"Untidy" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... thought the sea voyage might give her the vitality she needs. It was at least a chance, and she was determined to take it. Then thy father put all his own desires behind him, and came with her. We will talk more in a little while. I see thy dress is untidy, and I dare say thou art hungry. Go, eat and dress, by that time ...
— The Maid of Maiden Lane • Amelia E. Barr
... laurels; for they are always untidy, and scattering about their yellow leaves when all the trees about them are ...
— The Fairchild Family • Mary Martha Sherwood
... considerable time, an old servant opened it and made us a sign to follow him across the untidy park. Statues of nymphs, who must have seen the boyhood of the late king, secreted under tree ivy their gloominess and mutilations. At the end of an alley, the sloughs of which were covered with snow, stood a castle of stone and brick, as morose as the one of Madrid, which, ...
— The Queen Pedauque • Anatole France
... wall above a large autotype of the chief figure in Titian's Virgin of the Assumption, is very inviting. Altogether the room is the room of a good housekeeper, vanquished, as far as the table is concerned, by an untidy man, but elsewhere mistress of the situation. The furniture, in its ornamental aspect, betrays the style of the advertised "drawing-room suite" of the pushing suburban furniture dealer; but there is nothing useless or pretentious in the room. The paper and ...
— Candida • George Bernard Shaw
... time, a girl, dirty, ragged, and untidy, came into the room, and taking Duncan up in her arms, carried him upstairs, Elsie following ...
— Little Folks (Septemeber 1884) - A Magazine for the Young • Various
... asked Lalkhan where the sahib's linen was kept, and on being shown the cupboard which contained the rather untidy little piles of sheets, pillow-cases, and towels that formed Peter's modest store of house linen, she rearranged it and brought sundry flat, square muslin bags filled with dried lavender. Lace-edged bags with lavender-coloured ribbon run through insertion and ...
— Jan and Her Job • L. Allen Harker
... went on. Fixie grew tired and cross, and Martha put him to bed; and it was not till nearly the big people's dinner-time that Rosy came back to the nursery, swinging her hat on her arm, and looking rather untidy and tired too. "I think I'll go to bed," she said. "It makes me feel funny in my ...
— Rosy • Mrs. Molesworth
... about his once superb frock coat clung the scent of forbidden beverages. On one such day he appeared with an untidy sprouting of beard, accompanied by ...
— Merton of the Movies • Harry Leon Wilson
... shebeen, very rough and untidy. There is a sort of counter on the right with shelves, holding many bottles and jugs, just seen above it. Empty barrels stand near the counter. At back, a little to left of counter, there is a door into the open ...
— The Playboy of the Western World • J. M. Synge
... the son's will sent for a woman to be his daughter-in-law. Soon the son began to be pleased with his new wife, who took good care of his father. As time went on, however, she became tired of the old man, and planned to set his son against him. She accused her father-in-law of being not only very untidy, but also fierce and violent, and forever picking quarrels with her, and at last, by constant dinning her complaints in his ear, persuaded her husband to agree to take the old man into a cemetery, kill him, and bury him in a pit. Her small son, a wise lad of seven, overheard ...
— Filipino Popular Tales • Dean S. Fansler
... listening, and nervously arranging the long curls that would fall uncurled and untidy, felt a renewal of her old girlish enthusiasm for all true things; her eyes brightened, and her heart warmed towards "Harrie." She would have liked to stay talking longer, but for a vision of ...
— Agatha's Husband - A Novel • Dinah Maria Craik (AKA: Dinah Maria Mulock)
... make them look like marble, were disposed about the place with an eye to artistic effect, and near to an angle, where stood (on a pedestal, half concealed, half revealed by artistically arranged draperies) the life-size figure of a Roman senator, in toga and sandals, there was the one untidy spot, the one utterly inartistic ...
