"Flaw" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... easily, was clean in line and tough of frame. True, he was long of the leg, among a people who, having to climb and descend hills constantly, are, in the providence of fitness, short-legged, but he was all of a part. The kilt tests a man's figure, bringing out any flaw in it, and the Black Colonel's stood the ...
— The Black Colonel • James Milne
... day, when some great new force enters our life, to begin to crumble and fall away from us, and leave us strangers in a new world, so it is with the greater types of life, with peoples and civilisations; some secret inherent flaw was in their structure; they meet a trial for which they were not prepared, and fail; once more they must be passed into the crucible and melted down to their primitive matter. Yet Nature does not repeat herself; in some way the experience of all past generations enters into those which succeed ...
— Select Epigrams from the Greek Anthology • J. W. Mackail
... of the skies there comes from the soul within us a mournful response, that betokens some wide and deep—some everlasting change. Joy is not now what joy was of yore; like a fine diamond with a flaw is now Imagination's eye; other motes than those that float through ether cross between its orb and the sun; the "fine gold has become dim," with which morning and evening of old embossed the skies; the ...
— Recreations of Christopher North, Volume 2 • John Wilson
... elder Herschel's glass) in diameter; weighing 14,826 pounds, or nearly seven tons, after being polished, and possessing a magnifying power of 42,000 times!—a perfectly pure, spotless, achromatic lens, without a material bubble or flaw! ...
— The Humbugs of the World • P. T. Barnum
... you say to it? I don't find the flaw in him. If Heaven had given me a son, I'd have had him be like this one; and since it didn't, why here's my way ...
— Not Pretty, But Precious • John Hay, et al.
... collars. They will suit your soft head. As for food, I'm afraid you're not taking enough arsenic. A slight touch of relationship to my family has evidently turned your brain. I cannot say how sorry I am that you should have discovered the one flaw in my pedigree. ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 153, July 25, 1917 • Various
... exaltation. Now, tall, strong, white-haired, he looked a figure of an older world. "The spheres and all are set to harmony!" he said. "I would have fitness. Great things throughout! Diamonds and rubies without flaw in the crown.—We will talk no more about ...
— 1492 • Mary Johnston
... o' sails you used to see, in Mr. Dimmick's day, standing across to the mainland on a pleasant Sunday morning, filled with church-going folks, all sure to want him some time or other! You couldn't find no doctor that would stand up in the boat and screech if a flaw struck her." ...
— The Country of the Pointed Firs • Sarah Orne Jewett
... top of the kitchen stairs, which would then become his funeral pyre. He would do all this on Sunday evening while Miriam was at church, and it would appear that he had fallen downstairs with the lamp, and been burnt to death. There was really no flaw whatever that he could see in the scheme. He was quite sure he knew how to cut his throat, deep at the side and not to saw at the windpipe, and he was reasonably sure it wouldn't hurt him very much. And then everything would be at ...
— The History of Mr. Polly • H. G. Wells
... Happiness, "his being's end and aim," was his legitimate and covenanted reward. If God therefore was just, such a man would be happy; and inasmuch as God was just, the man who was not happy had not deserved to be. There is no flaw in this argument; and if it is unsound, the fallacy can only lie in the supposed right to happiness. It is idle to talk of inward consolations. Job felt them, but they were not everything. They did not relieve the anguish of his wounds; they ...
— Froude's Essays in Literature and History - With Introduction by Hilaire Belloc • James Froude
... fortune to be, he had ten thousand-fold the power and reason to see the tender radiance of her. As she was taller than other women, so her love seemed higher and greater, and as free from any touch of earthly poverty of feeling as her beauty was from any flaw. In it there could be no doubt, no pride; it could be bounded by no limit, measured by no rule, its ...
— A Lady of Quality • Frances Hodgson Burnett
... any other man, Dorothy, he'd make me 'sure,' when he gets home! I will defend myself to this extent: I've patched and propped them all summer, after every rain, and tried to provide for the fall storms; but there's a flaw in ...
— Stories by American Authors (Volume 4) • Constance Fenimore Woolson
... us for a moment survey the existing condition of affairs. I, myself, to begin with, I and my ancestors, for many generations, have held undisputed possession of this pollard. Not the slightest flaw has ever been discovered in our title-deeds; and no claimant has ever arisen. The rook has had, I believe, once or twice some little difficulty respecting his own particular tenancy, which is not a freehold; but his townsmen, as a body, possess their trees in peace. ...
— Wood Magic - A Fable • Richard Jefferies
... to all noble ambitions and touched by all noble dissatisfactions with what is, makes its plan for what should be on a strictly logical basis. His rejected Evil is wholly evil; his chosen Good without a flaw. Children are all Calvinists; and youth, for the most part, separates its ideas of good and bad as the sheep and goats within its mind. Well that it is so. The law of growth in life is so far from logical, ...
— The Family and it's Members • Anna Garlin Spencer
... as sharp as yours, Belle, would never have accepted me if there had been a visible flaw ...
