|
|
|
More "Impeccable" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... last thing Hetty would have forbidden her to tell, yet just the last thing Hetty would have told, had she been pleading for Molly. For Hetty had long since gauged her mother and knew that, while her instinct for her sons' interests was well-nigh impeccable, on any question that concerned her daughters she would blunder ...
— Hetty Wesley • Sir Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch
... Historical Recitals, refused to accept him as an interpreter. His touch was too rich and full, his tone too big. Chopin did not care for Liszt's reading of his music, though he trembled when he heard him thunder in the Eroica Polonaise. I doubt if even Karl Tausig, impeccable artist, unapproachable Chopin player, would have pleased the composer. Chopin played as his moods prompted, and his playing was the despair and delight of his hearers. Rubinstein did all sorts of wonderful things with the coda of the Barcarolle—such ...
— Chopin: The Man and His Music • James Huneker
... marble "desk" stood several impeccable clerks, and to one of these I addressed myself, giving our names and mentioning the fact that we had telegraphed for rooms. I am not sure that this young man wore a braided cutaway and a white carnation; I only know ...
— American Adventures - A Second Trip 'Abroad at home' • Julian Street
... respectable pseudo-spinsters, the Sister Arts, supposedly cozily immune in their polygamous chastity (for every suitor for favor is popularly expected to be wedded to his particular art)—I repeat, it is very dreadful to suggest that these impeccable old ladies are in danger of being talked ...
— Iole • Robert W. Chambers
... primitive Umbrian Masters. They are all alike; they are awkwardly posed; everything in and around them sins against the most elementary rules of art, and yet their memory pursues you, and when you have long forgotten the works of impeccable modern artists you recall without effort these creations of those unknown painters; for love calls for love, and these vapid personages have very true and pure hearts, a more than human love shines forth from their whole being, they speak to ...
— Life of St. Francis of Assisi • Paul Sabatier
... by no means impeccable has long been recognized. Already George Smith had written "The contempt of chronology in the Assyrian records is well shown by the fact that in Cylinder A, the account of the revolt of Psammitichus is given under the third expedition, while the ...
— Assyrian Historiography • Albert Ten Eyck Olmstead
... amateur journalism and the association which best represents it. To some minds the term conveys an idea of crudity and immaturity, yet the United can boast of members and publications whose polish and scholarship are well-nigh impeccable. In considering the adjective "amateur" as applied to the press association, we must adhere to the more basic interpretation, regarding the word as indicating the non-mercenary nature of the membership. Our amateurs ...
— Writings in the United Amateur, 1915-1922 • Howard Phillips Lovecraft
... principles, and made a point of forgiving her enemies—slowly! As a preliminary process she demanded an abject apology, and a period of waiting, during which the culprit was expected to be devoured by remorse and anxiety. Then, bending from an impeccable height, she vouchsafed a mitigated pardon. "I forgive you, but I can never forget!" Some such absolution she would have been ready to bestow upon a tearful and dejected Cornelia, but the pink and white complaisance of the uplifted face steeled her ...
— Flaming June • Mrs. George de Horne Vaizey
... police of Europe and America even now scouring the surface of the globe for him? That brother, that dare-devil gentleman of the painter-cousin's letter, was a fitting accomplice for him, the quiet, unobtrusive, impeccable "seaman." He had a number, what was it? Three-nine-(fool not to write it down!) three-nine-something. Was that his number during his last imprisonment? Had he spoken in terrific hyperbole when he admitted that no doubt it was "a picturesque life"? Good God! How ...
— Aliens • William McFee
... said, "it's so unlike him. His taste for furniture's impeccable. The old house was perfect. So, in its ...
— The Belfry • May Sinclair
... world only too readily condones in many a famous man less tempted than Josselin was inevitably bound to be through life. Men of the Josselin type (there are not many—he stands pretty much alone) can scarcely be expected to journey from adolescence to middle age with that impeccable decorum which I—and no doubt many of my masculine readers—have found it so easy to achieve, and find it now so pleasant to remember and get credit for. Let us think of The Footprints of Aurora, or Etoiles mortes, or Dejanire et Dalila, or even Les Trepassees ...
— The Martian • George Du Maurier
... not in our room, and she stayed out all night, greatly to her owner's alarm and distress. Her habits were so regular, her deportment was always so impeccable that the circumstance assumed the proportions of an Event by breakfast time. My mother was anxious, Mary 'Liza sorrowful, and my father shook his head more gravely than the occasion seemed ...
— When Grandmamma Was New - The Story of a Virginia Childhood • Marion Harland
... side, he was a typical reformer, a man of impeccable private character, solitary, a little austere. He had never married; he had never sought the company of women, and in fact he knew nothing about them. Women had had no more bearing on his ...
— Angel Island • Inez Haynes Gillmore
... consecrated to the enormous event he arose nervously at six o'clock dressed himself, adjusted an impeccable stock, and hurried forth through the streets of Baltimore to the hospital, to determine whether the darkness of the night had borne in new life ...
— Tales of the Jazz Age • F. Scott Fitzgerald
... church. Some of these new characteristics may be of the nature of defects, but they also mean that he is more of a man than he was in his heathen days. And as regards honesty and general trustworthiness, although every Indian Christian is not altogether impeccable, he is on a completely different plane to his heathen comrade. It is also an unspeakable relief, to anyone whose Christianity is something more than form, to have Christian ...
— India and the Indians • Edward F. Elwin
... pavilions, and on the broad tracts of their hunting preserves. It is always the same people with whom we have to do: imperious counts who wish to be admired and to enjoy themselves, and whose life consists of hunting, gaming, adultery, duelling, and ultimate return to impeccable correctness in their peaceful homes. In this world, "hung with fine white curtains," there are women with the fine pallor of the old families, they also full of longing for freshly pulsating life. When, however, the yearned-for ...
— The German Classics of the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries - Masterpieces of German Literature Vol. 19 • Various
... a proof of inability to express. Great writers have often misspelled; and the letters which some of our capable business men write when the stenographer fails to come back after lunch are by no means impeccable. Other accusations refer to a childish vagueness of expression—due to the fact that the American undergraduate is often a child intellectually rather than to any defects in composition per se. But it is a waste of time to deny that he writes, if not badly, at least not ...
— College Teaching - Studies in Methods of Teaching in the College • Paul Klapper
... contrary, a lady of quiet reserve, composed of manner, authoritative of speech, not lacking in humour, of impeccable taste in dress, and to all appearances not a day older than forty-five, despite hair like snow that framed a face of rich but ...
— Nobody • Louis Joseph Vance
... immaculate vesture, of impeccable manners, of undeniable culture, of instinctive sympathy with the great world where great things are done, of unerring tact, of mythological beauty and charm, of boundless ambition, of resistless energy, of incalculable promise, in outer semblance and ...
— The Fortunate Youth • William J. Locke
... literary fashion or copied some brand-new aesthetic, above all conserving his own distinct, singular personality ... is but to repeat what has been said many times already. All these judgments are confirmed by his latest book, wherein may be noted the same impeccable correctness of language, the same firm grasp upon form, the same abundancy, force and originality of thought that make of him the only thinker among our writers of fiction, the ...
— Brazilian Tales • Joaquim Maria Machado de Assis
... criticism is, fortunately, a sort of safeguard. The French writer Buffon said: "Bien crire, c'est tout; car bien crire c'est bien sentir, bien penser, et bien dire." ... Let the artist then, by all means, make his work impeccable, clothe his ideas, feelings, visions, in just such garments as can withstand the winds of criticism. He himself must be his cruellest critic. Before cutting his cloth let him very carefully determine the precise thickness, shape, and colour ...
— Another Sheaf • John Galsworthy
... far and because she is a foreigner, as he reminds her, she may be mistaken in her blame of him. Yet foreigners, strangers, will in the ultimate issue be the judges of this matter, and shall they find Aristophanes any more impeccable than she does? (She now begins to put forth the rosy strength!) What is it that he has done? He did not invent comedy! Has he improved upon it? No, she declares. One of his aims is to discredit war. That was an aim of Euripides ...
— Browning's Heroines • Ethel Colburn Mayne
... speech during the hour of her stay amounted to a dozen or so drawling sentences. With no hint of condescension or superciliousness, she still managed to arouse in Stella a mild degree of resentment. She wore an impeccable pongee silk, simple and costly, and her hands had evidently never known the roughening of work. In one way and another Miss Benton straightway conceived an active dislike for Linda Abbey. As her reception of Paul's sister was not conducive to ...
— Big Timber - A Story of the Northwest • Bertrand W. Sinclair
... understood to exist still in manuscript], but found that too stiff and bald a medium for a satire on the social crudity of Norway. In writing satire, it is all-important that the form should be adequate, and at this time Ibsen had not reached the impeccable perfection of his later colloquial prose. He started Love's Comedy, therefore, anew, and he wrote it as a pamphlet in rhyme. It is not certain that he had any very definite idea of the line which his attack should take. He was very poor, very sore, very uncomfortable, and he was easily ...
— Henrik Ibsen • Edmund Gosse
... Major Cartwright stop him, and with his hand on the Butterfly Man's arm, walk off with him. Major Cartwright had kept George Inglesby out of two coveted clubs, for all his wealth; he was stiff as the proverbial poker to Howard Hunter, for all that gentleman's impeccable connections; he met John Flint, not as through a glass darkly, but face ...
— Slippy McGee, Sometimes Known as the Butterfly Man • Marie Conway Oemler
... little intuition of the popular taste: She wouldn't be a bad heroine of Romance! He said it derisively of the Romantic. But the right worshipful heroine of Romance was the front-face female picture he had won for his walls. Poor Diana was the flecked heroine of Reality: not always the same; not impeccable; not an ignorant-innocent, nor a guileless: good under good leading; devoted to the death in a grave crisis; often wrestling with her terrestrial nature nobly; and a growing soul; but not one whose purity was carved in marble for the assurance to an Englishman that his possession of the ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... with a sneer. "Rags rather!" And then more quickly, "But that is not all, nor the half. Do you think Blondel, who is on the point, Blondel, who will and will not and on whom all must turn, Blondel the upright, the impeccable, the patriotic, without whom we can do nothing, and who, I tell you, hangs in the balance—do you think he likes it, blockhead? Or is the more inclined to trust his life with us when he sees us brawlers, toss-pots, common swillers? Do you think he on whom I am bringing ...
— The Long Night • Stanley Weyman
... inside, before a small hand mirror. Scissors and safety razor were for a while busy. The man who entered in impeccable clothes emerged fifteen minutes later—transformed. There appeared under the rising June crescent, a smooth-faced native, clad in stained store-clothes, with rough woolen socks showing at his brogan tops, and a battered felt hat drawn over his face. No ...
— The Call of the Cumberlands • Charles Neville Buck
... world lesson too terribly well. It would be only another case of man's pursuing, promising—what had they promised in the past? And after all, he thought recklessly, what did the private honor of his testifying yes or no amount to anyway? What moral conceit! To save his own impeccable soul by denying a woman the one consolation that would ...
— Old Crow • Alice Brown
... it is a curious fact that men are better pleased at being trusted by a clever woman who has had many adventures than when an angel of virtue places her good name under their protection: there is less irksome responsibility in playing confidant to Lady Jezebel than in being guardian to the impeccable Lucretia. ...
— The White Sister • F. Marion Crawford
... virtues with which you endow this excellent Florian. He is a delightful creature,—a good artist—unique in his own particular line,—but you think him something much greater than even artist or man—a sort of god, (though the gods themselves were not impeccable) only fit to be idealised. Now, I am not a believer in the gods,—but of course it is delightful to me to ...
— The Master-Christian • Marie Corelli
... person, but not much, and certainly there was no excuse for ordering a personal examination, for he could not have hidden a tenth part of what we knew he had, even under the proverbial porous plaster. He was impeccable. Accordingly there was nothing for the inspector to do but to declare ...
— The Poisoned Pen • Arthur B. Reeve
... struggle for existence on a desert island, the family butler provides the brains and safety for an English family; the party is then rescued, and returns to the impeccable conventions of London. ...
— The Atlantic Book of Modern Plays • Various
... the more apt word, perhaps; you worry me, Nephew. Such impeccable virtue naturally suggests an early death—a harp—a halo! And yet you appear to enjoy robust health. Pray to what do you attribute your so great immunity from those pleasant weaknesses that are so frequently a concomitant of strength and youthful vigour—those charming follies, ...
— Peregrine's Progress • Jeffery Farnol
... unbelievable explanations were the fruit of Meilhan's efforts to cover the fact that the annuity was the price paid him by the Widow Lacoste for his part in the murder of her husband. It was to be remembered that M. Sabazan, whose testimony was impeccable, had seen Meilhan come from the house of Mme Lacoste, and that Meilhan had jingled money, saying he had just drawn the ...
— She Stands Accused • Victor MacClure
... German agents, and Captain Rust failed to discover a siren who appeared to be French and yet was not French, and who aroused any plausible suspicion that she dwelt in the central web of German intrigue. Madame began to think that for once the impeccable Dawson had despatched her upon a wild goose chase, and Rust became convinced that Froissart's vivid longing to score off the detested Dawson had misled him in the selection of the means to bring about this much-desired consummation. They told me little of these wanderings, but when I asked for ...
— The Lost Naval Papers • Bennet Copplestone
... find an echo of it in the uniform type of his creatures, their monotonous grace, their prodigious invariability. He may very well have wanted to produce figures of a substantial, yet at the same time of an impeccable innocence; but we feel that he had taught himself how even beyond his own belief in them, and had arrived at a process that acted at last mechanically. I confess at the same time that, so interpreted, the painter affects me as ...
— Italian Hours • Henry James
... her errors were owing, and not to a weak or reproachable heart. As far as it is consistent with human frailty, and as far as she could be perfect, considering the people she had to deal with, and those with whom she was inseparably connected, she is perfect. To have been impeccable, must have left nothing for the Divine Grace and a purified state to do, and carried our idea of her from woman to angel. As such is she often esteemed by the man whose heart was so corrupt that he could hardly believe human ...
— Clarissa, Volume 1 (of 9) • Samuel Richardson
... Greeks and Romans, in all that concerned their moral life, were an extraordinarily solemn set of folks. The Athenians thought that the very gods must admire the rectitude of Phocion and Aristides; and those gentlemen themselves were apparently of much the same opinion. Cato's veracity was so impeccable that the extremest incredulity a Roman could express of anything was to say, 'I would not believe it even if Cato had told me.' Good was good, and bad was bad, for these people. Hypocrisy, which church-Christianity ...
— A Pluralistic Universe - Hibbert Lectures at Manchester College on the - Present Situation in Philosophy • William James
... perchance you would gaze upon those whose array's Of impeccable texture and cut, It is futile to go to Pall Mall or the Row, Now the haunt of the second-rate nut; Take a train (G.N.R.), for example, as far As Cleckheaton or Cleethorpes-on-Sea, Where each male that you meet, from his head to his feet, Follows ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Volume 159, October 13, 1920 • Various
... (superiority) 33. V. be perfect &c. adj.; transcend &c. (be supreme) 33. bring to perfection, perfect, ripen, mature; complete &,,c. 729; put in trim &c. (prepare) 673; maturate. Adj. perfect, faultless; indefective[obs3], indeficient[obs3], indefectible; immaculate, spotless, impeccable; free from imperfection &c. 651; unblemished, uninjured &c. 659; sound, sound as a roach; in perfect condition; scathless[obs3], intact, harmless; seaworthy &c. (safe) 644; right as a trivet; in seipso totus teres atque rotundus [Lat][Horace]; ...
— Roget's Thesaurus
... Ireland with the long eyelashes. She was always inventing new divinities. But even this change of plan, this more feminine line of politics failed to reconcile the strict and the stern, the Queen Charlotte-ish elderly ladies, and the impeccable matrons, to Lady Kirkbank and her sea. The girls who were launched by Lady Kirkbank never took high rank in society. When they made good marriages it was generally to be observed that they dropped Lady Kirkbank soon afterwards. It was not their fault, these ingrates ...
— Phantom Fortune, A Novel • M. E. Braddon
... most correctly, on the edge of a chair, and responded monosyllabically to Judith's questions. Her demeanour could not have been more impeccable had she been trained in a French convent. Just before we arrived, she had been laughing immoderately because I had ordered her to spit out a mass of horrible sweetmeat which she had found it impossible to masticate, and she had challenged me to ...
— The Morals of Marcus Ordeyne • William J. Locke
... Slavery is always the same, whether in a Roman villa or on a Barbarian farm. The man, like the ox and the ass, is a part of the live-stock; a price is set upon his head; he is a tool without a conscience, a chattel without personality, an impeccable, irresponsible being, who has neither rights ...
— What is Property? - An Inquiry into the Principle of Right and of Government • P. J. Proudhon
... complaisant fair; there was a 'cabinet particulier' in a certain San Francisco restaurant which had listened to their various vanities and professions of undying faith; he might have recalled certain festal rendezvous with a widow whose piety and impeccable reputation made it a moral duty for her to come to him only in disguise; it was but a few days ago that he had been let privately into the palatial mansion of a high official for a midnight supper with a foolish wife. It was not strange, therefore, that ...
