"Unobservant" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... She felt at ease sitting amongst them and was glad she was there and not at the English end of the table. Down here, hemmed in by the Bergmanns with Emma's little form, her sounds, movements and warmth, her little quiet friendliness planted between herself and the English, with the apparently unobservant Minna and Elsa across the way she felt safe. She felt fairly sure those German eyes did not criticise her. Perhaps, she suggested to herself, they thought a good deal of English people in general; and then they ...
— Pointed Roofs - Pilgrimage, Volume 1 • Dorothy Richardson
... Peyton, unobservant of the wistful sigh by which the maid's speech was accompanied, replied, "Nay, for me, 'tis safest travelling at night. I must go through dangerous country to reach ...
— The Continental Dragoon - A Love Story of Philipse Manor-House in 1778 • Robert Neilson Stephens
... group is the only one that counts. Now we are strong for disagreeable facts. We know a great many. But somehow we cannot shake ourself loose from the instinctive conviction that imagination is the without-which-nothing of the art of fiction. Miss Stella Benson is one who is not unobservant of disagreeables, but when she writes she can convey her satire in flashing, fantastic absurdity, in a heavenly chiding so delicate and subtle that the victim hardly knows he is being chidden. The photographic facsimile of life ...
— Plum Pudding - Of Divers Ingredients, Discreetly Blended & Seasoned • Christopher Morley
... uncle told you a fib; Mr. Talboys is at home. And observe! until I came to Font Abbey, he was here three times a week. You admit that. I come; your uncle knows I am not so unobservant as you, and Mr. Talboys is kept out ...
— Love Me Little, Love Me Long • Charles Reade
... been rowers in the same boat on the silent river! Rowers, indeed! Short the spells and far between that we should have taken—the one would not have turned round the other, but when the oar chanced to drop out of his listless hand—and the canoe would have been allowed to drift with the stream, unobservant we of our backward course, and wondering and then ceasing to wonder at the slow-receding beauty of the hanging banks of grove—the cloud-mountains, immovable as those of earth, and in spirit ...
— Recreations of Christopher North, Volume 2 • John Wilson
... for an hour in his office, dispatching his accumulated two-days' mail, all unobservant of the cat-like tread of Einstein, the office boy, moving in and out. He lingered in a gloomy reverie, after checking up his correspondence, and a half hour's sharp dictations, absorbed in the cautious letter of Hugh Worthington, ...
— The Midnight Passenger • Richard Henry Savage
... cried as she fingered the greasy pages, while Elsie flinched inwardly. And unobservant as the girl naturally was, she could not help noticing that Mrs. Middleton retained ...
— Elsie Marley, Honey • Joslyn Gray
... draw off the attention, call away the attention, divert the attention, distract the mind; put out of one's head; disconcert, discompose; put out, confuse, perplex, bewilder, moider^, fluster, muddle, dazzle; throw a sop to Cerberus. Adj. inattentive; unobservant, unmindful, heedless, unthinking, unheeding, undiscerning^; inadvertent; mindless, regardless, respectless^, listless &c (indifferent) 866; blind, deaf; bird-witted; hand over head; cursory, percursory^; giddy-brained, scatter-brained, hare-brained; unreflective, ...
— Roget's Thesaurus of English Words and Phrases: Body • Roget
... Henslow, to whom I owe much, is dying, and Hooker is with him. Many thanks for two sets of sheets of your Proceedings. I cannot understand what Agassiz is driving at. You once spoke, I think, of Professor Bowen as a very clever man. I should have thought him a singularly unobservant man from his writings. He never can have seen much of animals, or he would have seen the difference of old and wise dogs and young ones. His paper about hereditariness beats everything. Tell a breeder that he might pick out his worst ...
— The Life and Letters of Charles Darwin, Volume II • Francis Darwin
... business is to exploit the Cabbage-caterpillar, a clearly-defined business, admitting of no possible confusion. Would we behold her works? In the spring, let us inspect the neighbourhood of the kitchen-garden. Be our eye never so unobservant, we shall notice against the walls or on the withered grasses at the foot of the hedges some very small yellow cocoons, heaped into masses the size of ...
— The Wonders of Instinct • J. H. Fabre
... away upon Brother Bonaday, whom preoccupation with trouble had long ago made unobservant. Brother Copas reeled in a few ...
— Brother Copas • Sir Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch
... themselves, and unobservant In what state God's other works may be, In their own tasks all their powers pouring, These attain the mighty ...
— The Pleasures of Life • Sir John Lubbock
... said, "are not so unobservant as you seem, but you hate facts. Vera and your friend Lawrence have been in love with one another since their first meeting, and my ...
— The Secret City • Hugh Walpole
... "I am not unobservant, Mr. Brent," he said. "Our profession, as you know, sir, leads us to the cultivation of that faculty. Now, I've thought a good deal about this matter, and I'll tell you a conclusion I've come to. Do you remember that when ...
— In the Mayor's Parlour • J. S. (Joseph Smith) Fletcher
... to the unobservant man's acute flashes of vision, and Mrs. Westmore's beauty was like a blinding light abruptly turned on eyes subdued to obscurity. As he spoke, his glance passed from her face to her hair, and remained caught in its meshes. He had never seen such hair—it ...
— The Fruit of the Tree • Edith Wharton
... child once, a clever woman now, had not been unobservant of some things in Lydia's past, some things that Lydia supposed to be buried in the grave of her own heart. A kind-hearted girl, Jane had never used this knowledge. But now knowledge was power. She would use ...
— The Children's Pilgrimage • L. T. Meade
... fault, and but for it he now thought he should not have been so unobservant of things about him. Could he, but for such weary nights of sleepless wandering and watching, have let his darling boy drive those young horses, filling the carriage so full of his brothers and sisters ...
— Fated to Be Free • Jean Ingelow
... in a low station, slanders his superiors. He hates those who have valour merely, and are unobservant of propriety. He hates those who are forward and determined, and, at the same time, of contracted understanding.' 2. The Master then inquired, 'Ts'ze, have you also your hatreds?' Tsze-kung replied, 'I hate those who pry out matters, and ascribe the knowledge to their ...
— The Chinese Classics—Volume 1: Confucian Analects • James Legge
... a puzzled expression. Julius Savine smiled, but his sister-in-law, who had remained silent, but not unobservant, broke in: "You believe in the hereditary transmission of character, ...
— Thurston of Orchard Valley • Harold Bindloss
... you, Mr. Bellward," he said: "With a superficial acquaintance, even with an intimate friend, if he's as unobservant as most people are, you'll pass muster. But I shouldn't like to guarantee anything if you were to meet, say, Mrs. Bellward, if the gentleman has got a wife, or his mother. Keep out of a strong light; don't show your profile more than you can help, and remember that a woman is a heap ...