— Dave Darrin's Fourth Year at Annapolis • H. Irving Hancock
... train, they fall into a stupid trance with their eyes open. To see them, you would suppose there was nothing to look at and no one to speak with; you would imagine they were paralysed or alienated; and yet very possibly they are hard workers in their own way, and have good eyesight for a flaw in a deed or a turn of the market. They have been to school and college, but all the time they had their eye on the medal; they have gone about in the world and mixed with clever people, but all the time they were ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition - Vol. 2 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... sea, and life, for those at home, became a joy without a flaw—except the thought that he would sometime come ...
— A Maid of the Silver Sea • John Oxenham
... But I shall not believe in them till I see them; a skysail seems high enough in all conscience; and the idea of any thing higher than that, seems preposterous. Besides, it looks almost like tempting heaven, to brush the very firmament so, and almost put the eyes of the stars out; when a flaw of wind, too, might very soon take the conceit out ...
— Redburn. His First Voyage • Herman Melville
... fallen humanity. He has gone there as their surety-Saviour. If his suretyship be accepted—if He meet and fulfil all the requirements of an outraged law, the gates of the dismal prison-house will and must be opened. If, on the other hand, there be any flaw or deficiency in His person or work as the Kinsman-Redeemer, then no power can snap the chains which bind Him; the tomb will refuse to surrender what it has in custody; the hopes of His people must perish along ...
— Memories of Bethany • John Ross Macduff
... the mediaevals had it—in theory at any rate. The Round Table stories, merely as such, illustrate Valour; the Graal stories, Religion; the passion of Lancelot and Guinevere with the minor instances, Love. All these have their [Greek: amarthia]—their tragic and tragedy-causing fault and flaw. The knight wastes his valour in idle bickerings; he forgets law in his love; and though there is no actual degradation of religion, he fails to live up to the ideal that he does not actually forswear. To throw the presentation—the mimesis—of all this ...
— The English Novel • George Saintsbury
... conversation, now and then raising his eyes to a portrait of the deceased farmer, an enlarged and highly-tinted photograph, which gazed down on him from the opposite wall. The gaze was obstinate, brow-beating, as though it challenged Cai to find a flaw in the defence: and Cai, although dimly aware of a fallacy somewhere, could not meet the challenge. He lowered his eyes again to his plate. He found himself wondering if, in any future circumstances, Mrs Bosenna would consent to ...
— Hocken and Hunken • A. T. Quiller-Couch
... perceived too late that his persistence was unmannerly; hung his head a while in silence; then, lifting up a sheepish countenance, 'I 'shamed,' said the tyrant. It was the first and the last time we heard him own to a flaw in his behaviour. Half an hour after he sent us a camphor-wood chest worth only a few dollars—but then heaven knows what Tembinok' ...
— In the South Seas • Robert Louis Stevenson
... come hither. But when this fairest of the sisters led them through her palace and showed them all the treasures that were hers, envy grew in their hearts and choked their old love. Even while they sat at feast with her, they grew more and more bitter; and hoping to find some little flaw in her good fortune, they asked ...
— Old Greek Folk Stories Told Anew • Josephine Preston Peabody
... set saile and went off to sea to get the winde of them, which wee should haue had if the winde had kept his ordinary course, which is all the day at the Southwest, and West-southwest: but this day with a flaw it kept all the day at the East, and East-southeast, so that the Portugals had the winde of vs, and came roome with the Tyger and vs untill night, and brought themselues all saue one, which sailed not so well as the rest, within shot of vs: then it fell calme, and the ...
— The Principal Navigations, Voyages, Traffiques, and Discoveries of - The English Nation, Vol. 11 • Richard Hakluyt
... The only flaw in his happiness at the moment was the fact that his circle of friends was so small. He had not missed the old brigade of the studio before, but now the humblest of them would have been welcome, provided he would have sat still and listened. Even Percy Shanklyn ...
— The Coming of Bill • P. G. Wodehouse
... story," she continued, after a moment of silence, "you can see that I have been deeply wronged, and though from a moral standpoint, I have every claim upon Emil Correlli, yet legally, I have none whatever; and, unless you can prove some flaw in that ceremony of night before last—prove that he fraudulently tricked you into a marriage with him, you are irrevocably ...
— The Masked Bridal • Mrs. Georgie Sheldon
... name is ruined. That is the only mistake I have made in my whole life and it was done in a moment of weakness. Before I was just like a piece of pure jade; everyone admired me for what I have done for my country, but the jade has a flaw in it since this Boxer movement and it will remain there to the end of my life. I have regretted many, many times that I had such confidence in, and believed that wicked Prince Tuan; ...
— Two Years in the Forbidden City • The Princess Der Ling
... her dream-Venice had returned. There were private yachts, Adriatic liners, all brilliant with illumination, and hundreds of gondolas, bobbing, bobbing, like captive leviathans, bunched round the gaily-lanterned barges of the serenaders. There was only one flaw to this perfect dream: the shrill whistle of the ferry-boats. They had no place here, and their ...
