"Prim" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... cried the lieutenant angrily. "How can you be so absurd, Smithson! it was her prim ...
— The Queen's Scarlet - The Adventures and Misadventures of Sir Richard Frayne • George Manville Fenn
... kept away. He had even left two of her letters—the rather formal letters which had come to mean so very much in his life—unanswered. A fortnight had gone by, and then there had reached him a prim little note from Mrs. Pomeroy, asking him why he had not been to see them lately. There was a postscript: "If you do not come soon, you will not see my daughter. She has not been well, and we are thinking of sending her up to Scotland, to friends who ...
— Defenders of Democracy • Militia of Mercy
... presented himself again at the Temperance Hotel, inquired for Mr. Bovill, and was shown by the prim maid-servant into the drawing-room, where he found Mr. Bovill seated amicably at breakfast with his niece, who of course was still in boy's clothing, having no other costume at hand. To Kenelm's great relief, Mr. Bovill rose from the table ...
— Kenelm Chillingly, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... not speak to him during the entire meal. She sat prim and erect, barely glanced at him, and as Frank arose from the table, half choked with the unwelcome food he had eaten, he resolved to speak ...
— The Boys of Bellwood School • Frank V. Webster
... about in the most trampish manner, and poppies, because they are privileged characters, spring up as they please. Then, as though the two of them were not sufficient California gold, there is the faithful gaillardia with its prim little sunflower-faces smiling up ...
— Vignettes of San Francisco • Almira Bailey
... The prim and the precise, or the exact, the homogeneous, the single, the puritanic, the mathematic, the pure, the perfect. We can have illusion of this state—but only by disregarding its infinite denials. It's a drop of milk afloat in acid that's ...
— The Book of the Damned • Charles Fort
... paper-maker's art and shocking to man's aesthetic feelings. Now from the first Fan had spontaneously written a small hand, with fine web-like lines and flourishes, which gave it a very curious and delicate appearance; for, unlike the sloping prim Italian hand, it was all irregular, and the longer curves and strokes crossed and recrossed through words above and beneath, so that, while easy enough to read, at first sight it looked less like writing than an intricate ...
— Fan • Henry Harford
... town. There are no green lawns, no twisted yews, no weeping willows; the few fir trees hold themselves stiffly up, as though in pride at this triumph of the vegetable over the animal; and the great bushes of faded geranium only throw into relief the regular lines of limestone mounds, each with its prim wooden cross of advertisement. Always an ugly and a dreary place, it was, when I saw it a few days after the relief, more dreary than ever; for the sun, whose presence makes the difference of a season in this bare land, was hidden behind dark stacks of ...
— The Relief of Mafeking • Filson Young
... the prim English lady whom Perlet was acting with such ludicrous effect, nor hear the English-French that had filled the house with roars of laughter; instead of all this, he beheld himself hurrying from the Rue Richer, hailing a cab on the Boulevard, bargaining with the man to ...
— Library of the World's Best Mystery and Detective Stories • Edited by Julian Hawthorne
... to banish the sting of Ruby's postscript. Diana's letter contained a little too much Fred, but was otherwise crowded and crossed with items of interest, and Anne almost felt herself back in Avonlea while reading it. Marilla's was a rather prim and colorless epistle, severely innocent of gossip or emotion. Yet somehow it conveyed to Anne a whiff of the wholesome, simple life at Green Gables, with its savor of ancient peace, and the steadfast abiding ...
— Anne Of The Island • Lucy Maud Montgomery
... before he began to feel any interest in Mary. He knew nothing of her save as a nice-looking maid his wife had got—rather a prim-looking puss, he would have said, had he had occasion to describe her. What Mary knew of him was merely the reflection of him in the mind of his wife; but, the first time she saw him, she felt she would rather not have to speak ...
— Mary Marston • George MacDonald
... it, of course not! We were brought up very particularly in Miss Simpson's, I can assure you." This with a prim tightening of her lips and a severity that any other than our dreamer would have understood. To Nan there came a delight in this play with an intelligence she knew so keen, though different from her own. ...
— Gilian The Dreamer - His Fancy, His Love and Adventure • Neil Munro
... indulge less frequently in his violent outbreaks of furious passion, and to have laid aside his rugged untamable fierceness, since his marriage. There he sat beside his beautiful Annunciata, spruce and prim, in the richest, gayest apparel, smirking and smiling, challenging in the sweet glances of his grey eyes,—from which a treacherous tear stole from time to time,—those who were present to say if any one of them could boast of such a wife as his. Instead of speaking in the rough arrogant tone ...
— Weird Tales, Vol. II. • E. T. A. Hoffmann
... Smooth-it-away, as soon as he could speak for laughing. "And charming young ladies! Why, my dear fellow, they are old maids, every soul of them—prim, starched, dry, and angular; and not one of them, I will venture to say, has altered so much as the fashion of her gown since ...
— Mosses from an Old Manse and Other Stories • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... told them, laughingly, to "remember him if they did not think him past praying for." During his breakfast he recalled the fact that Madge was uncommonly well dressed. "She hasn't in externals," he thought, "the provincial air that one might expect, although her ideas are not only provincial, but prim, obtained, no doubt, from some goody-good books that she has read in the remote region wherein she has developed so remarkably. She has some stilted ideal of womanhood which she is seeking to attain, and the more unnatural the ideal, the ...
— A Young Girl's Wooing • E. P. Roe
... to him, Yet he most Christian-like laments his death: And for my selfe, Foe as he was to me, Might liquid teares, or heart-offending groanes, Or blood-consuming sighes recall his Life; I would be blinde with weeping, sicke with grones, Looke pale as Prim-rose with blood-drinking sighes, And all to haue the Noble Duke aliue. What know I how the world may deeme of me? For it is knowne we were but hollow Friends: It may be iudg'd I made the Duke away, So shall my name with Slanders tongue be wounded, And Princes Courts be fill'd ...
— The First Folio [35 Plays] • William Shakespeare
... rent in the gingham going up the cedar-tree, but that was nothing to what followed. She entered through Amelia's window, her prim little room, to find herself confronted by Amelia's mother in a wrapper, and her two grandmothers. Grandmother Stark had over her arm a beautiful white embroidered dress. The two old ladies had entered the room in order to lay ...
— The Copy-Cat and Other Stories • Mary E. Wilkins Freeman
... still in the draw-dining-room—a fantastic apartment crowded with nouveau-art furniture all out of drawing, like daddy longlegs—when the woman tapped and peeped in. If I had gone upstairs to my own top-floor room, I'm sure, being a prim person, she would have considered it improper to summon me down, and I should have missed ...
— Secret History Revealed By Lady Peggy O'Malley • C. N. Williamson and A. M. Williamson
... are not to think that the Egyptian children's life was all teaching and prim behaviour. When Tahuti got his holidays, he would sometimes go out with his father and mother and sister on a fishing or fowling expedition. If they were going fishing, the little papyrus skiff was launched, and the party paddled away, armed ...
