"Untidy" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... stolen bubbs blossom out. There'd be a real pirates' party, like he'd seen, once. They'd have a lookout posted, of course. But the enormity of the Belt made them cocky. Who could ever really police very much of it? One other advantage was that Jolly Lads were untidy. Around the distant bubbs floated a haze of jettisoned refuse. Boxes, wrappings, shreds of stellene. Nelsen had ...
— The Planet Strappers • Raymond Zinke Gallun
... two girls with their hair fastened up in womanly guise, and their cousins becurled as before; but there was nothing particularly untidy, and ...
— The Carbonels • Charlotte M. Yonge
... "Biographie Universelle" (sole source of my knowledge of the renowned Cujacius) that his usual manner of study was to spread himself on his belly on the floor. He did not sit down, he lay down; and the "Biographie Universelle" has (for so grave a work) an amusing pic- ture of the short, fat, untidy scholar dragging himself a plat ventre across his room, from one pile of books to the other. The house in which these singular gym- nastics took place, and which is now the headquarters of the gendarmerie, is one of ...
— A Little Tour in France • Henry James
... good," growled the scribe, reluctantly pitching his untidy epistle into a very disorderly desk. "He only comes here to show off. Just because he's in a lawyer's office, he thinks he's a big pot, and all he does is to write copies like a kid in ...
— Soldiers of the Queen • Harold Avery
... should it be disfigured by being surmounted by a kind of cushion or roll of hair which gives the idea of weight and size. Nor should the hair have the appearance of a bird's nest, and look tumbled and untidy. This was lately the "beau ideal" of a well dressed head. It was desired that it should appear unkempt and uncombed, as if it had been drawn through a quickset hedge. The back of the head, if well shaped, has a beautiful appearance, ...
— Routledge's Manual of Etiquette • George Routledge
... "I'm not joking—I mean what I say. You don't know how far rough looks and an untidy person go against one. I do wish you would try and keep yourself decent." "Well, there then—I will," answered Kinch. "But, Charlie, I'm afraid, with your travelling and one thing or other, you will forget your old playmate by-and-by, ...
— The Garies and Their Friends • Frank J. Webb
... matter of habit also I looked about for a book. I did not have to look far. Books were my extravagance—almost my only one. They filled the shelves to the ceiling on three sides of the study and overflowed in untidy heaps on the floor. They were Hephzy's bugbear, for I refused to permit their being ...
— Kent Knowles: Quahaug • Joseph C. Lincoln
... with the two windows, while on the other were the kitchen and scullery. Upstairs there were two good-sized bedrooms with a small third room in a lean-to at the back, the lower part of which was occupied by a wash-house. Through the windows could be seen a neglected bit of garden, and an untidy orchard. ...
— Harvest • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... steep steps, Helen following. The room was dirty and untidy. A rusty stove and table, three chairs and an ill-smelling cupboard in the corner, with some gaudy glass dishes upon it, were the ...
— The End of the Rainbow • Marian Keith
... come on to this country because it was too hard for a woman to make her way in Spain. She spoke little English, but with that little she showed that she was kindly disposed and anxious to help all she could. She herself had a stolid, untidy efficiency about her, and all the while, poor thing, suffered with ...
— Working With the Working Woman • Cornelia Stratton Parker
... light, and Jack caught a clearer view of the man. What he saw sent a shiver through him. A great change had come over his friend. His untidy dress,—always so neat and well kept; his haggard eyes and shambling, unsteady walk, so different from his springy, debonair manner, all showed that he had been and still was under some terrible mental strain. That he had not been drinking was evident from his utterance and gait. ...
— Peter - A Novel of Which He is Not the Hero • F. Hopkinson Smith
... little skips. She was very thin, as people generally are who have quicksilver instead of blood in their veins; she had a small, eager, freckled face, with very, bright dark eyes, a small, determined mouth, and a mane of untidy, curly dark hair that was: ...
— Seven Little Australians • Ethel Sybil Turner
... the strange little church of sweet chimes, almost hidden between immense, concealing walls of rock; but to-day he merely paid his respects to the saint and quickly went his way again. Twenty minutes after parting from Lady Dauntrey, he rang the bell of her villa, and was told by an untidy servant that Miss Grant was ...
— The Guests Of Hercules • C. N. Williamson and A. M. Williamson
... crouched in a sulky heap in a far corner of the schoolroom, and glowered across the empty desks and benches at his elder brother who sat in the place of authority at his writing-table with a litter of untidy exercise-books in front of him. There was a long, thin cane also at his elbow that had the look of a somewhat sinister wand of office. He was correcting book after book with a species of forced patience, that was not without ...
— The Obstacle Race • Ethel M. Dell
... Bubbles spoke very positively. "There's a woman here. I can see her quite distinctly in the firelight. She's got a fat, angry face, and untidy grey hair. Hullo, she's ...
— From Out the Vasty Deep • Mrs. Belloc Lowndes
... continually practised, can do great and irreparable harm in undermining the will. Every man or woman knows his own little weaknesses best, but that which leads to the greatest harm is the excuse, "It is my temperament; if I were not tardy, or irritable, or untidy,"—or whatever it may be,—"I would not be myself." Our temperament is given us as a servant, not as a master; and when we discover that an inherited perversion of temperament can be trained to its opposite good, and train it so, we ...
— Power Through Repose • Annie Payson Call
... respite from these attentions, but he felt it was at best an interlude, and he was doing what he could to appreciate his position. Incidentally he was having some hot coffee and pie in an untidy inadvertent manner, with an eye fluttering nervously over the side of the car. At first he had ascribed the growing interest in his career to his ill-conceived attempt to land in the bright little upland town, but now he was ...
