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More "Preoccupation" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... is the art of Kisling. Rarely does he produce one of those pictures so appetizing that one fancies they must be good to eat. What you will find in his work, besides much good painting, is a serious preoccupation with the problem of externalizing in form an aesthetic experience. And as, after all, that is the proper end of art his work is treated with respect by all the best painters and most understanding critics, though it has ...
— Since Cezanne • Clive Bell
... cannot. In the treasury-house of your soul, there are infinitely precious things, that may not be taken from you. And so, try to so shape your life that external things will not harm you. And try also to get rid of personal property. It involves sordid preoccupation, endless industry, continual wrong. Personal property hinders Individualism at every step.' It is to be noted that Jesus never says that impoverished people are necessarily good, or wealthy people necessarily ...
— The Soul of Man • Oscar Wilde
... attached an extreme importance to proper names, and he did not decide which to give to his heroes until after long meditation, for he believed that names were significant, even to the extent of influencing their destinies. The manuscript of The Search for the Absolute bears witness to his constant preoccupation about money. He had inscribed on it the ...
— Honor de Balzac • Albert Keim and Louis Lumet
... Mission activity in New Mexico remained dormant, not only on account of intense preoccupation in other fields, but because the political leaders seemed to see no purpose in attempting the further subjugation of the country to the north (now New Mexico and Arizona). But about forty years after Coronado, another explorer was filled with adventurous zeal, and he applied for a charter ...
— The Old Franciscan Missions Of California • George Wharton James
... medicine, I found I was doing it mechanically, and had to begin over again, making an effort to keep my mind to my task. I think it is an axiom that no man can properly perform the business of life who indulges in emotional preoccupation. ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker
... the Supervisor's brain. In the midst of his preoccupation as a forester he suddenly became the father. His eyes narrowed and his face darkened. "That's so. The old rip could make a whole lot of capital out of your being left in camp that way. At the same time I don't believe in dodging. The worst thing we ...
— The Forester's Daughter - A Romance of the Bear-Tooth Range • Hamlin Garland
... pretence, but was written plainly in the languid gait, the drooped lids, and the dark patches beneath the eyes. By her side walked Charlemagne, and half a yard behind the three puppies trotted sleepily, Charlot lagging last; even in his anxious preoccupation La Mothe noticed it was Charlot, the best beloved of the three because it was ...
— The Justice of the King • Hamilton Drummond
... This preoccupation with the main issue, in getting beneficial results was one thing that made him glad to acclaim and use the gifts of other men. Through his sympathies he could follow as well as lead, and he caught enthusiasms as well as kindled them. He believed in enthusiasm for ...
— The Letters of Franklin K. Lane • Franklin K. Lane
... uncertain at what time the wasting disease, of which he died, first settled upon him; but he seems to have been always somewhat sickly of body, and with just that at times depressing, at times exciting, malady which tells most upon the whole organisation. That preoccupation with death, which in early life led him to write his Biathanatos, with its elaborate apology for suicide, and at the end of his life to prepare so spectacularly for the act of dying, was but one symptom of a morbid state of body and brain and nerves, to which so many ...
— Figures of Several Centuries • Arthur Symons
... and ambassadors, harassed by this constant preoccupation, had little time or inclination left for any serious pursuit, since, to take a moment's repose or an hour's breathing space was to risk falling behind in the endless and aimless race. Strange as it may appear, the knowledge that they owed place and preferment more to chance ...
— Worldly Ways and Byways • Eliot Gregory
... lapses, and called at my office. He was dressed with unusual care (he was always a good deal of a dandy), and he did not stagger nor slush his syllables; indeed, the only way I could have told what was the matter with him, at first, was by the solemn preoccupation of his expression. A little black pickaninny followed him, grinning and carrying a big bundle, covered with a ...
— In the Arena - Stories of Political Life • Booth Tarkington
... a man of notable attributes and shocking manners—is as easily lost in Paris as anywhere; it is a city of many shadows. At the end of some weeks, during which his work had suffered from his new preoccupation, Rufin saw himself baffled. His man had vanished effectually, carrying with him to his obscurity the great picture. It was the memory of that consummate thing that held Rufin to his task of finding the author; he pictured it to himself, ...
— The Second Class Passenger • Perceval Gibbon
... about the war and was a little too vocal about it for the tastes of some of his readers. During the First World War he served in Egypt as a Major in a Remount Unit, training horses for the war. This fit one of his main interests in life — horses —a preoccupation which is very evident in his poems, and even in his choice of pseudonym —"The ...
— Rio Grande's Last Race and Other Verses • Andrew Barton 'Banjo' Paterson
... interests in the South had become so large as to require personal attention; also that he had new enterprises in view. The young man's interest and ambition were naturally kindled. As Mara had taken the Bodines and their affairs as an antidote for her trouble, he sought relief in the preoccupation which the Ainsleys might bring to his mind. Accordingly he met father and daughter at the station and escorted them to the hotel with ...
— The Earth Trembled • E.P. Roe
... distant ages that lie before us what will be the result of this constant preoccupation with desire? Will it kill us or save us? Will this trait and our insatiable curiosity interact on each other? That might further eugenics. That might give us a better chance to breed finely ...
— This Simian World • Clarence Day Jr.
... advantage of the preoccupation of his captors during the last moments of Theriere to gnaw in two the grass rope which bound him to the mucker, and with hands still fast bound behind him had slunk into the jungle path that ...
— The Mucker • Edgar Rice Burroughs
... this strange sort of remarks which corresponded so intimately and logically with the preoccupation of his brain and which, at the same time, tended to persuade many people that his mind was unhinged. The count himself was seized with this idea; and, later, the examining magistrate, on receiving the report of the commissary of police, came to the ...
— The Phantom of the Opera • Gaston Leroux
... appeared to be extremely fatigued. Jane reflected that one hundred and twenty miles, with probably a great deal of climbing on foot, all in three days, was enough to tire any rider. Moreover, it presently developed that Lassiter had returned in a mood of singular sadness and preoccupation. She put it down to a moodiness over the loss of her white herd and the now precarious condition ...
— Riders of the Purple Sage • Zane Grey
... own people. But to his war-enlightened and disillusioned eyes his own people seemed almost like aliens; he vaguely resented their too evident prosperity, their irresponsible immunity, their heedless preoccupation with the petty things of life. The acres of bright flags fluttering above them, the posters that made a gay back-ground for the scene, the sheltered, undisturbed routine of peace ...
— The Crimson Tide • Robert W. Chambers
... sudden production of a cousin from America was so manifest that only his preoccupation at the moment when he met the young man could have prevented him seeing it before. His knowledge of Albert told him that, if one so versed as that youth in the art of Swank had really possessed a cousin in America, he would long ago have been boring the servants' hall with fictions about the ...
— A Damsel in Distress • Pelham Grenville Wodehouse
... grave responsibility before the country in deciding to be disinterested in the struggle. The keen popular awakening which is manifested in demonstrations, meetings, and public discussions shows that growing preoccupation and varied uneasiness will not cease so long as the fate of the country is not decided at the right time by men who by temperament are best fitted to be interpreters of the soul and the ...
— New York Times Current History; The European War, Vol 2, No. 2, May, 1915 - April-September, 1915 • Various
... farther preoccupation, and she went out herself to take up her conference with the gardener. Thence she walked to the village post-office, a mile or so away; and when she turned toward home, the early twilight ...
— The Early Short Fiction of Edith Wharton, Part 2 (of 10) • Edith Wharton
... Here was a slight smooth-faced blond-haired boy, who must have been dearly beloved by the women of his family. Here again a serious, kindly, middle-aged man whose face bore a curious expression of preoccupation. I caught myself thinking, "I should like to have known him." We found one who in his dying agony had evidently taken from his pocket a letter which now lay a sodden mass in his dead hand. We could not resist that mute appeal, but picked ...
— The Note-Book of an Attache - Seven Months in the War Zone • Eric Fisher Wood
... almost unbroken silence. When preoccupation withstands the influence of a social meal with one pleasant companion, the mental scene must be surpassingly vivid. Just as she was rising a ...
— Desperate Remedies • Thomas Hardy
... always had poor luck in South Africa, and never worse than on that occasion. Through no bad faith, but simply through preoccupation and delay, the promises made were not instantly fulfilled. If the Transvaalers had waited, they would have had their Volksraad and all that they wanted. But the British Government had some other local matters to set right, the rooting out of Sekukuni ...
— The War in South Africa - Its Cause and Conduct • Arthur Conan Doyle
... that wandering about, with a bag on one's back, from mountain to mountain, under the pretext of studying and of sketching nature. I know nothing more enjoyable than that happy-go-lucky wandering life, in which you are perfectly free; without shackles of any kind, without care, without preoccupation, without thought even of to-morrow. You go in any direction you please, without any guide save your fancy, without any counselor save your eyes. You pull up, because a running brook seduces you, or because you are attracted, in ...
— Selected Writings of Guy de Maupassant • Guy de Maupassant
... in a faint voice. I had not been looking at him in my own preoccupation, but when I did so, I found that the greatest change had come over the fat and ruddy coachman. "Me, Cornel!" he repeated, wiping the perspiration from his brow. His ruddy face hung in flabby folds, ...
— The Open Door, and the Portrait. - Stories of the Seen and the Unseen. • Margaret O. (Wilson) Oliphant
... Ridolfo, reading Selvaggia's sheaf of rhymes that night, was for running Master Cino through the body, jurist or no jurist; but Ugolino saw his way to a jest of the most excellent quality, and prevailed. He was much struck by the poet's preoccupation with his sister's eyes. ...
— Little Novels of Italy • Maurice Henry Hewlett
... years had passed by when Sophy Chantrey detected in her husband a degree of preoccupation and reticence that had long been unusual to him. For a few days he kept the secret; but at last, just as she began to feel she could bear his reserve no longer he ...
— Brought Home • Hesba Stretton
... speechless refer to fact or state; taciturn refers to habit and disposition. The talkative person may be stricken dumb with surprise or terror; the obstinate may remain mute; one may be silent through preoccupation of mind or of set purpose; but the taciturn person is averse to the utterance of thought or feeling and to communication with others, either from natural disposition or for the occasion. One who is silent does not speak ...
— English Synonyms and Antonyms - With Notes on the Correct Use of Prepositions • James Champlin Fernald
... of the guests, and he took advantage of the Baroness's preoccupation for their comforts to sit down by Sabina. He did not look at her, and she thought he looked bored, as he sat a moment in silence. Then a thin deputy with a magnificent forehead and thick grey hair began to hold forth on the subject of a projected divorce law and the guests gathered round him. Sabina ...
— The Heart of Rome • Francis Marion Crawford
... well-groomed and debonair, with waxed moustaches, greeted us. It was the procureur du roi. With him was another civilian—the juge d'instruction. They politely requested us to take a seat and to excuse a judicial preoccupation. The juge d'instruction was interrogating an inhabitant of Poperinghe. The procureur explained to me that the prevenu (the accused), who was not present but was within the precincts, was charged with calomnie[27] under Section 444 of the Code Penal. "But," I exclaimed in ...
— Leaves from a Field Note-Book • J. H. Morgan
... and for a few minutes we discussed weather signs like any other conventional Englishmen. A natural comparison led us presently to the subject of Canada. But through it all he bore himself as a man with a preoccupation he could not forget; and I was looking for a good opening to make an excuse of fatigue and go back to the Hall, when something of the thought that was intriguing him broke through ...
— The Jervaise Comedy • J. D. Beresford
... agitated, and the performance of the special graces which he usually displayed in this difficult act left a good deal to be desired. In fact, for the first time in his life, Professor Tartlet, forgetting in his preoccupation the most elementary principles of his art, went out with ...
— Godfrey Morgan - A Californian Mystery • Jules Verne
... uncle Phaeton?" queried Bruno, taking note of that preoccupation, which might easily prove dangerous ...
— The Lost City • Joseph E. Badger, Jr.
... even take the trouble to conceal that he was trying to appease her. Their parting sank to the level of the commonplace for he shook hands hastily, and her look of appeal flattened itself ineffectively against his preoccupation. ...
— Other People's Business - The Romantic Career of the Practical Miss Dale • Harriet L. Smith
... must have cost him a rebuke. As it was, I found something friendly, as well as curious, in his fixed frown; and ignorant of his name, though I knew him by sight, wondered both who he was and what was the cause of his preoccupation. ...
— From the Memoirs of a Minister of France • Stanley Weyman
... away beyond the sandy desert and the tree-crowned slopes, stretched a high cordillera, a curtain drawn between them and the unknown world of the interior. What lay there? Matters of grave interest and preoccupation! For beyond that far, blue maritime defence of Anahuac—they had that moment learned it—there dwelt a mighty potentate and people, steeped with savage soldier-craft, rendered more terrible by the barbaric civilisation which ...
— Mexico • Charles Reginald Enock
... disregarding the materialistic dress in which, perhaps under the influence of the materialism current in his youth, he clothed his essentially vitalistic thought? Everything goes to prove it—his constant preoccupation with psychological questions, his tacit assimilation of organ-formation to instinctive behaviour, his constant insistence on the ...
