"Unromantic" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... symbol of folly and contempt in the dust of the mountain road. And had she not made his humiliation complete by begging Charley's interference between him and his enemy? He would go home and send her back the handkerchief she had given him. But here the unromantic reflection that although he had washed it that very afternoon in the solitude of his own cabin, he could not possibly iron it, but must send it "rough ...
— Frontier Stories • Bret Harte
... have nothing to do with the criminal law, and of which the mere framework of the story is often interesting enough. His peculiar power is best displayed in so presenting to us the sorrows of commonplace characters as to make us feel that a shabby coat and a narrow education, and the most unromantic of characters, need not cut off our sympathies with a fellow-creature; and that the dullest tradesman who treads on our toes in an omnibus may want only a power of articulate expression to bring before us some of the deepest of all problems. The parish clerk and the grocer—or ...
— Hours in a Library - New Edition, with Additions. Vol. II (of 3) • Leslie Stephen
... He opened some letters, and looked up from one with a twitching face and a curious droop of the eyelids. "Miss Wishart is all right," he said. "My aunt says that she is none the worse, but that Stocks has caught a tremendous cold. An unromantic ending!" ...
— The Half-Hearted • John Buchan
... profit to their owners, who had been put to an enormous expense and risk in sending vessels in, was so much reduced that the ventures hardly paid. And when at last Fort Fisher was taken, and thus all blockade-running entirely put an end to, the enterprise had lost much of its charm; for, unromantic as it may seem, much of that charm ...
— Sketches From My Life - By The Late Admiral Hobart Pasha • Hobart Pasha
... and beans!" protested Helen in simulated disgust. "They are so unromantic! It will sound so poor if ever I tell the ...
— A Mating in the Wilds • Ottwell Binns
... to few—to none indeed save you that I have confided the secret of my minstrelsy," he said deferentially a little later. "Illness, love of adventure, a longing to brush elbows with the world, a hunger for the woodland—in the eyes of unromantic men these things are weaknesses. You and I know differently, but nevertheless it is best that I seem but a poor vagrant grinding forth a hapless tune for the coppers ...
— Diane of the Green Van • Leona Dalrymple
... (from which I must draw my instances) the great change of the past century has been effected by the admission of detail. It was inaugurated by the romantic Scott; and at length, by the semi-romantic Balzac and his more or less wholly unromantic followers, bound like a duty on the novelist. For some time it signified and expressed a more ample contemplation of the conditions of man's life; but it has recently (at least in France) fallen into a merely technical and decorative stage, which ...
— The Art of Writing and Other Essays • Robert Louis Stevenson
... are the principal secret societies at work in Great Britain, but amongst minor secret or semi-secret movements may be mentioned the strange sect the Faithists, said to have some affinity with the Druses, inhabiting a singularly unromantic London suburb, whose "Ancient Founder" is the author of a series of tracts urging man not to be misled by false Gods, but to worship "Jehovih the Creator only," and at the same time advocating nationalization ...
— Secret Societies And Subversive Movements • Nesta H. Webster
... a very ordinary bird, but I, at least, will not be a party to it. I refuse to surrender the portcullis and the moat, the bastion and the well-manned towers, which were the features of every castle with which hitherto I have played, in order to take the field with allies so unromantic as a brace of rooks. You may tell me that "rook" is a corruption of this or that word, meaning something which has never laid an egg in its life. It may be so, but in that case you cannot blame me for continuing to call it the castle ...
— If I May • A. A. Milne
... truth must be told—and every word of this narrative of my life is of the most sacred veracity—my passion for Nora began in a very vulgar and unromantic way. I did not save her life; on the contrary, I once very nearly killed her, as you shall hear. I did not behold her by moonlight playing on the guitar, or rescue her from the hands of ruffians, ...
— Barry Lyndon • William Makepeace Thackeray
... the Sawdust Pile, had seen Donald McKaye, in the light cast through the open door of Caleb Brent's cottage, take Nan Brent in his arms and kiss her, since he had heard Nan Brent's voice apply to the young laird of Port Agnew a term so endearing as to constitute a verbal caress, his practical and unromantic soul had been ...
— Kindred of the Dust • Peter B. Kyne
... Mediterranean, even in the calmest weather, a light pleasant breeze springs up after sunset; this and the cloudless sky, and unobscured brilliancy of the stars, are attractions sufficient to allure the most somnolent and unromantic ...
— A Ramble of Six Thousand Miles through the United States of America • S. A. Ferrall
... silence along the beach, and, rounding a corner of the cliffs, they came presently to a cave. In earlier days W. Bales could have done desperate deeds against smugglers there, with Miss Spratt looking on. Alas for this unromantic age! It was now a place for picnics, and a crumpled sheet of newspaper on the sand showed that there had been ...
— Happy Days • Alan Alexander Milne
... forsook the American and indulged in a rosy picture of herself as the owner of a mine—a gold mine—coal was too unromantic. She saw herself in a short skirt and a sombrero superintending the exertions of a number of dusky workers who were loading neat little gold bars on the backs ...
— Across the Mesa • Jarvis Hall
... outward once again, beyond the boats with their beautiful coxswains—I mean hen-swains—to where that huge glistening iron mass floats proudly on the main. Reader, that object is the heroine, if I may so say, of this very unromantic story. She is in strange contrast with the numerous wooden veterans around her—relics of Old England's fighting days. I thought as I gazed on that splendid ship that, had I my choice, nothing would suit me better than to go to ...
— In Eastern Seas - The Commission of H.M.S. 'Iron Duke,' flag-ship in China, 1878-83 • J. J. Smith
... I believe it, too? It would be monstrous—disloyal and unromantic not to. I won't listen to a word more on that score, please. And the rest follows, doesn't it? We are marrying because we love each other and believe we can help each other, and I am sure one of the reasons why we love each other is that we both ...
— The Law-Breakers and Other Stories • Robert Grant
... splendid animal "Don Fulano," after that superb horse in Winthrop's "John Brent," not because he was a magnificent black charger, etc.; on the contrary, in many respects he was the opposite of the original Don Fulano. Raised upon an unromantic farm near Scranton, an unattractive yellow bay, rather too heavy limbed and too stockily built to be called handsome, yet powerful, courageous, intelligent (he could almost talk), high spirited, with a heavy, shaggy mane and forelock, through which gleamed a pair of keen, fierce eyes, ...
— War from the Inside • Frederick L. (Frederick Lyman) Hitchcock
... fashion of our still too adolescent world, Mr. Britling and Mrs. Harrowdean proceeded to negotiate these extremely unromantic matters in the phrases of that simple, honest and youthful passionateness which is still the only language available, and at times Mr. Britling came very near persuading himself that he had something of the passionate love for her that he had ...
