"Mask" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... mistake; but the maid persisting that she was certain of the name, all the women were desirous of having the bundle immediately opened; which operation was at length performed by little Betsy, with the consent of Mr Jones: and the contents were found to be a domino, a mask, and ...
— The History of Tom Jones, a foundling • Henry Fielding
... truly to those whose lot is 'In the sweat of thy brow shalt thou eat bread.' For us it is true. God feeds us. 'Thou givest meat to them that fear Thee, Thou wilt ever be mindful of Thy covenant.' In giving us our daily bread, His hand is hid under second causes, but these should not mask ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture - Ezekiel, Daniel, and the Minor Prophets. St Matthew Chapters I to VIII • Alexander Maclaren
... that fatuity common to his sex, that he had worn an impenetrable mask in regard to his wild passion for Evelyn, and did not dream that, all along, Celia had read him like an open book. She judged Philip quite accurately. It was herself that she did not know, and she would have repelled as nonsense the suggestion that her own restlessness and her own ...
— Baddeck and That Sort of Thing • Charles Dudley Warner
... is filled with doubt. A twofold mask has the prover of shields. The skilful tongue is put to shame. They doubt if they ...
— Grettir The Strong - Grettir's Saga • Unknown
... Philosophy. When therefore, people express a desire to "see a MAHATMA," they really do not seem to understand what it is they ask for. How can they, with their physical eyes, hope to see that which transcends that sight? Is it the body—a mere shell or mask—they crave or hunt after? And supposing they see the body of a MAHATMA, how can they know that behind that mask is concealed an exalted entity? By what standard are they to judge whether the Maya before them reflects the image of a true MAHATMA ...
— Five Years Of Theosophy • Various
... groans were pitiable to hear, the tall figure of a lieutenant of foot Chasseurs rose suddenly before us. He looked like a ghost, and for a moment we thought he was about to fall, an exhausted mass, at our feet. His face was covered with blood. The red mask in which the white of the eyes formed two brilliant spots was horrible to see. His torn tunic and all his clothing were saturated with blood. He was gesticulating wildly with the revolver he clutched in his hands, and ...
— In the Field (1914-1915) - The Impressions of an Officer of Light Cavalry • Marcel Dupont
... this—even though she might pretend ignorance of the fact. She had reckoned with it before she gave Steve her word. Perhaps it, too, had been a factor in stripping off the mask of commercial nun and showing him the Gorgeous-Girl propensities. Nothing would content him so much as to think of someone dependent upon him, make him shoulder responsibility, surround him in a halo of hero worship. ...
— The Gorgeous Girl • Nalbro Bartley
... and no soft curves anywhere in her slimness; only her black hair, growing low on the forehead, and her eyes were fine. Her profile, indeed, with the narrow forehead and the sensitive upper lip, might fairly have suggested the mask of Clytie which Richard had bought of an itinerant image-dealer, and fixed on a bracket over the mantel-shelf. But her eyes were her specialty, if one may say that. They were fringed with such heavy lashes that the girl seemed always ...
— The Stillwater Tragedy • Thomas Bailey Aldrich
... shown that he actually joined the mob of Stockdale's wits as hale-fellow-well-met—ever participated in this loyalty to their sovran virtues and superiorities. He was the god, not they; and although he hid his divinity under a mask and knew the value of silence in a court of fools, yet he could not fail to be conscious that small and unimportant as he was held to be among those Titans of imagination and song, yet it would be found upon trial that he alone ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Vol. XII, No. 28. July, 1873. • Various
... passed through a smiling land to a land wearing the mask of death; through harvest fields rich with great stacks snugly builded against the winter to the fields of a braver harvest; by jocund villages where there is no break in the ebb and flow of everyday life to villages and towns that despoiling ...
— America's War for Humanity • Thomas Herbert Russell
... and reiterated excuses, during which interval they pretended to be often upon the point of completing the business, they at last (being pressed, and measures being taken for delivering a letter to the viceroy) threw off the mask, and declared they neither had applied to the viceroy nor could they; for he was too great a man, they said, for them to approach on any occasion. And, not contented with having themselves thus grossly deceived the commodore, ...
— A General History and Collection of Voyages and Travels, Volume 11 • Robert Kerr
... liberty of admonishing Burns about his errors, is generally believed to have been William Simpson, the schoolmaster of Ochiltree: the verses seem about the measure of his capacity, and were attributed at the time to his hand. The natural poet took advantage of the mask in which the made poet concealed himself, and rained such a merciless storm upon him, as would have extinguished half the Tailors in Ayrshire, and made ...
— The Complete Works of Robert Burns: Containing his Poems, Songs, and Correspondence. • Robert Burns and Allan Cunningham
... in without a word, his face a mask of such empty hopelessness that I was moved by ...
— Tramping on Life - An Autobiographical Narrative • Harry Kemp
... there, thinking, some of her gay courage failed her. For the moment her mask was off, and in the merciless sunlight, she looked old and worn. Rose, looking at her with tender pity, marvelled at the ignorance of man, in asking a frail little old lady to open and make habitable, in less than a fortnight, a house of ...
— Old Rose and Silver • Myrtle Reed
... and counted out the gold pieces; brightly they glimmered in the moonshine, their lustre delighted my heart—ah! it did not foresee that this was to be its last joy. I put the money in my pocket, and then wished to get a good view of the generous stranger, but he had a mask before his face, through which two dark eyes ...
— The Oriental Story Book - A Collection of Tales • Wilhelm Hauff
... sufficient answer, that one main object of my attempt was to demonstrate the vagueness or insufficiency of the terms used in the metaphysical schools of France and Great Britain since the revolution, and that the errors which I propose to attack cannot subsist, except as they are concealed behind the mask of a ...
— Biographia Literaria • Samuel Taylor Coleridge
... and delusion in our Neighbour Land, in the policy of Satan hath vailed it self in many, under the mask of holinesse and is in the righteous and wise dispensation of God, armed with power, and attended with successe: Therefore all the Inhabitants of this land would labour for more knowledge, and more love of the truth, without which they may easily be deceived, audled into tentation, and would ...
— The Acts Of The General Assemblies of the Church of Scotland
... dishes and all after them, who now ran huddling out, lords, ladies, with their caps snatched up in haste, a splendid confusion, Timon pursuing them, still calling them what they were, "smooth smiling parasites, destroyers under the mask of courtesy, affable wolves, meek bears, fools of fortune, feast-friends, time-flies." They, crowding out to avoid him, left the house more willingly than they had entered it; some losing their gowns and ...
— Tales from Shakespeare • Charles Lamb and Mary Lamb
... prelude, he took a few seeds and began to coax the bird, until it, in point of fact, performed various tricks, on the stage, clasping in its beak a mask and a flag. ...
— Hung Lou Meng, Book II • Cao Xueqin
... dare to act alone and strike a decisive blow. But they counted wrongly. Gladstone's toleration in regard to foreign affairs was large-hearted, but it had its limits. He now declared in Parliament that Arabi had thrown off the mask and was evidently working to depose the Khedive and oust all Europeans from Egypt; England would intervene to prevent this—if possible with the authority of Europe, with the support of France, and the co-operation of ...
