"Fretful" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... less prepossessing, admitted her to the dressing-room of the woman of fashion; and this last greeted Sally with a fretful, preoccupied frown, visible in the mirror, which reflected as well the excellent results obtainable from discreet employment of ...
— Nobody • Louis Joseph Vance
... of my own spirit seemed to pass into that little stream. In its deep wailings and fretful sighs, I fancied myself lamenting for the land I had left for ever; and its restless and impetuous rushings against the stones which choked its passage, were mournful types of my own mental struggles against the destiny which ...
— Roughing it in the Bush • Susanna Moodie
... my office at the front of the stable talking business with somebody, and all of a sudden the front half of the largest East Indian elephant in the world shoves three or four thousand pounds of herself in at that side door and begins waving her trunk around in the air, meanwhile uttering fretful, complaining sounds. I've lost two or three customers that way,' he says. 'They get right up and go away sudden,' he says, 'and they don't never come back no more, not even for their hats and umbrellas. They ...
— From Place to Place • Irvin S. Cobb
... eyes wide and wider, looking round the room no longer in fear, but in a sort of wonder. Her gaze rested an instant on my face, she drew her arm from round my neck and rose to her feet, pushing away my arm. There she stood for a moment with a strange, fretful, ashamed look on her face. She tossed her head, flinging her hair back behind her shoulders. I had taken her hand and still held it; now she drew it ...
— The King's Mirror • Anthony Hope
... steps of his dogs had punctured the surface. Just before him, three yards distant, the ice had broken open, leaving a gaping hole over whose jagged edges the water climbed, and whimpered, and fell back, like a fretful child in its cot, which has wakened too early and is ...
— Murder Point - A Tale of Keewatin • Coningsby Dawson
... was something so fretful and impatient in his change of position, that her quick fingers stopped, and she ...
— The Haunted Man and the Ghost's Bargin • Charles Dickens
... as long as we can get along together all right, which it seems like from appearances that ought to be always. But after he gives up being circuit judge on account of him getting along so in age he gets sort of fretful by reasons of him not having much to do any more and most of his own friends having died off on him. When the State begins going Republican about once in so often, he says to me, kind of half joking, he's a great mind to pull up stakes and move off and go live somewheres ...
— When Winter Comes to Main Street • Grant Martin Overton
... tactful,—the little mother-talks she remembers. She did not believe when mother told her, that he had qualities which she would only find out after marriage, but she knows now. She is learning that household duties are exacting and fretful; that, though married, life still has a few thorns. She finds out also that the long day, when husband is at business, affords many opportunities for reflection and serious thought. These moments of seeming leisure are the ...
— The Eugenic Marriage, Vol. 3 (of 4) - A Personal Guide to the New Science of Better Living and Better Babies • W. Grant Hague
... and logically ordered, is neat, compact, clearly defined, and covers the whole ground. I desire to recommend it to such as find the other systems too difficult, exacting, and irksome for the uses of this fretful brief ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... followed day in a dreadful monotony, and the girl visibly lost health and spirits. She changed a good deal, and both men noticed it. She lost her wonderful sweetness and evenness of temper and her bright smiles, and became fretful and irritable, discontented, and sharp in her replies. In the long winter mornings now she would not spring up in the early darkness as formerly, but try to fall asleep again after waking, and put her arm across Stephen and tell him there was no use of getting up, that the day ...
— A Girl of the Klondike • Victoria Cross
... careful slowness, and neither good-will nor patience had Eyebright to bring to the task. Her fingers twitched, she "pshawed," and "oh deared," ran the needle in and out and in irregularly, jerked the thread, and finally gave a fretful pull when she came to the end of the first needleful, which tore a fresh hole in the stuff and puckered all she had darned, so that it was not fit to be seen. Wealthy looked in just then, and was scandalized at the ...
— Eyebright - A Story • Susan Coolidge
... design'd To sway the movements of the mind, Whatever fretful passion springs, Whatever wayward fortune brings 50 To disarrange the power within, And strain the musical machine; Thou Goddess, thy attempering hand Doth each discordant string command, Refines the soft, and ...
— Poetical Works of Akenside - [Edited by George Gilfillan] • Mark Akenside
... drove to the new house before going to the Hornbys' for the rest of the day. John ceased to be fretful, and by the time for leaving had arrived, Elizabeth had forgotten that he had ever been so. That evening Aunt Susan was told of the engagement, and having divined its arrival, she was able to hide any misgivings she had about it. Besides, ...
— The Wind Before the Dawn • Dell H. Munger
... patient to deal with; he doesn't like people to go near him. I think, therefore, it will be well if even you do not see him. He seems to have an odd distrust of people, especially of women. It may be that he is fretful in his blindness, which is in itself so trying to a strong man. But besides, the treatment is not calculated to have a very buoyant effect. It is apt to make a man fretful to lie in the dark, and know that he has to do so for indefinite weeks. Pilocarpin, and salicylate of ...
— The Man • Bram Stoker
... that Christ was around them, knocking at the door of their hearts, that He may enter in, and dwell there, and give them peace; crying to their restless, fretful, confused, unhappy souls, 'Come unto Me, all ye that labour and are heavy laden, and I will give you rest. Take My yoke upon you and learn of Me; for I am meek and lowly in heart: and ye shall find rest ...
