"Conventionally" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... want it: the side she knew best and longest as herself, Annesley Grayle, a timid girl brought up conventionally, and taught that to rely on others older and wiser than she was the right way for a well-born, sheltered woman to go through life. The other side, the new, desperate side that Mrs. Ellsworth's "stuffiness" had developed, was not looking for any means ...
— The Second Latchkey • Charles Norris Williamson and Alice Muriel Williamson
... beauty in either sex characterised our chivalrous times. Now it is mostly confined to "professional beauties" or what is conventionally called the "fair sex"; as if there could be any comparison between the beauty of man and the beauty of woman, the Apollo Belvidere ...
— The Book of the Thousand Nights and a Night, Volume 1 • Richard F. Burton
... his own. He is a master of gray tones, and his scale is, as Duret justly observes, a very intense one. He avoids the anecdote, historic or domestic. He detests design, prearranged composition. His studio is an open field, light the chief actor of his palette. He is never conventionally decorative unless you can call his own particular scheme decorative. He paints what he sees without flattery, without flinching from any ugliness. Compared with him Courbet is as sensuous as Correggio. He ...
— Promenades of an Impressionist • James Huneker
... distinguished a diminutive keyhole, outlined with shining metal. I let the curtain drop again, though lingeringly. It could be only a cupboard, or a particularly secure wine cellar, perhaps, behind this dwarfish door, yet had I discovered it in a house not English, but of a country less conventionally civilised than our own, I should have told myself that I had chanced upon the clue to ...
— The House by the Lock • C. N. Williamson
... sentimental about it. Thrash the whole subject out with yourself and with other people—with your own friends, and with your family too. They're a modern, broad-minded set, your people, after all; they won't look at the thing conventionally; they'll talk sense; they won't fob you off with stock phrases, or talk about the sanctity of the home. They're not institutionalists. Only be fair about it; weigh all the pros and cons, and judge honestly, and for heaven's sake don't look at the thing ...
— Dangerous Ages • Rose Macaulay
... perception, the most characteristic mark in Browning's portrayal of women is his admiration for dauntlessness and individuality; and this makes explicable to me the failure which I constantly perceive in his dramatic presentment of her whose "innocence" (as the term is conventionally accepted) is her salient quality. The type, immortal and essential, is one which a poet must needs essay to show; and Browning, when he showed it through others, or in his own person hymned it, found words for its delineation ...
— Browning's Heroines • Ethel Colburn Mayne
... to be interpreted as teaching a restoration to life; and this we learn from the legend itself, without any previous understanding. The sprig of acacia is a symbol of the immortality of the soul. But this we know only because such meaning had been conventionally determined when the symbol was first established. It is evident, then, that an allegory which is obscure is imperfect. The enigmatical meaning should be easy of interpretation; and hence Lemiere, a French poet, has said, "L'allegorie habite un palais diaphane"—Allegory lives ...
— The Symbolism of Freemasonry • Albert G. Mackey
... text, words and phrases supplied by the translator were printed in italics. In this e-text they are shown in braces {}. Italics in the notes and commentary are shown conventionally with lines. Square brackets [] in the body text are in ...
— The Metamorphoses of Ovid - Literally Translated into English Prose, with Copious Notes - and Explanations • Publius Ovidius Naso
... that he would tell his father Yes to what that very morning he had told him No,—that he would go into the Fortune, East and Sabre business. Extraordinary effect from such a cause! Grotesque. Paradoxical. Going into Fortune, East and Sabre meant "settling down"; marriage conventionally involved settling down; yet, while he had visioned marriage with Nona, settling down had been the last thing in the world to think of,—because he projected marriage with Nona, he had that very morning ...
— If Winter Comes • A.S.M. Hutchinson
... peaches and amethyst bunches of grapes were brought by the footman, I knew that soon Princess Sanzanow would smile at the French duchess, and we should all troop away to leave the men. I was sure that Eagle would not join the ladies conventionally in the drawing-room, and I did not want that summons to mean a long good-bye. I asked hastily, therefore, if he would come and see me and the Miss Splatchleys and our Belgians at "The Haven," when he had ...
— Secret History Revealed By Lady Peggy O'Malley • C. N. Williamson and A. M. Williamson
... the station as Cordova was from Madrid. It might, under the circumstances, have, been a merit in it to be undergoing a thorough overhauling of the furnishing and decoration of the rooms on the patio which had formed our ideal for a quiet night. A conventionally napkined waiter welcomed us from the stony street, and sent us up to our rooms with the young interpreter who met us at the station, but was obscure as to their location. When we refused them because they were ...
— Familiar Spanish Travels • W. D. Howells
... his nobles had not only been led by years of proscription and exile to hate on principle everything that bore the name of Puritan, but had spent their exile at the French Court, where utterly cynical and selfish pursuit of pleasure and licentiousness of conduct were merely masked by conventionally polished manners. The upshot was that the quarter century of the renewed Stuart rule was in almost all respects the most disgraceful period of English history and life. In everything, so far as possible, ...
— A History of English Literature • Robert Huntington Fletcher
... Every interpolation of this kind, however, was so obviously introduced on the spur of the moment, so refreshingly spontaneous and so ludicrously apropos, that it was always cheered to the very echo, or, to put the fact not conventionally but literally, was received with peals of laughter. Thus it was in one instance, as we very well remember, in regard to Mr. Justice Stareleigh—upon every occasion that we saw him, one of the Reader's most whimsical impersonations. The little judge—described in the ...
— Charles Dickens as a Reader • Charles Kent
... km (these roads are said to be hard-surfaced, and include, in addition to conventionally paved roads, some that are surfaced with gravel or other coarse aggregate, making them ...
— The 2001 CIA World Factbook • United States. Central Intelligence Agency.
... italicized letters within words are shown in braces {}; other italics are shown conventionally with lines. Boldface type is shown by marks. Individual bold or CAPITALIZED words within an italicized phrase should be read as non-italic, though the extra lines have been omitted ...
— A Brief History of the English Language and Literature, Vol. 2 (of 2) • John Miller Dow Meiklejohn
... essentially a system-man. When he travelled he had his practical jokes and his Irish stories and his fondness for the social side; but he was conventionally as correct as a time-table. Had there been a spark of genius in him he would have extinguished it for the sake of betterments to the most conventional Colossus in Canada. The C.P.R. was supposed to lead. ...
— The Masques of Ottawa • Domino
... character has hardly begun even to be sketched as yet—our lectures may possibly serve as a crumb-like contribution to the structure. The first thing to bear in mind (especially if we ourselves belong to the clerico-academic-scientific type, the officially and conventionally "correct" type, "the deadly respectable" type, for which to ignore others is a besetting temptation) is that nothing can be more stupid than to bar out phenomena from our notice, merely because we are incapable of taking part ...
— The Varieties of Religious Experience • William James
... chuckle over the Revolution. The forgetfulness, no less than the vindictiveness, of men is often surprising. Marvell, who played the part of Laureate during the Protectorate, produced two songs for the conventionally joyful occasion. The second of the two is decidedly ...
