"Piquant" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... his brass stewpans, the verdigris of which never poisons, the dead horse is transformed into beef a-la-mode; the thighs of the dead dogs found in Rue Guenegaud become legs of mutton from the salt-marshes; and the magic of a piquant sauce gives to the staggering bob (dead born veal) of the cow-feeder the appetizing look of that of Pontoise. We are told that the cheer in winter is excellent, when the rot prevails; and if ever (during M. ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, Vol. 13, - Issue 377, June 27, 1829 • Various
... of forthcoming books. It is a capital study of girl-students from Boston, New York, and Chicago, exemplifying the most piquant characteristics of the respective phases of civilization and social criteria of the three cities. It is suited alike to old and young, being rich in beautiful passages of tender pathos, strong, simple and vivid, and full of sustaining interest. Nothing has been published ...
— The Olden Time Series, Vol. 1: Curiosities of the Old Lottery • Henry M. Brooks
... goods shown by the leading anti-suffrage houses this spring is the statement that woman suffrage is the same thing as free love. The effect is extremely piquant and surprising. ...
— Are Women People? • Alice Duer Miller
... lured a young engineer through Kentucky to catch the trail, and when he finally climbed to its shelter he found not only the pine but the footprints of a girl. And the girl proved to be lovely, piquant, and the trail of these girlish foot-prints led the young engineer a madder chase than "the trail of the ...
— Through stained glass • George Agnew Chamberlain
... Chrysler's eyes rested on the village of Dormilliere from the steamer's deck, the observations of the place and its people were to him a piquant and ...
— The Young Seigneur - Or, Nation-Making • Wilfrid Chateauclair
... language. Litte of Ratisbon composed a history of King David in the celebrated "Book of Samuel," a poem in the Nibelungen stanza, and we are told that Rachel Ackermann of Vienna was banished for having written a piquant novel, ...
— Jewish Literature and Other Essays • Gustav Karpeles
... velvet and silver braid; a white chemisette with full sleeves; a red flannel bodice embroidered with white, black, and silver, and glittering with brass saucer-shaped ornaments; and a waistbelt adorned with metal buttons. The effect is neat, bright, and decidedly piquant. The girls plait their fair hair in two long tails, wearing a handkerchief as a head-dress; but the married women have a most elaborate coiffure, something of the sister-of-mercy type, consisting of the so-called skaut, or hood, and the lin, or forehead band. It takes ...
— Peeps at Many Lands: Norway • A.F. Mockler-Ferryman
... control of his senses, and he didn't believe she could be as pretty as he thought she was. There was no reason to think that she was better to look at than an out-and-out beauty. Her nose wasn't Greek. It was just a trifle faulty, but it was piquant and full of mischief. There was nothing to be said against her mouth or her eyelashes, which were beyond criticism, and he particularly liked the way her dark-brown hair grew round her temples and her ears—but the quality ...
— Ladies-In-Waiting • Kate Douglas Wiggin
... she received his advice in silence. Not a feature of the piquant, yet proud, arresting face, not a curve of the slim figure, did his ...
— Winnie Childs - The Shop Girl • C. N. Williamson
... than its diction, shows the cultivated scholar, practised in the art of composition. Instead of the naivete, engaging, but childlike, of the old military chroniclers, Gomara handles his various topics with the shrewd and piquant criticism of a man of the world; while his descriptions are managed with a comprehensive brevity that forms the opposite to the longwinded and rambling paragraphs of the monkish annalist. These literary merits, ...
— The History Of The Conquest Of Peru • William H. Prescott
... comfort. To the gratification of my palate they paid the most unwearied attention. They continually invited me to partake of food, and when after eating heartily I declined the viands they continued to offer me, they seemed to think that my appetite stood in need of some piquant stimulant ...
— Typee - A Romance of the South Sea • Herman Melville
... spirit of most charming abandon, revealing such a familiarity with the scenes and subjects that she writes about that no one can doubt she has been among them taking notes, while her style indicates her femininity, though there are many who doubt it. There has nothing more piquant, spicy, and unconventional ever been published in Boston, and Peppermint ...
— A Romantic Young Lady • Robert Grant
... Brighton; you will see costumes a ravir, dresses that are artistic and elegant; you will see faces beautiful and well-known; you will hear a charming ripple of conversation; you will witness many pleasant and piquant adventures; but if you want to dream; if you want to give up your whole heart and soul to the poetry of the sea; if you want to listen to its voice and hear no other; if you want to shut yourself away from the world; if you want to hear the music of ...
— The Tragedy of the Chain Pier - Everyday Life Library No. 3 • Charlotte M. Braeme
... in a tone of hearty congratulation, "of course I know Miss Lou. She is a most excellent young lady. And so the wind sits in that quarter? Your blushes, Goolsby, are a happy confirmation of many sweet and piquant rumors." ...
— Free Joe and Other Georgian Sketches • Joel Chandler Harris
... arranged in the Parisian fashion: the art of the toilet appears indeed to be the only one they study, as their education does not always proceed so far as reading and writing, although they are not deficient in natural capabilities; their conversation is often as graceful and piquant as that of European ladies. Nor is general information much more extended among the gentlemen, as the following anecdote will testify. When, in 1817, the Russian frigate Kamschatka anchored in the Port of Rio ...
— A New Voyage Round the World in the Years 1823, 24, 25, and 26. Vol. 1 • Otto von Kotzebue
... how charming she might be in the motor rides with the four, how pretty and piquant in the afternoon at the piano, how melodious in the evenings upon the steps, the full measure of his ...
— The Innocent Adventuress • Mary Hastings Bradley
... many blankets he liked upon his bed, telling him that if he found the odour of the moonflowers which grew near the verandah too strong, he had better shut the right-hand window and open that on the other side of the room. Then at length, with a piquant little nod of her golden head, she went off, looking, John thought as he watched her retreating figure, about as healthy, graceful, and generally satisfactory a young woman as a man ...
— Jess • H. Rider Haggard
... certain pages in which he is incontestably at the height of his powers. Here, as in his writing for piano and for orchestra, one will find abundant evidence of his distinguishing traits—sensitiveness and fervour of imagination, a lovely and intimate sense of romance, whimsical and piquant humour, virility, passion, an unerring instinct for atmospheric suggestion. But there are times when, despite his avowed principles in the matter, he sacrifices truth of declamation to the presumed requirements of melodic design—when he seems to pay ...
— Edward MacDowell • Lawrence Gilman
... be published daily, which, in addition to the latest telegraphic news, will contain short and piquant articles upon the incidents of the day, and especially ...
— Continental Monthly , Vol V. Issue III. March, 1864 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy • Various
... something piquant in this notion. Was not life short? and precious hours were too often wasted carelessly and dawdled away. It might even be worth while to see how much could be seen in these few hours. In a few moments the resolution was taken, and I was ...
— A Day's Tour • Percy Fitzgerald
... They have immense farms, rich silver mines, large shops and butcheries, and do a vast trade. Yet they continually intrigue for legacies—a woman has recently left them 70,000 crowns—and they refuse to pay the appointed tithe on them. It is piquant to add to this authoritative description that the Jesuit congregation at Rome were still periodically forbidding the fathers to engage in commerce, and Jesuit writers still gravely maintain that the society never engaged in commerce. It should be added that the missionaries ...
