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More "Prim" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... dramatic entertainment censored by a frail, prim little thing like Miss Beach tickled his burly sense of humor. "It would be a horrible thing if I should go to see anything vulgar, wouldn't it?" he observed. "But I think I'll take a chance. You ...
— The Real Adventure • Henry Kitchell Webster
... long run, but they would go home not wholly unlearned. Should they stay to a turkey-shoot, they would see in it the Occidental analogue of their own public matches—more picturesque, if not quite so prim and scientific. Strictly, it presupposes conditions non-existent in England—a community, for instance, first of hunters, and second of ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science Vol. XV., No. 85. January, 1875. • Various
... siege of Yorktown in the next year. Whittlesey was a veteran whose varied experience in and out of the army had all been turned to good account. He was already growing old, but was indefatigable, pushing about in a rather prim, precise way, advising wisely, criticising dryly but in a kindly spirit, and helping bring every department into better form. I soon lost both him and McElroy, my adjutant-general, for their three months' service was up, and they ...
— Military Reminiscences of the Civil War V1 • Jacob Dolson Cox
... red-brick house, with green blinds and a prim, tidy look. He was shown into a prim parlor and interviewed by a prim old lady, who wore spectacles and had a pencil stuffed in the bosom of her black gown. However, she was less prim than she looked, and had a cheerful old ruddy face with a twinkling pair of ...
— A Coin of Edward VII - A Detective Story • Fergus Hume
... have had experience of the older generation out West would have suspected the pride, the affection, the delight hiding behind Martha Skeffington's prim and formal welcome, or that it was not indifference but the unfailing instinct of a tender heart that made her say, after a very few minutes: "Adelaide, don't you think Dory'd like ...
— The Second Generation • David Graham Phillips
... Where mixed jonquils and gowans grow And roses midst rank clover grow Upon a bank of a clear strand, In wrimplings made by Nature's hand Though docks and brambles here and there May sometimes cheat the gardener's care, Yet this to me is Paradise, Compared with prim cut plots and nice, Where Nature has to Act resigned, Till all ...
— Flowers and Flower-Gardens • David Lester Richardson
... the city and neighborhood to keep their false hair in order, and trim the natural tresses of their children. Not only have the dignitaries of the cathedral taken the worthy barber under their special protection, but they have extended to his little boy Charles, a demure, prim lad, who is at this present time a pupil in the King's School, to which academy clerical interest gained him admission. The lad is in his fourteenth year; and Dr. Osmund Beauvoir, the master of the school, gives him so good a character for industry and dutiful demeanor, that ...
— A Book About Lawyers • John Cordy Jeaffreson
... was wholly without interest, through a country entirely flat, and looking wretchedly brown and barren. There were rows of trees, very slender, very prim and formal; there was ice wherever there happened to be any water to form it; there were occasional villages, compact little streets, or masses of stone or plastered cottages, very dirty and with gable ends and earthen ...
— Passages From the French and Italian Notebooks, Complete • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... opening the door, and that blessed feller I sent for hasn't come to do 'em up yet; but some people!" She finished so exasperatedly that I felt impelled to state my name and business without delay, and with a prim "Indeed," she led the way across a narrow linoleumed hall, so beeswaxed that one had to stump ...
— Some Everyday Folk and Dawn • Miles Franklin
... then admiration. He had never heard its like, nor did he feel any offense. The daughter, too, stood by, pursing her prim lips, and evidently approving. Colonel Winchester was motionless like a statue, while the infuriated man shook his fist at him and launched imprecations. But his face had turned white and Dick saw that he ...
— The Rock of Chickamauga • Joseph A. Altsheler
... little changed; the small, tall, thin, narrow-chested, stooping figure—the same long, fair, freckled, sharp set face—the same prim cap, and clean, scant, faded gown, or one of the same sort—made up her personal individuality. Miss Nancy now had charge of the village post-office; and her early and accurate information respecting all neighborhood affairs, was obtained, it was whispered, by an official breach of trust; ...
— The Missing Bride • Mrs. E. D. E. N. Southworth
... remember Dr. Pettigrew, that prim little effigy of a man, and his delightful Irish wife, and how conversation used to run when he was ...
— Kate Carnegie and Those Ministers • Ian Maclaren
... altar, in a great robe of gold and damask, two little boys in white surplices serving him, holding his robe as he rose and bowed, and the money-gatherer swinging his censer, and filling the little chapel with smoke. The music pealed with wonderful sweetness; you could see the prim white heads of the nuns in their gallery. The evening light streamed down upon old statues of saints and carved brown stalls, and lighted up the head of the golden-haired Magdalen in a picture of the entombment of Christ. Over the gallery, and, as it were, a ...
— Little Travels and Roadside Sketches • William Makepeace Thackeray
... forgot its pride, And sail'd with litter side by side; Uniting all, to show their amity, As in a general calamity. A ball of new-dropp'd horse's dung, Mingling with apples in the throng, Said to the pippin plump and prim, "See, brother, how we apples swim." Thus Lamb, renown'd for cutting corns, An offer'd fee from Radcliff scorns, "Not for the world—we doctors, brother, Must take no fees of one another." Thus to a dean some curate sloven ...
— Poems (Volume II.) • Jonathan Swift
... to his little home in the village; and the fees which he was to receive for the documents which he was to draw up made him so happy that he flung his arms about his wife, who was rather a prim person, and fell to kissing her with the ...
— IT and Other Stories • Gouverneur Morris
... thou leave the beds Where roses and where lilies vie, To seek a prim-rose, whose pale shades Must sicken when those ...
— Graham's Magazine Vol XXXII No. 6 June 1848 • Various
... to split thy ugly face just in the middle. Thy mouth hath already done half the work. And, after all, I found not seldom in this conversation, that my humourous undaunted airs forced a smile into my service from the prim mouths of the young ladies. They perhaps, had they met with such another intrepid fellow as myself, who had first gained upon their affections, would not have made such a rout as my beloved has done, about such an affair as that we were assembled upon. Young ladies, as I have observed ...
— Clarissa, Volume 7 • Samuel Richardson
... seemed to have escaped his cunning calculation. Though the door leading from the verandah into the reception hall swung wide to the balmy airs of late Spring the prowler passed this blatant invitation to the hospitality of the House of Prim. It was as though he knew that from his place at the head of the table, with his back toward the great fire place which is the pride of the Prim dining hall, Jonas Prim commands a view of the major portion of ...
— The Oakdale Affair • Edgar Rice Burroughs
... decaying ceiling. Worn boards and ragged walls, and the rusty ribs fallen from the fireplace, are all that meet your eyes, but I see a round, unsteady, waxcloth-covered table, with four books lying at equal distances on it. There are six prim chairs, two of them not to be sat upon, backed against the walls, and between the window and the fireplace a chest of drawers, with a snowy coverlet. On the drawers stands a board with coloured marbles for the game of solitaire, ...
— A Window in Thrums • J. M. Barrie
... old gardens, with their formal walks and prim parterres; I like also the company by which they are chiefly frequented, consisting of old people ...
— The Idler in France • Marguerite Gardiner
... that I am conveying no adequate impression of what I beheld by giving it any such prim and decorous name as—a Hedge. It was a menagerie, a living, green menagerie! I had no sooner seen it than I began puzzling my brain as to whether one of the curious ornaments into which the upper part of the hedge had ...
— The Friendly Road - New Adventures in Contentment • (AKA David Grayson) Ray Stannard Baker
... to smoking large quantities of tobacco. Her natural brother, who was an officer in the army, came down to Nohant and taught her to ride—to ride like a boy, seated astride. She went about without any chaperon, and flirted with the young men of the neighborhood. The prim manners of the place made her subject to a certain amount of scandal, and the village priest chided her in language that was far from tactful. In return she refused any longer to ...
— Famous Affinities of History, Vol 1-4, Complete - The Romance of Devotion • Lyndon Orr
... bloomed against the syringa bush. There were certain windows thrown wide open that were usually shut, and their curtains were blowing free in the light wind of a summer afternoon; it looked as if a large household had returned to the old house to fill the prim best rooms and ...
— The Queen's Twin and Other Stories • Sarah Orne Jewett
... offer, and wondering what her prim and staid Aunt Betty would think of it, when Frau Deichenberg entered the dressing-room. The Frau had been on the stage looking after several of the Herr's proteges, and was highly elated over the showing they ...
— Dorothy's Triumph • Evelyn Raymond
... one—if it was to make all the people who love me unhappy, I suppose," Sally said in her mild, prim voice, with an effort at lightness. "No happiness could come of that, ...
— Martie the Unconquered • Kathleen Norris
... under her later name of Cassandra—a piece of Gascon half-naivete, half-jest which Mlle. de Scudery's Norman shrewdness[203] would hardly have allowed. There is also much more of the supernatural in these books than in hers, and the characters are much less prim. Roxana, who, of course, is meant to be naughty, actually sends a bracelet of her hair to Oroondates! which, however, that faithful lover of another ...
— A History of the French Novel, Vol. 1 - From the Beginning to 1800 • George Saintsbury
... arm—to its shame be it said—had failed to steal about her waist, nor had he dared to touch his lips to hers, beneath the hooded shelter of the great buffalo robe which curled protectingly around them. He would as soon have dared such familiarity with the minister's maiden sister, aged forty-two and prim as a Bible book-mark. Yet Jennie was just the sort of girl whom a cold-blooded expert must have declared as really meriting a kiss, when prudent and fairly practicable for the kisser and kissee, and as possessing ...
— The Wolf's Long Howl • Stanley Waterloo
... found at Button's; at the "Bedford" we shall meet Garrick and Quin, and stop a moment at Tom King's, close to St. Paul's portico, to watch Hogarth's revellers fight with swords and shovels, that frosty morning that the painter sketched the prim old maid going to early service. We shall look in at the Tavistock to see Sir Peter Lely and Sir Godfrey Kneller at work at portraits of beauties of the Carolean and Jacobean Courts; remembering that ...
— Old and New London - Volume I • Walter Thornbury
... tried, and directed my attention to a middle-aged, angular-looking woman, whose strong, sharp-featured face betokened a prim spinster, probably at the head of a girls' school, or engaged in some clerical work. However, as I passed her on my way to leave the train I noticed a wedding-ring on her hand, and heard her say to her companion, "No; I think ...
— The Gold Bag • Carolyn Wells
... kiss her," she was asking herself, "on a platform like this, and before a lot of people? She might think it silly;" and while she was still debating the point, she had held out her hand and shaken Anna's stiffly, with a prim "How do you do," ...
— Kitty Trenire • Mabel Quiller-Couch
... made some excursions in a prim basha to places which were always several miles farther on than they were supposed to be and were usually reached by tracks covered with stones from 6 to 9 ins. long and having ruts ...
— The Foundations of Japan • J.W. Robertson Scott
... distance in the rear came an ancient cumbrous chariot, drawn by two very corpulent horses, driven by as corpulent a coachman, beside whom sat a page dressed in a fanciful green livery. Inside of the chariot was a starched prim personage, with a look somewhat between a lady's companion and a lady's maid; and two pampered curs, that showed their ugly faces, and barked ...
— Bracebridge Hall, or The Humorists • Washington Irving
... of sympathetic understanding. Devotion to a beautiful woman was matter of immediate appeal to him. His respect for the doctor rose in proportion, especially when the devotion was weighed in the balance against a fine practice. Looking at the girl's profile with prim black curls against the cheek, he saw the French-Canadian mother, and said not gallantly, but ...
— The Emigrant Trail • Geraldine Bonner
... moments the door opened, and Joe entered the drawing-room. She was pale, and her great brown eyes had a serious expression in them that was unusual. There was something prim in the close dark dress she wore, and the military collar of most modern cut met severely about her throat. If Ronald had expected a very affectionate welcome he was destined to disappointment; Joe had determined not to be affectionate until all was over. ...
— An American Politician • F. Marion Crawford
... bestowed the priceless boon of his society for life? How did he know what she was—he could not find the exact adjective to express his meaning, but he knew what he meant. Was she worthy of the boon? That was what it amounted to. All his life he had had a prim shrinking from the section of the feminine world which is connected with the light-life of large cities. Club acquaintances of his in London had from time to time married into the Gaiety Chorus, and Mr. Carmyle, ...
— The Adventures of Sally • P. G. Wodehouse
... sitting, Elsley could see, in his shirt sleeves, cigar in mouth, bent over his microscope: but instead of the unexpected prim voice, he heard a very gay and arch one answer, "Is that a proper way in which to come peeping into an old bachelor's sanctuary, ma'am? Go away this moment, till I make myself ...
— Two Years Ago, Volume II. • Charles Kingsley
... had been sent there to spend their college vacation and get toughened (the process was obviously succeeding); they made Nimrod apologise for keeping his coat on during dinner; the three brothers who owned the ranch, and the wife of one of them; several children; a prim and proper spinster from Washington—how she got there, who can tell?—and Miss Belle ...
— A Woman Tenderfoot • Grace Gallatin Seton-Thompson
... first visit to the scene of the crime—a high, dingy, narrow-chested house, prim, formal, and solid, like the century which gave it birth. Lestrade's bulldog features gazed out at us from the front window, and he greeted us warmly when a big constable had opened the door and let us in. The room into which we were shown was that in which the crime had ...
— The Return of Sherlock Holmes • Arthur Conan Doyle
... America in which to travel great distances, are very remarkable for their many strange adventures, and I was very much interested but also perturbed when the black garcon placed my bag and overcoat upon the floor at the feet of a very prim lady and left me to stand uncomfortably in the ...
— The Daredevil • Maria Thompson Daviess
... said Alan. "All there is about it is that they want to come, and I'm afraid mother is going to let them. Molly likes it, but I don't want them round in the way. I know they'll be prim and fussy, without any fun in them. I believe I'll come ...
— Half a Dozen Girls • Anna Chapin Ray
... handkerchiefs, she shut the wardrobe and turned the key. She went first to her own small, prim room to restore stolen property to its rightful place, and then she descended towards the kitchen with the other handkerchief. Giving it to her mother, and concealing her triumph beneath a mask of wise, long-suffering benevolence, she would say: "I've found ten of your handkerchiefs, ...
— Hilda Lessways • Arnold Bennett
... Rochas came along and blew up Sergeant Sapin for not keeping his men in better order, and Captain Beaudoin, very prim and starchy, attracted by the ...
— The Downfall • Emile Zola
... praii theoria non fine fructu incredibili coiungeret. Ex quo pulcherrimo & fapientifsimo inftitutotuo, quid breui euentutum fit, qui vel mediocri iudicio volent, facil proculdubio diuinare poterunt. Vnum hoc fcio, vnam & vnicam rationem te inire, qua prim Lufitani, deinde Caftellani, quod antea toties cum no exigua iactura funt conati, tandem ex animoru votis perficerut. Perge ergo Spartam quam nactus es ornare, perge nauem illam plufquam Argonauticam, mille cuparum fere capace, quam fumptibus ...
— Thomas Hariot • Henry Stevens
... sees her clad in muslin white, With eyes downcast and manner prim, May well be minded by the sight, Of ...
— Too Old for Dolls - A Novel • Anthony Mario Ludovici
... a thin, prim, red-nosed lady, with a vinegar aspect, who sat erect, and apparently fearless, in the corner of the coach—"very shocking language, indeed. Why, my good man, should you ...
— The Black Baronet; or, The Chronicles Of Ballytrain - The Works of William Carleton, Volume One • William Carleton
... glancing water seen through them, are 100 fresh-cheeked manly boys, the future captains of Taepings and Ariels, and as fine specimens of the gentleman sailor-lad as any Englishman would wish to see. Such neatness and order without nonsense or prim awe. Health and brightness of boyhood, with seamen's smartness and silence: I hope they do not get too much trigonometry. However, for the past week they have been skurrying up aloft "to learn the ropes," ...
— The Voyage Alone in the Yawl "Rob Roy" • John MacGregor
... modern novel is complete without one? It gives a spicy flavor to the story. People of propriety like it. Prim ladies of an uncertain age always 'dote' on the gallant, gay Lothario, and wish that ...
— Daisy's Necklace - And What Came of It • Thomas Bailey Aldrich
... said; "and it seems such a treat to get away from the Lawn—of course I am sorry to leave mamma, you know," she added, parenthetically—"and the stiff breakfasts, and Mr. Sheldon's newspapers that crackle, crackle, crackle so shockingly all breakfast-time; and the stiff dinners, with a prim parlor-maid staring at one all the time, and bringing one vegetables that one doesn't want if one only ventures to breathe a little louder than usual. Here it is Liberty Hall. Uncle Joe—he is aunt Dorothy's husband—is ...
— Birds of Prey • M. E. Braddon
... incomings; but liberty the most entire was theirs, and they enjoyed it heartily. Wisely and well too; for, though off the grand route, they behaved themselves in public as decorously as if the eyes of all prim Boston were upon them, and proved by their triumphant success, that the unprotected might go where they liked, if they conducted themselves with the courtesy and ...
— Shawl-Straps - A Second Series of Aunt Jo's Scrap-Bag • Louisa M. Alcott
... evenings, that my heart was ready to break out into words of passionate entreaty. She had been so used to see me sitting there, or to run with me round the little paved courtyard, or the old dingy grass plot in the midst of its prim gravel walks at the side of the hall that I had become an ordinary association of her life. I had left school while she was still learning of a governess, who came four times a week to teach her, for her father was a man of more consideration than mine. But Mary was ...
— Miss Grantley's Girls - And the Stories She Told Them • Thomas Archer
... be cheerful, and trust should be glad, And our follies and sins, not our years, make us sad. Should the heart closer shut as the bonnet grows prim, And the face grow in length as ...
— The Complete Works of Whittier - The Standard Library Edition with a linked Index • John Greenleaf Whittier
... family, and he on the last leg of the mountain. That he was his father's son puzzled him more than that he was his uncles' nephew, for there was little mention of his father in the house. At the dead man's name his prim Huguenot mother from Nantes pursed her mouth, and in her presence even his uncles were uncomfortable, those great, gallant men. All he knew was that his father, Colquitto Campbell, had been a great Gaelic ...
— The Wind Bloweth • Brian Oswald Donn-Byrne
... nowadays as much as the temperaments they were born with tell them to. He has grown too old for miracles. After two thousand years he has no longer the force to turn water into wine. Ellen, I love your dear prim smile. But always, everywhere, I have found the love of men and women doing that. Sometimes the love of places does something very like it. A man may land on a strange island, and abandon the journey on which ...
— The Judge • Rebecca West
... chanced that, unbeknown to the cripple, a prim-looking stranger had overheard part of his story. Beholding him, then, on his present begging adventure, this person, turning to the herb-doctor, indignantly said: "Is it not too bad, sir, that yonder ...
— The Confidence-Man • Herman Melville
... eyes hardened for a minute. Then Billy Louise moved from the door and went over to kneel comfortingly beside Marthy, and Seabeck looked at the two and sighed again, though his eyes were no longer stern. He pulled a sheet of paper toward him and wrote steadily in a prim, upright chirography that had never a flourish anywhere, but carefully crossed t's and carefully dotted i's and ...
— The Ranch at the Wolverine • B. M. Bower
... Hutton Her last dress has put on; Her fine lessons forgotten, She died, as the dunce died: And prim Betsy Chambers, Decay'd in her members, No longer remembers Things, as ...
— The Works of Charles and Mary Lamb IV - Poems and Plays • Charles and Mary Lamb
... how was one to bear patiently with foolish, friendly fingers, or with uncomfortable thoughts of your own, pointing you to Lucy Purcell? With the great marriage-night scene from 'Valentine' thrilling in your mind, how was it possible to think of the prim self-conceit, the pettish temper and mincing airs of that little person in Half Street ...
— The History of David Grieve • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... rustle of dresses down the stairs outside, and two thin little girls, looking excessively proper and prim, came in with an elderly gentlewoman who was their governess and wore a pince-nez to impart the necessary suggestion of a superior intellect. They were the Miss Mutlows, sisters of one of the day-boarders, ...
— Vice Versa - or A Lesson to Fathers • F. Anstey
... characters monstrous in size and form, an insult to the paper-maker's art and shocking to man's aesthetic feelings. Now from the first Fan had spontaneously written a small hand, with fine web-like lines and flourishes, which gave it a very curious and delicate appearance; for, unlike the sloping prim Italian hand, it was all irregular, and the longer curves and strokes crossed and recrossed through words above and beneath, so that, while easy enough to read, at first sight it looked less like writing ...
— Fan • Henry Harford
... was of clapboards painted white, and stood four square; its small-paned windows, flanked with green shutters, blinking toward the west. It had a very prim air, said to have been absorbed from Aunt Jed, and seemed to be eternally trying to draw back its skirts from contact with the interloping veranda and the rose-tree, which, toward the end of the flowering season, certainly gave it a mussed appearance. At such times, if the great front ...
— Through stained glass • George Agnew Chamberlain
... The prim, black-robed duenna had gained courage from her mistress's temerity. She had ceased trembling. Yet she was exercised about something. Jack could not understand why. Surely, she was no longer fearful of him. She leaned ...
— The Radio Boys on the Mexican Border • Gerald Breckenridge
... will give it to you. Do you see that plumber's shop next to the corner saloon?" I pointed to the Avenue whose ceaseless stream of humanity flows past Our Square without ever sweeping us into its current. "That was once a tea-shop. It was started by a dear little, prim little old maiden lady. The saloon was run by Tough Bill Manigan. The little old lady had a dainty sign painted and hung it up outside her place, 'The Teacup.' Tough Bill took a board and painted a sign and hung it up outside his place; 'The Hiccup.' The dear little, prim ...
— From a Bench in Our Square • Samuel Hopkins Adams
... made arrangements for the production of a crackling flame. This old woman's name was Azarina. The Baroness had begun by thinking that there would be a savory wildness in her talk, and, for amusement, she had encouraged her to chatter. But Azarina was dry and prim; her conversation was anything but African; she reminded Eugenia of the tiresome old ladies she met in society. She knew, however, how to make a fire; so that after she had laid the logs, Eugenia, who was terribly bored, ...
— The Europeans • Henry James
... with her prim New England manner, "if you want to marry me, you'll have to come and live in a country where they don't have queens, and you'll work in your shirt-sleeves like an honest man. You might just's well understand that ...
— The Panchronicon • Harold Steele Mackaye
... this bower a clump of shrubbery veils the view from the street and in between shrubs and arbor lies a small pool of water flowers and goldfish. On the arbor's right, in charming privacy, masked by hollyhocks, dahlias and other tall-maidenly things, lie beds of strawberries and lettuce and all the prim ranks and ...
— The Amateur Garden • George W. Cable
... reason why we shouldn't stay as long as we wish. You are surely not so prim that you are ...
— Mistress Anne • Temple Bailey
... look very neat and prim; they march well, and their muskets are polished very bright. I wonder how they would stand fire," said Higgins, after the party had ...
— The Old Bell Of Independence; Or, Philadelphia In 1776 • Henry C. Watson
... had plenty of reverence for what deserved to be revered, but that the gods which he deemed golden were in reality made of baser metal. He never, as I have said, complained of his father to me, and his only other friends were, like himself, staid and prim, of evangelical tendencies, and deeply imbued with a sense of the sinfulness of any act of insubordination to parents—good young men, in fact—and one cannot blow off steam to a ...
— The Way of All Flesh • Samuel Butler
... of gaining another ally who would be more subservient than Russia. One of the many revolutions which had harassed Spain during this century had broken out. Queen Isabella had lost the throne, and General Prim found himself obliged to look about for a new sovereign. He applied in vain to all the Catholic Courts; nobody was anxious to accept an honour coupled with such danger as ruling over the Spanish people. Among others he applied to Leopold, hereditary ...
— Bismarck and the Foundation of the German Empire • James Wycliffe Headlam
... for the time. What then, 'tis easy to guess: she exhausted the resources of soap and water in her own adornment (for she smelled of suds in the cabin of the Shining Light), and set out by the path from Whisper Cove to Twist Tickle, with never a glance behind, but a prim, sharp outlook, from shyly downcast eyes, upon all the world ahead. A staid, slim little maid, with softly fashioned shoulders, carried sedately, her small head drooping with shy grace, like a flower upon its slender stalk, seeming as she went her dainty way to perceive neither scene nor incident ...
— The Cruise of the Shining Light • Norman Duncan
... found close by, and the little village has leapt, as if by magic, into a thriving town. Huge factories and foundries rise from the banks of the stream; the ford is spanned by a substantial bridge; the corn-mill has disappeared, and so have the rheumatic-looking old mossy cottages. A street of prim, substantial houses, uniform, and duly numbered, with brass handles, latches, and knockers to the doors, now leads up to the church. And that venerable building has certainly gained by the change; for the plaster and the iron chimney have vanished, full daylight pours in through all the windows, ...
— True to his Colours - The Life that Wears Best • Theodore P. Wilson
... lived, and who had taken his daughter to every race meeting in England since the time when she could first sit beside him on the front seat of his coach. He had never allowed her to go to school, and he had dismissed half a dozen governesses in turn because they were trying to make a prim little miss of her, and because they always insisted on pouring out tea for him as if they expected him to marry them. When Kitty was sixteen he dismissed 'the whole bothering lot of old women' and finished her education himself. Lord Sherard spoke French like a native, and ...
— Peter and Jane - or The Missing Heir • S. (Sarah) Macnaughtan
... muskets. The evening was beautiful and clear, and the entire population was astir. The bells pealed, flags waved, and cannon thundered forth the triumphant nomination of Springfield's distinguished citizen. The bonfires blazed brightly, and especially in front of that prim-looking white house on Eighth street. The committee and the vast crowd following it passed in at the front door, and made their exit through the kitchen door in the rear, Mr. Lincoln giving them all a hearty shake of the hand as they passed him in the parlor. By appointment, ...
— The Every-day Life of Abraham Lincoln • Francis Fisher Browne
... rustled briskly as she moved about the room, and then she went out in the shed and came back with a round, low basket in which lay two black kittens, which she placed in Anne's lap saying: "There, little girls and little kittens always like each other; so you can have Pert and Prim for your own ...
— A Little Maid of Massachusetts Colony • Alice Turner Curtis
... is the most mature child I have ever met, and I presume it is attributable to the fact that she has never been thrown with children, and having always associated with older persons, has insensibly imbibed their staid thoughts, and adopted their quiet ways. I should not be more astonished to see my prim puritanical grandmother yonder step down from the frame, and turn a somersault on the carpet, or indulge in leap-frog, than to find Regina guilty of any boisterous hoidenish behaviour, or unrefined, undignified language. If she had been born on the Mayflower, raised on Plymouth Rock, and fed three ...
— Infelice • Augusta Jane Evans Wilson
... the demure, prim thing. Sure all the world is hypocrisy Well, I thank my stars, whatsoever sufferings I have, I have none in reputation. I wonder at the men; I could never think her handsome. She has really a good shape and complexion but no mein; and no woman has the ...
— The Palmy Days of Nance Oldfield • Edward Robins
... as second in command of the army. He did right. Battalions and brigades could hardly have strengthened the hands of the general, and invigorated the spirits of the troops, so much as the active accession of Hardinge. Prim etiquette may pucker its thin lips, and solemn discretion knit its ponderous brows; but neither discipline nor prudence ran any risk of being injured or affronted by the veteran of the Peninsula. What the exigency required, he knew; what the exigency exacted, he ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 59, No. 367, May 1846 • Various
... direct question, the laughter, the gaiety vanished from her face. She looked thoughtful and seemed to consider so trivial a matter quite unnecessarily. Then, apparently arriving at a sudden decision, she said with a sort of sweet, prim courtesy: "I should be very glad to have you come in with me and meet my mother. I think it is very probable that we will find Kitty, and ...
— The Silver Butterfly • Mrs. Wilson Woodrow
... him, that she has seen him rise six or seven Capers together with the greatest Ease imaginable, and that his Scholars twist themselves more ways than the Scholars of any Master in Town: besides there is Madam Prim, an Alderman's Lady, recommends a Master of her own Name, but she declares he is not of their Family, yet a very extraordinary Man in his way; for besides a very soft Air he has in Dancing, he gives them a particular Behaviour at a Tea-Table, ...
— The Spectator, Volume 2. • Addison and Steele
... prim for a week, and our bottled up spirits could no longer be contained; so we planed a revel after our own hearts, and set our wits to ...
— An Old-fashioned Girl • Louisa May Alcott
... they are becoming—rather—are they not?" And here, having arranged the glasses in the ordinary form of spectacles, I applied them gingerly in their proper position; while Madame Simpson, adjusting her cap, and folding her arms, sat bolt upright in her chair, in a somewhat stiff and prim, and indeed, in ...
— The Works of Edgar Allan Poe - Volume 3 (of 5) of the Raven Edition • Edgar Allan Poe
... to hear a friend, Tak tent, and nae wi' strunts offend, I've seen queans dink, and neatly prim'd Frae tap to middle, Looking just like the far-aff end O' an auld ...
— The Proverbs of Scotland • Alexander Hislop
... brayed at me again by way of rejoinder; and we went on for a while, braying and laughing, until I began to grow a-weary of it, and, shouting a derisive farewell, turned to pursue my way. In so doing—it was like going suddenly into cold water—I found myself face to face with a prim little old maid. She was all in a flutter, the poor old dear! She had concluded beyond question that this must be a lunatic who stood laughing aloud at a white donkey in the placid beech-woods. I was sure, by her face, that she had already recommended her spirit most religiously ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. XXII (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... a prim little woman, with honest blue eyes that sometimes made men think of their sins, and when Dusty Rhodes perceived that he had gone a bit too far he endeavored ...
— Wunpost • Dane Coolidge
... nothing about what happened last night but I am afraid mother will tell him when she sees him to-day. It would not surprise me if they bury the hatchet and join hands and try to make a good little girl out of me. I think he is quite a prim young man. He spent the night at Striker's and I saw him there. I must say he is good-looking. He is so good-looking that nobody would ever suspect that he is related to me." She signed herself, "Your loving and devoted ...
— Viola Gwyn • George Barr McCutcheon
... flanked by two old-fashioned decanters of port and sherry; and both the bailiff and his host did ample justice to the feast. It was a long dreary afternoon of eating and drinking; and Ellen was not sorry to get away from the prim wainscoted parlour, where her father and Mr. Whitelaw were solemnly sipping their wine, to wander over the house ...
— Fenton's Quest • M. E. Braddon
... an eagerness that wilted in spite of her before she reached its object. Mrs. Merston did not rise to meet her. She sat prim and upright and waited for her greeting, and Sylvia knew in a moment before their hands touched each other that here ...
— The Top of the World • Ethel M. Dell
... gracious' sake, let me talk! I feel sometimes as if I should suffocate. Everything about this house is so demure, and silent, and solemn, and Quakerish, and hatefully prim. If ever I have a house of my own, I mean to paste in great letters over the doors and windows, 'Laughing and talking freely allowed!' This is my birthday, and I think I might stay at home. Mother, don't forget to have the ends of my sash fringed, and the tops of my gloves ...
— Beulah • Augusta J. Evans
... sober Flemish interior expresses my mistress's character almost as well as her own apartment used to do. I always experienced a chill, a sense of formality, when the door was opened, and while I stood waiting for her in the prim drawing-room. Every chair was in its appointed place, large, gilt-edged, illustrated books lay upon the tables.... There was not much light in her rooms; heavy curtains clung about the windows, and tapestries covered the walls. In the passage there were oak chests, and you can imagine, reader, this ...
— Memoirs of My Dead Life • George Moore
... be just," defended Dorothy. "She has rather prim ideas about things, but she's a stickler for principle. I am glad she's over her prejudice ...
— Jane Allen: Right Guard • Edith Bancroft
... and sun-drenched apartment as a bright leopardess might tread her cage. Then she wheeled. "Friend, I think that God Himself has deigned to avenge you. All misery my reign has been. First Hotspur, then prim Worcester harried us. Came Glyndwyr afterward to prick us with his devils' horns. Followed the dreary years that linked me to the rotting corpse which God's leprosy devoured while the poor furtive thing yet moved, ...
— Chivalry • James Branch Cabell
... One had broken the paramount law of sham-Bohemia—the law of "Laisser faire." The shock came not from the blow delivered, but from the blow received. With the effect of a schoolmaster entering the play-room of his pupils was that blow administered. Women pulled down their sleeves and laid prim hands against their ruffled side locks. Men looked at their watches. There was nothing of the effect of a brawl about it; it was purely the still panic produced by the sound of the ax of the fly cop, Conscience hammering at the gambling-house ...
— The Trimmed Lamp and Others • O Henry
... to him—a farewell not to a real illusion, but to the idea that for him, in that matter, there could ever be an acceptable pis-aller. He congratulated Miss Blanchard upon her engagement, and she received his compliment with a touch of primness. But she was always a trifle prim, even when she was quoting Mrs. Browning and George Sand, and this harmless defect did not prevent her responding on this occasion that Mr. Leavenworth had a "glorious heart." Rowland wished to manifest an extreme regard, but toward the end of the talk his zeal relaxed, and he fell a-thinking ...
— Roderick Hudson • Henry James
... of the nymphs and satyrs became somewhat obscene, but Rafe didn't bother to correct it. He had more to worry about than offending the rather prim ...
— The Foreign Hand Tie • Gordon Randall Garrett
... They peered everywhere for the truant form of Musa balanced on one side by a bag and on the other by a fiddle case. From the trim houses, each without exception new, twinkled discreet lights, with glimpses of surpassingly correct domesticity, and the wind rustled loudly through the foliage of the prim gardens, ruffling them as it might have ruffled the unwilling hair of the daughters of an arch-deacon. Nobody was abroad. Absurd thoughts ran through Audrey's head. A letter from Mr. Foulger had followed ...
— The Lion's Share • E. Arnold Bennett
... ministry cannot last six months; I would bet that the lightness of the latter emerged first. George Selwyn, hearing some people at Arthur's t'other night lamenting the distracted state of the country, joined in the discourse, with the whites of his eyes and his prim mouth, and fetching a deep sigh, said, "Yes, to be sure it is terrible! There is the Duke of Newcastle's faction, and there is Fox's faction, and there is Leicester-house! between two factions and one faction we ...
— The Letters of Horace Walpole, Volume 2 • Horace Walpole
... bad child,' said Susan at her tea in the servants' quarters. 'That nurse frightened him out of his little wits with her prim ways, you may depend. He's civil enough if you speak ...
— The Magic City • Edith Nesbit
... in town, Monsieur Madeleine; his workmen and the children continued to call him Father Madeleine, and that was what was most adapted to make him smile. In proportion as he mounted, throve, invitations rained down upon him. "Society" claimed him for its own. The prim little drawing-rooms on M. sur M., which, of course, had at first been closed to the artisan, opened both leaves of their folding-doors to the millionnaire. They made a thousand advances ...
— Les Miserables - Complete in Five Volumes • Victor Hugo
... two years later, left Italy to ascend the Spanish throne, his reluctance to accept the invitation of the Cortes having been overridden by the Italian cabinet. On the 16th of November 1870 he was proclaimed king of Spain by the Cortes; but, before he could arrive at Madrid, Marshal Prim, chief promoter of his candidature, was assassinated. Undeterred by rumours of a plot against his own life, Amedeo entered Madrid alone, riding at some distance from his suite to the church where Marshal Prim's body lay in state. His efforts ...
— Project Gutenberg Encyclopedia
... so prim and old fashioned. I told you what to call me—Fauvette. That's the name I like. Fauvette! I am ...
— Possessed • Cleveland Moffett
... fair, Why do you stare At poor old Mr. Joker? You're quite as stiff And prim as if ...
— The Wonderful Wizard of Oz • L. Frank Baum
... pushed open her little gate, hung crookedly in a very compact and prim spruce hedge, she stopped in amazement and said, "Well, for ...