— Andrew Marvell • Augustine Birrell
... startled by the crackling of twigs and the sound of a man running. We instinctively held our rifles a little tighter in readiness for whatever might befall—when there burst out of the woods a pleasant-faced young Peruvian, quite conventionally clad, who had come in haste from Saavedra, his father, to extend to us a most cordial welcome! It seemed scarcely credible, but a glance at his face showed that there was no ambush in store for us. It was with a sigh of relief that we realized there ...
— Inca Land - Explorations in the Highlands of Peru • Hiram Bingham
... be a perfect ogre. In this variation it was always the Prince Charming, that looms large in every young girl's dreams, who finally, after a brief period of unhappiness, came to the rescue and everything ended happily if somewhat conventionally. ...
— The Land of Promise • D. Torbett
... was his wont after breakfast, he had scarcely felt a fibre of pity or remorse stir in his body while Mrs. Delarayne had described Cleopatra's second fainting fit to him. He had expressed his sympathy formally, conventionally, like one who had but a few moments to spare for such considerations, and even before Mrs. Delarayne had completed her narrative, had allowed his eyes to wander eagerly all over the garden for a ...
— Too Old for Dolls - A Novel • Anthony Mario Ludovici
... too. Did Glenfernie mean to dog him through life—think that he would be let to do so? Alone in a forest, very far back, they might, at this point, have flown at each other's throat. But they had felled many forests since the day when just that was possible.... The thing conventionally in order for such a moment as the present was to act as though that annihilation which each wished upon the other had been achieved. All that they had shared since the day when first they met, boys on a heath in Scotland, should be instantaneously ...
— Foes • Mary Johnston
... honourable one, nor are the duties light or unimportant which devolve upon these functionaries. The honour, moreover, is as costly as it is onerous; not only do the sheriffs receive no salary, but they are conventionally expected to disburse several thousand pounds in charities and hospitality. The inspection of the city gaols occupies no small portion of their time, nor do they enjoy much intermission from the incessant ...
— The Corporation of London: Its Rights and Privileges • William Ferneley Allen
... mantel-shelf for roasting. The plain kitchen table is opposite the fire, at her elbow, with a candle on it in a tin sconce. Her chair, like all the others in the room, is uncushioned and unpainted; but as it has a round railed back and a seat conventionally moulded to the sitter's curves, it is comparatively a chair of state. The room has three doors, one on the same side as the fireplace, near the corner, leading to the best bedroom; one, at the opposite end of the opposite wall, leading to the scullery and washhouse; and the ...
— The Devil's Disciple • George Bernard Shaw
... out in words to him, but that his tone, his manner, his look keep it back absolutely, as a firm hand holds down the rising cork upon the exuberant wine. And now, at this sentence of his, her words fail her. They are strangers practically, that is conventionally—quite strangers, she remembers confusedly—but for this secret bond of passion, knit up between them, which both ...
— Six Women • Victoria Cross
... rank and place, made her appeal to her fiance; and the Spanish bastard dancer, with her daring, her passion, her naked humanity, so coarse and so intensely human, made her appeal also. And they watched while the young conventionally-bred officer hesitated; they watched till ...
— Simon Called Peter • Robert Keable
... and a little furniture. A consciousness stood in the room between them, and their commonplaces about the picturesqueness of the bazar rode on long absorbed regards, one reading, the other anxious to read; yet the encounter was so conventionally creditable to them both that they might have smiled past each other under any circumstances next day and acknowledged no demand ...
— The Path of a Star • Mrs. Everard Cotes (AKA Sara Jeannette Duncan)
... the rose, and edged with fine gold thread. The back is divided into four panels, containing respectively a cornflower, a pomegranate, a fruit, perhaps meant for an apple, and a honeysuckle, all conventionally treated and very delicately worked. The edge is bound all round with a strong braid, and there is one tie of broad, cherry-silk ribbon. With this book is its canvas bag, embroidered in silver ground ...
— English Embroidered Bookbindings • Cyril James Humphries Davenport
... Charlotte was not far wrong in her supposition. In spite of their twinship of soul, and in spite of that habit of loving which was involved in their belief "that they had been husband and wife in many a previous existence," Mr. and Mrs. Julius Sandal disagreed as conventionally as the ordinary husband and wife of one existence. The day on which the Florence letter was written had been a very unhappy one for Sophia. Julius had quarrelled with her about some very trivial affair, and had gone out in a temper disgracefully at variance with the occasion for it; and Sophia ...
— The Squire of Sandal-Side - A Pastoral Romance • Amelia Edith Huddleston Barr
... and Belgium as more akin to the genius of the English people, as respects the supremacy of honest industry, its independent exercise, and the comparative insignificance of aristocracies, conventionally so called, we come to FRANCE: there we find a provincial and a Parisian aristocracy—the former a servile mob of placemen, one in fifty, at least, of the whole population; and the latter—oh! my poor head, what a clanjaffrey of journalistes, feuilletonistes, artistes, dramatists, novelists, ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, No. CCCXXIX. - March, 1843, Vol. LIII. • Various
... though from within and by a miracle of sympathy, the [25] biographies of an infinite number of distinct monads. This is absolutely impossible. Our senses represent the coexistent families of monads in the gross, and therefore conventionally; what is in fact the mutual representation of monads in ordered systems, is represented as the mechanical interaction of spatially extended and material parts.' This does not mean that science is overthrown. The physical world-view is in terms of the convention of representation, ...
— Theodicy - Essays on the Goodness of God, the Freedom of Man and the Origin of Evil • G. W. Leibniz
... universe as living and able to feel and remember, but in a humble way. He must have life eternal as well as matter eternal; and the life and the matter must be joined together inseparably as body and soul to one another. Thus he will see God everywhere, not as those who repeat phrases conventionally, but as people who would have their words taken according to their most natural and legitimate meaning; and he will feel that the main difference between him and many of those who oppose him lies in the ...
— God the Known and God the Unknown • Samuel Butler
... had taken to keeping her bolt slipped. It had dated from the day Lydia made hostile entrance. Finding he could not walk in unannounced, he stood for a moment, his intention blank. It did not seem to him he could be named conventionally to Esther, who was afraid of him. And then, by a hazard, Esther, who had not been out for days, and yet had heard of nobody's meeting him abroad, longed for the air and threw wide the door. There she was, by a God-given chance. It was like predestined welcome, a confirming of his hardihood. ...
— The Prisoner • Alice Brown
... and phrases supplied by the translator (Riley only) were printed in italics. In this e-text they are shown in {braces}. Italics in the notes and commentary are shown conventionally with lines, boldface ...
— The Fables of Phdrus - Literally translated into English prose with notes • Phaedrus
... Abbey. As the supporter of the Pretender he was quite uninfluenced by admiration for England, and imputed, not to the English Deists and Whigs but to the Church and her divisions and intolerance, the unbelieving spirit that threatened both Church and State. It was conventionally understood on the Continent that 1688 had been an uprising of Nonconformists, and a Whig was assumed to be a Presbyterian down to the death of Anne. It was easy to infer that a more violent theological ...
