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More "Prim" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... was a sight to be seen—crumpled, infinitely prim, crow-footed like an ivied wall; but extraordinarily wise; with that tempered resolve which says, "I know Evil and I know Good, and dare be just to either." He was thinking profoundly; every one could see it. Best of the company before him Angioletto, ...
— Little Novels of Italy • Maurice Henry Hewlett
... was, however, pleased to hear that there was a young female in the house, as it would make the time pass away more agreeably; not that he expected much. Judging from the father, he made up his mind, as he took his clothes out of his valise, that she was very short, very prim, ...
— Snarley-yow - or The Dog Fiend • Frederick Marryat
... guest royally; so much that when we assembled the next mornin' for the inspection, the grey-faced man were shaky as a wet dog. But the Major were all set prim and dry, like the ...
— At a Winter's Fire • Bernard Edward J. Capes
... wood and sea-coal. Faggots, but not the treasonable kind! Try as he might, he could-get no farther with that pillar of the magistracy, my Lord Danly's friend, the beloved of Aldermen. He hated his solemn face, his prim mouth, his condescending stoop. Such a man was encased in proof armour of public esteem, and he heeded Mr. Lovel no more than ...
— The Path of the King • John Buchan
... a change I found in the religious house! no card-playing, for it had been forbidden to the scholars, and there was now nothing going on but reading and singing; divil a merry visage to be seen, but plenty of prim airs and graces; but the case of the scholars, though bad enough, was not half so bad as mine, for they could spake to each other, whereas I could not have a word of conversation, for the ould thaif of a rector had ordered them to send me to 'Coventry,' ...
— The Romany Rye - A Sequel to 'Lavengro' • George Borrow
... as one of your little feet in these places again.' She could feel the shears against her hair, and she was so scared she swore like he told her. And so she was that afraid of losin' her fine yellow hair afterward, knowin' Father McNally was a man that didn't make no idle threats, that she kept prim and proper—fur a half-breed." ...
— The Spenders - A Tale of the Third Generation • Harry Leon Wilson
... roof. The incentive to the celebration had come rather from those who had left North Dormer than from those who had been obliged to stay there, and there was some difficulty in rousing the village to the proper state of enthusiasm. But Miss Hatchard's pale prim drawing-room was the centre of constant comings and goings from Hepburn, Nettleton, Springfield and even more distant cities; and whenever a visitor arrived he was led across the hall, and treated to a glimpse of the group of girls ...
— Summer • Edith Wharton
... played a considerable part in his political education. He was influential with the Regency in Spain, which succeeded Queen Isabel when that sovereign became too malodorous to be longer tolerated, and he was the personal friend of the Regent, General Prim, whose motto, "More liberal today than yesterday, more liberal tomorrow than today," he was fond of quoting. He was present in Madrid at the time of General Prim's assassination and often told of how this wise patriot, recognizing the unpreparedness of the ...
— Lineage, Life, and Labors of Jose Rizal, Philippine Patriot • Austin Craig
... for dissipline I ever shipped with was Cap'n Tasker, of the Lapwing. He'd got it on the brain bad. He was a prim, clean-shaved man except for a little side-whisker, an' always used to try an' look as much like a naval officer ...
— Sea Urchins • W. W. Jacobs
... the deacon says to his friend, who is a tall, prim, sedate-looking man, apparently about forty, "I pity Marston; I pity him because he is a noble-hearted fellow. But, after all, this whispering about the city may be only mother Rumour distributing her false tales. Let us hope it is all rumour and scandal. Come, ...
— Our World, or, The Slaveholders Daughter • F. Colburn Adams
... that prim little cap. Tie up your hair with black ribbon, and put on a blouse. Then you will be ...
— Little Folks (July 1884) - A Magazine for the Young • Various
... I'd have to be very prim and proper in England," said Gipsy, looking serious, "but I didn't know things were as bad as that. I'll begin to wish I hadn't come here. Oh dear! we were going right through to Chicago if we hadn't been shipwrecked, ...
— The Leader of the Lower School - A Tale of School Life • Angela Brazil
... that the "Rape of the Lock" is better worth reading and really more helpful than magazine metaphysics. Anyhow, it is certain that the training which the Misses Ponsonby had received, although it may have made them starched, prim, and even uninteresting, had an effect upon their character not altogether unwholesome, and prevented any public crying for the moon, or any public charge of injustice against its ...
— Catharine Furze • Mark Rutherford
... for long. The next moment an exceedingly astonished, irate cat was taking an unusual amount of exercise in the prim little garden, urged cheerily on by a small, curly dog, whose three legs seemed quite as effective as most dogs' four. While down the path from the house came Miss Jane and Miss Susan, also stout, elderly, and unaddicted to overmuch exercise, anxious for their cat, anxious ...
— Patricia • Emilia Elliott
... clean, and its aspect was prim and sober, as was indeed that of the whole city. Men in wide-brimmed hats and wide-skirted coats of sombre hue walked the streets, and talked earnestly together at the corners; whilst the women, for the most part, passed on their way with lowered eyes, and hoods drawn modestly ...
— French and English - A Story of the Struggle in America • Evelyn Everett-Green
... bailiff, or head-keeper or something, who would die of apoplexy if either of you did anything so lowering. You may be allowed to ride, Norah, but it won't be an Australian scurry—you'll have to be awfully prim and proper, and have a groom trotting behind you. With a top-hat." He beamed upon ...
— Captain Jim • Mary Grant Bruce
... disturbed. We have had for some years in this household a housekeeper—one Sarah, with whose second name I have never attempted to burden my memory. She is a woman of a severe and forbidding aspect, prim and demure in her bearing, very impassive in her nature, and never known within our experience to show signs of any emotion. As I sat alone at my breakfast—Mrs. Challenger is in the habit of keeping ...
— The Poison Belt • Arthur Conan Doyle
... suburbs of a town in the Midlands are, one would suppose, as hideous as human half-wittedness could invent or endure. But they are different. They are complete; they are, in their way, compact; rounded and finished with an effect that may be prim or smug, but is not raw. The surroundings of them are neat, if it be in a niggling fashion. But American ugliness is not complete even as ugliness. It is broken off short; it is ragged at the edges; ...
— Gilbert Keith Chesterton • Maisie Ward
... her character deteriorated and Trelawny's judgment grew more acute. Her corners grew more brutally protuberant beneath the tissue of glamour cast over them by a name. To her also Trelawny's purse was open; but long before the quarrel over "Queen Mab" his generous spirit had begun to groan under her prim banality, and to express itself in ungenerous backbitings. His final estimate he imparted to Claire when he was seventy-eight years old, and it remains for those who dislike ...
— Pot-Boilers • Clive Bell
... the office Mr. Scalper has reached the letter of a correspondent which appears to give him particular pleasure, for he delineates the character with a beaming smile of satisfaction. To the unpractised eye the writing resembles the prim, angular hand of an elderly spinster. Mr. Scalper, however, seems to think ...
— Literary Lapses • Stephen Leacock
... believe in the immortality of the soul: the characters which he can never learn to comprehend, are precisely those in which dwell the intuitions of the infinite. He piques himself upon the precision of his language, not perceiving it has gained this boasted prim exactitude at the expense of breadth and depth. All honor to the savant! but let him keep the lamp of spontaneity ever burning in his soul. By its light the savage and the woman divine God; without it, he may weigh creation—and 'find ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol. 4, No. 5, November, 1863 • Various
... be found scattered up and down our country churchyards—'uncouth rhymes,' as Gray calls them, yet full of the sombre philosophy of life. They are fast becoming illegible, worn out by the rain that raineth every day, and our prim, present-day parsons do not look with favour upon them, besides which—to use a clumsy phrase—besides which most of our churchyards are now closed against burials, and without texts ...
— In the Name of the Bodleian and Other Essays • Augustine Birrell
... Prendendo la campagna lento lento Su per lo suol che d'ogni parte oliva. Un'aura dolce senza mutamento Avere in se, mi feria per la fronte, Non di piu colpo che soave vento: Per cui le fronde tremolando pronte Tutte quante piegavano alla parte U'la prim' ombra gitta il santo monte; Non pero dal loro esser dritto sparte Tanto, che gli augelletti per le cime Lasciasser d'operare ogni lor arte; Ma con piena letizia l'ore prime Cantando ricevieno intra le foglie Che tenevan bordone ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 20, No. 118, August, 1867 • Various
... been our next-door neighbors, and she has never been inside the house. Nor he either, for that matter, except once when it took fire, you know, and he came in with that funny little chemical engine tucked under his arm, and took off his hat in the same prim, polite way that he takes it off when he talks to Sibyl, and said, 'If you'll excuse me offering advice, Miss Hopkins, it is not necessary to move anything; it mars furniture very much to move it at a fire. ...
— Different Girls • Various
... to dinner wearing a pale green frock with a prim fichu of chiffon and lace. Terry had already arrived and was in the drawing-room, standing on the hearthrug with his back ...
— Love of Brothers • Katharine Tynan
... let them have one day in which they can howl and racket and frolic to their hearts' content. A holiday isn't a holiday without plenty of freedom and fun; and they shall have full swing once a week," Mrs. Bhaer used to say, when prim people wondered why banister-sliding, pillow-fights, and all manner of jovial games were allowed under the once ...
— Little Men - Life at Plumfield With Jo's Boys • Louisa May Alcott
... voice that asked the question, and Judith looked up with a smile. Her mother's cousin stood in the doorway—a prim little old spinster, who had been their guest for several days. Like Marguerite, she, too, had come back to her native village after an absence of four years, but not to her father's house. She was all alone in the ...
— Mildred's Inheritance - Just Her Way; Ann's Own Way • Annie Fellows Johnston
... and loved in that brief month in Paris, I cherish tenderer memories. Prim little Pauline Deschapelles! How clearly I can still see the respectable brass plate on the door of your little flat—"Mademoiselle Deschapelles—Modes et Robes;" and indeed the "modes et robes" were true ...
— The Quest of the Golden Girl • Richard le Gallienne
... with agitation. Monsieur Fardet stamped about with a guttural rolling of r's, glancing angrily at his companions as if they had in some way betrayed him; while the fat clergyman stood with his umbrella up, staring stolidly with big, frightened eyes at the camel-men. Cecil Brown curled his small, prim moustache, and looked white, but contemptuous. The Colonel, Belmont, and the young Harvard graduate were the three most cool-headed and resourceful members ...
— The Tragedy of The Korosko • Arthur Conan Doyle
... a more melancholy place than the street in which you have lived; than the house, now curtainless and weather-stained, you knew prim, and full of happy human creatures; than the "banquet-hall deserted:" than the empty chair; than the bed where Death found ...
— The Cockaynes in Paris - 'Gone abroad' • Blanchard Jerrold
... restaurant outside; and it was but the work of a moment after taps to tack a blanket over the window, light the gas, and bring out a dilapidated pack of cards for a game of California Jack or draw-poker; or to convert the prim pine table into a billiard-table, with marbles for balls, with which the ownership of many a collar, neckerchief, shirt, and other articles of none too plentiful wardrobes, were decided in a twinkling, while the air of the crowded room grew thick and stifling ...
— The Bay State Monthly - Volume 1, Issue 4 - April, 1884 • Various
... his eye every morning when he opened the door of his bedroom; it was there when he came home late at night, and seemed to be sitting up for him, in the reproachful, feminine fashion. When he was writing his letters, there it was, with a prim, furtive air of looking on. It was not like a mere slipper; it had traits and an individuality of its own; there were moments when the jet beads in the buckle sparkled with a sort of intelligence. Sitting at night, reading under the drop-light, Lynde often ...
— The Queen of Sheba & My Cousin the Colonel • Thomas Bailey Aldrich
... then admiration. He had never heard its like, nor did he feel any offense. The daughter, too, stood by, pursing her prim lips, and evidently approving. Colonel Winchester was motionless like a statue, while the infuriated man shook his fist at him and launched imprecations. But his face had turned white and Dick saw that he was ...
— The Rock of Chickamauga • Joseph A. Altsheler
... impatience, or anger. He toddles if his steps are short, uneven, and unsteady, like those of a child. He waddles if his movement is ungainly, with a duck-like swaying from side to side. He shuffles if he drags his feet with a scraping noise. He minces if he takes short steps in a prim, precise, or affectedly nice manner. He strolls or saunters if he goes along in an easy, aimless, or idle fashion. He rambles if he wanders about, with no definite aim or toward no definite goal. He meanders if he proceeds slowly and perhaps ...
— The Century Vocabulary Builder • Creever & Bachelor
... didn't she let him see her laughing and dancing like that? Why didn't she? She'll come down all prim and staid for him and he'll never dream what she really is like. Oh, how can she be so blind? I don't know how to stand it! And I don't know what to do! Why isn't there some one to tell me what I ...
— The Precipice • Elia Wilkinson Peattie
... himself one of those lightning flashes from the eyes of his boy, and doubly afraid to introduce his son anywhere, to show him anything that might bring upon him the reproach of doing harm to Pippo. His house, which had been very decent and orderly in the late Lord St. Serf's time, became almost prim in the terror Phil had lest they should say that it ...
— The Marriage of Elinor • Margaret Oliphant
... Tell me, ye prim adepts in Scandal's school, Who rail by precept, and detract by rule, Lives there no character, so tried, so known, So deck'd with grace, and so unlike your own, That even you assist her fame to raise, Approve by envy, and ...
— The School For Scandal • Richard Brinsley Sheridan
... professed a keener interest in his grave—was a matter of universal astonishment. Her dress was a triumph of tactful discretion, sensible, but not too "touristy"'—Miss Winchelsea had a great dread of being "touristy"—and her Baedeker was carried in a cover of grey to hide its glaring red. She made a prim and pleasant little figure on the Charing Cross platform, in spite of her swelling pride, when at last the great day dawned, and she could start for Rome. The day was bright, the Channel passage would be pleasant, and all the omens ...
— The Country of the Blind, And Other Stories • H. G. Wells
... and directed my attention to a middle-aged, angular-looking woman, whose strong, sharp-featured face betokened a prim spinster, probably at the head of a girls' school, or engaged in some clerical work. However, as I passed her on my way to leave the train I noticed a wedding-ring on her hand, and heard her say to her companion, "No; I think a woman's sphere ...
— The Gold Bag • Carolyn Wells
... on in this life, day by day, I become more of a bewildered child; I cannot get used to this world, to procreation, to heredity, to sight, to hearing, the commonest things are a burthen. The prim, obliterated, polite surface of life, and the broad, bawdy and orgiastic—or maenadic—foundations, form a spectacle to which no habit reconciles me. R. ...
— The Varieties of Religious Experience • William James
... stylish, to suit the prim Eudora, who felt keenly how she must suffer by comparison with her sister's waiting maid. Even unsuspicious Anna saw the point, and smiling archly asked "what she could do to make ...
— Bad Hugh • Mary Jane Holmes
... chance this afternoon, and Mrs. Walker, the vicar's wife, with two of her countless daughters, had come by invitation. Mrs. Walker was a middle-aged, careworn, rather prim-looking woman. Lady Engleton was handsome. Bright auburn hair waved back in picturesque fashion from a piquant face, and constituted more than half her claim to beauty. The brown eyes were bright and vivacious. The mouth was seldom ...
— The Daughters of Danaus • Mona Caird
... scales and exercises was given to the master's playing. He was fond of Weber's "Invitation to the Waltz," and he played it with force and precision and the utmost delicacy. Mr. Timm had a pale, smooth, sharp face, a rather prim manner, and a quick, modest gait. He was most simple-hearted, and loved a joke; and his fun was all the more effective from his very sober face and his lisp. It was his wife who was long the most efficient actress at Mitchell's ...
— From the Easy Chair, vol. 1 • George William Curtis
... the later version of this Reading was said about the prim person in cloth boots, who unsuccessfully attempted all through the evening to make a joke. Of him the readers of "Pickwick" will very well remember it to have been related that he commenced a long story about a great public character, whose name he had ...
— Charles Dickens as a Reader • Charles Kent
... woman whose elegant form and manners make her as lovely as the moon and as beautiful as light. The rapid and constant motion of the foliage of the poplar and the aspen reminds him of some nervous and excitable person who is never quiet or easy for a moment. The prim spruce-tree suggests to him some person of formal habits and primness of dress. The symmetrical maple and pine remind him of some quiet and dignified character who is well balanced and rounded at every point. The patriarchal tree which has outlived all its companions ...
— The Road and the Roadside • Burton Willis Potter
... as the old Butler had promised, the four dog dishes, heaping to the brim, loomed in prim line upon the kitchen ...
— Peace on Earth, Good-will to Dogs • Eleanor Hallowell Abbott
... this girl on whom he had bestowed the priceless boon of his society for life? How did he know what she was—he could not find the exact adjective to express his meaning, but he knew what he meant. Was she worthy of the boon? That was what it amounted to. All his life he had had a prim shrinking from the section of the feminine world which is connected with the light-life of large cities. Club acquaintances of his in London had from time to time married into the Gaiety Chorus, and Mr. Carmyle, though ...
— The Adventures of Sally • P. G. Wodehouse
... was wholly without interest, through a country entirely flat, and looking wretchedly brown and barren. There were rows of trees, very slender, very prim and formal; there was ice wherever there happened to be any water to form it; there were occasional villages, compact little streets, or masses of stone or plastered cottages, very dirty and with gable ends and earthen roofs; and a succession of this same ...
— Passages From the French and Italian Notebooks, Complete • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... gay garden, With prim geraniums pied, And spreading yew trees, old, unchanging Tho' men ...
— The Second Book of Modern Verse • Jessie B. Rittenhouse
... representing a reasoned and intellectual reaction, mainly suggested and influenced by the French. The group of contributors was a peculiarly mixed one with only one thing in common. And that was a conscious effort to repudiate the sugary airs and prim ...
— Modern British Poetry • Various
... later, Mademoiselle de Corandeuil appeared, and with a prim air seated herself beside ...
— Serge Panine • Georges Ohnet
... stiff salon with glass doors, prim furniture, and an elaborately ornamental French clock. It was silent, of course. One wonders sometimes whether ornamental French Ormolu clocks have any works, or are solid throughout. For no one has ever seen ...
— The Incomplete Amorist • E. Nesbit
... let me alone: I am not thine. [1] Prim Creed, with categoric point, forbear To feature me my Lord by rule and line. Thou canst not measure Mistress Nature's hair, Not one sweet inch: nay, if thy sight is sharp, Would'st count the strings upon ...
— Select Poems of Sidney Lanier • Sidney Lanier
... quiet, sleek, old creature, and was so prim, that her friends called her an old maid; and some of them even said that she was an old cat, but they were the people who were not asked to her nice tea parties. When she gave a tea party, she sent her page ...
— A Apple Pie and Other Nursery Tales • Unknown
... dozens of strange, prim houses to puzzle up the streets. The street-signs, another innovation, were truly needed. Of old it had been enough to say "down toward the depot," "out by the McCormick place," "next to the Presbyterian church," "up around the schoolhouse," or "down by the lumber yard." But now ...
— The Boss of Little Arcady • Harry Leon Wilson
... she began to disengage her hand from his—loosened the slim fingers one by one, all the while watching him sideways with prim lips pursed and ...
— The Crimson Tide • Robert W. Chambers
... our own age with that of Pericles, and congratulate themselves on the reawakening of the feeling of patriotism: I remember a parody on the funeral oration of Pericles by G. Freytag,[9] in which this prim and strait-laced "poet" depicted the happiness now experienced by sixty-year-old men.—All pure and simple caricature! So this is the result! And sorrow and irony and seclusion are all that remain for him who has seen more ...
— We Philologists, Volume 8 (of 18) • Friedrich Nietzsche
... place is a suburb of the second city in Ireland, and one of the most beautiful spots about the town. What a prim, bustling, active, green-railinged, tea-gardened, gravel-walked place would it have been in the five-hundredth town in England!—but you see the people can be quite as happy in the rags and without the paint, and I hear a great deal more heartiness and affection from these children than from their ...
— Seeing Europe with Famous Authors - Vol. II Great Britain And Ireland, Part Two • Francis W. Halsey
... a fair fight; one feels it. Poor little prim Common Sense, with her defiant, turned-up nose and her shrill giggle and her innate vulgarity. And against her the stillness of the night, and the music of the ages, and the beating of ...
— Malvina of Brittany • Jerome K. Jerome
... the South; but before childhood was over I watched the quick, luxuriant growth of flowers through the brief summer of a northern clime. The Canterbury-bell, so like a prim, pretty maiden, the dahlia, that stately dame always in court costume of gorgeous velvet, remind me of those well-kept beds where not a leaf or flower was allowed to grow awry; and in one ancient garden the imagination of a child found wings for many an airy flight. The town ...
— Aunt Jane of Kentucky • Eliza Calvert Hall
... many directions. A sweet breath came from its parterres of mingled hyacinths and jonquils that hid themselves every moment in black shadows of lagustrums and laurestines. Here, in severe order, a pair of palms, prim as mediaeval queens, stood over against each other; and in the midst of the garden, rising high against the sky, appeared the pillared veranda and immense, four-sided roof of an old French colonial villa, as it stands ...
— Dr. Sevier • George W. Cable
... ubi omne quod de mea mihi occupatione displicebat, se patenter ostenderet, et cuncta qu infligere dolorem consueverant, congesta ante oculos licenter venirent. Ibi itaque cum afflictus valde et diu tacitus sederem, dilectissimus filius meus Petrus diaconus adfuit, mihi a primvo juventutis flore amicitiis familiariter obstrictus, atque ad sacri verbi indagationem socius. Qui gravi excoqui cordis languore me intuens, ait: Num quidnam tibi aliquid accidit, quod plus te solito mror tenet? Cui inquam: Mror, Petre, quem quotidie patior, ...
— Anglo-Saxon Literature • John Earle
... it to you. Do you see that plumber's shop next to the corner saloon?" I pointed to the Avenue whose ceaseless stream of humanity flows past Our Square without ever sweeping us into its current. "That was once a tea-shop. It was started by a dear little, prim little old maiden lady. The saloon was run by Tough Bill Manigan. The little old lady had a dainty sign painted and hung it up outside her place, 'The Teacup.' Tough Bill took a board and painted a sign and hung it up outside his place; 'The Hiccup.' The dear little, prim little old maiden ...
— From a Bench in Our Square • Samuel Hopkins Adams
... and every breadth of her skirts always fell in straight, precise folds. From bonnet-strings to shoe-laces there was never a wrinkle or a spot. But the Little Colonel felt no awe. She had discovered that under that prim exterior was a heart thoroughly in sympathy with all her childish joys and griefs, and in consequence the two had become warm friends. Lloyd stood beside the rocking-chair, where she had seated Mrs. Brewster, and waved a big fan so vigorously that the bonnet-strings fluttered, and a lock ...
— The Little Colonel's House Party • Annie Fellows Johnston
... perfect host. He had the right word for everybody; his infectious conviviality made them all straightway at their ease. The overdressed native ladies, the priests and officials moving about in prim little circles, were charmed with his affable manner "so different from most Englishmen"; likewise that flock of gleeful tourists who had suddenly turned up, craving for admission without a single letter of introduction between them, ...
— South Wind • Norman Douglas
... Ireland had soldiers for the world. Don Patricio, Don Miguel, Don Carlos, Don Tadeo took the place of Patrick, Michael, Charles, and Thadeus. O'Hart gives a list of sixty descendants of the "Wild Geese" in places of honor in Spain. General Prim was a descendant of the Princes of Inisnage in Kilkenny. An O'Donnell was Duke of Tetuan and field marshal of Spain. Ambrose O'Higgins, born in county Meath, Ireland, was the foremost Spanish soldier in Chile and Peru; Admiral Patricio Lynch was one of its ...
— The Glories of Ireland • Edited by Joseph Dunn and P.J. Lennox
... natural science. One of these was Ainsworth, who afterwards published his travels in Assyria; he was a Wernerian geologist, and knew a little about many subjects. Dr. Coldstream was a very different young man, prim, formal, highly religious, and most kind-hearted; he afterwards published some good zoological articles. A third young man was Hardie, who would, I think, have made a good botanist, but died early ...
— The Life and Letters of Charles Darwin, Volume I • Francis Darwin
... see the prim English lady whom Perlet was acting with such ludicrous effect, nor hear the English-French that had filled the house with roars of laughter; instead of all this, he beheld himself hurrying from the Rue Richer, hailing a cab ...
— Melmoth Reconciled • Honore de Balzac
... might have seen forty years or sixty; except for her snowy hair, time seemed to have forgotten her. Her dress was a near approach to the Quaker garb of the followers of Penn. Everything about her was of softest gray; but the face, framed by the prim Quaker bonnet, was as fair as an infant's, and with a child's soft colouring in the cheeks that had not yet lost the charming curves of young womanhood. She looked like a creature whom Life had loved so well that Time had not been permitted ...
— Against Odds - A Detective Story • Lawrence L. Lynch
... protected by brass wire-netting, to which hangs his thermometer just where he originally placed it. The house has been little if any altered since he was carried to his last resting-place. He is described by those who knew him as "a little thin, prim, upright man," a quiet, unassuming, but very observing country parson, who occupied his time in watching and recording the habits of his parishioners, quadruped as well as feathered. At the end of the garden is still kept his sun-dial, the ...
— England, Picturesque and Descriptive - A Reminiscence of Foreign Travel • Joel Cook
... they did not think him past praying for." During his breakfast he recalled the fact that Madge was uncommonly well dressed. "She hasn't in externals," he thought, "the provincial air that one might expect, although her ideas are not only provincial, but prim, obtained, no doubt, from some goody-good books that she has read in the remote region wherein she has developed so remarkably. She has some stilted ideal of womanhood which she is seeking to attain, and the more unnatural the ideal, ...
— A Young Girl's Wooing • E. P. Roe
... the suns of Palestine, and whose heart has been warmed in the company of the tender and beautiful Rebecca, sit down contented for life by the side of such a frigid piece of propriety as that icy, faultless, prim, niminy-piminy Rowena? Forbid it fate, forbid it poetical justice! There is a simple plan for setting matters right, and giving all parties their due, which is here submitted to the novel-reader. Ivanhoe's history MUST have had a continuation; and it is this which ...
— Burlesques • William Makepeace Thackeray
... made him picture his Cousin Eleanor as a prim young person, with sharp elbows and a pinched nose and stringy hair. She would be lifeless and oppressively good-mannered, he felt certain. All the ill success of the last three days seemed to be behind his sudden determination to have none of her. But Cousin Jasper, having once conceived the idea, ...
— The Windy Hill • Cornelia Meigs
... look now, Polly?" And across the wax-cloth Tilly pushed a copybook, in which she had laboriously inscribed a prim maxim the requisite number ...
— Australia Felix • Henry Handel Richardson
... it. Fifteen minutes after his vocal organs had been thus renewed, LEOPOLD was in a condition to see things in an entirely new light, and hesitated no longer to write the following note to General PRIM: ...
— Punchinello Vol. 1, No. 21, August 20, 1870 • Various
... the newspaper without dread and sickness of suspense, came the telegram saying that Tom was wounded; and without so much as asking Miranda's leave, she packed her trunk and started for the South. She was in time to hold Tom's hand through hours of pain; to show him for once the heart of a prim New England girl when it is ablaze with love and grief; to put her arms about him so that he could have a home to die in, and that was all;—all, but ...
— The Flag-raising • Kate Douglas Wiggin
... in the air—had been hearing all about me. Beside her glass of stout and ale, she looked a little less prim and defiant. But she was still on company manners. She sat delicately, on the extreme edge of a chair, by the side of, not facing, her plate of bread, cheese and pickles; approached them; mopped up, so to speak, a mouthful and a gulp; ...
— A Poor Man's House • Stephen Sydney Reynolds
... to her house; we will wait for her here in the Ceramicus. I should think it is near her hour for coming back from the Academy, and taking her walk in the Poecile; she is very regular; to be sure, here she comes. Do you see the orderly, rather prim lady there, with the kindly look in her eyes, and ...
— Works, V1 • Lucian of Samosata
... would be when she should look on triumphantly to see her husband die. He had played the widower in sight of all Edinburgh, and now it would be seen how great was the lie, and nobody could dispute that the widowhood was hers. She hoped that he would turn his prim figure and formal face her way, that she might make him, too, an easy bow, showing how she despised the hypocrite, and how completely he had failed in breaking her spirit. She hoped she should be in good looks at that time, not owning the power of her enemies by ...
— The Billow and the Rock • Harriet Martineau
... there we found her spruce and prim with her best black silk bonnet, something in shape like a coal-scuttle, her stick in her hand, and her shoes on her feet. We drove up the chair in fine style. There were several cottages close by, and the neighbors came out to see ...
— Young Folks Treasury, Volume 3 (of 12) - Classic Tales And Old-Fashioned Stories • Various
... experience of the older generation out West would have suspected the pride, the affection, the delight hiding behind Martha Skeffington's prim and formal welcome, or that it was not indifference but the unfailing instinct of a tender heart that made her say, after a very few minutes: "Adelaide, don't you think Dory'd like to ...
— The Second Generation • David Graham Phillips
... me to tell her that he would be in that afternoon. I did so, and she was very much delighted—ran and told the other members of the household. She seated herself in the parlor and would look at her clothes and brush them and sit in as prim a position as possible. She seemed to want to look her best. Her kindergarten teacher tried to coax her to go to her room; she said, "Oh no, Mr. —— is coming to see me," and would ask impatiently when I thought he would come. She acted the same when alone or with others. She was very jealous, ...
— A Preliminary Study of the Emotion of Love between the Sexes • Sanford Bell
... have "raked in golden barley," Like the great Fleet Street "Cock." Their jealous jeremiads, sour and snarly, PARTLET'S prim feelings shock. "Luck! Not at all: but the ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 98, January 25th, 1890 • Various
... came in with a rustle of garments suggestive of Sunday. Even in his confusion Mr. Opp was aware that there was something unusual in her appearance. Her hair, ordinarily drawn taut to a prim knot at the rear, had burst forth into curls and puffs of an amazing complexity. Moreover, her change of coiffure had apparently affected her spirits, for she, too, was flurried and self-conscious and glanced continually at the clock ...
— Mr. Opp • Alice Hegan Rice
... is not at all as you and I had imagined it to be. There is no high wall around it as there is at Fort Trumbull. It reminds one of a prim little village built around a square, in the center of which is a high flagstaff and a big cannon. The buildings are very low and broad and are made of adobe—a kind of clay and mud mixed together—and the walls are very thick. At every window are ...
— Army Letters from an Officer's Wife, 1871-1888 • Frances M.A. Roe
... the players each contribute a letter toward the spelling of a word, their object being never to be the one to complete it, but to force the next player to do so. Thus (with four players) the first player may say "p," and the next, thinking of "prim," may say "r," and the next, also thinking of "prim," may say "i." But the fourth player, running his thoughts quickly over possible words beginning with "pri," may light upon "prism" and say "s." This saves her, but puts the first player in danger, ...
— What Shall We Do Now?: Five Hundred Games and Pastimes • Dorothy Canfield Fisher
... The prim little lady, who had been standing beside Mrs. Ford, appeared not to hear the gentleman's question, but turned with an air of ...
— Dorothy on a Ranch • Evelyn Raymond
... she gladdened the pride of Francis by choosing him as her partner. Betty and Billy mutually chose each other. Mrs. Kingdon selected a newcomer. Agatha and the "other girl" asked their particular friends, and the cook spitefully "sat it out." Pen had to follow the prim little steps learned by Francis at a city dancing school the winter before, and Sleepy Sandy thoughtfully timed his tune thereto and shortened the number. Then Jo started for the belle of the ball, but a youth ...
— Penny of Top Hill Trail • Belle Kanaris Maniates
... as before—when he did not ignore him altogether. If Amy had but been rescued by him, George F. Pearson, instead of by this Bertram Cope, and if she had been snatched from a disorderly set of breakers at the foot of those disheveled sandhills instead of from the prim, prosy, domestic edge of Churchton—well, wouldn't the affair have been better set and better carried off? In such case it might have been picturesque and heroic, ...
— Bertram Cope's Year • Henry Blake Fuller
... Enid sat prim and straight on a chair at the foot of his bed. Her flowered organdie dress was very much like the bouquet she had brought, and her floppy straw hat had a big lilac bow. She began to tell Claude about her father's several attacks of erysipelas. He listened but absently. ...
— One of Ours • Willa Cather
... Town, that no Man teaches a Jigg like him, that she has seen him rise six or seven Capers together with the greatest Ease imaginable, and that his Scholars twist themselves more ways than the Scholars of any Master in Town: besides there is Madam Prim, an Alderman's Lady, recommends a Master of her own Name, but she declares he is not of their Family, yet a very extraordinary Man in his way; for besides a very soft Air he has in Dancing, he gives them a particular Behaviour at a Tea-Table, ...
— The Spectator, Volumes 1, 2 and 3 - With Translations and Index for the Series • Joseph Addison and Richard Steele
... successful revolution inaugurated by Prim is worth relating, as it deals with an episode of Spanish politics which is repeated almost every other year with slender variations. The play is the same; the scene and the dramatis personae are merely shifted. One of the stereotyped military risings was ...
— Romantic Spain - A Record of Personal Experiences (Vol. II) • John Augustus O'Shea
... But somehow he has never thought of sending me back my shabby old Gibbon. And that was the way with my Montaigne—gone. And here were two editions of Gulliver. I lent one to a nephew of the Harringtons and the other to a rather prim young lady from Boston who impressed me as having had too much Emerson. My Shelley is gone. My 'Rousseau's Confessions' is also gone." And Cooper smiled ...
— The Patient Observer - And His Friends • Simeon Strunsky
... revered, but that the gods which he deemed golden were in reality made of baser metal. He never, as I have said, complained of his father to me, and his only other friends were, like himself, staid and prim, of evangelical tendencies, and deeply imbued with a sense of the sinfulness of any act of insubordination to parents—good young men, in fact—and one cannot blow off steam to a good ...
— The Way of All Flesh • Samuel Butler
... half-naivete, half-jest which Mlle. de Scudery's Norman shrewdness[203] would hardly have allowed. There is also much more of the supernatural in these books than in hers, and the characters are much less prim. Roxana, who, of course, is meant to be naughty, actually sends a bracelet of her hair to Oroondates! which, however, that faithful lover of another ...
— A History of the French Novel, Vol. 1 - From the Beginning to 1800 • George Saintsbury
... joined in a few minutes by a prim, dignified little lady, ridiculously like Mr. Pengarth, whom he called sister, and she Miss Rachael. Juliet walked down ...
— The Malefactor • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... Calabra), known as the "Pino della Sila"—it is found over this whole country, and grows to a height of forty metres with a silvery-grey trunk, exhaling a delicious aromatic fragrance. In youth, especially where the soil is deep, it shoots up prim and demure as a Nuremberg toy; but in old age grows monstrous. High-perched upon some lonely granite boulder, with roots writhing over the bare stone like the arms of an octopus, it sits firm and unmoved, deriding the tempest and flinging fantastic limbs into the air—emblem ...
— Old Calabria • Norman Douglas
... greatest—theme of poetry, but to one which this poet had not yet tried—to Love. Let it be remembered that the thought has the cast of a strictly pessimist quietism—that the style aims, if it aims at any single thing, at the reproduction of the simpler side of classicalism, at an almost prim and quakerish elegance, a sort of childlike grace. There is, however, by no means any great austerity in the tone: on the contrary, the refrain ...
— Matthew Arnold • George Saintsbury
... the defiles of Taff Vawr and Taff Vach, bringing down old apple-faced farmers and their wives, who were told of a power and a speed that would alter everything, and do away with horses altogether. Prim, cosy, apple-faced people, innocent and primitive, little thought ye then of the changes which the clanking monster was to yield; how Grey Dobbin would see flying by a mass of wood and iron, thousands of tons of weight, bearing ...