— Lucy Maud Montgomery Short Stories, 1902 to 1903 • Lucy Maud Montgomery
... or flowers, behind him, as he passes, careless of them, unconsciously, through the world, the school, the precincts, the old city. Strangers' eyes, resting on him by chance, are deterred for a while, even among the rich sights of the venerable place, as he walks out and in, in his prim gown and purple-tasselled cap; goes in, with the stream of sunlight, through the black shadows of the mouldering Gothic gateway, like youth's very self, eternal, immemorial, eternally renewed, about those immemorially ancient stones. "Young Apollo!" people say—people ...
— Miscellaneous Studies: A Series of Essays • Walter Horatio Pater
... Cromartins, and Bunsbys, being of another class, viewed the young couple's visit in a different light. "Mr. Feilding has such nice hands and wears such lovely cravats," the younger Miss Cromartin said, and "Miss Collins is too sweet for anything." Prim Mr. Bunsby, having superior notions of life and deportment, only shook his head. He looked for more dignity, he said; but then this Byronic young man had not been invited to ...
— The Tides of Barnegat • F. Hopkinson Smith
... some morning early and look out to the gate, the cobwebs must be diamond-sprinkled on the circle at the doorway, the catalpa trees must stand like stiff, prim, proper, knickerbockered footmen, on either side of the hedge, the ground must rise in a very gradual swell and culminate in the rose- covered gate. Throw it a kiss for me—(I wonder if there could be any roses left?). All of it is a lovely bit of man's handiwork, and Mr. Eno should have been ...
— The Letters of Franklin K. Lane • Franklin K. Lane
... his part, intended his youngest daughter to be a model of prim propriety. He attributed to Flavia's frivolity of behaviour the difficulty he experienced in finding her a husband, and he had no intention of exposing himself to a second failure in the case of Faustina. She should marry in her first season, ...
— Sant' Ilario • F. Marion Crawford
... already." "Oh no," said Father, "country air does her such a lot of good, and when I take the children away for a change I don't forbid any innocent pleasures." My darling Father, I had to keep a tight hand on myself so as not to kiss him then and there. They were all so prim, with their eyes glued to their plates as if they had never eaten rum pudding before. It is true that Ferdinand winked at Marina, but of course she noticed nothing. They soon put away their first helps, and they all took a second, and then they went on talking. When we ...
— A Young Girl's Diary • An Anonymous Young Girl
... was writing to a "proper" person, making a postscript which says, "when I wrote d——d I only meant deuced." But one would as soon think of dropping out Shakspeare's adjective, and saying (as a very prim lady we once knew did in reading Lady Macbeth's soliloquy), "Out, spot!" as to drop out any of Lamb's qualifying words. He was sometimes accused of being irreverent, as in his article upon "Saying Graces," where he affirms that he is more disposed to say grace upon twenty other ...
— Home Life of Great Authors • Hattie Tyng Griswold
... ungainly in her behaviour, and such a laughing hoyden! Pastorella had with him the allowance of being blameless; but what was that towards being praiseworthy? To be only innocent is not to be virtuous! He afterwards spoke so much against Mrs. Dipple's forehead, Mrs. Prim's mouth, Mrs. Dentifrice's teeth, and Mrs. Fidget's cheeks that she grew downright in love with him; for it is always to be understood that a lady takes all you detract from the rest of her sex to be a gift to her. In a word, things went so far that I was dismissed. The ...
— Isaac Bickerstaff • Richard Steele
... crept softly down the cold gray passage in the dawn. The girls' door was open; for the girls were afraid of robbers, and left their bed-room door wide open at night, as a natural and obvious means of self-defence. The girls slept together; and the frill of the pale sister's prim little night-cap was buried in the ...
— In the Yule-Log Glow, Book II - Christmas Tales from 'Round the World • Various
... up before a small, prim house in Brompton Square when the door was opened by a neat maid in immaculate cap and apron. She was so neat and respectful as to appear almost passionless. She had the high complexion of a Country girl, good gray eyes, a slim, ...
— The Kingdom Round the Corner - A Novel • Coningsby Dawson
... the long windows, beyond which large greenish flies were buzzing around the branch of a mulberry tree in the alley, Gabriella was trying a purple hat on a prim-looking lady who regarded herself in the mirror with a furtive and deprecating air as if she were afraid of being unjustly blamed for her appearance. "I'm not sure—but I don't think it suits me exactly," she appeared to murmur in a strangled whisper, while she twisted ...
— Life and Gabriella - The Story of a Woman's Courage • Ellen Glasgow
... Many have run away, to be sure. Once across the wide Atlantic, or wider Pacific, their passage paid (not sneaking in among the ballast like the more fortunate weeds), some are doomed to stay in prim, rigidly cultivated flower beds forever; others, only until a chance to bolt for freedom presents itself, and away they go. Lucky are they if every flower they produce is not picked before a ...
— Wild Flowers Worth Knowing • Neltje Blanchan et al
... years? And they have been our next-door neighbors, and she has never been inside the house. Nor he either, for that matter, except once when it took fire, you know, and he came in with that funny little chemical engine tucked under his arm, and took off his hat in the same prim, polite way that he takes it off when he talks to Sibyl, and said, 'If you'll excuse me offering advice, Miss Hopkins, it is not necessary to move anything; it mars furniture very much to move it at a fire. I think, if you will allow me, I can extinguish this.' And he did, too, ...
— Different Girls • Various
... miminy] prim, demure. gleg] bright, sharp. wud] mad. randies] viragoes. flytin'] scolding. skirlin'] shrieking. souter] cobbler. doited] mazed. a-widdershin] the wrong way of the sun: or E. to W. through N. waled] chose. cantrip] magic. stour] ...
— Book of English Verse • Bulchevy
... be silly, Moses," said the half-indignant Melindy, pouting her ripe red lips, and trying to look very prim. ...
— Marguerite Verne • Agatha Armour
... green lawns, no twisted yews, no weeping willows; the few fir trees hold themselves stiffly up, as though in pride at this triumph of the vegetable over the animal; and the great bushes of faded geranium only throw into relief the regular lines of limestone mounds, each with its prim wooden cross of advertisement. Always an ugly and a dreary place, it was, when I saw it a few days after the relief, more dreary than ever; for the sun, whose presence makes the difference of a season in this bare land, was hidden behind dark stacks of cloud ...
— The Relief of Mafeking • Filson Young
... strange," he continues, "to go back to England and be respectable? Imagine yourself in a prim little village, posing as a good young widow, playing Lady Bountiful to the poor, and being called on by the county magnates, while I lived a virtuous bachelor life in the dreary ...
— When the Birds Begin to Sing • Winifred Graham
... spare him. "Do you think you can make your child and hers into a prim miss, to sit at home and work embroidery?" she demanded. "Upon my word, if I were a boy I believe you'd suggest putting me ...
— The Fur Bringers - A Story of the Canadian Northwest • Hulbert Footner
... feet ran the slim, straight causeway, which was the King's highway of the district—a trim, prim line of white above the picturesque disorder of the marshes. It skirted the low-lying fields at the foot of the uplands and slipped through an iron gate to end in the far distance at the gigantic portal of The Fort. This was a squat, ungainly pile of rugged gray stone, ...
— The Green Mummy • Fergus Hume
... lucubrations and healthy exercises during his college days had consumed all the energy his normal digestion extracted from a wholesome omnivorous diet. When he did discover a bit of surplus energy, he worked it off in the society of his mother and of the conventional minds and prim teas she surrounded herself with. Result: A very nice young man, of whom no maid's mother need ever be in trepidation; a very strong young man, whose substance had not been wasted in riotous living; a very learned young man, with a Freiberg mining engineer's ...
— A Daughter of the Snows • Jack London
... been standing prim, erect, and stiff, fell limply into a convenient rocking chair, and looked closely at this orphaned nephew who had ...
— Miss Minerva and William Green Hill • Frances Boyd Calhoun
... solitudes. My Arabs were busy with their bread; Mysseri rattling tea-cups; the little kettle, with her odd old-maidish looks, sat humming away old songs about England; and two or three yards from the fire my tent stood prim and tight, with open portal, and with welcoming look, like “the old arm-chair” of our lyrist’s “sweet ...
— Eothen • A. W. Kinglake
... In this connection may be mentioned a remark of General Prim, one of the leading spirits in the provisional government of 1868. When asked why at that time he did not establish a republic his reply was: "It would have been a republic without republicans." There was no less a dearth of ...
— The Governments of Europe • Frederic Austin Ogg
... the private office of Tredgold and Son, land and estate agents, gazing through the prim wire blinds at the peaceful High Street of Binchester. Tredgold senior, who believed in work for the young, had left early. Tredgold junior, glad at an opportunity of sharing his father's views, had passed most of the work on to ...
— Dialstone Lane, Complete • W.W. Jacobs
... apparently within reach, and he was about to cross the dewy band of grass which bordered the road, when he recollected that he had just put on clean boots, and the result of a scramble through and among brambles would be unsatisfactory for their appearance in the rector's prim study. So the berries hung in their place, left to ripen, and he went on till a great dragon-fly came sailing along the moist lane to pause in the sunny openings, and poise itself in the clear air where its wings vibrated so rapidly that they looked like a patch ...
— The Weathercock - Being the Adventures of a Boy with a Bias • George Manville Fenn
... I," said Rita. "But he's got the idea he would be doing me a favor in marrying me; and when a man gets that notion it's fatal. Also—He doesn't realize it himself, but I'm not prim enough to suit him. He imagines he's liberal—that's a common failing among men. But a woman who is natural shocks them, and they are taken in and pleased by one who poses as more innocent and impossible than any human being not perfectly imbecile could remain in a world ...
— The Fashionable Adventures of Joshua Craig • David Graham Phillips
... beings, of whichever sex they may be, will do amazing things in times of spiritual upheaval. I have known the primmest of vicar's churchwardens curse like a coal-heaver when a new incumbent chose in his stead a less prim man ...
— The Beloved Vagabond • William J. Locke
... a slow smile dawning. There she was, "prim as a dish," Charlotte would say, her two braids down her back, her hands clasped about her knees. He had never, the undercurrent in his mind still reminded him, been so alone with her since the days when they had, with an unspoken sense ...
— Old Crow • Alice Brown
... or Jasper would hurry in and wade through the missives. And when he saw the hungry longing of the desolate soul, and the sweet refinement of the writer came out, and the sterling honesty was revealed in the prim sentences, he relented and went tumultuously ...
— Five Little Peppers and their Friends • Margaret Sidney
... laid aside her fan, lifted her mantilla from her head with both hands, and, drawing it around her shoulders and under her lifted chin, had crossed it over her bosom with a certain prim, automatic gesture, as if it had been the starched kerchief of some remote Puritan ancestress. With her arms still unconsciously crossed, she stooped rigidly, picked up her fan with three fingers, as if it had been a prayer-book, and, with a slight ...
— The Crusade of the Excelsior • Bret Harte
... of the winter, raged violently among the Irish Loyalists. Nowhere were the recruiting officers more fervently besieged than in Dublin. Youthful squireens who boasted of being admirable snipe shots, and possessed a knowledge of all that pertained to horses, struggled with prim youths out of banks for the privilege of serving as troopers. The sons of plump graziers in the West made up parties with footmen out of their landlords' mansions, and arrived in Dublin hopeful of enlistment. Light-hearted undergraduates of Trinity, drapers' assistants of dubious character, ...
— Hyacinth - 1906 • George A. Birmingham
... exaggeration of its weaknesses. But meanwhile, they overlook the fact, that not the woman Elizabeth, but the Virgin-queen, the royal heroine, is the theme of admiration. Not the petty virtues, the pretty sensibilities, the cheap charity, the prim decorum, which modern flatterers dwell upon, degrading royalty, while they palaver its possessor, but Britannia's sacred majesty, enshrined in chaste and lofty womanhood. Our ancestors paid their compliments to sex or rank—ours ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction - Vol. 17, No. 483., Saturday, April 2, 1831 • Various
... heard the old man's genial laugh, and felt the gentle pressure of his hand upon his curls. And then his playing! How little Ludwig had listened enrapt whilst Grandfather Ludwig charmed forth those mysterious melodies which seemed to be locked up at other times in the silent, prim little clavier! Those were delicious day-dreams that Grandfather Ludwig had the power to conjure up in his grandson's mind. But two years had passed since the kindly old musician had gone to his rest, and during those years the surroundings of Ludwig's childhood ...
— Story-Lives of Great Musicians • Francis Jameson Rowbotham
... autumn of 1868 the throne of Spain had been vacant in consequence of a revolution in which General Prim had been the leading actor. It was not easy to discover a successor for the Bourbon Isabella; and after other candidatures had been vainly projected it occurred to Prim and his friends early in 1869 that a suitable candidate might be found in Prince Leopold of Hohenzollern-Sigmaringen, ...
— History of Modern Europe 1792-1878 • C. A. Fyffe
... the use of the word "wish" in place of "want"; I don't know why, but I always associate it with prim, prudish, ...
— The Four Faces - A Mystery • William le Queux
... the sea; and when the billowing fields and neat hedges changed to chalky downs, a sudden whiff of salt on the air blowing through a half-open window made her heart leap. She nearly cried, "The sea!" but controlled herself because of her prim fellow-passengers. ...
— The Guests Of Hercules • C. N. Williamson and A. M. Williamson
... feelings at the inevitable outbreak. Besides, there's a more serious difficulty." Jernyngham's tense face relaxed into a grim smile. "Can you imagine Ellice an inmate of an English country house, patronizing local charities, presiding over prim garden parties? The idea's preposterous! And ...
— Prescott of Saskatchewan • Harold Bindloss
... all a courtier's arts for Warburton; to him he devoted all his genius, though that, indeed, was moderate; aided him with all his ingenuity, which was exquisite; and lent his cause a certain delicacy of taste and cultivated elegance, which, although too prim and artificial, was a vein of gold running through his mass of erudition; it was Hurd who aided the usurpation of Warburton in the province of criticism above Aristotle and Longinus.[191] Hurd is justly characterised by Warton, in his Spenser, vol. ...
— Calamities and Quarrels of Authors • Isaac D'Israeli
... where the games were to be played. The house would have been nothing but a plain square mansion of Queen Anne's time, but for the remnant of an old abbey to which it was united at one end, in much the same way as one may sometimes see a new farmhouse rising high and prim at the end of older and lower farm-offices. The fine old remnant stood a little backward and under the shadow of tall beeches, but the sun was now on the taller and more advanced front, the blinds were all down, and the house seemed asleep in the hot midday. It made ...
— Adam Bede • George Eliot
... such kindred emotion, stared fixedly over my head at a point on the further wall. It was as though he had seen something that turned him to stone. I instinctively followed the direction of his eyes, but I could see nothing unusual. The still feebly flickering ashes in the grate, and the row of prim ornaments on the mantelpiece, were ...
— The Mysterious Affair at Styles • Agatha Christie
... more melancholy place than the street in which you have lived; than the house, now curtainless and weather-stained, you knew prim, and full of happy human creatures; than the "banquet-hall deserted:" than the empty chair; than the bed where Death ...
— The Cockaynes in Paris - 'Gone abroad' • Blanchard Jerrold
... smiling all at once, and holding up her face to be kissed. She paid the two guineas for the kiss. Was it not a mean act? "Is it possible that people can love where they do not respect?" says Miss Prim: "I never would." Nobody asked you, Miss Prim: but recollect Morgiana was not born with your advantages of education and breeding; and was, in fact, a poor vulgar creature, who loved Mr. Walker, not because her mamma told her, nor because he was an exceedingly ...
— Men's Wives • William Makepeace Thackeray
... forward to seeing Bath with a curious kind of interest. I once knew one of those dear old English ladies whom one finds all the world over, with their prim little ways, and their gilt prayer-books, and lavender-scented handkerchiefs, and family recollections. She gave me the idea that Bath, a city where the great people often congregate, was more especially the paradise ...
— Our Hundred Days in Europe • Oliver Wendell Holmes
... about vaccination and fresh air! or a reading of John Gilpin or the Pied Piper. Mamsey, you know a model parish stifles me. I can't stand your prim school-children, drilled in the Catechism, and your old women who get out the Bible and the clean apron when they see you a quarter of a mile off. Free air and open minds for me! No, I won't have you sighing, mother. You have returned to your native element, and you must ...
— More Bywords • Charlotte M. Yonge
... ladies are seen, in care of papas in caps and gowns, or mammas, who look as if they were Doctors of Divinity, or deserved to be. The Oxford female is only of two kinds—prim and brazen. The latter we will not describe; the former seem to live in perpetual fear of being winked at, ...
— Rides on Railways • Samuel Sidney
... pocket. Then as she tripped demurely down The steep descent, the little town Spread wider till its sprawling street Enclosed her and her footfalls beat On hard stone pavement, and she felt Those throbbing ecstasies that melt Through heart and mind, as, happy, free, Her small, prim personality Merged into the seething strife Of auction-marts ...
— Georgian Poetry 1920-22 • Various
... had lopped away every unsightly branch from the beeches and oaks. Probably there may have been homely corners in the gardens and grounds which Peter had discovered as a child; but Mrs. Ogilvie, when she walked, kept to the prim paths of the terrace and the garden, where every pebble seemed to have its proper place, in full view of the windows ...
— Peter and Jane - or The Missing Heir • S. (Sarah) Macnaughtan
... jamb of the store was a curved plate of polished metal, with the name GERRISH cut into it in black letters; the sills of the wide windows were of metal, and bore the same legend. At the threshold a very prim, ceremonious little man, spare and straight, met Mrs. Munger with a ceremonious bow, and a solemn "How do you do, ma'am I how do you do? I hope I see you well," and he put a small dry hand into the ample clasp of Mrs. ...
— Annie Kilburn - A Novel • W. D. Howells
... word of three letters. In all the messages sent him by the schoolma'am, it was the precise, school-grammar wording of them which had irritated him most and impressed him insensibly with the belief that she was too prim to be quite human. The Happy Family had felt all along that they were artists in that line, and they knew that the precise sentences ever carried conviction of their truth. Weary mopped his perspiring face upon a white ...
— The Lonesome Trail and Other Stories • B. M. Bower
... communicative as to her previous history, still might the feeling of pique with which they at first received such a rebuff to their curiosity, have been a very evanescent one in the minds of the villagers, had it not chanced that Aberdeen was blessed (?) with two prim sister-spinsters, (was it they or Aunt Nora, who formed the exception to the general rule? I leave it for thee, dear reader, to decide, since with that early-instilled reverence before mentioned, I cannot consider my humble opinion infallible,) whose hearts, according to their own impression on ...
— Graham's Magazine Vol XXXIII No. 3 September 1848 • Various
... is so," said Valerie demurely. Her little heart was beating confidently again and she seated herself beside Helene d'Enver in the prim circle of delegates intent upon their chairman, who was calling ...
— The Common Law • Robert W. Chambers
... centuries, and the sudden bursting forth of character and capacity that began with our grandfather! But as I go on in life, day by day, I become more of a bewildered child; I cannot get used to this world, to procreation, to heredity, to sight, to hearing; the commonest things are a burthen. The prim obliterated polite face of life, and the broad, bawdy, and orgiastic—or maenadic—foundations, form a spectacle to which no habit reconciles me; and "I could wish my days to be bound each to each" by the same open-mouthed wonder. ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 25 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... Prim Margaret Fuller, who was a visitor—and never a member of the community as has often been stated—professed herself disturbed, at first, by the easy and perhaps indifferent manner in which they listened to her long conversations, as they sat on the floor or on crickets; but on a later visit, ...
— Brook Farm • John Thomas Codman
... white-stone gate surmounted with stone lions, which led from the yard into the field, stood two girls. One of them, the elder, thin, pale, very handsome, with masses of chestnut hair and a little stubborn mouth, looked rather prim and scarcely glanced at me; the other, who was quite young—seventeen or eighteen, no more, also thin and pale, with a big mouth and big eyes, looked at me in surprise, as I passed, said something in English ...
— The House with the Mezzanine and Other Stories • Anton Tchekoff
... Young Ladies! Until the fact was pointed out, we actually did not know that we had a girls' school as close to us as the school for boys. The garden, equally large with the other, affords no sign whatever of any provision for juvenile recreation; but is entirely laid out with prim grass-plots, gravel-walks, shrubs, and flowers, after the usual suburban style. During five months we have not once had our attention drawn to the premises by a shout or a laugh. Occasionally girls may be observed sauntering along the paths with their lesson-books ...
— Woman and Womanhood - A Search for Principles • C. W. Saleeby
... address. That looks bad. Who's Archibald Dorrimore? May be that isn't his right name. He's some worthless spark who's got hold of her for his own amusement. Oh, the silly hussy! What could that prim Mistress Pinwell have been about? A fine boarding school indeed! She can't go back. But I won't have her here turning the heads of the men. That dull lout, Bob Dobson, 'ud as lieve throw his money into her lap as he'd swallow a mug ...
— Madame Flirt - A Romance of 'The Beggar's Opera' • Charles E. Pearce
... to be very prim when I'm with you," and Patty glanced saucily from beneath her long lashes; ...
— Patty's Butterfly Days • Carolyn Wells
... express that she had forgotten locking it, and slip round to the kitchen; but most of the ladies made their way back at once between the roses and syringas of their grassy door-yards, which were as neat and prim as their own persons, or the best chamber in their white- walled, green-shuttered, story-and-a-half house, and as perfectly kept as the ...
— Henry James, Jr. • William Dean Howells
... very home that had sprung up for me in the midst of these solitudes. My Arabs were busy with their bread; Mysseri rattling tea-cups; the little kettle, with her odd old-maidish looks, sat humming away old songs about England; and two or three yards from the fire my tent stood prim and tight, with open portal, and with welcoming look, like “the old arm-chair” of ...
— Eothen • A. W. Kinglake
... a tall red-brick house, with green blinds and a prim, tidy look. He was shown into a prim parlor and interviewed by a prim old lady, who wore spectacles and had a pencil stuffed in the bosom of her black gown. However, she was less prim than she looked, and had a cheerful old ruddy face with a twinkling pair of kindly ...
— A Coin of Edward VII - A Detective Story • Fergus Hume
... long time Sir Richmond had met no one so interesting and amusing as this frank-minded young woman from America. "Young woman" was how he thought of her; she didn't correspond to anything so prim and restrained and extensively reserved and withheld as a "young lady "; and though he judged her no older than five and twenty, the word "girl" with its associations of virginal ignorances, invisible purdah, and trite ideas newly discovered, seemed even less appropriate for her than ...
— The Secret Places of the Heart • H. G. Wells
... very direct question, the laughter, the gaiety vanished from her face. She looked thoughtful and seemed to consider so trivial a matter quite unnecessarily. Then, apparently arriving at a sudden decision, she said with a sort of sweet, prim courtesy: "I should be very glad to have you come in with me and meet my mother. I think it is very probable that we will find Kitty, and perhaps ...
— The Silver Butterfly • Mrs. Wilson Woodrow
... Frank? What am I to do? Think how desolate I am, how unfriended, how much in want of some one whom I can call a protector! I cannot have you always with me. You care more for the little finger of that prim piece of propriety down at the old dowager's than you do for me and all my sorrows." This was true, but Frank did not say that it was true. "Lord Fawn is at any rate respectable. At least, I thought he was so when I accepted ...
— The Eustace Diamonds • Anthony Trollope
... Kindly tell her, Augustina, that I will let her have the key of it. And kindly tell her also—as from yourself, of course—that she will be treating us all with courtesy if she does come home at a reasonable hour. We have been a very quiet, prim household all these years, and Mrs. Denton, for all her virtues, has ...
— Helbeck of Bannisdale, Vol. I. • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... his fame: But open force was vain; by night she went, And while he slept, surpris'd the darling rent: Where yawn'd the frieze is now become a doubt; And glory, at one entrance, quite shut out.(12) He scorns Florello, and Florello him; This hates the filthy creature; that, the prim: Thus, in each other, both these fools despise Their own dear selves, with undiscerning eyes; Their methods various, but alike their aim; The sloven and the fopling are the same. Ye whigs and tories! thus it fares with you, When party rage too ...
— The Poetical Works of Edward Young, Volume 2 • Edward Young
... Outside there projected a stout iron rod, from which hung a gilded miniature of a bale of wool which swung and squeaked with every puff of wind. Beyond that again were the houses of the other side, high, narrow, and prim, slashed with diagonal wood-work in front, and topped with a bristle of sharp gables and corner turrets. Between were the cobble-stones of the Rue St. Martin and the clatter of ...
— The Refugees • Arthur Conan Doyle
... who was leading the horse seemed to be no Quaker, though his intercourse with the family had given him a touch of their prim sobriety of look and manner. He assured Joshua that his horse had received no injury, and I even hinted that the exercise would be of service to him. Solomon himself neighed towards his master, and rubbed his head against the good Quaker's shoulder, as if to assure him of his ...
— Redgauntlet • Sir Walter Scott
... and heavier, and has little of the colouring of her passionate wooer on her wings, though her body is decorated with unexpected red. Her flight, ordinarily, is cumbersome and slow, and her demeanour pensive—almost prim. She seems to be of a steady, matronly disposition, whereas the shape of the wings of her mate alone denotes quite a different ideal of life. He is all alert, charged to the full with nervous energy—free, careless, ...
— The Confessions of a Beachcomber • E J Banfield
... a sympathetic voice that asked the question, and Judith looked up with a smile. Her mother's cousin stood in the doorway—a prim little old spinster, who had been their guest for several days. Like Marguerite, she, too, had come back to her native village after an absence of four years, but not to her father's house. She was all alone in the world, ...
— Mildred's Inheritance - Just Her Way; Ann's Own Way • Annie Fellows Johnston
... and does not stir the blood till much later, and thus their temperament is much less precocious.] Children are preternaturally quick to discern immoral habits under the cloak of decency with which they are concealed. The prim speech imposed upon them, the lessons in good behaviour, the veil of mystery you profess to hang before their eyes, serve but to stimulate their curiosity. It is plain, from the way you set about it, that they are meant to learn what you profess to conceal; and of ...
— Emile • Jean-Jacques Rousseau
... alone. You mustn't think everybody's forsaken you and you've no friend left to you. It's often the case that you know your true friends in trouble," she continued sententiously. "And if only you could find the best Friend of all now when you need Him most." Her prim phrasing changed to earnestness. "There was a woman once that they dragged out in front of everybody for evil-doing. But He wouldn't have it. He put them to silence, and then when she was all alone with Him He showed her how tender He was to them ...
— Women of the Country • Gertrude Bone
... aunt, prim, proper and worldly-wise, was as much Aunt Sally to Filmer as she was to her niece and nephew. Jock jollied the aristocratic lady as freely as he did Drew, toward whom he held the tolerant admiration that he had given him ...
— Joyce of the North Woods • Harriet T. Comstock
... which consisted of an elderly uncle and aunt, and a middle-aged governess, Leo Gordon had never known intimate association with younger people; and while her nature was gentle and tranquil, she gradually imbibed the grave and rather prim ideas which were in vogue when Miss Patty was the reigning belle of her county. Although petted and indulged, she had not been spoiled, and remained singularly free from the selfishness usually developed in the character of ...
— At the Mercy of Tiberius • August Evans Wilson
... troubled sea wherein to ride than the stormy fluctuance of mortal passion; Plato is diviner than Ovid," said a puritanic, piping voice from a coif that was fashioned out of the white camellia-blooms behind my chair, and circled the prim beauty of Lady ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. II, No. 8, June 1858 • Various
... and she was so scared she swore like he told her. And so she was that afraid of losin' her fine yellow hair afterward, knowin' Father McNally was a man that didn't make no idle threats, that she kept prim and ...
— The Spenders - A Tale of the Third Generation • Harry Leon Wilson
... noticed," rather grimly rejoined Mr. Ashe. Blue Bonnet's prim New England aunt had not suffered him to remain long in ignorance of her disapproval of tobacco ...
— Blue Bonnet's Ranch Party • C. E. Jacobs
... middle of the hard horsehair sofa sat Mrs Fanshawe herself, her elaborately coiffured, elaborately attired figure looking extraordinarily out of place in the prim bareness of the little room. Her gloved hands were crossed on her lap, she sat ostentatiously erect, her satin cloak falling around her in regal folds; her face was a trifle paler than usual, but the mocking light shone in her eyes. At Claire's entrance she stood ...
— The Independence of Claire • Mrs. George de Horne Vaizey
... words about the "English" question: As I said, it seems to me, academical correctness, among the higher characters, will give a prim, old-fashioned tone: and you can look after this, as all my own work has been in the opposite direction in art. I have given it no thought in writing ...
— Shenandoah - Representative Plays by American Dramatists: 1856-1911 • Bronson Howard
... Man teaches a Jigg like him, that she has seen him rise six or seven Capers together with the greatest Ease imaginable, and that his Scholars twist themselves more ways than the Scholars of any Master in Town: besides there is Madam Prim, an Alderman's Lady, recommends a Master of her own Name, but she declares he is not of their Family, yet a very extraordinary Man in his way; for besides a very soft Air he has in Dancing, he gives them a particular Behaviour at a ...
— The Spectator, Volume 2. • Addison and Steele
... him no explanations. It stood as usual, large and prim and precise, the very acme of solid, sober wealth and assertive moral rectitude. He was strongly tempted to call and ask for Miss Brandt, but it was only ten o'clock in the morning, and the house looked so truly an embodiment in stucco ...
— Pearl of Pearl Island • John Oxenham
... the lawn. "I like her," she answered, "but she is funny. I suppose it is because she hasn't gone much to school. She isn't like Charlotte, or Katherine, or me. She isn't prim, and yet—it is queer, father, but she makes me feel as I do when I am ...
— Mr. Pat's Little Girl - A Story of the Arden Foresters • Mary F. Leonard
... has no effect on the skin—no, I really dare not." As she said this she looked as prim as a vestal. "It is the first time, do you know, that I ever used this liquid white, ah! ah! ah! What a baby I am! I am ...
— Monsieur, Madame and Bebe, Complete • Gustave Droz
... Artist, whose undying name With classic Rogers shall go down to fame, Be this thy crowning work! In my young days How often have I, with a child's fond gaze, Pored on the pictur'd wonders[1] thou hadst done: Clarissa mournful, and prim Grandison! All Fielding's, Smollett's heroes, rose to view; I saw, and I believed the phantoms true. But, above all, that most romantic tale[2] Did o'er my raw credulity prevail, Where Glums and Gawries wear mysterious things, That serve at once for jackets and for wings. ...
— The Works of Charles Lamb in Four Volumes, Volume 4 • Charles Lamb
... called "the genteel," for no storekeeper in Chaudiere ever opened or shut a shop-door for anybody. She smiled a vacuous smile; she played "the lady" terribly, as, with a curious conception of dignity, she held her body stiff as a ramrod, and with a prim merci ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker
... that past weakness. He had thought her fairest and most delightful among women, and he had left the Abbey House dejected and undone. But he had quickly recovered from the brief fever: and now, reverentially admiring Lady Mabel's prim propriety, he wondered that he could have ever seriously offered himself to a girl of ...
— Vixen, Volume III. • M. E. Braddon
... the conscientious heiress who returns to a New England homestead after long residence abroad, and endeavors to do her duty in the station to which Providence has called her. Prim, pale, pretty, and not youthful except in heart.—Annie Kilburn, by William ...
— Character Sketches of Romance, Fiction and the Drama, Vol 1 - A Revised American Edition of the Reader's Handbook • The Rev. E. Cobham Brewer, LL.D.
... Rochelle welcomed President Van Buren with a parade, bands playing, and crowds in the streets, this prim self-righteous young woman took no part in this hero worship, but gave vent to her disapproval ...
— Susan B. Anthony - Rebel, Crusader, Humanitarian • Alma Lutz
... because yt was the coyne of Constantinople sometyme called Bizant{i}um; and because you shall not thinke this any fic{ti}one of myne owne, Iwill warrante the same with Williame of Malmesberye in the fourthe booke De Regibus, who hathe these wordes: Constantinopolis prim{u}m Bizantiu{m} dicta forma{m} antiqui vocabuli preferu{n}t imperatorii nu{m}mi Bizantiu{m} dicta; where one other coppye for nummi Bizantiu{m} hath Bizantini nu{m}mi, and the frenche hath yt besante or Bezantine, makinge yt an olde coyne of france, (when he ...
— Animaduersions uppon the annotacions and corrections of some imperfections of impressiones of Chaucer's workes - 1865 edition • Francis Thynne
... melancholy place than the street in which you have lived; than the house, now curtainless and weather-stained, you knew prim, and full of happy human creatures; than the "banquet-hall deserted:" than the empty chair; than the bed where Death found ...
— The Cockaynes in Paris - 'Gone abroad' • Blanchard Jerrold
... Victorian tetrarchs are gone now or decayed into boarding-houses, but the Eathorne Mansion remains virtuous and aloof, reminiscent of London, Back Bay, Rittenhouse Square. Its marble steps are scrubbed daily, the brass plate is reverently polished, and the lace curtains are as prim and superior ...
— Babbitt • Sinclair Lewis
... hot day, sunny, but with brooding clouds on the low horizons; and he was dispirited and tired as he came at last into a small, prim village street rather after two o'clock (its name, once more, ...
— None Other Gods • Robert Hugh Benson
... in her little garden patch in the dewy, golden morning. She wore absurd pale-blue negligees that made her stout figure loom immense against the greenery of garden and apple tree. The neighborhood women viewed these negligees with Puritan disapproval as they smoothed down their own prim, starched gingham skirts. They said it was disgusting—and perhaps it was; but the habit of years is not easily overcome. Blanche Devine—snipping her sweet peas, peering anxiously at the Virginia ...
— One Basket • Edna Ferber
... knowledge of Italian literature is confined to a few of the most popular of Petrarch's sonnets, and an imperfect acquaintance with Ariosto, through the medium of Mr. Hoole. As to the French poets, he dismisses them in the mass as a set of prim, precise, unnatural pretenders. The truth is, he is in a state of happy ignorance about them and all that they have done. He has never read Zaire nor Phedre. To those great German poets who have illuminated the last fifty years with a splendour to which this country has, for a long time, ...
— Famous Reviews • Editor: R. Brimley Johnson
... to the lady, indicating the tie and bobbing his head forward with a prim little bow: ...
— The Cruise of the Jasper B. • Don Marquis
... standing forth to demand vengeance."—Murray's Sequel, p. 114. "Alleging, that their decrial of the church of Rome, was a uniting with the Turks."—Barclay cor. "To which is added the Catechism by the Assembly of Divines."—N. E. Prim. cor. "This treachery was always present in the thoughts of both of them."— Robertson cor. "Thus far their words agree." Or: "Thus far the words of both agree."—W. Walker cor. "Aparithmesis ...
— The Grammar of English Grammars • Goold Brown
... with him the allowance of being blameless: but what was that towards being praiseworthy? To be only innocent, is not to be virtuous. He afterwards spoke so much against Mrs. Dipple's forehead, Mrs. Prim's mouth, Mrs. Dentifrice's teeth, and Mrs. Fidget's cheeks, that she grew downright in love with him: for it is always to be understood, that a lady takes all you detract from the rest of her sex to be a gift to her. In a word, things ...
— The Tatler, Volume 1, 1899 • George A. Aitken
... when a village was set on fire and attacked by the Arabs. Not once, nor twice, but many times he had left some tiny kraal nestling sweetly among its fields of maize, an odd, savage counterpart to the country hamlet described in prim, melodious numbers by the gentle Goldsmith: the little naked children were playing merrily; the women sat in groups grinding their corn and chattering; the men worked in the fields or lounged idly about the hut doors. It was a charming scene. You felt that here, ...
