"Stuffy" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... is little wonder if those people of fashion and wealth and position were indignant and sore. For they had dressed and dined hastily and come all the way down-town to see Le Mire; they waited for her for two hours and a half in stuffy theater seats, and Le ...
— Under the Andes • Rex Stout
... college friends who knew his gifts and ability, had deprecated the burial; and he himself had been curious enough to pay Kent a visit to spy out the reason why. On their first evening together in the stuffy little law office which had been his father's, Kent had made a clean breast of it: there was a young woman in the case, and a promise passed before Kent had gone to college. She was a farmer's daughter, with no notion ...
— The Grafters • Francis Lynde
... ugly and huffy, and smoky, and stuffy, And pokey, and chokey, and black as my hat. As wooer he's dull, for his breath smells of sulphur; Asphyxia incarnate, and horrid at that! You cannot see beauty in one who's so sooty, So dusty, and dingy, and dismal, and ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 99, November 15, 1890 • Various
... Remember this trunk must not go in the hold of the ship. Have it marked "Wanted" and "This end up." I will lie with my head this way. I'll put the shears in here, and I can cut another hole from the inside if it gets too stuffy. ...
— The Ghost Breaker - A Melodramatic Farce in Four Acts • Paul Dickey
... the unrested soul in nothing more than this, that (like a revolution in Paris) it tempts the people to "go down into the streets." The streets are cooler, at least, than stuffy gas-lit rooms; and if the public would only roam them in a contemplative spirit, with eyes turned up to the peaceful constellations, the public might fall down an area now and then, but would not much disturb the neighbourhood. ...
— Lost Leaders • Andrew Lang
... more than once a reverie was pleasantly changed by the whisper of a chickadee in some near-by tree as a cold comrade snuggled up to it. Even during the worst of nights, when I thought of my lot at all. I considered it better than that of those who were sick in houses or asleep in the stuffy, deadly air ...
— Wild Life on the Rockies • Enos A. Mills
... into the rather stuffy, overcrowded living-room, that was too cosy and too warm. The son followed last, standing in the doorway. The father talked to me. Maggie put out the tea-cups. The mother went into the ...
— Wintry Peacock - From "The New Decameron", Volume III. • D. H. Lawrence
... selected as one would select a color for clothes, to harmonize with the color of the skin in all lights, and, for service Color schemes in decoration are being followed and we have no more stuffy parlors, often closed for days. Instead we have living rooms, with cleanable furniture, strong but light, entirely suitable for winter, and cool in summer. No one has a parlor now-a-days. The best room is generally a living room for the whole family. No more do we ...
— The Colored Girl Beautiful • E. Azalia Hackley
... in this mood that she entered the little apartment where Bott held what he called his "Intermundane Seances." The room was small and stuffy. A simulacrum of a chest of drawers in one corner was really Bott's bed, where the seer reposed at night, and which, tilted up against the wall during the day, contained the rank bedclothes, long innocent of the wash-tub. ...
— The Bread-winners - A Social Study • John Hay
... small and stuffy, the night had been very hot, and Mrs. Darnell paused for a moment at the door, wondering whether the girl on the bed was really the dusty-faced servant who bustled day by day about the house, or even ...
— The House of Souls • Arthur Machen
... down the track, I reviewed the past winter months, the long days and evenings spent at my desk in the stuffy little lodgings to which I was limited by my narrow income, interrupted frequently by invasions on various pretexts of the ill-fed chambermaid, who insisted on telling me her woes, or by my neighbor from ...
— A Village Ophelia and Other Stories • Anne Reeve Aldrich
... was as easy to be placated as to be stirred to anger; and when Flint urged him to come into the stuffy little office and partake of a lemonade with the addition of a stronger fluid from a bottle in Flint's room, he forgot his wrath or drowned it in the cooling drink, and at length parted in kindliness, only bidding his patient wear cabbage-leaves ...
— Flint - His Faults, His Friendships and His Fortunes • Maud Wilder Goodwin
... he found himself in a narrow hall. On his right was the jury-room, and on his left the county clerk's office, stuffy little holes, each lighted by a single window. Beyond, and occupying the full width of the building, was the court-room, with its hard, wooden benches and its staring white walls. Advancing to the door, which stood open, the judge ...
— The Prodigal Judge • Vaughan Kester
... how hot those days were. Well, in my cheap, stuffy room, openin' on an air-shaft, it was hotter 'n hell with the lid on. When I couldn't stand it any longer, I went out into the corridor an' down it to the fire escape outside the window. It was a lot cooler there. I lit a stogie an' sat on the railin' smokin', maybe for a ...
— Tangled Trails - A Western Detective Story • William MacLeod Raine
... part of the vessel. The roof, formed of the upper deck, was low, upheld by immense timbers, and the apartment, nearly square, was dimly flooded by the sparse light sifting down through the single hatch-opening above, so that, in spite of its large dimensions, it had a cramped and stuffy appearance. The vast butt of the mainmast arose directly in front of me, and, upon a narrow bench surrounding it, a dozen soldiers were lounging, while near the entrance to the passageway, scarcely more than a shadow in that dimness, stood a sentry, stiff and erect, with musket at his shoulder. ...
— Prisoners of Chance - The Story of What Befell Geoffrey Benteen, Borderman, - through His Love for a Lady of France • Randall Parrish
... shells, where a fierce swoop of the storm struck the laden tops of pines; the dense swirl, again exactly like smoke but now of a great fire, that marked the lakes. The picture super-imposed itself silently over this stuffy bourgeois respectability, like the shadow of a dream. He heard plainly enough the commonplace drawl of the woman before him offering him the platitudes of ...
— The Blazed Trail • Stewart Edward White
... and very stuffy indoors—we used to play a good deal in the garden. We made a tent out of the kitchen clothes-horse and some blankets off our beds, and though it was quite as hot in the tent as in the house it was a very different sort of hotness. Albert's uncle ...
