"Conversational" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... he gave her full credit for her great qualities, in especial for a good sense amounting to genius. And she in turn was pleased with the serious German who argued with her in lame French, not as one caring to hold his own in a conversational fencing-match, but as one wishing to convince her of important truths in which he really believed. It must have been an interesting occasion in a small way, this first rencontre between Schiller and the lady who was afterwards ...
— The Life and Works of Friedrich Schiller • Calvin Thomas
... like the "Chanson de Fortunio" of Alfred de Musset. It was not strange that the great Sainte-Beuve found the verse of De Gu['e]rin somewhat too unusual. Sainte-Beuve calls it "the familiar Alexandrine reduced to a conversational tone, and taking all the little turns of an intimate talk." Eug['e]nie complains that "it sings too much and does not talk enough." However, one of the most charming of literary essays, to which Matthew Arnold's seems almost ...
— Confessions of a Book-Lover • Maurice Francis Egan
... their changes of lodgings and their petty disbursements, it is, after all, because they are great personalities, and have displayed their greatness in imaginative writings or in uttering fertile and inspiring conversational dicta. Imagine what one's responsibility would have been if one could have persuaded Charles Lamb to have taken up the task of editing the works of Beaumont and Fletcher, and to have deserted his ephemeral contributions to literature. ...
— The Silent Isle • Arthur Christopher Benson
... lady guest spent much of her time on deck—sitting in a deck- chair, within easy conversational range of whichever had the tiller; and she favoured me with her company during the whole of the first watch (it being my eight hours out that night); but she was unusually silent gazing in an absent, dreamy manner ...
— For Treasure Bound • Harry Collingwood
... conversational. "Don't get up," said Jimmie Dale coolly. "And take your hand off ...
— The Adventures of Jimmie Dale • Frank L. Packard
... think, whose capitals are particularly graphic, throws the whole party up in a dry light. One can see the rhapsodist talking interminably, involving himself ever deeplier in a web of his own spinning; the great lady gazing in wonder. It is one of the very few impartial witnesses we have to his conversational feats. Nearly all the evidence is tainted either by predisposition in his favour or the reverse. Hazlitt, a mainly hostile witness, says that he talked well on every subject; Godwin on none. One suspects antithesis there. He reports Holcroft as saying that "he thought Mr. C. a very ...
— In a Green Shade - A Country Commentary • Maurice Hewlett
... that Bonaparte had conversed a good deal with Bernadotte, and that he had made every effort to render himself agreeable, which he very well knew how to do when he chose! but that, in spite of all his conversational talent; and supported as he was by the presence of his three brothers, and Regnault de St. Jean d'Angely, he could not withstand the republican firmness of Bernadotte. However, the number of his partisans daily augmented; for all had not the uncompromising spirit ...
— The Memoirs of Napoleon Bonaparte • Bourrienne, Constant, and Stewarton
... surprise to me," she began, in a conversational tone, "to hear Mr. Steadman make a speech. I am sure his colleagues in the House would have been surprised to have heard him today. He is a very quiet man there—he never speaks. The first night I went to the House with a crowd of Normalites, I pointed ...
— Purple Springs • Nellie L. McClung
... powwow [U.S.].. discourse with, confer with, commune with, commerce with; hold converse, hold conference, hold intercourse; talk it over; be closeted with; talk with one in private, tete-a-tete. Adj. conversing &c. v.; interlocutory; conversational, conversable[obs3]; discursive, discoursive[obs3]; chatty &c. (sociable) 892; colloquial. Phr. "with thee conversing I forget ...
— Roget's Thesaurus
... he . . . Nikita, haven't we any of that red Kavkas wine [Footnote: Chikir] left?" I asked, very much enlivened by Guskof's conversational talent. Nikita still kept muttering; but he brought us the red wine, and again looked on angrily as Guskof drained his glass. In Guskof's behavior was noticeable his old freedom from constraint. I wished that he ...
— Stories by Foreign Authors: Russian • Various
... thirteen, and with an extraordinary disregard to grammar and spelling. And as Miss Amory felt very keenly that she was not appreciated, and that she lived with persons who were not her equals in intellect or conversational power, she lost no opportunity to acquaint her family circle with their inferiority to herself, and not only was a martyr, but took care to let everybody know that she was so. If she suffered, as she said ...
— The History of Pendennis • William Makepeace Thackeray
... duck makin' for a pond. Her chief aim in life seems to be to be better posted on your affairs than you are yourself, and, of course, that keeps her reasonably busy. Also she's a lady gusher from Gushville. Now, I don't object to havin' a conversational gum drop tossed at me once in a while, sort of offhand and casual. But that ain't Mrs. Buttinski's method. She feeds you raw molasses with a mixin' spoon. Just smears ...
— Torchy As A Pa • Sewell Ford
... observing that it was long since they had met; but no one could be expected to find the way to the other end of nowhere. Cecil blushed and stammered something about Hounslow, but Allen, who prided himself on being the conversational man of the world, carried off the ...
— Magnum Bonum • Charlotte M. Yonge
... hear," returned the minister, in polite recognition of the fact that it had been Miss Mehitable's sole conversational topic at the time. "He stole the chickens because he was hungry, and he got drunk because he didn't know any better. I talked with him, and he promised me that he would neither steal nor drink any more. Moreover, he earned the money and paid full price for ...
— A Spinner in the Sun • Myrtle Reed
... as a placefiller for things one is barred from giving details about. For example, a poster with pre-released hardware in his machine might say "Yup, my machine now has an extra 16M of memory, thanks to the card I'm testing for Mumbleco." 7. A conversational wild card used to designate something one doesn't want to bother spelling out, but which can be {glark}ed from context. Compare {blurgle}. 8. [XEROX PARC] A colloquialism used to suggest that further discussion would ...
— The Jargon File, Version 4.0.0
... added to the establishment. Wobbler, the pedestrian, a candidate for the ten-miles championship of Somersetshire, was residing there during his training for that world-renowned contest. It cannot be correctly said that Wobbler was very good company, for indeed his conversational powers were limited, which was perhaps fortunate, seeing that his language was not very choice when he did speak. But he was a man of varied accomplishments; not only could he walk, but he could run, and swim, and box. Indeed he had only deserted ...
— Dr. Jolliffe's Boys • Lewis Hough
... older lawyer, Jeremiah Mason, who graduated at Yale about the time Webster was born. Mason, who was frequently Webster's opponent, took pleasure in ridiculing all ornate efforts and in pricking rhetorical bubbles. Webster says that Mason talked to the jury "in a plain conversational way, in short sentences, and using no word that was not level to the comprehension of the least educated man on the panel. This led me to examine my own style, and I set about reforming it altogether." Note the simplicity in the following sentences from Webster's ...
— History of American Literature • Reuben Post Halleck
... fair hair, to start his career in the House, and to end it, so far as the novel is concerned, lying wounded in a hospital, where his fiancee, a famous singer, happened to be a nurse in the same ward. Nor does the young man disdain the threadbare conversational cliche. "Don't you think there is something elemental in most of us which no veneer of civilisation or artificial living can ever deaden?" he says in one place (rather as if veneer were a kind of rat poison). Still bolder, on leaving America, where he ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 158, April 7, 1920 • Various
... Home, their wives, children and friends. Every evening, at half-past nine o'clock, there is family prayer in the chapel, and every Sunday afternoon the president, Mr. S.P. Godwin, has a class for Bible study and instruction in the same place. On Tuesday evenings there is a conversational temperance meeting; and on Thursday evening of each week the Godwin Association, organized for mutual help and encouragement, holds a meeting in ...
