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More "Flaw" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... bed when he was arrested, that he had not been seen to commit the deed, did not weigh in the minds of the general public. The man's guilt was freely believed; not even the few who clung to the opinion that Charley Steele would yet get him off thought that he was innocent. There seemed no flaw in the evidence, once granted ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker
... then draweth Sigurd Andvari's ancient Gold; There is nought but the sky above them as the ring together they hold, The shapen ancient token, that hath no change nor end, No change, and no beginning, no flaw for God to mend: Then Sigurd cried: 'O Brynhild, now hearken while I swear, That the sun shall die in the heavens and the day no more be fair, If I seek not love in Lymdale and the house that fostered thee, And the land where thou awakedst ...
— Myths of the Norsemen - From the Eddas and Sagas • H. A. Guerber
... come to a determinate thinness of them they shall appear transparent and colourless; but if you continue to split and divide them further, you shall find at last that each plate shall appear most lovely tinged or imbued with a determinate colour. If, further, by any means you so flaw a pretty thick piece that one part begins to cleave a little from the other, and between these two there be gotten some pellucid medium, those laminated or pellucid bodies that fill that space shall exhibit several rainbows or coloured lines, the colours of which will be disposed and ranged ...
— Six Lectures on Light - Delivered In The United States In 1872-1873 • John Tyndall
... limits are among the best of any state, the only serious flaw being "10 sage grouse" per ...
— Our Vanishing Wild Life - Its Extermination and Preservation • William T. Hornaday
... the Eternal Nameless And all-creative spirit of the Law, Uncomprehended, comprehensive, blameless, Invincible, resistless, with no flaw; So full of love it must create for ever, Destroying that it may create again, Persistent and perfecting in endeavour, It yet must bring forth angels, after men ...
— Poems of Cheer • Ella Wheeler Wilcox
... with the elaborate gold medal, his name in full conspicuously engraved upon its face—and the youthful society of his school-town was at his feet. Every door was open. So almost without fault was he that few mothers objected to his companionship with their daughters. Yes, here was to be the flaw!—he was soon to find that it was easy for him to have his way with a maid, a dangerous knowledge for a seventeen-year- old boy who had already reached higher social levels than his own home had known, who was much quicker of wit than his almost ...
— Our Nervous Friends - Illustrating the Mastery of Nervousness • Robert S. Carroll
... I will take you home to your father and mother, now; then see this man, myself. If there is indeed no flaw in the marriage and it cannot be annulled, a divorce must be arranged. Any money I have or expect to have would be a small price to set you free from the miserable business. But the first thing is to get you home. We ...
— The Thing from the Lake • Eleanor M. Ingram
... and anger grew in her heart. "He is with that girl," she thought, and she was sick with anxiety and inquietude. The roast sirloin was done to the last perfect minute, and the Yorkshire pudding deliciously brown and light; the table was set without a flaw or a "forget," and the fire and light just as they should be. There was no obvious outlet for her annoyance, and it took away her appetite and made ...
— The Measure of a Man • Amelia Edith Huddleston Barr
... you to revolve these propositions through your mind very seriously. See if you can find a flaw in any of them; and conceive if you can, of any reasonable theory whereby any of them ...
— Love's Final Victory • Horatio
... of poor old Thompson scrawling in the inside of his envelope, furiously, furtively, while the ink of his neat copperplate dried on the outside, and Macartney likely stood by poring over the actual letter, wondering if there was any flaw in it that could show out and damn him. And the desperate scrawl in the envelope had been no good, thanks to the fool brain and tongue of myself, Nicky Stretton! It had done more to warn Macartney than either Dudley or me, since if Thompson had written in the reverse of the envelope he was also ...
— The La Chance Mine Mystery • Susan Carleton Jones
... was without a flaw, says an eyewitness. Behind it the Canadians mounted Hill 70 and swept along the rest of the line. On the crest of the hill, where so much blood had been, spilled before, heavy fighting might have been expected, for the position was well manned with machine ...
— America's War for Humanity • Thomas Herbert Russell
... the Baron steps back with that same look in his face, and lifts his hat. His courtesy shows at the last some flaw, for, although Mrs. Steele is there, his ...
— Under the Southern Cross • Elizabeth Robins
... some one or more of our fundamental active and emotional powers with no object outside of themselves to react-on or to live for. Any one of these defects is fatal to its complete success. Some one {126} will be sure to discover the flaw, to scout the system, and to ...
— The Will to Believe - and Other Essays in Popular Philosophy • William James
... conviction; as if the speaker verily saw into the recesses of the mental and physical being of the listener, while his own expression of perfect temperance had in it a fascinating power—the merely negative element of purity, the mere freedom from taint or flaw, in exercise [34] as a positive influence. Long afterwards, when Marius read the Charmides—that other dialogue of Plato, into which he seems to have expressed the very genius of old Greek temperance—the image of this speaker came back vividly before him, ...
— Marius the Epicurean, Volume One • Walter Horatio Pater
... may be! The power of this woman is astonishing. She has been acting a part the whole time." But he can act a part too—his one unchanging character—and as he holds the door open for this woman, fifty pairs of eyes, each fifty times sharper than Sir Leicester's pair, should find no flaw in him. ...
— Bleak House • Charles Dickens
... like any other man, Dorothy, he'd make me 'sure,' when he gets home! I will defend myself to this extent: I've patched and propped them all summer, after every rain, and tried to provide for the fall storms; but there's a flaw in the original plan—" ...
— Stories by American Authors (Volume 4) • Constance Fenimore Woolson
... his honors by her wit. Nothing was known of the stove at this latter day in Hall. The grandfather Strehla, who had been a master-mason, had dug it up out of some ruins where he was building, and, finding it without a flaw, had taken it home, and only thought it worth finding because it was such a good one to burn. That was now sixty years past, and ever since then the stove had stood in the big, desolate, empty room, warming three generations of the Strehla family, and having seen ...
— Bimbi • Louise de la Ramee
... shafts and so quickly is he letting them off. Indeed, this slayer of hostile heroes, viz., the son of Subhadra, gratifieth me although he afflicteth my vital breath and stupefieth me with shafts. Even the mightiest car-warriors, filled with wrath, are unable to detect any flaw in him. The son of Subhadra, therefore, careering on the field of battle, gratifieth me greatly. I do not see that in battle there is any difference between the wielder of Gandiva himself and this one of great lightness of hand, filling all ...
— The Mahabharata of Krishna-Dwaipayana Vyasa, Volume 2 • Kisari Mohan Ganguli
... signifies now, quirk, quibble, or flaw, Since Law is made Justice, seek justice ...
— Notes and Queries, Number 235, April 29, 1854 • Various
... temperament. It required all the manly qualities of activity, endurance, pluck, and skill peculiar to cricket, and was immeasurably superior to that game in exciting features. There were dash, spirit, and variety, and it required only a couple of hours to play a game. Developed by American brains, it was flaw to us, and we took to it with all the enthusiasm peculiar to ...
— Base-Ball - How to Become a Player • John M. Ward
... the crab, with a sigh, "I made that rule for others, and not for myself. I see now that there is a flaw in it." ...
— The Diving Bell - Or, Pearls to be Sought for • Francis C. Woodworth
... specifically meet Mrs. Stowe's allegation, that Lady Byron, in conversing with her thirteen years ago, affirmed the charge now before us. It remains open, therefore, to a scandal-loving world, to credit the calumny through the advantage of this flaw, involuntary, I believe, in the answer produced against it. My object in addressing you is to supply that deficiency by proving that what is now stated on Lady Byron's supposed authority is at variance, in all respects, with what she stated immediately ...
— Lady Byron Vindicated • Harriet Beecher Stowe
... never even envy real women, whose romances were always made for two. She was not a real woman, she was morbidly bodiless. Strange though it may seem, the kind, awkward, absent-minded touch of Richard as he had lifted her on to the Horse Vivian's back had been for her the one flaw in that enchanted ride. She could not bear touch. She had no pleasure in seeing or feeling the skin and homespun that encloses men and women. She hated to watch people feeding themselves, or to see her own thin body in the mirror. She ought really ...
— Living Alone • Stella Benson
... Malice and partiality set apart, let any man who understands English, read diligently the works of Shakspeare and Fletcher, and I dare undertake that he will find in every page either some solecism of speech, or some notorious flaw in sense; yet these men are reverenced, when we are not forgiven. That their wit is great, and many times their expressions noble, envy itself cannot deny. But the times were ignorant in which they lived. Poetry was ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine - Volume 57, No. 352, February 1845 • Various
... as sweetly as a child, And when you woke you recked not of your shame, But babbled greetings, stretched yourself and smiled From that eviscerated sofa's frame, Which, flawless erst, was now one mighty flaw Through the ...
— The Vagabond and Other Poems from Punch • R. C. Lehmann
... Philadelphia shines pre-eminent, it is in the matter of entertainments, whether private or public. A lavish and generous hospitality rules our actions whenever we bid a guest to our board. Emphatically, it is to our board. If that hospitality has a flaw, it is to be found in the fact that we make the eating and drinking part of our festivities of far too much importance. Terrapin and Roederer take the place of dress and of diamonds. Our cooks, and not our mantuamakers, ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science Volume 15, No. 89, May, 1875 • Various
... not have a higher electrical resistance than 10 ohms from the point to the ground, including the "earth" contact. Exceptionally good conductors have only about 5 ohms. A high resistance in the rod is due either to a flaw in the conductor or a bad earth connection, and in such a case the rod may be a source of danger instead of security, since the discharge is apt to find its way through some part of the building to the ground, rather than entirely by the rod. It is, therefore, ...
— The Story Of Electricity • John Munro
... owning the paper title to a thousand acre boundary traceable to the Commonwealth without break or flaw, might not be the owner in fact of a single acre of land; as the whole boundary might be covered by senior grants or the natural objects ...
— Chit-Chat; Nirvana; The Searchlight • Mathew Joseph Holt
... custom in excess, and it grows worse instead of better, as the influence of the better mannered and better educated diminishes; but this is a spot on the sun—a mere flaw in the diamond, that friction will take out. But what a country—what a glorious country, in truth, it is! You have now done the civilized parts of the old world pretty thoroughly, my dear boy, and must be persuaded, yourself, of the ...
— The Redskins; or, Indian and Injin, Volume 1. - Being the Conclusion of the Littlepage Manuscripts • James Fenimore Cooper
... fractured or lost piece that may have been knocked off a projecting part of the scroll, there are other injuries likely to occur to this part of the instrument and caused in a variety of ways, some occasionally seeming mysterious in their origin. Thus from a weakness or flaw in the grain of the wood, or it may be from a blow having first started a crack and successive ones gradually increasing the fracture, the scroll itself will come away bodily, separating at the weakest part just behind the second turn. This is a delicate matter for manipulation. If the fracture ...
— The Repairing & Restoration of Violins - 'The Strad' Library, No. XII. • Horace Petherick
... pretence of working for their living, used to go and fish through the ice for pickerel every winter. And here those three young people were drowned, a few summers ago, by the upsetting of a sail-boat in a sudden flaw of wind. There is not one of these smiling ponds that has not devoured more youths and maidens than any of those monsters the ancients used to tell such lies about. But it was a pretty pond, and never looked more innocent—so the native "bard" of Rockland said in his elegy—than on the morning ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 5, No. 28, February, 1860 • Various
... one flaw. He was a fanatic on formality, and he only addressed me in the third person—to the point ...
— 20000 Leagues Under the Seas • Jules Verne
... There was one flaw in our content. Bobby Green's mother arrived shortly after one o'clock in a high state of wrath, and I was obliged to go out in the hall and calm ...
— The Girl and the Kingdom - Learning to Teach • Kate Douglas Wiggin
... a vast number, however, that, according to the theory of probability, and allowing a few thousand arrangements each day, the same problem ought never to turn up more than twice in a century or so. As a matter of fact—it is probably due to some flaw in the theory of probability—the same problem has a way of turning up in different publications several times in a month or so. It may be, of course, that, after all, quite "sound" problems are limited in number, and that we keep on inventing and ...
— Certain Personal Matters • H. G. Wells
... Tete Rouge once more related this story. We hardly knew how much of it to believe, though after some cross-questioning we failed to discover any flaw in the narrative. Passing by the wagoner's camp, they confirmed Tete Rouge's account in ...
— The Oregon Trail • Francis Parkman, Jr.
... Lightfoot has assailed a work so opposed to principles which he himself holds sacred, although I may be permitted to express my regret that he has not done so in a spirit more worthy of the cause which he defends. In spite of hostile criticism of very unusual minuteness and ability, no flaw or error has been pointed out which in the slightest degree affects my main argument, and I consider that every point yet objected to by Dr. Lightfoot, or indicated by Dr. Westcott, might be withdrawn without at all ...
— A Reply to Dr. Lightfoot's Essays • Walter R. Cassels
... on the bay would bear, there would be coming and going, no doubt; but until then Caius had the restful security that she was near him, and that it could not be many days before he saw her. The only flaw in his conclusion was that the fact did not bear it out; he ...
— The Mermaid - A Love Tale • Lily Dougall
... of capital and it would have been forthcoming. He had something that capital would cheerfully get behind if he had the courage to back up his claims. To fail was nothing less than moral cowardice. The will to do had not been efficient. There was a flaw ...
— Laugh and Live • Douglas Fairbanks
... crank-shafts of transatlantic steamers are forged by hydraulic pressure, and the worker has but to turn a tap to give shape to the immense mass of steel, which makes a far more homogeneous metal, without crack or flaw, of the blooms, whatever ...
— The Conquest of Bread • Peter Kropotkin
... him as unequalled; why should not Paradoxus displace him and be praised in like manner? It would be unfair, perhaps, to say that the paradoxist consciously argues thus. He doubtless in most instances convinces himself that he has really detected some flaw in the theory of gravitation. Yet it is impossible not to recognise, as the real motive of every paradox-monger, the desire to have that said of him which has been said of ...
— Myths and Marvels of Astronomy • Richard A. Proctor
... nearer; the man in such haste had now reached the end of the stone stairs and was climbing the ladder to the roof. The clock below rumbled. It was almost two. Apollonius had not yet had dinner, but when there was a flaw of any kind in his work he could not rest until he had rectified it. He had gone back to fetch the ladder. It lay on the beam near the swinging-seat. As he stooped to get it he felt himself seized and pushed with wild ...
— The German Classics of The Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, Vol. IX - Friedrich Hebbel and Otto Ludwig • Various
... agree," the Bishop protested. "An act of unchristian violence would be a flaw in the whole superstructure which we are trying ...
— The Devil's Paw • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... she rose to depart that the hand of fate intervened. I had only one lamp burning in the room, a table-lamp; and at this moment, preceded by a sudden accession of light due to some flaw of the generating plant, the filament expired, plunging the room into darkness! I stood up with a startled cry. I do not deny that I felt ill at ease in the gloom with my strange visitor; but worse was to come. Looking across the darkened room to the chair upon which she was seated, I saw ...
— The Green Eyes of Bast • Sax Rohmer
... impoverished "horseless" peasants abandoned their allotments, and this land often became the property of those richer peasants, who borrow additional incomes from trade, or of outside traders, who buy land chiefly for exacting rack rents from the peasants. It must also be added that a flaw in the land redemption law of 1861 offered great facilities for buying peasants' lands at a very small expense,(36) and that the State officials mostly used their weighty influence in favour of individual as against communal ...
— Mutual Aid • P. Kropotkin
... said the services were soothing. She was genuinely shocked by a sign of irreverence, and would sing the most jingling nonsense as a hymn with perfect gravity and without perceiving that there was any flaw in it. In these matters she showed no originality at all. She would repeat "my duty towards my neighbour is to love him as myself, and to do to all men as I would that they should do unto me" fervently, and come out and cut Mrs. Chrimes to the quick ...
— The Heavenly Twins • Madame Sarah Grand
... Russell—gets his most moving effects by portraying the commonplace aspects of the water in a way that reminds people of things which they noticed but failed to admire promptly. Mr. Russell's gospel is plain enough; he watches minutely, and there is not a flaw of wind or a cross-drift of spray that does not offer some new emotion to his quick ...
— Side Lights • James Runciman
... up the amethyst to a lamp. It seemed to him a stone of great value. As it was uncut, he could only judge by its colour. There might be some flaw which he could not see. He tried to put it back ...
— There was a King in Egypt • Norma Lorimer
... not, however, be supposed that General Gordon availed himself of a flaw in his instructions to carry out a policy of his own. On the contrary, he clearly understood from the British Government that evacuation was what was required, and that all the Egyptian employes must be given a chance of leaving the Soudan ...
— General Gordon - A Christian Hero • Seton Churchill
... to be a good driver of aeroplanes," commented Roy, as he watched; "see that flaw strike them! There! he brought the Cobweb through it like an old general of the ...
— The Girl Aviators' Sky Cruise • Margaret Burnham
... turn'd to clay, Might stop a hole to keep the wind away: O, that that earth, which kept the world in awe Should patch a wall to expel the winter's flaw!" —Hamlet. ...
— Grain and Chaff from an English Manor • Arthur H. Savory
... was wounded, and in the hospital, he repeatedly complained to me of the deficiency of the staffs. I reminded him of it, and he promised to do his best to organize a staff without a flaw. ...
— Diary from November 12, 1862, to October 18, 1863 • Adam Gurowski
... anything that could restrain or bind a man, had held a marvelous fascination for him, until now he was recognized as one of the world's greatest experts on these subjects. The great lock concerns often sent for him to test new inventions, and invariably he could point to any flaw in the constructions of them that existed. As he came to manhood his knowledge had grown apace until to many he seemed a ...
— The Master Mystery • Arthur B. Reeve and John W. Grey
... considerably larger than the end of my thumb—as large as a big hickory-nut and, my uncle averred, flawless. Rubies of such a size and without a flaw are extremely rare, I believe; in fact, there are only one or two known to be in existence. The old gentleman declared that one of five carats was worth five times as much as a diamond of equal weight, and that the value increased ...
— The Paternoster Ruby • Charles Edmonds Walk
... their performance shook his self-conceit. "It makes me ashamed of myself. I ask what there is that I can do as well as this. Nothing..... Is there no one thing in which I can challenge competition, that I can bring as an instance of exact perfection, in which others cannot find a flaw? The utmost I can pretend to is to write a description of what this fellow can do. I can write a book; so can many others who have not even learned to spell. What abortions are these essays! What errors, what ill-pieced transitions, what crooked reasons, what lame conclusions! ...
— Adventures in Criticism • Sir Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch
... words on the approach of death, "O! what a prodigal have I been of that most valuable of all possessions—Time!" express with exact truth the fundamental flaw of his character and career, of which he had at ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 4, Part 3 - "Brescia" to "Bulgaria" • Various
... it. Now listen to me carefully. I'll give you, step by step, the whole matter." He walked up and down for some minutes and then suddenly stopped beside me and thumped me on the back. "There's not a flaw in it!" he cried. "It's magnificent. My dear fellow, death is only a failure in human perfection. There's nothing mysterious in it. Religion has made a ridiculous fuss about it. There's nothing more mysterious in it than there ...
— The Blue Germ • Martin Swayne
... I think," said Nono critically, for Pelle had taught him how to trim a sail. He had hardly spoken the word when a flaw struck the little skiff they were watching, and it capsized instantly. There was a loud shriek from the place of the accident, and a groan from Nono and Alma. They could soon see two heads, and arms clinging to the upturned boat. Alma and Nono rowed ...
— The Golden House • Mrs. Woods Baker
... of kings, who each chose to rule for himself; and the uncertainty of supplies of men or money to be gained from them made him so often fail necessarily in his engagements, that he acquired a shiftiness and callousness to breaches of promise, which became the worst flaw in his character. But of the fascination of his manner there can be no doubt. Even Henry VIII.'s English ambassadors, when forced to own how little they could depend on him, and how dangerous it was to let subsidies pass through his fingers, still show themselves under a sort of enchantment ...
— The Dove in the Eagle's Nest • Charlotte M. Yonge
... troubles; her dream-Venice had returned. There were private yachts, Adriatic liners, all brilliant with illumination, and hundreds of gondolas, bobbing, bobbing, like captive leviathans, bunched round the gaily-lanterned barges of the serenaders. There was only one flaw to this perfect dream: the shrill whistle of the ferry-boats. They had no place here, and their presence was ...
— The Lure of the Mask • Harold MacGrath
... remote possibility that some lackland wanderer might come by and find a flaw in the protection of the Estates—even somehow penetrate to the Residence. Barra shuddered at that thought, then shrugged it off. Kira Barra was well protected, of that he had made sure. Ever vigilant surrogates were deposited in all the strategic spots of the Estates—not only to allow quick ...
— The Weakling • Everett B. Cole
... knowledge of the law of that cause would, unless there was a logical error in our reasoning, enable us confidently to predict all the circumstances of the phenomenon. We might then, if we had carefully examined our premises and our reasoning, and found no flaw, venture to disbelieve the testimony which might be brought to show that matters had turned out differently from what we should have predicted. If the causes of erroneous conclusions were always patent on the ...
— Essays on some unsettled Questions of Political Economy • John Stuart Mill
... thought of having this clever man classed as his enemy, for in the course of his duties about the bank he necessarily came into frequent contact with the cashier, and it was unpleasant to feel that the other was eyeing him constantly, as though ready to pick a flaw in his conduct. ...
— Dick the Bank Boy - Or, A Missing Fortune • Frank V. Webster
... of that kind. It was a small stone, and had a flaw in it. Number Five said she did n't want a diamond with a flaw in it, and that she did want to see how a diamond ...
— Over the Teacups • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.
... way in which experience may be utilized by the human soul. For instance, one may make the discovery that someone whom he or another greatly reveres, has some quality that must be regarded as a flaw in his character. An experience of this kind may lead the person to whom it comes to thoughts which will tend toward one of two different directions. He may simply feel that he can never again regard the person in question with the same degree of veneration; or on the other ...
— An Outline of Occult Science • Rudolf Steiner
... of her mistress, and would as soon have doubted that the sun was fire as suspected any flaw in Clarissa's integrity. She had spoken her mind more than once upon this subject in the servants' hall, and had put the bulky Jarvis ...
— The Lovels of Arden • M. E. Braddon
... the conduct of Marcus Aurelius that neither the malignity of contemporaries nor the sprit of posthumous scandal has succeeded in discovering any flaw in the extreme integrity of his life and principles. But meanness will not be baulked of its victims. The hatred of all excellence which made Caligula try to put down the memory of great men rages, though less openly, in the minds of many. They delight to degrade human life into ...
— Seekers after God • Frederic William Farrar
... bitter lesson that the South had learned, but the verdict of history is that it was salutary. The Union was greater than any State or any group of States. It had required a War to rectify that fatal flaw in the Constitution, but out of the fires of that terrible conflict was fused a Union "strong and great," that should be far better fitted to ...
— Boys' Book of Famous Soldiers • J. Walker McSpadden
... danger that surrounded him. He knew the danger was rapidly increasing because whenever he pressed his ear to the wall he could hear the almost inaudible tickings and vibrations as the bubble's skin contracted or expanded and the Nothing tapped and searched with its empty fingers for a flaw or crack that it could tear ...
— The Nothing Equation • Tom Godwin
... do," he said to me and the dragoman; and then, immediately after giving the third shock, which was as ineffectual as those that preceded it, he advanced to our grim host with a face radiant with satisfaction, and congratulated him vehemently. "You are a happy man," he said. "Your household has not a flaw in it. Fortunate it was that you sent for the wise man: I have discovered the matter." "What have you discovered?" "The fate of the ring. It has never been stolen: if it had, I would have restored it to you. Fear ...
— Harper's New Monthly Magazine, Volume 1, No. 3, August, 1850. • Various
... elated, exalted. It would not have taken a close observer to decide that in his devotion there was no element of the spurious and in his happiness, no flaw. As for Armitage, unseeing, but sensing clearly the drift of things, his eyes were grimly fixed ahead, the muscles of his jaws bulging in knots on either side. This chauffeur business, he felt, was fast ...
— Prince or Chauffeur? - A Story of Newport • Lawrence Perry
... couldn't imagine what he meant. They made a good many guesses. But there was always somebody to point out some flaw and upset every calculation. So at last everybody stopped guessing and admitted that he had no idea as to what Kiddie Katydid had in mind. It was just another one of his secrets. And people might as well wait ...
— The Tale of Kiddie Katydid • Arthur Scott Bailey
... But the flaw of a certain insincerity in Mr. Flack's nature was suggested by his present tendency to rare visits. He evidently didn't care for her father in himself, and though this mild parent always took what was ...
— The Reverberator • Henry James
... her late husband's goods in addition to her dower. The case goes against her in the Court of Husting, and is heard on appeal before the king's justiciar sitting at St. Martin's-le-Grand. The verdict is not set aside, but some flaw is discovered in the mode of procedure; the explanation of the citizens is deemed insufficient, and the mayor and sheriffs are forthwith deposed, to be reinstated only on the understanding that they will so far forego ...
— London and the Kingdom - Volume I • Reginald R. Sharpe
... the audience hesitate to accept it? Point these things out to the audience. It may be that prejudiced, dishonest, or ignorant testimony has been given. It may be that not enough evidence has been given to carry weight. Whatever the flaw, point out to the audience that, upon a critical examination, experience shows the evidence ...
— Elements of Debating • Leverett S. Lyon
... worship. Christianity had the Saviour, but at first and for generations it lacked money and concentrated power. In Mrs. Eddy, Christian Science possesses the new personage for worship, and in addition—here in the very beginning—a working equipment that has not a flaw in it. In the beginning, Mohammedanism had no money; and it has never had anything to offer its client but heaven—nothing here below that was valuable. In addition to heaven hereafter, Christian Science has present health and a cheerful spirit to offer; and in comparison ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... of the rarest Chinese porcelain. What delicacy in the artist's sense of relief and modelling is here implied! What tireless industry and patience! Run your hand over a limb, or a torso, or, better still, over some wooden vessel; there is no flaw, no break in the continuity of the surface; the thing is alive from end to end. And this extraordinary sense of quality seems to be universal amongst them. I think I never saw a genuine nigger object that was vulgar—except, of course, things made ...
