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More "Decorous" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... thoughts were dancing through Molly's head, and when she left her cats, after a general romp in which even decorous Granny allowed her family to play leap-frog over her respectable back, she had made up her mind not to have yellow ribbons on her summer hat if she got a pink muslin as she had planned, but to finish off Boo's last shirt before she ...
— Jack and Jill • Louisa May Alcott
... experience had not yet disciplined away the natural vanity which may sometimes lead a man of genius to fancy himself an object of the tender passion. And we are the more disposed to judge leniently of Falstaff, inasmuch as his merry persecutors are but a sort of decorous, respectable, commonplace people, who borrow their chief importance from the victim of their mischievous sport; and if they are not so bad as to make us wish him success, neither are they so good that ...
— Shakespeare: His Life, Art, And Characters, Volume I. • H. N. Hudson
... exhibit in every act the sanctity of the name he bears. But," continues the same historian, "if the Eve of Pentecost was spent in such worthy functions, the celebrations of the coming of the Holy Ghost on the following day were no less decorous and becoming to the spirit of the Church; for thus writes the master of the ...
— Celebrated Crimes, Complete • Alexandre Dumas, Pere
... daughter, who looked after the accounts. There were occasional lady visitors at the hotel, attracted from the neighboring towns and settlements by its picturesqueness and a vague suggestiveness of its being a watering-place—and there was the occasional flash in the decorous street of a Sacramento or San Francisco gown. It is needless to say that to the five men who held the guilty secret of Committee Room No. 4 it only strengthened their belief in the super-elegance of their hidden treasure. At their last meeting they had fitted ...
— Openings in the Old Trail • Bret Harte
... number from another number and unity, because they are not the same absolute and infinite. Therefore was it well said by a theologian that as the fountain of light far exceeds not only our intellects, but also the divine, it is decorous that one should not discourse with words, but that with silence alone it ...
— The Heroic Enthusiast, Part II (Gli Eroici Furori) - An Ethical Poem • Giordano Bruno
... Exchange happened to be there, a decorous resort for those who became hungry, as I did, at the hour of noon each day. In my very pleasant boarding-house, where, to be sure, there was one dreadful boarder, a tall lady, whom I soon secretly called Juno—but let unpleasant things wait—in the very ...
— Lady Baltimore • Owen Wister
... silence was restored. Elizabeth knelt, with her eyes fixed on the wall: it was a green paper, patterned with bunches of nuts. How far she listened, or how much she understood, it was impossible to say; but her manner was decent and decorous. ...
— Mistress and Maid • Dinah Craik (aka: Miss Mulock)
... a quiet corner of the porch with the tea-steam floating pleasantly from the silver nose of its pot and a decorous scarlet and yellow still-life of muffins and jam between them, Oliver felt that so far things had slid along as well as could be expected. Elinor's manners in the first place and her genuine liking for him in the second had come to his help as he knew they would—she was too concerned now ...
— Young People's Pride • Stephen Vincent Benet
... lovers and no fun!" said Gervase gayly. "And the possibility of a highly decorous marriage with a curate or a bankclerk, followed by the pleasing result of a family of little curates or little bank-clerks. It is ...
— Ziska - The Problem of a Wicked Soul • Marie Corelli
... Parini, Byron and his biographers date from very much later, when the institution was long past its prime if not actually moribund. Now Smollett saw it at the very height of its perfection and at a time when our decorous protestant curiosity on such themes was as lively as Lady Mary Montagu had found it in the case of fair Circassians and Turkish harems just thirty years previously. [A cicisbeo was a dangler. Hence the word came to be applied ...
— Travels Through France and Italy • Tobias Smollett
... exclaimed, "how right you were to tell me to marry respectably; to have a solid position; to live in decorous fear of the world and one's wife; and to command the envy of the poor, the good opinion of the rich. You have practised what you preach. Delicious existence! The merchant's desk and the curtain lecture! Ha! ha! Shall we ...
— Zanoni • Edward Bulwer Lytton
... beg you will not talk nonsense to Captain Kearney. Your ideas on some subjects are really hardly decorous. ...
— Captain Brassbound's Conversion • George Bernard Shaw
... The young ladies came in mostly one at a time, sometimes in pairs, the mistress came in from time to time. The ladies came in, in loose gowns, a chemise and slippers, all but undressed. Everything was quite decorous, the mistress mostly present. Each girl would deposit her gown and chemise on a chair, turning her rump to the other, and get into the bath. When they left it, they stepped out, and came straight to the spot where I could best see them, their cunts towards me, and began to dry themselves. Servants ...
— My Secret Life, Volumes I. to III. - 1888 Edition • Anonymous
... where the grudge comes in. You can't stir about these foot-hills without coming across a woman, like as not, holdin' on to a posse of kids, and ridin' clothes-pin fashion in a looped-up skirt; when she sees you comin' she'll p'r'aps upset a kid or two assoomin' a decorous attitood. That's feeminine, and as such is approved by the ladies, but"—and here Leander put his head on one side and gave a grotesque impression of outraged decorum—"pants ...
— Judith Of The Plains • Marie Manning
... earth was, in fact, one reason why Eustacia had thought that the part of the Turkish Knight, though not the shortest, would suit her best. A direct fall from upright to horizontal, which was the end of the other fighting characters, was not an elegant or decorous part for a girl. But it was easy to die like a ...
— The Return of the Native • Thomas Hardy
... favor of a distinguished family-tree. ESTO PERPETUA! To have had somebody for a great-grandfather that was somebody is exciting. To be able to look back on long lines of ancestry that were rich, but respectable, seems decorous and all right. The present Earl of Warwick, I think, must have an idea that strict justice has been done him in the way of being launched properly into the world. I saw the Duke of Newcastle once, and as the farmer in Conway described ...
— The Wit and Humor of America, Volume I. (of X.) • Various
... quiet, decorous talk, touching on nothing vital, but holding a smoldering fire underneath. The young men said nothing about the fact that the regiment had been called to duty, and soon the camp on the bluff would be breaking up. They dared not ...
— The Eye of Dread • Payne Erskine
... faintly blue and misty like gauze hung down from the sky, down over the houses, but falling not quite on to the pavement which was hard and ugly and grey. The little street was very silent and quiet and had, like so many Petrograd streets, a decorous intimacy with the eighteenth century ...
— The Dark Forest • Hugh Walpole
... ill-pleased to have the occasion to avenge. In truth, the words of Ursula, mystic and dark as they were in their denunciation, had left upon Villani's boyish impressions an unaccountable feeling of antipathy and hatred to the man it was now his object to betray. For the rest, every device seemed to him decorous and justifiable, so that it saved his master, served his ...
— Rienzi • Edward Bulwer Lytton
... In her own single person, she could have comprised the duties of a first minister and a superintendent of police. Wise, firm, faithless; secret, crafty, passionless; watchful and inscrutable; acute and insensate—withal perfectly decorous—what more could ...
— Villette • Charlotte Bronte
... It was selfish of me not to have thought of it, and to have kept you so long waiting. The fact is, Auntie, that Leonard—I like to call him Leonard, since we were children together, and he is so young; though perhaps it would be more decorous nowadays to say "Mr. Everard"—has consulted me about his debts. You know, Auntie dear, that young men will be young men in such matters; or perhaps you do not, since the only person who ever worried you has been myself. But I stayed at Oxford and I know something of young men's ways; ...
— The Man • Bram Stoker
... misfortunes have a farcical nature which makes its appeal as much through the medium of one's love of the ludicrous as through that of one's interest in the romance of adventure. Those who are acquainted with Egypt will see in him one of the types of naif, delightful children of the Nile, whose decorous introduction into the parlour of the nations of to-day is requiring ...
— The Treasury of Ancient Egypt - Miscellaneous Chapters on Ancient Egyptian History and Archaeology • Arthur E. P. B. Weigall
... road that overhangs the river, they came at length to the promontory itself. Here, beneath the huge State shamianah, gaily coloured Kashmir rugs were spread, for Govind Singh and his court: while curtained enclosures, set at duly decorous distance, concealed the women-folk, who had been conveyed thither under close cover much earlier in ...
— The Great Amulet • Maud Diver
... opinion come round—for where are rules of accommodation to stop? The narrow path of truth and virtue inclines neither to the right nor left, it is a straight-forward business, and they who are earnestly pursuing their road, may bound over many decorous prejudices, without leaving modesty behind. Make the heart clean, and give the head employment, and I will venture to predict that there will be nothing offensive ...
— A Vindication of the Rights of Woman - Title: Vindication of the Rights of Women • Mary Wollstonecraft [Godwin]
... sighs of bliss till she saw the towers of Paris embattling the horizon. They reminded her that she was now going to be occasionally divided from him; that when entered within those walls, it would no longer be decorous for her to pass days and nights in listening to his voice, in losing all of woman's love in the beautified ...
— The Scottish Chiefs • Miss Jane Porter
... duties of active warfare, officers who aim at appearing in a decorous dress, in whatever emergency their presence may be required, make their toilet overnight before going ...
— The Art of Travel - Shifts and Contrivances Available in Wild Countries • Francis Galton
... what new movement of spiritual awakening in the people—against what form of religious revival might not the same argument of offended culture and decorous holiness be employed? And where would the lower masses of men be to-day if Religion had not stooped out of her celestial heights—from the first chapters of Christendom until the last—to the intellectual and moral levels of the poor and lowly? In the sheet, knit at four corners, ...
— The Authoritative Life of General William Booth • George Scott Railton
... disputation showeth a friendly spirit, then is my lord overfriendly; for it oft hath seemed of late to pleasure his mood to wax disputations, though, in sooth, lady fair, I have always maintained a wary and decorous demeanor." ...
— Other Things Being Equal • Emma Wolf
... is needed. If you loved him you would have learnt to do it. If you can't wail properly, you should wail a little, if only for example. It is always more decorous; or else one sees it is all words with you. Well, I'm going to pray to God; ...
— The Storm • Aleksandr Nicolaevich Ostrovsky
... fact, a thing must be well because it was his choice to do it. His journey to India might, it was true, be a matter of a few months, and involved diplomatic business for which a certain unimpeachable respectability was required. A more brilliant man, who had been less respectable in the most decorous British sense, would not have served ...
— Emily Fox-Seton - Being The Making of a Marchioness and The Methods of Lady Walderhurst • Frances Hodgson Burnett
... "becomes a saturnale, during which servants forget their duty to their masters, children their reverence for parents, men their respect for women, and women all notions of modesty, delicacy, and gentleness; they become raging bacchantes." Usually the Hos are quiet and reserved in manner, decorous and gentle to women. But during this festival "their natures appear to undergo a temporary change. Sons and daughters revile their parents in gross language, and parents their children; men and women become ...
— The Golden Bough - A study of magic and religion • Sir James George Frazer
... "th' best tarrier i' Riggan" were among the most faithful attendants. The lad's fancy for Anice had extended to Grace. Grace's friendly toleration of Nib had done much for him. Nib always appeared with his master, and his manner was as composed and decorous as if rats were subjects foreign to his meditations. His part it was to lie at Jud's feet, his nose between his paws, his eyes twinkling sagaciously behind his shaggy eyebrows, while occasionally, ...
— That Lass O' Lowrie's - 1877 • Frances Hodgson Burnett
... decorous in the extreme, and if you don't see me again, suppose all goes right; I'll get shut up in Miss Garden's ...
