"Conventionally" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... Pretender he was quite uninfluenced by admiration for England, and imputed, not to the English Deists and Whigs but to the Church and her divisions and intolerance, the unbelieving spirit that threatened both Church and State. It was conventionally understood on the Continent that 1688 had been an uprising of Nonconformists, and a Whig was assumed to be a Presbyterian down to the death of Anne. It was easy to infer that a more violent theological ...
— Lectures on the French Revolution • John Emerich Edward Dalberg-Acton
... highly honourable one, nor are the duties light or unimportant which devolve upon these functionaries. The honour, moreover, is as costly as it is onerous; not only do the sheriffs receive no salary, but they are conventionally expected to disburse several thousand pounds in charities and hospitality. The inspection of the city gaols occupies no small portion of their time, nor do they enjoy much intermission from the incessant demands for eleemosynary aid. That an office ...
— The Corporation of London: Its Rights and Privileges • William Ferneley Allen
... in her Sunday clothes, ready for church, he rose and greeted her conventionally, shaking hands. His manners were better than hers. She flushed. She noticed that he now had a thick fledge on his upper lip, a black, finely-shapen line marking his wide mouth. It rather repelled her. It reminded her of the thin, fine fur ...
— The Rainbow • D. H. (David Herbert) Lawrence
... I pencill'd down from time to time, almost automatically, moods, sights, hours, tints and outlines, on the spot. Let me specially record the satisfaction of this current forenoon, so serene and primitive, so conventionally ...
— Complete Prose Works - Specimen Days and Collect, November Boughs and Goodbye My Fancy • Walt Whitman
... and wholesome people—man and a woman, can not meet, either conventionally or unconventionally, without expressing some atom of interest in one another as individuals. I ...
— The Firing Line • Robert W. Chambers
... though without a touch of that religious mysticism which later marked Wolfram yon Eschenbach's "Parzival". "Guillaime d'Angleterre" is a pseudo-historical romance of adventure in which the worldly distresses and the final reward of piety are conventionally exposed. It is uninspired, its place is difficult to determine, and its authorship is questioned by some. It is aside from the Arthurian material, and there is no clue to its place in the evolution of Chretien's art, if indeed ...
— Four Arthurian Romances - "Erec et Enide", "Cliges", "Yvain", and "Lancelot" • Chretien de Troyes
... "This is the funniest convention I have ever attended." We have an idea that there was an element of prophecy in her homely remark—a body representing more than four million American soldiers and sailors that makes so little political noise is likely to be about as funny to the conventionally minded politician as a bombardment of gas shells. This language of restraint in the mouths of organized civilian youth may prove to be a natural companion to the famous battle slogan of ...
— The Story of The American Legion • George Seay Wheat
... spirit at all times, it must always be partly a matter of individual temperament. The eighteenth century in England has been regarded as almost exclusively a classical period; yet William Blake, a type of so much which breaks through what are conventionally thought the influences of that century, is still a noticeable phenomenon in it, and the reaction in favour of naturalism in poetry begins in that century, early. There are, thus, the born romanticists and the born classicists. There are the born classicists who start ...
— Appreciations, with an Essay on Style • Walter Horatio Pater
... are shown with a single before the word; large drop capitals are shown with two . Mid-word italics, representing expanded contractions, are shown in {braces}. Elsewhere, boldface and italics are shown conventionally. Superscripts ...
— Dialogues in French and English • William Caxton
... of palmettes and lotuses. The cornices above and below are of clay or poros, painted in just such designs as appear on the Olympian terracottas; and these designs are frequently repeated in the sculptures themselves. The feathers of Typhon's wings are conventionally represented by a scale-pattern; the arc of the scales has been drawn with compass; we observe still the hole left in the centre by the leg of the compass. The larger pinions at the ends of the wings have been outlined, regularly by incised lines, and then filled up with color. ...
— The American Journal of Archaeology, 1893-1 • Various
... let to do so? Alone in a forest, very far back, they might, at this point, have flown at each other's throat. But they had felled many forests since the day when just that was possible.... The thing conventionally in order for such a moment as the present was to act as though that annihilation which each wished upon the other had been achieved. All that they had shared since the day when first they met, boys on a heath in Scotland, should be instantaneously blotted out. Two strangers, jostled face to face ...
— Foes • Mary Johnston
... repugnance to that form of existence. They were mostly cousins, who inhabited dingy houses with engravings from Cole's Voyage of Life on the drawing-room walls, and slatternly parlour-maids who said "I'll go and see" to visitors calling at an hour when all right-minded persons are conventionally if not actually out. The disgusting part of it was that many of these cousins were rich, so that Lily imbibed the idea that if people lived like pigs it was from choice, and through the lack of any proper standard ...
— House of Mirth • Edith Wharton
... higher than we know, and, by our wants, by our woes, by our tears, by our yearnings, by our poverty, urging us, with mightier and mightier force, against those chains of sin which keep us from our God. We speak not of things conventionally called prayers,—vain mutterings of unawakened spirits talking drowsily in sleep,—but of such prayers as come when flesh and heart fail, in mighty straits;—then he who prays is a prophet, and a Mightier than he speaks in him; ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. IV, No. 22, Aug., 1859 • Various
... read her letter; and as he read the tappa mallets at work in the Fijian houses hard by seemed to thump in unison with the dull beats of his heart as he stared at the correctly-worded and conventionally-expressed lines that mocked at his fond imaginings of but a ...
