"Underbred" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... with one of our own kind, I suppose," returned Draymore bluntly. "And, for that matter," he said, turning to the others, "we might have known that Captain Selwyn could have had no hand in and no knowledge of such an underbred ...
— The Younger Set • Robert W. Chambers
... many politicians, changed my opinion. It concerns the particular fashion in which women tend to regard, or rather to disregard, the formal and legal rights of the citizen. In so far as this is a bias, it is a bias in the directly opposite direction from that now lightly alleged. There is a sort of underbred history going about, according to which women in the past have always been in the position of slaves. It is much more to the point to note that women have always been in the position of despots. ...
— What I Saw in America • G. K. Chesterton
... without a very sensible pressure from the putty, or whatever it is that is so tenacious. I am afraid it is rather a habit of his, which has lost all force or meaning by being too frequently repeated. Then there was a horrid little wretch, vulgar and underbred (to my idea), to whom I was introduced as Mr. G——.... But here is Lieutenant Dupre, whom I have not yet introduced, though we have met before. Tall, good-looking, a fine form, and not a sparkling face, I am inclined to believe that his chief merit lies in his legs. Certainly ...
— A Confederate Girl's Diary • Sarah Morgan Dawson
... them; and generally it may be said that he is disappointingly dull and indifferent to Paris, though he liked it well enough when there. He never caught the Paris fever as Hume did, and Sterne, or even as Walpole did, for all the hard things he says of the underbred and overbearing manners of the philosophers. Gibbon had ready access to the well-known houses of Madame Geoffrin, Madame Helvetius and the Baron d'Holbach; and his perfect mastery of the language must have removed every obstacle in the way of complete social intercourse. But no word in his ...
— Gibbon • James Cotter Morison
... look back upon the high spirit and independent temper uniformly displayed by Mr. Adams abroad and at home in all dealings with foreign powers. Never in any instance did he display the least tinge of that rodomontade and boastful extravagance which have given an underbred air to so many of our diplomats, and which inevitably cause the basis for such self-laudation to appear of dubious sufficiency. But he had the happy gift of a native pride which enabled him to support in the most effective ...
— John Quincy Adams - American Statesmen Series • John. T. Morse
... motive, to do the secondary thing, to confuse sounds or appearances with values, which is covered by the word as we commonly use it, very early came to seem to me a way of looking at life for which I know no other term than underbred. ...
— McClure's Magazine, Volume VI, No. 3. February 1896 • Various
... be a man of moods, the young lady had produced in him a revolution of curiosity, set his sympathy in motion. Her mixture, as it spread itself before him, was an appeal and a challenge: she was sensitive and dense, she was underbred and fine. Certainly she was very various, and that was rare; quite not at this moment the heavy-eyed, frightened creature who had pulled herself together with such an effort at Madame Carre's, nor the elated "phenomenon" who had just been declaiming, nor the rather affected ...
— The Tragic Muse • Henry James
... to it I found the others all at this door, very angry. They'd been here all night, trying to get out. Then the door opened this gentleman must have opened it and before I could protect him, that underbred man in the high ...
— The Enchanted Castle • E. Nesbit
... SHOULD she do? The situation was intolerable; yet how could it be ended, except by a humiliating direct request for money? She wondered how young wives habitually dealt with this problem, when they happened to marry husbands so negligent, not to say underbred, as to cause them the awkwardness and the shame. There followed several days during which the money idea was an obsession, nagging and grinning at her every instant. The sight of money gave her a peculiar itching ...
— The Price She Paid • David Graham Phillips
... into two almost equal halves: deeming that the countess should not insist, and the earl should not refuse: him she condemned for lack of sufficient spiritual insight to perceive the merits of his wife's request: her she accused of some vestige of something underbred in her nature, for putting such fervid stress upon the supplication: i.e. making too much of it—a trick of the vulgar: and not known ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith |
