"Decorously" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... Literary Gazette, which the author playfully reclaims in a note from their vagabond and precarious existence in the corners of newspapers —gathering his children from wanderings in lanes and alleys, and introducing them decorously to the world. A few later poems were added, and these, with the Hyperion, showed a new and distinctive literary talent. In both of these volumes there is the purity of spirit, the elegance of form, the romantic tone, the airy grace, which were already associated ...
— Literary and Social Essays • George William Curtis
... exclaimed, in a sort of joy, decorously flavored with grief, "that I did not know! Of course that explains everything. The ...
— King John of Jingalo - The Story of a Monarch in Difficulties • Laurence Housman
... off, and though the line moved on decorously towards the much-desired rest and cocoa, Major Phillips would have been considerably surprised if he could have heard its sudden ...
— Judy of York Hill • Ethel Hume Patterson Bennett
... matter—the sum and substance, and, we need not add, the real and true cause of her present amiable feeling towards her worthy neighbours, John Anderson and his wife. Adjusting her mutch now on her head, and spreading her apron decorously before her, Mrs. Callender intimated her intention of proceeding instantly to Mrs. Anderson's to demand her jelly pot in person, and to seek, at the same time, satisfaction for the insulting message that had been sent her. Acting on this resolution, ...
— Wilson's Tales of the Borders and of Scotland, Volume III • Various
... Strether decorously, "I heartily hope you may." There seemed little else for him to say, though her communication had the oddest effect on him. Vaguely and confusedly he was troubled by it; feeling as if he had even himself been concerned in something deep and dim. He had allowed for depths, but these were greater: ...
— The Ambassadors • Henry James
... children's (that is to say, ours), and the other one Karl's own. Upon ours were heaped all sorts of books—lesson books and play books—some standing up and some lying down. The only two standing decorously against the wall were two large volumes of a Histoire des Voyages, in red binding. On that shelf could be seen books thick and thin and books large and small, as well as covers without books and books without covers, since everything got crammed up together anyhow ...
— Childhood • Leo Tolstoy
... that afternoon, and at the early hour of four o'clock Mr. Walkingshaw resumed his overcoat and muffler. As Mr. Thomieson, his confidential clerk, decorously tucked the scarf beneath the velvet collar, he offered a word or two of ...
— The Prodigal Father • J. Storer Clouston
... She shed them decorously, even under cover of the dark; she was still a dainty and proud little lady, with nothing about her to advertise conspicuously that she was crying, or why. But her little gloved hands were closing and unclosing themselves, her lips were trembling in spite of her, and ...
— The Wishing Moon • Louise Elizabeth Dutton
... Duchess still radiant and maternal, Elsa infinitely kind, infinitely apologetic, a little tearful, never for an instant wavering in her acceptance of the future. Varvilliers took leave of me with great friendliness; there was in his air now just a hint of amusement, most decorously suppressed; he was charmingly unconscious of any possible seriousness in the position. My mother went to visit Styrian relatives. Victoria and William Adolphus had taken a villa by the seaside. I was quite alone ...
— The King's Mirror • Anthony Hope
... impress him as she had now. But—here she was—a paragon of feminine promptitude—already standing in the doorway, accurately gloved and booted, and wearing a demure gray hat that modestly crowned her decorously ...
— A First Family of Tasajara • Bret Harte
... matter out in a dismal conference—they had digested the bad news that they were not in for the series. If they weren't useful to me even for the Cheapside their function seemed difficult to determine, and I could only judge at first that they had come, forgivingly, decorously, to take a last leave. This made me rejoice in secret that I had little leisure for a scene; for I had placed both my other models in position together and I was pegging away at a drawing from which I hoped to derive ...
— Some Short Stories • Henry James
... headstrong and vehement, and will not listen to me. He is for settling matters by the sword, for making forcible entries and detainers, and ousting the tenants in possession, whereby he would render himself liable to arrest, fine, ransom, and forfeiture; instead of proceeding cautiously and decorously as the law directs, and as I advise, Sir Ralph, by writ of ejectione firmae or action of trespass, the which would assuredly establish his title, and restore him the house and lands. Or he may proceed by writ of right, which perhaps, in his case, ...
— The Lancashire Witches - A Romance of Pendle Forest • William Harrison Ainsworth
... Still, however decorously Broadway subdues its hilarity before the ladies, like a fast young man at a tea party, we all know it is not in the least like Saturday night on Main Street. Let us saunter along, like two men of the world, perfectly competent ...
— Ainslee's, Vol. 15, No. 5, June 1905 • Various
... receiving his instructions from the cemetery authorities. If any special position is desired for the new grave, this will be definitely stated. With this knowledge, an undertaker will conduct a burial so quietly and decorously that as a bereaved wife once remarked, it was "a real comfort to have John buried." She did not quite mean ...
— Mother's Remedies - Over One Thousand Tried and Tested Remedies from Mothers - of the United States and Canada • T. J. Ritter
... larger and larger and the competition engendered by them grew fiercer, it became increasingly difficult to attract attention by mere academic merit. So the painters began to search for sensationalism of subject, and the typical salon picture, no longer decorously pompous, began to deal in blood and horror and sensuality. It was Regnault who began this sensation hunt, but it has been carried much further since his day than he can have dreamed of, and the modern salon picture is not ...
— Artist and Public - And Other Essays On Art Subjects • Kenyon Cox
... hall, and facing the benches for visitors, the Shaker fraternity were ranged. The hats and straight straw bonnets hung decorously upon the wall over their heads: here and there a sky-blue shawl or one of faded lilac hung beneath the headgear. Across the wide apartment it was difficult to distinguish faces. I scanned closely the sisterhood—old, withered faces most of them, with here and there one young and blooming—but ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Vol. XII. No. 31. October, 1873. • Various
... hangings of dull cloth-of-gold, its lights discriminatingly clustered and discreetly shaded, redoubled in half a hundred mirrors, its subdued shimmer of plate and glass, its soberly festive assemblage of circumspect men and women splendidly gowned, its decorously muted murmur of voices penetrated and interwoven by the strains of a hidden string orchestra—caressed his senses as always, yet with a difference. To-night he saw it a room populous with lovers, lovers insensibly paired, man unto woman ...
— The Black Bag • Louis Joseph Vance
... stopped, and some one made a signal to Thayer. Simply as a boy, and with a boyish tenderness, he sang the little hymn they had chosen for him. Each man and woman who listened, felt gentler and nobler for his song; but only Beatrix, shut decorously in the room upstairs, away from her dead, realized that, for the passing hour, Thayer had annulled the passion and the pain of those last weeks, and had gone back again to the old, pitiful, protecting love which for years had marked ...
— The Dominant Strain • Anna Chapin Ray
... to be seen. But perhaps Miss Wilkins had not had the same difficulty in disentangling him from among her impressions of the past, for she had flashed upon him a glance, bright with interest, before casting down her eyes decorously and ...
— The Port of Adventure • Charles Norris Williamson and Alice Muriel Williamson
... well as pictures, they adorned and enriched the walls marvellously as architectural embellishments. The Peers' seats are four rows of long sofas on each side, covered with red morocco; comfortable seats enough, but not adapted to any other than a decorously exact position. The woolsack is between these two divisions of sofas, in the middle passage of the floor,—a great square seat, covered with scarlet, and with a scarlet cushion set up perpendicularly for the Chancellor to lean against. In front of the woolsack ...
— Passages From the English Notebooks, Complete • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... black braids hanging down her white neck as she sat in the "minister's pew" of the old brick church, into a beautiful pale woman in a widow's bonnet. Therese went now every Sunday to the same church where her father used to preach. The countess accompanied her most decorously. She was a pagan at heart, but it pleased Therese. In church she spent her time looking at her friend's profile ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Volume 22. October, 1878. • Various
... whispered Ramsey to Hugh. Then openly, yet decorously, "Ahem!" she said as they lapsed into waiting attitudes. But the mate was not to be ahemmed, and while he hearkened on to the critic she could do no better than hammer the small of her back and smooth into it a ...
