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More "Disillusion" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... brave enough to face this misfortune nor bad enough to tamper with that brother's crude ideals for the sake of his own gain. From the length of his own experience, from the present weariness of his soul, he looked upon Alec more than ever as a boy to be shielded from the shock of further disillusion with regard to himself. He had not had Alec's weal a thorn in his conscience for ten months without coming to feel that, if merely for the sake of his own comfort, he would not shoulder that burden again. Now this conception he had of Alec as a weaker man, and of ...
— What Necessity Knows • Lily Dougall
... Gleason was herself a hero-worshiper, or, more strictly speaking, a heroine-worshiper. At present Dr. Breen was her cult, and she was apt to lie in wait for her idol, to beam upon it with her suggestive eyes, and evidently to expect it to say or do something remarkable, but not to suffer anything like disillusion or disappointment in any event. She would sometimes offer it suddenly a muddled depth of sympathy in such phrases as, "Too bad!" or, "I don't see how you keep- up?" and darkly insinuate that she appreciated all that Grace was doing. She seemed to rejoice in keeping herself at ...
— Henry James, Jr. • William Dean Howells
... moment, only, her mind dwelt upon herself. Then all thought of self was merged in the realisation of his loneliness, his suffering, his bitter disillusion. To have found her dead, would have been hard; to have lost her living, was almost past bearing. Would it cost him his faith in God, in ...
— The White Ladies of Worcester - A Romance of the Twelfth Century • Florence L. Barclay
... the question; but in reality he was studying the exquisite delicacy of the face turned so wistfully upon him, and the lovely lines of the slim throat and rounded chin—"So beautiful a creature"—he was saying within himself—"And must she also suffer pain and disillusion like all the rest of her ...
— Temporal Power • Marie Corelli
... into the house, groaning in spirit, but thankful that she had taken it for granted that he had secured their release in the manner indicated. He did not propose to disillusion her. It would be time enough to take the blame when the blame came along. Probably old Derek would simply be amused and laugh at the whole bally affair like a sportsman. Freddie cheered up considerably at ...
— The Little Warrior - (U.K. Title: Jill the Reckless) • P. G. Wodehouse
... of disappointment and disillusion). Down't awsk me, Miste Jornsn. The kepn's naow clawss ...
— Captain Brassbound's Conversion • George Bernard Shaw
... the groom quickly, and naturally, perhaps, bred contempt and disillusion. His coarseness offended every susceptibility; he was frankly impossible in such an intimate relation; and after she had given birth to a daughter in Holland, she arranged a separation, for which the groom was, at least, as grateful as herself. The child—the ...
— Love Romances of the Aristocracy • Thornton Hall
... not then have revealed myself. It was all too marvellous, too hard to comprehend. The old doubts of my reality, of the realness of everything I had seen, surged up again, and swept over me in a tide of disillusion. ...
— The Certainty of a Future Life in Mars • L. P. Gratacap
... clear, Nature and nothing else. Have I lost anything in getting down to fact instead of to fancy? Have I shut my eyes in pain—pain for disillusion? No—now I know that my home is not in Nature; there is no awe and splendour in her which can keep me with her. Oh, far beyond is the true splendour, the infinite source of awe and love which ...
— The Poetry Of Robert Browning • Stopford A. Brooke
... The disillusion was complete. The slices of veal were like boiled boot-soles; a muddy fluid had taken the place of the lobster; the fish-stew was unrecognisable; mushroom growths had sprouted over the soup, and an intolerable smell tainted ...
— Bouvard and Pecuchet - A Tragi-comic Novel of Bourgeois Life • Gustave Flaubert
... settle to nothing till he had seen her again; there was a curious jealousy in his heart about Ashton; he would have given anything he possessed to be able to disillusion her, but knew it was impossible without ...
— The Phantom Lover • Ruby M. Ayres
... of hope for better things, while in the page of Mr. Pulitzer there is no such qualification of the disillusion. Both are enamoured of the beauty of those daughters of Mammon, and of the distinction of our iron-clad youth, the athletic, well-groomed, well-tailored worldlings who hurry up-town from their banks ...
— Imaginary Interviews • W. D. Howells
... cries in the last disillusion, "is science, since this people abounding in scholars commits abominations worthy of the Huns and worse than theirs, because they are systematic, cold-blooded, voluntary, and have for an excuse, neither passion nor hunger?" And ...
— The George Sand-Gustave Flaubert Letters • George Sand, Gustave Flaubert
... conquer the passions that have blinded our reason. We have been enrolled in the army of thoughtlessness; the time has come to enroll in the army of God. We have followed a false ideal of honor; we must disillusion ourselves and the world. If men declare that the preservation of courage and manliness demand that we fight, let us lead them to the fight, not against each other, but against all that is unrighteous and undesirable in our national life. Men still cling to an ancient conception of national ...
— Prize Orations of the Intercollegiate Peace Association • Intercollegiate Peace Association
... had confessed it with compunction and penitence. Crispus had wished to transform her into an angel, to raise her to heights where love for Christ alone existed, and she had fallen in love with an Augustian. The very thought of that filled his heart with horror, strengthened by a feeling of disillusion and disappointment. No, no, he could not forgive her. Words of horror burned his lips like glowing coals; he struggled still with himself not to utter them, but he shook his emaciated hands over ...
— Quo Vadis - A Narrative of the Time of Nero • Henryk Sienkiewicz
... his brain he fought—fought against disillusion, claiming exemption for at least one woman from these sweeping denunciations—the woman ...
— The Kingdom Round the Corner - A Novel • Coningsby Dawson
... ancestors—in such an appalling minority; and it certainly surprised me to find that Ireland and Germany were responsible for so large a proportion of the population. When I walked in the streets or visited the stores or public buildings disillusion trod close on my heels: I was constantly accosting, or being accosted by, persons of Irish or German or other foreign nationality, who, though displaying characteristics that somehow distinguished them from their countrymen in Europe, did not fall in with my ideal of the American people. I do not ...
— Lippincott's Magazine, Vol. 22, September, 1878 • Various
... heaven-rending passion—yea, when for her every veil seemed rent and a terrible and sacred creative darkness covered the earth—then—after all this wonder and miracle—in crept a poisonous grey snake of disillusionment, a poisonous grey snake of disillusion that bit her to madness, so that she really was a ...
— Aaron's Rod • D. H. Lawrence
... for whom it was impossible to feel indifference; one either hated him or became fascinated by his curious and peculiar charm. This quality led many admirers to remain faithful to him even after disillusion had shattered their former friendship, and who, whilst refusing to speak to him any more, yet retained for him a deep affection which not even the conviction that it had been misplaced could alter. This is a remarkable ...
— Cecil Rhodes - Man and Empire-Maker • Princess Catherine Radziwill
... unconscious appeal, but in Nature's products knowledge adds to admiration. The deeper you probe, the more you reveal, until you come to mysteries beyond our solving." He added with some dryness: "It's often otherwise with man's work; knowledge means disillusion. You see how the ...
— Blake's Burden • Harold Bindloss
... help it. The younger members of the Wragg family were eying her sourly through the glass partition. They seemed to be nice girls too, and she made up her mind to disillusion them speedily if they thought that she harbored designs on the callow youth whom they probably regarded as their own ...
— The Silent Barrier • Louis Tracy
... that society has really developed so successfully as it might have done; many believe that it finds itself in a cul-de-sac. But what is to be done? The experienced can see that many of the offered reforms are but the repetition of old mistakes which will involve us in the unhappy cycle of disillusion and failure. It is not to be wondered at, therefore, if men everywhere are seeking for a sign, a glimpse of a scheme of life, a view of reality, a hint of human destiny and the true outcome of human effort, ...
— Bergson and His Philosophy • J. Alexander Gunn
... "She's another disillusion. She's idle and dirty. And Potifer never does a stroke of work if he can help it. Moral—don't bother your head about martyrs. There's generally some ...
— The Coryston Family • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... how long she sat absorbed in her speculations, and still less had she any idea that the man beside her was for the second time wondering if she, too, had fallen under the casual Arthur's spell, and reflecting regretfully that he could not well disillusion her ...
— Juggernaut • Alice Campbell
... and golden dreams were succeeded by despondency and disillusion; then supervened years of impatient waiting,—a standing with folded arms when so much remained to be done, a time of despair, of restless suffering. But the Jew had acquired his franchise, and gratefully he remembered those to whom he owed this ...
— Stories by Foreign Authors: German • Various
... clincher. Anyone who believed Metamorphizer had salesappeal just wasnt all there. But why should I disillusion her and wound her pride? Down underneath her rough exterior I supposed she could be as sensitive as I; and I hope I am not ...
— Greener Than You Think • Ward Moore
... chill and disillusion was extremely disagreeable to him, and, by the time the scene was half-way through, he had almost ceased to watch her. Edward Wallace, who had seen her some two or three times in the part, was perfectly conscious of the change, and had ...
— Miss Bretherton • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... Sylvie Hermenstein had acted wisely by removing herself from association, or "blind contact" with her would-be lover,—and yet, though she was aware that her doing so had caused a certain dispersal of the atmosphere which almost veered towards complete disillusion, she found nevertheless, that Rome as she had said, was "dull"; her heart was empty, and longing for she knew not what. And that deep longing she felt could not have been completely gratified by the ...
— The Master-Christian • Marie Corelli
... comforts itself with its indubitable conquests there. This happened earlier to the romanticists (in a way which I have tried to describe in the subjoined paper on Shelley) although their poetic and political illusions did not suffer them to perceive it. It is happening now, after disillusion, to some radicals and mathematicians like Mr. Bertrand Russell, and to others of us who, perhaps without being mathematicians or even radicals, feel that the sphere of what happens to exist is too alien and accidental to absorb all the play of a free mind, whose function, after it has come to clearness ...
— Winds Of Doctrine - Studies in Contemporary Opinion • George Santayana
... retarded a little by habit, spreads slowly through all the subsidiary impulses, and a whole tract of life becomes inexplicably colourless. What was formerly full of zest, and so obviously worth doing that it raised no questions, has now grown dreary and purposeless: with a sense of disillusion we inquire the meaning of life, and decide, perhaps, that all is vanity. The search for an outside meaning that can compel an inner response must always be disappointed: all "meaning" must be at bottom ...
— Mysticism and Logic and Other Essays • Bertrand Russell
... with exceeding diligence and care, marvelling, it must be confessed, at the taste of the Fairy Queen. The accessories to his own composition are in rapid progress. Most of the fairies have been put in, and the gradual change from glamour to disillusion, cunningly conveyed by a stream of cold grey morning light entering the magic cavern from realms of upper earth, to deaden the glitter, pale the colouring, and strip, as it were, the tinsel where it strikes. On the Rhymer himself our artist has bestowed an infinity of pains, preserving ...
— M. or N. "Similia similibus curantur." • G.J. Whyte-Melville
... about France what Pericles felt of Athens—unique value in her, nothing else mattering; but his theory of politics was Bismarck's. He had one illusion—France; and one disillusion—mankind, including Frenchmen, and his colleagues not least. His principles for the peace can be expressed simply. In the first place, he was a foremost believer in the view of German psychology that the German understands and can understand nothing but intimidation, that he is without ...
— The Economic Consequences of the Peace • John Maynard Keynes
... know the mother who complains that her boys did not turn out just the way she wanted them to—although they are very good boys. After they have grown up she suddenly realizes one day how far they are from her in spirit. She could have avoided the disillusion by recognizing early enough that the interests and instincts of her boys were healthy ones, notwithstanding they were so different from her own. She would have been more to the boys, and they more to her, if, instead of wasting ...
— Your Child: Today and Tomorrow • Sidonie Matzner Gruenberg
... Railroad bridges to cut!—Frozen creeks, frozen rivers, steel in a world of snow—Kelly probably already at Cumberland, and Rosecrans beyond at Wheeling—hunger, cold, winter in the spurs of the Alleghenies, disease, stragglers, weariness, worn-out shoes, broken-down horses, disappointment, disillusion, a very, very strange commanding general—Suddenly confidence, heretofore a somewhat limping attendant of the army, vanished quite away. The shrill, derisive wind, the grey wraiths of snow, the dusk of the mountains took her, conveyed her from sight, ...
— The Long Roll • Mary Johnston
... in itself is too simple for Mascagni's strong dramatic talent, hence the lack of interest, hence the disillusion of so many. ...
— The Standard Operaglass - Detailed Plots of One Hundred and Fifty-one Celebrated Operas • Charles Annesley
... had only to read a few pages to be transported into those chasing attics where Rodolphe and the rest of them danced and loved and sang. He began to think of Paris as before he had thought of London, but he had no fear of a second disillusion; he yearned for romance and beauty and love, and Paris seemed to offer them all. He had a passion for pictures, and why should he not be able to paint as well as anybody else? He wrote to Miss Wilkinson and asked her how much she thought he could live on in Paris. She told him ...
— Of Human Bondage • W. Somerset Maugham
... gentle and sweet—and then if she has to face trouble, she will have the strength of feeling that the tenderness, gentleness and sweetness are the real stuff of life, waiting for her behind the cloud. I don't want to disillusion her; I want to establish her faith in happiness and love, so that it cannot be shaken. That is a better philosophy, when all is said and done, than the stoical fortitude that anticipates dreariness, that draws the shadow over the sun, that overvalues ...
— The Altar Fire • Arthur Christopher Benson
... exclusiveness could not go farther Discover the writers in a day when all are writing! Feigned utter condemnation to make partial comfort acceptable Frozen vanity called pride, which does not seek to be revenged Half-truth that we may put on the mask of the whole Hopes of a coming disillusion that would restore him How angry I should be with you if you were not so beautiful! I can confess my sight to be imperfect: but will you ever do so? If there's no doubt about it, how is it I have a doubt about it? It is not high flying, ...
— Quotations from the Works of George Meredith • David Widger
... armed with eyeglass and bouquet and bustle, away went my dream of the slim blushing maiden. The Colonel is quite right, Lionel; the romance once suspended, 'tis a haunting remembrance till thrown again in our way, but complete disillusion if we try to renew it; though I swear that in my case the interest was deep, and the heroine improved in her beauty. So with you and that dear little creature. See her again, and you'll tease, me no more to give you that ...
— What Will He Do With It, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... the same time of a new feeling of repulsion on Kate's part, and the thought filled him with nervous foreboding. Whatever change her disillusion had brought, his own physical infatuation for her was, if possible, deeper ...
— The One Woman • Thomas Dixon
... false things nothing is more false than the glamour of Evil, for when on being drawn into it we sin, instead of the hoped-for delight we soon find satiety; instead of exhilaration, fatigue; instead of contentment, disillusion; instead of satisfaction, dust; instead of romance, the greedy claws of the harpy; and the further we go in response to this glamour the more pitiable our outlook; for the sweets and possibilities of Evil are extraordinarily limited. Can any man devise a new sin? No, but ever pursues ...
— The Romance of the Soul • Lilian Staveley
... sky of Paris and its cold light the disillusion began. Determined to settle down, to receive, to give entertainments, the Nabob had brought his wife over with the idea of setting her at the head of the establishment; but when he saw the arrival of that display of gaudy draperies of Palais-Royal jewelry, and all the strange paraphernalia ...
— The Nabob • Alphonse Daudet
... her mother left her in a very distressed state of mind. It is a horrible disillusion when a girl begins to suspect that her mother is not sincere, and that her ideals of life are mean. This knowledge may exist with the deepest affection—indeed, in a noble mind, with an inward tenderness and an almost divine pity. How many times have we seen a daughter loyal to a frivolous, worldly-minded, ...
— Baddeck and That Sort of Thing • Charles Dudley Warner
... can foresee the end of love,' I said, with an exquisite gentle sorrow. 'But when the illusion is as intense as mine, as yours, even if its hour is brief, that hour is worth all the terrible years of disillusion which it will cost. Darling, this precious night alone would not be too dear if I paid for it with ...
— Sacred And Profane Love • E. Arnold Bennett
... each other, on either side of the fire—the monumental matron whose black bodice heavily overhung the table, whose large rounded face was creased and wrinkled by what seemed countless years of joy and disillusion; and the young, slim girl, so fresh, so virginal, so ignorant, with all the pathos of an unsuspecting victim about to be sacrificed to the minotaur of Time! They both ate hot toast, with careless haste, in silence, preoccupied, worried, ...
— The Old Wives' Tale • Arnold Bennett
... that he should let the opportunity slip. There was a chance of a straight, unhampered view of the whole meaning of his matter; nothing was needed but to allow the scene to show itself, fairly and squarely. All its force would have been lent to the disaster that follows; the dismay, the disillusion, the snarl of anger and defiance, all would have been made beforehand. By so much would the effect of the impending scene, the scene of catastrophe, have been strengthened. There would have been no necessity for the sudden heightening ...
— The Craft of Fiction • Percy Lubbock
... is proud of belonging, has fallen into the hands of traitors, eloquent liars, and vile hypocrites, and cannot escape without crawling in the dust—this produces a large deep gloom, and a crushing sense of doom beyond philosophy. Scudamore could have endured the loss and the disillusion of his love—pure and strong as that power had been—but the ruin of his native land would turn his lively heart ...
— Springhaven - A Tale of the Great War • R. D. Blackmore
... disillusion you," the Master answered, "but my explosive produces an entirely different type of concussion. What we have just heard is the blowing-in of the treasure-crypt door. There's no time to ...
— The Flying Legion • George Allan England
... How do you know all that, and who has told you? You know so much that I'm an atom frightened Because you know so little. And what is this? You know the luxury there is in haunting The blasted thoroughfares of disillusion — If that's your name for them — with only ghosts For company? You know that when a woman Is blessed, or cursed, with a divine impatience (Another name of yours for a bad temper) She must have one at hand on whom to wreak it (That's what you mean, whatever the turn ...
— The Three Taverns • Edwin Arlington Robinson
... his thin hand upon Christian's shoulder, he said, "My friend, you have saved me. In the first shock of my disillusion I never thought of this. I think—I think there is work ...
— The Slave Of The Lamp • Henry Seton Merriman
... heedlessness with which, in the beginning of their acquaintance, he surrendered himself to the charm of her presence, thereby engaging her affection without a thought of the consequences to either. Besides the disillusion, which showed him, when he came fairly to face the question, that he did not love her sufficiently to justify marriage, there were circumstances—material, economical—which made it practically ...
— Beacon Lights of History, Volume XIII • John Lord
... author is well within his rights. But if he prefers unmitigated gloom in his representations of life, we on our part have the right of not taking him too seriously. Speaking of disillusion, two can play at that game. We must get over our too romantic attitude toward literature. We must not exaggerate the significance of what is presented to us, and treat that which is of necessity partial as if it were ...
— By the Christmas Fire • Samuel McChord Crothers
... me up. She did her worst with the best intentions, and you mustn't forget Steve! [She sits beside the table and DICK leans against it to talk to her.] He's my own brother, you know, and I'm so afraid Louise will finally disillusion him and spoil his happiness. ...
— Her Own Way - A Play in Four Acts • Clyde Fitch
... knows it is for that, and she has been sufficiently humble to accept him on those terms—she owes him money. If for love—she owes him at least the outside observances of love. If he has pretended love and it is for some other motive, his Nemesis will fall upon himself in the disillusion and contempt he will inspire. But in all cases the woman, through want of intelligence or pure misfortune, has crossed the Rubicon with him; she has allowed him to teach her the meaning of dual life—she has put it into ...