— The Water of Life and Other Sermons • Charles Kingsley
... time there was a very visible alteration in Miss Betty's behaviour. She grew reserved to her sister as well as to me. She was fretful and captious on the slightest occasion; nay, she affected much to talk on the ill consequences of an imprudent marriage, especially before her mother; and if ever any little tenderness or endearments escaped me in public towards Amelia, ...
— Amelia (Complete) • Henry Fielding
... have dreamed that trams could look so big, or bridges so narrow, except in nightmares. And—and you can't make your horn heard much, can you, over the noise on the stones? Oh, there was a close shave with that wagon, wasn't it? I felt bristling like a fretful porcupine—oh, but a stark, ...
— The Chauffeur and the Chaperon • C. N. Williamson
... thunderstorm that we heard coming without covering of any kind. The quiet determination to endure much in the belief that we were coming to a country where we would better our condition sustained all in doing our best to make light of our trials. To a young woman, who was trying to get a fretful baby to sleep, the mistress sent me with a tin of milk and we had some talk. I asked if she was not sorry she had left the Old Land. 'No, no,' she replied, 'we had no prospect there; here, with hard work we have the prospect of comfort ...
— The Narrative of Gordon Sellar Who Emigrated to Canada in 1825 • Gordon Sellar
... is a burden; later, when mastered, it becomes a wonderful bearer of burdens. To wear a careworn, fretful look, to go through life shedding misery, is to confess that we have not learned our lesson, that we are ...
— Levels of Living - Essays on Everyday Ideals • Henry Frederick Cope
... have changed since you made love, O Whiskey Bill, O Whiskey Bill! The happy sun grinned up above At Whiskey Bill. And down the middle of the street The sheriff comes on toe and feet A-wishin' for one fretful peek At Whiskey Bill. ...
— Songs of the Cattle Trail and Cow Camp • Various
... tale unfold, whose lightest word Would harrow up thy soul; freeze thy young blood; Make thy two eyes, like stars, start from their spheres, Thy knotted and combined locks to part, And each particular hair to stand on end, Like quills upon the fretful porcupine: But this eternal blazon must not be To ears of flesh and blood: List, list, oh, list!— If thou didst ...
— The Canadian Elocutionist • Anna Kelsey Howard
... service door at the end of the long hall with fretful eyes. "That piece," she confided to Harkness, the moment not being so important as to still her grumbling, "said she wouldn't come in. And when I told her she could just choose t'wixt this and the door she said she wouldn't dress up, anyways. Impertinent chit! Thinks she's too good for the place. ...
— Red-Robin • Jane Abbott
... common sense of most shall hold a fretful realm in awe, And the kindly earth shall slumber, lapt in ...
— The World's Best Poetry, Volume 3 - Sorrow and Consolation • Various
... seldom gave an alarm of this sort unless something serious was the matter. Ted's dream was of Indians, and the call of Sultan was very natural, for the little black stallion hated Indians, and whenever one came within smelling distance of him he grew uneasy and fretful, and always gave ...
— Ted Strong in Montana - With Lariat and Spur • Edward C. Taylor
... much, or eats greedily; or she inclines to be slovenly, or indolent, or fretful. Now all these things are in general merely forbidden or rated, or at most, shown to be contrary to the will of the parents. They are seldom or never shown to be right or wrong, in their own nature; nor is the child assured, upon the authority ...
— The Young Woman's Guide • William A. Alcott
... I am fretful or low-spirited at times in the gout, like other weak old men, and have less to boast than most men. I have some strange things in my drawer, even wilder than the Castle of Otranto, and called Hieroglyphic Tales; but they ...
— Letters of Horace Walpole, V4 • Horace Walpole
... left alone—to meet that crisis most fatal to wedded happiness, the discovery of the first deceit Captain Rothesay sat silent, with averted face; Sybilla was weeping—not that repentant shower which rains softness into a man's heart, but those fretful tears which ...
— Olive - A Novel • Dinah Maria Craik, (AKA Dinah Maria Mulock)
... interval between the ceremony of our marriage and his departure, she had remained at home, occupying her old place by her father, and bed by her sister's side: he as kind as ever, but the women almost speechless among themselves; Aunt Lambert, for once, unkind and fretful in her temper; and little Hetty feverish and strange, and saying, "I wish we were gone. I wish we were gone." Though admitted to the house, and forgiven, I slunk away during those last days, and only saw my wife for a minute or two in ...
— The Virginians • William Makepeace Thackeray
... a heavy-wing'd flight, and grow busy as rooks; And the postman (that Genius, indifferent and stern, Who shakes out even-handed to all, from his urn, Those lots which so often decide if our day Shall be fretful and anxious, or joyous and gay) Brings, each morning, more letters of one sort or other Than Cadmus, himself, put together, to bother The heads of Hellenes;—I say, in the season Of Fair May, in May Fair, there can be no reason Why, when quietly munching your dry toast and butter, Your ...
— Lucile • Owen Meredith
... uncertain, she prized it doubly, even though, by a strange fatality, she had never had so much trouble and vexation with them as arose at once on their being made over to her! When all was settled, doubt over, and the routine life begun, Lucilla evidently felt the blank of her vanished hopes, and became fretful and captious, weary of things in general, and without sufficient motive to control her natural taste for the variety of naughtiness! Honor had not undertaken the easiest of tasks, but she neither shrank from her enterprise nor ceased to love the fiery little flighty sprite, the pleasing ...
