"Primness" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... annoying about that confounded Shaw chap," he remarked to his wife as he mounted the broad steps leading to the gallery half an hour later, walking with the primness which suggests pain. Lady Bazelhurst looked up from her book, her fine aristocratic young face ...
— Master Tales of Mystery, Volume 3 • Collected and Arranged by Francis J. Reynolds
... it given me to choose, I would have one that had grown by itself; full of branches on all sides, but with no suggestion of primness; in short, a perfect tree, a miracle hardly to be found in any forest, since the forest would be no better than a park if the separate members of it were allowed room to develop each after its own law. Nature is too cunning an artist to ...
— The Foot-path Way • Bradford Torrey
... had flashed at the window near which she had sat spinning, and sighing perhaps that Nature had not provided feathers or fur for a brood like hers; then the girl's arms were about her neck, the news was stammered out—for the letter could never be shown to any one—in a way that tore primness to tatters. The widow tried to act as if it were a dispensation of Providence which should be received in solemn gratitude; but before she knew it she was laughing and crying, kissing her sweet-faced daughter, or telling how good and brave ...
— Taken Alive • E. P. Roe
... relations with men of his own age, and to his taking a more lively part in social gatherings. What we hear of the essays that he wrote at school, what we can read of his early letters, all harmonizes with our conception of a Quaker upbringing. There is a staid primness about him, which contrasts strangely with the pictures of medical students presented to us in the pages of Dickens. Capable though he was of enjoying a holiday, or of expanding among congenial associates, Lister was not quick to make friends. He was apt to keep too much ...
— Victorian Worthies - Sixteen Biographies • George Henry Blore
... almost awkwardly as if she were totally unused to smiling, at my cheap jocularity. Then she said with that forced precision, a sort of conscious primness: ...
— Chance • Joseph Conrad
... a small square ticket in her hand and held it with such disapproving primness that Oliva ...
— The Green Rust • Edgar Wallace
... on all subjects, they are never fluent. The man with no ear must not hope to be a musician, nor the man with no fluency a letter-writer. Yet this is not all. You will find some at perfect ease in conversation who, touching pen to paper, exhibit the affected primness commonly ascribed to the maiden aunt. They have not learned that this is a place where words must speak for themselves without comment of inflection, gesture of the hand, or interpreting smile. Here to be unaffected one must take thought. As on the stage a natural hue must be obtained ...
— A Williams Anthology - A Collection of the Verse and Prose of Williams College, 1798-1910 • Compiled by Edwin Partridge Lehman and Julian Park
... he was a man punctual and precise in his habits. Associating constantly with fashionable folk his naturally dignified behavior was increased. He was an aristocrat- -there is no other word—and he did not care to be hail-fellow- well-met with the musicians. A certain primness and asperity did not make him popular. While teaching, his manner warmed, the earnest artist came to life, all halting of speech and polite insincerities were abandoned. His pupils adored him. Here at least the sentiment was one of solidarity. De Lenz is his most censorious critic and ...
— Chopin: The Man and His Music • James Huneker
... disagreeable became horrible. To complete the description of her face, she had a broad flat nose, a wide mouth, furnished with the worst set of teeth I ever saw, and her chin was long and pointed. She had heard primness so often mentioned as the characteristic of an old maid, that to avoid wearing that appearance she was slatternly and dirty to an excess; besides she had great addition of filthiness, from a load of Spanish snuff with which her whole dress was covered, as if, by ...
— A Description of Millenium Hall • Sarah Scott
... (a young yet rising barrister with green spectacles) with delicate primness opened the case. A considerable ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Volume 1, Complete • Various
... prayer book in satin and offered to her Maker the incense of flowers. She regarded heaven with something of the respectful fervour with which she regarded the world—that great world she had never seen; for "the proper place for a spinster is her father's house," she would say with her conventional primness, and send, despite herself, a mild imagination in pursuit of the follies from which she so earnestly prayed to be delivered—she, to whom New York was as the terror of a modern Babylon, and a Jezebel but a woman with paint upon her cheeks. "They ...
— The Battle Ground • Ellen Glasgow
... was performed; but before I called him from the field I exchanged a few words with the milkmaid, who sat on a bench, in all the primness of expectation, and decked with the most gaudy plumage. I rated her imaginary lover for his tardiness, and vowed eternal hatred to them both for not making me a bride's attendant. She listened to me with an air in which embarrassment was mingled sometimes with exultation and sometimes ...
— Arthur Mervyn - Or, Memoirs of the Year 1793 • Charles Brockden Brown
... she busied herself arranging the chairs and tidying the sofa into its usual stiff primness; "I guess he's a good man." And ...