— The Explorer • W. Somerset Maugham
... soul sickening under the crushing truth of what Dill in his prim grammatical way was saying, did not answer at all. He was picking blindly, mechanically at the splinter, his face shaded by his worn, gray hat; and he was thinking irrelevantly how a condemned man must feel when they come to him in his cell and in formal words ...
— The Long Shadow • B. M. Bower
... her here in the Ceramicus. I should think it is near her hour for coming back from the Academy, and taking her walk in the Poecile; she is very regular; to be sure, here she comes. Do you see the orderly, rather prim lady there, with the kindly look in her eyes, and ...
— Works, V1 • Lucian of Samosata
... was an advantage, for I became well acquainted with several young men fond of natural science. One of these was Ainsworth, who afterwards published his travels in Assyria; he was a Wernerian geologist, and knew a little about many subjects. Dr. Coldstream was a very different young man, prim, formal, highly religious, and most kind-hearted; he afterwards published some good zoological articles. A third young man was Hardie, who would, I think, have made a good botanist, but died early in India. Lastly, Dr. Grant, my senior by several years, but how I ...
— The Life and Letters of Charles Darwin, Volume I • Francis Darwin
... open to all kinds of insult, there were women brave enough to refuse to barter their souls for the animal comforts of food and shelter. Speaking about "old maids," by which term we mean now a prim, fussy person, it is well to remember that there are male "old maids" as well as female who remain so all through life; also that many "old maids" marry, and ...
— In Times Like These • Nellie L. McClung
... with her back to it, smiled in enjoying recognition of the thin, high academic note, the prim finish of the inflection. It reminded her of a man she knew who "did" curates beautifully. Arnold walked past her with his quick, humble, clerical gait, and it amused her to think that he bent over Alicia's hand as if he ...
— Hilda - A Story of Calcutta • Sara Jeannette Duncan
... and disparaged him as before—when he did not ignore him altogether. If Amy had but been rescued by him, George F. Pearson, instead of by this Bertram Cope, and if she had been snatched from a disorderly set of breakers at the foot of those disheveled sandhills instead of from the prim, prosy, domestic edge of Churchton—well, wouldn't the affair have been better set and better carried off? In such case it might have been picturesque and ...
— Bertram Cope's Year • Henry Blake Fuller
... Bath with a curious kind of interest. I once knew one of those dear old English ladies whom one finds all the world over, with their prim little ways, and their gilt prayer-books, and lavender-scented handkerchiefs, and family recollections. She gave me the idea that Bath, a city where the great people often congregate, was more especially the paradise of ...
— Our Hundred Days in Europe • Oliver Wendell Holmes
... strangers tread the shores that he calls home, What white-winged ships have braved the wild sea-foam. Prows of the Norsemen, etched against the blue! Helmets agleam! Faces of wind-bronzed hue! On roll the years, and in a forest green The Princess Pocahontas next is seen; And then in prim white cap and somber gown Lovely Priscilla, Maid o' Plymouth Town. Benjamin Franklin supping at an Inn, A 'prentice lad with all his world to win. Then Washington encamped before a blaze O' fagots, swiftly learning woodland ways. Next ...
— Patriotic Plays and Pageants for Young People • Constance D'Arcy Mackay
... kept away. He had even left two of her letters—the rather formal letters which had come to mean so very much in his life—unanswered. A fortnight had gone by, and then there had reached him a prim little note from Mrs. Pomeroy, asking him why he had not been to see them lately. There was a postscript: "If you do not come soon, you will not see my daughter. She has not been well, and we are thinking of sending her up to Scotland, to friends who are in Skye, for ...
— Defenders of Democracy • The Militia of Mercy
... been sparing of his colours. In one, a lady was having a toe amputated—an operation which a saintly personage had sailed into the room, upon a couch, to superintend. In another, a lady was lying in bed, tucked up very tight and prim, and staring with much composure at a tripod, with a slop-basin on it; the usual form of washing-stand, and the only piece of furniture, besides the bedstead, in her chamber. One would never have supposed her to be ...
— Pictures from Italy • Charles Dickens
... brushes and trays looked somewhat out of place on the prim dressing-table, but Patty thought them a decided improvement. Then she unwrapped her mother's portrait, and ...
— Patty Fairfield • Carolyn Wells
... officer, or a roast goose or turkey be smuggled by a trusty darkey from some restaurant outside; and it was but the work of a moment after taps to tack a blanket over the window, light the gas, and bring out a dilapidated pack of cards for a game of California Jack or draw-poker; or to convert the prim pine table into a billiard-table, with marbles for balls, with which the ownership of many a collar, neckerchief, shirt, and other articles of none too plentiful wardrobes, were decided in a twinkling, while the air of the crowded room grew thick and stifling ...
— The Bay State Monthly - Volume 1, Issue 4 - April, 1884 • Various
... to blow, The prim-rose, and the hare-bell blue, That on the verdant moss bank grow, With violet cups, that weep ...
— The Mysteries of Udolpho • Ann Radcliffe
... also. "It's an artistic disarray," she explained. "It's hard work because I've slipped into the habit of being prim and precise, and I had to bend a pin intentionally. Four girls already have warned me about my hair falling down. It worries me a lot and yet it doesn't give the same effect as yours. Does yours feel loose ...
— Beatrice Leigh at College - A Story for Girls • Julia Augusta Schwartz
... after this memorable event, arrived the new pastor—a slim, prim, orderly, and starch young man, framed by nature and trained by practice to bear a great deal of solitude and starving. Two loving couples had waited to be married till his Reverence should arrive. The ceremony performed, where ...
— Night and Morning, Volume 1 • Edward Bulwer Lytton
... a moment. Ida Haslam pointed her out to me in the recreation room. I thought she seemed rather prim. At any rate, she doesn't look nearly as nice ...
— The Nicest Girl in the School - A Story of School Life • Angela Brazil
... are so preachy, you are so good-natured, you believe all the prim things that grown people say!" exclaimed Becky. "What would you say if you never went to Boston but once, and then had the toothache all the time? You have been everywhere, and you think it's great fun to stay a little while in poky ...
— Betty Leicester - A Story For Girls • Sarah Orne Jewett
... of rejoinder; and we went on for awhile, braying and laughing, until I began to grow a-weary of it, and shouting a derisive farewell, turned to pursue my way. In so doing—it was like going suddenly into cold water—I found myself face to face with a prim, little old maid. She was all in a flutter, the poor old dear! She had concluded beyond question that this must be a lunatic who stood laughing aloud at a white donkey in the placid beech-woods. I was sure, by her face, that she had already recommended ...
— English: Composition and Literature • W. F. (William Franklin) Webster
... passionate discussion under Miss Hatchard's roof. The incentive to the celebration had come rather from those who had left North Dormer than from those who had been obliged to stay there, and there was some difficulty in rousing the village to the proper state of enthusiasm. But Miss Hatchard's pale prim drawing-room was the centre of constant comings and goings from Hepburn, Nettleton, Springfield and even more distant cities; and whenever a visitor arrived he was led across the hall, and treated to a glimpse of the group of girls deep ...
— Summer • Edith Wharton
... the prim decision of a teacher instructing a class, but that seemed to be only his way, and Helen May was growing used to it. "His evidencing a tendency toward sluggishness to-day, and his subsequent irritability, may or ...
— Starr, of the Desert • B. M Bower
... door opened again. All were genuinely surprised this time, for a prim, spick and span, ...
— The Exploits of Elaine • Arthur B. Reeve
... simple," replied Papa Prim. "You see, without fail, the little building to which I am pointing, over ...
— Uncle Sam's Boys with Pershing's Troops - Dick Prescott at Grips with the Boche • H. Irving Hancock
... ostenderet, et cuncta qu infligere dolorem consueverant, congesta ante oculos licenter venirent. Ibi itaque cum afflictus valde et diu tacitus sederem, dilectissimus filius meus Petrus diaconus adfuit, mihi a primvo juventutis flore amicitiis familiariter obstrictus, atque ad sacri verbi indagationem socius. Qui gravi excoqui cordis languore me intuens, ait: Num quidnam tibi aliquid accidit, quod plus te solito mror tenet? Cui inquam: Mror, Petre, quem quotidie ...
— Anglo-Saxon Literature • John Earle
... drives may often be planted with shrubbery. It is not necessary that they always have prim and definite borders. Figure 73 illustrates a bank of foliage which breaks up the hard line of a walk, and serves also as a border for the growing of flowers and interesting specimens. This walk is also characterized by the absence of high and ...
— Manual of Gardening (Second Edition) • L. H. Bailey
... he was, he spoke with a sort of prim decision, so that the mob fell silent in the middle of his ...
— The Wisdom of Father Brown • G. K. Chesterton
... is complete without one? It gives a spicy flavor to the story. People of propriety like it. Prim ladies of an uncertain age always 'dote' on the gallant, gay Lothario, and wish that he wasn't ...
— Daisy's Necklace - And What Came of It • Thomas Bailey Aldrich
... braying and laughing, until I began to grow a-weary of it, and, shouting a derisive farewell, turned to pursue my way. In so doing—it was like going suddenly into cold water—I found myself face to face with a prim little old maid. She was all in a flutter, the poor old dear! She had concluded beyond question that this must be a lunatic who stood laughing aloud at a white donkey in the placid beech-woods. I was sure, by her face, that she had already recommended her spirit most religiously ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. XXII (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... long street of two-story brick houses, neat and prim, with whitened stone steps and little groups of aproned women gossiping at the doors. Half-way down, Lestrade stopped and tapped at a door, which was opened by a small servant girl. Miss Cushing was sitting in the front room, into which we were ushered. She was a placid-faced ...
— The Strand Magazine, Volume V, Issue 25, January 1893 - An Illustrated Monthly • Various
... come there to see him. He settled to sleep quite happily with an occasional glad wistful glance toward the door, as the long lashes sank on the white cheeks, for the first sleep the boy had ever taken in a clean, white, soft bed. The prim nurse, softened for once from her precise attention to duties, stood and looked upon the lovely face of the sleeping child, wondered what his life had been, and how the future would be for him. She half pitied ...
— Lo, Michael! • Grace Livingston Hill
... House who is not well born or at least rich. Mr. Keir Hardie would look strange indeed in these serried ranks of portly gentlemen with high coat collars, cravats up to their chin, short-bodied coats showing the waistcoat beneath, and the tightly trousered legs. Yet this House, and its equally prim successors, had its obstruction, its personal wrangles, and its occasional duel. Peel was attacked by Disraeli in a fashion and in language that would not be tolerated in the House of Commons now, even though the ...
— The Strand Magazine, Volume V, Issue 27, March 1893 - An Illustrated Monthly • Various
... the parlor was also very offensive to the young lady, and when Miss Lyon came in to meet them, she, too, was secretly styled, "a prim, fussy, slippery-tongued old maid." Jenny, however, who always saw the bright side of every thing, was completely charmed with the sweet smile, and placid face, so well remembered by all who have seen and known, the founder of Mt. Holyoke Seminary. After some conversation between Miss Lyon and ...
— The English Orphans • Mary Jane Holmes
... can imagine. Our place is about a mile from the city, so the dirt will not annoy you; and you will meet such pleasant people there that you will not mind the smoke. I am sure, Mary, you will come away quite in love with Limeton, and prefer it to this prim old place.' ...
— The Four Canadian Highwaymen • Joseph Edmund Collins
... the astute little woman, "the boys' settlement is out of her power to revoke; but it would be rather good if she came to live with us, instead of filling the pockets of this prim, presumptuous, self-satisfied old maid. I am sure she is awfully selfish, ...
— A Crooked Path - A Novel • Mrs. Alexander
... here by the fire, and I'll give you your tea and put you tidily to bed. I shan't be home any other night this week. Kate has a convoy coming for her;—haven't you, Kate?—Le beau cousin will take the best possible care of us; and even prim Aunt Deborah won't object to our walking back with him. I believe he came up from Wales on purpose. What would somebody else give to take the charge off his hands?—You needn't blush, Kate; I can ...
— Kate Coventry - An Autobiography • G. J. Whyte-Melville
... omnemque complectitur vit consequentis statum. b. Eademque ratio facit hominem hominum appetentem, cumque his, natura, & sermone in vsu congruentem: vt profectus caritate domesticorum ac suorum, currat longius, & se implicet, prim Ciuium, deinde omnium mortalium societati: vtque non sibi soli se natum meminerit, sed patri, sed suis, vt exigua pars ipsi relinquatur. c. Et quoniam eadem natura cupiditatem ingenuit homini veri inueniendi, quod facillim apparet, cum vacui ...
— The Schoolmaster • Roger Ascham
... denominated in the catalogue "La vie d'une femme." They were painted rather in a remarkable style—flat, dead, pale, and formal. The first represented a "Jeune Fille," coming out of a church-door, a missal in her hand, her dress very prim, her eyes cast down, her mouth pursed up—the image of a most villanous little precocious she-hypocrite. The second, a "Mariee," with a long white veil, kneeling at a prie-dieu in her chamber, holding her hands plastered together, finger to finger, and showing ...
— Villette • Charlotte Bronte
... she cried. "Why didn't she let him see her laughing and dancing like that? Why didn't she? She'll come down all prim and staid for him and he'll never dream what she really is like. Oh, how can she be so blind? I don't know how to stand it! And I don't know what to do! Why isn't there some one to tell me what I ...
— The Precipice • Elia Wilkinson Peattie
... children, in high glee at what to them was a most comical transformation in their elder sister, danced around her with shrieks of laughter, crying out at the funny white cap which she wore, and the prim little three-cornered cape falling over her bosom, designed modestly to cover the vanity of woman's ...
— Tillie: A Mennonite Maid - A Story of the Pennsylvania Dutch • Helen Reimensnyder Martin
... Margaret," she cried, impatiently, "I am to stay there for at least six weeks, and I know nothing about them, not what age they are, nor if they are tall or short, jolly or prim, pretty, or ugly, not ...
— Stories By English Authors: Italy • Various
... rising above the two great wings forms a conspicuous landmark. In the days of William and Mary the gardens sloping down to the Thames were laid out in the stiff, formal Dutch style. Canals, in the shape of a capital L, with the foot reaching to the river, intersected prim gardens, and rows of little limes, pollarded like willows, edged the banks. It was only in 1852 that these canals were finally filled in, and the limes transplanted in the avenue bordering Ranelagh Gardens, where they still flourish. The Court favourite ...
— Chelsea - The Fascination of London • G. E. (Geraldine Edith) Mitton
... Juan Prim, inspector of preventive service, gave information to the Government and revenue board in Madrid, on the 22d of November 1841, that having attempted to make a seizure of contraband goods in the town of Estepona, in the province of Malaga, where he was ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Vol. 53, No. 331, May, 1843 • Various
... July picnic had usually been the occasions when Mary Hope, with her skirts just hitting her shoe tops in front and sagging in an ungainly fashion behind, had teetered solemnly through a "square" dance with him. Mother Douglas herself had always sat very straight and prim on a bench, her hands folded in her lap and her eyes blinking disapprovingly at the ungodly ones who let out an exultant little yip now and then when they started exuberantly through the mazes ...
— Rim o' the World • B. M. Bower
... came to was a little white house with green shutters and a slate roof. It stood in a prim little garden, and down each side of the neat path were large stone vases for flowers to grow in; but all the flowers ...
— The Phoenix and the Carpet • E. Nesbit
... Saint Paul all right," answered Loring with a smile, as he glanced up at the prim and precise Gresham, who had now succeeded in fencing Miss Joy in a corner, away from the other ...
— Five Thousand an Hour - How Johnny Gamble Won the Heiress • George Randolph Chester
... now I can admire and think of how Aunt Jenny, the prim maiden lady, gave up all her own old ways to set to and work and drudge for us all, living in a wagon and then in a tent, and smiling pleasantly at the trees we planted, and bringing us lunch where we were working away, dragging down stones for the house which progressed ...
— Charge! - A Story of Briton and Boer • George Manville Fenn
... house, 'Parkview,' solid, double-fronted, handsome, stood on the opposite side of the roadway, facing the park. As Audrey sat at meals in the dining-room, she looked across at the prim patches of green grass, intersected by black paths, the whole outlined by gay, trim flower-beds. Two of the patches of green had large trees in the middle, with wooden seats encircling their trunks; on several of the other patches were green seats with backs to them; the backs were all towards ...
— Anxious Audrey • Mabel Quiller-Couch
... clapboards painted white, and stood four square; its small-paned windows, flanked with green shutters, blinking toward the west. It had a very prim air, said to have been absorbed from Aunt Jed, and seemed to be eternally trying to draw back its skirts from contact with the interloping veranda and the rose-tree, which, toward the end of the flowering season, certainly gave it ...
— Through stained glass • George Agnew Chamberlain
... knowledge of housekeeping, but the rare habit of doing all things with regularity, neatness, decorum, and quietness. The writer of the above letter has also described one of these Pennsylvania schools with its prim teachers and commendable mingling of the practical and the artistic. "The first was merely a sewing school, little children and a pretty single spinster about 30, her white skirt, white short tight waistcoat, nice handkerchief ...
— Woman's Life in Colonial Days • Carl Holliday
... passage in the dawn. The girls' door was open; for the girls were afraid of robbers, and left their bed-room door wide open at night, as a natural and obvious means of self-defence. The girls slept together; and the frill of the pale sister's prim little night-cap was buried in the other ...
— Melchior's Dream and Other Tales • Juliana Horatia Ewing
... her affections on the young orphan if adopted; "you know it would never do to keep that little fellow with us. How old did you say he was—about fifteen? Well, fifteen or sixteen—ya—you recollect how that old priest acted last July, at the village of Scurvy? A little girl I sent out to Brother Prim this priest smelt and hunted out; and actually broke in the room door where she was confined, and took her off by physical force to a Roman Catholic orphan house. These priests are terrible fellows; and your young ...
— The Cross and the Shamrock • Hugh Quigley
... sight of his tousled head both our callers gave a whoop of recognition, and set upon him,—shook him out of his slippers, and pulled him down the steps on to the sidewalk barefoot; thereby scandalizing a whole houseful of prim damsels across the street, who indignantly pulled down their curtains. Such a hand-shaking and back-patting as ensued! All the hardships and discouragement we had endured on our last season's expedition seemed to bear an exultant harvest ...
— Left on Labrador - or, The cruise of the Schooner-yacht 'Curlew.' as Recorded by 'Wash.' • Charles Asbury Stephens
... peeling off in flakes that hang long and reluctant before falling to the ground. There are quaint gardens everywhere, with sometimes an entrance arched with iron gracefully wrought by some forgotten colonial Quentin Matsys, and always with their paths bordered by prim and fragrant box, and grass that keeps rich and green in an Old World way, by virtue of some secret of growth caught from fresher centuries than ours. If your steps have the right magic in them, you will encounter presently one of the ancient ...
— A Study Of Hawthorne • George Parsons Lathrop
... wearies of reproducing, for I suppose he is essential to life. This sober Flemish interior expresses my mistress's character almost as well as her own apartment used to do. I always experienced a chill, a sense of formality, when the door was opened, and while I stood waiting for her in the prim drawing-room. Every chair was in its appointed place, large, gilt-edged, illustrated books lay upon the tables.... There was not much light in her rooms; heavy curtains clung about the windows, and tapestries covered the walls. ...
— Memoirs of My Dead Life • George Moore
... day Fanny Hutton Her last dress has put on; Her fine lessons forgotten, She died, as the dunce died: And prim Betsy Chambers, Decay'd in her members, No longer remembers Things, ...
— The Works of Charles and Mary Lamb IV - Poems and Plays • Charles and Mary Lamb
... imagine the discomfiture suffered by many a village Hercules at the hands of this lithe young man, who could behead a bull at a single stroke of a spadoon and break a horseshoe in his fingers. The diary in question, you will have gathered, is that of a pedant, prim and easily scandalized. So much being obvious, it is noteworthy that Cesare's conduct should have afforded him no subject for graver strictures than these, Cesare being such a man as has been represented, and the time being that of carnival when ...
— The Life of Cesare Borgia • Raphael Sabatini
... face over the threshold—Clytemnestra, of a matronly circumference, yet with a certain prim consciousness of herself, which despite the gray hair and the excellent maturity of her face, was unmistakably maidenish—Clytie of the eyes always wise to another's needs and beaming with ...
— The Seeker • Harry Leon Wilson
... accentuation. We say "prim-arily" and "tem-porarily;" most (or at any rate many) Americans say "primar-ily" and "temporar-ily." Here there is no question of right or wrong, refinement or vulgarity. The one accentuation is as good as the other. It may be argued, indeed, that our accentuation ...
— America To-day, Observations and Reflections • William Archer
... See! Behold! they are becoming—rather—are they not?" And here, having arranged the glasses in the ordinary form of spectacles, I applied them gingerly in their proper position; while Madame Simpson, adjusting her cap, and folding her arms, sat bolt upright in her chair, in a somewhat stiff and prim, and indeed, in a ...
— The Works of Edgar Allan Poe - Volume 3 (of 5) of the Raven Edition • Edgar Allan Poe
... villas in the suburbs of a town in the Midlands are, one would suppose, as hideous as human half-wittedness could invent or endure. But they are different. They are complete; they are, in their way, compact; rounded and finished with an effect that may be prim or smug, but is not raw. The surroundings of them are neat, if it be in a niggling fashion. But American ugliness is not complete even as ugliness. It is broken off short; it is ragged at the edges; even its worthy objects have around them ...
— Gilbert Keith Chesterton • Maisie Ward
... enjoyed hugely one notable evidence of his persuasive eloquence to be seen in a Lebanon Valley town, inhabited by the quaint folk known as Pennsylvania Germans. All along the line of the railroad traversing this valley may be seen these distorted willows decorating the prim front yards, and they are not so offensive when used with other shrubs and trees. In this one instance, however, the tree agent evidently found a customer who was persuaded that if one Kilmarnock willow was a good thing to have, a dozen of them was ...
— Getting Acquainted with the Trees • J. Horace McFarland
... pinners edged with colberteen; Her petticoat, transformed apace, Became black satin flounced with lace. Plain 'Goody' would no longer down; 'Twas 'Madam' in her grogram gown. Philemon was in great surprise, And hardly could believe his eyes, Amazed to see her look so prim; And she admired ...
— Specimens with Memoirs of the Less-known British Poets, Complete • George Gilfillan
... familiar, till she provoked the young princess into giving her the nickname of Madame Etiquette; and, no doubt, in her childish playfulness, to utter many a speech and do many an act whose principle object was to excite the astonishment or provoke the frowns of the too prim lady of honor. ...
— The Life of Marie Antoinette, Queen of France • Charles Duke Yonge
... dignified, as I have mentioned, with her prim notions, she was essentially like the old-fashioned idea of an old maid. As her fine house was very perfectly and meticulously furnished, she treated the presence of Clifford as an outrage in any room but this particularly practical and saddle-bag ...
— Bird of Paradise • Ada Leverson
... is to be married rich, I thought, as I arose and strolled into the library, where everything was elegant and prim and neat, with no scraps of paper and piles of newspapers or evidences of literary slovenness on the table, and no books in attractive disorder, and where I seemed to see the legend staring at me from all the walls, "No smoking." So I uneasily lounged out of the house. ...
— Baddeck and That Sort of Thing • Charles Dudley Warner
... to the prim, elderly lady who presided over the household, acting as housekeeper, "Herbert will be the better for having ...
— Helping Himself • Horatio Alger
... the South; but before childhood was over I watched the quick, luxuriant growth of flowers through the brief summer of a northern clime. The Canterbury-bell, so like a prim, pretty maiden, the dahlia, that stately dame always in court costume of gorgeous velvet, remind me of those well-kept beds where not a leaf or flower was allowed to grow awry; and in one ancient ...
— Aunt Jane of Kentucky • Eliza Calvert Hall
... not need to do some great evil, some deadly sin, to quench the Spirit. Just cease to rejoice, through fear of man and of being peculiar; be prim and proper as a white and polished gravestone; let gushing joy be curbed; neglect to pray when you feel a gentle pull in your heart to get alone with the Lord; omit giving hearty thanks for all God's ...
— When the Holy Ghost is Come • Col. S. L. Brengle
... pounds were wanted to make his career, and it might have been as many thousand for any chance there seemed to be of his obtaining it. He was roused from his black meditation by the entrance of Dr. Oldacre himself, a large, clean-shaven, respectable man, with a prim manner and an austere face. He had prospered exceedingly by the support of the local Church interest, and the rule of his life was never by word or action to run a risk of offending the sentiment which had made him. His standard of respectability and of dignity ...
— The Green Flag • Arthur Conan Doyle
... antechamber, they came into a big room of some prim splendour, and as they passed the door Harry made out what that feeble voice was saying: "The Council, Abbie: we must go to the Council: we keep the Council waiting, Abbie:" that came over and over again, and he knew why he had not understood. The words were run together ...
— The Highwayman • H.C. Bailey
... supposing that I meant to quiz thee; no, not I, indeed. I wish from my heart more of us who take the profession of Jesus on our lips were willing to wear shag cloaks and linsey-woolsey garments. Now I may inform thee that, notwithstanding my prim caps, etc., I am as economical as thou art. I do many things in the way of dress to please my friends, but perhaps their ...
— The Grimke Sisters - Sarah and Angelina Grimke: The First American Women Advocates of - Abolition and Woman's Rights • Catherine H. Birney
... terrifying and confusing him. He was a little man, and knew it. He was a poor man, and knew it. He was a weary man, and knew it. He hated his wife, and knew it. He hated his children—whom she had made like herself, prim, peeking ...
— The Best British Short Stories of 1922 • Edward J. O'Brien and John Cournos, editors
... before him. He was born and raised in the house, and I thought it probable that he could solve the mystery, or at least suggest a remedy. Doctor Matthai lived just across the way in a quaint cottage covered with great climbing roses and set well back in a prim garden, with hollyhocks and hedges of box, and an ancient sun-dial which was my ...
— The Statesmen Snowbound • Robert Fitzgerald
... character and capacity that began with our grandfather! But as I go on in life, day by day, I become more of a bewildered child; I cannot get used to this world, to procreation, to heredity, to sight, to hearing; the commonest things are a burthen. The prim obliterated polite face of life, and the broad, bawdy, and orgiastic—or maenadic—foundations, form a spectacle to which no habit reconciles me; and "I could wish my days to be bound each to each" ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 25 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... this, with a despairing sort of look, as if he could not spare even so humble a friend as myself, my heart was quite rent within me, and, regardless of several prim English ladies, I drew down his tall head and kissed him tenderly, feeling that in this world there were no more meetings for us. Then I ran away and buried myself in an empty railway carriage, hugging the little cologne ...
— Aunt Jo's Scrap-Bag • Louisa M. Alcott
... led into confusion or error in the perusal of the above curious and valuable volumes, which have always been considered precious by the philologist.——MORELLI. Jacobi Morellii Bibliothecae Regiae divi Marci Venetiarum Custodis, Bibliotheca Manuscripta Graeca et Latina. Tom. prim. Bassani, 8vo. Morelli was the amiable and profoundly learned librarian of St. Mark's at Venice; and this catalogue of his Greek and Latin MSS. is given upon the authority of Peignot's Curiosites Bibliographiques, p. lix.——MUSEUM BRITISH. Catalogus Librorum ...
— Bibliomania; or Book-Madness - A Bibliographical Romance • Thomas Frognall Dibdin
... steep descent, the little town Spread wider till its sprawling street Enclosed her and her footfalls beat On hard stone pavement, and she felt Those throbbing ecstasies that melt Through heart and mind, as, happy, free, Her small, prim personality Merged into the seething strife Of ...
— Georgian Poetry 1920-22 • Various
... to book for this frolic on Inneraora fair-day, banned by Kirk, and soundly beaten by the Doomster in name of law. To read some books I've read, one would think our Gaels in the time I speak of, and even now, were pagan and savage. We are not, I admit it, fashioned on the prim style of London dandies and Italian fops; we are—the poorest of us—coarse a little at the hide, too quick, perhaps, to slash out with knife or hatchet, and over-ready to carry the most innocent argument the dire length of a thrust with the sword. That's the ...
— John Splendid - The Tale of a Poor Gentleman, and the Little Wars of Lorn • Neil Munro
... be no check upon the private conversation of her lord and lady, now came forward; and as she made her reverential curtsy, the Earl could not help smiling at the contrast which the extreme simplicity of her dress, and the prim demureness of her looks, made with a very pretty countenance and a pair of black eyes, that laughed in spite of their mistress's desire to ...
— Kenilworth • Sir Walter Scott
... fooling; why every genius does not look out upon life and the world with the same eyes and find the same method to record what he sees. Some men can only marvel with Louis Stevenson at the wide contrast between the "prim obliterated polite face of life" and its "orgiastic foundations"; others are only reconciled to it by the humour in the contrast or by the pity invoked by its victims. What makes the genius is just the fact that he looks out upon life, that he feels, that he uses his eyes, in his own ...
— Nights - Rome, Venice, in the Aesthetic Eighties; London, Paris, in the Fighting Nineties • Elizabeth Robins Pennell
... Peter and Myron march together in school. Why? Because they look wretchedly together. Myron makes Peter look short and Peter causes Myron to look overgrown. So it is with trees. A long-looking poplar does not go with a nice rather rounded little tulip tree. A juniper, so neat and prim, would look silly beside a spreading chestnut. One must keep proportion ...
— The Library of Work and Play: Gardening and Farming. • Ellen Eddy Shaw
... sound, as of an infinity of scholars in a prim school conning their lessons, and a long row of young women seated in a dim radiance on a long row of precisely similar stools, before a long apparatus of holes and pegs and pieces of elastic cord, all extremely ...
— Your United States - Impressions of a first visit • Arnold Bennett
... rushed at Richter like a wild beast. You, my friend, who have never heard the whistle of sharp Schlager cannot know the song which a skilled arm draws from the blade. It was music that morning: You should have seen the noble's mighty strokes—'Prim und Second und Terz und Quart'. You would have marked how Richter met him at every blow. Von Kalbach never once took his eyes from the blue smoke from the bowl. He was terrible in his fury, and I shiver now to think how we of the Burschenschaft trembled when we saw that our champion ...
— The Crossing • Winston Churchill
... in the above communication to his mother, showed some little hypocrisy and reticence in his dealings with that venerable person, I dare say, young folks, you in your time have written more than one prim letter to your papas and mammas in which not quite all the transactions of your lives were narrated, or if narrated, were exhibited in the most favourable light for yourselves—I dare say, old folks! you, in your time, ...
— The Virginians • William Makepeace Thackeray
... said to the lady, indicating the tie and bobbing his head forward with a prim little bow: ...
— The Cruise of the Jasper B. • Don Marquis
... tried to spend all her time in study. But the dry old scholars whom the Tsar employed as teachers were not amusing companions for a young girl and the first lady-in-waiting who was in constant attendance was scarcely any better for she, too, was old and thin and very prim. ...
— The Laughing Prince - Jugoslav Folk and Fairy Tales • Parker Fillmore
... so much disliked and dreaded, was a cousin of Mr. Dayton, and was a prim, matter-of-fact maiden of fifty, or thereabout. That she was still in a state of single blessedness was partially her own fault, for at twenty she was engaged to the son of a wealthy farmer who lived near her father. But, alas! ere the wedding day arrived, there came to the ...
— Homestead on the Hillside • Mary Jane Holmes
... none in the matter of literary style. The history of the sonata is the history of musical evolution. Every great composer, Schubert included, added to the form, filed here, chipped away there, introduced lawlessness where reigned prim order—witness the Schumann F sharp minor Sonata—and ...
— Chopin: The Man and His Music • James Huneker
... reproved for whistling by Amy, the art-loving sister, says: "I hate affected, niminy-piminy chits! I'm not a young lady; and if turning up my hair makes me one, I'll wear it in two tails till I'm twenty. I hate to think I've got to grow up, and be Miss March, and wear long gowns, and look as prim as a china-aster! Its bad enough to be a girl, anyway, when I like boy's games and work ...
— Lives of Girls Who Became Famous • Sarah Knowles Bolton
... Mr. Scalper has reached the letter of a correspondent which appears to give him particular pleasure, for he delineates the character with a beaming smile of satisfaction. To the unpractised eye the writing resembles the prim, angular hand of an elderly spinster. Mr. Scalper, however, seems to think otherwise, ...
— Literary Lapses • Stephen Leacock
... the same extravagance of life as in the devil's garden on the blue Mediterranean. On landing, I was struck with the number of well-dressed men and women who rub shoulders in the street with the dilapidated-looking mining element. In the same way palatial banks and prim business houses are incongruously scattered amongst saloons and drinking bars. Front Street, facing the sea, is the principal thoroughfare, so crowded at midday that you can scarcely get along. It is ...
— From Paris to New York by Land • Harry de Windt
... our own age with that of Pericles, and congratulate themselves on the reawakening of the feeling of patriotism: I remember a parody on the funeral oration of Pericles by G. Freytag,[9] in which this prim and strait-laced "poet" depicted the happiness now experienced by sixty-year-old men.—All pure and simple caricature! So this is the result! And sorrow and irony and seclusion are all that remain for him who has seen more ...
— We Philologists, Volume 8 (of 18) • Friedrich Nietzsche
... how often, an awkward and sophisticated youth and a prim maid with down-cast eyes will sit together, waltz together, and the one never get one inch the nearer to the other, though soul and mind and body crave a closer union. The youth would give the solid earth—nay, ...
— Hints for Lovers • Arnold Haultain
... the United States; Egypt had been flooded with savans: the Cretan rebellion had terminated ; a Spanish revolution had driven Isabella from the throne of Spain, and a Regent had been appointed: General Prim was assassinated; a Castelar had electrified Europe with his advanced ideas upon the liberty of worship; Prussia had humbled Denmark, and annexed Schleswig-Holstein , and her armies were now around Paris; the "Man of Destiny" was a prisoner at Wilhelmshohe; ...
— How I Found Livingstone • Sir Henry M. Stanley
... seen the sea; and when the billowing fields and neat hedges changed to chalky downs, a sudden whiff of salt on the air blowing through a half-open window made her heart leap. She nearly cried, "The sea!" but controlled herself because of her prim fellow-passengers. ...
— The Guests Of Hercules • C. N. Williamson and A. M. Williamson
... Mademoiselle de la Valliere," Saint-Aignan continued, "she was brought up under the care of the Dowager Madame, that is to say, in the greatest austerity and formality. This young engaged couple coldly exchanged their little vows in the prim presence of the moon and stars; and now, when they find they have to break those vows asunder, it plays the ...
— Louise de la Valliere • Alexandre Dumas, Pere
... And he sobbed, as men will, unmanned by drink. Had he lost her? Never to see her eyes closing and press his lips against them! Never to soak his senses in her loveliness! He leaped up, with the tears still wet on his face. Lost her? Absurd! That calm, prim, devilish Englishman, her father—he was to blame—he had worked it ...
— Forsyte Saga • John Galsworthy
... who is not highly sensitive is an amusement that it is possible to exhaust, and Tom by and by began to look round for some other mode of passing the time. But in so prim a garden, where they were not to go off the paved walks, there was not a great choice of sport. The only great pleasure such a restriction suggested was the pleasure of breaking it, and Tom began to meditate an insurrectionary visit to the ...
— Journeys Through Bookland, Vol. 7 • Charles H. Sylvester
... some way in the world. And, truth to say, at all times, even in the lowest ebb of his fortunes, there was that indescribable neatness and formality of precision about all the exterior seemings of the ci-devant friend of the prim Robespierre which belong to those in whom order and method are strongly developed,—qualities which give even to neediness a certain dignity. As the room and its owner met the eye of Gabriel, on whose senses all externals had ...