— Hopes and Fears - scenes from the life of a spinster • Charlotte M. Yonge
... again, and with fretful unease, that the most awful thing about it all was that he wasn't sure. If only he could have been sure, he might have made up his mind exactly what it was he ought ...
— The Lodger • Marie Belloc Lowndes
... nephew, whom the reader has seen already, accompanied him, and also the youth named Hippolyte Terentieff. The latter was only seventeen or eighteen. He had an intelligent face, though it was usually irritated and fretful in expression. His skeleton-like figure, his ghastly complexion, the brightness of his eyes, and the red spots of colour on his cheeks, betrayed the victim of consumption to the most casual glance. He coughed persistently, and panted for breath; it looked ...
— The Idiot • (AKA Feodor Dostoevsky) Fyodor Dostoyevsky
... might have reproved the little girl for her fretful words, but kind-hearted Mrs. Boardman was too sorry for her. She could imagine how hard it must seem to a child who had never been under any control at all, to find herself obliged to obey rules, whether she liked them ...
— Ruby at School • Minnie E. Paull
... dance, nor in the three successive dances did Maitland appear. The precious moments were slipping by. Patricia was becoming more and more anxious and fretful at the non-appearance of her hero. Also, Hugh began to notice and detect a ...
— To Him That Hath - A Novel Of The West Of Today • Ralph Connor
... when the people of Zuni and Cicuye and Tiguex would not tell them where the sacred gold was hid, there were terrible things done. That winter when the days were cold, the food was low and the soldiers fretful. Many an Indian kept the secret ...
— The Trail Book • Mary Austin et al
... teacupful in which is stirred a large dessert spoonful of moist sugar and a little grated ginger is an excellent thing to give to aged persons a couple of hours before dinner," It is remarkable to see how this treatment aids the digestion, especially in chronic cases. It may also be given to fretful children in small doses. ...
— Mother's Remedies - Over One Thousand Tried and Tested Remedies from Mothers - of the United States and Canada • T. J. Ritter
... the most magnificent creation which the mind of man has as yet thrown out of itself. If there be any such thing as a philosophy of history, real or possible, it is in virtue of there being certain progressive organising laws in which the fretful lives of each of us are gathered into and subordinated in some larger unity, through which age is linked to age, as we move forward, with an horizon expanding and advancing. And if this is true, the magnitude of any human phenomenon is a criterion of its importance, and definite forms ...
— Short Studies on Great Subjects • James Anthony Froude
... town a week yet," she said. "We're not half settled. Not having any one to help makes it harder; and the baby is rather fretful." ...
— A Mountain Woman and Others • (AKA Elia Wilkinson) Elia W. Peattie
... But gain'd in softness what it lost in force: Kind his opinions; he would not receive An ill report, nor evil act believe; "If true, 'twas wrong; but blemish great or small Have all mankind; yea, sinners are we all." If ever fretful thought disturb'd his breast, If aught of gloom that cheerful mind oppress'd, It sprang from innovation; it was then He spake of mischief made by restless men: Not by new doctrines: never in his life Would he attend to controversial strife; For sects he cared ...
— The Borough • George Crabbe
... a proposition in Euclid, should we really be satisfied with the statement that it represented the random pencil-strokes made by a blindfolded child ignorant of geometry? On the other hand, if a fretful baby is allowed to divert himself by hammering the piano keys, is the result ever remotely akin to a tune? We know perfectly well that we never get harmony, order, beauty, rationality by accident; and there is only one other alternative—design, purpose, guidance. Professor Fiske ...
— Problems of Immanence - Studies Critical and Constructive • J. Warschauer
... form in Morovenia for a husband or father to discuss his home life, or to show enthusiasm on the subject of mere woman; but the Count, prompted by a fretful desire to dispose of his rapidly maturing offspring, often remarked to the high-born young gentlemen of his acquaintance that Kalora was a most remarkable girl and one possessed of many charms, leaving them to infer, if they cared to do ...
— The Slim Princess • George Ade
... waters gleam And sparkle with the sun's warm beam, Reflecting then some mirrored cloud Like specter wrapt in filmy shroud— Till pouring down with fretful whirl They o'er the mill-dam rush and curl, And foaming round in eddies deep, The circles ...
— The Old Hanging Fork and Other Poems • George W. Doneghy
... forcibly reminded her of earlier days, when she had carried Lilly about in her arms. For some time after the departure of Mrs. Martin and Laura, the little fellow seemed perfectly satisfied, but finally grew fretful, and Beulah surmised ...
— Beulah • Augusta J. Evans
... simplicity of the farmer's life, he knows very much better than to pin his faith to it. To him the farmer's house is too often a place where the mother is overworked, tired, wearied with constant annoyance, and made peevish and fretful. The conversation of hired men and young neighbors and brothers is not marked by refined delicacy and simplicity, as he understands these terms. At the end of all our preaching he will say, at least to himself, that ...
— Village Improvements and Farm Villages • George E. Waring
... and the gin-palaces. Sometimes they go down quickly to a dishonored grave, over which Love stands bewildered, and weeps her unavailing tears. Sometimes, on the other hand, they are gloomy, sad, silent. Perhaps they are morose. Worse still, they are whining, fretful, complaining. You would even call them sour. Often they are cynical and disagreeable. But be not too hasty, too sweeping, too clear-cut. I have seen such men who were the reverse of the Pharisees. Their faces were a ...
