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More "Callousness" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... equally flagrant of the utter callousness of the men who at that time ruled Germany, was the murder of Captain Fryatt, a gallant British seaman, who had dared to attack the pirates of ...
— History of the World War - An Authentic Narrative of the World's Greatest War • Francis A. March and Richard J. Beamish
... can watch me eat mine," I said, with the callousness of one who had heard dozens of people declare the same thing, and then watched them tuck into a square meal. Delphine proved another protester to add to the list. She ate her share of the meal with no sign of choking, and brightened into ...
— The Lady of the Basement Flat • Mrs. George de Horne Vaizey
... upon the scene of our story. One speedily felt that its cause was not in externals, but that it resulted from inherent qualities. As with Mara, there had been much in her young life sad and hard to endure. She had not surmounted her trouble by shallowness of soul or callousness, but rather by a spiritual buoyancy which kept her above the dark waves, and enabled her to enjoy all the sunshine vouchsafed. Yet, unlike her father and Mara, she lived keenly in the present. She sympathized ...
— The Earth Trembled • E.P. Roe
... Regent's Park, and seeing my dear mother stitching at those pretty frocks by the light of one candle. It was no uncommon thing to find her sewing at that time, but if she was tired, she never showed it. She was always bright and tender. With the callousness of childhood, I scarcely realized the devotion and ceaseless care that she bestowed on us, and her untiring efforts to bring us up as beautifully as she could. The knowledge came to me later on when, all too early in my life, my own responsibilities ...
— The Story of My Life - Recollections and Reflections • Ellen Terry
... so selfish as this; and perhaps the sorrow in Bebee's heart made their callousness seem harder than it ...
— Bebee • Ouida
... awake and conscious, were killed forcibly in broad daylight within a few paces of a number of men occupied in pitching tents, without their noticing anything of the matter; and this may certainly be characterised as an instance of murder as a fine art to show the absolute callousness of the Thugs towards their victims and the complete absence of any feelings of compassion, the story of the following murder by the same gang may be recorded. [685] The Thugs were travelling from Nagpur toward ...
— The Tribes and Castes of the Central Provinces of India - Volume IV of IV - Kumhar-Yemkala • R.V. Russell
... but it must reckon with the might of organized, united mass defense represented and organized by the I.L.D. For example, the Nine Old Men who have made the United States Supreme Court the stronghold of reaction with the same callousness as their predecessors, arrogantly refused to review the appeal in the case of Haywood Patterson, one of the innocent Scottsboro boys. But the fight goes on, until all ...
— Labor's Martyrs • Vito Marcantonio
... about mankind; I mean my latest lesson, for of course I do not know what surprises there are yet in store for me. But that I could have so felt astonished me beyond description. There is a wonderful callousness in human nature which enables us to live. I had no feeling one way or another from New York to California, until, at Dutch Flat, a mining camp in the Sierra, I heard a cock crowing with a home voice; and then I fell to hope and regret ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 23 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... in mines and collieries. The speech of Lord Ashley disclosed a state of things in the mining districts the most appalling. Cruel oppressions were perpetrated by the mine owners and overseers, especially upon women and children; and frequently parents showed an utter callousness to the sufferings of their offspring. The work assigned to girls and young women was destructive of health, and was conducted under circumstances so indecent that it was difficult for the noble speaker ...
— The History of England in Three Volumes, Vol.III. - From George III. to Victoria • E. Farr and E. H. Nolan
... the dead man with that callousness which denotes one who, for love or convenience, has become a doctor. He was a doctor—an amateur. ...
— The Sowers • Henry Seton Merriman
... thought, roving over the world, could fix only on Ephraim as she had at first learned to know him, wise and quiet and kind. The warm chimney seemed a poor thing to lean her head against while she felt that her faith was failing. Then the remembrance of the shot Ephraim had fired and his callousness ...
— The Mormon Prophet • Lily Dougall
... Strong had actually given up his pastorship in two places, moving westward until he reached Kansas City.—Here for a number of years, he had experienced peace, a sort of indifferent peace, he admitted, due more to callousness of soul than to anything else. Then came Lucy's adventure with the "Mormon" elders on the streets, and her visit to "Mormon" meetings. She had brought "Mormon" literature home, and he had read it, read it all. He had asked her to ...
— Story of Chester Lawrence • Nephi Anderson
... so poor a figure as an heir and a bridegroom. The nervous fatigue of this existence, the insincerities and platitudes which I had to live through twice over—through my inner and outward sense—would have been maddening to me, if I had not had that sort of intoxicated callousness which came from the delights of a first passion. A bride and bridegroom, surrounded by all the appliances of wealth, hurried through the day by the whirl of society, filling their solitary moments with hastily-snatched caresses, are prepared for their future life together as the novice ...
— The Lifted Veil • George Eliot
... Will meant to do, but, expressed in his uncle's cold, business-like tones, its callousness jarred upon him, and he felt some twinges of conscience, and a regretful sympathy with his old father rose in his heart, which brought a lump in his throat and an unwonted moisture in his eyes. But he mastered the feeling, and assumed an air of pleased compliance which for the ...
— Garthowen - A Story of a Welsh Homestead • Allen Raine
... Armstrong's rooms to kill him—it was impossible—impossible!" The clinched fist came down on the black broadcloth knee with the conviction of the man behind it. The words rushed like melted metal, hot, stinging, not to be stopped. The judge quivered as if they had stung through the callousness, touched a nerve. A faint color crawled to his cheeks; for the first time he spoke quickly, as if his thoughts connected with something more than ...
— The Lifted Bandage • Mary Raymond Shipman Andrews
... remained pale, looking at the cold stove, the table on which no plates were laid, the lugubrious hovel which this pair of drunkards invested with the pale horror of their callousness. She did not take off her hat but walked round the room; then with her teeth tightly set, she opened the door and ...
— L'Assommoir • Emile Zola
... only to boys; but half its virtue lies in the fact that all are there in body and may sometimes be there in spirit too. The familiarity of the oft-repeated prayers and the oft-sung hymns leads to inattention perhaps, but seldom, it may be hoped, to callousness; religious emotion may only occasionally be stirred but the thread of natural piety, binding man to man and man to God, is strengthened, as fresh strands are added. At the least it may be claimed for the chapel services that they rescue from our hours of business some minutes each ...
— Cambridge Essays on Education • Various
... had soft spots in his armour of callousness, and little Jane's instinct was far surer than mine. She had taken to him at sight. When I tried to get from her why, why he had so marked an attraction for her, her replies baffled me more than the central fact. "I love Colonel Dawson. ...
— The Lost Naval Papers • Bennet Copplestone
... Lund's apparent callousness that affected him more than his own squeamishness. He could not regret Carlsen's death. With the doctor alive, his own existence would have been a constant menace. But he was not used to seeing a killing, though, in his water-front detail, he ...
— A Man to His Mate • J. Allan Dunn
... with a passionate exclamation in prose—O Generation—you!—look at the Word of the Lord!—which (as I have said) I like to think was added to his earlier verses when he dictated these to Baruch. Cannot you see, cannot you see? He is amazed by the stupidity, the callousness, the abandonment with which his people from their leaders down have treated a guidance so clear, a love so constant and yearning. And again his soul sways upon the contrast between the early innocence and the ...
— Jeremiah • George Adam Smith
... the gardens were full, in spite of the weather; for what must be the callousness of that man who could let the Gardens pass under the hammer of George Robins, without bidding them an affectionate farewell? Good gracious! we can hardly believe such insensibility does exist. Hasten then, dear readers, as you would fly to catch the expiring sigh of a fine old boon companion—hasten ...
— Gossip in the First Decade of Victoria's Reign • John Ashton
... of a daughter's affection, towards this enigmatical being; in spite, too, of all the cold and measured vice of his character,—the hard and wintry grayness of heart with which he regarded the welfare of others, or the substances of Truth, Honour, and Virtue,—the callousness of his fossilized affections, which no human being softened but for a moment, and no warm and healthful impulse struck, save into an evanescent and idle flash;—in spite of this consummate obduracy and worldliness of temperament, ...
— Paul Clifford, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... the beginnings of the modern organization of industry. In the midst of this advance and uplift this slave trade and slavery spread more human misery, inculcated more disrespect for and neglect of humanity, a greater callousness to suffering, and more petty, cruel, human hatred than can well be calculated. We may excuse and palliate it, and write history so as to let men forget it; it remains the most inexcusable and despicable blot on ...
— The Negro • W.E.B. Du Bois
... he had concluded, all, except Meehan and his brother, and a few who were really innocent, had slunk back out of the circle into the crowd. Denis, however, became pale as a corpse; and from time to time wiped the large drops from his haggard brow: even Anthony's cheek, despite of his natural callousness, was less red; his eyes became disturbed; but by their influence, he contrived to keep Denis in sufficient dread, to prevent him from mingling, like the rest, among the people. The few who remained along with ...
— The Hedge School; The Midnight Mass; The Donagh • William Carleton
... at this point that the first wrongness in the case asserted itself. There was an element of callousness, almost of indecency, in Gloria's absence from home. He suspected that by going out she had intrigued him into a disadvantage. Returning she would find his name, and smile. Most discreetly! He should have waited ...
— The Beautiful and Damned • F. Scott Fitzgerald
... know that it was right. It is right to save the man whom one loves. I am less enthusiastic about justice now. But we both thought you wrote at his dictation. It seemed the last touch of his callousness. Being very much wrought up by this time—and Mrs. Bast was upstairs. I had not seen her, and had talked for a long time to Leonard—I had snubbed him for no reason, and that should have warned me I was in danger. So when the notes came I wanted us to go to you for an explanation. He said that he ...
— Howards End • E. M. Forster
... other people—by old 'Lias and his wife; by Mr. Ancrum, the lame minister at Clough End; by the dogs; hardly ever by Louie. He had grown used, moreover, to her perpetual explosions, and took them generally with a boy's natural callousness. ...
— The History of David Grieve • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... her with as little compunction as they would a fly," he said. "Ah! you do not know the callousness of those people. I only hope and pray that she may have escaped and is in hiding somewhere, and will arrive unexpectedly and give me a startling surprise. She delights in startling me," ...