— Three Things • Elinor Glyn
... tell of the disillusion that gradually came. Frank found his debts mounting up and his cares increasing. She was all sympathy and regret when he mentioned it, but—there were certain comforts, luxuries and things she had always been accustomed to, ...
— Found in the Philippines - The Story of a Woman's Letters • Charles King
... nor hero, except in Mary's fancy sketch of the Coming Man. He remonstrates against canonization strenuously—dissent that passes with the idealist for modesty, and enhances her admiration. She is oftener to blame for the disillusion than he. With the perverseness of feminine nature she construes strength into coarseness of fibre, slowness into brutal indifference. Until women get at the truth in this matter of self-deception, disappointment surely awaits upon awakening ...
— The Secret of a Happy Home (1896) • Marion Harland
... dauntless in her, something that could endure. He felt for her a quick passion of comradeship and the worship men have for women who seem to them entirely beautiful and precious enough to be saved from disillusion. ...
— The Prisoner • Alice Brown
... it passim. Children are more often wrong than women. And as for dogs, it is notorious that they are for ever being taken in by plausible scoundrels; the perspective of dogs is grotesque. Not seldom have I grimly watched the gradual disillusion of deceived dogs. Nevertheless, the sentimental legend of the infallibility of women, children, and dogs, will persist ...
— The Author's Craft • Arnold Bennett
... particles might be expected to have wrought up the outward presence to their own high quality. A creature of the eye, in this case at least, the intellectual hold on him being what it was, Gaston had no fear of disillusion. His poetic readings had borrowed an additional relish from the genial, companionable, manner of his life at this time, taking him into the remotest corners of the vast level land, and its outer ring of blue up-lands; amid which, as he rode one ...
— Gaston de Latour: an unfinished romance • Walter Horatio Pater
... the season back for a month. Miss Tempest had a first-night audience that gave the "among-those-present" chroniclers quite a tussle. It seemed like early September, when theatrical hopes run high, and the demon of disillusion is not even a cloud as big as ...
— Ainslee's, Vol. 15, No. 6, July 1905 • Various
... most notable verses, The Lie, are a challenge to the world, inspired by indignant pride and the weariness of life—the saeva indignatio of Swift. The same grave and caustic melancholy, the same disillusion marks his quaint poem, The Pilgrimage. It is remarkable how many of the verses among his few poetical remains are asserted in the MSS. or by tradition to have been "made by Sir Walter {89} Raleigh ...
— Brief History of English and American Literature • Henry A. Beers
... perfect," was Mrs. Wells's reply. "I dread to think what it will cost her when disillusion comes, as come it must. Why! Who is that he is talking ...
— 'Laramie;' - or, The Queen of Bedlam. • Charles King
... in grievous straits. Must he tell Bennett the truth? Must this final disillusion be added to that long train of others, the disasters, the failures, the disappointments, and deferred hopes of all those past months? Must Bennett die hugging to his heart this ...
— A Man's Woman • Frank Norris
... she saw very rarely. It is hard to build up new on an old friendship when in that friendship there has been bitter disillusion. They did their best, both these women to be friends, but they were never able to again touch one another nearly. There were too many things between them that they could not speak of, things that had never ...
— Three Lives - Stories of The Good Anna, Melanctha and The Gentle Lena • Gertrude Stein
... sister, the mother of Ivan, had been married when she was herself a child scarce out of arms. But he wondered to find how very few of his aunt's intimates remembered the age of her daughter, now for many years convent-wrapped. His first moment of disillusion came on the day that his aunt informed him, with considerable asperity, that his pretty cousin was not a person to be mentioned in their circle—the reason given—that "she was not yet out,"—sounding rather flimsy even to his trusting ears. Still, he was given to understand that, in all probability, ...
— The Genius • Margaret Horton Potter
... same time solemn and reiterated. They might have believed that when they disembarked at Carthage the town would be abandoned to them, and that they should have treasures divided among them; and when they saw that scarcely their wages would be paid, the disillusion touched their pride no ...
— Salammbo • Gustave Flaubert
... record of my own impressions, all the drudgery, gossip, quarrels, arguments, events and experiences it contains would have to be set against a background of that extraordinary vitality which obstinately persists in Moscow even in these dark days of discomfort, disillusion, pestilence, ...
— Russia in 1919 • Arthur Ransome
... reached that state of speculative doldrums where the human animal turns upon itself in bitter self-analysis; the end with the more sensitive or the less durable is dissipation or even death. Woe to him who places his faith in illusion—the only reality—and woe to him who does not. In one way lies disillusion with its pain, in ...
— The Titan • Theodore Dreiser
... to know that Otto Kahn sees eye to eye with me. The utter degradation of the fine old Germany by Prussia was a bitter disillusion of my young manhood. What must it have been to Otto Kahn? He loved the old Germany to which he was "linked by ties of blood, by fond memories and cherished sentiments." To cast her out of his soul—to range himself ...
— Right Above Race • Otto Hermann Kahn
... pause, and ponder what else I can tell you in this letter, it occurs to me that I have not yet told you of the one great disillusion of this campaign for me and all other former civilians—I mean "The British Officer." The few remarks which I am now going to make are founded on the universal opinion of all the Regular soldiers and Colonial ...
— A Yeoman's Letters - Third Edition • P. T. Ross
... going on there; it was revolting, loathsome, horrible; but it was too manifest to be overlooked or ignored; its vulgarity and horror forced it on her attention. For some time she stood spell-bound, paralyzed; but then she covered her face with her hands; maidenly shame, bitter disillusion, and pious indignation at the gross desecration of all that she deemed most sacred and inviolable surged up in her stricken soul, and she burst into tears, weeping as she had never wept in all her life before. Sobbing bitterly, she wrapped her face in her veil, as though ...
— Uarda • Georg Ebers
... seemed thrown upon her—there was a touch of something base in her beauty—a flash of cruelty in her smile—a hardness in her eyes. Maryllia looked at her wistfully now and then, and was half sorry she had invited her, the disillusion was ...
— God's Good Man • Marie Corelli
... forth her blossoms anew, since the bird builds its nest, and the mother smiles at her child, let us have the courage to be men, and commit the rest to Him who has numbered the stars. For my part, I would I might find glowing words to say to whomsoever has lost heart in these times of disillusion: Rouse your courage, hope on; he is sure of being least deluded who has the daring to do that; the most ingenuous hope is nearer truth than the ...
— The Simple Life • Charles Wagner
... the way my father talked to us, and by these recitals, a soldier was made of a dreamy child. But later, what a disillusion! Where is the poetry of battle? I have never made any campaign except in Africa, but that has been enough for me. And I believe the army surgeon is right, who said to me one day: 'If instantaneous photographs could be taken after a battle, and millions of copies made and scattered through ...
— International Short Stories: French • Various
... the National Liberals, if we make ourselves their accomplices, if we declare ourselves ready for the same miserable behavior which the Freethinkers made themselves guilty of by entering into an alliance with von Buelow, we may disillusion the masses; we may push them from us and kill political life. If the Social Democracy ceases to be an opposition party, if even this party is ready to betray its friends as soon as it becomes by such means ...
— Socialism As It Is - A Survey of The World-Wide Revolutionary Movement • William English Walling
... loved her waited anxiously for the disillusion which must come in spite of all their cherishing, for till now Rose had been so busy with her studies, travels, and home duties that she knew very little of the triumphs, trials, and temptations of fashionable life. Birth and fortune placed her where she could not well escape some of them, and ...
— Rose in Bloom - A Sequel to "Eight Cousins" • Louisa May Alcott
... he answered with a rather whimsical smile. "I'll try to disillusion you to begin with. Perhaps if you understand me better ...
— The Lion of Petra • Talbot Mundy
... worshipping spirit exhibited in Aprile, and in the poet Eglamor, whom Sordello foils and subdues in the contest of song. The fame as a singer which comes suddenly to him draws Sordello out of his Goito solitude to the worldly society of Mantua, and his experiences of disillusion and half voluntary self-degradation are those which had been faintly shadowed forth in Pauline, and exhibited more fully—and yet with a difference—in the Basil experiences of Paracelsus. Like the poet of Pauline, after his immersion in worldliness, Sordello again seeks ...
— Robert Browning • Edward Dowden
... the individual worker for better things is not merely a prophesier but has become an actual agent for the realization of his ideal in practical achievement, he suffers many a disillusion, not in respect to his ideal, but in respect to the ease of working it into the body politic or into the compelling purpose of the social mind. That is the time of danger; and how many lose heart and hope ...
— The Family and it's Members • Anna Garlin Spencer
... Lanyard didn't trouble to ascertain. He drove morosely home and went to bed, though not to sleep for many hours: bitterness of disillusion ate like an acid ...
— The Lone Wolf - A Melodrama • Louis Joseph Vance
... a crippled beggar, who croaked in a voice rough with frost and aguardiente his deep disillusion and distrust of ...
— Castilian Days • John Hay
... place, and to Roland novelty of any kind had a charm. A fine morning, a good cigar, a change of scene, and Denasia at the end, what more was necessary to a pleasant trip? His first disillusion was the house to which he was directed. It was but a cottage, and in some peculiar way Roland had persuaded himself that Denasia had not only got money, but also a large sum. The cottage in which he found her did not confirm his anticipations. And in the small parlour ...
— A Singer from the Sea • Amelia Edith Huddleston Barr
... looks when it is wet. It was found that the sense of disappointment which this produced was greater than the Painters' Union could bear; so someone, in order to prevent industrial strife, invented some stuff called varnish, by which, at the very moment of disillusion, the maximum of shininess can be again produced with the minimum of effort. It is one of the few inventions which make a man grateful for the ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 158, May 12, 1920 • Various
... hope. They are there, the disappointed ones, but he doesn't know, he doesn't know! He hasn't on his conscience the memory of hearts cruelly wounded,—wounded even to death. He doesn't in memory see the eagerness in a good friend's eyes die to disillusion, to hopelessness, to bitter, bitter sorrow. He doesn't have to remember how the life died suddenly out of a voice that had been tender and eloquent. He doesn't sicken with the thought that his hand ...
— The Lieutenant-Governor • Guy Wetmore Carryl
... substance of the hook, we may be allowed to notice one or two matters of literary or historical interest in which Sir Henry Maine is certainly open to criticism. There is an old question about Burke which was discussed by the present writer a long time ago. A great disillusion, says Sir Henry Maine, has always seemed to him to separate the Thoughts on the Present Discontents and the Speech on Taxation from the magnificent panegyric on the British Constitution in 1790. "Not ...
— Studies in Literature • John Morley
... I unwittingly allowed my town acquaintances to believe me to be a chap of means. When I discovered their false estimate I did not have the courage to disillusion them. My true spending-pace was struck on my eighteenth birthday, and inside the year I had wasted my ...
— A Virginia Scout • Hugh Pendexter
... new sound on the stairs, and swiftly, instantly, instead of glancing to the entrance, her eyes sought Ranjoor Singh's; and she saw that he had heard it too. So she sat up as if enlightenment had come and had brought disillusion in its wake. ...
— Winds of the World • Talbot Mundy
... Europe with unpleasant people. He had too much money—and that is ruinous for a boy. I hate to disillusion you, but for several years people have been gossipping about Duane Mallett's exploits abroad; and they ...
— The Danger Mark • Robert W. Chambers
... His Majesty's Parliament to discharge their functions in this grotesque travesty of a legislative chamber, this sombre and obscure repository of mouldering archives and forgotten records, where the constructive statesmen of to-morrow are expected to shape their Utopias in an atmosphere of disillusion and decay, in surroundings appointed to be the shameful sepulchre of the nostrums of the past." If that is what Mr. ASQUITH said, I agree with him; if he didn't say ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 158, April 14, 1920 • Various
... of cautious suspicion which men of science maintain in investigations of this character, but even with a predisposition in its favour, as one who comes to seek the confirmation of his innermost longings; but for this reason was my disillusion all the greater. In spite of its critical apparatus it does not differ in any respect from medieval miracle-mongering. There is a fundamental defect of method, ...
— Tragic Sense Of Life • Miguel de Unamuno
... can be disillusioned have no convictions. Disillusion is the failure of a half-belief. I learnt that long ago. But I hate the very word in your mouth. Woe to us both if we cannot be resolute now. I could have waited—had I seen any reason to wait. Time could make no difference in my love. As it is, I have stolen you ...
— Robert Orange - Being a Continuation of the History of Robert Orange • John Oliver Hobbes
... free and lawless life of war with the zest of a collegian out of bounds; but he could not hide the feeling of painful disillusion that the sight of those armies of the Faith caused him. He had expected to find something akin to the ancient crusading expeditions: soldiers who fought for an ideal, who bent the knee before beginning the fight, so that God might be on their side, ...
— The Shadow of the Cathedral • Vicente Blasco Ibanez
... impinging upon each other, swinging back again to complete separation, and so on. But the violence of the motion consisted by no means in speed: it suggested a very much retarded rolling off of a motion picture reel. There was at first an element of disillusion in the impression. I felt tempted to shout and to spur the mist into greater activity. On the surface, to both sides of the tear, waves ran out, and at the edges of the pool they rose in that same leisurely, stately way which struck me as one of the most characteristic features ...
— Over Prairie Trails • Frederick Philip Grove
... love: love, which has its origin in Dream, its acme in Ecstasy, and its catastrophe in Disillusion: love, which is life's core and kernel and epitome, the focus and quintessence of existence. A life that is without it has somehow missed its mark: it is meaningless and plotless, "a string of casual episodes, like a bad tragedy." For what, after all, is Love? Who has given ...
— Bubbles of the Foam • Unknown
... allusion to; glance at; tip the wink &c. (indicate) 550; suggest, prompt, give the cue, breathe; whisper, whisper in the ear. give a bit of one's mind; tell one plainly, tell once for all; speak volumes. undeceive[obs3], unbeguile[obs3]; set right, correct, open the eyes of, disabuse, disillusion one of. be informed of &c.; know &c 490; learn &c. 539; get scent of, get wind of, gather from; awaken to, open one's eyes to; become alive, become awake to; hear, overhear, understand. come to one's ears, come to one's knowledge; reach one's ears. Adj. informed &c. v.; ...
— Roget's Thesaurus
... end of her life, Sylvia would never forget the rending shock of disillusion brought her by these blunt words. She did not dream of disbelieving them, or of underestimating their significance. A thousand confirmatory details leaped into her mind: the rich, sweet voices—the dramatic ability—the banjo—the ...
— The Bent Twig • Dorothy Canfield
... to her will. In the first moment of disillusion he had not been without a certain apprehension that she might wish to take advantage of the fact that he belonged to a wealthy family. But he saw now the thought had done her an injustice. Creature of rich, luscious sentiment, of gorgeous emotions, she scorned to be untrue to the equatorial ...
— Cleo The Magnificent - The Muse of the Real • Louis Zangwill
... this generalized affection which is at the basis of any sustained interest in philanthropic or altruistic enterprises. No less than a large and generous affection for humanity is required to enable men to endure for long the dreariness and disillusion so often incident to philanthropic work, the conflicts and disappointments of public administration. Certainly this is true of the first rank of statesmen; no characterization of Lincoln fails to emphasize his essential humanity ...
— Human Traits and their Social Significance • Irwin Edman
... this feeling is largely based on wrong and ignorant ideas, it must still be recognized that it is to some extent natural and inevitable. "How much is risked," exclaims Dugas, "in the privacies of love! The results may be disillusion, disgust, the consciousness of physical imperfection, of brutality or coldness, of aesthetic disenchantment, of a sentimental shock, seen or divined. To be without modesty, that is to say, to have no fear of the ordeals of love, one must be sure of one's self, of one's grace, ...
— Studies in the Psychology of Sex, Volume 1 (of 6) • Havelock Ellis
... he realized that she had asked him a question. He didn't want to disillusion her in any way, and, after all, an FBI agent was a kind of detective, but he thought it was only fair that she should know the whole truth about ...
— The Impossibles • Gordon Randall Garrett
... soldiering and disillusion, the first months of the War no doubt seem brighter than they really were. It is easy to forget the illnesses that sent the writer as an invalid to Luxor and Cairo, and finally to England; to ignore ...
— With Manchesters in the East • Gerald B. Hurst
... first feelings were that she ought to die, that she had failed and that her disillusion as to Marty had been directly brought about by herself. She saw it all honestly and made no attempt to hedge. By day, she sat quietly, big-eyed, amazingly childlike, waiting for her punishment, watched ...
— Who Cares? • Cosmo Hamilton
... confidence in, and respect for, a person capable of dealing his fame such a deadly blow as Mr. Froude, not unnaturally increases the irritation with which the public has read his recollections of his friends and contemporaries. The "disillusion and disenchantment" worked by the book, in so far as it affects Carlyle's fame as a prophet, is, of course, a misfortune, and a very serious one. What it was he preached when his preaching first startled the world, but very few now undertake to say, and these few by no means agree in their story. ...
— Reflections and Comments 1865-1895 • Edwin Lawrence Godkin
... crimson cheeks,' and orders a heavy English dinner, which he washes down with ale and porter, seasoning his coffee, as he imagines we do in England, with gin. As time passes, and the hour of the train draws near, he begins to reflect vaguely on his project; he recalls the disillusion of the visit he had once paid to Holland. Does not a similar disillusion await him in London? 'Why travel, when one can travel so splendidly in a chair? Was he not at London already, since its odours, its atmosphere, its inhabitants, its food, its utensils, ...
— Figures of Several Centuries • Arthur Symons
... late one evening, and feeling that the power to read was leaving me—for the letters from incessant perusal were losing all sap and significance: my gold was withering to leaves before my eyes, and I was sorrowing over the disillusion—suddenly a quick tripping foot ran up the stairs. I knew Ginevra Fanshawe's step: she had dined in town that afternoon; she was now returned, and would come here to replace her ...
— Villette • Charlotte Bronte
... Blanch rendered such a course impossible. The only alternative left her was to extricate herself as swiftly and gracefully as possible from her dilemma by making herself as disagreeable as possible in his eyes. In this wise she hoped to disillusion him, and it was with this intention she had come forth to meet him. She could not see him from where she sat, having turned her back upon him; but, judging from the length of time it took him to approach, she rightly ...
— When Dreams Come True • Ritter Brown
... knows how to keep a strict watch over himself will be able to escape the causes of disillusion, which lead us through fatal paths of error, to the ...
— Common Sense - - Subtitle: How To Exercise It • Yoritomo-Tashi
... certainly a very pretty woman: there was the beautifully rounded chin, the short straight nose, and delicately curved upper lip, that he had seen in the profile,—and yet—yet it was not the same face he had dreamt of. With an odd, provoking sense of disillusion, he swept ahead of the coach, and again slackened his speed to let it pass. This time the fair unknown raised her long lashes and gazed suddenly at this persistent horseman at her side, and an odd expression, it seemed to him almost a glance of recognition and ...
— In a Hollow of the Hills • Bret Harte
... sentimental dreamer, whose imagination, disdainful of political requirements, straightway winged its flight to the future abode of universal happiness; whereas the Viscount aspired to complete the downfall of the liberal ideas of 1789 by utilising the disillusion and anger of the democracy to work a return ...
— The Three Cities Trilogy, Complete - Lourdes, Rome and Paris • Emile Zola
... effect is that he long remains wounded and bruised, and sometimes disabled for life. The test is severe and dangerous. In the course of it the mental and moral equilibrium is affected, and runs the risk of not being re-established. Too sudden and complete disillusion has supervened. The deceptions have been too great, the ...