— Since Cezanne • Clive Bell
... developing what is latent in the suggestive imagery of a predecessor, laying under contribution the most intimate familiarity with what is best in the literature of the ancient and modern world, the unwearied artist toils patiently on till his precious mosaic work is without a flaw. All the resources of rhetoric are employed to give distinction to his style and every figure in rhetoric finds expression in his ...
— The Early Poems of Alfred Lord Tennyson • Tennyson
... going to give you, Raphael, is the little picture of a lass who is in my eyes a thing of Heaven's best making. For loyalty, honour, courage, truth, faith, she is an unmatchable maid. I have known her all the days of my life and never found a flaw ...
— Marjorie • Justin Huntly McCarthy
... well to rehearse the movements of the bridal procession within a day or two of the ceremony, that there may be no flaw in the conduct of the actors in this dramatic bit of realism. If it is to be a church wedding, more than one rehearsal may be required. In that case the organist should be present, as well as every member of the bridal party, except ...
— The Etiquette of To-day • Edith B. Ordway
... yet a certainty, however. The estate of Coila was well worth fighting for. Was there not the possibility, the bare possibility, that the solicitors or advocates of Le Roi, or the M'Rae, who now held the castle and glen, might find some fatal flaw in the evidence which Townley had spent so much time and care in ...
— Our Home in the Silver West - A Story of Struggle and Adventure • Gordon Stables
... she replied jestingly. "No one is perfect, and I least of all. If you expect perfection in this world you will be disappointed when you find the flaw." ...
— East of the Shadows • Mrs. Hubert Barclay
... in the same way, also. Taking the ball with the heel results in the slice being put on more quickly and in there being more of it, but I need hardly observe that the stroke must be perfectly judged and played, and that there must be no flaw in it anywhere, or disaster must surely follow. As I say, it is not an easy shot to accomplish, but it is a splendid thing to do when wanted, and I strongly recommend the golfer who has gained proficiency in the ordinary way ...
— The Complete Golfer [1905] • Harry Vardon
... however, of purely divine descent. Her maternal ancestor, Sonisonbu, had not been a scion of the royal house, and this flaw in her pedigree threatened to mar, in her case, the sanctity of the solar blood. According to Egyptian belief, this defect of birth could only be remedied by a miracle,* and the ancestral god, becoming incarnate in the earthly father at the moment of conception, had to condescend to ...
— History Of Egypt, Chaldaea, Syria, Babylonia, and Assyria, Volume 4 (of 12) • G. Maspero
... truth, his passion to be the benefactor of his kind; with all the charm that made him loved by good and worthy friends, amiable, courteous, patient, delightful as a companion, ready to take any trouble—there was in Bacon's "self" a deep and fatal flaw. He was a pleaser of men. There was in him that subtle fault, noted and named both by philosophy and religion in the [Greek: areskos] of Aristotle, the [Greek: anthropareskos] of St. Paul, which is more common than it is pleasant ...
— Bacon - English Men Of Letters, Edited By John Morley • Richard William Church
... should be doing so when Phil's needs cried so stridently aroused the direst apprehensions. They had all received from Amzi their exact proportion of their father's estate; even Waterman had never been able to find a flaw in the adjustment. Through Waterman they had learned that Lois's proper receipt was on file; they knew exactly the date on which it had been placed of record in the county clerk's office. They had looked upon this as the final closing of all the doors that shut this sister out of their ...
— Otherwise Phyllis • Meredith Nicholson
... cousin Mr. Percy's estate. He suggested that the conveyance might not be forthcoming; but Sir Robert assured him that both his grandfather and the present Mr. Percy were men of business, and that there was little likelihood either that the deeds should be lost, or that there should be any flaw in the title. Afterwards a fire broke out at Percy-hall, which consumed that wing of the house in which were Mr. Percy's papers—the papers were all saved except this deed of conveyance. Mr. Sharpe being accidentally apprized of the loss, conveyed the intelligence ...
— Tales And Novels, Vol. 8 • Maria Edgeworth
... those who frequent this place that he who steps upon the marble slab facing the god courts disaster, unless his heart is as free, from treachery and guile as this stone beneath him is free from flaw. Perhaps you have heard the rumour, ...
— The Strong Arm • Robert Barr
... "And that's the first flaw in your reasoning," the other objected. "Why, necessarily, should I be the one to get out? I ...
— Love of Life - and Other Stories • Jack London
... remind Applerod that his four thousand dollars represented only a trifling part of the investment required to yield this seventy-six thousand dollars' profit. Yet, after all, there was no flaw in Applerod's ...
— The Making of Bobby Burnit - Being a Record of the Adventures of a Live American Young Man • George Randolph Chester
... If 't wasn't for that you'd be just splendid, and they don't seem to mind—much—anyway," remarked Alfaretta, beaming upon pretty Molly with loving smiles. Molly's liking for "boys" seemed to honest, sensible Alfy the one flaw in an otherwise ...
— Dorothy on a Ranch • Evelyn Raymond
... those Sylvan poets glean, Who picture life without a flaw; Nature may form a perfect scene, But Fancy must ...
— May Day With The Muses • Robert Bloomfield
... galactic plane we perceive that the density decreases with great rapidity. So far we can perceive no flaw in this reasoning if only it be granted (1) that the level planes are continuous and of equal density throughout; and (2) that an absolute and definite limit is set to telescopic vision, beyond which, if stars exist, they elude our sight, and are to us as if they ...
— The World's Greatest Books - Volume 15 - Science • Various
... vengeance so mean. Strange how she had grown so gentle and so good under the constant persecution of this thieving gang! Her conscience was as clear as a windowpane; a man could look through her soul and see the world undisturbed by a flaw beyond it. A good girl; she sure was a good girl. And as pretty a figure on a horse as ...
— The Duke Of Chimney Butte • G. W. Ogden
... this time some distance out. The wind had carried him along finely, the boat scudding, as he expressed it. He was congratulating himself on the success of his trial trip, when all at once a flaw struck the boat. Not being a skillful boatman he was wholly unprepared for it, ...
— Frank's Campaign - or the Farm and the Camp • Horatio Alger, Jr.
... that is, the police and the Courts were so completely in the scheme that it was sufficient, on the arrest of a "reliable," if the boss sent word to the judge or State's attorney "to be keerful" as this was "one of our boys." Promptly a flaw would be discovered in the indictment and ...
— The Preacher of Cedar Mountain - A Tale of the Open Country • Ernest Thompson Seton
... fashion: the mediaevals had it—in theory at any rate. The Round Table stories, merely as such, illustrate Valour; the Graal stories, Religion; the passion of Lancelot and Guinevere with the minor instances, Love. All these have their [Greek: amarthia]—their tragic and tragedy-causing fault and flaw. The knight wastes his valour in idle bickerings; he forgets law in his love; and though there is no actual degradation of religion, he fails to live up to the ideal that he does not actually forswear. To throw the presentation—the ...
— The English Novel • George Saintsbury
... early days of the French Revolution, men must have looked for an immediate and universal improvement in their condition. Christianity, up to that time, had been somewhat of a failure politically. The reason was now obvious, the capital flaw was detected, the sickness of the body politic traced at last to its efficient cause. It was only necessary to put the Bible thoroughly into practice, to set themselves strenuously to realise in life the Holy Commonwealth, ...
— Familiar Studies of Men & Books • Robert Louis Stevenson
... of Mr. Pennifeather's rifle, while it was far too large for that of any other person in the borough or its vicinity. To render the matter even surer yet, however, this bullet was discovered to have a flaw or seam at right angles to the usual suture, and upon examination, this seam corresponded precisely with an accidental ridge or elevation in a pair of moulds acknowledged by the accused himself to ...
— The Works of Edgar Allan Poe - Volume 5 (of 5) of the Raven Edition • Edgar Allan Poe
... from their dust.' I drave the impostor forth: Perjured ere long he fled, and now returns To reap a harvest from his master's dream" - Thus mused he, while black shadow swept the moor. So day by day darker was Milcho's heart, Till, with the endless brooding on one thought, Began a little flaw within that brain Whose strength was still his boast. Was no friend nigh? Alas! what friend had he? All men he scorned; Knew truly none. In each, the best and sweetest Near him had ever pined, like stunted growth Dwarfed by some glacier nigh. The fifth day dawned: And inly thus he muttered, ...
— The Legends of Saint Patrick • Aubrey de Vere
... Kingdom. Within a few days the Chartists could boast that for fifty miles round Manchester every loom was still. The attempt to extend the strike to London was followed by the arrest of O'Connor and nearly a hundred of his associates. They were tried and convicted, but owing to a flaw in the indictment sentence could not be carried out. The agitation was made to appear more serious by two attempts to assassinate the Queen in May and July, but the young Queen was not deterred thereby from making her ...
— A History of the Nineteenth Century, Year by Year - Volume Two (of Three) • Edwin Emerson
... valuable lessons. The universal, all-embracing Trust made marionettes of us, every one. Our strength was, to them, no more than that of a mouse to a lion. Their system is perfect, their lines of supply and communication are without a flaw. The Prussian army machine of other days was but a bungling experiment by comparison with the efficiency of this new mechanism. I tell you, Gabriel, we've got to give these tyrants credit for being infernally efficient tyrants! All that science has been able to devise, or press and ...
— The Air Trust • George Allan England
... away their goods in the darkest corners of the bazaar where their defects could not be seen plainly. When the purchase had been consummated they were brought out into the sunlight. The word also means "wax." It is said that in the days of imperial Rome when a sculptor came to a flaw in the marble he filled it with wax to hide the defect, but when the hot days came and the wax was melted the defect was seen plainly. Paul is desiring for these Philippians that there may be none of this, but that their lives should commend themselves ...
— And Judas Iscariot - Together with other evangelistic addresses • J. Wilbur Chapman
... was upon the same footing on which the first physicians are usually summoned to the bedside of some dying man of rank;—the doctors to take the advantage of some incalculable chance of an exertion of nature—the lawyers to avail themselves of the barely possible occurrence of some legal flaw. Edward pressed into the court, which was extremely crowded; but by his arriving from the north, and his extreme eagerness and agitation, it was supposed he was a relation of the prisoners, and people made way for him. It was the third sitting of the court, and there were two men ...
— Waverley • Sir Walter Scott
... of tears in which he once was shrouded, the face of the Grey Angel is seen to be wondrously kind. By his mysterious alchemy, he has crystallised the doubtful waters, which once were in the cup of Life and Love, into a jewel which has no flaw. He has kept the child forever a child, caught the maiden at the noon of her beauty to enshrine her thus for always in the heart that loved her most; made the true and loving comrade a comrade always, though on the highways of ...
— A Spinner in the Sun • Myrtle Reed
... throne had no jealousy of Nundcomar, because he knew, that, as a Gentoo, he could not aspire to the office of Subahdar. For that reason he was firmly attached to him; he might depend completely on his services; he was his against Mahomed Reza Khan, and against the whole world. There was, however, a flaw in the Nabob's title, which it was necessary should be hid. And perhaps it lay against Mahomed Reza Khan as well as him. But it was a source of apprehension to the Nabob, and contributed to make him wish to keep all Mahomedan influence at a distance. ...
— The Works Of The Right Honourable Edmund Burke, Vol. IX. (of 12) • Edmund Burke
... would be home. The brown waters of the bayou had spread until they were seemingly trying to rival the Mississippi in width. The little house was scrubbed and cleaned until it shone again. Louisette had looked her dainty little dress over and over to be sure that there was not a flaw to be found wherein Sylves' could compare her unfavourably ...
— The Goodness of St. Rocque and Other Stories • Alice Dunbar
... but a clumsy Wind-flaw with a hand like stone Hurls the boom round. In an instant Arnold, ...
— Ballads of Lost Haven - A Book of the Sea • Bliss Carman
... thronged every flag-decked street. I saw white waving hands from every roof and window. I heard the dull, deep roar of welcome, as with superb seat upon my snow-white charger—or should it be coal-black? The point cost me much consideration, so anxious was I that the day should be without a flaw—I slowly paced at the head of my victorious troops, between wild waves of upturned faces: walked into a lamp-post or on to the toes of some irascible old gentleman, and awoke. A drunken sailor stormed from between swing doors and tacked tumultuously down the street: the factory ...
— Paul Kelver • Jerome Klapka, AKA Jerome K. Jerome
... sister in religious feeling and good works; and Mrs. Linnet was so agreeably surprised by the fact that Dempster had left his wife the money 'in that handsome way, to do what she liked with it,' that she even included Dempster himself, and his villanous discovery of the flaw in her title to Pye's Croft, in her magnanimous oblivion of past offences. She and Mrs. Jerome agreed over a friendly cup of tea that there were 'a many husbands as was very fine spoken an' all that, an' yet all the while kep' a will locked up from you, as tied you up as tight ...
— Scenes of Clerical Life • George Eliot
... the orange blossoms in her hair, and all the guests assembled—for what? because of—one who made no claim, who would never make any claim, who had not been heard of for more than six years. That was the flaw which disturbed Lizzie. It was not quite out seven years. Had that mystic period been accomplished she felt that she could have left Chatty to the protection of God. But at the outside it was only six and a half, and he had heard of her through Lizzie herself—though she inwardly resolved that ...
— A Country Gentleman and his Family • Mrs. (Margaret) Oliphant
... over Mr Pickering. He was vaguely conscious of a sense of being treated unjustly, of there being a flaw in Claire's words somewhere if he could only find it, but the sudden attack had deprived him of the free and unfettered use of his powers of reasoning. He gurgled wordlessly, and Claire went on, her low, sad voice mingling with the moonlight in a manner that caused ...
— Uneasy Money • P.G. Wodehouse
... vastly more sure that Socrates was morally imperfect, than that I am able to censure him rightly; so also, a disputant who concedes to me that Jesus is a mere man, has no right to claim that I will point out some moral flaw in him, or else acknowledge him to be a Unique Unparalleled Divine Soul. It is true, I do see defects, and very serious ones, in the character of Jesus, as drawn by his disciples; but I cannot admit that my right to ...
— Phases of Faith - Passages from the History of My Creed • Francis William Newman
... suffer and die, if need be, with a stiff lip, and an obstinate faith in 'the ultimate decency of things.' For of a truth, the earth holds no more fantastic farrago of folly and heroism than your average human being; and musing on these things, Lenox decided that there must have been some radical flaw in his own education. ...
— The Great Amulet • Maud Diver
... 1764 in Rome whilst "musing amongst the ruins of the Capitol"; in 1787 his great work was finished at Lausanne, where he had resided since 1783; modern criticism, working with fresh sources of information, has failed to find any serious flaw in the fabric of this masterpiece in history, but the cynical attitude adopted towards the Christian religion has always been regarded as a defect; "a man of endless reading and research," was Carlyle's verdict after a final perusal of the "Decline," "but ...
— The Nuttall Encyclopaedia - Being a Concise and Comprehensive Dictionary of General Knowledge • Edited by Rev. James Wood
... grief O'ercame me wholly, straight around I see New torments, new tormented souls, which way Soe'er I move, or turn, or bend my sight. In the third circle I arrive, of show'rs Ceaseless, accursed, heavy, and cold, unchang'd For ever, both in kind and in degree. Large hail, discolour'd water, sleety flaw Through the dun midnight air stream'd down amain: Stank all the land whereon that tempest fell. Cerberus, cruel monster, fierce and strange, Through his wide threefold throat barks as a dog Over the multitude immers'd beneath. His eyes glare crimson, black his unctuous beard, His belly ...
— The Divine Comedy • Dante
... yielding to his taste she was still vigilant as to his interests—Virginia discovered a flaw in one of the plumes. The sylph in the trailing gown held volubly that it did not fait rien; the man with the open purse said he couldn't see that it figured much, but the small American held firm. That must be replaced by a perfect plume or they ...
— Lifted Masks - Stories • Susan Glaspell
... no flaw in the title-deeds of genius, if the same thoughts reappear as have been exhibited long ago. The indisputable sign of defect should be looked for in the proportion they bear to the unquestionably original. There are ideas which necessarily ...
— Imaginary Conversations and Poems - A Selection • Walter Savage Landor
... party to-night, with what Tom Brown sober says to sober sister Maria about her to-morrow. Tom remembers that he was a fool last night, and knows what he thinks and always has thought to-day; but pretty Seraphina thinks he adores her, so that no matter what she does he will never see a flaw, she is sure of that,—poor little puss! She does not know that philosophic Tom looks at her as he does at a glass of champagne, or a dose of exhilarating gas, and calculates how much it will do for him to take of the stimulus without interfering with his serious ...
— The Pearl of Orr's Island - A Story of the Coast of Maine • Harriet Beecher Stowe
... of all too many American homes and hotels, obtruding their highly colored, gold-laden ornament, the Randolph house rather inclined toward an austerity of decoration. But after the first general impression, more careful observation revealed the extreme luxury of appointments and details. The one flaw—if one might call it such—was that every article in the entire house was spotlessly, perfectly brand-new. The Persian rugs, pinkish red in coloring and made expressly to tone in with the gray white marble of the hall, were direct from the looms. The banister, of beautiful simplicity, was as ...
— The Title Market • Emily Post
... a flaw of wind sweeping from the south round the end of the island, so narrow that most of the English fleet hardly felt it. It filled the sails of Hood's ships in the van, and they steered for two French battleships that dropped astern of their consorts. One of the Frenchmen passed close under ...
— Famous Sea Fights - From Salamis to Tsu-Shima • John Richard Hale
... Seer of time, But Thee, O poet's Poet, Wisdom's Tongue, But Thee, O man's best Man, O love's best Love, O perfect life in perfect labor writ, O all men's Comrade, Servant, King, or Priest,— What if or yet, what mole, what flaw, what lapse, What least defect or shadow of defect, What rumor, tattled by an enemy, Of inference loose, what lack of grace Even in torture's grasp, or sleep's, or death's,— Oh, what amiss may I forgive in Thee, Jesus, good ...
— The Ascent of the Soul • Amory H. Bradford
... machinery of the crane, the whole is slowly hoisted out, and then swung round to some convenient level, where the ponderous mass is freed from its casing of masonry, and brought out at last to open day. It is then thoroughly examined with a view to the discovery of any latent flaw or imperfection, and, if found complete in every part, is conveyed away to be the subject of a long series of finishing operations in another place,—operations many and complicated, but all essential to enable it ...
— Harper's New Monthly Magazine, Volume 2, No. 12, May, 1851. • Various
... "I have heard a great deal about you from various sources, and I little thought that I should ever require your services; but, lately, while consulting Mr. Chapman relative to a possible flaw in the title to my farm, I also laid before him some other troubles which he acknowledged were so serious as to require the advice and assistance of some one with a training and experience somewhat different from his. He urged me so strongly to state my case to you, ...
— The Somnambulist and the Detective - The Murderer and the Fortune Teller • Allan Pinkerton
... estate are, as I have said, good ones, but there is one singular and ominous flaw in their provisions. The ocean has marked three boundaries to it, but the fourth is undefined. There is no word of the 'Hinterland;' for neither the term nor the idea had then been thought of. Had Great Britain ...
— The Great Boer War • Arthur Conan Doyle
... to place little bunches of flowers at the feet of the statue as a tender tribute to its beauty. But one day I was greatly annoyed by the presence of a critical woman who had discovered a little flaw in the statue, where a bit had been broken off. She chattered about it like an excited magpie. Poor soul, she had no eyes for the beauty of the thing, the mystery which shrouded its past stirred no emotions in her breast. ...
— The Common Sense of Socialism - A Series of Letters Addressed to Jonathan Edwards, of Pittsburg • John Spargo
... himself into an easy-chair. He felt like a man who has built a mighty piece of machinery, has set it swinging through space, and watches now its imminent collapse; watches some tiny but ghastly flaw, pregnant with disaster, growing wider and wider before ...
— The Pawns Count • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... there must be a flaw in it," retorted Random, but did not seem to be unmoved by Hope's generous action. "Sit down, Professor; it appears that you are ...
— The Green Mummy • Fergus Hume
... each other; the confidence between us is without a flaw. The fair one, believe me, is good to look on, and is worth all the ogling, fan-flirting baggages put together that one sees at court or on the balconies of the Palais Roy: ah! I'll answer for that. ...
— Celebrated Crimes, Complete • Alexandre Dumas, Pere
... all the precautions taken to carry out my Lord Cardinal's wishes—a work at least in which you, yourselves, have evinced a degree of zeal that I cannot too highly commend to his Eminence—the possibility yet remains of some mistake of trivial appearance, of some slight flaw that might yet cause the ...
— The Suitors of Yvonne • Raphael Sabatini
... Scottish clergy, and re-instated the families of the barons killed in the war. Doubtless he hoped to do great good to the wild population, and bring them into the same order as the English; but the flaw in his title made this impossible; the Scots regarded his soldiery as their enemies and oppressors, and though the nobles had given in a self-interested adhesion to the new government, they abhorred it all the time, and the mutual hatred between the English garrisons and Scottish ...
— Cameos from English History, from Rollo to Edward II • Charlotte Mary Yonge
... tried for the unlawful possession of the will, which he had either procured to be stolen, or had dishonestly acquired and retained by other means as bad. By dint of an ingenious counsel, and a legal flaw, he escaped; but only to undergo a worse punishment; for, some years afterwards, his house was broken open in the night by robbers, tempted by the rumours of his great wealth, and he was found murdered ...
— The Life And Adventures Of Nicholas Nickleby • Charles Dickens
... flaw or puff comes," Dory continued, "it changes the course of the boat. The helm has to be shifted to meet this change. Almost always the tiller has to be carried to the weather side of the boat. Do you know which the weather side of the boat is, fellows?" asked the ...
— All Adrift - or The Goldwing Club • Oliver Optic
... third, we cannot deny that The Ring and the Book, in its perfection and integrity, fully satisfies the conditions of artistic triumph. Are we to ignore the grandeur of a colossal statue, and the nobility of the human conceptions which it embodies, because here and there we notice a flaw in the marble, a blemish in its colour, a jagged slip of the chisel? "It is not force of intellect," as George Eliot has said, "which causes ready repulsion from the aberration and eccentricities of greatness, any more than it is force of vision that causes the eye to explore ...
— Studies in Literature • John Morley
... lees if such drain on it continue. To fight with effect being the one sure hope, and salve for all sores, it is not in the Army, in the Fortresses, the Fighting Equipments, that there shall be any flaw left! Friedrich's budget is a sore problem upon him; needing endless shift and ingenuity, now and onwards, through this war:—already, during these months, in the Berlin Schloss, a great deal of those ...
— History of Friedrich II. of Prussia, Vol. XV. (of XXI.) • Thomas Carlyle
... became businesslike—"as you know, these manual tests are the last tests before actually blasting off. In the past weeks, you cadets have been subjected to every possible examination, to discover any flaw in your work that might later crop up in space. This manual operations test of the control board, like Manning's on the radar bridge and Astro's on the power deck, is designed to test you under simulated ...
— Stand by for Mars! • Carey Rockwell
... Dudley. Young, and elegant, Though of a stock somewhat attenuate; Rich, though a younger son; a gentleman, A scholar,—what good reason could I give For saying Nay to such an applicant? 'Explain!' my mother cried, with brow severe; 'Is not his character without a flaw?' 'So far as known to me.'—'Is he a fool?' 'Far from it; culture and good sense are his.' 'Could you not love him?'—'Very tenderly, Perhaps, with time to aid.'—'Has any one Preoccupied your heart?'—'My heart is free, And has been always ...
— The Woman Who Dared • Epes Sargent
... in his bearing toward the major's wife, both major and wife became incensed at him,—Plume because he believed the Bugologist still cherished a tender passion for his wife—or she for him; Clarice, it must be owned, because she knew well he did not. Plume sought to find a flaw in his subordinate's moral armor to warrant the aversion that he felt, and was balked at every turn. It was with joy almost fierce he discovered what he thought to be proof that the subaltern was no saint, and, never stopping to give his better nature time to ...
— An Apache Princess - A Tale of the Indian Frontier • Charles King
... seal on a massacre or a robbery. At one time dirt, at another indecency, at another rapine, at a fourth rancorous malignity, is decked out and accredited in the garb of sanctity. The instant there is a flaw, a 'damned spot' to be concealed, it is glossed over with a doubtful name. Again, we dress up our enemies in nicknames, and they march to the stake as assuredly as in san Benitos.... Strange, that a reptile should wish to be thought an angel; or that he ...
— Hazlitt on English Literature - An Introduction to the Appreciation of Literature • Jacob Zeitlin
... born in you With a sudden clamorous pain, When you know the dream is true And lovely, with no flaw nor stain, O then, be careful, or with sudden clutch You'll hurt the delicate ...
— Georgian Poetry 1916-17 - Edited by Sir Edward Howard Marsh • Various
... dreary grave-yard toll, betokening a flaw, the ship's forecastle bell, smote by one of the grizzled oakum-pickers, proclaimed ten o'clock, through the leaden calm; when Captain Delano's attention was caught by the moving figure of a gigantic black, ...
— The Piazza Tales • Herman Melville
... would, the two Generals, equal in battle, face to face for the first time—could not give the total of the day. It was still an unadded sum, and the guns, despite the night, were steadily contributing new figures. This was the flaw in their arithmetic; nothing was complete, and they saw that they would have to begin again to-morrow. So, with this day's work yet unfinished, they began to prepare, sending for new regiments and brigades, massing ...
— Before the Dawn - A Story of the Fall of Richmond • Joseph Alexander Altsheler
... assault the dwellers at land, and leaue them vncouered houses, pared hedges, and dwarfe-growne trees, as witnesses of their force and furie : yea, euen the hard stones, and yron barres of the windowes, doe fret to be so continually grated. One kind of these stormes, they call a flaw, or flaugh, which is a mightie gale of wind, passing suddainely to the shore, and working strong effects, vpon whatsoeuer it incountreth in ...
— The Survey of Cornwall • Richard Carew
... we have seen, the idea of the tragic hero as a being destroyed simply and solely by external forces is quite alien to him; and not less so is the idea of the hero as contributing to his destruction only by acts in which we see no flaw. But the fatal imperfection or error, which is never absent, is of different kinds and degrees. At one extreme stands the excess and precipitancy of Romeo, which scarcely, if at all, diminish our regard for him; at the other the murderous ambition of Richard III. In most cases ...
