"Frigidity" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... written in heroic or blank verse. These tours de force were supported by minute efforts in miniature-painting, by touch applied to touch, and were often monuments of industry, but they were apt to lack personal interest, and to suffer from a general and deplorable frigidity. They were infected with the faults which accompany an artificial style; they were monotonous, rhetorical and symmetrical, while the uniformity of treatment which was inevitable to their plan rendered them hopelessly tedious, if they were prolonged ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 8, Slice 2 - "Demijohn" to "Destructor" • Various
... of the sexual excitability in women has nothing in common with their character; it may be associated with high intelligence, with high moral and aesthetic qualities, and even with a strong will. On the other hand, deficiency in moral sense and will may occur with sexual frigidity, and, as we have already seen, may lead to sexual excess without any voluptuous sensation, in accordance with the peculiarities of feminine sentiment. These facts show how complex are the causes of a given effect in the ...
— The Sexual Question - A Scientific, psychological, hygienic and sociological study • August Forel
... the document into the bosom of her dress. "There will be no duplicate." The frigidity of her tones would have congealed the blood of an ordinary rascal. But Steinbock ...
— The Princess Elopes • Harold MacGrath
... has been very successful in Wagnerian roles, makes a superb Elsa, and, in the "Meistersinger," an ideal Eva. During her early years on the stage her extreme calmness amounted almost to aggravating frigidity, but with time she has thawed. She may well be considered a conscientious artist ...
— For Every Music Lover - A Series of Practical Essays on Music • Aubertine Woodward Moore
... had amused herself by watching the small coteries of stiff and starched Britons scattered throughout the room; she was endeavoring to classify the traveled and the untraveled by varying degrees of frigidity. As it happened, she was wholly wrong in her rough analysis. The Englishman who has wandered over the map is, if anything, more self-contained than his stay-at-home brother. He is often a stranger in his own land, and the dozen most reserved ...
— Cynthia's Chauffeur • Louis Tracy
... was not present at the time," said Mrs. Saltillo, rebuking my eagerness with a gentle frigidity, "I am unable to do so. Anything else would be mere hearsay, and more or less ex parte. I do ...
— Stories in Light and Shadow • Bret Harte
... to live much under water without respiration, especially because the cold of the water penetrates their bodies and so they generally all die from haemorrhages, oppression of the chest caused by staying such long stretches of time without breathing; and from dysentery caused by the frigidity. 40. Their hair, which is by nature black, changes to an ashen colour like the skin of seals, and nitre comes out from their shoulders so that they resemble human monsters of some species. 41. With this insupportable toil, or rather, infernal ...
— Bartholomew de Las Casas; his life, apostolate, and writings • Francis Augustus MacNutt
... He is not long soft and pathetick without some idle conceit, or contemptible equivocation. He no sooner begins to move, than he counteracts himself; and terrour and pity, as they are rising in the mind, are checked and blasted by sudden frigidity. ...
— Preface to Shakespeare • Samuel Johnson
... cold air stung her face as with a lash. But she was out of the direct course of the blast as it came shrilly fluttering from over the roof, and she could maintain her position, although she could scarcely breathe in the keen frigidity. Snow had fallen, deeper than she had ever seen. With it had come that strange quality of visibility that seems to appertain to a sheeted world like an inherent luminosity; or was it perchance some vague diffusion of light from the clouded moon, skulking affrighted ...
— The Ordeal - A Mountain Romance of Tennessee • Charles Egbert Craddock
... of the subtlest ornaments of style, and even when fulfilling no particular purpose is capable of imparting a luxuriant and somewhat rococo richness to the verse. The effect, however, is frequently one of unrelieved frigidity, as in ...
— Pastoral Poetry and Pastoral Drama - A Literary Inquiry, with Special Reference to the Pre-Restoration - Stage in England • Walter W. Greg
... asked for Mrs. Miller at her hotel. This lady and her daughter, however, were not at home; and on the next day after, repeating his visit, Winterbourne again had the misfortune not to find them. Mrs. Walker's party took place on the evening of the third day, and, in spite of the frigidity of his last interview with the hostess, Winterbourne was among the guests. Mrs. Walker was one of those American ladies who, while residing abroad, make a point, in their own phrase, of studying European society, and she had on this occasion collected several specimens of her diversely born fellow ...
— Daisy Miller • Henry James
... ultimately gave her name to the place of punishment precious to the Calvinistic mind. And because the Norseman very much disliked the bitter, cruel cold of the long winter, his heaven was a warm, well-fired abode, and his place of punishment one of terrible frigidity. Somewhere on the other side of the Tweed and Cheviots was the spot selected by the Celt of southern Britain. On the other hand, the eastern mind, which knew the terrors of a sun-smitten land and of a heat that was torture, had for a hell a fiery ...
— A Book of Myths • Jean Lang
... I shall melt and be mailed in this letter as a spot if I do not surcease. May you be blest with frigidity, a blessing far removed from my hope. Of course I must be warmly, nay, hotly ...
— Early Letters of George Wm. Curtis • G. W. Curtis, ed. George Willis Cooke
... struggle. In October it began, and in November its empire was established. During December, January, February, March, and April it reigned unmolested, in steadfast bitterness; enclosing in its icy bands, and retaining in torpid frigidity, the whole inanimate and vegetable creation. But in May its powerful enemy, caloric, made a decided attack upon the empire, and dealt hoary ...
— Hudson Bay • R.M. Ballantyne
... presented him an early copy, and I never lost faith in my own senses until I saw him sit down and go to reading it in cold blood—saw him open the book, and heard him read these following lines, with the same inflectionless judicial frigidity with which he always read his charge to the jury, or administered ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... horse, Albemarle, and early in the afternoon he arrived at the widow Keswick's gate. He had looked for a stormy reception, in which the thunder-bolts of rage should burst around him, and he was surprised, therefore, to be received with the frigidity ...
— The Late Mrs. Null • Frank Richard Stockton
... an inexpressible feeling of exultation that I drove off with her. At last we were alone together, and would be so for hours. The frigidity which had grown up within her during the last two months might possibly be relaxed now under the influence of this closer association. My heart beat fast. I talked rapidly about every thing. In my excitement I ...
— The Lady of the Ice - A Novel • James De Mille
... the frigidity of the subchief where he had expected gratitude or at least hospitality, glanced questioningly at Yuara. But the young man stood ...
— The Pathless Trail • Arthur O. (Arthur Olney) Friel
... morning Louis by a fine frigidity would have tried to show to the obtuse Axon that he resented such demeanour towards himself on the part of an Axon, assuming as it did that the art-director of the works was one of the servile crew that scuttled about in ...
— The Price of Love • Arnold Bennett
... growing very cold; there was a bite to the foul air, and moisture from the red mist was frosting his beard. The liberation of the tiny planet and consequent shifting of the terminator was bringing frigidity to Vulcan's Workshop. ...
— Vulcan's Workshop • Harl Vincent
... answer, he could only leave her, and her failure to ask him to write hurt as much as the frigidity of the leave-taking. ...