— A Protegee of Jack Hamlin's and Other Stories • Bret Harte
... Pope may do what he will with the women of Italy, and Monseigneur of Orleans may deal stern justice out to the women of France; Continental immorality is in the nature of things; but there is something else that is in the nature of things too, and before the impeccable majesty of British womanhood every critic must ...
— Modern Women and What is Said of Them - A Reprint of A Series of Articles in the Saturday Review (1868) • Anonymous
... duty rather than love may have done well, but she has chosen the easier way and perhaps has evaded the probation of life; the man who chooses passion rather than duty has slipped and stumbled, but his was the harder course and perhaps the better. Which of the two was sinner? which was saint? To be impeccable may be the most damning of offences. In St Martin's Summer the eerie presence of ghosts of dead loves, haunting a love that has grown upon the graves of the past, is a check upon passion, which by a sudden turn at the close triumphs in a victory that is defeat. Fears and Scruples ...
— Robert Browning • Edward Dowden
... tradition impeccable in the political ideas, the literary ideals, the social customs it has given us. We must admit a rampant individualism in our political practices which is in the very best Anglo-American tradition, ...
— Definitions • Henry Seidel Canby
... Cooper's novels for attack. Every grammar school teacher is ready to point out that his style is often prolix and his sentences are sometimes ungrammatical. Amateurs even criticize Cooper's seamanship, although it seemed impeccable to Admiral Mahan. No doubt one must admit the "helplessness, propriety, and incapacity" of most of Cooper's women, and the dreadfulness of his bores, particularly the Scotchmen, the doctors, and the naturalists. Like Sir Walter, Cooper seems to have taken but ...
— The American Spirit in Literature, - A Chronicle of Great Interpreters, Volume 34 in The - Chronicles Of America Series • Bliss Perry
... the effort needed to come to a decision and choose. What slothful cowardice is here! All whitewashed over with a comfortable faith in the goodness of things, which will, we think, settle themselves. And we continue to look on, and glorify the impeccable course of Destiny, paying ...
— Clerambault - The Story Of An Independent Spirit During The War • Rolland, Romain
... ready to believe that Bob, being attacked by an overwhelming force, suddenly bethought him of an engagement, and made a swift run for safety. The impeccable man who has never done a cowardly thing, nor a mean thing, is no kinsman of mine! The saintly hero who has not had his heels run away with his head, and sought safety in a friendly pig-pen—aye! and filled his belly with the husks that the ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great, Volume 7 - Little Journeys to the Homes of Eminent Orators • Elbert Hubbard
... the sobriquet which Lord Francis had invented to conceal—or to display—his courteous disdain of the ideals represented by Mrs. Sardis, that pillar long established, that stately dowager, that impeccable doyenne of serious English fiction. Mrs. Sardis had captured two continents. Her novels, dealing with all the profound problems of the age, were read by philosophers and politicians, and one of them had reached a circulation of a quarter of a million copies. Her dignified and ...
— Sacred And Profane Love • E. Arnold Bennett
... hand over his face to conceal a smile, but Leary seemed sincerely grieved by Archie's conduct and remarked dolefully that there must be something wrong with the money. The Governor hastily vouched for its impeccable quality and excused Archie as a person hardly second to himself ...
— Blacksheep! Blacksheep! • Meredith Nicholson
... solicitor to represent me. In the end I should be fined for furious driving—at the rate, when the accident happened, of a mile an hour—and probably have to pay a heavy compensation to the wilful and uninjured victim of McKeogh's impeccable driving. And all the time, while waiting for injustice to take its course, I should be the guest of a hostile population. I grew angry. The crowd grew angrier. The gendarmes approached with an air of majesty and fate. But just before ...
— The Joyous Adventures of Aristide Pujol • William J. Locke
... felt myself being drawn into a fog-filled labyrinth of intrigue in which already groping were most of the people I knew. What with the mysterious relations between Betty and Boyce and Gedge, what with young Dacre's full exoneration of Boyce, what with young Randall's split with Gedge and his impeccable attitude towards Phyllis, things were complicated enough; Sir Anthony's revelations regarding poor Althea and his dark surmises concerning Randall complicated them still more; and now comes Mrs. Holmes to tell me of ...
— The Red Planet • William J. Locke
... I have wandered from "Sordello," my dear Mainwaring, but when a man turns to his books, his thoughts, like those of a boy, "are long, long thoughts." I have not written on Longfellow's sonnets, for even you, impeccable sonneteer, admit that you admire them as much ...
— Letters on Literature • Andrew Lang
... not take this well-known gaze with meekness. She was a small person, thin as a lath, with no attempt at complexion, and a way of doing her hair which alone would have proved impeccable virtue in the face of incriminating circumstantial evidence. She had neat little features, and a neat little figure, though "provincial" was written over her in conspicuous letters; and the gray eyes which she fastened on Miss Dene looked almost ill with gloomy ...
— The Port of Adventure • Charles Norris Williamson and Alice Muriel Williamson
... height, hung over the narrow and, during the winter months, not a little dusky channel, with endless movement and interest in the vivid exhibition it supplied. What faced us was a series of subjects, with the baker, at the corner, for the first—the impeccable dispenser of the so softly-crusty crescent-rolls that we woke up each morning to hunger for afresh, with our weak cafe-au-lait, as for the one form of "European" breakfast-bread fit to be named even with the feeblest of our American forms. Then came the small cremerie, ...
— A Small Boy and Others • Henry James
... stream of social influence is turned loose on the child; and if the attention to him is incessant and wise, and the copies he has are good and stimulating, he is molded nearer to the heart's desire. Sometimes he escapes, and becomes a criminal, tramp, sport, or artist; and even if made into an impeccable and model citizen, he periodically breaks away from the network of social ...
— Sex and Society • William I. Thomas
... sea, edge to edge, with a perfect and unmarked closeness, in one levelled floor half brown, half blue under the enormous dome of the sky. Corresponding in their insignificance to the islets of the sea, two small clumps of trees, one on each side of the only fault in the impeccable joint, marked the mouth of the river Meinam we had just left on the first preparatory stage of our homeward journey; and, far back on the inland level, a larger and loftier mass, the grove surrounding the great Paknam pagoda, was the only thing on which the eye could rest from ...
— 'Twixt Land & Sea • Joseph Conrad
... stew, attacked and gave up a chunk of hard boiled potato, and lighted a cheap Virginia cigarette. He glanced out of the dirty window. Before it, making inquiries of a big, leisurely policeman, was a slim, exquisite girl of twenty, rosy-cheeked, smart of hat, impeccable of gloves, with fluffy white furs beneath her chin, which cuddled into the furs with a hint of a life bright and spacious. She laughed as she talked to the policeman, she shrugged her shoulders with the exhilaration of ...
— The Trail of the Hawk - A Comedy of the Seriousness of Life • Sinclair Lewis
... elevation to this unique pinnacle of power was at once an advantage and a disadvantage to us. It was an advantage to us in that it made our attack more dramatic. One supposed to be impeccable was more vulnerable. It was a disadvantage to have to overcome this universal trust and world-wide popularity. But this conflict of wits and brains against power only enhanced ...
— Jailed for Freedom • Doris Stevens
... career Adam Patch had married an anemic lady of thirty, Alicia Withers, who brought him one hundred thousand dollars and an impeccable entre into the banking circles of New York. Immediately and rather spunkily she had borne him a son and, as if completely devitalized by the magnificence of this performance, she had thenceforth effaced herself within the shadowy dimensions of the ...
— The Beautiful and Damned • F. Scott Fitzgerald
... almost touched the artificial orchid that adorned her corsage. He was acutely sensitive of her presence, of the faint persistent odour of her individual perfume, of the beauty and grace of her strong, free-limbed body in its impeccable Paquin gown, of the sheen of her immaculate arms and shoulders and the rich warmth of her face with its alluring, shadowed eyes that seemed to mock him with light, fascinating malice, of the magnetism of her intense, ineluctable ...
— The Bandbox • Louis Joseph Vance
... debating with herself internally how a young lady of perfect manners and impeccable breeding, travelling without a chaperon, ought to behave under such trying circumstances, after having allowed herself to be drawn unawares into familiar conversation with a most attractive young artist, ...
— What's Bred In the Bone • Grant Allen
... first been heard in America (November 29, 1825). Save Mme. Patti we have heard no Zerlina comparable with Mme. Sembrich, and Mme. Nilsson's singing of the airs, "Ah, che mi dice mai," and "Mi tradi quell' alma ingrata" lingers in my memory as an impeccable exemplification of the true classic style. The performance suffered shipwreck, however, in the famous first finale, because of the untunefulness of the orchestra, and the incapacity of the enlisted stage bands. In "Mefistofele," on December 5th, Nilsson appeared as ...
— Chapters of Opera • Henry Edward Krehbiel
... of the flat bench and Dominic Iglesias at the other, with the two absurd and exquisite little dogs in between. And the lady chattered. Her voice was sweet and full, with plaintive tones and turns of laughter in it; and, though the vowel sounds were not wholly impeccable, having the tang in them common to the speech of the cockney bred, the aspirates happily remained inviolate. And Iglesias listened, still with a curious indifference, as, sitting in the body of the house, he might have listened to patter from ...
— The Far Horizon • Lucas Malet
... threatened to fire into the ranks; while the maiden of sour visage and uncertain years was saluted as "Ole Miss Vinegar" by a whole division of infantry. But this was the limit of the soldier's resentment. At the same time, when in the midst of plenty he was not impeccable. For highway robbery and housebreaking he had no inclination, but he was by no means above petty larceny. Pigs and poultry, fruit, corn, vegetables and fence-rails, he looked upon ...
— Stonewall Jackson And The American Civil War • G. F. R. Henderson
... the messengers of the congregation had offered him a pension of a thousand florins not to disturb its "established religion." Fullest freedom in philosophy, forsooth! How was that to be reconciled with impeccable deference to the ruling religion? A courtier like Descartes might start from the standpoint of absolute doubt and end in a pilgrimage to Our Lady of Loretto; but for himself, who held miracles impossible, and if possible irrelevant, there could be no such compromise with a creed ...
— Dreamers of the Ghetto • I. Zangwill
... No. That would never do. He could not trust himself with speech, but in writing he knew he was impeccable. ...
— The Divine Fire • May Sinclair
... so much worse than his bite, and who, having been a pup with the University, knows something of every Stanford "case" ever developed in the pleasant shade of his domain. After fifteen minutes of impeccable behavior, ...
— Stanford Stories - Tales of a Young University • Charles K. Field
... Nellie, impeccable to the last, accompanied him in the motor to Knype, the main-line station. The drive, superficially pleasant, was in reality very disconcerting to him. For nine days the household had talked in apparent cheerfulness ...
— The Regent • E. Arnold Bennett
... man, it is said, was necessarily liable to corruption. God could not communicate to him impeccability, which is an inalienable attribute of his divine perfection. But if God could not make man impeccable, why did he give himself the pains to make man, whose nature must necessarily be corrupted, and who must consequently offend God? On the other hand, if God himself could not make human nature impeccable, by ...
— Good Sense - 1772 • Paul Henri Thiry, Baron D'Holbach
... always calling forth steady tones. However, on the whole, her voice sounded amazingly fresh. Her high notes especially rang true and resonant as ever. Her middle voice showed wear. Her style remained impeccable, unrivalled.... She announced, following this concert, a series of four recitals in a small hall and actually appeared at one of them. This time I did not hear her, but I am told that her voice refused to respond to ...
— The Merry-Go-Round • Carl Van Vechten
... bad quarter of an hour. Lady with a hard luck story—he was not unused to the type—but Mrs. Martin Marteen! He could not very well dismiss her unheard, an acquaintance of years' standing, a friend of his sister's. His curiosity was aroused. What could be the matter with the impeccable Mrs. Marteen? Perhaps she had been speculating. She read ...
— Out of the Ashes • Ethel Watts Mumford
... sleek-headed and sturdily under-sized, with an air of sagacity and consciously shrewd eyes under a projecting brow, that it seemed like uttering one's complaint before a jury or some other representative body. She believed, too, that he was not one of the impeccable and happy to whom one dare not disclose one's need for pity, for she was sure that the clipped speech that slid through his half-opened mouth was a sign that secretly he was timid and ashamed. So she cried honestly, "I'm so dull that I'll die. You and Mr. James are awfully good to me, ...
— The Judge • Rebecca West
... were impeccable in their sense of form; indeed, he was very English in that matter: People must be just so; things smell properly; and affairs go on in the one right way. He could tolerate neither creatures in ragged clothes, nor children on their hands and knees, nor postmen, because, with their ...
— Forsyte Saga • John Galsworthy
... impatient innovator scoff at the English law on the subject of mustard, and demand why, in the nature of things, mustard should not be eaten with mutton. The answer is very simple; this law has been made by the English palate—which is impeccable. I maintain it is impeccable! Your educated Englishman is an infallible guide in all that relates to the table. "The man of superior intellect," said Tennyson—justifying his love of boiled beef and new potatoes—"knows ...
— The Private Papers of Henry Ryecroft • George Gissing
... horror of her eyes, and for an instant he had to grapple with the new temptation they lit up. Then he said, with an effort—"Don't blame him—he's impeccable. He helped me to get them published; but I lied to him too; I pretended they were written to another man... a ...
— The Touchstone • Edith Wharton
... horses and domestic animals of all sorts; of crimson-faced hosts and buxom ale-wives; of the most winsome and black-eyed milkmaids and the most devoted lovers and their lasses; of the most headlong and horn-blowing huntsmen—a land where Madam Blaize forgathers with the impeccable worthy who caused the death of the Mad Dog; where John Gilpin takes the Babes in the Wood en croupe; and the bewitchingest Queen of Hearts coquets the Great Panjandrum himself "with the little round button at top"—a land, in short, of the most kindly and light-hearted fancies, ...
— De Libris: Prose and Verse • Austin Dobson
... swiftness with which her family went to bed. Josephine was usually incorrigibly slow, and Sally May always needed reminding that the devotion bell would ring in two minutes' time. To-night clothes were neatly arranged ready for the morning, rooms were in impeccable order, hair was properly brushed, and there was no mad rush to be at one's own door when ...
— Judy of York Hill • Ethel Hume Patterson Bennett
... natural national traits—of which, I think, the architectonic spirit is one of the most conspicuous. Painting will again become creative, constructive, personally expressive. Its basis having been established as scientifically impeccable, its superstructure will exhibit the taste, the elegance, the imaginative freedom, exhibited within the limits of a cultivated sense of propriety, that are an integral part of ...
— French Art - Classic and Contemporary Painting and Sculpture • W. C. Brownell
... dare not question it. My reverence for her will not let me directly question it. But let me, in my turn, ask thee—Is not, may not her virtue be founded rather in pride than in principle? Whose daughter is she?—And is she not a daughter? If impeccable, how came she by her impeccability? The pride of setting an example to her sex has run away with her hitherto, and may have made her till now invincible. But is not that pride abated? What may not both men and women be brought to do in a mortified state? What mind is superior ...
— Clarissa, Volume 3 (of 9) • Samuel Richardson
... forgotten; the feeling was between these two. Strikingly contrasted they stood there: Carse, in rough blue denim trousers, faded work-shirt, open at the neck, old-fashioned rubber shoes and battered skipper's cap askew on his flaxen hair; Ku Sui, suavely impeccable in high-collared green silk blouse, full-length trousers of the same material, and red slippers, to match the wide sash which revealed the slender lines of his waist. A perfume hung about the man, the indescribable odor of tsin-tsin ...
— The Affair of the Brains • Anthony Gilmore
... compete with Parson Adams—none certainly which we regard with equal admiration. Allworthy, excellent compound of Lyttelton and Allen though he be, remains always a little stiff and cold in comparison with the "veined humanity" around him. We feel of him, as of another impeccable personage, that we "cannot breathe in that fine air, That pure severity of perfect light," and that we want the "warmth and colour" which we find in Adams. Allworthy is a type rather than a character—a fault which also seems to apply to that Molieresque ...
— Fielding - (English Men of Letters Series) • Austin Dobson
... Elizabethans, and refined under the Stuarts, was whittled away to common sense by the admirers of Addison and Steele. Swift and Johnson, Gibbon and Fielding, were apparitions of strength in an amiable, ineffective age. They emerged sudden from the impeccable greyness, to which they afforded an heroic contrast. So, while the highway drifted—drifted to a vulgar incompetence, the craft was illumined by many a flash of unexpected genius. The brilliant achievements of Jonathan ...
— A Book of Scoundrels • Charles Whibley
... sunshine. The shadows of leafy boughs lay still on the short grass. The coloured sunshades far off, passing between trees, resembled deliberate and brilliant butterflies moving without a flutter. Men smiling amiably, or else very grave, within the impeccable shelter of their black coats, stood by the side of women who, clustered in clear summer toilettes, recalled all the fabulous tales of enchanted gardens where animated flowers smile at bewitched knights. There was a sumptuous ...
— Tales of Unrest • Joseph Conrad
... and the tour de force. Regimental life is not unlike that of a large family; it has the same sort of claims, intimacies, and quarrels, the same sort of jealousies within, combined with solidarity against the outsider. Perceiving this quickly, Drusilla proceeded to disarm criticism by being impeccable in dress and negatively amiable in conduct. "With my temperament," she said to herself, "I can afford to wait." Following her husband to Barbados, the Cape, and India, she had just succeeded in passing ...