— The Czar's Spy - The Mystery of a Silent Love • William Le Queux
... thing to me," announced Mrs. Pope, groping her way with trepidation, "is that nobody shows a light. I don't like to call people unfeeling; but really, with folks in distress out at sea, and the guns firing, I wouldn't have believed such callousness." ...
— Major Vigoureux • A. T. Quiller-Couch
... them, could make it. Beth watched him surveying himself in the glass from different points of view with a complacent smile, and felt that his physical advantages, and the superabundant vitality which made the business of living such an easy enjoyable farce to him, made his inhuman callousness ...
— The Beth Book - Being a Study of the Life of Elizabeth Caldwell Maclure, a Woman of Genius • Sarah Grand
... with the callousness of a brother; but the other two lads gazed at her with an adoring admiration which was balm to her vain little heart. Vain still, for a nature does not change in a day; and, though Rosalind was an ...
— About Peggy Saville • Mrs. G. de Horne Vaizey
... phase in Economic Evolution, it is not Scientific and it is not English to confuse the system with the living human beings attached to it, and to contrast "Rich" and "Poor," insisting on the supposed luxury and callousness of the one or the humiliations and sufferings of ...
— On Nothing & Kindred Subjects • Hilaire Belloc
... right to be spared such an infliction," and that, therefore, "one must wish it could have appeared in this light to Madame Sand." This is a mild way of expressing disapproval of conduct that shows, to say the least, an inhuman callousness to the susceptibilities of a fellow-being. And to speak of the irresistible prompting of genius in connection with one who had her faculties so well under her control is downright mockery. It would, however, be foolish ...
— Frederick Chopin as a Man and Musician - Volume 1-2, Complete • Frederick Niecks
... were interesting to him. He would find himself confronted with the image of the society clergyman, or of the sleek editor in his club, or some other memory out of the world of luxury and pride. And each day came the newspaper, with its burden of callousness and scorn; and perhaps also a letter from Corydon, with something to goad him to new tilts with the enemies ...
— Love's Pilgrimage • Upton Sinclair
... found customers, as absorbed in the trivialities of purchase as though nothing whatever had happened. He was shocked; he resented their callousness. ...
— The Old Wives' Tale • Arnold Bennett
... son was absent from school," said the master coldly, turning away. "If you are satisfied, I have nothing more to say." Nevertheless, for the moment he was so startled by this remarkable theory of his own responsibility in the case that he quite accepted the father's callousness,—or rather it seemed to him that his unfortunate charges more than ever needed his protection. There was still the chance of his hearing some news from Julian Fleming's father; he lived at some distance, in the valley on the opposite side of Hemlock Hill; and thither the master ...
— Tales of Trail and Town • Bret Harte
... among the Italians is the good-nature with which they take personal jokes, and their callousness to ridicule of personal defects. Jests which would provoke a blow from an Anglo-Saxon, or wound and rankle in the memory for life, are here taken in good part. A cripple often joins in the laugh at his own deformity; and the rough carelessness with which such personal misfortunes are alluded to ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 3, No. 18, April, 1859 - [Date last updated: August 7, 2005] • Various
... to hell," he said with brutal callousness. "You're no' hauf a woman like Leebie. She's a tippy wee lass, an' has a way wi' her. She has some spirit, an' is aye snod and nate," and there was a tantalizing smile about his lips that was ...
— The Underworld - The Story of Robert Sinclair, Miner • James C. Welsh
... him one day, when musing on this all-absorbing subject, he tried to inspire him with a sense of the wrongs he had suffered at the hands of the Rev. William Lisle Bowles; but meeting with utter apathy, Mr. Gilchrist turned in disgust from his poetic friend, shocked at his callousness. As a sort of revenge, on being appealed to for his aid in settling the difficulty between his friend and Messrs. Taylor and Hessey, he declared that he had no time to attend to the matter. This was certainly true, for the din of the great Bowles battles ...
— The Life of John Clare • Frederick Martin
... your callousness, and at the cheery way in which you go about your dreadful business," said Manuel, once, after he had ...
— Figures of Earth • James Branch Cabell
... crimes, her evil nature, her flint-like callousness, her more than inhuman cruelty, her contempt for the laws of God and man, she was condemned to bury her magnificent personalty, her transcendent beauty, her superhuman charms, in gilded obscurity at a King's left hand. A powerful ...
— The Rose of Old St. Louis • Mary Dillon
... swallowed, and thought nothing of it? Messengers were dispatched at once for Charley, who came and cross-examined the animal; but he only shook his head and wagged his tail. These actions might have been proofs of his innocence if Fluff had still been with us, but as it was, it only showed his callousness—the callousness ...
— Harper's Young People, December 23, 1879 - An Illustrated Weekly • Various
... he said to himself, "that a dying man's throat rattled but once." Then it flashed on him with horror that he should have so little feeling, and he knew it at once as the curious callousness that comes quickly to toughen the heart for the sights of war. A man killed in battle was not an ordinary dead man at all—he stirred no sensation at all—no more than a dead animal. Already he had heard officers remarking calmly to one another, ...
— Crittenden - A Kentucky Story of Love and War • John Fox, Jr.
... unconscious of the halted procession, he picked a handful of the large leaves of the wild grape. It was a hot day; he took off his hat, and put the cool leaves in the crown of it and rejoined the procession. It did not seem to me to be the mere forgetfulness of old age, nor yet callousness to his own great sorrow. It was rather an instinctive return to the immeasurable continuity of the trivial things of life—the trivial necessary things which so often carry ...
— Adventures In Friendship • David Grayson
... free to determine who were insane or feeble or worthless enough to be put out of the way! Or free to select a human victim for vivisection whenever experts deemed it wise! The widespread horror and uneasiness of such a regime, the callousness to suffering it would engender, the private revenges and crimes that might insidiously creep in under the guise of public good, are alone enough to render vicious ...
— Problems of Conduct • Durant Drake
... paper when writing a few brief and curiously stiff acknowledgments of the letters of condolence she received, reacted indirectly in Andrew's favor. People pitied the brother of this unfeeling girl. How wounded he must feel by her callousness! ...
— The Prodigal Father • J. Storer Clouston
... an undressed woman, there is no stroke of wit so certain of Parisian mirth as a bad coin. The first thought of everyone to whom I showed my collection was to be amused." His face blackened with rage. "This cheerful callousness in a matter involving a total want of principle and straight-dealing as between man and man," he said, "denotes to what a point of ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 146, May 20, 1914 • Various
... these laborious exercises pain interferes sometimes. They are thrown down, receive blows, have bad falls, and are bruised, and the labor itself produces a sort of callousness to pain. ...
— Cicero's Tusculan Disputations - Also, Treatises On The Nature Of The Gods, And On The Commonwealth • Marcus Tullius Cicero
... cried, peremptorily, in his pulpit voice—which he used when "my people" stood convicted of some exhibition of extreme callousness ...
— Bog-Myrtle and Peat - Tales Chiefly Of Galloway Gathered From The Years 1889 To 1895 • S.R. Crockett
... for their seeming callousness they reiterated Aunt Victoria's dictum: "We can know nothing about it until Felix comes. Let us hold our minds in suspense until we know what to think." That Morrison would be in Paris soon, none of them ...
— The Bent Twig • Dorothy Canfield
... lawyer of the time, 'do malefactors go to execution more intrepidly than in England'; and assuredly, buoyed up by custom and the approval of their fellows, Wild's victims made a brave show at the gallows. Nor was their bravery the result of a common callousness. They understood at once the humour and the delicacy of the situation. Though hitherto they had chaffed the Ordinary, they now listened to his exhortation with at least a semblance of respect; and though their last night upon earth might have been devoted to a joyous ...
— A Book of Scoundrels • Charles Whibley
... gratify his secret wish to participate in stirring adventures, he would see to it that all his wounded enemies, no matter how many there might be of them, received adequate medical attention. He had often been shocked at the callousness with which so many of the heroes of romance dash blithely into the next adventure—though those whom they have seriously injured lie on all sides of them as thick as autumn leaves—with only the most perfunctory consideration of these victims; sometimes, ...
— The Cruise of the Jasper B. • Don Marquis
... man in the house now," he used to say to his mother with joy. They learned how perfectly peaceful the home could be. And they almost regretted—though none of them would have owned to such callousness—that their ...
— Sons and Lovers • David Herbert Lawrence
... say that when I think of the frequent instances which I have met with in children, of a hard-heartedness, a callousness, and insensibility to the loss of relations, even of those who have begot and nourished them, I cannot but consider it as a proof of something in the peculiar conformation of that school, favorable to the expansion of ...
— The Works of Charles Lamb in Four Volumes, Volume 4 • Charles Lamb
... should turn up to witness the execution. The captives were then brought up on deck, and Cavendish himself read the sentence over to them, and bade them prepare for death. They met the announcement with the utmost callousness. One or two of them exchanged remarks in a low tone of voice, and one man was actually heard to laugh outright. As for Jose Leirya, he heard the sentence with absolute indifference, and, when asked whether he had anything to say, ...
— Across the Spanish Main - A Tale of the Sea in the Days of Queen Bess • Harry Collingwood
... among the most reckless. A man is face to face with eternal things, and though after a little while the influence of this to some extent passes off, and either an unhealthy excitement or an equally unhealthy callousness takes its place, it never wholly goes, and any serious battle suffices to bring the man to ...
— From Aldershot to Pretoria - A Story of Christian Work among Our Troops in South Africa • W. E. Sellers
... a method of producing a quick, inexpensive, and pleasing effect on one's egotism the C.O.S. is simply not in it with this dodge of giving pennies at random, without inquiry. Only—which of the two devices ought to be accused of harshness and callousness? Which of them is truly kind? I bring forward the respectable young widow as a sample case of the Heart v. Brain conflict. All other cases are the same. The brain is always more kind than the heart; the brain is always more willing than the heart to put itself ...
— The Human Machine • E. Arnold Bennett
... worth. It is at least certain that had the transgressor been imbued with feelings of ordinary delicacy he would not have permitted himself to be goaded into using such expressions as are to be found in his "Statement of Facts," published at York nearly two years after the type riot.[78] His callousness stirred the hot blood of Francis Collins, of The Canadian Freeman, to speak his mind editorially on the subject:—"We view it," he wrote, "as the greatest misfortune that could happen to any man in this life to ...