— Okewood of the Secret Service • Valentine Williams
... Plant, Wig Tree, or Venetian Sumach. Spain to Caucasus, 1656. On account of its singular appearance this shrub always attracts the attention of even the most unobservant in such matters. It is a spreading shrub, about 6 feet high, with rotundate, glaucous leaves, on long petioles. The flowers are small and inconspicuous, but the feathery nature of the flower clusters, occasioned by the transformation of the pedicels and hairs into fluffy awns, renders ...
— Hardy Ornamental Flowering Trees and Shrubs • A. D. Webster
... and her father was changed. Eyebright was no longer careless or unobservant, as before her mother's death, and she noticed how fast papa's hair was turning gray, and how deep and careworn the lines about his mouth and eyes had become. He did not seem to gain in cheerfulness as time went on, but, if any thing, to look more sad and troubled; and he spent much of his ...
— Eyebright - A Story • Susan Coolidge
... parents' portraits in her bedroom, for they had both been of a florid texture and full habit; and she had now long refused sugar and the comforts of sweetmeats dear to the palate of her age and sex. And mostly was this self-denial practised for the sake of a young and unobservant friend, one Stephen Craig, who had so far evinced no unusual inclination for her, or for anything except cigars and masculine society of his own age ...
— Ailsa Paige • Robert W. Chambers
... rode fast up the Rue St. Louis, not unobservant of the dark looks of the Honnetes Gens or the familiar nods and knowing smiles of the partisans of the Friponne whom he met on ...
— The Golden Dog - Le Chien d'Or • William Kirby
... for I cast you, sweet! This one gift, you shall take: Like ointment, on your unobservant feet, My ...
— The Poems And Prose Of Ernest Dowson • Ernest Dowson et al
... "Jackie." A stick of candy from Tom's pocket was greedily accepted by Jackie. Tom was feeling blue that day thinking of his father from whom had come no word, of his mother and sister, and his old home. He wandered on unobservant of the fact that it was growing dark, and that a storm was fast approaching. He was suddenly called to a sense of his surroundings by hearing a cry behind him, and turning back saw that little Jackie was ...
— The Dare Boys of 1776 • Stephen Angus Cox
... a rule, unobservant; they go on in the old way until the horse flinches in action or stands "pointing" in dumb appeal to his owner, telling with mute but touching eloquence of his tight-ironed, feverish foot, the dead frog, and the insidious disease, ...
— Rational Horse-Shoeing • John E. Russell
... charity agents, {97} who work habitually in poor neighborhoods, get so accustomed to bad sanitary conditions that they hardly notice them. Volunteer workers are not so likely to fall into this error, though it is possible for volunteers to be very unobservant. They often feel that things are all wrong, without being able to state the specific difficulties. An observant visitor will learn the condition of the cellar, walls, yard, plumbing, and outhouses; will learn to take the cubic contents ...
— Friendly Visiting among the Poor - A Handbook for Charity Workers • Mary Ellen Richmond
... Greek and mediaeval modes of regarding Nature is not a little remarkable. Both Greeks and monks, judged by nineteenth-century standards, were unobservant of natural beauties. They make but brief and general remarks upon landscapes and the like. The [Greek: pontion te kumaton anerithmon gelasma] is very rare. But the Greeks stopped at the threshold of Nature; the ...
— Sketches and Studies in Italy and Greece • John Addington Symonds
... The unobservant visitor wondered how Hugo made it pay. The observant visitor did not fail to note that there were more than a hundred cash-desks in the place, and that all the cashiers had the air of being overworked. Once the entire army of cashiers, driven to defensive action, ...
— Hugo - A Fantasia on Modern Themes • Arnold Bennett
... for years he had done when he bade her good-by; but though she smiled and gave him "Good-day" in her usual voice, she drew the hand away. The Colonel's eyebrows went up another fraction of an inch, but he was a discreet gentleman who had bought experience. Skillfully unobservant, his parting words were at once cordial and few in number; and after Haward had mounted and had turned into the side road, he put his handsome, periwigged head out of the coach window and called to him some advice about the transplanting ...
— Audrey • Mary Johnston
... when she forgot her prayer, and Cummins did not notice it. He failed to notice it the next night, and the next. Plunged deep in his own gloom, he was unobservant of many other things, so that, in place of laughter and joy and merry rompings, only gloomy and oppressive shadows of things that had come and gone filled the life ...
— The Honor of the Big Snows • James Oliver Curwood
... not,—since we have no other way of judging. And the judge himself was so simple, so sincere, so essentially honest, that he could not doubt one who was in a way a member of his own family. And then he was absent-minded, unobservant, easy-going, indolent, and the slave of habit, as such a nature is apt to be. Moreover, he was not always master of the slight power of observation which had been given him. That very day, while on his way home from the court-house, he had stopped at a cabin ...
— Round Anvil Rock - A Romance • Nancy Huston Banks
... and fruits of holiness. Here is Macarius; Romoaldo here: And here my brethren, who their steps refrain'd Within the cloisters, and held firm their heart." I answ'ring, thus; "Thy gentle words and kind, And this the cheerful semblance, I behold Not unobservant, beaming in ye all, Have rais'd assurance in me, wakening it Full-blossom'd in my bosom, as a rose Before the sun, when the consummate flower Has spread to utmost amplitude. Of thee Therefore entreat I, father! to declare If I may gain such favour, as to gaze Upon ...
— The Divine Comedy • Dante
... not only to dispel Lady Seyton's anguish, but to extinguish the exultation, and trample on the hopes, of the Honorable James Kingston, a stiff, grave, middle-aged piece of hypocritical propriety, who was surveying from out the corners of his affectedly-unobservant eyes the furniture and decorations of the splendid apartment, and hugging himself with the thought that all that was his! Business was immediately proceeded with. Chilton was called in. He repeated his former story verbatim, and with much fluency and confidence. ...
— The Experiences of a Barrister, and Confessions of an Attorney • Samuel Warren
... of her on the stage, deepened the impression she made upon him when they first met. It gratified him to see that, among the shower of bouquets she was constantly receiving, his was the one she usually carried; nor was she unobservant that he always wore a fresh rose. But she was unconscious of his continual guardianship, and he was careful that she should remain so. Every night that she went to the opera and returned from it, he assumed a dress like the driver's, and ...
— A Romance of the Republic • Lydia Maria Francis Child
... peculiarly fitted for a Poet, without which genius and sensibility can hardly fill the circle of their capacities. No education, indeed, can entitle to this appellation a dull and unobservant mind, or one, though neither dull nor unobservant, in which the channels of communication between thought and expression have been obstructed or closed. How far it is my fortune to belong to either of the latter classes I cannot know. I ...
