"Boyishness" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... something curiously attractive about the young man's personality, something that appealed to her, yet that she felt disposed to resist. That air of the ancient Roman was wonderfully compelling, too compelling for her taste, but then his boyishness counteracted it to a very great degree. There was a hint of sweetness running through his arrogance against which she was not proof. Audacious he might be, but it was a winning species of audacity that probably no woman could condemn. She thought to herself as she returned to her charges ...
— The Bars of Iron • Ethel May Dell
... resemblance, and a note was written to Miss Porter asking her to find and send the picture in question. It came, a cabinet photo of a tall, slender, well-built young fellow with dark eyes and brows and thick, curving lashes and oval, attractive face, despite its boyishness, and nine men out of ten who saw and compared it with the face of the dead declared it looked as though it had been taken for the latter perhaps a year or so agone. Ray had hurt his own case, and, when excused to return to his sister's side, went forth into the gathering twilight stricken with the ...
— Ray's Daughter - A Story of Manila • Charles King
... and twirled his thumbs. He had left his boyishness but not his happiness back in the Markland woods, and it was quite ...
— Dorothy's Travels • Evelyn Raymond
... bigot. He would not hear of religion. I have seen him waste hours of time in argument with all sorts of poor human creatures who understood neither him nor themselves, and he had had the boyishness to dissect and criticise even so small a matter as the riddler's definition of mind. He snorted aloud with zealotry and the lust for intellectual battle. Anything, whatever it was, that seemed to him likely to discourage the continued passionate production of corn and steam-engines ...
— Essays of Travel • Robert Louis Stevenson
... up at him for a moment in silence; he was very tall and straight, and his face retained much of its boyishness, in spite of ...
— Mrs. Wiggs of the Cabbage Patch • Alice Caldwell Hegan
... while retreating from battle with his back towards them? I hope, O Govinda, that, his face did not become cheerless while fighting? He was possessed, O Krishna, of mighty energy. From a spirit of boyishness, that puissant hero, boasting (of his prowess) in my presence, used to speak of his skill (in battle). I hope that boy does not lie on the field, slain deceitfully by Drona and Karna and Kripa and others? Do thou ...
— The Mahabharata of Krishna-Dwaipayana Vyasa, Volume 4 • Kisari Mohan Ganguli
... generally the closest companions, and were alike in having more boyishness, restlessness, and enterprise than their brothers. This winter their ambition was to be at all the meets within five miles, follow up the hunt, and be able to report the fox's death at the end of the day. Indeed, their appetite for whatever bore the name of sport ...
— The Pillars of the House, V1 • Charlotte M. Yonge
... recognition meant nothing, yet it gave Pan a start, a twinge, and then sent a slow heat along his veins. He laughed to find the boyishness of old still alive in him. After eight years of hard life on the ranges! By that sudden resurging of long forgotten emotion Pan judged the nature of what the years had made him. It would be interesting to see ...
— Valley of Wild Horses • Zane Grey
... a little later than this nonsense with the dog, which was a piece of boyishness, a degree of relaxation to the strain of my fight with down-town conditions, that there came in what makes a man think the affairs of this world are not adjusted rightly, and makes recurrent the impulse ...
— The Wolf's Long Howl • Stanley Waterloo
... than a relief to the tedium of a wet Sunday morning. But his incredulity did not survive one glance at Saskia as she stood in that bleak drawing-room among Victorian water-colours and faded chintzes. The young man's boyishness deserted him. He stopped short in his tracks, and made a profound and awkward bow. "I am at your service, Mademoiselle," he said, amazed at himself. The words seemed to have come out of a confused ...
— Huntingtower • John Buchan
... consequence, petted and cosseted me. I like petting; and since everyone seemed agreed to regard me as "the Child in the House"—that was Alicia Wade's nickname, and it clung,—and to like having a child in the house, I began a little to heighten my very real boyishness. There was no harm in it; and if people were fonder of me because I sat upon the floor by preference, and drolly exaggerated what I really thought, it became a sort of public duty to do these things. So I did, and found ...
— The Cords of Vanity • James Branch Cabell et al
... bigness, his great burly figure and plain face, there was something very pleasant about him. He was rough and unpolished, his dress was careless and of colonial cut; and yet one could not fail to see he was a gentleman. His boyishness and fun would have delighted Dick, who was of the same calibre; only Dick was far cleverer, and had more in his little finger than this great lumbering Harry ...
— Not Like Other Girls • Rosa N. Carey
... in which to resume his friendships, arrange to write, at some distant time, a play, revisit his club and his tailor, and revel, as at a pageant, in the fresh beauty, the summer clothes, the white skin and clean-limbed boyishness of English girls. He went through, in a word, the first experiences of most men returned from a long sojourn in other climes; and they were ordinary enough. But the week was made notable for ...
— The Summons • A.E.W. Mason
... boyishness. Why, I'm buying it, upon my honor, simply, believe me, for the glory of it, that Ryabinin, and no one else, should have bought the copse of Oblonsky. And as to the profits, why, I must make what God gives. In God's name. If you would kindly ...
— Anna Karenina • Leo Tolstoy
... to the point of boyishness, even though she was clearly some years older than Geoffrey. She had short hair the color of hammered copper, high cheekbones, and tawny eyes. She was wearing a tunic and short trousers, and there ...
— The Barbarians • John Sentry
... very much of a boy still, was Jimmy Challoner. Perhaps he would never grow up into a man as Kettering and Sangster understood the word; but his very boyishness was what Christine had first loved in him. Perhaps he could have chosen no surer or swifter way to her forgiveness ...
— The Second Honeymoon • Ruby M. Ayres
... was, of a sudden. There was his shyness again, so lamely come upon him that it colored his face. And the halting boyishness of the request had warmed Cecille's face too; warmed her through and through. She knew an impulse to hug his head to her breast, a very ...
— Winner Take All • Larry Evans
... his stead by the unanimous decision of the Danes. But they held an assembly first, and judged that the minority of the king should be taken in charge by guardians, lest the sovereignty should pass away owing to the boyishness of the ruler. For one and all paid such respect to the name and memory of Fridleif, that the royalty was bestowed on his son despite his tender years. So a selection was made, and the brothers Westmar and Koll were summoned ...
