"Blankness" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... remembered Hyde was much like other fourth-year University men except that he was not egotistical and not shy: he had altered away from his class, but in what direction it was difficult to tell: there was no deciphering the pleasant blankness of his features or the conventional ...
— Nightfall • Anthony Pryde
... a tender custom, he put his arm about her and drew her to him, and while he thought she slept, she lay there, her eyes closed against his breast, and the hard certainty upon her of something to think about. Blankness had seized upon her, not because he had married a woman before her, but because he had not told. Possibly he had told her mother in some of their desultory talks and had forgotten to say more. The chill wonder of it sprang from her learning it ...
— Country Neighbors • Alice Brown
... why we rate acceptance as a better adaptation than belief. Opposing us is the strong belief that, as to inter-planetary phenomena, virtually everything has been found out. Sense of finality and illusion of homogeneity. But that what is called advancing knowledge is violation of the sense of blankness. ...
— The Book of the Damned • Charles Fort
... adrift in fine weather, with the sea calm and the ship as steady as a rock. I moved away from the rail and went towards Williams. He knew something, or, at least, he guessed at something that was very much a blankness to me at that time. Up above, the boy was climbing up, to what? That was the thing that made me feel so frightened. Ought I to tell all I knew and guessed? And then, who should I tell? I should ...
— The Ghost Pirates • William Hope Hodgson
... incidentally in universal destiny; but beyond just happening it has no function. No function, of course, except for man himself. If man is to find any value in life it is he himself that must create the value. For the sense of the ultimate uselessness of life, of the blankness of imperturbable darkness that surrounds it, Goethe's word "Hell" is not too shocking. But no one has properly lived who has not felt this Hell; and we may easily believe that in an heroic age, the intensity of this feeling was the secret of the intensity of living. For where will the primitive ...
— The Epic - An Essay • Lascelles Abercrombie
... of her false gayety,—put on to mask the wounded pride, the new sensation of blankness that fills her with dismay,—flings herself upon her bed and cries away all the remaining hours that rest between her and her maid's ...
— Molly Bawn • Margaret Wolfe Hamilton
... Holcomb's daughter; that is, son-in-law-to-be of the prophet Jarados; that he was sort of Junior Rhamda. He declared that he had come from the occult Rhamdas, through the other side of the Spot, in search of the Jarados who had gone before. As to his blankness up to now, and his perplexity—he was but a Junior; and the Spot had naturally benumbed his senses. Even now, he apologised, it was difficult to know ...
— The Blind Spot • Austin Hall and Homer Eon Flint
... together as it was before ever I saw him. I must confess that I find it hard to keep my mind on the play when the moonshine comes into my room. It is full moon here, and last night I was out on the pergola for hours, staring away at the shining blankness that hides so much. Imagine it! tables and chairs, and trestles and bars of gold! Confound it!—if only one could hit on that Cavorite again! But a thing like that doesn't come twice in a life. Here I am, a little better off than I was at Lympne, and that ...
— The First Men In The Moon • H. G. Wells
... a few steps in. Her little body started convulsively at the sudden, derisive can-cank-ank of the geese. A blankness spread over her. The geese trailed away with uplifted heads under the ...
— The Rainbow • D. H. (David Herbert) Lawrence
... brought back and by her order to her house. Fatally wounded, in delirium her name was ever on his lips, but in his eyes blankness. And on her knees by his bed she had twisted in an agony of prayer that for one moment, but one moment, light might come into them that she might pray for pardon ere he died. But no light came and he died, not knowing that for her love, too, ...
— Miss Gibbie Gault • Kate Langley Bosher
... of elders. A great need of something to lean on, and a great weariness of independence and responsibility took possession of my soul; and looking round for support and comfort in that transitory mood, the emptiness of the present and the blankness of the future sent me back to the past with all its ghosts. Why should I not go and see the place where I was born, and where I lived so long; the place where I was so magnificently happy, so exquisitely wretched, so close to heaven, so near to ...
— Elizabeth and her German Garden • "Elizabeth", AKA Marie Annette Beauchamp
... though his bones were turning to water, and Zaidos had sneered at the description. It flashed into his mind when he looked into the wild, chalky countenance of the man against the wall. He glanced down the line of soldiers. A stupid blankness seemed to envelop them. Pale as death they stared at the shaking creature before them. There was a terrible silence that sounded as loud and beat as fiercely in their ears as the boom of cannon. ...
— Shelled by an Unseen Foe • James Fiske
... a sturdy cottage, with a grim endurance and inflexibility which even some later and lighter additions had softened rather than changed. On either side of the door, against the bleak whitewashed wall, two tall fuchsias relieved the rigid blankness with a show of color. The windows were prettily draped with curtains caught up with gay ribbons. In a stony pound-like enclosure there was some attempt at floral cultivation, but all quite recent. So, too, were a wicker garden ...
— The Bell-Ringer of Angel's and Other Stories • Bret Harte
... to convey the blankness of his ignorance, whereupon other men addressed him, also in northern tongues. Then, as he still shook his head, a lad of about nineteen came forward and spoke ...
— Stella Fregelius • H. Rider Haggard
... the forest at all—not the cry of a bird, not the rustle of snow falling from a branch—but there was something deeper and remoter than sound, the approach of night. There was a change on the face of the forest—an effective silence which was not blankness—a voiceless expression of attention as the Newcomer settled into his place. Fanny looked up and saw the labyrinth of trees in the very act ...
— The Happy Foreigner • Enid Bagnold
... forbidding politics as a subject for discussion in the house, and confined the general conversation exclusively to fish. That this thoughtful act was appreciated by the overworked politician it is needless to remark; he settled down to his brief respite with a tranquil contentment and complete blankness of mind which only the cleverest of us can ...
— Terribly Intimate Portraits • Noel Coward
... back to the window, and again they heard the footsteps in the corridor. Hodge went through the window at a flying leap and hurled open the corridor door, only to again find silence and blankness. ...
— Frank Merriwell's Reward • Burt L. Standish
... child of the gutter, the adventurer, the vagabond, with no address, not even a back room over a sweetstuff shop in wide England, the possessor of a few suits of old clothes and one pound, one shilling and a penny, with nothing in front of him but the vast blankness of 'life, nothing behind him save memories of sordid struggle, with nothing to guide him, nothing to set him on his way with thrilling pulse and quivering fibres save the Vision Splendid, the glorious Hope, the unconquerable Faith. In the older man's eyes ...
— The Fortunate Youth • William J. Locke
... realized that there was a blankness about it all. He had won money, it is true. But all the money in the world could not free him from the taint that had been left upon him by a coroner's investigation, from the hint that still remained ...
