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More "Aloofness" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... know why. He had never been told why. All he knew was that his father would have nothing to do with Gower, never mentioned the name voluntarily, let his catch of salmon rot on the beach before he would sell to a Gower cannery boat,—and had enjoined upon his son the same aloofness from all things Gower. Once, in answer to young Jack's curious question, his natural "why," Donald MacRae ...
— Poor Man's Rock • Bertrand W. Sinclair
... although she had no hatred of men, and indeed liked many and craved their society, she gave her real sympathies and affections to her women friends. She had no intimates, and this, perhaps, was one secret of her power. A certain aloofness is essential in intellectual leadership. But if she had no talent for intimacy she had much for friendship, and the friends of her inner circle were all women, partly because there was no waste of time fending off love-making, partly ...
— The White Morning • Gertrude Atherton
... company for an hour or more. He had the natural hunger of a young man to talk to a young woman; and, moreover, it is a severe strain for a man to be living under the same roof with the girl he loves and not to be on terms of friendship with her. But Maggie maintained her aloofness. She spoke only when she was pressed into it, and her speech was usually no more than a "yes" or a "no," or a flashing phrase ...
— Children of the Whirlwind • Leroy Scott
... was a noticeable woman, a woman of temperament, not beautiful exactly, but with a stateliness about her, an aloofness. The more I studied her face, with its thin sensitive lips and commanding, almost imperious eyes, the more there seemed to be something peculiar about her. She was dressed very simply in black, but it was the ...
— The War Terror • Arthur B. Reeve
... was a favourite, as he well deserved to be, and his beautiful wife was regarded with a fervent admiration, which her very aloofness had served to heighten. Other ladies might call round at cottage doors, and talk intimately concerning book clubs, and Dorcas societies, but no one expected such condescension from Mrs Geoffrey Hilliard. She whizzed along in her great green car, or cantered past on her tall brown horse, followed ...
— The Love Affairs of Pixie • Mrs George de Horne Vaizey
... fiction. The woman novelist, if she be skillful enough to arise out of mere imitation into genuine self-expression, never takes her heroes quite seriously. From the day of George Sand to the day of Selma Lagerlof she has always got into her character study a touch of superior aloofness, of ill-concealed derision. I can't recall a single masculine figure created by a woman who is not, at bottom, ...
— In Defense of Women • H. L. Mencken
... it seemed, had been behaving oddly. Ardent towards Miss Sinclair almost to an embarrassing point in the early stages of their acquaintance, he had suddenly cooled; at a recent lunch had behaved with a strange aloofness; and now, at this writing, had vanished altogether, leaving nothing behind him but an abrupt note to the effect that he had been compelled to go abroad and that, much as it was to be regretted, he and she would ...
— A Damsel in Distress • Pelham Grenville Wodehouse
... great mistake that day. He had been misled by the gentleness of her ways, the sweet aspect of her face, and by a look of aloofness in her eyes, as though she lived in dreams. He had seen surely that she was innocent, and since he believed that knowledge must needs corrupt, he thought her ignorant as well. But she was not ignorant. She ...
— Running Water • A. E. W. Mason
... the fact, but Ida was different to the general run of her sex. She had been brought up in an out-of-the-way place in which the modern novel, the fashionable pastime of flirtation, were not known; and her secluded life in the lonely dale had deepened that sense of aloofness from the world, that indifference to the sentiment which lurks in most girls' bosoms. This tall, handsome man who had stepped into her life and shared the secret of her father's strange affliction, weakness, was nothing more to her than one of the other tourists whom she sometimes chanced ...
— At Love's Cost • Charles Garvice
... humorous intentness upon the spinning wheel. Even amongst that crowd of beautiful women she possessed a certain individual distinction. She not only looked what she was—an Englishwoman of good birth—but there was a certain delicate aloofness about her expression and bearing which gave an added charm to a personality which seemed to combine the two extremes of provocativeness and reserve. One would have hesitated to address to her even the chance remarks which pass so easily ...
— Mr. Grex of Monte Carlo • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... was not deluded by his silence and aloofness; but she was unable to devise means to circumvent him. Constant fear of his power to crush lurked near her day and night. Conscious of her weakness, but eager to have done with the strife, sometimes she longed for the enemy to advance. At first, she distrusted ...
— Jane Cable • George Barr McCutcheon
... alarm on the subject of the "sanctions" which France threatened to apply. The Bavarian is too lethargic, slow, and easy-going to be readily frightened—in temperament he has little in common with the high-spirited, nervous Prussian. Bavarians spoke of Germany and Germany's war-debt with an aloofness as of neutrals. It did not trouble them deeply. They were sceptical as to France's ability to collect a huge indemnity. The fifty per cent tax they regarded as an absurdity. "It is possible to ruin Germany, but it is not possible to enslave her," was ...
— Europe—Whither Bound? - Being Letters of Travel from the Capitals of Europe in the Year 1921 • Stephen Graham
... mountains, to live in a cave with a lion or a wolf for his sole companion. This is the spirit which took St. Anthony into a solitary place in Egypt. It led St. Simeon Stylites to secure a more perfect sense of aloofness from the world, and a greater security from contact with it by spending the last thirty years of his life on the top of a pillar near Antioch. In the Western world, which was thoroughly imbued with the Roman spirit, the Christian who ...
— The Common People of Ancient Rome - Studies of Roman Life and Literature • Frank Frost Abbott
... despite its unsurpassed and almost unmatched literary faculty, has prevented it from contributing any of the very greatest masterpieces to the literature of the world, has communicated to them this aloofness, this, as it may almost be called, provincialism. But some such note there is in them, and it may be that the immense stretch of time during which they were worse than ...
— The Flourishing of Romance and the Rise of Allegory - (Periods of European Literature, vol. II) • George Saintsbury
... twittered like startled birds, jumped and twirled, wriggled and revolved, and inclined their greasy foreheads to the impenetrable spectators, who stuck silver coins on to the perspiring flesh. And Marnier sat and gazed at them with the aloofness of one who watches the creatures in puddle water through a microscope. I could scarcely help laughing at him, but I wished him away. For to me there was excitement, there was even a sort of ecstasy, in the utter barbarity ...
— Desert Air - 1905 • Robert Hichens
... when war was the normal condition, the warrior was the normal pillar of the state. In how great a proportion of the time that history describes, war was the normal condition and peace the abnormal, few realize now in our country, because of the aloofness of the present generation from even the memory of war. Our last great war ended in 1865; and since then only the light and transient touch of the Spanish War has been laid upon us. Even that war ended seventeen ...
— The Navy as a Fighting Machine • Bradley A. Fiske
... in any hour of trouble. There was space here, and air, and solitude. It was a diversion that was almost a form of consolation to be in touch with the wood's teeming life. Moreover, the trees, with their stately aloofness from mortal cares, their strifelessness and strength, shed on him a kind of benediction. From long association, from days of bird's-nesting in spring, and camping in summer, and nutting in autumn, and snow-shoeing in winter, he knew ...
— The Side Of The Angels - A Novel • Basil King
... ideals of which this building was the outward expression, he would wake from his constructive reverie to realise sadly for the first time, not the beauty, but the incompleteness, of the institution; not its proximity to the city beyond, but its air of aloofness from the ...
— The Mayor of Warwick • Herbert M. Hopkins
... long time no technical words were invented to give aloofness and seeming precision to philosophic and scientific discussion. Aristotle was the first to use words incomprehensible to the average citizen. It was in these conditions that the possibilities of human criticism first showed themselves. The primitive ...
— The Mind in the Making - The Relation of Intelligence to Social Reform • James Harvey Robinson
... greatly. Like Aunt Elinor. Aunt Elinor had loved her husband more than she had loved her child. Quite calmly Lily decided that, as between her husband and herself, her mother loved her husband. Perhaps that was as it should be, but it added to her sense of aloofness. And she wondered, too, about these great loves that seemed to feed ...
— A Poor Wise Man • Mary Roberts Rinehart
... reproduced (p. 128), by far the best likeness extant, he gave to Madame Novikoff in 1870, receiving hers in return, but pronouncing the transaction "an exchange between the personified months of May and November." The face gives expression to the shy aloofness which, amongst strangers, was characteristic of him through life. He had even a horror of hearing his name pealed out by servants, and came early to parties that the proclamation might be achieved before as few auditors as possible. Visiting the newly married husband of his friend ...
— Biographical Study of A. W. Kinglake • Rev. W. Tuckwell
... noticeably falling low. The attitude of the workers suggested suspicion and discontent. That fine glow of comradeship which had been characteristic of all workers in the Maitland Mills had given place to a sullen aloofness and a shiftiness of eye that all too plainly ...
— To Him That Hath - A Novel Of The West Of Today • Ralph Connor
... had appealed to his imagination before, and now again he sat absolutely motionless while great new thoughts and impersonal emotions sprang up in his brain. He saw women in a new light, and the aloofness of the speaker grew upon him again. He felt that she was holding her place as his teacher. Around him he heard the rustle of approval upon the gown she wore, upon her voice, and some few favorable comments upon her ideas. He saw some of the people crowd ...
— A Spoil of Office - A Story of the Modern West • Hamlin Garland
... immaturity in the understanding of spiritual things; in the knowledge how heaven's high with earth's low should intertwine. The third speaker voices the manifold protest of the nineteenth century against all theologies built upon an aloofness of the divine and human, whether the aloof God could be reached by special processes and ceremonies, or whether he was a bare abstraction, whose "pale bliss" never thrilled in response to human hearts. The best comment upon his faith is the ...
— Robert Browning • C. H. Herford
... awe upon the Adelaide and its presiding genius, beholding in it the fine essence of New England neatness and in him a small, thin, nervous, insignificant- looking "colored gemman," who gazed past the sides of their faces with cold aloofness. Often, neighbors, passing the impressive entrance, heard from the lower regions of the building the sound of a high chuckle, deepening rapidly to a contralto gurgle, and then broadening out into a long, rich, velvety laugh as smooth ...
— Many Kingdoms • Elizabeth Jordan
... had a chance of leading Silas behind her chariot; to fool with her would have meant an expenditure of time and energy in journeys to Charleston quite beyond his inclination. This aloofness coupled with his good looks had set ...