— Shakespearean Tragedy - Lectures on Hamlet, Othello, King Lear, Macbeth • A. C. Bradley
... frustrated by the very different conceptions which obtain in the two religions. The Christian incarnation must be, and is, first of all, of a perfect ethical type—an ideal of transcendent moral beauty and spiritual excellence. The least flaw or crookedness in His character would vitiate His pretensions, and would be the death-blow to the doctrine of His incarnation and divinity. In Hinduism, on the other hand, moral criteria have no application to the "descents" or incarnations of Vishnu. To his three ...
— India, Its Life and Thought • John P. Jones
... a portion of the truth; for there was more in the background, which he did not wish to confide to his friend. Toto Chupin's revolt had disquieted him. Let there be but a single flaw in the axletree, and one day it will snap in twain; and Mascarin wanted to ...
— Caught In The Net • Emile Gaboriau
... honourable than that of a clergyman's wife unless indeed it were a bishop's. Considering his father's influence it was not at all impossible that Theobald might be a bishop some day—and then—then would occur to her that one little flaw in the practice of the Church of England—a flaw not indeed in its doctrine, but in its policy, which she believed on the whole to be a mistaken one in this respect. I mean the fact that a bishop's wife does not take the rank ...
— The Way of All Flesh • Samuel Butler
... Kremlin live in fear their power and position would collapse were their own people to acquire knowledge, information, comprehension about our free society. Their world has many elements of strength, but this one fatal flaw: the weakness represented by their iron curtain and their police state. Surely, a social order at once so insecure and so fearful, must ultimately lose its ...
— State of the Union Addresses of Harry S. Truman • Harry S. Truman
... a present of rarities was brought to the sultan, among which were two precious stones; one of them remarkably clear in its water, and the other with a flaw. The sultan now bethought himself of the lapidary, and sent for him to his presence, when he gave him the clear jewel to examine, and demanded what ...
— The Arabian Nights Entertainments Complete • Anonymous
... invincible, magnanimous in conquest and never so sublime as on that day when he laid down his victorious sword and sought his noble retirement—here, indeed, is a character to admire and revere; a life without a stain, a fame without a flaw." ...
— The Constitution of the United States - A Brief Study of the Genesis, Formulation and Political Philosophy of the Constitution • James M. Beck
... fear o' that. She's as toom's a cock. Gang and luik. The last drap in her wame flaw oot at the window i' that bottle. Eh! Alec, but I'll hae a sair day, and ye maun be true to me. Gie me my Homer, or I'll never win throu't. An ye may lay John Milton within my rax (reach); for I winna pit my leg oot o' the blankets till ...
— Alec Forbes of Howglen • George MacDonald
... reasoning," Cyril remarked. "There's scarcely a flaw in it, as you'll see by my account of the affair. After saying good-by to Prescott on the night I left the settlement, I went on until I was near the muskeg and had dismounted to camp when a stranger rode up. We sat talking for a while and I foolishly told him I meant to buy some horses ...
— Prescott of Saskatchewan • Harold Bindloss
... quarter of an hour ago, proud, and, I may say, swaggering, as he does over his learned friends when he has found a flaw in one of ...
— The Ink-Stain, Complete • Rene Bazin
... paradoxical reactions of price changes on supply. Let us turn, though, once more to these earlier laws, and with a heightened critical sense let us submit them to the test of the whole gamut of our experience, and see if in any of them we can find the smallest flaw. The first of them will pass through the ordeal—let each reader prove it for himself—unscathed. The second will emerge with a few hairs, as it were, singed. It tells us, for instance, that a rise in price will tend to augment the supply. Now there are some things the supply ...
— Supply and Demand • Hubert D. Henderson
... you find that there are no stampers. The immense hundred-ton guns and the crank-shafts of transatlantic steamers are forged by hydraulic pressure, and the worker has but to turn a tap to give shape to the immense mass of steel, which makes a far more homogeneous metal, without crack or flaw, of the ...
— The Conquest of Bread • Peter Kropotkin
... blissful gentleness, Not like a rocket, which, with passionate glare, Whirs suddenly up, then bursts, and leaves the night Painfully quivering on the dazed eyes; A love that gives and takes, that seeth faults, Not with flaw-seeking eyes like needle points, But loving-kindly ever looks them down With the o'ercoming faith that still forgives; A love that shall be new and fresh each hour, As is the sunset's golden mystery, Or the sweet coming of the evening-star, Alike, and ...
— The Complete Poetical Works of James Russell Lowell • James Lowell
... a peculiar experience came to the captain of the yacht Coral. A slight flaw in the breeze, which was bearing the vessel forward, caused the sails to flap, and must have made a sort of funnel of one of them for the moment; or rather, as may be said, it made a temporary whispering gallery of the deck ...
— Adrift on the Pacific • Edward S. Ellis
... the people were destined to learn the highest of all arts, self-government on a grand scale. The absence of a leisure class, devoted to no calling or profession, merely enjoying the refinements of life and adding to its graces—the flaw in American culture that gave deep distress to many a European leader—de Tocqueville thought a necessary virtue in the republic. "Amongst a democratic people where there is no hereditary wealth, ...
— History of the United States • Charles A. Beard and Mary R. Beard
... strong-minded a man to accept the hazy modern notion that the soul in its highest sense can change: he seems to have held that religion can never get any better and that poetry rather tends to get worse. But he did not see the flaw in his political theory; which is that unless the soul improves with time there is no guarantee that the accumulations of experience will be adequately used. Figures do not add themselves up; birds do not label or stuff themselves; ...
— The Victorian Age in Literature • G. K. Chesterton
... there is a flaw in Blizzard's mind. It is the only way to account for him. He stands on ...
— The Penalty • Gouverneur Morris
... thing out till there's no flaw. We shall surprise the Acropolis today: That is the duty set the older dames. While we sit here talking, they are to go And under pretence ...
— Lysistrata • Aristophanes
... small volumes, "The Lesson of the Master" and "Terminations," and in those two little volumes of short stories he who will may find out something of what it means to be really an artist. The framework is perfect and the polish is absolutely without flaw. They are sometimes a little hard, always calculating and dispassionate, but they are perfect. I wish James would write about modern society, about "degeneracy" and the new woman and all the rest of it. Not that he would throw any light on it. He seldom does; but he would say ...
— A Collection of Stories, Reviews and Essays • Willa Cather
... the blast, Bent like a reed each mast, Yet we were gaining fast, When the wind failed us; And with a sudden flaw Came round the gusty Skaw,[9] So that our foe we saw Laugh as ...
— Journeys Through Bookland, Vol. 5 • Charles Sylvester
... a different development of the same type of quiet unassuming English gentleman,—the gallant, thrusting, never-tiring Plumer. Small spare man of dainty gait and finish, yet moulded in a clay which hitherto has shown no flaw in the rougher elements of the soldier. It is no inconsiderable tribute to his sterling qualities as a leader that he gained both the confidence and devotion of the rough Bushboys from the Antipodes, with whom he was associated. But however dainty and unassuming the shell, it is the spirit ...
— On the Heels of De Wet • The Intelligence Officer
... But when I came to reflect that this was but an outbreak among old friends on an old occasion, after (I do believe) months of sobriety; that there was no concealment about it; and that though obstinate at first as to how little drunk, &c., he was very repentant afterwards—I cannot let this one flaw weigh against the general good of the man. I cannot if I would: what then is the use of trying? But my confidence in that respect must be so far shaken, and it vexes me to think that I can never be sure of his not being overtaken so. I declare that ...
— Two Suffolk Friends • Francis Hindes Groome
... stiletto type than the dagger. An inscription ran lengthwise down the steel, which was of a distinct bluish tinge where it was not darkly stained. About an inch from the tip a tiny triangular nick had been made in one of the sharp edges, the only flaw in the weapon's perfection. Creighton looked up from it to meet ...
— The Monk of Hambleton • Armstrong Livingston
... resolving to lose no more time by awaiting new orders from Angers, and fearing the least flaw in her marriage, the Court was obliged to comply with my proposal, and ...
— Marguerite de Navarre - Memoirs of Marguerite de Valois Queen of Navarre • Marguerite de Navarre
... cried the Lamps' Father in great anger, "who sells cracked lamps? If there is a flaw in one of mine, ask me for ...
— Morocco • S.L. Bensusan
... the former, there is nothing that you Christian people need more to have dinned into you than this, that your continuance in the state of a redeemed man, with all the security and blessing that attach thereto, depends upon your continuing to be righteous. Every sin, every flaw, every dropping beneath our own standard in conscience of what we ought to be, has for its inevitable result that we are robbed for the time being of consciousness of the walls of the city being about us and of our ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture - Isaiah and Jeremiah • Alexander Maclaren
... were present; the old spell which he threw over everybody—a spell which was from the heart and the manner as well as from the meaning of his words—was not lacking, but to Harley, keenly attentive, there seemed to be a flaw in his logic. The reasoning was not as clear and compact as usual. Only a man with a penetrating, analytical mind would observe it, but there were openings here and there where his armor could be pierced. Blaisdell, ...
— The Candidate - A Political Romance • Joseph Alexander Altsheler
... before the stout arm-chair was secured to the cables, slowly lowered, and landed at last on the outside of the hut. Many an anxious glance was cast at the slate-gray sky. An inopportune flurry of snow, a flaw of wind:—and even now all would be lost. Dusk too impended, and as the rope began to coil on the windlass at the signal to hoist every eye was strained to discern the identity of the first voyagers in this aerial journey,—the two children, securely lashed to the chair. This was well,—all ...
— The Christmas Miracle - 1911 • Charles Egbert Craddock (AKA Mary Noailles Murfree)
... expression that I have already mentioned: here it was somewhat marred, though, by an over-rigidity of the lines. It is unfortunate that our farmers, when they plant at all, will nearly always plant in straight lines. The straight line is a flaw where we try to blend the work of our hands with Nature. They also as a rule neglect shrubs that would help to furnish a foreground for their trees; and, worst of all, they are given to importing, instead of utilising our native ...
— Over Prairie Trails • Frederick Philip Grove
... even after the most careful revision, to find any flaw in my argument; and I incline to think none has been found by my critics—at least, if they have, they have kept the discovery ...
— Collected Essays, Volume V - Science and Christian Tradition: Essays • T. H. Huxley
... them perfectly. Very likely next day they, too, would fade, as you put it, Burkhardt; they would want to get out of this part of country as quickly as possible when they realized what had happened. I see no flaw in our plan. Fortunately the three directors who are coming will be gone by ...
— In the Shadow of the Hills • George C. Shedd
... the way, and thus he justified, he is in pursuit of an enemy, and consequently is at war), and dodging about, under cover, spying out the secrets of the land, and not very fastidious in listening to conversation that does not exactly concern him. We fear that there is some such flaw in the character of Ned Hinkley, though, otherwise, a good, hardy fellow—with a rough and tumble sort of good nature, which, having bloodied your nose, would put a knife-handle down your back, and apply a handful of cobwebs ...
— Charlemont • W. Gilmore Simms
... merits both spiritual and spectacular, and he brought to the big house an exotic atmosphere that was spicy with delights. The little boy prayed that this hero might be made again the man he once was; not because of any flaw that he could see in him—but only because the sufferer appeared somewhat less than perfect to himself. To Bernal's mind, indeed, nothing could have been superior to the noble melancholy with which Cousin ...
— The Seeker • Harry Leon Wilson
... protection; that is, the police and the Courts were so completely in the scheme that it was sufficient, on the arrest of a "reliable," if the boss sent word to the judge or State's attorney "to be keerful" as this was "one of our boys." Promptly a flaw would be discovered in the indictment and the ...
— The Preacher of Cedar Mountain - A Tale of the Open Country • Ernest Thompson Seton
... forth: Perjured ere long he fled, and now returns To reap a harvest from his master's dream" - Thus mused he, while black shadow swept the moor. So day by day darker was Milcho's heart, Till, with the endless brooding on one thought, Began a little flaw within that brain Whose strength was still his boast. Was no friend nigh? Alas! what friend had he? All men he scorned; Knew truly none. In each, the best and sweetest Near him had ever pined, like stunted growth Dwarfed ...
— The Legends of Saint Patrick • Aubrey de Vere
... a work of genius. But, oh! Jaffery, I do want it to be without a flaw. Don't hate me, dear—I know you've done all that mortal man could do for Adrian and for me. But it isn't your fault if you're not a professional novelist or an imaginative writer. And you, yourself, said the bridges were clumsy. Couldn't you—oh!—I loathe hurting you, ...
— Jaffery • William J. Locke
... in the purest statuary marble would convert the Eve of Powers to a monster. Masculine observers, if the birthmark did not heighten their admiration, contented themselves with wishing it away, that the world might possess one living specimen of ideal loveliness without the semblance of a flaw. After his marriage,—for he thought little or nothing of the matter before,—Aylmer discovered that this was the case ...
— The Short-story • William Patterson Atkinson
... traditions of centuries namely, to its bumptiousness, in a word. But chiefly, I think, the reason is to be found in its lack of anything properly to be called a philosophy. This is surely a fatal flaw in any system, because it involves a contradiction in terms; and to say that to have no philosophy is the philosophy of the impressionists, is merely a word-juggling bit of question-begging. A theory of technic is not a philosophy, however systematic it may be. It is a mechanical, ...
— French Art - Classic and Contemporary Painting and Sculpture • W. C. Brownell
... most ingenious. But there is in this plan one flaw which no one has noted. I suppose that you, Maternus, evolved this really promising idea from pondering on what Claudius told us. All the hearsay about Rome and its festivals which ever came to the ears of all of ...
— Andivius Hedulio • Edward Lucas White
... come as nigh as that of Crasweller, he too, like Crasweller, would impotently implore the grace of another year. He would ape madness like Barnes, or arm himself with a carving-knife like Tallowax, or swear that there was a flaw in the law, as Exors was disposed to do. He too would clamorously swear that he was much younger, as did the old women. Was not the world peopled by Craswellers, Tallowaxes, Exorses, and old women? Had I a right to hope to alter the feelings which nature herself had implanted in the ...
— The Fixed Period • Anthony Trollope
... course, these facts themselves, being less than all the stream of creative duration to which they belong, will be abstractions, if taken apart from that whole stream, and so distorted. This flaw in what we know even by direct acquaintance can never be wholly remedied short of our succeeding in becoming acquainted with the whole of duration. It is something, however, to be aware of the flaw, even if we cannot wholly remedy it, and the wider the acquaintance ...
— The Misuse of Mind • Karin Stephen
... vulgar at the same time. All lighter agitations and excitements might be dangerous to Jevons, but passion and great grief and grave anxiety ennobled him. He came back from Switzerland chastened and purified of all offence. Even Reggie couldn't have found a flaw ...
— The Belfry • May Sinclair
... help forming some opinion of a man's sense and character from his dress; and I believe most people do as well as myself. Any affectation whatsoever in dress implies in my mind a flaw in the understanding.... A man of sense carefully avoids any particular character in his dress; he is accurately clean for his own sake; but all the rest is for other people's. He dresses as well, and in the same manner, as the people of sense and fashion ...
— The Best of the World's Classics, Restricted to Prose, Vol. IV (of X)—Great Britain and Ireland II • Various
... walls the mighty sire explores, With eye close searching, lest a weakening flaw, Might hurl some part to ruin. All he found Firm in its pristine strength;—then glanc'd his eye Around the earth, and toils of man below. 'Bove all terrestrial lands, Arcadia felt— His own Arcadia—his preserving care. Her fountains he restores; her streams not yet To murmur daring; to ...
— The Metamorphoses of Publius Ovidus Naso in English blank verse Vols. I & II • Ovid
... that it could go through a ring without touching it; he was also able to dance, and play the castanets, while his ears touched the ground. The King was embarassed, for it was impossible to find a flaw ...
— My Book of Favorite Fairy Tales • Edric Vredenburg
... sweep of his hair; the sharp clearness of his profile; the steady serenity of his gray eyes; the ease and suppleness and indolent strength of his tall thin figure—all these physical details expressed the reserves and inhibitions of generations. The only flaw that she could detect was that dryness of soul that she had noticed before, as of soil that has been too heavily drained. She knew that he excelled in all the virtues that are monumental and public, that he was an honourable opponent, a scrupulous defender of established rules and precedents. ...
— One Man in His Time • Ellen Glasgow
... even then, if he bought the land, and another person, for any reason whatever, laid claim to it, the owner had to prove the validity of each of a long series of documents, going back, perhaps, for centuries. A flaw in any one of these would give rise to a contest which could be settled only after a very tedious investigation; and thus arose the long and ruinous Chancery suits which were the disgrace of English law. When a man's title to his estate was disputed, it often happened ...
— History of Australia and New Zealand - From 1606 to 1890 • Alexander Sutherland
... England some black storm Shall blow ten thousand souls to heaven or hell; And this fell tempest shall not cease to rage Until the golden circuit on my head, Like to the glorious sun's transparent beams, Do calm the fury of this mad-bred flaw. And for a minister of my intent, I have seduc'd a headstrong Kentishman, John Cade of Ashford, To make commotion, as full well he can, Under the tide of John Mortimer. In Ireland have I seen this stubborn Cade Oppose himself against ...
— King Henry VI, Second Part • William Shakespeare [Rolfe edition]
... The Ring and the Book, in its perfection and integrity, fully satisfies the conditions of artistic triumph. Are we to ignore the grandeur of a colossal statue, and the nobility of the human conceptions which it embodies, because here and there we notice a flaw in the marble, a blemish in its colour, a jagged slip of the chisel? "It is not force of intellect," as George Eliot has said, "which causes ready repulsion from the aberration and eccentricities of greatness, any more than it is force of vision that causes the eye to explore the ...
— Studies in Literature • John Morley
... passage of his supplies up the Rhine, which might have been seriously impeded by them at Rheinberg. The details of the siege, as of all the Prince's sieges, possess no more interest to the general reader than the working out of a geometrical problem. He was incapable of a flaw in his calculations, but it was impossible for him quite to complete the demonstration before the arrival of de la Chatre. Maurice received with courtesy the Marshal, who arrived on the 18th August, at the head of his contingent of ...
— The Rise of the Dutch Republic, 1555-1566 • John Lothrop Motley
... saddening in effect. The autumn wood robed in its scarlet clothes, The matchless tinting on the royal rose Whose velvet leaf by no least flaw is flecked, Love's supreme moment, when the soul unchecked Soars high as heaven, and its best rapture knows— These hold a deeper pathos than our woes, Since they leave ...
— Poems of Passion • Ella Wheeler Wilcox
... visitors, for the state of the country did not invite Londoners; but we did not want them. The suppression of Clarence was the only flaw in a singularly happy time; and, after all I believe I felt the pity of it more than he did, who expected nothing, and was accustomed to being ...
— Chantry House • Charlotte M. Yonge
... writer of 'slams' is that he must resolutely shut his eyes to any qualities which appeal, even to him, as good qualities, while dwelling with ferocious zest upon every point that he can possibly magnify into a flaw. Or he may even fly at one bound to a pinnacle of wisdom by basing his criticism entirely upon the first chapter or the last chapter of a book, or the first act or the last act of a play. Or he may win his spurs for smartness by deliberate misstatements, born, perhaps, ...
— Poet Lore, Volume XXIV, Number IV, 1912 • Various
... delicately-moulded mouth—a smile that was like sunlight on clear water, revealing a nature so simple and candid; and deep down, trembling into light, the crystalline soul which had come without flaw from its Maker's hands, and in the midst of evil had caught no stain to dim its perfect purity. It seemed now to Mrs. Churton, as she expounded the sacred doctrines which meant so much to her, that she had not known so great a happiness since her daughter, white even to her lips at the thought ...
— Fan • Henry Harford
... were fought, and victories gained. Success was his object, and he was generally successful. He conquered his enemies by their weakness rather than by his own strength, and it had been found almost impossible to make up a case in which Sir Abraham, as an antagonist, would not find a flaw. ...
— The Warden • Anthony Trollope
... down at the terraced streets just below, she thought it a strange thing that so favored a woman should rail at her own country and kinsmen. It oppressed her loyal little heart, for she had begun to like the titled lady, and hated to find so grave a flaw in her nature. ...
— All Aboard - A Story for Girls • Fannie E. Newberry
... loitered once, and fearing whipping, did As boys will do, sneaked to the stairs and hid. So, if this running off be not a, vice Too bad to pardon, let me have my price." The man would get his money, I should say, Without a risk of having to repay. You make the bargain knowing of the flaw; 'Twere mere vexatiousness ...
— The Satires, Epistles, and Art of Poetry • Horace
... this girl who had betrayed her father, her faith, her class. She ought to repent, of course, and Church was the right place; yet there was something brazen in her repenting there before their very eyes; she was too palpable a flaw in the crystal of the Church's authority, too visible a rent in the raiment of their priest. Her figure focused all the uneasy amazement and heart searchings of these last weeks. Mothers quivered with the knowledge that their daughters could see her; wives with the idea that their ...
— Forsyte Saga • John Galsworthy
... rapidly increasing because whenever he pressed his ear to the wall he could hear the almost inaudible tickings and vibrations as the bubble's skin contracted or expanded and the Nothing tapped and searched with its empty fingers for a flaw or crack that it could ...
— The Nothing Equation • Tom Godwin
... harmonies, to be always rejecting and refining. It had its sorrows, of course. How often in the old days one came in contact with some gracious and beautiful personality, and flung oneself into close relations; and then one began to see this and that flaw. There were lapses in tact, petulances, littlenesses; one's friend did not rightly use his beautiful mind; he was jealous, suspicious, trivial, petty; it ended in disillusionment. Instead of taking him as a passenger on one's vessel, and ...
— The Child of the Dawn • Arthur Christopher Benson
... charm are such that we wish to sit at her feet at once. She is intellectual, but with a disarming smile, religious, but so charitable, masterful, and yet loved of all. None is perfect, and there must be a flaw in her somewhere, but to find it would necessitate such a rummage among her many adornments as there is now no time for. Perhaps we may come upon it accidentally in ...
— Echoes of the War • J. M. Barrie
... we'll find support. Get them on the jump and we're all right. Now I'll ride somewhere between Canker and Truman. All ready now?" "What I want to know, major, is this," began Canker, always on the lookout for some point or flaw. ...
— Under Fire • Charles King
... had come to him in 1764 in Rome whilst "musing amongst the ruins of the Capitol"; in 1787 his great work was finished at Lausanne, where he had resided since 1783; modern criticism, working with fresh sources of information, has failed to find any serious flaw in the fabric of this masterpiece in history, but the cynical attitude adopted towards the Christian religion has always been regarded as a defect; "a man of endless reading and research," was Carlyle's verdict after a final perusal of the "Decline," "but of a most disagreeable style, and a ...
— The Nuttall Encyclopaedia - Being a Concise and Comprehensive Dictionary of General Knowledge • Edited by Rev. James Wood
... procured by the authority of Henry but he found it not so easy to levy the money upon his subjects. The people, who were acquainted with the immense treasures which he had amassed, could ill brook the new impositions raised on every slight occasion; and it is probable that the flaw which was universally known to be in his title, made his reign the more subject to insurrections and rebellions. When the subsidy began to be levied in Cornwall, the inhabitants, numerous and poor, robust and courageous, murmured against a tax occasioned by a sudden inroad ...
— The History of England in Three Volumes, Vol.I., Part C. - From Henry VII. to Mary • David Hume
... like the yarns and strands of a tow-line. Quick! I'll blow the fire. When at last the twelve rods were made, Ahab tried them, one by one, by spiralling them, with his own hand, round a long, heavy iron bolt. A flaw! rejecting the last one. Work that over again, Perth. This done, Perth was about to begin welding the twelve into one, when Ahab stayed his hand, and said he would weld his own iron. As, then, with regular, gasping hems, he hammered on the ...
— Moby-Dick • Melville
... the Supreme Being can see their innermost thoughts as clearly as they can perceive their own reflection; while the crystal ball is an emblem of purity. Great store is set by the latter, especially if of large size and without flaw; but to my mind the imperfect ones are the best, as they refract the light and do not ...
— A Voyage in the 'Sunbeam' • Annie Allnut Brassey
... of dates of past eclipses in Professor Morgan's book he referred to a certain eclipse of the moon which occurred about two hundred millions of years before Christ, and not a flaw could be discovered in his figuring. But Professor Macadam did not hesitate to make a charge. He asserted with great vehemence that as there was no moon two hundred millions of years before Christ, there could ...
— The Wolf's Long Howl • Stanley Waterloo
... latent in the suggestive imagery of a predecessor, laying under contribution the most intimate familiarity with what is best in the literature of the ancient and modern world, the unwearied artist toils patiently on till his precious mosaic work is without a flaw. All the resources of rhetoric are employed to give distinction to his style and every figure in rhetoric finds expression in his diction: Hypallage ...
— The Early Poems of Alfred Lord Tennyson • Tennyson
... Antony beside Caesar. In solitude we are ashamed of this cowardice and resolve to put it away; but when the great man returns, our knees knock and we are as weak as before. It is suicide to fly from such mortification. A brave boy faces it as well as he can. By-and-by the dazzle abates, he sees some flaw, some coarseness or softness, in this shining piece of metal; he begins to fathom the motives and measure the orbit of this tyrannous benefactor. They are the true friends who daunt and overpower us, to whom for a little we yield ...
— The Atlantic Monthly , Volume 2, No. 14, December 1858 • Various
... which cannot suffer the least injury without damage; it is a precious stone, the price of which is lessened by the least flaw. ...
— Life and Literature - Over two thousand extracts from ancient and modern writers, - and classified in alphabetical order • J. Purver Richardson
... allow me no more credit. Once when I was in a very bad humour, I let out my secret before Szilard, and the worthy young man undertook to relieve me of my burden. I don't know whether he detected a technical flaw in my bonds or whether he found out some other means of frightening my creditor; anyway, he assured me I only need pay the original sum with interest upon it at the legal rate. Moreover, he undertook to procure me an honourable ...
— The Poor Plutocrats • Maurus Jokai
... technically as hard as, say, Paganini—but in interpretation!... And in the Beethoven concerto, too, there is a simplicity, a kind of clear beauty which makes it far harder to play than many other things technically more advanced. The slightest flaw, the least difference in pitch, in intonation, ...