— The Danish History, Books I-IX • Saxo Grammaticus ("Saxo the Learned")
... naturally fall upon the books scattered about the tables. The young man knew them all far better than she did, with a cognate knowledge of others of which she had never heard. She found herself in the attitude of receiving information from this boy, whose boyishness, however, seemed to have evaporated, whose tone had changed with the subject, and who now spoke with the conscious reserve of knowledge. Decidedly, she must have grown rusty in her seclusion. This came, she thought bitterly, of living alone; of her husband's ...
— Susy, A Story of the Plains • Bret Harte
... She had tact and ability, otherwise she could never have preserved peace between the contending factions, Belloc and Fabian, old John Grier, the mother and Carnac. She was as though she sought for nothing, wished nothing but the life in which she lived. Yet her wonderful pliability, her joyful boyishness, had behind all a delicate anxiety which only showed in flashes now and then, fully understood by no one except Carnac's mother and old Denzil. These two having suffered strangely in life had realized that the girl was always waiting for a curtain to rise which did not ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker
... was a cold, hard, self-centred woman, not deserving love, and that she had in reality been injurious for her father. She was convinced that, had her own mother lived, with her half-censorious yet wholly loving care for him, he might still have preserved his youth and his handsome boyishness and health. She thought of the half-absurd, half-tragic secret which underlay her life, and she could not honestly think herself very much to blame for that. She always thought of that with bewilderment, as one might think of some dimly remembered vagary of delirium. ...
— By the Light of the Soul - A Novel • Mary E. Wilkins Freeman
... eyes so full of eagle boldness yet so tempered with kindness, and to his own expression came a responsive flash of that winning boyishness which these men had not seen on ...
— The Roof Tree • Charles Neville Buck
... dress the words fell like blows. Then it was that she realized for the first time how ill a crumb can satisfy the hunger which asks for a loaf; that she knew that her body was not the only part of her which was starving. Somewhere on that dark stairway she lost the boyishness out of her nature forever. The thin cheeks were white under their tan when they came again into the light of the guard-room fire; and the blue eyes had in ...
— The Ward of King Canute • Ottilie A. Liljencrantz
... good-looking young fellow of about six-and-twenty; he looks his profession all over, and is a good type of the average young barrister of the present day. He has fair hair, and small, close-cropped whiskers; his face is retrieved from boyishness by strongly-marked and rather heavy features; he studiously affects a solemn and imposing gravity of face and manner, and a severe and elderly style of dress, which he hopes may produce a favourable effect upon the non-legal minds ...
— Vera Nevill - Poor Wisdom's Chance • Mrs. H. Lovett Cameron
... possessing a speaking acquaintance with others at the hotel. But he and Mrs. Longworth had been congenial from their first meeting. In many ways, he was far older than his years, but there was a certain inerradicable boyishness about him ...
— Lucy Maud Montgomery Short Stories, 1907 to 1908 • Lucy Maud Montgomery
... is by no means the only one who ever took apart and put together the family clock, or even a lever-watch, with no other tool than a penknife. One of his inventions, which shows not so much his talent as his true boyishness, was a small box-wagon, open only underneath and with a hole in front, which, suddenly produced before his mother and sisters, ran mysteriously across the room. The motive power concealed within this agreeable toy was found to be ...
— James B. Eads • Louis How
... hair, his humorous smile and wide-awake look. She was not by any means beautiful!—her features were too irregular, her nose too tip-tilted, her mouth too generous for that—but she seemed crisp, clean-cut, and wholesome What first struck O'Neil was her effect of boyishness. From the crown of her plain straw "sailor" to the soles of her sensible walking-boots there was no suggestion of feminine frippery. She wore a plain shirtwaist and a tailored skirt, and her hair was arranged simply. The wave ...
— The Iron Trail • Rex Beach
... I just do!" answered the boy, in whose countenance every trace of boyishness was instantly swallowed up in an intense gaze ...
— Freaks on the Fells - Three Months' Rustication • R.M. Ballantyne
... his father. He had the same clear, dark skin, with regular features and kind, dark eyes, the same abundant, wavy hair, strong, square chin, and incongruous, beauty-loving mouth. He had, too, the lovable boyishness, which never quite leaves some fortunate men. He was studying law in the judge's office, and hoped by another year to be ready to take his examinations. After working hard all day, he found refreshment for ...
— Flower of the Dusk • Myrtle Reed
... back again. She had exchanged her smart rose-sprigged chintz for a pathetic little blue-checked frock of her school-days; the fateful hat had given way to a brown straw "flat," bent like a frame around her charming face. All the girlishness, and indeed a certain honest boyishness of her nature, seemed to have come out in her glowing, freckled cheek, brilliant, audacious eyes, and the quick stride which brought her to ...
— From Sand Hill to Pine • Bret Harte
... His boyishness annoyed Carlotta. She did not want the situation to get out of hand. Moreover, what was so real for her was only too plainly a lark for him. She began to doubt ...
— K • Mary Roberts Rinehart
... he was as quiet and courteous as if nothing had happened; but his mother was compelled to note that the boyishness had departed out of his face, and in its strong lines she recognized his growing resemblance ...
— An Original Belle • E. P. Roe
... an incident truly French and delightful in its boyishness, as mon capitaine hinted that I should ask mon colonel if he would permit mon capitaine to go into town and have dinner with my friend and the admiral and myself, returning in my friend's car in time to proceed to the ...
— My Second Year of the War • Frederick Palmer
... driver and talked in a low tone. Sometimes he sat quiet, looking ahead. He seemed, somehow, older, more careworn. His boyishness had gone. Now and then he turned to ask if she was comfortable, but in the intervals she felt that he had entirely forgotten her. Once, at something Jean said, he got out a pocket map and went over it carefully. It was a long time after that before he turned to see ...
— The Amazing Interlude • Mary Roberts Rinehart
... been Sheldon Corthell, quiet, persuasive, eloquent. Then Landry Court with his exuberance and extravagance and boyishness, and now—unexpectedly—behold, a new element had appeared—this other one, this man of the world, of affairs, mature, experienced, whom she hardly knew. It was charming she told herself, exciting. Life never had seemed half so delightful. ...