— The Complete Poetical Works of Percy Bysshe Shelley Volume I • Percy Bysshe Shelley
... their own feelings. But much as all the rest laughed, talked, and joked, much as they enjoyed their Rhine wine, saute, and ices, and however they avoided looking at the young couple, and heedless and unobservant as they seemed of them, one could feel by the occasional glances they gave that the story about Sergey Kuzmich, the laughter, and the food were all a pretense, and that the whole attention of that company was directed to—Pierre and Helene. Prince Vasili mimicked the sobbing of Sergey Kuzmich ...
— War and Peace • Leo Tolstoy
... at Mrs Grantly, who smiled at him in the friendliest fashion. "You see," she went on, "you are, if I may say so, a little unobservant, or you would perhaps have personally investigated what made Ger, an otherwise quite normally intelligent child, so very stupid ...
— The Ffolliots of Redmarley • L. Allen Harker
... many signs seen by a wise man, that escape the unobservant. When young cavaliers have a taste for mingling with the people in honorable disguise, as in the case of a certain patrician of this Republic, they are to be known by their air, if ...
— The Bravo • J. Fenimore Cooper
... find that the great majority of persons have never made that discovery, and suppose that Nature gets up those ornaments in spring. And if we are thus blind to what hangs conspicuously before our eyes for the whole long winter of every year, how unobservant must we be of the rarer phases of earthly beauty and of human life? Keep to the conventional, and you have something which all have seen, even if they disapprove; copy Nature, and her colors make art appear incredible. If you could paint the sunset before your window ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 20, No. 122, December, 1867 • Various
... every moment more exciting and the central figure more entirely captivating, and even between the acts Nannie was preoccupied and unobservant. They had got to the prison scene, with all its ingenious intricacies of plot and stage machinery; Con had accomplished the rescue, and was scrambling over the rocks, when suddenly the sharp report of a rifle rang out, followed by another, and then ...
— A Bookful of Girls • Anna Fuller
... wondered about this—she was all the time schooling herself, looking up, in memory, to the columns of the Parthenon. He was much more strung up, much more restless and excitable than she was, but she did not seem to notice it. Always singularly unconscious of herself she seemed at this period to be also unobservant of those about her. He felt that she was being deliberately egoistic for a great reason, that she was caring for herself, soul and body, with a sort of deep and quiet ...
— In the Wilderness • Robert Hichens
... gentleman-like manner with which he met his young kinswoman on this trying occasion, and the affectionate tones of his voice, and the winning expression of his eye, as he addressed her. Eve herself was not unobservant of these peculiarities, nor was she slow in comprehending the reason. She perceived at once that he was acquainted with the state of things between her and Paul. As she well knew the womanly fidelity of Mrs. Bloomfield, she rightly enough conjectured that the long ...
— Home as Found • James Fenimore Cooper
... of her father's intended marriage with madame came on Leam with a crushing sense of terror and despair. Unobservant youth sees little, and even what it does see it does not comprehend. Though the girl had accustomed herself by slow degrees to many works and ways which mamma had never known; though the faculties which had been, as it were, imprisoned by that close-set, hide-bound ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Vol. 17, - No. 97, January, 1876 • Various
... was indeed necessary, for even to Master Skyffington's unobservant mind it was apparent that Sue's eyes had a look of aloofness in them, of detachment from her surroundings, which was altogether inexplicable to the worthy attorney's practical sense of the due ...
— The Nest of the Sparrowhawk • Baroness Orczy
... as the others have done, and the man's life in his causal body begins. Here the man needs no windows, for this is his true home and all his walls have fallen away. The majority of men have as yet but very little consciousness at such a height as this; they rest dreamily unobservant and scarcely awake, but such vision as they have is true, however limited it may be by their lack of development. Still, every time they return, these limitations will be smaller, and they themselves will be greater; so that this truest life will be wider and fuller ...
— A Textbook of Theosophy • C.W. Leadbeater
... money-lender, quite unobservant of the sinister air, breasted the ascent. He set down his rifle by the door of the tower, and followed Tinker up ...
— The Admirable Tinker - Child of the World • Edgar Jepson
... was drooping a little, her feet moved reluctantly, she was no longer eager and her bag was heavy again, she had changed it from the right to the left hand, and then, unexpectedly, she quickened her pace. The naturally unobservant Charles divined a cause and, looking for it, he saw with a shock of surprise and horror the tall figure of a man at the end of the street. She ...
— THE MISSES MALLETT • E. H. YOUNG
... in theirs; and hence it is that diseased sympathy and compassion are every day expended on out-of-the-way objects, when only too many demands upon the legitimate exercise of the same virtues in a healthy state, are constantly within the sight and hearing of the most unobservant person alive. In short, charity must have its romance, as the novelist or playwright must have his. A thief in fustian is a vulgar character, scarcely to be thought of by persons of refinement; but dress him in green velvet, with ...
— The Life And Adventures Of Nicholas Nickleby • Charles Dickens
... sooner were we all gay and happy in the house again, running out as we pleased, beginning to think of parties and drives and theatres and all enjoyment—and rather unobservant, as young folks are apt to be unobservant of Aunt Pen's slight habitual pensiveness in the absence of guests or excitement, and of her ways generally—than Aunt Pen would challenge some lobster-salad to mortal combat, and, of course, come out floored by the colic. A little whiskey ...
— Humorous Masterpieces from American Literature • Various
... among these being Arthur Graydon and Dick Elliott. Three boys failed, not because their eyesight was poorer than that of the rest, but simply because they were unobservant, and did not pick up the trail quickly at one or two points where Mr. Elliott laid little traps for them, for he did not believe in making ...
— The Wolf Patrol - A Tale of Baden-Powell's Boy Scouts • John Finnemore
... chap. Glad you're back," drawled the unobservant Tony. "I say, Myra, dear, aren't you going to offer me a cup of tea? I suppose I may smoke as ...
— Bandit Love • Juanita Savage
... stood silent and unobservant; she knew not the dance was ended; she knew not that the music was silenced. A softer, sweeter, dearer melody sounded in her ears; she heard the echo of that voice which had spoken scornfully, despairingly, and yet love ...
— Frederick The Great and His Family • L. Muhlbach
... said, "how stupid and unobservant I was! I knew nothing of all this till Granny blurted it out one day. New York simply meant peace and freedom to me: it was coming home. And I was so happy at being among my own people that every one I met seemed kind and good, and glad to see me. But ...
— The Age of Innocence • Edith Wharton
... but Aunt Helen assured me that every one agreed I was peculiar, and deemed it unfortunate that a young lady possessed of such signal advantages should be different from all the rest of the world. Even I, unobservant as I was at this time, was made aware by the curious glances directed at me as I descended from my carriage, that to a certain extent an ...
— A Romantic Young Lady • Robert Grant
... part, stood silent and impassive, appearing to have heard or seen nothing of what had transpired, and to have no thought in her mind except the desire of fulfilling the duty which had brought her thither. But AEnone knew that the most unobservant person, upon entering, could not have failed at a glance to comprehend the whole import of the scene—and that therefore any such studied pretence of ignorance was superfluous. The attitude of the parties, the ill-disguised confusion of Sergius, her ...