— The Ebbing Of The Tide - South Sea Stories - 1896 • Louis Becke
... moment he addressed her. "This is Mr. Germaine," she answered: "a gentleman who was very kind to me in Scotland." She raised her eyes for a moment to mine, and took refuge, poor soul, in a conventionally polite inquiry after my health. "I hope you are quite well, Mr. Germaine," said the ...
— The Two Destinies • Wilkie Collins
... idealization in her peasant sketches was naturally over-estimated by those who, never having studied the class, could not conceive of a peasant except conventionally, as a drunken boor. The very just portrait of Cecilia Boccaferri, the conscientious but obscure artist in Le Chateau des Desertes, might seem over-flattered to such as imagine that all opera-singers ...
— Famous Women: George Sand • Bertha Thomas
... itself attractive; hence commerce is rapidly learning to cater to distaste for the unnatural. With few exceptions, only temporary concessions to unnatural living are required in order to dress and act conventionally. ...
— Civics and Health • William H. Allen
... she were "at home" was conventionally put, for it seemed practically certain that she must be in the hotel. Where could she, who had no other friends than they, and no chaperon, go at night? It was with blank surprise, therefore, that he and Stephen heard the man's answer. Mademoiselle ...
— The Golden Silence • C. N. Williamson and A. M. Williamson
... an afternoon in the middle phase of the strike, some half dozen of the law-makers of a sovereign state, top-hatted and conventionally garbed in black, accustomed to authority, to conferring favours instead of requesting them, climbing the steep stairs and pausing on the threshold of that hall, fingering their watch chains, awaiting ...
— The Crossing • Winston Churchill
... all like the whiteness of Monsieur Rigaud's face as it was then. Neither is there any expression of the human countenance at all like that expression in every little line of which the frightened heart is seen to beat. Both are conventionally compared with death; but the difference is the whole deep gulf between the struggle done, and the fight at its most ...
— Little Dorrit • Charles Dickens
... been more conventionally impolite. And yet the act was so utterly free from sham that it seemed the only decorous and decent thing to do. Thus was the dignity of conversation maintained; thus was each man and woman made to feel his or her worth along personal ...
— Penguin Persons & Peppermints • Walter Prichard Eaton
... was sometimes striking by reason of the nobility and elevation of the thought. She was full of prejudices, but she was always prejudiced against her own interest. There was nothing she set more value on than regularity of conduct, precisely because her own conduct was conventionally irregular.[411] She was very religious, because religion rigidly condemned her mode of life. In conversation she frowned on pleasantries which would have seemed quite innocent to other women, because she feared that her circumstances ...
— A History of the French Novel, Vol. 1 - From the Beginning to 1800 • George Saintsbury
... theology, while, within that circle, it frisks and plays in the oddest and wittiest freaks. A grave and religious earnestness is at the foundation of her individuality, and she is so assured of this fact that she can safely indulge in wilful gibes at pretension in all its most conventionally sacred forms. This bright audacity is the perfection of moral and intellectual health. No morbid nature, however elevated in its sentiments, would dare to hazard such keen and free remarks as Gail Hamilton scatters ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 10, No. 62, December, 1862 • Various
... bats as large as small herons swept down the long front gallery where we worked, gleaning as they went; but the vampires were long in coming, and for months we neither saw nor heard of one. Then they attacked our servants, and we took heart, and night after night exposed our toes, as conventionally accepted vampire-bait. When at last they found that the color of our skins was no criterion of dilution of blood, they came in crowds. For three nights they swept about us with hardly a whisper of wings, and accepted either toe or elbow or finger, or all three, and the cots and floor ...
— Edge of the Jungle • William Beebe
... artificial rest. To continue to labour and at the same time to take the anaesthetic is an inconsistency. It merely blunts the painful feeling of weariness, and prevents it from acting as a warning. I very much doubt the quickening or brightening of the wits which bacchanalian poets have conventionally attributed to alcohol. An abstainer in a party of even moderate topers finds their jokes dull and their anecdotes pointless, and his principal amusement consists in his observation of their curious bluntness to the groundlessness of their ...
— Study and Stimulants • A. Arthur Reade
... the Watchman's shout, enter the Chorus: Twelve Elders of Argos: in the usual processional order, combining music, chanting and gesture-dance, to a rhythm conventionally associated with marching. They enter on the right (as if from the city), and the Processional Chant takes them gradually round the Orchestra towards the Thymele, or Altar of ...
— Story of Orestes - A Condensation of the Trilogy • Richard G. Moulton
... were arranged, but the interview between mother and daughter hardly improved the position. Mrs. Eppington was conventionally moral; Edith had been thinking for herself, and thinking in a bad atmosphere. Mrs. Eppington, grew angry ...
— Sketches in Lavender, Blue and Green • Jerome K. Jerome
... to be conventionally happy, but I want you always. That is all ... you, always, on any terms—on a rag-heap, in a storm, with ...
— Robert Orange - Being a Continuation of the History of Robert Orange • John Oliver Hobbes
... with snow. In like manner Giotto, Perugino, Angelico, the young Raphael, and John Bellini, always, if, with any fitness to their subject, they can introduce them, use craggy or blue mountain distances, and this with definite expression of love towards them; Leonardo, conventionally, as feeling they were necessary for his sacred subjects, while yet his science and idealism had destroyed his mountain sincerity; Michael Angelo, wholly an artist, and Raphael in later years, show no love of mountains whatever, while the relative depths of feeling in Tintoret, Titian, and ...