— Grappling with the Monster • T. S. Arthur
... a laugh and sought other partners. In the middle of the evening Toby Carey strolled up to Averil and bent down in a conversational attitude. He was not dancing himself. She gave ...
— Rosa Mundi and Other Stories • Ethel M. Dell
... hastening to be the first to speak, in order to have any conversational chance at all with her, "it is not the least mysterious part of this Mystery of ours, that keeps us all out of doors so much in the unseasonable winter month of December,[1] and now I am peculiarly a meteorological ...
— Punchinello Vol. 1, No. 21, August 20, 1870 • Various
... This was disregarded at first as having been thrown out at random, afterwards it began to be canvassed in conversation; until one of the Roman soldiers on guard asked one of the townsmen who was nearest him (a conversational intercourse having now taken place in consequence of the long continuance of the war) who he was, who threw out those dark expressions concerning the Alban lake? After he heard that he was an aruspex, being a man whose mind was ...
— The History of Rome, Books 01 to 08 • Titus Livius
... up the street, timed Cissie's arrival at the front gate, picked up his hat, and walked briskly to the library in the hope of finishing any business the Captain might have, in time to encounter the octoroon. He even began making some little conversational plans with which he could meet Cissie in a simple, unstudied manner. He recalled with a certain satisfaction that he had not said a word of condemnation the night of Cissie's confession. He would make a point of that, and was prepared to argue that, since he had said nothing, ...
— Birthright - A Novel • T.S. Stribling
... of the great conversational brow-beaters of English literature, Samuel Johnson, though it was his chief business to be a critic of poetry, was hardly more in court on the matter than Carlyle. In fact, Dr. Johnson might with truth be described as the King Bull of all the Bulls of all the China-shops. ...
— Vanishing Roads and Other Essays • Richard Le Gallienne
... knowing look at me, he hissed (though none of his preceding words had been audible across the street), "An 'Irregular,' sir—cursed sugar-and-water quack—a figure 9 with the tail rubbed off. Why, sir" (in a more conversational but still emphatic tone), "I have given sixty grains of calomel at a dose, and I have given a tenth of a grain of calomel at a dose; I would give a man a hundred grains of quinine, and I have done it; I have" (and here he took from his pocket a small round lozenge ...
— A Strange Discovery • Charles Romyn Dake
... gloomily over the crowded drawers in the vain hope of finding something that had been overlooked. He pulled out a drawer at random—Schedule K-36, Minor Social Offenses—and ran his embittered eye over a card. It was marked Conversational Felonies, and ...
— In the Sweet Dry and Dry • Christopher Morley
... criticism. It is the shrewd sense everywhere cropping up which is really delightful. The keen remarks upon life and character, though, perhaps, rather too severe in tone, are worthy of a vigorous mind, stored with much experience of many classes, and braced by constant exercise in the conversational arena. Passages everywhere abound which, though a little more formal in expression, have the forcible touch of his best conversational sallies. Some of the prejudices, which are expressed more pithily in Boswell, are defended by a reasoned exposition ...
— Samuel Johnson • Leslie Stephen
... well as Overtop, was surprised to find that the single stereotyped observation, "It's a fine day," was, after all, more acceptable than a longer and more strikingly original remark for it imposed no tax upon the conversational resources of the ladies, and left them unfatigued to succeeding scores ...
— Round the Block • John Bell Bouton
... note, from a practical manufacturing Quaker, whom, as he is anonymous, we will call Friend Prudence. Prudence keeps a thousand workmen; has striven in all ways to attach them to him; has provided conversational soirees; play-grounds, bands of music for the young ones; went even 'the length of buying them a drum:' all which has turned out to be an excellent investment. For a certain person, marked here by a black stroke, ...
— Past and Present - Thomas Carlyle's Collected Works, Vol. XIII. • Thomas Carlyle
... but little," he said presently, relapsing into his conversational tone. "Hose and altogether, your clothes are worth but little. Still, if you've a mind to set yourself up with a lute worth more than any new one, or with a sword that's been worn by a Ridolfi, or with a paternoster of ...
— Romola • George Eliot
... fell upon them, broken only by the regular plash of the oars. In the young man's conversational attacks there had been nothing but a light play of sunny humour, but in this last retort of hers there was something like the glimmer of cold steel. It wounded him, yet he was unwilling either to conceal or reveal the hurt. But Helene DeBerczy had this weakness, common to generous souls, ...
— An Algonquin Maiden - A Romance of the Early Days of Upper Canada • G. Mercer Adam
... Merna, I was informed that music is never performed on such occasions as these, during conversational periods, as it is considered a desecration of a high ...
— To Mars via The Moon - An Astronomical Story • Mark Wicks
... took up his lamp and low table, and, coming without the altar rail, knelt down in the midst of the congregation. In this familiar relation with his people he delivered a homily in a conversational tone. Buddha was to mankind as a father to his children, he said. If a man did bad things but repented, his father would be more delighted than if he got rich. The way of serving Buddha was to feel his love. To ask of the rich or of a master was supplication, but we did ...
— The Foundations of Japan • J.W. Robertson Scott
... masterpieces of their kind. Easy and conversational, they touch upon no subject without leaving an indelible impression of the writer's originality; and the myriad matters of universal interest with which many of them are teeming will render them a precious legacy to the world, when the time shall have arrived ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 8, No. 47, September, 1861 • Various
... no means a bungler in his speech, but he was not fluent. He hesitated, and was at a loss for words, but whatever he wrote had a wonderful flow of harmony. The right word was always in the right place. Doubtless had he devoted as much attention to the acquirement of conversational ease, as he did to skill in writing, he would have been as successful in the one art as in the other. From early life it was his great ambition to be not merely a fine but a forcible writer. He did not seek splendor of diction, but that perspicuity, that transparency of ...
— Benjamin Franklin, A Picture of the Struggles of Our Infant Nation One Hundred Years Ago - American Pioneers and Patriots Series • John S. C. Abbott
... certain gentlemen, whom I see present, if they had not treated me as an impostor as soon as they saw me. Well,"—here he folded his hands on the ledge of the witness-box, and quietly fixing his eyes on the examining counsel, proceeded to speak in a calm, conversational tone—"the story is this: I left England about five-and-thirty years ago after certain domestic unpleasantnesses which I felt so much that I determined to give up all connection with my family and to start an absolutely new ...
— The Middle of Things • J. S. Fletcher
... famous. Lord Sheffield says that his conversation was superior to his writings, and in a circle of intimate friends it is probable that this was true. But in the free encounter of wit and argument, the same want of readiness that made him silent in parliament would most likely restrict his conversational power. It may be doubted if there is a striking remark or saying of his on record. His name occurs in Boswell, but nearly always as a persona muta. Certainly the arena where Johnson and Burke encountered each other was not fitted to bring out ...
— Gibbon • James Cotter Morison
... talk less than they did. They seldom "lay out" much for conversation. The conversational, like the epistolary age, is past; and we have come upon the age of periodical literature. People neither put their best thoughts and their available knowledge into their letters, nor keep them for evening conversation. The literary men of 1850 ...
— Harper's New Monthly Magazine, Volume 1, No. 4, September, 1850 • Various
... philanthropist, brought her young nephew, Robert Owen, who had come up from Oxford, and who was visibly excited and gratified by his first introduction to Miss Burgoyne. Hilda was very nice to him, and he sat on the edge of his chair, flushed with his conversational efforts and moving his chin about nervously over his high collar. Sarah Frost, the novelist, came with her husband, a very genial and placid old scholar who had become slightly deranged upon the subject of the fourth dimension. On other matters ...