— Form and Function - A Contribution to the History of Animal Morphology • E. S. (Edward Stuart) Russell
... compromis d'une facon si inconvenante dans nos debats. J'aurais voulu raconter moi-meme, a tout le monde, sa bienveillance si sincere pour la France, son desir si perseverant de maintenir entre nos deux pays une amitie qu'il regardait comme excellente pour tous les deux, et en meme temps sa constante preoccupation pour son propre pays, son devouement si tendre pour la Reine, son attachement si fidele pour ses collegues. Je n'ai rencontre personne qui sut concilier a ce point tous les devoirs, tous les sentiments, toutes les idees. Dans la confiance de nos entretiens j'ai bien souvent ...
— 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
... Hill's preface to the paraphrase of Genesis, published in 1720, we find no preoccupation with the fatality of temperament and style. But we do find a rising discontent with the emptiness and restraint of much contemporary verse, and a very real preference for a more meaningful and a more emotional and ...
— 'Of Genius', in The Occasional Paper, and Preface to The Creation • Aaron Hill
... as mad for her. Unless he could have her near him again, kiss her, hold her close and acquiescent, he wanted nothing more from life. By her three minutes of utter unwavering indifference the girl had lifted herself from a high but somehow casual position in his mind, to be instead his complete preoccupation. However much his wild thoughts varied between a passionate desire for her kisses and an equally passionate craving to hurt and mar her, the residue of his mind craved in finer fashion to possess the triumphant soul that had shone through ...
— The Beautiful and Damned • F. Scott Fitzgerald
... his preoccupation Wang Ho never suffered his mind to wander when sums of money were concerned, and his inability to express himself by written signs only engendered in his alert brain an ever-present decision not to be entrapped by their use. Frequently, Cheng Lin found small sums of money lying in ...
— Kai Lung's Golden Hours • Ernest Bramah
... daily affairs. Vancouver grew and prospered, and the growth of Summit sales left an increasing balance on the profit side of Thompson's ledger. Moreover the rapid and steady growth of his business kept his mind on the business. It worked out—his business preoccupation—much in the manner of the old story of fleas and dogs, to wit: a certain number of fleas is good for a dog. They keep him from brooding over the fact ...
— Burned Bridges • Bertrand W. Sinclair
... animal. To all the notary's questions, he replied only by monosyllables, passing his fingers every now and then through his bushy brown locks, and twining them in his forked beard, a sure indication with him of preoccupation and bad humor. ...
— A Woodland Queen, Complete • Andre Theuriet
... the prosaic lawyer suspect the preoccupation of his pupil during the next quarter of an hour. Sylvia did her best to obey him; and Edna, intent on keeping him in the best of humor, expressed her enjoyment of a situation whose finish she anticipated far more eagerly ...
— The Opened Shutters • Clara Louise Burnham
... properly, and how to feed himself. He should never be permitted to play with his food; out of that baby habit comes the later playing with crumbs, holding the fork in the hand when not eating, drinking tea from a spoon, and other little gaucheries resorted to in embarrassment or preoccupation. It is not necessary to wait until a child is ten or twelve years old before teaching him not to interrupt a conversation, and to make his wants known quietly and without iteration, nor yet that your yea means ...
— Mother's Remedies - Over One Thousand Tried and Tested Remedies from Mothers - of the United States and Canada • T. J. Ritter
... her hands. "No more preoccupation; no more cares. Look into my eyes, dear Victor, and think only of the present hour, of the joy of being ...
— Serge Panine • Georges Ohnet
... Robbia puts his skyeyest works there; and the tomb of the youthful and princely prelate became the strangest and most beautiful thing in that strange and beautiful place. After the execution of the Pazzi conspirators, Botticelli is employed to paint their portraits. This preoccupation with serious thoughts and sad images might easily have resulted, as it did, for instance, in the gloomy villages of the Rhine, or in the overcrowded parts of medieval Paris, as it still does in many a village ...
— The Renaissance - Studies in Art and Poetry • Walter Pater
... the spy meant another attempt upon his life, but, standing up, he stared at him intently. Garay shrank away and disappeared in the further ranges of the camp. Robert somehow was not afraid. The man would not make such a trial again at so great a risk, and his mind turned back to its preoccupation, the great ...
— The Lords of the Wild - A Story of the Old New York Border • Joseph A. Altsheler
... tea was being served, there sounded a voice welcome to no one present, that of Lee Hannaford. He came forward with his wonted air of preoccupation; a well-built man, in the prime of life, carefully dressed, his lips close-set, his eyes seemingly vacant, but in reality very attentive; a pinched ironical smile meant for cordiality. After greetings, he stood before ...
— The Crown of Life • George Gissing
... of their preoccupation with other things that she had been given no more intelligible account of it, or was it something that all three of them, her father, Paula and Aunt Lucile, were walking round the edge of? The nub of some ...
— Mary Wollaston • Henry Kitchell Webster
... knows what. As it is, I don't fancy that I could make her quite unemotional; but that grief—there's no reason why she should go through life under that additional burden! She is exquisite, young, sure of many happy years with some one else, if she is cured of this preoccupation with that fellow who is gone. Shall I ask permission to try to do her ...
— Sacrifice • Stephen French Whitman
... humiliated us even more than if he had scolded, for his silence was very marked, and he appeared to take not the slightest interest in either of us, except to get us indoors, where we could do no further mischief. His manner was cold; and whether this arose from his strange preoccupation, or from annoyance with us, I couldn't decide. In either case, I was thankful when we were in our room, and had taken off our shawls and the beautiful ...
— The Chauffeur and the Chaperon • C. N. Williamson
... present wretchedness, than by speech. It was perfectly clear to Linda that nothing else mattered. She was even beginning, in a vague way, to think of it in connection with herself; but still most of her preoccupation was in her mother. She decided gravely that a great deal, yet, could be ...
— Linda Condon • Joseph Hergesheimer
... they could dress the wounded and make the dying a little more comfortable. For there was no taking the wounded to the rear. They had to remain there in the trench perhaps to be wounded again, spectators of their comrades' valour without the preoccupation of action. ...
— My Year of the War • Frederick Palmer
... became purple in the face. He had in fact been eating and drinking with great gusto, taking advantage of the preoccupation of the company to insure that the excellent fare should not be wasted. He rose hurriedly and, with a sheepish look that scarcely fitted his cheerful features, followed his sarcastic host to the veranda. All the guests save ...
— In Clive's Command - A Story of the Fight for India • Herbert Strang
... to," returned that lady, who had been somewhat tried by her son's preoccupation in the last few days and considered the adventure a rather annoying interlude ...
— In Apple-Blossom Time - A Fairy-Tale to Date • Clara Louise Burnham
... vanity was without means of defence. The child's presence deprived Germinie of all hope of repose. Mere girl as she was, she wounded her every minute in the day by her presence, her touch, her caresses, everything in her amorous body that spoke of love. Her preoccupation with Jupillon, the work that kept them constantly together, the provincial wonderment that she constantly exhibited, the half-confidences she allowed to come to her lips when the young man had gone, her gayety, her jests, her healthy good-humor—everything ...
— Germinie Lacerteux • Edmond and Jules de Goncourt
... accordingly sent among them to link them up with their brethren at home, and fan the embers of patriotism which long residence in the Tsardom had not quenched. Little by little, the political fruits of these apostolic labours began to show themselves: the colonists, whose main preoccupation had been to occupy the most fertile soil in the district, began to take over the approaches to Russia's strategic plans, and to display an absorbing interest in Russian politics. Several Zemstvos fell into their hands, and were ...
— England and Germany • Emile Joseph Dillon
... of a boy who might reveal its secrets to others, was too appalling to face; it hardly occurred to him that the boys had homes of their own, places which they loved. He only thought of them as figures on the school stage, to be conciliated, tolerated, lived with, his only preoccupation being to shield and guard his own heart and inner life from any intruding influence whatever. He had no desire ever to see one of the crew again, boys or masters. Some indeed were preferable to others, but no one could be trusted for an instant; the ...
— Beside Still Waters • Arthur Christopher Benson
... appointed night Charles went back to Lancaster Gate, as I could not fail to remark, with a strange air of complete and painful preoccupation. Never before in his life had I seen him ...
— An African Millionaire - Episodes in the Life of the Illustrious Colonel Clay • Grant Allen
... leaves. Morris alone showed a trace of activity. He had fished from his pockets the short, blunt stub of a pencil, a penny and a piece of tissue paper. The latter he had superimposed over the penny and by rubbing with the pencil was engaged in making a tracing of the pattern on the coin. Through his preoccupation Bobby at last became cognizant of this process. He sat and watched it with ...
— The Adventures of Bobby Orde • Stewart Edward White
... in the chair beside the table, the chair which the doctor was wont to adopt when the mosquitoes outside made the veranda impossible. Perhaps he understood the preoccupation which more particularly looked out of Millie's eyes. He felt the burden of his debt to these people, a debt he could never repay; he understood the feelings which his return must inspire if the child, left in their care, had become ...
— The Heart of Unaga • Ridgwell Cullum
... occupants of the room, of whom he was the central, commanding figure. The head nurse held the lamp carelessly, resting her hand over one hip thrown out, her figure drooping into an ungainly pose. She gazed at the surgeon steadily, as if puzzled at his intense preoccupation over the common case of a man "shot in a row." Her eyes travelled over the surgeon's neat-fitting evening dress, which was so bizarre here in the dingy receiving room, redolent of bloody tasks. Evidently he had been out to some dinner or party, and ...
— The Web of Life • Robert Herrick
... eye of Sweetwater. For, in the person of this none too welcome intruder, he saw a very different man from the one upon whom he had just turned his back with so little ceremony; and there appeared to be no good reason for the change. He had not noted in his preoccupation, how George, at sight of his stooping figure, had made a sudden significant movement, and if he had, the pulling of a necktie straight, would have meant nothing to him. But to Sweetwater it meant every thing, and it was in the tone of ...
— Initials Only • Anna Katharine Green
... Monday morning, and to interchange a few words with any of his congregation whom he might happen to meet. This pastoral perambulation not only added importance to him, and made him a figure in Cowfold, but, coming always on Monday, served to give people some notion of a preoccupation during the other days of the week which was forbidden, for mental reasons, on the day after Sunday. On this particular Monday Mr. Broad was passing Mr. Allen's shop, and seeing father and son there, went in. Mr. Allen himself was at a desk which stood near the window, and George was at the ...
— The Revolution in Tanner's Lane • Mark Rutherford
... so, and consequently there was nothing remarkable in his footsteps tending that way. But the preoccupation of his mind so hindered him from planning any walk, or taking heed of the objects he passed, that his first consciousness of being near the Weir, was derived from the sound of the falling water ...
— The Mystery of Edwin Drood • Charles Dickens
... action were illusory. "Never take counsel of your fears," was a maxim often on his lips. Unlike many others, he first made up his mind what he wanted to do, and then, and not till then, did he consider what his opponents might do to thwart him. To seize the initiative was his chief preoccupation, and in this case it did not seem difficult to do so. He knew that Banks was unenterprising. It was improbable that McDowell would advance until McClellan was near Richmond, and McClellan was very slow. To prevent Fremont getting an inkling ...
— Stonewall Jackson And The American Civil War • G. F. R. Henderson
... went to the city together. He was very busy looking over papers, and noticing his preoccupation I did not attempt to engage in conversation ...
— John Henry Smith - A Humorous Romance of Outdoor Life • Frederick Upham Adams
... preoccupation was inability to work and little interest in recreation, and as the long weeks wore away I grew morose, morbid, and hypochondriacal. The pride which kept me from sharing my secret with my friend ...
— Shapes that Haunt the Dusk • Various
... reference to our affairs, which had been for so many months the dominant issue; but he answered with reference to the European situation, as if that alone existed. Looking back, it seems to me strange that one should have been so engrossed in any preoccupation as in reality to ignore the vast and imminent possibilities. Yet, after all, I believe my case was typical of many. For us Irish, this was the crucial point, the climax of a struggle which had been intense and continuous now for a period ...
— John Redmond's Last Years • Stephen Gwynn
... was, Chiabrera made it the one preoccupation of his life, in these untoward circumstances, to remodel Italian poetry upon the Greek pattern. It was a merit of the Sei Cento, a sign of grace, that the Italians now at last threw orthodox aesthetic precepts to the winds, and avowed their inability to carry the Petrarchistic ...
— Renaissance in Italy, Volumes 1 and 2 - The Catholic Reaction • John Addington Symonds
... that she adopted her mistress's superstition; then the queen, incapable of remaining idle in her great preoccupation of mind, collected the few jewels that she had preserved, enclosed them in a casket, got ready for the evening a black dress, in order to be still better hidden in the darkness: and, these preparations ...
— CELEBRATED CRIMES, COMPLETE - MARY STUART—1587 • ALEXANDRE DUMAS, PERE
... roundabout opening of the vexed Shrapnel question, rang like a shot in the room at Steynham, and breathed a different spirit from his customary easy pugnacity that welcomed and lured on an adversary to wild outhitting. Some sorrowful preoccupation is, however, to be expected in the man who has lost a brother, and some degree of irritability at the intrusion of past disputes. He chose to repeat a similar brief forbidding of the subject before they started together for the scene of the accident and Romfrey Castle. No notice was taken of ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... hospital built at one end of it, "so could not bombard"; came upon dhows crowded with "female refugees" which she "allowed to proceed," and was presented with fowls in return; but through it all her chief preoccupation was that racked and strained gun and mounting. When there was nothing else doing she reports sourly that she "worked on gun." As a philosopher of the lower deck put it: "'Tisn't what you blanky do that matters, it's what you blanky ...
