"Dawdling" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... and, for the time of year, warm, and I took advantage of it by dawdling along that glorious stretch of sea-coast, taking in to the full its rich stores of romantic scenery and suggestion of long-past ages. Sometimes I sat for a long time, smoking my pipe on the edge of the headlands, staring at the blue of ...
— Ravensdene Court • J. S. (Joseph Smith) Fletcher
... dawdling over this last chapter on purpose—and I have re-read the former ones and decided to rewrite one or two, but at best I cannot spread this out over more than six weeks, I fear, and then what excuse can I have ...
— Man and Maid • Elinor Glyn
... family dresses, some were very tasty milliners. It gave them a reliance upon what they could do themselves. The two daughters of one workman kept a little poultry-yard "scientifically," and dressed themselves from its proceeds. Industry became more general. Instead of dawdling away whole evenings in gossip, they had some light employment, ...
— Hope Mills - or Between Friend and Sweetheart • Amanda M. Douglas
... and vigorous to spend your life dawdling in society. You yearn for action, for the broad, free life of the open. You're in love with this country ...
— 'Firebrand' Trevison • Charles Alden Seltzer
... clattering about the dairy, cheese-room, and yard, in high pattens. Charity was some sort of niece of the old lady's, and was consequently free of the farmhouse and garden, into which she could not resist going for the purposes of gossip and flirtation with the heir-apparent, who was a dawdling fellow, never out at work as he ought to have been. The moment Charity had found her cousin, or any other occupation, Tom would slip away; and in a minute shrill cries would be heard from the dairy, "Charity, Charity, thee lazy huzzy, where bist?" ...
— Tom Brown's Schooldays • Thomas Hughes
... one from whom her whole nature recoiled, when she thought of her mother's ruined life? Mr. Dutton too had held her new duties up to her as capable of being ennobled. Noble! To read aloud a sporting paper she did not want to understand, to be ready to play at cards or billiards, to take that dawdling drive day by day, to devote herself to the selfish exactions of burnt-out dissipation. Was this noble? Her mother had done all this, and never even felt it a cross, because of her great love. It must be Nuttie's cross if it was her duty; but could the ...
— Nuttie's Father • Charlotte M. Yonge
... by one's domestics, and that she should be ill if she waited. Sir Samuel persuaded her to give you fifteen minutes' grace, but after that she was determined to start. Of course, she didn't know that an accident had happened. She thought you were simply dawdling, and wanted Sir Samuel to arrange for you to drive down with the newly arrived German tourists. Sir Samuel and I objected to this, and later it was settled for the Turnours to do what her ladyship planned for you, without the company of the ...
— The Motor Maid • Alice Muriel Williamson and Charles Norris Williamson
... took down a gun from the wall and began to clean it. His hands had the fumbling, indefinite movements, the obscure action, directed by a brain already begun to crumble. His industry with the gun was of a part with the impotent dawdling in the garden. His eyes would seek for the rag or the bottle of oil in a dull, glazed way, and, having found them, he would forget the reason of his quest. Not once that evening had they rested on his wife or any member of his family. He had shown no interest in any of the small happenings of ...
— Judith Of The Plains • Marie Manning
... taking his time, he was dawdling, keeping his donkeys fat, and letting his men wander at pleasure to right and left gathering reports for him of unusual folk or things. We came very close to being seen by one of them, who emerged from a ...
— The Ivory Trail • Talbot Mundy
... no dawdling and putting off of the day's work (else how, at eleven sharp, could tennis be played with a free conscience?). Loving, as he did, everything connected with a newspaper, he would now pass by those on the hall-table with never so much as a wistful ...
— The Red Cross Girl • Richard Harding Davis
... poor foolish morally dawdling old world to-day is that it is still hoping fondly it is going to be pulled straight into the kingdom of heaven by morally sterilized, spiritually pasteurized persons, by men who are trying to set the world right by abolishing ...
— The Ghost in the White House • Gerald Stanley Lee
... too," continued Flurry; but at this point I thought it better to say good-night. As it was, I found Allan had been waiting for me nearly half-an-hour, and pretended to growl at me for my dawdling, though in reality he was thoroughly enjoying his ...
— Esther - A Book for Girls • Rosa Nouchette Carey
... stayed for he would have been somewhat puzzled to explain. He was not the kind of man who, as a rule, cared to dawdle about all day with women when there was any kind of sport to be had from hunting down to ratting; more especially was he disinclined for any such dawdling when Helen Romer was amongst the number of the ladies so left to be danced attendance upon. And yet he distinctly told himself that he meant to be devoted for this one day to the fair sex. All yesterday he had been crossed and ...
— Vera Nevill - Poor Wisdom's Chance • Mrs. H. Lovett Cameron
... Euler and his son-in-law used sometimes to go and sit on the doorstep with Louisa. Frau Vogel and Rosa would only appear for a moment: they were kept by their housework: Frau Vogel took a pride in showing that she had no time for dawdling: and she used to say, loudly enough to be overheard, that all the people sitting there and yawning on their doorsteps, without doing a stitch of work, got on her nerves. As she could not—(to her sorrow)—compel them to ...
— Jean-Christophe, Vol. I • Romain Rolland
... started, and there I sat in my glory till we got to Annapolis, just the sleepiest town, crowded full of the oldest houses and the slowest people that I ever saw in my born days. Some colored persons were dawdling around the depot, and a few lazy white folks passing down the street, stopped to look at us as we got out of the cars. Especially my white hat and double-breasted jacket ...
— Phemie Frost's Experiences • Ann S. Stephens
... to evoke or to satisfy the artistic feeling. There were few pictures and no galleries; there was no music, except the amateur torture of strings which led the country dance, or the martial inflammation of fife and drum, or the sentimental dawdling here and there over the ancient harpsichord, with the songs of love, and the broad or pathetic staves and choruses of the convivial table; and there ...
— Baddeck and That Sort of Thing • Charles Dudley Warner
... don't own any record whatsoever of who it was put up to. For all that, if you've half an hour to spare, sir, when we get back to the house, Mr. Lake, I could tell you a tale about that tomb. I won't begin on it now; it strikes cold here, and we don't want to be dawdling ...
— A Thin Ghost and Others • M. R. (Montague Rhodes) James
... hateful to Albinia than dawdling. She left the girls' choice of employments, but insisted on their being veritably occupied, and many a time did she encounter a killing glance from Sophia for attacking her listless, moody position in her chair, or saying, in clear, alert tones, 'My dear, when you read, read, when you work, ...
— The Young Step-Mother • Charlotte M. Yonge
... answered Guy, musingly; 'and this reading comes naturally, and is just what I wanted to keep the pleasant things from getting a full hold of me. I ought to have thought of it sooner, instead of dawdling a whole month in idleness. Then all this would not have happened. I hope it will ...
— The Heir of Redclyffe • Charlotte M. Yonge
... they? Where are they? Oh, my God! [opening the door.] Husband! Antosha! Anton! [hurriedly, to Marya.] It's all your fault. Dawdling! Dawdling!—"I want a pin—I want a scarf." [Runs to the window and calls.] Anton, where are you going? Where are you going? What! He has come? The Inspector? He has a moustache? What ...
— The Inspector-General • Nicolay Gogol
... Hawbury had just finished his dinner, and was dawdling about in a listless way, when Dacres entered, quite unceremoniously, and flung himself into a chair by one ...
— The American Baron • James De Mille
... switches. "And, Morton," he added, when the butler brought the coffee, "get me a screwdriver or something to undo this box. Whatever the animal is, he's kicking up the deuce of a row. What is it? Why are you dawdling?" ...
