"Pique" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... "And private pique," returned the major. "No matter! The end is the same. Justice shall be satisfied. To your steeds, my merry men all. Hark, ...
— Rookwood • William Harrison Ainsworth
... Mr. Stokes, but he could not give her a title. The duke could—if he would. But would he? She was rich, but there were others richer. People said that he was wary. Yet he admired Miss Daisy, it was true, and if by her flirtation with Mr. Stokes she could pique him into a proposal, ...
— The Motor Maid • Alice Muriel Williamson and Charles Norris Williamson
... the hard terms bestowed upon it by Millin[58] who calls it the most absurd, most infamous, and most detestable of all privileges, and adduces a very flagrant instance of injustice committed under its plea.—D'Alegre, governor of Gisors, in consequence of a private pique against the Baron du Hallot, lord of the neighboring town of Vernon, treacherously assassinated him at his own house, while he was yet upon crutches, in consequence of the wounds received at the siege of Rouen. This happened during the civil wars; in the course of which, Hallot had signalized himself ...
— Account of a Tour in Normandy, Vol. I. (of 2) • Dawson Turner
... came with the Cauldstaneslap party; then she lived at Cauldstaneslap. Here was Archie's secret, here was the woman, and more than that - though I have need here of every manageable attenuation of language - with the first look, he had already entered himself as rival. It was a good deal in pique, it was a little in revenge, it was much in genuine admiration: the devil may decide the proportions! I cannot, and it is very ...
— Weir of Hermiston • Robert Louis Stevenson
... down panting. She hardly understood her own rage, and she was quite conscious that, for her own interests, she had acted during the whole afternoon like a fool. First, stung by the pique excited in her by the talk of the luncheon-table, she had let herself be exploited and explored by Alicia Drake. She had not meant to tell her secret, but somehow she had told it, simply to give herself importance with this smart lady, and to feel her power ...
— The Testing of Diana Mallory • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... to speak, but her thoughts were too weak for the task, and after putting her hand to her forehead, as if to assist her recollection, she let it fall passively beside her, and hung-her head in a mood, partaking at once of childish pique and ...
— Jane Sinclair; Or, The Fawn Of Springvale - The Works of William Carleton, Volume Two • William Carleton
... so many things. It answered for encouragement and applause and gentle reproof, and many other matters which words could but indifferently say, and it was one of her favourite ways of turning aside a question to which she did not think fit to give any reply. And Bice swallowed her pique and asked no more. The lamps were all shaded like the windows in this bower of beauty. There was scarcely a corner that was not draped with some softly-falling, richly-tinted tissue. A delicate perfume breathed through this half-lighted world. Thus, though ...
— Sir Tom • Mrs. Oliphant
... had been taken long ago, she told herself, and lay tucked away in the receptacle which contained the varied neatly labelled patterns of her masculine world; but at the same time she was perfectly aware that within five minutes he would pique afresh both her interest and her liking. "You can't warm yourself by fireworks," she had once said to him, and a moment later had paused to wonder at the intrinsic meaning of a daring phrase which he ...
— The Wheel of Life • Ellen Anderson Gholson Glasgow
... as, "To set off the banquet [that or which] he gives notice of."—Philological Museum, i, 454. Sometimes the objective word is put first because it is emphatical; as, "This the great understand, this they pique themselves upon."—Art of Thinking, p. 66. Prepositions of more than one syllable, are sometimes put immediately after their objects, especially in poetry; as, "Known all the world over."—Walker's Particles p. 291. "The thing is known all ...
— The Grammar of English Grammars • Goold Brown
... Mister Macliver, you knows him quite well, He comes upon deck and he cuts a great swell; It's damn your eyes there and it's damn your eyes here, And straight to the gangway he takes a broad sheer. —La Pique "Come-all-ye." ...
— Blow The Man Down - A Romance Of The Coast - 1916 • Holman Day
... that when we are old enough to enjoy them, the taste is gone, and the appetite palled. In some parts of the continent, young persons are taught from more common authors, and do not read the best classics till their maturity. I certainly do not speak on this point from any pique or aversion towards the place of my education. I was not a slow, though an idle boy; and I believe no one could, or can be, more attached to Harrow than I have always been, and with reason;—a part of the time passed there was the happiest of my ...
— The Works of Lord Byron, Volume 2 • George Gordon Byron
... moment longer than I can help it, I assure you, madam," I answered, rather inclined to be amused than angry, and hoping to pique her by my replies. "You are free to go in any direction you please directly you have ...
— Hurricane Hurry • W.H.G. Kingston
... youth away from her, and deeply wounded, she gave her hand to Krisztof Ungnad. Naturally Balassa only began to realize how much he loved Anna when he had lost her. He pursued her with gifts and verses, but she remained true to her pique and to her marriage vows, and he could only enshrine her memory in immortal verse. In 1574 Balint was sent to the camp of Gaspar Bekesy to assist him against Stephen Bathory; but his troops were encountered and scattered on ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 3, Part 1, Slice 2 - "Baconthorpe" to "Bankruptcy" • Various
... by storm. He fairly carried us away. He was eloquent, and that with a simplicity which made one question whether he did not speak out of some pressing personal experience."—Katherine's manner was touched by a pretty edge of pique.—"Really I believed I knew all about Julius and his doings by this time, but it seems I don't! I think I must find out. It would vex me that anything should happen in which he needed sympathy, and that I did not offer it.—His subject was the answer to prayer and the fulfilment of prophecy—and ...
— The History of Sir Richard Calmady - A Romance • Lucas Malet
... not know whether she wanted to weep or be angry. Pique and a flash of temper, however, saved her from tears, and she said, "You are so brave and handsome that you must have found it a very easy task—much easier than it would be for me—to convince those confiding ones ...