— Cleek: the Man of the Forty Faces • Thomas W. Hanshew
... inside my house if you used tobacco," she always replied. And she would get quite excited at the mere thought of such an untidy habit. ...
— The Tale of Rusty Wren • Arthur Scott Bailey
... fashion which lasted for a century and a half which was so untidy, so uncomfortable, so costly, and so ridiculous that we can only wonder that it was endured for a single season—I mean the fashion of wig-wearing by men. The first colonists wore their own natural hair. ...
— Home Life in Colonial Days • Alice Morse Earle
... he could have afforded to take her, in fact, the poor woman, feeling that she was a burden and drag on her husband, had taken to drinking, and had gradually removed herself still further from the pale of fashionable society. Her house (which was situated in a back street in Montreal) was not only untidy, but positively dirty, and her children ran about the streets unclad ...
— The Mysteries of Montreal - Being Recollections of a Female Physician • Charlotte Fuhrer
... visit to London for the purpose of bringing out her tragedy. The rehearsals, where "the only grave person present was Mr. Liston!—the tragic heroines sauntering languidly through their parts in bonnets and thick shawls,—the untidy ballet-girls" (there was a dance in "Foscari") "walking through their quadrille to the sound of a solitary fiddle,"—she was never weary of calling up for the amusement ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 6, Issue 35, September, 1860 • Various
... extravagant because beautiful things cost money; that being an artist he did not manage his affairs with the wisdom of a man of the world; that he was hot-headed, and played a hot-headed man's part in the family quarrels; and that he was plucky and improvident, and probably untidy to the end, and that he did his best work when the buffets of fate ...
— Rembrandt • Mortimer Menpes
... unshaven, untidy man sat in a rocking chair by a window. He had just lighted a pipe, and was puffing blue clouds with great satisfaction. He had removed his shoes and donned a pair of blue, faded carpet-slippers. With the morbid thirst ...
— The Trimmed Lamp and Others • O Henry
... turning round, saw her two-year-old daughter asprawl in the garden, and with sudden change from satisfied drawl to shrill exasperation, "Git up out of all that muck, you dirty little devil," she said. For she was a cleanly woman, proud of her children, and disliking to see them untidy. ...
— Change in the Village • (AKA George Bourne) George Sturt
... roll it comfortably up into a ball. Nurse on the contrary insisted that it didn't signify a bit what became of the worsted; she must dress and go down. The dispute ended by Hermione running off with the half finished ball and its untidy remains, and cramming the whole concern into the pocket of her best frock. "The people will soon be tired of talking to me," muttered she to herself, "and then I can finish my ball quietly in ...
— The Fairy Godmothers and Other Tales • Mrs. Alfred Gatty
... there is no money and no inclination to violence tragedy cannot be generated. He could not leave his wife, and he did not want to hit her. Petulance and squalor were enough. Here "that card" had come in. Leonard, though furtive, was untidy, and left it lying about. Jacky found it, and then began, "What's that card, eh?" "Yes, don't you wish you knew what that card was?" "Len, who's Miss Schlegel?" etc. Months passed, and the card, now as a joke, now as a grievance, ...
— Howards End • E. M. Forster
... that youth, "have you come to initiate us into the Sacred Order of Hullabalooloo? Dump those books off the chair and be seated. March is such a beastly untidy chap," he sighed; "he will leave his books around that way despite all I ...
— The Half-Back • Ralph Henry Barbour
... husband; but when not engaged in household cares she seldom cared to go out, and passed her time for the most part on the sofa. She was, like most other Russian ladies when at home and without visitors, very careless and untidy in ...
— Condemned as a Nihilist - A Story of Escape from Siberia • George Alfred Henty
... come in!' she heard Peter saying joyfully as he opened the door, and then came the sound of light footsteps on the wooden stairs. Another minute, and the bedroom door opened gently, and a sunshiny face looked into the children's untidy room. ...
