"Tentative" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... ratified in 1903 the final stage in the conversion of both countries to Parnell's policy of State-aided land purchase. Tentative beginnings were made with it under the Government which was in power from 1886 to 1892; but the main characteristic of this period was a fierce revival of the land war. It was virulent in Wexford, and in 1888 Redmond shared the experience which ...
— John Redmond's Last Years • Stephen Gwynn
... reincarnation of spirits, if one could believe it, would seem to me both to equalise the inequalities of human experience, and give one a lively belief in the virtue and worth of human endeavour. But all this is set down, as I say, in a tentative and not in ...
— The Child of the Dawn • Arthur Christopher Benson
... out his papers in the prospect of an evening of uninterrupted work. He was surprised, however, after a little interval, by the sound of uncertain and shuffling steps on the half-lighted passage outside, the noise of some heavy article set down on the floor, and then a tentative knock at his door. A little impatiently he called, ...
— Trent's Trust and Other Stories • Bret Harte
... sighed and turned to toil anew, The Seraph hailed them with observance due; And after some fit talk of higher things Touched tentative on mundane happenings. This they permitting, he, emboldened thus, Prolused of humankind promiscuous. And, since the large contention less avails Than instances observed, he told them tales—Tales of the shop, the bed, the court, the street, Intimate, elemental, indiscreet: Occasions where ...
— A Diversity of Creatures • Rudyard Kipling
... development of fundamental chord harmonies was inevitable and from them in the fullness of time was bound to spring the pure harmonic style. Chord successions without any melodic union cannot be long sustained, and the Italians, with the tentative achievements of the frottolists before them, were not long blind to this fact. Leone Battista Alberti, father of Renaissance architecture, in writing of his church of St. Francis at Rimini uses the expression ...
— Some Forerunners of Italian Opera • William James Henderson
... what becomes of human individuality, or how are human initiative and responsibility so much as thinkable? Benjamin Jowett, in his Essay on Predestination and Freewill, glanced at this problem in passing, and the remarks he made upon it more than fifty years ago, if somewhat tentative, ...
— Problems of Immanence - Studies Critical and Constructive • J. Warschauer
... wrong way with a tentative woolly-gloved finger. "Plitty, high hat," she cooed. "Can plitty little Fay have ...
— Jan and Her Job • L. Allen Harker
... this attitude was tentative. Everything depended on how well Thorpe lived up to his reputation at the outset,—how good a first impression of force and virility he would manage to convey,—for the first impression possessed the power of transmuting the present rather ill-defined ...
— The Blazed Trail • Stewart Edward White
... was not even sure of a vocation. An accident determined it. He became a workman in the atelier of Carrier-Belleuse, the sculptor, but not until he had failed at the Beaux-Arts (which was a stroke of luck for his genius) and after he had enjoyed some tentative instruction under the great animal sculptor, Barye. He was never a steady pupil of Barye, nor did he long remain with him. He went to Belgium and "ghosted" for other sculptors; indeed, it was a privilege, or misfortune, to have been the "ghost"—anonymous assistant—for half a dozen sculptors. ...
— Promenades of an Impressionist • James Huneker
... in your entry? I believe we've got it here, somewhere." He began to fumble industriously through a pile of papers and Denver caught his breath. For a moment he had seen his dreams brought to nothing, his last chance at the prize-money gone; but at this tentative suggestion on the part of the chairman he suddenly took heart of grace. They wanted him to compete, it had been advertised in all the papers, and they were willing to meet him half-way. But Denver was no ...
— Silver and Gold - A Story of Luck and Love in a Western Mining Camp • Dane Coolidge
... nor this nor that of those beings divine, But each and the whole—an essence of all the Nine; With tentative foot she neared to my halting-place, A pensive smile on ...
— Poems of the Past and the Present • Thomas Hardy
... preparation for all teachers in the high school and that along the four lines suggested. But the movement has gone much farther than suggested by my statement. The results are found in something more authoritative and more permanent than tentative agreement among educational leaders, or even among educational institutions. The law-making bodies of the land have taken a part, and by legal enactment have required about what I have suggested. The State of North Dakota, for example, requires professional equipment of every ...
— On the Firing Line in Education • Adoniram Judson Ladd
... filled the window-bench; four men, including Charley Jake, the hedge-carpenter, Elijah New, the parish clerk, and John Pitcher, a neighbouring dairyman, the shepherd's father-in-law, lolled in the settle; a young man and maid, who were blushing over tentative pourparlers on a life-companionship, sat beneath the corner cupboard; and an elderly engaged man of fifty or upward moved restlessly about from spots where his betrothed was not to the spot where she was. Enjoyment was pretty general, and ...
— Stories by English Authors: England • Various
... to be the lighter. I guessed that it was now time for me to expect to hear the birth-cry of my Creature, or at least to detect some thrill of life. Lifting a corner of the mufflings, I insinuated a tentative finger. ...