— Modern Painters, Volume IV (of V) • John Ruskin
... tubes or pipes. And here I want to call attention to a point which has never, to my knowledge, been noticed before. In the message, which, in pursuance of his first idea, adhered to by him for several years, was to be sent by means of numbers, every word is numbered conventionally except the proper name "Cuvier," and for this he put a number for each letter. How this was to be indicated was not made clear, but it is evident that he saw at once that all proper names could not be numbered; that some other means ...
— Samuel F. B. Morse, His Letters and Journals - In Two Volumes, Volume II • Samuel F. B. Morse
... answered Mr. Granger; and then he went on turning the leaves for Clarissa with a solemn air, and occasionally pointing out to her some noted feature in a landscape or city. His daughter stared at him in supreme astonishment. She had seen him conventionally polite to young ladies before to-night, but this was something more than conventional politeness. He kept his place all the evening, and all that Sophia could do was to remain ...
— The Lovels of Arden • M. E. Braddon
... opportunity ought properly to stimulate. But the moral blindness to which it gives rise has never, I think, been sufficiently emphasized. We require of business men only that measure of honesty that we {40} conventionally expect in that type of occupation. A politician is proverbially tricky and self-seeking. The artistic temperament would scarcely be recognized if it did not manifest itself in weakness and excess. It is as unreasonable ...
— The Moral Economy • Ralph Barton Perry
... reason (costumes always excepted) why the scene was the Paris of 1840. For the purposes of the play Tony might just as well have been a British designer of tanks (London, 1916). Nor was there anything even conventionally French about the girl Remnant, who might have been born ...
— Punch, Or The London Charivari, Volume 152, March 21, 1917 • Various
... in being able to say that the general tendency of the speeches was towards universal Emancipation, mental and physical. I doubt whether an English audience composed in so large proportion of the conventionally "respectable classes" ever listened to so much downright Democracy before. The French speakers, the French writers, were full of it, and the great event, at least of the last day's session, was the entrance of a body of fifteen French workmen, delegates to the World's Exhibition of the "Working ...
— Glances at Europe - In a Series of Letters from Great Britain, France, Italy, - Switzerland, &c. During the Summer of 1851. • Horace Greeley
... usual, it occurred to me to examine closely the scroll of music painted as hanging over the top of the pedestal on which the figure leant. I had hitherto thought that the signs depicted on it were merely such as painters might conventionally use to represent a piece of musical notation. This has generally been the case, I think, in such pictures as I have ever seen in which a piece of music has been introduced. I mean that while the painting gives a general representation of the ...
— The Lost Stradivarius • John Meade Falkner
... to the Springs in a few days," she replied. "Come and see us. Our bungalow is on the other side of the river—and you, too," she addressed Berrie; but her tone was so conventionally polite that the ranch-girl, burning with ...
— The Forester's Daughter - A Romance of the Bear-Tooth Range • Hamlin Garland
... nothing better," replied Cornish, conventionally, and they continued their inspection of the little colony. The arrangements were as simple as they were effective. Either Roden or Von Holzen certainly possessed the genius of organization. In one of the ...
— Roden's Corner • Henry Seton Merriman
... want it: the side she knew best and longest as herself, Annesley Grayle, a timid girl brought up conventionally, and taught that to rely on others older and wiser than she was the right way for a well-born, sheltered woman to go through life. The other side, the new, desperate side that Mrs. Ellsworth's "stuffiness" had developed, was not looking for any means of escape; and this side had seized the ...
— The Second Latchkey • Charles Norris Williamson and Alice Muriel Williamson
... suite (op. 15) before the Dvorakian invasion, and an overture, "In the Sunny South," afterward. The suite, which has been played frequently abroad, winning the praises of Hanslick, Nicode, and Rubinstein, is scored for string orchestra. It opens with an overly reminiscent waltz-tune, and ends conventionally, but it contains a movement in negro-tone that gives it importance. In this the strings are abetted by a tambourine, a triangle, and a gong. It is in march-time, and, after a staccato prelude, begins with a catchy ...
— Contemporary American Composers • Rupert Hughes
... accidentally, by speaking of his marriage institution as a community of wives. When reading Plato he could not or would not escape reading in his own conception of the natural ascendency of men, his idea of property in women and children. But as Plato intended women to be conventionally equal to men, this phrase belies him altogether; community of husbands and wives would be truer to his proposal. Aristotle condemns Plato as roundly as any commercial room would condemn him to-day, and in much ...
— A Modern Utopia • H. G. Wells
... principle everything that bore the name of Puritan, but had spent their exile at the French Court, where utterly cynical and selfish pursuit of pleasure and licentiousness of conduct were merely masked by conventionally polished manners. The upshot was that the quarter century of the renewed Stuart rule was in almost all respects the most disgraceful period of English history and life. In everything, so far as possible, ...
— A History of English Literature • Robert Huntington Fletcher
... pour itself out in words to him, but that his tone, his manner, his look keep it back absolutely, as a firm hand holds down the rising cork upon the exuberant wine. And now, at this sentence of his, her words fail her. They are strangers practically, that is conventionally—quite strangers, she remembers confusedly—but for this secret bond of passion, knit up between them, which both can feel ...
— Six Women • Victoria Cross
... and without any sign of oars, except two paddles for steering with. About midship is a short mast, crossed by a long spar or yard, which carries a sail, closely reefed along its entire length. The yard and sail are managed by means of four ropes, which are, however, somewhat conventionally depicted. Both the head and stern of the vessel rise to a considerable height above the water, and the stern is curved, very much as in the war-galleys. It perhaps terminated in the ...