— Violin Mastery - Talks with Master Violinists and Teachers • Frederick H. Martens
... It was on the same spot as all the others, but blow me if it didn't get three of them infantry. They fell squirmin' right on top o' us an' the instrument, so I concluded that spot wasn't as safe as the F.O. had reckoned, an' there was a flaw in 'is argument somewheres that the Coal-Box 'ad found out. The F.O. saw that too, an' we shifted out quick-time. After that things quietened down a bit, an' the short hairs on the back o' my neck had time to lie down. They stood on end again once or twice in the afternoon, when ...
— Between the Lines • Boyd Cable
... theas hed no avail, For th' waters deluged all the vale; An' th' latest news 'at I heerd Th' railway's nearly disappear'd; But if it's fun withaat a flaw, Wha, folks, I'm like ...
— Th' History o' Haworth Railway - fra' th' beginnin' to th' end, wi' an ackaant o' th' oppnin' serrimony • Bill o'th' Hoylus End
... out of anything," had been said. "He has somehow established her as if she were his mother or his aunt—or his interpreter. And such clothes, my dear, one doesn't behold. Worth and Paquin and Doucet must go sleepless for weeks to invent them. They are without a flaw in shade or line or texture." Which was true, because Mrs. Mellish of the Bond Street shop had become quite obsessed by her idea and committed extravagances Miss Alicia offered up contrite prayer to atone for, while Tembarom, simply chortling in his glee, signed checks to pay for their exquisite ...
— T. Tembarom • Frances Hodgson Burnett
... not better to cripple the easy, irresponsible, and delightfully casual social instincts of the House of Seagrave. Educated according to my own ideas, they must inevitably have become, in a measure, types of the set with which they are identified.... And the only serious flaw ...
— The Danger Mark • Robert W. Chambers
... characteristically and purely Russian. An Englishman may be in love with an idea, and start out bravely to follow it; but if he finds it leading him into a position contrary to the experience of humanity, then he pulls up, and decides that the idea must be false, even if he can detect no flaw in it; not so the Russian; the idea is right, ...
— Essays on Russian Novelists • William Lyon Phelps
... sacred, although I may be permitted to express my regret that he has not done so in a spirit more worthy of the cause which he defends. In spite of hostile criticism of very unusual minuteness and ability, no flaw or error has been pointed out which in the slightest degree affects my main argument, and I consider that every point yet objected to by Dr. Lightfoot, or indicated by Dr. Westcott, might be withdrawn without at all weakening my position. These objections, I may say, refer ...
— A Reply to Dr. Lightfoot's Essays • Walter R. Cassels
... in this country. As a rule, representatives of the committee visit the scene of the accident as soon as possible after its occurrence. Eye-witnesses are called before them to give evidence of the disaster; the remains of the craft are carefully inspected in order to discover any flaw in its construction; evidence is taken as to the nature and velocity of the wind on the day of the accident, the approximate height at which the aviator was flying, and, in fact, everything of value that might bear on the ...
— The Mastery of the Air • William J. Claxton
... for if not to encourage legitimate enterprises in the community upon which it depends for its business? There isn't a flaw in this proposition, Wentz! Can you ...
— The Fighting Shepherdess • Caroline Lockhart
... surprising pieces of news to give you, Eliza. In the first place it has been discovered that there was a very serious flaw in the title to Fairclose, and that the sale to me was altogether illegal. Mr. Hartington has behaved most kindly and generously in the matter, but the result is he comes back to Fairclose and we ...
— A Girl of the Commune • George Alfred Henty
... fascination for him, until now he was recognized as one of the world's greatest experts on these subjects. The great lock concerns often sent for him to test new inventions, and invariably he could point to any flaw in the constructions of them that existed. As he came to manhood his knowledge had grown apace until to many ...
— The Master Mystery • Arthur B. Reeve and John W. Grey
... "The flaw in that statement," says Cray after a pause, "is that this may be another ship of the ...
— The Lost Kafoozalum • Pauline Ashwell
... certain shape; it persists in this plan, and completes it. Here is a perfect crystal of quartz for you. It is of an unusual form, and one which it might seem very difficult to build—a pyramid with convex sides, composed of other minor pyramids. But there is not a flaw in its contour throughout; not one of its myriads of component sides but is as bright as a jeweler's faceted work (and far finer, if you saw it close). The crystal points are as sharp as javelins; their edges will cut ...
— The Ethics of the Dust • John Ruskin
... have the secret of removing flaws from diamonds. The King showed him a stone valued at 6,000 francs—without a flaw it would have been worth 10,000. Saint-Germain said that he could remove the flaw in a month, and in a month he brought back the diamond—flawless. The King sent it, without any comment, to his jeweler, ...
— The Lock and Key Library/Real Life #2 • Julian Hawthorne
... me, but I have just issued from many generations of forest poverty, and knowing how hard it is to break that thraldom, I would stop you from taking the first step towards it. The bloom upon your cheek, the mould you are the product of without flaw, the chaste lady's tastes and thoughts, and inborn strength and joy, are the work of God's favor to your family for generations. That favor he continues in laying those family burdens on another's shoulders, to spare you the toil and care, anxiety and slow decay, that this violent ...
— The Entailed Hat - Or, Patty Cannon's Times • George Alfred Townsend
... me, you four hundred, where did you get it? Who gave it to you? Your grandfather, you say? Your father? Can you go all the way back and show there is no flaw anywhere in your title? I tell you that the beginning and the root of your wealth is necessarily in injustice. And why? Because Nature did not make this man rich and that man poor from the start. Nature does not intend for one man to have capital and another ...
— The Profits of Religion, Fifth Edition • Upton Sinclair
... of flame, The coming man of the race will find her. For petty purpose and narrow aim, And fault and flaw she will leave behind her. He grown tender, and she grown wise, They shall enter the Eden by both created; The broadened kingdom of Paradise, And love, and mate, as the first ...
— Poems of Experience • Ella Wheeler Wilcox
... give her a Bible, that she might read the Scriptures. This had been one of the worst girls, and she had behaved so very badly upon her trial that it was almost shameful. She conducted herself afterwards in so amiable a manner, that her conduct was almost without a flaw. She is now in the Penitentiary, and, I hope, will become a valuable member ...
— Elizabeth Fry • Mrs. E. R. Pitman
... its realisation the limitation of the public authority, for liberty is the only object which benefits all alike, and provokes no sincere opposition. In supporting the claims of national unity, governments must be subverted in whose title there is no flaw, and whose policy is beneficent and equitable, and subjects must be compelled to transfer their allegiance to an authority for which they have no attachment, and which may be practically a foreign domination. ...
— The History of Freedom • John Emerich Edward Dalberg-Acton
... stability of the social security system. Shortly after taking office I proposed and Congress enacted legislation to protect the stability of the old age and survivors trust fund and prevent the imminent exhaustion of the disability insurance trust fund, and to correct a flaw in the benefit formula that was threatening the long run health of the entire social security system. The actions taken by the Congress at my request helped stabilize the system. That legislation ...
— State of the Union Addresses of Jimmy Carter • Jimmy Carter
... packing them for market. And oh! the joy of it! the pleasure she took in laying the rich brown and creamy-white eggs in cosy nests in the sweet-smelling hay; her pride in their appearance! The only flaw in her happiness was the fact that she could not carry the basket and dispose of the contents herself to the customers. She pictured herself turning back the snow-white cloth from the top of the basket, and counting out her beloved treasures one ...
— The Carroll Girls • Mabel Quiller-Couch
... and looked at it closely. He put it on the scales and weighed it carefully, measured it, and scrutinized it as closely as he could in the lamplight, but he knew himself that these were devices to gain time. The pearl showed all too clearly a flaw that would make it valueless. Every one waited for his verdict. He was conscious that his voice was a little shaky, but he answered as ...
— The Boy With the U. S. Fisheries • Francis Rolt-Wheeler
... hear of our flitting. Happily, we had little darkness to add to the misery of our passage, for the sun was far south, and we had only three hours of night. Yet, when the black squalls of snow and sleet rolled up from the westward, there was darkness enough. At times a flaw in the wind—a brief veering to the south—would let us keep the ship travelling to the westward. All hands would be in high spirits; we would go below at the end of our watches, making light of sodden bedclothes, ...
— The Brassbounder - A Tale of the Sea • David W. Bone
... manly dignity belonging to his proud position as an engaged man was very comical. So was the entire change from his former abasement and devotion to Nan to a somewhat lordly air with his little betrothed; for Dora made an idol of him, and resented the idea of a fault or a flaw in her Tom. This new state of things suited both, and the once blighted being bloomed finely in the warm atmosphere of appreciation, love, and confidence. He was very fond of the dear girl, but meant to be a slave no longer, and enjoyed his freedom immensely, quite unconscious that the great tyrant ...
— Jo's Boys • Louisa May Alcott
... have seemed a nuisance, but I was only trying to get you back on the straight path where you've always belonged. I can't believe you did this thing, even unconsciously, until I'm shown proof without a single flaw. Until the autopsy the only thing we have to work on is that party last night. I've telephoned to New York and put a trustworthy man on the heels of Maria and the stranger. Meantime I think I'd better watch ...
— The Abandoned Room • Wadsworth Camp
... definition is fatal to metaphysics. If you do not now point out a flaw in my definition, you are disqualified later on from advancing metaphysical arguments. You must go through life seeking that flaw and remaining metaphysically silent ...
— The Iron Heel • Jack London
... long been cultivated in our gardens, and is deservedly a great favourite. It may not be uninteresting to give the other common and ancient names of the Easter Flower, as in every way this is not only an old plant, but an old-fashioned flower. "Passe Flower" and "Flaw Flower" come from the above common names, being only derivations, but in Cambridgeshire, where it grows wild, it is called "Coventry Bells" and "Hill Tulip." Three hundred years ago Gerarde gave the following description of ...
— Hardy Perennials and Old Fashioned Flowers - Describing the Most Desirable Plants, for Borders, - Rockeries, and Shrubberies. • John Wood
... Some flaw in the wind lifted the smoke and sent it high over the heads of all. Dick saw Custer, the general with the yellow hair, still on horseback and apparently unwounded, but the little army had stopped. It had been riddled already by the rifle fire from ...
— The Last of the Chiefs - A Story of the Great Sioux War • Joseph Altsheler
... Tenney, as if his mind, unsatisfied, went back to one flaw after another in Raven's argument. "You see me go by to my work, an' you come up here to talk over my folks behind my back an' tole 'em off ...
— Old Crow • Alice Brown
... our favor. Ma says she will never, in this world, change it—and changes made in any other world won't do us any good. But pa says he knows how to break it! Mr. Meggley, her lawyer, who drew up the will, has made an agreement to sell pa the flaw—for of course there is one in it, for all wills have flaws—then he will employ another lawyer and break it without any trouble. My, it will be so exciting! I suppose we will have to prove that Aunt Patsey was of unsound mind. Pa will give us our testimony to learn by heart! Pa is a real enterprising ...
— The Inner Sisterhood - A Social Study in High Colors • Douglass Sherley et al.
... ar far, mark aw flaw, caught ay bake, rain e less, men ee easy, ski eir their, software i trip, hit i: life, sky o father, palm oh flow, sew oo loot, through or more, door ow out, how oy boy, coin uh but, some u put, foot y yet, young yoo few, chew [y]oo /oo/ with optional ...
— THE JARGON FILE, VERSION 2.9.10
... out to be a good driver of aeroplanes," commented Roy, as he watched; "see that flaw strike them! There! he brought the Cobweb through it like an old general of the ...
— The Girl Aviators' Sky Cruise • Margaret Burnham
... was in some sort a villain. Although shocked, I felt a secret joy. For somewhat too broadly had Bell smirked his sanctity on me. When piety has been flaunting over you, you will steal a slim occasion to proclaim a flaw. There is much human nature goes to the stoning of a saint. In my ignorance I had set the rogue in the company of the decorous Lorna Doone and the gentle ladies of Mrs. Gaskell. It is not that I admire that chaste assembly. But it were monstrous, even so, that I should neighbor them ...
— Journeys to Bagdad • Charles S. Brooks
... hard to tell without strict inquiries. I doubt me if we could learn all before next May Day, when we might get hold of the man himself and find out who and what he is. Such wedlock as his cannot be without flaw, and might be made invalid by law; but, wife, there is no getting over this, that the child took her vows in the name of God, and I dare not act as though such vows were unspoken. Her youth and ignorance may plead in part for her. She scarce knew the solemnity of the step she ...
— The Lost Treasure of Trevlyn - A Story of the Days of the Gunpowder Plot • Evelyn Everett-Green
... the nearest that nature has ever come to counterfeiting a colonnade. These trees are all the same height, say sixty feet; the trunks as gray as granite, with a very gradual and perfect taper; without sign of branch or knot or flaw; the surface not looking like bark, but like granite that has been dressed and not polished. Thus all the way up the diminishing shaft for fifty feet; then it begins to take the appearance of being closely wrapped, ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... been foul play, sir," he said. "I thought there must have been, for I could not imagine that this bar would have broken unless there had been a flaw in the metal or it had been tampered with. I unshackled it myself, for I thought it was better that the men should not see it until I ...
— The Queen's Cup • G. A. Henty
... no detailed account of the measure, but it seems to have provided grants of land for veterans, and was to be administered by seven commissioners. The law was afterwards cancelled by decree of the senate, probably on the ground of some technical flaw. The emperor Vespasian attempted to reclaim for the state small oddments of land (subseciva) which were held by neighbouring owners to whom they had never been definitely assigned. The attempt met with violent ...
— Project Gutenberg Encyclopedia
... temper. He exclaimed: "If there is a flaw in my sister-in-law's pedigree, what is to be said of people who visit women of alien religions, take food from their hands, and tipple strong liquor ...
— Tales of Bengal • S. B. Banerjea
... the causes of the movements of the heavenly bodies, as you, with your own common sense, would employ to detect a burglar. The only difference is, that the nature of the inquiry being more abstruse, every step has to be most carefully watched, so that there may not be a single crack or flaw in your hypothesis. A flaw or crack in many of the hypotheses of daily life may be of little or no moment as affecting the general correctness of the conclusions at which we may arrive; but, in a scientific inquiry, a fallacy, ...
— Lectures and Essays • T.H. Huxley
... keenness, which underlies the skill of the money-changer in detecting a counterfeit among a thousand bank-notes, notwithstanding its deceptive similarity; of the jeweler who marks the slightest, apparently imperceptible, flaw in an ornament; of the physicist who perceives distinctly the overtones of a vibrating string. According to this we see and hear not only with the eye and ear, but quite as much with the help of our present knowledge, with the apperceiving ...
— The Elements of General Method - Based on the Principles of Herbart • Charles A. McMurry
... centre of affairs. "Sir," it begins, "upon the sad and serious discourse which we fell into last night, concerning these dangerous ruptures of the Commonwealth, scarce yet in her infancy, which cannot be without some inward flaw in her bowels, I began to consider more intensely thereon than hitherto I have been wont,—resigning myself [i.e. having hitherto resigned myself] to the wisdom and care of those who had the government, and not finding that either God ...
— The Life of John Milton, Volume 5 (of 7), 1654-1660 • David Masson
... emergencies of the Government for twenty-five years. He has trodden the perilous heights of public duty, and against all the shafts of malice has borne his breast unharmed. He has stood in the blaze of 'that fierce light that beats against the throne,' but its fiercest ray has found no flaw in his armor, no stain on his shield. I do not present him as a better Republican or as better man than thousands of others we honor, but I present him for your deliberate consideration. I nominate ...
— Hidden Treasures - Why Some Succeed While Others Fail • Harry A. Lewis
... he left the room, however, had touched the one flaw in Galen Albret's confidence of righteousness. Wearied with the struggles and the passions he had undergone, his brain numbed, his will for the moment in abeyance, he seated himself and contemplated the images those two words ...
— Conjuror's House - A Romance of the Free Forest • Stewart Edward White
... the whole scene: only above the accursed wood, as if through a horrid rift in the murky ceiling, a rainy deluge—'sleety-flaw, discoloured water'— streams down amain, spreading a grisly spectral light, even more horrible than that palpable night. Already the Earth pants thick and fast! the darkened Cross trembles! the winds are dropt—the ...
— Intentions • Oscar Wilde
... general belief of those who frequent this place that he who steps upon the marble slab facing the god courts disaster, unless his heart is as free, from treachery and guile as this stone beneath him is free from flaw. Perhaps you have heard the rumour, ...
— The Strong Arm • Robert Barr
... secret from my stepfather was impossible. I had vainly endeavored for months to find the flaw in his armor of dissimulation; I had but broken not one dagger, but twenty against the plates of that cuirass. If I had had all the tormentors of the Middle Ages at my service, I could not have forced his fast-shut lips to open, or extorted ...
— Stories of Modern French Novels • Julian Hawthorne
... any one who seeks to discuss my stories with me, being a modest chap with a flaw in my vanity, she abandoned the subject after a few ineffectual attempts to find out how I get my plots, how I write my books, and how I ...
— A Fool and His Money • George Barr McCutcheon
... more than the sum of the station district returns (3) Different forms of work; one table revealing proportion of Missionaries, Native Workers, Foreign Funds, and Native Contributions employed in different forms of work One table of results A serious flaw in this table (4) The extent to which different classes, etc., are reached. One table including the station returns with the addition of special missions which work among special classes in the whole Province or Country (5) Self-support. ...
— Missionary Survey As An Aid To Intelligent Co-Operation In Foreign Missions • Roland Allen
... of those things," she admitted again; "but it is a flaw in a young man, isn't it," she persisted, betraying an unusually anxious interest, "for him never to think of a ...
— The Early Bird - A Business Man's Love Story • George Randolph Chester
... corners of the bazaar where their defects could not be seen plainly. When the purchase had been consummated they were brought out into the sunlight. The word also means "wax." It is said that in the days of imperial Rome when a sculptor came to a flaw in the marble he filled it with wax to hide the defect, but when the hot days came and the wax was melted the defect was seen plainly. Paul is desiring for these Philippians that there may be none of this, but that their lives should commend themselves ...
— And Judas Iscariot - Together with other evangelistic addresses • J. Wilbur Chapman
... Planchette serenely, "the piece of skin is as safe and sound as my eye. There was a flaw in your reservoir somewhere, or a crevice in the ...
— The Magic Skin • Honore de Balzac
... stood before Arndis, queen of Teris. Her eyes probed at him, trying to divine his thoughts. There was anger in those eyes. If she detected a single flaw in his story it would mean Ben's death. More than that, it would mean disaster for Earth. ...
— Daughters of Doom • Herbert B. Livingston
... for beauty, or attempts to produce what shall be beautiful, by complying with these conditions, come no nearer to the aim than do compounded mineral waters to the briskness and flavor of a fresh draught from the original spring. In the analysis there may be no flaw; the ingredients are chemically identical in quality and proportion; but the nameless, inimitable, inscrutable life is wanting: the mixing has been done by a mechanical, not by a creative hand. Haydon says, "The curve ...
— Essays AEsthetical • George Calvert
... profession as would a doctor or a lawyer? Have not students contented themselves with two lessons a week since time immemorial? Need we go further to discover one of the flaws in our own educational system,—a flaw that is not due to the teacher or to the methods of instruction, but rather to our time-old custom. Two lessons a week are adequate for the student who does not aspire to become a professional, but altogether insufficient ...
— Great Pianists on Piano Playing • James Francis Cooke
... potent fascination of this woman. As Sylvia looked, her feminine eye took in every gift of face and figure, every grace of attitude or gesture, every daintiness of costume, and found no visible flaw in Ottila, from her haughty head to her handsome foot. Yet when her scrutiny ended, the girl felt a sense of disappointment, and no ...
— Moods • Louisa May Alcott
... sensibilities. This choice of emotional gratification before truth and upright dealing with one's own understanding, creates a character that is certainly far less unlovely than those who sacrifice their intellectual integrity to more material convenience. The moral flaw is less palpable and less gross. Yet here too there is the stain of intellectual improbity, and it is perhaps all the more mischievous for being partly hidden under the ...
— On Compromise • John Morley
... midst of the surroundings she found "so wonderful and so beautiful"—thus she assured me, and her voice made it impossible to doubt. And, the evening before the great day, I, going for a final look round, could find no flaw serious enough to justify the sinking feeling that came over me every time I thought of what Anita would think when she saw my efforts to realize her dream. I set out for "home" half a dozen times at least, that afternoon, before I pulled myself together, ...
— The Deluge • David Graham Phillips
... each generation, while freely confessing the sins of its fathers, has protested its own innocence and boasted of its own achievements, and then, with a pharisaic sense of rectitude, has complacently pointed to some inscrutable flaw in the Irish character as the key to the Irish problem. The generation which passed the Act of Union, oblivious of British pledges solemnly given and lightly broken, wondered what had become of the prosperity ...
— Handbook of Home Rule (1887) • W. E. Gladstone et al.
... your duties as a prince (of the kingdom). To be prepared for unforeseen dangers, Be cautious of what you say; Be reverentially careful of your outward behaviour; In all things be mild and correct. A flaw in a mace of white jade May be ground away; But for a flaw in speech ...
— The Shih King • James Legge
... can a man become truly good; built four-square in hands and feet and mind, a work without a flaw.' ...
— Hellenica • Xenophon
... a last interview with Mr. Bradlaugh and Mrs. Besant at 63 Fleet Street. Mr. Bradlaugh told me he could find no flaw in our Indictment, and his air was that of a man who sees no hope, but is reluctant to say so. Mrs. Besant was full of quiet sympathy, proffering this and that kindness, and showing how much her heart was greater than her opportunity ...
— Prisoner for Blasphemy • G. W. [George William] Foote
... wind had hardly swept it easily to leeward once when it fell back against the shrouds, hardly stirring. The pirate sloop's deck righted slowly and her limp sails drooped from the gaffs. A sudden flaw in the breeze had settled about her, without interrupting her rival's progress in the least. A glum despair came over the crew. They lolled, for the most part silent or grumbling curses, against the rails, with here and there one trying to whistle up a wind. The other sloop ...
— The Black Buccaneer • Stephen W. Meader
... at the offer! Parting from Polly, and were it only for a little while, would be painful; but, did he go alone, he would be free to do his utmost—and with an easy mind, knowing that she lacked none of the creature-comforts. Yes, the more he considered the plan, the better he liked it. The one flaw in his satisfaction was the thought that if their child had lived, no such smooth and simple arrangement would have been possible. He could not have ...
— Australia Felix • Henry Handel Richardson
... speak of Leonard's position at the mill, as junior clerk. He had been there for six months, without a flaw being detected, either in his integrity, his diligence, or his regularity; indeed, it was evident that he had been gradually acquiring a greater degree of esteem and confidence than he had at first enjoyed, and had been latterly more employed by his uncle. That a young man of superior education ...
— The Trial - or, More Links of the Daisy Chain • Charlotte M. Yonge
... with grave consideration. "You've got nice eyes," was her verdict. "That deep brown is almost wasted on a man; some girl ought to have it. I used to hear a—a person, who made a deep impression on me at the time, insist that there was always a flaw in the character of a person with large, soft ...
— Success - A Novel • Samuel Hopkins Adams
... white; the mountain breeze that is already whirling the dust-clouds on the Denver plains has not yet begun to ruffle the cottonwoods or the placid surface of the slow-moving stream, and in many a sheltered pool the waters of the "Smoky Hill" gleam like silvered mirror, without break or flaw. Far out on the gentle slopes small herds of troop-horses or quartermaster's "stock," each with its attendant guard, give life to the somewhat sombre tone of the landscape, while nearer at hand two or three well-filled cavalry "troops" with fluttering ...
— Marion's Faith. • Charles King
... and so keep the kite aloft, whilst at the same time it was enabled to proceed through the air in any direction I chose; for, as may be conceived, a little too much weight made the kite a fixture, whilst a little too little, or a sudden flaw of wind, would topple the kite over and bring it to the earth. As a means of signalizing between ships when stationary, the flying of kites of different colours, sizes, or numbers, attached one to the other, would, I am sure, ...
— Stray Leaves from an Arctic Journal; • Sherard Osborn
... and exact was his explanation that his examiners could not find the least flaw in his doctrine. He was equally correct in the answer to the friar who proposed a ...
— The Autobiography of St. Ignatius • Saint Ignatius Loyola
... else, finally, it has left some one or more of our fundamental active and emotional powers with no object outside of themselves to react-on or to live for. Any one of these defects is fatal to its complete success. Some one {126} will be sure to discover the flaw, to scout the system, and to seek ...
— The Will to Believe - and Other Essays in Popular Philosophy • William James
... Latin verses upon the rapture of returning home, and to have breathed out his life in the anguish of thus reviving the images which for him were never to be realized.... The reader must not fancy any flaw in the Latin title. It is elliptic; revisere being ...
— The Posthumous Works of Thomas De Quincey, Vol. 1 (2 vols) • Thomas De Quincey
... Suddenly there came a flaw of wind sweeping from the south round the end of the island, so narrow that most of the English fleet hardly felt it. It filled the sails of Hood's ships in the van, and they steered for two French battleships that dropped astern of their consorts. ...
— Famous Sea Fights - From Salamis to Tsu-Shima • John Richard Hale
... his flattery, but disappointed at the failure in herself. She had thought that surely these garments would make a man of her in which the keenest eye could not detect a flaw. ...
— When Knighthood Was in Flower • Charles Major
... it was upon the same footing on which the first physicians are usually summoned to the bedside of some dying man of rank;—the doctors to take the advantage of some incalculable chance of an exertion of nature—the lawyers to avail themselves of the barely possible occurrence of some legal flaw. Edward pressed into the court, which was extremely crowded; but by his arriving from the north, and his extreme eagerness and agitation, it was supposed he was a relation of the prisoners, and people made way for him. It was the third sitting of the court, and there were two ...
— Waverley • Sir Walter Scott
... by this time some distance out. The wind had carried him along finely, the boat scudding, as he expressed it. He was congratulating himself on the success of his trial trip, when all at once a flaw struck the boat. Not being a skillful boatman he was wholly unprepared for it, and ...
— Frank's Campaign - or the Farm and the Camp • Horatio Alger, Jr.