— The Lure of the Mask • Harold MacGrath
... Salem. He was an abstemious man, one of a family of long lives, and he would linger here, increasingly unimportant, for a great while, an old man in new epochs, isolated among strange people and prejudices. Whatever the cause—the small safety or an inward flaw—he had never been part of the corporate sweating humanity where, in the war of spirit and flesh, the vital rewards and accomplishments ...
— Java Head • Joseph Hergesheimer
... Woodward,—counsel for the poet. Used to the ground, I know 'tis hard to deal With this dread court, from whence there's no appeal; No tricking here, to blunt the edge of law, Or, damn'd in equity, escape by flaw: But judgment given, your sentence must remain; No writ of error lies—to Drury Lane: Yet when so kind you seem, 'tis past dispute We gain some favour, if not costs of suit. No spleen is here! I see no hoarded fury;— I think ...
— The Rivals - A Comedy • Richard Brinsley Sheridan
... say more. You all know that stage solicitors are more outrageous villains than even their originals. Mr. Gammon is, of course, a "fine speciment of the specious," as Mr. Hood's Mr. Higgings says. It is he who, finding out a flaw in Aubrey's title, angled per advertisement for the heir, and caught a Tittlebat—Titmouse. It is he who has so disinterestedly made that gentleman's fortune.—"Only just merely for the sake of the costs?" one naturally asks. Oh no; there is a stronger reason (with which, however, ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 1, November 27, 1841 • Various
... who undertakes to produce some consummate work, will find himself pitiably in error, if he expects to turn it out of his hands, entire in all its parts, and without a flaw. ...
— Thoughts on Man - His Nature, Productions and Discoveries, Interspersed with - Some Particulars Respecting the Author • William Godwin
... strong man whom she eventually marries seems unfortunately to have a bit of a flaw in his granite character; at any rate, something is wrong with him, as the heroine fails to hold him altogether, and matters even begin to look as though she might lose him. But with her great happiness had come a new standard of honour, and ...
— Walking-Stick Papers • Robert Cortes Holliday
... small, and quite a tiny stream ran down the valley, cutting itself a channelled course; but Will knew enough—knew the power of water, and what such a tiny stream could do. In short, in those brief moments he had grasped the fact that a dangerous flaw had been formed in the dam, which, if unchecked, might mean ...
— Will of the Mill • George Manville Fenn
... among the best of any state, the only serious flaw being "10 sage grouse" per day: ...
— Our Vanishing Wild Life - Its Extermination and Preservation • William T. Hornaday
... line, all Sikhs of the true Sikh baptism except for the eight of their officers who were European, Outram's Own swept down a living avenue of British troops; and neither gunners nor infantry could see one flaw in them, although picking flaws in native regiments is almost part of the ...
— Winds of the World • Talbot Mundy
... of saying the unorthodox thing, an element which accounts for much of the unconventionality of that intellectual class of townsfolk figuring broadcast in the book, and largely discounts the value of its criticisms. I suspected the same flaw in her expressed convictions on religious, political and feminist matters, and I shouldn't be surprised to learn, though there is no hint of it, that she stopped short of complete revolt in her own big affair because she realized instinctively that even a passionate ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 146, April 22, 1914 • Various
... Lieutenants Terry and Overton had joined the first two officers on the deck, and order was maintained without a flaw. ...
— Uncle Sam's Boys with Pershing's Troops - Dick Prescott at Grips with the Boche • H. Irving Hancock
... we spred an hullocke of our foresaile, and bare roome with her, which was the Confidence, but the Edward we could not see. [Footnote: This vessel's successful voyage is related further on.] Then the flaw something abating, we and the Confidence hoysed vp our sailes the fourth day, sayling Northeast and by North, to the end to fall with the Wardhouse, as we did consult to doe before, in case we should part company. Thus running Northeast and by North, and Northeast ...
— The Principal Navigations, Voyages, Traffiques, • Richard Hakluyt
... rule of reasoning according to the inductive philosophy, that there is not one drop of water in slavery for the parched lips of a dying slave. I stated this to a member of our Junior Class who is a wonderful metaphysician. He was kind enough to say that he could discover no flaw in the logic. Your letter, which, I trust, is now on its way to me, I know will fully confirm ...
— The Sable Cloud - A Southern Tale With Northern Comments (1861) • Nehemiah Adams
... over the way, I've seen a head that's fair and gray; I've seen kind eyes not new to tears, A form of grace, though full of years— Her fifty summers have left no flaw— And I, a youth of twenty-three, So love this lady, fair to see, I want her ...
— The Book of Humorous Verse • Various
... together was still as great for them both as it had been in the first radiant days of their marriage. For herself, indeed, she knew that the joy was constantly deepening, and even the wild hunger and passion of her heart could find no flaw in his devotion. Her surrender to him was with a glorious and unashamed completeness, the tones of her extraordinary voice deepened when she spoke to him, and in her eyes all who looked might read the story of insatiable ...
