"Draughty" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... alone, did we rely for cooking the meals on sledging journeys. First used for purposes of sledging by Dr. Nansen in his journey across Greenland, the primus is only economically managed after some practice. To light a primus in a draughty tent at a low temperature calls for some forbearance before one is a thorough master of the art. A sledging cook will often make a disagreeable faux pas by extinguishing the primus in the preparation of hoosh. This is most readily done by lowering too quickly the outside cover over the rest of ...
— The Home of the Blizzard • Douglas Mawson
... said to her, 'we need not trouble ourselves about that. You may depend on it, no one will notice what we have on. For myself, I shall put on my Paisley shawl and my thickest boots. Picnics are always draughty and damp.' I don't think she quite liked it. Now, do you suppose the Palmers have asked Mr Goodwin? Anna Forrest's so much there, that I should almost think ...
— Thistle and Rose - A Story for Girls • Amy Walton
... the session would die for lack of sustenance. Again, take the case of the amiable feminine crowds which collect upon the Mall whenever Her Majesty holds a Drawing Room at Buckingham Palace. What has induced them to forsake lunch and the domestic joys in order to frequent that draughty thoroughfare? Nothing but accounts which they have read in vivacious newspapers of the sights to be seen there on these state occasions. They go; they see; they return fatigued and privately disappointed, with a vague feeling that some one has misled them. But with ...
— Journalism for Women - A Practical Guide • E.A. Bennett
... have porridge or kippered herring! I know you are never sea-sick, unlovable creature that you are, so you won't sympathize with us as we lay limp and wretched in our deck-chairs on the damp and draughty deck. Even the fact that our deck-chairs were brand-new, and had our names boldly painted in handsome black letters across the back, failed to give us a thrill of pleasure. At last it became too utterly ...
— Olivia in India • O. Douglas
... best of the situation, I remove my quarters from the cold and draughty bala-khana to the stable, and send the shagird-chapar out in quest of camel-thorn, bread, eggs, and pomegranates, thinking thus to obtain the luxury of a bit of fire and something to eat in comparative seclusion. This vain hope ...
— Around the World on a Bicycle Volume II. - From Teheran To Yokohama • Thomas Stevens
... cold and unfriendly day—we were going to have spring, leafy bloom, the desert filled with leaping springs, and blossoming like a rose? Full of wonder, surprise, and a certain excitement at the idea, I sat still and thought of my dream, and the rain beat against the windows, and a draughty wind fluttered the tinselly decorations of last night. The floor was strewed with fragments of garments torn in the crush—paper and silken flowers, here a rosette, there a buckle, a satin bow, a tinsel spangle. Benches and tables were ...
— The First Violin - A Novel • Jessie Fothergill
... 'Entrance passages are very draughty places, and the Channel is like the rest. It ruins the temper of sailors. It has been calculated by philosophers that more damns go up to heaven from the Channel, in the course of a year, than from all the five ...
— A Pair of Blue Eyes • Thomas Hardy
... enough meeting trains in any case, without having to hang about a draughty station ...
— The Little Warrior - (U.K. Title: Jill the Reckless) • P. G. Wodehouse
... house comfortable, though, of course, it is old-fashioned. I prefer more modern furniture; but Uncle David seems to think his queer old chairs and table all that can be desired, and did not appear interested when I told him where we got our things. I have a large room, rather draughty, but otherwise pleasant, with plenty of space for clothes, which is a comfort. I do think it's intensely annoying to be expected to keep your clothes in your trunk. ...
— Mates at Billabong • Mary Grant Bruce
... fog," she continued, "and I think it's very wrong to keep us in this draughty passage until the lecture-room is ...
— A Sweet Girl Graduate • Mrs. L.T. Meade
... barn, whirling the snowflakes into a little heap inside the half-open door. Even beyond the little heap of snow, right inside the barn among the whisps of hay and straw, and beyond the pile of turnips piled up in one far corner, it was still bitterly cold and draughty. ...
— More Tales in the Land of Nursery Rhyme • Ada M. Marzials
... think, have been at rather a low ebb when I first encountered it in London. Men breakfasted in public, as we have just seen, in order to indulge in it; and I remember a terrible Club where it raged on two nights of every week, in a large, dark, and draughty room, while men sat round an indifferent fire, drinking barley-water, and talking for talking's sake—the most melancholy of occupations. But at these dismal orgies one never heard anything worth remembering. The "pious and intellectual old persons" whom Mrs. Sherwood admired ...
— Fifteen Chapters of Autobiography • George William Erskine Russell
... greeted their ears—not that they knew what all these sounds meant. They only knew that it seemed as if the end of the world had come. Ernest, miserable as he was, wondered if the Telephone Boy had gotten safely home, or if he were alone in the draughty room in the basement; and Roderick hugged his big brother, who slept with him and said, "Now I lay me," three times running, as fast as ever his tongue ...
— The Children's Book of Christmas Stories • Various
... Septimus?" I sought my chamber, only to find, on enquiry, that my dressing-gown, my extra blankets and my hot-water bottle had disappeared—gone, I understand, to a local hospital. And, far from remaining in bed to-day, I am writing this from my office, an exceedingly draughty apartment. ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 147, November 4, 1914 • Various
... perched up above the village on a high embankment, upon which the railway crossed the valley from the hills that lay to the north to those that lay to the south of it. Up at the station it was always draughty and generally cold. To-day, this very early morning, about ten minutes before the first up train is due, it is not only cold and draughty, but it is also wet and foggy. A damp, white mist fills the valley below, and curls up the bare hill sides above; it hangs ...
— Vera Nevill - Poor Wisdom's Chance • Mrs. H. Lovett Cameron
... let me recommend you not to stay long in this miserable draughty place, if you do not wish to take rheumatism back to ...