— The Ghost Girl • H. De Vere Stacpoole
... days and weeks that followed, Percival maintained an attitude of rigid but courteous aloofness. Only on occasions when it was necessary to consult with Ruth and her aunt on matters pertaining to the "order of the day" did he relax in the slightest degree from the position he had taken in regard ...
— West Wind Drift • George Barr McCutcheon
... in a civilization that was very old and free. Not a few acquaintances of his grandfather's called on him, and had he so desired he might have been persona grata with the diplomatic set—indeed, he found that his inclinations tended more and more toward conviviality, but that long adolescent aloofness and consequent shyness ...
— The Beautiful and Damned • F. Scott Fitzgerald
... thinly, as if satirizing the condition implied by those commonplace, assuaging words. He had, in his flight from society, sought simply peace. John Woolfolk now questioned all his implied success. He had found the elemental hush of the sea, the iron aloofness of rocky and uninhabited coasts, but he had never been able to still the dull rebellion within, the legacy of the past. A feeling of complete failure settled over him. His safety and freedom amounted to this—that life had broken ...
— Wild Oranges • Joseph Hergesheimer
... They stayed on for a while in this Sleepy Hollow, but Maurice no longer felt its peace. Remote as it was, cloistered in the rolling moors, the cry of the child penetrated to it, making it the very centre, the very core of all things hideous and terrible. Even the silence of the village, its aloofness from the world, became hateful to Maurice. For they seemed to emphasise and to concentrate the voice that pierced more keenly in silence, that sounded more ...
— Tongues of Conscience • Robert Smythe Hichens
... interfere with the old and beautiful. The real Cambridge is so effectively girdled with greens and commons, and college grounds shaded with stately limes, elms, and chestnuts, that there are never any jarring backgrounds to destroy the sense of aloofness from the ugly and untidy elements of nineteenth-century individualism which are so ...
— Beautiful Britain—Cambridge • Gordon Home
... thing in the world. In truth he was kind, and in a confidential sort of way that seemed to chuckle and wink, saying, "We're rogues together; then I must lend you a hand." But he could be ruthless also, displaying a curious aloofness from his fellow-men and an unconsciousness of any suffering he might inflict that left mere cruelty far behind. If I were making an automaton king, I would model my machine on the lines of Hammerfeldt. He had no belief in a future life, but would ...
— The King's Mirror • Anthony Hope
... Courtney delayed. A certain aloofness on Alix's part caused him to hesitate. Something in her manner following upon the visit of the Blythes invited speculation. She was as pleasant as ever, yet he sensed a subtle change that warned him of defeat if he attempted ...
— Quill's Window • George Barr McCutcheon
... sure of his foothold, so deeply is he absorbed in reading. It is a triumph of concentration. Donatello has enlisted every agency that could intensify the oblivion of the world around him. It is from this aloofness that the figure leaves a detached and inhospitable impression. One feels instinctively that this St. John would be friendless, for he has nothing to offer, and asks no sympathy. There is no room for anybody else in his career, and nobody can share his labours ...
— Donatello • David Lindsay, Earl of Crawford
... she had dropped her pretense of aloofness, and was taking the lead. Hedwig, weary with the struggle, and now trembling with nervousness, put herself in her hands, listening while she planned, agreed eagerly to everything. Something of grim amusement came into Olga Loschek's face after a time. By doing this thing she would lose everything. ...
— Long Live the King • Mary Roberts Rinehart
... communication with Egypt, Arabia and the Persian Gulf. The reality of intercourse with the west is attested by Roman, Jewish, Nestorian and Mohammedan settlements, but on the other hand the Brahmans of Malabar are remarkable even according to Hindu standards for their strictness and aloofness. As I have pointed out elsewhere, the want of chronology in south Indian literature makes it difficult to sketch with any precision even the outlines of its religious history, but it is probable that Aryan ...
— Hinduism and Buddhism, An Historical Sketch, Vol. 3 (of 3) • Charles Eliot
... breeze came with it and stirred her hair. She had those purple shadows under her eyes which betray us after long, sleepless hours when we live with our troubles and the world dreams around us; she had no color at all in her cheeks, and she had that aloofness of manner which Manley, in his outburst, had described as being shut up inside herself. She glanced up at them, just as she would have done had they both been strangers, and went on sugaring her coffee with a dainty exactness which, under the circumstances, seemed altogether ...
— Lonesome Land • B. M. Bower
... basis, accepting the existence of capitalism and having for its object the enlarging of the bargaining power of the wage earner in the sale of his labor. Its opportunism was instrumental—its idealism was home and family and individual betterment. It also implied an attitude of aloofness from all those movements which aspire to replace the wage system by cooperation, whether voluntary or subsidized by government, whether greenbackism, socialism, ...
— A History of Trade Unionism in the United States • Selig Perlman
... Wallflower and the Sour Grapes." Fascinated and horrified, Denis pored over the drawing. It was masterful. A mute, inglorious Rouveyre appeared in every one of those cruelly clear lines. The expression of the face, an assumed aloofness and superiority tempered by a feeble envy; the attitude of the body and limbs, an attitude of studious and scholarly dignity, given away by the fidgety pose of the turned-in feet—these things were terrible. And, more terrible still, was the likeness, was the magisterial certainty with ...
— Crome Yellow • Aldous Huxley
... straightway the stillness of dawn was affronted by a riot of life and sound. Men, women, and children, cooking-pots and bundles, overflowed on to the sunlit platform; and through their midst, with a dignified aloofness that only flowers to perfection in the East, Honor Meredith's tall chuprassee[1] made his way to her carriage window. Beside him, in a scarlet coat over full white skirts, cowered the distressed figure of an old ayah, who for twenty ...
— Captain Desmond, V.C. • Maud Diver
... are veritable congresses of nations and a boy who plans to go into business gets far more than mere book learning from them. Jim's poverty cut him out of athletics and clubs so that all his inherent New England tendency to mental aloofness would have been vastly increased if it had not ...
— Still Jim • Honore Willsie Morrow
... "I have to thank you, sir, for your courtesy to my niece." He had assumed an air of reserve, of distinct aloofness, despite his studied politeness. Bryce stepped forward with extended hand, which the Colonel grasped in a manner vaguely suggestive of that clammy-palmed creation of Charles Dickens—Uriah Heep. Bryce was tempted to squeeze the lax fingers until the Colonel should bellow with pain; but ...
— The Valley of the Giants • Peter B. Kyne
... have made this strange man, whose head was anxiously bowed down on his breast, relax and unburden himself in his conversations with me, but I was unsuccessful, on account of his constant reserve and suspicion, and his studied aloofness. An opportunity arose for a discussion between us when he wanted the orchestra to take a melodramatic part (which they afterwards did) in a certain scene of his Uriel Acosta, where the hero had to recant his alleged heresy. The orchestra had to execute the soft tremolo for ...
— My Life, Volume I • Richard Wagner
... meanwhile, her very coldness and aloofness stirred desire in the man, and she shrank as she saw a spark of passion kindling in his eyes. It was merely passion, she felt, for she recognised that there was a strain ...
— Hawtrey's Deputy • Harold Bindloss
... land-pirates and river-wolves of Plum Point and Crow's Nest Island? To such sorts, self-described as human snapping-turtles and alligators, her peacock show of innumerable lights was the jewelled crown of the only civilization they knew, knowing it only with the same aloofness with which they knew the stars. She woke them with the flutter of her wheels as of winged feet and passed like a goddess using the river's points and islands for stepping-stones, her bosom wrapped in ...
— Gideon's Band - A Tale of the Mississippi • George W. Cable
... and wondered. This feeling of aloofness? It was intrinsic, coming from within, like the withering of one's marrow. I laughed at my foreboding; it was not natural; I tried ...
— The Blind Spot • Austin Hall and Homer Eon Flint
... good fortune of the Harrigans. They had money; all that was required was social recognition. She found it a battle within a battle. The good-natured reluctance of her husband and the careless indifference of her daughter were as hard to combat as the icy aloofness of those stars into whose orbit she was pluckily striving to steer the family bark. It never entered her scheming head that the reluctance of the father and the indifference of the daughter were the very conditions that drew society ...
— The Place of Honeymoons • Harold MacGrath
... in the effervescing politics of the German states. I mean, that while we may like or dislike the man for his sympathy or want of sympathy, we concede to the author the right of his attitude; if Goethe had not assumed freedom from moral responsibility, I suppose that criticism of his aloofness would long ago have ceased. Irving did not lack sympathy with humanity in the concrete; it colored whatever he wrote. But he regarded the politics of his own country, the revolutions in France, the long struggle in Spain, ...
— Washington Irving • Charles Dudley Warner
... a certain aloofness about him which she could not conquer, try as she might. Just so far they were comrades—beyond, Chip walked moodily alone. The Little Doctor did not like that overmuch. She preferred to know that she fairly understood her friends and was admitted, sometimes, ...
— Chip, of the Flying U • B. M. Bower
... his news had for a moment thawed her, but a dignified aloofness showed again in her manner. "If you want to see father you'll find him in ...
— Brand Blotters • William MacLeod Raine
... so far, indeed, as to accept our hospitality outright, building his nest in boxes put up for his accommodation, and making the roofs of our houses his favorite perching stations. But, while the robin is noisily and jauntily familiar, the bluebird maintains a dignified aloofness; coming and going about the premises, but keeping his thoughts to himself, and never becoming one of us save by the mere accident of local proximity. The robin, again, loves to travel in large flocks, when household duties are over for the ...
— Birds in the Bush • Bradford Torrey
... physics are still mentioned with respect in works devoted to the history of science. But he is perhaps chiefly remembered as the savant whom Frederick the Great attracted to his court during a period of aloofness from the scintillating Voltaire, and who consequently became a writhing target for the jealous ridicule of that waspish wit. Poor Maupertuis, unhappy in his exit from life, would appear to have been restless after it, for his ghost is averred ...