— Alexander's Bridge and The Barrel Organ • Willa Cather and Alfred Noyes
... echoed aunt Cecilia, with her sweet smile: it was almost the only conversational effort Miss Wentworth ...
— The Perpetual Curate • Mrs [Margaret] Oliphant
... has seen us, for certain." She was not ashamed. What she was afraid of was some foolish or awkward complication. But she could not conceive how much her person had been appropriated by Heemskirk (in his thoughts). She tried to be conversational. ...
— 'Twixt Land & Sea • Joseph Conrad
... inquired Grandfather, "that there is no record nor tradition of your conversational abilities? It is an uncommon thing to meet with a ...
— Grandfather's Chair • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... house had the sound and look of social life, voices in conversational interchange and lights where Mary Nellen excitedly arrayed them. Alston Choate had come to call, and following him appeared an elderly lady whom Jeffrey greeted with more outward warmth than he had even shown his ...
— The Prisoner • Alice Brown
... hour to write, but must, on no account, attempt to leave the canvas, for the guard would instantly shoot me down. The guard in question had a doppel-ganger,—counterpart of himself in inflexibility,—and both were appendages of their muskets. He was not probably a sentient being, certainly not a conversational one. He knew the length of a stride, and the manual of bayonet exercise, but was, during his natural life, a blind idolater of a deity, called "Orders." The said "Orders," for the present evening, were walking, not talking, and he was dumb to all conciliatory ...
— Campaigns of a Non-Combatant, - and His Romaunt Abroad During the War • George Alfred Townsend
... Englishman, German or American in courtesy and ease of manner, simply because it is his nature. They are more social and less self-dependent than men of Teutonic origin, more demonstrative and less reticent; they are more communicative, conversational, and freer in their intercourse with each other in all respects; while men of German race are comparatively stiff, reserved, shy and awkward. At the same time, a people may exhibit ease, gayety, and sprightliness of character, and yet possess no deeper qualities calculated to inspire ...
— How to Get on in the World - A Ladder to Practical Success • Major A.R. Calhoon
... end of his conversational rope with Porter, other guests arrived. Among them was Dr. Lindsay, a famous specialist in throat diseases. The older doctor nodded genially to Sommers with the air of saying: 'I am so glad to find you here. This is the right place ...
— The Web of Life • Robert Herrick
... Whig: for Whiggism is a negation of all principle." But it was not often that his Toryism expressed itself in anything so like a chain of reasoning as this. As a rule, it appears rather in those conversational sallies, so pleasantly compounded of wrath, humour, and contempt, which are the most remembered thing about him. It provides some of the most characteristic; as the dry answer to Boswell who expressed his surprise at having met a Staffordshire ...
— Dr. Johnson and His Circle • John Bailey
... evening paper, and he had made a great deal of noise, yelling back at old Austin White, whose sleigh had conveyed him from the station to the house, a "S'long, Uncle!" pregnant with the friendliness of a conversational ride. He had scraped away his snow-heels with a somewhat sustained noise, born perhaps of shyness, and now, as he stood in the center of the prim, old-fashioned room, a thin, eager youngster not too warmly clad for the ...
— Jimsy - The Christmas Kid • Leona Dalrymple
... and Betty Gower slid away in the one-step, that most conversational of dances. But Jack couldn't find himself chatty with Betty Gower. She was graceful and clear-eyed, a vigorously healthy girl with a touch of color in her cheeks that came out of Nature's rouge pot. But MacRae was subtly conscious ...
— Poor Man's Rock • Bertrand W. Sinclair
... SAM HORROCKS is a hulking young man of a rather vacant expression. He is dressed in mechanic's blue dungarees. His face is oily and his clothes stained. He wears boots, not clogs. He mechanically takes a ball of oily black cotton-waste from his right pocket when in conversational difficulties and wipes his hands upon it. He has a red muffler round his neck without collar, and his shock affair hair is surmounted by a greasy black cap, which covers ...
— The Atlantic Book of Modern Plays • Various
... crafty leading questions to such of my fellow travelers as were over-sized and made mental notes of their answers for my own subsequent use. Since the Eighteenth Amendment put the nineteenth hole out of commission, prohibition and how to evade it are the commonest of all conversational topics among those moving about from place to place in America; but the subject of what a man eats, and more particularly what he eats for breakfast, runs it a close ...
— One Third Off • Irvin S. Cobb
... plane surfaces, arid integuments, hair like the fibrous covering of a cocoa-nut in gloss and suppleness as well as color, and voices at once thin and strenuous,—acidulous enough to produce effervescence with alkalis, and stridulous enough to sing duets with the katydids. I think our conversational soprano, as sometimes overheard in the cars, arising from a group of young persons, who may have taken the train at one of our great industrial centres, for instance,— young persons of the female sex, we will say, who have bustled in full- dressed, engaged in loud strident speech, and who, after ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 2, Number 9, July, 1858 • Various
... qualifications for the festivities of Christmastide and New Year, there is one which is, perhaps, not so generally recognised as it might be. Some of us are welcomed to the bright fireside or the groaning table on the score of our social and conversational qualities. At many and many a cheery board, poverty is the only stipulation that is made. I mean not now that the guests shall occupy the unenviable position of "poor relations," but, in the large-hearted charity that so widely prevails at that festive season, the need of a dinner is being ...
— Mystic London: - or, Phases of occult life in the metropolis • Charles Maurice Davies
... day. The monkey house at the Zoo. One spot of clear gray light falls on the front of one cage so that the interior can be seen. The other cages are vague, shrouded in shadow from which chatterings pitched in a conversational tone can be heard. On the one cage a sign from which the word "gorilla" stands out. The gigantic animal himself is seen squatting on his haunches on a bench in much the same attitude as Rodin's "Thinker." YANK enters from the left. Immediately a chorus of angry chattering and screeching breaks ...
— The Hairy Ape • Eugene O'Neill
... great Florentine. During his residence abroad, he made notes and criticisms on everything he met with that was excellent, much of which he subsequently embodied in his lectures before the Royal Academy. His talents, acquirements, and his great conversational powers made his society courted; and he formed some valuable acquaintances at Rome, particularly among the English nobility and gentry, who flocked there for amusement, and who heralded his fame at home. He also ...
— Anecdotes of Painters, Engravers, Sculptors and Architects, and Curiosities of Art, (Vol. 2 of 3) • Shearjashub Spooner
... ride; forced to wonder at some new and unexpected revelation of the mind and character of this western girl who was so interested in the reclamation work and so unconscious of her womanly power. He came quickly to look forward to their hours together and to plan and carry out many conversational experiments. Invariably he had ...
— The Winning of Barbara Worth • Harold B Wright
... with the air of a man coming at last into a deferred inheritance of conversational importance, "that is precisely what I want to speak ...
— Beasts and Super-Beasts • Saki
... would halloo and shout at the poor oxen and lay on the whip; but father wouldn't let me swear at them. Let me say here that I later discontinued this foolish fashion of driving, and always talked to my oxen in a conversational tone ...
— Ox-Team Days on the Oregon Trail • Ezra Meeker
... harder-working section of the middle class, and has hereditary sympathies with the checkered life of the people. He gets together the working men in his parish on a Monday evening, and gives them a sort of conversational lecture on useful practical matters, telling them stories, or reading some select passages from an agreeable book, and commenting on them; and if you were to ask the first labourer or artisan in Tripplegate what sort ...
— Scenes of Clerical Life • George Eliot
... English painfully, unforgivably correct. A language should be like an easy shoe on a flexible foot, but to one unused to it, it proves rather a splint on a broken limb. The stranger stalked about in conversational splints until they arrived at Isaac Jackson's door. Then giving his guide a dime, he dismissed him with a courtly ...