— The Dude Wrangler • Caroline Lockhart
... we can say that his were feelings founded upon interest-moving in the foremost elements of secession-arbitrary, self-willed, and easily swayed by prejudice-a man known to the public and the bar for his frigidity, bound in his own opinions, and yielding second to the wishes and principles of none-fearful of his popularity as a judge, yet devoid of those sterling principles which deep jurists bring to their aid when considering ...
— Manuel Pereira • F. C. Adams
... insignificance by the side of this girl's ride on the ice cream freezer. If the young man had exhibited foresight, and had a side saddle buckled on to the ice cream freezer, the experience would have been robbed of much of its frigidity, or if there had been a thick blanket under the saddle, but he failed to take even ...
— Peck's Sunshine - Being a Collection of Articles Written for Peck's Sun, - Milwaukee, Wis. - 1882 • George W. Peck
... pretensions to Grace, and so get the thing past and done with. For though Giles had in a measure acquiesced in the wish of her family, he could make matters unpleasant if he chose to work upon Grace; and hence, when Melbury saw the young man approaching along the road one day, he kept friendliness and frigidity exactly balanced in his eye till he could see whether Giles's manner was presumptive ...
— The Woodlanders • Thomas Hardy
... have been some truth in the remark of one of his contemporaries that he could charm ten thousand men in a public speech but meet them individually and send every one away his enemy. His manner, even to senators and representatives of his own party, was reserved to the point of frigidity. When he granted requests for patronage he was so ungracious as to anger the recipients of favor. Although his personal character and integrity were as unquestioned as those of Hayes, and although he was a man of cultured tastes, well-informed, thoughtful ...
— The United States Since The Civil War • Charles Ramsdell Lingley
... respectability. It is an advantage for young people of both sexes, which cannot be too highly appreciated, to have judicious, and especially parental advisers. Let them not impute their kind suggestions to the frigidity of age when they do not keep pace with their own warm feelings, but consider that they are likely to know more of the world, and to deserve their attention after amassing a stock of experience. Why should their good advice, or even their urgent importunity, be deemed officious or be treated with ...
— Female Scripture Biographies, Vol. I • Francis Augustus Cox
... care of supplying the plates of his guests, he had eye, ear, and tongue for every one, and leisure to direct the conversation into what channel he pleased. He took care to turn it for some time on indifferent topics; and each man lost his reserve and his frigidity almost before he was aware; so that, by the time dinner was fairly over, every one was ready for animated conversation. If any one began to have queer suspicions of his neighbors, he felt, as on board ship, that he was ...
— The Eclipse of Faith - Or, A Visit To A Religious Sceptic • Henry Rogers
... by misunderstanding of motives, by lack of sympathy, by indifference and coldness; such hours came not infrequently to Rosalind and myself in the old days before we set out for the Forest. We found unfailing consolation and strength in our common faith and purpose, but the frigidity of the atmosphere made us conscious at times of the effort one puts forth to simply sustain the life of his ideals, the charm and sweetness of those secret hopes which feed the soul. What must it be to live among those who are quick to recognise nobility of motive, to conspire with aspiration, ...
— Under the Trees and Elsewhere • Hamilton Wright Mabie
... it slipped occasionally aside, and revealed glimpses of the volcanic passion that raged beneath. Jeanne was not for a moment deceived; and Marie de la Tour, the first time she again saw him, perceived with woman's intuitive quickness through all his assumed frigidity of speech and demeanour, that his sentiments towards her, so far from being subdued by the mortifying repulse they had met with, were more vehemently passionate than ever! He was a man, she felt, to be feared and shunned; and very earnestly did she warn Bertrand to avoid meeting, or, at all events, ...
— Chambers's Edinburgh Journal, No. 459 - Volume 18, New Series, October 16, 1852 • Various
... them his darkly luminous gaze glowed upon Terry. To escape their warmth she sent her own gaze past him to encounter the arctic stare of the large blonde person who had been included so lamely in the introduction. And at that the frigidity of that stare softened, ...
— Cheerful—By Request • Edna Ferber
... crime. Very excellent people hereabouts remember the many dynasties in which the Southern character has been predominant, and contrast the genial courtesy, the warm and graceful freedom of that region, with what they call (though I utterly disagree with them) the frigidity of our Northern manners, and the Western plainness of the President. They have a conscientious, though mistaken belief, that the South was driven out of the Union by intolerable wrong on our part, and that we are responsible for having compelled true patriots to love only half their country ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 10, No. 57, July, 1862 - A Magazine Of Literature, Art, And Politics • Various
... the artists and writers who frequented the house. Thus it was only in the presence of something extremely insulting that she again showed herself the last of the Vaugelades, and would all at once draw herself up and display haughty contempt and frigidity. ...
— Fruitfulness - Fecondite • Emile Zola
... dreary sanctuary is one of Titian's great paintings, The Martyrdom of St. Lawrence, to which (though it is so cunningly disposed as to light that no one ever yet saw the whole picture at once) you turn involuntarily, envious of the Saint toasting so comfortably on his gridiron amid all that frigidity. ...
— Venetian Life • W. D. Howells
... clear line of difference divided like a tangible fence her experience within this maze of motion from her experience without it. Her beginning to dance had been like a change of atmosphere; outside, she had been steeped in arctic frigidity by comparison with the tropical sensations here. She had entered the dance from the troubled hours of her late life as one might enter a brilliant chamber after a night walk in a wood. Wildeve by himself would have been ...
— The Return of the Native • Thomas Hardy
... lava torrent of burning words.” He possessed many of the qualities necessary to debate: concentration, the power of pouncing upon the weak spot in his adversary’s argument, and above all a wonderful memory. What he lacked was that calm and calculating frigidity so necessary to the successful debater. Instead of freezing his opponent to silence with deliberate logic, he would strive rather by the tempestuous quality of his rhetoric to hurl him into ...
— Old Familiar Faces • Theodore Watts-Dunton
... he met her on somebody's doorstep, and she, who was taking her departure, greeted him with some slight frigidity. He merely looked at her with a momentary twinkle in his eye, and said, "I think you had me there." Some days later she received yet another letter from him, which ...
— Memoirs of Life and Literature • W. H. Mallock
... style of "Paradise Regained" is a fertile theme for the critics. It is, indeed, carried to the verge of baldness; frigidity, used by Pattison, is too strong a word. This does not seem to be any token of a decay of poetical power. As writers advance in life their characteristics usually grow upon them, and develop into mannerisms. In "Paradise ...
— Life of John Milton • Richard Garnett
... 'contemporaries'. Milton did not escape it; and it was adduced with virulence against Gray and Collins. We now hear no more of it, not that their poems are better understood at present, than they were at their first publication; but their fame is established; and a critic would accuse him self of frigidity or, inattention, who should profess not to understand them: but a living writer is yet sub judice; and if we cannot follow his conceptions or enter into his feelings, it is more consoling to our pride to consider him as lost beneath, than ...
— The Life of Samuel Taylor Coleridge - 1838 • James Gillman
... leave and to bear off Florence, which she had long been thirsting to do. The move on her part roused Mr Dombey, whose eyes were fixed on Paul. After patting him on the head, and pressing his small hand again, he took leave of Doctor Blimber, Mrs Blimber, and Miss Blimber, with his usual polite frigidity, and ...