— The Pirate of the Mediterranean - A Tale of the Sea • W.H.G. Kingston
... Even the strongest conservatives would have been "Free-Soilers,"—not only those who are conservatives in virtue of their prudence, moderation, sagacity, and temper, but prejudiced conservatives, conservatives who are tolerant of all iniquity which is decorous, inert, long-established, and disposed to die when its time comes, conservatives as thorough in their hatred of change as Lamennais himself. "What a noise," says Paul Louis Courier, "Lamennais would have made on the day of creation, could he have ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 9, No. 55, May, 1862 • Various
... Physic, who has killed more men than the Knight, talking to a Clerk of Laws. There is a merry Friar, a lover of good cheer; and when seated in a tavern among his companions, singing songs it would be scarcely decorous to repeat, you may see his eyes twinkling in his head for joy, like stars on a frosty night. Beside him is a ruby-faced Sompnour, whose breath stinks of garlic and onions, who is ever roaring for wine,—strong wine, ...
— Dreamthorp - A Book of Essays Written in the Country • Alexander Smith
... not sign "Mr. F.'s aunt." "I bet she doesn't know her Dickens; it won't convey anything to her," he begged; "I'll cut out two cigars a day if you'll let me do it?" She would not let him, so the letter was perfectly decorous.)—"Of course it was not the proper way to treat an old friend, and marriage is too serious a business to be entered into in this way. Also I am sorry that there is any difference in age between you and ...
— The Vehement Flame • Margaret Wade Campbell Deland
... In that decorous mansion I could not follow her; and my impulse to dash after her and knock at her door till she answered me, I was forced to put ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Vol. XII, No. 29. August, 1873. • Various
... the mid-day meal is served for the whole household, as of old, with the salt-cellar in the middle, but with a far larger company above it than when first we saw it. The seven young folks preserve a decorous silence, save when Fraulein Ermentrude's cookeries are good-naturedly complimented by her father, or when Baron Friedmund Maximilianus breaks out with some wonderful fact about new armour seen at Ulm. He is a handsome, ...
— The Dove in the Eagle's Nest • Charlotte M. Yonge
... Rufus by the hand and they shot free of the procession, up and down dim and decorous streets, swerving round corners and past astonished policemen whose "Now then, you young devils" was lost in the clatter of their feet. Cosgrave gasped, but Robert's hold was relentless, compelling. He could have run faster by himself, but somehow he could not let Cosgrave go. "You've got to stick ...
— The Dark House • I. A. R. Wylie
... ardour of youth and with all the decorum recommended by Herman Hoppe, the self-instructor of good manners. In this regard the girls also responded to their intentions. Both with these and with the others it was accounted especially decorous and well-bred to dance as rigidly as possible, keeping the arms hanging down, while the heads were raised high and inclined to one side with a certain proud, and, at the same time, tired and enervated air. In the intermissions, ...
— Yama (The Pit) • Alexandra Kuprin
... your Majesties, there is not in the world a better nation, nor a better land. They love their neighbours as themselves; and their discourse is ever sweet and gentle, and accompanied with a smile; and though it is true that they are naked, yet their manners are decorous and praiseworthy." ...
— MacMillan's Reading Books - Book V • Anonymous
... sacrosanct. due to, merited, deserved, condign, richly deserved. allowable &c. (permitted) 760; lawful, licit, legitimate, legal; legalized &c. (law) 963. square, unexceptionable, right; equitable &c. 922; due, en r gle; fit, fitting; correct, proper, meet, befitting, becoming, seemly; decorous; creditable, up to the mark, right as a trivet; just the thing, quite the thing; selon les r gles[Fr]. Adv. duly, ex officio, de jure[Lat]; by right, by divine right; jure divino[Lat], Dei gratia[Lat], in the name of. Phr. civis Romanus sum [Lat][Cicero]; ...
— Roget's Thesaurus • Peter Mark Roget
... the midst of this. Plenty of people, the whole of Market Square and East Elgin, a good part, too, probably, of the Town Ward, were unaware of his arrival; but for the little world he penetrated he was clothed with all the interest of the great contingency. His decorous head in the Emmetts' pew on Sunday morning stood for a symbol as well as for a stranger. The nation was on the eve of a great far-reaching transaction with the mother country, and thrilling with the terms of the bargain. Hesketh ...
— The Imperialist • (a.k.a. Mrs. Everard Cotes) Sara Jeannette Duncan
... That leaned against a Druid oak, his pipe Pendent beneath his chin—a double one— (Meaning the pipe); reluctant was his breath, For he had mingled in the Morris dance And rested blown; but damsels in their teens, All decorous and decorously clad, Their very ankles hardly visible, Recalled his motions; while, for chaperon, Good Mrs. Grundy up against the ...
— The Battle of the Bays • Owen Seaman
... to caper with a sort of decorous hilarity before their teacher. " Look at the sausage, professor. Did you ever see such sausage " Isn't it salubrious " And see these other things, sir. Aren't they curious " I shouldn't wonder if they were alive. Turnips, sir? No, sir. I think they are Pharisees. I have seen a Pharisee look ...
— Active Service • Stephen Crane
... a rather more decorous manner among the aristocrats at Father John's end of the table—though even here they were carried on in a somewhat rapid and voracious fashion. The priest helped Feemy and Ussher, Mary and her husband; ...
— The Macdermots of Ballycloran • Anthony Trollope
... comfort of the homestead, we found a vast array of eatables and drinkables; every one was welcomed, but notwithstanding the unusual number of guests, all was well-ordered and decorous. The Thurlows and their numerous clan are a fine-looking folk; the men, sturdy, well set-up—a fighting people, yet generous, kindly and hospitable. The women—gracious, lovely, and altogether charming. Beyond the universally cherished idea of beautiful ...
— The Statesmen Snowbound • Robert Fitzgerald
... graces of disposition, and to do their work among men faithfully, are forgetting meanwhile the law of love which bids every follower of Christ go about doing good as the Master did. To be a Christian is far more than to be honest, truthful, sober, industrious, and decorous; it is also to be a cross-bearer after Jesus; to love men, and to serve them. Ofttimes it is to leave your fine room, your favorite work, your delightful companionship, your pet self-indulgence, and to go out among the needy, ...
— Personal Friendships of Jesus • J. R. Miller
... Burns's advent had worn off by his second winter in Edinburgh, and, though it may be a weakness, novelty always counts for something in human affairs. Then, again, the quiet decorous men of Blair's circle knew more of Burns's ways and doings than at first, and what they came to know was not likely to increase their desire for (p. 091) intimacy with him. It was, it seems, notorious that Burns kept that formidable memorandum-book already ...
— Robert Burns • Principal Shairp
... such was not the case at the Palazzo Castelmare. Presided over on such occasions as that of the great annual Carnival ball by a widowed sister-in-law of the Marchese, the Castelmare palace was the most decorous and respectable house, as its master was the most decorous and ...
— A Siren • Thomas Adolphus Trollope
... for the suggestion that a veiled throat and bust may charmingly fulfil the requirements of evening dress, and also satisfy that sense of delicacy peculiar to some women who have not inherited from their great-great-grandmothers the certain knowledge that a low-necked gown is absolutely decorous. ...
— What Dress Makes of Us • Dorothy Quigley
... clerical instinct in him winced at some of them. Robert had nothing of the sectary about him by nature; he was always too deeply and easily affected by the great historic existences about him. But when the Oxford man or the ex-official of one of the most venerable and decorous of societies protested, the believer, or, if you will, the enthusiast, put the ...
— Robert Elsmere • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... years ago, when some business had brought me into a corridor of one of the old court buildings facing the Place d'Armes, a loud voice from within one of the court-rooms arrested my own and the general ear. At once from all directions men came with decorous haste towards the spot whence it proceeded. I pushed in through a green door into a closely crowded room and found the Supreme Court of the State in session. A short, broad, big-browed man of an iron sort, with silver hair close shorn from a Roman head, had just begun ...
— Strange True Stories of Louisiana • George Washington Cable
... parent—then, not even a servant of honest repute would have been seen to eat or drink within a tavern!" "In the good old times," says the citizen of Aristophanes [210], "our youths breasted the snow without a mantle— their music was masculine and martial—their gymnastic exercises decorous and chaste. Thus were trained ...
— Athens: Its Rise and Fall, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... wager, for instance, that he was not unacquainted with the works of Herbert Spencer; and yet where, in all the history books, shall we lay our hands on two more incongruous contemporaries? Mr. Spencer so decorous—I had almost said, so dandy—in dissent; and Whitman, like a large shaggy dog, just unchained, scouring the beaches of the world and baying at the moon. And when was an echo more curiously like a satire, than when Mr. Spencer found his Synthetic Philosophy reverberated from the other shores of ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 3 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... church-tower and spire loomed up above us in grey twilight. The tireless wind still swept thin snow from fell and forest. But the frenzied bells had sunk into their twelvemonth's slumber, which shall be broken only by decorous tollings at less festive times. I wondered whether they were tingling still with the heart-throbs and with the pressure of those many arms? Was their old age warmed, as mine was, with that gust of life—the young men who had ...
— Sketches and Studies in Italy and Greece • John Addington Symonds
... readers will probably have some practical knowledge of the small, round paper pellets known as "throw-downs," which explode when flung against anything; and it was difficult to imagine that any member of the select and decorous Melchester School Debating Society would cause an interruption by flinging such things about in the middle ...
— Soldiers of the Queen • Harold Avery
... disposed of them we could give the proceeds to a charity, so there would be nothing really wrong about it. But nothing of that sort lies within the Mappined limits of my life. One of these days somebody dull and decorous and undistinguished will 'make himself agreeable' to me at a tennis party, as the saying is, and all the dull old gossips of the neighbourhood will begin to ask when we are to be engaged, and at last we shall be engaged, and people ...
— The Toys of Peace • Saki
... their signs in the countenance, and to broaden and confuse the clear-cut, statuesque lines of early youth. Evidently, that is the head of an easy-going, pleasure-loving man, who has waxed warm with good living, and performs the duties of his office with an unctuous grace as something becoming and decorous to be gone through with. Evidently, he is puzzled and half-contemptuous at the revelations which come through the grating in hoarse whispers from those thin, trembling lips. That other man, who speaks ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. IX., March, 1862., No. LIII. - A Magazine Of Literature, Art, And Politics, • Various
... and because these were usually mere curiosities, without intrinsic value, they often evaded the pawn-shop in those years of dire distress, when more negotiable articles passed irretrievably away from the family possession. And with them too, in stiff, decorous frames, are those certificates and testimonials which a master mariner always collects, together with photographs of gratuitously ...
— A Master of Fortune • Cutcliffe Hyne
... since it is derived from the cart, and signifies the draught or pull of the horses." The phrase "a prince's pelf" is reprobated, because pelf means properly "the scraps or shreds of taylors and of skinners." He gives strict rules for the decorous behaviour of ambassadors and all who address themselves to princes, being himself a courtier, and having probably exercised some diplomatic function. "I have seen," says he, "foreign ambassadors in the queen's presence laugh so dissolutely at some rare pastime or sport ...
— Memoirs of the Court of Queen Elizabeth • Lucy Aikin
... thyself! Look around thee! These are the streets in which thou weft wont to appear only on the Sabbath-day, when thou didst walk modestly to church; where, over-decorous perhaps, thou wert displeased if I but joined thee with a kindly greeting. And now thou dost stand, speak, and act before the eyes of the whole world. Recollect thyself, love! How can this ...
— Egmont - A Tragedy In Five Acts • Johann Wolfgang Von Goethe
... and half ostentatiously lifting his glass. "I pledge you, Frank, with my whole heart, believe me," taking a draught too decorous to be large, but which, small though it was, was followed by a slight involuntary wryness to ...
— The Confidence-Man • Herman Melville
... much in the same way you know Jim Bloxam. By the way, do you call him 'Jim'?" (The two girls nodded assent.) "Ah, I like to ask about these things: proprieties differ in different counties; it strikes me Fernshire is of the rigidly decorous order." ...