— The Profits of Religion, Fifth Edition • Upton Sinclair
... frame to the graceful picture, on one side rose the Buttes, that group of hills so piquant and saucy; and on the other tossing to Heaven the everlasting whiteness of their snow wreathed foreheads, stood, sublime in their very ...
— The Shirley Letters from California Mines in 1851-52 • Louise Amelia Knapp Smith Clappe
... that the lady neglected Mr. Stryker—by no means; she was very capable of managing two affairs of the kind at the same moment. All the remarks she addressed particularly to Mr. Wyllys, were sensible and lady-like; those she made to Mr. Stryker, were clever, worldly, and piquant; while the general tone of her conversation was always a well-bred medley of much fashionable levity, with some good sense and propriety. Mr. Stryker scarcely knew whether to be pleased, or to regret that he was obliged to ride at her side. He had lately become particularly anxious ...
— Elinor Wyllys - Vol. I • Susan Fenimore Cooper
... kine came lowing into the yard, and my piquant young friend who had met me at the gate stood in the doorway talking with us both, while their brother Charley, an awkward, self-conscious lad of ten, took my pail and milked into it the required two quarts. It ...
— Afloat on the Ohio - An Historical Pilgrimage of a Thousand Miles in a Skiff, from Redstone to Cairo • Reuben Gold Thwaites
... surpassing all similes. To caress that smooth downy cheek (if you looked close you could see the infinitesimal down against the light like an aura on the edge of the silhouette), even to let the gaze dwell on it, what an enchantment!... She considered herself piquant and comely, and she was not deceived. She ...
— The Lion's Share • E. Arnold Bennett
... Then, remembering the piquant and generous face of Fanchon, Betty clinched her fingers tightly and crushed the imp who had suggested the unworthy thought, crushed him to a wretched pulp and threw him out of the open window. He immediately sneaked in by the back way, for, in spite of her victory, she still felt a little sorry ...
— The Two Vanrevels • Booth Tarkington
... colonial life, and especially colonial politics, afford for ridicule, the author has been commendably careful to avoid, as far as possible, giving real offence. Yet her criticism is sufficiently free to be piquant, and, on the whole, as salutary as it is entertaining. 'Why need Australians always be on the defensive?' asks more than once an Englishman in one of her novels. The author seems to have put the same question to ...
— Australian Writers • Desmond Byrne
... the most difficult operations in war. This remark is so true that the celebrated Prince de Ligne said, in his usual piquant style, that he could not conceive how an army ever succeeded in retreating. When we think of the physical and moral condition of an army in full retreat after a lost battle, of the difficulty of preserving order, and of the disasters to which disorder ...
— The Art of War • Baron Henri de Jomini
... the street, he felt a sense of loss. The path before him seemed a bit less bright, the night a bit more barren. And although in the excitement of the eager life about him he quickly reacted, he did not turn a corner but he found himself peering beneath the lowered umbrellas with a piquant sense of hope. ...
— The Web of the Golden Spider • Frederick Orin Bartlett
... gables overtopped here and there by spires and belfries; all this bathed in smoke, traversed by sunlight and here and there returning a glitter of polished metal, the far-off distance blue and misty, and the foreground full of vigorous color, produced effects of the most brilliant and piquant novelty. A church-tower, covered with plates of copper, springing from this curious medley of rigging and of houses, recalled to me by its odd green color the tower ...
— Seeing Europe with Famous Authors, Volume V (of X) • Various
... A piquant meat filling for sandwiches—one that is already prepared and requires only careful slicing—is Armour's Summer Sausage. Each of the several kinds is a careful blending of meats and seasoning. Packed in casing, they will keep indefinitely and therefore it is possible to have a supply at hand ready ...
— Armour's Monthly Cook Book, Volume 2, No. 12, October 1913 - A Monthly Magazine of Household Interest • Various
... been, it was obviously in no way foreseen or intended by the thoughtless crew who arranged the motley procession. The tempting prospect of putting to the blush people who stand at the head of affairs—that supreme and piquant enjoyment of those who writhe under the heel of the same—had alone animated them, so far as he could see; for he knew nothing of Jopp's incitements. Other considerations were also involved. Lucetta had confessed everything ...
— The Mayor of Casterbridge • Thomas Hardy
... my face. "Not at all, I sit here as safe as if I were at White's, and a devilish deal better satisfied. Situation piquant! Company of the best! ...
— A Daughter of Raasay - A Tale of the '45 • William MacLeod Raine
... hurry? Gowns better than she had ever boasted were being fashioned for her; and the contrast between a tiara showing under a sunbonnet, a scarf of rose-point covering a cotton belt, and diamond-buckled shoes slipped on to torn stockings, made her beauty more piquant, as she sat watching the work of her lovers, on her throne by the sea. No wonder that the men who adored such a woman were brave as she! generous and reckless as she, and on ...
— The Port of Adventure • Charles Norris Williamson and Alice Muriel Williamson
... calculated to be most auspicious I suddenly threw off the semblance of boredom, rose up, lurched across the carriage and pulled the communication cord. (For the benefit of those who have not done this I may say that the cord comes away pleasantly in the hand and, at the same time, gives one a piquant feeling of unofficial responsibility.) Westaby Jones was, for ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 156, May 7, 1919. • Various
... nothing in all this to be frightened about," said Leopold, calmly. "That she has refused a booby who runs away for fear of a woman, only proves her to be a girl of character. I begin to think there will be something piquant in this adventure, and I prefer a lively young lady to ...
— Major Frank • A. L. G. Bosboom-Toussaint
... ever green; the music of the lark and the nightingale rang out from field and thicket. There was a gay avoidance of all that is serious, moral, or reflective in man's life: life was too amusing to be serious, too piquant, too sentimental, too full of interest and gaiety and chat. It was an age of talk: "mirth is none," says Chaucer's host, "to ride on by the way dumb as a stone "; and the Trouveur aimed simply at being the most agreeable talker of his ...
— History of the English People, Volume II (of 8) - The Charter, 1216-1307; The Parliament, 1307-1400 • John Richard Green
... honor to give the lights and shadows with the same fidelity, though it would be hardly wise to call them to too strict an account on this point. As may be readily imagined, the result was something piquant and original. That the amusement was a popular one goes without saying. People like to talk of themselves, not only because the subject is interesting, but because it gives them an opportunity of setting in relief their virtues and tempering their ...
— The Women of the French Salons • Amelia Gere Mason
... Steen is represented by his favorite subject, a doctor feeling the pulse of a lovesick girl in the presence of her duenna. It is an admirable study of expression, of piquant, roguish smiles. The doctor's face seems to say, "I think I understand;" the invalid's, "Something more than your prescriptions are needed;" the duenna's, "I know what she wants." Other pictures of home-life by Schaleken, Tilborch, Netscher, William van Mieris represent kitchens, ...
— Holland, v. 1 (of 2) • Edmondo de Amicis
... climax. In Rosamond's romance it was not necessary to imagine much about the inward life of the hero, or of his serious business in the world: of course, he had a profession and was clever, as well as sufficiently handsome; but the piquant fact about Lydgate was his good birth, which distinguished him from all Middlemarch admirers, and presented marriage as a prospect of rising in rank and getting a little nearer to that celestial condition on earth in which she would have nothing to do with vulgar people, and perhaps at last ...