— Peeps at Many Lands: Ancient Egypt • James Baikie
... reason why we shouldn't stay as long as we wish. You are surely not so prim that you ...
— Mistress Anne • Temple Bailey
... especially by the county folk; and as Sydney was young, handsome, and a good talker, he soon made himself popular amongst them. For himself, he did not find the occasion interesting, save as a means of social success. Most of the men were dull, and the women prim and proper: there were not more than two pretty girls in ...
— Name and Fame - A Novel • Adeline Sergeant
... falling to the ground. There are quaint gardens everywhere, with sometimes an entrance arched with iron gracefully wrought by some forgotten colonial Quentin Matsys, and always with their paths bordered by prim and fragrant box, and grass that keeps rich and green in an Old World way, by virtue of some secret of growth caught from fresher centuries than ours. If your steps have the right magic in them, you ...
— A Study Of Hawthorne • George Parsons Lathrop
... was not prim. She knew too much of the world to be easily shocked, in the old conventional sense. Besides, her Bleary Street work had brought her into contact with girls who had gone to the bad, and she had not found them different from other girls. If ...
— The Dust Flower • Basil King
... prefaced sotto voce with, 'What a child it is!' But she was a good kindly lady, who had the faculty of teaching, and of forestalling rebellion; and her little thin corkscrew curls, touched with gray, her pale eyes, prim black silk apron, and sandalled shoes, rise before me full of happy associations of tender kindness and patience. She was wise, too, in her own simple way. When nurse would have forewarned her of Clarence's failings in his own hearing, she cut the ...
— Chantry House • Charlotte M. Yonge
... do so; because it was part of a lady's accoutrements, so to speak. She had also a cushion, which was necessary, if not for comfort, yet for her sense of being fully equipped, placed behind her back when she sat down. But with all this she was not a formal or prim person. She was a woman who had not produced a great deal of effect in life; one of those who are not accustomed to have their advice taken, or to find that their opinion has much weight upon others. Perhaps it ...
— The Marriage of Elinor • Margaret Oliphant
... England are not often good subjects; there is a peculiar meanness about most of them and awkwardness of line. Old manor-houses are often pretty. Ruins are usually, with us, too prim, and cathedrals too orderly. I do not think there is a single cathedral in England from which it is possible to obtain one subject for an impressive drawing. There is always some discordant civility, or jarring vergerism ...
— The Elements of Drawing - In Three Letters to Beginners • John Ruskin
... "The prim coxcomb with an enormous bag, whose favours, like those of Hercules between Virtue and Vice, are contended for by two rival orange girls, gives an admirable idea of the dress of the day; when, if we may ...
— The Works of William Hogarth: In a Series of Engravings - With Descriptions, and a Comment on Their Moral Tendency • John Trusler
... enters—a structure of the understanding rising out of the moral and spiritual nature. Then follows a section on Children, which explodes not a few educational fallacies, and propounds certain articles of faith and practice wholesome for these times, though it will probably wear a prim and quakerish aspect to the admirers of Jean Paul's famous tractate[10] on the same theme. The concluding paper in this series, entitled The Life Poetic, is the liveliest, if not the most valuable of the six: it has, however, been charged, with considerable ...
— Chambers' Edinburgh Journal - Volume XVII., No 422, New Series, January 31, 1852 • Various
... and handsome he looks!" said Laura, a prim and demure little miss of thirteen: "in his presence, I am sure I could ...
— The Farmer Boy, and How He Became Commander-In-Chief • Morrison Heady
... natural prominence of which was enhanced by her grayish hair being drawn up tightly and rolled into a "bun" on the very top of the head. She was the personification of neatness, if such be the word to characterize the prim stiffness of a flat-figured, elderly spinster. She wore large, square-toed, common-sense shoes, with low heels capped with rubber cushions, which, as I was shortly to discover, had earned for the lady the sobriquet of "Old ...
— The Long Day - The Story of a New York Working Girl As Told by Herself • Dorothy Richardson
... tall one bowed to me I recognized Mrs. Gregory St. Michael, and took off my hat. It was not until they had crossed the street and come up the stone steps near where I stood on High Walk that the little lady also bowed to me; she was Mrs. Weguelin St. Michael, and from something in her prim yet charming manner I gathered that she held it to be not perfectly well-bred in a lady to greet a gentleman across the width of a public highway, and that she could have wished that her tall companion had not thus ...
— Lady Baltimore • Owen Wister
... for gold, and the same extravagance of life as in the devil's garden on the blue Mediterranean. On landing, I was struck with the number of well-dressed men and women who rub shoulders in the street with the dilapidated-looking mining element. In the same way palatial banks and prim business houses are incongruously scattered amongst saloons and drinking bars. Front Street, facing the sea, is the principal thoroughfare, so crowded at midday that you can scarcely get along. It is paved with wood, imported here at enormous ...
— From Paris to New York by Land • Harry de Windt
... Barstow had promised, duly made its appearance in the schoolhouse, to the delight of the scholars and the gentle satisfaction of Mrs. Martin, who, in addition to the rudimentary musical instruction of the younger girls, occasionally played upon it herself in a prim, refined, and conscientious fashion. To this, when she was alone after school hours, she sometimes added a faint, colorless voice of limited range and gentlewomanly expression. It was on one of these occasions that Twing, becoming ...
— Colonel Starbottle's Client and Other Stories • Bret Harte
... their college vacation and get toughened (the process was obviously succeeding); they made Nimrod apologise for keeping his coat on during dinner; the three brothers who owned the ranch, and the wife of one of them; several children; a prim and proper spinster from Washington—how she got there, who can tell?—and Miss Belle Hadley, the ...
— A Woman Tenderfoot • Grace Gallatin Seton-Thompson
... Islands, and whom Ormond had never seen, was to accompany Dora on her return to Corny Castle: our young hero had settled it in his head that this aunt must be something like Aunt Ellenor in Sir Charles Grandison; a stiff-backed, prim, precise, old-fashioned looking aunt. Never was man's astonishment more visible in his countenance than was that of Harry Ormond on the first sight of Dora's aunt. His surprise was so great as to preclude the ...
— Tales & Novels, Vol. IX - [Contents: Harrington; Thoughts on Bores; Ormond] • Maria Edgeworth
... cerca del Cuzco en cierta senal que estava puesta en cada camino de quatro que hay, havia dende alli de venir cargado hasta la presencia del Inga, y alli dejava la carga y hacia su obediencia." Ondegardo, Rel. Prim., Ms.] ...
— The History Of The Conquest Of Peru • William H. Prescott
... located within a few minutes' walk of the Temple Grammar School, and numbered about thirty-five pupils, the majority of whom boarded at the Hall—Primrose Hall, as Miss Dorothy prettily called it. The Prim-roses, as we called them, ranged from seven years of age to sweet seventeen, and a prettier group of sirens never got together even in Rivermouth, for Rivermouth, you should know, is famous for ...