— The War in the Air • Herbert George Wells
... counting-house, and in such a business as the manufacture of cigarettes by hand litter of all sorts accumulates rapidly. The "Famous Cigarette Manufactory of Christian Fischelowitz from South Russia" is about as dingy, as unhealthy, as untidy, as dusty a place as can be found within the limits of tidy, well-to-do Munich. The room is lighted by a window and a half-glazed door, both opening upon a dark court. The walls, originally whitewashed, are of a deep rich brown, attributable partly to the constant fumes and exhalations ...
— A Cigarette-Maker's Romance • F. Marion Crawford
... made in halves, and whilst the lower part was shut the upper part was open. Through this Jimmy could see inside the van, and it looked exactly like a small room, only rather dirty and untidy. As Jimmy stood on the steps staring into the van, with the clown close behind him, a girl came out from what seemed to be a second room behind the first. She had yellow hair, and her face looked very white; but although she must have changed her dress, ...
— The Little Clown • Thomas Cobb
... all ages are liable to "catch" ringworm of the scalp. It particularly affects those who are untidy, dirty, and badly cared for, though any child is apt to get it while attending ...
— The Eugenic Marriage, Volume IV. (of IV.) - A Personal Guide to the New Science of Better Living and Better Babies • Grant Hague
... very rough and untidy. There is a sort of counter on the right with shelves, holding many bottles and jugs, just seen above it. Empty barrels stand near the counter. At back, a little to left of counter, there is a door into the open ...
— The Playboy of the Western World • J. M. Synge
... over the Plover Slough to see Mrs. Paine. She noticed the quantity of machinery which stood in the yard, some under cover of the big shingled shed, and some of it sitting out in the snow, gray and weather-beaten. The yard was littered, untidy, prodigal, wasteful—every sort of machine had evidently been bought and used for a while, then discarded. But within doors there was a bareness that struck Pearl's heart with pity. The entrance at the ...
— Purple Springs • Nellie L. McClung
... think good to tell you that it looks so to Him; but He will come into it, and make it very cheerful for you, for all that, if you don't put the shutters up. And the one question for YOU, remember, is not "dark or light?" but "tidy or untidy?" Look well to your sweeping and garnishing; and be sure it is only the banished spirit, or some of the seven wickeder ones at his back, who will still whisper to you that ...
— The Ethics of the Dust • John Ruskin
... hope, and I don't intend that any one shall know where the one begins or the other leaves off, either! And if any foreigner should remark that America is unfinished or untidy I shall deny it!" ...
— Penelope's Postscripts • Kate Douglas Wiggin
... been expecting you for the last quarter of an hour, Abijah," Mrs. Mulready said querulously. "You know how I hate to have the room untidy after I ...
— Through the Fray - A Tale of the Luddite Riots • G. A. Henty
... a complete story, the greater part of which falls within the period of the Civil War. They give a vivid notion of the life from the midst of which they were written; of the flat, marsh-riddled country, in which few Northerners saw any lasting charm; of the untidy, down-at-the-heels plantations; of the "people," wards of the nation, childish, irritating, endlessly amusing; of the daily toil of Northern men in managing farms and of Northern women in managing households ...
— Letters from Port Royal - Written at the Time of the Civil War (1862-1868) • Various
... all this. It was a painting, unfinished, of a girl standing at a door and evidently hesitating whether to open the door or not: a very young girl, very thin, with long legs in black stockings, and short, white, untidy frock; thin bare arms; the head thrown on one side, and the hands raised, and one foot raised, in a wonderful childish gesture—the gesture of an undecided fox-terrier. The face was an infant's face, ...
— The Grim Smile of the Five Towns • Arnold Bennett
... clear, and had a wide, sorrowful way of looking at you; and her cheeks, that were usually pale, blossomed to roses when you spoke to her, her hair drooping over them dark and silky; and though she was slack and untidy and at loose ends about her dress, she somehow always seemed like a princess in disguise; and when she had on any thing new,—a sprigged calico, and her little straw bonnet with the pink ribbons, and Mrs. Devereux's black scarf, for instance,—you'd have allowed that she might have ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 9, No. 55, May, 1862 • Various
... sister Kate) opened to him. She was better dressed than in former days, but still untidy. Emma was out making purchases, but could not be many minutes. In the kitchen the third sister, Jane, was busy with her needle; at Richard's entrance she rose from her chair with evident feebleness: her illness of the spring had lasted long, ...
— Demos • George Gissing
... as much in appearance as in mind. The outer seeming of each is almost as familiar as the forms and faces of contemporaries. Fox was massively {213} corpulent, furiously untidy, a heroic sloven, his bull throat and cheeks too often black with a three days' beard, infinitely lovable, exquisitely cultured, capable of the noblest tenderness, yet with a kind of grossness sometimes that was but a part, and perhaps ...
— A History of the Four Georges and of William IV, Volume III (of 4) • Justin McCarthy and Justin Huntly McCarthy
... go, I shall comfort myself with the thought that it's a pleasure to you...Grisha, don't pull my hair. It's untidy enough without that," she said, putting up a straying lock, which Grisha ...
— Anna Karenina • Leo Tolstoy
... inspection. After a time he turned away and, passing behind the boxes, made his way into the wings. Bassett's curiosity was aroused, especially when, shortly after, Gregory reappeared, bringing with him a small man in an untidy suit who was probably, Bassett surmised, ...
— The Breaking Point • Mary Roberts Rinehart
... brown eyes, and rich golden hair that fell in curls over his shoulders like a girl's. He was peering out from amidst the host of packages and trying to look back along the road, and evidently arguing some point with the utmost persistence. The untidy servant girl who wheeled the carriage had stopped, and gave ...