— History of Phoenicia • George Rawlinson
... plays for the minor theatres, entirely carried on by action, occasionally aided by inscriptions painted on scrolls, and unrolled and exhibited by the actor when his power of expressing such words failed. This led to the education of a series of pantomimists, who taught action conventionally to represent words. At the close of the last century, there were many such; and the reader who may be curious to see the nature of these dumb dramas, may do so in two volumes named "Circusiana," by J.C. Cross, the author of very many that were performed at the Royal Circus, in St. George's Fields. ...
— Curiosities of Literature, Vol. II (of 3) - Edited, With Memoir And Notes, By His Son, The Earl Of Beaconsfield • Isaac D'Israeli
... love-story in 'William Tell', it is hardly of sufficient weight to merit extended discussion. Both Bertha and Rudenz are rather tamely and conventionally drawn, to meet the need of a pair of romantic lovers; they evidently cost their creator no very strenuous communings with the Genius of Art. Their private affair of the heart has nothing to do with the Tell episode and is but loosely related to the popular uprising. Their absence would ...
— The Life and Works of Friedrich Schiller • Calvin Thomas
... Lane, detected the burly figure of Father Dan, the Cordelier Friar, who was Mistress Winter's family confessor, coming up from Seacoal Lane. Not without some fears of his errand, she waited till he came near, and then humbly louted—the ancient English reverence, now conventionally supposed to be ...
— For the Master's Sake - A Story of the Days of Queen Mary • Emily Sarah Holt
... of gallantry upon his lips, "I have no doubt that you deserve the richest blessings of earth and heaven. For myself——" He shrugged his shoulders, just about to say conventionally, flippantly, that he was a sad, worthless fellow, but in some way her sincerity made him sincere, and he finished: "I do not know that I have done anything to ...
— The Mermaid - A Love Tale • Lily Dougall
... Mrs. Mangan!" said the priest simpering conventionally. "Wasn't it ministering to the afflicted that delayed him! Doctors mustn't be subjected to the rules that bind ...
— Mount Music • E. Oe. Somerville and Martin Ross
... elder Keats was a man of sense and energy, and that his wife was a "lively and intelligent woman, who hastened the birth of the poet by her passionate love of amusement," bringing him into the world, a seven-months' child, on the 29th October, 1795, instead of the 29th of December, as would have been conventionally proper. Lord Houghton describes her as "tall, with a large oval face, and a somewhat saturnine demeanour." This last circumstance does not agree very well with what he had just before told us of her liveliness, but he consoles us by adding that "she succeeded, however, in ...
— Among My Books • James Russell Lowell
... amethyst bunches of grapes were brought by the footman, I knew that soon Princess Sanzanow would smile at the French duchess, and we should all troop away to leave the men. I was sure that Eagle would not join the ladies conventionally in the drawing-room, and I did not want that summons to mean a long good-bye. I asked hastily, therefore, if he would come and see me and the Miss Splatchleys and our Belgians at "The Haven," when he had grown a ...
— Secret History Revealed By Lady Peggy O'Malley • C. N. Williamson and A. M. Williamson
... mind would call it, more objective; and our young woman had foreseen it of her, on the spot, that she would often look so again. It was exactly what she was doing this afternoon; and Milly, who had amusements of thought that were like the secrecies of a little girl playing with dolls when conventionally "too big," could almost settle to the game of what one would suppose her, how one would place her, if one didn't know her. She became thus, intermittently, a figure conditioned only by the great facts of aspect, a figure ...
— The Wings of the Dove, Volume 1 of 2 • Henry James
... Brineweald Park to "The Fastness," as was his wont after breakfast, he had scarcely felt a fibre of pity or remorse stir in his body while Mrs. Delarayne had described Cleopatra's second fainting fit to him. He had expressed his sympathy formally, conventionally, like one who had but a few moments to spare for such considerations, and even before Mrs. Delarayne had completed her narrative, had allowed his eyes to wander eagerly all over the garden ...
— Too Old for Dolls - A Novel • Anthony Mario Ludovici
... mere animal desire. The poets wrote of it coldly and conventionally, as of a thing which existed only in name. The lover could only beg his mistress "to ease his pain." But the conventionality which extended through all thoughts and expressions relating to the higher emotions of the human ...
— A History of English Prose Fiction • Bayard Tuckerman
... found himself was on the first floor, over looking the square, and was well but conventionally furnished. A fire blazed in the grate, and the draped mantelpiece was decorated with a number of photographs of junior officers, many of them autographed. His companion, who said her name was Kitty Chester, had discarded her raincoat and hat, and now stood before the ...
— The Orchard of Tears • Sax Rohmer
... conventionally called 'fair,' and unpolitely termed by Cato the 'chattering, finery-loving, ungovernable sex,' I despair to depict it. When returning north in the A.S.S. Winnebah, we carried on board a dark novice of the Lyons ...
— To the Gold Coast for Gold - A Personal Narrative in Two Volumes.—Vol. I • Richard F. Burton
... frequently the case, appears to have been erected earlier than other portions. Of this porch two pillars are supported by life-sized figures, one bearded, one beardless, both dressed in the girdled smock of the early Middle Ages. The enormous weight of the porch is resting, not conventionally (as in the antique caryatid) on the head, but on the spine; and the head is protruded forwards in a fearful effort to save itself, the face most frightfully convulsed: another moment and the spine must be broken and the head droop freely down. Before the ...