— The Story of the Treasure Seekers • E. Nesbit
... how many times I've heard those words since I've been here. And durable, too. And nourishing. That's another word. Honestly, Marie is getting awfully tired of Mary's sensible sewing and dusting, and her durable clumpy shoes and stuffy dresses, and her nourishing oatmeal and whole-wheat bread. But there, what can you do? I'm trying to remember that it's different, anyway, and that I said I liked ...
— Mary Marie • Eleanor H. Porter
... Albert's uncle asked. 'I'm afraid they'll be but dull dogs, the Antiquities, stuffy old gentlemen with amphorae in their buttonholes instead of orchids, and pedigrees poking out ...
— The Wouldbegoods • E. Nesbit
... to the boy who had been examining us minutely, "these are the young ladies who have been sending you such beautiful flowers. You see, he loves flowers so!" explained Mademoiselle. "Poor child, he cannot walk, and so he has to stay here in this stuffy room all day long. Before I was ill, I was able to take him out in his little carriage, and sometimes we would go as far as the open fields where he could see all the flowers he wanted to, to his heart's desire, but now that ...
— Paula the Waldensian • Eva Lecomte
... again, and to take possession of Phyllis Carey's every free moment, that they declared the Robarts's apartments were the very nicest the girls had ever seen. They, the apartments, were delightfully cosy (which meant stuffy in July). They were more cheerful (noisier) than the Old Doctor's House. It was great fun for the pair to stow themselves and their belongings ...
— A Houseful of Girls • Sarah Tytler
... do what Mr. Ferry proposed, if you think the house can't be lived in? Put up a tent in the grove and bring Sally there as soon as she's fit for it. She'd get strong twice as fast as in that stuffy flat!" ...
— Strawberry Acres • Grace S. Richmond
... brought back to the business on hand by hearing my name shouted. They must have let Mary out by another door for when I entered the jury room she was not there. It was hot and stuffy, smelling of stale tobacco and staler clothing. I noticed that the jurymen seemed deeply interested and that they were, for the most part, a rather intelligent lot. The foreman, a near-sighted business-looking ...
— 32 Caliber • Donald McGibeny
... opened the door and greeted the curate with a smile; then casting a surprised look at his companion, stood aside to let them pass into the narrow, dark, stuffy hallway. "He'll be sleeping just now," said the woman, pointing up the stairs. "You can just go quietly up. She'll be there by ...
— Fan • Henry Harford
... claustrophobia before it's over, anyway," said Multhaus morosely as he followed Mike down the hallway in the direction from which Snookums had come. "Darkness and stuffy air touch off ...
— Unwise Child • Gordon Randall Garrett
... emphatic that nobody had come into the building by the main entrance between the hours of ten and half-past. It was possible, he admitted, that they could have come between half-past ten and a quarter to eleven because he had gone to his "office," which proved to be a stuffy little place under the stairs, to change from his uniform into his private clothes before going home. He was in the habit of locking the front door at eleven o'clock. Tenants of the mansions had pass-keys to the main door, and of all that happened after eleven he would ...
— The Daffodil Mystery • Edgar Wallace
... nowhere any clean air to breathe or smell. I hated the gritty asphalt that gave no peace to my feet and cut my knees when my clumsiness made me fall. I hated the long stone corridors whose echoes seemed to me to mock my hesitating footsteps when I passed from one dull class to another. I hated the stuffy malodorous classrooms, with their whistling gas-jets and noise of inharmonious life. I would have hated the yellow fogs had they not sometimes shortened the hours of my bondage. That five hundred boys shared this horrible environment with me did not ...
— The Ghost Ship • Richard Middleton
... two groups of Philadelphia Orchestra subscribers—the Friday afternoon crowd, consisting largely of stuffy dowagers, and the Saturday night clientele, composed mostly of persons genuinely ...
— The World's Great Men of Music - Story-Lives of Master Musicians • Harriette Brower
... distant mountains for the first time being clearly visible. The station was crowded with vendors of pottery, curious things in buffalo horn, sweetmeats, &c. The rolling stock on this line is of English manufacture, and we were therefore put into the too familiar, close, stuffy, first-class carriage, and duly locked up for the journey down to Valparaiso. The line, running as it does through mountain gorges for a great portion of the way, must have been a difficult one ...
— A Voyage in the 'Sunbeam' • Annie Allnut Brassey
... she agreed, "but what would be the use? Mrs. Baird is much too busy to come, the classrooms are always stuffy after school and besides, we couldn't take the jam along, it's against ...
— Polly's Senior Year at Boarding School • Dorothy Whitehill
... the captain demanded. "She's worth more than her board any day. We don't want any money. If ye'll let her stay with us we'll be quite willin' to pay you something fer her. We need her, and so do the scouts. It'll be a shame to take her back to that stuffy city at this time ...
— Rod of the Lone Patrol • H. A. Cody
... pleased with the old-fashioned porch and low-studded rooms, though the sleeping-rooms seemed a little stuffy at first. ...
— The Peterkin Papers • Lucretia P Hale
... few minutes past nine when Kenneth followed his host up the ladder and through the trap-door into the stuffy attic. He carried his rough riding-boots, which Zachariah had cleaned and greased with a ...
— Viola Gwyn • George Barr McCutcheon
... distinguished about it from an architectural point of view. We went up to the count's room, which was tolerably furnished, and after shewing me over the house he took me to my own room. It was on the ground floor, stuffy, ...
— The Memoires of Casanova, Complete • Jacques Casanova de Seingalt
... young governess, and a walk at that early hour was of itself a pleasure to Celestina. She had not been inside the Rectory since the Vane family had replaced old Dr. Bunton and his wife, and scarcely was the door open when the little girl noticed a difference. The old, heavy, stuffy furniture was gone, and though it was still plain, the house looked lighter and brighter. The schoolroom was a nice little room looking towards the sea; there was a good strong table with a black oil-cloth cover and four hair-seated chairs, such as were much used at that time. ...