— A Book of Quaker Saints • Lucy Violet Hodgkin
... gladly sent off her boy Philip for Susan, who was never so untidy that she could not come at once when sent for. She had been very busy, but orderly people can be busy and neat at the same time. Putting on her usual straw hat, she set out for the Abbey. On the way she overtook Rose's mother, who was going there too with a basket ...
— Young Folks Treasury, Volume 3 (of 12) - Classic Tales And Old-Fashioned Stories • Various
... that sometimes disgust the invalid with what is put before him. There is a tidy and an untidy way of serving most dishes, too; for instance, in serving a poached egg, have it piping hot and on the toast; not cold, part on the toast and part on the saucer, with ...
— The Community Cook Book • Anonymous
... keep them for? I should be overrun with pigeons but for putting them in pies; they make the garden very untidy as it is. I have given up keeping ducks, but I have a tame gull for the slugs. Who is this at the gate? Oh! Miss Wort with her inexhaustible physic-bottle. Everybody seems to have heard that you ...
— The Vicissitudes of Bessie Fairfax • Harriet Parr
... his laboratory, she decided as she watched him strike a match against the side of the box and apply the flame to the charred bowl of his pipe. His long dark face became half obscured behind a cloud of bluish smoke as he puffed furiously. He looked like a lean untidy devil recently escaped from hell with his thick brows, green eyes and lank black hair highlighted intermittently by the leaping flame of the match. He certainly didn't look like a pathologist. She wondered if she was going to like working with ...
— Pandemic • Jesse Franklin Bone
... fire her, Sally?" her husband asked, as he had asked of almost every maid they had ever had—of lazy Annies, and untidy Selmas, and ignorant Katies. And, as always, Mrs. Salisbury ...
— The Treasure • Kathleen Norris
... to tea, and Mrs. Larkins, exuberantly genial in a floriferous but dingy flannel dressing gown, appeared to confirm that. He brought in his bicycle and put it in the narrow, empty passage, and everyone crowded into a small untidy kitchen, whose table had been hastily cleared of the debris ...
— The History of Mr. Polly • H. G. Wells
... beautiful pathetic brown eyes, and rich golden hair that fell in curls over his shoulders like a girl's. He was peering out from amidst the host of packages and trying to look back along the road, and evidently arguing some point with the utmost persistence. The untidy servant girl who wheeled the carriage had stopped, ...
— A Patriotic Schoolgirl • Angela Brazil
... as it was possible for him to show when at last she stood with outstretched hand before him. He had only an imperfect recollection of an ill-clad, untidy-looking child, with pale tear-stained cheeks, and dark unhappy eyes. The march of the years had been a thing whose effects he had altogether underestimated. The girl who stood now facing him was slight, and there was something of the child left in ...
— The Malefactor • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... air of exquisite neatness, a good library stored with books of reference, and adorned with presentation copies from authors of the day, very beautifully bound. Though the room served for the study of the professed man of letters, it had none of the untidy litter which generally characterizes the study of one whose vocation it is to deal with books and papers. Even the implements for writing were not apparent, except when required. They lay concealed in a vast cylinder bureau, French made, and French polished. Within that ...
— Kenelm Chillingly, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... round the room; it no longer seemed the same place to her. Beth's cheerful chatter had already driven away the evil spirit of dejection, and taken the old lady out of herself. Untidy child! She had left her work on the floor, her scissors on the bed, disarranged the window-curtain, and upset a chair. If she would not do any more unpicking when she returned, she must be made to put things straight. ...
— The Beth Book - Being a Study of the Life of Elizabeth Caldwell Maclure, a Woman of Genius • Sarah Grand
... a futile and extravagant house-keeper, kindly and unpunctual, prolific without resentment; she regarded with mild surprise the large and strenuous family that rushed past her, as a mountain torrent might rush past an untidy flower garden, and, after nearly fourteen years of maternal experience, she had abandoned the search for a point of contact with their riotous souls, and contented herself with an indiscriminate affection for their very creditable bodies. Lady Isabel had—if the saying may be reversed—"les qualites ...