— Lectures on the French Revolution • John Emerich Edward Dalberg-Acton
... were very fond of this "transposed applique upon two fabrics," especially when composed of designs of foliage conventionally treated, or of arabesques and scrolls. On a piece of old Milanese damask, figured with violet on violet, appear designs in applique cut from two shades of yellow satin. These are remarkable for their powerful relief, suggesting sculpture ...
— Quilts - Their Story and How to Make Them • Marie D. Webster
... An electrostatic charge has always an opposite and bound charge. This may be so distributed as not to be distinguishable, in which case the charge is termed, incorrectly but conventionally, a free charge. But when a charge is produced an opposite and equal one always is formed, which is the bound charge. The region between the two charges and permeated by their lines of force, often curving out so as to embrace a volume of cross-sectional area larger ...
— The Standard Electrical Dictionary - A Popular Dictionary of Words and Terms Used in the Practice - of Electrical Engineering • T. O'Conor Slone
... the recruity from his reverie—a voice of authority which asked with a most unnecessary emphasis what the blank, blank he meant by skulking there, when he knew conventionally well that he had been conventionally well ordered to the quartermaster's stores to get his conventional kit. The recruit was not accustomed to hear himself addressed in this manner, and his earliest impulse was to hit the pug nose of the person who accosted him, but he remembered ...
— VC — A Chronicle of Castle Barfield and of the Crimea • David Christie Murray
... better," replied Cornish, conventionally, and they continued their inspection of the little colony. The arrangements were as simple as they were effective. Either Roden or Von Holzen certainly possessed the genius of organization. In one of the cottages a cold ...
— Roden's Corner • Henry Seton Merriman
... truncated pig-like snout are sufficiently characteristic. In the Dresden Codex occur several figures of undoubted peccaries. Two of these are pictured in Pl. 32, figs. 2, 4. In each the hoofs and curly tail appear, and in the latter figure the bristling back is conventionally drawn by a series of serrations. These marks are sufficient to identify the animals. Their heads are further conventionalized, however, by a great exaggeration of the snout beyond that slightly indicated in Pl. 32, fig. 1, and Pl. 33, figs. 6, 9. Other representations ...
— Animal Figures in the Maya Codices • Alfred M. Tozzer and Glover M. Allen
... secure and settled income, Scott now meditated a literary life. A hundred years ago such a life was impossible without independent means, if a man would mingle in society and live conventionally, and what was called respectably. Even Burns had to accept a public office, although it was a humble one, and far from lucrative; but it gave him what poetry could not,—his daily bread. Hogg, peasant-poet of the Ettrick forest, ...
— Beacon Lights of History, Volume XIII • John Lord
... of age he had inherited a couple of thousand pounds, which had been left in trust to him by his father. Had it not been for that two thousand pounds he would have been forced to employ his knowledge and his talents conventionally, and would probably have made a fortune. But it was just enough to relieve him from the necessity of earning his living for the time being, and to make it possible for him to devote himself entirely to the realisation of his life-dream—at any rate ...
— The Angel of the Revolution - A Tale of the Coming Terror • George Griffith
... approach to the problem of syphilis are important at the outset. The first of these is to separate our thought about syphilis from that of the other two diseases, gonorrhea, or "clap," and chancroids, or "soft sores," which are conventionally linked with it under the label of "venereal diseases."[2] The second is to separate the question of syphilis at least temporarily from our thought about morals, from the problem of prostitution, from the question as to whether continence is possible or desirable, ...
— The Third Great Plague - A Discussion of Syphilis for Everyday People • John H. Stokes
... taken a few turns backward and forward, alone, he was joined by a spare, quiet, gray-haired man, whose personal appearance was totally devoid of marked character of any kind; whose inexpressive face and conventionally-quiet manner presented nothing that attracted approval and nothing that inspired dislike. This was Mr. Pendril—this was the man on whose lips hung the future ...
— No Name • Wilkie Collins
... Granger; and then he went on turning the leaves for Clarissa with a solemn air, and occasionally pointing out to her some noted feature in a landscape or city. His daughter stared at him in supreme astonishment. She had seen him conventionally polite to young ladies before to-night, but this was something more than conventional politeness. He kept his place all the evening, and all that Sophia could do was to remain ...
— The Lovels of Arden • M. E. Braddon
... romance of exaggeration has been built upon the facts, enough remains behind of real marvel to irritate the curiosity of the physiologist as to its efficient, and, perhaps, of the philosopher as to its final cause. Legally and politically, that is, conventionally, the differences are even greater on a comparison of nations and eras. In England we have seen senators of mark and authority, nay, even a prime minister, the haughtiest, [1] the most despotic, and the most irresponsible of his times, at an age which, in many states, both ancient and modern, would ...
— Autobiographic Sketches • Thomas de Quincey
... taste for smart society. Its inhabitants, by nature acquisitive and cautious, economical, tenacious, had learnt to worship the word "smart." The result was a kind of heavy froth, an air of thoroughly domestic vice. In addition to the conventionally fast, Shelton had met there one or two ladies, who, having been divorced, or having yet to be, still maintained their position in "society." Divorced ladies who did not so maintain their place were never to be found, for the Casserols ...
— Forsyte Saga • John Galsworthy
... shows to a stranger I do not know. I was never a stranger to it. I should suppose it to be a face almost vacant, perhaps a little conventionally picturesque, for it is grey and seamed. It might be even an altogether expressionless mask, staring at nothing. Anyhow, there must be very little to be learned from it, for those bright young cultured strangers, admirable in their eagerness for social service, who come and live with us for ...
— London River • H. M. Tomlinson
... have to take account of this clash and explain a good many of the divergencies of philosophers by it. Of whatever temperament a professional philosopher is, he tries when philosophizing to sink the fact of his temperament. Temperament is no conventionally recognized reason, so he urges impersonal reasons only for his conclusions. Yet his temperament really gives him a stronger bias than any of his more strictly objective premises. It loads the evidence for him one way or the other, making for a more sentimental or a ...
— Pragmatism - A New Name for Some Old Ways of Thinking • William James
... so. But—what is the use, Ada? It doesn't matter with us, does it? Are we not each capable of taking care of ourselves? Were we ever of the conventionally sentimental?" ...
— A Man and a Woman • Stanley Waterloo
... retorted, much annoyed, "conventionally at least: for they have all called upon me, though I didn't see them all. But I shall be very glad if you ...
— Richard Vandermarck • Miriam Coles Harris
... her peasant sketches was naturally over-estimated by those who, never having studied the class, could not conceive of a peasant except conventionally, as a drunken boor. The very just portrait of Cecilia Boccaferri, the conscientious but obscure artist in Le Chateau des Desertes, might seem over-flattered to such as imagine that all opera-singers ...
— Famous Women: George Sand • Bertha Thomas
... the actions of different kinds into which electricity has conventionally been subdivided, there is, I think, none which excels, or even equals in importance, that called Induction. It is of the most general influence in electrical phenomena, appearing to be concerned in every one of them, and has in reality the character of ...