— Lucretia, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... the valley, which was the heart of the town, and then they drew up before a very old brick house which stood on the summit of the hill. It had green blinds and a fanlight over the front door, and a brick walk running from the front steps to the street, bordered on each side by a box hedge in a prim, Ladies' Garden effect like one sees in ...
— The Camp Fire Girls Do Their Bit - Or, Over the Top with the Winnebagos • Hildegard G. Frey
... of Alabama, who was elected President pro tempore of the Senate while Colonel Johnson was Vice-President, was a prim, spare bachelor, known among his friends as "Miss Nancy King." When a young man he had accompanied the Minister to Russia, William Pinkney, to St. Petersburg, as Secretary of the Legation of the United States. Residing there for two years, he acquired the formal manners of the Court ...
— Perley's Reminiscences, Vol. 1-2 - of Sixty Years in the National Metropolis • Benjamin Perley Poore
... froze cub cube glad glade these nod node snip snipe gaze met mete shot shote rise plat plate spin spine size flam flame plan plane wise shad shade strip stripe haze mop mope grim grime rose whit white twin twine daze sham shame prim prime those scrap scrape plum ...
— The Beacon Second Reader • James H. Fassett
... silent. After a while she said in a prim little voice, which she adopted now and then when she wanted ...
— A Sweet Girl Graduate • Mrs. L.T. Meade
... of Philadelphia," he shouted, and looked back to address them more directly. Alas, the pistols reposed in the pockets of the two prim aprons, the lantern smoked askew at Aunt Sarah's waist, and both women were holding ...
— The Wit and Humor of America, Volume V. (of X.) • Various
... careless position, and yawned repeatedly as though heartily weary of the proceedings, stooping from time to time to fondle a shaggy Spanish greyhound which lay stretched at his feet. On the other throne there was perched bolt upright, with prim demeanor, as though he felt himself to be upon his good behavior, a little, round, pippin faced person, who smiled and bobbed to every one whose eye he chanced to meet. Between and a little in front of them on a humble charette or stool, sat a slim, dark young ...
— The White Company • Arthur Conan Doyle
... Flatheads." (Schoolcraft, vol. v., p. 693.) The embalmment of the body was also practised in Central America and among the Aztecs. The Aztecs, like the Egyptians, mummified their dead by taking out the bowels and replacing them with aromatic substances. (Dorman, "Origin Prim. Superst.," p. 173.) The bodies of the kings of the Virginia Indians were preserved ...
— The Antediluvian World • Ignatius Donnelly
... and high-featured matron, encased in the rigidity of her Sunday bombazine, gave a prim poke with her umbrella in the ribs of a sparrow-like little man, with a discoloured, scraggy beard, who nodded in one corner of the ...
— The Deliverance; A Romance of the Virginia Tobacco Fields • Ellen Glasgow
... You can't sell a sweet-scented, prim old-maidy newspaper to enough people to pay for the z's in one font of type. People are vulgar. Don't forget that. And you've got to make a newspaper to suit them. Lesson ...
— The Clarion • Samuel Hopkins Adams
... conveying no adequate impression of what I beheld by giving it any such prim and decorous name as—a Hedge. It was a menagerie, a living, green menagerie! I had no sooner seen it than I began puzzling my brain as to whether one of the curious ornaments into which the upper part of the hedge had been clipped and trimmed was made to represent ...
— The Friendly Road - New Adventures in Contentment • (AKA David Grayson) Ray Stannard Baker
... he passed over to Florida with four hundred selected men of his regiment, and a considerable party of Indians, headed by Molochi, son of Prim the late chief of the Creeks; Raven, war-chief of the Cherokees; and Toonahowi, nephew of Tomo Chichi. On the evening of the 10th, part of the ...
— Biographical Memorials of James Oglethorpe • Thaddeus Mason Harris
... travesty, done in a disguise like the solemn dandy's head of Disraeli. He acts with his eyelids, which move while all the rest of the face is motionless; with his pursed, reticent mouth, with his prim and pompous gestures; with that self-consciousness which brings all Malvolio's troubles upon him. It is a fantastic, tragically comic thing, done with rare calculation, and it has its formal, almost cruel share in the immense gaiety of the piece. The play is great and wild, ...
— Plays, Acting and Music - A Book Of Theory • Arthur Symons
... horse officer at the battle of Dettingen; they are double loaded, and if any highwayman in England robs you of the value of a pin while I have the honour of being in your company, d—n my heart." When he had expressed himself in this manner, a prim gentlewoman, who had sat silent hitherto, opened her mouth, and said, she wondered how any man could be so rude as to pull out such weapons before ladies. "D—me, madam," cried the champion, "if you are so much afraid at the sight of a pistol, ...
— The Adventures of Roderick Random • Tobias Smollett
... brick villas in the suburbs of a town in the Midlands are, one would suppose, as hideous as human half-wittedness could invent or endure. But they are different. They are complete; they are, in their way, compact; rounded and finished with an effect that may be prim or smug, but is not raw. The surroundings of them are neat, if it be in a niggling fashion. But American ugliness is not complete even as ugliness. It is broken off short; it is ragged at the edges; even its worthy ...
— Gilbert Keith Chesterton • Maisie Ward
... street of two-story brick houses, neat and prim, with whitened stone steps and little groups of aproned women gossiping at the doors. Half-way down, Lestrade stopped and tapped at a door, which was opened by a small servant girl. Miss Cushing was sitting in the front room, into which we were ushered. She was a placid-faced woman with large, ...
— The Strand Magazine, Volume V, Issue 25, January 1893 - An Illustrated Monthly • Various
... should lead us to think otherwise. Nevertheless, it was just such men as Hurd who tended to keep the Church of the eighteenth century in its apathetic state. Hurd was a religious-minded man; but his religion was characterised by a cold, prim propriety which was not calculated to commend it to men at large. Like his friend Warburton, he could see nothing but folly and fanatical madness in the great evangelical revival which was going on around him, and which he seems to have thought would soon be stamped out. He only emerged from ...
— The English Church in the Eighteenth Century • Charles J. Abbey and John H. Overton
... this poet had not yet tried—to Love. Let it be remembered that the thought has the cast of a strictly pessimist quietism—that the style aims, if it aims at any single thing, at the reproduction of the simpler side of classicalism, at an almost prim and quakerish elegance, a sort of childlike grace. There is, however, by no means any great austerity in the tone: on the contrary, ...
— Matthew Arnold • George Saintsbury
... shine of your cheeks was like the glimmer of an apple after you've rubbed it with a bit of cloth. Well, there you stood in some sort of smooth, plain, clingin' gown, a little bit loose and tumblin' at the throat, and your pretty foot with a brown slipper pushed out, just savin' you from bein' prim. That's why the men liked you—you didn't carry a sermon in your waist-ribbon, and the Lord's Day in the lift o' your chin; but you had a smile to give when 'twas the right time for it, and men never said things with you there that they'd have said before ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker
... borne the name of Angeln or the Engleland lay within the district which is now called Sleswick, a district in the heart of the peninsula that parts the Baltic from the northern seas. Its pleasant pastures, its black-timbered homesteads, its prim little townships looking down on inlets of purple water, were then but a wild waste of heather and sand, girt along the coast with a sunless woodland broken here and there by meadows that crept down to the marshes and the sea. The dwellers in this district, ...
— History of the English People, Volume I (of 8) - Early England, 449-1071; Foreign Kings, 1071-1204; The Charter, 1204-1216 • John Richard Green
... I go to church very often,' said Betty, putting on a prim little air. 'We have several businesses there; but we don't tell every one what ...
— Odd • Amy Le Feuvre
... or pediment. The windows had still the original small panes; the mansarde roof, with its one dormer, was untouched. The little house had rather deep eaves; three windows above; two, and the front door, below. It wore a prim, old-fashioned air, a good deal softened and battered, however, by age, and it stood at the corner of two streets, both dingily quiet, and destined, no doubt, to be rebuilt before long in the ...
— Lady Rose's Daughter • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... folks delightedly trooped in to destroy the order of that prim apartment with housekeeping under the black horse-hair sofa, "horseback riders" on the arms of the best rocking-chair, and an Indian war-dance all over the well-waxed furniture. Eph, finding the society of the peaceful sheep and cows more to his mind than that of two excited sisters, lingered ...
— Aunt Jo's Scrap-Bag VI - An Old-Fashioned Thanksgiving, Etc. • Louisa M. Alcott
... he spoke with a sort of prim decision, so that the mob fell silent in the middle of ...
— The Wisdom of Father Brown • G. K. Chesterton
... horrid, old-time, hoopskirt-minded prude. My first act of domestic tyranny is to make you find a sedate, prim place for my work and play, where I may know my own blushes when I see them in the mirror, and will have less occasion ...
— The Voice on the Wire • Eustace Hale Ball
... friends. See J. Wright's English Dialect Dictionary. "Mim-mouthed" means "affectedly prim or ...
— Essays of Robert Louis Stevenson • Robert Louis Stevenson
... a hall or large vestibule the figure of a man loomed black against dark gray. Win could see of him only that he was tall and straight and prim, like a well-trained servant, and his voice was a servant's voice as he said: "Please be a little careful, miss, not to trip. We have to keep it rather dark here, but there's plenty of light inside Let me ...
— Winnie Childs - The Shop Girl • C. N. Williamson
... the choice spirits of the day, the go-ahead lads of that time, had let down the flaps of their cocked hats into slouching, and we must say, most slovenly circular brims. There was a sort of free-and-easy look affected in that day about the head, totally at enmity with the prim rigidity of the cocked beaver; you might have taken off your chapeau rond, as it then came to be called, and you might have sat on it—it would have been never the worse; but not so with its stiff old father—no liberties were to be taken with him; once sit upon him, and you would have ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine — Volume 57, No. 351, January 1845 • Various
... felt very uncomfortable. He did not wish prim Miss Pegler to come in and find him sitting on Bubbles' bed, when no one was yet up in the house. These modern, unconventional ways were all very well, and he knew they often did not really mean anything, but ...
— From Out the Vasty Deep • Mrs. Belloc Lowndes
... by the window in the room next to the one where they drank, and strummed dreamily upon her guitar. And then, by twos and threes, would come visiting young caballeros and occupy the prim line of chairs set against the wall of this room. They were there to besiege the heart of "La Santita." Their method (which is not proof against intelligent competition) consisted of expanding the chest, looking valorous, and consuming a gross or two of cigarettes. Even saints ...
— Cabbages and Kings • O. Henry
... dear chap," remarked Auger to a very prim orderly, "it is no doubt unpleasant to have only one shoe to put on, but it gives one a chance of saving. And now, moreover, I only run half as much risk of scratching my wife with my toe-nails in bed as you ...
— The New Book Of Martyrs • Georges Duhamel
... then indeed to his direct remarks, but as often only a fuller look of the brown eyes. Since the gentleman had been under the tree she had been idly busy with her own thoughts, having sketched herself tired in the morning. "Prim" she recognized at once—Dr. Maryland's sister,—she had heard him speak of her. Would she be a friend? any one to whom these many thoughts might come out? So Wych Hazel sat, gazing out upon the lengthening shadows, leaning ...
— Wych Hazel • Susan and Anna Warner
... arms were bared, in a simple piquancy just like Jacqueline's now. He even saw the pickaninnies in the shade of the porch outside, worshiping the real Missouri girl from the very whites of their eyes. How he had loved to tease her! He could not help it; she was so daintily prim. That he should thus think of his sister, the while gazing on the one-time gilded butterfly—to say the least, it was a pertinent comment on the transmuting magic that lurks ...
— The Missourian • Eugene P. (Eugene Percy) Lyle
... had died but two months before and if perhaps then her younger sister had felt any pang of pity for the orphaned children, it did not enter her thoughts this morning. She plumped up the pillows on the prim horsehair sofa, painfully recalling the pillow fight she had once seen between her cousin's children. Children were a nuisance, and these two—Myra's dreadful boy and girl—were bound to ...
— Pearl and Periwinkle • Anna Graetz
... to the time when the Hyde Street hill had been in an opulent heyday, but the flavor of its quality had trickled through to his generation. This was the section where his mother had languished in the prim gloom of her lamp-shaded parlor before his father's discreet advances. The house was gone ... replaced by a bay-windowed, jig-sawed horror of the '80s, but the garden still smiled, its quaint fragrance reenforced at ...
— Broken to the Plow • Charles Caldwell Dobie
... interior expresses my mistress's character almost as well as her own apartment used to do. I always experienced a chill, a sense of formality, when the door was opened, and while I stood waiting for her in the prim drawing-room. Every chair was in its appointed place, large, gilt-edged, illustrated books lay upon the tables.... There was not much light in her rooms; heavy curtains clung about the windows, and tapestries covered the walls. In the passage there were oak chests, and you can imagine, reader, ...
— Memoirs of My Dead Life • George Moore
... absurd pale-blue negligees that made her stout figure loom immense against the greenery of garden and apple tree. The neighborhood women viewed these negligees with Puritan disapproval as they smoothed down their own prim, starched gingham skirts. They said it was disgusting—and perhaps it was; but the habit of years is not easily overcome. Blanche Devine—snipping her sweet peas, peering anxiously at the Virginia creeper that clung ...
— One Basket • Edna Ferber
... classical field, where he treated them with truly romantic truculence. He was himself always, moreover, and ideally cared as little for nature as a fairy-story teller. In this sense he was more romantic than the romanticists. His "Automedon," his portrait of General Prim, even his "Salome," are wilful in a degree that is either superb or superficial, as one looks at them; but at any rate they are romantic a outrance. At the same time it was unmistakably the aspect of things rather than their significance, rather than his view of them, that appealed to him. ...
— French Art - Classic and Contemporary Painting and Sculpture • W. C. Brownell
... were loud and aggressive. Now and then, with a rush and a swirl, amid a chorus of screams from the girls and good-humoured laughter from their escorts, some band of high-blooded, noisy youths would break their way across the moving throng. It was no place for the prim or demure, and there was a spirit of good-nature and merriment among the crowd which ...
— Danger! and Other Stories • Arthur Conan Doyle
... bad. Who's Archibald Dorrimore? May be that isn't his right name. He's some worthless spark who's got hold of her for his own amusement. Oh, the silly hussy! What could that prim Mistress Pinwell have been about? A fine boarding school indeed! She can't go back. But I won't have her here turning the heads of the men. That dull lout, Bob Dobson, 'ud as lieve throw his money into ...
— Madame Flirt - A Romance of 'The Beggar's Opera' • Charles E. Pearce
... was sitting, Elsley could see, in his shirt sleeves, cigar in mouth, bent over his microscope: but instead of the unexpected prim voice, he heard a very gay and arch one answer, "Is that a proper way in which to come peeping into an old bachelor's sanctuary, ma'am? Go away this moment, till I make ...
— Two Years Ago, Volume II. • Charles Kingsley
... it, narvous. But when I was out—oh, what a change I found in the religious house! no card-playing, for it had been forbidden to the scholars, and there was now nothing going on but reading and singing; divil a merry visage to be seen, but plenty of prim airs and graces; but the case of the scholars, though bad enough, was not half so bad as mine, for they could spake to each other, whereas I could not have a word of conversation, for the ould thaif of a rector had ordered them to send me to 'Coventry,' telling them that I was ...
— The Romany Rye - A Sequel to 'Lavengro' • George Borrow
... not run. It is not dignified. The Baroness Von Aschersleben would be shocked," said the princess with a somewhat prim air. ...
— The Terrible Twins • Edgar Jepson
... Christian names were Priscilla and Hortense—she found to be middle-aged maiden ladies, eminently prim and proper, and the educational establishment over which they presided a sort of Protestant nunnery ruled according to the precepts of the Congregational Church and the New England aristocracy. Miss Priscilla was tall and thin and her favorite author was Emerson; ...
— Mary-'Gusta • Joseph C. Lincoln
... century the central cupola rising above the two great wings forms a conspicuous landmark. In the days of William and Mary the gardens sloping down to the Thames were laid out in the stiff, formal Dutch style. Canals, in the shape of a capital L, with the foot reaching to the river, intersected prim gardens, and rows of little limes, pollarded like willows, edged the banks. It was only in 1852 that these canals were finally filled in, and the limes transplanted in the avenue bordering Ranelagh Gardens, where they still flourish. The Court favourite of ...
— Chelsea - The Fascination of London • G. E. (Geraldine Edith) Mitton
... structure of the understanding rising out of the moral and spiritual nature. Then follows a section on Children, which explodes not a few educational fallacies, and propounds certain articles of faith and practice wholesome for these times, though it will probably wear a prim and quakerish aspect to the admirers of Jean Paul's famous tractate[10] on the same theme. The concluding paper in this series, entitled The Life Poetic, is the liveliest, if not the most valuable of the six: it has, however, been charged, ...
— Chambers' Edinburgh Journal - Volume XVII., No 422, New Series, January 31, 1852 • Various
... shriek in the night, as of a soul tormenting and tormented. He wanted the protection of a good woman, and sometimes against the clear whiteness of her letters so joyous and generous, even if a bit prim and didactic, he saw a vision of himself reflected as he was, ...
— The Quest of the Silver Fleece - A Novel • W. E. B. Du Bois
... long table, where, as I entered, I saw Bailie Duke seated at his ease in a large armchair. At his right sat Bailie Thomson—a man with a forbidding face, whom I had often of late seen in the company of Carver Kinlay. At Mr. Duke's left hand was the schoolmaster, prim and businesslike as I had often seen him look in the school when anything of importance was pending, such as a class examination. Near him sat Lieutenant Fox, looking very handsome in his naval uniform, and very ...
— The Pilots of Pomona • Robert Leighton
... capacity that began with our grandfather! But as I go on in life, day by day, I become more of a bewildered child; I cannot get used to this world, to procreation, to heredity, to sight, to hearing; the commonest things are a burthen. The prim obliterated polite face of life, and the broad, bawdy, and orgiastic - or maenadic - foundations, form a spectacle to which no habit reconciles me; and 'I could wish my days to be bound each to each' by the same open-mouthed wonder. ...
— Letters of Robert Louis Stevenson - Volume 2 • Robert Louis Stevenson
... "Take off that prim little cap. Tie up your hair with black ribbon, and put on a blouse. Then you will ...
— Little Folks (July 1884) - A Magazine for the Young • Various
... tall Lieutenant, "the Regulars look prim and march well, but they have done little fighting, as yet, in this Army ...
— Red-Tape and Pigeon-Hole Generals - As Seen From the Ranks During a Campaign in the Army of the Potomac • William H. Armstrong
... brought him to the cigar-stand. The men about him purchased cigars and cigarettes, and as is the habit of all smokers, strolled off with delighted relish. The man watched them. Had anyone noticed his eyes he would have noted a peculiar colour and a light of surprise. With the prim step that made him so distinctive ...
— The Blind Spot • Austin Hall and Homer Eon Flint
... the gleam and passion fade out of the man's face, and the demure mask of the valet replace it. His eyes still smouldered, but his features regained their prim ...
— Rodney Stone • Arthur Conan Doyle
... careful housekeeping. It was a sin to gorge the body, and godly conversation was better than abundance. Yet the pastor's tea-table arises with a halo around it. The rye and Indian bread, the doughnuts fragrant as flowers, the sparing tea, the prim mats which saved the cloth, the wire screen covering sponge ...
— Lazarre • Mary Hartwell Catherwood
... concerned, hating everyone and disliked by all. To the little maiden of the Bush, only half tamed as yet, the London school-room and walks in the park were penance in themselves, and the company of three steady prim girls, in the idealess state produced by confinement to a school-room, and nothing but childish books, was as distasteful to her as she was shocking to them, and her life was one warfare with them and with their Fraulein. The only person she seemed able to endure was Nessy Horsman, who was allowed ...
— My Young Alcides - A Faded Photograph • Charlotte M. Yonge
... repeated Miss Priscilla, with a prim little nod, "Sergeant Appleby, late of the Nineteenth Hussars,—a soldier every inch of him, Mr. Bellew,—with one arm—over there by the peaches." Glancing in the direction she indicated, Bellew observed a tall figure, very straight and ...
— The Money Moon - A Romance • Jeffery Farnol
... entrusted to him, before he went down the hill. There are many men like Big Louie who are pitifully faithful until events outstrip their intellects. Steve was sorry for him; and a half hour later, after he had read Miss Sarah's prim note requesting his presence at dinner at seven-thirty, Christmas eve, he grew sorrier still while he watched the ill-assorted trio meet once more, blanket-packs upon their backs and snow-shoes on their feet. Big Louie had joined the other two from the direction of the stables. There were words ...
— Then I'll Come Back to You • Larry Evans
... a singularly quaint-looking personage presented himself. He was very stiff and prim in his appearance; dressed in a blue coat and scarlet waistcoat, with a rich bandanna handkerchief tied very neatly round his neck, and a very new hat, to which his ...
— The Young Duke • Benjamin Disraeli
... emotion, stared fixedly over my head at a point on the further wall. It was as though he had seen something that turned him to stone. I instinctively followed the direction of his eyes, but I could see nothing unusual. The still feebly flickering ashes in the grate, and the row of prim ornaments on the ...
— The Mysterious Affair at Styles • Agatha Christie
... and I must stop;" and then recollecting that he was writing to a "proper" person, making a postscript which says, "when I wrote d——d I only meant deuced." But one would as soon think of dropping out Shakspeare's adjective, and saying (as a very prim lady we once knew did in reading Lady Macbeth's soliloquy), "Out, spot!" as to drop out any of Lamb's qualifying words. He was sometimes accused of being irreverent, as in his article upon "Saying Graces," where he affirms ...
— Home Life of Great Authors • Hattie Tyng Griswold
... and prim; they march well, and their muskets are polished very bright. I wonder how they would stand fire," said Higgins, after ...
— The Old Bell Of Independence; Or, Philadelphia In 1776 • Henry C. Watson
... incorporated in his edition of the Philosophical Works. Beside these we may mention, as particularly deserving of notice, the "Meditationes de Cognitione, Veritate et Ideis", the "Systeme Nouveau de la Nature", "De Prim Philosophi Emendatione et de Notione Substanti", "Reflexions sur l'Essai de l'Entendement humain", "De Rerum Originatione Radicali", "De ipsa Natura", "Considerations sur la Doctrine d'un Esprit universel", "Nouveaux ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. II, No. 8, June 1858 • Various
... aspirations, or are you content simply to eat and drink? You have a good time of it now, but what if you were kicked and cuffed and starved? You are sensitive, for I saw you shrink and shiver when Bill Wright,—the scoundrel!—dared to strike you. He'll never do it again, Prim! Have you the taste of an epicure for the juicy grass blades and the clover when it is young,—do you love to hear the birds sing and the brook murmur, and do you enjoy living under the trees and watching the clouds chase the sunbeams as you chew your ...
— A Beautiful Possibility • Edith Ferguson Black
... but was reconciled when little Miss Sharp was made to quit the carriage, and mount up beside him—when he covered her up in one of his Benjamins, and became perfectly good-humoured—how the asthmatic gentleman, the prim lady, who declared upon her sacred honour she had never travelled in a public carriage before (there is always such a lady in a coach—Alas! was; for the coaches, where are they?), and the fat widow with the brandy-bottle, took their places inside—how the porter asked them all for money, and got ...
— Vanity Fair • William Makepeace Thackeray
... their wife perchance may have A comely sort of face, And at the table's upper end Conduct herself with grace, I hate the prim reserve that reigns, The caution and the state, I hate to see my friend grow vain Of furniture ...
— The Modern Scottish Minstrel, Volumes I-VI. - The Songs of Scotland of the Past Half Century • Various
... me alone: I am not thine. [1] Prim Creed, with categoric point, forbear To feature me my Lord by rule and line. Thou canst not measure Mistress Nature's hair, Not one sweet inch: nay, if thy sight is sharp, Would'st count the strings upon an angel's harp? ...
— Select Poems of Sidney Lanier • Sidney Lanier
... other denizens of the old building, it will suffice out of a large household to mention the prim, respectable, and capable Ames, and Mrs. Allen, a buxom and cheerful person, who relieved the lady of some of her household cares. The other six servants in the house bear no relation to the events of the ...
— The Valley of Fear • Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
... arranged the glasses in the ordinary form of spectacles, I applied them gingerly in their proper position; while Madame Simpson, adjusting her cap, and folding her arms, sat bolt upright in her chair, in a somewhat stiff and prim, and indeed, in a ...
— The Works of Edgar Allan Poe - Volume 3 (of 5) of the Raven Edition • Edgar Allan Poe
... wind. The generous wheat forgot its pride, And sail'd with litter side by side; Uniting all, to show their amity, As in a general calamity. A ball of new-dropp'd horse's dung, Mingling with apples in the throng, Said to the pippin plump and prim, "See, brother, how we apples swim." Thus Lamb, renown'd for cutting corns, An offer'd fee from Radcliff scorns, "Not for the world—we doctors, brother, Must take no fees of one another." Thus to a dean some curate sloven Subscribes, ...
— Poems (Volume II.) • Jonathan Swift
... she was about to take her prim leave, the scarce-discerned figure of her companion stepped out ...
— Hilda Lessways • Arnold Bennett
... under a glass case, miniatures all representing the same blue-eyed lady, now with hair curled, now in a ball dress, now in a yellow gown with leg-of-mutton sleeves. And all this—consoles, King of Rome, marshals, yellow-gowned, short-waisted ladies, with that prim stiffness which was considered graceful in 1806, this atmosphere of victory and conquest—it was this more than anything we could say to him that made him accept so ...
— Short Stories of Various Types • Various
... passion is strong in death, they say, and my heart was dead that night. But, independently of my trouble, no man who has for forty years lived the life I have, can with impunity go coop himself in this prim English country, with its trim hedgerows and cultivated fields, its stiff formal manners, and its well-dressed crowds. He begins to long — ah, how he longs! — for the keen breath of the desert air; he dreams of the sight of Zulu ...
— Allan Quatermain • by H. Rider Haggard
... sickening under the crushing truth of what Dill in his prim grammatical way was saying, did not answer at all. He was picking blindly, mechanically at the splinter, his face shaded by his worn, gray hat; and he was thinking irrelevantly how a condemned man must feel when they come to him in ...
— The Long Shadow • B. M. Bower
... yt was the coyne of Constantinople sometyme called Bizant{i}um; and because you shall not thinke this any fic{ti}one of myne owne, Iwill warrante the same with Williame of Malmesberye in the fourthe booke De Regibus, who hathe these wordes: Constantinopolis prim{u}m Bizantiu{m} dicta forma{m} antiqui vocabuli preferu{n}t imperatorii nu{m}mi Bizantiu{m} dicta; where one other coppye for nummi Bizantiu{m} hath Bizantini nu{m}mi, and the frenche hath yt besante or Bezantine, makinge yt an olde coyne of france, (when he sholde haue ...
— Animaduersions uppon the annotacions and corrections of some imperfections of impressiones of Chaucer's workes - 1865 edition • Francis Thynne
... lancio, var. Calabra), known as the "Pino della Sila"—it is found over this whole country, and grows to a height of forty metres with a silvery-grey trunk, exhaling a delicious aromatic fragrance. In youth, especially where the soil is deep, it shoots up prim and demure as a Nuremberg toy; but in old age grows monstrous. High-perched upon some lonely granite boulder, with roots writhing over the bare stone like the arms of an octopus, it sits firm and unmoved, deriding the tempest and flinging fantastic limbs into the air—emblem of tenacity in ...
— Old Calabria • Norman Douglas
... Polly," said Jasper, her next neighbour, "I want to do the same thing. And it will do some of those starched and prim people good to hear a little enthusiasm." Polly knew whom he meant,—some young Englishmen. One of them immediately put up his monocle and regarded her as if she had been a new kind of creature displayed for his benefit. Jasper glared ...
— Five Little Peppers Abroad • Margaret Sidney
... smiles; but they faded like mist before the sun the minute the curtain was lowered, and she looked tired and worn out. Her maid was there, waiting with a shawl to wrap around the shoulders of the hot prima-donna, and the prim Miss Richardson ready to escort her to her room, while the army of shirt- sleeved men invaded the stage like bees, with brooms which, though anything but new, I hope swept clean. Then everything was dark and dismal, lit only by one or two candles and ...
— In the Courts of Memory 1858-1875. • L. de Hegermann-Lindencrone
... even though we were poor I was to take the fresh air," replied the child in a prim little voice, out of which all the spirit ...
— A Young Mutineer • Mrs. L. T. Meade
... and who carried upon his arm a half-empty basket of cheap wares. The man was ragged; his toes were thrusting through his shoes; it was evident that he wore no linen, and a week's growth of beard dirtily stubbled his chin,—in a word, he was a man from whom M. Chateaudoux's prim soul positively shrank. M. Chateaudoux went quickly by, fearing to be pestered for alms. The hawker, however, remained seated upon the bench, drawing idle patterns upon the gravel with a hazel stick stolen ...
— Clementina • A.E.W. Mason
... "remember him if they did not think him past praying for." During his breakfast he recalled the fact that Madge was uncommonly well dressed. "She hasn't in externals," he thought, "the provincial air that one might expect, although her ideas are not only provincial, but prim, obtained, no doubt, from some goody-good books that she has read in the remote region wherein she has developed so remarkably. She has some stilted ideal of womanhood which she is seeking to attain, and the more unnatural the ideal, the more ...
— A Young Girl's Wooing • E. P. Roe
... her this July till his fluffy hair shook like a dog's ears in fly-time. He pounded his fist on the prim center-table by which Mother had been solemnly reading the picture-captions in the Eternity Filmco's Album of Funny Film Favorites. The statuettes of General Lafayette and Mozart on the false mantel shook with his lusty thumping. He roared till his voice filled ...
— The Innocents - A Story for Lovers • Sinclair Lewis
... most trampish manner, and poppies, because they are privileged characters, spring up as they please. Then, as though the two of them were not sufficient California gold, there is the faithful gaillardia with its prim little sunflower-faces smiling up at their ...
— Vignettes of San Francisco • Almira Bailey
... Protestant religion at Court at all. All that the Protestants do there is to hear sermons—it is all so dismal and noisy. But here, with you, you have a proper soul. It seems to me that you are like a little herb-garden, very prim and plain, but living and wholesome and pleasant to walk in at sunset. And these Protestants that I know are more like a paved court at noon—all hot and hard and glaring. They give me the headache. Tell ...
— By What Authority? • Robert Hugh Benson
... the moonlight. Within lay a deep, old-fashioned garden. Its white shell-walks gleamed in many directions. A sweet breath came from its parterres of mingled hyacinths and jonquils that hid themselves every moment in black shadows of lagustrums and laurestines. Here, in severe order, a pair of palms, prim as mediaeval queens, stood over against each other; and in the midst of the garden, rising high against the sky, appeared the pillared veranda and immense, four-sided roof of an old French colonial villa, ...
— Dr. Sevier • George W. Cable
... alone: I am not thine. Prim Creed, with categoric point, forbear To feature me my Lord by rule and line. Thou canst not measure Mistress Nature's hair, Not one sweet inch: nay, if thy sight is sharp, Would'st count the strings upon an angel's ...
— The Poems of Sidney Lanier • Sidney Lanier
... are not often good subjects; there is a peculiar meanness about most of them, and awkwardness of line. Old manor-houses are often pretty. Ruins are usually, with us, too prim, and cathedrals too orderly. I do not think there is a single cathedral in England from which it is possible to obtain one subject for an impressive drawing. There is always some discordant civility, or jarring vergerism ...
— The Crown of Wild Olive • John Ruskin
... "Who's going to make a prim old call, I'd like to know? S'pose a fellow is going to lug a card case just to go ...
— Princess Polly At Play • Amy Brooks
... pure Chicagoese, Jennie, into which I occasionally lapse even here in prim Vienna. I would like to see a good baseball match, with the Chicago nine going strong. Let us abandon this effete monarchy, Jennie, and pay ...
— Jennie Baxter, Journalist • Robert Barr
... Before the prim white house set back from the street, Catherine's buoyancy suffered a collapse. She had been inside that house, calling, with her mother, but to go there—or anywhere—on a begging errand! Here Algernon's long familiarity with rebuffs ...
— The Wide Awake Girls in Winsted • Katharine Ellis Barrett
... conventionality in the girl surprised and rather touched him. He saw that she was quite painfully aware of the prim little wrapper, the unbound hair, the bare ...
— Kildares of Storm • Eleanor Mercein Kelly
... out into the main street, from which he turned up the hill towards the Hoe. The day had dawned by that time, and the sky was a gloomy grey, varied towards the horizon by stormy gleams of yellow; the prim clean streets were deserted, save by an occasional workman going to his labours with a heavy tramp echoing on the wet flags. Mark went along by terraces of lodging-houses, where the placards of 'apartments' had an especially forlorn and futile look ...
— The Giant's Robe • F. Anstey
... Newcastle, his ministry cannot last six months; I would bet that the lightness of the latter emerged first. George Selwyn, hearing some people at Arthur's t'other night lamenting the distracted state of the country, joined in the discourse, with the whites of his eyes and his prim mouth, and fetching a deep sigh, said, "Yes, to be sure it is terrible! There is the Duke of Newcastle's faction, and there is Fox's faction, and there is Leicester-house! between two factions and one faction ...
— The Letters of Horace Walpole, Volume 2 • Horace Walpole
... petii amicum mroris, ubi omne quod de mea mihi occupatione displicebat, se patenter ostenderet, et cuncta qu infligere dolorem consueverant, congesta ante oculos licenter venirent. Ibi itaque cum afflictus valde et diu tacitus sederem, dilectissimus filius meus Petrus diaconus adfuit, mihi a primvo juventutis flore amicitiis familiariter obstrictus, atque ad sacri verbi indagationem socius. Qui gravi excoqui cordis languore me intuens, ait: Num quidnam tibi aliquid accidit, quod plus te solito mror ...
— Anglo-Saxon Literature • John Earle
... it was; and now I can admire and think of how Aunt Jenny, the prim maiden lady, gave up all her own old ways to set to and work and drudge for us all, living in a wagon and then in a tent, and smiling pleasantly at the trees we planted, and bringing us lunch where we were working away, dragging down stones for the house which progressed ...
— Charge! - A Story of Briton and Boer • George Manville Fenn
... was little changed; the small, tall, thin, narrow-chested, stooping figure—the same long, fair, freckled, sharp set face—the same prim cap, and clean, scant, faded gown, or one of the same sort—made up her personal individuality. Miss Nancy now had charge of the village post-office; and her early and accurate information respecting all neighborhood affairs, was obtained, it was ...
— The Missing Bride • Mrs. E. D. E. N. Southworth
... found that she loved you with a warmth and richness I'm incapable of. I felt I had stepped into something big and splendid, as if I had been a caterpillar walking into the heart of a red rose. I felt prim and small and petty. Until then I had never known what love meant, and I didn't feel it; I couldn't feel it. I couldn't give you a millionth part of what that woman does. And I knew that having lived in that atmosphere, ...
— Simon the Jester • William J. Locke
... was also very offensive to the young lady, and when Miss Lyon came in to meet them, she, too, was secretly styled, "a prim, fussy, slippery-tongued old maid." Jenny, however, who always saw the bright side of every thing, was completely charmed with the sweet smile, and placid face, so well remembered by all who have ...
— The English Orphans • Mary Jane Holmes
... presume it is attributable to the fact that she has never been thrown with children, and having always associated with older persons, has insensibly imbibed their staid thoughts, and adopted their quiet ways. I should not be more astonished to see my prim puritanical grandmother yonder step down from the frame, and turn a somersault on the carpet, or indulge in leap-frog, than to find Regina guilty of any boisterous hoidenish behaviour, or unrefined, undignified ...