— Terre Napoleon - A history of French explorations and projects in Australia • Ernest Scott
... smiled. That mask of aloofness was wiped away as if he were ten years younger and twenty years less responsible than he had been only seconds earlier. "And if they did not beware our rifles, Bartolome here would talk them to death! Is that not so, amigo?" His speech was oddly formal, as if he were using a language other than ...
— Rebel Spurs • Andre Norton
... might shoulder a rifle and fight Germans would at that time, if it had entered his head, have seemed just as ridiculous as a thought that he should play in the Final at the Crystal Palace or step into the ring to fight Carpentier. It took a long time to move him from this attitude of aloofness. Recruiting posters failed utterly to touch him. He looked at them, criticized them, even discussed their "goodness" or drawing power on recruits with complete detachment and without the vaguest idea ...
— Action Front • Boyd Cable (Ernest Andrew Ewart)
... of bitterness in this remark must not be taken too seriously. The fact remains, however, that among the veterans of the South there prevails a certain feeling of aloofness from the national jubilation over the Spanish War. They "don't take much stock in it." The feeling is widespread, I believe, but not loud-voiced. If I represented it as surly or undignified, I should misrepresent it grossly. It is simply ...
— America To-day, Observations and Reflections • William Archer
... This aloofness of Emerson must be remembered only as blended with his benignity. "His friends were all that knew him," and, as Dr. Holmes said, "his smile was the well-remembered line of Terence written out in living ...
— Emerson and Other Essays • John Jay Chapman
... the neighbourhood of the bibliographer's villa about the hour of midday. Under ordinary circumstances Signor Malipizzo would have been delighted to lay sacrilegious hands on Mr. Eames, whose Olympic aloofness had always annoyed him and against whom a case could now be got up, on the strength of these indications. Somewhere in the neighbourhood of the villa—that was quite ...
— South Wind • Norman Douglas
... the hall below for afternoon classes, and there was just time to snatch a little refreshment before they joined the other girls trooping through the corridors. Kit found herself watching Marcelle. There was a peculiar aloofness about the girl which seemed to put almost a wall of defense around her. She was intensely interested in everything, one could see that plainly, except the other students, and it seemed as if she simply ...
— Kit of Greenacre Farm • Izola Forrester
... that we must not be unmindful of world conditions, that peoples are struggling for industrial rehabilitation and that we can not dwell in industrial and commercial exclusion and at the same time do the just thing in aiding world reconstruction and readjustment. We do not seek a selfish aloofness, and we could not profit by it, were it possible. We recognize the necessity of buying wherever we sell, and the permanency of trade lies in its acceptable exchanges. In our pursuit of markets we must give ...
— Complete State of the Union Addresses from 1790 to the Present • Various
... Sorotchinetz. His descriptions of the simple folk, the beasts, and the bargainings seem as true as those in "Madame Bovary"—the difference is in the attitude of the author toward his work. Gogol has nothing of the aloofness, nothing of the scorn of Flaubert; he himself loves the revelry and the superstitions he pictures, loves above all the people. Superstition plays a prominent role in these sketches; the unseen world of ghosts and apparitions has an enormous influence on the daily life of the peasants. ...
— Essays on Russian Novelists • William Lyon Phelps
... be inconvenient for some people." There an aloofness in his tone that did not encourage further remarks, but the young stranger was evidently not thin-skinned, or else he loved to hear ...
— Cloudy Jewel • Grace Livingston Hill
... acidulated sentences in the passages which deal with the attitude of America towards European problems. These sentences were due to the deep disappointment which most Englishmen and most Frenchmen felt with the attitude of aloofness which America seemed to have adopted towards the greatest struggle for freedom and justice ever waged in history. It was an indescribable satisfaction to be forced by events to recognise that I was wrong, and that these passages of my book ought not to have been written ...
— The Expansion of Europe - The Culmination of Modern History • Ramsay Muir
... wore always a mantle of gentle aloofness, like something forgotten among its over-grown garden paths. To Kirk, it was a place under a spell; to the others, who could see its grave, vine-covered, outer walls and its dim interior crowded with strange and wonderful things, it seemed a lodging place for memories, ...
— The Happy Venture • Edith Ballinger Price
... of bushes cool and green and silent. Occasionally through tiny openings we caught instant impressions of straight column trunks and transparent shadows. Miniature grass marshes jutted out from the bends of the little river. We idled along as with a homely rustic companion through the aloofness of ...
— The Forest • Stewart Edward White
... was an old Confederate colonel—was Elliot, but although we had served on opposite sides of the sad war of a few years back, the common bond of nationality that is always strongest beyond the confines of one's own land prevented us from feeling any aloofness toward each other on this account. To me Colonel Elliot was an American, and a mighty decent specimen of an American at that—a friend in need. And to Colonel Elliot also I was an American, and one needing assistance. We seldom spoke of our political differences, partly because our ...
— Arizona's Yesterday - Being the Narrative of John H. Cady, Pioneer • John H. Cady
... a clipping from a Los Angeles newspaper telling of the prophet's arriving there. He takes the front page with the captivating headline: "Women Didn't Think Till They Put On Corsets". The interview tells about his mysteriousness, his aloofness, his bird-like-diet, and his personal beauty. "Despite his seventy-three years, Ha'nish evidences no sign of age. His keen blue eyes showed no sign of wavering. There were no wrinkles on his face, and his walk was that of a man of forty." The humor of ...
— The Profits of Religion, Fifth Edition • Upton Sinclair
... square. Over its fretted surface the electric lights shone coldly, and the deserted benches beyond brought to Thayer, fresh from the glow and good-fellowship of the club, a sudden depressing sense of his own aloofness from his kind. The club and Bobby were incidental points of contact, pleasant, but not permanent. Like the arch, he was alone, outside the rushing life of the busy town, something to be watched and commented upon, but never destined to be really ...
— The Dominant Strain • Anna Chapin Ray
... practical. In their few casual conversations he interested her. The English, from the first terrible day of their association with her, had commanded her deep admiration. But until lately—in the most recent past—her sex, her national aloofness and her ignorance of English, had restrained her from familiar talk with the British Army. But now she keenly desired to understand this strange, imperturbable, kindly race. She put many questions to the sergeant—always at the kitchen door, in full view of the courtyard, for she never thought ...
— The Rough Road • William John Locke
... space they opened up with their aloofness and indefiniteness, until, alas! they took concrete shape when chosen as title to the picture of a robust, Royal Academy, Fed-on-Virol looking babe, which doubtless, when trying to grab some passing Olympian butterfly, fell off ...
— Desert Love • Joan Conquest
... so agreeable to let the body move from place to place, and remain in a peaceful aloofness of the spirit all the time," he said at last. "To watch all the rushing currents which dominate human beings when they do not know how to manipulate them. If they did, the millennium would come,—but, meanwhile, it is reserved ...
— The Point of View • Elinor Glyn
... happiness and good-luck in the land he was going to, and her promise of his welcome back, some not too distant day, to the land he was leaving. She wanted to forget, and to make him forget, the months of irritable jangling and sharp discussions, the months of cold aloofness and indifference and to remember only that he was her own dear Comus as in the days of yore, before he had grown from an unmanageable pickle into a weariful problem. But she feared lest she should break down, and she did not wish to cloud his light-hearted gaiety on the very eve of his departure. ...
— The Unbearable Bassington • Saki
... and as Miss Lermontof inclined her head slightly in response, there was a kind of cold aloofness in her bearing—a something defiantly repellent—which filled Diana with a sudden sense of dislike, almost of fear. It was as though the sun had all at once gone ...
— The Splendid Folly • Margaret Pedler
... evening of my first day that we met. At first the one embarrassed me a little by his apparent cold aloofness. But his caustic observations on the war soon made it clear that he had stood the test. I realized, from the hatred that lay behind them, that he had suffered as much as many a soldier in ...
— Combed Out • Fritz August Voigt
... (almost as fine a beak as the one belonging to His Grace, the Duke of M——!) and you see it in the sad and somewhat elongated face, as though he had pored over big books too much, a sort of air of pathos and aloofness from things. His mouth strikes you as being rather meager, until he smiles, which is quite often, for, glory be, he has a good sense of humor. But besides that he has a neatness, a coolness, an impersonal sort of ease, which would make you think that he might ...
— The Prairie Wife • Arthur Stringer
... consists in feeling himself mine; the aloofness of his love, his strict obedience, irritate me, just as his attitude of profound respect provoked me when he was only my Spanish master. I am tempted to cry out to him as he passes, "Fool, if you love me so much as a picture, what will it be when ...
— Letters of Two Brides • Honore de Balzac
... suggested suffering. Undoubtedly she had suffered. To the sympathetic observer, this would have been obvious; but to the calculating mind of Mrs. Bishop it presented itself in the form of a social aloofness which she was morbidly quick to see ...
— Sally Bishop - A Romance • E. Temple Thurston
... no call when he went to bed, though he lay reading for half-an-hour after his usual time, to be ready for her. The morning brought a pencilled note ("Surprisingly tidy hand," Eric commented, "seeing what she's like"), instinct with a new aloofness and restraint. "After your refreshingly plain hint that I was a nuisance to you, I determined that you should not have occasion to suffer from my importunity. You may lunch with us on Saturday, if you like. And ...
— The Education of Eric Lane • Stephen McKenna
... something should loose those churches, or, at any rate, their big Sunday-school rooms and their ample basements from this icy exclusiveness, this week-day aloofness from humanity? Can you picture them at night, streaming with light, gay with music, filled with dancing crowds? not crowds from homes of wealth and comfort, but crowds from streets and byways; crowds for which, at present, the underworld spreads its nets? The great mass of ...
— What eight million women want • Rheta Childe Dorr
... not in practice, however, faithful to the humanitarianism of their law, and, in keeping with other nations, showed a tendency to restrict divine favours within the limits of their own land, and to maintain throughout their history an attitude of aloofness and repellent isolation which even amounted to intolerance towards other races. In early days, however, the obligation of hospitality was regarded as sacred.[23] Nor must we forget that, whatever may have been the Jewish practice, the promise enshrined in ...