— The Story of a Bad Boy • Thomas Bailey Aldrich
... this, however, for if you have an atom of observation, one glance at his sleek, knowing-looking head and face—his prim white neckerchief, with the wooden tie into which it has been regularly folded for twenty years past, merging by imperceptible degrees into a small-plaited shirt-frill—and his comfortable-looking form encased in a well-brushed suit of black—would ...
— Sketches by Boz - illustrative of everyday life and every-day people • Charles Dickens
... tarry fence and slimy paling. On, on it pants—through Bishop's Wood, by tangled Churchyard Bottom, where now the railway shrieks; down sloppy lanes, bordering Muswell Hill, where now stand rows of jerry-built, prim villas. At intervals it stops an instant to dab its eyes with its dingy little rag of a handkerchief, to rearrange the bundle under its arm, its chief anxiety to keep well out of sight of chance wanderers, to ...
— Paul Kelver • Jerome Klapka, AKA Jerome K. Jerome
... interesting as self-revelations. Prosperity is not always the best condition under which to produce the highest work, and the temperament of Rembrandt was so peculiar that there is little wonder that the prim Dutchmen were not entirely captivated by his exuberant sensuality, or that we ourselves reserve our admiration principally for the more sombre and mysterious products of his later years after misfortune began ...
— Six Centuries of Painting • Randall Davies
... who is not highly sensitive is an amusement that it is possible to exhaust, and Tom by and by began to look round for some other mode of passing the time. But in so prim a garden, where they were not to go off the paved walks, there was not a great choice of sport. The only great pleasure such a restriction suggested was the pleasure of breaking it, and Tom began to meditate an insurrectionary visit ...
— The Mill on the Floss • George Eliot
... perversity made him picture his Cousin Eleanor as a prim young person, with sharp elbows and a pinched nose and stringy hair. She would be lifeless and oppressively good-mannered, he felt certain. All the ill success of the last three days seemed to be behind his sudden determination to have none of her. But Cousin Jasper, ...
— The Windy Hill • Cornelia Meigs
... Mrs. Alfred appeared. She looked more prim and nice and neat than ever in this black silk dress with old lace on the open square in front and on the ...
— The Beautiful Wretch; The Pupil of Aurelius; and The Four Macnicols • William Black
... a liking For the prim in face and mind, And some prefer the striking And the loud in womankind; Wee Madge is wooed of many, And buxom Kate, as well, And Jennie—charming Jennie— Ah, Jennie ...
— Songs and Other Verse • Eugene Field
... fool, that he had missed his true destiny. Sara possessed the warmth and wealth of heart which were the complements his own bleak nature required. Agnes Carillon, with her accurate, invariable beauty, had a prim disposition, wholesome enough for a man of strange, dark humours like David Rennes, but perilous always in its effect on any frigid or calculating mind. And Reckage was known to be supremely selfish. It seemed to Pensee that Sara had behaved very naturally, very touchingly, through ...
— Robert Orange - Being a Continuation of the History of Robert Orange • John Oliver Hobbes
... street of two-story brick houses, neat and prim, with whitened stone steps and little groups of aproned women gossiping at the doors. Half-way down, Lestrade stopped and tapped at a door, which was opened by a small servant girl. Miss Cushing was sitting in the front room, into which we were ushered. She ...
— The Strand Magazine, Volume V, Issue 25, January 1893 - An Illustrated Monthly • Various
... avium venisse insistere saxo, Quarum prim abeunte superstitit inde secunda: Illa autem fugiens jam vix vestigia liquit, Et saxum m[oe]rens ...
— Chenodia - The Classic Mother Goose • Jacob Bigelow
... that it has no effect on the skin—no, I really dare not." As she said this she looked as prim as a vestal. "It is the first time, do you know, that I ever used this liquid white, ah! ah! ah! What a baby I am! I am ...
— Monsieur, Madame and Bebe, Complete • Gustave Droz
... brother to open his heart to sister that even his egoistic chatter passed muster. As for young Jerry, who in a couple of days was to begin work in the same claim as Ned, he sat round-eyed, his thoughts writ large on his forehead. Mahony translated them thus: how in the world I could ever have sat prim and proper on the school-bench, when all this—change, adventure, romance—was awaiting me? Jerry was only, Mahony knew, to push a wheelbarrow from hole to water and back again for many a week to come; but for him it would certainly be a ...
— Australia Felix • Henry Handel Richardson
... moral Almanack of years— The prim old maid, and, by her side, her Niece, Full of bewitching beauty, health, and love. See, how the tabby watches Laura's eyes, Lest they should smile upon some pleasing spark, And violate grim prudery's tyrant ties. With icy finger, she her charge directs, To ...
— Poems (1828) • Thomas Gent
... will do that in the morning. And now, Cardo, I must do what my uncle told me to do," she said, as they returned into the cosy parlour, glowing with the light of the blazing fire; and, holding up her dress with her two fingers, she made a prim little curtsey, and said: ...
— By Berwen Banks • Allen Raine
... de la Revolucin de Septiembre; i.e., 1868. The Revolution began on September 19, under the leadership of Generals Prim and Serrano, and Vice-Admiral Topete. It drove Queen Isabel II from the throne, and initiated a six-year period of violent change and innovation, which ended only with the accession of Isabel's son Alfonso ...
— Heath's Modern Language Series: Mariucha • Benito Perez Galdos
... steep-pitched roof. There was a little paved courtyard in front, where the rose-bushes grew and clambered up to the windows of the upper story. Behind lay a little country garden, with its box-edged borders, shut in by damp, gloomy-looking walls. The prim, gray-painted street door, with its wicket opening and bell attached, announced quite as plainly as the official scutcheon that "a ...
— The Jealousies of a Country Town • Honore de Balzac
... among the girls of the district round Bordeaux. His whole appearance was feminine, and the unstable glance that he flashed from side to side spoke of vanity. He said to his companion, "Who is the prim virgin with ...
— The Romance of the Coast • James Runciman
... was flat and poor; even the subject did not strike me for the first moment as anything very remarkable. It was the portrait of a man in the prime of life—about thirty-five, I should have supposed—with the long whiskers and rather prim pose of a portrait made by an evidently poor artist, probably thirty or forty ...
— Seen and Unseen • E. Katharine Bates
... of vivid happenings in unoccupied houses and particularly of the prim, industrious, capable Susan Burnet, biting aggressive wrists, stuck in Lady Harman's imagination. She seemed to be looking into hitherto unsuspected pits of simple and violent living just beneath her feet. ...
— The Wife of Sir Isaac Harman • H. G. (Herbert George) Wells
... Grandma, with prim precision The seam-stitch impaleth deftly On her sharp and glittering needle, Then she turns and answers calmly, With a deep assurance—"Never Was there ...
— Poems • Marietta Holley
... nothing on but his gown and slippers. At sight of his tousled head both our callers gave a whoop of recognition, and set upon him,—shook him out of his slippers, and pulled him down the steps on to the sidewalk barefoot; thereby scandalizing a whole houseful of prim damsels across the street, who indignantly pulled down their curtains. Such a hand-shaking and back-patting as ensued! All the hardships and discouragement we had endured on our last season's expedition seemed to bear an exultant harvest in this our ...