— The Story of the Upper Canada Rebellion, Volume 1 • John Charles Dent
... say?" she whispered sobbingly. "You wouldn't understand. You have never understood. How should you? You were too generous. You gave me your name, your wealth, you sacrificed your freedom to save me from a knowledge of the callousness and cruelty of the world. You saw further than I did. You knew that I would fail—as I have failed. And because of that you married me in pity. Did you think I would never guess? I didn't at first. I was a stupid ignorant child, I didn't realise what a marriage ...
— The Shadow of the East • E. M. Hull
... was a superior essence, even to all around him. The world seemed created solely for his enjoyment. Nor man nor woman could withstand him. From this hour he delivered himself up to a sublime selfishness. With all his passions and all his profusion, a callousness crept over his heart. His sympathy for those he believed his inferiors and his vassals was slight. Where we do not respect we soon cease to love; when we cease to love, virtue weeps and flies. His soul wandered ...
— The Young Duke • Benjamin Disraeli
... was the bridge, and the Bannisdale gate. Laura shut her eyes, and reckoned up the minutes that remained. Then, as they sped up the park, she wrestled indignantly with herself. She was outraged by her own callousness towards this death in front of her. "Oh! let me think of her! Let me be good to her!" she cried, in dumb appeal to some power beyond herself. She recalled her father. She tried with all her young strength to forget the ...
— Helbeck of Bannisdale, Vol. II • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... knowing his sentiments; but callousness to the pangs of a lightly won and unvalued heart is not ...
— Bluebell - A Novel • Mrs. George Croft Huddleston
... at the success of the plot, and her utter callousness, are expressed in her words to Ahab, in which the main point is the taking possession of the vineyard. The death of its owner is told with exultation, as being nothing but the sweeping aside of an obstacle. Ahab asks no questions as to how this opportune clearing away of hindrance came ...
— Expositions Of Holy Scripture - Volume I: St. Luke, Chaps. I to XII • Alexander Maclaren
... available to his biographer. His career was that of the most sordid of hucksters. Of eleven of his sons nothing good is told, but Joseph was undoubtedly an able and exemplary man; the only thing to his discredit being his utter callousness regarding the fate of his father, after he had attained to a high ...
— Phyllis of Philistia • Frank Frankfort Moore
... softened] Oh, doctor, if you acknowledge that—if you have confessed it to yourself—if you realize what you have done, then there is forgiveness. I trusted in your strength instinctively at first; then I thought I had mistaken callousness for strength. Can you blame me? But if it was really strength—if it was only such a mistake as we all make sometimes—it will make me so happy to ...
— The Doctor's Dilemma • George Bernard Shaw
... also his fortune to forget. Oblivion and sorrow share our being, as Darkness and Light divide the course of time. It is not in human nature to endure extremities, and sorrows soon destroy either us or themselves. Perhaps the fate of Niobe is no fable, but a type of the callousness of our nature. There is a time in human suffering when succeeding sorrows are but like snow falling on an iceberg. It is indeed horrible to think that our peace of mind should arise, not from a retrospection of the past, but from a forgetfulness ...
— Vivian Grey • The Earl of Beaconsfield
... made Kennedy such a favourite in Roman society. I say "had," because just at the moment the young Englishman was somewhat under a cloud. A love-affair, the details of which had never quite come out, had indicated a heartlessness and callousness upon his part which shocked many of his friends. But in the bachelor circles of students and artists in which he preferred to move there is no very rigid code of honour in such matters, and though a head might be shaken or a pair of shoulders shrugged ...
— Tales of Terror and Mystery • Arthur Conan Doyle
... entirely respectable, and which during the pioneer period had not worked badly. On the other hand, when, the mass of American voters failed to detect the danger of such usurpation until it had gone altogether too far, they, too, were not without warrant for their lethargy and callousness. They, too, in a smaller way had considered the American political and economic system chiefly as a system framed for their individual benefit, and it did not seem sportsmanlike to turn and rend their more successful competitors, ...
— The Promise Of American Life • Herbert David Croly
... visitors to these parts and has been attributed to "Saracenic" influences. Wrongly, of course; one might as well attribute it to the old Greeks. [Footnote: Whose attitude towards animals, by the way, was as far removed from callousness as from sentimentalism. We know how those Hellenic oxen fared who had laboured to draw up heavy blocks for the building of a temple—how, on the completion of their task, they were led into green fields, there to pasture unmolested ...
— Old Calabria • Norman Douglas
... displayed in this transaction just the qualities that her father most admired. But even she was shocked at his callousness, and lifted a ...
— Barriers Burned Away • E. P. Roe
... before supper, indicative of the callousness and brutishness of these men. There is one green hand in the crew, Harrison by name, a clumsy-looking country boy, mastered, I imagine, by the spirit of adventure, and making his first voyage. In the light baffling airs ...
— The Sea-Wolf • Jack London
... the quick. Her husband's shame was hers, and it was somehow plain that Horble had been at fault before. She never thought to doubt Greg's word, though his callousness revolted her. ...
— Wild Justice: Stories of the South Seas • Lloyd Osbourne
... almost querulous self-concern (the thing most foreign to his earlier nature), as where he complains that his companions, his son and daughter, 'are neither desirous to follow his amusements nor anxious that he should adopt theirs'; now of still more foreign callousness, as where he dismisses the news of the death of Hugh Littlejohn, whose illnesses earlier had been almost his chief anxiety, and records in the same entry that he 'went to the opera.' The passage in the Introduction to the Chronicles, written not so very long before, traces ...
— Sir Walter Scott - Famous Scots Series • George Saintsbury
... not justified to us by what else the saga tells us of the speaker. I am sure that Skarphedin had more to say, or that if he had not the poet could have expressed him better. It recalls the humorous callousness of our soldiers, which, nakedly rendered, is often shocking. This is, however, not really the point. Terseness may be dramatic—it often is, as in "Cover her face—mine eyes dazzle—She died young"—but in narrative it ...
— Gudrid the Fair - A Tale of the Discovery of America • Maurice Hewlett
... problem of what to do with his two francs. To have killed Laploshka was one thing; to have kept his beloved money would have argued a callousness of feeling of which I am not capable. The ordinary solution, of giving it to the poor, would by no means fit the present situation, for nothing would have distressed the dead man more than such a misuse of his property. On ...
— Reginald in Russia and Other Sketches • Saki (H.H. Munro)
... of anger at Richard Burton's callousness gave way almost at once to a feeling of fatigue and defeat as she started on her return home, and a persistent image of Jane, a little girl playing skipping-ropes in red stockings, kept coming before ...
— Women of the Country • Gertrude Bone
... short of torture had been used in the effort to induce him to divulge the truth, and not a word had he spoken. His mother and Mrs. Hardy and Harry had all visited him in the cell, and had failed to persuade him to open his lips. His callousness in the presence of his poor mother's distress was described in feeling terms as unworthy of the black and naked savage. All this was much nearer the truth than speculation at Waddy was wont to be; and when Dick was restored to his home in the flesh on Saturday at noon and permitted ...
— The Gold-Stealers - A Story of Waddy • Edward Dyson
... certain portion of their income to the regular calls of necessity, which cannot be exceeded, and have a specified circle of objects which cannot be changed; and, if one may judge by their comparative callousness to all other claims, it would be natural to infer that they had taken a certain quantum sufficit from their stock of sensibility, which bore an invariable proportion to their calculations. In vain you plead for the most urgent distress, in vain you solicit the smallest contribution; they have no ...
— Female Scripture Biographies, Vol. II • Francis Augustus Cox
... their utter callousness regarding the psychology and temper of their soldiers and civilian population. They put a greater strain upon them than human nature could bear, and by driving their fighting-men into one shambles after another, while they doped their people with false promises which were never fulfilled, they ...
— Now It Can Be Told • Philip Gibbs
... on their places, and to set osage orange hedges along the borders of their fields. Now these trees were all being cut down and grubbed up. Just why, nobody knew; they impoverished the land... they made the snow drift... nobody had them any more. With prosperity came a kind of callousness; everybody wanted to destroy the old things they used to take pride in. The orchards, which had been nursed and tended so carefully twenty years ago, were now left to die of neglect. It was less trouble to run into ...
— One of Ours • Willa Cather
... head and held it to her bosom. Alone, with no eye looking, she pressed her lips on his forehead. Courant's callousness roused a fierce, perverse tenderness in her. He might sneer at David's lack of force, but she understood. She crooned over him, moved his hair back with caressing fingers, pressing him against herself as if the strength of her hold would assure her of the love she did not feel ...
— The Emigrant Trail • Geraldine Bonner
... Her callousness seems to freeze him—while his blood boils at the insult to Kyllikki. He is about to speak: "Say what you will, but not an evil word of ...
— The Song Of The Blood-Red Flower • Johannes Linnankoski
... to his door, then turned homeward; and to my surprise in a dark by-street heard myself laughing heartily. I checked myself instantly, feeling ashamed of my callousness, of my seeming indifference to the trouble even of myself and my mother. Yet as there passed before me the remembrance of that imposing and expensive funeral with its mournful following of tearful faces; the hushed reading of the will with its accompaniment of rustling approval; the picture of ...
— Paul Kelver • Jerome Klapka, AKA Jerome K. Jerome
... none of this in Washington; no idle whimsies, no studied or foolish eccentricities; none of the buffoonery of ripe years. They were not in him; or if they were, self-discipline extirpated them, as it did the bad ambition and moral callousness that have disfigured too many of the great names of the earth, ancient and modern; whilst his matchless purity and deathless deeds raise him above them all. This verdict is already more than half pronounced by the most enlightened and scrutinizing portions of mankind, and time is silently extending ...
— Washington in Domestic Life • Richard Rush
... seats, on the steps of hotels, discharging dilatory duties; the appalling chaos of hard-eyed, capable dames with defiant clothes, and white-cheeked hunted-looking men; of splendid creatures in their cabs, and cadging creatures in their broken hats—the callousness and ...
— Forsyte Saga • John Galsworthy
... is a great deal of foul talk and brawling among the passers, and Athenian children have receptive eyes and ears. Yet on the other hand, there is a notable regard and reverence for childhood. With all its frequent callousness and inhumanity, Greek sentiment abhors any brutality to young children. Herodotus the historian tells of the falling of a roof, whereby one hundred and twenty school children perished, as being a frightful calamity,[*] although recounting cold-blooded massacres ...