— Dorothy Vernon of Haddon Hall • Charles Major
... Jones decided. But the course of her true love could not have run very smooth and, knowing that Lennox was otherwise interested, she took up with Paliser out of pique. ...
— The Paliser case • Edgar Saltus
... pique had vanished, but she may have thought that the conversation was becoming dangerous, for ...
— The Little Minister • J.M. Barrie
... was the incentive force of pique. While the leader gave his smiling interviews to the reporters on the subject of the governor's vetoes, he had too often had to dissemble that his earliest information came from them. He did not resent the vetoes, if they made party capital; nor did he resent Shelby's popularity, for he liked him. ...
— The Henchman • Mark Lee Luther
... I can't afford to buy a tempting dog, I take no notice of him, because if he took a strong fancy to me and looked lovingly at me, the struggle between arithmetic and inclination might become unpleasantly severe. I pique myself on my wisdom there, Arthur, and as an old fellow to whom wisdom had become cheap, I bestow it ...
— Adam Bede • George Eliot
... to have made her want of vivid religious conviction the excuse for not proposing to her, but it is not easy to put aside the conviction that it was her want of a fortune which actuated him most strongly. Finally, he tries to pique her by telling her that he "knows of parties" in the city of Hanover "who might bring him much honour and comfort" were he "not afraid of losing (Catharine Trotter's) friendship." They write to one another ...
— Some Diversions of a Man of Letters • Edmund William Gosse
... would be the most dashing. It is astonishing how soon the eye of even a child can discriminate, in that particular which has been rendered the sole subject of its studies and the grand object of its wishes; so that people who pique themselves upon being men of the world, or women of fashion, are rivalled in all their boasted knowledge and discernment by young creatures, whose faculties they may deem very inefficient, and which are indeed so in all the higher requisites of mind ...
— The Barbadoes Girl - A Tale for Young People • Mrs. Hofland
... in inculcating such a precept if all men were good; but as the generality of mankind are wicked, and ever ready to break their words, a prince should not pique himself in keeping his more scrupulously, especially as it is always easy to justify a breach of faith on his part. I could give numerous proofs of this, and show numberless engagements and treaties which have been violated by the treachery of princes, and that those who enacted ...
— The Best of the World's Classics, Restricted to Prose, Vol. VIII (of X) - Continental Europe II. • Various
... She was trying to escape the horrible sadness, the sinister disgust into which Mora's death had thrown her. What a terrible blow for the proud girl! Ennui, pique, had thrown her into this man's arms; she had given him pride—modesty—all; and now he had carried all away with him, leaving her tarnished for life, a tearless widow, without mourning and without dignity. ...
— The Nabob • Alphonse Daudet
... aroused. To be sure I was in her debt for the opportunity she had given me of meeting these literary friends, but that gave her no license to misrepresent me, in a light which in my present humor was the most distasteful she could have selected. Under the spur of pique I redoubled my graciousness toward Mr. Spence and Mr. Fleisch, and likewise watched my opportunity to court the artist with a smile, whereupon he sighed again and reached out his hand for the crystal ...
— A Romantic Young Lady • Robert Grant
... mother's sake, and my little Viola, and Auld Lang Syne besides, I was much hurt, and defended myself in a tone of pique which made Miss Woolmer smile and say she was far from blaming me, but that she thought I ought to count the cost of my remaining at Arghouse. And then she told me that the whole county was up in arms against the new comers, not only from ...
— My Young Alcides - A Faded Photograph • Charlotte M. Yonge
... were advised by George Thomas, who had instigated them to this violence out of pique against the Begam for her preference of the Frenchman,[29] to set aside their puppet and reseat the Begam in the command, as the only chance of keeping the territory of Sardhana.[30] 'If', said he, 'the Begam should die under the torture of mind and ...
— Rambles and Recollections of an Indian Official • William Sleeman
... endorsed the bloody document, and the last signature of the endorsement is that of him, who had resigned a post in his youth rather than be a party to putting a man to death. As was observed at the time, Robespierre in doing this, suppressed his pique against his colleagues, in order to take part in a measure, that was a sort of complement to ...
— Critical Miscellanies (Vol. 1 of 3) - Essay 1: Robespierre • John Morley
... thrusting herself upon Lord Hartledon, knowing that in his true heart it was another that he loved, not her. Yes, she knew that full well. He admired her beauty, and was marrying her; marrying partly in pique against Anne Ashton; partly in blindfold submission to the deep schemes of her mother, brought to bear on his yielding nature. All the injustice done to Anne Ashton was in that moment beating its refrain upon her heart; and a thought crossed her—would God not avenge it? Another time she might ...
— Elster's Folly • Mrs. Henry Wood
... opportunities for a reply; she looked round the circle for applause so openly, that not a few of the women began to think that their return together was something more than a coincidence, and that Lucien and Louise, loving with all their hearts, had been separated by a double treason. Pique, very likely, had brought about this ill-starred match with Chatelet. And a reaction set in ...
— Eve and David • Honore de Balzac
... gloom, as if she took note of its sinister aspect. She showed scant interest in the stranger, whose gaze seldom left her as he sat beside the fire. He was a handsome man, his face and figure illumined by the firelight, and it might have been that he felt a certain pique, an unaccustomed slight, in that his presence was so indifferent an element in the estimation of any young and comely specimen of the feminine sex. Certainly he had rarely encountered such absolute preoccupation as her smiling far-away look ...
— The Phantoms Of The Foot-Bridge - 1895 • Charles Egbert Craddock (AKA Mary Noailles Murfree)
... rock on which you split, poor Harry! Incensed at the want of polite refinement in the mates and crew, Harry, in a pet and pique, only determined to provoke them the more; and the storm of indignation he ...