— Mount Music • E. Oe. Somerville and Martin Ross
... beautifully formed bosoms covered only by the shirt, rose and fell in goddesslike shamelessness. A string of glass beads hung round her neck, and two long earrings tapped her cheeks at every movement. She made no effort to hide her bare feet, but now and then put back her untidy but beautiful black hair from her forehead and eyes; for it was so thick that if she did not do ...
— The Most Interesting Stories of All Nations • Julian Hawthorne
... fall to the other again, All the time they were exchanging loud protests: 'He is mine, and I mean to keep him;' 'Not yours at all, and it is no use your saying he is.' One of them seemed to be a working woman, masculine looking, with untidy hair, horny hands, and dress kilted up; she was all powdered with plaster, like my uncle when he was chipping marble. The other had a beautiful face, a comely figure, and neat attire. At last they invited me to decide which of them I would live with; the rough manly ...
— Works, V1 • Lucian of Samosata
... untidy room, with dull green coloured walls, badly lighted by two dusty windows. The furnishings consisted of an iron bedstead standing in a corner, a table in the middle, several chairs, and a bookcase piled up with books. At the table sat a woman of about ...
— Virgin Soil • Ivan S. Turgenev
... Rousseau brought out a little opera entitled Le Devin de village (The Village Wizard), which had a great success. It was played at Fontainebleau before the king. "I was there that day," writes Rousseau, "in the same untidy array which was usual with me; a great deal of beard and wig rather badly trimmed. Taking this want of decency for an act of courage, I entered in this state the very room into which would come, a short time afterwards, the king, the queen, the royal family, ...
— A Popular History of France From The Earliest Times - Volume VI. of VI. • Francois Pierre Guillaume Guizot
... what b-b-beast comes in here and does not shut the door!" he grumbles angrily, wrapping his dressing-gown about him and spitting loudly. "Take away that paper! Why is it lying about here? We keep twenty servants, and the place is more untidy than a pot-house. Who was that ringing? Who the devil ...
— The Lady with the Dog and Other Stories • Anton Chekhov
... while yet it is twilight, secretly one by one. She went to gardens and awaked from dreaming the warm maternal earth. In little patches bare and desolate she called up like a flame the golden crocus, or its purple brother like an emperor's ghost. She gladdened the graceless backs of untidy houses, here with a weed, there with a little grass. She said ...
— Fifty-One Tales • Lord Dunsany [Edward J. M. D. Plunkett]
... accomplished the interview with him at his fine house in Carlton House Terrace, on the 23rd November. After waiting some while, following, as we did, about a dozen previous waiters on the Chancellor, we were shown into Mr. Gladstone's working room, or den. The room was very untidy. Placards, papers, letters, newspapers, magazines, and blue boots on the table, chairs, bookshelves, and the floor. It looked, altogether, as if the window had been left open, and the contents of a miscellaneous newspaper, book, and parliamentary paper shop ...
— Canada and the States • Edward William Watkin
... dishevelled and untidy man I ever laid my eyes on. His hair and beard were not only long, but tangled and unkempt, and grew so far toward each other as barely to expose a strip of dirty brown skin. His shoulders were bowed and enormous. His ...
— The Mystery • Stewart Edward White and Samuel Hopkins Adams
... was in your place, Dolly," she said, as she was going away. "You seem so happy together here, somehow or other. Oh, dear! You don't know how dreadful our house seems by contrast. If things would break or upset, or look a little untidy,—or if mamma's caps and dresses just would n't look so ...
— Vagabondia - 1884 • Frances Hodgson Burnett
... hut. She was not altogether untidy, but of course showed that she lived far from civilization. She bowed to the party, then called to the children in ...