— Christianity and Ethics - A Handbook of Christian Ethics • Archibald B. C. Alexander
... whole are sufficiently vague to be easily seen to coincide with self-interest. All these causes lead Parliaments to betray the people, consciously or unconsciously; and it is no wonder if they have produced a certain aloofness from democratic theory in the more vigorous champions ...
— Proposed Roads To Freedom • Bertrand Russell
... effecting her safe deliverance, and whilst she had no thanks to offer him for the efforts he was to exert on her behalf—accepting them as her absolute due, as the inadequate liquidation of the debt that lay between them—yet there was now none of that aloofness amounting almost to scorn which hitherto had marked ...
— The Sea-Hawk • Raphael Sabatini
... This singular aloofness, this separation of subject and spectator by a vast and impenetrable though translucent wall, as in a museum or a morgue, is characteristic of all Beyle's books more or less. In fact, he somewhere confesses—the confession having, as always ...
— A History of the French Novel, Vol. 2 - To the Close of the 19th Century • George Saintsbury
... ago. There was more of character in the face now, less, much less, of youth and none of the old gaiety. The open frankness had gone. The big dark eyes which looked out straight at Thresk as he stood before them had, even in that likeness, something of aloofness and reserve. And underneath, in a contrast which seemed to him startling, there was her name signed in the firm running hand in which she had written the few notes which passed between them during that month in Sussex. ...
— Witness For The Defense • A.E.W. Mason
... Chester to Perryville. They were about half-way between the two little towns, and they did not seem to belong to either. Perryville's small manufacturing bustle repelled the silent old man whom Dr. Lavendar called an "Irvingite"; and Old Chester's dignity and dull aloofness repelled young Philippa. The result was that the Robertses and their one woman servant, Hannah, had been living on the Perryville pike for some months before anybody in either village was quite aware of their existence. Then one day in May, Dr. Lavendar's sagging old buggy pulled up at their ...
— The Voice • Margaret Deland
... their subjects—favored the non-interference which the colonists craved. When, however, the Stuarts had any leisure at all, they at once devoted it to quarrelling with their subjects in New England. Even to the easy-going Charles II the cool aloofness of the colonists was a bit too strong; to his father and brother it ...
— The Siege of Boston • Allen French
... excellent partners in business matters; Mallalieu knew Cotherstone, and Cotherstone knew Mallalieu in all things relating to the making of money. But in taste, temperament, character, understanding, they were as far apart as the poles. This aloofness when tested further by the recent discomposing events manifested itself in a disinclination to confidence. Mallalieu, whatever he thought, knew very well that he would never say what he thought to Cotherstone; Cotherstone knew precisely the ...
— The Borough Treasurer • Joseph Smith Fletcher
... at him without visible change of expression. Her lips, however, were a little parted. The air of aloofness with which she moved through the world seemed suddenly more marked. He would have been a brave man, or one entirely without perceptions, who would have advanced ...
— The Great Prince Shan • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... Philosophical aloofness is all very well in its way, but while we argue about economic causes and attempt to induce a philosophy of earthquakes, our bright young democracy lies bleeding under the ruins. The urgent necessity is a little first aid, a little cessation of the killing. I don't know how many young ...
— The World in Chains - Some Aspects of War and Trade • John Mavrogordato
... covered with boats carrying fantastic sails, never for a moment make the impression of reality. But they are beautiful compositions, designed to please the eye and stimulate the fancy, and are even attractive by virtue of their novel aloofness ...
— The Book of Art for Young People • Agnes Conway
... that he was in no humour to carry coals. In a distant corner of the room he seated himself and fell to frowning at the table on which his elbow rested. At no time was he a man upon whom one would be likely to foist his company undesired, for he had at command on occasion a hauteur and an aloofness that challenged respect even from ...
— A Daughter of Raasay - A Tale of the '45 • William MacLeod Raine
... weakness; it involves interdependence. There is always danger that increased personal independence will decrease the social capacity of an individual. In making him more self-reliant, it makes him more self-sufficient; it may lead to aloofness and indifference. It often makes an individual so insensitive in his relation to others as to develop an illusion of being really able to stand and act alone, an unnamed form of insanity which is ...
— Creative Impulse in Industry - A Proposition for Educators • Helen Marot
... because it is a tale of love and guilt and woe, and the poet, unconcerned with any other issue, sets the tale to an enchanting melody. It does not occur to him to condone or to reprobate the loves of Hugo and Parisina, and in detailing the issue leaves the actors to their fate. It was this aloofness from ethical considerations which perturbed and irritated the "canters," as Byron called them—the children and champions of the anti-revolution. The modern reader, without being attracted or repelled by the motif of the story, will take ...
— The Works Of Lord Byron, Vol. 3 (of 7) • Lord Byron
... meal with the Misses Bartlett was an ordeal he never forgot. Their formal aloofness and evident dismay at his presence were enough in themselves to embarrass him; but combined with the necessity of choosing the right knife and fork, of breaking his bread properly, and of removing his spoon from his coffee-cup, ...
— Quin • Alice Hegan Rice
... was, his aloofness, however natural, would probably have proved depressing had it not been for the gay charm and agreeable condescension of the other nobleman. Seldom had more rested upon that adventurer's shoulders, and never had he acquitted himself with greater credit. It was with considerable secret concern ...
— Count Bunker • J. Storer Clouston
... His aloofness freed him from the temptations of distraction. He knew no women. He did not put himself in the way of meeting them. He kept away from theatres. He sunk himself in a routine of labour which, viewed from the outside, seemed dull and monotonous. Viewed from his stand-point of acquisition, ...
— The Great God Success • John Graham (David Graham Phillips)
... talk with an aged Chinese actor and view his collection of flowery hats. It was a still prouder (and also a subtly humiliating) moment when we were led through courtyards and beheld in their cloistral aloofness the American legitimate wives of wealthy China-men, sitting gorgeous, with the quiescence of odalisques, in gorgeous uncurtained interiors. I was glad when one of the ladies defied the detective by abruptly swishing ...
— Your United States - Impressions of a first visit • Arnold Bennett
... reversion to the type of the Red Indian. The most distinctive note in Thoreau is his inhumanity. Emerson spoke of him as a "perfect piece of stoicism." "Man," said Thoreau, "is only the point on which I stand." He strove to realize the objective life of nature—nature in its aloofness from man; to identify himself, with the moose and the mountain. He listened, with his ear close to the ground, for the voice of the earth. "What are the trees saying?" he exclaimed. Following upon the trail of the lumberman, ...
— Initial Studies in American Letters • Henry A. Beers
... below which a cultivated sense of the proprieties in homiletical discourse will not permit a well-bred clergyman to decline in his discussion of temporal interests. These matters that are of human and secular consequence simply, should properly be handled with such a degree of generality and aloofness as may imply that the speaker represents a master whose interest in secular affairs goes only so far as to ...
— The Theory of the Leisure Class • Thorstein Veblen
... friend, I would my tongue could cry as my heart cries— Turn back from darkness before the hour has struck! Even yet may mercy fold you. God is great And tender; and perhaps His love may clasp Even your aloofness, if at last your heart Calls in repentance to Him. O Faust, Faust, Sink your vain pride of spirit—kneel to Him— Beseech His mercy ere ...
— Mr. Faust • Arthur Davison Ficke
... at her in quick surprise, then made the mistake of letting himself smile at her frosty aloofness instead of being crestfallen by it. She happened to look round and catch that smile before he could extinguish it. Her petulance hardened instantly ...
— A Texas Ranger • William MacLeod Raine
... at Cash's sudden interest, his abrupt change from moody aloofness to his old partnership in trouble as well as in good fortune. He knew that Cash was not fit for the task, however, and he hurried the coffee to the boiling point that he might the sooner send Cash back to bed. He gulped down a cup of coffee scalding hot, ate a few ...
— Cabin Fever • B. M. Bower
... emotion of that occasion, not recalled in years, returned to me sharply and clearly as though I experienced it for the first time. It was a peculiar emotion: the first time I had ever felt the oppression of space—can I describe it?—the utter bigness of the world and the aloofness of myself, a little boy, within it—now that my father was gone. It was not at that moment sorrow, nor remorse, nor love: it was an inexpressible cold terror—that anywhere I might go in the world, I should still ...
— Adventures In Contentment • David Grayson
... not as we or our fellows see us, but out of the continual observation of humanity which goes on in the wary and inquiring eyes of birds, the meditative and indifferent regard of cattle, and the deprecating aloofness and inspection ...
— Figures of Several Centuries • Arthur Symons
... limited. True it may be They never more will meet; although—to use The bounded prophecy I am dowered with— The screen that will maintain their severance Would pass her own believing; proving it No gaol-grille, no scath of scorching war, But this persuasion, pressing on her pulse To breed aloofness and a mind averse; Until his image in her soul will shape Dwarfed as a far Colossus on a plain, Or figure-head that smalls upon ...
— The Dynasts - An Epic-Drama Of The War With Napoleon, In Three Parts, - Nineteen Acts, And One Hundred And Thirty Scenes • Thomas Hardy
... of goldcrests were investigating the branches overhead and two buzzards cruised, in dreamy spirals, about the sunny sky of midday; to repose; to indulge my genius and review the situation; to profit, in short, by that sense of aloofness peculiar to such aerial spots, which tempts the mind to set its house in order. What are we doing, in these empty regions? Why not wander hence? That cursed traveller's gift of sitting still; of remaining stationary, no matter where, until one is actually pushed away! And ...
— Alone • Norman Douglas
... girl closely. "To the manner born," she thought. And yet there was that about Joan that she would have altered, a coldness, an aloofness. Too often the beautiful mouth was set and hard, never cruel, yet scornful. Too often those lustrous eyes looked coldly out on to a world that was ...
— The Imaginary Marriage • Henry St. John Cooper
... a great many things about Peter God that night; of the man's life in the little cabin, his loneliness, his aloofness, and the mystery of him. Philip had asked no questions of Josephine and her father, and more than once he had caught that almost tender gratitude in Josephine's eyes. And at least twice he had seen the swift, haunting fear—the first time when he told of Peter God's coming and goings at Port ...