... pine-tree on McGregor's height, How didst thou grow to such a lofty bearing, For song of bird or beat of breeze uncaring, There where thy shadow touched the dying brow? Were all thy sinewy fibres shaped aright? Was there no flaw? With what mysterious daring Didst thou put forth each murmuring, odorous bough And trust it to the frail support of air? We only know that thou art now supreme: We know not how thou grewest so tall and fair. So from the unnoticed, humble earth arose The sturdy man whom we, bewailing, deem Worthy ...
— Dreams and Days: Poems • George Parsons Lathrop
... 'There wasn't any flaw in that evidence. Walen read out their last observations, and Mankeltow asked questions, and Lord Lundie sort o' summarised, and I looked at the photos in the album. 'J'ever see a bird's-eye telephoto-survey of England for military purposes? It's ...
— A Diversity of Creatures • Rudyard Kipling
... revolve these propositions through your mind very seriously. See if you can find a flaw in any of them; and conceive if you can, of any reasonable theory whereby any ...
— Love's Final Victory • Horatio
... till I grew weary of looking at them; still I learned to feel perfectly secure—a sensation I was at first very far from experiencing. Yet much, if not everything, depended on the soundness of our spars and rigging: a flaw in the wood or rope might be the cause of our destruction. I went below at meal-time, but I hurried again on deck, fascinated by the scene, though I would gladly have shut it out from my sight. At length, towards night, ...
— James Braithwaite, the Supercargo - The Story of his Adventures Ashore and Afloat • W.H.G. Kingston
... jestingly. "No one is perfect, and I least of all. If you expect perfection in this world you will be disappointed when you find the flaw." ...
— East of the Shadows • Mrs. Hubert Barclay
... was the conduct of Marcus Aurelius that neither the malignity of contemporaries nor the sprit of posthumous scandal has succeeded in discovering any flaw in the extreme integrity of his life and principles. But meanness will not be baulked of its victims. The hatred of all excellence which made Caligula try to put down the memory of great men rages, ...
— Seekers after God • Frederic William Farrar
... water-carrier day after day, when he had been engaged with his work for several hours, Velasquez found himself vexed by perceiving, as it were, the effect of a shadow cast by some of the drapery. Small flaw as it might have been, it appeared to him to interfere with and spoil the picture. Again and again, in endeavouring to do away with this 'shadow,' Velasquez undid portions of his work, and had to repeat them ...
— The Old Masters and Their Pictures - For the Use of Schools and Learners in Art • Sarah Tytler
... conscience; and the idea of any thing higher than that, seems preposterous. Besides, it looks almost like tempting heaven, to brush the very firmament so, and almost put the eyes of the stars out; when a flaw of wind, too, might very soon take the conceit out of ...
— Redburn. His First Voyage • Herman Melville
... changed dramatically in Virginia in the 1760's. This was partially due to changing economic conditions. Prosperity did not return as rapidly as expected. The long war probably masked a basic flaw in the Virginia economy which Virginians believed they had solved—they were too reliant on tobacco. The great Virginia fortunes of the mid-18th Century were built on extensive credit from Britain, the efficient operation of ...
— The Road to Independence: Virginia 1763-1783 • Virginia State Dept. of Education
... ghost it was, pass through unopened doors. The flaw in Trenholme's comfortable theory was that he had forgotten that the large double door, which opened from the baggage room to the railway track, was barred on the inside. When he got back to his place ...
— What Necessity Knows • Lily Dougall
... proved correct. After supper she dressed herself carefully in her blue, beaded crepe—for vanity is harder to quell than pride and Irene always saw any flaw or shortcoming in another girl's appearance. Besides, as Rilla had told her mother one day when she was nine years old, "It is easier to behave nicely when you ...
— Rilla of Ingleside • Lucy Maud Montgomery
... only way. She dare not give him time to question, to suspect; she must sweep him along to conviction. She was by no means sure that there wasn't a flaw in the scheme somewhere, something that would betray her; and she could hardly wait till it was over, till he ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker
... how anyone, however hypercritical, could find a flaw in Ted. His character was spotless. He was comfortably off. And so far from being in any way inferior socially, it was he who condescended. For Ted, she had discovered from conversation with Mr Murdoch, the glazier, was no ordinary ...
— The Man with Two Left Feet - and Other Stories • P. G. Wodehouse
... that such a youngling as this was looked upon by all as a lucky man without a lack; but there was this flaw in his lot, whereas he had fallen into the toils of love of a woman exceeding fair, and had taken her to wife, she nought unwilling as it seemed. But when they had been wedded some six months he found by manifest tokens, that his fairness was not so much to her but that she must seek to ...
— The Wood Beyond the World • William Morris
... major's hat was always of the glossiest, the major's coat was without a wrinkle, and, in short, from the summit of the major's bald head to his bulbous finger-tips and his gouty toes, there was not a flaw which the most severe critic of deportment—even the illustrious Turveydrop himself—could have detected. Let us add that the conversation of the major was as irreproachable as his person—that he was a distinguished soldier and an accomplished traveller, ...
— The Firm of Girdlestone • Arthur Conan Doyle
... Whatever beauty a thing has is by the way, not as the end for which it exists, and so it is left to be baffled and soiled by accident. This is the "jealousy of the gods," that could not endure that anything should exist without some flaw of imperfection to confess its ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 13, No. 76, February, 1864 • Various
... Church and the gorgeousness of her material fabric. The religious ideals taught him by his good mother took deep root. But the day arrived when the expansion of his intellect reached such a point as to enable him to detect a flaw in her reasoning. It was but a little rift, yet the sharp edge of doubt slipped in. Alas! from that hour he ceased to drift with the current of popular theological belief; his frail bark turned, and launched out upon the storm-tossed sea, where only ...
— Carmen Ariza • Charles Francis Stocking
... equations, Lancaster found what he believed was the flaw that was blocking progress. The man had used a simplified quantum mechanics without correction for relativistic effects. That made for neater mathematics but overlooked certain space-time aspects of the psi function. The error ...
— Security • Poul William Anderson
... hearers might have been excused for staring. It may be strange, but is not inconsistent, that a wolf which has eaten ninety-nine children should spare the hundredth. But the fact that a wolf has once spared a child is sufficient to show that there must be some flaw in the chain of reasoning purporting to prove that wolves cannot ...
— The Miscellaneous Writings and Speeches of Lord Macaulay, Vol. 2 (of 4) - Contributions To The Edinburgh Review • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... instead of being used as an appendage to the toilet, though humble, I fear they will be traced to the vulgar bricklayer and plasterer, to be mingled with mortar, and "patch a wall, to expel the winter's flaw." Now, I believe, every particle is accounted for; and any little article, in the shape of a bijou, is the perquisite of those pickers-up ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, Vol. 10, No. - 287, December 15, 1827 • Various
... lose no more time by awaiting new orders from Angers, and fearing the least flaw in her marriage, the Court was obliged to comply with my proposal, and the ...
— The Memoirs of Cardinal de Retz, Complete • Jean Francois Paul de Gondi, Cardinal de Retz
... clearly upon it. It was the head of a beautiful woman, framed in thick, silken yellow hair, the eyes deep blue, and the skin of the wonderful fairness so often found in that state. The face was that of a woman about thirty-seven or eight years of age, and without a wrinkle or flaw. ...
— The Guns of Shiloh • Joseph A. Altsheler
... The problem is to construct a design pleasant to the eye in line, form, colour, and suggestion; which will be interesting in detail, and yet repeat upon a wall-surface without flaw, and without becoming wearisome. Moreover, one which will lend itself to being cut upon wood, if for block-printing, and which may be reproduced with a due regard to economy of means. The designer may have a square of twenty-one inches ...
— Line and Form (1900) • Walter Crane
... always deceived in some particular. Therefore, while man is asleep, according as sense and imagination are free, so is the judgment of his intellect unfettered, though not entirely. Consequently, if a man syllogizes while asleep, when he wakes up he invariably recognizes a flaw ...
— Summa Theologica, Part I (Prima Pars) - From the Complete American Edition • Thomas Aquinas
... the two households became friendly, and very seldom did a week pass without their seeing something of each other. Try as she might, and dangerous as she assumed the acquaintanceship to be, Lady Mottisfont could detect no fault or flaw in her new friend. It was obvious that Dorothy had been the magnet which had drawn the Contessa ...
— A Group of Noble Dames • Thomas Hardy
... be excluded, without having a voice, from a participation of the natural rights of mankind, prove first, to ward off the charge of injustice and inconsistency, that they want reason, else this flaw in your NEW CONSTITUTION, the first constitution founded on reason, will ever show that man must, in some shape, act like a tyrant, and tyranny, in whatever part of society it rears its brazen front, will ...
— A Vindication of the Rights of Woman - Title: Vindication of the Rights of Women • Mary Wollstonecraft [Godwin]
... grief by just degrees: But like a hurricane on Indian seas, The tempest rose; An unexpected burst of woes; With scarce a breathing space betwixt— This now becalm'd, and perishing the next. As if great Atlas from his height Should sink beneath his heavenly weight, And with a mighty flaw, the flaming wall (At once it shall), Should gape immense, and rushing down, o'erwhelm this nether ball; So swift and so surprising was our fear: Our Atlas fell indeed, but ...
— The Poetical Works of John Dryden, Vol I - With Life, Critical Dissertation, and Explanatory Notes • John Dryden
... source. It was delightful to have her husband pleased by the smallest pains she took for his comfort; to know that his eye never failed to discover the little refinements of dress or cookery or household adornment; but wearing was the burden of understanding, too, that no flaw was too small to escape his sight. Mrs. Fenton's friends rallied her upon being a slave to her housekeeping; few of them were astute enough to understand that, kind as was always his manner toward her, she was instead ...
— The Philistines • Arlo Bates
... will to resist a hopeless love was broken down, but that only increased the strength of her determination to conceal the weakness from every eye, to continue the struggle of life as though there were no flaw in her armor, and to work indefatigably for the independence of thought and feeling and action which she valued above ...
— Name and Fame - A Novel • Adeline Sergeant
... he stood beside the helm, His pipe was in his mouth, And he watched how the veering flaw did blow The ...
— Poems Every Child Should Know - The What-Every-Child-Should-Know-Library • Various
... illustrate Valour; the Graal stories, Religion; the passion of Lancelot and Guinevere with the minor instances, Love. All these have their [Greek: amarthia]—their tragic and tragedy-causing fault and flaw. The knight wastes his valour in idle bickerings; he forgets law in his love; and though there is no actual degradation of religion, he fails to live up to the ideal that he does not actually forswear. To throw the presentation—the mimesis—of all this into perfectly ...
— The English Novel • George Saintsbury
... How easy it would be for her to love and forgive him if only he would give her one little sign by which to know that he himself was conscious of the blackness of that past! Repentance would show at least that there was no twist in his conscience, no flaw in his ethical constitution; it would set him right with the universe, if not with himself. For the moment there was nothing Nan so passionately desired as to hear him own himself in the wrong—not for any personal satisfaction so much as for his own sake; also that she might ...
— Name and Fame - A Novel • Adeline Sergeant
... without perfect physical religion. Every flaw and defect in the bodily system is just so much taken from the spiritual vitality: we are commanded to glorify God, not simply in our spirits, but in our bodies and spirits. The only example of perfect manhood the world ever ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 18, No. 105, July 1866 • Various
... this masterly little sketch. But he detected one fatal flaw: "You don't say what is ...
— Hard Cash • Charles Reade
... particularly good humour. He had one, whom I took to be a renegade Englishman, with him, to aid in the examination, though, as this man never spoke in my presence, I was unable precisely to ascertain who he was. The two had a long consultation in private, after the closest scrutiny could detect no flaw in the papers. Then Monsieur Gallois approached ...
— Miles Wallingford - Sequel to "Afloat and Ashore" • James Fenimore Cooper
... throw the cloak of religion over it, and invoke Heaven to set its seal on a massacre or a robbery. At one time dirt, at another indecency, at another rapine, at a fourth rancorous malignity, is decked out and accredited in the garb of sanctity. The instant there is a flaw, a 'damned spot' to be concealed, it is glossed over with a doubtful name. Again, we dress up our enemies in nicknames, and they march to the stake as assuredly as in san Benitos.... Strange, that a reptile should wish to be ...
— Hazlitt on English Literature - An Introduction to the Appreciation of Literature • Jacob Zeitlin
... my abominable, unpardonable dialect," deplored Rouquin, who spoke English without a flaw. "Millions of babes have I seen, but not one so wonderful as this one. It is a—ah—it is ...
— Mr. Bingle • George Barr McCutcheon
... Quetelet, in respect to evidence of curative processes, viz., that no one knows in disease what is the simple result of nothing being done, as a standard with which to compare homoeopathy, and all other such things. It is a sad flaw, I cannot but think, in my beloved Dr. Gully, that he believes in everything. When Miss — was very ill, he had a clairvoyant girl to report on internal changes, a mesmerist to put her to sleep—an homoeopathist, viz. Dr. —, and himself ...
— The Life and Letters of Charles Darwin, Volume I • Francis Darwin
... Wilford, pointing to the garment under the rail. "We had a flaw of wind just now, and it came pretty ...
— Haste and Waste • Oliver Optic
... From the establishment of order and of confidence sprang a prosperity which enabled her to obtain a certain revenue, though entirely inadequate to her expenditure. Thus we beheld her pressing solidly on, and we knew not where she might stop. Pretexts, such as it was difficult to find a flaw in, were never wanting on which to ground a fresh absorption of territory. And seeing behind this advance a vast country—almost a continent—which was not merely a great Asiatic Power, but a great European State, under autocratic, irresponsible rule, with ...
— Afghanistan and the Anglo-Russian Dispute • Theo. F. Rodenbough
... held a marvelous fascination for him, until now he was recognized as one of the world's greatest experts on these subjects. The great lock concerns often sent for him to test new inventions, and invariably he could point to any flaw in the constructions of them that existed. As he came to manhood his knowledge had grown apace until to many he seemed ...
— The Master Mystery • Arthur B. Reeve and John W. Grey
... eighteen months, both men had studied her character as manifested in the trying phases of prison existence, finding no flaw; to-day they looked up reverently at the graceful form in its homespun uniform, at the calm, colorless face, wearing its crown of meekness, with an inalienable, proud air of ...
— At the Mercy of Tiberius • August Evans Wilson
... hesitation. "The rubies were uncut and of various sizes, ranging perhaps from ten to eighty carats. They were true rubies, not spinels, remember that. The sapphires ran from fifteen carats to sixty, and there was not a flaw ...
— My Strangest Case • Guy Boothby
... do," the other said. "It's very seldom that you hear of a first-class gun exploding. I don't recall a case of one of ours for years and years. And even if by some chance flaw they did, the good ones, being nickel steel, would just make a hole in the barrel,—not fly to pieces. But, as a matter of fact, any barrel that has been through that 'proof-room' will have been subjected to the greatest strain it will ever have to undergo, for there is no cartridge made that ...
— The Boy With the U.S. Census • Francis Rolt-Wheeler
... time she became aware of the slight discrepancy in Ears, she suffered only a slight Annoyance. It handed her a tiny Pang to find a Flaw in a Piece of Work that ...
— Ade's Fables • George Ade
... any eye but that of a parent, made him watch her intently, while a new hope which made his heart beat more quickly sprang up within him. Christians had not shown up well that day; prosecuting and persecuting Christians are the most repulsive beings on earth! Did she begin to feel a flaw in the system she had professed belief in? Might she by this injustice come to realize that she had unconsciously cheated herself into a belief? If such things might win her back to him, might bridge over that miserable gulf ...
— We Two • Edna Lyall
... flatter us, as much as our own Hearts. They either do not see our Faults, or conceal them from us, or soften them by their Representations, after such a manner, that we think them too trivial to be taken notice of. An Adversary, on the contrary, makes a stricter Search into us, discovers every Flaw and Imperfection in our Tempers, and though his Malice may set them in too strong a Light, it has generally some Ground for what it advances. A Friend exaggerates a Man's Virtues, an Enemy inflames his Crimes. ...
— The Spectator, Volume 2. • Addison and Steele
... whole. Our great distances, and the impossibility of clearly imagining them have necessarily presented obstacles thus far to a unified image of country. The time may come, and perhaps soon, when such a divided consciousness of country will be a grave flaw ...
— The Psychology of Nations - A Contribution to the Philosophy of History • G.E. Partridge
... those watching anxiously from the deck of the trader were unable to discern her pursuer as she passed behind them. As soon as they were well assured that she must have gone on, the boats were got in, the sails hoisted again, and, taking advantage of every light flaw of wind, they proceeded on their course. In the morning the sails of the galley could be seen on the horizon, but the distance was too great for her to take up the pursuit again with any chance of success, and the trader continued her course ...
— A Knight of the White Cross • G.A. Henty
... lanthorn shoots above the crowd! Here, 'neath the lines, Hygeia's fount that shade, Smart booths allure the lounger on parade. Bohemia's glass, and Nevers' beaded wares, Millecour's fine lace, and Moulins' polish'd shears; And crates of painted wicker without flaw, And fine mesh'd products of Germania's straw, Books of dull trifling, misnamed "reading light," And foxy maps, and prints in damaged plight, Whilst up and down to rattling castanettes, The active ...
— Blackwoods Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 59, No. 365, March, 1846 • Various
... which, had it been published and explained in Locke's lifetime, would have tainted his whole philosophy with suspicion. It relates to the Aristotelian doctrine of syllogism, which Locke undertook to ridicule. Now, a flaw, a hideous flaw, in the soi-disant detecter of flaws, a ridicule in the exposer of the ridiculous—that is fatal; and I am surprised that Lee, who wrote a folio against Locke in his lifetime, and other examiners, should have failed in detecting this. I shall ...
— Memorials and Other Papers • Thomas de Quincey
... I, 'I am no very perfect craftsman. This is supposed to be a house, and you see the chimneys are awry. You may call this a box if you are very indulgent; but see where my tool slipped! Yes, I am afraid you may go from one to another, and find a flaw in everything. Failures for Sale should be on my signboard. I do not keep a shop; I keep a Humorous Museum.' I cast a smiling glance about my display, and then at her, and instantly became grave. 'Strange, is it not,' I added, 'that ...
— St Ives • Robert Louis Stevenson
... thought himself so much wiser than his parents,—a man who had gained honours at the University,—a man of the gravest temperament,—a man of so nicely critical a turn of mind that there was not a law of art or nature in which he did not detect a flaw; that he should get himself into this mess was, to say the least ...
— Kenelm Chillingly, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... it in a hurry yesterday; to-day I saw it again and read it carefully. There is no flaw in it; it is a will that must stand, that cannot be disputed. Charlotte, you were right in your forebodings. Niece Charlotte, you and your mother, before you, were basely robbed, cruelly wronged; your dead father was just and upright; your living brothers are villains; ...
— How It All Came Round • L. T. Meade
... at a turn and stopped to examine it. An indignant worker told him brusquely he needn't try to pick holes in their roads because there weren't any, and Christopher returned meekly he thought they looked good, but fancied the mark he examined was a flaw. ...
— Christopher Hibbault, Roadmaker • Marguerite Bryant
... cannot do that. It was I who asked him to marry me." The girl lied tremulously, panic-stricken at the threat. "Before God, I am his wife!" she maintained. "And if this marriage has a flaw, then I will stand beside the prison gates and remarry ...
— The Ne'er-Do-Well • Rex Beach
... knots an hour, though the ship was as stiff as a madman in a strait-jacket, with the compressed wool in her hold and loaded down to her main-chain bolts besides. By two bells (one o'clock) forward of the break of the poop the decks were deserted, though now and again, amidst some swiftly passing flaw in the storm of snow, you might just discern the gleaming shapes of two men on the look-out on the forecastle, with the glimpse of a figure in the foretop, also on the watch for anything that might be ahead. The captain in his tall hat was stumping the deck to and fro close against the wheel, cased ...
— The Honour of the Flag • W. Clark Russell
... an easy-chair. He felt like a man who has built a mighty piece of machinery, has set it swinging through space, and watches now its imminent collapse; watches some tiny but ghastly flaw, pregnant with disaster, growing wider ...
— The Pawns Count • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... One flaw there was in the picture, and that is where the first experiment in wheedling came in. A large telegraph pole on our property line bisected the horizon like one of the parallels on a map. It seemed to us at times to assume the proportions of the Washington Monument. I ...
— The Smiling Hill-Top - And Other California Sketches • Julia M. Sloane
... now insisted that Frederick should begin his masterpiece. He had himself sought out the finest, purest oak wood, without the least vein or flaw, which had been over five years in his wood-store, and nobody was to help Frederick except old Valentine. Not only was Frederick put more and more out of taste with his work by the rough journeymen, but he felt a tightness in his throat ...
— Weird Tales, Vol. II. • E. T. A. Hoffmann
... for pilgrim feet, Those stern, impassioned stress A thoroughfare for freedom beat Across the wilderness! America! America! God mend thine every flaw, Confirm thy soul in self-control, Thy ...
— ANTHOLOGY OF MASSACHUSETTS POETS • WILLIAM STANLEY BRAITHWAITE
... produced Like change on sea and land; sideral blast, Vapour, and mist, and exhalation hot, Corrupt and pestilent: Now from the north Of Norumbega, and the Samoed shore, Bursting their brazen dungeon, armed with ice, And snow, and hail, and stormy gust and flaw, Boreas, and Caecias, and Argestes loud, And Thrascias, rend the woods, and seas upturn; With adverse blast upturns them from the south Notus, and Afer black with thunderous clouds From Serraliona; thwart of these, as fierce, Forth rush the Levant and the Ponent winds, Eurus and Zephyr, with ...
— Paradise Lost • John Milton
... most unexpectedly evicted, stood disconsolately on the porch of the Half Way House, peering out into the storm. The character of it had changed somewhat, the rain driving fiercely now and then, with an occasional quick flaw of wind, instead of falling monotonously. And now there came a few rumblings of thunder, with faint flashes of lightning low ...
— The Rival Campers Ashore - The Mystery of the Mill • Ruel Perley Smith
... overtook the merchantmen sufficiently to send a shot skipping along the crests of the waves, as a polite Invitation to stop. The two vessels hove to, and a boat was sent from the man-of-war to examine their papers, and see if all was right. Though no flaw was found in the papers of either vessel, Capt. Reid determined to take them back to Newport, which was done. In the harbor the two vessels were brought to anchor under the guns of the armed sloop, and without any reason ...
— The Naval History of the United States - Volume 1 (of 2) • Willis J. Abbot
... customs, and in its military equipment. A long epic can only present an unity of historical ideas if it be the work of one age. Wandering minstrels, living through a succession of incompatible ages, civic, commercial, democratic, could not preserve, without flaw or failure, the attitude, in the first place, of the poet of feudal princes towards an Over-Lord who rules them by undisputed right divine, but rules weakly, violently, unjustly, being subject to gusts of arrogance, and avarice, and repentance. Late poets not living in feudal ...
— Homer and His Age • Andrew Lang
... a little sigh of relief. After all, what he had feared was not coming. He saw the flaw, he felt even now the revulsion of feeling with which her words had inspired him. Yet the other things remained. She was still wonderful. It was still she who was the presiding genius of that ...
— The Double Life Of Mr. Alfred Burton • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... Fund which is running low, threatening to be at the lees if such drain on it continue. To fight with effect being the one sure hope, and salve for all sores, it is not in the Army, in the Fortresses, the Fighting Equipments, that there shall be any flaw left! Friedrich's budget is a sore problem upon him; needing endless shift and ingenuity, now and onwards, through this war:—already, during these months, in the Berlin Schloss, a great deal of ...
— History of Friedrich II. of Prussia, Vol. XV. (of XXI.) • Thomas Carlyle
... sequence.] Discontinuity — N. discontinuity; disjunction &c 44; anacoluthon^; interruption, break, fracture, flaw, fault, crack, cut; gap &c (interval) 198; solution of continuity, caesura; broken thread; parenthesis, episode, rhapsody, patchwork; intermission; alternation &c (periodicity) 138; dropping fire. V. be discontinuous &c adj.; alternate, intermit, sputter, stop and start, hesitate. ...
— Roget's Thesaurus of English Words and Phrases: Body • Roget
... of frame. True, he was long of the leg, among a people who, having to climb and descend hills constantly, are, in the providence of fitness, short-legged, but he was all of a part. The kilt tests a man's figure, bringing out any flaw in it, and the Black Colonel's stood the ...
— The Black Colonel • James Milne
... the room. Evelina's cheeks were pink, and her blue eyes glittered; but it seemed to Ann Eliza that the coquettish tilt of her head regrettably emphasized the weakness of her receding chin. It was the first time that Ann Eliza had ever seen a flaw in her sister's beauty, and her involuntary criticism startled her like a ...
— Bunner Sisters • Edith Wharton
... again, To sentence Letters, as he sentenced men. With hand less mighty, but with heart as black, With voice as willing to decree the rack; Bred in the Courts betimes, though all that law As yet hath taught him is to find a flaw,— Since well instructed in the patriot school To rail at party, though a party tool— Who knows? if chance his patrons should restore 450 Back to the sway they forfeited before, His scribbling toils some recompense may meet, And raise this Daniel to ...
— Byron's Poetical Works, Vol. 1 • Byron
... embezzlement, or robbery, not alone in the State, but elsewhere in any direction,—in the department, in the commune, in the Church, or in educational and benevolent institutions. It excels in practicing distributive justice. The second defect is its hidden flaw: the legislator having introduced this into all local and special statutes, its effects differ according to different societies; but all these effects converge, paralyzing in the nation the best half of the soul, and, worse still, to leading the will astray and perverting the public ...
— The Origins of Contemporary France, Volume 5 (of 6) - The Modern Regime, Volume 1 (of 2)(Napoleon I.) • Hippolyte A. Taine
... retorted Raffles Holmes. "My father was too fond of my mother to permit of any flaw in his title. A year later I was born, and— well, here I am—son of one, grandson of the other, with hereditary traits from both strongly developed and ready for business. I want a literary partner—a man who will write me up as Bunny did Raffles, and Watson did Holmes, so that I may ...
— R. Holmes & Co. • John Kendrick Bangs
... was dressed in a white lace dress, with a white crepe bonnet with a wreath of white roses round it. I went in the chariot with my dear Mamma and the others followed in another carriage." One seems to hold in one's hand a small smooth crystal pebble, without a flaw and without a scintillation, and so transparent that one can see through ...