— When Grandmamma Was New - The Story of a Virginia Childhood • Marion Harland
... a foggy finger, Moving to set the minutes right With tentative touches that lift and linger In the wont of a moth on a summer night, ...
— Moments of Vision • Thomas Hardy
... She made tentative efforts at remonstrating with him. Her father, whom she saw now and then, said that Edward was much too generous to his tenants; the wives of his brother officers remonstrated with her in private; ...
— The Good Soldier • Ford Madox Ford
... indeed, a tentative character, and lacks symmetrical completeness, but is the more welcome as not aiming at the impossible. A whole series of phenomena in organic beings are correlated under the term of MEMORY, CONSCIOUS AND UNCONSCIOUS, ...
— Unconscious Memory • Samuel Butler
... overwhelming enough to secure his adhesion. He was therefore forced to torpedo the Conciliation Bill, to snatch away the half-loaf that was better than no bread at all. He spoke and voted against these tentative measures of feminine enfranchisement, with tongue in cheek, no doubt, and hand linked in that of Lulu Grandcourt whose opposition to any vote being given to woman and whole attitude towards the sex was so bitter that he had to be reminded by Lord Aloysius Brinsley (who ...
— Mrs. Warren's Daughter - A Story of the Woman's Movement • Sir Harry Johnston
... that she might have prevailed on you to lunch with us on the day of the Confirmation. She was only waiting for the Bishop's acceptance to send you an invitation; but we hear now," he said in a dubitative and tentative way—"we hear now that it is possible that the Bishop may ...
— The Nebuly Coat • John Meade Falkner
... bladders collapsed into one idea, they actually expanded into four names, two Latin and two Greek, gustus and gustatio, [Greek: geusis], and [Greek: geusma], which all alike express the merely tentative or exploratory act of a praegustator or professional "taster" in a king's household: what, if applied to a fluid, we ...
— Miscellaneous Essays • Thomas de Quincey
... the teller, with tentative sympathy, running his pencil through his upright hair, and tapping his forefinger with it nervously. "I believe that's one of Bartlett's personal matters," he said ...
— The Wizard's Daughter and Other Stories • Margaret Collier Graham
... second story ruffled white curtains fluttered to the breeze. As the shield-shaped knocker clanged dully to Aleck's stroke, a large, melancholy hound came slowly round the corner of the house, approached the visitor with tentative wags of the tail, and after sniffing mildly, lay down on the cool grass. It wasn't a house to be hurried, that was plain. After a wait of five or ten minutes Aleck was about to knock again, when a face appeared at one of the side-lights of the door. Presently the door itself opened a few inches, ...
— The Stolen Singer • Martha Idell Fletcher Bellinger
... their Meaning," deals with apparitions of the living, of the dying, and of the dead—according to the tentative arrangement of these cases made by the English S. P. R. Most of these are quoted from the Society's Proceedings, and the usual theories are offered to account for them; in the case of apparitions of the dead, e. g., "ghosts," the theory of deferred telepathic suggestion being held. This ...
— The Journal of Abnormal Psychology - Volume 10
... tone by corresponding use of colour is necessarily tentative. In the perfected stage- composition the two elements are increased by the third, and endless possibilities of combination and individual use are opened up. Further, the external can be combined with the internal harmony, as Schonberg has attempted in his quartettes. It ...
— Concerning the Spiritual in Art • Wassily Kandinsky
... good instance of it in German literature, always in its developments so much later than the English; and as the best instance of it in French literature, in the century preceding Browne, is Montaigne, from whom indeed, in a great measure, all those tentative writers, or essayists, derive. ...
— Appreciations, with an Essay on Style • Walter Horatio Pater
... the Hexahedron, demonstrated geometrically to all the Universities and all the Academies of Europe.[2] There are innumerable verses, French and Italian, in all stages, occasionally attaining the finality of these lines, which appear in half a dozen tentative forms: ...
— Figures of Several Centuries • Arthur Symons
... not have told exactly how it was done, but she knew that two minutes later young Gray and Mellicent were at the piano, he, shining-eyed and happy, drawing a tentative bow across the strings: she, no less shining-eyed and happy, giving him "A" on ...
— Oh, Money! Money! • Eleanor Hodgman Porter
... himself called upon to make common cause against the Philistine, put in a tentative ...
— Cleo The Magnificent - The Muse of the Real • Louis Zangwill
... slightest words! What signifies the conversation, when you listen for the heart to answer? What sweetness in the glance of a woman who begins to attract you! At first it seems as though everything that passes between you is timid and tentative, but soon there is born a strange joy, an echo answers you; you know a dual life. What a touch! What a strange attraction! And when love is sure of itself and knows response in the object beloved, what serenity in the soul! Words die on the lips, for each one knows what the other ...
— Child of a Century, Complete • Alfred de Musset
... old man with iron-gray hair and a very red and bulby nose, was a garrulous servant, and after a tentative cough made an attempt at ...