— Lady Audley's Secret • Mary Elizabeth Braddon
... been waiting to bid you good-bye. Father is going to walk with me to Hillside, so Percival will not mind my being so late. How cold your face and hands are, and I am as warm as possible! You have been running about those draughty passages, and have taken a chill. She looks ...
— Lover or Friend • Rosa Nouchette Carey
... made and it isn't bad either. You'd better put on your coat; the hall's draughty." And waiting till Sweetwater did so, he led the way back to his own room. Brotherson's manner expressed perfect ease, Sweetwater's not. He knew himself changed in looks, in bearing, in feeling, even; but was he changed enough to deceive ...
— Initials Only • Anna Katharine Green
... at you now, but get me some water first," she directed, and having disposed of him, slipped out alone into the dim and draughty corridor. Odd Fellows' Building, the centre of various business activities by day, looked deserted and forlorn at night, when the suites of offices were dark and closed, and the hall where they danced, gayly lighted and ...
— The Wishing Moon • Louise Elizabeth Dutton
... It's rather a question of taste. Personally, I can't imagine anything more depressing and uncomfortable than being cooped up in a draughty frame house miles away from anywhere. There's no reason why you should not go, though, if you like that sort of thing. Of course, you ...
— The Coming of Bill • P. G. Wodehouse
... irascible, nervous, pleading, shy and boastful figure painted permanently, so that his actual physical presence seemed to be unimportant. There he was, as he liked to stand up against the white stove in my draughty room, his rather dirty nervous hands waving in front of me, his thin hair on end, his ragged beard giving his eyes an added expression of anxiety. His body was a poor affair, his legs thin and uncertain, an incipient stomach causing his waistcoat suddenly ...
— The Secret City • Hugh Walpole
... batter-pot. Chauncey said he thought it was getting cold enough for buckwheat cakes. I don't suppose you want to have stray tramps in there in the old house, building fires in the loom-room, where, if a spark got loose, it would blaze up them draughty stairs, and the whole house would go in a minute." Cerissa ...
— The Desert and The Sown • Mary Hallock Foote
... venture over such luncheon as the best hotel could give us. It was not so good a hotel as the lunch it gave. It was beyond the cleansing tide of modernity which has swept the Roman hotels, and was dirty everywhere, but with a specially dirty, large, shabby dining-room, cold and draughty, yet precious for the large, round brazier near our table which kept one side of us warm in romantic mediaeval fashion, and invited us to rise from time to time and thaw our fingers over its blinking coals. The bath in which our chicken had been boiled ...
— Roman Holidays and Others • W. D. Howells
... a carpet, a carpet is something that is not dusty, that is not delapidated, that is neither perspiring or draughty, that is not perfect or determined. A carpet is something that, judging from the beginning, from the middle, from the end, is not necessary when there is no necessity for it. A carpet is such a thing and the choice of it, the choice for it, all that is done to declare it is just ...
— Matisse Picasso and Gertrude Stein - With Two Shorter Stories • Gertrude Stein
... doors and windows did not shut, some free circulation of air remained. But now, our doors and windows shut only too tight. We have plate-glass instead of lattices; and we have replaced the draughty and smoky, but really wholesome open chimney, with its wide corners and settles, by narrow registers, and even by stoves. We have done all we can, in fact, to seal ourselves up hermetically from the outer air, and to breathe our own breaths ...
— Health and Education • Charles Kingsley
... the serious, unsmiling face, who was so perfectly at ease, and who hustled him about and made him feel as though he were to blame for the Cresslers' non-appearance; as though it was his fault that she must wait in the draughty vestibule. She had a great air with her; how had he offended her? If he had introduced himself to her, had forced himself upon her, she could not be more lofty, ...
— The Pit • Frank Norris
... up-stairs, and found herself in the midst of a fight between the governess and Margaret, who wanted to go to the draughty passage window, which she fancied had a better view than that of her nursery. Luckily, Aunt Ethel was almost the only person whom Margaret did not like to see her naughty; and she subsided into a much less objectionable lamentation after ...
— The Trial - or, More Links of the Daisy Chain • Charlotte M. Yonge
... once. But the heat inside those iron houses is far greater than inside mud-walled, brick, or wooden ones, and the alternations of temperature more sudden: mornings and evenings they are cold and clammy; draughty they are always, thereby giving you chill which means fever, and fever in West Africa means more than ...
— Travels in West Africa • Mary H. Kingsley
... after unloading the raft, was to render the cave habitable by stopping up all the holes which made it draughty. Sand, stones, twisted branches, wet clay, closed up the galleries open to the south winds. One narrow and winding opening at the side was kept, to lead out the smoke and to make the fire draw. The cave ...
— The Mysterious Island • Jules Verne
... with another, I think I must have been very comfortable at the North Pole—if I had only known it. Another man in my place might be inclined to say that this Newfoundland boat-house was rather a sloppy, slimy, draughty, fishy sort of a habitation to take shelter in. Another man might object to perpetual Newfoundland fogs, perpetual Newfoundland cod-fish, and perpetual Newfoundland dogs. We had some very nice bears at the North Pole. Never mind! it's all one ...
— The Frozen Deep • Wilkie Collins
... [Putting her arm round her.] Come, I want you to put your uncle's coat by the fire. He will be cold, coming out of that draughty church. ...
— The Servant in the House • Charles Rann Kennedy
... bitterly, you'd dream they longed to look All their lives through into some drift of wings. You've dandled them and fed them from the book And know them to the bone; impart to us— We'll keep the secret—a new trick to please. Is there a bridle for this Proteus That turns and changes like his draughty seas? Or is there none, most popular of men, But when they mock us that we ...
— The Green Helmet and Other Poems • William Butler Yeats
... while out of the loose squirrel parka a corded neck rose, brown and strong, above which darkly gleamed a rugged face seamed and scarred by the hate of Arctic winters. He had kicked off his deer-skin socks, and stood bare-footed on the cold and draughty floor, while the poison he had imbibed showed only in his heated face, Silently he extended a cracked and hardened hand, which closed like the armoured claw of a crustacean and tightened on the crunching fingers of the other. Captain's expression remained unchanged and, gradually slackening his ...