— Masterpieces of Mystery, Vol. 1 (of 4) - Ghost Stories • Various
... for the first tired minute of her day. Sunday dinner was nearly over, and though, in one way, the best meal in the week for her because all her children were sure to be at home, it was apt to be pure purgatory on a hot day, with Sheba dawdling and grumbling and Rosalind spilling pea-soup on her Sunday dress, and Aunt Elsie's deafness increased by the weather to ...
— Young People's Pride • Stephen Vincent Benet
... asked Duke Charles Augustus, stretching himself comfortably on the sofa, puffing clouds of smoke from his pipe—"are you not weary of dawdling about in this infamously superb pile of stones, called Berlin? Shall we any longer elegantly scrape to the right and to the left, with abominable sweet speeches and mere flattering phraseology, in this monster of dust and stone, of sand and sun, parades and gaiters? Have you not enough ...
— Old Fritz and the New Era • Louise Muhlbach
... fatigued and happy warrior laid himself down on the sofa, and put his yellow silk pocket-handkerchief over his face, and indulged in a snug little nap, of which the dreams, no doubt, were very pleasant, as he snored with refreshing regularity. The young men sate, meanwhile, dawdling away the sunshiny hours on the terrace, very happy, and Pen, at least, very talkative. He was narrating to Warrington a plan for a new novel, and a new tragedy. Warrington laughed at the idea of his writing a tragedy? By Jove, he would show that he could; ...
— The History of Pendennis, Vol. 2 - His Fortunes and Misfortunes, His Friends and His Greatest Enemy • William Makepeace Thackeray
... elect a study because it is easy, but because their inclinations run in that direction. Indeed, there are no easy courses, no snap courses in the school. Diligent, careful, thorough work is the rule, and there can be found no semblance of approval for loafing or dawdling. The school stands for purposes that are clear in definition and for work that is intense. There are no prizes offered for excellent work, but the approbation of parents, teachers, and schoolmates, in the estimation of the pupils, far transcends any material or symbolic prizes that could be ...
— The Vitalized School • Francis B. Pearson
... remained to help her. Just as they were going down at last, they met Mrs. Langford on her way up with inquiries for poor Mary. She would have almost been better pleased with a slight indisposition than with dawdling; but she kindly accepted Henrietta's apologies, and there was one exclamation of joy from all the assembled party at Mrs. Frederick Langford's ...
— Henrietta's Wish • Charlotte M. Yonge
... after Lanier went out, and went silent but in unspeakable wrath, Paymaster Scott came dawdling in, and though but a casual visitor at the post, just back that day from a tour of the northward camps and forts along the Indian border, he saw at a glance that something had gone amiss. The colonel was laboriously waltzing; three or four couples were mechanically following suit, but most ...
— Lanier of the Cavalry - or, A Week's Arrest • Charles King
... Logan asked. 'Dawdling, as jesters, from country house to country house. In the British Museum, verifying references for literary gents, if they can get references to verify. Asking leave to describe their friends' parties in The Leidy's News. Trying for places as golfing governesses, or bridge ...
— The Disentanglers • Andrew Lang
... lessons to pay his small expenses, although after one or two stormy passages in which he treated with outrageous and unjustifiable violence the dawdling pupils coming from well-to-do families, he made it a rule to take no pupils whose parents employed a servant, and confined himself to children of the poorer classes, among whom he kept up a small orchestra ...
— The Bent Twig • Dorothy Canfield
... The little widow was positively dawdling over the preparations for supper. And when at last it came, she set it in front of them not with the charming manner to which they were accustomed, but quite indifferently. And the sausage was not as fresh and ...
— The German Classics of the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries - Masterpieces of German Literature Vol. 19 • Various
... crests—one seldom sees them fly; when they do they rise straight up, and then dart away close to the ground and drop suddenly within a few yards. Of all birds the crow has most sound common sense; there is no dawdling in his methods; down he swoops with beautifully polished feathers glistening in the sun, to the water's edge, stands for a second to look calmly from side to side; then a long drink and away he goes, thoroughly satisfied to mind his own business ...
— Spinifex and Sand - Five Years' Pioneering and Exploration in Western Australia • David W Carnegie
... called out another young woman from, the broad hammock in which she had been dawdling with half-alert ears through the foregoing conversation. "Spoken like a true Briton. What is this ...
— Master Tales of Mystery, Volume 3 • Collected and Arranged by Francis J. Reynolds
... Dawdling in steamer chairs and looking upon the Michigan shore sat little mother of the country and big son of the city. The woman—the blessed silver-haired creature—forgot herself, and talked to the son as a crony. She pointed out spots upon the shore where she, an early teacher in ...
— The Wolf's Long Howl • Stanley Waterloo
... sufficiently focused, but they fail to "set fire." It is like focusing the sun's rays while an eclipse is on. They lack energy. They will not kindle the paper after they have passed through the lens. This kind of attention means mental dawdling. It means inefficiency. For the individual it means defeat in life's battles; for the nation ...
— The Mind and Its Education • George Herbert Betts
... material, I judged, so much as want of breath. Veronica performed a useful service by seizing the moment to express a hope that it was not early-closing day. Robina felt a conviction that it was: it would be just like Dick to stand there dawdling in a corner till it was too late to ...
— They and I • Jerome K. Jerome
... avoid being occasionally troublesome, he at any rate cured himself of teazing people on purpose. And it was remarkable how many employments he found as soon as his mind was disengaged from mischief. Instead of his dawdling about all the morning calling things stupid, and saying he had nothing to do, all manner of pleasant occupations seemed to start up in his path, as if made to order for him, now that he had time to attend to them. ...
— The Doll and Her Friends - or Memoirs of the Lady Seraphina • Unknown
... rare good time. Far off, and now near, the girls were singing their quaint wild songs. Thus heard, the rondinella sounds well: it is of the woods and deserts; strange, barbaric, oriental, bacchantic, what you please, save dawdling drawing-room ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol. 3, No. 1 January 1863 - Devoted To Literature And National Policy • Various
... that convenient medium, my monocle, I was able to place the man who had accosted me. He was a rich mining king from Colorado, by the name of Harvey Farnham, whom I had met in Denver, when I had been dawdling through America three ...
— The House by the Lock • C. N. Williamson
... fresh from her sulphur bath, was reclining on a sofa in her large cool room, where the jalousies were half closed, and dawdling over Godey's Lady's Book, a fashion magazine printed in the United States, which found great ...
— The Gorgeous Isle - A Romance; Scene: Nevis, B.W.I. 1842 • Gertrude Atherton
... needles of the other two. After her own little room, the mere spaciousness of it seemed almost noble. She even liked it, when, about half past one in the afternoon, on matinee days, the chorus-girls of the show now drawing to the end of its run, began dawdling in, passing shrill jokes with Bill Flynn, the fireman, rummaging through the mail in the letter-box, casually unfastening their clothes all the while, preliminary to kimonos and make-up, gathering in little knots about the sewing-machines and exclaiming in profane ...
— The Real Adventure • Henry Kitchell Webster
... this time the sun was sinking, giving the plain on which so many important events had occurred a more weird and deserted look than ever. The cavass in charge of the servants was beginning to be fussy, in fear that while we were dawdling about the one train might come and go, and the sitts and effendis be left to the limited accommodations of Aiasulouk for the night. So we filed down to the station, the servants preceding us with the hampers upon their heads, and the Armenian lady stepping out after them ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Volume 22. July, 1878. • Various
... obliged to you, sir," Ralph replied; "but I shall work my way home if I can. I have learned to be pretty handy on board the privateer, and I would as lief be working forward as dawdling about aft all the way home. Beside, I don't want to inconvenience my mother by her being called upon suddenly to pay thirty or forty pounds directly I get home. I have caused her trouble enough as ...
