Woodley, of Carstairs, but the engagement had been broken off by mutual consent some months before, and there was no sign that it had left any very profound feeling behind it. For the rest {sic} the man's life moved in a narrow and conventional circle, for his habits were quiet and his nature unemotional. Yet it was upon this easy-going young aristocrat that death came, in most strange and unexpected form, between the hours of ten and eleven-twenty on the night ...
— The Return of Sherlock Holmes • Arthur Conan Doyle
... as classics of that sort go. It is better than the gross obscenities of Rabelais, and perhaps, in some day to come, the taste that justified Gargantua and the Decameron will give this literary refugee shelter and setting among the more conventional writings of Mark Twain. Human taste is a curious thing; delicacy is purely a matter of environment and point of view.—[In a note-book of a later period Clemens himself wrote: "It depends on who writes a thing whether it is coarse or not. I ...
— Mark Twain, A Biography, 1835-1910, Complete - The Personal And Literary Life Of Samuel Langhorne Clemens • Albert Bigelow Paine
... Patoff possessed, when in the yellow lamp-light of her apartment her white skin had seemed so smooth and even. But she was evidently in her right mind, and very quiet, as she gave me her hand, with the conventional smile which we use to convey the idea of an equally conventional satisfaction when a stranger is introduced ...
— Paul Patoff • F. Marion Crawford
... least once a day to set her watch by the shadow of the quill, though I have told her a hundred times that it is seventeen minutes off standard time. I am convinced that this estimable lady wilfully ignores conventional time and marks her cycles by such divisions as "catalogue time," "seed-buying time," "planting time," "sprouting time," "spraying time," "flowering time," "seed-gathering time," "mulching time," and "dreary time," until the ...
— The Fat of the Land - The Story of an American Farm • John Williams Streeter
... using digital technology offers over both photocopy and microfilm: 1) The potential exists to create a higher quality reproduction of a deteriorating original than conventional light-lens technology. 2) Because a digital image is an encoded representation, it can be reproduced again and again with no resulting loss of quality, as opposed to the situation with light-lens processes, in which there is discernible difference between a second and a ...
— LOC WORKSHOP ON ELECTRONIC TEXTS • James Daly
... her in the 'Argosy' of February 1890. It was a final expression of what the writer regarded as the fitting intellectual attitude towards a rising poet, whose aims and methods lay so far beyond the range of the conventional rules of poetry. The great event in the history of 'Paracelsus' was John Forster's article on it in the 'Examiner'. Mr. Forster had recently come to town. He could barely have heard Mr. Browning's name, and, as he afterwards told him, was perplexed in reading ...
— Life and Letters of Robert Browning • Mrs. Sutherland Orr
... contact in the old days, though he had almost forgotten it since,—the arrogance of weakness as much as of virtue,—honesty without charity, pluming itself on its virtue, and despising the weaknesses which it could not understand, a worship of the conventional, and a shocked disdain of "irregular" higher things. Minna was calmly and sententiously confident that she was always right. There were no degrees in her judgment of others. For the rest, she never made any attempt to understand them, and ...
— Jean-Christophe Journey's End • Romain Rolland
... what men will prize, what men will treasure. Peter Marchdale, for example, prizes, treasures, (and imagines that he will always prize and treasure), the perfectly conventional, the perfectly commonplace little document, of which the foregoing is ...
— The Cardinal's Snuff-Box • Henry Harland
... Jacinth had derived her knowledge on such points it would have been difficult to say. No one could have been less a woman of the world than the late Mrs Denison; indeed, the much misused but really sweet old word 'homely' might have been applied to her in its conventional sense without unkindly severity. And no life could have been simpler, though from that very fact not without a certain dignity of its own, than the family life at Stannesley, which was in reality the only training these girls had ...
— Robin Redbreast - A Story for Girls • Mary Louisa Molesworth
... house, and by the evening every one knew of the engagement, and she was congratulated on all sides, and petted by the hostess, and she and John were left ostentatiously alone in a smaller drawing-room after dinner, and there was not a grain of excitement in the whole conventional thing! ...
— The Price of Things • Elinor Glyn
... his raptures and his processes severely to himself. He never seems to have given the smallest hint as to how he conceived a poem or worked it out. He was as reticent about his occupation as a well-bred stockbroker, and did his best in society to give the impression of a perfectly decorous and conventional gentleman, telling strings of not very interesting anecdotes, and making a great point of being ordinary. Indeed, I believe that Browning was haunted by the eighteenth-century idea that there was something not quite respectable about professional literature, and that, like Gray, ...
— Escape and Other Essays • Arthur Christopher Benson
... of Lawson is illuminating. They are afraid of him on State Street. He thinks so rapidly and does things with such instant decision that he bewilders the conventional plodders. They admit that he is brilliant, that he has a genius for gathering in the dollars, but he shocks the financial Mrs. Grundy. They tell you that he is "irregular," "sensational," "bizarre," and the rest of it—all of which means ...
— Frenzied Finance - Vol. 1: The Crime of Amalgamated • Thomas W. Lawson
... actions. It is sometimes debated whether lovers should kiss in public. As the sweetest kisses must ever be those exchanged "under four eyes," as the Germans put it, there seems little advantage in a mere conventional "peck" in the public gaze. A close clasp of the hand, a silent greeting of the eyes, will be truer to the love that is held too sacred ...
— The Etiquette of Engagement and Marriage • G. R. M. Devereux
... brilliantly, delighting Euphra, overcoming Harry with reverent astonishment, and even interesting slow Mr. Arnold. With the latter Hugh had been gradually becoming a favourite; partly because he had discovered in him what he considered high-minded sentiments; for, however stupid and conventional Mr. Arnold might be, he had a foundation of sterling worthiness of character. Euphra, instead of showing any jealousy of this growing friendliness, favoured it in every way in her power, and now and then alluded to it ...
— David Elginbrod • George MacDonald
... very beautiful girl of ten or eleven; slim, delicately fashioned, of a definite proud type. But although she held herself erect, in an unconscious patrician sort of way, there was, also, about her something wayward and different from the conventional, aristocratic set. The disordered golden hair proclaimed it, while in the depths of the fine, blue eyes manifold changing lights told of a capriciousness out of the pale of a stiffly decorous and ...
— Half A Chance • Frederic S. Isham
... the greatest thinkers, which I had desired: and I can now but cite them in support, more or less pronounced, of the views above put forward, viz.: President Barnard, of Columbia College, who with rare honesty and boldness has spoken loudly against the conventional folly of classical studies; Professor Newman, himself Professor of Latin at the University of London, England; Professors Tindall, Henfry, Huxley, Forbes, Pajet, Whewell, Faraday, Liebig, Draper, De Morgan, Lindley, Youmans, Drs. Hodgson, Carpenter, Hooker, ...