— Pardners • Rex Beach
... he cried, as he stopped to warm his hands, for the little room on the roof was draughty, and the ...
— The Moving Picture Girls Snowbound - Or, The Proof on the Film • Laura Lee Hope
... wake unhappily to see the sun come And stand to arms in some Cimmerian grot— But I, in town, well rid of all that bunkum, I like to think that Mahomet is not; He must sit on, now sweltering, now frozen, By many a draughty cliff and mountain holt, And, when rude fears afflict the Prophet's chosen, Gird on his arms and madly work his bolt, While round the heights the awful whispers run, "The bard of PUNCH is landing ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Volume 150, February 2, 1916 • Various
... in that draughty inn gave me an insight into their common lives which I had not before, causing me to meditate upon their simple lives and their simple needs. They did not raise the forests in order to get gold; they did not squander their patrimony in youth, ...
— Across China on Foot • Edwin Dingle
... the other, with a laugh of intelligence. 'I call a day like this "the blue room". It's the least draughty apartment in all the ...
— The Trespasser • D.H. Lawrence
... not to be expected that Shafto would see one familiar face, and he felt completely "out of it," as he took a scat at a draughty table between two elderly people, whose interest was entirely concentrated upon their meals and ...
— The Road to Mandalay - A Tale of Burma • B. M. Croker
... himself at the very doors of the great Library. His Oriental researches, as we know, were speedily abandoned, but the rooms in Great Russell Street still kept their tenant. They were far from an ideal abode, indifferently furnished, with draughty doors and smoky chimneys, and the rent was exorbitant; the landlady, who speedily gauged her lodger's character, had already made a small competency out of him. Even during long absences abroad Egremont retained ...
— Thyrza • George Gissing
... delayed, or made uncomfortable; but our forefathers were a hale and hearty lot—less overworked perhaps, less nervous certainly, less indulged. They had never known anything better than cold houses, draughty and crowded stagecoaches, and stony highways—plenty of obstacles, you see, and few luxuries. Therefore with naive delight they welcomed one new invention after another, overlooking its defects and considering themselves greatly blessed to have anything as ...
— Steve and the Steam Engine • Sara Ware Bassett
... came, and it began to be cold in my hut. There was a fireplace where I cooked my food, but the wood burned poorly and it was very draughty, though I had caulked the walls as well as I could. The autumn was past, and the days were growing shorter. The first snow was still melting under the rays of the sun. Presently the ground was bare again, but the nights were cold, and the water froze. ...
— Pan • Knut Hamsun
... times by FitzGerald!) leads to the little one-storeyed cottage in Boulge Park, where he lived from 1838 till 1853. It probably is scarcely changed at all, with its low-pitched thatch roof forming eyebrows over the brown-shuttered windows. "Cold and draughty," says the woman who was living in it, and who showed me FitzGerald's old parlour and bedroom. The very nails were still in the walls on which he hung his big pictures. Boulge Hall, then tenantless, a large modern white-brick ...
— Two Suffolk Friends • Francis Hindes Groome
... Had the stern law-makers had their way thirty years ago, how many pretty sights should we have missed! Little Marie Wilton would not have romped about the stage in her childish glee (she enjoyed the work from the first, and even liked playing in a draughty booth when the company of roaming "artists" could get no better accommodation). Little Ellen Terry, too, would not have played in the Castle scene in "King John," and crowds of worthy matrons would have ...
— Side Lights • James Runciman
... directly the term of mourning was over; and leaving the civil service in which his father had by favour procured him a post, was perfectly blissful with his Masha, first in a country villa near the Lyesny Institute, afterwards in town in a pretty little flat with a clean staircase and a draughty drawing-room, and then in the country, where he settled finally, and where in a short time a son, Arkady, was born to him. The young couple lived very happily and peacefully; they were scarcely ever apart; they read together, sang and played duets together ...
— Fathers and Children • Ivan Sergeevich Turgenev
... time, no account of the city scenery of Chicago is complete without the admission that the gorges and canyons of its central district are exceedingly draughty, smoky, and dusty. Even in these radiant spring days, it fully acts up to its reputation as the Windy City. This peculiarity renders it probably the most convenient place in the world for the establishment of a Suicide Club on the ...
— America To-day, Observations and Reflections • William Archer
... are life-giving. Put a pale withering plant or human being into the sun, and each will recover health. Give a baby plenty of fresh air, out of doors if you can, but avoid draughty places. Air the rooms well. You know, too, that the air inside the bed-clothes is impure, so do not let Baby sleep with his head under the sheet; tuck it in under his chin. You remember what air did in curing illness in the case of the expressman's children. He had two boys and three little ...
— How Girls Can Help Their Country • Juliette Low
... morning's letters and the Journal of Commerce, and finding nothing important, turned his revolving chair to the fire. He had been forced to wait for a train at a draughty station, and his feet were cold. His office occupied an upper floor of an old-fashioned building near the docks. Fog from the river rolled up the street and the windows were grimed by soot, but Cartwright had not turned on the electric light. The fire ...
— Lister's Great Adventure • Harold Bindloss
... stretching away remotely, lay range on range of forest-covered hills. In the distance the heavens were red from the glow of a volcano. At their backs yawned the black mouth of a cave, out of which, from time to time, blew draughty gusts of wind. Immediately in front of them blazed a fire. At one side, partly devoured, lay the carcass of a bear, with about it, at a respectable distance, several large dogs, shaggy and wolf-like. Beside each man lay his bow and arrows and a huge ...
