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More "Offhand" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... offhand fashion as he took off his overcoat. "Hello, Jeff! Thought I'd look you up. Got settled in your diggings, eh?" Before his host could answer he rattled on: "Just ran in for a moment. Had the devil of a time to find you. What's the object in getting ...
— The Vision Spendid • William MacLeod Raine
... for instance, expect to see the capitalists, paralyzed by the most 'general' of general strikes surrender their property offhand to the victorious proletariat in despair of being able to operate it themselves. Much as we would like to see the working class march in and take possession of the abandoned factories and workshops in this manner, and commence operations under their collective ownership, the vision can only remain ...
— Socialism As It Is - A Survey of The World-Wide Revolutionary Movement • William English Walling
... startled at the question, lightly as it was put. She felt that it was scarcely a problem that could be settled offhand. And yet something in Priscilla's manner seemed to indicate that she wanted a ...
— The Swindler and Other Stories • Ethel M. Dell
... But from this admitted fact to the inference that it is "affection" that makes the husband defend his wife, there is a tremendous logical skip not warranted by the situation. Instead of making such an assumption offhand, the scientific method requires us to ask if there is not some other way of accounting for the facts more in accordance with the selfish disposition and habits of savages. The solution of the problem is easily found. A savage's wife ...
— Primitive Love and Love-Stories • Henry Theophilus Finck
... Whitey restrained his impatience until breakfast-time, then strolled down to the bunk house, wearing the boots. Several of the men were there, just finishing the meal, and rolling their after-breakfast cigarettes. Whitey sat down, sort of offhand and careless-like, and to his pained surprise, no one noticed the boots. Then he crossed his legs and leaned back, with his hands clasped behind his ...
— Injun and Whitey to the Rescue • William S. Hart
... replied with such offhand promptitude that I was certain the answer would have been the same had I asked him if he ...
— From a Bench in Our Square • Samuel Hopkins Adams
... wilderness, seven weeks that Thayer had voluntarily kept himself under the daily and hourly strain of constant intimate association with the woman he loved, of knowing that she gained strength and courage from her reliance upon him, and of forcing himself to treat her with an offhand good-fellowship which defied analysis for the mere reason that it ...
— The Dominant Strain • Anna Chapin Ray
... and was returned a few years ago a finished product, sublime, though a little terrifying to look at, and reeking with knowledge of one kind or another. I have heard it said that DeLancey can tell offhand what has been the correct thing in dress for each of the last thirty-five years, and that he can handle as many as fifteen articles of cutlery and forkery at a dinner ...
— Homeburg Memories • George Helgesen Fitch
... he must be as much as a week old," hazarded Adam, in an offhand tone. "They are never born with teeth, are they, unless they are going to be Richard the Thirds, ...
— The Green Satin Gown • Laura E. Richards
... round the bushes came the tall form of Alexander Roddice, striding romantically like a Meredith hero who remembers Disraeli. He was cordial with everybody, he was at once a host, with an easy, offhand hospitality that he had learned for Hermione's friends. He had just come down from London, from the House. At once the atmosphere of the House of Commons made itself felt over the lawn: the Home Secretary had said such and such a thing, and he, Roddice, on the other hand, thought such ...
— Women in Love • D. H. Lawrence
... he would come over to my bungalow in a friendly way; he would "just drop in," as he used to say, in his pleasant offhand fashion, and he would irrigate himself with my brandy and soda, amid genial smiles and a brandishing of his long cheroot, playfully indicating his recognition of a stimulant with which ...
— Twenty-One Days in India; and, the Teapot Series • George Robert Aberigh-Mackay
... to enter the laundry and pass over his parcel, as though it were his week's washing. He would be gone before they had discovered its contents. He merely needed to be offhand and nonchalant. More than once he had seen dilapidated actors carrying a limited wardrobe to the laundry at equally small hours of the night. And the sloe-eyed iron-thumpers would never ...
— Stories from Everybody's Magazine • 1910 issues of Everybody's Magazine
... men were talking, Mrs. Lincoln entered the room. She was, of course, greatly embarrassed at Mr. Lincoln's offhand manner of entertaining his caller, and, stepping up behind her husband, she grasped him by the hair and twitched his head about, at the same time looking ...
— The Lincoln Story Book • Henry L. Williams
... Norton. "Offhand, I can't seem to recall much about the fellow, although some one else might have known him ...
— The Gold of the Gods • Arthur B. Reeve
... to answer such a question positively, offhand, but I don't, on the spur of the moment, recall any supposition of ...
— The Beetle - A Mystery • Richard Marsh
... the universal envy of comrades, and unspoiled in teeth by the parental sugar-plums. People of older growth attach childish importance to the trade one plies. Nobs and nabobs (at least on the stage) disinherit daughters offhand for marrying grocers, and groan over sons who take to high art. The smug and prudent citizen shudders at the career of the filibuster, while the adventurer would commit suicide rather than achieve a modest livelihood in tape and needles. The mother of Sainte Beuve was ...
— The Galaxy - Vol. 23, No. 1 • Various
... expectations the Chia consort had expressed her desire that no more than a single stanza should be written on each tablet, so that unable, after all, to disregard her directions by writing anything in excess, she had no help but to compose a pentameter stanza, in an offhand way, merely with the intent of complying with ...
— Hung Lou Meng, Book I • Cao Xueqin
... make her an offer for the ranch—for yourself, you understand. She doesn't know you, and she may have become tired of mooning around here by now, and there's just a chance that she'll take you—that is, if you handle the cards right. No eagerness, you understand—just sort of offhand and careless, as if you didn't care much whether she took ...
— The Outdoor Girls in the Saddle - Or, The Girl Miner of Gold Run • Laura Lee Hope
... I see in it at all, ma'am. 'Tis a dale liker they just couldn't get out wid it convanient offhand. The same way that I'd aisy enough bate out a shoe on me anvil there, when it's bothered I'd be if you axed me to make a one promiscuous here of a suddint ...
— Strangers at Lisconnel • Barlow Jane
... was as innocent as he himself. And for the fraction of a second he was half-minded to tell all he knew to Fullaway there and then—and it was only by a still stronger effort of will that he restrained his tongue, determined to keep a stricter silence than ever, and replied to the American in an offhand, casual tone. ...
— The Rayner-Slade Amalgamation • J. S. Fletcher
... his Majesty the Sun of the tropics is not to be claimed offhand. The imperious luminary does not grant his letters-patent to all. Very few does he permit to wanton in his presence without exacting probation. He is a rare respecter of persons. Though there are faces, like King Henry V.'s, which the sun will not condescend to burn, sometimes ...
— My Tropic Isle • E J Banfield
... coat, he took a compact roll of bank-bills from a drawer in the desk and gave it to Gryson, saying tersely: "That isn't a bribe, you understand; it's merely to help you make your getaway. Can you manage to ride on Transcontinental trains without being recognized offhand?" ...
— The Honorable Senator Sage-Brush • Francis Lynde
... Mrs. Barton,' he said, stammering, speaking like one in a dream, 'you take me by surprise. I did not expect this; you certainly are too kind. In proposing this marriage to me, you do me an honour I did not anticipate, but you know it is difficult offhand, for I am bound to say . . . at least I am not prepared to say that I am in love with your daughter. . . . She is, of course, very beautiful, and no one admires her ...
— Muslin • George Moore
... movement it has no importance. Only when that is done is it imbued with life. But how among countless suggestions is a "cause" to know the difference between a true invention and a pipe-dream? There is, of course, no infallible touchstone by which we can tell offhand. No one need hope for an easy certainty either here or anywhere else in human affairs. No one is absolved from experiment and constant revision. Yet there are some hypotheses that prima facie deserve more ...
— A Preface to Politics • Walter Lippmann
... few of her own tribe, appears upon the scene. Probably it has been already ascertained that the male relatives have gone on a hunting or fishing expedition, but to make assurance doubly sure one or two of the party advance toward the women unarmed and make inquiries hi an offhand way. If the absence of the male relatives is confirmed, they thereupon seize the girl, and their companions rush out in full panoply from their hiding places and carry off the fair prize. By the time the girl's relatives become aware of the occurrence, the ...
— The Manbos of Mindano - Memoirs of the National Academy of Sciences, Volume XXIII, First Memoir • John M. Garvan
... as carefully as one generally watches men who dispose of one's future. A slouching, slender figure; a head like a wise macaw; a beaked nose; shaggy eyebrows; unorderly hair and clothes; hoarse voice; offhand manner; free talk, and perpetual cigar, offered a new type — of western New York — to fathom; a type in one way simple because it was only double — political and personal; but complex because the political had become nature, and ...
— The Education of Henry Adams • Henry Adams
... no preferred verse or meter, but leaves the poet free to choose or invent appropriate forms. In this species of verse Arnold was not wholly at ease. As has been said, one searches in vain through the whole course of his poetry for a blithe, musical, gay or serious, offhand poem, the true lyric kind. The reason for this is soon discovered. Obviously, it lies in the fundamental qualities of the poet's mind and temperament. Though by no means lacking in emotional sensibility, ...
— Matthew Arnold's Sohrab and Rustum and Other Poems • Matthew Arnold
... "I dunno 's I could say, right offhand, what trail yuh mean," he parried. "Every canyon 's got a trail that runs up a ways, and there's canyons all through the mountains; they all lead up to water, or feed, or something like that, and then quit, ...
— Cow-Country • B. M. Bower
... been a remarkable achievement if he had planned to do so and had learned up his speech; but the fact was that he was compelled to speak offhand on the spur of the moment. He describes the situation in a letter of February 6, ...
— The Life and Letters of Thomas Henry Huxley Volume 2 • Leonard Huxley
... wrote some lines, which I enclose to you, as I think they have a good deal of poetic merit; and Miss Nimmo tells me that you are not only a critic but a poetess. Fiction, you know, is the native region of poetry; and I hope you will pardon my vanity in sending you the bagatelle as a tolerable offhand jeu d'esprit. I have several poetic trifles, which I shall gladly leave with Miss Nimmo or you, if they were worth house-room; as there are scarcely two people on earth by whom it would mortify me more to ...
— Robert Burns - How To Know Him • William Allan Neilson
... Offhand as the words were, there was unmistakable satisfaction, happiness, even triumph in his voice, and he returned Aleck's hand-clasp with a vise-like grip. His masculinity ignored Agatha, or pretended to; but she had followed him to the door. As the old man clasped hands with Aleck, ...
— The Stolen Singer • Martha Idell Fletcher Bellinger
... strike one blow on the metal and drop the hammer because it jarred his fingers, argues sloth, not the "artistic temperament." Oh, mon ami, that "artistic temperament." "Is this all? Up again!" If you are discouraged I can only suggest a course of reading in the lives of dramatists. I recall a few offhand—Lessing, Moliere, Scribe, Wagner, Ibsen, these will suffice. When did they stop and fold their hands in despair? As for the Elizabethan and Restoration playwrights, their facility of invention, their ...
— An Ocean Tramp • William McFee
... modern times. Van Helmont, a celebrated alchemist physician who flourished during the brilliant reign of Louis XIV, wrote: "The smells which arise from the bottom of morasses produce frogs, slugs, leeches, grasses, and other things." As a recipe for producing a pot of mice offhand, he says that the only thing necessary is partly to fill a vessel with corn and plug up the mouth of the vessel with an old dirty shirt. In about twenty-one days, the ferment arising from the dirty shirt reacting with the odor from the corn will effect the ...
— Q. E. D., or New Light on the Doctrine of Creation • George McCready Price
... the room with a proprietary air. He threw in the casual "Lola" as if he owned her. Dale is the most delightful specimen of the modern youth of my acquaintance. But even Dale, with all his frank charm of manner, has the modern youth's offhand way with women. I often wonder how women abide it. But they do, more shame to them, and suffer more than they realise by their indulgence. When next I meet Maisie Ellerton I will read her a wholesome lecture, for her soul's good, on the proper ...
— Simon the Jester • William J. Locke
... returned the other superciliously. While willing to aid in a good work, he did not in the least approve either of the Unspeakable Perk or of his offhand manners. ...
— The Unspeakable Perk • Samuel Hopkins Adams
... eyes; she talked with a savouring vivacity. She never seemed tired or bored. She was, in one hackneyed word, attractive. And Vaness, the connoisseur, was quite obviously attracted. Of men who professionally admire beauty one can never tell offhand whether they definitely design to add a pretty woman to their collection, or whether their dalliance is just matter of habit. But he stood and sat about her, he drove and rode, listened to music, and played cards with her; he did all but dance with her, and even at times ...
— The Best British Short Stories of 1922 • Edward J. O'Brien and John Cournos, editors
... an absolutely wanton slander, were not a certain excuse to be found in the linguistic affinities of the word 'pragmatism,' and in certain offhand habits of speech of ours which assumed too great a generosity on our reader's part. When we spoke of the meaning of ideas consisting "in their 'practical' consequences", or of the 'practical' differences which our beliefs make to us; when we said that the truth of ...
— The Meaning of Truth • William James
... unnatural manner of the princess who—she thought—was making a favor of receiving her, and so everything displeased her. She did not like Princess Mary, whom she thought very plain, affected, and dry. Natasha suddenly shrank into herself and involuntarily assumed an offhand air which alienated Princess Mary still more. After five minutes of irksome, constrained conversation, they heard the sound of slippered feet rapidly approaching. ...
— War and Peace • Leo Tolstoy
... or experience; the born organizers came naturally to the front, and Garfield was one of them. Indeed, the faculty for organization seems innate in the American people, so that when it became necessary to raise and equip so large a body of men at a few weeks' notice, the task was undertaken offhand by lawyers, doctors, shopkeepers, and schoolmasters, without a minute's hesitation, and was performed on the whole with ...
— Biographies of Working Men • Grant Allen
... days such a drug is renown, We've "Immortals" as rife as M.P.s about town; And not a Blue's rout but can offhand supply Some invalid bard who's insured "not to die." Still let England but once try our authors, she'll find How fast they'll leave even these Immortals behind; And how truly the toils of Alcides were light, Compared with his toil who can ...
— The Complete Poems of Sir Thomas Moore • Thomas Moore et al
... move, slow to take in changed conditions, always two generations, at least, behind his authors. Consequently, this sudden development of capacity on the part of the poet is liable to take him unprepared, and the mere apparition of a poet who can add up a pounds shillings and pence column offhand might well induce apoplexy. Yet it is to be feared that that providence which arms every evil thing with its fang has so protected the publisher with an instinctive dread of verse in any form, and especially in manuscript, that he has, ...
— Prose Fancies • Richard Le Gallienne
... unresponsive, shy, she would sometimes raise her eyes from her book in school and find him gazing steadily at her like a timid deer drinking thirstily at a spring. Nancy did not like Cyril, but she pitied him and was as friendly with him, in her offhand, boyish fashion, as ...
— Mother Carey's Chickens • Kate Douglas Wiggin
... attached to the deep structures, and when it is so moved it is not tender or sore. Any little lump which ulcerates located on the genitals must be regarded with suspicion. Boys and men should not be satisfied with any offhand statement that, "it is nothing." It may be a chancre, and it may be exceedingly serious if not ...
— The Eugenic Marriage, Vol 2 (of 4) - A Personal Guide to the New Science of Better Living and Better Babies • W. Grant Hague
... showing me any preference. In six months he returned, and whether it was that he was told of by others, or at last perceived, my feelings towards him, he joined the crowd of suitors, made a proposal in his offhand manner, as if he was indifferent as to my reply, and was accepted. My father, to whom he communicated the intelligence as carelessly as if he were talking about freight, did not approve of the match. 'Very well,' replied he, 'I shall say no more; as long as a man has a ship he does ...
— Poor Jack • Frederick Marryat
... Hunsicker, one of last season's debutantes. Given to tennis and all outdoor sports generally. Offhand but stanch. It was she who gave a woman's care to Mrs. Taylor when the latter fainted ...
— The Mystery of the Hasty Arrow • Anna Katharine Green
... one day back in April, as I'm drivin' home from the station with Sadie, who should step to the curb and hold me up but Mr. Bayne. Does it offhand, friendly, mind you. Course I stops sudden. Sadie bows and smiles. I lifts my lid. Mr. Bayne holds his square-topped derby against his white shirt front. We shakes hands cordial. And I'm most gaspin' ...
— Shorty McCabe on the Job • Sewell Ford
... as one who in his day did very much, though quietly, to train the growth of English verse; and proved himself, in everything he wrote, an artist to the bottom of his conscience. As certainly as Spenser, he was a "poet's poet" while he lived. A couple of pages might be filled almost offhand with the genuine compliments of his contemporaries, and he will probably remain a "poet's poet" as long as poets write in English. But the average reader of culture—the person who is honestly moved by good poetry and goes from time to time to his bookshelves ...
— Adventures in Criticism • Sir Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch
... could I see the bear until he was upon me. The range was too short; and the bear wouldn't wait for me to examine the thermometer, and note the direction of the wind. Trial of the Creedmoor method, therefore, had to be abandoned; and I bitterly regretted that I had not read more accounts of offhand shooting. ...
— Baddeck and That Sort of Thing • Charles Dudley Warner
... everybody was afraid of Mr. Osborne, and Mr. Osborne was afraid of Georgy. The boy's dashing manners, and offhand rattle about books and learning, his likeness to his father (dead unreconciled in Brussels yonder) awed the old gentleman and gave the young boy the mastery. The old man would start at some hereditary feature or tone unconsciously used by the little lad, and ...
— Vanity Fair • William Makepeace Thackeray
... Sir Reginald; "and it is a somewhat difficult question to answer: very much too difficult to answer offhand. We want ...
— With Airship and Submarine - A Tale of Adventure • Harry Collingwood
... Prohack ought to have been resuming his ill-remunerated financial toil for the nation at the Treasury, Bishop suggested in his offhand murmuring style that they might pay a visit to the City solicitor who was acting in England for him and the Angmering estate. Mr. Prohack opposingly suggested that national ...
— Mr. Prohack • E. Arnold Bennett
... which wanted airing, and was not in good order for rifles: in the evening, however, they were drawn out to show the gentlemen of the town their dexterity in shooting. A clap board with a mark the size of a dollar was put up; they began to fire offhand, and the bystanders were surprised. Few shots were made that were not close to, or into, the paper. When they had shot some time in this way, some lay on their backs, some on their breasts or sides, others ran twenty or thirty steps, and, firing as they ran, ...
— American Prisoners of the Revolution • Danske Dandridge
... most interesting residents of the precinct. I had even seen him more than once on the avenue, but I had never before been brought face to face with him, and consequently had much too superficial a knowledge of his countenance to determine offhand whether the uneasy light in his small gray eyes was natural to them, or simply the result of present excitement. But when he began to talk I detected an unmistakable tremor in his tones, and decided that he was in a state of suppressed agitation; though he appeared to have nothing more ...
— The Filigree Ball • Anna Katharine Green
... Here the Pieris surpasses us. She does not consult the seed-vessel, to see if it be long or short, nor yet the petals, four in number and arranged in a cross, because the plant, as a rule, is not in flower; and still she recognizes offhand what suits her caterpillars, in spite of profound differences that would embarrass ...
— The Wonders of Instinct • J. H. Fabre
... eye to understand Those friends offhand Whose mode was crude, though whose dim purport Outpriced the courtesies of ...