— The Philosophy of Teaching - The Teacher, The Pupil, The School • Nathaniel Sands
... a pleasant surprise was in store for those who felt that his lordship must speak at greater length than either of the counsel between whom he was to hold the scales. The address from the bench was much the shortest of the three. Less exhaustive than the conventional review of a complicated case, it was a disquisition of conspicuous clearness and impartiality. Only the salient points were laid before the jury, for the last time, and in a nutshell, but with hardly ...
— The Shadow of the Rope • E. W. Hornung
... surprised or indignant. Genuine innocence displays none of the startled modesty assumed by conventional innocence. It never occurred to Valentine that she ought to bid ...
— File No. 113 • Emile Gaboriau
... stars, you unco guid lassie," he said within himself, his sarcastic eyes on Sissy's holy face, "that you've not a more religious and more conventional man for a father. 'T is one like that would yank you out of your play-acting preaching, or ...
— The Madigans • Miriam Michelson
... Helen is Homer's alone, there remains no great or typical work of Greek art which represents her beauty, and the breasts from which were modelled cups of gold for the service of the gods. We have only paintings on vases, or work on gems, which, though graceful, is conventional and might represent any other heroine, Polyxena, or Eriphyle. No Helen from the hands of Phidias or Scopas has survived to our time, and the grass may be growing in Therapnae over the shattered remains ...
— Adventures among Books • Andrew Lang
... here, but Gustave did not interrupt her. His interest was too profound for any conventional expression. He was listening to the story of his future wife's youth. That there could be any passage in that history which would hinder him from claiming this woman as his wife was a possibility he did not for a moment contemplate. If there were shame involved in the story, as Madame Meynell's ...
— Charlotte's Inheritance • M. E. Braddon
... sympathy. Indeed, his case appeared to be one of those in which the stern and unrelenting decree of human law comes to demand its rights, long after the unhappy victim has washed away his crime by repentance, and made his peace with God, a position in connection with conventional offences that is too often overlooked in the administration of justice and ...
— The Black Prophet: A Tale Of Irish Famine • William Carleton
... original plans were drawn with such a change in mind. That is, the original structure now becomes the living room, while new wings and additions provide the much needed space for service quarters and conventional bedrooms and baths. ...
— If You're Going to Live in the Country • Thomas H. Ormsbee and Richmond Huntley
... first German reform temple are truly instinct with the prophetic spirit. The breath of a mighty enthusiasm rises from the yellowed pages. Every word testifies that they were indited by a writer of puissant individuality, disengaged from the shackles of conventional homiletics, and boldly striking out on untrodden paths. In the Jewish Berlin of the day, a rationalistic, half-cultured generation, swaying irresolutely between Mendelssohn and Schleiermacher, these new ...
— Jewish Literature and Other Essays • Gustav Karpeles
... solemn embassy from the emperor to the States-General proposing mediation referring in the usual conventional phraseology to the right of kings to command, and to the duty of the people to submit, and urging the gentle-mindedness and readiness to forgive which characterised the sovereign of ...
— The Rise of the Dutch Republic, 1555-1566 • John Lothrop Motley
... were no doubt of a piece with the needs, habits, and mode of thought of his audience; for in what case could there be a stronger reciprocal action between an author and his public, than in that of a young stage depending upon voluntary support? The very absence of conventional rule made it easier to put on the stage a drama by which all that is grandest and mightiest is brought before the eyes as if actually present in that medley of great and small things which is characteristic of human life. Genius ...
— A History of England Principally in the Seventeenth Century, Volume I (of 6) • Leopold von Ranke
... proportion to its presence it will exalt and render impressive themes in themselves tame and trivial. If we will but think of it, it is very strange in how many unexpected places we shall find it lurking: for example, the painter of portraits is unhappy without his conventional white stroke under the sleeve or beside the armchair; the painter of interiors feels like a caged bird unless he can throw a window open or set a door ajar; the landscapist dare not lose himself in the forest without a gleam of light under its farthest branches, nor ventures ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol. 4, No. 1, July, 1863 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy • Various
... It is agreed—for I suppose when my honorable friend from Rhode Island [Mr. Anthony] and myself agree to it, it will be taken to be the universal sentiment of the body—that the right of suffrage is not a natural right, but a conventional right, and that it may be limited by the community, the body-politic, in any manner they see fit and consistent with their sense ...
— History of Woman Suffrage, Volume II • Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Susan B. Anthony, and Matilda Joslyn Gage
... his presence in a certain protected bit of woods, a little paradise for birds and bird lovers, where, if anywhere, he could be studied. There is some propriety in applying to him the strange epithet "squealing," I must allow, for the bird has a peculiar voice, nasal enough for the conventional Brother Jonathan; but "sapsucker" is, in the opinion of many who have studied his ways, undeserved. Dr. Merriam, even while admitting that the birds do taste the sap, says positively, "It is my firm belief that their chief object in making these holes is to ...
— Little Brothers of the Air • Olive Thorne Miller
... laughter. "May she never be resurrected—though I am afraid she will be. Where there are half-a-dozen conventional women Mrs. Grundy is always in the midst. But I'm free of her for the time, and I'm just going to live the primitive life whilst I'm here. I feel that I have got it in me to enjoy the life of the woods, and to endure hardships like any daughter of the land, and I'm going to do it. Not that ...
— A Mating in the Wilds • Ottwell Binns
... modern cultured men are satisfied with a simple work-a-day system of Ethics, priestly guidance being unnecessary, and they regard religion as being for the ignorant, superstitious or thoughtless. Thus they "emancipate their consciences from the conventional bonds of traditional religions." ...
— Ranching, Sport and Travel • Thomas Carson
... all he had done, he kept looking round the lodge, his eye resting on this or that; and everything had its own personal history, had become part of their lodge-life, because it had a use as between him and her, and not a conventional domestic place. Every skin, every utensil, every pitcher and bowl and pot and curtain had been with them at one time or another when it became of importance and renowned in the story of their days ...
— Northern Lights • Gilbert Parker
... their place in education just as Shakespeare and Beethoven have their place. We do not want to turn out cranks who will form a new superior crowd; we want to turn out men and women who will readily join the conventional crowd and help it to reach ...
— A Dominie in Doubt • A. S. Neill
... importance with young children, owing to the nature of the school curriculum during the early years of school. Beginning reading, writing, and spelling are systems of conventional signs, where authority and not reason decides what is right. Arithmetic, also, consists of absolutely definite, indisputable facts. Thus the facts in the three R's and spelling, which make up most of the curriculum in the majority of schools for the earlier years, show no ...
— How To Study and Teaching How To Study • F. M. McMurry
... formerly their vast patrimony—these same savages receiving their enemy into their hospitable hut, sharing with him their miserable meal, and, their couch undisturbed by remorse, sleeping close to him the calm sleep of the innocent. These virtues are as much above the virtues of conventional life as the soul of tho man in his natural state is above that of ...
— The Best of the World's Classics, Restricted to Prose, Vol. VII (of X)—Continental Europe I • Various
... is the conventional counter system behind which the clerk stands to serve the customer on the other side. There are many advocates of the counter that is built into the shelving, believing that the closer the customers are brought to the coffee, the more they will be inclined to buy. This system also makes for cleanliness, ...