— Continental Monthly , Vol. 6, No. 1, July, 1864 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy. • Various
... The failures of the city schools are less apparent because the atmosphere of urban life is itself socializing. The walk or ride to the city school is likely to make some contribution of socializing character even to the unobservant child. It is still true that the education outside of the schools, the spontaneous instruction provided by the children themselves in addition to the publicly constructed school, impresses itself most upon the childish mind. The urban school is greatly strengthened in its social ...
— Rural Problems of Today • Ernest R. Groves
... shuttle back and forth with a deafening clatter. Hannah's face was a little more sallow and wrinkled, and her hair a little more freely streaked with gray than of yore: that was all the change visible in her personal appearance. But long continued solitude had rendered her as taciturn and unobservant as if she had been ...
— Ishmael - In the Depths • Mrs. E. D. E. N. Southworth
... read again, but gave it up and glanced nervously up and down the little porch. Jane Gladys noted this with surprise, for he was usually quiet and unobservant, "like th' toad in th' garden, what squats under a bush all day an' fergits he's alive till a fly lights on his nose," as she expressed it to ...
— Mary Louise Solves a Mystery • L. Frank Baum
... also appears analogous to the custom of breaking bread and swearing alliance on it, a practice still observed by the inhabitants of some remote regions of the Caucasus. I must again solemnly express my conviction that we are standing on a slumbering VOLCANO; the thoughtless and unobservant may suppose not; probably because in the present tee-total state of society they see nothing of ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Volume 1, Complete • Various
... hanks or skeins and in warps, and lastly in the form of woven pieces. These different forms necessitate the employment of different forms of machinery and different modes of handling; it is evident to the least unobservant that it would be quite impossible to subject slubbing or sliver to the same treatment as yarn or cloth, otherwise the slubbing would be ...
— The Dyeing of Cotton Fabrics - A Practical Handbook for the Dyer and Student • Franklin Beech
... swollen and her eyes red. She looked anything but lovely. Grant, however, was instantly so moved that he did not notice her homeliness. Also, he was one of those unobservant people who, having once formed an impression of a person, do not revise it except under compulsion; his last observation of Margaret had resulted in an impression of good looks, exceptional charm. He bent upon her ...
— The Fashionable Adventures of Joshua Craig • David Graham Phillips
... long about the affairs of their neighbours. The Baroness had her trumps to think of, her dinners, her twinges of rheumatism: and her suspicions regarding Maria and Harry, lately so lively, now dozed, and kept a careless, unobservant watch. She may have thought that the danger was over, or she may have ceased to care whether it existed or not, or that artful Maria, by her conduct, may have quite cajoled, soothed, and misguided the old Dragon, to whose charge she was given over. At Maria's age, nay, earlier indeed, maidens ...
— The Virginians • William Makepeace Thackeray
... upon some sensible theme. Their attention being directed to other things, they were seldom troubled about their food, and became almost indifferent to what was placed on the table. Benjamin said, in his manhood, on referring to this subject: "I am so unobservant of it, that to this day I can scarcely tell, a few hours after dinner, of what dishes it consisted. This has been a great convenience to me in travelling, where my companions have been sometimes very unhappy for the want of a suitable gratification ...
— The Printer Boy. - Or How Benjamin Franklin Made His Mark. An Example for Youth. • William M. Thayer
... although I had been conscious of something odd, I never thought they were girls. Directly I knew it, I knew that I had been the most unobservant ass alive; for they ...
— A Boswell of Baghdad - With Diversions • E. V. Lucas
... his theatre, and saw nothing that did not immediately relate to it. Edmund, between his theatrical and his real part—between Miss Crawford's claims and his own conduct—between love and consistency, was equally unobservant: and Mrs. Norris was too busy in contriving and directing the general little matters of the company, superintending their various dresses with economical expedients, for which nobody thanked her, and saving, with delighted integrity, half-a-crown here and there to the absent Sir Thomas, to ...
— Library Of The World's Best Literature, Ancient And Modern, Vol 3 • Various
... cries Ludwig, with increasing indignation, for the first time apprised of the fact thus made known to him. Unobservant of such things generally, it had never occurred to him to reflect on what had long been patent to the jealous eyes of Cypriano. Besides, the thing seemed so absurd, even preposterous—a red-skinned savage ...
— Gaspar the Gaucho - A Story of the Gran Chaco • Mayne Reid
... had aged in the seven months since her husband's death. She had aged considerably. Her spirit, her courage, were undiminished, but the years had at last levied the toll which a happy wifehood had denied them. Nor was Murray unobservant of these things. His partner in the fortunes of Fort Mowbray ...
— The Triumph of John Kars - A Story of the Yukon • Ridgwell Cullum
... climate, glaciers are everywhere, so far as our observations enable us to judge, generally in process of decrease. In Switzerland, although the ancients even in Roman days were in contact with the ice, they were so unobservant that they did not even remark that the ice was in motion. Only during the last two centuries have we any observations of a historic sort which are of value to the geologist. Fortunately, however, the signs ...
— Outlines of the Earth's History - A Popular Study in Physiography • Nathaniel Southgate Shaler
... farmhouses of a more than ordinarily attractive type—apparently homes of prosperous people with an eye to appearances. Then quite suddenly the car, rounding a turn, came into a different region, one of cultivated wildness, of studied effects so cleverly disguised that they would seem to the unobservant only the efforts of nature at her best. A long, heavily shaded avenue of oaks, with high, untrimmed hedges of shrubbery on each side, curved enticingly before them, and all at once, Burns, looking sharply ahead, ...
— Red Pepper's Patients - With an Account of Anne Linton's Case in Particular • Grace S. Richmond
... finds are almost all hairy ones, very conspicuous and easy to discover—'woolly bears,' and such like common and unclean creatures—and the reason they take no pains to conceal themselves from his unobservant eyes is simply this: nobody on earth wants to discover them. For either they are protectively encased in horrid hairs, which get down your throat and choke you and bother you (I speak as a bird, from the point of view of a confirmed ...
— Falling in Love - With Other Essays on More Exact Branches of Science • Grant Allen
... while!" repeated that lady, who had not been unobservant of the flush. "You finger the piano as if you had been accustomed to diligent practice all your life, and you must have had the best ...
— Mona • Mrs. Georgie Sheldon
... Wilfrid's refuge, for sentiment was surging mightily within him. The commonplaces concerning father, sisters, health, weather, sickened him when uttered, so much that for a time he was unobservant of Emilia's ready exchange of them. To a compliment on her appearance, she said: "You like this dress? I will tell you the history of it. I call it the Branciani dress. Mr. Powys designed it for me. The Countess Branciani was his ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... Lhari slipped unobserved out of Raynor's house and hiked unnoticed to the edges of a small city nearby, where he mingled with the crowd and hired a skycab from an unobservant human driver to take him to the spaceport city. The skycab driver was startled, but not, Bart judged, unusually so, to pick up ...