— Gideon's Band - A Tale of the Mississippi • George W. Cable
... the winter. Boney must have sadly disconcerted the comfortable system of these old warriors by the harrowing, restless, cut-and-slash mode of warfare that he introduced. He has put an end to all the old carte and tierce system in which the cavaliers of the old school fought so decorously, as it were with a small sword in one hand and a chapeau bras in the other. During his career there has been a sad laying on the shelf of old generals who could not keep up with the hurry, the fierceness and dashing of the new system; and among the number I presume ...
— Washington Irving • Charles Dudley Warner
... touch our intensely odd successions. Three weeks after this came Vereker's death, and before the year was out the death of his wife. That poor lady I had never seen, but I had had a futile theory that, should she survive him long enough to be decorously accessible, I might approach her with the feeble flicker of my plea. Did she know and if she knew would she speak? It was much to be presumed that for more reasons than one she would have nothing to ...
— The Figure in the Carpet • Henry James
... Father Jose beheld him gravely draw his pocket-handkerchief from the basket-hilt of his rapier and apply it decorously to his eyes. "Pardon this weakness, Sir Priest," said the cavalier apologetically; "but these worthy gentlemen were ancient friends of mine, and have done me many a delicate service,—much more, perchance, than these poor ...
— The Luck of Roaring Camp and Other Tales • Bret Harte
... to contain so much accurate anticipation were at last arranged and the children sat decorously attentive, their faces turned curiously toward the strange lady with the fascinating ...
— The Speaker, No. 5: Volume II, Issue 1 - December, 1906. • Various
... dare to exchange a single word upon the subject nearest to their hearts as they rode decorously behind their parents and the two monks. The whole train had to restrain their horses to the ambling pace of the steed bestridden by the monks, who were by no means skilled riders; and dusk had fallen ere they all rode into the courtyard of Chad, where the bustle of dismounting afforded the brothers ...
— The Secret Chamber at Chad • Evelyn Everett-Green
... forward to the foot of the crucifix, where, upon its lowest step and upon the cemented floor immediately beneath it respectively, lay two shapes decorously covered with shawls of some heavy material interwoven with gold wire, for the manufacture of which the Makalanga were famous when first the Portuguese came into contact with them. The Molimo took hold of the cloths that seemed ...
— Benita, An African Romance • H. Rider Haggard
... her bedroom window as they walked down the path where she had gone the evening before, decorously side by side, Kate holding her light muslin frock back from the dew on the hedges. She wondered if it was because Kate had more respect for David than for Captain Leavenworth that she never seemed to treat him ...
— Marcia Schuyler • Grace Livingston Hill Lutz
... wife having been by that time decorously interred in one of the first great mausoleums west of the mountains, Anthony Cardew found himself already wealthy. He owned oil wells and coal mines. His mines supplied his coke ovens with coal, and his own river boats, as ...
— A Poor Wise Man • Mary Roberts Rinehart
... less strict than those which obtain about Plymouth Rock, but experience with them will prove that, however loose their own code, they carefully conform to the custom of others; that if they have any scars across their morals, they have also the tact and good taste to keep them decorously ...
— Four Years in Rebel Capitals - An Inside View of Life in the Southern Confederacy from Birth to Death • T. C. DeLeon
... as at the Bourse and the New York Gold Room; but they quietly bought and sold. Some of the leading firms had desks or tables at the side, and there awaited orders. Everything was phlegmatically and decorously done. ...
— Baddeck and That Sort of Thing • Charles Dudley Warner
... Goodchum. did not execute his threat; instead we walked along decorously in the direction of the nearest ferns, while Harold and aunt Helen followed, the latter carrying ...
— My Brilliant Career • Miles Franklin
... shining examples of the class of authors who are destined to live by their art alone. Poe, in his short-stories, said nothing of importance to the world; and de Maupassant said many matters which might more decorously have remained untalked of. But the thing they meant to do, they did unfalteringly; and perfect workmanship is in itself a virtue in this world of shoddy compromise and ragged effort. Long after people have ceased ...
— A Manual of the Art of Fiction • Clayton Hamilton
... mess-room in a Military Hospital, but a British school-room. Mrs. Torrence had changed her woollen cap for a grey felt wide-awake. She was no longer an Arctic explorer, but the wild-western cowboy of British melodrama. She was the first to go mad. One moment she was seated decorously at the Lieutenant's right hand; the next she was strolling round the tables with an air of innocent abstraction, having armed herself in secret with the little hard round rolls supplied by order of the Commandant. ...
— A Journal of Impressions in Belgium • May Sinclair
... in the pupils of the valley man's eyes. It was an expression closely correlated to laughter, but the muscles of his face were still, and he remained decorously grave. ...
— The Mystery of Witch-Face Mountain and Other Stories • Charles Egbert Craddock
... vinegary face outside her state-room door. Thinking she would get over her tantrum in a few minutes, the mate invited the two Samoan ladies and their attendants down into the cabin, where they awaited her appearance, behaving themselves, of course, very decorously, it being ...
— By Rock and Pool on an Austral Shore, and Other Stories • Louis Becke
... for the open country. Very soon his passenger knew that he was in for a long ride possibly, a cold ride certainly. Within the city limits the car moved decorously, but when the suburbs were reached, the driver put on all his power. He drove carefully, too, as one who must make ...
— Long Live the King • Mary Roberts Rinehart
... simplicity is gone, and has been replaced by a tone of sentiment which is almost mawkish. "Giants, dragons, and angelic champions carry us into a spurious fairyland where the knight-errant is a preacher in disguise. Fair ladies and love-matches, however decorously chastened, suit ill with the sternness of the mortal conflict between the soul and sin." With the acknowledged shortcomings of the Second Part of "The Pilgrim's Progress," we may be well content that Bunyan never carried out the idea hinted at in the closing words of his allegory: "Shall it ...
— The Life of John Bunyan • Edmund Venables
... population by no means coincides with the "physical subsistence minimum," from which in fact it always departs by something appreciable. The necessary standard of living of the working community is in fact made up of two distinguishable factors: the subsistence minimum, and the requirements of decorously wasteful consumption—the "decencies of life." These decencies are no less requisite than the physical necessaries, in point of workday urgency, and their amount is a matter of use and wont. This composite standard ...
— An Inquiry Into The Nature Of Peace And The Terms Of Its Perpetuation • Thorstein Veblen
... just as Sweetwater reached the lower floor. He was at the side door when they came in, and a single glance convinced him that all had gone off decorously at the grave, and that nothing further had occurred during their absence ...
— The House of the Whispering Pines • Anna Katharine Green
... matter of surprise to the staid and decorously-attired judges of the present day. "On all ordinary occasions," he wrote, "I usually wore a black velvet coat and waistcoat. The first time I saw the Chief Justice he had on a black kalimanco or camlet jacket, which I have seen him wear even on the ...
— The Story of the Upper Canada Rebellion, Volume 1 • John Charles Dent
... effort on his part to keep up the conversation, Margaret was so wholly unresponsive; and afterwards, knowing how affairs stood with them, I could understand his well-bred misery. The hardest thing in the world is to suffer decorously and make no sign in the midst of a society which insists on stoicism, no matter how badly one is hurt. The Society for First Aid to the Injured hardens its heart in these cases. "I have never seen another place," he continued, "where the women are so busy in improving themselves. Societies, ...
