"Tentative" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... heart would come with the lifting leaves, no pang of mysterious pain with bird-song, star-set, dewfall. Even her love of Foxy would become a groping thing, and not any longer would she know, when her blind bird made its tentative music, all it meant and all it dreamed. This very night she had forgotten to lean out and listen as of old to the soft voices of the trees. She had said her prayer, and then she had been so tired, and pains had shot through her, and her back had ached, and she ...
— Gone to Earth • Mary Webb
... mon ami. It is inevitable that Turkey fights if Germany goes to war. England, France, Russia know it. Ask yourself, then, how enormous to us the value of those plans—tentative, sketchy, perhaps, yet the inception and foundation of those German-made and German-armed fortifications which today line the Dardanelles and the adjacent waters within the ...
— The Dark Star • Robert W. Chambers
... Anyhow the sluice boxes were molested no more forever. But it was impossible to repress the abounding energies of such a nature as his, and he continued, possibly from habit, the tortuous courses which he had pursued for profit of Mr. Bentley. After a few tentative and resultless undertakings in the way of highway robbery—if one may venture to designate road-agency by so harsh a name—he made one or two modest essays in horse-herding, and it was in the midst of a promising enterprise of this character, and just ...
— The Collected Works of Ambrose Bierce, Vol. II: In the Midst of Life: Tales of Soldiers and Civilians • Ambrose Bierce
... only vaguely. He belonged to a much older set and went very little into general society. A man of the highest social connections, however, and of much wealth." And the doctor glanced keenly at her as he propounded this tentative. ...
— 'Laramie;' - or, The Queen of Bedlam. • Charles King
... possession, wherein she has assumed the moral responsibility of establishing a form of government on principles quite opposite to those of the defunct Spanish regime: whether it will be for better or for worse cannot be determined at this tentative stage. Without venturing on the prophetic, one may not only draw conclusions from accomplished facts, but also reasonably assume, in the light of past events, what might have happened under other circumstances. There is scarcely a Power which has ...
— The Philippine Islands • John Foreman
... It was a tentative reply, the man having a seafaring appearance. Her father was not at home, and Pleasant knew it. 'Take a seat by the fire,' were her hospitable words when she had got him in; 'men of your calling are ...
— Our Mutual Friend • Charles Dickens
... Comedy arose out of a mere negation, the abolition, viz., of the old political freedom, we may easily conceive that there would be an interval of fluctuating, and tentative efforts to supply its place, before a new comic form could be developed and fully established. Hence there may have been many kinds of the Middle Comedy, many intermediate gradations, between the Old ...
— Lectures on Dramatic Art - and Literature • August Wilhelm Schlegel trans John Black
... entirely of this strange half-caste, whose beauty was provoking, although he resolutely repelled her tentative advances, that Grantham was thinking. In that last gesture when she had scornfully tossed her head in turning aside, had lain a bitter memory. Grantham stood for a moment watching the swaying draperies. Then, dropping the end of his cigarette into a little brass ash-tray, he took ...
— Tales of Chinatown • Sax Rohmer
... brother, seeing that such a condition is possible, and that all the paths of evil, however tentative and timorous they may be at first, and however much the sin may be wrapped up with excuses and forms and masks, tend to that condition, let us take that old prayer upon our lips, which befits both those who distrust themselves because of slumbering sins, and those who dread ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture - St. Matthew Chaps. IX to XXVIII • Alexander Maclaren
... of Kiaochow on Chinese soil and the activity of German cruisers in the Yellow Sea brought the war to China's very doors. Vaguely conscious that this might spell disaster to his own ambitious plans, Yuan Shih-kai was actually in the midst of tentative negotiations with the German Legation regarding the retrocession of the Kiaochow territory when the news reached him that Japan, after some rapid negotiations with her British Ally, had filed an ultimatum on Germany, peremptorily demanding the handing-over of all those ...
— The Fight For The Republic In China • B.L. Putnam Weale
... don't want to mix into their social game," Charlie drawled. "Or at least, I don't propose to make any tentative advances. The women put on lots of side, they say. If they want to hunt us up and cultivate you, all right. But I've got too much to do to butt into society. Anyway, I didn't want to run up against any critical females looking like I ...
— Big Timber - A Story of the Northwest • Bertrand W. Sinclair
... to which he was almost disconcertingly a stranger. Even Madame Belot, holding a stalwart, brown-fisted baby on her arm, could comment on her husband's work with a discerning aptness of phrase which made his own appreciation seem very trite and tentative. He might be putting up with the Belots, but it was quite as likely, he perceived, that they might be putting up with him. He realized, in this world of the Belots, the significance, the laboriousness, the ...
— Tante • Anne Douglas Sedgwick
... running a slow bass scale on a sort of two-stringed horse-fiddle of a strange shape. Average Jones' still untouched glass, almost full of the precious port, trembled and sang a little tentative response. Up-up-up mounted the ...