— Queen Victoria • Lytton Strachey
... senses told him there was nothing amiss, yet he had had a proof, and yet, as he peered most earnestly, there was, it seemed, something strange and not altogether usual in the expression of the eyes. Perhaps it might be the unsteady flare of the gas, or perhaps a flaw in the cheap looking-glass, that gave some slight distortion to the image. He walked briskly up and down the room and tried to gaze steadily, indifferently, into his own face. He would not allow himself to be misguided by a word. When ...
— The Hill of Dreams • Arthur Machen
... amongst the three thousand attendants much benefit is derived; some come from twenty to twenty-five miles. The men flaunt about in gaudy-coloured lambas of many folded kilts—the women work hardest—the potters slap and ring their earthenware all round, to show that there is not a single flaw in them. I bought two finely shaped earthen bottles of porous earthenware, to hold a gallon each, for one string of beads, the women carry huge loads of them in their funnels above the baskets, strapped to the shoulders and ...
— The Last Journals of David Livingstone, in Central Africa, from 1865 to His Death, Volume II (of 2), 1869-1873 • David Livingstone
... Majesty's reception of these poor people could not but be good; nothing now wanting in the formal kind. But better far, in all the essentialities of it, there had not been hitherto, nor was henceforth, the least flaw. This Salzburg Pilgrimage has found for itself, and will find, regulation, guidance, ever a stepping-stone at the needful place; a paved road, so far as human regularity and punctuality could pave one. That is his Majesty's shining merit. "Next Sunday, after sermon, they [this first lot ...
— History of Friedrich II. of Prussia, Vol. IX. (of XXI.) • Thomas Carlyle
... marry by their parents from their earliest years, they adored each other and were married, and their union gave to the sixteenth century the noble spectacle of a perfect conjugal love without a flaw. When the marchesa became a widow at the age of thirty-four, beautiful, intellectually brilliant, universally adored, she refused to marry sovereigns and buried herself in a convent, seeing and knowing thenceforth only nuns. Such was the perfect love that suddenly developed itself in ...
— Pierrette • Honore de Balzac
... intangible, the unique relation between her and Rodney. It was proof against anything that anybody could think. And the Powells were not given to thinking things. Agatha's own mind had been a crystal without a flaw, ...
— The Flaw in the Crystal • May Sinclair
... boon to secure gratis the assistance of men specially trained as clerks, book-keepers or handicraftsmen. Hence all manner of intrigues and manoeuvres were afoot on the arrival of drafts and there was a scramble for the best hands. Here at once was a palpable flaw in the system of assignment. The lot of the convict was altogether unequal. Some, the dull, unlettered and unskilled, were drafted up country to heavy manual labour at which they remained, while clever expert rogues found ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 8, Slice 2 - "Demijohn" to "Destructor" • Various
... alive to the crisis in our national affairs, foresaw that our people, with their idealism fired by thought of increased freedom for the oppressed subjects of autocratic governments, might be aroused to new consciousness of the flaw in our own democracy. With this thought in mind, on the eve of the opening of the extraordinary session, she sent out a summons to the suffragists of the whole country to unite in a stupendous appeal to Congress for the immediate submission of the ...
— The History of Woman Suffrage, Volume V • Ida Husted Harper
... "The only flaw in that theory," I said, "is that the people who still have this most precious possession don't want to keep it in the least. Nobody ever heard of the Irish-speaking peasants taking the smallest interest in their language. The ...
— Gossamer - 1915 • George A. Birmingham
... disturbed, puzzled—made Mildred understand why she had been so reluctant to confess. Jennings did not pursue the subject, but abruptly began the lesson. That day and several days thereafter he put her to tests he had never used before. She saw that he was searching for something—for the flaw implied in the adverse verdict of the son of Lucia Rivi. She was enormously relieved when he gave over the search without having found the flaw. She felt that Donald Keith's verdict had been proved false or at least faulty. Yet she was not wholly reassured, and from time ...
— The Price She Paid • David Graham Phillips
... Gauwaine, held his word without a flaw, This Mellyagraunce saw blood upon my bed: Whose blood then pray you? ...
— The Defence of Guenevere and Other Poems • William Morris
... called every morning for letters. If anybody rang me up on the telephone, the admirable man answered in the capacity of my servant, took a message, and relayed it on to me at my boarding-house. If anybody called, he merely said that I was out. There wasn't a flaw in the whole scheme, my dear, and its chief merit was ...
— The Little Warrior - (U.K. Title: Jill the Reckless) • P. G. Wodehouse
... ground together, and the windlass was out of commission. Following upon that, the seventy-horse-power engine went out of commission. This engine came from New York; so did its bed-plate; there was a flaw in the bed-plate; there were a lot of flaws in the bed-plate; and the seventy-horse-power engine broke away from its shattered foundations, reared up in the air, smashed all connections and fastenings, and fell over on its side. And the Snark continued to stick between ...
— The Cruise of the Snark • Jack London
... conversation was resumed after Mr. Singleton had been requested to speak a little louder—there seemed some flaw in the connection. ...
— The Treasure Trail - A Romance of the Land of Gold and Sunshine • Marah Ellis Ryan
... had several results. It postponed the wedding: it stirred me to a very crescendo of patronage, for with the removal of the bread-winner the only flaw in my Cophetua pose had vanished: and it gave Audrey a great deal more scope than she had hitherto been granted for the exercise of free will in the ...
— The Little Nugget • P.G. Wodehouse
... he gained considerable sums by buying, at inferior prices, such as had flaws in them, and afterwards disposing of them at a profit of cent. per cent. Madame du Hausset relates the following anecdote on this particular:— "The King," says she, "ordered a middling-sized diamond, which had a flaw in it, to be brought to him. After having it weighed, his Majesty said to the Count, 'The value of this diamond, as it is, and with the flaw in it, is six thousand livres; without the flaw, it would be worth, at least, ten thousand. Will you undertake to make me ...
— Memoirs of Extraordinary Popular Delusions - Vol. I • Charles Mackay
... in Africa was so called, as well as that in Italy. (3) Meaning that her husband gave her this commission in order to prevent her from committing suicide. (4) See Book VIII., line 547. (5) See line 709. (6) This passage is described by Lord Macaulay as "a pure gem of rhetoric without one flaw, and, in my opinion, not very far from historical truth" (Trevelyan's "Life and Letters", vol. i., page 462.) (7) "... Clarum et venembile nomen Gentibus, et multum nostrae quod profuit urbi," quoted by Mr. Burke, and applied to Lord Chatham, in his Speech ...
— Pharsalia; Dramatic Episodes of the Civil Wars • Lucan
... possession. (I take for granted, of course, that as you go and come you are, in imagination, perpetually lodging yourself and setting up your gods; for if this innocent pastime, this borrowing of the mind, be not your favourite sport there is a flaw in the appeal that Venice makes to you.) There may be happy cases in which your envy is tempered, or perhaps I should rather say intensified, by real participation. If you have had the good fortune to enjoy the hospitality of an old Venetian home and to lead your ...
— Italian Hours • Henry James
... all know that stage solicitors are more outrageous villains than even their originals. Mr. Gammon is, of course, a "fine speciment of the specious," as Mr. Hood's Mr. Higgings says. It is he who, finding out a flaw in Aubrey's title, angled per advertisement for the heir, and caught a Tittlebat—Titmouse. It is he who has so disinterestedly made that gentleman's fortune.—"Only just merely for the sake of the costs?" one naturally asks. Oh no; there is a stronger reason (with which, ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Volume 1, Complete • Various
... lightning conductor should not have a higher electrical resistance than 10 ohms from the point to the ground, including the "earth" contact. Exceptionally good conductors have only about 5 ohms. A high resistance in the rod is due either to a flaw in the conductor or a bad earth connection, and in such a case the rod may be a source of danger instead of security, since the discharge is apt to find its way through some part of the building to the ground, rather than entirely by the rod. It is, therefore, important to test lightning conductors ...
— The Story Of Electricity • John Munro
... colonel," said Jimmie Dale softly, "that Thorold couldn't come, that old Jake found one of the diamonds cloudy and with a flaw, and that the deal fell through—and it means, colonel, that you will never be called upon to steal Mrs. Milford's diamonds again; there is ...
— The Further Adventures of Jimmie Dale • Frank L. Packard
... Catholicism taught its partizans to cherish very different feelings, for they were instructed to believe that the gospel itself was without efficacy when promulgated by a minister who did not belong to their own party. They could not challenge a single flaw in the creed of Novatian, [649:3] and yet they strongly maintained that his preaching was useless, and that the baptism he dispensed was worthless as the ablution of a heathen. "You should know," says Cyprian, ...
— The Ancient Church - Its History, Doctrine, Worship, and Constitution • W.D. [William Dool] Killen
... him all criticism was "rudeness": he never heeded it, for he never needed it: he was never wrong. All his life he had ordered little human beings about, and now he was equally magisterial to big ones: Stephen was a fifth-form lout whom, owing to some flaw in the regulations, he could not send up to the ...
— The Longest Journey • E. M. Forster
... whom she eventually marries seems unfortunately to have a bit of a flaw in his granite character; at any rate, something is wrong with him, as the heroine fails to hold him altogether, and matters even begin to look as though she might lose him. But with her great happiness had come a new standard of honour, and ...
— Walking-Stick Papers • Robert Cortes Holliday
... case. His complaints were bitter; and, in a tranquil observer, might have produced the united feeling of pity for his sufferings, and horror at his depravity. He recollected all the precautions he had used; he could scarcely find a flaw in the process; and he cursed that blind and malicious power which delighted to cross his most deep-laid schemes. "Of this malice he was beyond all other human beings the object. He was mocked with the shadow of power; and when he lifted ...
— Caleb Williams - Things As They Are • William Godwin
... preternatural clearness. I seemed suddenly to become possessed of a new sense. The other self, bygone experiences, Instinct, or Guardian Angel,—call it what you will,—came forward and assumed control. Then my trembling muscles became firm again, every rift and flaw in the rock was seen as through a microscope, and my limbs moved with a positiveness and precision with which I seemed to have nothing at all to do. Had I been borne aloft upon wings, my deliverance could not have been ...
— The Mountains of California • John Muir
... them through her palace and showed them all the treasures that were hers, envy grew in their hearts and choked their old love. Even while they sat at feast with her, they grew more and more bitter; and hoping to find some little flaw in her good fortune, they ...
— Good Stories For Great Holidays - Arranged for Story-Telling and Reading Aloud and for the - Children's Own Reading • Frances Jenkins Olcott
... know that your generosity can be supreme—without a flaw. Love at its highest should be the origin of ...
— Tales Of Hearsay • Joseph Conrad
... alteration in our present system, let us for a moment survey the existing condition of affairs. I, myself, to begin with, I and my ancestors, for many generations, have held undisputed possession of this pollard. Not the slightest flaw has ever been discovered in our title-deeds; and no claimant has ever arisen. The rook has had, I believe, once or twice some little difficulty respecting his own particular tenancy, which is not a freehold; but his townsmen, as ...
— Wood Magic - A Fable • Richard Jefferies
... would yield to the potent fascination of this woman. As Sylvia looked, her feminine eye took in every gift of face and figure, every grace of attitude or gesture, every daintiness of costume, and found no visible flaw in Ottila, from her haughty head to her handsome foot. Yet when her scrutiny ended, the girl felt a sense of disappointment, and no envy mingled ...
— Moods • Louisa May Alcott
... security system. Shortly after taking office I proposed and Congress enacted legislation to protect the stability of the old age and survivors trust fund and prevent the imminent exhaustion of the disability insurance trust fund, and to correct a flaw in the benefit formula that was threatening the long run health of the entire social security system. The actions taken by the Congress at my request helped stabilize the system. That legislation was later complemented by the Disability Insurance Amendments ...
— State of the Union Addresses of Jimmy Carter • Jimmy Carter
... idea, and start out bravely to follow it; but if he finds it leading him into a position contrary to the experience of humanity, then he pulls up, and decides that the idea must be false, even if he can detect no flaw in it; not so the Russian; the idea is right, ...
— Essays on Russian Novelists • William Lyon Phelps
... merciful to him, and let him alone, for if he be once driven from his humour, he is like two inward friends fallen out: his own bitter enemy and discontent presently makes a murder. In sum, he is a bladder blown up with wind, which the least flaw ...
— Microcosmography - or, a Piece of the World Discovered; in Essays and Characters • John Earle
... abstract of title, which is a paper showing the title as it appears on the records, and this title when not vouched for as perfect by an abstract title company, should be passed upon by a lawyer in order that any flaw or defect therein may be made right before the deed is passed from one owner to another. In some states, however, the law does not require the owner to furnish an abstract. When the title is proved or pronounced good, the deed should at once be ...
— Boy Scouts Handbook - The First Edition, 1911 • Boy Scouts of America
... talk into the channels of this delicate subject. But he as sedulously confined it to trivial matter whenever she approached him in this mood, fencing himself about with a wall of cold reserve that was not lightly to be overthrown. In this his conscience was at work. Cynthia was the flaw in the satisfaction he might have drawn from the contemplation of the vengeance he was there to wreak. He beheld her so pure, so sweet and fresh, that he marvelled how she came to be the daughter of Gregory Ashburn. His heart smote him at the thought of how she—the innocent—must suffer ...
— The Tavern Knight • Rafael Sabatini
... largest diamonds in the world. The question of accurately valuing it presented some serious difficulties. Its size made it a phenomenon in the diamond market; its colour placed it in a category by itself; and, to add to these elements of uncertainty, there was a defect, in the shape of a flaw, in the very heart of the stone. Even with this last serious draw-back, however, the lowest of the various estimates given was twenty thousand pounds. Conceive my father's astonishment! He had been within a hair's-breadth of refusing to act ...
— The Moonstone • Wilkie Collins
... narrowing eyelids, his voice rang changes upon chords of most exquisite tenderness; his whole manner was charged with a courtly reverence mingled with the subtlest hint of passion. Rupert as a lover had not a flaw in him. ...
— The Light of Scarthey • Egerton Castle
... action to the word, she put the helm up just as a flaw of wind came sweeping over the waves. The boat came round; the three sails, caught by the flaw, suddenly flew over, filled on the other side, and the Greyhound careened till she ...
— Hope and Have - or, Fanny Grant Among the Indians, A Story for Young People • Oliver Optic
... persuing and reperusing the verdict, counting the letters in each juror's name, and weighing every phrase, nay, every syllable, in the nicest scales of legal criticism. But the clerk of the jury had understood his business too well. No flaw was to be found, and Fairbrother mournfully intimated, that he had nothing to say in ...
— The Heart of Mid-Lothian, Complete, Illustrated • Sir Walter Scott
... but the rarest of virtues dwelt there? Rare virtues she had, but in commonplace ones Which make happy husbands and home loving sons She was utterly lacking. Ruth Somerville saw In sorrow and silence this blemishing flaw In the friend whom she loved with devotion! Maurice Saw only the angel with eyes full of peace. The faults of plain women are easily seen. But who cares to peer back of beauty's fair screen For things which are ugly to ...
— Three Women • Ella Wheeler Wilcox
... had his time come as nigh as that of Crasweller, he too, like Crasweller, would impotently implore the grace of another year. He would ape madness like Barnes, or arm himself with a carving-knife like Tallowax, or swear that there was a flaw in the law, as Exors was disposed to do. He too would clamorously swear that he was much younger, as did the old women. Was not the world peopled by Craswellers, Tallowaxes, Exorses, and old women? Had I a right to hope to alter the ...
— The Fixed Period • Anthony Trollope
... give. Just the things that I play to myself when I'm weary of listening to humanity tell of its ills and aches—the egotist! Then I look down into the beautifully clean inside of my fiddle, its good old mechanism without a flaw, and listen to the things it has to tell.... Thank you, just the same, Miss Maude; this is not a theme worthy of your brilliant rendition, but, as I said, a simple, old-fashioned playing of the fiddle. I'll supply the old-fashioned ...
— The Madigans • Miriam Michelson
... parade. A whole brigade swings into line and must prove that it can move as one man, as a perfect machine, without flaw or friction. One master mind directs every motion, and at the word of command thousands of feet are moving in exact time, wheeling, marching, maneuvering with a precision that proves the long months of patient practice. ...
— With Our Soldiers in France • Sherwood Eddy
... shape; it persists in this plan, and completes it. Here is a perfect crystal of quartz for you. It is of an unusual form, and one which it might seem very difficult to build—a pyramid with convex sides, composed of other minor pyramids. But there is not a flaw in its contour throughout; not one of its myriads of component sides but is as bright as a jeweler's faceted work (and far finer, if you saw it close). The crystal points are as sharp as javelins; their ...
— The Ethics of the Dust • John Ruskin
... settlement, wondering meanwhile what could possibly be the explanation of certain whiffs of a singularly vile and offensive odour which now and then assailed his nostrils when there occurred an occasional flaw in the trade-wind which was sweeping briskly over the island. He might, of course, have asked, but the thought occurred to him that by doing so he might perhaps be betraying his ignorance, and so lay himself open to the chance of being misled upon a matter that might very well be of importance. ...
— The Cruise of the Nonsuch Buccaneer • Harry Collingwood
... provided and so dimly inspired. Here was suspense indeed for a last "curtain" but one; and my fancy glows, all expertly, for the disclosure of the final scene, than which nothing could well have been happier, on all the premises, save for a single flaw: the installation in Forty-fourth Street of our admirable aunt, often, through the later years, domiciled there, but now settled to community of life with a touching charge and representing near him his extinguished, their extinguished, ...
— A Small Boy and Others • Henry James
... he admitted; but be contended there was a flaw in the argument; for that it was impossible to accept any religion on merely prudential grounds. And he then went on, in his curious way, to lament that an unreasonable candor prevented him from here taking advantage of an ingenious argument adopted ...
— The Eclipse of Faith - Or, A Visit To A Religious Sceptic • Henry Rogers
... capable of resenting the loss of a husband who is no longer hers. Rumour, of course, nothing more; yet the fact remained that Corinna, who liked all the world, hated Rose Stribling. It was the one flaw in Corinna's perfection; it was the black patch on the stainless cheek, which had always made her adorable to Stephen. Like the snow-white lock waving back from her forehead, it intensified the youth in her ...
— One Man in His Time • Ellen Glasgow
... and after her father's disappearance—for his body had never been found—she had been received into the governor's house out of pity and charity—she, a Melchite! The interpreter had little to say in her favor, by reason of her sect; and though he could find no flaw in her beauty, he insisted on it that she was proud and ungracious, and incapable of winning any man's love; only the child, little Mary—she, to be sure, was very fond of her. It was no secret that even her uncle's wife, worthy Neforis, did not care for her haughty niece and ...
— Uarda • Georg Ebers
... is most ingenious. But there is in this plan one flaw which no one has noted. I suppose that you, Maternus, evolved this really promising idea from pondering on what Claudius told us. All the hearsay about Rome and its festivals which ever came to the ears of all of us put together is as nothing at all compared with what Claudius told us ...
— Andivius Hedulio • Edward Lucas White
... make without question have been frankly repudiated by men quite as clever as he, and, perhaps, more critical. It opens the eyes to see that his standards of worth have been weighed by others and have been found wanting. It may well incline him to reexamine reasonings in which he has detected no flaw, when he finds that acute minds have tried them before, and ...
— An Introduction to Philosophy • George Stuart Fullerton
... recesses of the mental and physical being of the listener, while his own expression of perfect temperance had in it a fascinating power—the merely negative element of purity, the mere freedom from taint or flaw, in exercise [34] as a positive influence. Long afterwards, when Marius read the Charmides—that other dialogue of Plato, into which he seems to have expressed the very genius of old Greek temperance—the image of this speaker came back vividly before him, to take the ...
— Marius the Epicurean, Volume One • Walter Horatio Pater
... of his northern language and accent. "That horrible instrument, the boot, was brought this very morning to my smiddy for repair. They had been so hard on some poor wretch, I suppose, that they broke part of it, but I put a flaw into its heart that will force them to be either less cruel or to come to me again ...
— Hunted and Harried • R.M. Ballantyne
... Ingate, a natural phenomenon, like the lie of the land and the river Moze. Her opinions offended nobody, not Mr. Moze himself—she was Miss Ingate. She was laughed at, beloved and respected. Her sagacity had one flaw, and the flaw sprang from her sincere conviction that human nature in that corner of Essex, which she understood so profoundly, and where she was so perfectly at home, was different from, and more fondly foolish than, ...
— The Lion's Share • E. Arnold Bennett
... greatly puzzled Marston; it gave him even a vague sense of uneasiness. Could there exist any flaw in his own title to the estate of Gray Forest? He had an unpleasant, doubtful sort of remembrance of some apprehensions of this kind, when he was but a child, having been whispered in the family. Could this really be so, and could ...
— The Evil Guest • J. Sheridan Le Fanu
... We have laid down above the received doctrine with regard to opposition: but it is necessary to point out a flaw ...
— Deductive Logic • St. George Stock
... rant and ring fiercer than old Queen Elizabeth ever could do herself. Queen Mary's part was done by a bonny genty young lady, that was said to have run away from a boarding-school, and, by all accounts, she acted wonderful well. But she too was not altogether without a flaw, so that there was a division in the town between their admirers and visiters; some maintaining, as I was told, that Mrs Beaufort, if she would keep herself sober, was not only a finer woman, but more of a lady, and a better actress, ...
— The Provost • John Galt
... always sprang afresh in the success of each new venture. Many of the vessels could scarcely be said to be launched at all; they sank like lead, close to the shore. Others floated out for a time, and then, struck by a flaw in the wind, heeled over and disappeared. Some, not well put together, broke into fragments in the bufleting of the waves. Others danced on the flood, taking the sun on their sails, and went away with good promise of a long ...
— Baddeck and That Sort of Thing • Charles Dudley Warner
... That e'er deserved a watchful spirit's care; Some dire disaster, or by force or slight; But what, or where, the fates have wrapt in night. Whether the nymph shall break Diana's law, Or some frail china jar receive a flaw; Or stain her honour or her new brocade; Forget her prayers, or miss a masquerade; Or lose her heart, or necklace, at a ball; Or whether Heaven has doomed that Shock must fall, Haste, then, ye spirits! to your charge repair: ...
— Playful Poems • Henry Morley
... another lady. Send him away by himself this time; and let him feel the want of some kind creature to look after him. And when he meets with that kind creature (they are as plenty as fish in the sea), never trouble your head about it if there's a flaw in her character. I have got a cracked tea-cup which has served me for twenty years. Marry him, ma'am, to the new one with the utmost speed and impetuosity which the law will permit.' I hate Mr. MacGlue's opinions—so coarse and so hard-hearted!—but I sadly fear that ...
— The Two Destinies • Wilkie Collins
... which they had driven the jury. He was therefore reprieved, and committed to the Tower, where his wife was allowed to bear him company, and where his youngest son was born. His estates were, in general, preserved to him, but Carr, the infamous minion of the King, under some pretext of a flaw in the conveyance of it by Raleigh to his son, seized upon his manor of Sherborne. In the Tower he continued for twelve years. These years his industry and genius rendered the happiest probably of his life. ...
— Specimens with Memoirs of the Less-known British Poets, Complete • George Gilfillan
... conspicuously engraved upon its face—and the youthful society of his school-town was at his feet. Every door was open. So almost without fault was he that few mothers objected to his companionship with their daughters. Yes, here was to be the flaw!—he was soon to find that it was easy for him to have his way with a maid, a dangerous knowledge for a seventeen-year- old boy who had already reached higher social levels than his own home had known, who was much quicker of wit ...
— Our Nervous Friends - Illustrating the Mastery of Nervousness • Robert S. Carroll
... of the purchase and boundaries. People have not the courage to do so nowadays, but more cunning, knavery, and written parchment, wide as a cromlech, is necessary to bind the bargain, and for all that it would be strange if no flaw existed or were contrived therein." "Well, well," said Taliesin, "I would not be worth a straw there, I may as well be here; truth will never be found where there are many bards, nor justice where many lawyers, until health be found where there be ...
— The Visions of the Sleeping Bard • Ellis Wynne
... too faithful record. But his claims for his hero—amounting to the assertions that he was never seriously wrong; that he was as good as he was great; that "in the weightier matters of the law his life had been without speck or flaw"; that "such faults as he had were but as the vapours which hang about a mountain, inseparable from the nature of the man"; that he never, in their intercourse, uttered a "trivial word, nor one which he had better have left unuttered"—these claims ...
— Thomas Carlyle - Biography • John Nichol
... bow, trying it, whether it had taken any hurt, but the suitors thought scorn of him. Then, when he had found it to be without flaw, just as a minstrel fastens a string upon his harp and strains it to the pitch, so he strung the bow without toil; and holding the string in his right hand, he tried its tone, and the tone was sweet as the voice of a swallow. ...
— The Story Of The Odyssey • The Rev. Alfred J. Church
... the guileless frankness which, from first to last, characterises her whole relations to Ladislaw. If there is one flaw in this noble work, it is that Ladislaw on first examination is scarcely equal to this exquisite creation. Yet it might have been nearly as difficult even for George Eliot to satisfy our instinctive cravings in this particular with regard to ...
— The Ethics of George Eliot's Works • John Crombie Brown
... go down, then stepped aside to let his visitor precede him, at the same time glancing seaward to where the dark flaw of wind was ...
— A Son Of The Sun • Jack London
... must not leave you so, my young gallant; we three are sick in state, and your wealth must help to make us whole again. For this saying is as true as old— Strife nurs'd 'twixt man and wife makes such a flaw, How great soe'er their ...
— A Select Collection of Old English Plays, Vol. IX • Various
... misplaced, and merely faint suggestions of what might have been. Much of this is doubtless beyond mortal control, but a far greater portion is due to the lack of a nice direction of forces. The human mechanism is complicated, and a very slight flaw sets it all wrong. There may be too much steam or too much friction, or too little power or too little balance. But clearly the first step is to strengthen the weak points, to gauge its capabilities, to ...