— Kathleen • Christopher Morley
... adult male Badger (60144) was found dead; the skull and baculum were saved. The subspecific identification is on geographic grounds, and is tentative. In this area T. t. taxus and T. t. fippsi ...
— Mammals of the Grand Mesa, Colorado • Sydney Anderson
... to this tentative remark; but it was from no objection any longer in her mind to such a relation in the abstract. She had not yet at all consented with herself to abandon the faith of her father, but she did not see, and indeed it were hard for any one ...
— Paul Faber, Surgeon • George MacDonald
... spirit of lassitude and dulness and compliance with false conditions and limited aims which would seem almost incredible in those practising what should be an inspiring art. To men so trained, so employed, all counsels of perfection are foolishness; all idea of tentative work, experiment, modification while in progress, is looked upon as mere delusion. To them work consists of a series of never-varied formulas, all fitting into each other and combined to aim at producing a definite result, ...
— Stained Glass Work - A text-book for students and workers in glass • C. W. Whall
... rebellion, half genuine, half facetious, he made several tentative scrapes with the razor. He winced ...
— The Valley of the Moon • Jack London
... entrance at each side, so that the bird could go into his house at one doorway and out at the other, the room being too small to permit of his turning around in it. Thinking the nest might be occupied, in a tentative way I tossed a small club up among the branches, when to my surprise a magpie sprang out of the nest, and, making no outcry, swung around among the trees, appearing quite nervous and shy. When she saw me climbing the tree, she set up such a heart-broken series of cries that I permitted ...
— Birds of the Rockies • Leander Sylvester Keyser
... juvenile delinquents was strongly advocated by the council. Miss Clark and Mr. C. H. Goode were particularly keen on the introduction of Children's Courts. In this reform South Australia led the world, and in the new Act of 1896, after six years of tentative work, it became compulsory to try offenders under 18 at the Children's Court in the city and suburbs, and in the Magistrate's room in the country. The methods of organization and control vary in the different States of the Commonwealth, but on one point the six are all agreed—that ...
— An Autobiography • Catherine Helen Spence
... war seriously damaged Lebanon's economic infrastructure, cut national output by half, and all but ended Lebanon's position as a Middle Eastern entrepot and banking hub. A tentative peace has enabled the central government to begin restoring control in Beirut, collect taxes, and regain access to key port and government facilities. The battered economy has also been propped up by a financially ...
— The 1995 CIA World Factbook • United States Central Intelligence Agency
... his first tentative offer I had quite made up my mind that he wanted to engage me as a sort of super-butler with sudden death included amongst the risks of service, and I had no intention of mixing up in other people's quarrels on such terms. When I questioned him directly ...
— The Lost Valley • J. M. Walsh
... Her manner was so tentative and humble, so much that of one who scarce feels a right even to plead, so different from that of the old petted and radiant Madge, that 'twould have taken a harder man than Philip to decline. And so, when ...
— Philip Winwood • Robert Neilson Stephens
... instant vividness the wrecked framework of his own plans. He heard the echo of Fadeaway's sneering laugh in the fury of the wind. He told himself that he had been duped and that he deserved it. Lacking physical strength to carry him through to a place of tentative safety, he gave up, and credited his sudden regret to true repentance rather than to weakness. He would return to the Concho, knowing that his brother would forgive him. He wept as he thought of his attitude of the repentant ...
— Sundown Slim • Henry Hubert Knibbs
... the musicians now leaned together for a moment. The violins wailed in sad search for the accord, the assistant instrument less tentative. All at once the slack shoulders straightened up firmly, confidently, and then, their feet beating in unison upon the floor, their faces set, stern and relentless, the three musicians fell to the work and ...
— The Girl at the Halfway House • Emerson Hough
... Our own design is tentative, and neither very far-foreseeing nor very retrospective; it is a little of both, but much of neither; it is like a comet with a little light in front of the nucleus and a good deal more behind it, which ere long, however, fades away into the darkness; it is of a kind that, though ...
— Luck or Cunning? • Samuel Butler
... endowment of the brewers will continue, and my Lords Bass, Burton and the rest will merely await future opportunities to plunder the British public. In short, little constructive legislation, even of that mild and tentative character one might expect from a Liberal party, made up of capitalistic units can be expected after the ten years of corrupt and extravagant rule of this ...
— Mother Earth, Vol. 1 No. 1, March 1906 • Various
... hardly the rivers. Already the flowery waving oceans of Illinois begin to abound in ships, or what seem such,—houses looming up from the horizon, like three-masters sometimes, sometimes schooners, and again little tentative sloops. These are creeping nearer and nearer together, filling and making commonplace those lovely deserts where the imagination can still find wings, and world-wearied thought a temporary repose. Where neighbors ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 2, Issue 11, September, 1858 • Various
... the spirit of the entertainment. Some one calls the name of Corporal Smith. A man struggles to his feet and leaps on to the platform. He is greeted with applauding cheers. There is a short consultation between him and the pianist. A tentative chord is struck. Corporal Smith nods approval and turns to the audience. His song begins. If it is the kind of song that has a chorus the audience shouts it and Corporal Smith conducts the singing with waving of ...