— Infelice • Augusta Jane Evans Wilson
... Rome so admirable a residence for an artist. All things are easy and careless in the out-of-doors life of the common people,—all poses unsought, all groupings accidental, all action unaffected and unconscious. One meets Nature at every turn,—not braced up in prim forms, not conscious in manners, not made up into the fashionable or the proper, but impulsive, free, and simple. With the whole street looking on, they are as unconscious and natural as if they were where no eye could see them,—ay, and more natural, too, ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 5, No. 31, May, 1860 • Various
... held me now, rather apprehension. I had not lived my one and twenty years without learning that a young woman may be free of speech and yet discreet of action, that alluring eyes are oft mismated with prim maiden conscience. 'Tis in the blood of some of them to throw down the gauntlet to a man's courage and then to trample on him for daring ...
— A Daughter of Raasay - A Tale of the '45 • William MacLeod Raine
... pastor stepped forward. He was a spare, small, elderly man, with a white face and gentian-blue eyes and a mouth that could make up as anything. During the last few days it had been a prim and rather smug button. Now it had relaxed in shrewder, wider lines. He showed to Committee 9 the face not of the Calvinist pastor but of the great detective. He spoke the Italian of the Lombardy Alps, the French of Marseilles, the ...
— Mystery at Geneva - An Improbable Tale of Singular Happenings • Rose Macaulay
... actually did not know that we had a girls' school as close to us as the school for boys. The garden, equally large with the other, affords no sign whatever of any provision for juvenile recreation; but is entirely laid out with prim grass-plots, gravel-walks, shrubs, and flowers, after the usual suburban style. During five months we have not once had our attention drawn to the premises by a shout or a laugh. Occasionally girls may be observed sauntering along ...
— Woman and Womanhood - A Search for Principles • C. W. Saleeby
... the bank the next afternoon, Cherry rapped ostentatiously at his door. "Mother wishes me to ask you," she began with a certain prim formality, which nevertheless did not preclude dimples, "if you would give us the pleasure of your company at our Church Festival to-night? There will be a concert and a collation. You could accompany ...
— The Heritage of Dedlow Marsh and Other Tales • Bret Harte
... by four rough-hewn posts. It leaned far to the side on one wheel and a splintered hub. Down the hill a broken wheel was bounding; while, on the dusty road, four women—one tall and angular in a yellow duster, one little and weazened, arrayed in a prim gray traveling suit, a weeping maiden of uncertain age, and a portly dame of ponderous proportions, dressed not in a duster but a very dusty black silk—were pulling themselves up. Near by three little ...
— The Transformation of Job - A Tale of the High Sierras • Frederick Vining Fisher
... the Admiral was unconscious. The Captain now brought a suit of soiled mechanic's clothes and a clipper and razor, and in a half hour the prim Admiral in his fancy uniform had been reduced to the likeness of an oiler. His face roughly shaved, but pale and sallow, gave a very good simulation of ...
— City of Endless Night • Milo Hastings
... there, and went shivering out into the main street, from which he turned up the hill towards the Hoe. The day had dawned by that time, and the sky was a gloomy grey, varied towards the horizon by stormy gleams of yellow; the prim clean streets were deserted, save by an occasional workman going to his labours with a heavy tramp echoing on the wet flags. Mark went along by terraces of lodging-houses, where the placards of 'apartments' had an especially forlorn and futile ...
— The Giant's Robe • F. Anstey
... most imposing mansion, and often have I seen the old house shining with lights across its whole broadside of windows, and gay with the sound of a dozen French violins. The garden, now a wilderness, was the pride of the island. Its prim arbors, its spring and spring-house, its flowerbeds, where, with infinite pains, a few hardy plants were induced to blossom; its cherry-tree avenue, whose early red fruit the short summer could scarcely ripen; its annual attempts at vegetables, which never came to maturity,—formed topics for ...
— Castle Nowhere • Constance Fenimore Woolson
... alone: I am not thine. [1] Prim Creed, with categoric point, forbear To feature me my Lord by rule and line. Thou canst not measure Mistress Nature's hair, Not one sweet inch: nay, if thy sight is sharp, Would'st count the strings upon an angel's harp? ...
— Select Poems of Sidney Lanier • Sidney Lanier
... evenings Pasa sat by the window in the room next to the one where they drank, and strummed dreamily upon her guitar. And then, by twos and threes, would come visiting young caballeros and occupy the prim line of chairs set against the wall of this room. They were there to besiege the heart of "La Santita." Their method (which is not proof against intelligent competition) consisted of expanding the chest, looking valorous, and consuming a gross or two of cigarettes. Even saints ...
— Cabbages and Kings • O. Henry
... it was on their account he had thought of not marrying her. The revealed whiteness of her wrist, the intimacy of her relaxed posture, for though her mind had played into his as freely as a child in a meadow, she had been always, as regards her person, a little prim with him, had lent to their errand of house visiting a personal note in which it was absurdly apt for them to have run across Captain Dunham of the Merrythought at the door of the Consulate. Mr. Weatheral had some papers which Lessing had sent him to acknowledge there, and ...
— The Lovely Lady • Mary Austin
... was all ready for the war, it was not hard to find an excuse. Old Queen Isabella of Spain had been driven from her throne, and the Spanish army under General Prim offered the crown to Prince Leopold of Hohenzollern, a cousin of the king of Prussia. This alarmed Napoleon, who imagined that if Prussia attacked him on the east, this Prussian prince, as king of Spain, would ...
— The World War and What was Behind It - The Story of the Map of Europe • Louis P. Benezet
... part of the city, imagine yourself in some quarters of Dieppe or Calais, or any other of the busier towns in the north of France. The peaked roofs, the unexpected balconies, the ill-regulated gables, and the general individuality of the houses are pleasing to the eye wearied with the prim ...
— Faces and Places • Henry William Lucy
... while she said in a prim little voice, which she adopted now and then when she wanted to conceal ...
— A Sweet Girl Graduate • Mrs. L.T. Meade
... "old maids" were open to all kinds of insult, there were women brave enough to refuse to barter their souls for the animal comforts of food and shelter. Speaking about "old maids," by which term we mean now a prim, fussy person, it is well to remember that there are male "old maids" as well as female who remain so all through life; also that many "old maids" marry, and ...
— In Times Like These • Nellie L. McClung
... talk," continued his instructor, "and I felt satisfied that Major Carter, if a spy, would hardly have wasted his efforts in such a prim presentation of his facts." He glanced at his watch. "He would have doubtless used cipher. Josef is due in just one minute now. There he comes," he said, as there was a low rap at ...
— Trusia - A Princess of Krovitch • Davis Brinton
... Ruth Howard earnestly declared, it was so exciting—a real election. A stealthy canvas of candidates was in full swing. The names of Mrs. Flynn and of Mrs. Carrington were heard oftenest. Incidentally, certain sentences threw light on individual methods of determining executive merit. A prim spinster shook her head violently over some suggestion from the woman beside her. "No, my dear," she replied aggressively, "I certainly shall not vote for her—vote for a woman who wears a transformation? No, indeed!"... Cicily improved the interval of general bustle to inquire ...
— Making People Happy • Thompson Buchanan
... excited thoughts of Fraulein—not hating her, and choosing Mademoiselle to sleep with the servant, a new servant—the things on the landing—Mademoiselle refusing to share a room with a married woman... she felt about round this idea as Millie's prim, clear voice went on... her eyes clutched at Mademoiselle, begging to understand... she gazed at the little down-flung head, fine little tendrils frilling along the edge of her hair, her little hard grey shape, all miserable and ashamed. It was dreadful. Miriam felt she ...
— Pointed Roofs - Pilgrimage, Volume 1 • Dorothy Richardson
... earl, why didst thou leave the beds Where roses and where lilies vie, To seek a prim-rose, whose pale shades Must sicken when those ...
— Graham's Magazine Vol XXXII No. 6 June 1848 • Various
... always as smooth as a brush could make it, and every breadth of her skirts always fell in straight, precise folds. From bonnet-strings to shoe-laces there was never a wrinkle or a spot. But the Little Colonel felt no awe. She had discovered that under that prim exterior was a heart thoroughly in sympathy with all her childish joys and griefs, and in consequence the two had become warm friends. Lloyd stood beside the rocking-chair, where she had seated Mrs. Brewster, and waved a big fan so vigorously that the bonnet-strings fluttered, and a lock of gray ...
— The Little Colonel's House Party • Annie Fellows Johnston
... and jollier than any of the things you are after. We'll stand by you like bricks, and in a week you'll say it's the best lark you ever had in your life. Don't be prim, now, but say yes, like a trump, as you are," added Lucy, waving a pink satin train ...
— Work: A Story of Experience • Louisa May Alcott
... played a considerable part in his political education. He was influential with the Regency in Spain, which succeeded Queen Isabel when that sovereign became too malodorous to be longer tolerated, and he was the personal friend of the Regent, General Prim, whose motto, "More liberal today than yesterday, more liberal tomorrow than today," he was fond of quoting. He was present in Madrid at the time of General Prim's assassination and often told of how this wise ...
— Lineage, Life, and Labors of Jose Rizal, Philippine Patriot • Austin Craig
... from the train they ended. The cinders went on another ten feet and petered out. Beyond, the fields closed in. Brett looked up at the sun. It was lower now in the west, its light getting yellow and late-afternoonish. He turned and looked back at the train. The cars stood high and prim, empty, silent. He walked back, climbed in, got his bag down from the rack, pulled on his jacket. He jumped down to the cinders, followed them to where they ended. He hesitated a moment, then pushed between the knee-high stalks. Eastward across the ...
— It Could Be Anything • John Keith Laumer
... my dear," Guy is saying, "I agree with you they do look like fish-hooks strung in a row, but I heard Miss Nellie Teazle tell Mrs. John Prim, that that was the 'Montagu' style; so excuse me for ...
— Honor Edgeworth • Vera
... protected by brass wire-netting, to which hangs his thermometer just where he originally placed it. The house has been little if any altered since he was carried to his last resting-place. He is described by those who knew him as "a little thin, prim, upright man," a quiet, unassuming, but very observing country parson, who occupied his time in watching and recording the habits of his parishioners, quadruped as well as feathered. At the end of the garden is still kept his sun-dial, the lawn around ...
— England, Picturesque and Descriptive - A Reminiscence of Foreign Travel • Joel Cook
... and swift, deft touch, Ella served the dinner, standing prim and stiff and ghost-like behind ...
— The Foolish Virgin • Thomas Dixon
... It was no fault of mine. I even got a prim warning that it became me not to meddle about her ladies, and I doubted what slanders you might hear if I were seen asking ...
— The Caged Lion • Charlotte M. Yonge
... the hard horsehair sofa sat Mrs Fanshawe herself, her elaborately coiffured, elaborately attired figure looking extraordinarily out of place in the prim bareness of the little room. Her gloved hands were crossed on her lap, she sat ostentatiously erect, her satin cloak falling around her in regal folds; her face was a trifle paler than usual, but the mocking light shone in her eyes. At Claire's entrance she stood up, and crossed ...
— The Independence of Claire • Mrs. George de Horne Vaizey
... the Duke was enemie to him, Yet he most Christian-like laments his death: And for my selfe, Foe as he was to me, Might liquid teares, or heart-offending groanes, Or blood-consuming sighes recall his Life; I would be blinde with weeping, sicke with grones, Looke pale as Prim-rose with blood-drinking sighes, And all to haue the Noble Duke aliue. What know I how the world may deeme of me? For it is knowne we were but hollow Friends: It may be iudg'd I made the Duke away, So shall my name with Slanders tongue be wounded, And Princes Courts be fill'd with my reproach: ...
— The First Folio [35 Plays] • William Shakespeare
... have braved the wild sea-foam. Prows of the Norsemen, etched against the blue! Helmets agleam! Faces of wind-bronzed hue! On roll the years, and in a forest green The Princess Pocahontas next is seen; And then in prim white cap and somber gown Lovely Priscilla, Maid o' Plymouth Town. Benjamin Franklin supping at an Inn, A 'prentice lad with all his world to win. Then Washington encamped before a blaze O' fagots, swiftly learning woodland ways. Next the brave times ...
— Patriotic Plays and Pageants for Young People • Constance D'Arcy Mackay
... of green-brown waters, Smooth and framed in snow-white marble, Show between their mirrored statues Gold and silver fishes playing. Slender stems of oleander Cast their prim array of shadows On the primly close-cropped greensward. Overhead, the arching branches Meet and twine to sheltering niches, Where are grouped in loving couples Stiff-limbed heroines and heroes.... ...
— The Lonely Way—Intermezzo—Countess Mizzie - Three Plays • Arthur Schnitzler
... though he had seen something that turned him to stone. I instinctively followed the direction of his eyes, but I could see nothing unusual. The still feebly flickering ashes in the grate, and the row of prim ornaments on the mantelpiece, were ...
— The Mysterious Affair at Styles • Agatha Christie
... Cloud had laid aside in the very bottom of her new trunk the prim black serge that Ellen had bought, and the black funeral gloves and coat and hat; and she was wearing a lovely soft gray wool jersey dress with white collar and cuffs. The big gray coat was nestled by her side ready for use when the wind grew colder, and she was wearing the new gray hat ...
— Cloudy Jewel • Grace Livingston Hill
... gave expression to his dislike and mistrust of the antics or the Salvation Army. He was far from prim himself, but he held that if people were not "won over to Christ" by preaching, it was idle to bait the hook with mere sensationalism. Yet by a strange irony his closest friends, in announcing his death to his flock, actually improved on ...
— Flowers of Freethought - (First Series) • George W. Foote
... need to do some great evil, some deadly sin, to quench the Spirit. Just cease to rejoice, through fear of man and of being peculiar; be prim and proper as a white and polished gravestone; let gushing joy be curbed; neglect to pray when you feel a gentle pull in your heart to get alone with the Lord; omit giving hearty thanks for all God's tender mercies, faithful ...
— When the Holy Ghost is Come • Col. S. L. Brengle
... instruction in graceful social accomplishments and a thorough knowledge of housekeeping, but the rare habit of doing all things with regularity, neatness, decorum, and quietness. The writer of the above letter has also described one of these Pennsylvania schools with its prim teachers and commendable mingling of the practical and the artistic. "The first was merely a sewing school, little children and a pretty single spinster about 30, her white skirt, white short tight waistcoat, nice ...
— Woman's Life in Colonial Days • Carl Holliday
... shell-walks gleamed in many directions. A sweet breath came from its parterres of mingled hyacinths and jonquils that hid themselves every moment in black shadows of lagustrums and laurestines. Here, in severe order, a pair of palms, prim as mediaeval queens, stood over against each other; and in the midst of the garden, rising high against the sky, appeared the pillared veranda and immense, four-sided roof of an old French colonial villa, as it ...
— Dr. Sevier • George W. Cable
... These ladies, though not elderly, were middle-aged, and perhaps, a few years older than their brother. They were austere and prim, of aristocratic features ...
— Vicky Van • Carolyn Wells
... boarding-houses, but the Eathorne Mansion remains virtuous and aloof, reminiscent of London, Back Bay, Rittenhouse Square. Its marble steps are scrubbed daily, the brass plate is reverently polished, and the lace curtains are as prim and superior ...
— Babbitt • Sinclair Lewis
... Drew's maiden aunt, prim, proper and worldly-wise, was as much Aunt Sally to Filmer as she was to her niece and nephew. Jock jollied the aristocratic lady as freely as he did Drew, toward whom he held the tolerant admiration that he had ...
— Joyce of the North Woods • Harriet T. Comstock
... 1868 the throne of Spain had been vacant in consequence of a revolution in which General Prim had been the leading actor. It was not easy to discover a successor for the Bourbon Isabella; and after other candidatures had been vainly projected it occurred to Prim and his friends early in 1869 that a suitable ...
— History of Modern Europe 1792-1878 • C. A. Fyffe
... not at all as you and I had imagined it to be. There is no high wall around it as there is at Fort Trumbull. It reminds one of a prim little village built around a square, in the center of which is a high flagstaff and a big cannon. The buildings are very low and broad and are made of adobe—a kind of clay and mud mixed together—and the walls are very ...
— Army Letters from an Officer's Wife, 1871-1888 • Frances M.A. Roe
... and to his own great delight, the hour designed for the scholar's scales and exercises was given to the master's playing. He was fond of Weber's "Invitation to the Waltz," and he played it with force and precision and the utmost delicacy. Mr. Timm had a pale, smooth, sharp face, a rather prim manner, and a quick, modest gait. He was most simple-hearted, and loved a joke; and his fun was all the more effective from his very sober face and his lisp. It was his wife who was long the most efficient actress at Mitchell's old Olympic in the ...
— From the Easy Chair, vol. 1 • George William Curtis
... handsome and excessively dignified, as I have mentioned, with her prim notions, she was essentially like the old-fashioned idea of an old maid. As her fine house was very perfectly and meticulously furnished, she treated the presence of Clifford as an outrage in any room but ...
— Bird of Paradise • Ada Leverson
... a nasty little beast; She's seen at many a fete and feast. She's spiteful, sly and double-faced, Exceeding prim, exceeding chaste. And while a soft, sleek smile she ...
— The Wit and Humor of America, Volume III. (of X.) • Various
... She leaned forward and looked at herself in one of the oblong mirrors. Her face was almost colourless, the skin seemed drawn closely round her eyes, giving her almost a strained look. For the rest, her hair, smoothly brushed away from her face, was in perfect order, her prim little hat was at exactly the right angle, her little white tie alone relieved the sombreness of her black jacket. She sighed and suddenly felt a moistening of her hot eyes. She leaned far back into the corner ...
— A Prince of Sinners • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... pinners edg'd with colberteen;[4] Her petticoat, transform'd apace, Became black satin, flounced with lace. "Plain Goody" would no longer down, 'Twas "Madam," in her grogram gown. Philemon was in great surprise, And hardly could believe his eyes. Amaz'd to see her look so prim, And she admir'd as much at him. Thus happy in their change of life, Were several years this man and wife: When on a day, which prov'd their last, Discoursing o'er old stories past, They went by chance, amidst their talk, To ...
— The Poems of Jonathan Swift, D.D., Volume I (of 2) • Jonathan Swift
... Grace, for it was long past the time when she always expected to hear from him. But the last day or two he had rather shirked this duty. It would be difficult to explain to Grace. She might be rather shocked, for she was a little prim in such things, being her mother's daughter. He thought he would ask Mattie to tell her about the Challoners, and that he was busy and would write soon; and when he had made up his mind to this, he went down to the sea-shore and amused ...
— Not Like Other Girls • Rosa N. Carey
... thick, and studded all over with wooden pegs. The facade, indeed, was wholly grim, with a castellated tower at one end, and a number of narrow, sunken windows looking askance on the wreck and ruin of a once prim, old-fashioned, high-walled garden. I thought that Rattray might have shown more respect for the house of his ancestors. It put me in mind of a neglected grave. And yet I could forgive a bright young fellow for never coming ...
— Dead Men Tell No Tales • E. W. Hornung
... music-master arrived in Standon Square. It was for the last time, as Judith had said. Miss Crawford looked older, and Miss Crawford's cap looked newer, than either had ever done before. She put her weak little hand into Bertie's, and said some prim, kindly words about the satisfaction his lessons had given, the progress his pupils had made and the confidence she felt in his sister and himself. As she spoke she was sure he was gratified, for the color mounted to his face. Suddenly she stopped in ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Volume 22. October, 1878. • Various
... he liked her enormously, he considered—assured Haldane in his moments of misgiving. The very largeness in her ample effect of good looks, her genius for managing his affairs and hers, her prim neatness of dress, her utter freedom from any sort of weak dependence on him, her uncompromising rigidity of moral attitude, and, above all, her goodness to him—this convinced him of her ultimate fitness to be a wife to him; and it must be said that he had never heretofore ...
— Life at High Tide - Harper's Novelettes • Various
... Tell me, ye prim adepts in Scandal's school, Who rail by precept, and detract by rule, Lives there no character, so tried, so known, So deck'd with grace, and so unlike your own, That even you assist her fame to raise, Approve by envy, and by silence praise!— Attend!—a model ...
— The School For Scandal • Richard Brinsley Sheridan
... and a singularly quaint-looking personage presented himself. He was very stiff and prim in his appearance; dressed in a blue coat and scarlet waistcoat, with a rich bandanna handkerchief tied very neatly round his neck, and a very new hat, to which his ...
— The Young Duke • Benjamin Disraeli
... fancy. He wondered if by any chance the boatswain's ship was over there. He wondered what the brig Cohasset was like. He wondered what the "blessed little mate" was like. He visioned that surprising person who had such influence over rough boatswains—a prim little man with mutton chop whiskers, he decided. Yes, the 'blessed little mate' of the brig Cohasset would be a little, white-crowned, bewhiskered old gentleman, perhaps somewhat senile and ...
— Fire Mountain - A Thrilling Sea Story • Norman Springer
... deteriorated and Trelawny's judgment grew more acute. Her corners grew more brutally protuberant beneath the tissue of glamour cast over them by a name. To her also Trelawny's purse was open; but long before the quarrel over "Queen Mab" his generous spirit had begun to groan under her prim banality, and to express itself in ungenerous backbitings. His final estimate he imparted to Claire when he was seventy-eight years old, and it remains for those ...
— Pot-Boilers • Clive Bell
... 'tis impossible the demure, prim thing. Sure all the world is hypocrisy Well, I thank my stars, whatsoever sufferings I have, I have none in reputation. I wonder at the men; I could never think her handsome. She has really a good ...
— The Palmy Days of Nance Oldfield • Edward Robins
... most charming people in the world live in them, but their collective effect is below the quality of any individual among them. Cambridge is a world of subdued tones, of excessively subtle humours, of prim conduct and free thinking; it fears the Parent, but it has no fear of God; it offers amidst surroundings that vary between disguises and antiquarian charm the inflammation of literature's purple draught; one hears there a peculiar thin scandal like no other scandal ...
— The New Machiavelli • Herbert George Wells
... dinner. Simpson was astonished—and more than astonished, grieved—when I told him that he was to dine with the maid; but he could not complain in words, since my own guest, the mistress, was hardly more attractive. When our preparations were complete I could not help laughing: the two prim little tables, one in the parlor and one in the anteroom, and Simpson disapprovingly going back and ...
— Stories by American Authors (Volume 4) • Constance Fenimore Woolson
... married, Roger resolved that her child should have another chance before it was too late; and with that object in mind he scoured the neighbourhood until he found what suited him, a quiet, old-fashioned ladies' school, conducted by two prim but kindly women who appeared to him likely to have the ...
— The Making of a Soul • Kathlyn Rhodes
... bench sat Judge Hunt, a small-brained, pale-faced, prim-looking man, enveloped in a faultless suit of black broadcloth, and a snowy white neck-tie. This was the first criminal case he had been called on to try since his appointment, and with remarkable forethought, ...
— History of Woman Suffrage, Volume II • Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Susan B. Anthony, and Matilda Joslyn Gage
... other by a fiddle case. From the trim houses, each without exception new, twinkled discreet lights, with glimpses of surpassingly correct domesticity, and the wind rustled loudly through the foliage of the prim gardens, ruffling them as it might have ruffled the unwilling hair of the daughters of an arch-deacon. Nobody was abroad. Absurd thoughts ran through Audrey's head. A letter from Mr. Foulger had followed her to Birmingham, and in the letter Mr. Foulger had acquainted her ...
— The Lion's Share • E. Arnold Bennett
... man, no longer the smug gentleman in a black suit, with a visage as prim as his neck-cloth, but blazing in a red woollen shirt, and grinning incessantly with amazement at his own metamorphosis. Strapped to his waist by a broad belt of leather, was a large tin-kettle, for the purpose of making his Excellency's tea in the evening. Huge saddle-bags contained provisions, ...
— The Bushman - Life in a New Country • Edward Wilson Landor
... one, not only to illume All ages, and not leave one region dim, But at no height, allow his senses swim, Or let mirages lure him with false bloom. Lo! Here one comes with all the virtues prim To hurl God's fire and end all ...
— Freedom, Truth and Beauty • Edward Doyle
... walked on, telling Hiram to follow at his leisure. My heart beat fast as I espied a wagon in the distance with one—yes, two—Shaker bonnets in it. Bessie in masquerade! Perhaps so—it could not be the other: that would be too horrible. But she was coming, surely coming, and the cold prim sister had told the truth, ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Vol. XII. No. 31. October, 1873. • Various
... herself in that less jealous arrangement of drapery which the Beauty of the last century had insisted on as presenting her most fittingly to the artist. She rolled up the sleeves of her dress, she turned down its prim collar and neck, and glanced from her glass to the portrait, from the portrait back to the glass. Myrtle was not blind nor dull, though young, and in many things untaught. She did not say in so many words, "I too am a beauty," but she could ...
— The Guardian Angel • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.
... is a compound like Corinthian brass, into which many pure ores have been fused, or it is a full turbid river drawn from numerous feeders, which had their sources in remote climes. It is a blending of primval Keltic, Teutonic, Scandinavian, Italic, and Arab traditions, each adding a beauty, each yielding a charm, bat each accretion rendering the ...
— The Book of Were-Wolves • Sabine Baring-Gould
... "The prim coxcomb with an enormous bag, whose favours, like those of Hercules between Virtue and Vice, are contended for by two rival orange girls, gives an admirable idea of the dress of the day; when, if we may judge from this print, our grave forefathers, defying Nature, ...
— The Works of William Hogarth: In a Series of Engravings - With Descriptions, and a Comment on Their Moral Tendency • John Trusler
... house the tilled ground, either ploughed or dug with the spade, came up to the very windows. There was hardly even a particle of grass to be seen. A short way down the hill there were rows of olive trees, standing in prim order and at regular distances, from which hung the vines that made the coopering of the vats necessary. Olives and vines have pretty names, and call up associations of landscape beauty. But here they were in no way beautiful. The ground beneath them ...
— He Knew He Was Right • Anthony Trollope
... Bakkus, who had been absent from Paris, entered the salon, with his usual unceremoniousness, and beheld an odd spectacle. The prim chairs had been piled on the couch by the wall, the table pushed into a corner, and on the vacant space, Elodie, in her old dancer's practising kit, bodice and knickerbockers, once loose but now skin tight to grotesqueness, ...
— The Mountebank • William J. Locke
... sphere of Coventry's influence, we find him losing scruples and daily complying further with the age. When he began the Journal, he was a trifle prim and puritanic; merry enough, to be sure, over his private cups, and still remembering Magdalene ale and his acquaintance with Mrs. Ainsworth of Cambridge. But youth is a hot season with all; when a man smells April and May he is apt at times to stumble; and in spite of a disordered practice, Pepys's ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 3 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... you all this, however, for if you have an atom of observation, one glance at his sleek, knowing-looking head and face—his prim white neckerchief, with the wooden tie into which it has been regularly folded for twenty years past, merging by imperceptible degrees into a small-plaited shirt-frill—and his comfortable-looking form encased in a well-brushed suit of black—would give you a better idea ...
— Sketches by Boz - illustrative of everyday life and every-day people • Charles Dickens
... pleasant place is a suburb of the second city in Ireland, and one of the most beautiful spots about the town. What a prim, bustling, active, green-railinged, tea-gardened, gravel-walked place would it have been in the five-hundredth town in England!—but you see the people can be quite as happy in the rags and without the paint, and I hear a great deal more heartiness and affection from these children than ...
— Seeing Europe with Famous Authors - Vol. II Great Britain And Ireland, Part Two • Francis W. Halsey
... things a glimpse of the secret meaning of human existence, such as one gets sometimes, startlingly, in a mood of idle receptiveness. And it was so sad and so beautiful, so full of an ecstatic melancholy, that I dropped the curtain. And my thought ranged lovingly over our household—prim, regular, and perfect: my old aunt embroidering in the breakfast-room, and Rebecca and Lucy ironing in the impeachable kitchen, and not one of them with the least suspicion that Adam had not really waked up one morning minus a rib. I wandered in fancy all over the ...
— Sacred And Profane Love • E. Arnold Bennett
... Page, prim, with great parades of her ideas of "good form," declared between her pursed lips that her sister was a flirt. But this was not so. Laura never manoeuvered with her lovers, nor intrigued to keep from any one of them knowledge of her companionship with the other two. So ...
— The Pit • Frank Norris
... professed a keener interest in his grave—was a matter of universal astonishment. Her dress was a triumph of tactful discretion, sensible, but not too "touristy"'—Miss Winchelsea had a great dread of being "touristy"—and her Baedeker was carried in a cover of grey to hide its glaring red. She made a prim and pleasant little figure on the Charing Cross platform, in spite of her swelling pride, when at last the great day dawned, and she could start for Rome. The day was bright, the Channel passage would be pleasant, and all the omens promised well. There ...
— The Country of the Blind, And Other Stories • H. G. Wells
... She was a prim little woman, with honest blue eyes that sometimes made men think of their sins, and when Dusty Rhodes perceived that he had gone a bit too far he endeavored to ...
— Wunpost • Dane Coolidge
... never heard of the place until he received Joan's letter. But here it was, a tiny straggling village cuddled amongst the Ramapo hills of lower New York State, only a few miles from Tuxedo. There was a prim, white-painted church, a general store with the inevitable gasoline pump at the curb, and a dozen or so of weatherbeaten frame houses. That was all. It was a typical, dusty cross-roads hamlet of the vintage of thirty years before, utterly isolated and apart from the rushing ...
— Wanderer of Infinity • Harl Vincent
... Behold! they are becoming—rather—are they not?" And here, having arranged the glasses in the ordinary form of spectacles, I applied them gingerly in their proper position; while Madame Simpson, adjusting her cap, and folding her arms, sat bolt upright in her chair, in a somewhat stiff and prim, and indeed, in ...
— The Works of Edgar Allan Poe - Volume 3 (of 5) of the Raven Edition • Edgar Allan Poe
... life were very vigorous in Eustacie; and though at first she had been completely worn out, a few days of comfort, entire rest, and good nursing restored her. Noemi dressed her much like herself, in a black gown, prim little white starched ruff, and white cap,—a thorough Calvinist dress, and befitting a minister's widow. Eustacie winced a little at hearing of the character that had been fastened upon her; she disliked for her child, still more than for herself, to take this bourgeois name of ...
— The Chaplet of Pearls • Charlotte M. Yonge
... thought, if he had not felt, with all the bitterness of a conscious fool, that he had missed his true destiny. Sara possessed the warmth and wealth of heart which were the complements his own bleak nature required. Agnes Carillon, with her accurate, invariable beauty, had a prim disposition, wholesome enough for a man of strange, dark humours like David Rennes, but perilous always in its effect on any frigid or calculating mind. And Reckage was known to be supremely selfish. It seemed to Pensee that Sara ...
— Robert Orange - Being a Continuation of the History of Robert Orange • John Oliver Hobbes
... Minage gave Lucien no sense of surprise. This palace, that loomed so large in his imagination, was a house built of the soft stone of the country, mellowed by time. It looked dismal enough from the street, and inside it was extremely plain; there was the usual provincial courtyard—chilly, prim, and neat; and the house itself was sober, almost convent-like, but in ...
— Two Poets - Lost Illusions Part I • Honore de Balzac
... gateway and had come from suburban America, at a step, into rural Holland. The prim gravelled drive led between acres of prosaically regular flower-beds, flanked on one side by a domed green house and on the other by a creaking ...
— The Return of Peter Grimm - Novelised From the Play • David Belasco
... was therefore a well accustomed shop, and she herself was in appearance most fit to be its inhabitant, being a trim, prim little woman, neither old nor young, whose dress hung about her in stiff regular folds, very like the drapery of a china shepherdess on a mantel-piece, and whose pink and white complexion, skin, eyebrows, eyes, and hair, all tinted as it seemed with one dash of ruddy ...
— Miss Philly Firkin, The China-Woman • Mary Russell Mitford
... midinette Who goes to work each morning daily; I choose to call her Blithe Babette, Because she's always humming gaily; And though the Goddess "Comme-il-faut" May look on her with prim expression, It's Pagan Paris where, you know, The queen ...
— Ballads of a Bohemian • Robert W. Service
... were much sought after," said Clelia, with a prim shyness not like her own stormy confession. Sabrina, with her white hair and her young face seemed somehow set apart from love and the sweet ...
— Country Neighbors • Alice Brown
... no real reason why we shouldn't stay as long as we wish. You are surely not so prim that you are doing ...
— Mistress Anne • Temple Bailey
... column of the French coming on over that high ground where Commissary General Craigie [279] built his house, and headed by an Officer who was at some distance in advance of the column, he ask'd his servant if his fuzee was stil loaded? (The servant opened the pan, and found it is still prim'd). "Do you see," says Captain Hazen, "that fellow there, waving his sword to encourage those other fellows to come forward?"—Yes, says the servant, I do Sir;—Then, says the Captain again, "just place your back against mine for one moment, 'till I see if I can bring him down." ...
— Picturesque Quebec • James MacPherson Le Moine
... Damahoy, drawing up her thin maidenly form to its full height of prim dignity—"I really think this unnatural business of having bastard-bairns should be putten a stop to.—There isna a hussy now on this side of thirty that you can bring within your doors, but there will be chields—writer-lads, ...
— The Heart of Mid-Lothian, Complete, Illustrated • Sir Walter Scott
... must, they swear, have "raked in golden barley," Like the great Fleet Street "Cock." Their jealous jeremiads, sour and snarly, PARTLET'S prim feelings shock. "Luck! Not at all: but the reward emphatic Of ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 98, January 25th, 1890 • Various
... camel) pawed the ground." The prim. sig. is to beat, secondly, it is applied to a purblind camel which beats or strikes the ground and so stumbles, or to him who bashes a tree for its leaves; and lastly to him who gets alms by begging. See Chenery's Al-Hariri, ...
— Supplemental Nights, Volume 6 • Richard F. Burton
... an example which I quote because it is so absurd. The rooms I live in were owned by a prim old woman who for more than twenty years was my landlady. She and I were great friends, indeed she tended me like a mother, and when I was so ill nursed me as perhaps few mothers would have done. Yet while I ...
— The Mahatma and the Hare • H. Rider Haggard
... took her seat at the top of the room; next to her sat a lady in a riding habit, whom I soon found to be Mrs. Dobson;(120) below her sat a gentlewoman, prim, upright, neat, and mean; and, next to her, sat another, thin, haggard, wrinkled, fine, and tawdry, with a thousand frippery ornaments and old-fashioned furbelows; she was excellently nick-named, by Mrs. Thrale, the Duchess ...
— The Diary and Letters of Madame D'Arblay Volume 1 • Madame D'Arblay
... the doctors call it, narvous. But when I was out—oh, what a change I found in the religious house! no card-playing, for it had been forbidden to the scholars, and there was now nothing going on but reading and singing; divil a merry visage to be seen, but plenty of prim airs and graces; but the case of the scholars, though bad enough, was not half so bad as mine, for they could spake to each other, whereas I could not have a word of conversation, for the ould thaif of a rector had ordered them to send me to 'Coventry,' telling them that I was a gambling cheat, ...
— The Romany Rye - A Sequel to 'Lavengro' • George Borrow
... (Tom began to think she could make him fool enough for anything) all the resources of his purse. The old family pictures—sad daubs, or they would never have been consigned to the bedrooms—simpered down on him with encouraging benignity. Prim women, wearing enormously long waists, and their heads a good deal on one side, pointed their fans at him, while he washed his hands, with a coquetry irresistible, had their colours only stood, combining entreaty and command; while a jolly old boy in flowing ...
— M. or N. "Similia similibus curantur." • G.J. Whyte-Melville
... children like him first-rate; but now he's in Europe. Well, to come back to Nora: she likes to be called Eleanor, but we don't do it; she is so fussy and so very proper that Felix has nick-named her Miss Prim, and we do call her that. Miss Marston thinks Nora is the best behaved of us all; and sometimes, when Nannie is in papa's study, she lets her go in the drawing-room and entertain people that call. You should see the airs that Nora puts on when she comes upstairs after these occasions; it's ...