— Dombey and Son • Charles Dickens
... room. She had never seen Pansy's guardian before (the executor had brought the child); and this extraordinary creature, whose visit she could not deny, might be ruinous to school discipline. It was therefore with an extra degree of frigidity of demeanor that she threw open the door of the reception room, and entered majestically. But to her utter astonishment, the colonel met her with a bow so stately, so ceremonious, and so commanding that she ...
— Trent's Trust and Other Stories • Bret Harte
... with infinite patience, severe conscientiousness, and imperturbable frigidity in a style that was pure, though somewhat prolix, that History of Florence, virtually a history of Italy, which from its first appearance was hailed as a classic and has remained one. His history is altogether that of a statesman; ...
— Initiation into Literature • Emile Faguet
... Felton, of Harvard, and the party made an evening's entertainment out of them." This last sentence is the one I allude to; and were it not for fear of appearing too fanciful I should say that these few words were, to the initiated mind, an unconscious expression of the lonely frigidity which characterised most attempts at social recreation in the New England world some forty years ago. There was at that time a great desire for culture, a great interest in knowledge, in art, in aesthetics, together with a very scanty supply of the ...
— Hawthorne - (English Men of Letters Series) • Henry James, Junr.
... Cold. — N. cold, coldness &c. adj.; frigidity, inclemency, fresco. winter; depth of winter, hard winter; Siberia, Nova Zembla; wind-chill factor. [forms of frozen water] ice; snow, snowflake, snow crystal, snow drift; sleet; hail, hailstone; rime, frost; hoar frost, white ...
— Roget's Thesaurus
... for his popularity, had nothing of the frank and cordial temper, the genial expansion of the soul, which begets love. He carried the same cautious and impenetrable frigidity into private life, that he showed in public. "No one," says a writer of the time, "could read his thoughts by any change of his countenance." [65] Calm and calculating, even in trifles, it was too obvious that everything ...
— The History of the Reign of Ferdinand and Isabella The Catholic, V3 • William H. Prescott
... me. I felt that a man had the right to some slight display of tenderness from the woman who had borne him. Her frigidity wounded me. It wounded me the more in comparison with the affectionate clasp of old Gervasio's arms. With a knot in my throat I passed from the sunlight of the courtyard into the gloom of the gateway, and out again beyond, upon the drawbridge. Our hooves ...
— The Strolling Saint • Raphael Sabatini
... respectful curiosity by all within the house. Her cold and aristocratic bearing half repelled them, half excited their admiration. She was very beautiful, and her high breeding was evident in her manner; but there was about her such frigidity and such loftiness of demeanor that it repelled those who would have been willing to give her their love. She brought a maid with her who had only been engaged a short time previously; and it was soon known that the maid stood in great awe of her mistress, who was ...
— The Cryptogram - A Novel • James De Mille
... a powerful committee. By this time an animus in regard to the election had been created strong enough to bring out the men on both sides, and to produce heat, when otherwise there might only have been a warmth or, possibly, frigidity. The Whig Marquises and the Whig Barons came forward, and with them the liberal professional men, and the tradesmen who had found that party to answer best, and the democratical mechanics. If Melmotte's money ...
— The Way We Live Now • Anthony Trollope
... N. cold, coldness &c adj.; frigidity, inclemency, fresco. winter; depth of winter, hard winter; Siberia, Nova Zembla; wind- chill factor. [forms of frozen water] ice; snow, snowflake, snow crystal, snow drift; sleet; hail, hailstone; rime, ...
— Roget's Thesaurus of English Words and Phrases: Body • Roget
... he summed up courage to ask her. With as near an approach to frigidity of manner as she could show to a man to whom she was so indebted ...
— The Jungle Girl • Gordon Casserly
... half to herself. For a moment, even the knowledge of his presence had escaped her. Hamel, however, did not realise that fact. He welcomed her confidence as a sign of relaxation from the frigidity of her ...
— The Vanished Messenger • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... well known to exist; prominent examples being Augustus and Livia; Napoleon and Josephine. It is also a well-known fact that frigidity is a cause of barrenness. A short separation of husband and wife is often salutary ...
— The Four Epochs of Woman's Life • Anna M. Galbraith
... hesitated a veil of darkness seemed to fall upon me. Utter cold, a frigidity as of outer space, lanced into my brain. My senses reeled under the assault. Desperately, blind and sick and giddy, I called on the reserve strength Lhar had given ...
— Where the World is Quiet • Henry Kuttner
... quarrel on that score, Mr. Chairman," assented Sir Christopher, with cutting frigidity. "I am perfectly willing to admit that practically the two vessels were built on the same lines, but with modifications which would enable my boat to sail twenty miles to windward and back in six days less time than it would have taken the Ark to cover the same distance, and it could have taken ...
— The Pursuit of the House-Boat • John Kendrick Bangs
... concluded in a tone of polite frigidity. "And since you place conditions on his welcome to your house, permit me to remark that I prefer his acquaintance to yours." He ...
— Out of the Primitive • Robert Ames Bennet
... Do not mistake frigidity for serenity, nor austerity for self-control. Be affable, amiable, and sweet, no matter how much you know. And listen more than ...
— A Woman of the World - Her Counsel to Other People's Sons and Daughters • Ella Wheeler Wilcox
... Although she was now three-and-twenty, she was still a child, a child of thirteen, who had retired within herself, absorbed in the bitter catastrophe which had annihilated her. You could tell this by the frigidity of her glance, by her absent expression, by the haunted air she ever wore, unable as she was to bestow a thought on anything but her calamity. And never was woman's soul more pure and candid, arrested ...
— The Three Cities Trilogy, Complete - Lourdes, Rome and Paris • Emile Zola
... encountered the moment we had passed beyond the atmosphere—that awful absolute zero which men had measured by anticipation, but never yet experienced—by a simple system of producing within the air-tight suits a temperature sufficiently elevated to counteract the effects of the frigidity without. By means of long, flexible tubes, air could be continually supplied to the wearers of the suits, and by an ingenious contrivance a store of compressed air sufficient to last for several hours was provided for each suit, so that in case of necessity the wearer could throw ...
— Edison's Conquest of Mars • Garrett Putman Serviss
... of inanimate matter where you expect warmth is startling enough; but a colder temperature than that of the body being rather the rule than the exception in common substances, it hardly conveys such a shock to the system as finding warmth where utter frigidity is anticipated. ...
— A Pair of Blue Eyes • Thomas Hardy
... Proprietaire was the channel through which they sucked each other's history, for though they had both known her in their girlish days at Tonnerre, in the department of Yonne, they had not known each other. Madame Valiere (Madame Depine learnt, and it seemed to explain the frigidity of her neighbour's manner) still trailed clouds of glory from the service of a Princess a quarter of a century before. Her refusal to wink at the Princess's goings-on, her austere, if provincial, regard ...
— The Grey Wig: Stories and Novelettes • Israel Zangwill
... would give me the greatest pleasure to communicate. I have much to say of the climate of the planet; of its wonderful alternations of heat and cold, of unmitigated and burning sunshine for one fortnight, and more than polar frigidity for the next; of a constant transfer of moisture, by distillation like that in vacuo, from the point beneath the sun to the point the farthest from it; of a variable zone of running water, of the people themselves; of their manners, customs, and political ...