— The Pit • Frank Norris
... so have you to HER!" His voice broke down to boyishness. "I've never lost sight of that for a minute. It's been altogether easier for her, though," he threw ...
— The Reef • Edith Wharton
... own immediate associates, the gaiety of his spirits amounted almost to boyishness. He delighted in all sorts of dramatic tricks and disguises; and the lively parties, with which his country-house was always filled, were kept in momentary expectation of some new device for their mystification or amusement. ...
— Memoirs of the Life of Rt. Hon. Richard Brinsley Sheridan Vol 2 • Thomas Moore
... continues," said Wallace, "when he is quite old, to take pleasure in amusements which generally please only young children, that is boyishness of a harmless kind. For example, suppose we should see a boy, eighteen years old, playing marbles a great deal, we should say that he was boyish. So if you were to have a rattle or any other such little toy for a plaything, and should spend a great deal of ...
— Stuyvesant - A Franconia Story • Jacob Abbott
... all others which moved such boys as our hero, who had nothing whatever remarkable about him except excess of boyishness—by which I mean animal life in its fullest measure, good nature and honest impulses, hatred of injustice and meanness, and thoughtlessness enough to sink a three-decker. And so, during the next two years, in which it was more than doubtful whether he ...
— Tom Brown's Schooldays • Thomas Hughes
... and as he looked it seemed to him that her beauty spiced the atmosphere. He found himself drawing in his breath keenly and almost audibly, and gripping the arms of the easy-chair: with a sudden half-amused feeling of boyishness he relaxed his grip and leaned back comfortably. It was some time since the introspective Mr. McNally had found it necessary to reprove himself for ...
— The Short Line War • Merwin-Webster
... tempted to accept and stay, he looked so helpless, in such terrific danger, standing there blinking at them, his eyes vaguely trying to focus, and so mildly blue. His head with the graying hair so closely cropped gave him an odd appearance of boyishness, to which the smart little bow tie added not a little. He was trim, dapper, in spite of the fact that his standing collar was a size or two too large; in spite, too, of the tiny, well-trimmed goatee. He looked like a faun in trouble. With a shadow of distress crossing ...
— Stubble • George Looms
... by the perusal of the letter had momentarily aged it, affording a fleeting glimpse of the man as he might be ten years hence if things should chance to go awry with him—hard and relentless, with more than a suggestion of cruelty. But now, the strain lessened, his face revealed that charm of boyishness which is always curiously attractive in a man who has actually left his boyhood behind him. The mouth above the strong, clean-cut chin was singularly sweet, the grey eyes, alight and ardent, meeting the world with a friendly gaiety of expression that seemed to expect ...
— The Vision of Desire • Margaret Pedler
... found again his youth with his old friend of former times, and with his indestructible boyishness, liked practical jokes and dangers, whipped on the horses, whistled and shouted, "Let her go! Clear ...
— Historical Miniatures • August Strindberg
... an air of responsibility about the younger man, calmness, observation and concentration, very different from his former light-hearted, easy-mannered boyishness. Gard's greeting was affectionate. "Well, boy, what brings you out so early? Taking your responsibilities seriously? And in what can ...
— Out of the Ashes • Ethel Watts Mumford
... to herself, and the last. She wondered, sometimes, if he knew; it seemed incredible that he could be with her, watching her, studying her least look, and not know. Yet, she loved him for not knowing, for his boyishness, his babyishness, his simplicity. She wondered if she were a fairy-woman, who by her arts had beguiled a mortal. She had met an extraordinary woman once, in London, where anyone, however extraordinary, is ...
— Mount Music • E. Oe. Somerville and Martin Ross
... suspicion," I admitted, after a short examination of this beautiful woman's face for the marks of strength which her part in this plot seemed to call for. "But they all vanished before Mrs. Carew's seemingly open manner and the perfect boyishness of the child. ...
— The Millionaire Baby • Anna Katharine Green
... difference in him. This flushed, panting, talkative lad was not the same creature who had sought him in despair and bitterness. He watched in wonder as Freckles mopped the perspiration from his forehead and began to laugh. Then, forgetting all his customary reserve with the Boss, the pent-up boyishness in the lad broke forth. With an eloquence of which he never dreamed he told his story. He talked with such enthusiasm that McLean never took his eyes from his face or shifted in the saddle until he described the strange bird-lover, ...
— Freckles • Gene Stratton-Porter
... and sit down," he said very courteously, but with the boyishness gone from his voice even more ...
— I've Married Marjorie • Margaret Widdemer
... effect to have been accomplished. The work was going on each moment, each hour. He did not reply to his father immediately, but when he did so it was with a certain decision, a firmness, a lack of the old boyishness which ...
— Youth Challenges • Clarence B Kelland
... the boyishness out of me, and this has come and swept it away at one stroke and for ever.—Look here," he said aloud; "look round and see whether it is possible for you to get out—I mean, just think the matter over so that you may be able to contrive to get outside ...
— Trapped by Malays - A Tale of Bayonet and Kris • George Manville Fenn
... was, he towered above him by half a head. His eyes were cool, and gray, and steady, and he carried himself with the peculiar confidence of power that is bred of blood and tradition. His splendid masculinity was emphasized by his excessive boyishness,—he was a mere lad,—and his smooth cheek promised a blush as willingly as the cheek of ...
— Children of the Frost • Jack London
... age, one should be very much a man. One's moustache is confirmed in its place; one has the stature and muscle of a man, a man's tenacity and resistance, while the heart of boyishness still pulses in one's body. It is the age at which capacity is the ally of impulse, when heart and hand go paired in a perfect fraternity. One is as sure of oneself as a woman of thirty, and with as much and as little reason. Goodwin, when he announced that he, ...
— Those Who Smiled - And Eleven Other Stories • Perceval Gibbon
... her hand to the guest. She had the slightly hard beauty of nineteen years and exuberant health; contrasted with Flavia, there was almost a boyishness in her air of assurance and athletic vigor. But in the studied coquetry of her glance at Gerard, the instant desire to allure in response to the allure of this man's good looks, she showed femininity of a type that ...