— The Heart of Rachael • Kathleen Norris
... shall pray, And the heart shall cry out for the hand in the fight of the uttermost day. So he sang, and beheld not Gudrun, save as long ago he saw His sister, the little maiden of the face without a flaw: But wearily Hogni beheld her, and no change in her face there was, And long thereon gazed Hogni, and set his brows as the brass, Though the hands of the King were weary, and weak his knees were grown, And he felt as a man unholpen in a waste land ...
— Lyra Heroica - A Book of Verse for Boys • Various
... Shakespeare. As we have seen, the idea of the tragic hero as a being destroyed simply and solely by external forces is quite alien to him; and not less so is the idea of the hero as contributing to his destruction only by acts in which we see no flaw. But the fatal imperfection or error, which is never absent, is of different kinds and degrees. At one extreme stands the excess and precipitancy of Romeo, which scarcely, if at all, diminish our regard for him; at the other the murderous ambition of Richard III. In most cases the tragic error ...
— Shakespearean Tragedy - Lectures on Hamlet, Othello, King Lear, Macbeth • A. C. Bradley
... him captive, sent him to the prison, to the bar, to the scaffold, was known in our annals as emphatically the Long Parliament. Never would such disasters have befallen the monarchy but for the fatal law which secured that assembly from dissolution. [409] There was, it must be owned, a flaw in this reasoning which a man less shrewd than William might easily detect. That one restriction of the royal prerogative had been mischievous did not prove that another restriction would be salutary. It by no means followed ...
— The History of England from the Accession of James II. - Volume 4 (of 5) • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... with a critical eye the management and navigation as the Boadicea was pressed through the stream past Gallipoli into the sea of Marmora, and admitted to the second mate that but for the excessive carrying on there was no flaw to be found. ...
— The Shellback's Progress - In the Nineteenth Century • Walter Runciman
... withdraw From all men's eyes: but in the night would roam Till drowsy watchmen of the city saw A shadowy shape that chill'd the night with awe, Treading the battlements; and like a ghost, She stretch'd her lovely arms without a flaw, In shame and longing, to the ...
— Helen of Troy • Andrew Lang
... might not have been, the knowledge remained with him that she herself had suspected and convicted him. In all that mattered their friendship had ended there. Distrust was unbearable between friends. It was a flaw in his little lady that she could believe him capable of baseness.... But not an unforgivable flaw, it would seem, since every hour that he had spent in her presence had become roses and music in his memory, and the thought that he would see her no ...
— Queed • Henry Sydnor Harrison
... ladder was fifty feet in length; and consequently it reached to a point on the face of the cliff nearly fifty feet above the surface of the glacier. At this height there chanced to be a slight flaw in the rock—a sort of seam in the granite—where a hole could easily be ...
— The Plant Hunters - Adventures Among the Himalaya Mountains • Mayne Reid
... wagons broke apart, alternating right and left, until two long columns were formed. Each of these advanced, curving out, then drawing in, until a long ellipse, closed at front and rear, was formed methodically and without break or flaw. It was the barricade of the Plains, the moving fortresses of our soldiers of fortune, going West, across the Plains, across the Rockies, across the deserts that lay beyond. They did not know all these dangers, but they thus were ready ...
— The Covered Wagon • Emerson Hough
... times trembled, almost imperceptibly, with the generous sentiments that come with mellow age. He held his back straight and his head with an air—an air that was not a swagger but the sign-token of seasoned experience in the world. The most carping could have found no flaw in the quiet taste of his attire. To sum up, Kirkwood's very good friend—and his only one then in London—Mr. Brentwick looked and was an ...
— The Black Bag • Louis Joseph Vance
... the Pope, "I can't althegither give in to your second miner—no—your second major," says he, and he stopped. "Faix, then," says he, getting confused, "I don't rightly remimber where it was exactly that I thought I seen the flaw in your premises. Howsomdiver," says he, "I don't deny that it's a good conclusion, and one that 'ud be ov materil service to the Church if it was dhrawn ...
— Stories of Comedy • Various
... guest to slight; But still observe with special grace Those who obtain the foremost place, Whether for happier skill in art Or bearing in the rite their part. Do you, I pray, with friendly mind Perform the task to you assigned, And work the rite, as bids the law, Without omission, slip, or flaw" They answered: "As thou seest fit So will we do and naught omit." The sage Vasistha then addressed Sumantra called at his behest: "The princes of the earth invite, And famous lords who guard the rite, Priest, ...
— The Ramayana • VALMIKI
... most ingenious. But there is in this plan one flaw which no one has noted. I suppose that you, Maternus, evolved this really promising idea from pondering on what Claudius told us. All the hearsay about Rome and its festivals which ever came to the ears of all of us put together is as nothing at all compared with ...
— Andivius Hedulio • Edward Lucas White
... perfectly purified heart. Clarify the medium of vision, and truth undiscerned before breaks on the observer's sight. A mile or two from here skilful artisans make those great object-glasses with which the mysteries of the stars are disclosed. The slightest speck or flaw blurs the image, but with the perfect glass stars unseen by any eye throughout the history of the world are to be in our days discovered. It is a parable of the soul. Each film on the object-glass of character obscures ...