— The Rectory Children • Mrs Molesworth
... in September Amory arrived in Princeton and joined the sweltering crowd of conditioned men who thronged the streets. It seemed a stupid way to commence his upper-class years, to spend four hours a morning in the stuffy room of a tutoring school, imbibing the infinite boredom of conic sections. Mr. Rooney, pander to the dull, conducted the class and smoked innumerable Pall Malls as he drew diagrams and worked equations from six ...
— This Side of Paradise • F. Scott Fitzgerald
... the unfortunate individual who is barred by circumstances from participating in these joys, what inducement is there to work? Is such a one to leave the school nets in order to stew in a stuffy room over a Thucydides? ...
— Tales of St. Austin's • P. G. Wodehouse
... was presented to him in the year Eighteen Hundred Fifty-nine, in token of a running high jump—the world's record at the time, or not, as the case may be. Haeckel is essentially an out-of-door man, as opposed to the philosopher who works in a stuffy room, and grows round-shouldered over his microscope. "I may entrust laboratory analyses to others, but there is one thing I will never let another do for me, and that is take my daily walk a-field," ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great - Volume 12 - Little Journeys to the Homes of Great Scientists • Elbert Hubbard
... but yet they were more or less necessary, so Sam got out at Hollis Creek Inn with her, and led the way determinedly and directly into the stuffy little parlor just off the main assembly room. He saw Mr. Stevens in the door of the post-office, but only nodded to him, and then he drew Miss Josephine into ...
— The Early Bird - A Business Man's Love Story • George Randolph Chester
... house? What was this change in her? She was afraid to speak, lest the intense rebellious anger she felt should gain the mastery. Was it she that had these wicked thoughts of George—poor, kind, unsuspecting, loving George? She felt a little faint, for the windows were closed and the room stuffy with the odour of the new furniture and the atmosphere of the workshop; everything here seemed to her ...
— The Talking Horse - And Other Tales • F. Anstey
... is stuffy in here. Wait—I'll do it myself." Denver pushed down the upper sash, and returned to his chair. "Well—go on," he said, filling another pipe. His composure ...
— Tales Of Men And Ghosts • Edith Wharton
... to pick up Clarissa and take her to some stuffy cure in Austria with his mother. It's too lucky: there's just time to telegraph him to bring my things. I didn't mean to wait for him; but it won't delay me ...
— The Glimpses of the Moon • Edith Wharton
... officials caused me to forget completely the events of a few days before. Indeed, I grew so lighthearted that when I caught my first sight of the train which was to take us to Paris, I enjoyed a hearty laugh. The toy-looking engine, the stuffy little compartment cars, with tiny, old-fashioned wheels, struck me as being extremely funny. But before we reached Paris my respect for our train rose considerably. I found that the "tiny" engine ...
— The Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man • James Weldon Johnson
... figure than the Marquess who apes Caligula or Commodus. Still, his lurking dilettantism made him doubly alive to the elegance of the Palazzo Tournanches when he went thither from a coarse meal in the stuffy dining-parlour of one of his new acquaintances; as he never relished the discourse of the latter more than after an afternoon in the society of the ...
— The Valley of Decision • Edith Wharton
... angle one views them. They have a patriarchal, self-satisfied, suburban manner of complete importance. The old gentleman bosses his harem outrageously, and each and every member of the tribe walks about with short steps and a stuffy parvenu small-town self-sufficiency. One is quite certain that it is only by accident that they have long tusks and live in Africa, instead of rubber-plants and self-made business and a pug-dog within commuters' distance of New York. But at the slightest alarm ...
— The Land of Footprints • Stewart Edward White
... the beginning of last summer, when, as I re-entered my hotel at ten o'clock, the little reptile of a portress handed me your gracious lines. I was in a villainous humour. I had been having an over- dressed dinner in a stuffy restaurant, and had gone from there to a suffocating theatre, where, by way of amusement, I saw a play in which blood and lies were the least of the horrors. The theatres over there are insupportable; the atmosphere is pestilential. ...
— The Point of View • Henry James
... blast. Oaths and ribald laughter assailed her ears, while directly beneath, although out of her view, a quarrel threatened to lead to serious consequences. She pulled down the window to shut out these sounds, but the room became so stuffy and hot without even this slight ventilation, as to oblige her opening it again. As a compromise she hauled down the curtain, a green paper affair, torn badly, and which occasionally flapped in the wind with ...
— The Strange Case of Cavendish • Randall Parrish
... "Don't be so stuffy, Phoenix." She pouted. "Come and race with me. I've got a new broom, and I want to see ...
— David and the Phoenix • Edward Ormondroyd
... Amifontaine, to let our chauffeur, known affectionately as The Human Rabbit, tinker with a leaky tire valve or something. A young officer came up through the dusk to find out who we were, and, having found out, he invited us into the chief house of the place, and there in a stuffy little French parlor we were introduced in due form to General d'Elsa, the head of the Twelfth Reserve Corps, it turned out. Standing in a ceremonious ring, with filled glasses in our hands, about a table which bore a flary lamp ...
— Paths of Glory - Impressions of War Written At and Near the Front • Irvin S. Cobb
... fish-market at the Rialto, and you've shown her the house of Othello and the house of Desdemona, and the prisons in the ducal palace; and three nights you've taken us to the Piazza as soon as the Austrian band stopped playing, and all the interesting promenading was over, and those stuffy old Italians began to come to the caffes. Well, I can tell you that's no way to amuse a young girl. We must do something for her, or she will die. She has come here from a country where girls have always had the best time in the world, and where the times are livelier now than ...
— A Fearful Responsibility and Other Stories • William D. Howells
... James was led by instinct from the crowded highways to the dim border-lands of human experience. He preferred to dwell in the debatable lands. With a quizzical smile he listened to the dignitaries of philosophy. He found their completed systems too stuffy. He loved the wildernesses of thought where shy wild things hide—half hopes, half realities. They are not quite true now,—but they ...
