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More "Secretive" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... without comment upon the incident, but when they had reached the yard, Bowers detached himself from Kate's side and made a rush to the nearest light where, turning his back with a secretive air, he took from the inner pocket of his inside coat the worn and yellowed photograph that Mullendore had recognized in Bowers's wagon. He looked ...
— The Fighting Shepherdess • Caroline Lockhart
... Always we shall seek in vain for the early stages of Lincoln's ideas. His mind will never reveal itself until the moment at which it engages the world. No wonder, in later times, his close associates pronounced him the most secretive of men; that one of the keenest of his observers said that the more you knew of Lincoln, the ...
— Lincoln • Nathaniel Wright Stephenson
... adjoining the Englishmen, was called in. He was an Italian, by name Natale Ripaldi; a dark-skinned man, with very black hair and a bristling black moustache. He wore a long dark cloak of the Inverness order, and, with the slouch hat he carried in his hand, and his downcast, secretive look, he had the rather ...
— The Rome Express • Arthur Griffiths
... sheriffs' posses on the plains. Half-past ten came and still no Loring, and the round of drinks were getting monotonous. Judge Pardee, a bibulous and oracular limb of the law, had been chosen inquisitor-general, with powers to call for all the news that was stowed away in that secretive "knowledge-box" on the shoulders of the Engineer. Gate City had resolved and "'lowed" that a man reputed to know so much should be held up and compelled to part with at least a little. Jimmy Peters, the ...
— A Wounded Name • Charles King
... horseman showed upon the rim of Cold Spring Coulee. For a month he never left the ranch unless business compelled him to do so, and his return was speedy, his eyes anxious until he knew that all was well. After that his confidence returned. He grew more secretive, more self-assured, more at ease with his guilt. He looked the Wishbone men squarely in the eye, and it seldom occurred to him that he was a thief; or if it did, the word was but a synonym for luck, ...
— Lonesome Land • B. M. Bower
... and even Germany, I was interested from the first. And when he went further, and spoke of the Society, it was I who persuaded Dorset to join. Dear man, he is very earnest, but very slow, and very averse to anything at all secretive. I am sure the reflection that he is a member of a secret society, even although it is simply a linking together of the aristocracy of Europe in their own defence, has kept him awake for many ...
— The Yellow Crayon • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... know," said Clemency, and indeed she did not know, but there was something secretive in her manner. Emma set her mouth hard and tossed her head. Curiosity was almost a lust with her. She was always enraged when it was ...
— 'Doc.' Gordon • Mary E. Wilkins-Freeman
... don't know anything about Holton," replied Amzi, who had, in strictest truth, told them nothing of the kind. He experienced the instant regret suffered by secretive persons who watch a long-guarded fact slip away beyond reclamation; but repentance could ...
— Otherwise Phyllis • Meredith Nicholson
... she was secretive with her near acquaintances, she would become greatly communicative with a casual vendor of books, or even a vagrant to whom she had given a cup of tea, that English equivalent for a cup of cold water. She was so fearful of falling behind in sympathy with sinners that she fell into the unusual ...
— Women of the Country • Gertrude Bone
... a cooler moment, I hasten to blab the whole simplicity of it, to blab on Roscoe and the other navigators and the rest of the priesthood, all for fear that I may become even as they, secretive, immodest, and inflated with self-esteem. And I want to say this now: any young fellow with ordinary gray matter, ordinary education, and with the slightest trace of the student-mind, can get the books, and charts, and instruments and teach himself navigation. Now ...
— The Cruise of the Snark • Jack London
... elephant, he wouldn't even have known that babies were called babies. Like all fathers he deceived himself that there was nothing he didn't know about baby-lore. What was very much more surprising, by whispering and looking secretive he managed to impress the animals with his ...
— Christmas Outside of Eden • Coningsby Dawson
... smothering her. No faintest breath of air stirred the piny needles above her, nor ruffled the surface of the river, whose black waters, far below, flowed broad and deep and silent—smoothly—like a river of oil. Ominously hushed, secretive, it slipped out of the motionless dark. Silently portentous, it faded again into the dark, the mysterious half-dark, where the gradually deepening twilight blended the distance into the enshrouding pall of gloom. Involuntarily the girl shuddered and started nervously at the splash of an ...
— The Gun-Brand • James B. Hendryx
... He was rather secretive and mysterious than blatant or dashing, and this, of course, made him, on the whole, more interesting to women. The fact that he had made a fortune and lived alone in a charming house with nothing but housekeepers, secretaries, telephones, typewriters, ...
— The Limit • Ada Leverson
... Minamoto descent, and an aristocrat to the marrow of his bones. As a soldier he was scarcely inferior to Hideyoshi, whom he once defeated,—but he was much more than a soldier, a far-sighted statesman, an incomparable diplomat, and something of a scholar. Cool, cautious, secretive,—distrustful, yet generous,—stern, yet humane,—by the range and the versatility of his genius he might be not unfavourably contrasted with Julius Caesar. All that Nobunaga and Hideyoshi had wished to do, ...
— Japan: An Attempt at Interpretation • Lafcadio Hearn
... old houses crowding up to and huddled against its foundations had cramped themselves into ledges and boulders like men making their last stand in a mountain battle. The streets were tunnels, with vistas of long, dark stone stairways running up and down into mystery. Here and there above secretive doorways were beautiful carvings set into the thick stone walls, relics of the castle's decorations. At sharp corners were tiny shops with dark interiors, and strange assortments of golden oranges, big pearly onions, ruby beets, and bright ...
— The Guests Of Hercules • C. N. Williamson and A. M. Williamson
... riled; all the more because he was himself the secretive, the dexterous, libertine, adopting every precaution not to be discovered in his "weaknesses." Was it anger or envy that he felt on seeing a couple enough in love with each other to be fearless of gossip and indifferent to danger, to throw prudence to the winds, and flaunt their passion ...
— The Torrent - Entre Naranjos • Vicente Blasco Ibanez
... Her father was pacing up and down, talking forcibly. Ellen heard his hoarse voice. As she approached he ceased talking and his listeners relaxed their attention. Ellen's glance ran over them swiftly—Daggs, with his superb head, like that of a hawk, uncovered to the sun; Colter with his lowered, secretive looks, his sand-gray lean face; Jackson Jorth, her uncle, huge, gaunt, hulking, with white in his black beard and hair, and the fire of a ghoul in his hollow eyes; Tad Jorth, another brother of her father's, younger, red of eye and nose, a ...
— To the Last Man • Zane Grey
... and secretive sort where he could not hope to find intelligent sympathy. This, and some cloudy compromise with his sense of filial dutifulness, will perhaps explain why he passed six years as a student of medicine without any serious purpose of becoming a physician ...
— The Hound of Heaven • Francis Thompson
... almost; they may be nineteen, but neither look it; Kore laughs deep down in his throat, and laughs heartiest when his own jokes amuse the listeners. He is not fashioned in a strong mould, but is an elegant marcher, and light of limb; he may be a clerk in business, but as he is naturally secretive we know nothing of his profession. Kore is also a punster who makes abominable puns; these amuse nobody except, perhaps, himself. Teak, a good fellow, is known to us as Bill Sykes. He has a very pale complexion, and has the most delightful nose in all the world; it is like ...
— The Red Horizon • Patrick MacGill
... intercourse was confined to an accidental greeting in the street. I believe that during all this time my brother played very frequently on the Stradivarius violin, but always alone. Its very possession seemed to have engendered from the first in his mind a secretive tendency which, as I have already observed, was entirely alien to his real disposition. As he had concealed its discovery from his sister, so he had also from his friend, and Mr. Gaskell remained in complete ignorance of the existence of ...
— The Lost Stradivarius • John Meade Falkner
... the coffee, produced sugar and powdered milk, and settled down opposite Barney. He said abruptly, "Have you had any suspicions about the reason for the secretive mumbo jumbo?" ...
— Gone Fishing • James H. Schmitz
... breath as the two stood there facing each other, so sharp was the contrast. The man, the Mongolian, small, weazened, leather-colored, secretive—a strange, complex creature, steeped in all the obscure mystery of the East, nervous, ill at ease; and the girl, the Anglo-Saxon, daughter of the Northmen, huge, blond, big-boned, frank, outspoken, simple of composition, open as the day, bareheaded, her great ropes of sandy hair ...
— Moran of the Lady Letty • Frank Norris
... was spent, compelling them to go through the mush ice at Five Fingers, and the drift ice at Fort Selkirk, and had landed them safely at Dawson almost against their will, the last boat through before the Klondike froze up, with this secretive hang-dog individual who slunk through an unpeopled wilderness, twisting his neck from side to side, as though he already felt the halter there—like a Seven Dials assassin, fearful of arrest. There he sat ...
— Murder Point - A Tale of Keewatin • Coningsby Dawson
... the part. His reputation led one to expect a sort of cross between Uriah Heep and Sherlock Holmes, but there was nothing secretive or insinuating about his appearance. He was a bluff and hearty man of middle age, rather heavy-set, fresh-faced and clean-shaven, and with very bright blue eyes—evidently a man with a good digestion and a comfortable conscience. Had I met him on Broadway, I should have taken him for a ripe and ...
— The Mystery Of The Boule Cabinet - A Detective Story • Burton Egbert Stevenson
... Stewart. Her mind whirled about him and his life. She saw him drunk, brutal; she saw him abandoned, lost. Then out of the picture she had of him thus slowly grew one of a different man—weak, sick, changed by shock, growing strong, strangely, spiritually altered, silent, lonely like an eagle, secretive, tireless, faithful, soft as a woman, hard as iron to endure, and at the ...
— The Light of Western Stars • Zane Grey
... confidence. For example, a murder is committed by an Italian miner. Let us suppose he has killed his "boss," or even the superintendent or owner. He disappears. As the reader known, the Italians are so secretive that it is next to impossible to secure any information—even from the relatives of ...
— Courts and Criminals • Arthur Train
... my subject, there's no telling when I'll stop. But, Jim, I tell you, I'd give years of my life to be able to do what all entomologists are wild to do—study the depths of a termite mound. God! What wouldn't I give for the privilege of shrinking to ant-size, and roaming loose in that secretive-looking mound behind us!" ...
— The Raid on the Termites • Paul Ernst
... honest banker, whose virtue he was inclined to attribute to correct political principles, overlooking the moral delinquencies of other Democratic neighbors. But the old man, through long years of experience with human nature in California, had grown extremely cautious and secretive. Probably no one would ever have been the wiser in regard to his old sweetheart and her sad history except for the escape of Cummins' murderers. And now it was not necessary that any man ...
— Forty-one Thieves - A Tale of California • Angelo Hall
... of the detail of the years preceding those days when he appeared in the streets of Paris seeking health, but seeing often Margry, the "intractable yet kindly keeper" of an important department of French archives, who had in his secretive keeping documents most precious to the uses ...
— The French in the Heart of America • John Finley
... old heart. He saw the faults of Louise clearly, but also appreciated her sweeter qualities. Under his skillful guidance she soon redeemed herself and regained control of her better nature. The girl was not yet perfect, by any means; she was to an extent artificial and secretive, and her thoughtless flirtations were far from wise; but her two cousins and her uncle had come to know and understand her good points. They not only bore patiently with her volatile nature but strove to influence her to ...
— Aunt Jane's Nieces in Society • Edith Van Dyne
... on his conditions, and feign ignorance of all that he does n't tell," she reminded herself. "But fancy his being so secretive!" ...