— Sea Warfare • Rudyard Kipling
... to dispute the legitimacy of this extension. Man has his place in nature; the phenomena of life have one of their signal illustrations in him, and he is as proper a subject of biological study as any other living being. But the intense preoccupation of much of the most vigorous intelligence of our time with the biological study of man is not without effects upon the mind itself, which we need to consider. It tends to produce a habit of mind to which certain assumptions are natural and inevitable, ...
— The Atonement and the Modern Mind • James Denney
... voyaging as a review of these various anxieties. I have thrown them (for the reader's convenience) into a certain order; but in the mind of one poor human equal they whirled together like the dust of hurricanes. With the same obliging preoccupation, I have put a name to each of his distresses; and it will be observed with pity that every individual item would have graced and commended the cover of a ...
— The Wrong Box • Robert Louis Stevenson and Lloyd Osbourne
... all these disasters. And to think that, if I had followed the warnings of sound common-sense, I should have been tranquilly settled at Montbars six months ago, cultivating my little vineyard, with no other preoccupation than watching the grapes grow round and turn to the color of gold in the pleasant Burgundian sunshine, and picking from the vines, after a shower, the little gray snails that make such an excellent fricassee. With the results of my economy I would have built, on the high land at ...
— The Nabob, Vol. 2 (of 2) • Alphonse Daudet
... he once more threw himself down on the moss couch beneath the palm-trees. There he reclined as before, supported on his elbow, and turned the diamond ring this way and that on his finger in moody preoccupation. ...
— Idolatry - A Romance • Julian Hawthorne
... now, having pushed the grille ajar and issued forth, stood, placing himself with a tentative obeisance at her service, beside the carriage: he was so clearly, first of all—what, if it hadn't been for her preoccupation, his voice, tone, accent would have warned her to expect—so visibly a gentleman; and then, with the even pink of his complexion, his yellowish hair and beard, his alert, friendly, very blue blue eyes—with his very ...
— My Friend Prospero • Henry Harland
... was so full that it required an extraordinary effort to hold it there, brimming and suspended, during the awful interval before he could trust his hand to lower it again, untouched, to the table. It was this merciful preoccupation which saved him, kept him from crying out, from losing his hold, from slipping down into the bottomless blackness that gaped for him. As long as the problem of the glass engaged him he felt able to keep his seat, manage his muscles, fit unnoticeably into the group; but ...
— The Triumph Of Night - 1916 • Edith Wharton
... a matter that consumed a large amount of time, but gradually, day by day, she found herself systematizing her task and becoming less inexpert. To be sure she made many mistakes; once, indeed, in a fit of preoccupation, while occupied in rearranging the bedroom, burning up ...
— The Land of Promise • D. Torbett
... window, standing directly below it, he had seen Nolan. In the sunlit yard the chauffeur, his cap on the back of his head, his cigarette drooping from his lips, was tossing the remnants of a sandwich to a circle of excited hens. He presented a picture of bored indolence, of innocent preoccupation. It was ...
— Somewhere in France • Richard Harding Davis
... pressed to her forehead. The caress was not a feigned tenderness. Mrs. Kinloch really loved the girl, with such love as she had to bestow; and if her manner had been latterly abstracted or harsh, it was from preoccupation. She was soon satisfied that the suspicion she dreaded had not found place in the girl's mind. Leading the way by imperceptible approaches, she spoke in her softest tones of her joy at Hugh's altered manners, her hopes of his future, and especially ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 2, Issue 11, September, 1858 • Various
... to the possibilities of new inspiration. He sought to freshen his faculties, to find some diversion in the passing moment that might react favorably on the plan nearest his heart. He forced himself to listen, at first in dull preoccupation, to the talk of a group in the smoker; it glanced from one subject to another—the surroundings, the soil, the timber, the mining interests—and presently concentrated on a quaint corner of the region, near the scene of the stoppage, the Qualla Boundary. This was the reservation of a portion ...
— The Ordeal - A Mountain Romance of Tennessee • Charles Egbert Craddock
... this letter so long and seriously that his wife noticed his preoccupation, and asked him what was the matter. He ...
— Forsyte Saga • John Galsworthy
... intervals—represented to her an hour of torture and humiliation. How to hide the scenes and the being who caused them, from her husband, her servants, her friends, was becoming almost her chief preoccupation. She was beginning to be afraid of her brother. For some time she had regarded him as incipiently insane, and as she watched him this evening he seemed to her more than ever charged with sinister possibilities. It appeared to be impossible to influence or frighten him; ...
— Harvest • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... peculiar kindness, and held his hand almost lovingly. His friendship for the dominie—if he had known it—was a grain of salt in his fast deteriorating life. He did not notice the dominie's stern preoccupation, he was so full of his own new plans. He began at once to lay them before his old friend; he had that very day got the estimates from ...
— Scottish sketches • Amelia Edith Huddleston Barr
... her best to be entertaining, and took no notice of his evident preoccupation until she had given her orders and they turned toward home; then she said: "I have been waiting in the hope that you would tell me what is troubling you, but now I shall have to ask; Carl and I are both wondering what ...
— The Story of the Big Front Door • Mary Finley Leonard
... was the most difficult but with a deliberate effort of will he accomplished it to his satisfaction. His secret thoughts he buried beneath a continuous mental preoccupation with the vain and the trivial. It was important to the success of his plan that ...
— The Man from Time • Frank Belknap Long
... moustache so trifling that one could not be sure whether it was a moustache or whether he had been too busy to think of shaving. Janet received all these facts into her brain, and then carelessly let them all slip out again, in her preoccupation with his eyes. She said they were sad eyes. The mouth, too, was somewhat sad (she thought), but there was a drawing down of the corners of it that seemed to make gentle fun of its sadness. Janet, perhaps out of her good-nature, liked his restless, awkward ...
— Clayhanger • Arnold Bennett
... late at his grand-aunt's because he had by a certain preoccupation, during a period of about an hour, been rendered oblivious of the passage of time. The real origin of the affair went back nearly sixty years, to an indecorous episode in the history of the ...
— The Price of Love • Arnold Bennett
... unconscious reaction of new concepts upon conduct. Preoccupation with the problems of space hyper-dimensionality cannot fail to produce profound changes in our ethical outlook upon life and in our attitude towards our fellow beings. The nature of these changes it is not difficult ...
— Four-Dimensional Vistas • Claude Fayette Bragdon
... whole of the following day; there was a promenade, a banquet, a comedy to be acted, and a comedy, too, in which, to his great amazement, Porthos recognized "M. Coquelin de Voliere" as one of the actors, in the piece called "Les Facheux." Full of preoccupation, however, from the scene of the previous evening, and hardly recovered from the effects of the poison which Colbert had then administered to him, the king, during the whole of the day, so brilliant in its effects, so full of unexpected ...
— The Man in the Iron Mask • Alexandre Dumas, Pere
... breeze dropped and it began to rain. He ignored the rain. But December rain has a strange, horrid quality of chilly persistence. It is capable of conquering the most obstinate and serious mental preoccupation, and it conquered Priam's. It forced him to admit that his tortured soul had a fleshly garment and that the fleshly garment was soaked to the marrow. And his soul gradually yielded before the attack of the rain, and he ...
— Buried Alive: A Tale of These Days • Arnold Bennett
... out of her weary preoccupation, opened her eyes to see that the driver had halted at a turn of the road, where apparently it descended a ...
— The Call of the Canyon • Zane Grey
... mystical life, and neither can exist in a wholesome and well-balanced form without the other. By them the mind, the will, the heart, which so long had dissipated their energies over a thousand scattered notions, wants, and loves, are gradually detached from their old exclusive preoccupation with the ephemeral interests of the self, or of the group ...
— Practical Mysticism - A Little Book for Normal People • Evelyn Underhill
... aimless preoccupation, among closely-packed shelves, and in pursuance of this indirection was familiar with the interior of every library in the city ...
— The Flaw in the Sapphire • Charles M. Snyder
... very sensitive, many-sided nature.[87] There is no other evidence in Shakespeare's work of homosexual instinct such as we may trace throughout Marlowe's, while there is abundant evidence of a constant preoccupation with women. ...
— Studies in the Psychology of Sex, Volume 2 (of 6) • Havelock Ellis
... Those from the north have eyes that are bright and clear; and amongst those from Moghreb, from Morocco and the Sahara, are many whose skins are almost black. But the expression of all the faces is alike: something of ecstasy and of aloofness marks them all; the same detachment, a preoccupation with the self-same dream. And in the sky, to which they raise their eyes, the heavens—framed always by the battlements of El-Azhar—are almost white from the excess of light, with a border of tall, red minarets, which seem to be aglow with the refection of some great fire. And, watching ...
— Egypt (La Mort De Philae) • Pierre Loti
... so beautiful in the midst of the watchfulness imprisoning me," she sighed, ever returning to her mild, pathetic preoccupation. ...
— The Inferno • Henri Barbusse
... Paul found among his morning letters an envelope addressed in Colonel Pendleton's boyish scrawling hand. He opened it with an eagerness that no studied self-control nor rigid preoccupation of his duties had yet been able to subdue, and glanced hurriedly ...
— A Ward of the Golden Gate • Bret Harte
... provincial. The story cannot be rightly estimated, it is true, without remembering the Puritan reverence for physical purity, the Puritan reverence for the magistrate-minister—differing so widely from the respect of Latin countries for the priest—the Puritan preoccupation with the life of the soul, or, as more narrowly construed by Calvinism, the problem of evil. The word Adultery, although suggestively enough present in one of the finest symbolical titles ever devised by ...
— The American Spirit in Literature, - A Chronicle of Great Interpreters, Volume 34 in The - Chronicles Of America Series • Bliss Perry
... Washington was at work in the real estate office again, and was alternately in paradise or the other place just as it happened that Louise was gracious to him or seemingly indifferent—because indifference or preoccupation could mean nothing else than that she was thinking of some other young person. Col. Sellers had asked him several times, to dine with him, when he first returned to Hawkeye, but Washington, for no particular reason, had not accepted. No particular reason ...
— The Gilded Age, Complete • Mark Twain and Charles Dudley Warner
... themselves wholly to delight in the glory of heaven and of earth? Is it the case with one man in every fifty thousand? Consider what extraordinary kindness of fate must tend upon one, that not a care, not a preoccupation, should interfere with his contemplative thought for five or six days successively! So rooted in the human mind (and so reasonably rooted) is the belief in an Envious Power, that I ask myself whether I shall ...
— The Private Papers of Henry Ryecroft • George Gissing
... son from the North, who, after beginning as a student of politics, soon turned his attention to literature and journalism. He became editor of Icelandic newspapers in Canada (1885-95), and, later, in Iceland, mainly in Reykjavk. His chief preoccupation, however, became the composition of short stories and novels, and besides these he also wrote some plays and poetry. The delicacy and the religious bent of his nature could not for long remain the soil for the satirical asperity and materialism of the realist school, though his art was ...
— Seven Icelandic Short Stories • Various
... 1526, as appears from his Ricordi. Still the work went on slowly, not through his negligence, but, as we have seen, from the Pope's preoccupation with graver matters. He had a great many workmen in his service at this period, and employed celebrated masters in their crafts, as Tasso and Carota for wood-carving, Battista del Cinque and Ciapino for carpentry, upon the various fittings of the library. ...
— The Life of Michelangelo Buonarroti • John Addington Symonds
... classical tradition—that all nature was to be remoulded in the form of antique sculpture. But it was also at this time, and owing to his stern apprenticeship to the study of form, that he acquired the mastery of drawing which served him so well when in the presence of nature; and with no other preoccupation than to reproduce his model, he painted the people of his time and produced his greatest works. For by a strange yet not unprecedented contradiction, David's fame to-day rests, not upon the great classical pictures which were the admiration of his time and by which ...
— McClure's Magazine, January, 1896, Vol. VI. No. 2 • Various
... bit ashamed of my preoccupation, and flung the bit of metal into the grass, poked my key in ...
— Highways in Hiding • George Oliver Smith
... in local approbation, and law business coming freely in with a special eye on the junior partner. But the tract was there, subconscious, plain in the wider glance, the alerter manner; plain even in the grasp and stride which marked him in a crowd; plain, too, in the preoccupation with other issues, were it only turning over a leader in the morning's Dominion, that carried him along indifferent to the allurements I have described. The family had a bond of union in their respect for Lorne, and this ...
— The Imperialist • (a.k.a. Mrs. Everard Cotes) Sara Jeannette Duncan
... was distinguished. The constant loss of sleep, and the incessant and weary vigils which she was forced to maintain, seemed to have but little effect upon her elastic and energetic nature. Zillah, in spite of her preoccupation, could not help seeing that Hilda was doing nearly all the work, and remonstrated with her accordingly. But to her earnest remonstrances ...
— The Cryptogram - A Novel • James De Mille
... called "Mr. Modern Republican," because the political philosophy which he espoused was precisely that of Eisenhower (Larson is now, 1962, Director of the World Rule of Law Center at Duke University, where his full-time preoccupation is working for repeal of the Connally Reservation, so that the World Court can take jurisdiction over United ...
— The Invisible Government • Dan Smoot
... carrying on at the same time. Starting from this point of view, it will always remain my private persuasion that Nature was absorbed in making cabbages when Mrs. Vesey was born, and that the good lady suffered the consequences of a vegetable preoccupation in the mind of the Mother ...