— The heart of happy hollow - A collection of stories • Paul Laurence Dunbar
... that play so large a part in that life which so appealed to her; and, with Phil's ever-ready and hearty endorsement of Patches, she felt safe in permitting the friendship to develop. And Patches, quietly observing, with now and then a conversational experiment—at which game he was an adepts—came to understand, almost as well as if he had been told, Phil's love for Kitty and her attitude toward the cowboy—her one-time schoolmate and sweetheart. Many times when the three were together, and the talk, ...
— When A Man's A Man • Harold Bell Wright
... other's foreheads "communing," I tug the white hairs from my head and curse till my asthma brings me the blessed relief of suffocation. In our old day such a gathering talked pure drivel and "rot," mostly, but better that, a thousand times, than these dreary conversational funerals that oppress our spirits in this ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... of all, that week was one of the happiest in my life. The brothers were both men of enough ability and cultivation to be pleasant talkers, and Lucy could perform adequately the part of conversational accompanist, which, socially speaking, is all that is required of a woman. The meals and evenings passed quickly and agreeably; the mornings I spent in unending gossips with Lucy, or in games with the children, two bright boys of five and six years ...
— The Lock and Key Library • Julian Hawthorne, Ed.
... know Balzac, my friend,' went on the young man in a conversational tone, 'or I would tell you that, like Rastignac, war is declared between ourselves and society; but if you have not the knowledge you have the will, and that is enough for me. Come, let us make the ...
— Madame Midas • Fergus Hume
... she visibly started at sight of me and my Z. I explained that I had cut myself shaving. I said, with an attempt at lightness, that shy men ought always to cut themselves shaving: it made such a good conversational opening. "But surely," she said after a pause, "you don't cut yourself on purpose?" She was an abysmal fool. I didn't think so at the time. She was Lady Thisbe Crowborough. This fact hallowed her. That we ...
— Seven Men • Max Beerbohm
... in English, "forbears," in the sense of ancestors. The good old English phrase "with child," which finds its analogues in many other languages, has, through false modesty, been almost driven out of literature, as it has been out of conversational language, by pregnant, which comes to us from the Latins, who also used gravidus,—a word we now apply only to animals, especially dogs and ants,—and enceinte, borrowed from French, and referring to the ancient custom of girding a woman who was with child. ...
— The Child and Childhood in Folk-Thought • Alexander F. Chamberlain
... could still have the arm-chair or the sofa, and hear, or not hear, as the case might be. But when any effort was necessary—when she must interest herself, or seem to interest herself in her work, or when Arthur brought any one home with him, making it necessary for Graeme to be hospitable and conversational, then it was very bad indeed. She might get through very well at the time with it all, but a miserable night was sure to follow, and she could only toss about through the slow ...
— Janet's Love and Service • Margaret M Robertson
... face. The part is a part for the voice, and it is only in "Phedre" that one can hear that orchestra, her voice, in all its variety of beauty. In her modern plays, plays in prose, she is condemned to use only a few of the instruments of the orchestra: an actress must, in such parts, be conversational, and for how much beauty or variety is there room in modern conversation? But here she has Racine's verse, along with Racine's psychology, and the language has nothing more to offer the voice of a tragic actress. She seems to speak her words, her lines, with a kind of joyful ...
— Plays, Acting and Music - A Book Of Theory • Arthur Symons
... of Sallust is characterised by the use of old words and forms (especially in the speeches). He makes use of alliteration, extensively employs the Historic Infinitive, and shows a partiality for conversational expressions which from a literary point of view are archaic. His abrupt unperiodic style of writing (rough periods without particles of connexion) has won for Sallust his reputation for brevity. His style ...
— Helps to Latin Translation at Sight • Edmund Luce
... finish of Caird or Guthrie; while his composition and style are neither so graceful nor so polished as those of Spurgeon or Newman Hall. He makes no attempt at nicely rounded periods, or subtle verbal distinctions. But he has other qualities entirely his own. His speech is homely, familiar, almost conversational. There is no "darkening of counsel with vain words." He is not only easily understood, but it is difficult, even on the most recondite points, to misunderstand him. What he states in the plainest possible phraseology, he renders still more ...
— Western Worthies - A Gallery of Biographical and Critical Sketches of West - of Scotland Celebrities • J. Stephen Jeans
... in the wilderness, where the anomalous pair lived in some respects like other people. They had seats in church, and social gatherings—Wednesday "At Homes," to which the celebrity of their brilliant conversational powers attracted the brightest spirits of the northern capital, among them Sir William Hamilton, Sir David Browster, John Wilson, De Quincey, forgiven for his review, and above all Jeffrey, a friend, though of opposite character, nearly as ...
— Thomas Carlyle - Biography • John Nichol
... period elapsed, when he was back again upon his twig on the tall elm. He had certainly not exhausted his strength or conversational music-powers in that round of morning visits, for he renewed, then and there, his merriest notes, quite in the old style; and after this prelude, by way of making sure that the course was clear, he ...
— The Story of a Dewdrop • J. R. Macduff
... see more of each other socially, not in grand fetes, tiresome dinners, idle pomposities, but in simple and hospitable greetings, in frequent, unrestrained, and easy commune. She must learn to take a conversational part in the great questions of the day, soothing asperities, and bringing hearts together as she alone can; for women possess naturally the secret of society. Let us not ask in what rank men and ...
— Continental Monthly, Vol. 4, No 3, September 1863 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy • Various
... Timothy Fuller, formerly a lawyer of Boston, but more recently a resident of Cambridge. She was remarkable for her thorough intellectual cultivation, being familiar with both the ancient and most of the modern languages and their literature—for the vigor and natural strength of her mind—for her conversational powers, and for her enthusiastic devotion to letters and art. She was at Rome during the recent revolution, and took the deepest interest in the struggles of that day. She had been for some time engaged upon a work on Italy, which it is feared has perished with her. Her husband and child were lost ...
— Harper's New Monthly Magazine, Volume 1, No. 3, August, 1850. • Various
... morning after his strange discovery, and he and Bob Wade had not seen each other since. And now Bernald, moved by an irresistible instinct of postponement, had waited for his companion to bring up Winterman's name, and had even executed several conversational diversions in the hope of delaying its mention. For how could one talk of Winterman with the thought of ...
— Tales Of Men And Ghosts • Edith Wharton
... events were happening at Vivey, the person whose name excited the curiosity and the conversational powers of the villagers—Marie-Julien de Buxieres—ensconced in his unpretentious apartment in the Rue Stanislaus, Nancy, still pondered over the astonishing news contained in the Auberive notary's first letter. The announcement of his ...
— A Woodland Queen, Complete • Andre Theuriet
... hand of a young woman is sought in marriage, she should look beyond the mere personal accomplishments of dress, manners, and conversational powers of him who would make her his wife. Many an individual who has the appearance and manners of a gentleman, is, in reality, a black-hearted villain—a marriage with, whom would seal their wretchedness for life. ...
— Golden Steps to Respectability, Usefulness and Happiness • John Mather Austin
... is to awaken interest in the female breast, to make the heart of lovely woman go pit-pat, as her eyes read the words one's pen has written. Even in drawing-rooms and boudoirs, it seems, bright eyes have marked these attempts to teach a correct conversational manner to those who engage in game-shooting. Here is one letter of the hundreds that Mr. Punch has one by one pressed to his gallant lips with an emotion that might, perhaps, not have been expected from ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 103, November 12, 1892 • Various
... host, and immediately surrounded. In the close press of friends she did not notice the strangers; time was too short and they were too many. A lord of her acquaintance, who still hoped to make her his lady, took her into dinner, and called upon all her powers of wit and repartee to meet his conversational tactics during the meal. It was an exhilarating encounter, and of sufficient interest to keep her "eyes in the boat". Moreover, the table was immense, and the chief of the strangers sitting on her side of ...