— A Padre in France • George A. Birmingham
... leavened.' This likeness does not reach its completeness by a leap. It is not struck, as the image of a king is, upon the blank metal disc, by one stroke, but it is wrought out by long, laborious, and, as I said, approximating and tentative touches. My text suggests that to us by its addition, 'So are we, in this world.' The 'world'—or, to use modern phraseology, 'the environment'—conditions the resemblance. As far as it is possible for a thing encompassed ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture - Ephesians; Epistles of St. Peter and St. John • Alexander Maclaren
... and Independents. First in order came the adherents of the established church, a church which was in a very real sense the creation of Queen Elizabeth and of her times— for all that had gone before was unstable and tentative, and might readily have been altered by a ruler of different character or policy. When Elizabeth ascended the throne in 1558 the great body of the people of England, from a religious point of view, ...
— European Background Of American History - (Vol. I of The American Nation: A History) • Edward Potts Cheyney
... informally some time during the afternoon. I wish then to impress the thought that, although the official representatives of the University and College are not with us, they have not forgotten this meeting. As a member of the Executive Committee, in charge of the sessions, I have made up a tentative program for this morning for the purpose of starting the meeting off; and as the President will undoubtedly tell you later on, this program is subject to revision and change according to the convenience ...
— Northern Nut Growers Association Report of the Proceedings at the Second Annual Meeting - Ithaca, New York, December 14 and 15, 1911 • Northern Nut Growers Association
... bids for an aerial mail service between New York and Washington—an act urged upon the Government in this volume. That service contemplates a swift carriage of first-class mail at an enhanced price—the tentative schedule being three hours, and a postage fee of twenty-five cents an ounce. There can be no doubt of the success of the service, its value to the public, and its possibilities of revenue to the post-office. Once its usefulness is established ...
— Aircraft and Submarines - The Story of the Invention, Development, and Present-Day - Uses of War's Newest Weapons • Willis J. Abbot
... the colonel as he made himself comfortable on the lounge, then he lighted a fresh cigar, tilted his chair against the wall and with head thrown back studied the ceiling. Watt Harbison made one or two tentative attempts at conversation, to which Gilmore briefly responded, then the young fellow also became thoughtful. He fell to watching the gambler's strong profile which the lamp silhouetted against the opposite wall; then drowsiness completely ...
— The Just and the Unjust • Vaughan Kester
... charge of all printing, such as Advance Notices of Conference, Registration Cards, Banquet Tickets, Tentative Program, Completed Program, Crusade Folder, Newspaper Articles, Conference Badges ...
— The Boy and the Sunday School - A Manual of Principle and Method for the Work of the Sunday - School with Teen Age Boys • John L. Alexander
... dozen lines were awaiting them when they arrived in Seattle. Without loss of time Boyd installed himself and his friends at a hotel, secured a competent and close-mouthed stenographer, and then sought out the banker with whom he had made a tentative agreement before going to Chicago. Mr. ...
— The Silver Horde • Rex Beach
... the sluggish calm that followed the abatement of old controversies men's minds reverted anew to the wide general principles on which the Reformation had been based, and, with the loss of power which attends uncertainty, were making tentative efforts to improve and strengthen the superstructure. 'Intensity,' as has been remarked, 'had for a time done its work, and was now giving place to breadth; when breadth should be natural, intensity might come again.'[195] The Latitude men of the last age can only be fairly judged ...
— The English Church in the Eighteenth Century • Charles J. Abbey and John H. Overton
... attempted one task at a time and aimed at winning back in turn the alienated classes. Then, and then alone, after civic peace had been re-established, would he attempt the reconstruction of the civil order in the same tentative manner, taking up only this or that frayed end at once, trusting to time, skill, and patience to transform the tangle into a symmetrical pattern. And thus, where Feuillants, Girondins, and Jacobins had produced chaos, the practical man and his able helpers succeeded ...
— The Life of Napoleon I (Volumes, 1 and 2) • John Holland Rose
... subtlest wit, touched life too closely and too often to attain to that flawless beauty to which it seems to aspire. He lacked the precision of form which is the mark of the consummate artist; he was sometimes tentative and ambiguous, often careless; the structure of some of his finest works was perfunctorily thrown together; the envelope of his thought—his language—was by no means faultless, his verse often coming near to prose, and his prose ...
— Landmarks in French Literature • G. Lytton Strachey
... Monseigneur led the way to his little Gothic dining-room full of Arundel prints, Mark soon apprehended that his host had evidently not had the slightest notion of offering an ad hoc hospitality. He paid no attention to Mark's tentative advances, and if he was willing to talk about Rome, it was only because he had just paid a visit there in connexion with a school of which he was a trustee and out of which he wanted to make one kind of school and the Roman Catholic Bishop of ...