— The Lady Paramount • Henry Harland
... that Mr. Morris wanted. At first I got the notion that it was something that he wanted to buy and which Mr. Hume refused to sell; but later I changed my mind. There seemed to be more to it than appeared on the top. Both were very secretive about it." ...
— Ashton-Kirk, Investigator • John T. McIntyre
... Mollenhauer, sly and secretive himself, was apparently not at all moved by this unexpected development. At the same time, never having thought of Stener as having any particular executive or financial ability, he was a little stirred and curious. So his treasurer was ...
— The Financier • Theodore Dreiser
... and after pressing a spring, released what appeared to be a secret drawer. From this she lifted out a little packet wrapped in white paper and sealed with red wax, and holding it in her hand she came slowly back to where Anstice stood, made vaguely uncomfortable by her curious, almost secretive manner. ...
— Afterwards • Kathlyn Rhodes
... descent from his seat to the ground was deliberate, even for him; his silent nod to those wide-eyed, loose-jawed old men upon the sidewalk was the very quintessence of secretive dignity, and yet had he taken up his position there on the corner of the uneven boardwalk and cried aloud his sensation, like a bally-hoo advertising the excellence of his own particular side-show, he could not have equaled the ...
— Once to Every Man • Larry Evans
... the cat perched close to her thin face walked across the state to Tarrytown. Several times during the five years after leaving Lem's scow she walked to Tarrytown, returning only when she had seen the little boy, to take up her squatter life in her father's hut. So secretive was she that no one had been taken into her confidence; neither had she interfered with her child in any way. Never once, hitherto, had her senses left her on those long country marches toward the east; but often when she turned ...
— From the Valley of the Missing • Grace Miller White
... has several motives for not letting his subordinate into the knowledge of all his complicated schemes; among them one springing from a moral peculiarity. He is of a strangely-constituted nature, secretive to the last degree—a quality or habit in which he prides himself. It is his delight to practice it whenever the opportunity offers; just as the thief and detective officer take pleasure in their respective callings beyond the mere prize to ...
— The Lone Ranche • Captain Mayne Reid
... December 5, it was evident that the terms of peace would be sharply criticised by both the parties in opposition, the followers of North and of Fox. Shelburne was disliked and distrusted by his colleagues, who considered him secretive and inclined to act alone, and the government soon showed signs of dissolution. Richmond retired from the cabinet in January, 1783, though he kept his office; the next day Keppel resigned the admiralty because he was dissatisfied with the preliminaries, and Carlisle, the lord ...
— The Political History of England - Vol. X. • William Hunt
... now and take on a few drinks. Hunt up an old friend or two and wag your chins. Make it right secretive and confidential and make each one promise faithful not to breathe a syllable to another living soul. That way the news ...
— The Settling of the Sage • Hal G. Evarts
... heard of the death on the morning after it occurred. John Broad, an inarticulate, secretive fellow, had come to the Rectory in quest of the Rector within a few hours of its occurrence. His mother had returned home, he said, unexpectedly, after many years of wanderings in the States; he had not had very much conversation ...
— The Case of Richard Meynell • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... is, I understand, of a very retiring and secretive disposition. In fact, I have had great difficulty in learning anything about him. But at length I have discovered that he receives and answers letters at ...
— The Prophet of Berkeley Square • Robert Hichens
... boss. The others were local men of some position commercially and financially in the town. Sibley did not give any sign that he noticed the three men, but he watched carefully from under the rim of his hat. His imagination, however, read a story of consequence in the secretive vigilance of the three, who evidently thought that, standing far back in the room, ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker
... Vladimir Ulianov, and that's what he called himself. He had proved to be reticent, secretive, deceitful, diligent, and utterly unhuman. His lower lip was shaped as though something dripped from it. Blood, perhaps. His eyes were brown and not entirely unattractive. But God makes the eyes; the mouth is ...
— The Crimson Tide • Robert W. Chambers
... raw-bone he was; and to me, as I casually met his gaze, looked to be obstinate, secretive and small minded. But who can explain those sudden antagonisms that spring ...
— Desert Dust • Edwin L. Sabin
... capable any time of unguessed mystery. Did her frank comradeliness with Grandison token merely frank comradeliness and childhood contacts continued and recrudesced into adult years? or did it hide, in woman's subtler and more secretive ways, a beat of heart and return of feeling that might even out- balance what ...
— On the Makaloa Mat/Island Tales • Jack London
... say that I do not mean by this that the mere addition of blood and normal flesh is what we want, but that their gradual increase will be a visible result of the multitudinous changes in digestive, assimilative, and secretive power in which the whole economy inevitably shares, and of which my relation of cases will be a better statement than any more general one I ...
— Fat and Blood - An Essay on the Treatment of Certain Forms of Neurasthenia and Hysteria • S. Weir Mitchell
... over the squire's injustice, Mrs. Sandal's indifference to every one but Harry, and Charlotte's envy, until they had persuaded themselves that they were the only respectable and intelligent members of the family. Naturally Sophia's nature deteriorated under this isolating process. She grew secretive and suspicious. Her love-affairs assumed a proportion which put her in false relations to all the ...
— The Squire of Sandal-Side - A Pastoral Romance • Amelia Edith Huddleston Barr
... in the city nor during the homeward journey, referred to the "hen" in which he and his friend from Chicago were mutually interested. It was not until nine o'clock that evening, when supper was over and Zoeth, having locked up the store, was with them in the sitting-room, that the hitherto secretive fowl came off ...
— Mary-'Gusta • Joseph C. Lincoln
... she regarded him as an unknown quantity. A man of one idea, extraordinarily concentrated, methodical, abstracted, without friends, no outside interests whatever. That is all she could gather. Silent, yet hardly secretive, he merely gave her the impression that he had nothing he wished to impart. He was not curious about other people, why should they want to know about him? Not by any stretch of imagination could ...
— Juggernaut • Alice Campbell
... shewed the parkland clearly defined, the leafless oaks standing here and there, oaks that of a summer afternoon stood in ponds of shadow, the clumps of hazel, and away to the west the great dip, a little valley haunted by a fern-hidden river, a glen mysterious and secretive, holding in its ...
— The Ghost Girl • H. De Vere Stacpoole
... I never did," answered Marian. "I so love one spot that I have been most secretive about it. I am certain I never went further than to say there was a place on which I would love to build for myself the house of my dreams. I have just about finished getting that home on paper, and I truly have high hopes that I may stand at least a fair chance ...
— Her Father's Daughter • Gene Stratton-Porter
... would not step out of my place without occasion; but I see how much evil has flowed in the past to all of your noble house from that unhappy and secretive fault of reticency, and the papers on which I venture to call your attention are family papers, and all ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition, Vol. XII (of 25) - The Master of Ballantrae • Robert Louis Stevenson
... to the shifts and the sordid disgraces and the lurking defeats of the Divorce Court, when there she was like an empty house only waiting to be retaken into use and possession by him who legally owned her? To one so secretive as Soames the thought of reentry into quiet possession of his own property with nothing given away to the world was intensely alluring. 'No,' he mused, 'I'm glad I went to see that girl. I know now ...
— Forsyte Saga • John Galsworthy
... a great red-tailed hawk has visited the field every afternoon between three and four o'clock, swooping and soaring with the airs of a gentleman adventurer. What he finds there is chiefly conjectured, so secretive are the little people of Naboth's field. Only when leaves fall and the light is low and slant, one sees the long clean flanks of the jackrabbits, leaping like small deer, and of late afternoons little cotton-tails scamper in the runways. But the most one sees of the burrowers, gophers, ...
— The Land of Little Rain • Mary Austin
... This idea was disagreeable to her, and she was reminded again, with pain, of her aunt's secretive habits. Morris, the reader may be informed, had had the tact not to tell her that he sat in her father's study. He had known her but for a few months, and her aunt had known her for fifteen years; and yet he would not have made the mistake of thinking that Catherine would see the ...
— Washington Square • Henry James
... beardless face, with its brilliant inquisitorial dark blue eyes, handsome secretive mouth veiled by no mustache—and boldly assertive chin deeply cleft in the centre—affected Beryl very unpleasantly, as a perplexing disagreeable memory; an uncanny resemblance hovering just beyond the grasp of identification. A feeling of unaccountable repulsion made her shiver, and she breathed ...
— At the Mercy of Tiberius • August Evans Wilson
... to be wondered at that when a soul is in the throes of such experiences as these, it is a time of storm and stress. Yet often the struggle is carried on alone, in silence, for life becomes secretive. The open frankness of childhood is gone, and only to one in close sympathy will thoughts and feelings which sound foundation depths be revealed. It does not at all follow that because there is a physical tie between ...
— The Unfolding Life • Antoinette Abernethy Lamoreaux
... the story from my lips. I found her in her study with three or four of her ladies. Catherine looked pale and heavy-eyed, and there were hard lines about her mouth. It was said she had never smiled since the day of the masque. I for one am certain it was from that day her secretive nature took the dark and devious course that led her to be what she became; but now it was only ...
— Orrain - A Romance • S. Levett-Yeats
... up quickly, but she could not meet his eyes. "She is very secretive, you know, and jealous of the old legends which to her form the sacred history of her beloved country. Suppose you tell me ...
— The Fifth Ace • Douglas Grant
... is secretive," thought Kecskerey. "I know that they are making their palace at Pest habitable. We shall get to ...
— A Hungarian Nabob • Maurus Jokai
... had his way, though Bennett Addenbrooke showed some temper when he was gone, and I myself shared his annoyance to no small extent. I could only tell him that it was in the nature of Raffles to be self-willed and secretive, but that no man of my acquaintance had half his audacity and determination; that I for my part would trust him through and through, and let him gang his own gait every time. More I dared not say, even to ...
— The Amateur Cracksman • E. W. Hornung
... country of compromise goes to pieces at the first cannon-shot A lady's company-smile A superior position was offered her by her being silent And it's one family where the dog is pulled by the collar Arch-devourer Time As if she had never heard him previously enunciate the formula As secretive as they are sensitive Be politic and give her elbow-room for her natural angles Becoming air of appropriation that made it family history Constitutionally discontented Decency's a dirty petticoat in the Garden of Innocence England's the foremost country of the globe Enjoys his luxuries ...
— Quotations from the Works of George Meredith • David Widger
... had appeared in the newspapers regarding a dusty and dirty old house in that part of the Heights in Brooklyn whence all that is fashionable had not yet taken flight, a house of mystery, yet not more mysterious than its owner in his secretive comings and goings in the affairs of men of a generation beyond his time. Further than the facts that he was reputed to be very wealthy and led, in the heart of a great city, what was as nearly like the life of a hermit as possible, I knew little or nothing, "What has ...
— Master Tales of Mystery, Volume 3 • Collected and Arranged by Francis J. Reynolds
... people's notice. It is reached by a narrow, stone-flagged path, crowded in between two houses which block its view from the street. There are four windows in a row on the front facade, all with the curtains drawn. These four blind windows add to the secretive appearance. Over the front steps the yellowing leaves of a lime tree rustled in the wind and ...
— Trapped in 'Black Russia' - Letters June-November 1915 • Ruth Pierce
... young woman, who was going to have a baby, and who was turning over a mattress and making a young man, down-at-heel and dejected, feel it also. So secretive and active and anxious the young woman seemed, so reluctant, slinking, the young man. He was going to marry her because she was having ...