— Sisters • Ada Cambridge
... attempted it before, and Gongora afterward carried it to much greater lengths; but the idea never succeeded in Castilian to an extent nearly so great as it did in France, for example; and to-day the best poetical diction does not differ greatly from good conversational language. ...
— Modern Spanish Lyrics • Various
... know. She will say that she is not well herself; that the breeze from the river does her good; that she loves nature, and sleeps better after a ramble under the stars. I cannot disconcert her—not for long—and I cannot compete with her in volubility and conversational address, so I will continue to play a ...
— The Forsaken Inn - A Novel • Anna Katharine Green
... disturbance, for the cottager, to whom the deceased was as the apple of her eye, may make complaint of the keeper to his master. My friend SYKES, one of the best keepers I know, once related to me an incident of this nature. As it may help to explain the nature of keepers, and throw light on the conversational method to be adopted with them, I here set down the winged words ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Volume 104, January 28, 1893 • Various
... think anything can happen." He smiled. "If anything does, and you are conscious enough to know it, you can call my butler by means of an electrical device I have perfected simply by speaking his name, Peter, in an ordinary conversational voice. But I don't see how anything can ...
— The Chamber of Life • Green Peyton Wertenbaker
... loungers of the lobby, all eyes were turned in that direction. There were salutations; the introduction of Mr. Canning to Mrs. Heth; inquiries after Miss Heth's health. Quite easily the square party resolved itself into two conversational halves. Mrs. Heth, it was clear from the outset, preferred Willie Kerr's talk above any other obtainable at that time and place. She was, and ...
— V. V.'s Eyes • Henry Sydnor Harrison
... related to the family, and was oppressed with the thought that he was fast losing the welcome given him on his father's account. But in a few moments Annie rallied and made unwonted efforts to banish the general embarrassment, and with partial success, for Gregory had tact and good conversational powers if he chose to exert them. When, soon after, they adjourned to the ...
— Opening a Chestnut Burr • Edward Payson Roe
... the book is more of a descriptive than conversational style, as it is presumed that the pupil, after having finished the previous books of the series, will have formed the habit of easy intonation and ...
— New National Fourth Reader • Charles J. Barnes and J. Marshall Hawkes
... Stepping backward now and running both hands deep into his pockets, he dropped his oratorical tone, and, falling easily into the conversational, continued: ...
— Moriah's Mourning and Other Half-Hour Sketches • Ruth McEnery Stuart
... to recite in a plain, conversational way some of my personal experiences and individual observations extending over a period of thirty years of public life, during nearly nineteen years of which we have had equal suffrage ...
— The History of Woman Suffrage, Volume V • Ida Husted Harper
... ridiculous midshipmen, have, in the eyes of the girl whom he has come to see, a reputation that he can never win. They're in the Service; they're so dashing; they're so charmingly extravagant; they're so tremendous in face of an emergency that their conversational limitations of "Yes" and "No" are hailed as brilliant flights of genius. Their inane anecdotes, their pointless observations are positively courted. It is they who retire to the conservatory with the divine Violet, whose face is like the Venus of Milo's, whose hair (one hears) ...
— Not George Washington - An Autobiographical Novel • P. G. Wodehouse
... went to some theatre, but always ended up at the big cafe on the Grands Boulevards. I wish the reader to know that it was not alone the gaiety which drew me there; aside from that I had a laudable purpose. I had purchased an English-French conversational dictionary, and I went there every night to take a language lesson. I used to get three or four of the young women who frequented the place at a table and buy beer and cigarettes for them. In return ...
— The Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man • James Weldon Johnson
... be weak but once, but you will be audacious many times, madam," Newman answered. "I didn't come however, for conversational purposes. I came to say this, simply: that if you will write immediately to your daughter that you withdraw your opposition to her marriage, I will take care of the rest. You don't want her to turn nun—you know more about the ...
— The American • Henry James
... incidentally mentioned the barber in a comparison of professional temperaments, I hope no other trade will take offence, or look upon it as an incivility done to them if I say, that in courtesy, humanity, and all the conversational and social graces which "gladden life," I esteem no profession comparable to his. Indeed, so great is the goodwill which I bear to this useful and agreeable body of men, that, residing in one of the Inns of Court (where the best specimens of them are to ...
— The Works of Charles Lamb in Four Volumes, Volume 4 • Charles Lamb
... Buck, with a warning cantankerous inflection, firmly and almost brutally reproving this conversational delinquency of George's. "Rule it out, young man! We don't want any of that sort of mountebanking in England. We ...
— The Roll-Call • Arnold Bennett
... with a healthy tan, the little waist, the slender but perfect figure, and the toe of a dainty shoe held me in an aphasic spell. But the laughing eyes brought me out of it, and I made one of the most brilliant conversational efforts of my career. ...
— John Henry Smith - A Humorous Romance of Outdoor Life • Frederick Upham Adams
... saw a very tall and heavy gentleman, dressed in black, who sat, wholly at ease, on the table! One hand was in his pocket, one foot swung clear of the ground; and he was not preaching, but talking in an easy, conversational tone to some forty young men who sat intent on his words. I was too excited to listen to what he was saying, I was making a vain attempt to classify him. But I remember the thought, for it struck me with force,—that ...
— The Crossing • Winston Churchill
... that there may be much ability Shown in this sort of desultory rhyme; But there's a conversational facility, Which may round off an hour upon a time. Of this I'm sure at least, there's no servility In mine irregularity of chime, Which rings what's uppermost of new or hoary,[nn] Just as I feel ...
— The Works of Lord Byron, Volume 6 • Lord Byron
... before he was finally bumped protesting into bed. Theodore and Duncan prolonged their ablutions until the noise of shouting, splashing, and thumping in the bathroom brought Mother to the foot of the stairs. Rebecca was conversational. She lay with her slender arms locked behind her head on the pillow, and talked, as Julie had talked on that memorable night five years ago. Margaret, restless in the hot darkness, wondering whether the maddening little shaft of light ...
— Mother • Kathleen Norris
... proud of his handiwork; so, this made him more conversational than anyone I had yet ...
— The White Squall - A Story of the Sargasso Sea • John Conroy Hutcheson
... half of Shadrach, his son David, newly back from England and the study of metallurgy, and a Mr. Winscombe, come out to the Provinces in connection with the Maryland boundary dispute, accompanied by his wife. All this Howat Penny regarded with profound distaste; necessary social and conversational forms repelled him. And it annoyed his father when he sat, apparently morose, against the wall, or retired solitary to ...
— The Three Black Pennys - A Novel • Joseph Hergesheimer
... or stole it the moment he smelled Clara's special pot-pourri in the hall; and, though he sometimes threw it out of the railway-carriage window in returning to town, there was nothing remarkable about that. The conversational debauch of the first night's dinner—and, alas! there were only two even at Becket during a week-end—had undoubtedly revealed the feeling, which had set in of late, that there was nothing really wrong with the condition of the agricultural ...
— Forsyte Saga • John Galsworthy
... discontent. The second are subjects too heavy for children: your formal theology would be one of them, your judgments on some intricate subjects may be among them. It is seldom wise to announce negative injunctions, but we can make up our own minds to avoid the conversational poisons and, when they appear, it is always easy to push them out. Even when the unpleasant subject is so common to all and has been so impressive in the day's experience that it threatens to become the ...