— The Colors of Space • Marion Zimmer Bradley
... realists of the race. Apparently illogical, they are the possessors of a rare and subtle super-logic. Apparently whimsical, they hang to the truth with a tenacity which carries them through every phase of its incessant, jellylike shifting of form. Apparently unobservant and easily deceived, they see with bright and horrible eyes. In men, too, the same merciless perspicacity sometimes shows itself—men recognized to be more aloof and uninflammable than the general—men of special talent for the logical—sardonic men, cynics. Men, too, sometimes have brains. ...
— In Defense of Women • H. L. Mencken
... invited them to desert, no fear was ever entertained of an insurrection of the slaves. During a war of seven years, with our country in possession of the enemy, no such danger was ever apprehended. But should we, therefore, be unobservant spectators of the progress of society within the last twenty years; of the silent but powerful change wrought, by time and chance, upon its composition and temper? When the fountains of the great deep of abomination were broken up, ...
— American Eloquence, Volume I. (of 4) - Studies In American Political History (1896) • Various
... to meet our fellow-men, our neighbors, or even our own households, in all moods, in all discordances between the world without us and the frames within, in all states of health, of solicitude, of preoccupation, and show no signs of impatience, ungentleness, or unobservant self-absorption,—with only kindly feeling finding expression, and ungenial feeling at least inwardly imprisoned;—we shall be ready to acknowledge that the man who has thus attained is master of himself, and in the graciousness ...
— Daily Strength for Daily Needs • Mary W. Tileston
... unobservant eye intent upon her tea and cakes, saw every one who came and went. Many officers were in the restaurant, but one only attracted her special notice. He was a young handsome man in the field-service kit of the French Army, and upon ...
— The Lost Naval Papers • Bennet Copplestone
... may appear to the unobservant, our hearts warm more readily to those we have benefited than to our benefactors. Some of the Greek philosophers noticed this; but the British Homer has stamped ...
— The Cloister and the Hearth • Charles Reade
... of our day is mainly distinguished from that of preceding generations by the largeness of the sphere which is occupied in it by Contract. Some of the phenomena on which this proposition rests are among those most frequently singled out for notice, for comment, and for eulogy. Not many of us are so unobservant as not to perceive that in innumerable cases where old law fixed a man's social position irreversibly at his birth, modern law allows him to create it for himself by convention; and indeed several of the few exceptions ...
— Ancient Law - Its Connection to the History of Early Society • Sir Henry James Sumner Maine
... Tappertit, who seemed, physically speaking, to have grown smaller with years (particularly as to his legs, which were stupendously little), but who, in a moral point of view, in personal dignity and self-esteem, had swelled into a giant. Nor was it by any means difficult for the most unobservant person to detect this state of feeling in the quondam 'prentice, for it not only proclaimed itself impressively and beyond mistake in his majestic walk and kindling eye, but found a striking means of revelation in his turned-up nose, which ...
— Barnaby Rudge • Charles Dickens
... you are!" he said. "Are you so unobservant as not to have found out that sanity and happiness are an impossible combination? No sane man can be happy, for to him life is real, and he sees what a fearful thing it is. Only the mad can be ...
— The Mysterious Stranger and Other Stories • Mark Twain
... faintly the drowsy sounds of early church bells, never indeed to be heard here except on a morning of surpassing tranquillity. And in the barnyard back of the house Harriet's hens are cackling triumphantly: they are impiously unobservant ...
— Adventures In Friendship • David Grayson
... Aunt Trudy slept long hours and did not interfere with the goings and comings of her young nieces, she was not quite so unobservant as they ...
— Rosemary • Josephine Lawrence
... unobservant eye the muskrat house in the alders might have looked like a mass of drift in which the rank water-grass had taken root. But within the clumsy pile, about a foot below the centre of the dome, was a shapely, small, warm chamber, lined with the softest ...
— The Watchers of the Trails - A Book of Animal Life • Charles G. D. Roberts
... was she with these gyrating thoughts that she was not conscious that Dick had stopped the car on the green roadside until he had taken her hand and had begun to speak. The happy, garrulous, unobservant Dick had not noticed anything out of the way with her more than a pallor which she had explained away as being due to nothing more than a bit of temporary dizziness. And so for the second time Dick now poured out his love to her and ...
— Children of the Whirlwind • Leroy Scott
... Lavaur, what penalties were in store at Toulouse, and on what principles Master Conrad administered in Germany the powers received from Rome. The Papacy which inspired the coronation laws of 1220, in which there is no mention of capital punishment, could not have been unobservant of the way in which its own provisions were transformed; and Gregory, whom Honorius had already called "magnum et speciale ecclesie Romane membrum," who had required the university of Bologna to ...
— The History of Freedom • John Emerich Edward Dalberg-Acton
... are so irreligious, depraved by nature, so wandering in their affections, so brutish, so subject to disagreement, so unobservant of marriage rites, what shall I say? If thou beest such a one, or thou light on such a wife, what concord can there be, what hope of agreement? 'tis not conjugium but conjurgium, as the Reed and Fern in the [5783]Emblem, averse and opposite ...
— The Anatomy of Melancholy • Democritus Junior
... that sunny fall morning the storm approached. Long before this, unobservant though she was, had the girl not been living in the future instead of the present, she would have recognised its coming. For the pursuers were gaining rapidly now. They had crossed onto the same street, the principal residence thoroughfare, and were coming as a crowd ever ...
— Where the Trail Divides • Will Lillibridge
... Mammalia and Birds, the fauna of Ceylon has, up to the present, failed to receive that systematic attention to which its richness and variety most amply entitle it. The Singhalese themselves, habitually indolent, and singularly unobservant of nature and her operations, are at the same time restrained from the study of natural history by the tenet of their religion which forbids the taking of life under any circumstances. From the nature of their avocations, the majority of the European ...
— Sketches of the Natural History of Ceylon • J. Emerson Tennent
... Luck's too derned rash," Flandrau commented. "He'll run into trouble good and hard one of these days. When I'm in Rattlesnake Gulch I don't aim to pick posies too unobservant." ...
— Crooked Trails and Straight • William MacLeod Raine
... but if that is the only reason for asking the Government to pay owners part of the cost of manning their ships, then they are living in a fool's paradise, and are much too credulous about public philanthropy, and very unobservant and illogical too if they imagine that national interests are entirely centred in the industry they happen to be engaged in. It would be just as reasonable for Armstrong's or Vickers' to request a subsidy for training ...
— Windjammers and Sea Tramps • Walter Runciman
... from the table, she exclaimed, "I regret, Madame, that I can tell you nothing—nothing at all! I feel ill—very ill!" and, indeed, she had turned, even to Sylvia's young and unobservant eyes, terribly pale. ...
