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More "Flaw" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... thee, soon as we find Convenient place. Come on, sir! you shall get A lesson that shall serve you for the rest Of your life. I'll make you own her, sir, a piece Of Nature's handiwork, as costly, free From bias, flaw, and fair, as ever yet Her cunning hand turned out. Come ...
— The Hunchback • James Sheridan Knowles
... my discourse, And leave the rest for some other time. For the bells themselves are the best of preachers; Their brazen lips are learned teachers, From their pulpits of stone, in the upper air, Sounding aloft, without crack or flaw, Shriller than trumpets under the Law, Now a sermon and now a prayer. The clangorous hammer is the tongue, This way, that way, beaten and swung, That from mouth of brass, as from Mouth of Gold, May be taught the Testaments, New and ...
— The Golden Legend • Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
... appeared that he had summoned to our conference several of his associates—the subordinates, merely, of his ventures—his manager of finance (with a sharp eye for a business flaw), his costumer and designer, and another person who is his reader and adviser and, in emergency, fills and mends any sudden gap that ...
— Wappin' Wharf - A Frightful Comedy of Pirates • Charles S. Brooks
... sudden sinking of the heart at the words, "save one wing under Thomas." Then the victory was not complete. It could be complete only when the whole Union army was driven from the field. As long as Thomas stood, there was a flaw in the triumph. He had heard many times of this man, Thomas. He had Grant's qualities. He was at his best in ...
— The Shades of the Wilderness • Joseph A. Altsheler
... came over her, when she saw the brightness, the happy look, the girl brought back, as it had done in the earlier months, that the great trouble was that weak spot of Verena's, that sole infirmity and subtle flaw, which she had expressed to her very soon after they began to live together, in saying (she remembered it through the ineffaceable impression made by her friend's avowal), "I'll tell you what is the matter with you—you don't dislike men as a class!" Verena ...
— The Bostonians, Vol. II (of II) • Henry James
... an indication of conscious weakness on their part," he remarked with great complacency, as he and Mr. Whitney were dining at the club on the following day. "They have evidently discovered some flaw in their defence which it will take some time to repair. I can afford to wait, however; my attorneys and experts will soon be here, and while our side could easily have been in readiness in a much shorter time, this, of course, will give ...
— That Mainwaring Affair • Maynard Barbour
... nasty custom in excess, and it grows worse instead of better, as the influence of the better mannered and better educated diminishes; but this is a spot on the sun—a mere flaw in the diamond, that friction will take out. But what a country—what a glorious country, in truth, it is! You have now done the civilized parts of the old world pretty thoroughly, my dear boy, and must be persuaded, yourself, of the superiority of ...
— The Redskins; or, Indian and Injin, Volume 1. - Being the Conclusion of the Littlepage Manuscripts • James Fenimore Cooper
... wandered over the world, but could find no man whose happiness had not some flaw, until he fell in with an Irishman; with whom he promptly began to bargain for his shirt, only to find he had not one ...
— The Reminiscences of an Irish Land Agent • S.M. Hussey
... was done with, instead of rolling yourself up with it in that unseemly manner? You go for nothing. A fourth, and a goodly one at last. What think we of yonder slow rise, and crystalline hollow, without a flaw? Steady, good wave; not so fast; not so fast; where are you coming to?—By our architectural word, this is too bad; two yards over the mark, and ever so much of you in our face besides; and a wave which we had some hope of, behind there, broken all to pieces out at sea, and laying a ...
— The Stones of Venice, Volume I (of 3) • John Ruskin
... by this time some distance out. The wind had carried him along finely, the boat scudding, as he expressed it. He was congratulating himself on the success of his trial trip, when all at once a flaw struck the boat. Not being a skillful boatman he was wholly unprepared for it, and ...
— Frank's Campaign - or the Farm and the Camp • Horatio Alger, Jr.
... almost without flaw. Even Helen, whose fancy had played with him at first, but who in time had indolently yielded to the fascination exerted over her, and even gone so far as to permit his adulation, and accept in the ring the mystic pledge thereof (during all the countless ages of its experience it had never touched ...
— Idolatry - A Romance • Julian Hawthorne
... water,' yet it does not follow that because 'this ship is iron' it will 'sink in water,' Hence syllogistic 'proof' seems quite devoid of the 'cogency' it claimed. After a conclusion has been 'demonstrated' it has still to come true in fact. This flaw in the Syllogism was first pointed out ...
— Pragmatism • D.L. Murray
... steeds: "Pony-breeding is a more puzzling business than anything else in God's universe. The parents, grandparents, and great grandparents of a given pony have all been perfect in every point. Good! You naturally expect that a pony with such exceptionable ancestry will itself be without a flaw. But is it? No, often it is not. Too frequently you get bitter water from sweet, and thistles instead of grapes. Just look at that tricky, mischievous, ill-tempered, wall-eyed little rascal. Where did he get ...
— Literary Tours in The Highlands and Islands of Scotland • Daniel Turner Holmes
... us for a moment survey the existing condition of affairs. I, myself, to begin with, I and my ancestors, for many generations, have held undisputed possession of this pollard. Not the slightest flaw has ever been discovered in our title-deeds; and no claimant has ever arisen. The rook has had, I believe, once or twice some little difficulty respecting his own particular tenancy, which is not a freehold; but his townsmen, as a body, possess their trees in peace. The crow holds ...
— Wood Magic - A Fable • Richard Jefferies
... regard me with such disfavor." She looked at the girl almost wistfully. "Life is hard, Vesta, and exacting, spite of all that we can do; and the world is hard and exacting, supercilious, ready to pick at a flaw—you do ...
— Vesty of the Basins • Sarah P. McLean Greene
... dictate his will to a notary in the presence of witnesses, lest his sanity should be called in question and the Camusots should attempt upon that pretext to dispute the will. At the name of Trognon he caught a glimpse of machinations of some kind; perhaps a flaw purposely inserted, or premeditated treachery on La Cibot's part. He would prevent this. Trognon should dictate a holograph will which should be signed and deposited in a sealed envelope in a drawer. Then Schmucke, hidden in one of the cabinets in his alcove, should see La Cibot ...
— Poor Relations • Honore de Balzac
... girl. Why, there were not six men in the world who had ever reflected that words forced out of a person by horrible tortures were not necessarily words of verity and truth, yet this unlettered peasant-girl put her finger upon that flaw with an unerring instinct. I had always supposed that torture brought out the truth—everybody supposed it; and when Joan came out with those simple common-sense words they seemed to flood the place with light. It ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... always sprang afresh in the success of each new venture. Many of the vessels could scarcely be said to be launched at all; they sank like lead, close to the shore. Others floated out for a time, and then, struck by a flaw in the wind, heeled over and disappeared. Some, not well put together, broke into fragments in the bufleting of the waves. Others danced on the flood, taking the sun on their sails, and went away with good promise of a long voyage. But only ...
— Baddeck and That Sort of Thing • Charles Dudley Warner
... in Europe to the effective way in which the Act was dealing with the traffickers in America, and urged them to get a similar one passed in their own country, when, to our intense disappointment the Judges of the Supreme Court in America, discovered a flaw in one of its chief clauses, and, I am told that in consequence, hundreds of men and women, who had been convicted as traffickers, were immediately let loose upon society, to again engage in this ...
— Fighting the Traffic in Young Girls - War on the White Slave Trade • Various
... well mixed and placed concrete the film of cement paste which flushes to the surface will take the impress of every flaw in the surface of the forms. It will even show the grain marks in well dressed lumber. From this it will be seen how very difficult it is so to mold concrete that the surface will not bear evidence of the mold used. The task is impracticable of perfect accomplishment and ...
— Concrete Construction - Methods and Costs • Halbert P. Gillette
... merits both spiritual and spectacular, and he brought to the big house an exotic atmosphere that was spicy with delights. The little boy prayed that this hero might be made again the man he once was; not because of any flaw that he could see in him—but only because the sufferer appeared somewhat less than perfect to himself. To Bernal's mind, indeed, nothing could have been superior to the noble melancholy with which Cousin Bill J. looked back upon his splendid ...
— The Seeker • Harry Leon Wilson
... this the Face that thrills with awe Seraphs who veil their face above? Is this the Face without a flaw, The Face that is the Face of Love? Yea, this defaced, a lifeless clod, Hath all creation's love sufficed, Hath satisfied the love of God, This Face the Face ...
— Poems • Christina G. Rossetti
... way because I want you to realize that except for the one fault which has shadowed your father's life, there is no flaw in him. Other men have gone through the world apparently untouched by any temptation, but their families could tell you the story of a thousand tyrannies, their clerks could tell you of selfishness and hardness, their churches and benevolent ...
— The Tin Soldier • Temple Bailey
... to send you a novel, which a gentleman, your acquaintance, said you would hand to him. I beg with expedition, as 'tis time it should be published, and 'tis requisite he first revise it, or the reviewers may find a flaw.—I am, sir, ...
— The Diary and Letters of Madame D'Arblay Volume 1 • Madame D'Arblay
... Sunday-school scholars fairly convulsed her by their life-like appearance. There was the little scamp of a boy who was revealed by the dozen to any one who took a walk down town toward the close of the day; the argumentative old man, with his nose pointing out a flaw in your reasoning or on the keen scent for a mistake; and the pert fourteen-year-old girl whose very nose, as it slightly turned upward, showed that she knew more than all the logicians ...
— Four Girls at Chautauqua • Pansy
... romances were always made for two. She was not a real woman, she was morbidly bodiless. Strange though it may seem, the kind, awkward, absent-minded touch of Richard as he had lifted her on to the Horse Vivian's back had been for her the one flaw in that enchanted ride. She could not bear touch. She had no pleasure in seeing or feeling the skin and homespun that encloses men and women. She hated to watch people feeding themselves, or to see her own thin body in the mirror. She ought really to have been born a poplar tree; a human ...
— Living Alone • Stella Benson
... than the dagger. An inscription ran lengthwise down the steel, which was of a distinct bluish tinge where it was not darkly stained. About an inch from the tip a tiny triangular nick had been made in one of the sharp edges, the only flaw in the weapon's perfection. Creighton looked up from it to meet the Sheriff's ...
— The Monk of Hambleton • Armstrong Livingston
... rather hard for her, and she judged it as it appeared, and there did seem a great flaw somewhere which she was trying her best to solve by noting every phase of life as she found it. Naturally bright, keenly intellectual and very independent, she was a philosopher as well as an artist, and always ready for a tilt with the world ...
— The Right Knock - A Story • Helen Van-Anderson
... hair. Lady Gwendoline is his ideal of fair, sweet womanhood, turning coldly from all the rest of the world to hold out her arms to one happy possessor. The vision of Lady Gwendoline as he saw her last, the morning sunshine searching her fair English face and finding no flaw in it, rises for a second before him—why, he does not know. Then a triumphal burst of music crashes out, and be is looking down once more upon Edith Darrell, in her white dress and coral ornaments, her dark ...
— A Terrible Secret • May Agnes Fleming
... Hopper had obtained a copy of the recognizance, signed by the magistrate, he chuckled inwardly and marched out of the office. If there was a flaw in anything, Thomas Harrison had a jocose way of saying, "There is a hole in the ballad." As they went into the street together, his friend said, "Thomas, there's a hole in the ballad. The recognizance we have just signed is good for nothing. The ...
— Isaac T. Hopper • L. Maria Child
... Powers to a monster. Masculine observers, if the birth-mark did not heighten their admiration, contented themselves with wishing it away, that the world might possess one living specimen of ideal loveliness, without the semblance of a flaw. After his marriage—for he thought little or nothing of the matter before—Aylmer discovered that this was the ...
— Masterpieces of Mystery - Riddle Stories • Various
... that "sincere" is made of the words sine-cera, meaning "honey without wax." I have been told that it refers also to the Greeks, who, when they found a crack in a statue, would sometimes fill the flaw with wax; and that hence a "sincere" statue, one "without wax," would have no flaw, but be a true ...
— St. Nicholas Magazine for Boys and Girls, Vol. 5, May, 1878, No. 7. - Scribner's Illustrated • Various
... he is dying, he draws it out of the warm wound. As he falls on his back upon the ground, the blood spurts forth on high, not otherwise than as when a pipe is burst on the lead decaying,[22] and shoots out afar the liquid water from the hissing flaw, and cleaves the air with its jet. The fruit of the tree, by the sprinkling of the blood, are changed to a dark tint, and the root, soaked with the gore, tints the hanging mulberries with a purple hue. ...
— The Metamorphoses of Ovid - Vol. I, Books I-VII • Publius Ovidius Naso
... Ken." Patty's quick perceptions had caught the flaw in Kenneth's argument. "It isn't that. It's because you're so absorbed in your work that you'd RATHER dig and delve in it, than to go to parties. That's all right, of course, and much to your credit. But you can't blame me for liking ...
— Patty's Suitors • Carolyn Wells
... that your generosity can be supreme—without a flaw. Love at its highest should be the ...
— Tales Of Hearsay • Joseph Conrad
... bit," says the Pope, "I can't althegither give in to your second miner—no—your second major," says he, and he stopped. "Faix, then," says he, getting confused, "I don't rightly remimber where it was exactly that I thought I seen the flaw in your premises. Howsomdiver," says he, "I don't deny that it's a good conclusion, and one that 'ud be ov materil service to the Church if it was dhrawn wid ...
— Stories of Comedy • Various
... but there is no flaw in your claim, and I have unearthed a delightful relative for you, a cousin of your mother's with whom much of her early life was passed. After her marriage they seemed to fall apart as people often do, and she heard you were all dead. She has three charming girls, fourteen, ...
— A Modern Cinderella • Amanda M. Douglas
... his hands and critically examined it for several minutes. It was most unmistakably a diamond, and that, too, of the very finest water, without the faintest trace of a flaw of any kind. He remained silent so long that Sir Reginald grew impatient and ...
— The Log of the Flying Fish - A Story of Aerial and Submarine Peril and Adventure • Harry Collingwood
... for, we reckoned, close on three hours when the sun rose. The gray shadows drew slowly off the face of the sea, and we stood up and scanned the northern horizon anxiously. But there was no flaw upon the brimming white rim. Torode had evidently not been able to get round La Hague, and a man must have been blind indeed not to see therein the hand of Providence; for a cap full of wind and he would have been down on us like a wolf on two strayed lambs. But now Sercq lay straight in front ...
— Carette of Sark • John Oxenham
... streets just below, she thought it a strange thing that so favored a woman should rail at her own country and kinsmen. It oppressed her loyal little heart, for she had begun to like the titled lady, and hated to find so grave a flaw in her nature. ...
— All Aboard - A Story for Girls • Fannie E. Newberry
... 3: In order that an election be not rebutted in a court of law, it suffices to elect a good man, nor is it necessary to elect the better man, because otherwise every election might have a flaw. But as regards the conscience of an elector, it is necessary to elect one who is better, either absolutely speaking, or in relation to the common good. For if it is possible to have one who is more competent ...
— Summa Theologica, Part II-II (Secunda Secundae) • Thomas Aquinas
... the strength and verity of Dartmouth's love for Weir, and he had yet to be daunted by anything in life; consequently he found his present course of psychological research without flaw. Moreover, the quaintness of her nature pervaded all her ideas. She had an old-fashioned simplicity and directness which, combined with a charming quality of mind and an unusual amount of mental development, ...
— What Dreams May Come • Gertrude Franklin Horn Atherton
... unlaced disheveled country within fifty miles of Boston, which, moreover, can be reached in half an hour's ride by railway. But the nearest railway station (Heaven be praised!) is two miles distant, and the seclusion is without a flaw. Ponkapog has one mail a day; two mails a day ...
— The Wit and Humor of America, Volume III. (of X.) • Various
... to a married woman but improper to a young girl—this was very sweet to Rachel. The subdued stir made by Mrs. Tams in clearing the table was for Rachel a delicious background to the scene. The one flaw in it was her short skirt, which she had not had time to change. Louis had protested that it was entirely in order, and indeed admirably coquettish, but Rachel would have preferred a long train of soft drapery disposed with art round the front ...
— The Price of Love • Arnold Bennett
... households became friendly, and very seldom did a week pass without their seeing something of each other. Try as she might, and dangerous as she assumed the acquaintanceship to be, Lady Mottisfont could detect no fault or flaw in her new friend. It was obvious that Dorothy had been the magnet which had drawn the Contessa hither, and ...
— A Group of Noble Dames • Thomas Hardy
... magnanimous in conquest, and never so sublime as on that day when he laid down his victorious sword and sought his noble retirement:—here indeed is a character to admire and revere; a life without a stain, a fame without a flaw. Quando invenies parem? In that more extensive work, which I have planned and partly written on the subject of this great war, I hope I have done justice to the character of its greatest leader. [And I trust that in the opinions I have recorded regarding him, ...
— The Virginians • William Makepeace Thackeray
... Leopold Dietrich, a vintner, and we are soon to be married." There was a flaw in the ...
— The Goose Girl • Harold MacGrath
... of candid marble without flaw, Or alabaster blemishless and rare, Ruggiero might have fancied what he saw, For statue-like it seemed, and fastened there By craft of cunningest artificer; Save in the wistful eyes Ruggiero thought A teardrop gleamed, and with the rippling hair The ocean breezes played as ...
— Poems • Alan Seeger
... the lines, Hygeia's fount that shade, Smart booths allure the lounger on parade. Bohemia's glass, and Nevers' beaded wares, Millecour's fine lace, and Moulins' polish'd shears; And crates of painted wicker without flaw, And fine mesh'd products of Germania's straw, Books of dull trifling, misnamed "reading light," And foxy maps, and prints in damaged plight, Whilst up and down to rattling castanettes, The active ...
— Blackwoods Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 59, No. 365, March, 1846 • Various
... it. Now listen to me carefully. I'll give you, step by step, the whole matter." He walked up and down for some minutes and then suddenly stopped beside me and thumped me on the back. "There's not a flaw in it!" he cried. "It's magnificent. My dear fellow, death is only a failure in human perfection. There's nothing mysterious in it. Religion has made a ridiculous fuss about it. There's nothing more mysterious in it than there is in a badly-oiled ...
— The Blue Germ • Martin Swayne
... now to the family gathering in the palatial home of Mr. Courtney Van Winkle, just off Fifth Avenue (on the near east side), and it is December. Corky's wife bought the place, furnished. He couldn't stop her. The only flaw in the whole arrangement, according to the ambitious Grand Duchess, was the deplorable accident that admitted a trained nurse into the family circle. It would be very hard to live down. She never could understand why Mr. Van ...
— Her Weight in Gold • George Barr McCutcheon
... and one fair daughter—Aline. The two families had met. Freddie and Aline had been thrown together; and, only a few days before, the engagement had been announced. And for Lord Emsworth the only flaw in this best of all possible worlds had ...
— Something New • Pelham Grenville Wodehouse
... flaw of magic lies not in its general assumption of a sequence of events determined by law, but in its total misconception of the nature of the particular laws which govern that sequence. If we analyse the various cases of sympathetic magic ...
— The Golden Bough - A study of magic and religion • Sir James George Frazer
... sure of that," she replied thoughtfully. "I want the pedestal of my hero to be a low one; and Cooee declares that she wishes no pedestal at all. If her hero is worthy of the name, he must bear inspection even from above. The worst flaw of all might lurk in the very ...
— On the Firing Line • Anna Chapin Ray and Hamilton Brock Fuller
... undergoing a dark crucifixion: the hosts of light are overcoming it, and it is dying filled with anguish and despair at a beauty it cannot attain. All these strange emotions have a profound psychological interest. I do not think because a spiritual flaw can be urged against a certain phase of life that it should remain unexpressed. The psychic maladies which attack all races when their civilization grows old must needs be understood to be dealt with: and they cannot be understood without being revealed ...
— Imaginations and Reveries • (A.E.) George William Russell
... speed on the draw might possibly overcome this advantage"—he raised his ray-gun slightly—"and, though I know you would not kill me—save in the direst emergency, since you wish to take me a living prisoner—I would find it most distressing to have to carry for the rest of my life a flaw on my body. So, may I request you to withdraw your ray-guns with two fingertips and put them on the floor? Observe—your fingertips. ...
— The Affair of the Brains • Anthony Gilmore
... at daylight of the 9th, to prosecute the examination of the coast, the anchor came up with an arm broken off, in consequence of a flaw extending two-thirds through the iron. The negligence with which this anchor had been made, might in some cases have caused the loss ...
— A Voyage to Terra Australis Volume 2 • Matthew Flinders
... him some definite intellectual defect; as, moreover, I am vastly more sure that Socrates was morally imperfect, than that I am able to censure him rightly; so also, a disputant who concedes to me that Jesus is a mere man, has no right to claim that I will point out some moral flaw in him, or else acknowledge him to be a Unique Unparalleled Divine Soul. It is true, I do see defects, and very serious ones, in the character of Jesus, as drawn by his disciples; but I cannot admit that my right to disown ...
— Phases of Faith - Passages from the History of My Creed • Francis William Newman
... defiled temple. It was a crude plot, too, and quite unworthy of Francis Bullard, as he would have realised for himself had he not been obsessed by the new conviction that the real diamonds, now virtually Alan's, were hidden in the clock in that upper room. Further, it contained a serious flaw, in that it allowed nothing for the possibility of Alan's making a fresh will. And finally, if one may be permitted to put the primary objection last, it depended on the possession of the Green Box which had ...