— Sword and Pen - Ventures and Adventures of Willard Glazier • John Algernon Owens
... principles which he himself holds sacred, although I may be permitted to express my regret that he has not done so in a spirit more worthy of the cause which he defends. In spite of hostile criticism of very unusual minuteness and ability, no flaw or error has been pointed out which in the slightest degree affects my main argument, and I consider that every point yet objected to by Dr. Lightfoot, or indicated by Dr. Westcott, might be withdrawn without at all weakening ...
— A Reply to Dr. Lightfoot's Essays • Walter R. Cassels
... were doing finely, and Aunt Hannah's health, and affairs at the Annex, were all that could be desired. As Billy, indeed, saw it, there was only one flaw to mar her perfect content on this holiday trip with Bertram, and that was her disappointment over the very evident disaster that had come to her cherished matrimonial plans for Arkwright and Alice Greggory. She could not forget Arkwright's face that day at the Annex, when ...
— Miss Billy Married • Eleanor H. Porter
... the which they rowed from the one side to the other to the number of 30. of their small boates, wherein were many people which passed from one shore to the other to come and see vs. (M336) And behold vpon the sudden (as is woont to fall out in sayling) a contrary flaw of wind comming from the sea, we were inforced to returne to our ship, leauing this lande to our great discontentment, for the great commodity and pleasantnesse thereof, which we suppose is not without some riches, all the hils shewing minerall waters in them. (M337) We weyed anker, and sayled ...
— The Principal Navigations, Voyages, Traffiques and Discoveries of - the English Nation. Vol. XIII. America. Part II. • Richard Hakluyt
... been rowing hard for, we reckoned, close on three hours when the sun rose. The gray shadows drew slowly off the face of the sea, and we stood up and scanned the northern horizon anxiously. But there was no flaw upon the brimming white rim. Torode had evidently not been able to get round La Hague, and a man must have been blind indeed not to see therein the hand of Providence; for a cap full of wind and he would have ...
— Carette of Sark • John Oxenham
... tempestuous mind the various circumstances of the case. His complaints were bitter; and, in a tranquil observer, might have produced the united feeling of pity for his sufferings, and horror at his depravity. He recollected all the precautions he had used; he could scarcely find a flaw in the process; and he cursed that blind and malicious power which delighted to cross his most deep-laid schemes. "Of this malice he was beyond all other human beings the object. He was mocked with the shadow of power; and when he lifted his hand ...
— Caleb Williams - Things As They Are • William Godwin
... pointed to the north. Against the sky hung a little black cloud, the merest flaw in the ...
— The Valley of Decision • Edith Wharton
... and happy for one of the laziest and most objectionable students whom they had ever had. I have never been really able to decide whether I was right or wrong. At liberal Cambridge, Massachusetts, neither I nor the professors would ever have discovered a flaw in my industry. At the closely cramped, orthodox, hide-bound, mathematical Princeton, every weakness in me seemed to be developed. Thirty years later I read in the Nassau Monthly, which I had once edited, that if Boker and I and a few others had become known in literature, ...
— Memoirs • Charles Godfrey Leland
... required of him, and did it better than was expected. He treated all upper-class men with profound respect, and he did it without effort because it came natural to him. He never ventured to look them in the eye, and he blushed and stammered when they addressed him. Saunders tried to find a flaw in his behavior so that he might have the matter taken up by the class committee, but there was no flaw to be found. Self-respect prevented him from giving the real reason, his jealousy; besides, it was out of the question to drag in the ...
— Captain Jinks, Hero • Ernest Crosby
... instructive to observe that at the very end of the great work on arithmetic to which I have referred Frege found himself compelled by difficulties which had been overlooked until Russell called attention to them to add an appendix confessing that there was a single important flaw in his elaborate logical construction of the principles of arithmetic. He had shown that if there are certain things called 'integers', defined as he had defined them, the whole of arithmetic follows. But he had not shown ...
— Recent Developments in European Thought • Various
... Laura turned pale, and Strozzi remarked her pallor with a malicious pleasure. "Ah! your faith is not strong! My poisoned arrows will find the flaw, and upon him shall be avenged every pang that you have inflicted upon my bleeding heart. You know that he is here—I see ...
— Prince Eugene and His Times • L. Muhlbach
... his life Was harmony without a flaw, He took no other for a wife, Nor sighed for any that he saw; And if he doubted his two sons, And heirs, Alexis and Evander, He might have been as doubtful once Of ...
— The Second Book of Modern Verse • Jessie B. Rittenhouse
... was in 1850, bore little resemblance to the well-known pleasure resort of to-day. So far as I can remember, there was not a modern building in the city, and as a picture of an old-world Scottish town it was without a flaw. No club-house faced the sea, nor were there the fashionable residences which adorn the modern St. Andrews. The grass grew and the oats ripened where now stretch the long terraces devoted to summer lodgings for the ...
— Memoirs of Sir Wemyss Reid 1842-1885 • Stuart J. Reid, ed.
... and the mention of this last point, Cosmo had believed Mr. Burns an immaculate tradesman, but here the human gem was turned at that angle to the light which revealed the flaw in it. There are tradesmen not a few, irreproachable in regard to money, who are not so in regard to the quality of their wares in relation to the price: they take and do not give the advantage of their superior knowledge; ...
— Warlock o' Glenwarlock • George MacDonald
... in establishing an alternative theory, this man is lost. You can hardly find a flaw in the case which can now be presented against him, and all further investigation has served to strengthen it. By the way, there is one curious little point about those papers which may serve us as ...
— The Return of Sherlock Holmes • Arthur Conan Doyle
... The number of espostos que nao se sabe quem, sao seus pais (fatherless foundlings) outnumbered those born de legitimo matrimonio; and few of the gudewives prided themselves upon absolute fidelity. This flaw, which in England would poison all domestic affection, was not looked upon in a serious light by the islandry. The priesthood used to lament the degeneracy of the age and sigh for the fine times of foros e fogos, the rights and fires of an ...
— To the Gold Coast for Gold - A Personal Narrative in Two Volumes.—Vol. I • Richard F. Burton
... it, I couldn't do it! Granted, granted that there is no flaw in all that reasoning, that all that I have concluded this last month is clear as day, true as arithmetic.... My God! Anyway I couldn't bring myself to it! I couldn't do it, I couldn't do it! Why, why ...
— Crime and Punishment • Fyodor Dostoyevsky
... I sat trying to piece my puzzle together, but without success. There was a flaw in the story, a missing point in it, somewhere, I felt certain. I often imagined I was about to touch it, when, heigh! presto! ...
— The Uninhabited House • Mrs. J. H. Riddell
... anything that has a flaw in it is quite as bad as to have that excess of credulity ...
— Little Journeys To The Homes Of Great Teachers • Elbert Hubbard
... to Whistler as they matter to Degas, or to Manet. Whistler took Duret out of his environment, dressed him up, thought out a scheme—in a word, painted his idea without concerning himself in the least with the model. Mark you, I deny that I am urging any fault or flaw; I am merely contending that Whistler's art is not modern art, but classic art—yes, and severely classical, far more classical than Titian's or Velasquez;—from an opposite pole as classical as Ingres. No Greek dramatist ever sought the synthesis of things more uncompromisingly ...
— Confessions of a Young Man • George Moore
... aloofness—had again that friendly, old-country expression that I have already mentioned: here it was somewhat marred, though, by an over-rigidity of the lines. It is unfortunate that our farmers, when they plant at all, will nearly always plant in straight lines. The straight line is a flaw where we try to blend the work of our hands with Nature. They also as a rule neglect shrubs that would help to furnish a foreground for their trees; and, worst of all, they are given to importing, instead of utilising our native forest growth. Not often have I seen, ...
— Over Prairie Trails • Frederick Philip Grove
... eyes open. To see them, you would suppose there was nothing to look at and no one to speak with; you would imagine they were paralysed or alienated; and yet very possibly they are hard workers in their own way, and have good eyesight for a flaw in a deed or a turn of the market. They have been to school and college, but all the time they had their eye on the medal; they have gone about in the world and mixed with clever people, but all the time they were thinking of their own ...
— Essays of Robert Louis Stevenson • Robert Louis Stevenson
... insisted that Frederick should begin his masterpiece. He had himself sought out the finest, purest oak wood, without the least vein or flaw, which had been over five years in his wood-store, and nobody was to help Frederick except old Valentine. Not only was Frederick put more and more out of taste with his work by the rough journeymen, but he felt a tightness in his throat as he thought that this masterpiece was to ...
— Weird Tales, Vol. II. • E. T. A. Hoffmann
... law as there laid down was drawn up and administered by the Brehons, who were the judges and the law-makers of the people, and whose decision was appealed to in all matters of dispute. The most serious flaw of the system—a very serious one it will be seen—was that, owing to the scattered and tribal existence prevailing, there was no strong central rule behind the Brehon, as there is behind the modern judge, ready and able to enforce his decrees. At bottom, ...
— The Story Of Ireland • Emily Lawless
... crude plot, too, and quite unworthy of Francis Bullard, as he would have realised for himself had he not been obsessed by the new conviction that the real diamonds, now virtually Alan's, were hidden in the clock in that upper room. Further, it contained a serious flaw, in that it allowed nothing for the possibility of Alan's making a fresh will. And finally, if one may be permitted to put the primary objection last, it depended on the possession of the Green Box which had just ...
— Till the Clock Stops • John Joy Bell
... on this occasion—whether the attorney really persuaded Jack that, if he set about it, he would undertake to find him a flaw in his contract with Squire Bull, which would enable him to take the matter of the usherships into his own hand, and to do as he pleased; or whether Jack—as he seemed afterwards to admit in private—believed nothing of what the attorney ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, No. CCCXXIX. - March, 1843, Vol. LIII. • Various
... finish in the same way, also. Taking the ball with the heel results in the slice being put on more quickly and in there being more of it, but I need hardly observe that the stroke must be perfectly judged and played, and that there must be no flaw in it anywhere, or disaster must surely follow. As I say, it is not an easy shot to accomplish, but it is a splendid thing to do when wanted, and I strongly recommend the golfer who has gained proficiency in the ordinary way with his ...
— The Complete Golfer [1905] • Harry Vardon
... arise in the best-planned institutions; nay, in what are not human. Don't you think we ought to do our utmost to have no flaw in the foundation? Schools are not such perfect places that we can build them without fear, and, if the means are to be raised by a bargain for amusement—if they are to come from frivolity instead of self-denial, I am afraid of them. I do not mean that Cocksmoor ...
— The Daisy Chain, or Aspirations • Charlotte Yonge
... surety-Saviour. If his suretyship be accepted—if He meet and fulfil all the requirements of an outraged law, the gates of the dismal prison-house will and must be opened. If, on the other hand, there be any flaw or deficiency in His person or work as the Kinsman-Redeemer, then no power can snap the chains which bind Him; the tomb will refuse to surrender what it has in custody; the hopes of His people must perish along with Him! ...
— Memories of Bethany • John Ross Macduff
... Theodosius inaugurated religious persecution for honest opinions, and his edicts were similar in spirit to those of Louis XIV. against the Protestants,—a great flaw in his character, but for which he is lauded by the Catholic historians. The eloquent Flechier enlarges enthusiastically on the virtues of his private life, on his chastity, his temperance, his friendship, ...
— Beacon Lights of History, Volume IV • John Lord
... far, mark aw flaw, caught ay bake, rain e less, men ee easy, ski eir their, software i trip, hit i: life, sky o father, palm oh flow, sew oo loot, through or more, door ow out, how oy boy, coin uh but, some u put, foot y yet, young yoo few, chew ...
— THE JARGON FILE, VERSION 2.9.10
... for you we speak, not for ourselves: You are abus'd, and by some putter-on That will be damn'd for't: would I knew the villain, I would land-damn him. Be she honour-flaw'd,— I have three daughters; the eldest is eleven; The second and the third, nine and some five; If this prove true, they'll pay for't. By mine honour, I'll geld 'em all: fourteen they shall not see, To bring false generations: they are co-heirs; And I had rather glib myself ...
— The Winter's Tale - [Collins Edition] • William Shakespeare
... dressed in a white lace dress, with a white crepe bonnet with a wreath of white roses round it. I went in the chariot with my dear Mamma and the others followed in another carriage." One seems to hold in one's hand a small smooth crystal pebble, without a flaw and without a scintillation, and so transparent that one can see through it ...
— Queen Victoria • Lytton Strachey
... larger than the end of my thumb—as large as a big hickory-nut and, my uncle averred, flawless. Rubies of such a size and without a flaw are extremely rare, I believe; in fact, there are only one or two known to be in existence. The old gentleman declared that one of five carats was worth five times as much as a diamond of equal weight, and that the value increased ...
— The Paternoster Ruby • Charles Edmonds Walk
... days, the penal days, When Ireland hopelessly complained. Oh! weep those days, the penal days, When godless persecution reigned; When year by year, For serf and peer, Fresh cruelties were made by law, And filled with hate, Our senate sate To weld anew each fetter's flaw. Oh! weep those days, those penal days— Their memory still ...
— Thomas Davis, Selections from his Prose and Poetry • Thomas Davis
... partition about Mr. Wilkins's private office, each of the hundreds of times a day she passed it; and when she lay awake at midnight, her finger-tips would recall precisely the feeling of that rough surface, even to the sharp edges of a tiny flaw in the ...
— The Job - An American Novel • Sinclair Lewis
... they passed over sections that Harris would have accepted, but McCrae objected, finding always some flaw not apparent to the untrained eye. Once, where a little river had worn its way across the plain, they came on a sod shack, where a settler was already located. "Nice spot," said McCrae, "but too sandy. His farm'll blow away when he breaks ...
— The Homesteaders - A Novel of the Canadian West • Robert J. C. Stead
... took a flaw of pain, A hap of skiey pleasure, A thought had in his cradle lain, And mingled them in measure. That chrism he laid upon his eyes, And lips, and heart, for euphrasies, That he might see, feel, sing, perdie, The simple things that are the ...
— New Poems • Francis Thompson
... case there must be a flaw in it," retorted Random, but did not seem to be unmoved by Hope's generous action. "Sit down, Professor; it appears that you ...
— The Green Mummy • Fergus Hume
... which would serve for a case of petty larceny,—and that he should be abetted by more than half the national representatives, while he brings down a case of public conscience to the moral level of those who are content with the maculate safety which they owe to a flaw in an indictment, or with the dingy innocence which is certified to by the disagreement of ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 1, No. 6, April, 1858 • Various
... well as you do, Molly Breckenridge. But I s'pose you can't help it. If 't wasn't for that you'd be just splendid, and they don't seem to mind—much—anyway," remarked Alfaretta, beaming upon pretty Molly with loving smiles. Molly's liking for "boys" seemed to honest, sensible Alfy the one flaw in an ...
— Dorothy on a Ranch • Evelyn Raymond
... has proved very successful is to pass the bar or rod to be tested through a solenoid electro-magnet. With suitable instruments it is claimed that this is an almost infallible test as the instruments show at once when a seam or flaw is ...
— The Working of Steel - Annealing, Heat Treating and Hardening of Carbon and Alloy Steel • Fred H. Colvin
... rented by an American, a Mr. Peters—a man with many millions, chronic dyspepsia, and one fair daughter—Aline. The two families had met. Freddie and Aline had been thrown together; and, only a few days before, the engagement had been announced. And for Lord Emsworth the only flaw in this best of all possible ...
— Something New • Pelham Grenville Wodehouse
... which her then betrothed had told her about Suke—the dramatic account of her entreaties to him to draw the aching enemy, and the fine artistic touch he had given to the story by explaining that it was a lovely molar without a flaw! ...
— The Woodlanders • Thomas Hardy
... Church who had been used for her death sentence, worked wonders when that sentence had to be annulled; all the zeal they had displayed in the institution of the trial they now displayed in its revision; they were prepared to discover in it every possible flaw.[2724] ...
— The Life of Joan of Arc, Vol. 1 and 2 (of 2) • Anatole France
... barring a flaw, and I congratulate you on its recovery, but I see no human eye in it. I see some indistinct lines, fine as the thread of a spider's web, that is all. There is the breakfast bell, duke. We will go into the drawing ...
— For Woman's Love • Mrs. E. D. E. N. Southworth
... that they had to thank Villon. It was he who had grasped the flaw of Saxe's over-proof, and so tumbled the whole fabric of lies into a ruin never to be built up again. For both these mercies he humbly thanked God. It is to be noted by the student of the ways of men that he never gave the Dauphin's safety ...
— The Justice of the King • Hamilton Drummond
... of it. Now listen to me carefully. I'll give you, step by step, the whole matter." He walked up and down for some minutes and then suddenly stopped beside me and thumped me on the back. "There's not a flaw in it!" he cried. "It's magnificent. My dear fellow, death is only a failure in human perfection. There's nothing mysterious in it. Religion has made a ridiculous fuss about it. There's nothing more mysterious in it than there is in a badly-oiled ...
— The Blue Germ • Martin Swayne
... the mind, it first of all discovers every flaw in it. The sober man, by the strength of reason, may keep under and subdue every vice or folly to which he is most inclined; but wine makes every latent seed sprout up in the soul, and shew itself: it gives fury to the passions, and force ...
— The Young Gentleman and Lady's Monitor, and English Teacher's Assistant • John Hamilton Moore
... and puppetry remain, Is an owned flaw in her consistency Men love to dub Dame Nature—that lay-shape They use to hang phenomena upon— Whose deftest mothering in fairest sphere Is girt ...
— The Dynasts - An Epic-Drama Of The War With Napoleon, In Three Parts, - Nineteen Acts, And One Hundred And Thirty Scenes • Thomas Hardy
... are liable to ignite. Fusion then takes place in a terrible heat. The heat must be sufficient to remove the obstacles that the mass may become unified. We have as a result a firmly established representative union of local self-governments. The cooling and finishing process has left no flaw. Sir, what sort of a soldier must he be who is not proud of having been tempered in such a trial? If after the unmatched tournament this is not the spirit of victor and vanquished, then the lights of chivalry are burnt out and magnanimity ...
— Memorial Addresses on the Life and Character of William H. F. Lee (A Representative from Virginia) • Various
... all decency to say that he was suited to the delicate and responsible post he was sent to fulfil. In fact, all his actions prove him to have been without an atom of tact, judgment, or administrative quality, and his nature had a big unsympathetic flaw in it. The fact is, there are indications that his nature was warped from the beginning, and that he was just the very kind of man who ought never to have been sent to a post of such varied responsibilities. His appointment shows how appallingly ignorant or wicked the Government, or ...
— The Tragedy of St. Helena • Walter Runciman
... the other day of an English gentlemen being taken in by one of these scoundrels, and giving a lot of money for land which on examination proved to be worthless. Luckily for him, there was some flaw in his agreement, and his purchase was cancelled. Men who intend buying land should be in no great hurry about their investments; the banks give a fair percentage on deposits, and it is always so much more satisfactory to look ...
— A Lady's Life on a Farm in Manitoba • Mrs. Cecil Hall
... blinded him. So, instead of lashing Miki to the sledge as Le Beau had fastened him to his improvised drag, Durant made his captive comfortable, covering him with a warm blanket before he began his journey eastward. He made sure, however, that there was no flaw in the muzzle about Miki's jaws, and that the free end of the chain to which he was still fastened was well hitched to the Gee-bar of ...
— Nomads of the North - A Story of Romance and Adventure under the Open Stars • James Oliver Curwood
... to explain the circumstances of this family— in case you should hereafter have any serious thoughts; as you say, you should know what comforted Marcus in his disappointment there. There is, then, some confounded flaw in that old father's will, through which the great Herbert estate slips to an heir-at-law, who has started up within this twelvemonth. Miss Annaly, who was to have been a nonpareil of an heiress in case of the brother's death, will have ...
— Tales & Novels, Vol. IX - [Contents: Harrington; Thoughts on Bores; Ormond] • Maria Edgeworth
... probable, though I cannot vouch for its accuracy. It is said that, while painting the water-carrier day after day, when he had been engaged with his work for several hours, Velasquez found himself vexed by perceiving, as it were, the effect of a shadow cast by some of the drapery. Small flaw as it might have been, it appeared to him to interfere with and spoil the picture. Again and again, in endeavouring to do away with this 'shadow,' Velasquez undid portions of his work, and had to repeat them next day, but always, towards the end of his task, the invidious shadow stole upon his ...
— The Old Masters and Their Pictures - For the Use of Schools and Learners in Art • Sarah Tytler
... the flaw, or the depth of the plan, In the make of that wonderful creature, call'd man, No two virtues, whatever relation they claim, Nor even two different shades of the same, Though like as was ever twin brother to brother, Possessing the one shall ...
— The Complete Works of Robert Burns: Containing his Poems, Songs, and Correspondence. • Robert Burns and Allan Cunningham
... And maybe we didn't dare even think! If Fraser were able to read minds—as I was nearly sure he was—then hadn't we better keep our minds blank even down here? But an instant's thought showed me the flaw in my logic. Fraser could, without much doubt, read minds—when those minds were close to him. If he could read minds at a distance then he wouldn't need to ...
— The Floating Island of Madness • Jason Kirby
... for flushing. "They disseminate news. We've got to have news, to carry on the world. Only a small fraction of it is—well, malodorous. Would you destroy the whole system because of one flaw? You're ...
— Success - A Novel • Samuel Hopkins Adams
... Somewhat as in the early days of the French Revolution, men must have looked for an immediate and universal improvement in their condition. Christianity, up to that time, had been somewhat of a failure politically. The reason was now obvious, the capital flaw was detected, the sickness of the body politic traced at last to its efficient cause. It was only necessary to put the Bible thoroughly into practice, to set themselves strenuously to realise in life the Holy Commonwealth, and all abuses and iniquities would surely pass away. ...
— Familiar Studies of Men & Books • Robert Louis Stevenson
... define the causes of the movements of the heavenly bodies, as you, with your own common sense, would employ to detect a burglar. The only difference is, that the nature of the inquiry being more abstruse, every step has to be most carefully watched, so that there may not be a single crack or flaw in your hypothesis. A flaw or crack in many of the hypotheses of daily life may be of little or no moment as affecting the general correctness of the conclusions at which we may arrive; but, in ...
— Lectures and Essays • T.H. Huxley
... midmost course and true 'Twixt Scylla and Charybdis, lest to death we sail o'er-close: So safest seemed for backward course to let the sails go loose. But lo, from out Pelorus' strait comes down the northern flaw, And past Pantagia's haven-mouth of living stone we draw, And through the gulf of Megara by Thapsus lying low. Such names did Achemenides, Ulysses' fellow, show, 690 As now he coasted back again the ...
— The AEneids of Virgil - Done into English Verse • Virgil
... at the sea-side was very happy—quite the happiest since Kate's change of fortune. The one flaw in those times on the sands was when she was alone with Sylvia and Josephine; not in Sylvia's dulness—that she had ceased to care about—but in a little want of plain dealing. Sylvia was never wild ...
— Countess Kate • Charlotte M. Yonge
... you how at present. I have not the smallest idea. But every one has some weak point. There is some flaw in each one of us. [Strolls to the fireplace and looks at himself in the glass.] My father tells me that even I have faults. Perhaps I ...
— An Ideal Husband - A Play • Oscar Wilde
... mean. Strange how she had grown so gentle and so good under the constant persecution of this thieving gang! Her conscience was as clear as a windowpane; a man could look through her soul and see the world undisturbed by a flaw beyond it. A good girl; she sure was a good girl. And as pretty a figure on a horse ...
— The Duke Of Chimney Butte • G. W. Ogden
... sinful world is somewhat similar to ours, so that there is a oneness in the whole family of the redeemed. This is one main factor that makes the bond of unity perfect and renders the fellowship of the celestial hosts absolutely without a flaw. ...
— Life in a Thousand Worlds • William Shuler Harris
... unable, even after the most careful revision, to find any flaw in my argument; and I incline to think none has been found by my critics—at least, if they have, they have kept ...
— Collected Essays, Volume V - Science and Christian Tradition: Essays • T. H. Huxley
... Thompson scrawling in the inside of his envelope, furiously, furtively, while the ink of his neat copperplate dried on the outside, and Macartney likely stood by poring over the actual letter, wondering if there was any flaw in it that could show out and damn him. And the desperate scrawl in the envelope had been no good, thanks to the fool brain and tongue of myself, Nicky Stretton! It had done more to warn Macartney than either Dudley or me, since if Thompson ...
— The La Chance Mine Mystery • Susan Carleton Jones
... Away from Paris they carry on a fairly regular correspondence. Such of Bakkus's letters as Lackaday has kept and as I have read, are literary gems with—always—a perverse and wilful flaw ...
— The Mountebank • William J. Locke
... not have been, the knowledge remained with him that she herself had suspected and convicted him. In all that mattered their friendship had ended there. Distrust was unbearable between friends. It was a flaw in his little lady that she could believe him capable of baseness.... But not an unforgivable flaw, it would seem, since every hour that he had spent in her presence had become roses and music in his memory, and the thought that he would see her no more stabbed ceaselessly ...
— Queed • Henry Sydnor Harrison
... hands. It was fetched to him by the galleons in passing, and when he was relieved he carried it with him to Manila, often to the amount of eighty or ninety thousand dollars." A glimpse of high finance without a flaw! ...
— The Old Merchant Marine - A Chronicle of American Ships and Sailors, Volume 36 in - the Chronicles Of America Series • Ralph D. Paine
... "Too bad! I don't blame you for not wanting to talk about it. They's a flaw in everything, Jig, and this is yours. If I was to be around you much, d'you know what ...
— The Rangeland Avenger • Max Brand
... the form as in the abstract something almost sacred, have felt free to mould it in some measure to the immediate demands of their subject—not all, however, with the same success.[63] For the sonnet demands perfection, a single flaw almost cripples it; and few have the absolute command of language necessary to forge a single idea without irrelevance and without omission according to so strict a pattern. Those who are too subservient to the form weaken their poetic thought; those who, like Wordsworth often, are inobedient ...
— The Principles of English Versification • Paull Franklin Baum
... Thee, O Sovereign Seer of time, But Thee, O poet's Poet, Wisdom's Tongue, But Thee, O man's best Man, O love's best Love, O perfect life in perfect labor writ, O all men's Comrade, Servant, King, or Priest,— What if or yet, what mole, what flaw, what lapse, What least defect or shadow of defect, What rumor, tattled by an enemy, Of inference loose, what lack of grace Even in torture's grasp, or sleep's, or death's,— Oh, what amiss may I forgive in Thee, Jesus, good ...