— Average Jones • Samuel Hopkins Adams
... quarter to the hour it was discovered that Y.D. had not yet dressed for the occasion. He was, in fact, engaged with Landson in making a tentative arrangement for the distribution of next year's hay. Zen had been so insistent upon an invitation being sent to Mr. and Mrs. Landson, that Y.D., although fearing a snub for his pains, at last conceded the point. He had done his neighbor rather less than justice, and now he and Landson, ...
— Dennison Grant - A Novel of To-day • Robert Stead
... tentative movement against the strait by a detachment of galleys; Barbarossa told off an equal number to oppose them, and they mutually cannonaded and skirmished during the day. There was much noise and excitement, ...
— Sea-Wolves of the Mediterranean • E. Hamilton Currey
... fine, "Well, really now—?" said Lichfield. Then there was a tentative invitation or two, and I cut the knot by accepting all of them, and talking to every woman as though she were the solitary specimen of feminity extant. It was presently agreed that gossip often embroidered the actual occurrence and that wild oats were, after all, a not unheard-of phenomenon, and ...
— The Cords of Vanity • James Branch Cabell et al
... too, who intercepted a tentative movement of Captain Magnus in my direction, and ordered me into the cabin with my aunt and Miss Browne. Through the walls of the hut we heard loud and eager talk of the morrow and its certain golden harvest as the ...
— Spanish Doubloons • Camilla Kenyon
... Shakespeare be, and give eye and ear to his history, comedy, tragedy; and when we have done with them, one by one, we shall discover how the aggregated mass climbs taller than highest mountains. This method, in tentative fashion, I propose to apply in some studies in this volume, or other volumes, believing that the company of those who love Shakespeare can never be large enough for his merits, and that many are kept away from the witchery of him because ...
— A Hero and Some Other Folks • William A. Quayle
... idea!" Mrs. Forsyth said, more to gain time than anything else. She added, "Everything is at sixes and sevens in the flat. There wouldn't be standing-room." A sudden thought flashed upon her, which, because it was sudden and in keeping with her character, she put into tentative words. "You're more at home here than anywhere else. You were almost born here. You've played about here ever since you were a child. You first met Peter here. He proposed to you here, and you rejected him here. He's proposed here again, and ...
— The Daughter of the Storage - And Other Things in Prose and Verse • William Dean Howells
... high school and that along the four lines suggested. But the movement has gone much farther than suggested by my statement. The results are found in something more authoritative and more permanent than tentative agreement among educational leaders, or even among educational institutions. The law-making bodies of the land have taken a part, and by legal enactment have required about what I have suggested. The State of North Dakota, for example, requires professional equipment ...
— On the Firing Line in Education • Adoniram Judson Ladd
... American lady; and yet she would not admit to herself that he was any way in the wrong. She would entertain no suspicion of him. She would have no jealousy in her heart, for how could jealousy exist with a perfect faith? And so she had repeatedly reasoned herself out of these tentative feelings, and resolved that she would do neither her husband nor Mrs. Lorraine the injustice of being vexed with them. So it was now. What more natural than that Frank should recommend to any friend the duets of which he was particularly fond? What more natural ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Vol. XII. No. 30. September, 1873 • Various
... had died, too, never to come again. And as it is in the nature of things that no one is less lenient towards romantic longings than he who has suffered disappointment in them, who has failed to transmute them into reality, so, in this case, the son's first tentative leanings to a wider life, met with a more deeply-rooted, though less decisive, opposition, on the part of the father than of ...
— Maurice Guest • Henry Handel Richardson
... might be hastened. He took the rifle and slipped cautiously through the bushes, stopping to make what assurance he could that he was not being seen, crawling for the most part across the open places, keeping as much as possible where boulders or trees hid him. He had already made his tentative plans; he made his way down into the bed of the ravine and thence upstream. Swiftly the light increased over the still solitudes. The sun was up on the highlands, the canons ...
— Daughter of the Sun - A Tale of Adventure • Jackson Gregory
... OF PROGRAMME TO THE WORK.—Under Traditional Management the tentative calendar might cause speed, but could not direct speed. Under Transitory Management elimination of waste by prescribed methods and routing increases output. This increase becomes greater under Scientific Management. Standardized ...
— The Psychology of Management - The Function of the Mind in Determining, Teaching and - Installing Methods of Least Waste • L. M. Gilbreth
... creating the crusade against witches. These are conclusions of some moment and a caution must be inserted. We have been treating of a period where facts are few and information fragmentary. Under such circumstances conclusions can only be tentative. Perhaps the most that can be said of them is that ...
— A History of Witchcraft in England from 1558 to 1718 • Wallace Notestein
... in relation to this Colony Over-Sea by pointing out that all my proposals here are necessarily tentative and experimental. There is no intention on my part to stick to any of these suggestions if, on maturer consideration and consultation with practical men, they can be improved upon. Mr. Arnold White, who has already conducted two parties of Colonists to South Africa, ...