— The Motor Girls Through New England - or, Held by the Gypsies • Margaret Penrose
... silk skirts tightly around her and lifted them high above her starched white petticoat lest she contaminate them in such an untidy house; Mrs. Van Dorn followed her example, and they tiptoed into the double parlors. They were furnished, for the most part, with the pieces dating back to the building of the house, in one of the ugliest eras of the country, both in architecture and furniture. The ...
— The Debtor - A Novel • Mary E. Wilkins Freeman
... probably never know the difference except by a vague sense of improved comfort. Men are dreadfully untidy, as a general thing, when left to themselves; but they like very well to have other ...
— Clover • Susan Coolidge
... mulch away from the plants that were given protection in fall as soon as the weather gets warm enough to start them to growing. Or it can be dug into the soil about them to act as a fertilizer. Get it out of sight, for it always gives the garden an untidy effect if left ...
— Amateur Gardencraft - A Book for the Home-Maker and Garden Lover • Eben E. Rexford
... he locked the door again behind him. He bustled about the room as if preparing to move. He had little to pack; a few shabby clothes were thrown into a small trunk, a pile of letters and papers were hastily torn up and pitched into the untidy grate. All this while he muttered to himself as if to keep himself in company. He said: "I had to take the other shoot—he hadn't the sand to help—I couldn't tell him any more. . . . I wonder if she will go with me when I come tonight—ready? ...
— The Bread-winners - A Social Study • John Hay
... faith in him and was becoming very tired of his noise and bustle in the stillness and subdued light which meant home to her, and which this loud, excitable, untidy ...
— The Crimson Tide • Robert W. Chambers
... willing to forgive preoccupation in all others, since how an engineer dresses has no relation to his skill as a mathematician, and when a doctor mumbles it doesn't suggest that he would be clumsy with a scalpel. But when they meet an uncivil or unkempt officer, or see an untidy soldier or bluejacket on the street, they worry that the national defense is going to pot. One reason for the great prestige of the Marine Corps is that the public seldom, if ever, sees a sloppy marine, though its members do sometimes look a little ...
— The Armed Forces Officer - Department of the Army Pamphlet 600-2 • U. S. Department of Defense
... the gate and saw the two sisters near the side porch. One was on a bench shelling peas and the other was lolling in a hammock. Each looked very untidy and both wore wrappers that were full ...
— Randy of the River - The Adventures of a Young Deckhand • Horatio Alger Jr.
... seen a poet like you," said the sentinels, doubtfully. "All the poets in the palace have smooth, smiling faces, and fine clothes, and white hands. Her Royal Highness is not accustomed to receiving any one so untidy ...
— All the Way to Fairyland - Fairy Stories • Evelyn Sharp
... commonly seen in London girls of the lower orders,—the kind of prettiness which ultimately loses itself in fat and chronic perspiration. Her complexion already began to show a tendency to muddiness, and when her lips parted, they showed decay of teeth. In dress she was untidy; her hair exhibited a futile attempt at elaborate arrangement; she ...
— The House of Cobwebs and Other Stories • George Gissing
... was generally well built, if somewhat untidy looking, with the pigstys and out buildings in rather too close proximity for comfort. There was usually a large living room with heavy sooty beams overhead, and thick walls pierced by quaint deeply sunken windows furnished often with seats. These picturesque ...
— Vanished towers and chimes of Flanders • George Wharton Edwards
... energy found an outlet in the gossip of things nautical. They knew by instinct almost when a vessel was thoroughly cared for, and although they might not be able to call things by their proper names, they never liked their husbands or sweethearts to have any hand in, or association with, an untidy vessel. Hence, to secure approval from their women critics, these sailor men and apprentice lads would strain every faculty to have sails stowed in a cloth, that is, stowed so that not a wrinkle could ...