— From the Car Behind • Eleanor M. Ingram
... they possessed a queer slant or cast which twinkled perpetually now in one, now in the other. It invested him at once with an air singularly remote and singularly determined. But at once when he looked away the old boyishness returned, enhanced further by a certain youthful barbarity in the details of his dress—a slanted heron's feather in his hat, a beaded knife-sheath, an excess of ornamentation on his garters and moccasins, and ...
— The Silent Places • Stewart Edward White
... crisp and boyish, and there was something of boyishness in her manner—if one can apply the term to so dainty a lady. It arose perhaps from an ease, a directness, which disdained the artifices of her sex, and set her on good terms with all the world. To this it may be due that Miss Arabella had reached the ...
— Captain Blood • Rafael Sabatini
... sudden boyishness. "You know me. Never say die! If I thought we ought to give it up would I be trying to find this old bag Valeria Schmitt or whatever her name is? Brogan was right, that's just about as farfetched a notion as has come down the ...
— The Last Straw • William J. Smith
... wondering how on earth he had come to assume, all along, that she was not a woman. He now saw that what he had previously considered boyishness in her was, in fact, simply the vigor and freshness of an earnest, healthy, energetic girl. It dawned upon him that her keen, gray eyes were not sharp, but alert; her mouth, not hard, but resolute; her whole expression, instead of ...
— The Lord of Death and the Queen of Life • Homer Eon Flint
... laughed and played about like a boy, and this childish, frolicsome mood in which he became exceedingly good-natured suited him far better than any other. Olga Mihalovna loved him when he was like that. But his boyishness did not usually last long. It did not this time; after playing with the scythe, he for some reason thought it necessary to take a serious tone ...
— The Party and Other Stories • Anton Chekhov
... life I will," cried Chet, with a hearty boyishness that made Billie's eyes glow. "I'll do everything I can, Sis. I tell you—" he paused as ...
— Billie Bradley and Her Inheritance - The Queer Homestead at Cherry Corners • Janet D. Wheeler
... room when she heard the cry of pain that escaped his lips. He stood in the middle of the floor with the book in his hand. All the boyishness had gone out of his face, which now had the spent look of one who has had a great fright or suffered great pain. The book on solitaire had pierced through his cloudy brain with the thought that his was a solitary part in life, and for a few moments ...
— The Next of Kin - Those who Wait and Wonder • Nellie L. McClung
... illusions and hopes. Monte-Cristo forgot this, and forgot that Esperance was but twenty. He had been kind and loving to Esperance; he had, as he believed, armed him for the battle of life, but he had extinguished his boyishness and engrafted the seeds ...
— The Son of Monte Cristo • Jules Lermina
... agreed the Ranger with a burst of boyishness through his old-man air, "and the Lord pity the chap who has wife ...
— The Freebooters of the Wilderness • Agnes C. Laut
... to be done was to gain admittance to some good office. Mr. Webster was lucky enough to obtain an introduction to Mr. Gore, with whom, as with the rest of the world, that wonderful look and manner, apparent even then, through boyishness and rusticity, stood him in good stead. Mr. Gore questioned him, trusted him, and told him to hang up his hat, begin work as clerk at once, and write to New Hampshire for his credentials. The position ...
— Daniel Webster • Henry Cabot Lodge
... to say the truth, as part of Landor's abiding boyishness. It is only in schoolboy themes that we are still inclined to talk about the devouring love of fame. Grown-up men look rightly with some contempt upon such aspirations. What work a man does is really done in, or at least through, ...
— Hours in a Library - New Edition, with Additions. Vol. II (of 3) • Leslie Stephen
... were different. Humdrum life and habits must be relegated to the background. It was permitted that, unabashed, you be as silly, as frivolous, as inconsequential, as boisterous, as lighthearted, as delightfully irresponsible as your ordinary concealed boyishness pleased. Customary repressions had nothing to do here. This was a celebration! And in the aforementioned our very wise woman ...
— The Gray Dawn • Stewart Edward White
... your own discredit. He is always slighting the general opinion, and wondering why such and such men should be applauded. Commend a good divine, he cries postilling; a philologer, pedantry; a poet, rhiming; a school-man, dull wrangling; a sharp conceit, boyishness; an honest man, plausibility. He comes to publick things not to learn, but to catch, and if there be but one soloecism, that is all he carries away. He looks on all things with a prepared sowerness, ...
— Microcosmography - or, a Piece of the World Discovered; in Essays and Characters • John Earle
... self-contradicting countenance, the duke reflected, as he took him in with a somewhat long look. One did not usually see a face built up of boyishness and maturity, simpleness which was baffling, and a good nature which could be hard. At the moment, it was both of these last at ...
— T. Tembarom • Frances Hodgson Burnett
... burly gamekeeper, as, for the first moment, he had supposed. It was a woman who faced him—a mere girl of twenty, whose slender figure looked somehow boyish in its knitted sports coat and very short, workmanlike skirt. The suggestion of boyishness was emphasized by her attitude, as she stood squarely planted in front of Black Brady, her hands thrust deep into her pockets, her straight young back very flat, and her head a little tilted, so that her eyes might search the surly face ...
— The Hermit of Far End • Margaret Pedler
... while understanding her so little. The mere feeling that she could talk and take pleasure in talking beyond his comprehension wounded him, as a sensitive half-grown boy sometimes suffers real pain when his boyishness shows itself among men. ...
— The Children of the King • F. Marion Crawford
... crowd and showed an interesting profile to Carrie. His forehead was high, his nose rather large and strong, his chin moderately pleasing. He had a good, wide, well-shaped mouth, and his dark-brown hair was parted slightly on one side. He seemed to have the least touch of boyishness to Carrie, and yet he was a man ...
— Sister Carrie • Theodore Dreiser
... And the poet's boyishness demands still further consideration. He has a crude violence of expression which is apt to shock the mature person—some of the descriptions of wounds in the two Battles of Hastings would sicken a butcher; while in another vein such ...