— Baddeck and That Sort of Thing • Charles Dudley Warner
... A mild, subdued excitement reigned in the chamber. It flashed through the mind of every Democratic member that that death in the Chesapeake had brought a crisis in the war between Bassett and Thatcher. In due course the assembly, convened in joint session, would mourn decorously the death of a statesman who had long and honorably represented the old Hoosier State in the greatest tribunal on earth; and his passing would be feelingly referred to in sonorous phrases as an untoward event, ...
— A Hoosier Chronicle • Meredith Nicholson
... portion of the provisions for its inmates is prepared. There was a savoury smell of soup, which we could not help inhaling while we gazed on death. The cooks too were in attendance, and though they, as became them, did all in their power to look decorously dismal, well as they managed their faces, they could not so divest themselves of their professional peculiarities, as not to awaken thoughts which involuntarily turned to ludicrous or festive scenes. Their very costume was at variance with the general gloom, and no ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction. - Volume 10, No. 271, Saturday, September 1, 1827. • Various
... with their hands — the efforts of a band of six or seven artists on the pipe and tabor, who kept up a quavering strain of what they doubtless believed to be music. To the united melody thus produced, a string of a dozen or so of ladies, in their full war paint, were decorously going through the monotonous evolutions of a popular dance, waving their arms about, gesticulating, and at the same time lingering, as it were, over the ground, and comporting themselves in that staid, yet fitfully lively way, which seems to be the general style of Eastern dancing. ...
— Diary of a Pedestrian in Cashmere and Thibet • by William Henry Knight
... Millsap; the people whose families were not so old perhaps, but by way of compensation more likely to be large ones, the common people, as the word goes, knew the father. The best people commiserated decorously with the daughter when her father was abruptly taken from this life; the others wondered what was going to become of his widow. For, you see, the daughter moved in very different circles from the one in which ...
— Sundry Accounts • Irvin S. Cobb
... been straightened to the body to the elbows, and then crossed decorously on the breast. Barrant walked round to the other side of the bed, knelt down by the edge of it, and examined the underneath part of the arm. A single livid mark was imprinted ...
— The Moon Rock • Arthur J. Rees
... remonstrated with for taking part in such a perilous journey at his time of life, especially as he was far past the stipulated age for active service, the old chief patriotically remarked that one of his age could not possibly die more decorously than in the defence of his country. In the same year (1547) he fought bravely, at the head of his clan, with all the enthusiasm and gallantry of his younger days, at the battle of Pinkie, where he was wounded in the head and taken prisoner, but was soon afterwards released, through ...
— History Of The Mackenzies • Alexander Mackenzie
... exactly as it goes on in the suburbs of a Belgian city in ordinary times. There was nothing to suggest war or a captured city in the family parties sitting at small tables before the outlying cafes or strolling decorously under the trees that shaded every road. Even the Red Cross flags hanging from the windows of many of the larger houses seemed for once in keeping with the peaceful picture. Of Germans during the afternoon we saw almost none. Thick enough in the center ...
— Paths of Glory - Impressions of War Written At and Near the Front • Irvin S. Cobb
... Brace, and disappeared. He hesitated a moment or two, then quickly rescaling the wall, dropped into the lane outside, followed it to the gateway of the casa, and entered the patio as Dona Isabel decorously advanced from a darkened passage to the corridor. Although the hour of siesta had passed, her sister, Miss Chubb, the Alcalde, and Mrs. Brimmer were still lounging here ...
— The Crusade of the Excelsior • Bret Harte
... of Todborough and on through the environs of the city the gay cavalcade rode decorously and discreetly; but nearing Tapton Downs, the spirits of the party seemed to rise as they ...
— Belles and Ringers • Hawley Smart
... be oozing with interest and actuality. Tell G.J. to bring you to tea one day, quite, quite soon, will you? I'll tell him." And Molder murmured something fatuously conventional. G.J. showed decorously that he had caught his own name. Whereupon Lady Queenie, instead of naming a day for tea, addressed ...
— The Pretty Lady • Arnold E. Bennett
... her Welsh castle, surrounded by rocks and blow-holes, and finally to that last great scene, where (if I followed events accurately) she trusses her ex-husband like a fowl, and trundles him in a wheel-barrow to the pyre of sacrifice, not the best will in the world could keep me convinced or even decorously thrilled. So I will content myself with repeating my advice to a clever writer in future to ride imagination on the curb, and leave you to endorse this or not ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 152, May 30, 1917 • Various
... the Major's voice, stern, indignant, commanding. I dashed the tears of laughter from my eyes, and strove to face him decorously. ...
— My Lady of the North • Randall Parrish
... solemnly out of the front door and round a corner of the house. There they found the gay marquee; the small orchestra seated on the lawn at one side of it, and a punch bowl of lemonade inviting attention, under a tree. Decorously the small couples stepped upon the platform, one after another, and ...
— Penrod • Booth Tarkington
... had not been overwhelmed with social duties herself my babies would, I am confident, have had no time for their parent except at serious inconvenience and a tremendous sacrifice of time. To be sure, I used occasionally to watch them decorously eating their strictly supervised suppers in the presence of the governess; but the perfect arrangements made possible by my financial success rendered parents a superfluity. They never bumped their heads, or soiled their clothes, or dirtied their little ...
— The "Goldfish" • Arthur Train
... your pardon, but we are accustomed to have grace before meat," said Robin decorously. "And as our own chaplain is not with us to-day, will you be good enough to ...
— Robin Hood • J. Walker McSpadden
... its tragic and comic peculiarities are well worth describing. An end was put to the melee, by the captain's calling the ship's company to put the salt water mobocrats in irons. At this determined order, the gentlemen of the lash scampered, and for the rest of the voyage conducted themselves very decorously. ...
— My Bondage and My Freedom • Frederick Douglass
... heard amidst the music and the revelry of the Louvre and the Tuileries. On the 5th of January, 1666, Philip, the Duke of Orleans, gave a magnificent ball in the palace of St. Cloud. Louis XIV. was then in deep mourning for his father-in-law. Decorously he wore the mourning dress of violet-colored velvet adopted by the court; he, however, took care so effectually to cover his mourning garments with glittering and costly gems that the color of the material ...
— Louis XIV., Makers of History Series • John S. C. Abbott
... Chautauqua lecturers were hoarse, industry was at a standstill, misery and despair were widespread. Even the indomitable Chuff himself was a little nonplussed. Better (he thought) one man indubitably, decorously, publicly, and legally drunk, than millions of citizens privily attempting to cajole raisins and apples into ...
— In the Sweet Dry and Dry • Christopher Morley
... Decorously having tea on the terrace in the June afternoons, knowing herself the centre of interest, Harriet's heart sang with a wild inward delight. She smiled; she could afford the friendliest interest for everyone's affairs. When her own were ...
— Harriet and the Piper - (Norris Volume XI) • Kathleen Norris
... must not appear agitated and therefore, instead of racing across the lawn and shouting for Jerry as would have been his inclination, he walked decorously along the path until he came to the boathouse from which door Jerry was at ...
— Walter and the Wireless • Sara Ware Bassett
... baby on her comfortable lap, she was thinking of this and feeling glad that poor Jem's widow and children were so well provided for. It would be highly respectable and proper. The ardour of Mr. Jenkinson would not interfere with his waiting until Henrietta's weeds could be decorously laid aside and then the family would be joyfully established in his well-furnished and decent house. During his probation he would visit Henrietta and bring presents to the children and unostentatiously protect them ...
— Robin • Frances Hodgson Burnett
... north the glebe was bounded by a thick wood, a rank and dense "second growth" springing from earth where had once stood, decorously apart, the monster trees of the primeval forest; a wild maze of young trees, saplings and underbrush, overrun from the tops of the slender, bending pines to the bushes of dogwood and sassafras, and the rotting, ancient stumps and fallen logs, by the uncontrollable, all-spreading ...