— The Ascent of the Soul • Amory H. Bradford
... Adams, however, appears to have found a flaw in Laplace's calculation, and to have shown that only half the observed retardation could be accounted for in the way he had suggested. There remains, therefore, the other half to be accounted for; and here, in the absence of all positive knowledge, three ...
— Lay Sermons, Addresses and Reviews • Thomas Henry Huxley
... clouds in the sky, and in the purest heart the Lord discerns a flaw. Did Jehovah himself write the books of Our Law? Did the angels write them? No; people wrote them. Has there ever been a man during all the ages who did not know what it meant to go astray? Is there any human work which is adequate or all times and ...
— An Obscure Apostle - A Dramatic Story • Eliza Orzeszko
... and then, immediately after giving the third shock, which was as ineffectual as those that preceded it, he advanced to our grim host with a face radiant with satisfaction, and congratulated him vehemently. "You are a happy man," he said. "Your household has not a flaw in it. Fortunate it was that you sent for the wise man: I have discovered the matter." "What have you discovered?" "The fate of the ring. It has never been stolen: if it had, I would have restored it to you. Fear nothing; your household ...
— Harper's New Monthly Magazine, Volume 1, No. 3, August, 1850. • Various
... so modern, so praiseworthy and enlightened, had one serious flaw. What was a fact? And how did you know? This important problem, so significant for the growth of scientific medicine, we can study quite readily in the ...
— Medical Investigation in Seventeenth Century England - Papers Read at a Clark Library Seminar, October 14, 1967 • Charles W. Bodemer
... like tooth-picks; and now with solid steel and quick-setting concrete they were fighting for the life of the mine. It was a dangerous job, such as few men cared to tackle; but to Denver it was a relief, a return to his old life after the delirium of an ugly dream. Even yet he could not trace the flaw in his reasoning which had brought him to earth with such a thump; but he knew, in general, that his error was the common one of trying to run a mine on a shoestring. He had set up in business as a mining magnate on eight hundred dollars and his nerve, ...
— Silver and Gold - A Story of Luck and Love in a Western Mining Camp • Dane Coolidge
... anyone, however hypercritical, could find a flaw in Ted. His character was spotless. He was comfortably off. And so far from being in any way inferior socially, it was he who condescended. For Ted, she had discovered from conversation with Mr Murdoch, the glazier, was no ordinary young man. He was a celebrity. So ...
— The Man with Two Left Feet - and Other Stories • P. G. Wodehouse
... afraid of the monarchs, and often resisted them and bid them defiance. It was the law in those days that all estates to which no other person had a legal claim escheated, as they called it, to the king. Of course, if the king could find an estate in which there was any flaw in the title of the man who held it, he would claim it for his own. At one time a king asked a certain baron to show him the title to his estate. He was intending to examine it, to see if there was any flaw in it. The baron, instead of producing ...
— Richard II - Makers of History • Jacob Abbott
... and turned to clay, Might stop a hole to keep the wind away: O that that earth, which kept the world in awe, Should patch a wall to expel the winter's flaw." ...
— Lynton and Lynmouth - A Pageant of Cliff & Moorland • John Presland
... I deserve it, for my ill-timed truth. Was it for me to prop The ruins of a falling majesty? To place myself beneath the mighty flaw, Thus to be crushed, and pounded into atoms, By its o'erwhelming weight? 'Tis too presuming For subjects to preserve that wilful power, Which courts its ...
— All for Love • John Dryden
... this opinion, and that was the personal pleasure of saying the unorthodox thing, an element which accounts for much of the unconventionality of that intellectual class of townsfolk figuring broadcast in the book, and largely discounts the value of its criticisms. I suspected the same flaw in her expressed convictions on religious, political and feminist matters, and I shouldn't be surprised to learn, though there is no hint of it, that she stopped short of complete revolt in her own big affair because she realized ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 146, April 22, 1914 • Various
... to Jackson Street, and Anne made it quite as quaint and charming as her dreams. For a year they could not find a flaw ...
— Poor, Dear Margaret Kirby and Other Stories • Kathleen Norris
... drastic proposal to put forward; and he added that when the historic provincial divisions of France were broken up into departments, the nation had been prepared by nearly 200 years of centralization under the monarchy. It is a flaw in his argument to say that the previously existing areas were racial, whereas populations of identical race were divided from one another by the course of events. And in the proposed obliteration ...
— The Birth of Yugoslavia, Volume 2 • Henry Baerlein
... wind. Certainly the person on board of her had pluck enough; for he stuck to the halyards, though he was nearly jerked overboard by the sudden pitching and rolling of the craft. Recovering the sheet which had run out into the water, he took his place at the helm. He flattened down the sail, when the flaw had spent its force, and headed his boat towards Friedrichshafen. The next gust that struck the sail carried her down so that the water poured in over her lee rail by the barrel. The lady screamed lustily; and the tones of her voice indicated ...
— Down the Rhine - Young America in Germany • Oliver Optic
... read it in a hurry yesterday; to-day I saw it again and read it carefully. There is no flaw in it; it is a will that must stand, that cannot be disputed. Charlotte, you were right in your forebodings. Niece Charlotte, you and your mother, before you, were basely robbed, cruelly wronged; your dead father was just and ...
— How It All Came Round • L. T. Meade
... The play, whose only flaw was a certain rather upsetting ambiguity (whether accidental or designed I could not quite gather) in the last few sentences before the curtain fell, was interpreted with a very fine intelligence. Miss IRENE VANBRUGH'S superbly trained talent ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 150, February 16, 1916 • Various
... she replied. "Maybe not the necessity exactly, but the spirit surely. Why should you quarrel? You're the first one to insist on perfection—to quarrel if there is any flaw ...
— Jennie Gerhardt - A Novel • Theodore Dreiser
... indeed, far too strong-minded a man to accept the hazy modern notion that the soul in its highest sense can change: he seems to have held that religion can never get any better and that poetry rather tends to get worse. But he did not see the flaw in his political theory; which is that unless the soul improves with time there is no guarantee that the accumulations of experience will be adequately used. Figures do not add themselves up; birds do not label or ...
— The Victorian Age in Literature • G. K. Chesterton
... king was chancellor Hyde, afterwards made Earl of Clarendon. He had been in the beginning of the long parliament very high against the judges upon the account of the ship-money and became then a considerable man; he spake well, his style had no flaw in it, but had a just mixture of wit and sense, only he spoke too copiously; he had a great pleasantness in his spirit, which carried him sometimes too far into raillery, in which he sometimes shewed more wit than discretion. He went over to the court ...
— Characters from 17th Century Histories and Chronicles • Various
... good lady," replied the traveller "he is an English lord, and, as they say, a Lord of Parliament—but some folk pretend to say there is a flaw in the title." ...
— St. Ronan's Well • Sir Walter Scott
... consequently is at war), and dodging about, under cover, spying out the secrets of the land, and not very fastidious in listening to conversation that does not exactly concern him. We fear that there is some such flaw in the character of Ned Hinkley, though, otherwise, a good, hardy fellow—with a rough and tumble sort of good nature, which, having bloodied your nose, would put a knife-handle down your back, and apply a handful of cobwebs to the nasal extremity in order to arrest the haemorrhage. ...
— Charlemont • W. Gilmore Simms
... moment the girl knelt there beside him and gazed unseeingly at the inscrutable calm of the silent country. Something in the depths of her blue eyes was changing—deepening, growing in subtle beauty, as if the universe was suddenly become perfect, as if there was nowhere a flaw. ...
— Tharon of Lost Valley • Vingie E. Roe
... capability. There is no such thing as 'standing still' in the Universe. Every atom, every organism is doing something, or going somewhere, and there is no stop. Rest itself is merely a form of Progress towards Beauty and Perfection, and there is no flaw anywhere in the majestic splendour of God's scheme for the ultimate happiness of ...
— The Life Everlasting: A Reality of Romance • Marie Corelli
... cannot exist without perfect physical religion. Every flaw and defect in the bodily system is just so much taken from the spiritual vitality: we are commanded to glorify God, not simply in our spirits, but in our bodies and spirits. The only example of perfect manhood ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 18, No. 105, July 1866 • Various
... on. It's not very big, for a mountain. But except about fifty feet of sod and gravel on top it's solid diamond. One diamond, one cubic mile without a flaw. Aren't you listening? Say——" ...
— Tales of the Jazz Age • F. Scott Fitzgerald
... to scratch her lovely cheeks I bent. 50 Sighing she stood, her bloodless white looks shewed, Like marble from the Parian mountains hewed. Her half-dead joints, and trembling limbs I saw, Like poplar leaves blown with a stormy flaw. Or slender ears, with gentle zephyr shaken, Or waters' tops with the warm south-wind taken. And down her cheeks, the trickling tears did flow, Like water gushing from consuming snow. Then first I did perceive I had ...
— The Works of Christopher Marlowe, Vol. 3 (of 3) • Christopher Marlowe
... with an idea, and start out bravely to follow it; but if he finds it leading him into a position contrary to the experience of humanity, then he pulls up, and decides that the idea must be false, even if he can detect no flaw in it; not so the Russian; the idea is ...
— Essays on Russian Novelists • William Lyon Phelps
... the pitchers in her hand with an inquisitorial air, balanced them, knocked them with her small knuckles—they rang as clear as a bell—examined the glass—there was not a flaw in it. Chloe went through the same process; they looked significantly at each other, nodded, set the pitchers on the slab, and gave a little ...
— The Wit and Humor of America, Volume II. (of X.) • Various
... such as Venice, Rome, and Naples, received such rich filling-in to the first outlines sent, as fairly justified the title of Pictures finally chosen for them. The weather all the time too had been without a flaw. "Since our return," he wrote on the 27th April, "we have had charming spring days. The garden is one grove of roses; we have left off fires; and we breakfast and dine again in the great hall, with the windows open. To-day we have rain, but rain ...
— The Life of Charles Dickens, Vol. I-III, Complete • John Forster
... it over with his eyes quickly and eagerly, as if certain of finding a flaw; and there was something like disappointment in the tone of his voice as he said, briefly, "Right, sir," and laid ...
— The Brother Clerks - A Tale of New-Orleans • Xariffa
... ceasing to use the title, I knew he had given up all hope of my cause. "Of course," he continued, "you can go to law if you like, but I tell you quite honestly you have no chance. The evidence is clear and without a flaw; nothing can shake it. If you have a lawsuit you will lose it, and probably ...
— Coralie • Charlotte M. Braeme
... beauty, the fact that she was Ray's sister, and that Mrs. Stannard and Mrs. Truscott became devoted to her from the start, and that "old Stannard" and Truscott took Rallston under their protecting wings, and showed him around as though there had never been a flaw in his record,—all these things and his natural good nature combined to make him popular among the officers, and the night before they left he had the whole crowd in at a "stag party" in town, whereat there was much conviviality and good feeling; and the next thing whispered about the garrison ...
— Marion's Faith. • Charles King
... most beautiful woman I ever beheld. Looking back across this weary chasm of years, and bringing her image before me (as I can and do) with all the vividness of life, I am unable, even now, to detect a flaw in her beauty. I do not attempt to describe her. I do not believe there is a poet living who could find the words to do it; but I once saw a picture that was somewhat like her (not half so lovely, but still like her), and, ...
— Mugby Junction • Charles Dickens
... the Pilgrim's Progress the first of allegories. In execution it is almost perfect. Don Juan is in scope and magnitude a far wider work; but no considerable series of stanzas in Don Juan are so free from serious artistic flaw. From first to last, every epithet hits the white; every line that does not convulse with laughter stings or lashes. It rises to greatness by the fact that, underneath all its lambent buffoonery, it is aflame with righteous wrath. Nowhere in such ...
— Byron • John Nichol
... not been for this accident the visit of the six little Bunkers to Seaview would have been without a flaw. Even as it was, it turned out to be most delightful. Seaview was a fine place to spend the end of the summer, and Cousin Tom and his wife made the children feel so at home, and did so much for ...
— Six Little Bunkers at Cousin Tom's • Laura Lee Hope
... rising from her to his and her Creator, as a rule, it sooner or later burns low and at last burns out, and leaves nothing but embers and ashes in his once so ardent heart. Mr. Brisk's love-making might have ended in his becoming a pilgrim but for this fatal flaw in his heart, that even in his love-making he stuck so fast to the world. It is almost incredible: you may well refuse to believe it—that any young man in love, and especially a young gentleman of Mr. Brisk's breeding, would approach his mistress with the question ...
— Bunyan Characters (Second Series) • Alexander Whyte
... threw himself into an easy-chair. He felt like a man who has built a mighty piece of machinery, has set it swinging through space, and watches now its imminent collapse; watches some tiny but ghastly flaw, pregnant with disaster, growing wider and wider before ...
— The Pawns Count • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... essay again and, finding no flaw in it, frowned once more on his fellow pupils and wrote: "My father won the Victoria Cross Meddle." Having written this he looked round again somewhat defiantly. His eye caught one of the new ...
— Punch or the London Charivari, Vol. 147, October 21, 1914 • Various
... cruel near the water;' for she had not more than a sixteen inches to spare in the nether overloop, as I heard after. And saith he, 'That won't do for going to windward in a say, Martin.' And as the words came out of mun's mouth, your worship, there was a bit of a flaw from the westward, sharp like, and overboard goeth my cap, and hitth against the wall, and as I stooped to pick it up, I heard a cry, and it ...
— Westward Ho! • Charles Kingsley
... are susceptible to disorder, be reasonably careful about what you eat, even though you consider yourself quite well. What a stomach has once done in the line of misbehavior, a stomach may do again. If a pitcher has in it a tiny flaw, it may crack when filled with boiling liquid. If you know of some article of food which disagrees with you, let it alone. If you are inclined to dyspepsia, eschew hot breads, pastry, fried or greasy food, nuts and many sweets. Avoid becoming dependent ...
— The Secret of a Happy Home (1896) • Marion Harland
... does not end here. The flaw runs through the whole constitution of things; there is no possible equation between the anomalies and dislocations on which he turns the dry light of that sceptical philosophy which has usurped the place of faith. Thought is good and action is good, but they will not work together. Our reason ...
— The Contemporary Review, January 1883 - Vol 43, No. 1 • Various
... and deriving some solace herself from the occupation—at least she always said the services were soothing. She was genuinely shocked by a sign of irreverence, and would sing the most jingling nonsense as a hymn with perfect gravity and without perceiving that there was any flaw in it. In these matters she showed no originality at all. She would repeat "my duty towards my neighbour is to love him as myself, and to do to all men as I would that they should do unto me" fervently, ...
— The Heavenly Twins • Madame Sarah Grand
... barrier as far as our old trysting-place without finding any flaw through which I could get a glimpse of the house, for the fence had been repaired with each rail overlapping the last, so as to secure absolute privacy for those inside, and to block those peep-holes which ...
— The Mystery of Cloomber • Arthur Conan Doyle
... cast iron; and that part of the bow which clasps the withers and sits on the shoulders spread out in the form of iron wings or plates. The saddle, at some time in its history, had received a strain which was too much for it, and one of the iron wings broke partly across; and this flaw, hidden by leather and padding, had been lurking in the dark and biding its time. When Janet braced her foot in the stirrup and made the horse dodge, it cracked the rest of the way, whereupon the jagged point of metal pressed into his shoulder with her weight upon ...
— The Wrong Woman • Charles D. Stewart
... The major's hat was always of the glossiest, the major's coat was without a wrinkle, and, in short, from the summit of the major's bald head to his bulbous finger-tips and his gouty toes, there was not a flaw which the most severe critic of deportment—even the illustrious Turveydrop himself—could have detected. Let us add that the conversation of the major was as irreproachable as his person—that he was a distinguished soldier and an accomplished traveller, ...
— The Firm of Girdlestone • Arthur Conan Doyle
... he would marry some girl years younger than himself, than herself. How old was he? Could it be that he was too young for her? As he seemed to grow inaccessible, she was drawn toward him more compellingly. He was so strong, so gentle. She lived over the events of the day. There was no flaw there. He had considered her and Mary, always. And he had torn the program up and danced only with her. Surely he had liked her, or he would not have ...
— The Valley of the Moon • Jack London
... the Tower, where his wife was allowed to bear him company, and where his youngest son was born. His estates were, in general, preserved to him, but Carr, the infamous minion of the King, under some pretext of a flaw in the conveyance of it by Raleigh to his son, seized upon his manor of Sherborne. In the Tower he continued for twelve years. These years his industry and genius rendered the happiest probably of his ...
— Specimens with Memoirs of the Less-known British Poets, Complete • George Gilfillan
... has lived day by day for five months with Carlotta's magical beauty, and all he has noticed as characteristic is the little white scar—she fell on marble steps as a child—the only flaw, if flaw can be in a thing so imperceptible, in ...
— The Morals of Marcus Ordeyne • William J. Locke
... child would have thought of it. He is all right, not a flaw in him, as far as I have carried the work. If I've been able to bring him as far as the beginning of this century, what's to stop me now? I'll go on and materialize him down ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... useless, since it would tend to keep up the idea that he is an actual London entity. We are very confident that he is not a London non-entity, but are willing to agree that he is either the one or the other. The flaw that we are after lies in his interstitial logic, not in the hallucination in which he indulges respecting nonentities. His assumption that life cannot exist without an organism, of which it is the phenomenal manifestation, is what we propose to ...
— Life: Its True Genesis • R. W. Wright
... of the Kremlin live in fear their power and position would collapse were their own people to acquire knowledge, information, comprehension about our free society. Their world has many elements of strength, but this one fatal flaw: the weakness represented by their iron curtain and their police state. Surely, a social order at once so insecure and so fearful, must ultimately lose its ...
— State of the Union Addresses of Harry S. Truman • Harry S. Truman
... companionship, and compared these associates with those of my happier childhood, with the boys at Salem House. Often in the early morning, when I was alone, I mingled my tears with the water in which I was washing the bottles, and sobbed as if there were a flaw in my breast, and it were ...
— The World's Greatest Books, Vol III • Arthur Mee and J.A. Hammerton, Eds.
... Raffles Holmes. "My father was too fond of my mother to permit of any flaw in his title. A year later I was born, and— well, here I am—son of one, grandson of the other, with hereditary traits from both strongly developed and ready for business. I want a literary partner—a man who ...
— R. Holmes & Co. • John Kendrick Bangs
... worth of its securities are owned there. Madera County, then, has property within her borders that earns an income, not one cent of which goes to the county where it was earned.[1] The property is there, but the income from it is taken elsewhere. This is the one great flaw in our present economic life, and is the very root ...
— Confiscation, An Outline • William Greenwood
... separate pieces of iron that have been rolled only once, or "muck bar," as it is called; while the thrice-rolled bar is made from a pile of eight separate pieces of double-rolled iron. If, therefore, one of the original pieces of iron has any flaw or defect, it will form only a hundred and twelfth part of the thrice-rolled bar. The uniformity of texture and the toughness of the bars which have been thrice rolled are so great that they may be twisted, cold, ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Vol. 11, - No. 22, January, 1873 • Various
... Nights their fables of the jewels of "Serendib;" and the travellers of the Middle Ages, on returning to Europe, told of the "sapphires, topazes, amethysts, garnets, and other costly stones" of Ceylon, and of the ruby which belonged to the king of the island, "a span in length, without a flaw, ...
— Ceylon; an Account of the Island Physical, Historical, and • James Emerson Tennent
... me, think of the risks of ship-owners! Consider, too, that Edwin's ship was not insured. What, then, was his dismay, when, as she got into the middle of the Atlantic Ocean (for so Edwin called the pond), a flaw of wind threw her on her beam-ends, and sent her masts down under water till ...
— The Nursery, October 1873, Vol. XIV. No. 4 • Various
... below, she thought it a strange thing that so favored a woman should rail at her own country and kinsmen. It oppressed her loyal little heart, for she had begun to like the titled lady, and hated to find so grave a flaw in her nature. ...
— All Aboard - A Story for Girls • Fannie E. Newberry
... more. You all know that stage solicitors are more outrageous villains than even their originals. Mr. Gammon is, of course, a "fine speciment of the specious," as Mr. Hood's Mr. Higgings says. It is he who, finding out a flaw in Aubrey's title, angled per advertisement for the heir, and caught a Tittlebat—Titmouse. It is he who has so disinterestedly made that gentleman's fortune.—"Only just merely for the sake of the costs?" one naturally asks. Oh no; there is a ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 1, November 27, 1841 • Various
... sermon was in style and sentiment, the flaw in its reasoning was too patent for any converts to be made. As he walked out of the quadrangle, the Duke felt the hopelessness of his cause. Still he battled bravely for it up the High, waylaying, cajoling, commanding, offering vast bribes. He carried his crusade into the Loder, ...
— Zuleika Dobson - or, An Oxford Love Story • Max Beerbohm
... has trodden the perilous heights of public duty, and against all the shafts of malice has borne his breast unharmed. He has stood in the blaze of 'that fierce light that beats against the throne,' but its fiercest ray has found no flaw in his armor, no stain on his shield. I do not present him as a better Republican or as better man than thousands of others we honor, but I present him for your deliberate consideration. I nominate John ...
— Hidden Treasures - Why Some Succeed While Others Fail • Harry A. Lewis
... hadn't so much as looked at Kent for years; but a woman has a long memory for emotions, and she is capable of resenting the loss of a husband who is no longer hers. Rumour, of course, nothing more; yet the fact remained that Corinna, who liked all the world, hated Rose Stribling. It was the one flaw in Corinna's perfection; it was the black patch on the stainless cheek, which had always made her adorable to Stephen. Like the snow-white lock waving back from her forehead, it intensified the youth in her face. He had often ...
— One Man in His Time • Ellen Glasgow
... so dishonest as to try and impose upon the locomotive engineer, who they know will carefully examine every part of his boiler, and who is able to detect any flaw, it is not to be expected that the farmer will escape. Nor does he. The great number of explosions of boilers used in thrashing and in other farm work proves that there are boilermakers who "force their boilers into ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 433, April 19, 1884 • Various
... him; for her knowledge of the previous night's disclosures worried and distressed her. She thought Collie's half promise to Overland Red to turn to their old life had been too easily made. Her pride in him was touched. She was hurt, and not a little angry. She saw the flaw in his ultimate decision to sacrifice himself and his prospects through a too stringent and quixotic interpretation of his duty. To go back to ...
— Overland Red - A Romance of the Moonstone Canon Trail • Henry Herbert Knibbs
... 'at they ca' Kelpie jist the pictur' o' the deil's ain horse 'at lay at the door an' watched, whan he flaw oot an' tuik the ...
— The Marquis of Lossie • George MacDonald
... enormous expenditure of time, thought and labor which has gone into the preparation of the case and made possible his brief and easily delivered speech. For in this opening address of his there must be no flaw, since a single misstated or overstated fact may prejudice the jury against him and result in his defeat. Upon it also depends the jury's first impression of the case and of the prosecutor himself—no inconsiderable factor ...
— Courts and Criminals • Arthur Train
... farther. lava, larva. halm, harm. calve, carve. talk, torque. daw, door. flaw, floor. yaw, yore. law, lore. laud, lord. maw, more, gnaw, ...
— Society for Pure English, Tract 2, on English Homophones • Robert Bridges
... greatest ease into the ways and habits of her new life. It did not puzzle or disturb her in the least to live in large rooms, be waited on by servants, or have nice things about her; she took to all these naturally. For a few days Mr. and Mrs. Grant watched with some anxiety, fearing to discover a flaw in their treasure, but no flaw appeared. Not that Annie was faultless, but hers were honest little faults; there was nothing hidden or concealed in her character, and in a short time her new friends had learned to trust her and ...
— Nine Little Goslings • Susan Coolidge
... that your generosity can be supreme—without a flaw. Love at its highest should be the origin of ...
— Tales Of Hearsay • Joseph Conrad
... polite," said Kitty, warm in defence of him at once. She might sometimes admit to herself that there was a flaw in her brother, but she could not endure that any one else should see one; "and he is always sorry for people when they are hurt, and it was our fault ...
— Kitty Trenire • Mabel Quiller-Couch
... black storm Shall blow ten thousand souls to heaven or hell; And this fell tempest shall not cease to rage Until the golden circuit on my head, Like to the glorious sun's transparent beams, Do calm the fury of this mad-bred flaw. And for a minister of my intent, I have seduc'd a headstrong Kentishman, John Cade of Ashford, To make commotion, as full well he can, Under the tide of John Mortimer. In Ireland have I seen this stubborn Cade Oppose himself ...
— King Henry VI, Second Part • William Shakespeare [Rolfe edition]
... then because his chum was queening "like all the rest of the frat-men," and their jovial expeditions to Mayfield were over, "because she wouldn't understand" (most conclusive proof!), but he ended by taking it as he might have taken an inequality of temper—as a flaw in character to be overlooked in a friend. Then again, Pellams found it positively uncanny to be getting on so well in his work, an uneasy feeling as though he were walking along the edge of a steep place. ...
— Stanford Stories - Tales of a Young University • Charles K. Field
... that windlass. The castings had flaws; they shattered asunder, the gears ground together, and the windlass was out of commission. Following upon that, the seventy-horse-power engine went out of commission. This engine came from New York; so did its bed-plate; there was a flaw in the bed-plate; there were a lot of flaws in the bed-plate; and the seventy-horse-power engine broke away from its shattered foundations, reared up in the air, smashed all connections and fastenings, and fell over on its side. And the Snark continued to stick between the ...
— The Cruise of the Snark • Jack London
... to the word, she put the helm up just as a flaw of wind came sweeping over the waves. The boat came round; the three sails, caught by the flaw, suddenly flew over, filled on the other side, and the Greyhound careened till she was half ...
— Hope and Have - or, Fanny Grant Among the Indians, A Story for Young People • Oliver Optic
... sea, and life, for those at home, became a joy without a flaw—except the thought that he would sometime come ...
— A Maid of the Silver Sea • John Oxenham
... senses. Yet, if that evidence be wanting in certainty, then, since no chain can be stronger than its weakest point, inferences are doubly uncertain; first, because they are drawn from facts reported by sense, and, secondly, because a flaw in the ...
— Across the Zodiac • Percy Greg
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