— One of the 28th • G. A. Henty
... hearts of those two who met and would have fought, had I not so skillfully prevented it! Santa Maria, I truly must have been inspired, to act like the dove with the branch of the olive when I flew between them; and the eyes of Jose were blazing; and Senor Jack—" There came the smile again, and the dawdling of the brush while she thought of those two. So the pretty senora was forgotten, after all, and left to shiver over her mending in the prairie schooner because Teresita was a spoiled child with more hearts than it is good for ...
— The Gringos • B. M. Bower
... me on errands to a considerable distance with the pony, and as he hated all dawdling and loitering in others, though he had become a perfectly undisciplined man himself, he would limit me strictly to the time necessary for my journey, a time that I never ventured to exceed. In some respects the education that he was giving me, though of Spartan severity, was ...
— Philip Gilbert Hamerton • Philip Gilbert Hamerton et al
... a fortnight since I expected to be with you, for I thought that directly my figure was finished they would place it. And now these people are dawdling and doing nothing; and I have orders from the Pope not to leave until it is placed, so that it seems to me I shall be prevented. I shall stay and look after it all this week too; if there are no further orders I will ...
— Michael Angelo Buonarroti • Charles Holroyd
... of the pipe on the table, the listless shabby figure on the sofa, were the most dismal part of the interior at St Roque's Cottage, so far as it appeared to the external eye. But it is doubtful whether Mrs Fred, spiteful and useless, with her poor health, her selfish love, her utter unreason, dawdling over trifling matters which she never completed; or the three children, entirely unrespectful of father and mother, growing up amid that wonderful subversion of the ordinary rules of nature, with some loyalty ...
— The Doctor's Family • Mrs. (Margaret) Oliphant
... before we were finally off. Luggage had to be packed and repacked, wheels greased, harness mended, many things done that ought to have been attended to the day before. Now of course that happens in China,—though nowhere else in my journeyings did I encounter such dawdling and shiftlessness,—but there at least you may relieve your feelings by storming a bit and stirring things up; these people, however, looked like Western men, and one simply ...
— A Wayfarer in China - Impressions of a trip across West China and Mongolia • Elizabeth Kendall
... and Lake Superior are not comfortable. But no doubt a train for those six hundred miles would be worse. You start one afternoon, and in the morning of the next day you have done with the rather colourless, unindividual expanses of Huron, and are dawdling along a canal that joins the lakes by the little town of Sault Ste. Marie (pronounced, abruptly, 'Soo'). We happened on it one Sunday. The nearer waters of the river and the lakes were covered with little sailing or rowing or bathing parties. Everybody ...
— Letters from America • Rupert Brooke
... the philosopher's study that morning, Mr. Vanstone had found him still dawdling over his late breakfast, with an open letter by his side, in place of the book which, on other occasions, lay ready to his hand at meal-times. He held up the letter the moment his visitor came into ...
— No Name • Wilkie Collins
... to posterity. If I fail to finish my book, if I am delayed in finishing it, I can hardly doubt that the world will be the loser. This is not a task like organizing a prolonged search for one's father, or dawdling with friends, which a million men can do equally well. I alone can write my book. Perhaps you now grasp my duty of concentrating all my time and energy on this single work and ruthlessly eliminating whatever ...
— Queed • Henry Sydnor Harrison
... punishment, Anne sprang up the next morning at Louise's first call and dressed at once. To her surprise, she found that it was really pleasanter than dawdling over her toilette, and Louise good-naturedly gave her permission to take Honey-Sweet for a before-breakfast stroll to the arbor in ...
— Honey-Sweet • Edna Turpin
... after Lulu's return, for she soon took up her old habits of intimacy, she sat listlessly by the fire, holding her two hands in her lap, as usual, and not even dawdling at netting. Perhaps the still evening and the quiet room induced confidence, or she may have felt the effect of my "receptivity," as she called it. (She always insisted that she could not help telling me everything.) She turned away abruptly from ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 12, No. 72, October, 1863 • Various
... time for the departure of the next train; and then choosing a secluded spot in the office, where he would be out of observation, and yet able to see all who came up for tickets, he waited patiently until the slow, dawdling hand of ...
— Life in London • Edwin Hodder
... said in a loud voice as he stepped on board. "I found them dawdling and gossiping in the street, forgetting altogether that you were waiting for your evening meal ...
— The Cat of Bubastes - A Tale of Ancient Egypt • G. A. Henty
... the Misses Dosson. He was in search of freshness, but he needn't have gone far: he would have had but to turn his lantern on his own young breast to find a considerable store of it. Like many of his dawdling coaevals he gave much attention to art, lived as much as possible in that more select world where it is a positive duty not to bustle. To make up for his want of talent he espoused the talent of others—that is of several—and was as sensitive and conscientious about them as he might ...
— The Reverberator • Henry James
... are we dawdling? All the heads are up, Steepled on spikes above the Scottish Gate,— Some of the ...
— Emblems Of Love • Lascelles Abercrombie
... thing, or appear to? Why, even the buds on the trees teach us the lesson. How many springtimes have you gone to your bed feeling that the season was late, and the trees were bare, and the fruits would all be backward, and Nature was dawdling along in a very wearisome fashion; and awakened in the morning to find that there had in the night been a gentle rain, and a movement of mysterious power among the buds and the grasses, and that now, in the morning sunshine, the world had burst into bloom? Yet, did you really suppose, ...
— Ester Ried Yet Speaking • Isabella Alden
... the courts. Besides, he will remark that there is a much greater choice of friends than of wives—you may have more of them and they will be far more improving to your mind. They will not keep you dawdling at home, or dancing attendance upon them; or withdraw you from the great world and stirring scenes of life and action which would ...
— Phaedrus • Plato
... harrowed by Jamieson's months of anguish and illness, and angered by the indifference and dawdling of the captors in the face of his demand and threat. His heart was set upon punishment, now, not treaty. He felt that he was being played with. And he longed to find the red Sioux and thrash them soundly. A word about the evangelist's trip put him ...
— The Plow-Woman • Eleanor Gates
... anticipating trouble? Your plan is certainly the right one, and the sooner that we see about carrying it out the better. Now it is quite evident that there is no place of concealment in this room, so there is nothing to be gained by dawdling here. Also, we know that it is useless to retrace our steps; and yonder is obviously the kitchen, and must therefore be avoided. That leaves us with no resource but to try the big door; so come along and let us see how far our luck ...
— Two Gallant Sons of Devon - A Tale of the Days of Queen Bess • Harry Collingwood
... classical studies go on vigorously. I have read Demosthenes twice,—I need not say with what delight and admiration. I am now deep in Isocrates and from him I shall pass to Lysias. I have finished Diodorus Siculus at last, after dawdling over him at odd times ever since last March. He is a stupid, credulous, prosing old ass; yet I heartily wish that we had a good deal more of him. I have read Arrian's expedition of Alexander, together with Quintus Curtius. I have at stray hours read Longus's Romance and Xenophon's ...
— Life and Letters of Lord Macaulay • George Otto Trevelyan
... readers of serious matter have a similar eagerness to discover what the author has to say; they get the author's question, and press on to find his answer. Such readers are both quick and retentive. The dawdling reader, who simply spends so much time and covers so many pages, in the vague hope that something will stick, does not remember the point because he never got the point, and never got it because he wasn't ...
— Psychology - A Study Of Mental Life • Robert S. Woodworth
... a few moments. I will try to tell you or rather to show you what she looked like, when I have ended my story. She enlightened me not a little. I saw how lame a thing my own journey was my leisurely dawdling back to my work. This girl came as it were on wings, with power in her heart and will, that would take no denial but God's. Her few words as we walked up and down the well-deck were words that burnt and shone in the ...