— The Chink in the Armour • Marie Belloc Lowndes
... not skilful enough to win the Major's lasting favour. He was always slow to interfere in domestic matters, but he was not unobservant. ...
— Six to Sixteen - A Story for Girls • Juliana Horatia Ewing
... the Thea Bohea, and the large pale-green monhanaeous leaves of the Thea viridis. The manner, too, of growth is very striking, and on entering the plantation the distinction is at once marked to the most unobservant eye. This species of Thea Bohea forms nearly the whole of the plantations, and was brought ...
— The Commercial Products of the Vegetable Kingdom • P. L. Simmonds
... Clarence had not been unobservant of her—indeed it would not be too much to say that he had been acutely conscious all the time of ...
— In Brief Authority • F. Anstey
... the "incompatibility" is relative as far as Afrikanders are concerned, it is only "absolute" as applied to the Boers. After giving us this example of the consistency of his views, Dr. Kuyper speaks of the English as being "unobservant." A reproach somewhat unexpected, when directed against the countrymen of Darwin. As a proof, he presents us with this metaphor, equally unexpected from the pen of a Dutchman—a ...
— Boer Politics • Yves Guyot
... These Arabian sages acted up to what they knew, and followed the light which was afforded them; in consequence of which they made discoveries of the most valuable description, such as could have been attained by no other proceeding, and such as were totally concealed from the unobservant mass of mankind. It was indeed a small "star" that first attracted their notice, but it led to the "Sun of Righteousness." O that we were equally wise and diligent in the use of our opportunities and privileges—we should ...
— Female Scripture Biographies, Vol. II • Francis Augustus Cox
... son and heir, Henry II., he prepared the way for the most tragic event in her history. Powerless to win the affection, or even confidence, of Henry while he lived, Catharine remained unobserved; but, as the event proved, not unobservant. Her astute mind had been studying ...
— A Short History of France • Mary Platt Parmele
... the ideal of learning to know and to master that mysterious water. His dream, in time, was realized; he not only became a pilot, but—which is infinitely more significant—he changed from a callow, indolent, unobservant lad, with undeveloped faculties, to a man, a master of the river, with a knowledge which, in its accuracy and minuteness, was, for its purpose, ...
— Mark Twain • Archibald Henderson
... horns in vain towards the skies. Thence backwards he retraced his steps 'midst great laud, guiding his errant footsteps by means of a tenuous thread, lest when outcoming from tortuous labyrinthines his efforts be frustrated by unobservant wandering. But why, turned aside from my first story, should I recount more, how the daughter fleeing her father's face, her sister's embrace, and e'en her mother's, who despairingly bemoaned her lost daughter, ...
— The Carmina of Caius Valerius Catullus • Caius Valerius Catullus
... side was not unobservant; and when the second supply of milk had been drunk, she looked down at the round-headed man, and said ...
— Romola • George Eliot
... reports by Boswell we have scarcely anything but the remarks of Johnson; it is only by accident that he now and then gives us the observations of others, when they are necessary to explain or set off those of his hero. "When in that presence," says Miss Burney, "he was unobservant, if not contemptuous of every one else. In truth, when he met with Dr. Johnson, he commonly forbore even answering anything that was said, or attending to anything that went forward, lest he should miss the smallest sound from that voice, to which he paid such exclusive, though merited, homage. ...
— Oliver Goldsmith • Washington Irving
... have always been diametrically opposed to racial purity, their original separation could only have gone on through such an entire lack of communication as prevented either trade or warfare between the bulk of the differentiating bodies. These original racial types are now inextricably mingled. Unobservant, over-scholarly people talk or write in the profoundest manner about a Teutonic race and a Keltic race, and institute all sorts of curious contrasts between these phantoms, but these are not races ...
— Anticipations - Of the Reaction of Mechanical and Scientific Progress upon - Human life and Thought • Herbert George Wells
... with the Eskimos: she wears the usual tribal adornments, and beadwork, and skins; she's as dazzling as any other beauty, in her box at the opera; and she sleeps and eats in the family's big stone igloo near Fifth Avenue. An unobservant citizen might almost suppose she was one of us. But every now and then her neglect of some small ceremonial sets our whole tribe to chattering about her, and eyeing her closely, and nodding their hairy coiffures or their ...
— The Crow's Nest • Clarence Day, Jr.
... and flowering things. As it was, he whistled—an unusual thing for him to do in the street—then assumed the air of a man hard pressed for time. Gradually the passers-by began to look at him with the right amount of attention; he jostled, as if by accident, one or two of those who were unobservant, then apologised for his hurry. It was not pleasurable anticipation alone that was responsible for Dove's state of mind, and for the heightening and radiation of his self-consciousness. In offering to go early to the theatre, and ...
— Maurice Guest • Henry Handel Richardson
... agility, and is perfectly master of himself; has a light complexion, sandy hair, and generally wears a mustache, and a little beard on his chin. His eyes are keen, bluish gray in color, and when at rest, have a sleepy look, but he sees every one and every thing around him, although apparently unobservant. He is an admirable horseman, and a good shot. As a leader of a battalion of cavalry, he has no superior in the Rebel ranks. His command of his men is supreme. While they admire his generosity and manliness, ...
— Thirteen Months in the Rebel Army • William G. Stevenson
... to compare two children, one of whom has had at his disposal the sixty-four colors in the conditions described above, and another who has been left to himself in poor surroundings, where gray and brown tints prevail, and who seems dull and unobservant, etc., we should find a very remarkable psychical difference. Such a difference is not, however, intrinsic; it might well be that, subjected to the same conditions as the first child, the second would recognize the sixty-four colors. The judgment we should give in such a case would be based ...
— Spontaneous Activity in Education • Maria Montessori
... one, for he was of English extraction—having since become celebrated. He was an orphan, who lived on a miserable pittance while he pursued the medical studies for which he had a special genius. Strange! that with my vague mind, susceptible and unobservant, hating inquiry and given up to contemplation, I should have been drawn towards a youth whose strongest passion was science. But the bond was not an intellectual one; it came from a source that can happily blend the stupid with the brilliant, the dreamy with the practical: it came from ...
— The Lifted Veil • George Eliot
... precisely the same natural advantages; yet the total absence of progress, if not the appearance of retrogression and decay, the loungers in the streets, and the peculiar appearance of the slaves, afford a contrast to the bustle on the opposite side of the river, which would strike the most unobservant. I was credibly informed that property of the same real value was worth 300 dollars in Kentucky and 3000 in Ohio! Free emigrants and workmen will not settle in Kentucky, where they would be brought into contact with compulsory slave-labour; thus the development ...
— The Englishwoman in America • Isabella Lucy Bird
... It may well be that music, like so many other things in nature, has a three-fold aspect corresponding to our own make-up as body, soul, and spirit. The outer form, the composition and actual structure, represents the "body" of music: that part which is visible even to the unobservant eye and audible to the indiscriminating ear. This is a matter of notes and tones quite apart from any real meaning or value. Such would be an academic exercise, or a technically correct but unconvincing ballad. ...