— Railway Adventures and Anecdotes - extending over more than fifty years • Various
... in Christ Church idealizes in form and color the spirit of this noble woman, without attempting portraiture. A real likeness of Miss Cooper, as she appeared in her ripest years, would recall a sweet face framed in dangling curls, a manner somewhat prim, but always gentle and placid, a figure slight and spare, with a bonnet and Paisley shawl that are all but essential to the resemblance. She would best be represented in the midst of orphan children whom she catechises for the benefit of ...
— The Story of Cooperstown • Ralph Birdsall
... arrange therein the day's floral offerings. A sweet and crushed mixture they were, pansies, clove-pinks, mignonette, bleeding hearts, bachelors' buttons, all short stemmed and minus any saving touch of green, but true love offerings for all that. Wordless gifts most of them, prim little bunches, hot from tight clasping in chubby hands, shyly and swiftly deposited on "Teacher's desk" when the back of that divinity was turned. The blue bowl took kindly to them all, and as the girl's clever fingers settled ...
— Up the Hill and Over • Isabel Ecclestone Mackay
... night and scolded above half of it, is quite beautiful. Yet she looks as neat and as ready to welcome the Captain at breakfast-time as if she had been asleep in the Queen's bed all night. My dear! you could never laugh at her prim little curls or her pink bows again if you saw her as I have done." I could only feel very penitent, and greet Miss Jessie with double respect when I met her next. She looked faded and pinched; and her lips began to quiver, as if she was very weak, when she spoke of her ...
— Cranford • Elizabeth Cleghorn Gaskell
... see him in such a plight as this was altogether beyond their experience. He was prim and precise in every detail of his clothes, and his sense of personal dignity was very strong. Neatness was a passion with him, and, in his regulated bachelor existence, this had grown upon him ...
— The Rushton Boys at Rally Hall - Or, Great Days in School and Out • Spencer Davenport
... jolly mother took her seat at the top of the room; next to her sat a lady in a riding habit, whom I soon found to be Mrs. Dobson;(120) below her sat a gentlewoman, prim, upright, neat, and mean; and, next to her, sat another, thin, haggard, wrinkled, fine, and tawdry, with a thousand frippery ornaments and old-fashioned furbelows; she was excellently nick-named, by Mrs. Thrale, the Duchess of Monmouth. On the opposite side was placed Mrs. Thrale, and, next to ...
— The Diary and Letters of Madame D'Arblay Volume 1 • Madame D'Arblay
... farm-house and barns clustered against a hill-side, just over a wooden spire in the shallow valley, about which were gathered a few white houses, giving signs of life thrice a day in tiny threads of smoke rising from their prim chimneys; and over all, the pallid skies of New England, where the sun wheeled his shorn beams from east to west as coldly as if no tropic seas mirrored his more fervid glow thousands of miles away, and the chilly moon beamed with irreproachable ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. IV, No. 22, Aug., 1859 • Various
... waste of good bricks and mortar!—the room was ridiculously large! On the smooth white walls reddish shadows moved in a fantastic procession, and from the big chintz-covered lounge the monstrous blue poppies leaped out of the firelight. The high canopy over the bed was draped with prim folds of damask, and the coverlet was of some quaint crocheted work that hung in fringed ends to the floor. Here again from the threadbare velvet carpet the blue ...
— The Miller Of Old Church • Ellen Glasgow
... look on triumphantly to see her husband die. He had played the widower in sight of all Edinburgh, and now it would be seen how great was the lie, and nobody could dispute that the widowhood was hers. She hoped that he would turn his prim figure and formal face her way, that she might make him, too, an easy bow, showing how she despised the hypocrite, and how completely he had failed in breaking her spirit. She hoped she should ...
— The Billow and the Rock • Harriet Martineau
... hours, during same three or four days, a very prim and devout-looking Episcopal clergyman, with a cast in his eye, had visited Alonzo. According to his card, he was the Rev. Melton Hargrave, of Cincinnati. He said he had retired from the ministry on account of his health. If he had said on account of ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... Clara would prove that the mysterious picture in the drawing-room was a portrait, but, it must be confessed, with a little curiosity to view the first specimen of the sex who lived under the roof of Mr. Beckendorff. Clara was a hale old woman, with rather an acid expression of countenance, prim in her appearance, and evidently precise in her manners. She placed a bottle and two wine-glasses with long, thin stems on the table; and having removed the game and changed the plates, ...
— Vivian Grey • The Earl of Beaconsfield
... See J. Wright's English Dialect Dictionary. "Mim-mouthed" means "affectedly prim or proper ...
— Essays of Robert Louis Stevenson • Robert Louis Stevenson
... must, they swear, have "raked in golden barley," Like the great Fleet Street "Cock." Their jealous jeremiads, sour and snarly, PARTLET'S prim feelings shock. "Luck! Not at all: but the reward emphatic Of ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 98, January 25th, 1890 • Various
... great-coats in front; but was reconciled when little Miss Sharp was made to quit the carriage, and mount up beside him—when he covered her up in one of his Benjamins, and became perfectly good-humoured—how the asthmatic gentleman, the prim lady, who declared upon her sacred honour she had never travelled in a public carriage before (there is always such a lady in a coach—Alas! was; for the coaches, where are they?), and the fat widow with the brandy-bottle, took their places inside—how the porter asked them all for money, ...
— Vanity Fair • William Makepeace Thackeray
... atmosphere of crowded rooms." Began to feel hungry about lunch-time, but happily remembered that "it is not luxury which is enervating, it is over-eating." Exhausted, but virtuous. Remembered that I had to dine at my aunt's. Awkward! Could I go in that dress? She is so prim, and so prejudiced in favour of trousers. Also she is so rich, and I was her heir. It needs money to obtain the luxury which the great teacher advocates. Hurried home, and put on hateful evening dress. Avoided hansoms, ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Volume 103, December 10, 1892 • Various
... 'Knowledge (vedana) means meditation (upsana), scripture using the word in that sense'; i.e. in all Upanishads that knowledge which is enjoined as the means of final release is Meditation. The Vkyakra then propounds a prvapaksha (prim facie view), 'Once he is to make the meditation, the matter enjoined by scripture being accomplished thereby, as in the case of the prayjas and the like'; and then sums up against this in the words 'but (meditation) is established ...
— The Vedanta-Sutras with the Commentary by Ramanuja - Sacred Books of the East, Volume 48 • Trans. George Thibaut
... leave one snap to meet its partner. Come on Judy," the feet were again on the rug, "we will be simply dead in the morning, and we have got to be very much alive. We do miss the Weatherbee. I don't see why we let her go. Dear, prim, prompt Weatherbee! Now we know we loved her. Her successor is too ...
— Jane Allen: Junior • Edith Bancroft
... Tredgold sat in the private office of Tredgold and Son, land and estate agents, gazing through the prim wire blinds at the peaceful High Street of Binchester. Tredgold senior, who believed in work for the young, had left early. Tredgold junior, glad at an opportunity of sharing his father's views, had passed most of the work on to a clerk who had arrived ...
— Dialstone Lane, Complete • W.W. Jacobs
... character and capacity that began with our grandfather! But as I go on in life, day by day, I become more of a bewildered child; I cannot get used to this world, to procreation, to heredity, to sight, to hearing; the commonest things are a burthen. The prim obliterated polite face of life, and the broad, bawdy, and orgiastic - or maenadic - foundations, form a spectacle to which no habit reconciles me; and 'I could wish my days to be bound each to each' by the same open-mouthed ...
— Letters of Robert Louis Stevenson - Volume 2 • Robert Louis Stevenson
... he fared the better from her, as he always does, for faring worse from me: for there was, How do you now, Sir? And how do you now, Mr. Hickman? as he ambled now on this side of the chariot, now on that, stealing a prim look at me; her head half out of the chariot, kindly smiling, as if married to the man but a fortnight herself: while I always saw something to divert myself on the side of the chariot where the honest man was not, were it but old Robin at ...
— Clarissa, Volume 2 (of 9) • Samuel Richardson
... Prim little Mrs. Dale, the one person in the world who could influence her austere husband, gently tapped him upon the arm ...
— Rosa's Quest - The Way to the Beautiful Land • Anna Potter Wright
... having his dramatic entertainment censored by a frail, prim little thing like Miss Beach tickled his burly sense of humor. "It would be a horrible thing if I should go to see anything vulgar, wouldn't it?" he observed. "But I think I'll take a chance. You go ahead ...
— The Real Adventure • Henry Kitchell Webster
... few more words about the "English" question: As I said, it seems to me, academical correctness, among the higher characters, will give a prim, old-fashioned tone: and you can look after this, as all my own work has been in the opposite direction in art. I have given it no thought in writing this ...
— Shenandoah - Representative Plays by American Dramatists: 1856-1911 • Bronson Howard
... precise, and trim, You begin your steps demurely— There's a spirit almost prim In the feet that move so surely. So discreetly, to the chime Of the music that so ...
— Shandygaff • Christopher Morley
... shocking language," observed a thin, prim, red-nosed lady, with a vinegar aspect, who sat erect, and apparently fearless, in the corner of the coach—"very shocking language, indeed. Why, my good man, should you form any such ...
— The Black Baronet; or, The Chronicles Of Ballytrain - The Works of William Carleton, Volume One • William Carleton
... breath of sound. His very lids refused to wink, as if afraid in that brief proverbial interval to lose a particle of the rich music that floated through the room. For the first time the idea crossed Mary's mind that it was possible the plain little sensible Margaret, so prim and demure, might have power over the heart of the handsome, dashing spirited ...
— Mary Barton • Elizabeth Gaskell
... met with the approval of all but the two rather prim and elderly women who flatly refused to walk up a ladder, even to get out of their present ...
— Betty Gordon in Washington • Alice B. Emerson
... tree or a Fourth of July picnic had usually been the occasions when Mary Hope, with her skirts just hitting her shoe tops in front and sagging in an ungainly fashion behind, had teetered solemnly through a "square" dance with him. Mother Douglas herself had always sat very straight and prim on a bench, her hands folded in her lap and her eyes blinking disapprovingly at the ungodly ones who let out an exultant little yip now and then when they started exuberantly through the mazes ...
— Rim o' the World • B. M. Bower
... sure that it has no effect on the skin—no, I really dare not." As she said this she looked as prim as a vestal. "It is the first time, do you know, that I ever used this liquid white, ah! ah! ah! What a baby I am! I am all in ...
— Monsieur, Madame and Bebe, Complete • Gustave Droz
... and considered that the presumption of the colonists must be put down with a high hand. They little knew of what stuff the descendants of the Pilgrim Fathers—the sturdy Puritans, the dashing Cavaliers, the prim Quakers, and of many other classes whom persecution, poverty, or their crimes, had driven from Europe—were made, as I had full many opportunities afterwards of discovering. A just and judicious policy which at once would have granted all the rights the colonists ...
— Hurricane Hurry • W.H.G. Kingston
... and trays looked somewhat out of place on the prim dressing-table, but Patty thought them a decided improvement. Then she unwrapped her mother's portrait, and placed ...
— Patty Fairfield • Carolyn Wells
... midst of a hostile population, the little band of worshippers was armed to the teeth. The father carried his "plain falling band" and steeple-crowned hat with a stiff air, and also carried lethal weapons. His prim wife and daughters bare Bibles, and his serving men, muskets. "Like a servant of the Lord, With his Bible and his sword," the unflinching old soldier of the Commonwealth strode manfully from his homestead to his religious duties, not unprepared to deal with ...
— Disturbed Ireland - Being the Letters Written During the Winter of 1880-81. • Bernard H. Becker
... of St. Helena under a glass case, miniatures all representing the same blue-eyed lady, now with hair curled, now in a ball dress, now in a yellow gown with leg-of-mutton sleeves. And all this—consoles, King of Rome, marshals, yellow-gowned, short-waisted ladies, with that prim stiffness which was considered graceful in 1806, this atmosphere of victory and conquest—it was this more than anything we could say to him that made him accept so naively the ...
— Short Stories of Various Types • Various
... pleases most when one's back is turned to it. It must be very ancient, for I well remember that five years ago, when I matriculated there (and shortly after received notice to quit), it had already the same gray, prim look, and was fully furnished with catch-polls, beadles, dissertations, thes dansants, washerwomen, compendiums, roasted pigeons, Guelphic orders, graduation coaches, pipe-heads, court-councilors, law-councilors, ...
— The German Classics of The Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, Vol. VI. • Editor-in-Chief: Kuno Francke
... the heart enters—a structure of the understanding rising out of the moral and spiritual nature. Then follows a section on Children, which explodes not a few educational fallacies, and propounds certain articles of faith and practice wholesome for these times, though it will probably wear a prim and quakerish aspect to the admirers of Jean Paul's famous tractate[10] on the same theme. The concluding paper in this series, entitled The Life Poetic, is the liveliest, if not the most valuable of the six: it has, however, been charged, with considerable show of justice, with a tendency ...
— Chambers' Edinburgh Journal - Volume XVII., No 422, New Series, January 31, 1852 • Various
... and prim; they march well, and their muskets are polished very bright. I wonder how they would stand fire," said Higgins, after ...
— The Old Bell Of Independence; Or, Philadelphia In 1776 • Henry C. Watson
... standing prim, erect, and stiff, fell limply into a convenient rocking chair, and looked closely at this orphaned nephew who had ...
— Miss Minerva and William Green Hill • Frances Boyd Calhoun
... back and see all my philosophy refuted, all my prim little opinions lying prone like dolls with the sawdust knocked out of them. All these years I have been judging Judith with an ignorance as cruel as it has been complacent. Verily I have been the fag end of wisdom. So I forbear ...
— The Morals of Marcus Ordeyne • William J. Locke
... old thing!" he whispered to Norah, indicating a prim maiden lady who had arrived on foot. "I know she's aching for a chance to ask me why I'm not in khaki!" He grinned delightedly. "She's rather like the old lady who met me in the train the other day, and after looking at me sadly for ...
— Captain Jim • Mary Grant Bruce
... Robin Hood and his merry outlaws, which have charmed readers young and old for more than six hundred years. These entertaining stories date back to the time when Chaucer wrote his "Canterbury Tales," when the minstrel and scribe stood in the place of the more prim and ...
— Bulfinch's Mythology • Thomas Bulfinch
... there was a square prim garden, arranged in parallelograms, tree answering to tree at every corner, round which it was still her delight to creep when the weather permitted. Poor Clara! How much advice she had received during these creepings, ...
— The Belton Estate • Anthony Trollope
... und Wirbelstrme[12]) herbeizufhren, mssen die Eisenkerne der Transformatoren aus dnnen (kaum 0,5 mm dicken) Eisenblechen mit isolierenden Zwischenlagen von paraffiniertem Papier etc. hergestellt werden. Zur Magnetisierung des Eisenkerns dient die Primrbewickelung desselben, und durch die abwechselnde Magnetisierung des Eisenkerns wird die Sekundarbewickelung desselben induziert und dadurch der transformierte Wechselstrom erzeugt. Man hat es dabei in der Gewalt, die Spannung ...
— German Science Reader - An Introduction to Scientific German, for Students of - Physics, Chemistry and Engineering • Charles F. Kroeh
... small matter—a common little word of three letters. In all the messages sent him by the schoolma'am, it was the precise, school-grammar wording of them which had irritated him most and impressed him insensibly with the belief that she was too prim to be quite human. The Happy Family had felt all along that they were artists in that line, and they knew that the precise sentences ever carried conviction of their truth. Weary mopped his perspiring face upon a white ...
— The Lonesome Trail and Other Stories • B. M. Bower
... whom Lucy Dayton so much disliked and dreaded, was a cousin of Mr. Dayton, and was a prim, matter-of-fact maiden of fifty, or thereabout. That she was still in a state of single blessedness was partially her own fault, for at twenty she was engaged to the son of a wealthy farmer who lived near her father. But, ...
— Homestead on the Hillside • Mary Jane Holmes
... intimacy of his domestic life, as "Majesty," the butt of his daughter's playful sallies, as the beloved father, the tender grandfather, a gracious, benevolent presence. We read the romance of his daughter, that pretty, prim courtship of a bygone day; we see her home life as a young wife, the coming of another race of merry children; by and by, we follow the fortunes of graceful "little Madam" with her brilliant eyes, and see the advent of yet another ...
— The Letter-Bag of Lady Elizabeth Spencer-Stanhope v. I. • A. M. W. Stirling (compiler)
... sooner out of bed than a passion came over her to see herself in that less jealous arrangement of drapery which the Beauty of the last century had insisted on as presenting her most fittingly to the artist. She rolled up the sleeves of her dress, she turned down its prim collar and neck, and glanced from her glass to the portrait, from the portrait back to the glass. Myrtle was not blind nor dull, though young, and in many things untaught. She did not say in so many words, ...
— The Guardian Angel • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.
... said Dennet, with prim mouth and laughing eyes. "Far be it from me! But 'tis ever the wont of the kitchen, when those come there ...
— The Armourer's Prentices • Charlotte Mary Yonge
... school-room, where she was plainly the dunce and the black sheep, a misery to herself and all concerned, hating everyone and disliked by all. To the little maiden of the Bush, only half tamed as yet, the London school-room and walks in the park were penance in themselves, and the company of three steady prim girls, in the idealess state produced by confinement to a school-room, and nothing but childish books, was as distasteful to her as she was shocking to them, and her life was one warfare with them and ...
— My Young Alcides - A Faded Photograph • Charlotte M. Yonge
... exaggeration of its weaknesses. But meanwhile, they overlook the fact, that not the woman Elizabeth, but the Virgin-queen, the royal heroine, is the theme of admiration. Not the petty virtues, the pretty sensibilities, the cheap charity, the prim decorum, which modern flatterers dwell upon, degrading royalty, while they palaver its possessor, but Britannia's sacred majesty, enshrined in chaste and lofty womanhood. Our ancestors paid their compliments to sex ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction - Vol. 17, No. 483., Saturday, April 2, 1831 • Various
... garden. Marigolds go wandering about in the most trampish manner, and poppies, because they are privileged characters, spring up as they please. Then, as though the two of them were not sufficient California gold, there is the faithful gaillardia with its prim little sunflower-faces smiling ...
— Vignettes of San Francisco • Almira Bailey
... fine and seemed very sensitive in the tips, so she put her food apart with fine, small motions, she ate carefully, delicately. It pleased him very much to see her, and it irritated Birkin. They were all drinking champagne. Maxim, the prim young Russian with the smooth, warm-coloured face and black, oiled hair was the only one who seemed to be perfectly calm and sober. Birkin was white and abstract, unnatural, Gerald was smiling with a constant bright, amused, cold light in ...
— Women in Love • D. H. Lawrence
... means of intercourse with older settlements, of the extension of political organization, of religious and educational activity. And the settlement of these and similar questions for one frontier served as a guide for the next. The American student needs not to go to the "prim little townships of Sleswick" for illustrations of the law of continuity and development. For example, he may study the origin of our land policies in the colonial land policy; he may see how the system grew by adapting the statutes to the customs of the successive frontiers.[10:1] He may ...
— The Frontier in American History • Frederick Jackson Turner
... in Paris (for she had specialised in travelling Englishmen) could not re-establish her conviction as to the sameness of men. The presence of her professed rivals of various nationalities in the Promenade could not restore it either. The Promenade in its cold, prim languor was the very negation of desire. She was afraid. She foresaw ruin for herself in this London, inclement, misty ...
— The Pretty Lady • Arnold E. Bennett
... entrance of Mademoiselle Therese Loire. Her face was not so long nor her hair so tightly drawn back as her sister's, and she came forward with a rush, smiling broadly, but, somehow, Barbara felt she would like the prim sister better. ...
— Barbara in Brittany • E. A. Gillie
... exquisite. When I watched the way she moved her hands and feet, despair entered my soul. It was all so precise, so "express and admirable." Her limbs were so dainty and graceful—mine so big and unmanageable! "How long and gaunt I am," I used to say to myself, "and what a pattern of prim prettiness she is!" I was so much ashamed of my large hands, during this time at the Royalty, that I kept them tucked up under my arms! This subjected me to unmerciful criticism from Madame Albina ...
— The Story of My Life - Recollections and Reflections • Ellen Terry
... continued the queen, "be so good as to await me in the reception-room." As she saw that the prim lips of De Noailles were about to be opened, she added: "The mistress of ceremonies and the ladies of the ...
— Joseph II. and His Court • L. Muhlbach
... ask, Sir,' a drawin' of herself up to her full height, as straight and as prim as a Lombardy poplar, or rather, a bull-rush, for that's all one size. 'May I ask, Sir, what is the object of your visit here—at a place where no gentlemen are received but the parents or guardians ...
— Nature and Human Nature • Thomas Chandler Haliburton
... me Penelope. It's so prim and old fashioned. I told you what to call me—Fauvette. That's the name I like. Fauvette! I ...
— Possessed • Cleveland Moffett
... her little gate, hung crookedly in a very compact and prim spruce hedge, she stopped in amazement and ...
— Lucy Maud Montgomery Short Stories, 1902 to 1903 • Lucy Maud Montgomery
... bookcase protected by brass wire-netting, to which hangs his thermometer just where he originally placed it. The house has been little if any altered since he was carried to his last resting-place. He is described by those who knew him as "a little thin, prim, upright man," a quiet, unassuming, but very observing country parson, who occupied his time in watching and recording the habits of his parishioners, quadruped as well as feathered. At the end of the garden is still kept his sun-dial, the ...
— England, Picturesque and Descriptive - A Reminiscence of Foreign Travel • Joel Cook
... consulted. His almanacks were spelled over in the tavern and quoted in the senate; they nerved the arm of the soldier, and rounded the periods of the orator. The fashionable beauty, dashing along in her calash from St. James's or the Mall, and the prim, starched dame, from Watling-street or Bucklersbury, with a staid foot-boy, in a plush jerkin, plodding behind her—the reigning toast among 'the men of wit about town,' and the leading groaner in a tabernacle concert—glided alternately into the study of the trusty wizard, and poured ...
— William Lilly's History of His Life and Times - From the Year 1602 to 1681 • William Lilly
... Besides, there's a more serious difficulty." Jernyngham's tense face relaxed into a grim smile. "Can you imagine Ellice an inmate of an English country house, patronizing local charities, presiding over prim garden parties? The idea's preposterous! ...
— Prescott of Saskatchewan • Harold Bindloss
... family in Ashurst, where is laid the scene of John Ward, Preacher: By Margaret Deland. The wife is prim and dictatorial, a pattern housewife, with decided views upon all subjects, including religion and matrimony. The husband wears a cashmere dressing-gown, and spreads a red handkerchief over his white hair to protect his white head from draughts; reads "A ...
— Character Sketches of Romance, Fiction and the Drama, Vol 1 - A Revised American Edition of the Reader's Handbook • The Rev. E. Cobham Brewer, LL.D.
... ran the slim, straight causeway, which was the King's highway of the district—a trim, prim line of white above the picturesque disorder of the marshes. It skirted the low-lying fields at the foot of the uplands and slipped through an iron gate to end in the far distance at the gigantic portal of The Fort. This was a squat, ungainly pile of rugged gray ...
— The Green Mummy • Fergus Hume
... battle with all the force of his intellect, and (Tom began to think she could make him fool enough for anything) all the resources of his purse. The old family pictures—sad daubs, or they would never have been consigned to the bedrooms—simpered down on him with encouraging benignity. Prim women, wearing enormously long waists, and their heads a good deal on one side, pointed their fans at him, while he washed his hands, with a coquetry irresistible, had their colours only stood, combining entreaty and command; while a jolly old boy in flowing wig, steel breast-plate, and the most ...
— M. or N. "Similia similibus curantur." • G.J. Whyte-Melville
... had gone Beth appeared. To please Arthur, she had covered her cropped head with a white muslin mob-cap bound round with a pale pink ribbon, and put on a high ruffle and a large white apron, in which she looked pretty and prim, like a sweet little Puritan, in spite of the pale pink vanity; and Arthur smiled when he saw her, but afterwards grumbled: "Why did you cut your pretty hair off? I shouldn't have thought you could do such a ...
— The Beth Book - Being a Study of the Life of Elizabeth Caldwell Maclure, a Woman of Genius • Sarah Grand
... lady was very aristocratic, but somewhat prim and precise. Nevertheless, when the company had been telling of college pranks, she relaxed slightly, and told of a lark that had caused excitement in Cambridge when she was a girl there. This was to the effect that two maidens of social standing were smuggled into the second-story ...
— Jokes For All Occasions - Selected and Edited by One of America's Foremost Public Speakers • Anonymous
... aunt, prim, proper and worldly-wise, was as much Aunt Sally to Filmer as she was to her niece and nephew. Jock jollied the aristocratic lady as freely as he did Drew, toward whom he held the tolerant admiration that ...
— Joyce of the North Woods • Harriet T. Comstock
... had the dinner. Simpson was astonished—and more than astonished, grieved—when I told him that he was to dine with the maid; but he could not complain in words, since my own guest, the mistress, was hardly more attractive. When our preparations were complete I could not help laughing: the two prim little tables, one in the parlor and one in the anteroom, and Simpson disapprovingly going back and ...
— Stories by American Authors (Volume 4) • Constance Fenimore Woolson
... died but two months before and if perhaps then her younger sister had felt any pang of pity for the orphaned children, it did not enter her thoughts this morning. She plumped up the pillows on the prim horsehair sofa, painfully recalling the pillow fight she had once seen between her cousin's children. Children were a nuisance, and these two—Myra's dreadful boy and girl—were bound ...
— Pearl and Periwinkle • Anna Graetz
... you know—your Aunt Winifred—who was keeping house for your father—gathered up her silly skirts, and departed when your father announced his engagement. Then she and your Aunt Marcia settled together in an old prim Georgian house, about five miles from the Fallodens; and there they have been ever since. And now they are ...
— Lady Connie • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... think of Miss Patricia? I'm afraid of her. The night we came home she met us in the hall, looking so tall and severe in her black gown, with those prim little bunches of gray curls on each side of her face, that I went under a chair. Then I thought I must have misjudged her, for there were tears in her eyes when she kissed the children, and I heard her whisper as she turned away, "poor little motherless lambs!" Still I have seen ...
— The Story of Dago • Annie Fellows-Johnston
... candydates in th' field. But th' other candydates know it. Th' sthrongest iv thim—his name is Flannigan, an' he's a re-tail dealer in wines an' liquors, an' he lives over his establishment. Flannigan was nomynated enthusyastically at a prim'ry held in his bar-rn; an' befure Willie Boye had picked out pants that wud match th' color iv th' Austhreelyan ballot this here Flannigan had put a man on th' day watch, tol' him to speak gently to anny raygistered voter that wint to sleep behind th' sthove, an' was out that night ...
— The Wit and Humor of America, Volume II. (of X.) • Various
... be silly, Moses," said the half-indignant Melindy, pouting her ripe red lips, and trying to look very prim. ...
— Marguerite Verne • Agatha Armour
... weekly progress had been for some time the delight of Elsmere's heart, they met old Meyrick in his pony-carriage. He stopped his shambling steed at sight of the pair. The bleared spectacled eyes lit up, the prim mouth broke into a smile ...
— Robert Elsmere • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... something doing!" quoth Frank. "That's the trouble with a crowd of girls. After they have played 'Ring Around the Rosy' and 'London Bridge is Falling Down' they don't know another living thing to do except to sit down and look prim and be prosy. But with boys it's different. There's ...
— Wyn's Camping Days - or, The Outing of the Go-Ahead Club • Amy Bell Marlowe
... a little stiff salon with glass doors, prim furniture, and an elaborately ornamental French clock. It was silent, of course. One wonders sometimes whether ornamental French Ormolu clocks have any works, or are solid throughout. For no one has ever seen one ...
— The Incomplete Amorist • E. Nesbit
... on the sheet were beginning to glisten with sweat, appeared to become merged in some strange way with himself. Merged, not with the man he was to-day, but with the Hugh Elwyn of thirty years back, who, as a lonely only child, had lived so intensely secret, imaginative a life, peopling the prim alleys of Hyde Park with fairies, imps, tricksy hobgoblins in whom he more than half believed, and longing even then, as ever after, for the unattainable, never carelessly happy as his father and mother believed him ...
— Studies in love and in terror • Marie Belloc Lowndes
... some such kindred emotion, stared fixedly over my head at a point on the further wall. It was as though he had seen something that turned him to stone. I instinctively followed the direction of his eyes, but I could see nothing unusual. The still feebly flickering ashes in the grate, and the row of prim ornaments on the mantelpiece, ...
— The Mysterious Affair at Styles • Agatha Christie
... so to speak. She had also a cushion, which was necessary, if not for comfort, yet for her sense of being fully equipped, placed behind her back when she sat down. But with all this she was not a formal or prim person. She was a woman who had not produced a great deal of effect in life; one of those who are not accustomed to have their advice taken, or to find that their opinion has much weight upon others. Perhaps it was because Elinor ...
— The Marriage of Elinor • Margaret Oliphant
... adopted; "you know it would never do to keep that little fellow with us. How old did you say he was—about fifteen? Well, fifteen or sixteen—ya—you recollect how that old priest acted last July, at the village of Scurvy? A little girl I sent out to Brother Prim this priest smelt and hunted out; and actually broke in the room door where she was confined, and took her off by physical force to a Roman Catholic orphan house. These priests are terrible fellows; and your young fancy orphan, Paul, would ...
— The Cross and the Shamrock • Hugh Quigley
... she was asking herself, "on a platform like this, and before a lot of people? She might think it silly;" and while she was still debating the point, she had held out her hand and shaken Anna's stiffly, with a prim "How do you do," and ...
— Kitty Trenire • Mabel Quiller-Couch
... of his many friends, and he found himself watching for the little brown face that, half-way across the old meeting-house, would turn round to look for him more than once during the service. At first there was only the top of little Nan Prince's prim best bonnet or hood to be seen, unless it was when she stood up in prayer-time, but soon the bright eyes rose like stars above the horizon of the pew railing, and next there was the whole well-poised little head, and the tall child was possessed ...
— A Country Doctor and Selected Stories and Sketches • Sarah Orne Jewett
... and State make their way beneath the overhanging houses, the lattices are thrust ajar, and you may discern, just in the boundaries of light and shade, the prim faces of the little Puritan damsels, eying the magnificent governor, and envious of the bolder curiosity of the men. Another object of almost equal interest now appears in the middle of the way. It is a man clad in a ...
— Biographical Sketches - (From: "Fanshawe and Other Pieces") • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... out and see her first," she thought, smoothing down with a large, bony hand the folds of her rather prim white cambric dress. She was a very stupid woman, and not a passionate one; therefore the agony of pain of a loving, jealous wife was quite unknown to her. But she was malignant, as such people usually are. She loved making other people uncomfortable ...
— Six Women • Victoria Cross
... somewhat tight and tubby, with his chest out and his head back, went the prim figure of Mr. May, reminding one of a consequential bird of the smaller species. His plumbago-grey suit fitted exactly—save that it was perhaps a little tight. The jacket and waistcoat were bound with silk braid of exactly the same shade as the cloth. His soft collar, ...
— The Lost Girl • D. H. Lawrence
... face over the threshold—Clytemnestra, of a matronly circumference, yet with a certain prim consciousness of herself, which despite the gray hair and the excellent maturity of her face, was unmistakably maidenish—Clytie of the eyes always wise to another's needs and beaming with ...
— The Seeker • Harry Leon Wilson
... which no argument could affect. But, with a lover's unreasonableness, he had found the fight between Bodava and Castrillon an insult to the lady at stake. He suspected, too, that Castrillon had spoken lightly of her to General Prim, to Zeuill, perhaps to d'Alchingen. This was insufferable, and so, inasmuch as the mischief had been done, he would not and could not remain outside the combat. There seemed, also, a certain feeling at the Clubs where the Madrid scandal had become known, ...
— Robert Orange - Being a Continuation of the History of Robert Orange • John Oliver Hobbes
... change, be less than the admirable creature he had loved when he was something more than himself, would have seemed no less a calamity than had the stars turned black. She sat up very straight in her prim little way and talked of Helena's new project; which was to build bath-houses down by the lagoon at Ravenswood and bathe when the tide was in. He told her that he too had a project: to persuade the men of Menlo to build a Club House, and thus have some sort of informal social centre. She told ...
— The Californians • Gertrude Franklin Horn Atherton
... life! Rose, why dost thou harden that little heart of thine? Is there none hereaway whom thou couldst love? ROSE. And if there were such an one, verily it would ill become me to tell him so. HAN. Nay, dear one, where true love is, there is little need of prim formality. ROSE. Hush, dear aunt, for thy words pain me sorely. Hung in a plated dish-cover to the knocker of the workhouse door, with naught that I could call mine own, save a change of baby-linen and a book of etiquette, little wonder if I have ...
— The Complete Plays of Gilbert and Sullivan - The 14 Gilbert And Sullivan Plays • William Schwenk Gilbert and Arthur Sullivan
... there was little time to dress for dinner when I brought them to anchor for the night. The nice old hotel, with its Delft plates half covering the walls, its alcoves and unexpected stairways with green balusters, and its old dining-room looking on a prim garden, pleased the eyes which find all things ...
— The Chauffeur and the Chaperon • C. N. Williamson
... had unconsciously laid aside her fan, lifted her mantilla from her head with both hands, and, drawing it around her shoulders and under her lifted chin, had crossed it over her bosom with a certain prim, automatic gesture, as if it had been the starched kerchief of some remote Puritan ancestress. With her arms still unconsciously crossed, she stooped rigidly, picked up her fan with three fingers, as if it had been a prayer-book, and, with a slight inclination of ...
— The Crusade of the Excelsior • Bret Harte
... to be felt in the air—had been hearing all about me. Beside her glass of stout and ale, she looked a little less prim and defiant. But she was still on company manners. She sat delicately, on the extreme edge of a chair, by the side of, not facing, her plate of bread, cheese and pickles; approached them; mopped up, so to ...
— A Poor Man's House • Stephen Sydney Reynolds
... had been brought up nicely. She had pretty prim ways of drinking and eating, queer little fashions of sitting in company, and of addressing people. She had peculiar notions about colors in dress, about wearing her hair; and she seemed to have already imbibed a small stock of social prejudices ...
— Chita: A Memory of Last Island • Lafcadio Hearn
... into which I occasionally lapse even here in prim Vienna. I would like to see a good baseball match, with the Chicago nine going strong. Let us abandon this effete monarchy, Jennie, and pay ...
— Jennie Baxter, Journalist • Robert Barr
... face; to him the crooked mouth was straight; and ever since Savaron, by taking him into his service, had brought him so near to the Wattevilles' house, he had laid siege systematically to the maid, who was as prim and sanctimonious as her mistress, and who, like every ugly old maid, was far more ...
— Albert Savarus • Honore de Balzac
... knowing what he was capable of I scented trouble in store for Charlotte. Rosa I was not so sure about; she sat demurely and upright, and looked far away into the tree-tops in a visionary, world-forgetting sort of way; yet the prim purse of her mouth was somewhat overdone, and her ...
— The Golden Age • Kenneth Grahame
... getting back from the river that day and Miss Benton had to ring her bell hard in that direction before they came trooping up and clattered into the schoolroom, where the girls already sat, their eyes lowered virtuously to their books, with a prim air of self-righteousness. THEY were ...
— Understood Betsy • Dorothy Canfield
... they are becoming—rather—are they not?" And here, having arranged the glasses in the ordinary form of spectacles, I applied them gingerly in their proper position; while Madame Simpson, adjusting her cap, and folding her arms, sat bolt upright in her chair, in a somewhat stiff and prim, and indeed, in a somewhat ...