— Humanly Speaking • Samuel McChord Crothers
... head out from the upper berth of the stuffy little state-room assigned to Mrs. Fisher, Mrs. Henderson, Phronsie, and herself; "was anything ever so delicious as this boat? —and to think, Mamsie,"—here Polly paused to add as impressively as if the idea had never been voiced before,—"that we are really to see ...
— Five Little Peppers Abroad • Margaret Sidney
... whose rights to a perfect fidelity of word and deed must by no means be tampered with, and he would have the button sewed on or the rip sewed up at once, and refuse to charge anything, while the customer waited in his shirt-sleeves in the small, stuffy shop opening directly from the street. When he tolerantly discussed the peculiarities of ladies as a sex, he would endure to be laughed at, "for sufferance was the badge of all his tribe," and possibly ...
— The Daughter of the Storage - And Other Things in Prose and Verse • William Dean Howells
... especial train didn't go any farther. It's lovely there, Mother, and plenty of lodgings to let. We walked along and saw one house that looked pleasant, so we went up and rang and a maid showed us into a parlor. We knew right off we didn't want to come there, because the place was so dark and stuffy and there were fourteen hundred family photographs and knit woolen mats and such things around. I was going to sit down but just as I got near the chair,—it was rather dark, you see,—something said 'Hello!' and there was a horrid great parrot ...
— The Spanish Chest • Edna A. Brown
... which show indications of a reaction as a result of (a) advanced pregnancy, (b) the excitement of [oe]strum, (c) concurrent diseases, as inflammation of the lungs, intestines, uterus, udder, or other parts, abortion, retention of afterbirth, indigestion, etc., (d) inclosure in a hot, stuffy stable, especially in summer, or exposure to cold drafts or rains, (e) any change in the method of feeding, watering, or stabling of the animal during the test. Notwithstanding all these possibilities of error, the results of thousands of tests show that in less ...
— Special Report on Diseases of Cattle • U.S. Department of Agriculture
... has not been done yet," she said, ushering the visitors into a stuffy little drawing-room adorned with many ikons and pots of flowers. "Oh, Mother of God! Vassilisa, go and open the shutters anyway! My little angel! My little beauty! I did not know that Olitchka had a ...
— The Bishop and Other Stories • Anton Chekhov
... very good artist. I think his etchings are as good as any line work the war has produced. A most amusing man. We had many happy dinners together at (p. 027) a little restaurant, where the old lady used to give us her bedroom as a private sitting-room dining-room. It was a bit stuffy, but the ...
— An Onlooker in France 1917-1919 • William Orpen
... economized space with a dozen such little plans, and all through the unpacking and settling and arranging, she would say every hour or two, "Oh, it's a little crowded and stuffy, but it's ours—it's home," until Henderson and the children caught something of her inspiration, and the sod-roof shack became "home" in the ...
— The Moccasin Maker • E. Pauline Johnson
... see it in July and August," Daphne laughed. "Then it is crowded, and the people sleep on the fire-escapes and even on the sidewalks in some of the smaller streets. It is so hot in their stuffy rooms." ...
— Drusilla with a Million • Elizabeth Cooper
... stuffy room with its guttering candles and its Chameleon-colored ark-curtain was the pivot of their barren lives. Joy came to bear to it the offering of its thanksgiving and to vow sixpenny bits to the Lord, prosperity ...
— Children of the Ghetto • I. Zangwill
... word as if it were an unclassified insect. It was a lovely beckoning day out-of-doors. The children felt like captives; there was something that provoked rebellion in the droning voices, the buzzing of an early wild bee against the sunlit pane, and even in the stuffy familiar odor of the place,—the odor of apples and crumbs of doughnuts and gingerbread in the dinner pails on the high entry nails, and of all the little gowns and trousers that had brushed through junipers and young pines ...
— A Country Doctor and Selected Stories and Sketches • Sarah Orne Jewett
... men. The way to lessen sorrow is to make a lot of it. The way to endure a painful crisis is to insist very much that it is a crisis; to permit people who must feel sad at least to feel important. In this the poor are simply the priests of the universal civilization; and in their stuffy feasts and solemn chattering there is the smell of the baked meats of Hamlet and the dust and echo of ...
— What's Wrong With The World • G.K. Chesterton
... of a young lady turning up at a bachelor's flat at 9 A.M. on a Sunday in a ball-frock, after a night out at a dancing-club. Lately we have learnt to bear such escapades without flinching. But it was not so with Emily's guardian, Sir Samuel Lethbridge, very Victorian in his stuffy prejudice in favour of the decencies; and it was necessary to put him off with a tale of her sudden departure to Brussels to render first aid to an aunt stricken with mumps. In order to give colour to this fabrication Emily urges Dick Trotter, the bachelor ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Volume 150, February 2, 1916 • Various
... Belcher gave the reins to his servant, and, with a sharp rap upon the door with the butt of his whip, summoned to the latch the red-faced and stuffy keeper. What passed between them, Phipps did not hear, although he tried very hard to do so. At the close of a half hour's buzzing conversation, Tom Buffum took the bundle from the wagon, and pitched it into his doorway. Then, with the ...
— Sevenoaks • J. G. Holland
... they all went in. A stuffy, smoky wave of atmosphere struck them in the face. A kerosene lamp, hanging from the ceiling and covered with a white shade, provided light for the ...
— The Quest • Pio Baroja
... drive with me," said Hesper, moved by a sudden impulse: through some hidden motion of sympathy, she felt, as she looked at her, that the place was stuffy. "It will do you good," she went on. "You are too much indoors.—And the ceiling is low," she ...