— Spirit and Music • H. Ernest Hunt
... I was still writing in my Journal, and the mist was still over everything in the room. Persons in the lower ranks of life are curiously unobservant of the aspects of Nature. I never (in the days of my blindness) got any information from servants or laborers about the views round Dimchurch. They seemed to have no eyes for anything beyond the range of the kitchen, or the ploughed ...
— Poor Miss Finch • Wilkie Collins
... had not been unobservant of these steady encroachments upon Chinese territory, and while a military occupation of the peninsula was necessary at this time, it was viewed with uneasiness; but none was prepared for what followed. Before peace was actually concluded, ...
— A Short History of Russia • Mary Platt Parmele
... them, and buried all traces of Susa and Babylon. Their venerable antiquity and majestic proportions do not more command our reverence, than the mystery which involves their construction awakens the curiosity of the most unobservant spectator. Pillars which belong to no known order of architecture, inscriptions in an alphabet which continues an enigma, fabulous animals which stand as guards at the entrance, the multiplicity of allegorical figures which decorate the walls,—all conspire ...
— Ten Great Religions - An Essay in Comparative Theology • James Freeman Clarke
... stood by, no unobservant witness of this scene. He noted something in those two men's eyes that recalled the fierce quarrel of the two boys; and as soon as it was possible for him to get away, he went off after the Blounts, determined, if ...
— Atlantic Monthly Volume 7, No. 39, January, 1861 • Various
... evidence will enable you to form an opinion for yourselves. I only obtained it yesterday, and, as it made my case quite complete, I wrote off to you immediately. It is the statement of Joseph Ridley, another cabman, and unfortunately, a rather dull, unobservant fellow, unlike Wilkins. He has not much to tell us, but what little he has is highly instructive. Here is the statement, signed by the ...
— The Mystery of 31 New Inn • R. Austin Freeman
... repulse the friendly overture; that also was not his way. But neither did he respond to it. He stood passive, looking out over the park with unobservant eyes. ...
— The Rocks of Valpre • Ethel May Dell
... remarks, the question cannot fail to have occurred to the most unobservant reader, why the history of the Family of Bethany and the Resurrection of Lazarus, in themselves so replete with interest and instruction—the latter, moreover, forming, as it did, so notable a crisis in the Saviour's life—should have been recorded only by the Evangelist John. ...
— Memories of Bethany • John Ross Macduff
... testimony, which is so often adduced as final proof, may prove nothing more, as is well known to those accustomed to deal with the unobservant imaginative, than that one person has told his story a great ...
— Notes on Nursing - What It Is, and What It Is Not • Florence Nightingale
... house, he had to wait. Mrs. Ormonde was gone out for an hour, and neither Mr. Emerson nor his wife was at home. He sat in the Emersons' parlour, seldom stirring, his eyes unobservant. For Gilbert Grail there was little left in the world that he ...
— Thyrza • George Gissing
... individual is leading the beatified existence of an epicurean god. The world without—its cares and joys, its storms and calms, its passions, evil and good—all are indifferent to the unheeding oyster. Unobservant even of what passes in its immediate vicinity, its whole soul is concentrated in itself; yet not sluggishly and apathetically, for its body is throbbing with life and enjoyment. The mighty ocean ...
— The International Monthly, Volume 5, No. 3, March, 1852 • Various
... had not been entirely unobservant of all that had been going on. She had had her qualms, but business must be business, and so long as Joan did not interfere with that she had not felt called upon to remonstrate with her on her growing friendliness with the protege of ...
— The Shield of Silence • Harriet T. Comstock
... not been very indifferent or unobservant, she would have noticed the striking difference between the manner and appearance of Lizzie Stevens and the class who generally came to see McCloskey. She did not, however, appear to observe it, nor did she manifest any curiosity greater than that evidenced by ...
— The Garies and Their Friends • Frank J. Webb
... fair scope for acting, she was perfect. In the ordinary scenes of ordinary life, such as befell her during her visit to Fawn Court, she could not acquit herself well. There was no reality about her, and the want of it was strangely plain to most unobservant eyes. But give her a part to play that required exaggerated, strong action, and she hardly ever failed. Even in that terrible moment, when, on her return from the theatre, she thought that the police had discovered ...
— The Eustace Diamonds • Anthony Trollope
... [apparent] differences between St. John and the Synoptics respecting the scene of our Lord's ministry, the character of His discourses, the miracles ascribed to Him, and the day of His Crucifixion, or rather of His partaking of the Paschal feast. The most ignorant and unobservant would notice these differences; and the more labour required to reconcile the statements or representations of the last Gospel with the three preceding ones, the more certain it is that none would have ventured to put forth ...
— The Lost Gospel and Its Contents - Or, The Author of "Supernatural Religion" Refuted by Himself • Michael F. Sadler
... was concluded, the trio remained sitting as if spellbound, quite unobservant of the ...
— Adele Dubois - A Story of the Lovely Miramichi Valley in New Brunswick • Mrs. William T. Savage
... appeared morose and dissatisfied. Something had not worked to his liking in the complicated machinery of his plans, and he showed his vexation so palpably as soon to attract the attention of his submissive but by no means unobservant wife, who, after a while, plucked up the ...
— Gaut Gurley • D. P. Thompson
... wearies, sleeps. At that moment Mrs. Y. should fall on her knees and rejoice. She would if she could leave young Jack or Jill; but she can't—she—never—can. That's what sent Mr. Y. to sleep. It is just as well perhaps that Mrs. Y. is unobservant. ...
— The Delicious Vice • Young E. Allison
... condition of the body, and in the expression of the face. So the motives of man festoon his personality with flaunting and infallible signs to be known and read by all men who care to take the trouble to learn. Some of them are so plain that there is scarcely any grown person so unobservant as not to have seen them. Others are more elusive, but none the less legible to ...
— Analyzing Character • Katherine M. H. Blackford and Arthur Newcomb
... Dumont seemed to be putting him in the way of making a fortune. He was distasteful to her, because she saw that he was an ill-tempered sycophant under a pretense of manliness thick enough to shield him from the unobservant eyes of a world of men and women greedy of flattery and busy each with himself or herself. But for Leonora's sake she invited him. And Leonora was appreciative, was witty, never monotonous or commonplace, most helpful in ...
— The Cost • David Graham Phillips
... He rose, not unobservant of the general expectation, nor ungratified; for that great man, with all his grand genius, solid intellect, sound virtue, had one small miserable weakness; he was not proud, but vain; vain beyond the feeblest and most craving vanity ...