— We Ten - Or, The Story of the Roses • Lyda Farrington Kraus
... gardens of the South; but before childhood was over I watched the quick, luxuriant growth of flowers through the brief summer of a northern clime. The Canterbury-bell, so like a prim, pretty maiden, the dahlia, that stately dame always in court costume of gorgeous velvet, remind me of those well-kept beds where not a leaf or flower was allowed to grow awry; and in one ancient ...
— Aunt Jane of Kentucky • Eliza Calvert Hall
... his ease in a large armchair. At his right sat Bailie Thomson—a man with a forbidding face, whom I had often of late seen in the company of Carver Kinlay. At Mr. Duke's left hand was the schoolmaster, prim and businesslike as I had often seen him look in the school when anything of importance was pending, such as a class examination. Near him sat Lieutenant Fox, looking very handsome in his naval uniform, and very ...
— The Pilots of Pomona • Robert Leighton
... of the older generation of governesses, motherly, kind, but rather prim and precise, the accomplished element being supplied with diplomaed foreigners, who, since Lady Phyllis's failure in health, had been dispensed with. She was a good and sensible woman, as Jane could see, in spite of the annoyance her ...
— Beechcroft at Rockstone • Charlotte M. Yonge
... Lucy Dayton so much disliked and dreaded, was a cousin of Mr. Dayton, and was a prim, matter-of-fact maiden of fifty, or thereabout. That she was still in a state of single blessedness was partially her own fault, for at twenty she was engaged to the son of a wealthy farmer who lived near her father. ...
— Homestead on the Hillside • Mary Jane Holmes
... long past, heavy and covered in brown morocco, and the big writing-table, behind which the great doctor would sit blinking at his patient through the circular gold-rimmed glasses, that gave him a somewhat Teutonic appearance, was noted for its prim neatness and orderly array. On the one side was an adjustable couch; on the other a bookcase with glass doors containing a number of instruments which were, however, not visible because of curtains of ...
— The Seven Secrets • William Le Queux
... and the children instructed to say that they would rather not have the treats he offered. He certainly preferred the wild spirits and rebellious conduct of the little Phillipses, even in their worst days, to the prim good-child behaviour of his ...
— Mr. Hogarth's Will • Catherine Helen Spence
... preoccupations, how was one to bear patiently with foolish, friendly fingers, or with uncomfortable thoughts of your own, pointing you to Lucy Purcell? With the great marriage-night scene from 'Valentine' thrilling in your mind, how was it possible to think of the prim self-conceit, the pettish temper and mincing airs of that little person ...
— The History of David Grieve • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... Only the birds come to share the beauty with you, and their singing seems a part of the very peace and quiet of it all. The old-fashioned flowers are set out in the old-fashioned way. There are (or once were) the prim squares, each with its cowslip border, and the stiffly regular little hedgerows. One may hunt them all out now; but for so many generations have shrub and vine and plant lived together here, that a good deal of formality has been dispensed ...
— Virginia: The Old Dominion • Frank W. Hutchins and Cortelle Hutchins
... we beheld our ancestry, literary as well as political, radiantly legitimised; though not, to be sure, in the England that we knew—but far away in Sleswick, happy Sleswick! 'Its pleasant pastures, its black-timbered homesteads, its prim little townships looking down on inlets of purple water, were then but a wild waste of heather and sand, girt along the coast with sunless woodland, broken here and there with meadows which crept down to the marshes and to the sea.' But what ...
— On the Art of Writing - Lectures delivered in the University of Cambridge 1913-1914 • Arthur Quiller-Couch
... on Sunday I saw the children, many of them small, and all clean and neat, and looking happy in their prim way. They came in, as usual, the boys by one door, the girls by another, each side with its care-taker; and took part in the marching, kneeling, and other forms of the Shaker worship. After the war, the South Union elders sought out twenty orphans in Tennessee, whom they adopted. Last ...
— The Communistic Societies of the United States • Charles Nordhoff
... representing the same blue-eyed lady, now with hair curled, now in a ball dress, now in a yellow gown with leg-of-mutton sleeves. And all this—consoles, King of Rome, marshals, yellow-gowned, short-waisted ladies, with that prim stiffness which was considered graceful in 1806, this atmosphere of victory and conquest—it was this more than anything we could say to him that made him accept so naively ...
— Short Stories of Various Types • Various
... the heart enters—a structure of the understanding rising out of the moral and spiritual nature. Then follows a section on Children, which explodes not a few educational fallacies, and propounds certain articles of faith and practice wholesome for these times, though it will probably wear a prim and quakerish aspect to the admirers of Jean Paul's famous tractate[10] on the same theme. The concluding paper in this series, entitled The Life Poetic, is the liveliest, if not the most valuable of the six: it has, ...
— Chambers' Edinburgh Journal - Volume XVII., No 422, New Series, January 31, 1852 • Various
... voice that asked the question, and Judith looked up with a smile. Her mother's cousin stood in the doorway—a prim little old spinster, who had been their guest for several days. Like Marguerite, she, too, had come back to her native village after an absence of four years, but not to her father's house. She was all alone in the world, save for a few distant relatives who called ...
— Mildred's Inheritance - Just Her Way; Ann's Own Way • Annie Fellows Johnston
... Commander-in-Chief his services as second in command of the army. He did right. Battalions and brigades could hardly have strengthened the hands of the general, and invigorated the spirits of the troops, so much as the active accession of Hardinge. Prim etiquette may pucker its thin lips, and solemn discretion knit its ponderous brows; but neither discipline nor prudence ran any risk of being injured or affronted by the veteran of the Peninsula. What the exigency required, he knew; what ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 59, No. 367, May 1846 • Various
... Glittering like precious stones, parrots, and birds Of all rich plumage, fly from tree to tree, The whole scene vocal with sweet varied song; And here a widespread lawn bedecked with flowers, With clumps of brilliant roses grown to trees, And fields with dahlias spread,[4] not stiff and prim Like the starched ruffle of an ancient dame, But growing in luxuriance rich and wild, The colors of the evening and the rainbow joined, White, scarlet, yellow, crimson, deep maroon, Blending all colors in one dazzling blaze; There orchards bend beneath their luscious loads; Here vineyards ...
— The Dawn and the Day • Henry Thayer Niles
... a hereditary trait? the son of a celebrity? then his essays in design were unworthy of his name. Abashed, inclined to despair, having a glimpse of a tumultuous rabble shouting: "At last he is here!" before the ruddy guillotine on a raw morning, a pale, prim man between the executioner's aids, the young Clemenceau listened to the girl, who probably resembled the Lovely Iza, but looked at the dead woman ...
— The Son of Clemenceau • Alexandre (fils) Dumas
... anything we hear of his life, that should lead us to think otherwise. Nevertheless, it was just such men as Hurd who tended to keep the Church of the eighteenth century in its apathetic state. Hurd was a religious-minded man; but his religion was characterised by a cold, prim propriety which was not calculated to commend it to men at large. Like his friend Warburton, he could see nothing but folly and fanatical madness in the great evangelical revival which was going on around him, and which he seems to have thought would soon ...
— The English Church in the Eighteenth Century • Charles J. Abbey and John H. Overton
... few hours, during same three or four days, a very prim and devout-looking Episcopal clergyman, with a cast in his eye, had visited Alonzo. According to his card, he was the Rev. Melton Hargrave, of Cincinnati. He said he had retired from the ministry on account of his health. If he had said on account of ill-health, he would probably ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... the Abbess observing, with a prim aspect, that she had read quite enough concerning such worldly vanities, and the Count of Crevecoeur, breaking out, "Aroint thee, deceitful witch!—Why, this device smells rank as the toasted cheese in a rat trap.—Now fie, and double fie, upon ...
— Quentin Durward • Sir Walter Scott
... sure I did. There was a certain Arabella Rayleigh in Temp. Geo. Prim., that means in the time of George I. or II., I forget which—but it is ages ago—that married Martin Hicks, and had a daughter, who married in Temp. of another of the Geos John Smith, and had a daughter; ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine - Volume 55, No. 343, May 1844 • Various
... was stout and prim, a combination which was surely never intended by nature. Her gray dress and tight linen collar and cuffs gave the uncomfortable impression of being sewed on, while her rigid black water-waves seemed irrevocably painted upon her high forehead. She was a routinist; she believed ...
— Lovey Mary • Alice Hegan Rice
... progress had been for some time the delight of Elsmere's heart, they met old Meyrick in his pony-carriage. He stopped his shambling steed at sight of the pair. The bleared spectacled eyes lit up, the prim mouth broke into a smile ...
— Robert Elsmere • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... ridiculous, ever condescends to use colloquial speech. Even in moments of extreme peril the heroines are very choice in their diction. Dialogue in Mrs. Radcliffe's world is as stilted and unnatural as that of prim, old-fashioned school books. In her earliest novel she uses very little conversation, clearly finding the indirect form of narrative easier. Sometimes, in the more highly wrought passages of description, ...
— The Tale of Terror • Edith Birkhead
... not often good subjects; there is a peculiar meanness about most of them, and awkwardness of line. Old manor-houses are often pretty. Ruins are usually, with us, too prim, and cathedrals too orderly. I do not think there is a single cathedral in England from which it is possible to obtain one subject for an impressive drawing. There is always some discordant civility, or ...
— The Crown of Wild Olive • John Ruskin
... was very aristocratic, but somewhat prim and precise. Nevertheless, when the company had been telling of college pranks, she relaxed slightly, and told of a lark that had caused excitement in Cambridge when she was a girl there. This was to the effect that two maidens of social standing were smuggled into the ...
— Jokes For All Occasions - Selected and Edited by One of America's Foremost Public Speakers • Anonymous
... longer empty. Looking down its dusty length from beneath the shelter of his palmleaf fan, Judge Priest saw here and there groups of children—the little girls in prim and starchy white, the little boys hobbling in the Sunday torment of shoes and stockings; and all of them were moving toward a common center—Sunday school. Twice again that day would the street show life—a little ...
— The Escape of Mr. Trimm - His Plight and other Plights • Irvin S. Cobb
... hall or large vestibule the figure of a man loomed black against dark gray. Win could see of him only that he was tall and straight and prim, like a well-trained servant, and his voice was a servant's voice as he said: "Please be a little careful, miss, not to trip. We have to keep it rather dark here, but there's plenty of light inside Let me show ...
— Winnie Childs - The Shop Girl • C. N. Williamson
... as in the robes of the magistrates. Thus we see the men and women of the Renaissance in the works of all its painters; heavy in Ghirlandajo, vulgarly jaunty in Fillipino, preposterously starched and prim in Mantegna, ludicrously undignified in Signorelli; and mediaeval stiffness, awkwardness, and absurdity reach their acme perhaps in the little boys, companions of the Medici children, introduced into Benozzo Gozzoli's Building ...
— The Contemporary Review, Volume 36, September 1879 • Various
... the refusal to allow me to walk or hunt with Xenophon, and to saunter through his kitchen or his grounds. And all because I could not show the requisite grammatical ticket. Could anything be more fascinating than the tale of Xenophon's prim yet most lovable young wife, or the glorious picture of the boy and girl lovers with which ...
— The Adventure of Living • John St. Loe Strachey
... from Aunt Winnie,—a Government boat brought weekly mail to the lighthouse on Numskull Nob. They were prim little letters, carefully margined and written, and spelled as the good Sisters had taught her in early youth. She took her pen in hand—so letters had always begun in Aunt Winnie's schooldays—to write him a few lines. She was in good health and hoped he was ...
— Killykinick • Mary T. Waggaman
... who have had experience of the older generation out West would have suspected the pride, the affection, the delight hiding behind Martha Skeffington's prim and formal welcome, or that it was not indifference but the unfailing instinct of a tender heart that made her say, after a very few minutes: "Adelaide, don't you think Dory'd like to look at ...
— The Second Generation • David Graham Phillips
... or a Fourth of July picnic had usually been the occasions when Mary Hope, with her skirts just hitting her shoe tops in front and sagging in an ungainly fashion behind, had teetered solemnly through a "square" dance with him. Mother Douglas herself had always sat very straight and prim on a bench, her hands folded in her lap and her eyes blinking disapprovingly at the ungodly ones who let out an exultant little yip now and then when they started exuberantly through the mazes ...
— Rim o' the World • B. M. Bower
... philosopher like Rabelais chose to express the wisest thought in the most indecent fooling; why every genius does not look out upon life and the world with the same eyes and find the same method to record what he sees. Some men can only marvel with Louis Stevenson at the wide contrast between the "prim obliterated polite face of life" and its "orgiastic foundations"; others are only reconciled to it by the humour in the contrast or by the pity invoked by its victims. What makes the genius is just the fact that he looks out upon life, that he feels, that he uses his eyes, in his own way; also, that ...
— Nights - Rome, Venice, in the Aesthetic Eighties; London, Paris, in the Fighting Nineties • Elizabeth Robins Pennell
... mihi occupatione displicebat, se patenter ostenderet, et cuncta qu infligere dolorem consueverant, congesta ante oculos licenter venirent. Ibi itaque cum afflictus valde et diu tacitus sederem, dilectissimus filius meus Petrus diaconus adfuit, mihi a primvo juventutis flore amicitiis familiariter obstrictus, atque ad sacri verbi indagationem socius. Qui gravi excoqui cordis languore me intuens, ait: Num quidnam tibi aliquid accidit, quod plus te solito mror tenet? ...
— Anglo-Saxon Literature • John Earle
... his telephone and spoke into it. We waited a few minutes, and finally a very prim young woman came in. She was followed by a uniformed policeman. She was carrying one of those sub-miniature silent typewriters which she set up on its little stand with a ...
— Highways in Hiding • George Oliver Smith
... forward through a dull, disappointing day to an evening with Felicite Delord. She was expecting him—she would be greatly disappointed. He sighed a second time, for he was far from happy. Life seemed to be one long constant worry over money matters and Myra Nell. Being a prim, orderly man, he intensely disliked searching for mislaid articles, but he began a systematic hunt; for, knowing Myra Nell's peculiar irresponsibility, he was prepared to find the missing slipper anywhere between the hammock on the front ...
— The Net • Rex Beach
... Christ Church idealizes in form and color the spirit of this noble woman, without attempting portraiture. A real likeness of Miss Cooper, as she appeared in her ripest years, would recall a sweet face framed in dangling curls, a manner somewhat prim, but always gentle and placid, a figure slight and spare, with a bonnet and Paisley shawl that are all but essential to the resemblance. She would best be represented in the midst of orphan children whom she catechises ...
— The Story of Cooperstown • Ralph Birdsall
... cried, impatiently, "I am to stay there for at least six weeks, and I know nothing about them, not what age they are, nor if they are tall or short, jolly or prim, pretty, or ugly, not even if they ...
— Stories By English Authors: Italy • Various
... at me a moment, his lips still prim, but whitening and tightening; then he deliberately broke his long pipe and glass on the table and stood up, the very picture of a perfect gentleman with the framing ...
— The Wisdom of Father Brown • G. K. Chesterton
... all in the later version of this Reading was said about the prim person in cloth boots, who unsuccessfully attempted all through the evening to make a joke. Of him the readers of "Pickwick" will very well remember it to have been related that he commenced a long story about a great public character, whose name he had forgotten, making a particularly ...
— Charles Dickens as a Reader • Charles Kent
... night; And spectral dance, before the dawn, A hundred Vicars down the lawn; Curates, long dust, will come and go On lissom, clerical, printless toe; And oft between the boughs is seen The sly shade of a Rural Dean . . . Till, at a shiver in the skies, Vanishing with Satanic cries, The prim ecclesiastic rout Leaves but a startled sleeper-out, Grey heavens, the first bird's drowsy calls, The falling house ...
— The Collected Poems of Rupert Brooke • Rupert Brooke
... Rows of red brick villas in the suburbs of a town in the Midlands are, one would suppose, as hideous as human half-wittedness could invent or endure. But they are different. They are complete; they are, in their way, compact; rounded and finished with an effect that may be prim or smug, but is not raw. The surroundings of them are neat, if it be in a niggling fashion. But American ugliness is not complete even as ugliness. It is broken off short; it is ragged at the edges; even its worthy objects have around them a sort of halo ...
— Gilbert Keith Chesterton • Maisie Ward
... blackly between its crystalline walls; beyond, the green woods stretching upward to touch the cloud-flecked summer sky; and over all, like a furnace blast, the hot sun beating down. A great picture, but somehow Corliss's mind turned to his mother and her perennial tea, the soft carpets, the prim New England maid-servants, the canaries singing in the wide windows, and he wondered if she could understand. And when he thought of the woman behind him, and felt the dip and lift, dip and lift, of her paddle, his mother's women came back to him, one by one, and passed in long review,—pale, ...
— A Daughter of the Snows • Jack London
... Besides, there's a more serious difficulty." Jernyngham's tense face relaxed into a grim smile. "Can you imagine Ellice an inmate of an English country house, patronizing local charities, presiding over prim garden parties? The idea's ...
— Prescott of Saskatchewan • Harold Bindloss
... having a square of green lawn in front and another in back enclosed with a rail fence, gay flowers in the corners, rubber plants in pots on the porch, and grape arbor down one side of the back yard. Inside, rust-colored mohair overstuffed chairs and davenport look prim with white, crocheted doilies, a big clock with weights stands in one corner on an ornately carved table, and several enlarged framed photographs hang on the wall. The other two rooms are the combined kitchen and dining room, and a bedroom with a heatrola in it ...
— Slave Narratives: A Folk History of Slavery in the United States From Interviews with Former Slaves: The Ohio Narratives • Works Projects Administration
... nature in the lad, which, by the time he has reached his eighth year,—Miss Eliza having now been in the position of mistress of the household a twelvemonth,—works itself off in explosive tempests of feeling, with which the prim spinster has but faint sympathy. No care could be more studious and complete than that with which she looks after the boy's wardrobe and the ordering of his little chamber; his supply of mittens, of stockings, and of underclothing is always of the most ample; nay, his caprices of ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 15, No. 90, April, 1865 • Various
... ye first prim Christianity. 2d Roman Catholicism: ye first is put away and dwells apart, 2d Guinevere flies. Arthur takes to the first again, but finds her changed by lapse ...
— Old Familiar Faces • Theodore Watts-Dunton
... what Derek said of her. Bursting with life! And so she is.' And she gazed doubtfully at the girl, whose prim black dress and apron seemed scarcely able to ...
— Forsyte Saga • John Galsworthy
... meekness. But there was a distinction about her that neither grief nor poverty could destroy. She was so unmistakably the gentle-woman. In the simple, but dainty white cap, with its floating strings, which modestly covered her dark waving hair, the plain black dress and prim collar fastened with its mourning pin, she made a reposeful picture of the old-fashioned conception ...
— The Dreamer - A Romantic Rendering of the Life-Story of Edgar Allan Poe • Mary Newton Stanard
... Mrs. Maxwell took leave of the three strange women standing in a prim row, she gave a meaning nod to Mrs. Field, who ...
— Jane Field - A Novel • Mary E. Wilkins Freeman
... a horrid, old-time, hoopskirt-minded prude. My first act of domestic tyranny is to make you find a sedate, prim place for my work and play, where I may know my own blushes when I see them in the mirror, and will have less occasion to ...
— The Voice on the Wire • Eustace Hale Ball
... of them would try her front door, and then, with a bridling toss of the head, express that she had forgotten locking it, and slip round to the kitchen; but most of the ladies made their way back at once between the roses and syringas of their grassy door-yards, which were as neat and prim as their own persons, or the best chamber in their white- walled, green-shuttered, story-and-a-half house, and as perfectly kept as the very ...
— Henry James, Jr. • William Dean Howells
... in the schoolhouse, to the delight of the scholars and the gentle satisfaction of Mrs. Martin, who, in addition to the rudimentary musical instruction of the younger girls, occasionally played upon it herself in a prim, refined, and conscientious fashion. To this, when she was alone after school hours, she sometimes added a faint, colorless voice of limited range and gentlewomanly expression. It was on one of these occasions that Twing, ...
— Colonel Starbottle's Client and Other Stories • Bret Harte
... laments his death: And for my selfe, Foe as he was to me, Might liquid teares, or heart-offending groanes, Or blood-consuming sighes recall his Life; I would be blinde with weeping, sicke with grones, Looke pale as Prim-rose with blood-drinking sighes, And all to haue the Noble Duke aliue. What know I how the world may deeme of me? For it is knowne we were but hollow Friends: It may be iudg'd I made the Duke away, So shall my name with Slanders tongue be wounded, And Princes Courts ...
— The First Folio [35 Plays] • William Shakespeare
... bursting forth of character and capacity that began with our grandfather! But as I go on in life, day by day, I become more of a bewildered child; I cannot get used to this world, to procreation, to heredity, to sight, to hearing; the commonest things are a burthen. The prim obliterated polite face of life, and the broad, bawdy, and orgiastic—or maenadic—foundations, form a spectacle to which no habit reconciles me; and "I could wish my days to be bound each to each" by the same open-mouthed wonder. They are anyway, and whether ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 25 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... continued the queen, "be so good as to await me in the reception-room." As she saw that the prim lips of De Noailles were about to be opened, she added: "The mistress of ceremonies and the ladies of ...
— Joseph II. and His Court • L. Muhlbach
... the room known as the library is on the ground floor in a wing of the main building. As rooms have a way of doing, it expresses unmistakably the character of its tenant. There is a book-case, with a few spick-and-span books standing in prim, cold rows behind the glass doors—which are always locked. The key is somewhere, no doubt. There are no pictures on the walls, save a fancy calendar—presented with the compliments of the Judge's ...
— The Calling Of Dan Matthews • Harold Bell Wright
... iron, bulging out and angular, in which the body was buried as successfully as in the robes of the magistrates. Thus we see the men and women of the Renaissance in the works of all its painters; heavy in Ghirlandajo, vulgarly jaunty in Fillipino, preposterously starched and prim in Mantegna, ludicrously undignified in Signorelli; and mediaeval stiffness, awkwardness, and absurdity reach their acme perhaps in the little boys, companions of the Medici children, introduced into Benozzo Gozzoli's ...
— The Contemporary Review, Volume 36, September 1879 • Various
... twisted yews, no weeping willows; the few fir trees hold themselves stiffly up, as though in pride at this triumph of the vegetable over the animal; and the great bushes of faded geranium only throw into relief the regular lines of limestone mounds, each with its prim wooden cross of advertisement. Always an ugly and a dreary place, it was, when I saw it a few days after the relief, more dreary than ever; for the sun, whose presence makes the difference of a season in this bare land, was hidden behind dark stacks ...
— The Relief of Mafeking • Filson Young
... well accustomed shop, and she herself was in appearance most fit to be its inhabitant, being a trim, prim little woman, neither old nor young, whose dress hung about her in stiff regular folds, very like the drapery of a china shepherdess on a mantel-piece, and whose pink and white complexion, skin, eyebrows, eyes, and hair, all tinted as it seemed with one dash of ruddy colour, had the same professional ...
— Miss Philly Firkin, The China-Woman • Mary Russell Mitford
... Hereford and Vesey Fitzgerald, and to declare Lord Bathurst President of the Council and the Duke of Northumberland Lord-Lieutenant of Ireland. Previously the King received the address of the dissenting ministers, and then that of the Quakers, presented by William Allen; they were very prim and respectable persons; their hats were taken off by each other in the room before the Throne Room, and they did not bow, though they seemed half inclined to do so; they made a very loyal address, but without 'Majesty,' and said 'O King.' There was a question after ...
— The Greville Memoirs - A Journal of the Reigns of King George IV and King William IV, Vol. II • Charles C. F. Greville
... doctor was a lonely man in spite of his many friends, and he found himself watching for the little brown face that, half-way across the old meeting-house, would turn round to look for him more than once during the service. At first there was only the top of little Nan Prince's prim best bonnet or hood to be seen, unless it was when she stood up in prayer-time, but soon the bright eyes rose like stars above the horizon of the pew railing, and next there was the whole well-poised little head, ...
— A Country Doctor and Selected Stories and Sketches • Sarah Orne Jewett
... under Miss Hatchard's roof. The incentive to the celebration had come rather from those who had left North Dormer than from those who had been obliged to stay there, and there was some difficulty in rousing the village to the proper state of enthusiasm. But Miss Hatchard's pale prim drawing-room was the centre of constant comings and goings from Hepburn, Nettleton, Springfield and even more distant cities; and whenever a visitor arrived he was led across the hall, and treated to a glimpse of the group of girls deep in their ...
— Summer • Edith Wharton
... began to disengage her hand from his—loosened the slim fingers one by one, all the while watching him sideways with prim lips ...
— The Crimson Tide • Robert W. Chambers
... respecting the law on the north side of the island. On the south side in the meantime disorder was unusual, but energetic troops under Major V. Geillerup and Captain V. Castonier scoured the country, captured leaders of the riot and imprisoned them. In the meantime Governor Prim of Porto Rico had in response to an appeal for assistance despatched 600 Spanish troops and two mountain howitzers that assured peace ...
— The Journal of Negro History, Volume 2, 1917 • Various
... even the subject did not strike me for the first moment as anything very remarkable. It was the portrait of a man in the prime of life—about thirty-five, I should have supposed—with the long whiskers and rather prim pose of a portrait made by an evidently poor artist, probably thirty or forty ...
— Seen and Unseen • E. Katharine Bates
... and slaps and thrusts at gloomy Harry and prim Miss Carrington and boorish Mr. George, wherewith the Countess, torn with wrath, thought it necessary to cover her retreat, need not be told. She struck the weak alone: Juliana she respected. Masterly tactics, for they showed her ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... it, is quite beautiful. Yet she looks as neat and as ready to welcome the Captain at breakfast-time as if she had been asleep in the Queen's bed all night. My dear! you could never laugh at her prim little curls or her pink bows again if you saw her as I have done." I could only feel very penitent, and greet Miss Jessie with double respect when I met her next. She looked faded and pinched; and her lips began to quiver, as if she was very weak, when she spoke of her sister. But ...
— Cranford • Elizabeth Cleghorn Gaskell
... the Spanish throne, his reluctance to accept the invitation of the Cortes having been overridden by the Italian cabinet. On the 16th of November 1870 he was proclaimed king of Spain by the Cortes; but, before he could arrive at Madrid, Marshal Prim, chief promoter of his candidature, was assassinated. Undeterred by rumours of a plot against his own life, Amedeo entered Madrid alone, riding at some distance from his suite to the church where ...
— Project Gutenberg Encyclopedia
... Italian literature is confined to a few of the most popular of Petrarch's sonnets, and an imperfect acquaintance with Ariosto, through the medium of Mr. Hoole. As to the French poets, he dismisses them in the mass as a set of prim, precise, unnatural pretenders. The truth is, he is in a state of happy ignorance about them and all that they have done. He has never read Zaire nor Phedre. To those great German poets who have illuminated the last fifty years ...
— Famous Reviews • Editor: R. Brimley Johnson
... passed through it and down a passage to a sitting-room heavily furnished with solid horsehair-seated chairs and a sofa. In the exact centre of this sofa, reading by the light of a lamp with a pink shade which was placed on a table behind her, sat a prim grey-haired woman dressed in a black silk dress and apron and a lace cap with lappets. I noticed at once that the right lappet was larger than the left. Evidently it had been made so with the design of hiding a patch of affected skin below the ear, which looked to me as though ...
— Doctor Therne • H. Rider Haggard
... it in particular. Jessica in the "still small hours" was never really gay. It was dimly comforting to one of my companionable nature to turn from her to the little old woman opposite me. In figure and dress she might have posed for one of Leech's drawings of ancient dames, so quaintly prim was she, so precise in their folds were her little black mantle and her simple black gown, so effective a frame to her wrinkled face was the wide black bonnet she wore. On her hands, demurely crossed in her lap, were black lace mitts. Moreover, she was enveloped, so to speak, in a dim ...
— Many Kingdoms • Elizabeth Jordan
... side road there suddenly trotted a piebald pony, drawing a low, basket phaeton, in which sat two prim, little, old ladies, a fat one and a lean one. Despite the difference in their avoirdupois the two old ladies showed themselves to be ...
— Janice Day at Poketown • Helen Beecher Long
... the firm belief that they belonged to "a gent way up in G," as he expressed it, he never having waited on "the likes of him before." As to Bolton, he thought he was the "best ever," and as to his prim, patient sister who had closed her school to be near her brother—she declared to Mrs. Hicks five minutes after she had laid her eyes on him, that Mr. Breen's uncle was "just too dear for anything,"—to which the lady ...
— Peter - A Novel of Which He is Not the Hero • F. Hopkinson Smith
... the eagerness of all onboard the frigate to take part in the work. The crews of the boats, and those who were to go on the expedition, stood in readiness, with pistols in their belts, and cutlasses at their sides; the marines drawn up, stiff and prim, ready to step into the boats, offering a strong contrast to the blue-jackets, with their rolling, somewhat swaggering movements, while several not told off to go were stealing round in the hopes of being able to slip unnoticed into ...
— Ronald Morton, or the Fire Ships - A Story of the Last Naval War • W.H.G. Kingston
... tousled head both our callers gave a whoop of recognition, and set upon him,—shook him out of his slippers, and pulled him down the steps on to the sidewalk barefoot; thereby scandalizing a whole houseful of prim damsels across the street, who indignantly pulled down their curtains. Such a hand-shaking and back-patting as ensued! All the hardships and discouragement we had endured on our last season's expedition seemed to bear an exultant harvest in this our ...
— Left on Labrador - or, The cruise of the Schooner-yacht 'Curlew.' as Recorded by 'Wash.' • Charles Asbury Stephens
... butler—everything correct, except myself. It was of no use. I can hold myself in for a month or two; then I break out, the old original savage that I am under my frock coat. I feel I must run amuck, stabbing, hacking at the prim, smiling Lies mincing round about me. I can fool a silly woman for half-a-dozen visits; bow and rub my hands, purr round her sympathetically. All the while I am longing to tell her ...
— Paul Kelver • Jerome Klapka, AKA Jerome K. Jerome
... whose elegant form and manners make her as lovely as the moon and as beautiful as light. The rapid and constant motion of the foliage of the poplar and the aspen reminds him of some nervous and excitable person who is never quiet or easy for a moment. The prim spruce-tree suggests to him some person of formal habits and primness of dress. The symmetrical maple and pine remind him of some quiet and dignified character who is well balanced and rounded at every point. The patriarchal tree which has outlived all its companions and stands alone with ...
— The Road and the Roadside • Burton Willis Potter
... that prim little cap. Tie up your hair with black ribbon, and put on a blouse. Then you will be ...
— Little Folks (July 1884) - A Magazine for the Young • Various
... less interesting as self-revelations. Prosperity is not always the best condition under which to produce the highest work, and the temperament of Rembrandt was so peculiar that there is little wonder that the prim Dutchmen were not entirely captivated by his exuberant sensuality, or that we ourselves reserve our admiration principally for the more sombre and mysterious products of his later years after misfortune began to ...
— Six Centuries of Painting • Randall Davies
... do want to sit at the head of our table, papa," said Patty; "I'd just like to see a housekeeper there! A prim, sour-faced old lady with a black silk dress and dangling ear-rings! No, I thank you. If I have my way I will keep that house myself, and when I get into any trouble, I will fly to Aunt ...
— Patty at Home • Carolyn Wells
... breakfast he lingered for half an hour; and during this time Miss Walker, who had noticed me no more up to now than as one of the persons at the table, came to a seat near me in the living room. She was lovely to look at, but in a way half prim. The whiteness of her forehead, the fineness of her hands, her air of clear and quick intellectuality, made her a person to inspire something of deference. And yet I felt myself captivated by her. Surely in every thinking man's heart ...
— Children of the Market Place • Edgar Lee Masters
... they not?" And here, having arranged the glasses in the ordinary form of spectacles, I applied them gingerly in their proper position; while Madame Simpson, adjusting her cap, and folding her arms, sat bolt upright in her chair, in a somewhat stiff and prim, and indeed, in a somewhat ...
— The Works of Edgar Allan Poe - Volume 3 (of 5) of the Raven Edition • Edgar Allan Poe
... That prim maid Moore, who looks as if she'd had a rush of teeth to the head, minced to the door of the summer-house where we were sitting, and called us to luncheon. Of course that interrupted our conversation, but Mr. Norman said it must be "continued in our next," ...
— The Heather-Moon • C. N. Williamson and A. M. Williamson
... that, even before this era, when "old maids" were open to all kinds of insult, there were women brave enough to refuse to barter their souls for the animal comforts of food and shelter. Speaking about "old maids," by which term we mean now a prim, fussy person, it is well to remember that there are male "old maids" as well as female who remain so all through life; also that many "old maids" marry, and ...
— In Times Like These • Nellie L. McClung
... of the Right Wing with the First Division. He moved from camp at 6 A.M. on the Edmondson pike, on which he was ordered to move to Prim's blacksmith shop, from whence he was to march direct on a country road to Nolinsville. The Third Division under Sheridan moved on the Nolinsville pike, followed by the Second under Johnson. The advance of both these columns encountered the cavalry pickets of the enemy, within two ...
— The Army of the Cumberland • Henry M. Cist
... and all concerned, hating everyone and disliked by all. To the little maiden of the Bush, only half tamed as yet, the London school-room and walks in the park were penance in themselves, and the company of three steady prim girls, in the idealess state produced by confinement to a school-room, and nothing but childish books, was as distasteful to her as she was shocking to them, and her life was one warfare with them and with their Fraulein. The ...
— My Young Alcides - A Faded Photograph • Charlotte M. Yonge
... she drew thee. The Doctor has been catechised, 'tis plain; Great good, I hope, the thing will do thee. The girls have much desire to ascertain If one is prim and good, as ancient rules compel: If there he's led, they think, he'll follow ...
— Faust • Johann Wolfgang Von Goethe
... impossible things can happen. I'm going to write a book some day—from a girl's point of view—and I intend to make all parents and guardians and governesses, et cetera, sit up. Why should boys have everything jolly, while girls are made to be so prim and proper? Read a boys' book and you will find it full of fun and adventures and excitement, but girls are supposed to care about nothing but wish-wash, about self-denial and being good, and all that. Course I know we ought to try to be good, keep our promises, and never do mean things, ...
— Hunter's Marjory - A Story for Girls • Margaret Bruce Clarke
... I met and loved in that brief month in Paris, I cherish tenderer memories. Prim little Pauline Deschapelles! How clearly I can still see the respectable brass plate on the door of your little flat—"Mademoiselle Deschapelles—Modes et Robes;" and indeed the "modes et robes" were true enough. ...
— The Quest of the Golden Girl • Richard le Gallienne
... back in the sailboat again, going down the bay with their precious freight, the hoarded money all spent and nothing to think of but tiller and sail. I looked at the unworn carpet, the glass vases on the mantelpiece with their prim bunches of bleached swamp grass and dusty marsh rosemary, and I could read the history of Mrs. Tilley's best room from ...
— The Country of the Pointed Firs • Sarah Orne Jewett
... I used to catch of her at that time, slim-legged and swift, and shrilly sweet of voice as a lark, and as shyly a-flutter at the motion of a hand toward her, or else seated prim as any grown maiden, with grave eyes of attention upon her task of ...
— The Heart's Highway - A Romance of Virginia in the Seventeeth Century • Mary E. Wilkins
... just a few old gentlemen here and a few old ladies there, sometimes with their prematurely aged and chastened paid companions by their sides. There were some girls of fifteen or sixteen, too, scattered about, a few of them accompanied by prim governesses. ...
— Ladies-In-Waiting • Kate Douglas Wiggin
... when these were done, But she would never romp and run; Prim and sedate she walked about, Her back quite straight, her toes turned out: And all the people, seeing this, Exclaimed, "Oh, what a model Miss!" Jane's Uncle, who lived far away, Sent her Mama a note one day, Explaining ...