— The Street Called Straight • Basil King
... constitution, was regarded as incapable of committing wrong; whereas, in the other, he was no less constitutionally regarded as equally peccable with any of his subjects. A peccable monarch may forfeit his throne; an impeccable one can only abdicate it. The argument must of course depend on the soundness of Baillie's statement. Was the doctrine that the king can do no wrong a Scottish doctrine at the time of the Revolution, ...
— Leading Articles on Various Subjects • Hugh Miller
... speaking through Falstaff's mouth. Yet to criticize Falstaff is difficult, and if easy, it would still be an offence to those capable of gratitude. I would as soon find fault with Ariel's most exquisite lyric, or the impeccable loveliness of the "Dove Sono," as weigh the rich words of the Lord of Comedy in small balances of reason. But such considerations must not divert me from my purpose; I have undertaken to discover the very soul of Shakespeare, ...
— The Man Shakespeare • Frank Harris
... middle-aged but not too middle-aged, not overly handsome, but not overly otherwise; an excellent disciplinarian, of a good family, and with impeccable references. ...
— The Purple Heights • Marie Conway Oemler
... the young squaw inquired calmly, and pointed to William. Casey jumped. Any man would, hearing that impeccable sentence issue from the lips of a squaw with a blanket ...
— Casey Ryan • B. M. Bower
... taste. Some of the more formal sorts of invitations—as to weddings—have become rather fixed, and the set wordings are carried through regardless of the means at hand for proper presentation. For instance, one often sees a wedding invitation in impeccable form but badly printed on cheap paper. It would be far better, if it is impossible to get good engraving or if first-class work proves to be too expensive, to buy good white notepaper and write the invitations. A typewriter is, of course, out of the ...
— How to Write Letters (Formerly The Book of Letters) - A Complete Guide to Correct Business and Personal Correspondence • Mary Owens Crowther
... Papa was not impeccable—far from it. I am—which makes all the difference. I have here a letter giving KROGSTAD the sack. One of the conveniences of living close to the Bank is, that I can use the housemaids as Bank-messengers. (Goes to door and calls.) ELLEN! (Enter parlourmaid.) Take that letter—there ...
— Punch, Or The London Charivari, Vol. 100, April 11, 1891 • Various
... I asked, as he entered. He tried to look encouraging, without success. I noticed that he looked tired and dusty, and, although he was ordinarily impeccable in his appearance, it was clear that he was at least two days from ...
— The Circular Staircase • Mary Roberts Rinehart
... only a part of it. What's really the matter with Bishen Singh is class-hatred, which, unfortunately, is even more intense and more widely spread. That's one of the little drawbacks of caste, which some of your recent English writers find an impeccable system." ...
— The Works of Rudyard Kipling One Volume Edition • Rudyard Kipling
... should surely not have run it off the rails. The royalist ought to seek to prove that Charles was a fool and a knave, to account for the collapse of royalty; and the case against royalty is all the stronger, if you could show that Charles, in spite of impeccable virtue, was forced by his position to end on the scaffold. Choose between him and the system which he applied. So Catholics and conservatives are never tired of denouncing Henry VIII. and the French revolutionists. So far as I can guess (I know very little ...
— Social Rights and Duties, Volume I (of 2) - Addresses to Ethical Societies • Sir Leslie Stephen
... application of the historical method of inquiry into theological doctrines.'[20] Here, perhaps, we have examples. In its highest aspect that 'simplest theology' of Australia is free from the faults of popular theology in Greece. The God discourages sin, though, in myth, he is far from impeccable. He is almost too revered to be named (except in mythology) and is not to be represented by idols. He is not moved by sacrifice; he has not the chance; like Death in Greece, 'he only, of all Gods, loves not gifts.' Thus the status of theology does not correspond to ...
— The Making of Religion • Andrew Lang
... and without a heart, the incarnation of cold and selfish virtue admiring itself and most patently self-satisfied. He knew it too well, he had seen it in reality, the type of German Pharisee, foppish, impeccable, and hard, bowing down before its own image, the divinity to which it has no scruple about sacrificing others. The Flying Dutchman overwhelmed him with its massive sentimentality and its gloomy boredom. The loves of the barbarous decadents ...
— Jean-Christophe, Vol. I • Romain Rolland
... to you the care of their money," he went on, solemnly. "It was a high, a sacred trust. You should have guarded the door of the treasury even as the cherubim protected the Garden of Eden, and should have turned the flaming sword of impeccable honesty against every one who approached it improperly. Your position as the representative of a great community ...
— The Financier • Theodore Dreiser
... are persone gratissime at the Quirinale, and that her jewels are extremely fine. When he was named Senator two years ago the Press, especially the Press of the Right, saluted his nomination as strengthening the Senate by the accession to it of a person of impeccable virtue, of enlightened intellect, and of a character cast in antique moulds of noble simplicity and Spartan courage. You think, my brother, that this favourite of fortune is likely to favour your ...
— The Waters of Edera • Louise de la Rame, a.k.a. Ouida
... her as the poles; simply a paramount desire to translate the incomprehensible into sequence and consequence. Harmless old Gregor's disappearance and the advent of John Two-Hawks—the absurdity of that name!—with his impeccable English accent, his Latin gestures, and his black eye, convinced her that it was political; an electrical cross current out of that broken world over there. Moribund perspectives. What did that signify save that Johnny Two-Hawks had fought somewhere that day for his life? Had Gregor been spirited ...
— The Drums Of Jeopardy • Harold MacGrath
... relish for its banal, vulgar mustache, its prosaic, mercantile whisker, surmounting the last new thing in shirt-collars. Dear to him is the physiognomy of clean-shaven periods, when cheek and lip and chin, abounding in line and surface, had the air of soliciting the pencil. Impeccable as he is in drawing, he likes a whole face, with reason, and likes a whole figure; the latter not to the exclusion of clothes, in which he delights, but as the clothes of our great-grandfathers helped it to be seen. No one has ever understood breeches ...
— Picture and Text - 1893 • Henry James
... sure the trade had found an answer to the riddle; and the answer was that, on close inspection, Neave had found the collection less impeccable than he had supposed. It was a preposterous answer—but then there was no other. Neave, by this time, was pretty generally recognized as having the subtlest flair of any collector in Europe, and if he didn't choose to keep the Daunt collection it could ...
— Tales Of Men And Ghosts • Edith Wharton
... image. But we must remember with Heine that Aristophanes is the God of this ironic earth, and that all argument is apparently vitiated from the start by the simple fact that Wagner and a rooster are given an analogous method of making love. And therefore it seems impeccable logic to say that all that is most unlike the rooster is the most spiritual part of love. All will agree on that, schisms only arise when one tries to decide what does go farthest from the bird's automatic mechanism. Certainly not a Dante-Beatrice affair which is only the negation of ...
— Lysistrata • Aristophanes
... naught but a monotonous array of pleasing gewgaws, to his eye differing one from another only in size. He was, however, actuated by a high moral purpose, which uplifted him and enabled him to listen with dignity to the technical eulogies given by the experts. Eve of course behaved with impeccable correctness, hiding the existence of the wall from everybody except Mr. Prohack, but forcing Mr. Prohack to behold the ...
— Mr. Prohack • E. Arnold Bennett
... embraced ever the image of Madeleine; what he had lost and what he had never possessed. And, again, he tormented himself with imaginings of her own suffering and despair; alternated with visions of Madeleine enthroned, secure, impeccable, admired, envied—and with other men in love with her! Some depth of insight convinced him that she loved him immortally, but he knew her need for mental companionship, and the thought that she might find it, however ...
— Sleeping Fires • Gertrude Atherton
... other as the illegitimate and negative, exercise of one and the same faculty. He thus announces, in opposition to Kant, the fundamental doctrine of the Conditioned, as "the distinction between intelligence within its legitimate sphere of operation, impeccable, and intelligence beyond that sphere, affording (by abuse) the occasions of error."[AB] Hamilton, like Kant, maintained that all our cognitions are compounded of two elements, one contributed by the object known, and the other by the mind knowing. But the very conception ...
— The Philosophy of the Conditioned • H. L. Mansel
... entire union with the Divine essence, is held by Schamyl alone. In virtue of this elevation and spiritual endowment, the Imam, as an immediate organ of the Supreme Will, is himself the source of all law to his followers, unerring, impeccable; to question or disobey his behests is a sin against religion, as well as a political crime. It may be seen what advantage this system must have given to Schamyl in his conflict with the Russians. The doctrine of the indifference of ...
— The International Weekly Miscellany, Volume I. No. 9. - Of Literature, Art, and Science, August 26, 1850 • Various
... who did not too openly boast of being a bigamist and who limited his homicidical inclinations to half a dozen foreigners when on shore leave, was considered a highly respectable character. Perhaps this is not at all true and I for one can hardly believe it when I look at the virtuous and impeccable exteriors of the few remaining representatives with whom I have come in contact. However, any one has my permission to ask them if it is true or not, should they care to find out for themselves. I refuse to be held responsible though. I think I shall ...
— Biltmore Oswald - The Diary of a Hapless Recruit • J. Thorne Smith, Jr.
... tradition to this or that national expression, the Ninety-ninth Regiment, to a flare of music that made the heart leap out against its walls, turned into a scene thus swept clean for it, a wave of olive drab, impeccable row after impeccable row of scissors-like legs advancing. Recruits, raw if you will, but already caparisoned, sniffing and scenting, as it were, for the great primordial mire ...
— Americans All - Stories of American Life of To-Day • Various
... is to be interpreted Soul. Sometime the intellectuall facultie of the soul. Sometimes Intellect is an absolute essence shining into the soul: whose nature is this. A substance purely immateriall, impeccable, actually omniform, or comprehending all things at once, which the soul doth also being perfectly joyned with the Intellect. Echomen oun kai ta eide dichos, en men psuchei hoion men aneiligmena kai hoion kechorismena, en de toi noi homou ta panta. Plot. Ennead. 1. lib. 1. ...
— Democritus Platonissans • Henry More
... pueblo of Tesuque which has just finished its series of Christmas dances—a four-day festival celebrating with all but impeccable mastery the various identities which have meant so much to them both physically and spiritually—that I would here cite as an example. It is well known that once gesture is organized, it requires but a handful of people to represent ...
— Adventures in the Arts - Informal Chapters on Painters, Vaudeville, and Poets • Marsden Hartley
... this Meindert Hobbema? Where was he born? Where did he live? What was his life? Alas, we know very little concerning this impeccable master, one of the greatest glories of Dutch painting. The principal historians of the Netherland school are ignorant of him or pass him by in silence. Houbraken, Descamps, and d'Argenville are dumb regarding him. Those who, by chance, treat of him, commit ...
— Great Pictures, As Seen and Described by Famous Writers • Esther Singleton
... when the mirror on the dressing-table assured him that he was at length point-device in the habit and apparel of a gentleman of elegant nocturnal leisure. But if he approved the figure he cut, it was mainly because clothes interested him and he reckoned his own impeccable. Of their tenant he was feeling just then a bit less sure than he had half-an-hour since; his regard was louring and mistrustful. He was, in short, suffering reaction from the high spirits engendered by his cross-Channel exploits, his successful get-away, and the unusual circumstances ...
— The Lone Wolf - A Melodrama • Louis Joseph Vance
... his partisans were at least as resourceful as their opponents. The Cretan had never been able to bear contradiction. If his greatness had created him {45} many enemies, his pettiness had created him more. His tone of prophetic and impeccable omniscience was vexatious at all times, but particularly galling at this agitated period. It was now his constant cry that the situation called for the work of a statesman and not of an international lawyer or strategist. ...
— Greece and the Allies 1914-1922 • G. F. Abbott
... in the vastness of the opened horizon, in the different atmosphere that seemed to vibrate with the toil of life, with the energy of an impeccable world. This sky and this sea were open to me. The girl was right—there was a sign, a call in them—something to which I responded with every fibre of my being. I let my eyes roam through space, like a man released from bonds who stretches ...
— Lord Jim • Joseph Conrad
... strongest and most indomitable of female tyrants, 'twas small wonder a dull, ease-loving woman, feeling the burden of her royalty all too wearisome and heavy, should turn with almost pathetic insistence to a man young enough to be her son, attractive enough to be a favourite, high enough to be impeccable, and of such clear wit, strength of will and resource, and power over herself and others as seemed to set him apart from all the rest of those who gathered to clamour about her. In truth, my lord Duke's value to her Majesty was founded greatly upon that which had drawn his Grace of ...
— His Grace of Osmonde • Frances Hodgson Burnett
... old Sybaris which kindle the imagination so much as the spacious amplitude of the whole prospect. In England we think something of a view of ten miles. Conceive, here, a grandiose valley wider than from Dover to Calais, filled with an atmosphere of such impeccable clarity that there are moments when one thinks to see every stone and every bush on the mountains yonder, thirty miles distant. And the cloud-effects, towards sunset, are such as would inspire the brush of Turner or ...
— Old Calabria • Norman Douglas
... been a little swifter than the generality in reading signs; a little bolder in conception and execution. If you read the papers you will gather that each of us is, in private life, impeccable, and each of us is, in business, as ...
— Destiny • Charles Neville Buck
... this world are to be found always among the thoroughly-upright, meanly-impeccable members of any and every church. They are the Scribes and Pharisees who contribute most to the building of fine houses of worship; they give most to its causes. They are the "right hands" of all the preachers from their youth ...
— A Circuit Rider's Wife • Corra Harris
... weakness we have already noticed elsewhere, is the design of the leg and foot, the drawing of which is far from impeccable. That the execution in this respect is not equal to the supreme conception of the whole, is no valid reason for the belief that this "Judith" is only a copy of a lost original, a belief that could apparently only be held by those who have ...
— Giorgione • Herbert Cook
... Alda to be other than impeccable so amazed Cherry, that she could scarcely answer. 'O Mettle, I never knew what you and Felix must be. I have so often thought of a house divided against itself, one against two, and two against three. ...
— The Pillars of the House, V1 • Charlotte M. Yonge
... de facto no more than such "cunning casts in clay" a contention which will occupy us at a later stage; we merely state the commonplace that in making us free God Himself could not also {98} make us impeccable, insusceptible to temptation, immune ...
— Problems of Immanence - Studies Critical and Constructive • J. Warschauer
... now, I wouldn't exactly say so, your lordship. He knew how clothes should be worn, yes. But he couldn't pick out a woman's gown of his own accord. He could choose his own clothing with impeccable taste, but he'd not any real notion of how a woman's clothing should go, if you see what I mean. All he knew was how good clothing should be worn. But he knew nothing about design for ...
— The Eyes Have It • Gordon Randall Garrett
... manager was in the depths of a box and the poor actress in the glare of the footlights. But she passed, the poor performer—he could see how she always passed; her wig, her paint, her jewels, every mark of her expression impeccable, and her entrance accordingly greeted with the proper round of applause. Such impressions as we thus note for Densher come and go, it must be granted, in very much less time than notation demands; but we may none the less make the point that there was, still further, time ...
— The Wings of the Dove, Volume II • Henry James
... floral count, compute cowardly, pusillanimous tent, pavilion money, finance monetary, pecuniary trace, vestige face, countenance turn, revolve bottle, vial grease, lubricant oily, unctuous revive, resuscitate faultless, impeccable scourge, flagellate power, puissance barber, tonsorial bishop, episcopal carry, portable fruitful, prolific punish, punitive scar, cicatrix hostile, inimical choice, option cry, vociferate ease, facility peaceful, pacific ...
— The Century Vocabulary Builder • Creever & Bachelor
... in a state of abject subjection, Berry, whose heart was hard that day, but whose diplomacy was impeccable, discovered a thing of moment. There was to be a procession of strikers from two factories in Manitou, who would throw down their tools or leave their machines at a certain moment. Falling into line these strikers ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker
... her stern gaze with a smile; and in the midst of her resentment she was distinctly aware of the impeccable honesty of his judgment. The peculiar breeziness she had always thought of as "Western" sounded in his voice ...
— Life and Gabriella - The Story of a Woman's Courage • Ellen Glasgow
... circumstances, found himself received at this excellent man's home with a warmth of welcome which left no doubt in his own mind as to the unselfishness of his host. Even before the war Renwick and Constantine Koulas had met in secret, so that if trouble came no plan should mar the man's impeccable character in Austrian eyes. And Renwick would not have come to him now, had not his own need been great. But Herr Koulas, having heard the tale of his adventures and reassured as to the present danger of pursuit, gave willingly of his hospitality and counsel, and when he learned the ...
— The Secret Witness • George Gibbs
... let me help you?" Brother Copas suggested. "Upon my word, you may trust me. I am, as nearly as possible, impeccable with Greek accents, and may surely say so without vanity, since the gift is as useless as any other ...
— Brother Copas • Sir Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch
... I have been told that the Prussian officers were always vaguely uncomfortable in her presence. There was, perhaps, not enough humility in her clear eyes, and they worked her to the breaking point. Yet so impeccable and businesslike was her conduct that they could never convict her of any infringement of rules. Little did these pompous invaders suspect how this slender capable girl with the hazel eyes was spicing ...