— Back to God's Country and Other Stories • James Oliver Curwood
... pale and seemed to have wrapped herself in her old mantle of aloofness. But her eyes had lost the look which had haunted Gilbert; they were cold and bright; and she proceeded to discuss details with him in a crisp, business-like way. There were plans to be made and many things to be thought over. When Leslie had ...
— Anne's House of Dreams • Lucy Maud Montgomery
... hour of trouble. There was space here, and air, and solitude. It was a diversion that was almost a form of consolation to be in touch with the wood's teeming life. Moreover, the trees, with their stately aloofness from mortal cares, their strifelessness and strength, shed on him a kind of benediction. From long association, from days of bird's-nesting in spring, and camping in summer, and nutting in autumn, and snow-shoeing in winter, he knew them almost as individual ...
— The Side Of The Angels - A Novel • Basil King
... in him, when, as now, he found himself in her vicinity, an attitude towards the rest of the world that justified his mother's employment of the verb to "mooch" (a word that may be taken as implying a moody and furtive aloofness). ...
— Mount Music • E. Oe. Somerville and Martin Ross
... present at these Sunday luncheons, sometimes not. Violet was with her mother, of course, on these occasions; but, while bodily present, she contrived to maintain an attitude of aloofness which would have driven a less resolute man than Conrad Winstanley to absent himself. A man more sensitive to the opinions of others could hardly have existed in such an atmosphere of dislike; but Captain Winstanley meant to ...
— Vixen, Volume I. • M. E. Braddon
... Henry Callandar was not quite as other men, had come an intense, delicious shyness; the aloofness of the maiden who feels love near yet cannot, through her very nature, take one ...
— Up the Hill and Over • Isabel Ecclestone Mackay
... consult the police?" she inquired, with manifest disdain. Mary turned to the maid, who now entered in response to the bell she had sounded a minute before. "Fanny, will you ask Miss Lynch to come in, please?" Then she faced the lawyer again, with an aloofness of manner that was contemptuous. "Really, Mr. Irwin," she drawled, "why don't you take this matter to ...
— Within the Law - From the Play of Bayard Veiller • Marvin Dana
... that the aloofness in the eyes of Miss Wainwright—he had seen the name on her suit-case—gave way to horror when her glance fell on his gloved hand. She had a swift, shuddering vision of a grim-faced man, jaws set like a vise, hacking at his wrist with a hunting-knife. But the engaging impudence of his ...
— Bucky O'Connor • William MacLeod Raine
... The aloofness from political partisanship has been faithfully maintained by the successors of Queen Victoria, and great as the royal influence may be in the social life of the wealthier classes, it is certain that no such influence operates in the casting of votes by the people at Parliamentary elections. ...
— The Rise of the Democracy • Joseph Clayton
... day, a lowering sky, A lonesome pigeon wheeling by; The soft, blue smoke that hangs and fades, The shivering crane that flaps and wades; Dead leaves that, whispering, quit their tree, The peace the river sings to me; The chill aloofness of the Fall— I ...
— Poems Teachers Ask For, Book Two • Various
... green and silent. Occasionally through tiny openings we caught instant impressions of straight column trunks and transparent shadows. Miniature grass marshes jutted out from the bends of the little river. We idled along as with a homely rustic companion through the aloofness of patrician multitudes. ...
— The Forest • Stewart Edward White
... again left to the hills. The taciturnity of winter was upon them still, and in the sky beyond was the cynical aloofness that comes with ...
— Gone to Earth • Mary Webb
... weeks confirmed. Production was noticeably falling low. The attitude of the workers suggested suspicion and discontent. That fine glow of comradeship which had been characteristic of all workers in the Maitland Mills had given place to a sullen aloofness and a shiftiness of eye that all too plainly ...
— To Him That Hath - A Novel Of The West Of Today • Ralph Connor
... months Pitt put up with this peevishness; but on the receipt of alarming news from Holland, he exerted his authority. On 27th January 1795 he informed Richmond that his long absence from the Cabinet and his general aloofness would make his return unpleasant and "embarrassing to public business. This consideration," he added, "must decide my opinion ... and at this critical time it seems indispensable to make some such arrangement as shall substitute some other efficient military aid in so important ...
— William Pitt and the Great War • John Holland Rose
... was a bulky, gauche, noisy, humorous man, with narrow eyes, a rustic complexion, large red hands, and brilliant clothes. He was attentive to all women. He was the first man in town who had not been sensitive enough to feel Carol's aloofness. He put his arm about her shoulder while he condescended to Kennicott, "Nice lil wifey, I'll say, doc," and when she answered, not warmly, "Thank you very much for the imprimatur," he blew on her neck, and did not know that he ...
— Main Street • Sinclair Lewis
... experienced in directing men, conducted himself at all times as a commanding officer should: he saw all, said little, treated Jose as a subordinate officer, and left the handling of the crew entirely to him. His aloofness forestalled any of that familiarity which, with such a gang, would have led to contempt. On the other hand, his avoidance of any assumption of meddlesome authority prevented the irritation and dislike which free men inevitably feel for the self-important type of leader. Thus ...
— The Pathless Trail • Arthur O. (Arthur Olney) Friel
... growing used to these swift shifts of humor, these flashes of tenderness, veering instantly to aloofness, and then back to a half-confidential camaraderie, that was alluringly delicious, yet irritatingly unsatisfying. At first he had tried to force the situation to his own liking,—to break through her moods and effect an atmosphere more equable,—but she soon ...
— Beatrix of Clare • John Reed Scott
... broad-shouldered man of thirty-seven. While spare, his figure has an appearance of rugged health, of great nervous strength held in reserve. His square-jawed, large-featured face retains an eager boyish enthusiasm in spite of its prevailing expression of thoughtful, preoccupied aloofness. His crisp dark hair is graying at the temples. EDWARD BIGELOW is a large, handsome man of thirty-nine. His face shows culture and tolerance, a sense of humor, a lazy unambitious contentment. CURTIS is reading an article in some scientific ...
— The First Man • Eugene O'Neill
... accommodation for travellers; an infinity of barbers and chemists. Nothing remarkable in all this. Yet the character is there, if one could but seize upon it, since every place has its genius. Perhaps it lies in a certain feeling of aloofness that never leaves one here. We are on a hill—a mere wave of ground; a kind of spur, rather, rising up from, the south—quite an absurd little hill, but sufficiently high to dominate the wide Apulian plain. And the nakedness of the land stimulates this ...
— Old Calabria • Norman Douglas
... we—we make some sort of compromise? Or at least couldn't you cut your—prayers short so he can get in an hour or two of his favorite pleasure after—after duty well done?" As I spoke I had come to the edge of the steps and thus stood alone above him, looking down on him with a kind of cool aloofness as if he belonged to another world, while I heard all of his recent converts grouped back of me ...
— The Heart's Kingdom • Maria Thompson Daviess
... There passed before her, in that Sunday quiet, a terrible procession of the things that she would forget. She knew that she would not be patient under correction, especially under the correction of her Aunt Anne. Already she felt in her a rebellion at her aunt's aloofness and passivity. After all, why should she treat every one as though she were God? Maggie felt that there was in her aunt's attitude something sentimental and affected. She hated sentiment and affectation ...
— The Captives • Hugh Walpole
... misplacement of a comma will do it. A distinguished graduate of Oxford determined to enter the Nonconformist ministry, and, quite unnecessarily, published a manifesto setting forth his reasons and his intentions. In his enumeration of the various methods by which he was going to mark his aloofness from the sacerdotalism of the Established Church, he wrote; "I shall wear no clothes, to distinguish me from my fellow-Christians." Need I say that all the picture-shops of the University promptly displayed a fancy portrait of the newly ...
— Collections and Recollections • George William Erskine Russell
... a certain air of serene security and a certain aloofness that characterized her. He felt it to a lesser degree to-night than ever before, but he made no mistake. He might be permitted to admire those features as one admires a beautiful portrait, but somewhere a barrier existed. There are faces that reflect the soul; there are faces ...
— The Triflers • Frederick Orin Bartlett
... going to say he did not know. Herrick was such a steady old chap, from him radiated such uncomplaining patience, about him was such aloofness concerning his private affairs, that to speak to him on personal matters was difficult. He handed him ...
— How It Happened • Kate Langley Bosher
... Sunday mornings, after the ringing of the church bells, quite alone in Walderhurst's study, following the Service and reading the Collects and Lessons. The room used to seem so beautifully still, even Berkeley Square wearing its church-hour aspect suggested devout aloofness ...
— Emily Fox-Seton - Being The Making of a Marchioness and The Methods of Lady Walderhurst • Frances Hodgson Burnett
... noses with broad nostrils, and wide mouths with thick lips. Their hair is black, straight and shining, and the women dress it in a plain knot at the back of the head. To my thinking, both sexes are decidedly ugly, and there is a coldness and aloofness of manner about them which chills one even where they are on friendly terms with Europeans, as the people whom we ...
— The Golden Chersonese and the Way Thither • Isabella L. Bird (Mrs. Bishop)
... see," her voice grew gentle, "you mustn't waste your time upon me. The girls won't like you if you do, and you don't know how dreadful it is to be left out of everything. Of course, you can speak to me, but——" She paused and looked eloquent meaning at Marjorie. Her late aloofness had quite vanished. Her small face was now soft and friendly, making the resemblance to happy-go-lucky Mary Raymond ...
— Marjorie Dean High School Freshman • Pauline Lester
... forgotten by those who knew them well in those days when by the publication of the Studies in the Renaissance (1873) their author had just become famous. I recall very clearly the effect of that book, and of the strange and poignant sense of beauty expressed in it; of its entire aloofness also from the Christian tradition of Oxford, its glorification of the higher and intenser forms of esthetic pleasure, of "passion" in the intellectual sense—as against the Christian doctrine of self-denial and renunciation. It was ...
— A Writer's Recollections (In Two Volumes), Volume I • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... seclusion, privacy; retirement; reclusion, recess; snugness &c. adj.; delitescence[obs3]; rustication, rus in urbe[Lat]; solitude; solitariness &c. (singleness) 87; isolation; loneliness &c. adj.; estrangement from the world, voluntary exile; aloofness. cell, hermitage; convent &c. 1000; sanctum sanctorum[Lat]. depopulation, desertion, desolation; wilderness &c. (unproductive) 169; howling wilderness; rotten borough, Old Sarum. exclusion, excommunication, banishment, ...