— The Rowley Poems • Thomas Chatterton
... other kind—the cult of the ugly, because, being ugly, it is more real than the beautiful. He has no fear of ugliness, but he cultivates the ugly because it is the real, not the real because it is the ugly. Being to a great extent a satirist and (despite his personal boyishness) saturnine rather than jovial in temperament, there is a good deal in him that is not beautiful. But he can escape into beauty whenever he chooses, and in these escapes he ...
— A History of the French Novel, Vol. 2 - To the Close of the 19th Century • George Saintsbury
... trick of smiling with her eyes when there was no mirth lurking in the corners of her full lips, the same full-throated little laugh that carried the faintest hint of mockery in its thrill. Year by year her slim body lost its unformed boyishness in a new soft roundness which her long outgrown skirt and too scant little waist failed completely to conceal. And the hillsfolk were given to shaking their heads over her now, just as the generation before had done, for to cap it all—the last straw upon the back of their toleration—Dryad ...
— Once to Every Man • Larry Evans
... occasion of the last lecture, Mr. Moggridge had not been satisfied with the colour of the platform. It wanted repainting, and I think it very likely that it was a strain of that boyishness which I hope survives in us all, and one of whose quaint fancies is an envy of house-painters, so happy all day with paint-pot and brush and great smooth boards to dab and smooth, that decided him to do the job himself. Mr. ...
— The Romance of Zion Chapel [3d ed.] • Richard Le Gallienne
... matrons shook their heads. They did not altogether approve of him. He was well enough known for a certain unsteadiness; then, too, there was a boyishness about his look, an irresponsibility which was not general among the hard features of the men they knew. Most of these thought that Eve was rather throwing herself away. They all believed that she would have done far better ...
— The One-Way Trail - A story of the cattle country • Ridgwell Cullum
... the ground, not daring to look at the man who had been brought to her as her future husband. A single glance she had taken as he entered the room, and she had seen at once that he was fair and handsome, that he still had that sweet winsome boyishness of face which makes a girl feel that she need not fear a man,—that the man has something of her own weakness, and need not be treated as one who is wise, grand, or heroic. And she saw too in one glance how different he was from Daniel Thwaite, ...
— Lady Anna • Anthony Trollope
... for the first time how young they both were to be floundering on the main road, himself with several entanglements and money worries, his friend married and with another complication. They were both making a pretty fine hash of things, it seemed, and just for a moment, with something of boyishness that still remained behind his sophistication, he wished that they were both back at Yale, unhampered and unencumbered, their days filled with nothing but honest sport and good lectures and the whole ...
— Who Cares? • Cosmo Hamilton
... pleased with the result of her study. Always frank and likable, Weldon had developed wonderfully during those past months of hard work and slender comfort. Underneath his sunburn, his face had taken on new lines of resolution. His eyes were as clear as ever; but their boyishness was all in the past. It was a man who had come striding into the room, that afternoon, and paused beside her tea-table. And Ethel, looking up, had greeted him as she might have greeted ...
— On the Firing Line • Anna Chapin Ray and Hamilton Brock Fuller
... good-looking. They said No of Tommy when he came back, but it had been an emphatic Yes for Dr. Gemmell. He was tall and very slight, and at twenty-seven, as at twenty-one, despite the growth of a heavy moustache, there was a boyishness about his appearance, which is, I think, what women love in a man more than anything else. They are drawn to him by it, and they love him out of pity when it goes. I suppose it brings back to them some ...
— Tommy and Grizel • J.M. Barrie
... hands that afternoon, one might see that both had aged a little, but he most. Something of the appealing boyishness had gone out of his eyes. He had become her contemporary. A certain moral advantage, too, had passed to his side and she, whose prerogative it had been to take the leading part, now waited for him to begin. As if on honour to do nothing abruptly, he sketched ...
— The Collectors • Frank Jewett Mather
... swallow something of upward tendency, were the only signs of her discomposure, and none of them were observed by her mother or her guest. Could she have known, however, what feelings had already begun to rouse themselves in the mind of him whose boyishness was an offence to her, she would have found it more difficult to ...
— St. George and St. Michael • George MacDonald
... is not all hardness. He surprises me, now and then, by disturbing little gestures of boyishness. He announced to me the other night that the only way to get any use out of a worn-out husband was to revamp him, with the accent on the vamp. I understood what he meant, and I think I actually changed color a trifle. But I know of nothing more desolating than trying ...
— The Prairie Child • Arthur Stringer
... boyishness of his nature in the devotion with which he threw himself first into bicycling, then into motoring, and then into flying. He loves machinery. He loves every game which involves physical risk and makes severe demands on courage. His love of England is not his ...
— The Mirrors of Downing Street - Some Political Reflections by a Gentleman with a Duster • Harold Begbie
... is that they are both self-engrossed, but women can dissemble and men cannot. It is another proof of their invincible boyishness, this total inability to pretend interest. Even the averagest man is no hypocrite. He tries it sometimes, and fails pitifully. The successful male dissembler is generally a crook. But the most honest woman in the world is often driven to pretense, ...
— 'Oh, Well, You Know How Women Are!' AND 'Isn't That Just Like a Man!' • Irvin Shrewsbury Cobb
... shortcomings in this respect are due to the fact that she is lamentably unaffected. Affectation, in the case of girls who ride straight and don't know what it is to have a headache, very often takes the form of boyishness. Let us console ourselves with the fact that, being perfectly natural, Jane has ...
— Peter and Jane - or The Missing Heir • S. (Sarah) Macnaughtan
... a moment. He was wondering whether Valentine could possibly be serious. But his face was serious, even eager. There was an unwonted stain of red on his smooth, usually pale cheeks. A certain wild boyishness had stolen over him, a reckless devil danced in his blue eyes. Julian caught the infection of ...
— Flames • Robert Smythe Hichens
... stony look. It was as if something had sponged all the boyishness from his face. Still trying to get him to give away his partners in the rustling, were they? Well, he would show them he could take his medicine ...
— Crooked Trails and Straight • William MacLeod Raine
... them in the spell of his infectious deviltries. Irrepressibly gay, impish, it seemed as if he vented all of the stored up boyishness in him, spilled it in one heaping measure. Story followed story, in quickly shifting brogues that rocked the building with the sidesore laughter of the transported audience; they followed him through ...