— Experimental Researches in Electricity, Volume 1 • Michael Faraday
... you fellars don't come soon, everything'll get cold," he had no thought of other than a kindly and respectful regard for their welfare, and was glad to modify his form of address on being told that it was not what could be described as conventionally military. When one of our sentinels, who had with much labor learned the manual of arms, saluted with great pride as I passed, and added, with a friendly nod, "Good-evening, Colonel," this variation in the accepted formula on such occasions ...
— Rough Riders • Theodore Roosevelt
... happy, and I will always bless the memory of those days, and thank God I was the means of bringing a little gladness into her marred life. She was happy, and yet we were living in what society would call sin. Conventionally we were not man and wife, yet never were man and wife more devoted, more self-respecting. Never were man and wife endowed with purer ideals, with a more exalted conception of the sanctity of love. Yet there were many in the town ...
— The Trail of '98 - A Northland Romance • Robert W. Service
... in the true period—under Louis PHILIPPE. Indeed I know no other reason (costumes always excepted) why the scene was the Paris of 1840. For the purposes of the play Tony might just as well have been a British designer of tanks (London, 1916). Nor was there anything even conventionally French about the girl Remnant, who might have been born next-door ...
— Punch, Or The London Charivari, Volume 152, March 21, 1917 • Various
... she were "at home" was conventionally put, for it seemed practically certain that she must be in the hotel. Where could she, who had no other friends than they, and no chaperon, go at night? It was with blank surprise, therefore, that he and Stephen heard the ...
— The Golden Silence • C. N. Williamson and A. M. Williamson
... you did," she replied. "I'll admit that it was better than an ordinary sermon, because the subject was more personal. But don't you think we admitted the sufficing reason at the start, and isn't it natural that a girl who has been conventionally brought up is pretty well satisfied in her own mind of the moral status? Of course," she added, with a toss of her pretty head, "I am not asking you or anybody else to kiss me. I am merely curious to know if ...
— The Romance of an Old Fool • Roswell Field
... on the outer walls stared blindly at the black night for three heavy hours; for three heavy hours the horses in the stables rattled at their racks, the dogs barked, and the owl made a noise with very little resemblance in it to the noise conventionally assigned to the owl by men-poets. But it is the obstinate custom of such creatures hardly ever to say what is ...
— Library of the World's Best Literature, Ancient and Modern — Volume 11 • Various
... he was a dictator in his quiet way. And she knew even if the shock of his wife's sudden going had pushed his thought of her into the background, that in a few months he would be hovering about her again, conventionally freed for ...
— The Beloved Woman • Kathleen Norris
... in the Australasian Critic once rightly observed, respecting a batch of short stories of the conventionally Australian kind, that English readers might 'fancy from them that big cities are unknown in Australia; that the population consists of squatters, diggers, stock-riders, shepherds and bushrangers; that the superior residences are weatherboard homesteads with wide ...
— Australian Writers • Desmond Byrne
... Alpine distances, bright with snow. In like manner Giotto, Perugino, Angelico, the young Raphael, and John Bellini, always, if, with any fitness to their subject, they can introduce them, use craggy or blue mountain distances, and this with definite expression of love towards them; Leonardo, conventionally, as feeling they were necessary for his sacred subjects, while yet his science and idealism had destroyed his mountain sincerity; Michael Angelo, wholly an artist, and Raphael in later years, show no love of mountains whatever, while the relative ...
— Modern Painters, Volume IV (of V) • John Ruskin
... of palmettes and lotuses. The cornices above and below are of clay or poros, painted in just such designs as appear on the Olympian terracottas; and these designs are frequently repeated in the sculptures themselves. The feathers of Typhon's wings are conventionally represented by a scale-pattern; the arc of the scales has been drawn with compass; we observe still the hole left in the centre by the leg of the compass. The larger pinions at the ends of the wings have been ...
— The American Journal of Archaeology, 1893-1 • Various
... its old-time footing owed its longevity more to the enterprising solicitude of Miss McQuade than to any conscious sentimental effort on the part of Youghal himself. Molly McQuade was known to her neighbours in a minor hunting shire as a hard-riding conventionally unconventional type of young woman, who came naturally into the classification, "a good sort." She was just sufficiently good-looking, sufficiently reticent about her own illnesses, when she had any, and sufficiently appreciative of her neighbours' gardens, children and hunters to be generally ...
— The Unbearable Bassington • Saki
... more conventionally. He might have had a dismal explanatory interview with Joanna, and ordered a fly to convey himself and his luggage to the Railway Station the next morning. Perhaps if Joanna had found him in the November Sunday afternoon garden this might have occurred. But Joanna did not find him. His temperament ...
— The Beloved Vagabond • William J. Locke
... side, at that moment, were fathomless mysteries to me. It was like a dream. Was I Walter Hartright? Was this the well-known, uneventful road, where holiday people strolled on Sundays? Had I really left, little more than an hour since, the quiet, decent, conventionally domestic atmosphere of my mother's cottage? I was too bewildered—too conscious also of a vague sense of something like self-reproach—to speak to my strange companion for some minutes. It was her voice again that first broke the silence ...
— The Woman in White • Wilkie Collins
... him. Above all it was too negative and unrelated to anything but the brain for the man who wrote "Lines to Six- foot-three" and consorted with Gypsies. He had taken atheism along with Taylor's literary and linguistic teaching, perhaps with some eagerness at first as a form of protest against conventionally pious and respectable Norwich life. The Bible Society and Mrs. Clarke and her friends came radiant and benevolent to his "looped and windowed" atheism. They gave him friends and money: they gave him an occupation on which he felt, ...
— George Borrow - The Man and His Books • Edward Thomas
... proceeding, even after the partial recognition of his error:—one drops a word or two by hazard, one expresses an anxiety to afford reparation, one sends a message, and so forth, for the satisfaction of one's conventionally gentlemanly feeling: but the adviseable proceeding under stress of peculiar circumstances, his clearly-awakened recognition of that, impelled him unhesitatingly. His wife had said it was the portion she brought him. Tears would ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... able to say that the general tendency of the speeches was towards universal Emancipation, mental and physical. I doubt whether an English audience composed in so large proportion of the conventionally "respectable classes" ever listened to so much downright Democracy before. The French speakers, the French writers, were full of it, and the great event, at least of the last day's session, was the entrance of ...
— Glances at Europe - In a Series of Letters from Great Britain, France, Italy, - Switzerland, &c. During the Summer of 1851. • Horace Greeley
... lunching here," Tabs commenced conventionally. But he altered his tactics promptly. In the presence of his friend's self-advertised misery nothing but the briefest ...
— The Kingdom Round the Corner - A Novel • Coningsby Dawson
... anyone else in his place. Or she may have loved truly some man who loved another. Or nothing may ever have happened to awaken conscious love in her, in which case it is still possible that her nature may cry out at times for the satisfaction of its primary needs. And while all this is true, she is conventionally supposed never to show by any sign that she would have liked to be married. However much she may suffer it is held unseemly for her to show that she suffers, or to ask for sympathy. She is often, and I think ...