— Elder Conklin and Other Stories • Frank Harris
... of Henry Rayne's comfortable house everything has undergone a change, there is a primness and a fitness about the rooms that used not to be there, a cosy look peeps out from every turn and corner of the well-furnished apartments. The pantry shelves are whole rows of temptations. Very tame lions looking meekly out with their "jelly" eyes, and rare ...
— Honor Edgeworth • Vera
... him," he answered, emphatically, "for as proper a fellow as ever I met in all my vagabond days. Barring his primness he would have proved a gallant"—he was going to say "pirate," but paused in time and said "seaman." "God pardon him for a Puritan," he went on, "for he has in him the ...
— The Lady of Loyalty House - A Novel • Justin Huntly McCarthy
... entered the room, Margaret's first thought was that there could be no other so beautiful as this, and her second was that the stranger seemed even more timid than herself. After a few minutes' talk she laid aside her primness, a weapon she had drawn in self-defence lest this fine lady should not understand the grandeur of a manse, and at a "Call me Babbie, won't you?" ...
— The Little Minister • J.M. Barrie
... that he is worthy of the labour of disentangling them. What he wished to accomplish had either been accomplished, though not in France, or did not deserve to be accomplished, or was altogether impracticable. His attack on the formality and holiday primness of the dramatic probabilities, of the excessive symmetry of the French versification, declamation, and mode of acting, was just; but, at the same time, he objected to all theatrical elevation, and refused to allow to the characters anything like ...
— Lectures on Dramatic Art - and Literature • August Wilhelm Schlegel trans John Black
... although he came out of his study on hearing Doctor Jolly's voice he begged him to excuse his going, while accepting his kind offer for the girls—who were ready in less than no time, Miss Conny losing her primness in her anxiety not to keep the doctor waiting, and the generally slow Liz being for once quick in ...
— Teddy - The Story of a Little Pickle • J. C. Hutcheson
... curious, mingled air of primness and gayety, as if gayety were not quite proper," the artist began. "Some of them look downright interesting, and I've no doubt they are ...
— Baddeck and That Sort of Thing • Charles Dudley Warner
... good original work." Mr. Crittenden warned me at the outset, "Keep an eye out or they'll run over you." But I never had anything but kindness from my pupils. I realized that cheerful, courteous requests were wiser than commands, and sincere friendship more winning than "Teachery" primness. I knew of an unpopular instructor who, being annoyed by his pupils throwing a few peanuts at his desk, said, "Young men, if you throw another peanut, I shall leave the room." A shower ...
— Memories and Anecdotes • Kate Sanborn
... ask sir,' she said, with great primness, not unmixed with fear, 'who comes so early in the morning with so ...
— Lucile Triumphant • Elizabeth M. Duffield
... in support of a first-magnitude star, her dressing room was marked "A." Other members of the company did not drop into her dressing room except by invitation. That room was neat to the point of primness. A square of white coarse sheeting was spread on the floor, under the chair before her dressing table, to gather up dust and powder. It was regularly shaken or changed. There were always flowers—often a single fine rose in a slender vase. On her dressing ...
— Gigolo • Edna Ferber
... these experiments worth trying in the face of a determined hostility on the part of the subject of them. The most rigorous primness of behavior does not daunt them, nor the assertion of an icily virtuous intangibility. But the sort of good-humored preoccupation that doesn't see them at all, that sees the pattern in the wall-paper behind their backs, that tries, ...
— The Real Adventure • Henry Kitchell Webster
... problem," Fran said, with exceeding primness, pronouncing the word as if it were too large for her, and holding up the book with a slender finger placed ...
— Fran • John Breckenridge Ellis
... her in his arms and half-lifted her up the last step of the veranda. She resisted slightly with her characteristic action of catching his wrists in both her hands and holding him off with an awkward primness, and almost in the same tone that she had used to Edward ...
— The Argonauts of North Liberty • Bret Harte
... middle-aged people seem occasionally to come into the world ready tamed. With a certain old-fashioned primness, they step sedately through the paths of childhood. So good, so easy to ...
— Fated to Be Free • Jean Ingelow
... bars always up. The ground was parcelled off in such bits as to make me smile when I remembered our own wide tracts in the New World. Here waste was sin: with us part and parcel of a creed. I marvelled, too, at the primness and solidity of the houses along the road, and remarked how their lines belonged rather to the landscape than to themselves. But I was conscious ever of a strange wish to expand, for I felt as tho' I were in the land of the Liliputians, and ...
— The Crossing • Winston Churchill
... "de Maufant") and her sister sate by the fire knitting in the autumn twilight. Both were lovely; beautiful women in the typical style of island beauty, which not even the primness of their somewhat old-fashioned costume could wholly disguise. For their eyes were dark and sparkling, and their cheeks glowed with the rosy bloom of a healthy and innocent womanhood. They were talking in low tones of the troubles of the ...