— The Crowd • Gustave le Bon
... that lonely launch of mine in London, I see a very curious and sombre picture. In the living I am sure there must have been mitigations, and light as well as shade. In the retrospect it seems one long disillusion. I see myself, and the few folk with whom my relations were intimate, struggling like ants across a grimy stage, in the midst of an inferno of noise, confusion, pointless turmoil, squalor, and ultimate cataclysm. The whole picture is ...
— The Message • Alec John Dawson
... wish to flatter me, don't you? Never mind; let us pretend I'm Major Grim disguised as an Arab; only, I'm afraid we must continue the conversation in Arabic; I might disillusion you if I tried to talk English. We'll say then that I'm Major Grim, disguised. Let's see now... What would he do in the circumstances? Here's Yussuf Dakmar, wanted for murder in the city and known to be plotting a massacre, seen climbing ...
— Affair in Araby • Talbot Mundy
... the poems of disillusion which are the outcome of this mood, is "The Newcomer's Wife," with the terrible abruptness of its last stanza. It is not for criticism to find fault with the theme of a work of art, but only to comment upon its execution. Of the merit of these monotonously sinister Satires of Circumstance ...
— Some Diversions of a Man of Letters • Edmund William Gosse
... a disillusion! Say, wilt thou that we woo her, double-handed? Wilt thou that we two woo her, both together? Feel'st thou, passing from my leather doublet, Through thy laced doublet, ...
— Cyrano de Bergerac • Edmond Rostand
... to the idea of confessions and disavowals. He could not bear to think of her disillusionment. He felt that he owed it to her not to disillusion her, to spoil things for her in that fashion. "To turn into something mean and ugly after she has believed in me.... It would be like playing a practical joke upon her. It would be like taking her into my arms and suddenly making a grimace at her.... It ...
— The Secret Places of the Heart • H. G. Wells
... her; she was scarcely prepared for any emotion concerning him except the natural shock of disillusion and the natural pity of a young girl for anything ignoble ...
— The Gay Rebellion • Robert W. Chambers
... Thus disillusion had been her misfortune—perhaps it would be more accurate to say her fortune. She had built up, after each invasion, her defences more carefully and solidly than before, only to be again astonished and dismayed by the next onslaught, until at length the question had become ...
— The Crossing • Winston Churchill
... on. From bitter disillusion felt against everything in her world her mind chilled to analysis. Her mother loved her, she believed, and yet—she did not complete her swift thought; indeed, she looked quickly about in fear of her disloyalty. She had once ...
— Suzanna Stirs the Fire • Emily Calvin Blake
... dreams were succeeded by despondency and disillusion; then supervened years of impatient waiting,—a standing with folded arms when so much remained to be done, a time of despair, of restless suffering. But the Jew had acquired his franchise, and gratefully he remembered those to whom he owed this ...
— Stories by Foreign Authors: German • Various
... as the professor had opportunity he came to Coleman. He was a changed little man, and his extraordinary bewilderment showed in his face. It was the disillusion and amazement of a stubborn mind that had gone implacably in its one direction and found in the end that the direction was all wrong, and that really a certain mental machine had not been infallible. Coleman remembered what the American minister in Athens had described of his protests ...
— Active Service • Stephen Crane
... spiritual disillusion had come at last, and it had revealed him to himself at an awful depth of self-deception. Thinking in his pride and arrogance he was the divine messenger, the avenger, the man of God, he had set out to shed blood like any wretched criminal, any jealous murderer who was driven along by devilish ...
— The Christian - A Story • Hall Caine
... worm-eaten steps groaned beneath our weight, like a sensitive woman under a new disillusion. At the top was a room with a door that closed on the outside with a hook. We slept there. The plaster on the once yellow walls was crumbling away; the beams of the ceiling bent beneath the weight of the slated roof, and on the window-panes was a layer of dust that softened the light like a piece ...
— Over Strand and Field • Gustave Flaubert
... about my connection with Master Willie the better. Our colleagues are already restless at what they consider my neglect of my professional work. They attribute it to the wiles of Nur-el-Din. They may if they like and I don't propose to disillusion ...
— Okewood of the Secret Service • Valentine Williams
... die, and friends come to the funeral and remark: "Dear me! How stuffy this room is, and the shop's practically full of trash!" Or, some little time before they are dead, they stay later than usual in the shop one evening, and make up their minds to take stock and count the till, and the disillusion lays them low, and they struggle into the living-room and murmur: "I shall never have that beautiful furniture, and I shall never have that system of ventilation. If I had known earlier, I would have at least ...
— Mental Efficiency - And Other Hints to Men and Women • Arnold Bennett
... have failed, but ours is full of brighter promise. There is something very touching, to us older men almost tragical, in the unbounded self- confidence of the young life that we see rushing to the front all round us. We know so well the disillusion that is sure to come, the disappointments that will cloud the morning sky. We would not carry one shadow from the darkened experience of middle life into the roseate tints of the morning. ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture: St. John Chaps. XV to XXI • Alexander Maclaren
... begun by coveting all the joys, those of the great and those of the humble, those of the fools and those of the sages. For more than sixty years he had dragged on this painful earth of ours the most weary, the most uneasy soul that civilization had ever fashioned to its ends of disillusion and regret. One could not refuse him a measure of greatness, for he was unhappy in a way unknown to mediocre souls. His mother Heyst had never known, but he kept his father's pale, distinguished face in affectionate ...
— Victory • Joseph Conrad
... inference himself; yet it must show itself to be strictly an inference from the story—the story must not seem to have been constructed to prove it. "Die Weltgeschichte ist das Weltgericht," wrote Schiller; even so, the delineation of life is the criticism of life. To show the scope of disillusion, monotony, repression—life's generous impulses narrowed and made timid by the social, economic, and political machine—would be a criticism of our modern world; there would be no need of moralizing. This the Russian novelists seem to have understood; ...
— The Principles Of Aesthetics • Dewitt H. Parker
... the great tragedies; it was all done at the topmost height of happy hours, but there are hints in it which we shall have to notice later, which show that when writing it Shakespeare had already looked into the valley of disillusion which he was about to tread. But "Twelfth Night" is written in the spirit of "As You Like It" or "Much Ado," only it is still more personal-ingenuous and less dramatic than these; it is, indeed, a lyric of love and the ...
— The Man Shakespeare • Frank Harris
... no doubt, that this was all very well before the War, but that in the Army a little writing would be a pleasant change after the day's duties. Allow me to disillusion you. If, three years ago, I ever conceived a glorious future in which my autograph might be of value to the more promiscuous collectors, that conception has now been shattered. Three years in the Army has absolutely spoilt the market. Even were I revered in the year 2,000 A.D. ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 153, Nov. 28, 1917 • Various
... other remarkable persons whose college life had proved disappointing. But it is to be remembered that Miss Keller has written many things in her autobiography for the fun of writing them, and the disillusion, which the writer of the editorial took seriously, is in great part humorous. Miss Keller does not suppose her views to be of great importance, and when she utters her opinions on important matters ...
— Story of My Life • Helen Keller
... visions which tinted their souls to the colour of sacrifice; I also knew what refugees and devastated districts look like. I feared that the discrepancy between the dream and the reality would doom them to disillusion. ...
— Out To Win - The Story of America in France • Coningsby Dawson
... began to weep softly, partly from the pain of the man's unconsciously cruel grasp, partly frotn disillusion, partly from a fear that she had to do with ...
— Doom Castle • Neil Munro
... speculation that we find the richest and most varied reaction to the Great Failure. It takes different shapes in those writers, like Plato and Xenophon, who were educated in the fifth century and had once believed in the Great City, and those whose whole thinking life belonged to the time of disillusion. ...
— Five Stages of Greek Religion • Gilbert Murray
... moon, but, in sad disillusion, Snug under Point Comfort are glad to make fast, And strive (sans our glasses) to make a confusion 'Twixt our rind of green cheese and the moon of the past; Ah, Might-have-been, Could-have-been, Would-have-been! rascals, ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 11, No. 63, January, 1863 - A Magazine Of Literature, Art, And Politics • Various
... life, Sylvia would never forget the rending shock of disillusion brought her by these blunt words. She did not dream of disbelieving them, or of underestimating their significance. A thousand confirmatory details leaped into her mind: the rich, sweet voices—the dramatic ability—the banjo—the deprecatory ...
— The Bent Twig • Dorothy Canfield
... the end of love,' I said, with an exquisite gentle sorrow. 'But when the illusion is as intense as mine, as yours, even if its hour is brief, that hour is worth all the terrible years of disillusion which it will cost. Darling, this precious night alone would not be too dear if I paid for it with the ...
— Sacred And Profane Love • E. Arnold Bennett
... "I'm afraid this will disillusion you," he said, "if you expect something interesting. I simply make notes of things I want to see, or jot down thoughts to recall pictures to my mind. Reading over one's notebook is like glancing over a lot of kodak films. Sometimes one sticks in a ...
— The Heather-Moon • C. N. Williamson and A. M. Williamson
... to them seem to me well found and well named. I own to that kind of candour you attribute to me: when I am frankly interested, I suppose I fancy the public will be so too; and when I am moved, I am sure of it. It has been my luck hitherto to meet with no staggering disillusion. 'Before' and 'After' may be two; and yet I believe the habit is now too thoroughly ingrained to be altered. About the doctors, you were right, that dedication has been the subject of some pleasantries that made me grind, and of your happily touched reproof which made me blush. And ...
— Letters of Robert Louis Stevenson - Volume 2 • Robert Louis Stevenson
... arrived she roused from her apathy, and with trembling fingers sorted out the letters, going over them again and again, and never finding the one she sought. Gradually beneath the poignant grief for her father, came the dull persistent pain of a first disillusion. The belief and loyalty with which she had started out to defend Donald began to weaken before his silence. In his trouble she had been ready to rush to him, to succor and forgive, but he had not called ...
— A Romance of Billy-Goat Hill • Alice Hegan Rice
... National Liberals, if we make ourselves their accomplices, if we declare ourselves ready for the same miserable behavior which the Freethinkers made themselves guilty of by entering into an alliance with von Buelow, we may disillusion the masses; we may push them from us and kill political life. If the Social Democracy ceases to be an opposition party, if even this party is ready to betray its friends as soon as it becomes by such means "capable of governing," those ...
— Socialism As It Is - A Survey of The World-Wide Revolutionary Movement • William English Walling
... ready—seated himself. This isolated action rendered him almost as conspicuous as his coat, which was also alone in its sombre glory. Presently others followed the stranger's example, and the meal began. Then ensued a period of disillusion. There was no punkah, the glare of the lamplight was blinding, and the food—all of it—coarse, greasy and cold. The soup which had been waiting was of the variety known as tinned, an old acquaintance ...
— From Jungle to Java - The Trivial Impressions of a Short Excursion to Netherlands India • Arthur Keyser
... had no charms for Nance. On the one occasion when curiosity had induced her to follow the stream of well-dressed children into the side door of the cathedral, she had met with disillusion. It was a place where little girls lifted white petticoats when they sat down and straightened pink sashes when they got up, and put nickels in a basket. Nance had had no lace petticoat or pink sash or nickel. She showed ...
— Calvary Alley • Alice Hegan Rice
... was a very silly toast, but let it go to please them—for why disillusion those who believe in the ...
— Wings of the Wind • Credo Harris
... book were to be an accurate record of my own impressions, all the drudgery, gossip, quarrels, arguments, events and experiences it contains would have to be set against a background of that extraordinary vitality which obstinately persists in Moscow even in these dark days of discomfort, disillusion, ...
— Russia in 1919 • Arthur Ransome
... wounded and bruised, and sometimes disabled for life. The test is severe and dangerous. In the course of it the mental and moral equilibrium is affected, and runs the risk of not being re-established. Too sudden and complete disillusion has supervened. The deceptions have been too ...
— The Crowd • Gustave le Bon
... So do people who are not mediums. I congratulate you on liking anybody better. That's pleasant for you at any rate. My changes are always the other way. I begin by seeing the beautiful in most people, and then comes the disillusion. It isn't caprice or unsteadiness; oh no! it's merely fate. My fate, I mean. ...
— The Letters of Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Volume II • Elizabeth Barrett Browning
... of St. Ignace, and so long had the name been familiar throughout New France, that my first view of the place brought me bitter disappointment. The faces of the others in our party pictured the same disillusion. ...
— Beyond the Frontier • Randall Parrish
... inquiry, I arrive at the place, make my peace with the gardener, and enter. My disillusion dates from the opening of the garden door. I repine, I find a reluctation of spirit against believing that this is the place. What, is this kailyard that inexhaustible paradise of a garden in which M—— and I found "elbow-room," and expatiated together ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. XXII (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... feeling of disappointment and disillusion became more and more intense and bitter. A stanza from one of his more mature poems (1795) "An die Natur," will serve to illustrate the sentiment which ...
— Types of Weltschmerz in German Poetry • Wilhelm Alfred Braun
... will be no war while I am Secretary of State, and I believe there will be no war so long as I live." It has not come out that way; it might have so easily come out that way if only Germany had signed that treaty of his! But he is not disillusioned; nothing can disillusion him; his ideal is still only a day or two ahead of him, and he resigns to fight for it, since fight for it in the Cabinet ...
— New York Times Current History; The European War, Vol 2, No. 4, July, 1915 - April-September, 1915 • Various
... do I know?"—"What does any one know?"—of this shrewd pagan spirit has nothing in it of the ache of pessimistic disillusion. It has never had any illusions. It has taken things as they appear, and life as it appears, and it is so close to the kindly earth-mud beneath our feet that it is in no ...
— Suspended Judgments - Essays on Books and Sensations • John Cowper Powys
... had wished to transform her into an angel, to raise her to heights where love for Christ alone existed, and she had fallen in love with an Augustian. The very thought of that filled his heart with horror, strengthened by a feeling of disillusion and disappointment. No, no, he could not forgive her. Words of horror burned his lips like glowing coals; he struggled still with himself not to utter them, but he shook his emaciated hands over the terrified girl. Lygia felt guilty, but not to that degree. ...
— Quo Vadis - A Narrative of the Time of Nero • Henryk Sienkiewicz
... other, on either side of the fire—the monumental matron whose black bodice heavily overhung the table, whose large rounded face was creased and wrinkled by what seemed countless years of joy and disillusion; and the young, slim girl, so fresh, so virginal, so ignorant, with all the pathos of an unsuspecting victim about to be sacrificed to the minotaur of Time! They both ate hot toast, with careless haste, in silence, ...
— The Old Wives' Tale • Arnold Bennett
... me, don't you? Never mind; let us pretend I'm Major Grim disguised as an Arab; only, I'm afraid we must continue the conversation in Arabic; I might disillusion you if I tried to talk English. We'll say then that I'm Major Grim, disguised. Let's see now... What would he do in the circumstances? Here's Yussuf Dakmar, wanted for murder in the city and known to be plotting a massacre, seen climbing a wall when the sentry's ...
— Affair in Araby • Talbot Mundy
... the sun gave token of setting, they arrived in town; and Bud was made happy in seeing his precious miniature flier safely deposited at his own door. He still had the look of one whose mind was soaring away up in the clouds and Hugh did not have the heart to disillusion him just then. There would be no harm done in letting poor Bud dream a little longer before giving him that rude if ...
— The Boy Scouts of the Flying Squadron • Robert Shaler
... It rains. The Tarasconese hero salutes the Ashes. The truth about William Tell. Disillusion. Tartarin of ...
— Tartarin On The Alps • Alphonse Daudet
... sharp, and she wore that expression of unyouthful weariness that Boyd had noted before. He could not help wondering what bitter experience had taught her disillusion, what strange environment had edged her ...
— The Silver Horde • Rex Beach
... whose defence he has undertaken. He believes passionately in her innocence, and, never doubting that she loves him in return, he is determined to secure for her a triumphant acquittal. Just at the crucial moment, however, he learns that she loves another man; and, overwhelmed by this disillusion, he has still to face the ordeal and plead her cause. The conjuncture would be still more dramatic if the revelation of this love were to put a different complexion on the murder, and, by introducing a new motive, shake the advocate's faith in his client's innocence. But that is another matter; the ...
— Play-Making - A Manual of Craftsmanship • William Archer
... to disillusion a young man tricked into love for an adventuress. Now, neither as Chancellor nor friend could he make further open protest, unless favored by fate with some striking new development. There were, nevertheless, other ways of working; ...
— The Princess Virginia • C. N. Williamson
... Nature and nothing else. Have I lost anything in getting down to fact instead of to fancy? Have I shut my eyes in pain—pain for disillusion? No—now I know that my home is not in Nature; there is no awe and splendour in her which can keep me with her. Oh, far beyond is the true splendour, the infinite source of awe and ...
— The Poetry Of Robert Browning • Stopford A. Brooke
... members of a ruined family. The windows were open, and one gave a view of the Court's watchful lamp-post, and the other of the house—now occupied by an art dealer and a commission agent—where the Duke had known both illusion and disillusion. The delicate sound of the collision of billiard-balls came from somewhere, and the rat-tatting of a tape-machine from somewhere else. The two friends had arrived at the condition of absolute wisdom and sagacity and tolerance which is apt to be achieved at a late hour in clubs ...
— The Roll-Call • Arnold Bennett
... with eyeglass and bouquet and bustle, away went my dream of the slim blushing maiden. The Colonel is quite right, Lionel; the romance once suspended, 'tis a haunting remembrance till thrown again in our way, but complete disillusion if we try to renew it; though I swear that in my case the interest was deep, and the heroine improved in her beauty. So with you and that dear little creature. See her again, and you'll tease, me no more to give you that portrait of Titania at watch over Bottom's soft slumbers. All a Midsummer ...
— What Will He Do With It, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... ready to tear to pieces, allowing them neither intelligence nor virtue—in just that there seemed to her some flaw of taste that was almost like a confession of failure. Surely she loved him, and was ready to forgive him much: not for worlds would she have confessed to disillusion. And yet, now and again, when the rush and ostentation of their new life, with its monotony of dinners and dances—so little like that which she had anticipated as the future lot of a painter's wife—had left her rather ...
— A Comedy of Masks - A Novel • Ernest Dowson and Arthur Moore
... models. The Petit Jehan de Saintre is certainly the work of Antoine de la Salle; the irony of a realist, endowed with subtlety and grace, conducts the reader through chivalric exaltations to vulgar disillusion. The writer was not insensible to the charm of the ideals of the past, but he presents them only in the end to cover them with disgrace. The anonymous farce of Pathelin, and the Chronique de petit Jehan de Saintre, are perhaps the most instructive documents which we possess with respect to the ...
— A History of French Literature - Short Histories of the Literatures of the World: II. • Edward Dowden
... hook, we may be allowed to notice one or two matters of literary or historical interest in which Sir Henry Maine is certainly open to criticism. There is an old question about Burke which was discussed by the present writer a long time ago. A great disillusion, says Sir Henry Maine, has always seemed to him to separate the Thoughts on the Present Discontents and the Speech on Taxation from the magnificent panegyric on the British Constitution in 1790. "Not many persons in the last century could have divined from the ...
— Studies in Literature • John Morley
... their struggles, triumphed in their triumphs, and was beginning to see in everything, good or bad, its necessity of existence. Under ordinary circumstances one cannot see much misery without experiencing a world of disillusion and futile rebellion of spirit; but Ruth was not living just at that time ...