— The Altar Steps • Compton MacKenzie
... return; ah, see the tentative Movements, and the slow feet, The trouble in the pace and the ...
— Penguin Persons & Peppermints • Walter Prichard Eaton
... His color deepened. He avoided Saunders's tentative gaze. "I reckon I won't, to-day, anyway," he faltered. "I never was much of a hand to hang ...
— The Desired Woman • Will N. Harben
... with enthusiasm not only in England but in France and Germany, and it gave an impulse for the writing of descriptive poetry which lasted for a generation; but Thomson's romantic achievement, though important, is tentative and incomplete, like that of all beginners. He described Nature from full and sympathetic first-hand observation, but there is still a certain stiffness about his manner, very different from the intimate and confident familiarity and power ...
— A History of English Literature • Robert Huntington Fletcher
... creating the crusade against witches. These are conclusions of some moment and a caution must be inserted. We have been treating of a period where facts are few and information fragmentary. Under such circumstances conclusions can only be tentative. Perhaps the most that can be said of them ...
— A History of Witchcraft in England from 1558 to 1718 • Wallace Notestein
... been but tentative. It had been understood that, should the storm abate, Mrs. Schuyler, Muriel and Blake would follow on the next train; for he himself was forced by the exigency of his mission to reach the city at least two hours ...
— A Fool There Was • Porter Emerson Browne
... — N. experiment; essay &c. (attempt) 675; analysis &c. (investigation) 461; screen; trial, tentative method, ttonnement. verification, probation, experimentum crucis[Lat], proof, (demonstration) 478; criterion, diagnostic, test, probe, crucial test, acid test, litmus test. crucible, reagent, check, touchstone, pix[obs3]; assay, ordeal; ring; litmus paper, curcuma paper[obs3], turmeric paper; ...
— Roget's Thesaurus • Peter Mark Roget
... looked him up and down as if in search of a convenient button-hole; he smiled innocently on the young man (Durant soon learned to know and dread that smile); nothing could have been more delicate and tentative than his approach. He had been silent for the last few minutes, lying low behind a number of the Nineteenth Century, for if he were a bore he had the dangerous power of masking his deadly qualities in an unreal absorption. At the signal that followed Durant's last desperate ...
— The Return of the Prodigal • May Sinclair
... which he traced to the climate of his birthplace, marked him from the first for an encyclopaedic or some such task. His interest was nearly as promptly and vehemently kindled in one subject as in another; he was always boldly tentative, always fresh and vigorous in suggestion, always instant in search. But this multiplicity of active excitements—and with Diderot every interest rose to the warmth of excitement—was even more hostile to masterpieces than were the exigencies of a livelihood. It was not unpardonable ...
— Diderot and the Encyclopaedists (Vol 1 of 2) • John Morley
... all agreed to this plan without the usual discussion of individual tastes which usually follows the most tentative suggestion on the part of any one of us who has the temerity to leap into the arena to ...
— Abroad with the Jimmies • Lilian Bell
... out of a mere negation, the abolition, viz., of the old political freedom, we may easily conceive that there would be an interval of fluctuating, and tentative efforts to supply its place, before a new comic form could be developed and fully established. Hence there may have been many kinds of the Middle Comedy, many intermediate gradations, between the Old and the New; and this is the opinion of some ...
— Lectures on Dramatic Art - and Literature • August Wilhelm Schlegel trans John Black
... live, what should be the character of his work, what should be the distinctive character of his clothing, when and whom he should marry, how much land he should hold and cultivate, and so on, were the result of ages of tentative experiment, and were so numerous and intricate that probably none but the amautas themselves thoroughly understood them. The committee, however, which had for nearly a month been preparing itself ...
— Harry Escombe - A Tale of Adventure in Peru • Harry Collingwood
... of unanimity; for while France was stamping out revolt, and Great Britain felt increasingly the drag of Ireland, Pitt encountered an antagonist of unsuspected strength. Over against his diffuse and tentative policy stood that of Bonaparte, clear-cut, and for the present everywhere victorious. While Pitt pursued that will o' the wisp, a money-bought peace, the Corsican was bullying the Austrian negotiators at Udine and ...
— William Pitt and the Great War • John Holland Rose
... it turned out. Throughout the sultry hours he held his position, not daring to move his men save to drive back tentative advances on the part of the enemy, which he knew were designed to cover the movements of their artillery. He could not press his attack home, far less penetrate to the guns, and the range of his musketry would of course be hopelessly inadequate when Chand Singh chose to begin ...
— The Path to Honour • Sydney C. Grier
... long preceded the Cufic which, amongst vulgar Moslems, is looked upon like black letter in Europe. But Semitic epigraphy is only now entering upon its second stage of study, the first being mere tentative ignorance: about 80 years ago the illustrious De Sacy proved, in a learned memoir, the non-existence of letters in Arabia before the days of Mohammed. But Palmer[FN454], Halevy, Robertson Smith, Doughty and Euting ...