— Women in Love • D. H. Lawrence
... but they are not secretive!" I sneered, flopping our inner shield over flat on the ground. "Come, sit on this, Doctor, and we will lean the outer shield over us, and snuggle in between them as cosy as two oysters! Let them fondly imagine they can shoot us through this ...
— Pharaoh's Broker - Being the Very Remarkable Experiences in Another World of Isidor Werner • Ellsworth Douglass
... waved his hand towards a poster which showed chiefly a toreador hat, a pair of flashing eyes, and a whirl of white draperies—"is engaged or no to the Prince of Sardinia. I find the maiden coy, not to say secretive——" ...
— Swirling Waters • Max Rittenberg
... fact that every fruitful experiment is published, every new discovery of relationships explained. In a sense, scientific research is a triumph over natural instinct, over that mean instinct that makes men secretive. ...
— Euthenics, the science of controllable environment • Ellen H. Richards
... and Hergesheimer and Cabell. For these artists, each in his due place, we have only the most genial respect. But when the passion of our youth is impugned as "idolatry" we feel in our spirit an intense weariness. We feel the pacifism of the wise and secretive mind that remains tacit when its most perfect inward certainties are assailed. One does not argue, for there are certain things not arguable. One shrugs. After all, what human gesture more eloquent (or more satisfying to ...
— Pipefuls • Christopher Morley
... what was in store for her, and all—sometimes scorched Nancy Nelson's mind like a devouring flame. She kept a deal of it to herself; it was making her a morose, secretive girl, instead of the open-hearted, frank character she was meant to be. Nancy's future as a girl and woman ...
— A Little Miss Nobody - Or, With the Girls of Pinewood Hall • Amy Bell Marlowe
... commonness, not to say vulgarity of interest, and the book was certainly unique in one respect, and that was the absolute sincerity of the author with himself. Montaigne is conscious that we are looking over his shoulder, and Rousseau secretive in comparison with him. The very fact of that sincerity of the author with himself argued a certain greatness of character. Dr. Hickes, who attended Pepys at his deathbed, spoke of him as 'this great man,' and said he knew no ...
— Diary of Samuel Pepys, Complete • Samuel Pepys
... and trust which characterized her feelings towards him would soon have ripened into more passionate love, but for the advent into her life of the mysterious hero, who by his personality, his strange, secretive ways, his talk of patriotism and liberty, at once took complete possession ...
— The Nest of the Sparrowhawk • Baroness Orczy
... could not have happened but for her; and yet—and yet Varick again told himself that he could very well have dispensed with Bubbles from his Christmas house party. There was growing up, in his dark, secretive heart, an unreasoning, violent ...
— From Out the Vasty Deep • Mrs. Belloc Lowndes
... in harmony with the implicit confidence which I had observed Oscar to place habitually in Lucilla. It jarred on my experience of his character, which presented him to me as the reverse of a reserved secretive man. His concealment of his identity, when he first came among us, had been a forced concealment—due entirely to his horror of being identified with the hero of the trial. In all the ordinary relations of life, he was open and unreserved to a fault. That he could have a secret ...
— Poor Miss Finch • Wilkie Collins
... as did also the private mansions, which preserved a kind of mystery behind their high-walled gardens and massive double doors. There was one such which I never passed at night without thinking of the Sieur de Maletroit's door. The streets were narrow, tortuous, and secretive, with many blind alleys and dark closes, and it required no great effort of the imagination—especially at night when not a light showed—to call to mind the ambuscades and adventures with the watch which they must have witnessed some centuries before. The very names of the streets—such ...
— Leaves from a Field Note-Book • J. H. Morgan
... querulousness—"Since you arrived we have been talking nothing but generalities and Church matters. Heavens, how sick I am of Church matters! Yet I know you see a change in me. I am sure you do—and you will not say it. Now you never were secretive—you never said one thing and meant another—so speak the truth as you have always done! I AM changed, am ...
— God's Good Man • Marie Corelli
... canopy up. There were two men on the forward deck of the boat, Kellogg and another man who would be Ernst Mallin. A third man came out of the control cabin after the boat was off contragravity. Jack didn't like Mallin. He had a tight, secretive face, with arrogance and bigotry showing underneath. The third man was younger. His face didn't show anything much, but his coat showed a bulge under the left arm. After being introduced by Kellogg, Mallin introduced him as ...
— Little Fuzzy • Henry Beam Piper
... dining-room, and thought how pleasant peace and quietness were. But just when it was time to start for The Hurst in order to talk over the disclosures of the night before with Lucia before the class, and perhaps to frame some secretive policy which would obviate further exposure, he remembered that he had left his cigarette-case (the pretty straw one with the turquoise in the corner) in the drawing-room and went to find it. The window was open, ...
— Queen Lucia • E. F. Benson
... was a bad tool, at once stubborn and secretive, cunning enough to recognise and to resent handling, thickheaded and vain enough to blunder ruinously. And Elmur found at the last and most important moment that for some unexplained reason he had lost the ...
— A Modern Mercenary • Kate Prichard and Hesketh Vernon Hesketh-Prichard
... old dresses at a pinch. Sad expression, as though she had something on her mind. Honest-looking, but I think a trifle inquisitive, seeing how she examined the room and is stealing glances at me. Talks sufficiently, but in a low voice. Fairly intelligent, but not too much so. Might be secretive. Humph!" ...
— The Secret Passage • Fergus Hume
... of disposition, but strangely secretive on certain subjects. For instance, she seldom said anything about her home or relatives. She lived in Villa Park, a small town midway between Westmoreland and Hollyhill. Her father was dead, and, when not at school, she had lived with her mother; these two, ...
— Campfire Girls in the Allegheny Mountains - or, A Christmas Success against Odds • Stella M. Francis
... however—either he hadn't looked at the address, or he had been impatient to see if there were any message for himself, and so on; but Beth was not mollified although she said nothing, and her annoyance made her secretive. She would watch for the postman, and take the letters from him herself, and conceal her own, so that Dan might not even know ...
— The Beth Book - Being a Study of the Life of Elizabeth Caldwell Maclure, a Woman of Genius • Sarah Grand
... said in an appealing tone. I feared that his secretive instincts would get the better of him, and he would delay giving his reasons, out of the pure love of mystification that was inherent in the old fellow's nature. I was too anxious to be patient; ...
— The War Trail - The Hunt of the Wild Horse • Mayne Reid
... it is out one hears the men, in places and then all along, detach themselves from their secretive stillness, get up, and resume the task ...
— Under Fire - The Story of a Squad • Henri Barbusse
... much interested in the optical instruments of a certain Bressieux, then in Paris, who had for two years been chief workman in that line for Descartes. They were anxious to make him a present of some good glass from London, because he was rather secretive about his workmanship, and such a present would go a ...
— The Life of John Milton, Volume 5 (of 7), 1654-1660 • David Masson
... think you were," said Mrs. Belloc. "If I hadn't seen you weren't that kind, I'd not have been so confidential. Not that I'm secretive with anybody. I say and do what I please. Anyone who doesn't like my way or me can take the other side of the street. I didn't come to New York to go in society. ...
— The Price She Paid • David Graham Phillips
... latest years was really an enemy to freedom, in the sense that he was an enemy to that very special and occidental form of freedom which we call Nationalism. The resistance of the Spaniards, for instance, was certainly a popular resistance. It had that peculiar, belated, almost secretive strength with which war is made by the people. It was quite easy for a conqueror to get into Spain; his great difficulty was to get out again. It was one of the paradoxes of history that he who had turned the mob into an army, in defence of its rights ...
— The Crimes of England • G.K. Chesterton
... the four showed any overt sign of being impressed. Phillips knew that the others, like himself, were scrutinizing the old man with cold, secretive stares. They had learned through harsh experience to keep their own counsels. Varret shrugged. "Well, then," he said dryly, "I might as well call the roll. I have been supplied with ...
— This World Must Die! • Horace Brown Fyfe
... curious to me because I am not so reticent now. When I discover anything, if only a new tint in the red sunset, I must publish the fact to all my friends. Is it possible that in my childish reflections I recognized the fact that ours was a secretive atmosphere, where knowledge was for the few, and wisdom was sometimes a ...
— The Promised Land • Mary Antin
... forgotten. The Preventive men were secretly as much on the alert as when the smugglers were most active. They purposely adopted an apparent indifference with the idea of luring the rovers into over-confidence. Each party took into account the possibility of being betrayed. In all secretive illegal societies there are suspects. Jimmy Stone having changed his mode of life, suspicion fell very naturally on him; but though he sometimes darkly hinted at the identity and the secrets of his late allies, he was never known to definitely divulge anything that ...
— Looking Seaward Again • Walter Runciman
... of the curtains that draped the larger part of the octagonal walls. Under the first two that I raised only a blank space of dark wood was visible, but under the third I was surprised to find a small, secretive-looking door. ...
— The House by the Lock • C. N. Williamson
... in the villages which bordered the merchants' trail, from the Yangtze to the Irriwaddi, but Peter's interest was kindled. As he made off in the direction of the most reliable village mule-seller, he decided that the secretive young bridegroom, ...
— Peter the Brazen - A Mystery Story of Modern China • George F. Worts
... have just said that the Jews are an Eastern people. And all Eastern peoples are subtle and secretive. I invariably lose half of my self-importance in Egypt, for instance. There is something in the eye of the meanest fellah which ...
— The Sins of Severac Bablon • Sax Rohmer
... had, with all the rest, been reduced to. She had almost the sense of tracking her young friend as if at a given moment to pounce. She knew she shouldn't pounce, she hadn't come out to pounce; yet she felt her attention secretive, all the same, and her observation scientific. She struck herself as hovering like a spy, applying tests, laying traps, concealing signs. This would last, however, only till she should fairly know what was the matter; and to watch was, after all, meanwhile, a way ...
— The Wings of the Dove, Volume 1 of 2 • Henry James
... any. She is a most secretive person, twiddles us all round her fingers and never lets us know anything until it's done. It is most exasperating. Oh, I say, Kate," added Harry, suddenly, "would you mind dropping ...
— The Man From Glengarry - A Tale Of The Ottawa • Ralph Connor
... still drowsed over his books; where Alan Donn still hunted and fished and golfed, haler at five and fifty than a boy in his early twenties; and where his mother sat and did beautiful broidery, dumbly, inimically, cold as a fish, secretive as a badger, there he would meet the women of the Antrim families, women who knew of the disaster of his marriage, and they would look approvingly at his firm face and smiling, steady eyes, and they would say: "A ...
— The Wind Bloweth • Brian Oswald Donn-Byrne
... experiences of competition, and accepted by business men through contagion and imitation. Certainly the trusts increase. Wherever politics is rigid and hostile to that tendency, there is irritation and struggle, but the agglomeration goes on. Hindered by political conditions, the process becomes secretive and morbid. The trust is not checked, but it is perverted. In 1910 the "American Banker" estimated that there were 1,198 corporations with 8,110 subsidiaries liable to all the penalties of the Sherman Act. Now this concentration must represent a profound impetus ...
— A Preface to Politics • Walter Lippmann
... declared Edna. "I only thought that if she is in any trouble—She's so secretive, you know, Mums. I've tried more than once to get her to tell me what cosmetic she uses for her hands—and she never will own to ...