— The Cross-Cut • Courtney Ryley Cooper
... means of knowing now. She has not been her natural self for these last few days, but she had other causes for worry, and I have been willing enough to think that these were the occasion of her restless ways and short, sharp speech and the blankness with which she met all my attempts to soothe and encourage her. This evening"—I choked at the word. The day had been one string of extraordinary experiences, accumulating in intensity to the one ghastly discovery which had overtopped and overwhelmed all the rest. ...
— The House of the Whispering Pines • Anna Katharine Green
... leap, and close in upon the horror; I heard a sort of wolfish yapping. The Black Death disappeared. And then I, too, was falling, falling into infinite blackness and blankness, with one red flash when I ...
— A Woman Named Smith • Marie Conway Oemler
... that no longer, she went into the front room and stared vacantly around at the bare walls. When she saw her picture again, nailed fast beside the kitchen door, her face lost a little of its frozen blankness—enough so that her lips quivered until she bit them ...
— Lonesome Land • B. M. Bower
... His life must pay. O, soul so full of sin, So devil tangled, tortured—which not prayer Nor watching could deliver. So I thought To save my soul from murder I must fly— I felt an urging as one does in sleep Pursued by giant things to fly, to fly From terror, death, from blankness on the scene, From emptiness, from beauty gone. The world Seemed something seen in fever, where the steps Of men are muffled, and a futile scheme Impels all steps. So packing up my kit, My Bible in my pocket, secretly I disappeared. Next ...
— Toward the Gulf • Edgar Lee Masters
... at all! Why, at least, could not Turner have kept it out of sight?" He has quite gratuitously brought it into sight; gratuitously drawn firmly the three lines of stiff drip-stone which mark its squareness and blankness. It is precisely that blank vacancy of decoration, and setting of the meager angles against wind and war, which he wants to force on your notice, that he may take you thoroughly out of Italy and Greece, and put you wholly into a barbarous ...
— Lectures on Landscape - Delivered at Oxford in Lent Term, 1871 • John Ruskin
... dumbly out of the infirmary and down a bare corridor whose metal floor rang coldly underfoot. An open port near the corridor's end relieved the blankness of wall and let in a flood of reddish Alphardian sunlight; Farrell slowed to look out, wondering how long he had lain unconscious, and felt panic knife at him when he saw Xavier's scouter lying, port open and undefended, on the ...
— Control Group • Roger Dee
... magic characters, muttered prayers in a strange tongue that sounded like INDEXERRORPARALLAXREFRACTION, made cabalistic signs on paper, added and carried one, and then, on a piece of holy script called the Grail—I mean the Chart—he placed his finger on a certain space conspicuous for its blankness and said, "Here we are." When we looked at the blank space and asked, "And where is that?" he answered in the cipher-code of the higher priesthood, "31-15-47 north, 133-5-30 west." And we said "Oh," and ...
— The Cruise of the Snark • Jack London
... not know that her lips touched his, she was seeking only to learn if he breathed. When his eyes opened blankly, she kissed them till they closed again, because she could not bear to see the dreadful blankness that was in them. When he moaned she fell to rocking gently back and forth, holding his head closer against her breast, and presently began to croon softly. She never once thought of calling for help; it was to her as if there ...
— Round Anvil Rock - A Romance • Nancy Huston Banks
... the day grew outside. Cuckoo, having directed her steps down a blind-alley had, not unnaturally, reached a dead-wall, blotting out the horizon. Lying there, she faced it. She stared at the wall, and the wall seemed to stare back at her. Perhaps for that reason a dull blankness flowed over and filled her mind, and made her widely opened eyes almost as expressionless as the eyes of a corpse. For a long time she lay in this alive stupor. Then Jessie stirred again, and Cuckoo, as she had ...
— Flames • Robert Smythe Hichens
... false to say that he reached his goal with a certain elation and stood there again with a certain assurance. The creature beneath the sod knew of his rare experience, so that, strangely now, the place had lost for him its mere blankness of expression. It met him in mildness—not, as before, in mockery; it wore for him the air of conscious greeting that we find, after absence, in things that have closely belonged to us and which seem to confess of themselves to the ...
— The Beast in the Jungle • Henry James
... sod: his fingers clutched A handful of loose weeds and grass and earth, Uprooted in his anguish as he fell, And slowly from his heart the thick stream flowed, Fouling the green, leaving the fair, sweet face Ghastly, transparent, with blue, stony eyes Staring in blankness on that other one Who triumphed over him. With hot desire Of instant vengeance I unsheathed my sword To rush upon the slayer, when he turned In ...
— The Poems of Emma Lazarus - Vol. I (of II.), Narrative, Lyric, and Dramatic • Emma Lazarus
... any time very little meaning, to an ordinary observer, in the countenance of this anxious candidate for the magisterial bench, but it was not without cunning; just as in the case of a certain class of fools, any one may recollect that anomalous combination of the latter with features whose blankness betokens the natural idiot at a first glance. Crackenfudge, who, on this occasion, felt conscious of the valuable intelligence he was about to communicate, sat with a face in which might be read, as far at least as anything could, ...
— The Black Baronet; or, The Chronicles Of Ballytrain - The Works of William Carleton, Volume One • William Carleton
... his hands crossed, and a look of inexpressible blankness, "the child wants to marry! What ...
— Marie • Alexander Pushkin
... vantage point, ready to follow Karara. But he could not blot from his mind the picture of those lines, nor forget the terrible blankness which made their faces more unhuman, more frightenly alien ...
— Key Out of Time • Andre Alice Norton
... troubled;" the coming encounter with Caliban has shaken him. Most Shaksperean, too, is this: alternating impulses of trust and doubt; now a sense of being led "by Providence divine;" an instinct of a "divinity that shapes our ends;" and again, the mood that sees beyond the present scene only blankness ...
— The Chief End of Man • George S. Merriam
... Buchanan's London house, and he had come there to call upon young Miss Buchanan. The memory of Helen's unobtrusive, wonderfully understanding kindness to him during his last days at Merriston, remained for him as the only bright spot in a desolate blankness. He had not seen her again. She had been paying visits, but she had written in return to a note of inquiry from Cambridge, to say that she was settled, now, in London for a long time and that she would be delighted to see him on the day ...
— Franklin Kane • Anne Douglas Sedgwick
... creek down below the level of the plain and the red bluffs, thirty miles to the eastward. But the sun stole in and crossed the hard earthen floor, and stole up the wall on the other side, crept up slowly, emphasising the dull blankness of the place. So did the sun every day of the year, pretty nearly; so did he in every stockkeeper's hut on the plains of Western Australia; but to-day he seemed to Turner to be mocking his misery, pointing it out and emphasising it. Such ...
— The Moving Finger • Mary Gaunt
... her case beautiful, blankness of fear smoothed Eve's forehead. She said, her voice low, her eyes not meeting his, "Yesterday you'd never have noticed what she ...