— Left on Labrador - or, The cruise of the Schooner-yacht 'Curlew.' as Recorded by 'Wash.' • Charles Asbury Stephens
... be included in all meditations on the highest Brahman.— Since there is no valid reason for including in a meditation those qualities which are not expressly mentioned in the section containing that meditation, only those qualities which are thus expressly mentioned should be included!—This prim facie view is negatived by the Stra. The clause, 'on account of non-difference,' has to be carried on from the preceding Stra. As the 'subject of the qualities,' i.e. Brahman is the same in all meditations, the qualities ...
— The Vedanta-Sutras with the Commentary by Ramanuja - Sacred Books of the East, Volume 48 • Trans. George Thibaut
... seated at his ease in a large armchair. At his right sat Bailie Thomson—a man with a forbidding face, whom I had often of late seen in the company of Carver Kinlay. At Mr. Duke's left hand was the schoolmaster, prim and businesslike as I had often seen him look in the school when anything of importance was pending, such as a class examination. Near him sat Lieutenant Fox, looking very handsome in his naval uniform, and very much at his ease. The only other ...
— The Pilots of Pomona • Robert Leighton
... against the current rules of truth. These, however, did not include the commandment to use in disputation only such arguments as could be employed in a positive doctrinal presentation. Basilius (Ep. 210 ad prim. Neocaes) was quite ready to excuse an utterance of Gregory Thaumaturgus, that sounded suspiciously like Sabellianism, by saying that the latter was not speaking [Greek: dogmatikos], but [Greek: agonistikos]. ...
— History of Dogma, Volume 2 (of 7) • Adolph Harnack
... latter as pale as marble, the tears still lingering in the long dark lashes that veiled her sad and downcast eyes. The Captain was rocking to and fro in an easy chair, smoking his pipe and glancing first towards his daughter, and then at her starch prim-looking aunt, ...
— Mark Hurdlestone - Or, The Two Brothers • Susanna Moodie
... traversing a street in Old Brompton—a quaint, prim by-way lined with dwellings singularly Old-Worldish, even for London. He seemed to know it subjectively, to have retained a memory of it from another existence: as the stage setting of a vivid dream, all forgotten, will sometimes recur with peculiar and exasperating intensity, in broad ...
— The Black Bag • Louis Joseph Vance
... audience?" She slowed her steps, and he slowed to keep by her side. She lifted her clear face proudly. "I tell you," she said, "the part I am to play to-night will move Europe to its core. Paris! Berlin! Vienna! Even cautious prim London! I have them under my hand; even to-morrow they will be asking an account, crying for the heads of the wrongdoers on a charger. And you ask me if ...
— The Second Class Passenger • Perceval Gibbon
... unluckily they were caught by a sudden flood. At the end of June it was announced in Madrid that Leopold of Hohenzollern, son of the Roumanian prince, had accepted the crown of Spain that had been secretly offered to him by Marshal Prim; and the news, M. Ollivier says, startled all France like the bursting of a bomb. It had always, we must remember, been a cardinal maxim of French statesmanship that the maintenance of a preponderant influence in Spain was essential to the security of France; while, on the other hand, ...
— Studies in Literature and History • Sir Alfred Comyn Lyall
... blue and hair of the deepest brown that waved and clustered around the temples—a mouth that was winsome and sweet, a small and aristocratic nose, a chin that was slightly determined, giving her altogether a queenly air, as she sat so straight and prim behind ...
— The Tory Maid • Herbert Baird Stimpson
... that the lightness of the latter emerged first. George Selwyn, hearing some people at Arthur's t'other night lamenting the distracted state of the country, joined in the discourse, with the whites of his eyes and his prim mouth, and fetching a deep sigh, said, "Yes, to be sure it is terrible! There is the Duke of Newcastle's faction, and there is Fox's faction, and there is Leicester-house! between two factions and one faction we are torn ...
— The Letters of Horace Walpole, Volume 2 • Horace Walpole
... open her little gate, hung crookedly in a very compact and prim spruce hedge, she stopped in amazement and said, ...
— Lucy Maud Montgomery Short Stories, 1902 to 1903 • Lucy Maud Montgomery
... and headed directly for the Baker home. He was unaware that morning was not the fashionable time to call upon a lady. To him the fact of inclination and of presence in the vicinity was sufficient justification; and mounting the well-remembered steps he rang the doorbell stoutly. A prim maid in cap and diminutive apron, a recent addition to ...
— Ben Blair - The Story of a Plainsman • Will Lillibridge
... monstrous that scandal was can never be known save by such confidential agents as myself. The honour and careers of many of the chief men in France were at stake. You have seen a group of ninepins standing, all so rigid, and prim, and unbending. Then there comes the ball from far away and pop, pop, pop—there are your ninepins on the floor. Well, imagine some of the greatest men in France as these ninepins and then this Monsieur Caratal was the ball which could be ...
— Tales of Terror and Mystery • Arthur Conan Doyle
... landmark. In the days of William and Mary the gardens sloping down to the Thames were laid out in the stiff, formal Dutch style. Canals, in the shape of a capital L, with the foot reaching to the river, intersected prim gardens, and rows of little limes, pollarded like willows, edged the banks. It was only in 1852 that these canals were finally filled in, and the limes transplanted in the avenue bordering Ranelagh Gardens, where they still flourish. The Court favourite of Charles II., ...
— Chelsea - The Fascination of London • G. E. (Geraldine Edith) Mitton
... seems to me something very pathetic about these old Bloomsbury streets," said Thorndyke, "with their faded grandeur and dignified seediness. They remind me of some prim and aged gentlewoman in reduced circumstances who—Hallo! What ...
— The Red Thumb Mark • R. Austin Freeman
... genial. Nevertheless at once Maggie distrusted her. No servant had any right to appear so wildly delighted to see a new mistress. Alice had doubtless her own plans. Emily was prim and conceited, and Clara did not exist. Alice was ready to do everything that Maggie wanted, and it was very apparent at once that she ...
— The Captives • Hugh Walpole
... face to face over the threshold—Clytemnestra, of a matronly circumference, yet with a certain prim consciousness of herself, which despite the gray hair and the excellent maturity of her face, was unmistakably maidenish—Clytie of the eyes always wise to another's needs and beaming with ...
— The Seeker • Harry Leon Wilson
... arrested by recognising, in the president, the well-remembered face of Major Monthault. The brims of his hat were of more than ordinary dimensions; his hair was notched into the exact shape prescribed by the highest standard of puritanical orthodoxy; his band was crimped, and his robes folded with prim decorum; while his hands demurely rested on the cushion before him, holding a small edition of the sacred volume, on which he seemed to be meditating in the intervals between the exercise of his professional duties. But neither the starched sobriety of his aspect, nor ...
— The Loyalists, Vol. 1-3 - An Historical Novel • Jane West
... words were lost in the laughter of the King and Cardinal at the unblushing avowal of the small, prim-faced maiden. ...