— Gala-days • Gail Hamilton
... bear in the wilderness. Often when they wanted water for their little ones and their cattle, and could not find it, they were like fretful children when they were tired and thirsty. Once, at Horeb, Moses struck a rock with his wonderful rod, and water sprung ...
— Child's Story of the Bible • Mary A. Lathbury
... Hardwicke as a son since he bore the body of the dear old fellow's son out of fire in the Khyber Pass, and won a promotion and the V. C. Harry says the girl is a modern Noor-Mahal! But, she is as speechless and timid as a startled fawn! Now, Major, you will excuse me. I have to leave you!" There was a fretful haste in the passionate boy's manner. The hour was ...
— A Fascinating Traitor • Richard Henry Savage
... phantoms, always longing to get, always sparing to give, careless as to talk, unwilling to sit silent, eager for food, wakeful for news, weary of a good book, quick to anger, easy of offence at my neighbour, and too ready to judge him, too merry over prosperity, and too gloomy, fretful, and peevish in adversity; so often making good rules for my future life, and coming so little speed with them all, and so on. And, in facing even such a terrible thicket as that, let not even an old man absolutely despair. At forty, at sixty, at threescore and ...
— Bunyan Characters - Third Series - The Holy War • Alexander Whyte
... scream, so she sat down to nurse it: for a little while the infant refused to drink, struggling and kicking in its mother's arms, then for a few minutes it was quite, taking the milk in a half-hearted, fretful way. Then it began to scream and ...
— The Ragged Trousered Philanthropists • Robert Tressell
... midst of torturing physical pain, in the extreme form of that experience, of which the slightest degree makes us fretful, irritable, self-absorbed, our Lord calmly provides for the future of His mother and the disciple ...
— Gloria Crucis - addresses delivered in Lichfield Cathedral Holy Week and Good Friday, 1907 • J. H. Beibitz
... will keep Pace with her Ignorance, and she will forsake him for the Sweetheart of a Week. You think Marriage the supreme Bliss: a good many don't find it so. Lively Passions soon burn out; and then come disappointed Expectancies, vain Repinings, fretful Complainings, wrathful Rejoinings. You fly from Collision with jarring Minds: what Security have you for more Forbearance among your new Connexions? Alas! you will carry your Temper with you—you will carry your bodily ...
— Mary Powell & Deborah's Diary • Anne Manning
... mother, and how she ought to tell her of all these things. But how could she? During the past day or two Mrs. Rosewarne had been at times singularly fretful and anxious. No letter had come from her husband. In vain did Wenna remind her that men were more careless of such small matters than women, and that it was too soon to expect her father to sit down ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Vol. 15, - No. 87, March, 1875 • Various
... fretful contortion, and obeyed. So it went on all the morning, Ethel's eagerness checked by Miss Winter's dry manner, producing pettishness, till Ethel, in a state between self-reproach and a sense of injustice, went up to prepare for dinner, and to visit ...
— The Daisy Chain, or Aspirations • Charlotte Yonge
... you tell me who it is?" she retorted, in an impatient, fretful tone, not having the discernment to see that he wished to prepare her for what was coming. "Can't you speak, Jan, if he won't? People have no right to come, dressed up in other people's clothes and faces, to frighten us to death. He ...
— Verner's Pride • Mrs. Henry Wood
... out, when Cherokee makes this yere long an' fretful break, the avaricious gent's holdin' a brace of kings. He's delighted with Cherokee's uproar, an' thinks how soft, an' what a case of open- ...
— Wolfville Days • Alfred Henry Lewis
... fields to search the brambles for stray hips, or locks of wool the sheep had not left there willingly; men and women even worse off had been there before them, and they came home at night, tired out and footsore, only to hear Zitza's fretful cry for food, and the constant chatter of Meister Hans, croaking for his own share in what they ...
— Our Young Folks—Vol. I, No. II, February 1865 - An Illustrated Magazine for Boys and Girls • Various
... father, you are the oldest among us; you shall be our foreman." And when the coroner had sworn them on the jury, the coffin was uncovered, that they might look upon the body. But the old man, disturbed in his mind at the interruption they had given him, and grown somewhat fretful upon it, said to them: "To what purpose do you show us a dead body here? You would not have us think, sure, that this man died in this room! How then shall we be able to judge how this man came by his death unless we see the place wherein he died, and wherein ...
— The History of Thomas Ellwood Written by Himself • Thomas Ellwood
... was so hungry that he cried aloud. His grandmother told him to be quiet, but he cried the harder. She became vexed with him and cried out, "Ho, Kalopaling, come and take this fretful ...
— A Treasury of Eskimo Tales • Clara Kern Bayliss
... well understands the character), we are assured, that "he feels equally indifferent, Mr. Gilchrist, for what your malice can invent, or your impudence utter." This is indubitable; for it rests not only on Mr. Bowles's assurance, but on that of Sir Fretful Plagiary, and nearly in the same words,—"and I shall treat it with exactly the same calm indifference and philosophical ...
— Life of Lord Byron, Vol. 6 (of 6) - With his Letters and Journals • Thomas Moore
... the heat of his ardor and longing for his native land this hackneyed phrase took on its real and dreadful value. In the sudden sweep of this vital remembrance, Claire Robson rose for a moment above the fretful drip of circumstance.... Blood-red Dawn!... She threw herself back ...