— The Strength of the Strong • Jack London
... gentleman differs from that of the vulgar in that he fears yet goes; and I lifted the latch, and entered boldly. The scene which met my eyes inside was sufficiently commonplace to reassure me. At the farther end of a long bare room, draughty, half-lighted, and having an earthen floor, yet possessing that air of homeliness which a wood fire never fails to impart, sat a single traveller; who had drawn his small table under the open chimney, and there, with his feet almost in the fire, was partaking of ...
— From the Memoirs of a Minister of France • Stanley Weyman
... "These old windows are draughty, too," said Raven. He paused at one of them, fumbling with the catch. Really he was watching the path. There she was, at the left, going toward her own house. He pulled down the shade and lounged back to his ...
— Old Crow • Alice Brown
... a significant remark was made by a lady friend who came to call. She will undoubtedly remember now when she reads these lines that she said, on leaving the studio: "This is a curiously draughty place. I feel as if it had been blowing hot and cold on me all the time I have been here, and yet you have ...
— Shapes that Haunt the Dusk • Various
... day, however, when things were calmer. The echoing, draughty house grew still and warm, and a fire was lit in the hall. William lay in front of it unmolested; but he felt dejected and lonely, and laid his head down on his ...
— Jan and Her Job • L. Allen Harker
... sign of summer than the lilac-blossom or Bridget's flower-basket was the heat. It was hot in the dusty, draughty streets of the little town. The empty bedrooms at Bush House were like ovens, and the well-filled school-room was much worse. Madame would never hear any complaints of the heat from me or from Matilda. Summer at Bush House, in the nature of ...
— Six to Sixteen - A Story for Girls • Juliana Horatia Ewing
... crusaders and the lords of feudal times, who spent their lives in the sport of encamping outside of fortresses, at whose walls they occasionally butted with rams, lances, and strong language, leaving their wives and children in badly drained and draughty castles. If any one wishes to see brave men and true, simply come to a fire with Evan and ...
— People of the Whirlpool • Mabel Osgood Wright
... . . to man. She is sweet to his tongue, and fragrance in his nostrils. She is fire in his blood, and a thunder of trumpets; her voice is beyond all music in his ears; and she can shake his soul that else stands steadfast in the draughty presence of the Titans of the Light and of the Dark. And beyond his star-gazing, in his far-imagined heavens, Valkyrie or houri, man has fain made place for her, for he could see no heaven without her. And the sword, in battle, singing, sings not ...
— The Jacket (The Star-Rover) • Jack London
... and the silence that succeeded seemed to him as startling as the awful shriek. He was thunderstruck with surprise. Almayer came out of the office, leaving the door ajar, passed close to his servant without taking any notice, and made straight for the water-chatty hung on a nail in a draughty place. He took it down and came back, missing the petrified Ali by an inch. He moved with long strides, yet, notwithstanding his haste, stopped short before the door, and, throwing his head back, poured a thin stream of water down his throat. While he came and went, ...
— An Outcast of the Islands • Joseph Conrad
... her down the draughty passage that led to the offices of the long-since-deserted dwelling-house. There was a large apartment at the end of the passage—the kitchen, to judge from the character of the fittings. The room had been formerly lighted by electricity, ...
— The Doomsman • Van Tassel Sutphen
... frequently cursed him. It stood up just high enough to catch the full force of every blast that blew, and not quite high enough to get a really fine view. There was too much bleak foreground, so that one got no value from the site whatever so far as I could see. And, lord, it was draughty! ...
— The Man From the Clouds • J. Storer Clouston
... is that no train can come back on it until we've stopped going forward. So, you see, there's no object in getting out of this train until it has finished for the day. Probably it will go back itself before long, out of sheer boredom. And it's much better waiting here than on a draughty Byres platform." ...
— The Holiday Round • A. A. Milne
... were terrible, and in later years he could not speak of his sufferings at this time without tears coming to his eyes. Apparently he could not even afford to have a fire; and the attic was extremely draughty, blasts coming from the door and window; so that in a letter to his sister he begs her, when sending the coverlet for which he has already asked, to let him have a very old shawl, which he can wear at night. His legs, where he feels the cold most, are wrapped in an ancient coat made ...
— Honore de Balzac, His Life and Writings • Mary F. Sandars
... stage-coach. For, left to herself, what is the best Nature can do for you with March well on the way? Personally, I find the face of the country practically unchanged. It is, to all intents and purposes, the same as it has been for the last three or four months—as grim, as unadorned, as bleak, as draughty, and generally as comfortless as ever. There isn't a flower to be seen, hardly a bird worth listening to, not a tree that is not winter-naked, and not a chair to sit down upon. If you want flowers on your walks you must bring ...
— Prose Fancies (Second Series) • Richard Le Gallienne
... looks. They are warm and pleasant to unshod feet, and therefore suitable for bedroom use. They are soft to shoe tread, and give colour and comfort to a summer piazza. They can be hung as portieres in draughty places with a certainty of shelter, and can be lifted and thrown upon the grass to be washed by the downpour of a thunder shower, and left to dry in the sun without detriment to colour ...
— How to make rugs • Candace Wheeler
... Bensons and the artist it was all new, and to King it was seen for the first time in the transforming atmosphere of love. To men of sentiment its beauties will never be exhausted; but to the elderly and perhaps rheumatic tourist the draughty steamboats do not always bring back the remembered delight of youth. There is no pleasanter place in the North for a summer residence, but there is a certain element of monotony and weariness inseparable from an excursion: travelers have been known to yawn even on the Rhine. It was a gray ...
— Baddeck and That Sort of Thing • Charles Dudley Warner
... eagerly to work to turn this charming but neglected place into a pleasant home, directing servants in the cleaning and scrubbing, hanging curtains over draughty doors, repapering walls, putting fresh coverings on old furniture, planting flowers and vegetables in the garden—in fact, pouring out her Dutch housekeeping soul in a thousand and one ways. The French servants, amazed at these activities, thought she ...