— Supplemental Nights, Volume 6 • Richard F. Burton
... and I had to take on an Argentine re-mount, a rough, stupid little mare, with kicking and biting propensities which quite threw the roan's into the shade. She also had a peg of ignominy, and three times a day I had to dance perilously round my precious pair with a tentative body-brush and hoof-pick. The scene generally ended in the pegs coming away from the loose sand, and a perspiring chase through the lines. I had some practice, too, in driving in a team, for one of our drivers "went sick," and I took his place in the team of an ammunition-waggon ...
— In the Ranks of the C.I.V. • Erskine Childers
... taken in 1790, under the act of March 1 of that year, and many of the worst features of that tentative experiment still remain to vex the soul of every one who desires a census which shall be in accord with the demands of science and the times. Then, as now, the United States marshals were designated to conduct ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Volume 22. July, 1878. • Various
... the stile that led into the fields, and sat there for a moment. Lucia's tentative melodies were still faintly audible, but soon they stopped, and he guessed that she was looking out of the window. She was too great to take part in the morning spying that went on round about the Green, but she often saw a good deal from her window. He wondered what Mrs Quantock was meaning to ...
— Queen Lucia • E. F. Benson
... round which grew the Senhusian school of a later day, where neither reading nor writing could be had until the pupil was fifteen years old. But this is anticipatory, for the school was a matter of long gestation and tentative birth. ...
— Rest Harrow - A Comedy of Resolution • Maurice Hewlett
... questions; but she was gone, and the road before them plainly led to the low-roofed cabin, and loosely built barn with straw and daylight showing through its cracks, the newly planted poplar-trees above the thatched earth cellar, and all the signs of a tentative home in this ...
— In Exile and Other Stories • Mary Hallock Foote
... OF PROGRAMME TO THE WORK.—Under Traditional Management the tentative calendar might cause speed, but could not direct speed. Under Transitory Management elimination of waste by prescribed methods and routing increases output. This increase becomes greater under ...
— The Psychology of Management - The Function of the Mind in Determining, Teaching and - Installing Methods of Least Waste • L. M. Gilbreth
... and I grew More tentative and undecided, Consulted friends, and found they knew As little as ...
— Punch, Or The London Charivari, Volume 102, January 30, 1892 • Various
... has been found concerning the acid corrosive used by Rembrandt to bite his plate.[28] Only tentative conclusions can be drawn from this and other prints. The etched lines in the Landscape with a hay barn ... appear to be bitten with a fairly strong acid. The lines are relatively broad in relation to their depth, a strong-acid effect. Furthermore, illustrations of some of Rembrandt's ...
— Rembrandt's Etching Technique: An Example • Peter Morse
... violently? And his oaths of vengeance were breaths on a mirror. Ah well, I had ceased to hate him these twenty years. Did he love yonder woman, or was his fancy like mine, ephemeral? And he married Mademoiselle de Montbazon? That is droll, a kind of tentative vengeance." ...
— The Grey Cloak • Harold MacGrath
... science which is to intermediate between the modern laboratory psychology and the problems of economics: the psychological experiment is systematically to be placed at the service of commerce and industry. So far we have only scattered beginnings of the new doctrine, only tentative efforts and disconnected attempts which have started, sometimes in economic, and sometimes in psychological, quarters. The time when an exact psychology of business life will be presented as a closed and perfected system lies very far ...
— Psychology and Industrial Efficiency • Hugo Muensterberg
... Her first tentative efforts at going to the field were cautious and beset with difficulties. Through the long Peninsula campaign as each transport brought its load of suffering men, with the mud of the Chickahominy and the gore of battle baked hard upon them like the shells of turtles, she went down each day ...
— Woman's Work in the Civil War - A Record of Heroism, Patriotism, and Patience • Linus Pierpont Brockett
... but so it chanced to be. He whose talk at Kelmscott had been of ‘Blessed Damozels’ and ‘Roman Widows’ and the like, talked now of the wanderings of Ulysses, of ‘The Ancient Mariner,’ of ‘Sir Patrick Spens,’ and even of ‘Arthur Gordon Pym’ and ‘Allan Gordon.’ And on hearing a friend recite some tentative verses on a great naval battle, he looked about for sea subjects too; and it was now, and not later, as is generally supposed, that he really thought of the subject of ‘The White Ship,’ a subject apparently so alien from his genius. Every evening he used to take walks on the beach for miles and miles, ...
— Old Familiar Faces • Theodore Watts-Dunton
... retainers flock in, a long and elaborate chorus is sung—a musical, not a dramatic, chorus, almost as much in the Rienzi manner as in the manner of Tannhaeuser. It is curious to observe how cautious and tentative Wagner was at this stage of his growth. He was still groping, seeing only very dimly the destination he would reach by the way he was taking. Lohengrin, had he followed the plan he would certainly have adopted ten years later, ...