— A World Apart • Samuel Kimball Merwin
... He looked at me with that blankness of incomprehension that must be maddening in a man after you ...
— Sunny Slopes • Ethel Hueston
... blankness, for he had placed himself so that he could see nothing but the sky, and had taken off his silver ears as well as his gold spectacles—what was the use of either when he had no legs with which to walk or run?—up from below there rose ...
— The Little Lame Prince - And: The Invisible Prince; Prince Cherry; The Prince With The Nose - The Frog-Prince; Clever Alice • Miss Mulock—Pseudonym of Maria Dinah Craik
... realise that the absence of Brenda must be a horribly insistent fact to her own family. She was so entirely different from the rest of them. Her vivacity, her spirit must have shown amidst the nervous respectability of this dull and fearful household like the gleam of unexpected water in the blankness of a desert. Her absence must have seemed to them a positive thing. Probably every one at the table was thinking of her at that moment. And the result of this combined thought was producing a hallucination of ...
— The Jervaise Comedy • J. D. Beresford
... innermost secret, not confided even to Maggie, though he felt she understood it, as she understood, to his view, everything—thus had shaped itself the innocent trick of occasionally making believe that he had no conscience, or at least that blankness, in the field of duty, did reign for an hour; a small game to which the few persons near enough to have caught him playing it, and of whom Mrs. Assingham, for instance, was one, attached indulgently that idea of quaintness, ...
— The Golden Bowl • Henry James
... between life and death becomes more and more palpable. The Destroyer has hurled his winds, his frosts, his fires; and gray wastes, broken wastes, black wastes, attest with what signal power. But life follows closely, planting his seeds in the very footprints of death. Where blankness and bleakness seem to reign, a tiny life springs in mosses, rich with promise of better things. Long forked tongues of green are lapping up the dreary wastes, and will presently overpower them with its vivid tints. Even amid the blanched petrifaction of the Silver Grove fresh growths are creeping, ...
— Gala-days • Gail Hamilton
... which, with its trees and kiosque, recalled the Place Verte at Antwerp, I noticed a large building of the pattern so common in France for colleges and convents—a vast expanse of whiteness or blankness, and a yet vaster array of long windows. It appeared to be a cavalry barrack for soldiers. The bugles sounded through the archway, and orderlies were riding in and out. This monotonous building, I found, had once been ...
— A Day's Tour • Percy Fitzgerald
... in the morning with a headache. My emotion of the previous day had vanished. It was replaced by a dreary sense of blankness and a sort of sadness I had not known till then, as though something ...
— The Torrents of Spring • Ivan Turgenev
... determined never to look ahead or picture the blankness of his days as they must become with no hope of ever seeing Sabine. He supposed vaguely that the pain would grow less in time. He should have to play a lot of games, and take tremendous interest in ...
— The Man and the Moment • Elinor Glyn
... There was no fortune, no little girl! His dreams were all shattered, the last effort of his life had been in vain. He caught hold of the tumbler with fingers that shook as though an ague were upon him, lifted it to his lips and drank. Then there came the old blankness, and he saw nothing but what seemed to him the face of a satyr—dark and evil—mocking him through the shadows which had surely fallen now for ever. Da Souza lifted him up and conveyed him carefully to a ...
— A Millionaire of Yesterday • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... to Lucy the idea that of course she would hardly see this rider again after to-day. Even if he went to the Ford, which event was unlikely, he would not remain there long. The sensation of blankness puzzled her, and she ...
— Wildfire • Zane Grey
... regarding the emissary with a curious chill blankness. In peace, to the outward eye he was a commonplace man; in war he changed. The authority with which he was clothed went, no doubt, for much, but it was rather, perhaps, that a door had been opened for him. His inner self became visible, and ...
— The Long Roll • Mary Johnston
... Dare understood, and the sudden utter blankness of his expression smote Ruth to the heart. He had loved her in his way after all. It is a bitter thing to be refused. She felt that she had been almost brutal in her direct explicitness, called forth at the moment by an ...
— The Danvers Jewels, and Sir Charles Danvers • Mary Cholmondeley
... compass; and whereas she had seldom or never been in my thoughts of late, I had now the strangest ideas that she was coming towards me in the street, or that she would presently knock at the door. In my rooms too, with which she had never been at all associated, there was at once the blankness of death and a perpetual suggestion of the sound of her voice or the turn of her face or figure, as if she were still alive and had been ...
— Great Expectations • Charles Dickens
... The girl knocked softly. There was no response. She turned the handle quietly. If, possibly, her guest were asleep, she would not awaken her. Slowly, slowly she opened the unresisting door, and her expression changed from expectancy to blankness as she perceived that the room was empty. The fair white pillow bore no imprint of a curly head. The curtain ring was striking rhythmically against the window sill in ...
— The Opened Shutters • Clara Louise Burnham
... and Tump lost in blankness, trying to think of something to do for Cissie. Finally ...
— Birthright - A Novel • T.S. Stribling
... deliberate on-coming of age draws on all of us were, it is true, nearly obliterated, but in their place was a certain blankness that was ...
— The Halo • Bettina von Hutten
... Consciously she saw her husband's face now, as she had often, with a half wilful unconsciousness, seen it, looking at Tante—ah, a fierce resentment flamed up in her at last with the unavoidable clearness of her vision—looking at Tante with a courteous blankness that cloaked hostility; with cold curiosity; with mastered irony, suspicion, dislike. He was, then, a man not generous, not large and wise of heart, a man without the loving humour that would have enabled him to see past the defects and flaws of greatness, nor with the heart and mind to recognize ...
— Tante • Anne Douglas Sedgwick
... case, was the blankest of blanks in the lottery of their draw for information. Whether this blankness was real or affected men could not make up their minds. The gambler was so unlike his usual self. The hard, rough, autocratic manner of the man seemed to have undergone a subtle change. He went about full of geniality and a lightness his fellow-citizens had never before observed in him. And, ...
— The Twins of Suffering Creek • Ridgwell Cullum
... He swallowed it in great gulps. He felt as though he were burning up inside. The room began to swim around him, but with his hands kneading into the old sofa he warded off unconsciousness. He must not lose a single minute in blankness. He must get back to her—get back to her as soon as he could stand. She was suffering, too, though in another way. He must not let another ...
— The Seventh Noon • Frederick Orin Bartlett
... had despatched it a sense of blankness descended on her. She had succeeded in driving from her mind all vain hesitations, doubts, returns upon herself: her healthy system naturally rejected them. But they left a queer emptiness in which her thoughts rattled about as thoughts might, she supposed, in the first ...
— The Glimpses of the Moon • Edith Wharton
... was fuller and more rounded, because the man knew he was speaking of his best work. Maisie looked at the blur, and a lunatic desire to laugh caught her by the throat. But for Dick's sake—whatever this mad blankness might mean- -she must make no sign. Her voice choked with hard-held tears as she answered, still gazing at the wreck—"Oh, ...