— The Blood Red Dawn • Charles Caldwell Dobie
... opened his mother's bedroom door and walked self-consciously forward to turn up the light, a fretful voice from the bed ...
— The Secret of the Storm Country • Grace Miller White
... the long years before him filled him with horror, the long road that life offered him, monotonous, dusty, rough, without a shadow or a resting place, a painful journey lacking enthusiasm and ardor, pulling at the chain of duty, at the end of which dragged the enemy, always fretful, always unjust, with the selfish cruelty of disease, spying on him with searching eyes in the hours when his mind was off its guard, while he slept, violating his secrecy, forcing his immobility, robbing him of his most intimate ideas, ...
— Woman Triumphant - (La Maja Desnuda) • Vicente Blasco Ibanez
... not told Aunt Barbara of Hatty's letter about her new resolutions, yet the old lady felt that some change must have taken place in Hatty to make her willing to give up her own pleasure to sit in that quiet room with a sick, fretful old woman, as Aunt Barbara knew ...
— Hatty and Marcus - or, First Steps in the Better Path • Aunt Friendly
... night the fretful, shrill Banshee Lurks in the chambers' dark festoons, Calling for ever, o'er garden and river, Through magpie changing of the moons: 'Alulvan, O, alas! Alulvan, The doom ...
— Songs of Childhood • Walter de la Mare
... morning of the great Gymkhana, to be followed by the Bachelors' Ball. For Lahore's unfailing social energy was not yet spent; though Depot troops had gone to the Hills, and the leave season was open, releasing a fortunate few; leaving the rest to fretful or stoical endurance of the stealthy, stoking-up process of a Punjab hot-weather. And the true inwardness of those three words must be burned into body and brain, season after season, ...
— Far to Seek - A Romance of England and India • Maud Diver
... all his faculties upon what he was doing, whether it was work or play, that made Mr. Gladstone one of the ablest as well as happiest of the century. He took the keenest delight in the scholarly and beautiful, and this accounts for his disregard of minor ills and evils. He was too absorbed to be fretful or impatient. But to be absorbed in great things did not mean, in his case, to be neglectful of little things. At one time his mind and time were so completely taken up with the Eastern question, that he could not be induced to spare a thought for ...
— The Grand Old Man • Richard B. Cook
... Pelle, nodding earnestly. "But she was so fretful, she was always ailing; and it's better they should go when they get like that. But now we're soon going to get married again—when Father Lasse's found ...
— Pelle the Conqueror, Complete • Martin Andersen Nexo
... to go. I could understand his doing that. He is not like us, and would have been fretful here, wanting that which I could not give him. He became worse from day to day, and was silent and morose. I am glad he went. But, mamma, for his sake I wish that this could ...
— The House of Heine Brothers, in Munich • Anthony Trollope
... motherless,' he added, 'and I'm taking her to my relatives. But I have to ride some distance from here on very urgent business, and if you will look after her for to-night I'll call for her to-morrow. Poor little innocent! She's hungry and fretful. I haven't anything to give her and the storm looks like continuing. Will you let her stay with you?' 'Certainly!' said I, without thinking a bit further about it. 'Leave her here by all means. We'll see she gets all she wants.' ...
— Innocent - Her Fancy and His Fact • Marie Corelli
... agitated.) It must be he. That fretful animal motion—that face working up and down with uneasy sensibility, ...
— The Works of Charles and Mary Lamb IV - Poems and Plays • Charles and Mary Lamb
... the sick-room swiftly and noiselessly, put the nun through a strict cross-examination with the fretful sharpness of a person disturbed in her night's rest. Then she went into the sitting-room where Philippus was on the point of pledging Paula in his second cup of wine, while she stood before him with dishevelled hair and robe ungirt. All this was an ...
— Uarda • Georg Ebers
... was fretful impatience now in Sonia's tone. "I hate sewing—any kind of sewing. You know I ...
— The Torch Bearer - A Camp Fire Girls' Story • I. T. Thurston
... Stanford spoke, the pink infant in the crib awoke and set up a dismal wail. The young mother arose, with an impatient sigh, lifted the babe, and sat down in a low nurse-chair, to soothe it to sleep again. But the baby was fretful, and cried and moaned drearily, and resisted every effort to ...
— Kate Danton, or, Captain Danton's Daughters - A Novel • May Agnes Fleming
... tone is fretful, That my mourning days were few, You call me over forgetful— My God, if ...
— India's Love Lyrics • Adela Florence Cory Nicolson (AKA Laurence Hope), et al.
... to me that the prairie would be a lonely place to live in, especially if it rained. But the people who have lived there for years tell me they get very homesick if they go away for a time. Valleys and hills seem to them petty, fretful, unlovable. The magic of the ...
— Letters from America • Rupert Brooke
... home wearied with excitement, and dusty and fretful—but content. We had seen it. We had grasped as much of it as anybody and could remember it as well as the best. Next day as we resumed work in the field the memory of its splendors went with ...
— A Son of the Middle Border • Hamlin Garland
... physical endowment of the others all the fires of his being were dying down to smoldering ashes. His love for Susan faded, if not from his heart, from his eyes and lips. She was as dear to him as ever, but now with a devitalized, undemanding affection in which there was something of a child's fretful dependence. He rode beside her not looking at her, contented that she should be there, but with the thought of marriage buried out of sight under the weight of his weariness. It did not figure at all in his mind, which, when roused ...