— The Armourer's Prentices • Charlotte M. Yonge
... I allow even that's better than the pains Mrs. Prim takes to conceal her losses in front. She draws her mouth till it positively resembles the aperture of a poor's-box, and all her words appear to slide out edgewise as it were—thus: How do you do, madam? ...
— The Ontario Readers: The High School Reader, 1886 • Ministry of Education
... prevented me from attempting the higher walks of our profession; but this object of my ambition was gained at last. I had taken a pocket-book from a worthy Quaker, and, unfortunately, was perceived by a man at a shop window, who came out, collared, and delivered me into the hands of the prim gentleman. Having first secured his property, he then walked with me and a police officer to Bow-street. My innocent face, and my tears, induced the old gentleman, who was a member of the Philanthropic Society, not only not to prefer the charge against ...
— The King's Own • Captain Frederick Marryat
... President Van Buren with a parade, bands playing, and crowds in the streets, this prim self-righteous young woman took no part in this hero worship, but gave vent to her disapproval in a ...
— Susan B. Anthony - Rebel, Crusader, Humanitarian • Alma Lutz
... prim and severe aspect was seated next a young couple, who were discussing the merits of ...
— More Toasts • Marion Dix Mosher
... that," replied Richard, with something like a sigh. "Out in the country everybody knows everybody else, and outside of a few prim people all are as sociable as can be. But I suppose if one wants to make money one must expect to give ...
— Richard Dare's Venture • Edward Stratemeyer
... of the sentry, on the quarter-deck below him, grounding arms, turned the current of his thoughts. A thin, tall, soldier-like man, with a cold blue eye, and prim features, came out of the cuddy below, handing out a fair-haired, affected, mincing lady, of middle age. Captain Vickers, of Mr. Frere's regiment, ordered for service in Van Diemen's Land, was bringing his lady on deck to get ...
— For the Term of His Natural Life • Marcus Clarke
... exaggeration of its weaknesses. But meanwhile, they overlook the fact, that not the woman Elizabeth, but the Virgin-queen, the royal heroine, is the theme of admiration. Not the petty virtues, the pretty sensibilities, the cheap charity, the prim decorum, which modern flatterers dwell upon, degrading royalty, while they palaver its possessor, but Britannia's sacred majesty, enshrined in chaste and lofty womanhood. Our ancestors paid their compliments to sex or rank—ours are addressed to the person. There is no flattery where there ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction - Vol. 17, No. 483., Saturday, April 2, 1831 • Various
... which I took from a horse officer at the battle of Dettingen; they are double loaded, and if any highwayman in England robs you of the value of a pin while I have the honour of being in your company, d—n my heart." When he had expressed himself in this manner, a prim gentlewoman, who had sat silent hitherto, opened her mouth, and said, she wondered how any man could be so rude as to pull out such weapons before ladies. "D—me, madam," cried the champion, "if you are so ...
— The Adventures of Roderick Random • Tobias Smollett
... his arm a half-empty basket of cheap wares. The man was ragged; his toes were thrusting through his shoes; it was evident that he wore no linen, and a week's growth of beard dirtily stubbled his chin,—in a word, he was a man from whom M. Chateaudoux's prim soul positively shrank. M. Chateaudoux went quickly by, fearing to be pestered for alms. The hawker, however, remained seated upon the bench, drawing idle patterns upon the gravel with a hazel ...
— Clementina • A.E.W. Mason
... denizens of the old building, it will suffice out of a large household to mention the prim, respectable, and capable Ames, and Mrs. Allen, a buxom and cheerful person, who relieved the lady of some of her household cares. The other six servants in the house bear no relation to the events of the night of ...
— The Valley of Fear • Arthur Conan Doyle
... a singularly quaint-looking personage presented himself. He was very stiff and prim in his appearance; dressed in a blue coat and scarlet waistcoat, with a rich bandanna handkerchief tied very neatly round his neck, and a very new hat, to which his ...
— The Young Duke • Benjamin Disraeli
... smothered or strangled. Perhaps some day we shall go back to them, and find that the "Rape of the Lock" is better worth reading and really more helpful than magazine metaphysics. Anyhow, it is certain that the training which the Misses Ponsonby had received, although it may have made them starched, prim, and even uninteresting, had an effect upon their character not altogether unwholesome, and prevented any public crying for the moon, or any public charge of injustice against its Maker because ...
— Catharine Furze • Mark Rutherford
... her white face as she spoke) gave me a slight shudder. She remained demure, almost prim. And ...
— Chance - A Tale in Two Parts • Joseph Conrad
... him no explanations. It stood as usual, large and prim and precise, the very acme of solid, sober wealth and assertive moral rectitude. He was strongly tempted to call and ask for Miss Brandt, but it was only ten o'clock in the morning, and the house looked so truly an embodiment in stucco of Mrs. Grundy and Jeremiah ...
— Pearl of Pearl Island • John Oxenham
... and capacity that began with our grandfather! But as I go on in life, day by day, I become more of a bewildered child; I cannot get used to this world, to procreation, to heredity, to sight, to hearing; the commonest things are a burthen. The prim obliterated polite face of life, and the broad, bawdy, and orgiastic—or maenadic—foundations, form a spectacle to which no habit reconciles me; and "I could wish my days to be bound each to each" by the same open-mouthed wonder. They are anyway, ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 25 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... the decaying ceiling. Worn boards and ragged walls, and the rusty ribs fallen from the fireplace, are all that meet your eyes, but I see a round, unsteady, waxcloth-covered table, with four books lying at equal distances on it. There are six prim chairs, two of them not to be sat upon, backed against the walls, and between the window and the fireplace a chest of drawers, with a snowy coverlet. On the drawers stands a board with coloured marbles for the game of solitaire, and I ...
— A Window in Thrums • J. M. Barrie
... first visit to the scene of the crime—a high, dingy, narrow-chested house, prim, formal, and solid, like the century which gave it birth. Lestrade's bulldog features gazed out at us from the front window, and he greeted us warmly when a big constable had opened the door and let us in. The room into which we were shown was that in which the crime had been committed, ...
— The Return of Sherlock Holmes - Magazine Edition • Arthur Conan Doyle
... seemed to me a very home that had sprung up for me in the midst of these solitudes. My Arabs were busy with their bread; Mysseri rattling tea-cups; the little kettle, with her odd old-maidish looks, sat humming away old songs about England; and two or three yards from the fire my tent stood prim and tight, with open portal, and with welcoming look, like “the old arm-chair” of ...
— Eothen • A. W. Kinglake
... generally known. However, we need not go to her house; we will wait for her here in the Ceramicus. I should think it is near her hour for coming back from the Academy, and taking her walk in the Poecile; she is very regular; to be sure, here she comes. Do you see the orderly, rather prim lady there, with the kindly look in her eyes, and ...
— Works, V1 • Lucian of Samosata
... shrewdly. The streets were wide, the walks were narrow and lined with trees that would one day spread nobly. The houses were built in rows, each independent of the other, mounted upon little terraces, fronted by guards of iron railing and prim little flower gardens. Bat Scanlon, as he ...