— In Brief Authority • F. Anstey
... no character but their exceeding shapeliness, and the comely external utterance that they make of their internal comfort. Now the others are, as I have said, both furtive and bedevilled; they are sly and grotesque; they combine their sort of feverish grandeur with their sort of secretive baseness, after the manner of a Charles the Ninth. They are peopled for me with persons of the same fashion. Dwarfs and sinister people in cloaks are about them; and I seem to divine crypts, and, as I said, trap-doors. ...
— The Letters of Robert Louis Stevenson - Volume 1 • Robert Louis Stevenson
... especially those that go mad, like yours!' 'Lor', miss,' said Farmer Hendry, 'he haven't been pastured here for three weeks. I keep him six mile away. There ben't nothing but gentle cows in the home medder.' But I didn't think that you knew, you secretive person! I dare say you planned the whole thing in advance, in order to ...
— A Cathedral Courtship • Kate Douglas Wiggin
... person universally esteemed, both within and without the shop, the surrogate of bedridden Mr. Baines, the unfailing comfort and stand-by of Mrs. Baines, the fount and radiating centre of order and discipline in the shop; a quiet, diffident, secretive, tedious, and obstinate youngish man, absolutely faithful, absolutely efficient in his sphere; without brilliance, without distinction; perhaps rather little-minded, certainly narrow-minded; but ...
— The Old Wives' Tale • Arnold Bennett
... greatest possible esteem for Mrs. Fisher, but he did at times find her a little difficult. She liked him, he was sure, and she was in a fair way, he felt, to become a client, but he feared she would be a headstrong and secretive client. She was certainly secretive, for though he had been skilful and sympathetic for a whole week, she had as yet given him no inkling of what was so ...
— The Enchanted April • Elizabeth von Arnim
... was unable to count the openings she had given him thereto. For one of the frankest of men he had kept his secret, so far as words went, with a remarkable tenacity. Probably the neighbourhood of Mrs. Thornburgh was enough to make the veriest chatterbox secretive. But notwithstanding, no one possessing the clue could live in the same house with him these June days without seeing that the whole man was absorbed, transformed, and that the crisis might be reached at any moment. Even the vicar was eager and watchful, and playing up to his wife in fine style, ...
— Robert Elsmere • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... shoulders. Argument was not his strong point, and, like most men who cannot argue, he was almost impervious to the arguments of others. He recognized the necessity for secrecy—the absolute need of a thousand little secretive precautions and disguises which were intensely disagreeable to him. But he also grumbled at them freely, and whenever he made such objection Karl Steinmetz grew uneasy, as if the question which he disposed of with facile philosophy or humorous ...
— The Sowers • Henry Seton Merriman
... idealize common things. If the same letter is formed differently by the same person this shows love of change. Long loops or endings to the letters indicate that the writer "wears his heart upon his sleeve," or in other words, is trusting, non-secretive, and very fond of company. If the "y" has a specially long finish, this shows affectation, but if the same person is also careless about crossing the "t's," the combination is an unhappy one, as it points to fickleness in work and to affectation. A curved cross to ...
— Disputed Handwriting • Jerome B. Lavay
... has a secret constantly on her mind is bound to become secretive, not to say deceitful in other ways. What is her secret?" she asked abruptly. "Has she negro ...
— Senator North • Gertrude Atherton
... strict ideas of right and wrong. The kleptomaniac is generally recognized as being a well-defined class of the insane. Most of the shop-lifters are women. This is especially a female crime. It is useless to explain why. It is not a daring crime; it is secretive in its nature; it requires more stealth than courage; it especially appeals to women on account of their taste for the finery exhibited at stores. The kleptomaniac, however, is generally a rich or influential woman. She steals something she does not need, and she is ...
— Crime: Its Cause and Treatment • Clarence Darrow
... point the tale would stop abruptly, and it was impossible to find out what men said across the border. The Afghans were always a secretive race, and vastly preferred doing something wicked to saying anything at all. They would be quiet and well-behaved for months, till one night, without word or warning, they would rush a police-post, cut the throats of a constable or two, dash through ...
— The Kipling Reader - Selections from the Books of Rudyard Kipling • Rudyard Kipling
... this instinct of boyhood. But whereas the boy is secretive and reticent about the particular associations his pocket holds, the man will talk ...
— A Tall Ship - On Other Naval Occasions • Sir Lewis Anselm da Costa Ritchie
... yet! by one means or another! I can't change clothes with him as I did with Clara; he's too big, but one way or other I'll save him," said Cap, to herself. She said it to no one else, for the more difficult the enterprise the more determined she was to succeed, and the more secretive she grew ...
— Capitola's Peril - A Sequel to 'The Hidden Hand' • Mrs. E.D.E.N. Southworth
... while Love's Young Dream is yours and Ronald's, dear, take all the joy that it holds for you. The other song is for Salemina and Dr. Gerald, and I only hope they are realising it at this moment—secretive, provoking ...
— Penelope's Irish Experiences • Kate Douglas Wiggin
... Parliament called him Vladimir Ulianov, and that's what he called himself. He had proved to be reticent, secretive, deceitful, diligent, and utterly unhuman. His lower lip was shaped as though something dripped from it. Blood, perhaps. His eyes were brown and not entirely unattractive. But God makes the eyes; the mouth is ...
— The Crimson Tide • Robert W. Chambers
... pauper, and will be made to see that she is one, sooner or later. She has nothing but what he gives her, I know, for I have asked her; but she would not tell me why she separated from her husband. Americans are so absurdly secretive and sensitive! Do you know, she was vexed by the inquiry? A great mistake, as I told her, to get rid of him, unless he was a dangerous brute: men are so useful, and 'grass-widows,' as they say here, are always looked down upon. Did you ever know anything so idle as those ...
— Lippincott's Magazine Of Popular Literature And Science, Old Series, Vol. 36—New Series, Vol. 10, July 1885 • Various
... misdoings, though he registered the knowledge he guessed at for future guidance. It was against Ishmael's nature to be expansive, and if he had been so on that occasion he would probably never have felt so easy with the Parson again. As it was, he began, in his secretive way, to copy Boase at all points that seemed good to him, doing things of his own initiative which he would have rebelled from being told. When the Parson got him a pony at fair-time, Ishmael soon gathered that a gentleman rode without kicking his horse in the ...
— Secret Bread • F. Tennyson Jesse
... newspapers regarding a dusty and dirty old house in that part of the Heights in Brooklyn whence all that is fashionable had not yet taken flight, a house of mystery, yet not more mysterious than its owner in his secretive comings and goings in the affairs of men of a generation beyond his time. Further than the facts that he was reputed to be very wealthy and led, in the heart of a great city, what was as nearly like the life of a hermit ...
— Master Tales of Mystery, Volume 3 • Collected and Arranged by Francis J. Reynolds
... There is that double possibility. But I am inclined to think neither. Women are naturally secretive, and they like to do their own secreting. Why should she hand it over to anyone else? She could trust her own guardianship, but she could not tell what indirect or political influence might be brought to bear upon a business man. Besides, remember that she had resolved to use it within a few days. ...
— The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes • Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
... Pat McCormick. "Mac," with his grim, set face and his silent, secretive habits, fitted perfectly to Peter's conception of a dynamiter. Also "Mac" was Peter's personal enemy; "Mac" had just returned from his organizing trip in the oil fields, and had been denouncing Peter and gossiping ...
— 100%: The Story of a Patriot • Upton Sinclair
... to the overheard conversation. Not that Cleo wanted to be secretive, but because she felt it might be embarrassing ...
— The Girl Scouts at Bellaire - Or Maid Mary's Awakening • Lilian C. McNamara Garis
... indeed, nothing was further from the case. Ozias Lamb's own precepts never went into practice. He was scrupulously honest, and his word was as good as a bond. However, although Ozias had never told a lie in his life, he had perpetrated many subtleties of the truth. He was wily and secretive. "A man ain't a liar because he don't tell all ...
— Jerome, A Poor Man - A Novel • Mary E. Wilkins Freeman
... rising impatiently and crossing the room. He was more than half convinced that Uncle Ben was deceiving him. Either under the veil of his hide-bound simplicity he was an utterly selfish, heartless, secretive man, or else he was telling ...
— Cressy • Bret Harte
... sentimentalist in art than Mr. Abbey had been. He was quiet, undemonstrative, alert, and wholly willing to let the public dictate the course of the establishment. Outwardly he was always calm, urbane, neither communicative nor secretive. I sat behind him during all the years of his divided and undivided directorship, and never failed of a pleasant greeting, no matter what the expression of The Tribune had been on the morning of the day. He accepted congratulations ...
— Chapters of Opera • Henry Edward Krehbiel
... of the man whose knife scar I bear. Whether or not his knife was meant for me, I can not say. Nor have I sufficient proof openly to accuse him, but of this much I am convinced. Themar's presence near the camp of Miss Westfall is, in the face of your peculiar and secretive errand, ...
— Diane of the Green Van • Leona Dalrymple
... notice. It is reached by a narrow, stone-flagged path, crowded in between two houses which block its view from the street. There are four windows in a row on the front facade, all with the curtains drawn. These four blind windows add to the secretive appearance. Over the front steps the yellowing leaves of a lime tree rustled in the wind and detached themselves ...
— Trapped in 'Black Russia' - Letters June-November 1915 • Ruth Pierce
... very instant—perhaps he is reading. He is close by. If I shouted, he might hear...." And yet she was utterly cut off from him. Again, in the late dawn, she saw the same building, pale and clear, but just as secretive and enigmatic as in the night. "He is asleep yet," she thought. "Why did he not call? Is he hurt? Is ...
— Hilda Lessways • Arnold Bennett
... contrary, though she was secretive with her near acquaintances, she would become greatly communicative with a casual vendor of books, or even a vagrant to whom she had given a cup of tea, that English equivalent for a cup of cold water. She was so fearful of falling behind in sympathy with sinners that ...
— Women of the Country • Gertrude Bone
... slightly, "I've forgotten. Some principle of latent heat involved, I believe. Ask Webb. If he could live long enough he'd coax from Nature all her secrets. He's the worst Paul Pry into her affairs that I ever knew. So beware, Amy, unless you are more secretive than Nature, which I cannot believe, since you seem ...
— Nature's Serial Story • E. P. Roe
... From the beginning the Standard Oil had always been a close corporation. Originally it had had only ten stockholders, and this number had gradually grown until, in 1881, there were forty-one. These men had adopted a new and secretive method of combining their increasing possessions into a single ownership. In 1873 the Standard Company had increased its capital stock (originally $1,000,000) to $3,500,000, the new certificates being exchanged for interests in the great New York ...
— The Age of Big Business - Volume 39 in The Chronicles of America Series • Burton J. Hendrick
... "line of talk" came wholly, astonishingly, from one side of his mouth—the left side. As a muscular feat it was a triumph. A deaf person on his right side would not have known he was speaking. The effect was secretive, extraordinarily confidential; enabling him to sell sprinklers, it ought to have helped him to make love, so distinctly personal was it, implying as it did that the individual addressed was alone of all the world worthy of consideration. Among his friends it was regarded ...
— The Crossing • Winston Churchill
... "torquere mero," was a favourite with the mediaeval Arabs. Its effect varies greatly with men's characters, making some open-hearted and communicative, and others more cunning and secretive than in the normal state. So far it is an excellent detection of disposition, and many a man passes off well when sober who has shown himself in liquor a rank snob. Among the lower orders it provokes ...