— Where the Sabots Clatter Again • Katherine Shortall
... tiny slippers at the foot of the wardrobe there were Mrs. Boyer's substantial house shoes. But in some indefinable way the room had changed. About it hung an atmosphere of solid respectability, of impeccable purity that soothed Mrs. Boyer's ruffled virtue into peace. Is it any wonder that there is a theory to the effect that things take on the essential qualities of people who use them, and that we are haunted by things, not people? That when ...
— The Street of Seven Stars • Mary Roberts Rinehart
... insist upon electing and dismissing whom they pleased. Thus was inadvertently demonstrated the invincible security of democratic principles; the masses are always willing to agree that the best shall rule, but insist that they, the multitude, and not any Star Chamber, no matter how impeccable, shall decide who the best are. Herein alone is safety. The masses, of course, are not actuated by motives higher than those of the select few; but their impartiality cannot but be greater, because, assuming that each voter has in view his personal welfare, their ballots ...
— The History of the United States from 1492 to 1910, Volume 1 • Julian Hawthorne
... gain possession. The girl, at least, regarded him as firmly anchored to his Leonora. She had not the slightest inkling of any infidelities. He had always spoken to her of his wife in terms of reverence and deep affection. He had given her the idea that he regarded Leonora as absolutely impeccable and as absolutely satisfying. Their union had appeared to her to be one of those blessed things that are spoken of and contemplated with ...
— The Good Soldier • Ford Madox Ford
... was a tender-hearted and anxious mother, daughter, and sister, and an impeccable wife, if a somewhat monotonous one. At all events her husband never found fault with her in public or private. He had his reasons. To the friends of her youth and to all members of her own old set, ...
— The Sisters-In-Law • Gertrude Atherton
... anything foolish; you might compare these last to the much-admired statues which must come down at once from their pedestal if the frost chips off a nose or a finger. They are not permitted to be human; they are required to be for ever divine and for ever impeccable. So one glance exchanged between Mme. de Bargeton and Lucien outweighed twelve years of Zizine's connection with Francis in the social balance; and a squeeze of the hand drew down all the thunders of the Charente upon ...
— Lost Illusions • Honore De Balzac
... all the realm he cares for; good society has not a vote against him—he transacts its affairs, he knows its secrets—he yields its patronage. Ever requested to do a favour—no loan great enough to do him one. Incorruptible, yet versed to a fraction in each man's price; impeccable, yet confidant in each man's foibles; smooth as silk, hard as adamant; impossible to wound, vex, annoy him—but not insensible; thoroughly kind. Dear, dear Alban! nature never polished a finer gentleman out of a solider block of man!" Darrell's voice quivered a little as he completed ...
— What Will He Do With It, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... he is not invariably victorious, and he is thoroughly human. Spenser's Prince began the "blamelessness" which grew more trying still in Tennyson's King. (In the few remarks of this kind made here I am not, I need hardly say, "going back upon" my lifelong estimate of Tennyson as an almost impeccable poet. But an impeccable poet is not necessarily an impeccable plot- and character-monger either ...
— A History of the French Novel, Vol. 1 - From the Beginning to 1800 • George Saintsbury
... he has done so. It is not his fault, in the manner that he has explained it. Let the young man enjoy himself a little and see a little of life. We are only young once, and you laics must not be too severely impeccable, otherwise what would become of us granters of absolution. Furthermore, we must not be too old-fashioned. Our people here are getting out of the strictness of the old social distinctions. It may be so too in France. ...
— The False Chevalier - or, The Lifeguard of Marie Antoinette • William Douw Lighthall
... never suspected it to be other than a man. It was dressed in black; it had the very aspect of life. I could follow the creases in the black coat, the direction of the nap of the silk hat. How well by this time I knew the faultless black coat and that impeccable hat! Yet it seemed that I could not examine them too closely. I pierced them with the intensity of my fascinated glance. Yes, I pierced them, for, showing faintly through the coat, I could discern the outline ...
— The Haunters & The Haunted - Ghost Stories And Tales Of The Supernatural • Various
... reserve is necessary in my case, it seems to me that it also is necessary for the country as a whole. The attitude of the President has been impeccable. That of the whole American press and people should be ...
— The New York Times Current History of the European War, Vol. 1, January 9, 1915 - What Americans Say to Europe • Various
... genius enabled him to write an immortal masterpiece, not about the Cambridge hierarchy, but about illiterate tillers of the soil. The Elegy is the genius of synthesis; without submitting each man in the ground to a ruthless cross-examination, Gray managed to express in impeccable beauty of language the common thoughts and feelings that have ever animated the human soul. His poem will live as long as any book, ...
— The Advance of English Poetry in the Twentieth Century • William Lyon Phelps
... reputation the less on that account. The longer it is delayed and kept sacred from the vulgar gaze, the more it swells into imaginary consequence; the labour and care required for a work of this kind being immense;—and then there are no faults in an unexecuted translation. The only impeccable writers are those that never wrote. Another is an oracle on subjects of taste and classical erudition, because (he says at least) he reads Cicero once a year to keep up the purity of his Latinity. A third makes the indecency pass for the depth ...
— Table-Talk - Essays on Men and Manners • William Hazlitt
... almost feverishly turning its leaves and trying to extract from them, for my friend's benefit, some symptom of reassurance, some ground for felicitation. This rash challenge had consequences merely dreadful; the wretched volumes, imperturbable and impeccable, with their shyer secrets and their second line of defence, were like a beautiful woman more denuded or a great symphony on a new hearing. There was something quite sinister in the way they stood up to me. I couldn't however be dumb—that was to give the wrong tinge to my disappointment; so ...
— Embarrassments • Henry James
... selected Cooper's novels for attack. Every grammar school teacher is ready to point out that his style is often prolix and his sentences are sometimes ungrammatical. Amateurs even criticize Cooper's seamanship, although it seemed impeccable to Admiral Mahan. No doubt one must admit the "helplessness, propriety, and incapacity" of most of Cooper's women, and the dreadfulness of his bores, particularly the Scotchmen, the doctors, and the naturalists. Like Sir Walter, Cooper ...
— The American Spirit in Literature, - A Chronicle of Great Interpreters, Volume 34 in The - Chronicles Of America Series • Bliss Perry
... contradictory being in a sentient world than a man in love, Blount was not quite sure that it was what he wanted her to say. By times, to any lover worthy of the name, the chosen woman figures as a goddess, a tutelary divinity postulating for a mere earthly man all that is high and holy and inerrant; an impeccable standard by which he can measure his own baser desires and ambitions and be shrived of them. At other times the straitly human has its innings, and the longing is for a comrade, a companion, a second self buried, lost, submerged ...
— The Honorable Senator Sage-Brush • Francis Lynde
... choose between staying without honour and going quickly. He went. But even the bare facts concerning his protracted absence are less easily stated because his absence dragged on long after the period when he might, with impeccable ...
— The Best British Short Stories of 1922 • Various
... reproachable heart. As far as it is consistent with human frailty, and as far as she could be perfect, considering the people she had to deal with, and those with whom she was inseparably connected, she is perfect. To have been impeccable, must have left nothing for the Divine Grace and a purified state to do, and carried our idea of her from woman to angel. As such is she often esteemed by the man whose heart was so corrupt that he could hardly believe human nature capable of the ...
— Clarissa, Volume 1 (of 9) • Samuel Richardson
... prime minister of all the realm he cares for; good society has not a vote against him—he transacts its affairs, he knows its secrets—he yields its patronage. Ever requested to do a favour—no loan great enough to do him one. Incorruptible, yet versed to a fraction in each man's price; impeccable, yet confidant in each man's foibles; smooth as silk, hard as adamant; impossible to wound, vex, annoy him—but not insensible; thoroughly kind. Dear, dear Alban! nature never polished a finer gentleman out of a solider ...
— What Will He Do With It, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... important as its taste. Some of the more formal sorts of invitations—as to weddings—have become rather fixed, and the set wordings are carried through regardless of the means at hand for proper presentation. For instance, one often sees a wedding invitation in impeccable form but badly printed on cheap paper. It would be far better, if it is impossible to get good engraving or if first-class work proves to be too expensive, to buy good white notepaper and write the invitations. A typewriter is, of course, out of ...
— How to Write Letters (Formerly The Book of Letters) - A Complete Guide to Correct Business and Personal Correspondence • Mary Owens Crowther
... procedure regulated by the "Assises de Jerusalem" (1099), whose ordinances were received and recognized throughout Europe as a code of law and honour. For a general statement of conditions and effects we cannot do better than turn to the pages of the almost impeccable Gibbon. ...
— The Customs of Old England • F. J. Snell
... is no name for it! What do we know of the vagaries of the human mind? Three minds and one obsession!" he said with the utmost gentleness. "Three maiden ladies who have lived impeccable lives for far be it from me to say how many years; and now—this! Oh, Aunt ...
— Tish, The Chronicle of Her Escapades and Excursions • Mary Roberts Rinehart
... heroic effort, it would be found that the four institutions that have been attacked were more venerable and impeccable than ever, and that the question, instead ...
— Napoleon the Little • Victor Hugo
... to intellectuality and an ideal of refinement of the most negative description ... the Aunt Errant of Christendom."[80] There is always that blushful shyness, that timorous uncertainty, broken by sudden rages, sudden enunciations of impeccable doctrine, sudden runnings amuck. Formalism is the hall-mark of the national culture, and sins against the one are sins against the other. The American is school-mastered out of gusto, out of joy, out of innocence. He can never fathom William Blake's notion that ...
— A Book of Prefaces • H. L. Mencken
... all there is—you may find an echo of it in the uniform type of his creatures, their monotonous grace, their prodigious invariability. He may very well have wanted to produce figures of a substantial, yet at the same time of an impeccable innocence; but we feel that he had taught himself how even beyond his own belief in them, and had arrived at a process that acted at last mechanically. I confess at the same time that, so interpreted, ...
— Italian Hours • Henry James
... need not worry us. When the time comes for a safari, there shall also be clients, impeccable clients, asking for it ...
— Star Hunter • Andre Alice Norton
... Sean O'Donohue got out of the enforcedly stopped car. It had seemed that he could be no more incensed, but he was. Within ten feet of him a matronly black snake moved along the sidewalk with a manner of such assurance and such impeccable respectability that it would have seemed natural for her to ...
— Attention Saint Patrick • William Fitzgerald Jenkins
... retrospective judgement should depopulate the Pantheon of the few divinities that remained; more especially when I considered that Voltaire, notwithstanding his merits as an enemy to revelation, had been already accused of aristocracy, and even Rousseau himself might not be found impeccable. His Contrat Social might not, perhaps, in the eyes of a committee of philosophical Rhadmanthus's, atone for his occasional admiration of christianity: and thus some crime, either of church or state, disfranchise the whole race of immortals, and their fame ...
— A Residence in France During the Years 1792, 1793, 1794 and 1795, • An English Lady
... But thousands of them were muttering to one another and reading with envy the literature of woman's revolt in other lands. When one of their own sex rose, a woman of the highest intelligence and an impeccable style, who, although she signed herself Gisela Doering, was said to be a rebellious member of the Prussian aristocracy, their own vague protests slowly crystallized and they grew to look upon her as a leader, ...
— The White Morning • Gertrude Atherton
... by which the butler had passed. Stover's glance was riveted on it, trying to remember whether the American Constitution prohibited head masters from the brutal English practice of caning and birching; and,—listening to the lagging tick of the mantel clock, he solemnly vowed to lead that upright, impeccable life that would keep him from such ...
— The Varmint • Owen Johnson
... belonged, I believe there is enough of nobility in your class as a whole to considerably damp their resistance. Because you have silver mirrors and silver hairbrushes, it does not follow that you have not a conscience. I am no believer in the theory that to be a sans-culotte is to be morally impeccable, or that a man loses his soul because he possesses thirty pairs of trousers beautifully folded by a valet. I cherish the belief that your very refinement will turn—I have seen it in one or two fine minds visibly turning—against the social conditions that made it possible. All this space, all this ...
— New Worlds For Old - A Plain Account of Modern Socialism • Herbert George Wells
... Depth below depth! She could never seem to get to the bottom of this business. There was only one thing she could count on, and that was Clara's impeccable honor in living up to a bargain. Flora sealed that bargain now. She held out her fluttering slip of paper, ...
— The Coast of Chance • Esther Chamberlain
... is necessary in my case, it seems to me that it also is necessary for the country as a whole. The attitude of the President has been impeccable. That of the whole American press and people should ...
— The New York Times Current History of the European War, Vol. 1, January 9, 1915 - What Americans Say to Europe • Various
... over his face to conceal a smile, but Leary seemed sincerely grieved by Archie's conduct and remarked dolefully that there must be something wrong with the money. The Governor hastily vouched for its impeccable quality and excused Archie as a person hardly second ...
— Blacksheep! Blacksheep! • Meredith Nicholson
... the moment as in his purchased stall at the play; the watchful manager was in the depths of a box and the poor actress in the glare of the footlights. But she passed, the poor performer—he could see how she always passed; her wig, her paint, her jewels, every mark of her expression impeccable, and her entrance accordingly greeted with the proper round of applause. Such impressions as we thus note for Densher come and go, it must be granted, in very much less time than notation demands; but we may none the less make the point ...
— The Wings of the Dove, Volume II • Henry James
... Strikingly contrasted they stood there: Carse, in rough blue denim trousers, faded work-shirt, open at the neck, old-fashioned rubber shoes and battered skipper's cap askew on his flaxen hair; Ku Sui, suavely impeccable in high-collared green silk blouse, full-length trousers of the same material, and red slippers, to match the wide sash which revealed the slender lines of his waist. A perfume hung about the man, the indescribable odor of tsin-tsin ...
— The Affair of the Brains • Anthony Gilmore
... quickly, turning to the Council. "Gentlemen," he said, "he did not strike the first blow, nor did Cadet Corbett, nor Cadet Manning. And I will not insist that the three members of the Capella unit be asked the same question, since I concede that they are three impeccable gentlemen who could not strike the first blow in ...
— Sabotage in Space • Carey Rockwell
... and tastes too intellectual for mere vulgar debauchery." And as to the "alleged 'harems,'" the "Paphian girls," there were only one or two, says Moore, "among the ordinary menials." But, even so, the "wassailers" were not impeccable, and it is best to leave the story, fact or fable, ...
— The Works of Lord Byron, Volume 2 • George Gordon Byron
... or ever could have all the virtues with which you endow this excellent Florian. He is a delightful creature,—a good artist—unique in his own particular line,—but you think him something much greater than even artist or man—a sort of god, (though the gods themselves were not impeccable) only fit to be idealised. Now, I am not a believer in the gods,—but of course it is delightful to me to ...
— The Master-Christian • Marie Corelli
... positive defenders are beginning to hesitate in their judgments. Ancient evidence proves to be far from impeccable. The faith in dogmas once held sacred is shaken. The latest literature of the Revolution betrays these uncertainties. Having related, men are more and more ...
— The Psychology of Revolution • Gustave le Bon
... bolt upright, most correctly, on the edge of a chair, and responded monosyllabically to Judith's questions. Her demeanour could not have been more impeccable had she been trained in a French convent. Just before we arrived, she had been laughing immoderately because I had ordered her to spit out a mass of horrible sweetmeat which she had found it impossible to masticate, and she had challenged me to extract it with my fingers. But now, compared ...
— The Morals of Marcus Ordeyne • William J. Locke
... imposing marble "desk" stood several impeccable clerks, and to one of these I addressed myself, giving our names and mentioning the fact that we had telegraphed for rooms. I am not sure that this young man wore a braided cutaway and a white carnation; I only ...
— American Adventures - A Second Trip 'Abroad at home' • Julian Street
... (November 29, 1825). Save Mme. Patti we have heard no Zerlina comparable with Mme. Sembrich, and Mme. Nilsson's singing of the airs, "Ah, che mi dice mai," and "Mi tradi quell' alma ingrata" lingers in my memory as an impeccable exemplification of the true classic style. The performance suffered shipwreck, however, in the famous first finale, because of the untunefulness of the orchestra, and the incapacity of the enlisted stage bands. In "Mefistofele," on December 5th, Nilsson appeared as Marguerite and ...
— Chapters of Opera • Henry Edward Krehbiel
... with that weakness we have already noticed elsewhere, is the design of the leg and foot, the drawing of which is far from impeccable. That the execution in this respect is not equal to the supreme conception of the whole, is no valid reason for the belief that this "Judith" is only a copy of a lost original, a belief that could apparently only be held by those who have never stood before the picture itself.[48] ...
— Giorgione • Herbert Cook
... always sure and impeccable, he was of all critics the most independent of authority. Had he chanced to find in the poets’ corner of The Eatanswill Gazette a lyric equal to the best of Shelley’s, he would have recognized its merits at once and proclaimed them; and had he come across a lyric of Shelley’s that had ...
— Old Familiar Faces • Theodore Watts-Dunton
... asked. The other had been not merely forbidding, not merely repugnant, but alternately forbidding and repugnant—in daylight, an impeccable burgher sitting tall and righteous under a tall hat; in tunnels, a hunchbacked gargoyle picking its ...
— In the Control Tower • Will Mohler
... criminal irresistibly driven to tell us the story of his evil life? Were the police of Europe and America even now scouring the surface of the globe for him? That brother, that dare-devil gentleman of the painter-cousin's letter, was a fitting accomplice for him, the quiet, unobtrusive, impeccable "seaman." He had a number, what was it? Three-nine-(fool not to write it down!) three-nine-something. Was that his number during his last imprisonment? Had he spoken in terrific hyperbole when he admitted that ...