— Moments of Vision • Thomas Hardy
... being, for the greater the tension between reality and the vision of the soul, the greater is the task and the more gigantic the creative power which such a task may develop. It has been said that, in this scene, Goethe revealed leanings towards Catholicism. I do not pretend to deny it offhand, but I must insist on these leanings being understood in the sense of my premises. Goethe took from tradition those elements which were able to materialise his spiritual life and gave them a new interpretation. ...
— The Evolution of Love • Emil Lucka
... and began to dress as quickly as I could; but the more I thought of it, the more I felt that I hadn't been fairly treated, to be disposed of in such an offhand way. After all, I am eighteen; and a person of eighteen isn't ...
— Lady Betty Across the Water • Charles Norris Williamson and Alice Muriel Williamson
... at this insolent and offhand definition. He was astonished and hurt at the tone of his friend. However, presently, he resolved to go through with it, and ...
— Tom Brown at Oxford • Thomas Hughes
... related to him that he had dreamt he was Archbishop of Cambrai! The Regent, who smelt the rat, turned on his heel, and said nothing. Dubois, more and more embarrassed, stammered, and paraphrased his dream; then, re-assuring himself by an effort, asked, in an offhand manner, why he should not obtain it, His Royal Highness, by his will alone, being able ...
— Marguerite de Navarre - Memoirs of Marguerite de Valois Queen of Navarre • Marguerite de Navarre
... it was the Bona Nova in the November of 1619,—for the first Musgrave had settled in Virginia, prior to his removal to Lichfield,—which had the honor of transporting the forebear of this family into America. Stapylton could have told you offhand which scions of the race had represented this or that particular county in the House of Burgesses, and even for what years; which three of them were Governors, and which of them had served as officers of the State ...
— The Rivet in Grandfather's Neck - A Comedy of Limitations • James Branch Cabell
... them; such can be purchased outside any cutcherry in India for a few rupees. The men were convicted. Some were given a choice between execution and service in the Nawab's army; others were sentenced offhand to a term of imprisonment, and these considered themselves lucky in escaping with their lives. In vain they protested their innocence and pleaded that a messenger might be sent to Calcutta; the Nawab was known to be so ...
— In Clive's Command - A Story of the Fight for India • Herbert Strang
... which, in the management of the affairs of the world, obliges one to consider possible ramifications of every great enterprise. Rhodes wanted simply to sweep away all obstacles without giving the slightest thought to the consequences likely to follow on so offhand a manner of getting rid ...
— Cecil Rhodes - Man and Empire-Maker • Princess Catherine Radziwill
... I know is also the most beautiful," he replied. "Yes, I can name her offhand. She has all the finesse of her sex, together with the reasoning mind; she is surpassingly good to look at, and knows how to use her looks to obtain her end; as the occasion demands, she can be as cold as steel or warm as a summer's ...
— The Cab of the Sleeping Horse • John Reed Scott
... of the rear sight will necessitate a corresponding change in the position of the soldier's head when aiming, the exercise should not be held with the sight adjusted for the longer ranges until the men have been practiced with the sights as the latter would generally be employed for offhand firing. ...
— Manual of Military Training - Second, Revised Edition • James A. Moss
... the picturesque scenery and traditions of his own native land, the scandals of the court and the cloister, the petty struggle for the primacy of Wales, and the great tragedy of the fall of the Angevin Empire - is all alike dealt with in the bold, dashing, offhand style of a modern newspaper or magazine article. His first important work, the 'Topography of Ireland,' is, with due allowance for the difference between the tastes of the twelfth century and those of the nineteenth, just such a series of sketches as a special ...
— The Itinerary of Archibishop Baldwin through Wales • Giraldus Cambrensis
... to the matter under discussion," said the Attorney. "One cannot affirm offhand that we are floating on the battered hull. One must not forget to take the young Norway ...
— Shallow Soil • Knut Hamsun
... and the other States would still maintain their cohesion when they were no longer fighting units, and when the motives of conquest and defence were no longer in operation, is a question on which I should not like to dogmatize either way. Certainly we have no right to assume offhand that the unifying process which has given the nations the mass cohesion and efficiency they require for holding their own against enemy States would still remain in full power when there were no longer any enemy ...
— Progress and History • Various
... Bert. "I never heard any one say 'factor' offhand like that. It's one of the words I've always held sacred to special topics and theses ...
— The Wide Awake Girls in Winsted • Katharine Ellis Barrett
... understand the same thing by "self-evident,'' so that what is self-evident to one is far from so to the other. This difference becomes especially clear when a lawyer examines professional people who can imagine offhand what is in no sense self-evident to persons in other walks of life. I might cite out of my own experience, that the physicist Boltzmann, one of the foremost of living mathematicians, was told once upon a time that his ...
— Robin Hood • J. Walker McSpadden
... of the American mind is admirably illustrated by that "Father of all the Yankees," Benjamin Franklin. No student of Franklin's life fails to be impressed by its happy casualness, its cheerful flavor of the rogue-romance. Gil Blas himself never drifted into and out of an adventure with a more offhand and imperturbable adroitness. Franklin went through life with the joyous inventiveness of the amateur. He had the amateur's enthusiasm, coupled with a clairvoyant penetration into technical problems such as few amateurs have possessed. With all of his wonderful patience ...
— The American Mind - The E. T. Earl Lectures • Bliss Perry
... of the genesis of homosexuality put forward by Freud need not be dismissed offhand. Freud has often manifested the insight of genius, and he refrains from molding his conceptions in those inflexible shapes which have sometimes been adopted by the more dogmatic psychoanalysts who have followed him. Nor need we be unduly shocked by the "incestuous" ...
— Studies in the Psychology of Sex, Volume 2 (of 6) • Havelock Ellis
... become almost embarrassing. One day she announced she wanted me to marry one of her brothers-in-law. "I got two nice ones and we'll go out some Sunday afternoon and you can have your pick. One's a piano tuner; the other's a detective." I thought offhand the piano tuner sounded a bit more domestic. He ...
— Working With the Working Woman • Cornelia Stratton Parker
... golf course mystery. Jack had obeyed the colonel's instructions to the letter. He had played many rounds on the links and had gotten to a certain degree of friendship with Jean Forette. He had even formed a liking for Bruce Garrigan, who, offhand, informed him that the amount of India ink used in tattooing sailors during the past year was less by fifteen hundred ounces than the total output of radium salts for 1916, while the wheat crop of Minnesota for the same period was ...
— The Golf Course Mystery • Chester K. Steele
... the football team, was to make a few grief-saturated remarks. So was Perkins. Every one was confidently expecting Perkins to make the effort of his life and swamp the chapel in sorrow. He was in the secret and he afterward said that he would rather try to write a Shakespearean tragedy offhand than to write another funeral oration about a man who he knew was at that moment sitting in a pair of pajamas in an upper room half a mile away ...
— At Good Old Siwash • George Fitch
... say offhand. We'd have to figure that. That's another reason for filling the boat up, though. The more we have the less everyone's share of the expense ...
— The Adventure Club Afloat • Ralph Henry Barbour
... from two till three o'clock, he was at Master Gyles's private singing-room at the old cathedral school, learning to read music at first sight, and to sing offhand the second, third, and fourth parts of queer intermingled fugues or ...
— Master Skylark • John Bennett
... Farrell must be very rich," I said. "I wonder," I asked, "if I could sell him an automobile?" The moment I spoke I noticed that the manner of Miss Briggs toward Me perceptibly softened. Perhaps, from my buying offhand a fifty-dollar book she had thought me one of the rich, and had begun to suspect I was keeping her waiting on me only because I found her extremely easy to look at. Many times before, in a similar manner, other youths must have imposed upon her, and ...
— The Log of The "Jolly Polly" • Richard Harding Davis
... come into the room with a laugh when we go back, and say, in an offhand way, "By the way, Agnes, Willis and I made a remarkable discovery in my dressing-room; we found my watch there on the bureau. Ha, ha, ha!" Do you think you ...
— The Garotters • William D. Howells
... two ladies, he again appeared. Between two violent blushes, and with an air which would have been light and offhand if it could, Mr. Ransome presented to his friend, the foreman, his mother—and Miss Usher. And as if the foreman had not sufficiently divined her, Miss Usher's averted shoulders, burning cheeks, and lowered eyelids made it impossible for him to forget that ...
— The Combined Maze • May Sinclair
... of Utopia would of course contain a few surprises for two men from terrestrial England. You imagine us entering, the botanist lagging a little behind me, and my first attempts to be offhand and commonplace in a ...
— A Modern Utopia • H. G. Wells
... at first sight, from the young man's outer aspect, the nature of his occupation. The gross and clumsy male intellect, which works in accordance with the stupid laws of inductive logic, has a queer habit of requiring something or other, in the way of definite evidence, before it commits itself offhand to the distinct conclusion. But Elma Clifford was a woman; and therefore she knew a more excellent way. HER habit was, rather to look things once fairly and squarely in the face, and then, with the unerring intuition of her sex, to make up her mind ...
— What's Bred In the Bone • Grant Allen
... to go further than this and to give offhand a definition of humor, or of that elusive quality, a sense of humor, he might find himself confronted with a difficulty. Yet certain things about it would be patent at the outset: Women haven't it; Englishmen ...
— Toaster's Handbook - Jokes, Stories, and Quotations • Peggy Edmund & Harold W. Williams, compilers
... Their sea-boots, I have no doubt, would have protected their feet and rendered carpet-tacks harmless. Paddling clumsily, they passed down the strait at a distance of a hundred yards from the sloop, in an offhand manner and as if bound to Fortescue Bay. This I judged to be a piece of strategy, and so kept a sharp lookout over a small island which soon came in range between them and the sloop, completely hiding them from view, and toward which the Spray was now drifting helplessly with ...
— Sailing Alone Around The World • Joshua Slocum
... people from New York down East," he said in an offhand manner, as if, after all, a man might meet a New Yorker and still not ...
— In the Midst of Alarms • Robert Barr
... Stedman, in a modest, offhand way. "I made it out of hollow bamboo reeds connected with a spring. And now I'm making one for the King. He saw this and had a lot of bamboo sticks put up all over the town, without any underground connections, and couldn't make out why the ...
— The Exiles and Other Stories • Richard Harding Davis
... for the very best woman I shall ever have the chance of marrying. Shall I tell you the sort of woman my mother would like me to marry? Oh, I know the sort! First, she must be tall and handsome, with red, fashionable hair, and cool, offhand manners. She must never look shy or put out, or as if she did not know what to say. On the contrary, she must know who's who, and what's what, and never wear a dowdy bonnet, but always a stunning hat. And she must have a father who can give her something ...
— Far Above Rubies • George MacDonald
... apparently inexhaustible. It is continually bringing forth things new and old, and often it happens that the newest are the oldest of all. Whether this or the exact converse is the case in regard to the latest discovery of Biblical archaeology is a question not to be determined offhand; but the interest and importance of the question can hardly be overrated. There are now deposited in the British Museum fifteen leather slips, on the forty folds of which are written portions of the Book of Deuteronomy in a recension entirely different from that of ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 401, September 8, 1883 • Various
... drew forth our hero's regard by nursing him with almost womanly tenderness during a three-days' severe illness at the beginning of the journey. Thereafter Tom gained his affection by repeated little acts of kindness, done in a quiet, offhand, careless way, as though he had pleasure in being kind, and did not care much whether the kindness were appreciated or not. He also excited his admiration by the imperturbable coolness and smiling good-humour with which he received every event in life; ...
— Hunting the Lions • R.M. Ballantyne
... but he could not move her. At last he gave it up and turned her over for the day's inquest to an old hand at tricks and traps and deceptive plausibilities—Beaupere, a doctor of theology. Now notice the form of this sleek strategist's first remark—flung out in an easy, offhand way that would have thrown any unwatchful ...
— Personal Recollections of Joan of Arc Volume 2 • Mark Twain
... intimacy with the works of all the great composers. Bill Opus and Jeremiah Fugue have no secrets from him—none whatever—and in conversation he creates the impression that old Issy Sonata was his first cousin. He can tell you offhand which one of the Shuberts—Lee or Jake—wrote that Serenade. He speaks of Mozart and Beethoven in such a way a stranger would probably get the idea that Mote and Bate used to work for his folks. He can go to a musical show, and while the performance is going ...
— Cobb's Bill-of-Fare • Irvin Shrewsbury Cobb
... bowed his sleek, yellow head and muttered a formal blessing with an offhand manner, as if it were a mere ceremony. Bud stared contemptuously at him the while, and Cap uttered a low rumble as of a distant growl. Margaret felt a sudden desire to laugh, and tried to control herself, wondering what her father would feel ...
— A Voice in the Wilderness • Grace Livingston Hill
... Pontine Marshses had an interest for him which was greater than any that might be created by the magnificent prowess and indomitable pluck that had been exhibited on that occasion by the modest narrator. Beneath the careless and offhand recital of Obed Lord Chetwynde was able to perceive the full extent of the danger to which he had been exposed, and from which his own cool courage had saved him. An ordinary man, under such circumstances, would have basely yielded; or, if the presence of his family had inspired him with ...
— The Cryptogram - A Novel • James De Mille
... on the northern edge of the southern range of the North American malaria belt; and when I was growing up, if one seemed intellectually torpid or became filled with an overpowering bodily languor, the indisposition always was diagnosed offhand as a touch of malaria. Accordingly, the victim, taking his own advice or another's, jolted his liver with calomel until the poor thing flinched every time a strange pill was seen approaching it, and then he rounded out the course of treatment with all the ...
— One Third Off • Irvin S. Cobb
... bigger brass buttons, and a blue cap with a brass button on either side—each brass button, on coat, cap, and vest, having an anchor of, (apparently), burnished gold in the centre of it. He had clear blue eyes, brown curly hair, and an easy, offhand swagger, which last was the result of a sea-faring life and example; but he had a kindly and happy, rather than a boastful or self-satisfied, expression of face, as he bowled along with his hands in his pockets, kicking all the stones ...
— Freaks on the Fells - Three Months' Rustication • R.M. Ballantyne
... those smaller mines, Mr. Potash," he explained, "which sometimes get to be phenomenal profit-makers. Of course, I can't tell you offhand what the value of the stock is, but I'll make inquiries at once. The inside market at present is very strong, ...
— Potash & Perlmutter - Their Copartnership Ventures and Adventures • Montague Glass
... His offhand manner covered a good deal of irritation. He made a shrewd guess at the idea in Fontenoy's mind, and meant to show that he would ...
— Sir George Tressady, Vol. I • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... expect me to answer offhand so momentous a question as that, do you? It is all very well, of course, for you, who have given the matter much careful thought, to feel so confident as you do that your plans are capable of realisation, ...
— A Middy of the King - A Romance of the Old British Navy • Harry Collingwood
... mainly inspired by a spirit of contradiction, and he was afraid of inciting her, by resistance, to say something she would be unable to retract. "I don't think you've given the matter sufficient thought," he said at last. "It can't be decided offhand." ...
— Maurice Guest • Henry Handel Richardson
... not, however, so far in advance of them but that the others could hear quite distinctly his offhand introduction of their party on the threshold, and the somewhat lukewarm response of the inmates. "We thought we'd just drop in and be sociable until the coach was ready to start again," he continued, as the other passengers entered. "This ...
— From Sand Hill to Pine • Bret Harte
... the deprivation, not merely of the good name, but of the skin of the offender. The adherents of modern theological systems dismiss these objects of the love and fear of a hundred generations of their equals, offhand, as "gods of the heathen," mere creations of a wicked and idolatrous imagination; and, along with them, they disown, as senseless, the crude theology, with its gross anthropomorphism and its low ethical conception of the ...
— Hasisadra's Adventure - Essay #7 from "Science and Hebrew Tradition" • Thomas Henry Huxley
... it far easier to quote instances offhand of friends who had missed their proper vocation in life than of those who were placed exactly in the position best suited to their taste and capacity. The failures in life are so obviously in excess of those who may be said to have succeeded that specific ...
— The Curse of Education • Harold E. Gorst
... addressed by Everybody in General, or by Nobody in Particular to Everybody Else, which took this form: "Where shall we dine to-day?" I forget what the answer was, but, as a rule, the domesticated man, with a good cook in his own kitchen, could answer it offhand by saying to himself, "'Where shall we dine to-day?' Why, at home, of course—where better?—and catch me moving out afterwards." But, if he were contemplating the unpleasant certainty of having post-prandially to leave his hearth and home in ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Volume 103, December 3, 1892 • Various
... often encountered the criticism that intelligence tests are superfluous, and that in going to so much trouble to devise his measuring scale he was forcing an open door. Those who made this criticism believed that the observant teacher or parent is able to make an offhand estimate of a child's intelligence which is accurate enough. "It is a stupid teacher," said one, "who needs a psychologist to tell her which pupils are not intelligent." Every one who uses intelligence tests meets this attitude from ...
— The Measurement of Intelligence • Lewis Madison Terman
... out his foolish blackguardism. I was all pity. I had not thought him great, but I had not suspected how small he was. His friends, the best, were confounded. One of them said to me the next day, 'It was not amazement that I felt, but consternation.' I spoke offhand and the report is horrible. Conkling's speech was carefully written out, and therefore you do not get all the venom, and no one can imagine the Mephistophelean leer ...
— A Political History of the State of New York, Volumes 1-3 • DeAlva Stanwood Alexander
... singing summer birds easily espied amongst the young leaves and sprouting brushwood; the long days and warm nights of June, when the wild rose is a beauty to be admired, and the distant masses of elder have a fine foamy appearance. These extracts settled Belinda offhand, and she and Lamia laid their heads together and read the book faithfully. They are good girls, spite of the names selected for them by a fanciful parent, and if they are not proud of those names, and prefer being called by their intimates Blind (with a short "i") and Lammy, there is, I hope, no ...
— Lines in Pleasant Places - Being the Aftermath of an Old Angler • William Senior
... that money is good for nothing? Because the eyes do not justify, would you have them taken out? Because the Law does not justify it does not follow that the Law is without value. We must find and define the proper purpose of the Law. We do not offhand condemn the Law because we say it ...
— Commentary on the Epistle to the Galatians • Martin Luther
... Perhaps the best offhand description of Washington in these later days is that given by an English actor, Bernard, who happened to be driving near Mount Vernon when a carriage containing a man and a woman was upset. Bernard dismounted to give help, and presently another rider came up and joined in the work. "He was a tall, ...
— George Washington • William Roscoe Thayer
... with an unqualified assent at the moment. For though Sally, as we have seen, had taken him into her confidence the day after her mother's wedding—and, indeed, had talked over the matter many times with him since—the actual truth was far too strange to suggest itself offhand, as it would have been doing had the doctor connected the fact that Sally's mother went out to India to be married with this meeting of two lovers at a simmering railway-station, name not known. The idea of the impossible per ...
— Somehow Good • William de Morgan
... seemed to suggest du Croisier's name in this predicament. He had seen du Croisier on his knees to the aristocracy, and of the man's real disposition he was entirely ignorant. So to du Croisier he wrote a very offhand letter, informing him that he had drawn a bill of exchange on him for ten thousand francs, adding that the amount would be repaid on receipt of the letter either by M. Chesnel or by Mlle. Armande d'Esgrignon. Then he indited two touching epistles—one ...
— The Collection of Antiquities • Honore de Balzac
... Mrs. Mencke began, throwing herself into a chair and trying to speak in an offhand way, "that another little trip would do us all good. Will has business that calls him to Canada, and he thinks he would like company on the journey; so we have decided to combine business and pleasure, ...