— Till the Clock Stops • John Joy Bell
... Jimmie Dale softly, "that Thorold couldn't come, that old Jake found one of the diamonds cloudy and with a flaw, and that the deal fell through—and it means, colonel, that you will never be called upon to steal Mrs. Milford's diamonds again; there ...
— The Further Adventures of Jimmie Dale • Frank L. Packard
... had been in a mood for theological discussion, he might have pointed out to his mother the flaw in the logic of her own belief. Grandfather Wheeler, translated into the glory that awaits the faithful servant of the Lord, in all surety should have been beyond the danger of vicarious and everlasting death. However, Scott was too much in earnest, just ...
— The Brentons • Anna Chapin Ray
... jest.] Isn't it awful! You can't make him jealous! I think it's a positive flaw in his ...
— The Girl with the Green Eyes - A Play in Four Acts • Clyde Fitch
... steel now used was first tried in 1880. It possessed tensile strength of 24 to 25 tons per square inch. It was then considered advisable not to exceed this, and err rather on the safe side. This shaft has been in use eight years, and no sign of any flaw has been observed. Since then the tensile strength of mild steel has gradually been increased by Messrs. Vickers, the steel still retaining the elasticity and toughness to endure fatigue. This has only been arrived at by improvements in the manufacture and more powerful and better adapted ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 717, September 28, 1889 • Various
... golden. He inherited the lines of his mother's features, however; also her good teeth, her stature (or the promise of her stature, for he was not yet full- grown), and, what was better, her health without flaw, and her spirits of that tone and equality which are better than a fortune ...
— Villette • Charlotte Bronte
... of slush and flaw Red with a blood red dye. And a million faces fungus pale Stare ...
— Toward the Gulf • Edgar Lee Masters
... moves off, the Baron steps back with that same look in his face, and lifts his hat. His courtesy shows at the last some flaw, for, although Mrs. Steele is there, his lips and eyes ...
— Under the Southern Cross • Elizabeth Robins
... the future. Somewhat as in the early days of the French Revolution, men must have looked for an immediate and universal improvement in their condition. Christianity, up to that time, had been somewhat of a failure politically. The reason was now obvious, the capital flaw was detected, the sickness of the body politic traced at last to its efficient cause. It was only necessary to put the Bible thoroughly into practice, to set themselves strenuously to realise in life the Holy Commonwealth, and all abuses and iniquities would surely pass away. ...
— Familiar Studies of Men & Books • Robert Louis Stevenson
... seem! Their faces beam; I give them all their names, Bertram and Gilbert, Louis, Frank and James, Each with his aims; One thinks he is a poet, and writes verse His friends rehearse; Another is full of law; A third sees pictures which his hand can draw Without a flaw. ...
— Behind the Arras - A Book of the Unseen • Bliss Carman
... estate. He suggested that the conveyance might not be forthcoming; but Sir Robert assured him that both his grandfather and the present Mr. Percy were men of business, and that there was little likelihood either that the deeds should be lost, or that there should be any flaw in the title. Afterwards a fire broke out at Percy-hall, which consumed that wing of the house in which were Mr. Percy's papers—the papers were all saved except this deed of conveyance. Mr. Sharpe being accidentally apprized of the loss, ...
— Tales And Novels, Vol. 8 • Maria Edgeworth
... slept as sweetly as a child, And when you woke you recked not of your shame, But babbled greetings, stretched yourself and smiled From that eviscerated sofa's frame, Which, flawless erst, was now one mighty flaw Through the addition of ...
— Punch, Or The London Charivari, Vol. 146., January 21, 1914 • Various
... in the dating of letters), their want of impartiality, both in seeing and stating occurrences and in tracing or attributing motives, it is plain that history is not to be depended on in any absolute sense. That smooth and indifferent quality of mind, without a flaw of prejudice or a blur of theory, which can reflect passing events as they truly are, is as rare, if not so precious, as that artistic sense which can hold the mirror up to nature. The fact that there is so little historical or political prescience, that no man of experience ventures to prophesy, ...
— The Writings of James Russell Lowell in Prose and Poetry, Volume V - Political Essays • James Russell Lowell
... got her head to the wind we were aground. The captain immediately ordered the sails to be clewed up and handed. While the people were on the yards, we caught sight of a boat pulling from the brig towards the town. Just then, before the people were off the yards, a sudden flaw of wind drove the ship's head off the bank. Hoping now to get off, the order was given to hoist the driver and mizzen-staysail, and to keep the sheets to windward. The instant the ship lost her ...
— The Loss of the Royal George • W.H.G. Kingston
... side of ignoring functionally produced modifications than of insisting on them. The main agency with him is the direct action of the environment upon the organism. This, no doubt, is a flaw in Buffon's immortal work, but it is one which Erasmus Darwin and Lamarck easily corrected; nor can we doubt that Buffon would have readily accepted their amendment if it had been suggested to him. Buffon did infinitely more in the way of discovering and establishing ...
— Luck or Cunning? • Samuel Butler
... puzzled—made Mildred understand why she had been so reluctant to confess. Jennings did not pursue the subject, but abruptly began the lesson. That day and several days thereafter he put her to tests he had never used before. She saw that he was searching for something—for the flaw implied in the adverse verdict of the son of Lucia Rivi. She was enormously relieved when he gave over the search without having found the flaw. She felt that Donald Keith's verdict had been proved false or at least faulty. Yet she was not wholly reassured, and from time ...
— The Price She Paid • David Graham Phillips
... a bell, And he gave him a mortal thrust; For himself, by law, since Adam's flaw, Is contractor for ...
— The Humourous Poetry of the English Language • James Parton
... couldn't do it, I couldn't do it! Granted, granted that there is no flaw in all that reasoning, that all that I have concluded this last month is clear as day, true as arithmetic.... My God! Anyway I couldn't bring myself to it! I couldn't do it, I couldn't do it! Why, why ...
— Crime and Punishment • Fyodor Dostoyevsky
... curiosity to examine this flaw with a strong magnifier which he unscrewed from one of ...
— The Mysterious Island • Jules Verne
... of this school the last human teacher is gone. Gone are all the human weaknesses, the temper fits of teachers, their ignorance and prejudices. The roboteachers are without flaw." ...
— There Will Be School Tomorrow • V. E. Thiessen
... seemed careless about their young ones. The father canary, attracted by the cries of the baby goldfinches, forced himself through a flaw in the wire, and began to feed them. This it did regularly, until the goldfinches undertook the work themselves, and rendered the kindness of the ...
— Anecdotes of Animals • Unknown
... bring out and make visible his inner exaltation. Now, tall, strong, white-haired, he looked a figure of an older world. "The spheres and all are set to harmony!" he said. "I would have fitness. Great things throughout! Diamonds and rubies without flaw in the crown.—We will talk no more about ...
— 1492 • Mary Johnston
... quoting the council of Toledo: "In regard to the Jews the holy synod commands that henceforward none of them be forced to believe: for such are not to be saved against their will, but willingly, that their righteousness may be without flaw." ...
— Summa Theologica, Part III (Tertia Pars) - From the Complete American Edition • Thomas Aquinas
... development of the same type of quiet unassuming English gentleman,—the gallant, thrusting, never-tiring Plumer. Small spare man of dainty gait and finish, yet moulded in a clay which hitherto has shown no flaw in the rougher elements of the soldier. It is no inconsiderable tribute to his sterling qualities as a leader that he gained both the confidence and devotion of the rough Bushboys from the Antipodes, with whom he was associated. But however dainty and ...
— On the Heels of De Wet • The Intelligence Officer
... I had a last interview with Mr. Bradlaugh and Mrs. Besant at 63 Fleet Street. Mr. Bradlaugh told me he could find no flaw in our Indictment, and his air was that of a man who sees no hope, but is reluctant to say so. Mrs. Besant was full of quiet sympathy, proffering this and that kindness, and showing how much her heart was greater than ...
— Prisoner for Blasphemy • G. W. [George William] Foote
... as much as our own Hearts. They either do not see our Faults, or conceal them from us, or soften them by their Representations, after such a manner, that we think them too trivial to be taken notice of. An Adversary, on the contrary, makes a stricter Search into us, discovers every Flaw and Imperfection in our Tempers, and though his Malice may set them in too strong a Light, it has generally some Ground for what it advances. A Friend exaggerates a Man's Virtues, an Enemy inflames his Crimes. A Wise Man should give a just Attention ...
— The Spectator, Volume 2. • Addison and Steele
... snorted indignantly. "That's the pup worth two hundred dollars at eight months, 'because she has every single good point of Champion Rothsay Chief and not a flaw from nostril to tail-tip'! Rothsay wrote those very words about her, you remember. And he's supposed to be the most dependable man in the collie business! Lord! She's undersized—no bigger than a five monther! And she's ...
— Bruce • Albert Payson Terhune
... set free, Enjoyed delusive liberty, While every water-pipe must drip To greet the passing thaw. Then rudely dashed from eager lip The cup of joy would be, And fingers numbed, and chattering jaw, Owned unexpelled the winter's flaw, And on the steps the goodmen slip, And shout ...
— Punch, Or The London Charivari, Vol. 100., Jan. 24, 1891. • Various
... and richer men than I. Norris Whitehouse has loved her all her life, and you know what a splendid man he is, but Louise ridicules the idea of ever caring for anybody but me. She is so perfect that there is absolutely no flaw in her for me to recognize and feel friendly with. She reads me like a book, but I am less acquainted with her than I was before we were engaged. She says such beautiful things to me sometimes, things that are far beyond my comprehension, ...
— The Love Affairs of an Old Maid • Lilian Bell
... perfect, everything—no flaw in the perfect harmony of the seen. No limit to its onapproachable beauty. Yes, the glory of that seen as it bust onto my raptured vision will go with me through life, and won't never be outdone and replaced by anything more perfect, ...
— Samantha at the World's Fair • Marietta Holley
... took a flaw of pain, A hap of skiey pleasure, A thought had in his cradle lain, And mingled them in measure. That chrism he laid upon his eyes, And lips, and heart, for euphrasies, That he might see, feel, sing, perdie, The simple things that are the wise. Beside ...
— New Poems • Francis Thompson
... have seen a field of wheat surged in one wave by the wind, I saw the closely packed people in that wide parquet sway forward in a great gust of laughter. With quick, experienced eye I scanned first Othello's garb from top to toe, and finding no unseemly rent or flaw of any kind to provoke laughter, I next swept the stage. Coming to the close-drawn curtains, I saw—heavens! No wonder the people laughed. The murdered Desdemona had risen, was evidently sitting on the side of the bed; for beneath the curtains her dangling feet alone were ...
— Stage Confidences • Clara Morris
... rather shallow loch, seldom much over fifteen feet deep, save where a long narrow rent or geological flaw runs through the bottom. The water is of a queer glaucous green, olive-coloured, or rather like the tint made when you wash out a box of water-colour paints. This is not so pretty as the black wave of Loch Awe or Loch Shin, but has a redeeming quality in the richness of the feeding for trout. ...
— Angling Sketches • Andrew Lang
... which dubbed Sir Charles Dilke as 'anti-German' or 'anti-Russian' were never more curiously misapplied. The flaw to be found even in the mental constitution of Gambetta's great personality, as shown by his antagonism to Russia, had no part in his friend's outlook; nor did Sir Charles's friendship for all things French ...
— The Life of the Rt. Hon. Sir Charles W. Dilke, Vol. 2 • Stephen Gwynn
... work of genius. But, oh! Jaffery, I do want it to be without a flaw. Don't hate me, dear—I know you've done all that mortal man could do for Adrian and for me. But it isn't your fault if you're not a professional novelist or an imaginative writer. And you, yourself, said the bridges were clumsy. Couldn't you—oh!—I loathe hurting you, dear Jaffery—but ...
— Jaffery • William J. Locke
... some people had been enough stirred to place little bunches of flowers at the feet of the statue as a tender tribute to its beauty. But one day I was greatly annoyed by the presence of a critical woman who had discovered a little flaw in the statue, where a bit had been broken off. She chattered about it like an excited magpie. Poor soul, she had no eyes for the beauty of the thing, the mystery which shrouded its past stirred no emotions in her breast. ...
— The Common Sense of Socialism - A Series of Letters Addressed to Jonathan Edwards, of Pittsburg • John Spargo
... an estate. The law—the eagle-eyed law itself—had been deceived, and had handed over disputed thousands to a madman's hands. Where was the wit of the sharp-sighted men of sound mind? Where the dexterity of the lawyers, eager to discover a flaw? The madman's cunning had overreached ...
— The Pickwick Papers • Charles Dickens
... ring is used as a guard to the wedding ring, it should be as handsome as possible, and a small, pure stone is a far better choice than a more showy one that may be a little off in color or possess a flaw. ...
— The Handy Cyclopedia of Things Worth Knowing - A Manual of Ready Reference • Joseph Triemens
... violently, opening his eyes. No use remembering her. There had been that fatal flaw in him from the very first, he knew now. If he were the boy again knowing all he knew today, still the flaw would be there and sooner or later the same thing must have happened that had happened twenty years ago. He had been ...
— Song in a Minor Key • Catherine Lucille Moore
... put together, the chains would hold, and that the piers would sustain them. Still there was necessarily an element of uncertainty in the undertaking. It was the largest structure of the kind that had ever been attempted. There was the contingency of a flaw in the iron; some possible scamping in the manufacture; some little point which, in the multiplicity of details to be attended to, he might have overlooked, or which his subordinates might have neglected. It was, indeed, impossible but that he should feel intensely anxious ...
— The Life of Thomas Telford by Smiles • Samuel Smiles
... much benefit is derived; some come from twenty to twenty-five miles. The men flaunt about in gaudy-coloured lambas of many folded kilts—the women work hardest—the potters slap and ring their earthenware all round, to show that there is not a single flaw in them. I bought two finely shaped earthen bottles of porous earthenware, to hold a gallon each, for one string of beads, the women carry huge loads of them in their funnels above the baskets, strapped to the shoulders ...
— The Last Journals of David Livingstone, in Central Africa, from 1865 to His Death, Volume II (of 2), 1869-1873 • David Livingstone
... imperceptibly, with the generous sentiments that come with mellow age. He held his back straight and his head with an air—an air that was not a swagger but the sign-token of seasoned experience in the world. The most carping could have found no flaw in the quiet taste of his attire. To sum up, Kirkwood's very good friend—and his only one then in London—Mr. Brentwick looked ...
— The Black Bag • Louis Joseph Vance
... better not tell you what I mean. Miss Farrel gives herself clean away just by her looks. No living woman was ever made so there wasn't a flaw in her face but that there was a flaw in her soul. We're none of us perfect. If there ain't a flaw outside, there's a flaw ...
— The Shoulders of Atlas - A Novel • Mary E. Wilkins Freeman
... therefore, lies in this thought for us all. First, let us labour that our faith may be enlightened, importunate, and firm: for every flaw in it will injuriously affect our possession of the grace of God. Errors in opinion will hinder the blessings that flow from the truths which we misconceive or reject. Languor of desire will diminish the sum and enfeeble the energy of the powers that work in ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture - St. Mark • Alexander Maclaren
... O Sovereign Seer of time, But Thee, O poet's Poet, Wisdom's Tongue, But Thee, O man's best Man, O love's best Love, O perfect life in perfect labor writ, O all men's Comrade, Servant, King, or Priest,— What if or yet, what mole, what flaw, what lapse, What least defect or shadow of defect, What rumor, tattled by an enemy, Of inference loose, what lack of grace Even in torture's grasp, or sleep's, or death's,— Oh, what amiss may I forgive in Thee, Jesus, good Paragon, ...
— The Ascent of the Soul • Amory H. Bradford
... or both of these circumstances the following. Errata almost entirely literal have been committed. I believe however that the Scholar will not find any misstatement of facts, nor the Logician any flaw in the arguments; the book lays before the Public. On these two points I feel quite secure in this respect: I calmly and firmly lay my gage at the feet of all Christendom. Let him who dares to take it ...
— Five Pebbles from the Brook • George Bethune English
... thought, construe the Constitution, in its letter, as intending to perpetuate slavery. To come to such a conclusion with a full knowledge of what was the mind of this nation in regard to slavery, when that instrument was made, demonstrates a moral or intellectual flaw ...
— The Anti-Slavery Examiner, Omnibus • American Anti-Slavery Society
... The face and hands are of turquoise blue; the head- dress is yellow, with violet stripes; the hieroglyphic characters of the inscription, and the vulture with outspread wings upon the breast of the figure, are also violet. The whole is delicate, brilliant, and harmonious; not a flaw mars the purity of the contours or the clearness of ...
— Manual Of Egyptian Archaeology And Guide To The Study Of Antiquities In Egypt • Gaston Camille Charles Maspero
... I seem to see it quite clearly—then in that White scheme is a singular flaw: at one point, it is obvious, that elaborate Forethought fails: for I have a free will—and I refuse, ...
— The Purple Cloud • M.P. Shiel
... shall you see me again!' And turning his back on the assembly, he withdrew to his own house, incessantly repeating to himself, 'World, I know you now.' What annoyed him most was, that having studied and re-studied the process during a whole month, without having discovered this important flaw, he could not understand how it had escaped ...
— Apologia pro Vita Sua • John Henry Newman
... takes the court twenty years. I am however at the end of my labor, and have in reward for all my toil and vexation a judgment in my favor. But hold—a sagacious commander, in the adversary's army, has found a flaw in the proceeding. My triumph is turned into mourning. I have used or, instead of and, or some mistake, small in appearance, but dreadful in its consequences; and have the whole of my success quashed in a writ of ...
— The Works of the Right Honourable Edmund Burke, Vol. I. (of 12) • Edmund Burke
... to be a good driver of aeroplanes," commented Roy, as he watched; "see that flaw strike them! There! he brought the Cobweb through it like an old general of the ...
— The Girl Aviators' Sky Cruise • Margaret Burnham
... betraying a flaw in the wise woman's perception, gave Moll courage, and she answered readily enough that she was called "Lala Mollah"—which was true, "Lala" being the Moorish for lady, and "Mollah" the name her friends in Elche had called her ...
— A Set of Rogues • Frank Barrett
... in bettering her. Only once does he sound a false note. I find her speech a trifle rhetorical after she learns the facts in the case of Razumov (p. 354). Two lines are superfluous at the close of this heart-breaking chapter, and in all the length of the book that is the only flaw I can offer to hungry criticism. The revolutionary group at Geneva—the mysterious and vile Madame de S——, the unhappy slave, Tekla, the much-tried Mrs. Haldin, and the very vital anarchist, surely a portrait ...
— Ivory Apes and Peacocks • James Huneker
... queening "like all the rest of the frat-men," and their jovial expeditions to Mayfield were over, "because she wouldn't understand" (most conclusive proof!), but he ended by taking it as he might have taken an inequality of temper—as a flaw in character to be overlooked in a friend. Then again, Pellams found it positively uncanny to be getting on so well in his work, an uneasy feeling as though he were walking along the edge of a steep place. As for the joke ...
— Stanford Stories - Tales of a Young University • Charles K. Field
... a child would have thought of it. He is all right, not a flaw in him, as far as I have carried the work. If I've been able to bring him as far as the beginning of this century, what's to stop me now? I'll go on and materialize him down ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... her hands, the fluttering at her throat. He endured it for a time, but broke out savagely at last. "You'd be perfect then—as lovely as ever any woman—why, you're perfect now! And yet without that one flaw where would you be? You'd not be married ...
— The Sagebrusher - A Story of the West • Emerson Hough
... that his persistence was unmannerly; hung his head a while in silence: then, lifting up a sheepish countenance, "I 'shamed," said the tyrant. It was the first and the last time we heard him own to a flaw in his behaviour. Half an hour after he sent us a camphor-wood chest, worth only a few dollars—but then heaven knows what Tembinok' had ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 18 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... with a dreary grave-yard toll, betokening a flaw, the ship's forecastle bell, smote by one of the grizzled oakum-pickers, proclaimed ten o'clock, through the leaden calm; when Captain Delano's attention was caught by the moving figure of a gigantic black, emerging from the general ...
— The Piazza Tales • Herman Melville
... ar far, mark aw flaw, caught ay bake, rain e less, men ee easy, ski eir their, software i trip, hit i: life, sky o father, palm oh flow, sew oo loot, through or more, door ow out, how oy boy, coin uh but, some u put, foot y ...
— THE JARGON FILE, VERSION 2.9.10
... as he left the room, however, had touched the one flaw in Galen Albret's confidence of righteousness. Wearied with the struggles and the passions he had undergone, his brain numbed, his will for the moment in abeyance, he seated himself and contemplated the images those two words ...
— Conjuror's House - A Romance of the Free Forest • Stewart Edward White
... favorite ballad, however, is that which he composed and set to tune several years ago about Sergeant Alvin C. York, who is Jilson Setters' idea of "a mountain man without nary flaw." ...
— Blue Ridge Country • Jean Thomas
... scrawling in the inside of his envelope, furiously, furtively, while the ink of his neat copperplate dried on the outside, and Macartney likely stood by poring over the actual letter, wondering if there was any flaw in it that could show out and damn him. And the desperate scrawl in the envelope had been no good, thanks to the fool brain and tongue of myself, Nicky Stretton! It had done more to warn Macartney than either Dudley or me, since if Thompson had written in the reverse of the envelope he ...