— The Development of the European Nations, 1870-1914 (5th ed.) • John Holland Rose
... give a kind of gnarled surface to the style, which is pleasant when you get familiar with it, but which repels the stranger, and to some people even remains permanently disagreeable. I think it was his continual irony which at last brought him to writing as if under a mask; whereas it would have been better to write out flowingly, musically, and lucidly. His mixture of satire and kindliness always reminds me of those lanes near Beyrout in which you ride with the prickly-pear bristling alongside of you, and yet can pluck the grapes which force themselves among ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. I, No. 1, Nov. 1857 • Various
... entire success. I therefore implicitly believed the tale in the lid of the trunk to be a true account of the sorrows of a lady of title, who had to flee the country, and who was pursued into foreign lands by enemies bent upon her ruin. Somebody had an interview with a 'minion' in a 'mask'; I went downstairs and looked up these words in Bailey's 'English Dictionary', but was left in darkness as to what they had to do with the lady of title. This ridiculous fragment filled me with delicious fears; I fancied that my Mother, ...
— Father and Son • Edmund Gosse
... him on the sleeve. "Meet me at ten o'clock at the turn of the lane behind the Corpus Domini. Wear a cloak and a mask, and leave this gentleman at home with a flask of Asti." He glanced ...
— The Valley of Decision • Edith Wharton
... by my brief but informing speech. He leaned upon his axe and gazed at me with shocked wonder. The face of the American Indian is said to be unrevealing—to be a stoic mask under which his emotions are ever hidden. For a second time this day I found tradition at fault. Pete's face was lively and eloquent under his shock of dead-black hair—dead black but for half a dozen gray or grayish strands, for ...
— Somewhere in Red Gap • Harry Leon Wilson
... title, "The Honeymoon." The bright binding, albeit soiled by the dusty road, and the fluttering of the leaves in the breeze had startled the horse and incidentally attracted the attention of his master. Across the somber mask of melancholy was traced in buoyant hand the name of the ...
— The Strollers • Frederic S. Isham
... whom his client oppresseth, and you shall win him just as easily. Let the question of gain put him in action, and the devil inside shall jump out, like an ape stirred up to malice. He affects, too, a vulgar frankness, which is often the mask of selfishness, as a man who helps himself first at table with a "ha! ha!" in a facetious manner, a jocose greediness, which is most actual, real ...
— Cromwell • Alfred B. Richards
... a laugh, "after all these years in which I flattered myself I had made such a good job of it, too. Truth to tell, no mask and domino ever afforded such perfect protection as the jingle of my jester's bells. I am apparently so given up to pomps and vanities that nobody gives me credit for a serious thought, and so takes no pains to conceal his own from me. It has long been ...
— An American Suffragette • Isaac N. Stevens
... Lady Anne,(801) intending to pull down the house and rebuild it. I returned a quarter before seven; and in the interim between my Gothic gate and Ashe's nursery, a gentleman and gentlewoman, in a one-horse chair and in the broad face of the sun, had been robbed by a single highwayman, sans mask. Ashe's mother and sister stood and saw it; but having no notion of a robbery at such an hour in the high-road and before their men had left work, concluded it was an acquaintance of the robber's. I suppose Lady Cecilia ...
— Letters of Horace Walpole, V4 • Horace Walpole
... Verplank's Point, on the east side of the Hudson, a short distance below Peekskill, upon which General Putnam retired to the heights in his rear. On the evening of the same day, a part of these troops re-embarked, and the fleet moved up the river to Peekskill Neck, in order to mask King's ferry, which was below them. The next morning, at break of day, the troops destined for the enterprise, landed on the west side of Stony Point, and commenced their march through the mountains, into the rear of forts Clinton and Montgomery.[92] ...
— The Life of George Washington, Vol. 2 (of 5) • John Marshall
... Mr. Dallas sat and considered, as if at a loss what to say; but whether it was that scepticism was at the root of his thoughts, or that he assumed it as a mask to conceal misgivings to which he did not like to confess, ...
— Wilson's Tales of the Borders and of Scotland, Vol. XXIII. • Various
... woman I have ever known. That, of course, is partly the reason of her power over me. I feel that if ever—if ever she should disclose herself to me, it would be the strangest revelation. Every woman wears a mask, except to one man; but Rhoda's—Miss Nunn's—is, I fancy, a far completer disguise than I ever tried ...
— The Odd Women • George Gissing
... in the face of the rock, but this was made in 1793 when the soil and the bones of the old canons of the Church of the Three Kings were required for saltpetre to make gunpowder for the armies of the Republic. Over the door is a mask carved in the stone and a little window; above the monolithic church, standing on the platform of rock, is the exquisite flamboyant spire, not communicating with the church beneath, also a ...
— Castles and Cave Dwellings of Europe • Sabine Baring-Gould
... of a name familiar down the length of the street had caused two or three other men to come forward and to look more closely into the horribly distorted mask of the ...
— The Old Man in the Corner • Baroness Orczy
... No mask lay over the green eyes now, no spark of fire glinted deep in them. They were clear and serene; they hid nothing; almost they were the eyes of a fresh, innocent child. Dr. Ku Sui, he of a hundred schemes, a score of plots, he of the magnificent capacity and untiring brain ...
— The Passing of Ku Sui • Anthony Gilmore
... can they want of me," thought Billy, but he soon found out for they dressed him up as a clown in a white suit with red spots on it and tied a mask on his face and a pointed clown's cap on his head. Then they led him to where the pony stood and made him walk up a step ladder, onto a little platform, strapped to the pony's back. From this he was made to walk up another step onto a similar platform on the zebra's back; ...
— Billy Whiskers - The Autobiography of a Goat • Frances Trego Montgomery
... my antagonist baring an arm which, despite the bejeweled hand, was to the full as big-muscled as my own. My glance went from his weapon, a rather heavy German blade, straight and slender-pointed, to his face. He was smiling as one who strives to make the outer man a mask to cover all emotion, and the plasters on his cheek drew the smile into a grimace that ...
— The Master of Appleby • Francis Lynde
... of human character are not in the order of nature, and, due allowance made for the numbing hand of time, the youthful Goethe remained essentially the same Goethe to the end. Behind the mask of impassivity which chilled the casually curious who sought him in his last years there was ever that etwas weibliches which Schiller noted in him in his middle age. In the critical moments of life he was in his maturity as in his youth subject to emotions ...
— The Youth of Goethe • Peter Hume Brown
... so long as the Poet made his Salaam to Mohammed at the beginning and end of his Song. Under such conditions Jelaluddin, Jami, Attar, and others sang; using Wine and Beauty indeed as Images to illustrate, not as a Mask to hide, the Divinity they were celebrating. Perhaps some Allegory less liable to mistake or abuse had been better among so inflammable a People: much more so when, as some think with Hafiz and Omar, the abstract is not only likened to, but ...
— Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam • Omar Khayyam
... of satire. He hates that hypocrisy which tries to conceal itself under a mask of morality. In the evolution of the plots of his novels, he invariably puts such characters in positions that tear away their mask. He displays almost savage pleasure in making them ridiculous. Perhaps the lack of spirituality of the age ...
— Halleck's New English Literature • Reuben P. Halleck
... courteously pressed upon her the salts and perfumes with which these gentlemen were ordinarily provided for their own use. She regained consciousness. In the excitement of the moment her travelling companions noticed that the highwayman's mask had fallen off, but they did not see ...
— The Companions of Jehu • Alexandre Dumas, pere
... appears strange indeed. But the caprice and wilfulness which marked his public playing are shown equally in his relations with people in everyday life. What may have been his true feelings is concealed—it is only the mask which is seen; and the mask was so constantly worn that it no doubt deceived many. Every now and again, however, we get a glimpse of his true nature in his intercourse with those who knew him best. Irritable to a degree, and occasionally outrageous as his conduct appears to have been, ...
— Story-Lives of Great Musicians • Francis Jameson Rowbotham
... and to stop short of any legal consequences, in order to profit of that panic and confusion for extorting compliances with his hideous pretensions. It perplexed me, therefore, that he did not appear to have pursued this manifestly his primary purpose, the other being merely a mask to conceal his true ends, and also (as he fancied) a means for effecting them. In this, however, I had soon occasion to find that I was deceived. He had, but without the knowledge of Agnes, taken such steps as were then open to him, for making overtures to her ...
— Narrative And Miscellaneous Papers • Thomas De Quincey
... all, I vants you to come down off that box,' sez Black Dan. 'Oh?' sez my feyther, cool as a coocumber. 'Ah!' sez Black Dan. 'Verefore an' v'y?' enkvires my feyther, but Black Dan only vagged 'is veppings in my feyther's face, an' grinned under 'is mask. 'I vants you, so, 'Andsome 'Arry—come down!' sez 'e. Now I've told you as my ...
— The Amateur Gentleman • Jeffery Farnol et al
... strayed almost unconsciously towards his revolver, then, with a gesture, half of horror, half of dismay, at the significance of his action, he twisted on his heel and strode to the door. He turned then, blocking the light with his figure, so that his face was just a black expressionless mask. ...
— The Lost Valley • J. M. Walsh
... traveling companion of Wade's, and the other a noted desperado and highwayman, still masked, as at the moment of the attack. Wade and his companion had probably sold their lives dearly, and against odds, for another mask was found on the ground, indicating that the attack was not single-handed, and as Wade's body had not yet been rifled, it was evident that the remaining highwayman had fled in haste. The hue and cry had been given by apparently ...
— Under the Redwoods • Bret Harte
... allotted time. The intention was to let him live to be one hundred and eighty years old, the same age as Isaac's at his death, but on account of Esau God brought his life to an abrupt close. For some time Esau had been pursuing his evil inclinations in secret. Finally he dropped his mask, and on the day of Abraham's death he was guilty of five crimes: he ravished a betrothed maiden, committed murder, doubted the resurrection of the dead, scorned the birthright, and denied God. Then the Lord said: "I promised Abraham ...
— The Legends of the Jews Volume 1 • Louis Ginzberg
... tones to his followers; an officer and two soldiers in Roman attire; the three Magi, in Oriental garb, a child, and "two comical figures—the paiata (the clown) and the mosul, or old man, the former in harlequin accoutrement, the latter with a mask on his face, a long beard, a hunch on his back, and dressed in a sheepskin with the wool on the outside. The plot of the play is quite simple. The officer brings the news that three strange men have been caught, going to Bethlehem to adore the new-born Messiah; Herod orders ...
— Christmas in Ritual and Tradition, Christian and Pagan • Clement A. Miles
... entered, and stared about them. It became apparent immediately that the house was but a mask or covering for the mouth of a natural cave or grotto, probably forty feet long, nine or ten high, and twelve or fifteen in width. The light streamed through the doorway, over an uneven floor, falling upon piles of grain and fodder, and earthenware and ...
— Ben-Hur: A Tale of the Christ • Lew Wallace
... in the twinkling of an eye. You are no longer the heart-broken father, begging for his boy; but you have flung aside some of the mask, and ...
— Frank Merriwell Down South • Burt L. Standish
... awful "oo" sound again! Litton was in an icy perspiration; but he was even more afraid for his beloved, precious sweetheart than for himself—and that was being about as much afraid as there is. Teed went on relentlessly, gloating like a satyric mask: ...
— In a Little Town • Rupert Hughes
... me thinks now a maske would do well. But I perceyve your drift, I smell your policy; you think a bold face hath no need of a black mask. Shall I tell you what you look like? A broyld herring or a tortur'de Image made of ...
— A Collection of Old English Plays, Vol. III • Various
... deeper than yours. I can't keep on the mask as you do. I'm crude and real, you are my appearance in ...
— Washington Square Plays - Volume XX, The Drama League Series of Plays • Various
... troublous days; nor Mr. McAdoo how to manage the railroads; nor Mr. Pershing all about war; nor any local worker how to lead the Red Cross work, any more than the lower schools have taught the boys who went into the trenches how to use the gas mask and how to go without food; how to shoulder arms and how to march. But the schools all along the line did help to give them ideals, did train them in team-play; did instil into them the principles of democracy and the love of country, so that when the need ...
— On the Firing Line in Education • Adoniram Judson Ladd
... resentment in the soul of every man, whether in Ireland or in England, who believes that national morality is more than a mere phrase, though even in this case the open cynicism might excite less disgust than cynicism veiling itself under the mask of benevolence. Happily, however, there is in the present instance no opposition between truth and justice. Home Rule is no doubt primarily a scheme for the government of Ireland, but it is also much more than this: it is a plan for revolutionising ...
— England's Case Against Home Rule • Albert Venn Dicey
... an oath; his apathy and mock dignity had fallen from him like a mask. His face was mottled, and his vicious little eyes flashed with fear and anger. Erhaupt crowded close behind him, crouching like a dog ...
— The King's Jackal • Richard Harding Davis
... one of the alterations made by AEschylus in tragedy, was the mask worn by his actors. These dramatic masks had no resemblance to ours, which only cover the face, but were a kind of case for the whole head, and which, besides the features, represented the beard, the hair, the ...
— The Ancient History of the Egyptians, Carthaginians, Assyrians, • Charles Rollin
... there to hurl themselves once more into that sort of madman's part imposed on all men by the madness of the human race. One sees the thought and the fear and the farewell that there is in their silence, their stillness, in the mask of tranquillity which unnaturally grips their faces. They are not the kind of hero one thinks of, but their sacrifice has greater worth than they who have not seen them will ever be ...
— Under Fire - The Story of a Squad • Henri Barbusse
... the count, "let us both lay aside the mask we have assumed. You no more deceive me with that false calmness than I impose upon you with my frivolous solicitude. You can understand, can you not, that to have acted as I have done, to have broken ...