— Mr. Britling Sees It Through • H. G. Wells
... will not testify to anything so unromantic; besides, it might be inconvenient for Mrs. Bondy's cook." She put on her hat, and stepped along the stones towards the entrance ...
— In Exile and Other Stories • Mary Hallock Foote
... just ascertained from the brass plate on the door that Dr McTougall dwelt there, and was thinking what an ugly unromantic name that was for a pretty girl as I descended the steps, when Dumps's first yell broke upon my astonished ears. I recognised the voice at once, though I must confess that the second yell from the interior of the watering-pan perplexed me not a little, but ...
— My Doggie and I • R.M. Ballantyne
... and very unromantic change in the subject Nan laughed. And as laughter and ill-temper never go hand in hand, it was not long before Nan had forgotten all ...
— Nan Sherwood at Palm Beach - Or Strange Adventures Among The Orange Groves • Annie Roe Carr
... the New Forest at nightfall when the forest seemed full of pixies and the fading sunset was red and grey and golden like the transformation scene of a pantomime. But alas! the next day we found the forest unromantic, and Clapham Common looked indescribably common in the morning sunlight. Our mood had vanished, and although we tried to reproduce the same uplifting emotion the following evening, we couldn't—we had a headache and the gnats ...
— Over the Fireside with Silent Friends • Richard King
... event the boy's introduction to war was going to be as unromantic as anyone could want, short of being thrown cold and untrained into a major battle. They must be prepared for a bad time until they made it out of the ...
— Ride Proud, Rebel! • Andre Alice Norton
... the voices of the two speakers were hushed, or were replaced by the gentle but unromantic music of the nose; and save when the church bells tolled the hour and the watchman called it, all was silent at the house of John Sedley, Esquire, of Russell Square, ...
— Vanity Fair • William Makepeace Thackeray
... Babylon. In the office of Powells were seven full-fledged solicitors and seventeen other clerks, without counting Henry, and not a man or youth of the educated lot of them made the slightest reference to Love in Babylon during all that day. (It was an ordinary, plain, common, unromantic, dismal Tuesday in Lincoln's Inn Fields.) Eighteen thousand persons had already bought Love in Babylon; possibly several hundreds of copies had been sold since nine o'clock that morning; doubtless someone was every minute inquiring for it and demanding it in bookshop or library, just ...
— A Great Man - A Frolic • Arnold Bennett
... it was her photograph that you kindly brought for my guidance. I ought to have mentioned, perhaps, that I once had the honour of being engaged to her—until you (no doubt from the highest motives) invested my little gift of song with a flavour of unromantic ridicule. That ridicule I am now enabled to repay, with interest calculated up to ...
— The Talking Horse - And Other Tales • F. Anstey
... Mrs. Shrimplin came into his life, and as Mr. Shrimplin delicately intimated, tied him hand and foot. The same grounds of mutual understanding and intellectual dependence which existed between Custer and his father were lacking where Mrs. Shrimplin was concerned. She was unromantic, with a painfully literal cast of mind, though Custer—without knowing what is meant by a sense of humor, suspected her of this rare gift, a dangerous and destructive thing in woman. Privately considering her relation ...
— The Just and the Unjust • Vaughan Kester
... been wise enough not to attempt panegyric. He is all but prolix in details, filling up some half of his volume with letters of preternatural length from Alexander to his publishers and critics, and from the said publishers and critics to Alexander, altogether of an unromantic and business- like cast, but entirely successful in doing that which a book should do—namely, in showing the world that here was a man of like passions with ourselves, who bore from boyhood to the grave hunger, cold, wet, rags, brutalising and health-destroying toil, and all the storms of the world, ...
— Literary and General Lectures and Essays • Charles Kingsley
... anyone, she never asked questions about them. It suggested a doubt, and doubt to Peg meant disloyalty in friendship and affection. Everyone had referred to this young gentleman as "Jerry." He even introduced himself by that unromantic and undignified name. No one seemed to treat him with any particular deference, nor did anything in his manner seem to demand it. She had imagined that anyone with a title should not only be proud of it, but would naturally hasten to let everyone they met become immediately ...
— Peg O' My Heart • J. Hartley Manners
... declared heartily. "It was a cleverly worked job, but there was no mystery about it. Some chap went for him because he got riding about like a millionaire. A more unromantic figure than Hamilton Fynes never breathed. Call him a crank and you've ...
— The Illustrious Prince • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... last scene in the tragic part of my unromantic experience. One of the artful dodgers, having transformed himself into an angel of light (in my hearing, not in my sight), informed me, at about eight o'clock in the evening, that, though my destruction ...
— Continental Monthly, Volume 5, Issue 4 • Various
... taken, and was beginning to enjoy the keen bracing air of the hills, when she happened to cast her eyes to the far-off meadows beneath. Her head grew suddenly giddy, and she could not divest herself of the idea, that one false step would send her to the plains below. Here was a most ridiculous and unromantic position: she neither dared to advance nor retreat; and she stood grasping a ledge of the rocky wall in an agony of cowardice and irresolution. At this critical moment, the mother of the run-away child returned panting from the higher ledge of the mountain, and, perceiving Flora pale ...
— Flora Lyndsay - or, Passages in an Eventful Life • Susan Moodie
... a special branch of education, in which experts are only gradually becoming developed. The phenomena are as massive and wide-spread as is anything in Nature, and the study of them is as tedious, repellent and undignified. To reject it for its unromantic character is like rejecting bacteriology because penicillium glaucum grows on horse-dung and bacterium termo lives in putrefaction. Scientific men have long ago ceased to think of the dignity of the materials they work in. When imposture ...
— Memories and Studies • William James
... always made much of the nuns. It has ever been the custom of the priesthood to endeavor to throw a veil of romance over the very unromantic way of life followed by females who have shut themselves up for life in a place hardly equal to a second-class state-prison. Woman has an important place which God has assigned her in the world; ...
— Mexico and its Religion • Robert A. Wilson
... eat. This, we felt, would have made the melancholy picture of Katrina's condition most satisfyingly complete. But when we sought eagerly for such details, Katrina, with shameless indifference to dramatic possibilities, painted for us an unromantic, matter-of-fact old German, kind to her when he remembered her existence, but submerged in his library and in scientific research. We further learned that they ate five meals a day at Katrina's home, with "coffee" and numerous ...
— Many Kingdoms • Elizabeth Jordan
... that all had a modicum of brains. Some came from luxurious homes, some from garrets. Visitors from Paris were frequent; their presence made a characteristic of the salon. This evening, for instance, honour was paid by the hostess to M. Amedeee Silvenoire, whose experiment in unromantic drama had not long ago gloriously failed at the Odeon; and Madame Jacquelin, the violinist, was ...