— All About Coffee • William H. Ukers
... the common superficial consciousness of mankind bears witness. I agree with this statement about the basis of Mysticism, but I prefer to use the word symbol of that which has a real, and not merely a conventional affinity to the thing symbolised.[320] The line is by no means easy to draw. An aureole is not, properly speaking, a symbol of saintliness,[321] nor a crown of royal authority, because in these instances the connexion of sign with significance is conventional. ...
— Christian Mysticism • William Ralph Inge
... in his interesting notes on Lockhart in his later life, recalls his remark: "If I had to write my Life of Scott over again, now, I should say more about his religious opinions. Some people may think passages in his novels conventional and commonplace, but he hated cant, and every word he said came from his heart." Of Lockhart's own religious opinions, Mr. Gleig writes: "A clergyman, with whom he had lived in constant intimacy from his Oxford days [probably the writer himself], was in the frequent habit, between 1851 and 1853, ...
— Memoirs of the Life of Sir Walter Scott, Volume I (of 10) • John Gibson Lockhart
... in their atmosphere, I was mirthful when they were mirthful, and grave when they were grave. The mere fact that I had no young companions, no storybooks, no outdoor amusements, none of the thousand and one employments provided for other children in more conventional surroundings, did not make me discontented or fretful, because I did not know of the existence of such entertainments. In exchange, I became keenly attentive to the limited circle of interests open to me. Oddly enough, I have no recollection of any curiosity about other children, nor ...
— Father and Son • Edmund Gosse
... grew worse, when the outriders would have opened a passage for the carriage through the crowded streets. As soon as the people recognized the liveries, all the conventional homage with which they were accustomed to greet such ...
— Prince Eugene and His Times • L. Muhlbach
... a sort of reckless earnestness that moved his hearer more than that individual cared to show. Redmond felt it was useless to offer mere conventional sympathy in a case like this. He did the next best thing possible—he remained silently attentive and let ...
— The Luck of the Mounted - A Tale of the Royal Northwest Mounted Police • Ralph S. Kendall
... lines. Hence we see that any effort to define or describe coal, lignite, or anthracite accurately must be a failure, because neither has a fixed composition, neither is a distinct substance, but simply a conventional group of substances which form part of an ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 362, December 9, 1882 • Various
... consideration is put on one side when the business of the shop has to be attended to. They are all tradesmen who have strayed into unlawful courses. They have nothing about them of the heroism of sin; their crimes are not the result of ungovernable passion, or even of antipathy to conventional restraints; circumstances and not any law-defying bias of disposition have made them criminals. How is it that the novelist contrives to make them so interesting? Is it because we are a nation of shopkeepers, and enjoy following lines of business which are a ...
— Daniel Defoe • William Minto
... from me hurriedly, but not without strong manifestation of feeling. I folded her to my heart; that being no moment for affectations or conventional distance; and I know I was, while I trusted Anneke might be, none the less happy for remembering we had exchanged ...
— Satanstoe • James Fenimore Cooper
... fatigue. The martyrdom of discomfort, however, was obviously much easier to bear than that to which, even to the eyes of the casual visitor, Count Tolstoy daily subjected himself, for his study in the basement of the conventional dwelling, with its short shelf of battered books and its scythe and spade leaning against the wall, had many times lent itself to that ridicule which is the most ...
— Twenty Years At Hull House • Jane Addams
... cupboard door. Back is a window looking on the street. A door, left, leads to other rooms. There is a table near shop door and a horse-hair sofa back, an armchair at fire, and two leather-covered chairs about. Conventional pictures on walls, and two certificates framed, showing that some one in the house has passed some ...
— Three Plays • Padraic Colum
... for the audience to know the thoughts of stage characters, the aside and the soliloquy in all species of dramatic composition have always been recognized as the only feasible conventional mode of conveying them. According to the strictest canons of dramatic art, the ideally constructed play should be entirely free from this weakness. Mr. Gillette is credited with having written in "Secret Service" the first aside-less ...
— The Dramatic Values in Plautus • William Wallace Blancke
... Siva, Vishnu and Brahma, with innumerable minor deities, some 30,000,000 altogether, which have been created during emergencies from time to time by worshipers of vivid imaginations. When we speak of Hinduism or Brahminism as a religion, however, it is only a conventional use of a term, because it is not a religion in the sense that we are accustomed to apply that word. In all other creeds there is an element of ethics; morality, purity, justice and faith in men, but none of these qualities is taught by the Brahmins. With them the fear ...
— Modern India • William Eleroy Curtis
... the same effect,[2] with which it is unnecessary to trouble the reader. Now, all this was quite new to me. If I had ever given a second thought to the so-called "supernatural" beings of tradition, it was only to dismiss them, in the conventional manner as creatures of the imagination. But these ideas of Mr. Campbell's were decidedly interesting, and deserving of consideration. It was obvious that tradition, especially where there had been an intermixture of races, could not preserve one clear, ...
— Fians, Fairies and Picts • David MacRitchie
... approach the perfect face—so the poets and the philosophers, with their diverse conceptions of ideal manhood, divide the kingdom of character. "The true man cannot be a fragmentary man," said Plato. Is he not one-sided who masters the conventional refinement and the stock proprieties, yet indulges in drunkenness and gluttony? "Pleasure must not be his sole aim," said the accomplished Chesterfield. "I have enjoyed all the pleasures of the world, and consequently know their futility, and do not regret their loss. Those who have no experience ...
— The Investment of Influence - A Study of Social Sympathy and Service • Newell Dwight Hillis
... the exception of Giotto himself—to whose premature excellence none of his contemporaries and disciples ever attained—give us, by means of pictorial representation, just about the same as could be given to us by the conventional symbolism of writing. In describing a Giottesque fresco, or panel, we are not stopped by the difficulty of rendering visible effects in words, because the visible effects that meet us are in reality so many words; so that, to describe the picture, ...
— Renaissance Fancies and Studies - Being a Sequel to Euphorion • Violet Paget (AKA Vernon Lee)
... country, she herself was born in Massachusetts, where for a time she had been a school-teacher. This, then, with the exception of two months at the village school, was the limit of young Edison's education—to use the conventional term. The world was now to take him in hand, and show what it could do with ...
— Great Men and Famous Women. Vol. 6 of 8 • Various
... conventional reply, Mr. Ducaine," she remarked, with faint sarcasm. "I gave you credit for a larger ...
— The Betrayal • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... know the distinctive styles and figures of different countries, and not confuse an entrechat with a pirouette, should be aware of the meaning of the terms arabesque and rond de jambe, and understand to some extent the conventional language and history of grand ballet. No one will deny that his study of history must be substantial and, to put the matter compendiously, he must have a good general education, which, however, will not carry him very far, since he must own a ...