— The Count of Monte Cristo • Alexandre Dumas, Pere
... official here; and Apollos is a great preacher there. And here am I, grinding away at the secularities yet. I think I'll "strike," and try and get more conspicuous work.' Or he might perhaps deceive himself, and say, 'more directly religious work,' like a great many of us that often mask a very carnal desire for prominence under a very saintly guise of desire to do spiritual service. Let us take care of that. This 'minister,' who was not a minister at all, in our sense of the word, ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture - Ephesians; Epistles of St. Peter and St. John • Alexander Maclaren
... every flat surface that could be covered—occasional tables, tops of grand pianos. If she did not put frills round piano legs, she placed tasselled poufs about the drawing-room that every short-sighted visitor fell over, and used large bows of slightly discoloured ribbon to mask unneeded brackets. In the reception rooms food-bestrewn parrot stands were left where they ought never to be seen; and there were gilt-wired parrot cages; baskets for the pugs lined with soiled shawls; absurd ornaments, ...
— Mrs. Warren's Daughter - A Story of the Woman's Movement • Sir Harry Johnston
... not there—so SELIM thought, And every thing seemed drear without thee; But, ah! thou wert, thou wert,—and brought Thy charm of song all fresh about thee, Mingling unnoticed with a band Of lutanists from many a land, And veiled by such a mask as shades The features of young Arab maids,[320]— A mask that leaves but one eye free, To do its best in witchery,— She roved with beating heart around And waited trembling for the minute When she might try if still the sound Of her loved lute had ...
— The Complete Poems of Sir Thomas Moore • Thomas Moore et al
... Muskat, at Buscheir, he found that their faces were covered with black masks, though the rest of the body might be clothed in a transparent sort of crape; to look at a naked face was very painful to the ladies themselves; even a mother never lifts the mask from the face of her daughter after the age of twelve; that is reserved for her lord and husband. "I observed that the ladies looked at me with a certain confusion, and after they had glanced into my face, lowered their eyes, ashamed. On making inquiries, I found that my uncovered face was indecent, ...
— Studies in the Psychology of Sex, Volume 1 (of 6) • Havelock Ellis
... dressings of the wound, around which a bluish circle of extravasated blood was gradually increasing in size. A deep sigh broke from her lips. She leaned against one of the columns of the bed, and gazed, through the holes in her mask, upon the harrowing spectacle before her. A hoarse harsh sigh passed like a death rattle through the comte's clenched teeth. The masked lady seized his left hand, which felt as scorching as burning coals. But at the very moment she placed her icy ...
— The Vicomte de Bragelonne - Or Ten Years Later being the completion of "The Three - Musketeers" And "Twenty Years After" • Alexandre Dumas
... upon her freedom and seeking to make a better world, will not permit the indecent and unclean forces of reaction to mask themselves forever behind the plea that it is necessary to keep her in ignorance to preserve her purity. In the birth-control movement, she has already begun to fight for her right to have, without legal interference, all knowledge ...
— Woman and the New Race • Margaret Sanger
... in her eyes as she said, "I will." She looked upon Pros. with the shy love of a girl who has loved but once. For a brief minute we saw the depth, the earnestness, the affection that in her seek so often the mask of frivolity, and I wouldn't be surprised if more than one tempest-tossed soul envied her peace, her love, ...
— The Bacillus of Beauty - A Romance of To-day • Harriet Stark
... over to Henry and Elizabeth while it shammed a dispute about the sacraments. No one cared really about transubstantiation any more than the earlier betrayers cared about consubstantiality; that dispute did but serve to mask the betrayal." ...
— Soul of a Bishop • H. G. Wells
... the present reign, imitated with success, for some time, the hypocrisy of his master; and, had his ambitious temper, impatient of attaining its object, allowed him to wear the mask for a longer period, he might have gained the imperial diadem; in the pursuit of which he was overtaken by that fate which he merited still more by his cruelties than his perfidy to Tiberius. This man was a native of Volsinium in Tuscany, and the son of a Roman knight. He had first insinuated ...
— The Lives Of The Twelve Caesars, Complete - To Which Are Added, His Lives Of The Grammarians, Rhetoricians, And Poets • C. Suetonius Tranquillus
... promised to spare Archie? What was to be the end of it? Over a maze of difficulties she glanced, and saw, at the end of every passage, the flinty countenance of Hermiston. And a kind of horror fell upon her at what she had done. She wore a tragic mask. "Erchie, the Lord peety you, dear, and peety me! I have buildit on this foundation" - laying her hand heavily on his shoulder - "and buildit hie, and pit my hairt in the buildin' of it. If the hale hypothec were to fa', I think, laddie, I would dee! Excuse a daft wife that ...
— Weir of Hermiston • Robert Louis Stevenson
... Macdonald's compositions, it is one of the most natural and earnest. His appeal to the hesitating chiefs of Sleat and Dunvegan, is a curious specimen of indignation, suppressed by prudence, and of contempt disguised under the mask of civility. ...
— The Modern Scottish Minstrel, Volume II. - The Songs of Scotland of the past half century • Various
... throw off the mask. It peeled off by degrees. He began by telling his wife, gravely enough, Sir Charles had met with a severe fall, and he had attended to him and taken ...
— A Terrible Temptation - A Story of To-Day • Charles Reade
... embraced Christianity, and the Christians were therefore not without influential supporters. Hideyoshi's first act was to secure his position. For this purpose he marched into Kiushiu at the head of a large force and was everywhere victorious. This done, he threw off the mask he had been wearing up to this time, and in 1587 took the first step in his new course of action by ordering the destruction of the Christian church at Kioto—which had been in existence for a period of eighteen years—and the expulsion of ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Volume 9 • Various
... with its hind paws on the elephant's head, its fore-feet on the front rail of the howdah, standing right over the mahout who crouched in terror on the neck. The savage, snarling, yellow-and-black mask was thrust almost into Wargrave's face, and from the open red mouth lined with fierce white fangs he could feel the hot breath on his cheek as he tugged frantically at the under-lever of his rifle to open ...
— The Jungle Girl • Gordon Casserly
... a maritime county in the W. of Ireland, in the province of Connaught; Lough Corrib (25 m. long) and Lough Mask (12 m. long), stretching N. and S., divide the county into East and West districts; the former is boggy, yet arable; the latter, including the picturesque district known as CONNEMARA, is wild and hilly, and chiefly consists of bleak morass and bogland; its rocky and indented coast ...
— The Nuttall Encyclopaedia - Being a Concise and Comprehensive Dictionary of General Knowledge • Edited by Rev. James Wood
... an ulterior purpose was suffered to appear. Burr was noted for the fascination of his manners, and his host and hostess were charmed with him. He was unusually well informed, eloquent in speech, familiar with all social arts, and could mask the deepest designs with the most artless affectation of simplicity. All the secrets of American political movements were familiar to him, and he conversed fluently of the prospects of war with Spain, the ease with which the Mexicans might ...