— Supplemental Nights, Volume 2 • Richard F. Burton
... of a thing, with them big eyes lookin' sorry all the while. I feel sort of drawed to her. But she won't have no truck with me... nor nobody.... She hain't never left nothin' layin' around her room that a body could git any idee about her from. Secretive, I call it." ...
— Youth Challenges • Clarence B Kelland
... out one hears the men, in places and then all along, detach themselves from their secretive stillness, get up, and resume the task ...
— Under Fire - The Story of a Squad • Henri Barbusse
... easy to say which is our finest or most beautiful wild flower, but certainly the most poetic and the best beloved is the arbutus. So early, so lowly, so secretive there in the moss and dry leaves, so fragrant, tinged with the hues of youth and health, so hardy and homelike, it touches the heart ...
— The Wit of a Duck and Other Papers • John Burroughs
... Because of that face he remained in Algiers, bought this house, spent years in restoring it, exactly in Arab style, and making a beautiful garden out of his fifteen or sixteen acres. Whether he ever got to know the owner of the face, history doesn't state: my uncle was as secretive as he was romantic. But odd things have been said. I expect they're still said, behind my back. And they're borne out, I'm bound to confess, by the beauty of the decorations in that part of the house intended for the ladies. Whether it was ever occupied in Uncle ...
— The Golden Silence • C. N. Williamson and A. M. Williamson
... economical of the truth. 'That's his politeness,' says the traveller. 'He does not wish to hurt your feelings. Love him and treat him like a brother, and he'll change.' To treat one of the most secretive of races on a brotherly basis is not very easy, and the natural politeness that enters into a signed and sealed contract and undulates out of it so soon as it does not sufficiently pay is more than embarrassing. It is almost annoying. The want of fixity or commercial honour may ...
— Letters of Travel (1892-1913) • Rudyard Kipling
... untrained years. Slight, straight, strong, full-blooded, she had dreamed her life away in wilful wandering through her dark and sombre kingdom until she was one with it in all its moods; mischievous, secretive, brooding; full of great and awful visions, steeped body and soul in wood-lore. Her home was out of doors, the cabin of Elspeth her port of call for talking and eating. She had not known, she had scarcely seen, a child of her own age until Bles Alwyn had fled from her dancing in the ...
— The Quest of the Silver Fleece - A Novel • W. E. B. Du Bois
... who buy gloves for unfortunate gents. Besides this wide knowledge of the human species, Masie had acquired other information. She had listened to the promulgated wisdom of the 2,999 other girls and had stored it in a brain that was as secretive and wary as that of a Maltese cat. Perhaps nature, foreseeing that she would lack wise counsellors, had mingled the saving ingredient of shrewdness along with her beauty, as she has endowed the silver fox of the priceless fur above the ...
— The Voice of the City • O. Henry
... candidate he most dislikes. So the nimble wire-puller slips in. In Great Britain we do not have Elections any more; we have Rejections. What really happens at a general election is that the party organisations—obscure and secretive conclaves with entirely mysterious funds—appoint about 1,200 men to be our rulers, and all that we, we so-called self-governing people, are permitted to do is, in a muddled, angry way, to strike off the names of about half ...
— An Englishman Looks at the World • H. G. Wells
... following my arrival in the city I had noticed the large house in our rear, and had asked some questions about it. It had a peculiarly secluded and secretive look. The windows were all shuttered and closed, with the exception of the three on the lower floor and two others directly over these. On the top story they were even boarded up, giving to that portion of the house a ...
— The House in the Mist • Anna Katharine Green
... grown so familiar that every eye and ear was on the strain, and finger upon trigger, as tree, shrub, and grassy clump was expected momentarily to develop into a foe. The secretive nature of these people made our position at times more painful and exciting, as we knew that at any moment they might come close to us in the darkness, and almost before the alarm could be given, dash up to the ...
— Mass' George - A Boy's Adventures in the Old Savannah • George Manville Fenn
... look the part. His reputation led one to expect a sort of cross between Uriah Heep and Sherlock Holmes, but there was nothing secretive or insinuating about his appearance. He was a bluff and hearty man of middle age, rather heavy-set, fresh-faced and clean-shaven, and with very bright blue eyes—evidently a man with a good digestion and a comfortable conscience. Had I met him on Broadway, I ...
— The Mystery Of The Boule Cabinet - A Detective Story • Burton Egbert Stevenson
... he said. "He is so secretive. But Mrs. Wellington can't be pleased at having a Navy man masquerading about. Why ...
— Prince or Chauffeur? - A Story of Newport • Lawrence Perry
... of the serenata. She had followed it with an acquaintance from the hotel, and she had seen not only Kitty and Madame d'Estrees, but also—the solitary man in the heavy cloak. She knew quite well that Cliffe was in Venice; though, true to her secretive temper, she had not mentioned ...
— The Marriage of William Ashe • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... Park, a cheerful view beneath the sky of a perfect summer's morning. He turned from the window, and crossing the room opened the door through which the apparition had vanished. A thickly carpeted corridor lay outside, a corridor silent as the hypogeum of the Apis, secretive, gorgeous, with tasseled silk curtains and hanging lamps. Jones judged these lamps to be of silver and worth a thousand dollars apiece. He had read the Arabian Nights when a boy, and like a waft now from the garden of Aladdin came a vague something stirring his senses and disturbing his ...
— The Man Who Lost Himself • H. De Vere Stacpoole
... her dull life at the Court: and there is small doubt but that the friendship and trust which characterized her feelings towards him would soon have ripened into more passionate love, but for the advent into her life of the mysterious hero, who by his personality, his strange, secretive ways, his talk of patriotism and liberty, at once took complete possession of ...
— The Nest of the Sparrowhawk • Baroness Orczy
... watching events from Vienna, had a better perspective than Boston then afforded. Even Mr. Norton, Lowell's dear friend and associate upon the North American Review, thought in 1862 that the President was timid, vacillating, and secretive, and, what now seems a queerer judgment still, that he wrote very poor English. But if the editors of the North American showed a typical Anglo-Saxon reluctance in yielding to the spell of a new political ...
— Modern American Prose Selections • Various
... such modern giants as Dreiser and Hergesheimer and Cabell. For these artists, each in his due place, we have only the most genial respect. But when the passion of our youth is impugned as "idolatry" we feel in our spirit an intense weariness. We feel the pacifism of the wise and secretive mind that remains tacit when its most perfect inward certainties are assailed. One does not argue, for there are certain things not arguable. One shrugs. After all, what human gesture more eloquent (or more satisfying to the performer) than ...
— Pipefuls • Christopher Morley
... answered, as we hustled along in the early morning crowd, "it was only yesterday afternoon that I saw Minturn at his office and he made an appointment with me for this very morning. He was a very secretive man, but he did tell me this much, that he feared his life was in danger and that it was in some way connected with that Pearcy case up in Stratfield, Connecticut, where he has an estate. You have ...
— The War Terror • Arthur B. Reeve
... me to be treated like this, after all the years we have known each other. I wish you would try to cultivate the virtue of frankness. You are far too secretive. Something will really have to be done ...
— Alone • Norman Douglas
... gripping the arm of the chair, like a man holding fast because stranded, and then, just because his corn twinges, or it may be the gout, what execrations, and, dear me, to hear him talk of money, taking out his leather purse and grudging even the smallest silver coin, secretive and suspicious as an old peasant woman with all her lies. Strange paralysis and constriction—marvellous illumination. Serene over it all rides the great full brow, and sometimes asleep or in the quiet spaces of the night you might fancy that ...
— Jacob's Room • Virginia Woolf
... woman, ever the mysterious sex, was capable any time of unguessed mystery. Did her frank comradeliness with Grandison token merely frank comradeliness and childhood contacts continued and recrudesced into adult years? or did it hide, in woman's subtler and more secretive ways, a beat of heart and return of feeling that might even out- balance what ...
— On the Makaloa Mat/Island Tales • Jack London
... a boy of sixteen, very short, in fact almost a dwarf, and, as his name implies, disfigured by a hump. He was sharp, however, and secretive, and, though he could not help understanding the character of the men who employed him, was not likely to betray them. He had a pride in deserving the confidence which he saw was reposed ...
— Rufus and Rose - The Fortunes of Rough and Ready • Horatio Alger, Jr
... lighting his pipe, had shown his face. At the thought of a warm engine-room and the company of his fellow creatures, David's heart leaped with pleasure. He advanced quickly. And then something in the appearance of the tug, something mysterious, secretive, threatening, caused him to halt. No lights showed from her engine-room, cabin, or pilot-house. Her decks were empty. But, as was evidenced by the black smoke that rose from her funnel, she was awake and awake to some purpose. David ...
— The Red Cross Girl • Richard Harding Davis
... misjudge me," says he in a low, hurt tone. "I have often noticed it, yet have failed to understand why it is. I was right, you see, when I told myself last night and this morning that you were harboring unkindly thoughts toward me. You have not been open with me, you have been willfully secretive, and, believe me, that is a mistake. Candor, complete and perfect, is the only great virtue that will steer one clear through all the shoals and rocks of life. Be honest, above board, and, I can assure you, you will never regret it. ...
— April's Lady - A Novel • Margaret Wolfe Hungerford
... returning for an equal length of time to my own country. During that long residence in Germany I naturally met many of its inhabitants, and of as many classes as possible. German women do not tell you the history of their lives the first time you meet them, not by any means; they are naturally secretive and the reverse of frank. But they are human, and when you have won their confidence they will tell you surprising things. The confidences I received were for the most part from girls, and one and all assured me they never ...
— The White Morning • Gertrude Atherton
... breathless. "You take a couple now and a couple more in half an hour if the ache hasn't stopped." "Bless your heart! Come around inside." He was through the door and in the dimly lit little office behind that secretive partition. "And here's something else," he continued. "It's a menthol pencil and you take this cap off—see?—and rub your forehead with it. It'll be a help." She swallowed two of the magic wafers with the aid of water from the ...
— Merton of the Movies • Harry Leon Wilson
... seen you before, have I?" she asked, with a secretive attempt to take a good look ...
— The Slim Princess • George Ade
... esteem for Mrs. Fisher, but he did at times find her a little difficult. She liked him, he was sure, and she was in a fair way, he felt, to become a client, but he feared she would be a headstrong and secretive client. She was certainly secretive, for though he had been skilful and sympathetic for a whole week, she had as yet given him no inkling of what was ...
— The Enchanted April • Elizabeth von Arnim
... noncommittally. He wasn't at all certain by now that he wanted his secretive client to wake up before he'd checked on the contents ...
— The Winds of Time • James H. Schmitz
... sudden querulousness—"Since you arrived we have been talking nothing but generalities and Church matters. Heavens, how sick I am of Church matters! Yet I know you see a change in me. I am sure you do—and you will not say it. Now you never were secretive—you never said one thing and meant another—so speak the truth as you have always done! I AM changed, am ...
— God's Good Man • Marie Corelli
... about his never getting away from business even in the country and pointing at the half dozen telephones on top of the big flat desk with a derisive gesture while detailing to Oliver the fondness that Sargent Piper has for secretive private wires and the absurd precautions he takes to keep them intensely private. "Why he went and had all his special numbers here changed once just because I found out one of them by mistake and called him up on it for a joke—the cryptic ...