— Religious Education in the Family • Henry F. Cope
... lives from some menacing calamity, they were very philosophical in spirit; and having got aboard of their own motion, and being neither of them apparently the worse for the ordeal they had passed through, were of a light, conversational temper. ...
— The Best of the World's Classics, Restricted to Prose, Vol. X (of X) - America - II, Index • Various
... and turned her face away. "I was glad to come," she answered, after a pause. For a moment she trembled upon the verge of a confidence, then summoned all her conversational powers to ...
— Master of the Vineyard • Myrtle Reed
... were bandits they could scarcely be out banditting, for the two horsemen were talking in ordinary, conversational tones as they rode leisurely down to the ford. When they passed Lorraine, the horse nearest her shied against the other and was sworn at parenthetically for a fool. Against the skyline Lorraine saw the rider's form bulk squatty and ungraceful, ...
— The Quirt • B.M. Bower
... a good two weeks later that Olive Keltridge came into any actual contact with the new rector. At the Dennison dinner, she had been too busy in dodging the conversational assaults of the rector's lady to pay any great amount of attention to the rector himself. Since that time, she had viewed Brenton only with the height of the chancel steps between them. However, Olive was conscious that the man interested her, even ...
— The Brentons • Anna Chapin Ray
... labored at the symbolistic vision of Romanticism; preeminently a man of prose, he endeavored all his life to be a great poet. He mistook the responsive excitement produced by the ideas and visions of others for authentic inspiration, the vivacity of a sociable and conversational gift for the creative force of genius, and the immobility of obvious and established conventional judgments for an extraordinary soundness ...
— The German Classics of The Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, Vol. VII. • Various
... were fetched to go over the university, the honours of which were done us by the "grand master" in a blue and gold gown, assisted by two professors who spoke French admirably well. Aumale, being much more lettered and academic than myself, kept the conversational ball rolling brilliantly. The huge institution, in which professors and students alike seemed to me to know their work thoroughly, is admirably organised, and is venerated throughout the whole country on account of its great antiquity. To the Portuguese ...
— Memoirs • Prince De Joinville
... eloquence find spontaneous and unaffected expression through the same medium as might be employed in a deliberate definition of the nature of poetry. The various sets of lectures are pitched in the same conversational key and are found adequate to conveying a notion of the grandeur of Milton as well as of the familiarity ...
— Hazlitt on English Literature - An Introduction to the Appreciation of Literature • Jacob Zeitlin
... versatile and perhaps the most unstable of eighteenth century men of letters, was born in Ireland on November 10, 1728. At Trinity College, Dublin, he revealed three characteristics that clung to him throughout his career—high spirits, conversational brilliance, and inability to keep money in his pocket. After a spell of "philosophic vagabondage" on the Continent, he settled in London in 1756, earned money in various ways, and spent it all. "The Vicar of Wakefield," perhaps the greatest of all Goldsmith's ...
— The World's Greatest Books, Vol IV. • Editors: Arthur Mee and J.A. Hammerton
... spent much more than he had. He mingled freely in all the London circles of thirty years ago, whose glory is still fresh in the minds of most of us, and everywhere his talent as an improvisatore, and his conversational powers, ...
— The Wits and Beaux of Society - Volume 2 • Grace & Philip Wharton
... first conversational exchanges, was entirely that of the butler. From what I came to know of him later, I think he took an artistic pride in throwing himself into whatever role he had ...
— The Little Nugget • P.G. Wodehouse
... to stem her protests. She was of the blood,—her aunt's own niece. But whereas Medora Phillips sometimes "scrapped," as he called it, merely to promote social diversion and to keep the conversational ball a-rolling, this young person, a more vigorous organism, and with decided, even exaggerated ideas as to her dues... Well, the room was still full, and he ...
— Bertram Cope's Year • Henry Blake Fuller
... to keep the conversational bark on an even keel; the rocks were thick on every hand. Business, politics, and local affairs were all for obvious reasons tabooed. More than once they were near an upset, as when they began to talk ...
— The Fur Bringers - A Story of the Canadian Northwest • Hulbert Footner
... will excuse any conversational breaks that I make—thanks, I knew you would—got that sneaking little respect and agreeable feeling toward even an X, haven't you? You see, a tainted bill doesn't have much chance to acquire a correct form of expression. I never ...
— The Trimmed Lamp and Others • O Henry
... table, while Mrs. Simpson served them, going back and forth to the little kitchen adjoining for fresh supplies of hot food. Mr. Grayson did most of the talking, and it was addressed in an easy, confidential manner to old Daniel Simpson. The candidate's gift of conversational talk was equal to his gift of platform oratory, but never before had Harley known him to be so interesting and so attractive. He fairly radiated with the quality called personal magnetism, and soon the old man ate ...
— The Candidate - A Political Romance • Joseph Alexander Altsheler
... obstinate cases, as the advertisements say) be taught. Let us suppose therefore, that she dances well, that she has a certain degree of looks, that she is fairly intelligent. The next most important thing, after dancing well, is to be unafraid, and to look as though she were having a good time. Conversational cleverness is of no account in a ballroom; some of the greatest belles ever known have been as stupid as sheep, but they have had happy dispositions and charming and un-self-conscious manners. There is one thing ...
— Etiquette • Emily Post
... subject, beyond giving the terms of the official resignation and some scanty addenda thereto; but enough is said generally by Busch concerning Bismarck's conversations to show that the Chancellor was deeply mortified by his dismissal. Bismarck indeed expressly denies this in a conversational statement quoted by an able Bismarckian writer of our own time, Dr. Paul Liman; but in view of subsequent events and statements the denial can hardly be taken as sincere. The passage referred to ...
— William of Germany • Stanley Shaw
... stay?" Bassett had tried to keep his tone carefully conversational, but he saw that it was not necessary. She was glad of a ...
— The Breaking Point • Mary Roberts Rinehart
... justice; I can bear witness to having in all loyalty and loving-kindness done so myself a thousand times. Nor is this even the worst. For your living human being has luckily a wonderful knack of reasserting his reality; and the hero or victim of such conversational manipulation will take your breath away by suddenly entering the room or entering into your consciousness as hale and whole as old AEson stepping out of Medea's cooking-pot. But opinions, impressions, principles, standards, possess, alas! no such recuperative virtue; ...
— Hortus Vitae - Essays on the Gardening of Life • Violet Paget, AKA Vernon Lee
... She had already suggested that madness was the real reason of the seclusion of the tenants at the Warren. Cashel saw the glance, and intercepted it by turning to her and saying, with an attempt at conversational ease, ...
— Cashel Byron's Profession • George Bernard Shaw
... to dinner. She never ate before a seance. And although we tried to keep the conversational ball floating airily, there was not the usual effervescence of the Neighborhood Club dinners. One and all, we were waiting, ...
— Sight Unseen • Mary Roberts Rinehart
... parlance had been given yesterday, the day before, would be given today, tomorrow, and the next day. It was the boss item on the conversational programme ...
— My Brilliant Career • Miles Franklin
... The painters appeared to be well matched. Hoppner had the advantage of a start of ten years, though this was nearly balanced by the very early age at which Lawrence obtained many of his successes. Hoppner was also a handsome man, of refined address and polished manner; he, too, possessed great conversational powers, while in the matter of wit and humour he was probably in advance of his antagonist. He was well read—'one of the best-informed painters of his time,' Mr. Cunningham informs us—frank, out-spoken, ...
— Art in England - Notes and Studies • Dutton Cook
... the woods a bit. I tied her over a stump and broke two sticks across the first seat of Tranest. Got the idea from Mihul sort of," Trigger added vaguely. "When I picked up a third stick, Lyad got awfully anxious to keep things at just a fast conversational level. We kept ...