— Aliens • William McFee
... dainty, outstretched black paws and watched the movements of James Edward, the gander, or Butters, the fat woodchuck, a savage glint would come, which MacPhairrson unerringly interpreted. Moreover, while his demeanour was impeccable, his reserve was impenetrable, and even the tolerant and kindly MacPhairrson could find nothing in him to love. The decree, therefore, had gone forth; that is, it had been announced by MacPhairrson himself, and apparently approved by the ever attentive Stumpy and Ebenezer, that Carrots should ...
— The Backwoodsmen • Charles G. D. Roberts
... no great height, hung over the narrow and, during the winter months, not a little dusky channel, with endless movement and interest in the vivid exhibition it supplied. What faced us was a series of subjects, with the baker, at the corner, for the first—the impeccable dispenser of the so softly-crusty crescent-rolls that we woke up each morning to hunger for afresh, with our weak cafe-au-lait, as for the one form of "European" breakfast-bread fit to be named even with the feeblest of our American forms. Then came the small cremerie, ...
— A Small Boy and Others • Henry James
... work of empire-building out of unwarlike materials could apparently be carried out only by some alien power hampered by no reserve of scruple, and backed by a servile populace of its own, imbued with an impeccable loyalty to its masters and with a suitably bellicose temper, as, e.g., ...
— An Inquiry Into The Nature Of Peace And The Terms Of Its Perpetuation • Thorstein Veblen
... clambering up fir posts on which the stumps of boughs remain; and in every case the rose is flowering more freely than ever before, and has arranged its blossoms, leaves, and branches with an exquisite and impeccable taste. Always lovely, Dorothy Perkins is never so lovely as in the evening, just after the sun has gone, when the green takes on a new sobriety against which her gay and tender pink is gayer and more tender. "Pretty little ...
— A Boswell of Baghdad - With Diversions • E. V. Lucas
... not see that he has done so. It is not his fault, in the manner that he has explained it. Let the young man enjoy himself a little and see a little of life. We are only young once, and you laics must not be too severely impeccable, otherwise what would become of us granters of absolution. Furthermore, we must not be too old-fashioned. Our people here are getting out of the strictness of the old social distinctions. It may be so too in France. On my advice, dear Lecour, ...
— The False Chevalier - or, The Lifeguard of Marie Antoinette • William Douw Lighthall
... Chateau de Nantes, where she was born; at Langeais, where she married her first husband; at Amboise, where she lost him; at Blois, where she married her second, the "good" Louis XII., who divorced an impeccable spouse to make room for her, and where she herself died. Transferred to the cathedral from a demolished convent, this monument, the masterpiece of Michel Colomb, author of the charming tomb of the children of Charles VIII. and the aforesaid Anne, which we admired at ...
— A Little Tour in France • Henry James
... on the brain—and how could a work of Adrian's be impeccable when an alien hand, however imperceptible, had touched it?—was not satisfied. Towards noon, when she came downstairs, she met Jaffery on the terrace, with a familiar little knitting of the brow before ...
— Jaffery • William J. Locke
... Umbrian Masters. They are all alike; they are awkwardly posed; everything in and around them sins against the most elementary rules of art, and yet their memory pursues you, and when you have long forgotten the works of impeccable modern artists you recall without effort these creations of those unknown painters; for love calls for love, and these vapid personages have very true and pure hearts, a more than human love shines forth from their whole being, they speak to you and ...
— Life of St. Francis of Assisi • Paul Sabatier
... majority. Priestley, for example, while adhering to the idea that the Christian revelation had been guaranteed by miracles, had abandoned belief in the Virgin birth as early as 1784, and went so far as to maintain that Jesus was not impeccable and had certainly entertained erroneous ideas about demoniacal possession. Probably there were very few who had arrived at these conclusions even thirty years later; some Unitarians repudiated them at a much later period. The miraculous element, ...
— Unitarianism • W.G. Tarrant
... still on the short grass. The coloured sunshades far off, passing between trees, resembled deliberate and brilliant butterflies moving without a flutter. Men smiling amiably, or else very grave, within the impeccable shelter of their black coats, stood by the side of women who, clustered in clear summer toilettes, recalled all the fabulous tales of enchanted gardens where animated flowers smile at bewitched knights. There was a sumptuous serenity in it all, a thin, ...
— Tales of Unrest • Joseph Conrad
... of it. What's really the matter with Bishen Singh is class-hatred, which, unfortunately, is even more intense and more widely spread. That's one of the little drawbacks of caste, which some of your recent English writers find an impeccable system." ...
— The Works of Rudyard Kipling One Volume Edition • Rudyard Kipling
... rhythmical rise and fall of the currents of life as is the social organism or man himself, therefore it is not to be expected that it will pursue a course of even exaltation, or maintain a status that is impeccable. ...
— Towards the Great Peace • Ralph Adams Cram
... of low talk, which if I attempted to set it down here, would only result in my being treated to the same humiliating process as the excellent M. M. with his "choicest paragraphs." It was highly instructive—the contrast between that impeccable personality which he displays at home and his present state. I wish his wife and two little girls could have caught a few shreds of what he said—just a few shreds; they would have seen a new light ...
— Alone • Norman Douglas
... Mr. Banneker had been deftly enshrouded in a fur-lined coat, worthy of a bank president, had crowned these glories with an impeccable silk hat, and had set forth. Wickert had only to add that he wore in his coat lapel one of those fancy tuberoses, which he, Wickert, had gone to the pains of pricing at the nearest flower shop ...
— Success - A Novel • Samuel Hopkins Adams
... Lily Bart in The House of Mirth. She goes to pieces on the rocks of that decorum, though she has every advantage of birth except a fortune, and knows the rules of the game perfectly. But she cannot follow them with the impeccable equilibrium which is needful; she has the Aristotelian hero's fatal defect of a single weakness. In that golden game not to go forward is to fall behind. Lily Bart hesitates, oscillates, and is lost. Having left her appointed course, she finds ...
— Contemporary American Novelists (1900-1920) • Carl Van Doren
... time and substance in riotous living. He lived to the mature age of fifty-two and died a well-to-do man. The prodigals of the world do not retire with a competency. I repeat that Shakspere was not impeccable; he was no Puritan; but we cannot think of the creator of Hamlet, Ophelia, Othello, Desdemona, Cordelia, Portia, Rosalind, Miranda, and Prospero as other than a man of a contrite spirit and a pure ...
— Stories of Authors, British and American • Edwin Watts Chubb
... received at this excellent man's home with a warmth of welcome which left no doubt in his own mind as to the unselfishness of his host. Even before the war Renwick and Constantine Koulas had met in secret, so that if trouble came no plan should mar the man's impeccable character in Austrian eyes. And Renwick would not have come to him now, had not his own need been great. But Herr Koulas, having heard the tale of his adventures and reassured as to the present danger of pursuit, ...
— The Secret Witness • George Gibbs
... had never entered his mind. Perhaps you will say that it was the one thing Jerry would want to do, being the thing that was forbidden him, but you would not understand as I did the way Jerry's mind worked. If as a boy Jerry had been impeccable in the way of matters of duty, he was no less so now. He had been trained to do what was right and now did it instinctively, not because it was his duty, but because it was the only thing ...
— Paradise Garden - The Satirical Narrative of a Great Experiment • George Gibbs
... the contrary, a lady of quiet reserve, composed of manner, authoritative of speech, not lacking in humour, of impeccable taste in dress, and to all appearances not a day older than forty-five, despite hair like snow that framed a face of ...
— Nobody • Louis Joseph Vance
... air, intangible, as though no Legitimist of flesh and blood had ever existed to the man's mind except perhaps myself. He, of course, was just simply a banker, a very distinguished, a very influential, and a very impeccable banker. He persisted also in deferring to my judgment and sense with an over-emphasis called out by his perpetual surprise at my youth. Though he had seen me many times (I even knew his wife) he could never get over my immature age. He himself was born about fifty years old, all complete, ...
— The Arrow of Gold - a story between two notes • Joseph Conrad
... they?" the young squaw inquired calmly, and pointed to William. Casey jumped. Any man would, hearing that impeccable sentence issue from the lips of a squaw with a blanket over ...
— Casey Ryan • B. M. Bower
... smiled secretly to himself. He was a young man not without experience in ladies' moods and he had a very shrewd idea that somebody had been making remarks, but he did not permit a hint of any perception of the coolness of her manner to impair the impeccable suavity of his. ...
— The Palace of Darkened Windows • Mary Hastings Bradley
... story—he was not unused to the type—but Mrs. Martin Marteen! He could not very well dismiss her unheard, an acquaintance of years' standing, a friend of his sister's. His curiosity was aroused. What could be the matter with the impeccable Mrs. Marteen? Perhaps she had been speculating. ...
— Out of the Ashes • Ethel Watts Mumford
... be sure, he took a glass of something occasionally, but he thoroughly understood himself at the time. He took it to be companionable, that was all. Therefore, in view of what happened to him on one unforgetable night, it is well to know that Hawkins bore an impeccable reputation for sobriety. Likewise, his veracity never ...
— Her Weight in Gold • George Barr McCutcheon
... their moral life, were an extraordinarily solemn set of folks. The Athenians thought that the very gods must admire the rectitude of Phocion and Aristides; and those gentlemen themselves were apparently of much the same opinion. Cato's veracity was so impeccable that the extremest incredulity a Roman could express of anything was to say, 'I would not believe it even if Cato had told me.' Good was good, and bad was bad, for these people. Hypocrisy, which church-Christianity brought in, hardly ...
— A Pluralistic Universe - Hibbert Lectures at Manchester College on the - Present Situation in Philosophy • William James
... insolence of beauty and pride. And in this it almost assuredly did more good than harm. There is nothing so cold or so pitiless as youth, and youth in aristocratic stations and ages tended to an impeccable dignity, an endless summer of success which needed to be very sharply reminded of the scorn of the stars. It was well that such flamboyant prigs should be convinced that one practical joke, at least, ...
— The Defendant • G.K. Chesterton
... man's pursuing, promising—what had they promised in the past? And after all, he thought recklessly, what did the private honor of his testifying yes or no amount to anyway? What moral conceit! To save his own impeccable soul by denying a woman the one consolation that would ...
— Old Crow • Alice Brown
... the trade had found an answer to the riddle; and the answer was that, on close inspection, Neave had found the collection less impeccable than he had supposed. It was a preposterous answer—but then there was no other. Neave, by this time, was pretty generally recognized as having the subtlest flair of any collector in Europe, and if he didn't choose ...
— Tales Of Men And Ghosts • Edith Wharton
... so far and because she is a foreigner, as he reminds her, she may be mistaken in her blame of him. Yet foreigners, strangers, will in the ultimate issue be the judges of this matter, and shall they find Aristophanes any more impeccable than she does? (She now begins to put forth the rosy strength!) What is it that he has done? He did not invent comedy! Has he improved upon it? No, she declares. One of his aims is to discredit war. That was an aim of Euripides also; ...
— Browning's Heroines • Ethel Colburn Mayne
... more apt word, perhaps; you worry me, Nephew. Such impeccable virtue naturally suggests an early death—a harp—a halo! And yet you appear to enjoy robust health. Pray to what do you attribute your so great immunity from those pleasant weaknesses that are so frequently ...
— Peregrine's Progress • Jeffery Farnol
... with a worm, and then not catch your fish! To fail with a fly is no disgrace: your art may have been impeccable, your patience faultless to the end. But the philosophy of worm-fishing is that of Results, of having something tangible in your basket when the day's work is done. It is a plea for Compromise, for cutting the coat according to ...
— Fishing with a Worm • Bliss Perry
... last to the much-admired statues which must come down at once from their pedestal if the frost chips off a nose or a finger. They are not permitted to be human; they are required to be for ever divine and for ever impeccable. So one glance exchanged between Mme. de Bargeton and Lucien outweighed twelve years of Zizine's connection with Francis in the social balance; and a squeeze of the hand drew down all the thunders of ...
— Lost Illusions • Honore De Balzac
... of you that I would not hear an enemy say. When I read, in the criticism of an American novelist, about your "hysterical emotionality" (for he writes in American), and your "waste of verbiage," I am almost tempted to deny that our Dickens has a single fault, to deem you impeccable! ...
— Letters to Dead Authors • Andrew Lang
... inside or outside of the constitution, as most modern democratic theorists maintain; since, if so, the will of the people, however expressed, is the criterion of right and wrong, just and unjust, true and false, is infallible and impeccable, and no moral right can ever be pleaded against it; they are accountable to nobody, and, let them do what they please, they can do no wrong. This would place the individual at the mercy of the state, and deprive him of all right to complain, however oppressed or cruelly ...
— The American Republic: Its Constitution, Tendencies, and Destiny • A. O. Brownson
... high principles, and made a point of forgiving her enemies—slowly! As a preliminary process she demanded an abject apology, and a period of waiting, during which the culprit was expected to be devoured by remorse and anxiety. Then, bending from an impeccable height, she vouchsafed a mitigated pardon. "I forgive you, but I can never forget!" Some such absolution she would have been ready to bestow upon a tearful and dejected Cornelia, but the pink and white complaisance ...
— Flaming June • Mrs. George de Horne Vaizey
... keeping her true self locked against him had, during the last twenty-four hours, become an obsession, making it impossible for him to eat or to sleep. In her serene, impeccable bearing he saw nothing but the bars up and the blinds drawn down. An instant of faltering or self-betrayal would have admitted him to at least a glimpse of what was passing within; but through this well-balanced graciousness it was as difficult to ...
— The Wild Olive • Basil King
... attempt to gain possession. The girl, at least, regarded him as firmly anchored to his Leonora. She had not the slightest inkling of any infidelities. He had always spoken to her of his wife in terms of reverence and deep affection. He had given her the idea that he regarded Leonora as absolutely impeccable and as absolutely satisfying. Their union had appeared to her to be one of those blessed things that are spoken of and contemplated with ...
— The Good Soldier • Ford Madox Ford
... moments, selected Cooper's novels for attack. Every grammar school teacher is ready to point out that his style is often prolix and his sentences are sometimes ungrammatical. Amateurs even criticize Cooper's seamanship, although it seemed impeccable to Admiral Mahan. No doubt one must admit the "helplessness, propriety, and incapacity" of most of Cooper's women, and the dreadfulness of his bores, particularly the Scotchmen, the doctors, and the naturalists. Like Sir Walter, Cooper seems to have taken ...
— The American Spirit in Literature, - A Chronicle of Great Interpreters, Volume 34 in The - Chronicles Of America Series • Bliss Perry
... do anything foolish; you might compare these last to the much-admired statues which must come down at once from their pedestal if the frost chips off a nose or a finger. They are not permitted to be human; they are required to be for ever divine and for ever impeccable. So one glance exchanged between Mme. de Bargeton and Lucien outweighed twelve years of Zizine's connection with Francis in the social balance; and a squeeze of the hand drew down all the thunders of the ...
— Lost Illusions • Honore De Balzac
... of the close-shaven clear-cut London consultant. His shirt-front was as impeccable as his moral character was spotless—in the way that Belgravia and Harley Street still understood spotlessness. He was tall and straight, and unbent by age; the professional poker which he had swallowed in early life seemed to stand ...
— The Woman Who Did • Grant Allen
... "amateur" fails to do full credit to amateur journalism and the association which best represents it. To some minds the term conveys an idea of crudity and immaturity, yet the United can boast of members and publications whose polish and scholarship are well-nigh impeccable. In considering the adjective "amateur" as applied to the press association, we must adhere to the more basic interpretation, regarding the word as indicating the non-mercenary nature of the membership. Our amateurs write purely for love of their art, without the stultifying influence of commercialism. ...
— Writings in the United Amateur, 1915-1922 • Howard Phillips Lovecraft
... He seemed to feel that this was no place for the furnace-man, notwithstanding the scouring and polishing process that temporarily had restored him to a more exalted office,—for once more he was the smug, impeccable valet. ...
— From the Housetops • George Barr McCutcheon
... could give him any suggestions towards a possible means of earning a livelihood. Most of them, he found to his surprise, though they had been great chums of his at college, seemed a little shy of him nowadays: one old Oxford friend, in particular, an impeccable man in close-cut frock coat and hat of shiny perfection, he overheard saying to another, he followed him accidentally up a long staircase in King's Bench Walk, 'Ah, yes, I met Le Breton in the Strand ...
— Philistia • Grant Allen
... enforcedly stopped car. It had seemed that he could be no more incensed, but he was. Within ten feet of him a matronly black snake moved along the sidewalk with a manner of such assurance and such impeccable respectability that it would have seemed natural for her to be carrying ...
— Attention Saint Patrick • William Fitzgerald Jenkins
... child; and if the attention to him is incessant and wise, and the copies he has are good and stimulating, he is molded nearer to the heart's desire. Sometimes he escapes, and becomes a criminal, tramp, sport, or artist; and even if made into an impeccable and model citizen, he periodically breaks away from the network of social habit ...