— The Woman in White • Wilkie Collins
... forgot him as soon as she was through the gate, and her face resumed its expression of stern preoccupation. "It's either now or ...
— Ann Veronica • H. G. Wells
... myself why Mrs. Carew, of all persons in the vicinity, had been the only one to hang back from this scene of excitement. It was not like her to hide herself at such a crisis (how invariably she had followed me in each and every visit I had paid here!), and though I remembered all her reasons for preoccupation, her absence under the present conditions bore an aspect of guilt which sent my mind working in a direction which was not entirely new to me, but which I had not as ...
— The Millionaire Baby • Anna Katharine Green
... but indifferently. She was secretly bound to another, on whose career she had staked all her happiness. Having thus other interests she evinced to-day the ease of one who hazards nothing, and there was no sign of that preoccupation with housewifely contingencies which so often makes the hostess hardly recognizable as the charming woman who graced a friend's home the day before. In marrying Swithin Lady Constantine had played ...
— Two on a Tower • Thomas Hardy
... of the three miles behind her; and she grew a little afraid lest in the white darkness she might miss the little church; once past it, though never so little, and looking back would be in vain. It was a question if she would not pass it even with her best endeavour. In her preoccupation it had never once occurred to Diana to speculate on what she would find at the church, if she reached it; and now she had but one thought, not to miss reaching it. She had some anxious minutes of watching, for ...
— Diana • Susan Warner
... blandishments from any one whom she doesn't take a fancy to. That good-natured, talkative Mr. Distel has been trying all day to get her to come to him, but she always gives him the slip." And Blythe, in her preoccupation, proceeded to throw two rings out of three wide ...
— A Bookful of Girls • Anna Fuller
... His preoccupation was such that, though he now slept on the other side of the house, he mechanically went to the room that he and his wife had occupied when he first became a tenant of Old-Grove Place, which since his differences with Sue had been hers exclusively. ...
— Jude the Obscure • Thomas Hardy
... his annoyance, or to keep himself from temptation, he bent closer over the article he was writing for The Museion. She came and stood beside him, watching him as he worked, still with his air of passionate preoccupation. Presently he found himself drawn against his will ...
— The Divine Fire • May Sinclair
... to the objection of unduly exposing the troops and ships placed in unfortified or poorly fortified harbors, which received such a sad illustration at Galveston; but it was dropped, owing, first, to the preoccupation of the Government with its expectations of immediately reducing the Mississippi, and afterward to the fear of losing ships which at that time could not be replaced. Hesitation to risk their ships and to take decisive action when seasonable opportunity offers, is the penalty paid by nations ...
— Admiral Farragut • A. T. Mahan
... are cunningly registered and the effects of lines and colors and tones upon the human organism are set forth with mathematical precision. He need not trouble himself overmuch at the outset with definitions of Beauty. The chief thing is to become aware of the long and intimate preoccupation of men with beautiful objects and to remember that any inquiry into the nature and laws of poetry will surely lead him into a deeper curiosity as to the nature and manifestations of aesthetic feeling ...
— A Study of Poetry • Bliss Perry
... continence is imposed upon the unmarried woman, under pain of being considered immoral or fallen, with the result of producing neurasthenia, impotence, depression, and a great variety of nervous complaints involving diminished power of work, limited enjoyment of life, sleeplessness, and preoccupation with sexual desires and imaginings. The arbitrary and pernicious dictum of total continence probably also explains the mental inequality of the sexes. Thus Freud believes that the intellectual inferiority of so many women is due to the inhibition ...
— Anarchism and Other Essays • Emma Goldman
... of impressions, his intense preoccupation with present dangers and future contingencies, the thought of Natalie floated now and then vaguely but comfortingly. He had seen her for a moment, before leaving—barely long enough to explain the nature of his mission—but her quick ...
— The Iron Trail • Rex Beach
... of population, the common people are more trustworthy than the corporations, the colleges, or the newspapers. The selfishness, the preoccupation, the anti-republicanism of these, are proverbial. We know that editors are echoes, not leaders, printing what will sell, not what is true. Landor declared that there is a spice of the scoundrel in most literary men. Everybody understands ...
— The Arena - Volume 4, No. 22, September, 1891 • Various
... In this intense preoccupation with the Soul, Hawthorne's romance is in unison with the more mystical and spiritual utterances of Catholicism as well as of Protestantism. It was in part a resultant of that early American isolation which contributed ...
— The American Mind - The E. T. Earl Lectures • Bliss Perry
... novice who has not learned his business, the tyro to whom the elements of his occupation are unknown. We have seen that when he wrote Catilina he had neither sat through nor read any of the plays of the world, whether ancient or modern. The pieces which belong to his student years reveal a preoccupation with Danish dramas of the older school, Oehlenschlaeger and (if we may guess what Norma was) Holberg, but with nothing else. Yet Ole Bull, one of the most far-sighted men of his time, must have perceived the germs of theatrical genius in him, and it is probable that Ibsen owed ...
— Henrik Ibsen • Edmund Gosse
... and an unprecedented reorganization of the army. There was also a reference to the new law for a return to three years' service which France was introducing to improve the efficiency of her peace establishment. But it was obvious that Russia was the main preoccupation. Germany had forced the pace both in the aggrandizement of her military strength and in the methods of her diplomatic intercourse. Suddenly she found herself on the brink of an abyss. She had gone too far; she had provoked into the competition ...
— Why We Are At War (2nd Edition, revised) • Members of the Oxford Faculty of Modern History
... periodicals. Except for its maps, it was a lawyer's room, although James Thorold never claimed either legal ability or legal standing. Peter seldom entered it without interest in its possibilities of entertainment, but to-day his father's strange and sudden preoccupation of manner ingulfed all the boy's thought. "What is it, dad?" he asked, a tightening fear screwing down upon his brain as he noted the change that had come over the mask that James Thorold's ...
— The Best Short Stories of 1915 - And the Yearbook of the American Short Story • Various
... in the direction of his hotel in a state of preoccupation. He was sore and irritated; he disliked it all intensely; it jarred upon him and offended his taste. Over and over he cursed it all for a damnable business from beginning to end. He was perfectly aware, reasoning from cause to effect, that the situation was, in some ...
— Princess • Mary Greenway McClelland
... had worn five years earlier. More and more France was drawn into the actual conflict of the Thirty Years' War, impelled by a sense of new and unparalleled opportunity to weaken the House of Hapsburg. This, in turn, meant the preoccupation of Richelieu with European affairs, and a heavy drain upon the resources of France in order to meet the cost of her more ambitious foreign policy. Thus the duel with Austria, as it progressed during the last decade of the cardinal's life, meant a fresh check to {129} those colonial prospects which ...
— The Founder of New France - A Chronicle of Champlain • Charles W. Colby
... we have a fresh pattern—a pattern, to speak grossly, of letters—which makes the fourth preoccupation of the prose writer, and the fifth of the versifier. At times it is very delicate and hard to perceive, and then perhaps most excellent and winning (I say perhaps); but at times again the elements of this literal melody stand more ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 16 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... work?" Brenton interrupted banally, for, in his secret heart, he was painfully aware that it was not the church alone which kept him so preoccupied that his preoccupation had come to be an occupation on its ...
— The Brentons • Anna Chapin Ray
... ask, do I dwell on all this? It is because these are the true Advent voices for us, coming as they do to rouse us out of narrow preoccupation, to open our eyes to the sinfulness of sin, to make us feel that the self-centred, isolated, self-seeking life is a life of a low type, and to stir us with social ...
— Sermons at Rugby • John Percival
... an old-fashioned adjective which describes better than any other this preoccupation with things, which so often prevents a woman's coming to an understanding of the heart of her Business. It is old maidish. It has often been the pathetic fate of single women to live alone. To minister to themselves becomes their occupation. The force ...
— The Business of Being a Woman • Ida M. Tarbell
... full heart I set off in the dusk of evening to ride back to Shrewsbury. I rode slowly, my mind being filled with forebodings, and I was only roused from my preoccupation by the sudden appearance of a horseman at the turning of a byroad leading from Bridgenorth. He was riding rapidly, and we both reined up at the same moment to avoid a collision. And at that moment my heart leapt with furious exultation as, in the fading light, ...
— Humphrey Bold - A Story of the Times of Benbow • Herbert Strang
... serious preoccupation, with no anxiety for the future, exempt from family cares, they transfer all their solicitude to themselves, and make a divinity of ...
— The Grip of Desire • Hector France
... student, with its gracious peace, its beauty, its dignity, seemed to me, as the life of social preoccupation or success may seem to children born to that penumbra, ...
— McClure's Magazine, Volume VI, No. 3. February 1896 • Various
... hands I took such special notice of it as might be expected. Upon one corner of the lid I detected a peculiar device scratched slightly upon it, most probably with the sharp point of a steel pen, in such a moment of preoccupation of mind as causes most of us to draw odd lines and caricatured faces upon any piece of paper which may lie under our hand. It was the old revolutionary device of a heart with a dagger piercing it; and I wondered whether it could be the Premier, or one of his ...
— Mugby Junction • Charles Dickens
... magical conditions. But the forging of the shield and the wonderful house of Alcinous are no merely incongruous episodes in Homer, but the consummation of what is always characteristic of him, a constant preoccupation, namely, with every form of lovely craftsmanship, resting on all things, as he says, like the shining of the sun. We seem to pass, in reading him, through the treasures of some royal collection; in him the presentation of almost every aspect ...
— Greek Studies: A Series of Essays • Walter Horatio Pater
... But for all his preoccupation, he had not failed to note the wistfulness in Evelyn's dutifully smiling eyes. He was more than usually tender with her on his return, and successfully banished the wistfulness by giving up his polo to take ...
— Captain Desmond, V.C. • Maud Diver
... course of our stroll through the town the night before. We had said, How charming it would be to draw money in such an environment; and full of the romantic expectation, I offered my letter at the window, where after a discreet interval I managed to call from their preoccupation some unoccupied persons within. They had not a very financial air, and I thought them the porters they really were, with some fear that I had come after banking-hours. But they joined in reassuring me, and told me that if I would return after ...
— Familiar Spanish Travels • W. D. Howells
... every captain I have met in the Bahamas, knew as little about it as I did. Charlie had been right; you must know how to sail your own boat when you hoist your sails in Bahaman waters. I confess that I began to regret Charlie's preoccupation with Tobias—for, in spite of his missing his way that day in the North Bight, Charlie seems to know his way in the dark wherever one happens to be ...
— Pieces of Eight • Richard le Gallienne
... moral as well as material progress. To a large number of people here, on the other hand, the bolting of food—ten-minute dinners, for instance—and general unconsciousness of "what is on the table," is a sign of preoccupation with serious things. It may be; but the German love of food is not necessarily a sign of grossness, and that "overfed" appearance, of which the Union spoke, is not necessarily a sign of inefficiency, any ...
— Reflections and Comments 1865-1895 • Edwin Lawrence Godkin
... was not calculated to encourage Jumping Frog in his high-handed policy. His face fell considerably, and Pepin, taking advantage of his preoccupation, walked off with ...
— The Rising of the Red Man - A Romance of the Louis Riel Rebellion • John Mackie
... stock which still gives character, ethical and otherwise, to the English tradition. The "Kalevala," which otherwise should seem nearest to the basic qualities of our poetry, is almost unique, as Hearn points out, in the extent of its preoccupation with enchantments and charms, with the magic of words. "Amis and Amile," which otherwise ought to seem more foreign to us, is strangely close in its glorification of friendship; for chivalry left ...
— Books and Habits from the Lectures of Lafcadio Hearn • Lafcadio Hearn
... here the interpreter goes astray under the preoccupation of the times: 'heret significat hereticum et infidelem; hence "It is not good to take the children's bread and cast it unto dogs, that is ...
— The Age of Erasmus - Lectures Delivered in the Universities of Oxford and London • P. S. Allen
... it? Are you ailing?" "Ailing? No," I answered, laughing lightly, "I am not; Just see my cheek, sir—is it thin, or pale? Now, tell me, am I looking very frail?" "Nay, nay," he answered, "it cannot be SEEN, The change I speak of—'twas more in your mien - Preoccupation, or—I know not what! Miss Helen, am I wrong, or does Maurine Seem to have something on her mind this eve?" "She does," laughed Helen, "and I do believe I know what 'tis! A letter came to-day Which ...
— Maurine and Other Poems • Ella Wheeler Wilcox
... hands. From a first glance at the great three whom his jest had made its theme, I was aware of Longfellow sitting upright, and regarding the humorist with an air of pensive puzzle, of Holmes busily writing on his menu, with a well-feigned effect of preoccupation, and of Emerson, holding his elbows, and listening with a sort of Jovian oblivion of this nether world in that lapse of memory which saved him in those later years from so much bother. Clemens must have dragged his joke to the climax and left it there, but I cannot say this from ...
— Henry James, Jr. • William Dean Howells
... depict the troubled seas in which he was now voyaging as a review of these various anxieties. I have thrown them (for the reader's convenience) into a certain order; but in the mind of one poor human equal they whirled together like the dust of hurricanes. With the same obliging preoccupation, I have put a name to each of his distresses; and it will be observed with pity that every individual item would have graced and commended the cover of a ...
— The Wrong Box • Robert Louis Stevenson and Lloyd Osbourne
... Church of Rome, he acted under the combined impulse of the two dominating forces in his nature. His preoccupation with the supernatural might, alone, have been satisfied within the fold of the Anglican communion; and so might his preoccupation with himself— the one might have found vent in the elaborations of High Church ritual, ...