— "In Darkest England and The Way Out" • General William Booth
... for her in a tentative form; that is to say, they placed suppositious propositions before her and cunningly tried to commit her to one end of the propositions without committing themselves to the other. But she always saw the game and spoiled it. The trap was in ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... involuntary choice of association but also the time of every associative process. But a second condition ought also to be fulfilled. After some indifferent words, others ought to be mixed into the series which touch in a tentative way on various spheres corresponding to the possible suspicions. The groups to which the hidden thoughts of psychasthenics, for instance, belong are not many. As soon as our series of words strikes such a ...
— Psychotherapy • Hugo Muensterberg
... rose that morning I had a tentative plan for stirring him to action. I was elaborating it on the way down town in my electric. It shows how badly Anita was crippling my brain, that not until I was almost at my office did it occur to me: "That was a tremendous luxury Roebuck indulged his ...
— The Deluge • David Graham Phillips
... carefully traced a neck to its own proper head and then his steel fingers opened and swooped down and shut off the dialect. Hopalong pushed Dent off him and managed to catch Johnny's flaying arm on the third attempt, while Dent made tentative sorties against ...
— Bar-20 Days • Clarence E. Mulford
... made in the otherwise exact reproduction of the Grand Trianon. According to documents published in the seventeenth century, and especially to the tentative drawings made by Lepautri himself, the Grand Trianon architect, that monument was originally to be decorated over its high balustrade railings with some artistic devices and groups of children, each to ...
— Final Report of the Louisiana Purchase Exposition Commission • Louisiana Purchase Exposition Commission
... feature of his aristocratic little face. He seemed at first rather uncertain how to take Durant, and looked him up and down as if in search of a convenient button-hole; he smiled innocently on the young man (Durant soon learned to know and dread that smile); nothing could have been more delicate and tentative than his approach. He had been silent for the last few minutes, lying low behind a number of the Nineteenth Century, for if he were a bore he had the dangerous power of masking his deadly qualities in an unreal absorption. At the signal that followed Durant's last desperate ...
— The Return of the Prodigal • May Sinclair
... existence, such a programme would have been unnecessary, and, in any case, Ezekiel would hardly have ventured to contradict a code which enjoyed so venerable a sanction and bore the honoured name of Moses. It is easier to suppose that Ezekiel's programme is a tentative sketch, which was modified and improved upon by the authors of P. Again there was every inducement during and immediately after the exile to formulate definitely the ritual practice of pre-exilic times, and to modify it in the direction of existing or future needs. So long as the ...
— Introduction to the Old Testament • John Edgar McFadyen
... conscientious and able pen of Dr. Henry Malter, but of books there is none. But while this is due to several causes, chief among them perhaps being that English speaking people in general and Americans in particular are more interested in positive facts than in tentative speculations, in concrete researches than in abstract theorizing—there are ample signs that here too a change is coming, and in many spheres we are called upon to examine our foundations with a view to making our superstructure deep and secure as well as broad and comprehensive. And this is nothing ...
— A History of Mediaeval Jewish Philosophy • Isaac Husik
... communications were, of course, tentative, based upon a yet imperfect knowledge of conditions. For the most part they conveyed, besides the notification of his having taken the command, chiefly general assurances of the good-will of the writer's ...
— The Life of Nelson, Vol. II. (of 2) - The Embodiment of the Sea Power of Great Britain • A. T. (Alfred Thayer) Mahan
... with death or faith, or some powerful word like that. But we are limited to skiff, sniff, tiff and whiff. And what can you do with those? Students, I hope, will see what they can do. My own tentative solution is printed, by arrangement with the Editor, on another page (458). I do not pretend that it is perfect; in fact it seems to me to strike rather a vulgar note. At the same time it is copyright, and must not be set to music ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 158, June 9, 1920 • Various
... fortified coaling ports which every naval nation should frame for itself. In our own case, such distance is that from Honolulu to Guam, in the Ladrones,—3,500 miles. The excellent results obtained from our vessels already in commission, embodying as they do the tentative experiences of other countries, as well as the reflective powers of our own designers, make it antecedently probable that 10,000 and 12,000 tons represent the extremes of normal displacement advantageous for the United States battleship. ...
— Lessons of the war with Spain and other articles • Alfred T. Mahan
... of that. But before the test I shall send my blueprints to Washington. Our patent attorney there has already filed tentative plans and applied for certain patents that I consider completed. Don't fret. I'll make it impossible for anybody to steal our ...
— Tom Swift and his Electric Locomotive - or, Two Miles a Minute on the Rails • Victor Appleton
... conspicuous than the wheat, we should ask ourselves whether our own lack of vigilance and forethought did not contribute to the luxuriant growth of tares in a soil naturally congenial to them. After many hesitations, and some tentative and half-hearted steps, we at length recognised that intellectual partnership however imperfect must lead towards a closer political partnership. It became, indeed, impossible for us to refuse to do so without being untrue to the principles that had governed not only our own national ...