— The Emancipated • George Gissing
... she was very cold, and she went into the Big Soprano's deserted and disordered room. The tile stove was warm and comfortable, but on the toilet table there lay a disreputable comb with most of the teeth gone. Harmony kissed this unromantic object! Which reveals the fact that, genius or not, she was only a young and rather frightened girl, and that every atom ...
— The Street of Seven Stars • Mary Roberts Rinehart
... affectations of French dishes became highly significant. They were really the symbol of London's night romance. They were the tuning fork which gave the pitch for London pleasures. For romance and gaiety in London are grafted to an otherwise unromantic and lugubrious hulk. All joys in that terrible city are lugged from overseas, and, in the process of suturing, the spontaneity has been lost, the buoyancy has ...
— Europe After 8:15 • H. L. Mencken, George Jean Nathan and Willard Huntington Wright
... motherly embrace, the old lady bustled away to stir up her maid and wakt John from his first nap with the smell of coffee. a most unromantic but satisfying perfume to all the weary watchers in ...
— A Garland for Girls • Louisa May Alcott
... melancholy roar, and the same dreamy town, and gleaming white Mission, as when we beached our boats for the first time, riding over the breakers with shouting Kanakas, the three small hide-traders lying at anchor in the offing. But now we are the only vessel, and that an unromantic, ...
— Two Years Before the Mast • Richard Henry Dana
... crucibles, but must seek them on the breathing stage of life. Pinches, buffets, the glow of hope, the shock of disappointment, furious contention with obstacles: these are the true elixir for all vital spirits, these are what they seek alike in their romantic enterprises and their unromantic dissipations. When they are taken in some pinch closer than the common, they cry, 'Catch me here again!' and sure enough you catch them there again—perhaps before the week is out. It is as old as Robinson Crusoe; as old as man. Our race has not been strained for all these ages through ...
— Lay Morals • Robert Louis Stevenson
... land, I believe I cannot emphasize too strongly the pastured pig. Pigs below trees (and nuts maybe above). This is merely the two-story farming that Europe was practising when Columbus was a boy. Upon all good nut growers I urge the pig for the first story. This unromantic but very practical aid to income for the nut-grower has had the great honor to be accepted by a president of the Northern Nut Growers' Association, Mr. Littlepage, and by a president of the National Nut Growers' Association, Colonel Van Duzee. Colonel Van Duzee, ...
— Northern Nut Growers Association, Report of the Proceedings at the Seventh Annual Meeting • Various
... singing birds were let free, thus giving the appearance of a forest glade in summer-time. There is no evidence that this crypt was appropriated to any special use in former times, but to-day it serves the useful, if unromantic, purpose of a kitchen for preparing the mayoralty banquet on the ...
— Memorials of Old London - Volume I • Various
... the Frenchman, "as we should like to appear before the Selenites in full skins, please land us in the snug though unromantic North. We shall have time enough to break our necks in ...
— All Around the Moon • Jules Verne
... fine upon the whole, and a very fair quantity of fish brought in, Miss Twemlow had picked up a sweetheart, as the unromantic mothers of the place expressed it. And the circumstances were of such a nature that very large interest was aroused at once, and not only so, but was fed ...
— Springhaven - A Tale of the Great War • R. D. Blackmore
... tastefully ornamented with an immense heap of compost, which nearly barricaded the drawing-room window. The inhabitant must have been a prodigious agriculturist; and probably preferred the useful, but unromantic heap, to any other object in the view. We gave it ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 58, Number 360, October 1845 • Various
... unromantic English sailor had a gleam of Don Quixote in him. On this pleasant summer morning he was waiting alone, under easy sail, outside a hostile port, strongly fortified and full of armed vessels, waiting ...
— Deeds that Won the Empire - Historic Battle Scenes • W. H. Fitchett
... the words "with you" formed themselves in my heart. I know not what folly I might have spoken had not the conversation been interrupted by Gazen, who called out in his unromantic style, ...
— A Trip to Venus • John Munro
... not." But the interior Tiffles was disappointed at this sudden and unromantic termination of his case. A few more nights in the station house, or in the Tombs, would have given him capital material for a book, of which he had already projected the first chapter. He sat down, ...
— Round the Block • John Bell Bouton
... been dancing instead of fastened to a table in front of an eternal platter. And of all names to precede it the fittest surely is JOANNA. For what is that but the glorification with many feminine thrills of the unromantic chawbacon JOHN masticating at home in semi-privacy the husks of contentment, the lean scrapings of the divine dish which is offered once in every life to all. So JOANNA she shall be and is, and as JOANNA shall her ...
— Punch, Or The London Charivari, Vol. 99, October 18, 1890 • Various
... outlived that particular phase of romantic moral reform which he had been taught by Maria White. But in other men and women bred in that old New England of the eighteen-forties, the moral fervor knew no restraint. Garrison, although in many respects a most unromantic personality, was engaged in a task which gave him all the inspiration of romance. A romantic "atmosphere," fully as highly colored as any of the romantic atmospheres that we are accustomed to mark in literature, surrounded as with a luminous mist the figures of the New ...
— The American Mind - The E. T. Earl Lectures • Bliss Perry
... through its windings and enlargement after it issued from the little parent rock, or fill our pages with the rest of the pedigree. Senefelder invented Lithography. His invention has not made so much noise and larum in the world as some others, which have an origin quite as humble and unromantic; but it is one to which we owe no small profit, and a great deal of pleasure; and, as such, we are bound to speak of it with all gratitude and respect. The schoolmaster, who is now abroad, has taught ...
— The Paris Sketch Book Of Mr. M. A. Titmarsh • William Makepeace Thackeray
... broad avenues of the nation's capital, and away from the sight of the marble dome, the great army and its faithful historians moved from sight, to the bloodiest contests of war. No more splendid pageants in the fields, but close, hard, unromantic destruction in the woods and among trenches and craters! One mind now directed all the movements of the many armies of the Union, making all the forces at the control of the nation into one mighty trip-hammer, for the crushing of Slavery's ...
— Charles Carleton Coffin - War Correspondent, Traveller, Author, and Statesman • William Elliot Griffis
... literature of the Restoration and Queen Anne periods—which may be regarded as one, for present purposes—was classical, or at least unromantic, in its self-restraint, its objectivity, and its lack of curiosity; or, as a hostile criticism would put it, in its coldness of feeling, the tameness of its imagination, and its narrow and imperfect sense of beauty. It was a literature not simply of this world, but of the world, ...
— A History of English Romanticism in the Eighteenth Century • Henry A. Beers
... at him in wonder. If ever there was a man who seemed unromantic, it was he, heavy and prosaic and so shy that he was visibly agitated even in ...
— The Plum Tree • David Graham Phillips
... vain some sweet-voiced querist sought To sound him, leaving as she came; Her baited album only caught A common, unromantic name. ...