— The Works of Edgar Allan Poe - Volume 3 (of 5) of the Raven Edition • Edgar Allan Poe
... That prim little Frenchwoman! She hadn't yet got over the music lessons being taken away from her. That wouldn't help. His little sweet was the only friend they had. Well, they were her lessons. And he shouldn't budge shouldn't budge ...
— Forsyte Saga • John Galsworthy
... to the death; they will defend all, the golden legend itself, with all the lies and tales in it: as that of St. George, St. Christopher, St. Winifred, St. Denis, &c. It is a wonder to see how Nic. Harpsfield, that Pharisaical impostor, amongst the rest, Ecclesiast. Hist. cap. 22. saec prim, sex., puzzles himself to vindicate that ridiculous fable of St. Ursula and the eleven thousand virgins, as when they live, [6580]how they came to Cologne, by whom martyred, &c., though he can ...
— The Anatomy of Melancholy • Democritus Junior
... the only one of his sons who disobeyed him; but there was a redeeming feature. Adam married a slender tall slip of a woman, four years his senior, who had been teaching in the Hartley schools when he began courting her. She was a prim, fussy woman, born of a prim father and a fussy mother, so what was to be expected? Her face was narrow and set, her body and her movements almost rigid, her hair, always parted, lifted from each side and tied on the crown, fell in stiff little curls, the back part hanging free. Her speech, ...
— A Daughter of the Land • Gene Stratton-Porter
... Scotland once when she was about fourteen, and I saw her, and was not favourably impressed. She was quiet and prim and proper, as cold as an icicle: a very pretty little girl, I owned that; but then I had thought to find something of my Janet, and was disappointed. Her eyes were indeed blue, but looked one in the face calmly as though they had belonged to a woman of forty; ...
— The Argosy - Vol. 51, No. 5, May, 1891 • Various
... of their manners the imagination remains calm and peaceful, and does not stir the blood till much later, and thus their temperament is much less precocious.] Children are preternaturally quick to discern immoral habits under the cloak of decency with which they are concealed. The prim speech imposed upon them, the lessons in good behaviour, the veil of mystery you profess to hang before their eyes, serve but to stimulate their curiosity. It is plain, from the way you set about it, that they are meant to learn what you profess to conceal; and of all you teach them this ...
— Emile • Jean-Jacques Rousseau
... here a lot, and we children like him first-rate; but now he's in Europe. Well, to come back to Nora: she likes to be called Eleanor, but we don't do it; she is so fussy and so very proper that Felix has nick-named her Miss Prim, and we do call her that. Miss Marston thinks Nora is the best behaved of us all; and sometimes, when Nannie is in papa's study, she lets her go in the drawing-room and entertain people that call. You should see the airs that ...
— We Ten - Or, The Story of the Roses • Lyda Farrington Kraus
... said Jasper, her next neighbour, "I want to do the same thing. And it will do some of those starched and prim people good to hear a little enthusiasm." Polly knew whom he meant,—some young Englishmen. One of them immediately put up his monocle and regarded her as if she had been a new kind of creature displayed for his benefit. Jasper glared ...
— Five Little Peppers Abroad • Margaret Sidney
... preoccupations, how was one to bear patiently with foolish, friendly fingers, or with uncomfortable thoughts of your own, pointing you to Lucy Purcell? With the great marriage-night scene from 'Valentine' thrilling in your mind, how was it possible to think of the prim self-conceit, the pettish temper and mincing airs of that little person in ...
— The History of David Grieve • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... omne quod de mea mihi occupatione displicebat, se patenter ostenderet, et cuncta qu infligere dolorem consueverant, congesta ante oculos licenter venirent. Ibi itaque cum afflictus valde et diu tacitus sederem, dilectissimus filius meus Petrus diaconus adfuit, mihi a primvo juventutis flore amicitiis familiariter obstrictus, atque ad sacri verbi indagationem socius. Qui gravi excoqui cordis languore me intuens, ait: Num quidnam tibi aliquid accidit, quod plus te solito mror tenet? Cui inquam: Mror, Petre, quem quotidie patior, et semper mihi per usum ...
— Anglo-Saxon Literature • John Earle
... teach, or learn, is expressed in Gipsy by the word sikker, sig, or seek. The reader may not be aware that the Sikhs of India derive their name from the same root, as appears from the following extract from Dr Paspati's etudes: "Sikava, v. prim. 1 cl. 1 conj. part, siklo', montrer, apprendre. Sanskrit, s'iks', to learn, to acquire science; siksaka, adj., a learner, a teacher. Hindustani, seek'hna, v.a., to learn, to acquire; seek'h, s.f., admonition." I next inquired why they were called Seeks, and they told me it was a ...
— The English Gipsies and Their Language • Charles G. Leland
... ought to know pretty well, Marcia," Joe replied, "back home they think I don't care much for the young people's work. It is a little too prim and ready-to-wear for me, if you'll excuse me for saying so. No fun in it at all, though I'll admit some of the classes here have more life in them than ...
— John Wesley, Jr. - The Story of an Experiment • Dan B. Brummitt
... listening to the voices which speak to her so oft in the autumn wind, the running brook, the opening flower, and the falling leaf, has learned a lesson different far from those taught her daily by the prim, stiff governess, who, imported from England six years ago, has drilled both Theo and Maggie in all the prescribed rules of high life as practiced in the Old World. She has taught them how to sit and how to stand, how to eat and how to drink, as becomes young ladies of Conway blood and birth. And ...
— Maggie Miller • Mary J. Holmes
... her was a small-faced little woman who might have seen forty years or sixty; except for her snowy hair, time seemed to have forgotten her. Her dress was a near approach to the Quaker garb of the followers of Penn. Everything about her was of softest gray; but the face, framed by the prim Quaker bonnet, was as fair as an infant's, and with a child's soft colouring in the cheeks that had not yet lost the charming curves of young womanhood. She looked like a creature whom Life had loved so well that Time had not been permitted to touch ...
— Against Odds - A Detective Story • Lawrence L. Lynch
... recent years. There is a growing interest in wild things and wild places. The benedicite of the Druid woods, always appreciated by the few, like Lowell, is coming to be understood by the many. There is an increasing desire to get away from the roar and rattle of the streets, away from even the prim formality of suburban avenues and artificial bits of landscape gardening into the panorama of woodland, field, and stream. Men with means are disposing of their palatial residences in the cities and moving to real ...
— Some Winter Days in Iowa • Frederick John Lazell
... took leave of the three strange women standing in a prim row, she gave a meaning nod to Mrs. Field, who followed her to ...
— Jane Field - A Novel • Mary E. Wilkins Freeman
... to have everything just so, and Mr. Darling had a passion for being exactly like his neighbours; so, of course, they had a nurse. As they were poor, owing to the amount of milk the children drank, this nurse was a prim Newfoundland dog, called Nana, who had belonged to no one in particular until the Darlings engaged her. She had always thought children important, however, and the Darlings had become acquainted with ...
— Peter and Wendy • James Matthew Barrie
... was only two or three years older than Dorothy, and was pretty, except when she began to speak, and then for a moment there was a strange discord in her features. She took a dislike to Dorothy, as she said herself, the instant she cast her eyes upon her. She could not bear that prim, set face, she said. The country-bred heifer evidently thought herself superior to every one in the castle. She was persuaded the minx was a sly one, and would carry tales. So judged mistress Amanda Serafina Fuller, after her kind. Nor was it wonderful that, being such as she was, she ...
— St. George and St. Michael • George MacDonald
... name With classic Rogers shall go down to fame, Be this thy crowning work! In my young days How often have I with a child's fond gaze Pored on the pictured wonders thou hadst done: Clarissa mournful, and prim Grandison! All Fielding's, Smollett's heroes, rose to view; I saw, and I believed the phantoms true. But, above all, that most romantic tale Did o'er my raw credulity prevail, Where Glums and Gawries wear ...
— The Works of Charles and Mary Lamb (Vol. 6) - Letters 1821-1842 • Charles and Mary Lamb
... the dogs. Life on the shore was prim and patriarchal. Whole families sat or lay about on camp stools or on traveling rugs, the wives in morning wraps, the husbands smoking in linen suits; the former occupied with needlework, the latter reading the newspapers or novels. The young ...
— The Malady of the Century • Max Nordau
... often, an awkward and sophisticated youth and a prim maid with down-cast eyes will sit together, waltz together, and the one never get one inch the nearer to the other, though soul and mind and body crave a closer union. The youth would give the solid earth—nay, the ...
— Hints for Lovers • Arnold Haultain
... nor poverty could destroy. She was so unmistakably the gentle-woman. In the simple, but dainty white cap, with its floating strings, which modestly covered her dark waving hair, the plain black dress and prim collar fastened with its mourning pin, she made a reposeful picture of the old-fashioned ...
— The Dreamer - A Romantic Rendering of the Life-Story of Edgar Allan Poe • Mary Newton Stanard
... "It's an artistic disarray," she explained. "It's hard work because I've slipped into the habit of being prim and precise, and I had to bend a pin intentionally. Four girls already have warned me about my hair falling down. It worries me a lot and yet it doesn't give the same effect as yours. Does yours feel loose ...
— Beatrice Leigh at College - A Story for Girls • Julia Augusta Schwartz
... stand upright beneath the decaying ceiling. Worn boards and ragged walls, and the rusty ribs fallen from the fireplace, are all that meet your eyes, but I see a round, unsteady, waxcloth-covered table, with four books lying at equal distances on it. There are six prim chairs, two of them not to be sat upon, backed against the walls, and between the window and the fireplace a chest of drawers, with a snowy coverlet. On the drawers stands a board with coloured marbles for the game of solitaire, and I have only to open the drawer with the ...
— A Window in Thrums • J. M. Barrie
... for Young Ladies! Until the fact was pointed out, we actually did not know that we had a girls' school as close to us as the school for boys. The garden, equally large with the other, affords no sign whatever of any provision for juvenile recreation; but is entirely laid out with prim grass-plots, gravel-walks, shrubs, and flowers, after the usual suburban style. During five months we have not once had our attention drawn to the premises by a shout or a laugh. Occasionally girls may be observed sauntering along the paths with their lesson-books in their hands, or else walking ...
— Woman and Womanhood - A Search for Principles • C. W. Saleeby
... Bailie Duke seated at his ease in a large armchair. At his right sat Bailie Thomson—a man with a forbidding face, whom I had often of late seen in the company of Carver Kinlay. At Mr. Duke's left hand was the schoolmaster, prim and businesslike as I had often seen him look in the school when anything of importance was pending, such as a class examination. Near him sat Lieutenant Fox, looking very handsome in his naval uniform, and very much at his ease. The only other person in the room was Dr. Linklater, who ...
— The Pilots of Pomona • Robert Leighton
... Pauline Augusta who saw me first. She came toward the car with her strapped school-books and her lunch-box in her hand and a prim little smile on her slightly freckled face. She impressed me as a startingly shabby figure, in the old sealskin coat which I had made over for her, worn clean to the hide along the front, for even those early autumn days found a chill in the air when the sun ...
— The Prairie Child • Arthur Stringer
... grande nefas, & morte piandum, Si iuuenis vetulo non assurrexerat, & si Barbato cuicunq; puer, lict ipse videret Plura domi farra, & maioris glandis aceruos, Tam venerabile erat prcedere quattuor annis, Primq; ...
— Chronicles of England, Scotland and Ireland (2 of 6): England (5 of 12) - Henrie the Second • Raphael Holinshed
... system; they had no notion of changing horses in mid-stream, yet most unluckily they were caught by a sudden flood. At the end of June it was announced in Madrid that Leopold of Hohenzollern, son of the Roumanian prince, had accepted the crown of Spain that had been secretly offered to him by Marshal Prim; and the news, M. Ollivier says, startled all France like the bursting of a bomb. It had always, we must remember, been a cardinal maxim of French statesmanship that the maintenance of a preponderant influence in Spain was essential to the security ...
— Studies in Literature and History • Sir Alfred Comyn Lyall
... paucos, cum praii theoria non fine fructu incredibili coiungeret. Ex quo pulcherrimo & fapientifsimo inftitutotuo, quid breui euentutum fit, qui vel mediocri iudicio volent, facil proculdubio diuinare poterunt. Vnum hoc fcio, vnam & vnicam rationem te inire, qua prim Lufitani, deinde Caftellani, quod antea toties cum no exigua iactura funt conati, tandem ex animoru votis perficerut. Perge ergo Spartam quam nactus es ornare, perge nauem illam plufquam Argonauticam, mille cuparum fere capace, quam fumptibus plane regiis fabricatam iam tadem foelicitcr ...
— Thomas Hariot • Henry Stevens
... your politeness," said the prim little steward: "I, myself, like every true Briton, reverence the ladies; we will therefore retire to my study. Mary, girl," turning to the attendant, "see that we have a nice chop for supper in ...
— The Disowned, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... laughing hoyden! Pastorella had with him the allowance of being blameless; but what was that towards being praiseworthy? To be only innocent is not to be virtuous! He afterwards spoke so much against Mrs. Dipple's forehead, Mrs. Prim's mouth, Mrs. Dentifrice's teeth, and Mrs. Fidget's cheeks that she grew downright in love with him; for it is always to be understood that a lady takes all you detract from the rest of her sex to be a gift to her. In a word, things ...
— Isaac Bickerstaff • Richard Steele
... define the charm of that garden. It did not consist in order or system, for there was no trace of either, except, perhaps, in that prim row of poplars growing about the whole domain and shutting it away from all idle and curious eyes. For the rest, I think the real charm must have been in its unexpectedness. At every turn and in every nook you stumbled on some miracle ...
— Lucy Maud Montgomery Short Stories, 1905 to 1906 • Lucy Maud Montgomery
... relations and good citizens, excuse themselves for not standing forth to demand vengeance."—Murray's Sequel, p. 114. "Alleging, that their decrial of the church of Rome, was a uniting with the Turks."—Barclay cor. "To which is added the Catechism by the Assembly of Divines."—N. E. Prim. cor. "This treachery was always present in the thoughts of both of them."— Robertson cor. "Thus far their words agree." Or: "Thus far the words of both agree."—W. Walker cor. "Aparithmesis is an enumeration of the several parts of what, as a whole, ...
— The Grammar of English Grammars • Goold Brown
... Salisbury, Northumberland and many more streets whose names tell of vanished splendors, whose dingy lengths are smoke-blackened, and far enough off from the whole aroma of Belgravia, is Craven street. The houses are all of a pattern—prim, dingy, small-windowed habitations, but within this one there must be comfort, for the fire-flames dance on the meek minute panes and a heavy curl of smoke is cutting the air above its square, business-like little chimney-pot. Drawing-room ...
— Lippincott's Magazine, Vol. 22, August, 1878 • Various
... her clad in muslin white, With eyes downcast and manner prim, May well be minded by the sight, Of angels ...
— Too Old for Dolls - A Novel • Anthony Mario Ludovici
... and endeavoured to maintain that dignity which she felt to be so beneficial an example to the world. But Juanita emphasised each item of her late education with a jerk which gradually deranged Cousin Peligros' prim mantilla. Then she danced her round an impalpable mulberry bush until the ...
— The Velvet Glove • Henry Seton Merriman
... run. It is not dignified. The Baroness Von Aschersleben would be shocked," said the princess with a somewhat prim air. ...
— The Terrible Twins • Edgar Jepson
... still lingering in the long dark lashes that veiled her sad and downcast eyes. The Captain was rocking to and fro in an easy chair, smoking his pipe and glancing first towards his daughter, and then at her starch prim-looking aunt, with no very ...
— Mark Hurdlestone - Or, The Two Brothers • Susanna Moodie
... sight, is it not, Fanny?" Yes—no—no, said I, courageously, it gives me the heart-ache. Oh, I see as you do, that their clothes are clean and whole, and that they are drilled like a little regiment of soldiers, (heads up,) but I long to see them step out of those prim ranks, and shout and scamper. I long to stuff their little pockets full of anything—everything, that other little pets have. I want to get them round me, and tell them some comical stories to take the care-worn look out of their anxious little faces. I want to see them twist their ...
— Little Ferns For Fanny's Little Friends • Fanny Fern
... you; on the next occasion you do not forget. The Park merges into the forest; you go by winding ways till you reach the trim Dutch garden, moat-encircled, in the centre of which stands the prim old-fashioned villa, which, to the simple Dutchman, appears a palace. The concierge, an old soldier, bows low to you and introduces you to his wife—a stately, white-haired dame, who talks most languages a little, so far as relates to all things within and appertaining ...
— Idle Ideas in 1905 • Jerome K. Jerome
... a deep emotional nature in the lad, which, by the time he has reached his eighth year,—Miss Eliza having now been in the position of mistress of the household a twelvemonth,—works itself off in explosive tempests of feeling, with which the prim spinster has but faint sympathy. No care could be more studious and complete than that with which she looks after the boy's wardrobe and the ordering of his little chamber; his supply of mittens, of stockings, and of underclothing is always of the most ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 15, No. 90, April, 1865 • Various
... as 'My daughter Harriet,' and made a stiff curtsey as Mrs. Moss smiled, and nodded, and bade her 'sit down, my dear.' Throughout the whole interview she seemed to be looked upon by both ladies as a child, and played the part so well, sitting prim and silent on her chair, that I could hardly help humming as I ...
— Mrs. Overtheway's Remembrances • Juliana Horatia Ewing
... address. That looks bad. Who's Archibald Dorrimore? May be that isn't his right name. He's some worthless spark who's got hold of her for his own amusement. Oh, the silly hussy! What could that prim Mistress Pinwell have been about? A fine boarding school indeed! She can't go back. But I won't have her here turning the heads of the men. That dull lout, Bob Dobson, 'ud as lieve throw his money into her lap as he'd swallow a mug of ale. What'll her ...
— Madame Flirt - A Romance of 'The Beggar's Opera' • Charles E. Pearce
... so fine and frosty a kind of devil seemed to creep into me. I have been so good since Saturday, so when Malcolm said, in his usual prim, priggish voice, "Miss Travers, may I have the pleasure of taking you for a little exercise," I jumped up without consulting Lady Katherine, and went and put my things ...
— Red Hair • Elinor Glyn
... at her this July till his fluffy hair shook like a dog's ears in fly-time. He pounded his fist on the prim center-table by which Mother had been solemnly reading the picture-captions in the Eternity Filmco's Album of Funny Film Favorites. The statuettes of General Lafayette and Mozart on the false mantel shook with his lusty thumping. He roared till his voice filled the living-room ...
— The Innocents - A Story for Lovers • Sinclair Lewis
... which Mr. Barstow had promised, duly made its appearance in the schoolhouse, to the delight of the scholars and the gentle satisfaction of Mrs. Martin, who, in addition to the rudimentary musical instruction of the younger girls, occasionally played upon it herself in a prim, refined, and conscientious fashion. To this, when she was alone after school hours, she sometimes added a faint, colorless voice of limited range and gentlewomanly expression. It was on one of these occasions that Twing, becoming an accidental auditor of this chaste, sad ...
— Colonel Starbottle's Client and Other Stories • Bret Harte
... angrily at his companions as if they had in some way betrayed him; while the fat clergyman stood with his umbrella up, staring stolidly with big, frightened eyes at the camel-men. Cecil Brown curled his small, prim moustache, and looked white, but contemptuous. The Colonel, Belmont, and the young Harvard graduate were the three most cool-headed and resourceful members ...
— The Tragedy of The Korosko • Arthur Conan Doyle
... the orchard the apple trees were softly putting on their nonpareil dress of blossoms, feeding the air with nectar till it was half intoxicated; and down in the garden a little bevy of bells stood prim and soft and sweet, ringing their noiseless spring ...
— Say and Seal, Volume II • Susan Warner
... at Mrs. Willoughby, and then at Minnie. The latter faltered forth some words, among which the Baron caught the names Mrs. Willoughby and Rufus K. Gunn, the latter name pronounced, with the middle initial and all, in a queer, prim way. ...
— The American Baron • James De Mille
... and bye," said Dymock, "the question is, what is to be done now? I am afraid that aunt Margaret will look prim and stately if I carry the little one up to the Tower; however, I see not what else to do. Who is afraid? But put your fire out, Shanty, and come with us. You shall carry the bantling, and I will take the lanthorn. ...
— Shanty the Blacksmith; A Tale of Other Times • Mrs. Sherwood [AKA: Mrs. Mary Martha Sherwood]
... thousand printed pages, and Roger Williams even to-day looms up with all the more power because we have become "rather fatigued by the monotony of so vast a throng of sages and saints, all quite immaculate, all equally prim and stiff in their Puritan starch and uniform, all equally automatic and freezing." It is most comfortable to find anyone defying the rigid and formal law of the time, whether spoken or implied, and we have positive ...
— Anne Bradstreet and Her Time • Helen Campbell
... "pestering," like all children who have any great and positive elements in them. I dare say she was disposed, like any other "only child," to be self-willed and selfish, and that she required a fair amount of wholesome discipline, and that she got it. Had she been the prim and pious little precocity which some biographers have painted her, she would have died young, like the "Dairyman's Daughter"; we might have had an edifying tract, ...
— Queen Victoria, her girlhood and womanhood • Grace Greenwood
... door made them start like guilty things. The door opened softly and a charming vision appeared, to wit, Mistress Betty Carrington, rosy from sleep and hastily clad in a dressing-gown of sombre silk. Her little white feet were bare, and her dark hair had escaped from its prim, white night coif. She started when she saw a visitor, and her feet drew demurely back under the hem of her gown, while her hands went up to her disheveled hair; but a second glance showing her his quality, ...
— Prisoners of Hope - A Tale of Colonial Virginia • Mary Johnston
... you Aunt Sophia's ill. And would you be happy if you had to sit in this prim room ...
— THE MISSES MALLETT • E. H. YOUNG
... people in the world live in them, but their collective effect is below the quality of any individual among them. Cambridge is a world of subdued tones, of excessively subtle humours, of prim conduct and free thinking; it fears the Parent, but it has no fear of God; it offers amidst surroundings that vary between disguises and antiquarian charm the inflammation of literature's purple draught; one hears there a peculiar thin scandal like no other scandal in the world—a covetous ...
— The New Machiavelli • Herbert George Wells
... has no effect on the skin—no, I really dare not." As she said this she looked as prim as a vestal. "It is the first time, do you know, that I ever used this liquid white, ah! ah! ah! What a baby I am! I am all ...
— Monsieur, Madame and Bebe, Complete • Gustave Droz
... of Aberdeen Friends in 1692 a "weighty paper containing several heads of solid advyces and Counsells to friends" sent by Irish Quakers, was read. These counsels abound with amusingly prim suggestions. Among them is the warning to "take heed of being overcome with strong drink or tobacco, which many by custome are brought into bondag to the creature." The Aberdeen Friends themselves a little later were greatly concerned at the ...
— The Social History of Smoking • G. L. Apperson
... dare. No nicety of conscience held me now, rather apprehension. I had not lived my one and twenty years without learning that a young woman may be free of speech and yet discreet of action, that alluring eyes are oft mismated with prim maiden conscience. 'Tis in the blood of some of them to throw down the gauntlet to a man's courage and then to trample on him for daring to ...
— A Daughter of Raasay - A Tale of the '45 • William MacLeod Raine
... fatal movement for him, for his eyes received part of the libation destined for his hair. He closed them with a disagreeable sensation, after seeing Mademoiselle Reine Gobillot's fresh, chubby face, her figure prim beyond measure in a lilac-and-green plaid gingham dress, and carrying a basket on her arm, a necessary burden to maidens of a certain ...
— Gerfaut, Complete • Charles de Bernard
... and their determination to have their own way, quite a bevy of friends accompanied them to the railway station—Miss Martineau was there, looking prim and starched, but with red rims round her eyes, and her lips only stern because they were so firmly shut, and because she was so determined not to show any emotion—Mrs. Jenkins, Poppy's mother, was also present; she was sending up a great bouquet of wild flowers and some eggs and butter ...
— The Palace Beautiful - A Story for Girls • L. T. Meade
... high-featured matron, encased in the rigidity of her Sunday bombazine, gave a prim poke with her umbrella in the ribs of a sparrow-like little man, with a discoloured, scraggy beard, who nodded in one corner of the ...
— The Deliverance; A Romance of the Virginia Tobacco Fields • Ellen Glasgow
... a famous restaurant in the Champs Elysees, and as it was a warm evening drove afterwards out to the Bois. The next day Adelle ventured forth to the bankers alone, and secured the first quarterly installment of the funds left there to her account by the prim Mr. Smith. With the notes and gold she hastened back to Archie, and the couple began to ...
— Clark's Field • Robert Herrick
... a while she said in a prim little voice, which she adopted now and then when she wanted to ...
— A Sweet Girl Graduate • Mrs. L.T. Meade
... Aunt Winnie,—a Government boat brought weekly mail to the lighthouse on Numskull Nob. They were prim little letters, carefully margined and written, and spelled as the good Sisters had taught her in early youth. She took her pen in hand—so letters had always begun in Aunt Winnie's schooldays—to write him a few lines. ...
— Killykinick • Mary T. Waggaman
... they can, unless it was Quiz; but, mamma, don't you think I might go to Beechcroft with Primrose? I should be so much quieter working for the examination there, and I could send my exercises to Miss Vincent; and then I should keep up Prim's lessons.' ...
— Beechcroft at Rockstone • Charlotte M. Yonge
... Mimi... You see..." was all Natasha managed to utter (to her everything seemed funny). She leaned against her mother and burst into such a loud, ringing fit of laughter that even the prim visitor ...
— War and Peace • Leo Tolstoy
... surer work with them, that was all; though 'tis to be hoped you are now reformed; and if you are, the whole country round you, east, west, north, and south, owe great obligations to your fair reclaimer. But here is a fine prim young fellow, coming out of Norfolk, with one estate in one county, another in another, and jointures and settlements in his hand, and more wit in his head, as well as more money in his pocket, than he can tell what to do with, to visit ...
— Pamela (Vol. II.) • Samuel Richardson
... enters—a structure of the understanding rising out of the moral and spiritual nature. Then follows a section on Children, which explodes not a few educational fallacies, and propounds certain articles of faith and practice wholesome for these times, though it will probably wear a prim and quakerish aspect to the admirers of Jean Paul's famous tractate[10] on the same theme. The concluding paper in this series, entitled The Life Poetic, is the liveliest, if not the most valuable of the six: it has, however, been charged, with considerable show of justice, ...
— Chambers' Edinburgh Journal - Volume XVII., No 422, New Series, January 31, 1852 • Various
... trooped in to destroy the order of that prim apartment with housekeeping under the black horse-hair sofa, "horseback riders" on the arms of the best rocking-chair, and an Indian war-dance all over the well-waxed furniture. Eph, finding the society of the peaceful sheep and cows ...
— Aunt Jo's Scrap-Bag VI - An Old-Fashioned Thanksgiving, Etc. • Louisa M. Alcott
... in Mexico, in which latter country he had acted as one of Bazaine's orderly officers. At the Revolution Keratry was appointed Prefect of Police, but on October 14 he left Paris by balloon, being entrusted by Trochu and Jules Favre with a mission to Prim, in the hope that he might secure Spanish support for France. Prim and his colleagues refused to intervene, however, and Keratry then hastened to Tours, where he placed himself at the disposal of Gambetta, with whom he was on terms of close friendship. It was arranged between them that ...
— My Days of Adventure - The Fall of France, 1870-71 • Ernest Alfred Vizetelly
... clover grow Upon a bank of a clear strand, In wrimplings made by Nature's hand Though docks and brambles here and there May sometimes cheat the gardener's care, Yet this to me is Paradise, Compared with prim cut plots and nice, Where Nature has to Act resigned, Till all looks ...
— Flowers and Flower-Gardens • David Lester Richardson
... was allowed to run up to the dormitory for something, unescorted by an Enfant de Marie. "Ascend, my child," said Madame Agathe, smiling sweetly, for Eileen had outstripped all her classmates that morning in geography, and Eileen, with a prim "Oui, ma mere," rose and sailed with drooping eyelashes to the other end of the schoolroom, and courtesied herself out of the door, knowing herself the focus of envy and humorously conscious of her goodness. ...
— The Grey Wig: Stories and Novelettes • Israel Zangwill
... words to the Skipper before they started about taking care, to which he replied rather importantly, "Of course, Ma," and about keeping his fresh suit clean; but Mrs. Trevor said nothing to Dot, because, there was no need, for she was about the most prim, neat little creature that ever lived. And, now she paced along by her brother's side, carrying two sticks with iron hooks at their ends, with which she walked in her precise measured way, as if they were wands, while ...
— The Little Skipper - A Son of a Sailor • George Manville Fenn
... orphan if adopted; "you know it would never do to keep that little fellow with us. How old did you say he was—about fifteen? Well, fifteen or sixteen—ya—you recollect how that old priest acted last July, at the village of Scurvy? A little girl I sent out to Brother Prim this priest smelt and hunted out; and actually broke in the room door where she was confined, and took her off by physical force to a Roman Catholic orphan house. These priests are terrible fellows; and your young fancy orphan, Paul, would ...
— The Cross and the Shamrock • Hugh Quigley
... Krayton, "the organization that calls itself the Prims. Prim for Primitive. They leave little cards and pamphlets around damning the Computer System. I saw one the other day. It had a big title splashed across it: OUR NEW TYRANT—THE COMPUTER. The article complained that some of the new labor and food regulations were the result of conscious ...
— Two Plus Two Makes Crazy • Walt Sheldon
... Church idealizes in form and color the spirit of this noble woman, without attempting portraiture. A real likeness of Miss Cooper, as she appeared in her ripest years, would recall a sweet face framed in dangling curls, a manner somewhat prim, but always gentle and placid, a figure slight and spare, with a bonnet and Paisley shawl that are all but essential to the resemblance. She would best be represented in the midst of orphan children whom she catechises for the benefit of some ...
— The Story of Cooperstown • Ralph Birdsall
... audience?" She slowed her steps, and he slowed to keep by her side. She lifted her clear face proudly. "I tell you," she said, "the part I am to play to-night will move Europe to its core. Paris! Berlin! Vienna! Even cautious prim London! I have them under my hand; even to-morrow they will be asking an account, crying for the heads of the wrongdoers on a charger. And you ask me if ...
— The Second Class Passenger • Perceval Gibbon
... to meet its partner. Come on Judy," the feet were again on the rug, "we will be simply dead in the morning, and we have got to be very much alive. We do miss the Weatherbee. I don't see why we let her go. Dear, prim, prompt Weatherbee! Now we know we loved her. Her successor is too ...
— Jane Allen: Junior • Edith Bancroft
... was dressed that day in a maroon brocade, figured with bunches of dim pink flowers; and some of these flowers looked to me like wicked little faces. It was a mocking, silly, creature that I saw at the side of every prim bouquet, and I looked at the faded little imps, until they seemed as much ...
— An Arrow in a Sunbeam - and Other Tales • Various
... Money-worshippers all!... Well, nearly all! It mattered not whether you were one of the dandies or one of the hatless or Fletcherite corps that lolled on foot or on bicycles, or shot on motor-cycles, through the prim streets of the suburb—the young women would not remain in dalliance with you for the mere sake of your beautiful eyes. Because they were girls they would take all that you had and more, and give you nothing ...
— The Price of Love • Arnold Bennett
... vie d'une femme." They were painted rather in a remarkable style—flat, dead, pale, and formal. The first represented a "Jeune Fille," coming out of a church-door, a missal in her hand, her dress very prim, her eyes cast down, her mouth pursed up—the image of a most villanous little precocious she-hypocrite. The second, a "Mariee," with a long white veil, kneeling at a prie-dieu in her chamber, holding her hands plastered ...
— Villette • Charlotte Bronte
... compare our own age with that of Pericles, and congratulate themselves on the reawakening of the feeling of patriotism: I remember a parody on the funeral oration of Pericles by G. Freytag,[9] in which this prim and strait-laced "poet" depicted the happiness now experienced by sixty-year-old men.—All pure and simple caricature! So this is the result! And sorrow and irony and seclusion are all that remain for him who has seen more of ...
— We Philologists, Volume 8 (of 18) • Friedrich Nietzsche
... have enjoyed hugely one notable evidence of his persuasive eloquence to be seen in a Lebanon Valley town, inhabited by the quaint folk known as Pennsylvania Germans. All along the line of the railroad traversing this valley may be seen these distorted willows decorating the prim front yards, and they are not so offensive when used with other shrubs and trees. In this one instance, however, the tree agent evidently found a customer who was persuaded that if one Kilmarnock willow was a good thing to have, a dozen of them was twelve ...
— Getting Acquainted with the Trees • J. Horace McFarland
... suspecting that it was on their account he had thought of not marrying her. The revealed whiteness of her wrist, the intimacy of her relaxed posture, for though her mind had played into his as freely as a child in a meadow, she had been always, as regards her person, a little prim with him, had lent to their errand of house visiting a personal note in which it was absurdly apt for them to have run across Captain Dunham of the Merrythought at the door of the Consulate. Mr. Weatheral had some papers which Lessing had sent ...
— The Lovely Lady • Mary Austin
... for." During his breakfast he recalled the fact that Madge was uncommonly well dressed. "She hasn't in externals," he thought, "the provincial air that one might expect, although her ideas are not only provincial, but prim, obtained, no doubt, from some goody-good books that she has read in the remote region wherein she has developed so remarkably. She has some stilted ideal of womanhood which she is seeking to attain, and the more ...
— A Young Girl's Wooing • E. P. Roe
... war-cripples as porters at the station, dirty streets encumbered by hawkers and their wares, strings of pitiful beggars shaking their hands and exposing mortified limbs—can this be Berlin, Berlin the prim, the orderly, the clean? Something has happened here in seven years, some sort of psychological change has been wrought in the mind of a people. Here, as in some Slav countries, there are laws and they are not kept, regulations and they are not observed. Unshaven men and ill-washed women on the ...
— Europe—Whither Bound? - Being Letters of Travel from the Capitals of Europe in the Year 1921 • Stephen Graham
... house next door. The yards of the houses were only separated by a green hedge, with no gate, so that Cecy spent two-thirds of her time at Dr. Carr's, and was exactly like one of the family. She was a neat, dapper, pink-and-white-girl, modest and prim in manner, with light shiny hair, which always kept smooth, and slim hands, which never looked dirty. How different from my poor Katy! Katy's hair was forever in a snarl; her gowns were always catching on nails and tearing "themselves"; and, in spite of her age and size, she was as heedless ...
— What Katy Did • Susan Coolidge
... handsome he looks!" said Laura, a prim and demure little miss of thirteen: "in his presence, I am sure I could never ...
— The Farmer Boy, and How He Became Commander-In-Chief • Morrison Heady
... Maggie? Isn't it four years? And they have been our next-door neighbors, and she has never been inside the house. Nor he either, for that matter, except once when it took fire, you know, and he came in with that funny little chemical engine tucked under his arm, and took off his hat in the same prim, polite way that he takes it off when he talks to Sibyl, and said, 'If you'll excuse me offering advice, Miss Hopkins, it is not necessary to move anything; it mars furniture very much to move it at a fire. I think, if you will allow me, I can extinguish this.' And he did, too, ...
— Different Girls • Various
... scrambling through the dripping hedges; swarming over tarry fence and slimy paling. On, on it pants—through Bishop's Wood, by tangled Churchyard Bottom, where now the railway shrieks; down sloppy lanes, bordering Muswell Hill, where now stand rows of jerry-built, prim villas. At intervals it stops an instant to dab its eyes with its dingy little rag of a handkerchief, to rearrange the bundle under its arm, its chief anxiety to keep well out of sight of chance wanderers, to dodge farmhouses, to dart across highroads when nobody is looking. ...