— Mornings in the College Chapel - Short Addresses to Young Men on Personal Religion • Francis Greenwood Peabody
... just come to this determination, when there blew a flaw of wind through the autumnal gardens; the dead leaves showered down, and a flight of sparrows, thick as a snowfall, wheeled above my head with sudden pipings. This agreeable bustle was the affair of a moment, but it startled me from the abstraction ...
— The Wrecker • Robert Louis Stevenson and Lloyd Osbourne
... results. It postponed the wedding: it stirred me to a very crescendo of patronage, for with the removal of the bread-winner the only flaw in my Cophetua pose had vanished: and it gave Audrey a great deal more scope than she had hitherto been granted for the exercise of free will in the choice of ...
— The Little Nugget • P.G. Wodehouse
... I read it in a hurry yesterday; to-day I saw it again and read it carefully. There is no flaw in it; it is a will that must stand, that cannot be disputed. Charlotte, you were right in your forebodings. Niece Charlotte, you and your mother, before you, were basely robbed, cruelly wronged; your dead father was just and ...
— How It All Came Round • L. T. Meade
... week one more such letter reached us—from Mr. Philip Waite, this time—claiming that there was "an atrocious flaw" in two stories of Captain S. P. Meek's. This we could not let go unanswered, first because of the strong terms used, and second because the objection would sound to many like a true criticism; so we turned the letter over to Captain Meek, and his answer follows Mr. Waite's ...
— Astounding Stories of Super-Science January 1931 • Various
... presence of witnesses, lest his sanity should be called in question and the Camusots should attempt upon that pretext to dispute the will. At the name of Trognon he caught a glimpse of machinations of some kind; perhaps a flaw purposely inserted, or premeditated treachery on La Cibot's part. He would prevent this. Trognon should dictate a holograph will which should be signed and deposited in a sealed envelope in a drawer. Then Schmucke, hidden in one of the cabinets in his alcove, should see La Cibot search for the will, ...
— Poor Relations • Honore de Balzac
... and exact was his explanation that his examiners could not find the least flaw in his doctrine. He was equally correct in the answer to the friar who proposed a ...
— The Autobiography of St. Ignatius • Saint Ignatius Loyola
... admirable, but human; consequently, not without a flaw. Uncle Fountain was left to chance, like the flying atoms of Epicurus, and chance put him at Bazalgette's right hand save one. From this point his inquisitive eye commanded David Dodd and Mrs. Bazalgette, and raked Lucy and her neighbors, who were ...
— Love Me Little, Love Me Long • Charles Reade
... I'm a Kansan from away beyond the Kaw, and I reckon I'm a diamond pure without the slightest flaw! Sure! A genuine prairie-dog from the short-grass country couldn't chatter more like a Westerner than that. That would fool Badger himself. That's whatever! Yes, I reckon. My daddy is a rancher, and I allow that I am great; for my home is on the boundless plains of the wonderful ...
— Frank Merriwell's Reward • Burt L. Standish
... rain, and the first drops would soon come pattering through the leaves. It was not unpleasant, in such an humour, to catch sight, ever and anon, of large spaces of the open plain. This happened only where the path lay much upon the slope, and there was a flaw in the solid leafy thatch of the wood at some distance below the level at which I chanced myself to be walking; then, indeed, little scraps of foreshortened distance, miniature fields, and Liliputian houses and hedgerow trees would appear for a moment ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. XXII (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... he said was not free from consciousness of self, from that perpetual presence of self to self which is common enough in men of great ability and ambition, and yet never ceases to be a flaw; but he said it soberly enough; ...
— Quisante • Anthony Hope
... flaw in the project, from a merely utilitarian point of view, is that the future of these young women appears rather vague. The demand for female Hindu teachers in India is at present small, and a few only have found employment in this way. Three or four have become nurses or ...
— India and the Indians • Edward F. Elwin
... a man who thought himself so much wiser than his parents,—a man who had gained honours at the University,—a man of the gravest temperament,—a man of so nicely critical a turn of mind that there was not a law of art or nature in which he did not detect a flaw; that he should get himself into this mess was, to say the least ...
— Kenelm Chillingly, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... Saumarez, as a last resource, prepared for a boat attack on the batteries, but in the whole squadron there were not enough uninjured boats to carry the marines. The British flagship itself was by this time well-nigh a wreck, and was drifting on the reefs. A flaw of wind from the shore gave the ships steerage-way, and Saumarez drew off, leaving the Hannibal to ...
— Deeds that Won the Empire - Historic Battle Scenes • W. H. Fitchett
... a history which all men know: how the next Pope was just, and put the Carafa to their trial for many deeds of bloodshed; how the judgment was long delayed that it might be without flaw; how it took eight hours at last to read the judges' summing up; and how Cardinal Carafa was strangled by night in Sant' Angelo, while at the same hour his brother and the two who had murdered his wife were beheaded in Tor di Nona, just opposite the Castle, across the Tiber—a ...