— India, Old and New • Sir Valentine Chirol
... itself this separation imports a spirit of lassitude and dulness and compliance with false conditions and limited aims which would seem almost incredible in those practising what should be an inspiring art. To men so trained, so employed, all counsels of perfection are foolishness; all idea of tentative work, experiment, modification while in progress, is looked upon as mere delusion. To them work consists of a series of never-varied formulas, all fitting into each other and combined to aim at producing a definite result, the ...
— Stained Glass Work - A text-book for students and workers in glass • C. W. Whall
... Graham and Mrs. Sanders to call upon the wife of the commanding officer and say what words of welcome were possible as appropriate to her return. "And Angela," said Janet, for reasons of her own, "will be coming later." There was no response, nor was there to the next tentative. The ladies thought Mrs. Plume should join forces with them and take Natzie out of the single cell she occupied. "Can she not be locked at the hospital, under the eye of the matron, with double sentries? ...
— An Apache Princess - A Tale of the Indian Frontier • Charles King
... it all," or even a part of it. To be thoroughly happy in a case like this it is best to leave minute details and even a general knowledge of such things to the inquisitive. I had, however, sufficient curiosity to speculate on the dishes, and have made a tentative menu of them, assuming the courses, from their color, flavor and general appearance, to ...
— A Fantasy of Mediterranean Travel • S. G. Bayne
... integuments than in them. Not from this class, however, do your all-the-year-round bathers come. The Arab is an exotic—a child of the Sun, loving not to disport himself in water the temperature of which shocks his tentative knuckles, as he dips them in the unaccustomed element. His wardrobe, again, is too much after the fashion of that pertaining to Canning's needy knife-grinder to make an al fresco toilette other than embarrassing. From the all-the-year-round ...
— Mystic London: - or, Phases of occult life in the metropolis • Charles Maurice Davies
... played with them, capriciously, touching one here, one there, with tentative finger to see them explode in ...
— Barbarians • Robert W. Chambers
... practical motives behind the attempts at community study. Such investigations as have been made, with a few shining exceptions, the Pittsburgh Survey and the community studies of the Russell Sage Foundation, have been superficial. All, perhaps, have been tentative and experimental. The community has not been studied from a fundamental standpoint. Indeed, there was not available, as a background of method and of orientation, any ...
— Introduction to the Science of Sociology • Robert E. Park
... with the disciplines of natural science is ever before my mind, and I am fearful of doing these disciplines an injustice. The ability and pugnacity of the partisans of natural science make them formidable persons to contradict. The tone of tentative inquiry, which befits a being of dim faculties and bounded knowledge, is the tone I would wish to take and not to depart from. At present it seems to me, that those who are for giving to natural ...
— English Prose - A Series of Related Essays for the Discussion and Practice • Frederick William Roe (edit. and select.)
... ready to give an answer, even to the tentative question; yet she did it—was, in a manner, surprised into doing it. For the young woman who has not loved, it is easy to doubt the existence of the seventh Heaven, or at least to reckon without its possibilities. At the very crucial moment the clear-sighted ...
— The Quickening • Francis Lynde
... European travel had followed for the family, a year of spending the new money lavishly for strange, long-dreamed-of luxuries—a year in which the money was joyously proved to be real. Then came a year of tentative residence in the East. That year was less satisfactory. The novelty of being sufficiently fed, clad, and sheltered was ...
— The Spenders - A Tale of the Third Generation • Harry Leon Wilson
... his prophecies, and yet managed to live on it. He responded readily, I imagine, to any request for "something prophetic, you know," from acquaintances or even strangers. Above all, he kept to one style, and did not worry the public, when once it had got used to him, by tentative gropings after a new method. And Isaiah, we may be sure, did ...
— Not that it Matters • A. A. Milne
... these characteristics will challenge the attention of the class. It is directed straight at the point at issue, and no time will be lost in wondering what the question means, or in trying two or three tentative answers. Third, the younger the child, the simpler the question must be. With little children, to be good a question may involve only one idea, or relationship. The amount involved in the question, its scope and content, ...
— How to Teach • George Drayton Strayer and Naomi Norsworthy
... in the present stage of evolution possess no economic value. True, cross-country cruises by airship have been inaugurated, and, up to a point, have proved popularly, if not commercially, successful, while tentative efforts have been made to utilise the aeroplane as a mail-carrier. Still, from the view-point of the community at large aerial travel is as remote as it was ...
— Aeroplanes and Dirigibles of War • Frederick A. Talbot
... of weed attacked a city you utter an absurdity. I think everyone was aware of the fantastic discrepancy between statement of the event and the event itself. So innocent and ridiculous the grass looked as it made its first tentative thrust at the urban nerves; the green blades sloped forward like some prettily arranged but unimaginative corsage upon the concrete bosom of the street. You could not believe those fragile seeming strands would resist the impress of a careless ...