— The La Chance Mine Mystery • Susan Carleton Jones
... giving chase, the armed vessel soon overtook the merchantmen sufficiently to send a shot skipping along the crests of the waves, as a polite Invitation to stop. The two vessels hove to, and a boat was sent from the man-of-war to examine their papers, and see if all was right. Though no flaw was found in the papers of either vessel, Capt. Reid determined to take them back to Newport, which was done. In the harbor the two vessels were brought to anchor under the guns of the armed sloop, and without any reason or explanation were kept there several days. After submitting ...
— The Naval History of the United States - Volume 1 (of 2) • Willis J. Abbot
... why should not Paradoxus displace him and be praised in like manner? It would be unfair, perhaps, to say that the paradoxist consciously argues thus. He doubtless in most instances convinces himself that he has really detected some flaw in the theory of gravitation. Yet it is impossible not to recognise, as the real motive of every paradox-monger, the desire to have that said of him which has been said of Newton: 'Genus humanum ...
— Myths and Marvels of Astronomy • Richard A. Proctor
... extent, borne out by the admissions of Sir William Hamilton himself, in regard to the tenets of the founder of the school. And should some of our shafts glance off against the editor's own opinions, he has only himself to blame for it. If we see a fatal flaw in the constitution of all, and consequently of his, psychology, it was his writings that first opened our eyes to it. So lucidly has he explained certain philosophical doctrines, that they cannot stop at the point to which he has carried them. They must be rolled forward into a new ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 62, No. 382, October 1847 • Various
... very long time before the inquest was over, and Aunt Jane had almost yielded to her niece's impatience and her own, and consented to walk down to meet the intelligence, when Fergus came tearing in, 'I've seen the rock, and there is a flaw of crystal- lisation in it! And the coroner-man called me ...
— Beechcroft at Rockstone • Charlotte M. Yonge
... was wounded, and in the hospital, he repeatedly complained to me of the deficiency of the staffs. I reminded him of it, and he promised to do his best to organize a staff without a flaw. ...
— Diary from November 12, 1862, to October 18, 1863 • Adam Gurowski
... I don't believe it!" Jack broke out. "You'll find a flaw in his art, if you find a moral chaos in him. ...
— A Fountain Sealed • Anne Douglas Sedgwick
... from the diary:—"To cure the hoopingcough:—get 3 field mice, flaw them, draw them, and roast one of them, and let the party afflicted eat it; dry the other two in the oven until they crumble to a powder, and put a little of this powder in what the patient drinks at night and in the morning." Mice played, and still play in remote districts, ...
— Highways & Byways in Sussex • E.V. Lucas
... glean, Who picture life without a flaw; Nature may form a perfect scene, But Fancy must ...
— May Day With The Muses • Robert Bloomfield
... shown me this afternoon something which I did not believe existed—an absolutely perfect body without a fault or flaw anywhere. I did not believe there could be anything so ...
— Five Nights • Victoria Cross
... with such a threat as the man was uttering, nor had she ever been in danger of detection. And all the time she was eyeing him so steadily, not a muscle of her face moving, her mind was groping back into the past, examining every detail of the crime he had mentioned, seeking for some flaw in the carefully prepared plan which had brought a good man to ...
— The Angel of Terror • Edgar Wallace
... not, however, of purely divine descent. Her maternal ancestor, Sonisonbu, had not been a scion of the royal house, and this flaw in her pedigree threatened to mar, in her case, the sanctity of the solar blood. According to Egyptian belief, this defect of birth could only be remedied by a miracle,* and the ancestral god, becoming ...
— History Of Egypt, Chaldaea, Syria, Babylonia, and Assyria, Volume 4 (of 12) • G. Maspero
... who could thoroughly control his vices whenever they interfered with his interests, and who could completely put on the appearance of every virtue as often as it suited his purposes, is, on the Stanhopian plan, the perfect man; a man to lead nations. But are great abilities, complete without a flaw, and polished without a blemish, the standard of human excellence? This is certainly the staunch opinion of men of the world; but I call on honour, virtue, and worth, to give the Stygian doctrine a loud negative! However, this must be allowed, that, if you abstract from ...
— The Letters of Robert Burns • Robert Burns
... was as ineffectual as those that preceded it, he advanced to our grim host with a face radiant with satisfaction, and congratulated him vehemently. "You are a happy man," he said. "Your household has not a flaw in it. Fortunate it was that you sent for the wise man: I have discovered the matter." "What have you discovered?" "The fate of the ring. It has never been stolen: if it had, I would have restored it to you. Fear nothing; your household is trustworthy and virtuous. I know where ...
— Harper's New Monthly Magazine, Volume 1, No. 3, August, 1850. • Various
... me with great courtesy, and readily exhibited my uncle's will, which seemed to be without a flaw. He was for some time in obvious distress, how he should speak and act in my presence; but when he found, that though a supporter of the present Government upon principle, I was disposed to think with pity on those who had opposed it on a mistaken feeling of loyalty and duty, ...
— Rob Roy, Complete, Illustrated • Sir Walter Scott
... to do with it! We're as innocent as children unborn. It's all shocking to us. Mr. Rodney shouldn't be arrested. His rectitude is without a flaw. For heaven's sake, don't ...
— The Husbands of Edith • George Barr McCutcheon
... enthusiasm were found in one mind combined with the pernicious tendency in question. In that very remarkable but eccentric genius, William Blake, mysticism was rich in fruits of faith and love, and it is needless, therefore, to add that he was a good man, of blameless morals; yet, by a strange flaw or partial derangement in his profoundly spiritual nature, 'he was for ever, in his writings, girding at the "mere moral law" as the letter that killeth. His conversation, his writings, his designs, were equally marked by theoretic licence ...
— The English Church in the Eighteenth Century • Charles J. Abbey and John H. Overton
... title to a thousand acre boundary traceable to the Commonwealth without break or flaw, might not be the owner in fact of a single acre of land; as the whole boundary might be covered by senior grants or the natural objects called for, ...
— Chit-Chat; Nirvana; The Searchlight • Mathew Joseph Holt
... I had said nothing to Mary of the burthen these pretences were to me; it had seemed a monstrous ingratitude to find the slightest flaw in the passionate love and intimacy she had given me. But at last the divergence of our purposes became manifest to us both. A time came when we perceived it clearly and discussed it openly. I have still ...
— The Passionate Friends • Herbert George Wells
... had been, had the effect of making Karen, when they were all three confronted, more calm, more mildly cheerful than before, more than ever the fond wife who did not even suspect that a flaw might ...
— Tante • Anne Douglas Sedgwick
... eclipse;—so that the Earth revolved in a horror of great darkness. My faith however is not troubled,—nor even perplexed,—by the strangeness of these things. Shall I think it a mere matter of course that one little flaw in a pipe shall, in a second of time, transform the orderly well-compacted seats of a goodly Church to one unsightly mass of shapeless and disordered ruin[278]; and shall I pretend to stand aghast at the ...
— Inspiration and Interpretation - Seven Sermons Preached Before the University of Oxford • John Burgon
... the place was Madame Charlet-Flaw, Christian name Suzette. The other two girls were, respectively, Berthe and Marthe. Ages of all three in the order I have mentioned them were, I should say, twenty-eight, twenty-four, and twenty. The place had, I found, been used ...
— Bullets & Billets • Bruce Bairnsfather
... morns, they saw The fishing-schooners outward run, Their low-bent sails in tack and flaw Turned white or dark to shade and sun. Sometimes, in calms of closing day, They watched the spectral mirage play, Saw low, far islands looming tall and nigh, And ships, with upturned keels, sail like a sea ...
— The Complete Works of Whittier - The Standard Library Edition with a linked Index • John Greenleaf Whittier
... has begun to understand the trend of the woman's rights movement, and has rendered its first favorable decision, in the famous Eddy-will case. Wendell Phillips told me that he drew up this will, and that its provisions were so carefully worded, that even the Supreme Court could find no flaw in it. It is in his own hand-writing, and Chandler R. Ransom was the executor. Eliza F. Eddy was the daughter of Francis Jackson, and just before her death in 1882, desiring to help the suffrage cause and thus carry out her father's intentions, ...
— History of Woman Suffrage, Volume III (of III) • Various
... has that nasty custom in excess, and it grows worse instead of better, as the influence of the better mannered and better educated diminishes; but this is a spot on the sun—a mere flaw in the diamond, that friction will take out. But what a country—what a glorious country, in truth, it is! You have now done the civilized parts of the old world pretty thoroughly, my dear boy, and must be persuaded, yourself, of the superiority ...
— The Redskins; or, Indian and Injin, Volume 1. - Being the Conclusion of the Littlepage Manuscripts • James Fenimore Cooper
... should not be put forward as poetry), could possibly accept these lines as expressionally poetical. It would seem as though, from the first, Browning's ear was keener for the apprehension than for the sustained evocation of the music of verse. Some flaw there was, somewhere. His heart, so to say, beat too fast, and the singing in his ears from the o'er-fevered blood confused the serene rhythm haunting the far perspectives of the brain, "as Arab birds float sleeping ...
— Life of Robert Browning • William Sharp
... in the same field, as in India; for the published proceedings of the court bring down upon him the indignation of society—the moral and religions feelings of his fellow men are arrayed against him, and from these salutary checks no flaw in the indictment can save him. Not so in India. There no moral or religions feelings interpose to assist or to supply the deficiencies of the penal law. Provided he eats, drinks, smokes, marries, and makes his offerings to his priest ...
— Rambles and Recollections of an Indian Official • William Sleeman
... even yet a certainty, however. The estate of Coila was well worth fighting for. Was there not the possibility, the bare possibility, that the solicitors or advocates of Le Roi, or the M'Rae, who now held the castle and glen, might find some fatal flaw in the evidence which Townley had spent so much time and care in working out ...
— Our Home in the Silver West - A Story of Struggle and Adventure • Gordon Stables
... contest, which was decided by a most remarkable judge. The benchers had determined to have the best organ in London; the competitors for the building were Smith and Harris. Father Smith, a German, was renowned for his care in choosing wood without knot or flaw, and for throwing aside every metal or wooden pipe that was not perfect and sound. His stops were also allowed by all to be singularly equal and sweet in tone. The two competitors were each to erect an organ in the Temple Church, and the best one was to be ...
— Old and New London - Volume I • Walter Thornbury
... had called at the post-office. Her anxiety concerning the wayward Tessie constituted the one flaw in her otherwise happy new days. That she could not at once be with her parents was clear and reasonable to the girl, reared in hardship, and accustomed to many personal sacrifices, but that an incriminating letter would surely ...
— The Girl Scout Pioneers - or Winning the First B. C. • Lillian C Garis
... crank-shafts of transatlantic steamers are forged by hydraulic pressure, and the worker has but to turn a tap to give shape to the immense mass of steel, which makes a far more homogeneous metal, without crack or flaw, of the blooms, whatever be ...
— The Conquest of Bread • Peter Kropotkin
... not by a few, And those of true condition, that your subjects Are in great grievance. There have been commissions Sent down among 'em, which hath flaw'd the heart Of all their loyalties; wherein, although, My good Lord Cardinal, they vent reproaches Most bitterly on you, as putter on Of these exactions, yet the King our master— Whose honour Heaven shield from soil!—even he escapes not Language ...
— The Life of Henry VIII • William Shakespeare [Dunlap edition]
... Christmas visitors, for the state of the country did not invite Londoners; but we did not want them. The suppression of Clarence was the only flaw in a singularly happy time; and, after all I believe I felt the pity of it more than he did, who expected nothing, and was accustomed ...
— Chantry House • Charlotte M. Yonge
... Murray's admirable new dictionary, I have remarked a flaw sub voce Beacon. In its express, technical sense, a beacon may be defined as "a founded, artificial ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson, Volume 9 • Robert Louis Stevenson
... the number of Christians has increased during the last decade at a certain ratio. Given the continuance of this uniform rate of increase, it will follow that within a computable period India will be a Christian land. One flaw in this method of calculation is that it takes for granted that Brahmans, high-caste Hindus, and Mohammedans will be Christianised at the same rate of progress as prevails at present among ...
— Things as They Are - Mission Work in Southern India • Amy Wilson-Carmichael
... I, 'I am no very perfect craftsman. This is supposed to be a house, and you see the chimneys are awry. You may call this a box if you are very indulgent; but see where my tool slipped! Yes, I am afraid you may go from one to another, and find a flaw in everything. Failures for Sale should be on my signboard. I do not keep a shop; I keep a Humorous Museum.' I cast a smiling glance about my display, and then at her, and instantly became grave. 'Strange, is it not,' I added, 'that a grown man and a soldier should ...
— St Ives • Robert Louis Stevenson
... enough dodge, all right," the man remarked. "The only possible flaw in it is that there might be some gentleman present who's dealt with cattle-duffers in the past. If so, he'd be pretty sure to scent our little game, and ...
— The Lost Valley • J. M. Walsh
... from simple things, such as eating one's breakfast alone in a room which had nice colors in it, clean from the skirting of the boards to the corners of the ceiling, seemed to suit her so thoroughly that she used at first to hunt about for some one to apologize to, or for some flaw in the situation. She had now been six months in London, and she could find no flaw, but that, as she invariably concluded by the time her boots were laced, was solely and entirely due to the fact that she had her work. Every day, as she stood with ...
— Night and Day • Virginia Woolf
... themselves, being less than all the stream of creative duration to which they belong, will be abstractions, if taken apart from that whole stream, and so distorted. This flaw in what we know even by direct acquaintance can never be wholly remedied short of our succeeding in becoming acquainted with the whole of duration. It is something, however, to be aware of the flaw, even if we cannot wholly remedy it, and the wider the acquaintance the less is ...
— The Misuse of Mind • Karin Stephen
... the Cat had given to him, and there was seen a little dog so tiny that it could go through a ring without touching it; he was also able to dance, and play the castanets, while his ears touched the ground. The King was embarassed, for it was impossible to find a flaw in this lovely ...
— My Book of Favorite Fairy Tales • Edric Vredenburg
... old croaker, will you?" one Chester rooter called out. "How anybody could pick a flaw with this splendid day beats me all hollow. Why, it was made on purpose for Chester to lick that boasting Harmony team, and send them back home like dogs, with their tails between their legs. Hurrah ...
— Jack Winters' Baseball Team - Or, The Rivals of the Diamond • Mark Overton
... Planchette serenely, "the piece of skin is as safe and sound as my eye. There was a flaw in your reservoir somewhere, or a crevice in the ...
— The Magic Skin • Honore de Balzac
... McGregor's height, How didst thou grow to such a lofty bearing, For song of bird or beat of breeze uncaring, There where thy shadow touched the dying brow? Were all thy sinewy fibres shaped aright? Was there no flaw? With what mysterious daring Didst thou put forth each murmuring, odorous bough And trust it to the frail support of air? We only know that thou art now supreme: We know not how thou grewest so tall and fair. ...
— Dreams and Days: Poems • George Parsons Lathrop
... speech as he left the room, however, had touched the one flaw in Galen Albret's confidence of righteousness. Wearied with the struggles and the passions he had undergone, his brain numbed, his will for the moment in abeyance, he seated himself and contemplated the images those ...
— Conjuror's House - A Romance of the Free Forest • Stewart Edward White
... that because 'this ship is iron' it will 'sink in water,' Hence syllogistic 'proof' seems quite devoid of the 'cogency' it claimed. After a conclusion has been 'demonstrated' it has still to come true in fact. This flaw in the Syllogism was first pointed out by Mr. ...
— Pragmatism • D.L. Murray
... to revolve these propositions through your mind very seriously. See if you can find a flaw in any of them; and conceive if you can, of any reasonable theory whereby any of them may ...
— Love's Final Victory • Horatio
... promontory in Africa was so called, as well as that in Italy. (3) Meaning that her husband gave her this commission in order to prevent her from committing suicide. (4) See Book VIII., line 547. (5) See line 709. (6) This passage is described by Lord Macaulay as "a pure gem of rhetoric without one flaw, and, in my opinion, not very far from historical truth" (Trevelyan's "Life and Letters", vol. i., page 462.) (7) "... Clarum et venembile nomen Gentibus, et multum nostrae quod profuit urbi," quoted by ...
— Pharsalia; Dramatic Episodes of the Civil Wars • Lucan
... in its perfection and integrity, fully satisfies the conditions of artistic triumph. Are we to ignore the grandeur of a colossal statue, and the nobility of the human conceptions which it embodies, because here and there we notice a flaw in the marble, a blemish in its colour, a jagged slip of the chisel? "It is not force of intellect," as George Eliot has said, "which causes ready repulsion from the aberration and eccentricities of greatness, any more than it is force of vision that causes the eye to explore the ...
— Studies in Literature • John Morley
... a miser (or rather did so proclaim you until, less than ten seconds after I had unpacked it from its wrappings of tissue paper, I took it to the open window and had the satisfaction of seeing it shattered to atoms on the pavement). But stay! I perceive a flaw in my argument. Perhaps you were guided in your choice by a definite wish to insult me. I am sure, on reflection, that this is so. ...
— The So-called Human Race • Bert Leston Taylor
... with the directness of allusion in conversation due to a married woman but improper to a young girl—this was very sweet to Rachel. The subdued stir made by Mrs. Tams in clearing the table was for Rachel a delicious background to the scene. The one flaw in it was her short skirt, which she had not had time to change. Louis had protested that it was entirely in order, and indeed admirably coquettish, but Rachel would have preferred a long train of soft drapery disposed with art round the front ...
— The Price of Love • Arnold Bennett
... Emancipation had left bitterness behind, and in addition to this complication, his followers in the Commons included both men like Stanley, who had voted for Parliamentary reform, and its implacable opponents. But in spite of this flaw in the solidarity of the Opposition, the Ministers were far from secure. There were the troubles in Canada, which Lord Durham had been sent out to deal with (the Canadian patriots had a great deal of Lady Fanny's sympathy), and in England ...
— Lady John Russell • Desmond MacCarthy and Agatha Russell
... gained an Archduke's heart by her beauty and the right to wear his honors by her wit. Nothing was known of the stove at this latter day in Hall. The grandfather Strehla, who had been a master-mason, had dug it up out of some ruins where he was building, and, finding it without a flaw, had taken it home, and only thought it worth finding because it was such a good one to burn. That was now sixty years past, and ever since then the stove had stood in the big desolate empty room, warming ...
— Famous Stories Every Child Should Know • Various
... Dietrich, a vintner, and we are soon to be married." There was a flaw in the usual ...
— The Goose Girl • Harold MacGrath
... here about a quarter of an hour ago, proud, and, I may say, swaggering, as he does over his learned friends when he has found a flaw in one ...
— Serge Panine • Georges Ohnet
... The answer is that Germany is not a single national State but a number of dynastic States, federated together under the control of one predominant partner. In other words, the problem of Alsace-Lorraine has led us to the consideration of the second flaw in the development of the national ...
— The War and Democracy • R.W. Seton-Watson, J. Dover Wilson, Alfred E. Zimmern,
... take it for granted that satisfaction goes with the goods; their experience enables them to size up a proposition quickly and if there is any flaw in the advertisements or the company's methods, they pass it by. But women, not so familiar with business affairs, must be approached from a different angle. Little points must be explained and guarantees must be strongly emphasized. The formal letter which appeals to a ...
— Business Correspondence • Anonymous
... which cannot suffer the least injury without damage; it is a precious stone, the price of which is lessened by the least flaw. ...
— Life and Literature - Over two thousand extracts from ancient and modern writers, - and classified in alphabetical order • J. Purver Richardson
... conceptions. The passage was transcribed from my address at the California Philosophical Union, reprinted in the Journal of Philosophy, vol. i, p. 673. I had no sooner given the address than I perceived a flaw in that part of it; but I have left the passage unaltered ever since, because the flaw did not spoil its illustrative value. The flaw was evident when, as a case analogous to that of a godless universe, I thought of what ...
— The Meaning of Truth • William James
... character of merits both spiritual and spectacular, and he brought to the big house an exotic atmosphere that was spicy with delights. The little boy prayed that this hero might be made again the man he once was; not because of any flaw that he could see in him—but only because the sufferer appeared somewhat less than perfect to himself. To Bernal's mind, indeed, nothing could have been superior to the noble melancholy with which Cousin Bill J. looked back upon his ...
— The Seeker • Harry Leon Wilson
... responses, pleasing the clergy, and deriving some solace herself from the occupation—at least she always said the services were soothing. She was genuinely shocked by a sign of irreverence, and would sing the most jingling nonsense as a hymn with perfect gravity and without perceiving that there was any flaw in it. In these matters she showed no originality at all. She would repeat "my duty towards my neighbour is to love him as myself, and to do to all men as I would that they should do unto me" fervently, and come out and cut Mrs. Chrimes to the quick just afterward because she had ...
— The Heavenly Twins • Madame Sarah Grand
... a smile at this faint flaw in an impartiality so scrupulous. Every evidence of feminine inconsequence in Anna seemed to attest her deeper subjection to the most inconsequent of passions. He had certainly promised her his help—but before he knew ...