— Redburn. His First Voyage • Herman Melville
... to decipher. Others, polluted by a license which calls itself liberty, squat gambling shamelessly with pegs stuck in the ground. Now and then fighting-looking fellows ride past us, with the Arabic ring-bit and the heavy Mandenga demi-pique. The nags are ponies some ten hands high, ragged and angular, but hardy and sure-footed. As most of the equines in this part of Africa, they are, when well fed, intensely vicious and quarrelsome. Like the Syrians, they have only three paces, the walk, the lazy loping canter, and the brisk ...
— To the Gold Coast for Gold - A Personal Narrative in Two Volumes.—Vol. I • Richard F. Burton
... several years later, when a lady incited him to quarrel with one of his best friends on account of a groundless pique of hers. He went to Washington for the purpose of challenging the gentleman, and it was only after ample explanation had been made, showing that his friend had behaved with entire honor, that Pierce and Cilley, who were his advisers, ...
— The Life and Genius of Nathaniel Hawthorne • Frank Preston Stearns
... unfortunate break downs, he would be obliged to resign the speaking-trumpet to the first-lieutenant; and if, as sometimes happened, the latter (either from accident, or perhaps from a pardonable pique at having the duty taken out of his hands), was not at his elbow to prompt him when at fault—at these times the cant phrase of the officers, taken from some farce, used to ...
— Newton Forster - The Merchant Service • Captain Frederick Marryat
... a word to each other; we kept the great pace Neck by neck, stride for stride, never changing our place; I turned in my saddle and made its girths tight, Then shortened each stirrup, and set the pique right, Rebuckled the cheek-strap, chained slacker the bit,— Nor galloped less ...
— The American Union Speaker • John D. Philbrick
... lover heartlessly played with, as she herself confessed he had been, Claude Bainrothe bore himself very proudly and calmly in Evelyn Erle's presence, I thought. At first, there was a shade of coolness, of pique even in my own manner toward him as the memory of Evelyn's insinuations rose between us; but after the lapse of a few weeks all thought of this kind was put away, and he was received with a pleasure as undisguised, as it was innocent ...
— Miriam Monfort - A Novel • Catherine A. Warfield
... The second pique they had against him was his opposing the law by which the city was to be divided; for the tribunes of the people brought forward a motion that the people and senate should be divided into two parts, one of which should ...
— The Boys' and Girls' Plutarch - Being Parts of The "Lives" of Plutarch • Plutarch
... young ruler took the world into his confidence by announcing in a Vermilion Edict that he had degraded Prince Kung and his son in their hereditary rank as princes of the empire, for using "language in very many respects unbecoming." Whether Tungche took this very decided step in a moment of pique or because he perceived that there was a plan among his chief relatives to keep him in leading-strings, must remain a matter of opinion. At the least he must have refused to personally retract what he had done, for on the very following day (September 11) a decree appeared from the ...
— China • Demetrius Charles Boulger
... glass of wine, she became more and more amiable toward Fandor. And since the King paid little attention to her caresses, she began a flirtation with the journalist in order to pique him. ...
— A Royal Prisoner • Pierre Souvestre
... being right; it practically means being wrong. All this can mean one thing, and one thing only. It means that people care less for whether they are philosophically right. For obviously a man ought to confess himself crazy before he confesses himself heretical. The Bohemian, with a red tie, ought to pique himself on his orthodoxy. The dynamiter, laying a bomb, ought to feel that, whatever else he is, at least ...
— Heretics • Gilbert K. Chesterton
... man's interest to live unless he can live in the spirit, because his spiritual capacity, when unused, will lacerate and derange even his physical life. The brutal individualist falls into the same error into which despots fall when they declare war out of personal pique or tax the people to build themselves a pyramid, not discerning their country's interests, which they might have appropriated, from interests of their own which no ...
— The Life of Reason • George Santayana
... she told me the story, the whole miserable story, that I'd heard enough of to suspect. Why she'd married the other man she couldn't explain herself, except that it was a woman's whim—I had stayed away and he had come the oftener—part pique and part the man's dare-devil fascination, I reckon; but a month had shown her how she really stood, and had shown him, too. Likewise, she saw the sort of man he was and the kind of life he lived. At last he got rough and cruel to her, trying every way to break her spirit; and ...
— The Barrier • Rex Beach
... she who drew the longest straw, and Beth drew a long breath, saying with cheerful philosophy, "Well, I am thankful not to leave mother. I'd prob'ly cry in the night, and worry dear grandmother." So every one was satisfied, and Ethelwyn, dimpling delightfully under her broad white pique hat, bade them good-bye, and took her place beside Peter in ...
— What Two Children Did • Charlotte E. Chittenden
... our morals develops in the young girl whom you make your wife a curiosity which is naturally excessive; but as mothers in France pique themselves on exposing their girls every day to the fire which they do not allow to scorch them, this ...
— The Physiology of Marriage, Part I. • Honore de Balzac
... we part: even the 'servant' may presume to counsel his 'master' as he is quitting his service. The landlord within is not one of those landlords who pique themselves on courtesy: and the gentleman tourist, with submission be it said, is not one of those tourists who travel with four horses,—or even by the stage-coach: and foot-travellers in England, especially in the winter season, do not meet with 'high consideration.' Which premises ...
— Walladmor: - And Now Freely Translated from the German into English. - In Two Volumes. Vol. I. • Thomas De Quincey
... Germain it was all preposterous; if she had owned the humorous sense it would have been tragically absurd. For what did it amount to, pray, but this, that Jack Senhouse had been in love with a girl who had loved somebody else, had married her choice, and was now repenting it? Jack, then, in a pique, had trifled with her, Mary Germain, and made love to her. Now he found that this Sanchia was to be seen he was for jumping back. Was he to jump, or not to jump? Did it lie with her? Jack seemed to think ...