— A Patriotic Schoolgirl • Angela Brazil
... the interior, and came back to usher him into the drawing-room. The flat was expensively furnished, but very untidy. He at once perceived, however, that the "former" Mr. Okasaki was not romancing when he boasted of his artistic tastes. The Japanese articles in the room were gems of ...
— The Stowmarket Mystery - Or, A Legacy of Hate • Louis Tracy
... stone stairs, through an untidy, low-roofed lobby, redolent of cooking food, into the street, without challenge ...
— The Green Rust • Edgar Wallace
... put unnecessary burdens upon my associates by untidy, careless habits; orderly ways save my own time and things as well ...
— Principles of Teaching • Adam S. Bennion
... that sometimes disgust the invalid with what is put before him. There is a tidy and an untidy way of serving most dishes, too; for instance, in serving a poached egg, have it piping hot and on the toast; not cold, part on the toast and part on the saucer, with ...
— The Community Cook Book • Anonymous
... Green, around which the modest homes cluster sociably. Poor, plain places they may be, but never dirty nor untidy. And the children and dogs! Such lovely babies; such human animals. They play and work together quite naturally and are the ...
— The Place Beyond the Winds • Harriet T. Comstock
... decayed apples are of course in the barrels, and help to decay others. Although packed ever so well and pressed ever so tight, the shrinking of the fresh-picked fruit, soon makes them loose, and nothing is so bad in handling apples as this. Altogether this was a very untidy method of handling apples, and has been entirely abandoned for ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 358, November 11, 1882 • Various
... a regular spindle-shanks. And just look at that fool Akoulna. Wasn't the girl a regular untidy slattern, and just look at her now! Where has it all come from? Yes, he has fitted her out. She's grown so smart, so puffed up, just like a bubble that's ready to burst. And, though she's a fool, she's got ...
— The Power of Darkness • Leo Tolstoy
... snugly bestowed. The terrace was uncultivated, save a small garden patch close to the house, where the soil was torn and uneven from the uprooting of vegetables from the rudely-shaped beds. Sweetbrier and wild honey-suckles gave a picturesque grace to the building, at variance with the untidy state of the grounds, and there was something in the whole place more suggestive of refinement than is usual to dwellings where the inmates work ...
— Mabel's Mistake • Ann S. Stephens
... nice room to ask you into," she said. "We are very untidy just now, but you must excuse us. We have had so much anxiety about poor ...
— The Mystery of 31 New Inn • R. Austin Freeman
... to appreciate them. An Irish landlord took his tenantry out of their mud huts, and removed them into comfortable dwellings which he had built for their accommodation. When he returned to his estate, he was greatly disappointed. The houses were as untidy and uncomfortable as before. The pig was still under the bed, and the hens over it. The concrete floor was as dirty as the mud one had been. The panes of the windows were broken, and the garden was full ...
— Thrift • Samuel Smiles
... butter and cheese, and half an apple pudding. Also a great jug of cider and another of milk, and several half-full glasses, and no end of dirty plates, knives, and forks. All were scattered about the table in the most untidy fashion, just as the servants had risen from their supper, without thinking to ...
— Types of Children's Literature • Edited by Walter Barnes
... architecture; but her proximates, in her phenomena as we immediately experience them, Nature is everywhere gothic, not classic. She forms a real jungle, where all things are provisional, half-fitted to each other, and untidy. When we add such a complex kind of subliminal region as Myers believed in to the official region, we restore the analogy; and, though we may be mistaken in much detail, in a general way, at least, we become plausible. In comparison with Myers' way of attacking ...
— Memories and Studies • William James
... dining with the Empress herself almost every week, and going about the palace as he pleased, he dressed as plainly as any peasant, and slept on straw like a common soldier. Once or twice the palace servants, seeing this untidy little fellow coming up to the grand entrance, took him for a tramp, and wanted to drive him away; but they soon found out that that would ...
— Harper's Young People, February 17, 1880 - An Illustrated Weekly • Various
... and airplanes which were the whole world's property. But he could scarcely fit his neighbour into even his haziest picture of war. The young man was tall and a little round-shouldered; he had short-sighted, rather prominent brown eyes, untidy black hair and dark eyebrows which came near to meeting. He wore a knickerbocker suit of bluish-grey tweed, a pale blue shirt, a pale blue collar, and a dark blue tie—a symphony of colour which seemed too elaborately ...
— Huntingtower • John Buchan
... a girl, dirty, ragged, and untidy, came into the room, and taking Duncan up in her arms, carried him upstairs, Elsie following ...
— Little Folks (Septemeber 1884) - A Magazine for the Young • Various
... frightened the life out of her companions by her hairbreadth escapes. Her careless, happy-go-lucky ways seemed all the more curious because of the almost Quaker-like neatness of her appearance. Mellicent was often untidy, and even Esther had moments of dishevelment, but Peggy was a dainty little person, whose hair was always smooth, whose dress well brushed and natty. Her artistic sense was too keen to allow of any shortcoming in ...
— About Peggy Saville • Mrs. G. de Horne Vaizey
... house was called Puncher's—Puncher's Farm, a few hundred yards along the lane leading to the great highroad—and it was the largest and by far the most untidy house in Penny Green. Successive Punchers of old time, when it had been the most considerable farm in all the country between Chovensbury and Tidborough, had added to it in stubborn defiance of all laws of comfort and principles of domestic architecture, and now, shorn alike of its Punchers and of ...
— If Winter Comes • A.S.M. Hutchinson
... man," old General Powhatan Plummer, who hadn't smelt powder for more than half a century, chuckled as he always did at the shrewd and friendly pleasantries of the Judge. He was a jocular, tiresome, gregarious soul, habitually untidy, creased and rumpled, who was always thirsty, but who, as the Judge was accustomed to reply when Corinna remonstrated, "would divide his last julep with a friend." The men had been companions from boyhood, ...