— The Reef • Edith Wharton
... purest statuary marble would convert the Eve of Powers[2] to a monster. Masculine observers, if the birthmark did not heighten their admiration, contented themselves with wishing it away, that the world might possess one living specimen of ideal loveliness without the semblance of a flaw. After his marriage,—for he thought little or nothing of the matter before,—Aylmer discovered that this ...
— Short-Stories • Various
... been for this accident the visit of the six little Bunkers to Seaview would have been without a flaw. Even as it was, it turned out to be most delightful. Seaview was a fine place to spend the end of the summer, and Cousin Tom and his wife made the children feel so at home, and did so much for them, that Russ and the others said they never had been ...
— Six Little Bunkers at Cousin Tom's • Laura Lee Hope
... better man being beaten, and fools rushing in where angels fear to tread. Such men as he is accept a sentence without disputing it, because they do not think too much of themselves while they think a great deal of other people. It is not a flaw in their sensitive manliness, it is part and parcel of it, to know when they are dismissed, and take the dismissal as final. They are not the most light-hearted and sanguine of mortals, but they are constant enough, and brave enough ...
— A Houseful of Girls • Sarah Tytler
... going to tell you. Life, to me, is like this train, a lot of sections and a lot of couplings. When you're through with a car, side-track it and—yank out the coupling. Like all philosophies, this one has its flaw. Once in a while your soul looks out of the window and sees some long-forgotten, side-tracked car beckoning to be coupled on again. If you try to go back and pick it up, you're done. Never look back, boy; never look back. Live ahead even if you're ...
— Through stained glass • George Agnew Chamberlain
... it, for my ill-timed truth. Was it for me to prop The ruins of a falling majesty? To place myself beneath the mighty flaw, Thus to be crushed, and pounded into atoms, By its o'erwhelming weight? 'Tis too presuming For subjects to preserve that wilful power, Which courts its ...
— All for Love • John Dryden
... also many other precious stones. The king is reported to possess the grandest ruby that ever was seen, being a span in length, and the thickness of a man's arm, brilliant beyond description, and without a single flaw. The grand khan, Kublai, sent ambassadors to this monarch, with a request that he would yield to him possession of this ruby; in return for which he should receive the value of a city. The answer was that he would not sell it for all the treasure of the universe. The grand ...
— The World's Greatest Books, Volume 19 - Travel and Adventure • Various
... children of fallen humanity. He has gone there as their surety-Saviour. If his suretyship be accepted—if He meet and fulfil all the requirements of an outraged law, the gates of the dismal prison-house will and must be opened. If, on the other hand, there be any flaw or deficiency in His person or work as the Kinsman-Redeemer, then no power can snap the chains which bind Him; the tomb will refuse to surrender what it has in custody; the hopes of His people must perish along with Him! ...
— Memories of Bethany • John Ross Macduff
... it! I don't believe it!" Jack broke out. "You'll find a flaw in his art, if you find a moral chaos in him. It ...
— A Fountain Sealed • Anne Douglas Sedgwick
... innovation; the foe to all convention." No less than of Burke, it was said of him that "born for the universe, he did not surrender to party," but General Longstreet declared of Robert Toombs that he needed only discipline to make him a great military genius. This was the radical flaw in his make-up. How near he came to the ideal of ...
— Robert Toombs - Statesman, Speaker, Soldier, Sage • Pleasant A. Stovall
... vague liquid sound fell dulcetly on the ear, and by Miss Long and Miss Heatherton no flaw in this art criticism could be discerned. And the artist, glancing about him, saw with gratification that, in addition to the two young ladies, there had by some vague current of motion been swept into his immediate vicinity human flotsam to ...
— White Ashes • Sidney R. Kennedy and Alden C. Noble
... this judgment of beauty should be compared Fornander's story of Kepakailiula, where "mother's brothers" search for a woman beautiful enough to wed their protege, but find a flaw in each candidate; and the episode of the match of beauty in ...
— The Hawaiian Romance Of Laieikawai • Anonymous
... been told that "God" was wise to a finish,—from my birth until I was thirty-five years old,—when I saw that all work done by that law of power and wisdom was absolutely perfect in all its requirements. In vegetable life no power of human can detect a flaw or even suggest an additional leaf, limb or fruit. I had made a long study of minerology in which I found each stone or mettle was in a division of life that was its own, and no other stone could appear dressed in its garb, from the black silurian to the purely transparent ...
— Philosophy of Osteopathy • Andrew T. Still
... himself was somewhat chagrined when he learned of our failure to infect any one with mosquitoes, but, like a true believer, was inclined to attribute this negative result more to some defect in our technique than to any flaw in ...
— Popular Science Monthly Volume 86
... taste she was still vigilant as to his interests—Virginia discovered a flaw in one of the plumes. The sylph in the trailing gown held volubly that it did not fait rien; the man with the open purse said he couldn't see that it figured much, but the small American held firm. That must be replaced by a perfect plume ...
— Lifted Masks - Stories • Susan Glaspell
... they had come hither. But when this fairest of the sisters led them through her palace and showed them all the treasures that were hers, envy grew in their hearts and choked their old love. Even while they sat at feast with her, they grew more and more bitter; and hoping to find some little flaw in her good fortune, they asked a ...
— Old Greek Folk Stories Told Anew • Josephine Preston Peabody
... and the servants annoy, and our best-laid plans fall to pieces, and our castles in the air are dissipated like bubbles that break at a breath, then can we walk with God? That religion which fails us in the every-day trials and experiences of life has somewhere in it a flaw. It should be more than a plank to sustain us in the rushing tide, and land us exhausted and dripping on the other side. It ought, if it come from above, to be always, day by day, to our souls as the wings of a bird, bearing us away from and beyond the impediments which seek to hold us down. ...
— Daily Strength for Daily Needs • Mary W. Tileston
... Nelly's looks are blithe and sweet, And what is best of a', [all] Her reputation is complete, And fair without a flaw. ...
— Robert Burns - How To Know Him • William Allan Neilson
... Uganda. "Oh yes! of course Bana wrote to Bana Mdogo" (the little master) "as soon as he arrived in Uganda and told him and Rumanika all about it." "Wrote! what does that mean?" and I was called upon to explain. Mtesa, then seeing a flaw in K'yengo's statements, called him a story-teller; ordered him and his party away, and bade ...
— The Discovery of the Source of the Nile • John Hanning Speke
... couldst not have had Othello's flaw, Not erred with Brutus,—greater, then, than those For all their nobleness. Oh, albeit with awe, Leave we the mighty phantoms and draw near The man that fashioned them and gave them law! The Master Poet found with scarce a peer In all the ages his domain to share, Yet of all singers gentlest ...
— More Songs From Vagabondia • Bliss Carman and Richard Hovey
... reality. He made the receivers and transmitters exactly as Mr. Bell requested; but on testing them out, great was the surprise of the inventor to find that his idea, so feasible in theory, refused to work. Nevertheless, his faith was not shaken. He insisted on trying to discover the flaw in his logic and correct it, and as Watson had now completed some work that he had been doing for Moses Farmer, the two began a series of experiments that ...
— Ted and the Telephone • Sara Ware Bassett
... the muster had been called and a psalm sung, and a prayer offered. They alternated thus throughout the twenty-four hours, each watch having four hours below, after four hours on deck, unless "some flaw of winde come, some storm or gust, or some accident that requires the help of all hands." In these cases the whole ship's company remained on deck until the work was done, or until the master discharged the watch below.[24] The decks were washed down by the swabbers ...
— On the Spanish Main - Or, Some English forays on the Isthmus of Darien. • John Masefield
... had been sent for by his dead relative to inquire into Milburgh's mode of living and that Milburgh was under suspicion of having robbed the firm. Suppose Milburgh had committed the crime? Suppose, to hide his defalcations, he had shot his employer dead? There was a flaw in this reasoning because the death of Thornton Lyne would be more likely to precipitate the discovery of the manager's embezzlements—there would be an examination of accounts and everything would come out. Milburgh himself was not unmindful ...
— The Daffodil Mystery • Edgar Wallace
... no. The astronaut fell victim to a psychological stress that was unforeseen. What he sent made no sense whatever. We blame the medical men for not finding the flaw in ...
— Ten From Infinity • Paul W. Fairman
... sawed a little wood or dug a few potatoes now and then under the pretence of working for their living, used to go and fish through the ice for pickerel every winter. And here those three young people were drowned, a few summers ago, by the upsetting of a sail-boat in a sudden flaw of wind. There is not one of these smiling ponds that has not devoured more youths and maidens than any of those monsters the ancients used to tell such lies about. But it was a pretty pond, and never ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 5, No. 28, February, 1860 • Various
... how the blessed sunlight had suffered dire eclipse;—so that the Earth revolved in a horror of great darkness. My faith however is not troubled,—nor even perplexed,—by the strangeness of these things. Shall I think it a mere matter of course that one little flaw in a pipe shall, in a second of time, transform the orderly well-compacted seats of a goodly Church to one unsightly mass of shapeless and disordered ruin[278]; and shall I pretend to stand aghast at the strangeness of a similar overthrow of this ...
— Inspiration and Interpretation - Seven Sermons Preached Before the University of Oxford • John Burgon
... defect, imperfection, failing, foible, shortcoming, blemish, flaw; demerit, dereliction, offense, indiscretion, lapse, delinquency. Antonyms: merit, perfection, ...
— Putnam's Word Book • Louis A. Flemming
... might not have been, the knowledge remained with him that she herself had suspected and convicted him. In all that mattered their friendship had ended there. Distrust was unbearable between friends. It was a flaw in his little lady that she could believe him capable of baseness.... But not an unforgivable flaw, it would seem, since every hour that he had spent in her presence had become roses and music in his memory, and the thought ...
— Queed • Henry Sydnor Harrison
... my voice must have been drowned in the creaking of blocks and yards. They were alert enough for every chance of getting away—for every flaw of wind. Already the ship was less distinct, as if my eyes had grown dim. By the time a voice on board her cried, "Belay," faintly, she had gone from my sight. Then the puff of wind passed away, too, and left us more alone than ever, with only the small disk of the moon ...
— Romance • Joseph Conrad and F.M. Hueffer
... mellowness of the country around the Bavarian lakes and the golden glow of the Wiener Wald. But across all this glory that I drank in leaning back on the comfortable seat in luxurious contentment, there steadily ran an ugly black spot—a flaw in the window-pane. That is the way my obstinate comrade flits across woods and walls, stands still when I stand still, dances over the faces of passers-by, over the asphalt paving wet from the rain, over everything my eyes happen to fall upon. He interposes himself between me and the world, ...
— Men in War • Andreas Latzko
... of reasoning," Cyril remarked. "There's scarcely a flaw in it, as you'll see by my account of the affair. After saying good-by to Prescott on the night I left the settlement, I went on until I was near the muskeg and had dismounted to camp when a stranger rode up. We sat talking for a while and I foolishly told him ...
— Prescott of Saskatchewan • Harold Bindloss
... particular cases, it was not better to cripple the easy, irresponsible, and delightfully casual social instincts of the House of Seagrave. Educated according to my own ideas, they must inevitably have become, in a measure, types of the set with which they are identified.... And the only serious flaw ...
— The Danger Mark • Robert W. Chambers
... the old Polynesian paradise—a world seemingly without flaw except the subtle one of being too perfect, too welcoming, too wooing. Its long, uneventful, unchanging days enticed forgetfulness, offered a life without ...
— Key Out of Time • Andre Alice Norton
... carried the affair so far with a for him—commendable lightness of touch, he should be at a loss for a delicate word to convey a harsh accusation began to anger him. And once Garnache began to be angered, the rest followed quickly. It was just that flaw in his character that had been the ruin of him, that had blighted what otherwise might have been a brilliant career. Astute and wily as a fox, brave as a lion, and active as a panther, gifted with intelligence, insight and ...
— St. Martin's Summer • Rafael Sabatini
... she saw Than ever yet had charmed her eyes, A fairer picture, void of flaw, Than any, ...
— Fringilla: Some Tales In Verse • Richard Doddridge Blackmore
... laud him as unequalled; why should not Paradoxus displace him and be praised in like manner? It would be unfair, perhaps, to say that the paradoxist consciously argues thus. He doubtless in most instances convinces himself that he has really detected some flaw in the theory of gravitation. Yet it is impossible not to recognise, as the real motive of every paradox-monger, the desire to have that said of him which has been said of ...
— Myths and Marvels of Astronomy • Richard A. Proctor
... his mind had thrown up against the grievous flaw in his character, which made him feel uncertain of himself when he should have felt strong and capable, crumbled away completely. He could no longer pretend, no longer deceive himself. He hated his father because the elder Burnett had never known a moment of profound self-distrust ...
— Rescue Squad • Thomas J. O'Hara
... lightning; and he still saw it, as one seems still to see the object in the after-darkness. Every line of the features lived in his eyes, even an almost indistinguishable scar there was on the girl's right cheek near the temple. It was not a flaw, that faint scar; it seemed somehow to heighten her loveliness, as an accent over a word sometimes gives it one knows not ...
— The Queen of Sheba & My Cousin the Colonel • Thomas Bailey Aldrich
... than ten seconds after I had unpacked it from its wrappings of tissue paper, I took it to the open window and had the satisfaction of seeing it shattered to atoms on the pavement). But stay! I perceive a possible flaw in my argument. Perhaps you were guided in your choice by a definite wish to insult me. I am sure, on reflection, that this was so. I shall not forget. Yours, etc., ...
— And Even Now - Essays • Max Beerbohm
... up to him, shook him cordially by the hand, and led him up to the assembled guests. "My daughter—Miss Quirk; Mrs. Alderman Addlehead; Mrs. Deputy Diddle-daddle; Mrs. Alias, my sister;—Mr. Alderman Addlehead; Mr. Deputy Diddle-daddle; Mr. Bluster; Mr. Slang; Mr. Hug; Mr. Flaw; Mr. Viper; Mr. Ghastly; Mr. Gammon you know." Miss Quirk was about four or five and twenty—a fat young lady, with flaxen hair curled formally all over her head and down to her shoulders; so that she very much resembled one of those great wax dolls seen ...
— Ten Thousand a-Year. Volume 1. • Samuel Warren
... leetle more is so easily carried up into the garden; and a beet of nice strong wire might so easily be found in a cellar, and afterwards in the lock! No, Senhor Cole, I do not expect to 'ang. My schims have seldom one seengle flaw. There was just one in the Lady Jermyn; there was—Senhor Cole! If there is one this time, and you will be so kind as to point it out, I will—I will run the reesk of ...
— Dead Men Tell No Tales • E. W. Hornung
... surface. Two causes have co-operated to produce the illusion. Everybody agrees that Great Britain has acted in a most blackguardly fashion towards Ireland; everybody assumes that blackguardism always succeeds in this world, therefore Ireland is a failure. The only flaw in this syllogism is that it is in direct conflict with every known fact. For the rest we have to thank or blame the sentimentalism of Mr Matthew Arnold. His proud but futile Celts who "went down to battle but always fell" ...
— The Open Secret of Ireland • T. M. Kettle
... kind of supernatural character. It is true that blessings, equally with afflictions, come from Heaven; but this truth is not so generally felt. A sharp disappointment will suddenly drive us to God. The mariner of life sails, unthinking, over its prosperous seas, but a flaw of storm will bring him to his prayers. And religion, reason as we will, is peculiarly associated with affliction. And does not sorrow possess this supernatural air, not merely because it interrupts the usual order ...
— The Crown of Thorns - A Token for the Sorrowing • E. H. Chapin
... a flaw somewhere in the argument, but I only said, "'Valeat quantum valere potest.'" Bez looked solemn; a little Latin goes a long way with some people. He was an object of charity, and I made ...
— The Book of the Bush • George Dunderdale
... himself. Men are merciful to him, and let him alone, for if he be once driven from his humour, he is like two inward friends fallen out: his own bitter enemy and discontent presently makes a murder. In sum, he is a bladder blown up with wind, which the least flaw crushes ...
— Microcosmography - or, a Piece of the World Discovered; in Essays and Characters • John Earle
... with it does not end here. The flaw runs through the whole constitution of things; there is no possible equation between the anomalies and dislocations on which he turns the dry light of that sceptical philosophy which has usurped the place ...
— The Contemporary Review, January 1883 - Vol 43, No. 1 • Various
... if the train is stopped from some trivial motive it will be found either that the strength of the necessary influences has been miscalculated, or that the man has been miscalculated, in the same way as an engine may break down from an unsuspected flaw; but even in such a case there will have been no spontaneity; the action will have had its true parental causes: spontaneity is only a term for ...
— Erewhon • Samuel Butler
... the goddess of wisdom, had a character without a flaw, and ranked with Apollo in wisdom. She even expostulated with Zeus himself when he was wrong. But on the other hand she had few attractive feminine qualities, ...
— Beacon Lights of History, Volume I • John Lord
... over the embryo or a vessel over its cargo. Parent and offspring are like successive copies of books printed from the same "type." A battered letter in the "type" will display its effects in both earlier and later copies alike, but a purely extraneous or acquired flaw in the first copy is not necessarily repeated in subsequent copies. Unlike printer's type, however, the material source of heredity is of a fluctuating nature, consisting of competing elements derived from two parents and from ...
— Are the Effects of Use and Disuse Inherited? - An Examination of the View Held by Spencer and Darwin • William Platt Ball
... Majesty's reception of these poor people could not but be good; nothing now wanting in the formal kind. But better far, in all the essentialities of it, there had not been hitherto, nor was henceforth, the least flaw. This Salzburg Pilgrimage has found for itself, and will find, regulation, guidance, ever a stepping-stone at the needful place; a paved road, so far as human regularity and punctuality could pave one. That is his Majesty's shining merit. "Next Sunday, after sermon, they [this first lot of Salzburgers] ...
— History of Friedrich II. of Prussia, Vol. IX. (of XXI.) • Thomas Carlyle
... wisdom which had enabled him to live through all the perils of a well-known trout-stream and grow to his present fame and stature. Behind that red hackle which hooked him in his youth had been a good rod, a crafty head, and a skilful wrist. His hour had sounded then and there, but for a fortunate flaw in the tackle. The leader had parted just at the drop, and the terrified trout (he had taken the tail fly) had darted away frantically through the rapids with three feet of fine gut trailing from his jaw. For several weeks ...
— The Watchers of the Trails - A Book of Animal Life • Charles G. D. Roberts
... these worthies on this occasion—whether the attorney really persuaded Jack that, if he set about it, he would undertake to find him a flaw in his contract with Squire Bull, which would enable him to take the matter of the usherships into his own hand, and to do as he pleased; or whether Jack—as he seemed afterwards to admit in private—believed nothing of what the attorney told him, but was ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, No. CCCXXIX. - March, 1843, Vol. LIII. • Various
... tall ones, about an inch in diameter, and taking care that they tapered as little and as regularly as possible. Cutting them off at both ends and leaving them about fifteen feet in length, he next cut three or four small canes, very long and green ones, without flaw. ...
— Captain Sam - The Boy Scouts of 1814 • George Cary Eggleston
... this moment, and the mention of this last point, Cosmo had believed Mr. Burns an immaculate tradesman, but here the human gem was turned at that angle to the light which revealed the flaw in it. There are tradesmen not a few, irreproachable in regard to money, who are not so in regard to the quality of their wares in relation to the price: they take and do not give the advantage of their superior knowledge; and well can I imagine how such ...
— Warlock o' Glenwarlock • George MacDonald
... the general good health upon which vitality depends, unless the intestinal tract is in a healthy and vigorous condition, so that the functions of this particular part of the body- machine may be performed without a flaw. The entire digestive system may be compared to a boiler supplying the energy by which the ...
— Vitality Supreme • Bernarr Macfadden
... he was suited to the delicate and responsible post he was sent to fulfil. In fact, all his actions prove him to have been without an atom of tact, judgment, or administrative quality, and his nature had a big unsympathetic flaw in it. The fact is, there are indications that his nature was warped from the beginning, and that he was just the very kind of man who ought never to have been sent to a post of such varied responsibilities. His appointment shows how ...
— The Tragedy of St. Helena • Walter Runciman
... he said was not free from consciousness of self, from that perpetual presence of self to self which is common enough in men of great ability and ambition, and yet never ceases to be a flaw; but he said it soberly enough; there ...
— Quisante • Anthony Hope
... suspense indeed for a last "curtain" but one; and my fancy glows, all expertly, for the disclosure of the final scene, than which nothing could well have been happier, on all the premises, save for a single flaw: the installation in Forty-fourth Street of our admirable aunt, often, through the later years, domiciled there, but now settled to community of life with a touching charge and representing near him his extinguished, ...
— A Small Boy and Others • Henry James
... in establishing an alternative theory, this man is lost. You can hardly find a flaw in the case which can now be presented against him, and all further investigation has served to strengthen it. By the way, there is one curious little point about those papers which may serve us as the starting-point for an inquiry. On looking over the bank-book I found that the ...
— The Return of Sherlock Holmes • Arthur Conan Doyle
... holder, whether it contains air or gas, first all the likely spots (joints, &c.), then the entire length of pipe is carefully brushed over with strong soapy water, which will produce a conspicuous "soap- bubble" wherever the smallest flaw occurs. The tightness of a system of pipes put under pressure from a loaded holder cannot be ascertained safely by observing the height of the bell, and noting if it falls on standing. Even if there is no issue of gas from the holder, the position of the bell will alter with ...