— Belles and Ringers • Hawley Smart
... I've done what I could to make the place attractive. But what is an old woman to do for a girl in a garden? We ought to have brought some other young people—some of the Inglehart boys. But we're respectable, we Americans abroad; we're decorous, above all things; and I don't know about meeting you here, Mr. Colville. It has a very bad appearance. Are you sure that you didn't know I was to go by ...
— Indian Summer • William D. Howells
... Doctor. "Faith, I forgot that. I was going to High Mass meself, but I ran over to see ye. Yes, it's his turn. Sure, the poor man puts me to sleep, and sleepin' in the House of God is neither respectful nor decorous. But what is a ...
— The City and the World and Other Stories • Francis Clement Kelley
... "Lawyer Roberts" go by, and would bid "God bless him" for what he had done. This dear old man was my first tutor in Radicalism, and I was an apt pupil. I had taken no interest in politics, but had unconsciously reflected more or less the decorous Whiggism which had always surrounded me. I regarded "the poor" as folk to be educated, looked after, charitably dealt with, and always treated with most perfect courtesy, the courtesy being due from me, as a lady, to all equally, whether they were ...
— Autobiographical Sketches • Annie Besant
... common people would not have dared to do in his native town. The foreigners themselves impressed him still more disagreeably: it was the period when new settlers could assume the tone of conquerors to the conquered, and when the life of the "open ports" was much less decorous than now. The new buildings of brick or stuccoed timber revived for him unpleasant memories of the Japanese colored pictures of foreign manners and customs; and he could not quickly banish the fancies of his boyhood concerning Occidentals. Reason, based on larger knowledge ...
— Kokoro - Japanese Inner Life Hints • Lafcadio Hearn
... best means of doing this, which took so much time to carry out that the business of arraying her for her first banquet as a Royal Hostess had to be got through more hurriedly than her ladies of the Bedchamber thought at all decorous. ...
— In Brief Authority • F. Anstey
... was full of subdued bustle and decorous excitement; and all the bustle and all the excitement were caused ...
— The Children's Pilgrimage • L. T. Meade
... men, the Middle Temple as the society frequented by Templars of narrow means, and Lincoln's Inn as the abode of gentlemen—is, of itself, a proof that the pervading manners of the last three institutions were outwardly decorous. Under the least favorable circumstances, a barrister's wife living in chambers, within or near Lincoln's Inn, or the Temple, during Charles II.'s reign, fared as well in this respect as she would have done had Fortune made ...
— A Book About Lawyers • John Cordy Jeaffreson
... very next day, in the decorous Times (Great—Guns— How the headlines ran!) In spite of the kings and the wars and the crimes, There were five full columns ...
— The New Morning - Poems • Alfred Noyes
... feasts are still less interesting. Here and there the clergyman of the parish has succeeded in turning what was a rude saturnalia into a decorous "fete," with tea in a tent. But generally the feasts are falling into rapid disuse, and would perhaps have died away altogether had not the benefit societies often chosen that day for their annual club-dinner. ...
— The Toilers of the Field • Richard Jefferies
... serious. I may have been ridiculous. Catherine evidently found me so, for, after gauging me with that wry but humourous look which I knew so well of old, for which I had been waiting this afternoon, she went off into the decorous little fit of laughter in which it had ...
— No Hero • E.W. Hornung
... a flash of horror pass over Rickie's face. The horror disappeared, for, thank God, he was now a man, whom civilization protects. But he and Gerald had met, as it were, behind the scenes, before our decorous drama opens, and there the elder boy had done things to him—absurd things, not worth chronicling separately. An apple-pie bed is nothing; pinches, kicks, boxed ears, twisted arms, pulled hair, ghosts at night, inky books, befouled ...
— The Longest Journey • E. M. Forster
... replied in a tone so reasonable, decorous and temperate as to wring unwilling admiration even from his opponents. He pointed out briefly the weak points that rendered the governor's position utterly untenable, ignored the implied warning of resistance to the law; and succinctly stated that he relied upon ...
— Four Years in Rebel Capitals - An Inside View of Life in the Southern Confederacy from Birth to Death • T. C. DeLeon
... 27 on the afternoon of his return to London. She had seen him twice or three times, and he had struck her as a coldly decorous person, tall, white-faced, slow speaking; the last man to behave violently or surprise a head chambermaid in any way. On the morning of his departure she was told by the first-floor waiter that the occupant of Room 26 had complained of an uproar ...
— The Research Magnificent • H. G. Wells
... rustle of silk on the sidewalk; Just now there passed by a tall hat; But there's gloom in this "boom" and this wild talk Of the "future" of Poverty Flat. There's a decorous chill in the air, Joe, Where once we were simple and free; And I hear they've been making a mayor, Joe, Of the man who ...
— Complete Poetical Works of Bret Harte • Bret Harte
... am to take it for a month's warning, of course." Matthew understood well enough that this was merely an expression of his master's displeasure, and, being anxious for his master's welfare, knew that it was decorous that some decision should be come to at once as to Miss Thoroughbung, and that time should not be lost in his own little personal quarrel. "She is waiting, you know, sir, and she looks uncommon irascible. There is the other lady left ...
— Mr. Scarborough's Family • Anthony Trollope
... Maryland or Virginia. I am of Mr. Bacon's opinion—return the sovereignty to the states. I hope we shall preserve peace with Spain. I observe, with much gratification, that the debates in Congress are much more decorous ...
— Memoirs of Aaron Burr, Complete • Matthew L. Davis
... up at five. The sky is grey. There is a cold, unpleasant wind that reminds one of Moscow. It is dull. I wait for the church bells and go to late Mass. In the cathedral it is all very charming, decorous, and not boring. The choir sings well, not at all in a plebeian style, and the congregation entirely consists of young ladies in olive-green ...
— Letters of Anton Chekhov • Anton Chekhov
... political affections and ideals. Their leaders saw only two possibilities. British connection was the sheet-anchor of the old colonial Tories; but their vision of the country's future was an aristocracy, a landed gentry, a decorous union of church and state—in short, a colonial replica of old Tory England. On the other hand, the Radical leaders, French and English alike, saw before them only an independent republic, or fusion with the United States. How limited was the vision of both time has made blindingly clear. The instinct ...
— The Winning of Popular Government - A Chronicle of the Union of 1841 • Archibald Macmechan
... through the hall she met Holliday. His appearance was decorous and subdued, as befitted the occasion, yet as he came up the stairs in his dark, inconspicuously correct attire, she felt in his manner something assured, almost proprietary, as if he considered himself already master here. She inclined her head slightly and was hurrying past when, to her surprise, ...
— Juggernaut • Alice Campbell
... the Lady Eveline, to all those who had suffered by the late inroad. Death-meals, as they were termed, were also spread in honour of the deceased; but the lady herself, and most of her attendants, observed a stern course of vigil, discipline, and fasts, which appeared to the Normans a more decorous manner of testifying their respect for the dead, than the Saxon and Flemish custom of banqueting and drinking ...
— The Betrothed • Sir Walter Scott
... fellow!" emptying his goblet with satisfaction. And, rising to his firm and graceful height, he strolled away toward the salon where play progressed amid the most decorous and ...
— The Dark Star • Robert W. Chambers
... the sand? Streaming tears, sobbing tears, throes, choked with wild cries; O storm, embodied, rising, careering with swift steps along the beach! O wild and dismal night storm, with wind—O belching and desperate! O shade so sedate and decorous by day, with calm countenance and regulated pace, But away at night as you fly, none looking—O then the unloosened ...
— The Gate of Appreciation - Studies in the Relation of Art to Life • Carleton Noyes
... agonies, what convulsive struggles he may take to cast the torture off from him; and then finally the last departure of life itself, and how he lies extinct and ended, either wrapt like Caesar in decorous mantle-folds, or unseemly sunk together, like one that had not the ...
— The French Revolution • Thomas Carlyle
... know not how it happened, though I found, on recovering my self-possession, that I was folding Lucy to my heart, while Rupert was doing the same to Grace. This little mistake, however, was soon rectified, each man embracing his own sister, as in duty bound, and as was most decorous. The girls shed torrents of tears, and assured us, again and again, that this was the only really happy moment they had known since the parting on the wharf, nearly a twelvemonth before. Then followed looks at each other, exclamations ...
— Afloat And Ashore • James Fenimore Cooper
... of a gayer and more gorgeous society than any he had ever known. Wealth and great houses existed even then in New York and upon occasion their owners made full use of both, but there was a restraint about the Americans, the English and the Dutch. Their display was often heavy and always decorous, and in Quebec he felt for the first time the heedless gayety of the French, when the Bourbon monarchy had passed its full bloom, and already was in its brilliant decay. Truly, they could have carved over the doorway, "Leave all ...
— The Hunters of the Hills • Joseph Altsheler
... through the ancestral hall. The sunlight edged it like a bright border. The doors were wide open, and Dong-Yung saw the decorous rows of square chairs and square tables set rhythmically along the walls, and the covered dais at the head for the guest of honor. Long crimson scrolls, sprawled with gold ideographs, hung from ceiling to ...
— The Best Short Stories of 1919 - and the Yearbook of the American Short Story • Various
... know it takes nearly that time for a well-brought-up young lady to get over a real matrimonial disappointment. However, shy or not shy, they certainly ought to be explicit. It's too bad to miss a chance because we cannot interpret the metaphor in which some bashful swain thinks it decorous to couch his proposals; and I once knew a young lady who, happening to dislike needlework, and replying in the negative to the insidious question, "Can you sew a button?" never knew for months that she had actually ...
— Kate Coventry - An Autobiography • G. J. Whyte-Melville
... Elizabeth. And there is no knowing what might have happened if the decorous Nannie had not come to ...
— The Iron Woman • Margaret Deland
... hundred dollars; whereof anon. America is fertile in mixtures: what do we not owe her? Sherry cobbler, gin sling, cocktail, mint julep, brandy smash, sudden death, eye openers. Well, one day she outdid herself, and mixed Fullalove: Quaker, Nimrod, Archimedes, Philanthropist, decorous Red ...
— Hard Cash • Charles Reade
... hastily to take the air for half-an-hour before dinner. In the middle of Magdalen Bridge we met a woman with a child in her arms. Shelley was more attentive at that instant to our conduct in a life that was past, or to come, than to a decorous regulation of the present, according to the established usages of society, in that fleeting moment of eternal duration styled the nineteenth century. With abrupt dexterity he caught hold of the child. The mother, ...
— Oxford • Andrew Lang
... the best of men. On the other side, Ephorus is as much out of the way in his encomiums. For, however ingenious he is in supplying unjust acts and wicked conduct with fair and worthy motives, and in selecting decorous and honorable terms, yet when he does his best, he does not himself stand clear of the charge of being the greatest lover of tyrants, and the fondest admirer of luxury and power and rich estates and alliances ...
— Plutarch's Lives • A.H. Clough
... into the restaurant; scrutinized the tables; and selected the best lighted one. The waiter, a decorous elderly man, approached with some severity of manner, and handed a bill of fare to Marmaduke. She snatched it from him, and addressed ...
— The Irrational Knot - Being the Second Novel of His Nonage • George Bernard Shaw
... for a moment supposed that anything in my attire of simple decorous work-clothes could awaken pity. Yet pity it was and nothing less ...
— The Woman Who Toils - Being the Experiences of Two Gentlewomen as Factory Girls • Mrs. John Van Vorst and Marie Van Vorst
... besought his hearers to prepare for the fasting and prayer of the Lenten season, failed to rouse Blake from his moody abstraction. But at the end of the regular service, when the white-gowned choir-boys flocked out and the majority of the congregation began to crowd into the aisles with decorous murmurings and the soft rustling of silken skirts, Blake raised his head and followed their departure with ...