— The Complete Works of Whittier - The Standard Library Edition with a linked Index • John Greenleaf Whittier
... in a little dressing-room, and called upon the lightnings of the heavens—condensed into unromantic numbers ...
— Options • O. Henry
... know him and I don't, but that's how it strikes a stranger." He turned on his heel and paced the veranda thoughtfully. "And, after all, the burden of the actual, daily unromantic toil falls on the shoulders of the men out here, and not on his own. He enjoys all the privileges of recommendation without responsibility, and we—well, perhaps, when you've seen a little more of India you'll understand. To begin with, ...
— The Works of Rudyard Kipling One Volume Edition • Rudyard Kipling
... novel of manners and experience briefly treated, this defect might be lessened and our mystery seem to inhere in life. The tone of the age, its movement, the mingling of races and classes in the dollar hunt, the fiery and not quite unromantic struggle for existence, with its changing trades and scenery, and two types in particular, that of the American handy-man of business and that of the Yankee merchant sailor—we agreed to dwell upon at some length, and ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 13 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... through the plain of Kossovo where old Serbian culture was prostrated before the onrush of the Turk, and whence Serbia has drawn all its legends and heroes; possibly the most unromantic looking spot in all Europe, save only Waterloo. Here, far to the left, was Mahmud's tomb:—Mahmud the great victor, stabbed the day before the battle, and dying as he saw his armies victorious. History contains no keener romance. ...
— The Luck of Thirteen - Wanderings and Flight through Montenegro and Serbia • Jan Gordon
... in the woods was an enemy to every sort of sentimentalism—though a more unromantic being than the pioneer can hardly be imagined—yet his character unquestionably took its hue, from the primitive scenes and events of his solitary existence. He was, in many things, as simple as a child: as credulous, as unsophisticated. Yet the utmost cunning of ...
— Western Characters - or Types of Border Life in the Western States • J. L. McConnel
... year their courtship, if such it might be termed, ran an uneventful course. I had almost said unromantic. But who shall tell where is fancy bred or wherein romance consists? Whenever Plooie saw the drabbled little worker busy on a doorstep, he would cross over and open the conversation according to ...
— From a Bench in Our Square • Samuel Hopkins Adams
... case. A brilliant inspiration! Here, at all events, was a temporary hiding-place for the corpse of the blackmailer. If it was putting new wine into old bottles, circumstances surely justified a violation of the proverb. Till now a severe unromantic Hellenist, he held Egyptology in some contempt; and for Egypt, except in so far as it illustrated the art of Greece or remained a treasure-house for Greek manuscripts, his distaste was only surpassed by that of the Prophet Isaiah. A bias so striking in the immortal Herodotus ...
— Masques & Phases • Robert Ross
... Reminiscences" Ballantyne wrote: "How many thousands of lads have an intense liking for the idea of a sailor's life!" and he pointed out there the other side of the romantic picture: the long watches "in dirty unromantic weather," and the hard work of holystoning the decks, scraping down the masts and cleaning out the coal-hole. But though his books show something of this reverse side too, there is no doubt they have helped to set many boys ...
— Martin Rattler • Robert Michael Ballantyne
... you the impression I was ashamed of loving her or would ever be ashamed of her anywhere?" continued Tetlow, a very loverlike light in his usually unromantic eyes. "If I did, it wasn't what I meant—far from it. You'll see, when I marry her, ...
— The Grain Of Dust - A Novel • David Graham Phillips
... story of the girl's name and address written on the egg which is relegated to cold storage for twenty years, then to be discovered by a love-lorn man who seeks out the writer, who by this time has at least one unromantic husband and a ...
— Writing the Photoplay • J. Berg Esenwein and Arthur Leeds
... long narrative poems on unromantic subjects. Dauber (1912) contains some of his best lines and its story is the most poetic. This poem follows the fortunes of a poor youth who, wishing to be a painter of ships, went to sea to study his mode at first hand. Masefield describes, with much power, ...
— Halleck's New English Literature • Reuben P. Halleck
... came the consideration of a basketful of things Mr. Linden had brought her. Very simple things they were, and unromantic enough to be useful; yet with sentiment enough about them,—if that name might be given to the tokens of a care that busied itself about all the ins and outs of her daily life, and sought out and remembered the various little things ...
— Say and Seal, Volume II • Susan Warner
... early morning—that sunrise of which poets write so sweetly, but which to the unromantic traveller is wont to seem a dreary thing—mother and nurse and child went their way in a great black steamer, redolent of oil and boiled mutton; and at nine o'clock at night—a starless March night—Clarissa and her belongings ...
— The Lovels of Arden • M. E. Braddon
... Unromantic though it may sound, I must confess to having slept well on the first night I spent under the roof of my mother's ancestors. Sleep surprised me whilst I was reflecting on the strange and incomprehensible character of Francis. Proud, ...
— Major Frank • A. L. G. Bosboom-Toussaint
... He did have a cleft in his chin. But even that was none of nature's doing. A Mexican with a knife was solely responsible. Yet, worse than all of these disappointments is the fact that his name was not Gerald Van Alstyne. No, indeed. The Leading Man owned to the plain, homely, unromantic patronymic of Bob McGraw. The only thing romantic and—er—literary about Bob McGraw was his Roman-nosed mustang, Friar Tuck—so called because he had been foaled and raised on a wooded range near Sherwood in Mendocino county. As a product of Sherwood forest, Mr. McGraw had very properly christened ...
— The Long Chance • Peter B. Kyne
... reason she had thought to discover a burglar of one or another accepted type—either a dashing cracksman in full-blown evening dress, lithe, polished, pantherish, or a common yegg, a red-eyed, unshaven burly brute in the rags and tatters of a tramp. But this man wore unromantic blue serge upon a person neither fascinating nor repellent. She could hardly imagine him either stealing a diamond tiara ...
— Nobody • Louis Joseph Vance
... dazzling light that compact mass of houses swarming over the city's hills and valleys, with sudden palms in high gardens and a tree here and there, produced the impression that all were white with red roofs, and looked not unlike Genoa. But it seemed quite unromantic and uninspiring to a girl who had just paid her first brief visit to the old world, an interval, moreover, that had been without a responsibility, cut her off so completely from her general life that when variously addressed "Mademoiselle," "Signorina," "Senorita," she ceased ...
— The Sisters-In-Law • Gertrude Atherton
... prone to wax enthusiastic over the delights of architecture or natural scenery. He called himself unexpansive and unromantic; he confessed to small understanding, small veneration, for artistic effects. The beauty of a man's character moved him more strongly than the beauty of any picture or any landscape. Yet, on arriving next afternoon at the upper plateau of Nepenthe he could not help being ...
— South Wind • Norman Douglas
... take of small talk she more than held her own, and occasionally discomfited her admirer by sallies which were tipped with wit and reached their mark unerringly.[295] Did she know that just such treatment—strange paradox—won, while it at times wounded, the heart of the unromantic Westerner? ...