— Cinderella in the South - Twenty-Five South African Tales • Arthur Shearly Cripps
... these ideas, I prepared myself with a pair of green spectacles, and called one fine morning, quite by accident, at the Ministerial hotel. I found D— at home, yawning, lounging, and dawdling, as usual, and pretending to be in the last extremity of ennui. He is, perhaps, the most really energetic human being now alive—but that is only when ...
— The Works of Edgar Allan Poe - Volume 2 (of 5) of the Raven Edition • Edgar Allan Poe
... cruelty of these sepoys vitiates my experiment, and I quite expect many camels, one buffalo, and one mule to die yet; they sit down and smoke and eat, leaving the animals loaded in the sun. If I am not with them, it is a constant dawdling; they are evidently unwilling to exert themselves, they cannot carry their belts and bags, and their powers of eating and vomiting are astounding. The Makonde villages are remarkably clean, but no sooner ...
— The Last Journals of David Livingstone, in Central Africa, from 1865 to His Death, Volume I (of 2), 1866-1868 • David Livingstone
... known, did not leave her room until near noon—taking chocolate in bed in the morning, while Becky Sharp read the Morning Post to her, or otherwise amusing herself or dawdling. The conspirators below agreed that they would spare the dear lady's feelings until she appeared in her drawing-room: meanwhile it was announced to her that Mrs. Bute Crawley had come up from Hampshire ...
— Vanity Fair • William Makepeace Thackeray
... dawdling along with this packing as if the morning were not fairly flying by, and he'll be here on the five o'clock train. There's so much to do I don't know what to ...
— Mary Ware's Promised Land • Annie Fellows Johnston
... certainly no city in England which can boast of nearly as many fine buildings, or as large ones, proportionately to its size, as Melbourne. And this is the more remarkable, remembering, that even in the existing hard times, masons are getting 10s. 6d. a day of eight hours, and often a very dawdling eight hours too. ...
— Town Life in Australia - 1883 • R. E. N. (Richard) Twopeny
... been brought up at all so early in the day lay in the fact that Mrs. Bird never allowed her babies to go over night unnamed. She was a person of so great decision of character that she would have blushed at such a thing; she said that to let blessed babies go dangling and dawdling about without names, for months and months, was enough to ruin them for life. She also said that if one could not make up one's mind in twenty-four hours it was a sign that—but I will not repeat the rest, as it might ...
— The Birds' Christmas Carol • Kate Douglas Wiggin
... hear it? Is it howling wind? The tram-car rattling o'er the stony street? The groans of M.P.'s wearily confined To the dull House when night and morning meet, Dragged to Divisions drear with dawdling feet? ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 102, June 18, 1892 • Various
... Bayley said, "we will travel together, my dear sir; for of course we shall go straight back to England now. We have been dawdling about in this wretched country long enough. Besides, everything has to be arranged, and we have got to get to the bottom of this matter; so if you have no objection, we will travel home together. If the young people here want to ...
— Captain Bayley's Heir: - A Tale of the Gold Fields of California • G. A. Henty
... We are dawdling our time away very idly and pleasantly, at a Mrs. Leishman's, Chace, Enfield, where, if you come a-hunting, we can give you cold meat and a tankard. Her husband is a tailor; but that, you know, does not make her ...
— The Works of Charles and Mary Lamb (Vol. 6) - Letters 1821-1842 • Charles and Mary Lamb
... but we never complain, because nobody ever wakes us too soon, or thinks of interfering with our slumbering again. We wear each other's coats, smoke each other's pipes, poach on each other's victuals. We are a happy, dawdling, undisciplined, slovenly lot. We have no principles, no respectability, no business, no stake in the country, no knowledge of Mrs. Grundy. We are a parcel of Lotos-Eaters; and we know nothing, except that we ...
— Rambles Beyond Railways; - or, Notes in Cornwall taken A-foot • Wilkie Collins
... its lurid light the Government for a moment forgot its dawdling "peace policy," and "let slip the dogs of war." No wonder the canting prayers of maudlin fanatics were stilled amid the wrathful cry for vengeance. The blood of Canby and Thomas and Sherwood "cried unto God from the ground" against them. The ...
— Reminiscences of a Pioneer • Colonel William Thompson
... but there have been incessant delays owing to want of money. It has been enough to madden one; and, after all, I have to go without her and we sail in the Rose. She is one of the sloops sold out of the navy, and is now a merchantman. I daresay they would have kept me dawdling about here for months to come if it hadn't been that they have been getting the worst of it out there, and it at length occurred to them that the admiral's place is in command of his fleet, and not to act as a sort of foreman in looking after a single ship being built. ...
— With Cochrane the Dauntless • George Alfred Henty
... any enterprise. I'd rather see him breaking windows or shooting cats out the back door than dawdling like that," he ...
— Flint - His Faults, His Friendships and His Fortunes • Maud Wilder Goodwin
... you five thousand dollars, but you'll never get another cent from me until you've learned what a fool you're making of yourself, and return to do what I want you to do. It won't be long! There's a vast difference between dawdling around a university learning something that is going to be useless while your father pays the bills, and turning that foolish education into dollars to stave off an empty belly. ...
— The Plunderer • Roy Norton
... for which he had very little appetite, though he relished his coffee, and also an anchovy. While dawdling over these, he heard sundry wheels grinding about below the window, and the bumping and thumping of boxes, indicative of 'goings away,' for which he couldn't say he felt sorry. He couldn't even be at the trouble of getting up and going ...
— Mr. Sponge's Sporting Tour • R. S. Surtees
... honest, but it is not, because you pay for it with the health and strength that God gave you to use for Him. Instead of the satisfactory scourge and hair shirt of rising betimes next morning, try the more commonplace penance of going to bed in proper time the next night, without any dawdling. So many girls do things in a dreamy, dawdling way, that must be a sore trial to those about them: if a thing has to be done, you should do it in a quick, purpose-like way, and not waste your own time and other people's ...
— Stray Thoughts for Girls • Lucy H. M. Soulsby
... With dawdling, laughing and good-comradeship we chose our bonbons, and getting back into the barouche we proceeded to crunch them as we drove on to Monceaux. It was like being children over again, with a slight sense ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Vol. XXVI., December, 1880. • Various
... man is so much in the way if he is dawdling about a house all day long. You would begin to regard me as a nuisance, Sheila, and would be for sending me to play croquet with those young Carruthers, merely that you might get the rooms dusted. Besides, you know I couldn't work here: I must have a studio of some sort—in the neighborhood, ...
— Library Of The World's Best Literature, Ancient And Modern, Vol. 5 • Various
... into tears; and then, as her husband jumped up to console her, started to scold the children furiously for dawdling over breakfast, when goodness knew, with their clothes in such a state, how long it would take to get them ...
— Nicky-Nan, Reservist • Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch (Q)
... nights, leaving me all the mornings and three evenings in the week at my own disposal. Here we rush from place to place, at each place have to drill a new set of actors, and every night to act a different play; so that my days are passed in dawdling about cold, dark stages, with blundering actors who have not even had the conscience to study the words of their parts, all the morning. All the afternoon I pin up ribbons and feathers and flowers, and ...
— Records of a Girlhood • Frances Anne Kemble
... dead Cistercian monks, clothed not in white, but in decent black, ever mourning their lost glory. But we are in a perfect duck of a hotel, covered with Virginia creeper, and as close by as can be. We arrived this afternoon, and have had an hour or two of delightful dawdling in the Abbey. Soon we are to have an early dinner, which we shall bolt if necessary, so that we may go in again by moonlight, before the moon escapes. I have dressed quickly, because I wanted to begin a letter to you. I shan't have time to finish it, but I'll ...