— Mary Marston • George MacDonald
... the coffin was being tilted downwards from the catafalque into the grave close by. G.J. wanted surcease, were it but for an hour. He longed acutely, unbearably, to be for an hour with Christine in her warm, stuffy, exciting, languorous, enervating room hermetically sealed against the war. Then he remembered the tones of her voice as she had told her Belgian adventures.... Was it love? Was it tenderness? Was it sensuality? The difference ...
— The Pretty Lady • Arnold E. Bennett
... pamphlets, and coming to realize what a mind was here being destroyed. For this man, it seemed to him, was master of the noblest prose utterance that had been heard in America since Emerson died. He went again to hear him speak, in another ill-lighted and stuffy hall before less than a hundred people; and the pain of this was more than he could bear. He went home that night with his friend, and labored with him with all the force of his being. "You stay here," he declared, ...
— Love's Pilgrimage • Upton Sinclair
... father and I feel the same; and really, Geraldine, on a wet day these rooms are terribly small. I used to take my work upstairs; one seemed to breathe freer than in that stuffy parlour that Audrey and Michael think ...
— Lover or Friend • Rosa Nouchette Carey
... well educated, trained, and ambitious young women would be a blessing and benefit. Socially, of course, the first young women who adopted such a radical change in custom would be pariahs. They would also, doubtless, suffer many hardships in the way of irregular hours, small, dark, stuffy rooms, unreasonable mistresses, no adequate place to entertain their friends, and other such injustices. But, with a higher and more intelligent class of household servants, doubtless these ...
— Analyzing Character • Katherine M. H. Blackford and Arthur Newcomb
... a crowded stuffy hall he faced what was at the start almost a menacing crowd. Yet as he addressed them you would have thought that he had known every man and woman in the assembly all their lives. The easy, intimate, frank manner of his delivery: his immediate claim to kinship with ...
— The War After the War • Isaac Frederick Marcosson
... the Deychi Club. Time, 10.30 P. M. of a stuffy night in the Rains. Four men dispersed in picturesque attitudes and easy-chairs. To these enter BLAYNE of the Irregular ...
— Soldiers Three • Rudyard Kipling
... He shrugged. "We know everybody who works at the plant. We've known them all their lives. They'd get mad if we started to get stuffy. We ...
— Space Platform • Murray Leinster
... keep you waiting, ma'am, but—" He held the doors open and the two ladies entered the stuffy, unlighted hall. ...
— From the Housetops • George Barr McCutcheon
... be to leave his own work for public agitation, he plunged into the Socialist campaign with characteristic energy. For two or three years he was constantly devoting his Sundays to open-air speech-making, his evenings to thinly-attended meetings in stuffy rooms in all the poorer parts of London; and, at the call of comrades, he often travelled into the provinces, and even as far as Scotland, to lend a hand. And he spent time and money prodigally in supporting journals which were to spread the special doctrines of his form of Socialism. Nor ...
— Victorian Worthies - Sixteen Biographies • George Henry Blore
... meet a body Cubbin' thro' the rye, What a body calls a body Dare I say?—not I; Farmers get distinctly stuffy, Neither are they shy, And Masters, when they're really rattled, Sometimes ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 159, October 6, 1920 • Various
... instinctively goes to the light masses in a picture, and if these masses are sky, the figures lose some importance. The fashion of lowering its tone has much to be said for it on the score of the added interest it gives to the figures. But it is apt to bring a heavy stuffy look into the atmosphere, and is only really admissible in frankly conventional treatment, in which one has not been led to expect implicit truth to natural effect. If truth to natural appearances is carried far in the figures, the same truth will be ...
— The Practice and Science Of Drawing • Harold Speed
... by the name of a parlour, was a dingy, stuffy apartment of the true Dull Street type. The paper was faded and torn, the ceiling was discoloured, the furniture was decrepit, the carpet was threadbare, and the cheap engraving on the wall, with its title, "As ...
— Reginald Cruden - A Tale of City Life • Talbot Baines Reed
... jingling bells coming rapidly nearer roused me from my contemplative mood. The diligence, so called, was in sight, and a few minutes later I took my place in the very stuffy box on wheels, nearly filled with women and bundles. As it was only a drive of some seven or eight miles to Espalion, the town was reached in good time for dinner. I sat at a side-table in the large room of the inn, at the door of which the coach ...
— Wanderings by southern waters, eastern Aquitaine • Edward Harrison Barker
... shop-door and let him in. Barbier looked round with some amazement on the small stuffy place, piled to bursting by now with books of every kind, which only John's herculean efforts ...
— The History of David Grieve • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... devouring the newspaper, which is his only form of recreation and his only bit of excitement. At 5 he will go out for a short stroll down College-street or around College-square. This is his one piece of exercise, if such you can call it. At dusk he returns to his ill-lighted, stuffy room and continues his work, keeping it up, with a short interval for his evening meal, until he goes to bed, the hour of bed-time depending upon the proximity of his examination. A very large percentage when they actually sit for their examinations are nothing ...
— Indian Unrest • Valentine Chirol
... stuffy and crowded to its utmost limit, and Mr. Polly's skies were dark with the sense of irreparable acts. Everybody seemed noisy and greedy and doing foolish things. Miriam, still in that unbecoming hat—for presently they ...
— The History of Mr. Polly • H. G. Wells
... shaky, the Ingletons managed to dress, and tottered on deck. Everard and Mr. Stacey, both looking pale, though they assured every one that they were all right, found comfortable chairs for the ladies, and tucked them up snugly with rugs. After the long hours in the stuffy cabin it was delightful to sit in the sunshine and watch the gray, racing water. Here and there in the distance could occasionally be seen the funnels of far-away steamers, and then there was much excitement and focussing of opera-glasses ...
— The Princess of the School • Angela Brazil
... amongst the anciens militaires frequenting a certain little cafe full of flies when one stuffy afternoon "that poor General Feraud" let out suddenly a volley ...