— Our Stage and Its Critics • "E.F.S." of "The Westminster Gazette"
... from sentimentality; and even a carping critic will find little to cavil at in her productions. If fault should be found with any of them it would probably be with such a narrative as "Wolverine." It "bites," like all her Indian pieces, and conveys a definite meaning. But, written in the conventional slang of the frontier, it jars with her other work, and seems out of form, if not out ...
— The Moccasin Maker • E. Pauline Johnson
... rummages through Violet's wardrobe in a state of hapless bewilderment, calling finally upon Gertrude to make a proper selection. Denise attires her young mistress, who looks really pale after this enforced seclusion. Mr. Grandon carries her down-stairs; and if it is not a conventional parlor, the room still has some picturesque aspects of its own, and the two luxurious wolf-robes on the floor are grudged afterward, as Laura steps on them. There is a great jar full of autumn branches and berries in one corner that ...
— Floyd Grandon's Honor • Amanda Minnie Douglas
... juvenility, but made no comment. "News sways people more than editorials," he continued. "That's why there's so much tinkering with it. I'd like to give you a definition of news, but there isn't any. News is conventional. It's anything that interests the community. It isn't the same in any two places. In Arizona a shower is news. In New Orleans the boll-weevil is news. In Worthington anything about your father is news: in Denver ...
— The Clarion • Samuel Hopkins Adams
... eager for novelty as the veterans were impatient of it, had come upon the stage, that the requisite impulse was given. Victor Hugo, Lamartine, Merimee, Alfred de Vigny, and other young men of genius, were just opening the assault on the citadel of classicisme. Conventional rules were set at defiance; the authorities that had so long held sway were summoned to abdicate; nature, truth, above all passion, were invoked as the sources of inspiration, the law-givers of the imagination, ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 17, No. 102, April, 1866 • Various
... said that there is enough on the face of this communication to show that the Duke of Wellington took a narrow, and, so to speak, technical, view of the relative positions of himself and Mr. Canning; that the latter expected a more conventional and generous construction of his position and proposal from one with whom he was on terms ...
— Maxims And Opinions Of Field-Marshal His Grace The Duke Of Wellington, Selected From His Writings And Speeches During A Public Life Of More Than Half A Century • Arthur Wellesley, Duke of Wellington
... few days the crew discussed our destination. Discipline, while maintained strictly, was not conventional. During the dog watches, often, every man aboard would be below, for at that period Captain Selover loved to take the wheel in person, a thick cigar between his lips, the dingy checked shirt wide open to expose his hairy chest to the ...
— The Mystery • Stewart Edward White and Samuel Hopkins Adams
... to welcome the strangers, much better behaved than those found at San Diego, who stripped the clothing from those too ill to defend themselves. Perhaps a reason for this superiority may be found in the fact that these tribes were entirely naked, and had no desire for any conventional covering. They serenaded their new friends so loudly that sleep or rest was impossible, and offered their most delicious food and free use of canoes. They ate seeds, fruit, fish, locusts; hunted rabbit, hare, and deer; ...
— A Truthful Woman in Southern California • Kate Sanborn
... tell, but as it contained from 2000 to 3000 armed and mounted gentlemen it must have counted at least double that tale of cavalry, and perhaps five-, perhaps ten-fold the number of foot soldiers. A force of 15,000 to 30,000 men in an England of some 5,000,000 (I more than double the conventional figures) was prepared to enforce feudal independence against the central government, even at the expense of ceding vast territories to Scotland or of submitting to the nominal rule of a foreign king. Against this army the King had a number of mercenaries, mainly drawn from ...
— The Historic Thames • Hilaire Belloc
... permissible for women in some circumstances to propose marriage. Even in England it is so, where society is like a huge Clapham Junction, with human creatures moving like trucks and carriages on cast-iron, conventional rails, which they can only leave at the risk of a destructive collision. And a proposal of the kind was never more justifiable than in this case. Shut away from the sight of men in her dreary seclusion, ...
— The Purple Land • W. H. Hudson
... minute. This is what I want to say: I have no belief whatever in conventional moral codes, and no respect for them. To me the relations between men and women are simply questions of personal ...
— The Gadfly • E. L. Voynich
... book has been enlarged and greatly improved as to its order and grammar, the first edition contains all the essential elements of her philosophy, if such it may be called. Mr. Wiggin did good work in translating the book into comparatively conventional English, and gave a kind of unity to paragraphs and sentences, and later revisers have greatly improved upon his work; but the first edition gave a fairly complete and, on the whole, a comprehensible statement of ...
— McClure's Magazine, Vol 31, No 2, June 1908 • Various
... them as to who should entertain me first, and who should be the next. Invitations to breakfast and dinner literally poured in; and those convenient "sick headaches," "colds," and "previous engagements," so opportune in more conventional parts, were of no avail here. No card—no friendly note bade one to come and be merry. They generally arrived en masse to fetch me. Pulling and pushing played a not unimportant part in their urging, and to decline was ...
— In the Forbidden Land • Arnold Henry Savage Landor
... "entirely reached the special Puritan class he meant to reach." "Whether," he said, "I have rendered St. Paul's ideas with perfect correctness or not, there is no doubt that the confidence with which these people regarded their conventional rendering of them was quite baseless, made them narrow and intolerant, and prevented all progress. I shall have a last paper at Christmas, called Puritanism and the Church of England, to show how the Church, though holding certain doctrines like justification ...
— Matthew Arnold • G. W. E. Russell
... problem which she had been perpetually trying to solve lately so very simple, after all, and only a perplexity to her own weak powers of reason? Lady Laura must be the best judge, of course, and she was surely too warm-hearted a woman to take a conventional view of things, or to rejoice in a mere marriage of convenience. No, it must be true. They really did love each other, these two, and that utter absence of all those small signs and tokens of attachment which Clarissa had expected to see was only a characteristic of good taste. ...
— The Lovels of Arden • M. E. Braddon
... she answered. "Lord Arranmore is not exactly the man to be a slave to, or even to respect, the conventional, and your being—what you are, naturally makes you a pleasant companion to him—and his guests. No, I don't think that ...
— A Prince of Sinners • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... of conventional approaches, he plunged boldly into the matter with which their thoughts were at once occupied. "So this was why Dr. Melton insisted I should take this car. Well, I'm grateful to him! It gives me a chance to relieve my mind of a weight of ...
— The Squirrel-Cage • Dorothy Canfield
... an answer to her prayer, or a denial of it. Anyhow, there he was; better, perhaps, than nobody, until she learned from his own lips—tactless though ardent lips—that he had come from Cairo to Assuan, from Assuan to Philae, to see her. Then she took alarm, and remarked in the old, conventional way of women, that they'd "better go look for the others." But Sir Marcus hadn't spent his money, time, and gray matter in hurrying to Philae from Shellal, for nothing. Finding himself too late to catch us at Assuan, he had paid for a special train in order to ...
— It Happened in Egypt • C. N. Williamson & A. M. Williamson
... riding breeches and leggins. Otherwise he was dressed as a Texas cowboy of the past generation. His sombrero was almost Mexican in its size and ornateness. But his rifle was of the latest American pattern, and in place of the conventional Colt's he carried an automatic pistol. As his horse patiently clambered with him up towards the top of the escarpment the man gazed indolently about between half-closed eyelids and inhaled the smoke from an unbroken ...