— Greener Than You Think • Ward Moore
... from London in the end, got out beyond the last tentative reachings of the speculative builder, into country lane-ways. There were hedges covered with hawthorn, and the scent of it reached us as we rushed past. Gorman threw away a half-smoked cigar. Perhaps he wanted to enjoy the country smells. Perhaps he was preparing himself for life in the new ...
— Gossamer - 1915 • George A. Birmingham
... N. experiment; essay &c. (attempt) 675; analysis &c. (investigation) 461; screen; trial, tentative method, ttonnement. verification, probation, experimentum crucis[Lat], proof, (demonstration) 478; criterion, diagnostic, test, probe, crucial test, acid test, litmus test. crucible, reagent, check, ...
— Roget's Thesaurus
... have every blade of grass eaten by their own cattle, which would be counted as improving their claims. They meant to give a homelike air of permanency to their dwellings. They had already talked over a tentative plan of bringing water to their desert claims, and had ridden over the bench-land for two days, with the plat at hand for reference, that they might be sure of choosing their claims wisely. They had prepared for every contingency save the one that ...
— The Flying U's Last Stand • B. M. Bower
... consideration in laying out his lines of railway was what would best answer the intended purpose, or, to use his own words, to secure the maximum of result with the minimum of means. He was pre-eminently a safe man, because cautious, tentative, and experimental; following closely the lines of conduct trodden by his father, ...
— Lives of the Engineers - The Locomotive. George and Robert Stephenson • Samuel Smiles
... Southern richness of her colouring: the warm white and covert rose of her skin, the dense black of her undulating abundant hair, the sudden, sanguine red of her lips,—I think you would have taken her for more than twenty-two. There was nothing of the immature or the unfinished, nothing of the tentative, in her aspect. With no loss of freshness, there were the strength, the poise, the assurance, that we are wont to associate with a riper womanhood. Whether she looked twenty-five or not, she looked, at any rate, a completed ...
— The Lady Paramount • Henry Harland
... case of survival of the fittest! A fac-simile reproduction of a hitherto unpublished Polonaise in A flat, written at the age of eleven, is also included in this unique number. This tiny dance shows, it is said, the "characteristic physiognomy" of the composer. In reality this polacca is thin, a tentative groping after a form that later was mastered so magnificently by the composer. Here is the way it begins—the autograph ...
— Chopin: The Man and His Music • James Huneker
... repealed. The endowment of the brewers will continue, and my Lords Bass, Burton and the rest will merely await future opportunities to plunder the British public. In short, little constructive legislation, even of that mild and tentative character one might expect from a Liberal party, made up of capitalistic units can be expected after the ten years of corrupt and extravagant rule of this band ...
— Mother Earth, Vol. 1 No. 1, March 1906 • Various
... capital into the business," said Corey, with the tentative accent of a man who chances a thing. "I've got a little money, but I didn't imagine you cared ...
— Henry James, Jr. • William Dean Howells
... though certainly not without guidance. One of the books he best and earliest loved was 'Quarles' Emblemes', which his father possessed in a seventeenth century edition, and which contains one or two very tentative specimens of his early handwriting. Its quaint, powerful lines and still quainter illustrations combined the marvellous with what he believed to be true; and he seemed specially identified with its world of religious fancies by the fact that the soul in it was always depicted ...
— Life and Letters of Robert Browning • Mrs. Sutherland Orr
... his napkin under his collar or spit on the carpet.... What laughable little folk we were! I, who had always seen man as the last and final expression of evolution, now saw him as the stumbling, crawling, incredibly stupid, result of a tentative experiment—a first step up a ...
— The Blue Germ • Martin Swayne
... became formidable under the name of THE LEVELLERS. All the while, however, there was also a quiet formation, in some of the superior and more educated minds of the Army, of sentiments essentially Republican, but more reserved and tentative in the style of their Republicanism. Among these minds too it had become a question whether a mere settlement with the King even on the basis of the Nineteen Propositions would suffice, and whether the hour had not ...
— The Life of John Milton Vol. 3 1643-1649 • David Masson
... use of female labor has become almost a necessity. Woman has had her share of work from the beginning, often much more than her share, but it ran usually in the simple lines of household requirements; and if it chanced, here and there, to be of larger scope, this was, after all, mostly tentative. Work with deliberate intent to earn a living is chiefly a fact of the nineteenth century, and any tangible estimate of woman as a competitor of man in the struggle for existence must be based upon the facts of the past hundred years. It is within hardly more than a generation ...
— The Arena - Volume 4, No. 21, August, 1891 • Various
... the window recess and looked up at him. He was leaning forward to her, smiling, self-conscious, tentative, and eager. She thought it best to laugh ...
— The Lost Girl • D. H. Lawrence
... the animal gravely, feeling its pulse, counting its respirations, and finally inserting a tentative finger in an attempt to examine its ...
— In Search of the Unknown • Robert W. Chambers
... have charge of all printing, such as Advance Notices of Conference, Registration Cards, Banquet Tickets, Tentative Program, Completed Program, Crusade Folder, Newspaper Articles, ...