— A Day In Old Athens • William Stearns Davis
... Elizabeth Kemp of the lissome limbs and auburn hair. The story pursues its way, and one sees the soul of a woman shining clearly through the racy dialect and frolics of the Chingford beano, the rueful futility of faithful Thomas and the engaging callousness of ...
— When Winter Comes to Main Street • Grant Martin Overton
... answered, with incredible callousness, "that to save his craven skin he might elect to do ...
— The Trampling of the Lilies • Rafael Sabatini
... come to loathe the sensuous artificiality of his life. He had come to loathe the ruthless selfishness of finance. He was sick with the callousness of that stratum of the ...
— Swirling Waters • Max Rittenberg
... felt decidedly sick. He was country-born himself, and, being no mere dreamer of dreams, realised that it was as well that country people should not flinch at the less poetic side of their lives, but this callousness struck him as horrible in a young child like Phoebe. Yet as he saw Ishmael wince he regretted the very sensibility in the boy, the lack of which had shocked him in Phoebe. He knew Ishmael had a horror of blood and disagreeable sights, and the thought ...
— Secret Bread • F. Tennyson Jesse
... boy, just as you were a very interesting girl, Sabina. He often reminds me of you. There are the possibilities of beauty in his character. He is sentimental about some things and strangely indifferent about others. He is a mixture of exaggerated kindness in some directions and utter callousness in others. Sentimental people often are. He will pick a caterpillar out of the road to save it from death, and he will stone a dog if he has a grudge against it. His attitude to Peter Grim is one of devotion. He actually told me that it was very sad that Peter had ...
— The Spinners • Eden Phillpotts
... of the second piece the tense silence in the room was ghastly. Who was the guilty person? Who possessed such amazing callousness that an exhibition of this sort brought ...
— The Film Mystery • Arthur B. Reeve
... would go down. There had been no liaison between the Cardews and the workmen. The very magnitude of the business forbade that. And for many years, too, the Cardews had shown a gross callousness to the welfare of the laborers. Long ago he had urged on his father the progressive attitude of other steel men, but Anthony had jeered, and when Howard had forced the issue and gained concessions, ...
— A Poor Wise Man • Mary Roberts Rinehart
... rocks or bushes, and demand our valuables; but if any were lying in wait in the neighbourhood, they probably thought four well-armed men too formidable to be assailed, and we proceeded towards our journey's end without molestation. I had at first felt a sort of callousness about reaching home, and should have been indifferent had any delay occurred; but as I approached Castle Ballinahone I became more and more eager to be there, and could scarcely restrain my feelings when I saw the towers rising beyond the trees in the distance, and the ...
— Paddy Finn • W. H. G. Kingston
... scandal. Stories of the ill-treatment of the king while in the prince's charge may be dismissed as unfounded; it is alleged that the prince made sport of his father's ravings, it is certain that his associates did so, and that he and his brother behaved with brutal callousness and openly indulged in riotous merry-making during the king's illness.[219] Before the resolutions could be made law it was thought that a formal opening of parliament was necessary in order to invest it with legislative capacity, and this was effected ...
— The Political History of England - Vol. X. • William Hunt
... of his callousness and his selfishness, the intense womanliness of the girl stirred the softer emotions of his heart; there was so much freshness in her, so much beauty and so much girlishness that just for one brief second a wave, almost of ...
— A Bride of the Plains • Baroness Emmuska Orczy
... the air of one whose heart is bruised or torn. That she had gained in queenliness within the past year was not evidence of austerity or the callousness that ensues upon the healing of a wound. The Ayletts were a stately race, and the few who, while she was in her teens, had carped at her lack of pride because of her disposition to choose friends from the walks of life lower than her own, and criticised ...
— At Last • Marion Harland
... demanded incredulously, struck numb by his callousness. "You want ten more to add to those six? Carse, Carse! They are not cabbages you are counting; they are human heads. Do you think I am a fiend to let this continue? No; it must end—it must ...
— The Homicidal Diary • Earl Peirce
... true Rest of man; no stunted unbelieving callousness, no reckless surrender to blind Force, no opiate delusion; but the harmonious adjustment of Necessity and Accident, of what is changeable and what is unchangeable in our destiny; the calm supremacy of ...
— English literary criticism • Various
... period shudder. The “benefit of the public,” indeed! Who is this “public,” and what are its rights as against the rights of the dead poet, whose heartstrings are woven into “copy” by the disloyal friend he trusted? The inherent callousness of man’s nature is never so painfully seen as in the relation of this ogre, “the public,” to dead genius. Without the smallest real reverence for genius—without the smallest capacity of distinguishing the poetaster it always adores from the true poet it always ignores—the public can still ...
— Old Familiar Faces • Theodore Watts-Dunton
... her secret to console her. It remained a secret because there was no one to whom she could relate it. Sarah had no ear for news unconnected with her malady. And indeed to tell Sarah, as Sarah was, would have been to carry callousness to the point of insult. And so Hilda, amid her enormous labours and fatigue, had lived with her secret, which, from being a perfumed delight, turned in two days to something subtly horrible, to something that ...
— Hilda Lessways • Arnold Bennett
... back to Mrs. Gould, contemplated a flower-bed away in the sunshine. People believed him scornful and soured. The truth of his nature consisted in his capacity for passion and in the sensitiveness of his temperament. What he lacked was the polished callousness of men of the world, the callousness from which springs an easy tolerance for oneself and others; the tolerance wide as poles asunder from true sympathy and human compassion. This want of callousness accounted for his sardonic turn of mind ...
— Nostromo: A Tale of the Seaboard • Joseph Conrad
... objections to his proposal that they should walk back from the station, leaving a boy to drive the cart home during the afternoon, and they struck across the fields together, disregarding damp and mud with the callousness of true lovers of the country. The girl's face was worn and downcast, for the Castle would seem sadder and emptier than ever, now that the little sister had gone and that dear, helpful Mademoiselle; ...
— Pixie O'Shaughnessy • Mrs. George de Horne Vaizey
... spoken of as a good business man. He, too, then had his other side. For him the Battle of the Street was an exhilaration. Beneath that boyish exterior was the tough coarseness, the male hardness, the callousness that met the brunt and withstood the shock ...
— The Pit • Frank Norris
... He forgot all his anger. It seemed shocking to him to find the old man untended in his extremity. He had heard tales of Indian callousness. ...
— The Huntress • Hulbert Footner
... Its effect upon them might be disastrous. They might find themselves cured of their modern disease, and in the possession of ideas that would render worthless their whole stock in trade. Verily, he must have fallen to the zero-point of anti-Semitic callousness who is not thrilled through and through by the lofty fortitude, the saint-like humility, the trustful resignation to the will of God, the stoic firmness, laid bare by the study of Jewish history. The tribute ...
— Jewish History • S. M. Dubnow
... said in the whole book against any traditional belief; the Scriptures are scarcely more than alluded to; he seems scarcely conscious that he is attempting to establish conclusions at variance with the cherished creeds of vast multitudes of men. To some this may seem the callousness of infidelity; to us it seems the sublime composure of science. To him, the fact in the case is everything; and he is content to leave it to ...
— Continental Monthly, Volume 5, Issue 4 • Various
... Ben Armstrong's rooms to kill him—it was impossible—impossible!" The clinched fist came down on the black broadcloth knee with the conviction of the man behind it. The words rushed like melted metal, hot, stinging, not to be stopped. The judge quivered as if they had stung through the callousness, touched a nerve. A faint color crawled to his cheeks; for the first time he spoke quickly, as if his thoughts connected with something more ...
— The Lifted Bandage • Mary Raymond Shipman Andrews
... seriousness. He was of the right sort; he was one of us. He talked soberly, with a sort of composed unreserve, and with a quiet bearing that might have been the outcome of manly self-control, of impudence, of callousness, of a colossal unconsciousness, of a gigantic deception. Who can tell! From our tone we might have been discussing a third person, a football match, last year's weather. My mind floated in a sea of conjectures till the turn ...
— Lord Jim • Joseph Conrad
... Rest of man; no stunted unbelieving callousness, no reckless surrender to blind Force, no opiate delusion; but the harmonious adjustment of Necessity and Accident, of what is changeable and what is unchangeable in our destiny; the calm supremacy of the spirit over its circumstances; the dim aim of ...
— English literary criticism • Various
... like sympathy for provoking misery and starting tears, and, as Stanley uttered that sentence, I decided that God had gone over to the prefects, and I would very much like to cry. To drive back the tears I called to my aid all the callousness and sulkiness which I possess. My face was the portrait of a sulky schoolboy as ...
— Tell England - A Study in a Generation • Ernest Raymond
... at the clerks, who had been on their feet steadily since eight o'clock, and began to understand the callousness of their expressions. A great throb of pity for them, rather than for herself, dimmed her eyes for an instant so that she ...
— For Gold or Soul? - The Story of a Great Department Store • Lurana W. Sheldon
... mate. If, then, the human animal drops the restraints imposed by law, reverting thereby to the theft, murder, and cunning of savagery, why should it be shocking that the female should equal the male in callousness? Why should it be shocking should she even surpass the male? It is quite possible that, since for physiological reasons she is nearer to instinctive motivation than the male, she cannot help being more ruthless once deterrent inhibition has been sloughed. But is she in fact more dangerous, more ...
— She Stands Accused • Victor MacClure
... that blunt callousness would help him more than sympathy. He had recovered his self-control, but his eyes were still ...
— The Sisters-In-Law • Gertrude Atherton
... irresistible impulse to be present at every execution, as I there behold the various effects of the near approach of death.' He maintains 'that the curiosity which impels people to be present at such affecting scenes, is certainly a proof of sensibility, not of callousness. For, it is observed, that the greatest proportion of the spectators is composed of women.' See post, June ...
— Life Of Johnson, Vol. 2 • Boswell
... our way to the beach, but I could not observe any other expression on the faces of the men than that of total indifference or contempt. It seemed to me a very awful thing that it should be possible for men to come to such hardness of heart and callousness to the sight of bloodshed and violence; but, indeed, I began to find that such constant exposure to scenes of blood was having a slight effect upon myself, and I shuddered when I came to think that I, too, ...