— Roget's Thesaurus
... beside Mr. Travers, for companionship only. He had preserved a typically British aloofness during the voyage, and he had never spoken to her. But there was something forlorn in Sara Lee that night as she clutched her hat with both hands and stared out at the shore lights. And if he had been silent during the voyage he had not been deaf. So he ...
— The Amazing Interlude • Mary Roberts Rinehart
... to me, as the Rathmines cleared Cape Town, I had forgotten the aloofness I desired to feign, and was in heated discussion on the immorality of expanding telegrams beyond a certain fixed point. Then Zuyland came out of his cabin, and we were all at home instantly, because we were men of the same profession needing no introduction. We annexed the boat formally, broke open ...
— The Kipling Reader - Selections from the Books of Rudyard Kipling • Rudyard Kipling
... the grey evening of a grey day, had a stark and sinister aspect, an atmosphere of mystery and secretiveness, an air of solitary aloofness in the dreary marshes, standing half shrouded in the night mists which were sluggishly crawling across the oozing flats from the sea. It was not a place where people could be happy—this battered abode of a past age on the edge of the North Sea, with the bitter waters of the marshes lapping ...
— The Shrieking Pit • Arthur J. Rees
... voluminous overcoat. The fact that his borrowed hat was several sizes too large for him detracted a little from the dignity of his appearance, a misfortune for which he endeavoured to atone by a distinct aloofness of manner. The newspaper men, however, were ...
— The Box with Broken Seals • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... not call on Annie again, but a fretted and outraged sense of Annie's coolness and aloofness, and a somewhat similar impression from Leslie's manner, when they met in Fifth Avenue one day, was always in her mind. They could drop her as easily as they had picked her up, these high-and-mighty Melroses! She consoled herself, for a few days, with spectacular fancies of ...
— The Beloved Woman • Kathleen Norris
... orchards; the bluebird goes so far, indeed, as to accept our hospitality outright, building his nest in boxes put up for his accommodation, and making the roofs of our houses his favorite perching stations. But, while the robin is noisily and jauntily familiar, the bluebird maintains a dignified aloofness; coming and going about the premises, but keeping his thoughts to himself, and never becoming one of us save by the mere accident of local proximity. The robin, again, loves to travel in large flocks, when household duties are over for the season; but although ...
— Birds in the Bush • Bradford Torrey
... first month and the second, this aloofness came upon Scott Brenton's nerves, and drove him well-nigh mad. Night after night, he tramped the floor, asking himself in vain if such a situation could develop, without some fault upon his side. Day after day, he strove most conscientiously to renew the old relations with his wife. He might ...
— The Brentons • Anna Chapin Ray
... say it with a certain envy, doubtless thinking of their loved ones now suffering the privations and dangers of war. . . . But the fact that he was a foreigner would instantly create a vague atmosphere of spiritual aloofness, an alienation that Julio had not known in the good old days when people sought each other without considering nationality, without feeling that disavowal of danger which isolates and concentrates ...
— The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse • Vicente Blasco Ibanez
... Himself to be 'a just (righteous) God and a Saviour.' So then, if we would rightly conceive of His righteousness, we must give it a wider extension than that of retributive justice or cold, inflexible aloofness from sinners. It impels God to be man's saviour. And with similar enlarging of popular conceptions there follows: 'In the Lord is righteousness and strength,' and therefore, 'In the Lord shall all the seed of Israel be justified ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture - Isaiah and Jeremiah • Alexander Maclaren
... with greetings from Gawin Goodluck, long betrothed to Dame Custance, a certain sea-captain, who, misled by Ralph's confident assurance, misunderstands the relations between the Dame and him, suspects disloyalty, and changes from friendliness to cold aloofness. This, by vexing the lady, brings disaster upon Ralph, whose bold attempt, on the suggestion of Merrygreek, to carry his love off by force is repulsed by that Dame's Amazonian band of maid-servants with scuttles and brooms. ...
— The Growth of English Drama • Arnold Wynne
... the interests of the community as a whole are sufficiently vague to be easily seen to coincide with self-interest. All these causes lead Parliaments to betray the people, consciously or unconsciously; and it is no wonder if they have produced a certain aloofness from democratic theory in the more ...
— Proposed Roads To Freedom • Bertrand Russell
... so fearless a front, the little woman drew up suddenly at sight of the boy, and, entrenching herself behind the doctor, began to swing by his coat-tails, and to take furtive glances at the stranger in silence and aloofness. ...
— The Eternal City • Hall Caine
... hearty satisfaction over his altered circumstances. To all these, whether they were moved by mere neighbourly good will, or perchance were inspired by impulses of selfishness, the old man exhibited a mien of aloofness and embarrassment. ...
— From Place to Place • Irvin S. Cobb
... face, perhaps, there flickered, for half-a-second, the least perceptible light, as of a comprehending and unresentful smile. But she went on, with fine aloofness. ...
— The Cardinal's Snuff-Box • Henry Harland
... sore soul at this second discovery, and from the smiling, genial hostess she froze into a marble statue of aloofness. But tongues were loosened somewhat by that time, and her change of attitude did not apparently affect ...
— The Safety Curtain, and Other Stories • Ethel M. Dell
... is so kind!" A man without ideals finds kindness the easiest thing in the world. In truth he was kind, and in a confidential sort of way that seemed to chuckle and wink, saying, "We're rogues together; then I must lend you a hand." But he could be ruthless also, displaying a curious aloofness from his fellow-men and an unconsciousness of any suffering he might inflict that left mere cruelty far behind. If I were making an automaton king, I would model my machine on the lines of Hammerfeldt. He had no belief in a future life, but would sometimes trifle whimsically with the theory of a ...
— The King's Mirror • Anthony Hope
... was riding without immediate objective through the Bush. His eyes were still upon his wife's slight figure as she moved slowly towards the veranda, with the air of one who has no more concern with the business in hand. Her graceful aloofness, which he knew to be merely a social trick, stung him inexpressibly, the faint bow she had given Harris when he bade her good evening had seemed to include himself. It galled him that he did not seem fitted by nature or breeding to cope with this kind of situation. ...
— Lady Bridget in the Never-Never Land • Rosa Praed
... a peculiar quality in Tommy Ashe's tone, a something that was neither aloofness nor friendliness, nor anything that Wes Thompson could immediately classify. But it was there, a something Tommy tried to suppress and still failed to suppress. His words were hearty, but his manner was not. And this he ...
— Burned Bridges • Bertrand W. Sinclair
... South was waiting for them with open arms? 'Open arms'! Apparently it was only 'climates' that were allowed any such privileges with girls like Cornelia. Yet, after all, wasn't it just exactly that very quality of serene, dignified aloofness that had attracted him first to Cornelia among the score of freer-mannered girls of ...
— Molly Make-Believe • Eleanor Hallowell Abbott
... Lady Dawn—to her pale aloofness. She wasn't like this—she was different from all other women. It was ridiculous that he should be so sure that she was different when his only proof was a portrait, quite certainly idealized. He began to ...
— The Kingdom Round the Corner - A Novel • Coningsby Dawson
... his every word, his every glance! How I maneuvered to win from him a few minutes' conversation on a Latin verb or a French translation! How I thrilled if he bestowed upon me one of his infrequent smiles! How I grieved over his stern aloofness! ...
— Mary Marie • Eleanor H. Porter
... women, finding Mary a stanch Feminist, and feeling for her the sympathy a bride always commands from her sex, took to her at once. The revolutionary group on the other hand would have broken through her pleasant aloofness with the force—and twice the speed—of a McEwan, had Stefan not, with them, adopted the role ...
— The Nest Builder • Beatrice Forbes-Robertson Hale
... summer of 1876 our frontier policy was frequently under discussion. Sir Bartle Frere wrote two very strong letters after the Conservative Government came into power in 1874, drawing attention to the danger of our being satisfied with a policy of aloofness, and pointing out the necessity for coming into closer relations with the Amir of Afghanistan and the Khan of Khelat. Soon afterwards the Secretary of State communicated with the Government of India as to the advisability of establishing British agents in Afghanistan, and of persuading ...
— Forty-one years in India - From Subaltern To Commander-In-Chief • Frederick Sleigh Roberts
... to apply. The Bavarian is too lethargic, slow, and easy-going to be readily frightened—in temperament he has little in common with the high-spirited, nervous Prussian. Bavarians spoke of Germany and Germany's war-debt with an aloofness as of neutrals. It did not trouble them deeply. They were sceptical as to France's ability to collect a huge indemnity. The fifty per cent tax they regarded as an absurdity. "It is possible to ruin Germany, but it is not possible to enslave her," ...
— Europe—Whither Bound? - Being Letters of Travel from the Capitals of Europe in the Year 1921 • Stephen Graham
... the Misses Bartlett was an ordeal he never forgot. Their formal aloofness and evident dismay at his presence were enough in themselves to embarrass him; but combined with the necessity of choosing the right knife and fork, of breaking his bread properly, and of removing his spoon from his coffee-cup, they were quite overpowering. During ...
— Quin • Alice Hegan Rice
... for a reply to this. Mr. Lorimer's mouth was drawn down at the corners, but he looked into the fire with the aloofness of a mind not ...
— The Bars of Iron • Ethel May Dell
... himself very seriously. Having married an exceedingly wealthy woman after a career in which liveliness had meant more to him than livelihood, he assumed that if he treated the world at large with extreme aloofness it would soon forget—and overlook— the fact that he had never amounted to a row of pins in the estimation of those who knew him as a harvester in Broadway. Shortly before his marriage—at forty-three—he abandoned an extensive crop of wild oats in the very heart of New York City—announcing ...