— Other Things Being Equal • Emma Wolf
... medical. There is, however, a sort of code that answers instead of language frequently, when two or three women of later middle life are gathered together, a code born of mutual understanding, mutual disillusion, mutual distrust, a language of outspread hands, raised eyebrows, portentous shakings of the head. Frau Schwarz, on the edge of Peter's tub-shaped bed, needed no English to convey the fact that Peter was a bad lot. Not that she resorted ...
— The Street of Seven Stars • Mary Roberts Rinehart
... wharf, so now at his farming, doubts assail his mind whether this manual labor is a satisfactory solution of his difficulties in adjusting himself to the world and opening communication with his fellow-men. The disillusion, if there really had ever been any true hope on his part, was effected even more quickly than before. Six weeks of manuring had brought him to enthusiastic thankfulness that it ...
— Nathaniel Hawthorne • George E. Woodberry
... On the bed, stretched at full length, with his Grand Army hat flung beside him, lay the inventor, dead. A little round hole in the temple, from which a few drops of blood had flowed, told what remained of his story. In the night disillusion had come, with failure. ...
— Children of the Tenements • Jacob A. Riis
... felt a deadly sickness of this road. She loved each individual tree, each bush and field and the view from every point, but the whole thing she hated. It was the personification of mistake, disappointment and slow disillusion, but now it was all shrouded in darkness and she seemed to be walking on nothing, through nothing and towards nothing. She herself was nothing and she thought of nothing, though now and then a little wave of anxiety washed ...
— THE MISSES MALLETT • E. H. YOUNG
... the author is well within his rights. But if he prefers unmitigated gloom in his representations of life, we on our part have the right of not taking him too seriously. Speaking of disillusion, two can play at that game. We must get over our too romantic attitude toward literature. We must not exaggerate the significance of what is presented to us, and treat that which is of necessity partial ...
— By the Christmas Fire • Samuel McChord Crothers
... really had nothing left, and that the home-coming of the man had robbed her of her boy and of the child she had been. Nothing was left but the man and woman who had lost their youth. And the man had nothing to give the woman. Nothing but gratitude and disillusion. And now a still bitterer thought came to her—the thought that the boy had had nothing to give the girl. For twenty years it had been the girl's illusion. The storms in her heart broke out. She put her face in her hands and wept like wild rain on the sea. She wept so violently that between ...
— Martin Pippin in the Apple Orchard • Eleanor Farjeon
... over seriously; he was entirely sincere in the silence he held while he revolved it in his mind. He doubted whether more learning would bring to Joan the contentment which she lacked in her present state. It might only open the door to a greater longing, or it might disillusion her when her feet had left these wild, free hills, and set a pang in her heart like a flame for the things which knowledge closes the door against the ...
— The Flockmaster of Poison Creek • George W. Ogden
... thrown upon her—there was a touch of something base in her beauty—a flash of cruelty in her smile—a hardness in her eyes. Maryllia looked at her wistfully now and then, and was half sorry she had invited her, the disillusion was so complete. ...
— God's Good Man • Marie Corelli
... orders a heavy English dinner, which he washes down with ale and porter, seasoning his coffee, as he imagines we do in England, with gin. As time passes, and the hour of the train draws near, he begins to reflect vaguely on his project; he recalls the disillusion of the visit he had once paid to Holland. Does not a similar disillusion await him in London? 'Why travel, when one can travel so splendidly in a chair? Was he not at London already, since its odours, its ...
— Figures of Several Centuries • Arthur Symons
... in love: love, which has its origin in Dream, its acme in Ecstasy, and its catastrophe in Disillusion: love, which is life's core and kernel and epitome, the focus and quintessence of existence. A life that is without it has somehow missed its mark: it is meaningless and plotless, "a string of casual episodes, like a bad tragedy." For what, after all, is Love? Who ...
— Bubbles of the Foam • Unknown
... any kind word about The Return (and there have been such words said at different times) awakens in me the liveliest gratitude, for I know how much the writing of that fantasy has cost me in sheer toil, in temper and in disillusion. ...
— Notes on My Books • Joseph Conrad
... very rarely. It is hard to build up new on an old friendship when in that friendship there has been bitter disillusion. They did their best, both these women to be friends, but they were never able to again touch one another nearly. There were too many things between them that they could not speak of, things that had never been explained nor yet forgiven. The good Anna still did her best for foolish Julia ...
— Three Lives - Stories of The Good Anna, Melanctha and The Gentle Lena • Gertrude Stein
... more probable it is that experience will produce disappointment. If one spouse enters wedlock with the belief that the other is the most superlative man or woman living, the cases must be very few in which disappointment and disillusion will not result. Moreover, pair marriage, by its exclusiveness, risks the happiness of the parties on a very narrow and specific condition of life. The coercion of this arrangement for many ...
— Folkways - A Study of the Sociological Importance of Usages, Manners, Customs, Mores, and Morals • William Graham Sumner
... slowly through all the subsidiary impulses, and a whole tract of life becomes inexplicably colourless. What was formerly full of zest, and so obviously worth doing that it raised no questions, has now grown dreary and purposeless: with a sense of disillusion we inquire the meaning of life, and decide, perhaps, that all is vanity. The search for an outside meaning that can compel an inner response must always be disappointed: all "meaning" must be at bottom related to our primary desires, and when ...
— Mysticism and Logic and Other Essays • Bertrand Russell
... began on January 18 was bound to disillusion a great many people, including President Wilson himself. Principles had to be translated into practice, and every effort to do so left one party to the dispute, if not both, convinced that the principles had been betrayed. The treaty which was eventually produced ...
— Woodrow Wilson's Administration and Achievements • Frank B. Lord and James William Bryan
... which may be tragic or trivial in record, according as the artist is able to mould his material. Each of the sections shows us a mood, signalized by some slight link of circumstance which may the better enable us to grasp it. The development of disillusion, the melancholy progress of change, is finely indicated in the successive stages of this lyric sequence, from the first clear strain of believing love (shaken already by a faint tremor of fear), through gradual alienation and inevitable severance, ...
— An Introduction to the Study of Browning • Arthur Symons
... remembered, was something which he had himself foreseen. He had never really accepted Spence's theory that early disillusion had seriously poisoned the lifesprings natural to her age. Her awakening had been certain. He had warned Spence that she would wake! He felt all the exultation of a prophet who sees his prophecy fulfilled. But common sense urged caution. To frighten her now might be fatal. He tried to bring his ...
— The Window-Gazer • Isabel Ecclestone Mackay
... a finishing stroke to the disillusion. In all his troubles and perplexities the good Bishop of S— had been a rock to lean on for the ...
— Reginald Cruden - A Tale of City Life • Talbot Baines Reed
... feel in this sombre season, the passionate force of her imagination making itself the law of life and the arbiter of her destiny. She could not take counsel with time; her temperament knew nothing of that compromise with ardours and impulses which is the wisdom of disillusion. Circumstances willed that she should suffer by the nobleness of her instincts those endowments which might in a happier lot have exalted her to such perfection of calm joy as humanity may attain, ...
— A Life's Morning • George Gissing
... that he discovered what had hitherto been hidden from him—the disillusion of his senses. None the less did he make professions of ardent love; but in order to call up such emotions he found it necessary to evoke the images of Rosanette and ...
— Sentimental Education, Volume II - The History of a Young Man • Gustave Flaubert
... animal known as the Meritorious Cat—to the Land of Promise. The book is the history of how they got on there. Naturally, from the circumstances of their start and the giddy altitude of Alberta's hopes, you will be prepared for its being, to some extent at least, a story of disillusion. Miss MADGE S. SMITH, who wrote it, says that it is all true; and indeed there is much in the tale that stamps it as the outcome of personal experience. This being so, I could wish that her attitude in the matter had been ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 147, August 26th, 1914 • Various
... passing shadows, and dreamy echoes concerning them, will not be for himself. You may think him, that philosophic archon or king, who in consenting to be your master has really taken upon himself "the form of a servant"—you may think him, in our late age of philosophic disillusion, a wholly chimerical being. Yet history records one instance in which such a figure actually found his way to an imperial throne, and with a certain approach to the result Plato promises. It was precisely because his whole being ...
— Plato and Platonism • Walter Horatio Pater
... I won't turn into a monkey," she said, in accents at once of disillusion and disdain. "I did not know there was any such danger. I should hate to be a monkey." Then her eyes brightened again. "May I go and get them now?" she ...
— My Friend Prospero • Henry Harland
... quieter type of man who had no real love for the pomps and shows the rattle and tumult, of the city. The vision of wholesome country-produce—of fresh milk and eggs and vegetables, and of tender poultry—is one which still attracts our city-folk. But the vision, then as now, was often subject to disillusion. Complaints are many that you had to feed the homestead in place of it feeding you, and when Martial has given a pleasant picture of a family reaching the gate of Rome with a coachful of the typical produce of the country, he ends by suddenly letting you know ...
— Life in the Roman World of Nero and St. Paul • T. G. Tucker
... reflect by how few others like them his life was destined to be brightened. The Aeolian Harp has no more than the moderate merits, with its full share of the characteristic faults, of his earlier productions; but one cannot help "reading into it" the poet's after-life of disappointment and disillusion—estrangement from the "beloved woman" in whose affection he was then reposing; decay and disappearance of those "flitting phantasies" with which he was then so joyously trifling, and the bitterly ironical scholia which fate was preparing for ...
— English Men of Letters: Coleridge • H. D. Traill
... made her suffer, weep, confide in Susan Fleet, in Algeria? Had pink roses and dust, far-off and near sounds, movements and stillnesses, and that strange little island spoken to her of him, prophesied to her about him? She had a sense of banality, of disillusion, as if all that had been in her own brain only, almost crazily conceived without any action of ...
— The Way of Ambition • Robert Hichens
... a man for whom it was impossible to feel indifference; one either hated him or became fascinated by his curious and peculiar charm. This quality led many admirers to remain faithful to him even after disillusion had shattered their former friendship, and who, whilst refusing to speak to him any more, yet retained for him a deep affection which not even the conviction that it had been misplaced could alter. This is a remarkable and indisputable fact. After having rallied around him all that was honest ...
— Cecil Rhodes - Man and Empire-Maker • Princess Catherine Radziwill
... and she values domestic peace too much to risk friction by making unexpected claims. But beneath the surface there is often a profound discontent, and even in women who thought they had gained an insight into life, a sense of disillusion. Everyone knows this who is privileged to catch a glimpse into the hearts of women—often women of most distinguished intelligence as well as women of quite ordinary nature—who leave a life of spontaneous activity in the ...
— Little Essays of Love and Virtue • Havelock Ellis
... disappointed and bitter. The sad disillusion of the middle years, still heroically clinging to faiths that one after another destroyed themselves, ...
— Dangerous Days • Mary Roberts Rinehart
... laughter followed this attack—laughter which found a smothered echo among the ghosts. The spell was broken; disillusion followed the exquisite thrill of fear; and all Lady Sarah's male visitors made a rush upon the guilty nun. The loose white robe was stripped off, and little Jerry Spavinger, gentleman jock, famous on the Heath, and at Doncaster, stood revealed, in his shirt and ...
— London Pride - Or When the World Was Younger • M. E. Braddon
... of it is too continuous and interesting to need elaborate argument, for nobody is likely to miss any important link in it. But Balzac has nowhere excelled in finesse and success of analysis, the double disillusion which introduces itself at once between Madame de Bargeton and Lucien, and which makes any redintegratio amoris of a valid kind impossible, because each cannot but be aware that the other has anticipated the rupture. ...
— Lost Illusions • Honore De Balzac
... to his creature, Billy McLoughlin, heard of it. To him it presented another idea.20 To him it offered a chance to overthrow a political enemy and a hated rival for Miss Ashton's hand. Perhaps into the bargain it would disgust her with politics, disillusion her, and shake her faith in what he believed to be some of her 'radical' notions. All could be gained at one blow. They say that a check-book knows no politics, but Bennett has learned some, I venture to say, and to save his reputation he will pay back what he ...
— The Poisoned Pen • Arthur B. Reeve
... that when they disembarked at Carthage the town would be abandoned to them, and that they should have treasures divided among them; and when they saw that scarcely their wages would be paid, the disillusion touched their pride no ...
— Salammbo • Gustave Flaubert
... fading of visions and dreams which seemed to have the luminous constancy of fixed stars, breed temporary depressions and passing moods of scepticism and despair; but the spiritual vitality of the race always reasserts itself, and faith returns after every disaster or disillusion. ...
— Books and Culture • Hamilton Wright Mabie
... was studying the exquisite delicacy of the face turned so wistfully upon him, and the lovely lines of the slim throat and rounded chin—"So beautiful a creature"—he was saying within himself—"And must she also suffer pain and disillusion like all the rest of her ...
— Temporal Power • Marie Corelli
... for us the whole romance of life," he declared. "I will not listen to you any longer. I fear ignorance less than disillusion!" ...
— The Betrayal • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... of disillusion burst from between Mallory's teeth as he saw the front-page double-column spread, a type-specialty of the usually conservative Ledger upon which it prided itself, dwindle to a carefully handled inside-page three-quarter ...
— Success - A Novel • Samuel Hopkins Adams
... trifling by comparison. The next moment, a new life was born into the world—a new life, with all its heritage of certain sorrow and possible joy; with all its infinite sensibility to pleasure or pain, to hope and love and disillusion. ...
— Sparrows - The Story of an Unprotected Girl • Horace W. C. Newte
... perfect joy, when Myra was his wife. Would he not have the turning of the fair leaves of her book of life? Each page should unfold fresh happiness, hold new surprises as to what life and love could mean. He would know how to guard her from the faintest shadow of disillusion. Even now it was his right to keep her from that. How much, after all, should he tell her of the heart-searchings of these wretched weeks? Last night he had meant to tell her everything; he had ...
— The Mistress of Shenstone • Florence L. Barclay
... mystery out of the world. After the departed darkness the shadows remain, more mysterious because as if more enduring; and one feels a dread of them from which one was free before. What if they were to be victorious at the last? They, or what perhaps lurks in them: fear, deception, desire, disillusion—all silent at first before the song of triumphant love vibrating in the light. Yes. Silent. Even desire itself! All silent. But ...
— The Arrow of Gold - a story between two notes • Joseph Conrad
... events will compel him to talk sense sooner or later, even without a bribe, his bargaining position is not strong. In the meantime he may make trouble. If so, it can't be helped. But it will do him no good, and may even help to bring nearer the inevitable day of disillusion. I may add that for France to agree to a short moratorium is not a great sacrifice since, on account of the Belgian priority and other items, the amount of cash to which France will be entitled in the near future, even if ...
— Essays in Liberalism - Being the Lectures and Papers Which Were Delivered at the - Liberal Summer School at Oxford, 1922 • Various
... a rather whimsical smile. "I'll try to disillusion you to begin with. Perhaps if you understand ...
— The Lion of Petra • Talbot Mundy
... through moments of disillusion. After these two years she had looked forward to the meeting with such eagerness, such hidden emotion! And now—what was there to have been eager about? They seemed to be talking almost as strangers. The soreness ...
— Elizabeth's Campaign • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... in this way. And I did like the rest. If the young people who dream of the honeymoon only knew what a disillusion it is, and always a disillusion! I really do not know why all think it necessary ...
— The Kreutzer Sonata and Other Stories • Leo Tolstoy
... giant—it occurred in her version—pleased him immensely. Then when she had finished she was alarmed to find, from words dropped by him, that he considered the story to be true, or at least to be taken seriously. She did not disillusion him; to do so she would have had to tell him that she had lied. That was the funny part of the thing. He would have said to himself "what made her lie to me about that chap?" By no possible means could he have imagined a person sitting down to invent in cold blood for the amusement of ...
— The Beach of Dreams • H. De Vere Stacpoole
... sentimental eyes at the people grouped among palm-trees on a verandah, while the girl at the piano sang what was evidently a song about "the dear homeland," to judge from the far-away look in the eyes of all present. It seems a pity to disillusion you, but it isn't at all like that. To begin with, it was quite chilly, and we were very glad of the big fire burning in the grate, and we did not look pensive or far-away, but ate our dinner with great content. I think, perhaps, Christmas fare is even more uninteresting in India than ...
— Olivia in India • O. Douglas
... stars and the pitying angels looked down on the fierce conflict of grief and love and disillusion with which her desolate young soul wrestled alone through the long, midnight vigil. How should she separate these two beautiful faiths which had been enthroned as one in the happy depths of her guileless heart, without perilling her ...
— The Royal Pawn of Venice - A Romance of Cyprus • Mrs. Lawrence Turnbull
... beautifully rounded chin, the short straight nose, and delicately curved upper lip, that he had seen in the profile,—and yet—yet it was not the same face he had dreamt of. With an odd, provoking sense of disillusion, he swept ahead of the coach, and again slackened his speed to let it pass. This time the fair unknown raised her long lashes and gazed suddenly at this persistent horseman at her side, and an odd expression, it ...
— In a Hollow of the Hills • Bret Harte
... or twice we got entangled in channels among the many islands, and had to retrace our course, but we went on until late in the evening, my men believing firmly that we had now reached civilization again and that the journey would be over in a few days. I did not care to disillusion them. ...
— Across Unknown South America • Arnold Henry Savage Landor
... whom it was impossible to feel indifference; one either hated him or became fascinated by his curious and peculiar charm. This quality led many admirers to remain faithful to him even after disillusion had shattered their former friendship, and who, whilst refusing to speak to him any more, yet retained for him a deep affection which not even the conviction that it had been misplaced could alter. This is a remarkable and indisputable ...
— Cecil Rhodes - Man and Empire-Maker • Princess Catherine Radziwill
... loneliness of this visit and that riotous, joyful party of four years before. Things that had been the merest commonplaces of his life then, deep sleep, the sense of beauty around him, all desire, had flown away and the gaps they left were filled only with the great listlessness of his disillusion. ...
— This Side of Paradise • F. Scott Fitzgerald
... first serious disillusion of my life, and it left a deep and permanent impression upon my mind. What was the relation between the great banquet of Pereire & Co., this train full of statesmen, literati, and other distinguished men, this blast of the press ...
— Maximilian in Mexico - A Woman's Reminiscences of the French Intervention 1862-1867 • Sara Yorke Stevenson
... opposite to each other, on either side of the fire—the monumental matron whose black bodice heavily overhung the table, whose large rounded face was creased and wrinkled by what seemed countless years of joy and disillusion; and the young, slim girl, so fresh, so virginal, so ignorant, with all the pathos of an unsuspecting victim about to be sacrificed to the minotaur of Time! They both ate hot toast, with careless haste, in silence, preoccupied, worried, ...
— The Old Wives' Tale • Arnold Bennett
... allowing them neither intelligence nor virtue—in just that there seemed to her some flaw of taste that was almost like a confession of failure. Surely she loved him, and was ready to forgive him much: not for worlds would she have confessed to disillusion. And yet, now and again, when the rush and ostentation of their new life, with its monotony of dinners and dances—so little like that which she had anticipated as the future lot of a painter's wife—had left her rather weary, a trifle sad, she had thought suddenly of her old friend Philip ...
— A Comedy of Masks - A Novel • Ernest Dowson and Arthur Moore
... is licked off from life before the boy or the girl is twenty. Afterwards—repetition, disillusion, ...