— Ave Roma Immortalis, Vol. 2 - Studies from the Chronicles of Rome • Francis Marion Crawford
... rightness, and she perceived, but she found it difficult to express her perception, that Miss Alimony wasn't so much answering her objections as trying to swamp her with exalted emotion. And if there was any flaw whatever in her attention to Miss Alimony's stirring talk, it was because she was keeping a little look-out in the tail of her eye for the reappearance of the men, and more particularly for the reappearance of Mr. Brumley with whom she had a peculiar feeling ...
— The Wife of Sir Isaac Harman • H. G. (Herbert George) Wells
... theories proved to demonstration by one of the most learned and responsible men of science in the world, and one of their most sarcastic and hitherto successful flouters had been compelled to confess that he could find no flaw in the calculations of this mathematical Daniel so unexpectedly come to judgment. They did not understand his proofs, but that was no reason why they should reject them, and so they rose as one man in support ...
— The Mummy and Miss Nitocris - A Phantasy of the Fourth Dimension • George Griffith
... our minds being busy with the new situation thus presented,—mine, in wonderment at this flaw that so often declared itself in enviable natures of fullest endowment,—in a grown-up man and a good cricketer, for instance, even as this curate; Edward's (apparently), in the consideration of how such a state of things, ...
— The Golden Age • Kenneth Grahame
... archduke's heart by her beauty and the right to wear his honors by her wit. Nothing was known of the stove at this latter day in Hall. The grandfather Strehla, who had been a master-mason, had dug it up out of some ruins where he was building, and, finding it without a flaw, had taken it home, and only thought it worth finding because it was such a good one to burn. That was now sixty years past, and ever since then the stove had stood in the big, desolate, empty room, warming three generations of the Strehla family, and having seen ...
— Bimbi • Louise de la Ramee
... had been, had the effect of making Karen, when they were all three confronted, more calm, more mildly cheerful than before, more than ever the fond wife who did not even suspect that a flaw might be ...
— Tante • Anne Douglas Sedgwick
... moves off, the Baron steps back with that same look in his face, and lifts his hat. His courtesy shows at the last some flaw, for, although Mrs. Steele is there, his lips and eyes ...
— Under the Southern Cross • Elizabeth Robins
... already whirling the dust-clouds on the Denver plains has not yet begun to ruffle the cottonwoods or the placid surface of the slow-moving stream, and in many a sheltered pool the waters of the "Smoky Hill" gleam like silvered mirror, without break or flaw. Far out on the gentle slopes small herds of troop-horses or quartermaster's "stock," each with its attendant guard, give life to the somewhat sombre tone of the landscape, while nearer at hand two or three well-filled cavalry "troops" with ...
— Marion's Faith. • Charles King
... who may be less self-confident than most are when they make their debut in print. Bouilhet, whom I first came to know somewhat intimately about two years before I gained the friendship of Flaubert, by dint of telling me that a hundred lines—or less—if they are without a flaw and contain the very essence of the talent and originality of even a second-rate man, are enough to establish an artist's reputation, made me understand that persistent toil and a thorough knowledge of the craft, might, in some happy hour of lucidity, power, and enthusiasm, by the fortunate occurrence ...
— The Works of Guy de Maupassant, Volume VIII. • Guy de Maupassant
... with three blankets, with which I contrived a comfortable bed in my hiding-place. No one came below, except my companion, during the day. Tiger took his station in the berth just by the aperture, and slept heavily, as if not yet entirely recovered from the effects of his sickness. Toward night a flaw of wind struck the brig before sail could be taken in, and very nearly capsized her. The puff died away immediately, however, and no damage was done beyond the splitting of the foretopsail. Dirk Peters treated Augustus all this day with great kindness and entered ...
— The Works of Edgar Allan Poe - Volume 3 (of 5) of the Raven Edition • Edgar Allan Poe
... this time some distance out. The wind had carried him along finely, the boat scudding, as he expressed it. He was congratulating himself on the success of his trial trip, when all at once a flaw struck the boat. Not being a skillful boatman he was wholly unprepared for it, ...
— Frank's Campaign - or the Farm and the Camp • Horatio Alger, Jr.
... move, The myriad worlds on worlds that course The spaces of the universe; Since everywhere the Spirit walks The garden of the heart, and talks With man, as under Eden's trees, In all his varied languages. Why mourn above some hopeless flaw In the stone tables of the law, When scripture every day afresh Is traced on tablets of the flesh? By inward sense, by outward signs, God's presence still the heart divines; Through deepest joy of Him we learn, In ...
— The Complete Works of Whittier - The Standard Library Edition with a linked Index • John Greenleaf Whittier
... time Ben stood before Arndis, queen of Teris. Her eyes probed at him, trying to divine his thoughts. There was anger in those eyes. If she detected a single flaw in his story it would mean Ben's death. More than that, it would mean disaster for Earth. ...