— The Shellback's Progress - In the Nineteenth Century • Walter Runciman
... tidy-looking woman, wearing black trousers bound tight round the ankles, and the usual blue cotton smock. Her feet were not very small, and she could walk about fairly quickly. The old woman was very ugly and untidy, but the girl evidently gave a good deal of attention to her toilet. She had silk trousers and a handsomely embroidered smock over them. Her feet were very small, and just like a claw. Her hair, which was a beautiful jet black, was dressed most elaborately ...
— The Little Girl Lost - A Tale for Little Girls • Eleanor Raper
... to exhale a positive hostility towards him, and entered his cousin's sitting-room. He would wait. He waited. He glanced through a pile of illustrated newspapers that lay about. And still he waited. The room looked different somehow; almost untidy. There were no rouses about. An hour passed. And still ...
— South Wind • Norman Douglas
... wire netting, but they are not snobs at all, and give of their bounty to all who call. The sensuous jasmine is there, and the cold puritanical ceneraria and old maids' pin cushions, with fragrance of sandalwood. The red-hot-poker grows stiff and straight, but the ragged sailor goes uncombed and untidy still. ...
— Vignettes of San Francisco • Almira Bailey
... as that,' said Jacinth in a melancholy voice. 'I can't bear ugly, messy places; above all, messy, untidy places make me perfectly cross ...
— Robin Redbreast - A Story for Girls • Mary Louisa Molesworth
... boy's bedroom is untidy. And then, too, he uses too many shirt-collars, and he doesn't know how to blow his nose. He stuffs handkerchiefs into his pockets, and you ...
— Light • Henri Barbusse
... the sitting-room door and looked forth. He was habited in a long, faded, palm-figured bed-gown, all muffled up round his chin, and sheep-skin slippers without heels. He had a lank, pale, discouraged visage, and thin, light hair, streaked with gray, in a very untidy state straggling about his face. He pulled his wrapper up yet closer about his head, when he discovered the washerwoman, and shambled across the clean-swept floor, his heelless slippers going clip-clap ...
— Eventide - A Series of Tales and Poems • Effie Afton
... by now. He is in distress over his shortage of water as none is to be had in the small islands. This shortage of water got me into trouble with the O.C. the troops on board at general parade this morning. Many of the men had not shaved for two days, and some looked untidy and unwashed, but all put this down to their being denied water to slake their thirst, which must come before washing and shaving but the order was "see that it does not happen again". I advised one particularly hirsute chap to lower his shaving brush into the sea to-morrow ...
— The Incomparable 29th and the "River Clyde" • George Davidson
... total ruin of the laboratory. "Really!" he said to a thickly bandaged Dr. Berry who was attempting to rescue an undamaged electroencephalograph from a gleeful fireman's ax, "can't you test your hypothesis without being so untidy?" ...
— I Was a Teen-Age Secret Weapon • Richard Sabia
... the eyelids and lips, a dried-up appearance, and a heated oppressed air, as if the faculties were deadened and burnt up, though her hand was cold and trembling. Her hair, still in its elaborate arrangement, hung loose, untidy, untouched; her collar and sleeves were soiled and tumbled; her dress, with its inconvenient machinery of inflation, looked wretched from its incongruity, and the stains on the huge hanging sleeves. Not a moment could ...
— The Trial - or, More Links of the Daisy Chain • Charlotte M. Yonge
... Anna pass, and she found herself in a dim untidy scented room, with a pink curtain pinned across its single window, and a lady with a great deal of fair hair and uncovered neck smiling at her from a pink bed on which an ...
— The Reef • Edith Wharton
... USING CEPHALIC OIL.—It is quite useless to oil the hair; this is not only a vulgar and foolish prejudice, but an untidy habit, for the reason that all cosmetics leave their trace. It suffices to wet a little sponge in the oil, and after parting the hair with the comb, to apply it at the roots in such a manner that the whole skin of the head may be enabled to imbibe it, after the scalp has ...
— Rise and Fall of Cesar Birotteau • Honore de Balzac
... slightly when shaving," he explained, "and the wound persists in bleeding. It has an untidy appearance, and a drop of blood might fall on ...