— Eminent Victorians • Lytton Strachey
... said you'd been a partner. You have. Some day I'm going to tell you how grateful I am." In his preoccupation, he forgot to tie up the blankets; and, one hand on "Red's" shoulder, he let the cord fall on ...
— The Bad Man • Charles Hanson Towne
... to Aberdeen to hear me speak, and as I looked down on them from the platform of the opera house, I detected on their faces an expression which was not so much attention, as preoccupation. They were not listening to my words, they were thinking of my relationship to them, of the mystery involved in my being there on the platform surrounded by the men of the county whom they most respected. They could not take my theories seriously, but they did value ...
— A Son of the Middle Border • Hamlin Garland
... on the head, her eyes fixed on the ground. From the open doors of the houses were heard, as she passed, friendly calls inviting her within for business purposes, but she never heeded them, neglecting her sales in the preoccupation of intense thinking. Since the very early morning she had heard much, she had also seen much that filled her heart with a joy mingled with great suffering and fear. Before the dawn, before she left Bulangi's house to paddle up to Sambir she had heard ...
— Almayer's Folly - A Story of an Eastern River • Joseph Conrad
... even enthusiasm of the girl was quite transparent. Nor was the man insensible to it. For all his preoccupation he realized something of his debt to these people, to Nan. It was a debt he had never attempted to pay, and now its rapid mounting made even ultimate payment ...
— The Forfeit • Ridgwell Cullum
... Shrapnel question, rang like a shot in the room at Steynham, and breathed a different spirit from his customary easy pugnacity that welcomed and lured on an adversary to wild outhitting. Some sorrowful preoccupation is, however, to be expected in the man who has lost a brother, and some degree of irritability at the intrusion of past disputes. He chose to repeat a similar brief forbidding of the subject before they ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... must mean. I am brought back to our wrong ideals; I have no new remedy to give; I can only again insist upon this truth: A preoccupation with a desire for love does not, and never can, result in happiness. But the personal (or perhaps my meaning will be clearer by saying the egoistic) view of love has assumed such gigantic proportion in our minds to-day that we accept these selfish desires as a safe ...
— Women's Wild Oats - Essays on the Re-fixing of Moral Standards • C. Gasquoine Hartley
... him into the whirlpool of her vivid, physical personality. Before her the memory of his wife faded into insignificance. But there was no mere retrospect in the considering of Essie; very much alive she presented, outside the Penny iron, the one serious preoccupation, ...
— The Three Black Pennys - A Novel • Joseph Hergesheimer
... Shrimp, who had taken advantage of his master's preoccupation to finish the contents of the pewter pot, tossed the utensil to the gamekeeper, having previously attracted that individual's attention by exclaiming, in a tone of easy familiarity—"Look out, Leggings!"—then, as the man, taken by surprise, and having some difficulty in saving himself from ...
— Frank Fairlegh - Scenes From The Life Of A Private Pupil • Frank E. Smedley
... You see your weppings might get you into trouble at Red Dog, and your money's a temptation to the evilly disposed. I think you said your address was San Francisco. I shall endeavor to call." It may be stated here that Tennessee had a fine flow of humor, which no business preoccupation could wholly subdue. ...
— Tennessee's Partner • Bret Harte
... departing cavalry drew the elders to the windows, and in this preoccupation Janice saw her opportunity to gain by stealth what had been denied her. Slipping silently from the parlour, she sped through hall and dining-room, pausing only when the kitchen doorway was attained, her courage wellnigh gone at the thought that the aide might refuse to believe her protestations ...
— Janice Meredith • Paul Leicester Ford
... must unlearn certain things the schools had taught them: preoccupation with the relative merits of Gothic and Classic—tweedledum and tweedledee. Furthermore, they must learn certain neglected lessons from the engineer, lessons that they will be able immeasurably to better, ...
— Architecture and Democracy • Claude Fayette Bragdon
... domiciled in Hawkeye. Washington was at work in the real estate office again, and was alternately in paradise or the other place just as it happened that Louise was gracious to him or seemingly indifferent—because indifference or preoccupation could mean nothing else than that she was thinking of some other young person. Col. Sellers had asked him several times, to dine with him, when he first returned to Hawkeye, but Washington, for no particular reason, had not accepted. No particular reason except one ...
— The Gilded Age, Part 2. • Mark Twain (Samuel Clemens) and Charles Dudley Warner
... river. I forgave it its attempt on my life; which was after all one part owing to the unruly winds of heaven that had blown down the tree, one part to my own mismanagement, and only a third part to the river itself, and that not out of malice, but from its great preoccupation over its business of getting to the sea. A difficult business, too; for the detours it had to make are not to be counted. The geographers seem to have given up the attempt; for I found no map represent the infinite contortion of its course. A fact will say more than any ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition - Vol. 1 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... distorted posture on two chairs, his figure in deep shadow, but his book was raised above his head so as to catch the red glow of the stove on the printed page. Even then his father's angry interruption scarcely diverted his preoccupation; he raised himself in his chair mechanically, with his eyes still fixed on his book. Seeing which his father quickly regained the paper, but continued ...
— A First Family of Tasajara • Bret Harte
... man of notable attributes and shocking manners—is as easily lost in Paris as anywhere; it is a city of many shadows. At the end of some weeks, during which his work had suffered from his new preoccupation, Rufin saw himself baffled. His man had vanished effectually, carrying with him to his obscurity the great picture. It was the memory of that consummate thing that held Rufin to his task of finding the author; he pictured it to himself, housed in some garret, making ...
— The Second Class Passenger • Perceval Gibbon
... and in the Magazine of 1898 and 1899 there are papers on "The Colonial Expansion of the Great European Powers", "The Italian Riots of May, 1898", "The Philippine Question", "The Dreyfus Incident." This preoccupation of young college women of the nineteenth century with modern industrial and political history is significant when we consider the part that woman has elected to play in politics and reform since the beginning of the ...
— The Story of Wellesley • Florence Converse
... magic, whether associated with communal or propitiatory sacrifice, whether directed to the earth or to the heaven, all had an intensely practical and terribly real character, due to man's constant preoccupation with the growth and storage of food for man and beast. In the hunting, the pastoral, and above all in the agricultural life, religion was not a matter merely of imagination or sentiment, but one most ...
— Celtic Religion - in Pre-Christian Times • Edward Anwyl
... period of his youth Eliot had more than ever the appearance of inhuman preoccupation. His dark, serious face detached itself with a sort of sullen apathy from the social scene. He seemed to have no keen interests beyond his slides and mixing jars and test-tubes. Women, for whom his indifference had a perverse fascination, said of him: "Dr. Fielding isn't interested in people, ...
— Anne Severn and the Fieldings • May Sinclair
... hard lesson. Harlan's changeless preoccupation hurt her cruelly, but, woman-like, she considered it a manifestation of genius and endeavoured to be proud accordingly. It had not occurred to her that there could ever be anything in Harlan's thought into which she was not privileged to ...
— At the Sign of the Jack O'Lantern • Myrtle Reed
... all the freshness and brilliancy of her twenty years, with large eyes, soft and luminous. Her natural disposition was evidently a bright and gay one, but this evening sadness overshadowed her, and to such a point that, in spite of her efforts to be lively and pleasant, she could not hide her sad preoccupation. ...
— A Nest of Spies • Pierre Souvestre
... element is almost eliminated. We are in the open, the sun blazes in the blue, and all is gay, atmospheric, and illuding. Even where the tone deepens, where the shadows grow cooler and darker in the B major section, there is little hint of preoccupation with sadness. Subtle are the harmonic shifts, admirable the ever changing devices of the figuration. Riemann accents the B, the E, A, B flat, C and F, at the close—perilous leaps for the left hand, but they bring into fine relief the exquisite harmonic ...
— Chopin: The Man and His Music • James Huneker
... is too bad of him," said Chris, as she sat on a rock at twelve yards' distance and dried her feet in melancholy preoccupation. "It's the third day running, and I'm so tired of having nobody to talk to and nothing to do—not ...
— The Rocks of Valpre • Ethel May Dell
... six o'clock in the evening that the carriages containing the grand duke and his family passed through the Porta San Gallo, from which proceeds the road to Bologna, and thence to Vienna. The main preoccupation of the people at that moment was to assure themselves by the evidence of their own senses that the duke and dukelings were really gone. An immense crowd of people assembled round the gate and lined the road immediately outside it. Along the living line thus ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Vol. 15, - No. 87, March, 1875 • Various
... shudder ran through him when he remembered that he still owed sixty thousand francs, to say nothing of bills to come for another ten thousand. He went back melancholy enough. His friends remarked his ill-disguised preoccupation, and spoke of it ...
— The Collection of Antiquities • Honore de Balzac
... was, however, his main preoccupation during all this period. Two discoveries of ancient MSS. made during his stay in London, the one containing a shorter text of the Epistles of St Ignatius, and the other an unknown work On all the Heresies, ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 4, Part 4 - "Bulgaria" to "Calgary" • Various
... ambassadors, harassed by this constant preoccupation, had little time or inclination left for any serious pursuit, since, to take a moment's repose or an hour's breathing space was to risk falling behind in the endless and aimless race. Strange as it may appear, the knowledge that they owed place and preferment more ...
— Worldly Ways and Byways • Eliot Gregory
... purple in the face. He had in fact been eating and drinking with great gusto, taking advantage of the preoccupation of the company to insure that the excellent fare should not be wasted. He rose hurriedly and, with a sheepish look that scarcely fitted his cheerful features, followed his sarcastic host to the veranda. All the guests save Mr. Merriman ...
— In Clive's Command - A Story of the Fight for India • Herbert Strang
... urging, half pushing, half leading, the doctor swept his trio of visitors into the parlor. Despite her start at Miller's appearance at the door, despite his preoccupation and gloom, which several glasses of the doctor's good wine failed to dissipate, Miss Forrest remained after a brief visit to the invalid up-stairs and, saying that she had promised Nellie, sang to ...
— 'Laramie;' - or, The Queen of Bedlam. • Charles King
... aspect of our epoch and how it is likely to be regarded in the future, when the paradise of ideal living is regained, a modern writer says: "Will not the intense preoccupation of material production, the hurry and strain of our cities, the draining of life into one channel, at the expense of breadth, richness, and beauty, appear as mad as the Crusades, and perhaps of a lower type of madness? Could anything be more ...
— A Fleece of Gold - Five Lessons from the Fable of Jason and the Golden Fleece • Charles Stewart Given
... took slow shape and he sat up feeling in the pockets of his coat. The paper was gone; Knapp saying he had taken it was not a dream. For a space he sat, coming to clearer recollection, his partner's voice calling, vaguely heard, its request unheeded in his preoccupation. He gave a mutter of relief, and dropping back settled himself into comfort. The paper was as safe there as in his own pocket and he'd have it again inside of a week. With the first light in his eyes, he lapsed off again ...
— Treasure and Trouble Therewith - A Tale of California • Geraldine Bonner
... of the magna peccatrix, lovely still in her penitence. It is an embodiment of the favourite subject, infinitely finer and more moving than the much earlier Magdalen of the Pitti, in which the artist's sole preoccupation has been the alluring portraiture of exuberant feminine charms. This later Magdalen, as Vasari says, "ancorche che sia bellissima, non muove a lascivia, ma a commiserazione," and the contrary might, without ...
— The Later works of Titian • Claude Phillips
... is my work?" Brenton interrupted banally, for, in his secret heart, he was painfully aware that it was not the church alone which kept him so preoccupied that his preoccupation had come to be an occupation on ...
— The Brentons • Anna Chapin Ray
... builder's disposal, by his inventiveness, and, often, by his personal whims. As a result time is required for the organist to learn his instrument thoroughly. After this he is as free as the fish in the sea, and his only preoccupation is the music. Then, to play freely with the colors on his vast palette, there is but one way—he must plunge ...
— Musical Memories • Camille Saint-Saens
... out-sizes. Such food is too apt to behave resentfully, rebel and work Obi. She ceased to listen to her husband's talk from the day she married him, and ceased to unwrinkle the kink in her brow at his presence, giving herself up to mental states that had a quality of secret preoccupation. And she developed an idea for which perhaps there was legitimate excuse, that he was lazy. He seemed to stand about in the shop a great deal, to read—an indolent habit—and presently to seek company for talking. He began to attend the bar parlour ...
— The History of Mr. Polly • H. G. Wells
... any of his contemporaries, does not afford any excuse for the irrelevancies of ornamental criticism; with him the appearance of form and colour, acted upon by light, the relative values of which flesh and draperies consist with reference to the surrounding medium, all this becomes so evident a preoccupation and a basis for decorative effects, as to give certain of his works an almost startling air of being modern. But this tendency comes to nothing: the men of the sixteenth century appear scarcely to have perceived wherein lay the true excellence of this "Andrea ...
— Euphorion - Being Studies of the Antique and the Mediaeval in the - Renaissance - Vol. II • Vernon Lee
... revelation as to Calcutta or London incidents. Paul was vague, and would abruptly change the subject. Then I appeared bored and listless, when he would tell more, but less disconnected, stories about his past. At each suggestive hint I would show renewed interest, again lapsing into listless preoccupation, uneasy dissatisfaction, or frigid unconcern. Paul noted each changing mood, suiting his conduct ...