— Acetylene, The Principles Of Its Generation And Use • F. H. Leeds and W. J. Atkinson Butterfield
... stiletto type than the dagger. An inscription ran lengthwise down the steel, which was of a distinct bluish tinge where it was not darkly stained. About an inch from the tip a tiny triangular nick had been made in one of the sharp edges, the only flaw in the weapon's perfection. Creighton looked up from it to meet ...
— The Monk of Hambleton • Armstrong Livingston
... Debt? What about that little lyric on Winchelsea that you thought of writing six years ago? Why are the few lines still in your head and not on paper? Because you can't begin. However, never mind, you can't help it, it's your one great flaw, and it's fatal. Look at Jones! Younger than you by half a year, and already on the Evening Yankee taking bribes from Company Promoters! And where are ...
— The Path to Rome • Hilaire Belloc
... pieces of news to give you, Eliza. In the first place it has been discovered that there was a very serious flaw in the title to Fairclose, and that the sale to me was altogether illegal. Mr. Hartington has behaved most kindly and generously in the matter, but the result is he comes back to Fairclose and we ...
— A Girl of the Commune • George Alfred Henty
... goods in addition to her dower. The case goes against her in the Court of Husting, and is heard on appeal before the king's justiciar sitting at St. Martin's-le-Grand. The verdict is not set aside, but some flaw is discovered in the mode of procedure; the explanation of the citizens is deemed insufficient, and the mayor and sheriffs are forthwith deposed, to be reinstated only on the understanding that they will ...
— London and the Kingdom - Volume I • Reginald R. Sharpe
... be a very long time before the inquest was over, and Aunt Jane had almost yielded to her niece's impatience and her own, and consented to walk down to meet the intelligence, when Fergus came tearing in, 'I've seen the rock, and there is a flaw of crystal- lisation in it! And the coroner-man called me ...
— Beechcroft at Rockstone • Charlotte M. Yonge
... "When a flaw or puff comes," Dory continued, "it changes the course of the boat. The helm has to be shifted to meet this change. Almost always the tiller has to be carried to the weather side of the boat. Do you know which the weather side of the boat is, fellows?" ...
— All Adrift - or The Goldwing Club • Oliver Optic
... a man to accept the hazy modern notion that the soul in its highest sense can change: he seems to have held that religion can never get any better and that poetry rather tends to get worse. But he did not see the flaw in his political theory; which is that unless the soul improves with time there is no guarantee that the accumulations of experience will be adequately used. Figures do not add themselves up; birds do not label or stuff themselves; ...
— The Victorian Age in Literature • G. K. Chesterton
... The fatal flaw of magic lies not in its general assumption of a sequence of events determined by law, but in its total misconception of the nature of the particular laws which govern that sequence. If we analyse the various cases of sympathetic magic which have been passed in review in the preceding ...
— The Golden Bough - A study of magic and religion • Sir James George Frazer
... talking of their former life as of something long gone by, saying to each other now and then, "Do you remember?" What is talked of in that way assumes unwonted proportions and appears to be without flaw. ...
— Lisbeth Longfrock • Hans Aanrud
... at the maestro's windows. 'Hark! it is her voice,' he said, and drew up his clenched fists with rage, as if pumping. 'Cold as ice! Not a flaw. She is a lantern with no light in it—crystal, if you like. Hark now at Irma, the stork-neck. Aie! what a long way it is from your throat to your head, Mademoiselle Irma! You were reared upon lemons. The split hair of your mural crown is not thinner than ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... hands, the fluttering at her throat. He endured it for a time, but broke out savagely at last. "You'd be perfect then—as lovely as ever any woman—why, you're perfect now! And yet without that one flaw where would you be? You'd not be married ...
— The Sagebrusher - A Story of the West • Emerson Hough
... first physicians are usually summoned to the bedside of some dying man of rank;—the doctors to take the advantage of some incalculable chance of an exertion of nature—the lawyers to avail themselves of the barely possible occurrence of some legal flaw. Edward pressed into the court, which was extremely crowded; but by his arriving from the north, and his extreme eagerness and agitation, it was supposed he was a relation of the prisoners, and people made way for him. It was the ...
— Waverley • Sir Walter Scott
... that is, not by reason of any deficiency, or by what it is not, but evil by what it is in itself. Such an essential, positive evil in human nature would vengeance be, a natural thing for which there was no natural use, unless punishment may in some measure be retributive. We cannot admit such a flaw in nature. All healthy philosophy goes on the principle, that what is natural is so far forth good. Otherwise we lapse into Manicheism, pessimism, scepticism, abysses beyond the reach of argument. Vengeance ...
— Moral Philosophy • Joseph Rickaby, S. J.
... law which reduced the hours of daily labour from fifteen to twelve has not reduced wages, the proposition that every reduction of the hours of labour must necessarily reduce wages is a false proposition. There is evidently some flaw in that demonstration which my honourable friend thinks so complete; and what the flaw is we may perhaps discover if we look at the analogous case to which ...
— The Miscellaneous Writings and Speeches of Lord Macaulay, Vol. 4 (of 4) - Lord Macaulay's Speeches • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... elated, exalted. It would not have taken a close observer to decide that in his devotion there was no element of the spurious and in his happiness, no flaw. As for Armitage, unseeing, but sensing clearly the drift of things, his eyes were grimly fixed ahead, the muscles of his jaws bulging in knots on either side. This chauffeur business, he felt, was ...
— Prince or Chauffeur? - A Story of Newport • Lawrence Perry
... he was unable. To return He sought, but could not find the way. Alone He was, and in perplexity, because His huntsmen he no longer could descry. Then, wandering to and fro, he found at last A pleasure garden of the days gone by, Belonging to King Lila, beautiful And without flaw. He was astonished quite When he perceived a palace. All alone He found himself, when he had entered there. He walked about, but found no living soul. Unto himself he said: "Can this domain A habitation be of demons dread And spirits? Can this be the cause of all The solitude ...
— Malayan Literature • Various Authors
... I am unable, even after the most careful revision, to find any flaw in my argument; and I incline to think none has been found by my critics—at least, if they have, they have kept ...
— Collected Essays, Volume V - Science and Christian Tradition: Essays • T. H. Huxley
... went on, "that I have known you for years, and never suspected your sense of humor. You'll forgive me, I know, if I tell you that your lack of humor was to my mind the only flaw in an ...
— Sight Unseen • Mary Roberts Rinehart
... this morning's Times. You have never voiced the feeling of the moment with more force or keener insight. But you will, I am sure, pardon me when I say that in the fifty-eighth stanza there is a regrettable flaw, which could however quickly be put right. To me, that fine appeal to Monaco to give up its neutrality is impaired by the use of the word "cope," which I have always understood should be avoided by good writers. "Deal" has the same meaning and is a truer word. You will, ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 152, March 7, 1917. • Various
... used here it is the specific one of a derelict come to grief through fire. Even yet some flickering combustion illuminated the drifting hulk. His face and hands had been recently washed—a rite insisted upon by Phillips as a memorial to the slaughtered conventions. In the candle-light he stood, a flaw in the decorous fittings of the apartment. His face was a sickly white, covered almost to the eyes with a stubble the shade of a red Irish setter's coat. Phillips's comb had failed to control the pale brown hair, long matted and conformed ...
— The Trimmed Lamp and Others • O Henry
... the circle-squarers, and the cube-doublers, had seen their long-flouted theories proved to demonstration by one of the most learned and responsible men of science in the world, and one of their most sarcastic and hitherto successful flouters had been compelled to confess that he could find no flaw in the calculations of this mathematical Daniel so unexpectedly come to judgment. They did not understand his proofs, but that was no reason why they should reject them, and so they rose as one man in support of their champion to demand that ...
— The Mummy and Miss Nitocris - A Phantasy of the Fourth Dimension • George Griffith
... of the bayou had spread until they were seemingly trying to rival the Mississippi in width. The little house was scrubbed and cleaned until it shone again. Louisette had looked her dainty little dress over and over to be sure that there was not a flaw to be found wherein Sylves' could compare her unfavourably to ...
— The Goodness of St. Rocque and Other Stories • Alice Dunbar
... fires in the morning. Then, partly because the recollection appeared to reproach him, and partly because, not possessing the critical faculty, she had never learned to acknowledge the existence of a flaw in a person she loved, she edged closer to him, and ...
— Virginia • Ellen Glasgow
... not been seen to commit the deed, did not weigh in the minds of the general public. The man's guilt was freely believed; not even the few who clung to the opinion that Charley Steele would yet get him off thought that he was innocent. There seemed no flaw in the evidence, once granted ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker
... great emergencies of the Government for twenty-five years. He has trodden the perilous heights of public duty, and against all the shafts of malice has borne his breast unharmed. He has stood in the blaze of 'that fierce light that beats against the throne,' but its fiercest ray has found no flaw in his armor, no stain on his shield. I do not present him as a better Republican or as better man than thousands of others we honor, but I present him for your deliberate consideration. I nominate John Sherman, ...
— Hidden Treasures - Why Some Succeed While Others Fail • Harry A. Lewis
... that such Men, as these, are not convinc'd of the divine Revelation of the Christian Religion, but from hence, that they (who will be presum'd to have examin'd this matter the best of any Men) do find indeed some flaw or just cause of doubt in the evidence thereof? From whence it is that they prefer their Natural Reason as a surer Teacher than that Revelation; however on some occasions they speak highly of it. And as Men of this Philosophical ...
— Occasional Thoughts in Reference to a Vertuous or Christian life • Lady Damaris Masham
... Paradoxus displace him and be praised in like manner? It would be unfair, perhaps, to say that the paradoxist consciously argues thus. He doubtless in most instances convinces himself that he has really detected some flaw in the theory of gravitation. Yet it is impossible not to recognise, as the real motive of every paradox-monger, the desire to have that said of him which has been said of Newton: ...
— Myths and Marvels of Astronomy • Richard A. Proctor
... vapor from a steam boiler, came down upon the gale and flew past, when it disappeared. I followed the white mass as it sailed down the wind; it did not, as it appeared to me, vanish in the darkness, but seemed to remain in sight to leeward, as if checked by a sudden flaw; yet none of our sails were taken aback. A thought flashed on me. I peered still more intensely into the night. I was not certain.—"A sail, broad on the lee bow." The captain answered from the quarter-deck—"Thank you, Mr. Cringle. How shall we steer?" "Keep her away a couple ...
— Thrilling Narratives of Mutiny, Murder and Piracy • Anonymous
... portion of the fact which feeds the imaginative and volitional life, is the glorious and saving unlikeness of God—His unthinkable and inexpressible glory; His utter comprehension and unbelievable compassion; His justice which knows no flaw and brooks no evasion and cannot be swerved; His power which may not be withstood and hence is a sure and certain tenderness; His hatred of sin, terrible and flaming, a hatred which will send sinful men through a thousand hells, if they will ...
— Preaching and Paganism • Albert Parker Fitch
... before truth and upright dealing with one's own understanding, creates a character that is certainly far less unlovely than those who sacrifice their intellectual integrity to more material convenience. The moral flaw is less palpable and less gross. Yet here too there is the stain of intellectual improbity, and it is perhaps all the more mischievous for being partly hidden under the mien ...
— On Compromise • John Morley
... much for me. I was dressed in a white lace dress, with a white crepe bonnet with a wreath of white roses round it. I went in the chariot with my dear Mamma and the others followed in another carriage." One seems to hold in one's hand a small smooth crystal pebble, without a flaw and without a scintillation, and so transparent that one can see through ...
— Queen Victoria • Lytton Strachey
... has ruined us yet more: The fort's revolted to the emperor; The gates are opened, the portcullis drawn, And deluges of armies from the town Come pouring in: I heard the mighty flaw, When first it broke; the crowding ensigns saw, Which choked the passage; and, what least I feared, The waving arms of Aureng-Zebe appeared, Displayed with your Morat's: In either's flag the golden serpents bear ...
— The Works of John Dryden, Volume 5 (of 18) - Amboyna; The state of Innocence; Aureng-Zebe; All for Love • John Dryden
... had been a flaw in him Laura would have found it. Next to Tanqueray she was the best critic of the four. There followed a discussion of technical points that left Hambleby intact. Then Laura ...
— The Creators - A Comedy • May Sinclair
... category with murderers, regicides, and horrid mysterious sinners who commit crimes too dreadful for women to think of. She would not believe that Bertram was one of these; but it was fearful to think that any one should so call him. Caroline, perhaps, would not so much have minded this flaw in her future husband's faith if it had not been proof of his unsteadiness, of his unfitness for the world's battle. She remembered what he had said to her two years since on the Mount of Olives; and then thought of what he was saying ...
— The Bertrams • Anthony Trollope
... lava, larva. halm, harm. calve, carve. talk, torque. daw, door. flaw, floor. yaw, yore. law, lore. laud, lord. maw, more, gnaw, nor. raw, ...
— Society for Pure English, Tract 2, on English Homophones • Robert Bridges
... poet took a flaw of pain, A hap of skiey pleasure, A thought had in his cradle lain, And mingled them in measure. That chrism he laid upon his eyes, And lips, and heart, for euphrasies, That he might see, feel, sing, perdie, The simple things ...
— New Poems • Francis Thompson
... the Empress, impatiently, "I have criticised your plan; criticise mine if you find a flaw in it." ...
— The Strong Arm • Robert Barr
... human creature worthy and available, except the gift of seeing the bright side of things. His bead-roll of Christian virtues includes all the graces of the spirit except hope; and so, if one wants to know exactly the flaw, the defect, the doubtful side, and to take into account all the untoward possibilities of any person, place, or thing, he had best apply to friend Theophilus. He can tell you just where and how the best-laid scheme is likely to fail, ...
— Household Papers and Stories • Harriet Beecher Stowe
... went off with as much appearance of goodwill and proper family feeling as if there had been no flaw in Ida's matrimonial bliss. Sir Reginald was full of kindness for his new son-in-law: as he would have been for any other human creature whom he had asked to dinner. Hospitality was a natural instinct of his being, and he invited Brian Wendover to take up his abode at Wimperfield as easily as he ...
— The Golden Calf • M. E. Braddon
... water, fancied that he was a made man; he could almost see that box. But a few more yards and it was his. Alas! In his eagerness to secure "a smith of kind" he had made insufficient inquiries into that smith's ancestry. There was (as he discovered when too late) a flaw in his pedigree! Some ancestress, it was said, could not show her marriage lines, or something else was wrong. At any rate, there was a flaw, and that was sufficient to upset the whole thing, for the chain, not being made by a smith of kind, ...
— Stories of the Border Marches • John Lang and Jean Lang
... and so still higher and higher good without limit; and of the natural working of the will, following up and fastening upon what the understanding discerns as good. The desire in question, then, is by no means a necessary evil, or natural flaw, in ...
— Moral Philosophy • Joseph Rickaby, S. J.
... that she had never met the sister-soul (for such there must be by the score, as silent as she), who shared her rage and her detestations. Valeria, with all her native pride, regarded these as proof of a big flaw in an otherwise sound nature. Yet how deep, how passionately strong, these feelings were, how gigantic ...
— The Daughters of Danaus • Mona Caird
... Caesar, dead and turned to clay, Might stop a hole to keep the wind away: O that that earth, which kept the world in awe, Should patch a wall to expel the winter's flaw." ...
— Lynton and Lynmouth - A Pageant of Cliff & Moorland • John Presland
... daily labour from fifteen to twelve has not reduced wages, the proposition that every reduction of the hours of labour must necessarily reduce wages is a false proposition. There is evidently some flaw in that demonstration which my honourable friend thinks so complete; and what the flaw is we may perhaps discover if we look at the analogous case to which ...
— The Miscellaneous Writings and Speeches of Lord Macaulay, Vol. 4 (of 4) - Lord Macaulay's Speeches • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... more trivial ills to quote, The freshly-furnished house that shines, The coxcomb's fashionable coat, Both brushed and polished "to the nines," Both yielding to some fatal flaw; A crack; a fiend who plays the flute; Both, both examples of the law Of Rift within ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 103, September 3, 1892 • Various
... little basement door gleefully. All seemed propitious, yet he meant once more and carefully to examine the preparations he had made, to see if there was any flaw anywhere. He was so absorbed, so excited, that he scarcely breathed as he crept slowly along the inside of the wall, just as a moment before he had passed along its outer surface. At one spot he paused and ...
— Reels and Spindles - A Story of Mill Life • Evelyn Raymond
... by is another building of far greater beauty. It is faced all over with encaustic tiles, each made at the kiln a thousand miles away, for the particular place it was to occupy. Each one fits without a flaw, a suggestion to ...
— Court Life in China • Isaac Taylor Headland
... reason, the musical properties of euphuism do not appear to have found favour among those critics, and this was probably a loss to our literature. "Alliteration," as Professor Raleigh remarks, "is often condemned as a flaw in rhymed verse, and it may well be open to question whether Lyly did not give it its true position in attempting to invent a place for it in what is called prose[81]." Possibly its failure in this respect was due to the growth of that intellectual ...
— John Lyly • John Dover Wilson
... a goldfield, but no reefs having been found there and the ground not having been pegged, it was afterwards withdrawn from proclamation. The Mining Commissioner of Johannesburg in the course of his duties discovered some flaw in the second or withdrawing proclamation. He advised the head office in Pretoria of this discovery and stated that it might be contended that the de-proclamation was invalid, and that great loss and inconvenience would follow if ...
— The Transvaal from Within - A Private Record of Public Affairs • J. P. Fitzpatrick
... with her emeralds, apparently searching for some flaw. Like a thief in the night was a phrase that rang unpleasantly in her ears. Her remarkable interest in the man was neither to be denied nor ignored. In fact, drawing her first by the resemblance to the man she wanted to love but could not, and then by the mystery that ...
— Parrot & Co. • Harold MacGrath
... he said, "that I wanted to look after you—that I wanted our friendship to be what it has proved to be—without the flaw of sentiment. I wouldn't spoil a single hour by any thought of yours or mine that led us away ...
— The Vagrant Duke • George Gibbs
... so I went to Attorney Case, and, with a power of difficulty, I got him to lend me the money; for which, to be sure, I gave him something, and left my lease of our farm with him, as he insisted upon it, by way of security for the loan. Attorney Case is too many for me. He has found what he calls a flaw in my lease; and the lease, he tells me, is not worth a farthing, and that he can turn us all out of our farm to-morrow if he pleases; and sure enough he will please, for I have thwarted him this day, and he swears ...
— The Parent's Assistant • Maria Edgeworth
... the son of Peleus glowed With hammered wonders, all without a flaw; The Shield of Union in its splendor showed The Compromise ...
— A Wreath of Virginia Bay Leaves • James Barron Hope
... felt that even his pride would yield to the potent fascination of this woman. As Sylvia looked, her feminine eye took in every gift of face and figure, every grace of attitude or gesture, every daintiness of costume, and found no visible flaw in Ottila, from her haughty head to her handsome foot. Yet when her scrutiny ended, the girl felt a sense of disappointment, and no envy ...
— Moods • Louisa May Alcott
... take the liberty to send you a novel, which a gentleman, your acquaintance, said you would hand to him. I beg with expedition, as 'tis time it should be published, and 'tis requisite he first revise it, or the reviewers may find a flaw.—I am, sir, ...
— The Diary and Letters of Madame D'Arblay Volume 1 • Madame D'Arblay
... encourage any one who seeks to discuss my stories with me, being a modest chap with a flaw in my vanity, she abandoned the subject after a few ineffectual attempts to find out how I get my plots, how I write my books, and how I keep from ...
— A Fool and His Money • George Barr McCutcheon
... like the eye which cannot suffer the least injury without damage; it is a precious stone, the price of which is lessened by the least flaw. ...
— Life and Literature - Over two thousand extracts from ancient and modern writers, - and classified in alphabetical order • J. Purver Richardson
... Would raise the prisoning paw, And Nature, like a mouse set free, Enjoyed delusive liberty, While every water-pipe must drip To greet the passing thaw. Then rudely dashed from eager lip The cup of joy would be, And fingers numbed, and chattering jaw, Owned unexpelled the winter's flaw, And on the steps the goodmen slip, And ...
— Punch, Or The London Charivari, Vol. 100., Jan. 24, 1891. • Various
... and then a rest.... And then wider spaces than he had ever known, greater adventure.... A day would come when he would be called, as though some one had said: Shane Campbell! and then a gesture that made a horse stumble, or a flaw of wind that would ...
— The Wind Bloweth • Brian Oswald Donn-Byrne
... Kremlin live in fear their power and position would collapse were their own people to acquire knowledge, information, comprehension about our free society. Their world has many elements of strength, but this one fatal flaw: the weakness represented by their iron curtain and their police state. Surely, a social order at once so insecure and so fearful, must ultimately lose its competition ...
— State of the Union Addresses of Harry S. Truman • Harry S. Truman
... than fights, They ow'd that glory only to His ancestor, that made them so. Fast friend he was to REFORMATION, 430 Until 'twas worn quite out of fashion. Next rectifier of wry LAW, And wou'd make three to cure one flaw. Learned he was, and could take note, Transcribe, collect, translate, and quote. 435 But PREACHING was his chiefest talent, Or argument, in which b'ing valiant, He us'd to lay about and stickle, Like ram or bull, at conventicle: For disputants, like rams and bulls, 440 Do fight ...