— His Heart's Queen • Mrs. Georgie Sheldon
... really remarkable to hear these three men, disguised as devils, discussing matters generally in such an offhand manner. ...
— Jack Harkaway and his son's Escape From the Brigand's of Greece • Bracebridge Hemyng
... demand to know what Dicky had written to me had been appeased by Lillian's offhand remark that country mails were never reliable, and that my letter would probably arrive later, the elder woman went to her own room to puzzle anew over her son's letter, which simply said over again what he had ...
— Revelations of a Wife - The Story of a Honeymoon • Adele Garrison
... know I could have played tragedy or real Italian opera. I had to work hard at first; and they wont fill my place, very readily: thats one comfort. My cleverness was my ruin. Ned was not half so quick. It used to take him months to learn things that I picked up offhand, and yet you see how much better ...
— The Irrational Knot - Being the Second Novel of His Nonage • George Bernard Shaw
... cleared away. But this aversion to the superannuated, which had become useless and soulless, extended much farther. He found society, and especially religious life, full of practices, ceremonies, traditions and conceptions, from which the spirit seemed to have departed. He does not reject them offhand and altogether: what revolts him is that they are so often performed without understanding and right feeling. But to his mind, highly susceptible to the foolish and ridiculous things, and with a delicate need of high decorum and inward dignity, ...
— Erasmus and the Age of Reformation • Johan Huizinga
... hadn't been able to think offhand of an objection; not one which he wanted to voice. He couldn't admit outright that the prospect was dismaying to his young pride. That he was afraid of the ridicule which certainly it would bring ...
— Winner Take All • Larry Evans
... who were not husband and wife, but respectively brother and sister of Dave's father and mother. Uncle Moses' name was Wardle, Aunt M'riar's that of a deceased or vanished husband. But Sapps Court was never prepared to say offhand what this name was, and "Aunt M'riar" was universal. So indeed was "Uncle Mo"; but, as No. 7 had been spoken of as "Wardle's" since his brother took the lower half of the house for himself and his first wife, with whom he had lived there fifteen years, the name Wardle ...
— When Ghost Meets Ghost • William Frend De Morgan
... long in suspense. A loud ring at the front door was followed by the sound of a heavy stalking tread. Mr Orlando Vivian entered the other parlour, whither Amos and his sister had retired, and saluted the former with an offhand, swaggering assumption of politeness. ...
— Amos Huntingdon • T.P. Wilson
... about sharks, envisioning huge jaws armed with multiple rows of teeth and capable of cutting a man in half. I could already feel a definite pain around my pelvic girdle. And how I resented the offhand manner in which the captain had extended his deplorable invitation! You would have thought it was an issue of going into the woods ...
— 20000 Leagues Under the Seas • Jules Verne
... Latin words and making the changes which regularly would have occurred, and when words failed, making signs, and in extreme cases drawing pictures of what he wanted. This versatility with the pencil, for many of his offhand sketches had humorous touches that almost carried them into the cartoon class, interested officers and passengers, so that the young student had the freedom of the ship and a voyage far ...
— Lineage, Life, and Labors of Jose Rizal, Philippine Patriot • Austin Craig
... not at what the price of it may become. There is no doubt that would be a more satisfactory way of dealing if it could be done but I don't see how it could be adopted, because no curer could offer to buy fish offhand at a price that ...
— Second Shetland Truck System Report • William Guthrie
... last two hours, she was prepared to hear Wayne tell her, in an offhand way, that it was Norrie Ford. Nevertheless, she summoned what was left of her stunned faculties and did her best ...
— The Wild Olive • Basil King
... valley is not to be fully explained offhand; as Griggs says, there are many problems to work out. The steam vents appear to be very recent. They did not exist when Spurr crossed the valley in 1898, and Martin heard nothing of them when he was in the near neighborhood ...
— The Book of the National Parks • Robert Sterling Yard
... see that this was a grave, constitutional, legal, and historical problem not to be solved offhand by vehement citations from Scripture, nor by pragmatical dissertations from the lips ...
— The Rise of the Dutch Republic, 1555-1566 • John Lothrop Motley
... "purest" and simplest forms, as well as in their most complicated forms. We cannot fairly talk of despotisms or of democracies as though they were absolutely distinct types of government to be contrasted offhand with each other or with other types. All depends for each despotism and each democracy and each other form of government on the given interests, their relations, and their methods of interaction. The interest groups create the government and ...
— Introduction to the Science of Sociology • Robert E. Park
... something in the quiet man that had effectually prevented any development of roughness in Norah. Boyish and offhand to a certain extent, the solid foundation of womanliness in her nature was never far below the surface. She was perfectly aware that while Daddy wanted a mate he also wanted a daughter; and there ...
— Mates at Billabong • Mary Grant Bruce
... abstruse authors as Descartes, Spinoza, Schopenhauer, Comte, Gumplowicz, some of them names she had never heard of and could not even spell without following her copy letter by letter. Holman Sommers seemed to have read all of them and to have weighed all of them and to be able to quote all of them offhand; whereas Schopenhauer was the only name in the lot that sounded in the least familiar to Helen May, and she had a guilty feeling that she had always connected the name with music instead of the sort of things Holman Sommers quoted ...
— Starr, of the Desert • B. M Bower
... man was released offhand; but he looked nothing the less sad on that account, it being beyond the power of magistrate or constable to rase out the written troubles in his brain, for they concerned another, whom he regarded with more solicitude than himself. When ...
— Stories by English Authors: England • Various
... Sergt. Kuzick of the first precinct, "offhand, I can't think of any stories for you. If you give me a little time, maybe I could think of one or two. What you want, I suppose, is some story as I know about from personal experience. Like the time, ...
— A Thousand and One Afternoons in Chicago • Ben Hecht
... seem to prove it? He knew Riley's lines, and wrote them down. I doubt if the greatest poet that ever lived scribbled lines like that, offhand." ...
— Patty Blossom • Carolyn Wells
... he chooses to," laughed Whitcomb, "but you'd better not let him know that I said so. He'll be more likely to give you information if you ask him offhand." ...
— At the Time Appointed • A. Maynard Barbour
... and a half, trying to suggest some alternative that didn't look so silly. Kindly get the facts well into your head, will you? The man must pursue Mary's affection either there or here, mustn't he? He can't do it there because his wife won't let him. In order to do it here, one would say offhand that Mary would have to be here, and since her mother declines to bring her, it does look to me as if the job would have to be done by somebody else. However, if my logic is wrong, kindly let ...
— Captivating Mary Carstairs • Henry Sydnor Harrison
... Terrified at the majesty of the law and its grand though incomprehensible wording, the young warned one burst into tears, which so worked upon the tender-hearted officer that he (being conveniently a widower) proposed to her offhand, was called in meeting, married her, and thus took her under his own and the town's protection. More than one case of "marriage at first sight" is recounted, of bold Puritan wooers riding up to the door of a fair one whom they had never seen, telling their story ...
— Customs and Fashions in Old New England • Alice Morse Earle
... foundations, and old Jane's announcements, combined with the captain's own actions in regard to the Port family, had almost convinced him that this miserable engagement was a fact. But, of course, he would not in any way intimate to the captain that he believed in such nonsense, and therefore, in an offhand manner, he mentioned Olive's absurd anxiety ...
— The Captain's Toll-Gate • Frank R. Stockton
... hold, and with his disengaged hand pointed successively to the constellation of Orion, to the stars Castor, Pollux, Aldebaran, Rigel, the Pleiades, Sirius and others which with my very limited knowledge I could not recognise offhand. Then on the plate which I held, he showed us those same stars and constellations, checking ...
— When the World Shook - Being an Account of the Great Adventure of Bastin, Bickley and Arbuthnot • H. Rider Haggard
... language more difficult to acquire than French; most of us can name worthy persons who have been assiduously struggling with it from childhood to mature age, and who do not know it now: yet it is treated as something any one can pick up offhand.... French staggers under the fearful burden of apparent easiness." I do not think these words overstate the case. All the more reason, then, to bear in mind that the burden of this accomplishment should not fall on the college ...
— College Teaching - Studies in Methods of Teaching in the College • Paul Klapper
... committee that he would give them a better railroad bill than they were asking. His practice was to commit to memory a bill that he was about to introduce and then go into his committee-room, when it was full of loafers, and pretend to dictate it offhand to the stenographer, section by section without pausing. It was an impressive performance, and gained Handy the reputation of being brainy. But we at home who knew Handy were not impressed; and, in our office, we knew that he was the same Ab Handy who once did business ...
— In Our Town • William Allen White
... system; that energy consists of two parts—the moon-energy and the earth's rotation energy. The problem therefore for us to consider is, which of these two banks the tides have drawn on to meet their constant expenditure. This is not a question that can be decided offhand; in fact, if we attempt to decide it in an offhand manner we shall certainly go wrong. It seems so very plausible to say that as the moon causes the tides, therefore the energy which these tides expend should be contributed by the ...
— Time and Tide - A Romance of the Moon • Robert S. (Robert Stawell) Ball
... should be able to form very exact ideas of just what he wants, and the doing so is, in my opinion, one of the most important requisites for satisfactory tomato growing. I also believe that it is as impossible for a man to answer offhand the question, "What is the best variety of tomato?" as for a wise physician to answer the question, "What is ...
— Tomato Culture: A Practical Treatise on the Tomato • William Warner Tracy
... and comes slowly down the stairs, giving some very audible and offhand orders in the hall respecting his particular belongings. A close observer might notice that he speaks and laughs a little too readily. The little, pale woman, sitting motionless in the room, hears him, and in her heart of hearts hears ...
— The Idler Magazine, Volume III, April 1893 - An Illustrated Monthly • Various
... seemed oblivious of his presence, and absolutely regardless of his wish. In truth, the texture of that salmon-coloured skin could be seen to be aristocratic without a microscope, and the exceptious artizan has an offhand way when contrasts are made painfully strong by an idler of this kind coming, gloved and brushed, into the very den where he is sweating and ...
— The Hand of Ethelberta • Thomas Hardy
... bodyservant, as it were. He shipped raw sugar from his plantation in boat-loads to the Southwark wharves in Philadelphia. Frank liked him because he took life in a hearty, jovial way, rather rough and offhand for this somewhat quiet ...
— The Financier • Theodore Dreiser
... Manderton, picking up his hat and speaking in an offhand way, "I'm getting that adjourned for ...
— The Yellow Streak • Williams, Valentine
... the deed. He wanted to lay it under some flowers in a basket, or slip it into her pocket, or send it to her with some eggs or something. But Mother—it was so like her!—the first time Cousin Parnelia happened to come to the house, Mother picked up the deed from her desk and said offhand, 'Oh, Parnelia, we bought the little Garens house for you,' and handed her the paper, and went to talking about ...
— The Bent Twig • Dorothy Canfield
... them out on the waggon. Then Mary began to hear (through James) of a buggy that some one had for sale cheap, or a dogcart that somebody else wanted to get rid of—and let me know about it, in an offhand way. ...
— Joe Wilson and His Mates • Henry Lawson
... country has been commonly thought of, and referred to by writers on the history of the West, as a "wilderness"; and offhand, one might suppose that the settlers were obliged literally to hew their way through densely grown vegetation to the spots which they selected for their homes. In point of fact, there were great areas of upland—not ...
— The Old Northwest - A Chronicle of the Ohio Valley and Beyond, Volume 19 In - The Chronicles Of America Series • Frederic Austin Ogg
... He told me three times before I took it off. He wouldn't have so much as a rag on me. 'What's this?' says he. 'A little trouble I had a year or so ago, with a gland that swelled,' says I. 'It had to be cut, and has been as right as rain ever since.' Just in that offhand way, Cicely. Quite brisk and cheerful. 'Tubercular, eh?' says he, very soft and thoughtful-like. And I knew it was ...
— A Sheaf of Corn • Mary E. Mann
... had taken off the 5.30 from Larne Harbour, or that the 7.30 from Galashiels was stopping that month at Shankend. He knew all the connections; he knew all the restaurant trains; and, if you mentioned the 6.15 to Little Buxton, he could tell you offhand whether it was a Saturdays Only ...
— Punch or the London Charivari, Vol. 158, March 24, 1920. • Various
... Benson having a second key of Glenthorpe's room. Many hotel-keepers and innkeepers keep duplicate keys of bedrooms. The significance of this discovery is that Benson kept silence about the existence of this key. Undoubtedly he should have told us about it, but I am not prepared to accept, offhand, that his silence was the silence of a guilty man. He may have kept silence regarding it through a foolish fear of directing suspicion to himself. That theory seems to me quite as probable as Mr. Colwyn's theory. There remains the recovery of the money in the ...
— The Shrieking Pit • Arthur J. Rees
... much less could he explain this sudden attack. Yet if the tall, lean man, serious and growing grey, represented one form of strength, the shorter, stouter man, with the mobile face and the quick brain, stood for another. Offhand he could think of no weak spot on his side; and if he ...
— The Wild Geese • Stanley John Weyman
... answer such questions as were put to me. The case was very rare where I was misrepresented, and then it was either unintentional or to brighten a story or to exaggerate a fact. I recall one interview in respect to courts of arbitration and the universal labor question. My opinions were expressed offhand, and, although not taken down at the time by the interviewer, my words uttered during a half hour's interview were quoted with great exactness. I know this is not the common opinion in respect to the interviewer, and in some cases gross misrepresentations are made, but ...
— Recollections of Forty Years in the House, Senate and Cabinet - An Autobiography. • John Sherman
... a few others, I have picked out from hundreds of atrocity tales which I heard during four months spent in England, Belgium, Germany, and Holland. It will serve as an example, not only because it has the earmarks of truth,—having been told in an offhand way merely as an explanation of the private's insanity,—but because it is typical of the kind of incident which in the telling is, nine times out of ten, twisted into ...
— The Log of a Noncombatant • Horace Green
... of the directors had been studying Bryce on ultra vires, and he went round to the Bar library to take advice from his friends there. Sir Charles Paul and Mr. Hill said offhand: But you agreed to pay, how can you get out of it? To this Mr. Tremearne (the director in question) replied: Yes, but it was an extortion, the Municipality is the creature of a statute, they have only statutory powers, and are not entitled to charge ...
— Recollections of Calcutta for over Half a Century • Montague Massey
... be answered offhand. Mr. Grey, advancing, laid a finger on the man's shoulder. "Come," said he, "we will have ...
— The Woman in the Alcove • Anna Katharine Green
... get a horse and ride to Manzanita to interview old Vanney and a couple of other big guys from the East. My first story's on the wire," explained the newcomer offhand. "I want some local-color stuff for my ...
— Success - A Novel • Samuel Hopkins Adams
... one were to ask me (which is highly unlikely) 'In what university would an intelligent young man do best to study?' I think I should be very much inclined indeed to answer offhand, 'In the Tropics.' ...
— Science in Arcady • Grant Allen
... was high time for Persis Dale to have a husband. His elation over all that was implied by her consulting him on so personal a matter, was almost lost in his feeling of annoyance. This made it plain that he must lose no time, but marry her offhand. What with her penchant for orphans and for foolish investments, she would make ducks and drakes of her fortune unless a man peremptorily ...
— Other People's Business - The Romantic Career of the Practical Miss Dale • Harriet L. Smith
... disseminator in the country than in town. A townsman picks up twenty letters, snatches the envelopes open, and casts them aside. The letters delivered in the country have marvellously multiplied, but still country people do not treat letters offhand. The arrival of a letter or two is still an event; it is read twice or three times, put in the pocket, and looked at again. Suburban residents receive circulars by every other post of every kind and description, and cast them contemptuously aside. In the country ...
— The Life of the Fields • Richard Jefferies
... asked whether I could remove the property in the time limit set. I informed the gentlemen that I could make my bid considerably higher if I was granted more time in which to remove the debris. President Francis asked me how much more I could bid, and I told him I could not state offhand. The conditions as to the removal of the wreckage in the specified time, namely, three months, were somewhat prohibitive, as it would be impossible to fulfill the requirements without an enormous expense. It would be well-nigh impossible to get sufficient ...
— Final Report of the Louisiana Purchase Exposition Commission • Louisiana Purchase Exposition Commission
... anybody I know," said the veteran, "and I can't, offhand, recall anybody whose initials are S.T. But Tim Mellick, who keeps the store over at Palmo, has paper bags of the same kind ...
— The Boy Ranchers in Death Valley - or Diamond X and the Poison Mystery • Willard F. Baker
... you, Polly!" said Bert. "I never heard any one say 'factor' offhand like that. It's one of the words I've always held sacred to special ...
— The Wide Awake Girls in Winsted • Katharine Ellis Barrett
... curiously calm, curiously cold, curiously detached from the scene. He regarded the other man.... This man was his father. His FATHER! The laws of life and of humanity demanded that he regard this man with veneration. Yet, offhand, without investigation, this man could jump to a vile conclusion regarding him. Not only that, but could accuse him, not of guilt, but of failing to conceal guilt!... Respectability! He knew he was watching a manifestation of the family tradition. It was wrong to commit an unworthy act, ...
— Youth Challenges • Clarence B Kelland
... conceive of a critic who in general and offhand looks upon the presentations of this book as the out-pourings of a fantasy run wild or as dreamy thought-pictures. Yet all that can be said in this respect is contained in the book itself, and it is explicitly shown that sane and earnest thought not only can but must be the touch-stone ...
— An Outline of Occult Science • Rudolf Steiner
... Luscombe would not yield an inch of his position. I can't say offhand how far history bears him out, but I fancy that he is right to this extent: the lower deck has less flexibility of mind. It cannot view a depressing situation from so many sides at once. It is not, for instance, so quick to see the underlying ...
— A Poor Man's House • Stephen Sydney Reynolds
... old steak-eater—tastes best when eaten with those tools of Nature's own providing, both hands and your teeth. An hour passed—busy, yet pleasant—and we were both gorged to the gills and had reared back with our cigars lit to enjoy a third jorum of black coffee apiece, when Johnny, speaking in an offhand way to Bill, who was still hiding away biscuits inside of himself like ...
— Roughing it De Luxe • Irvin S. Cobb
... residents of the precinct. I had even seen him more than once on the avenue, but I had never before been brought face to face with him, and consequently had much too superficial a knowledge of his countenance to determine offhand whether the uneasy light in his small gray eyes was natural to them, or simply the result of present excitement. But when he began to talk I detected an unmistakable tremor in his tones, and decided ...
— The Filigree Ball • Anna Katharine Green
... Germany—his second Note of the Peace Series—we were given no view of the Note which was already in Lansing's hands and was emitted at four o'clock; and had no talk upon it, other than some outline given offhand by the President to one of the Cabinet who referred to it before the meeting; and for three-quarters of an hour told stories on the war, and took ...
— The Letters of Franklin K. Lane • Franklin K. Lane
... his sleek, yellow head and muttered a formal blessing with an offhand manner, as if it were a mere ceremony. Bud stared contemptuously at him the while, and Cap uttered a low rumble as of a distant growl. Margaret felt a sudden desire to laugh, and tried to control herself, wondering what her father would feel ...
— A Voice in the Wilderness • Grace Livingston Hill
... remarkable to hear these three men, disguised as devils, discussing matters generally in such an offhand manner. ...
— Jack Harkaway and his son's Escape From the Brigand's of Greece • Bracebridge Hemyng
... which are the most intriguing, or cause the most hilarity, but which really and truly are the most useful for their purpose—that of conveying food to one's mouth in a convenient and graceful manner. Don't condemn Ann offhand. If I were to ask you this question, what answer ...