— Men, Women, and God • A. Herbert Gray
... groaned Owen. He sat down on the grassy bank and stared moodily into the amber water beneath him. "I know there's nothing to do—nothing but to say conventionally, 'Good-bye, Mrs. Moore. Thank you for all your kindness to me this summer,' just as I would have said it to the sonsy, bustling, keen-eyed housewife I expected her to be when I came. Then I'll pay my board money like any honest boarder and go! Oh, it's very simple. ...
— Anne's House of Dreams • Lucy Maud Montgomery
... and had left her in disgust, her words had not failed of certain weight. Again he recalled with jealous pain the obvious indifference with which his approaches had been received. True, no well-bred girl would be more than conventionally civil to a stranger even under the exceptional circumstances of their meeting on the train. True, she was cordial, bright, winsome, and all that when at last he was formally presented; but so she was to everybody. True, they had had many—at ...
— Ray's Daughter - A Story of Manila • Charles King
... smartened up for the occasion. He was plain of feature, but wore a pleasant, honest look, and his demeanour to the girl showed not only good breeding but unmistakable interest of the warmest kind. His age might perhaps be thirty; he was dressed well, and in all respects conventionally. ...
— Eve's Ransom • George Gissing
... choice of colors she left me to my own taste. I was pleased with an outline of yellow upon a background of dark blue, or a combination of red and myrtle-green. There was another of red with a bluish-gray that was more conventionally used. When I became a little familiar with designing and the various pleasing combinations of color, a harder lesson was given me. It was the sewing on, instead of beads, some tinted porcupine quills, moistened and flattened between the nails of the ...
— American Indian stories • Zitkala-Sa
... he had been conventionally polite, but playing a role was so foreign to him that even this laudable one of pretending to be amused when he was bored sat gloomily and ...
— The Halo • Bettina von Hutten
... are told. Time was when there were more. Names occur to all of us, each of which stands in our mind for someone who, as we put it, was a man of himself. All Churches have had such men; our own was rich in them. To-day, they tell us, we are all in real danger of becoming decorously, decently, conventionally alike. We have conceived a typical preacher and we try to approximate to our conception; a typical sermon, and we try to preach it. "He is a typical curate," "a typical Presbyterian minister," "a typical Baptist pastor," "a typical Methodist travelling ...
— The Message and the Man: - Some Essentials of Effective Preaching • J. Dodd Jackson
... conventionally covers this passion is one of the saddest consequences of Adam's fall. It was a terrible misfortune in man's development that he should not have been able to acquire the higher functions without deranging the lower. Why should the depths of his being be thus polluted and the most ...
— The Life of Reason • George Santayana
... regenerating idea,—the thoughtful reader will question the instruction. The adjectives "extreme" and "fanatical" have, during the last twenty years, been applied to most valuable men of various parties and beliefs; they have been so applied by masses of conventionally respectable and not insincere citizens. But that the persons thus stigmatized have, on the whole, advanced the interests of civilization, freedom, and ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 13, No. 77, March, 1864 • Various
... see you, Dr. Pettit," I murmured conventionally, then hurriedly: "Pardon me a moment, I must greet these guests. I will ...
— Revelations of a Wife - The Story of a Honeymoon • Adele Garrison
... community of wives. When reading Plato he could not or would not escape reading in his own conception of the natural ascendency of men, his idea of property in women and children. But as Plato intended women to be conventionally equal to men, this phrase belies him altogether; community of husbands and wives would be truer to his proposal. Aristotle condemns Plato as roundly as any commercial room would condemn him to-day, and in much the same spirit; ...
— A Modern Utopia • H. G. Wells
... a jerk of his head, a "Come along," and a lifted glass. Leaning back as she came on, watching and waiting for her, he stretched out his left arm. She smiled rather conventionally, did not meet his eyes, but came within reach. His arm encircled her, and drew her in. "Well, my girl, well!" he said, glancing up, laughing, tempting her to laugh. She looked down gently, blushing a little, and ...
— Rest Harrow - A Comedy of Resolution • Maurice Hewlett
... its original meaning. There is a curious mention of this gesture by Strabo." Mr. Washington Matthews informs me that, with the Dakota Indians of North America, contempt is shown not only by movements of the face, such as those above described, but "conventionally, by the hand being closed and held near the breast, then, as the forearm is suddenly extended, the hand is opened and the fingers separated from each other. If the person at whose expense the sign is made is present, the hand is moved towards ...
— The Expression of Emotion in Man and Animals • Charles Darwin
... thinking of Loring's recountal as he stood looking down on her. Other women were younger—and with features more conventionally beautiful; Kent could find a round dozen within easy eye-reach, to say nothing of the calm-eyed, queenly improvisatrice at the piano—his constant standard of all womanly charm and grace. Unconsciously ...
— The Grafters • Francis Lynde
... modern times; and at the back of the stage is a wall architecturally adorned to represent a house or "palace" front, and containing one central and two side doors, which served for separate purposes conventionally understood. Over the stage is a roof, which slopes backward to join the wall. The entrances to the ordinary tiers of seats are from openings reached by stairs from the outside arcade surrounding the building; those to the level "orchestra" are from ...
— Life in the Roman World of Nero and St. Paul • T. G. Tucker
... had deliberated, have replied to this question by something conventionally vague and polite; but the answer somehow slipped from my tongue before I ...
— Jane Eyre - an Autobiography • Charlotte Bronte
... they know not, the more learned that he never did. But should I ask with what letters the name "Aeneas" is written, every one who has learnt this will answer me aright, as to the signs which men have conventionally settled. If, again, I should ask which might be forgotten with least detriment to the concerns of life, reading and writing or these poetic fictions? who does not foresee what all must answer who have not wholly forgotten themselves? I sinned, then, when as a boy ...
— The Confessions of Saint Augustine • Saint Augustine
... this period Athens means Greece—the relations between men and women are even under Pericles beginning to be vulgarised. In the great dramatic poets love enters either as a subsidiary motive somewhat severely and conventionally treated, as in the Antigone of Sophocles, or, as in the Phaedra and Medea of Euripides, as part of a general study of psychology. It would be foolish to attempt to defend the address of the chorus in the Antigone ...
— Select Epigrams from the Greek Anthology • J. W. Mackail
... during stormy weather, and for the inevitable bathing and anointing with oil which will follow all exercise. This great square court formed by the "gymnasium" proper is swarming with interesting humanity, but we pass it hastily in order to depart by an exit on the inner side and discover a second more conventionally laid out park. Here to right and to left are short stretches of soft sand divided into convenient sections for wrestling, for quoit hurling, for javelin casting, and for jumping; but a loud shout and cheering soon draw us onward. At the end of this park we find the stadium; ...
— A Day In Old Athens • William Stearns Davis
... good!" she exclaimed, not nibbling conventionally, but taking big bites. "'Cause I ...
— The Poor Little Rich Girl • Eleanor Gates
... a bite to eat since yesterday," she exclaimed practically, while preparing to divest herself of her pack. "Everybody get busy here and we'll get him some lunch. Shane, you and Kayak see what you can spare in the way of clothes, and in the meantime, Mr. Harlan—" her conventionally polite tone as she turned to that young man caused Boreland and Kayak Bill to exchange an amused wink—"you may take this blanket that Jean has wrapped about her violin, and ...