— One Man in His Time • Ellen Glasgow
... myself, my only thought was for Faye whose mother might find cause to pity him for the delinquencies of his wife! First impressions are indelible, and it would be difficult to convince Mrs. Rae ever that the house was not always dusty and untidy. How could she know that with pride I had ever seen that our house, however rough it might have been, was clean and cheerful. And of what use would it be to arrange things attractively now? She would be justified in supposing that it was ...
— Army Letters from an Officer's Wife, 1871-1888 • Frances M.A. Roe
... Marcus Aurelius Latin literature fell into decay. Aulus Gellius was only a rather untidy or at least not very methodical scholar who wrote feebly; Apuleius with his Golden Ass was merely a fantastic romancist, very complex, curious about everything, more especially with regard to singularities, lively, amusing, mystical at times; in ...
— Initiation into Literature • Emile Faguet
... uncomfortable, but very untidy. There are no ricks, everything is stored in large barns, where it is safe from weather, ...
— Correspondence & Conversations of Alexis de Tocqueville with Nassau William Senior from 1834 to 1859, Vol. 2 • Alexis de Tocqueville
... his gaze still fixed on the salmon, and his lower jaw dropped; he looked even paler than usual, and his thin hair lay in untidy streaks on his forehead. Suddenly he looked at his daughter and laughed. The laugh was so strange that Lily coloured under it: she disliked being ridiculed, and her father seemed to see something ridiculous in the request. Perhaps he thought it foolish ...
— House of Mirth • Edith Wharton
... entirely lost the almost foppish concern for his appearance, and was grown careless and slovenly in his dress. He allowed a black beard to grow on cheeks that had ever been so carefully shaven; and the long, thick black hair, once so sedulously curled, hung now in a lank, untidy mane about a face that was changing from its vigorous swarthiness to an unhealthy sallow, whilst the blue eyes, that had been so vivid and compelling, ...
— Captain Blood • Rafael Sabatini
... right elbow, and a perfect continent of tobacco smoke lay between us, wafted towards the door by the draught from an open window. He had littered the hearth with matches and tobacco ash, being the most untidy smoker I had ever met; and save for his frequent rappings out of his pipe bowl and perpetual striking of matches, he had shown no sign of activity for the past hour. Collarless and wearing an old tweed jacket, he had spent the evening, as he had spent ...
— The Devil Doctor • Sax Rohmer
... the weeds and clearing out the brush and vines in an effort to make practical improvements, while with curious oversight they have permitted the weeds to grow in the paths and the grass to lengthen in the yard. Many a farm in rural communities has untidy refuse heaps, tottering outbuildings, rusting machinery, and general litter that reveal the absence of all sense of beauty or even neatness, yet the farmer and his wife may be thrifty, hard-working ...
— Society - Its Origin and Development • Henry Kalloch Rowe
... fidelity in thought, word and deed that looks (and, I am assured by equally innocent victims, is) positively deadly. The friend "frits and flutters" about in a distinctly casual, not to say polygamous, mood, but has one sacred place in his untidy heart in which the wife is enshrined. He can manage to sustain life so long as he may come to triangular tea on Thursdays. But the faithful husband puts his ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Volume 158, February 11, 1920 • Various
... inevitable wedding present), and on the wall above a large autotype of the chief figure in Titian's Virgin of the Assumption, is very inviting. Altogether the room is the room of a good housekeeper, vanquished, as far as the table is concerned, by an untidy man, but elsewhere mistress of the situation. The furniture, in its ornamental aspect, betrays the style of the advertised "drawing-room suite" of the pushing suburban furniture dealer; but there is nothing useless or pretentious in the room. The paper and panelling are dark, throwing ...
— Candida • George Bernard Shaw
... were a common type, no doubt, but they were new to me. There were two lank sons who had been playing singles at tennis, red-eared youths growing black moustaches, and dressed in conscientiously untidy tweeds and unbuttoned and ungirt Norfolk jackets. There were a number of ill-nourished-looking daughters, sensible and economical in their costume, the younger still with long, brown-stockinged legs, and the eldest present—there were, we discovered, one ...
— Tono Bungay • H. G. Wells
... khaki trousers, white rubber-soled shoes, a light flannel shirt that had once been brown and was now the colour of much diluted coffee and a white duck hat sat on the forward deck of a trim motor-boat with his feet suspended above the untidy water of a slip. By turning his head slightly he could have looked across the sunlit surface of Buttermilk Channel to the green slopes of Governor's Island and, beyond the gleaming Statue of Liberty. But Perry Bush was far more interested ...
— The Adventure Club Afloat • Ralph Henry Barbour
... The somewhat untidy forcing-beds which now stand in the immediate proximity to the Palace, and which supply the royal parks, are shortly to be ...
— The Kensington District - The Fascination of London • Geraldine Edith Mitton
... looked exceedingly strange and untidy. But nothing seemed to concern little Eve Edgarton except that spreading circle ...
— Little Eve Edgarton • Eleanor Hallowell Abbott
... will you?" said Sina, laughing. "I would ask you to come indoors, but I am afraid things are rather untidy, as I have been out ...
— Sanine • Michael Artzibashef
... the low hills or in ravines below the hills. But it is a favourite tree on roads and near wells throughout the province, and deservedly so, for it yields excellent timber. The siris on the other hand is an untidy useless tree. The kikar might be planted as a roadside tree to a greater extent. Several species of figs, especially the pipal (Ficus religiosa) and bor or banian ...