— The Boy and the Sunday School - A Manual of Principle and Method for the Work of the Sunday - School with Teen Age Boys • John L. Alexander
... cheerful within, but outside the wind still blared mournfully. Once more Dundas was sorry that he had declined the invitation to remain, and it was with a somewhat tentative intention that he made a motion to return to the hotel. But his host seemed to regard his resolution as final, and rose with a regret, not an insistence. The two women stared in silent amazement at the mere idea of his camping out, as it were, in the old hotel. ...
— The Phantoms Of The Foot-Bridge - 1895 • Charles Egbert Craddock (AKA Mary Noailles Murfree)
... from the car barn beyond came like a reminder of his purpose, a summons to make a tentative effort, at least, to achieve it. So he turned resolutely away, leaving academic dreams in the ...
— The Mayor of Warwick • Herbert M. Hopkins
... go at once to a doctor, but he told his trouble to every one he met and received much tentative advice. He had meant to have his talk with Eleanor on the morning next after their conversation in the dining-room, but his bodily and ...
— Soul of a Bishop • H. G. Wells
... evidence, it seems to me a difficult faith to hold; while a reincarnation of spirits, if one could believe it, would seem to me both to equalise the inequalities of human experience, and give one a lively belief in the virtue and worth of human endeavour. But all this is set down, as I say, in a tentative and ...
— The Child of the Dawn • Arthur Christopher Benson
... adequate report upon the qualities of a book, even a book which has not been examined, why should it assume to do more than talk about it and talk all the better for being merely tentative and altogether unfinal? Nobody can really be authoritative concerning anything, for there is no one whose wisdom will not be disputed by others of the wise. The best way, then, might be for a reviewer to go round ...
— Imaginary Interviews • W. D. Howells
... which would have been scouted by their fathers; but they are themselves as ready as their fathers were to scout any further new suggestion, and it is only by iteration and reiteration that the shorter steps of tentative experiment can be urged upon ...
— Village Improvements and Farm Villages • George E. Waring
... and wandered to his shirt, which he began to unfasten. Stripped, and adopting an athletic posture like the tiger-skin man in the advertisement, he regarded himself with some satisfaction in the mirror, breaking off to dabble a tentative foot in the tub. Readjusting a faucet and indulging in a few preliminary grunts, he ...
— The Beautiful and Damned • F. Scott Fitzgerald
... part have read every one of these books. I throw out this list as a tentative effort in the direction of suggesting a hundred books with which to start a library. The young student will find much to amuse, and certainly nothing here to bore him. These books will not make him a prig, as Mr. James Payn ...
— Immortal Memories • Clement Shorter
... of Belmont nothing of importance occurred in the year 1861. The work on the ironclads was pushed on, and there are traces of the reconnoissances by the gunboats in the rivers. In January, 1862, some tentative movements, having no particular result, were made in the direction of Columbus and up the Tennessee. There was a great desire to get the mortar-boats completed, but they were not ready in time for the opening operations at Fort Henry and Donelson, their ...
— The Gulf and Inland Waters - The Navy in the Civil War. Volume 3. • A. T. Mahan
... intervals he could devote to her were usually intruded upon by the correspondent. Naturally, Corliss was not drawn to him, and other men, who knew or had heard of the Opera House occurrence, only accepted him after a tentative fashion. Trethaway had the indiscretion, once or twice, to speak slightingly of him, but so fiercely was he defended by his admirers that the colonel developed the good taste to thenceforward keep his tongue ...
— A Daughter of the Snows • Jack London
... at least, he resembled Dutch Fred. His abilities in many directions had been recognised by Harry Goldenburg. It was not till they had gone over to a little table in a remote corner that Dutch Fred broached Goldenburg's name, in a tentative reference to the murder ...
— The Grell Mystery • Frank Froest
... she went on. "I didn't forget anything! Everything meant you—all else tentative and preparatory. I knew then that the plan was for joy, as soon as we knew ...
— Son of Power • Will Levington Comfort and Zamin Ki Dost
... the scene of many changes whose origin is now obscure. But I am unfortunate in having to discuss Central Asian Buddhism before scholars have had time to publish or even catalogue completely the store of material collected and the reader must remember that the statements in this chapter are at best tentative and incomplete. They will certainly be supplemented and probably corrected as year by year new documents and works of art are ...
— Hinduism and Buddhism, An Historical Sketch, Vol. 3 (of 3) • Charles Eliot
... multitude," applied to mobs, was then in every body's mouth; and, accordingly, after my brother had recovered from his first astonishment at this audacious mutiny, he made us several sweeping bows that looked very much like tentative rehearsals of a sweeping fusillade, and then addressed us in a very brief speech, of which we could distinguish the words pearls and swinish multitude, but uttered in a very low key, perhaps out ...