— Plain Jane • G. M. George
... outward musty and yet alluring odours swept them inward. They descended a flight of winding steps to a subterranean anteroom of stone. Dim lights winked at them from stone niches and from a cleft in the rock to one side a prim little maid in a ruched white cap took Joe's hat. There should have been a troglodyte attendant, instead. On the other side of swinging glass doors was much clatter and laughter and the indistinct voice of a woman above a ...
— Stubble • George Looms
... boys, you see, and so the same rules do not apply to us, for girls always have to observe the conventions," said Nealie, with the prim little air which she sometimes put on for the sake of ...
— The Adventurous Seven - Their Hazardous Undertaking • Bessie Marchant
... a pretty, blonde young girl, with ringlets, were sitting there, enjoying the sea-breeze, then coming in, all cool and refreshing, from the spray of the reef. As I approached, the old lady peered hard at me; and her very cap seemed to convey a prim rebuke. The blue, English eyes, by her side, were also bent on me. But, oh Heavens! what a glance to receive from such a beautiful creature! As for the mob cap, not a fig did I care for it; but, to be taken for anything ...
— Omoo: Adventures in the South Seas • Herman Melville
... "Marion Prim was her name," the narrator continued presently, "'n' she writ it from Knoxville fifty-one years ago come last October. Did you ever hear ...
— Susan Clegg and Her Friend Mrs. Lathrop • Anne Warner
... fastenings. I wouldn't leave one snap to meet its partner. Come on Judy," the feet were again on the rug, "we will be simply dead in the morning, and we have got to be very much alive. We do miss the Weatherbee. I don't see why we let her go. Dear, prim, prompt Weatherbee! Now we know we loved her. Her successor is too ...
— Jane Allen: Junior • Edith Bancroft
... hat, for he had looked forward through a dull, disappointing day to an evening with Felicite Delord. She was expecting him—she would be greatly disappointed. He sighed a second time, for he was far from happy. Life seemed to be one long constant worry over money matters and Myra Nell. Being a prim, orderly man, he intensely disliked searching for mislaid articles, but he began a systematic hunt; for, knowing Myra Nell's peculiar irresponsibility, he was prepared to find the missing slipper anywhere between the hammock on the front gallery and the kitchen in ...
— The Net • Rex Beach
... your sword! Have you no place for a harper-at-arms in the courts of your lord— Prim fountains, clipped trees, and trim gardens, and music, and rest? Nay, keep your sugared delights and your margents embroidered! My life is the best. In my ears is the sound of a bugle blown, and my pulses like kettle-drums beat For the hungry blind onset, the rally, the stubborn defeat. I, ...
— Miscellany of Poetry - 1919 • Various
... Jacky and Miss Harriot" arrests the eye by its quaint inscription: "Rozella Ford's Book. For being the second speller in the second class." At once the imagination calls up the exercises in a village school at the end of a year's session: a row of prim little maids and sturdy boys, standing before the school dame and by turn spelling in shrill tones words of three to five syllables, until only two, Rozella and a better speller, remain unconfused by Dilworth's and Webster's word mysteries. Then the two children step ...
— Forgotten Books of the American Nursery - A History of the Development of the American Story-Book • Rosalie V. Halsey
... however, at the appointed hour, and Mrs. Wilkinson, a prim old gentlewoman, who had chaperoned Kate on the rare occasions when she went out, having arrived, ...
— The Firm of Girdlestone • Arthur Conan Doyle
... was a prim, brunette soprano who wore her eyes disguised behind heavy tortoiseshell. The ill-cut garb she could afford added greatly to her staid appearance, obscuring a certain full-bodied litheness. She earned a throttled existence soloing at funerals ...
— Zero Data • Charles Saphro
... right," answered Loring with a smile, as he glanced up at the prim and precise Gresham, who had now succeeded in fencing Miss Joy in a corner, away from the other ...
— Five Thousand an Hour - How Johnny Gamble Won the Heiress • George Randolph Chester
... up the street, With a wagon of virgins, sour and sweet; Each bearing the bloom of recent date, Each misrepresenting a single State. There was California, pious and prim, And Louisiana, humming a hymn; The Texas lass was the smallest one— Rhode Island weighed the tenth of a ton; The Empire State was pure as a pearl, And Massachusetts a modest girl; Vermont was red as the blush of a rose— And the goddess sported a turn-up ...
— Farm Ballads • Will Carleton
... to do, Frank? What am I to do? Think how desolate I am, how unfriended, how much in want of some one whom I can call a protector! I cannot have you always with me. You care more for the little finger of that prim piece of propriety down at the old dowager's than you do for me and all my sorrows." This was true, but Frank did not say that it was true. "Lord Fawn is at any rate respectable. At least, I thought he was so when I accepted ...
— The Eustace Diamonds • Anthony Trollope
... back and see all my philosophy refuted, all my prim little opinions lying prone like dolls with the sawdust knocked out of them. All these years I have been judging Judith with an ignorance as cruel as it has been complacent. Verily I have been the fag end of wisdom. So I forbear ...
— The Morals of Marcus Ordeyne • William J. Locke
... was to make all the people who love me unhappy, I suppose," Sally said in her mild, prim voice, with an effort at lightness. "No happiness could come of that, could ...
— Martie the Unconquered • Kathleen Norris
... for life? How did he know what she was—he could not find the exact adjective to express his meaning, but he knew what he meant. Was she worthy of the boon? That was what it amounted to. All his life he had had a prim shrinking from the section of the feminine world which is connected with the light-life of large cities. Club acquaintances of his in London had from time to time married into the Gaiety Chorus, and ...
— The Adventures of Sally • P. G. Wodehouse
... of England some two and a half centuries ago; an old-world garden, with prim yew hedges and a sundial, and, in one shady and sequestered nook, two persons standing; one, a man some forty years of age, tall and handsome, the other a lady of grace and beauty some fifteen years his junior. ...
— Fifty-Two Stories For Girls • Various
... off that bonnet, and let me see thee as thou art really; with thy hair about thy face. So." Peggy reached over and untied the bow as she spoke, then removed the prim little bonnet from her cousin's head. "How beautiful thee is," she commented gazing at the maiden with admiring eyes. "I think thee grows more so every time I see thee. That bonnet ...
— Peggy Owen and Liberty • Lucy Foster Madison
... the Englishman, seated erect and prim on what had once been a hill of potatoes, her bonnet perched rakishly on one ear, and her grey toupee partially disarranged, hanging with its sustaining hairpins over her eyes, was Mrs. Mackintosh, firmly grasping ...
— His Lordship's Leopard - A Truthful Narration of Some Impossible Facts • David Dwight Wells
... grew very rapidly after this first encounter which had so violently disturbed the little man's equilibrium. He was naturally very prim, and prim folk live mostly in so small a world that anything violently unusual may shake them clean out of it, and they therefore instinctively distrust originality. But Vezin began to forget his primness after awhile. ...
— Three John Silence Stories • Algernon Blackwood
... where he treated them with truly romantic truculence. He was himself always, moreover, and ideally cared as little for nature as a fairy-story teller. In this sense he was more romantic than the romanticists. His "Automedon," his portrait of General Prim, even his "Salome," are wilful in a degree that is either superb or superficial, as one looks at them; but at any rate they are romantic a outrance. At the same time it was unmistakably the aspect of things rather than their significance, rather than his view of them, that appealed ...
— French Art - Classic and Contemporary Painting and Sculpture • W. C. Brownell
... he jestingly called it) consisted of the girl, two spinsters (Prudence and Angelina Jedson), prim and doubtful of the world, and the young man who appeared to be considerably the worse for the alcohol he ...
— The Ragged Edge • Harold MacGrath
... offering to the Commander-in-Chief his services as second in command of the army. He did right. Battalions and brigades could hardly have strengthened the hands of the general, and invigorated the spirits of the troops, so much as the active accession of Hardinge. Prim etiquette may pucker its thin lips, and solemn discretion knit its ponderous brows; but neither discipline nor prudence ran any risk of being injured or affronted by the veteran of the Peninsula. What the exigency required, he knew; what the exigency exacted, he performed. That those who censure ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 59, No. 367, May 1846 • Various
... extravagance of life as in the devil's garden on the blue Mediterranean. On landing, I was struck with the number of well-dressed men and women who rub shoulders in the street with the dilapidated-looking mining element. In the same way palatial banks and prim business houses are incongruously scattered amongst saloons and drinking bars. Front Street, facing the sea, is the principal thoroughfare, so crowded at midday that you can scarcely get along. It is paved with wood, imported here at enormous ...
— From Paris to New York by Land • Harry de Windt
... could not help saying to her husband that a precise, prim, old bachelor was the very last person for a hunt in slums and the like. The very sight of him would put the people on their guard. 'And think of his fine words,' she added. 'I wish I could go! If I started with a shawl over my head, yoked to a barrel-organ, I should ...
— Nuttie's Father • Charlotte M. Yonge
... dust. This was a fatal movement for him, for his eyes received part of the libation destined for his hair. He closed them with a disagreeable sensation, after seeing Mademoiselle Reine Gobillot's fresh, chubby face, her figure prim beyond measure in a lilac-and-green plaid gingham dress, and carrying a basket on her arm, a necessary burden to maidens of a certain class who ...
— Gerfaut, Complete • Charles de Bernard
... in which to travel great distances, are very remarkable for their many strange adventures, and I was very much interested but also perturbed when the black garcon placed my bag and overcoat upon the floor at the feet of a very prim lady and left me to stand uncomfortably in the aisle ...
— The Daredevil • Maria Thompson Daviess
... scholar's scales and exercises was given to the master's playing. He was fond of Weber's "Invitation to the Waltz," and he played it with force and precision and the utmost delicacy. Mr. Timm had a pale, smooth, sharp face, a rather prim manner, and a quick, modest gait. He was most simple-hearted, and loved a joke; and his fun was all the more effective from his very sober face and his lisp. It was his wife who was long the most efficient ...
— From the Easy Chair, vol. 1 • George William Curtis
... old mother Prim, don't throw cold water on our little party," said Alicia. "You know how the conversation would run, with uncle at ...
— Two Little Women on a Holiday • Carolyn Wells
... believe it is so," said Valerie demurely. Her little heart was beating confidently again and she seated herself beside Helene d'Enver in the prim circle of delegates intent upon their chairman, who was calling the ...
— The Common Law • Robert W. Chambers
... leaving me bewildered. This was a queen of cannibals; she was tattooed from hand to foot, and perhaps the greatest masterpiece of that art now extant, so that a while ago, before she was grown prim, her leg was one of the sights of Tai-o- hae; she had been passed from chief to chief; she had been fought for and taken in war; perhaps, being so great a lady, she had sat on the high place, and throned it there, alone of her sex, while the drums were going twenty ...
— In the South Seas • Robert Louis Stevenson
... she said, as she rose to go; then, in a burst of confidence, added, "Of course, after all, I don't care so much about it myself—but, you know, my aunt—is so dreadfully prim and proper that she couldn't forgive a thing like this. She'd never let Mr. ...
— Guy Garrick • Arthur B. Reeve
... where a considerable amount of prosperity and a good deal of mental culture is compatible with much personal homely exertion. As the eldest of thirteen, Sarah had to work hard, but all the time she kept a prim little journal, recording, at an age when one is surprised to see her able to write at all, that her mother is too busy to let her go to school, and she must improve herself at home; and this she really did, for her notes, as she grew older, ...
— Pioneers and Founders - or, Recent Workers in the Mission field • Charlotte Mary Yonge
... the garden showed cleared and scarred patches where the children had 'worked,' which meant that they had begun to 'tidy' by pulling up everything that grew, after which they would scrape the bed over with a rake and replace in a prim row as many of the plants as they could get in, and a day or two later the eye would be caught by a square of brown earth, broken by a row of sorry-looking dead or dying plants standing conspicuous and solitary against the wild, untrained vegetation round about, while ...
— The Carroll Girls • Mabel Quiller-Couch
... letters. In all the messages sent him by the schoolma'am, it was the precise, school-grammar wording of them which had irritated him most and impressed him insensibly with the belief that she was too prim to be quite human. The Happy Family had felt all along that they were artists in that line, and they knew that the precise sentences ever carried conviction of their truth. Weary mopped his perspiring face upon a white silk handkerchief and ...
— The Lonesome Trail and Other Stories • B. M. Bower
... had unconsciously laid aside her fan, lifted her mantilla from her head with both hands, and, drawing it around her shoulders and under her lifted chin, had crossed it over her bosom with a certain prim, automatic gesture, as if it had been the starched kerchief of some remote Puritan ancestress. With her arms still unconsciously crossed, she stooped rigidly, picked up her fan with three fingers, as if it had been a prayer-book, and, with a slight inclination of her bared head, with its accurately ...
— The Crusade of the Excelsior • Bret Harte
... priest at the altar, in a great robe of gold and damask, two little boys in white surplices serving him, holding his robe as he rose and bowed, and the money-gatherer swinging his censer, and filling the little chapel with smoke. The music pealed with wonderful sweetness; you could see the prim white heads of the nuns in their gallery. The evening light streamed down upon old statues of saints and carved brown stalls, and lighted up the head of the golden-haired Magdalen in a picture of the entombment of Christ. Over the gallery, and, as it were, a kind protectress to the poor ...
— Little Travels and Roadside Sketches • William Makepeace Thackeray
... gardens of the palace, took his way to the Faubourg St. Germain. There was no change in the aspect of this man: the same meditative tranquillity characterized his downward eyes and bonded brow; the same precise simplicity of dress which had pleased the prim taste of Robespierre gave decorum to his slender, stooping form. No expression more cheerful, no footstep more elastic, bespoke the exile's return to his native land, or the sanguine expectations of Intellect restored to a career. Yet, to all appearance, ...
— Lucretia, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... a trig, not to say prim, spinster, without a vestige of comeliness in her face, save the comeliness of a clear, clean, energetic expression,—such as a new broom or a bright tea-kettle might have, suggesting capacity for house thrift and hearth comfort,—who ...
— A Summer in Leslie Goldthwaite's Life. • Mrs. A. D. T. Whitney
... old-fashioned boys' books was one which taught me that; and therefore I am more grateful to it than if it had been as full of wonderful pictures as all the natural history books you ever saw. Its name was Evenings at Home; and in it was a story called "Eyes and no Eyes;" a regular old-fashioned, prim, sententious story; ...
— Madam How and Lady Why - or, First Lessons in Earth Lore for Children • Charles Kingsley
... house was spotlessly clean, and its aspect was prim and sober, as was indeed that of the whole city. Men in wide-brimmed hats and wide-skirted coats of sombre hue walked the streets, and talked earnestly together at the corners; whilst the women, for the most part, ...
— French and English - A Story of the Struggle in America • Evelyn Everett-Green
... were debarred from benefit of clergy. But 'quint. Eliz.' must have offered some special attraction to poets, since Pope also refers to it in the 'Satires and Epistles', i. 147-8:— Consult the Statute: 'quart'. I think, it is, 'Edwardi sext.' or 'prim. et ...
— The Complete Poetical Works of Oliver Goldsmith • Oliver Goldsmith
... I quote because it is so absurd. The rooms I live in were owned by a prim old woman who for more than twenty years was my landlady. She and I were great friends, indeed she tended me like a mother, and when I was so ill nursed me as perhaps few mothers would have done. Yet while I was watching on the Road suddenly she came by, and with horror I saw that during ...
— The Mahatma and the Hare • H. Rider Haggard
... of our young people to render in a creditable way the conceptions of a great poet? Let us look at the precedents again. When Mademoiselle de Caylus, in her account of St. Cyr, speaks of the representation of Andromaque, she writes, "It was only too well done." And prim Madame de Maintenon wrote to Racine: "Our young girls have played it so well they shall play it no more"; begging him to write some moral or historic poem. Hence came the beautiful masterpiece Esther, to which the young ...
— The Last Leaf - Observations, during Seventy-Five Years, of Men and Events in America - and Europe • James Kendall Hosmer
... into a mess; scrambling through the dripping hedges; swarming over tarry fence and slimy paling. On, on it pants—through Bishop's Wood, by tangled Churchyard Bottom, where now the railway shrieks; down sloppy lanes, bordering Muswell Hill, where now stand rows of jerry-built, prim villas. At intervals it stops an instant to dab its eyes with its dingy little rag of a handkerchief, to rearrange the bundle under its arm, its chief anxiety to keep well out of sight of chance wanderers, to dodge farmhouses, to dart ...
— Paul Kelver • Jerome Klapka, AKA Jerome K. Jerome
... is essential to life. This sober Flemish interior expresses my mistress's character almost as well as her own apartment used to do. I always experienced a chill, a sense of formality, when the door was opened, and while I stood waiting for her in the prim drawing-room. Every chair was in its appointed place, large, gilt-edged, illustrated books lay upon the tables.... There was not much light in her rooms; heavy curtains clung about the windows, and tapestries covered ...
— Memoirs of My Dead Life • George Moore
... had two expressions of countenance—the gracious and the prim. Till lately, Hester had been favoured with the first exclusively. She was now to be amused with variety, and the prim was offered to her contemplation. Never did Mrs Howell look more inaccessible than to-day, when she scarcely rose from her stool behind the counter, to learn ...
— Deerbrook • Harriet Martineau
... it, and every breadth of her skirts always fell in straight, precise folds. From bonnet-strings to shoe-laces there was never a wrinkle or a spot. But the Little Colonel felt no awe. She had discovered that under that prim exterior was a heart thoroughly in sympathy with all her childish joys and griefs, and in consequence the two had become warm friends. Lloyd stood beside the rocking-chair, where she had seated Mrs. Brewster, ...
— The Little Colonel's House Party • Annie Fellows Johnston
... when you realize that even I have had moments when my balance has been disturbed. We have had for some years in this household a housekeeper—one Sarah, with whose second name I have never attempted to burden my memory. She is a woman of a severe and forbidding aspect, prim and demure in her bearing, very impassive in her nature, and never known within our experience to show signs of any emotion. As I sat alone at my breakfast—Mrs. Challenger is in the habit of keeping her room ...
— The Poison Belt • Arthur Conan Doyle
... with British topsails. "While the negotiation is going on," he said, "the Dane should see our flag waving every time he lifts up his head." Time was worth more than gold; it was worth brave men's lives. The Danes were toiling day and night to prepare the defence of their capital. But prim Sir Hyde anchored, and sent up a single frigate with his ultimatum, and it was not until March 30 that the British fleet, a long line of stately vessels, came sailing up the Sound, passed Elsinore, and cast anchor fifteen miles from Copenhagen. Nothing could surpass the gallant ...
— Deeds that Won the Empire - Historic Battle Scenes • W. H. Fitchett
... the depository for his hat and stick and opened the door of the sitting-room. She had barely smiled. Indeed she had not smiled. She had not mentioned the weather. On the other hand, she had not been prim or repellent. She had revealed nothing of herself. Her one feat had been to stimulate mightily his curiosity and his imagination concerning her—rampant enough even before he ...
— The Roll-Call • Arnold Bennett
... of the sentry, on the quarter-deck below him, grounding arms, turned the current of his thoughts. A thin, tall, soldier-like man, with a cold blue eye, and prim features, came out of the cuddy below, handing out a fair-haired, affected, mincing lady, of middle age. Captain Vickers, of Mr. Frere's regiment, ordered for service in Van Diemen's Land, was bringing his lady on deck to get an appetite ...
— For the Term of His Natural Life • Marcus Clarke
... formality in Zoe's garden. Marigolds go wandering about in the most trampish manner, and poppies, because they are privileged characters, spring up as they please. Then, as though the two of them were not sufficient California gold, there is the faithful gaillardia with its prim little sunflower-faces smiling up at ...
— Vignettes of San Francisco • Almira Bailey
... not be imagined that the history of fashion is merely the tale of dressmakers' caprice. The very language of changing ideals is the variation of the toilet. When women were restricted to an oriental extent within convention, when to be "prim" was the aim of life, no feature of dress was lacking that could put "abandonment" of any but a moral kind, out of the question. A shake of the head too quickly and the coiffure was imperilled; the movements that came within the prescribed circle of dignity within the circle of the crinoline were ...
— George Du Maurier, the Satirist of the Victorians • T. Martin Wood
... July till his fluffy hair shook like a dog's ears in fly-time. He pounded his fist on the prim center-table by which Mother had been solemnly reading the picture-captions in the Eternity Filmco's Album of Funny Film Favorites. The statuettes of General Lafayette and Mozart on the false mantel shook with his lusty thumping. ...
— The Innocents - A Story for Lovers • Sinclair Lewis
... eyes—limpid and clear as the dew on Scottish heather. Cheerful they were withal, for they soon began to flit hither and thither, following the motions of Jean's "eident hand" with most housewifely care. And Jean herself, a handmaid prim and ancient, but youthful compared to her mistress, seemed to watch the latter's faintest gesture with most affectionate observance. Of all the light traits which reveal character, none is more suggestive than the sight of a mistress whom ...
— Olive - A Novel • Dinah Maria Craik, (AKA Dinah Maria Mulock)
... hours, during same three or four days, a very prim and devout-looking Episcopal clergyman, with a cast in his eye, had visited Alonzo. According to his card, he was the Rev. Melton Hargrave, of Cincinnati. He said he had retired from the ministry on account of his health. If he had ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... Lanyard was, like all London, on terms of visual acquaintance. The reigning beauty of the hour, her portrait was enjoying a vogue of its own in the public prints. Furthermore, Lady Diantha Mainwaring was moderately the talk of the town, in those prim, remotely ante-bellum days—thanks to high spirits and a whimsical tendency to flout the late Victorian proprieties; something which, however, had yet to lead her into any prank perilous to her ...
— Red Masquerade • Louis Joseph Vance
... garden-wall, and the plaster is peeling off in flakes that hang long and reluctant before falling to the ground. There are quaint gardens everywhere, with sometimes an entrance arched with iron gracefully wrought by some forgotten colonial Quentin Matsys, and always with their paths bordered by prim and fragrant box, and grass that keeps rich and green in an Old World way, by virtue of some secret of growth caught from fresher centuries than ours. If your steps have the right magic in them, you will encounter presently ...
— A Study Of Hawthorne • George Parsons Lathrop
... came down to breakfast, the next morning, I felt that something was in the air. Grandmamma sat so particularly straight up, and my Aunt Dorothea looked so prim, and my Uncle Charles fidgetted about between the fire and the window, like a man who knew of something coming which he wanted to have over. My Aunt Dorothea poured the chocolate in silence. When all were served, Grandmamma took ...
— Out in the Forty-Five - Duncan Keith's Vow • Emily Sarah Holt
... hugely one notable evidence of his persuasive eloquence to be seen in a Lebanon Valley town, inhabited by the quaint folk known as Pennsylvania Germans. All along the line of the railroad traversing this valley may be seen these distorted willows decorating the prim front yards, and they are not so offensive when used with other shrubs and trees. In this one instance, however, the tree agent evidently found a customer who was persuaded that if one Kilmarnock willow was a good thing to have, a dozen of them was twelve times better; wherefore his dooryard ...
— Getting Acquainted with the Trees • J. Horace McFarland
... decidedly the most feminine. "Mrs. Longman hasn't quite caught the true note," the architect remarked. "The base of the fountain is interesting, though I don't care for the shape. But the figure itself is too prim and modish. Somehow I can't think of Ceres as a proper old maid, dressed with modern frills. The execution, however, shows a good deal of skill. The frieze might be improved by the softening of those sharp lines that cut out the figures like ...
— The City of Domes • John D. Barry
... pale-blue negligees that made her stout figure loom immense against the greenery of garden and apple tree. The neighborhood women viewed these negligees with Puritan disapproval as they smoothed down their own prim, starched gingham skirts. They said it was disgusting—and perhaps it was; but the habit of years is not easily overcome. Blanche Devine—snipping her sweet peas, peering anxiously at the Virginia creeper that clung with such fragile fingers to the trellis, ...
— One Basket • Edna Ferber
... consumed all the energy his normal digestion extracted from a wholesome omnivorous diet. When he did discover a bit of surplus energy, he worked it off in the society of his mother and of the conventional minds and prim teas she surrounded herself with. Result: A very nice young man, of whom no maid's mother need ever be in trepidation; a very strong young man, whose substance had not been wasted in riotous living; a very learned young man, with a Freiberg ...
— A Daughter of the Snows • Jack London
... of the secret meaning of human existence, such as one gets sometimes, startlingly, in a mood of idle receptiveness. And it was so sad and so beautiful, so full of an ecstatic melancholy, that I dropped the curtain. And my thought ranged lovingly over our household—prim, regular, and perfect: my old aunt embroidering in the breakfast-room, and Rebecca and Lucy ironing in the impeachable kitchen, and not one of them with the least suspicion that Adam had not really waked up one morning minus a rib. I wandered in fancy all over the ...
— Sacred And Profane Love • E. Arnold Bennett
... aristocratic, but somewhat prim and precise. Nevertheless, when the company had been telling of college pranks, she relaxed slightly, and told of a lark that had caused excitement in Cambridge when she was a girl there. This was to the effect ...
— Jokes For All Occasions - Selected and Edited by One of America's Foremost Public Speakers • Anonymous
... half-naivete, half-jest which Mlle. de Scudery's Norman shrewdness[203] would hardly have allowed. There is also much more of the supernatural in these books than in hers, and the characters are much less prim. Roxana, who, of course, is meant to be naughty, actually sends a bracelet of her hair to Oroondates! which, however, that faithful lover of another ...
— A History of the French Novel, Vol. 1 - From the Beginning to 1800 • George Saintsbury
... colors! Nay, and since that time he has shot many a fiery glance at me. Only lately he wrote to his uncle from Paris that he was minded to make me his wife. Ah, you may open your eyes wide, most respected every-one's-cousin Maud, and you likewise, prim and spotless Mistress Margery! Cross yourselves in the name of all the Saints! A dead wolf cannot bite, and as for my love for that man, I may boldly declare that it is dead and buried. But mark me," and she clapped her hand to her heaving bosom, "mark me, somewhat ...
— Uarda • Georg Ebers
... stopped, the Abbess observing, with a prim aspect, that she had read quite enough concerning such worldly vanities, and the Count of Crevecoeur, breaking out, "Aroint thee, deceitful witch!—Why, this device smells rank as the toasted cheese ...
— Quentin Durward • Sir Walter Scott
... something to tell us, she said, and as she opened the door a delicate pink flush spread over her face. I noted it, with surprise, but no inkling of the truth came to me—for nobody ever connected the idea of possible lovers or marriage with this prim little ...
— Chronicles of Avonlea • Lucy Maud Montgomery
... canaries singing in the pretty little room in which George had slept, but the apartment was in the same prim order in which the laundress had arranged it after the departure of the two young men—not a chair displaced, or so much as the lid of a cigar-box lifted, to bespeak the presence of George Talboys. With a last, lingering hope, he searched upon the mantelpieces ...
— Lady Audley's Secret • Mary Elizabeth Braddon
... but two months before and if perhaps then her younger sister had felt any pang of pity for the orphaned children, it did not enter her thoughts this morning. She plumped up the pillows on the prim horsehair sofa, painfully recalling the pillow fight she had once seen between her cousin's children. Children were a nuisance, and these two—Myra's dreadful boy and girl—were bound to be more ...
— Pearl and Periwinkle • Anna Graetz
... always a man of his word, packed up his portmanteau, and paid his bill. He had just completed this heavy operation, when somebody wanted to speak to him, and a sort of half-clerical, half-legal sort of looking gentleman was introduced, who, with a starched face and prim air, said that he came to request in writing the name of the officer who was dressed as a devil in the masquerade of ...
— Mr. Midshipman Easy • Captain Frederick Marryat
... two women disappear down the long, rubber-carpeted corridor, he began to pace the small, spotlessly neat office in which he had been asked to wait. It was a prim, barren room, heavy with the fumes of iodoform and ether. At intervals, the muffled tread of a doctor or nurse passing through the hall broke its stillness, but otherwise there was not a sound ...
— The Wall Between • Sara Ware Bassett
... strikingly differs from the typical New England village, where the charm comes of a prim uniformity, and individuality is made to give place to a general parking of lawns and shade-trees in rectangular blocks and avenues. A New England village suggests some large institution disposed in separate uniform buildings, placed on one level carpet of green, ...
— Vanishing Roads and Other Essays • Richard Le Gallienne
... having his dramatic entertainment censored by a frail, prim little thing like Miss Beach tickled his burly sense of humor. "It would be a horrible thing if I should go to see anything vulgar, wouldn't it?" he observed. "But I think I'll take a chance. You go ahead ...
— The Real Adventure • Henry Kitchell Webster
... dress, paid due attention to it. She was never seen out of her chamber with papers in her hair, nor in that worst of dis-illusions,—a morning wrapper. At half-past eight every morning Mrs. Mervale was dressed for the day,—that is, till she re-dressed for dinner,—her stays well laced, her cap prim, her gowns, winter and summer, of a thick, handsome silk. Ladies at that time wore very short waists; so did Mrs. Mervale. Her morning ornaments were a thick, gold chain, to which was suspended a gold watch,—none ...
— Zanoni • Edward Bulwer Lytton
... cursed shame that, when you feel a continual propensity to quarrel with a man, he should be such a prince Prim as never to give you an opportunity? And why have I this propensity?—I know not!—Confound the fellow, why does he make himself so great a favourite? Why does he not contrive to be hated a little? And then perhaps ...
— Anna St. Ives • Thomas Holcroft
... graui primus cecinit camoena Aureum vellus, procersque Grcos, quos sibi adiunxit comites Ianson Vectus in Argo Naue, qum primm secuisse fluctus prdicant salsos, sibi comparauit Inde non vnquam moritura magn prmia fam Tanta si merces calamum secuta Vnic nauis referentis acta, Quanta Rachardum manet Hakluytum gloria? cuius Penna descripsit freta mille, mille ...
— The Principal Navigations, Voyages, Traffiques and Discoveries - of the English Nation, v. 1, Northern Europe • Richard Hakluyt
... visit to the scene of the crime—a high, dingy, narrow-chested house, prim, formal, and solid, like the century which gave it birth. Lestrade's bulldog features gazed out at us from the front window, and he greeted us warmly when a big constable had opened the door and let us in. The room ...
— The Return of Sherlock Holmes - Magazine Edition • Arthur Conan Doyle
... prevented me from attempting the higher walks of our profession; but this object of my ambition was gained at last. I had taken a pocket-book from a worthy Quaker, and, unfortunately, was perceived by a man at a shop window, who came out, collared, and delivered me into the hands of the prim gentleman. Having first secured his property, he then walked with me and a police officer to Bow-street. My innocent face, and my tears, induced the old gentleman, who was a member of the Philanthropic Society, not only not to prefer the charge against me, but to ...
— The King's Own • Captain Frederick Marryat
... by its austere surroundings—crowed lustily from the cradle in which, after the fashion of the country, it was tightly strapped. It was a low, grimy room, with one square bit of a window, and far from clean. Dr. Gilly, the prim English biographer of Neff, quaintly says: "Cleanliness is not a virtue which distinguishes any of the people in these mountains; and, with such a nice sense of moral perception as they display, and with such strict attention to the duties of religion, it is astonishing that they have not yet ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science - Vol. XVII, No. 102. June, 1876. • Various
... me alone: I am not thine. Prim Creed, with categoric point, forbear To feature me my Lord by rule and line. Thou canst not measure Mistress Nature's hair, Not one sweet inch: nay, if thy sight is sharp, Would'st count the strings upon an angel's ...
— The Poems of Sidney Lanier • Sidney Lanier
... not believe that in this age God has altered anyone. People love God nowadays as much as the temperaments they were born with tell them to. He has grown too old for miracles. After two thousand years he has no longer the force to turn water into wine. Ellen, I love your dear prim smile. But always, everywhere, I have found the love of men and women doing that. Sometimes the love of places does something very like it. A man may land on a strange island, and abandon the journey on ...
— The Judge • Rebecca West
... something to one of the girls. Then suddenly they all saw me, and that politely enduring look came over all three faces at once, though Mamie Sue's face is so jolly and round by nature that it is very hard to prim it down suddenly, and I don't believe she would always trouble to put it on for me, only Belle seems to demand it of her as an echo of her sentiments toward me. Some people can't seem to be sure of themselves unless they can get somebody else to echo them ...
— Phyllis • Maria Thompson Daviess
... reproducing, for I suppose he is essential to life. This sober Flemish interior expresses my mistress's character almost as well as her own apartment used to do. I always experienced a chill, a sense of formality, when the door was opened, and while I stood waiting for her in the prim drawing-room. Every chair was in its appointed place, large, gilt-edged, illustrated books lay upon the tables.... There was not much light in her rooms; heavy curtains clung about the windows, and tapestries covered the walls. In the passage there were oak chests, ...
— Memoirs of My Dead Life • George Moore
... Caverly Cutting. 14 female characters. 1 interior scene, plain or elaborate, as may be desired. Time, 1-1/2 hours. Particularly adapted for girls' high schools. The action of the play occurs in Boston. The cast, including as it does two Southern girls, a prim Boston matron, an old darkey mammy, an Irish maid, the "twinnies" and the other Boston residents, gives great scope for ...
— Three Hats - A Farcical Comedy in Three Acts • Alfred Debrun
... another ally who would be more subservient than Russia. One of the many revolutions which had harassed Spain during this century had broken out. Queen Isabella had lost the throne, and General Prim found himself obliged to look about for a new sovereign. He applied in vain to all the Catholic Courts; nobody was anxious to accept an honour coupled with such danger as ruling over the Spanish people. Among others he applied ...
— Bismarck and the Foundation of the German Empire • James Wycliffe Headlam
... Nobody, republished from Mr. Punch's pages, but with considerable additions. The Diary is very funny, not a page of it but affords matter for a good laugh; and yet the story is not without a touch of pathos, as it is impossible not to pity the steady, prim, old-fashioned jog-trot NOBODY, whose son, but just one remove above a regular 'ARRY, treats him with ...
— Punch, Or The London Charivari, Vol. 103, July 23, 1892 • Various
... for it would make him feel so miserable. But I think, Red, when you looked down you did not look prim enough—you know papa said 'prim.' Now, you stand, ...
— What Necessity Knows • Lily Dougall
... before Bessie came down. She was a great invalid, although her prim and rigid countenance forbore any expression save of severity. She had no pathos about her, not a touch. Whatever her bodily sufferings may have been—and Bessie dimly hinted that they were severe to agony at times—they were resolutely shut within her chamber door; and when she came out ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Vol. XII, No. 29. August, 1873. • Various
... save amusement. Miss Guile was watching through half-closed eyes. There was a noticeable stiffening of the prim ...
— The Prince of Graustark • George Barr McCutcheon
... irresistible fascination—Bonaparte with his little band crossing the bridge at Arcola amid showers of bullets. And then our own generals, not to go further—Espartero at Luchana, O'Donnel in Africa, and, above all, Prim, that almost legendary leader, directing the battalion at Castillejos with his sword. 'I wish to be the same,' say these youths; 'where one man has arrived another may also succeed'; enthusiasm is taken for predestination, ...
— The Shadow of the Cathedral • Vicente Blasco Ibanez
... feeling of pique with which they at first received such a rebuff to their curiosity, have been a very evanescent one in the minds of the villagers, had it not chanced that Aberdeen was blessed (?) with two prim sister-spinsters, (was it they or Aunt Nora, who formed the exception to the general rule? I leave it for thee, dear reader, to decide, since with that early-instilled reverence before mentioned, I cannot consider my humble opinion infallible,) ...