— The Panjab, North-West Frontier Province, and Kashmir • Sir James McCrone Douie
... Lonely Claire felt quite a throb of relief as she heard the welcome words. She entered the oil-clothed passage and was shown into a small, very warm, very untidy front parlour wherein stood Sophie herself, staring with widened eyes ...
— The Independence of Claire • Mrs. George de Horne Vaizey
... library stored with books of reference, and adorned with presentation copies from authors of the day, very beautifully bound. Though the room served for the study of the professed man of letters, it had none of the untidy litter which generally characterizes the study of one whose vocation it is to deal with books and papers. Even the implements for writing were not apparent, except when required. They lay concealed in a vast cylinder bureau, French made, ...
— Kenelm Chillingly, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... clean place rubbed on the window opposite your dressing-room. Splendid view of an untidy interior. If that house is ever occupied, you'd better put stained glass ...
— The Man in Lower Ten • Mary Roberts Rinehart
... stuffed the tag-end of fear back into the jammed, untidy mental pigeon-hole she used for all unpleasant thoughts. "Don't run ...
— Tree, Spare that Woodman • Dave Dryfoos
... the little girl complacently. "I've quite left off being careless and untidy; it's so much nicer to be careful and neat. Good-night, grandmother dear, and thank you so much for teaching me ...
— Grandmother Dear - A Book for Boys and Girls • Mrs. Molesworth
... seen any shops or people in his life before. At last he arrived at the Corner, and, turning into the Park, spent a quarter of an hour watching the riders in Rotten Row; then he crossed to the Marble Arch, passing a vast array of gorgeous flowers in full bloom, listened wonderingly to an untidy orator demolishing Christianity for the benefit of a little knot of errand-boys and nursemaids, took another omnibus along Oxford Street to the Circus, and, after an enchanting walk down Regent Street, entered a bright ...
— Austin and His Friends • Frederic H. Balfour
... at once. He was lying back again, staring out at the respectable imitation of a lawn, at rose beds, carpeted with over-blown mignonette, and a lone untidy tamarisk that flung a spiky shadow on the grass. And the eye of his mind was picturing the loveliest lawn of his acquaintance, with its noble twin beeches and a hammock slung between—an empty casket; the jewel gone. It was picturing the drawing-room; ...
— Far to Seek - A Romance of England and India • Maud Diver
... snobbery to even mention class distinctions in these wilds, where the only aristocracy that counts is nobility of endeavour. But I could not reckon myself that woman's superior, Father, because under the same circumstances I might have been even more untidy ...
— A Countess from Canada - A Story of Life in the Backwoods • Bessie Marchant
... lounging upon the ground were a dozen untidy, unshaven men, whom I recognized by their uniforms to be Germans. One man cast an insolent glance toward me and turned his back. Two others smiled and pointed toward the bread they held in their hands. On some straw in a couple of drays lay ...
— My Home In The Field of Honor • Frances Wilson Huard
... when a vessel was thoroughly cared for, and although they might not be able to call things by their proper names, they never liked their husbands or sweethearts to have any hand in, or association with, an untidy vessel. Hence, to secure approval from their women critics, these sailor men and apprentice lads would strain every faculty to have sails stowed in a cloth, that is, stowed so that not a wrinkle could be seen anywhere. The youngest apprentice ...
— The Shellback's Progress - In the Nineteenth Century • Walter Runciman
... to admit that his Majesty did not look very regal in his bathing costume, particularly when he was dripping with water and his long straight hair hung half over his face, and even when he wore his crown he was continually catching bits of seaweed in it, which gave him a singularly untidy ...
— The Wallypug in London • G. E. Farrow
... effectively girdled with greens and commons, and college grounds shaded with stately limes, elms, and chestnuts, that there are never any jarring backgrounds to destroy the sense of aloofness from the ugly and untidy elements of nineteenth-century individualism which are so ...
— Beautiful Britain—Cambridge • Gordon Home
... spoke quite soberly, but Sally laughed, for she knew who the untidy girl was who had left the cups sticky. Then she turned up her cuffs, and with a sigh of satisfaction began to stir about her kitchen, having little raptures now and then over the "sweet rolling pin," the "darling ...
— Little Men - Life at Plumfield With Jo's Boys • Louisa May Alcott
... poorly dressed, Untidy, an spoortin black e'en; Wi' a babby hawf clammed at her breast, Neglected an shame-to-be-seen; If yo ax, an shoo'll answer yo true, What's th' cause of her trouble? Aw think, Yo'll find her misfortuns are due To ...
— Yorkshire Lyrics • John Hartley
... lying on a sofa before the window, wrapped in an untidy dressing-gown, and with the lower part of his body covered up with a rug. His face, fair and florid, with more than a suggestion of coarseness in the heavy jaw and thick lips, was drawn and wrinkled as though ...
— Berenice • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... even Julia had given up all thought of interfering, and was watching, curiously, the round head with its untidy ...
— Jewel's Story Book • Clara Louise Burnham
... him additionally, perhaps, to see the expression of starry-eyed admiration on Babs' face as she looked at him across the untidy laboratory table, cluttered up ...
— Operation: Outer Space • William Fitzgerald Jenkins
... day, and what his eyes saw as he leaned on the bridge was not a willing beast and a gladdened infant, but the puzzling world and the advance guard of its problems bearing down on him. Slim, gawky, untidy, fair, with his worn black-braided clothes, and slung over his shoulders in a bursting satchel the last load of his schoolbooks, and on his bright, rough hair a shapeless cap whose lining protruded behind, he had the extraordinary wistful look of innocence and simplicity ...
— Clayhanger • Arnold Bennett
... graves for men. Skeletons, weapons, and tools are found here together. There are axes, knives, scrapers, lance-points of flint; arrows, harpoon-points, needles of bone like those used by certain savages to this day. The soil is strewn with the bones of animals which these men, untidy like all savages, threw into a corner after they had eaten the meat; they even split the bones to extract the marrow just as savages do now. Among the animals are found not only the hare, the deer, the ox, the horse, the salmon, but also the rhinoceros, the cave-bear, the mammoth, ...