— Fantasia of the Unconscious • D. H. Lawrence
... and 1780, were the years in which he came nearest to despair. The strain of a great movement is not in the early days of enthusiasm, but in the slow years when idealism is tempered by the strife of opinion and self-interest which brings delay and disillusion. As the war went on recruiting became steadily more difficult. The alliance with France actually worked to discourage it since it was felt that the cause was safe in the hands of this powerful ally. Whatever Great Britain's difficulties about finance they were light compared with Washington's. ...
— Washington and his Comrades in Arms - A Chronicle of the War of Independence • George Wrong
... the money and counting it, his furtive glance kept watch of Jack. Then, as the committee turned to go, he suddenly exclaimed with angry surprise and disillusion: ...
— Over the Pass • Frederick Palmer
... the first disillusion. Others followed. The aunt who had inhabited one of the ginger-brick almshouses over aginst 'Ighgyte Cemetery was dead when they took her a whole pound of tea and three-quarters of best cooked ham, ...
— The Dop Doctor • Clotilde Inez Mary Graves
... enough, and from the others I had no account so full and personal and true as from Markovitch. He told me all about that great day afterwards, only a short time before that catastrophe that overwhelmed us all, and in his account there was all the growing suspicion and horror of disillusion that after-events fostered in him. But as he told me, sitting through the purple hours of the night, watching the light break in ripples and circles of colour over the sea, he regained some of the splendours of that great day, and before he had finished his tale he was right back ...
— The Secret City • Hugh Walpole
... escape, since even the precious being whom you affect to worship you keep sternly at arm's length, that is among the other pleasing things you confided to me immediately on my arrival—lest, seen at close quarters, she should fall below your requirements and so you should suffer disillusion. Ah! you are frightfully cold-blooded, repulsively inhuman. Whether you judge others by yourself, reckoning them equally devoid of natural feeling, or whether you find a vindictive relish in rejecting the friendship and affection so lavishly ...
— The History of Sir Richard Calmady - A Romance • Lucas Malet
... novel, "A Love Crime," has admirably drawn one of these characters. The exquisite Armand, seeking pleasure constantly, is divided into the sensualist who seduces and ruins and the introspectionist who watches the proceeding with disgust and disillusion. It is not an outraged conscience that is at work but the inability to feel without analyzing the feeling "Ah, for a single passion that might apply my entire sensibility to another being, like wet paper against a window pane." This is the eternal tragedy of ...
— The Foundations of Personality • Abraham Myerson
... it was a very silly toast, but let it go to please them—for why disillusion those who believe in the actuality ...
— Wings of the Wind • Credo Harris
... their Italian models. The Petit Jehan de Saintre is certainly the work of Antoine de la Salle; the irony of a realist, endowed with subtlety and grace, conducts the reader through chivalric exaltations to vulgar disillusion. The writer was not insensible to the charm of the ideals of the past, but he presents them only in the end to cover them with disgrace. The anonymous farce of Pathelin, and the Chronique de petit Jehan ...
— A History of French Literature - Short Histories of the Literatures of the World: II. • Edward Dowden
... many a successful dinner has an aftermath in the drawing-room as cold and dismal as a party call. Madame Francesca had once characterised the hour after dinner as "the stick of a sky-rocket, which never fails to return and bring disillusion with it." Hence she postponed it as long as she could, but the Colonel himself gave the signal by moving ...
— Old Rose and Silver • Myrtle Reed
... never have a disillusion! Say, wilt thou that we woo her, double-handed? Wilt thou that we two woo her, both together? Feel'st thou, passing from my leather doublet, Through thy laced doublet, ...
— Cyrano de Bergerac • Edmond Rostand
... after her kind, felt the bitterness of disillusion. She had believed that my wild poet's passion for her would make me her slave; and that, being her slave, I should execute her will in all things. With the essential shallowness of a negative, unimaginative nature, she was unable ...
— The Lifted Veil • George Eliot
... clearly up to me to disillusion her and persuade her either to put down the revolver or hold it in a way less calculated ...
— The Lost Valley • J. M. Walsh
... wondered at Ancrum's sense of difference and disillusion. For David after all had made a mark. As he sat talking to Ancrum of the new buildings behind the printing-office where he now employed from two to three hundred men, of the ups and downs of his profit-sharing experiences, of this apprentices' ...
— The History of David Grieve • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... according to the European fashion and at twenty had married and lost the young nobleman whose name she bore, and had buried him in his family crypt in Moscow with the simple fortitude of one who is well out of a bad bargain. But she had paid her toll to disillusion and the age of thirty found her a little more careless, a little more worldly-wise than was necessary, even in a cosmopolitan. Her comments spared neither friend nor foe and Hilda Ashhurst, whose mind ...
— Madcap • George Gibbs
... country, the child is very near to Nature's heart; he is brother to the tree and calls all the dumb, growing things by name. He is sublimely superstitious. His imagination, as yet untouched by disillusion, makes good all that earth lacks, and habited in a healthy body ...
— Little Journeys To the Homes of the Great, Volume 3 (of 14) • Elbert Hubbard
... at her ear whispering; the cold chill of disappointment, of disillusion, of sickening ...
— Jeanne d'Arc - Her Life And Death • Mrs.(Margaret) Oliphant
... destroyed the smiling gardens in the wilderness. A remnant of the escaped converts had gone back to a wild life in the woods, and the Fathers, who had done their Master's work so well, drifted away to mingle in other scenes or die of broken hearts. Then, in the sober eighteenth century, when the disillusion was complete, Spain woke up to the fact that in the temperate part of the continent, shared by her with Portugal, she possessed a new bright little Spain worth cultivating. About the same time, Portugal discovered that the ...
— The Purple Land • W. H. Hudson
... John gloomily. "I don't know any longer. At any rate, let us love for a while, for a year or so, you and me. That's a form of divine drunkenness that we can all try. There are only diamonds in the whole world, diamonds and perhaps the shabby gift of disillusion. Well, I have that last and I will make the usual nothing of it." He shivered. "Turn up your coat collar, little girl, the night's full of chill and you'll get pneumonia. His was a great sin who first invented consciousness. Let us lose it ...
— Tales of the Jazz Age • F. Scott Fitzgerald
... five thousand inhabitants. From a romantic point of view, however, this discovery was a disappointment. Having made my way into the most primitive region of all Japan, I had imagined myself far beyond the range of all modernising influences; and the suggestion of beefsteak with fried potatoes was a disillusion. Nor was I entirely consoled by the subsequent discovery that there were ...
— Glimpses of an Unfamiliar Japan • Lafcadio Hearn
... silence of his brain he fought—fought against disillusion, claiming exemption for at least one woman from these sweeping denunciations—the woman in ...
— The Kingdom Round the Corner - A Novel • Coningsby Dawson
... one sense it is true. Love is a beautiful thing to look at—an angel to outward show—with the heart, too often, of a fiend; and it is he who leads us to that precipice of which I spoke—the precipice of disillusion and despair." ...
— Brooke's Daughter - A Novel • Adeline Sergeant
... waited anxiously for the disillusion which must come in spite of all their cherishing, for till now Rose had been so busy with her studies, travels, and home duties that she knew very little of the triumphs, trials, and temptations of fashionable life. Birth and ...
— Rose in Bloom - A Sequel to "Eight Cousins" • Louisa May Alcott
... surprised me very unpleasantly, Lydia. I do not think now that I ever had much hope of success; but I thought, at least, that my disillusion would be ...
— Cashel Byron's Profession • George Bernard Shaw
... like it. I think I'll stay with it for a while." Again Mark had put back the thought of his heart. Like so many of the loyal and devoted, he could hardly bring himself to speak of his own deeper motives and ambitions. Least of all could he reveal them in this moment of disillusion. He had never told Bertram about the four-act comedy hidden in the writing desk of their common room, to be mulled over during the mornings of his leisure. "I think I'll stay with it for a while, ...
— The Readjustment • Will Irwin
... fury on this exposed peak, minimise the delights of a mountain sojourn. The invasion of an army of jungle rats, behind the walls and above the ceiling of a room sodden and dripping with the afternoon's flood, completes the disillusion, and compels a hasty descent to the warmer damp of the lowlands, for the Equatorial climate, and the general absence of bed-coverings, causes a rheumatic stiffness on rising, which has to be steamed out by the atmospheric ...
— Through the Malay Archipelago • Emily Richings
... sheets were in violent commotion, approaching, impinging upon each other, swinging back again to complete separation, and so on. But the violence of the motion consisted by no means in speed: it suggested a very much retarded rolling off of a motion picture reel. There was at first an element of disillusion in the impression. I felt tempted to shout and to spur the mist into greater activity. On the surface, to both sides of the tear, waves ran out, and at the edges of the pool they rose in that same ...
— Over Prairie Trails • Frederick Philip Grove
... me! How stuffy this room is, and the shop's practically full of trash!" Or, some little time before they are dead, they stay later than usual in the shop one evening, and make up their minds to take stock and count the till, and the disillusion lays them low, and they struggle into the living-room and murmur: "I shall never have that beautiful furniture, and I shall never have that system of ventilation. If I had known earlier, I would ...
— Mental Efficiency - And Other Hints to Men and Women • Arnold Bennett
... seized him again and he heard his teeth rattle. He must move from this spot, forever now to be associated with black disillusion. He arose from his seat and was dismayed to hear a hail from the Montague girl. Was he never to be free from her? She was poised at a little distance, one hand raised to him, no longer the drenched victim of a capricious ...
— Merton of the Movies • Harry Leon Wilson
... exquisite delicacy of the face turned so wistfully upon him, and the lovely lines of the slim throat and rounded chin—"So beautiful a creature"—he was saying within himself—"And must she also suffer pain and disillusion like all the rest of her ...
— Temporal Power • Marie Corelli
... negation, of theoretic insecurity, which was in the air, conspiring with what was of like tendency in himself, made of Lord UFFORD a central type of disillusion. . . . He had been amiable because the general betise of humanity did not in his opinion greatly matter, after all; and in reading these 'SATIRES' it is well-nigh painful to witness the blind and naked forces of nature and circumstance surprising him in the uncontrollable ...
— The Certain Hour • James Branch Cabell
... really loved her. She had thrown him and Celeste together in vain. Poor Celeste, poor lovely Celeste, who wore her heart upon her sleeve, patent to all eyes save Donald's! Thus, it was with defined purpose that she had lured him this night into the garden. She wanted to disillusion him. ...
— The Place of Honeymoons • Harold MacGrath
... was in him more of the Yahoo than of the decadent. There was an excremental element in his genius as in the genius of that other gloomy dean, Jonathan Swift. Donne and Swift were alike satirists born under Saturn. They laughed more frequently from disillusion than from happiness. Donne, it must be admitted, turned his disillusion to charming as well as hideous uses. Go and Catch a Falling Star is but one of a series of delightful lyrics in disparagement of women. In several of the Elegies, however, he throws away ...
— The Art of Letters • Robert Lynd
... tragedies; it was all done at the topmost height of happy hours, but there are hints in it which we shall have to notice later, which show that when writing it Shakespeare had already looked into the valley of disillusion which he was about to tread. But "Twelfth Night" is written in the spirit of "As You Like It" or "Much Ado," only it is still more personal-ingenuous and less dramatic than these; it is, indeed, a lyric of love and the joy ...
— The Man Shakespeare • Frank Harris
... manner of uttering these last words, that it would not have required the wisdom of one older than Miss Cable to detect that he was thoroughly enjoying his pose of man of the world. He was indeed young! For, he had yet to learn that not to disillusion the girl, but to conform as much as possible to her ideals, was the surest way to win her favour; and his vanity surely would have received a blow had not David Cable at that moment come out of the doorway across the sidewalk, pausing for a moment ...
— Jane Cable • George Barr McCutcheon
... house, groaning in spirit, but thankful that she had taken it for granted that he had secured their release in the manner indicated. He did not propose to disillusion her. It would be time enough to take the blame when the blame came along. Probably old Derek would simply be amused and laugh at the whole bally affair like a sportsman. Freddie cheered ...
— The Little Warrior - (U.K. Title: Jill the Reckless) • P. G. Wodehouse
... at his farming, doubts assail his mind whether this manual labor is a satisfactory solution of his difficulties in adjusting himself to the world and opening communication with his fellow-men. The disillusion, if there really had ever been any true hope on his part, was effected even more quickly than before. Six weeks of manuring had brought him to enthusiastic thankfulness ...
— Nathaniel Hawthorne • George E. Woodberry
... air of disappointment and disillusion). Down't awsk me, Miste Jornsn. The kepn's ...
— Captain Brassbound's Conversion • George Bernard Shaw
... existing one in Jerusalem; while the faithful are comforted with the prospect of victory, increase of population and resources, and the perpetuity of their race (lxvi.). [Footnote 1: Professor G. A. Smith refers this prayer to the period of disillusion after the return and before the new religious impulse given by Haggai and ...
— Introduction to the Old Testament • John Edgar McFadyen
... the expletive of disillusion burst from between Mallory's teeth as he saw the front-page double-column spread, a type-specialty of the usually conservative Ledger upon which it prided itself, dwindle to a carefully handled inside-page ...
— Success - A Novel • Samuel Hopkins Adams
... his creature, Billy McLoughlin, heard of it. To him it presented another idea.20 To him it offered a chance to overthrow a political enemy and a hated rival for Miss Ashton's hand. Perhaps into the bargain it would disgust her with politics, disillusion her, and shake her faith in what he believed to be some of her 'radical' notions. All could be gained at one blow. They say that a check-book knows no politics, but Bennett has learned some, I venture to say, ...
— The Poisoned Pen • Arthur B. Reeve
... and she had all mine, poor foolish wretch that I was. There's nothing more pathetic, I think, at this distance, than a boy's passionate purity in his first love—unless it's his disillusionment; for disillusion does no nature good. It would have done mine great harm if I hadn't had a friend like you to groan and ...
— Set in Silver • Charles Norris Williamson and Alice Muriel Williamson
... reported from various parts of France. A Prussian officer, speaking French fluently, was among a convoy of prisoners at Versailles yesterday. The officer, on seeing some French territorials march past, singing the "Marseillaise," remarked to his guard: "What a disillusion awaits us!" ...
— Paris War Days - Diary of an American • Charles Inman Barnard
... shadow on that portrait has Simon Perkins studied with exceeding diligence and care, marvelling, it must be confessed, at the taste of the Fairy Queen. The accessories to his own composition are in rapid progress. Most of the fairies have been put in, and the gradual change from glamour to disillusion, cunningly conveyed by a stream of cold grey morning light entering the magic cavern from realms of upper earth, to deaden the glitter, pale the colouring, and strip, as it were, the tinsel where it strikes. On the Rhymer himself our artist has bestowed an infinity of pains, preserving ...
— M. or N. "Similia similibus curantur." • G.J. Whyte-Melville
... an educational genius will write a book to be given to every young man on the date of his disillusion. This work will have the flavor of Montaigne's essays and Samuel Butler's note-books—and a little of Tolstoi and Marcus Aurelius. It will be neither cheerful nor pleasant but will contain numerous passages ...
— Flappers and Philosophers • F. Scott Fitzgerald
... all the climes, the fears as the hopes, all the travail of deepest, fullest living, we claim as our own forever. We guard jealously our heritage of feeling. Would you for all the world sleep rather than wake, forget rather than remember? Then cease the requiem of your speech about the dangers of disillusion! ...
— The Kempton-Wace Letters • Jack London
... taking us across the quad to hear moderate music in the hideous Balliol hall. Of all the Master's women friends, I infinitely preferred Mrs. T. H. Green, John Addington Symonds' sister. She is among the rare women who have all the qualities which in moments of disillusion ...
— Margot Asquith, An Autobiography: Volumes I & II • Margot Asquith
... a whole tract of life becomes inexplicably colourless. What was formerly full of zest, and so obviously worth doing that it raised no questions, has now grown dreary and purposeless: with a sense of disillusion we inquire the meaning of life, and decide, perhaps, that all is vanity. The search for an outside meaning that can compel an inner response must always be disappointed: all "meaning" must be at bottom related to our primary desires, and when they are extinct no miracle can ...
— Mysticism and Logic and Other Essays • Bertrand Russell
... was this barren drought of feeling which at last served to disillusion him, whose existence he at last realized in this creature who had been his cherished idol. He realized it in her apathy upon hearing of the death of the child. He realized it in the look she turned upon him in which he saw her stern suspicion that ...
— The Way of the Wind • Zoe Anderson Norris
... no need to tell of the disillusion that gradually came. Frank found his debts mounting up and his cares increasing. She was all sympathy and regret when he mentioned it, but—there were certain comforts, luxuries and things she had ...
— Found in the Philippines - The Story of a Woman's Letters • Charles King
... of disappointment which this produced was greater than the Painters' Union could bear; so someone, in order to prevent industrial strife, invented some stuff called varnish, by which, at the very moment of disillusion, the maximum of shininess can be again produced with the minimum of effort. It is one of the few inventions which make a man grateful for the ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 158, May 12, 1920 • Various
... of human spirit and the disappointment and disillusion as to the aftermath of the harvest of blood, may have aggravated, but they could not cause the symptoms of which I speak; for the very obvious reason that all these symptoms were in existence and apparent to a few discerning men for decades before the ...
— The Constitution of the United States - A Brief Study of the Genesis, Formulation and Political Philosophy of the Constitution • James M. Beck
... itself is too simple for Mascagni's strong dramatic talent, hence the lack of interest, hence the disillusion of so many. ...
— The Standard Operaglass - Detailed Plots of One Hundred and Fifty-one Celebrated Operas • Charles Annesley
... orchards widening around it, the immense barn on the corner opposite, and the wheat- and corn-fields waving in the distance, caused many a passer-by to envy the possessors; but a look at the interior of the house and only a brief acquaintance with the occupants were sufficient to disillusion any one regarding the ...
— The Poorhouse Waif and His Divine Teacher • Isabel C. Byrum
... uppermost in her mind when she opened her eyes; and the girl, under the impression of so disgusting a disillusion, remained for a while pondering and yawning, before making up her mind to exchange warmth and featherbed for ...
— The Light of Scarthey • Egerton Castle
... boot, there was nothing clumsy or weak about old Jolyon. He was as upright—very nearly—as in those old times when he came every night; his sight was as good—almost as good. But what a feeling of weariness and disillusion! ...
— Forsyte Saga • John Galsworthy
... because he did not care to disillusion Hawksley. "I found an appraiser's receipt in your wallet. You carried some fine jewels. Did you hide them or did Karlov get them? It struck me as odd that you haven't inquired about them." The change that came ...
— The Drums Of Jeopardy • Harold MacGrath
... on then to tell us how tired he was and how discouraged by this lesson of disillusion following swiftly upon the finest day of his life. He told us how he went the round of all the ship-owners' offices in the City where some junior clerk would furnish him with printed forms of application which he took home ...
— Chance - A Tale in Two Parts • Joseph Conrad
... generous ardour and the splendid humanitarian enthusiasms which had been stirred by the opening phases of the revolutionary movement, had now ebbed away; revulsion had followed, and with it the mood of disillusion and despair. The spirit of doubt and denial was felt as a paralysing power in every department of life and thought, and the shadow of unbelief lay heavy ...
— Sartor Resartus, and On Heroes, Hero-Worship, and the Heroic in History • Thomas Carlyle
... upon fiction, the first proposal comes in the nature of a shock. Disillusion follows as a matter of course. Men, evidently, do not read fiction, or at least do not profit by the valuable hints to ...