— Where the Sun Swings North • Barrett Willoughby
... was longer. It began conventionally, and went on in delicate language to tell me that time was passing, and surely soon I must be thinking of seeing my friends again, and he was entirely at my disposition when I ...
— The Reflections of Ambrosine - A Novel • Elinor Glyn
... standing aside and commenting on the main action is a familiar situation and often productive of good fun. An excellent example is Most. 166 ff., where Philematium is performing her conventionally out-door toilet with the aid of her duenna Scapha. Philolaches stands on the other side of the ...
— The Dramatic Values in Plautus • Wilton Wallace Blancke
... they have been practically abandoned. These paintings, compared with the beautiful, conventional productions of the Navaho, are crude; in making them the Apache always attempt to picture the objects literally rather than to represent them conventionally or symbolically. ...
— The North American Indian • Edward S. Curtis
... forms, and the comparative triviality of versification. Yet in dramatic music, as in dramatic literature, the tradition of versification clings with the same pernicious results; and the opera, like the tragedy, is conventionally made like a wall paper. The theatre seems doomed to be in all things the last refuge of the hankering after ...
— The Perfect Wagnerite - A Commentary on the Niblung's Ring • George Bernard Shaw
... century, the great masters of the Flemish school, Hubert and Jan van Eyck, suddenly lifted the veil from nature. Their landscapes are not merely the fruit of an endeavor to reflect the real world in art, but have, even if expressed conventionally, a certain poetical meaning—in short, a soul. Their influence on the whole art of the West is undeniable, and extended to the landscape-painting of the Italians, but without preventing the characteristic interest of the Italian eye for nature from ...
— The Civilization of the Renaissance in Italy • Jacob Burckhardt
... of denotation between Scott and the author of Waverley. But there is some difficulty in choosing among alternative meanings of this contention. In the first place, it should be observed that the author of Waverley is not a mere name, like Scott. Scott is merely a noise or shape conventionally used to designate a certain person; it gives us no information about that person, and has nothing that can be called meaning as opposed to denotation. (I neglect the fact, considered above, that even ...
— Mysticism and Logic and Other Essays • Bertrand Russell
... that time a suspicion has now become practically a certainty. Spectrum-analysis yields results wholly irreconcilable with the assumption that the conventionally-named simple substances are really simple. Each yields a spectrum having lines varying in number from two to eighty or more, every one of which implies the intercepting of ethereal undulations of a certain order by something oscillating in unison or in harmony with them. Were iron ...
— Essays: Scientific, Political, & Speculative, Vol. I • Herbert Spencer
... murmured conventionally, as Steele dropped slightly back among the others who had by this time drawn near. "To arrive at such an unfashionable ...
— Half A Chance • Frederic S. Isham
... best of it; for having helped her mount, the man who did so climbed up back of one of his fellows and abandoned her to her fate. Hard, in the meantime, had mounted another rough-looking but more conventionally disposed beast, and the procession started back to the road, the two Americans side by side, surrounded by the Mexicans; Angel Gonzales leading, and Porfirio Cortes bringing ...
— Across the Mesa • Jarvis Hall
... George Sand in Paris—was at one of her soirees—and called her 'a magnificent creature.' The soiree was 'full of rubbish' in the way of its social composition, which George Sand likes, nota bene. If Mdme. Ossoli called it 'rubbish' it must have been really rubbish—not expressing anything conventionally so—she being one of the out and out Reds and scorners of grades of society. She said that she did not see Balzac. Balzac went into the world scarcely at all, frequenting the lowest cafes, so that it was difficult to track him out. Which information I receive doubtingly. The rumours about ...
— The Letters of Elizabeth Barrett Browning (1 of 2) • Frederic G. Kenyon
... more audacious touches of realism—anything resembling the exaggerated horrors of such efforts of 1830 itself as Janin's own Ane Mort and part of Borel's Champavert. In her splendour as in her misery, in her frivolity as in her devotion and self-sacrifice, repulsive as this contrast may conventionally be, Marguerite is never impossible or unnatural. Her chief companion of her own sex, Prudence Duvernoy, though, as might be expected, a good deal of a proxenete, and by no means disinterested in other ways, is also very well drawn, and assists the general ...
— A History of the French Novel, Vol. 2 - To the Close of the 19th Century • George Saintsbury
... development which political freedom and economic opportunity ought properly to stimulate. But the moral blindness to which it gives rise has never, I think, been sufficiently emphasized. We require of business men only that measure of honesty that we {40} conventionally expect in that type of occupation. A politician is proverbially tricky and self-seeking. The artistic temperament would scarcely be recognized if it did not manifest itself in weakness and excess. It is as unreasonable to expect either tunefulness ...
— The Moral Economy • Ralph Barton Perry
... had turned to the left, he would have come presently to a public beach and would have had his swim conventionally and in due time. But some impulse told him to turn to the right, and he began to wander westward along the edge of the cliffs—always on his left hand, space and the sea, and on his right, lawns or gardens or parapets crowned by cactus plants in urns, ...
— The Beauty and the Bolshevist • Alice Duer Miller
... through which he is looking? Is there a sudden play of light that warms, and, through this warmth, illuminates the object before him? Few of those just quoted, put to such test, could be called more than conventionally poetical—if this be not a solecism. To illustrate one sensuous object by another does not animate the mind enough to fulfill any one of the above conditions. Such similitudes issuing from intellectual liveliness, there is through them no steeping of intellectual perception ...
— Essays AEsthetical • George Calvert
... awakened by steps and whispers and upon inquiry found that their unexpected visitors were soldiers who had crept through the lines to see Miss Evans and hear her sing. The mother was disposed to object to her appearing at a time and place not conventionally appropriate to artistic performances, but, wrapping her travelling coat and robe about her, she went out into the moonlight with her mass of hair streaming in the wind like a flying cloud, and sang that thrilling song ...
— Literary Hearthstones of Dixie • La Salle Corbell Pickett
... Manhattan was conventionally affable to Geraldine Seagrave, also somewhat curious to see what she looked like. Fifth Avenue and the neighbouring side streets were jammed with motors and carriages on the bright January afternoon that Geraldine made her bow, and the red and silver drawing-rooms, so famous ...
— The Danger Mark • Robert W. Chambers
... no better illustration than the state of what we conventionally know as Christendom. Christendom as we see it is a purely Caucasian phase of man's struggle upward, with Caucasian merits and Caucasian defects. Nowhere is its defectiveness more visible than in what the Caucasian has made of the teaching of Jesus Christ. It was probably a misfortune ...
— The Conquest of Fear • Basil King
... it is round his head that success sheds its halo. The American Government is described truly as a Government composed of three members, of three powers distinct from one another. The English Government is likewise so described, not truly, but conventionally. For in the English Government there has gradually formed itself a fourth power, entering into and sharing the vitality of each of the other three, and charged with the business of holding them in ...