— Rest Harrow - A Comedy of Resolution • Maurice Hewlett
... hired an old plantation house and grounds and were living a strictly secluded life. The narrator had seen them in one of his drives through the country, and had talked a few minutes with Mr. Fern; but—and he said it with a touch of pique—he had not been invited to visit them, nor had any apology been made ...
— A Black Adonis • Linn Boyd Porter
... Weary reiterated—ungenerously, perhaps; but it was the only card he felt sure of. There was no gainsaying that fact, it seemed. She had married Spikes in a fit of pique at Irish. Still, it was not well to remind her of it too often. In the next five minutes of tumultuous recrimination, Weary had cause to remember what Shakespeare has to say about a woman scorned, and he wondered, more than ...
— The Lonesome Trail and Other Stories • B. M. Bower
... asked, again and again, smiling,—but still feeling a little pique. She had counted on gladdening ...
— Prudence Says So • Ethel Hueston
... to conceal her pique and indignation, Mrs. Spiewell snatched letters and donation, and, without lingering an instant, swept haughtily down the steps, "shaking off the dust of her feet" against ...
— Vashti - or, Until Death Us Do Part • Augusta J. Evans Wilson
... of still greater interest than 'Pique.' The plot is well conceived, the characters skilfully developed, and the attention is fascinated even to the end. The moral is unexceptionable, the style fresh and pure. We must however enter an earnest protest against the manifest injustice of the ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol. 6, No 2, August, 1864 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy • Various
... esteemed by every one. Neither pique nor passion nor petty feelings could ever influence her mind. She is the most angelic, good woman I ever met—she is one to whom one may complain, and be a bore. ...
— Robert Orange - Being a Continuation of the History of Robert Orange • John Oliver Hobbes
... of cruelty in it. The phrase "I hate" does not suit you at all; and a public confession "I am a sinner, a sinner, a sinner," is such pride that it made me feel uncomfortable. When the pope took the title "holiness," the head of the Eastern church, in pique, called himself "The servant of God's servants." So you publicly expatiate on your sinfulness from pique of Solovyov, who has the impudence to call himself orthodox. But does a word like orthodoxy, ...
— Letters of Anton Chekhov • Anton Chekhov
... in a mere fit or pique when he told Lady Swansdown of his fixed intention of putting a term to his present life. His last interview with his wife had quite decided him to throw up everything and seek forgetfulness in travel. Inclination had pointed toward such countries as ...
— April's Lady - A Novel • Margaret Wolfe Hungerford
... she felt better in spite of the fact that she had, with characteristic and fatal folly, her good sense warned her, cut herself off from all the income in sight or in prospect. She had debated sending back the check, but had decided that if she did she might give the impression of pique or anger. No, she would give him every chance to withdraw from a bargain with which he was not content; and he would get the idea that it was she who was ending the arrangement, would therefore feel no sense of responsibility for her. She would save her pride; she would spare his feelings. She ...
— Susan Lenox: Her Fall and Rise • David Graham Phillips
... Cong hotel came to be named the "Carlisle Arms." On a certain occasion, when the then Lord Lieutenant of Ireland, the Earl of Carlisle, was making some sort of progress through Ireland, he proposed stopping at the hotel at Maam, a hotel under the thumb of the late Lord Leitrim, who had some pique at the Lord Lieutenant, which determined him to order under pain of the usual penalty that there be no admittance to the Viceroy of Ireland at this hotel. His Lordship for once felt the power of a text of Scripture, and sent ...
— The Letters of "Norah" on her Tour Through Ireland • Margaret Dixon McDougall
... peasants, who, by the way, dance with great zeal and spirit. So that I am instructor in my turn, and she takes with great gratitude lessons from me upon the harpsichord; and I have even taught her some of La Pique's steps, and you know he thought me ...
— Guy Mannering, or The Astrologer, Complete, Illustrated • Sir Walter Scott
... reads or not, some good or evil genius will tell him his ancestors were kings. Thenceforward his object must be to assert himself and to avenge his parents. This you will say is not his duty. That may be; but it is Nature; and whilst you pique Nature against you, you do unwisely to trust to duty. In this futile scheme of polity, the state nurses in its bosom, for the present, a source of weakness, perplexity, counteraction, inefficiency, and decay; and it prepares the means of its final ruin. In short, I see nothing in the executive ...
— The Works of the Right Honourable Edmund Burke, Vol. III. (of 12) • Edmund Burke
... double-breasted frock coat of soft cheviot, vicuna, or diagonal worsted with either waistcoat to match—single-breasted or double-breasted—of fancy cloth, Marseilles duck or pique; trousers of different material, usually cashmere, quiet in tone, with a striped pattern on a dark gray, drab, or blue background; boots of patent leather, buttoned, not tied; a white or colored shirt with straight standing white collar; ...
— The Complete Bachelor - Manners for Men • Walter Germain
... hair hiding your face gives you an air of mystery and romance no woman could possibly resist. You're a perpetual puzzle, and to pique a woman's curiosity is the surest way to interest her. Why, there are plenty of women who would marry you simply to find out what is under all that ...
— The Bittermeads Mystery • E. R. Punshon
... eaten his breakfast, however, he became sensible of a certain pique against both Mrs. Hastings and Agatha. In planning for the day he was forced to remember that he had no hired man, and that there was a good deal to be done. He decided that it might be well to wait until the afternoon before ...