— Middlemarch • George Eliot
... the kitchen, but contented themselves with sitting side by side, with their noses turned towards the wall. A glorious prospect of stewpans was before them. A bunch of laurel and thyme hung near, and a spice-box exhaled a piquant perfume. Around them—the kitchen was not yet tidied—was all the litter of the things cleared away from the dining-room; however, the spot seemed a charming one to these hungry sweethearts, and especially to Zephyrin, who here feasted on such things ...
— A Love Episode • Emile Zola
... religion, matters of state, great persons, any man's present business of importance, and any case that deserveth pity. Yet there be some, that think their wits have been asleep, except they dart out somewhat that is piquant, and to the quick. That is a vein which would ...
— Essays - The Essays Or Counsels, Civil And Moral, Of Francis Ld. - Verulam Viscount St. Albans • Francis Bacon
... under the title of boiled beef there exist two things, one of which, without any great impropriety, might be called junk; but this was the powdered beef of our ancestors, a huge piece just slightly salted in the house itself, so that the generous juice remained in it, but the piquant slices, with the mealy potatoes, made a delightful combination. The glasses were filled with home-brewed ale, sparkling and clear and golden as the finest Madeira. They all ate manfully, stimulated by the genial hostess. ...
— A Perilous Secret • Charles Reade
... fluctuate between childhood and womanhood. Let me add that these seeming fluctuations depend much on the company she is in: the budding virgin is princess of chameleons; and, to confine ourselves to her two most piquant contrasts, by her mother's side she is always more or less childlike; but, let a nice young fellow engage her apart, and, hey presto! she shall be every inch a woman: perhaps at no period of her life are the purely mental ...
— Hard Cash • Charles Reade
... Paris as a woman, rather pretty, somewhat regardless of morals and decidedly slovenly of person; craving admiration, but too indolent to earn it by keeping herself presentable; covering up the dirt on a piquant face with rice powder; wearing paste jewels in her earlobes in an effort to distract criticism from the fact that the ears themselves stand in need of soap and water. London, viewed in retrospect, seems a great, clumsy, slow-moving ...
— Europe Revised • Irvin S. Cobb
... the tastes of the host and the nature of the company. The meal, it may be mentioned, begins with an invocation corresponding to our grace. The hors d'oeuvres are taken in the shape of shell-fish, such as oysters and mussels, snails with piquant sauce, lettuce, radishes and the like, eggs, and a taste of wine ...
— Life in the Roman World of Nero and St. Paul • T. G. Tucker
... of novel and piquant forms of speech is one of the most obvious of Stevenson's devices. No man handles his adjectives with greater judgment and nicer discrimination. There is hardly a page of his work where we do not come across ...
— Through the Magic Door • Arthur Conan Doyle
... seen, like heady lamplight, or sunshine to some sleeper in a delirious dream, hung upon, clung to, the bold, naked, shameful imageries, as his step-mother trimmed the lamps, drew forth her sickly perfumes, clad afresh in piquant change of raiment the almost formless goddess crouching there in her unclean shrine or stye, set at last her foolish wheel in motion to a low chant, holding him by the wrist, keeping close all the while, as if to catch some germ of consent in his ...
— Greek Studies: A Series of Essays • Walter Horatio Pater
... next day, a short time before the hour appointed, the invitation is repeated, to inform them that the feast is prepared and awaits them. A great number of dishes are served on small ebony tables, and dressed in the most piquant manner; there are several courses; and, in addition to various wines, cordials of a fiery nature are offered from time to time. When two persons wish to pledge one another, they leave the tables, go into the middle of the room, and take ...
— The American Quarterly Review, No. 17, March 1831 • Various
... Johnson from his bed an hour sooner than he wished to rise. The subject, like the flesh of that 'melancholy' creature the hare, may be dry, but, as with that, an astute cookery prevails to make it exceedingly piquant; the sauce is better than the substance. Burton's melancholy is not, like Johnson's, a deep, hopeless, 'inspissated gloom,' thickened by memories of remorse, and lighted up by the lurid fires of feared perdition; it is not, like Byron's, dashed with the demoniac element, and fretted into universal ...
— Specimens with Memoirs of the Less-known British Poets, Complete • George Gilfillan
... shock which the latter felt at sight of the beauty and fashionable appearance of the mysterious little being who was to solve her difficulties, her glance, which under other circumstances might have lingered unduly upon the piquant features and exquisite dressing of the fairy-like figure before her, passed at once to Violet's eyes in whose steady depths beamed an intelligence quite at odds with the coquettish dimples which so often misled the casual observer in his estimation of a character singularly ...
— Masterpieces of Mystery In Four Volumes - Detective Stories • Various
... glass. "A balsamic taste, slightly piquant but agreeable," he observed. "A dangerous wine, Scroggs! It carries no warning; your older kind is like a world-worn coquette whose glances at once place you on the defensive. This maiden vintage, just springing ...
— The Strollers • Frederic S. Isham
... merry doings of the famous people of this sweet and productive land, more fertile in cuckolds, dandies and witty wags than any other, and which has furnished a good share of men of renown in France, as witness the departed Courier of piquant memory; Verville, author of Moyen de Parvenir, and others equally well known, among whom we will specially mention the Sieur Descartes, because he was a melancholy genius, and devoted himself more to brown studies than to drinks and dainties, a man of whom all the cooks and ...
— Droll Stories, Volume 1 • Honore de Balzac
... hundred pounds from her fascinated publisher. It contains much curious information about the antiquities and social condition of Ireland, and a passionate pleading against the wrongs of its people. It made the piquant little governess all the rage in fashionable society, and until her marriage she was known by the name of her heroine, Glorvina. As a story the book is not worth ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Volume 22. October, 1878. • Various
... biographer does not seem aware that for several months before he became editor of the "New Monthly" he wrote the "Monthly Commentary" for that magazine,—a pleasant, piquant, and sometimes severe series of comments on the leading topics or events of ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 15, No. 90, April, 1865 • Various
... simply bechamel and aspic treated in the same way. It differs, of course, from plain bechamel in having the piquant flavor of the aspic; in appearance there ...
— Choice Cookery • Catherine Owen
... the day's doings than is consistent with even their social responsibilities, in compensation the women of this circle are as pretty and amiable as it is possible to be in a fallen world. The foreigner never forgets those piquant, mutines faces of Andalusia and those dreamy eyes of Malaga,—the black masses of Moorish hair and the blond glory of those graceful heads that trace their descent from Gothic demigods. They were not very learned nor very witty, but they were knowing enough to trouble the soundest ...
— Castilian Days • John Hay
... campaign, and one night Raymond Lyle, of Lone Hollow, and another of the Carrington colonists spent an hour with us. Since Aline honored Fairmead with her presence we had frequent visits from the younger among them. Aline was generally piquant, and these visitors, who, even if a few were rather feather-brained, were for the most part honest young Englishmen, seemed to find much pleasure in her company. Lyle, however, was a somewhat silent and thoughtful man, ...
— Lorimer of the Northwest • Harold Bindloss
... happened that there were no tragedies or other horrors in the newspapers sufficiently piquant to tempt the cook's intellectual palate; and in the absence of these, if it happened also to be Jane's "evening out," Mary would occasionally produce a well-thumbed copy of the Arabian Nights, or some old volume of fairy tales, from ...
— The Rover's Secret - A Tale of the Pirate Cays and Lagoons of Cuba • Harry Collingwood
... in German to Colonel Grau, who had been uneasy during the conversation in English, because he failed to understand it. His expression of piquant surprise was intensified as he ...