— Oswald Langdon - or, Pierre and Paul Lanier. A Romance of 1894-1898 • Carson Jay Lee
... fireplace, muttering French phrases in humorous imitation of her grace. Observing the King's preoccupation, she tossed a ...
— Mistress Nell - A Merry Tale of a Merry Time • George C. Hazelton, Jr.
... going?" asked the friar of Maria Clara and Aunt Isabel, who were about to enter a silver-mounted carriage. In the midst of his preoccupation Padre Damaso ...
— The Social Cancer - A Complete English Version of Noli Me Tangere • Jose Rizal
... which he died, first settled upon him; but he seems to have been always somewhat sickly of body, and with just that at times depressing, at times exciting, malady which tells most upon the whole organisation. That preoccupation with death, which in early life led him to write his Biathanatos, with its elaborate apology for suicide, and at the end of his life to prepare so spectacularly for the act of dying, was but one symptom of ...
— Figures of Several Centuries • Arthur Symons
... Prescott," he said, "that we may not have acted rightly or squarely by you; and this last adventure was a most unhappy result of my careless awkwardness and preoccupation." ...
— Modern Broods • Charlotte Mary Yonge
... the battlefields of Champagne, Belgium, Galicia, and Hungary the Government is assuming a grave responsibility before the country in deciding to be disinterested in the struggle. The keen popular awakening which is manifested in demonstrations, meetings, and public discussions shows that growing preoccupation and varied uneasiness will not cease so long as the fate of the country is not decided at the right time by men who by temperament are best fitted to be interpreters of the soul and the interests ...
— New York Times Current History; The European War, Vol 2, No. 2, May, 1915 - April-September, 1915 • Various
... does not lie in mad Byronic passion, or in terrible Herodian lust. It lies in a certain deliberate "petrifaction" of the human soul in us; a certain glacial detachment from all interests save one; a certain frigid insanity of preoccupation with our own emotion. And this emotion, for the sake of which every earthly feeling turns to ice, is our Death-hunger, our eternal craving to make what has been be again, ...
— Visions and Revisions - A Book of Literary Devotions • John Cowper Powys
... all pilgrims from the city's struggle, where they found no oases of rest. He melts "pasts" and family skeletons and hidden stories of any kind whatsoever into the blue as a background with the abandoned preoccupation of his own brushwork. His lieges, who seek oblivion in the desert, need not worry about the water that will never run over the millwheel again, or dwell in prophecy on floods to come. The omnipotence of the moment transports and ...
— Over the Pass • Frederick Palmer
... too active to stay quietly at the house of Mr. Huysman. Only their host, Tayoga and he were present at their supper that evening, and, as the man was rather silent, the lads respected his preoccupation, believing that he was concerned with the great affairs in which he was having a part. After supper Tayoga left for the camp on the flats to see an Onondaga runner who had arrived that day, and Mr. Huysman, still immersed ...
— The Sun Of Quebec - A Story of a Great Crisis • Joseph A. Altsheler
... so much with preoccupation, perhaps, as with indifference. She thought it rather a nice name, but she did not know what she had to ...
— The Coast of Bohemia • William Dean Howells
... where he was. His delay may have been intentional, yet he had the appearance of deep preoccupation. He quite understood that Wanaha's presence during his story had been deliberate. She had left her own class on some trifling excuse and come out to warn him, knowing that he would be alone with his children. There was no smile on his face while he stood thinking, only a pucker between ...
— The Watchers of the Plains - A Tale of the Western Prairies • Ridgewell Cullum
... sent for him, he had drawn a piteous picture of the peasant's condition, and had expatiated with eloquence on his own poverty, and on the extreme difficulty of collecting any rents at all. It was not until he discovered that Corona's chief preoccupation was for the welfare of her tenants that he changed his tactics, and endeavoured to prove that all was for the best upon the best of ...
— Saracinesca • F. Marion Crawford
... Dick Hunter, the weather-beaten one, and talked to him as he imagined he wanted to be talked to. He had always liked his host's Bohemian ways very well, he was only impatient of his preoccupation with native postulants. There was his usual fly-swarm of them, that day as other days, about his threshold, and lunch was late, as usual. At last they began. Julian had the first two courses to himself for the most part, while his host was busy once again ...
— Cinderella in the South - Twenty-Five South African Tales • Arthur Shearly Cripps
... with unusual care (he was always a good deal of a dandy), and he did not stagger nor slush his syllables; indeed, the only way I could have told what was the matter with him, at first, was by the solemn preoccupation of his expression. A little black pickaninny followed him, grinning and carrying a big bundle, covered with a new ...
— In the Arena - Stories of Political Life • Booth Tarkington
... the mathematical degree; we would make common stock: he would bring long hours of calculation, I my youthful ardor. We would begin as soon as I had finished with my arts degree, which was my main preoccupation for the moment. ...
— The Life of the Fly - With Which are Interspersed Some Chapters of Autobiography • J. Henri Fabre
... exaggerated. So confident was Everard that he even whistled a tune as he walked, and planned how he would stroll into the drawing-room on his return to Casa Bianca, slip the necklace from his pocket, and casually mention where he had been. In his preoccupation he did not give any particular heed to the road, or see movement among the dark shadows of a group of prickly pears that overhung a ...
— The Princess of the School • Angela Brazil
... frenzied but beautiful as he remembered. But he rarely cared to speak of this memory to any one. In his childhood and youth he was by no means expansive, and talked little indeed, but not from shyness or a sullen unsociability; quite the contrary, from something different, from a sort of inner preoccupation entirely personal and unconcerned with other people, but so important to him that he seemed, as it were, to forget others on account of it. But he was fond of people: he seemed throughout his life to put implicit trust in people: yet no one ever looked on him as a simpleton or naive person. There ...
— The Brothers Karamazov • Fyodor Dostoyevsky
... America, during which she had, in spite of her sentimental preoccupation, studied diligently every phase that passed before her keen critical vision, analyzed every person she had met, and passed many of her evenings in the study of the best contemporary fiction, had, associated with the spur of her own upheaval, developed her imagination, and her ...
— The White Morning • Gertrude Atherton
... Rutot's time, following Mortillet's example, investigators have called these "eoliths," and they have been traced back by Verworn to the Miocene of the Auvergne, and by Rutot even to the upper Oligocene. Although these eoliths are even nowadays the subject of many different views, the preoccupation with them has kept the problem of the age of the ...
— Darwin and Modern Science • A.C. Seward and Others
... did later hadn't influenced events in a strange, dramatic way.) She couldn't let Eagle alone; and she showed her feelings so plainly—as a very rich girl sometimes thinks she may do with a comparatively poor man—that even Eagle himself, despite his lack of self-conceit and his preoccupation with thoughts of Di, couldn't help understanding. He kept out of Milly's way as often as he could, but she attributed this retirement to the calls of duty; and at last began to behave so foolishly that for her own sake ...
— Secret History Revealed By Lady Peggy O'Malley • C. N. Williamson and A. M. Williamson
... were accordingly sent among them to link them up with their brethren at home, and fan the embers of patriotism which long residence in the Tsardom had not quenched. Little by little, the political fruits of these apostolic labours began to show themselves: the colonists, whose main preoccupation had been to occupy the most fertile soil in the district, began to take over the approaches to Russia's strategic plans, and to display an absorbing interest in Russian politics. Several Zemstvos fell into their hands, and were practically controlled by them, and ...
— England and Germany • Emile Joseph Dillon
... men that were all that was left of the section." He now knew that the great offensive was imminent. "The situation," he wrote, "is most interesting and exciting, but I am not at liberty to say anything about it. My greatest preoccupation now is whether this affair is coming off before or after the 4th of July. The indications are that it is going to break very soon. In that case nothing doing in the way of permission. But I still have hopes of ...
— Poems • Alan Seeger
... with it, questing kudos. In the garden he met Finn, who with careless good humor strolled toward him, offering a game. Jan tried his best to growl and to turn up his nose at the same time, indicating serious preoccupation with matters more weighty than play. But finding that his hold upon the mouse was gravely endangered by this process, he gave up the attempt, and swaggered on toward the front entrance, followed quizzingly by the wolfhound. Finding nobody in the porch, Jan fell over ...
— Jan - A Dog and a Romance • A. J. Dawson
... moment before the storm, when trees hang lifeless in a stifling atmosphere, and animals raise their heads in frightened expectancy, awaiting with nameless terror the first gust which shall herald the tornado. Since her father's return from France, she noted that the air of preoccupation apparent before his departure, was now intensified. While in his kindness toward her the girl could detect no change, still, there had come between them a species of estrangement. Seldom was there an opportunity for them to converse, for Fawkes was up before ...
— The Fifth of November - A Romance of the Stuarts • Charles S. Bentley
... which she took such shy and secret delight, and handled in idle gossip the delicate joys and fragile hopes of young love, it is more than likely that she would have been frightened away from bower and lane, shocked and disenchanted. But the preoccupation of her cousin and her own eccentric and solitary habits prevented suspicion and inquiry,—no unfriendly spy, no rude, untoward event, disturbed the quiet and seclusion of this charmed scene of her wooing, where Nature, Romance, and Poetry were in ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 4, No. 21, July, 1859 • Various
... girls, he would have added another beautiful page to his estasi umane ("Human Ecstasies") because at these little festivals, whether they are held in the hut or outside, one never sees pouting faces, frowning brows or any other indication of preoccupation or passion. Everybody is merry and their delight can be read upon their countenances (notwithstanding the frightful way they are besmeared with paint), and shines in their eyes; happy are the women who blow into the flute or grate the krob or beat the bamboo sticks; happy ...
— My Friends the Savages - Notes and Observations of a Perak settler (Malay Peninsula) • Giovanni Battista Cerruti
... he told himself, as he noted that his speedometer had dropped from sixty to thirty in his preoccupation. He speeded again, but was soon forced to stop and ask his way into Primrose Meadows. The vague directions of a farmer's son lost him nearly eight precious minutes, during which his friend, Captain Strawn of the Homicide Squad, might be bungling things ...
— Murder at Bridge • Anne Austin
... step was the most difficult but with a deliberate effort of will he accomplished it to his satisfaction. His secret thoughts he buried beneath a continuous mental preoccupation with the vain and the trivial. It was important to the success of his plan that ...
— The Man from Time • Frank Belknap Long
... my spirits were raised; there was no point in trying to get out of the depression now, seeing we could as easily be rescued from one portion of the grass as from another. Again the grass was soft and pleasant to touch and Slafe's preoccupation with his pictures no longer seemed either eccentric or heroic, but rather proper and sensible. Like Alice and the Red Queen, since we had given up trying to reach a particular spot we found ourselves able to travel with comparative ...
— Greener Than You Think • Ward Moore
... the art of Kisling. Rarely does he produce one of those pictures so appetizing that one fancies they must be good to eat. What you will find in his work, besides much good painting, is a serious preoccupation with the problem of externalizing in form an aesthetic experience. And as, after all, that is the proper end of art his work is treated with respect by all the best painters and most understanding critics, though it has not yet scored a popular ...
— Since Cezanne • Clive Bell
... related. We have now whole congregations whose preachers, far from magnifying our consciousness of sin, seem devoted rather to making little of it. They ignore, or even deny, eternal punishment, and insist on the dignity rather than on the depravity of man. They look at the continual preoccupation of the old-fashioned Christian with the salvation of his soul as something sickly and reprehensible rather than admirable; and a sanguine and "muscular" attitude. which to our forefathers would have seemed purely heathen, has become in their eyes an ideal element of Christian character. ...
— The Varieties of Religious Experience • William James
... belief with some foolish dog. I would be a village "character" of the sort that is justly said to "dodder." And the judicious would shun observation by me, or, if it befell them, would affect an intense preoccupation lest I halt and dodder to them of a past ...
— The Boss of Little Arcady • Harry Leon Wilson
... growing discomfort. He ate his dinner and answered the brisk questions of his wife with increasing preoccupation. Like Miss Ware, he was picturing Jim solitary and suffering in his lonely cell. With the utmost sincerity and ingenuousness he ...
— The Calico Cat • Charles Miner Thompson
... by a stinging shower of lime-dust. An Englishman in the next balcony had take courteous advantage of her preoccupation, and had flung a scoopful of confetti in her undefended face! It is generally Anglo-Saxons of the less refined class, English or Americans, who do these things at Carnival times. The national love of a rough joke comes to the surface, encouraged ...
— What Katy Did Next • Susan Coolidge
... primary characteristics of the British mind to be interested in problems of conduct rather than of thought. The seventeenth century had, for the most part, been interested in theology and government; and its preoccupation, in both domains, with supernatural sanctions, made its conclusions unfitted for a period dominated by rationalism. Locke regarded his Human Understanding as the preliminary to an ethical enquiry; and Hume seems to ...
— Political Thought in England from Locke to Bentham • Harold J. Laski
... and the irritation which he experienced habitually manifested itself against the remnants of the Jacobin party, the declared enemies of the order of things which he wished to establish, capable, he thought, of any crimes, and whose works he had had the opportunity of judging. This exclusive preoccupation sometimes turned away his attention from more pressing perils and bolder enemies. A conspiracy to which the police had lent themselves, and which had failed without any of the accomplices daring to put their hands on their arms, roused public attention, in the month ...