— Set in Silver • Charles Norris Williamson and Alice Muriel Williamson
... to-morrow, the said purchaser having first taken special care to enquire 'whether I would meet him with temper?'—Certainly. The question is this—I shall either have the estate back, which is as good as ruin, or I shall go on with him dawdling, which is rather worse. I have brought my pigs to a Mussulman market. If I had but a wife now, and children, of whose paternity I entertained doubts, I should be happy, or rather fortunate, as Candide or Scarmentado. In the mean time, if you don't come and see me, I shall think that Sam.'s ...
— Life of Lord Byron, Vol. III - With His Letters and Journals • Thomas Moore
... kind. She is a handsome girl, with good abilities, who has had the sense to make the most and best of herself instead of dawdling." ...
— A Young Girl's Wooing • E. P. Roe
... received by the end of September equipment sufficient to enable that officer to advance by short marches. Roberts was holding his durbar in the Balla Hissar of Cabul on the day that the head of Gough's advance reached Jellalabad. No man can associate the idea of dawdling with Jenkins and his Guides, yet the Guides reaching Jellalabad on October 12th were not at Gundamuk until the 23d, and Gundamuk is but thirty miles beyond Jellalabad. The anti-climax for the time of General Bright's exertions occurred on November ...
— The Afghan Wars 1839-42 and 1878-80 • Archibald Forbes
... anything not befitting a high-toned gentleman, but I taught that snob how a man of honor regards his cowardice and cold-bloodedness. He was one of our fair-weather friends, who promptly disappeared when the sky clouded. Here he is, dawdling around a high-priced hotel, while I'm on my way to seek rooms in a tenement for those to whom he is not worthy to speak; but the time shall come, and speedily, too, when even on the base plane of money—the sole claim of his proud family for consideration—we shall meet ...
— Without a Home • E. P. Roe
... characters—the good-natured and good-witted Marquis Filippo Trasimeni, the faithful peasant Menico, Tolla's foster-brother, and even the bad chambermaid Amarella—have some merit. But twenty of them could not save the book, which, after dawdling till close upon its end, huddles itself up in a few pages, chiefly of recit, in a singularly ...
— A History of the French Novel, Vol. 2 - To the Close of the 19th Century • George Saintsbury
... follows you, walking or keeping pace with your gentle trot, as the case may be. We rode along the bustling mall, crowded with men and women on horseback, with numbers of gorgeously arrayed native servants and chuprassies of the Government offices hurrying on their respective errands, or dawdling for a chat with some shabby-looking acquaintance in private life; we passed by the crowded little shops on the hill below the church, and glanced at the conglomeration of grain-sellers, jewellers, confectioners, and dealers in metal or earthen vessels, ...
— Mr. Isaacs • F. Marion Crawford
... on horseback, now riding furiously over everything, as if driven by the very fiend, now dawdling along with the reins on the neck of his weary animal. Donal once met him thus in a narrow lane. The moment Forgue saw him, he pulled up his horse's head, spurred him hard, and came on as if he did not see him. Donal shoved himself into the ...
— Donal Grant • George MacDonald
... thoroughly. Oxford was a sort of Utopia to the Captain, who was resolutely bent on seeing nothing but beauty and learning and wisdom within the precincts of the University. On one or two occasions his faith was tried sorely by the sight of young gentlemen gracefully apparelled, dawdling along two together in low easy pony carriages, or lying on their backs in punts for hours, smoking, with not even a Bell's Life by them to pass the time. Dawdling and doing nothing were the objects of his special abhorrence; but, with this ...
— Tom Brown at Oxford • Thomas Hughes
... Dawdling down Whitehall one day a jogger nailed me—they come to me like flies to honey—and got me to look at his pamphlet. He went about, he said, all his time distributing them as a duty for the safety of the nation. The pamphlet was printed in the smallest type, and consisted of extracts ...
— The Open Air • Richard Jefferies
... she couldn't assert her identity; those huge passive folds of green country wouldn't believe her. They wouldn't accept the fact that she was Gabrielle Hewish, now called Considine. To them she was just the wife of a country parson dawdling through the leafy lanes in a pony-trap. She lashed the pony into a canter, but felt no better for it. The animal settled down again into his shamble. No power on earth could make him keep on cantering over the hills of the South Hams, ...
— The Tragic Bride • Francis Brett Young
... us," he said, quite irrelevantly. Selim muttered the sacred word "Allah." Chase's trend of thought, whatever it may have been, was ruthlessly checked. "That reminds me," he said briskly, "we can't waste Allah's time in dawdling here. Luck has been with us—and Allah, too—great is Allah! But we'll have to do some skilful sneaking on our own hook, just the same. If the upper gate is being watched—and I doubt it very much—we'll have a hard time getting inside the ...
— The Man From Brodney's • George Barr McCutcheon
... and old women; fleshy women, and women with small children and babies. Couples came, too—dawdling couples, plainly newly married: the men were not two steps ahead, and the women's gloves were buttoned and their furs ...
— Miss Billy's Decision • Eleanor H. Porter
... dashed only by the sight of a blooming face at Willett's side behind that stylish Eastern team. In the windings of the road among the willow islands in the Platte he had come suddenly upon them, he riding at rapid gallop, they dawdling with loosened reins. Willett was bending eagerly toward her, talking earnestly. She sat with downcast eyes that never saw the swift rider until he had almost passed them by. Mrs. Darling, chatting with Mr. Burtis on the rear seat, was the first to announce his ...
— Under Fire • Charles King
... right. What's the use of dawdling about up there in the broad moonlight, and the ...
— Harry Heathcote of Gangoil • Anthony Trollope
... alarmed. I explained what was the matter, and after Biron had chatted a moment, and again pressed me to set out at once, he went away to eat his dinner. Ours was served. I waited a little time in order to recover myself, determined not to vex M. le Duc d'Orleans by dawdling, took some soup and an egg, and went off to ...
— Marguerite de Navarre - Memoirs of Marguerite de Valois Queen of Navarre • Marguerite de Navarre
... the wood, and hasn't come back himself. I'll just go and help him!" So off he went too, and never came back. And the third wolf was left sitting there, and at last he said: "I must really go and hurry them up. What are they dawdling all this time for!" And as soon as he was gone, he set off running and never so much ...
— More Russian Picture Tales • Valery Carrick
... he said gruffly. "I know enough of him to be sure that he needs no one prying and ferreting into his affairs. Besides, it isn't safe for us to be dawdling about here. How many soldiers have you ...
— A Millionaire of Yesterday • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... it's very jolly. Find I get a trifle mixed afterwards, though. And, between ourselves, I wouldn't mind—now and then, you know—just dawdling about among the shops and people, as ...
— Punch, Or The London Charivari, Vol. 102, Jan. 9, 1892 • Various
... A woman never forgets when she is really friends with a man. I know now you were telling me about Anne Charteris, for you have been in love with her all your life, Rudolph, in your own particular half-hearted and dawdling fashion. Perhaps that is why you have had so many affairs. You plainly found the run of women so unimportant that it put every woman on her pride to prove she was different. Yes, I remember. But that night I thought you were trying to make love to me, and I was disappointed in you, ...
— The Rivet in Grandfather's Neck - A Comedy of Limitations • James Branch Cabell
... consider your work? Road inspector?" For, to tell the truth, Norris was not wholly satisfied with Dick's year of dawdling around the streets. ...
— Jewel Weed • Alice Ames Winter
... poetry, full of false sentiment, sometimes written in the eighteenth century. "It is the very last refuge of those who can do nothing better in the shape of verse; and a man of genius should disdain to invade the province of these dawdling rhymers."[68] ...
— Sir Walter Scott as a Critic of Literature • Margaret Ball
... higher rates demanded by a good one, what they usually had was a whimsical coloured woman of nomadic impulses. In the hands of such a person the old-fashioned "dinner-bell" was satisfying; life could instantly be made intolerable for any one dawdling on his way to a meal; the bell was capable of every desirable profanity and left nothing bottled up in the breast of the ringer. But the chamois-covered stick might whack upon Alice's little Chinese bowls for a considerable length of time and produce no ...