— Young People's Pride • Stephen Vincent Benet
... came to know much of many things. They contrived to acquaint her with the secretive peculiarities of the prairie dog, and—when she would listen with more than ordinary attention—they would loose their wonderful imaginations in the hope of continuing the conversation. Then it was that the ...
— The Two-Gun Man • Charles Alden Seltzer
... during the afternoon, and I had not meant to do so. Since our last meeting my position in relation to Miss Jenrys had been changed. I was now in some degree the guardian of her interests, and while I believed in and admired this handsome and secretive stranger guard, and might have entrusted him with a secret all my own, perhaps, my mouth was closed concerning the young lady whom he professed to know yet ...
— Against Odds - A Detective Story • Lawrence L. Lynch
... said Clemency, and indeed she did not know, but there was something secretive in her manner. Emma set her mouth hard and tossed her head. Curiosity was almost a lust with her. She was always enraged when it was excited and ...
— 'Doc.' Gordon • Mary E. Wilkins-Freeman
... his way, though Bennett Addenbrooke showed some temper when he was gone, and I myself shared his annoyance to no small extent. I could only tell him that it was in the nature of Raffles to be self-willed and secretive, but that no man of my acquaintance had half his audacity and determination; that I for my part would trust him through and through, and let him gang his own gait every time. More I dared not say, even to remove ...
— The Amateur Cracksman • E. W. Hornung
... uncomfortable, muggy, unventilated; narrow, cramped; close-mouthed, secretive, reticent, reserved, uncommunicative, taciturn; dense, solid, compact, imporous; near, adjacent, adjoining; intimate, confidential; parsimonious, stingy, penurious niggardly, miserly, illiberal, close-fisted; exact, literal, faithful; intent, ...
— Putnam's Word Book • Louis A. Flemming
... interest you to know that I have wit enough to contrast your secretive manner with Maillot's willingness to talk, and to draw the one ...
— The Paternoster Ruby • Charles Edmonds Walk
... work. He had a remarkable memory for faces and could pierce any disguise, he was as persistent as a ferret, and his knowledge of the underworld of San Francisco was illimitable. But his chief assets were that he looked so little like a detective, and that, so secretive were his methods, his calling was practically unknown. He had set up a cheap restaurant with a gambling room behind at which the police winked, although pretending to raid him now and again. He was a large soft man with pendulous cheeks streaked with red, a predatory ...
— The Avalanche • Gertrude Franklin Horn Atherton
... the silent and secretive sort where he could not hope to find intelligent sympathy. This, and some cloudy compromise with his sense of filial dutifulness, will perhaps explain why he passed six years as a student of medicine ...
— The Hound of Heaven • Francis Thompson
... good as a prime young popcorn-fed elephant, and he'll certainly live high. And just then up rides old Safety First again. So they get silent and mysterious all at once and warn Pete, so Safety will hear it, not to say a word to any one. Pete looks secretive and hostile at the visitor and goes back to his woodpile. Safety naturally says what fool thing have they got into their heads now, and he supposes it's some ...
— Ma Pettengill • Harry Leon Wilson
... head quickly; her deep violet eyes seemed also to leap with a sudden suspicion, and with a half-mechanical, secretive movement, that might have been only a schoolgirl's instinct, her right hand had slipped a paper on which she was scribbling between the leaves of her book. Yet the next moment, even while looking interrogatively at her mother, she withdrew the paper quietly, tore ...
— Susy, A Story of the Plains • Bret Harte
... hope of Sunday ice-cream; while the boys, experiencing some solace in that they were finally out where a person could at least scratch himself if he had to, yet oppressed by the decorous necessities of the day, marched along, furtively planning, behind imperturbably secretive countenances, various means for the later dispersal of ...
— The Conquest of Canaan • Booth Tarkington
... November night that my father again took too much to drink, and, coming home toward morning, lay down and went to sleep in the vestibule between our front-door and the storm-doors; and five days later died of pneumonia...In that era I was accounted an odd boy; given to reading and secretive ways, and, they record, to long silences throughout which my lips would move noiselessly. "Just talking to one of my friends," they tell me I was used to explain; though it was not until my career at King's College that I ...
— The Cords of Vanity • James Branch Cabell et al
... close, descended the stairs and crossing the courtyard, entered St. Honore. I was in a maze what I was to expect from him; and overjoyed as I was at my present deliverance, had a sneaking fear that I might be courting a worse fate in this inquiry; so grim and secretive was my guide's face, and so much did that sombre dress—which gave him somewhat of the character of an inquisitor—add to the weight of his silence. However, when he had crossed St. Honore and entered a lane leading to the river, he halted ...
— In Kings' Byways • Stanley J. Weyman
... saw him drunk, brutal; she saw him abandoned, lost. Then out of the picture she had of him thus slowly grew one of a different man—weak, sick, changed by shock, growing strong, strangely, spiritually altered, silent, lonely like an eagle, secretive, tireless, faithful, soft as a woman, hard as iron to endure, and at the ...
— The Light of Western Stars • Zane Grey
... tossing out the sixty thousand pounds' worth of bonds to Tracy, who was waiting with his three warning lights, failed because of old Blumenfeld's sleeplessness, but it was substituted by a far more secretive yet simple plan—one never even dreamed of by the astute police attached to the Paris, Lyons and Mediterranean Railway. It being daylight at Lyons, ...
— The Golden Face - A Great 'Crook' Romance • William Le Queux
... made it all the more necessary for him to babble when alone. True, in the early days his confidences are innocent enough. Pepys began to write in cipher some time before there was any purpose in it save the common prudence of a secretive man. Having built, however, this secret and solitary fastness, he gradually became more daring. He had discovered a room to the walls of which he dared speak aloud. Here we see the respectable man liberated. He no longer needs to be on his official behaviour, but may play the ...
— The Art of Letters • Robert Lynd
... wizened face screwed up wisely. "A year ago, when he was back from one of those mysterious long excursions he takes in that weirdly different aircraft of his, about which he is so secretive, he told me that he was conducting experiments to prove his belief that the human brain generates electric current, and that the electrical impulses in the brain set up radioactive waves that some ...
— Astounding Stories of Super-Science February 1930 • Various
... were your informants," Anita said. "No one except my father's three closest associates had any possible conception of how much he possessed, even approximately, for he was always secretive and conservative in his dealings. Only to Mr. Mallowe, Mr. Rockamore and Mr. Carlis did he ever divulge his plans to the slightest extent. A bankrupt! My father a bankrupt? The very words seem meaningless to me. Dr. Franklin, there must ...
— The Crevice • William John Burns and Isabel Ostrander
... the open spaces. Sergeants' eyes caught and measured him, appraising his physique. Behind and among them he saw Drayton's, and Reveillaud's, and Stephen's eyes; and young Wadham's eyes, strange and secretive ...
— The Tree of Heaven • May Sinclair
... correct political principles, overlooking the moral delinquencies of other Democratic neighbors. But the old man, through long years of experience with human nature in California, had grown extremely cautious and secretive. Probably no one would ever have been the wiser in regard to his old sweetheart and her sad history except for the escape of Cummins' murderers. And now it was not necessary that any man other ...
— Forty-one Thieves - A Tale of California • Angelo Hall
... remembering with vague amusement his reformatory impulse, went to see her; but he did not talk to Eleanor about the call. By this time there were days when he talked as little as possible to Eleanor about anything,—not because he was secretive—he hated secrecy! "It's next door to lying," he thought, faintly disgusted at himself,—but because she seemed to feel hurt if he was interested in anyone except herself. Maurice had passed the point which had seemed so terrible at Green Hill, where he had called his ...
— The Vehement Flame • Margaret Wade Campbell Deland
... the horizontal section first, it will be seen that the hollow space extends wholly round the toe, and as far back as the commencement of the quarters. In the latter position one is able to observe laminae still in their normal positions and condition. At the toe, however, the horny and secretive laminae are widely separated, and the space between them filled with a yellow, semi-solid material, the remains of the inflammatory exudate and new horn secreted by the keratogenous membrane. The laminae, both horny and sensitive, are greatly enlarged. ...
— Diseases of the Horse's Foot • Harry Caulton Reeks
... anxious curiosity and the same commonness, not to say vulgarity of interest, and the book was certainly unique in one respect, and that was the absolute sincerity of the author with himself. Montaigne is conscious that we are looking over his shoulder, and Rousseau secretive in comparison with him. The very fact of that sincerity of the author with himself argued a certain greatness of character. Dr. Hickes, who attended Pepys at his deathbed, spoke of him as 'this great man,' and said he knew no one who died so greatly. And yet there was ...
— Diary of Samuel Pepys, Complete • Samuel Pepys
... having come down to Cloisterham by a late train, on Christmas Eve, to keep his Christmas appointment with Rosa, paid a darkling visit to the tomb of his lost love, Rosa's mother. Grewgious was very sentimental, but too secretive to pay such a visit by daylight. "A night of memories and sighs" he might "consecrate" to his lost lady love, as Landor did to Rose Aylmer. Grewgious was to have helped Bazzard to eat a turkey on ...
— The Puzzle of Dickens's Last Plot • Andrew Lang
... throat, and laughs heartiest when his own jokes amuse the listeners. He is not fashioned in a strong mould, but is an elegant marcher, and light of limb; he may be a clerk in business, but as he is naturally secretive we know nothing of his profession. Kore is also a punster who makes abominable puns; these amuse nobody except, perhaps, himself. Teak, a good fellow, is known to us as Bill Sykes. He has a very pale complexion, and has the most delightful nose in all the world; it is like a little white ...
— The Red Horizon • Patrick MacGill
... an ordinary, rather clever, secretive child, speaking very little of his feelings, and caring, as he has told me since, very little for anybody except his nurse. "I cared about her in a curious way. I enjoyed the sensation of crying over imaginary evils; and I should not like to say how often in bed at ...
— Memoirs of Arthur Hamilton, B. A. Of Trinity College, Cambridge • Arthur Christopher Benson
... imitation. Certainly the trusts increase. Wherever politics is rigid and hostile to that tendency, there is irritation and struggle, but the agglomeration goes on. Hindered by political conditions, the process becomes secretive and morbid. The trust is not checked, but it is perverted. In 1910 the "American Banker" estimated that there were 1,198 corporations with 8,110 subsidiaries liable to all the penalties of the Sherman Act. Now this concentration must represent a profound ...
— A Preface to Politics • Walter Lippmann
... bridge, hung above a broad river that was a flood of tarnished gold. Thence we looked across to the old buttressed and balconied town of Miranda del Ebro, strange and even startling in its wild setting of white mountains; and as we slowed down in admiration, from a dark secretive tunnel which was the principal street of the place, there seemed to blow out, like wind-driven petals of flowers, a flock of girls in golden yellow, tulip red, and iris blue. Then, as we looked, followed a string of black mules with ...
— The Car of Destiny • C. N. Williamson and A. M. Williamson
... wouldn't be so secretive," Frank said. "You have a straight out and out theory of that night's work, and you won't tell ...
— Boy Scouts in the Canal Zone - The Plot Against Uncle Sam • G. Harvey Ralphson
... "Secretive chaps, you sailors," he observed. "Never mind, I have a pal in the Admiralty who gives me a few hints now and then. I shall go and ...