— Legacy • James H Schmitz
... which might form part of The Alf Laylah. "On that night (we read in Chap. vi. 1) could not the King sleep, and he commanded to bring the book of records of the chronicles; and they were read before the King." The Rawi would declaim the recitative somewhat in conversational style; he would intone the Saj'a or prose-rhyme and he would chant to the twanging of the Rabab, a one-stringed viol, the poetical parts. Dr. Scott[FN301] borrows from the historian of Aleppo a life-like picture of the Story-teller. "He recites walking to and fro in the middle of the coffee-room, ...
— The Book of the Thousand Nights and a Night, Volume 10 • Richard F. Burton
... very quickly on closer acquaintance. In the first place he looked well in evening dress, carrying himself with a sort of shy, kind air that became him immensely. At table he developed the greatest of conversational gifts—that of the appreciative and intelligent listener. I heard one of the guests asking Eleanor who was that charming young man. Freddy and I hugged each other (I mean metaphorically, of course) and gloried in his success. In the presence of an admirer (such ...
— The Wit and Humor of America, Volume VI. (of X.) • Various
... leave of Jonas Lie, a word about his style is in order. Style, as such, counts for very little with him. Yet he has a distinctly individual and vigorous manner of utterance, though a trifle rough, perhaps, abrupt, elliptic, and conversational. Mere decorative adjectives and clever felicities of phrase he scorns. All scientific and social phenomena—all that we include under the term modern progress—command his most intense and absorbed attention. Having since 1882 been a resident of Paris (except ...
— Essays on Scandinavian Literature • Hjalmar Hjorth Boyesen
... dog's chief value is conversational. At afternoon teas such an animal is a wonderful resource after you have exhausted the picture-shows, the theatres, and all the scandals. You can lead off about his pedigree. "He's champion bred on both sides," always sounds well. A funny ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 104, April 15, 1893 • Various
... the easy or conversational style) that you and I belong to a happy minority. We are the sons of the hunters and the wandering singers, and from our boyhood nothing ever gave us greater pleasure than to stand under lonely skies in forest clearings, ...
— On Nothing & Kindred Subjects • Hilaire Belloc
... in him a most affable companion, pleasant, witty, and gifted with great conversational powers. Five days were thus spent breakfasting at well-known restaurants, driving in the Bois, and dining at clubs of which the doctor was a member, while the evenings were passed at the banker's. The doctor played cards with his host, ...
— Caught In The Net • Emile Gaboriau
... in February, 1858, before the Supreme Court, an ungainly appearing man, called Abe Lincoln. He was arguing the application of a statute of limitations to a defective tax title to land. He talked very much in a conversational way to the judges, and they gave attention, and in a Socratic way the discussion went on. I did not see anything to specially attract attention to Mr. Lincoln, save that he was awkward, ungainly in build, more than plain in features and dress, his clothes not fitting ...
— Slavery and Four Years of War, Vol. 1-2 • Joseph Warren Keifer
... or three conversational lessons, let pupils begin their diaries (composition books). In these may be written descriptions of what they see, hear, or read about the ...
— A Little Journey to Puerto Rico - For Intermediate and Upper Grades • Marian M. George
... the suggestion, Anna Sergyevna, and for your flattering opinion of my conversational talents. But I think I have already been moving too long in a sphere which is not my own. Flying fishes can hold out for a time in the air; but soon they must splash back into the water; allow me, too, to paddle in my ...
— Fathers and Children • Ivan Sergeevich Turgenev
... the world, too! I have gone quite through with it, and was thinking to have accomplished that pleasure a second time before I wrote to thank you; but Martin Burney came in the night (while we were out) and made holy theft of it: but we expect restitution in a day or two. It is the noblest conversational poem [1] I ever read,—a day in heaven. The part (or rather main body) which has left the sweetest odor on my memory (a bad term for the remains of an impression so recent) is the "Tales of the Churchyard"—the ...
— The Best Letters of Charles Lamb • Charles Lamb
... discovery of the new method, during a conversation between Sir John Herschel and Sir David Brewster, is one of the most cleverly conceived (though also one of the absurdest) passages in the pamphlet. 'About three years ago, in the course of a conversational discussion with Sir David Brewster upon the merits of some ingenious suggestions by the latter, in his article on Optics in the "Edinburgh Encyclopaedia," p. 644, for improvements in Newtonian reflectors, Sir John Herschel ...
— Myths and Marvels of Astronomy • Richard A. Proctor
... as children in the near advent of Christmas, and finally book-shops in which to browse at his pleasure. It was interesting to hear him talk about city life. One of his quaint mannerisms consisted in modifying a well-known quotation to suit his conversational needs. 'Why, sir,' he would remark, 'Fleet Street has a very animated appearance, but I think the full tide of human existence is at the corner of ...
— The Bibliotaph - and Other People • Leon H. Vincent
... times. She remarked on this fact, with her bright, engaging smile. Her manner was perfectly respectful, yet free from servility. It would not have occurred to her that any one could have considered her little conversational outburst a liberty; and she proceeded to introduce the old man as ...
— The Guests Of Hercules • C. N. Williamson and A. M. Williamson
... would not go, as I could not have asked for what I wanted on account of my inability to speak French; my only hope, therefore, was to find a shop or store that displayed in the window what I wanted, so that I could make my purchase by gestures. I had provided myself with a Conversational Guide Book, in London, containing the French, Italian and German equivalents of English words and phrases, most necessary to the tourist; but the French pronunciation is so difficult that I could after all not make myself understood except by pointing out these ...
— The Youthful Wanderer - An Account of a Tour through England, France, Belgium, Holland, Germany • George H. Heffner
... place, but because a smattering knowledge is bought at too high a price of ignorance of more valuable things. German, French, and Italian should be allowed and provided for by native teachers and by conversational methods if desired, ...
— Youth: Its Education, Regimen, and Hygiene • G. Stanley Hall
... and even this effort quite exhausts me. Art and politics! What, in the name of heaven, do I care for art and politics, with the knife at my throat? I only utilize these things; yes, I utilize them for conversational purposes, in order to deceive others as to my true, incessant and miserable preoccupations. Laughable, is it not? Why don't you smile, Monsieur—you, who have never ...
— Fountains In The Sand - Rambles Among The Oases Of Tunisia • Norman Douglas
... in the course of time Gertrude grew a little tired of Paul's ceaseless devotion. It is quite likely that she sometimes found him in the way, and she was deprived of her best conversational theme. It was of no use to try to revive the legend of the Isolated Soul any longer, because of the frequent and earnest confession which had been made of the final discovery of a spiritual rapport ...
— Despair's Last Journey • David Christie Murray
... 1875, the bill was considered in the House of Representatives and, after a very brief conversational debate, passed by the vote of yeas 136, ...
— Recollections of Forty Years in the House, Senate and Cabinet - An Autobiography. • John Sherman
... family there were, for conversational purposes, but one set of villains in the world—the mutineers of ...
— For the Term of His Natural Life • Marcus Clarke
... could no longer see each other, and the little gestures and significant glances which had supplemented their few words, and made up for the lack of better conversational facilities were ...
— The Frontiersmen • Charles Egbert Craddock
... himself, has rather a chilling rhetoric, it is not therefore certain that there is no good work or fine feeling in him. Did not an immortal physicist and interpreter of hieroglyphs write detestable verses? Has the theory of the solar system been advanced by graceful manners and conversational tact? Suppose we turn from outside estimates of a man, to wonder, with keener interest, what is the report of his own consciousness about his doings or capacity: with what hindrances he is carrying on his daily labors; what fading of hopes, or what deeper fixity of ...