— Prose Masterpieces from Modern Essayists • James Anthony Froude, Edward A. Freeman, William Ewart Gladstone, John Henry Newman and Leslie Steph
... the same date, perhaps somewhat earlier, we may place the fine Tondo (No. 79B) hanging in the same gallery, formerly in the Patrizi collection, Rome. I have not given it its usual name of a "Visitation," because that scene, conventionally treated, took place before the birth of the children who here play so important a part. Signorelli has, according to his habit, conceived the subject without any reference to traditional custom. I have already spoken of the ease with which he composes in the Tondo form, and this is perhaps ...
— Luca Signorelli • Maud Cruttwell
... victory. When I went down to you that first evening, it was like going to meet an enemy, dear and terrible. I was divided between two impulses, both equally savage 1 think, either to stab or to fall upon your breast and weep. But you will bear me witness that my greeting in reality was conventionally awkward. In any case, your eyes would have saved me. They are wide and deep, and as you stood here by the window where I am writing now, with both my hands clasped in yours, I saw a bright beam leap up far within them like candles ...
— The Jessica Letters: An Editor's Romance • Paul Elmer More
... States, Camerados, or My Message, which fills Leaves with their patriotic frounces. His philosophy is fudge. It was an artistic misfortune for Walt that he had a "mission," it is a worse one that his disciples endeavour to ape him. He was an unintellectual man who wrote conventionally when he was plain Walter Whitman, living in Brooklyn. But he imitated Ossian and Blake, and their singing robes ill-befitted his burly frame. If, in Poe, there is much "rant and rococo," Whitman is mostly yawping and yodling. He is destitute ...
— Ivory Apes and Peacocks • James Huneker
... suggestive words, spoken with suppressed ire and flashing eyes, Speers scuttled to the door crabwise, holding the young lion in check conventionally—to wit, with an eye as valiant as a sheep's; and a joyful apothecary was he when he found himself safe outside the house and beside Dr. Wycherley, who ...
— Hard Cash • Charles Reade
... The Unmanifest is called Kshetra, Sattwa (understanding), and also Iswara (the supreme Lord), while Purusha, which is the twenty-fifth principle has nothing superior to it and is not a principle (for it transcends all principles and is only called a principle conventionally). This much O king, is an account of the Sankhya philosophy. The Sankhyas called the cause of the universe, and merging all the grosser principles into the Chit behold the Supreme Soul. Rightly studying the four and twenty topics along with ...
— The Mahabharata of Krishna-Dwaipayana Vyasa, Volume 3 - Books 8, 9, 10, 11 and 12 • Unknown
... in her complexion and in the sweetness of her mouth. Above all she was natural—that was indubitable now; more natural than he had supposed at first, perhaps on account of her aesthetic toggery, which was conventionally unconventional, suggesting what he might have called a tortuous spontaneity. He had feared that sort of thing in other cases, and his fears had been justified; for, though he was an artist to the essence, the modern reactionary nymph, with the brambles of the woodland caught in her ...
— The Lesson of the Master • Henry James
... beauty, natural tendencies of the artistic spirit at all times, it must always be partly a matter of individual temperament. The eighteenth century in England has been regarded as almost exclusively a classical period; yet William Blake, a type of so much which breaks through what are conventionally thought the influences of that century, is still a noticeable phenomenon in it, and the reaction in favour of naturalism in poetry begins in that century, early. There are, thus, the born romanticists and the born ...
— Appreciations, with an Essay on Style • Walter Horatio Pater
... looking with shining eyes at the face bending above the paper. It was a handsome face with clear, hard lines—the reddish hair brushed up conventionally from the temples, and the skin a little pallid under its careful massage and skilfully ...
— Mr. Achilles • Jennette Lee
... overpowering air of grandeur and exclusiveness, quenched all desires save that which prompted a hasty retreat. The sectarian school paid as little attention to the social as to the athletic side of its youth; and Tom Gordon at fifteen past was as helpless conventionally as if he had never set ...
— The Quickening • Francis Lynde
... any sign of oars, except two paddles for steering with. About midship is a short mast, crossed by a long spar or yard, which carries a sail, closely reefed along its entire length. The yard and sail are managed by means of four ropes, which are, however, somewhat conventionally depicted. Both the head and stern of the vessel rise to a considerable height above the water, and the stern is curved, very much as in the war-galleys. It perhaps terminated in ...
— History of Phoenicia • George Rawlinson
... in a plate is with a burin—an instrument with a sharp triangular point—which is pushed through the copper, instead of being pulled, as is the drypoint needle. When used conventionally, the burin produces a very characteristic hard, controlled printed line, one which does not appear in this print. When used lightly, however, its line is virtually indistinguishable from that of the vertical drypoint needle. It is quite possible that Rembrandt used the burin in ...
— Rembrandt's Etching Technique: An Example • Peter Morse
... odd enough to hold us in arrest a moment—that quality of our situation that could suffer such elements as those I have glanced at to take so considerably the place of education as more usually and conventionally understood, and by that understanding more earnestly mapped out; a deficiency, in the whole thing, that I fail at all consistently to deplore, however—struck as I am with the rare fashion after which, in any small victim of life, the inward ...
— A Small Boy and Others • Henry James
... progenitors of "Saleas, at present called Chalias," who inhabit the country between Galle and Colombo, and who, along with their ostensible occupation as peelers of cinnamon, still employ themselves in the labours of the loom.[1] All handicrafts are conventionally regarded by the Singhalese as the occupations of an inferior class; and a man of high caste would submit to any privation rather than stoop to an occupation ...
— Ceylon; an Account of the Island Physical, Historical, and • James Emerson Tennent
... any more than in all works of handicraft. Now the notions of nobleness and justice, with the examination of which politikea is concerned, admit of variation and error to such a degree, that they are supposed by some to exist conventionally only, and not in the nature of things: but then, again, the things which are allowed to be goods admit of a similar error, because harm cornes to many from them: for before now some have perished through wealth, and others ...
— Ethics • Aristotle
... a Smell on one side of which is built a prim little French town finished off with conventionally placed poplars in true Latin style; and on the other side lies a disreputable, rambling Turkish village culminating in a cone of rock upon which is the old fortress called ...
— The Luck of Thirteen - Wanderings and Flight through Montenegro and Serbia • Jan Gordon
... hat, he said conventionally enough: "Old friends should have much to say to each other. ...
— An Unpardonable Liar • Gilbert Parker
... and I fear I shall giggle," said Katherine, but she encountered a glance from her elder sister quite as haughty as any Lady Angela might have bestowed, and all thought of merriment fled for the moment; thus the ordeal passed conventionally without ...
— A Rock in the Baltic • Robert Barr
... the columns, which in the distance I had taken as due to the effect of weather, were really a vast number of small pictures, sculptured in very low relief, representing scenes in the history of Bandokolo, many of those scenes being, naturally, battles. And although the figures were conventionally drawn, the vigour of action and the truth to nature of the attitudes portrayed evidenced the work of an artist of no ...
— Through Veld and Forest - An African Story • Harry Collingwood
... the romantic logic of the stage. The axioms and postulates of that dreary mimanthropometry are so well known that it is almost impossible for its slaves to write tolerable last acts to their plays, so conventionally do their conclusions follow from their premises. Because I have thrown this logic ruthlessly overboard, I am accused of ignoring, not stage logic, but, of all things, human feeling. People with completely theatrified imaginations tell me that no girl would treat her ...