— Sex and Society • William I. Thomas
... I entered the door I felt as one again at home. Here were the sanded floors, the old water-bottles, the large chandelier with its cut glasses in the middle of the room, the small tables with their coarse clean linen. The same old French waiters stood here and there about, each with impeccable apron and very peccable shoes, as is the wont of all waiters. But the waiters at Luigi's are more than waiters; they are friends, and they never forget a face. Therefore, as always, I had no occasion for surprise when Jean, my waiter these many years at Luigi's, stepped forward ...
— The Lady and the Pirate - Being the Plain Tale of a Diligent Pirate and a Fair Captive • Emerson Hough
... his hand over his face to conceal a smile, but Leary seemed sincerely grieved by Archie's conduct and remarked dolefully that there must be something wrong with the money. The Governor hastily vouched for its impeccable quality and excused Archie as a person hardly ...
— Blacksheep! Blacksheep! • Meredith Nicholson
... considered. "Hm-m-m. Well, now, I wouldn't exactly say so, your lordship. He knew how clothes should be worn, yes. But he couldn't pick out a woman's gown of his own accord. He could choose his own clothing with impeccable taste, but he'd not any real notion of how a woman's clothing should go, if you see what I mean. All he knew was how good clothing should be worn. But he knew nothing about design for ...
— The Eyes Have It • Gordon Randall Garrett
... set of men over another to attain its object of restraining those who override public interests for their personal ends, power ought only to be put into the hands of the impeccable, as it is supposed to be among the Chinese, and as it was supposed to be in the Middle Ages, and is even now supposed to be by those who believe in the consecration by anointing. Only under those conditions could the social organization ...
— The Kingdom of God is within you • Leo Tolstoy
... a worm, and then not catch your fish! To fail with a fly is no disgrace: your art may have been impeccable, your patience faultless to the end. But the philosophy of worm-fishing is that of Results, of having something tangible in your basket when the day's work is done. It is a plea for Compromise, for cutting the coat according to the cloth, for taking the world as it actually is. The fly-fisherman ...
— Fishing with a Worm • Bliss Perry
... at regular intervals. The daily routine of attending to minor ailments and injuries was in the hands of Monsieur Ree-shar (Richard), who knew probably less about medicine than any man living and was an ordinary prisoner like all of us, but whose impeccable conduct merited cosy quarters. A sweeper was appointed from time to time by the Surveillant, acting for the Directeur, from the inhabitants of La Ferte; as was also a cook's assistant. The regular cook was a fixture, and a Boche like the ...
— The Enormous Room • Edward Estlin Cummings
... has been a little swifter than the generality in reading signs; a little bolder in conception and execution. If you read the papers you will gather that each of us is, in private life, impeccable, and each of us is, in business, as ...
— Destiny • Charles Neville Buck
... as he entered. He tried to look encouraging, without success. I noticed that he looked tired and dusty, and, although he was ordinarily impeccable in his appearance, it was clear that he was at least ...
— The Circular Staircase • Mary Roberts Rinehart
... young creature from Ireland with the long eyelashes. She was always inventing new divinities. But even this change of plan, this more feminine line of politics failed to reconcile the strict and the stern, the Queen Charlotte-ish elderly ladies, and the impeccable matrons, to Lady Kirkbank and her sea. The girls who were launched by Lady Kirkbank never took high rank in society. When they made good marriages it was generally to be observed that they dropped Lady Kirkbank soon afterwards. It was not their fault, these ingrates pleaded piteously; but Edward, ...
— Phantom Fortune, A Novel • M. E. Braddon
... same, whether in a Roman villa or on a Barbarian farm. The man, like the ox and the ass, is a part of the live-stock; a price is set upon his head; he is a tool without a conscience, a chattel without personality, an impeccable, irresponsible being, who ...
— What is Property? - An Inquiry into the Principle of Right and of Government • P. J. Proudhon
... right; there was! A gravely-reproachful, sternly-commiserating 'leader,' wherein the apparently impeccable and highly conscientious writer 'deplored' the laxity of those who supported M. Carl Perousse in his 'regrettable' scheme ...
— Temporal Power • Marie Corelli
... them. I have heard an impatient innovator scoff at the English law on the subject of mustard, and demand why, in the nature of things, mustard should not be eaten with mutton. The answer is very simple; this law has been made by the English palate—which is impeccable. I maintain it is impeccable! Your educated Englishman is an infallible guide in all that relates to the table. "The man of superior intellect," said Tennyson—justifying his love of boiled beef and new potatoes—"knows what is good ...
— The Private Papers of Henry Ryecroft • George Gissing
... certain orders to certain people and made certain odd arrangements. When everything had been set up to his satisfaction, he ate a leisurely dinner, topped it off with two glasses of Velaskan wine, read the tenth edition of the Globe, and strolled out to the street again, looking every inch the impeccable gentleman. ...
— The Unnecessary Man • Gordon Randall Garrett
... victory. PAUL-LOUIS COURIER DE MERE (1772-1825) counts for nothing in the history of French thought; in the history of French letters his pamphlets remain as masterpieces of Attic grace, luminous, light and bright in narrative, easy in dialogue, of the finest irony in comment, impeccable in measure and in malice. The translator of Daphnis and Chloe, wearied by war and wanderings in Italy, lived under the Restoration among his vines at Veretz, in Touraine. In 1816 he became the advocate of provincial popular rights against the vexations of ...
— A History of French Literature - Short Histories of the Literatures of the World: II. • Edward Dowden
... Colonel Stratz bent upon him was heavy and piercing. Yet he awaited the result with confidence. It was true that he was American, but he had been with the French so much now that he had acquired many of their tricks of manner, and his French accent was impeccable. ...
— The Hosts of the Air • Joseph A. Altsheler
... that after this memorable evening, the feelings of the worthy Abbot towards his adviser were much more kindly and friendly than when he deemed the Sub-Prior the impeccable and infallible person, in whose garment of virtue and wisdom no flaw was to be discerned. It seemed as if this avowal of his own imperfections had recommended Father Eustace to the friendship of the Superior, although at the same ...
— The Monastery • Sir Walter Scott
... so unlike him. His taste for furniture's impeccable. The old house was perfect. So, in ...
— The Belfry • May Sinclair
... or a parson his presence in such company would have been no more surprising. He had the appearance of a well-dressed gentleman, probably a professional man of some kind. His features were good and his dress impeccable. ...
— Frontier Boys in Frisco • Wyn Roosevelt
... repeat, Gyp," he said. "Nobody could blame you, if you disqualified yourself from this decision. I think we could get the newscasts to see it as impeccable public behavior. We'll paint you as the administrator so devoted to pure justice that even potential resentment will be a barrier to your personal decision. How's that sound to ...
— Tinker's Dam • Joseph Tinker
... might know at any moment, and had but to give my mind to it. Maupassant was an impeccable artist, but I think the secret of the hold he had on the young men of my day was not so much that we discerned his cunning as that we delighted in the simplicity which his cunning achieved. I had read a great number of his short stories, but none that had made me feel as though I, if I were ...
— And Even Now - Essays • Max Beerbohm
... bring to perfection, perfect, ripen, mature; complete &,,c. 729; put in trim &c. (prepare) 673; maturate. Adj. perfect, faultless; indefective[obs3], indeficient[obs3], indefectible; immaculate, spotless, impeccable; free from imperfection &c. 651; unblemished, uninjured &c. 659; sound, sound as a roach; in perfect condition; scathless[obs3], intact, harmless; seaworthy &c. (safe) 644; right as a trivet; in seipso totus teres atque rotundus [Lat][Horace]; consummate &c. (complete) 52; finished &c. 729. best ...
— Roget's Thesaurus
... only since I have possessed your love. Before I possessed it I sought the truth elsewhere, I struggled with the fixed idea of saving the world. You have come, and life is full; the world is saved every hour by love, by the immense and incessant labor of all that live and love throughout space. Impeccable life, omnipotent ...
— Doctor Pascal • Emile Zola
... slight inclination of the head Mr. Brimmer passed out into the lobby, erect, self-possessed, and impeccable. One or two of his commercial colleagues of maturer age, who were loitering leisurely by the wall, unwilling to compromise themselves by actually sitting down, took heart of grace at this correct apparition. Brimmer nodded to them coolly, as if on 'Change, and made his ...
— The Crusade of the Excelsior • Bret Harte
... much-praised literary style, his method of expression, is strictly conformable—impersonal in its beauty, the perfection of nobody's style—thus vindicating anew by its very impersonality that much worn, but not untrue saying, that the style is the man:—a man, impassible, unfamiliar, impeccable, veiling a deep sense of what is forcible, nay, terrible, in things, under the sort of personal pride that makes a man a nice observer of all that is most conventional. Essentially unlike other people, he is always fastidiously ...
— Miscellaneous Studies: A Series of Essays • Walter Horatio Pater
... of an American novelist, about your "hysterical emotionality" (for he writes in American), and your "waste of verbiage," I am almost tempted to deny that our Dickens has a single fault, to deem you impeccable! ...
— Letters to Dead Authors • Andrew Lang
... supposed instance of a foreigner, who, after reading a commentary on the principles of English Law, does not get nearer to a real apprehension of them than to be led to accuse Englishmen of considering that the queen is impeccable and infallible, and that the Parliament is omnipotent. Mr. Kingsley has read me from beginning to end in the fashion in which the hypothetical Russian read Blackstone; not, I repeat, from malice, but because of his intellectual build. He appears to be so constituted as to have no notion of what ...
— Apologia pro Vita Sua • John Henry Newman
... Regimental life is not unlike that of a large family; it has the same sort of claims, intimacies, and quarrels, the same sort of jealousies within, combined with solidarity against the outsider. Perceiving this quickly, Drusilla proceeded to disarm criticism by being impeccable in dress and negatively amiable in conduct. "With my temperament," she said to herself, "I can afford to wait." Following her husband to Barbados, the Cape, and India, she had just succeeded in passing all the tests of the troop-ship ...
— The Street Called Straight • Basil King
... perfect engine should surely not have run it off the rails. The royalist ought to seek to prove that Charles was a fool and a knave, to account for the collapse of royalty; and the case against royalty is all the stronger, if you could show that Charles, in spite of impeccable virtue, was forced by his position to end on the scaffold. Choose between him and the system which he applied. So Catholics and conservatives are never tired of denouncing Henry VIII. and the French revolutionists. So far as I can guess (I know very little about it), their case is ...
— Social Rights and Duties, Volume I (of 2) - Addresses to Ethical Societies • Sir Leslie Stephen
... newspaper—'from the morning press. When I take to art criticism, as you kindly suggested a dishonest man might do, it will be of a livelier description than any to which you are usually accustomed. Vain dupe, you think yourself impeccable. Infallible ass, there is hardly a museum in Europe where my manuscripts are not carefully preserved for the greatest and rarest treasures by senile curators, too ignorant to know their errors or too vain to acknowledge ...
— Masques & Phases • Robert Ross
... measure account for her lack of success in always calling forth steady tones. However, on the whole, her voice sounded amazingly fresh. Her high notes especially rang true and resonant as ever. Her middle voice showed wear. Her style remained impeccable, unrivalled.... She announced, following this concert, a series of four recitals in a small hall and actually appeared at one of them. This time I did not hear her, but I am told that her voice refused to respond to her wishes. Nor was the hall filled. The remaining concerts were abandoned. ...
— The Merry-Go-Round • Carl Van Vechten
... perplexity. And Mr. Frank, standing at his shoulder with legs similarly spread, used the same gesture—as Miss Bracy had seen him use it a thousand times. Yet the boy had no artistic talent—not so much as a germ. For beauty of line and beauty of colour he inherited an impeccable eye; indeed his young senses were alive to seize all innocent delight,—his quickness in scenting the lemon-verbena bush proved but the first of many instances. But he began and ended with enjoyment; of the artist's impulse to reproduce ...
— The White Wolf and Other Fireside Tales • Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch
... I inferred that I still was in the criminal dock before this lady Chief Justice. I smiled at the airs the little woman gave herself now that I was no longer the impeccable and irreproachable dictator of the family. Mine was the experience of every fallen tyrant since the ...
— Simon the Jester • William J. Locke
... unabridged, authentic temple" of his idol's fame. That seems to me simply degrading: and then the portentous ass, whose review I read, says that if the editor had done nothing else, he is sure of an honoured place for ever in the hierarchy of impeccable critics! And what is all this jabber about—a few rhymes which a man made when he was feeling a little off colour, and which he did not think it worth ...
— Father Payne • Arthur Christopher Benson
... cut Jamison off. Naturally. The sponsor was paying for time. So for Jamison was substituted the other fiction about the poor young man who found himself envied by the board of directors of the firm which employed him. His impeccable attire caused him to be promoted to vice-president without any question of whether or not he could fill the job. Because, of course, he ...
— Operation: Outer Space • William Fitzgerald Jenkins
... principles were established and the procedure regulated by the "Assises de Jerusalem" (1099), whose ordinances were received and recognized throughout Europe as a code of law and honour. For a general statement of conditions and effects we cannot do better than turn to the pages of the almost impeccable Gibbon. ...
— The Customs of Old England • F. J. Snell
... bless you both," the Reverend Mr. Andrews concluded unofficially, noting with a certain curiosity, the impeccable riding breeches of the groom, and the bride's looped-up linen habit—he had never married a couple attired in precisely that manner, and ...
— While Caroline Was Growing • Josephine Daskam Bacon
... wish, and the thought of venturing out alone had never entered his mind. Perhaps you will say that it was the one thing Jerry would want to do, being the thing that was forbidden him, but you would not understand as I did the way Jerry's mind worked. If as a boy Jerry had been impeccable in the way of matters of duty, he was no less so now. He had been trained to do what was right and now did it instinctively, not because it was his duty, but because it was the only thing that ...
— Paradise Garden - The Satirical Narrative of a Great Experiment • George Gibbs
... "desk" stood several impeccable clerks, and to one of these I addressed myself, giving our names and mentioning the fact that we had telegraphed for rooms. I am not sure that this young man wore a braided cutaway and a white carnation; I only know that he affected me as hotel clerks in braided cutaways ...
— American Adventures - A Second Trip 'Abroad at home' • Julian Street
... hard boiled potato, and lighted a cheap Virginia cigarette. He glanced out of the dirty window. Before it, making inquiries of a big, leisurely policeman, was a slim, exquisite girl of twenty, rosy-cheeked, smart of hat, impeccable of gloves, with fluffy white furs beneath her chin, which cuddled into the furs with a hint of a life bright and spacious. She laughed as she talked to the policeman, she shrugged her shoulders with the exhilaration of ...
— The Trail of the Hawk - A Comedy of the Seriousness of Life • Sinclair Lewis
... this American tradition impeccable in the political ideas, the literary ideals, the social customs it has given us. We must admit a rampant individualism in our political practices which is in the very best Anglo-American tradition, and yet by ...
— Definitions • Henry Seidel Canby
... is this Meindert Hobbema? Where was he born? Where did he live? What was his life? Alas, we know very little concerning this impeccable master, one of the greatest glories of Dutch painting. The principal historians of the Netherland school are ignorant of him or pass him by in silence. Houbraken, Descamps, and d'Argenville are dumb regarding ...
— Great Pictures, As Seen and Described by Famous Writers • Esther Singleton
... Stuarts, was whittled away to common sense by the admirers of Addison and Steele. Swift and Johnson, Gibbon and Fielding, were apparitions of strength in an amiable, ineffective age. They emerged sudden from the impeccable greyness, to which they afforded an heroic contrast. So, while the highway drifted—drifted to a vulgar incompetence, the craft was illumined by many a flash of unexpected genius. The brilliant achievements of Jonathan Wild and of Jack Sheppard might have relieved the gloom of the ...
— A Book of Scoundrels • Charles Whibley
... of those of the majority. Priestley, for example, while adhering to the idea that the Christian revelation had been guaranteed by miracles, had abandoned belief in the Virgin birth as early as 1784, and went so far as to maintain that Jesus was not impeccable and had certainly entertained erroneous ideas about demoniacal possession. Probably there were very few who had arrived at these conclusions even thirty years later; some Unitarians repudiated them at a much later period. The miraculous element, however, was formerly ...
— Unitarianism • W.G. Tarrant
... lining of a trunk or grip. Some of the goods might have been on his person, but not much, and certainly there was no excuse for ordering a personal examination, for he could not have hidden a tenth part of what we knew he had, even under the proverbial porous plaster. He was impeccable. Accordingly there was nothing for the inspector to do but ...
— The Poisoned Pen • Arthur B. Reeve
... regeneration. The Church, in its human manifestation, is as subject to the rhythmical rise and fall of the currents of life as is the social organism or man himself, therefore it is not to be expected that it will pursue a course of even exaltation, or maintain a status that is impeccable. ...
— Towards the Great Peace • Ralph Adams Cram
... congregate, so that one has constantly the sense of being "in" for all there is—you may find an echo of it in the uniform type of his creatures, their monotonous grace, their prodigious invariability. He may very well have wanted to produce figures of a substantial, yet at the same time of an impeccable innocence; but we feel that he had taught himself how even beyond his own belief in them, and had arrived at a process that acted at last mechanically. I confess at the same time that, so interpreted, the painter affects me ...
— Italian Hours • Henry James
... and, during the winter months, not a little dusky channel, with endless movement and interest in the vivid exhibition it supplied. What faced us was a series of subjects, with the baker, at the corner, for the first—the impeccable dispenser of the so softly-crusty crescent-rolls that we woke up each morning to hunger for afresh, with our weak cafe-au-lait, as for the one form of "European" breakfast-bread fit to be named even with the feeblest of our American forms. ...