— The Life of Mrs. Robert Louis Stevenson • Nellie Van de Grift Sanchez
... "I've followed you 'way up here to hear it. I've waited around in these beastly, draughty picnic grounds for over a week to hear it. You know what ...
— The Octopus • Frank Norris
... in bed with his eyes wide open, and staring still at the old print, which he could see from his bed by the light of the candle, which he had left alight on the mantel-piece to keep him awake. The flame waved up and down, for the room was draughty; and, as the lights and shadows passed over the old man's face, Melchior almost fancied that it nodded to him, so he nodded back again; and as that tired him he shut his eyes for a few seconds. When he opened them again ...
— In the Yule-Log Glow, Book II - Christmas Tales from 'Round the World • Various
... those flanking it are plain. This chancel, owing to its good architectural disposition, might, by a little more decoration and the insertion of full stained glass windows, be made very beautiful. The Church is an extremely draughty one; and if it were not for a screen at the west end and a series of curtains at the different doors, stiff necks, sore throats, coughs, colds, and other inconveniences needing much ointment and many pills would be required by the congregation. Just within the screen there ...
— Our Churches and Chapels • Atticus
... reluctance, for the place is said to be haunted, and its silent, spectral appearance certainly suggested an abiding-place of evil spirits. But one of the ruined huts, although pitch dark and partly filled with snow, offered a pleasanter shelter than our draughty tent, and I insisted upon a halt. Drift-wood was plentiful (it always was near the mouth of a river), and a fire was soon kindled, or rather a bad imitation of one, for this fuel only yields a dull, flickering flame. This latter, however, melted the snow ...
— From Paris to New York by Land • Harry de Windt
... week there was even a flutter of snow at Clark's Hills. Rachael did not dislike it, and it was a huge adventure to the boys. Nevertheless, she began to feel that a longer stay down on the bleak coast might be unwise. The old house, for all its purring furnace and double windows, was draughty enough to admit icy little fingers of the outside air, here and there, and the village, getting under storm shutters and closing up this wing or that room for the winter, was so businesslike in its preparations as to fill ...
— The Heart of Rachael • Kathleen Norris
... place. The room is very draughty: I fear it will give you cold. Let me drive you home now. An apology can be made for whatever else you are supposed to do for these people. Let me get your cloak ...
— The Irrational Knot - Being the Second Novel of His Nonage • George Bernard Shaw
... the hall was there a glimpse of staircase visible. I had not thought about it before, but now I realised that it was just this absence which gave that touch of comfort and privacy which is wanting in the ordinary entrance "lounge". There was no draughty well, no galleried space overhead, from which curious ears could overhear private confidences. I stared round mystified, till Charmion opened yet another doorway, and behold! there was the staircase, the oddest, curliest specimen of its kind, ...
— The Lady of the Basement Flat • Mrs. George de Horne Vaizey
... back by half-past twelve, And tot of rum to send him warm to sleep In draughty dug-out frowsty with the fumes Of coke, and full of snoring, ...
— The War Poems of Siegfried Sassoon • Siegfried Sassoon
... 'Lisbeth Connors added to the great threnody of industry. Department stores that turned from her services almost before they were offered. Offices gleaned from penny papers, miles of them, and hours of waiting on hard-bottom chairs in draughty waiting-rooms. Faces, pasty as her own, lined up alongside, greedy of the morsel ...
— Gaslight Sonatas • Fannie Hurst
... a tiny boy of five sheltering from the rain under a dripping and draughty railway arch, and crying as if his little heart would break. I tried to comfort him and could not, but when a rather shame-faced young woman came along, as if returning from her work, he burst ...
— The Woman Thou Gavest Me - Being the Story of Mary O'Neill • Hall Caine
... ain't comin' to I don't know, I'm sure. Wot with silk next their skin an' them draughty stockin's, as you might say, things is gettin' to a pretty pass. Say, I wouldn't put myself into them pants, no, not if the President o' the United States was to stand over me an' wouldn't let ...
— The Golden Woman - A Story of the Montana Hills • Ridgwell Cullum
... male attendant below in this fellow's company, La Voisin took up a candle and lighted Madame de Montespan up the broad stone staircase, draughty and cold, to the ante-room of the chapel on the floor above. Mademoiselle Desceillets followed closely and fearfully, ...
— The Historical Nights' Entertainment • Rafael Sabatini
... the Church had assimilated and hallowed the world-old festivals of the year's changing seasons. She provided for the human love of recreation. Her Sundays were holidays, not composed of gloomy hours in stuffy or draughty kirks, under the current voice of the preacher. Her confessional enabled the burdened soul to lay down its weight in sacred privacy; her music, her ceremonies, the dim religious light of her fanes, naturally awaken religious emotion. While these things, ...
— John Knox and the Reformation • Andrew Lang
... large families, and an "army of grand-children": but note well the startling, the hideous fact, that every one of his children is dead! The crude grave has gaped before the cock to suck in every one of those shrunk forms, so indigent of vital impulse, so pauper of civism, lust, so draughty, so vague, so lean—but not before they have had time to dower with the ah and wo of their infirmity a whole wretched "army of grand-children." And yet this man of wisdom is on the point, in his old age, of marrying once again, of producing ...
— Prince Zaleski • M.P. Shiel
... cough myself," declared the Arts mistress. "I stayed in bed all Saturday and Sunday, and it was really a little better, but it was as bad as ever after a day in this big draughty hole." ...
— The Independence of Claire • Mrs. George de Horne Vaizey
... a draughty cattle-shed. The door was slammed. I sneezed. It was a bright prospect. I changed my views on the inefficiency of our Home Defenders. They now appealed to me as violently efficient. A night in a tumble-down cow-house! Desolation! Then I brightened up: the MacNeils' whisky. The cork popped in ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 150, February 23, 1916 • Various
... a distressing misfortune came upon Sir Joshua. He meant to learn all that a man could learn in a given time of the art treasures there, and while he was working in a draughty corridor of the Vatican, he caught a severe cold which rendered him deaf. He continued deaf till the end of his life and had to use an ear-trumpet when people ...