— Graham's Magazine Vol XXXIII No. 3 September 1848 • Various
... pier in the moonlight, leaving me bewildered. This was a queen of cannibals; she was tattooed from hand to foot, and perhaps the greatest masterpiece of that art now extant, so that a while ago, before she was grown prim, her leg was one of the sights of Tai-o- hae; she had been passed from chief to chief; she had been fought for and taken in war; perhaps, being so great a lady, she had sat on the high place, and throned it there, alone of ...
— In the South Seas • Robert Louis Stevenson
... pretty, too stylish, to suit the prim Eudora, who felt keenly how she must suffer by comparison with her sister's waiting maid. Even unsuspicious Anna saw the point, and smiling archly asked "what she could do to make ...
— Bad Hugh • Mary Jane Holmes
... father, like the one in which your worship took part. These charges are not, as one might say, greatly to the taste of the Moors, who, when they hear the call to the charge, to which we have given the name of General Prim's Polka, tremble and turn pale and fall back. [Note: It may properly be related here that this same division, with its leader, General Prim, reconnoitring at a few leagues distance from Tetuan, came upon a poor old Moorish woman, sick and abandoned by her people; and that putting her on a stretcher, ...
— Stories by Foreign Authors: Spanish • Various
... rouse my audience?" She slowed her steps, and he slowed to keep by her side. She lifted her clear face proudly. "I tell you," she said, "the part I am to play to-night will move Europe to its core. Paris! Berlin! Vienna! Even cautious prim London! I have them under my hand; even to-morrow they will be asking an account, crying for the heads of the wrongdoers on a charger. And you ask me if that ...
— The Second Class Passenger • Perceval Gibbon
... 's nought but shy finesse, And mim and prim 'bout mess and dress, That scarce a hand a hand will press Wi' ought o' feeling free; A cauldrife pride aside has laid The hodden gray, and hame-spun plaid, And a' is changed since neebors said Just, ...
— The Modern Scottish Minstrel, Volume III - The Songs of Scotland of the Past Half Century • Various
... stout and prim, a combination which was surely never intended by nature. Her gray dress and tight linen collar and cuffs gave the uncomfortable impression of being sewed on, while her rigid black water-waves seemed irrevocably painted upon her high forehead. ...
— Lovey Mary • Alice Hegan Rice
... zone, Where vines and weeds and scrub-oaks intertwine Safe from the plough, whose rough, discordant stone 80 Is massed to one soft gray by lichens fine, The tangled blackberry, crossed and recrossed, weaves A prickly network of ensanguined leaves; Hard by, with coral beads, the prim black-alders shine. ...
— The Complete Poetical Works of James Russell Lowell • James Lowell
... a number. Let me see: there's Neb (he's an old black fellow—Nebuchadnezzar), and Miss Snowflake, Aunt Chloe (after the one in Uncle Tom's Cabin), Fanny Elssler (because she jumps about so), and Mr. Prim—- he is the stillest ...
— Prince Lazybones and Other Stories • Mrs. W. J. Hays
... and we went on for a while, braying and laughing, until I began to grow a-weary of it, and, shouting a derisive farewell, turned to pursue my way. In so doing—it was like going suddenly into cold water—I found myself face to face with a prim little old maid. She was all in a flutter, the poor old dear! She had concluded beyond question that this must be a lunatic who stood laughing aloud at a white donkey in the placid beech-woods. I was ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. XXII (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... was only this mist which he now saw, terrifying and confusing him. He was a little man, and knew it. He was a poor man, and knew it. He was a weary man, and knew it. He hated his wife, and knew it. He hated his children—whom she had made like herself, prim, peeking and ...
— The Best British Short Stories of 1922 • Edward J. O'Brien and John Cournos, editors
... morning hours and are quickly passed. The forenoon is marked by lilacs, apple blooms and roses. The day's meridian is reached with lilies, red carnations, and the dusky splendor of pansies and passion flowers. Then come the languid poppy and the prim little 4 o'clock, the marigold, the sweet pea, and later the dahlia and the many-tinted chrysanthemum to mark the day's decline. Lastly the goldenrod, the aster and the gentian, tell us it is evening time, and night and frost are ...
— A String of Amber Beads • Martha Everts Holden
... singularly quaint-looking personage presented himself. He was very stiff and prim in his appearance; dressed in a blue coat and scarlet waistcoat, with a rich bandanna handkerchief tied very neatly round his neck, and a very new hat, to which his head ...
— The Young Duke • Benjamin Disraeli
... but a curious and rather pathetic thing is that, although it must be a hundred years since the place was deserted, there are still multitudes of flowers which must have come from those in the old garden. There are iris and narcissus and a little blue flower, with a neat, prim, clean smell that makes one feel as if it ought to be put with lavender into chests of fresh old linen. The narcissus in particular was growing around everywhere, together with real wild flowers like the painted columbine and star of Bethlehem. It was a lovely spot on a headland overlooking ...
— Letters to His Children • Theodore Roosevelt
... had a sunny disposition and liked life in the nunnery, and had a natural aptitude for the pretty table manners which she learnt there, as well as for talking French, and though she was not at all prim and liked the gay clothes and pet dogs which she used to see at home in her mother's bower, still she had no hesitation at all about taking the veil when she was fifteen, and indeed she rather liked the fuss that was made of her, and being called Madame or Dame, which was the courtesy title ...
— Medieval People • Eileen Edna Power
... who returns to a New England homestead after long residence abroad, and endeavors to do her duty in the station to which Providence has called her. Prim, pale, pretty, and not youthful except in heart.—Annie Kilburn, by William ...
— Character Sketches of Romance, Fiction and the Drama, Vol 1 - A Revised American Edition of the Reader's Handbook • The Rev. E. Cobham Brewer, LL.D.
... the first bright days of April came a change. He was going back to England, he told her, one Saturday afternoon, as they sat, lover-like, side by side, in the prim salon. She gave a low cry at the words, and looked at him with wild, ...
— The Baronet's Bride • May Agnes Fleming
... high-featured matron, encased in the rigidity of her Sunday bombazine, gave a prim poke with her umbrella in the ribs of a sparrow-like little man, with a discoloured, scraggy beard, who nodded in one ...
— The Deliverance; A Romance of the Virginia Tobacco Fields • Ellen Glasgow
... sighed at the word. Comfortable! Was she to give her mind to making Fred and his children comfortable—such a creature as this? Involuntarily it occurred to Edward that, under such ministrations, sundry changes might come over the aspect of that prim apartment in which he had seen her first; the room with the bookcase and the red curtains, and the prints over the mantelpiece—a very tidy, comfortable room before any bewitching imp came to haunt it, and whisper suspicions of its imperfection—the doctor's ...
— The Doctor's Family • Mrs. (Margaret) Oliphant
... the bedroom with the tray, on my arm is that badge of pride, the towel; and I approach with prim steps to inform Madam that breakfast is ready, and she puts on the society manner and addresses me as 'Sir,' and asks with cruel sarcasm for what purpose (except to boast) I carry the towel, and I say 'Is there anything more I can do for Madam?' and Madam replies that there ...
— Margaret Ogilvy • James M. Barrie
... con cone slim slime froze cub cube glad glade these nod node snip snipe gaze met mete shot shote rise plat plate spin spine size flam flame plan plane wise shad shade strip stripe haze mop mope grim grime rose whit white twin twine daze sham shame prim prime those scrap scrape plum ...
— The Beacon Second Reader • James H. Fassett
... desire and yet afraid to dare. No nicety of conscience held me now, rather apprehension. I had not lived my one and twenty years without learning that a young woman may be free of speech and yet discreet of action, that alluring eyes are oft mismated with prim maiden conscience. 'Tis in the blood of some of them to throw down the gauntlet to a man's courage and then to trample on him for daring ...
— A Daughter of Raasay - A Tale of the '45 • William MacLeod Raine
... too funny; she turned around and said, very prim and stiff, 'No, indeed; I'm too old a woman.' Funny! If I think of that on my deathbed I ...
— A Man's Woman • Frank Norris
... looked round, and her eyes fell upon the last of the photograph-albums—the one she had yawned over. She picked it up, propped it on her knees, and, lying back against the cushions, turned the pages over. These were all children, prim children with tidy hair and solemn faces. Mollie stopped at the picture of a girl dressed in a wide-skirted, sprigged-muslin frock. Her hair fell in plump curls from beneath a broad-brimmed hat with long ribbons floating over one shoulder. Her legs were very conspicuous ...
— The Happy Adventurers • Lydia Miller Middleton
... his knowledge of Italian literature is confined to a few of the most popular of Petrarch's sonnets, and an imperfect acquaintance with Ariosto, through the medium of Mr. Hoole. As to the French poets, he dismisses them in the mass as a set of prim, precise, unnatural pretenders. The truth is, he is in a state of happy ignorance about them and all that they have done. He has never read Zaire nor Phedre. To those great German poets who have illuminated the last fifty years with ...
— Famous Reviews • Editor: R. Brimley Johnson
... and the daguerreotype of his father. These were his sacred relics, and with them was a bundle of cedar twigs to keep the fragrance ever there—to keep continually with them the power, through smell, to conjure up those days and thoughts of her love. Belle took them reverently and gazed at the prim old pictures; then she looked him squarely in the eyes, intensely for a moment, like one who looks through a veil for the first time and sees a hidden ...
— The Preacher of Cedar Mountain - A Tale of the Open Country • Ernest Thompson Seton
... part, intended his youngest daughter to be a model of prim propriety. He attributed to Flavia's frivolity of behaviour the difficulty he experienced in finding her a husband, and he had no intention of exposing himself to a second failure in the case of Faustina. She should marry in her first season, and if she chose to be gay ...
— Sant' Ilario • F. Marion Crawford
... do compare our own age with that of Pericles, and congratulate themselves on the reawakening of the feeling of patriotism: I remember a parody on the funeral oration of Pericles by G. Freytag,[9] in which this prim and strait-laced "poet" depicted the happiness now experienced by sixty-year-old men.—All pure and simple caricature! So this is the result! And sorrow and irony and seclusion are all that remain for him who has seen ...
— We Philologists, Volume 8 (of 18) • Friedrich Nietzsche
... pauperism, and patriotism,—these and suchlike stupendous subjects for reflection, all branching more or less intricately from the single idea of the Castleton property, the young lord discussed and disposed of in half-a-dozen prim, poised sentences; evincing, I must say in justice, no inconsiderable information, and a mighty solemn turn of mind. The oddity was that the subjects so selected and treated should not come rather from some young barrister, or mature political ...
— The Caxtons, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... the last man in the world with whom you would have associated romance, and it was hard to see what there was in him to arouse love. In the clothes he wore now he looked podgier than ever, and his round spectacles gave his round face the look of a prim cherub. He suggested rather a curate who had gone to the dogs. His conversation was peppered with the quaintest Americanisms, and it is because I despair of reproducing these that, at whatever loss of vividness, I mean to narrate the story he told me a little later in my own words. ...
— The Trembling of a Leaf - Little Stories of the South Sea Islands • William Somerset Maugham
... a regular "character;" and, from the first, had been feared as our stumbling-block. He was a perfect martinet; a prim, precise, black-stock'd, military, Miss Nancy. He neither ate nor drank, neither talked nor smiled, but paraded the deck with a grim air of iron severity, as if resolved to preserve his own "discipline" if he could not ...
— Captain Canot - or, Twenty Years of an African Slaver • Brantz Mayer
... spoke with the prim decision of a teacher instructing a class, but that seemed to be only his way, and Helen May was growing used to it. "His evidencing a tendency toward sluggishness to-day, and his subsequent irritability, may or may not be significant ...
— Starr, of the Desert • B. M Bower
... by nature, recorded his mind in some two thousand printed pages, and Roger Williams even to-day looms up with all the more power because we have become "rather fatigued by the monotony of so vast a throng of sages and saints, all quite immaculate, all equally prim and stiff in their Puritan starch and uniform, all equally automatic and freezing." It is most comfortable to find anyone defying the rigid and formal law of the time, whether spoken or implied, and we have positive ...
— Anne Bradstreet and Her Time • Helen Campbell
... was about to cross the dewy band of grass which bordered the road, when he recollected that he had just put on clean boots, and the result of a scramble through and among brambles would be unsatisfactory for their appearance in the rector's prim study. So the berries hung in their place, left to ripen, and he went on till a great dragon-fly came sailing along the moist lane to pause in the sunny openings, and poise itself in the clear air where its wings vibrated so rapidly that they looked ...
— The Weathercock - Being the Adventures of a Boy with a Bias • George Manville Fenn
... York millionaires' sons who had been sent there to spend their college vacation and get toughened (the process was obviously succeeding); they made Nimrod apologise for keeping his coat on during dinner; the three brothers who owned the ranch, and the wife of one of them; several children; a prim and proper spinster from Washington—how she got there, who can tell?—and Miss Belle Hadley, the ...
— A Woman Tenderfoot • Grace Gallatin Seton-Thompson
... has other hundreds of volumes waiting to be read. But somehow he has never thought of sending me back my shabby old Gibbon. And that was the way with my Montaigne—gone. And here were two editions of Gulliver. I lent one to a nephew of the Harringtons and the other to a rather prim young lady from Boston who impressed me as having had too much Emerson. My Shelley is gone. My 'Rousseau's Confessions' is also gone." And Cooper smiled at ...
— The Patient Observer - And His Friends • Simeon Strunsky
... "La vie d'une femme." They were painted rather in a remarkable style—flat, dead, pale, and formal. The first represented a "Jeune Fille," coming out of a church-door, a missal in her hand, her dress very prim, her eyes cast down, her mouth pursed up—the image of a most villanous little precocious she-hypocrite. The second, a "Mariee," with a long white veil, kneeling at a prie-dieu in her chamber, holding her hands plastered together, ...
— Villette • Charlotte Bronte
... light under the sea, and there was little time to dress for dinner when I brought them to anchor for the night. The nice old hotel, with its Delft plates half covering the walls, its alcoves and unexpected stairways with green balusters, and its old dining-room looking on a prim garden, pleased the eyes which find all things in ...
— The Chauffeur and the Chaperon • C. N. Williamson
... grey passage in the dawn. The girls' door was open; for the girls were afraid of robbers, and left their bed-room door wide open at night, as a natural and obvious means of self-defence. The girls slept together; and the frill of the pale sister's prim little night-cap was buried in the ...
— Melchior's Dream and Other Tales • Juliana Horatia Ewing
... his composition. "If I were a young man going a-courting I'd scent my letters with rose or something nice, and I'd write 'em on pink paper—I would!" Susan reflected. But Lisle was wiser. There is no perfume for a young ladies' school like a whiff of cigar-smoke. To that prim, half convent-like seclusion, where manners are being formed and the proprieties are strictly observed, it comes as a pleasant suggestion of something worldly and masculine, just a little wicked and ...
— Lippincott's Magazine, Vol. 22, September, 1878 • Various
... the moon and as beautiful as light. The rapid and constant motion of the foliage of the poplar and the aspen reminds him of some nervous and excitable person who is never quiet or easy for a moment. The prim spruce-tree suggests to him some person of formal habits and primness of dress. The symmetrical maple and pine remind him of some quiet and dignified character who is well balanced and rounded at every point. The patriarchal tree which has outlived all its companions ...
— The Road and the Roadside • Burton Willis Potter
... in her life Ann Veronica was utterly disgusted with herself; she was wrung with a passionate and belated desire to move gently, to speak softly and ambiguously—to be, in effect, prim. ...
— Ann Veronica • H. G. Wells
... with a force of carabineers and troops of the line. On entering, he ordered the suspected depot of goods to be surrounded, and gave notice to the second alcalde of the town to attend to assist him in the search. In some time the second alcalde presented himself, and at the instance of M. Prim dispersed some groups of the inhabitants who had assumed a hostile attitude. In a few minutes after, and just as some shots were fired, the first alcalde of the town appeared, and stated that the whole population was in a ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Vol. 53, No. 331, May, 1843 • Various
... she was short. He was bulky, promising to be fat. She was thin, and, with a paring here and there, would have been skinny. His face was sternly resolute, solemn indeed, hers was prim, and primness is the most everlasting, indestructible trait of humanity. It can outface the Sphinx. It is destructible only by death. Whoever has married a prim woman must hand over his breeches and his purse, he will collect postage stamps in his old age, ...
— Here are Ladies • James Stephens
... no explanations. It stood as usual, large and prim and precise, the very acme of solid, sober wealth and assertive moral rectitude. He was strongly tempted to call and ask for Miss Brandt, but it was only ten o'clock in the morning, and the house looked so truly an embodiment ...
— Pearl of Pearl Island • John Oxenham
... an advantage, for I became well acquainted with several young men fond of natural science. One of these was Ainsworth, who afterwards published his travels in Assyria; he was a Wernerian geologist, and knew a little about many subjects. Dr. Coldstream was a very different young man, prim, formal, highly religious, and most kind-hearted; he afterwards published some good zoological articles. A third young man was Hardie, who would, I think, have made a good botanist, but died early in India. Lastly, Dr. Grant, my senior by several years, but how I became acquainted with him I cannot ...
— The Life and Letters of Charles Darwin, Volume I • Francis Darwin
... seated erect and prim on what had once been a hill of potatoes, her bonnet perched rakishly on one ear, and her grey toupee partially disarranged, hanging with its sustaining hairpins over her eyes, was Mrs. Mackintosh, ...
— His Lordship's Leopard - A Truthful Narration of Some Impossible Facts • David Dwight Wells
... displease you, but I love you, old woman, I do indeed. And whatever I may have said in the past I 'take back' as we bushmen say, and I want you to give me some of your affection. I know you have tons of it concealed under that prim little manner of yours, but you are too proud to show it. And see, Lizzie, old girl, I'm not really the reckless scallawag you think me to be," and he stroked her hair, and looked so earnestly and pleadingly into her eyes, that her woman's heart triumphed, and she leant her head ...
— Tom Gerrard - 1904 • Louis Becke
... a cousin to the Queen of England, himself a Coburg, finally declined the honour. And Spain could not wait. There was a certain picturesqueness in Prim, the usual ornamental General through whose hands Spain has passed and repassed during the last century. He was a hard man, and the men of Spain, unlike the French, understand a martinet. But Spain could not wait. She must have a king; for the regency was ...
— The Velvet Glove • Henry Seton Merriman
... that her power reached its full development, and she even took prizes in magazines and newspapers for some stories with what her friends called "prim heroes and pasteboard heroines," classifications which she good-naturedly accepted, as she readily acknowledged that she had no gift ...
— Literary Hearthstones of Dixie • La Salle Corbell Pickett
... the consent of her guardians. Now her guardians were four in number, and their characters so widely different that "they never agreed on any one thing." They were sir Philip Modelove, an old beau; Mr. Periwinkle, a silly virtuoso; Mr. Tradelove, a broker on 'Change; and Mr. Obadiah Prim, a hypocritical quaker. Colonel Feignwell contrived to flatter all the guardians to the top of their bent, and won the ...
— Character Sketches of Romance, Fiction and the Drama, Vol 1 - A Revised American Edition of the Reader's Handbook • The Rev. E. Cobham Brewer, LL.D.
... wouldn't leave one snap to meet its partner. Come on Judy," the feet were again on the rug, "we will be simply dead in the morning, and we have got to be very much alive. We do miss the Weatherbee. I don't see why we let her go. Dear, prim, prompt Weatherbee! Now we know we loved her. Her successor is too young to ...
— Jane Allen: Junior • Edith Bancroft
... big, prim old Howe house sits Madam Howe. She is called Madam to distinguish her from her daughter-in-law, Mrs. George Howe. She is a regal old lady of eighty-three and spends most of her time in her room up-stairs where are gathered the wonderful ...
— Green Valley • Katharine Reynolds
... the hall, Helen following her, feeling extremely old and prim. Grandma Armstrong's bedroom was at the back of the house overlooking the orchard and kitchen-garden. She was sitting up in bed, a very handsome little old lady in cap and ribbons. She gave the strange girl's hand ...
— The End of the Rainbow • Marian Keith
... off and a few moments later a girl entered the office—if the prim little wisp that was Lucy Crane could be so ...
— The Big Tomorrow • Paul Lohrman
... Tredgold sat in the private office of Tredgold and Son, land and estate agents, gazing through the prim wire blinds at the peaceful High Street of Binchester. Tredgold senior, who believed in work for the young, had left early. Tredgold junior, glad at an opportunity of sharing his father's views, had passed most of the work on to ...
— Dialstone Lane, Complete • W.W. Jacobs
... Islands, and whom Ormond had never seen, was to accompany Dora on her return to Corny Castle: our young hero had settled it in his head that this aunt must be something like Aunt Ellenor in Sir Charles Grandison; a stiff-backed, prim, precise, old-fashioned looking aunt. Never was man's astonishment more visible in his countenance than was that of Harry Ormond on the first sight of Dora's aunt. His surprise was so great as to preclude ...
— Tales & Novels, Vol. IX - [Contents: Harrington; Thoughts on Bores; Ormond] • Maria Edgeworth
... joined the league against him, have you, Miss Heritage?" said Edna. "But, of course, you would condemn anyone who failed to conform to your prim, governessy little notions of right and wrong. I might have known as much! I am only sorry I should have gone out of my way to offer you a privilege you are so incapable of appreciating. You ...
— In Brief Authority • F. Anstey
... advance of the Right Wing with the First Division. He moved from camp at 6 A.M. on the Edmondson pike, on which he was ordered to move to Prim's blacksmith shop, from whence he was to march direct on a country road to Nolinsville. The Third Division under Sheridan moved on the Nolinsville pike, followed by the Second under Johnson. The advance of both these columns encountered ...
— The Army of the Cumberland • Henry M. Cist
... you talk," continued his instructor, "and I felt satisfied that Major Carter, if a spy, would hardly have wasted his efforts in such a prim presentation of his facts." He glanced at his watch. "He would have doubtless used cipher. Josef is due in just one minute now. There he comes," he said, as there was a low rap at the door. ...
— Trusia - A Princess of Krovitch • Davis Brinton
... path round the world, and failed, though by no fault of their own. The man who pledges them better luck next time, is George Fenner, known to "the seven Portugals," Leicester's pet, and captain of the galleon which Elizabeth bought of him. That short prim man in the huge yellow ruff, with sharp chin, minute imperial, and self-satisfied smile, is Richard Hawkins, the Complete Seaman, Admiral John's hereafter famous and hapless son. The elder who is talking with him is his good uncle ...
— Westward Ho! • Charles Kingsley
... the coyne of Constantinople sometyme called Bizant{i}um; and because you shall not thinke this any fic{ti}one of myne owne, Iwill warrante the same with Williame of Malmesberye in the fourthe booke De Regibus, who hathe these wordes: Constantinopolis prim{u}m Bizantiu{m} dicta forma{m} antiqui vocabuli preferu{n}t imperatorii nu{m}mi Bizantiu{m} dicta; where one other coppye for nummi Bizantiu{m} hath Bizantini nu{m}mi, and the frenche hath yt besante or ...
— Animaduersions uppon the annotacions and corrections of some imperfections of impressiones of Chaucer's workes - 1865 edition • Francis Thynne
... But, of course, if you want a clean hearthstone and the logs roosting upon the andirons, and are devoid of all the camp-fire sentiment, have some asbestos gas-logs. There will be no dust or dirt, no covering up at night with ashes, no bill for cord-wood, and it will look as stiff and prim as any New England old maid and be as devoid of sentiment and art as a ...
— Shelters, Shacks and Shanties • D.C. Beard
... was spotlessly clean, and its aspect was prim and sober, as was indeed that of the whole city. Men in wide-brimmed hats and wide-skirted coats of sombre hue walked the streets, and talked earnestly together at the corners; whilst the women, for the most part, passed on their way with lowered eyes, and hoods drawn ...
— French and English - A Story of the Struggle in America • Evelyn Everett-Green
... just in front of us." Mrs. Thesiger laughed and her head fell back upon her pillow. But during that movement her eyes had never left her daughter's face. "A middle-aged man with stiff gray hair, a stiff, prim face, and a figure like a ramrod. Oh, there never was anything so stiff." A noticeable bitterness began to sound in her voice and increased as she went on. "There was an old woman with him as precise and old-fashioned ...
— Running Water • A. E. W. Mason
... of me," she said, with a little break in her voice. "Bert used to be the same. But he's different now. He knows I wasn't made prim ...
— The Odds - And Other Stories • Ethel M. Dell
... la Valliere," Saint-Aignan continued, "she was brought up under the care of the Dowager Madame, that is to say, in the greatest austerity and formality. This young engaged couple coldly exchanged their little vows in the prim presence of the moon and stars; and now, when they find they have to break those vows asunder, it plays the very deuce ...
— Louise de la Valliere • Alexandre Dumas, Pere
... architecture astonishing in sheer extravagance and variety. Gabled houses, red-tiled and gay with rough-cast and fresh paint; dull, sad-faced houses with sleepy windows like half-shut eyes; square, solid Georgian houses for doctors with white chokers and snuff-boxes, and prim old ladies with mittened wrists; low, little dolls'-houses, red brick neatly pointed; tall, slim houses graceful with slender casements and light shafts of wood; casements nobly elaborate in wood-carving and heavy with leaded panes; bay windows which should belong to nurseries and high, square-latticed ...
— Highways and Byways in Surrey • Eric Parker
... wondering out loud, so that Georgina heard her, and wanted to say things back—shocking things, such as Rosa said to Joseph. But she never said them. There was always that old silver porringer, sitting prim and ...
— Georgina of the Rainbows • Annie Fellows Johnston
... fire came driving straight for it the fire with the wind behind. 'Which things are a parable,' he said, his ugly sunburnt face twitching curiously, his eyes quite handsome, nay, even splendid with honest scorn. He was shaking his fist towards the prim little dorp that we had left behind over the ridges. 'No doubt but ye are the people,' he said, 'ye that have made the freedom of England and the franchise of Jesus of no effect by your tradition your sacrosanct tradition. What's the good of the frowsy old stuff? It must be ...
— Cinderella in the South - Twenty-Five South African Tales • Arthur Shearly Cripps
... Cope, and disparaged him as before—when he did not ignore him altogether. If Amy had but been rescued by him, George F. Pearson, instead of by this Bertram Cope, and if she had been snatched from a disorderly set of breakers at the foot of those disheveled sandhills instead of from the prim, prosy, domestic edge of Churchton—well, wouldn't the affair have been better set and better carried off? In such case it might have been picturesque and heroic, instead ...
— Bertram Cope's Year • Henry Blake Fuller
... a little smile in my hair early in the morning," replies quick, cheery Bel. "It never crimps decidedly, and it all gets straightened out prim enough as the day's work comes on. It's like the grass of the field, and a good many other things; in the morning it is fresh and springeth up; in the evening it giveth up, and is ...
— The Other Girls • Mrs. A. D. T. Whitney
... only separated by a green hedge, with no gate, so that Cecy spent two-thirds of her time at Dr. Carr's, and was exactly like one of the family. She was a neat, dapper, pink-and-white-girl, modest and prim in manner, with light shiny hair, which always kept smooth, and slim hands, which never looked dirty. How different from my poor Katy! Katy's hair was forever in a snarl; her gowns were always catching on nails and tearing "themselves"; and, in spite of her ...
— What Katy Did • Susan Coolidge
... where we find them enrolled, for instance, in the service of the King of France, and having revenge on their oppressors on the field of Fontenoy. Elsewhere in every country of Europe do we discover them or their descendants in the front ranks, and at the helm of affairs—in Spain, O'Donnell and Prim; in France, Mac Mahon and Lally Tollendal; in Austria, O'Taafe ...
— Percy Bysshe Shelley as a Philosopher and Reformer • Charles Sotheran
... which has not escaped comment, in offering to the Commander-in-Chief his services as second in command of the army. He did right. Battalions and brigades could hardly have strengthened the hands of the general, and invigorated the spirits of the troops, so much as the active accession of Hardinge. Prim etiquette may pucker its thin lips, and solemn discretion knit its ponderous brows; but neither discipline nor prudence ran any risk of being injured or affronted by the veteran of the Peninsula. What the exigency required, he knew; what the exigency exacted, ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 59, No. 367, May 1846 • Various
... he kept up a desultory correspondence, had expressed her regret in a letter written in the stiff, carefully worded style of "sweet sixteen," and he had never guessed the passion of disappointment which the prim ...
— Peak and Prairie - From a Colorado Sketch-book • Anna Fuller
... nearest it,—a small, plainly furnished apartment, with an almost conventual simplicity in its cold, white walls and draperies, and the narrow, nun-like bed. It struck him that it might have belonged to some prim elder daughter or maiden aunt, who had acted as housekeeper, as it commanded the wing and servants' offices, with easy access to ...
— Clarence • Bret Harte
... Miss Mordaunt was hardly the woman to be intrusted with a girl's education. She was a gentle, shallow creature, with narrow views of life, very prim and puritanical—orthodox, she would have called it—and she brought up Fay in the old-fashioned way in which she herself had been brought up. Fay never mixed with young people; she had no companions of her own age; but people were beginning to talk of her in the neighborhood. Fay's youth, ...
— Wee Wifie • Rosa Nouchette Carey
... appearance in the schoolhouse, to the delight of the scholars and the gentle satisfaction of Mrs. Martin, who, in addition to the rudimentary musical instruction of the younger girls, occasionally played upon it herself in a prim, refined, and conscientious fashion. To this, when she was alone after school hours, she sometimes added a faint, colorless voice of limited range and gentlewomanly expression. It was on one of these occasions that Twing, ...
— Colonel Starbottle's Client and Other Stories • Bret Harte
... King and the Tories, and considered that the presumption of the colonists must be put down with a high hand. They little knew of what stuff the descendants of the Pilgrim Fathers—the sturdy Puritans, the dashing Cavaliers, the prim Quakers, and of many other classes whom persecution, poverty, or their crimes, had driven from Europe—were made, as I had full many opportunities afterwards of discovering. A just and judicious policy which at once would ...
— Hurricane Hurry • W.H.G. Kingston
... High Lords, deep Statesmen, Dutchesses, and Whores; All ranks and stations, Publicans and Peers, Grooms, Lawyers, Fiddlers, Bawds, and Auctioneers; Prudes and Coquettes, the Ugly and the Fair, The Pert, the Prim, the Dull, the Debonnair; The Weak, the Strong, the Humble and the Proud, All help'd to form the ...
— The First of April - Or, The Triumphs of Folly: A Poem Dedicated to a Celebrated - Duchess. By the author of The Diaboliad. • William Combe
... piquancy just like Jacqueline's now. He even saw the pickaninnies in the shade of the porch outside, worshiping the real Missouri girl from the very whites of their eyes. How he had loved to tease her! He could not help it; she was so daintily prim. That he should thus think of his sister, the while gazing on the one-time gilded butterfly—to say the least, it was a pertinent comment on the transmuting magic that ...
— The Missourian • Eugene P. (Eugene Percy) Lyle
... a rustle of dresses down the stairs outside, and two thin little girls, looking excessively proper and prim, came in with an elderly gentlewoman who was their governess and wore a pince-nez to impart the necessary suggestion of a superior intellect. They were the Miss Mutlows, sisters of one of the day-boarders, and attended the course by special favour as friends ...
— Vice Versa - or A Lesson to Fathers • F. Anstey
... place is a suburb of the second city in Ireland, and one of the most beautiful spots about the town. What a prim, bustling, active, green-railinged, tea-gardened, gravel-walked place would it have been in the five-hundredth town in England!—but you see the people can be quite as happy in the rags and without the paint, and I hear a great deal more heartiness and affection from these children than ...
— Seeing Europe with Famous Authors - Vol. II Great Britain And Ireland, Part Two • Francis W. Halsey
... FEESH. He is deep, that FEESH. So deep I no can understand hims. They tella me much other peoples no can understand hims too. He makee much policee with his Foreign Relations. I ask a much people to tella me who are his Foreign Relations. They laugh great deal and tella me Spain and General PRIM. No knowee Spain countree in Japan. I no tink it much of a countree, no havee muchee—how you call—Commerce. One ting puzzle me great deal. Here much freedom. Sometimes I tink, too much. But that Island—how ...
— Punchinello, Vol. 1, No. 17, July 23, 1870 • Various
... vaccination and fresh air! or a reading of John Gilpin or the Pied Piper. Mamsey, you know a model parish stifles me. I can't stand your prim school-children, drilled in the Catechism, and your old women who get out the Bible and the clean apron when they see you a quarter of a mile off. Free air and open minds for me! No, I won't have you sighing, mother. You have returned to your native element, and you ...
— More Bywords • Charlotte M. Yonge
... at his companions as if they had in some way betrayed him; while the fat clergyman stood with his umbrella up, staring stolidly with big, frightened eyes at the camel-men. Cecil Brown curled his small, prim moustache, and looked white, but contemptuous. The Colonel, Belmont, and the young Harvard graduate were the three most cool-headed and ...
— The Tragedy of The Korosko • Arthur Conan Doyle
... you both like it. I feel a little unusual in it—but I'll settle down. I have been a trifle prim ...
— The Man Thou Gavest • Harriet T. Comstock
... swear, have "raked in golden barley," Like the great Fleet Street "Cock." Their jealous jeremiads, sour and snarly, PARTLET'S prim feelings shock. "Luck! Not at all: but the ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 98, January 25th, 1890 • Various
... Trott for the prettiest Master in Town, that no Man teaches a Jigg like him, that she has seen him rise six or seven Capers together with the greatest Ease imaginable, and that his Scholars twist themselves more ways than the Scholars of any Master in Town: besides there is Madam Prim, an Alderman's Lady, recommends a Master of her own Name, but she declares he is not of their Family, yet a very extraordinary Man in his way; for besides a very soft Air he has in Dancing, he gives them a particular Behaviour at a Tea-Table, and in ...
— The Spectator, Volume 2. • Addison and Steele
... trade) to the death; they will defend all, the golden legend itself, with all the lies and tales in it: as that of St. George, St. Christopher, St. Winifred, St. Denis, &c. It is a wonder to see how Nic. Harpsfield, that Pharisaical impostor, amongst the rest, Ecclesiast. Hist. cap. 22. saec prim, sex., puzzles himself to vindicate that ridiculous fable of St. Ursula and the eleven thousand virgins, as when they live, [6580]how they came to Cologne, by whom martyred, &c., though he can say nothing for it, yet he must and will approve ...
— The Anatomy of Melancholy • Democritus Junior
... discussion under Miss Hatchard's roof. The incentive to the celebration had come rather from those who had left North Dormer than from those who had been obliged to stay there, and there was some difficulty in rousing the village to the proper state of enthusiasm. But Miss Hatchard's pale prim drawing-room was the centre of constant comings and goings from Hepburn, Nettleton, Springfield and even more distant cities; and whenever a visitor arrived he was led across the hall, and treated to a glimpse of the group of girls deep in ...
— Summer • Edith Wharton
... drive in the park, in hopes that she might see him. Her sister, the banker's lady, occasionally condescended to pay her old home and companion a visit in Russell Square. She brought a couple of sickly children attended by a prim nurse, and in a faint genteel giggling tone cackled to her sister about her fine acquaintance, and how her little Frederick was the image of Lord Claud Lollypop and her sweet Maria had been noticed by the Baroness as they were driving in their donkey-chaise at Roehampton. She urged her to make ...
— Vanity Fair • William Makepeace Thackeray
... Fitzgerald, and to declare Lord Bathurst President of the Council and the Duke of Northumberland Lord-Lieutenant of Ireland. Previously the King received the address of the dissenting ministers, and then that of the Quakers, presented by William Allen; they were very prim and respectable persons; their hats were taken off by each other in the room before the Throne Room, and they did not bow, though they seemed half inclined to do so; they made a very loyal address, but without ...
— The Greville Memoirs - A Journal of the Reigns of King George IV and King William IV, Vol. II • Charles C. F. Greville
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