— The Point Of Honor - A Military Tale • Joseph Conrad
... beer? Splendid. He would have a bottle of beer. Yes, and a sandwich. Excellent. Just the thing after an eighty-mile run. What excellent roads they kept in Oxfordshire! He never remembered better. And the Cotswold air was magnificent. Really, one had to spend one's days in a stuffy Court in Town to appreciate the country as ...
— Anthony Lyveden • Dornford Yates
... said the shell door-stop. "If you knew how tired I was of hearing about the War, when there's nothing to do for ever but stop in this stuffy room. And to me it's particularly galling, because I never exploded at all. I failed. For all the good we are any more, we—we warriors—we might as well be mouldy old fossils like the home-grown things in this room, who know of war or excitement ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 153, Oct. 10, 1917 • Various
... the bereaved mother was so listless and broken in health that the doctor advised a change to some quiet country place, where she could get the benefit of outdoor life and better air than in the stuffy little Paris apartment. A casual acquaintance, Mr. Pardessus, an American sculptor whom they had met at the art school, told them about Grez, a little village in Fontainebleau Forest on the River Loing, where there was a ruined castle, a picturesque old inn, and a lovely ...
— The Life of Mrs. Robert Louis Stevenson • Nellie Van de Grift Sanchez
... of fancy to see inside the stuffy little theatre of Bath, on that memorable summer afternoon, when "Sir Courtly Nice"[A] is produced, with Cibber in the foppish title-role and the fair unknown as Leonora, "Belguard's sister, in love with ...
— The Palmy Days of Nance Oldfield • Edward Robins
... work to have to set on a high stool, to dot and carry one, and to scribble away all day. I could not stand it. It would kill me. It was bad enough to have to go to school, and then we had a good many play-hours; but in these stuffy, musty, dark offices, I have heard that they have only half-an-hour for dinner, and work away till ten o'clock at night. That sort of life would ...
— Dick Cheveley - His Adventures and Misadventures • W. H. G. Kingston
... stand against the impression of such charges advanced with heat and conviction. They shook him. They were yet vibrating in the air of that stuffy hotel-room, terrific, disturbing, impossible to get rid of, when the door opened and Flora de ...
— Chance • Joseph Conrad
... distinguish the store from any other similar one. If some following sentence should be, "Though not wider, it yet presents a more imposing appearance than its neighbors, because the door is placed at one side, thus making room for a single wide display window instead of two stuffy, narrow ones," a detail has been added which, though not changing the general outline, makes the picture clearer and at the same time emphasizes the distinguishing feature of ...
— Composition-Rhetoric • Stratton D. Brooks
... stiflingly hot there, after the cool breeze which blew off the moor on the hillside; the air was thick with smoke and dust, and, as Maggie turned into the alley where she was to leave her child, she felt how close and stuffy it was. ...
— A Pair of Clogs • Amy Walton
... Just then, poor Alice Tracey came up from below, walked aft, and stood at the stern with her hand on the rail, looking at the brig's boiling wake; this was a frequent habit of hers. Neither of us took any further notice of her after she had remarked that the cabin was very stuffy—we were running before the wind at the time. About five minutes later I went for'ard, and just as Barradas was giving up the wheel again, he noticed that Mrs. Tracey bad disappeared. He gave the alarm in an instant, for he knew she had not gone below again, and must ...
— Edward Barry - South Sea Pearler • Louis Becke
... equipped. I have seen the man in halls talking, his huge body swaying back and forth, his great fists in the air, his voice harsh, persistent, insistent—with something of the quality of the drums in it—beating down into the upturned faces of the men crowded into the stuffy little places. ...
— Marching Men • Sherwood Anderson
... was rushing wind-driven over that rolling upland. 'At last,' he said. I sighed. A mile further on we came into the smiling green vlei. 'This was black a while back,' he said. 'Doesn't the fire help a bit after all? Who wants that moldy stuffy old feed, isn't it parabolic of that fusty Dutch-Anglo dorp and its prejudices? What are they meant for, and it? 'Fuel of fire,' say I.' I smiled indulgently. Since we had got into town things had happened. We had had our memorial services for the Dead that last night, and this same morning. ...
— Cinderella in the South - Twenty-Five South African Tales • Arthur Shearly Cripps
... that night—the story of the summer's heat and horror and suffering—heard and seen, and keenly felt in his delirium: the dusty, grimy days of drill on the hot sands of Tampa; the long, long, hot wait on the transport in the harbour; the stuffy, ill-smelling breath of the hold, when the wind was wrong; the march along the coast and the grewsome life over and around him—buzzard and strange bird in the air, and crab and snail and lizard and scorpion and hairy tarantula scuttling through ...
— Crittenden - A Kentucky Story of Love and War • John Fox, Jr.
... and sometimes are all the better for a change ("like Miss Margery," so he said), and sometimes are home-sick and won't settle ("which I've a notion might be one of your follies, Miss Grace"), and turn pale and sickly in dark corners or stuffy rooms. But he never knew one that went home ...
— Last Words - A Final Collection of Stories • Juliana Horatia Ewing
... into the room and duly introduced, lost no time in making a suggestion of an eminently practical nature—that as all these gentlemen had been cooped up in that stuffy police-court for two or three hours, they would be none the worse for a glass of wine, and she immediately disappeared, jingling a bunch of keys, to reappear a few minutes later in charge of the parlour-maid carrying decanters ...
— The Middle of Things • J. S. Fletcher
... Summerlee asked if he might light his pipe, and we all had cigarettes. It steadied our nerves, I think, but it was a mistake, for it made a dreadful atmosphere in that stuffy room. Challenger had ...
— The Poison Belt • Arthur Conan Doyle
... "I suppose you expected a black fire and impertinent apologies by way of substitute for warmth; a stuffy room, and damp sheets, roasted, like a ...
— Love Me Little, Love Me Long • Charles Reade
... chair an inch or two higher than the rest, between two bundles. From the first, a huge heap of feathers and wings, she was taking the downy plumes, and pulling the others from the quills, and so filling bundle two littering the floor ankle-deep, and contributing to the general stock a stuffy little malaria, which might have played a distinguished part in a sweet room, but went for nothing here. Gerard asked her if he could have something ...