— The Works of Rudyard Kipling One Volume Edition • Rudyard Kipling
... spirited away as if by some furious and mighty power that had grown impatient in waiting for it. There remained for a few seconds on the collective retina of the spectators a vision of the inclined car swinging near the roof like the tail of a kite. And then nothing! Blankness! Blackness! Already the balloon was lost to sight in the vast stormy ocean of the night, a plaything of the winds. The spectators became once more aware of the dull booming of the cannonade. The balloon was already perhaps flying unseen amid ...
— The Old Wives' Tale • Arnold Bennett
... the canvas was entirely released, and Faith silently held it up before the eyes of the dying man, upon whose face had come a dull, leaden blankness, and whose eyes were painful to watch as they struggled to pierce the film ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 4, No. 25, November, 1859 • Various
... and she went out. I laid the sketch on the table beside me, and sat thinking. A sudden blankness fell upon me as I stood mentally opposite this new idea that had never presented itself to me in the same form before, that in my former easy, wandering existence I had always welcomed a beautiful model, not only for the gain to my art, but because of the incidental ...
— Five Nights • Victoria Cross
... leave the house And think for a breath it is you I see At the end of the alley of bending boughs Where so often at dusk you used to be; Till in darkening dankness The yawning blankness Of the ...
— Satires of Circumstance, Lyrics and Reveries, with - Miscellaneous Pieces • Thomas Hardy
... the city ways appeared again and again as the costume of the common people. He had no doubt the story was contemporary, and its intense realism was undeniable. And the end had been a tragedy that oppressed him. He sat staring at the blankness. ...
— The Sleeper Awakes - A Revised Edition of When the Sleeper Wakes • H.G. Wells
... people, the strongest staff a politician may lean upon. Like a brave and honest man he had cast from his thoughts all hope of power. The king might be old, senile, decrepit, but he was none the less the king. If he had moments of blankness of thought, there were other moments when the old man was keen enough; and keen enough he was to realize in these lucid intervals that Ramabai, among ...
— The Adventures of Kathlyn • Harold MacGrath
... honest loyalty to established reputation, did not blind him to defects; did not seduce him into indiscriminating praise; did not deter him from exposing the tendency to verbiage in Burke and Jeremy Taylor, the excess blankness of much of Wordsworth's blank verse, the undercurrent of mediocrity in Macaulay, the absurdities of Mr. Ruskin's etymology. And as in great matters, so in small. Whatever literary production was brought under Matthew Arnold's notice, his judgment was clear, sympathetic, and independent. ...
— Matthew Arnold's Sohrab and Rustum and Other Poems • Matthew Arnold
... for the beautiful woman who was forced to suffer the ignominy of being thus announced. She had herself been daily conscious of that same flatness when, after the long announcement of her aunt's and uncle's names, came the blankness of ...
— The Title Market • Emily Post
... never any want of conversation, largely due to the fact that no conversation was expected: we most of us know the horrible blankness which comes over our minds when we realize that because we are eating we are also supposed to talk, whether we have anything to say or not. It was also due to the more primitive reason that in a company of specialists, whose travels extended ...
— The Worst Journey in the World, Volumes 1 and 2 - Antarctic 1910-1913 • Apsley Cherry-Garrard
... sleep that night but she did sleep and heavily. When she awoke it was to blankness, a cold throbbing blankness of undefined ill being. Then her Ego, with a sigh, came back from far places; the busy brain shot into focus; all the memories, fears, humiliation of the night before stood forth clear and poignant. She buried her face in ...
— Up the Hill and Over • Isabel Ecclestone Mackay
... valet procured some iced water. This simple remedy, and the change of atmosphere, proved enough to restore the fainting man to his senses, but hardly—as it seemed to his friends—to his former self. They noticed a change to blankness and stillness in his face, and when he spoke, an indescribable alteration in the tone ...
— After Dark • Wilkie Collins
... particular fancy to the roof, high, steep, old, with its slope of bluish slate, and the way the weather-worn chimneys seemed to grow out of it—living things in a deep soil. The single defect of the house is the blankness and bareness of its walls, which have none of that delicate parasitic deposit that agrees so well—to the eye—with the surface of old dwellings. It is true that this bareness results in a kind of silvery whiteness of complexion which carries out the ...
— A Little Tour in France • Henry James
... never have had much of a margin. Their good looks had been their capital, and they had good- humouredly made the most of the career that this resource marked out for them. It was in their faces, the blankness, the deep intellectual repose of the twenty years of country-house visiting that had given them pleasant intonations. I could see the sunny drawing-rooms, sprinkled with periodicals she didn't read, in which Mrs. Monarch had continuously ...
— Some Short Stories • Henry James
... question appeared to strike the young man as abrupt and irrelevant, to come down on him from a height with which he was not accustomed to hold intercourse. He was used to quick operations, however, and he had only a moment of bright blankness before replying: ...
— The Bostonians, Vol. I (of II) • Henry James
... 'shakedowns,' as the piles of straw stuffed into bed-ticks are called; but it had nothing whatever beyond these articles. There was not even the remnant of a bedstead; not a cheap print, so common in the hovels of the poor, to relieve the blankness of the rough, whitewashed walls. The bedroom, which was little more than half the size of the other, was that outrage of capital upon poverty known as a 'dark room,' by which is meant that it had no window opening to the outer ...
— Lights and Shadows of New York Life - or, the Sights and Sensations of the Great City • James D. McCabe
... or thereabouts, I walked down to the shore and pulled my skiff out to where the Comfort lay at her moorings, there had not been a sign of it. Now I was near the entrance of the bay, somewhere abreast Crow Point, and all about me was gray, wet blankness. Sitting in the stern of the little launch I could see perhaps a scant ten feet beyond the ...
— The Rise of Roscoe Paine • Joseph C. Lincoln
... other with visages of sevenfold blankness. They next unanimously directed their gaze towards their preceptor, hoping to detect some symptom of jocularity upon his venerable features. Nothing could be descried thereon but the most imperturbable solemnity, or, if perchance anything like an expression ...
— The Twilight of the Gods, and Other Tales • Richard Garnett
... was revel and entertainment, and when the slight blankness with which his lateness had oppressed her had been overswayed by her enjoyment, she could have wished to sit here for hours, doing nothing, saying nothing, eating nothing, but just breathing in this ...
— Married Life - The True Romance • May Edginton
... own life, and so you could spare time to make my troubles turn to happiness, too. But there's one little time in the twenty-four hours when I'm not happy. It's now, when I have to say good night. I feel dismal every time it comes—and then, when I've left the house, there's a bad little blankness, a black void, as though I were temporarily dead; and it lasts until I get it established in my mind that I'm really beginning another day that's to end with YOU again. Then I cheer up. But now's the bad time—and I must go through it, and so—good night." And he added with a pungent vehemence ...