— Mr. Bingle • George Barr McCutcheon
... cricket. Though Oxford men have their Cambridge moments, and beneath their haughty exterior there sometimes beats a Cambridge heart. Behind such reserve you would never suspect any passions at all save one of pride. Even frankly irreligious Oxford men acquire an ecclesiastical pre- Reformation aloofness which must have piqued Thackeray quite as much as the refusal of the city to send him to Westminster. He complains somewhere that the undergraduates wear kid gloves and drink less wine than their jolly brethren of the Cam. He was thoroughly Cambridge in his attitude towards ...
— Masques & Phases • Robert Ross
... at all; nothing but that Susanna Nelson was a lovely girl and he wanted her for his own. The type was one he had never met before, one that allured him by its mysteries and piqued him by its shy aloofness. ...
— Homespun Tales • Kate Douglas Wiggin
... the exultant patriotism of the times, and the sense of their aloofness from the continent of Europe, which was now born in the breasts of Englishmen, is evident from many a passage in ...
— Brief History of English and American Literature • Henry A. Beers
... hein, la petite!" she cried. And the epithet—"little one"—was a light to Celia. Till now, upon these occasions, with her black ceremonial dress, her air of aloofness, her vague eyes, and the dignity of her carriage, she had already produced some part of their effect before the seance had begun. She had been wont to sail into the room, distant, mystical. She had her audience already ...
— At the Villa Rose • A. E. W. Mason
... end she gave in. And on the way out he lived up to the letter of their agreement. The situation exhilarated him: Grace with her new air of virtue, her new aloofness; his comfortable car; Johnny Rosenfeld's discreet back ...
— K • Mary Roberts Rinehart
... have spared the Poet, had tradition offered him any such matter. As for the passages in question, I know no reason for excepting them from the acknowledged purity and disinterestedness of the Poet's representations; where nothing is more remarkable, or more generally commended, than his singular aloofness of self; his perfect freedom from every thing ...
— Shakespeare: His Life, Art, And Characters, Volume I. • H. N. Hudson
... sympathy with which Shakspeare embraced all natural and common affections of his brother men. Milton, burning as he did with a consuming fire of passion, and yearning for rapt communion with select souls, had withal an aloofness from ordinary men sad women, and a proud disdain of commonplace joy and sorrow, which has led hasty biographers and critics to represent him as hard, austere, an iron man of iron mould. This want of interest in common life disqualified him for the ...
— Milton • Mark Pattison
... lost in her aloofness from mundane affairs: Taou Yuen in whispering silk, her grandfather's rotund tones, Laurel and Camilla and her mother, were distant, immaterial. In the evening she sat on the front steps, a web of white, dreamily intent ...
— Java Head • Joseph Hergesheimer
... as Flaubert's Bouvard et Pecuchet and the Latter-Day Pamphlets of Carlyle, only the difference between the two minds is apparent, the difference is, after all, but a difference in temperament. It is the contrast between the impassive aloofness of the artist, and the personal and ...
— The Origins and Destiny of Imperial Britain - Nineteenth Century Europe • J. A. Cramb
... impression of great force. He would have been picked out of a multitude, not alone because of his remarkable height, but because he had an air of command and the aloofness which shows a man ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker
... O'Connor attacked Denis Quirk on the subject of his treatment of Desmond. Mrs. Quirk was breakfasting in bed; her husband had scrambled through his meal, and rushed out to superintend the making of a drain, leaving Denis alone with the girl. He had noticed her silence and aloofness, sure signs of displeasure, and, as was his way, he calmly faced her in the moment ...
— Grey Town - An Australian Story • Gerald Baldwin
... promised to marry him. To live in his high-walled house with its conventional customs, its age-dimmed portraits, its stiff furnishings, and shut-out sunshine, would stifle every cell in brain and lungs, and to marry him would be to marry his house. I hate his house, hate the aloofness, the lack of sympathy it represents. Its proud past I can appreciate, but not its useless present. Save his brother Harrie, it is the one thing of his old life left Selwyn. At the death of his father he bought Harrie's interest ...
— People Like That • Kate Langley Bosher
... unprofissyonal, an' conthry to th' laws iv evidence.' 'My Gawd, has my clint no rights in this coort?' says th' other lawyer. 'Ye bet he has,' says th' coort. 'We'll sthrike out th' wurrud and but well substichoot th' more proper wurrud "aloofness." ...
— Mr. Dooley Says • Finley Dunne
... Fairlands Junction. The little city, itself, is set in the lap of the hills that form the southern side of the valley, some three miles from the main line. It is as though this particular "Queen" withdrew from the great highway traveled by the vulgar herd—in the proud aloofness of her superior clay, sufficient unto herself. The soil out of which Fairlands is made is much richer, it is said, than the common dirt of her sister cities less than fifteen miles distant. A difference ...
— The Eyes of the World • Harold Bell Wright
... certain aloofness on Alix's part caused him to hesitate. Something in her manner following upon the visit of the Blythes invited speculation. She was as pleasant as ever, yet he sensed a subtle change that warned him of defeat if he attempted to storm the citadel. ...
— Quill's Window • George Barr McCutcheon
... sympathy. I do not think that even a Swift or a Voltaire could have been irreconcilably opposed to a world which offered them so much merriment. The satire, which begins in moral fervor, must end in understanding. The bond that binds us to our fellows is too strong to be broken by the aloofness of our condemnation. The same intelligence that discerns the incongruity between what men ought to be and what they are, cannot fail to penetrate the impelling reasons for the failure. Only in humor is sympathetic insight complete. Satire has the temporal usefulness of ...
— The Principles Of Aesthetics • Dewitt H. Parker
... retirement from aviation was the theme of many romantic legends. They did not know precisely what it was he had done in the pre-historic period of a year before, but they treated him with reverence instead of the amused aloofness with which an office usually waits to see whether a new man will prove to be a fool or a "grouch," a clown or a good fellow. The stenographers and filing-girls and telephone-girls followed with yearning ...
— The Trail of the Hawk - A Comedy of the Seriousness of Life • Sinclair Lewis
... men whose hearts are more knit to the things of earth. Those who see in the dearest and most intimate of human relations, the purest and highest gift of God, will watch with a species of terror, and even repulsion, the aloofness, the solitariness of the mystic and the artist. It will seem to them a sort of chilly isolation, an inhuman, even a selfish thing; just as the mystic and the artist will see in the normal life of men a thing fettered and bound with sad and small chains. ...
— The Silent Isle • Arthur Christopher Benson
... mills, where the water-power found its way, and it was something of a climb even from the business street of the old hill village, which the rival prosperity of the industrial settlement in the valley had thrown into an aristocratic aloofness. From the upper windows of the rectory one could have seen only the red and yellow of the maples, but from the study door we caught glimpses past their boles of the outlying country, as it showed between the white mansions across the way. One of these, as I have already mentioned, ...
— A Pair of Patient Lovers • William Dean Howells
... I, catching him by the tail of his khaki coat. 'You've made me kind of mad, in spite of the aloofness in which I have heretofore held you. You are out for making a success in this hero business, and I believe I know what for. You are doing it either because you are crazy or because you expect to catch some girl by ...
— Options • O. Henry
... head it suggested tragic sorrow. Or it might have been her wavy hair. Or even just that pointed chin stuck out a little, resentful and not particularly distinguished, doing away with the mysterious aloofness of her fragile presence. But any way at a given moment Anthony must have suddenly seen the girl. And then, that something had happened to him. Perhaps nothing more than the thought coming into his head that this was ...
— Chance - A Tale in Two Parts • Joseph Conrad
... happen if something should loose those churches, or, at any rate, their big Sunday-school rooms and their ample basements from this icy exclusiveness, this week-day aloofness from humanity? Can you picture them at night, streaming with light, gay with music, filled with dancing crowds? not crowds from homes of wealth and comfort, but crowds from streets and byways; crowds for which, at present, the underworld spreads its nets? The great mass ...
— What eight million women want • Rheta Childe Dorr
... girls of her age, with whom she played, and too young for the older set with whom she was called to recite. "Not only," she says, "I was not their schoolmate, but my book-life and lonely habits had given a cold aloofness to my whole expression, and veiled my manner with a hauteur which turned ...
— Daughters of the Puritans - A Group of Brief Biographies • Seth Curtis Beach
... had been emphasised at the expense of its young grace and bloom, and the new indications of moustache and beard did but add to its striking and painful black and white. And the whole impression of change was completed by the melancholy aloofness, the shrinking distrust with which eyes once overflowing with the frankness and eagerness of one of the most accessible of human souls now looked ...
— The History of David Grieve • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... explained to Mavis how the proffered hospitality was alien to the ways of the giver of the feast. At heart they were greatly pleased with the invitation; it promised a meeting with county folk on equal terms, together with a termination to the aloofness with which Major Perigal had treated the Devitts since his son's marriage to Victoria. They accepted with alacrity. Mavis, ...
— Sparrows - The Story of an Unprotected Girl • Horace W. C. Newte
... Empire-builders. They heard so late, so unpreparedly, so suddenly; and in the first shock, an exile which had been a calmly accepted condition, became almost a menace, seemed swiftly to develop a force. The men in the far places felt their aloofness; knew that their souls were beating vainly against prison bars, for the longing to annihilate space and stand beside the beloved dead. That quiet band of men whom we sometimes call "The Pathfinders," and who go away across the world to bring the wilderness into line; to smooth the rough, link ...
— The Rhodesian • Gertrude Page
... 1831, before Lockhart Southey and Carlyle by their biographies of Scott, Nelson, and Frederick had appeared as rivals, why is it no less true now? What singular gift or quality can account for this singular aloofness from the ordinary or extraordinary class of writers? Why does Boswell yet wear the crown of indivisible supremacy in biography? His own words will not explain it, the possession of Johnson's intimacy, the twenty years' view of his subject, his faculty for ...
— James Boswell - Famous Scots Series • William Keith Leask
... and when left alone in their company had a sense of empty benches. Mrs. Vulcany once remarked that Miss Harleth was too fond of the gentlemen; but we know that she was not in the least fond of them—she was only fond of their homage—and women did not give her homage. The exception to this willing aloofness from her was Miss Arrowpoint, who often managed unostentatiously to be by her side, and talked ...