— The Kingdom of the Blind • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... possibility of a real political revolution, in the narrower sense of the word, in Germany, a revolution that will end the Hohenzollern system, the German dynastic system, altogether, that will democratise Prussia and put an end for ever to that secretive scheming of military aggressions which is the essential quarrel of Europe with Germany. It is the most momentous possibility of our times, because it opens the way to an alternative state of affairs that may supersede the armed ...
— What is Coming? • H. G. Wells
... (unintelligible) 519. irrevealable^, inviolable; confidential; esoteric; not to be spoken of; unmentionable. obreptitious^, furtive, stealthy, feline; skulking &c v.; surreptitious, underhand, hole and corner; sly &c (cunning) 702; secretive, evasive; reserved, reticent, uncommunicative, buttoned up; close, close as wax; taciturn &c 585. Adv. secretly &c adj.; in secret, in private, in one's sleeve, in holes and corners; in the dark &c adj.. januis clausis [Lat.], with closed doors, a huis clos [Fr.]; hugger ...
— Roget's Thesaurus of English Words and Phrases: Body • Roget
... that any poor fellow breaking stones on the road is able to claim relationship with the greatest personages of the island, and is thereby able to exert a serious influence. These complications are aggravated still more by the national temperament, which is proud, secretive, scheming, and vindictive; so it follows that one has to be careful how one walks amid the network of threads stretching from one extremity of ...
— The Nabob • Alphonse Daudet
... heart to wake Madeleine to make her tell me more, though I really ought to pinch her well for being so secretive—besides, my head is so full of my own day that I want to get it all written down, and I shall never have done so unless I begin ...
— The Light of Scarthey • Egerton Castle
... out. It always seemed as though it was something that Mr. Morris wanted. At first I got the notion that it was something that he wanted to buy and which Mr. Hume refused to sell; but later I changed my mind. There seemed to be more to it than appeared on the top. Both were very secretive about it." ...
— Ashton-Kirk, Investigator • John T. McIntyre
... showed any overt sign of being impressed. Phillips knew that the others, like himself, were scrutinizing the old man with cold, secretive stares. They had learned through harsh experience to keep their own counsels. Varret shrugged. "Well, then," he said dryly, "I might as well call the roll. I have been supplied ...
— This World Must Die! • Horace Brown Fyfe
... mingled hope and wary suspicion transfixed Gray's heart. Ward's dark face grinned briefly into his, with a flash of secretive black eyes, and ...
— A World is Born • Leigh Douglass Brackett
... well-kept; and though the evil she was sent to investigate was said to be notorious, she had as yet discovered nothing of it for herself. It seemed to her that she must be either stupid, or that there must be something about her which made Mrs. Vincent more secretive with her than with others; ...
— Marcella • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... complexities, kindred difficulties. We have for instance an imported dynasty, we have a soul-destroying State Church which cramps and poisons the education of our ruling class, we have a people out of touch with a secretive government, and the same traditional contempt for science. We have our Irelands and Polands. Even our kings bear a ...
— Mr. Britling Sees It Through • H. G. Wells
... about to make some passionate rejoinder. Then, all at once, she checked herself, and again Sara was conscious of that curiously secretive expression in her eyes, as ...
— The Hermit of Far End • Margaret Pedler
... was not to be drawn. Much of his success in the paths of crime, both at school and afterwards, was due to his secretive habits. ...
— Tales of St. Austin's • P. G. Wodehouse
... as when the smugglers were most active. They purposely adopted an apparent indifference with the idea of luring the rovers into over-confidence. Each party took into account the possibility of being betrayed. In all secretive illegal societies there are suspects. Jimmy Stone having changed his mode of life, suspicion fell very naturally on him; but though he sometimes darkly hinted at the identity and the secrets of his late allies, ...
— Looking Seaward Again • Walter Runciman
... mention it," said Raven, bending to it where it lurked, with its secretive look, under the lower shelf. He lifted the cover with an involuntary care. He had been there so often when he wanted a handful of cookies and knew, if he clinked the cover, he might hear his father's ...
— Old Crow • Alice Brown
... darling! What's the sense? Pretty soon your uncle will be dead—wretched old man! Then you'll never have to think of him again." Being a childless woman, her red, a trifle cruel mouth would twist itself in the darkness into a small, secretive, maternal smile. ...
— O. Henry Memorial Award Prize Stories of 1920 • Various
... But his studies had by no means been confined to the one theme. History had also interested him profoundly. He had published a work on the old houses of England. The Priory figured among them. It was not difficult to discover from the conversation of this singular man, whose subtle and secretive instincts were contradicted, at times, by a strange inconsequent frankness, that his genuine feeling for the picturesque was accompanied by an equally strong predilection for the appurtenances of wealth and splendour; his love of great names and estates being ...
— The Daughters of Danaus • Mona Caird
... a very shrewd idea what girls John Thomas had taken out. She went to Nora Purdy. Nora was a tall, rather pale, but well-built girl, with beautiful yellow hair. She was rather secretive. ...
— England, My England • D.H. Lawrence
... heart. He saw the faults of Louise clearly, but also appreciated her sweeter qualities. Under his skillful guidance she soon redeemed herself and regained control of her better nature. The girl was not yet perfect, by any means; she was to an extent artificial and secretive, and her thoughtless flirtations were far from wise; but her two cousins and her uncle had come to know and understand her good points. They not only bore patiently with her volatile nature but strove to influence her to ...
— Aunt Jane's Nieces in Society • Edith Van Dyne
... that I do not mean by this that the mere addition of blood and normal flesh is what we want, but that their gradual increase will be a visible result of the multitudinous changes in digestive, assimilative, and secretive power in which the whole economy inevitably shares, and of which my relation of cases will be a better statement than any more general one I ...
— Fat and Blood - An Essay on the Treatment of Certain Forms of Neurasthenia and Hysteria • S. Weir Mitchell
... of the waves on the seaward bars. The patches of green sky had grown larger, the clouds swept by with the apparent menace of solid, flying objects. The land lay in a low, formless mass on the left. It appeared secretive, a masked place of evil. Its influence reached out and subtly touched John Woolfolk's heart with the premonition of base treacheries. The tormented trees had the sound of Iscah Nicholas sobbing. He must take ...
— Wild Oranges • Joseph Hergesheimer
... the Street one man alone who would have taken exception to this analysis—and he kept his opinion securely locked in his secretive, his very secretive brain. This man was F. Mills ...
— White Ashes • Sidney R. Kennedy and Alden C. Noble
... is a very secretive man. All I know of his affairs I learned from handling his court papers; but I know he has many interests I am entirely ignorant of. For instance, I did not know what brought Dr. Ichi to the office, though he and Smatt were ...
— Fire Mountain - A Thrilling Sea Story • Norman Springer
... whenever a horseman showed upon the rim of Cold Spring Coulee. For a month he never left the ranch unless business compelled him to do so, and his return was speedy, his eyes anxious until he knew that all was well. After that his confidence returned. He grew more secretive, more self-assured, more at ease with his guilt. He looked the Wishbone men squarely in the eye, and it seldom occurred to him that he was a thief; or if it did, the word was but a synonym for luck, with shrewdness ...
— Lonesome Land • B. M. Bower
... which has its advantage, for we always know whither an indiscreet man is heading. His zeal for his master blinds him and makes him rash. It is better, perhaps, than if he were secretive and crafty." ...
— The Historical Nights' Entertainment • Rafael Sabatini
... voyages, where Robin More still drowsed over his books; where Alan Donn still hunted and fished and golfed, haler at five and fifty than a boy in his early twenties; and where his mother sat and did beautiful broidery, dumbly, inimically, cold as a fish, secretive as a badger, there he would meet the women of the Antrim families, women who knew of the disaster of his marriage, and they would look approvingly at his firm face and smiling, steady eyes, and they would say: "A man, thon! He could be a good ...
— The Wind Bloweth • Brian Oswald Donn-Byrne
... sensitive man had committed a trifling offence, and he drove a great spike into the head of the god. A thick-skinned criminal inserted a small tack where it would do the least harm—in the hoof. An honest, or an egotistic penitent drove his nail in where it stands out prominently; while the secretive devotee placed his among a mass of others of long standing and ...
— Men, Women, and Gods - And Other Lectures • Helen H. Gardener
... you I don't know anything about Holton," replied Amzi, who had, in strictest truth, told them nothing of the kind. He experienced the instant regret suffered by secretive persons who watch a long-guarded fact slip away beyond reclamation; but repentance could avail nothing, ...
— Otherwise Phyllis • Meredith Nicholson
... looked at Carlisle, and wondered if she possibly had refused Mr. Canning, and, if so, why Mr. Canning had skipped back just to stay over Sunday and not go near her, and why Cally was so mysterious and secretive all of a sudden. She always told Cally every single thing about her affairs, reporting in detail what was "the most" each man said to her, and always bringing her their letters to read, even Mr. Dudley's, who wrote such perfectly beautiful ones. Cally had always done ...
— V. V.'s Eyes • Henry Sydnor Harrison
... No. 1: "Sociable, scheming, secretive; poor judge of men; lacking seriously in executive ability; decidedly a 'one-man-job' man; does not plan ahead; clannish, narrow-minded; very low intelligence for a foreman. Any organization he builds will be close-mouthed, unreliable, ...
— Analyzing Character • Katherine M. H. Blackford and Arthur Newcomb
... at variance with or unfindable in his published speeches. Of some of them he repeated apposite slices; to others he referred for further enlightenment as to his views on imperial federation. Really he was neither secretive nor newly informative. The Premier of Canada at any time is governed, much as I have endeavored to show how the electors are, by that natural, instinctive course of the general loyal Canadian mind, which constitutes "the situation" and controls Governmental ...
— New York Times Current History; The European War, Vol 2, No. 2, May, 1915 - April-September, 1915 • Various
... monomania. We had two children, twins, whom she worshipped and in whose company she would no doubt have recovered her mental balance and moral health, when, by a stupid accident—a passing carriage—they were killed before her eyes. The poor thing went mad ... with the silent, secretive madness which you imagined. Some time afterwards, when I was appointed to an Algerian station, I brought her to France and put her in the charge of a worthy creature who had nursed me and brought me up. Two years later, I made the acquaintance of the woman who was to become the joy of my life. ...
— The Eight Strokes of the Clock • Maurice Leblanc
... into the church and had to stand back by the door, for as it was, he made a spectacle of himself. My suspicion is"—and here every lady stopped eating and sat up straight—"that the Sawyer girls have lost money. They don't know a thing about business 'n' never did, and Mirandy's too secretive and contrairy ...
— Rebecca of Sunnybrook Farm • Kate Douglas Wiggin
... about their love-making, especially Englishmen. Mostly we regard such things as too sacred to speak about, even to those we trust and love the most. Besides, there is something in the character of the normal Englishman which is reserved and secretive, and the thought of telling about our love-making is utterly repugnant to us. Nevertheless, Edgecumbe told me the story of their conversation that afternoon almost word for word ...
— "The Pomp of Yesterday" • Joseph Hocking
... we passed didn't look like faces descended from smugglers, they seemed so kind and good; but then, of course, smuggling was quite a respectable industry in Sussex, where the secretive formation of the coast clearly showed that Providence had meant it to epict. I love the Sussex downs, I like the Sussex faces, and I admire the Sussex church spires—tall and pointed, covered ...
— Set in Silver • Charles Norris Williamson and Alice Muriel Williamson
... I tell you, I'd give years of my life to be able to do what all entomologists are wild to do—study the depths of a termite mound. God! What wouldn't I give for the privilege of shrinking to ant-size, and roaming loose in that secretive-looking mound behind us!" ...