— Out of the Primitive • Robert Ames Bennet
... 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
... and shovel lay a pair of riding boots, still so wet and mud-spattered that he must have pulled them off within the hour. A decanter of rum was near him on a stand. On his knee was a volume of Rabelais, which was affording him decorous amusement. ...
— The Unspeakable Gentleman • John P. Marquand
... the ring eyed a watch, raised a hand; the two umpires were on foot in their places; the pair of opposing seconds hurried out cheery or bolt-business words to their men; and the champions advanced to the scratch. Todds first, by the courtesy of Ines, whose decorous control of his legs at a weighty moment was rightly read ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... confided to Pecuchet that he did not think this imitation of a tomb in the midst of vegetables quite decorous. Hurel, as he withdrew, made a low bow to the company. M. Marescot had disappeared after dessert. Madame Bordin again went over her recipe for gherkins, promised a second for plums with brandy, and made three turns in the large walk; but, passing close to the linden tree, ...
— Bouvard and Pecuchet - A Tragi-comic Novel of Bourgeois Life • Gustave Flaubert
... the usual dinner hour took place in the long vacation; that it was introduced for the convenience of study, and that the doctor, could he so far have forgotten his dignity as to have joined the four o'clock party, would have found decorous manners, and more than one brother fellow ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine—Vol. 54, No. 333, July 1843 • Various
... of the open window. Down in the street a footman was settling the rug over the knees of a lady in a carriage, and the decorous immovability of both their faces, which were clearly visible to him, was like a ...
— Forsyte Saga • John Galsworthy
... of his adopted mother and retaining fast hold of her hand, assumed a grave and decorous demeanor such as might befit a person of matured taste and understanding who should find himself in a temple dedicated to some worship which he did not recognize, but felt himself bound to respect. The exercises had ...
— Twice Told Tales • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... steep bank by the Dawson barracks with fluttering heart and shaking knees. The dogs were so weak that he was forced to rest them, and, waiting, he leaned limply against the gee-pole. A man, an eminently decorous-looking man, came sauntering by in a great bearskin coat. He glanced at Rasmunsen curiously, then stopped and ran a speculative eye over the dogs ...
— The Faith of Men • Jack London
... drama there had been much that was reprehensible. But whoever compares even the least decorous plays of Fletcher with those contained in the volume before us will see how much the profligacy which follows a period of overstrained austerity goes beyond the profligacy which precedes such a period. ...
— Critical and Historical Essays Volume 2 • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... submission to blame on his, while every now and then there was an implied protest—whenever the payments of the interest became due, or whenever my lady stinted herself of any personal expense, such as Mr. Horner thought was only decorous and becoming in the heiress of the Hanburys. Her carriages were old and cumbrous, wanting all the improvements which had been adopted by those of her rank throughout the county. Mr. Horner would fain have had ...
— My Lady Ludlow • Elizabeth Gaskell
... Walkingshaw, accompanied as usual by his eldest son, set forth from his decorous residence. It was one of a circle of stately houses, broken in two or three places to permit the sedatest kind of street to enter. The grave dignity of these mansions was accentuated by the straight, deep-hewn furrows at the junctions ...
— The Prodigal Father • J. Storer Clouston
... finger first solemnly began to trace its route. In doing this, I observed that his Highness's hand kept swerving far into the Netherlands, so, gently pulling it by the thumb towards Paris, I used as much force as I thought decorous, to induce it to advance in a straight line; however, finding my efforts ineffectual, I ventured with respectful astonishment, to ask, 'Why travel ...
— Captain Sword and Captain Pen - A Poem • Leigh Hunt
... mistake my meaning. It is not for the selfish purpose of keeping you here near me that I advise you to defer your marriage for a time. It is because I think it is decorous that some months should elapse between the betrothal of a young pair and their wedding. Though, of course, there are some cases in which a short engagement and a speedy marriage become expedient or even necessary. As, for instance, my child, if I felt myself near death now I should certainly wish ...
— Victor's Triumph - Sequel to A Beautiful Fiend • Mrs. E. D. E. N. Southworth
... rode home in the crisp starlight gurgling and leaning over their saddle-horns in spasmodic fits of laughter. But when they trooped into the bunk-house they might have been deacons returning from prayer meeting so far as their decorous behavior was concerned. Happy Jack was in bed, covered to his ears and he had his face to the wall. They cast covert glances at his carroty top-knot and went silently to bed—which was contrary ...
— The Lonesome Trail and Other Stories • B. M. Bower
... September 21, 1876, relates the following incident: "A late English traveler found a Baptist mission church, in far-off Burmah, using for the communion service Bass's pale ale instead of wine. The opening of the frothing bottle on the communion table seemed not quite decorous to the visitor, who presented the pastor with a half-dozen bottles ...
— The Faith of Our Fathers • James Cardinal Gibbons
... tomatoes looked ashamed of being red; and only a suit of drab apiece seemed wanting, to make the pumpkins as respectably grave as the other members of the community. Two small boys, in wide-brimmed hats and legs of discreet tint, were weeding these decorous vegetables. They raised their heads and took one good stare as the big wagon rattled past, then they lowered them again, and went on with their work, laying the pig-weeds, which they pulled out of the ground, in neat little piles ...
— Eyebright - A Story • Susan Coolidge
... capital. It was of little moment that petty wars were being waged in East and West, and that bulletins sometimes brought news of a general's defeat. Rome was accustomed to these things; and her efforts were still marked by their usual characteristics of steady expansion and decorous success. To predicate failure of her foreign activity for this period is to predicate it for all her history, for never was an empire more slowly won or more painfully preserved. It is true that at the commencement of this epoch an imperialist might have been justified in taking a gloomy view ...
— A History of Rome, Vol 1 - During the late Republic and early Principate • A H.J. Greenidge
... escape any more of Sir George's complaints. "Just be so kind, Miss Effingham, ma'am, to look into this here pantry, once! Them niggers, I do believe, have had their fingers in every thing, and it will take Toast and me a week to get things decorous and orderly again. Some of the shrieks" (for so the steward styled the chiefs) "have been yelling well in this place, I'll engage, as you may see, by the manner in which they have spilt the mustard ...
— Homeward Bound - or, The Chase • James Fenimore Cooper
... Booddhism, its mystic creed and imposing ceremonies, and have made very many changes in the form of worship; but, apparently, they are no more Christians than were their respective fathers, the late first and second kings. They treat Christianity with outward respect, because they esteem it decorous to do so; and the same is true of the regent and prime minister; but none of them even profess any real regard for the worship of the true God. The concessions made thus far indicate progress in ...
— Lippincott's Magazine Of Popular Literature And Science, No. 23, February, 1873, Vol. XI. • Various
... rise of an entirely new style of English prose. The ancient and universal restraints were swept away, the decorous stateliness of all the buried centuries was abandoned, and there arose a band of writers, to whom De Quincey and Ruskin were the leaders, who withdrew all veils from their emotions, threw away all the shackles ...
— The Glory of English Prose - Letters to My Grandson • Stephen Coleridge
... The decorous, orderly machinery of knowledge rolls over one—one listens to It, to the soft clatter of the endless belt ...
— Crowds - A Moving-Picture of Democracy • Gerald Stanley Lee
... beginning. The black glaring figure in the portico did not stir. I almost thought it was really a statue. In another moment the grey area was golden with gaslight as the basement door was opened suddenly and a small and decorous housemaid ...
— The Club of Queer Trades • G. K. Chesterton
... gradually developed in its present form. Upon its publication in 1805, it achieved an immediate success. The vividness of its descriptive passages, the buoyant rush of its meter, the deep romantic glow suffusing all its pages, took by storm a public familiar to weariness with the decorous abstractions of the eighteenth century poets. The first edition, a sumptuous quarto, was exhausted in a few weeks; an octavo edition of fifteen hundred was sold out within the year; and before 1830, ...
— Lady of the Lake • Sir Walter Scott
... short time with Maren, and then came to Appledore, where she lived at service two years, till within a fortnight of her death. The first time I saw Maren she brought her sister to us, and I was charmed with the little woman's beautiful behavior; she was so gentle, courteous, decorous, she left on my mind a most delightful impression. Her face struck me as remarkably good and intelligent, and her gray eyes were full ...
— Stories by American Authors, Volume 3 • Various
... Where, in the map of Africa, would he hide her? And how would he take care of her? What would he do to her? Make love to her? Marry her? Take home a wife from an Egyptian harem—a surprising acquisition with which to startle and enchant his decorous ...
— The Fortieth Door • Mary Hastings Bradley
... any rate, had a crowd to receive him, for it was Saturday evening. On Saturdays by custom the fishing-fleet of Port Nassau made harbour before nightfall, and the crews kept a sort of decorous carnival before the Sabbath, of which they were strict observers. In the lower part of the town, by the quays, much buying and selling went on, in booths of sail-cloth lit as a rule by oil-flares. For close upon a week no boat ...
— Lady Good-for-Nothing • A. T. Quiller-Couch
... business, a father and two sons, to whom Squercum was a pest and a musquito, a running sore and a skeleton in the cupboard. It was not only in reference to Mr Longestaffe's affairs that they knew Squercum. The Bideawhiles piqued themselves on the decorous and orderly transaction of their business. It had grown to be a rule in the house that anything done quickly must be done badly. They never were in a hurry for money, and they expected their clients never to be in a hurry for work. Squercum was the very opposite ...
— The Way We Live Now • Anthony Trollope
... evident unhappiness, the son promised never to write again for the obnoxious periodical. The second number was so dull and decorous that Zachary Macaulay, who felt that, if the magazine went on through successive quarters reforming its tone in the same proportion, it would soon be on a level of virtue with the Christian Observer, withdrew his objection; and the ...
— Life and Letters of Lord Macaulay • George Otto Trevelyan
... piece of work for her, a silk quilt. No one had gone insane over crazy work then. This was shapely, decorous diamonds, with the name of the wearer, or a date, embroidered on each block. The Morgans had given her pieces from Paris and Venice and Holland, and even Hong Kong. Some were a hundred and more years old, and were gowns ...
— A Little Girl of Long Ago • Amanda Millie Douglas
... captain, when all had assumed a decorous silence, "what do you think that war ship supposed ...
— Ralph Granger's Fortunes • William Perry Brown
... for you every day, The zealous ones, who sorrow in your life. Undaunted by a century of strife, With urgent fingers still they point the way To drawing rooms, in decorous array, And moral Heavens where no casual wife May share your lot; where dice and ready knife Are barred; and feet are silent ...
— Carolina Chansons - Legends of the Low Country • DuBose Heyward and Hervey Allen
... single person in the room with whom she had the advantage of acquaintance, whose face her own could seek with a kind of right to response. But the sensation Duff Lindsay tried to sit still under was not simple. It had the novelty, the shock, of a plunge into the sea; behind his decorous countenance he gasped and blinked, with unfamiliar sounds in his ears. His soul seemed shudderingly repelling Laura's, yet the buffets themselves were enthralling. In the strangeness of it he made a mechanical movement to depart, picked up his stick, but ...
— Hilda - A Story of Calcutta • Sara Jeannette Duncan
... Mr. Sutherlan'," said Mrs. Glasford, in a final tone, and trying to smother the anger which she felt she had allowed to carry her further than was decorous, "we'll say nae mair aboot it at present; but I maun jist speak to the laird himsel', an' see what ...
— David Elginbrod • George MacDonald
... she opened her large dark eyes, sitting bolt upright in bed. She heard a slamming of doors, a growing hubbub in the usually decorous hallway outside, and her feminine curiosity almost conquered the aristocratic reserve, to impel her to rise and discover the origin ...