— Middlemarch • George Eliot
... value to us," he said in a conversational tone. "I am talking this way to you because you can be of much more value as a willing ally than ...
— Highways in Hiding • George Oliver Smith
... not quite like Andrews who was not talkative. She made a conversational sort of remark after she ...
— The Head of the House of Coombe • Frances Hodgson Burnett
... her charming conversational powers kept all the company amused. I conceived that it would be possible to get used to her face, and to live with her without being disgusted. In the evening I talked about her to my housekeeper, who said that the beauty of her body and her mental endowments might be sufficient ...
— The Memoires of Casanova, Complete • Jacques Casanova de Seingalt
... of friends through this conversational difficulty. They think it is my dulness or my temper, when really it is only my refined mind, my subtlety of consideration. It seems to me that when I go to see a man, I go to see him—to enjoy his presence. If he is my friend, the sight of him healthy and happy is enough for me. I don't want ...
— Certain Personal Matters • H. G. Wells
... under circumstances and conditions which he began to comprehend and have an amiable contempt for, he became urbane and conversational, and a little amused to find navigation so simple, even when out ...
— The Dark Star • Robert W. Chambers
... Henry, had great conversational powers, and inherited from his father an eager and sanguine disposition. He was a very entertaining companion, but had perhaps less steadiness of purpose, certainly less success in life, than his brothers. He became a clergyman when middle-aged; and an allusion to his sermons ...
— Memoir of Jane Austen • James Edward Austen-Leigh
... from the viewpoint of the pupil rather than from that of the teacher or the scientist. The style is simple, clear, and conversational, yet the method is distinctly scientific, and the book has a cultural as well ...
— General Science • Bertha M. Clark
... of a select circle—the fight had begun. Even now she awoke sometimes at night with a shudder, having lived again in vivid dream that August afternoon in Newport Harbor, when she sat at her tea table facing the first ordeal. She had come through it. With what rare felicity had she scattered her conversational charms; with what skill had she played upon the pet failings and foibles of her guests; what unerring judgment had been hers, and memory of details, unfailing tact, and exquisite taste! A triumph, yes. And the first knowledge of it had come in a lingering hand clasp from the great man of ...
— Prince or Chauffeur? - A Story of Newport • Lawrence Perry
... Irving's request for another alteration in the scenery (he speaks with an utter absence of effort in a voice which can be heard at the other end of the theatre, although it does not appear to be raised above a conversational pitch), a middle-aged gentleman, attired in a frock coat, his brows carefully swathed in a white pocket handkerchief, comes forward, yardstick in hand, and measures the stage with great assiduity. When this has been done, Mr. Irving ...
— The Idler Magazine, Volume III, March 1893 - An Illustrated Monthly • Various
... gay young shooters, you who week by week suck wisdom and conversational ability from these columns, it is borne in upon me that for your benefit I must treat of the Smoking-room in its connection with shooting-parties. Thus, perhaps, you may learn not so much what you ought to say, as what you ought not to say, and your discretion shall ...
— Punch, Or The London Charivari, VOL. 103, November 26, 1892 • Various
... away for a little private talk with the skipper, but that gentleman was not in a conversational mood, and a sombre silence fell upon all until they were snugly berthed at Summercove, and the ladies, preceded by their luggage on a trolly, went off to look for lodgings. They sent down an hour later to say that they had found them, and that they were very clean and comfortable, but a little ...
— Sea Urchins • W. W. Jacobs
... went to hear him out of curiosity were swung by his personality into being supporters. He had always his own natural style of talk. Possessing a musical and clear voice, he never strained for effect, rarely used a rotund sentence, but talked to his audiences in a red-hot conversational kind of way, his heightened feelings finding expression in a sibilance which always touched the nerves of his hearers. He seldom interrupted interrupters, finding it more effective to let them speak and then to deal ...
— Lloyd George - The Man and His Story • Frank Dilnot
... being indeed heard without, inquiring of nobody in a blandly conversational tone as she advances: 'Eh? Indeed! Are you quite sure you saw my mother-of-pearl button-holder on the work-table in my room?' is at once solicited for walking leave, and graciously accords it. And soon the young couple go out of the Nuns' House, taking all precautions against the ...
— The Mystery of Edwin Drood • Charles Dickens
... of the strange inconsistencies of Mlle. de Lespinasse, she is doubly interesting to us as a type that contrasts strongly with that of her age. Her exquisite tact, her brilliant intellect, her conversational gifts, her personal charm made her the idol of the world in which she lived. Her influence was courted, her salon was the resort of the most distinguished men of the century, and while she loved to discuss the great social problems which her friends were trying to solve, she forgot none of the ...
— The Women of the French Salons • Amelia Gere Mason
... the wedding, ma'am," she said presently, in a purely conversational style, sitting in our little kitchen, and scrubbing the potatoes; "and such a lovely day for them." She proceeded to numerous other details, ...
— The Country of the Blind, And Other Stories • H. G. Wells
... many years he had been leading a healthy human life, living constantly in the open air, walking every day for eight or nine hours, eating sparingly, accepting every conversational opportunity, not even disdaining the discussion of possible work. And beyond mending a hole in his coat that he had made while negotiating barbed wire, with a borrowed needle and thread in a lodging house, he had done ...
— The History of Mr. Polly • H. G. Wells
... offended personality; while the third category had no existence at all, so far as I was concerned, since my contempt for them was too complete. This "comme il faut"-ness of mine lay, first and foremost, in proficiency in French, especially conversational French. A person who spoke that language badly at once aroused in me a feeling of dislike. "Why do you try to talk as we do when you haven't a notion how to do it?" I would seem to ask him with my most venomous and quizzing smile. The second condition ...
— Youth • Leo Tolstoy
... are of the most commanding character. Pity that such a handsome man, so active in everything that calls for the gun, the rod, the boat, the horse, the dog, should have been shorn of so essential a prerequisite as a leg. His conversational powers are quite extraordinary. I felt constantly as if I were in the presence of a lover of nature and natural things; a bon vivant perhaps, or an epicure, a Tom Moore, in some sense, whose day-dreams of heaven are mixed up with glowing ...
— Personal Memoirs Of A Residence Of Thirty Years With The Indian Tribes On The American Frontiers • Henry Rowe Schoolcraft
... to the day, and on the day, when Mr. Bounderby issued the weekly invitation recorded above. Mrs. Sparsit was in good spirits, and inclined to be conversational. ...
— Hard Times • Charles Dickens*
... his life in the two hours before the arrival of the noon express. The station agent was a sociable soul. He had a guinea-pig in a box, so delightful to observe that Elsmere forgot his desire for zwieback and became conversational. He told the agent the history of the polly-wogs he had raised "till they was all froggies, only one was deaded." He showed the place where he had cut his finger in the mower-lawn. He explained how fond he was of back-horse-saddle-riding, ...
— The Wide Awake Girls in Winsted • Katharine Ellis Barrett
... David standing in the narrow doorway between the two rooms, nodding this way, nodding that, in a futile effort to keep a semblance of time among the boisterous worshipers. A short reading from the Bible, a very brief prayer, a short, conversational story-talk from David, and the meeting broke up in ...
— Sunny Slopes • Ethel Hueston
... the old rgime who entered the Emperor's court were soon wearied by the inflexible severity of its discipline. The court, moreover, was very splendid. The Faubourg Saint Germain brought to it its politeness and conversational charm. For his part, Napoleon speedily assumed the manners of a European sovereign, while preserving his martial character. He was at the same time Emperor and commander-in-chief. Yet the military element did not control his court; the civil ...
— The Court of the Empress Josephine • Imbert de Saint-Amand |