— St George's Cross • H. G. Keene
... him a face from which all primness had vanished. The corners of her mouth broke and her eyes grew soft. She smiled at Mr. Vyner, and Mr. Vyner, pluming himself upon his address, ...
— Salthaven • W. W. Jacobs
... not like better, however, the villas that were empty and ruinous, and the gardens that had run wild, and the statues that had lost legs and arms. Some of the ingenious proprietors had enterprisingly whitewashed their statues, and there was a horrible primness about certain of the well-kept gardens which offended me. Most of the houses were not large, but there was here and there a palace as grand as any in the city. Such was the great villa of the Contarini of the Lions, which was ...
— Venetian Life • W. D. Howells
... no fatigue, and was always ready to chatter to Lucy of the most womanish things. Especially, as the girl's beauty grew upon her, was she anxious to carry out those plans of transforming her dress and hair,—her gowns and hats and shoes—the primness of her brown braids, which she and Miss Manisty had ...
— Eleanor • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... his ruddy hair and bronzed skin, his massive frame clad in gorgeously embroidered tunic, his whole appearance heavy and almost rough, in strange contrast alike to the young decadents of the day as to the rigid primness of the patrician matrons, just as his harsh, even voice seemed to dominate the lazy and mellow trebles ...
— "Unto Caesar" • Baroness Emmuska Orczy
... the expression of a personality which was only so on the mental side. He always rode bareheaded, and the brown hair, which he wore a little longer than other men's, was tossed from its masculine primness to certain hyacinthine lines which were becoming. Just now his clear brown eyes were luminous with feeling. He put out a swift, detaining hand and caught hers, laying sympathetic fingers over the clasp and retaining ...
— The Power and the Glory • Grace MacGowan Cooke
... illusion, and unresponsive to masculine attention; but deep in her heart were all the instincts and longings of femininity, and at such times as this they came uppermost. Her bedroom had none of the Puritanical primness which marked her habit of dress; it was in no way suggestive of the masculine character which she so proudly paraded upon the street. On the contrary, it was a bower of daintiness, and was crowded with ...
— The Iron Trail • Rex Beach
... was very full and she was thinking of other matters. But as he continued she answered at length, hesitating, using phrases as trite and quaintly stilted as the theme itself, gently defending the old names he sneered at. And in her words he savoured a certain old-time flavour of primness and pride—a vaguely delicate hint of resentment, which it amused him to excite. Pacing the dunes with her waist enlaced, he said, ...
— The Firing Line • Robert W. Chambers
... she was short. He was bulky, promising to be fat. She was thin, and, with a paring here and there, would have been skinny. His face was sternly resolute, solemn indeed, hers was prim, and primness is the most everlasting, indestructible trait of humanity. It can outface the Sphinx. It is destructible only by death. Whoever has married a prim woman must hand over his breeches and his purse, he will collect postage stamps in his old age, ...
— Here are Ladies • James Stephens
... and go. And he found he didn't even think of marrying. He didn't even want to come or go, particularly. A rather frumpy old bachelor, with thinning hair and a thickening neck. Much has been written about the unwed, middle-aged woman; her fussiness, her primness, her angularity of mind and body. In the male that same fussiness develops, and a certain primness, too. But he grows flabby where ...
— The Best Short Stories of 1917 - and the Yearbook of the American Short Story • Various
... housewife, seldom pausing to laugh or play except with her father, and now and then to chat with her old friend and playfellow, Kit Smallbones. Her childish freedom of manner had given way to grave discretion, not to say primness, in her behaviour to her father's guests, and even the apprentices. It was, of course, the unconscious reaction of the maidenly spirit, aware that she had nothing but her own modesty to protect ...
— The Armourer's Prentices • Charlotte Mary Yonge
... account of her primness and old maidishness, and the frequent hints which she gave to keep her room in order. Miriam had picked up an epithet, perhaps from her aunt, perhaps from a book which seemed exactly to describe Miss Tippit—she was "conventional;" and having ...
— Miriam's Schooling and Other Papers - Gideon; Samuel; Saul; Miriam's Schooling; and Michael Trevanion • Mark Rutherford
... my purpose here to review any of Mr. James's books; I like better to speak of his people than of the conduct of his novels, and I wish to recognize the fineness with which he has touched-in the pretty primness of Osmond's daughter and the mild devotedness of Mr. Rosier. A masterly hand is as often manifest in the treatment of such subordinate figures as in that of the principal persons, and Mr. James does them unerringly. This is felt ...
— Henry James, Jr. • William Dean Howells |