— Aunt Jane's Nieces in the Red Cross • Edith Van Dyne
... must have made inquiries after his Op. 1, and succeeded in getting it. For on January 1832, he wrote to Frederick Wieck: "Chopin's first work (I believe firmly that it is his tenth) is in my hands: a lady would say that it was very pretty, very piquant, almost Moschelesque. But I believe you will make Clara [Wieck's daughter, afterwards Mdme. Schumann] study it; for there is plenty of Geist in it and few difficulties. But I humbly venture to assert that there are between this composition and Op. 2 two ...
— Frederick Chopin as a Man and Musician - Volume 1-2, Complete • Frederick Niecks
... of his gaze slowly softened to a smile compound both of humor and grimness. He was a man to appreciate a piquant situation, none the less because it was at his expense. The spark that gleamed in his bold eye held some spice of ...
— A Texas Ranger • William MacLeod Raine
... away from the throbbing sunshine into the green-black shadows of a tree, and seated himself with a boyish lightness in piquant contrast with his gray-haired dignity—a lightness that meant athletic years. Eleanor bent down the branch of a great bush that faced him and sat on it as if a bird had poised there. She smiled as their eyes met, and began to hum ...
— The Militants - Stories of Some Parsons, Soldiers, and Other Fighters in the World • Mary Raymond Shipman Andrews
... expression and finely-chiselled features of a Spaniard steal upon us like a soft moonlight, while a Frenchwoman, however plain, has so graceful a manner of saying agreeable things, so charming a tournure, such a piquant way of managing her eyes, and even her mouth, that we think her a beauty after half an hour's acquaintance, and even lose our admiration for the quiet and high-bred, but less graceful Anglaise. The beauty of the women here consist in superb black eyes, very fine dark hair, a beautiful ...
— Life in Mexico • Frances Calderon de la Barca
... with the pessimism of a woman of ninety, as she stole an admiring glance at her sister. Patty's own face, irregular, piquant, tantalizing, had its peculiar charm, and her brilliant skin and hair so dazzled the masculine beholder that he took note of no small defects; but Waitstill was beautiful; beautiful even in her working dress of purple calico. Her single braid of hair, the Foxwell hair, ...
— The Story Of Waitstill Baxter • By Kate Douglas Wiggin
... dinner, and made a great to-do when he heard that my housekeeper dined in her room. The ladies said he was quite right, so we all went and made her sit down at table with us. She must have been flattered, and the incident evidently increased her good humour, as she amused us by her wit and her piquant stories about Lady Montagu. When we had risen from table Madame ...
— The Memoires of Casanova, Complete • Jacques Casanova de Seingalt
... but rather a piquant titillation of my bitter humour, when I disentangled from Wetter's confident and eloquent description of the Ideal Ambassador a tolerably accurate, if somewhat partial, portrait of himself. I was rather surprised at his desire for the position. Subsequently ...
— The King's Mirror • Anthony Hope
... something especially piquant in the way in which after Guilford he left Cornwallis to himself. It reminds one of a chess-player who first gets the queen off the board, where she can do no harm, and then wins the game against the smaller pieces. As for Cornwallis, when he reached Petersburg, May 20, he found himself at ...
— The War of Independence • John Fiske
... not ask thee, for my sake, To read a book which well may make Its way by native force of wit Without my manual sign to it. Its piquant writer needs from me No gravely masculine guaranty, And well might laugh her merriest laugh At broken spears in her behalf; Yet, spite of all the critics tell, I frankly own I like her well. It may be ...
— The Complete Works of Whittier - The Standard Library Edition with a linked Index • John Greenleaf Whittier
... things. You may not pick out the plums, because the pudding falls to pieces if you do. In The Way of all Flesh, however, a compere is always present whose business it is to say good things. His perpetual flow of asides is pleasant because the asides are piquant and, in their way, to the point. Butler's mind, being a good mind, had a predilection for the object, and his detestation of the rotunder platitudes of a Greek chorus, if nothing else, had taught him ...
— Aspects of Literature • J. Middleton Murry
... been a celebrated beauty; and, though a grandmother, still retains considerable traces of it. Her countenance is so spirituelle and piquant, that it gives additional point to the clever things she perpetually utters; and what greatly enhances her attractions is the perfect freedom from any of the airs of a bel esprit, and the total exemption from ...
— The Idler in France • Marguerite Gardiner
... with a singularly high colour and almost startling silver hair. She had, as if designedly to relieve these effects, a pair of Mephistophelian black eyebrows and a very neat black dress. The glare of the gas lit up her piquant hair and face perfectly against the brown background of the shutters. The background was blue and not brown in one place; at the place where Rupert's knife had torn a great opening in the wood about ...
— The Club of Queer Trades • G. K. Chesterton
... been carefully trained in heart and mind while Maggie had been neglected. Miss Lee was going through a course of training at St. Benet's College for Women at Kingsdene. She was an uncommon girl in every sense of the word. The expression of her lovely face was as piquant as its features were beautiful; her eyes were dark as night; they also possessed the depth of the tenderest, sweetest summer night, subjugating all those who came in contact with her. Annabel Lee won Maggie's warmest affections at once; she determined to ...
— A Sweet Girl Graduate • Mrs. L.T. Meade
... fortunate as to be personally acquainted with Charles Lamb are lavish in their praise of his conversational powers. Hazlitt says that no one ever stammered out such fine, piquant, deep, eloquent things in a half-dozen half-sentences as he did. "He always made the best pun and the best remark in the course of the evening." Lamb was undoubtedly "matchless as a fireside companion," inimitable as a table-talker, "great at the midnight hour." ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 11, Issue 67, May, 1863 • Various
... as he did so, and their eyes met. He would have known her anywhere, in spite of the nine years since he had seen her. The small oval of the sparkling gypsy face, the fine features, so mobile and piquant, he instantly recognized from the portrait painted in undying colors ...
— The Duke of Stockbridge • Edward Bellamy
... Bridau, Mesdames de Cadignan and de Montcornet, the Comtesse de Vandenesse, Daniel d'Arthez, and Madame Rochegude, otherwise known as Rochefide. Canalis, Rastignac, Laginski, Montriveau, Bianchon, Marsay, and Blondet rivaled each other in telling piquant stories and passing caustic remarks under her roof. [Another Study of Woman.] Furthermore, Mademoiselle des Touches shortly afterwards gave advice to Marie de Vandenesse and condemned free love. [A Daughter of Eve.] In 1836, while traveling through ...
— Repertory Of The Comedie Humaine, Complete, A — Z • Anatole Cerfberr and Jules Franois Christophe
... pained Letty that great ladies should be so beautiful. Not that this one was beautiful of face—she wasn't—only piquant—but the general effect was beautiful. It showed what money and the dressmaker could do. If she, Letty could have had a dress and a hat like this!—a blue or a green, it was difficult to say which—with these strips ...
— The Dust Flower • Basil King
... conspicuous and the clerk at the desk seemed to be unusually popular with the guests. And after every stop there ensued a shifting of passengers in the taxicabs, until Neville found himself occupying the rear taxi in the procession accompanied by a lively young lady in pink silk and swansdown—a piquant face and pretty figure, white and smooth and inclined to a plumpness so far successfully contended ...
— The Common Law • Robert W. Chambers
... Nance and Dan had reported to Mrs. Purdy, rumor traveled from house to house and from room to room that the rent man was putting the Lewises out. The piquant element in the situation lay in the absence of the chief actor. "Mis' Lewis" herself had disappeared, and nobody knew where she was ...