— Historic Tales, Vol. 1 (of 15) - The Romance of Reality • Charles Morris
... "My manners shall mask devilish craft until success is assured. There will be smiling, hypocritical acquiescence in Northfield plans, then prompt, decisive action upon ...
— Oswald Langdon - or, Pierre and Paul Lanier. A Romance of 1894-1898 • Carson Jay Lee
... of the dream that Rossetti has dealt. The principal personage in the picture is, of course, Dante himself. Of the poet's face, two old and accredited witnesses remain to us—the portrait of Giotto and the mask supposed to be copied from a similar one taken after death. Giotto's portrait represents Dante at the age of twenty-seven. The face has a feminine delicacy of outline, yet is full of manly beauty; strength and tenderness are seen blended in its ...
— Recollections of Dante Gabriel Rossetti - 1883 • T. Hall Caine
... de Bertigny steps out through the haze, and stands, a tragic little figure, on the platform by the piano. Her hair and eyes are ebon black; her face, thin lipped and pale, is like a mask of ivory. There is no life whatever in it. She stands there like a tragedy in miniature, her hands behind her back, unseeing, motionless. Then, to a low, monotonously modulated melody, she sings a song of utter misery and passion, and, as she sings, ...
— Frank Reynolds, R.I. • A.E. Johnson
... cultivate orchids, until it blooms and luxuriates in the strangest and gaudiest shapes. Your real face is known of no other abstraction; indeed, you never see it yourself, so well-fitted and so constant is the mask through which you waft the endearments which have caused you to be avoided everywhere. This, I admit, is imagination; but is it very far from the truth? Perhaps I ask in vain, for truth is the very ...
— Punch, or The London Charivari, Volume 101, October 31, 1891 • Various
... strange what a torment it is to the world that the godly are in it! Piety is an eyesore to many, if they could extirpate all that bears that image, they would think it sweet as bread, Psal. xiv. This is a more open and declared enmity against the God of heaven, and yet I know it lurks under the mask of some other thing. You pretend to hate hypocrisy only, alas! what a scorn is it for profanity to hate hypocrisy? Sure it is not because it is a sin but for the very shadow of piety it carries. You hate the thing itself ...
— The Works of the Rev. Hugh Binning • Hugh Binning
... with such a look in her gentle, filmy old eyes as had never been there before. She did not move, except to rock slightly, and the Thought grew and grew till her face was disguised as by some hideous mask of tragedy. ...
— The Shape of Fear • Elia W. Peattie
... like a shock to either of them in the directness of their words. They seemed spoken rightly at the inevitable time. No thought of question, of denial, was entertained by them. Maurice sat there by her and dropped his mask utterly. ...
— Tongues of Conscience • Robert Smythe Hichens
... centuries. Men taking women's parts seem to have worn masks, but that can hardly have improved matters. Flute, when he complains that it would hardly befit him to play a woman's part because he had a beard coming, is bidden by his resourceful manager, Quince, play Thisbe in a "mask." At times actors who had long lost the roses of youth masqueraded in women's roles. Thereby the ungainliness, which marked the distribution of the cast in Elizabethan and Jacobean playhouses, was often forced into ...
— Shakespeare and the Modern Stage - with Other Essays • Sir Sidney Lee
... with regular features and an expression which showed a high degree of intelligence. Her clear grey eyes seemed to penetrate and tear the mask off you. It was not only her features and eyes that showed intelligence, but her gown showed that without sacrificing neatness she had deliberately toned down the existing fashions which so admirably fitted in with her figure in order that she might not appear noticeable. It was clever, for ...
— The Ear in the Wall • Arthur B. Reeve
... girdle and cut her throat. He threw the body down where all could see it, and ran along the adjoining terraces till he cleared the village. A little way up the mesa was a large flat rock, upon which he sprang and took off his dancer's mask so that all might recognize him; then turning again to the mesa he sped swiftly up the ...
— A Study of Pueblo Architecture: Tusayan and Cibola • Victor Mindeleff and Cosmos Mindeleff
... and soul of the masquerade, and she pushed its claims to the disadvantage of the exhibition. Some of the young ladies who thought that art should have the first place, went about saying that she was for the dance because she could waltz and mask better than she could draw, and would rather exhibit herself than her work, but it was a shame that she should make Miss Saunders work for her the way she did, because Miss Saunders, though she was so overrated, was really learning something, thanks to the Synthesis atmosphere; and Charmian Maybough ...
— The Coast of Bohemia • William Dean Howells
... Carfax sat silent behind the tea-table and endured the encounter with a mask-like patience that betrayed no faintest hint of what ...
— The Knave of Diamonds • Ethel May Dell
... prevalent habit among the colored people of taking patented cure-all nostrums, which contain narcotics that insidiously benumb the sensibilities and mask the symptoms of disease, would naturally contribute to ...
— Twentieth Century Negro Literature - Or, A Cyclopedia of Thought on the Vital Topics Relating - to the American Negro • Various
... sipped her liqueur appreciatively, smiling good-humouredly, and Philip could not help regarding her with a certain admiration. Her small, sharp, subtile face, beneath its mask of smiling indifference, looked positively youthful in the judicious candle-light; only the little, bird-like, withered hands bore the stigmata of age. And he could not conceive her changing; to ...
— A Comedy of Masks - A Novel • Ernest Dowson and Arthur Moore
... bringing back the clime, the sky, the loneliness, the mingled feeling of grandeur and situation—the gentle melancholy with which the eternal city impresses even the least imaginative mind? To us they appear to embody more of the poetry of travel than many a work which figures under the mask of poesy. ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 59, No. 364, February 1846 • Various
... descried an uncommonly tall figure, bearing in his arms a young and living leopard. I could not detect a single lineament of his face or figure, for he was covered from head to foot in a complete dress of monkey skins, while his face was hidden by a grotesque white mask. Behind him groped a ...
— Captain Canot - or, Twenty Years of an African Slaver • Brantz Mayer
... But she has!" And on that, seeing the change in the other's face—for, for once, the scholar's mask slipped and suffered his consternation to appear—Blondel laughed triumphantly: in torture himself, he revelled in a disaster that touched another. "She has! ...
— The Long Night • Stanley Weyman
... stiffened into a cold, calm mask, but behind his gray eyes lay anything but calmness. Ku Sui's easy assumption that the information as to Eliot Leithgow's whereabouts would be forthcoming from his lips, puzzled him, brought real anxiety. Torture would probably not be able to force his tongue ...
— The Affair of the Brains • Anthony Gilmore
... waistcoat, richly embroidered, partly concealed a blouse of silk and wholly revealed a silken scarf round his neck. His swarthy face showed dark lines, like cords, under the surface. His little eyes were exceedingly prominent and glittering. To Madeline his face seemed to be a bold, handsome mask through which his eyes piercingly betrayed the ...
— The Light of Western Stars • Zane Grey
... lying eyes, the insincerity Of pressures of the hand, The mask of friendship that ...