— A Small Boy and Others • Henry James
... the candle. Moreover, the clarity of mind necessary to sustained work embraced ever the image of Madeleine; what he had lost and what he had never possessed. And, again, he tormented himself with imaginings of her own suffering and despair; alternated with visions of Madeleine enthroned, secure, impeccable, admired, envied—and with other men in love with her! Some depth of insight convinced him that she loved him immortally, but he knew her need for mental companionship, and the thought that she might find it, however briefly and barrenly, with another man, sent him ...
— Sleeping Fires • Gertrude Atherton
... change in the bedroom apparent to the eye, save that for Marie's tiny slippers at the foot of the wardrobe there were Mrs. Boyer's substantial house shoes. But in some indefinable way the room had changed. About it hung an atmosphere of solid respectability, of impeccable purity that soothed Mrs. Boyer's ruffled virtue into peace. Is it any wonder that there is a theory to the effect that things take on the essential qualities of people who use them, and that we are haunted by things, not people? That when grandfather's wraith is seen in his ...
— The Street of Seven Stars • Mary Roberts Rinehart
... Witnessed in Southampton County (Virginia) on Monday the 22d of August Last," the list below of the victims of Nat Turner's insurrection is given. It must be said about this work, however, that it is not altogether impeccable; it seems to have been prepared very hastily after the event, its spelling of names is often arbitrary, and instead of the fifty-five victims noted it appears that at least ...
— A Social History of the American Negro • Benjamin Brawley
... that is left by a study of these books is the lack of confidence in their own dignity which papas and mammas betrayed in the early Victorian era. This seems past all doubt when you realise that the common effort of all these pictures and prose is to glorify the impeccable parent, and teach his or her offspring to grovel silently before the stern ...
— Children's Books and Their Illustrators • Gleeson White
... upright, most correctly, on the edge of a chair, and responded monosyllabically to Judith's questions. Her demeanour could not have been more impeccable had she been trained in a French convent. Just before we arrived, she had been laughing immoderately because I had ordered her to spit out a mass of horrible sweetmeat which she had found it impossible ...
— The Morals of Marcus Ordeyne • William J. Locke
... efforts had been less barren. The public was talking, for, after all, the disappearance of poor Dimmock's body had got noised abroad in an indirect sort of way, and Theodore Racksole did not like the idea of his impeccable hotel being the subject of sinister rumours. He wondered, grimly, what the public and the Sunday newspapers would say if they were aware of all the other phenomena, not yet common property: of Miss Spencer's disappearance, of Jules' strange visits, and of the non-arrival ...
— The Grand Babylon Hotel • Arnold Bennett
... impeccable in their sense of form; indeed, he was very English in that matter: People must be just so; things smell properly; and affairs go on in the one right way. He could tolerate neither creatures in ragged clothes, nor children ...
— Forsyte Saga • John Galsworthy
... children of the Church. Thus Bellarmino writes to Cardinal Sirleto, suggesting a doubt whether it is obligatory to adhere to the letter of the Tridentine decree upon the Vulgate.[137] Is it rational, he asks, to maintain that every sentence in the Latin text is impeccable? Must we reject those readings in the Hebrew and the Greek, which elucidate the meaning of the Scriptures, in cases where Jerome has followed a different and possibly a corrupt authority? Would it not be more sensible to regard the Vulgate as the sole ...
— Renaissance in Italy, Volumes 1 and 2 - The Catholic Reaction • John Addington Symonds
... Aragon, Queen of England, quite in the spirit of the Enchiridion, save for a certain diffuseness betraying old age. Later follows De vidua Christiana, The Christian Widow, for Mary of Hungary, which is as impeccable but less interesting. ...
— Erasmus and the Age of Reformation • Johan Huizinga
... him Russian literary art reached its climax, and the art of the modern novel as well. He is not only the greatest master of prose style that Russia has ever produced; he is the only Russian who has shown genius in Construction. Perhaps no novels in any language have shown the impeccable beauty of form attained in the works of Turgenev. George Moore queries, "Is not Turgenev the greatest artist that has ...
— Essays on Russian Novelists • William Lyon Phelps
... and his partisans were at least as resourceful as their opponents. The Cretan had never been able to bear contradiction. If his greatness had created him {45} many enemies, his pettiness had created him more. His tone of prophetic and impeccable omniscience was vexatious at all times, but particularly galling at this agitated period. It was now his constant cry that the situation called for the work of a statesman and not of an international lawyer or strategist. There were times when he declaimed this thesis ...
— Greece and the Allies 1914-1922 • G. F. Abbott
... till the previous evening I had never suspected it to be other than a man. It was dressed in black; it had the very aspect of life. I could follow the creases in the black coat, the direction of the nap of the silk hat. How well by this time I knew the faultless black coat and that impeccable hat! Yet it seemed that I could not examine them too closely. I pierced them with the intensity of my fascinated glance. Yes, I pierced them, for, showing faintly through the coat, I could discern the outline ...
— The Haunters & The Haunted - Ghost Stories And Tales Of The Supernatural • Various
... misplacing of letters, but not in itself a proof of inability to express. Great writers have often misspelled; and the letters which some of our capable business men write when the stenographer fails to come back after lunch are by no means impeccable. Other accusations refer to a childish vagueness of expression—due to the fact that the American undergraduate is often a child intellectually rather than to any defects in composition per se. But it is a waste of time ...
— College Teaching - Studies in Methods of Teaching in the College • Paul Klapper
... perhaps, we have examples. In its highest aspect that 'simplest theology' of Australia is free from the faults of popular theology in Greece. The God discourages sin, though, in myth, he is far from impeccable. He is almost too revered to be named (except in mythology) and is not to be represented by idols. He is not moved by sacrifice; he has not the chance; like Death in Greece, 'he only, of all Gods, loves not gifts.' Thus the status of theology does not correspond to ...
— The Making of Religion • Andrew Lang
... levelled floor half brown, half blue under the enormous dome of the sky. Corresponding in their insignificance to the islets of the sea, two small clumps of trees, one on each side of the only fault in the impeccable joint, marked the mouth of the river Meinam we had just left on the first preparatory stage of our homeward journey; and, far back on the inland level, a larger and loftier mass, the grove surrounding the great Paknam pagoda, ...
— 'Twixt Land & Sea • Joseph Conrad
... discover a siren who appeared to be French and yet was not French, and who aroused any plausible suspicion that she dwelt in the central web of German intrigue. Madame began to think that for once the impeccable Dawson had despatched her upon a wild goose chase, and Rust became convinced that Froissart's vivid longing to score off the detested Dawson had misled him in the selection of the means to bring about this much-desired consummation. They told ...
— The Lost Naval Papers • Bennet Copplestone
... man. To be sure, he took a glass of something occasionally, but he thoroughly understood himself at the time. He took it to be companionable, that was all. Therefore, in view of what happened to him on one unforgetable night, it is well to know that Hawkins bore an impeccable reputation for sobriety. Likewise, his veracity never had been ...
— Her Weight in Gold • George Barr McCutcheon
... terribly well. It would be only another case of man's pursuing, promising—what had they promised in the past? And after all, he thought recklessly, what did the private honor of his testifying yes or no amount to anyway? What moral conceit! To save his own impeccable soul by denying a woman the one consolation that would ...
— Old Crow • Alice Brown
... Save Mme. Patti we have heard no Zerlina comparable with Mme. Sembrich, and Mme. Nilsson's singing of the airs, "Ah, che mi dice mai," and "Mi tradi quell' alma ingrata" lingers in my memory as an impeccable exemplification of the true classic style. The performance suffered shipwreck, however, in the famous first finale, because of the untunefulness of the orchestra, and the incapacity of the enlisted stage bands. In "Mefistofele," on December ...
— Chapters of Opera • Henry Edward Krehbiel
... much as the spacious amplitude of the whole prospect. In England we think something of a view of ten miles. Conceive, here, a grandiose valley wider than from Dover to Calais, filled with an atmosphere of such impeccable clarity that there are moments when one thinks to see every stone and every bush on the mountains yonder, thirty miles distant. And the cloud-effects, towards sunset, are such as would inspire the brush of Turner or Claude Lorraine. ...
— Old Calabria • Norman Douglas
... believe that German ladies admire the shocking garments in which their servants will come to the door and wait at table. But though these clothes are sloppy looking and unsuitable, they are never ragged; and the girl who puts on an impossible tie and blouse will also wear an impeccable long white apron with an embroidered monogram you can see across the room. In most towns servants go shopping or to market with a large basket and an umbrella. They do not consider a hat or a stuff gown necessary, for they are not ...
— Home Life in Germany • Mrs. Alfred Sidgwick
... a man. For a man there is always present the chance of winning a vast fortune and the power that it brings; but it can seldom come to a woman except through marriage. It ill became him to be self-righteous, for his life had not been impeccable— ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker
... psychological mystery not to be solved by the cold empirical methods which could be employed in the solution of other problems. I must ask you to bear this in mind when judging Lady Auriol. She had once fancied herself in love with an Italian poet, an Antinous-like young man of impeccable manners, boasting an authentic pedigree which lost itself in the wolf that suckled Romulus and Remus. None of your vagabond ballad-mongers. A guest when she first met him of the Italian Ambassador. To him, Prince ...
— The Mountebank • William J. Locke
... Within the impeccable orderliness of the bedroom was silence; and beyond was the vast Sunday afternoon silence of the district, producing the sensation of surcease, re-creating the impressive illusion of religion even out of the brutish irreligion that was bewailed from pulpits to empty pews in all the ...
— The Price of Love • Arnold Bennett
... wrapped in a chinchilla cloak, caught about her with a grace Esther felt she could never emulate, even granting the chinchilla cloak. There was a revelation of apple-green and silver beneath, of white skin, pearls, and the flash of an immense diamond brooch. Held high gleamed the impeccable golden head, one of those flawless marvels of our time. Therese looked radiant, younger than Esther had yet seen her. Her grey eyes, rayed round with black lashes, shone like stars. There was a sort of cold purity about her ...
— Juggernaut • Alice Campbell
... profession at that period of the highest honor, and one that led to preferment, not only in religious circles, but in the world of society. At that time, conventual and monastic dignitaries occupied a prominent place in the formation of public and private manners and customs, and if not regarded impeccable, their opinions were always considered valuable in state matters of the greatest moment, even the security of thrones, the welfare and peace of nations sometimes depending upon their wisdom, ...
— Life, Letters, and Epicurean Philosophy of Ninon de L'Enclos, - the Celebrated Beauty of the Seventeenth Century • Robinson [and] Overton, ed. and translation.
... proportioned to his capacity to begin life with, what certainty is there that the rules of strict right will be followed? that wrong will not often be done, both voluntarily and involuntarily? Are your chiefs to be infallible and impeccable? Still the movement interested me, and many of its principles took firm hold of me and held me for years in a species of mental thraldom; insomuch that I found it difficult, if not impossible, either to refute them or to harmonize ...
— Library Of The World's Best Literature, Ancient And Modern, Vol 6 • Various
... rise to all sorts of difficult situations, with Spaniards, with serpents, with dangerous bridges, with rafts on rivers and so forth. Dated 1853 this must be one of Kingston's earliest books, and certainly one of the earliest with this theme: the style is impeccable. This edition is probably some years later, since there is an inscription in the version I used dated 1900, and it might have been tidied ...
— Manco, the Peruvian Chief - An Englishman's Adventures in the Country of the Incas • W.H.G. Kingston
... put it, "to leave out any facts which spoil the political picture of the Revolution they chose to paint for our edification; a ferocious, blood-shot tyrant on the one side, and on the other a compact band of 'Fathers,' downtrodden and martyred, yet with impeccable linen and ...
— Washington's Birthday • Various
... audience. The average auditor is moved mainly by the emotional content of a sentence spoken on the stage, and pays very little attention to the form of words in which the meaning is set forth. At Hamlet's line, "Absent thee from felicity a while"—which Matthew Arnold, with impeccable taste, selected as one of his touchstones of literary style—the thing that really moves the audience in the theatre is not the perfectness of the phrase but the pathos of Hamlet's plea for his best friend to outlive him and explain his motives to a ...
— The Theory of the Theatre • Clayton Hamilton
... as it often is interesting. But thousands of them were muttering to one another and reading with envy the literature of woman's revolt in other lands. When one of their own sex rose, a woman of the highest intelligence and an impeccable style, who, although she signed herself Gisela Doering, was said to be a rebellious member of the Prussian aristocracy, their own vague protests slowly crystallized and they grew to look upon her as a leader, who one day would ...
— The White Morning • Gertrude Atherton
... indeed, of habits and tastes too intellectual for mere vulgar debauchery." And as to the "alleged 'harems,'" the "Paphian girls," there were only one or two, says Moore, "among the ordinary menials." But, even so, the "wassailers" were not impeccable, and it is best to leave the story, fact or fable, ...
— The Works of Lord Byron, Volume 2 • George Gordon Byron
... aesthetic, above all conserving his own distinct, singular personality ... is but to repeat what has been said many times already. All these judgments are confirmed by his latest book, wherein may be noted the same impeccable correctness of language, the same firm grasp upon form, the same abundancy, force and originality of thought that make of him the only thinker among our writers of fiction, the same ...
— Brazilian Tales • Joaquim Maria Machado de Assis
... Moreover, it is a curious fact that men are better pleased at being trusted by a clever woman who has had many adventures than when an angel of virtue places her good name under their protection: there is less irksome responsibility in playing confidant to Lady Jezebel than in being guardian to the impeccable Lucretia. ...
— The White Sister • F. Marion Crawford
... Dame was the sobriquet which Lord Francis had invented to conceal—or to display—his courteous disdain of the ideals represented by Mrs. Sardis, that pillar long established, that stately dowager, that impeccable doyenne of serious English fiction. Mrs. Sardis had captured two continents. Her novels, dealing with all the profound problems of the age, were read by philosophers and politicians, and one of them had reached ...
— Sacred And Profane Love • E. Arnold Bennett
... extraordinarily solemn set of folks. The Athenians thought that the very gods must admire the rectitude of Phocion and Aristides; and those gentlemen themselves were apparently of much the same opinion. Cato's veracity was so impeccable that the extremest incredulity a Roman could express of anything was to say, 'I would not believe it even if Cato had told me.' Good was good, and bad was bad, for these people. Hypocrisy, which church-Christianity brought in, hardly existed; the naturalistic ...
— A Pluralistic Universe - Hibbert Lectures at Manchester College on the - Present Situation in Philosophy • William James
... thing to suggest that those highly respectable pseudo-spinsters, the Sister Arts, supposedly cozily immune in their polygamous chastity (for every suitor for favor is popularly expected to be wedded to his particular art)—I repeat, it is very dreadful to suggest that these impeccable old ladies are in danger ...
— Iole • Robert W. Chambers
... admired in him was his keenness and his impeccable unworldliness. He was perfectly independent of public opinion and as free from rancour as he was from fear, malice or acerbity. He never said a stupid thing. Some people would say that this is not a compliment, but the amount of silly things that I ...
— Margot Asquith, An Autobiography: Volumes I & II • Margot Asquith
... your account, and charges it to the Superior. So that Saint Jerome well exclaimed, in celebrating the advantages of obedience, 'Oh, sovereign liberty! Oh, holy and blessed security by which one become almost impeccable!' ...
— The Varieties of Religious Experience • William James
... memories of Horeb, Sinai and the forty years, Showed only when the daylight fell Level across the face Of Brennbaum "The Impeccable". ...
— Hugh Selwyn Mauberley • Ezra Pound
... Dominic Iglesias at the other, with the two absurd and exquisite little dogs in between. And the lady chattered. Her voice was sweet and full, with plaintive tones and turns of laughter in it; and, though the vowel sounds were not wholly impeccable, having the tang in them common to the speech of the cockney bred, the aspirates happily remained inviolate. And Iglesias listened, still with a curious indifference, as, sitting in the body of the house, he might have listened to patter from the other side of the footlights. ...
— The Far Horizon • Lucas Malet
... gave his Historical Recitals, refused to accept him as an interpreter. His touch was too rich and full, his tone too big. Chopin did not care for Liszt's reading of his music, though he trembled when he heard him thunder in the Eroica Polonaise. I doubt if even Karl Tausig, impeccable artist, unapproachable Chopin player, would have pleased the composer. Chopin played as his moods prompted, and his playing was the despair and delight of his hearers. Rubinstein did all sorts of wonderful things with the coda of the Barcarolle—such a page!—but Sir ...
— Chopin: The Man and His Music • James Huneker
... talk, which if I attempted to set it down here, would only result in my being treated to the same humiliating process as the excellent M. M. with his "choicest paragraphs." It was highly instructive—the contrast between that impeccable personality which he displays at home and his present state. I wish his wife and two little girls could have caught a few shreds of what he said—just a few shreds; they would have seen a new ...
— Alone • Norman Douglas
... and the fire-stitch ruffler, and obviously had a fling at the binder and a turn at the tucker. What she did to the tension-spring heaven only knows. And my brand-new machine is on the blink. And my meek-eyed little Poppsy isn't as impeccable as the world about ...