— Audrey • Mary Johnston
... at length by the footsteps of the mourners returning. They went down the hill almost as decorously as they had gone up. Flo stepped aside and ...
— Wandering Heath • Sir Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch
... silence for a few seconds, while Christopher manfully struggled with his feelings and Miss Maria decorously gave vent to hers. Christopher was vexed with himself for so nearly breaking down before Elisabeth, and throwing the shadow of his sorrow across the sunshine of her path. He did not know that the mother-heart in her was ...
— The Farringdons • Ellen Thorneycroft Fowler
... specimen, making six in all. The rustic element varies in each case, but it assumed the form of burlesque comedy in all except the purely didactic 'Coventry' cycle of the Cotton manuscript. Here, indeed, the treatment of the situation is decorously dull, but in the others we can trace a gradual advance in humorous treatment leading up to the genuine comedy of the alternative Towneley plays. Thus, like Noah and his wife, the shepherds of the adoration early ...
— Pastoral Poetry and Pastoral Drama - A Literary Inquiry, with Special Reference to the Pre-Restoration - Stage in England • Walter W. Greg
... Eat deliberately and decorously (there can be no harm in repeating this precept), masticate your food thoroughly, and beware of ...
— How To Behave: A Pocket Manual Of Republican Etiquette, And Guide To Correct Personal Habits • Samuel R Wells
... it's some one at the door," calmly announced Sims, raising his voice decorously, to be heard over the noise. "Shall I see who it is, or shall I let them knock ...
— Winnie Childs - The Shop Girl • C. N. Williamson
... Araminta Vining, as he had previously settled with her father, and found her to his vast relief a very personable girl. She had in consequence a host of admirers, pre-eminent among whom was young Robert Minifie of Milanor. Mr. Wycherley, a noted stickler for etiquette, decorously made bold to question Mr. Minifie's taste in a dispute concerning waistcoats. A duel was decorously arranged and these two met upon the narrow beach of ...
— The Certain Hour • James Branch Cabell
... that night, but I opened my eyes and saw hundreds of my fellow-creatures, all with some strange delusions, many with ferocious and vicious propensities, yet all kept in order by a few warders, a handful of girls, and all behaving as decorously as in a real ball-room. And the question which would haunt me all the way home was, which are the sane people, and which ...
— Mystic London: - or, Phases of occult life in the metropolis • Charles Maurice Davies
... already left to fulfil an early appointment down-town. Old Nixon waited on me. As he, like every other member of the family, with the possible exception of the mayor, was still an unknown quantity in the problem given me to solve, I allowed a few stray glances to follow him as he moved decorously about the board anticipating my wants and showing himself an adept in his appointed task. Once I caught his eye and I half expected him to speak, but he was too well-trained for that, and the meal proceeded ...
— The Mayor's Wife • Anna Katharine Green
... Eeny ran up the steps, and favoured this vision of youthful bloom with a kiss, while Kate followed more decorously. ...
— Kate Danton, or, Captain Danton's Daughters - A Novel • May Agnes Fleming
... happened that, just when Maxfield was preparing in a quiet way to celebrate the coming of age of the heir; just as the gloom which had followed on Captain Oliphant's tragic death was beginning to lift a little and allow Tom and Jill decorously to think of football; just as Rosalind was beginning to make up her mind that she was not destined for ever to teach the elements of art and science to the Vicarage children; just when everything seemed to be settling down for the last scene of the drama, Roger and his tutor ...
— Roger Ingleton, Minor • Talbot Baines Reed
... tell you that I have sent Summers express, with a note to Lady Ellinor begging her to come here? I did not see, on reflection, how I could decorously accompany Miss Trevanion alone, without even a female servant, to a house full of gossiping guests. And even had your uncle been well enough to go with us, his presence would but have created an additional cause for wonder; so ...
— The Caxtons, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... umbrage in the same way as the vulgar dogs below the gangway; so it is in the world. The people who must meet, must dine together, sit side by side at flower-shows and garden-parties, always manage to do their hatreds decorously, and only pay off their dislikes by instalments. If Lady Maude were to receive my wife at all, it would be with a most winning politeness. All her malevolence would limit itself to making the supposed underbred woman commit a gaucherie, to do or say something that ought ...
— Lord Kilgobbin • Charles Lever
... of the wall, and speedily lifted the ladder to our side, where it leaned comfortably against the stout branches of the draper's peach vine. Willie ran nimbly up the ladder and bestrode the wall. I followed, first standing, and then decorously sitting down on the top of it. Mr. Anstruther pulled up the ladder, and replaced it on the side of liberty; then he descended, then Willie, and I last of all, amidst the acclamations of the onlookers, a select company of six ...
— Penelope's Experiences in Scotland • Kate Douglas Wiggin
... was talking. Dong-Yung turned back from all the greenness around her to listen. He sat very still, with his hands hid in his sleeves. The wave-ridged hem of his robe—blue and green and purple and red and yellow—was spread out decorously above his feet. Dong-Yung looked and looked at him, so still and motionless and so gorgeously arrayed. She looked from his feet, long, slim, in black satin slippers, and close-fitting white muslin socks, to the feet of the foreign ...
— The Best Short Stories of 1919 - and the Yearbook of the American Short Story • Various
... girls appeared at the cabin that evening, the table was set and the steak was frying. Inez and Judith winked at each other when Mr. Fowler said grace but otherwise the meal progressed decorously enough. It was Inez who brought up the tabooed subject. They had been sitting round the stove listening to a tale of old lynch law which the preacher told with real skill, when Inez interrupted him with ...
— Judith of the Godless Valley • Honore Willsie
... of one of the churches, and several church- members, who, hearing a noise, set out gravely and decorously to see what was going ...
— Doctor Grimshawe's Secret - A Romance • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... sharing his studio later with Aristide Sartorio, now a leading Italian painter. Here, in the Via Flaminia, he painted his first important mural decoration, for the dining room of Mrs. Potter Palmer's Chicago Lake Shore mansion. This work, called "The Vintage," is decorously inebriate, a vinous riot of little cupids. It led, shortly after his marriage in 1887 to Miss Maud Howe, a daughter of Mrs. Julia Ward Howe, to his establishing himself in Chicago, where he did many decorations and portraits. In 1894, he went back to Rome to execute a commission for a huge ...
— Stories from Everybody's Magazine • 1910 issues of Everybody's Magazine
... fact his flow of ideas failed him for a moment, his mind being so constituted that they came in rapid and temporary bursts, geyser fashion. He inquired when Mrs. Field arrived, was kindly circumstantial as to her health, touched decorously but not too mournfully upon the late Thomas Maxwell's illness and decease. He alluded to the letter which he had written her, mentioning as a singular coincidence that at the moment of her entrance he was engaged ...
— Jane Field - A Novel • Mary E. Wilkins Freeman
... clock work is the old Dijon time keeper, which still performs its office, and which is a privilege to watch at high noon. Twelve times the bell is struck: first by a man, who turns decorously with his hammer, and then by a woman, who does the same. This staunch couple have worked for their living for many centuries. Froissart alludes to this clock, saying: "The Duke of Burgundy caused to be carried away from the market place at Courtray a clock that struck the hours, ...
— Arts and Crafts in the Middle Ages • Julia De Wolf Addison
... imagine, until she looked back, then Rawson-Clew saw a very devil of mockery and mischief flash up in her eyes. Only for a second; the expression was gone before her head was turned again, and that was decorously soon. But it had been there; it was like the momentary parting of the clouds on a grey day; it illumined her whole face—her mind, too, perhaps—as the eerie, tricky gleam, which is gone before a man knows it, lights up the level landscape, and transforms ...
— The Good Comrade • Una L. Silberrad
... up and composed. His wig, which had covered his left eye, was arranged decorously in its proper place, and the gold-rimmed spectacles pressed back so that the good man could beam mildly and gratefully upon his supposed preserver. The clerical hat, however, had lost its character beyond recovery, and though its owner was obliged to wear it home, it must be confessed that it did ...