— Mrs. Warren's Profession • George Bernard Shaw
... mentioned only as illustrative of something Aristotle wishes to say about epic or drama. Aristotle's Poetics discusses only epic and, especially, drama. Thus of the twenty-six books into which the Poetics is conventionally divided, five are devoted to the general theory of poetry, three to diction, two to epic, and sixteen to drama. Although Aristotle includes dithyrambic, nomic, satiric, and lyric poetry in his discussion, he practically ...
— Rhetoric and Poetry in the Renaissance - A Study of Rhetorical Terms in English Renaissance Literary Criticism • Donald Lemen Clark
... two weeks later, to a similar situation. On Friday, November 7th, I was in a strait-jacket. On November 9th and 10th I was apparently as tractable as any of the twenty-three hundred patients in the State Hospital—conventionally clothed, mild mannered, and, seemingly, right minded. On the 9th, the day after my arrival, I attended a church service held at the hospital. My behavior was not other than that of the most pious worshipper in the land. The next evening, with most exemplary ...
— A Mind That Found Itself - An Autobiography • Clifford Whittingham Beers
... faculty of the intellect becomes more developed. It is an indisputable truth that the influence of myth on thought and fancy, a survival from prehistoric ages, still prevails among the common people both in town and country, among those who are uncultivated, and even in the higher classes conventionally called good society. ...
— Myth and Science - An Essay • Tito Vignoli
... in the walled garden there is no need to speak in detail. They were conventionally correct, but an earnestness of purpose which could be felt in the very air lifted the business above the common run of affairs of honour. One bit of byplay unnoticed by the seconds, very busy for the moment with their arrangements, ...
— The Arrow of Gold - a story between two notes • Joseph Conrad
... had now an interest greater than before; and almost as soon as anxiety gave place, the impulse to utterance began again to urge him. What this impulse is, who can define, or who can trace its origin? The result of it in Walter's case was ordered words, or, conventionally, poetry. Seldom is such a result of any value, but the process is for the man invaluable: it remained to be seen whether in Walter it was for others as well ...
— Home Again • George MacDonald
... merge away into all other phenomena: that, for instance—suppose there should be vast celestial super-oceanic, or inter-planetary vessels that come near this earth and discharge volumes of smoke at times. We're only supposing such a thing as that now, because, conventionally, we are beginning modestly and tentatively. But if it were so, there would necessarily be some phenomenon upon this earth, with which that phenomenon would merge. Extra-mundane smoke and smoke from cities merge, or both would manifest in ...
— The Book of the Damned • Charles Fort
... law into his own hands, and chooses to stand against what is conventionally deemed fitting:—against the world, as we say, is open to these moods of degrading humility. Robert waited for the sound of the bells with the emotions of a common culprit. Could he have been driven to the church and deposited suddenly in ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... what's the world's good word worth? "the Institute!" (the reference is, of course, to the French Institute), the Institute! with all its authoritative, dictatorial learnedness! v.6. Guizot and Montalembert were both members of the Institute, and being thus in the same boat, Guizot conventionally receives Montalembert. vv. 7 and 8. These two unconventional Bohemian lovers, strolling together at night, at their own sweet will, see down the court along which they are strolling, three lampions flare, which indicate some big place or other where the "respectables" do congregate; and the ...
— Introduction to Robert Browning • Hiram Corson
... dismal wilderness, to spend her days in toil and poverty, with a half-crazy mother-in-law, and a rheumatic brother- in-law, in such a looking hovel?" Mrs. Sewell did not group these disadvantages conventionally, but they were effective. "You have allowed your feelings about that baffling creature to blind you to everything else, David. Why should you care so much for his future, and nothing for hers? Is ...
— The Minister's Charge • William D. Howells
... character and having double doors is the entrance to Solitude. Conventionally Ionic in detail, with smooth columns and voluted capitals, it pleases the eye but lacks the impressiveness of the doorway at Cliveden. The three-panel double doors are narrower, and this fact is emphasized by the deep recess with paneled jambs. There is but one broad ...
— The Colonial Architecture of Philadelphia • Frank Cousins
... first person whom they saw at Willow Lawn. Two letters had passed, both so conventionally civil, that her state of mind could not be gathered from them, but her first tones proved that coherence was more than ever wanting, and no one attempted to understand anything she said, while she enfolded Sophy in an agitated embrace, and marshalled them to the drawing-room, where ...
— The Young Step-Mother • Charlotte M. Yonge
... extraordinary name—had a curious fascination for him. He was rather fond of her, yet the greatest wish he had in the world was to break it off. When with her he felt himself to be at once a criminal and a benefactor, a sinner and a saint. Theoretically, theatrically, and perhaps conventionally, his relations with her constituted him the villain of the piece. Yet he behaved to her more like Don Quixote than ...
— Tenterhooks • Ada Leverson
... Morgan's Gap. No railroad has ever yet penetrated this southern country, despite the fact that rich mines have been opened along these mountains, and are still being opened; but it lies to-day in much of the condition of primitive savagery, and lawlessness, as the word is conventionally accepted, that obtained when the first rush was made for ...
— Nan of Music Mountain • Frank H. Spearman
... afterwards they'd see I'd done them a service. You know, Terebyeva (who is in the community now) was blamed because when she left her family and... devoted... herself, she wrote to her father and mother that she wouldn't go on living conventionally and was entering on a free marriage and it was said that that was too harsh, that she might have spared them and have written more kindly. I think that's all nonsense and there's no need of softness; on the contrary, what's wanted is protest. Varents had been married seven years, she abandoned ...
— Crime and Punishment • Fyodor Dostoyevsky
... a happy one. Her husband was polite, complaisant, and conventionally correct in his behaviour towards her, and that was all. And then she saw so little of him. He was frequently absent from Hidvar for weeks at a time, and when he returned he regularly brought in his train a merry company of comrades, in whose pastimes Henrietta could ...
— The Poor Plutocrats • Maurus Jokai
... but one wing sending out a ray of welcome; and the next moment Faxon was receiving a violent impression of warmth and light, of hothouse plants, hurrying servants, a vast spectacular oak hall like a stage setting, and, in its unreal middle distance, a small concise figure, correctly dressed, conventionally featured, and utterly unlike his rather florid conception of the great ...
— Short Stories for English Courses • Various (Rosa M. R. Mikels ed.)
... in which Paul found himself was on the first floor, over looking the square, and was well but conventionally furnished. A fire blazed in the grate, and the draped mantelpiece was decorated with a number of photographs of junior officers, many of them autographed. His companion, who said her name was Kitty Chester, had discarded her ...
— The Orchard of Tears • Sax Rohmer
... from mere animal desire. The poets wrote of it coldly and conventionally, as of a thing which existed only in name. The lover could only beg his mistress "to ease his pain." But the conventionality which extended through all thoughts and expressions relating to the higher emotions of the human soul, had no effect in diminishing the coarseness ...
— A History of English Prose Fiction • Bayard Tuckerman |