— Alice Adams • Booth Tarkington
... we must first consider two geological facts. The first is that no dawdling modern Merced cut this chasm, but a torrent considerably bigger; and that this roaring river swept at tremendous speed down a sharply tilted bed, which it gouged deeper and deeper by friction of the enormous masses of sand and granite fragments ...
— The Book of the National Parks • Robert Sterling Yard
... unison it mingled with the dull impact of their feet on the heavy sod like the exhaust of many engines. No horseman who values the life of the beast between his legs, fails to heed that warning. Landor did not, but at the first dawdling prairie creek that offered water and, with its struggling fringe of willows, a suggestion of shade, he gave the word to halt, and for four mortal, blistering hours while, man and beast alike, the others slept, kept watch over them from the nearest rise. Relentless ...
— Where the Trail Divides • Will Lillibridge
... much better. The assemblage, roused now, jolly and merciless, was not disposed to give quarter; and his obtuseness in dawdling over such high-flown notions as that population, not property, formed the basis of representative government, reaped him a harvest of boos and groans. This was not what the diggers had come out to hear. And they were as direct as children ...
— Australia Felix • Henry Handel Richardson
... cheerful," said Major Hunt, when dinner was over, and they were dawdling over coffee. "Stella and I were feeling rather down on our luck, I believe, when you appeared, and now we've forgotten all about it. Do you always behave ...
— Captain Jim • Mary Grant Bruce
... replied Mrs. McLean, between the lines she read. "She is Creole, I believe. She is perfect. The women are as infatuated about her as the men. Here's Helen Heath been dawdling round the table all the morning for the sake of chatting to her while she breakfasts. I don't know why, I'm sure; the woman's charming, but she's too lazy even to talk. ...
— Atlantic Monthly Volume 6, No. 37, November, 1860 • Various
... his ship was in, and he could afford the big hotel, it had no charms. He hated the women dawdling in its alleys, the men smoking in its corridors, the whole idle crowd, lunching in acres of ...
— Mistress Anne • Temple Bailey
... preacher and he would have sustained you. You tacitly put certain conditions on our marriage. I assented to them. I have respected them. I shall continue to respect them. But—when you married me, you didn't marry a dawdling dude chattering 'advanced ideas' with his head full of libertinism. You married a man. And ...
— The Deluge • David Graham Phillips
... and so after paying a visit to the Archdeacon, whom we met in going there some fortnight ago, and seeing his nice house and wife, we dined at the depot and left for Chicago, our coloured cook was walking and dawdling about apparently quite well, now that he had got rid of us. We had sleeping berths in the train—an unknown man slept in the one over mine, and I had to dress and undress behind the curtains of my own. We breakfasted at Barnsville Wednesday morning, ...
— The British Association's visit to Montreal, 1884: Letters • Clara Rayleigh
... weakness of his own slouching, pleasure-loving mind. It seemed to him that, in the intellectual region, he was like a dusty and ragged tramp, permeated on sunshiny days with a sort of weak, unsystematic contentment, dawdling by hedgerow-ends and fountain-heads, lying in a vacant muse in grassy dingles, and sleeping by stealth in the fragrant shadow of hayricks; while his friend seemed to him to be a brisk gentleman in a furred coat, flashing along ...
— Beside Still Waters • Arthur Christopher Benson
... about alone for an hour or two. I had been in the habit of doing so at Elmsley, and I found nothing so effectual as this in subduing agitation, and recalling my mind to a state of composure. After making the tour of the grounds, walking round the lake, and dawdling some time in the shrubberies, I opened a small gate into a lane which led towards the common. This lane was scarcely wider than a path, and was only divided from the grounds of the villa by a ditch and a slight railing. I was intently occupied in examining an ant's nest, ...
— Ellen Middleton—A Tale • Georgiana Fullerton
... When the birds left in the fall. But to fill it came late butterflies, Dawdling flocks of brilliant things In clouds of scintillating beauty, Covering every bush and flower. As silently as they came did they disappear And in their place came the music Of the katydid and the cricket. ...
— A Little Window • Jean M. Snyder
... have thought that Keg had been caught in a gilded den of sin, playing poker with body-snatchers. Pa Rearick simply cut loose and bombarded the neighborhood with red-hot adjectives. That he should have brought up a son to do him honor and should have found him dawdling his college moments away with loafers; fawning on the idle sons of the rich; tinkling a mandolin instead of walking with Homer; wasting time and money instead of trying to earn his way to success—"Bah," likewise "Faugh," to say nothing of other picturesque expressions of entire disgust—from ...
— At Good Old Siwash • George Fitch
... and be off with you! And no dawdling, mind. It's ten minutes late, and you'll have to step it to be there by one. That's your dinner, and ...
— Dick Lionheart • Mary Rowles Jarvis
... Venice," he exclaimed, "and I'm glad of it. One gets tired of dawdling about on a magnified frog-pond. One begins to long for the open sea." Miss Stickney looked gratified, and Kenwick felt himself once more ...
— A Venetian June • Anna Fuller
... tragic incident arising from the conflict of two social classes, the petty tradesmen and the nobility. From the coarse environment of the first emerge honest, upright natures like Krasnov; from the superficial, dawdling culture of the second come weak-willed triflers like Babayev. The sordid plot sweeps on to its inevitable conclusion ...
— Plays • Alexander Ostrovsky
... for conversation on old poets, etc. What have you been reading, and what tastes of rare Authors have you to send me? I have read (as usual with me) but very little, what with looking at the sea with its crossing and recrossing ships, and dawdling with my nieces of an evening. Besides a book is to me what Locke says that watching the hour hand of a clock is to all; other thoughts (and those of the idlest and seemingly most irrelevant) will intrude between my ...
— Letters of Edward FitzGerald - in two volumes, Vol. 1 • Edward FitzGerald
... the other familiar figure, which was that of Mme. Delhasse. She wore the bonnet and cloak which had been lying on the bed in her room at the time of my intrusion. She was just leaving the premises of the inn strolling, nay dawdling, along. She met Bontet and stopped for a moment in conversation with him. Then she pursued her leisurely walk in the direction of Pontorson, and I watched her till she was about three hundred yards off. But her form had no charms, and, growing ...
— The Indiscretion of the Duchess • Anthony Hope
... could not bear, and say, "Of course, Leila, of course." No! By God, no! "I am going quietly home," she muttered; "just quietly home! Come along, be brave; don't be a fool! Come along!" And she went down into the street: At the entrance to the Park she saw him, fifty yards in front, dawdling along. And, as if she had been his shadow lengthened out to that far distance, she moved behind him. Slowly, always at that distance, she followed him under the plane-trees, along the Park railings, past St. James's Palace, into Pall Mall. ...
— Forsyte Saga • John Galsworthy
... in which college boys by a similar program were metamorphosed, almost at over-night, into capable army officers, had the same effect. How signally had the schools failed! And these long years spent in school and college, "dawdling over the frills," had been to no effect, whereas "a few weeks under intelligent educational direction ...
— On the Firing Line in Education • Adoniram Judson Ladd
... few and precious to let slip unused. The field to be cultivated is too wide and the possible harvest for the toiler too abundant, and the certain crop of weeds in the sluggard's garden too poisonous, to allow dawdling to be considered a venial fault. Little progress will be made if we do not work as feeling that 'the night is far spent, the day is at hand,' or as feeling the apparently opposite but really identical conviction, 'I must work the works of Him that sent me while it is day. The night cometh ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture - Ephesians; Epistles of St. Peter and St. John • Alexander Maclaren
... administering medicine, somewhat dashed the expectations of many who conjected that the Grey estate could not possibly be worth the amount so long reputed, or the principal heir would certainly not soil his fingers with pills and plasters, instead of sauntering and dawdling with librettos, lorgnettes, meerschaums, and curiously-carved canes cut in the Hebrides ...