— The Cloister and the Hearth • Charles Reade
... such high spirits was lying beneath that grim sea behind the smiling headland. Yet she knew that Boyle meant no harm by his chatter. He was weak from his wound, and perhaps a trifle light-headed as the result of being brought from the stuffy saloon to the airy and sunlit chart-room. So she crushed a sorrow that was unavailing, and strove to put the sailor at his ...
— The Captain of the Kansas • Louis Tracy
... up his cigar again and puffed at it a moment before saying anything. Then, "Dr. Turnbull, please don't think I'm being stuffy, but may I ask the purpose ...
— Dead Giveaway • Gordon Randall Garrett
... It is stuffy in the steerage where the second-classers sleep, For there's near a hundred for'ard, and they're stowed away like sheep, — They are trav'lers for the most part in a straight 'n' honest path; But their linen's rather scanty, an' there isn't any bath — Stowed away like ewes and wethers ...
— In the Days When the World Was Wide and Other Verses • Henry Lawson
... aboard the Zouave on the voyage from Marseilles! But I have no facility with the brush, and mere words cannot convey how he passed from the proudly heroic to the hopelessly miserable in the course of the journey. Worst of all, while he was groaning in his stuffy bunk, he knew that a very merry party of passengers were enjoying themselves in the saloon. He was still in his bunk when the ship came to her moorings at Algiers, and he got up with a sudden jerk, under the impression ...
— The World's Greatest Books, Vol III • Arthur Mee and J.A. Hammerton, Eds.
... position is possible, one soon becomes tired sitting in the fixed attitude. In pity to your coolies, you walk up-hill and you are exposed to inclement weather unless you hire a covered chair. This, however, is not only hot and stuffy, but it makes people think you an aristocrat, as only officials or the rich use such chairs in the country, though in cities they are a common means of conveyance. Besides, I had travelled in a chair in Korea and I wished to try something else ...
— An Inevitable Awakening • ARTHUR JUDSON BROWN
... appearance, from her grey hair to her slattern heels, was disordered. Her cap had fallen off on to the ground, and Mr. Blee noticed that her parting was as a broad turnpike road much tramped upon by Time. The room smelt stuffy beyond its wont and reeked not only of spirits but tobacco. This Billy sniffed inquiringly, and Mrs. Coomstock observed the action. "'Twas Lezzard," she said. "I like to see a man in comfort. You can smoke if you mind to. Coomstock always done it, and a man's no man without, ...
— Children of the Mist • Eden Phillpotts
... know what was the matter; so, bidding a couple of the men to securely bind the prisoners, I descended the companion ladder, with Lindsay at my heels, to see whether there were any more Frenchmen to be fought. There were not, however; the close, stuffy little cabin was empty; so we went on deck again, and, leaving two men to keep watch and ward at the after end of the ship, went forward, where I personally superintended the operation of effectually securing the crew, who we ...
— A Pirate of the Caribbees • Harry Collingwood
... childish laughter, nor all the tiny steps that glided over the polished floors. For a moment, as she sat on the edge of a great red-silk couch, taking from the plate presented to her the first sherbet of her life, she suddenly thought of the dark stairway, of her parents' stuffy little rooms, and it produced upon her mind the effect of a distant country which she had ...
— Fromont and Risler, Complete • Alphonse Daudet
... father, being an ardent Radical, with a passion for any one that Gladstone patronised, had made elaborate preparations for Dilke's reception; when he arrived at Glen he was given a warm welcome; and we all sat down to tea. After hearing him talk uninterruptedly for hours and watching his stuffy face and slow, protruding ...
— Margot Asquith, An Autobiography: Volumes I & II • Margot Asquith
... narrow and stuffy as a prison-cell, Yourii found life as dreary as ever, and his little love-episode seemed ...
— Sanine • Michael Artzibashef
... as well as any, I guess," said Meyers. He drew Mr. Trimm past him into the seat nearer the window and sat down alongside him on the side next the aisle, settling himself on the stuffy plush seat and breathing deeply, like a man who had got through the hardest part of a not ...
— The Escape of Mr. Trimm - His Plight and other Plights • Irvin S. Cobb
... hatters, felt as if they were in a sort of fairyland. Never had they experienced such thrilling excitement before. They could not get over their surprise at discovering such heroes as Rougon, Granoux, and Roudier in their midst. At last, half stifled by the stuffy atmosphere, and tired of ever telling each other the same things, they decided to go off and spread the momentous news abroad. They glided away one by one, each anxious to have the glory of being the first to know and ...
— The Fortune of the Rougons • Emile Zola
... me sit here a bit for the last time. The air's so stuffy inside. Oh, how bad I feel! Oh, my heart's burning.... Oh, if ...
— Redemption and Two Other Plays • Leo Tolstoy et al
... or three years ago I camped by the Muir Glacier for a week. I had caught just such a cold as this from the same cause—a stuffy stateroom. So I made me a little sled out of spruce boughs, put a blanket and some sea biscuit on it and set out up the glacier. I got into a labyrinth of crevasses and a driving snowstorm, and had to spend the night on the ice ten miles from land. I sat on the sled all night or thrashed ...
— Alaska Days with John Muir • Samual Hall Young
... is by day or by night, this first shock of Venice is not to be forgotten. To step out of the dusty, stuffy carriage, jostle one's way through a thousand hotel porters, and be confronted by the sea washing the station steps is terrific! The sea tamed, it is true; the sea on strange visiting terms with churches and houses; but the sea none the less; and if one had the pluck ...
— A Wanderer in Venice • E.V. Lucas
... in small villages, and the one hotel being too sure of its patronage to bother about getting guests from depot to hall bedroom. A deaf old fellow with white whiskers and poor eyesight fumbled two or three keys on a nail, chose one and led the way down a little dark hall to a little, stuffy room with another door opening directly on the sidewalk. Marie had not registered on her arrival, because there was no ink in the inkwell, and the pen had only half a point; but she was rather relieved to find that she was not ...