— History Of Ancient Civilization • Charles Seignobos
... we see you to-morrow? I must change my dress a little. I am expecting my cousin, and I look too untidy. Come, Mother, help me a moment. Take the book, Brackenburg, and ...
— Egmont - A Tragedy In Five Acts • Johann Wolfgang Von Goethe
... an untidy old man of great ability and probity, was in his seat, looking out absently over the spectators. "The next case" to him was only a case. He had grown gray in dealing with infractions of the law, and ...
— The Eagle's Heart • Hamlin Garland
... camels, serve her husband, prepare his food, wash his hands, face, and feet, and stood and waited on him while he ate, like any Arab woman, and gloried in so doing. But at Damascus she led a semi-European life. She blackened her eyes with kohl, and lived in a curiously untidy manner. But otherwise she was not in the least extraordinary at Damascus. But what was incomprehensible to me was how she could have given up all she had in England to live with that dirty little black—or nearly so—husband. I could understand her leaving ...
— The Romance of Isabel Lady Burton Volume II • Isabel Lady Burton & W. H. Wilkins
... book-shelves, where she selected a book, strolling out again with the barest nod of sullen recognition. She was a swarthy girl, robust and ample of form, with black eyes and dusky cheeks. Her torn red blouse and untidy hair marked her out from the sleek and social group. Sir Basil thought her very interesting looking. He asked Imogen, as they walked away under the elms, who she was. "That artistic young ...
— A Fountain Sealed • Anne Douglas Sedgwick
... forgot her himself; but as he left the office in the afternoon he did remember the coat. At the address which the red-cheeked lady had given him, he found her card—"Miss Lily Dale"—below a letter box in the tiled, untidy vestibule of a yellow-brick apartment house, where he waited, grinning at the porcelain ornateness about him, for a little jerking elevator to take him up to the fourth floor. There, in a small, gay, clean parlor ...
— The Vehement Flame • Margaret Wade Campbell Deland
... were never coming to see us again, Philip," she said reproachfully, as she held out her little hand to him. "What possessed them to bring you here? It's awfully untidy." ...
— A Comedy of Masks - A Novel • Ernest Dowson and Arthur Moore
... students entered the waiting-room. They looked dirty from head to foot, mud-bespattered, untidy, and exhausted with travelling. One of them, a fair boy with a charming profile, seemed absent-minded or depressed. He sat down in a corner, took off his cap, and hid his face in his hands. His companion bought his ticket for him, sat down beside him, and grasped his ...
— Selected Polish Tales • Various
... untidy in her habits. She was out one evening to a party—she managed to get a considerable number of parties into her dull days at home. Rosalie, come in from Field's, peeped into her bedroom to find her. She had not known that Doda was going out. The bedroom cried aloud that Doda had gone ...
— This Freedom • A. S. M. Hutchinson
... hates it. It is very important that you should remember that. Then there's another thing—(An untidy looking servant comes in. Can it be—can it possibly be AUNT JANE? Horrors!) He dislikes—Oh, there you are, Jane. You've been a very long ...
— Second Plays • A. A. Milne
... the single ones best: double-carnations are so untidy, all bursting out of the calyx as if the petals had quarrelled and ...
— Work: A Story of Experience • Louisa May Alcott
... away, however, Roger's routine was somewhat different. After closing the shop he would return to his desk and with a furtive, shamefaced air take out from a bottom drawer an untidy folder of notes and manuscript. This was the skeleton in his closet, his secret sin. It was the scaffolding of his book, which he had been compiling for at least ten years, and to which he had tentatively assigned such different titles as "Notes ...
— The Haunted Bookshop • Christopher Morley
... hostility towards him, and entered his cousin's sitting-room. He would wait. He waited. He glanced through a pile of illustrated newspapers that lay about. And still he waited. The room looked different somehow; almost untidy. There were no rouses about. An hour passed. And still no sign ...
— South Wind • Norman Douglas
... the reporters and besieged the door for news—an untidy lot of men at that hour, unshaven, hastily dressed, and very sorry for themselves because they had been beaten up by their respective papers so early in the morning. They were also extremely disappointed because the portress had no story to tell and would not ...
— The White Sister • F. Marion Crawford
... sighed Elsie, examining it, "how very dirty and slovenly I must look; and that will vex papa, for he can't bear to see me untidy. Can't we get in the back way, Sophy? so that I can get a clean dress on before he sees me? I don't mean to deceive him. I will tell him all about it afterwards, but I know he wouldn't like to ...
— Holidays at Roselands • Martha Finley
... beat," he said later on, in his own particular and untidy den, as he carefully stuffed the bowl of his pipe. "I think it would go better with you, old chap, if you did not hold yourself in quite so tight. I don't want you to rave or commit suicide in some untidy fashion, as the hero of a French novel does; ...
— Cecilia de Noel • Lanoe Falconer
... Caddle, untidy condition. "In he comes when I'm all of a caddle." To stabble, to walk about aimlessly, or in the wet. "Now, Miss, don't you come stabbling in and out when I am scouring." Or, "I can't come stabbling down that there ...
— John Keble's Parishes • Charlotte M Yonge
... informed her of his departure looked her over curiously, setting her thinking that he thought Mr. Ede had done well to get clear of the likes of her. She had tried to make herself look tidy and thought she had succeeded, but tidy or untidy, it was all the same, nothing mattered now; she was done for. No doubt the porter was right; Ralph had gone away to escape from her, which was just as well, for what more had they to say to each ...