— The Emigrant Trail • Geraldine Bonner
... brother, and the particular morning on which it occurred, were each for itself separately and equally memorable. Freedom won, and death escaped, almost in the same hour,—freedom from a yoke of such secret and fretful annoyance as none could measure but myself, and death probably through the fiercest of torments,—these double cases of deliverance, so sudden and so unlooked for, signalized by what heraldically might have been described as a two-headed memorial, the establishment of an epoch in my life. ...
— Autobiographic Sketches • Thomas de Quincey
... months—most frequently those that give the child pleasure, that satisfy his desires, or lessen his discomfort. It is not to be forgotten that even the ae, which requires effort on account of the drawing back and spreading out of the tongue, diminishes discomfort. The fretful babe feels better when he cries u-ae than when he keeps silent. The second factor is determined by the surroundings of the child. Those sounds which the child distinctly hears he will be able to imitate correctly sooner than ...
— The Mind of the Child, Part II • W. Preyer
... had but only one, A puny and decrepid son; But day and night, Though fretful oft, and weak, and small, A loving child, he was her all— ...
— London Lyrics • Frederick Locker
... crest, Or hold the tiller in the dashing spray, My love of you leaps foaming in my breast, Shouts with the winds and sweeps to their foray; . . . I laugh aloud for love of you, Glad that our love is fellow to rough weather— No fretful orchid hothoused from the dew, But hale and hardy as the highland heather, Rejoicing in the wind that stings and thrills, Comrade of the ocean, playmate of ...
— Where the Sun Swings North • Barrett Willoughby
... I was bearing was thereupon bestowed in the boot, I followed my cousin into the car, and a few minutes later we were at the mouth of the Adour. Here we left Ping beside Pong, and proceeded to join three figures on the horizon, apparently absorbed in the temper of a fretful sea. ...
— Jonah and Co. • Dornford Yates
... the Hills, a thousand miles from home, when they had not seen men for a very long time, Dalua touched them with his wing, and they went mad for the space of thirty hours. It was by a stream in a profound gorge at evening and under a fretful moon. The next morning they lustrated themselves with water, ...
— Hills and the Sea • H. Belloc
... gaily, half boldly: "You ought to do better than that with those big eyes of yours!" She drew back and shuddered; he broke into a coarse laugh, and went his way. Standing where he had left her, she seemed for a time lost in wretched reflections; the fretful, wailing cry of the child she carried roused her, and hushing it softly, she murmured, "Yes, yes, darling, it is too wet and cold for you; we had better go." And acting suddenly on her resolve, she hailed another omnibus, this time bound for Tottenham Court Road, and was, after ...
— Stories By English Authors: London • Various
... have been walking worthily in her footsteps, but of nameless saints of more retired and private state,—domestic saints, who have tended children not their own through whooping-cough and measles, and borne the unruly whims of fretful invalids,—stocking-darning, shirt-making saints,—saints who wore no visible garment of haircloth, bound themselves with no belts of spikes and nails, yet in their inmost souls were marked and seared with the red cross of a lifelong self-sacrifice,—saints for whom the mystical terms ...
— Household Papers and Stories • Harriet Beecher Stowe
... getting up behind his triumphal chariot—came to Bolt Court from Johnson's Court, whither he had flitted from Inner Temple Lane, where he was living when the young Scotch barrister who was afterwards his biographer first knew him. His strange household of fretful and disappointed almspeople seems as well known as our own. At the head of these pensioners was the daughter of a Welsh doctor, (a blind old lady named Williams), who had written some trivial poems; Mrs. Desmoulins, an old Staffordshire lady, ...
— Old and New London - Volume I • Walter Thornbury
... begins to turn its face away from the light because it makes its eyes smart, and complains not so much of soreness as of a peppery, burning, itching sensation in its nose and throat. The tongue is coated, the stomach mildly upset; the little patient is more uncomfortable and fretful than seriously ill. This condition drags on, without apparently getting anywhere, for from two to four days, during which time it is often very difficult even for the most experienced physician to say positively what the sufferer has. But about the ...
— Preventable Diseases • Woods Hutchinson
... and invariably inhibition of associations and loss of effective power. Of course, the sovereign cure for worry is religious faith; and this, of course, you also know. The turbulent billows of the fretful surface leave the deep parts of the ocean undisturbed, and to him who has a hold on vaster and more permanent realities the hourly vicissitudes of his personal destiny seem relatively insignificant things. The really religious person ...
— A Book of Exposition • Homer Heath Nugent
... record, on whom all this was thrown away. Yet she was of very religious habit, and preserved all the externals of propriety; but, as Pirkheimer observes, "one would rather choose a woman who conducts herself in an agreeable manner, than a fretful, jealous, scolding wife, however devout she ...
— Rambles of an Archaeologist Among Old Books and in Old Places • Frederick William Fairholt
... haste new Palms to seize, Thy little, envious, angry Genius teize; Let thy weak wilful Head, unrein'd by Art, Obey the Dictates of thy flatt'ring Heart; Divide a busy, fretful Life between Smut, Libel, Sing-song, Vanity, and Spleen; With long-brew'd Malice warm thy languid Page, And urge delirious Nonsense into Rage; Let bawdy Emblems, now, thy Hours beguile; Now, Fustian Epic, aping Virgil's Stile; To Virgil like, to Indian Clay as Delf, Or Pulteney, ...