— The Roman Traitor (Vol. 1 of 2) • Henry William Herbert
... doing so was her knowledge that Maitland would be more pained by her sacrifice than gladdened or relieved. He was so sure of clearing himself.... It was inconceivable to her that there could be men so stupid and crassly unobservant as to be able to confuse the identity of the two men for a single instant. What though they did resemble each other in form and feature? The likeness went no deeper: below the surface, and rising through it with every word and look and gesture, lay a world-wide ...
— The Brass Bowl • Louis Joseph Vance
... be so utterly wanting in Theological instinct, or so depraved of taste; so utterly unused to the study of GOD'S Word, or so unobservant of the characteristic method of it,—as to imagine that there is something trifling in the specimens of Interpretation before us. I am only concerned to maintain that they are Divine. You may think what you please about them. They are the teaching of the HOLY GHOST. Nay, if unfortunately ...
— Inspiration and Interpretation - Seven Sermons Preached Before the University of Oxford • John Burgon
... horse was captured. Toussaint listened, ran to the door, and quickly returning, put the blue pack from the shelf into his pocket, leaving in exchange one of his own. He hesitated about altering the position of the cards on the shelf, but Kelley and Loomis were unobservant young men, and the half-breed placed the pink cards on top of his blue ones. The little yellow curtain again hung innocently over the shelves, and Toussaint, pouring himself a drink of whiskey, faced round, and ...
— The Jimmyjohn Boss and Other Stories • Owen Wister
... to importunity, and unmindful of the unities of time and place, went freely about, from gourd to gourd, concocting in him a punch. At which, Samoa expressed much surprise, that he should be so unobservant as not to know, that in Mardi, guests might be pressed to demean themselves, without its being expected that so they would do. A true toss-pot himself, he ...
— Mardi: and A Voyage Thither, Vol. I (of 2) • Herman Melville
... even if they only hear of him without actually seeing him. They that are atheists, they that are destitute of all acts, they that are disobedient to preceptors and transgress the injunctions of the scriptures, they that are unacquainted with and, therefore, unobservant of duties, and they that are wicked of conduct, become shortlived. They that are of improper behaviour, they that transgress all restraints, they that are unscrupulous in respect of sexual congress, become shortlived here and have to go to Hell hereafter. Even those men live for a hundred years ...
— The Mahabharata of Krishna-Dwaipayana Vyasa, Volume 4 • Kisari Mohan Ganguli
... further aggravated when he insisted on his wife accepting the invitations of his hostess. These visits, always against the grain, were rendered more irritating from a half-conscious antagonism between the chief female actors in the tragi-comedy; the one sometimes innocently unobservant of the wants of her guest, the other turning every accidental neglect into a slight, and receiving every jest as an affront. Carlyle's "Gloriana" was to the mind of his wife a "heathen goddess," while Mrs. Carlyle, with reference to her favourite ...
— Thomas Carlyle - Biography • John Nichol
... I took to my room, coming down only for meals. I couldn't eat a thing, and Cyrus noticed it—it is queer how observant men are about some things and how unobservant about others. He didn't tell me what he was going to do, but in the afternoon Dr. Denbigh came to see me. That's the way they do—I'm liable to have the doctor sent in to look me over any time, whether ...
— The Whole Family - A Novel by Twelve Authors • William Dean Howells, Mary E. Wilkins Freeman, Mary Heaton Vorse, Mary Stewart Cutting, Elizabeth Jo
... they entered; saw Notely enter with his easy, unobservant swagger, lest the unexpected visit of this fashionable company should embarrass her. He walked across the room, humming an air, to his ...
— Vesty of the Basins • Sarah P. McLean Greene
... I love you, though I was able to hide it from you. And it has often irritated me that you were so unobservant. You know now the cause of many of my difficult moods, ...
— The Plum Tree • David Graham Phillips
... house early on Sunday morning, and her unobservant aunt did not notice the marks the young girl's sleepless night had left upon her countenance. Aunt 'Mira was too greatly distracted just then about a new gown she, with the help of Mrs. John-Ed. Hutchins, had made and was to wear for the first ...
— How Janice Day Won • Helen Beecher Long
... of long hours of reflection. They belonged to her nature and a quality of judgment which, even in her most extravagant romances, is never for a moment swayed from that sane impartiality described by the unobservant as common sense. ...
— Mauprat • George Sand
... of apparent coldness, during which either the fear of exciting the observation of others, and thus drawing danger upon her lover, or that of sinking in his esteem by seeming too willing to be won, made her behave with indifference, and as if unobservant of ...
— The Talisman • Sir Walter Scott
... compelled to endure in silence. She did indeed attempt one remark, and Master Hardy, with a horrified expression of outraged piety, said "H'sh," and shook his head at her. It was almost more than flesh and blood could bear, and when the unobservant Mrs. Kingdom asked her for the text on the way home her reply nearly cost her ...
— At Sunwich Port, Complete • W.W. Jacobs
... works on the dead. Unite sympathy to observation, and the dead Spring to life." It is thus to the shy, in their moments of tremor, that we should endeavor to be calmly unsympathetic; not cruel, but indifferent, unobservant. ...
— Manners and Social Usages • Mrs. John M. E. W. Sherwood
... of telling him of his mistake she hesitated. He was unobservant of her amusement and went on ...
— Cap'n Abe, Storekeeper • James A. Cooper
... How much beyond whole Libraries of orthodox Theology is, sometimes, the mute action, the unconscious look of a father, of a mother, who HAD in them "Devoutness, pious Nobleness"! In whom the young soul, not unobservant, though not consciously observing, came at length to recognize it; to read it, in this irrefragable manner: a seed planted thenceforth in the centre of his holiest ...
— History Of Friedrich II. of Prussia, Volume IV. (of XXI.) - Frederick The Great—Friedrich's Apprenticeship, First Stage—1713-1728 • Thomas Carlyle
... hungered for news of him, for the sound of his habitual phrases, for the description of his familiar gestures. She had the woman's anxiety for his bodily health, she wished to know whether he had changed in face or figure, and, if so, how and in what measure. But she glanced at the obtuse, unobservant countenance of Captain Willoughby, and she understood that however much she craved for these particulars, she must ...
— The Four Feathers • A. E. W. Mason
... decorated like those she has for sale, but made of plain buff leather, better suited to the great flat snow-shoes by her side, with which she has made her way hither across the deep snow. She speaks but little, yet her keen and watchful glances show that she is by no means unobservant of what is going on around her. See! one of the market women has stopped just in front of her, but it is only to have a good look at the glossy wrapper, white as snow, which glistens quite dazzlingly in ...
— The King's Warrant - A Story of Old and New France • Alfred H. Engelbach
... in this respect, all the members of the Relief Corps have made the most of their opportunity. Some are unobservant, or perhaps simply inarticulate; others, when going beyond the bald statistics of their job, tend to drop into sentiment and cinema scenes; and none but H. Macy Greer has the gift of making the thing told seem as true as if ...
— Coming Home - 1916 • Edith Wharton |