— Have We No Rights? - A frank discussion of the "rights" of missionaries • Mabel Williamson
... at all. She had been proud of her Spanish blood, of her mantilla, her high comb and her fan; but of herself as a woman among women she knew nothing, nor whether she was plain or pretty. Indeed, had she had to say offhand which, she would have answered plain. The revelation which comes sooner or later to all women of the charms they possess had not yet come to her; and Edgar's words, making the first puncture in her ignorance, pained her more by the shock which they gave her self-consciousness ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science - February, 1876, Vol. XVII, No. 98. • Various
... the Sun of the tropics is not to be claimed offhand. The imperious luminary does not grant his letters-patent to all. Very few does he permit to wanton in his presence without exacting probation. He is a rare respecter of persons. Though there are ...
— My Tropic Isle • E J Banfield
... the laundry and pass over his parcel, as though it were his week's washing. He would be gone before they had discovered its contents. He merely needed to be offhand and nonchalant. More than once he had seen dilapidated actors carrying a limited wardrobe to the laundry at equally small hours of the night. And the sloe-eyed iron-thumpers would never again get ...
— Stories from Everybody's Magazine • 1910 issues of Everybody's Magazine
... regard to burnt brick, nobody can tell offhand whether it is of the best or unfit to use in a wall, because its strength can be tested only after it has been used on a roof and exposed to bad weather and time—then, if it is good it is accepted. If not made of good clay or if not baked sufficiently, it shows itself defective there ...
— Ten Books on Architecture • Vitruvius
... hour call meant they seemed all to be in high good-humor and amused at their own adventure. One of them, a scoutmaster as Pee-wee knew, was particularly offhand and jovial and seemed to fill the room with his breezy talk. Peter Piper stared like one transfixed; they were scouts, the kind he had read about, the kind that were on the cover of the handbook! He backed into a corner so as not to get in ...
— Pee-wee Harris on the Trail • Percy Keese Fitzhugh
... who also lived at Brookport. It occurred to him that the question would invite a counter-question as to his own knowledge of Miss Boyd, and he knew that he would not be able to invent a satisfactory answer to that offhand. ...
— Uneasy Money • P.G. Wodehouse
... the room with a laugh when we go back, and say, in an offhand way, "By the way, Agnes, Willis and I made a remarkable discovery in my dressing-room; we found my watch there on the bureau. Ha, ha, ha!" Do you think ...
— The Garotters • William D. Howells
... although the need is far greater. Some of the reasons for the small proportions of this work are manifest. In order to reach the Slavs and Italians there must be native missionaries, and these cannot be found offhand. After converts are made, those who are fitted to preach and teach must be trained, and schools must be provided for the training.[95] The difficulties of language must first be overcome. The process requires time and patience and large resources. Missions cannot ...
— Aliens or Americans? • Howard B. Grose
... the news column by column that night and I learned more about the stars than I'd learned in a lifetime. Doc, as I've said before, is an educated man, and what he couldn't recall offhand about astronomy the newspapers quoted by chapter and verse. They ran interviews with astronomers at Harvard Observatory and Mount Wilson and Lick and Flagstaff and God knows where else, but nobody could explain why all of those stars would ...
— To Remember Charlie By • Roger Dee
... States would still maintain their cohesion when they were no longer fighting units, and when the motives of conquest and defence were no longer in operation, is a question on which I should not like to dogmatize either way. Certainly we have no right to assume offhand that the unifying process which has given the nations the mass cohesion and efficiency they require for holding their own against enemy States would still remain in full power when there were no longer any ...
— Progress and History • Various
... for a lawyer who does not know certain fundamental definitions by heart; and I have less respect for the preacher who cannot repeat the eleventh chapter of Hebrews offhand. ...
— The Young Man and the World • Albert J. Beveridge
... know is also the most beautiful," he replied. "Yes, I can name her offhand. She has all the finesse of her sex, together with the reasoning mind; she is surpassingly good to look at, and knows how to use her looks to obtain her end; as the occasion demands, she can be as cold as steel or warm as ...
— The Cab of the Sleeping Horse • John Reed Scott
... establishment, male or female, who did not say and believe that Mr Frederick was the best master, not only in Liverpool, but in the whole world. He did not by any means overdose the people with attentions; but he had a hearty offhand way of addressing them that was very attractive. He was a firm ruler. No skulker had a chance of escape from his sharp eye, but, on the other hand, ...
— Chasing the Sun • R.M. Ballantyne
... rebellion against their authority was apt to end in the deprivation, not merely of the good name, but of the skin of the offender. The adherents of modern theological systems dismiss these objects of the love and fear of a hundred generations of their equals, offhand, as "gods of the heathen," mere creations of a wicked and idolatrous imagination; and, along with them, they disown, as senseless, the crude theology, with its gross anthropomorphism and its low ethical ...
— Hasisadra's Adventure - Essay #7 from "Science and Hebrew Tradition" • Thomas Henry Huxley
... her go so easily. Assuming charge in a simple, offhand manner, he found a taxicab which took them to the South Station, led her to the ticket-office, secured a chair, and ...
— Elsie Marley, Honey • Joslyn Gray
... ready, and comes slowly down the stairs, giving some very audible and offhand orders in the hall respecting his particular belongings. A close observer might notice that he speaks and laughs a little too readily. The little, pale woman, sitting motionless in the room, hears him, and in her heart of hearts hears ...
— The Idler Magazine, Volume III, April 1893 - An Illustrated Monthly • Various
... looked gravely at the pair. "I guess you have," he said slowly. "I guess you have, Caroline. Anyhow, I can't think offhand of anything you've left out. I could explain some things, but what's the use? And," with a sigh, "you may be right in a way. Perhaps I shouldn't have come here to live. If you'd only told me plain afore just how you felt, I'd—maybe ...
— Cap'n Warren's Wards • Joseph C. Lincoln
... whenever its terms involve a contradiction. And the ground of this is the sheer impossibility of bringing the terms together in thought. That a circle may be square, or that parallel lines may enclose a space, are propositions the truth of which may be denied offhand. The ground of this is that the conception of squareness and circularity, of straight lines and an enclosed space are mutually destructive, they cancel each other. And so far as Atheism may be said to involve the denial of particular gods that denial is based upon precisely similar grounds. When ...
— Theism or Atheism - The Great Alternative • Chapman Cohen
... money does not justify, would you say that money is good for nothing? Because the eyes do not justify, would you have them taken out? Because the Law does not justify it does not follow that the Law is without value. We must find and define the proper purpose of the Law. We do not offhand condemn the Law because we ...
— Commentary on the Epistle to the Galatians • Martin Luther
... seasons for Hank Rowan and his partner," I returned briefly. I didn't much like his offhand way of asking; not that it wasn't a perfectly legitimate query. But I couldn't get rid of the notion that he would hand me out the same dose he had given MacRae if ...
— Raw Gold - A Novel • Bertrand W. Sinclair
... Barracks, were taken into court by the owner; but all the judges and juries in the land had no power to put them back when it was decided upon a technicality that they should not have been destroyed offhand. It was a case of "They can't put you in jail for that."—"Yes, but I am in jail." They were gone, torn down under the referee's decision that they ought to go, before the Appellate Division called ...
— The Battle with the Slum • Jacob A. Riis
... citizen in the "Pantagruel" of Rabelais, who seats himself judge-wise on the first stump that offers, and passes offhand a sentence in any matter of litigation; a character who figures similarly in a comedy of Racine's, and in ...
— The Nuttall Encyclopaedia - Being a Concise and Comprehensive Dictionary of General Knowledge • Edited by Rev. James Wood
... be an absolutely wanton slander, were not a certain excuse to be found in the linguistic affinities of the word 'pragmatism,' and in certain offhand habits of speech of ours which assumed too great a generosity on our reader's part. When we spoke of the meaning of ideas consisting "in their 'practical' consequences", or of the 'practical' differences which our beliefs make to us; when we said that the truth of a belief consists in its 'working' ...
— The Meaning of Truth • William James
... tall and athletic-looking, but with a slight stoop, that impressed the reporter as a physical assumption of humility which the handsome face, with its faintly sneering lines and bold eyes, contradicted. But he acknowledged Brander's offhand "How d'ye do?" in a properly deferential manner, and listened respectfully to a ...
— The False Gods • George Horace Lorimer
... said the detective, deftly slipping half-a-sovereign into the hand of the guard, "by going to the window and informing them in an offhand casual sort of way that the tragedy ...
— The Face And The Mask • Robert Barr
... contented himself with conducting, besides his own symphony, the Oberon Overture and a Mozart concerto. These performances were interesting; a personality like his is so curious that it is quite amusing to find it coming out in the works he conducts. But how Mozart's features took on an offhand and impatient air; and how the rhythms were accentuated at the expense of the melodic grace. In this case, however, Strauss was dealing with a concerto, where a certain liberty of interpretation is allowed. But Mahler, who was less discreet, ventured ...
— Musicians of To-Day • Romain Rolland
... an earthquake, Bird, at all events. Offhand I would say that a huge cavern had been washed in the earth and ...
— Astounding Stories, May, 1931 • Various
... could have said on the subject. Take two or three hours of leisure and quiet; write with great deliberation, but write on till the subject is concluded. No deferring, no bit by bit piecework, but all offhand. No correction, not a word to be altered; once written let it stand. Put the Essay aside for a month. Then criticize it with your best judgment—the order and sequence of facts, its verbal defects, its want or superabundance of illustration, its want ...
— The Life of the Rt. Hon. Sir Charles W. Dilke V1 • Stephen Gwynn
... It is continually bringing forth things new and old, and often it happens that the newest are the oldest of all. Whether this or the exact converse is the case in regard to the latest discovery of Biblical archology is a question not to be determined offhand; but the interest and importance of the question can hardly be overrated. There are now deposited in the British Museum fifteen leather slips, on the forty folds of which are written portions of the Book of Deuteronomy in a recension entirely ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 401, September 8, 1883 • Various
... departed for Saginaw, at seven o'clock A.M. The adverb "fiducially" first brought to my notice, as the synonym of confidently, steadily. Finished the perusal of Mr. F.'s manuscript lectures, on the Romish Church. Think them an offhand practical appeal to truth, clear in method, forcible in illustration. Learning and research, such as are to be drawn from books other than the Bible, have not been evidently relied on. They might not do to print without ...
— Personal Memoirs Of A Residence Of Thirty Years With The Indian Tribes On The American Frontiers • Henry Rowe Schoolcraft
... perhaps it was the best thing he could do, and 'e asked 'im in a offhand sort o' way 'ow long the room ...
— Captains All and Others • W.W. Jacobs
... for the beef-shoot was forty yards "ef ye shot from a chunk." Twenty-seven yards, or about two-thirds the distance, if the shot was offhand. "A chunk" was any rest for the rifle—a bowed limb cut from a tree, the fork of a limb driven firmly into the ground, a part of a log—anything that was the height to give the needed low level to the rifle-barrel when the shooter lay sprawled behind the gun. The permission to shoot from the rest ...
— Sergeant York And His People • Sam Cowan
... was confidently expecting Perkins to make the effort of his life and swamp the chapel in sorrow. He was in the secret and he afterward said that he would rather try to write a Shakespearean tragedy offhand than to write another funeral oration about a man who he knew was at that moment sitting in a pair of pajamas in an upper room half a mile away and yelling ...
— At Good Old Siwash • George Fitch
... let you get a bit used to me. It might have upset you to have a perfect stranger come up and marry you offhand." ...
— McClure's Magazine, Vol. XXXI, No. 3, July 1908. • Various
... an act of God to keep her goin', but He does it offhand an' casual, same as He makes three-year-old steers out ...
— Prairie Flowers • James B. Hendryx
... the New World, and were accepted as the future creed of a great people. The boldest theories of the human reason were put into practice by a community so humble that not a statesman condescended to attend to it; and a legislation without a precedent was produced offhand by the imagination of the citizens. In the bosom of this obscure democracy, which had as yet brought forth neither generals, nor philosophers, nor authors, a man might stand up in the face of a free people and pronounce the following ...
— Democracy In America, Volume 1 (of 2) • Alexis de Tocqueville
... pressed forward to greet the host and to press the fingers of the seer, lingered the two young men, one of whom had stirred the unstirable. Norris looked vaguely around as at unknown faces, and Dick nodded in this or that direction in that offhand manner which invites people to keep their distance rather than to seek further intercourse, but the woman who was handsome and thirty refused to be held ...
— Jewel Weed • Alice Ames Winter
... moved if taken between the fingers, showing it is not attached to the deep structures, and when it is so moved it is not tender or sore. Any little lump which ulcerates located on the genitals must be regarded with suspicion. Boys and men should not be satisfied with any offhand statement that, "it is nothing." It may be a chancre, and it may be exceedingly ...
— The Eugenic Marriage, Vol 2 (of 4) - A Personal Guide to the New Science of Better Living and Better Babies • W. Grant Hague
... have thought of Luck Lindsay just then, they replied politely, and did not tell him offhand that there was no possible opening for him in their companies. Three of them made appointments with him at their offices. One promised to call him up just as soon as he "had a line on anything." One said that, with the rainy weather coming on, they were cutting ...
— The Phantom Herd • B. M. Bower
... college training? We who have had it seldom hear the question raised—we might be a little nonplussed to answer it offhand. A certain amount of meditation has brought me to this as the pithiest reply which I myself can give: The best claim that a college education can possibly make on your respect, the best thing it can aspire to accomplish for you, is this: that it should help you to ...
— English Prose - A Series of Related Essays for the Discussion and Practice • Frederick William Roe (edit. and select.)
... Dulcinea del Toboso named, I was struck with surprise and amazement, for it occurred to me at once that these pamphlets contained the history of Don Quixote. With this idea I pressed him to read the beginning, and doing so, turning the Arabic offhand into Castilian, he told me it meant, "History of Don Quixote of La Mancha, written by Cide Hamete Benengeli, an Arab historian." It required great caution to hide the joy I felt when the title of the book reached my ears, and snatching ...
— Don Quixote • Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra
... not; and this touch the girl Corinne had given her. Now, too, impulse met convenient opportunity. For two weeks she had been thinking that if she did ever happen to go to the Works, she would make a point of going in some offhand, incidental sort of way, thus proving to herself and the public that she had not the slightest responsibility for whatever might be going on there. (How could she possibly have, no matter what Mr. V.V. thought, with his exaggerated sympathies for the poor?) Now ...
— V. V.'s Eyes • Henry Sydnor Harrison
... If I had not finished my engineering career, I should certainly have been jealous of your powers of specification. I do not know that it is sufficient to base a contract upon that would hold water in law; nevertheless, it is sufficient for me. I cannot offhand state the cost; but when the sketch and estimate are made, you shall see them; and if the cost exceeds your views, there will be no harm done; on the contrary, I shall have had the pleasure of scheming a little for you by ...
— Memoirs of James Robert Hope-Scott, Volume 2 • Robert Ornsby
... Ranger from Khatka just came on board," he reported, carefully offhand, as he busied himself reading labels. He knew better than to serve fish or any of its derivatives in ...
— Voodoo Planet • Andrew North
... whether she was not mainly inspired by a spirit of contradiction, and he was afraid of inciting her, by resistance, to say something she would be unable to retract. "I don't think you've given the matter sufficient thought," he said at last. "It can't be decided offhand." ...
— Maurice Guest • Henry Handel Richardson
... his impatience until breakfast-time, then strolled down to the bunk house, wearing the boots. Several of the men were there, just finishing the meal, and rolling their after-breakfast cigarettes. Whitey sat down, sort of offhand and careless-like, and to his pained surprise, no one noticed the boots. Then he crossed his legs and leaned back, with his hands clasped behind his head—and ...
— Injun and Whitey to the Rescue • William S. Hart
... families lies not only in their injury to the members of those families but in their injury to society. If one were asked offhand to name the greatest evil of the day one might, in the light of one's education by the newspapers, or by agitators, make any one of a number of replies. One might say prostitution, the oppression of labor, child labor, or war. Yet the poverty and neglect which drives a ...
— Woman and the New Race • Margaret Sanger
... expression on his deeply wrinkled, tough old face, which Sewall said "looked like the instep of an old boot that had lain out in the weather for years,"—"what I can't make out is why you make all this fuss instead of hanging 'em offhand." ...
— Roosevelt in the Bad Lands • Hermann Hagedorn
... in nineteen cases out of twenty the elementary scholar, educated as he has probably been, is unlikely to profit by the education given in a secondary school, conducted as those schools usually are, I am not prepared to say offhand that the statement is untrue. But if it means that the average mental capacity of the children of our "lower orders" is hopelessly inferior to that of the children of our middle and upper classes, I can say without hesitation that it is a ...
— What Is and What Might Be - A Study of Education in General and Elementary Education in Particular • Edmond Holmes
... words," said Mrs. Hills, "there's nothing in it. My land, he's as offhand about 'em as if they were circulars, and I don't believe he answers one ...
— Jane Journeys On • Ruth Comfort Mitchell
... a remarkable achievement if he had planned to do so and had learned up his speech; but the fact was that he was compelled to speak offhand on the spur of the moment. He describes the situation in a letter of February 6, ...
— The Life and Letters of Thomas Henry Huxley Volume 2 • Leonard Huxley
... elevation of the rear sight will necessitate a corresponding change in the position of the soldier's head when aiming, the exercise should not be held with the sight adjusted for the longer ranges until the men have been practiced with the sights as the latter would generally be employed for offhand firing. ...
— Manual of Military Training - Second, Revised Edition • James A. Moss
... government, or being disreputable. But trying to use one's brains is bad business! A serious offense! Are your legs all right now? Then come on down with me and I'll have you given some dinner and some fresh clothing and so on. Offhand," he added amiably, "it would seem that using one's brains would be classed as a political offense rather than a criminal one on Walden. ...
— The Pirates of Ersatz • Murray Leinster
... in open-mouthed amazement, for the young girl who acknowledged in an offhand way that she had performed such tremendous feats of horsemanship was modest, pretty, ...
— The Floating Light of the Goodwin Sands • R.M. Ballantyne
... one's eyes. Davy Lindsay had yet to play many a spring before King James, and some that were not gay. But the gentle stripling with the infant on his shoulder, the pertinacity of the little babbling cry, the "homely springs" played offhand that it was pity to hear, but which the lad enjoyed almost as much in laughing at their dashing incorrectness as the baby who knew only that it was a pleasant sound—how bright and vivid is the picture! Thus while the lords and his mother stormed over him, the little King, ...
— Royal Edinburgh - Her Saints, Kings, Prophets and Poets • Margaret Oliphant
... in bed and whistled softly to himself. This was a contingency he had not foreseen. What would the Mexican chief do to two of the range-rider's friends who delivered themselves into his hands so opportunely? Steve did not think he would kill them offhand, but he was very sure they would not be at liberty to return home. Moreover, Harrison would be on the ground, eager for revenge. The prizefighter never had liked Farrar. He had sworn to get even with Threewit. An added incentive to this course was the fact that he knew them ...
— Steve Yeager • William MacLeod Raine
... laid his hand on Gilbert's shoulder and whispered to him in a pleasant, offhand way, "Get through and come in the office, I want to speak ...
— Tom Slade's Double Dare • Percy Keese Fitzhugh
... else, but contrary to her expectations the Chia consort had expressed her desire that no more than a single stanza should be written on each tablet, so that unable, after all, to disregard her directions by writing anything in excess, she had no help but to compose a pentameter stanza, in an offhand way, merely with the intent of complying with ...