— Richard Wagner - Composer of Operas • John F. Runciman
... retention of Vikara{n}a in the aorist, which can be defended by analogous forms such as g{r}-{n}-sh-{n}i, st{r}-{n}-sh-{n}i, of which more hereafter. However, all these translations, as every real scholar knows, are, and can be tentative only. Nothing but a complete Vedic grammar, such as we may soon expect from Professor Benfey, will give us ...
— Chips from a German Workshop - Volume IV - Essays chiefly on the Science of Language • Max Muller
... tentative efforts to go, but seemed awkwardly rooted to the spot. He was gazing at her with an open admiration of which he was quite unconscious, and which was drowning, along with him, in the rising sea of embarrassment ...
— Brown Wolf and Other Jack London Stories - Chosen and Edited By Franklin K. Mathiews • Jack London
... this faith is always vague, tentative, and inconclusive. He is certain of something, but he cannot say what; yet he knows that he is certain, although, if he were to try to express his certainty in any old terms, he would reject it himself. He knows; but he cannot ...
— Letters of a Soldier - 1914-1915 • Anonymous
... swinish multitude," applied to mobs, was then in every body's mouth; and, accordingly, after my brother had recovered from his first astonishment at this audacious mutiny, he made us several sweeping bows that looked very much like tentative rehearsals of a sweeping fusillade, and then addressed us in a very brief speech, of which we could distinguish the words pearls and swinish multitude, but uttered in a very low key, perhaps ...
— Autobiographic Sketches • Thomas de Quincey
... cheeks still red, and plucking at the rope netting with nervous fingers, Miss Nan essays a tentative. Her eyes are ...
— Starlight Ranch - and Other Stories of Army Life on the Frontier • Charles King
... sharpshooters of the country-side. Its duty was to go forward and make connectioon with the Scotch and Goorkha troops with which it was brigaded. The Afghans knew this, and knew too, after their first tentative shots, that they were dealing with a raw regiment Thereafter they devoted themselves to the task of keeping the Fore and Aft on the strain. Not for anything would they have taken equal liberties with a seasoned ...
— This is "Part II" of Soldiers Three, we don't have "Part I" • Rudyard Kipling
... what is so positively and repeatedly stated must of necessity be true, must of necessity have been proved by irrefutable evidence at some time or other. So much you take for granted—for matters which began their existence perhaps as tentative hypotheses have imperceptibly developed into ...
— The Life of Cesare Borgia • Raphael Sabatini
... for another—fruit of the ineradicable sex antagonism which so often colours the judgments men pass on women and women on men. Then had come love, against which he had striven in vain, and gradually, out of love, had grown a new tentative belief which the pitiful culmination of the Raynham episode had suddenly and very ...
— The Lamp of Fate • Margaret Pedler
... said, more to gain time than anything else. She added, "Everything is at sixes and sevens in the flat. There wouldn't be standing-room." A sudden thought flashed upon her, which, because it was sudden and in keeping with her character, she put into tentative words. "You're more at home here than anywhere else. You were almost born here. You've played about here ever since you were a child. You first met Peter here. He proposed to you here, and you rejected him here. ...
— The Daughter of the Storage - And Other Things in Prose and Verse • William Dean Howells
... rang—she remembered it afterward—with a loud thrilling note. It was what they used to call the "visitor's ring"; not the tentative tinkle of a neighbor dropping in to borrow a sauce-pan or discuss parochial incidents, but a decisive summons from ...
— Crucial Instances • Edith Wharton
... and studied maps until I felt as if I had lived in the country concerned and was personally acquainted with the Dutch governors on the Cuyuni and the Spanish monks on the Orinoco. As a result lines more or less tentative were prepared by each of us, Judge Brewer and myself agreeing very closely, and the others not being very distant from us at any important point. One former prime minister of Great Britain I learned, during this investigation, to respect greatly,—Lord Aberdeen, whom I well ...
— Autobiography of Andrew Dickson White Volume II • Andrew Dickson White
... to take these terrible possibilities very seriously, Dot took comfort from that fact and went on again cheerfully. Nor did she mind carrying the basket of attractive fruit. One of the peaches on top was a little mellow and she stuck a tentative finger into the most luscious spot she could see upon the ...
— The Corner House Girls Growing Up - What Happened First, What Came Next. And How It Ended • Grace Brooks Hill
... which pervaded the court during this scene, in which the reader will have observed I played a bold, tentative, and happily-successful game, was broken as the witness was borne off by a loud murmur of indignation, followed by congratulatory exclamations on the fortunate termination of the suit. The defendant's counsel threw up their briefs, ...
— The Experiences of a Barrister, and Confessions of an Attorney • Samuel Warren
... multiple authorship often possess too wide a diversity of viewpoints. The reader comes away with no underlying thought and no controlling principles. To overcome this defect, so common in books of this type, a tentative outline was formulated, setting forth a desirable mode of treating, in the confines of one chapter, the teaching of any subject in the college curriculum. This outline was submitted to all contributors for ...