— Musicians of To-Day • Romain Rolland
... have broken the news with the pious platitudes that everything is for the best, with the whitewashed lies that every damnable tragedy is a blessing in disguise, that every devil-dance of fool circumstance is beneficent design, that disease is really health in a mask and sin a joke, a misnomer, that crime is really a trump card up Deity's sleeve to play down some wonderful trick of good; but—was it the Indian strain in her blood back many generations? She could not mouthe the hollow mockery of such sophistries ...
— The Freebooters of the Wilderness • Agnes C. Laut
... acting as she had. She was so sorry for them all that she had really tried to like them all. She had succeeded but once—and even that was a mistake. But she remembered one thing: through it all—far back as it all was—she had never trifled with Crittenden. Before him she had dropped foil and mask and stood frankly face to face always. There was something in him that had always forced that. And he had loved her through it all, and he had suffered—how much, it had really never occurred to her until she thought of a sudden that he ...
— Crittenden - A Kentucky Story of Love and War • John Fox, Jr.
... believed in 'eternal punishment' no doubt people were sometimes terrified into 'goodness' by the picture of that dread vista of torment, as no doubt they were bribed into it by the companion picture of a green unbounded Paradise; but, O my friend, what an unworthy kind of goodness, the mere mask of virtue! And now that the Inferno has practically disappeared from our theology, the belief in eternal life simply means unlimited cakes and ale, for good and evil alike, for all eternity. How such a belief can be moralising I fail to understand. To my mind, indeed, far from being moralising, ...
— Prose Fancies (Second Series) • Richard Le Gallienne
... on," the chauffeur responded calmly through his mask. "But I am not taking you any farther, Major Brandon. So tumble out at once, you ...
— The Safety Curtain, and Other Stories • Ethel M. Dell
... course, to sustain what is here alleged by quoting speeches from his plays, since Ibsen is too completely a dramatist to use any one character merely as a mask thru the mouth of which he might voice his private opinion. But when we consider the whole group of the social dramas and when we disengage the philosophy underlying them and sustaining them, we may venture to deduce the private opinion of the author. And in his letters to Georg Brandes we find ...
— Inquiries and Opinions • Brander Matthews
... every outline, a slender young man, barefoot, bare-legged, kilted with the scantiest form of gladiator's body-piece and apron, clad in a green tunic and carrying only the small round shield and short sabre of a Thracian. He wore a helmet like a skull cap with a broad nose-guard that amounted to a mask, above which were small openings for ...
— The Unwilling Vestal • Edward Lucas White
... however, he set about building an entrenched fortress, in the labours connected with which he took his full share of work with the men. While the building was in progress the natives, despite the friendly chiefs, threw off the mask of good-will, which had doubtless been put on for the purpose of getting the white men into their power. Strong in overwhelming numbers, they made frequent attacks on the mutineers, which these latter, being strong in arms, successfully repelled. It soon became evident that warfare, not ...
— The Lonely Island - The Refuge of the Mutineers • R.M. Ballantyne
... despite his religious calling, the destruction of Turks was rewarded as a distinguished national service. Such, however, is no longer the case; although their hatred is not one whit diminished, or their depredations less frequent than of old, they mask them under the garb of a feigned neutrality and an unreal friendship. Thus they protest, in the face of the most damning proofs to the contrary, their innocence of all connivance with the Herzegovinian rebels. Corpses of those who have ...
— Herzegovina - Or, Omer Pacha and the Christian Rebels • George Arbuthnot
... done—the curtain drops, Slow-falling to the prompter's bell: A moment yet the actor stops, And looks around, to say farewell. It is an irksome word and task; And, when he's laughed and said his say, He shows, as he removes his mask, A ...
— Christmas - Its Origin, Celebration and Significance as Related in Prose and Verse • Various
... my request; and from that period till the death of the king I heard no more of this singular personage. CHAPTER XXI Extraordinary anecdote of Louis XIV and madame de Maintenon— The comtesse du Barry at Chantilly—Opinion of king and comte de la Marche respecting the "Iron Mask"—Madame du Barry visits madame de Lagarde My acquaintance with the singular being I was speaking of in the last chapter did not end here, as you will find in the sequel. I will now give you an account of an equally strange affair, ...
— "Written by Herself" • Baron Etienne Leon Lamothe-Langon
... stuff with Mr. Davitt, the day of a great Democratic revolution, not in Ireland only, but in Great Britain, might be a good deal nearer than anything in the signs of the times now shows it to be. Mr. Parnell and the National League are really nothing but the mask of Mr. Davitt and the Land League. Mr. Forster knew what he was about when he proclaimed the Land League in October 1881, six months or more after he had arrested and locked up Mr. Davitt in Portland prison. This was shown by the foolish No-Rent manifesto which Mr. Parnell and his associates ...
— Ireland Under Coercion (2nd ed.) (1 of 2) (1888) • William Henry Hurlbert
... find in Horace. Sometimes, it is only fair to say, his hymns are beautiful and simple ... but they follow generally and too servilely the pagan models ... but they are the work of strong and clear inspiration, which under the mask of classic diction shows itself in every part." (Inst. Liturg. t. I., p. 370.) During the reign of Pope Paul III. new hymnals were issued, but the Breviary hymns were not removed. St. Pius V. in his reform of the Breviary did not touch the Breviary ...
— The Divine Office • Rev. E. J. Quigley
... with clouds do mask her eyes And make the heavens dark with her disdain, With windy sighs disperse them in the skies Or with thy tears dissolve them into rain. Thoughts, Hopes, and Love, return to me no more Till Cynthia shine as she ...
— Lyrics from the Song-Books of the Elizabethan Age • Various
... leisurely style in which a pinch of snuff should be taken, so as not to endanger a lace cravat or a canary-coloured vest; where you may seat yourself on a bench by Rosamond's Pond in company with a tremulous mask who is evidently expecting the arrival of a "pretty fellow"; or happen suddenly, in a secluded side-walk, upon a damsel in muslin and a dark hat, who is hurriedly scrawling a poulet, not without obvious signs of ...
— De Libris: Prose and Verse • Austin Dobson
... Coachmen took care to meet, jostle, and threaten each other for Way, and be entangled at the End of Newport-Street and Long-Acre. The Fright, you must believe, brought down the Lady's Coach Door, and obliged her, with her Mask off, to enquire into the Bustle, when she sees the Man she would avoid. The Tackle of the Coach-Window is so bad she cannot draw it up again, and she drives on sometimes wholly discovered, and sometimes half escaped, according to the Accident of Carriages in her Way. One of these Ladies keeps ...
— The Spectator, Volumes 1, 2 and 3 - With Translations and Index for the Series • Joseph Addison and Richard Steele
... gondolier, was in attendance at the vestibule of the palace, feasting his avaricious eyes on the glimpses of wealth and luxury he noted within doors, when a gentleman in rich costume, and wearing a mask, beckoned him to one side, ...