— The Works of Edgar Allan Poe - Volume 1 (of 5) of the Raven Edition • Edgar Allan Poe
... Bernard very indifferent. As to the deportment of the monks, certainly, so far as we were concerned, it had none of that warmth and hospitality that travellers have celebrated; but, on the contrary, it struck us both as cold and constrained, strongly reminding me, in particular, of the frigidity of the ordinary American manner.[40] This might be discipline; it might be the consequence of habitual and incessant demands on their attentions and services; it might be accidental; or it might be prejudice against ...
— A Residence in France - With An Excursion Up The Rhine, And A Second Visit To Switzerland • J. Fenimore Cooper
... the queerness of it all as well as with the icy frigidity of the hallway, I mounted ...
— The Best Short Stories of 1921 and the Yearbook of the American Short Story • Various
... in the dining-room, late as usual, her frigidity was not especially marked. On the contrary, her face rippled into one smile after another, and seizing Blake by both hands, she ...
— The Net • Rex Beach
... young girl had adopted in her intercourse with Marien, her stepmother could see, was no evidence of coquetry. She showed, in her behavior to the friend of the family, a freedom from embarrassment which was new to her, and a frigidity which could not possibly have been assumed so persistently. No! what struck Madame de Nailles was the suddenness of this transformation. Jacqueline evidently took no further interest in Marien; she had apparently no longer ...
— Jacqueline, Complete • (Mme. Blanc) Th. Bentzon
... found, and the slight restraint imposed by his presence was removed. Mrs. LaGrange and her son were also absent, preferring to take their meals privately in an adjoining room which Hugh Mainwaring had often used as a breakfast-room. The silence and frigidity which had lately reigned at the table seemed to have given place to almost universal sociability, though Ralph Mainwaring's face still wore ...
— That Mainwaring Affair • Maynard Barbour
... have given an ounce of fish-meal. Clark grumbled something about their being meteor-stones, whose ferruginous substance had been lured by the magnetic Pole, and kept from frictional burning in their fall by the frigidity of the air: and they quickly ceased to interest our sluggish minds, except in so far as ...
— The Purple Cloud • M.P. Shiel
... Irmgard von Disthal, an ample slow lady, the unmarried daughter of a noble house, about fifty at this time, and luckily—or unluckily—for Priscilla, a great lover of much food and its resultant deep slumbers) would bow in her turn in as stately a manner as her bulk permitted, and with a frigidity so pronounced that in any one less skilled in shades of deportment it would have resembled with a singular completeness a sniff of scorn. Her frigidity was perfectly justified. Was she not a hochgeboren, a member of an ancient house, ...
— The Princess Priscilla's Fortnight • Elizabeth von Arnim
... panelling, all reverend with the gloom of departed years, seemed to fit it for the haunt of solemn meditation; but, being in a wealthy, aristocratic neighborhood, the glitter of fashion penetrated even into the sanctuary; and I felt myself continually thrown back upon the world, by the frigidity and pomp of the poor worms around me. The only being in the whole congregation who appeared thoroughly to feel the humble and prostrate piety of a true Christian was a poor decrepit old woman, bending under the weight of years and infirmities. She bore ...
— The Sketch Book of Geoffrey Crayon, Gent. • Washington Irving
... seemed to have been earnestly written, and might be conceived to have possessed warmth at some former period; although, with the lapse of time, the heated masses had cooled down even to the freezing-point. The frigidity of the modern productions, on the other hand, was characteristic and inherent, and evidently had little to do with the writer's qualities of mind and heart. In fine, of this whole dusty heap of literature I tossed aside all the sacred part, and felt myself none the less a Christian for eschewing ...
— The Old Manse (From "Mosses From An Old Manse") • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... it up very well, and in spite of the earthy and mouldy smell, it was conscientiously clean. There was not a speck of dust anywhere; the old yellowish-white paint was spotless; the windows shone. But there was a sort of frigidity in the perfect order and repair which repelled her, and she left her things tossed about, as if to break the ice of this propriety. In several places, within and without, she found marks of the faithful hand of Bolton in economical patches of the ...
— Annie Kilburn - A Novel • W. D. Howells
... Marchmont's account of him, she must have liked him; but knowing what she did, she could and would not: looking at him something as Madame Cottin's Matilde first looked at Malek Adel, and not suffering herself to lose any of her horror. For the first day or two her frigidity was something wonderful, as she found him inclined to make attempts to cultivate her acquaintance; but she thoroughly succeeded in repelling him. He left off trying to talk to her; and one day when they were obliged to go in to dinner together, ...
— The Two Guardians • Charlotte Mary Yonge
... full in the northern regions of the Far West, backed up seemingly by all the powers of nature—to try and cramp the energies of the party, and arrest their labours; but, neither the severity of the weather, nor the languor which the excessive frigidity of the atmosphere produced— although it sent them to sleep of a night after their day's toil, without the necessity of an opiate—were sufficient to ...
— Picked up at Sea - The Gold Miners of Minturne Creek • J.C. Hutcheson
... Anne of Beaujeu and the Breton Marshal de Rieux both claimed the wardship of the young Duchess, for whose hand the widower Maximilian was already a prominent suitor. Now up to this point Henry had refused to adopt a hostile attitude towards France, and had treated overtures from Maximilian with frigidity. But in six months' time he was concluding alliances both with Brittany ...
— England Under the Tudors • Arthur D. Innes
... must always prefer the keener but more wholesome frigidity of his own clime. There, the external gloom and bleakness of a severe winter day enhance our in-door comforts, and we do not miss sunny skies when greeted with sunny looks. If we then see no blooming flowers, we see blooming faces. ...
— Flowers and Flower-Gardens • David Lester Richardson
... extended to all his family. These feelings caused him perhaps to have an exaggerated idea of the beauty of the young girl who was presented to him as a sister, and who, in spite of this title, received him with the frigidity and hauteur of a queen. Nevertheless, her appearance, in spite of her cool and freezing manner, had left a lasting impression upon the young man's heart, and his arrival in St. Petersburg had been marked by feelings till then never experienced ...
— CELEBRATED CRIMES, COMPLETE - VANINKA • ALEXANDRE DUMAS, PERE
... archaic. Like other high-bred people of his time, he talked of "cowcumbers" and "laylocks," called a woman an "'ooman," and was "much obleeged" where a degenerate age is content to be obliged. The frigidity of his address and the seeming stiffness of his manner, due really to an innate and incurable shyness, produced even among people who ought to have known him well a totally erroneous notion of his character and temperament. ...
— Collections and Recollections • George William Erskine Russell
... was interested. A rush of colour warmed her cheeks. The frigidity of her manner vanished ...
— The Traitors • E. Phillips (Edward Phillips) Oppenheim
... indolently dallying with one of her cubs, exhibits, even in repose, those fiery scintillations in the eye which startle the beholders. The light of that eye, though intense, was cold, calculating, and disagreeable to look upon. The frigidity of her manner and reception of him might, to a certain extent, be accounted for from the fact that she had gone to his uncle's several times for the purpose of seeing him, and watching his interests. Let us not, therefore, ...