— Stephen A. Douglas - A Study in American Politics • Allen Johnson
... grandfather was a boy—I had paid a rare price for them in Japan. To these he added three basket-handled cutlasses, which I had obtained in London, each almost old enough to have belonged to the crew of Drake himself. A short-barreled magazine pistol for each of us was his concession to the present unromantic age. As for Jimmy, he insisted on a small bore rifle as well as a shotgun. "We might ...
— The Lady and the Pirate - Being the Plain Tale of a Diligent Pirate and a Fair Captive • Emerson Hough
... Unromantic enough, but beyond all conception wonderful. I stood at the east end of Bourke Street, not a year ago, looking at the black swarming masses, which thronged the broad thoroughfare below. All the town lay at my feet, and the sun was ...
— The Recollections of Geoffrey Hamlyn • Henry Kingsley
... good dinner in enforced solitude, with a beautiful lady imprisoned in the upper rooms of the castle. In the rare old days I could go up and knock the jailers' heads together, break in the door, and bear the captive damsel away on my charger. But in this unromantic age I can't even send in ...
— High Noon - A New Sequel to 'Three Weeks' by Elinor Glyn • Anonymous
... all the many species, and that it belongs to the discreetly valorous class that "vites" and flies away, and lives to "vite" another day, he might have achieved renown of a more popular kind than is the reward of the unromantic naturalist who discovers merely ...
— Tropic Days • E. J. Banfield
... hour on account of the tournament, so preparation followed immediately afterwards, and Lindsay and Cicely were obliged, with their thoughts still running on possible tragedies, to endeavour to apply their minds to the unromantic details of parsing. ...
— The Manor House School • Angela Brazil
... I am no more worthy of you, Lady dear, than I have ever been, but I have never felt more tender toward you, more sensible of all you are giving me. I cannot pretend to the wild love of the poets you read so much; that time, if it ever was, is past for me. I am a plain, unromantic person, who takes and leaves a great deal for granted—I thought you knew that. But you must never doubt—" He paused a moment, and for the first ...
— The Courting Of Lady Jane • Josephine Daskam
... plenty," I said, "but it's usually bad—at least hopelessly unromantic. Who ever heard of a heroic or self-denying cat? Cats do what they like, not what you want ...
— Lords of the Housetops - Thirteen Cat Tales • Various
... little realised, and the needed reinforcements are not forthcoming, as they would be if the position were thoroughly understood. Reinforcements of men and women are needed, but, far above all, reinforcements of prayer. And so we have tried to tell you the truth—the uninteresting, unromantic truth—about the heathen as we find them, the work as it is. More workers are needed. No words can tell how much they are needed, how much they are wanted here. But we will never try to allure anyone to think of coming by painting coloured pictures, ...
— Things as They Are - Mission Work in Southern India • Amy Wilson-Carmichael
... ladies; those of Pulci's Ardenne forests and Cathay deserts are buffoons such as Florentine shopmen may have trapped out for their amusement in rusty armour and garlands of sausages. The only lifelike heroes and heroines are those of Ariosto. And they are most untragic, unromantic. The men are occasionally small scoundrels, but unintentionally on the part of the author. They show no deep moral cancers or plague-spots; they display cheerfully all the petty dishonour and small lusts which the Renaissance regarded as mere flesh and blood characteristics. ...
— Euphorion - Being Studies of the Antique and the Mediaeval in the - Renaissance - Vol. I • Vernon Lee
... But before this unromantic conclusion to a rather sentimental scene could be suffered to take place, a servant brought word that Major Pendennis had returned to the hotel, and was waiting to see his nephew. Upon this announcement, ...
— The History of Pendennis • William Makepeace Thackeray
... mouthful, the chick was being crunched by Mickie, feathers and all. The menu of the Chinese—with its ducks' eggs salted, sharks' fins and tails, stewed pups, fowls' and ducks' tongues, fricasseed cat, rat soup, silkworm grubs, and odds and ends generally despised and rejected—is pitifully unromantic when set against the ...
— The Confessions of a Beachcomber • E J Banfield
... for a recent trial, who of the outside public would even have guessed that the unromantic and quite Bozzian name of "Mr. and Mrs. TILKINS" meant the clever musician, Mr. IVAN CARTEL and the charming and accomplished actress and soprano, Miss GERALDINE ULMAR? The TILKINSES are to be congratulated on their winning the recent action of Tilkins ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 102, May 21, 1892 • Various
... past, present, and to come, is this land we live in, and how much smaller still in the history of the arts, and yet how our forefathers clung to it, and with what care and pains they adorned it, this unromantic, uneventful-looking land of England, surely by this too our hearts may be touched, and ...
— Hopes and Fears for Art • William Morris
... that he could place his hands readily upon it, found that he had half an hour to spare. He said to himself: "Miss Ludolph is wrong. I shall leave the house for a short time. I am a most unromantic individual; for, no matter what or how I feel, I do get hungry. But I am sure Miss Brown's coffee and sandwiches would choke me. I have already swallowed too much from her to care for any more, so ...
— Barriers Burned Away • E. P. Roe
... before I had fairly realized how rapidly I was drifting, I found myself whirling down the swift current, and was lost. Nor was it a marvel that this should have so happened. To one who sits aloof in his unromantic, distant home, it is an easy thing, indeed, to moralize about matters of inferior station and mesalliance; but I believe that few could have seen little Jessie, as she first appeared to me, and not have felt some secret inclination to give way before those subtile charms of beauty ...
— Stories by American Authors, Volume 9 • Various
... his chaplain (a good man of no present account) stayed to see the police arrive that night, and the romantic ruffians taken thence next morning in unromantic bonds. Comparatively little attention was paid to their departure—partly on account of the truculent attitude of the police—partly because the Episcopal pair were making an equally early start in another direction. No one accompanied the armed men and the bound. But every man on the place, ...
— Stingaree • E. W. (Ernest William) Hornung
... was so simple as that. In the two days that followed, days of the greatest discomfort, disappointment and disorder, his mind never left her for a moment. His diary for these four days is very short and unromantic. ...
— The Dark Forest • Hugh Walpole
... do something that would lower your reputation in the eyes of gouty old gentlemen or mothers with marriageable daughters! If you could manage to get your nose broken, or elope with a chorus girl, or commit an unromantic murder, I should begin to have ...
— One Man in His Time • Ellen Glasgow
... modification of the little one's diet were useless. Indigestion was unromantic (in the mother's judgment), and "nerves" were highly aristocratic ...
— The Secret of a Happy Home (1896) • Marion Harland
... I had to be content, and watch their taxi swing out into the bright-dark flow of traffic where it was lost from my sight. After which, I entered another taxicab by my unromantic self and was driven to that railroad station where I would find a train bound to the college town that was the home of Aunt Caroline and her husband. One always thought of Phil's parents in that order, although the Professor was a moderately distinguished ...