— The Turmoil - A Novel • Booth Tarkington
... Miggs, folding her hands and looking upwards with a kind of devout blankness, 'I wouldn't lay myself out as she does; I wouldn't be as bold as her; I wouldn't seem to say to all male creeturs "Come and kiss me"'—and here a shudder quite convulsed her frame—'for any earthly crowns as might be offered. Worlds,' Miggs added solemnly, ...
— Barnaby Rudge • Charles Dickens
... that table the sunshine of the morning went out at a stroke, and the birds muffled their song. But neither girl by word or gesture revealed her blankness. "He's getting on towards the end of his time wi' me," added the dairyman, with a phlegm which unconsciously was brutal; "and so I suppose he is beginning to see about his ...
— Tess of the d'Urbervilles - A Pure Woman • Thomas Hardy
... upon which was revealed the control room of the untried super-ship. He heard Rodebush speak to Cleveland; heard the observer's brief reply; saw the navigator throw his switches—then the communicator plate went blank. Not the ordinary blankness of a cut-off, but a peculiarly disquieting fading out into darkness. And where the great space-ship had rested there was for an instant nothing. Exactly nothing—a vacuum. Vessel, falsework, rollers, trucks, the enormous ...
— Triplanetary • Edward Elmer Smith
... as lunch marked what was perhaps the most enjoyable epoch of the whole day, it was his or her bounden duty to eat slowly and to go on demanding helpings so long as the supply endured; and a certain feeling of blankness descended when there was no longer any excuse for lingering, inasmuch as nothing remained to be eaten but a dozen jam puffs, which, as mother said, had been meant to be very nice, but had somehow failed to achieve ...
— A College Girl • Mrs. George de Horne Vaizey
... never knew or cared. The surprising blankness of the disappointment made her almost dizzy; she turned aside blindly, and stumbled into the quiet backwater behind a stairway, where she could recover her self-possession and endure unobserved the first pangs of bitterness. ...
— The Beloved Woman • Kathleen Norris
... then at the expressionless face of the curio dealer. Was it merely the natural blankness of his countenance that impressed me, or was there, in fact, something deep and dark hidden in it, something of "East is East and West is West" which I did not and could not understand? Craig was admiring the bronzes. He had paused before one, a square metal fire-screen of odd design, ...
— The War Terror • Arthur B. Reeve
... familiar and suddenly—there comes a door where should be space, or space where there should be a window—and he is lost, his senses betray him, for the moment he is completely fogged, all bearings lost, possessed with the blankness that ...
— Rimrock Trail • J. Allan Dunn
... there was manifestly none. And then, once here in this loveliness, with everything so soft and kind and sweet all round, it would be easier to tell him, to try and explain, to ask for something different, for at least an attempt at something different in their lives in the future, instead of the blankness of separation, the cold—oh, the cold—of nothing at all but the great windiness of faith, the great bleakness of works. Why, one person in the world, one single person belonging to one, of one's very own, to talk to, to take care of, to love, to be ...
— The Enchanted April • Elizabeth von Arnim
... stared at him with the blankness of surprise. "Where did you come from, Big Abel?" he questioned at last, ...
— The Battle Ground • Ellen Glasgow
... ring?... I gave him none.... Are you sure that is the one?" "Where do you conceal the ring," Bruennhilde presses him, "which you robbed from me?" Gunther is stupidly silent, not knowing what he should say; his confusion is so obvious and his blankness so convincingly unassumed, that the truth is borne upon Bruennhilde: It was not he, despite all appearances, who took the ring from her, and if not he—"Ha!" she cries, in a burst of furious indignation, "This is the man who tore the ring from me; ...
— The Wagnerian Romances • Gertrude Hall
... standing, naively exhibiting to the stranger his first scalp. Which seemed to please the dusty and brier-torn runner, for he was all smiles and animation until he caught sight of me. Then instantly the mask of blankness smoothed his features, so that when I confronted him he was utterly ...
— The Hidden Children • Robert W. Chambers
... don't know either," said Betty, humorously and simply, and who shall deny that this blankness of mind, when combined with profusion, mother wit, old wives' tales, haphazard ways, moments of astonishing daring, humour, and sentimentality—who shall deny that in these respects every woman is nicer ...
— Jacob's Room • Virginia Woolf
... stifling had passed away, I seemed at first in a state of utter blankness; then came flashes of intense light, alternating with blackness, and with a keen vision of what was going on in the room around me, but no sensation of touch. I thought that I was near death; when, suddenly, my soul became aware of God, who was manifestly dealing with me, handling ...
— The Varieties of Religious Experience • William James
... grandson Nicholas looked forward to the issue. The question to be decided seemed to him of almost as vital importance as if it were: Whether or no the sun should rise again next morning. For him at least, it depended upon that whether his world should loom back again in a dreary blankness, or waken lit with new and wondrous gleams. Nicholas's thirst for knowledge and love of learning were much more essentially part and parcel of him than his hands and eyes, and had so far found little except dreams and desires to thrive upon. Even before the memorable ...
— Strangers at Lisconnel • Barlow Jane
... snow-covered roads and into the gorge of the mountains. Imagination failed her at this point. Do what she would, all was misty in her mind's eye, and she could not see that wandering image. There was blankness between his form and her, and no life or movement anywhere but here in ...
— Midnight In Beauchamp Row - 1895 • Anna Katharine Green (Mrs. Charles Rohlfs)
... lecture we turned ourselves from the usual way of talking of the universe's oneness as a principle, sublime in all its blankness, towards a study of the special kinds of union which the universe enfolds. We found many of these to coexist with kinds of separation equally real. "How far am I verified?" is the question which ...
— Pragmatism - A New Name for Some Old Ways of Thinking • William James
... ticked on, but Martin Eden, his face buried on his arms, did not hear it. He heard nothing. He did not think. So absolutely had he relived life that he had fainted just as he fainted years before on the Eighth Street Bridge. For a full minute the blackness and the blankness endured. Then, like one from the dead, he sprang upright, eyes flaming, sweat ...
— Martin Eden • Jack London
... even the tiniest wrong he had ever done her, for he had been, on the whole, an exemplary husband; his indifference, his absent-mindedness of the previous day, filled him with shame and regret, and in a moment of blankness he realised all the pettishness and selfishness of his science which, he had imagined, was benefiting mankind. But these emotions were short-lived; if you open a door with a spring behind it, it will close again immediately. On the following morning, ...
— Married • August Strindberg
... that terrible old sorrow; Too numb to weep, too cowardly to pray. Again the blankness of a dread to-morrow Filled me with sickly terror ...