— Paul Kelver • Jerome Klapka, AKA Jerome K. Jerome
... housekeeper is in bed. At each creaking stair they pause, to listen if the noise has awakened her; then, finding all silent, creep forward again, with suppressed laughter, wondering with alarm, half feigned, half real, what the prim, methodical dame would say were she to come down and ...
— John Ingerfield and Other Stories • Jerome K. Jerome
... time Ballarat was a prim town of many churches and strong Wesleyan proclivities, and Eureka had been justified by the concession of nearly all that the diggers fought for. One-armed Peter Lalor was a staid Parliamentarian and a stout Constitutionalist now, and the grave in which Micah ...
— In the Roaring Fifties • Edward Dyson
... connection with a monstrous scandal in politics and finance. How monstrous that scandal was can never be known save by such confidential agents as myself. The honour and careers of many of the chief men in France were at stake. You have seen a group of ninepins standing, all so rigid, and prim, and unbending. Then there comes the ball from far away and pop, pop, pop—there are your ninepins on the floor. Well, imagine some of the greatest men in France as these ninepins and then this Monsieur Caratal was the ball ...
— Tales of Terror and Mystery • Arthur Conan Doyle
... call her the Rose Queen," Barlow was communing with himself. For the oval face with its olive skin, as fair as a Kashmiri girl's, was certainly beautiful. The black hair was smoothed back from a wide low forehead, after the habit of the Mahratti women; the prim simplicity of this seeming to add to the girlish effect. A small white-and-gold turban, even with its jauntiness, seemed just the very thing to check the austere simplicity. The girl's eyes, like Ajeet's, were the eyes of some one unafraid, of one born to a caste ...
— Caste • W. A. Fraser
... eyes and pausing. "Eleanor Grebby," she continues with a prim little air that is quite unnatural, then ...
— When the Birds Begin to Sing • Winifred Graham
... evening, when the stage came in, Mrs. Dering found a thick, tempting letter, with the Staunton post mark, and Jean's prim, childish hand writing. There had come several short letters from the little girl, who said she would wait until she saw everything about her new home before writing a very long letter to describe it; so it was evident now that the long letter had come, and with this extra joy for herself and ...
— Six Girls - A Home Story • Fannie Belle Irving
... ceiling of painted rafters, and iron gratings, like a prison's bars, shutting out the street in the front of the house. Behind these gratings the passer-by may see the Cuban family arranged in two prim rows of arm-chairs vis-a-vis, or gathered about the bars as if looking for some means of escape. Occasionally now in some of the better quarters a child of either sex, but black as night, disports itself in full view, ...
— Lippincott's Magazine Of Popular Literature And Science, April 1875, Vol. XV., No. 88 • Various
... my room some morning early and look out to the gate, the cobwebs must be diamond-sprinkled on the circle at the doorway, the catalpa trees must stand like stiff, prim, proper, knickerbockered footmen, on either side of the hedge, the ground must rise in a very gradual swell and culminate in the rose- covered gate. Throw it a kiss for me—(I wonder if there could be any roses left?). All ...
— The Letters of Franklin K. Lane • Franklin K. Lane
... a square, and there is a garden in the middle, with iron railings round it, and everyone who lives in the square has a key to open the gate; but it must not be left open, or other people would get in and use the garden too. It has green grass in it and flower-beds, and it is all very prim and proper, and not at all interesting; and, worst of all, the dear dogs, Scamp and Jim, cannot go there, even when they are led by a string. The gardener would turn them out, for he imagines they would kick about in his flower-beds and rake out the seeds. ...
— The Children's Book of London • Geraldine Edith Mitton
... the pier in the moonlight, leaving me bewildered. This was a queen of cannibals; she was tattooed from hand to foot, and perhaps the greatest masterpiece of that art now extant, so that a while ago, before she was grown prim, her leg was one of the sights of Tai-o-hae; she had been passed from chief to chief; she had been fought for and taken in war; perhaps, being so great a lady, she had sat on the high place, and throned it there, alone of her sex, while the drums were going twenty strong and the priests carried ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 18 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... spotlessly clean, and its aspect was prim and sober, as was indeed that of the whole city. Men in wide-brimmed hats and wide-skirted coats of sombre hue walked the streets, and talked earnestly together at the corners; whilst the women, for the most part, passed on their way with ...
— French and English - A Story of the Struggle in America • Evelyn Everett-Green
... was a distinction about her that neither grief nor poverty could destroy. She was so unmistakably the gentle-woman. In the simple, but dainty white cap, with its floating strings, which modestly covered her dark waving hair, the plain black dress and prim collar fastened with its mourning pin, she made a reposeful picture of the old-fashioned conception ...
— The Dreamer - A Romantic Rendering of the Life-Story of Edgar Allan Poe • Mary Newton Stanard
... sword! Have you no place for a harper-at-arms in the courts of your lord— Prim fountains, clipped trees, and trim gardens, and music, and rest? Nay, keep your sugared delights and your margents embroidered! My life is the best. In my ears is the sound of a bugle blown, and my pulses like kettle-drums beat For the hungry blind onset, the rally, the stubborn ...
— Miscellany of Poetry - 1919 • Various
... all this, however, for if you have an atom of observation, one glance at his sleek, knowing-looking head and face—his prim white neckerchief, with the wooden tie into which it has been regularly folded for twenty years past, merging by imperceptible degrees into a small-plaited shirt-frill—and his comfortable-looking form encased in a well-brushed suit of black—would give you a better idea of his real ...
— Sketches by Boz - illustrative of everyday life and every-day people • Charles Dickens
... extravagance of green and crimson, red and white carnations, red, white, and yellow roses. The sunshine broke into colour, it laughed, it danced, it almost rioted, among the flowers; but in the prim alleys, and on the formal hedges of box, and the quaintly-clipped yews, and the old purple brick walls, where fruit trees were trellised, it lay fast, fast asleep. Without the walls, in the deep cool greenery of the park, there was a perpetual drip-drip ...
— The Lady Paramount • Henry Harland
... replied. "I'm sorry you didn't like the photograph. It never occurred to me when I sent it, that you mightn't think it decent. However, I told Gyp that it didn't quite suit your prim and proper notions, so she's going to send you another, that I hope will please you better. She's always being photographed; in fact, the photographers ask her if they may take her ...
— Sons and Lovers • David Herbert Lawrence
... detached villas and stone walls, sheltering prim gardens, right on to the west end of the esplanade, which is, in fact, a continuation of it. For the first few hundred yards Jones thought that nothing could go quicker than the houses and walls rushing past him, towards the ...
— The Man Who Lost Himself • H. De Vere Stacpoole
... then a carriage, filled with well-to-do citizens out for an evening ride, drove slowly by. The people in the carriages always saluted Mrs. Worth and she returned their salutations with a prim little bow. But no one stopped to chat or to offer her a seat. In this, also, there was nothing strange to the woman on the porch of the big, empty house. Sometimes the people in the carriages, entertaining visiting friends, pointed to Jefferson ...
— The Winning of Barbara Worth • Harold B Wright
... bridling toss of the head, express that she had forgotten locking it, and slip round to the kitchen; but most of the ladies made their way back at once between the roses and syringas of their grassy door-yards, which were as neat and prim as their own persons, or the best chamber in their white- walled, green-shuttered, story-and-a-half house, and as perfectly kept as the very ...
— Henry James, Jr. • William Dean Howells
... boarded roofs. Above each roof, the high pole of a pigeon-house; over each entry a little short-maned horse of wrought iron. The window-panes of faulty glass shine with all the colours of the rainbow. Jugs of flowers are painted on the shutters. Before each door, a little bench stands prim and neat; on the mounds of earth, cats are basking, their transparent ears pricked up alert; beyond the high door-sills, is the cool ...
— Dream Tales and Prose Poems • Ivan Turgenev
... about the "English" question: As I said, it seems to me, academical correctness, among the higher characters, will give a prim, old-fashioned tone: and you can look after this, as all my own work has been in the opposite direction in art. I have given it no thought in ...
— Shenandoah - Representative Plays by American Dramatists: 1856-1911 • Bronson Howard
... faith should be cheerful, and trust should be glad, And our follies and sins, not our years, make us sad. Should the heart closer shut as the bonnet grows prim, And the face grow in length as the hat grows ...
— The Complete Works of Whittier - The Standard Library Edition with a linked Index • John Greenleaf Whittier
... PRIM, JUAN, a Spanish general; distinguished as a statesman; rose to be Minister of War, but aspiring to dictatorship, was shot by an assassin; he was the leader of the movement that overthrew Isabella in 1868 and installed Amadeo ...
— The Nuttall Encyclopaedia - Being a Concise and Comprehensive Dictionary of General Knowledge • Edited by Rev. James Wood
... prettiest Master in Town, that no Man teaches a Jigg like him, that she has seen him rise six or seven Capers together with the greatest Ease imaginable, and that his Scholars twist themselves more ways than the Scholars of any Master in Town: besides there is Madam Prim, an Alderman's Lady, recommends a Master of her own Name, but she declares he is not of their Family, yet a very extraordinary Man in his way; for besides a very soft Air he has in Dancing, he gives them ...
— The Spectator, Volume 2. • Addison and Steele
... in Lexington that her power reached its full development, and she even took prizes in magazines and newspapers for some stories with what her friends called "prim heroes and pasteboard heroines," classifications which she good-naturedly accepted, as she readily acknowledged that she ...
— Literary Hearthstones of Dixie • La Salle Corbell Pickett
... "I—prim?"—and Betty went off into a shout of girlish laughter, as she flung a pine needle at Peter, who dodged it successfully; "that I live to hear myself called what I have so often dubbed Pamela. Fie, Peter, let Miranda dance if she will; I should love to see her. It would ...
— An Unwilling Maid • Jeanie Gould Lincoln
... it was; and now I can admire and think of how Aunt Jenny, the prim maiden lady, gave up all her own old ways to set to and work and drudge for us all, living in a wagon and then in a tent, and smiling pleasantly at the trees we planted, and bringing us lunch where we were working away, dragging down stones for the house which progressed ...
— Charge! - A Story of Briton and Boer • George Manville Fenn
... first bright days of April came a change. He was going back to England, he told her, one Saturday afternoon, as they sat, lover-like, side by side, in the prim salon. She gave a low cry at the words, and looked at ...
— The Baronet's Bride • May Agnes Fleming
... thin, prim-looking, rather plain children; but Oliver was the very picture of a father's darling, a boy that any childless man would bitterly covet, any childless woman crave and yearn for, with a longing that ...
— Christian's Mistake • Dinah Maria Mulock Craik
... of his forsaken Quakerism hung around him; his coat was buff, his hat straight in the brim, his manner prim, and when he spoke it was in the speech of his people. His complexion was very light, hair, eyebrows and lashes, and the down on his chin—almost flaxen; his face was browned by exposure to the weather, but so well formed that Susannah found him very good to look upon, the features ...
— The Mormon Prophet • Lily Dougall
... brain; four pairs of eyes, of varied color and character, swept the wind-blown wilderness of tender green, and gazed questioningly at the high-piled thunderheads above. A small boy, with an abundance of yellow curls and white collar, almost precipitated himself into the prim lap of a lady on ...
— Her Prairie Knight • B.M. Sinclair, AKA B. M. Bower
... occasions when Mary Hope, with her skirts just hitting her shoe tops in front and sagging in an ungainly fashion behind, had teetered solemnly through a "square" dance with him. Mother Douglas herself had always sat very straight and prim on a bench, her hands folded in her lap and her eyes blinking disapprovingly at the ungodly ones who let out an exultant little yip now and then when they started exuberantly through the mazes of ...
— Rim o' the World • B. M. Bower
... thou leave the beds Where roses and where lilies vie, To seek a prim-rose, whose pale shades Must sicken when those ...
— Graham's Magazine Vol XXXII No. 6 June 1848 • Various
... his arm a half-empty basket of cheap wares. The man was ragged; his toes were thrusting through his shoes; it was evident that he wore no linen, and a week's growth of beard dirtily stubbled his chin,—in a word, he was a man from whom M. Chateaudoux's prim soul positively shrank. M. Chateaudoux went quickly by, fearing to be pestered for alms. The hawker, however, remained seated upon the bench, drawing idle patterns upon the gravel with a hazel stick stolen from ...
— Clementina • A.E.W. Mason
... gay villains rise And reach the heights which honest men despise; Mute at the Bar and in the Senate loud, Dull 'mong the dullest, proudest of the proud, A pert prim prater of the northern race, Guilt in his heart, ...
— William Pitt and the Great War • John Holland Rose
... that, even before this era, when "old maids" were open to all kinds of insult, there were women brave enough to refuse to barter their souls for the animal comforts of food and shelter. Speaking about "old maids," by which term we mean now a prim, fussy person, it is well to remember that there are male "old maids" as well as female who remain so all through life; also that many "old maids" marry, and are ...
— In Times Like These • Nellie L. McClung
... this poet had not yet tried—to Love. Let it be remembered that the thought has the cast of a strictly pessimist quietism—that the style aims, if it aims at any single thing, at the reproduction of the simpler side of classicalism, at an almost prim and quakerish elegance, a sort of childlike grace. There is, however, by no means any great austerity in the tone: on the contrary, the refrain ...
— Matthew Arnold • George Saintsbury
... and Bunsbys, being of another class, viewed the young couple's visit in a different light. "Mr. Feilding has such nice hands and wears such lovely cravats," the younger Miss Cromartin said, and "Miss Collins is too sweet for anything." Prim Mr. Bunsby, having superior notions of life and deportment, only shook his head. He looked for more dignity, he said; but then this Byronic young man had not been invited to any of ...
— The Tides of Barnegat • F. Hopkinson Smith
... of their attire there was still a formal suggestion of the sect to which their father belonged, their summer frocks—differing in color, yet each of the same subdued tint—were alike in cut and fashion, and short enough to show their dainty feet in prim slippers and silken hose that matched their frocks. As the afternoon sun glanced through the leaves upon their pink cheeks, tied up in quaint hats by ribbons under their chins, they made a charming picture. At least Paul ...
— Under the Redwoods • Bret Harte
... essential to life. This sober Flemish interior expresses my mistress's character almost as well as her own apartment used to do. I always experienced a chill, a sense of formality, when the door was opened, and while I stood waiting for her in the prim drawing-room. Every chair was in its appointed place, large, gilt-edged, illustrated books lay upon the tables.... There was not much light in her rooms; heavy curtains clung about the windows, and tapestries covered ...
— Memoirs of My Dead Life • George Moore
... as to render an immediate move advisable. An order to this effect was issued at 2 P.M., just as I had succeeded in rendering habitable a very smart little tent, which had previously belonged to the Spanish General Prim, and had been given by him to Omer Pacha after the campaign on the Danube. At 3 P.M. six battalions paraded with eight guns, and some sappers, the whole under the command of Ali Pacha of Scutari, a General ...
— Herzegovina - Or, Omer Pacha and the Christian Rebels • George Arbuthnot
... open her little gate, hung crookedly in a very compact and prim spruce hedge, she stopped in amazement and ...
— Lucy Maud Montgomery Short Stories, 1902 to 1903 • Lucy Maud Montgomery
... Bercail, in a house with a steep-pitched roof. There was a little paved courtyard in front, where the rose-bushes grew and clambered up to the windows of the upper story. Behind lay a little country garden, with its box-edged borders, shut in by damp, gloomy-looking walls. The prim, gray-painted street door, with its wicket opening and bell attached, announced quite as plainly as the official scutcheon that "a ...
— The Jealousies of a Country Town • Honore de Balzac
... It's only that at the best. A nasty, prim, 'official' woman who's perched on her little local pedestal and thinks she's a queen for ever because she's ridiculous for an hour! Oh you needn't tell me, I've seen them abroad—the dreariest females—and could imitate them here. I could do one for you on the spot ...
— The Tragic Muse • Henry James
... him before we went away, and he called me by my first name as pat as you may please, and I didn't like it. And when he rolled up the towelling he crooked his little finger in such an affected, genteel, Miss Prim sort of way that it made his big fat hands look ridiculous. I don't know exactly what it was about him that irritated me so, but I couldn't bear him. And yet it seemed that he was so near being nice, that he could be awfully likable if he wasn't ...
— Mary Ware's Promised Land • Annie Fellows Johnston
... couple who passed along the deal boards just in front of us." Mrs. Thesiger laughed and her head fell back upon her pillow. But during that movement her eyes had never left her daughter's face. "A middle-aged man with stiff gray hair, a stiff, prim face, and a figure like a ramrod. Oh, there never was anything so stiff." A noticeable bitterness began to sound in her voice and increased as she went on. "There was an old woman with him as precise and old-fashioned as himself. But you didn't see them? I never saw anything so ...
— Running Water • A. E. W. Mason
... a match, and a moment or two later we saw him strolling along the cliff side, smoking a cigarette, his hands behind him, prim, carefully dressed, walking with the measured ease of a man seeking an appetite for his dinner. He was scarcely out of sight, and Lord Chelsford was on the point of descending for his note, when my heart gave a great leap. Lady Angela emerged from the plantation and crossed ...
— The Betrayal • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... mssen die Eisenkerne der Transformatoren aus dnnen (kaum 0,5 mm dicken) Eisenblechen mit isolierenden Zwischenlagen von paraffiniertem Papier etc. hergestellt werden. Zur Magnetisierung des Eisenkerns dient die Primrbewickelung desselben, und durch die abwechselnde Magnetisierung des Eisenkerns wird die Sekundarbewickelung desselben induziert und dadurch der transformierte Wechselstrom erzeugt. Man hat es dabei ...
— German Science Reader - An Introduction to Scientific German, for Students of - Physics, Chemistry and Engineering • Charles F. Kroeh
... scandalous reports concerning a certain young man in Richmond should reach us here in the North, relating his unparalleled exploits in the giddier circles of our gay capital, I should know without the telling that it was our prim young ...
— The Shades of the Wilderness • Joseph A. Altsheler
... against the solemn League and Covenant of the three Kingdoms, and of vile aspersions of Treason, Rebellion, and Sedition most falsly and impudently imputed to the Estates, and most faithfull and loyall Subjects of this Kingdome: Doe therfore declare, That such as have bin prim Instruments of the publishing of that or the Proclamation and Declaration, deserve the highest censures of the Kirks, unlesse they make humble confession of their offence publickely, in such manner as is prescribed by this Assembly; And humbly Recommends ...
— The Acts Of The General Assemblies of the Church of Scotland
... was becoming frighted, or, as the doctors call it, narvous. But when I was out—oh, what a change I found in the religious house! no card-playing, for it had been forbidden to the scholars, and there was now nothing going on but reading and singing; divil a merry visage to be seen, but plenty of prim airs and graces; but the case of the scholars, though bad enough, was not half so bad as mine, for they could spake to each other, whereas I could not have a word of conversation, for the ould thaif of a rector had ordered them to send me to 'Coventry,' telling them that I was a gambling ...
— The Romany Rye - A Sequel to 'Lavengro' • George Borrow
... sister, says: "I hate affected, niminy-piminy chits! I'm not a young lady; and if turning up my hair makes me one, I'll wear it in two tails till I'm twenty. I hate to think I've got to grow up, and be Miss March, and wear long gowns, and look as prim as a china-aster! Its bad enough to be a girl, anyway, when I like boy's games and work ...
— Lives of Girls Who Became Famous • Sarah Knowles Bolton
... of a hall or large vestibule the figure of a man loomed black against dark gray. Win could see of him only that he was tall and straight and prim, like a well-trained servant, and his voice was a servant's voice as he said: "Please be a little careful, miss, not to trip. We have to keep it rather dark here, but there's plenty of light inside Let me show you ...
— Winnie Childs - The Shop Girl • C. N. Williamson
... that he would be in that afternoon. I did so, and she was very much delighted—ran and told the other members of the household. She seated herself in the parlor and would look at her clothes and brush them and sit in as prim a position as possible. She seemed to want to look her best. Her kindergarten teacher tried to coax her to go to her room; she said, "Oh no, Mr. —— is coming to see me," and would ask impatiently when I thought he would come. She acted the same when ...
— A Preliminary Study of the Emotion of Love between the Sexes • Sanford Bell
... a dull, disappointing day to an evening with Felicite Delord. She was expecting him—she would be greatly disappointed. He sighed a second time, for he was far from happy. Life seemed to be one long constant worry over money matters and Myra Nell. Being a prim, orderly man, he intensely disliked searching for mislaid articles, but he began a systematic hunt; for, knowing Myra Nell's peculiar irresponsibility, he was prepared to find the missing slipper anywhere between the hammock on the front gallery and the kitchen ...
— The Net • Rex Beach
... the fire came driving straight for it the fire with the wind behind. 'Which things are a parable,' he said, his ugly sunburnt face twitching curiously, his eyes quite handsome, nay, even splendid with honest scorn. He was shaking his fist towards the prim little dorp that we had left behind over the ridges. 'No doubt but ye are the people,' he said, 'ye that have made the freedom of England and the franchise of Jesus of no effect by your tradition your sacrosanct tradition. ...
— Cinderella in the South - Twenty-Five South African Tales • Arthur Shearly Cripps
... approached the truth, that she almost seemed to be an old acquaintance as she came to the door as the carriage stopped. She was a tall, upright, elderly lady, with a kind, but very decided face, and a certain prim look about ...
— The Young Buglers • G.A. Henty
... grew more acute. Her corners grew more brutally protuberant beneath the tissue of glamour cast over them by a name. To her also Trelawny's purse was open; but long before the quarrel over "Queen Mab" his generous spirit had begun to groan under her prim banality, and to express itself in ungenerous backbitings. His final estimate he imparted to Claire when he was seventy-eight years old, and it remains for those ...
— Pot-Boilers • Clive Bell
... of the handkerchiefs, she shut the wardrobe and turned the key. She went first to her own small, prim room to restore stolen property to its rightful place, and then she descended towards the kitchen with the other handkerchief. Giving it to her mother, and concealing her triumph beneath a mask of wise, long-suffering ...
— Hilda Lessways • Arnold Bennett
... be young people, Monsieur Bertram," Madame Vaillant said, smiling, "and my husband and I are not of those who think that it is necessary to carry a prim face, and to attire one's self in ugly garments, as a proof of religion. Youth is the time for mirth and happiness, and nature teaches a maiden what is becoming to her; why then should we blame her for setting off the charms God has given her to their ...
— Saint Bartholomew's Eve - A Tale of the Huguenot WarS • G. A. Henty
... were busy with their bread; Mysseri rattling tea-cups; the little kettle, with her odd old-maidish looks, sat humming away old songs about England; and two or three yards from the fire my tent stood prim and tight, with open portal, and with welcoming look, like “the old arm-chair” of our lyrist’s ...
— Eothen • A. W. Kinglake
... confined to a few of the most popular of Petrarch's sonnets, and an imperfect acquaintance with Ariosto, through the medium of Mr. Hoole. As to the French poets, he dismisses them in the mass as a set of prim, precise, unnatural pretenders. The truth is, he is in a state of happy ignorance about them and all that they have done. He has never read Zaire nor Phedre. To those great German poets who have illuminated the last fifty years with a splendour to which this country ...
— Famous Reviews • Editor: R. Brimley Johnson
... Ladies! Until the fact was pointed out, we actually did not know that we had a girls' school as close to us as the school for boys. The garden, equally large with the other, affords no sign whatever of any provision for juvenile recreation; but is entirely laid out with prim grass-plots, gravel-walks, shrubs, and flowers, after the usual suburban style. During five months we have not once had our attention drawn to the premises by a shout or a laugh. Occasionally girls may be observed sauntering along ...
— Woman and Womanhood - A Search for Principles • C. W. Saleeby
... the repelling effect on the eye, and the depressing influence on the mind, of an English country town in the first stage of its existence, and in the transition state of its prosperity? I asked myself that question as I passed through the clean desolation, the neat ugliness, the prim torpor of the streets of Welmingham. And the tradesmen who stared after me from their lonely shops—the trees that drooped helpless in their arid exile of unfinished crescents and squares—the dead house-carcasses that waited in vain for the vivifying human element to animate them with the ...
— The Woman in White • Wilkie Collins
... now there 's nought but shy finesse, And mim and prim 'bout mess and dress, That scarce a hand a hand will press Wi' ought o' feeling free; A cauldrife pride aside has laid The hodden gray, and hame-spun plaid, And a' is changed since neebors said Just, ...
— The Modern Scottish Minstrel, Volume III - The Songs of Scotland of the Past Half Century • Various
... dignitaries of Church and State make their way beneath the overhanging houses, the lattices are thrust ajar, and you may discern, just in the boundaries of light and shade, the prim faces of the little Puritan damsels, eying the magnificent governor, and envious of the bolder curiosity of the men. Another object of almost equal interest now appears in the middle of the way. It is a man clad in a hunting- shirt and Indian stockings, ...
— Biographical Sketches - (From: "Fanshawe and Other Pieces") • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... think otherwise. Nevertheless, it was just such men as Hurd who tended to keep the Church of the eighteenth century in its apathetic state. Hurd was a religious-minded man; but his religion was characterised by a cold, prim propriety which was not calculated to commend it to men at large. Like his friend Warburton, he could see nothing but folly and fanatical madness in the great evangelical revival which was going on around him, and which he seems to ...
— The English Church in the Eighteenth Century • Charles J. Abbey and John H. Overton
... only for her—not at being left alone. That part, was a relief. The poor little late Mrs Aylmer Ross had turned out a terrible mistake. She had said the wrong thing from morning till night, and, combining a prim, refined manner with a vulgar point of view, had been in every way dreadfully impossible. He had really been patience and unselfishness itself to her, but he had suffered. The fact was, he had never even liked her. That was the reason ...
— Tenterhooks • Ada Leverson
... the use of the word "wish" in place of "want"; I don't know why, but I always associate it with prim, prudish, highly-conventional old ladies. ...
— The Four Faces - A Mystery • William le Queux
... had turned another corner. We followed him round hotfoot, and found ourselves in a prim little cul-de-sac, with villas on each side. Across the end of the street ran a high wall, obviously screening ...
— Scally - The Story of a Perfect Gentleman • Ian Hay
... planks. You can scarcely stand upright beneath the decaying ceiling. Worn boards and ragged walls, and the rusty ribs fallen from the fireplace, are all that meet your eyes, but I see a round, unsteady, waxcloth-covered table, with four books lying at equal distances on it. There are six prim chairs, two of them not to be sat upon, backed against the walls, and between the window and the fireplace a chest of drawers, with a snowy coverlet. On the drawers stands a board with coloured marbles for the game of solitaire, and I have only to open the ...
— A Window in Thrums • J. M. Barrie
... they swear, have "raked in golden barley," Like the great Fleet Street "Cock." Their jealous jeremiads, sour and snarly, PARTLET'S prim feelings shock. "Luck! Not at all: but the ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 98, January 25th, 1890 • Various
... Moglaut's price was a prim, brunette soprano who wore her eyes disguised behind heavy tortoiseshell. The ill-cut garb she could afford added greatly to her staid appearance, obscuring a certain full-bodied litheness. She earned a throttled existence soloing at funerals and in the ...
— Zero Data • Charles Saphro
... object of my ambition was gained at last. I had taken a pocket-book from a worthy Quaker, and, unfortunately, was perceived by a man at a shop window, who came out, collared, and delivered me into the hands of the prim gentleman. Having first secured his property, he then walked with me and a police officer to Bow-street. My innocent face, and my tears, induced the old gentleman, who was a member of the Philanthropic Society, not only not to prefer ...
— The King's Own • Captain Frederick Marryat
... but does not waste. The rooms are each furnished forth in spare and righteous daintiness, over which nowadays is poured, in occasional instances, a pretty modern color, timidly laid on, which does not remove the prim Quakerness. Ventures in the use of decoration, however, have been crude in most cases, and the results, so far as they have been effected by the taste of the woman of the Hill, are incongruous in color, and ill-assorted in design. It is in house-furnishing ...
— Quaker Hill - A Sociological Study • Warren H. Wilson
... thoughtfully across the lawn. "I like her," she answered, "but she is funny. I suppose it is because she hasn't gone much to school. She isn't like Charlotte, or Katherine, or me. She isn't prim, and yet—it is queer, father, but she makes me feel as I do when I ...
— Mr. Pat's Little Girl - A Story of the Arden Foresters • Mary F. Leonard
... door. He had been gardening, and was in his shirt-sleeves. At sight of his visitor he became exceedingly prim and scholastic, with a touch of defiance. He was short in stature, and, aware of this, often paused in the middle of a sentence to raise himself on his toes. He made a special study of what he called "Voice-Production," and regulated his most ordinary conversation by the laws (as he understood ...
— Nicky-Nan, Reservist • Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch (Q)
... the Duke of Northumberland Lord-Lieutenant of Ireland. Previously the King received the address of the dissenting ministers, and then that of the Quakers, presented by William Allen; they were very prim and respectable persons; their hats were taken off by each other in the room before the Throne Room, and they did not bow, though they seemed half inclined to do so; they made a very loyal address, but without 'Majesty,' and said 'O King.' There was a question ...
— The Greville Memoirs - A Journal of the Reigns of King George IV and King William IV, Vol. II • Charles C. F. Greville
... with it. Fifteen minutes after his vocal organs had been thus renewed, LEOPOLD was in a condition to see things in an entirely new light, and hesitated no longer to write the following note to General PRIM: ...
— Punchinello Vol. 1, No. 21, August 20, 1870 • Various
... thorough knowledge of housekeeping, but the rare habit of doing all things with regularity, neatness, decorum, and quietness. The writer of the above letter has also described one of these Pennsylvania schools with its prim teachers and commendable mingling of the practical and the artistic. "The first was merely a sewing school, little children and a pretty single spinster about 30, her white skirt, white short tight waistcoat, nice handkerchief pinned outside, a muslin apron and a close cap, of the most singular ...
— Woman's Life in Colonial Days • Carl Holliday
... promised to sit in the nursery till it was finished. Lucy came, with her books, to sit with me. She always follows like my shadow. After a while Mrs. Embury called. I hesitated a little about trusting the child to Lucy's care, for though her prim ways have given her the reputation of being wise beyond her years, I observe that she is apt to get into trouble which a quick-witted child would either avoid or jump out of in a twinkling. However, children are often left to much younger girls, ...
— Stepping Heavenward • Mrs. E. Prentiss
... must the Disinherited Knight, whose blood has been fired by the suns of Palestine, and whose heart has been warmed in the company of the tender and beautiful Rebecca, sit down contented for life by the side of such a frigid piece of propriety as that icy, faultless, prim, niminy-piminy Rowena? Forbid it fate, forbid it poetical justice! There is a simple plan for setting matters right, and giving all parties their due, which is here submitted to the novel-reader. Ivanhoe's history MUST have had a continuation; ...
— Burlesques • William Makepeace Thackeray
... fancy store, kept by two prim but pleasant spinster sisters. Besides newspapers, stationery, thread and needles, and so forth, they kept a stock of toys, candies, and pickled limes, which insured them a run of custom among the young folk, who ...
— Apples, Ripe and Rosy, Sir • Mary Catherine Crowley
... for a bridegroom, and one which many regarded at the time as ominous for the future. In truth, no two persons could have been more thoroughly mismated—Byron, the human volcano, and his wife, a prim, narrow-minded, and peevish woman. Their incompatibility was evident enough from the very first, so that when they returned from their wedding-journey, and some one asked Byron ...
— Famous Affinities of History, Vol 1-4, Complete - The Romance of Devotion • Lyndon Orr
... door opened, and Joe entered the drawing-room. She was pale, and her great brown eyes had a serious expression in them that was unusual. There was something prim in the close dark dress she wore, and the military collar of most modern cut met severely about her throat. If Ronald had expected a very affectionate welcome he was destined to disappointment; Joe had determined not ...
— An American Politician • F. Marion Crawford
... out," said Andy, lingering behind her. "Since Tuesday night I've followed her through streets an' alleys, night an' day. Jest as prim an' sober as you see. Cryin' softly to herself at times. It's a sore heart-break, Sir. Waitin' ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 12, No. 74, December, 1863 • Various
... tokens and they blooed 'em as above, While Jim-o done the hinvalid 'oom Sammy had to shove. Sez I: "No noble 'eroes what's bin fightin' for their king Should smirch theirselves by doin' this dis- 'onerable thing." But fine old gents 'n' donahs prim They stopped 'n' slid the beans to Jim. You betcher life I let 'im hear just what I though ...
— 'Hello, Soldier!' - Khaki Verse • Edward Dyson
... eating, his self-absorption showed that. Yet after breakfast he lingered for half an hour; and during this time Miss Walker, who had noticed me no more up to now than as one of the persons at the table, came to a seat near me in the living room. She was lovely to look at, but in a way half prim. The whiteness of her forehead, the fineness of her hands, her air of clear and quick intellectuality, made her a person to inspire something of deference. And yet I felt myself captivated by her. Surely in every thinking man's heart there is a biological groping toward a woman of mind. Shadowy ...
— Children of the Market Place • Edgar Lee Masters
... British topsails. "While the negotiation is going on," he said, "the Dane should see our flag waving every time he lifts up his head." Time was worth more than gold; it was worth brave men's lives. The Danes were toiling day and night to prepare the defence of their capital. But prim Sir Hyde anchored, and sent up a single frigate with his ultimatum, and it was not until March 30 that the British fleet, a long line of stately vessels, came sailing up the Sound, passed Elsinore, and cast anchor fifteen miles from ...
— Deeds that Won the Empire - Historic Battle Scenes • W. H. Fitchett
... to be very prim when I'm with you," and Patty glanced saucily from beneath her long ...
— Patty's Butterfly Days • Carolyn Wells
... do want to sit at the head of our table, papa," said Patty; "I'd just like to see a housekeeper there! A prim, sour-faced old lady with a black silk dress and dangling ear-rings! No, I thank you. If I have my way I will keep that house myself, and when I get into any trouble, I will fly to Aunt ...
— Patty at Home • Carolyn Wells
... girls—"With God's help I will be a good angel to this man, who has to meet trials and temptations from which I am exempt. So far as in me lies I will make him respect all women, and help, not hinder him in his work." It isn't necessary to be prim and proper—don't think that! The Misses Prunes and Prisms, who are always preaching, weary rather than help, but when the bright, sweet-natured girl, who loves a joke, and can be the whole-hearted companion of a summer day, speaks a word of reproof, or draws back from a proposed enterprise, ...
— Betty Trevor • Mrs. G. de Horne Vaizey
... swept outward musty and yet alluring odours swept them inward. They descended a flight of winding steps to a subterranean anteroom of stone. Dim lights winked at them from stone niches and from a cleft in the rock to one side a prim little maid in a ruched white cap took Joe's hat. There should have been a troglodyte attendant, instead. On the other side of swinging glass doors was much clatter and laughter and the indistinct voice of a woman above a rhythmic strumming and the bleat of a saxophone. The transition to this ...
— Stubble • George Looms
... which deepened the blush of the comparison. Her father had noticed the same funny thing in his effort to balance his tugging accounts: 'Now then for a look at Man and Wife': except that he made Debit stand for the portly frisky female, Credit the decorous and contracted other half, a prim gentleman of a constitutionally lean habit of body, remonstrating with her. 'You seem to forget that we are married, my dear, and must walk in step or bundle into the Bench,' Dan Merion ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... in the private office of Tredgold and Son, land and estate agents, gazing through the prim wire blinds at the peaceful High Street of Binchester. Tredgold senior, who believed in work for the young, had left early. Tredgold junior, glad at an opportunity of sharing his father's views, had passed most of the work on to a clerk who had arrived ...