— Two Poems Against Pope - One Epistle to Mr. A. Pope and the Blatant Beast • Leonard Welsted
... along pretty soon," complained a fretful voice that Racey recognized as belonging ...
— The Heart of the Range • William Patterson White
... to say at supper. She sat by her father and ate her muffins like a very hungry, tired child—like a very cross child, Gypsy thought. Joy's face was always pale and fretful; in the bright lamplight now, after the exhaustion of the long journey, it ...
— Gypsy's Cousin Joy • Elizabeth Stuart Phelps
... was packed with a sweltering throng, and they took refuge in the waiting-room, where there was another throng, already dejected by the heat and the long waiting for retarded trains. Pale mothers were struggling with fretful babies, or trying to keep their older offspring from the fascination of the track; girls and their "fellows" were giggling and shoving, and passing about candy in sticky bags, and older men, collarless and perspiring, were shifting heavy children from one arm ...
— Summer • Edith Wharton
... fine set of the Encyclopaedia Britannica; histories of all sorts, but only the best in every case; a little standard poetry; the great English novelists—Dickens much worn, Meredith's early works, the unquenchable Charles Reade, who has nursed so many fretful convalescents back to the harness; two or three fine editions of Shakespeare, one, a half-dozen small green volumes, worn loose from their bindings; Darwin, Huxley, and a dozen blazers of that wonderful trail, much underlined and cross-indexed, ...
— Margarita's Soul - The Romantic Recollections of a Man of Fifty • Ingraham Lovell
... wonder, and then, clasping them round Wilson's neck (she was carrying him), he kissed her in an ecstasy of joy. And that was after a long day's journey, when most other children would have been tired and fretful. But the sense of the beautiful is certainly very strong in him, little darling. He can't say the word 'church' yet, but when he sees one he begins to chant. Oh, he's a true Florentine in ...
— The Letters of Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Volume II • Elizabeth Barrett Browning
... or three of her favourite poems, but with little heart in her reading, for she felt that her listener was not listening. Now and then would come an impatient sigh, or a fretful movement of the jewelled hands; once a sapphire was tossed up in the air, and fell on the floor by Margaret's feet. Only when she began the lovely "Good Night, Babette!" did Mrs. Peyton's attention seem to fix. She listened quietly, and, at ...
— Margaret Montfort • Laura E. Richards
... 'ears of flesh and blood' the secrets of its fiery prison-house. Yet it knows how to tell enough of the horrors of that gruesome place to make the hair of a stronger mortal than Hamlet is, stand on end, 'like quills upon the fretful porcupine.' ...
— Shakspere And Montaigne • Jacob Feis
... twilight, and up the ravine came the murmuring I had heard below—a sobbing sound which at first affrighted and then soothed, for it could be nothing but the echo of the sea on the curving beach below; and in its comfort that lulled all ineffectual clamour, and eventually to fretful but frightful sleep. Always I awoke panting with thirst, stiff and strained, and with unmanly cries of fear and pain on my lips, while the chaste stars danced across the narrow slit as I strove to stem ...
— Tropic Days • E. J. Banfield
... belching mountain in the South Hurls boulders thro' the fearful night: A demon-quire rants from script, Led by staccato raspings, howls; A meteor vaults a Cauldron's mouth; A sombre maid doth long for light. Bleak wintry winds engulf us all— Hosannah! cry the fretful mobs; White-heated storms assail all heads— Triumphal paeons shake the air! Unnumbered gawks roam thro' each hall— Where Typhon sits, a maiden sobs! Conscience stabs our nightly beds, Remorse leers daily ...
— Betelguese - A Trip Through Hell • Jean Louis de Esque
... to kiss her as she might a fretful child who had much to learn, murmured, "Of course, dear. It will ...
— Together • Robert Herrick (1868-1938)
... restless. An unconquerable curiosity lay at the very root of their lives. She thought him English and self-sufficient; he thought her foreign and a little superstitious. This ineffable criticism was constant, fretful, and ever nearing the climax of uttered reproach. Sara had inherited all the amazement, but she owned, as well, its comprehension. She adored passionately the mother she had never seen; she loved her father, whom she knew by heart. After exchanging an affectionate ...
— Robert Orange - Being a Continuation of the History of Robert Orange • John Oliver Hobbes
... far as the eye could reach, a thin stream of white and pink and blue, a tumbling river of curls and caps and bare legs, were the children. A babble of shrill cries, of chattering laughter, of fretful screams, an undercurrent of remonstrance, of soothing patience, of angry threatening, marked their slow progress up and down the walk; in the clear spaces of the little park they trotted freely after hoops and balls, rolled and ran over ...
— While Caroline Was Growing • Josephine Daskam Bacon
... in the very grasp of death, did this faith fail him. He kept, in the midst of a fretful, slothful, wailing world, where prophets like Carlyle and Ruskin were as impatient and bewildered, as lamenting and despondent, as the decadents they despised, the temper of his Herakles in Balaustion. He left us ...