— The Raid on the Termites • Paul Ernst
... statements advanced by the oldsters. And we had no reply for their argument, or if we had one could not find the language in which to couch it. Besides there was another and a deeper reason. A boy, being what he is, the most sensitive and the most secretive of living creatures regarding his innermost emotions, rarely does bare his real thoughts to his elders, for they, alas, are not young enough to have a fellow feeling, and they are too old and they know too much to ...
— A Plea for Old Cap Collier • Irvin S. Cobb
... this moment caused by a victory won over her Cousin Lisbeth's perversity; she had just wrung from her an avowal she had been hoping for these three years past. However secretive an old maid may be, there is one sentiment which will always avail to make her break her fast from words, and that is her vanity. For the last three years, Hortense, having become very inquisitive on such matters, had pestered her ...
— Poor Relations • Honore de Balzac
... her kimono stripped from her. They were the eyes of the Oriental girl, a creature closer to the animals than we are, lit by instinct more often than by reason, and hiding a soul in its infancy, a repressed, timorous, uncertain thing, spasmodically violent and habitually secretive and aloof. ...
— Kimono • John Paris
... he had already been suspecting, he now accounted proven to him. Aline had been wanting in candour on the subject of her feelings towards M. de La Tour d'Azyr. It was, he supposed, a woman's way to be secretive in such matters, and he must not blame her. Nor could he blame her in his heart for having succumbed to the singular charm of such a man as the Marquis—for not even his hostility could blind him to M. de La Tour d'Azyr's attractions. That she had succumbed was betrayed, ...
— Scaramouche - A Romance of the French Revolution • Rafael Sabatini
... the girl, with the secretive instinct of self-reliance hiding the unhappiness his abrupt question ...
— Susan Lenox: Her Fall and Rise • David Graham Phillips
... fruitless treasure hunt after reading what has here been set down. It was the knowledge of the inevitable consequences that would result from incautious confidence that sealed Barraclough's lips and made his movements on arriving at Southampton so secretive. It is known there was a fog over the Solent on the afternoon in question and that a small brown-sailed boat with a man sitting in the stern put out from the shore and was presently swallowed up in the white tasselled wreaths of mist. That same boat was discovered minus its passenger in the early ...
— Men of Affairs • Roland Pertwee
... a little, but they are not secretive!" I sneered, flopping our inner shield over flat on the ground. "Come, sit on this, Doctor, and we will lean the outer shield over us, and snuggle in between them as cosy as two oysters! Let them fondly imagine they ...
— Pharaoh's Broker - Being the Very Remarkable Experiences in Another World of Isidor Werner • Ellsworth Douglass
... been rather cleverly managed. The only regrettable thing will be the death of two—two brilliant detectives. It may interest you to know that you will be found dead—shot—which will account for my having waited for you in vain at Whiteladies to-night. You have helped me greatly by being secretive to-day and not arriving here until after dark. Your death will be a nine days' wonder, but it will be a mystery which will ...
— The Master Detective - Being Some Further Investigations of Christopher Quarles • Percy James Brebner
... Indian River to the Yukon, a sparrow nests. Yet one can hardly associate sparrows with marshes, for they seem out of place in houseless, treeless, half-submerged stretches. These are the haunts of the shyer, more secretive birds. Here the ducks, rails, bitterns, coots,—birds that can wade and swim, eat frogs and crabs,—seem naturally at home. The sparrows are perchers, grain-eaters, free-fliers, and singers; and they, of all birds, are the friends and neighbors of man. This is no place for them. The effect ...
— Roof and Meadow • Dallas Lore Sharp
... know how to answer you, because, as you know, Marion is so silent and secretive. I never could understand the girl. To be candid, Darrell dear, I never could understand why you should care for her, and I never thought she cared for you ...
— At the Time Appointed • A. Maynard Barbour
... was; and to me, as I casually met his gaze, looked to be obstinate, secretive and small minded. But who can explain those sudden antagonisms that ...
— Desert Dust • Edwin L. Sabin
... the homeward journey, referred to the "hen" in which he and his friend from Chicago were mutually interested. It was not until nine o'clock that evening, when supper was over and Zoeth, having locked up the store, was with them in the sitting-room, that the hitherto secretive fowl came ...
— Mary-'Gusta • Joseph C. Lincoln
... quite ejaculated the word. "She always has. That's her abominable secretive way. But he! T. Tembarom with something up his sleeve! One can't ...
— T. Tembarom • Frances Hodgson Burnett
... danger in ordinary life of any such "block" as this. But there is very great danger of the pore being deprived of its secretive power, and of its power to open its mouth when that is so much wanted. Warm olive oil sets millions of pores to full work sometimes in a ...
— Papers on Health • John Kirk
... for myself. It is curious to me because I am not so reticent now. When I discover anything, if only a new tint in the red sunset, I must publish the fact to all my friends. Is it possible that in my childish reflections I recognized the fact that ours was a secretive atmosphere, where knowledge was for the few, and wisdom was sometimes a ...
— The Promised Land • Mary Antin
... this work has been known under the title of Letters to Eugenia. The secretive character of those, however, into whose hands the manuscript at first fell; the singular and yet actual pleasure that is caused generally enough in the minds of all men by the exclusive possession of any object whatever; that kind of torpor, servitude, ...
— Letters to Eugenia - or, a Preservative Against Religious Prejudices • Baron d'Holbach
... women; but there are likewise names of men—jitsumyo; [8] and, oddly enough, a girl's name and a man's are in no instance written together. To judge by all this ideographic testimony, lovers in Japan—or at least in Izumo—are even more secretive than in our Occident. The enamoured youth never writes his own jitsumyo and his sweetheart's yobi-na together; and the family name, or myoji, he seldom ventures to inscribe. If he writes his jitsumyo, then he contents ...
— Glimpses of an Unfamiliar Japan - First Series • Lafcadio Hearn
... was not his strong point, and, like most men who cannot argue, he was almost impervious to the arguments of others. He recognized the necessity for secrecy—the absolute need of a thousand little secretive precautions and disguises which were intensely disagreeable to him. But he also grumbled at them freely, and whenever he made such objection Karl Steinmetz grew uneasy, as if the question which he disposed of with facile philosophy ...
— The Sowers • Henry Seton Merriman
... absolutely frank about its sins, but absolutely secretive about its lapses into goodness, if I may so phrase it. I once knew a young nobleman who went twice to church on Sunday—in the morning and the afternoon. He managed to conceal it for nearly five years, but one day, to his horror, he saw ...
— The Green Carnation • Robert Smythe Hichens
... parents by being so severe with their children, scolding and criticizing them and crushing their childhood, make them secretive and deceitful instead of open and transparent, and estrange them and drive them ...
— Pushing to the Front • Orison Swett Marden
... a harmless patient, but most secretive and passionate. She must have suffered for years from some heavy burden on ...
— The Goose Man • Jacob Wassermann
... letters for a little, but then he began again. He had always some excuse, however—either he hadn't looked at the address, or he had been impatient to see if there were any message for himself, and so on; but Beth was not mollified although she said nothing, and her annoyance made her secretive. She would watch for the postman, and take the letters from him herself, and conceal her own, so that Dan might not even know that she had ...
— The Beth Book - Being a Study of the Life of Elizabeth Caldwell Maclure, a Woman of Genius • Sarah Grand
... doctor walked to the back of the hall to telephone, Katherine, an anxious figure, a secretive one, beckoned Bobby to the library. He went with her, wondering what ...
— The Abandoned Room • Wadsworth Camp
... not only saved his own life but that of his fellow-officer, Lieutenant Conder, who had been beaten to the earth with an Arab club. He continued his work indeed with prosaic pertinacity, and developed in the survey of the Holy Land all that almost secretive enthusiasm for detail which lasted all his life. Of the most famous English guide-book he made the characteristic remark, "Where Murray has seven names I have a hundred and sixteen." Most men, in speaking or writing of such a thing, would certainly ...
— Lord Kitchener • G. K. Chesterton
... really an enemy to freedom, in the sense that he was an enemy to that very special and occidental form of freedom which we call Nationalism. The resistance of the Spaniards, for instance, was certainly a popular resistance. It had that peculiar, belated, almost secretive strength with which war is made by the people. It was quite easy for a conqueror to get into Spain; his great difficulty was to get out again. It was one of the paradoxes of history that he who had turned the mob into an army, in ...
— The Crimes of England • G.K. Chesterton
... both within and without the shop, the surrogate of bedridden Mr. Baines, the unfailing comfort and stand-by of Mrs. Baines, the fount and radiating centre of order and discipline in the shop; a quiet, diffident, secretive, tedious, and obstinate youngish man, absolutely faithful, absolutely efficient in his sphere; without brilliance, without distinction; perhaps rather little-minded, certainly narrow-minded; but what a force in the ...
— The Old Wives' Tale • Arnold Bennett
... bluff trimmings. In camp and field he quickly learned the routine of duty, and then his daring, active temperament led him gradually into the scouting service. Now, although so young, he was a veteran in experience, frank to friends, but secretive and ready to deceive the very elect among his enemies. Few could take more risks than he, yet he had not a particle of Mad Whately's recklessness. Courage, but rarely impulse, controlled his action. As we have seen, he could instantly stay his hand the second a deadly ...
— Miss Lou • E. P. Roe
... millstone—while a lady remarked "It's a pity his appearance is so insignificant." This reached the composer's ear and caused him an evil quarter of an hour for he was morbidly sensitive; but being, like most Poles, secretive, managed ...
— Chopin: The Man and His Music • James Huneker
... from pains in her head and abdomen, and, a common condition in hysteria—all four of her limbs were contracted. She passed neither urine nor faeces. Margaret, though only ten years old—hysteria develops the secretive faculties—played her part so well that, after being watched by the priest of the parish and Dr. Bucoldianus, she was considered free from all juggling, and was sent home to her friends by order of the King, "not," the doctor adds, "without ...
— Fasting Girls - Their Physiology and Pathology • William Alexander Hammond
... houses crowding up to and huddled against its foundations had cramped themselves into ledges and boulders like men making their last stand in a mountain battle. The streets were tunnels, with vistas of long, dark stone stairways running up and down into mystery. Here and there above secretive doorways were beautiful carvings set into the thick stone walls, relics of the castle's decorations. At sharp corners were tiny shops with dark interiors, and strange assortments of golden oranges, big pearly onions, ruby beets, and bright green, peasant pottery in low-browed windows ...
— The Guests Of Hercules • C. N. Williamson and A. M. Williamson
... After capture, was given into the care of Dr. Itard by Abbe Sicard. Dermal sense duller than in animals; gaze wandering; language wanting and ideas few; food—raw potatoes, acorns, and fruit; would eagerly tear open a bird and eat it raw; indolent, secretive; would hide in the garden until hunger drove him to the kitchen; rolled in new snow like an animal; paid no heed to the firing of a gun, but became alert at the cracking of a nut; sometimes grew wildly angry; all his powers were then enlarged; was delighted with hills ...
— Introduction to the Science of Sociology • Robert E. Park
... a dreadful suggestion," she said. "No such idea ever occurred to me. Secretive I thought Susan might be, but immoral, never. I must forget you ever thought that. Let's talk about something less painful. Perhaps you would like to tell ...
— Miss Mapp • Edward Frederic Benson
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