— Out of the Depths - A Romance of Reclamation • Robert Ames Bennet
... murderess recalled that type. She presented the delicate light hair, the quiet eyes, the finely-shaped lower features and the correctly oval form of face, repeated in hundreds on hundreds of the conventional works of Art to which I have ventured to allude. To those who doubt me, I can only declare that what I have here written is undisguised and absolute truth. Let me add that daily observation of all classes of criminals, extending over many ...
— The Legacy of Cain • Wilkie Collins
... man, Umgona, merely started, then began to pour out sentences of conventional thanks and praise to the king for his goodness and condescension. Cetywayo listened to his talk in silence, and when he had done answered by reminding him tersely that if Nanea did not appear at ...
— Black Heart and White Heart • H. Rider Haggard
... and I fell down and broke a bone; the L—— house, where also we boarded, and there were many young girls. There I dreamed of an angel,—a person about eight feet long, flying along past the second-story side-windows, in the conventional horizontal attitude, so suggestive of a "crick in the neck," with great, wide wings, tooting through a trumpet as long as himself; and out of each temple, as I distinctly remember, grew a thing like a knitting-needle, with a cherry on the end. There ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 18, No. 108, October, 1866 • Various
... importance, but I stood up to him at first in words, and finally for a few seconds on my feet. Then I went down like an ox, and Raffles came out of his tent. Their fight lasted twenty minutes, and Raffles was marked, but the net result was dreadfully conventional, for the bully was ...
— Raffles - Further Adventures of the Amateur Cracksman • E. W. Hornung
... that the Indian is weaned from his idea of the happy hunting-ground, and the sacrilegious thought of ever meeting his horse again is eradicated from his mind. I thought with satisfaction that the missionary really knows no more about the future than the Indian, who seems ill adapted to the conventional idea of heaven. For my part, I prefer to think of him, in the unknown future, as retaining something of his earthly wildness and freedom, rather than as a white-robed saint, singing psalms, and playing on ...
— Life at Puget Sound: With Sketches of Travel in Washington Territory, British Columbia, Oregon and California • Caroline C. Leighton
... embarrassing in the encounter seemed dissolved by the utterly conventional tone of her greeting. Sir Leslie Borrowdean came up and joined them, and Lord and Lady Redford. Then the little party, escorted by the landlord, disappeared into the hotel. Mannering resumed his seat and continued his dinner. He leaned over and addressed his wife. ...
— A Lost Leader • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... formal beauty, moreover, was nothing to him. Over and over again he emphasizes soul, feeling, direct and immediate life, as the first necessity of an art work. It is therefore not strange that under certain circumstances he ignored conventional forms in sonata and symphony. An irrepressible impulse toward freedom is the most prominent peculiarity of the man and artist Beethoven; nearly all of his observations, no matter what their subject, radiate the word "Liberty." In his remarks about composing there is a complete ...
— Beethoven: the Man and the Artist - As Revealed in his own Words • Ludwig van Beethoven
... not speak of the past. She did not appear to wish to recall it and I had no desire to refer to it. We resumed our old relations of neighbors; yet there was something of constraint between us, a sort of conventional familiarity. It was as though we had said: "It was thus before, let it still be thus." She granted me her confidence, a concession that was not without its charms for me; but our conversation was colder, ...
— The Confession of a Child of The Century • Alfred de Musset
... wished to ask was something like this: Suppose I had had the chance to present to you my letters of introduction, and suppose that we had known each other for some time, and suppose that everything had been very conventional, instead of somewhat unconventional; supposing all this, would you have deemed a recent action of mine so unpardonable as you ...
— One Day's Courtship - The Heralds Of Fame • Robert Barr
... thoughtless differentiation between the "bad" and the "good" feeble-minded, we find new evidence of the conventional middle-class bias that also finds expression among some of the eugenists. We do not object to feeble-mindedness simply because it leads to immorality and criminality; nor can we approve of it when it expresses itself in docility, submissiveness and obedience. We object because ...
— The Pivot of Civilization • Margaret Sanger
... embrace the class of gestures which form the subject of this paper, and which often have an immediate pantomimic origin, the earliest gestures were doubtless instinctive and generally emotional, preceding pictorial, metaphoric, and, still subsequent, conventional gestures even, as, according to DARWIN's cogent ...
— Sign Language Among North American Indians Compared With That Among Other Peoples And Deaf-Mutes • Garrick Mallery
... Conventional religion had passed Daylight by. He had lived a sort of religion in his square dealing and right playing with other men, and he had not indulged in vain metaphysics about future life. Death ended all. He had always believed that, and been unafraid. And at this moment, the boat fifteen feet above ...
— Burning Daylight • Jack London
... speechlessly. She felt cold from head to foot. She had known that he was coming. She had been steeling herself for weeks to meet him in an armour of conventional reserve. But all her efforts had come to this. Swift, swift as the wind over wheat, his coming swept across her new-born confidence. It wavered and bent ...
— The Way of an Eagle • Ethel M. Dell
... paused there a half-score of years before, Stephen O'Mara paused now, with Caleb and Miss Sarah again gazing up at him. It was the first time Sarah Hunter had seen the grown-up Steve in conventional black and white; her emotions were much the same as they had been on that remoter day. But Steve did not even see her glowing face below him in that instant, nor Caleb's, nor that of Allison either, who ...
— Then I'll Come Back to You • Larry Evans
... Hemstead better, she found that he was different from what she had expected. The conventional idea of a theological student had dwelt in her mind; and she had expected to find a rather narrow and spiritually conceited man, full of the clerical mannerisms which she had often heard laughed at. But she saw that Hemstead's awkwardness ...
— From Jest to Earnest • E. P. Roe
... Win began in the conventional way that he had laughed at in the morning. Then, afraid of being teased again, she said that she must ...
— Winnie Childs - The Shop Girl • C. N. Williamson
... had been running in conventional channels and that my hopes had always been drab stuff. I had envisaged a command as a result of a slow course of promotion in the employ of some highly respectable firm. The reward of faithful service. Well, faithful service was all right. One would ...
— The Shadow-Line - A Confession • Joseph Conrad
... pleasure," should lead you to expect that species of happy ending in which Jack shall have Jill and naught shall go ill, I think a word of warning may not be wasted. In only three of the tales is the finish a matter of conventional happiness. Elsewhere you have a deserted husband, who has tracked his betrayer to a nigger saloon in Atlantic City, wrested from his purpose of murder by a revivalist hymn; a young lad, having avenged the destruction of his home, returning to his widowed mother to await, one supposes, ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Volume 159, December 8, 1920 • Various
... out and the men were wet and muddy. I stood by the bridge watching them pass and, thinking it was the right and conventional thing to do, wished them all a Merry Christmas. My intentions were of the best, but I was afterwards told that it sounded to the men like the voice of one mocking them in their misery. However, as it turned out, the wish was fulfilled on the ...