— Pictures Every Child Should Know • Dolores Bacon
... dark draughty nooks and corners, he saw the strong, heavily built shape before him. She laughed and called to him, and shrieked and sent him messages by the blast. And then a ...
— Weird Tales from Northern Seas • Jonas Lie
... old writers reveal themselves, and they keep themselves in sympathy with mankind by not affecting to be above the little weaknesses common to humanity. Here Montaigne spent the greater part of his time, except in winter, when he often found the library too draughty to be comfortable. It was in this room that he wrote his essays, and chiefly thought them out while pacing up and down the floor, which even then was so uneven that the only flat bit was where he had placed his table and chair. In common with some other celebrated writers, he found ...
— Two Summers in Guyenne • Edward Harrison Barker
... better not,' said Albinia, moving the flaring light to a less draughty part of the dingy whitewashed attic. 'Or shall I read ...
— The Young Step-Mother • Charlotte M. Yonge
... of the door showed a long, black, gloomy entrance hall—bare, bleak and draughty. Two people stood there—a grizzly old man, stooping, and bleared, and wrinkled, who had opened the door, and a grizzly old woman, just a shade less stooping, and bleared, and wrinkled, who held ...
— The Unseen Bridgegroom - or, Wedded For a Week • May Agnes Fleming
... "It is very draughty," he remarked, "and you seem cold; we must not keep you here. May we—can I," he added, glancing down the stone passage, "show ...
— Berenice • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... is damp and the air is chill, and these narrow halls are draughty. Do not stand out here," he said, with eager ...
— Jolly Sally Pendleton - The Wife Who Was Not a Wife • Laura Jean Libbey
... to grow the world in which Sir Denis Jocelyn Cathley passed that day. Time after time, the great hall in which he had played when a boy, draughty now but still moderately weather-tight, had echoed to the roars of welcome from old associates. But the climax of it all came later on, when he sat at the head of the long, black oak table, presiding over what was surely the strangest feast ever prepared and given to the strangest ...
— The Box with Broken Seals • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... immense distance and indifference of those bright, cold specks, and how infinitely insignificant after all they, the Twinklers were, and how they would both in any case be dead in a hundred years. And this last reflection afforded them somehow a kind of bleak and draughty comfort. ...
— Christopher and Columbus • Countess Elizabeth Von Arnim
... a wanton trick, though, that these folk of malice used to play on a small school-boy, new kicked out of his nest into the draughty, uncomfortable outer world, his unfledged skin still craving the feathers whereinto he was wont to nestle. The barrack-like school, the arid, cheerless class-rooms, drove him to Nature for redress; and, under an alien sky, he would go forth and wander ...
— Pagan Papers • Kenneth Grahame
... I, "wait in a draughty level with an extinguishable candle close to the main shaft, with 30 or 40 miles of levels around, and no end of winzes? No, no, Captain Jan, go on; I'll stick to you now through thick and thin like ...
— Personal Reminiscences in Book Making - and Some Short Stories • R.M. Ballantyne
... when it's cold. Rags wouldn't be so bad in summer, but they must be awfully draughty in winter. And I spend less in sweets than any of the others, because my teeth ache. I've often wished we could do something for the Mission; but I'm so poor, and I sha'n't get any goose-money till autumn. I wish we could think ...
— A Houseful of Girls • Mrs. George de Horne Vaizey
... less cold than outdoors. Inadvertently, we took off our wraps,—not all, only two or three; for we are becoming quite Chinese in our manner of putting one coat on over another. We put them all on again, however, at the end of the second course, for the draughty windows and the door constantly swinging open into the courtyard made all ...
— Peking Dust • Ellen N. La Motte
... trees, sir; winding brooks, larks and cuckoos carolling all day long. Sir, there has been a Smivvle at the Hall since before the Conquest! Fine old place, the Hall; ancient, sir, hoary and historic—though devilish draughty, upon my ...
— The Amateur Gentleman • Jeffery Farnol et al
... smells, and the sounds, fail to bring back to Kitty memories of that supremely miserable day, and through any happiness make her taste again for a moment the forlornness, the black misery which swamped her as she first stood on that draughty, dingy platform. ...
— Kitty Trenire • Mabel Quiller-Couch
... work was done of an evening it was his practice to sit with his wife in their huge and draughty parlour, practising the good husband and the domestic virtues in an upright zealous manner, such as one may read of in the books. A noble thing to do, but what's the good of it when hearts are miles apart and the practitioner ...
— Doom Castle • Neil Munro
... the door behind her in her grief. Sir Nicholas sat still a moment, sick and shaken; he knew what it meant; but it had never come so close to him before. He got up presently and went to the door to listen for he knew not what. But there was no sound but the moan of the wind up the draughty staircase, and the sound of a prisoner singing somewhere above him a snatch of a song. He looked out presently, but there was nothing but the dark well of the staircase disappearing round to the left, and the ...
— By What Authority? • Robert Hugh Benson
... little difference he made Sopp'd by the fog's asthmatic shade; From day's beginning till its close The day no brighter grew. Above the sheets, the sleeper's nose Peep'd shyly, as afraid, While 'neath the dark and draughty flue The burnt-out cinders meanly strew The hearth, where now no firelight glows, No waiting ...
— Punch, Or The London Charivari, Vol. 100., Jan. 24, 1891. • Various
... companions around her. She does not see her on a wet day in Newcastle, practising scales for an hour at a stretch, though her throat is half choked with the fog, in a dismal parlor with a piano out of tune, and with the prospect of having to go out through the wet to a rehearsal in a damp and draughty theatre, with escaped gas added to the fog. That is ...