— Terry - A Tale of the Hill People • Charles Goff Thomson
... as he spoke, and Ned suddenly felt a strong liking for him. He was not young and, despite his buckskin dress and careless grammar, there was something of the man of the world about him. But he seemed to have a certain boyishness of spirit ...
— The Texan Scouts - A Story of the Alamo and Goliad • Joseph A. Altsheler
... quietly as he was able. Then the boyishness pent up within him came bursting out once more. "Listen, mother," he said impetuously. "Really, this thing has got to be talked out between us to the very dregs. We may as well face it now as ever, and come to the final conclusion. I know you started ...
— The Brentons • Anna Chapin Ray
... was frankly amused by the streak of boyishness in him—the perfectly transparent desire of this young man to detain her in conversation. And, still amused, she leaned back against the rail. If he wanted to talk to her she would let him—even help him. ...
— The Crimson Tide • Robert W. Chambers
... Then why had she? Her first surprise and bewilderment at so wholly unpremeditated an act gave way to consternation as she considered its consequences. She knew that Burning Daylight was not a man to be trifled with, that under his simplicity and boyishness he was essentially a dominant male creature, and that she had pledged herself to a future of inevitable stress and storm. And again she demanded of herself why she had said yes at the very moment when it had ...
— Burning Daylight • Jack London
... eager a life in the triple world of Reality, Books, and Waking Dreams, that Maggie was strangely old for her years in everything except in her entire want of that prudence and self-command which were the qualities that made Tom manly in the midst of his intellectual boyishness. And now her lot was beginning to have a still, sad monotony, which threw her more than ever on her inward self. Her father was able to attend to business again, his affairs were settled, and he was acting as Wakem's manager on the old spot. Tom went to and fro ...
— The Mill on the Floss • George Eliot
... remarkable in his intellect. In Sicily she did not cease from realizing this, but she felt about it differently. In Sicily she actually loved and rejoiced in Delarey's mental shortcomings because they seemed to make for freshness, for boyishness, to link him more closely with the spring in their Eden. She adored in him something that was pagan, some spirit that seemed to shine on her from a dancing, playful, light-hearted world. And here in Sicily she presently grew to know that she would be a little saddened ...
— The Call of the Blood • Robert Smythe Hichens
... robust as well as tall, and Stephen thought she looked rather like a handsome Spanish boy; yet she was feminine enough in her outlines. It was the frank and daring expression of her face and great black eyes which gave the look of boyishness. She had thick, straight eyebrows, a large mouth that was beautiful when she smiled, to show perfect teeth between the red lips that had a faint, shadowy line of down ...
— The Golden Silence • C. N. Williamson and A. M. Williamson
... the day's fierce burning was upon him. He understood hate and death, the thirst to kill; the slow ruin that comes at first to the human mind, suddenly cut off from the one held more dear than life. It seemed all boyish dazzle that he had ever found loveliness in this place. That boyishness had passed. In this hour he saw only hatred ahead and mockery, if Carlin—. . . but the far dim peak of misty ...
— Son of Power • Will Levington Comfort and Zamin Ki Dost
... fighter. "I was ever," as he says, "a fighter." His faults, a certain occasional fierceness and grossness, were the faults that are counted as virtues among navvies and sailors and most primitive men. His virtues, boyishness and absolute fidelity, and a love of plain words and things are the virtues which are counted as vices among the aesthetic prigs who pay him the greatest honour. He had his more objectionable side, like other men, but it had nothing to do with literary egotism. ...
— Robert Browning • G. K. Chesterton
... had known his father, Theo had never seemed to her to lack personality; he was young, but his very boyishness was individual. Yet now with Joyselle clamouring for her to fix her wedding-day, Theo seemed to fade into insignificance, and her task to become that of breaking the news of her intended rupture with the son, ...
— The Halo • Bettina von Hutten
... sharply turned his face upwards. It was haggard and drawn and ghastly, but even then its boyishness remained. ...
— The Way of an Eagle • Ethel M. Dell
... however, not unfairly introduce a very few considerations on the side of Keats's letters which is not so good. All but idolaters acknowledge a certain boyishness in him—a boyishness which is in fact no mean source contributary of his charm in verse. It is perhaps not always quite so charming in prose, and especially in letters. You do not want self-criticism of an obviously second-thought kind in them. But you do want that less obtrusive ...
— A Letter Book - Selected with an Introduction on the History and Art of Letter-Writing • George Saintsbury
... had paled to an ivory tone, the features had a cameo sharpness and purity of outline; cheeks and chin were covered with a heavy, jet-black beard,—as if his countenance were in morning for its lost boyishness. And out of this thin, quiet, black-haired, black-bearded face looked a pair of golden eyes of an almost intolerable clarity. Don Pedro Mrs. Hemingway called him laughingly, and El Conquistador. Secretly, she was immensely ...
— The Purple Heights • Marie Conway Oemler
... read with the generous enthusiasm of a boy; but as the reader knows, it was but the first act of the piece. The letters, vivid as they are, written as they were by a hand trembling with fear and excitement, yet do injustice, in their boyishness of tone, to the profound effect produced. At the sound of these songs and shot of cannon, the boy's mind awoke. He dated his own appreciation of the art of acting from the day when he saw and heard ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson, Volume 9 • Robert Louis Stevenson
... specimen of epistolary writing that Frederick is still a boy, and if I had given the letter in extenso, the boyishness would have been even more apparent, in the loose and careless style as well ...
— Frederick Chopin as a Man and Musician - Volume 1-2, Complete • Frederick Niecks
... hard laugh. "Are we tigers?" he asked, and he pulled himself back and leaned, shaking, against a tree-trunk, gripping it with his hands. His blue eyes were cold and blazing in his white face, against which Hugh's blow had made a mark. "You won't strike me again," Pete said. All boyishness was gone from his hard, level voice. "Go on. Say what you ...