— Vashti - or, Until Death Us Do Part • Augusta J. Evans Wilson
... 'choice and pith of diction,' again, of which Mr. Lowell speaks, he hits the mark with a felicity that is almost his own in this generation. He is terse, concentrated, and free from the important blunder of mistaking intellectual dawdling for meditation. Nor in fine does his abruptness ever impede a true urbanity. The accent is homely and the apparel plain, but his bearing has a friendliness, a courtesy, a hospitable humanity, which goes nearer to our hearts than either literary decoration or rhetorical unction. That modest and lenient ...
— Essays • Ralph Waldo Emerson
... mood myself; rather a cruel mood, although the starting-point of my intention had been kind. I knew that my mood had something of cruelty in it, because I discovered that I was purposely dawdling over my dinner, in order to keep the man longer than necessary on the rack. Queer, the complexities one unearths in oneself. But probably if I had been an ordinary straightforward kind of fellow, I should never have had the ...
— The Tale Of Mr. Peter Brown - Chelsea Justice - From "The New Decameron", Volume III. • V. Sackville West
... stay indoors, and mercifully gave him a double share of work to do. The weather was cooler now, and the days could be filled with outdoor occupation from morning till night. There were no siestas in the afternoon or lazy dawdling over afternoon coffee in the heat of the day to remind him of long gossips with Toffy, and the evenings were shorter and ...
— Peter and Jane - or The Missing Heir • S. (Sarah) Macnaughtan
... with Mrs. Hablot than dawdling about here and amusing themselves in the new Sunday fashion. Mind, I am not going to have them racketing about the house and garden, disturbing you, ...
— Beechcroft at Rockstone • Charlotte M. Yonge
... warm weather, and this afternoon, as he went along the maple-bordered road that leads to the post office he found himself dawdling over the dusty grasses and bushes, recognizing old friends and making new ones, as right-minded folks will when the sun is warm and the birds sing beside the way. He watched a tiny chipmunk scamper along the top of the stone wall and disappear in the branches of a maple, looked upward ...
— The Half-Back • Ralph Henry Barbour
... Mr. Lorry had been dawdling away the months in Mexico and California. For years he had felt, together with many other people, that a sea-voyage was the essential beginning of every journey; he had started round the world soon after leaving Cambridge; he had fished through Norway and hunted in India, and shot everything ...
— Graustark • George Barr McCutcheon
... nothing-to-doishness. He was too indolent to engage heart and soul in the manly sports of his comrades; and he never thought it necessary to commence learning his lessons until the school had been in an hour. As he grew up to man's estate, he might be seen dawdling about in a black frock-coat, jean trousers, and white kid gloves, making lazy bows to the pretty girls of his acquaintance; or dressed in a green shooting-jacket, with a gun across his shoulder, sauntering down the wooded lanes, with a brown spaniel dodging at his heels, and looking as sleepy ...
— Roughing it in the Bush • Susanna Moodie
... Girl's somnolent form into unfathomable darkness, the White Linen Nurse in the throb of her own heart began to keep pace with that faint, horrid thud-thud-thud in the room below. Was he passing the book-case now? Had he reached the bay-window? Was he dawdling over those glistening scalpels? Would his nerves remember the flask in that upper desk drawer? Up and down,—round and round,—on and on,—the ...
— The White Linen Nurse • Eleanor Hallowell Abbott
... unknown thing. And yet this was market day, as was evident by the country women with their baskets, and by occasional processions of sheep or cattle. One man went slowly by driving a huge pig; he was in sight for quite five minutes, dawdling along, and allowing the pig to have his own sweet will as far as speed was concerned, but occasionally giving him a gentle poke with a stick when he paused to burrow his nose in the mud. Small groups of men stood talking at the corner of the market ...
— We Two • Edna Lyall
... at the mercy of circumstances, that she never seemed scandalised by their crazy unpunctuality, their wonderful free and easy ways, and customs of putting things to every use but the right, did not censure Grace or Lucy for dawdling and gossiping whole mornings away, and took it naturally when their mother inquired after her eldest brother by the alternate names of Festus and Frank, and when she mentioned Lance's disaster as his coup d'etat. And here was the last of these ...
— The Pillars of the House, V1 • Charlotte M. Yonge
... until some three or four nights after this, when he came hurriedly into our room. It was quite late, but Mac was still at his Mathematics, while I was dawdling with my pipe and a volume of Sternberg's pleasant tales. Clarian walked directly up to Mac, holding out his hand, and saying, "I have come to ask your forgiveness, my dear Mac; I was wrong and foolish ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 5, No. 32, June, 1860 • Various
... see him until Christmas,—nearly six months. A sense of dreariness, as new as it was strange, swept momentarily over Nan as she pondered this. The summer months would be grievously clouded. Dick had been the moving spirit of all the fun; the tennis-parties, the pleasant dawdling afternoons, would lose their zest when ...
— Not Like Other Girls • Rosa N. Carey
... shall have enough to do without a sick house at home. You can perform quarantine with Richard, and then go to Flora, if she will have you. Well, what are you dawdling about? ...
— The Trial - or, More Links of the Daisy Chain • Charlotte M. Yonge
... us so unobtrusively that before we knew it we had accepted him as guide. In that capacity he realized an ideal, for he never addressed a word to us, nor did he even stay in sight. We wandered along at our sweet will, dawdling as slowly as we pleased. The guide had apparently quite disappeared. Look where we would we could in no manner discover him. At the next corner we would pause, undecided as to what to do; there, in the middle distance, would stand our friend, smiling. When he ...
— African Camp Fires • Stewart Edward White
... Ingram, with that dark light returning to his eyes. "Do you know what you are talking about? Do you know that, while you are living on the charity of a woman you despise, and dawdling about the skirts of a woman who laughs at you, you are breaking the heart of a girl who has not her equal in England? Whims and fancies! Good God, I wonder how ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Vol. XII. No. 30. September, 1873 • Various
... 7th.—A month without news is very long to wait. Perhaps time passes a little more quickly than when one was dawdling and doing nothing at Hong-Kong; but still this life is tiresome enough. I do not suppose that there ever was a town of the same extent, or a population of the same number, more utterly uninteresting than the town and population of Canton—low houses, narrow streets, ...
— Letters and Journals of James, Eighth Earl of Elgin • James, Eighth Earl of Elgin
... changed his quick movements into a comfortable, concentrated dawdling, chose a place by a big stone, and sat down without hurry. He turned himself, as if seeking a comfortable position, laid his hands side by side on the grey stone, and heavily sank his head upon them. And so for an hour or two he ...
— The Crushed Flower and Other Stories • Leonid Andreyev
... He quoted Heine's tenderest love songs. Altogether his society was much more intellectual and more agreeable than any to be had at Mauleverer Manor. Miss Wolf parted from him reluctantly, and thought that Ida was unreasonably urgent when she insisted on leaving him at the end of half an hour's dawdling walk up and down ...
— The Golden Calf • M. E. Braddon
... you have out-grown that one too. You pant like a lizard when you run to catch a car. You cross your legs and have to hold the crossed one on with both hands to keep your stomach from shoving it off in space. After a while you quit crossing them and are content with dawdling yourself on your own lap. You are fat! ...
— Cobb's Anatomy • Irvin S. Cobb
... might be—any forced maturity that a crammed consciousness of Paris was likely to take upon itself to assert on behalf of the boy. He knew to the full, on what he had just extracted from Miss Gostrey, Chad's marks of alertness; but they were a reason the more for not dawdling. If he was himself moreover to be treated as young he wouldn't at all events be so treated before he should have struck out at least once. His arms might be pinioned afterwards, but it would have been left on record that he was fifty. The importance ...