— McClure's Magazine, Volume VI, No. 3. February 1896 • Various
... open door of the small bedroom opposite her, Rilla saw Mrs. Anderson lying on the untidy bed; and Mrs. Anderson was dead. There was no doubt of that; neither was there any doubt that the big, frowzy, red-headed, red-faced, over-fat woman sitting near the door-way, smoking a pipe quite comfortably, was very much alive. She rocked ...
— Rilla of Ingleside • Lucy Maud Montgomery
... tasks become a drudgery, for she is too exhausted to have the strength to perform them. After the tasks finally are finished, she is too tired to don the afternoon dress, and so easily falls into untidy habits. This brings its train of results. The young husband, on his return from work, fails to find his wife the bright, attractive girl he ...
— Herself - Talks with Women Concerning Themselves • E. B. Lowry
... an inferior quality to hide. And yet it was not a critical gaze at all. She wore a black dress with a bit of white collar, and she had so much soft, red hair that he could not help recalling one or two women who owned the same quantity and seemed able to carry it only as a sort of untidy bundle. Hers looked entirely under control, and yet was such a wonder of burnished fullness that it tempted the hand to reach out and touch it. It became Tembarom's task during the meal to keep his eyes from turning too often toward it ...
— T. Tembarom • Frances Hodgson Burnett
... whistle blows I follow the hundreds down into the dining-room. Each wears her cap in a way that speaks for her temperament. There is the indifferent, the untidy, the prim, the vain, the coquettish; and the faces under them, which all looked alike at first, are becoming familiar. I have begun to make friends. I speak bad English, but do not attempt to change my voice and inflection nor to adopt the ...
— The Woman Who Toils - Being the Experiences of Two Gentlewomen as Factory Girls • Mrs. John Van Vorst and Marie Van Vorst
... two girls with their hair fastened up in womanly guise, and their cousins becurled as before; but there was nothing particularly untidy, and ...
— The Carbonels • Charlotte M. Yonge
... glamour about the most damnable crimes and hoggish meannesses, special and general, of the feudal and dynastic world over there, with its personnel of lords and queens and courts, so well-dress'd and so handsome. But the People are ungrammatical, untidy, and their ...
— Complete Prose Works - Specimen Days and Collect, November Boughs and Goodbye My Fancy • Walt Whitman
... Pollyanna give about her; then, with a confused vision in her eyes of crimson draperies, book-lined walls, a littered floor, an untidy desk, innumerable closed doors (any one of which might conceal a skeleton), and everywhere dust, dust, dust, she fled back through the hall to the great carved door, still half open ...
— Pollyanna • Eleanor H. Porter
... Stonebridge House, and one under which every generation of "backward and troublesome boys" who resided there had groaned. If any boy's hands or nails were, in the opinion of Miss Henniker, unclean or untidy, he received a bad mark, and was at once dismissed to the ...
— My Friend Smith - A Story of School and City Life • Talbot Baines Reed
... since you left there That I call a burning shame— Did you know that rope-necked Johnson Jumped your eighty-acre claim? Last I saw him, he was plowing, And he laughed and tried to joke: Said 'twas kind of you to leave him All the ground that you had broke; Said your house was so untidy He was sleeping out of doors, Till he got a girl to help him Wash the ...
— Nancy MacIntyre • Lester Shepard Parker
... with her husband and there was no one in the apartment that seemed so big and grand to Mary Rose's unsophisticated eyes. But Aunt Kate sniffed at the untidy ...
— Mary Rose of Mifflin • Frances R. Sterrett
... however, for you to go in your present untidy condition," he remarked; "go and put on your best clothes, and by that time I shall be ...
— Dick Cheveley - His Adventures and Misadventures • W. H. G. Kingston
... naturally so untidy about their persons, and have such shocking table-manners that it seems difficult to treat a sow like a lady, but that one in the pen yonder, with her litter of sucking pigs, seems very interesting. Come, let's have a look. Aren't the little pigs dear things? I'd like to climb in and take one of ...