— Calvary Alley • Alice Hegan Rice
... the spade across his shoulder and walked slowly up the road that led to the plantation, through the wet hay which exhaled a piquant odor. ...
— Brazilian Tales • Joaquim Maria Machado de Assis
... they were politicians or persons of distinction, greatly interested the translator of Plato, Thucydides, and Aristotle. Though he was not the kind of man to inflate himself with any idea that he was "Socrates redivivus" I have no doubt that he found the worldlywise malice of Lord Westbury as piquant as the Greek philosopher did the ...
— The Adventure of Living • John St. Loe Strachey
... favourite of hers; she is pretty, and she is piquant in manner and conversation; two very good things, which she thinks highly of in any young woman. Besides that, she knows that Helen loves her younger son; and, although she hardly understands how things ...
— Vera Nevill - Poor Wisdom's Chance • Mrs. H. Lovett Cameron
... with Winton made the girl regard it as beneath her to be shocked. She did not seek knowledge of life, but refused to shy away from it or be discomfited; and the baroness, to whom innocence was piquant, went on: ...
— Forsyte Saga • John Galsworthy
... Piquant contrast to these obsessions, the well-known expression of Talbot Potter lifted him above the crowd to such high serenity his face might have been that of a young Pope, with a dash of Sydney Carton. His glance ...
— Harlequin and Columbine • Booth Tarkington
... from everybody; his private superstitions, and his inordinate love of humbugging and selling friend and foe, tend to produce in him that goblin, elfin, boyish-mischievous, out-of-the-age state of mind which is utterly indescribable to a prosaic modern-souled man, but which is delightfully piquant to others. Many a time among Gipsies I have felt, I confess with pleasure, all the subtlest spirit of fun combined with picture-memories of Hayraddin Maugrabin—witch-legends and the "Egyptians;" for in their ignorance they are still an unconscious race, and ...
— The English Gipsies and Their Language • Charles G. Leland
... from their sisters of the Eastern Gold Coast. You never see beauty beyond the beaute du diable and the naive and piquant plainness which one admires in a pug-pup. The forms are unsupported, and the figure falls away at the hips. They retain the savage fashion of coiffure shown in Cameron's 'Across Africa,' training their wool to bunches, ...
— To The Gold Coast for Gold, Vol. II - A Personal Narrative • Richard Francis Burton and Verney Lovett Cameron
... to tiny naked shoulders, presented a piquant contrast with the huge, black Assyrian, bull-like policemen, who guarded the passage, and reduced, by contrast, to almost doll-like proportions the white creatures who went up the great stairway. Overhead an artificial plant, ...
— Muslin • George Moore
... certainly great perfection, particularly in figure; though in the crowd of beauty that has been so profusely lavished on the youthful in this country, she would not have been at all remarked in a large assembly of young American girls. Her face was pleasing nevertheless; and there was a piquant contrast between the raven blackness of her hair the deep blue of her eyes, and the dazzling whiteness of her skin. Her colour, too, was high, and changeful with her emotions. As for teeth, she had a set that one might have travelled weeks ...
— Afloat And Ashore • James Fenimore Cooper
... there, and also Beatrice Egerton, who, as exchange editor of the "Argus," Dorothy had come to know well and to like for her quick wit and her daring, piquant ways, while she thoroughly disapproved of her worldly, self-seeking attitude ...
— Betty Wales, Sophomore • Margaret Warde
... as possible into the arms of the villain; after which she became interesting. His natural taste in heroines was for the lady with a past, preferably several pasts. The blot on the woman's character was as piquant to him as the mole upon her shoulder. He had spent an impressionable youth ...
— Kildares of Storm • Eleanor Mercein Kelly
... and laughed at it, as if it were a chained wild beast, and conversed with perfect serenity. Unfortunately, even our dearest friends, generally women, cannot, to save their very lives and souls, refrain from having frequent piquant scenes with such tempting subjects; while, on the other hand, the subjects are often led by mere vanity into exhibiting themselves as something peculiar. Altogether, I believe that where there is no deeply seated hereditary or congenital defect, or no displacement or injury from violence ...
— Memoirs • Charles Godfrey Leland
... and Pierre pensively trifled with the fringe on Shon's buckskin jacket, which was whisked from his fingers with smothered anger. For a few moments he was silent; but the eager looks of the Chief Factor and Lazenby encouraged him to continue. Besides, it was only Pierre's way—provoking Shon was the piquant sauce of his life. ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker
... two interviewers. (How these men had got on board—and how my own particular friend had got on board—I knew not, for we were yet far from quay-side.) I had been hearing all my life about the sublime American institution of the interview. I had been warned by Americans of its piquant dangers. And here I was suddenly up against it! Beneath a casual and jaunty exterior, I trembled. I wanted to sit, but dared not. They stood; I stood. These two men, however, were adepts. They had the better qualities of American ...
— Your United States - Impressions of a first visit • Arnold Bennett
... long and silken, its nut-brown tint contrasting exquisitely with the dazzling whiteness of her fine fresh complexion. At the commencement of her supreme power, the Empress still liked to adorn her head in the morning with a red madras handkerchief, which gave her a most piquant Creole air, and rendered her ...
— The Private Life of Napoleon Bonaparte, Complete • Constant
... bowed in and the pricked, scored fingers of a seamstress, and a permanent pucker at one corner of her mouth from holding pins there. The daughter showed trim, slender limbs and a bodily grace and a piquant face which generations of breeding and wealth so very often fail ...
— Sundry Accounts • Irvin S. Cobb
... bay, riding upon the heights beyond El-Biar, or, ensconced in a sumptuous private box, listening to the latest French farce at one or another of the theatres. Only one day, when they had driven out to the monastery at La Trappe de Staoueli, did a momentary cloud descend upon her piquant features, and she explained this by the frank confession that she had always wished to become a nun, but had been hindered from following her vocation by the necessity of earning money to support ...
— The Mission Of Mr. Eustace Greyne - 1905 • Robert Hichens
... 75 cents net The Girl with the Green Eyes 75 cents net Her Own Way 75 cents net The Stubbornness of Geraldine 75 cents net The Truth 75 cents net Ingenious satires on modern society, unhackneyed in incident, piquant in humor, showing minute observation happily used. Each is bound in cloth, with white ...
— The Faith Healer - A Play in Three Acts • William Vaughn Moody
... ashes of roses, with overskirt of scare bleu ventre saint gris, cut bias on the off-side, with facings of petit polonaise and narrow insertions of pa^te de foie gras backstitched to the mise en sce'ne in the form of a jeu d'esprit. It gives to the wearer a singularly piquant and alluring aspect. ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... Ray made Mildred sit with me at the little metal table while he served the little brown cakes and the dark-red soup and the fragrant amber drink. Mildred got up and brought a great metal bowl filled with tiny purple fruits that had a delicious, piquant tang. ...
— Astounding Stories, April, 1931 • Various
... Mr. Povey did not usually take tea in the house on Thursday afternoons; his practice was to go out into the great, mysterious world. Never before had he shared a meal with the girls alone. The situation was indubitably unexpected, unforeseen; it was, too, piquant, and what added to its piquancy was the fact that Constance and Sophia were, somehow, responsible for Mr. Povey. They felt that they were responsible for him. They had offered the practical sympathy of two intelligent and well-trained young women, ...