— The Three Brides, Love in a Cottage, and Other Tales • Francis A. Durivage
... Carrington is preserved, and there are several places—Newcastle-under-Lyne (now in the Mayer Collection), Manchester, and others—where they have existed. There is a very grotesque one in Doddington Park, which is a mask, having eyeholes, and a long funnel-shaped peak projecting from the mouth; and there are some very terribly cruel ones, with fearful gags; but these can scarcely come under scold's or gossip's bridles. There was one at Forfar, with a spiked gag, which pierced the tongue, ...
— Gossip in the First Decade of Victoria's Reign • John Ashton
... understand?" she said. "The girl who sang to you now and then isn't me. I am selfish, discontented, and shallow, and if you hadn't heard me sing or play you would never have thought of me. There are people who sing divinely, and are—you see, I have met them with the mask off—just horrible." ...
— The Cattle-Baron's Daughter • Harold Bindloss
... to conceal under an impenetrable mask the tumultuous feeling resulting from his now satisfied vengeance. He, as well as his two companions, ...
— Wood Rangers - The Trappers of Sonora • Mayne Reid
... chronicle. It has given rise to two most incompatible-sounding criticisms. Some have been chiefly struck by its amazing unreserve, and denounced the over-frankness of the author in revealing herself to the public. Others complain that she keeps on a mask throughout, and never allows us to see into the recesses of her mind. Her passion for the analysis of sentiment has doubtless led her here, as in her romances, to give very free expression to truths usually better left unspoken. But her silence ...
— Famous Women: George Sand • Bertha Thomas
... should know the character of your father, to prevent your despising your mother; the only parent inclined to discharge a parent's duty. In London, George had acquired habits of libertinism, which he carefully concealed from his father and his commercial connections. The mask he wore, was so complete a covering of his real visage, that the praise his father lavished on his conduct, and, poor mistaken man! on his principles, contrasted with his brother's, rendered the notice he took ...
— Posthumous Works - of the Author of A Vindication of the Rights of Woman • Mary Wollstonecraft
... if, in despotic statecraft, the supreme and essential mystery be to hoodwink the subjects, and to mask the fear, which keeps them clown, with the specious garb of religion, so that men may fight as bravely for slavery as for safety, and count it not shame but highest honour to risk their blood and their lives for the vainglory of a tyrant; ...
— A Theologico-Political Treatise [Part I] • Benedict de Spinoza
... education, while we feed their minds with tedium and trifles, while we allow them to busy themselves only with playthings and fashions and adornments, while we seek to inspire them only with the taste for frivolous accomplishments, do we not show our real contempt, while we mask it with a show of deference ...
— Shelley, Godwin and Their Circle • H. N. Brailsford
... Carthage thought that the end had been reached, she was destined to be rudely awakened from her dream. The consuls, thinking the city now to be wholly helpless, dropped the mask they had worn, and made known the ...
— Historic Tales, Volume 11 (of 15) - The Romance of Reality • Charles Morris
... over it, instead of hiding it in grief and shame, or veiling it in the love which covereth a multitude of sins; if, in seeing a joy or a grace or an effective service given to others, we do not rejoice, but feel depressed, let us be very watchful; the most diabolical of passions may mask itself as humility, or zeal for the ...
— Daily Strength for Daily Needs • Mary W. Tileston
... them, was one of self-preservation. He boldly asserted that the men of New Plymouth would never either pardon or forget the destruction of their countrymen of Wessagussett, but would immediately lay aside the mask of kindness and forbearance with which they had hitherto concealed their undoubted project of acquiring the dominion of the whole country, and gradually destroying the red men; and would call forth all their supernatural powers, and blast ...
— The Pilgrims of New England - A Tale Of The Early American Settlers • Mrs. J. B. Webb
... lost all its cheerfulness in a second and became a mask. He was a Madrassee and black as coal. To Thresk it seemed that the man had suddenly withdrawn himself altogether and left merely an image with living eyes. He shrugged his shoulders. He knew that change in his servant. It came at the first note of reproach in his ...
— Witness For The Defense • A.E.W. Mason
... acquired a society manner," she announced proudly. "I conceal my real emotions under a mask ...
— Betty Wales Senior • Margaret Warde
... information I could collect, the messages being conveyed in a cryptograph in which the form of the letter was to be that of a correspondence between lovers. The words composing the message were to be written on spaces left in a mask of which each had a copy, and the spaces between the words then filled up so that the letter would carry some meaning when read as a whole. Love-letters were supposed to give most room for nonsense. Knowing very little French, ...
— The Autobiography of a Journalist, Volume I • Stillman, William James
... enormous lumps and masses rounded by degradation; all chasms and naked columns, with here and there a sheet burnished by ancient cataracts, and a slide trickling with water, unseen in the shade and flashing in the sun like a sheet of crystal. The granite, however, is a mere mask or excrescence, being everywhere based upon and backed by the green and red plutonic traps which have enveloped it. And the prism has no easy inland slopes, as a first glance suggests; instead of being the sea-wall of a great plateau, it falls ...
— The Land of Midian, Vol. 2 • Richard Burton
... itself, and she wears a long black gown, Paris unmistakably, and"—Kitty threw great emphasis on this "and," and paused a moment for dramatic effect—"she wears a mantilla about her head, and a little black mask, with fringe falling from it so that even her mouth is concealed. It gives you the queerest creepy feeling when ...
— The Silver Butterfly • Mrs. Wilson Woodrow
... herself as him; he lacked the conceit which could have convinced him that they merely marked a secret struggle for mastery, a desperate effort to crush an inclination to surrender before the temptation of the moment. It was a battle for deliverance being fought silently behind a mask of smiles, an exchange of sparkling commonplace; yet ever beneath this surface play she was breathing a fervent prayer that he would go away of his own volition and leave her free. Far more clearly ...
— Beth Norvell - A Romance of the West • Randall Parrish
... to play tricks,—most of them directed against Hugh and Tom Holt. One boy, Warner, began to make the face that always made Holt laugh, however he tried to be grave. Page drew a caricature of Mrs Watson on his slate, and held it up; and Davison took a mask out of his desk, and even ventured to tie it on, as if it ...
— The Crofton Boys • Harriet Martineau
... and did nothing but what he judged necessary for his own welfare. Their misery was even grotesque. Faces, discolored by cold, were covered with a layer of mud, on which tears had made a furrow from the eyes to the beard, showing the thickness of that miry mask. The filth of their long beards made these men still more repulsive. Some were wrapped in the countess's shawls, others wore the trappings of horses and muddy saddlecloths, or masses of rags from which the hoar-frost hung; some had a boot on one leg and a shoe on ...
— Adieu • Honore de Balzac
... overshadow everything in reach—chronic dyspepsia ought to be among the "statutory causes"; a woman's life might be ruined by a man's inability to digest fresh bread. Grotesque? Yes—and tragic—like most absurdities. There's nothing grimmer than the tragedy that wears a comic mask.... Where was he? Oh—the reason they chucked Sicily and rushed back? Well—partly, no doubt, Miss Bart's desire to get back to bridge and smartness. Dead as a stone to art and poetry—the light never WAS on sea or land for her! And of course she persuaded Dorset ...