— The Spinster Book • Myrtle Reed
... and bitter. The sad disillusion of the middle years, still heroically clinging to faiths that one after another destroyed themselves, ...
— Dangerous Days • Mary Roberts Rinehart
... would shudder at that fate for anything I loved. Do you know, Captain Lingard, how people lost in a maze end?" he went on holding Lingard by a steadfast stare. "No? . . . I will tell you then. They end by hating their very selves, and they die in disillusion and despair." ...
— The Rescue • Joseph Conrad
... charms for Nance. On the one occasion when curiosity had induced her to follow the stream of well-dressed children into the side door of the cathedral, she had met with disillusion. It was a place where little girls lifted white petticoats when they sat down and straightened pink sashes when they got up, and put nickels in a basket. Nance had had no lace petticoat or pink sash or nickel. She showed her ...
— Calvary Alley • Alice Hegan Rice
... been the outcome of the discussions, the dish-washings, the walks, the leanings over the bridge at the trysting-place, we may only speculate now. For a time the outlook for this "romance of real life" seemed promising, then came disillusion. Gibbs, alas, had a bent which at first we did not suspect, but which in time became only too manifest. It had its root in a laudable desire—the desire to destroy anything resembling strong drink. Only, I think he went ...
— Dwellers in Arcady - The Story of an Abandoned Farm • Albert Bigelow Paine
... to Stephen about it, in the accents of disillusion. 'What?' cried Stephen. 'Don't you know? They're engaged to be married. Her name is Mary Callear. She used to be parlourmaid at Uncle John's at Oldcastle. ...
— The Grim Smile of the Five Towns • Arnold Bennett
... old fools can no longer dream. We have only those phantoms called memories, which are the husks of dreams. Disillusion stands in one doorway of our house and Mockery ...
— The Ragged Edge • Harold MacGrath
... rarely. It is hard to build up new on an old friendship when in that friendship there has been bitter disillusion. They did their best, both these women to be friends, but they were never able to again touch one another nearly. There were too many things between them that they could not speak of, things that had never been explained nor yet forgiven. The ...
— Three Lives - Stories of The Good Anna, Melanctha and The Gentle Lena • Gertrude Stein
... moment of this process seems to be, that man falls out of love with life as he has commonly lived it, and the world as he has known it. Dissatisfaction and disillusion possess him; the negative marks of his nascent intuition of another life, for which he is intended but which he has not yet found. We see this initial phase very well in St. Benedict, disgusted by the meaningless life of ...
— The Life of the Spirit and the Life of To-day • Evelyn Underhill
... wise," he mused. "If only the child knew! Heigh-ho! I am kind, sometimes I've been good, and often wise. Well, I can't disillusion the child, happily; she has ...
— Half a Rogue • Harold MacGrath
... that one can secure a divorce in Reno without having to present grounds or causes for it. Let me hasten to disillusion such "idealists." As mentioned above, there are seven causes for divorce in this State, any one of which in the eyes of the liberal Nevada law, is sufficient justification for a ...
— Reno - A Book of Short Stories and Information • Lilyan Stratton
... the idea that, after all, love, which she chose to consider as single and wonderful a thing in a man's life as birth, or adolescence, or death, was temporary, and formed only an episode. It was her hour of disillusion. ...
— The Trespasser • D.H. Lawrence
... from my saddle and taking one of her gloved hands into mine, "the time has come for me to disillusion you. There are no mammoths in that mud ...
— Police!!! • Robert W. Chambers
... the German attack was a real defeat, for it upset all the confident calculations of the enemy, who from the height of Mount Kemmel had seen, first Ypres, and then channel ports, within his grasp. It brought disappointment and disillusion to his troops, who had been urged on to their disastrous massed attacks by flamboyant promises of success. The effect was seen in a renewal of German peace propaganda, which all the Allies had learned by this time ...
— America's War for Humanity • Thomas Herbert Russell
... households, begun under the happiest auspices—the bride all the more apt to believe that she loves her betrothed in virtue of her suggestibility, easily exalted, perhaps at the expense of the senses—become hells on earth. The sexual act has for the hysterical woman more than one disillusion; she cannot understand it; it inspires her with insurmountable repugnance."[246] I refer to these hysterical phenomena because they present to us, in an extreme form, facts which are common among women whom, under the artificial conditions of civilized life, ...
— Studies in the Psychology of Sex, Volume 1 (of 6) • Havelock Ellis
... by Graham Wallas, who, abandoning the deductive construction of intellectual theorems, made an exhaustive study of the Chartist movement. It is greatly to be regretted that these lectures were not effectively published. Their delivery wrought a tremendous disillusion as to the novelty of our ideas and methods of propaganda; much new gospel suddenly appeared to us as stale failure; and we recognized that there had been weak men before Agamemnon, even as far back as in Cromwell's army. The necessity for mastering the history of our own movement and falling into ...
— The History of the Fabian Society • Edward R. Pease
... the humble, those of the fools and those of the sages. For more than sixty years he had dragged on this painful earth of ours the most weary, the most uneasy soul that civilization had ever fashioned to its ends of disillusion and regret. One could not refuse him a measure of greatness, for he was unhappy in a way unknown to mediocre souls. His mother Heyst had never known, but he kept his father's pale, distinguished face in affectionate memory. He remembered him mainly in an ample blue ...
— Victory • Joseph Conrad
... young one, full of soft southern inflections, and an older voice, a trifle hard, as from disillusion. ...
— K • Mary Roberts Rinehart
... had been a very gradual disillusion, and one mitigated by many experiences that had fully justified even Sophy's extravagant anticipations. The trouble, in the main, was one common to a great majority of travellers for pleasure—a mind totally ...
— A Knight of the Nets • Amelia E. Barr
... beginning. My father was a fairly wealthy man—but a dreamer. He made his money by a clever invention and lost it by an investment little short of idiotic. Like many unpractical men he had rather fancied himself as a man of business and the disillusion killed him. He—shot himself. My mother, my sister and myself were left, with nothing save a small sum in the bank and the deed of the modest house we lived in. Adela was twenty-one and I was nineteen. We sold the house, moved into ...
— Up the Hill and Over • Isabel Ecclestone Mackay
... cube which would contain the rendered ring. He had loved, and loved tragically. (That was how he put it—in his unspoken thoughts; but the truth was merely that he had loved something too expensive.) Now the dream was done. And a man of disillusion walked along the Parade towards St Asaph's Road among revellers, a man with a past, a man who had probed women, a man who had nothing to learn about the sex. And amid all the tragedy of his heart, and all his apprehensions concerning hollow, worldly success, little thoughts of absurd unimportance ...
— The Card, A Story Of Adventure In The Five Towns • Arnold Bennett
... as if more enduring; and one feels a dread of them from which one was free before. What if they were to be victorious at the last? They, or what perhaps lurks in them: fear, deception, desire, disillusion—all silent at first before the song of triumphant love vibrating in the light. Yes. Silent. Even desire itself! All silent. ...
— The Arrow of Gold - a story between two notes • Joseph Conrad
... with such confidence that Oliver had a difficulty in choosing the words that were to disillusion him. Therefore he ...
— The Sea-Hawk • Raphael Sabatini
... out, the next morning, the tracts in her hand and zeal in her heart. At the very first saloon, she was doomed to disillusion. ...
— Teddy: Her Book - A Story of Sweet Sixteen • Anna Chapin Ray
... give it to me?" I said. "I should like to have it very much. I should set it up on my writing table and call it 'Disillusion.' But do you think it will collapse ...
— Gossamer - 1915 • George A. Birmingham
... good and kind magician when we were children," was Hadria's thought, "and now one is grown up, there is no disillusion. He is a good and kind ...
— The Daughters of Danaus • Mona Caird
... at the girl's expression as it changed from bitter disillusion to something akin to ...
— This One Problem • M. C. Pease
... with compunction and penitence. Crispus had wished to transform her into an angel, to raise her to heights where love for Christ alone existed, and she had fallen in love with an Augustian. The very thought of that filled his heart with horror, strengthened by a feeling of disillusion and disappointment. No, no, he could not forgive her. Words of horror burned his lips like glowing coals; he struggled still with himself not to utter them, but he shook his emaciated hands over the terrified girl. Lygia felt guilty, but not to that degree. She had judged ...
— Quo Vadis - A Narrative of the Time of Nero • Henryk Sienkiewicz
... right," nodded the tired-looking man in the big chair, removing his feet from the railing. He was in his shirt- sleeves, and was smoking a pipe. The droop of his thin mustache matched the droop of his thin shoulders—and both indefinably but unmistakably spelled disillusion and discouragement. "It's grand, but I think it's too grand—for us. However, daughter says the best is none too ...
— Oh, Money! Money! • Eleanor Hodgman Porter
... surer indication of his change of mood. The fresh joyousness, the keen delight in life and in man, which breathes through Shakspere's early work disappears in comedies such as "Troilus" and "Measure for Measure." Disappointment, disillusion, a new sense of the evil and foulness that underlie so much of human life, a loss of the old frank trust in its beauty and goodness, threw their gloom over these comedies. Failure seems everywhere. In "Julius Caesar" the virtue of Brutus is foiled by its ignorance of ...
— History of the English People, Volume V (of 8) - Puritan England, 1603-1660 • John Richard Green
... manner or grace of speech, her very voice was the deep bass of a man. In the days of her joyous entrance into London, amid the acclamations of the populace, her high spirit, her kind heart, and the excitement of adventure lent a passing glow to her sallow cheeks. But ill-health and disillusion followed. She became morbid and sullen, sometimes remaining for days in a dull stupor, at other times giving way to gusts of hysterical passion. But beneath her forbidding exterior there beat a warm, tender, womanly heart, which yearned for some one to love and to cherish. ...
— The Reign of Mary Tudor • James Anthony Froude
... attempt to disillusion them, recognizing that it must fail. She was resigned to being misjudged. If she could achieve success at that price, success ...
— Dope • Sax Rohmer
... girls came into the kitchen in time to hear the question, and Rick almost hated to give the answer, knowing that it would disillusion them, and ...
— The Blue Ghost Mystery • Harold Leland Goodwin
... way. And I did like the rest. If the young people who dream of the honeymoon only knew what a disillusion it is, and always a disillusion! I really do not know why all think ...
— The Kreutzer Sonata and Other Stories • Leo Tolstoy
... is hardly surprising that such ideas as these, jumbled together by a mob in Trafalgar Square, took practical form, on a certain memorable occasion, in a looting of shops in Piccadilly—an enterprise instigated by men one of whom, enlightened by disillusion, has subsequently earned respect as a grave ...
— Memoirs of Life and Literature • W. H. Mallock
... ourselves putting forth the lovely flowers and fruit of the virtues whereof the heroes and heroines of romance are so prolific. Usually nothing occurs to disillusion us about ourselves. But now and then fate, in unusually brutal ironic mood, forces us to see the real reason why we did this or that virtuous, self-sacrificing action, or blossomed forth in this or that nobility of character. Mildred was destined now to suffer one of these savage blows ...
— The Price She Paid • David Graham Phillips
... its worm-eaten steps groaned beneath our weight, like a sensitive woman under a new disillusion. At the top was a room with a door that closed on the outside with a hook. We slept there. The plaster on the once yellow walls was crumbling away; the beams of the ceiling bent beneath the weight of the slated roof, and on the window-panes was a layer of dust that softened ...
— Over Strand and Field • Gustave Flaubert
... as if she liked that, too. It was their hour for liking everything. As Kate opened the outer door for them, the blast struck through her, but the lovers, laughing, ran down the stairs together. They were, in their way, outcasts; they were poor; the future might hold bitter disillusion. But now, borne by the sharp wind, their laughter drifted back ...
— The Precipice • Elia Wilkinson Peattie
... the illusions of youth and a new enthusiasm. The desire for novelty, the passion for force and dirt, and the hankering after freakishness of mood, which many have attempted to substitute for the older and simpler things, are themselves the best evidence of disillusion and jaded nerves. There is a weariness and a disgust in our recent impatience with beauty which indicate too clearly the exhaustion of our spiritual resources. It may well be that the rebirth of poetry is to be manifest in a reappearance ...
— Young Adventure - A Book of Poems • Stephen Vincent Benet
... to think for themselves, or they would realize that by appearing in the same attire as their daughters they challenge a comparison which can only be to their disadvantage, and should be if possible avoided. Is there any disillusion more painful than, on approaching what appeared from a distance to be a young girl, to find one’s self face to face with sixty years of wrinkles? That is a modern version of the saying, “an old head on young shoulders,” with a vengeance! If mistaken sexagenarians could ...
— The Ways of Men • Eliot Gregory
... Whitaker spared him disillusion. Painting with Kenny was an occupation, never work. When it slipped tiresomely into the class of work and palled, he threw it aside for something ...
— Kenny • Leona Dalrymple
... history begins, she had led as happy a life as a woman strong enough to protect herself can be supposed to live. From 1817 to 1834 she had come some five or six times to Les Touches. Her first stay was after her first disillusion in 1818. The house was uninhabitable, and she sent her man of business to Guerande and took a lodging for herself in the village. At that time she had no suspicion of her coming fame; she was sad, she saw no one; she wanted, as it ...
— Beatrix • Honore de Balzac
... hope for better things, while in the page of Mr. Pulitzer there is no such qualification of the disillusion. Both are enamoured of the beauty of those daughters of Mammon, and of the distinction of our iron-clad youth, the athletic, well-groomed, well-tailored worldlings who hurry up-town from their banks and brokers' offices and lawyers' offices to the dinners and ...
— Imaginary Interviews • W. D. Howells
... novelists would destroy for us the whole romance of life," he declared. "I will not listen to you any longer. I fear ignorance less than disillusion!" ...
— The Betrayal • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... from the story—the story must not seem to have been constructed to prove it. "Die Weltgeschichte ist das Weltgericht," wrote Schiller; even so, the delineation of life is the criticism of life. To show the scope of disillusion, monotony, repression—life's generous impulses narrowed and made timid by the social, economic, and political machine—would be a criticism of our modern world; there would be no need of moralizing. This the Russian ...
— The Principles Of Aesthetics • Dewitt H. Parker
... Disgrace malhonori. Disguise alivesti. Disgust nauxzi. Dish plado. Dishcloth telertuko. Dishearten malkuragxigi. Dishonest malhonesta. Dishonesty malhonesteco. Dishonour malhonori. Dishonourable malhonora. Disillusion elrevigxo. Disinfect dezinfekti. Disinterested malprofitema. Disjoin disligi. Disjoint elartikigi. Disjunction disigo. Dislike malsxati, malameti. Dislike antipatio. Dislocate elartikigi. Dislocate (to take to pieces) dispecigi. Dislocation ...
— English-Esperanto Dictionary • John Charles O'Connor and Charles Frederic Hayes
... literature attributed unhappiness of life almost exclusively to the mischances of unrequited love or to the jealousies that attend adulterous love, he disregarded such puerile maladies and probed into those wounds which are more fatal, more keen and deep, which arise from satiety, disillusion and scorn in ruined souls whom the present tortures, the past fills with loathing and the future frightens and ...
— Against The Grain • Joris-Karl Huysmans
... should let the opportunity slip. There was a chance of a straight, unhampered view of the whole meaning of his matter; nothing was needed but to allow the scene to show itself, fairly and squarely. All its force would have been lent to the disaster that follows; the dismay, the disillusion, the snarl of anger and defiance, all would have been made beforehand. By so much would the effect of the impending scene, the scene of catastrophe, have been strengthened. There would have been no necessity for the sudden heightening of the pitch, the ...
— The Craft of Fiction • Percy Lubbock
... enthusiasm for a Conrad book, or, indeed, any genuine comprehension of it. The feminine mind, which rules in English fiction, both as producer and as consumer, craves inevitably a more confident and comforting view of the world than Conrad has to offer. It seeks, not disillusion, but illusion. It protects itself against the disquieting questioning of life by pretending that all the riddles have been solved, that each new sage answers them afresh, that a few simple principles suffice to dispose of them. Women, one may say, have to ...
— A Book of Prefaces • H. L. Mencken
... she entered thoroughly into the lives of others, struggled with their struggles, triumphed in their triumphs, and was beginning to see in everything, good or bad, its necessity of existence. Under ordinary circumstances one cannot see much misery without experiencing a world of disillusion and futile rebellion of spirit; but Ruth was not living just at that time ...
— Other Things Being Equal • Emma Wolf
... her father simply perfect," was Mrs. Wells's reply. "I dread to think what it will cost her when disillusion comes, as come it must. Why! Who is that he ...
— 'Laramie;' - or, The Queen of Bedlam. • Charles King
... Stendhal's life, which, viewed impartially, is a simple and somewhat pathetic record of failure and disillusion. He was six years older than Balzac, having been born January 23d, 1783, in the small town of Grenoble, in Dauphine, which, with its narrow prejudices and petty formalism, seemed to him in after years "the souvenir of an abominable indigestion." He early developed an abnormal sensibility, ...
— Library Of The World's Best Literature, Ancient And Modern, Vol 4 • Charles Dudley Warner
... with the groom quickly, and naturally, perhaps, bred contempt and disillusion. His coarseness offended every susceptibility; he was frankly impossible in such an intimate relation; and after she had given birth to a daughter in Holland, she arranged a separation, for which the groom was, at least, as grateful as herself. The child—the very sight of whom, reminding her ...
— Love Romances of the Aristocracy • Thornton Hall
... hope disillusion was not the outcome of realisation. Up to the present"—the humorous, keen eyes were wrinkled at the corners—"all the boy's swans have been geese, some of ...
— The Dop Doctor • Clotilde Inez Mary Graves
... generations have failed, but ours is full of brighter promise. There is something very touching, to us older men almost tragical, in the unbounded self- confidence of the young life that we see rushing to the front all round us. We know so well the disillusion that is sure to come, the disappointments that will cloud the morning sky. We would not carry one shadow from the darkened experience of middle life into the roseate tints of ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture: St. John Chaps. XV to XXI • Alexander Maclaren
... Lyddite shells was better than before, and the dervishes, even more clearly than we, must have seen from the volcanic upheavals when the missiles struck, that their capital was being wrecked. It must have been something of a disillusion to many of them to note that the sacred tomb of their Mahdi was suffering most of all from the infidels' fire. Several of the gunboats assisted in the bombardment, but their chief duty was to drive all bodies ...
— Khartoum Campaign, 1898 - or the Re-Conquest of the Soudan • Bennet Burleigh
... fiction, the first proposal comes in the nature of a shock. Disillusion follows as a matter of course. Men, evidently, do not read fiction, or at least do not profit by the valuable hints to be found ...
— The Spinster Book • Myrtle Reed
... liars, and vile hypocrites, and cannot escape without crawling in the dust—this produces a large deep gloom, and a crushing sense of doom beyond philosophy. Scudamore could have endured the loss and the disillusion of his love—pure and strong as that power had been—but the ruin of his native land would turn his lively heart ...
— Springhaven - A Tale of the Great War • R. D. Blackmore
... below. Percival, looking down, beheld the young person standing on the lower rung of a ladder, coaxing a small boy to jump from the platform above. Now, on several occasions in the past Percival had met Disillusion face to face in a bathing-suit. A certain attenuated memory of the faithless Hortense made him wince even yet. But the round and graceful figure poised in dancing impatience on the ladder-rung defied criticism. Much as he disapproved ...