— Hudibras • Samuel Butler
... only one tiny flaw in this plan. If we head straight north, we drop Steve's car into the Little Choptank. If we cross that safely, we'll get wet in the ...
— The Flying Stingaree • Harold Leland Goodwin
... yielding to his taste she was still vigilant as to his interests—Virginia discovered a flaw in one of the plumes. The sylph in the trailing gown held volubly that it did not fait rien; the man with the open purse said he couldn't see that it figured much, but the small American held firm. That must ...
— Lifted Masks - Stories • Susan Glaspell
... a link in the chain some little way from its great attachment. Porlock is not quite a sound link—between ourselves. He is the only flaw in that chain so far as I have been able ...
— The Valley of Fear • Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
... I said, for there were no words to describe the magnitude of it. 'An' young Bannister's sayin' it's no more than a superfeecial flaw!' ...
— The Day's Work, Volume 1 • Rudyard Kipling
... transmitters exactly as Mr. Bell requested; but on testing them out, great was the surprise of the inventor to find that his idea, so feasible in theory, refused to work. Nevertheless, his faith was not shaken. He insisted on trying to discover the flaw in his logic and correct it, and as Watson had now completed some work that he had been doing for Moses Farmer, the two began a series of ...
— Ted and the Telephone • Sara Ware Bassett
... unexpected denouement, that they all sat mute and dumb-founded for some moments; both lawyer and clients being scarcely able to credit their own senses, and each hoping that the other had discovered some flaw in the testimony, by which it could be picked to pieces. But no such flaw or discrepancy could be discovered; and the testimony, after the severe and prolonged cross-examination to which it was subjected by the rallying and desperate attorney, remained ...
— Gaut Gurley • D. P. Thompson
... was a winning and lovely character of merits both spiritual and spectacular, and he brought to the big house an exotic atmosphere that was spicy with delights. The little boy prayed that this hero might be made again the man he once was; not because of any flaw that he could see in him—but only because the sufferer appeared somewhat less than perfect to himself. To Bernal's mind, indeed, nothing could have been superior to the noble melancholy with which Cousin Bill J. looked back upon his splendid past. There was a perfect dignity in it. Surely no ...
— The Seeker • Harry Leon Wilson
... Mr. Crookes made certain experiments on Home's power of causing a balance to move without contact he succeeded; in the presence of some Russian savants a similar experiment failed. Granting that Mr. Crookes's tests were accurate (and the lay mind, at least, can see no flaw in them), we must suppose that the personal conditions, in the Russian ...
— Cock Lane and Common-Sense • Andrew Lang
... wonders indeed how kindred souls became separated, and one feels startled and repelled at the thought that, such as they were on earth, they can never meet again. And yet there is continuity in the world, there is no flaw, no break anywhere, and what has been will surely be again, though how it will be we cannot know, and if only we trust in the wisdom that pervades the whole universe, we need ...
— Stories of Authors, British and American • Edwin Watts Chubb
... Pope, "I can't althegither give in to your second miner—no—your second major," says he, and he stopped. "Faix, then," says he, getting confused, "I don't rightly remimber where it was exactly that I thought I seen the flaw in your premises. Howsomdiver," says he, "I don't deny that it's a good conclusion, and one that 'ud be ov materil service to the Church if it was dhrawn ...
— Stories of Comedy • Various
... under way at daylight of the 9th, to prosecute the examination of the coast, the anchor came up with an arm broken off, in consequence of a flaw extending two-thirds through the iron. The negligence with which this anchor had been made, might in some cases have caused the loss of ...
— A Voyage to Terra Australis Volume 2 • Matthew Flinders
... generous sentiments that come with mellow age. He held his back straight and his head with an air—an air that was not a swagger but the sign-token of seasoned experience in the world. The most carping could have found no flaw in the quiet taste of his attire. To sum up, Kirkwood's very good friend—and his only one then in London—Mr. Brentwick looked and ...
— The Black Bag • Louis Joseph Vance
... presence, and anger grew in her heart. "He is with that girl," she thought, and she was sick with anxiety and inquietude. The roast sirloin was done to the last perfect minute, and the Yorkshire pudding deliciously brown and light; the table was set without a flaw or a "forget," and the fire and light just as they should be. There was no obvious outlet for her annoyance, and it took away her ...
— The Measure of a Man • Amelia Edith Huddleston Barr
... obtain a certain revenue, though entirely inadequate to her expenditure. Thus we beheld her pressing solidly on, and we knew not where she might stop. Pretexts, such as it was difficult to find a flaw in, were never wanting on which to ground a fresh absorption of territory. And seeing behind this advance a vast country—almost a continent—which was not merely a great Asiatic Power, but a great European ...
— Afghanistan and the Anglo-Russian Dispute • Theo. F. Rodenbough
... him away by himself this time; and let him feel the want of some kind creature to look after him. And when he meets with that kind creature (they are as plenty as fish in the sea), never trouble your head about it if there's a flaw in her character. I have got a cracked tea-cup which has served me for twenty years. Marry him, ma'am, to the new one with the utmost speed and impetuosity which the law will permit.' I hate Mr. MacGlue's opinions—so coarse and so hard-hearted!—but I sadly fear that ...
— The Two Destinies • Wilkie Collins
... and the sea along with it; but there was a return toward sunset of the heavy weather of the day before. The night set in pitch dark. The wind came off the sea in squalls, like the firing of a battery of cannon; now and then there was a flaw of rain, and the surf rolled heavier with the rising tide. I was down at my observatory among the elders, when a light was run up to the masthead of the schooner, and showed she was closer in than when I had last seen her by the dying daylight. I concluded that this ...
— The Lock And Key Library - Classic Mystery And Detective Stories, Modern English • Various
... that I have been in, bark is almost exclusively used by the natives, for their huts; where it can be procured good it is better than any thing else. I have frequently seen sheets of bark twelve feet long, and eight or ten feet wide, without a single crack or flaw, in such cases one sheet would form a large and good hut; but even where it is of a far inferior description, it answers, by a little system in the arrangement, better than almost any thing else. Projecting, ...
— Journals Of Expeditions Of Discovery Into Central • Edward John Eyre
... good, the works were fine, and yet there was a flaw; When Cyrus turned the crank around, the neighbors watched with awe. He confidently pulled the chain with motion quick and deft; The knowledge entered his right ear—and came ...
— The Jingle Book • Carolyn Wells
... astronaut fell victim to a psychological stress that was unforeseen. What he sent made no sense whatever. We blame the medical men for not finding the flaw in his psyche." ...
— Ten From Infinity • Paul W. Fairman
... after her father's disappearance—for his body had never been found—she had been received into the governor's house out of pity and charity—she, a Melchite! The interpreter had little to say in her favor, by reason of her sect; and though he could find no flaw in her beauty, he insisted on it that she was proud and ungracious, and incapable of winning any man's love; only the child, little Mary—she, to be sure, was very fond of her. It was no secret that even her uncle's wife, worthy Neforis, did not care for her haughty niece ...
— Uarda • Georg Ebers
... am going to give you, Raphael, is the little picture of a lass who is in my eyes a thing of Heaven's best making. For loyalty, honour, courage, truth, faith, she is an unmatchable maid. I have known her all the days of my life and never found a flaw in her.' ...
— Marjorie • Justin Huntly McCarthy
... man has lived day by day for five months with Carlotta's magical beauty, and all he has noticed as characteristic is the little white scar—she fell on marble steps as a child—the only flaw, if flaw can be in a thing so ...
— The Morals of Marcus Ordeyne • William J. Locke
... princess whose hand the Crown Prince, Frederick, thrice divorced, has sought in vain; for, he failing heirs, Holstein passes from the present dynasty to the Ducal House of Augustenburg. This political flaw is, while I write, being adjusted by the Danish Senate, as the impotency of Frederick, now reigning Sovereign of Denmark, has been pretty well admitted. The company took no heed of the royal presence, but walked and talked, and stood with hats on; and when ...
— A Yacht Voyage to Norway, Denmark, and Sweden - 2nd edition • W. A. Ross
... come to him in 1764 in Rome whilst "musing amongst the ruins of the Capitol"; in 1787 his great work was finished at Lausanne, where he had resided since 1783; modern criticism, working with fresh sources of information, has failed to find any serious flaw in the fabric of this masterpiece in history, but the cynical attitude adopted towards the Christian religion has always been regarded as a defect; "a man of endless reading and research," was Carlyle's verdict after a final perusal of the "Decline," "but of a most disagreeable style, and a great ...
— The Nuttall Encyclopaedia - Being a Concise and Comprehensive Dictionary of General Knowledge • Edited by Rev. James Wood
... her verdict. "That deep brown is almost wasted on a man; some girl ought to have it. I used to hear a—a person, who made a deep impression on me at the time, insist that there was always a flaw in the character of a person with large, soft ...
— Success - A Novel • Samuel Hopkins Adams
... she crouched low in the canoe, but remained perfectly still. The wind tore at them as if with frantic hands that sought their life; the water hissed under them, raced past them madly. No waves could rise under the raging gale, but black flaw after flaw flew along the surface of the lake. The rain fell in torrents; the falling streams were caught by the wind, tossed hither and thither, twisted into fantastic shapes of spray, sent flying forward, forward ...
— Hildegarde's Neighbors • Laura E. Richards
... them, and I heere protest, By this white Gloue (how white the hand God knows) Henceforth my woing minde shall be exprest In russet yeas, and honest kersie noes. And to begin Wench, so God helpe me law, My loue to thee is sound, sans cracke or flaw, Rosa. Sans, sans, ...
— The First Folio [35 Plays] • William Shakespeare
... Lancaster found what he believed was the flaw that was blocking progress. The man had used a simplified quantum mechanics without correction for relativistic effects. That made for neater mathematics but overlooked certain space-time aspects of the psi function. The error ...
— Security • Poul William Anderson
... any construction but the one which stared me in the face? My reason forced me to confess that they would not. I endeavoured to array the various facts which formed the chain of circumstantial evidence, and to find a flaw in it; but no, not a link was missing. There was the strange way in which our passengers had come aboard, enabling them to evade any examination of their luggage. The very name of "Flannigan" smacked of Fenianism, while "Muller" suggested nothing but socialism and murder. Then their mysterious ...
— The Captain of the Pole-Star and Other Tales • Arthur Conan Doyle
... considerably larger than the end of my thumb—as large as a big hickory-nut and, my uncle averred, flawless. Rubies of such a size and without a flaw are extremely rare, I believe; in fact, there are only one or two known to be in existence. The old gentleman declared that one of five carats was worth five times as much as a diamond of equal weight, and that the value increased proportionately ...
— The Paternoster Ruby • Charles Edmonds Walk
... resources for a maintenance. Remembering some friends in the western part of New York, she resolved to visit them. While crossing Lake Seneca, en route to Buffalo, there came sweetly stealing upon the senses of the passengers of the steamer her rich, full, round, clear voice, unmarred by any flaw. The lady passengers, especially the noble Mrs. Gen. P., feeling that the power and sweetness of her voice deserved attention, urged her to sing again, and were not satisfied until five or six more songs were given to them. Before reaching their destined port she ...
— Music and Some Highly Musical People • James M. Trotter
... the night I sat trying to piece my puzzle together, but without success. There was a flaw in the story, a missing point in it, somewhere, I felt certain. I often imagined I was about to touch it, when, heigh! presto! it eluded ...
— The Uninhabited House • Mrs. J. H. Riddell
... abode of Joy Grieved to behold, but eager to destroy; Round blooming beauty, like the wasp, he flew, Soil'd the fresh sweet, and changed the rosy hue; The wise, the good, with anxious heart he saw, And here a failing found, and there a flaw; Discord in families 'twas his to move, Distrust in friendship, jealousy in love; He told the poor, what joys the great possess'd; The great, what calm content the cottage bless'd: To part the learned and the rich he tried, Till their slow friendship perish'd in their ...
— Miscellaneous Poems • George Crabbe
... they passed over sections that Harris would have accepted, but McCrae objected, finding always some flaw not apparent to the untrained eye. Once, where a little river had worn its way across the plain, they came on a sod shack, where a settler was already located. "Nice spot," said McCrae, "but too sandy. His farm'll blow away when he breaks the sod. There's an ...
— The Homesteaders - A Novel of the Canadian West • Robert J. C. Stead
... beautiful, the sympathetic, whose magnetic force and charm are such that we wish to sit at her feet at once. She is intellectual, but with a disarming smile, religious, but so charitable, masterful, and yet loved of all. None is perfect, and there must be a flaw in her somewhere, but to find it would necessitate such a rummage among her many adornments as there is now no time for. Perhaps we may come upon it accidentally in the ...
— Echoes of the War • J. M. Barrie
... interdependence of each part of our organism, which often, owing to a want of equilibrium of strength and resistance in some part when compared to the rest, causes the whole to give way, just as a flaw in a levee will cause the whole of the solidly-constructed mass to give way, or a demoralized regiment may entail the utter rout of an army. As described by George Murray Humphry, in his instructive work on "Old ...
— History of Circumcision from the Earliest Times to the Present - Moral and Physical Reasons for its Performance • Peter Charles Remondino
... and reckon as they would, the two Generals, equal in battle, face to face for the first time—could not give the total of the day. It was still an unadded sum, and the guns, despite the night, were steadily contributing new figures. This was the flaw in their arithmetic; nothing was complete, and they saw that they would have to begin again to-morrow. So, with this day's work yet unfinished, they began to prepare, sending for new regiments and brigades, massing more cannon, ...
— Before the Dawn - A Story of the Fall of Richmond • Joseph Alexander Altsheler
... eyes open. To see them, you would suppose there was nothing to look at and no one to speak with; you would imagine they were paralysed or alienated; and yet very possibly they are hard workers in their own way, and have good eyesight for a flaw in a deed or a turn of the market. They have been to school and college, but all the time they had their eye on the medal; they have gone about in the world and mixed with clever people, but all the time they were thinking of their own affairs. As if a man's soul were ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition - Vol. 2 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... with which I contrived a comfortable bed in my hiding-place. No one came below, except my companion, during the day. Tiger took his station in the berth just by the aperture, and slept heavily, as if not yet entirely recovered from the effects of his sickness. Toward night a flaw of wind struck the brig before sail could be taken in, and very nearly capsized her. The puff died away immediately, however, and no damage was done beyond the splitting of the foretopsail. Dirk Peters treated Augustus all this day with great kindness and entered into a long conversation with ...
— The Works of Edgar Allan Poe - Volume 3 (of 5) of the Raven Edition • Edgar Allan Poe
... him. He knew the danger was rapidly increasing because whenever he pressed his ear to the wall he could hear the almost inaudible tickings and vibrations as the bubble's skin contracted or expanded and the Nothing tapped and searched with its empty fingers for a flaw or crack that it could tear into ...
— The Nothing Equation • Tom Godwin
... born in you With a sudden clamorous pain, When you know the dream is true And lovely, with no flaw nor stain, O then, be careful, or with sudden clutch You'll hurt the delicate thing you ...
— Fairies and Fusiliers • Robert Graves
... critical minuteness, and when there no longer existed a pretext for affecting to doubt the punctuality of their captive, a deep ejaculation of assent issued from the chest of each. Like some wary judge, whose justice is fettered by legal precedents, as if satisfied there was no flaw in the proceedings, the Mohegan then signed to the white ...
— The Wept of Wish-Ton-Wish • James Fenimore Cooper
... I had my mind made up to leave him, and soon; but what you say, coupled with doubts I had myself, have set me to thinking, till I don't know. I hate a scandal. You know how careful I always have been. All my closest friends have jeered me for a prude; there isn't a flaw he can find, there ...
— Michael O'Halloran • Gene Stratton-Porter
... forbidden to return home at the holidays, is suspected to have written the lyrical Latin verses upon the rapture of returning home, and to have breathed out his life in the anguish of thus reviving the images which for him were never to be realized.... The reader must not fancy any flaw in the Latin title. It is elliptic; revisere being understood, or some ...
— The Posthumous Works of Thomas De Quincey, Vol. 1 (2 vols) • Thomas De Quincey
... thought it a strange thing that so favored a woman should rail at her own country and kinsmen. It oppressed her loyal little heart, for she had begun to like the titled lady, and hated to find so grave a flaw in her nature. ...
— All Aboard - A Story for Girls • Fannie E. Newberry
... controversialists would make of it, if each had his opponent looking over his shoulder, pointing out flaws in his arguments, suggesting untimely truths, and putting every possible impediment in the path of his logic; and if, moreover, he were obliged to mend every flaw, prove every such truth a falsehood, and remove every impediment before he could advance a step. Were such the case, how much less would there be of fine-spun theory and specious argument; how much more ...
— Knickerbocker, or New-York Monthly Magazine, March 1844 - Volume 23, Number 3 • Various
... agree," the Bishop protested. "An act of unchristian violence would be a flaw in the whole superstructure which we are trying to ...
— The Devil's Paw • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... owning the paper title to a thousand acre boundary traceable to the Commonwealth without break or flaw, might not be the owner in fact of a single acre of land; as the whole boundary might be covered by senior grants or the natural objects ...
— Chit-Chat; Nirvana; The Searchlight • Mathew Joseph Holt
... appeal to those who know how dear a fresh coat of paint is to a seaman's heart. She had just been thus decorated within and without, and was standing into a West-Indian port to show her fine feathers, when a sudden flaw of wind knocked her off, and over, dangerously close to a rocky point. The first order given was, "Stand clear of the paint-work!"—an instance of the ruling passion strong in extremis. He had another woesome account of a sloop-of-war in which he had gone through the ...
— From Sail to Steam, Recollections of Naval Life • Captain A. T. Mahan
... which are more proper, more sounding, and more luxuriant. * * * Malice and partiality set apart, let any man who understands English, read diligently the works of Shakspeare and Fletcher, and I dare undertake that he will find in every page either some solecism of speech, or some notorious flaw in sense; yet these men are reverenced, when we are not forgiven. That their wit is great, and many times their expressions noble, envy itself cannot deny. But the times were ignorant in which they lived. ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine - Volume 57, No. 352, February 1845 • Various
... be hard to tell without strict inquiries. I doubt me if we could learn all before next May Day, when we might get hold of the man himself and find out who and what he is. Such wedlock as his cannot be without flaw, and might be made invalid by law; but, wife, there is no getting over this, that the child took her vows in the name of God, and I dare not act as though such vows were unspoken. Her youth and ignorance may plead in part for her. ...
— The Lost Treasure of Trevlyn - A Story of the Days of the Gunpowder Plot • Evelyn Everett-Green
... Gogol (I do not venture to mention much greater names, but I have them in my mind), as they now appear, and were perhaps obliged to be: men of the moment, enthusiastic, sensuous, and childish, light-minded and impulsive in their trust and distrust; with souls in which usually some flaw has to be concealed; often taking revenge with their works for an internal defilement, often seeking forgetfulness in their soaring from a too true memory, often lost in the mud and almost in love with it, until they become like the Will-o'-the-Wisps ...
— Beyond Good and Evil • Friedrich Nietzsche
... lived a lifetime within a dozen squares of Westminster Abbey, and were never inside of that historic cathedral, as I have known persons to live forty years not fifty miles distant from Niagara, and never to have heard the organ speech of that great cataract. This is a common flaw in intellect. We tend to underestimate the near, and exaggerate the remote. Another application of the same frailty is noticeable in literature. Homegrown literature is, with not a few, depreciated. According to their logic, ...
— A Hero and Some Other Folks • William A. Quayle
... habit of imitation. The child of intellectual, cultured parents, born into savage surroundings, becomes the slave of this inherited habit—call it tendency, if you will, the intention is the same. I elaborated the theory by instance and introspection, and found no flaw ...
— The Wonder • J. D. Beresford
... redden her proud eyes with tears of rage—what a success! He counted on it. Tenacious, diligent, faithful to the torment of his neighbour, not to be torn from his purpose, nature had not formed him for nothing. He well understood how to find the flaw in Josiana's golden armour, and how to make the blood of that ...
— The Man Who Laughs • Victor Hugo
... consequence hereafter (as, for example, in the dating of letters), their want of impartiality, both in seeing and stating occurrences and in tracing or attributing motives, it is plain that history is not to be depended on in any absolute sense. That smooth and indifferent quality of mind, without a flaw of prejudice or a blur of theory, which can reflect passing events as they truly are, is as rare, if not so precious, as that artistic sense which can hold the mirror up to nature. The fact that there is so little historical or political prescience, ...
— The Writings of James Russell Lowell in Prose and Poetry, Volume V - Political Essays • James Russell Lowell
... has seen Lord Craven at Barton, and probably by this time at Kintbury, where he was expected for one day this week. She found his manners very pleasing indeed. The little flaw of having a mistress now living with him at Ashdown Park seems to be the only unpleasing circumstance about him. From Ibthorp, Fulwar and Eliza are to return with ...
— Jane Austen, Her Life and Letters - A Family Record • William Austen-Leigh and Richard Arthur Austen-Leigh
... everlastingly re-discovered and re-read. It is a monotonous memory which keeps us in the main from seeing things as splendid as they are. The ancients were not wrong when they made Lethe the boundary of a better land; perhaps the only flaw in their system is that a man who had bathed in the river of forgetfulness would be as likely as not to climb back upon the bank of the earth and fancy ...