— The Old Wives' Tale • Arnold Bennett
... the peculiarities of his character, amiable and benevolent as it was, to take delight in the conflict of ideas. If he saw, in the course of his lecture, a man whom he took for a philosopher or anything like it, he never failed to direct some piquant phrase, some aggressive sentence or some irritating thought that way—it was the gauntlet which he ...
— Delsarte System of Oratory • Various
... yawned, produced her vanity case, peered into the mirror, and used her powder puff with the somewhat piquant assurance of the foreigner. Then she closed her dressing case with a snap, pulled down her veil, and looked across ...
— The Devil's Paw • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... days, these two had plenty to gossip about; and gradually he found himself drifting back into the lively, refreshing, piquant intimacy of yesterday. And realised that it ...
— The Crimson Tide • Robert W. Chambers
... soon after of the volatile duke who had held him there to be stabbed from behind. Both writers began their memoirs in 1652, and no one has ever decided which is the more elegant of the two unique conpositions. The conjunction between two of the greatest prose-writers of France is piquant, and we cannot trace in Retz's sketch of his antagonist the smallest sign of resentment. It was not published until 1717, but it has all the appearance of having been written sixty years earlier, at least, when Mademoiselle ...
— Three French Moralists and The Gallantry of France • Edmund Gosse
... her Maker because she had found some one whom she believed she could trust? That was a hideous and an abominable thing to do! "You swore it! You swore you'd see me through!"—the words came and rang insistently in her ears. The sweet, piquant little face set in hard, determined lines. Mechanically she picked up the flashlight and a package of the banknotes, lowered the board in the ceiling into place, ...
— The White Moll • Frank L. Packard
... continually. Did you feast on 'The Marble Faun'? I have a charming letter from Una Hawthorne, herself a poet by nature, all about 'papa's book.' Ought not Mr. Hawthorne to be the happiest man alive? He isn't, though! Do save all the anecdotes you possibly can, piquant or not; starved ...
— Maria Mitchell: Life, Letters, and Journals • Maria Mitchell
... in her light white morning gown, looking at me, her slight figure seems full of poetry and grace. She is neither large, nor small; her head is alluring, piquant—in the sense of the period of the French marquises—rather than formally beautiful. What enchantment and softness, what roguish charm play about her none too small mouth! Her skin is so infinitely delicate, ...
— Venus in Furs • Leopold von Sacher-Masoch
... inches at the top by letting in a piece of shirting. A thin red-and- black-striped jacket that she wears, a kind of loose Garibaldi, is supposed to hide this addition, which it only very imperfectly does. Her head is small and piquant; her hair heavy, blue-black; her eyes light brown, of exquisite shape, smiling and kind. She has small, red lips, and the most beautiful teeth that I remember seeing. Her complexion is brown, unless ...
— Recollections Of My Childhood And Youth • George Brandes
... ribbons, and her golden head surmounted by a sailor hat, with a scarf of the same azure hue tied around it, Kitty looked really charming, and Vandeloup could hardly restrain himself from taking her up in his arms and kissing her, so delightfully fresh and piquant she appeared. Kitty, on her side, had examined Gaston with a woman's quickness of taking in details, and she mentally decided he was the best-looking man she had ever seen, only she wished he would talk. Shyness was not a part of her nature, so after waiting a reasonable time for Vandeloup to ...
— Madame Midas • Fergus Hume
... verse, now in what is worse, in rhymed prose, until he reaches the point which is to us of import. Khalid, in the winter of the first year of the Dastur (Constitution) writes to him many letters from Beirut, of which he gives us not less than fifty! And of these, the following, if not the most piquant and interesting, are the ...
— The Book of Khalid • Ameen Rihani
... a very peculiar turn of thinking. He was, when alive, the editor, or an editor, of the Family Herald: I say when alive, to speak according to knowledge; for, if his own views be true, he may have a hand in it still. The answers to correspondents, in his time, were piquant and original above any I ever saw. I think a very readable book might be made out of them, resembling "Guesses at Truth:" the turn given to an inquiry about morals, religion, or socials, is often of the highest degree of unexpectedness; ...
— A Budget of Paradoxes, Volume II (of II) • Augustus de Morgan
... bewildering variety. Some of the stories, such as D.F. Hayne's Romance of the Castle, seem like familiar, well-tried friends, and conceal no surprises for the readers of Gothic romance. Others, like The Sleepless Woman, by W. Jerdan, are more piquant. The hero is warned by his dying uncle to beware of women's bright eyes. In spite of this he marries a lady, whose eyes unite the qualities of the robin and the falcon. After the wedding he makes the awful discovery that she is of too noble ...
— The Tale of Terror • Edith Birkhead
... Mildred Taylor, fully dressed, sat at the window looking listlessly out. If she heard Grace's light knock she paid no attention to it. It was not until Grace said rather diffidently, "We heard you were ill and thought we'd come in to see you," that the girl at the window turned toward Grace. Her piquant little face was drawn and pale, and her eyes looked suspiciously red. She eyed Grace almost sulkily, then said slowly, "It was kind of you to come, but I shall be all right to-morrow." Under Grace's serious ...
— Grace Harlowe's Second Year at Overton College • Jessie Graham Flower
... renewed stimulus; the passion, which quickly becomes normal and intermittent when it spends itself upon one object, is apt to become an abnormal and almost continuous craving when it is solicited by a succession of novel and piquant attractions. The advocates of free love assert that it is unnatural repression that creates an undue and morbid longing; that freedom to satisfy the instinct would tend to keep it in its properly subordinate place. But the contrary is, in reality, true. More usually, as ...
— Problems of Conduct • Durant Drake
... party associations, would have done such complete justice to the memory of a friend and Parliamentary associate. Mr. Disraeli has here presented us with the very type and embodiment of what history should be. His sketch of the condition of parties is seasoned with some of those piquant personal episodes of party manoeuvres and private intrigues, in the author's happiest and most captivating vein, which convert the dry details of politics into a sparkling and agreeable narrative. But the portrait which will ...
— Memoirs of the Court and Cabinets of George the Third, Volume 2 (of 2) - From the Original Family Documents • The Duke of Buckingham
... should have been the happiest man alive, but the devil had recruited him for his miserables. Her piquant face no longer confronting and bewildering him, he saw this second net into which he had permitted himself to be drawn. As if the first had not been colossal enough! Where would it all end? Private secretary and two hundred the month—forty pounds—this was a godsend. But to take her orders ...
— The Voice in the Fog • Harold MacGrath
... sudden vengeance of the Three. There is a brooding sense of peril over all the blithe and flitting fancies said or sung to one another by the lovers in their gondola; a sense, however, of future rather than of present peril, something of a zest and a piquant pleasure to them. The sudden tragic ending, anticipated yet unexpected, rounds the whole with a dramatic touch of infallible instinct. I know nothing with which the poem may be compared: its method and its magic are alike its own. We might hear it or fancy it perhaps in one of the Ballades ...
— An Introduction to the Study of Browning • Arthur Symons
... saying all the arms—and the most accurate understanding; but the only practical outcome of these things had been an intimate object-lesson in the small value of the intelligence, that flavoured her state with cynicism and made it more piquant. She did not altogether scorn her own intelligence at the result, because it had always admitted the existence of dominating facts that belonged to life and not to reason; it was only the absurd unexpectedness of ...