— A Mummer's Wife • George Moore
... Captain Jonas Baker. Abbie, who was a systematic housekeeper, approved of his habit of wiping his feet before he entered the door and the careful fashion he had of replacing any chair he moved; most men, she averred, were so thoughtless and untidy. But it was with Zenas Henry that the young man won his greatest triumph, the two immediately coming into harmony on the common ground of motor-boating. Most of the male visitors who dropped in at the white cottage came only to see Delight, but here ...
— Flood Tide • Sara Ware Bassett
... essayed, under the auspices of good Queen Charlotte, to render the round hat, with the straight-projecting brim, less ugly; but their invention carried them no further than to surround it, at one time, with a deep ruff of ribands, or they crushed it into an untidy rumble-tumble shape; at another, they let copious streamers float from the crown down their backs; or again, they gave it a monstrous pitch up behind. There is this to be said in their excuse—they hardly knew what ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine - Volume 57, No. 352, February 1845 • Various
... was generally well built, if somewhat untidy looking, with the pigstys and out buildings in rather too close proximity for comfort. There was usually a large living room with heavy sooty beams overhead, and thick walls pierced by quaint deeply sunken windows furnished often with seats. These picturesque ...
— Vanished towers and chimes of Flanders • George Wharton Edwards
... a dark, untidy sitting-room. It seemed at first sight to be littered with papers, newspapers, Revolutionary sheets and proclamations, the Pravda, the Novaya Jezn, the Soldatskaya Mwyssl.... On the dirty wall-paper there were enormous dark photographs, in faded ...
— The Secret City • Hugh Walpole
... to the Country, and what did she find there? Just a lot of emptiness, with flowers everywhere. The birds were screaming overhead, the sun was on her face, The fences were untidy, and the ...
— England over Seas • Lloyd Roberts
... should I keep them for? I should be overrun with pigeons but for putting them in pies; they make the garden very untidy as it is. I have given up keeping ducks, but I have a tame gull for the slugs. Who is this at the gate? Oh! Miss Wort with her inexhaustible physic-bottle. Everybody seems to have heard that you are ...
— The Vicissitudes of Bessie Fairfax • Harriet Parr
... I found out that their names were Mary and Maria Porter. I liked them, for they were very neat and plain in their dress,—not like some, who seem to think that if their waists are small, and their hair dressed in the fashion, it is no matter how soiled their collars are, nor how untidy their nails. Well, one day when I went for certain kinds of buttons which were to be made for us, Maria, the younger one, who took the order, was not there. I asked for her, and Mary said she was at home with a lame knee. I was so sorry, and ventured ...
— A Garland for Girls • Louisa May Alcott
... strokes as the ship's corporal lays them on. The cane with which he punishes the boy is a very stout one, each end being covered with wax-string, and is reversed every fourth stroke. This caning is a punishment, and is meted out to boys who are caught smoking, to boys who may be untidy or to those who break their leave a short time. The other punishment is that of the birch—again the boy is lashed to the horse, and this time no garment intervenes. The ship's doctor stands by with water in case of fainting, as generally the boy receives twenty-four strokes. To witness ...
— From Lower Deck to Pulpit • Henry Cowling
... the untidy girl, not yet dressed for her evening labours, brought him his chop and potatoes, and Mr Harding begged for a pint of sherry. He was impressed with an idea, which was generally prevalent a few years ...
— The Warden • Anthony Trollope
... been bought sat not far from Uncle Billy. He was a furtive, untidy slouch of a man, formerly a Republican; he had a great capacity for "handling the coloured vote" and his name was Pixley. Hurlbut mistrusted him; the young man had that instinct, which good leaders need, for feeling the weak places in his following; and he had the leader's way, too, of ...
— In the Arena - Stories of Political Life • Booth Tarkington
... awakening on that wintry Sunday morning! It was snowing intermittently and the sky, seen from the high window, was lead-coloured. Owing to the scarcity of fuel, the cell was unwarmed. She dressed hurriedly, feeling still untidy and dishevelled when she had finished. Her breakfast, and with it a little packet of white powder from the prison doctor, to be taken with the breakfast. She swallowed it. If it were poison sent by the German Government, ...
— Mrs. Warren's Daughter - A Story of the Woman's Movement • Sir Harry Johnston
... ones in the nest," said Uncle Andy, in his sometimes irrelevant way, which seemed deliberately designed to make the Babe ask questions. "The nest was a big, untidy structure of sticks and dead branches; but it was strongly woven for all its untidiness, because it had to stand against the great winds sweeping down over the Ridge. Inside it was very nicely and softly lined with dry grass, and some horse-hair, ...
— Children of the Wild • Charles G. D. Roberts
... Holmes was that, although in his methods of thought he was the neatest and most methodical of mankind, and although also he affected a certain quiet primness of dress, he was none the less in his personal habits one of the most untidy men that ever drove a fellow-lodger to distraction. Not that I am in the least conventional in that respect myself. The rough-and-tumble work in Afghanistan, coming on the top of a natural Bohemianism of disposition, has made me ...
— The Strand Magazine, Volume V, Issue 29, May 1893 - An Illustrated Monthly • Various
... of equipment in the room as though it were an enemy. It didn't look finished. It didn't even look safe. But she trusted James, although she felt at that moment that she would grow old and die before she understood why and how any collection of apparatus could be functional and still be so untidy. "It—could teach me?" ...
— The Fourth R • George Oliver Smith
... house if you used tobacco," she always replied. And she would get quite excited at the mere thought of such an untidy habit. ...