— The Thing from the Lake • Eleanor M. Ingram
... or cruelly to surmise (as those who doubt the plunge of Curtius) that the inseparate conjuncture of man and beast, the centaur-phenomenon that staggerd all Dunstable, might have been the effect of unromantic necessity, that the horse-part carried the reasoning, willy nilly, that needs must when such a devil drove, that certain spiral configurations in the frame of Thomas Westwood unfriendly to alighting, made the alliance more forcible than voluntary. Let him ...
— The Works of Charles and Mary Lamb (Vol. 6) - Letters 1821-1842 • Charles and Mary Lamb
... despair! By such means romance has undoubtedly been affected in some degree, but let not that grieve thee! Romance has by no means been taken out of the world; nor has it been, to use an unromantic phrase, reduced in quantity or quality. Human inventions and appliances alter the aspects of romance, and transfer its influences, but they cannot destroy a Creator's gift to the human race. They have, indeed, taken the romance out of some things which were ...
— Under the Waves - Diving in Deep Waters • R M Ballantyne
... words. Another opera composer of the time was Reinhard Keiser. He married a woman who, with her wealth and her voice, rescued his operatic ventures from bankruptcy. These make a rather sordid and unromantic group. ...
— The Love Affairs of Great Musicians, Volume 2 • Rupert Hughes
... based on medieval ideals gradually lost their worth. They were not in relation to the altered facts of life; they had become an empty convention which could be turned to very unromantic uses. The movement for the emancipation of women was not consciously or directly a movement of revolt against an antiquated chivalry. It was rather a part of the development of civilization which rendered chivalry antique. Medieval romantic love implied in women a ...
— The Task of Social Hygiene • Havelock Ellis
... the Vosges will not compare with the hills of the Schwarzwald. The advantage about them from the tourist's point of view is their superior poverty. The Vosges peasant has not the unromantic air of contented prosperity that spoils his vis-a-vis across the Rhine. The villages and farms possess more the charm of decay. Another point wherein the Vosges district excels is its ruins. Many of its numerous castles are perched where you might think only eagles would ...
— Three Men on the Bummel • Jerome K. Jerome
... perversity had taken me to show myself at my most prosaic and unromantic. I think it was the contrast with the glamour of those fine gentlemen. I had neither claim nor desire to be of their company, and to her I could make ...
— Salute to Adventurers • John Buchan
... the back, which had the double advantage of keeping me in, and of preventing his tumbling out. We had two capital horses, and were driven for eight miles by the side of a mountain torrent called by the unromantic name of the Peabody River. The woods through which we passed were extremely pretty, and the torrent was our companion throughout the drive. The road was of the roughest possible description, over ...
— First Impressions of the New World - On Two Travellers from the Old in the Autumn of 1858 • Isabella Strange Trotter
... reason among so many, I love this mystic morning light. It has a strange power of revealing the beauty that is hidden from us by the coarser beams of the full day. These worn men and women, grown so foolish looking, so unromantic; these artisans and petty clerks plodding to their monotonous day's work; these dull-eyed women of the people on their way to market to haggle over sous, to argue and contend over paltry handfuls of food. In this magic morning light the disguising body becomes transparent. ...
— Idle Ideas in 1905 • Jerome K. Jerome
... and (to his mind) unromantic irritated him; but an instinct of good manners, that was not the least of his charm, compelled him to humour her. Once she sat for a whole hour in a dark cellar that smelt of tallow where a couple of men were engaged in making those enormous candles that people in ...
— The Tragic Bride • Francis Brett Young
... love and railroad-riding may not be obvious to all; and there are some, no doubt, who think the flying speed of the modern conveyance terribly unromantic. But there are others who know of nothing more thoroughly pleasant than lounging back easily in the cushioned seat of a railway-carriage, with the one close beside, with one hand in reach at any moment, the one face ready to reply in ...
— Shoulder-Straps - A Novel of New York and the Army, 1862 • Henry Morford
... romanticism he possessed to have its full swing. It always wore the classic dress, submitted itself to the classic traditions, used the classic forms. In the Idylls of the King he took a romantic story; but nothing could be more unromantic than many of the inventions and the characters; than the temper, the morality, and the conduct of the poem. The Arthurian poets, Malory himself, would have jumped out their skin with amazement, even with indignation, had they read it. And ...
— The Poetry Of Robert Browning • Stopford A. Brooke
... didn't pan out bigger. But I guess what you wanted most was my happiness—and I've got that." She turned to Sandy. The big bell of the ranch boomed brassily. Molly put her hand in Sandy's. "It may be most unromantic, Sandy dear," she said, "but I'm hungry. ...
— Rimrock Trail • J. Allan Dunn
... not have been Florrie at all, but some very different, unromantic, and unimaginative creature, had she failed of comprehension. Jim Galloway was ...
— The Bells of San Juan • Jackson Gregory
... a just criticism of mine. One part of the subject you have certainly omitted. You do not tell us how much there often is of physical disorder in despair. I dare say you will think it a coarse and unromantic mode of looking at things; but I must confess I agree with what Leigh Hunt has said somewhere, that one can walk down ...
— Friends in Council (First Series) • Sir Arthur Helps
... in the tendency of modern fiction, wrote: "For the first time perhaps in history, the youth of both sexes of the educated classes are universally growing up unromantic. What will come in mature age from such a youth the world has not yet had ...
— The Writer, Volume VI, April 1892. - A Monthly Magazine to Interest and Help All Literary Workers • Various
... even good women love to triumph over others. She, of course, could have no love for this portly old gentleman of seventy. But it is pitiful to think he was madly infatuated. The poor old man, in spite of his unromantic appearance, had warm blood in his veins and plenty of romance in his heart. At last, in spite of gossip and opposition, they were married, and then, instead of settling down, as the happy groom had hoped, to a life of wedded bliss in one of his ...
— Bidwell's Travels, from Wall Street to London Prison - Fifteen Years in Solitude • Austin Biron Bidwell
... service. And the very touch of fanaticism in her love for Owen, which made her feel that it would be a small thing indeed to die for him if by dying she might give him happiness, helped her to realize the strength of the pallid, unromantic young dentist's devotion. ...
— The Making of a Soul • Kathlyn Rhodes
... most primitive, as it is the most universal, of passions throughout all grades of living things. Poppy meanwhile turned her head aside, unable or unwilling to speak. Again she blew her nose with complete disregard of the unromantic quality of that action, ...
— The Far Horizon • Lucas Malet
... heedlessly on my desk was—what should it be but the little morocco case, empty now, in which our Francesca keeps her dead mother's engagement ring—the mother who died when she was a wee child. Truly a very pretty modern ballad to be sung in these unromantic, ...