— Hilda - A Story of Calcutta • Sara Jeannette Duncan
... quarrel was not cause enough for you to leave Persia, and so have I. Voila tout!" He examined Gaston in turn. "But I thought you knew all the time. Such is fame! I flattered myself that your Monsieur Guy would leave no one untold. Whereas he has left us the pleasure of a situation more piquant, after all, than I supposed. We enjoy the magnificent moonlight of the south, we admire a historic river under its most successful aspect, and we do not exalt ourselves because our countrymen, many hundreds of miles away, have lost their heads." He smiled over the piquancy of the situation. ...
— The Best Short Stories of 1917 - and the Yearbook of the American Short Story • Various
... usual philanthropic resolutions were passed. Victor Hugo, of France, excused himself from attendance on the score of ill-health; but the country was represented by Emile de Girardin. The congress is to meet next year simultaneously with the great World's Exposition at London. The most piquant incidents of the session were the speech of George Copway, a veritable American Indian Chief, and the presence, in one of the visitors' tribunes, of the famous General Haynau, whose victories and cruelties last year, in prosecuting the Hungarian war, were the theme in the congress ...
— International Miscellany of Literature, Art and Science, Vol. 1, - No. 3, Oct. 1, 1850 • Various
... literary character which he was proud of. The new management must have divined that its popularity, with the women at least, was largely due to its careful selections of verse and fiction, its literary news, and its full and piquant criticisms, with their long extracts from new books. It was some time since he had personally looked after this department, and the young fellow in charge of it under him had remained with the paper. Its continued excellence, which he could ...
— Indian Summer • William D. Howells
... standing by the fireplace or walking up and down in the warm, comfortable office. Alphonse had always some piquant stories to tell, and Charles laughed at them. ...
— Tales of Two Countries • Alexander Kielland
... piquant and dashing as she used to be, perhaps; but if she has been fretting for Launce—as Honor thinks—she has certainly lost none of her good ...
— Only an Irish Girl • Mrs. Hungerford
... Nelson's Extract of Meat, and if the gravy is required to be slightly thickened, add a small teaspoonful of potato-flour mixed smooth in cold water. For cutlets or other dishes requiring sharp sauce, make exactly as above, and just before serving add a little of any good piquant sauce, or pickles ...
— Nelson's Home Comforts - Thirteenth Edition • Mary Hooper
... which the great tragedian hid beneath the splendors of his genius. He began with those writings, superfine (precieux), dainty, tricked out in the fashion of the court and the drawing-room, which suggested La Bruyere's piquant portrait. ...
— A Popular History of France From The Earliest Times - Volume VI. of VI. • Francois Pierre Guillaume Guizot
... of epicures has developed a nation of excellent cooks. Our fare in China, outside the Gobi district, was far better than in Turkey or Persia, and, for this reason, we were better able to endure the increased hardships. A plate of sliced meat stewed with vegetables, and served with a piquant sauce, sliced radishes and onions with vinegar, two loaves of Chinese mo-mo, or steamed bread, and a pot of tea, would usually cost us about three and one quarter cents apiece. Everything in China is sliced so that it can be eaten with the ...
— Across Asia on a Bicycle • Thomas Gaskell Allen and William Lewis Sachtleben
... piquant! There's no need to take offence; so much the better! 'Tis all the same to a gentleman. To-morrow an elegant lady of fashion, to-day a Cinderella, one as beautiful as a young goddess, the other as villainous as Macbeth's witches; there perfume, ...
— A Hungarian Nabob • Maurus Jokai
... Roman satirists, properly speaking. The satirical spirit animates the piquant epigrams of his friend Martial, but their purpose is not moral or didactic. They sting the individual, and render him an object of scorn and disgust, but they do not hold up vice itself ...
— Handbook of Universal Literature - From The Best and Latest Authorities • Anne C. Lynch Botta
... of tumultuous feet and Miss Virginia Houston Cary burst upon the scene. She was a tot of seven with sun touched hair and great dark eyes whose witchery made her a piquant little fairy. In spite of her mother's despair over her clothes Virgie was dressed, or at least had been dressed at breakfast time, in a clean white frock, low shoes and white stockings, although all now showed ...
— The Littlest Rebel • Edward Peple
... was still fixed; the wondering smile would have been idiotic in any face less dimpled, rosy, and piquant than Susy's. After a slight gasp, as if in still incredulous and partly reminiscent preoccupation, she ...
— Susy, A Story of the Plains • Bret Harte
... fellow, even in that age of piquant personalities, that it may be worth while to translate a fragment of Vasari's gossip about him. We must, however, bear in mind that, for some unknown reason, the Aretine historian bore a rancorous ...
— Sketches and Studies in Italy and Greece, Complete - Series I, II, and III • John Symonds
... a delightful mood, and seemed to be applying all the points of his own Dora's attempts at housekeeping, with a pleasant slyness: the more so as the little lady of the house was the very replica of that piquant and fascinating heroine. She was destined, alas! to but a short enjoyment of her little rule, but she gained all hearts and sympathies by her very taking ways. Among others the redoubtable John Forster professed to be completely "captured," and was her most ...
— John Forster • Percy Hethrington Fitzgerald
... lodged, were found by a friend of mine, that was as a loan, which I have long since repaid, and the property in the journal is now exclusively mine. I have to thank you not only for your own brilliant contributions, but for those of the colleagues you secured. Monsieur Savarin's piquant criticisms were most valuable to us at starting. I regret to have lost his aid. But as he has set up a new journal of his own, even he has not wit enough to spare for another. A propos of our contributors, I shall ask you to present me ...
— The Parisians, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... not only in the French restaurants but in most of the Italian as well. Some of these places combine or interchange the menus of French, Italian and Swiss chefs, a piquant entree, or shellfish served bordelaise, being followed by a paste like lasagne, spaghetti or tagliarini, or by those geometric ravioli whose delights are in inverse ratio to their square. If you ...
— Fascinating San Francisco • Fred Brandt and Andrew Y. Wood
... before you leap; consider well, carefully, and prayerfully. A leap in the dark is a fearful risk, and will be far more likely to land you in a domestic purgatory than anywhere else. Do not be dazzled by a handsome face, an agreeable address, a brilliant or piquant manner. Choose, rather, modesty, simplicity, sincerity, morality, qualities of heart and mind, ...
— Plain Facts for Old and Young • John Harvey Kellogg
... Now they had to do with Daisy Ellington, the New York chorus girl whose mobile, piquant face was helping to make the Lunar reels popular. Steve was engaged in a whirlwind flirtation with her which both of them were enjoying extremely. He liked her slangy audacity, the frank good-fellowship with which ...
— Steve Yeager • William MacLeod Raine
... the enthusiasms of Coleridge which nobody was able to bear. Lamb would parade his admiration for some favourite author, Donne, for example, whom the rest of the company probably abhorred. He would select the most crabbed passages to quote and defend; he would stammer out his piquant and masterful half sentences, his scalding jests, his controvertible assertions; he would skilfully hint at the defects which no one else was permitted to see; and if he made no converts (wanting none), he woke no weary wrath. But we all have ...
— Americans and Others • Agnes Repplier
... windows of the cubicle in which he had been lodged—one of ten which sufficed for the demands of the itinerant Universe—not only overlooked the public square and its amusing life of a minor market town, but commanded as well a splendid vista of the valley of the Dourbie, with its piquant contrast of luxuriant alluvial verdure and grim scarps of rock that ran up, on either side the wanton, glimmering river, into two opposed and overshadowing pinnacles of crag, the Roc Nantais and the Roc de Saint Alban—peaks each a rendezvous just then for hosts of ...