— Masters of the Wheat-Lands • Harold Bindloss
... on to ground perilous for me, because Marget had evidently heard something and was determined to test it at first hand. Behind the curiosity there seemed, judging by her tone, to be a fight going on between friendliness and pique. It is a dangerous mixture for a man to have to counteract in a woman, because, responding to the friendliness, he may make ...
— The Black Colonel • James Milne
... from a policy of strict neutrality. On the one side Russell was being berated by pro-Southerners as weakly continuing an outworn policy and as having "made himself the laughing-stock of Europe and of America[799];" on the other he was regarded, for the moment, as insisting, through pique, on a line of action highly dangerous to the preservation of peace with the North. October 23 Palmerston wrote his approval of the Cabinet postponement, but declared Lewis' doctrine of "no recognition of Southern independence ...
— Great Britain and the American Civil War • Ephraim Douglass Adams
... on trivial impulses, a trivial resistance might have intercepted them. If a man has once persuaded himself, that long, costly, and bloody wars had arisen upon a point of ceremony, upon a personal pique, upon a hasty word, upon some explosion of momentary caprice; it is a natural inference, that strength of national will and public combinations for resistance, supposing such forces to have been ...
— Narrative And Miscellaneous Papers • Thomas De Quincey
... Lord Mowbray had laid down the law of gallantry, had produced that struggle of the passions, in the height of which his mask had fallen off. I never could decide whether the thought of becoming my rival really struck him, as he said it did, from the pique of the moment; or whether he only seized the occasion to declare a design he had previously formed: no ...
— Tales & Novels, Vol. IX - [Contents: Harrington; Thoughts on Bores; Ormond] • Maria Edgeworth
... vigorously for a few moments, in a way I felt might pique his curiosity, if it did not gain ...
— Frenzied Finance - Vol. 1: The Crime of Amalgamated • Thomas W. Lawson
... pique coat and short skirt, with pale blue blouse and pale blue hat—and at the extremity blue stockings and white tennis shoes. She picked up a tennis racket in its press, and prepared to leave the studio. She had ...
— The Lion's Share • E. Arnold Bennett
... too high. Although I try with all my might, I never seem to strike it right. Now I admit it seems to me They show great inconsistency. But they imply I am to blame; Of course that makes my anger flame, And in a fiery fit of pique I stay at ninety for a week. Or sometimes in a dull despair, I give them just a frigid stare; And as upon their taunts I think My spirits down to zero sink. Mine is indeed a hopeless case; To strive ...
— The Jingle Book • Carolyn Wells
... utterly unworthy of her loyalty either to Giovanni's love or to Jack's friendship. Jack was her best friend, almost her brother, and she had no right to feel so limp because—she did not finish the sentence even to herself; yet she was swept into such a turmoil of emotion—friendship, love, pique, doubt—that she could restore nothing to order. She knew Derby thought Giovanni wanted her money—instinctively her mouth hardened as she thought of it—but then—every one wanted it except Jack! And at once, with an unaccountable ...
— The Title Market • Emily Post
... the court of her husband. He is ashamed of this after he begins to know Clotilde, who is one of Jean Paul's pure and noble women; and he is at one time full of dread lest the Princess had read his watch-paper, and at another full of pique at the suspicion that she had not. Being court-physician and oculist, he has frequent opportunities to visit Agnola, and there is one rather florid occasion which the midnight cry of the street-watch man interrupts. But all this time, ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 16, No. 96, October 1865 • Various
... Everything she wore was put on carefully and with good taste. Her dress showed the quickest adaptability, and in correctness, and simplicity of line and color might have belonged to a college freshman "with every advantage." It was a little trim delft-blue linen frock with a white pique collar and a loose blue tie. She had tan stockings and low russet shoes. Fanny belonged to the Working-man's Circle. She said she went as often as she could possibly afford it to the theatre. And when she was asked what plays she liked, she replied with an unforgettable keenness ...
— Making Both Ends Meet • Sue Ainslie Clark and Edith Wyatt
... moral importance that I was not disposed to concede without knowing more about him. I suppose an Arab feels the same sensation when a Westerner lords it over him on highly moral grounds. At any rate, something or other in the way of pique urged me to stir him out of his self-complacency, just as one feels urged to prod a bull-frog to ...
— Jimgrim and Allah's Peace • Talbot Mundy
... Derek and Lady Underhill were merged into the mass of refugees. She could not see them. For an instant a little spasm of pique stung her at the thought that Derek had deserted her. She groped her way after her companion, and presently they came by way of a lower box to the iron pass-door leading ...
— The Little Warrior - (U.K. Title: Jill the Reckless) • P. G. Wodehouse
... cold and heartless. How could I have a heart, having failed to win yours, and mine being broken? Having lost the only man I loved, I knew no one else could replace him, and I was not the kind to marry for pique. People thought me handsome, but I felt myself aged when you ceased to call. Perhaps when you and she who holds all your love come to sheol, she may spare you to me a little, for as a spirit my every thought is known; or perhaps after the resurrection, when I, too, can leave ...
— A Journey in Other Worlds • J. J. Astor
... at the head of her club, gave me the first idea of her management and address, in inspiring these girls with so sensible a love and respect for her. There was no stiffness, no reserve, no airs of pique, or little jealousies, but all was unaffectedly gay, cheerful ...
— Memoirs Of Fanny Hill - A New and Genuine Edition from the Original Text (London, 1749) • John Cleland
... purposes, trained to a selfish coquetry and love of petty power, she does not look beyond the pleasure of making herself felt at the moment, and governments are shaken and commerce broken up to gratify the pique of a female favorite. The English shopkeeper's wife does not vote, but it is for her interest that the politician canvasses by the coarsest flattery. France suffers no woman on her throne, but her proud nobles kiss the dust at ...