— Ashton-Kirk, Criminologist • John T. McIntyre
... age at the capital, before the easy- going Southern ways had gone out and the prim new Northern ways had come in, and when the domestic animals were treated with distinguished consideration and granted the freedom of the city. There was a charm of cattle in the street and upon the commons; goats cropped your rosebushes through the pickets, and nooned upon your front porch; ...
— Birds and Poets • John Burroughs
... and down again, a climbing fern {133d} which is often seen in hothouses has tangled its finely-cut fronds. Up the next, a quite different fern is crawling, by pressing tightly to the rough bark its creeping root-stalks, furred like a hare's leg. Up the next, the prim little Griffe-chatte {133e} plant has walked, by numberless clusters of small cats'-claws, which lay hold of the bark. And what is this delicious scent about the air? Vanille? Of course it is; and up ...
— At Last • Charles Kingsley
... In this connection may be mentioned a remark of General Prim, one of the leading spirits in the provisional government of 1868. When asked why at that time he did not establish a republic his reply was: "It would have been a republic without republicans." There was no less a dearth of ...
— The Governments of Europe • Frederic Austin Ogg
... know pretty well, Marcia," Joe replied, "back home they think I don't care much for the young people's work. It is a little too prim and ready-to-wear for me, if you'll excuse me for saying so. No fun in it at all, though I'll admit some of the classes here have more life in them than I ...
— John Wesley, Jr. - The Story of an Experiment • Dan B. Brummitt
... to was a little white house with green shutters and a slate roof. It stood in a prim little garden, and down each side of the neat path were large stone vases for flowers to grow in; but all ...
— The Phoenix and the Carpet • E. Nesbit
... the paper dated the 4th of July and found the column and read: "'The press of Paris unanimously accuses the Imperial Government of allowing Prim and Bismarck to intrigue against the interests of France. The French ambassador, Count Benedetti, interviewed the King of Prussia at Ems and requested him to prevent Prince Leopold von Hohenzollern's acceptance. ...
— Lorraine - A romance • Robert W. Chambers
... would be a blissful life indeed. And Maggie, listening to the voices which speak to her so oft in the autumn wind, the running brook, the opening flower, and the falling leaf, has learned a lesson different far from those taught her daily by the prim, stiff governess, who, imported from England six years ago, has drilled both Theo and Maggie in all the prescribed rules of high life as practiced in the Old World. She has taught them how to sit and how to stand, how to eat and how to drink, as ...
— Maggie Miller • Mary J. Holmes
... lines of game travelling down the ridges to the water. The ruling passion is strong in death, they say, and my heart was dead that night. But, independently of my trouble, no man who has for forty years lived the life I have, can with impunity go coop himself in this prim English country, with its trim hedgerows and cultivated fields, its stiff formal manners, and its well-dressed crowds. He begins to long — ah, how he longs! — for the keen breath of the desert air; ...
— Allan Quatermain • by H. Rider Haggard
... easy, infectious laugh, "that's more than I can promise. To tell the truth, Johns, I don't believe I could by any possibility fall into the prim, stiff ways which make a man commendable hereabout. Even if I were religiously disposed, or should ever think of adopting your profession, I fancy I should take to the gown and liturgy, as giving a little freer ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 15, No. 89, March, 1865 • Various
... Primrose family, had not been sparing of his colours. In one, a lady was having a toe amputated—an operation which a saintly personage had sailed into the room, upon a couch, to superintend. In another, a lady was lying in bed, tucked up very tight and prim, and staring with much composure at a tripod, with a slop-basin on it; the usual form of washing-stand, and the only piece of furniture, besides the bedstead, in her chamber. One would never have supposed her to be labouring ...
— Pictures from Italy • Charles Dickens
... him; and I could eat no dinner this evening because he had not come back. I find him handsomer than any man in the world. When he says that he loves me, I can see, I can feel that it is true; I feel displeased, and at the same time delighted. M. de la Marche seems insipid and prim since I have known Bernard. Bernard alone seems as proud, as passionate, as bold as myself—and as weak as myself; for he cries like a child when I vex him, and here I am crying, too, as ...
— Mauprat • George Sand
... boys, you see, and so the same rules do not apply to us, for girls always have to observe the conventions," said Nealie, with the prim little air which she sometimes put on for the sake of ...
— The Adventurous Seven - Their Hazardous Undertaking • Bessie Marchant
... denominated in the catalogue "La vie d'une femme." They were painted rather in a remarkable style—flat, dead, pale, and formal. The first represented a "Jeune Fille," coming out of a church-door, a missal in her hand, her dress very prim, her eyes cast down, her mouth pursed up—the image of a most villanous little precocious she-hypocrite. The second, a "Mariee," with a long white veil, kneeling at a prie-dieu in her chamber, holding her hands plastered together, finger to finger, and showing the whites ...
— Villette • Charlotte Bronte
... In her very first term she was allowed to run up to the dormitory for something, unescorted by an Enfant de Marie. "Ascend, my child," said Madame Agathe, smiling sweetly, for Eileen had outstripped all her classmates that morning in geography, and Eileen, with a prim "Oui, ma mere," rose and sailed with drooping eyelashes to the other end of the schoolroom, and courtesied herself out of the door, knowing herself the focus of envy and humorously conscious of her goodness. She had learned to love this soothing sensation ...
— The Grey Wig: Stories and Novelettes • Israel Zangwill
... wouldn't leave one snap to meet its partner. Come on Judy," the feet were again on the rug, "we will be simply dead in the morning, and we have got to be very much alive. We do miss the Weatherbee. I don't see why we let her go. Dear, prim, prompt Weatherbee! Now we know we loved her. Her successor is ...
— Jane Allen: Junior • Edith Bancroft
... and jollier than any of the things you are after. We'll stand by you like bricks, and in a week you'll say it's the best lark you ever had in your life. Don't be prim, now, but say yes, like a trump, as you are," added Lucy, waving a pink satin ...
— Work: A Story of Experience • Louisa May Alcott
... Bath with a curious kind of interest. I once knew one of those dear old English ladies whom one finds all the world over, with their prim little ways, and their gilt prayer-books, and lavender-scented handkerchiefs, and family recollections. She gave me the idea that Bath, a city where the great people often congregate, was more especially the paradise ...
— Our Hundred Days in Europe • Oliver Wendell Holmes
... no; you and I will stay comfortably here by the fire, and I'll give you your tea and put you tidily to bed. I shan't be home any other night this week. Kate has a convoy coming for her;—haven't you, Kate?—Le beau cousin will take the best possible care of us; and even prim Aunt Deborah won't object to our walking back with him. I believe he came up from Wales on purpose. What would somebody else give to take the charge off his hands?—You needn't blush, Kate; I can see through a millstone as far ...