— The Ghost Breaker - A Novel Based Upon the Play • Charles Goddard
... (Abel Boyer, Letters of Wit, Politicks, and Morality, London, 1701, p. 362). But, she adds, since Collier has taught religion to the "Rhiming Trade, the Comick Muse in Tragick Posture sat" until she discovered Farquhar, whose language is amusing but decorous and whose plots are virtuous. This insistence on decorum and virtue indicates a concession to Collier and to the public. Thus in the preface to Love's Contrivance (1703), she reiterates her belief that comedy should amuse but ...
— The Busie Body • Susanna Centlivre
... in white, and if you were German, they brought you beer; if American, ice-cream. Beyond the tables was a stage, with footlights already set and orchestra tuning up, and a curtain on which was represented a gentleman making decorous love to a lady beside a fountain. As in a dream, Honora followed Peter to a table, and he handed ...
— The Crossing • Winston Churchill
... pupil of the transmuter of metals and prince of mountebanks and quacks—the expounder of Reuchlin de verbo mirifico, and lecturer in the unknown tongues—the follower of Trismegistus—cursed with bell, book and candle, by every decorous Church in Christendom—the redoubted Cornelius Agrippa; who, if he left not to his pupil Wierus the secret of the philosopher's stone or grand elixir, seems to have communicated a treasure perhaps equally rare and not less precious, the faculty of seeing a truth ...
— Discovery of Witches - The Wonderfull Discoverie of Witches in the Countie of Lancaster • Thomas Potts
... delights me. I am glad to think I have always liked him so well. I am sure that whenever he makes a mistake, it is a mistake; and that no man lives who has a grander and nobler scorn of every mean and dastard action. I would to Heaven it were decorous to pay him some public tribute of respect . . . O'Connell's speeches are the old thing: fretty, boastful, frothy, waspish at the voices in the crowd, and all that: but with no true greatness. . . . What a relief to turn to that noble letter of Carlyle's" (in ...
— The Life of Charles Dickens, Vol. I-III, Complete • John Forster
... when they fade away, leave a feeling of supernatural voluptuousness, which a man runs after for the remainder of his life. A single kiss had been enough. Never had rendezvous been spent in a manner more decorous or chaste, or, perhaps, more coldly, in a spot of which the surroundings were more gruesome, in presence of a more hideous divinity; for the mother had remained in Henri's imagination like some infernal, cowering thing, cadaverous, monstrous, savagely ferocious, ...
— The Girl with the Golden Eyes • Honore de Balzac
... a tone so reasonable, decorous and temperate as to wring unwilling admiration even from his opponents. He pointed out briefly the weak points that rendered the governor's position utterly untenable, ignored the implied warning of resistance to ...
— Four Years in Rebel Capitals - An Inside View of Life in the Southern Confederacy from Birth to Death • T. C. DeLeon
... and women honored the flag. In a theater, at any public gathering, a display of the national colors caused the men to bare reverently their heads, the women to clap their hands with decorous enthusiasm. Without doubt they were all agreed that it was a sacred duty to fight for one's country. How peculiar and illogical then, he reflected, to be horrified at the visible results of fighting for one's ...
— The Hidden Places • Bertrand W. Sinclair
... Later in the day there might probably be brawling and disputes betwixt the two parties—"town and gown," as they were later dubbed. But the early morning hour seemed to impose peace upon all spirits, and there was no hooting or brawling or rioting of any kind; but a decorous silence was observed, all faces being lifted upwards, as the sweet strains came floating from above, seeming to welcome the dawning day and the joyous season of ...
— For the Faith • Evelyn Everett-Green
... is the American Tory of this description: worthy, because honest and clean and free from vice; offensive, because totally destitute of republican principle. If stripped of his wealth, he might become a rich man's invaluable flunky, and carry the decorous prayer-book to church, bringing up the rear of the family with formalism. Toryism has a profound respect for external godliness, and remembers that the Southerner sympathizes with bishops, who, like Meade of Virginia, preach from the text, "Servants, obey your masters," ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 15, No. 92, June, 1865 • Various
... coldness can only come from our neglecting to stir up the gift that is in us. People reproach us with extravagant emotion: let us confess that we have never deserved that reproach half as much as we ought. The world's ideal of religion is decorous coldness—has not the world's ideal been our practice? We are afraid to be fervent, but our true danger is icy torpor. We sit frost-bitten and almost dead among the snows, and all the while the gracious sunshine is pouring down, that is able to melt the ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture - Ezekiel, Daniel, and the Minor Prophets. St Matthew Chapters I to VIII • Alexander Maclaren
... a certain decorous pause shall be made before the celebration of a marriage. Papers must be signed or banns published in church. But Father McFadden had lived so long on Inishrua that he had lost respect for law and perhaps forgotten what the law was. Besides, Andrew was King of the island by ...
— Lady Bountiful - 1922 • George A. Birmingham
... what the Emperor Napoleon has so happily called the logic of events,—that old, well-known logic by which the man who has once said A must say B, and he who has said B must say the whole alphabet. In a year we had a parlor with two lounges in decorous recesses, a fashionable sofa, and six chairs and a looking-glass, and a grate always shut up, and a hole in the floor which kept the parlor warm, and great, heavy curtains that kept out all the light that was not already excluded by the ...
— Household Papers and Stories • Harriet Beecher Stowe
... every experience. Primrose had known mating and childbearing, anxiety and content and jealousy and death; Mr. Constantine had, in his wandering life of the gentleman of leisure, experienced his moments of keen enjoyment, his tender and romantic interludes; Miss Le Pettit would know decorous wooing, prosperity, pain of giving birth as she duly presented her husband with an heir, sorrow as she saw her chestnut curls greying and her eye gathering the puckers of advancing years around its fading blue. Yet none of these would know as much as Loveday had known in the short life they ...
— The White Riband - A Young Female's Folly • Fryniwyd Tennyson Jesse
... advent had worn off by his second winter in Edinburgh, and, though it may be a weakness, novelty always counts for something in human affairs. Then, again, the quiet decorous men of Blair's circle knew more of Burns's ways and doings than at first, and what they came to know was not likely to increase their desire for (p. 091) intimacy with him. It was, it seems, notorious that Burns kept that formidable memorandum-book ...
— Robert Burns • Principal Shairp
... kilted and booted and coated and belted in the most beautiful and wholly correct attire for the hunt that could possibly have been contrived; that is, for a sedate cross-country bird stalk or a decorous trap shooting, but for a long night scramble over the frozen ground she was insufficiently clad. The other girls all wore heavy golf skirts and coats and were muffled to their eyes; even the big-bug lady wore a knitted comforter high round her throat. ...
— Andrew the Glad • Maria Thompson Daviess
... yes, pretty much in the same way you know Jim Bloxam. By the way, do you call him 'Jim'?" (The two girls nodded assent.) "Ah, I like to ask about these things: proprieties differ in different counties; it strikes me Fernshire is of the rigidly decorous order." ...
— Belles and Ringers • Hawley Smart
... mother, Spring has come! We've heard the Bluebird! Hurrah! Spring has come. We saw the Phebee on the top of the saw-mill!" Here Spring makes no sensation; takes no sudden leap into the seat of Winter, but comes in gently, like the law of primogeniture or the British Constitution. It is slow and decorous in its movements. It is conservative, treats its predecessor with much deference, and makes no sudden and radical changes in the face of things. It comes in with no Lord Mayor's Day, and blows no trumpets, and bends ...
— A Walk from London to John O'Groat's • Elihu Burritt
... it is derived from the cart, and signifies the draught or pull of the horses." The phrase "a prince's pelf" is reprobated, because pelf means properly "the scraps or shreds of taylors and of skinners." He gives strict rules for the decorous behaviour of ambassadors and all who address themselves to princes, being himself a courtier, and having probably exercised some diplomatic function. "I have seen," says he, "foreign ambassadors in the queen's presence laugh so dissolutely ...
— Memoirs of the Court of Queen Elizabeth • Lucy Aikin
... their conversation is dull and gloomy. There is often no want of sprightliness, wit, and humour. But then this sprightliness, never borders upon folly, for all foolish jesting is to be avoided, and it is always decorous. When vivacity makes its appearance among the Quakers; it is sensible, and it is uniformly in an ...
— A Portraiture of Quakerism, Volume I (of 3) • Thomas Clarkson
... Fair was attended with a good effect; for since its appearance the custom of resorting to the occasion in neighbouring parishes for the sake of holiday-making has been much abated and a great increase of decorous observance has taken place.' To that nothing ...
— Robert Burns - Famous Scots Series • Gabriel Setoun
... could not warm the imagination quite enough. He says, in speaking of the Carnival, "For my part, though I pretended to take no interest in the matter, I could have bandied confetti and nosegays as readily and riotously as any urchin there." These few words explain his magnetism. The decorous pretense of his observant calm could not make us forget the bursts of mirth and vigorous abandon which now and then revealed the flame of unstinted life in his heart. And I, watching constantly as I did, saw a riotous throw of the confetti, a mirthful smile of Carnival ...
— Memories of Hawthorne • Rose Hawthorne Lathrop
... see him keep a decorous distance from her. I felt he was acting upon deliberation; that he was trusting to the power of his insinuating address, his sophistry, to break down barriers. It was as if he felt himself at greater advantage, making no emotional ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker
... help us," said the consul. "My friend here is the victim of a curious annoyance;" and he stated the case in language so sympathetic and decorous as to restore some small shreds of the ...
— A Fearful Responsibility and Other Stories • William D. Howells
... and well-sounding name for a moderate sinecure. For more than a century, accordingly, it has existed on this footing; and its duties, like those of the other personages to whom we have just alluded, have been discharged with a decorous gravity and unobtrusive quietness, which has provoked no derision, merely because it has attracted ...
— Famous Reviews • Editor: R. Brimley Johnson
... should tie the knot, or that the dresses should be described in a newspaper. This was essentially a quiet marriage,—but it was quiet with a splendid quietude, and the obscurity of it was graceful and decorous. As soon as the thing was settled,—when it was a matter past doubt that all the Lovels were to sanction the marriage,—the two aunts went to work heartily. Another Lovel girl, hardly more than seen before by any of ...
— Lady Anna • Anthony Trollope
... Lordships; there is nothing sinister which can happen to you, in which we shall not be involved; and, if it should so happen, that we shall be subjected to some of those frightful changes which we have seen; if it should happen that your Lordships, stripped of all the decorous distinctions of human society, should, by hands at once base and cruel, be led to those scaffolds and machines of murder upon which great kings and glorious queens have shed their blood, amidst the prelates, amidst the nobles, amidst the magistrates, who ...
— The American Union Speaker • John D. Philbrick
... distinguished family-tree. ESTO PERPETUA! To have had somebody for a great-grandfather that was somebody is exciting. To be able to look back on long lines of ancestry that were rich, but respectable, seems decorous and all right. The present Earl of Warwick, I think, must have an idea that strict justice has been done him in the way of being launched properly into the world. I saw the Duke of Newcastle once, and ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 15, No. 90, April, 1865 • Various
... he studied the characters of the clergymen under him, he was just with his patronage, he endeavoured to be efficacious with his charges, he confirmed children in cold weather as well as in warm, he occasionally preached sermons, and he was beautiful and decorous in his gait of manner, as it behoves a clergyman of the Church of England to be. He liked to be master; but even to be master he would not encounter the abominable nuisance of a quarrel. When first coming to the diocese he had had some little difficulty with our Doctor; but the Bishop had ...
— Dr. Wortle's School • Anthony Trollope
... decided that his father's description of him as a retiring youth was really short of the mark. They walked along together down the quiet, bright streets; there were many people about, but nobody in a hurry, and all in Sunday clothes, bent on visiting or decorous pleasure-making. Everywhere was sunny and everything looked as if it had had its face washed; week days in the town always looked to Julia like Sundays, and Sundays, this Sunday in particular, ...