— College Teaching - Studies in Methods of Teaching in the College • Paul Klapper
... the world still colourless and mysterious, the house a long black bulk against a slowly lightening sky. Only the earliest sparrows were twittering; in the trees only the most wakeful rooks were uttering tentative caws. The outburst of joy and life and music which would attend the sun's ...
— The Wild Geese • Stanley John Weyman
... observe and record their own observations; to read, and then to select and record the materials which are the fruits of their readings; to organize and use, in short, their own experience. The whole organization of this volume may be taken as an illustration of a method, at once tentative and experimental, for the collection, classification, and interpretation of materials, and should be used by students from the very outset in all their reading ...
— Introduction to the Science of Sociology • Robert E. Park
... Desdemona's deception of her father how perfect an actress she could be. As he listens in horror, for a moment at least the past is revealed to him in a new and dreadful light, and the ground seems to sink under his feet. These suggestions are followed by a tentative but hideous and humiliating insinuation of what his honest and much-experienced friend fears may be the true explanation of Desdemona's rejection of acceptable suitors, and of her strange, and naturally temporary, preference for a black man. Here Iago goes too far. He sees something in ...
— Shakespearean Tragedy - Lectures on Hamlet, Othello, King Lear, Macbeth • A. C. Bradley
... particularly happy. Beale on the other hand appeared after an instant himself to feel a scruple. "What I mean is, to speak seriously, that she doesn't really know anything about anything." He paused, following the child's charmed eyes and tentative step or two as they brought her nearer to the pretty things on one of the tables. "She thinks she has good things, don't you know!" He quite jeered ...
— What Maisie Knew • Henry James
... or, at least, heretics. In this way the claims of religion were drawn into the arena, and, as neither the extreme Scholastics nor the extreme Humanists had learned to distinguish between dogmas and systems, between what was essential and what was tentative, there was grave danger that religion would suffer in the eyes of educated men on account of the crude methods of those who claimed to be ...
— History of the Catholic Church from the Renaissance to the French • Rev. James MacCaffrey
... this tentative synopsis, the playwright consulted his watch. Already the incident of the condemnable bandbox had eaten up much invaluable time. He would see himself doomed to unending perdition if he would submit to further hindrance ...
— The Bandbox • Louis Joseph Vance
... unity in the experienced world; the one what we may call the epistemological unity, due merely to the fact that my experienced world is what one experience selects from the sum total of existence: the other that tentative and partial unity exhibited in the prevalence of scientific laws in those portions of the world which science has hitherto mastered. Now a generalisation based upon either of these kinds of unity would be ...
— Mysticism and Logic and Other Essays • Bertrand Russell
... instinct, he sought for her hand. But she held that back. "I want to SEE it," she declared, and he was obliged to let her take the ring in her own way and examine it, and place it in every light, and compare it with others worn by her friends, and make little tentative charges of extravagance in his purchase of it, while he sat elated and adoring, the ...
— The Imperialist • (a.k.a. Mrs. Everard Cotes) Sara Jeannette Duncan
... kind of order which I have described. But as liberty and order, so conceived, imply one another, the difference between the two positions ceases to be one of ends and becomes one of means. But every problem of means is one of extreme complexity which can only be solved, in the most tentative way, by observation and experiment. And opinions based upon such a process, though they may be strongly held, cannot be held with the simplicity and force of a religious or ethical intuition. We might, conceivably, on this basis adopt the position either of the collectivist or of the anarchist; ...
— A Modern Symposium • G. Lowes Dickinson
... ambition for fame as a maker of plays was still keen, and nothing but a renewed invitation to write for the stage was needed to lure him back into tentative compliance with its ways. In the course of 1841 Macready intervened with a request for another play from the author of Strafford.[19] Thereupon Browning produced with great rapidity A Blot in the 'Scutcheon. After prolonged and somewhat sordid green-room vicissitudes, ...
— Robert Browning • C. H. Herford
... in the second and fourth years of the war, respectively. The final and authoritative history of the struggle has not yet been written, and cannot be written for many years to come. Many partial and tentative accounts have, however, appeared, among which may be mentioned, on the northern side, {555} Horace Greeley's American Conflict, 1864-66; Vice-president Wilson's Rise and Fall of the Slave Power in America, and J. W. ...
— Brief History of English and American Literature • Henry A. Beers
... the aerodrome a large packing-case addressed "Sergeant Tam." There was no surname, though there was no excuse for the timidity which stopped short at "Tam." The consignor might, at least, have ventured to add a tentative ...
— Tam O' The Scoots • Edgar Wallace
... landscape-painting if I had asked him, and I did at a later period study water-color with him; but his practice in oil did not suit me, for this reason: it was entirely tentative, he was constantly demolishing his work, so that it was hard to see how a pupil could possibly follow him. The advantage in working under his eye would have been in receiving a great variety of sound artistic ...
— Philip Gilbert Hamerton • Philip Gilbert Hamerton et al |