— The Defendant • G.K. Chesterton
... on the side of ignoring functionally produced modifications than of insisting on them. The main agency with him is the direct action of the environment upon the organism. This, no doubt, is a flaw in Buffon's immortal work, but it is one which Erasmus Darwin and Lamarck easily corrected; nor can we doubt that Buffon would have readily accepted their amendment if it had been suggested to him. Buffon did ...
— Luck or Cunning? • Samuel Butler
... pains she took for his comfort; to know that his eye never failed to discover the little refinements of dress or cookery or household adornment; but wearing was the burden of understanding, too, that no flaw was too small to escape his sight. Mrs. Fenton's friends rallied her upon being a slave to her housekeeping; few of them were astute enough to understand that, kind as was always his manner toward her, she was instead the slave of ...
— The Philistines • Arlo Bates
... consistent. Here, in the country, was the square, low-ceilinged meeting-house through whose open windows the glaring light relentlessly intensified the whiteness of the walls and revealed more plainly each flaw and knot in the unpainted pine benches. Yet the meeting-house on the hill was strangely, strongly representative of the frank, honest, unpretentious people who worshipped there, and after the first wave of surprise a feeling of interest ...
— Patchwork - A Story of 'The Plain People' • Anna Balmer Myers
... it as openly as I have said, you'd arrest him at once. But you must remember Cranze will have been thinking out his game for perhaps a year beforehand, till he can see absolutely no flaw in it, till he thinks, in fact, there's not the vaguest chance of being dropped on. If anything happens to Hamilton, his dear friend Cranze will be the last man to be suspected of it. And mark you, he's a clever chap. It isn't your clumsy, ignorant knave ...
— A Master of Fortune • Cutcliffe Hyne
... has gone there as their surety-Saviour. If his suretyship be accepted—if He meet and fulfil all the requirements of an outraged law, the gates of the dismal prison-house will and must be opened. If, on the other hand, there be any flaw or deficiency in His person or work as the Kinsman-Redeemer, then no power can snap the chains which bind Him; the tomb will refuse to surrender what it has in custody; the hopes of His people must perish ...
— Memories of Bethany • John Ross Macduff
... lovely white. Their meats they spoil with sprinkling cheese over them; O, perversity! Their salt is black; without a lie. In commerce these Venetians are masters of the earth and sea; and govern their territories wisely. Only one flaw I find; the same I once heard a learned friar cast up against Plato his republic: to wit, that here women are encouraged to venal frailty, and do pay a tax to the State, which, not content with silk and spice, and other rich and honest freights, good ...
— The Cloister and the Hearth • Charles Reade
... French Revolution, men must have looked for an immediate and universal improvement in their condition. Christianity, up to that time, had been somewhat of a failure politically. The reason was now obvious, the capital flaw was detected, the sickness of the body politic traced at last to its efficient cause. It was only necessary to put the Bible thoroughly into practice, to set themselves strenuously to realise in life the Holy Commonwealth, and all abuses and iniquities ...
— Familiar Studies of Men & Books • Robert Louis Stevenson
... says to sober sister Maria about her to-morrow. Tom remembers that he was a fool last night, and knows what he thinks and always has thought to-day; but pretty Seraphina thinks he adores her, so that no matter what she does he will never see a flaw, she is sure of that,—poor little puss! She does not know that philosophic Tom looks at her as he does at a glass of champagne, or a dose of exhilarating gas, and calculates how much it will do for him to take of the ...
— The Pearl of Orr's Island - A Story of the Coast of Maine • Harriet Beecher Stowe
... one of the puppets. He seemed to see Fate as a thin female with a soppy expression and pince-nez, sniffing a little as she worked the thing out. He could picture her glutinous satisfaction as she re-read her scenario and gloated over its sure-fire qualities. There was not a flaw in the construction. It started off splendidly with a romantic meeting, had 'em guessing half-way through when the hero and heroine quarrelled and parted—apparently for ever, and now the stage was all set for the reconciliation and the slow fade-out on the embrace. ...
— The Girl on the Boat • Pelham Grenville Wodehouse
... draw my plots from Nature's law To sound the depths of human life, And through her realm I find no flaw In all her seeming, varied strife; The good and bad are near allied; With sweet and sour forever blent, While vice and virtue side by side Exist in every continent. The poison vine that climbs the tree, Is just as great in Nature's plan As every mount and every sea Displayed below for little ...
— Shakspere, Personal Recollections • John A. Joyce
... graceful. Her hair was raven black and was combed away from as beautiful a forehead as nature could chisel. Her eyes were a brown hazel, large and intelligent, tinged with a slight look of melancholy. Her complexion was a rich olive, and seemed especially adapted to her face, that revealed not a flaw. ...
— Imperium in Imperio: A Study Of The Negro Race Problem - A Novel • Sutton E. Griggs
... is always polite," said Kitty, warm in defence of him at once. She might sometimes admit to herself that there was a flaw in her brother, but she could not endure that any one else should see one; "and he is always sorry for people when they are hurt, and it was our fault that ...
— Kitty Trenire • Mabel Quiller-Couch
... to be without flaw, it was invariably necessary that others should be in practically the ...
— Antony Gray,—Gardener • Leslie Moore
... without flaw Into the perfect sphere we saw Hanging before our happy eyes Amid the ...
— Rose and Roof-Tree - Poems • George Parsons Lathrop
... smiling in spirit, "what would my Chartist friends say if they saw me here? Not even Crossthwaite himself could find a flaw in the appreciation of merit for its own sake, the courtesy and condescension—ah! but he would complain of it, simply for being condescension." But, after all, what else could it be? Were not these men more experienced, more learned, older than myself? They were ...
— Alton Locke, Tailor And Poet • Rev. Charles Kingsley et al
... United States, you mean," said Patty, complacently, as she took a spoonful of chocolate. "Yes, the party in all its parts was all right. There wasn't a flaw. But, oh, Nan, I got into a scrap with ...
— Patty's Social Season • Carolyn Wells
... easily, was clean in line and tough of frame. True, he was long of the leg, among a people who, having to climb and descend hills constantly, are, in the providence of fitness, short-legged, but he was all of a part. The kilt tests a man's figure, bringing out any flaw in it, and the Black Colonel's stood the ...
— The Black Colonel • James Milne
... day, when some great new force enters our life, to begin to crumble and fall away from us, and leave us strangers in a new world, so it is with the greater types of life, with peoples and civilisations; some secret inherent flaw was in their structure; they meet a trial for which they were not prepared, and fail; once more they must be passed into the crucible and melted down to their primitive matter. Yet Nature does not repeat herself; in some way the experience of all past generations enters into those which succeed ...
— Select Epigrams from the Greek Anthology • J. W. Mackail
... of the skies there comes from the soul within us a mournful response, that betokens some wide and deep—some everlasting change. Joy is not now what joy was of yore; like a fine diamond with a flaw is now Imagination's eye; other motes than those that float through ether cross between its orb and the sun; the "fine gold has become dim," with which morning and evening of old embossed the skies; the ...
— Recreations of Christopher North, Volume 2 • John Wilson
... elder Herschel's glass) in diameter; weighing 14,826 pounds, or nearly seven tons, after being polished, and possessing a magnifying power of 42,000 times!—a perfectly pure, spotless, achromatic lens, without a material bubble or flaw! ...
— The Humbugs of the World • P. T. Barnum
... you say to it? I don't find the flaw in him. If Heaven had given me a son, I'd have had him be like this one; and since it didn't, why here's my way ...
— Not Pretty, But Precious • John Hay, et al.
... collars. They will suit your soft head. As for food, I'm afraid you're not taking enough arsenic. A slight touch of relationship to my family has evidently turned your brain. I cannot say how sorry I am that you should have discovered the one flaw in my pedigree. ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 153, July 25, 1917 • Various
... exaltation. Now, tall, strong, white-haired, he looked a figure of an older world. "The spheres and all are set to harmony!" he said. "I would have fitness. Great things throughout! Diamonds and rubies without flaw in the crown.—We will talk no more about ...
— 1492 • Mary Johnston
... o' sails you used to see, in Mr. Dimmick's day, standing across to the mainland on a pleasant Sunday morning, filled with church-going folks, all sure to want him some time or other! You couldn't find no doctor that would stand up in the boat and screech if a flaw struck her." ...
— The Country of the Pointed Firs • Sarah Orne Jewett
... top of the kitchen stairs, which would then become his funeral pyre. He would do all this on Sunday evening while Miriam was at church, and it would appear that he had fallen downstairs with the lamp, and been burnt to death. There was really no flaw whatever that he could see in the scheme. He was quite sure he knew how to cut his throat, deep at the side and not to saw at the windpipe, and he was reasonably sure it wouldn't hurt him very much. And then everything would be at ...
— The History of Mr. Polly • H. G. Wells
... Happiness, "his being's end and aim," was his legitimate and covenanted reward. If God therefore was just, such a man would be happy; and inasmuch as God was just, the man who was not happy had not deserved to be. There is no flaw in this argument; and if it is unsound, the fallacy can only lie in the supposed right to happiness. It is idle to talk of inward consolations. Job felt them, but they were not everything. They did not relieve the anguish of his wounds; they ...
— Froude's Essays in Literature and History - With Introduction by Hilaire Belloc • James Froude
... fortune to be, he had ten thousand-fold the power and reason to see the tender radiance of her. As she was taller than other women, so her love seemed higher and greater, and as free from any touch of earthly poverty of feeling as her beauty was from any flaw. In it there could be no doubt, no pride; it could be bounded by no limit, measured by no rule, its ...
— A Lady of Quality • Frances Hodgson Burnett
... any other man, Dorothy, he'd make me 'sure,' when he gets home! I will defend myself to this extent: I've patched and propped them all summer, after every rain, and tried to provide for the fall storms; but there's a flaw in ...
— Stories by American Authors (Volume 4) • Constance Fenimore Woolson
... to all noble ambitions and touched by all noble dissatisfactions with what is, makes its plan for what should be on a strictly logical basis. His rejected Evil is wholly evil; his chosen Good without a flaw. Children are all Calvinists; and youth, for the most part, separates its ideas of good and bad as the sheep and goats within its mind. Well that it is so. The law of growth in life is so far from logical, ...
— The Family and it's Members • Anna Garlin Spencer
... as sharp as yours, Belle, would never have accepted me if there had been a visible flaw ...
— Dave Darrin's Fourth Year at Annapolis • H. Irving Hancock
... train, they fall into a stupid trance with their eyes open. To see them, you would suppose there was nothing to look at and no one to speak with; you would imagine they were paralysed or alienated; and yet very possibly they are hard workers in their own way, and have good eyesight for a flaw in a deed or a turn of the market. They have been to school and college, but all the time they had their eye on the medal; they have gone about in the world and mixed with clever people, but all the time they were ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition - Vol. 2 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... sea, and life, for those at home, became a joy without a flaw—except the thought that he would sometime come ...
— A Maid of the Silver Sea • John Oxenham
... But I shall not believe in them till I see them; a skysail seems high enough in all conscience; and the idea of any thing higher than that, seems preposterous. Besides, it looks almost like tempting heaven, to brush the very firmament so, and almost put the eyes of the stars out; when a flaw of wind, too, might very soon take the conceit out ...
— Redburn. His First Voyage • Herman Melville
... fallen humanity. He has gone there as their surety-Saviour. If his suretyship be accepted—if He meet and fulfil all the requirements of an outraged law, the gates of the dismal prison-house will and must be opened. If, on the other hand, there be any flaw or deficiency in His person or work as the Kinsman-Redeemer, then no power can snap the chains which bind Him; the tomb will refuse to surrender what it has in custody; the hopes of His people must perish along ...
— Memories of Bethany • John Ross Macduff
... the mediaevals had it—in theory at any rate. The Round Table stories, merely as such, illustrate Valour; the Graal stories, Religion; the passion of Lancelot and Guinevere with the minor instances, Love. All these have their [Greek: amarthia]—their tragic and tragedy-causing fault and flaw. The knight wastes his valour in idle bickerings; he forgets law in his love; and though there is no actual degradation of religion, he fails to live up to the ideal that he does not actually forswear. To throw the presentation—the mimesis—of all this ...
— The English Novel • George Saintsbury
... conversation, now and then raising his eyes to a portrait of the deceased farmer, an enlarged and highly-tinted photograph, which gazed down on him from the opposite wall. The gaze was obstinate, brow-beating, as though it challenged Cai to find a flaw in the defence: and Cai, although dimly aware of a fallacy somewhere, could not meet the challenge. He lowered his eyes again to his plate. He found himself wondering if, in any future circumstances, Mrs Bosenna would consent to ...
— Hocken and Hunken • A. T. Quiller-Couch
... perceived too late that his persistence was unmannerly; hung his head a while in silence; then, lifting up a sheepish countenance, 'I 'shamed,' said the tyrant. It was the first and the last time we heard him own to a flaw in his behaviour. Half an hour after he sent us a camphor-wood chest worth only a few dollars—but then heaven knows what Tembinok' ...
— In the South Seas • Robert Louis Stevenson
... come hither. But when this fairest of the sisters led them through her palace and showed them all the treasures that were hers, envy grew in their hearts and choked their old love. Even while they sat at feast with her, they grew more and more bitter; and hoping to find some little flaw in her good fortune, they asked ...
— Old Greek Folk Stories Told Anew • Josephine Preston Peabody
... set saile and went off to sea to get the winde of them, which wee should haue had if the winde had kept his ordinary course, which is all the day at the Southwest, and West-southwest: but this day with a flaw it kept all the day at the East, and East-southeast, so that the Portugals had the winde of vs, and came roome with the Tyger and vs untill night, and brought themselues all saue one, which sailed not so well as the rest, within shot of vs: then it fell calme, and the ...
— The Principal Navigations, Voyages, Traffiques, and Discoveries of - The English Nation, Vol. 11 • Richard Hakluyt
... The only flaw in his happiness at the moment was the fact that his circle of friends was so small. He had not missed the old brigade of the studio before, but now the humblest of them would have been welcome, provided he would have sat still and listened. Even Percy Shanklyn ...
— The Coming of Bill • P. G. Wodehouse
... story," she continued, after a moment of silence, "you can see that I have been deeply wronged, and though from a moral standpoint, I have every claim upon Emil Correlli, yet legally, I have none whatever; and, unless you can prove some flaw in that ceremony of night before last—prove that he fraudulently tricked you into a marriage with him, you are irrevocably ...
— The Masked Bridal • Mrs. Georgie Sheldon
... name is ruined. That is the only mistake I have made in my whole life and it was done in a moment of weakness. Before I was just like a piece of pure jade; everyone admired me for what I have done for my country, but the jade has a flaw in it since this Boxer movement and it will remain there to the end of my life. I have regretted many, many times that I had such confidence in, and believed that wicked Prince Tuan; ...
— Two Years in the Forbidden City • The Princess Der Ling
... her dream-Venice had returned. There were private yachts, Adriatic liners, all brilliant with illumination, and hundreds of gondolas, bobbing, bobbing, like captive leviathans, bunched round the gaily-lanterned barges of the serenaders. There was only one flaw to this perfect dream: the shrill whistle of the ferry-boats. They had no place here, and their ...
— The Lure of the Mask • Harold MacGrath
... Salem. He was an abstemious man, one of a family of long lives, and he would linger here, increasingly unimportant, for a great while, an old man in new epochs, isolated among strange people and prejudices. Whatever the cause—the small safety or an inward flaw—he had never been part of the corporate sweating humanity where, in the war of spirit and flesh, the vital rewards and accomplishments ...
— Java Head • Joseph Hergesheimer
... Woodward,—counsel for the poet. Used to the ground, I know 'tis hard to deal With this dread court, from whence there's no appeal; No tricking here, to blunt the edge of law, Or, damn'd in equity, escape by flaw: But judgment given, your sentence must remain; No writ of error lies—to Drury Lane: Yet when so kind you seem, 'tis past dispute We gain some favour, if not costs of suit. No spleen is here! I see no hoarded fury;— I think ...
— The Rivals - A Comedy • Richard Brinsley Sheridan
... say more. You all know that stage solicitors are more outrageous villains than even their originals. Mr. Gammon is, of course, a "fine speciment of the specious," as Mr. Hood's Mr. Higgings says. It is he who, finding out a flaw in Aubrey's title, angled per advertisement for the heir, and caught a Tittlebat—Titmouse. It is he who has so disinterestedly made that gentleman's fortune.—"Only just merely for the sake of the costs?" one naturally asks. Oh no; there is a stronger reason (with which, however, ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 1, November 27, 1841 • Various
... who undertakes to produce some consummate work, will find himself pitiably in error, if he expects to turn it out of his hands, entire in all its parts, and without a flaw. ...
— Thoughts on Man - His Nature, Productions and Discoveries, Interspersed with - Some Particulars Respecting the Author • William Godwin
... strong man whom she eventually marries seems unfortunately to have a bit of a flaw in his granite character; at any rate, something is wrong with him, as the heroine fails to hold him altogether, and matters even begin to look as though she might lose him. But with her great happiness had come a new standard of honour, and ...
— Walking-Stick Papers • Robert Cortes Holliday
... small, and quite a tiny stream ran down the valley, cutting itself a channelled course; but Will knew enough—knew the power of water, and what such a tiny stream could do. In short, in those brief moments he had grasped the fact that a dangerous flaw had been formed in the dam, which, if unchecked, might mean ...
— Will of the Mill • George Manville Fenn
... among the best of any state, the only serious flaw being "10 sage grouse" per day: ...
— Our Vanishing Wild Life - Its Extermination and Preservation • William T. Hornaday
... line, all Sikhs of the true Sikh baptism except for the eight of their officers who were European, Outram's Own swept down a living avenue of British troops; and neither gunners nor infantry could see one flaw in them, although picking flaws in native regiments is almost part of the ...
— Winds of the World • Talbot Mundy
... of saying the unorthodox thing, an element which accounts for much of the unconventionality of that intellectual class of townsfolk figuring broadcast in the book, and largely discounts the value of its criticisms. I suspected the same flaw in her expressed convictions on religious, political and feminist matters, and I shouldn't be surprised to learn, though there is no hint of it, that she stopped short of complete revolt in her own big affair because she realized instinctively that even a passionate ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 146, April 22, 1914 • Various
... Lieutenants Terry and Overton had joined the first two officers on the deck, and order was maintained without a flaw. ...
— Uncle Sam's Boys with Pershing's Troops - Dick Prescott at Grips with the Boche • H. Irving Hancock
... we spred an hullocke of our foresaile, and bare roome with her, which was the Confidence, but the Edward we could not see. [Footnote: This vessel's successful voyage is related further on.] Then the flaw something abating, we and the Confidence hoysed vp our sailes the fourth day, sayling Northeast and by North, to the end to fall with the Wardhouse, as we did consult to doe before, in case we should part company. Thus running Northeast and by North, and Northeast ...
— The Principal Navigations, Voyages, Traffiques, • Richard Hakluyt
... rule of reasoning according to the inductive philosophy, that there is not one drop of water in slavery for the parched lips of a dying slave. I stated this to a member of our Junior Class who is a wonderful metaphysician. He was kind enough to say that he could discover no flaw in the logic. Your letter, which, I trust, is now on its way to me, I know will fully confirm ...
— The Sable Cloud - A Southern Tale With Northern Comments (1861) • Nehemiah Adams
... over the way, I've seen a head that's fair and gray; I've seen kind eyes not new to tears, A form of grace, though full of years— Her fifty summers have left no flaw— And I, a youth of twenty-three, So love this lady, fair to see, I want her ...
— The Book of Humorous Verse • Various
... together was still as great for them both as it had been in the first radiant days of their marriage. For herself, indeed, she knew that the joy was constantly deepening, and even the wild hunger and passion of her heart could find no flaw in his devotion. Her surrender to him was with a glorious and unashamed completeness, the tones of her extraordinary voice deepened when she spoke to him, and in her eyes all who looked might read the story of insatiable ...
— The Heart of Rachael • Kathleen Norris
... shall pray, And the heart shall cry out for the hand in the fight of the uttermost day. So he sang, and beheld not Gudrun, save as long ago he saw His sister, the little maiden of the face without a flaw: But wearily Hogni beheld her, and no change in her face there was, And long thereon gazed Hogni, and set his brows as the brass, Though the hands of the King were weary, and weak his knees were grown, And he felt as a man unholpen in a waste land ...
— Lyra Heroica - A Book of Verse for Boys • Various
... Shakespeare. As we have seen, the idea of the tragic hero as a being destroyed simply and solely by external forces is quite alien to him; and not less so is the idea of the hero as contributing to his destruction only by acts in which we see no flaw. But the fatal imperfection or error, which is never absent, is of different kinds and degrees. At one extreme stands the excess and precipitancy of Romeo, which scarcely, if at all, diminish our regard for him; at the other the murderous ambition of Richard III. In most cases the tragic error ...
— Shakespearean Tragedy - Lectures on Hamlet, Othello, King Lear, Macbeth • A. C. Bradley
... him captive, sent him to the prison, to the bar, to the scaffold, was known in our annals as emphatically the Long Parliament. Never would such disasters have befallen the monarchy but for the fatal law which secured that assembly from dissolution. [409] There was, it must be owned, a flaw in this reasoning which a man less shrewd than William might easily detect. That one restriction of the royal prerogative had been mischievous did not prove that another restriction would be salutary. It by no means followed ...