— Hung Lou Meng, Book I • Cao Xueqin
... to resemble a chessman and with a hole in the top through which you could see four views of Nauheim. And, as for experience, as for knowledge of one's fellow beings—nothing either. Upon my word, I couldn't tell you offhand whether the lady who sold the so expensive violets at the bottom of the road that leads to the station, was cheating me or no; I can't say whether the porter who carried our traps across the station ...
— The Good Soldier • Ford Madox Ford
... There is no offhand solution for the case of the incorrigible boy or girl. Of course the largest number sooner or later reform, sometimes overnight, and in a way to remind one of the religious conversions that James speaks of in his "Varieties of Religious Experiences." ...
— The Nervous Housewife • Abraham Myerson
... to look for you. In the prevailing confusion, I consider it a remarkable piece of luck to have found you. There's Master Karl, too," cried he, as Karl sprang forward with a shout of delight. "Now we have half the firm assembled, and we might begin offhand to play at counting-house work; but you seem to have a different way of amusing yourselves here." Then turning to Lenore, he continued, "I have already presented myself to the baron, and heard from your lady mother where to find the martial ...
— Debit and Credit - Translated from the German of Gustav Freytag • Gustav Freytag
... me to answer offhand so momentous a question as that, do you? It is all very well, of course, for you, who have given the matter much careful thought, to feel so confident as you do that your plans are capable of realisation, but with me it is very different; the entire ...
— A Middy of the King - A Romance of the Old British Navy • Harry Collingwood
... curiosity, Eusebius, to enquire of very many real scholars, who have professed to keep up their Greek after leaving the universities, if they have re-read Homer in Greek, and almost all have confessed that they had not. They read him in Pope and Cowper. Let them read him offhand, and fluently, continuously, as they do Marmion, or the Lay of the Last Minstrel, and I cannot but think they will be struck with the Homeric resemblance in the poems of Sir Walter Scott. Both great poets had, too, the same relish for natural scenery, the same close observation; did we not ...
— Blackwoods Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 59, No. 366, April, 1846 • Various
... changed conditions, always two generations, at least, behind his authors. Consequently, this sudden development of capacity on the part of the poet is liable to take him unprepared, and the mere apparition of a poet who can add up a pounds shillings and pence column offhand might well induce apoplexy. Yet it is to be feared that that providence which arms every evil thing with its fang has so protected the publisher with an instinctive dread of verse in any form, and especially ...
— Prose Fancies • Richard Le Gallienne
... wasn't botherin' me," was the offhand answer. "I was on'y wonderin' where you would ...
— The Wheel O' Fortune • Louis Tracy
... organizers came naturally to the front, and Garfield was one of them. Indeed, the faculty for organization seems innate in the American people, so that when it became necessary to raise and equip so large a body of men at a few weeks' notice, the task was undertaken offhand by lawyers, doctors, shopkeepers, and schoolmasters, without a minute's hesitation, and was performed on the whole with ...
— Biographies of Working Men • Grant Allen
... without preliminary scrutinising; he was often kept waiting; sometimes he was sent away without the slightest ceremony and when they wanted to conceal something from him they would converse in German in his presence. Emilie gave him no account of her doings and replied to his questions in an offhand way as though she had not heard them; and, worst of all, some of the rooms in Madame Fritsche's house, which was a fairly large one, though it looked like a hovel from the street, were never opened to him. For all that, Kuzma Vassilyevitch did not give up his visits; on the contrary, he paid ...
— Knock, Knock, Knock and Other Stories • Ivan Turgenev
... distressfully. "'Tis somebody else that I have married! I was so desperate—so afraid of being forced to anything else—so afraid of revelations that would quench his love for me, that I resolved to do it offhand, come what might, and purchase a week of ...
— The Mayor of Casterbridge • Thomas Hardy
... did! He told me three times before I took it off. He wouldn't have so much as a rag on me. 'What's this?' says he. 'A little trouble I had a year or so ago, with a gland that swelled,' says I. 'It had to be cut, and has been as right as rain ever since.' Just in that offhand way, Cicely. Quite brisk and cheerful. 'Tubercular, eh?' says he, very soft and thoughtful-like. And I knew it was ...
— A Sheaf of Corn • Mary E. Mann
... a bluff, offhand way, given him a flannel shirt, overalls, an old flop-brimmed Stetson, and, much to Sundown's delight, a pair of old riding-boots. Hitherto, Sundown had been too preoccupied with culinary matters to pay much attention to his clothing. Incidentally he was spending not a little ...
— Sundown Slim • Henry Hubert Knibbs
... day passed in complete inaction. Frankly, Starratt did not know what move to make. He felt that he should have been trying to square matters, but to raise offhand six hundred-odd dollars was a feat too impossible to even attempt. He had few relations, and these few were remote and penniless, and his friends were equally lacking in financial resource. He was confident that he could convince Hilmer of the soundness of his new plan ...
— Broken to the Plow • Charles Caldwell Dobie
... he had. Offhand, he couldn't remember where. Looking at the girl, Malone was ready to write brand-new definitions for every anatomical term. Even a term like "hands." Malone had never seen anything especially arousing in the human hand before—anyway, ...
— Brain Twister • Gordon Randall Garrett
... grow up alike unspoiled in morals by the universal envy of comrades, and unspoiled in teeth by the parental sugar-plums. People of older growth attach childish importance to the trade one plies. Nobs and nabobs (at least on the stage) disinherit daughters offhand for marrying grocers, and groan over sons who take to high art. The smug and prudent citizen shudders at the career of the filibuster, while the adventurer would commit suicide rather than achieve a modest livelihood in tape and needles. The mother of Sainte Beuve ...
— The Galaxy - Vol. 23, No. 1 • Various
... the 'chentlemens' were in the second floor front—the room with the sliding panel. Then I could, at least, keep a watch on them. I walked slowly upstairs gnashing my teeth with irritation. The sacrifice was so unnecessary. I could think, offhand, of half a dozen ways of annihilating these wretches without risking a single hair of any decent person's head. And here were the police, with all the resources of science at their disposal and practically unlimited time in which to work, actually contemplating a fight ...
— The Uttermost Farthing - A Savant's Vendetta • R. Austin Freeman
... Apologists solved almost offhand, namely, the task of showing that Christianity was the perfect and certain philosophy, because it rested on revelation, and that it was the highest scientific knowledge of God and the world, was ...
— History of Dogma, Volume 2 (of 7) • Adolph Harnack
... her own tribe, appears upon the scene. Probably it has been already ascertained that the male relatives have gone on a hunting or fishing expedition, but to make assurance doubly sure one or two of the party advance toward the women unarmed and make inquiries hi an offhand way. If the absence of the male relatives is confirmed, they thereupon seize the girl, and their companions rush out in full panoply from their hiding places and carry off the fair prize. By the time the girl's relatives ...
— The Manbos of Mindano - Memoirs of the National Academy of Sciences, Volume XXIII, First Memoir • John M. Garvan
... when Mr. Prohack ought to have been resuming his ill-remunerated financial toil for the nation at the Treasury, Bishop suggested in his offhand murmuring style that they might pay a visit to the City solicitor who was acting in England for him and the Angmering estate. Mr. Prohack opposingly suggested that national duty ...
— Mr. Prohack • E. Arnold Bennett
... find that we are of some account in the world,' says Mr Desmond, in his offhand Irish way; 'but if you please, Miss O'Regan, we are as hungry as hounds, and as thirsty as hippopotami, and I'm sure you'll say a good word to get us something ...
— The Three Lieutenants • W.H.G. Kingston
... with such offhand promptitude that I was certain the answer would have been the same had I asked him if he ...
— From a Bench in Our Square • Samuel Hopkins Adams
... name having been taken some years after. This is another instance of the literary perils to which imaginative authors may be subject; for litera scripta manet, especially if in printer's ink, and, for aught I know, that offhand word might be held a continuous libel. For all else, by way of notice, the stories speak for themselves; as, Covetousness was the text for "The Crock of Gold," while Concealment and False Witness are severally the morale ...
— My Life as an Author • Martin Farquhar Tupper
... war themes, and subjects in a lighter strain; was the first woman widely received as a lecturer by the colleges and lyceums. With a commanding presence, handsome face, an agreeable, permeating voice, a natural offhand manner, and something to say, she was at once a decided favourite, and travelled great distances to meet her engagements. She often quoted that ungallant speech from the Duke of Argyle: "Woman has no right on a platform—except to be hung; then it's unavoidable"; and by ...
— Memories and Anecdotes • Kate Sanborn
... see the connection offhand, but it may well be that there is one. Can anybody think of any connection between King James and Balaklava ...
— The Secret Wireless - or, The Spy Hunt of the Camp Brady Patrol • Lewis E. Theiss
... it was drawn so tight that it did not seem possible to endure any more, Johnny Byrd appeared at Ri-Ri's side, conscious-eyed and boyishly embarrassed, but managing an offhand smile. ...
— The Innocent Adventuress • Mary Hastings Bradley
... a profound scholar in Greek and Hebrew lexicology, and gave what was once his country house and garden in old Chelsea Village to the theological seminary of his professorship. How many people remember this, or his scholarship? But before that old rooftree was laid low, he wrote beneath it, quite offhand, a little poem, 'The Night Before Christmas,' that blends with childhood's dreams anew each Christmas Eve—a few short verses holding more vitality than all ...
— People of the Whirlpool • Mabel Osgood Wright
... pointed out to her she tapped. Miss Gallifer opened it, receiving her colleague with a great big hearty smile. Great, big, and hearty were the traits by which Miss Gallifer was known among the doctors. Healthy, skilful, jolly, and offhand, she carried the issues of life and death, in which she was at home, with a lightness which made her easy to work with. Some nurses would have resented the intrusion of an outsider—professionally speaking—like ...
— The Dust Flower • Basil King
... the culprit. Yet you tell me Millard did not contest her divorce and that it would have been very easy for him to file a counter-suit because everyone knew of her relationship with Manton. That, offhand, shows no ill-will on his part. And now we find this note from him, which at least is friendly ...
— The Film Mystery • Arthur B. Reeve
... would be," said she, offhand and careless, just as if two thousand a year, more or less, mattered ...
— The Bondboy • George W. (George Washington) Ogden
... Epic and Drama, it has no preferred verse or meter, but leaves the poet free to choose or invent appropriate forms. In this species of verse Arnold was not wholly at ease. As has been said, one searches in vain through the whole course of his poetry for a blithe, musical, gay or serious, offhand poem, the true lyric kind. The reason for this is soon discovered. Obviously, it lies in the fundamental qualities of the poet's mind and temperament. Though by no means lacking in emotional sensibility, Arnold was too intellectually self-conscious to be carried away by the ...
— Matthew Arnold's Sohrab and Rustum and Other Poems • Matthew Arnold
... and tenacity, can be compared with spiders who repair, or start again every instant at a damaged or broken thread. When these good fathers knew that their petition had not triumphed offhand, they struck out for some new road to reach the generous heart of the monarch. Having learnt that an alderman, full of enthusiasm, had just proposed in full assembly at the Hotel de Ville to raise a triumphal monument to the Peacemaker of Europe, and to proclaim him Louis the Great ...
— Marguerite de Navarre - Memoirs of Marguerite de Valois Queen of Navarre • Marguerite de Navarre
... it is something of a surprise to find that books by men whom he knows to be eminent for their ingenuity and their learning are condemned in very offhand fashion by quite young men, who as yet have attained to little learning and to no eminence at all. One sometimes is tempted to wonder that men admittedly remarkable should have fathered such poor productions as we are given to understand them to be, and should have offered them to a public that ...
— An Introduction to Philosophy • George Stuart Fullerton
... such a question positively, offhand, but I don't, on the spur of the moment, recall any supposition ...
— The Beetle - A Mystery • Richard Marsh
... gentleman, a bachelor in the prime of life, such a figure as had never risen, save in a dream or an old novel, before a fluttered, anxious girl out of a Hampshire vicarage. One could easily fix his type; it never, happily, dies out. He was handsome and bold and pleasant, offhand and gay and kind. He struck her, inevitably, as gallant and splendid, but what took her most of all and gave her the courage she afterward showed was that he put the whole thing to her as a kind of favor, an obligation he should ...
— The Turn of the Screw • Henry James
... stands for internationalism in the more advanced countries of Europe, but are we justified as yet in calling this more than a phase in the development of democratic doctrine? It is a very difficult question, which it would be presumptuous to try to answer offhand; all we have tried to show here is that, on the whole, the assumption as to the peaceful tendencies of a democratic foreign policy is a doubtful one, on which we must to some ...
— The War and Democracy • R.W. Seton-Watson, J. Dover Wilson, Alfred E. Zimmern,
... JONES. "Well, I should say——But, stay; I am not entitled to give a professional opinion until to-morrow morning! Still, offhand I may observe, that such an illegal death would savour of positive suicide; but it would not matter very much, as under existing circumstances suicide in some form or other seems to me inevitable!" And JONES ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 98, 1890.05.10 • Various
... propositions as these offhand? I tried, however, to get at the gist of the sentence, and, as the silence continued, I said with some hesitation: "But it is impossible, surely, to approach the work of writing, say a philosophy, without some apprehension ...
— The Wonder • J. D. Beresford
... suggest some alternative that didn't look so silly. Kindly get the facts well into your head, will you? The man must pursue Mary's affection either there or here, mustn't he? He can't do it there because his wife won't let him. In order to do it here, one would say offhand that Mary would have to be here, and since her mother declines to bring her, it does look to me as if the job would have to be done by somebody else. However, if my logic is wrong, kindly ...
— Captivating Mary Carstairs • Henry Sydnor Harrison
... suppose not; but here is where we come again to the real heart of all of these questions which so many of us feel able to solve offhand. What difference should you make between me and another? If it is right for the North to free all these slaves without paying for them, why should there be anything in my favor, over any one of my neighbors? And, most ...
— The Purchase Price • Emerson Hough
... give evidence against them; such can be purchased outside any cutcherry in India for a few rupees. The men were convicted. Some were given a choice between execution and service in the Nawab's army; others were sentenced offhand to a term of imprisonment, and these considered themselves lucky in escaping with their lives. In vain they protested their innocence and pleaded that a messenger might be sent to Calcutta; the Nawab was known to be so much incensed against the English that the fact of their being Company's ...
— In Clive's Command - A Story of the Fight for India • Herbert Strang
... remove the property in the time limit set. I informed the gentlemen that I could make my bid considerably higher if I was granted more time in which to remove the debris. President Francis asked me how much more I could bid, and I told him I could not state offhand. The conditions as to the removal of the wreckage in the specified time, namely, three months, were somewhat prohibitive, as it would be impossible to fulfill the requirements without an enormous expense. It would be well-nigh impossible to get sufficient men and ...
— Final Report of the Louisiana Purchase Exposition Commission • Louisiana Purchase Exposition Commission
... maintain their cohesion when they were no longer fighting units, and when the motives of conquest and defence were no longer in operation, is a question on which I should not like to dogmatize either way. Certainly we have no right to assume offhand that the unifying process which has given the nations the mass cohesion and efficiency they require for holding their own against enemy States would still remain in full power when there were no longer any ...
— Progress and History • Various
... it up and turned her over for the day's inquest to an old hand at tricks and traps and deceptive plausibilities—Beaupere, a doctor of theology. Now notice the form of this sleek strategist's first remark—flung out in an easy, offhand way that would have thrown any unwatchful person off ...
— Personal Recollections of Joan of Arc Volume 2 • Mark Twain
... the country cottage, Scott found enjoyment in composing poems based upon some of the legends and superstitions with which he had become familiar in his jaunts among ruined castles and scenes in the Highlands. Some of these verses, shown in an offhand manner to James Ballantyne, who was the head of a printing establishment in Kelso, met with such favorable recognition that Scott was encouraged to lay bare to his friend a plan that had been forming in his mind for publishing a great ...
— Journeys Through Bookland, Vol. 6 • Charles H. Sylvester
... earnest about that girl," said Poppins. Poppins had an offhand, irreverent way of speaking, especially on subjects which from their nature demanded delicacy, that was frequently ...
— The Struggles of Brown, Jones, and Robinson - By One of the Firm • Anthony Trollope
... pretty officious! Never saw you until two or three weeks ago," he muttered. "Not accustomed to being treated in that offhand manner. It's Colonial, ...
— The Long Portage • Harold Bindloss
... he said, stammering, speaking like one in a dream, 'you take me by surprise. I did not expect this; you certainly are too kind. In proposing this marriage to me, you do me an honour I did not anticipate, but you know it is difficult offhand, for I am bound to say . . . at least I am not prepared to say that I am in love with your daughter. . . . She is, of course, very beautiful, and no one admires ...
— Muslin • George Moore
... shot, offhand. The charging horse reared, stood so a moment as rigidly as if fixed by bronze in that pose, its rider leaning forward over its neck. Then, in whatever terrible pang that such sudden stroke of death visits, it flung itself backward, the girths snapping from its ...
— Trail's End • George W. Ogden
... the drummer to himself in his amazement. They were in a great hurry, too, to get him under the yoke, he thought; but they should find that a soldier on his way to the manoeuvres is not to be betrothed and married offhand. ...
— Weird Tales from Northern Seas • Jonas Lie
... had been fiddling with his hat and staring hard at a pile of old ties just outside the window. He raised his head, and regarded her steadily. It was beginning to occur to him that there was a good deal to this Miss Georgie, under that offhand, breezy exterior. He felt himself drawn to her as a person ...
— Good Indian • B. M. Bower
... for perseverance and tenacity, can be compared with spiders who repair, or start again every instant at a damaged or broken thread. When these good fathers knew that their petition had not triumphed offhand, they struck out for some new road to reach the generous heart of the monarch. Having learnt that an alderman, full of enthusiasm, had just proposed in full assembly at the Hotel de Ville to raise a triumphal monument to the Peacemaker ...
— Marguerite de Navarre - Memoirs of Marguerite de Valois Queen of Navarre • Marguerite de Navarre
... and high aspiration, not even his friend Crowder. When Crowder rallied him about this treatment of the Alstons he had been short and offhand—didn't care for society, hadn't time to waste going round being polite. He left upon Crowder the impression that the Alston girls did not interest him any more than any other girls. "Old Mark isn't a lady's man," was the way Crowder excused him to Chrystie. Of course Chrystie laughed ...
— Treasure and Trouble Therewith - A Tale of California • Geraldine Bonner
... have a husband. His elation over all that was implied by her consulting him on so personal a matter, was almost lost in his feeling of annoyance. This made it plain that he must lose no time, but marry her offhand. What with her penchant for orphans and for foolish investments, she would make ducks and drakes of her fortune unless a man peremptorily took ...
— Other People's Business - The Romantic Career of the Practical Miss Dale • Harriet L. Smith
... like sixty. It's my offhand opinion we better stop at that bunch of trees and argue some with them. No use buck-jumpin' along to burn the wind while they drill streaks of light ...
— Wyoming, a Story of the Outdoor West • William MacLeod Raine
... indication provided by the flower. Here the Pieris surpasses us. She does not consult the seed-vessel, to see if it be long or short, nor yet the petals, four in number and arranged in a cross, because the plant, as a rule, is not in flower; and still she recognizes offhand what suits her caterpillars, in spite of profound differences that would embarrass ...