— Renaissance Fancies and Studies - Being a Sequel to Euphorion • Violet Paget (AKA Vernon Lee)
... was essentially Christian in its spirit and motives. It used religious symbols extensively, but incorporated in its ornament a few pagan elements, such as the acanthus and the scroll. Natural forms were always conventionally treated. Its coloring was rich and gorgeous. The principal features of its architecture were the dome and round arch. The plan of the churches was often in the form of a Greek or Latin cross, with the dome placed over the intersection of the two arms. The church of St. Sophia, ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 598, June 18, 1887 • Various
... by the crackling of twigs and the sound of a man running. We instinctively held our rifles a little tighter in readiness for whatever might befall—when there burst out of the woods a pleasant-faced young Peruvian, quite conventionally clad, who had come in haste from Saavedra, his father, to extend to us a most cordial welcome! It seemed scarcely credible, but a glance at his face showed that there was no ambush in store for us. It was with a sigh of relief that we realized there was to be no shower of poisoned arrows from ...
— Inca Land - Explorations in the Highlands of Peru • Hiram Bingham
... from exceedingly imperfect knowledge, but just at this period Athens means Greece—the relations between men and women are even under Pericles beginning to be vulgarised. In the great dramatic poets love enters either as a subsidiary motive somewhat severely and conventionally treated, as in the Antigone of Sophocles, or, as in the Phaedra and Medea of Euripides, as part of a general study of psychology. It would be foolish to attempt to defend the address of the chorus in the Antigone to Eros,[10] if regarded as the language of passion; and even if regarded ...
— Select Epigrams from the Greek Anthology • J. W. Mackail
... arena. Tra-la-la-la-la! Tra-la-la-la-la! Off she whirls to the rythm of a Strauss waltz or a blood-stirring polka, and for the next four years, on an average, she never stops, metaphorically speaking. She may not always be waltzing or polkaing, but if she is conventionally sound she is sure to be in a whirl. She exchanges daylight for gaslight; her daily sustenance is stewed mushrooms with a rich gray gravy, beef-tea, and ice-cream, varied by an occasional mouthful of fillet as a conscience composer. All winter she participates in a feverish round of balls, receptions, ...
— The Opinions of a Philosopher • Robert Grant
... the present instance, was certainly not conventionally treated. When the curtain was withdrawn, they beheld a figure of life-like size, exhibiting in undisguised completeness the perfection of the female form, and yet the painter had so skilfully availed himself of the shadowy and mystic hour, and of some gauze-like drapery, which veiled without ...
— Lothair • Benjamin Disraeli
... the Colonel and the three Majors, genially remarked, "If you fellars don't come soon, everything'll get cold," he had no thought of other than a kindly and respectful regard for their welfare, and was glad to modify his form of address on being told that it was not what could be described as conventionally military. When one of our sentinels, who had with much labor learned the manual of arms, saluted with great pride as I passed, and added, with a friendly nod, "Good-evening, Colonel," this variation in the accepted formula on such occasions was meant, and was accepted, ...
— Rough Riders • Theodore Roosevelt
... glowed with delight in these tales, reading beneath the terse lines of Haney's slang something epic, detecting a perfect willingness to take any chance. The fact that his bravery led to nothing conventionally noble or moral did not detract from the inherent interest of the tale; on the contrary, the young fellow, being of unusual imaginative reach and freedom, took pleasure in the thought that a man would risk his ...
— Money Magic - A Novel • Hamlin Garland
... action, so as to lose sight of its original meaning. There is a curious mention of this gesture by Strabo." Mr. Washington Matthews informs me that, with the Dakota Indians of North America, contempt is shown not only by movements of the face, such as those above described, but "conventionally, by the hand being closed and held near the breast, then, as the forearm is suddenly extended, the hand is opened and the fingers separated from each other. If the person at whose expense the sign is made is present, the hand is moved towards him, ...
— The Expression of Emotion in Man and Animals • Charles Darwin
... are investigating what had happened, advantage will be taken of the opportunity to tell new readers something of the former books in this series, so they may feel better acquainted with the two young men who are to pose as "heroes," as it is conventionally termed, though, in truth, Joe and ...
— The Moving Picture Boys on the War Front - Or, The Hunt for the Stolen Army Films • Victor Appleton
... mark in Browning's portrayal of women is his admiration for dauntlessness and individuality; and this makes explicable to me the failure which I constantly perceive in his dramatic presentment of her whose "innocence" (as the term is conventionally accepted) is her salient quality. The type, immortal and essential, is one which a poet must needs essay to show; and Browning, when he showed it through others, or in his own person hymned it, found words for its delineation ...
— Browning's Heroines • Ethel Colburn Mayne
... girls of the people, evidently sisters, with ribbons round their uncovered heads, filleting the hair which fell in careless ringlets on their backs. It was hair of the bright flaxen sort, which the poets have conventionally called "golden," the hair one sees so often on the angels of the Italian primitive painters—though not so often on living Italians. It is the hair which always seems to me more beautiful than any other, and I felt as if I wanted ...
— Impressions And Comments • Havelock Ellis
... perennially restored to its old-time footing owed its longevity more to the enterprising solicitude of Miss McQuade than to any conscious sentimental effort on the part of Youghal himself. Molly McQuade was known to her neighbours in a minor hunting shire as a hard-riding conventionally unconventional type of young woman, who came naturally into the classification, "a good sort." She was just sufficiently good-looking, sufficiently reticent about her own illnesses, when she had any, and sufficiently appreciative of her neighbours' gardens, children and hunters to be generally ...