— Macleod of Dare • William Black
... right, mother darling. It was fearfully hot all day, squeezed tight in a third class carriage—no other class to be had. It's cold and draughty in this station by comparison, and I wish I had my coat. I've brought nothing away with me, except my fiddle and what would go into its case, which was handkerchiefs. Bernd will see that my things get sent on, I expect. I locked everything ...
— Christine • Alice Cholmondeley
... the way that Felice went into the House in the Woods. That was the way she entered the broad and draughty hall, with the formidably big rooms on either side dimly lighted by the queer candle lamps and the faint glow from the fires ...
— Little Miss By-The-Day • Lucille Van Slyke
... would have been a brave romantic spot for you and me to spend the night. We might have thought of great things there with the stars over us and nothing else between us and God's heaven. But it's a draughty place, lad." The laughter came into his eyes as he spoke. "A draughty place and a stony, like Luz, where Jacob lay, and maybe the angels wouldn't come near the likes of us. The place I have in ...
— The Northern Iron - 1907 • George A. Birmingham
... reply. "He has come out of it very well, but I dread the day when he must go home to a busy, careless mother and a draughty cottage. He ought to have a couple of ...
— Hildegarde's Holiday - a story for girls • Laura E. Richards
... cheerless morning. The temperature had risen and a thick rain was falling. There was nothing to do out-of-doors so Nan remained within. It was Friday, and one of Delia's sweeping days. She was shut up in the draughty parlor with a mob-cap on her head "cleaning for dear life," as she expressed it. After a brief experience of the cold and discomfort of open windows and clouds of dust, Nan gave up trying to talk to Delia and wandered out of the parlor ...
— The Governess • Julie M. Lippmann
... Marseilles may remember a station on the line, some way below Vienne, where the Rhone fleets seaward between vine-clad hills. This was Villon's Siberia. It would be a little warm in summer perhaps, and a little cold in winter in that draughty valley between two great mountain fields; but what with the hills, and the racing river, and the fiery Rhone wines, he was little to be pitied on the conditions of his exile. Villon, in a remarkably bad ballad, written in a breath, heartily thanked and fulsomely belauded ...
— Familiar Studies of Men & Books • Robert Louis Stevenson
... hotel, after a tedious hour at a cinematograph show on the Boulevard. It was still raining when they withdrew from this stale spectacle, but she had obstinately refused to take a cab, had even, on the way, insisted on loitering under the dripping awnings of shop-windows and poking into draughty passages, and finally, when they had nearly reached their destination, had gone so far as to suggest that they should turn back to hunt up some show she had heard of in a theatre at the Batignolles. But at ...
— The Reef • Edith Wharton
... Senator," began Mrs. Van Winkle Ruggles, "was troubled with colds during his political career. I remember his saying that the Senate Chamber at the Capitol was extremely draughty. Possibly Mr. Pearson's ailment does come from sleeping in a draught. Not that father was accustomed to sleep during the sessions—Oh, dear, no! not that, ...
— Cap'n Warren's Wards • Joseph C. Lincoln
... Two stories in height, walls of a warm yellow, tiles of an ancient ruddy brown diversified with moss and lichen, it stood with one wall to the street in the angle of the Doctor's property. It was roomy, draughty, and inconvenient. The large rafters were here and there engraven with rude marks and patterns; the hand-rail of the stair was carved in countrified arabesque; a stout timber pillar, which did duty to support ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 6 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... the sort of things Mrs. Korner did say and did do, tears sprung into Mr. Korner's eyes. Noticing that a policeman was eyeing him with curiosity, he dashed them aside and hurried on. Pacing the platform of the Mansion House Station, where it is always draughty, the thought of his wrongs returned to him with renewed force. Why was there no trace of doglike devotion about Mrs. Korner? The fault—so he bitterly told himself—the fault was his. "A woman loves her master; it is her instinct," mused Mr. Korner to himself. ...
— Mrs. Korner Sins Her Mercies • Jerome K. Jerome
... Brigade were moved into huts at Lark Hill. They were certainly an improvement upon the tents, but they (p. 032) were draughty and leaky. From my window I could see, on the few occasions when the weather permitted it, the weird and ancient circles ...
— The Great War As I Saw It • Frederick George Scott
... God were building a palace for you, and had set up a scaffold, upon which he wanted you to help him; would it be reasonable in you to complain that you didn't find the scaffold at all a comfortable place to live in?—that it was draughty and cold? This World is that scaffold; and if you were busy carrying stones and mortar for the palace, you would be glad of all the cold to cool the glow of ...
— The Vicar's Daughter • George MacDonald
... nest, and is most adaptable. Practical experience, and one's early failures, teach one more than anything else how a nest should be made, and yet often when you are satisfied that you have selected a most suitable spot for nesting purposes, you will find a duck occasionally preferring a miserably draughty position for her nest within a yard of the snug retreat you have devised for her. The only thing then to be done is to leave her alone until she has settled down to lay steadily, when you can gradually ...
— Wild Ducks - How to Rear and Shoot Them • W. Coape Oates
... near, we came to Major Colfax's seat, some forty miles out of the town of Richmond. It was called Neville's Grange, the Major's grandfather having so named it when he came out from England some sixty years before. It was a huge, rambling, draughty house of wood,—mortgaged, so the Major cheerfully informed me, thanks to the patriotism of the family. At Neville's Grange the Major kept a somewhat roisterous bachelor's hall. The place was overrun with negroes and ...
— The Crossing • Winston Churchill
... words on the woman, but swept forth from the room and down the draughty ill-lit passage to the stage-door. Its guardian, staggered at her appearance, let her out; on the pavement outside, muffled to the eyes like a man that evades observation, was the big young Jew. He was gazing out over the ...