— The History of England from the Accession of James II. - Volume 4 (of 5) • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... with a critical eye the management and navigation as the Boadicea was pressed through the stream past Gallipoli into the sea of Marmora, and admitted to the second mate that but for the excessive carrying on there was no flaw to be found. ...
— The Shellback's Progress - In the Nineteenth Century • Walter Runciman
... withdraw From all men's eyes: but in the night would roam Till drowsy watchmen of the city saw A shadowy shape that chill'd the night with awe, Treading the battlements; and like a ghost, She stretch'd her lovely arms without a flaw, In shame and longing, to the ...
— Helen of Troy • Andrew Lang
... ladder was fifty feet in length; and consequently it reached to a point on the face of the cliff nearly fifty feet above the surface of the glacier. At this height there chanced to be a slight flaw in the rock—a sort of seam in the granite—where a hole could easily be ...
— The Plant Hunters - Adventures Among the Himalaya Mountains • Mayne Reid
... wagons broke apart, alternating right and left, until two long columns were formed. Each of these advanced, curving out, then drawing in, until a long ellipse, closed at front and rear, was formed methodically and without break or flaw. It was the barricade of the Plains, the moving fortresses of our soldiers of fortune, going West, across the Plains, across the Rockies, across the deserts that lay beyond. They did not know all these dangers, but they thus were ready ...
— The Covered Wagon • Emerson Hough
... times trembled, almost imperceptibly, with the generous sentiments that come with mellow age. He held his back straight and his head with an air—an air that was not a swagger but the sign-token of seasoned experience in the world. The most carping could have found no flaw in the quiet taste of his attire. To sum up, Kirkwood's very good friend—and his only one then in London—Mr. Brentwick looked and was an ...
— The Black Bag • Louis Joseph Vance
... the Pope, "I can't althegither give in to your second miner—no—your second major," says he, and he stopped. "Faix, then," says he, getting confused, "I don't rightly remimber where it was exactly that I thought I seen the flaw in your premises. Howsomdiver," says he, "I don't deny that it's a good conclusion, and one that 'ud be ov materil service to the Church if it was dhrawn ...
— Stories of Comedy • Various
... guest to slight; But still observe with special grace Those who obtain the foremost place, Whether for happier skill in art Or bearing in the rite their part. Do you, I pray, with friendly mind Perform the task to you assigned, And work the rite, as bids the law, Without omission, slip, or flaw" They answered: "As thou seest fit So will we do and naught omit." The sage Vasistha then addressed Sumantra called at his behest: "The princes of the earth invite, And famous lords who guard the rite, Priest, ...
— The Ramayana • VALMIKI
... most ingenious. But there is in this plan one flaw which no one has noted. I suppose that you, Maternus, evolved this really promising idea from pondering on what Claudius told us. All the hearsay about Rome and its festivals which ever came to the ears of all of us put together is as nothing at all compared with ...
— Andivius Hedulio • Edward Lucas White
... perfectly purified heart. Clarify the medium of vision, and truth undiscerned before breaks on the observer's sight. A mile or two from here skilful artisans make those great object-glasses with which the mysteries of the stars are disclosed. The slightest speck or flaw blurs the image, but with the perfect glass stars unseen by any eye throughout the history of the world are to be in our days discovered. It is a parable of the soul. Each film on the object-glass of character obscures ...
— Mornings in the College Chapel - Short Addresses to Young Men on Personal Religion • Francis Greenwood Peabody
... just come to this determination, when there blew a flaw of wind through the autumnal gardens; the dead leaves showered down, and a flight of sparrows, thick as a snowfall, wheeled above my head with sudden pipings. This agreeable bustle was the affair of a moment, but it startled me from the abstraction ...
— The Wrecker • Robert Louis Stevenson and Lloyd Osbourne
... results. It postponed the wedding: it stirred me to a very crescendo of patronage, for with the removal of the bread-winner the only flaw in my Cophetua pose had vanished: and it gave Audrey a great deal more scope than she had hitherto been granted for the exercise of free will in the choice of ...
— The Little Nugget • P.G. Wodehouse
... I read it in a hurry yesterday; to-day I saw it again and read it carefully. There is no flaw in it; it is a will that must stand, that cannot be disputed. Charlotte, you were right in your forebodings. Niece Charlotte, you and your mother, before you, were basely robbed, cruelly wronged; your dead father was just and ...
— How It All Came Round • L. T. Meade
... week one more such letter reached us—from Mr. Philip Waite, this time—claiming that there was "an atrocious flaw" in two stories of Captain S. P. Meek's. This we could not let go unanswered, first because of the strong terms used, and second because the objection would sound to many like a true criticism; so we turned the letter over to Captain Meek, and his answer follows Mr. Waite's ...
— Astounding Stories of Super-Science January 1931 • Various
... presence of witnesses, lest his sanity should be called in question and the Camusots should attempt upon that pretext to dispute the will. At the name of Trognon he caught a glimpse of machinations of some kind; perhaps a flaw purposely inserted, or premeditated treachery on La Cibot's part. He would prevent this. Trognon should dictate a holograph will which should be signed and deposited in a sealed envelope in a drawer. Then Schmucke, hidden in one of the cabinets in his alcove, should see La Cibot search for the will, ...
— Poor Relations • Honore de Balzac
... and exact was his explanation that his examiners could not find the least flaw in his doctrine. He was equally correct in the answer to the friar who proposed a ...
— The Autobiography of St. Ignatius • Saint Ignatius Loyola
... admirable, but human; consequently, not without a flaw. Uncle Fountain was left to chance, like the flying atoms of Epicurus, and chance put him at Bazalgette's right hand save one. From this point his inquisitive eye commanded David Dodd and Mrs. Bazalgette, and raked Lucy and her neighbors, who were ...
— Love Me Little, Love Me Long • Charles Reade
... I'm a Kansan from away beyond the Kaw, and I reckon I'm a diamond pure without the slightest flaw! Sure! A genuine prairie-dog from the short-grass country couldn't chatter more like a Westerner than that. That would fool Badger himself. That's whatever! Yes, I reckon. My daddy is a rancher, and I allow that I am great; for my home is on the boundless plains of the wonderful ...
— Frank Merriwell's Reward • Burt L. Standish
... rain, and the first drops would soon come pattering through the leaves. It was not unpleasant, in such an humour, to catch sight, ever and anon, of large spaces of the open plain. This happened only where the path lay much upon the slope, and there was a flaw in the solid leafy thatch of the wood at some distance below the level at which I chanced myself to be walking; then, indeed, little scraps of foreshortened distance, miniature fields, and Liliputian houses and hedgerow trees would appear for a moment ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. XXII (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... a man who thought himself so much wiser than his parents,—a man who had gained honours at the University,—a man of the gravest temperament,—a man of so nicely critical a turn of mind that there was not a law of art or nature in which he did not detect a flaw; that he should get himself into this mess was, to say the least ...
— Kenelm Chillingly, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... Saumarez, as a last resource, prepared for a boat attack on the batteries, but in the whole squadron there were not enough uninjured boats to carry the marines. The British flagship itself was by this time well-nigh a wreck, and was drifting on the reefs. A flaw of wind from the shore gave the ships steerage-way, and Saumarez drew off, leaving the Hannibal to ...
— Deeds that Won the Empire - Historic Battle Scenes • W. H. Fitchett
... a history which all men know: how the next Pope was just, and put the Carafa to their trial for many deeds of bloodshed; how the judgment was long delayed that it might be without flaw; how it took eight hours at last to read the judges' summing up; and how Cardinal Carafa was strangled by night in Sant' Angelo, while at the same hour his brother and the two who had murdered his wife were beheaded in Tor di Nona, just opposite the Castle, across the Tiber—a ...
— Ave Roma Immortalis, Vol. 2 - Studies from the Chronicles of Rome • Francis Marion Crawford
... rightness, and she perceived, but she found it difficult to express her perception, that Miss Alimony wasn't so much answering her objections as trying to swamp her with exalted emotion. And if there was any flaw whatever in her attention to Miss Alimony's stirring talk, it was because she was keeping a little look-out in the tail of her eye for the reappearance of the men, and more particularly for the reappearance of Mr. Brumley with whom she had a peculiar feeling ...
— The Wife of Sir Isaac Harman • H. G. (Herbert George) Wells
... theories proved to demonstration by one of the most learned and responsible men of science in the world, and one of their most sarcastic and hitherto successful flouters had been compelled to confess that he could find no flaw in the calculations of this mathematical Daniel so unexpectedly come to judgment. They did not understand his proofs, but that was no reason why they should reject them, and so they rose as one man in support ...
— The Mummy and Miss Nitocris - A Phantasy of the Fourth Dimension • George Griffith
... our minds being busy with the new situation thus presented,—mine, in wonderment at this flaw that so often declared itself in enviable natures of fullest endowment,—in a grown-up man and a good cricketer, for instance, even as this curate; Edward's (apparently), in the consideration of how such a state of things, ...
— The Golden Age • Kenneth Grahame
... archduke's heart by her beauty and the right to wear his honors by her wit. Nothing was known of the stove at this latter day in Hall. The grandfather Strehla, who had been a master-mason, had dug it up out of some ruins where he was building, and, finding it without a flaw, had taken it home, and only thought it worth finding because it was such a good one to burn. That was now sixty years past, and ever since then the stove had stood in the big, desolate, empty room, warming three generations of the Strehla family, and having seen ...
— Bimbi • Louise de la Ramee
... already whirling the dust-clouds on the Denver plains has not yet begun to ruffle the cottonwoods or the placid surface of the slow-moving stream, and in many a sheltered pool the waters of the "Smoky Hill" gleam like silvered mirror, without break or flaw. Far out on the gentle slopes small herds of troop-horses or quartermaster's "stock," each with its attendant guard, give life to the somewhat sombre tone of the landscape, while nearer at hand two or three well-filled cavalry "troops" with ...
— Marion's Faith. • Charles King
... who may be less self-confident than most are when they make their debut in print. Bouilhet, whom I first came to know somewhat intimately about two years before I gained the friendship of Flaubert, by dint of telling me that a hundred lines—or less—if they are without a flaw and contain the very essence of the talent and originality of even a second-rate man, are enough to establish an artist's reputation, made me understand that persistent toil and a thorough knowledge of the craft, might, in some happy hour of lucidity, power, and enthusiasm, by the fortunate occurrence ...
— The Works of Guy de Maupassant, Volume VIII. • Guy de Maupassant
... with three blankets, with which I contrived a comfortable bed in my hiding-place. No one came below, except my companion, during the day. Tiger took his station in the berth just by the aperture, and slept heavily, as if not yet entirely recovered from the effects of his sickness. Toward night a flaw of wind struck the brig before sail could be taken in, and very nearly capsized her. The puff died away immediately, however, and no damage was done beyond the splitting of the foretopsail. Dirk Peters treated Augustus all this day with great kindness and entered ...
— The Works of Edgar Allan Poe - Volume 3 (of 5) of the Raven Edition • Edgar Allan Poe
... this time some distance out. The wind had carried him along finely, the boat scudding, as he expressed it. He was congratulating himself on the success of his trial trip, when all at once a flaw struck the boat. Not being a skillful boatman he was wholly unprepared for it, ...
— Frank's Campaign - or the Farm and the Camp • Horatio Alger, Jr.
... move, The myriad worlds on worlds that course The spaces of the universe; Since everywhere the Spirit walks The garden of the heart, and talks With man, as under Eden's trees, In all his varied languages. Why mourn above some hopeless flaw In the stone tables of the law, When scripture every day afresh Is traced on tablets of the flesh? By inward sense, by outward signs, God's presence still the heart divines; Through deepest joy of Him we learn, In ...
— The Complete Works of Whittier - The Standard Library Edition with a linked Index • John Greenleaf Whittier
... time Ben stood before Arndis, queen of Teris. Her eyes probed at him, trying to divine his thoughts. There was anger in those eyes. If she detected a single flaw in his story it would mean Ben's death. More than that, it would mean disaster for Earth. ...
— Daughters of Doom • Herbert B. Livingston
... drinking too much. People are talking about it. Quit it! Whisky never won a jury. In the Morse case you loaded up for your speech and I beat you because in all your agonizing about the wrong to old man Mueller and his 'pretty brown-eyed daughter' as you called her, you forgot slick and clean the flaw in ...
— In the Heart of a Fool • William Allen White
... young lady of Beccles Whose face was infested with freckles, But nobody saw Any facial flaw, For she had ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 159, July 21, 1920 • Various
... lessen her, bring her grief, redden her proud eyes with tears of rage—what a success! He counted on it. Tenacious, diligent, faithful to the torment of his neighbour, not to be torn from his purpose, nature had not formed him for nothing. He well understood how to find the flaw in Josiana's golden armour, and how to make the blood of that ...
— The Man Who Laughs • Victor Hugo
... valuable lessons. The universal, all-embracing Trust made marionettes of us, every one. Our strength was, to them, no more than that of a mouse to a lion. Their system is perfect, their lines of supply and communication are without a flaw. The Prussian army machine of other days was but a bungling experiment by comparison with the efficiency of this new mechanism. I tell you, Gabriel, we've got to give these tyrants credit for being infernally efficient tyrants! All that science has been able to devise, or press and church ...
— The Air Trust • George Allan England
... quarrel with it does not end here. The flaw runs through the whole constitution of things; there is no possible equation between the anomalies and dislocations on which he turns the dry light of that sceptical philosophy which has usurped the place of faith. Thought is good and action is good, ...
— The Contemporary Review, January 1883 - Vol 43, No. 1 • Various
... appears to be good, when it really is not so. Reasoning very often appears to be good, while there is all the time some latent flaw in it which makes the conclusion wrong. Very often something is left out of the account which ought to be taken in and calculated for, and that is the case here. The truth is, that the current helps ...
— Rollo on the Rhine • Jacob Abbott
... comes to the Hospitals," Colonel Jostoff, the chief of the staff, tells me, "there are ten who say 'I am ill.'" The Bulgarians recognise bitterly that in their otherwise fine organisation there has been one flaw, the medical service. Among this nation of peasant proprietors—sturdy, abstemious, moral, living in the main on whole-meal bread and water—illness was so rare that the medical service was but little regarded. Up to Chatalja ...
— Bulgaria • Frank Fox
... moments one wonders indeed how kindred souls became separated, and one feels startled and repelled at the thought that, such as they were on earth, they can never meet again. And yet there is continuity in the world, there is no flaw, no break anywhere, and what has been will surely be again, though how it will be we cannot know, and if only we trust in the wisdom that pervades the whole ...
— Stories of Authors, British and American • Edwin Watts Chubb
... and nieces. The popular morals, using the word in its limited sense, were peculiar. The number of espostos que nao se sabe quem, sao seus pais (fatherless foundlings) outnumbered those born de legitimo matrimonio; and few of the gudewives prided themselves upon absolute fidelity. This flaw, which in England would poison all domestic affection, was not looked upon in a serious light by the islandry. The priesthood used to lament the degeneracy of the age and sigh for the fine times of foros e fogos, the rights and fires of an auto-da-fe. The shepherds have now learned ...
— To the Gold Coast for Gold - A Personal Narrative in Two Volumes.—Vol. I • Richard F. Burton
... Russian. An Englishman may be in love with an idea, and start out bravely to follow it; but if he finds it leading him into a position contrary to the experience of humanity, then he pulls up, and decides that the idea must be false, even if he can detect no flaw in it; not so the Russian; the idea is right, ...
— Essays on Russian Novelists • William Lyon Phelps
... institutions received general adhesion. Even Scotus, like Ockham, a brilliant Oxford scholar whose hidden tomb at Cologne finds such few pilgrims kneeling in its shade, so hardy in his thought and so eager to find a flaw in the arguments of Aquinas, has no alternative to offer. Franciscan though he was, and therefore, perhaps, more likely to favour communistic teaching, his own theory is but a repetition of what his rival had already propounded. Thus, for example, he writes in a typical passage: "Even supposing it ...
— Mediaeval Socialism • Bede Jarrett
... one of the privileged, and to produce, at the same tune, a shield, with exactly one more quartering than the reigning shield itself contained. The Margrave was astounded, the people in raptures, and the cousins in despair. The complainant's shield was examined and counted, and not a flaw discovered. What a dilemma! The chief magistrate consulted with the numerous branches of his family, and the next morning the complainant's head was struck off for high treason, for daring to have one more quartering ...
— Vivian Grey • The Earl of Beaconsfield
... all their names, Bertram and Gilbert, Louis, Frank and James, Each with his aims; One thinks he is a poet, and writes verse His friends rehearse; Another is full of law; A third sees pictures which his hand can draw Without a flaw. ...
— Behind the Arras - A Book of the Unseen • Bliss Carman
... and laborious work it is, and requires great exactitude. Often when the cutting is nearly accomplished some hidden flaw discloses itself, and a stone that had appeared of great value proves to be almost worthless; or the men when chipping the rough granite may suddenly find a flake too much has been chipped off by mistake, which involves not merely the loss of that block ...
— Through Finland in Carts • Ethel Brilliana Alec-Tweedie
... fear o' that. She's as toom's a cock. Gang and luik. The last drap in her wame flaw oot at the window i' that bottle. Eh! Alec, but I'll hae a sair day, and ye maun be true to me. Gie me my Homer, or I'll never win throu't. An ye may lay John Milton within my rax (reach); for I winna pit my leg oot o' the blankets ...
— Alec Forbes of Howglen • George MacDonald
... as friends did not venture to specify, except as the sun shone on it, when they called it golden. He inherited the lines of his mother's features, however; also her good teeth, her stature (or the promise of her stature, for he was not yet full- grown), and, what was better, her health without flaw, and her spirits of that tone and equality which are better than ...
— Villette • Charlotte Bronte
... me while I was lying there not so very far away from that shanty hidden among the rocks and brushwood. Most of the time the wind was blowing on my left side, but every little while there would come a pucker or a flaw, causing it to change for just for a second or two. And it was when this happened the first time I got scent of what was in the wind, in a double sense. In other words, Allan, I discovered a distinct odor of ...
— The, Boy Scouts on Sturgeon Island - or Marooned Among the Game-fish Poachers • Herbert Carter
... journey along the sands. When the snow came the sands were impassable. As soon as the ice on the bay would bear, there would be coming and going, no doubt; but until then Caius had the restful security that she was near him, and that it could not be many days before he saw her. The only flaw in his conclusion was that the fact did not bear it out; ...
— The Mermaid - A Love Tale • Lily Dougall
... which they rowed from the one side to the other to the number of 30. of their small boates, wherein were many people which passed from one shore to the other to come and see vs. (M336) And behold vpon the sudden (as is woont to fall out in sayling) a contrary flaw of wind comming from the sea, we were inforced to returne to our ship, leauing this lande to our great discontentment, for the great commodity and pleasantnesse thereof, which we suppose is not without some riches, all the hils shewing minerall waters in ...
— The Principal Navigations, Voyages, Traffiques and Discoveries of - the English Nation. Vol. XIII. America. Part II. • Richard Hakluyt
... curtailing his own personal needs as much as possible so that there would be no cause to discontinue or diminish the home comforts they had latterly been enjoying. "We are not peasants," he said, "and that we are not living from the mercy of chance is a flaw in me rather ...
— The Goose Man • Jacob Wassermann
... was ready. She'd been ready for weeks. There wasn't a mechanical or electronic flaw in her. We hoped, I hoped, the man who designed her hoped. The Doll's father—he hoped most of all. Even lying quiescent in her hangar, she looked as sleek as a Napoleon hat done in poured monel. When your eyes went over her you knew ...
— The Very Black • Dean Evans
... not the seventh son of a seventh son, sir. I did not see the flaw in your strategy. You lost by one of those strange accidents which must be attributed to the interference of the Almighty in the ...
— Cappy Ricks • Peter B. Kyne
... liberty, While every water-pipe must drip To greet the passing thaw. Then rudely dashed from eager lip The cup of joy would be, And fingers numbed, and chattering jaw, Owned unexpelled the winter's flaw, And on the steps the goodmen slip, And shout ...
— Punch, Or The London Charivari, Vol. 100., Jan. 24, 1891. • Various
... sovereign Seer of time, But Thee, O poets' Poet, Wisdom's Tongue, But Thee, O man's best Man, O love's best Love, O perfect life in perfect labor writ, O all men's Comrade, Servant, King, or Priest, — What IF or YET, what mole, what flaw, what lapse, What least defect or shadow of defect, What rumor, tattled by an enemy, Of inference loose, what lack of grace Even in torture's grasp, or sleep's, or death's — Oh, what amiss may I forgive in Thee, Jesus, good Paragon, Thou Crystal Christ?"*2* How tenderly Lanier ...
— Select Poems of Sidney Lanier • Sidney Lanier
... disappearance—for his body had never been found—she had been received into the governor's house out of pity and charity—she, a Melchite! The interpreter had little to say in her favor, by reason of her sect; and though he could find no flaw in her beauty, he insisted on it that she was proud and ungracious, and incapable of winning any man's love; only the child, little Mary—she, to be sure, was very fond of her. It was no secret that even her uncle's wife, worthy Neforis, did not care for her haughty niece and only suffered ...
— Uarda • Georg Ebers
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