— Worlds Best Histories - France Vol 7 • M. Guizot and Madame Guizot De Witt
... himself, 'How we shall be criticised! They will tell each other who was decently dressed, and who stepped awkwardly into the boats, and what the price of my boots was!' Such exclamations, murmured at intervals, and followed by chest-drawn sighs, expressed a deep preoccupation. With regard to his boots, he need have had no anxiety. They were of the shiniest patent leather, much too tight, and without a speck of dust upon them. But his nervousness infected me with a cruel dread. All those ...
— Sketches and Studies in Italy and Greece • John Addington Symonds
... ruin,—that man, when professionally so competent as Hawke, would be most fruitful in orders and in suggestions to attain the desired end. In this sense there can be no doubt that he was foremost, and his correspondence bears evidence of his preoccupation with the subject. ...
— Types of Naval Officers - Drawn from the History of the British Navy • A. T. Mahan
... and it began to rain. He ignored the rain. But December rain has a strange, horrid quality of chilly persistence. It is capable of conquering the most obstinate and serious mental preoccupation, and it conquered Priam's. It forced him to admit that his tortured soul had a fleshly garment and that the fleshly garment was soaked to the marrow. And his soul gradually yielded before the attack of the ...
— Buried Alive: A Tale of These Days • Arnold Bennett
... from the absence of natural defences, the Russian frontier had been artificially drawn so as to make her Polish province an indefensible salient, though properly organized it would have been an almost intolerable threat alike to East Prussia and to Austrian Galicia. But for her preoccupation in the West, Germany could have conquered Poland in a fortnight, and Russian plans, indeed, contemplated a withdrawal as far as the line of Brest-Litovsk. As it was, the German offensive in Belgium and France left the defence ...
— A Short History of the Great War • A.F. Pollard
... inclined to think the destination of the French. Yet, being dependent upon a wind then practically constant in direction, it would not do to yield a mile of ground, except upon a mature, if rapid, deliberation. Nelson's own mind was, by constant preoccupation, familiar beforehand with the bearings of the different conditions of any situation likely to occur, and with the probable inferences to be drawn; his opinions were, so to say, in a constant state of formation and development, ready ...
— The Life of Nelson, Vol. I (of 2) - The Embodiment of the Sea Power of Great Britain • A. T. (Alfred Thayer) Mahan
... Day (the last Thursday in November) and not thawing again until the beginning of March, and that, in the house where I was born, we had the fall of snow so heavy that we could tunnel the path to the barn, the drift covering the door of the house. The coming of spring was my constant preoccupation through the winter, and my joy was intense at the first swelling of the buds, the coming color in the willow twigs, which ushered in the changes of spring; then the catkins, the willow leaves, and ...
— The Autobiography of a Journalist, Volume I • Stillman, William James
... political pressure, of course," said Cameron. "But the real reason was simply our preoccupation with making bibliographies of each others' papers. It's going to take a lot of leg work, something in which our formal courses don't give us any basic training. Fothergill understands that—it's why he pushed me so hard with the Foundation. And Riley up there is ...
— Cubs of the Wolf • Raymond F. Jones
... might have been thinking of the spiritistic triumphs of Mrs. Meeker or of Ena with her sweet curves. Whatever might be said of the latter, it was clear that she was no prude. McGeorge drew a deep breath; it was the only expression of his immediate preoccupation. ...
— The Best Short Stories of 1919 - and the Yearbook of the American Short Story • Various
... propitiatingly and therein lay the sting, that he did not even take the trouble to conceal that he was trying to appease her. Their parting sank to the level of the commonplace for he shook hands hastily, and her look of appeal flattened itself ineffectively against his preoccupation. ...
— Other People's Business - The Romantic Career of the Practical Miss Dale • Harriet L. Smith
... a promenade, a banquet, a comedy to be acted, and a comedy, too, in which, to his great amazement, Porthos recognized "M. Coquelin de Voliere" as one of the actors, in the piece called "Les Facheux." Full of preoccupation, however, from the scene of the previous evening, and hardly recovered from the effects of the poison which Colbert had then administered to him, the king, during the whole of the day, so brilliant in its effects, so full of unexpected and startling novelties, in which all the wonders of the "Arabian ...
— The Man in the Iron Mask • Alexandre Dumas, Pere
... window with a sigh, and stepped back to the table for the tinder-box, that for the eleventh time he might relight his pipe. He sat down, blew a cloud of smoke to the ceiling, and considered. His nature triumphed now over his recent preoccupation; the matter of the moment, which concerned him not at all, engrossed him beyond any other matter of his life. He was intrigued to know in what relation one to the other stood the three so oddly assorted travellers he had seen arrive. He ...
— The Lion's Skin • Rafael Sabatini
... not even conceiving the possibility of an explanation, science would have enquired into, instead of dismissing a priori facts, such as those which you study; perhaps 'psychical research' would have stood out as its principal preoccupation. The most general laws of mental activity once discovered (as, in fact, the fundamental laws of mechanics were discovered), we should have passed from mind, properly so-called, to life; biology would have been constituted, but a ...
— The Unknown Guest • Maurice Maeterlinck
... President Eisenhower. Larson was often called "Mr. Modern Republican," because the political philosophy which he espoused was precisely that of Eisenhower (Larson is now, 1962, Director of the World Rule of Law Center at Duke University, where his full-time preoccupation is working for repeal of the Connally Reservation, so that the World Court can take jurisdiction over ...
— The Invisible Government • Dan Smoot
... leather, and it fastened with a lock and key. The first time it came into my hands I took such special notice of it as might be expected. Upon one corner of the lid I detected a peculiar device scratched slightly upon it, most probably with the sharp point of a steel pen, in such a moment of preoccupation of mind as causes most of us to draw odd lines and caricatured faces upon any piece of paper which may lie under our hand. It was the old revolutionary device of a heart with a dagger piercing it; and I wondered whether it could be the Premier, or one of his ...
— Mugby Junction • Charles Dickens
... of raising the spirits of the troops and of the people, reviews were constantly held and rewards distributed. The Emperor rode through the streets to comfort the inhabitants, and, despite his preoccupation with state affairs, himself visited the theaters that were established ...
— War and Peace • Leo Tolstoy
... of the gods, if prophecy must fulfill itself, should not be a contemptible or pitiful one, that was Wotan's preoccupation,—to save, if nothing more, the dignity of the Eternals; with this in view, to keep Alberich from recovering the Ring, by which he might work such really disgusting havoc. The Ring was in the possession of Fafner, who had turned himself into ...
— The Wagnerian Romances • Gertrude Hall
... corresponds, not with the busy life of succession but with the eternal sources of power, gets its chance. "Though the soul," says Von Huegel, "cannot abidingly abstract itself from its fellows, it can and ought frequently to recollect itself in a simple sense of God's presence. Such moments of direct preoccupation with God alone bring a deep refreshment and ...
— The Life of the Spirit and the Life of To-day • Evelyn Underhill
... the Pampas thistles, etc., against my statement of the importance of preoccupation. But I am referring especially to St. Helena, and to plants naturally introduced from the adjacent continents. Surely, if a certain number of African plants reached the island and became modified into a complete adaptation to its climatic conditions, they would ...
— Alfred Russel Wallace: Letters and Reminiscences, Vol. 1 (of 2) • James Marchant
... his heart were bestowed on few; for in early life they had never been cultivated, but they were singularly warm, pure, and constant; characterized not by the ardour of passion, but by the constant preoccupation of real affection. He had lost his mother, to whom he was fondly attached, early in life; and with his father, a man of coarse feelings and boisterous manners, he had few sentiments in common. Always feeble in constitution, he was unequal to the ...
— The Letters of Horace Walpole, Volume 1 • Horace Walpole
... to the preoccupation of the group, the German made his way up to them and picked ...
— Four Max Carrados Detective Stories • Ernest Bramah
... to do, and by and by she became absorbed in the elaborate pattern which she was working on a frock for wee Rosie, and was rather more remiss than before, as to doing her part for the entertainment of their guest. She had not done that from the beginning, but her quietness and preoccupation were more apparent, because the rain kept them within doors. Graeme saw it, and tried to break through it or cover it as best she might. Mrs Snow saw it, and sometimes looked grave, and sometimes amused, but she made no remarks about it. As for Mr Millar, if he noticed ...
— Janet's Love and Service • Margaret M Robertson
... while shaving that morning, and a large patch of black plaster showed in the centre of his long, prominent chin: as he walked, he now and then lifted a hand to pluck nervously at it; save in this unconscious gesture, he betrayed no sign of excitement or preoccupation, for, as he walked, he looked about him and once, for a ...
— Half a Hero - A Novel • Anthony Hope
... In his preoccupation he forgot that the supper hour was passing, but at last started hastily for his room. As he rapidly turned a sharp corner he nearly ran into two ladies who were coming from an opposite direction, and looking up saw Mrs. Mayhew ...
— A Face Illumined • E. P. Roe
... times in the course of that morning—for she stayed with us all the morning—Fanny Meyrick rallied me on my preoccupation and silence: "He didn't use to be so, Bessie, years ago, I assure you. It's very disagreeable, sir—not an improvement ...
— On the Church Steps • Sarah C. Hallowell
... compare the attitude of the two girls at this time, when the failure or success of his best work was still undecided. He felt that as Helen took so little interest in his success he could not dare to trouble her with his anxieties concerning it, and she attributed his silence to his preoccupation and interest in Marion. So the two grew apart, each misunderstanding the other and each troubled in spirit ...
— The Lion and the Unicorn and Other Stories • Richard Harding Davis
... her hair as it prepared to charge. Charge it did and in those close quarters there was no room to fence for openings. Instantly the two beasts locked in deadly embrace, each seeking the other's throat. Pan-at-lee watched, taking no advantage of the opportunity to escape which their preoccupation gave her. She watched and waited, for into her savage little brain had come the resolve to pin her faith to this strange creature who had unlocked her heart with those four words—"I am Om-at's friend!" ...
— Tarzan the Terrible • Edgar Rice Burroughs
... set me down as one who girds at your preoccupation, up here, with bodily games; for, indeed, I hold 'gymnastic' to be necessary as 'music' (using both words in the Greek sense) for the training of such youths as we desire to send forth from Cambridge. But I plead that they ...
— On the Art of Writing - Lectures delivered in the University of Cambridge 1913-1914 • Arthur Quiller-Couch
... widened in a smile for Cletus. "This is an honor, Your Highness. I trust you will pardon my preoccupation with affairs of state. They're in a mess—as are all capitals when the old order departs. I supposed you'd be announced." Andrei Broncov glared at the pseudo Volonsky and whispered in a dialect, "The Council ...
— Satan and the Comrades • Ralph Bennitt
... been trying to find an excuse for my lapse. But there is none. It was the blunder of a novice, my not remembering to question Ku Sui about that secret panel. That was the cardinal point, yet it slipped my mind, in my preoccupation with the emergencies connected with the restoration ...
— The Passing of Ku Sui • Anthony Gilmore
... annotators, it must be from the mental preoccupation of this unlucky "ex pede Herculem," that they have so often put their foot in it. They have worked up Alcides' shoe into a sort of antithesis to Cinderella's; and, like Procrustes, they are resolved to stretch everything ...
— Notes and Queries, Number 193, July 9, 1853 • Various
... Rose had again furnished a gourmet's meal, but Peter's preoccupation prevented its careful and appreciative gustation. An irrational feeling of the octoroon's imminence spurred him to fast eating. He had hardly begun his soup before he found himself drinking swiftly, looking up the street over his spoon, as if he meant to rush out and swing ...
— Birthright - A Novel • T.S. Stribling
... averted! It cannot be!" she was thinking. Her glimpse of him had no more interest for her at this moment of preoccupation than any other ...
— The Last Shot • Frederick Palmer
... spite of his preoccupation, began to realize that there was something peculiar about this night promenade, for as they reached a crossroad, M. Paul ordered the chauffeur to turn into it and go ahead as fast as he pleased. The chauffeur hesitated, muttered some ...
— Through the Wall • Cleveland Moffett
... of the planetoid opened and the First Section shot out into space. Full-driven as they were, Roger's screens flared white as he drove through the temporarily lessened attack of the Nevians; but in their preoccupation the amphibians did not notice the additional disturbance and the section tore on, unobserved and undetected. Far out in space, Roger raised his eyes from the instrument panel and continued the conversation as though ...
— Triplanetary • Edward Elmer Smith
... My greatest preoccupation hitherto has been the problem of decadence, and I had reasons for this. "Good and evil" form only a playful subdivision of this problem. If one has trained one's eye to detect the symptoms of decline, one also understands morality,—one understands ...
— The Case Of Wagner, Nietzsche Contra Wagner, and Selected Aphorisms. • Friedrich Nietzsche.
... stands stock-still, turning instinctively from the wind like one of the brutes, while the past comes back in a waking dream so akin to reality, that even in his preoccupation he seems to live the last year of his life over again. Once more he is at the old place in Cheshire, whither he has gone like any other young dandy, an agreeable addition to a country shooting-party because of his chestnut locks, his blue eyes, his handsome person, ...
— M. or N. "Similia similibus curantur." • G.J. Whyte-Melville
... Flavian himself, in his boundless animation, there, at the centre of the situation. From the natural defects, from the pettiness, of his euphuism, his assiduous cultivation of manner, he was saved by the consciousness that he had a matter to present, very real, [103] at least to him. That preoccupation of the dilettante with what might seem mere details of form, after all, did but serve the purpose of bringing to the surface, sincerely and in their integrity, certain strong personal intuitions, a certain vision or apprehension of things ...