— Dialstone Lane, Complete • W.W. Jacobs
... firm, unbending, inelastic, stark, impliable, rigorous, unyielding, inductile; strong, violent, forcible, inopposable; pertinacious, obstinate, tenacious, uncompromising, incompliant; constrained, formal, starched, affected, unnatural, precise, prim, ceremonious, prudish, punctilious; cramped, graceless, inelegant; (Slang) high, immoderate, large. Antonyms: limber, flaccid, ...
— Putnam's Word Book • Louis A. Flemming
... a cursed shame that, when you feel a continual propensity to quarrel with a man, he should be such a prince Prim as never to give you an opportunity? And why have I this propensity?—I know not!—Confound the fellow, why does he make himself so great a favourite? Why does he not contrive to be hated a little? And then perhaps I might be induced to love him. I dislike to have friendship ...
— Anna St. Ives • Thomas Holcroft
... a very long street of two-story brick houses, neat and prim, with whitened stone steps and little groups of aproned women gossiping at the doors. Halfway down, Lestrade stopped and tapped at a door, which was opened by a small servant girl. Miss Cushing was sitting in the ...
— The Adventure of the Cardboard Box • Arthur Conan Doyle
... county folk; and as Sydney was young, handsome, and a good talker, he soon made himself popular amongst them. For himself, he did not find the occasion interesting, save as a means of social success. Most of the men were dull, and the women prim and proper: there were not more than two pretty girls ...
— Name and Fame - A Novel • Adeline Sergeant
... cried the lieutenant angrily. "How can you be so absurd, Smithson! it was her prim ...
— The Queen's Scarlet - The Adventures and Misadventures of Sir Richard Frayne • George Manville Fenn
... kept away. He had even left two of her letters—the rather formal letters which had come to mean so very much in his life—unanswered. A fortnight had gone by, and then there had reached him a prim little note from Mrs. Pomeroy, asking him why he had not been to see them lately. There was a postscript: "If you do not come soon, you will not see my daughter. She has not been well, and we are thinking of sending her up to Scotland, to friends who ...
— Defenders of Democracy • Militia of Mercy
... presented himself again at the Temperance Hotel, inquired for Mr. Bovill, and was shown by the prim maid-servant into the drawing-room, where he found Mr. Bovill seated amicably at breakfast with his niece, who of course was still in boy's clothing, having no other costume at hand. To Kenelm's great relief, Mr. Bovill rose from the table ...
— Kenelm Chillingly, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... not speak to him during the entire meal. She sat prim and erect, barely glanced at him, and as Frank arose from the table, half choked with the unwelcome food he had eaten, he resolved to speak ...
— The Boys of Bellwood School • Frank V. Webster
... about in the most trampish manner, and poppies, because they are privileged characters, spring up as they please. Then, as though the two of them were not sufficient California gold, there is the faithful gaillardia with its prim little sunflower-faces smiling up ...
— Vignettes of San Francisco • Almira Bailey
... paper-maker's art and shocking to man's aesthetic feelings. Now from the first Fan had spontaneously written a small hand, with fine web-like lines and flourishes, which gave it a very curious and delicate appearance; for, unlike the sloping prim Italian hand, it was all irregular, and the longer curves and strokes crossed and recrossed through words above and beneath, so that, while easy enough to read, at first sight it looked less like writing than an intricate ...
— Fan • Henry Harford
... town. There are no green lawns, no twisted yews, no weeping willows; the few fir trees hold themselves stiffly up, as though in pride at this triumph of the vegetable over the animal; and the great bushes of faded geranium only throw into relief the regular lines of limestone mounds, each with its prim wooden cross of advertisement. Always an ugly and a dreary place, it was, when I saw it a few days after the relief, more dreary than ever; for the sun, whose presence makes the difference of a season in this bare land, was hidden behind dark stacks of ...
— The Relief of Mafeking • Filson Young
... the prim English lady whom Perlet was acting with such ludicrous effect, nor hear the English-French that had filled the house with roars of laughter; instead of all this, he beheld himself hurrying from the Rue Richer, hailing a cab on the Boulevard, bargaining with the man to ...
— Library of the World's Best Mystery and Detective Stories • Edited by Julian Hawthorne
... to banish the sting of Ruby's postscript. Diana's letter contained a little too much Fred, but was otherwise crowded and crossed with items of interest, and Anne almost felt herself back in Avonlea while reading it. Marilla's was a rather prim and colorless epistle, severely innocent of gossip or emotion. Yet somehow it conveyed to Anne a whiff of the wholesome, simple life at Green Gables, with its savor of ancient peace, and the steadfast abiding ...
— Anne Of The Island • Lucy Maud Montgomery
... before he began to feel any interest in Mary. He knew nothing of her save as a nice-looking maid his wife had got—rather a prim-looking puss, he would have said, had he had occasion to describe her. What Mary knew of him was merely the reflection of him in the mind of his wife; but, the first time she saw him, she felt she would rather not have to speak ...
— Mary Marston • George MacDonald
... it, of course not! We were brought up very particularly in Miss Simpson's, I can assure you." This with a prim tightening of her lips and a severity that any other than our dreamer would have understood. To Nan there came a delight in this play with an intelligence she knew so keen, though different from her own. ...
— Gilian The Dreamer - His Fancy, His Love and Adventure • Neil Munro
... indulge less frequently in his violent outbreaks of furious passion, and to have laid aside his rugged untamable fierceness, since his marriage. There he sat beside his beautiful Annunciata, spruce and prim, in the richest, gayest apparel, smirking and smiling, challenging in the sweet glances of his grey eyes,—from which a treacherous tear stole from time to time,—those who were present to say if any one of them could boast of such a wife as his. Instead of speaking in the rough arrogant tone ...
— Weird Tales, Vol. II. • E. T. A. Hoffmann
... Smooth-it-away, as soon as he could speak for laughing. "And charming young ladies! Why, my dear fellow, they are old maids, every soul of them—prim, starched, dry, and angular; and not one of them, I will venture to say, has altered so much as the fashion of her gown since ...
— Mosses from an Old Manse and Other Stories • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... told them, laughingly, to "remember him if they did not think him past praying for." During his breakfast he recalled the fact that Madge was uncommonly well dressed. "She hasn't in externals," he thought, "the provincial air that one might expect, although her ideas are not only provincial, but prim, obtained, no doubt, from some goody-good books that she has read in the remote region wherein she has developed so remarkably. She has some stilted ideal of womanhood which she is seeking to attain, and the more unnatural the ideal, the ...
— A Young Girl's Wooing • E. P. Roe
... to him, Yet he most Christian-like laments his death: And for my selfe, Foe as he was to me, Might liquid teares, or heart-offending groanes, Or blood-consuming sighes recall his Life; I would be blinde with weeping, sicke with grones, Looke pale as Prim-rose with blood-drinking sighes, And all to haue the Noble Duke aliue. What know I how the world may deeme of me? For it is knowne we were but hollow Friends: It may be iudg'd I made the Duke away, So shall my name with Slanders tongue be wounded, And Princes Courts be fill'd ...
— The First Folio [35 Plays] • William Shakespeare
... rent in the gingham going up the cedar-tree, but that was nothing to what followed. She entered through Amelia's window, her prim little room, to find herself confronted by Amelia's mother in a wrapper, and her two grandmothers. Grandmother Stark had over her arm a beautiful white embroidered dress. The two old ladies had entered the room in order to lay ...
— The Copy-Cat and Other Stories • Mary E. Wilkins Freeman
... still in the draw-dining-room—a fantastic apartment crowded with nouveau-art furniture all out of drawing, like daddy longlegs—when the woman tapped and peeped in. If I had gone upstairs to my own top-floor room, I'm sure, being a prim person, she would have considered it improper to summon me down, and I should have missed ...
— Secret History Revealed By Lady Peggy O'Malley • C. N. Williamson and A. M. Williamson
... are not to think that the Egyptian children's life was all teaching and prim behaviour. When Tahuti got his holidays, he would sometimes go out with his father and mother and sister on a fishing or fowling expedition. If they were going fishing, the little papyrus skiff was launched, and the party paddled away, armed ...
— Peeps at Many Lands: Ancient Egypt • James Baikie
... reason why we shouldn't stay as long as we wish. You are surely not so prim that you ...
— Mistress Anne • Temple Bailey
... especially by the county folk; and as Sydney was young, handsome, and a good talker, he soon made himself popular amongst them. For himself, he did not find the occasion interesting, save as a means of social success. Most of the men were dull, and the women prim and proper: there were not more than two pretty girls in ...
— Name and Fame - A Novel • Adeline Sergeant
... falling to the ground. There are quaint gardens everywhere, with sometimes an entrance arched with iron gracefully wrought by some forgotten colonial Quentin Matsys, and always with their paths bordered by prim and fragrant box, and grass that keeps rich and green in an Old World way, by virtue of some secret of growth caught from fresher centuries than ours. If your steps have the right magic in them, you ...
— A Study Of Hawthorne • George Parsons Lathrop
... was not prim. She knew too much of the world to be easily shocked, in the old conventional sense. Besides, her Bleary Street work had brought her into contact with girls who had gone to the bad, and she had not found them different from other girls. If ...
— The Dust Flower • Basil King
... prefaced sotto voce with, 'What a child it is!' But she was a good kindly lady, who had the faculty of teaching, and of forestalling rebellion; and her little thin corkscrew curls, touched with gray, her pale eyes, prim black silk apron, and sandalled shoes, rise before me full of happy associations of tender kindness and patience. She was wise, too, in her own simple way. When nurse would have forewarned her of Clarence's failings in his own hearing, she cut the ...
— Chantry House • Charlotte M. Yonge
... do so; because it was part of a lady's accoutrements, so to speak. She had also a cushion, which was necessary, if not for comfort, yet for her sense of being fully equipped, placed behind her back when she sat down. But with all this she was not a formal or prim person. She was a woman who had not produced a great deal of effect in life; one of those who are not accustomed to have their advice taken, or to find that their opinion has much weight upon others. Perhaps it ...
— The Marriage of Elinor • Margaret Oliphant
... England are not often good subjects; there is a peculiar meanness about most of them and awkwardness of line. Old manor-houses are often pretty. Ruins are usually, with us, too prim, and cathedrals too orderly. I do not think there is a single cathedral in England from which it is possible to obtain one subject for an impressive drawing. There is always some discordant civility, or jarring vergerism ...
— The Elements of Drawing - In Three Letters to Beginners • John Ruskin
... "The prim coxcomb with an enormous bag, whose favours, like those of Hercules between Virtue and Vice, are contended for by two rival orange girls, gives an admirable idea of the dress of the day; when, if we may ...
— The Works of William Hogarth: In a Series of Engravings - With Descriptions, and a Comment on Their Moral Tendency • John Trusler
... and handsome he looks!" said Laura, a prim and demure little miss of thirteen: "in his presence, I am sure I could ...
— The Farmer Boy, and How He Became Commander-In-Chief • Morrison Heady
... natural prominence of which was enhanced by her grayish hair being drawn up tightly and rolled into a "bun" on the very top of the head. She was the personification of neatness, if such be the word to characterize the prim stiffness of a flat-figured, elderly spinster. She wore large, square-toed, common-sense shoes, with low heels capped with rubber cushions, which, as I was shortly to discover, had earned for the lady the sobriquet of "Old ...
— The Long Day - The Story of a New York Working Girl As Told by Herself • Dorothy Richardson
... tall one bowed to me I recognized Mrs. Gregory St. Michael, and took off my hat. It was not until they had crossed the street and come up the stone steps near where I stood on High Walk that the little lady also bowed to me; she was Mrs. Weguelin St. Michael, and from something in her prim yet charming manner I gathered that she held it to be not perfectly well-bred in a lady to greet a gentleman across the width of a public highway, and that she could have wished that her tall companion had not thus ...
— Lady Baltimore • Owen Wister
... for gold, and the same extravagance of life as in the devil's garden on the blue Mediterranean. On landing, I was struck with the number of well-dressed men and women who rub shoulders in the street with the dilapidated-looking mining element. In the same way palatial banks and prim business houses are incongruously scattered amongst saloons and drinking bars. Front Street, facing the sea, is the principal thoroughfare, so crowded at midday that you can scarcely get along. It is paved with wood, imported here at enormous ...
— From Paris to New York by Land • Harry de Windt
... Barstow had promised, duly made its appearance in the schoolhouse, to the delight of the scholars and the gentle satisfaction of Mrs. Martin, who, in addition to the rudimentary musical instruction of the younger girls, occasionally played upon it herself in a prim, refined, and conscientious fashion. To this, when she was alone after school hours, she sometimes added a faint, colorless voice of limited range and gentlewomanly expression. It was on one of these occasions that Twing, becoming ...
— Colonel Starbottle's Client and Other Stories • Bret Harte
... their college vacation and get toughened (the process was obviously succeeding); they made Nimrod apologise for keeping his coat on during dinner; the three brothers who owned the ranch, and the wife of one of them; several children; a prim and proper spinster from Washington—how she got there, who can tell?—and Miss Belle Hadley, the ...
— A Woman Tenderfoot • Grace Gallatin Seton-Thompson
... Islands, and whom Ormond had never seen, was to accompany Dora on her return to Corny Castle: our young hero had settled it in his head that this aunt must be something like Aunt Ellenor in Sir Charles Grandison; a stiff-backed, prim, precise, old-fashioned looking aunt. Never was man's astonishment more visible in his countenance than was that of Harry Ormond on the first sight of Dora's aunt. His surprise was so great as to preclude the ...
— Tales & Novels, Vol. IX - [Contents: Harrington; Thoughts on Bores; Ormond] • Maria Edgeworth
... cerca del Cuzco en cierta senal que estava puesta en cada camino de quatro que hay, havia dende alli de venir cargado hasta la presencia del Inga, y alli dejava la carga y hacia su obediencia." Ondegardo, Rel. Prim., Ms.] ...
— The History Of The Conquest Of Peru • William H. Prescott
... located within a few minutes' walk of the Temple Grammar School, and numbered about thirty-five pupils, the majority of whom boarded at the Hall—Primrose Hall, as Miss Dorothy prettily called it. The Prim-roses, as we called them, ranged from seven years of age to sweet seventeen, and a prettier group of sirens never got together even in Rivermouth, for Rivermouth, you should know, is famous for ...
— The Story of a Bad Boy • Thomas Bailey Aldrich
... this, however, for if you have an atom of observation, one glance at his sleek, knowing-looking head and face—his prim white neckerchief, with the wooden tie into which it has been regularly folded for twenty years past, merging by imperceptible degrees into a small-plaited shirt-frill—and his comfortable-looking form encased in a well-brushed suit of black—would ...
— Sketches by Boz - illustrative of everyday life and every-day people • Charles Dickens
... tarry fence and slimy paling. On, on it pants—through Bishop's Wood, by tangled Churchyard Bottom, where now the railway shrieks; down sloppy lanes, bordering Muswell Hill, where now stand rows of jerry-built, prim villas. At intervals it stops an instant to dab its eyes with its dingy little rag of a handkerchief, to rearrange the bundle under its arm, its chief anxiety to keep well out of sight of chance wanderers, to ...
— Paul Kelver • Jerome Klapka, AKA Jerome K. Jerome
... interesting as self-revelations. Prosperity is not always the best condition under which to produce the highest work, and the temperament of Rembrandt was so peculiar that there is little wonder that the prim Dutchmen were not entirely captivated by his exuberant sensuality, or that we ourselves reserve our admiration principally for the more sombre and mysterious products of his later years after misfortune began ...
— Six Centuries of Painting • Randall Davies
... who is not highly sensitive is an amusement that it is possible to exhaust, and Tom by and by began to look round for some other mode of passing the time. But in so prim a garden, where they were not to go off the paved walks, there was not a great choice of sport. The only great pleasure such a restriction suggested was the pleasure of breaking it, and Tom began to meditate an insurrectionary visit ...
— The Mill on the Floss • George Eliot
... perversity made him picture his Cousin Eleanor as a prim young person, with sharp elbows and a pinched nose and stringy hair. She would be lifeless and oppressively good-mannered, he felt certain. All the ill success of the last three days seemed to be behind his sudden determination to have none of her. But Cousin Jasper, ...
— The Windy Hill • Cornelia Meigs
... Mrs. Alfred appeared. She looked more prim and nice and neat than ever in this black silk dress with old lace on the open square in front and on the ...
— The Beautiful Wretch; The Pupil of Aurelius; and The Four Macnicols • William Black
... a liking For the prim in face and mind, And some prefer the striking And the loud in womankind; Wee Madge is wooed of many, And buxom Kate, as well, And Jennie—charming Jennie— Ah, Jennie ...
— Songs and Other Verse • Eugene Field
... fool, that he had missed his true destiny. Sara possessed the warmth and wealth of heart which were the complements his own bleak nature required. Agnes Carillon, with her accurate, invariable beauty, had a prim disposition, wholesome enough for a man of strange, dark humours like David Rennes, but perilous always in its effect on any frigid or calculating mind. And Reckage was known to be supremely selfish. It seemed to Pensee that Sara had behaved very naturally, very touchingly, through ...
— Robert Orange - Being a Continuation of the History of Robert Orange • John Oliver Hobbes
... street of two-story brick houses, neat and prim, with whitened stone steps and little groups of aproned women gossiping at the doors. Half-way down, Lestrade stopped and tapped at a door, which was opened by a small servant girl. Miss Cushing was sitting in the front room, into which we were ushered. She ...
— The Strand Magazine, Volume V, Issue 25, January 1893 - An Illustrated Monthly • Various
... avium venisse insistere saxo, Quarum prim abeunte superstitit inde secunda: Illa autem fugiens jam vix vestigia liquit, Et saxum m[oe]rens ...
— Chenodia - The Classic Mother Goose • Jacob Bigelow
... that it has no effect on the skin—no, I really dare not." As she said this she looked as prim as a vestal. "It is the first time, do you know, that I ever used this liquid white, ah! ah! ah! What a baby I am! I am ...
— Monsieur, Madame and Bebe, Complete • Gustave Droz
... brother to open his heart to sister that even his egoistic chatter passed muster. As for young Jerry, who in a couple of days was to begin work in the same claim as Ned, he sat round-eyed, his thoughts writ large on his forehead. Mahony translated them thus: how in the world I could ever have sat prim and proper on the school-bench, when all this—change, adventure, romance—was awaiting me? Jerry was only, Mahony knew, to push a wheelbarrow from hole to water and back again for many a week to come; but for him it would certainly be a ...
— Australia Felix • Henry Handel Richardson
... moral Almanack of years— The prim old maid, and, by her side, her Niece, Full of bewitching beauty, health, and love. See, how the tabby watches Laura's eyes, Lest they should smile upon some pleasing spark, And violate grim prudery's tyrant ties. With icy finger, she her charge directs, To ...
— Poems (1828) • Thomas Gent
... will do that in the morning. And now, Cardo, I must do what my uncle told me to do," she said, as they returned into the cosy parlour, glowing with the light of the blazing fire; and, holding up her dress with her two fingers, she made a prim little curtsey, and said: ...
— By Berwen Banks • Allen Raine
... among the girls of the district round Bordeaux. His whole appearance was feminine, and the unstable glance that he flashed from side to side spoke of vanity. He said to his companion, "Who is the prim virgin with ...
— The Romance of the Coast • James Runciman
... was flat and poor; even the subject did not strike me for the first moment as anything very remarkable. It was the portrait of a man in the prime of life—about thirty-five, I should have supposed—with the long whiskers and rather prim pose of a portrait made by an evidently poor artist, probably thirty or forty ...
— Seen and Unseen • E. Katharine Bates
... of vivid happenings in unoccupied houses and particularly of the prim, industrious, capable Susan Burnet, biting aggressive wrists, stuck in Lady Harman's imagination. She seemed to be looking into hitherto unsuspected pits of simple and violent living just beneath her feet. ...
— The Wife of Sir Isaac Harman • H. G. (Herbert George) Wells
... Grandma, with prim precision The seam-stitch impaleth deftly On her sharp and glittering needle, Then she turns and answers calmly, With a deep assurance—"Never Was there ...
— Poems • Marietta Holley
... nothing on but his gown and slippers. At sight of his tousled head both our callers gave a whoop of recognition, and set upon him,—shook him out of his slippers, and pulled him down the steps on to the sidewalk barefoot; thereby scandalizing a whole houseful of prim damsels across the street, who indignantly pulled down their curtains. Such a hand-shaking and back-patting as ensued! All the hardships and discouragement we had endured on our last season's expedition seemed to bear an exultant harvest in this our ...
— Left on Labrador - or, The cruise of the Schooner-yacht 'Curlew.' as Recorded by 'Wash.' • Charles Asbury Stephens
... be included in all meditations on the highest Brahman.— Since there is no valid reason for including in a meditation those qualities which are not expressly mentioned in the section containing that meditation, only those qualities which are thus expressly mentioned should be included!—This prim facie view is negatived by the Stra. The clause, 'on account of non-difference,' has to be carried on from the preceding Stra. As the 'subject of the qualities,' i.e. Brahman is the same in all meditations, the qualities ...
— The Vedanta-Sutras with the Commentary by Ramanuja - Sacred Books of the East, Volume 48 • Trans. George Thibaut
... seated at his ease in a large armchair. At his right sat Bailie Thomson—a man with a forbidding face, whom I had often of late seen in the company of Carver Kinlay. At Mr. Duke's left hand was the schoolmaster, prim and businesslike as I had often seen him look in the school when anything of importance was pending, such as a class examination. Near him sat Lieutenant Fox, looking very handsome in his naval uniform, and very much at his ease. The only other ...
— The Pilots of Pomona • Robert Leighton
... against the current rules of truth. These, however, did not include the commandment to use in disputation only such arguments as could be employed in a positive doctrinal presentation. Basilius (Ep. 210 ad prim. Neocaes) was quite ready to excuse an utterance of Gregory Thaumaturgus, that sounded suspiciously like Sabellianism, by saying that the latter was not speaking [Greek: dogmatikos], but [Greek: agonistikos]. ...
— History of Dogma, Volume 2 (of 7) • Adolph Harnack
... latter as pale as marble, the tears still lingering in the long dark lashes that veiled her sad and downcast eyes. The Captain was rocking to and fro in an easy chair, smoking his pipe and glancing first towards his daughter, and then at her starch prim-looking aunt, ...
— Mark Hurdlestone - Or, The Two Brothers • Susanna Moodie
... traversing a street in Old Brompton—a quaint, prim by-way lined with dwellings singularly Old-Worldish, even for London. He seemed to know it subjectively, to have retained a memory of it from another existence: as the stage setting of a vivid dream, all forgotten, will sometimes recur with peculiar and exasperating intensity, in broad ...
— The Black Bag • Louis Joseph Vance
... unluckily they were caught by a sudden flood. At the end of June it was announced in Madrid that Leopold of Hohenzollern, son of the Roumanian prince, had accepted the crown of Spain that had been secretly offered to him by Marshal Prim; and the news, M. Ollivier says, startled all France like the bursting of a bomb. It had always, we must remember, been a cardinal maxim of French statesmanship that the maintenance of a preponderant influence in Spain was essential to the security of France; while, on the other hand, ...
— Studies in Literature and History • Sir Alfred Comyn Lyall
... blue and hair of the deepest brown that waved and clustered around the temples—a mouth that was winsome and sweet, a small and aristocratic nose, a chin that was slightly determined, giving her altogether a queenly air, as she sat so straight and prim behind ...
— The Tory Maid • Herbert Baird Stimpson
... that the lightness of the latter emerged first. George Selwyn, hearing some people at Arthur's t'other night lamenting the distracted state of the country, joined in the discourse, with the whites of his eyes and his prim mouth, and fetching a deep sigh, said, "Yes, to be sure it is terrible! There is the Duke of Newcastle's faction, and there is Fox's faction, and there is Leicester-house! between two factions and one faction we are torn ...
— The Letters of Horace Walpole, Volume 2 • Horace Walpole
... and headed directly for the Baker home. He was unaware that morning was not the fashionable time to call upon a lady. To him the fact of inclination and of presence in the vicinity was sufficient justification; and mounting the well-remembered steps he rang the doorbell stoutly. A prim maid in cap and diminutive apron, a recent addition to ...
— Ben Blair - The Story of a Plainsman • Will Lillibridge
... monstrous that scandal was can never be known save by such confidential agents as myself. The honour and careers of many of the chief men in France were at stake. You have seen a group of ninepins standing, all so rigid, and prim, and unbending. Then there comes the ball from far away and pop, pop, pop—there are your ninepins on the floor. Well, imagine some of the greatest men in France as these ninepins and then this Monsieur Caratal was the ball which could be ...
— Tales of Terror and Mystery • Arthur Conan Doyle
... landmark. In the days of William and Mary the gardens sloping down to the Thames were laid out in the stiff, formal Dutch style. Canals, in the shape of a capital L, with the foot reaching to the river, intersected prim gardens, and rows of little limes, pollarded like willows, edged the banks. It was only in 1852 that these canals were finally filled in, and the limes transplanted in the avenue bordering Ranelagh Gardens, where they still flourish. The Court favourite of Charles II., ...
— Chelsea - The Fascination of London • G. E. (Geraldine Edith) Mitton
... seems to me something very pathetic about these old Bloomsbury streets," said Thorndyke, "with their faded grandeur and dignified seediness. They remind me of some prim and aged gentlewoman in reduced circumstances who—Hallo! What ...
— The Red Thumb Mark • R. Austin Freeman
... genial. Nevertheless at once Maggie distrusted her. No servant had any right to appear so wildly delighted to see a new mistress. Alice had doubtless her own plans. Emily was prim and conceited, and Clara did not exist. Alice was ready to do everything that Maggie wanted, and it was very apparent at once that she ...
— The Captives • Hugh Walpole
... face to face over the threshold—Clytemnestra, of a matronly circumference, yet with a certain prim consciousness of herself, which despite the gray hair and the excellent maturity of her face, was unmistakably maidenish—Clytie of the eyes always wise to another's needs and beaming with ...
— The Seeker • Harry Leon Wilson
... arrested by recognising, in the president, the well-remembered face of Major Monthault. The brims of his hat were of more than ordinary dimensions; his hair was notched into the exact shape prescribed by the highest standard of puritanical orthodoxy; his band was crimped, and his robes folded with prim decorum; while his hands demurely rested on the cushion before him, holding a small edition of the sacred volume, on which he seemed to be meditating in the intervals between the exercise of his professional duties. But neither the starched sobriety of his aspect, nor ...
— The Loyalists, Vol. 1-3 - An Historical Novel • Jane West
... words were lost in the laughter of the King and Cardinal at the unblushing avowal of the small, prim-faced maiden. ...
— The Armourer's Prentices • Charlotte M. Yonge
... I allow even that's better than the pains Mrs. Prim takes to conceal her losses in front. She draws her mouth till it positively resembles the aperture of a poor's-box, and all her words appear to slide out edgewise as it were—thus: How do you do, madam? ...
— The Ontario Readers: The High School Reader, 1886 • Ministry of Education
... prevented me from attempting the higher walks of our profession; but this object of my ambition was gained at last. I had taken a pocket-book from a worthy Quaker, and, unfortunately, was perceived by a man at a shop window, who came out, collared, and delivered me into the hands of the prim gentleman. Having first secured his property, he then walked with me and a police officer to Bow-street. My innocent face, and my tears, induced the old gentleman, who was a member of the Philanthropic Society, not only not to prefer the charge against ...
— The King's Own • Captain Frederick Marryat
... President Van Buren with a parade, bands playing, and crowds in the streets, this prim self-righteous young woman took no part in this hero worship, but gave vent to her disapproval in a ...
— Susan B. Anthony - Rebel, Crusader, Humanitarian • Alma Lutz
... prim and severe aspect was seated next a young couple, who were discussing the merits of ...
— More Toasts • Marion Dix Mosher
... that," replied Richard, with something like a sigh. "Out in the country everybody knows everybody else, and outside of a few prim people all are as sociable as can be. But I suppose if one wants to make money one must expect to give ...
— Richard Dare's Venture • Edward Stratemeyer
... of the sentry, on the quarter-deck below him, grounding arms, turned the current of his thoughts. A thin, tall, soldier-like man, with a cold blue eye, and prim features, came out of the cuddy below, handing out a fair-haired, affected, mincing lady, of middle age. Captain Vickers, of Mr. Frere's regiment, ordered for service in Van Diemen's Land, was bringing his lady on deck to get ...
— For the Term of His Natural Life • Marcus Clarke
... which I took from a horse officer at the battle of Dettingen; they are double loaded, and if any highwayman in England robs you of the value of a pin while I have the honour of being in your company, d—n my heart." When he had expressed himself in this manner, a prim gentlewoman, who had sat silent hitherto, opened her mouth, and said, she wondered how any man could be so rude as to pull out such weapons before ladies. "D—me, madam," cried the champion, "if you are so ...
— The Adventures of Roderick Random • Tobias Smollett
... denizens of the old building, it will suffice out of a large household to mention the prim, respectable, and capable Ames, and Mrs. Allen, a buxom and cheerful person, who relieved the lady of some of her household cares. The other six servants in the house bear no relation to the events of the night of ...
— The Valley of Fear • Arthur Conan Doyle
... a singularly quaint-looking personage presented himself. He was very stiff and prim in his appearance; dressed in a blue coat and scarlet waistcoat, with a rich bandanna handkerchief tied very neatly round his neck, and a very new hat, to which his ...
— The Young Duke • Benjamin Disraeli
... smothered or strangled. Perhaps some day we shall go back to them, and find that the "Rape of the Lock" is better worth reading and really more helpful than magazine metaphysics. Anyhow, it is certain that the training which the Misses Ponsonby had received, although it may have made them starched, prim, and even uninteresting, had an effect upon their character not altogether unwholesome, and prevented any public crying for the moon, or any public charge of injustice against its Maker because ...
— Catharine Furze • Mark Rutherford
... her white face as she spoke) gave me a slight shudder. She remained demure, almost prim. And ...
— Chance - A Tale in Two Parts • Joseph Conrad
... him no explanations. It stood as usual, large and prim and precise, the very acme of solid, sober wealth and assertive moral rectitude. He was strongly tempted to call and ask for Miss Brandt, but it was only ten o'clock in the morning, and the house looked so truly an embodiment in stucco of Mrs. Grundy and Jeremiah ...
— Pearl of Pearl Island • John Oxenham
... and capacity that began with our grandfather! But as I go on in life, day by day, I become more of a bewildered child; I cannot get used to this world, to procreation, to heredity, to sight, to hearing; the commonest things are a burthen. The prim obliterated polite face of life, and the broad, bawdy, and orgiastic—or maenadic—foundations, form a spectacle to which no habit reconciles me; and "I could wish my days to be bound each to each" by the same open-mouthed wonder. They are anyway, ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 25 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... the decaying ceiling. Worn boards and ragged walls, and the rusty ribs fallen from the fireplace, are all that meet your eyes, but I see a round, unsteady, waxcloth-covered table, with four books lying at equal distances on it. There are six prim chairs, two of them not to be sat upon, backed against the walls, and between the window and the fireplace a chest of drawers, with a snowy coverlet. On the drawers stands a board with coloured marbles for the game of solitaire, and I ...
— A Window in Thrums • J. M. Barrie
... first visit to the scene of the crime—a high, dingy, narrow-chested house, prim, formal, and solid, like the century which gave it birth. Lestrade's bulldog features gazed out at us from the front window, and he greeted us warmly when a big constable had opened the door and let us in. The room into which we were shown was that in which the crime had been committed, ...
— The Return of Sherlock Holmes - Magazine Edition • Arthur Conan Doyle
... seemed to me a very home that had sprung up for me in the midst of these solitudes. My Arabs were busy with their bread; Mysseri rattling tea-cups; the little kettle, with her odd old-maidish looks, sat humming away old songs about England; and two or three yards from the fire my tent stood prim and tight, with open portal, and with welcoming look, like “the old arm-chair” of ...
— Eothen • A. W. Kinglake
... generally known. However, we need not go to her house; we will wait for her here in the Ceramicus. I should think it is near her hour for coming back from the Academy, and taking her walk in the Poecile; she is very regular; to be sure, here she comes. Do you see the orderly, rather prim lady there, with the kindly look in her eyes, and ...
— Works, V1 • Lucian of Samosata
... shrewdly. The streets were wide, the walks were narrow and lined with trees that would one day spread nobly. The houses were built in rows, each independent of the other, mounted upon little terraces, fronted by guards of iron railing and prim little flower gardens. Bat Scanlon, as he ...
— Ashton-Kirk, Criminologist • John T. McIntyre
... age at the capital, before the easy- going Southern ways had gone out and the prim new Northern ways had come in, and when the domestic animals were treated with distinguished consideration and granted the freedom of the city. There was a charm of cattle in the street and upon the commons; goats cropped your rosebushes through the pickets, and nooned upon your front porch; ...
— Birds and Poets • John Burroughs
... and down again, a climbing fern {133d} which is often seen in hothouses has tangled its finely-cut fronds. Up the next, a quite different fern is crawling, by pressing tightly to the rough bark its creeping root-stalks, furred like a hare's leg. Up the next, the prim little Griffe-chatte {133e} plant has walked, by numberless clusters of small cats'-claws, which lay hold of the bark. And what is this delicious scent about the air? Vanille? Of course it is; and up ...
— At Last • Charles Kingsley
... In this connection may be mentioned a remark of General Prim, one of the leading spirits in the provisional government of 1868. When asked why at that time he did not establish a republic his reply was: "It would have been a republic without republicans." There was no less a dearth of ...
— The Governments of Europe • Frederic Austin Ogg
... know pretty well, Marcia," Joe replied, "back home they think I don't care much for the young people's work. It is a little too prim and ready-to-wear for me, if you'll excuse me for saying so. No fun in it at all, though I'll admit some of the classes here have more life in them than I ...
— John Wesley, Jr. - The Story of an Experiment • Dan B. Brummitt
... to was a little white house with green shutters and a slate roof. It stood in a prim little garden, and down each side of the neat path were large stone vases for flowers to grow in; but all ...
— The Phoenix and the Carpet • E. Nesbit
... the paper dated the 4th of July and found the column and read: "'The press of Paris unanimously accuses the Imperial Government of allowing Prim and Bismarck to intrigue against the interests of France. The French ambassador, Count Benedetti, interviewed the King of Prussia at Ems and requested him to prevent Prince Leopold von Hohenzollern's acceptance. ...
— Lorraine - A romance • Robert W. Chambers
... would be a blissful life indeed. And Maggie, listening to the voices which speak to her so oft in the autumn wind, the running brook, the opening flower, and the falling leaf, has learned a lesson different far from those taught her daily by the prim, stiff governess, who, imported from England six years ago, has drilled both Theo and Maggie in all the prescribed rules of high life as practiced in the Old World. She has taught them how to sit and how to stand, how to eat and how to drink, as ...
— Maggie Miller • Mary J. Holmes
... lines of game travelling down the ridges to the water. The ruling passion is strong in death, they say, and my heart was dead that night. But, independently of my trouble, no man who has for forty years lived the life I have, can with impunity go coop himself in this prim English country, with its trim hedgerows and cultivated fields, its stiff formal manners, and its well-dressed crowds. He begins to long — ah, how he longs! — for the keen breath of the desert air; ...
— Allan Quatermain • by H. Rider Haggard
... easy, infectious laugh, "that's more than I can promise. To tell the truth, Johns, I don't believe I could by any possibility fall into the prim, stiff ways which make a man commendable hereabout. Even if I were religiously disposed, or should ever think of adopting your profession, I fancy I should take to the gown and liturgy, as giving a little freer ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 15, No. 89, March, 1865 • Various
... Primrose family, had not been sparing of his colours. In one, a lady was having a toe amputated—an operation which a saintly personage had sailed into the room, upon a couch, to superintend. In another, a lady was lying in bed, tucked up very tight and prim, and staring with much composure at a tripod, with a slop-basin on it; the usual form of washing-stand, and the only piece of furniture, besides the bedstead, in her chamber. One would never have supposed her to be labouring ...