— Woman in the Ninteenth Century - and Kindred Papers Relating to the Sphere, Condition - and Duties, of Woman. • Margaret Fuller Ossoli
... the best of poets heroic, If you'll believe two wits and a Stoic. Down go the Iliads, down go the AEneidos: All must give place to the Gondiberteidos. For to Homer and Virgil he has a just pique, Because one's writ in Latin, the other in Greek; Besides an old grudge (our critics they say so) With Ovid, because his sirname was Naso. If fiction the fame of a poet thus raises, What poets are you that have writ his praises? But we justly quarrel ...
— Calamities and Quarrels of Authors • Isaac D'Israeli
... another fit of the gout — perhaps, I may explain myself in my next. I shall set out tomorrow morning for the Hot Well at Bristol, where I am afraid I shall stay longer than I could wish. On the receipt of this send Williams thither with my saddle-horse and the demi pique. Tell Barns to thresh out the two old ricks, and send the corn to market, and sell it off to the poor at a shilling a bushel under market price. — I have received a snivelling letter from Griffin, offering to make a public ...
— The Expedition of Humphry Clinker • Tobias Smollett
... thought to pique him with this adjective, she was disarmed by the heartiness of his admission, "As green as grass! But I'd like to help you all the same, ...
— Short Stories of Various Types • Various
... melancholy; they rarely laugh, and the gaiety of the French appears to them a fit of delirium. When they speak, it is with deliberation, without gestures and without passion; they listen without interrupting you; they are silent for whole days together, and they by no means pique themselves on supporting conversation. If they walk, it is always leisurely, and on business. They have no idea of our troublesome activity, and our walks backwards and forwards for amusement. Continually seated, ...
— Historical Sketches, Volume I (of 3) • John Henry Newman
... said the Princess, rallying herself, with a certain degree of pique, arising perhaps from her not thinking more dramatis personae were appropriate to the scene, than the two who were already upon the stage. Then, as if for the first time, appearing to recollect the message with which she had been commissioned, she exhorted the Varangian ...
— Waverley Volume XII • Sir Walter Scott
... other duties, furnishing the house, working for every one, and reading some books that Louis had brought before her. The impulse of self-improvement had not expired with his attention, and without any shadow of pique she was always ready to play the friend and elder sister whenever he needed her, and to be grateful when he shared her interests or pursuits. So the world went till Lord Ormersfield's return caused Clara's noise ...
— Dynevor Terrace (Vol. I) - or, The Clue of Life • Charlotte M. Yonge
... of Thomas Ball, Burnworth, and Barton, whom we have before mentioned, pitched upon the house of an old Justice of the Peace of Clerkenwell, to whom they had a particular pique for having formerly committed Burnworth, and proposed it to their companions to break it open that night, or rather the next morning (for it was about one of the clock). They put their design in execution and executed it successfully, carrying off some things of real value, and a considerable parcel ...
— Lives Of The Most Remarkable Criminals Who have been Condemned and Executed for Murder, the Highway, Housebreaking, Street Robberies, Coining or other offences • Arthur L. Hayward
... the aviation game has gone up completely in this country, except for hydro-aeroplaning and military aviation, and possibly it never will come back," said Carl, a hint of pique in his voice. ...
— The Trail of the Hawk - A Comedy of the Seriousness of Life • Sinclair Lewis
... had done; but her husband's remark suggested other thoughts. It was possible that reports were in circulation calculated to injure her social standing, and that Mrs. Todd's conduct toward her was not the result of any private pique. ...
— Off-Hand Sketches - a Little Dashed with Humor • T. S. Arthur
... to put an end to this miserable pique between us," cried Andrew warmly. "It's absurd, and I hate it. I thought we were to be always friends. I can't bear it, Frank, for I ...
— In Honour's Cause - A Tale of the Days of George the First • George Manville Fenn
... the bevy of girls we know, laden with generous baskets of food and drink. Finding their sweethearts so merrily employed, "Just look at them!" they say; "As we live, they are dancing! The ladies do certainly seem superfluous!" With a playful feint of pique they pass without further notice the lighted, noisy ship, and go toward the Hollander, whose blood-tinted sails and black masts form but a grim silhouette against the star-sown sky. "Hi, girls,—stop! Where are ...
— The Wagnerian Romances • Gertrude Hall
... Mr. Charles Mackay's "Life and Liberty in America" is unusually free from the worst of these faults. Hasty judgments, offences against taste, inaccuracies, occasional revelations of personal pique it has; but it is not malicious. Sometimes it is even affecting in its tenderness. It breathes a spirit of paternal regard. But it is, perhaps, the dullest of books. If not "icily regular," it is "splendidly null." The style is as oppressive as a London fog. It is marked, ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 4, No. 23, September, 1859 • Various
... a business engagement, and so I shall not be in your way," he added with an air of some pique and ...
— Crime and Punishment • Fyodor Dostoyevsky
... prefect by his clothes." Now it had unfortunately happened that M. de Chamans having sent his trunks by diligence they had not yet arrived, and being dressed in a green coat; nankeen trousers, and a pique vest, it could hardly be expected that in such a suit he should overawe the people under the circumstances; so, when he got up on a bench to harangue the populace, cries arose of "Down with the green coat! We have enough of charlatans like ...
— Celebrated Crimes, Complete • Alexandre Dumas, Pere
... a rather wistful look at the jasmine-covered old house she had learned to love; and for a moment she felt as though she saw herself as those other women had seen her—the ignorant, frivolous, common little person whom Owen had married out of pique. ...