— Autobiographic Sketches • Thomas de Quincey
... sole reference in the interview to the murder. I take it for tentative, and that Hamlet is satisfied by his mother's utterance, carriage, and expression, that she is innocent of any knowledge of that crime. Neither does he allude to the adultery: there is enough in what she ...
— The Tragedie of Hamlet, Prince of Denmark - A Study with the Text of the Folio of 1623 • George MacDonald
... was forty-eight, but he bent over the sack, applied a tentative, shifting grip that balanced it, and, with a quick heave, stood erect, the somersaulted sack of ...
— Smoke Bellew • Jack London
... of human individuality, or how are human initiative and responsibility so much as thinkable? Benjamin Jowett, in his Essay on Predestination and Freewill, glanced at this problem in passing, and the remarks he made upon it more than fifty years ago, if somewhat tentative, are ...
— Problems of Immanence - Studies Critical and Constructive • J. Warschauer
... 128) so long preceded the Cufic which, amongst vulgar Moslems, is looked upon like black letter in Europe. But Semitic epigraphy is only now entering upon its second stage of study, the first being mere tentative ignorance: about 80 years ago the illustrious De Sacy proved, in a learned memoir, the non-existence of letters in Arabia before the days of Mohammed. But Palmer[FN454], Halevy, Robertson Smith, Doughty ...
— Supplemental Nights, Volume 6 • Richard F. Burton
... the combination of words (in whose case this occurs) is said to be vitiated by ambiguity.[1689] By ascertainment (of faults and merits), called Sankhya, is meant the establishment, by elimination, of faults or merits (in premises and conclusions), adopting tentative meanings.[1690] Krama or weighing the relative strength or weakness of the faults or merits (ascertained by the above process), consists in settling the propriety of the priority or subsequence of the words ...
— The Mahabharata of Krishna-Dwaipayana Vyasa, Volume 3 - Books 8, 9, 10, 11 and 12 • Unknown
... will make an extract of it here: "Vous ne me parlez, ma chere enfant, que des avantages de la position que je vous offre, mais mon devoir est de vous signaler aussi ses dangers; ils sont grands, je serai sans doute a vos cotes l'objet de plus d'une tentative d'assassinat; independamment de cela, je dois vous confier que des complots serieux se fomentent dans l'armee. J'ai l'[oe]il ouvert de ce cote et je compte bien d'une maniere ou d'autre prevenir toute explosion; le moyen sera peut-etre la guerre. La encore il ...
— The Letters of Queen Victoria, Vol 2 (of 3), 1844-1853 • Queen Victoria
... easily. She made feeble tentative attempts to share his author's rapture. She asked him timid little questions, to which he gave smilingly vague answers; and once she even suggested that he should read to her the chapters he ...
— The Making of a Soul • Kathlyn Rhodes
... he said, patting the neck which arched impatiently as she felt the boards hollow beneath her feet. Yet she came obediently enough on deck, arching her fore-feet high and throwing them out in an uncertain and tentative manner. ...
— Bog-Myrtle and Peat - Tales Chiefly Of Galloway Gathered From The Years 1889 To 1895 • S.R. Crockett
... among the members of the community. Of this phase he said: "The social education was extremely pleasant. For instance, in the matter of music we had extremely limited means or talent, and very little could be done except in a very rudimentary, tentative, and experimental way. We had a singing-class, and we had some who could sing a song gracefully and accompany themselves at the piano. We had some piano music; and, so far as it was possible, care was taken that it should be good—sonatas of Beethoven and Mozart, and ...
— Early Letters of George Wm. Curtis • G. W. Curtis, ed. George Willis Cooke
... extraordinary development of mining interests in the region about the head of Lynn Canal brought about a temporary modus vivendi, by which a convenient separation was made at the watershed divides of the White and Chilkoot passes and to the north of Klukwan, on the Klehini River. These partial and tentative adjustments could not, in the very nature of things, be satisfactory or lasting. A permanent disposition of the ...
— State of the Union Addresses of Theodore Roosevelt • Theodore Roosevelt
... accumulation and attacking, breaking up, and redistributing any large unanticipated bodies of wealth that appeared. But both men are equally set towards the Normal Social Life, and equally enemies of the New. The so-called "socialist" land legislation of New Zealand again is a tentative towards the realisation of the same school of ideas: great estates are to be automatically broken up, property is to be kept disseminated; a vast amount of political speaking and writing in America and throughout the ...
— An Englishman Looks at the World • H. G. Wells
... compressed into a few days in the former, in the latter into forty days of time. The tragedy of Arthur's reign could not so be condensed; and Tennyson chose the only feasible plan. He has left a work, not absolutely perfect, indeed, but such as he conceived, after many tentative essays, and such as he desired to achieve. His fame may not rest chiefly on the Idylls, but they form one of the fairest jewels in the crown that shines with unnumbered gems, each with ...