— The Evil Eye; Or, The Black Spector - The Works of William Carleton, Volume One • William Carleton
... and handed him a dinner napkin. Francis took it, but with the most distant and curt politeness. The next day an interview took place between Bourbon and the king, in reference to the position of the latter as captive. In this Francis displayed the same frigidity of manner as before, while he was all cordiality with Pescara, Bourbon's fellow in command. The two leaders claimed Francis as their own captive, but Lannoy, to whom he had surrendered, had him embarked for Naples, and instead of taking him there, sent him directly to Spain, where ...
— Historical Tales, Vol. 6 (of 15) - The Romance of Reality. French. • Charles Morris
... at dinner, she evinced an icy frigidity. She made no offers to serve Florent, but several times remarked: "It's very strange what an amount of bread ...
— The Fat and the Thin • Emile Zola
... still underneath the old apartment, with the tin labels stuck in the kosher meat, and there was Gideon, the fat, genial butcher, flourishing his great carving-knife as of yore, though without that ancient smile of brotherly recognition. Gideon's frigidity chilled him; it was an inauspicious omen, a ...
— Ghetto Comedies • Israel Zangwill
... Senora, drawing herself together as though she had received an electric shock; the pleased and animated expression of her face changing suddenly to one of utmost frigidity. "I never could understand why people considered that Indian good looking," and her black eyes snapped as she turned to resume her work, plainly betraying the jealousy aroused. Senora Sanchez, knowing her sister's temper only too well, hastened to ...
— When Dreams Come True • Ritter Brown
... system in Paris may be described simply as extreme frigidity and extraordinary accuracy. M. Vauthrot, the chorus-master, excelled in both these qualities. He was a man whom I could not help regarding as hostile to me, because I had never been able to win from him a single expression of enthusiasm. ...
— My Life, Volume II • Richard Wagner
... git out my fur-lined sealskin coat," said the colored man to himself as he felt the chill night air, that seemed to increase in frigidity along about eleven o'clock. He went to the cabin to get his overcoat, and, returning on deck prepared to spend the rest of his hour of watch in ease and comfort. He stretched out on the bench in the conning tower, noted ...
— Under the Ocean to the South Pole - The Strange Cruise of the Submarine Wonder • Roy Rockwood
... around the walls. One girl at the organ is graceful; another with a tambourine has a sort of Bassarid beauty. But the group of Apollo, Pegasus, and a Muse upon Parnassus, is a failure in its meaningless frigidity, while few of these subordinate compositions show power of ...
— Sketches and Studies in Italy and Greece, Complete - Series I, II, and III • John Symonds
... Apuleius is, so to say, a beginning of modern literature. From this brilliant medley of reality and romance, of wit and pathos, of fantasy and observation, was born that new art, complex in thought, various in expression, which gives a semblance of frigidity to perfection itself. An ...
— The Great English Short-Story Writers, Vol. 1 • Various
... unfailing charm, and it is to be hoped that whatever advantages they may derive from their intercourse with foreigners, they may never lose this graceful cordiality, which forms so agreeable a contrast with English and American frigidity. ...
— Life in Mexico • Frances Calderon De La Barca
... you do?" The lady murmured this much so far under her breath that the words might have been mistaken for anything else—most plausibly, perhaps, for, "Who cares if it is?"—nor further did she acknowledge John's profound inclination. Frigidity and complaint of ill-usage made a glamour in every fold of her expensive garments; she was large and troubled and severe. A second figure emerged from behind her and bowed with the suave dignity that belonged to Brainard Macauley. "Mr. Macauley has asked to sit at our table," ...
— The Gentleman From Indiana • Booth Tarkington
... a paramount "Jus Primis Noctis." True, the majority of men are abashed in the presence of innocence and deal gently with it,—but others follow in a repellent way their instinct of possession. Any neurologist of experience has cases where sexual frigidity and neurasthenia in a woman can be traced back to the shock ...
— The Nervous Housewife • Abraham Myerson
... endure the hardship of being at the bank by nine o'clock, and made the best of it by claiming in consequence an utter immunity from the petite norale of the breakfast-table. Never did he lose a moment in helping anybody. Even the little Saffy he allowed with perfect frigidity to stretch out a very long arm after the butter—except indeed it happened to cross his plate, when he would sharply rebuke her breach of manners. It would have been all the same if he had not been going till noon, but now he had hurry and business to rampart his ...
— Weighed and Wanting • George MacDonald
... of his fire had evidently been seen, and like a beacon had attracted some wandering and possibly intoxicated mariner with American papers. The consul walked into the hall with a sudden righteous frigidity of manner. It was one thing to be lounging in one's own office on the Sabbath day, and quite another to be deliberately calling there ...
— A Protegee of Jack Hamlin's and Other Stories • Bret Harte
... devotedly, tenderly, all through the Roget's Thesaurusly, and have from the moment I first saw you. With you to share it my lot in life will be heaven itself. Without you a Saharan waste of Arctic frigidity. Wilt thou?' I think I'd wilt. I couldn't bring myself to say 'No, Ethelinda, I can not be yours because my heart is set on a strengthful damsel with raven locks and eyes of coal, with lips a shade less cherry than thine, and a cheek more like the apple than the peach, who ...
— The Wit and Humor of America, Volume X (of X) • Various
... feeling, the latter prevailed, and justice yielded to mercy. Had a Bligh or an Edwards been placed in his situation it is to be feared that, judging from their former conduct, passion in the one, and frigidity in the other, would most likely have consigned the criminal to captivity in irons, and the innocent and helpless family, solely dependent on him, to misery and destruction—and yet, in so doing, they would ...
— The Eventful History Of The Mutiny And Piratical Seizure - Of H.M.S. Bounty: Its Cause And Consequences • Sir John Barrow
... was eating into the courage of Grantline's men. An unreality here. A weirdness. These fantastic crags. The deadly silence. The nights, almost two weeks of Earth-time in length, congealed by the deadly frigidity of Space. The days of black sky, blaring stars and flaming Sun, with no atmosphere to diffuse the daylight. Days of weird blending sheen of illumination with most of the Sun's heat radiating so swiftly from the naked Lunar surface ...
— Astounding Stories of Super-Science April 1930 • Various
... stove, crammed with coal, reached the point where dull red spots enlivened its bulging belly; yet the big room was cold with non-detectable drafts, the men shivered in spite of their heavy clothing, and the region outside the immediate radius of the heater was barn-like with frigidity. Midnight came, and the group about the stove slept in their chairs, rather than undergo the ...
— The White Desert • Courtney Ryley Cooper
... Kresney's pronounced frigidity was more ludicrous than impressive; and the shadow of a smile lurked beneath Paul's moustache as ...
— Captain Desmond, V.C. • Maud Diver
... given to him by the officers he was more than likely to take it without the prescribed permission. When burghers without such written permits reached their homes they were not received by their wives with the customary cordiality, and the air of frigidity which encompassed them soon compelled them to return to the field. The Boer women despised a coward, or a man who seemed to be shirking his duty to his country, and, not unlike their sisters in countries of older civilisation, they possessed ...