— Alias The Lone Wolf • Louis Joseph Vance
... birth, though penniless. He borrows clothes for her (by onerous contract with the haberdashers, it is said, being poor to a degree); he easily gets her introduced to the Ducal Soirees; bids her—She knows what to do? Right well she knows what; catches, with her piquant face, the dull eye of Eberhard Ludwig, kindles Eberhard Ludwig, and will not for something quench him. Not she at all: How can SHE; your Serene Highness, ask her not! A virtuous young lady, she, and come of a ...
— History of Friedrich II of Prussia V 7 • Thomas Carlyle
... fresh cold water and cook until very tender. Add other ingredients and bring to boiling point. Slice thin, hard cooked egg and lemon from which seeds have been removed and serve with each portion. Do not remove lemon rind as this gives a piquant flavor. ...
— Foods That Will Win The War And How To Cook Them (1918) • C. Houston Goudiss and Alberta M. Goudiss
... that flashed through Bansemer's brain was the realisation that she was far more beautiful than he had expected her to be. There was a truly aristocratic loveliness in the rather piquant face, and she undeniably possessed "manner." Maturity had improved her vastly, he confessed with strange exultation; age had been kinder than youth. He forgot the play, seldom taking his eyes from the back which again had been turned to him. Calculating, ...
— Jane Cable • George Barr McCutcheon
... preceded by another, from The Westminster Review, written fourteen years earlier, on The Genius of Cruikshank. This contains a descriptive catalogue of Cruikshank's works up to that period, and is interesting from the piquant style in which it is written. I fancy that these two are the only efforts of the kind which he made,—and in both he dealt with the two great caricaturists of his time, he himself being, in the imaginative part of a caricaturist's work, equal in ...
— Thackeray • Anthony Trollope
... tavern to the other bar. The toasts at the first hand were better than the arguments at the second. Even when the toasts began to grow old as sarcasms, they were washed down with still older pricked election Port; then the acid of the wine made some amends for the want of anything piquant in the wit. But when his Grace gave them a second transformation, and brought out the vapid stuff which had wearied the clubs and disgusted the courts, the drug made up of the bottoms of rejected bottles, all smelling so wofully of the cork and of the cask, and of everything except the ...
— The Works of the Right Honourable Edmund Burke, Vol. V. (of 12) • Edmund Burke
... open the conversation, asking himself uneasily what punishment the girl would award him for his faux pas of the afternoon. Would she be haughty? She didn't look the kind of little thing to be haughty! Would she be cold and aloof? Somehow, glancing at the irregular, piquant little profile, he could not imagine her aloof. Would she snap? Ah! Now he was not so certain. He saw distinct possibilities of snap, and then, just as he determined that he really must make the plunge and get it over, Pixie leaned confidentially toward him ...
— The Love Affairs of Pixie • Mrs George de Horne Vaizey
... Paris have said to that? I spent all my leisure time in the women's house, whither I was unconsciously more and more strongly attracted, not less by the young American's conversation—which was a piquant mixture of animated controversy and unaffected chatter—than by her harp-playing and her clear alto voice. But this did not satisfy sister Clara, who at last hit upon the plan of marrying us. Our common 'foolishness'—that is, our social ideas—made us, she thought, ...
— Freeland - A Social Anticipation • Theodor Hertzka
... had been dreaming evidently, gazing into the fire, and seeing therein, no doubt, a pretty, piquant face, with large brown eyes and a wealth of dark curls round ...
— The Scarlet Pimpernel • Baroness Orczy
... creature, yes," said the old fellow, kissing her affectionately, and quite overcome by her tenderness. He looked after her as she retreated, with a fondness which was rendered more piquant, as it were, by the mixture of a certain scorn which accompanied it. "Innocent!" he said; "I'd swear, till I was black in the face, he was innocent, rather than give that ...
— The History of Pendennis • William Makepeace Thackeray
... gardens with Jovita, every one who passed them gave her a second look; many turned to watch her; certainly there was not a man who did not glance over his shoulder at the bewitching girlish figure with the small round waist, at the piquant radiant face, at the well-carried little head with the red rose blooming in its cloud ...
— The Pretty Sister Of Jose - 1889 • Frances Hodgson Burnett
... ever has been by the intellectual supremacy of any "greatest man of his day" who might chance to have been his contemporary at Oxford or Cambridge. In Dr. Carrlyon's reminiscences and in the quoted letters of a certain young Parry, another of the English student colony at Gottingen, we get a piquant picture of the poet-philosopher of seven-and-twenty, with his yet buoyant belief in his future, his still unquenched interest in the world of things, and his never-to-be-quenched interest in the world of thought, his even then inexhaustible flow of disquisition, his generous admiration for ...
— English Men of Letters: Coleridge • H. D. Traill
... splendid pheasant stretched its brownish, shining limbs, and filled the whole room with the odor of the truffles with which it was stuffed. By its side shone, in crystal bottles, the most precious Rhine wine, looking like liquid gold, and a silent, still undisclosed pie gave a presentiment of a piquant enjoyment. ...
— LOUISA OF PRUSSIA AND HER TIMES • Louise Muhlbach
... comic, the merry upon the terrible, and at need calling in the charms of the opera, these performances, while presenting but one play, would be worth a multitude of others? The romantic stage would make a piquant, savoury, diversified dish of that which, on the classic stage, is a drug ...
— Prefaces and Prologues to Famous Books - with Introductions, Notes and Illustrations • Charles W. Eliot
... amuse the King. One had to captivate him by some piquant detail; without that, he would escape you, give you no time to speak. The success generally began by the first words, no matter how vague, of any conversation; these he found means to make interesting; and what, ...
— History of Friedrich II. of Prussia, Vol. XXI. (of XXI.) • Thomas Carlyle
... was one day mislaid, but—luckily for future generations of epicures—was afterward recovered. The book is a charming badinage, a bizarre ragout of gastronomic precepts and spicy anecdote, doubly piquant for its prevailing tone of mock ...
— Library Of The World's Best Literature, Ancient And Modern, Vol 6 • Various
... young and slender. Her face was piquant but not intellectual, and scarcely beautiful. It pleased rather by its life and motion and oddity than by its beauty. She looked at her companion in a peculiar way—trustfully, almost reverently—and yet with a touch of coquetry which seemed ...
— Other Main-Travelled Roads • Hamlin Garland
... a rare flower, as dainty as the rose, as piquant as the daisy. The unmistakable mark of the high bred glowed in her face, the fine traces of blue blood graced her every movement, her every tone and look. At the time that she, as well as every one ...
— The Daughter of Anderson Crow • George Barr McCutcheon
... griddle cakes, and maple syrup soon put the contending forces at their ease. Bazelhurst so far forgot himself as to laugh amiably at his host's jokes. The count responded in his most piquant dialect, and the duke swore by an ever-useful Lord Harry that he had ...
— Master Tales of Mystery, Volume 3 • Collected and Arranged by Francis J. Reynolds
... himself sitting in the library at Mrs. Staggchase's, with his hostess comfortably enthroned in a great chair of carved oak on the opposite side of the fire. The conversation had somehow turned upon marriage. There is always a certain fascination, a piquant if faint sense of being upon the borderland of the forbidden, which makes such a discussion attractive to a man and woman who are playing at making love when ...
— The Philistines • Arlo Bates |