— Daniel Deronda • George Eliot
... country of weird forms, strange animals, and untutored savages. If ever boat breasted the "foam of perilous seas in faery lands forlorn," it was this, and if ever its occupants realised the complete strangeness of their situation and their utter aloofness from the tracks of their fellowmen, it must have been on this cloudless moonlit summer night. There was hardly a stretch of the world's waters, at all events in any habitable zone, where they could have been farther away from all that they remembered ...
— The Life of Captain Matthew Flinders • Ernest Scott
... mischief, and even gaiety, is gone in an instant, quicker than I have ever seen a smile flash out of sight, and immediately the fine scholarly face sinks back into somnolent austerity which for all its aloofness and immemorial calm suggests, in some fashion for which I cannot account, ...
— Painted Windows - Studies in Religious Personality • Harold Begbie
... the system the Indians were secured in the right of dwelling in their own villages under their own chiefs. But the encomenderos complained that the aloofness of the natives hampered the work of conversion and asked that a fuller and more intimate control be authorized. This was promptly granted and as promptly abused. Such limitations as the law still imposed upon encomendero ...
— American Negro Slavery - A Survey of the Supply, Employment and Control of Negro Labor as Determined by the Plantation Regime • Ulrich Bonnell Phillips
... candidate spoke from a stage in the public square, and it would not be fair to say that his address fell flat; but for the first time in the long campaign Harley noticed a certain coldness on the part of the audience, a sense of aloofness, as if Jimmy Grayson were not one of them, but a stranger in the town whom they must treat decently, although they might not approve of him or his ways. And Harley did not have to seek the cause, for there at a corner of the stage sat a dominating ...
— The Candidate - A Political Romance • Joseph Alexander Altsheler
... that Lady Alicia has got her hand-made ranch, what's she going to do with it? I scarcely expect her to take me into her confidence on the matter, since she seems intent on regarding me as merely a bit of the landscape. The disturbing part of it all is that her aloofness is so unstudied, so indifferent in its lack of deliberation. It makes me feel like a bump on a log. I shouldn't so much mind being actively and martially snubbed, for that would give me something definite and tangible to grow combative over. ...
— The Prairie Mother • Arthur Stringer
... outward expression, he would wake from his constructive reverie to realise sadly for the first time, not the beauty, but the incompleteness, of the institution; not its proximity to the city beyond, but its air of aloofness from the community in which ...
— The Mayor of Warwick • Herbert M. Hopkins
... do not make a mistake. I am no Beatrice. I love not chill aloofness. I am but Lucia, here to-day and gone to-morrow. But rather than all rhapsodies, I would that you were just my friend, and no further off than where I can reach you my hand and you can ...
— Bog-Myrtle and Peat - Tales Chiefly Of Galloway Gathered From The Years 1889 To 1895 • S.R. Crockett
... wearisome description, is Smith as I saw him for the first time that winter's evening in my shabby student's rooms in Edinburgh. And yet the real part of him, of course, I have left untouched, for it is both indescribable and un-get-atable. I have spoken already of an atmosphere of warning and aloofness he carried about with him. It is impossible further to analyse the series of little shocks his presence always communicated to my being; but there was that about him which made me instantly on the qui vive ...
— The Empty House And Other Ghost Stories • Algernon Blackwood
... and dark as ever, his eyes had still the attractive look of being set in with a smutty finger. He had got the same brownish suit on, which she disliked, the same black hat set slightly, jauntily over one eye. He looked common: and yet with that peculiar southern aloofness which gave him a certain beauty and distinction in her eyes. She felt she hated him, rather. She felt she had been ...
— The Lost Girl • D. H. Lawrence
... with any other issue, sets the tale to an enchanting melody. It does not occur to him to condone or to reprobate the loves of Hugo and Parisina, and in detailing the issue leaves the actors to their fate. It was this aloofness from ethical considerations which perturbed and irritated the "canters," as Byron called them—the children and champions of the anti-revolution. The modern reader, without being attracted or repelled by the motif of ...
— The Works Of Lord Byron, Vol. 3 (of 7) • Lord Byron
... house wore always a mantle of gentle aloofness, like something forgotten among its over-grown garden paths. To Kirk, it was a place under a spell; to the others, who could see its grave, vine-covered, outer walls and its dim interior crowded with strange and ...
— The Happy Venture • Edith Ballinger Price
... implied by those commonplace, assuaging words. He had, in his flight from society, sought simply peace. John Woolfolk now questioned all his implied success. He had found the elemental hush of the sea, the iron aloofness of rocky and uninhabited coasts, but he had never been able to still the dull rebellion within, the legacy of the past. A feeling of complete failure settled over him. His safety and freedom amounted to this—that life had broken him and cast ...
— Wild Oranges • Joseph Hergesheimer
... a man of fifty odd. Naturally reticent, his long voyages in command of merchant vessels had fostered an aloofness and love of solitude, which had later been intensified by a great grief. His stern bearing had repelled his country neighbors in the year he had lived on Big John. He was satisfied that it should be so, yet he was ...
— Chicken Little Jane on the Big John • Lily Munsell Ritchie
... Jr., with all his keen insight into human nature, had failed utterly to diagnose Thor's case, had not even stumbled on the true cause of that young giant's aloofness. The truth was unknown to anyone, but there was one natural reason for John Thorwald's not mingling with his fellows of the campus-the blond Colossus was inordinately bashful! From his fifteenth year, Thor had seen the seamy side of life, had lived, grown and developed among ...
— T. Haviland Hicks Senior • J. Raymond Elderdice
... parodied nowadays, he will even get the event of Bayreuth reproduced for him, through the very un-magic lanterns of our facetious art-critics. And one ought to be thankful if they stop at parody; for by means of it a spirit of aloofness and animosity finds a vent which might otherwise hit upon a less desirable mode of expression. Now, the observant sage already mentioned could not remain blind to this unusual sharpness and tension ...
— Thoughts out of Season (Part One) • Friedrich Nietzsche
... well-to-do, and when one thinks of how greatly this is valued it seems a pity that it is not open to the talents, to the industry, to the enthusiasm of all the young of both sexes. But one exception I must make to the aloofness of people with degrees and professions from the preventible evils of the world, and that is in the profession that is the longest and the most exacting—the medical profession. The women doctors whom I have met in Adelaide, Melbourne, and Sydney have a keen sense of their ...
— An Autobiography • Catherine Helen Spence
... in one house. But the ranchmen themselves, with two or three exceptions, were content to be solicitous at long range—an abstention that relieved and at the same time troubled Huntington. He was not eager to talk with his neighbors about that episode at the post-office, but their aloofness filled him with uneasiness. Well, let them wait! They would hear from him again, and so ...
— The Heart of Thunder Mountain • Edfrid A. Bingham
... Marise did not understand or recognize. If it had not been impossible to think it of Eugenia, Marise would have imagined that her eyes looked troubled, excited. Was it possible that even in her safe ivory tower of aloofness from life, she had felt the jarring blow of the brutally immediate tragedy of the Eagle Rocks? Or perhaps even Cousin Hetty's disappearance . . . she had always ...
— The Brimming Cup • Dorothy Canfield Fisher
... strings, and Swot giving shouts of delight at each new treasure. Presently, in especial joy over some prize, the boy turned to show it to the doctor, to discover that he was standing well back, watching, rather than sharing, in the pleasure of the two; and, as the little chap discovered the aloofness, he leaned over and whispered something ...
— Wanted—A Match Maker • Paul Leicester Ford
... Attached to his name was an unsavoury reputation of card-playing for high stakes, of drinking too much, although not to the extent of actual drunkenness; and the character had alienated from him the friendship of serious men, and evoked a disapproving aloofness in the manner of his instructors. At the moment when he most needed help those who were best fitted to give it sedulously avoided his company, and in this first moment of meeting Darsie was ...
— A College Girl • Mrs. George de Horne Vaizey
... of her sex. She had been brought up in an out-of-the-way place in which the modern novel, the fashionable pastime of flirtation, were not known; and her secluded life in the lonely dale had deepened that sense of aloofness from the world, that indifference to the sentiment which lurks in most girls' bosoms. This tall, handsome man who had stepped into her life and shared the secret of her father's strange affliction, weakness, was nothing more to her than one of the other tourists whom she sometimes chanced ...
— At Love's Cost • Charles Garvice
... curiosity. His glance shifted to the official group by the table. These good-natured commonplace men who, whether they liked him or not, had invariably had a pleasant word for him, instantly took on an air of grim aloofness. Conklin, the fat jolly sheriff; the coroner; Moxlow, the prosecuting attorney in his baggy trousers and seam-shining coat,—why, he had known these men all his life, he had met them daily,—what did they mean by suspecting him! The mere ...
— The Just and the Unjust • Vaughan Kester
... gracious condescension of the elderly, and the frank curiosity of the young—only a discerning few had made any real headway with this attractive, oddly disconcerting child of another continent; this creature of queer reserves and aloofness and passionate pride of race. The friendliest were baffled by her incomprehensible lack of social instinct, the fruit of India's purdah system. Loyal wives and mothers who 'adored' their children—yet spent most of their day in pursuit of other interests—were ...
— Far to Seek - A Romance of England and India • Maud Diver
... took the hands stretched out to him in passing by several of the different sectarians who used the Temple. Gillespie seemed not to notice or to care for the greetings to his guest, and his girl wore her wonted look of vague aloofness. ...
— The Leatherwood God • William Dean Howells
... fools and deserving of all that they got, and more, he couldn't bear the thought that they should perceive that he allowed himself to be unhappy. He coveted death. If it meant extinction he could imagine nothing pleasanter than so restful an aloofness, quiet and apart and alone, whilst others hurried and ...
— The Secret City • Hugh Walpole
... sets of legends a more profound, if subtler, difference, in the handling of the protagonist: with Jurgen all of the physical and mental man is rendered as a matter of course; whereas in dealing with Manuel there is, always, I believe, a certain perceptible and strange, if not inexplicable, aloofness. Manuel did thus and thus, Manuel said so and so, these legends recount: yes, but never anywhere have I detected any firm assertion as to Manuel's thoughts and emotions, nor any peep into the workings of this hero's mind. He is "done" from ...
— Figures of Earth • James Branch Cabell
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