— The Making of a Soul • Kathlyn Rhodes
... listening, as usual, to the various little night sounds that constantly pique my curiosity, for no matter how long you may have lived in the country you are not wholly in touch with it until you have slept at least a few nights in the open,—when rain began to fall softly, an even, persevering, growing rain, entirely different ...
— The Garden, You, and I • Mabel Osgood Wright
... seen its tendency to schism. There seems very little in the movement which makes for peace and unity. Any little pique or difference of views has not only created internal dissension, but ...
— India, Its Life and Thought • John P. Jones
... again. Conversation was scarcely worth while during the dancing. Neale watched as before. Twice as he gazed at the whirling couples he caught the eyes of the girl Ruby bent upon him. They were expressive of pique, resentment, curiosity. Neale did not look that way any more. Besides, his attention was drawn elsewhere. Hough yelled in his ear to watch the fun. A fight had started. A strapping fellow wearing a belt containing gun and bowie-knife ...
— The U.P. Trail • Zane Grey
... people she liked, it was impossible for her to believe that Verena had had the intention of deceiving her. Mrs. Luna, in a calmer hour, might also have divined that Olive would make her private comments on the strange story of Basil Ransom's having made up to Verena out of pique at Adeline's rebuff; for this was the account of the matter that she now offered to Miss Chancellor. Olive did two things: she listened intently and eagerly, judging there was distinct danger in the air (which, however, she had not wanted Mrs. Luna to tell her, having perceived ...
— The Bostonians, Vol. II (of II) • Henry James
... Pigeons, Ducks, and Geese is obvious enough; we see them stream across the heavens, or hear their clang in the night; but these minstrels of the field and forest add to their other charms a shade of mystery, and pique the imagination by their invisible and unknown journeyings. To be sure, we know they follow the opening season north and the retreating summer south; but who will point to the parallels that mark the limits of their wandering, or take us to their ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 15, No. 91, May, 1865 • Various
... will go down in the barouche, and I'll call for you, and we'll take Mr. Jones with us. And mind you're very civil to him, and only notice the other in a quiet, good-humoured way—for he mustn't think you do it out of pique—and before the whitebait is on the table you'll see he'll be a different man. But now you must go—there's a dear. I'll call for you at five. It's too bad to turn you out; but I'm never at home to any one between three and half-past four. ...
— Kate Coventry - An Autobiography • G. J. Whyte-Melville
... movement—Mozart's lines of demarcation being perfectly clear but not so rigid as in Haydn; the much greater richness of the whole musical fabric, due to Mozart's marvellous skill in polyphony. The time had not yet come when the composer could pique the fancy of the hearer by unexpected structural devices or even lead him off on a false trail as was so often done by Beethoven. Both Haydn and Mozart are homophonic composers, i.e., the outpouring of individual melodies is the ...
— Music: An Art and a Language • Walter Raymond Spalding
... died in the West Indies, and doughty Sir Roger Williams had left the world in which he had bustled so effectively, bequeathing to posterity a classic memorial of near a half century of hard fighting, written, one might almost imagine, in his demi-pique saddle. But that most genial, valiant, impracticable, reckless, fascinating hero of romance, the Earl of Essex—still a youth although a veteran in service—was in the spring-tide of favour and glory, and was to command the land-forces now assembled at Plymouth. That other "corsair"—as the ...
— The Rise of the Dutch Republic, 1555-1566 • John Lothrop Motley
... generals, Lecourbe, Souham, etc., were excluded as being too republican or suspect and hostile. Lemercier, Ducis, Delille, and Lafayette refused. Admiral Truguet, through pique and discontent, had at first declined the grade of grand-officer, but finally changed his mind and became at first commander and ...
— The Origins of Contemporary France, Volume 5 (of 6) - The Modern Regime, Volume 1 (of 2)(Napoleon I.) • Hippolyte A. Taine
... only stung to action by pique, or by what is called the "instinct of self-preservation," an instinct which, as Ibsen shows, is the very last that will ...
— Adventures in Criticism • Sir Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch
... other fathers of the first ages of the church, speak of the power which the Christian exorcists exercised over the possessed, so confidently and so freely, that we can doubt neither the certainty nor the evidence of the thing. They call upon their adversaries to bear witness, and pique themselves on making the experiment in their presence, and of forcing to come out of the bodies of the possessed, to declare their names, and acknowledge that those they adore in the pagan temples ...
— The Phantom World - or, The philosophy of spirits, apparitions, &c, &c. • Augustin Calmet
... noticed the pique of the Chevalier at the mention of Philibert, but in that spirit of petty torment with which her sex avenges small slights she continued to irritate the vanity of the Chevalier, whom in her heart ...
— The Golden Dog - Le Chien d'Or • William Kirby
... pique themselves on their politeness; but far from being the polish of a cultivated mind, it consists merely of tiresome forms and ceremonies. So far indeed from entering immediately into your character, and making you feel instantly ...
— Mary Wollstonecraft • Elizabeth Robins Pennell
... cloud; and my eyes being a little sharpened now, I could see that not by my young companions alone, but by every one of the four teachers, I was looked upon as a harmless little girl whose mother knew nothing about the fashionable world. I do not think that anything in my manner showed either my pique or my disdain; I believe I went out of doors just as usual; but these things were often in my thoughts, and taking by ...
— Daisy • Elizabeth Wetherell
... say not; but Captain Blastblow is a very brilliant man, and has been around Cape Horn and the Cape of Good Hope so many times that he ought to know what he is about," I replied, letting out a little of my pique at the commander of the Islander ...