— Daughters of Doom • Herbert B. Livingston
... drinking too much. People are talking about it. Quit it! Whisky never won a jury. In the Morse case you loaded up for your speech and I beat you because in all your agonizing about the wrong to old man Mueller and his 'pretty brown-eyed daughter' as you called her, you forgot slick and clean the flaw in ...
— In the Heart of a Fool • William Allen White
... young lady of Beccles Whose face was infested with freckles, But nobody saw Any facial flaw, For she had ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 159, July 21, 1920 • Various
... terraced streets just below, she thought it a strange thing that so favored a woman should rail at her own country and kinsmen. It oppressed her loyal little heart, for she had begun to like the titled lady, and hated to find so grave a flaw ...
— All Aboard - A Story for Girls • Fannie E. Newberry
... been foul play, sir," he said. "I thought there must have been, for I could not imagine that this bar would have broken unless there had been a flaw in the metal or it had been tampered with. I unshackled it myself, for I thought it was better that the men should not see it until I had told ...
— The Queen's Cup • G. A. Henty
... lessen her, bring her grief, redden her proud eyes with tears of rage—what a success! He counted on it. Tenacious, diligent, faithful to the torment of his neighbour, not to be torn from his purpose, nature had not formed him for nothing. He well understood how to find the flaw in Josiana's golden armour, and how to make the blood of that ...
— The Man Who Laughs • Victor Hugo
... valuable lessons. The universal, all-embracing Trust made marionettes of us, every one. Our strength was, to them, no more than that of a mouse to a lion. Their system is perfect, their lines of supply and communication are without a flaw. The Prussian army machine of other days was but a bungling experiment by comparison with the efficiency of this new mechanism. I tell you, Gabriel, we've got to give these tyrants credit for being infernally efficient tyrants! All that science has been able to devise, or press and church ...
— The Air Trust • George Allan England
... quarrel with it does not end here. The flaw runs through the whole constitution of things; there is no possible equation between the anomalies and dislocations on which he turns the dry light of that sceptical philosophy which has usurped the place of faith. Thought is good and action is good, ...
— The Contemporary Review, January 1883 - Vol 43, No. 1 • Various
... appears to be good, when it really is not so. Reasoning very often appears to be good, while there is all the time some latent flaw in it which makes the conclusion wrong. Very often something is left out of the account which ought to be taken in and calculated for, and that is the case here. The truth is, that the current helps ...
— Rollo on the Rhine • Jacob Abbott
... comes to the Hospitals," Colonel Jostoff, the chief of the staff, tells me, "there are ten who say 'I am ill.'" The Bulgarians recognise bitterly that in their otherwise fine organisation there has been one flaw, the medical service. Among this nation of peasant proprietors—sturdy, abstemious, moral, living in the main on whole-meal bread and water—illness was so rare that the medical service was but little regarded. Up to Chatalja ...
— Bulgaria • Frank Fox
... moments one wonders indeed how kindred souls became separated, and one feels startled and repelled at the thought that, such as they were on earth, they can never meet again. And yet there is continuity in the world, there is no flaw, no break anywhere, and what has been will surely be again, though how it will be we cannot know, and if only we trust in the wisdom that pervades the whole ...
— Stories of Authors, British and American • Edwin Watts Chubb
... and nieces. The popular morals, using the word in its limited sense, were peculiar. The number of espostos que nao se sabe quem, sao seus pais (fatherless foundlings) outnumbered those born de legitimo matrimonio; and few of the gudewives prided themselves upon absolute fidelity. This flaw, which in England would poison all domestic affection, was not looked upon in a serious light by the islandry. The priesthood used to lament the degeneracy of the age and sigh for the fine times of foros e fogos, the rights and fires of an auto-da-fe. The shepherds have now learned ...
— To the Gold Coast for Gold - A Personal Narrative in Two Volumes.—Vol. I • Richard F. Burton
... Russian. An Englishman may be in love with an idea, and start out bravely to follow it; but if he finds it leading him into a position contrary to the experience of humanity, then he pulls up, and decides that the idea must be false, even if he can detect no flaw in it; not so the Russian; the idea is right, ...
— Essays on Russian Novelists • William Lyon Phelps
... institutions received general adhesion. Even Scotus, like Ockham, a brilliant Oxford scholar whose hidden tomb at Cologne finds such few pilgrims kneeling in its shade, so hardy in his thought and so eager to find a flaw in the arguments of Aquinas, has no alternative to offer. Franciscan though he was, and therefore, perhaps, more likely to favour communistic teaching, his own theory is but a repetition of what his rival had already propounded. Thus, for example, he writes in a typical passage: "Even supposing it ...
— Mediaeval Socialism • Bede Jarrett
... one of the privileged, and to produce, at the same tune, a shield, with exactly one more quartering than the reigning shield itself contained. The Margrave was astounded, the people in raptures, and the cousins in despair. The complainant's shield was examined and counted, and not a flaw discovered. What a dilemma! The chief magistrate consulted with the numerous branches of his family, and the next morning the complainant's head was struck off for high treason, for daring to have one more quartering ...