— The Ambassadors • Henry James
... nor the Frenchified Spaniards and Portuguese who gobble the guisillo madrileno at Don Jose's in the Rue Helder, nor the half-French Cossacks amid the potrokha in the Restaurant Cubat, nor the Orientals with the waxed moustachios and girlish waists who may be observed at moontide dawdling over their cafe a la Turque at Madame Louna Sonnak's. These are the Frenchmen of Paris no more than the habitues of Back Bay are the Americans of Boston, no more than ...
— Europe After 8:15 • H. L. Mencken, George Jean Nathan and Willard Huntington Wright
... blessed thing as if his fingers were all thumbs. And where could he be loafing tonight? Not home yet! Serve him right if she locked the house and allowed him to stay in the sheepcotes, or wherever it was he was dawdling. There now, those infernal brats were at the spinning wheel. Groa jumped up, darted into the passage, and went ...
— Seven Icelandic Short Stories • Various
... see, is a great plague to you as well as me; for not only does it not bring me the grapes, but is the cause of your having this long dawdling letter. Why don't you show up its iniquities? What is a "Post" made and set up for, if not, among other things, to bear affiches testifying to the people of their wickedness? The express is the most slovenly agent and the most ...
— Autobiography and Letters of Orville Dewey, D.D. - Edited by his Daughter • Orville Dewey
... he said, peevishly clutching me by the arm; "what do you want dawdling? Are you a nursery-maid, that you must stare at those red-coated butchers?" And ...
— Alton Locke, Tailor And Poet • Rev. Charles Kingsley et al
... his sheep. Perhaps little things, now you are little children, may be like the lion and the bear—so kill them off— get rid of them—cure yourself of whining or dawdling, or whatever it be, and mind your sheep well," said he, smiling sweetly in answer to the children's earnest looks as they caught his meaning, "and if you do, you will not find it near so hard to deal with your great ...
— The Daisy Chain, or Aspirations • Charlotte Yonge
... not work as fast now, for things were nearly in order, and she dreaded having nothing to do; her aunt, Mrs. Dale, would have said she was dawdling, but Miss Deborah Woodhouse, who had come over to the rectory early to see if she could be of use, said haste was not genteel, and it was a pleasure to see a young person who was deliberate in ...
— John Ward, Preacher • Margaret Deland
... itself in her mind—something that her uprooted thoughts could fasten on. She would go away, of course; and meanwhile, in order not to see him, she would feign a headache, and remain in her room till after luncheon. Then she and Andora would pack a few things, and fly with the child while he was dawdling about up-stairs in the studio. When one's house fell, one fled from the ruins: nothing could be simpler, ...
— Tales Of Men And Ghosts • Edith Wharton
... a perfect fiend," said Dick Ross, as he sate dawdling over his cheese. "I wouldn't have his ill-nature for all his money." But he turned that sentiment over in his mind, endeavouring to ascertain what he would do if the offer of the exchange were made to him. For Dick was very poor, and at this moment was in great want of money. Sir ...
— Kept in the Dark • Anthony Trollope
... heart to see the shirking of work, the slipping away into the bush for a sleep, and the roasting of maize and palm-nuts—'ground-pigs' fare,' they call the latter—whenever an opportunity occurs. The dawdling walk and the dragging of one leg after the other, with intervals to stand and scratch, are a caution. Even the villagers appear incapable of protracted labour unless it leads immediately to their benefit, and the future never claims ...
— To The Gold Coast for Gold, Vol. II - A Personal Narrative • Richard Francis Burton and Verney Lovett Cameron
... distracting thing in the world when you've nothing to do, and takes up more time than you'd believe. I think of you all in the morning in the dear little house, every one bustling round, and only longing for more hands and legs to get along the quicker, while here we sit, the six of us, dawdling over breakfast, with not a thing to think of but how to waste the time until we can decently begin to eat again! It isn't energetic, and it isn't useful, and it isn't wise, or noble, or improving, or anything of the kind, but I won't disguise from you, my dear, that, ...
— The Love Affairs of Pixie • Mrs George de Horne Vaizey
... I am following, having got Lord Malmesbury's Diary; but I am relapsing into my natural dawdling, lazy, and somnolent habits, and can with difficulty get through the leaders even ...
— Lord George Bentinck - A Political Biography • Benjamin Disraeli
... not forget me either. Where would they have been without Matryna? They'd not have known how to contrive things. (Peering into the cellar.) Is it ready, sonny? Nikta (puts out his head). What are you about there? Bring it quick! What are you dawdling for? If it is to be done, ...
— Redemption and Two Other Plays • Leo Tolstoy et al
... street interrupted her thoughts, and reminded her that she must not be dawdling longer in bed. She shut her teeth, made a leap for it, and, running to the window, peered over the blind. Some score of the prisoners in a gang were clearing the pavement with shovels and brushes, laughing and chattering all the while, and breaking off to pelt each other with snowballs. She had ...
— The Westcotes • Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch
... when at length he slipped through the Robin Hood Gate, passed up Priory Lane, and walked rapidly by the shuttered houses of Roehampton. And, looking a moment over Putney Bridge; he saw the reflections of the stars in the muddy, dawdling Thames. Nothing anywhere was thick enough to hide them. The Net of Stars, being in his heart, was everywhere. No prisoner could be more securely caught than ...
— A Prisoner in Fairyland • Algernon Blackwood
... came to draw the vehicle, and by degrees the dismal truth leaked out that the three coolies who had been impressed for the occasion had all absconded, and that four policemen were in search of them. I walked on in a dawdling way up the steep hill which leads from the town, met Mr. Akboshi, a pleasant young Japanese surveyor, who spoke English and stigmatised Mororan as "the worst place in Yezo;" and, after fuming for two hours at the waste of time, was ...
— Unbeaten Tracks in Japan • Isabella L. Bird
... no banqueting-hall, with its refinements and luxuries; it is a workshop where suitable tools are provided, and everybody gets up and goes as soon as he has finished. The coming and going within are swift. There is no dawdling among the waiters; they are all busy; every one of ...
— Lost Illusions • Honore De Balzac
... birth, Leo was a youth most simple-minded. He knew that much was expected of him, and that he was destined to rule; yet so easily was he satisfied that his greatest happiness was to lie all day basking in the sun or dawdling through his father's park with his dog at his heels, the heels themselves in a very down-trodden state of humility, watching with languid gaze the movements of the ...
— Prince Lazybones and Other Stories • Mrs. W. J. Hays
... can only guess the point in his reign at which Joash summoned the priests to his help. It was after his marriage (ver. 3), and considerably before the twenty-third year of his reign, at which time his patience was exhausted (2 Kings xii. 6). Some years were apparently wasted by the dawdling sluggishness of the priests, who, for some reason or other, did not go into the proposed restoration heartily. Joash seems to have suspected that they would push the work languidly; for there is a distinct tinge of suspicion and 'whipping ...
— Expositions Of Holy Scripture - Volume I: St. Luke, Chaps. I to XII • Alexander Maclaren
... are the convulsions of a fever, not the sober workings of health. Translated into plain English, he now and then perceives he must work or starve, and then he thinks he'll work; but when he goes about it there's a lion in the way. He came dawdling to me for an Encyclopaedia yesterday. I recommended him to Norris' library and he said if he could not get it there, Phillips was bound to furnish him with one; it was Phillips' interest to do so, and all that. This was true with some restrictions—but ...
— The Works of Charles and Mary Lamb, Vol. 5 • Edited by E. V. Lucas
... Conference would get busy and finish up that treaty," observed Frank impatiently. "What in heck keeps them dawdling ...
— Army Boys on German Soil • Homer Randall |