— Yesterdays • Ella Wheeler Wilcox
... Farquaharson, which had a moment before seemed incapable of any expression beyond lethargic fatigue, underwent so sudden a transformation that the ingenue interrupted her weeping to watch it. There was a prefatory blankness of sheer amazement followed by an upleaping of latent fires into the eyes; fires that held hints of revived hopes and suppressed yearnings. Within the moment this fitful light died again into a pained gravity. What was the use of ...
— The Tyranny of Weakness • Charles Neville Buck
... with her sister; but the words Selina spoke the moment the brougham began to move were of course exactly those she had not foreseen. She had considered that she might take this tone or that tone or even no tone at all; she was quite prepared for her presenting a face of blankness to any form of interrogation and saying, 'What on earth are you talking about?' It was in short conceivable to her that Selina would deny absolutely that she had been in the museum, that they had stood face to face and that she had fled in confusion. She was capable of explaining the incident by ...
— A London Life; The Patagonia; The Liar; Mrs. Temperly • Henry James
... year washing dishes and clothes— only their fingers occupied. They read no good books, think no clean thoughts, are made love to as John Telfer had said, with kisses in a darkened room by a shame-faced yokel and, after marrying some such a yokel, live lives of unspeakable blankness. Into the houses of these women come the husbands at evening, tired and uncommunicative, to eat hurriedly and then go again into the streets or, the blessing of utter physical exhaustion having come to ...
— Windy McPherson's Son • Sherwood Anderson
... sheets, must be named under the breath or not at all. A powerful minister may be accused with sturdy courage of something which he did not do and no one would mind his doing, but under the influence of Fear, to tell the least little truth about him will put a whole assembly into a sort of blankness. ...
— First and Last • H. Belloc
... brows were two outcurving and passionate wrinkles. She was thirty, perhaps, or younger. Gossip had never touched her, but every man naturally and instantly rose to flirtatiousness when he spoke to her, and every woman watched her with stilled blankness. ...
— Babbitt • Sinclair Lewis
... Lady Jane fired a simple Greek phrase at Tom. The Princess Elizabeth's quick eye saw by the serene blankness of the target's front that the shaft was overshot; so she tranquilly delivered a return volley of sounding Greek on Tom's behalf, and then straightway changed the ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... force and dignity. But before her simple impulsive question I was dumb. A wave of shyness swept over me; not even to her could I divulge my thoughts, not even from her risk the smile of ridicule or the blankness of non-apprehension. I became wretchedly certain that I should be only absurd and priggish, that she would not believe me, would see only excuse and hypocrisy in what I said. It was so difficult also not to seem to accuse her, ...
— The King's Mirror • Anthony Hope
... was blinded by a firm, deadening blankness! Whatever was to be the outcome must be of ...
— Joyce of the North Woods • Harriet T. Comstock
... come up a little sooner and all have a bit of a romp.... Well, EMILY, my dear, here we are, all of us—ready for anything in the way of a frolic—what's it to be? Forfeits, games, Puss in the Corner, something to cheer us all up, eh? Won't anyone make a suggestion? [General expression of gloomy blankness. ...
— Punch, Or The London Charivari, Vol. 99., December 27, 1890 • Various
... be dressy if she expects to be seen." This young man was the only one who had ever taken her to the theater and if he failed her, she was sure that she would never go again, and she sobbed out incoherently that she "couldn't live at all without it." Apparently the blankness and grayness of life itself had been broken for her only by the portrayal ...
— The Spirit of Youth and the City Streets • Jane Addams
... puzzle set by a Competition Editor. Here is another one, which begins as beautifully as Hedda Gabler could desire, and ends in blankness. ...
— Without Prejudice • Israel Zangwill
... some of these things?" he said. "I have a reading lamp in one of my bags, which I will light for you in a moment. I won't pledge myself for your finding the magazines very amusing, but anything is better than the blankness of a long ...
— The Lovels of Arden • M. E. Braddon
... "shegry ain'tgry gotgry agry thinggry." But when the little girl, who knew pig-Latin in all its various dialects, turned angry, scornful eyes upon her, the neighbor woman's daughter sat up and her smile faded to a sickly blankness. ...
— The Biography of a Prairie Girl • Eleanor Gates
... out. The old look is gone. It is gone, and will never come back—the tender, brooding, reverent happiness and peace of motherhood with the child at her knee—that great earthly beacon-light in women of ages past. It was brutally put out but it did not leave blankness behind it. There has come in its place another light, another ancient beacon-light on the faces of women of old—the look of faith in immortal things. She is not now the mother with the tenderness of this ...
— A Cathedral Singer • James Lane Allen
... political economy all the morning, eagerly pounced on him for a tour of his stables, which lasted till luncheon was due, and he could casually enter the dining-room, where Lady Tyrrell held out her hand good- naturedly to him, laughing at the blankness he could not entirely conceal. "Only me!" she said. "It can't be helped! Poor Lenore caught such a dreadful sore throat last night, that I have shut her up in her room with ...
— The Three Brides • Charlotte M. Yonge
... bide-a-wee cushions, and deep, cuddly armchairs and a lamp or two with shades as mellow as autumn woods! And some perfectly frivolous pictures which aren't in the least inspiring or uplifting,—and every single girl's room shall have a pink pincushion!" Then at their blankness, she softened. "Oh, very well,—you shall have your tubs and your linoleum, if you'll let me humanize the rest of the house,—will you?" She came to her feet with a spring of incredible energy. "Come along, Miss Ellis,—let's have a ...
— Jane Journeys On • Ruth Comfort Mitchell
... said I, sensible that the blankness of my face began to brighten as the thought occurred to me, "could one ...
— The Seven Poor Travellers • Charles Dickens
... weak as a child. The shock knocked the strength out of me. I had never thought of anything else but being a soldier, you see, and it's a strange experience to have to face life afresh, with everything that you had expected taken out of it, and nothing ahead but blankness and disappointment. I've been so strong too—as strong as a horse. If it hadn't been for that blow—well, it's over! It's a comfort to me to feel that it was not my own fault. If I'd been lazy or careless, and had failed in the exam., it would have ...
— About Peggy Saville • Mrs. G. de Horne Vaizey
... my heart. But my lips were saying, "When I awoke I threw my pistol away." Sheer blankness kept my thoughts silent for a little while; I said empty things. "I am very glad I did not kill you—that you are here, so fair and well. ...
— In the Days of the Comet • H. G. Wells
... gazed in bewilderment. Almost before they could comprehend the truth, the enemy's goal was just before the Sunrise warriors, and half a minute of time remained in which to play. One more line plunge with Burleigh holding the ball! A film came before his eyes. A sudden blankness of failure and despair seized him. In the grandstand, Elinor Wream stood clutching a pennant in both hands, her dark eyes luminous with proud hope. Amid all the yells and cheers, her ...