— With the Boer Forces • Howard C. Hillegas
... little too chill, and we took a parlor in the front and came back on the first day hoping to find it stored full of the afternoon sun's warmth, but found that the camerera had opened the windows and closed the shutters in our absence so that our parlor was of a frigidity which no glitter of the electric light could temper. The halls and public rooms were chill in anticipation and remembrance of any cold outside, but in otir parlor there was a hole for the sort of stove which we saw in the reading-room, twice as large as an average teakettle, with a pipe ...
— Familiar Spanish Travels • W. D. Howells
... corrective to them, or they must infallibly have damned you. It is timidity. Other people may laugh at this quality. For my part I esteem it worthy the loudest praise and most assiduous cultivation. When the balance hangs in doubt between the adventurousness of vanity and the frigidity of fear, ever incline to the latter side. I had rather your lordship should be a coward, than a coxcomb. If however you could attain to that reasonable and chastised opinion of yourself, which should steer a proper ...
— Four Early Pamphlets • William Godwin
... Claude, that I met these advances with a frigidity of manner that left no doubt as ...
— Serge Panine • Georges Ohnet
... him, and Olga experienced a very novel feeling of relief to see him there. She advanced and shook hands with extreme frigidity. ...
— The Keeper of the Door • Ethel M. Dell
... need not leave Madison Hall unless you wish to do so." Mrs. Weatherbee's frigidity had miraculously vanished. A gleam of kindly purpose had appeared in ...
— Jane Allen: Right Guard • Edith Bancroft
... liked him. He was now particularly friendly in his manner to her, but when he spoke to her across one intermediate person, she could only answer him in monosyllables. Every one silently remarked her absence of mind and unusual frigidity. ...
— Gladys, the Reaper • Anne Beale
... community has its errors in its laws. No human laws, how skilfully soever framed, but give to a national character defects as well as merits, merits as well as defects. Craft, selfishness, cruelty to the subdued, inhospitable frigidity to neighbours, make the defects of the Spartan character. But," added Alcman, with a kind of reluctant anguish in his voice, "the character has its grand virtues, too, or would the Helots not be the masters? Valour indomitable; grand scorn of death; passionate ardour for the State which is so ...
— Pausanias, the Spartan - The Haunted and the Haunters, An Unfinished Historical Romance • Lord Lytton
... Art is thus independent of science, as it is of the useful and the moral. Let it not be feared that thus may be justified art that is frivolous or cold, since that which is truly frivolous or cold is so because it has not been raised to expression; or in other words, frivolity and frigidity come always from the form of the aesthetic elaboration, from the lack of a content, not from the ...
— Aesthetic as Science of Expression and General Linguistic • Benedetto Croce
... have been too often gathered to place upon its tomb. Can we believe that MILTON did not endure mortification from the neglect of "evil days," as certainly as Tasso was goaded to madness by the systematic frigidity of his critics? He who is now before us had a mind not less exalted than Milton or Tasso; but was so effectually ridiculed, that he has only sent us down the fragment of ...
— Calamities and Quarrels of Authors • Isaac D'Israeli
... affable and kind, and (shall we say it?) he would not make Mr. Lincoln uncomfortable either by a superiority of English or the certain frigidity of manner which people in the West said he had. But he tried to imagine a Massachusetts senator, Mr. Sumner, for instance, going through the rat story, and couldn't. Somehow, Massachusetts senators hadn't this gift. And yet he was not quite sure that it wasn't a fetching ...
— The Crossing • Winston Churchill
... Morris said with a stare that blended frigidity and surprise in just the right proportions. "I ain't said nothing about forty-eight nine-fifty. What I ...
— Potash & Perlmutter - Their Copartnership Ventures and Adventures • Montague Glass
... The heat-sucking frigidity of the thin Martian air whispered around him in a feeble breeze. He shivered a little and began walking toward the ...
— The Man Who Hated Mars • Gordon Randall Garrett
... you like a prize pig," murmured Carter without moving a muscle. Shaw looked round helplessly.—"And you would enjoy the fun—wouldn't you?" he said with slow bitterness. Carter's distant non-committal smile quite overwhelmed him by its horrid frigidity. Extreme despondency replaced the proper feeling of racial pride in the primitive soul of the mate. "My God! What luck! What have I done to fall amongst that lot?" he groaned, sat down, and took his big grey head in his hands. Carter drew aside to make room for Immada, ...
— The Rescue • Joseph Conrad
... aren't you?' he inquired with eager concern. Of late, owing to the capricious frigidity of Millicent's attitude towards him, he had been much less a frequenter of Leonora's house, and he was no longer privy to ...
— Leonora • Arnold Bennett
... I loaned you yesterday?" demanded Silvia in a tone far below thirty-two degrees Fahrenheit, while her features assumed a frigidity that would have congealed father's favorite sustenance had it been ...
— Our Next-Door Neighbors • Belle Kanaris Maniates
... and Michael Field there was fixed a great social gulf. He himself had assured her of that fact. Keeping that fact in view, he could deceive himself into the belief that it alone would be accountable for the aloofness of her bearing, for the frigidity of her manner should they again meet. Oh, he'd pictured the meetings often enough; pictured, too, and schooled himself to endure, the ...
— Antony Gray,—Gardener • Leslie Moore
... to Florence for his consort early in 1560, but, true to her determination, Duchess Eleanora required him to come for Lucrezia in person! With perhaps less frigidity than he had exhibited the year before, but with very little more friendliness, Alfonso made his second appearance in Florence. He was accompanied by Cardinal de' Medici, his brother-in-law—so soon to come to a tragical and untimely end in the Maremma—and ...
— The Tragedies of the Medici • Edgcumbe Staley
... these, when differences arose, by arbitration, rather than battle. It was complained that Europe took little note of or interest in this conference, and among the delegates of some of the Latin American states—representatives of all of which were present—Europe was blamed for frigidity to thoughts of arbitration. But the world grows wiser slowly, and Spanish-America not more rapidly. Important matters which occupied the attention of the Congress were the questions of some standardising ...
— Mexico • Charles Reginald Enock
... combined with scientific accuracy, were always distinctive of Florentines. To such an extent did these qualities determine their treatment of the arts that acute critics have been found to tax them—and in my opinion justly—with hardness and frigidity.[30] Brunelleschi in 1425 designed the basilica of S. Lorenzo after an original but truly classic type, remarkable for its sobriety and correctness. What he had learned from the ruins of Rome he here applied in obedience to his own artistic instinct. S. Lorenzo is a columnar ...
— Renaissance in Italy Vol. 3 - The Fine Arts • John Addington Symonds
... moved by unworthy pleas and misrepresentations, to accord approval only to the best speakers and the soundest arguments. But surely in a class of public speakers any such tricks and schemes should be received with stolid frigidity. Nothing is so damaging to appeals to prejudice, spread-eagleism, and fustian bombast as an ...
— Public Speaking • Clarence Stratton
... to back their opinion by laying odds. The rejection of the Bill so far from exasperating the Nationalist party, would positively come as a relief. To say that they are lukewarm is only to fairly indicate a state of feeling which is rapidly degenerating into frigidity. They declare that the Bill is unworkable, and while maintaining their abstract right to demand whatever they choose, believe that, taking one consideration with another, the lot of autonomic Ireland would not ...