— Pictures from Italy • Charles Dickens
... him; and I could eat no dinner this evening because he had not come back. I find him handsomer than any man in the world. When he says that he loves me, I can see, I can feel that it is true; I feel displeased, and at the same time delighted. M. de la Marche seems insipid and prim since I have known Bernard. Bernard alone seems as proud, as passionate, as bold as myself—and as weak as myself; for he cries like a child when I vex him, and here I am crying, too, as ...
— Mauprat • George Sand
... boys, you see, and so the same rules do not apply to us, for girls always have to observe the conventions," said Nealie, with the prim little air which she sometimes put on for the sake of ...
— The Adventurous Seven - Their Hazardous Undertaking • Bessie Marchant
... denominated in the catalogue "La vie d'une femme." They were painted rather in a remarkable style—flat, dead, pale, and formal. The first represented a "Jeune Fille," coming out of a church-door, a missal in her hand, her dress very prim, her eyes cast down, her mouth pursed up—the image of a most villanous little precocious she-hypocrite. The second, a "Mariee," with a long white veil, kneeling at a prie-dieu in her chamber, holding her hands plastered together, finger to finger, and showing the whites ...
— Villette • Charlotte Bronte
... In her very first term she was allowed to run up to the dormitory for something, unescorted by an Enfant de Marie. "Ascend, my child," said Madame Agathe, smiling sweetly, for Eileen had outstripped all her classmates that morning in geography, and Eileen, with a prim "Oui, ma mere," rose and sailed with drooping eyelashes to the other end of the schoolroom, and courtesied herself out of the door, knowing herself the focus of envy and humorously conscious of her goodness. She had learned to love this soothing sensation ...
— The Grey Wig: Stories and Novelettes • Israel Zangwill
... wouldn't leave one snap to meet its partner. Come on Judy," the feet were again on the rug, "we will be simply dead in the morning, and we have got to be very much alive. We do miss the Weatherbee. I don't see why we let her go. Dear, prim, prompt Weatherbee! Now we know we loved her. Her successor is ...
— Jane Allen: Junior • Edith Bancroft
... and jollier than any of the things you are after. We'll stand by you like bricks, and in a week you'll say it's the best lark you ever had in your life. Don't be prim, now, but say yes, like a trump, as you are," added Lucy, waving a pink satin ...
— Work: A Story of Experience • Louisa May Alcott
... Bath with a curious kind of interest. I once knew one of those dear old English ladies whom one finds all the world over, with their prim little ways, and their gilt prayer-books, and lavender-scented handkerchiefs, and family recollections. She gave me the idea that Bath, a city where the great people often congregate, was more especially the paradise ...
— Our Hundred Days in Europe • Oliver Wendell Holmes
... no; you and I will stay comfortably here by the fire, and I'll give you your tea and put you tidily to bed. I shan't be home any other night this week. Kate has a convoy coming for her;—haven't you, Kate?—Le beau cousin will take the best possible care of us; and even prim Aunt Deborah won't object to our walking back with him. I believe he came up from Wales on purpose. What would somebody else give to take the charge off his hands?—You needn't blush, Kate; I can see through a millstone as far ...
— Kate Coventry - An Autobiography • G. J. Whyte-Melville
... standing at the white gates of Sunnyside, waiting for the arrival of the girls. Mrs. Merriman had soft brown hair, soft brown eyes to match, and a kindly, gentle face. Lucy was somewhat prim, very neat in her person, with thick fair hair which she wore in two long plaits far below her waist, a face full of intensity and determination, and a slightly set ...
— A Modern Tomboy - A Story for Girls • L. T. Meade
... living. Down the Strand, past Villiers, Essex, Salisbury, Northumberland and many more streets whose names tell of vanished splendors, whose dingy lengths are smoke-blackened, and far enough off from the whole aroma of Belgravia, is Craven street. The houses are all of a pattern—prim, dingy, small-windowed habitations, but within this one there must be comfort, for the fire-flames dance on the meek minute panes and a heavy curl of smoke is cutting the air above its square, business-like little chimney-pot. Drawing-room there ...
— Lippincott's Magazine, Vol. 22, August, 1878 • Various
... bored if she would only be her natural self," reflected the author. "And would not talk prim platitudes." (This was hard, for he had talked nothing else himself.) "Does she think she is so interesting that I am likely to study ...
— The Autobiography of a Slander • Edna Lyall
... feet sink luxuriously into the rugs, oh, so different from the threadbare ingrain carpet at home! She peeped into the ball-room, smilax-draped and glowing as if eager to welcome the guests to come. Through it all she carried a prim air, making businesslike notes on her little pad; but beneath her very demure exterior raged a storm of rebellion that these things should be and not be for her. The world was one huge sour grape; and yet she ...
— Jewel Weed • Alice Ames Winter
... surgeon and helped to fill cartridges, contributing his own cotton hose for the purpose when those government stores gave out in battle, and who never smiled, even when committing a marine to the briny deep; the purser, too, prim and business-like, looking as if he were a complicated key with an iron lock of his own strong chest, calculating perpetually the amount of dollars deposited in his charge, the total of pay to be deducted therefrom, and never ...
— Captain Brand of the "Centipede" • H. A. (Henry Augustus) Wise
... rather from those who had left North Dormer than from those who had been obliged to stay there, and there was some difficulty in rousing the village to the proper state of enthusiasm. But Miss Hatchard's pale prim drawing-room was the centre of constant comings and goings from Hepburn, Nettleton, Springfield and even more distant cities; and whenever a visitor arrived he was led across the hall, and treated to a glimpse of the group of girls deep ...
— Summer • Edith Wharton
... the lower part of the city, imagine yourself in some quarters of Dieppe or Calais, or any other of the busier towns in the north of France. The peaked roofs, the unexpected balconies, the ill-regulated gables, and the general individuality of the houses are pleasing to the eye wearied with the prim monotony of ...
— Faces and Places • Henry William Lucy
... obstinacy, poured out a glassful and requested him to clear his voice with it. Fifteen minutes after his vocal organs had been thus renewed, LEOPOLD was in a condition to see things in an entirely new light, and hesitated no longer to write the following note to General PRIM: ...
— Punchinello Vol. 1, No. 21, August 20, 1870 • Various
... players each contribute a letter toward the spelling of a word, their object being never to be the one to complete it, but to force the next player to do so. Thus (with four players) the first player may say "p," and the next, thinking of "prim," may say "r," and the next, also thinking of "prim," may say "i." But the fourth player, running his thoughts quickly over possible words beginning with "pri," may light upon "prism" and say "s." This saves her, but puts the first player in danger, which is only averted ...
— What Shall We Do Now?: Five Hundred Games and Pastimes • Dorothy Canfield Fisher
... introduced as 'My daughter Harriet,' and made a stiff curtsey as Mrs. Moss smiled, and nodded, and bade her 'sit down, my dear.' Throughout the whole interview she seemed to be looked upon by both ladies as a child, and played the part so well, sitting prim and silent on her chair, that I could hardly help humming as I looked ...
— Mrs. Overtheway's Remembrances • Juliana Horatia Ewing
... in the Valley who refused to go to war, esteeming it a sin. Some of these were in town, coming in on horseback or in their white-covered wagons, and bringing wife or daughter. The men were long-bearded and venerable of aspect; the women had peaceful Quaker faces, framed by the prim close bonnet of their peculiar garb. These quiet folk, too, were anxious-eyed. They would not resist evil, but their homes and barns ...
— The Long Roll • Mary Johnston
... equally inviting. The men and women associate very little; the former employ themselves either in the business of life, or in hunting horse-racing, and gaming; while the latter meet in large parties, composed entirely of themselves, to sip tea and look prim!" Would a stranger who had been among us, who had witnessed the polished state of our society, the elegance of our parties, the case and sociability of manners which prevail there, the constant and agreeable intercourse between the sexes, the accomplishments of our ladies, that proud ...
— Memoirs of Aaron Burr, Complete • Matthew L. Davis
... these old gardens, with their formal walks and prim parterres; I like also the company by which they are chiefly frequented, consisting of ...
— The Idler in France • Marguerite Gardiner
... palace, that loomed so large in his imagination, was a house built of the soft stone of the country, mellowed by time. It looked dismal enough from the street, and inside it was extremely plain; there was the usual provincial courtyard—chilly, prim, and neat; and the house itself was sober, almost convent-like, but ...
— Two Poets - Lost Illusions Part I • Honore de Balzac
... relief from his malady by an extended tour in Germany. He sojourned some time in Dresden, whither his reputation had preceded him, and where he was cordially and familiarly received, not only by the foreign residents, but at the prim and antiquated little court of King Frederick Augustus and Queen Amalia. Of Irving at this time Mrs. Emily Fuller (nee Foster), whose relations with him have been referred to, ...
— Baddeck and That Sort of Thing • Charles Dudley Warner
... surpassingly beautiful Venetian whose love affairs upset a Quarter, a common-sense, motherly nurse whose heart warmed toward her companion in the adjoining berth, a plucky New England girl with the courage of her convictions, and a prim spinster whose only consolation was the boarder who ...
— The Veiled Lady - and Other Men and Women • F. Hopkinson Smith
... alone: I am not thine. [1] Prim Creed, with categoric point, forbear To feature me my Lord by rule and line. Thou canst not measure Mistress Nature's hair, Not one sweet inch: nay, if thy sight is sharp, Would'st count the strings upon an angel's ...
— Select Poems of Sidney Lanier • Sidney Lanier
... the taste of OSRICK turned a wit. Humour baccilophil, microbic merriment, Might suit him better. He will try the experiment. His mirth's a smirk and not a paroxysm; "Papa, potatoes, poultry, prunes and prism" Do not disturb the "plie" of his prim lips, Neither do cynic quirks and querulous quips. Mirth would guffaw—when hearts and mouths were bigger, OSRICK would shrink from aught beyond a snigger, Such as is stirred by screeds of far-fetched whim. Ay! that's the humour o't, ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Volume 104, February 4, 1893 • Various
... off that bonnet, and let me see thee as thou art really; with thy hair about thy face. So." Peggy reached over and untied the bow as she spoke, then removed the prim little bonnet from her cousin's head. "How beautiful thee is," she commented gazing at the maiden with admiring eyes. "I think thee grows more so every time I see thee. That bonnet doth ...
— Peggy Owen and Liberty • Lucy Foster Madison
... his office furniture. He fought over every article, over the little iron stove, the bed-lounge, the marble-topped centre table, the whatnot in the corner, the bound volumes of "Allen's Practical Dentist," the rifle manufacturer's calendar, and the prim, military chairs. A veritable scene took place between him and his wife before he could bring himself to part with the steel engraving of "Lorenzo de' Medici and His Court" and the stone pug dog with ...
— McTeague • Frank Norris
... over her to see herself in that less jealous arrangement of drapery which the Beauty of the last century had insisted on as presenting her most fittingly to the artist. She rolled up the sleeves of her dress, she turned down its prim collar and neck, and glanced from her glass to the portrait, from the portrait back to the glass. Myrtle was not blind nor dull, though young, and in many things untaught. She did not say in so many words, "I too am a beauty," but she could mot help seeing that she had many of the attractions ...
— The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. (The Physician and Poet not the Jurist)
... in front of the tea-tray. Almost at the same moment a neat black-and-white parlourmaid brought in teapot, copper kettle, and a silver-covered dish containing hot pikelets; then departed. Clara was alone again; not the same Clara now, but a personage demure, prim, precise, frightfully upright of back—a sort of impregnable stronghold—without doubt ...
— Tales of the Five Towns • Arnold Bennett
... Copenhagen crowded with British topsails. "While the negotiation is going on," he said, "the Dane should see our flag waving every time he lifts up his head." Time was worth more than gold; it was worth brave men's lives. The Danes were toiling day and night to prepare the defence of their capital. But prim Sir Hyde anchored, and sent up a single frigate with his ultimatum, and it was not until March 30 that the British fleet, a long line of stately vessels, came sailing up the Sound, passed Elsinore, and cast anchor fifteen miles from Copenhagen. ...
— Deeds that Won the Empire - Historic Battle Scenes • W. H. Fitchett
... the greater they expand. If scandalous reports concerning a certain young man in Richmond should reach us here in the North, relating his unparalleled exploits in the giddier circles of our gay capital, I should know without the telling that it was our prim young ...
— The Shades of the Wilderness • Joseph A. Altsheler
... diners noticed me, or that Mary 'Liza, sitting prim and dainty on her side of our table, had her doll by her in another chair, and interrupted her meal, once in a while, to caress her or to re-arrange her curls and skirts. I affected not to see the pantomime, which ...
— When Grandmamma Was New - The Story of a Virginia Childhood • Marion Harland
... are to be found scattered up and down our country churchyards—'uncouth rhymes,' as Gray calls them, yet full of the sombre philosophy of life. They are fast becoming illegible, worn out by the rain that raineth every day, and our prim, present-day parsons do not look with favour upon them, besides which—to use a clumsy phrase—besides which most of our churchyards are now closed against burials, and without texts ...
— In the Name of the Bodleian and Other Essays • Augustine Birrell
... novels, except the talkative, comic servant, who is meant to be vulgar and ridiculous, ever condescends to use colloquial speech. Even in moments of extreme peril the heroines are very choice in their diction. Dialogue in Mrs. Radcliffe's world is as stilted and unnatural as that of prim, old-fashioned school books. In her earliest novel she uses very little conversation, clearly finding the indirect form of narrative easier. Sometimes, in the more highly wrought passages of description, she slips unawares into a more daring phrase, e.g. in Udolpho, the track ...
— The Tale of Terror • Edith Birkhead
... as the outward signs of an inward fretfulness and quarrelsomeness, which was rendered all the more offensive in her eyes by the fact that Mona Crozier was the most, spotless thing she had ever seen, at the end of a journey—and this, a journey across a continent. Orderliness and prim exactness, taste and fastidiousness, tireless tidiness were seen in every turn, in every fold of her dress, in the way everything she wore had been put on, in the decision of every step and gesture. Kitty noticed all this, and she ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker
... and this evening when our number came Mr. Gilder began his quaint Quaker march and Reuben was to come from one side of the stage and Rachel, on the other, and meet in the center of the stage like two prim Quakers. I took the steps with Mr. Gilder's tom tom of quaint chords and I arrived in the front of the stage and no Walter. I was in dismay and the people began to laugh, especially a portly individual sitting directly in front of the orchestra. He thought ...
— Sixty Years of California Song • Margaret Blake-Alverson
... the debt of Nature, our informant could not say; enough that, in time, he owned a brush and immortalized himself by his skill in its use. Such erratic ones as Whittier, West, and Anna Dickinson go to prove that even the prim, proper, perfect Quakers are subject to like infirmities with the rest of ...
— Eighty Years And More; Reminiscences 1815-1897 • Elizabeth Cady Stanton
... who passed along the deal boards just in front of us." Mrs. Thesiger laughed and her head fell back upon her pillow. But during that movement her eyes had never left her daughter's face. "A middle-aged man with stiff gray hair, a stiff, prim face, and a figure like a ramrod. Oh, there never was anything so stiff." A noticeable bitterness began to sound in her voice and increased as she went on. "There was an old woman with him as precise and old-fashioned as himself. But you didn't see them? I never saw anything so ludicrous as that ...
— Running Water • A. E. W. Mason
... entered Daniellis in subdued triumph, and said good night before Arabella, with prim decorum, and then Cecilia mounted to make herself look beautiful for the flinging of his ...
— Halcyone • Elinor Glyn
... petticoat when her sister joined her in her bed-room—not in a petticoat of lace and needlework, such as peeped from under the edge of Polly's smart frock as she threw herself into a chair, but a skimpy black silk skirt with a prim ruffle, made from an old gown of Mrs. Ponsonby's. It was neat and fresh, however, and her neck and arms, exposed by her little tucked underwaist, were of a beauty to ravish a painter or a sculptor. Polly ...
— Ainslee's, Vol. 15, No. 5, June 1905 • Various
... up and looked round, and her eyes fell upon the last of the photograph-albums—the one she had yawned over. She picked it up, propped it on her knees, and, lying back against the cushions, turned the pages over. These were all children, prim children with tidy hair and solemn faces. Mollie stopped at the picture of a girl dressed in a wide-skirted, sprigged-muslin frock. Her hair fell in plump curls from beneath a broad-brimmed hat with ...
— The Happy Adventurers • Lydia Miller Middleton
... artists of every age in their inspired hours, fitted by genius and culture to mingle as an equal in the most refined circles of Europe, and yet her youth and early womanhood had passed away amid the very decent, yet drudging, descendants of the prim Puritans. Trained among those who could have discerned her peculiar power, and early fed with the fruits of beauty for which her spirit pined, she would have developed into one of the finest lyrists, romancers and critics, that the modern literary world has seen. This she knew; and this tantalization ...
— Memoirs of Margaret Fuller Ossoli, Vol. II • Margaret Fuller Ossoli
... he burst out. "You can't understand. You 're a girl. You like to be prim and neat, and to be good in deportment and ahead in your studies. You don't care for danger and adventure and such things, and you don't care for boys who are rough, and have life and go in them, and all that. You like good little boys in white collars, with clothes always ...
— The Cruise of the Dazzler • Jack London
... there suddenly trotted a piebald pony, drawing a low, basket phaeton, in which sat two prim, little, old ladies, a fat one and a lean one. Despite the difference in their avoirdupois the two old ladies showed themselves to be what ...
— Janice Day at Poketown • Helen Beecher Long
... was so ungainly in her behaviour, and such a laughing hoyden! Pastorella had with him the allowance of being blameless; but what was that towards being praiseworthy? To be only innocent is not to be virtuous! He afterwards spoke so much against Mrs. Dipple's forehead, Mrs. Prim's mouth, Mrs. Dentifrice's teeth, and Mrs. Fidget's cheeks that she grew downright in love with him; for it is always to be understood that a lady takes all you detract from the rest of her sex to be a gift to her. In a word, things went so far that I was dismissed. ...
— Isaac Bickerstaff • Richard Steele
... minute late. Did you ever hear such impudence, Sallie, and all because he reached your door one minute before me," she added, stooping to kiss Mrs. Horn. Punctuality was one of the cardinal virtues of this most distinguished, prim, precise, and most lovable of old maids. "You are really getting to be dreadful, Mr. Nathan Gill, and so puffed up —isn't he, Richard?" As she spoke she turned abruptly and faced both gentlemen. Then, with ...
— The Fortunes of Oliver Horn • F. Hopkinson Smith
... of facades, a jumble of architecture astonishing in sheer extravagance and variety. Gabled houses, red-tiled and gay with rough-cast and fresh paint; dull, sad-faced houses with sleepy windows like half-shut eyes; square, solid Georgian houses for doctors with white chokers and snuff-boxes, and prim old ladies with mittened wrists; low, little dolls'-houses, red brick neatly pointed; tall, slim houses graceful with slender casements and light shafts of wood; casements nobly elaborate in wood-carving and heavy with leaded panes; bay windows which should belong to ...
— Highways and Byways in Surrey • Eric Parker
... the rest of the scene. In this instance I found these broad smooth walks, with their deep rich red color, a very beautiful contrast to the glow of brilliant blossoms in the enormous flower-beds. For this garden was not at all like an ordinary garden, still less like a prim English parterre. The beds were as large as small fields, slightly raised and bordered by a thick line of violets. Large shrubs of beautiful semitropical plants made tangled heaps of purple, scarlet and white blossoms on every side; the large creamy bells of ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, April, 1876. • Various
... life were very vigorous in Eustacie; and though at first she had been completely worn out, a few days of comfort, entire rest, and good nursing restored her. Noemi dressed her much like herself, in a black gown, prim little white starched ruff, and white cap,—a thorough Calvinist dress, and befitting a minister's widow. Eustacie winced a little at hearing of the character that had been fastened upon her; she disliked for her child, still more than for herself, to take this ...
— The Chaplet of Pearls • Charlotte M. Yonge
... bad child,' said Susan at her tea in the servants' quarters. 'That nurse frightened him out of his little wits with her prim ways, you may depend. He's civil enough if ...
— The Magic City • Edith Nesbit
... their oppressors on the field of Fontenoy. Elsewhere in every country of Europe do we discover them or their descendants in the front ranks, and at the helm of affairs—in Spain, O'Donnell and Prim; in France, Mac Mahon and Lally Tollendal; ...
— Percy Bysshe Shelley as a Philosopher and Reformer • Charles Sotheran
... passage which led from the schoolroom to the nursery, opened the door, and approached a prim old servant with a somewhat cross face, who ...
— A Little Mother to the Others • L. T. Meade
... you knew and name. And now I discern gay diners in a mansion-place, And the guests dropping wit—pert, prim, or choice, And the hostess's tender and laughing face, And the host's bland brow; I cannot help hearing a hollow voice, And I'd fain ...
— Moments of Vision • Thomas Hardy
... undying name With classic Rogers shall go down to fame, Be this thy crowning work! In my young days How often have I, with a child's fond gaze, Pored on the pictur'd wonders[1] thou hadst done: Clarissa mournful, and prim Grandison! All Fielding's, Smollett's heroes, rose to view; I saw, and I believed the phantoms true. But, above all, that most romantic tale[2] Did o'er my raw credulity prevail, Where Glums and Gawries wear mysterious things, That serve ...
— The Works of Charles Lamb in Four Volumes, Volume 4 • Charles Lamb
... Evergreen and Tea-Table Miscellany. It was a fresh dawning of Scottish poetry. Warmth, light, and freedom seemed to come again into the frozen world. The blithe and genial spirit of the black-avised little barber-poet was itself the greatest imaginable contrast to the soured Puritanism and prim formalism that for half a century and more had infested the national letters. But the author of The Gentle Shepherd himself—and small blame to him—did not fully comprehend the nature and extent of his mission. He did ...
— The Balladists - Famous Scots Series • John Geddie
... played. The house would have been nothing but a plain square mansion of Queen Anne's time, but for the remnant of an old abbey to which it was united at one end, in much the same way as one may sometimes see a new farmhouse rising high and prim at the end of older and lower farm-offices. The fine old remnant stood a little backward and under the shadow of tall beeches, but the sun was now on the taller and more advanced front, the blinds were all down, and the house seemed asleep in the hot midday. ...
— Adam Bede • George Eliot
... of it now, but what if you were kicked and cuffed and starved? You are sensitive, for I saw you shrink and shiver when Bill Wright,—the scoundrel!—dared to strike you. He'll never do it again, Prim! Have you the taste of an epicure for the juicy grass blades and the clover when it is young,—do you love to hear the birds sing and the brook murmur, and do you enjoy living under the trees and watching the clouds ...
— A Beautiful Possibility • Edith Ferguson Black
... not go to her house; we will wait for her here in the Ceramicus. I should think it is near her hour for coming back from the Academy, and taking her walk in the Poecile; she is very regular; to be sure, here she comes. Do you see the orderly, rather prim lady there, with the kindly look in her eyes, ...
— Works, V1 • Lucian of Samosata
... and on the other by a fiddle case. From the trim houses, each without exception new, twinkled discreet lights, with glimpses of surpassingly correct domesticity, and the wind rustled loudly through the foliage of the prim gardens, ruffling them as it might have ruffled the unwilling hair of the daughters of an arch-deacon. Nobody was abroad. Absurd thoughts ran through Audrey's head. A letter from Mr. Foulger had followed her to Birmingham, and in the letter Mr. Foulger had acquainted her ...
— The Lion's Share • E. Arnold Bennett
... gone now or decayed into boarding-houses, but the Eathorne Mansion remains virtuous and aloof, reminiscent of London, Back Bay, Rittenhouse Square. Its marble steps are scrubbed daily, the brass plate is reverently polished, and the lace curtains are as prim and superior ...
— Babbitt • Sinclair Lewis
... teaches a Jigg like him, that she has seen him rise six or seven Capers together with the greatest Ease imaginable, and that his Scholars twist themselves more ways than the Scholars of any Master in Town: besides there is Madam Prim, an Alderman's Lady, recommends a Master of her own Name, but she declares he is not of their Family, yet a very extraordinary Man in his way; for besides a very soft Air he has in Dancing, he gives them a ...
— The Spectator, Volume 2. • Addison and Steele
... reconciled when little Miss Sharp was made to quit the carriage, and mount up beside him—when he covered her up in one of his Benjamins, and became perfectly good-humoured—how the asthmatic gentleman, the prim lady, who declared upon her sacred honour she had never travelled in a public carriage before (there is always such a lady in a coach—Alas! was; for the coaches, where are they?), and the fat widow with the brandy-bottle, took their places ...
— Vanity Fair • William Makepeace Thackeray
... ceiling. Worn boards and ragged walls, and the rusty ribs fallen from the fireplace, are all that meet your eyes, but I see a round, unsteady, waxcloth-covered table, with four books lying at equal distances on it. There are six prim chairs, two of them not to be sat upon, backed against the walls, and between the window and the fireplace a chest of drawers, with a snowy coverlet. On the drawers stands a board with coloured marbles ...
— A Window in Thrums • J. M. Barrie
... street in Old Brompton—a quaint, prim by-way lined with dwellings singularly Old-Worldish, even for London. He seemed to know it subjectively, to have retained a memory of it from another existence: as the stage setting of a vivid dream, all forgotten, ...
— The Black Bag • Louis Joseph Vance
... otherwise. Nevertheless, it was just such men as Hurd who tended to keep the Church of the eighteenth century in its apathetic state. Hurd was a religious-minded man; but his religion was characterised by a cold, prim propriety which was not calculated to commend it to men at large. Like his friend Warburton, he could see nothing but folly and fanatical madness in the great evangelical revival which was going on around him, and ...
— The English Church in the Eighteenth Century • Charles J. Abbey and John H. Overton
... the dozen grown-up diners noticed me, or that Mary 'Liza, sitting prim and dainty on her side of our table, had her doll by her in another chair, and interrupted her meal, once in a while, to caress her or to re-arrange her curls and skirts. I affected not to see the ...
— When Grandmamma Was New - The Story of a Virginia Childhood • Marion Harland
... in his precise prim tones, "I must make a confession to you. When you were up for this club I—my vote was ...
— Tristram of Blent - An Episode in the Story of an Ancient House • Anthony Hope
... "Prymerose, primula, calendula, ligustrum"—and this name for the Privet lasted with a slight alteration into Shakespeare's time. Turner in 1538 says, "ligustrum arbor est non herba ut literator[u] vulgus credit; nihil que minus est quam a Prymerose." In Tusser's "Husbandry" we have "set Privie or Prim" ...
— The plant-lore & garden-craft of Shakespeare • Henry Nicholson Ellacombe
... our noise grew too loud the Pater would say, "Less tumult! Less tumult! Have you never heard of a Father's right over his children? He can slay them, my loves—slay them dead, and the Gods highly approve of the action!" Then Mother would prim up her dear mouth over the wheel and answer: "H'm! I'm afraid there can't be much of the Roman Father about you!" Then the Pater would roll up his accounts, and say, "I'll show you!" and then—then, he'd be worse ...
— Puck of Pook's Hill • Rudyard Kipling
... little changed; the small, tall, thin, narrow-chested, stooping figure—the same long, fair, freckled, sharp set face—the same prim cap, and clean, scant, faded gown, or one of the same sort—made up her personal individuality. Miss Nancy now had charge of the village post-office; and her early and accurate information respecting all neighborhood ...
— The Missing Bride • Mrs. E. D. E. N. Southworth
... answered a prim little voice from the dusk below, for only the glow of the fire filled ...
— Jack and Jill • Louisa May Alcott
... and she was short. He was bulky, promising to be fat. She was thin, and, with a paring here and there, would have been skinny. His face was sternly resolute, solemn indeed, hers was prim, and primness is the most everlasting, indestructible trait of humanity. It can outface the Sphinx. It is destructible only by death. Whoever has married a prim woman must hand over his breeches and his purse, he will collect postage stamps ...
— Here are Ladies • James Stephens
... can be said to own a waist) is marked by the belt with the three polished buttons peeping through. The belt must bulge neither to the right nor to the left; the pyramidal edifice of great-coat must not loll—it must sit up prim and firm. And unless all your foldings of the great-coat, from first to last, have, been deftly precise, no pyramid will reward you, but a flabby trapezium: the belt will sag, its buttons won't come centrally, and indeed the whole edifice of unwieldy cloth ...
— Observations of an Orderly - Some Glimpses of Life and Work in an English War Hospital • Ward Muir
... moment she had taken Stanislao's arm, and they moved off along the pier in the moonlight, leaving me bewildered. This was a queen of cannibals; she was tattooed from hand to foot, and perhaps the greatest masterpiece of that art now extant, so that a while ago, before she was grown prim, her leg was one of the sights of Tai-o-hae; she had been passed from chief to chief; she had been fought for and taken in war; perhaps, being so great a lady, she had sat on the high place, and throned it there, alone of her sex, while the drums were going twenty strong and the ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 18 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... wagon in the distance with one—yes, two—Shaker bonnets in it. Bessie in masquerade! Perhaps so—it could not be the other: that would be too horrible. But she was coming, surely coming, and the cold prim sister had told ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Vol. XII. No. 31. October, 1873. • Various
... Meeting of Aberdeen Friends in 1692 a "weighty paper containing several heads of solid advyces and Counsells to friends" sent by Irish Quakers, was read. These counsels abound with amusingly prim suggestions. Among them is the warning to "take heed of being overcome with strong drink or tobacco, which many by custome are brought into bondag to the creature." The Aberdeen Friends themselves a little later ...
— The Social History of Smoking • G. L. Apperson
... religion. It is not like the Protestant religion at Court at all. All that the Protestants do there is to hear sermons—it is all so dismal and noisy. But here, with you, you have a proper soul. It seems to me that you are like a little herb-garden, very prim and plain, but living and wholesome and pleasant to walk in at sunset. And these Protestants that I know are more like a paved court at noon—all hot and hard and glaring. They give me the headache. Tell me all ...
— By What Authority? • Robert Hugh Benson
... the day's floral offerings. A sweet and crushed mixture they were, pansies, clove-pinks, mignonette, bleeding hearts, bachelors' buttons, all short stemmed and minus any saving touch of green, but true love offerings for all that. Wordless gifts most of them, prim little bunches, hot from tight clasping in chubby hands, shyly and swiftly deposited on "Teacher's desk" when the back of that divinity was turned. The blue bowl took kindly to them all, and as the girl's clever fingers ...
— Up the Hill and Over • Isabel Ecclestone Mackay
... other denizens of the old building, it will suffice out of a large household to mention the prim, respectable, and capable Ames, and Mrs. Allen, a buxom and cheerful person, who relieved the lady of some of her household cares. The other six servants in the house bear no relation to the events of the night ...
— The Valley of Fear • Arthur Conan Doyle
... our ancestors of two or three generations off - the heroes and heroines of Jane Austen, in their pantaloons and high-waisted, short-skirted frocks, their pigtails and powdered hair, their sandalled shoes, and Hessian boots. Our near connection with them entrances our self-esteem. Their prim manners, their affected bows and courtesies, the 'dear Mr. So-and-So' of the wife to her husband, the 'Sir' and 'Madam' of the children to their parents, make us wonder whether their flesh and blood were ever as warm as ours; or whether they were a ...
— Tracks of a Rolling Stone • Henry J. Coke
... vaccination and fresh air! or a reading of John Gilpin or the Pied Piper. Mamsey, you know a model parish stifles me. I can't stand your prim school-children, drilled in the Catechism, and your old women who get out the Bible and the clean apron when they see you a quarter of a mile off. Free air and open minds for me! No, I won't have you sighing, mother. You have returned to your native element, and you ...
— More Bywords • Charlotte M. Yonge
... It was no fault of mine. I even got a prim warning that it became me not to meddle about her ladies, and I doubted what slanders you might hear if I were seen asking your ...
— The Caged Lion • Charlotte M. Yonge
... in this life, day by day, I become more of a bewildered child; I cannot get used to this world, to procreation, to heredity, to sight, to hearing, the commonest things are a burthen. The prim, obliterated, polite surface of life, and the broad, bawdy and orgiastic—or maenadic—foundations, form a spectacle to which no habit reconciles me. R. L. Stevenson: ...
— The Varieties of Religious Experience • William James
... (as he jestingly called it) consisted of the girl, two spinsters (Prudence and Angelina Jedson), prim and doubtful of the world, and the young man who appeared to be considerably the worse for ...
— The Ragged Edge • Harold MacGrath
... proprietor coughed in embarrassment and motioned to a prim, thin-faced woman in the front room who came forward with fidgety shyness, begging the gentlemen to forgive her if she had done wrong, but there was something on her conscience and she couldn't sleep without ...
— Through the Wall • Cleveland Moffett
... John Melton, of Philadelphia," he shouted, and looked back to address them more directly. Alas, the pistols reposed in the pockets of the two prim aprons, the lantern smoked askew at Aunt Sarah's waist, and both women were holding their hands ...
— The Wit and Humor of America, Volume V. (of X.) • Various
... were open to all kinds of insult, there were women brave enough to refuse to barter their souls for the animal comforts of food and shelter. Speaking about "old maids," by which term we mean now a prim, fussy person, it is well to remember that there are male "old maids" as well as female who remain so all through life; also that many "old maids" marry, ...
— In Times Like These • Nellie L. McClung
... of the tea table. Her wit, her effervescence, her whimsicalities amused even the prim Miss Frances. When she recounted the exploit of the camouflaged fan, Cutty and Harrison laughed so loudly that the nurse had to put her linger on her lips. They ...
— The Drums Of Jeopardy • Harold MacGrath
... a surfeit, William Lilly was the oracle to be consulted. His almanacks were spelled over in the tavern and quoted in the senate; they nerved the arm of the soldier, and rounded the periods of the orator. The fashionable beauty, dashing along in her calash from St. James's or the Mall, and the prim, starched dame, from Watling-street or Bucklersbury, with a staid foot-boy, in a plush jerkin, plodding behind her—the reigning toast among 'the men of wit about town,' and the leading groaner in a tabernacle concert—glided alternately into the study ...
— William Lilly's History of His Life and Times - From the Year 1602 to 1681 • William Lilly
... Juan Prim, inspector of preventive service, gave information to the Government and revenue board in Madrid, on the 22d of November 1841, that having attempted to make a seizure of contraband goods in the town of Estepona, in the province of Malaga, where he was aware a large quantity of smuggled ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Vol. 53, No. 331, May, 1843 • Various
... no sense of surprise. This palace, that loomed so large in his imagination, was a house built of the soft stone of the country, mellowed by time. It looked dismal enough from the street, and inside it was extremely plain; there was the usual provincial courtyard—chilly, prim, and neat; and the house itself was sober, almost ...
— Lost Illusions • Honore De Balzac
... said. She opened a funny old chest in the corner of the spacious, high studded chamber. "And here are some of the dolls that I play with." She produced a manikin dressed primly after the manner of eighteen-thirty, prim parted hair over a small head festooned with ringlets, a fichu, and mits painted on her fingers. "Beulah," she said with a mischievous flash of a grimace at Eleanor. "Gertrude,"—a dashing young brunette in riding clothes. "Jimmie,"—a curly haired dandy. "David,"—a serious creature ...
— Turn About Eleanor • Ethel M. Kelley
... and scrub-oaks intertwine Safe from the plough, whose rough, discordant stone 80 Is massed to one soft gray by lichens fine, The tangled blackberry, crossed and recrossed, weaves A prickly network of ensanguined leaves; Hard by, with coral beads, the prim black-alders shine. ...