— The Wonders of Instinct • J. H. Fabre
... risen, save in a dream or an old novel, before a fluttered, anxious girl out of a Hampshire vicarage. One could easily fix his type; it never, happily, dies out. He was handsome and bold and pleasant, offhand and gay and kind. He struck her, inevitably, as gallant and splendid, but what took her most of all and gave her the courage she afterward showed was that he put the whole thing to her as a kind of ...
— The Turn of the Screw • Henry James
... in a modest, offhand way. "I made it out of hollow bamboo reeds connected with a spring. And now I'm making one for the King. He saw this and had a lot of bamboo sticks put up all over the town, without any underground connections, and couldn't make out why the ...
— The Exiles and Other Stories • Richard Harding Davis
... though we were seated in friendly converse around the soda fount of a Kansas drug store; and I want you to feel as free to talk back as though we had gotten into this difficulty by accident instead of design. Ask me all the questions you want to, and if I'm unable to answer offhand I'll look the matter up later and telegraph you—at your expense. With such unbounded liberty there's really no telling whither we will drift, what subjects we may touch upon; but should I inadvertently trample upon any of your social idols or political gods, I trust that you will take ...
— Volume 12 of Brann The Iconoclast • William Cowper Brann
... taken leave very cheerfully; that was certain. As much could not be said for his principal. Dolly had privately asked her father to send her down the money for the servants' wages; and Mr. Copley had given an offhand promise; but Dolly saw that same want of the usual ready ease in his manner, and was not surprised when days passed and the money did not come. The question recurred, what was she to do? She wrote to remind her father; and she took a fixed resolve that she would buy no more, ...
— The End of a Coil • Susan Warner
... soon were deep in a discussion of their school doings. Dolly lay back among her pillows and looked at them. She adored her brother and she decided that Dotty's brother was also worthy of consideration. She liked Bob's breezy offhand way which was not at all like Bert's gentle, kindly manner. But they were two awfully nice boys and she felt sure they were going to be friends. If only she could be up and around and have good times with them! A slight pang ...
— Two Little Women • Carolyn Wells
... realize, was totally unlike theirs. He could do nothing but sit still, remain physically inert while he was mentally in a state of extreme unrest. He ventured a banality about the weather. Carr smiled faintly. Tommy Ashe observed offhand that the heat was beastly, but not a patch to blizzards and frost. Then they were ...
— Burned Bridges • Bertrand W. Sinclair
... A chap who can tell you offhand the difference between the outside of the world and ...
— The Devil's Dictionary • Ambrose Bierce
... down the stream, little elated at my solution of what at first had seemed a mystery, for I felt that Nick would have told me offhand all about it. ...
— Who Goes There? • Blackwood Ketcham Benson
... Chicago, I will simply have to 'phone Chicago. We socialists don't do anything like this offhand, Mr. McPherson," he had explained as ...
— Windy McPherson's Son • Sherwood Anderson
... for it," returned the other superciliously. While willing to aid in a good work, he did not in the least approve either of the Unspeakable Perk or of his offhand manners. ...
— The Unspeakable Perk • Samuel Hopkins Adams
... parts of the hairy scalp, so little variation exists in the relative density and structure of the skin, that, in spite of the want of external support at the aperture of exit, it is often difficult to discriminate offhand the two apertures, if neither bone nor brain debris occupies ...
— Surgical Experiences in South Africa, 1899-1900 • George Henry Makins
... the quiet man that had effectually prevented any development of roughness in Norah. Boyish and offhand to a certain extent, the solid foundation of womanliness in her nature was never far below the surface. She was perfectly aware that while Daddy wanted a mate he also wanted a daughter; and there was never any ...
— Mates at Billabong • Mary Grant Bruce
... very cordial when he found I was an American, and with that offhand hospitality which seems to know no distinctions of race or religion in Ireland urged me to come and make him a visit at a place he has nearer the sea-coast. "I'll show you Downpatrick," he said, "where the tombs of St. Patrick ...
— Ireland Under Coercion (2nd ed.) (2 of 2) (1888) • William Henry Hurlbert
... impregnated religion with the crudest superstitions, going so far as to forbid its adherents to read the Bible, and when the greatest philosopher representatives of the Church, like Albertus Magnus, would have rejected offhand, as a childish fancy or, indeed, as an heretical chimera, any attempt to rescue the lower classes of the people from their wretched state of spiritual servitude—in a time like this, the truly majestic spectacle is presented of a philosophy ...
— Jewish History • S. M. Dubnow
... we are of some account in the world,' says Mr Desmond, in his offhand Irish way; 'but if you please, Miss O'Regan, we are as hungry as hounds, and as thirsty as hippopotami, and I'm sure you'll say a good word to get us something to ...
— The Three Lieutenants • W.H.G. Kingston
... rear sight will necessitate a corresponding change in the position of the soldier's head when aiming, the exercise should not be held with the sight adjusted for the longer ranges until the men have been practiced with the sights as the latter would generally be employed for offhand firing. ...
— Manual of Military Training - Second, Revised Edition • James A. Moss
... The letters are evidently written in code, and I can't translate it offhand. But I'll make another attempt at it. And here's one from a person who signs himself Walter Simpson, but the writing is ...
— Tom Swift and his War Tank - or, Doing his Bit for Uncle Sam • Victor Appleton
... asked to go further than this and to give offhand a definition of humor, or of that elusive quality, a sense of humor, he might find himself confronted with a difficulty. Yet certain things about it would be patent at the outset: Women haven't it; Englishmen haven't ...
— Toaster's Handbook - Jokes, Stories, and Quotations • Peggy Edmund & Harold W. Williams, compilers
... providing, both hands and your teeth. An hour passed—busy, yet pleasant—and we were both gorged to the gills and had reared back with our cigars lit to enjoy a third jorum of black coffee apiece, when Johnny, speaking in an offhand way to Bill, who was still hiding away biscuits inside of himself like a parlor ...
— Roughing it De Luxe • Irvin S. Cobb
... think it over oncet, Tillie, and till to-morrow mornin' a'ready I'll give you my answer. My conscience won't give me the dare to adwise you offhand in a matter that's so ...
— Tillie: A Mennonite Maid - A Story of the Pennsylvania Dutch • Helen Reimensnyder Martin
... Madge," he replied, in cordial, offhand tones, "we are friends. There's nothing else for us to be. I don't pretend to understand your scruples. Even if a woman refused to be my wife I should be none the less friendly, unless she had trifled with me. To my man's reason a natural tie does not count for so much as the years ...
— A Young Girl's Wooing • E. P. Roe
... "Wa-al, offhand I'd say it was consid'able better 'n a will. Ya-as.... Wills kin be busted, but this here docyment—I calc'late it would take mighty powerful hammerin' to knock ...
— Scattergood Baines • Clarence Budington Kelland
... Burnett described in Hindostanee, as if speaking to Reginald, a wonderful rod he possessed, which had the property of discovering poison—as also the poisoner, by whirling itself about as soon as he appeared, and pointing towards him. He spoke in a natural, offhand manner, as if there was nothing unusual in what ...
— The Young Rajah • W.H.G. Kingston
... strike the reader that an offhand statement like the foregoing relates to a proceeding of no special difficulty or peril. A party of brave white men were pursuing a company of Indian horse thieves and the chances of escape and capture were about equal. Thus the matter presents itself to the ordinary ...
— The Life of Kit Carson • Edward S. Ellis
... amongst the young leaves and sprouting brushwood; the long days and warm nights of June, when the wild rose is a beauty to be admired, and the distant masses of elder have a fine foamy appearance. These extracts settled Belinda offhand, and she and Lamia laid their heads together and read the book faithfully. They are good girls, spite of the names selected for them by a fanciful parent, and if they are not proud of those names, and prefer being called by their intimates ...
— Lines in Pleasant Places - Being the Aftermath of an Old Angler • William Senior
... is quite obvious. By the process of elimination. Every owner except the one in fault will be able to prove an alibi. Yet, merely guessing offhand, I think it quite probable that there is only one number that fits the case. We ...
— The Canterbury Puzzles - And Other Curious Problems • Henry Ernest Dudeney
... numerous, requiring such an enormous amount of time and labour, that it seems only reasonable to believe that the gold-mining went on for many hundreds of years, probably before the age of writing at all. I am not prepared to agree offhand that Zimbabwe is probably the ancient Havilah of the Scriptures, but I see no very good reason why it should not be. On the other hand, the ancient workings and fortifications and temples may have been the work of Phoenicians ...
— The Rhodesian • Gertrude Page
... untruth, and that pretends not to instruct him in the progress of the works of nature. When we read in Bouchet the miracles of St. Hilary's relics, away with them: his authority is not sufficient to deprive us of the liberty of contradicting him; but generally and offhand to condemn all suchlike stories, seems to me a singular impudence. That great St. Augustin' testifies to have seen a blind child recover sight upon the relics of St. Gervasius and St. Protasius at ...
— The Essays of Montaigne, Complete • Michel de Montaigne
... not at all impair the possibility that it is his accusation which they are answering. So multiple are the threads of influence leading from the Republic through succeeding literatures and civilizations that it is unsafe to assert, offhand, that any modern expression of hostility to poetry may not be traced, by a patient untangler of evidence, to a source in the Republic. But even this is aside from the point. One might concede that ...
— The Poet's Poet • Elizabeth Atkins
... The worst of them all, the Mott Street Barracks, were taken into court by the owner; but all the judges and juries in the land had no power to put them back when it was decided upon a technicality that they should not have been destroyed offhand. It was a case of "They can't put you in jail for that."—"Yes, but I am in jail." They were gone, torn down under the referee's decision that they ought to go, before the Appellate Division called a halt. We were not in a mood to trifle with the ...
— The Battle with the Slum • Jacob A. Riis
... short; and the bear wouldn't wait for me to examine the thermometer, and note the direction of the wind. Trial of the Creedmoor method, therefore, had to be abandoned; and I bitterly regretted that I had not read more accounts of offhand shooting. ...
— Baddeck and That Sort of Thing • Charles Dudley Warner
... the high and low places; he seldom made mistakes in judging men offhand, an art acquired only after many initial blunders. This man Breitmann was no sham; he was a scholar, a gentleman, a fine linguist, versed in politics and war. Well, the little mystery would be brushed aside in the morning. Breitmann would certainly ...
— A Splendid Hazard • Harold MacGrath
... swaggered around the room with a proprietary air. He threw in the casual "Lola" as if he owned her. Dale is the most delightful specimen of the modern youth of my acquaintance. But even Dale, with all his frank charm of manner, has the modern youth's offhand way with women. I often wonder how women abide it. But they do, more shame to them, and suffer more than they realise by their indulgence. When next I meet Maisie Ellerton I will read her a wholesome lecture, for her soul's good, ...
— Simon the Jester • William J. Locke
... understand"—he gave me a straight, clear, proud look—"that it was never my desire to mystify or to frighten you. But I couldn't take you offhand into my confidence, could I? I had to find out something more about you. Remember, too, that my search in ...
— A Woman Named Smith • Marie Conway Oemler
... Hebrew lexicology, and gave what was once his country house and garden in old Chelsea Village to the theological seminary of his professorship. How many people remember this, or his scholarship? But before that old rooftree was laid low, he wrote beneath it, quite offhand, a little poem, 'The Night Before Christmas,' that blends with childhood's dreams anew each Christmas Eve—a few short verses holding more vitality than all ...
— People of the Whirlpool • Mabel Osgood Wright
... tennis. She laughed with her eyes; she talked with a savouring vivacity. She never seemed tired or bored. She was, in one hackneyed word, attractive. And Vaness, the connoisseur, was quite obviously attracted. Of men who professionally admire beauty one can never tell offhand whether they definitely design to add a pretty woman to their collection, or whether their dalliance is just matter of habit. But he stood and sat about her, he drove and rode, listened to music, and played cards with her; he did all but dance with her, and ...
— The Best British Short Stories of 1922 • Edward J. O'Brien and John Cournos, editors
... with a ponderous air of weighing his words. "I ain't the man to judge a feller offhand like. I 'lows I know suthin' o' the blind man o' Skitter Bend, seein' I wus workin' contract fer him all last summer. An' wot I knows is—nasty. I've see'd things on that ranch as made me git a tight grip on my axe, an' long a'mighty ...
— The Night Riders - A Romance of Early Montana • Ridgwell Cullum
... the meal, giving no heed to Diana's small attempts at conversation, and wandered early to his blankets. In the morning, however, he was all boy again, even attempting once or twice to tease Diana, in a boy's offhand manner. That small person, however, had become conscious of the fact that Enoch was not interested in her, and she had withdrawn into herself with a pride and self-control that was highly amusing to her father. Nor did she unbend during ...
— The Enchanted Canyon • Honore Willsie Morrow
... so far in advance of them but that the others could hear quite distinctly his offhand introduction of their party on the threshold, and the somewhat lukewarm response of the inmates. "We thought we'd just drop in and be sociable until the coach was ready to start again," he continued, as the other passengers entered. "This yer gentleman ...
— From Sand Hill to Pine • Bret Harte
... in Burma in monasteries, or in the rest-houses attached to them. We break all their laws: we ride and wear boots within the sacred enclosure; our servants kill fowls for our dinners there, where all life is protected; we treat these monks, these who are the honoured of the nation, much in the offhand, unceremonious way that we treat all Orientals; we often openly laugh at their religion. And yet they always receive us; they are often even glad to see us and talk to us. Very, very seldom do you meet with any return in kind for your contempt of their faith and habits. I have ...
— The Soul of a People • H. Fielding
... 'Would God that had been put to the trial.' 'Why?' 'Because then you would have known your friends from your foes.' 'A reason,' says old Aubrey, 'never forgotten or forgiven.' Aubrey is no great authority; but the speech smacks so of Raleigh's offhand daring that one cannot but believe it; as one does also the other story of his having advised the lords to keep out James and erect a republic. Not that he could have been silly enough to propose such ...
— Sir Walter Raleigh and his Time from - "Plays and Puritans and Other Historical Essays" • Charles Kingsley
... down from the gate, slowly, so as to get time to think. The question surprised me and I was not prepared to give, offhand, a definition of simony. ...
— Lalage's Lovers - 1911 • George A. Birmingham
... misrepresented, and then it was either unintentional or to brighten a story or to exaggerate a fact. I recall one interview in respect to courts of arbitration and the universal labor question. My opinions were expressed offhand, and, although not taken down at the time by the interviewer, my words uttered during a half hour's interview were quoted with great exactness. I know this is not the common opinion in respect to the interviewer, and in some cases gross misrepresentations ...
— Recollections of Forty Years in the House, Senate and Cabinet - An Autobiography. • John Sherman
... growth of English verse; and proved himself, in everything he wrote, an artist to the bottom of his conscience. As certainly as Spenser, he was a "poet's poet" while he lived. A couple of pages might be filled almost offhand with the genuine compliments of his contemporaries, and he will probably remain a "poet's poet" as long as poets write in English. But the average reader of culture—the person who is honestly moved by good poetry and goes from ...
— Adventures in Criticism • Sir Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch
... breeding-season, defending her from enemies and giving her a share of their game. But from this admitted fact to the inference that it is "affection" that makes the husband defend his wife, there is a tremendous logical skip not warranted by the situation. Instead of making such an assumption offhand, the scientific method requires us to ask if there is not some other way of accounting for the facts more in accordance with the selfish disposition and habits of savages. The solution of the problem is easily found. A savage's wife is his ...
— Primitive Love and Love-Stories • Henry Theophilus Finck
... I said in an offhand fashion, though inwardly I glowed with pride at the success of my great idea, for at the time I thought it ...
— She and Allan • H. Rider Haggard
... a touch to make up her mind here, whether she realized it or not; and this touch the girl Corinne had given her. Now, too, impulse met convenient opportunity. For two weeks she had been thinking that if she did ever happen to go to the Works, she would make a point of going in some offhand, incidental sort of way, thus proving to herself and the public that she had not the slightest responsibility for whatever might be going on there. (How could she possibly have, no matter what Mr. V.V. ...
— V. V.'s Eyes • Henry Sydnor Harrison
... connected with the golf course mystery. Jack had obeyed the colonel's instructions to the letter. He had played many rounds on the links and had gotten to a certain degree of friendship with Jean Forette. He had even formed a liking for Bruce Garrigan, who, offhand, informed him that the amount of India ink used in tattooing sailors during the past year was less by fifteen hundred ounces than the total output of radium salts for 1916, while the wheat crop of Minnesota ...
— The Golf Course Mystery • Chester K. Steele
... reality and the vision of the soul, the greater is the task and the more gigantic the creative power which such a task may develop. It has been said that, in this scene, Goethe revealed leanings towards Catholicism. I do not pretend to deny it offhand, but I must insist on these leanings being understood in the sense of my premises. Goethe took from tradition those elements which were able to materialise his spiritual life and gave them a new interpretation. We ...
— The Evolution of Love • Emil Lucka
... just come into the room with a laugh when we go back, and say, in an offhand way, "By the way, Agnes, Willis and I made a remarkable discovery in my dressing-room; we found my watch there on the bureau. Ha, ha, ha!" Do you ...
— The Garotters • William D. Howells
... Hank Rowan and his partner," I returned briefly. I didn't much like his offhand way of asking; not that it wasn't a perfectly legitimate query. But I couldn't get rid of the notion that he would hand me out the same dose he had given MacRae if only he ...
— Raw Gold - A Novel • Bertrand W. Sinclair
... a simple citizen in the "Pantagruel" of Rabelais, who seats himself judge-wise on the first stump that offers, and passes offhand a sentence in any matter of litigation; a character who figures similarly in a comedy of Racine's, and in a ...
— The Nuttall Encyclopaedia - Being a Concise and Comprehensive Dictionary of General Knowledge • Edited by Rev. James Wood
... accompanied by two ladies, he again appeared. Between two violent blushes, and with an air which would have been light and offhand if it could, Mr. Ransome presented to his friend, the foreman, his mother—and Miss Usher. And as if the foreman had not sufficiently divined her, Miss Usher's averted shoulders, burning cheeks, and lowered ...
— The Combined Maze • May Sinclair
... seemingly a moderately easy task to lay out a suburb in so far as its exterior appointments are concerned, the rub comes in the getting of citizens. A Standard Oil magnate can build a city if he is willing to spend the money, but all the powers of heaven and earth combined cannot manufacture offhand a citizenship. In an emergency of this nature most land improvement companies would have issued pretty little pamphlets, gotten up in exquisite taste, full of beautiful pictures and bubbling over with ...
— The Booming of Acre Hill - And Other Reminiscences of Urban and Suburban Life • John Kendrick Bangs
... so silly. Kindly get the facts well into your head, will you? The man must pursue Mary's affection either there or here, mustn't he? He can't do it there because his wife won't let him. In order to do it here, one would say offhand that Mary would have to be here, and since her mother declines to bring her, it does look to me as if the job would have to be done by somebody else. However, if my logic is ...
— Captivating Mary Carstairs • Henry Sydnor Harrison
... probably up to some devilry with some fool of a girl," he said in an offhand tone. "I know the type of man. They have a keen scent for impressionable women, of whom a fellow of that sort has always half-a-dozen in tow. No doubt that is what he came down here for—a ...
— The Hunt Ball Mystery • Magnay, William
... two men were talking, Mrs. Lincoln entered the room. She was, of course, greatly embarrassed at Mr. Lincoln's offhand manner of entertaining his caller, and, stepping up behind her husband, she grasped him by the hair and twitched his head about, at the same time ...