— The Unbearable Bassington • Saki
... always conceived as a perpetual holiday, and that whoever is not born to an independent income is striving for one or longing for one because it gives holidays for life. To which I reply, first, that heaven, as conventionally conceived, is a place so inane, so dull, so useless, so miserable, that nobody has ever ventured to describe a whole day in heaven, though plenty of people have described a day at the seaside; and ...
— A Treatise on Parents and Children • George Bernard Shaw
... salams to the Amir, saying that we came from Aden, and requested the honor of audience. Whilst he sped upon his errand, we sat at the foot of a round bastion, and were scrutinised, derided, and catechized by the curious of both sexes, especially by that conventionally termed the fair. The three Habr Awal presently approached and scowlingly inquired why we had not apprised them of our intention to enter the city. It was now "war to the knife"—we did ...
— First footsteps in East Africa • Richard F. Burton
... them? They might be offended at first, but afterwards they'd see I'd done them a service. You know, Terebyeva (who is in the community now) was blamed because when she left her family and... devoted... herself, she wrote to her father and mother that she wouldn't go on living conventionally and was entering on a free marriage and it was said that that was too harsh, that she might have spared them and have written more kindly. I think that's all nonsense and there's no need of softness; on ...
— Crime and Punishment • Fyodor Dostoyevsky
... here nobody dreams of disputing the greater difficulty of the prose forms, and the comparative triviality of versification. Yet in dramatic music, as in dramatic literature, the tradition of versification clings with the same pernicious results; and the opera, like the tragedy, is conventionally made like a wall paper. The theatre seems doomed to be in all things the last refuge of the hankering after cheap ...
— The Perfect Wagnerite - A Commentary on the Niblung's Ring • George Bernard Shaw
... Napoleon and still less anywhere else. Interwoven with all the new developments, and however less obtrusive it may have become, the old tradition still continues among us. Since, also, the husband is, conventionally and in large measure really, the economic support of the home,—the work of the wife and even actual financial contributions brought by her not being supposed to affect that convention,—this state of things is held to ...
— Little Essays of Love and Virtue • Havelock Ellis
... months more the new arrangement was consummated and little Dutchy—or Zuleika, as he subsequently named her—was duly brought to Newark and installed, at first in a charming apartment in a conventionally respectable and cleanly neighborhood, later in a small house with a "yard," lawn front and back, in one of the homiest of home neighborhoods in Newark. It was positively entertaining to observe Peter not ...
— Twelve Men • Theodore Dreiser
... secure and settled income, Scott now meditated a literary life. A hundred years ago such a life was impossible without independent means, if a man would mingle in society and live conventionally, and what was called respectably. Even Burns had to accept a public office, although it was a humble one, and far from lucrative; but it gave him what poetry could not,—his daily bread. Hogg, peasant-poet of the Ettrick forest, was supported in all his earlier years by tending ...
— Beacon Lights of History, Volume XIII • John Lord
... Sviazhsky's he should meet the landowners of the neighborhood, and it was particularly interesting for him just now to hear and take part in those rural conversations concerning crops, laborers' wages, and so on, which, he was aware, are conventionally regarded as something very low, but which seemed to him just now to constitute the one subject of importance. "It was not, perhaps, of importance in the days of serfdom, and it may not be of importance in England. In both cases the conditions ...
— Anna Karenina • Leo Tolstoy
... tardier, and we may well pardon an impatience that sprung of reasoned zeal for the happiness of mankind. There is something much more attractive about Condorcet's undisguised disappointment at having to exchange active public labour for geometrical problems, than in the affected satisfaction conventionally professed by statesmen when driven from place to their books. His correspondence shows that, even when his mind seemed to be most concentrated upon his special studies, he was incessantly on the alert for every new idea, book, transaction, that was likely to stimulate the love of virtue ...
— Critical Miscellanies (Vol. 2 of 3) - Essay 3: Condorcet • John Morley
... actions, and language might bear either interpretation. One striking omission had marked her conduct when I had referred to George's return. She had not inquired when I expected him back. Was this indifference? Surely not. Surely indifference would have led her to ask the conventionally civil question which ninety-nine persons out of a hundred would have addressed to me as a matter of course. Was she, on her side, afraid to trust herself to speak of George at a time when an unusual tenderness was aroused in her by the near prospect of saying farewell? ...
— The Queen of Hearts • Wilkie Collins
... of this clash and explain a good many of the divergencies of philosophers by it. Of whatever temperament a professional philosopher is, he tries when philosophizing to sink the fact of his temperament. Temperament is no conventionally recognized reason, so he urges impersonal reasons only for his conclusions. Yet his temperament really gives him a stronger bias than any of his more strictly objective premises. It loads the evidence for him one way or the ...
— Pragmatism - A New Name for Some Old Ways of Thinking • William James
... theater with Tom and hears Garrick play "Hamlet," thinks but poorly of the player because he only does what anybody would do under the circumstances! All-worthy and Blifil one may object to, each in his kind, for being conventionally good and bad, but in numerous male characters in less important roles there is compensation: the gypsy episode, for example, is full of raciness and relish. And what a gallery of women we get in the story: Mrs. Honour the maid, and Miss Western (who in some sort ...