— The Poetry Of Robert Browning • Stopford A. Brooke
... observe, that Rosamond's father had not been too severe upon Bell when he called her a silly girl. From her infancy she had been humoured; and at eight years old she had the misfortune to be a spoiled child. She was idle, fretful, and selfish; so that nothing could make her happy. On her birthday she expected, however, to be perfectly happy. Everybody in the house tried to please her, and they succeeded so well, that between breakfast and dinner she had only six fits of crying. ...
— The Parent's Assistant • Maria Edgeworth
... the lion fits were on, it was always safest to let the unhappy child alone. Prudy, who had no more temper than a humming-bird, and Susy, who was only moderately fretful once in a while, were made very unhappy by Dotty's dreadful behavior. At such times as I describe, they even looked guilty, and cast down their eyes, for they could not help feeling their sister's conduct ...
— Dotty Dimple At Home • Sophie May
... demonstrations of affection were not common in our family, although a certain impetuous, almost passionate and boisterous manner always characterised our dealings. This being so, it naturally seemed to me quite a great event when one night I, fretful with sleepiness, looked up at her with tearful eyes as she was taking me to bed, and saw her gaze back at me proudly and fondly, and speak of me to a visitor then present with ...
— My Life, Volume I • Richard Wagner
... "Dinna greet. But tell me what's wrang. I'm sorry if it's me that has done it, Mysie. Maybe I hae frightened you; but, there now, dinna greet. I didna mean ony harm!" and he stroked and caressed her hair softly with his hands, or patted her shoulders at every word, as a mother does with a fretful child. ...
— The Underworld - The Story of Robert Sinclair, Miner • James C. Welsh
... perspiring humanity, rotting garbage, and vile sewage. And, in the midst of the hot filth, the people moved with languid, feeble manner; their faces worn and pallid; their eyes dull and weary; their voices thin and fretful. ...
— Their Yesterdays • Harold Bell Wright
... in the dim greenish light of the drawing-room; the feathers of the hat were unusually large and drooping; they curled heavily round the thin neck and long, hollow-eyed face, so that its ivory whiteness, its fatigue, its fretful beauty were framed in and emphasized by them; her bloodless hands lay upon her lap, and the folds of the sweeping dress drawn round her showed her slenderness, or rather her emaciation. Two years before ...
— Marriage a la mode • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... of the grimly-ludicrous moved me to a fretful laugh, as I replied, "I have looked over it. In Heaven's name, ...
— Great Expectations • Charles Dickens
... all her dreams and thoughts of her husband, Ogilvie did not come back to his loving wife in the early hours of the first day of the bazaar. Neither was there any message or telegram from him. In spite of herself, Mrs. Ogilvie now grew a little fretful. ...
— Daddy's Girl • L. T. Meade
... life, and was country-gentleman, magistrate, antiquary, clergyman, and poet.[21] Such names are enough to recall a type which has not quite vanished, and which has gathered a new charm in more stirring and fretful times. These most excellent people, however, were not likely to be prominent in movements destined to break up the placid environment of their lives nor, in truth, to be sources of any ...
— The English Utilitarians, Volume I. • Leslie Stephen
... hungry noses, the dogs answered each cry with a single keen yap of preoccupied affirmation. Almost at once Charmer came to the spot pointed out to me, reared her full length upon the rails and let out a new note; long, musical, fretful, overjoyed. Hardy mounted breast-high to the fence's top, wreathed two fingers in the willing brute's collar, lifted her, and dropped her on the other side. There she instantly ...
— The Flower of the Chapdelaines • George W. Cable
... looking at a picture-book, her face resting on the back of her hand, and golden ringlets falling over her bare arm. He could see the boy, too. He remembered that his name was Billy. Billy who? he wondered. He could hear the sweet, rather fretful voice calling ...
— The Wild Olive • Basil King
... labors of the household is the killing of conversation. There is perhaps no more general weakness in the average American family than glumness! The silent newspaper-reading father, the worried watchful mother, the surly boy, the fretful girl, these are characters typical in both town and country. In one of Mrs. Daskam Bacon's lively tales, "Ardelia in Arcadia," the little heroine is transplanted from a lively, chattering, sweltering New York street to the maddening silence ...
— The Business of Being a Woman • Ida M. Tarbell
... "To tell the truth, I am a little anxious about Hilda; she is not at all well. I don't mean that she is actually ill," she added quickly, as Mr. Graham looked up in alarm, "but she seems languid and dispirited, has no appetite, and is inclined to be fretful,—an unusual thing ...
— Queen Hildegarde • Laura Elizabeth Howe Richards
... Elizabeth's went up. Nothing could bring her out of a "grumpy" fit so satisfactorily as her mistresses falling into one. When Miss Selina now began to fidget hither and thither, each tone of her fretful voice seeming to go through her eldest sister's every nerve, till even Hilary said, impatiently, "Oh, Selina, can't you be quiet?" then Elizabeth rose from the depth of her gloomy discontent up ...
— Mistress and Maid • Dinah Craik (aka: Miss Mulock)
... One might sleep, for the lapping of the wind wears one to the point of exhaustion very soon, but there is dread, in open sand stretches sometimes justified, of being over blown by the drift. It is hot, dry, fretful work, but by going along the ground with the wind behind, one may come upon strange things in its tumultuous privacy. I like these truces of wind and heat that the desert makes, otherwise I do not know how I should come by so many acquaintances ...
— The Land of Little Rain • Mary Austin |