— The Coral Island - A Tale Of The Pacific Ocean • R. M. Ballantyne
... truth. In no long time after that paper was written I became sensible that the effort which remained would cost me far more energy than I had anticipated, and the necessity for making it was more apparent every month. In particular I became aware of an increasing callousness or defect of sensibility in the stomach, and this I imagined might imply a scirrhous state of that organ, either formed or forming. An eminent physician, to whose kindness I was at that time deeply indebted, informed me that such a termination of ...
— Confessions of an English Opium-Eater • Thomas De Quincey
... a man of finer temperament during eight years passed amidst scene of rapacious ferocity, something must be admitted to explain the callousness of men of fewer sensibilities and lower moral standards, who found themselves far removed from the usual restraint of civilised society and confronted by many hard ships and severe disappointments. The moral and physical condition of the majority of these men ...
— Bartholomew de Las Casas; his life, apostolate, and writings • Francis Augustus MacNutt
... children in mines and collieries. The speech of Lord Ashley disclosed a state of things in the mining districts the most appalling. Cruel oppressions were perpetrated by the mine owners and overseers, especially upon women and children; and frequently parents showed an utter callousness to the sufferings of their offspring. The work assigned to girls and young women was destructive of health, and was conducted under circumstances so indecent that it was difficult for the noble speaker to state the ...
— The History of England in Three Volumes, Vol.III. - From George III. to Victoria • E. Farr and E. H. Nolan
... tree's dead heart. At last, as fibre after fibre was cut away, it began to tremble. The children stood breathless and almost pitying as they saw the shiver, apparently conscious, which followed each blow. Something of the same callousness of custom with which the fall of a man is witnessed must blunt one's nature before he can look unmoved upon the destruction of a ...
— Nature's Serial Story • E. P. Roe
... ever. Prayer was unceasing for her; and it pleased God suddenly to reveal Christ to her as her Saviour. Great self-loathing now at once took the place of former indifference; confession of sin, of previous callousness of conscience; and unspeakable joy in the Lord, of former apathy and coldness. It was a spiritual miracle—this girl's sudden transformation into a witness for God, manifesting deepest conviction for past sin and earnest concern ...
— George Muller of Bristol - His Witness to a Prayer-Hearing God • Arthur T. Pierson
... for the young lady, but he is afraid of Christine, who has his dangerous secrets in her keeping. His emotional callousness is sufficient to prevent the night's happenings from exercising a disturbing influence on his plans for the future. Having at once the slave's brutality and the master's lack of squeamishness, he can see blood without fainting, and he can also ...
— Plays by August Strindberg, Second series • August Strindberg
... coarseness and callousness, as he whips his team, are the consequences of the hard calling in which he ministers to the recluse's pleasure and refinement. If town life has its evils, from the city comes all that makes retirement comfortable and civilized. Retirement without the city-would have been bookless and ...
— Cowper • Goldwin Smith
... literatures than in the earlier classics. In the austere masterpieces of the Greek drama, for example, we may discover a lack of this warmth of sympathy; and we can not but suspect a certain aloofness, which is akin to callousness. The cultivated citizens of Athens were supported by slave-labor; but their great dramatic poets cast little light on the life of the slaves or on the sad conditions of their servitude. Something of this narrow chilliness is to be detected also in the literature of the court of Louis ...
— Inquiries and Opinions • Brander Matthews
... not MY idea of the medical art," I cried, shocked at his callousness. "An operation is ...
— Hilda Wade - A Woman With Tenacity Of Purpose • Grant Allen
... Washington; no idle whimsies, no studied or foolish eccentricities; none of the buffoonery of ripe years. They were not in him; or if they were, self-discipline extirpated them, as it did the bad ambition and moral callousness that have disfigured too many of the great names of the earth, ancient and modern; whilst his matchless purity and deathless deeds raise him above them all. This verdict is already more than half pronounced by the most enlightened and scrutinizing portions ...
— Washington in Domestic Life • Richard Rush
... is a selfish callousness about your reply which I do not like. A crisis in the life of another evidently does not ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 146, June 3, 1914 • Various
... decidedly sick. He was country-born himself, and, being no mere dreamer of dreams, realised that it was as well that country people should not flinch at the less poetic side of their lives, but this callousness struck him as horrible in a young child like Phoebe. Yet as he saw Ishmael wince he regretted the very sensibility in the boy, the lack of which had shocked him in Phoebe. He knew Ishmael had a horror of blood and disagreeable sights, ...
— Secret Bread • F. Tennyson Jesse
... writing a few brief and curiously stiff acknowledgments of the letters of condolence she received, reacted indirectly in Andrew's favor. People pitied the brother of this unfeeling girl. How wounded he must feel by her callousness! ...
— The Prodigal Father • J. Storer Clouston
... innocently and sincerely, but Newgag thought I was jesting. Instead of his usual attempt at lofty callousness, however, he smiled that dismal, marionette-like smile of his. That gave me an idea, of which I said nothing ...
— Tales From Bohemia • Robert Neilson Stephens
... Portrait Gallery, the academic republicanism of the cultivated patricians with English Liberalism, and the thrills of the arena with those of the playing-field, would be pretty sport for any little German boy. I shall not encourage the brat to lay an historical finger on callousness, bravado, trembling militarism, superficial culture, mean political passion, megalomania, and a taste for being in the majority as attributes common to Imperial Rome and Imperial England. Rather I will inquire whether the rest of Europe does not labour under the proverbial ...
— Art • Clive Bell
... Under other circumstances, the callousness of this speech, the coarseness of some of the expressions, the calling of Miss Draper by her surname, would have grated upon me. But I was too rejoiced both at the girl's departure and the matter of fact way in which Dicky took it to be captious about the language in which he couched ...
— Revelations of a Wife - The Story of a Honeymoon • Adele Garrison
... pushed on, and came with his dragoons at the rear of the mob. With a fine Russian callousness he thrust into it, his horses clearing a way for themselves and bowling men to right and left. The street was in darkness and resounded with violence. Standing in his stirrups and peering ahead, the Prince realized that he might ride Truda down ...
— The Second Class Passenger • Perceval Gibbon
... with narcotics, you may go to sleep in a cell with visions of home playing round the head that shall be capped for hanging to-morrow. But no more than I call these peaceful sights, can I apply the name of peace to the insensibility of a conscience seared by sin; to the calmness, or rather callousness of one who has allowed the devil to persuade him that God is too merciful to reckon with us for our transgressions. The peace we are to seek, and, seeking to pursue, is not that of death, but life,—not that the lake presents in winter, when no life appears on its ...
— The Angels' Song • Thomas Guthrie
... thought; but, briefly, the essence of all vulgarity lies in want of sensation. Simple and innocent vulgarity is merely an untrained and undeveloped bluntness of body and mind; but in true inbred vulgarity, there is a dreadful callousness, which, in extremity, becomes capable of every sort of bestial habit and crime, without fear, without pleasure, without horror, and without pity. It is in the blunt hand and the dead heart, in the diseased habit, ...
— Sesame and Lilies • John Ruskin
... hot bath and a good tiffin I retired gratefully to bed, but, such is the callousness of human nature, only to be routed out at three o'clock to play in a football match, which, the Fates be ...
— Life and sport in China - Second Edition • Oliver G. Ready
... of making something new out of refuse—paper out of rags—so Magdalen seemed to have the power of cherishing and transforming the weaker, meaner elements of the characters with which she came in contact. Certain qualities in those we are inclined to love daunt us. Insincerity, callousness, selfishness, treachery in its more refined aspects, these are apt to arouse at first incredulity and at last scorn in us. But they aroused neither in Magdalen. She saw them with clearness, and dealt ...
— Prisoners - Fast Bound In Misery And Iron • Mary Cholmondeley
... flushed, playing with a light topic in a manner that suggested a conscience singularly at ease. He went on sitting there, absolutely unembarrassed, eating dessert. The eating of dinner was bad enough, it showed complacency. But dessert argued callousness. She had wondered how he could have any appetite at all. Her dinner had ...
— The Helpmate • May Sinclair
... should with difficulty be surpassed, or even equalled. He must have possessed much elevation of thought, and an intense ambition, together with inordinate selfishness, an overweening pride, and entire callousness to the sufferings of others, before he could have approved the plan which his master-builder set before him. That plan, including the employment of huge blocks of stone, their conveyance to the top of a hill a hundred feet high, and their emplacement, ...
— Ancient Egypt • George Rawlinson
... meant to do, but, expressed in his uncle's cold, business-like tones, its callousness jarred upon him, and he felt some twinges of conscience, and a regretful sympathy with his old father rose in his heart, which brought a lump in his throat and an unwonted moisture in his eyes. But he mastered the feeling, and assumed an ...
— Garthowen - A Story of a Welsh Homestead • Allen Raine
... to high mental or moral endowment, far less than has wealth. There is much left to be done to achieve a meritorious distribution of wealth. The fact that the insignia of success are too often awarded to trickery, callousness and luck does not argue for the abolition altogether of the financial success element in reputability, in favor of a "dead level" of equality such as would result from the application of certain communistic ideals. Distinctions, rightly awarded, are an aid, not a hindrance ...
— Applied Eugenics • Paul Popenoe and Roswell Hill Johnson
... move her in any way. Reflections which had caused her the sharpest misery only yesterday recurred to her now without affecting her in the least degree—except in that they made her feel herself to be a kind of monster of callousness, coldness, and egotism. The lonely grave, looking deserted already, with the rain-bespattered, mud-bedraggled flowers fading upon it; the man himself as she had known him; his goodness, his kindness, the disinterested affection he had lavished ...
— The Heavenly Twins • Madame Sarah Grand
... him narrowly. He saw the perfect good-humoured callousness, even strange, glistening malice, in Gerald, glistening through ...
— Women in Love • D. H. Lawrence
... callousness unusual and repulsive in so young a man. It jarred with the feelings of the frightened and nervous boy. Tears of alarm and pity were in his eyes. He felt about in the heather till he reached the infant. It was lying under a bush. He took the poor little ...
— The Broom-Squire • S. (Sabine) Baring-Gould
... volley of bullets, that his blood went in one rush to the floor, and traced the outlines of his trunk on the ceiling of the room below, where it remained months afterwards, an eye-witness told me, as an illustration of the callousness of the jailer. The leading murderers were tried. They had no defence. The facts were not disputed. The judge and the bar did their duty, but the jury acquitted the prisoners without leaving their seats. Mrs. Chisholm, the widow, found neither sympathy ...