— A Knight Of The Nineteenth Century • E. P. Roe
... House was decorously dull to the street; the doors to the bar closed, the lights within low and drowsy; even the side door, giving access to the "restaurant," was closed much of the time—when, that is to say, it wasn't swinging to admit an intermittent ...
— The Day of Days - An Extravaganza • Louis Joseph Vance
... the brown Madonna of the Copts. He would not be the dupe of such degenerate fables; God forbid. He would not be grovelling at such grotesque shrines; no indeed. He would be many hundred yards away, decorously bowing towards a more distant city; where, above the only formal and official open place in Jerusalem, the mighty mosaics of the Mosque of Omar proclaim across the valleys the victory and the ...
— The New Jerusalem • G. K. Chesterton
... their curved arms; the coachmen in front of them seemed carved in plum-colored broadcloth; only by watching the groom's eyelids could one ascertain that they were flesh and blood. Young girls, two, three, and four, cantered by; their linen habits rose and fell decorously, their hair was smooth. Mounted policemen, glorious in buttons, breathing out authority, curvetted past, and everywhere and always the chug-chug-chug of the gleaming, fierce-eyed motor cars filled one's ears. They darted ...
— While Caroline Was Growing • Josephine Daskam Bacon
... a woman such a trial to sustain as this! By no possible supposition could Miriam explain the identity of the dead Capuchin, quietly and decorously laid out in the nave of his convent church, with that of her murdered persecutor, flung heedlessly at the foot of the precipice. The effect upon her imagination was as if a strange and unknown corpse had miraculously, while she was gazing at it, assumed ...
— The Marble Faun, Volume I. - The Romance of Monte Beni • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... two must have a strong presumption against him of being one, whether or no. Either the clean and decorously clad man, or the dirty and indecorously clad ...
— Tom Tiddler's Ground • Charles Dickens
... jacket, and one squire lumbered off the platform.) But he held on, warming with a theme that hitherto had hardly interested him. His speeches were above the heads of his peasant audiences; but they were a more sensitive harp to play on than the average Anglo-Saxon audience. Many women wept, only decorously, as he outlined their influence in a reformed village, a purified Principality. The men applauded frantically because, despite some prudent reserves, there seemed to be a promise of revolt in his suggestions. David ...
— Mrs. Warren's Daughter - A Story of the Woman's Movement • Sir Harry Johnston
... He had just discovered the defection of Du Meresq and Lilla, and, having his own opinion of his brother-in-law, disapproved of it entirely. Miss Tremaine also was much too flighty for his taste, and he was very hard on Captain Delamere for not applying to him to get her decorously out of ...
— Bluebell - A Novel • Mrs. George Croft Huddleston
... at least as a necessary evil, and ere long to seek for the Roman religion, which in its simplicity was no longer tenable, a support in foreign philosophy—a support which no doubt ruined it as faith, but in return at any rate allowed the man of culture decorously to retain in some measure the names and forms of the popular creed. But this support could neither be Euhemerism, nor the system of Carneades ...
— The History of Rome (Volumes 1-5) • Theodor Mommsen
... life in the person of Stonewall Jackson, who was dragging dejectedly across the yard from the direction of the back door with Mrs. Sniffer and all five little dogs trailing in his wake. And as if in sympathy with his mood, the frisky little puppies were waddling along decorously while Sniffer poked her nose affectionately into the little brown hand which was hanging without its usual jaunty swing. Rose Mary took in the situation at a glance and sank down under one of the tall lilac bushes and looked up with adoring eyes ...
— Rose of Old Harpeth • Maria Thompson Daviess
... march of the beasts began, they saw and heard no more of the globes. And as they reached a curve in the river, Hume stopped, swung around, stood studying the line of decorously ...
— Star Hunter • Andre Alice Norton
... of was a dismal one of sleety snow. My own room seemed to me cheerier than the lonely parlour, where I could not have had good Mary Quince so decorously. ...
— Uncle Silas - A Tale of Bartram-Haugh • J.S. Le Fanu
... which the general public are not allowed to be spectators; but I only speak of what is done openly. I would also by far prefer a popular festival in the East to a fair in our highly-civilised states. The Oriental feasts were to me a source of much enjoyment, for the people always behaved most decorously. They certainly shouted, and pushed, and elbowed each other like an European mob; but no drunken men were to be seen, and it was very seldom that a serious quarrel occurred. The commonest man, too, ...
— A Visit to the Holy Land • Ida Pfeiffer
... walking on, the merry child frolicking hither and thither round him, and the sturdy body-servant Ralph, without whom he never stirred, plodding after, while Keeper, the only dog allowed to follow to the sheepfolds, marched decorously along, proud of the distinction. Then she went up to Lady Archfield, who could not be perfectly easy as to the precious grandchild being left to his own devices in the cold, while Sir Philip was sure to run into a discussion with the shepherd over the turnips, ...
— A Reputed Changeling • Charlotte M. Yonge
... stretch of road a lone old man and a pig. Surely I knew that tall figure in the quaint grey smock, surely I knew the face, furrowed like nature's face in springtime, and crowned by a round, soft hat? And the pig, the black pig walking decorously free? Ay, ...
— The Roadmender • Michael Fairless
... were a religious people, were these early dwellers in the land. They built kivas and estufas,—under and above ground ceremonial chambers,—where they regularly and decorously met to worship by dance, recitation of ancient songs, telling of divine leadings and interpositions on their behalf, smoking, singing, prayer, and the observance of other ritual. Thus happy, contented and basking in ...
— The Grand Canyon of Arizona: How to See It, • George Wharton James
... into a barber's shop to be shaved, she would wait on the pavement until he came out; and in many of his visits she accompanied him, very decorously remaining outside while her master was enjoying the society ...
— Round-about Rambles in Lands of Fact and Fancy • Frank Richard Stockton
... endowing the deceased with aureate harps and crowns and footgear. In fine, death cowed the colonel's thoughts; beyond the grave they did not care to venture, and when confronted with that abyss they decorously balked. ...
— The Rivet in Grandfather's Neck - A Comedy of Limitations • James Branch Cabell
... in Tom's eye, in Tom's tone, that somehow over-awed Mr. Pierce; and he walked sheepishly to his own place. There was no mistaking that Channing would make a firm senior. The boys proceeded, two and two, decorously through the cloisters, snatching off their trenchers as they entered the college gates. Tom and Huntley walked last, Tom bearing the keys. The choir gained, the two branched off right and left, Huntley placing himself at the head of the ...
— The Channings • Mrs. Henry Wood
... glade, brooded over its peaceful yard of graves. The men had all donned their coats and exchanged field hats for stiff, uncomfortable, straight-brimmed straw, and their wives still wore the Sewing Circle gala attire. The older children walked decorously along, each group in wake of the heads of their own family, though Buck Peavey had managed to annex ...
— The Road to Providence • Maria Thompson Daviess
... attendance on his sister. He persuaded her to sit for a picture, but it was quite impossible to catch her elusive beauty. She would turn her head, change the curve of her pretty lips, allow her eyes to rove about and then let the lids drop decorously in a fashion he called a nun's face; but it ...
— A Little Girl in Old Quebec • Amanda Millie Douglas
... with her," Satan often whispered. Still, there was nothing definitely reprehensible in this reflection. It was the prospect of often being decorously alone with a woman who inspired me with respect and interested me more and more keenly that tempted me. Vaguely, however, I had a feeling that I was on the road to ...