— Marius the Epicurean, Volume One • Walter Horatio Pater
... went to see if the children had wakened. All day she was thinking so deeply she would stumble over the chairs in her preoccupation. George noticed it, and it frightened him. After supper he came and sat ...
— A Daughter of the Land • Gene Stratton-Porter
... disgust of her walk hither, she had never noticed the situation of the cabin, as it nestled on the slope at the fringe of the woods; in the preoccupation of her disappointment and the mechanical putting away of her things, she had never looked once from the window of her room, or glanced backward out of the door that she had entered. The view before her was a revelation—a ...
— Devil's Ford • Bret Harte
... strange self-engrossment and stranger mania about people long dead, this indifference and desire to annoy towards her husband—did it all mean that Alice Oke had loved or still loved some one who was not the master of Okehurst? And his melancholy, his preoccupation, the something about him that told of a broken youth—did it mean that he ...
— Hauntings • Vernon Lee
... there was another, a more secret and a hardly less holy shrine. The suite of rooms which Albert had occupied in the Castle was kept for ever shut away from the eyes of any save the most privileged. Within those precincts everything remained as it had been at the Prince's death; but the mysterious preoccupation of Victoria had commanded that her husband's clothing should be laid afresh, each evening, upon the bed, and that, each evening, the water should be set ready in the basin, as if he were still alive; and this incredible rite was performed with scrupulous ...
— Queen Victoria • Lytton Strachey
... his aide-de-camp Sulkowsky, so severely wounded at Salahieh that he left his pallet of suffering with the greatest difficulty only. Bonaparte, in his preoccupation forgetting the young Pole's condition, said to him: "Sulkowsky, take fifteen Guides and go see what that ...
— The Companions of Jehu • Alexandre Dumas
... in Peter's tone and his preoccupation during supper both worried and perplexed me. So as soon as I could get away from the shack I went out to the windmill tower again. And the small platform at the end of the sloping little iron ladder looked so tempting and high ...
— The Prairie Mother • Arthur Stringer
... picture herself when they went in to look at it, but she did not turn round on hearing them. She had Tod in her arms yet, but she seemed to have forgotten his very existence in her preoccupation. And it was scarcely to be wondered at. The picture was only a head,—Mollie's own fresh, drowsy-eyed face standing out in contrast under some folds of dark drapery thrown over the brown hair like a monk's cowl, two or three autumn-tinted oak leaves clinging to a straying tress,—but ...
— Vagabondia - 1884 • Frances Hodgson Burnett
... My preoccupation now is to find out as near as possible where we are bound for. I am a good-enough sailor to be able to estimate the approximate speed of a ship. In my opinion the Ebba has been travelling at the rate of from ten to eleven knots an hour. As to ...
— Facing the Flag • Jules Verne
... his anxious preoccupation he could see that the church itself was a quaint and wonderful preservation of the past. For four centuries it had been sacred to the tombs of the Dorntons and their effigies in brass and marble, yet, as Randolph glanced ...
— Trent's Trust and Other Stories • Bret Harte
... economic advantages of the Far East. How seriously this situation will be taken by the United States and Great Britain depends in part upon the vigor with which Japan prosecutes her claims and in part upon the preoccupation of these two great powers with Bolshevism in Europe and with their own competitive activities in ship building, ...
— The American Empire • Scott Nearing
... thin bread-and-butter. He paused in the act of daintily sprinkling it with salt pinched in finger and thumb, and looked at Deleah across the table, her hand hiding her face. So long he looked at her, so long she remained unconscious of him, that Franky ventured in their preoccupation to help himself to a third piece of ...
— Mrs. Day's Daughters • Mary E. Mann
... let's have mercy on the poor hunted figure. I was about to say that your occupation—or preoccupation—as I drove down the street brought to my attention a new phase of our scenery—a brilliant one. Is this the girl I used to know as ...
— Double Trouble - Or, Every Hero His Own Villain • Herbert Quick
... result of this preoccupation was inability to work and little interest in recreation, and as the long weeks wore away I grew morose, morbid, and hypochondriacal. The pride which kept me from sharing my secret with my friend also held me at my ...
— Shapes that Haunt the Dusk • Various
... drove up in front of Captain Tiago's house and the Franciscan stepped to the ground just as Aunt Isabel and Maria Clara were getting into their silver-trimmed carriage. They saluted Father Damaso, and he, in his preoccupation, gently patted Maria Clara ...
— Friars and Filipinos - An Abridged Translation of Dr. Jose Rizal's Tagalog Novel, - 'Noli Me Tangere.' • Jose Rizal
... maps, it was a lawyer's room, although James Thorold never claimed either legal ability or legal standing. Peter seldom entered it without interest in its possibilities of entertainment, but to-day his father's strange and sudden preoccupation of manner ingulfed all the boy's thought. "What is it, dad?" he asked, a tightening fear screwing down upon his brain as he noted the change that had come over the mask that James Thorold's ...
— The Best Short Stories of 1915 - And the Yearbook of the American Short Story • Various
... latter, in truth, sometimes acts as if it were not so much fighting us off as drawing us on. Leaning far forward and stretching forth its arms, it buttonholes the wayfarer, so to speak, and with generous country insistence forces upon him the delicious clusters which he, in his preoccupation, seemed in danger of passing untasted. I think I know the human counterparts of both barberry and bramble,—excellent people in their place, though not to be chosen for bosom friends without a careful weighing of consequences. Judging ...
— The Foot-path Way • Bradford Torrey
... to all of whom he was familiar, considered his success as certain, just as the veteran soldiery anticipate a triumph from the General, who has so often led them to victory that they deem him to have become invincible. But to the thoughtful and more observant, at times he showed signs of preoccupation, strangely at variance with his present undoubted supremely master mood; and as the trial proceeded these fits of wandering from the point increased in duration and intensity. An anxious expression settled on his countenance; his usually ...
— The Advocate • Charles Heavysege
... anxiety and preoccupation passed, and she stepped backward again to sit down. She did sit down, but with such terrific force that the stove and nearly everything else in the room threatened to fall with her. She sat helplessly for a bewildered ...
— He Fell in Love with His Wife • Edward P. Roe
... task she devoted herself with that assiduity and patience for which she was distinguished. The constant loss of sleep, and the incessant and weary vigils which she was forced to maintain, seemed to have but little effect upon her elastic and energetic nature. Zillah, in spite of her preoccupation, could not help seeing that Hilda was doing nearly all the work, and remonstrated with her accordingly. But to her earnest remonstrances ...
— The Cryptogram - A Novel • James De Mille
... be strown with all the disconcerting items of a theatrical wardrobe. Cope soon reached the point where he was not quite sure that he liked it all, and he began to develop a distaste for Lemoyne's preoccupation with it. He came home one afternoon to find on the corner of his desk a long pair of silk stockings and a too dainty pair of ladies' shoes. "Oh, Art!" he protested. And then,—not speaking his essential thought,—"Aren't ...
— Bertram Cope's Year • Henry Blake Fuller
... have told him (perhaps he did) that the artist, wherever he goes, sometimes hardly aware of his preoccupation, is always selecting subjects to paint, and brooding over the method of treatment; that one day Rembrandt noted with amusement a man in the street shaking his fist at the skull-capped head of an older man bobbing ...
— Rembrandt • Mortimer Menpes
... do I dwell on all this? It is because these are the true Advent voices for us, coming as they do to rouse us out of narrow preoccupation, to open our eyes to the sinfulness of sin, to make us feel that the self-centred, isolated, self-seeking life is a life of a low type, and to stir us with social ...
— Sermons at Rugby • John Percival
... the Major question her, but taking up a handful of accounts, he settled himself into the preoccupation in which she had found him, but the moment she went out and closed the door, he got out of his chair and with his hands behind him, walked up and down the room. At the window he halted, and standing there, looked down the river, in the direction of the cape ...
— An Arkansas Planter • Opie Percival Read
... the box. He was silent as she opened it. She noted his preoccupation, his gray eyes looking off ...
— Amanda - A Daughter of the Mennonites • Anna Balmer Myers
... to her house on an autumn evening. To him there was something almost distressing in this change which he noticed specially to-night. And her look into the glass had shown him that she was preoccupied about her appearance. Such a preoccupation on her part seemed foreign to her character as he had conceived of it. Her greatest charm had been her extraordinary lack, or apparent lack, of all self-consciousness. She had never seemed to bother about herself, to be thinking ...
— December Love • Robert Hichens
... Cray I felt that I must never meet you again, either waking or dreaming. The discovery that you were Gogo, after all, combined with the preoccupation which as a mere stranger you had already caused me for so long, created such a disturbance in my spirit that—that—there, you must try ...
— Peter Ibbetson • George du Marier et al
... suspected that he is incapable of playing the part. However unfairly discriminating that judgment may seem to be, in comparison with the attitude toward other professions, it has a perfectly logical basis. The people are willing to forgive preoccupation in all others, since how an engineer dresses has no relation to his skill as a mathematician, and when a doctor mumbles it doesn't suggest that he would be clumsy with a scalpel. But when they meet an uncivil or unkempt officer, or see ...
— The Armed Forces Officer - Department of the Army Pamphlet 600-2 • U. S. Department of Defense
... all the next day; and such was the natural quickness of the young man's mind, that he seemed to learn something every hour, in spite of the preoccupation which, as the reader may imagine, his affection for our ...
— The Last of the Foresters • John Esten Cooke
... that something had happened which she did not comprehend, and sensitively aware of the preoccupation which, if it did not ignore her, accepted her presence as of no consequence, she permitted her horse to set ...
— The Younger Set • Robert W. Chambers
... pear-tree, and even in his preoccupation he was struck with the signs of its extraordinary age. Twisted out of all proportion, and knotted with excrescences, it was supported by iron bands and heavy stakes, as if to prop up its senile decay. He tried to interest himself ...
— Maruja • Bret Harte
... held his own with the rest: nay, he became a person to be considered. It was remarked, however, that any who met Challice out walking found him stupid and dull beyond belief. This was put down to preoccupation. The man was full of his work; he was meditating, they said, his brain was working all the while; he was making up ...
— The Strand Magazine, Volume V, Issue 25, January 1893 - An Illustrated Monthly • Various
... signified the friendly ancestral ghosts of a Roman household. To them, under the name of Lares, it was the solemn preoccupation of male descendants to offer food and sacrifice and to keep alight the hearth fire which cooked the offerings. Small waxen images of the Manes called Lares, clothed in dogskin, and on feast days crowned with garlands, stood round the family hearth of which they were the ...
— Project Gutenberg Encyclopedia
... feverishly to think, and I suppose that my preoccupation made me careless. I was now in a veritable slum, and when I put my hand to my vest pocket I found that my watch had gone. That put the top stone on my depression. The reaction from the wild burnout of the forenoon had left me very cold about ...
— Mr. Standfast • John Buchan
... in the plaster, a slender black aperture which staggered across the dusty ceiling and down the dustier wall to disappear behind a still dustier map of Carlow County. "That's the trouble!" exclaimed Parker, observing the other's preoccupation. "Soon as you get to writing a line or two that seems kind of promising, you begin to take a morbid interest in that blamed crack. It's busted up enough copy for me, the last eight days, to have filled ...
— The Gentleman From Indiana • Booth Tarkington
... prove. But just what subtle racial differentiation had been at work, since William Hawthorne migrated to Massachusetts with Winthrop in 1630? Here we face, unless I am mistaken, that troublesome but fascinating question of Physical Geography. Climate, soil, food, occupation, religious or moral preoccupation, social environment, Salem witchcraft and Salem seafaring had all laid their invisible hands upon the physical and intellectual endowment of the child born in 1804. Does this make Nathaniel Hawthorne merely an "Englishman with a difference," ...
— The American Mind - The E. T. Earl Lectures • Bliss Perry
... Mr. Irwine's face, he felt in an instant that there was a new expression in it, strangely different from the warm friendliness it had always worn for him before. A letter lay open on the table, and Mr. Irwine's hand was on it, but the changed glance he cast on Adam could not be owing entirely to preoccupation with some disagreeable business, for he was looking eagerly towards the door, as if Adam's entrance were a matter ...
— Adam Bede • George Eliot
... enjoyed the hero-worshipful gaze focussed on him from all the tables of the Caffe' Greco. But not for adulation had he come to Rome. Rome was what he had come for; and the fussers of the coteries must not pester him in his golden preoccupation with the antique world. Tischbein was very useful in warding off the profane throng—fanning away the flies. Let us hope he was actuated solely by zeal in Goethe's interest, not by the desire to swagger ...
— And Even Now - Essays • Max Beerbohm
... a start that Roland Bleke realized that the girl at the other end of the bench was crying. For the last few minutes, as far as his preoccupation allowed him to notice them at all, he had been attributing the subdued sniffs to a summer cold, having ...
— A Man of Means • P. G. Wodehouse and C. H. Bovill
... in bliss. She surrendered herself to the joy of life, as to a new sensation. She was intoxicated, ravished, bewildered, and quite careless. Perhaps for the first time in her adult existence she lived without reserve or preoccupation completely in and for the moment. Moreover the hearty laughter of Louis Fores helped to restore her dignity. If the spectacle was good enough for him, with all his knowledge of the world, to laugh at, she need not blush for its effect on herself. And in another ten ...
— The Price of Love • Arnold Bennett
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