— Penelope's Experiences in Scotland • Kate Douglas Wiggin
... souvenirs. "Pieces of a coffin of one of the Acadians, exhumed at Grand Pr fourteen months ago, near the site of the old church," we are told; and when he continues: "A woman's bone was found in it", one unromantic and matter-of-fact member of the Octave asserts, "Evangeline's grandmother, of course"; while another skeptically remarks, "That's more than I can swallow; it would give me such a spell o' coughin' as I couldn't get over"; but the conductor and ...
— Over the Border: Acadia • Eliza Chase
... a mill by the Neckar-side, to which many people resort for coffee, according to the fashion which is almost national in Germany. There is nothing particularly attractive in the situation of this mill; it is on the Mannheim (the flat and unromantic) side of Heidelberg. The river turns the mill-wheel with a plenteous gushing sound; the out-buildings and the dwelling-house of the miller form a well-kept dusty quadrangle. Again, further from the river, ...
— The Grey Woman and other Tales • Mrs. (Elizabeth) Gaskell
... well for the traveler of the nineteenth century to protest against the artificial and unromantic guidance of the railway: he will find, after a little experience, that the homes of true romance are discovered for him by the locomotive; that solitudes and recesses which he would never find after years of plodding in sandal shoon are silently ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Vol. XII. No. 31. October, 1873. • Various
... of my depth, Blanche, methinks," said Lysken, re-threading her needle in a practical unromantic way. "Love is love, for me. It differeth, of course, in degree; we love not all alike. But, methinks, even a man's love for God, though it be needs deeper and higher far, must yet be the same manner of love that he hath for his father, or his childre, ...
— Clare Avery - A Story of the Spanish Armada • Emily Sarah Holt
... moment, being only withheld from introducing such an episode by a strong conviction that it does not usually occur at such times. And I trust that my fairest reader, who remembers that, in a real crisis, it is always some uninteresting stranger or unromantic policeman, and not Adolphus, who rescues, ...
— Selected Stories • Bret Harte
... looks horrified. She did not know she had such a very unromantic little wretch for a listener, when she was telling all those wonderful stories of Love slaying dragons, and living in caves, and walking over burning ploughshares as if they were ...
— The Leavenworth Case • Anna Katharine Green
... was forthcoming. They had attacked Gil Steele, who had wounded one of them and fled. It was then that Mrs. Steele had sent Whitey for aid, as it was certain that the infuriated mob would hang Steele if they found him. Gil was hidden in a most unromantic place; a sort of dugout, one-third dirt, one-third boards, and one-third stone, in which hams were smoked. You know how near he came to going from that place ...
— Injun and Whitey to the Rescue • William S. Hart
... story I've a fancy for inditing; It shows the funny quarters in which chivalry may lodge, A story about Africa, and Englishmen, and fighting, And an unromantic hero by the ...
— Successful Recitations • Various
... Brian and Guy went away to mend the boat, while Elsie, left to herself, wandered out into the yard and entered the tool-house. There stood the grindstone in its usual place, looking a very unromantic object indeed; but the girl viewed it with almost bated breath. She had quite made up her mind that connected with that grindstone was a mystery in which the poultry-carver was somehow concerned. What this ...
— Under Padlock and Seal • Charles Harold Avery
... at the men who had lived and fought and conquered under the limitless skies of the Far West, free men, wild men—one of their shrill whoops banished distance and brought the mountain desert into the very heart of the unromantic East. Nevertheless from all these thrills these two ...
— Trailin'! • Max Brand
... unadulterated, unvarnished, unalloyed, uncolored; in its true colors; pukka^. well-grounded, well founded; solid, substantial, tangible, valid; undistorted, undisguised; unaffected, unexaggerated, unromantic, unflattering. Adv. truly &c adj.; verily, indeed, really, in reality; with truth &c (veracity) 543; certainly &c (certain) 474; actually &c (existence) 1; in effect &c (intrinsically) 5. exactly &c adj.; ad amussim [Lat.]; verbatim, verbatim et literatim [Lat.]; word for word, literally, ...
— Roget's Thesaurus of English Words and Phrases: Body • Roget
... think they will, though?' asked Jacker McKnight dubiously. He had found his parents very unromantic people, who took a severely commonplace view of things, and retained unquestioning faith in the strap as a means of ...
— The Gold-Stealers - A Story of Waddy • Edward Dyson
... Saxon, the widow of an eminent Q.C. She was a fine Junoesque tragic woman, who modelled herself on the portraits of the late Mrs. Siddons. Peter, on the contrary, was a small, meek, light-haired, short-sighted man, who had never done anything in his unromantic life, save accumulate a fortune as a law-stationer. For many years he lived in single blessedness, but when he retired with an assured income of three thousand a year, he thought he would marry. He had no relatives, having ...
— The Secret Passage • Fergus Hume
... It was dreadfully unromantic, but Minnie did not fall into a decline. She is alive and well at this moment. Life may be over, and yet we may live functionally through long stagnant years. Life is not a calendar of dates, but of feelings. Minnie will live a calm, chastened life. She cannot ...
— The Hunted Outlaw - Donald Morrison, The Canadian Rob Roy • Anonymous
... said Nellie, shocked at his unromantic description. "The waves seem to say 'Hush!' and speak to me, as softly as if they wanted to send ...
— Bob Strong's Holidays - Adrift in the Channel • John Conroy Hutcheson
... pictures, and boundless license to vagueness and to fancy, was on one side; and on the other, the drama, with its prima facie and superficially prosaic aspects, and its kinship to what was customary and commonplace and unromantic in human life. Of the nine comedies, composed on the model of those of Ariosto and Machiavelli and other Italians, every trace has perished. But this was Gabriel Harvey's opinion of the respective value ...
— Spenser - (English Men of Letters Series) • R. W. Church
... die as an offering to Ares, God of War. Perchance he will preserve us." The arch-priest's deep-set and glittering eyes swept with venomous hatred the two calm-featured aviators, who looked very plain and unromantic in their flying jackets and khaki serge. "We, familiars of the Gods, herewith demand that the blasphemers perish on the War God's altar! Else shall ye all die unbeloved ...
— Astounding Stories, March, 1931 • Various
... matter was so entirely unromantic, that I scarcely wondered at Mistress Stickles for having run away from him to an adventurous moss-trooper. For nine women out of ten must have some kind of romance or other, to make their lives endurable; and when their love has ...
— Lorna Doone - A Romance of Exmoor • R. D. Blackmore
... angel, while that angel strokes your forehead and cries over you and begs you for her sake not to die, is too precious a delusion to lose. But the opening of one's eyes is a mistake under such circumstances, and he had made it. The angel's next remark was entirely unromantic and practical. ...