— The Rise of David Levinsky • Abraham Cahan
... armour appear; pilgrims' processions such as we read of in Chaucer; knights and ladies on their stately steeds. There are the ghosts of royal progresses, kings and queens, and wonderful pageantry gorgeous in array; decorously ambling cardinals and abbots with their trains of servitors; hawking parties with hawks and attendants; soldiers after Sedgemoor in pursuit of Monmouth's ill-fated followers; George IV. and his gay courtiers ...
— Grain and Chaff from an English Manor • Arthur H. Savory
... the champagne; the first cork popped, and Monsieur Philippe played the introduction to a quadrille, through which the four dancers walked in society fashion, decorously, with propriety, deportment, bows and curtsies, and then they began ...
— The Works of Guy de Maupassant, Volume II (of 8) • Guy de Maupassant
... Monsieur John himself. No man of questionable blood dare set his foot within the door. Many noble gentlemen were pleased to dance with her. Colonel De —— and General La ——: city councilmen and officers from the Government House. There were no paid dancers then. Every thing was decorously conducted indeed! Every girl's mother was there, and the more discreet always left before there was too much drinking. Yes, it was gay, gay!—but sometimes dangerous. Ha! more times than a few had Monsieur John knocked down some long-haired and long-knifed rowdy, ...
— Old Creole Days • George Washington Cable
... dubiously at the abandoned farm-houses on the hillsides; the still green dooryards on the village street where no children were playing, and the quiet little brick school-house at the turn of the road, from which a dozen half-grown boys and girls issued decorously, looking at ...
— Penelope's Postscripts • Kate Douglas Wiggin
... noticed, naturally, that Johanson had not been forward to the Lord's Supper even when the cellar-master had been helped up the aisle from the poorhouse seat near the door, and Gull and the half-mad poet had decorously followed. At this he had hardly been surprised, for there were other members of the congregation who did not communicate more than once a year. The good man felt a sudden repulsion towards the stranger still without ...
— Little Tora, The Swedish Schoolmistress and Other Stories • Mrs. Woods Baker
... of this joyful occasion. We had once looked higher, it is true; but you see, after all, Monsieur Beauseant's father was a Marquis, and that's a great comfort. Pedigree and jointure!—you have them both in Monsieur Beauseant. A young lady decorously brought up should only have two considerations in her choice of a husband; first, is his birth honorable? secondly, will his death be advantageous? All other trifling details should be ...
— The Lady of Lyons - or Love and Pride • Edward Bulwer Lytton
... simplicity is gone, and instead of it there is a tone of sentiment which is almost mawkish. Giants, dragons, and angelic champions carry us into a spurious fairy land, where the knight-errant is a preacher in disguise. Fair ladies and love matches, however decorously chastened, suit ill with the sternness of the mortal conflict between the soul and sin. Christiana and her children are tolerated for the pilgrim's sake to whom they belong. Had they appealed to our interest on their own merits, ...
— Bunyan • James Anthony Froude
... that troubled brain that was struggling among closing shadows, nearer and nearer every slow clocktick to the end. How loathsome it must be to the prisoned spirit, this handsome, stifling room, this army of maids and nurses and doctors so decorously resigned to facing the last scene of all. Why, the poorest child in the city to-night, healthily asleep in some unspeakable makeshift for a bed, possessed what all the Melrose money could not buy for this moaning, ...
— The Beloved Woman • Kathleen Norris
... Sovereign will depart from Windsor, the Life Guards will present arms to the President of the Republic, and in the twinkling of an eye, as the result of a contested election, the Monarchy of England is to be decorously carried to the tomb. This is the doctrine which Tory lords and squires are asked to proclaim with sound of trumpet as the corner-stone of their political creed. "Only so far as the people take this view of its subsistence"—this is to be the Tory patent for the "subsistence" of the Crown. ...
— The Contemporary Review, January 1883 - Vol 43, No. 1 • Various
... there is neither grandeur nor gorgeousness in drowning in a tub. If you must sink, you at least would like to go down gracefully, in a stately ship, in mid-ocean, in a storm and uproar, bravely, decorously, sublimely, as the soldiers in Ravenshoe, drawn up in line, with their officers at their head, waving to each other calm farewells. I defy anybody to be graceful or heroic in plumping down to the bottom of a city river amid a jam of heated, ...
— Gala-days • Gail Hamilton
... it? He will rather extinguish it, if he has received it on fire. The next thing said is that list of titles which you briefly enumerated,—king, dictator, rich man, the only wise man; words poured out by you decorously and roundly: they well might be, for you have learnt them from the orators. But how vague and unsubstantial are those speeches about the power of virtue! which they make out to be so great that it can, by itself, secure the happiness of man. They ...
— The Academic Questions • M. T. Cicero
... the officers been more confiding in their records, an intimate view of the camp life might have been disclosed to posterity. For example, judging from McKendry's journal alone, Sunday, August 1, was decorously ...
— The Story of Cooperstown • Ralph Birdsall
... I have an affection for you," Miss Hepburn returned decorously, half alarmed at so pronounced a betrayal of her inner emotions, ...
— The Heather-Moon • C. N. Williamson and A. M. Williamson
... tentacles, first fastening on Eva, had finally crushed Latimer. Moore knew, if the others did not, that Blair was doomed if he once again came within its radius. Then for the others! But he made no immediate move, and decorously gave regard to the proprieties, both for himself and as a substitute for Mr. Burroughs. His chief was almost as hysterical as Eva herself over the judge's untimely death, for he thought his prospects ...
— A Man of Two Countries • Alice Harriman
... the most exhausting first-hand study, involving once more an endless number of the most unpleasant contacts? No, give me the past. It doesn't change; it's all there in black and white, and you can get to know about it comfortably and decorously and, above all, privately—by reading. By reading I know a great deal of Caesar Borgia, of St. Francis, of Dr. Johnson; a few weeks have made me thoroughly acquainted with these interesting characters, and ...
— Crome Yellow • Aldous Huxley
... gradually grew into the most voluminous of Erasmus's original writings: a forest of a work, operis sylvam, he calls it himself. In four books he treated his subject, the art of preaching well and decorously, with an inexhaustible abundance of examples, illustrations, schemes, etc. But was it possible that a work, conceived already by the Erasmus of 1519, and upon which he had been so long engaged, while he himself had ...
— Erasmus and the Age of Reformation • Johan Huizinga
... again, will apply quite as well to the evils of over-population as to any other evils. We are sure that those who humbly confess their inability to expound the great enigma act more rationally and more decorously than Mr Sadler, who tells us, with the utmost confidence, which are the means and which the ends,—which the exceptions and which the rules, in the government of the universe;—who consents to bear a little evil without denying ...
— The Miscellaneous Writings and Speeches of Lord Macaulay, Vol. 2 (of 4) - Contributions To The Edinburgh Review • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... Several stood around, the pulpit being in the middle, and already occupied by two ministers in Geneva bands and gowns, while other ministers, similarly attired, stood holding on to it, almost as if they were giving support instead of receiving it. Grace Hickson and her son sat decorously in their own pew, thereby showing that they had arrived early from the execution. You might almost have traced out the number of those who had been at the hanging of the Indian witch, by the expression of their countenances. They were awestricken into ...
— Curious, if True - Strange Tales • Elizabeth Gaskell
... inhabitants sipped their glasses decorously and listened. The well-pleased host, not knowing how to make enough of his cultured and interesting visitor, presented to him a distant relative who had just arrived, one Pavel Ignatyevitch Klimov, a bulky gentleman about forty, wearing a long ...
— The Horse-Stealers and Other Stories • Anton Chekhov
... Vining. Floretta leaned forward as soon as she was seated and gazed at her with astonishment, and that deepening of amiability and general sweetness which one can imagine in the face of a doll after persistent scrutiny. Ellen smiled decorously, for she was not sure how much smiling was permissible in school. When she smiled guardedly at Floretta, she was conscious of another face regarding her, twisted slightly over a shabby little shoulder covered with an ignominious ...