— Masters of the English Novel - A Study Of Principles And Personalities • Richard Burton
... than among the Greeks, but somewhat lower than it is commonly made in modern times; and at the back of the stage is a wall architecturally adorned to represent a house or "palace" front, and containing one central and two side doors, which served for separate purposes conventionally understood. Over the stage is a roof, which slopes backward to join the wall. The entrances to the ordinary tiers of seats are from openings reached by stairs from the outside arcade surrounding the ...
— Life in the Roman World of Nero and St. Paul • T. G. Tucker
... imitating natural forms and colours with paint and pencil, and strictly intermarrying always with other families possessing exactly the same inherited endowments, would probably go on getting more and more woodenly accurate in its drawing; more and more conventionally correct in its grouping; more and more technically perfect in its perspective and light-and-shade, and so forth, by pure dint of accumulated hereditary experience from generation to generation. It would ...
— Falling in Love - With Other Essays on More Exact Branches of Science • Grant Allen
... happy, and I will always bless the memory of those days, and thank God I was the means of bringing a little gladness into her marred life. She was happy, and yet we were living in what society would call sin. Conventionally we were not man and wife, yet never were man and wife more devoted, more self-respecting. Never were man and wife endowed with purer ideals, with a more exalted conception of the sanctity of love. Yet there were many ...
— The Trail of '98 - A Northland Romance • Robert W. Service
... system-man. When he travelled he had his practical jokes and his Irish stories and his fondness for the social side; but he was conventionally as correct as a time-table. Had there been a spark of genius in him he would have extinguished it for the sake of betterments to the most conventional Colossus in Canada. The C.P.R. was supposed to lead. It was built for dividends, and born in politics. It had craft at its cradle. The ...
— The Masques of Ottawa • Domino
... disgusting practices in the name of so-termed religion all contributed to that end. We arrived during the afternoon of December 26th, going to the Hotel de Paris. A drive was instantly proposed, and we were taken to the Maharaja's palace, with grounds laid out conventionally, the trees and shrubs representing peacocks and animals of different kinds. The palace was spacious but tawdrily furnished; it is noteworthy as being the home to which the Maharaja and his family repair whenever they feel the approach of death; there is a ...
— Travels in the Far East • Ellen Mary Hayes Peck
... little more than a fortnight to Christmas; but the weather showed no signs yet of the frost and snow, conventionally associated with the coming season. The atmosphere was unnaturally warm, and the old year was dying feebly in sapping rain ...
— No Name • Wilkie Collins
... inquiry found that their unexpected visitors were soldiers who had crept through the lines to see Miss Evans and hear her sing. The mother was disposed to object to her appearing at a time and place not conventionally appropriate to artistic performances, but, wrapping her travelling coat and robe about her, she went out into the moonlight with her mass of hair streaming in the wind like a flying cloud, and sang ...
— Literary Hearthstones of Dixie • La Salle Corbell Pickett
... traced them. What he did was first to call forth from it what it really meant, the awful heights and depths of its current words and forms; and next, to put beside them human character and its trials, not as they were conventionally represented and written about, but as a piercing eye and sympathising spirit saw them in the light of our nineteenth century, and in the contradictory and complicated movements, the efforts and failures, of real life. He took theology for ...
— Occasional Papers - Selected from The Guardian, The Times, and The Saturday Review, - 1846-1890 • R.W. Church
... announced it, and the three passed directly into the next room, furnished so conventionally there was absolutely nothing upon which to let the eyes rest in surprise, or pleasure. But it was painfully neat and regular, and both aunt and nephew were secretly satisfied that it must impress even this young heiress as a perfectly proper ...
— Joyce's Investments - A Story for Girls • Fannie E. Newberry
... the same date, perhaps somewhat earlier, we may place the fine Tondo (No. 79B) hanging in the same gallery, formerly in the Patrizi collection, Rome. I have not given it its usual name of a "Visitation," because that scene, conventionally treated, took place before the birth of the children who here play so important a part. Signorelli has, according to his habit, conceived the subject without any reference to traditional custom. I have already spoken of the ease ...
— Luca Signorelli • Maud Cruttwell
... were those of a woman grown, but the child lingered on in her complexion and in the sweetness of her mouth. Above all she was natural—that was indubitable now; more natural than he had supposed at first, perhaps on account of her aesthetic toggery, which was conventionally unconventional, suggesting what he might have called a tortuous spontaneity. He had feared that sort of thing in other cases, and his fears had been justified; for, though he was an artist to the essence, the modern reactionary nymph, with the brambles of the woodland ...
— The Lesson of the Master • Henry James
... incorporation." It is not apparent, the Court added, that State A has an interest superior to that of State B in the financial soundness and stability of insurance companies doing business in State B,—which is obviously more the language of arbitration than of adjudication, as conventionally regarded. ...
— The Constitution of the United States of America: Analysis and Interpretation • Edward Corwin
... admiration of beauty in either sex characterised our chivalrous times. Now it is mostly confined to "professional beauties" or what is conventionally called the "fair sex"; as if there could be any comparison between the beauty of man and the beauty of woman, the Apollo Belvidere with ...
— The Book of the Thousand Nights and a Night, Volume 1 • Richard F. Burton
... the previous evening. The Phipps house was a story and a half cottage, of the regulation Cape Cod type, with a long "L" and sheds connecting it with a barn and chicken yards. The house was spotlessly white, with blinds conventionally green, as most New England houses are. There was a white fence shutting it off from the road, the winding, narrow road which even yet held puddles and pools of mud in its hollows, souvenirs of the downpour of the ...