— Snow-Blind • Katharine Newlin Burt
... confined to the pursuers of literature and art. I had a few other friends, especially one old school-fellow, William Shaw, afterwards an able London solicitor. His mind was an odd compound of manly sense in everything connected with his profession, and boyishness in other ways. He always retained that boyishness, which was probably an excellent thing for him as a relaxation from serious cares. He took little interest in the fine arts, but at a later period he had the wonderful goodness to give house-room to some of my unpopular and unsalable ...
— Philip Gilbert Hamerton • Philip Gilbert Hamerton et al
... not, perhaps, made his declaration with that propriety of language in which such scenes are generally described as being carried on. Ladies may perhaps think that Mary should have been deterred, by the very boyishness of his manner, from thinking at all seriously on the subject. His "will you, won't you—do you, don't you?" does not sound like the poetic raptures of a highly inspired lover. But, nevertheless, there ...
— Doctor Thorne • Anthony Trollope
... Buoyant, good-natured, never easily abashed, his maturity and savoir faire were accentuated by the smallness of his stature. His blue eyes and his dark, abundant hair heightened his physical charm of boyishness; his virile movements, his face, heavy-browed, round, and strong, and his well-formed, uncommonly large head gave him an aspect of intellectual power. He had a truly Napoleonic trick of attaching men to his fortunes. He was a born ...
— Stephen Arnold Douglas • William Garrott Brown
... little while for lunch he showed the thoughtfulness and care for her comfort that many an older man might not have had. Even his talk was a mixture of boyishness and experience and he seemed to know her thoughts before she had ...
— A Voice in the Wilderness • Grace Livingston Hill
... 'pantheist,' a 'polytheist,' a Pagan, or a God knows what (and indeed I care very little so it be not a 'Student of Theology'), I would have permitted their dishonesty to pass unnoticed, through pure contempt of the boyishness—for the turn-down-shirt-collar-ness of their tone:—but, as it is, you will pardon me, Mr. Editor, that I have been compelled to expose a 'critic' who courageously preserving his own anonymosity, takes advantage of my absence from the city to misrepresent, ...
— International Miscellany of Literature, Art and Science, Vol. 1, - No. 3, Oct. 1, 1850 • Various
... with a great deal of boyishness in his defiance, "I do know it, Hester, but it is those who have been through the fire who can sometimes come out—new. It was your ...
— The Vertical City • Fannie Hurst
... numbers upon the doors. He was square and deep and broad, like a bottle of Geneva, with a large ruddy face and a pair of bright black eyes, which were shrewd and critical, and yet had a merry twinkle of eternal boyishness in their depths. Bushy side whiskers, shot with grey, flanked his rubicund visage, and he threw out his feet as he walked with the air of a man who is on good terms with himself and ...
— The Firm of Girdlestone • Arthur Conan Doyle
... first came out to France; and the younger men, all those lieutenants who had come quite recently from Sandhurst and Stonyhurst, and public schools in England, with the fine imperturbable manner of their class and caste, hiding their boyishness under a mask of gravity, and not giving themselves away by the slightest exuberance of speech or gesture, but maintaining stiff upper lips under a square quarter of an inch of fair bristles, went into this ...
— The Soul of the War • Philip Gibbs
... effort to face the situation as it affected herself and Laurence. Life without Laurence! The bare thought of it tested her heart and showed her how inalienably it belonged to him. But under all his lovingness and his boyishness, Laurence had a sternness, a ruggedness as adamantine as one of Cromwell's Iron-sides. With him to know would be to act. Well—he mustn't know. It terrified her to think of just what ...
— Slippy McGee, Sometimes Known as the Butterfly Man • Marie Conway Oemler
... he had said to Beatrice, as they had spoken of his presence of mind, and his enthusiasm had rung like a last echo of his old boyishness. "I can not understand why Travers seems to dislike ...
— The Native Born - or, The Rajah's People • I. A. R. Wylie
... By nothing worse than boyishness. You confirm what my aunt tells me, that there has never been a serious ...
— Dynevor Terrace (Vol. I) - or, The Clue of Life • Charlotte M. Yonge
... the neat, small features, the nose a little inclined to tilt, a soft and almost girlish fairness of complexion, and the smooth and remarkable gold hair that give him the suggestion of extreme boyishness—these ...
— Westward with the Prince of Wales • W. Douglas Newton
... they went to wander among the ruins of the outposts of the old Roman republic, and make Fourth of July speeches in honor of the great new Republic beyond the sea. Those who have been novices themselves will not be surprised at the boyishness of these three manly characters ...
— Life of Father Hecker • Walter Elliott
... her peculiar short, low laugh, that, like everything she said and did, had something a little mocking in it. It was curiously at variance with her boyishness. You could not say she was masculine, but there was a something stripped away from her which most people class as feminineness. Joy wondered if it was softness she missed—pity, perhaps, or tenderness. She was, at least, brilliant to the last degree ...
— The Wishing-Ring Man • Margaret Widdemer
... the going out of the light, the opening of the stove door, had all happened in a minute, but the interval was long enough to bring a change in Billy's voice. It was cold and hard when he continued. He leaned over toward Brokaw, and the boyishness had gone ...
— Back to God's Country and Other Stories • James Oliver Curwood
... subject: take hold of it, and it will steady and lead you on: you will know in what direction to look. Not one boy in a hundred does avail himself of this assistance; your boy is not solitary in his inaccuracy; all boys are more or less inaccurate, because they are boys; boyishness of mind means inaccuracy. Boys cannot deliver a message, or execute an order, or relate an occurrence, without a blunder. They do not rouse up their attention and reflect: they do not like the trouble ...
— The Idea of a University Defined and Illustrated: In Nine - Discourses Delivered to the Catholics of Dublin • John Henry Newman
... extraordinary than all else. It was that of a young person, of a hot-headed boy. But WHAT a boy he must be! What an unlicked, impudent, arrogant young cub! The boyishness was evident in every line, in the underscored words, the pitiful attempt at dignity and the silly veiled threats. He was so insistent upon the statement that he was not a beggar. And yet he could write a begging ...
— Kent Knowles: Quahaug • Joseph C. Lincoln
... symbolic potency, which belongs to legendary beings. That there remains a discrepancy between the boy-page and the music made for him, can be conceded without danger to my theory; for the music made for Cherubino is meant to interpret his psychical condition, and is independent of his boyishness ...