— The Second Class Passenger • Perceval Gibbon
... dripping window Their headlong rush makes bound, Galloping up and galloping by, Then back again and around, Till the gusty roofs ring with their hoofs, And the draughty ...
— The Literary World Seventh Reader • Various
... you, with a hard cold, were sitting out in that draughty shed smoking because she wouldn't allow you to smoke in your ...
— The Copy-Cat and Other Stories • Mary E. Wilkins Freeman
... and Mr. Hobbs were not long in disposing of their lunch. It was too cold for comfort in their draughty dining-room, and they were not invited to enter the inhospitable gates. In half an hour they were wending their way down the north side of the peak by gradually declining roads, headed for the much-talked-of home of the Witch in Ganlook Gap, some six ...
— Truxton King - A Story of Graustark • George Barr McCutcheon
... monster big ones paying five per cent. and blatantly lauded by smug middle-class men who know but one thing about them, and that one thing is their uninhabitableness. By this I do not mean that the roofs leak or the walls are draughty; but what I do mean is that life in them ...
— The People of the Abyss • Jack London
... was in the lowest quarter of Whitechapel and crowded daily with sullen and sad-looking people. It was hot, smelly and draughty. When we went in I observed that Phoebe was a favourite; she waved her hand gaily here and there and ordered herself a glass of bitter. The men who had been hanging about outside and in different corners of the room joined up ...
— Margot Asquith, An Autobiography: Volumes I & II • Margot Asquith
... ostrich-feathers; why, in Morocco, when you enter a mosque, you must take off your shoes and catch a violent cold, in order to show your respect for Allah; while in Europe, on entering a similar religious building, you must uncover your head, no matter how draughty the place may be, since the deity who presides there appears to be indifferent to the danger of consumption or chest-diseases for his worshippers; why certain clothes or foods are prescribed in London or Paris for Sundays and Fridays, while ...
— The British Barbarians • Grant Allen
... occurred to her she expressed with some diffidence. "But Zara, don't you ... I mean ... aren't they very draughty?" ...
— Australia Felix • Henry Handel Richardson
... my father, who was now Directeur de l'Usine a Gaz at Beaucaire, had suffered in health, catching frequent colds through having to get out of bed to look after the puddlers, to stand before the fires whilst they were replenished, and to cross a cold, draughty courtyard in coming back. He had never complained, but my mother thought it extremely dangerous, and wished that he ...
— Philip Gilbert Hamerton • Philip Gilbert Hamerton et al
... the Colonel's area becomes positively draughty, and the sole survivors of his dashing but sanguinary counter-attack, the king and two pawns, have assumed the bored and callous air of a remnant that has fought too long and is called upon to fight again. The Colonel ...
— Punch, Or The London Charivari, Vol. 152, January 24, 1917 • Various
... saw both your father and mother this morning. Mr. Raymond has been kept to the house by a chill; nothing serious: but he is fretting to be out again and at work in that draughty church. He will accept no help; and the mistress of Tredinnis has no right to press it on him. I shall never understand men and how they fight. I supposed that the war lay between him and my grandfather. ...
— The Ship of Stars • Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch
... wet, and windy night he came upon a negro shivering in the doorway of an Atlanta store. Wondering what the darky could be doing, standing on a cold, wet night in such a draughty position, the ...
— Toaster's Handbook - Jokes, Stories, and Quotations • Peggy Edmund & Harold W. Williams, compilers
... handkerchief into the pocket of her blue velvet coat. The little girl did not have many pleasures; there were very few children in the neighbourhood, and Julia was not very strong; she easily caught colds in dark O'Farrell Street, or in the draughty hall. All winter long she had been hanging over the coal fire in the front room, or leaning against the window watching the busy street below—but today was spring! Sunlight glorified even the dreary aspect ...
— The Story Of Julia Page - Works of Kathleen Norris, Volume V. • Kathleen Norris
... McVay. "It's out of the question. The place is draughty, too, though there is a stove. Do you remember the house at all? You would be surprised to see how nicely I've fixed it ...
— The Burglar and the Blizzard • Alice Duer Miller
... hours round midnight, made one great effort of courage and sallied out to fetch her. Poor Susie, standing shivering before her maid's bolted door, scantily clothed, anxiously watching the flame of her candle that threatened each second to be blown out, alone on the wide, draughty landing, frightened at the sound of her own calls mingling weirdly with the creakings and hangings of the tempest-shaken house, was an object deserving of pity. It took some minutes to induce Hilton to ...
— The Benefactress • Elizabeth Beauchamp
... p.m. we reached Avonmouth about 5, to find that our boat was not in. The men were put up in a cold, draughty shed for the night, where they had little sleep, while the officers took train to Bristol, nine miles off, where we dined excellently at the Royal Hotel, but, there being no vacant rooms, we went to the St. Vincent's Rocks Hotel, overlooking the Clifton Suspension ...
— The Incomparable 29th and the "River Clyde" • George Davidson
... ice-bound ship. I recall again the bitter touch of water-warping winter, of drifts of snow, of wind-swept plains. In the gamut of my remembrance I am once more in the poor, mean, lonely little sanctuary out on the prairie, with a handful of Christians, mostly women, gathered together in the freezing, draughty building. In later years I worship in the great cathedral church, ablaze with lights, verdant and fragrant with the evergreen pines, echoing with joyful carols and celestial harmonies. My recollections are of contrasts like those of life—joy ...
— A Little Book for Christmas • Cyrus Townsend Brady
... been seized with a bad attack of lumbago at a time when she felt particularly anxious to keep a vigilant eye upon what occurred in her neighbourhood, instead of being left dependent upon hearsay for a knowledge of anything happening outside her four draughty walls. Many a care-infested hour she fretted away between them. For how could she tell with what insidious steps the calamity to ensue from Ody's courtship of Theresa Joyce might all the while be stealing ...
— Strangers at Lisconnel • Barlow Jane |