— The Lincoln Story Book • Henry L. Williams
... because he was snobbish, but because, being a sensitive, high-strung person, he instinctively adopted the manner that would put the person before him at ease. He glanced at Mildred, rose, and thrust back forthwith the slangy, offhand personality that was perhaps the most natural—or was it merely the most used?—of his many personalities. It was Crossley the man of the world, the man of the artistic world, who delighted Mildred with a courteous bow and offer of ...
— The Price She Paid • David Graham Phillips
... me one of the plates to hold, and with his disengaged hand pointed successively to the constellation of Orion, to the stars Castor, Pollux, Aldebaran, Rigel, the Pleiades, Sirius and others which with my very limited knowledge I could not recognise offhand. Then on the plate which I held, he showed us those same stars and constellations, checking them ...
— When the World Shook - Being an Account of the Great Adventure of Bastin, Bickley and Arbuthnot • H. Rider Haggard
... scholars, who have professed to keep up their Greek after leaving the universities, if they have re-read Homer in Greek, and almost all have confessed that they had not. They read him in Pope and Cowper. Let them read him offhand, and fluently, continuously, as they do Marmion, or the Lay of the Last Minstrel, and I cannot but think they will be struck with the Homeric resemblance in the poems of Sir Walter Scott. Both great poets had, too, the same relish for natural scenery, the same close observation; did we ...
— Blackwoods Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 59, No. 366, April, 1846 • Various
... have been a remarkable achievement if he had planned to do so and had learned up his speech; but the fact was that he was compelled to speak offhand on the spur of the moment. He describes the situation in a letter of February 6, 1894, to ...
— The Life and Letters of Thomas Henry Huxley Volume 2 • Leonard Huxley
... from hundreds of atrocity tales which I heard during four months spent in England, Belgium, Germany, and Holland. It will serve as an example, not only because it has the earmarks of truth,—having been told in an offhand way merely as an explanation of the private's insanity,—but because it is typical of the kind of incident which in the telling is, nine times out of ten, twisted into atrocious and wholly ...
— The Log of a Noncombatant • Horace Green
... the beef-shoot was forty yards "ef ye shot from a chunk." Twenty-seven yards, or about two-thirds the distance, if the shot was offhand. "A chunk" was any rest for the rifle—a bowed limb cut from a tree, the fork of a limb driven firmly into the ground, a part of a log—anything that was the height to give the needed low level to the rifle-barrel when the shooter ...
— Sergeant York And His People • Sam Cowan
... smaller mines, Mr. Potash," he explained, "which sometimes get to be phenomenal profit-makers. Of course, I can't tell you offhand what the value of the stock is, but I'll make inquiries at once. The inside market at present is very strong, as ...
— Potash & Perlmutter - Their Copartnership Ventures and Adventures • Montague Glass
... New York down East," he said in an offhand manner, as if, after all, a man might meet a New Yorker and still not sink ...
— In the Midst of Alarms • Robert Barr
... wee hour call meant they seemed all to be in high good-humor and amused at their own adventure. One of them, a scoutmaster as Pee-wee knew, was particularly offhand and jovial and seemed to fill the room with his breezy talk. Peter Piper stared like one transfixed; they were scouts, the kind he had read about, the kind that were on the cover of the handbook! He backed into a corner so as not ...
— Pee-wee Harris on the Trail • Percy Keese Fitzhugh
... authority was apt to end in the deprivation, not merely of the good name, but of the skin of the offender. The adherents of modern theological systems dismiss these objects of the love and fear of a hundred generations of their equals, offhand, as "gods of the heathen," mere creations of a wicked and idolatrous imagination; and, along with them, they disown, as senseless, the crude theology, with its gross anthropomorphism and its low ethical conception of the divinity, which satisfied ...
— Hasisadra's Adventure - Essay #7 from "Science and Hebrew Tradition" • Thomas Henry Huxley
... If for no other reason, through sheer stress of numbers there will be collisions, and much damage done by kicks through mutual entanglement; whereas a pick of horse and men will be able to escape offhand, (15) especially if you have invention to create a scare in the minds of the pursuers by help of the moiety of troops who are out of action. (16) For this purpose false ambuscades will be ...
— The Cavalry General • Xenophon
... something of a surprise to find that books by men whom he knows to be eminent for their ingenuity and their learning are condemned in very offhand fashion by quite young men, who as yet have attained to little learning and to no eminence at all. One sometimes is tempted to wonder that men admittedly remarkable should have fathered such poor productions as we are given to understand them to ...
— An Introduction to Philosophy • George Stuart Fullerton
... shy, she would sometimes raise her eyes from her book in school and find him gazing steadily at her like a timid deer drinking thirstily at a spring. Nancy did not like Cyril, but she pitied him and was as friendly with him, in her offhand, boyish fashion, as ...
— Mother Carey's Chickens • Kate Douglas Wiggin
... position. He was proud of his strength. It pleased him to think of the weakness of women; it pleased him to anticipate the impressed thanks of the weak women for this exertion of his power on their behalf. "Have you managed it so soon?" his aunt would exclaim, and he would answer in a carefully offhand way, "Of course. ...
— The Price of Love • Arnold Bennett
... the menu, hurriedly. The Exclusive Room was ostentatious to the point of menus and waiters. "What'll you have, Nadine?" He still wasn't quite at ease with her first name. Offhand, he could never remember having been on a first name basis with a Mid-Upper, certainly not one of the ...
— Frigid Fracas • Dallas McCord Reynolds
... systems that he knows. They don't just cover HIS world. One will be too dapper, another too pedantic, a third too much of a job-lot of opinions, a fourth too morbid, and a fifth too artificial, or what not. At any rate he and we know offhand that such philosophies are out of plumb and out of key and out of 'whack,' and have no business to speak up in the universe's name. Plato, Locke, Spinoza, Mill, Caird, Hegel—I prudently avoid names nearer home!—I am sure that to many of you, my hearers, these names ...
— Pragmatism - A New Name for Some Old Ways of Thinking • William James
... audiences during the Civil War on war themes, and subjects in a lighter strain; was the first woman widely received as a lecturer by the colleges and lyceums. With a commanding presence, handsome face, an agreeable, permeating voice, a natural offhand manner, and something to say, she was at once a decided favourite, and travelled great distances to meet her engagements. She often quoted that ungallant speech from the Duke of Argyle: "Woman has no right on a platform—except ...
— Memories and Anecdotes • Kate Sanborn
... We were talking chiefly of—of club matters," he answered, in a fair imitation of his usual offhand manner. ...
— The Deluge • David Graham Phillips
... be turned to some good work. If I do not return, it will rest on your conscience that before you make your confession, you shall see it well placed for a charity. You'll have to find the charity, I can't say what it should be offhand now, but come with me. I must tell some man living my secret, and you're the only one. Besides—I trust you. ...
— The Eye of Dread • Payne Erskine
... and ride to Manzanita to interview old Vanney and a couple of other big guys from the East. My first story's on the wire," explained the newcomer offhand. "I want some local-color stuff for my second ...
— Success - A Novel • Samuel Hopkins Adams
... for money and then to lose it by a single spot upon the die, but such is the fate of him who plays, and a philosopher will swallow his ill luck and take to fighting for more. The Brandons could have done this easily enough, especially Charles, who was an offhand philosopher, rather fond of a good-humored fight, had it not been that in the course of play one evening the secret of Judson's winning had been disclosed by a discovery that he cheated. The Brandons waited until they ...
— When Knighthood Was in Flower • Charles Major
... Kolosov's carelessly offhand expressions offended me, perhaps, the more because they were applied to the woman with whom I was secretly in love.... I fired up. 'Stop,' I said to him; 'stop! I know why you have given up going ...
— The Diary of a Superfluous Man and Other Stories • Ivan Turgenev
... my way down the stream, little elated at my solution of what at first had seemed a mystery, for I felt that Nick would have told me offhand all about it. ...
— Who Goes There? • Blackwood Ketcham Benson
... both hands and your teeth. An hour passed—busy, yet pleasant—and we were both gorged to the gills and had reared back with our cigars lit to enjoy a third jorum of black coffee apiece, when Johnny, speaking in an offhand way to Bill, who was still hiding away biscuits inside of himself like a ...
— Roughing it De Luxe • Irvin S. Cobb
... unparagraphed, unphotographed existence upon the profits of "rashers" at three-ha'pence and "door-steps" at two a penny. He knew at what houses it was inadvisable to introduce soap, and at what tables it would be bad form to denounce political jobbery. He could tell you offhand what trade-mark went with what crest, and remembered the price paid for every baronetcy created during ...
— Sketches in Lavender, Blue and Green • Jerome K. Jerome
... among educated people, can tell you offhand how an American President is elected, what is the difference between a Republican and Democrat, or what is the position of the Governor of a State? Well, it will not be Mr. Harris' fault if the reader does not know how to answer these and kindred questions at the same time that ...
— Five Months on a German Raider - Being the Adventures of an Englishman Captured by the 'Wolf' • Frederic George Trayes
... monarch, black and glossy, with eyes of fire, dilating nostrils, and wicked-looking horns. The picadores attacked him warily, hurling their banderillos (small, dart-like javelins ornamented with ribbons, and intended to jade and infuriate). The bull had killed three horses offhand, and had received eight banderillos in his neck and shoulders, when, upon a given signal, the picadores and matadores suddenly withdrew leaving the infuriated beast alone in his wild paroxysm of wrath. Presently a soft musical note, like ...
— Cole's Funny Picture Book No. 1 • Edward William Cole
... surprise was of another order. The previous Sunday had been quite accidental, but his appearing a second time among her favorite haunts hinted of more than the fortuitous. Daylight was made to feel that she suspected him, and he, remembering that he had seen a big rock quarry near Blair Park, stated offhand that he was thinking of buying it. His one-time investment in a brickyard had put the idea into his head—an idea that he decided was a good one, for it enabled him to suggest that she ride along with ...
— Burning Daylight • Jack London
... shore Mr. Bransome, for that was the new man's name, rapidly recovered his presence of mind and manner, and, by way of covering his past confusion, remarked that he supposed the surf was seldom so bad as it then was. I replied in an offhand way, meaning to make fun of him, that what he had passed through was nothing, and appealed to the patrao to confirm what I had said. That negro, seeing the joke, grinned all over his black face; and Mr. Bransome, perceiving that he was being laughed at, snatched ...
— Stories by English Authors: Africa • Various
... Deliberately to let you get a bit used to me. It might have upset you to have a perfect stranger come up and marry you offhand." ...
— McClure's Magazine, Vol. XXXI, No. 3, July 1908. • Various
... with the golf course mystery. Jack had obeyed the colonel's instructions to the letter. He had played many rounds on the links and had gotten to a certain degree of friendship with Jean Forette. He had even formed a liking for Bruce Garrigan, who, offhand, informed him that the amount of India ink used in tattooing sailors during the past year was less by fifteen hundred ounces than the total output of radium salts for 1916, while the wheat crop of Minnesota for the same period was 66,255 bushels. All of which information, useful in ...
— The Golf Course Mystery • Chester K. Steele
... speak in that free-and-easy, offhand, unbusiness-like manner. Say 'Yes, sir,' and 'No, sir,' if you are not ...
— The Vast Abyss - The Story of Tom Blount, his Uncles and his Cousin Sam • George Manville Fenn
... which they had reached, and its unexpected rupture by him, merely through his meeting with a woman into whom the Well-Beloved unmistakably moved under his very eyes—by name Miss Marcia Bencomb. He described their spontaneous decision to marry offhand; and then he put it to Somers whether he ought to marry or not—her or anybody else—in ...
— The Well-Beloved • Thomas Hardy
... unexpectedly &c 508. suddenly &c (instantaneously) 113; before one can say 'Jack Robinson', at short notice, extempore; on the spur of the moment, on the spur of the occasion [Bacon]; at once; on the spot, on the instant; at sight; offhand, out of hand; a' vue d'oeil [Fr.]; straight, straightway, straightforth^; forthwith, incontinently, summarily, immediately, briefly, shortly, quickly, speedily, apace, before the ink is dry, almost immediately, presently at the first opportunity, in no long ...
— Roget's Thesaurus of English Words and Phrases: Body • Roget
... riband," thought the drummer to himself in his amazement. They were in a great hurry, too, to get him under the yoke, he thought; but they should find that a soldier on his way to the manoeuvres is not to be betrothed and married offhand. ...
— Weird Tales from Northern Seas • Jonas Lie
... strong-jawed, rugged face, a grizzling moustache, peculiarly keen gray eyes, and a wiry, vigorous figure which had lost nothing of the strength and activity of youth. He was cheery and genial to all, but somewhat offhand in his manners, giving the impression that he had seen life in social strata on some far lower horizon than the county ...
— The Valley of Fear • Arthur Conan Doyle
... one, but he has some halting and hesitating in his conversation, and says very pleasant, agreeable things in a husky, weak, peculiar voice. He has a dark complexion, dark hair, whiskers already a little gray. This is a very offhand portrait of so illustrious ...
— Stories of Authors, British and American • Edwin Watts Chubb
... done is it imbued with life. But how among countless suggestions is a "cause" to know the difference between a true invention and a pipe-dream? There is, of course, no infallible touchstone by which we can tell offhand. No one need hope for an easy certainty either here or anywhere else in human affairs. No one is absolved from experiment and constant revision. Yet there are some hypotheses that prima facie deserve more attention ...
— A Preface to Politics • Walter Lippmann
... snobbish, but because, being a sensitive, high-strung person, he instinctively adopted the manner that would put the person before him at ease. He glanced at Mildred, rose, and thrust back forthwith the slangy, offhand personality that was perhaps the most natural—or was it merely the most used?—of his many personalities. It was Crossley the man of the world, the man of the artistic world, who delighted Mildred with a courteous bow and offer of a chair, ...
— The Price She Paid • David Graham Phillips
... the party: he was a slow, sour old man, with fishy eyes; greeted Tommy offhand, and (as was afterwards remembered) exchanged winks ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 13 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... into the room with a laugh when we go back, and say, in an offhand way, "By the way, Agnes, Willis and I made a remarkable discovery in my dressing-room; we found my watch there on the bureau. Ha, ha, ha!" Do you think ...
— The Garotters • William D. Howells
... would now, if they could, try her again. Their sea-boots, I have no doubt, would have protected their feet and rendered carpet-tacks harmless. Paddling clumsily, they passed down the strait at a distance of a hundred yards from the sloop, in an offhand manner and as if bound to Fortescue Bay. This I judged to be a piece of strategy, and so kept a sharp lookout over a small island which soon came in range between them and the sloop, completely hiding them from view, and toward which the Spray was now drifting ...
— Sailing Alone Around The World • Joshua Slocum
... him little abrupt questions about the neighbourhood, his parish, his work, in a soft tone which had, however, a distinct aloofness, even hauteur. His answers, on the other hand, were often a trifle reckless and offhand. He was in a mood to be impatient with a mondaine's languid inquiries into clerical work, and it seemed to him the squire's description had ...
— Robert Elsmere • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... solemnly; "certainly I will think it over. Of course, there are pros and cons, but, on the whole, speaking offhand, I don't see why the young people should not make a match. Also you have always been a good relative, and, what is better, a good friend to me, so, of course, if possible I should like to fall in with ...
— Stella Fregelius • H. Rider Haggard
... beside him. He was tall and athletic-looking, but with a slight stoop, that impressed the reporter as a physical assumption of humility which the handsome face, with its faintly sneering lines and bold eyes, contradicted. But he acknowledged Brander's offhand "How d'ye do?" in a properly deferential manner, and listened respectfully to a few careless ...
— The False Gods • George Horace Lorimer
... he is an offhand kind of chap, and never stands bantering and chaffering a long time, but says at once what he means, as I do. "Done!" says he—"'tis mine!" and the deacon drives up to his house, gets his pay, and leaves ...
— Humour of the North • Lawrence J. Burpee
... of untruth, and that pretends not to instruct him in the progress of the works of nature. When we read in Bouchet the miracles of St. Hilary's relics, away with them: his authority is not sufficient to deprive us of the liberty of contradicting him; but generally and offhand to condemn all suchlike stories, seems to me a singular impudence. That great St. Augustin' testifies to have seen a blind child recover sight upon the relics of St. Gervasius and St. Protasius at Milan; a woman at Carthage cured of a cancer, by the sign of the cross made upon her by a woman ...
— The Essays of Montaigne, Complete • Michel de Montaigne
... Barton,' he said, stammering, speaking like one in a dream, 'you take me by surprise. I did not expect this; you certainly are too kind. In proposing this marriage to me, you do me an honour I did not anticipate, but you know it is difficult offhand, for I am bound to say . . . at least I am not prepared to say that I am in love with your daughter. . . . She is, of course, very beautiful, and no one admires her more than ...
— Muslin • George Moore
... Mercurian natives—he had seen them when ITA's expedition had cleaned out the burrows beneath the Dome and sealed them up—were midgets, the tallest not more than two feet in height. Whatever he was, why was the stranger trying to destroy the Dome? Apparently Thomas himself was not to be killed offhand: the jolting journey was continuing interminably. With enforced patience the Earthman resigned himself to wait for the next scene in this ...
— The Great Dome on Mercury • Arthur Leo Zagat
... stepped nimbly forth upon the pavement, feeling in his overcoat pocket for the fare; and then he realised he was not in West Eighty-fifth Street at all; he was not in any street that he remembered ever having seen before in the course of his life. Offhand, though, he guessed he was somewhere in that mystic maze of brick and mortar known as Old Greenwich Village; and, for a further guess, in that particular part of it where business during these last few years had been steadily encroaching upon the ancient residences ...
— The Life of the Party • Irvin Shrewsbury Cobb
... it? He knew Riley's lines, and wrote them down. I doubt if the greatest poet that ever lived scribbled lines like that, offhand." ...
— Patty Blossom • Carolyn Wells
... have consulted him, and have made him privy to his answer, but that he had attached so little importance to the proposal, and had considered it so totally out of the question, that he had replied offhand. ...
— The Greville Memoirs (Second Part) - A Journal of the Reign of Queen Victoria from 1837 to 1852 - (Volume 1 of 3) • Charles C. F. Greville
... with his hat and staring hard at a pile of old ties just outside the window. He raised his head, and regarded her steadily. It was beginning to occur to him that there was a good deal to this Miss Georgie, under that offhand, breezy exterior. He felt himself drawn to her as a person whom he could ...
— Good Indian • B. M. Bower
... me. The case was very rare where I was misrepresented, and then it was either unintentional or to brighten a story or to exaggerate a fact. I recall one interview in respect to courts of arbitration and the universal labor question. My opinions were expressed offhand, and, although not taken down at the time by the interviewer, my words uttered during a half hour's interview were quoted with great exactness. I know this is not the common opinion in respect to the interviewer, and ...
— Recollections of Forty Years in the House, Senate and Cabinet - An Autobiography. • John Sherman
... from his shoulder and stood for a moment as if in doubt. But it was not because of his wife he stopped. It was partly because he was quite too shaky to aim straight; and partly because he was too much of a sportsman to shoot offhand a thing which was sitting quiet and still on his own meal-barrel; but the main reason was that he was afraid to shoot the baby, whose crib was just beside it. So he gave the meal-barrel a kick with his foot to dislodge the ...
— The Monkey That Would Not Kill • Henry Drummond
... little man was released offhand; but he looked nothing the less sad on that account, it being beyond the power of magistrate or constable to rase out the written troubles in his brain, for they concerned another, whom he regarded with more solicitude ...