— Kate Coventry - An Autobiography • G. J. Whyte-Melville
... standing at the white gates of Sunnyside, waiting for the arrival of the girls. Mrs. Merriman had soft brown hair, soft brown eyes to match, and a kindly, gentle face. Lucy was somewhat prim, very neat in her person, with thick fair hair which she wore in two long plaits far below her waist, a face full of intensity and determination, and a slightly set ...
— A Modern Tomboy - A Story for Girls • L. T. Meade
... living. Down the Strand, past Villiers, Essex, Salisbury, Northumberland and many more streets whose names tell of vanished splendors, whose dingy lengths are smoke-blackened, and far enough off from the whole aroma of Belgravia, is Craven street. The houses are all of a pattern—prim, dingy, small-windowed habitations, but within this one there must be comfort, for the fire-flames dance on the meek minute panes and a heavy curl of smoke is cutting the air above its square, business-like little chimney-pot. Drawing-room there ...
— Lippincott's Magazine, Vol. 22, August, 1878 • Various
... bored if she would only be her natural self," reflected the author. "And would not talk prim platitudes." (This was hard, for he had talked nothing else himself.) "Does she think she is so interesting that I am likely to study ...
— The Autobiography of a Slander • Edna Lyall
... feet sink luxuriously into the rugs, oh, so different from the threadbare ingrain carpet at home! She peeped into the ball-room, smilax-draped and glowing as if eager to welcome the guests to come. Through it all she carried a prim air, making businesslike notes on her little pad; but beneath her very demure exterior raged a storm of rebellion that these things should be and not be for her. The world was one huge sour grape; and yet she ...
— Jewel Weed • Alice Ames Winter
... surgeon and helped to fill cartridges, contributing his own cotton hose for the purpose when those government stores gave out in battle, and who never smiled, even when committing a marine to the briny deep; the purser, too, prim and business-like, looking as if he were a complicated key with an iron lock of his own strong chest, calculating perpetually the amount of dollars deposited in his charge, the total of pay to be deducted therefrom, and never ...
— Captain Brand of the "Centipede" • H. A. (Henry Augustus) Wise
... rather from those who had left North Dormer than from those who had been obliged to stay there, and there was some difficulty in rousing the village to the proper state of enthusiasm. But Miss Hatchard's pale prim drawing-room was the centre of constant comings and goings from Hepburn, Nettleton, Springfield and even more distant cities; and whenever a visitor arrived he was led across the hall, and treated to a glimpse of the group of girls deep ...
— Summer • Edith Wharton
... the lower part of the city, imagine yourself in some quarters of Dieppe or Calais, or any other of the busier towns in the north of France. The peaked roofs, the unexpected balconies, the ill-regulated gables, and the general individuality of the houses are pleasing to the eye wearied with the prim monotony of ...
— Faces and Places • Henry William Lucy
... obstinacy, poured out a glassful and requested him to clear his voice with it. Fifteen minutes after his vocal organs had been thus renewed, LEOPOLD was in a condition to see things in an entirely new light, and hesitated no longer to write the following note to General PRIM: ...
— Punchinello Vol. 1, No. 21, August 20, 1870 • Various
... players each contribute a letter toward the spelling of a word, their object being never to be the one to complete it, but to force the next player to do so. Thus (with four players) the first player may say "p," and the next, thinking of "prim," may say "r," and the next, also thinking of "prim," may say "i." But the fourth player, running his thoughts quickly over possible words beginning with "pri," may light upon "prism" and say "s." This saves her, but puts the first player in danger, which is only averted ...
— What Shall We Do Now?: Five Hundred Games and Pastimes • Dorothy Canfield Fisher
... introduced as 'My daughter Harriet,' and made a stiff curtsey as Mrs. Moss smiled, and nodded, and bade her 'sit down, my dear.' Throughout the whole interview she seemed to be looked upon by both ladies as a child, and played the part so well, sitting prim and silent on her chair, that I could hardly help humming as I looked ...
— Mrs. Overtheway's Remembrances • Juliana Horatia Ewing
... in the Valley who refused to go to war, esteeming it a sin. Some of these were in town, coming in on horseback or in their white-covered wagons, and bringing wife or daughter. The men were long-bearded and venerable of aspect; the women had peaceful Quaker faces, framed by the prim close bonnet of their peculiar garb. These quiet folk, too, were anxious-eyed. They would not resist evil, but their homes and barns ...
— The Long Roll • Mary Johnston
... equally inviting. The men and women associate very little; the former employ themselves either in the business of life, or in hunting horse-racing, and gaming; while the latter meet in large parties, composed entirely of themselves, to sip tea and look prim!" Would a stranger who had been among us, who had witnessed the polished state of our society, the elegance of our parties, the case and sociability of manners which prevail there, the constant and agreeable intercourse between the sexes, the accomplishments of our ladies, that proud ...
— Memoirs of Aaron Burr, Complete • Matthew L. Davis
... these old gardens, with their formal walks and prim parterres; I like also the company by which they are chiefly frequented, consisting of ...
— The Idler in France • Marguerite Gardiner
... palace, that loomed so large in his imagination, was a house built of the soft stone of the country, mellowed by time. It looked dismal enough from the street, and inside it was extremely plain; there was the usual provincial courtyard—chilly, prim, and neat; and the house itself was sober, almost convent-like, but ...
— Two Poets - Lost Illusions Part I • Honore de Balzac
... relief from his malady by an extended tour in Germany. He sojourned some time in Dresden, whither his reputation had preceded him, and where he was cordially and familiarly received, not only by the foreign residents, but at the prim and antiquated little court of King Frederick Augustus and Queen Amalia. Of Irving at this time Mrs. Emily Fuller (nee Foster), whose relations with him have been referred to, ...
— Baddeck and That Sort of Thing • Charles Dudley Warner
... surpassingly beautiful Venetian whose love affairs upset a Quarter, a common-sense, motherly nurse whose heart warmed toward her companion in the adjoining berth, a plucky New England girl with the courage of her convictions, and a prim spinster whose only consolation was the boarder who ...
— The Veiled Lady - and Other Men and Women • F. Hopkinson Smith
... alone: I am not thine. [1] Prim Creed, with categoric point, forbear To feature me my Lord by rule and line. Thou canst not measure Mistress Nature's hair, Not one sweet inch: nay, if thy sight is sharp, Would'st count the strings upon an angel's ...
— Select Poems of Sidney Lanier • Sidney Lanier
... the taste of OSRICK turned a wit. Humour baccilophil, microbic merriment, Might suit him better. He will try the experiment. His mirth's a smirk and not a paroxysm; "Papa, potatoes, poultry, prunes and prism" Do not disturb the "plie" of his prim lips, Neither do cynic quirks and querulous quips. Mirth would guffaw—when hearts and mouths were bigger, OSRICK would shrink from aught beyond a snigger, Such as is stirred by screeds of far-fetched whim. Ay! that's the humour o't, ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Volume 104, February 4, 1893 • Various
... off that bonnet, and let me see thee as thou art really; with thy hair about thy face. So." Peggy reached over and untied the bow as she spoke, then removed the prim little bonnet from her cousin's head. "How beautiful thee is," she commented gazing at the maiden with admiring eyes. "I think thee grows more so every time I see thee. That bonnet doth ...