— The Vision of Sir Launfal - And Other Poems • James Russell Lowell
... by way of inheritance, cast covetous eyes on this snug corner, and her fingers itched to make it bright and cosy with chintz curtains and bowls of flowers, and a shelf or two of old china. The musty farm parlour, looking out on to a prim, cheerless garden imprisoned within high, blank walls, was not a room that lent itself readily ...
— Beasts and Super-Beasts • Saki
... are so preachy, you are so good-natured, you believe all the prim things that grown people say!" exclaimed Becky. "What would you say if you never went to Boston but once, and then had the toothache all the time? You have been everywhere, and you think it's great fun to stay a little while in poky old Tideshead, ...
— Betty Leicester - A Story For Girls • Sarah Orne Jewett
... know you've been awfully good to me always, and taken care of me since mamma died and all, but if it is so dreadful to play ball and skate and do things like that, why did you let me in the first place? I hate to sew and do worsted work and be prim, but perhaps, if you had brought me up that way I might have got so I could stand it. Don't you think if you had begun when I was a baby I might have? I don't want to have people hate me—honestly, I don't. When they talk to me, and ...
— The Governess • Julie M. Lippmann
... about, Cutter would offer one of them a quarter to hold the stop-watch, and then drive off, saying he had no change and would "fix it up next time." No one could cut his lawn or wash his buggy to suit him. He was so fastidious and prim about his place that a boy would go to a good deal of trouble to throw a dead cat into his back yard, or to dump a sackful of tin cans in his alley. It was a peculiar combination of old-maidishness and licentiousness that made Cutter ...
— My Antonia • Willa Sibert Cather
... and a singularly quaint-looking personage presented himself. He was very stiff and prim in his appearance; dressed in a blue coat and scarlet waistcoat, with a rich bandanna handkerchief tied very neatly round his neck, and a very new hat, to which his head ...
— The Young Duke • Benjamin Disraeli
... later. Every few hours, during same three or four days, a very prim and devout-looking Episcopal clergyman, with a cast in his eye, had visited Alonzo. According to his card, he was the Rev. Melton Hargrave, of Cincinnati. He said he had retired from the ministry on account of his health. If he had said on account of ill-health, he would probably have erred, to judge ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... cheerily, as I sank into the seat beside him, and Bess and Owen climbed in behind us. Owen's chauffeur took Judge Rutherford in Owen's car, and Annette perched her prim self on the ...
— The Golden Bird • Maria Thompson Daviess
... turkey be smuggled by a trusty darkey from some restaurant outside; and it was but the work of a moment after taps to tack a blanket over the window, light the gas, and bring out a dilapidated pack of cards for a game of California Jack or draw-poker; or to convert the prim pine table into a billiard-table, with marbles for balls, with which the ownership of many a collar, neckerchief, shirt, and other articles of none too plentiful wardrobes, were decided in a twinkling, while the air of the crowded room grew thick and stifling from the smoke of the forbidden ...
— The Bay State Monthly - Volume 1, Issue 4 - April, 1884 • Various
... their inspired hours, fitted by genius and culture to mingle as an equal in the most refined circles of Europe, and yet her youth and early womanhood had passed away amid the very decent, yet drudging, descendants of the prim Puritans. Trained among those who could have discerned her peculiar power, and early fed with the fruits of beauty for which her spirit pined, she would have developed into one of the finest lyrists, romancers and ...
— Memoirs of Margaret Fuller Ossoli, Vol. II • Margaret Fuller Ossoli
... no emotion save amusement. Miss Guile was watching through half-closed eyes. There was a noticeable stiffening of the prim figure of ...
— The Prince of Graustark • George Barr McCutcheon
... She was a prim little woman, with honest blue eyes that sometimes made men think of their sins, and when Dusty Rhodes perceived that he had gone a bit too far he endeavored ...
— Wunpost • Dane Coolidge
... hugely one notable evidence of his persuasive eloquence to be seen in a Lebanon Valley town, inhabited by the quaint folk known as Pennsylvania Germans. All along the line of the railroad traversing this valley may be seen these distorted willows decorating the prim front yards, and they are not so offensive when used with other shrubs and trees. In this one instance, however, the tree agent evidently found a customer who was persuaded that if one Kilmarnock willow was a good thing to have, ...
— Getting Acquainted with the Trees • J. Horace McFarland
... not permit it, of course not! We were brought up very particularly in Miss Simpson's, I can assure you." This with a prim tightening of her lips and a severity that any other than our dreamer would have understood. To Nan there came a delight in this play with an intelligence she knew so keen, though different from her own. It was with a holiday feeling she laughed and shone, mischievously eyeing him and trying him ...
— Gilian The Dreamer - His Fancy, His Love and Adventure • Neil Munro
... willows; the few fir trees hold themselves stiffly up, as though in pride at this triumph of the vegetable over the animal; and the great bushes of faded geranium only throw into relief the regular lines of limestone mounds, each with its prim wooden cross of advertisement. Always an ugly and a dreary place, it was, when I saw it a few days after the relief, more dreary than ever; for the sun, whose presence makes the difference of a season in this ...
— The Relief of Mafeking • Filson Young
... go out and see her first," she thought, smoothing down with a large, bony hand the folds of her rather prim white cambric dress. She was a very stupid woman, and not a passionate one; therefore the agony of pain of a loving, jealous wife was quite unknown to her. But she was malignant, as such people usually are. She loved making ...
— Six Women • Victoria Cross
... It is not dignified. The Baroness Von Aschersleben would be shocked," said the princess with a somewhat prim air. ...
— The Terrible Twins • Edgar Jepson
... hand. He delivered the letter which had been entrusted to him, before he went down the hill. There are many men like Big Louie who are pitifully faithful until events outstrip their intellects. Steve was sorry for him; and a half hour later, after he had read Miss Sarah's prim note requesting his presence at dinner at seven-thirty, Christmas eve, he grew sorrier still while he watched the ill-assorted trio meet once more, blanket-packs upon their backs and snow-shoes on their feet. Big Louie had joined the other two from the direction of the ...
— Then I'll Come Back to You • Larry Evans
... melancholy place than the street in which you have lived; than the house, now curtainless and weather-stained, you knew prim, and full of happy human creatures; than the "banquet-hall deserted:" than the empty chair; than the bed where Death found ...
— The Cockaynes in Paris - 'Gone abroad' • Blanchard Jerrold
... Gascon half-naivete, half-jest which Mlle. de Scudery's Norman shrewdness[203] would hardly have allowed. There is also much more of the supernatural in these books than in hers, and the characters are much less prim. Roxana, who, of course, is meant to be naughty, actually sends a bracelet of her hair to Oroondates! which, however, that faithful lover ...
— A History of the French Novel, Vol. 1 - From the Beginning to 1800 • George Saintsbury
... bearing on the successful revolution inaugurated by Prim is worth relating, as it deals with an episode of Spanish politics which is repeated almost every other year with slender variations. The play is the same; the scene and the dramatis personae are merely shifted. One of the ...
— Romantic Spain - A Record of Personal Experiences (Vol. II) • John Augustus O'Shea
... Rider sighed at the word. Comfortable! Was she to give her mind to making Fred and his children comfortable—such a creature as this? Involuntarily it occurred to Edward that, under such ministrations, sundry changes might come over the aspect of that prim apartment in which he had seen her first; the room with the bookcase and the red curtains, and the prints over the mantelpiece—a very tidy, comfortable room before any bewitching imp came to haunt it, and whisper suspicions of its imperfection—the doctor's own retirement, ...
— The Doctor's Family • Mrs. (Margaret) Oliphant
... see?... My doll... Mimi... You see..." was all Natasha managed to utter (to her everything seemed funny). She leaned against her mother and burst into such a loud, ringing fit of laughter that even the prim visitor ...
— War and Peace • Leo Tolstoy
... in the shape of brother, spouse, or courier, ordered their outgoings and incomings; but liberty the most entire was theirs, and they enjoyed it heartily. Wisely and well too; for, though off the grand route, they behaved themselves in public as decorously as if the eyes of all prim Boston were upon them, and proved by their triumphant success, that the unprotected might go where they liked, if they conducted themselves with the ...
— Shawl-Straps - A Second Series of Aunt Jo's Scrap-Bag • Louisa M. Alcott
... mysterious picture in the drawing-room was a portrait, but, it must be confessed, with a little curiosity to view the first specimen of the sex who lived under the roof of Mr. Beckendorff. Clara was a hale old woman, with rather an acid expression of countenance, prim in her appearance, and evidently precise in her manners. She placed a bottle and two wine-glasses with long, thin stems on the table; and having removed the game and changed the plates, ...
— Vivian Grey • The Earl of Beaconsfield
... dancing to some hidden string," the teacher remarked once to Miss Rodgers. "She mayn't be strong-minded but she's immensely warm-hearted, and if we can only pull the love-string she'll act the part we want. You can't force her into prim behavior; she's as much a child of nature as the birds, and if you clip her wings altogether you take away from her the very gift that perhaps God meant her to use. Let me have the handling of the little sky-rocket, ...
— The Jolliest School of All • Angela Brazil
... side of politics with her gudeman—Ex-sergeant in the Black Watch, and once Orderly to Garth himself—brings out her ain bottle from the spence—a hollow square, and green as emerald. Bless the gurgle of its honest mouth! With prim lips mine hostess kisses the glass, previously letting fall a not inelegant curtsy—for she had, we now learned, been a lady's maid in her youth to one who is indeed a lady, all the time her lover was abroad in the army, in Egypt, Ireland, and the West ...
— Recreations of Christopher North, Volume 2 • John Wilson
... pure Chicagoese, Jennie, into which I occasionally lapse even here in prim Vienna. I would like to see a good baseball match, with the Chicago nine going strong. Let us abandon this effete monarchy, Jennie, and pay a visit ...
— Jennie Baxter, Journalist • Robert Barr
... it's vulgar. You can't sell a sweet-scented, prim old-maidy newspaper to enough people to pay for the z's in one font of type. People are vulgar. Don't forget that. And you've got to make a newspaper to suit them. Lesson ...
— The Clarion • Samuel Hopkins Adams
... man's labour had reclaimed from these. That was a meet place indeed for the meditation of a quiet hour, and no more grateful refuge can be conceived than such a shady grove at the height of noon. You must not fancy an expanse of dusty land lined with prim rows of plants in the formal style of a nursery garden; but, spread over the lower slopes of the valleys, spacious woods of clean, grey-stemmed trees, with overarching branches thinned to cast a diaphanous shade over the sea of lustrous dark leaves below. The shrubs ...
— Apologia Diffidentis • W. Compton Leith
... literature, and use a great deal of French in their conversation: they have something of romance in their composition, and have been known to marry for love. In short, there is in their whole nature, a more roving, liberal, Continental character of dissipation, than belongs to the cold, tame, dull, prim, hedge-clipped indolence of more national exquisitism. Into this set, out of the other set, fell young Godolphin; and oh! the merry mornings at actresses' houses; the jovial suppers after the play; the buoyancy, the brilliancy, ...
— Godolphin, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... of these houses—a prim, thin-looking house, too tall for its breadth—lived a maiden lady, well known by some of the Thetford folk, not indeed unknown to any, for she had made her home in the town for many years. Her name was Miss Mildmay, or to be quite correct, Miss Alison Mildmay. For the actual ...
— Robin Redbreast - A Story for Girls • Mary Louisa Molesworth
... kept a school, and her portrait would have done very well for a frontispiece to Mrs Trimmer. She was what is called prim in her manner, and as delicate as an American. She always called the legs of a table its props—for the word legs was highly unfeminine. She admired talent, and gave it vast quantities of tea and toast. Her drawing-room ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, No. CCCXLII. Vol. LV. April, 1844 • Various
... parched face; to him the crooked mouth was straight; and ever since Savaron, by taking him into his service, had brought him so near to the Wattevilles' house, he had laid siege systematically to the maid, who was as prim and sanctimonious as her mistress, and who, like every ugly old maid, was far more ...
— Albert Savarus • Honore de Balzac
... life. This sober Flemish interior expresses my mistress's character almost as well as her own apartment used to do. I always experienced a chill, a sense of formality, when the door was opened, and while I stood waiting for her in the prim drawing-room. Every chair was in its appointed place, large, gilt-edged, illustrated books lay upon the tables.... There was not much light in her rooms; heavy curtains clung about the windows, and tapestries covered the walls. In the passage there were oak chests, and you ...
— Memoirs of My Dead Life • George Moore
... you tell me, Mr. Prim, why it is that almost all Northern people who come South to live become more Southern than the Southerners themselves; and that almost all Southern people who go North to live remain just ...
— Baddeck and That Sort of Thing • Charles Dudley Warner
... undignified attitude as he was dragged through the dust, clinging desperately to the frayed end of the broken rope. So she scrambled nimbly to her place on the running board, and there Mr. Haskell found her sitting prim and decorous when he had finally recovered his breath and made himself sufficiently presentable to face ...
— Tabitha's Vacation • Ruth Alberta Brown
... down the flaps of their cocked hats into slouching, and we must say, most slovenly circular brims. There was a sort of free-and-easy look affected in that day about the head, totally at enmity with the prim rigidity of the cocked beaver; you might have taken off your chapeau rond, as it then came to be called, and you might have sat on it—it would have been never the worse; but not so with its stiff old father—no liberties were to be taken with him; once sit ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine — Volume 57, No. 351, January 1845 • Various
... walked steadily on the whole day without any adventure, but when the dew was beginning to fall through the twilight she came to a short, shady reach of lane, at the end of which stood, in a green nook, a small, prim white cottage with two peaked windows and a door to match. That, at least, is how it would under ordinary circumstances have presented itself to a passer-by. Just then, however, nobody would have noticed anything about it except the fact that out of the open door thick coils of ...
— Strangers at Lisconnel • Barlow Jane
... England. The stuffed buckram of Johnsonese had been succeeded by the mincing hifalutin of Mrs. Anne Radcliffe and her like. It is at least to Irving's credit that his taste led him back half a century to the comparative simplicity and purity of the prim Augustan style. But it is odd that it should have been for this acquired manner that the world thought it liked him while he lived, and has chiefly praised ...
— Washington Irving • Henry W. Boynton
... place to his two Grandsons, his widowed Daughter's Children, Edward and John Phillips, whom my Husband led in to me just now. Two plainer Boys I never sett Eyes on; the one weak-eyed and puny, the other prim and puritanicall—no more to be compared to our sweet Robin! . . . After a few Words, they retired to theire Books; and my Husband, taking my Hand, sayd in his kindliest Manner,—"And now I leave my sweete Moll to the pleasant Companie of her own goode and innocent Thoughtes; and, ...
— Mary Powell & Deborah's Diary • Anne Manning
... destroyed, but a curious and rather pathetic thing is that, although it must be a hundred years since the place was deserted, there are still multitudes of flowers which must have come from those in the old garden. There are iris and narcissus and a little blue flower, with a neat, prim, clean smell that makes one feel as if it ought to be put with lavender into chests of fresh old linen. The narcissus in particular was growing around everywhere, together with real wild flowers like ...
— Letters to His Children • Theodore Roosevelt
... she would be like; and their ideas of her so nearly approached the truth, that she almost seemed to be an old acquaintance as she came to the door as the carriage stopped. She was a tall, upright, elderly lady, with a kind, but very decided face, and a certain prim look about her ...
— The Young Buglers • G.A. Henty
... Lanyard was, like all London, on terms of visual acquaintance. The reigning beauty of the hour, her portrait was enjoying a vogue of its own in the public prints. Furthermore, Lady Diantha Mainwaring was moderately the talk of the town, in those prim, remotely ante-bellum days—thanks to high spirits and a whimsical tendency to flout the late Victorian proprieties; something which, however, had yet to lead her into any prank ...
— Red Masquerade • Louis Joseph Vance
... interest into social converse, and some superfluous money to give to the needy, and to buy books. For it is not pleasant when the heart is opened by compassion, and the head active in arranging plans of usefulness, to have a prim urchin continually twitching back the elbow to prevent the hand from drawing out an almost empty purse, whispering at the same time some prudential maxim about ...
— A Vindication of the Rights of Woman - Title: Vindication of the Rights of Women • Mary Wollstonecraft [Godwin]
... long past, heavy and covered in brown morocco, and the big writing-table, behind which the great doctor would sit blinking at his patient through the circular gold-rimmed glasses, that gave him a somewhat Teutonic appearance, was noted for its prim neatness and orderly array. On the one side was an adjustable couch; on the other a bookcase with glass doors containing a number of instruments which were, however, not visible because of curtains of green ...
— The Seven Secrets • William Le Queux
... detail seemed to have escaped his cunning calculation. Though the door leading from the verandah into the reception hall swung wide to the balmy airs of late Spring the prowler passed this blatant invitation to the hospitality of the House of Prim. It was as though he knew that from his place at the head of the table, with his back toward the great fire place which is the pride of the Prim dining hall, Jonas Prim commands a view of the major portion of the ...
— The Oakdale Affair • Edgar Rice Burroughs
... young men fond of natural science. One of these was Ainsworth, who afterwards published his travels in Assyria; he was a Wernerian geologist, and knew a little about many subjects. Dr. Coldstream was a very different young man, prim, formal, highly religious, and most kind-hearted; he afterwards published some good zoological articles. A third young man was Hardie, who would, I think, have made a good botanist, but died early in India. Lastly, Dr. Grant, my senior by several years, but how ...
— The Life and Letters of Charles Darwin, Volume I • Francis Darwin
... nearer?" Her "little" and her "us" came straight from Paddington. These things were no false note for him—his difficulty absorbed them all. The eyes with which he pressed her, and in the depths of which she read terror and rage and literal tears, were just the same he would have shown any other prim person. ...
— In the Cage • Henry James
... me in the midst of these solitudes. My Arabs were busy with their bread; Mysseri rattling tea-cups; the little kettle, with her odd old-maidish looks, sat humming away old songs about England; and two or three yards from the fire my tent stood prim and tight, with open portal, and with welcoming look, like “the old arm-chair” of our lyrist’s ...
— Eothen • A. W. Kinglake
... like a regiment of cavalry on the turnpike road t'other side of the hill. And then up the wind got again, and swept the rain away, and took it all in its own hand again, and went on roaring worse than ever. 'You 'll be wet afore you get across the yard, Samuel,' said auntie, looking very prim in her long white apron, as she sat on the other side of the little round table before the fire, sipping a drop of hot rum and water, which she always had before she went to bed. 'You'll be wet to the skin, Samuel,' she said. 'Never mind,' says I. 'I'm not ...
— Annals of a Quiet Neighbourhood • George MacDonald
... windows, beyond which large greenish flies were buzzing around the branch of a mulberry tree in the alley, Gabriella was trying a purple hat on a prim-looking lady who regarded herself in the mirror with a furtive and deprecating air as if she were afraid of being unjustly blamed for her appearance. "I'm not sure—but I don't think it suits me exactly," she appeared to murmur in a strangled ...
— Life and Gabriella - The Story of a Woman's Courage • Ellen Glasgow
... and round if they went on, and feeling that Clara thought her old-maidish, and could not enter into her sense that, the balance-weight being gone, gusts of wind ought to be avoided. She sat wondering whether she herself was prim and old-maidish, or whether she was right in feeling it a duty to expostulate and deliver ...
— Magnum Bonum • Charlotte M. Yonge
... And the little girl stood at attention, very prim, apparently very watchful, toes ...
— Ben Blair - The Story of a Plainsman • Will Lillibridge
... his word, packed up his portmanteau, and paid his bill. He had just completed this heavy operation, when somebody wanted to speak to him, and a sort of half-clerical, half-legal sort of looking gentleman was introduced, who, with a starched face and prim air, said that he came to request in writing the name of the officer who was dressed as a devil in the masquerade of the ...
— Mr. Midshipman Easy • Captain Frederick Marryat
... other modes of expression of lofty thought and rapt feeling require not only a free outlet but natural and unrestrained surroundings. The true poet is at home in the forest or on the mountain rather than in prim parterres. The philosopher sees most clearly and reasons most suggestively, when his faculties are not cramped by the need of observing political rules and police regulations. And the historian, when he is tied down to a mere investigation and recital of facts, without reference to ...
— The Life of Napoleon I (Volumes, 1 and 2) • John Holland Rose
... mile from the city, so the dirt will not annoy you; and you will meet such pleasant people there that you will not mind the smoke. I am sure, Mary, you will come away quite in love with Limeton, and prefer it to this prim ...
— The Four Canadian Highwaymen • Joseph Edmund Collins
... into my room some morning early and look out to the gate, the cobwebs must be diamond-sprinkled on the circle at the doorway, the catalpa trees must stand like stiff, prim, proper, knickerbockered footmen, on either side of the hedge, the ground must rise in a very gradual swell and culminate in the rose- covered gate. Throw it a kiss for me—(I wonder if there could be any ...
— The Letters of Franklin K. Lane • Franklin K. Lane
... where he treated them with truly romantic truculence. He was himself always, moreover, and ideally cared as little for nature as a fairy-story teller. In this sense he was more romantic than the romanticists. His "Automedon," his portrait of General Prim, even his "Salome," are wilful in a degree that is either superb or superficial, as one looks at them; but at any rate they are romantic a outrance. At the same time it was unmistakably the aspect of things rather than their ...
— French Art - Classic and Contemporary Painting and Sculpture • W. C. Brownell
... you were much sought after," said Clelia, with a prim shyness not like her own stormy confession. Sabrina, with her white hair and her young face seemed somehow set apart from love and the sweet uses ...
— Country Neighbors • Alice Brown
... town itself is beautiful, and pleases most when one's back is turned to it. It must be very ancient, for I well remember that five years ago, when I matriculated there (and shortly after received notice to quit), it had already the same gray, prim look, and was fully furnished with catch-polls, beadles, dissertations, thes dansants, washerwomen, compendiums, roasted pigeons, Guelphic orders, graduation coaches, pipe-heads, court-councilors, law-councilors, expelling councilors, ...
— The German Classics of The Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, Vol. VI. • Editor-in-Chief: Kuno Francke
... to enjoy discussing it. Page averred that the whole affair had always passed his comprehension, "—what that ease-loving, vain, indulgent, trivial-minded grandson of Henri Quatre could ever have seen for all those years in that stiff, prim, ...
— The Bent Twig • Dorothy Canfield
... had a fair income, and so this prim, precise, exact and crystallized mode of education was continued. Out of her great love for her child, the mother sent him away from home when he was eight years old. Of course there were tears on both sides; but now a male man must educate him, and women were to be dropped out of the equation—this ...
— Little Journeys To The Homes Of Great Teachers • Elbert Hubbard
... room was ridiculously large! On the smooth white walls reddish shadows moved in a fantastic procession, and from the big chintz-covered lounge the monstrous blue poppies leaped out of the firelight. The high canopy over the bed was draped with prim folds of damask, and the coverlet was of some quaint crocheted work that hung in fringed ends to the floor. Here again from the threadbare velvet carpet the blue poppies stared back ...
— The Miller Of Old Church • Ellen Glasgow
... is deep, that FEESH. So deep I no can understand hims. They tella me much other peoples no can understand hims too. He makee much policee with his Foreign Relations. I ask a much people to tella me who are his Foreign Relations. They laugh great deal and tella me Spain and General PRIM. No knowee Spain countree in Japan. I no tink it much of a countree, no havee muchee—how you call—Commerce. One ting puzzle me great deal. Here much freedom. Sometimes I tink, too much. But that Island—how you ...
— Punchinello, Vol. 1, No. 17, July 23, 1870 • Various
... made any other plans for me to-morrow morning?" inquired Miss Welland in a prim and social tone, belied by the ...
— Success - A Novel • Samuel Hopkins Adams
... door was open; for the girls were afraid of robbers, and left their bed-room door wide open at night, as a natural and obvious means of self-defence. The girls slept together; and the frill of the pale sister's prim little night-cap was buried in the other ...
— In the Yule-Log Glow, Book II - Christmas Tales from 'Round the World • Various
... impossible the demure, prim thing. Sure all the world is hypocrisy Well, I thank my stars, whatsoever sufferings I have, I have none in reputation. I wonder at the men; I could never think her handsome. She has really a good shape and complexion but no mein; and ...
— The Palmy Days of Nance Oldfield • Edward Robins
... glimpses I used to catch of her at that time, slim-legged and swift, and shrilly sweet of voice as a lark, and as shyly a-flutter at the motion of a hand toward her, or else seated prim as any grown maiden, with grave eyes of attention upon her task ...
— The Heart's Highway - A Romance of Virginia in the Seventeeth Century • Mary E. Wilkins
... to buy a house owned by so famous a man," she insinuated gently one day, after vainly trying to awaken a proper enthusiasm in a prim little woman who was talking ...
— The Tangled Threads • Eleanor H. Porter
... only when they were safe back in the sailboat again, going down the bay with their precious freight, the hoarded money all spent and nothing to think of but tiller and sail. I looked at the unworn carpet, the glass vases on the mantelpiece with their prim bunches of bleached swamp grass and dusty marsh rosemary, and I could read the history of Mrs. Tilley's best ...
— The Country of the Pointed Firs • Sarah Orne Jewett
... were seen Good pinners edg'd with colberteen;[4] Her petticoat, transform'd apace, Became black satin, flounced with lace. "Plain Goody" would no longer down, 'Twas "Madam," in her grogram gown. Philemon was in great surprise, And hardly could believe his eyes. Amaz'd to see her look so prim, And she admir'd as much at him. Thus happy in their change of life, Were several years this man and wife: When on a day, which prov'd their last, Discoursing o'er old stories past, They went by chance, amidst their talk, To the churchyard, to take a walk; When Baucis ...
— The Poems of Jonathan Swift, D.D., Volume I (of 2) • Jonathan Swift
... have ever met, and I presume it is attributable to the fact that she has never been thrown with children, and having always associated with older persons, has insensibly imbibed their staid thoughts, and adopted their quiet ways. I should not be more astonished to see my prim puritanical grandmother yonder step down from the frame, and turn a somersault on the carpet, or indulge in leap-frog, than to find Regina guilty of any boisterous hoidenish behaviour, or unrefined, undignified language. If she had been born ...
— Infelice • Augusta Jane Evans Wilson
... "Partant pour la Syrie" Peace conditions "Pekin, Siege of" Pelcoq, Jules, artist Pelletan, Eugene Picard, Ernest Pietri, Prefect Pigeon-Post Piquet, M. Pius IX Pollard family Pontifical Zouaves Pontlieue (Le Mans) Pont-Noyelles, battle of Postal-services, see Balloon, Courier, Pigeon. Prim, General Prussians, not ...
— My Days of Adventure - The Fall of France, 1870-71 • Ernest Alfred Vizetelly
... a rustle of dresses down the stairs outside, and two thin little girls, looking excessively proper and prim, came in with an elderly gentlewoman who was their governess and wore a pince-nez to impart the necessary suggestion of a superior intellect. They were the Miss Mutlows, sisters of one of the day-boarders, ...
— Vice Versa - or A Lesson to Fathers • F. Anstey
... and inquiring eye on me. "I'm Captain Pendarves' housekeeper," she said, with a prim and bridling air, and once more her expression challenged me. "Deny it if you can, sir!" was ...
— McClure's Magazine, Vol 31, No 2, June 1908 • Various
... well enough the way the votes would run; that every grog-shop in the ward was his recruiting station; that all Farnham's tenants would vote against their landlord; that even the respectable Budsey and the prim Scotch gardener were sure for him against their employer. Farnham's conscience which had roused him to this effort against Metzger's corrupt rule, would not permit him to ask for the votes of his own servants and tenants, and he ...
— The Bread-winners - A Social Study • John Hay
... his son to go as well as he did, and Miss Virginia too, poor thing. The knocker seemed to make the house opposite echo very strangely, as I thumped; but when the door was opened in a few minutes, everything in the hall seemed very proper and prim, while the maid who came looked as stiff and disagreeable as ...
— Begumbagh - A Tale of the Indian Mutiny • George Manville Fenn
... a man in the case already." "Oh no," said Father, "country air does her such a lot of good, and when I take the children away for a change I don't forbid any innocent pleasures." My darling Father, I had to keep a tight hand on myself so as not to kiss him then and there. They were all so prim, with their eyes glued to their plates as if they had never eaten rum pudding before. It is true that Ferdinand winked at Marina, but of course she noticed nothing. They soon put away their first helps, and they all took a second, and then they went on ...
— A Young Girl's Diary • An Anonymous Young Girl
... seven Mrs. Alfred appeared. She looked more prim and nice and neat than ever in this black silk dress with old lace on the open square in front and on the ...
— The Beautiful Wretch; The Pupil of Aurelius; and The Four Macnicols • William Black
... behind ears the natural prominence of which was enhanced by her grayish hair being drawn up tightly and rolled into a "bun" on the very top of the head. She was the personification of neatness, if such be the word to characterize the prim stiffness of a flat-figured, elderly spinster. She wore large, square-toed, common-sense shoes, with low heels capped with rubber cushions, which, as I was shortly to discover, had earned for the lady the sobriquet of "Old Gum Heels." What her real name was I never found out. Nobody knew. She ...
— The Long Day - The Story of a New York Working Girl As Told by Herself • Dorothy Richardson
... autumn of 1868 the throne of Spain had been vacant in consequence of a revolution in which General Prim had been the leading actor. It was not easy to discover a successor for the Bourbon Isabella; and after other candidatures had been vainly projected it occurred to Prim and his friends early in 1869 that a suitable candidate ...
— History of Modern Europe 1792-1878 • C. A. Fyffe
... utensils in the kitchen. Left alone for a moment Dagmar recovered her composure and glanced about the room. It seemed almost fragrant in its clean freshness. She had never occupied such a room, with that peculiar, bracing atmosphere. The small mantel with its prim vases looked a veritable home shrine, and the center table with the sprigs of budding lilacs, seemed to the forlorn girl something to reverence. The rag rugs under her feet were so spotless, the curtains so white—it suddenly occurred to the girl these things could not exist in the ...
— The Girl Scout Pioneers - or Winning the First B. C. • Lillian C Garis
... and are therefore less interesting as self-revelations. Prosperity is not always the best condition under which to produce the highest work, and the temperament of Rembrandt was so peculiar that there is little wonder that the prim Dutchmen were not entirely captivated by his exuberant sensuality, or that we ourselves reserve our admiration principally for the more sombre and mysterious products of his later years after misfortune began to fall ...
— Six Centuries of Painting • Randall Davies
... the day, the go-ahead lads of that time, had let down the flaps of their cocked hats into slouching, and we must say, most slovenly circular brims. There was a sort of free-and-easy look affected in that day about the head, totally at enmity with the prim rigidity of the cocked beaver; you might have taken off your chapeau rond, as it then came to be called, and you might have sat on it—it would have been never the worse; but not so with its stiff old father—no ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine — Volume 57, No. 351, January 1845 • Various
... the Protestant religion at Court at all. All that the Protestants do there is to hear sermons—it is all so dismal and noisy. But here, with you, you have a proper soul. It seems to me that you are like a little herb-garden, very prim and plain, but living and wholesome and pleasant to walk in at sunset. And these Protestants that I know are more like a paved court at noon—all hot and hard and glaring. They give me the headache. Tell me all ...
— By What Authority? • Robert Hugh Benson
... of prandial attractions, Littimer tried to occupy himself by looking at the people around him. The omnifarious assembly included pale, prim-whiskered young clerks; shabby, lonely, sallow young women, whose sallowness and shabbiness stamped them with the mark of integrity; other females whose specious splendor was not nearly so reassuring; ...
— Short Story Classics (American) Vol. 2 • Various
... and her father had a discussion as to whom it could be, Raeburn maintaining that it was Thomas a Kempis. Wishing to verify it, Erica went to a bookseller's and asked for the "Imitation of Christ." A rather prim-looking dame ...
— We Two • Edna Lyall
... I met and loved in that brief month in Paris, I cherish tenderer memories. Prim little Pauline Deschapelles! How clearly I can still see the respectable brass plate on the door of your little flat—"Mademoiselle Deschapelles—Modes et Robes;" and indeed the "modes et robes" were true enough. For you were in truth a very hard-working ...
— The Quest of the Golden Girl • Richard le Gallienne
... important men who were heirs to some snug country property, and their gambrel-roofed houses odorous with traditions of old-time visits by some worthies of the Colonial period, or of the Revolution. The good, prim dames, in starched caps and spectacles, who presided over such houses, were proud of their tidy parlors,—of their old India china,—of their beds of thyme and sage in the garden,—of their big Family Bible with brazen clasps,—and, ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 15, No. 88, February, 1865 • Various
... adventurers would beat in the long run, but they would go home not wholly unlearned. Should they stay to a turkey-shoot, they would see in it the Occidental analogue of their own public matches—more picturesque, if not quite so prim and scientific. Strictly, it presupposes conditions non-existent in England—a community, for instance, first of hunters, and second of hunters with ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science Vol. XV., No. 85. January, 1875. • Various
... asked if Clem meant Mr. Fulmort of St. Matthew's, Whittingtonia, and when he said "Yes, he lived in the clergy house," he began regularly to play him off, asking the most absurd questions about fasts and feasts and vigils and decorations, and Clem answered them all in his prim little self-sufficient way, just as if he thought he was on the high- road to be St. Clement the Martyr, till I was ready ...
— The Pillars of the House, V1 • Charlotte M. Yonge
... Although the Duke was enemie to him, Yet he most Christian-like laments his death: And for my selfe, Foe as he was to me, Might liquid teares, or heart-offending groanes, Or blood-consuming sighes recall his Life; I would be blinde with weeping, sicke with grones, Looke pale as Prim-rose with blood-drinking sighes, And all to haue the Noble Duke aliue. What know I how the world may deeme of me? For it is knowne we were but hollow Friends: It may be iudg'd I made the Duke away, So shall my name with Slanders tongue be wounded, ...
— The First Folio [35 Plays] • William Shakespeare
... Lucy Dayton so much disliked and dreaded, was a cousin of Mr. Dayton, and was a prim, matter-of-fact maiden of fifty, or thereabout. That she was still in a state of single blessedness was partially her own fault, for at twenty she was engaged to the son of a wealthy farmer who lived near her father. But, alas! ere the wedding day arrived, there came to the ...
— Homestead on the Hillside • Mary Jane Holmes
... even uglier. Rows of red brick villas in the suburbs of a town in the Midlands are, one would suppose, as hideous as human half-wittedness could invent or endure. But they are different. They are complete; they are, in their way, compact; rounded and finished with an effect that may be prim or smug, but is not raw. The surroundings of them are neat, if it be in a niggling fashion. But American ugliness is not complete even as ugliness. It is broken off short; it is ragged at the edges; even its worthy objects have around them a sort of halo of refuse. Somebody said of the rugged ...
— Gilbert Keith Chesterton • Maisie Ward
... put his five great-coats in front; but was reconciled when little Miss Sharp was made to quit the carriage, and mount up beside him—when he covered her up in one of his Benjamins, and became perfectly good-humoured—how the asthmatic gentleman, the prim lady, who declared upon her sacred honour she had never travelled in a public carriage before (there is always such a lady in a coach—Alas! was; for the coaches, where are they?), and the fat widow with the brandy-bottle, took their places inside—how the porter asked them all ...
— Vanity Fair • William Makepeace Thackeray
... becoming—rather—are they not?" And here, having arranged the glasses in the ordinary form of spectacles, I applied them gingerly in their proper position; while Madame Simpson, adjusting her cap, and folding her arms, sat bolt upright in her chair, in a somewhat stiff and prim, and indeed, in ...