— The Honorable Percival • Alice Hegan Rice
... ago, and I see that Baedeker still withholds the distinction. What a variety of misfortune this little world holds! While some of us are indulging our right to be unhappy over a thousand trivial matters, such as illness and disillusion, there are inn-keepers on the Continent who are staggering ...
— A Wanderer in Holland • E. V. Lucas
... speaker's manner of uttering these last words, that it would not have required the wisdom of one older than Miss Cable to detect that he was thoroughly enjoying his pose of man of the world. He was indeed young! For, he had yet to learn that not to disillusion the girl, but to conform as much as possible to her ideals, was the surest way to win her favour; and his vanity surely would have received a blow had not David Cable at that moment come out of the ...
— Jane Cable • George Barr McCutcheon
... stuffy this room is, and the shop's practically full of trash!" Or, some little time before they are dead, they stay later than usual in the shop one evening, and make up their minds to take stock and count the till, and the disillusion lays them low, and they struggle into the living-room and murmur: "I shall never have that beautiful furniture, and I shall never have that system of ventilation. If I had known earlier, I would have at least got a few inexpensive cushions to go on with, and I would have put ...
— Mental Efficiency - And Other Hints to Men and Women • Arnold Bennett
... had expected romance, and had met merchandize He smoked, Lord Avonley said of the second departure He never calculated on the happening of mortal accidents Heights of humour beyond laughter Holding to his work after the strain's over—That tells the man Hopes of a coming disillusion that would restore him How angry I should be with you if you were not so beautiful! Humour preserved her from excesses of sentiment I can confess my sight to be imperfect: but will you ever do so? I do not think Frenchmen comparable to the women of France I cannot say less, and will say no ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... pregnant upheaval had taken place in that good lady's psychology during the past year. Her marriage, although arranged by the two families, had been a love match on both sides. The Graf was a handsome dashing and passionate lover and she a beautiful girl, lively and companionable. Disillusion was slow in coming, for she had been brought up on the soundest German principles and believed in the natural superiority of the male as she did in the House of ...
— The White Morning • Gertrude Atherton
... Anyone who believed Metamorphizer had salesappeal just wasnt all there. But why should I disillusion her and wound her pride? Down underneath her rough exterior I supposed she could be as sensitive as I; and I hope I ...
— Greener Than You Think • Ward Moore
... the hundred fancies that had held, or failed to hold him in his thirty-eight years; he recalled the women who had loved too little, the women who had loved too much; and, quick upon the recollection, came the consciousness of the disillusion that had ...
— Max • Katherine Cecil Thurston
... A repugnance to dirt and discomfort is justifiable enough, but there is something especially peevish in the tone of many Georgian travellers. Sam Sharp's Letters from Italy breathe only sorrow, disillusion and indignation. Italian beds and vermin, Italian post-boys and their sorry nags are too frequently the theme of his discourse. He even assures us that the young gentlemen whom he had always pictured ...
— English Travellers of the Renaissance • Clare Howard
... departed darkness the shadows remain, more mysterious because as if more enduring; and one feels a dread of them from which one was free before. What if they were to be victorious at the last? They, or what perhaps lurks in them: fear, deception, desire, disillusion—all silent at first before the song of triumphant love vibrating in the light. Yes. Silent. Even desire itself! All silent. But not ...
— The Arrow of Gold - a story between two notes • Joseph Conrad
... life of the street, it seemed to her to belong to a world in which she no longer had any stake. The shock of disillusion regarding faith-healing had destroyed for the time a good deal besides. If mistaken in one thing she might be in many. However wholesome and serviceable a critical skepticism may prove to an enthusiast in the full tide of health and activity, to Phillida ...
— The Faith Doctor - A Story of New York • Edward Eggleston
... still a living force. It would seem, however, to be the natural reaction produced by a tremendous national calamity, under which the mainspring of the collective mind temporarily gives way and the psychical equilibrium is upset. Disillusion, despondency, and contempt for the passions that lately stirred them drive the people to seek relief in the distractions of pleasures, among which dancing is perhaps one of the mildest. It was so in Paris at the close of the long period of stress which ended with the rise ...
— The Inside Story Of The Peace Conference • Emile Joseph Dillon
... pray," he cries in the last disillusion, "is science, since this people abounding in scholars commits abominations worthy of the Huns and worse than theirs, because they are systematic, cold-blooded, voluntary, and have for an excuse, neither passion nor ...
— The George Sand-Gustave Flaubert Letters • George Sand, Gustave Flaubert
... everyday young German believes firmly that it was a blow aimed specially at Germany; that no such regulation affected any goods but German goods. And the English, with their characteristic heedlessness, have never troubled to disillusion him. But even the British caricaturist and the British soldier betray their fundamental opinion of the matter in their very insults. They will not use a word of abuse for the Germans as Germans; they call ...
— What is Coming? • H. G. Wells
... years, 1779 and 1780, were the years in which he came nearest to despair. The strain of a great movement is not in the early days of enthusiasm, but in the slow years when idealism is tempered by the strife of opinion and self-interest which brings delay and disillusion. As the war went on recruiting became steadily more difficult. The alliance with France actually worked to discourage it since it was felt that the cause was safe in the hands of this powerful ally. Whatever Great Britain's difficulties ...
— Washington and his Comrades in Arms - A Chronicle of the War of Independence • George Wrong
... person capable of dealing his fame such a deadly blow as Mr. Froude, not unnaturally increases the irritation with which the public has read his recollections of his friends and contemporaries. The "disillusion and disenchantment" worked by the book, in so far as it affects Carlyle's fame as a prophet, is, of course, a misfortune, and a very serious one. What it was he preached when his preaching first startled the world, but very few now undertake to say, and these ...
— Reflections and Comments 1865-1895 • Edwin Lawrence Godkin
... changing rooms may change moods; that many a successful dinner has an aftermath in the drawing-room as cold and dismal as a party call. Madame Francesca had once characterised the hour after dinner as "the stick of a sky-rocket, which never fails to return and bring disillusion with it." Hence she postponed it as long as she could, but the Colonel himself gave the signal ...
— Old Rose and Silver • Myrtle Reed
... But the spiritual disillusion had come at last, and it had revealed him to himself at an awful depth of self-deception. Thinking in his pride and arrogance he was the divine messenger, the avenger, the man of God, he had set out to shed blood like any wretched criminal, any jealous murderer who was ...
— The Christian - A Story • Hall Caine
... bitter. The sad disillusion of the middle years, still heroically clinging to faiths that one after another ...
— Dangerous Days • Mary Roberts Rinehart
... unquestioning wives behind her, she sternly routed the unbidden doubts, she deliberately put from her thoughts many another disillusion as the days went by. She was a married woman now, protected and busy; she must not dream like a romantic girl. There was delightfully novel cooking to do; there was freedom from hateful business responsibility. All beginnings were hard, she told her shrinking soul; she was ...
— Martie the Unconquered • Kathleen Norris
... Pathway of Black Leaves I-IV Elegy Sequence I-X Disillusion November Afternoon Yareth at Solomon's Tomb ...
— A Woman of Thirty • Marjorie Allen Seiffert
... had acted wisely by removing herself from association, or "blind contact" with her would-be lover,—and yet, though she was aware that her doing so had caused a certain dispersal of the atmosphere which almost veered towards complete disillusion, she found nevertheless, that Rome as she had said, was "dull"; her heart was empty, and longing for she knew not what. And that deep longing she felt could not have been completely gratified by the brief ardours of Fontenelle. ...
— The Master-Christian • Marie Corelli
... the suggestion of such a possibility that had drawn her first to Douglas Falloden. For three golden days she had imagined herself blissfully in love with him. Then had come disillusion and repulsion. What was violent and imperious in him had struck on what was violent and imperious in her. She had begun to hold him off—to resist him. And that resistance had been more exciting even than ...
— Lady Connie • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... as he best could without attracting attention, deepen the stain on his face and hair, and rely on the change so made in his appearance to prevent his being recognised at the dedication of the temple. He would do nothing to disillusion the people—to do this would only be making bad worse. As soon as the service was over, he would set out towards the preserves, and, when it was well dark, make for the statues. He hoped that on such a great day ...
— Erewhon Revisited • Samuel Butler
... he might land and see her. But a word, and the questions of forty years might yet be answered—answered, yes, to shatter, as like as not, with pitiless realities the tender figment of a dream. No, he said, he dared not expose himself to a possible disillusion, to play into the hands of sardonic nature, ever mocking at man. No; but he would carry his ship close inshore and watch from the bridge the unfolding bays and tiny settlements of that lost paradise, and then, dipping his flag to his vanished youth, he ...
— Wild Justice: Stories of the South Seas • Lloyd Osbourne
... truth that he really loved her. She had thrown him and Celeste together in vain. Poor Celeste, poor lovely Celeste, who wore her heart upon her sleeve, patent to all eyes save Donald's! Thus, it was with defined purpose that she had lured him this night into the garden. She wanted to disillusion him. ...
— The Place of Honeymoons • Harold MacGrath
... huge depression. Its single row of low whitewashed houses of humble architectural pretensions became less and less impressive and less picturesque as one got nearer. I had by that time grown quite accustomed to this optical disillusion, for it was frequently the case with the work of man in Brazil. It always needed distance—the greater distance the ...
— Across Unknown South America • Arnold Henry Savage Landor
... talk sense sooner or later, even without a bribe, his bargaining position is not strong. In the meantime he may make trouble. If so, it can't be helped. But it will do him no good, and may even help to bring nearer the inevitable day of disillusion. I may add that for France to agree to a short moratorium is not a great sacrifice since, on account of the Belgian priority and other items, the amount of cash to which France will be entitled in the near future, even if the payments fixed last March were to be paid ...
— Essays in Liberalism - Being the Lectures and Papers Which Were Delivered at the - Liberal Summer School at Oxford, 1922 • Various
... a king, encouraged in him by the witches' chant, is an ambition for something that no being a king can satisfy; and the tragedy of his passion lies in the painful effort by which he wins his object and the painful disillusion when it turns ...
— Personality in Literature • Rolfe Arnold Scott-James
... formula knew not where to look for the renewal of faith and hope. The generous ardour and the splendid humanitarian enthusiasms which had been stirred by the opening phases of the revolutionary movement, had now ebbed away; revulsion had followed, and with it the mood of disillusion and despair. The spirit of doubt and denial was felt as a paralysing power in every department of life and thought, and the shadow of unbelief lay heavy ...
— Sartor Resartus, and On Heroes, Hero-Worship, and the Heroic in History • Thomas Carlyle
... conquests there. This happened earlier to the romanticists (in a way which I have tried to describe in the subjoined paper on Shelley) although their poetic and political illusions did not suffer them to perceive it. It is happening now, after disillusion, to some radicals and mathematicians like Mr. Bertrand Russell, and to others of us who, perhaps without being mathematicians or even radicals, feel that the sphere of what happens to exist is too alien and accidental to absorb all the play of a free mind, whose function, ...
— Winds Of Doctrine - Studies in Contemporary Opinion • George Santayana
... once became interested in the views of a new passenger concerning the local politics of San Francisco, and he found himself utterly forgotten. The bonnetless woman had changed her position, and her head was no longer visible. The disillusion and depression that overcame him suddenly were as complete as his previous expectations and hopefulness had been extravagant. For the first time his utter unimportance in the world and his inadequacy to this new life around him came upon ...
— A Waif of the Plains • Bret Harte
... groom quickly, and naturally, perhaps, bred contempt and disillusion. His coarseness offended every susceptibility; he was frankly impossible in such an intimate relation; and after she had given birth to a daughter in Holland, she arranged a separation, for which the groom was, at least, as grateful as herself. The ...
— Love Romances of the Aristocracy • Thornton Hall
... American born, the girl had been educated according to the European fashion and at twenty had married and lost the young nobleman whose name she bore, and had buried him in his family crypt in Moscow with the simple fortitude of one who is well out of a bad bargain. But she had paid her toll to disillusion and the age of thirty found her a little more careless, a little more worldly-wise than was necessary, even in a cosmopolitan. Her comments spared neither friend nor foe and Hilda Ashhurst, whose mind grasped only the obvious facts of existence, ...
— Madcap • George Gibbs
... Stephen about it, in the accents of disillusion. 'What?' cried Stephen. 'Don't you know? They're engaged to be married. Her name is Mary Callear. She used to be parlourmaid at Uncle John's at Oldcastle. But hotels pay ...
— The Grim Smile of the Five Towns • Arnold Bennett
... descendants of Revolutionary ancestors—in such an appalling minority; and it certainly surprised me to find that Ireland and Germany were responsible for so large a proportion of the population. When I walked in the streets or visited the stores or public buildings disillusion trod close on my heels: I was constantly accosting, or being accosted by, persons of Irish or German or other foreign nationality, who, though displaying characteristics that somehow distinguished ...
— Lippincott's Magazine, Vol. 22, September, 1878 • Various
... perhaps, might have wondered at Ancrum's sense of difference and disillusion. For David after all had made a mark. As he sat talking to Ancrum of the new buildings behind the printing-office where he now employed from two to three hundred men, of the ups and downs of his profit-sharing experiences, of this apprentices' school for the sons of members ...
— The History of David Grieve • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... wretched tale! She was of his flesh, of his blood; when she knew she would not wholly condemn him . . . No, no! He could not. She honored and trusted him now; she had placed him on so high a pedestal that it was utterly impossible for him to disillusion her young mind, to see for ever and ever the mute reproach in her honest eyes, to feel that though his arm encircled her she was beyond his reach.... God knew that he could not tell this child of the black gulf he had ...
— The Man on the Box • Harold MacGrath
... to keep a strict watch over himself will be able to escape the causes of disillusion, which lead us through fatal paths of error, to ...
— Common Sense - - Subtitle: How To Exercise It • Yoritomo-Tashi
... become a Benedictine and sought a lettered and cloistered peace. I despaired of finding anywhere upon earth the profound quietude, the absolute detachment, when a chance occasion seemed to crown my desire, and blind to all warnings of disillusion, I suddenly set sail for what I then thought might be a permanent ...
— Apologia Diffidentis • W. Compton Leith
... of a multitude of people to whom they have not even been introduced. Their verse is full of ready-made memories, various, numerous, and cruel. No single life—supposing it to be a liberal life concerned with something besides sex—could quite suffice for so much experience, so much disillusion, so much deception. To achieve that tone in its fulness it is necessary to take for one's own the praeterita (say) of Alfred de Musset and of the men who helped him—not to live but—to have lived; ...
— The Rhythm of Life • Alice Meynell
... romantic point of view, however, this discovery was a disappointment. Having made my way into the most primitive region of all Japan, I had imagined myself far beyond the range of all modernising influences; and the suggestion of beefsteak with fried potatoes was a disillusion. Nor was I entirely consoled by the subsequent discovery that there were no ...
— Glimpses of an Unfamiliar Japan • Lafcadio Hearn
... reply, hanging his head in genuine dismay. To his disillusion was added the sting of wounded pride. He who had imagined such very different things when they should see each ...
— Mare Nostrum (Our Sea) - A Novel • Vicente Blasco Ibanez
... the echoes of discord, of social unrest, of political upheavals, of commercial greed. In this hidden land of Olaf's would be life stripped of its sordidness, love free from the blight of cynicism and disillusion—faith, firm in its nearness to God and the wonder of His works. I envied Olaf his hidden land as I envied Nancy her opportunity. My blood is the same as Nancy's, and I love the sea. And as we grow older ...
— The Gay Cockade • Temple Bailey
... about that her sister, the mother of Ivan, had been married when she was herself a child scarce out of arms. But he wondered to find how very few of his aunt's intimates remembered the age of her daughter, now for many years convent-wrapped. His first moment of disillusion came on the day that his aunt informed him, with considerable asperity, that his pretty cousin was not a person to be mentioned in their circle—the reason given—that "she was not yet out,"—sounding rather flimsy even to his trusting ears. ...
— The Genius • Margaret Horton Potter
... secure on the throne of ivory and gold. A few days after he had heard the news he repeated the adventure of his boyhood; for the second time he scaled the steep hillside, and penetrated the matted brake. He expected violent disillusion, but his feeling was rather astonishment at the activity of boyish imagination. There was no terror nor amazement now in the green bulwarks, and the stunted undergrowth did not seem in any way extraordinary. Yet he did not laugh at the memory of his sensations, he was not angry ...
— The Hill of Dreams • Arthur Machen
... consists in the heedlessness with which, in the beginning of their acquaintance, he surrendered himself to the charm of her presence, thereby engaging her affection without a thought of the consequences to either. Besides the disillusion, which showed him, when he came fairly to face the question, that he did not love her sufficiently to justify marriage, there were circumstances—material, economical—which made it practically impossible. Her suffering in the separation, great as it was,—so great indeed as to ...
— Beacon Lights of History, Volume XIII • John Lord
... as the hopes, all the travail of deepest, fullest living, we claim as our own forever. We guard jealously our heritage of feeling. Would you for all the world sleep rather than wake, forget rather than remember? Then cease the requiem of your speech about the dangers of disillusion! ...
— The Kempton-Wace Letters • Jack London
... that the epoch that immediately followed the war of liberation was one of strife and bitter disillusion. A certain number of the leaders had foreseen the chaotic phase which had necessarily to be undergone before the benefits of independence and enlightenment could be enjoyed. These, however, were restricted to the very small ...
— South America • W. H. Koebel
... mail arrived she roused from her apathy, and with trembling fingers sorted out the letters, going over them again and again, and never finding the one she sought. Gradually beneath the poignant grief for her father, came the dull persistent pain of a first disillusion. The belief and loyalty with which she had started out to defend Donald began to weaken before his silence. In his trouble she had been ready to rush to him, to succor and forgive, but he had not called upon her. ...
— A Romance of Billy-Goat Hill • Alice Hegan Rice
... perchance may again tarry there, but the manner of it all has gone to join the past. Now he who wills may ensconce himself in the daimyo's corner, and fancy himself a feudal lord; nor will the breeding of those about him disillusion his midday ...
— Noto, An Unexplored Corner of Japan • Percival Lowell
... Again Mark had put back the thought of his heart. Like so many of the loyal and devoted, he could hardly bring himself to speak of his own deeper motives and ambitions. Least of all could he reveal them in this moment of disillusion. He had never told Bertram about the four-act comedy hidden in the writing desk of their common room, to be mulled over during the mornings of his leisure. "I think I'll stay with it for a while, anyway," he ...
— The Readjustment • Will Irwin
... quickly remembered, was something which he had himself foreseen. He had never really accepted Spence's theory that early disillusion had seriously poisoned the lifesprings natural to her age. Her awakening had been certain. He had warned Spence that she would wake! He felt all the exultation of a prophet who sees his prophecy fulfilled. But common ...
— The Window-Gazer • Isabel Ecclestone Mackay
... and death-bells in his music. Here is a realism of damned souls—damned in their merry sins—at which the writer of Ecclesiastes merely seems to hint like a detached philosopher. Villon may never have achieved the last faith of the penitent thief. But he was a penitent thief at least in his disillusion. If he continues to sing Carpe diem when at the age of thirty he is already an old, diseased man, he sings it almost with a sneer of hatred. It is from the lips of a grinning death's-head—not of a jovial roysterer, as Henley makes it ...