— The Great War As I Saw It • Frederick George Scott
... the bosom friend of the King, and mild reprover of his vices; and then, without the smallest transition, hey presto! he is the intransigent priest, bitterly combating the Constitutions of Clarendon. It is true that in the Prologue the poet places one or two finger-posts—small, conventional foreshadowings of coming trouble. For instance, the game of chess between King and Chancellor ends with a victory for ...
— Play-Making - A Manual of Craftsmanship • William Archer
... myself. That such a picture should be in the hands of these scoundrels might in any case have caused a mild surprise; but no more. It was no mild surprise that I felt. The likeness was an extremely good one, worked up with all the accessories of the conventional photographic studio. I was leaning my head on my hand and was relieved against a painted landscape of woodland. It was obvious that it was no snapshot; it was clear that I had sat for this photograph. And the truth was that I had never sat for such a photograph. It ...
— The Club of Queer Trades • G. K. Chesterton
... least that our poor Priscilla could do, to give her heart for a great many of them. There was the more danger of this, inasmuch as the footing on which we all associated at Blithedale was widely different from that of conventional society. While inclining us to the soft affections of the golden age, it seemed to authorize any individual, of either sex, to fall in love with any other, regardless of what would elsewhere be judged suitable and prudent. Accordingly the tender passion was very ...
— The Blithedale Romance • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... a second, as if making up his mind upon some point. Evidently, his lonely mode of living caused him to act differently from the conventional society man. ...
— Roger Trewinion • Joseph Hocking
... celebrated Order of the Templars, that became for all the secret associations, of the Rose-Croix, of the Illuminati, and of the Hermetic Freemasons, the reason of their strange rites, of their signs more or less conventional, and, above all, of their mutual devotedness and of ...
— Morals and Dogma of the Ancient and Accepted Scottish Rite of Freemasonry • Albert Pike
... sportsman, and dearly loved a day with his gun. As a boy, on his own Highland hills, he had been addicted to sporting a good deal without the formality of a licence, and the absolute freedom from conventional trammels in the wild North was a source of much gratulation to him. Perhaps he enjoyed his outings all the more that he was a stern disciplinarian—so deeply impressed with a sense of duty that he would neither allow himself nor his men to indulge in sport ...
— The Walrus Hunters - A Romance of the Realms of Ice • R.M. Ballantyne
... that returns around the urn. The cupboards on each side of the mantel have, at the top, circular glass doors, surmounted by an arch and keystone. The bottom doors are wood paneled. The remainder of the woodwork is conventional, plain chair ...
— Seaport in Virginia - George Washington's Alexandria • Gay Montague Moore
... father thinner and older than when he had last seen him, and asked how he was in a more earnest and meaning manner than is customary in the conventional "How do you do?" ...
— For Fortune and Glory - A Story of the Soudan War • Lewis Hough
... surmounted the tomb. He was lying extended full length, six feet and five inches, his head on a low pillow, his right hand grasping the handle of his drawn sword. The more I looked at it, both during and after the service, the more convinced I became that this was no mere conventional figure made by some lapidary long after the subject's death, but was the work of an inspired artist, an exact portrait of the man, even to his stature, and that he had succeeded in giving to the countenance the very expression of the ...
— A Traveller in Little Things • W. H. Hudson
... feelings were as exquisite as her means of expressing them? The iron bands of distrust were loosened from his spirit, and he blushed for his cheap scepticism of the morning. In a woman so evidently nurtured in dependence, whose views had been formed, and her actions directed, by the most conventional influences, the mere fact of coming alone to Westmore, in open defiance of her advisers, bespoke a persistence of purpose that ...
— The Fruit of the Tree • Edith Wharton
... addition to the military discipline, fencing, wrestling, weight-lifting and pole-twisting of which I have spoken, exercises itself in handwriting—which many Japanese practise as an art during their whole lifetime—and in composing the conventional short poem. I was gravely informed that "the custom of spending money on sweet-stuff is decreasing." What this really means is that the young men were not frequenting the sweet-stuff shops, which are staffed by girls who are in many cases a greater temptation than the sweets. The ...
— The Foundations of Japan • J.W. Robertson Scott
... me about some of the other men you are meeting in politics?" she asked when they had sat down before another open fire. "It seems as if all the people I know are just alike—I suppose it's because we are all so conventional—and I am very much interested in hearing about ...
— The Honorable Peter Stirling and What People Thought of Him • Paul Leicester Ford
... nothing, ascended another flight of stairs and went straight into the dressing room. A bronze dragon nailed by the tail to a bracket writhed away from the wall in calm convolutions, and held, between the conventional fury of its jaws, a crude gas flame that resembled a butterfly. The room was empty, of course; but, as he stepped in, it became filled all at once with a stir of many people; because the strips of glass on the doors of wardrobes and his wife's large pier-glass reflected him from head to foot, ...
— Tales of Unrest • Joseph Conrad
... saddled, very often, with a girl-wife in the background—the last by no means a matter of course in these enlightened days. In Dyan Singh's case the safeguard was lacking. His mother being dead, he had held his own against a rigidly conventional grandmother, and insisted on delaying the inevitable till his education was complete. Waxing bolder still, he had demanded the same respite for Aruna; a far more serious affair. For months they had waged a battle of tongues and temper and ...
— Far to Seek - A Romance of England and India • Maud Diver
... dear niece, that you are a good and pure-minded girl, and that you mean to live a life above reproach, and I fully understand your rebellion against many of the conventional forms which are incompatible with the career of a "girl bachelor," as you like to call yourself. But let us look at the subject from all sides, while you are on the threshold of life, in the morning of your career, and before ...
— A Woman of the World - Her Counsel to Other People's Sons and Daughters • Ella Wheeler Wilcox
... napkin over his arm did most of the serving, and being a man the conventional differences did not seem to him so great as ...
— The Hosts of the Air • Joseph A. Altsheler
... degenerated from century to century. The growing Christian religion, which forbade the picturing of any living beauty, gave the death-blow to such excellence as remained. A style of painting followed which received the name of Greek Byzantine. In it was no study of life; all was most strikingly conventional, and it grew steadily worse and worse. A comparison of the paintings and mosaics of the sixth, seventh, eighth, and ninth centuries shows the rapid decline of all art qualities. Finally every figure produced was a most arrant libel on nature. It was always painted against a flat gold background; ...
— Barbara's Heritage - Young Americans Among the Old Italian Masters • Deristhe L. Hoyt
... it might possibly help to set right-side-up the perverted conscience and re-invigorate the starved self-respect of our considerable class of loose-lived playgoers whose point of honor is to deride all official and conventional sermons. As it is, it only gives me an opportunity of telling the story of the Select Committee of both Houses of Parliament which sat last year to enquire into the working of the censorship, against which it was alleged by myself and others that as its imbecility ...