— Sketches and Studies in Italy and Greece, Complete - Series I, II, and III • John Symonds
... smile that smooth superior smile at me. But Carol's different— she's square, she is; she's just top-hole—if you know what I mean—she's the finest ever," finished Miss Sartoris, with a carefully calculated boyishness, "and what I mean to say is, she's never had ...
— The Heart of Rachael • Kathleen Norris
... tuft-hunter. "Mat had queerish eyes," writes his protege: "they projected like those of some insects, and were flattish on the orbit. His person was extremely small and boyish—he was indeed the least man I ever saw, to be strictly well and neatly made. . . This boyishness went through life with him. He was a child and a spoiled child, but a child of high imagination; and so he wasted himself on ghost stories and German romances. He had the finest ear for rhythm I ever met with—finer ...
— A History of English Romanticism in the Eighteenth Century • Henry A. Beers
... a typical English country girl, strictly tailor-made in her appearance, with a predisposition towards stiff linen collars and neat ties. In figure she was slight almost to boyishness and she had no pretensions whatever to good looks, but there was nevertheless something frank and wholesome and sweet about her—something of the charm of a nice boy—that counterbalanced her undeniable plainness. As she had once ...
— The Splendid Folly • Margaret Pedler
... to inform you," he said with a bow that might almost be called stately, so much had the tall, slender figure lost its boyishness, "that Miss Bristol is my fiancee, and as such it is my business to protect her. I must ask you both to publicly apologize before your sorority for what happened ...
— Cloudy Jewel • Grace Livingston Hill
... them, telling what are their weight and value, plain for every one to see. But of course there are many ways in which a book, sermon, or essay may be bad without being Vealy. It may be dull, stupid, illogical, and the like, and yet have nothing of boyishness about it. It may be insufferably bad, yet quite mature. Beef may be bad, and yet undoubtedly Beef. And the question now is, not so much whether there be a standard of what is in a literary sense good or bad, as whether ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 8, No. 46, August, 1861 • Various
... had begun anew. How could she ever begin anew? The fact of this man talking of everything as destiny—of the slaughter, the misery, as destiny—was the worst mockery of all. Yet he was true to himself. His enjoyed facility of fervid expression, his boyishness, his gift of making the lived moment the greatest of his life, was the very gift she had craved to make her forget her yesterdays. Only faintly did she hear his next outburst, until he came ...
— The Last Shot • Frederick Palmer
... the doorway to hurt her much. What she could not bear was that their happy evening should be spoiled by hard and cruel words at its close. Bob's face, that had been so merry, was sterner than she had ever seen it, all its boyishness gone. She put up her own face, and ...
— Back To Billabong • Mary Grant Bruce
... entertainment of the public. Perhaps it may be thought that she has seldom written anything more brilliant; and that, independent of the original manner in which the denouement is brought about, the pictures of Charles Musgrove's good-natured boyishness and of his wife's jealous selfishness would have been incomplete without these finishing strokes. The cancelled chapter exists in manuscript. It is certainly inferior to the two which were substituted ...
— Jane Austen, Her Life and Letters - A Family Record • William Austen-Leigh and Richard Arthur Austen-Leigh
... back, proudly proving to himself and to them that his individual force was inexhaustible. That straightening of the shoulders always affected Hilda as something wistful, as almost pathetic in its confident boyishness. It made her feel maternal and say to herself (but not in words) with a sort of maternal superiority: "How brave he is, poor thing!" Yes, in her heart she would apply the epithet 'poor thing' to this ...
— Hilda Lessways • Arnold Bennett
... probable, for it grew wilder and wilder, appearing to lead to the very heart of the Sierra Toledo—a huge ridge traversing Spain. By human foot it had evidently been seldom trod; yet on this particular evening a traveller there wended his solitary way. His figure was slight to boyishness, but of fair proportion, and of such graceful agility of movement, that the obstacles in his path, which to others of stouter mould and heavier step might have been of serious inconvenience, appeared by him as unnoticed as unfelt. The deep plume of ...
— The Vale of Cedars • Grace Aguilar
... what a girl who—who wrote your play was like exactly, and because I couldn't find out I have kept on trying. Now—now, by George, I know," he said, with a boyishness coming into his murky eyes. "Say, you know my mother was a Kentucky girl, and I guess that is one reason I have stuck by this fool—this 'Purple Slipper.' That and wanting ...
— Blue-grass and Broadway • Maria Thompson Daviess
... The unfading boyishness of hope and its vigorous irrationality are nowhere better displayed than in questions of conduct. There is a character in the PILGRIM'S PROGRESS, one Mr. LINGER-AFTER-LUST with whom I fancy we are all on speaking terms; one famous among the famous for ingenuity ...
— Virginibus Puerisque • Robert Louis Stevenson
... than as regards the other expressions of predatory emulation already spoken of, that the temperament which inclines men to them is essentially a boyish temperament. The addiction to sports, therefore, in a peculiar degree marks an arrested development of the man's moral nature. This peculiar boyishness of temperament in sporting men immediately becomes apparent when attention is directed to the large element of make-believe that is present in all sporting activity. Sports share this character of make-believe with ...
— The Theory of the Leisure Class • Thorstein Veblen
... his voice. But his mute, fluttering lips were infinite proof of the vow he could not speak. The boyishness, the stunted moral force, replaced the manhood in him then. He was only a factor in the lives of others, protected even from this Nemesis by the greatness of his ...
— The Mysterious Rider • Zane Grey
... the spell was broken. Hugging his parcel dangerously close he raced back to the shelter of the trees and waited. High over head the house opened a bright eye at him. He waved back at it with an absurd, incredible boyishness. ...
— The Dark House • I. A. R. Wylie
... her wearily, he arose mechanically, he placed his little gray checked cap on the back of his yellow curls, the old-time laughter was dead in the blue eyes that now looked scared and haunted, the boyishness and the dimples crept away for ever from the lips that quivered like a child's; he turned from her, but she had looked once into his face as the Law Giver must have looked at the land of Canaan outspread at his feet. She watched him go down ...
— The Moccasin Maker • E. Pauline Johnson |