— Cabin Fever • B. M. Bower
... expected. The struggles of the Fronde still continued, and before the spring of the next year this same haughty young monarch who, in that gorgeous August pageant, had glittered like a "golden statue," found himself with his court, fugitives from Paris, and crowded into stuffy little rooms or uncomfortable old castles, fearful of capture, while not far away the cannons of the two great generals, Turenne and Conde thundered at each other across the Loire, in all the fury of civil war. Something of a bully by nature, for all his blood ...
— Historic Boys - Their Endeavours, Their Achievements, and Their Times • Elbridge Streeter Brooks
... walls were rows of ambulances. Brancardiers (stretcher-bearers; from brancard, a stretcher) were loading wounded into these cars, and as soon as one car was filled, it would go out of the hall and another would take its place. There was an infernal din; the place smelled like a stuffy garage, and was full of blue gasoline fumes; and across this hurly-burly, which was increasing every minute, were carried the wounded, often nothing but human bundles of dirty blue cloth and fouled bandages. Every one of these wounded soldiers was ...
— A Volunteer Poilu • Henry Sheahan
... was anxious about the dear child in the night, and went into her room. She was sleeping soundly, so soundly that even my coming did not wake her. But the room was awfully stuffy. There were a lot of those horrible, strong-smelling flowers about everywhere, and she had actually a bunch of them round her neck. I feared that the heavy odour would be too much for the dear child in her weak state, so I took them all away and opened a bit of the window to let ...
— Dracula • Bram Stoker
... it was to stare for a dazed moment into a pair of blue eyes that looked down upon him in a place of dim light and stuffy atmosphere. The eyes were only vaguely familiar in his befuddled memory. Beautiful eyes, though, ...
— Creatures of Vibration • Harl Vincent
... off his queue to please Stella Allendale in the prenuptial days, and he seriously considered the advisability of shaving his crown and growing a new one. The dishes his highly paid chef concocted for him failed to tickle his reminiscent palate in the way that the weird messes did in the stuffy restaurant down in the Chinese quarter. He enjoyed vastly more a half-hour's smoke and chat with two or three Chinese chums, than to preside at the lavish and elegant dinners for which his bungalow was famed, where the pick of the Americans ...
— The House of Pride • Jack London
... to look at the dark little room, groped his way to the chest of drawers, and lighted a candle. Its flame sputtered, then settled and burned unwaveringly. Here in London the nights seemed as stuffy as the days; there was no life or freshness, no movement of the air; it was as if the warm breath of the crowd rose upward and nothing less than a balloon would allow one to escape from its taint. But he noticed that even at this slight elevation he had got free from the noise ...
— The Devil's Garden • W. B. Maxwell
... rarer of these an evening at the Gymnase for a spectacle coupe, with Mesdames Rose Cheri, Melanie, Delaporte and Victoria (afterwards Victoria-La-fontaine). I squeeze again with my mother, my aunt and my brother into the stuffy baignoire, and I take to my memory in especial Madame de Girardin's Une Femme qui Deteste son Mari; the thrilling story, as I judged it, of an admirable lady who, to save her loyalist husband, ...
— A Small Boy and Others • Henry James
... all alone in the compartment. The wretched lamp in the roof flickered dimly, scarcely lighting the stuffy box. I could not see to read my time-table, so I wrapped my legs in the travelling-rug and lay back, staring out into the misty morning. Trees, walls, telegraph-poles flashed past, and the cinders drove in showers ...
— In Search of the Unknown • Robert W. Chambers
... anchor, a very tired party indeed; and as the Maria could not accommodate us all with sleeping quarters, Mr. Cooke decided that the ladies should have the cabin, since the night was cold. And so it might have been, had not Miss Thorn flatly refused to sleep there. The cabin was stuffy, she said, and so she carried her point. Leaving Farrar and one of Mr. Cooke's friends to take care of the yacht, the rest of us went ashore, built a roaring fire and raised a tent, and proceeded to make ourselves ...
— The Crossing • Winston Churchill
... wearily by, and time hung heavily on our hands. We felt the inevitable reaction from the first few days of excitement, and also missed the comforts and ease to which we had been accustomed in former hot seasons. The barracks were close and stuffy, and the officers, in place of the luxury of their bungalows and their pleasant mess, had to endure privations ...
— A Narrative Of The Siege Of Delhi - With An Account Of The Mutiny At Ferozepore In 1857 • Charles John Griffiths
... back Dave Darrin was thrown, the skipper sitting on his chest, while the mate swiftly drew the door to and securely bolted it. In this stuffy apartment, lighted only by two swinging lanterns, Darrin realized that he must fight promptly if ...
— Dave Darrin After The Mine Layers • H. Irving Hancock
... Brice. his uninterested voice carrying well though it was not noticeably raised. "It seems a stuffy sort of hole. But I'll take a look at it if you like. Where's that light ...
— Black Caesar's Clan • Albert Payson Terhune
... "Stuffy place!" said he. "Best be getting on." And so, reluctantly, they led him down the gauntlet of widened eyes. Even so, the tenth Earl of Brinstead had dined publicly with them. More than repaid they were for the slight the Honourable George had put upon ...
— Ruggles of Red Gap • Harry Leon Wilson
... humor has a marvelous effect at times. There was the instance when the Rector went to conduct a funeral service on Mt. Adams. It was a very hot day, the little rooms were crowded, and family and neighbors were close to the coffin. Mr. Nelson put on his vestments in the stuffy kitchen. He had begun the majestic words of the service when there strolled into the room the small boy of the family nonchalantly carrying a very large slice of watermelon! He found a spot on the ...
— Frank H. Nelson of Cincinnati • Warren C. Herrick |