— Old and New Masters • Robert Lynd
... sun-rise! Night after night at a certain hour—the hour when she went to bed at last after that poignant revelation to Eglington—she wept, as she had wept then, heart-broken tears of disappointment, disillusion, loneliness; tears for the bitter pity of it all; for the wasting and wasted opportunities; for the common aim never understood or planned together; for the precious hours lived in an air of artificial happiness and social excitement; for a perfect ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker
... man for whom it was impossible to feel indifference; one either hated him or became fascinated by his curious and peculiar charm. This quality led many admirers to remain faithful to him even after disillusion had shattered their former friendship, and who, whilst refusing to speak to him any more, yet retained for him a deep affection which not even the conviction that it had been misplaced could alter. This is a remarkable and indisputable fact. After having rallied around him ...
— Cecil Rhodes - Man and Empire-Maker • Princess Catherine Radziwill
... second or two he realized that she had asked him a question. He didn't want to disillusion her in any way, and, after all, an FBI agent was a kind of detective, but he thought it was only fair that she should know the whole truth about him right ...
— The Impossibles • Gordon Randall Garrett
... other crimes. It was a terrible struggle, till finally the leaders again succumbed under the mighty blows of their adversaries. The years that followed this defeat (1880-1905) were most inauspicious in Russian life. A profound apathy deadened society, and an atmosphere of anguish and disillusion—which have left visible traces in ...
— Contemporary Russian Novelists • Serge Persky
... Paris and its cold light the disillusion began. Determined to settle down, to receive, to give entertainments, the Nabob had brought his wife over with the idea of setting her at the head of the establishment; but when he saw the arrival of that display of gaudy draperies of Palais-Royal jewelry, and all the strange paraphernalia ...
— The Nabob • Alphonse Daudet
... story must not seem to have been constructed to prove it. "Die Weltgeschichte ist das Weltgericht," wrote Schiller; even so, the delineation of life is the criticism of life. To show the scope of disillusion, monotony, repression—life's generous impulses narrowed and made timid by the social, economic, and political machine—would be a criticism of our modern world; there would be no need of moralizing. This the Russian ...
— The Principles Of Aesthetics • Dewitt H. Parker
... is that he long remains wounded and bruised, and sometimes disabled for life. The test is severe and dangerous. In the course of it the mental and moral equilibrium is affected, and runs the risk of not being re-established. Too sudden and complete disillusion has supervened. The deceptions have been too great, ...
— The Crowd • Gustave le Bon
... his military career the young ministers of the Gospel were provided with small diaries, in which they might record the dying messages of the wounded. Then came disillusion, and they found the dying had no messages to send; they are at peace, the wonderful peace that precedes the final dissolution, and all they ask is to be ...
— Sketches of the East Africa Campaign • Robert Valentine Dolbey
... that darkened her eyes. For he was always seeking her out, conversing with her, and it was evident to her mind that he had set himself to bring back that wanderer to the fold. But the very next Sunday brought a great disillusion. As usual her daughter did not go to church in the morning, but when the bells were calling to evening service, and she stood with Fan ready to leave the house, she still lingered, looking very pale, her hands trembling a little with her agitation, ...
— Fan • Henry Harford
... know their guilt. Having lost confidence in their own and other people's words, they revere my silence, even as people revere every silence and every mystery. If I were to start to speak suddenly, I would again become human to them and would disillusion them bitterly, no matter what I would say; in my silence I am to them like their eternally silent God. For these strange people would cease believing their God as soon as their God would commence to speak. ...
— The Crushed Flower and Other Stories • Leonid Andreyev
... He saw things largely as they were, with no inflorescence of rainbows where there was none; but there are actual rainbows, and even auroras, so that the man who does not dream has compensations and a less chance of disillusion. Of course Anderson had thought of marriage; he could scarcely have done otherwise; but he had thought of it as an abstract condition pertaining to himself only in a general way as it pertains to all mankind. He had never seen himself plainly ...
— The Debtor - A Novel • Mary E. Wilkins Freeman
... various parts of France. A Prussian officer, speaking French fluently, was among a convoy of prisoners at Versailles yesterday. The officer, on seeing some French territorials march past, singing the "Marseillaise," remarked to his guard: "What a disillusion awaits us!" ...
— Paris War Days - Diary of an American • Charles Inman Barnard
... His step was sometimes quite springy when he left the Spittal; but Grizel's shadow was always waiting for him somewhere on the way home, to take the life out of him, and after that it was again, oh, sorrowful disillusion! oh, world gone gray! Grizel did not admire him. T. Sandys was no longer a wonder to Grizel. He went home to that as surely as the ...
— Tommy and Grizel • J.M. Barrie
... the last earthly view is said to be photographed upon the retina of the dead. The highest earthly relationship is, in its very essence, fleeting, for men are fallible, and living in a world where material wants jostle, and time and change play their ceaseless parts, gradual obliteration comes and disillusion enters. But the memory of a sweet affinity once fully possessed, and snapped by Fate at its supremest moment, can never die from out the heart. All other troubles are swallowed up in this, and if the individual is of too stern a fiber ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great, Volume 5 (of 14) • Elbert Hubbard
... liberty of the country, the child is very near to Nature's heart; he is brother to the tree and calls all the dumb, growing things by name. He is sublimely superstitious. His imagination, as yet untouched by disillusion, makes good all that earth lacks, and habited in a healthy body ...
— Little Journeys To the Homes of the Great, Volume 3 (of 14) • Elbert Hubbard
... he not have the turning of the fair leaves of her book of life? Each page should unfold fresh happiness, hold new surprises as to what life and love could mean. He would know how to guard her from the faintest shadow of disillusion. Even now it was his right to keep her from that. How much, after all, should he tell her of the heart-searchings of these wretched weeks? Last night he had meant to tell her everything; he had meant to say: ...
— The Mistress of Shenstone • Florence L. Barclay
... also perceived the colossal absurdity of the whole business. But I could not convince them of it, for they met my objections with excellent arguments. Nothing save a sight of the Count would, I feared, disillusion them. ...
— The Moon Endureth—Tales and Fancies • John Buchan
... Another disillusion weighed upon my soul. Before I went up the Nile, I had a fancy of my own that the bank was studded with endless ruined temples, whose vast red colonnades were reflected in the water at every turn. I think Macaulay's Lays were primarily answerable for that particular misapprehension. As a ...
— Miss Cayley's Adventures • Grant Allen
... imagination, disdainful of political requirements, straightway winged its flight to the future abode of universal happiness; whereas the Viscount aspired to complete the downfall of the liberal ideas of 1789 by utilising the disillusion and anger of the democracy to work a ...
— The Three Cities Trilogy, Complete - Lourdes, Rome and Paris • Emile Zola
... had clenched his teeth as he left the orchard house, and had told himself that he would not be influenced or put off by any of these trifling things, and that it was some vixenish turn of Fate to have allowed these currents of disillusion about a woman who was so eminently suitable to reach him through the ...
— Halcyone • Elinor Glyn
... my explanation may disillusion you but it has always been my habit to hide none of my methods, either from my friend Watson or from any one who might take an intelligent interest in them. But, first, as I am rather shaken by the knocking about which I had in the dressing-room, I think that I shall help ...
— Memoirs of Sherlock Holmes • Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
... was the disillusion of one who wanted to try its effects on a dog. The poor beast howled with the pain but did not present any ...
— My Friends the Savages - Notes and Observations of a Perak settler (Malay Peninsula) • Giovanni Battista Cerruti
... no attempt to disillusion them, recognizing that it must fail. She was resigned to being misjudged. If she could achieve success at that price, success would have ...
— Dope • Sax Rohmer
... suffusion of hope for better things, while in the page of Mr. Pulitzer there is no such qualification of the disillusion. Both are enamoured of the beauty of those daughters of Mammon, and of the distinction of our iron-clad youth, the athletic, well-groomed, well-tailored worldlings who hurry up-town from their banks and brokers' offices ...
— Imaginary Interviews • W. D. Howells
... French general, "It was a great day for the Allies!" The repulse of the German attack was a real defeat, for it upset all the confident calculations of the enemy, who from the height of Mount Kemmel had seen, first Ypres, and then channel ports, within his grasp. It brought disappointment and disillusion to his troops, who had been urged on to their disastrous massed attacks by flamboyant promises of success. The effect was seen in a renewal of German peace propaganda, which all the Allies had ...
— America's War for Humanity • Thomas Herbert Russell
... What a disillusion it was to find on our arrival at Zandspruit that there were no tents, and as yet no provisions of any kind! So we were initiated by having to pass the first nights of our commando life on the open veld with insufficient food. ...
— On Commando • Dietlof Van Warmelo
... seemed so indulgent a wife, suddenly find that they have committed a murder or a suicide, to the great astonishment of the world which, even then, hesitates to recognize in that access of folly the proof, the blow, more formidable, more instantaneous in its ravages, than those of love-sudden disillusion. When the disaster is not interrupted by acts of violence, it causes an irreparable destruction of the youthfulness of the soul, it is the idea instilled in us forever that all can betray, since we have been betrayed in that manner. It ...
— Cosmopolis, Complete • Paul Bourget
... laying his thin hand upon Christian's shoulder, he said, "My friend, you have saved me. In the first shock of my disillusion I never thought of this. I think—I think there is work ...
— The Slave Of The Lamp • Henry Seton Merriman
... the Doctor. "Poor little Josephine, indeed! Lucky little Josephine, who arranged her own romance, and risked no disillusion. There have been cases where the joys of the imagination have ...
— Told in a French Garden - August, 1914 • Mildred Aldrich
... this will disillusion you," he said, "if you expect something interesting. I simply make notes of things I want to see, or jot down thoughts to recall pictures to my mind. Reading over one's notebook is like glancing over a lot of kodak films. Sometimes ...
— The Heather-Moon • C. N. Williamson and A. M. Williamson
... "They wander in it lamenting over themselves. I would shudder at that fate for anything I loved. Do you know, Captain Lingard, how people lost in a maze end?" he went on holding Lingard by a steadfast stare. "No? . . . I will tell you then. They end by hating their very selves, and they die in disillusion and despair." ...
— The Rescue • Joseph Conrad
... or, more strictly speaking, a heroine-worshiper. At present Dr. Breen was her cult, and she was apt to lie in wait for her idol, to beam upon it with her suggestive eyes, and evidently to expect it to say or do something remarkable, but not to suffer anything like disillusion or disappointment in any event. She would sometimes offer it suddenly a muddled depth of sympathy in such phrases as, "Too bad!" or, "I don't see how you keep- up?" and darkly insinuate that she appreciated all that Grace was doing. She seemed to rejoice in keeping herself ...
— Henry James, Jr. • William Dean Howells
... Carley brought me up. She did her worst with the best intentions, and you mustn't forget Steve! [She sits beside the table and DICK leans against it to talk to her.] He's my own brother, you know, and I'm so afraid Louise will finally disillusion him and spoil his happiness. ...
— Her Own Way - A Play in Four Acts • Clyde Fitch
... the substance of the hook, we may be allowed to notice one or two matters of literary or historical interest in which Sir Henry Maine is certainly open to criticism. There is an old question about Burke which was discussed by the present writer a long time ago. A great disillusion, says Sir Henry Maine, has always seemed to him to separate the Thoughts on the Present Discontents and the Speech on Taxation from the magnificent panegyric on the British Constitution in 1790. "Not many persons ...
— Studies in Literature • John Morley
... his light, joyous comedies and the great tragedies; it was all done at the topmost height of happy hours, but there are hints in it which we shall have to notice later, which show that when writing it Shakespeare had already looked into the valley of disillusion which he was about to tread. But "Twelfth Night" is written in the spirit of "As You Like It" or "Much Ado," only it is still more personal-ingenuous and less dramatic than these; it is, indeed, a lyric of love and the joy ...
— The Man Shakespeare • Frank Harris
... penitence. Crispus had wished to transform her into an angel, to raise her to heights where love for Christ alone existed, and she had fallen in love with an Augustian. The very thought of that filled his heart with horror, strengthened by a feeling of disillusion and disappointment. No, no, he could not forgive her. Words of horror burned his lips like glowing coals; he struggled still with himself not to utter them, but he shook his emaciated hands over the terrified girl. Lygia felt ...
— Quo Vadis - A Narrative of the Time of Nero • Henryk Sienkiewicz
... process seems to be, that man falls out of love with life as he has commonly lived it, and the world as he has known it. Dissatisfaction and disillusion possess him; the negative marks of his nascent intuition of another life, for which he is intended but which he has not yet found. We see this initial phase very well in St. Benedict, disgusted by the meaningless life of Roman society; in St. Francis, abandoning his gay and ...
— The Life of the Spirit and the Life of To-day • Evelyn Underhill
... passed, this feeling of disappointment and disillusion became more and more intense and bitter. A stanza from one of his more mature poems (1795) "An die Natur," will serve to illustrate the sentiment which ...
— Types of Weltschmerz in German Poetry • Wilhelm Alfred Braun
... do much more than the possible, and the thought was disturbing that, in a matter which so nearly touched his own interest, he had allowed his interest to prevail over his quixotry. Self-sacrifice appealed so keenly to his imagination that the inability to exercise it gave him a sense of disillusion. He was like the philanthropist who with altruistic motives builds model dwellings for the poor and finds that he has made a lucrative investment. He cannot prevent the satisfaction he feels in the ten per cent which rewards the bread he had cast upon the ...
— The Trembling of a Leaf - Little Stories of the South Sea Islands • William Somerset Maugham
... sudden fall of mental temperature. Mr. Denning went to his library and took out his private ledger, a penitential sort of reading which he relished after moods of any kind of enjoyment. Mrs. Denning selected Ethel Rawdon for her text of disillusion. She "thought Ethel had been a little jealous of Dora's dress," and Dora said, "It was one of her surprises, and Ethel thought she ought to know everything." "You are too obedient to Ethel," continued ...
— The Man Between • Amelia E. Barr
... of her life, Sylvia would never forget the rending shock of disillusion brought her by these blunt words. She did not dream of disbelieving them, or of underestimating their significance. A thousand confirmatory details leaped into her mind: the rich, sweet voices—the dramatic ability—the banjo—the deprecatory air of timidity—the ...
— The Bent Twig • Dorothy Canfield
... that this was all very well before the War, but that in the Army a little writing would be a pleasant change after the day's duties. Allow me to disillusion you. If, three years ago, I ever conceived a glorious future in which my autograph might be of value to the more promiscuous collectors, that conception has now been shattered. Three years in the Army has absolutely spoilt the market. Even were I ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 153, Nov. 28, 1917 • Various
... greater part of the play, and it seems to me a pity that the name of Tolstoi should be brought into such dangerous companionship with the vulgarities and sentimentalities of the London stage. I heard people around me confessing that they had not read the book. How terrible must have been the disillusion of those people, if they had ever expected anything of Tolstoi, and if they really believed that this demagogue Prince, who stands in nice poses in the middle of drawing-rooms and of prison cells, talking nonsense with a convincing disbelief, was in any ...
— Plays, Acting and Music - A Book Of Theory • Arthur Symons
... so silently loyal to duty in her second, that no one had discovered in Daisy the existence of a strong spirit. Sweet-tempered, acquiescent, gentle, every one had known her alike in joy or under the burden of disappointment and disillusion. "As docile as Daisy" might have been a proverb in the neighborhood, so general was this view of her nature. Least of all did the selfish, surly-tempered, wilful young Englishman who was her husband, and who had ridden rough-shod over her tender thoughts and dreams these ...
— In the Valley • Harold Frederic
... at the adoration I gave her. She was exactly the sort of girl to call out a boy's love, and she had all mine, poor foolish wretch that I was. There's nothing more pathetic, I think, at this distance, than a boy's passionate purity in his first love—unless it's his disillusionment; for disillusion does no nature good. It would have done mine great harm if I hadn't had a friend like you to ...
— Set in Silver • Charles Norris Williamson and Alice Muriel Williamson
... passion unrequited is bearable, even if it stings and anathematizes—there is a triumph in the humiliation, and a tenderness in the strife. This was what she had been expecting, and what she had not got. To be lectured because the lecturer saw her in the cold morning light of open-shuttered disillusion was exasperating. He had not finished, either. He continued in ...
— Far from the Madding Crowd • Thomas Hardy
... bad enough to tamper with that brother's crude ideals for the sake of his own gain. From the length of his own experience, from the present weariness of his soul, he looked upon Alec more than ever as a boy to be shielded from the shock of further disillusion with regard to himself. He had not had Alec's weal a thorn in his conscience for ten months without coming to feel that, if merely for the sake of his own comfort, he would not shoulder that burden again. Now this conception he had of Alec as a weaker ...
— What Necessity Knows • Lily Dougall
... in 1904 and 1905—to judge by the tone of Regulations for the Curricula of Secondary Schools issued by the Board of Education—for in these years it is most insistent and exacting for girls as well as boys, as to time and scope of the syllabus in this branch. Then disillusion seems to have set in and the tide began to ebb. It appeared that the results were small and poor in proportion to expectation and to the outlay on laboratories. The desirable qualities did not seem to develop as had been hoped, the temper of mind fostered was not entirely what ...
— The Education of Catholic Girls • Janet Erskine Stuart
... do the trustful daughters of the people, untutored in life and experience, and generally joyless and friendless, fall a prey to the seduction that approaches them in brilliant and seductive guise. Disillusion, then sorrows, finally crime,—such are the sequels. Of 1,846,171 live births in Germany in 1891, 172,456 were illegitimate. Only conjure up the volume of worry and heartaches prepared for a great number of these mothers, ...
— Woman under socialism • August Bebel
... not answer in the same tone. He understood Mark's feeling of bitter disillusion, and made another attempt at conciliation. "If you do not trust me," he said, "you hold ...
— The Precipice • Ivan Goncharov
... men it is this generalized affection which is at the basis of any sustained interest in philanthropic or altruistic enterprises. No less than a large and generous affection for humanity is required to enable men to endure for long the dreariness and disillusion so often incident to philanthropic work, the conflicts and disappointments of public administration. Certainly this is true of the first rank of statesmen; no characterization of Lincoln fails to emphasize his essential humanity ...
— Human Traits and their Social Significance • Irwin Edman
... however, after much inquiry, I arrive at the place, make my peace with the gardener, and enter. My disillusion dates from the opening of the garden door. I repine, I find a reluctation of spirit against believing that this is the place. What, is this kailyard that inexhaustible paradise of a garden in which M—— ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. XXII (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... fingers relaxed,—in her imagination she saw some coveted splendour slip from her hold, and her little face grew set and serious as though she had already suffered a whole life's disillusion. ...
— Innocent - Her Fancy and His Fact • Marie Corelli
... this exposed peak, minimise the delights of a mountain sojourn. The invasion of an army of jungle rats, behind the walls and above the ceiling of a room sodden and dripping with the afternoon's flood, completes the disillusion, and compels a hasty descent to the warmer damp of the lowlands, for the Equatorial climate, and the general absence of bed-coverings, causes a rheumatic stiffness on rising, which has to be steamed out by the atmospheric ...
— Through the Malay Archipelago • Emily Richings
... often called a pessimist, for his "heavy sadness of disillusion"; but he is never bitter. Finding the universe incomprehensible, he stands baffled and passive, with a tender sympathy, almost an envy, for those who still have faith. He is above all interesting as a sane and characteristic product of the latest social conditions. ...
— Library Of The World's Best Literature, Ancient And Modern, Vol. 5 • Various
... not wish to speak. I could not then have revealed myself. It was all too marvellous, too hard to comprehend. The old doubts of my reality, of the realness of everything I had seen, surged up again, and swept over me in a tide of disillusion. ...
— The Certainty of a Future Life in Mars • L. P. Gratacap
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