— The Portion of Labor • Mary E. Wilkins Freeman
... cheered and cheered, and waved their little pans and cups and napkins. And all went by as decorously and in as orderly a fashion as many thousands of happy cheering children could be expected to, until suddenly from the grass an astonished rabbit leaped out and started down the track. And then five thousand of these children broke from the ranks and ...
— Herbert Hoover - The Man and His Work • Vernon Kellogg
... as for the same classes in most, if not all, countries; and when in the summer-time there is music in the Wood at The Hague on Sunday afternoons or Wednesday evenings, the walks round about the 'Tent' are alive with servants and their lovers, parading decorously arm-in-arm. Happy fathers, too, with their wives and children in Sunday best, perambulate the grounds or rest on the seats amongst the trees and listen to the 'Bosch-muziek.' People of the better class only are members of the 'Witte Societeit,' and sit inside ...
— Dutch Life in Town and Country • P. M. Hough
... austere virtue. These causes held them apart for a time, but one might as well have attempted to block two comets rushing at each other in the same orbit. The magnetism of the Inevitable embraced them and knit their inner selves together, even while they sat decorously apart. Rachael had taken off her hat at once, and even after it grew dark in their arbour, Hamilton fancied he could see the gleam of her hair. Her eyes were startled and brilliant, and her nostrils ...
— The Conqueror • Gertrude Franklin Atherton
... was the air of silence, order, and decorum which prevailed and which gave to the station an aspect so different from that of an American station. It is true, the hall was very large, and there were a great many people in it going and coming; but they all walked decorously and quietly,—they spoke in an undertone,—and the presence of so many railway officials in their several uniforms, and of police officers with their badges, and here and there a soldier on guard, gave to the whole scene quite ...
— Rollo in Switzerland • Jacob Abbott
... of interest (we dare not say excitement), of whatever kind. Expression with them was pitched to so low a key that its changes might be compared to the slight variations in the drabs and grays in which they were clothed. Yet that there was a moderate, decorously subdued curiosity present in the minds of many of them on one of the First-days of the Ninth-month, in the year 1815, was as clearly apparent to a resident of the neighborhood as are the indications of a fire or a riot to the ...
— Beauty and The Beast, and Tales From Home • Bayard Taylor
... and to scatter the marsh-marigold flowers on the floor before service. He also keeps order in the congregation, pinches those who fall asleep, cuffs irreverent boys, and hustles mothers with crying children out of church as quickly and decorously ...
— Last Words - A Final Collection of Stories • Juliana Horatia Ewing
... the afternoon. In the second-rate, two-rouble establishment of Anna Markovna everything is plunged in sleep. The large square parlor with mirrors in gilt frames, with a score of plush chairs placed decorously along the walls, with oleograph pictures of Makovsky's Feast of the Russian Noblemen, and Bathing, with a crystal lustre in the middle, is also sleeping, and in the quiet and semi-darkness it seems unwontedly pensive, austere, strangely sad. Yesterday ...
— Yama (The Pit) • Alexandra Kuprin
... The twins soon came to associate the vision of Aaron Kastrinsky with the idea of restraint and of stern virtue, for on the way to the synagogue he walked by Leah's side—looking strangely incomplete without his green push-cart—and drove them by the sheer force of his will to walk decorously in front. Decorously, too, he marched them back again, and stood idly talking to Leah at the steps of her tenement while the twins escaped to ...
— Little Citizens • Myra Kelly
... endless walks brought new wonders to these little ones who were gazing for the first time upon the great world of growing things of which Miss Bailey had so often told them. The policeman's warning had been explicit and they followed decorously in the paths and picked none of the flowers which, as Eva had heard of old, were sticking right up out of the ground. And other flowers there were dangling high or low on tree or shrub, while here and there across the grass a bird came hopping or ...
— Little Citizens • Myra Kelly
... is peace and quietness in this town, because there are many people, you for instance, adorned with virtues, as with flowers; that's why everything is done decorously and tranquilly. Why, what is the meaning of all that haste and bustle, ma'am? It is vanity, to be sure! In Moscow now: the folk run to and fro; there's no knowing for why. It is all vanity. It is a people, full ...
— The Storm • Aleksandr Nicolaevich Ostrovsky
... joke, the historian prudently disguises the age, which, after all, was little above fifty. And the very persons who insist on the late dinner as the proximate cause of death, elsewhere insinuate something else, not so decorously expressed. It is odd that this amiable prince, so memorable as having been a martyr to late dining at eleven, A.M., was the same person who is so equally memorable for the noble answer about a King of France not remembering the wrongs of ...
— Miscellaneous Essays • Thomas de Quincey
... face of a horse-shoe shape, often with no feature except a long triangular nose. What religious ideas were associated with these barbarous little images by their possessors we can hardly guess. We shall see that when a truly Greek art came into being, figures of goddesses and women were decorously clothed. ...
— A History Of Greek Art • F. B. Tarbell
... this when they turned through a gateway, imposing with its tangle of wrought iron and gilt, and at a decorously reduced speed crinkled up a wide drive to the vast pile of gray stone that housed ...
— Bunker Bean • Harry Leon Wilson
... though he did not know how decorously to say it, was that she must not think that he could be moved by any tall beauty, towards the splendour of whose possessions his revered grandmother might be ...
— The Shuttle • Frances Hodgson Burnett
... corresponding amount of culture. This was my first reflection on entering Mr. Pfeifer's drawing-room, while in my heart I begged the proprietor's pardon for the patronizing attitude I found myself assuming toward him. The heavy, solid furniture, the grave and decorously mediocre pictures, and the very tint of the walls wore an air of substantial, though somewhat lugubrious comfort. His niece, too, although her form was by no means lacking in grace, seemed somehow to partake of this all-pervading air of Teutonic solidity and ...
— Ilka on the Hill-Top and Other Stories • Hjalmar Hjorth Boyesen
... from every part of the house was long ere it subsided. Now I know nothing so overpowering, as that sort of unanimous expression of deep interest, from any large body of men. It overset me; and when I ought to have been waving my handkerchief decorously from the great chamberlain's box, I was hiding my face with it, and weeping heartily. When the house was quiet again, I looked at Don Pedro: he had become very pale, and had drawn a chair close to his own; on the back of which he leaned, ...
— Journal of a Voyage to Brazil - And Residence There During Part of the Years 1821, 1822, 1823 • Maria Graham
... human contact. She now skipped irreverently from one grave to another; until, coming to the broad, flat, armorial tombstone of a departed worthy,—perhaps of Isaac Johnson himself,—she began to dance upon it. In reply to her mother's command and entreaty that she would behave more decorously, little Pearl paused to gather the prickly burrs from a tall burdock which grew beside the tomb. Taking a handful of these, she arranged them along the lines of the scarlet letter that decorated the maternal bosom, to which the burrs, as their nature was, tenaciously adhered. Hester ...
— The Scarlet Letter • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... forehead, his eyes, his lips, as he lifted her down. His hands rested for an instant on the warm softness of her neck and shoulders. His heart leaped in a mad riot of joy at the belief that she would have uttered no protest if he had drawn her nearer instead of setting her decorously on her feet. He dared not look at her, but turned and gazed at ...
— Cynthia's Chauffeur • Louis Tracy
... remained upon her own side of the fence. During the past ten days, her neighborly calls had been frequent; but she had always before now succeeded in making her escape before any one else appeared. Hubert, in the meantime, had dutifully called on his new neighbor; but he had called decorously and by way of the front gate, at a time when Billy was out with his mother for their daily drive, so Mrs. Farrington had caught no glimpse of their young neighbors who had it in their power to make such a difference in her son's life. She had been amused and interested ...