— The Shewing-up of Blanco Posnet • George Bernard Shaw
... greetings. But with what fervour girls of tender years re-unite some day after a separation of months need not, of course, be explained. Presently, she entered the apartments, paid her respects and inquired how they all were. But after this conventional interchange of salutations, old lady Chia pressed her to take off her outer garments as the weather was so close. Shih Hsiang-yuen lost no time in rising to her feet and loosening her clothes. "I don't see why," Madame Wang thereupon ...
— Hung Lou Meng, Book II • Cao Xueqin
... I make no pretence. I do not promise to work miracles. I do not, like your conventional candidates, talk in platitudes. I do not undertake to achieve a regeneration of politics out of unregenerate human nature. As long as we have cherries we shall have blackbirds; as long as we have politics we shall have politicians. I acknowledge the ...
— One Man in His Time • Ellen Glasgow
... other by conventional lines. Their absences were periods in which to store vital topics and questions—their meetings were ...
— The Man Thou Gavest • Harriet T. Comstock
... induction coil related to a carbon transmitter, a battery, and a receiver. Fig. 12 shows exactly the same arrangement, using conventional signs. The winding of the induction coil which is in series with the transmitter and the battery is called the primary winding; the other is called the secondary winding. In the arrangement of Figs. 11 and 12 the battery has no metallic ...
— Cyclopedia of Telephony & Telegraphy Vol. 1 - A General Reference Work on Telephony, etc. etc. • Kempster Miller
... making any noise, and without appearing to work much, he accomplished a good deal. She had an impulse once to thank him, but she restrained it, and she gave him a good-bye that was neither cool nor warm, just sufficiently conventional to leave no inference whatever. But when the train was gone and Mr. Grayson and he were riding back in the cab to the hotel, the candidate spoke ...
— The Candidate - A Political Romance • Joseph Alexander Altsheler
... Epicurean has even ultimately to surrender and be converted. No one of these three systems became in any proper sense popular. The plain intelligible character of Euhemerism exerted doubtless a certain power of attraction over the Romans, and in particular produced only too deep an effect on the conventional history of Rome with its at once childish and senile conversion of fable into history; but it remained without material influence on the Roman religion, because the latter from the first dealt only in allegory and not in fable, ...
— The History of Rome (Volumes 1-5) • Theodor Mommsen
... capricious. The realms of fancy were all untravelled, and its fairest flowers had not been gathered, nor its beauties despoiled by the rude touch of those who affected to cultivate them. The wing of genius was not bound to the earth by the cold and conventional rules of criticism, but was permitted to take its flight far and wide over the broad expanse of creation. But with science it was otherwise. No genius could suffice for the creation of facts, - hardly for their detection. ...
— The History Of The Conquest Of Peru • William H. Prescott
... to the other two plays here presented. It belongs to the school of Scribe and the "soliloquy," and the author avails himself of the recognised dramatic conventions of the day. At the same time, though the characters may be conventional in type, they are, thanks to Bjornson's sense of humour, alive; and the theme of the estrangement and reconciliation of the "newly-married couple" is treated with delicacy and charm. It is true that it is almost unbelievable that the hero could be so stupid as to ...
— Three Comedies • Bjornstjerne M. Bjornson
... must have betrayed more than conventional impassivity, for Evarin smiled. "Now you know, Rakhal, why I am called Toymaker. Is it not strange—the masterpriest of Nebran, a maker of Toys, and the shrine of the Toad God a workshop ...
— The Door Through Space • Marion Zimmer Bradley
... offered them. It was not that the affair differed much from affairs of its sort, but the fact that it did not materially differ might have been what made it seem so tiresome. Possibly the effect of a summer of out-door, home merrymaking, under the least conventional of conditions, had been to make formal entertaining under a roof seem more than ordinarily fatiguing and pointless. The handsome rooms were hot, in spite of open windows; the guests quite evidently were making heroic efforts to seem gay. Somehow even ...
— Strawberry Acres • Grace S. Richmond
... make so painful an avowal. Nonsense! Let us put aside all such trash: the question is, not—how we shall mutually make what the circumstances require us to say to each other agreeable to the self-love of either of us, and to silly rules of conventional gallantry, but there is a real question of fairness between us; and it is this: how much should each of us expect that the other will contribute towards the difficult task of liberating both of us from engagements we neither of us wish to undertake. You see, Signor ...
— A Siren • Thomas Adolphus Trollope
... the scenery: "It is ... the poetry of the shabby and hungry aspect of the earth itself. Daring poets who wished to escape from the conventional gardens and orchards had long been in the habit of celebrating the poetry of rugged and gloomy landscapes, but Browning is not content with this. He insists on celebrating the poetry of mean landscapes. That sense of scrubbiness in nature, as of a man unshaved, had ...
— Selections from the Poems and Plays of Robert Browning • Robert Browning
... presented with my card at Miss Loraine's door at exactly five o'clock. A Japanese page dressed in uniform ushered me into a conventional but well-furnished reception-room. There sat a young woman in a handsome silk negligee, who invited me to be seated, remarking that Miss Loraine was out, but would soon return, and that she was to entertain me in the interval. In a few minutes there came up the steps and then entered the room three ...
— Fifteen Years With The Outcast • Mrs. Florence (Mother) Roberts
... Kunst. It stood for a remoteness from reality which formed a strong contrast to the naturalistic creed and for a formal craftsmanship which set out to counteract the grooving tendency to break away from the fetters of conventional forms. The work of the group bordered often upon archaic preciosity, yet its influence was wholesome in holding up the ideal of a formalism which is after all one of the basic conditions of art. Though not a native ...
— The German Classics, v. 20 - Masterpieces of German Literature • Various
... and shoulder pressure. He called my attention to his tone. Tone! He made every individual wire jangle, and I trembled for my smooth, well-kept action. Then he began the B-minor Ballade of Liszt. Now, this particular piece always exasperates me. If there is much that is mechanical and conventional in the Thalberg fantasies, at least they are frankly sensational and admittedly for display. But the Liszt Ballade is so empty, so pretentious, so affected! One expects that something is about to occur, but it never comes. There are the usual chromatic ...
— Old Fogy - His Musical Opinions and Grotesques • James Huneker
... conscientious objector. They had been under the impression that his public career had been one long orgie of conscientious objection to everything that did not emanate from his own capacious brain. Even his hat and his waistcoat proclaim his defiance of conventional opinion. ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 153, Dec. 5, 1917 • Various
... valiant friend St. Saens' Dalila, where he has made a glorious love duet which is quite in place; for Dalila and Samson are bound to give themselves to the devil for love's sake, whilst in Massenet's Magdalen and Herodfade the whole thing is merely conventional...theatrical. ...
— Letters of Franz Liszt, Volume 2: "From Rome to the End" • Franz Liszt; letters collected by La Mara and translated
... some of the Japanese games differ slightly from ours, or else are altogether peculiar to that country. The facility with which a Japanese child slips its shoes on and off, and the absence on the part of the parents of conventional or health scruples regarding bare feet, lead to a sort of game of ball in which the shoes take the part of the ball, and to hiding pranks with the sandal, something like our hunt the slipper and hide-and-seek. On the other hand, kago play is entirely Japanese. In ...