— The Woman-Haters • Joseph C. Lincoln
... quite enough. This unromantic portrait corresponded sufficiently nearly with the ...
— My Friend Smith - A Story of School and City Life • Talbot Baines Reed
... feared and conciliated. Even when the missionaries taught them a better faith, they continued to hold the Mountain in superstitious reverence—an awe that still has power to silence their "civilized" and very unromantic descendants. ...
— The Mountain that was 'God' • John H. Williams
... two small numerals together, after his manner, had concluded that Loo Barebone was the reason. Even banking may, it seems, be carried on without the loss of all human weakness, especially if the banker be of middle age, unmarried, and deprived by an unromantic superfluity of adipose tissue of the possibility of living through a romance of his own. Turner had consented to countenance, if not actually to take part in, a nefarious scheme, to rid France and the ...
— The Last Hope • Henry Seton Merriman
... must confess, very unromantic, and not at all like the hero of three volumes, to confess that, for a time, my impulses of anger had given way to the gnawings of hunger; and I thought, for a time, less of Joshua Daunton than of the first succulent cut into a ...
— Rattlin the Reefer • Edward Howard
... cottage—there were four of them—to send me to the clearing, on the mountain back of the house, to pick blackberries. It was rather a series of small clearings, running up into the forest, much overgrown with bushes and briers, and not unromantic. Cows pastured there, penetrating through the leafy passages from one opening to another, and browsing among the bushes. I was kindly furnished with a six-quart pail, and told not ...
— Baddeck and That Sort of Thing • Charles Dudley Warner
... himself in his bunk and is happy. Only, when morning comes again, he awakes stiff and sore. But, no matter for that, inexorable duty claims him for the same toil. And so wags our daily life—hard, unremitting, unromantic labour, day after day, year after year. Still we say it is a glorious life, and we believe what we say. Anyhow, it is better than being chained to a desk, or growing purblind "poring ...
— Brighter Britain! (Volume 1 of 2) - or Settler and Maori in Northern New Zealand • William Delisle Hay
... trembled. He was in terror lest she would give way to crying. If it hadn't been for the table that parted them with its unromantic debris of dishes—— As it was he leant across and assured her earnestly, "I'm not cross with you, my dearest girl. I'm—— Terry, how is it that we've drifted so apart? I keep groping after the old Terry; for a minute I think I've found her, ...
— The Kingdom Round the Corner - A Novel • Coningsby Dawson
... could have kept him from carrying out his purpose; but together they were unromantic. How could he adjure her to tell him for God's sake whether or not she was in love with any one when he saw she was afraid that something was burning on the stove? He could only stammer out excuses for having come. Inventing on ...
— The Side Of The Angels - A Novel • Basil King
... whispered in an appalled tone. "Morrison!" Her head drooped. Unable to see her features, Heyst could tell from her voice that for some reason or other she was profoundly moved by the syllables of that unromantic name. A thought flashed through his head—could she have known Morrison? But the mere difference of their origins made ...
— Victory • Joseph Conrad
... leper becomes a rich Pharisee; the woman becomes a Dame aux Camellias; and nothing is said about money and the poor. The woman washes the feet of Jesus with her tears and dries them with her hair; and he is reproached for suffering a sinful woman to touch him. It is almost an adaptation of the unromantic Matthew to the Parisian stage. There is a distinct attempt to increase the feminine interest all through. The slight lead given by Mark is taken up and developed. More is said about Jesus's mother ...
— Preface to Androcles and the Lion - On the Prospects of Christianity • George Bernard Shaw
... house in so remote a place might be a great convenience to visitors like herself. She took the matter quietly, however, returning Emily's gay look with one somewhat rueful, and saying, "Ah, dear girl, all very mundane and unromantic, but depend upon it the house has proved a blessing often to poor wanderers in bleak weather over these wild hills; and we ourselves may find it not so unpleasant by and by when Paul has spread our luncheon in the parlor, and we look out of its little casement ...
— The International Monthly, Volume 3, No. 1, April, 1851 • Various
... the line of Chiarissimo III., called "The German," because of his alien Teutonic mother. Great-great-grandson of Ser Filippo, the last of the doctor-apothecaries, Salvestro does not appear to have gone in for the steady, unromantic life of a banker, but to have addressed his energies to the profession of arms. Nevertheless, he was chosen Prior in 1318, and contributed, during peace, to the advancement of his city's interest. Upon the outbreak of war with the Visconti of Milan, ...
— The Tragedies of the Medici • Edgcumbe Staley
... Howells and Richard Harding Davis. And here one wonders whether the Australian novelists who find so little material in Sydney and Melbourne have seen what the new writer, Henry B. Fuller, has done with the life of modern unromantic Chicago? ...
— Australian Writers • Desmond Byrne
... it is unnecessary to mention the sex, had given a sigh, and regretted that nineteenth century life was so prosaic and unromantic. Clearing his throat, quite as much to pre-empt the pause as to articulate the better, Mr. ...
— The Honorable Peter Stirling and What People Thought of Him • Paul Leicester Ford
... reluctantly faltered forth the owner of that name, "but, oh, please do call me Cordelia. It can't matter much to you what you call me if I'm only going to be here a little while, can it? And Anne is such an unromantic name." ...
— Anne Of Green Gables • Lucy Maud Montgomery
... bathroom with which she insisted on bathing the bump till Ted remarked disgruntledly that he smelt like a hospital. Oliver watched the domestic scene with frantic laughter tearing at his vitals—this was so entirely different and unromantic an end to the evening from that from which Oliver had set out to rescue Ted like a spectacled Mr. Grundy and which Ted in his gust of madness had so bitterly ...
— Young People's Pride • Stephen Vincent Benet
... occur for several years after that simple and platonic passion just described: for though they may talk of youth as the season of romance, it has always appeared to me that there are no beings in the world so entirely unromantic and selfish as certain young English gentlemen from the age of fifteen to twenty. The oldest Lovelace about town is scarcely more hard-hearted and scornful than they; they ape all sorts of selfishness and rouerie: they aim at excelling ...
— The Fitz-Boodle Papers • William Makepeace Thackeray
... the floor as he ended; then choked, and broke into a fit of coughing which unromantic chance brought on just ...
— The Line of Love - Dizain des Mariages • James Branch Cabell
... brought Jay back to Number Eighteen Mabel Place, Brown Borough. Chloris gave an unromantic snort and sat with unnecessary clumsiness upon Jay's toe. So Jay returned, falling suddenly out of the music of the sea into the band-of-hopeful music of distant Boy ...
— This Is the End • Stella Benson
... which I have made Captain Dangerous relate in fiction will be found narrated, act for act, and nearly word for word, in the very unromantic evidence given before the first parliamentary committee on slavery and the slave-trade ...
— The Strange Adventures of Captain Dangerous, Vol. 2 of 3 • George Augustus Sala |