— A Master's Degree • Margaret Hill McCarter
... come, one at least to every five ladies, but as the time passed and a certain blankness began to gather over the spirits of all, they fell into different attitudes of the despair which the ladies did their best to pass off for rapture. At each unscheduled noise they started in a vain expectation, and when the end came, it came so without accent, ...
— The Daughter of the Storage - And Other Things in Prose and Verse • William Dean Howells
... in some unaccountable manner from the will; it lies inert, though it knows itself and knows that it stills lives—which fundamentally differentiates it from sleep, because in sleep we do not know our body, we do not know if we are alive or dead, we know nothing. In ecstasy is no such blankness: merely the body is perforce inert, it would be entirely forgotten but ...
— The Prodigal Returns • Lilian Staveley
... could not find the matches I Yes, at last her hand closed on them. A blind rush, and she was out again in the passage. She re-entered the front-kitchen with limbs that quivered, with the sound of dreadful voices ringing about her, and blankness ...
— The Nether World • George Gissing
... Now, of course smoke would behave very differently. Dusty air itself is only a kind of smoke, and it looks bright, and the thicker the smoke the brighter it looks; the blackness is simply the utter absence of smoke; there is nothing at all for the light to illuminate, accordingly we have the blankness of sheer invisibility. Here is a flame burning under the beam, and, to show what real smoke looks like, I will burn also this spirit lamp filled with turpentine instead of alcohol. Why the convention currents were free from dust ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 443, June 28, 1884 • Various
... a moment in silence, he appealingly, she, with a cold blankness that seemed to say that not even a look could make her take further notice of him as a ...
— The Burglar and the Blizzard • Alice Duer Miller
... is launched without effect, a horrible blankness faces the passionate one. The men seeing Colina falter breathed more freely. They were frankly terrified ...
— The Fur Bringers - A Story of the Canadian Northwest • Hulbert Footner
... to have changed your attitude there in a minute or so. Here's another thing—" Pilch paused a moment, then said, "Night before last, about an hour after you'd gone to bed, you had a very light touch of the same pattern of mental blankness you experienced on ...
— Legacy • James H Schmitz
... out of himself for the moment by the appalling realization which surged over him; then, remembering himself, caught the doctor's swiftly given upward look and returned it with one of innocent blankness. "Awful, isn't it, doctor? Don't think it's smallpox, or something of that ...
— Cleek, the Master Detective • Thomas W. Hanshew
... like smoke." He pointed to the vessel, and a little way past her I spied a long line of white vapour no higher than Dover cliff as it looked, but as dense as those rocks of chalk too. The sun made steam of it, but if already it was putting a likeness of its own blankness into the sky over it, which seemed to be dying out, as the vapour came along, as the light perishes in a looking-glass upon which you breathe. I ran to the side and saw my boat under the gang-way ...
— The Honour of the Flag • W. Clark Russell
... upon her,—through it all, she never wavered. When he first told her that he must go, that it was the one thing he held it wise and right to do, she shrunk back affrighted, trembling at the coming blankness of a life without him. But after a while, seeing the misery that came into his face reflected from hers, she rose bravely above the terrible woe, and then, with her arms round him and her eyes looking steadfastly into his, she said, "I love you better than ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 5, No. 28, February, 1860 • Various
... wished they could paint him. He had himself sustained various characters in costume for them, and one night he pretended that they had sent him down for Lemuel to help out with a certain group. But they received him with a sort of blankness which convinced him that Berry had exceeded his authority; there was a helplessness at first, and then an indignant determination to save him from a false position even at their own cost, which Lemuel felt rather than saw. Miss Carver was foremost in his rescue; she devoted ...
— The Minister's Charge • William D. Howells
... slip there was not a little stir among the fifty eager questioners. 'What is the origin of evil?' she repeated. 'It has no origin,' was the unsatisfactory answer, after a momentary silence. Oh! the blankness of those faces! 'But,' she resumed presently, 'if you ask how seeming evil originated, I may give you the ideas that came to me as a solution of that mortal ...
— The Right Knock - A Story • Helen Van-Anderson
... at his side. For the first time in her life, perhaps, at least for one of the rare moments of it, her face was in no sense vacant. The wide gray eyes that looked forth upon the sordid world of Clark's Field were seeing eyes, though they did not see merely physical facts. Instead of their usual blankness or passive intelligence, they had a quality in them now of dream. And this gave Adelle's pale face a certain rare loveliness that in human faces does not depend upon color or line or emotional vivacity. It is rather the still radiance of the inner spirit, penetrating in some inexplicable manner ...
— Clark's Field • Robert Herrick
... been accepted no more by any bill-discounter in London; he had forestalled all, to the uttermost farthing; his debts pressed heavier every day; he could have no power to avert the crash that must in a few weeks, or at most a few months, fall upon him. And to him an utter blankness and darkness lay beyond. ...
— Under Two Flags • Ouida [Louise de la Ramee]
... the first sight of Lady Ogram a sinking heart drew all the blood from her checks. Encountering the bloodshot glare from those fleshless eye-caverns, she began to babble a "Good-morning, aunt!" But the words failed, and her frightened simper, meant for a smile, passed into mere blankness of visage. ...
— Our Friend the Charlatan • George Gissing
... that, in all probability before many weeks, many days even, were passed, there would be a severance of that friendship which meant so much to him. He forced himself to realize it, to dwell upon it, to bring consciously home to his soul the blankness the severance would bring with it. There was a certain relief in facing the worst; yet he could not always face it. There was the trouble. Now and then a hope, which he told himself was futile, would spring unbidden to his ...
— Antony Gray,—Gardener • Leslie Moore
... said Patty, a spark of mischief breaking through the blankness of her face, "to earn money enough for a carriage—you thump the tambourine and I'll dance the ...
— Just Patty • Jean Webster
... blankness—this misty unreality of things? Surcease from craving—yes. But what to take its place—what to fill in, occupy mind and body? What sop to his restless soul? What had this young iconoclast offered him after her infernal era of destruction? ...
— In Secret • Robert W. Chambers
... blankness in his mind—an absence of light and colour in which his thoughts were suddenly blotted out; then, as the wind raised the hair upon his brow, he lifted his eyes from the ground, and with the movement it seemed as if his life ran backward to its beginning and he saw himself not as he was to-day, ...
— The Deliverance; A Romance of the Virginia Tobacco Fields • Ellen Glasgow
... the old temptation came, And mocked him with the motion and the shame Of such desires that, shuddering, he abhorred Himself; and, crying mightily to the Lord To free his soul and cast the demon out, Smote with his staff the blankness round about. ...