— Handbook of Home Rule (1887) • W. E. Gladstone et al.
... knew before," he said to himself, "that a dying man's throat rattled but once." Then it flashed on him with horror that he should have so little feeling, and he knew it at once as the curious callousness that comes quickly to toughen the heart for the sights of war. A man killed in battle was not an ordinary dead man at all—he stirred no sensation at all—no more than a dead animal. Already he had heard officers remarking calmly to one another, ...
— Crittenden - A Kentucky Story of Love and War • John Fox, Jr.
... hand, be it never so grim or painful. Life has no veneering for them; they look hard realities in the face and meet them as they can. They are the true philosophers, and their straightforwardness about grief and disease is not callousness; it is directness, and generally means as much, if not more, feeling than the hysterical wailings of more cultivated emotion, ...
— Memoirs of Arthur Hamilton, B. A. Of Trinity College, Cambridge • Arthur Christopher Benson
... history, and that relative weakness has been progressively augmented in the interval by the conditions of human life. For one thing, the process of bringing forth young has become so much more exhausting as refinement has replaced savage sturdiness and callousness, and the care of them in infancy has become so much more onerous as the growth of cultural complexity has made education more intricate, that the two functions now lay vastly heavier burdens upon the strength and attention ...
— In Defense of Women • H. L. Mencken
... all these people. I found that my lamp had gone out leaving behind an awful smell. I fled from it up the stairs and went to bed in the dark. My slumbers—I suppose the one good in pedestrian exercise, confound it, is that it helps our natural callousness—my slumbers ...
— Chance • Joseph Conrad
... and vivid even after Bobadil and Parolles (I do not say Falstaff, because I hold it a vulgar error to consider Falstaff as really a coward at all), is perhaps more generally interesting. As for The Scornful Lady it is comedy pure and simple, and very excellent comedy too. The callousness of the younger Loveless—an ugly forerunner of Restoration manners—injures it a little, and the instantaneous and quite unreasonable conversion of the usurer Morecraft a little more. But the humours of the Lady herself (a most Molieresque personage), and those ...
— A History of English Literature - Elizabethan Literature • George Saintsbury
... ripplings that still betrayed a movement in the air. As for me, I was utterly exhausted with my long day's toil under the roasting sun; every bone in my body was aching; I was in a burning fever, and was sick with the smart of my raw and bleeding hands. The old feeling of callousness and indifference to my fate was once more upon me, and as I gazed at the crazy-looking raft which I had constructed with such a lavish expenditure of painful toil, I smiled in grim irony of myself that I should have done so much to preserve that life ...
— A Pirate of the Caribbees • Harry Collingwood
... all around him. The world seemed created solely for his enjoyment. Nor man nor woman could withstand him. From this hour he delivered himself up to a sublime selfishness. With all his passions and all his profusion, a callousness crept over his heart. His sympathy for those he believed his inferiors and his vassals was slight. Where we do not respect we soon cease to love; when we cease to love, virtue weeps and flies. His soul wandered in dreams ...
— The Young Duke • Benjamin Disraeli
... a waiter," he went on, "and he, like the cabman, laughed. In fact, next to an undressed woman, there is no stroke of wit so certain of Parisian mirth as a bad coin. The first thought of everyone to whom I showed my collection was to be amused." His face blackened with rage. "This cheerful callousness in a matter involving a total want of principle and straight-dealing as between man and man," he said, "denotes to what a point of cynicism ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 146, May 20, 1914 • Various
... me," announced Mrs. Pope, groping her way with trepidation, "is that nobody shows a light. I don't like to call people unfeeling; but really, with folks in distress out at sea, and the guns firing, I wouldn't have believed such callousness." ...
— Major Vigoureux • A. T. Quiller-Couch
... sympathy with other people's woes unless these found an echo in his own, and the callousness which he so often displayed was not entirely the affectation it was thought by his friends or even by his enemies. Great in so many things, there were circumstances when he could show himself unutterably small, and he seldom practised consistency. ...
— Cecil Rhodes - Man and Empire-Maker • Princess Catherine Radziwill
... stage of Christianity, and the Jews as the remnant of a people who, as a punishment for slaying the Saviour of the world, had been scattered all over the earth. The present-day Israelites were represented as people who, urged by a stiff-necked wilfulness and obstinacy and almost incomprehensible callousness, clung to the obsolete religious ideal of the stern God in opposition to ...
— Recollections Of My Childhood And Youth • George Brandes
... him to his door, then turned homeward; and to my surprise in a dark by-street heard myself laughing heartily. I checked myself instantly, feeling ashamed of my callousness, of my seeming indifference to the trouble even of myself and my mother. Yet as there passed before me the remembrance of that imposing and expensive funeral with its mournful following of tearful faces; the hushed reading of the will with its accompaniment of rustling approval; ...
— Paul Kelver • Jerome Klapka, AKA Jerome K. Jerome
... let him go; and he gave me plenty of good fun. He used to know you when he was in service at the H——s, and speaks of you as being then "a gallous young hound," whatever that may mean. I imagine "gallous" to be a rustic Lewis Carroll compound, made up in equal parts of callousness and gallantry, which most boys are, at some stage of ...
— An Englishwoman's Love-Letters • Anonymous
... apathy has its merciful compensations. After the first shock and panic of war there appears to descend on all who have a share in it, whether active or passive, a kind of numbed indifference as to danger; a kind of callousness as to consequences, which I find it difficult to define in words, but which, nevertheless, impresses itself on the observer's mind as a definite and tangible fact. The soldier gets it, and it enables him to endure his own discomforts ...
— Paths of Glory - Impressions of War Written At and Near the Front • Irvin S. Cobb
... Jacob, not a single praiseworthy act of his long life was available to his biographer. His career was that of the most sordid of hucksters. Of eleven of his sons nothing good is told, but Joseph was undoubtedly an able and exemplary man; the only thing to his discredit being his utter callousness regarding the fate of his father, after he had attained to a high ...
— Phyllis of Philistia • Frank Frankfort Moore
... Deputy, the compassionate Provost, and the hard-hearted Hangman; a young man of quality who is to suffer for the seduction of his mistress before marriage, loose wretches brought in by the police, nay, even a hardened criminal, whom even the preparations for his execution cannot awaken out of his callousness. But yet, notwithstanding this agitating truthfulness, how tender and mild is the pervading tone of the picture! The piece takes improperly its name from punishment; the true significance of the whole is the triumph ...
— Lectures on Dramatic Art - and Literature • August Wilhelm Schlegel trans John Black
... affair, the details of which had never quite come out, had indicated a heartlessness and callousness upon his part which shocked many of his friends. But in the bachelor circles of students and artists in which he preferred to move there is no very rigid code of honour in such matters, and though a head might be shaken or a pair of shoulders shrugged over the flight of two ...
— The Green Flag • Arthur Conan Doyle
... was not in externals, but that it resulted from inherent qualities. As with Mara, there had been much in her young life sad and hard to endure. She had not surmounted her trouble by shallowness of soul or callousness, but rather by a spiritual buoyancy which kept her above the dark waves, and enabled her to enjoy all the sunshine vouchsafed. Yet, unlike her father and Mara, she lived keenly in the present. She sympathized truly and honestly with her father, and in a large ...
— The Earth Trembled • E.P. Roe
... as usual,' I answered, with prompt callousness. 'I object to these base utilitarian considerations being imported into the discussion of a serious question. Florence is the city of art; as a woman of culture, it behoves you to revel in it. Your medical attendant sends you there; as a patient and an invalid, you ...
— Miss Cayley's Adventures • Grant Allen
... the iron of the Philistine giant in the effort to bring him to reason. These are the ostentatious violences of a missionary, who would fain save his enemy alive, where a grimmer purpose is glad to employ a more silent weapon and strike but once. The callousness of a thick-witted auditory lays the need for coarse method on the gentlest soul resolved to stir them. But he whose message is for minds attuned and tempered will beware of needless reiteration, as of the noisiest way of emphasis. Is the same word wanted again, he will examine carefully ...
— Style • Walter Raleigh
... many friends as they pleased, and could have no enemies unless they created them by treating them as such. And this is just what they did: from first to last, the spirit displayed by General Sarrail towards the Greek army was a spirit of insulting distrust and utterly unscrupulous callousness. ...
— Greece and the Allies 1914-1922 • G. F. Abbott
... himself. His natural reticence in serious situations and calamity, and his reserve in the outlet of feeling by vocal expression, give a wrong impression of its real depth, and may even convey the impression of callousness to anyone not conversant with the working of ...
— Grain and Chaff from an English Manor • Arthur H. Savory
... send His angel of life to watch over us and keep us from harm; and having this confidence, and using such means as seem wise and reasonable for the protection of all, I shall strive—and you must all strive with me—to dismiss selfish terrors and the horror that begets cruelty and callousness, that we may all of us do our duty towards those about us, and show that even the scourge of a righteous and offended God may become a blessing if taken in meekness ...
— The Sign Of The Red Cross • Evelyn Everett-Green
... in part, "is what we long since learned to expect from John Hamilton Barclay. Gross neglect of public duty, flagrant callousness to responsibility, contemptuous indifference to the interests of the citizens whose votes placed him where he is,—all these have been part and parcel of his attitude since the unfortunate moment of his election. But even in him we had not looked for the incredible spectacle of a ...
— The Lieutenant-Governor • Guy Wetmore Carryl
... deck again, I saw Captain West on the poop, hands still in pockets, quite uninterested, gazing at a blue break in the sky to the north-east. More than the mates and the maniac, more than the drunken callousness of the men, did this quiet figure, hands in pockets, impress upon me that I was in a different world ...
— The Mutiny of the Elsinore • Jack London
... disgrace to any community that tolerates such a horrible law or such a feeble administration of it, and such callousness to human suffering that it will not save these innocent victims from its outrageous injustice. When to this brutality are added the comparative safety of the criminal, and the vile jails and the vile inmates with whom young boys and girls and honest men and decent women are thrown for the ...