— The Good Comrade • Una L. Silberrad
... that had seemed to linger walked right on, not meeting each other's eye, and Shelley again become the angel child, turning in at his gate and walking up the path in a decorous manner with his schoolbooks under his arm. I first wondered if I shouldn't go warn Arline that her child had picked up some words that would get him nowhere at all with his doting pastor. Little could the fond woman dream, when she tucked him in after his prayers at night, that ...
— Ma Pettengill • Harry Leon Wilson
... "God bless him" for what he had done. This dear old man was my first tutor in Radicalism, and I was an apt pupil. I had taken no interest in politics, but had unconsciously reflected more or less the decorous Whiggism which had always surrounded me. I regarded "the poor" as folk to be educated, looked after, charitably dealt with, and always treated with most perfect courtesy, the courtesy being due from me, as a lady, to all equally, whether they were rich or poor. But to Mr. Roberts ...
— Annie Besant - An Autobiography • Annie Besant
... with some desperate battle turned by the valor of her charge, and the sight of the torn tricolor upheld in her little hands. That is what Cigarette hopes for—why not? There will always be a million of commonplace women ready to keep up the decorous traditions of their sex, and sit in safety over their needles by the side of their hearths. One little lioness here and there in a generation ...
— Under Two Flags • Ouida [Louise de la Ramee]
... as was said, to think evils even to intending them in order that they may be removed by means of what is civil, moral and spiritual. This is done when he considers that they are contrary to what is just and equitable, to what is honest and decorous and to what is good and true, contrary therefore to the peace, joy and blessedness of life. By these three means the Lord heals the love of man's will, in fear at first, it is true, but with love later. Still the evils are not separated from ...
— Angelic Wisdom about Divine Providence • Emanuel Swedenborg
... his eyes and was amazed—looking at the people and questioning them what had happened to their minister. Suddenly he flushed as a person struck by a friend, and then, as one blow followed another, he covered his face with both hands, sinking lower and lower in his chair, till even that decorous people were almost shaken in ...
— Kate Carnegie and Those Ministers • Ian Maclaren
... number of people. Strange to say, in spite of the overwhelming evidence that they had just heard, some few among the followers, whose love of the marvellous overpowered their reason, still maintained that the prisoner was the Sunchild. Nothing could be more decorous than the prisoner's behaviour when, after hearing the recantation that was read out to him by the Manager, he signed the document with his name and address, which we again withhold, and kissed the reliquary in ...
— Erewhon Revisited • Samuel Butler
... character, although there are a few phrases of a freer kind. Croker, who edited Lord Hervey's Memoirs, mentions that Hervey, answering one of her letters in 1737, in which she had complained that she was too old to inspire passion, after paying a compliment to her charms more gallant than decorous, said: "I should think anybody a great fool that said he liked spring better than summer merely because it is further from autumn, or that they loved green fruit better than ripe only because it was further from being rotten. I ever did, and believe ...
— Lady Mary Wortley Montague - Her Life and Letters (1689-1762) • Lewis Melville
... when some business had brought me into a corridor of one of the old court buildings facing the Place d'Armes, a loud voice from within one of the court-rooms arrested my own and the general ear. At once from all directions men came with decorous haste towards the spot whence it proceeded. I pushed in through a green door into a closely crowded room and found the Supreme Court of the State in session. A short, broad, big-browed man of an iron sort, with silver hair close shorn from a Roman ...
— Strange True Stories of Louisiana • George Washington Cable
... upon us the fact—so often forgotten—that our grandfathers were human beings. The ordinary historian reduces them to mere mechanical mummies; in Walpole's pages they are still living flesh and blood. Turn over any of the proper decorous history books, mark every passage where, for a moment, we seem to be transported to the past—to the thunders of Chatham, the drivellings of Newcastle, or the prosings of George Grenville, as they sounded in contemporary ears—and it will be safe to say that, on counting them up, ...
— Hours in a Library, Volume I. (of III.) • Leslie Stephen
... devotion, form half the houses of a recent settlement in a mining region. In South Africa, except at and near Johannesburg, one scarcely sees them. Drinking rarely obtrudes itself. What gambling there may be I know not, but at any rate there are no gambling-saloons. Nothing can be more decorous than the aspect of these new African towns, and the conduct of the inhabitants seldom belies the aspect. There is, of course, a free use of alcohol. But there is no shooting, such as goes on in American mining towns: crimes of ...
— Impressions of South Africa • James Bryce
... Stodgy I may be,—it was odd how that term of Dunny's rankled,—but I confess that I find chance traveling acquaintances boring and avoid them when I can. Unlike most of my countrymen, I suppose I am not gregarious, though I dine and week-end punctiliously, send flowers and leave cards at decorous intervals, and know people all the way from ...
— The Firefly Of France • Marion Polk Angellotti
... believe I write them at him! He has an eye of terrible and exacting truth. I feel myself on trial before him. He holds me up to a standard of sincerity that is killing me. Mrs. Sewell was bad enough; I was reasonably bad myself; but this! Couldn't you keep him away? Do you think it's exactly decorous to let your man-servant occupy a seat in your family pew? How do you suppose it ...
— The Minister's Charge • William D. Howells
... person quivered with indignant gratification as he saw Fenton in the role of a culprit, and he bent his look upon the notes spread out before him because he was aware that his eyes showed more satisfaction than was by any means decorous. ...
— The Philistines • Arlo Bates
... "dropping in" of an evening two or three times a week, when, if a quorum was present, a bowl of punch would be brewed, and sometimes a second and a third. The substitution for all this of the quiet and decorous family life of the Crabbes was naturally a hoary blow and grave discouragement to the village reveller, and contributed to make Crabbe's life at starting far from happy. His pursuits and inclinations, literary ...
— Crabbe, (George) - English Men of Letters Series • Alfred Ainger
... more disagreeable or disgusting performance. The sight of the resurrection of a whole convent of nuns, who rise from their graves and begin dancing like so many bacchantes, is revolting; and a sacred service in a church, accompanied by an organ on the stage, not very decorous. Neither does the music of Meyerbeer compensate for a fable which is a tissue of ...
— Great Italian and French Composers • George T. Ferris
... side of his adopted mother, and retaining fast hold of her hand, assumed a grave and decorous demeanor, such as might befit a person of matured taste and understanding, who should find himself in a temple dedicated to some worship which he did not recognize, but felt himself bound to respect. The exercises had not yet commenced, however, when the boy's ...
— Bible Stories and Religious Classics • Philip P. Wells
... not exchange this short, crazy, enchanting fantasy for a whole wilderness of seemly novels, proclaiming in decorous accents the undoubted truth that there are milestones ...
— The Ghost Ship • Richard Middleton
... association of billiards with the pursuit of sweetness and light may at first seem grotesque, but Mrs. Hilliard proved it to be not without warrant in sound philosophy; by her simple formula billiards stood to culture as the Salvation Army to the decorous body of the Church Militant, both alliances resting on the basic truth that some souls will prick ears only to the ...
— The Henchman • Mark Lee Luther
... inadvertently committed, Chrysantheme takes up her piece of wood, putting in its place my snake-skin drum; I shall therefore be in the middle between the two. It is really more correct, decidedly more proper; Chrysantheme is evidently a very decorous ...
— Serge Panine • Georges Ohnet
... in the lines of comfort. Of death she has no fears, for in the long chest in the kitchen lie a web of coarse white linen, two pennies covered with the same to keep down tired eyelids, decent white stockings, and a white cotton sun-bonnet—a decorous death-suit truly—and enough money in the little bag for self-respecting burial. The farmer buried his servant handsomely—good man, he knew the love of reticent grief for a 'kind' burial—and one day Harry's mother is to lie beside him in ...
— The Roadmender • Michael Fairless
... the general riff-raff of the place. Although the crowd was not so great, the meeting strongly reminded me of those scenes of infamy and disgrace in England—public executions; the conduct of the assembled throng on this occasion being the more decorous of the two. Precisely at twelve, the mob made a rush towards one corner of the open space, from which direction I saw the culprit advancing, in charge of thirty or forty well-dressed people (the committee appointed for the occasion being among the number). He was a stout man, and ...
— An Englishman's Travels in America - His Observations Of Life And Manners In The Free And Slave States • John Benwell
... hero of the sexual life. It is Till Eulenspiegel himself, the scurvy, comic rascal, the eternal dirty little boy with his witty and obscene gestures, who leers out of every measure of the tone-poem named for him, and twirls his fingers at his nose's end at all the decorous and respectable world. Here, for once, orchestral music is really wonderfully rascally and impudent, horns gleeful and windy and insolent, wood-wind puckish and obscene. Here a musical form reels hilariously and cuts capers and dances on bald heads. The variation ...
— Musical Portraits - Interpretations of Twenty Modern Composers • Paul Rosenfeld
... factor in a social situation. The delicate nuances and grades of attention given to different individuals moving in the same social circle are the superficial reflections of rivalries and conflicts beneath the smooth and decorous ...
— Introduction to the Science of Sociology • Robert E. Park
... entered at Caius 29th June 1667, migrating to St. John's, where he entered 2nd February 1668-69. Thomas Baker for once abandons his decorous reticence and states of Oates: "He was a lyar from the beginning, he stole and cheated his taylor of a gown, which he denied with horrid imprecations, and afterwards at a communion, being admonisht and advised by ...
— St. John's College, Cambridge • Robert Forsyth Scott
... other, will be his natural impulse; and this very circumstance seems to show us that to read a sermon needs an apology. For, why should he commit it to memory, or conceal his use of it, unless he felt that it was more natural, more decorous, to do without it? And so again, if he employs a manuscript, the more he appears to dispense with it, the more he looks off from it, and directly addresses his audience, the more will he be considered to preach; ...
— The Idea of a University Defined and Illustrated: In Nine - Discourses Delivered to the Catholics of Dublin • John Henry Newman
... you, Rhoda Hammond," she said sympathetically. "You must not mind our animal spirits. We just do slop over at this time, my dear. Wait till you see how gentle and decorous we have to be after the semester really begins. This is only letting off steam, ...
— Nan Sherwood at Rose Ranch • Annie Roe Carr
... me to-day, before rehearsal 'My dear little Nanteuil, there has never been anything between us. It is ridiculous.' He was extremely decorous, but he gave me to understand that we were in a false position with regard to one another, which could not go on indefinitely. You must know that Pradel has established a rule. Formerly he used to pick and choose ...
— A Mummer's Tale • Anatole France
... one had been found, Mr. Wales had started at once for the city. When he saw the child, he was dismayed. He had expected to see a girl of ten; this one was hardly five, and she had anything but the demure and decorous air which his Puritan mind esteemed becoming and appropriate in a little maiden. Her hair was black and curled tightly, instead of being brown and straight parted in the middle, and combed smoothly over her ears as his taste regulated; her eyes were black ...
— The Pot of Gold - And Other Stories • Mary E. Wilkins
... have two sitting-rooms: I call them so par excellence, for you may stand, or loll, or lean, or try any posture in them; but they are best for sitting; not squatting down Japanese fashion, but the more decorous use of the post——s which European usage has consecrated. I have two of these rooms on the third floor, and five sleeping, cooking, &c., rooms, on the fourth floor. In my best room is a choice collection ...
— The Works of Charles and Mary Lamb, Vol. 5 • Edited by E. V. Lucas
... the result that his bolt into the Salles de Jeu and his difficult extrication from them by the brawny, but liveried officials was fast becoming one of the events of the day. Sometimes Tinker would make his bolt from the outermost portal; sometimes, with the decorous air of one going to church, he would join the throng filing into the concert room, and bolt from the midst of it. The process of expulsion was always conducted with the greatest courtesy on either side; for his bolt had become an agreeable variety in the monotonous lives of ...