— Ireland as It Is - And as It Would be Under Home Rule • Robert John Buckley (AKA R.J.B.)
... prevent a further cooling. When the quantity of moisture in the air is small, the refrigerating process continues until frost is produced, and many a moonlight night in spring destroys half or even the whole of the fruit of a new season. Moonlight, therefore, frequently involves the idea of frigidity. With us, whose climate is comparatively cold, the change from the burning, blasting, or blighting heat of day, or sun-up, to the cold of a clear night, or sun-down, is not very great, but within the tropics the change ...
— Moon Lore • Timothy Harley
... Collins. / We now hear no more of it; not that their poems are better understood / at present, than they were at their first publication; but their fame is / established; and a critic would accuse himself of frigidity or inattention, / who should profess not to understand them. But a living writer is yet / sub judice; and if we cannot follow his conceptions or enter into his / feelings, it is more consoling to our pride to ...
— The Complete Poetical Works of Samuel Taylor Coleridge - Vol I and II • Samuel Taylor Coleridge
... beautiful chapel for the pensioners, in the classic style, over the altar of which hangs a picture by West. I never could look at it long enough to make out its design; for this artist (though it pains me to say it of so respectable a countryman) had a gift of frigidity, a knack of grinding ice into his paint, a power of stupefying the spectator's perceptions and quelling his sympathy, beyond any other limner that ever handled a brush. In spite of many pangs of conscience, I seize this opportunity to wreak a life-long abhorrence ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 11, No. 65, March, 1863 • Various
... tenderness did her husband watch over her, but with returning health returned also that unnatural frigidity of manner. There was no response to his words or looks ...
— The Wedding Guest • T.S. Arthur
... clear," he thought. "By some hocus-pocus, Miss Rose has made his acquaintance during those three weeks, and helped the slow time to pass. He did not tell her he was her sister's lover, hence the present frigidity. The long morning rides are accounted for now. I wonder"—he looked at pretty Rose—"I wonder if the matter ...
— Kate Danton, or, Captain Danton's Daughters - A Novel • May Agnes Fleming
... 16. Month of budding life; month of hope; month of spring when all the world is young again; when the heart thaws out after its long winter frigidity. It was the day of the opening of the Eastern racing season; the ...
— Garrison's Finish - A Romance of the Race-Course • W. B. M. Ferguson
... the Manor was not a very brilliant affair. Stafford did not appear, pleading that it was a Friday, and a strict fast for him. Kate was distinctly out of temper, and treated the company in general, and Eugene in particular, with frigidity. Everybody felt that the situation was somewhat strained, and in consequence the pleasant flow of personal talk that marks parties of friends was dried up at its source. The discussion of general topics was ...
— Father Stafford • Anthony Hope
... Lastly she took in the Promenade, in which she stood. She surveyed the Promenade with a professional eye. It instantly shocked her, not as it might have shocked one ignorant of human nature and history, but by reason of its frigidity, its constraint, its solemnity, its pretence. In one glance she embraced all the figures, moving or stationary, against the hedge of shoulders in front and against the mirrors behind—all of them: the programme girls, the cigarette girls, the chocolate girls, ...
— The Pretty Lady • Arnold E. Bennett
... this same evening. That great lady, having expected to find that Molly had, acting on her advice, abandoned Mrs. Delaport Green, was quite disappointed in the girl when she met them still together in London, and so she extended her frigidity ...
— Great Possessions • Mrs. Wilfrid Ward
... same error, but figure to themselves the circumstances of this transgressing pair, and well consider in what manner nature must operate, when thus powerfully excited, and if they are not rendered totally incapable of any soft sensations, by an uncommon frigidity of constitution, they will cease either to wonder at, or too cruelly condemn, the effects ...
— Life's Progress Through The Passions - Or, The Adventures of Natura • Eliza Fowler Haywood
... keep your engagement," she told him, and he could feel the instant frigidity which returned to her tone. A zero-like wave seemed to come right through the transmitter of the telephone and chill the perspiration of his brow into a ...
— The Early Bird - A Business Man's Love Story • George Randolph Chester
... fellow handed him a letter stamped from the head department at Washington. It stated that the bearer was a Federal attorney sent out to investigate the Smelter City Coal Claims and any other matters bearing on the contests of the Holy Cross. The letter was couched—Wayland thought—with peculiar frigidity, as though he and not the coal claimants were the guilty party to an undecided contest. Then he glanced back at the bearer: an incredibly young and inexperienced youth—not more than twenty-two or three, barely out of a ...
— The Freebooters of the Wilderness • Agnes C. Laut
... indeed, we contrived to get ourselves asked to the houses of high and mighty entertainers, where we ate the finest French dishes and drank the oldest vintages, and fortified ourselves sensibly and snugly in that way against the frigidity of the company. Of these repasts I have no hard words to say; it is of the dinners we gave ourselves, and of the dinners which people in our rank of life gave to us, ...
— A Rogue's Life • Wilkie Collins
... unanimous doubt? call it what you will. She might perhaps guess, but she did not suffer it to perplex her for more than a few moments. Throwing aside the extreme diffidence that marked her entree, and the perturbation that resulted from the frigidity of the spectators, she wound herself up to the condition of fearless independence for which she is constitutionally and morally remarkable, and with a look of superb indifference and conscious power she commenced the opening of her aria. In ...
— Great Singers, Second Series - Malibran To Titiens • George T. Ferris
... The frigidity of the saloon-keeper's manner was over-powering. The man called Sikkem was unequal in words to such a challenge. A flush slowly dyed his lean cheeks, and an angry depression of the brows suggested something passionate and forceful. Just for a moment ...
— The Forfeit • Ridgwell Cullum
... annoyed, partly by Clifford's reticence, partly by the unexplainable thaw in the frigidity of Rue Barree. At their frequent encounters, when she, tripping along the rue de Seine, with music-roll and big straw hat would pass Clifford and his familiars steering an easterly course to the Cafe Vachette, and at the respectful uncovering of the band would colour and smile at Clifford, Elliott's ...
— The King In Yellow • Robert W. Chambers
... tendency of democracy to a general mingling of elements, that this frigidity is deemed necessary by these good souls to prevent the commonalty from being attracted by them, and sticking to them, as straws and bits of paper do to amber. But more generally the "true-blue" old ...
— Pink and White Tyranny - A Society Novel • Harriet Beecher Stowe
... again. The voices of the musician and poetess had changed: there was a decided frigidity in their tone—then came ...
— The Hand of Ethelberta • Thomas Hardy
... in a glow of triumph; satisfied, notwithstanding her frigidity, that he had compassed his immediate aim, which was that she might not be able to dismiss from her thoughts him and his persevering desire for the shadow of her face during the next four-and-twenty-hours. And his confidence was well founded: ...
— A Laodicean • Thomas Hardy
... in the situation, that my sympathy was honest and open. But when they suggested that I introduce them to some of the women teachers from Michigan, and I declined the responsibility as gently as I could, the frigidity of their injured pride made me momentarily abject. They drifted away and hung about with expectancy printed on their faces—that and a mingled hate and defiance of the glittering uniforms which quite absorbed all feminine attention and left ...