— Galusha the Magnificent • Joseph C. Lincoln
... smart society. Its inhabitants, by nature acquisitive and cautious, economical, tenacious, had learnt to worship the word "smart." The result was a kind of heavy froth, an air of thoroughly domestic vice. In addition to the conventionally fast, Shelton had met there one or two ladies, who, having been divorced, or having yet to be, still maintained their position in "society." Divorced ladies who did not so maintain their place were never ...
— Forsyte Saga • John Galsworthy
... extraordinary name—had a curious fascination for him. He was rather fond of her, yet the greatest wish he had in the world was to break it off. When with her he felt himself to be at once a criminal and a benefactor, a sinner and a saint. Theoretically, theatrically, and perhaps conventionally, his relations with her constituted him the villain of the piece. Yet he behaved to her more like ...
— Tenterhooks • Ada Leverson
... was the first person whom they saw at Willow Lawn. Two letters had passed, both so conventionally civil, that her state of mind could not be gathered from them, but her first tones proved that coherence was more than ever wanting, and no one attempted to understand anything she said, while she enfolded Sophy in an agitated embrace, and marshalled them to ...
— The Young Step-Mother • Charlotte M. Yonge
... Madrid. It might, under the circumstances, have, been a merit in it to be undergoing a thorough overhauling of the furnishing and decoration of the rooms on the patio which had formed our ideal for a quiet night. A conventionally napkined waiter welcomed us from the stony street, and sent us up to our rooms with the young interpreter who met us at the station, but was obscure as to their location. When we refused them because they were over that loud-echoing alley, the ...
— Familiar Spanish Travels • W. D. Howells
... up there to that dismal wilderness, to spend her days in toil and poverty, with a half-crazy mother-in-law, and a rheumatic brother- in-law, in such a looking hovel?" Mrs. Sewell did not group these disadvantages conventionally, but they were effective. "You have allowed your feelings about that baffling creature to blind you to everything else, David. Why should you care so much for his future, and nothing for hers? Is that ...
— The Minister's Charge • William D. Howells
... my moral qualities are the softer rock in the strata that make up my being—the easiest worn away. I see that I carry the instinct of the naturalist into all my activities. If a thing is natural, sane, wholesome, that is enough. Whether or not it is conventionally correct, or square with the popular conception of morality, does not matter ...
— Our Friend John Burroughs • Clara Barrus
... Thrash the whole subject out with yourself and with other people—with your own friends, and with your family too. They're a modern, broad-minded set, your people, after all; they won't look at the thing conventionally; they'll talk sense; they won't fob you off with stock phrases, or talk about the sanctity of the home. They're not institutionalists. Only be fair about it; weigh all the pros and cons, and judge honestly, ...
— Dangerous Ages • Rose Macaulay
... in the same words, to one "Thomas Harberte, citizen and girdler, of London." In the meantime, of course, the playhouse had been erected, but no clear or direct mention of the building is made in the deed of sale. Possibly it was included in the conventionally worded phrase: "and all and singular other messuages, tenements, edifices, and buildings, with all and singular their appurtenances, erected and builded upon the said close called the Curtain."[125] Among the persons named as holding tenures of the above-mentioned ...
— Shakespearean Playhouses - A History of English Theatres from the Beginnings to the Restoration • Joseph Quincy Adams
... not unreasonably be contended, I think, that, when an exposition cannot be thoroughly dramatized—that is, wrung out, in the stress of the action, from the characters primarily concerned—it may best be dismissed, rapidly and even conventionally, by any not too improbable device. That is the principle on which Sir Arthur Pinero has always proceeded, and for which he has been unduly censured, by critics who make no allowances for the narrow limits imposed by custom and the constitution of the ...
— Play-Making - A Manual of Craftsmanship • William Archer
... taken a few turns backward and forward, alone, he was joined by a spare, quiet, gray-haired man, whose personal appearance was totally devoid of marked character of any kind; whose inexpressive face and conventionally-quiet manner presented nothing that attracted approval and nothing that inspired dislike. This was Mr. Pendril—this was the man on whose lips hung the future ...
— No Name • Wilkie Collins
... going in the right direction, noting, meanwhile, her general appearance so far as to infer that she was a farmer's daughter; or, rather, as he thought with a half smile, what a farmer's daughter is conventionally supposed to be like. Thick leather shoes, a plainly made gown of some light grey stuff, and short enough for country walking; a large brown straw hat, with neither flower nor feather to adorn it; and ungloved hands, in the one swinging by her side a strap buckled ...
— The Strand Magazine, Volume V, Issue 29, May 1893 - An Illustrated Monthly • Various
... already in her place. Seated between a little Bulgarian and a Jewish student from Galicia, she was almost immediately struggling in a sea of language, into which she struck out now and then tentatively, only to be again submerged. Byrne had bowed to her conventionally, even coldly, aware of the sharp eyes and tongues round the table, but Harmony did not understand. She had expected moral support from his presence, and failing that she sank back into the loneliness and depression of the day. ...
— The Street of Seven Stars • Mary Roberts Rinehart
... Palms at the entrance to the court of Flowers. It is interesting to note that, in this rugged and commanding figure, fineness, dignity and nobility are emphasized as well as the more customary endurance and hardihood conventionally associated with the character. On the leather trappings of the old Pioneer's horse, the tepee, the canoe and other symbols of Indian life are marked. The sculptor is himself the son of pioneers and has treated this subject with sincerity and affectionate ...
— The Sculpture and Mural Decorations of the Exposition • Stella G. S. Perry |