— Stories by English Authors: England • Various
... the rear sight will necessitate a corresponding change in the position of the soldier's head when aiming, the exercise should not be held with the sight adjusted for the longer ranges until the men have been practiced with the sights as the latter would generally be employed for offhand firing. ...
— Manual of Military Training - Second, Revised Edition • James A. Moss
... to earth in a good-sized field. Woods horizoned the field on three of its edges and a sunken road bounded it on the fourth. She measured, I should say at an offhand guess, seventy-five feet from tip to tip lengthwise, and she was perhaps twenty feet in diameter through her middle. She was a bright yellow in color—a varnished, oily-looking yellow—and in shape suggestive ...
— Paths of Glory - Impressions of War Written At and Near the Front • Irvin S. Cobb
... get the facts well into your head, will you? The man must pursue Mary's affection either there or here, mustn't he? He can't do it there because his wife won't let him. In order to do it here, one would say offhand that Mary would have to be here, and since her mother declines to bring her, it does look to me as if the job would have to be done by somebody else. However, if my logic is wrong, ...
— Captivating Mary Carstairs • Henry Sydnor Harrison
... Watts, and the brother-in-law each took a cigar with that careless yet deferential manner which always distinguishes the treatee from the treator; and then the box was protruded in an offhand way toward Harry Covare, the personal clerk of the Registrar; but this young man declined, saying that he preferred cigarettes, a package of which he drew from his pocket. He had very often seen that cigar-box with a Havana brand, which he himself had ...
— A Chosen Few - Short Stories • Frank R. Stockton
... requires the indication provided by the flower. Here the Pieris surpasses us. She does not consult the seed-vessel, to see if it be long or short, nor yet the petals, four in number and arranged in a cross, because the plant, as a rule, is not in flower; and still she recognizes offhand what suits her caterpillars, in spite of profound differences that would embarrass ...
— The Wonders of Instinct • J. H. Fabre
... so offhand," said Dwight. "But what you've said is all you have to say according to law. And there don't have to be witnesses ... say!" he said, ...
— Miss Lulu Bett • Zona Gale
... write something that thousands were willing to read and to pay for. Thirty thousand was the number thus far; and that number, reached within six weeks, meant a hundred thousand before the "run" should be over. His method involved simply a familiar offhand treatment of royalty, backed up by an excess of beauty, bravery, sword-play, costume, and irresponsible and impossible incident. "The only wonder is," he said, "that I shouldn't have taken up with this before. Anybody can do it; almost everybody ...
— Under the Skylights • Henry Blake Fuller
... you're in earnest about that girl," said Poppins. Poppins had an offhand, irreverent way of speaking, especially on subjects which from their nature demanded delicacy, that was frequently ...
— The Struggles of Brown, Jones, and Robinson - By One of the Firm • Anthony Trollope
... was no Anglo-maniac, shot at us a look fierce as any bonassus; while he asked, abruptly, what we thought in England of one whom he styled the "Demosthenes of Ireland"—looked at us for an answer. As it would have been unsafe to have answered him in the downright, offhand manner, in which we like both to deal and to be dealt by, we professed that we knew but one Demosthenes, and he not an Irishman, but a Greek; which, by securing us his contempt, kept us safe from the danger of something worse; but, our Demosthenic friend excepted, ...
— Blackwoods Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 59, No. 365, March, 1846 • Various
... me a question about her work which I could not answer offhand, I secretly consulted a standard cook-book, and later gave her the desired information airily. I taught her to cook many of the things which I could cook well, and imbued her with a sort of sneaking respect for my knowledge. ...
— Threads of Grey and Gold • Myrtle Reed
... on me! Anxious to pump him, I managed to control my muscles and asked him what authority he—a young nobody, who had not yet risen to the dignity of buying a wife for himself—could have to dispose of a sister in this offhand way? He replied that there would be no difficulty: that Runi would give his consent, as would also Otawinki, Piake, and other relations; and last, and LEAST, according to the matrimonial customs of these latitudes, Oalava herself ...
— Green Mansions - A Romance of the Tropical Forest • W. H. Hudson
... of us on board, mind you," the man who set us free said, as he gathered the loose cords and went his way. "Better join us offhand, and make the best ...
— A Sea Queen's Sailing • Charles Whistler
... energy consists of two parts—the moon-energy and the earth's rotation energy. The problem therefore for us to consider is, which of these two banks the tides have drawn on to meet their constant expenditure. This is not a question that can be decided offhand; in fact, if we attempt to decide it in an offhand manner we shall certainly go wrong. It seems so very plausible to say that as the moon causes the tides, therefore the energy which these tides expend ...
— Time and Tide - A Romance of the Moon • Robert S. (Robert Stawell) Ball
... foraging for yourself, and thank God if any notice is taken of what you say; it is as if your presence were barely tolerated. But once the stranger has learnt to pocket his pride and treat his hosts in the same offhand fashion, he will find among them an unconventional courtesy ...
— Old Calabria • Norman Douglas
... by two ladies, he again appeared. Between two violent blushes, and with an air which would have been light and offhand if it could, Mr. Ransome presented to his friend, the foreman, his mother—and Miss Usher. And as if the foreman had not sufficiently divined her, Miss Usher's averted shoulders, burning cheeks, and lowered eyelids made it impossible for him to forget that she was the Lady whose ...
— The Combined Maze • May Sinclair
... Lindsay had yet to play many a spring before King James, and some that were not gay. But the gentle stripling with the infant on his shoulder, the pertinacity of the little babbling cry, the "homely springs" played offhand that it was pity to hear, but which the lad enjoyed almost as much in laughing at their dashing incorrectness as the baby who knew only that it was a pleasant sound—how bright and vivid is the picture! Thus while the lords and his mother stormed over him, the little King, perhaps in ...
— Royal Edinburgh - Her Saints, Kings, Prophets and Poets • Margaret Oliphant
... understand him. So he resorted to a mixed system of his own, sometimes using Latin words and making the changes which regularly would have occurred, and when words failed, making signs, and in extreme cases drawing pictures of what he wanted. This versatility with the pencil, for many of his offhand sketches had humorous touches that almost carried them into the cartoon class, interested officers and passengers, so that the young student had the freedom of the ship and a ...
— Lineage, Life, and Labors of Jose Rizal, Philippine Patriot • Austin Craig
... day back in April, as I'm drivin' home from the station with Sadie, who should step to the curb and hold me up but Mr. Bayne. Does it offhand, friendly, mind you. Course I stops sudden. Sadie bows and smiles. I lifts my lid. Mr. Bayne holds his square-topped derby against his white shirt front. We shakes hands cordial. And I'm most gaspin' ...
— Shorty McCabe on the Job • Sewell Ford
... endured this state of affairs for some time simply because the woman did the essential work in her offhand, slapdash style, and left him unmolested to his brooding as long as he did not interfere with her ideas of domestic economy. But his impatience and the sense of being wronged were producing a feeling akin to desperation. Every week there was less ...
— He Fell in Love with His Wife • Edward P. Roe
... than to one from the whole of Johannesburg.' At the conclusion of an unpleasant interview, which called for all the tact and good temper at the command of the gentleman who was interesting himself on behalf of the prisoners, the President added in an offhand manner, 'The petitions can do no harm and might strengthen my hands in dealing with the rest of the Executive; so they can send them ...
— The Transvaal from Within - A Private Record of Public Affairs • J. P. Fitzpatrick
... met was an old lady who had difficulty in walking," the seine-maker went on in the same offhand manner, "and maybe she stumbled and fell ...
— The Emperor of Portugalia • Selma Lagerlof
... customs of its people, the picturesque scenery and traditions of his own native land, the scandals of the court and the cloister, the petty struggle for the primacy of Wales, and the great tragedy of the fall of the Angevin Empire - is all alike dealt with in the bold, dashing, offhand style of a modern newspaper or magazine article. His first important work, the 'Topography of Ireland,' is, with due allowance for the difference between the tastes of the twelfth century and those of the nineteenth, just such a series of sketches ...
— The Itinerary of Archibishop Baldwin through Wales • Giraldus Cambrensis
... owe my success in life to one single fact, namely, at the age of twenty-seven I commenced, and continued for years, the practice of daily reading and speaking upon the contents of some historical or scientific book. These offhand efforts were made sometimes in a corn field, at others in the forests, and not infrequently in some distant barn with the horse and ox for my auditors. It is to this early practice in the art of all arts that ...
— Public Speaking • Clarence Stratton
... door was pointed out to her she tapped. Miss Gallifer opened it, receiving her colleague with a great big hearty smile. Great, big, and hearty were the traits by which Miss Gallifer was known among the doctors. Healthy, skilful, jolly, and offhand, she carried the issues of life and death, in which she was at home, with a lightness which made her easy to work with. Some nurses would have resented the intrusion of an outsider—professionally speaking—like Miss Walbrook; but to Miss Gallifer it was the more the merrier, even in the sickroom. ...
— The Dust Flower • Basil King
... up to some devilry with some fool of a girl," he said in an offhand tone. "I know the type of man. They have a keen scent for impressionable women, of whom a fellow of that sort has always half-a-dozen in tow. No doubt that is what he came down here for—a tender adventure. That's the only kind ...
— The Hunt Ball Mystery • Magnay, William
... employed by our bureau of ethnology. Dr. Weir Mitchell and Dr. Harvey Wiley and several German scientists have investigated it since then. It is well known that it contains half a dozen alkaloids and resins of curious and little-investigated nature. I can't recall even the names of them offhand, but I ...
— The Silent Bullet • Arthur B. Reeve
... lexicology, and gave what was once his country house and garden in old Chelsea Village to the theological seminary of his professorship. How many people remember this, or his scholarship? But before that old rooftree was laid low, he wrote beneath it, quite offhand, a little poem, 'The Night Before Christmas,' that blends with childhood's dreams anew each Christmas Eve—a few short verses holding more vitality than ...
— People of the Whirlpool • Mabel Osgood Wright
... his work had been the signal of his doom, and the executioner waiting to make a sudden end of him when the last touch was laid upon the canvas, Austin Lovel could not have painted slowly. The dashing offhand brush was like a young thoroughbred, that could not be pulled, let the jockey saw at his mouth as he might. And yet the painter would have liked much to prolong this easy intercourse with his sister. ...
— The Lovels of Arden • M. E. Braddon
... is no merry-making and companions, but a matter of gravity, and one that must be performed offhand. The ...
— The Bravo • J. Fenimore Cooper
... He did not know precisely how things stood, much less could he explain this sudden attack. Yet if the tall, lean man, serious and growing grey, represented one form of strength, the shorter, stouter man, with the mobile face and the quick brain, stood for another. Offhand he could think of no weak spot on his side; and if he must fight, he ...
— The Wild Geese • Stanley John Weyman
... Majesty the Sun of the tropics is not to be claimed offhand. The imperious luminary does not grant his letters-patent to all. Very few does he permit to wanton in his presence without exacting probation. He is a rare respecter of persons. Though there are faces, like King Henry ...
— My Tropic Isle • E J Banfield
... if taken between the fingers, showing it is not attached to the deep structures, and when it is so moved it is not tender or sore. Any little lump which ulcerates located on the genitals must be regarded with suspicion. Boys and men should not be satisfied with any offhand statement that, "it is nothing." It may be a chancre, and it may be exceedingly serious if ...
— The Eugenic Marriage, Vol 2 (of 4) - A Personal Guide to the New Science of Better Living and Better Babies • W. Grant Hague
... part of the petitioner. Even then, if the man imparts that which shows that his own conduct has been reprehensible or that he would enlist the support of his superior in some unworthy act, it is better to hear him through and then skin him, than to treat what he says in the offhand manner. An officer will grow in the esteem of his men only as he treats their affairs with respect. The policy of patience and goodwill pays off tenfold because what happens to one man is soon known to ...
— The Armed Forces Officer - Department of the Army Pamphlet 600-2 • U. S. Department of Defense
... In an offhand manner, to his next neighbor. It went round the table, and a sort of icy silence, after that, greeted his small sallies. He never knew what the trouble was, but his heart was ...
— Love Stories • Mary Roberts Rinehart
... know,—I have never known,—where the steamers like the Mariposa Belle come from. Whether they are built by Harland and Wolff of Belfast, or whether, on the other hand, they are not built by Harland and Wolff of Belfast, is more than one would like to say offhand. ...
— Sunshine Sketches of a Little Town • Stephen Leacock
... consider," said Monica with a smile, "but one can't do these things offhand—that is worse than doing nothing. I'll tell you what to do NOW. Why not go and stay with Aunt Anne? She would like to see you, I know, and I have always thought it rather lazy of you not to go there—she is rather a remarkable woman, and it's a pretty ...
— Watersprings • Arthur Christopher Benson
... very certain that he was himself aware of his own condition. I observed, during my intercourse with him latterly, a listless melancholy in his manner, a circumstance that puzzled me a good deal in contrast with his powerful frame, and vigorous appearance, and blunt, offhand manner. I think I understand now, and can compassionate certain expressions in his last note to me, which, when I received it, made a painful and unfavorable impression upon me. I suppose he did not believe in a future state of existence, and ...
— Records of Later Life • Frances Anne Kemble
... the smaller details of everyday life which, in the management of the affairs of the world, obliges one to consider possible ramifications of every great enterprise. Rhodes wanted simply to sweep away all obstacles without giving the slightest thought to the consequences likely to follow on so offhand a manner of getting ...
— Cecil Rhodes - Man and Empire-Maker • Princess Catherine Radziwill
... for the greater the tension between reality and the vision of the soul, the greater is the task and the more gigantic the creative power which such a task may develop. It has been said that, in this scene, Goethe revealed leanings towards Catholicism. I do not pretend to deny it offhand, but I must insist on these leanings being understood in the sense of my premises. Goethe took from tradition those elements which were able to materialise his spiritual life and gave them a new interpretation. We are justified in believing that ...
— The Evolution of Love • Emil Lucka
... a guilty way, but he was, as you might say, flummoxed. "Now," I said to him, "where did you get it—that's the point?" He took his time to answer, and then he said: "Well, Mr Gilman," he said, "you know me; I am an honourable man. I can't tell you offhand, but I am above the board." He's foreign, you know, in his expressions. "Yes," I said, "that's all very well," I said, "but here I've got a stolen note and you've got the value for it. Now I tell you," I said, "what I'm going to do; I'm going straight with this note to Mr Jacob Twisden, who's ...
— Forsyte Saga • John Galsworthy
... he would give them a better railroad bill than they were asking. His practice was to commit to memory a bill that he was about to introduce and then go into his committee-room, when it was full of loafers, and pretend to dictate it offhand to the stenographer, section by section without pausing. It was an impressive performance, and gained Handy the reputation of being brainy. But we at home who knew Handy were not impressed; and, in our office, we knew that he was the same Ab Handy who once did business with a marked deck; ...
— In Our Town • William Allen White
... banker. "No, I never sign them offhand—not any more. I used to do so—once to my sorrow and to the amusement of my friends. Leave yours with me till day after to-morrow and I'll consider it. I have at least four more now on the waiting 5 list, ranging in subject from the Removal of a Soap Factory to ...
— Story Hour Readings: Seventh Year • E.C. Hartwell
... that an imaginative person would have peopled the hills with gnomes and the woods with devils. Even had fairies existed in the glades, one would have instinctively known them to be bad fairies. Yet one could not say offhand whence or from whom the evil that was to be, would originate; all earth and sky seemed somehow to be in ...
— The Lost Valley • J. M. Walsh
... to reform these rich people offhand. Just to call at their houses and advise them, when you aren't too busy—that would be a kindness, of course, but quite far from a cure. Besides, they might even resent your little calls as intrusions. A good-hearted reformer would certainly endanger his comfort, ...
— The Crow's Nest • Clarence Day, Jr.
... like to answer such a question positively, offhand, but I don't, on the spur of the moment, recall any supposition ...
— The Beetle - A Mystery • Richard Marsh
... everything was at last ready. The handsome beaver replaced the mean-looking raccoon, and I began by degrees to get to work. It would never have done to act offhand, at random; the plan had to be carried out skilfully, by degrees. But I must confess that after many efforts I began to despair: we simply could not run into each other. I made every preparation, I was quite determined—it seemed as though ...
— Notes from the Underground • Feodor Dostoevsky
... from the Hudson's Bay Company departed for Saginaw, at seven o'clock A.M. The adverb "fiducially" first brought to my notice, as the synonym of confidently, steadily. Finished the perusal of Mr. F.'s manuscript lectures, on the Romish Church. Think them an offhand practical appeal to truth, clear in method, forcible in illustration. Learning and research, such as are to be drawn from books other than the Bible, have not been evidently relied on. They might not do to print without revision. The New ...
— Personal Memoirs Of A Residence Of Thirty Years With The Indian Tribes On The American Frontiers • Henry Rowe Schoolcraft
... was a good motherly woman, noted for her housekeeping, and for her church activities. She looked oftener at her son, and his friend Raymond than at the schoolmaster. Mrs. Bonner was the most voluble of the three, and was the only one who shook hands with Jim; but in spite of her rather offhand manner, Jim sensed in the little, black-eyed Irishwoman the real commander of the expedition against him—for such he ...
— The Brown Mouse • Herbert Quick
... woman I know is also the most beautiful," he replied. "Yes, I can name her offhand. She has all the finesse of her sex, together with the reasoning mind; she is surpassingly good to look at, and knows how to use her looks to obtain her end; as the occasion demands, she can be as cold as steel or warm as a ...
— The Cab of the Sleeping Horse • John Reed Scott
... 6,500 shares ($650,000), which to-day are worth a fabulous figure. For some time after this I heard nothing about the matter and was in complete ignorance of what my portion was until one day Mr. Rogers said in an offhand way: "By the way, Lawson, you can send me a check for your allotment of the selling company's stock, 250 shares." Before I got a chance to interpose a word he said: "We had to divide that up among a great many, or there would have been a good deal of hard ...
— Frenzied Finance - Vol. 1: The Crime of Amalgamated • Thomas W. Lawson
... answered the watery-eyed young man with an offhand attempt at familiarity. "I'm his Assistant—name of ...
— Lady Good-for-Nothing • A. T. Quiller-Couch
... been thinking," Mrs. Mencke began, throwing herself into a chair and trying to speak in an offhand way, "that another little trip would do us all good. Will has business that calls him to Canada, and he thinks he would like company on the journey; so we have decided to combine business and pleasure, and take in all ...
— His Heart's Queen • Mrs. Georgie Sheldon
... think it all right. Their conversation is absolutely sublimated when they get to talking of architecture. I have just copied two quotations from Emerson, and am studying them every night for fifteen minutes before I go to sleep. I'm going to quote them some time offhand, just after morning service, when we are wandering about the cathedral grounds. The first is this: "The Gothic cathedral is a blossoming in stone, subdued by the insatiable demand of harmony in man. The mountain of granite blooms ...
— A Cathedral Courtship • Kate Douglas Wiggin
... to find somebody," continued Zack, in his offhand, familiar way. "I don't know—gently! we're not walking for a wager—I don't know whether you're married or not?" (Mat still made no answer, and walked faster than ever.) "But if you havn't got wife or child, every fellow's got a father and ...
— Hide and Seek • Wilkie Collins
... memory, or offhand—Bonaparte never admitted any one to such secrets—instead of the proclamation he had dictated to Bourrienne two days earlier, ...
— The Companions of Jehu • Alexandre Dumas
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