— The Prairie Child • Arthur Stringer
... endow this excellent Florian. He is a delightful creature,—a good artist—unique in his own particular line,—but you think him something much greater than even artist or man—a sort of god, (though the gods themselves were not impeccable) only fit to be idealised. Now, I am not a believer in the gods,—but of course it is delightful to me to meet ...
— The Master-Christian • Marie Corelli
... insatiable thirst for action and for renown was to be the source of Napoleon's strength and also of his weakness. But only a few clear-sighted men made these reflections when the Empire began. The masses, with their easy optimism, looked upon the new Emperor as an infallibly impeccable being, and thought that since he had not yet been beaten, he was invincible. Josephine indulged in no such illusions; she knew the defects in her husband's character, and dreaded the future for him as well as for herself. Singularly enough ...
— The Court of the Empress Josephine • Imbert de Saint-Amand
... tea-room, but a German woman marched up to the chair on which I had laid my daily newspaper, and ordered me to take it off, as she must have my chair! She was stout and ugly, and had a way of doing her hair which, as a writer says, "alone would have proved impeccable virtue in the face of incriminating circumstantial evidence." For all their "Kultur" Germans are gross, and to the last degree inartistic. Their "nouveau art" is repulsive; their dressing outrageously ugly, and their cooking atrocious. I have watched them here year after year tramping up and ...
— A War-time Journal, Germany 1914 and German Travel Notes • Harriet Julia Jephson
... the kind of a story that makes one grow younger, more innocent, more light-hearted. Its literary quality is impeccable. It is not every day that such a heroine blossoms into even temporary existence, and the very name of the story bears a ...
— The Passenger from Calais • Arthur Griffiths
... not wholly unpleasant to think the worst of his private life; but the idea of his having brought financial dishonour on his wife's family was too shocking to be enjoyed even by his enemies. Archer's New York tolerated hypocrisy in private relations; but in business matters it exacted a limpid and impeccable honesty. It was a long time since any well-known banker had failed discreditably; but every one remembered the social extinction visited on the heads of the firm when the last event of the kind had happened. It would be the same with the Beauforts, ...
— The Age of Innocence • Edith Wharton
... afraid of the effort needed to come to a decision and choose. What slothful cowardice is here! All whitewashed over with a comfortable faith in the goodness of things, which will, we think, settle themselves. And we continue to look on, and glorify the impeccable course of Destiny, paying court to ...
— Clerambault - The Story Of An Independent Spirit During The War • Rolland, Romain
... or Shakespeare, the thinker, speaking through Falstaff's mouth. Yet to criticize Falstaff is difficult, and if easy, it would still be an offence to those capable of gratitude. I would as soon find fault with Ariel's most exquisite lyric, or the impeccable loveliness of the "Dove Sono," as weigh the rich words of the Lord of Comedy in small balances of reason. But such considerations must not divert me from my purpose; I have undertaken to discover ...
— The Man Shakespeare • Frank Harris
... its most positive defenders are beginning to hesitate in their judgments. Ancient evidence proves to be far from impeccable. The faith in dogmas once held sacred is shaken. The latest literature of the Revolution betrays these uncertainties. Having related, men are more and more chary of ...
— The Psychology of Revolution • Gustave le Bon
... found that too stiff and bald a medium for a satire on the social crudity of Norway. In writing satire, it is all-important that the form should be adequate, and at this time Ibsen had not reached the impeccable perfection of his later colloquial prose. He started Love's Comedy, therefore, anew, and he wrote it as a pamphlet in rhyme. It is not certain that he had any very definite idea of the line which his attack should take. He was very poor, very sore, very ...
— Henrik Ibsen • Edmund Gosse
... different in aim and method from his own. I do not remember another case in which he dispraised any book. I do remember his observations on a novel then and now very popular, but not to his taste, nor, indeed, by any means, impeccable, though stirring; his censure and praise were both just. From his occasional fine efforts, the author of this romance, he said, should have cleared away acres of brushwood, of ineffectual matter. It was so, no doubt, as the writer spoken of would be ready to acknowledge. But he was an improviser ...
— Adventures among Books • Andrew Lang
... assumption of Maitland's ironic drawl was impeccable. O'Hagan no more questioned it than he questioned his own sanity. "Here, send this wire at once, please; and," pressing a coin into the ready palm, "keep the change. I was hurried and didn't bother to call you. And, I say, ...
— The Brass Bowl • Louis Joseph Vance
... dedicated by a growing tradition to this or that national expression, the Ninety-ninth Regiment, to a flare of music that made the heart leap out against its walls, turned into a scene thus swept clean for it, a wave of olive drab, impeccable row after impeccable row of scissors-like legs advancing. Recruits, raw if you will, but already caparisoned, sniffing and scenting, as it were, for the great ...
— Americans All - Stories of American Life of To-Day • Various
... logic of animal maternity, the impeccable dictates of instinct, with the hesitations, the gropings, the uncertainties, the errors and tragic failures of human maternity, when it seeks to replace the unerring commands of instinct by the clumsy ...
— Fabre, Poet of Science • Dr. G.V. (C.V.) Legros
... future, forbid that that work of elevation and progress should be, as in all the other instances, a work of creation. To create would be to supersede. God's work of elevation now is the work of fitting and preparing peccable, imperfect man for a perfect, impeccable, future state. God's seventh day's work is the work of Redemption. And, read in this light, his reason vouchsafed to man for the institution of the Sabbath is found to yield a meaning of peculiar breadth and emphasis. God, it seems ...
— The Testimony of the Rocks - or, Geology in Its Bearings on the Two Theologies, Natural and Revealed • Hugh Miller
... Parson Adams—none certainly which we regard with equal admiration. Allworthy, excellent compound of Lyttelton and Allen though he be, remains always a little stiff and cold in comparison with the "veined humanity" around him. We feel of him, as of another impeccable personage, that we "cannot breathe in that fine air, That pure severity of perfect light," and that we want the "warmth and colour" which we find in Adams. Allworthy is a type rather than a character—a fault which also seems to apply ...
— Fielding - (English Men of Letters Series) • Austin Dobson
... Lys dans la vallee, and who seems to have exercised an excellent influence on him in matters of taste till her death in 1836; the marquise de Castries, who took him up for a time and dropped him, and who has been supposed to have been his model for his less impeccable ladies of fashion; and lastly, the Polish-Russian countess Evelina Hanska, who after addressing, as l'Etrangere, a letter to him as early as 1832, became his idol, rarely seen but constantly corresponded with, for the last eighteen years, and his wife for the last ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 3, Part 1, Slice 2 - "Baconthorpe" to "Bankruptcy" • Various
... vote against him—he transacts its affairs, he knows its secrets—he yields its patronage. Ever requested to do a favour—no loan great enough to do him one. Incorruptible, yet versed to a fraction in each man's price; impeccable, yet confidant in each man's foibles; smooth as silk, hard as adamant; impossible to wound, vex, annoy him—but not insensible; thoroughly kind. Dear, dear Alban! nature never polished a finer gentleman out of a solider block of man!" Darrell's voice quivered a ...
— What Will He Do With It, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... was a paradoxer: he brought forward things counter to universal opinion. That Newton was impeccable in every point was the national creed; and failings of temper and conduct would have been utterly disbelieved, if the paradox had not come supported by very unusual evidence. Anybody who impeached Newton on existing evidence might as well have been squaring the circle, for any attention he ...
— A Budget of Paradoxes, Volume I (of II) • Augustus De Morgan
... intellectuality and an ideal of refinement of the most negative description ... the Aunt Errant of Christendom."[80] There is always that blushful shyness, that timorous uncertainty, broken by sudden rages, sudden enunciations of impeccable doctrine, sudden runnings amuck. Formalism is the hall-mark of the national culture, and sins against the one are sins against the other. The American is school-mastered out of gusto, out of joy, out of innocence. He can never fathom William Blake's notion ...
— A Book of Prefaces • H. L. Mencken
... beginning to have been indifferent and not to have taken much interest one way or another: the court, a hundred men and more with all their hangers-on, the cleverest men in France, one more distinguished and impeccable than the others: the stern ring of the Englishmen outside keeping an eye upon the tedious suit and all its convolutions: these all appear before us, surrounding as with bands of iron the young lonely victim in the donjon, who submitting to every indignity, and deprived ...
— Jeanne d'Arc - Her Life And Death • Mrs.(Margaret) Oliphant
... they pleased. Thus was inadvertently demonstrated the invincible security of democratic principles; the masses are always willing to agree that the best shall rule, but insist that they, the multitude, and not any Star Chamber, no matter how impeccable, shall decide who the best are. Herein alone is safety. The masses, of course, are not actuated by motives higher than those of the select few; but their impartiality cannot but be greater, because, assuming that each voter ...
— The History of the United States from 1492 to 1910, Volume 1 • Julian Hawthorne
... Lou reflected, a fifty-year diary, all jammed onto two sheets—a garbled, illegible log of day after day of strife. This day, Lou would be disinherited for the eleventh time, and it would take him perhaps six months of impeccable behavior to regain the promise of a share in the estate. To say nothing of the daybed in the living ...
— The Big Trip Up Yonder • Kurt Vonnegut
... at the swiftness with which her family went to bed. Josephine was usually incorrigibly slow, and Sally May always needed reminding that the devotion bell would ring in two minutes' time. To-night clothes were neatly arranged ready for the morning, rooms were in impeccable order, hair was properly brushed, and there was no mad rush to be at one's own door when ...
— Judy of York Hill • Ethel Hume Patterson Bennett
... we know, a pleasure more refined to be got from looking at a chart than from any impeccable modern map. Maps today are losing their attraction, for they permit of no escape, even to fancy. Maps do not allow us to forget that there are established and well-ordered governments up to the shores of the Arctic Ocean, waiting to restrict, to tax, and to punish us, ...
— London River • H. M. Tomlinson
... of the House of Peril into the wintry night (in a ball-dress), to find—what had apparently escaped Jean's memory for the moment—that her faithful husband's estate is in the immediate neighbourhood. Though Lady TROUBRIDGE'S sense of style is not impeccable she can tell a good tale; her dialogue rings true and her characters are well observed. The trouble with most authors of Society novels is that either they know their subject but can't write, or that they can write but know nothing of their subject. Lady TROUBRIDGE is one of the ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Volume 159, November 24, 1920 • Various
... know why an Omnipotent, Omniscient, Impeccable Deity allows this world to be the Hell it is, even if there be no actual Hell for the souls of his errant Creatures (in spite of the statements of the Chaplain who appears to have exclusive information on the subject, ...
— Driftwood Spars - The Stories of a Man, a Boy, a Woman, and Certain Other People Who - Strangely Met Upon the Sea of Life • Percival Christopher Wren
... confided to you the care of their money," he went on, solemnly. "It was a high, a sacred trust. You should have guarded the door of the treasury even as the cherubim protected the Garden of Eden, and should have turned the flaming sword of impeccable honesty against every one who approached it improperly. Your position as the representative of ...
— The Financier • Theodore Dreiser
... intellectual creativeness which strikes one in turning over his engravings, so many are there of which either the occasion or the conception are altogether trivial when compared with the grandiose aspect of the composition or the impeccable mechanical performance. Duerer's literary remains sufficiently prove his mind to have been constantly exercised upon and around great thoughts, and their influence may be felt in the austerity and intensity of his noblest portraits and other creations. But "great thoughts" ...
— Albert Durer • T. Sturge Moore
... with literary leanings (and the kind is independent of periods) used to drop into his place beyond Temple Bar—for he was a bookseller as well as printer, and printed and sold his own wares—to finger his volumes and have a chat about poor Pamela or the naughty Lovelace or impeccable Grandison. For how, in sooth, could they keep away or avoid talking shop when they were bursting with the ...
— Masters of the English Novel - A Study Of Principles And Personalities • Richard Burton
... play; the watchful manager was in the depths of a box and the poor actress in the glare of the footlights. But she passed, the poor performer—he could see how she always passed; her wig, her paint, her jewels, every mark of her expression impeccable, and her entrance accordingly greeted with the proper round of applause. Such impressions as we thus note for Densher come and go, it must be granted, in very much less time than notation demands; but we may none the less make ...
— The Wings of the Dove, Volume II • Henry James
... is to turn the tables on all this. I myself am impeccable in a real court of equity. My avatar as David Williams was by way of being a superb adventure. I only retired from the harmless imposture lest I might compromise you, and you are so far gone in politics now that the revelation—if it came ...
— Mrs. Warren's Daughter - A Story of the Woman's Movement • Sir Harry Johnston
... believe that Bob, being attacked by an overwhelming force, suddenly bethought him of an engagement, and made a swift run for safety. The impeccable man who has never done a cowardly thing, nor a mean thing, is no kinsman of mine! The saintly hero who has not had his heels run away with his head, and sought safety in a friendly pig-pen—aye! and filled his belly with the husks that the ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great, Volume 7 - Little Journeys to the Homes of Eminent Orators • Elbert Hubbard
... its leaves and trying to extract from them, for my friend's benefit, some symptom of reassurance, some ground for felicitation. This rash challenge had consequences merely dreadful; the wretched volumes, imperturbable and impeccable, with their shyer secrets and their second line of defence, were like a beautiful woman more denuded or a great symphony on a new hearing. There was something quite sinister in the way they stood up to me. I couldn't however be dumb—that was to give the wrong tinge to my disappointment; so that ...
— Embarrassments • Henry James
... gaze with a smile; and in the midst of her resentment she was distinctly aware of the impeccable honesty of his judgment. The peculiar breeziness she had always thought of as "Western" sounded in ...
— Life and Gabriella - The Story of a Woman's Courage • Ellen Glasgow
... natures to come to our attention till the light of God is focused upon them. The grosser manifestations of these sins, egotism, exhibitionism, self-promotion, are strangely tolerated in Christian leaders even in circles of impeccable orthodoxy. They are so much in evidence as actually, for many people, to become identified with the gospel. I trust it is not a cynical observation to say that they appear these days to be a requisite for popularity in some ...
— The Pursuit of God • A. W. Tozer
... hardly in a position that warrants declining to receive me," he announced with an ironically ceremonious bow to Karyl. He was imperturbable and impeccable from his patent-leather pumps to the Legion of ...
— The Lighted Match • Charles Neville Buck
... invariably victorious, and he is thoroughly human. Spenser's Prince began the "blamelessness" which grew more trying still in Tennyson's King. (In the few remarks of this kind made here I am not, I need hardly say, "going back upon" my lifelong estimate of Tennyson as an almost impeccable poet. But an impeccable poet is not necessarily an impeccable plot- and character-monger either ...
— A History of the French Novel, Vol. 1 - From the Beginning to 1800 • George Saintsbury
... case of Lily Bart in The House of Mirth. She goes to pieces on the rocks of that decorum, though she has every advantage of birth except a fortune, and knows the rules of the game perfectly. But she cannot follow them with the impeccable equilibrium which is needful; she has the Aristotelian hero's fatal defect of a single weakness. In that golden game not to go forward is to fall behind. Lily Bart hesitates, oscillates, and is lost. Having left her appointed course, she finds ...
— Contemporary American Novelists (1900-1920) • Carl Van Doren
... artificial orchid that adorned her corsage. He was acutely sensitive of her presence, of the faint persistent odour of her individual perfume, of the beauty and grace of her strong, free-limbed body in its impeccable Paquin gown, of the sheen of her immaculate arms and shoulders and the rich warmth of her face with its alluring, shadowed eyes that seemed to mock him with light, fascinating malice, of the magnetism of her intense, ineluctable vitality diffused as naturally as sunlight. ...
— The Bandbox • Louis Joseph Vance
... King Henry V. On a lower degree only than this final and imperial work we find the two chronicle histories which remain to be classed. In style as in structure they bear witness of a power less perfect, a less impeccable hand. They have less of perceptible instinct, less of vivid and vigorous utterance; the breath of their inspiration is less continuous and less direct, the fashion of their eloquence is more deliberate and more prepense; there is more of study and structure apparent in their speech, and less ...
— A Study of Shakespeare • Algernon Charles Swinburne
... itself had grown distorted. Because of some rooted infirmity of character, he must needs be true to the ideal which least merited truth. He saw this fact throughout his career. He had bowed at foolish shrines. Gertrude—oh yes, Gertrude was impeccable. But just as he was wasting the heart of ardent manhood now, he had wasted the heart of youth and the heart of boyhood The career was all of a piece. Born to be fooled, whether by a village coquette, or his own loftiest, or his own lowest, or by practised ...
— Despair's Last Journey • David Christie Murray
... compare the conscious with the unconscious self we see that the conscious self is often possessed of a very unreliable memory while the unconscious self on the contrary is provided with a marvelous and impeccable memory which registers without our knowledge the smallest events, the least important acts of our existence. Further, it is credulous and accepts with unreasoning docility what it is told. Thus, as ...
— Self Mastery Through Conscious Autosuggestion • Emile Coue
... of Tesuque which has just finished its series of Christmas dances—a four-day festival celebrating with all but impeccable mastery the various identities which have meant so much to them both physically and spiritually—that I would here cite as an example. It is well known that once gesture is organized, it requires but a handful of people to represent multitude; and this lonely handful of redmen ...
— Adventures in the Arts - Informal Chapters on Painters, Vaudeville, and Poets • Marsden Hartley
Copyright © 2024 Free Translator.org
|
|
|