— The Admirable Tinker - Child of the World • Edgar Jepson
... her changing; to the last, those tell-tale hands apart, she would be comely and cynical, and would die as she had lived, secure "in the high places of laughter"—a laughter that, for all its geniality, struck him at times as richly sardonic—in the decent drapery of her fictitious youth; in a decorous piety, yet a little complicated, in the very reception of the last rites, by the amiable arching of her ...
— A Comedy of Masks - A Novel • Ernest Dowson and Arthur Moore
... the natives of which you may recognise by their characteristics as surely as Ophelia recognises her true-love by his cockle-hat and sandal shoon. There is the land of grave gestures and courteous inclinations, of dignified leave-takings and decorous greetings; where the ladies (like Richardson's Pamela) don the most charming round-eared caps and frilled negliges; where the gentlemen sport ruffles and bag-wigs and spotless silk stockings, and invariably exhibit shapely calves above their ...
— De Libris: Prose and Verse • Austin Dobson
... astonished to notice that if the reapers let more than two ears fall, in spite of her need she did not pick them up, for the gleaning assigned to the poor by law does not refer to quantities of more than two ears inadvertently dropped at one time. (50) Boaz also admired her grace, her decorous conduct, her modest demeanor. (51) When he learned who she was, he commended her for her attachment to Judaism. To his praise she returned: "Thy ancestors found no delight even in Timna, (52) the daughter of a royal house. As for me, I am a member ...
— THE LEGENDS OF THE JEWS VOLUME IV BIBLE TIMES AND CHARACTERS - FROM THE EXODUS TO THE DEATH OF MOSES • BY LOUIS GINZBERG
... deliciously carried out by Turner with the Daedalus side of him, in the inlaying of these white spots on the Indiaman's deck, as if he were working a precious toy in ebony and ivory. But Turner did not paint either of the sea-pieces for the sake of these decorous arrangements; neither did he paint the Scarborough as a professor of physical science, to show you the level of low tide on the Yorkshire coast; nor the Indiaman to show you the force of impact in a ...
— Lectures on Landscape - Delivered at Oxford in Lent Term, 1871 • John Ruskin
... 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 well-contained caste. ...
— Half A Chance • Frederic S. Isham
... her mother only hoped to heaven it would last the day out; perhaps Sir Redmond would be able to extract some sort of a promise from her in that mood, Mrs. Lansell reflected, as she watched Beatrice chatting to her two cavaliers, with the most decorous impartiality. Sir Redmond seemed in high spirits, which argued well; Mrs. Lansell gave herself up to the pleasure of the drive with a heart free from anxiety. Not only was Beatrice at her best; Dorman's mood was nothing short ...
— Her Prairie Knight • B.M. Sinclair, AKA B. M. Bower
... have observed a steady regularity of feeding. Five days in the week we have our 'Rotherham steak'—that mystery of mysteries—or our 'chop and chop to follow,' with the indispensable wedge of Cheddar—unless it is preferred stewed or toasted—and on Saturday decorous variety is afforded in a plate of the world-renowned 'Cheddar' pudding. It is of this latter luxury that we are now assembled to partake, and that with all fitting ceremony and observance. As we sit, like pensioners ...
— Old and New London - Volume I • Walter Thornbury
... rowdy Alsatia, now wearing as decorous a face as any other portion of London; and, adjoining it, the avenues and brick squares of the Temple, with that historic garden, close upon the river-side, and still rich in shrubbery and flowers, where the partisans of York and Lancaster plucked ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 11, Issue 67, May, 1863 • Various
... the ancestral hall. The sunlight edged it like a bright border. The doors were wide open, and Dong-Yung saw the decorous rows of square chairs and square tables set rhythmically along the walls, and the covered dais at the head for the guest of honor. Long crimson scrolls, sprawled with gold ideographs, hung from ceiling to floor. A rosewood cabinet, filled with vases, peach bloom, imperial yellow, and turquoise ...
— The Best Short Stories of 1919 - and the Yearbook of the American Short Story • Various
... given over to the worms and the biographers. Fortunate Rachel, resting in serene confidence that the two would be fellow-laborers! It is the unhappy fate of her survivors to have reached a day in which biographers have grown impatient of the decorous delay which their lowly coadjutors demand. They can no longer wait for the lingering soul to yield up its title-deeds before they enter in and take possession; but, fired with an evil energy, they outstrip the worms and torment us ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 14, No. 85, November, 1864 • Various
... the title and the style of the King of Navarre, and honored the memory of his noble mother with every manifestation of regret and veneration. This melancholy event caused the postponement of the marriage ceremony for a short time, as it was not deemed decorous that epithalamiums should be shouted and requiems chanted from the same lips in the same hour. The knell tolling the burial of the dead would not blend harmoniously with the joyous peals of the marriage bell. Henry was not at all annoyed by this delay, for no impatient ardor urged him to his ...
— Henry IV, Makers of History • John S. C. Abbott
... the rise of an entirely new style of English prose. The ancient and universal restraints were swept away, the decorous stateliness of all the buried centuries was abandoned, and there arose a band of writers, to whom De Quincey and Ruskin were the leaders, who withdrew all veils from their emotions, threw away all the shackles ...
— The Glory of English Prose - Letters to My Grandson • Stephen Coleridge
... resembled one of the big gold-colored lions that live in the wilds of the Harpeth Mountains out beyond Paradise Ridge. His head, with its tawny thatch that ought to have waved majestically but which was sleek and decorous to the point of worldliness, was poised on his neck and shoulders with a singularly strong line that showed through a silk soft collar, held together by an exquisitely worldly amethyst silk scarf which, it was a shock to see, matched glints from eyes back under his heavy gold brows with what appeared ...
— The Heart's Kingdom • Maria Thompson Daviess
... and Dr. Service. Both of these men had protested against the street-speaking at this time; but of course, when it came to comrades in trouble, they could not resist the appeal to their sympathies. Such is the difficulty of entirely respectable and decorous "parlour" Socialists, in their dealings with the wayward children of the movement, the "impossibilists" and "direct actionists" and other sowers of proletarian wild oats. Dr. Service produced a wad ...
— Jimmie Higgins • Upton Sinclair
... bonnets their faces were placid, but their eyes were sad. Their schoolrooms are hospital wards, the tiny chapel is piled high with supplies; in the refectory, where decorous rows of small girls were wont to file in to the convent meals, unthinkable horrors of operations go on all day and far into the night. The Hall of the Holy Rosary is a convalescent room, where soldiers smoke and play at cards. The Room ...
— Kings, Queens And Pawns - An American Woman at the Front • Mary Roberts Rinehart
... establishment in a side street away from the Cannebiere. It flattered my vanity a little to be able to say that I had a corner table always reserved in the Salon des Palmiers, otherwise Salon Blanc, where the atmosphere was legitimist and extremely decorous besides—even in Carnival time. "Nine tenths of the people there," I said, "would be of your political opinions, if that's an inducement. Come along. Let's be festive," I ...
— The Arrow of Gold - a story between two notes • Joseph Conrad
... intelligent adolescent. At the approach of all such things he must have acquired the habit of the modest cough, the infectious trick of the nice evasion. How can "Kappa" expect inspiration from the decorous resultants who satisfy these conditions? What brand can ever be lit at altars that have borne no fire? And you find the secondary schoolmaster who complies with these restrictions becoming the zealous and grateful agent of the tendencies that have made him what ...
— An Englishman Looks at the World • H. G. Wells
... her. It was done in surprise and embarrassed formality. He knew, when the moment was past that his parents had perceived that Susannah needed more decorous training. He concurred in believing this to be desirable, for the manners that had surrounded him were very stiff. Yet the memory of the greeting remained with him, a thing to be wondered at while he turned the whispering leaves of ...
— The Mormon Prophet • Lily Dougall
... tattooed above the region of his heart. Mr. Fairfax had been two months at Hale when Lady Geraldine left on that dutiful visit to her father, and necessary interviewing of milliners and dressmakers; and he was, it is just possible, a little tired of decorous country-house life, with its weekly dinner-parties and perpetual influx of county families to luncheon, and its unfailing croquet. He felt, too, that at such a time it would, be perhaps safer for him to ...
— The Lovels of Arden • M. E. Braddon
... dead father and mother, to put this ruinous vagary from you, to abandon this preposterous journey, and to stay quietly here in Sampaolo. Then, if you must open up the past, if you must get into communication with your distant cousin, I 'll help you to find some other, some sane and decorous ...
— The Lady Paramount • Henry Harland
... but of the Bideawhiles there were three in the business, a father and two sons, to whom Squercum was a pest and a musquito, a running sore and a skeleton in the cupboard. It was not only in reference to Mr Longestaffe's affairs that they knew Squercum. The Bideawhiles piqued themselves on the decorous and orderly transaction of their business. It had grown to be a rule in the house that anything done quickly must be done badly. They never were in a hurry for money, and they expected their clients never to be ...
— The Way We Live Now • Anthony Trollope
... said he in a low voice, and he moved away with a decorous smile of self-satisfaction at being able clearly to understand and ...
— War and Peace • Leo Tolstoy
... scene of the fifth act of the concluding plays. [In this edition, scene iii., act v.] It would be unbecoming in me to be more diffuse on this subject. A translator stands connected with the original author by a certain law of subordination which makes it more decorous to point out excellences than defects; indeed, he is not likely to be a fair judge of either. The pleasure or disgust from his own labor will mingle with the feelings that arise from an afterview of the ...
— The Works of Frederich Schiller in English • Frederich Schiller
... him, rejecting, certainly with good reason, the fanatical panegyrics of some French and English writers of the last century. Upon the whole, we are inclined to believe that Epicurus was an apathetic, decorous, formal man, who was able, without much difficulty, to cultivate a measured and even habit of mind, who may have occasionally indulged in sensual gratifications to prove that he thought them lawful, but who generally preferred, as a matter of taste, the exercises of the intellect to the ...
— Christianity and Greek Philosophy • Benjamin Franklin Cocker
... papas, of course, and their brothers, and their relations; it would not be decorous to love any one else," ...
— The Rector of St. Mark's • Mary J. Holmes
... to bear in mind, that Samuel B. Comstock, the ringleader of the mutiny, was an officer, (being a boat-steerer,) and as is customary, ate in the cabin. The conduct and deportment of the Captain towards this individual, was always decorous and gentlemanly, a proof of intentions long premeditated to destroy the ship. Some of the crew were determined to leave the ship provided she touched at Fannings Island, and we believe had concerted a plan of escape, but of which ...
— A Narrative of the Mutiny, on Board the Ship Globe, of Nantucket, in the Pacific Ocean, Jan. 1824 • William Lay
... quite unable to prevent it, while everything he said was treated as a joke by his unwelcome father-in-law. It was a coarse time, and Wolsey's was not a refined or spiritual establishment, but it was decorous, and Randall had such an affection and respect for the innocence of his sister's young son, that he could not bear to have him exposed to the company of one habituated to the licentiousness of the mercenary soldier. At first ...
— The Armourer's Prentices • Charlotte M. Yonge
... it were, the decorous discipline of the room by clapping his hands and saying "Sho!" he passed up the narrow aisle of benches, replacing the forgotten arithmetic, and picking up from the desks here and there certain fragmentary pieces of plaster and crumbling wood that ...
— Cressy • Bret Harte
... impetuous ones slackened their pace, and four very demure little maidens entered the dining-room a moment later in a manner as decorous and restrained as the most ...