— Vivian Grey • The Earl of Beaconsfield
... all their names, Bertram and Gilbert, Louis, Frank and James, Each with his aims; One thinks he is a poet, and writes verse His friends rehearse; Another is full of law; A third sees pictures which his hand can draw Without a flaw. ...
— Behind the Arras - A Book of the Unseen • Bliss Carman
... and laborious work it is, and requires great exactitude. Often when the cutting is nearly accomplished some hidden flaw discloses itself, and a stone that had appeared of great value proves to be almost worthless; or the men when chipping the rough granite may suddenly find a flake too much has been chipped off by mistake, which involves not merely the loss of that block ...
— Through Finland in Carts • Ethel Brilliana Alec-Tweedie
... fear o' that. She's as toom's a cock. Gang and luik. The last drap in her wame flaw oot at the window i' that bottle. Eh! Alec, but I'll hae a sair day, and ye maun be true to me. Gie me my Homer, or I'll never win throu't. An ye may lay John Milton within my rax (reach); for I winna pit my leg oot o' the blankets ...
— Alec Forbes of Howglen • George MacDonald
... as friends did not venture to specify, except as the sun shone on it, when they called it golden. He inherited the lines of his mother's features, however; also her good teeth, her stature (or the promise of her stature, for he was not yet full- grown), and, what was better, her health without flaw, and her spirits of that tone and equality which are better than ...
— Villette • Charlotte Bronte
... me while I was lying there not so very far away from that shanty hidden among the rocks and brushwood. Most of the time the wind was blowing on my left side, but every little while there would come a pucker or a flaw, causing it to change for just for a second or two. And it was when this happened the first time I got scent of what was in the wind, in a double sense. In other words, Allan, I discovered a distinct odor of ...
— The, Boy Scouts on Sturgeon Island - or Marooned Among the Game-fish Poachers • Herbert Carter
... journey along the sands. When the snow came the sands were impassable. As soon as the ice on the bay would bear, there would be coming and going, no doubt; but until then Caius had the restful security that she was near him, and that it could not be many days before he saw her. The only flaw in his conclusion was that the fact did not bear it out; ...
— The Mermaid - A Love Tale • Lily Dougall
... which they rowed from the one side to the other to the number of 30. of their small boates, wherein were many people which passed from one shore to the other to come and see vs. (M336) And behold vpon the sudden (as is woont to fall out in sayling) a contrary flaw of wind comming from the sea, we were inforced to returne to our ship, leauing this lande to our great discontentment, for the great commodity and pleasantnesse thereof, which we suppose is not without some riches, all the hils shewing minerall waters in ...
— The Principal Navigations, Voyages, Traffiques and Discoveries of - the English Nation. Vol. XIII. America. Part II. • Richard Hakluyt
... curtailing his own personal needs as much as possible so that there would be no cause to discontinue or diminish the home comforts they had latterly been enjoying. "We are not peasants," he said, "and that we are not living from the mercy of chance is a flaw in me rather ...
— The Goose Man • Jacob Wassermann
... was ready. She'd been ready for weeks. There wasn't a mechanical or electronic flaw in her. We hoped, I hoped, the man who designed her hoped. The Doll's father—he hoped most of all. Even lying quiescent in her hangar, she looked as sleek as a Napoleon hat done in poured monel. When your eyes went over her you knew ...
— The Very Black • Dean Evans
... not the seventh son of a seventh son, sir. I did not see the flaw in your strategy. You lost by one of those strange accidents which must be attributed to the interference of the Almighty in the ...
— Cappy Ricks • Peter B. Kyne
... liberty, While every water-pipe must drip To greet the passing thaw. Then rudely dashed from eager lip The cup of joy would be, And fingers numbed, and chattering jaw, Owned unexpelled the winter's flaw, And on the steps the goodmen slip, And shout ...
— Punch, Or The London Charivari, Vol. 100., Jan. 24, 1891. • Various
... sovereign Seer of time, But Thee, O poets' Poet, Wisdom's Tongue, But Thee, O man's best Man, O love's best Love, O perfect life in perfect labor writ, O all men's Comrade, Servant, King, or Priest, — What IF or YET, what mole, what flaw, what lapse, What least defect or shadow of defect, What rumor, tattled by an enemy, Of inference loose, what lack of grace Even in torture's grasp, or sleep's, or death's — Oh, what amiss may I forgive in Thee, Jesus, good Paragon, Thou Crystal Christ?"*2* How tenderly Lanier ...
— Select Poems of Sidney Lanier • Sidney Lanier
... disappearance—for his body had never been found—she had been received into the governor's house out of pity and charity—she, a Melchite! The interpreter had little to say in her favor, by reason of her sect; and though he could find no flaw in her beauty, he insisted on it that she was proud and ungracious, and incapable of winning any man's love; only the child, little Mary—she, to be sure, was very fond of her. It was no secret that even her uncle's wife, worthy Neforis, did not care for her haughty niece and only suffered ...
— Uarda • Georg Ebers |