— Teddy: Her Book - A Story of Sweet Sixteen • Anna Chapin Ray
... second in front of the Baxters in the same wing, and Patty, seated decorously but unwillingly beside her father, was impatiently awaiting the entrance of the family, knowing that Mark would be with them if he had returned from Boston. Timothy Grant, the parish clerk, had the pew in between, and afforded a most edifying ...
— The Story Of Waitstill Baxter • By Kate Douglas Wiggin
... and, dressed in a new suit of puce-colored ferrandine, with fresh ruffles of finest lace, and a new plume in my hat, I walked decorously beside my aunt through the thronged streets, every one dressed in his best and every one going the same way—to the Church of the Madeleine, to see the First Consul attend service. The sun was shining, birds were singing, the air was soft ...
— The Rose of Old St. Louis • Mary Dillon
... Happy Family filed out decorously and went hastily down to the stables. They did not say much, but they did glance over their ...
— The Happy Family • Bertha Muzzy Bower
... footpath beside the canal, to dance in the village outside the Zyl-Gate. They walked quietly forward with eyes discreetly downcast, but many a cheek flushed and many an ill-suppressed smile hovered around rosy lips, when the youths, who followed the girls moving so decorously along, as gaily and swiftly as sea-gulls flutter around a ship, uttered teasing jests, or whispered into their ears words that ...
— Uarda • Georg Ebers
... of our holy faith', a work which the Jesuits, whatever might be their faults, had not neglected to insure. After some platitudes as to the vivifying effects of free and open trade, and an injunction to his captains to take care the Indian girls were decorously and virtuously dressed, he launched into a sermon about honest work, which, as he said, would make the Indians rich, happy, and virtuous, and alone could ever make a kingdom prosper; in fact, he used almost precisely similar language to that to-day used ...
— A Vanished Arcadia, • R. B. Cunninghame Graham
... energy than politeness, that his dearest wish was to cudgel the French into a proper respect for her. So little did he disguise his feelings that, at a great banquet where the most illustrious dignitaries of the State and of the Church were assembled, he not very decorously filled his glass to the confusion of all who were against a war with France. He would indeed most gladly have seen his country united with the powers which were then combined against Lewis, and was for that end bent on placing Temple, the author of the Triple Alliance, at the head of the department ...
— The History of England from the Accession of James II. - Volume 1 (of 5) • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... made their meal, but neither of them had ever more enjoyed eating. Beulah was still ravenously hungry, though she restrained her appetite decorously. ...
— The Sheriff's Son • William MacLeod Raine
... prolongation of its streets, up hill and down dale, makes San Francisco a place apart. The same street in its career visits and unites so many different classes of society, here echoing with drays, there lying decorously silent between the mansions of Bonanza millionaires, to founder at last among the drifting sands beside Lone Mountain cemetery, or die out among the sheds and lumber of the north. Thus you may be struck with a spot, set it down for the most romantic of the city, and, glancing ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition - Vol. 2 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... under any circumstances; there is something undignified in it, unheroic, un-Germanic. But if you must commit suicide—and there is no knowing to what people may be brought—always contrive to do it as decorously as possible; the decencies, whether of life or of death, should never be lost sight of. I remember a female Quaker who committed suicide by cutting her throat, but she did it decorously and decently: kneeling down over a pail, so that not one drop fell upon the floor, ...
— Lavengro - The Scholar, The Gypsy, The Priest • George Borrow
... is usually an acquired taste, like that for olives and caviare, and to gain aptitude for the duties it involves, requires patience. He needs filing down and chinking, and rounding off, and sand-papering before he fits decorously into the chimney-corner. And when there, he sometimes does not "season straight." He was hewed across the grain, or the native grain ran awry, or there is a ...
— The Secret of a Happy Home (1896) • Marion Harland
... by serious ill-health. "If they had examined me," he said afterward of the kindly professors in the Divinity School, "they never would have passed me." But approve him they did, in 1826, and he entered decorously upon the profession of his ancestors, as associate minister of the Second Church in Boston. His "Journals," which are a priceless record of his inner life, at this and later periods, reveal the rigid self-scrutiny, the tender idealism, with which ...
— The American Spirit in Literature, - A Chronicle of Great Interpreters, Volume 34 in The - Chronicles Of America Series • Bliss Perry
... the audience to order with some difficulty, and the rest of the performance went on quite decorously. And when the last notes of the pipes died away in the hills, Marmaduke and Trooper crawled from their hiding place and sat on the hall steps till the programme was ...
— In Orchard Glen • Marian Keith
... said, "will you bring me such ill winded pirns to ravel out? How often must I tell you, and especially both you, Ludovic Lesly, and you, Archie Cunningham, that the foreign soldier should bear himself modestly and decorously towards the people of the country if you would not have the whole dogs of the town at your heels? However, if you must have a bargain [a quarrel, videlicet. S.], I would rather it were with that loon of a Provost ...
— Quentin Durward • Sir Walter Scott
... door was decorously closed, and no one visible but a young man, who snatched something out of the road, and marched away again, whistling with more vigor of tone than accuracy of tune, "Only that, and ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. VI.,October, 1860.—No. XXXVI. - A Magazine Of Literature, Art, And Politics • Various
... the extravagances of fashion in dress and adornments; and, although conforming to some extent to prevailing modes in order to avoid singularity, which she abhorred, she always dressed neatly and decorously, and never, through the whole of her life, wore an article ...
— Excellent Women • Various
... are so many Poles and Italians there. We came to Portchester along a lovely, shady road, and it's really an old place, though it looks new. We had a river to cross named after an Indian village jokingly called "Bay Rum," but they've decorously altered it to Byram; and on its other side we were in Connecticut, which Jack pronounces precisely as it's spelled! ...
— The Lightning Conductor Discovers America • C. N. (Charles Norris) Williamson and A. M. (Alice Muriel)
... In the waist of the brig, in the narrow spars that were lashed on each side of the hatchway, he could see a group of men squatting in a circle around a wooden tray piled up with rice, which stood on the just swept deck. The dark-faced, soft-eyed silent men, squatting on their hams, fed decorously with an earnestness that ...
— The Rescue • Joseph Conrad
... only one," resumed Gringoire, "who has listened to the piece decorously. What do you ...
— Notre-Dame de Paris - The Hunchback of Notre Dame • Victor Hugo
... not to move except to a measure and cadence. So Queen Medea slew her children to a slow music: and King Agamemnon perished in a dying fall (to use Mr. Dryden's words): the Chorus standing by in a set attitude, and rhythmically and decorously bewailing the fates of those great crowned persons. The Muse of History hath encumbered herself with ceremony as well as her Sister of the Theatre. She too wears the mask and the cothurnus, and speaks to measure. She too, in our age, busies herself with the affairs only of kings; ...
— Henry Esmond; The English Humourists; The Four Georges • William Makepeace Thackeray
... thoughts on the relations of imaginative art in all its forms with science. The subject which in the hands of the scientific student is handled decorously,—reverently, we might almost say,—becomes repulsive, shameful, and debasing in the unscrupulous manipulations of the ...
— Over the Teacups • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.
... with "Poor poor," stroking the soft delicate cheek, but the Countess interfered, still wrathful. "Master Richard, I marvel that you should let her Grace be beset by a child, who, if she cannot demean herself decorously, should have been left at home. Susan Hardwicke, I thought I had ...
— Unknown to History - A Story of the Captivity of Mary of Scotland • Charlotte M. Yonge
... struck out in quite another direction. He no longer indulged in hand-springs, but walked decorously on his legs, had always much ado to pull down and straighten his collar and cuffs, and was in continual anxiety as to his clothes. He was now apprentice to a painter, but had a parting in his hair like a counter-jumper, and bought all sorts of things at the chemist's, ...
— Pelle the Conqueror, Complete • Martin Andersen Nexo |