— Alfred Tennyson • Andrew Lang
... sharpshooters of the countryside. Its duty was to go forward and make connection with the Scotch and Gurkha troops with which it was brigaded. The Afghans knew this, and knew too, after their first tentative shots, that they were dealing with a raw regiment. Thereafter they devoted themselves to the task of keeping the Fore and Aft on the strain. Not for anything would they have taken equal liberties with a seasoned corps—with the wicked little Gurkhas, whose delight it was to lie out in the open on ...
— Soldier Stories • Rudyard Kipling
... is on a sound basis and might well receive much wider use. Following along somewhat the same pattern, suggested schedules have been proposed for the hickories and butternuts. These should receive further consideration and adoption, if approved at least on a tentative basis. A schedule for Persian walnuts is very much needed as indicated by the recent contest in which confusion occurred related to there being no recognized standards of evaluation. With the Persian walnut such matters as the method of cracking ...
— Northern Nut Growers Association Report of the Proceedings at the 43rd Annual Meeting - Rockport, Indiana, August 25, 26 and 27, 1952 • Various
... disturbance was that they agreed to try a tentative sitting. Stepping out into the kitchen, Mrs. Meeker told Lizzie that she needn't bother to play ...
— The Best Short Stories of 1919 - and the Yearbook of the American Short Story • Various
... though it might have been comprehensible to an urban brain-worker, was an amazing thing to these quiet Sussex villagers. The frantic gesticulations they surprised now and then, the headlong pace after nightfall that swept him upon them round quiet corners, the inhuman bludgeoning of all tentative advances of curiosity, the taste for twilight that led to the closing of doors, the pulling down of blinds, the extinction of candles and lamps—who could agree with such goings on? They drew aside as he passed down the village, and when he had gone by, young humourists would up with coat-collars ...
— The Invisible Man • H. G. Wells
... lest he should fall on the hard floor of the cave, or rest his weight on the injured leg, and so undo all that had cost them so much of care and labor. But caution restrained him; for he was aware of the danger, though he was also half-mad with impatience to be a man once more. Venturing only a few tentative steps at first, he steadily accustomed himself to movement with the aid of the awkward crutches, and in a few days was able to take up some of the work of their wretched habitation. Marion saw that this pleased him immensely, almost as if he had been a boy entrusted ...
— The Heart of Thunder Mountain • Edfrid A. Bingham
... take up the foil with a tentative turn of the wrist, lunging at thin air. His zest for the game has gone; but the skill lingers, and at times he is tempted to show the younger blades a pass or two. These were veteran fencers with a skill of their own, which they loved to display at times. The zest was that ...
— With Edged Tools • Henry Seton Merriman
... two tentative questions he ventured softly, but though he waited for several minutes there came no reply, nor any sign of movement. Presently he heard his regular and quiet breathing, and putting his hand again gently on the breast, felt the steady rise ...
— The Wendigo • Algernon Blackwood
... silence which pervaded the court during this scene, in which the reader will have observed I played a bold, tentative, and happily-successful game, was broken as the witness was borne off by a loud murmur of indignation, followed by congratulatory exclamations on the fortunate termination of the suit. The defendant's counsel threw ...
— The Experiences of a Barrister, and Confessions of an Attorney • Samuel Warren
... driven into choosing the second-best material or the less becoming frock for the unsatisfying reason that it was the cheaper. The two men had given Kitty carte blanche as regards expenditure and she proceeded to take full advantage of the fact, promptly quelling any tentative suggestions towards economy which Penelope, rather overwhelmed by Mrs. Seymour's ...
— The Moon out of Reach • Margaret Pedler
... Alicia and had them witness a tentative agreement, which had to be ratified by a board of directors of a corporation back on Earth. That board would jump at it, but the stipulation for possible cancellation had to be made. It was mumbo-jumbo. Cochrane felt ...
— Operation: Outer Space • William Fitzgerald Jenkins
... took a tentative step forward, and Patsie followed in his wake. Half a yard from Pixie's chair they stopped short with eager, craning faces, with bodies braced in readiness ...
— The Love Affairs of Pixie • Mrs George de Horne Vaizey
... uniform, science is true,' the hypothetical character of science appears in the form of the statement. Nevertheless, it seems undesirable to call our confidence in Nature's uniformity an 'hypothesis': it is incongruous to use the same term for our tentative conjectures and for our most indispensable beliefs. 'The Universal Postulate' is a better term for the principle which, in some form or other, every generalisation ...
— Logic - Deductive and Inductive • Carveth Read
... its splendor. Cecilia Ingles, who could not but admire her beauty and her readiness, thought that her tone was a little too hard, and that in her excess of aplomb she pushed self-possession to the verge of self-assertion. Rosy, in fact, entered society not with the tentative step and slow advance of one who cautiously feels an unaccustomed way, but by a single confident and intuitive leap. As she stood there beside her mother, dressed in a pale yellow gown and playing carelessly with her bunch ...
— With the Procession • Henry B. Fuller
... man with iron-gray hair and a very red and bulby nose, was a garrulous servant, and after a tentative cough made ...
— Kathleen • Christopher Morley |