— The Works of Edgar Allan Poe - Volume 3 (of 5) of the Raven Edition • Edgar Allan Poe
... not at all as you and I had imagined it to be. There is no high wall around it as there is at Fort Trumbull. It reminds one of a prim little village built around a square, in the center of which is a high flagstaff and a big cannon. The buildings are very low and broad and are made of adobe—a kind of clay and mud mixed together—and the walls are very thick. At every window are heavy wooden shutters, ...
— Army Letters from an Officer's Wife, 1871-1888 • Frances M.A. Roe
... tower door. Kindly tell her, Augustina, that I will let her have the key of it. And kindly tell her also—as from yourself, of course—that she will be treating us all with courtesy if she does come home at a reasonable hour. We have been a very quiet, prim household all these years, and Mrs. Denton, for all her virtues, has ...
— Helbeck of Bannisdale, Vol. I. • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... twisted yews, no weeping willows; the few fir trees hold themselves stiffly up, as though in pride at this triumph of the vegetable over the animal; and the great bushes of faded geranium only throw into relief the regular lines of limestone mounds, each with its prim wooden cross of advertisement. Always an ugly and a dreary place, it was, when I saw it a few days after the relief, more dreary than ever; for the sun, whose presence makes the difference of a season in ...
— The Relief of Mafeking • Filson Young
... in her behaviour, and such a laughing hoyden! Pastorella had with him the allowance of being blameless; but what was that towards being praiseworthy? To be only innocent is not to be virtuous! He afterwards spoke so much against Mrs. Dipple's forehead, Mrs. Prim's mouth, Mrs. Dentifrice's teeth, and Mrs. Fidget's cheeks that she grew downright in love with him; for it is always to be understood that a lady takes all you detract from the rest of her sex to be a gift to her. In a word, things went so far that I was dismissed. The next, as I said, ...
— Isaac Bickerstaff • Richard Steele
... orchard out in back where grew the apples which sometimes gave her an "upset"; the garden where grandpa spent hours and hours "cultivating" his vegetables; and grandma's own particular garden, which was given over to tall gaudy hollyhocks, and prim rows of verbena, snap-dragon, phlox, spicy pinks, heliotrope, and other flowers such as ...
— Missy • Dana Gatlin
... told you, has hardly any garden; having the sea, it doesn't need one. But there is a little formal place about twenty paces across, set, as it were, in the heart of the House. A small prim square, bounded on the north, south and east by the House itself, and on the west by the cliff and the sea. There is a stone balustrade to divide the garden from space. In the middle of the square is a stone basin with becalmed water-lilies ...
— This Is the End • Stella Benson
... less jealous arrangement of drapery which the Beauty of the last century had insisted on as presenting her most fittingly to the artist. She rolled up the sleeves of her dress, she turned down its prim collar and neck, and glanced from her glass to the portrait, from the portrait back to the glass. Myrtle was not blind nor dull, though young, and in many things untaught. She did not say in so many words, "I too am a beauty," ...
— The Guardian Angel • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.
... "Take off that prim little cap. Tie up your hair with black ribbon, and put on a blouse. Then you will be ...
— Little Folks (July 1884) - A Magazine for the Young • Various
... dramatic entertainment censored by a frail, prim little thing like Miss Beach tickled his burly sense of humor. "It would be a horrible thing if I should go to see anything vulgar, wouldn't it?" he observed. "But I think I'll take a chance. ...
— The Real Adventure • Henry Kitchell Webster
... who once a week thumped it for an hour and the sum of two-and-sixpence gathered her shawl about her and tied the ribbons of her bonnet beneath her pointed chin: the little girls were also enshawled by prim figures who now materialised from the shadowy seats where they had waited for this moment; and the boys, with a hurried touching of caps to Mr. Eliot, went clattering out through the flagged and panelled passage into the High Street. Hilaria, by the ...
— Secret Bread • F. Tennyson Jesse
... I don't know what Uncle Win would do with a little girl! Miss Recompense Gardiner keeps the house, and she's as prim as the crimped edge of an apple pie. And there is ...
— A Little Girl in Old Boston • Amanda Millie Douglas
... problem of his calling gradually became a standing vexation. It fell under the class of conundrums, and one remembered from childhood that it is mean to be told the answer; so I could not say to Mister Perkins—for it was characteristic of the prim little man that no properly constituted person could have said Perkins—"By the way, what is your line of things?" or any more ...
— McClure's Magazine, Volume VI, No. 3. February 1896 • Various
... to have them at fifty," replied Elise; "you'll be such a charming middle-aged lady, Patty. A little prim, perhaps, ...
— Patty in Paris • Carolyn Wells
... bye," said Dymock, "the question is, what is to be done now? I am afraid that aunt Margaret will look prim and stately if I carry the little one up to the Tower; however, I see not what else to do. Who is afraid? But put your fire out, Shanty, and come with us. You shall carry the bantling, and I will take the lanthorn. Mayhap, aunt Margaret may think this arrangement the more genteel ...
— Shanty the Blacksmith; A Tale of Other Times • Mrs. Sherwood [AKA: Mrs. Mary Martha Sherwood]
... Davis are sitting on that bench, smoking tobacco from long silver pipes; and by them are Fenton and Wishington, who have both tried to follow Drake's path around the world, and failed, though by no fault of their own. The short, prim man, in the huge yellow ruff, is Richard Hawkins, the admiral's hereafter ...
— Ten Great Events in History • James Johonnot
... they ended. The cinders went on another ten feet and petered out. Beyond, the fields closed in. Brett looked up at the sun. It was lower now in the west, its light getting yellow and late-afternoonish. He turned and looked back at the train. The cars stood high and prim, empty, silent. He walked back, climbed in, got his bag down from the rack, pulled on his jacket. He jumped down to the cinders, followed them to where they ended. He hesitated a moment, then pushed between the knee-high stalks. Eastward across the field he could ...
— It Could Be Anything • John Keith Laumer
... the most imposing mansion, and often have I seen the old house shining with lights across its whole broadside of windows, and gay with the sound of a dozen French violins. The garden, now a wilderness, was the pride of the island. Its prim arbors, its spring and spring-house, its flowerbeds, where, with infinite pains, a few hardy plants were induced to blossom; its cherry-tree avenue, whose early red fruit the short summer could scarcely ripen; its annual attempts at vegetables, which never came to maturity,—formed ...
— Castle Nowhere • Constance Fenimore Woolson
... for him the danger to which he's exposed from himself?" I asked. "Look out sharp, if he has lately been too prim. He'll presently take a day off, treat us to some exhibition that will ...
— The Coxon Fund • Henry James
... though we were poor I was to take the fresh air," replied the child in a prim little voice, out of which all ...
— A Young Mutineer • Mrs. L. T. Meade
... gradually changed to "Lison." Since the birth of Jeanne she had become "Aunt Lison," a sort of poor relation whom everyone treated with a careless familiarity which hid a good-natured contempt. She was prim and very timid even with her sister and brother-in-law, who liked her as they liked everyone, but whose affection was formed of an indifferent ...
— The works of Guy de Maupassant, Vol. 5 (of 8) - Une Vie and Other Stories • Guy de Maupassant 1850-1893
... do let them have one day in which they can howl and racket and frolic to their hearts' content. A holiday isn't a holiday without plenty of freedom and fun; and they shall have full swing once a week," Mrs. Bhaer used to say, when prim people wondered why banister-sliding, pillow-fights, and all manner of jovial games were allowed under the once ...
— Little Men - Life at Plumfield With Jo's Boys • Louisa May Alcott
... Richard, with something like a sigh. "Out in the country everybody knows everybody else, and outside of a few prim people all are as sociable as can be. But I suppose if one wants to make money one must expect to give up ...
— Richard Dare's Venture • Edward Stratemeyer
... as he imagines it to be? But if independence is indeed a boon,—and I, for one, am too thoroughbred a New Englander ever to doubt it,—it is not the only good, nor even the highest. The nettle, standing straight and prim, asking no favors of anybody, may rail at the grape-vine, which must lay hold of something, small matter what, by which to steady itself; but the nettle might well be willing to forego somewhat of its self-sufficiency, if by so doing ...
— The Foot-path Way • Bradford Torrey
... in the avenue, and who carried upon his arm a half-empty basket of cheap wares. The man was ragged; his toes were thrusting through his shoes; it was evident that he wore no linen, and a week's growth of beard dirtily stubbled his chin,—in a word, he was a man from whom M. Chateaudoux's prim soul positively shrank. M. Chateaudoux went quickly by, fearing to be pestered for alms. The hawker, however, remained seated upon the bench, drawing idle patterns upon the gravel with a hazel stick stolen from ...
— Clementina • A.E.W. Mason
... at the door, and in a few minutes they were deposited before the prim exterior of ...
— The Man Who Knew • Edgar Wallace
... her the Rose Queen," Barlow was communing with himself. For the oval face with its olive skin, as fair as a Kashmiri girl's, was certainly beautiful. The black hair was smoothed back from a wide low forehead, after the habit of the Mahratti women; the prim simplicity of this seeming to add to the girlish effect. A small white-and-gold turban, even with its jauntiness, seemed just the very thing to check the austere simplicity. The girl's eyes, like Ajeet's, were the eyes of some one unafraid, of one born to a caste that felt ...
— Caste • W. A. Fraser
... the Abbess observing, with a prim aspect, that she had read quite enough concerning such worldly vanities, and the Count of Crevecoeur, breaking out, "Aroint thee, deceitful witch!—Why, this device smells rank as the toasted cheese in a rat trap.—Now fie, and double fie, ...
— Quentin Durward • Sir Walter Scott
... Strand, past Villiers, Essex, Salisbury, Northumberland and many more streets whose names tell of vanished splendors, whose dingy lengths are smoke-blackened, and far enough off from the whole aroma of Belgravia, is Craven street. The houses are all of a pattern—prim, dingy, small-windowed habitations, but within this one there must be comfort, for the fire-flames dance on the meek minute panes and a heavy curl of smoke is cutting the air above its square, business-like little chimney-pot. ...
— Lippincott's Magazine, Vol. 22, August, 1878 • Various
... self-respecting and historical village, tolerated no villas. If such abodes ventured to arise, they sprouted timidly in the fields beyond its boundaries. Moreover, the age and history of Highfield Cottage were too widely known for any change of name. The cottage was connected with the high road by a prim little garden and a red-tiled footpath; eight long narrow windows commanded a satisfactory outlook—including Littlecote Hall—a square white mansion withdrawn in dignified retirement behind elms and beeches, in age the contemporary of its ...
— The Road to Mandalay - A Tale of Burma • B. M. Croker
... to the scene of the crime—a high, dingy, narrow-chested house, prim, formal, and solid, like the century which gave it birth. Lestrade's bulldog features gazed out at us from the front window, and he greeted us warmly when a big constable had opened the door and let us in. The ...
— The Return of Sherlock Holmes - Magazine Edition • Arthur Conan Doyle
... about her that neither grief nor poverty could destroy. She was so unmistakably the gentle-woman. In the simple, but dainty white cap, with its floating strings, which modestly covered her dark waving hair, the plain black dress and prim collar fastened with its mourning pin, she made a reposeful picture of the old-fashioned conception of ...
— The Dreamer - A Romantic Rendering of the Life-Story of Edgar Allan Poe • Mary Newton Stanard
... the way the ladies ride, Prim, prim, prim; This is the way the gentlemen ride, Trim, trim, trim. Presently come the country-folks, Hobbledy gee, ...
— The Only True Mother Goose Melodies • Anonymous
... the King of France, and having revenge on their oppressors on the field of Fontenoy. Elsewhere in every country of Europe do we discover them or their descendants in the front ranks, and at the helm of affairs—in Spain, O'Donnell and Prim; in France, Mac Mahon and Lally Tollendal; ...
— Percy Bysshe Shelley as a Philosopher and Reformer • Charles Sotheran
... sudden bursting forth of character and capacity that began with our grandfather! But as I go on in life, day by day, I become more of a bewildered child; I cannot get used to this world, to procreation, to heredity, to sight, to hearing; the commonest things are a burthen. The prim obliterated polite face of life, and the broad, bawdy, and orgiastic—or maenadic—foundations, form a spectacle to which no habit reconciles me; and "I could wish my days to be bound each to each" by the same open-mouthed wonder. They are ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 25 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... at the door. Her eyes were shining with mischief. "You've got a visitor," she said. Maida could see that she was trying to keep her lips prim at the corners. She wondered who it was. Could ...
— Maida's Little Shop • Inez Haynes Irwin
... staid old chaplain, who had often assisted the surgeon and helped to fill cartridges, contributing his own cotton hose for the purpose when those government stores gave out in battle, and who never smiled, even when committing a marine to the briny deep; the purser, too, prim and business-like, looking as if he were a complicated key with an iron lock of his own strong chest, calculating perpetually the amount of dollars deposited in his charge, the total of pay to be deducted therefrom, and never making a mistake save when ...
— Captain Brand of the "Centipede" • H. A. (Henry Augustus) Wise
... this Tape, and was a bright red all over. She was disgustingly prim and formal, and could never bend herself a hair's breadth this way or that way, out of her naturally crooked shape. But, she was very potent in her wicked art. She could stop the fastest thing in the world, change the strongest thing into the weakest, and the most useful into the ...
— Reprinted Pieces • Charles Dickens
... church very often,' said Betty, putting on a prim little air. 'We have several businesses there; but we don't tell every ...
— Odd • Amy Le Feuvre
... his church, and, in short, became quite a demure pastor's wife. Occasionally my old fondness for fun would break out, to the horror of some of his antediluvian flock; but Ernest was very good, and bore patiently with me, and now I am as prim and precise as any old maid of sixty. At home I do as I like; that is, when Ernest likes it too. I sing, and play, and romp with the dogs and kittens; but the moment the door bell rings, lo! a demure matron receives her guests! Ernest's health is quite restored, and I am as happy ...
— Beulah • Augusta J. Evans
... waiter smiled so broadly that he showed two long rows of white teeth. It could not be Dotty who amused him. Her conduct was all that is prim and proper. She sat beside her papa as motionless as a waxen baby, her eyes rolling right and left, as if they were jerked by a secret wire. It certainly could not have been Dotty. Then what was it the man saw which ...
— Dotty Dimple Out West • Sophie May
... had looked forward through a dull, disappointing day to an evening with Felicite Delord. She was expecting him—she would be greatly disappointed. He sighed a second time, for he was far from happy. Life seemed to be one long constant worry over money matters and Myra Nell. Being a prim, orderly man, he intensely disliked searching for mislaid articles, but he began a systematic hunt; for, knowing Myra Nell's peculiar irresponsibility, he was prepared to find the missing slipper anywhere between the hammock on the front gallery and the kitchen in the rear. However, ...
— The Net • Rex Beach
... has long been settled.[2] The original editors did their work faithfully according to the editorial standards of their day; and they were well within the latitude allowed them by the terms of Clarendon's instructions when they occasionally omitted a passage, or when they exercised their somewhat prim and cautious taste in altering and polishing phrases that Clarendon had dashed down as quickly as his pen could move.[3] Later editors have restored the omitted passages and scrupulously reproduced Clarendon's own words. But no edition ...
— Characters from 17th Century Histories and Chronicles • Various
... considerable part in his political education. He was influential with the Regency in Spain, which succeeded Queen Isabel when that sovereign became too malodorous to be longer tolerated, and he was the personal friend of the Regent, General Prim, whose motto, "More liberal today than yesterday, more liberal tomorrow than today," he was fond of quoting. He was present in Madrid at the time of General Prim's assassination and often told of how this wise patriot, recognizing the unpreparedness ...
— Lineage, Life, and Labors of Jose Rizal, Philippine Patriot • Austin Craig
... usum Scholarum. Per Alexandrum Humium ex antiqua et nobili gente Humiorum in Scotia, a prim{a^} stirpe quinta sobole oriundum. This work is dated October 1660, and is therefore merely a transcript. It is an epitome of Buchanan's History, and Chr. Irvine in Histor. Scot. Nomenclatura, calls it Clavis in Buchananum, and Bishop ...
— Of the Orthographie and Congruitie of the Britan Tongue - A Treates, noe shorter than necessarie, for the Schooles • Alexander Hume
... yet considered the spiritual significance of slang? The dictionaries inform us that "slang is a conversational irregularity of a more or less vulgar type;" but that is not all. The prim definition refers merely to words, but I am rather more interested in considering the mental attitude which is indicated by the distortion and loose employment of words, and by the fresh coinages which seem to spring up every hour. ...
— The Ethics of Drink and Other Social Questions - Joints In Our Social Armour • James Runciman
... divorce from her; she states, however, that she never at any time had physical relationships with Rosenthal, who was a man of fragile organization and health. Sacher-Masoch united himself to Hulda Meister, who is described by the first wife as a prim and faded but coquettish old maid, and by the biographer as a highly accomplished and gentle woman, who cared for him with almost maternal devotion. No doubt there is truth in both descriptions. It must be noted that, as Wanda clearly shows, apart from his abnormal sexual temperament, ...
— Studies in the Psychology of Sex, Volume 3 (of 6) • Havelock Ellis
... ages and sizes thronged the spot; and the rumour of the day's doings even penetrated up the defiles of Taff Vawr and Taff Vach, bringing down old apple-faced farmers and their wives, who were told of a power and a speed that would alter everything, and do away with horses altogether. Prim, cosy, apple-faced people, innocent and primitive, little thought ye then of the changes which the clanking monster was to yield; how Grey Dobbin would see flying by a mass of wood and iron, thousands of tons of weight, bearing not only ...
— Railway Adventures and Anecdotes - extending over more than fifty years • Various
... noticed," rather grimly rejoined Mr. Ashe. Blue Bonnet's prim New England aunt had not suffered him to remain long in ignorance of her disapproval of ...
— Blue Bonnet's Ranch Party • C. E. Jacobs
... to possess our souls in patience until to-morrow," sighed Grace. "Isn't this a lovely, roomy house, Elfreda? I'm so glad, too, that there isn't a prim, stiff parlor. I like this immense living-room much better. The girls will surely like it. It will serve as a library too. That little room just off the hall will make such a convenient office for me. Imagine me as the head of a college house, with an office ...
— Grace Harlowe's Return to Overton Campus • Jessie Graham Flower
... species: Dr. Plot speaks of a fir-tree in Staffordshire, of 150 foot high, which some think of spontaneous growth; besides several more so irregularly standing, as shews them to be natives: But to put this at last out of controversie, see the extract of Mr. de la Prim's letter to the Royal Society, Transact. n. 277, and the old map of Crout, and of the yet (or lately) remaining firs, growing about Hatfield in the commons, flourishing from the shrubs and stubs of those trees, to which I refer the reader. As for buried trees of this sort, ...
— Sylva, Vol. 1 (of 2) - Or A Discourse of Forest Trees • John Evelyn
... side, somewhat tight and tubby, with his chest out and his head back, went the prim figure of Mr. May, reminding one of a consequential bird of the smaller species. His plumbago-grey suit fitted exactly—save that it was perhaps a little tight. The jacket and waistcoat were bound with silk braid of exactly the same shade as the cloth. His ...
— The Lost Girl • D. H. Lawrence
... a dressing-gown and escorted him to an unexpectedly modern bathroom at the end of the corridor. When Quest returned, his toilet articles were all laid out for him with prim precision; the window was wide open, the blinds drawn, and a soft breeze was stealing through into the room. Below him, the park, looking more beautiful than ever in the morning sunshine, stretched away to a vista of ...
— The Black Box • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... scarlet livery appeared. After exacting particular attention to his commands, my father quitted Mrs. Waddy, and we mounted the carriage, laughing at her deplorable eyes and prim lips, which he imitated for my amusement. 'A load is off my head,' he remarked. He asked me if splendour did not fatigue me also. I caught the answer from his face and replied that it did, and that I should like to go right on to Dipwell 'The Burgundy sleeps safe there,' said ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... old plainsmen wouldn't thank Major Lessard or any one else for disturbing their last, long sleep; the wide, unpeopled prairies had always been their choice in life, and I felt that they would rather be laid away in some quiet coulee, than in any conventional "city of the dead" with prim headstones and iron fences to shut them in. A Western man likes lots of room; dead or alive, it irks him to ...
— Raw Gold - A Novel • Bertrand W. Sinclair
... a strong force. There were lords magnificently condescending to commoners; M.P.s who talked politics, and M.P.s who had had enough of that sort of thing at St Stephen's and didn't; hearty squires from adjacent county seats; prim bankers, with whom the said squires were anxious to be on good terms, since they were the priests of Mammon; officers from near garrison towns, gay and lighthearted, who devoted themselves to the fairer portion of the company; and a sprinkling of barristers, literary men, hardy explorers, ...
— The Bishop's Secret • Fergus Hume
... me to walk or hunt with Xenophon, and to saunter through his kitchen or his grounds. And all because I could not show the requisite grammatical ticket. Could anything be more fascinating than the tale of Xenophon's prim yet most lovable young wife, or the glorious picture of the boy and girl lovers with which Xenophon ...
— The Adventure of Living • John St. Loe Strachey
... surroundings—crowed lustily from the cradle in which, after the fashion of the country, it was tightly strapped. It was a low, grimy room, with one square bit of a window, and far from clean. Dr. Gilly, the prim English biographer of Neff, quaintly says: "Cleanliness is not a virtue which distinguishes any of the people in these mountains; and, with such a nice sense of moral perception as they display, and with such strict attention to the duties of religion, it is astonishing that they ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science - Vol. XVII, No. 102. June, 1876. • Various
... much of your pin in your dress, too little of our taste—too little of our elegance, too much of your what you call tidiness, or God know what! But never you mind dat so much, Miss Rose; and you not prim up your little mouth, but listen to me. Never you put in one pin before you ask yourself, Miss Rose, what for I do it? In every toilette that has taste there is above all—tenez—a character—a sentiment to be support; suppose your lady is ...
— Helen • Maria Edgeworth
... really know of this girl on whom he had bestowed the priceless boon of his society for life? How did he know what she was—he could not find the exact adjective to express his meaning, but he knew what he meant. Was she worthy of the boon? That was what it amounted to. All his life he had had a prim shrinking from the section of the feminine world which is connected with the light-life of large cities. Club acquaintances of his in London had from time to time married into the Gaiety Chorus, ...
— The Adventures of Sally • P. G. Wodehouse
... surpris'd the darling rent: Where yawn'd the frieze is now become a doubt; And glory, at one entrance, quite shut out.(12) He scorns Florello, and Florello him; This hates the filthy creature; that, the prim: Thus, in each other, both these fools despise Their own dear selves, with undiscerning eyes; Their methods various, but alike their aim; The sloven and the fopling are the same. Ye whigs and tories! thus it fares with you, When party rage too warmly you pursue; ...
— The Poetical Works of Edward Young, Volume 2 • Edward Young
... Frank? What am I to do? Think how desolate I am, how unfriended, how much in want of some one whom I can call a protector! I cannot have you always with me. You care more for the little finger of that prim piece of propriety down at the old dowager's than you do for me and all my sorrows." This was true, but Frank did not say that it was true. "Lord Fawn is at any rate respectable. At least, I thought he was so ...
— The Eustace Diamonds • Anthony Trollope
... rather pathetic thing is that, although it must be a hundred years since the place was deserted, there are still multitudes of flowers which must have come from those in the old garden. There are iris and narcissus and a little blue flower, with a neat, prim, clean smell that makes one feel as if it ought to be put with lavender into chests of fresh old linen. The narcissus in particular was growing around everywhere, together with real wild flowers like the painted columbine and star of Bethlehem. It was a lovely spot on a headland ...
— Letters to His Children • Theodore Roosevelt
... shades, and its front door-yard was efficiently manned with plum trees and a peach, while the back yard was given over to vegetables. Elder Harricutt walked to Economy every day to his office in the Economy bank. He said it kept him in good condition physically. His wife was small and prim with little quick prying eyes and a false front that had a tendency to go askew. She wore bonnets with strings and her false teeth didn't quite fit; they clicked as she talked. She kept a watch over the road at all times and very little ...
— The City of Fire • Grace Livingston Hill
... like precious stones, parrots, and birds Of all rich plumage, fly from tree to tree, The whole scene vocal with sweet varied song; And here a widespread lawn bedecked with flowers, With clumps of brilliant roses grown to trees, And fields with dahlias spread,[4] not stiff and prim Like the starched ruffle of an ancient dame, But growing in luxuriance rich and wild, The colors of the evening and the rainbow joined, White, scarlet, yellow, crimson, deep maroon, Blending all colors in one dazzling blaze; There orchards bend beneath their luscious loads; Here vineyards ...
— The Dawn and the Day • Henry Thayer Niles
... King and the Tories, and considered that the presumption of the colonists must be put down with a high hand. They little knew of what stuff the descendants of the Pilgrim Fathers—the sturdy Puritans, the dashing Cavaliers, the prim Quakers, and of many other classes whom persecution, poverty, or their crimes, had driven from Europe—were made, as I had full many opportunities afterwards of discovering. A just and judicious policy which at once would have ...
— Hurricane Hurry • W.H.G. Kingston
... light, and freedom seemed to come again into the frozen world. The blithe and genial spirit of the black-avised little barber-poet was itself the greatest imaginable contrast to the soured Puritanism and prim formalism that for half a century and more had infested the national letters. But the author of The Gentle Shepherd himself—and small blame to him—did not fully comprehend the nature and extent of his mission. He did not wholly rid himself from the prevalent idea that the simple natural ...
— The Balladists - Famous Scots Series • John Geddie
... called, in town, Monsieur Madeleine; his workmen and the children continued to call him Father Madeleine, and that was what was most adapted to make him smile. In proportion as he mounted, throve, invitations rained down upon him. "Society" claimed him for its own. The prim little drawing-rooms on M. sur M., which, of course, had at first been closed to the artisan, opened both leaves of their folding-doors to the millionnaire. They made a thousand advances ...
— Les Miserables - Complete in Five Volumes • Victor Hugo
... their high, carved backs and faded velvet cushions, that had been so firm and luxurious once, were tottering and insecure; but it mattered little, since no one ever came to sit in them now round the festive board, and they stood against the wall in prim order, under the rows ...
— Captain Fracasse • Theophile Gautier
... thing, May felt like going on; so she nibbled and meddled with all sorts of forbidden things till she heard a step, then she ran away; and by and by, when the bell rang, came in with the rest as prim and proper as if she did not know how to play pranks. No one missed the cake, and her mother gave ...
— The Louisa Alcott Reader - A Supplementary Reader for the Fourth Year of School • Louisa M. Alcott
... was an old building with sharp eaves and dormer windows, its shingles stained a dark gray by long exposure to wind and weather. Faded green shutters hung on the windows of the lower story. Behind it grew a thick wood of spruces. The little yard in front of it was grassy and prim and flowerless; but over the low front door a luxuriant early-flowering rose vine clambered, in a riot of blood-red blossom which contrasted strangely with the general bareness of its surroundings. It seemed to fling itself over the grim old house as if intent on bombarding ...
— Kilmeny of the Orchard • Lucy Maud Montgomery
... there's no use of your trying to make a prim Puritan maiden of me. Zeb doesn't fight like a deacon, and I can't love like one. Ha! ha! ha! to think that great soldier is afraid of little me, and nothing else! It's too funny ...
— Taken Alive • E. P. Roe
... apron, elbowed the dink and dainty dame, his city mistress; where clowns with hobnailed shoes were treading on the kibes of substantial burghers and gentlemen of worship; and where Joan of the dairy, with robust pace and red sturdy arms, rowed her way onwards, amongst those prim and pretty moppets, whose sires were knights and squires. The throng and confusion was, however, of a gay and cheerful character. All came forth to see and to enjoy, and all laughed at the trifling ...
— From John O'Groats to Land's End • Robert Naylor and John Naylor
... and be absent some weeks. But, pray, what pretty neat damsel was with you? She says, she smiled, and asked, If his honour did not know who it was? No, said he, I never saw her before. Farmer Nichols, or Farmer Brady, have neither of them such a tight prim lass for a daughter! have they?—Though I did not see her face neither, said he. If your honour won't be angry, said she, I will introduce her into your presence; for I think, says she, she ...
— Pamela, or Virtue Rewarded • Samuel Richardson
... the old man seemed to indulge less frequently in his violent outbreaks of furious passion, and to have laid aside his rugged untamable fierceness, since his marriage. There he sat beside his beautiful Annunciata, spruce and prim, in the richest, gayest apparel, smirking and smiling, challenging in the sweet glances of his grey eyes,—from which a treacherous tear stole from time to time,—those who were present to say if any one of them ...
— Weird Tales, Vol. II. • E. T. A. Hoffmann
... regiment. He was not at first sight an impressive looking officer. He was of medium height, of slight build, with a pallid countenance, and a weakish drawling voice. In his movements there was an appearance of loose jointedness and an absence of prim stiffness. At once schools and drills were established for commissioned and non-commissioned officers and rumor credited Barlow with their establishment. Discipline became stricter: the duties of the soldier ...
— Personal Recollections of the War of 1861 • Charles Augustus Fuller
... Commander-in-Chief his services as second in command of the army. He did right. Battalions and brigades could hardly have strengthened the hands of the general, and invigorated the spirits of the troops, so much as the active accession of Hardinge. Prim etiquette may pucker its thin lips, and solemn discretion knit its ponderous brows; but neither discipline nor prudence ran any risk of being injured or affronted by the veteran of the Peninsula. What the exigency required, he knew; what the exigency exacted, he performed. That those who censure ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 59, No. 367, May 1846 • Various
... the tokens and they blooed 'em as above, While Jim-o done the hinvalid 'oom Sammy had to shove. Sez I: "No noble 'eroes what's bin fightin' for their king Should smirch theirselves by doin' this dis- 'onerable thing." But fine old gents 'n' donahs prim They stopped 'n' slid the beans to Jim. You betcher life I let 'im hear just ...
— 'Hello, Soldier!' - Khaki Verse • Edward Dyson
... skirts just hitting her shoe tops in front and sagging in an ungainly fashion behind, had teetered solemnly through a "square" dance with him. Mother Douglas herself had always sat very straight and prim on a bench, her hands folded in her lap and her eyes blinking disapprovingly at the ungodly ones who let out an exultant little yip now and then when they started exuberantly through the mazes of ...
— Rim o' the World • B. M. Bower
... My doll... Mimi... You see..." was all Natasha managed to utter (to her everything seemed funny). She leaned against her mother and burst into such a loud, ringing fit of laughter that even the prim visitor could ...
— War and Peace • Leo Tolstoy
... Rita. "But he's got the idea he would be doing me a favor in marrying me; and when a man gets that notion it's fatal. Also—He doesn't realize it himself, but I'm not prim enough to suit him. He imagines he's liberal—that's a common failing among men. But a woman who is natural shocks them, and they are taken in and pleased by one who poses as more innocent and impossible ...
— The Fashionable Adventures of Joshua Craig • David Graham Phillips
... the rock of St. Helena under a glass case, miniatures all representing the same blue-eyed lady, now with hair curled, now in a ball dress, now in a yellow gown with leg-of-mutton sleeves. And all this—consoles, King of Rome, marshals, yellow-gowned, short-waisted ladies, with that prim stiffness which was considered graceful in 1806, this atmosphere of victory and conquest—it was this more than anything we could say to him that made him accept so naively ...
— Short Stories of Various Types • Various
... was flourishing; making no display of itself, but offering to any who should choose to turn aside and look at them a few blossoms such as, for beauty and fragrance, are worthy to be, as they really are, cousin to the rose. On one of my rambles I came upon some plants of a strangely slim and prim aspect; nothing but a straight, erect, military-looking, needle-like stalk, bearing a spike of pods at the top, and clasped at the middle by two small stemless leaves. By some occult means (perhaps their growing with Tiarella had something to do with the matter) I felt at once ...
— Birds in the Bush • Bradford Torrey
... in the other stockings. Some of them Julia had no use for, such as silk for dresses, China crape shawls and fans, but they were just the things for his Grandmothers, who, after this, sat beside the fireplace, very prim and fine, in stiff silk gowns, with China crape shawls over their shoulders, and Chinese fans in their hands, and queer shoes on their feet. Julia liked their presents just as well as he did his own, and probably the Ambassador knew ...
— The Pot of Gold - And Other Stories • Mary E. Wilkins
... He was conventional, and prim in his thoughts of life and all he desired it to give. He was a creature of a past generation; and whenever in time he had chanced to exist he would always have lagged a generation behind. But there was that one colourful streak which somehow, as if by a mistake in creation, ...
— The Second Latchkey • Charles Norris Williamson and Alice Muriel Williamson
... good old Quaker, a native of the city of Penn. Captain Marlin had been for many days and nights considering whether it were best to carry a complement of wine for himself and friends, and grog for his crew. He had that morning met Simon Prim, and asked his opinion, which he gave as above; yet Captain Marlin seemed undetermined. He felt it to be an important question, and he desired to come to ...
— Town and Country, or, Life at Home and Abroad • John S. Adams
... to church, he made a furtive visit to the farm parlour in an endeavour to glean some fragmentary knowledge of the young man whose place he had usurped, and whose ill-repute he had fastened on himself. There were many photographs hung on the walls, or stuck in prim frames, but the likeness he sought for was not among them. At last, in an album thrust out of sight, he came across what he wanted. There was a whole series, labelled "Tom," a podgy child of three, in a fantastic frock, ...
— The Chronicles of Clovis • Saki
... shrubbery veils the view from the street and in between shrubs and arbor lies a small pool of water flowers and goldfish. On the arbor's right, in charming privacy, masked by hollyhocks, dahlias and other tall-maidenly things, lie beds of strawberries and lettuce and all the prim ranks and orders ...
— The Amateur Garden • George W. Cable
... delaine had been introduced, and at first it disturbed and embarrassed him; but his light, elastic temper soon recovered its careless buoyancy, with a sly smile at what he considered an oddity, newly discovered, in the character of his prim sweetheart. "Oh! it's all right, of course," he thought; "Sally knows what she's about; ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. II., November, 1858., No. XIII. • Various
... discreetly retired to some distance, that her presence might be no check upon the private conversation of her lord and lady, now came forward; and as she made her reverential curtsy, the Earl could not help smiling at the contrast which the extreme simplicity of her dress, and the prim demureness of her looks, made with a very pretty countenance and a pair of black eyes, that laughed in spite of their mistress's desire ...
— Kenilworth • Sir Walter Scott
... carpeted and hung with lace curtains! Once a young man of fashion had come to the Waldorf and registered himself and "Miss Elsie Cochrane"; and when the clerk made the usual inquiries as to the relationship of the young lady, it transpired that Miss Elsie was a dog, arrayed in a prim little tea-gown, and requiring a room to herself. And then there was a tale of a cat which had inherited a life-pension from a forty-thousand-dollar estate; it had a two-floor apartment and several attendants, and sat at ...
— The Metropolis • Upton Sinclair
... this was impossible, how they could draw on their bankers in New York. Mr. Washburne walked about cheerily shaking everyone by the hand, and telling them to make themselves at home. How different American diplomatists are to the prim old women who represent us abroad, with a staff of half-a-dozen dandies helping each other to do nothing, who have been taught to regard all who are not of the craft as their natural enemies. At the English ...
— Diary of the Besieged Resident in Paris • Henry Labouchere
... After a while she said in a prim little voice, which she adopted now and then when she wanted to conceal her ...
— A Sweet Girl Graduate • Mrs. L.T. Meade
... abroad in wild confusion, freed from the trammels of trellis work, broken fragments of which still adhered to some of their branches. They grew just as they listed, and resembled well-bred trees, once neat and prim, which, having gone astray, now flaunted but vestiges of whilom respectability. And from tree to tree, and from bough to bough, vine branches hung in confusion. They rose like wild laughter, twined for ...
— Abbe Mouret's Transgression - La Faute De L'abbe Mouret • Emile Zola
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