— Child-Life in Japan and Japanese Child Stories • Mrs. M. Chaplin Ayrton
... priests awaited him. It was a direct reversal of the ordinary effect in the ordinary theatre: where the play loses in realism because a current of necessarily recognized, but purposely ignored, antagonistic fact underruns the conventional illusion and compels us to perceive that the palace is but painted canvas, and (even on the largest stage) is only four or five times as high as the Prince. The palace at Orange—towering up as though it would touch the very ...
— The Christmas Kalends of Provence - And Some Other Provencal Festivals • Thomas A. Janvier
... Government commissioned this artist to execute the figure of a saint. One may well prophesy that there will be nothing conventional in this work. She has already produced a striking "Saint Barbara." Her portrait busts include those of Professor Wegr, Professor Hellmer, Mark Twain, Countess Kinsky, Countess Palffs, Baron ...
— Women in the fine arts, from the Seventh Century B.C. to the Twentieth Century A.D. • Clara Erskine Clement
... generosity defrayed all charges. The vessel was manned from the navy, and Engineer Melville, destined to bear a name great among Arctic men, together with two navy lieutenants, were assigned to her. The voyage planned was then unique among American Arctic expeditions, for instead of following the conventional route north through Baffin's Bay and Smith Sound, the "Jeannette" sailed from San Francisco and pushed northward through Bering Sea. In July, 1879, she weighed anchor. Two years after, no word having been heard of her meanwhile, the inevitable relief ...
— American Merchant Ships and Sailors • Willis J. Abbot
... one belongs to the ancient, though scarcely Honorable Primrose Hunt, and rides forever to the hounds down the path of dalliance, one's wife of four years is rather stale sport. One does not pry up her eyelashes; they have been pried; nor does one hold dialogues with her under the words of conventional speech. The rules of the Hunt require one to look up at one's wife—chiefly to find out what she is after and to wonder how long she will inflict herself. And when one is hearing afar the cry of the pack, no true sportsman is diverted ...
— In the Heart of a Fool • William Allen White
... very kind," answered Rorie, with exceeding coldness. "I suppose all such engagements are subjects for congratulation, from a conventional point of view. My future wife is both amiable and accomplished, as you know. I have reason to be very proud that she has done me so great an honour as to prefer me to many worthier suitors; but I am bound to tell you—as we once ...
— Vixen, Volume I. • M. E. Braddon
... in an evening paper, over the top of which he looked at every newcomer, was almost farcical. At five-and-twenty to nine Pamela arrived. He advanced down the lounge to meet her. Her face was inscrutable, her smile conventional. Yet she had come! He looked over his shoulder towards ...
— The Pawns Count • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... daily attrition and conventional intimacies of the table, the drawing-room, or the promenade, the cloak covering his resentful antipathy, his moral perversities, his thinly veiled impatience, was worn to such thin shreds that eyes keen as Jack's must see and ...
— The Iron Game - A Tale of the War • Henry Francis Keenan
... dickens don't you write something that they will accept? Why not make up something quite conventional?" ...
— To-morrow? • Victoria Cross
... be conventional,' I went on, 'It wouldn't fit in with these wonderful days a bit. Perhaps I've no right to talk to you like this—but Ombos is dead and you seem to have no friend in the world. We have got caught up, you and I, in one of the marvellous tangles of this great conflict, and God knows how it's ...
— War and the Weird • Forbes Phillips
... visits to Lord Stanhope's seat in Kent in order to consult his magnificent library, were the only visits which Macaulay made in the course of the year. He always had a dislike of visiting in private houses, much preferring hotels, where he could be free from conventional life. ...
— Beacon Lights of History, Volume XIII • John Lord
... human character of any sort. It runs eternally in certain grooves of local and historical type: the medieval knight, the eighteenth-century duellist, and the modern cowboy, recur with the same stiff simplicity as the conventional human figures in an Oriental pattern. I can quite as easily imagine a human being kindling wild appetites by the contemplation of his Turkey carpet as by such dehumanized ...
— The Defendant • G.K. Chesterton
... was facing Sally as he bent over the table and fumbled with the lock of the jewel-case, and she made good use of this chance to memorise a countenance of mildly sardonic cast, not unhandsome—the face of a conventional modern voluptuary, self-conscious, self-satisfied, selfish—rather attractive withal in the eyes of an excited ...
— Nobody • Louis Joseph Vance
... is not the highest. We feel that something is wanting, and yet we can hardly extol him too highly. He brought comedy into close relation with every-day life; he is the father of the modern French stage, which has gradually cast off the old conventional personages. The French dramatists of to-day are not men of genius like Moliere, but, in their airy, sparkling plays, they represent the freaks, follies, and fancies of society so exquisitely that nothing remains to be desired. They furnish the model and the materials for ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 15, No. 92, June, 1865 • Various
... rashly assumed spencer, you would scarcely have thought, after a glance at the contours of the man's bony frame, that this was an artist—that conventional type which is privileged, in something of the same way as a Paris gamin, to represent riotous living to the bourgeois and philistine mind, the most mirific joviality, in short (to use the old Rabelaisian word newly taken into use). Yet this elderly person had once taken the medal ...
— Poor Relations • Honore de Balzac
... child born of plural marriage before January, 1896. The solemn benignity of the concession touched me, as it must have touched many, to the very heart of gratitude. By it, ten thousand children were taken from the outer darkness of this world's conventional exclusion and placed within the honored relations of mankind. It was a tribute to the purity and sincerity of the Mormon women who had borne the cross of plural marriage, believing that God had commanded their suffering. It recognized the holy nature and honorable intent of the marriages of these ...
— Under the Prophet in Utah - The National Menace of a Political Priestcraft • Frank J. Cannon and Harvey J. O'Higgins
... more boldly conventional, not merely in the treatment of landscape, but in the general conception and machinery. An initial effort of the imagination is required to feel with the poet; it is not wonderful that no such wing bore up the solid Johnson. ...
— Life of John Milton • Richard Garnett
... their changes made from day to day. On the wall next to this map and at right angles to it, is a large-scale map of the entire region over which the squadron operates. On this map are numerous conventional markings which would have no meaning to the ...
— Night Bombing with the Bedouins • Robert Henry Reece
... half-brother," said the lawyer, softly; and then he added, with the conventional ...
— A Son of Hagar - A Romance of Our Time • Sir Hall Caine
... statesmanship, the President probably saw that he would make just the kind of a minister to suit his purposes. Armstrong had not done this. Although a man of some ability and military information, Armstrong lacked conventional morals, and was the possessor of objectionable peculiarities. He never won either the confidence or the respect of Madison. He not only did harsh things in a harsh way, but he had a caustic tongue, and a tone of irreverence whenever he estimated the capacity of a Virginia ...
— A Political History of the State of New York, Volumes 1-3 • DeAlva Stanwood Alexander
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