— The Carroll Girls • Mabel Quiller-Couch
... that licensed jester, whose jingling cap and motley coat concealed more genius than ever mustered in the saloon of Ninon or of Madame Geoffrin, was succeeded by writers as decorous and as ...
— The Miscellaneous Writings and Speeches of Lord Macaulay, Vol. 2 (of 4) - Contributions To The Edinburgh Review • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... controlled have become cold, with a dreary and formal Protestantism, without poetry or life. But the Church of England has survived two revolutions and all the changes of human thought, and is still a mighty power, decorous, beautiful, conservative, yet open to all the liberalizing influences of an age of science and philosophy. Cranmer, though a scholastic, seems to have perceived that nothing is more misleading and uncertain and unsatisfactory than any truth pushed out to its severest logical conclusions without reference ...
— Beacon Lights of History, Volume VI • John Lord
... came out. Charles Wrackham's name was in it all right, and poor Antigone's. I'm sure it made her sick to see it there. Furny had been very solemn and decorous in his article; but in private his profanity was awful. He said it only remained now for Charles Wrackham ...
— The Return of the Prodigal • May Sinclair
... Jos——friend!" He smiles with modest sweetness. "G. W. Tarbox doesn't run after money, and consequently he never runs past much without picking it up." They both laugh in decorous moderation. The horsemen are drawing near; they are Acadians. "I admit I love to make money. But that's not my chief pleasure. My chief pleasure is the ...
— Bonaventure - A Prose Pastoral of Acadian Louisiana • George Washington Cable
... miles; a man might go down to primal depths, might drop even the restraint of the human in outcries and struggles as free as a tortured beast's. It may be that solitude sees more such scenes than a decently decorous world would ...
— Stories by American Authors, Volume 9 • Various
... in the company of others were separate personalities and to pass from one to the other called for making up; for schooling of expression and the recovery of a suave exterior. In this process, however, he had from habit acquired celerity, so the delay was not a marked one before, with a decorous face, unstamped of either passion or brooding, he opened the door, to find Conscience waiting at ...
— The Tyranny of Weakness • Charles Neville Buck
... in 1805, it achieved an immediate success. The vividness of its descriptive passages, the buoyant rush of its meter, the deep romantic glow suffusing all its pages, took by storm a public familiar to weariness with the decorous abstractions of the eighteenth century poets. The first edition, a sumptuous quarto, was exhausted in a few weeks; an octavo edition of fifteen hundred was sold out within the year; and before 1830, forty-four thousand copies were needed ...
— Lady of the Lake • Sir Walter Scott
... own? We feel amiable, genteel, and refined; we detest the appearance of low impropriety, and would take a good deal of trouble to put it down; we look very kindly on the world in general, if the low people who are in it would only become as decorous as ourselves. In the old republics, the case was different. There men had a theory, even if a bad one, and they stuck to it through good report and through bad report. The theory was the spirit of the community, and its members sacrificed to it their whole individuality. ...
— Chambers's Edinburgh Journal, No. 455 - Volume 18, New Series, September 18, 1852 • Various
... it always with bated breath, and a capital letter was implied in his intonation; the Work was one on the Interpretation of Prophecy. Unlike Lady Georgina, who was tart and crisp, Mr. Marmaduke Ashurst was devout and decorous; where she said 'pack of fools,' he talked with unction of 'the mental deficiencies of our poorer brethren.' But his religious opinions and his stockbroking had got strangely mixed up at the wash somehow. He was convinced that the British nation ...
— Miss Cayley's Adventures • Grant Allen
... profession. Generally ignorant, often dissipated, and only superficially acquainted with his duties, the greater part of his time was given over to gambling, drinking, and other objectionable amusements. Little care was taken to preserve a properly decorous behavior, except when officiating in the church, when they read with an absurd assumption of dignity, without understanding a single word. The conventos are often full of girls and children, all of whom help themselves with their fingers out of a common dish. The worthy ...
— The Former Philippines thru Foreign Eyes • Fedor Jagor; Tomas de Comyn; Chas. Wilkes; Rudolf Virchow.
... Malcolm had his new hack, he rode him behind his mistress in the park, and nothing could be more decorous than the behaviour of both horse and groom. It was early, and in Rotten Row, to his delight, they met the lady of rebuke. She and Florimel pulled up simultaneously, greeted, and had a little talk. When they parted, and the lady came to pass Malcolm, whom she had not suspected, ...
— The Marquis of Lossie • George MacDonald
... associated with these recollections, and many changes came about before they had being. A necessary reflection for the purposes of these adventures, which at once subside into their accustomed train, and shunning all flighty anticipations or wayward wanderings, pursue their steady and decorous course. ...
— The Life And Adventures Of Nicholas Nickleby • Charles Dickens
... the apparatus of eating and drinking, the centre laden with every variety of comestibles, interspersed at intervals with tall epergnes and other silver ornaments sacred to all that's aesthetically captivating in fruit and flower; while in the rear, calm, collected and decorous, stand a row of middle-aged ministering persons from Gunter's. There are no chairs at the buffet. If you sup there, you must sup standing—no great hardship, as the table is of course of a height just convenient for the purpose—and you can either ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Vol. 12, No. 32, November, 1873 • Various
... our New England society, let him not give it the grim visage of Moloch, the brow knitted by revenge, the face black with settled hate, and the bloodshot eye emitting livid fires of malice. Let him draw, rather, a decorous, smooth-faced, bloodless demon; a picture in repose, rather than in action; not so much an example of human nature in its depravity, and in its paroxysms of crime, as an infernal being, a fiend, in the ordinary display and development ...
— The Great Speeches and Orations of Daniel Webster • Daniel Webster
... fragrant with buckeye blossoms. When the body was deposited in the box, Tennessee's Partner drew over it a piece of tarred canvas, and gravely mounting the narrow seat in front, with his feet upon the shafts, urged the little donkey forward. The equipage moved slowly on, at that decorous pace which was habitual with "Jenny" even under less solemn circumstances. The men—half curiously, half jestingly, but all good-humoredly—strolled along beside the cart; some in advance, some a little in the rear of the homely catafalque. But, whether ...
— Selected Stories • Bret Harte
... pwes, or plays in the Burmese character. These were acted by little figures wonderfully manipulated by strings behind the scenes; the holder of the string also supplied any amount of dialogue (not always of the most decorous description), and also all the latest and coarsest jokes from the bazaar. To the Europeans these entertainments offered scanty amusement, but to natives they proved enthralling. An audience would sit spell-bound and motionless for a whole ...
— The Road to Mandalay - A Tale of Burma • B. M. Croker
... some men, I believe, who have, or think they have, a very small share of vanity. Such may speak of their literary fame in a decorous style of diffidence. But I confess, that I am so formed by nature and by habit, that to restrain the effusion of delight, on having obtained such fame, to me would be truly painful. Why then should I suppress it? Why 'out of the abundance of ...
— Life Of Johnson, Vol. 1 • Boswell, Edited by Birkbeck Hill
... volatile Polynesian in this, as in all other respects, is our grave and decorous North American Indian. While the former bestows a name in accordance with some humorous or ignoble trait, the latter seizes upon what is deemed the most exalted or warlike: and hence, among the red tribes, we have the truly patrician appellations of "White Eagles," ...
— Omoo: Adventures in the South Seas • Herman Melville
... black dress, with easy unrestrained manners.... The lecture might have been a newspaper article, the first chapter of a book of travels, or the speech of a long-winded American Ambassador at a Mansion House dinner. All was exceedingly decorous and diplomatic, slightly gilded here and there with those commonplace laudations that stir a British public into the utterance of patriotic plaudits. A more inoffensive entertainment could hardly be imagined; and when the six sections into which the lady had divided ...
— The Magnificent Montez - From Courtesan to Convert • Horace Wyndham
... indignant complaint. It will be remembered by some of my readers, that, not long since, during a session of the House of Lords, he gave the lie direct to one of the peers,—an occurrence almost without precedent in that decorous body. Far different from this was the tone in which Lord Thurlow, while Lord-Chancellor, asserted his independence and vindicated his title to respect in his memorable rebuke addressed to the Duke of Grafton. If the testimony of English travellers in this country is to ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 12, August, 1863, No. 70 - A Magazine of Literature, Art, and Politics • Various
... victim of it would return to her when he had lost his wife. Accordingly, a few weeks later, Selma was granted a divorce nisi and the right to resume her maiden name. She had decided, however, to retain the badge of marriage as a decorous social prefix, and to call ...
— Unleavened Bread • Robert Grant
... necessary to put in force because of the seditious character of many of the vernacular papers has done much to purify the Indian press, so that while many of the papers retain an independent line, their criticisms are couched in sufficiently decorous language. ...
— India and the Indians • Edward F. Elwin
... pillar-box. The fresh air reproached me for the unreasonable indoor life I had been leading, and invited me to remain outside. It was already dark. An early touch of frost in the November air rendered it exhilarating. I walked along the decorous, residential roads of St. John's Wood feeling less remote from my kind, more in sympathy with the humdrum dramas in progress behind the rows of lighted windows. Now and then a garden gate opened and a man in evening dress, and a woman, a vague, dainty mass of satin and frills and fur, emerged, ...
— The Morals of Marcus Ordeyne • William J. Locke
... and these might be divided into two classes. 1st. The continental English—the daughters chiefly of broken adventurers, whom debt or dishonour had driven from their own country. These poor girls had never known the advantages of settled homes, decorous example, or honest Protestant education; resident a few months now in one Catholic school, now in another, as their parents wandered from land to land—from France to Germany, from Germany to Belgium—they had picked ...
— The Professor • (AKA Charlotte Bronte) Currer Bell
... conquering territory on paper, France was persuaded to set up a naval station in Gorilla-land. The northern and the southern shore each had a king, whose consent, after a careless fashion, was considered decorous. His Majesty of the North was old King Glass[FN1] and his chief "tradesman," that is, his premier, was the late Toko, a shrewd and far-seeing statesman. His Majesty of the South was Rapwensembo, known to the English as King William, to the French ...
— Two Trips to Gorilla Land and the Cataracts of the Congo Volume 1 • Richard F. Burton
... the General, in terms which made me almost think that this quasi-maternal love extended itself beyond the children. The idea, however, was a mistaken one, arising from the strength of her language, to which I was then unaccustomed. I have since become aware that nothing can be more decorous than old Mrs. Upton, the excellent head-nurse at Hardover Lodge; and no gentleman more discreet in his conduct ...
— Mrs. General Talboys • Anthony Trollope
... nor is there number from another number and unity, because they are not the same absolute and infinite. Therefore was it well said by a theologian that as the fountain of light far exceeds not only our intellects, but also the divine, it is decorous that one should not discourse with words, but that with silence alone it should ...
— The Heroic Enthusiast, Part II (Gli Eroici Furori) - An Ethical Poem • Giordano Bruno
... this scene of the quarrel between Mowbray and Bolingbroke seems introduced for the purpose of showing by anticipation the characters of Richard and Bolingbroke. In the latter there is observable a decorous and courtly checking of his anger in subservience to a predetermined plan, especially in his calm speech after receiving sentence of banishment compared with Mowbray's unaffected lamentation. In the one, all is ambitious hope of something yet to come; in the other it is desolation ...
— Shakespeare, Ben Jonson, Beaumont and Fletcher • S. T. Coleridge
... "Too decorous, Comrade Jackson. I came over here principally, it is true, to be at your side, should you be in any way persecuted by scoundrels. But at the same time I confess that at the back of my mind there lurked a hope that stirring adventures might come my way. I had heard so much of the ...
— Psmith, Journalist • Pelham Grenville Wodehouse
... and handkerchief, And dim and decorous mirth, With ham and sherry, they'll meet to bury The ...
— The Collected Poems of Rupert Brooke • Rupert Brooke
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