— Up the River - or, Yachting on the Mississippi • Oliver Optic
... meeting called for five o'clock in the private grill room at the Pan-American Building. Postcards will have been sent out the day before by the Secretary, saying: "Please try to be present as there are several important matters to be brought up." This will so pique the curiosity of the members that they will hardly be able to wait until five o'clock. One will come at four o'clock by mistake and, after steaming up and down the corridor for half an hour, will go home and ...
— Love Conquers All • Robert C. Benchley
... in and dragged out a mewing cat, placing it in the right-hand cage on the strange table. He then obtained a small monkey and put this animal in the left-hand cage, beside the cat. The cat, on the right, squatted on its haunches, mewing in pique and looking up at its tormentor. The monkey, after a quick look around, began to investigate the upper reaches of ...
— Astounding Stories of Super-Science April 1930 • Various
... key-stone of the Elysean arch, and that the weight of the government is on his shoulders. Look at him as he enters the Cafe de Paris to eat his puree a la Conde, and his supreme de volaille, and his filet de chevreuil pique aux truffes, and you would say that he is not only the prime, but the favorite minister of Louis Napoleon, par la grace de Dieu et Monsieur le Docteur President de la Republique. "Apres tout c'est un mauvais drole, que ce pharmacien," to use the term applied to the doctor ...
— The International Monthly, Volume 3, No. 2, May, 1851 • Various
... perfect mutual understanding on a pinnacle of married experience. Fancy there being any need for anything else between us! they said. Their editor then supplied explanatory text: "Of course there may have been a soupcon of personal feeling in the case—bias, pique, whatever one likes to call it. You know, dear Mrs. Fenwick?" But Mrs. Fenwick waited for further illumination. "Well, you know ... I suppose it's rather a breach of confidence, only I know I shall be ...
— Somehow Good • William de Morgan
... was some queer, abnormal chap. Gard remembered fragments of stories he had heard of comic or tragic happenings in the separated, locked compartments of continental trains. But the tales were too vague in his mind to pique any anxiety. He roused himself and took up his German newspaper. Muffled war scares. Always war scares more or less in evidence. How dull the Teuton journals would be without them! Dog days were coming and brains were no ...
— Villa Elsa - A Story of German Family Life • Stuart Henry
... commonest affairs of life, and the sight of American independence never inspired her with the idea of breaking the bondage in which she was spellbound. Still, she shrank back with instinctive horror from every advance of Gilbert's, and at last, to pique her, Lisette brought forward the intelligence that Allen ...
— Magnum Bonum • Charlotte M. Yonge
... None knows so well as he how to pique the curiosity of the reader—and how to disappoint it. He raises the hope, here, that he is going to tell all about how one enters a classic wall in the usual mode of Southern manners; but does he? No; he smiles in his sleeve, and turns aside to ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... convinced 'twere easy by introducing a few such [to bring about that] the dupes to the most foolish and absurd religion now in the world might be warmed out and your quiet as well as interest established from Point au Pique to the Lake."[7] The Roman Catholic faith had more vitality than Nairne's correspondent supposed. It was Protestantism that should in time be "warmed ...
— A Canadian Manor and Its Seigneurs - The Story of a Hundred Years, 1761-1861 • George M. Wrong
... very natural that his indifference should pique her vanity. Markham did not care for women. That was all the more a reason why he should learn to care for her. The love of being loved was habit, ingrained, and she could not dismiss it with a word. But she gave him her friendship, and having given it would not recant from ...
— Madcap • George Gibbs
... intentions of people, and that they did not mean what at the time I supposed they meant; and further, that, as a general rule, it was better to be a little dull of apprehension where phrases seemed to imply pique, and quick in perception when, on the contrary, they seemed to imply kindly feeling. The real truth never fails ultimately to appear; and opposing parties, if wrong, are sooner convinced when replied to ...
— Character • Samuel Smiles
... Lord Foppington pays her amorous attentions, but she utterly despises the conceited coxcomb, and treats him with contumely. Colonel Townly, in order to pique his lady-love, also pays attention to Loveless's wife, but she repels his advances with indignation, and Loveless, who overhears her, conscious of his own shortcomings, resolves to reform his ways, and, "forsaking all other," to remain true to Amanda, "so long as ...
— Character Sketches of Romance, Fiction and the Drama, Vol 1 - A Revised American Edition of the Reader's Handbook • The Rev. E. Cobham Brewer, LL.D.
... this from pique or anger—I am not angry now—but because my leaving home at present would from solid reasons be difficult to manage. If all be well I will visit you in the autumn, at present I cannot come. Be assured ...
— Charlotte Bronte and Her Circle • Clement K. Shorter
... submit it to the public eye, without the omission of some portion of its contents, and unluckily, too, of that very portion which, from its reference to the secret pursuits and feelings of the writer, would the most livelily pique and gratify the curiosity of the reader. Enough, however, will, I trust, still remain, even after all this necessary winnowing, to enlarge still further the view we have here opened into the interior of the poet's life and habits, and to indulge harmlessly that taste, as general as it is natural, ...
— Life of Lord Byron, Vol. II - With His Letters and Journals • Thomas Moore
... Clusium, and thence to Rome—that a single verse of Frederick II.[369] of Prussia on the Abbe de Bernis, and a jest on Madame de Pompadour, led to the battle of Rosbach—that the elopement of Dearbhorgil[370] with Mac Murchad conducted the English to the slavery of Ireland that a personal pique between Maria Antoinette and the Duke of Orleans precipitated the first expulsion of the Bourbons—and, not to multiply instances of the teterrima causa, that Commodus, Domitian, and Caligula fell victims not to their public ...
— The Works of Lord Byron, Volume 4 • Lord Byron
... and thoughtful woman, I am puzzled how to woo— Shall I praise, or pique her, Lily? Tell me ...
— Poems of Henry Timrod • Henry Timrod |