— The Tale of Rusty Wren • Arthur Scott Bailey
... must be. What a good memory you have! Would you care to see over the house before lunch? It's rather a charming old place, don't you think so? But of course it's terribly untidy now. I haven't started my house-parties yet, and everything's generally more or less upside down till my husband and I begin to come down regularly. Perhaps you'd prefer to ...
— Sally Bishop - A Romance • E. Temple Thurston
... down. The doctor's remedy was apparently successful this time, for with crimson cheeks and parted lips, Miss Blanche De Courcy had forgotten her headache in a very profound slumber. Druse gazed at her with mingled admiration and pity. No wonder the room seemed a little untidy. She would have liked to put it to rights, but fearing she might waken her new friend, who was now breathing very heavily, she only pulled the shade down, and with a last compassionate glance at the victim of a brother's intemperance, she picked up her crocheting and tip-toed lightly ...
— A Village Ophelia and Other Stories • Anne Reeve Aldrich
... stubborn flames. He surveyed the nearly total ruin of the laboratory. "Really!" he said to a thickly bandaged Dr. Berry who was attempting to rescue an undamaged electroencephalograph from a gleeful fireman's ax, "can't you test your hypothesis without being so untidy?" ...
— I Was a Teen-Age Secret Weapon • Richard Sabia
... drawing water for his bath. He had gone through his morning program as usual, by the sounds, and had started off for work without an inquiry about her. Only when she heard the gate click had she hammered at the front door and been admitted by the untidy servant. ...
— Dangerous Days • Mary Roberts Rinehart
... the next day, then saw her almost daily. Little by little I took to calling at all times, and sleeping with her. The more I had her, the more I liked her. She was a very nice woman in most ways, I scarcely ever found her untidy, dirty, or slammerkin. If not dressed, she had a clean wrapper on, had nearly always silk stockings on, and a clean chemise; and therefore call when I might she was ready to be fucked at a minute's notice. She was a good cook, and would cook omlettes and nice things in ...
— My Secret Life, Volumes I. to III. - 1888 Edition • Anonymous
... way render the room unpleasant. Medicines, drink, or nourishment should never be left uncovered in the sick-room, since they quickly absorb the gaseous emanations from the patient, and become unfit for the purpose which they were intended to serve. Their presence gives the room an untidy appearance, suggestive of filth and slovenliness, and imparts to the patient a feeling of loathing and disgust for articles ...
— The People's Common Sense Medical Adviser in Plain English • R. V. Pierce
... to prefer charges against him, she does not have to find him lazy, careless, incompetent, untidy, ill-mannered, unholy, dishonest, she does not have to discover a fault of any kind in him, she does not have to tell him nor his congregation why she dismisses and disgraces him and insults his meek flock, ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... first situation, and then, breakfasting slowly, she had just time to reach Miss Jubb's by nine. She did not like Miss Jubb, who was a thin-faced and fussy person who always wore a grey pinafore and felt that her untidy grey hair looked as though it might hint a sorrow rather than betray advancing years. Miss Jubb was full of the futile vanity of the elderly spinster, her mouth full of pins, and her head full of paper patterns. She lived with her mother on ...
— Coquette • Frank Swinnerton
... sight, said to herself that she really must go down soon and see old Dr. Ben, poke among his old books, feed his pigeons, and scold him for his untidy ways. The girl's generous imagination threw a veil of romance over his life; she told Sally that he was like some one in an ...
— Martie the Unconquered • Kathleen Norris
... eyes—the first time that he saw her in her father's mill, where he had gone to ask for work. She stood out all rosy from the warmth of the day, amidst the impalpable clouds of flour, which diffused an indistinct whiteness through the air. With her hair hanging about her in untidy curls, as if she had just awakened from a profound sleep, she stretched herself lazily, with her bare arms clasped behind her head, and yawned so as to show her white teeth, which glistened like those of a young wolf, and her maiden nudity appeared beneath ...
— The Works of Guy de Maupassant, Volume III (of 8) • Guy de Maupassant
... let it stand naturally, just as the curl will make it. Don't you do any of that nasty, untidy snarling, Elnora," cautioned Margaret. "Wash it this way every two weeks while you are in school, shake it out, and dry it. Then part it in the middle and turn a front quarter on each side from your face. You tie the back at your neck with a string—so, ...
— A Girl Of The Limberlost • Gene Stratton Porter
... later the tribe of the Leatherskins had assembled. There were four of them, for little rosy Cousin John from next door always came in for an Indian game. They had all Indian dresses with high feathers and wooden clubs or tomahawks. Daddy was in his usual untidy tweeds, but carried a rifle. He was very serious when he entered the room, for one should be very serious in a real good Indian game. Then he raised his rifle slowly over his head in greeting and the four childish voices rang out in the ...
— Danger! and Other Stories • Arthur Conan Doyle
... sent off her boy Philip for Susan, who was never so untidy that she could not come at once when sent for. She had been very busy, but orderly people can be busy and neat at the same time. Putting on her usual straw hat, she set out for the Abbey. On the way she overtook Rose's mother, who ...
— Young Folks Treasury, Volume 3 (of 12) - Classic Tales And Old-Fashioned Stories • Various
... a quaint, small drawing room which owed its atmosphere quite clearly to Mrs. Camber, for whereas the study was indescribably untidy, this was a model of neatness without being formal or unhomely. Here, in a few moments, Mrs. Camber joined us, an appealing little figure of wistful, almost elfin, beauty. I was surprised and delighted to find that an instant bond of sympathy sprang up between ...
— Bat Wing • Sax Rohmer
... asked for, however, as Miss Dowson was shown into the untidy little back room on the first floor, in which the sorceress ate, slept, and received visitors. She rose from an old rocking-chair as the visitor entered, and, regarding her with a pair of beady black eyes, bade ...
— Sailor's Knots (Entire Collection) • W.W. Jacobs |