— The Complete Works of Whittier - The Standard Library Edition with a linked Index • John Greenleaf Whittier
... through the thin walls. These and other memories crowded into Charlotte Dexter's brain as she looked around her room, crowded thick and fast, crowded fast and furious, surged, broke, leaving an empty moment of perfect blankness, then crowded again thicker, faster, surged and seethed and then broke again, leaving in the void of perfect blankness this time a fixed idea, a resolve, a determination, seen in the dark like a ...
— Crowded Out! and Other Sketches • Susie F. Harrison
... his will to God. He had hoped to do much for love of his Lord, to carry the message of the Gospel into the Andredsweald, where the kindred of his mother yet lived, and the thought that he should never see their forest glades again was painful. And the blankness of unconsciousness, the fearful nature of the black death, was in itself repulsive; but it had all been ordered and settled by Infinite Love before ever he was born, probably before the worlds were framed, and Martin said with all his heart the words breathed by the Incarnate God, when groaning ...
— The House of Walderne - A Tale of the Cloister and the Forest in the Days of the Barons' Wars • A. D. Crake
... fat red stags. Lady Blemley's house-party was not bounded on the north by the Bristol Channel, hence there was a full gathering of her guests round the tea-table on this particular afternoon. And, in spite of the blankness of the season and the triteness of the occasion, there was no trace in the company of that fatigued restlessness which means a dread of the pianola and a subdued hankering for auction bridge. The undisguised openmouthed attention of the entire party was fixed ...
— The Chronicles of Clovis • Saki
... goading her to work while she could. She hardly remembered the time when she had been without that fear; it was second nature now, and it kept her on her feet when other incentives might have failed. In the blankness of her misery shefelt no dread of death; but the horror of being ill and ...
— Tales Of Men And Ghosts • Edith Wharton
... he had never known before. This was a conflict within himself. He had to face unsuspected powers, foes that he could not go out to meet at the gate. They were within, as though he had been betrayed by somebody, by some secret enemy. He was ready to look round for that subtle traitor. A sort of blankness fell on his mind and he suddenly ...
— The Rescue • Joseph Conrad
... the null had thrust out. Shortly, they would have ambled into a stream and beyond, out of all possible control. Perhaps they might wander for years in the wastelands. Perhaps they and their increase might furnish meat for the pseudomen who lurked inside the swirling blankness. ...
— The Weakling • Everett B. Cole
... time of blankness, when he had lost all faith in God, when he had been robbed of friendship and family love, he had seized desperately on the one thing left him—the love of humanity. To him atheism meant not only the assertion—"The word God is a word without meaning, it ...
— We Two • Edna Lyall
... he was writing or figuring with blue chalk upon the wall's blankness, and although her heart feared the big rough boy she had ...
— An Australian Lassie • Lilian Turner
... position. Once again there came on him the sense of irresponsible unreality. . . . He stared out, hardly seeing that on which he looked: the grey mass of the lower castle beneath with lighted windows, at the blankness beyond, again with the scattered lights—the nearer ones, within what seemed a stone's throw, along the village street—the farther ones, infinitely remote, out upon the invisible sea. There again too, ...
— Dawn of All • Robert Hugh Benson
... more full of misery because of their elusive vagueness, which kept his tortured brain on a wearying strain of effort to reach some definite understanding of them. Yet when he awakened the consciousness of being again alive was an awful thing. If the dreams could have faded into blankness and all have passed with the passing of the night, how he could have thanked whatever gods there be! Only not to awake—only not to awake! ...
— The Dawn of a To-morrow • Frances Hodgson Burnett
... at him with dead blankness. Passers-by hopped over the coal-hole and glanced up at the pair standing engrossed upon the doorstep. Such as knew either of them concluded from their air that Mr. Beirne was ...
— V. V.'s Eyes • Henry Sydnor Harrison
... amongst strangers!" sobbed Bessie; and her philosophy quite failed her when that prospect recurred in its dreadful blankness. Happily, the time of night did not allow of long lamentation. Presently Harry called at the stair's foot that it was seven o'clock. And she kissed his mother ...
— The Vicissitudes of Bessie Fairfax • Harriet Parr
... her feelings bore not the slightest relation to love. She had been terrified, and had blamed herself, and had thought of his mother; but the idea that he might be dead had not hurt her as it would have done had she loved him. She had felt no wild grief, no awful sense of blankness; the tears which had risen to her eyes had been tears of pity, of genuine sorrow, but not of despair. She tried to think what she would have felt had she seen Paul lying dead before her, and the mere idea sent a sharp thrust through her heart that almost ...
— Paul Patoff • F. Marion Crawford
... that. But he did have a feud with circumstance, a profound resentment with the past for its hard dealing with his father, for the blankness of old Donald's last year or two on earth. And a good deal of this focused on Horace Gower and ...
— Poor Man's Rock • Bertrand W. Sinclair
... Thin streaks of blood oozed on the damp, plastered hair from the broken scalp. I could but stare at the lump of unconscious flesh that dripped sea-water at my feet. A man, all life and movement one moment, defying the universe, reduced the next moment to immobility and the blackness and blankness of death, is always a fascinating object for the contemplative eye of the philosopher. And in this case it had been accomplished so simply, by means of a stick of wood brought sharply in ...
— The Mutiny of the Elsinore • Jack London
... so short a space to tell what the next ten years did to those two. It would have been easier for Mary Matheson in a city, for in a city there is always the blankness of the crowd. In a village there is no such blessed thing as a stranger, the membership committee of the only club is the doctor and the midwife, and all the houses ...
— The Best Short Stories of 1920 - and the Yearbook of the American Short Story • Various
... interview. They covertly looked out for the arrival of the commonplace wooer—anything save their idea of a lover and hero. They keenly took note of him from an upper window as he walked with a certain studied composure, yet with a blankness of aspect, through the shrubbery. They even deigned—Annie as well as Rose and May—surreptitiously to inspect the poor wretch between the bannisters of the staircase, as he ran desperately up the stairs, thrusting one hand ...
— A Houseful of Girls • Sarah Tytler
... silence.—There is a silence in an audience which seems big and overflowing with love. But there was nothing in this. Nothing. Utter sleep. Blankness. Every phrase seemed to drop into depths of indifference. With his back turned to the audience, busy with his orchestra, Christophe was fully aware of everything that was happening in the hall, with those inner antennae which every true musician is endowed, ...
— Jean-Christophe, Vol. I • Romain Rolland
... green river gliding and glittering dizzily beneath him, their foam globes moving with him as he flew. It would be difficult to conceive a scene less dependent upon any other interest than that of its own secluded and serious beauty; but the writer well remembers the sudden blankness and chill which were cast upon it when he endeavoured, in order more strictly to arrive at the sources of its impressiveness, to imagine it, for a moment, a scene in some aboriginal forest of the New Continent. The flowers in an instant lost their light, the river ...
— Selections From the Works of John Ruskin • John Ruskin |