— Peggy Owen and Liberty • Lucy Foster Madison
... his office furniture. He fought over every article, over the little iron stove, the bed-lounge, the marble-topped centre table, the whatnot in the corner, the bound volumes of "Allen's Practical Dentist," the rifle manufacturer's calendar, and the prim, military chairs. A veritable scene took place between him and his wife before he could bring himself to part with the steel engraving of "Lorenzo de' Medici and His Court" and the stone pug dog with ...
— McTeague • Frank Norris
... over her to see herself in that less jealous arrangement of drapery which the Beauty of the last century had insisted on as presenting her most fittingly to the artist. She rolled up the sleeves of her dress, she turned down its prim collar and neck, and glanced from her glass to the portrait, from the portrait back to the glass. Myrtle was not blind nor dull, though young, and in many things untaught. She did not say in so many words, "I too am a beauty," but she could mot help seeing that she had many of the attractions ...
— The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. (The Physician and Poet not the Jurist)
... in front of the tea-tray. Almost at the same moment a neat black-and-white parlourmaid brought in teapot, copper kettle, and a silver-covered dish containing hot pikelets; then departed. Clara was alone again; not the same Clara now, but a personage demure, prim, precise, frightfully upright of back—a sort of impregnable stronghold—without doubt ...
— Tales of the Five Towns • Arnold Bennett
... Copenhagen crowded with British topsails. "While the negotiation is going on," he said, "the Dane should see our flag waving every time he lifts up his head." Time was worth more than gold; it was worth brave men's lives. The Danes were toiling day and night to prepare the defence of their capital. But prim Sir Hyde anchored, and sent up a single frigate with his ultimatum, and it was not until March 30 that the British fleet, a long line of stately vessels, came sailing up the Sound, passed Elsinore, and cast anchor fifteen miles from Copenhagen. ...
— Deeds that Won the Empire - Historic Battle Scenes • W. H. Fitchett
... the greater they expand. If scandalous reports concerning a certain young man in Richmond should reach us here in the North, relating his unparalleled exploits in the giddier circles of our gay capital, I should know without the telling that it was our prim young ...
— The Shades of the Wilderness • Joseph A. Altsheler
... diners noticed me, or that Mary 'Liza, sitting prim and dainty on her side of our table, had her doll by her in another chair, and interrupted her meal, once in a while, to caress her or to re-arrange her curls and skirts. I affected not to see the pantomime, which ...
— When Grandmamma Was New - The Story of a Virginia Childhood • Marion Harland
... are to be found scattered up and down our country churchyards—'uncouth rhymes,' as Gray calls them, yet full of the sombre philosophy of life. They are fast becoming illegible, worn out by the rain that raineth every day, and our prim, present-day parsons do not look with favour upon them, besides which—to use a clumsy phrase—besides which most of our churchyards are now closed against burials, and without texts ...
— In the Name of the Bodleian and Other Essays • Augustine Birrell
... novels, except the talkative, comic servant, who is meant to be vulgar and ridiculous, ever condescends to use colloquial speech. Even in moments of extreme peril the heroines are very choice in their diction. Dialogue in Mrs. Radcliffe's world is as stilted and unnatural as that of prim, old-fashioned school books. In her earliest novel she uses very little conversation, clearly finding the indirect form of narrative easier. Sometimes, in the more highly wrought passages of description, she slips unawares into a more daring phrase, e.g. in Udolpho, the track ...
— The Tale of Terror • Edith Birkhead
... as the outward signs of an inward fretfulness and quarrelsomeness, which was rendered all the more offensive in her eyes by the fact that Mona Crozier was the most, spotless thing she had ever seen, at the end of a journey—and this, a journey across a continent. Orderliness and prim exactness, taste and fastidiousness, tireless tidiness were seen in every turn, in every fold of her dress, in the way everything she wore had been put on, in the decision of every step and gesture. Kitty noticed all this, and she ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker
... and this evening when our number came Mr. Gilder began his quaint Quaker march and Reuben was to come from one side of the stage and Rachel, on the other, and meet in the center of the stage like two prim Quakers. I took the steps with Mr. Gilder's tom tom of quaint chords and I arrived in the front of the stage and no Walter. I was in dismay and the people began to laugh, especially a portly individual sitting directly in front of the orchestra. He thought ...
— Sixty Years of California Song • Margaret Blake-Alverson
... the debt of Nature, our informant could not say; enough that, in time, he owned a brush and immortalized himself by his skill in its use. Such erratic ones as Whittier, West, and Anna Dickinson go to prove that even the prim, proper, perfect Quakers are subject to like infirmities with the rest of ...
— Eighty Years And More; Reminiscences 1815-1897 • Elizabeth Cady Stanton
... who passed along the deal boards just in front of us." Mrs. Thesiger laughed and her head fell back upon her pillow. But during that movement her eyes had never left her daughter's face. "A middle-aged man with stiff gray hair, a stiff, prim face, and a figure like a ramrod. Oh, there never was anything so stiff." A noticeable bitterness began to sound in her voice and increased as she went on. "There was an old woman with him as precise and old-fashioned as himself. But you didn't see them? I never saw anything so ludicrous as that ...
— Running Water • A. E. W. Mason
... entered Daniellis in subdued triumph, and said good night before Arabella, with prim decorum, and then Cecilia mounted to make herself look beautiful for the flinging of his ...
— Halcyone • Elinor Glyn
... petticoat when her sister joined her in her bed-room—not in a petticoat of lace and needlework, such as peeped from under the edge of Polly's smart frock as she threw herself into a chair, but a skimpy black silk skirt with a prim ruffle, made from an old gown of Mrs. Ponsonby's. It was neat and fresh, however, and her neck and arms, exposed by her little tucked underwaist, were of a beauty to ravish a painter or a sculptor. Polly ...
— Ainslee's, Vol. 15, No. 5, June 1905 • Various
... up and looked round, and her eyes fell upon the last of the photograph-albums—the one she had yawned over. She picked it up, propped it on her knees, and, lying back against the cushions, turned the pages over. These were all children, prim children with tidy hair and solemn faces. Mollie stopped at the picture of a girl dressed in a wide-skirted, sprigged-muslin frock. Her hair fell in plump curls from beneath a broad-brimmed hat with ...
— The Happy Adventurers • Lydia Miller Middleton
... artists of every age in their inspired hours, fitted by genius and culture to mingle as an equal in the most refined circles of Europe, and yet her youth and early womanhood had passed away amid the very decent, yet drudging, descendants of the prim Puritans. Trained among those who could have discerned her peculiar power, and early fed with the fruits of beauty for which her spirit pined, she would have developed into one of the finest lyrists, romancers and critics, that the modern literary world has seen. This she knew; and this tantalization ...
— Memoirs of Margaret Fuller Ossoli, Vol. II • Margaret Fuller Ossoli |