— McClure's Magazine, March, 1896, Vol. VI., No. 4. • Various
... hebetude[obs3], supineness, lukewarmness[obs3]. cold fit, cold blood, cold heart; coldness, coolness; frigidity, sang froid[Fr]; stoicism, imperturbation &c. (inexcitability) 826[obs3]; nonchalance, unconcern, dry eyes; insouciance &c. (indifference) 866; recklessness &c. 863; callousness; heart of stone, stock and stone, marble, deadness. torpor, torpidity; obstupefaction|, lethargy, coma, trance, vegetative state; sleep &c. 683; suspended animation; stupor, stupefaction; paralysis, palsy; numbness ...
— Roget's Thesaurus
... Civilian audiences would have watched in breathless, awe-struck silence; but at a military school of aviation it was a different matter. "Oh, la la! Il est perdu!" adequately gauges the degree of emotional interest taken in the incident. At the time I was surprised at this apparent callousness, but I understood it better when I had seen scores of such accidents occur, and had watched the pilots, as in this case, crawl out from the wreckage, and walk sheepishly, and a little shaken, back to their classes. Although the ...
— High Adventure - A Narrative of Air Fighting in France • James Norman Hall
... de Luynes, and the valets who played cards on his coffin were hardly more indecent in their callousness than de Luynes' enemies. The Cardinal's Hat arrived with many gracious compliments to the Bishop of Lucon, who then gave up his diocese. Soon he rustled in flame-coloured taffeta at fetes and receptions, for wealth and all the rewards of office came to him. As a Prince ...
— Heroes of Modern Europe • Alice Birkhead
... determine who were insane or feeble or worthless enough to be put out of the way! Or free to select a human victim for vivisection whenever experts deemed it wise! The widespread horror and uneasiness of such a regime, the callousness to suffering it would engender, the private revenges and crimes that might insidiously creep in under the guise of public good, are alone enough to render vicious ...
— Problems of Conduct • Durant Drake
... was worth. And he could not leave it at that, either; but for pity's sake must bring in Hercules at the end to win back Alcestis from death. So the play is great-hearted and tender, and a covert lash for conventional callousness; and somehow does not quite hang together:—leaves you just a little uncomfortable. Browning calls him, ...
— The Crest-Wave of Evolution • Kenneth Morris
... he wonders at his own callousness, he can bear to look on the bed through a mist of tears; and, so looking, feels his intellect failing in its effort to grasp the calamity ...
— M. or N. "Similia similibus curantur." • G.J. Whyte-Melville
... begrudgingly. His face assumed lines of sullen repression; the tones of his voice were full of subdued resentment. He found satisfaction in meeting their overtures with irony, their constraint with callousness. Since he had given the one thing they required and he valued, he justified himself in a series of petty tyrannies. He met his stepmother with avoidance, his father with aversion. The children he swore at or ignored. Amos Burr, gathering his slow wits ...
— The Voice of the People • Ellen Glasgow
... purpose of killing off the Boer population. The truth is, the feeling against Britain, even amongst the onlookers, was extremely bitter, and great bitterness does not make for sane judgment. What is certain is that the camps illustrated some of the callousness and carelessness which war always produces. "The sites chosen for the camps were mostly chosen on purely military grounds, and were often unsuitable; the medical and sanitary staff was at first insufficient," writes Dr. Spaight. But, "unsuitable sites, and insufficient" sanitation may produce terrible ...
— The Better Germany in War Time - Being some Facts towards Fellowship • Harold Picton
... district confessed upon their trial that they had killed their master for so slight an offence as refusal to give them part of his own dinner of meat. On the other hand, an instance of the callousness of the white man may be cited. In a fit of the sulks one of the boys of the camp threw down some blankets he was carrying, and made off into the scrub. It was considered necessary to impress the others, and unhappy chance gave the opportunity. A strange and perfectly innocent boy appeared ...
— The Confessions of a Beachcomber • E J Banfield
... beautiful clothes and jewels, no doubt hoping that, as they were so close to land, there was a good chance of escape. She was, indeed, thrown up on the beach, but, it is to be hoped, already dead, for, with shocking callousness, the people watching there snatched away all her valuables and left her lying there. An account of the wreck, written in 1874, tells that at that date a lady living near the bay still had a corner ...
— Devon, Its Moorlands, Streams and Coasts • Rosalind Northcote
... which these touching recollections do not pertain, and they heed them not; and some there are, who, with a callousness which shocks sensibility, have the ignorant effrontery to ask, "Of what use are such recollections?" With such frigid utilitarians it would be vain to argue; but this question, at least, may be put in return:—Why should the ancient glories of Greece and Rome form a large portion ...
— Handy Andy, Vol. 2 - A Tale of Irish Life • Samuel Lover
... then—you can watch me eat mine," I said, with the callousness of one who had heard dozens of people declare the same thing, and then watched them tuck into a square meal. Delphine proved another protester to add to the list. She ate her share of the meal with no sign of choking, and brightened ...
— The Lady of the Basement Flat • Mrs. George de Horne Vaizey
... his eyes glowed. Lady Ferringhall listened, and her cheeks grew pale. Her whole face stiffened with suppressed anger. She forgot Anna's sacrifices, forgot her own callousness, forgot the burden which she had fastened upon her sister's shoulders. She was fiercely and bitterly jealous. Anna was singing as she used to sing. She was chic, distinguished, unusual. What right had she to call herself "Alcide"? It was abominable, an imposture. ...
— Anna the Adventuress • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... and of his subject. He does not effect his purpose by the eagerness of his blows, but by the delicacy of his tact. The poisoned wound he inflicted was so fine, as scarcely to be felt till it rankled and festered in its "mortal consequences." His callousness was an excellent foil for the antagonists he had mostly to deal with. He took knaves and fools on his shield well. He stole away its cloak from grave imposture. If he reduced other things below their true value, making ...
— Lectures on the English Poets - Delivered at the Surrey Institution • William Hazlitt
... science comes the philosophy of science. Our eyes are bathed in Revelation, but upon our ears the music of the Word has not yet fallen. Until that time when the meaning of it all shall flash out upon the world, the race will be hidebound in callousness and in faint-hearted melancholy. As yet we do not know what to do with all which we know, and we are afflicted with the pessimism of inertia and the pessimism of dyspepsia. Intellectually, we have ...
— The Kempton-Wace Letters • Jack London
... say, says to herself, 'He belongs to Tall Pine, to the Dildoos, and to me,' and never sends the telegram. Subsequently, La-ki-wa proposes to Jack who promptly rejects her and, with the usual callousness of men, offers her a brother's love. La-ki-wa, naturally, regrets the premature disclosure of her passion and weeps. 'My brother,' she remarks, 'will think that I have the timid heart of a deer with the crying voice of a papoose. I, the daughter of ...
— Reviews • Oscar Wilde
... and cry, but yet I was as bound in the wings of the temptation, and the wind would carry me away." He wished himself "a dog or a toad," for they "had no soul to be lost as his was like to be;" and again a hopeless callousness seemed to settle upon him. "If I would have given a thousand pounds for a tear I could not shed one; no, nor sometimes scarce desire to shed one." And yet he was all the while bewailing this hardness of heart, in which he thought himself singular. "This much sunk me. I thought my condition ...
— The Life of John Bunyan • Edmund Venables
... sky, illumine for a few seconds the dark vault of heaven, and in the sudden exit of their brilliant flash seem to leave greater darkness in the night, thus the impulses of grace shot across the soul of Cassier; he struggled in the grasp of an unseen power, but suddenly lapsed into the awful callousness which characterizes the relapses of confirmed guilt; he pretended to smile at his weakness, and found a sorry relief in cursing and scoffing at everything ...
— Alvira: the Heroine of Vesuvius • A. J. O'Reilly
... time, 'do malefactors go to execution more intrepidly than in England'; and assuredly, buoyed up by custom and the approval of their fellows, Wild's victims made a brave show at the gallows. Nor was their bravery the result of a common callousness. They understood at once the humour and the delicacy of the situation. Though hitherto they had chaffed the Ordinary, they now listened to his exhortation with at least a semblance of respect; and though their last night upon earth ...
— A Book of Scoundrels • Charles Whibley
... to whom she was bound by a feeling of alternate attraction and repulsion, even less comprehended than the man himself, and all the while she was going on living in the outward conditions of her old life. Living the old life, she was horrified at herself, at her utter insurmountable callousness to all her own past, to things, to habits, to the people she had loved, who loved her—to her mother, who was wounded by her indifference, to her kind, tender father, till then dearer than all the world. At one moment she ...
— Anna Karenina • Leo Tolstoy
... had discarded in summary fashion for a younger and more attractive one had sacrificed her name and her reputation for his sake, and had also presented him with three pledges of mutual affection. Infuriated at his callousness, she afterwards, as "Daniel Stern," relieved her outraged feelings in a novel ("written to calm her agitated soul"), Nelida, where Liszt, under a transparent disguise, figured ...
— The Magnificent Montez - From Courtesan to Convert • Horace Wyndham
... The man's callousness was so purposeful and deliberate that it awed. He seemed like one who stands above all ...
— The Golden Scorpion • Sax Rohmer
... his love to her because he had thought her great. Then she had disappointed him. She had been shallow and unworthy. And, yet, a feeling of infinite regret came over him, as he thought of her lying at his feet sobbing like a little child. He remembered with what callousness he had watched her. Why had he been made like that? Why had such a soul been given to him? But he had suffered also. During the three terrible hours that the play had lasted, he had lived centuries of pain, aeon upon aeon of ...
— The Picture of Dorian Gray • Oscar Wilde
... rather heartless, knowing his sentiments; but callousness to the pangs of a lightly won and unvalued heart is not ...
— Bluebell - A Novel • Mrs. George Croft Huddleston
... contemplated a flower-bed away in the sunshine. People believed him scornful and soured. The truth of his nature consisted in his capacity for passion and in the sensitiveness of his temperament. What he lacked was the polished callousness of men of the world, the callousness from which springs an easy tolerance for oneself and others; the tolerance wide as poles asunder from true sympathy and human compassion. This want of callousness accounted for his sardonic turn of mind and ...
— Nostromo: A Tale of the Seaboard • Joseph Conrad
... miser's gloating in this repetition of a phrase sufficiently expressive in itself, or rather the gloating of a man who sees himself suddenly rich after a life of poverty. There was likewise a callousness as regarded his niece's surprising death which I considered myself to ...