— House of Mirth • Edith Wharton
... Newport, days passed with only hurried thoughts of Lucy. Chance mention of her name gave me no uneasiness; they affected my heart, like sudden trumpets, but I knew that my face had become an inscrutable mask, and that my voice was in perfect control. Those who had thought that there was something between us began ...
— We Three • Gouverneur Morris
... looking back at the bowed figure, which, upon her departure, had resumed the perplexed frown as though it had been a mask. Then she walked briskly down ...
— Bog-Myrtle and Peat - Tales Chiefly Of Galloway Gathered From The Years 1889 To 1895 • S.R. Crockett
... for Europe day after to-morrow; shall, perhaps, go directly to Heidelberg. Have you any commissions? any messages?" Under the mask of seeming indifference, she watched Beulah intently as, shrinking from the cold, ...
— Beulah • Augusta J. Evans
... is not all beauty and pleasure. Things go wrong somehow. Life drops her happy mask. But this has nothing to ...
— Adventures among Books • Andrew Lang
... His affectation of a lazy, trifling, indifferent manner, his often-quoted remonstrance to impetuous would-be reformers, "Can't you let it alone?" had earned for him some angry disapproval, and caused him to be regarded as the embodiment of the detested laissez-faire principle. But under his mask of nonchalance he hid some noble qualities, which at this juncture served Queen ...
— Great Britain and Her Queen • Anne E. Keeling
... balanced himself on the raft while the Swede poled slowly toward the rock that now arose from the water the size of a small house, he was thankful that the face can be made at times to serve as so good a mask. Not for the world would he have had John Johnson guess how afraid he was, how actually scared to death when the raft bumped against the huge brown rock and he knew that he must look ...
— The Man from the Bitter Roots • Caroline Lockhart
... arts and by the arts of those dead men of Kor which I have learned, have held thee back, oh Kallikrates, from the dust, that the waxen stamp of beauty on thy face should ever rest before mine eye. 'Twas a mask that memory might fill, serving to fashion out thy presence from the past, and give it strength to wander in the habitations of my thought, clad in a mummery of life that stayed my appetite with visions of ...
— She • H. Rider Haggard
... be thus distinguished—but Leander was far too much alarmed to appreciate it. There had been suggestions of menace in the statue's remarks which made him shudder when he recalled them, and he started violently once or twice when some wavering of the light gave a play of life to the marble mask. "She's coming back!" he thought. "Oh, I do wish she wouldn't!" But Aphrodite continued immovable, and at last he concluded that, as he put it, she "had ...
— The Tinted Venus - A Farcical Romance • F. Anstey
... though she were listening for some expected sound. And as he continued to gaze at her, a wonder that was almost horror crept into his mind. For her face was not like that of an image, but rather resembled a mask, or the face of a very beautiful woman, that very moment dead. For the colour seemed as it were to have only just faded from her cheek, and the blood seemed only just before to have left her pallid lips, and the sight was as it were hanging yet in her great long open eyes, ...
— An Essence Of The Dusk, 5th Edition • F. W. Bain
... expectation of reducing it; and when he perceived that the Andalusian princes refused to join him, he eagerly left that city, and proceeded to secure far dearer and easier interests: he openly threw off the mask, and commenced his ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Volume 5 • Various
... nearer; and, by the light of a flaming bull's-eye cast upon the coach, it could be seen to come from a stout, medium-sized man with a black mask, which, however, showed half of a smooth, beardless face, and an affable yet satirical mouth. The speaker cleared his throat with the slight preparatory cough of the practiced orator, and, approaching the window, to Key's intense surprise, actually began in the identical ...
— In a Hollow of the Hills • Bret Harte
... strangeness of the reality surpassed every flight of fancy. And, moreover, the baron's calmness increased her stupor. She so often had heard him give vent to his rage and despair in terrible threats, that she could not believe he would be thus resigned. But was his calmness real? Was it not a mask, would not his fury suddenly ...
— Baron Trigault's Vengeance - Volume 2 (of 2) • Emile Gaboriau
... that afternoon he reflected. Tinkletown, seeing his mood, refrained from breaking in upon it. He was allowed to stroke his whiskers in peace and to think to his heart's content. By nightfall his face had become an inscrutable mask, and then it was known that the President of Bramble County's Horse-Thief Detective Association was determined to fathom the great problem. Stealthily he went up to the great attic in his home and inspected his "disguises." ...
— The Daughter of Anderson Crow • George Barr McCutcheon
... unattractive uniform was addressing a crowd of coolies in their own tongue. Kan Wong attached himself to the outer edge of the impassively curious throng, his ears alert, his features, as ever, an imperturbable mask. The foreign officer, for such he seemed to be, was making an offer to the assemblage for contract labour: one dollar a day, with rice, fish, and tea rations, for work in a foreign land. Kan Wong translated the money quickly into yens. The sum seemed incredible to him. What service would ...
— O Henry Memorial Award Prize Stories of 1919 • Various
... side. Or the old Carnival, which had six months of every year to riot in, comes back and throngs the place with motley company,—dominoes, harlequins, pantaloni, illustrissimi and illustrissime, and perhaps even the Doge himself, who has the right of incognito when he wears a little mask of wax at his button-hole. Or may be the grander day revisits Venice when Doria has sent word from his fleet of Genoese at Chioggia that he will listen to the Senate when he has bridled the horses of Saint Mark,—and the whole Republic of rich and poor crowds the ...
— Venetian Life • W. D. Howells
... strangers by measuring them according to our own notions of propriety. It has certainly long been a practice in courts to disfigure the beauty of the human countenance with paint; but what, in itself, may have been originally assumed for a mask or disguise, may, by usage, have grown into a very harmless custom. I am not, therefore, disposed to attach any criminal importance to the circumstance of her majesty wearing paint. Her late majesty did so herself." "I do not say it was criminal," ...
— The Ayrshire Legatees • John Galt
... never weary of the treasures attached to her watch-chain. I could not recount to you the gems clustered there,—such as a fairy tiny gold palette, with all the colors arranged; a tiny easel with a colored landscape, quarter of an inch wide; a tragic and comic mask, just big enough for a gnome; a cross of the Legion of Honor; a wallet, opening with a spring, and disclosing compartments just of a size for the Keeper of the Privy Purse of the Fairy Queen; a dagger for a pygmy; two minute ...
— Memories of Hawthorne • Rose Hawthorne Lathrop
... Henry had been advised to deprive himself of hot buttered toast. And here came Tom, with his characteristic inconvenience, to catch them in the very midst of their folly, and to make even Mr. Knight, that mask of stern rectitude, a ...
— A Great Man - A Frolic • Arnold Bennett
... remarked of old, to divert attention from scoundrelism as to make a brilliant show of patriotism. In the very act of looting Government and people and devastating the army and navy, the capitalists did the most ghastly business under the mask of the purest patriotism. Incredible as it may seem, this pretension was invoked and has been successfully maintained to this very day. You can scarcely pick up a volume on the Civil War, or a biography of the statesmen or rich men of the ...
— Great Fortunes from Railroads • Gustavus Myers |