— A Woman's Impression of the Philippines • Mary Helen Fee
... sleep, into solid ice. Harding escaped any ill effects, but in truth, although I have said little about physical sufferings, most of that journey was terrible work. I got into a way at last of classifying the various stages of frigidity on departure from a stancia, and this was their order: (1) the warm; (2) the chilly; and (3) the glacial. The first stage of comparative comfort was due to the effect of a fire and warm food and generally lasted for two or three hours. In stage No. 2, one gradually commenced to feel chilly ...
— From Paris to New York by Land • Harry de Windt
... it 'em." She even made her familiar entry between the curtains at the back of the stage, standing in the favourite attitude of simple, triumphant expectation, and smiling with that rather foolish friendliness that until now had never shaken her audiences from their frigidity. To them she had always been a spectacle, a strange vital thing with a lurid past and a dubious future, shocking and stimulating. They would never have admitted that they liked her. But tonight they gave her a sort of ashamed ...
— The Dark House • I. A. R. Wylie
... and unable to see Mr. Longmore. The young man knew just how disappointed he looked and just what Madame Clairin thought of it, and this consciousness determined in him an attitude of almost aggressive frigidity. This was apparently what she desired. She wished to throw him off his balance and, if she was ...
— Madame de Mauves • Henry James
... formality and frigidity; at the home is ease and enjoyment. The children of the home make breaks and we love them for it; it's ...
— Evening Round Up - More Good Stuff Like Pep • William Crosbie Hunter
... throughout its course, he scorned those tactful arts and melodramatic ways which win over waverers and inspire the fainthearted. Here he showed himself not a son of Chatham, but a Grenville. The results of this frigidity were disastrous. All Frenchmen and many Britons believed that he went out of his way to assail a peaceful Republic in order to crush liberty abroad and at home. History has exposed the falseness of the slander; but a statesman ought not to owe his vindication to research in archives. ...
— William Pitt and the Great War • John Holland Rose
... and wintry aspect. In one sense, however, the character of the season had changed; the dry, equal cold, that was generally supportable, having been succeeded by tempests that were sometimes a little moist, but oftener of intense frigidity. Of course the equinox was past, and there were more than twelve hours of sun. The great luminary showed himself well above the northern horizon; and though his circuit described an arch that did not promise soon to bring him near the zenith at meridian, it was a circuit that seemed about ...
— The Sea Lions - The Lost Sealers • James Fenimore Cooper
... task was to approach, it could be only successful at the end; for indeed Mr. Faringfield, with all his external frigidity, could refuse Phil nothing. In giving his consent, which perhaps he had been ready to do long before Phil had been ready to ask it, he made no allusion to Phil's going to England. He purposely ignored the circumstance, I fancy, that in consenting to the marriage, he knowingly ...
— Philip Winwood • Robert Neilson Stephens
... more Obscurity in "the roots of the War"; When Mr. PONSONBY stops belittling His country and WELLS abandons Britling: When the Ethiopian changes his hue To a vivid pink or a Reckitty blue— In fine, when the Earth has lost its solidity, Then I shall believe in "TAY PAY'S" frigidity. ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 152. January 17, 1917 • Various
... over. And, of course, she was none of these. Then suddenly he almost laughed; almost laughed aloud. For she was worse—far, far worse. The gushing, loud-voiced heiress he might have coped with. His frigidity froze most people if he chose; and avoidance was not difficult. But what could he do with Joan—his love, his dead love Joan—looking at him out of this girl's beautiful eyes, touching him with this girl's slender hands, speaking ...
— The Rhodesian • Gertrude Page
... cordiality towards strangers, homesick students at Dartmouth, and the audiences at my lectures, since learning a better habit. Frigidity and formality were driven away by the sunshine that brightened my stay at ...
— Memories and Anecdotes • Kate Sanborn
... the lady, with a good deal of frigidity in her manner, "that they should be something better ...
— An Algonquin Maiden - A Romance of the Early Days of Upper Canada • G. Mercer Adam
... bony and shining; and under the great dome of his skull his face, yellow, with deep lines in it, looked very small. He was quiet and exceedingly polite. He spoke with the accent of New England, and there was about his demeanour a bloodless frigidity which made me ask myself why on earth he was busying himself with Charles Strickland. I had been slightly tickled at the gentleness which Mrs. Strickland put into her mention of her husband's name, and while the pair conversed I took stock of the room in which we sat. Mrs. Strickland had moved ...
— The Moon and Sixpence • W. Somerset Maugham
... two half-crowns from his pocket, and began to clink them meditatively together. A slight softening of the frigidity of the constable's manner became noticeable. There was a milder beam in the ...
— Psmith in the City • P. G. Wodehouse
... me back again, or I will marry another;" Pompey beseeches her to wait only till the death of Sylla, whom he dare not offend: after this there is no need to mention the low scoundrel Perpenna. The tendency to this frigidity of soul was perceptible in Corneille, even at an early period of his career; but in the works of his old age it increased to ...
— Lectures on Dramatic Art - and Literature • August Wilhelm Schlegel trans John Black
... its brevity, but the clever word-juggling of such prestidigitators as Poe and Verlaine is perilous. Figurative language must spring only from living, figurative thought, otherwise the lyric falls into verbal conceits, frigidity, conventionality. Stanzaic law must follow emotional law, just as Kreisler's accompanist must keep time with Kreisler. All the rich devices of rhyme and tone-color must heighten and not cloy the singing quality. But why lengthen this list of truisms? The combination ...
— A Study of Poetry • Bliss Perry
... Worse, as people began to term her in the shops, was, in fact, a very different person, and much more important than the widow Torvestad. It was a consciousness of this that first gave Sarah a new interest in life, and tended to thaw some of that frigidity which had begun to settle upon her. When the first and the worst period was over, she buried her hopes and her youth as well as she could, giving herself up to prayer and study, whilst, at the same time, the management of her household affairs ...
— Skipper Worse • Alexander Lange Kielland
... affectation of learning, had as much sentiment in it as would have puzzled a Turk, upon his principles of female materialism, to account for. Her beneficence was unbounded; indeed the natural tenderness of her heart might have been argued, by the frigidity of a casuist, as detracting from her virtue in this respect, for her humanity was a feeling, not a principle: but minds like Harley's are not very apt to make this distinction, and generally give our virtue credit for all that benevolence which ...
— The Man of Feeling • Henry Mackenzie
... such an act; this was that case. We all know (as I observed at the time); that is to say, all of us who cannot wait to calculate upon the gains and losses of the affair; all of us, except those who are endowed with this provident frigidity, know well what youthful love is; and what its torments are, when accompanied by even the smallest portion of jealousy. Every man, and especially every Englishman (for here we seldom love or hate by halves), will recollect how many mad pranks he has played; how many wild and ridiculous things he ...
— Advice to Young Men • William Cobbett
... ceremoniously provided for—with an outbreak of talk between him and Eleanor, or between him and Benecke, more eager, animated and interesting than before. But Lucy had no part in it. It was not the early neglect and incivility of the villa; it was something infinitely colder and more wounding; the frigidity of disillusion and resentment, of kindness rebuffed ...
— Eleanor • Mrs. Humphry Ward |