— The Filigree Ball • Anna Katharine Green
... Alone and entirely by myself (as the school-boy said in translating the "Bellum Gallicum") did I beard a railway refreshment-room young lady in her own lair. I rebuked her in terms of mingled bitterness and sorrow for her callousness and want of condescension. I insisted, courteously but firmly, on being accorded that deference and attention that was the right of the traveling Briton, and at the end I looked her full in the face. ...
— Idle Thoughts of an Idle Fellow • Jerome K. Jerome
... that if Chance or Providence should ever gratify his secret wish to participate in stirring adventures, he would see to it that all his wounded enemies, no matter how many there might be of them, received adequate medical attention. He had often been shocked at the callousness with which so many of the heroes of romance dash blithely into the next adventure—though those whom they have seriously injured lie on all sides of them as thick as autumn leaves—with only the most perfunctory consideration of these victims; sometimes, indeed, with no thought ...
— The Cruise of the Jasper B. • Don Marquis
... sophistry, and devastating lies.[3418] All these dangerous ingredients which, mingled in the crucible of suppressed, concentrated ambition, long and silently boiling within him, have led to a constant defiance, a determined callousness, an automatic rigidity, and to the summary politics of the Utopian dictator and exterminator.—It is plain that such a minority will not obey parliamentary rules, and, rather than yield to the majority that it will introduce into the debate boos and hisses, insults, threats, ...
— The Origins of Contemporary France, Volume 3 (of 6) - The French Revolution, Volume 2 (of 3) • Hippolyte A. Taine
... haunts the Grove Where MURDER spilt the life-blood.—O! thy dart Kills more than Life,—e'en all that makes Life dear; Till we "the sensible of pain" wou'd change For Phrenzy, that defies the bitter tear; Or wish, in kindred callousness, to range Where moon-ey'd IDIOCY, with fallen lip, Drags the loose knee, ...
— Original sonnets on various subjects; and odes paraphrased from Horace • Anna Seward
... groping to his feet. I was torn between joy at his deliverance and rage at the inhuman callousness of Abud. ...
— Astounding Stories, July, 1931 • Various
... was far from being this. He had felt his wife's desertion far too deeply to show his scars, nor was he a man to wear his heart upon his sleeve; but as time went by and the utter callousness of Bella's conduct came home to him, he realised to the full that she was unworthy of a single pang, and he became reconciled to the inevitable. His profession claimed every spare moment, and for a man ill at ease there is no specific like hard ...
— If Only etc. • Francis Clement Philips and Augustus Harris
... to say that his class will need all the help Heaven can give them, for I shall prove their representative to be a villain of the deepest dye. He has acknowledged his connection with the Detlij Club, an infamous institution which is the expression of the depravity, the callousness, the cynicism, the degradation of English Society. He acknowledged also that he was the owner of this stick, and, in spite of his denial, I shall have little difficulty in proving to the satisfaction of the Court that ...
— Australia Revenged • Boomerang
... prose—O Generation—you!—look at the Word of the Lord!—which (as I have said) I like to think was added to his earlier verses when he dictated these to Baruch. Cannot you see, cannot you see? He is amazed by the stupidity, the callousness, the abandonment with which his people from their leaders down have treated a guidance so clear, a love so constant and yearning. And again his soul sways upon the contrast between the early innocence and the present corruption ...
— Jeremiah • George Adam Smith
... gardens were full, in spite of the weather; for what must be the callousness of that man who could let the Gardens pass under the hammer of George Robins, without bidding them an affectionate farewell? Good gracious! we can hardly believe such insensibility does exist. Hasten then, dear readers, as you would fly to catch the ...
— Gossip in the First Decade of Victoria's Reign • John Ashton
... dispatched at once for Charley, who came and cross-examined the animal; but he only shook his head and wagged his tail. These actions might have been proofs of his innocence if Fluff had still been with us, but as it was, it only showed his callousness—the callousness of cannibalism. ...
— Harper's Young People, December 23, 1879 - An Illustrated Weekly • Various
... outspoken to the point of cruelty, sprang from an indifference to her? Clarice had seen a good deal of Drake lately. She caught herself almost smiling at the idea, softening at its palpable falsity. In a last effort at resistance she fixed her thoughts on the cruelty, the callousness, in his method of narration, and began to feel herself on solid ground. She was consequently inspired to run over all that he had said, in order to make her footing yet firmer, and at the outset she was brought to a check. Why had she never questioned him upon the matter ...
— The Philanderers • A.E.W. Mason
... in his little den, he would give way to fits of violent rage. He had not yet reached a state of callousness to be able to endure these humiliations without the keenest torture to his ...
— File No. 113 • Emile Gaboriau
... and forethought; the charger, going perhaps to a bloody and cruel death, steps willingly enough up plank; the drunken man sings his good-bye; only the sober and alert taste the fearful sting of parting. Even the people who had kept up a great show of callousness had the mask suddenly and for the moment plucked from their faces; young subalterns with rather watery eyes and very loud voices ran swiftly up the plank, and brave women who had a smile even to the last for ...
— The Relief of Mafeking • Filson Young
... again, returned to the bed, set the candle down upon the chair, and stood there, her face white and drawn, staring with wide, tormented eyes about her. Murder. Danglar had spoken of it with inhuman callousness—and had laughed at it. They were going to take a man's life. And there was only herself, already driven to extremity, already with her own back against the wall in an effort to save herself, only herself to carry the burden of the responsibility ...
— The White Moll • Frank L. Packard
... His profound distaste for this conversation was betrayed by an air of weariness darkening his energetic sun-tanned features, and by the augmented dreaminess of his eyes. The Editor noted it as a further proof of that immoral detachment from mankind, of that callousness of sentiment fostered by the unhealthy conditions of solitude— according to his own favourite theory. Aloud he observed that as long as a man had not given up correspondence he could not be looked upon as lost. Fugitive criminals had been tracked in that way by justice, he ...
— Within the Tides • Joseph Conrad
... drew an additional ten thousand as a silent partner. Leary's method of dipping into the world's capital seemed quite as honorable as his own. Neither really did any work for the money. This he reflected was both morally and economically unsound, and yet Archie found himself envying Leary the callousness that made it possible for him to pocket sixty thousand stolen dollars without the ...
— Blacksheep! Blacksheep! • Meredith Nicholson
... his chair. In his altered position, a ray of sunshine fell for the first time upon his gaunt but striking face. Lined and hardened, as though by exposure and want of personal care, there was also a lack of sensibility, an almost animal callousness, on the coldly lit eyes and unflinching mouth, which readily suggested some terrible and recent experience—something potent enough to have dried up the human nature out of the man and left him soulless. His clothes had the impress of the ready-made, although he wore them with a distinction ...
— The Malefactor • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... of this brutish callousness. He was more susceptible to sex influences. Despite his worship of Lavinia, whom he elevated into a sort of divinity, and who satisfied the more refined part of his nature and his love of romance, he was not insensible ...
— Madame Flirt - A Romance of 'The Beggar's Opera' • Charles E. Pearce
... the third class carriage, there was no tight string round every man. They were not all trussed with self-conscious string as tight as capons. They had a sufficient amount of callousness and indifference and natural equanimity. True, one of them spat continually on the floor, in large spits. And another sat with his boots all unlaced and his collar off, and various important buttons ...
— Aaron's Rod • D. H. Lawrence
... immediately gave his attention to Big Jerry, and smiled with professional callousness as he caught the giant's wince when the antiseptic fluid which he poured on the ...
— 'Smiles' - A Rose of the Cumberlands • Eliot H. Robinson
... Revolutionists went on for a time flinging after his shade those jeers and curses from which that impartial lover of all his countrymen had suffered so much in his lifetime. For he, too, was sensitive. Every page of his writing bears its testimony to the fatal absence of callousness in the man. ...
— Notes on Life and Letters • Joseph Conrad
... was dark with clouds; people looked up dubiously when I asked the way and distance to Marchena, prophesying rain. Fetching my horse, the owner of the stable robbed me with peculiar callousness, for he had bound my hands the day before, when I went to see how Aguador was treated, by giving me with most courteous ceremony a glass of aguardiente; and his urbanity was then so captivating that now I lacked assurance to protest. I ...
— The Land of The Blessed Virgin; Sketches and Impressions in Andalusia • William Somerset Maugham
... made was their utter callousness regarding the psychology and temper of their soldiers and civilian population. They put a greater strain upon them than human nature could bear, and by driving their fighting-men into one shambles after another, while they doped their people with false promises which ...
— Now It Can Be Told • Philip Gibbs
... rejoined Sir Percy with a quaint laugh. "I know what venomous reptiles you and those of your kidney are. You certainly do owe your life at the present moment to the unfortunate girl whom you are persecuting with such infamous callousness." ...
— The League of the Scarlet Pimpernel • Baroness Orczy
... Ngo-Lan, a creature of the most alluring beauty; young, graceful and most delicately seductive, whose skill in the arts and sciences put many of their doctors to shame. This creature, his most prized possession, San-Lan with the utmost moral callousness ordered to seduce me, urging her to apply without stint and to its fullest extent, her knowledge of evil arts. Had I not seen the naked horror of her soul, that she let creep into her eyes for just one unguarded instant, and had it not been for my conviction ...
— The Airlords of Han • Philip Francis Nowlan
... or give back. Neither did he obey. Instead, he laughed with a hollow callousness and replied, "Shoot ef ye've a mind ter. I hain't goin' ter stir a step ...
— The Roof Tree • Charles Neville Buck
... she whispered sobbingly. "You wouldn't understand. You have never understood. How should you? You were too generous. You gave me your name, your wealth, you sacrificed your freedom to save me from a knowledge of the callousness and cruelty of the world. You saw further than I did. You knew that I would fail—as I have failed. And because of that you married me in pity. Did you think I would never guess? I didn't at first. I was a stupid ignorant child, I didn't realise what ...
— The Shadow of the East • E. M. Hull
... the watch at night was kept by the men, and regularly they had to go through the unpleasant Jack-in-the-box experience of taking the lid off Bill. The sudden way he used to pop out and rate them about his sufferings and their callousness was extremely trying, and it was only by much persuasion and reminders of his share of the hush-money that they could persuade him to return again to ...
— Sea Urchins • W. W. Jacobs
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