— Back Home • Eugene Wood
... didn't look any too promising. It didn't exactly stand up on the prairie-floor and shout "Welcome" into your ears. There was an overturned windmill and a broken-down stable that needed a new roof, and a well that had a pump which wouldn't work without priming. There was an untidy-looking corral, and a reel for stringing up slaughtered beeves, and an overturned Red River cart bleached as white as a buffalo skeleton. As for the wickiup itself, it was well-enough built, but lacking in windows and quite unfinished as ...
— The Prairie Mother • Arthur Stringer
... child really felt ashamed for her aunt and cousin, who seemed to be the quintessence of neatness, to discover her untidy wardrobe. ...
— Patty Fairfield • Carolyn Wells
... man! A strange being, who was only heard of, if I recollect right, in times of war. If there was any dispute going—especially on a religious point—Stephen Fountain would rush into it with broad-sheets. Oh, yes, I remember him perfectly—a great untidy, fair-haired, truculent fellow, to whom anybody that took any thought for his soul was either fool or knave. How much of him does ...
— Helbeck of Bannisdale, Vol. I. • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... a weakening after Lionel's return from St. Helen's with the only "slavey" attainable, in the shape of an untidy, middle-aged Irish woman, with red hair, and a hot little spark of temper glowing in either eye. Putting this unpromising female in possession of the fresh, clean kitchen of the cabin was a trial, but it had to be done; and the young mistress, with all the ardor of inexperience, ...
— In the High Valley - Being the fifth and last volume of the Katy Did series • Susan Coolidge
... tea, in the vestibule of the reading-room, an eccentric citizen of Arkansas varied the entertainment. A short, thin man, of the cracker type, swarthy, long-bearded, and untidy, he was dressed in well-worn civilian costume, with the exception of an old blue coat showing dim remnants of military garniture. Heeling up to a gentleman who sat near me, he glared stupidly at him from beneath a broad-brimmed hat, demanding a seat mutely, ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 7, Issue 42, April, 1861 • Various
... way through the mud, we soon reached the house, and at its door an untidy old gentleman, with the grace and courtesy of the days that are no more, greeted us as a gracious host greets warmly welcomed guests, and we were led to a roaring fire and told ...
— People Like That • Kate Langley Bosher
... dog came out of the shed evincing no desire to bark or bite. The kitchen was empty, and—she thanked the Lord silently, as she gave a hasty glance about—not as dreadful as she had anticipated. Untidy beyond words, bare, dreary, cheerless, but not repulsively dirty. She stole softly through the lower part of the house, and then with a beating heart went up the uncarpeted stairs. At the head was an ...
— Ladies-In-Waiting • Kate Douglas Wiggin
... a century the American tradition, quite as much by reason of what it disregards as of what it suggests, has meant a great release of human energy, a vigorous if rough and untidy exploitation of the vast resources that the European invention of railways and telegraphic communication put within reach of the American people. It has stimulated men to a greater individual activity, perhaps, than the world ...
— An Englishman Looks at the World • H. G. Wells
... of such domestic comforts as habit has rendered almost necessities. The exercise of a little philosophy will reconcile him to the exigencies of the case, and render endurable here what would be inadmissible at home. A coarse, ill-cooked dinner, untidy service, and an unappeased appetite must be compensated by active interest in grand and peculiar scenery; a hard bed and a sleepless night, by the intelligent enjoyment of famous places clothed with historic interest; foul smells and rank odors, by the charming study of a unique people, ...
— Aztec Land • Maturin M. Ballou
... I see. They are generally fond of eating, very cautious about their money, untidy in their own houses, and apt to go to ...
— The Bertrams • Anthony Trollope
... but beyond words untidy and out of repair. As it is neither drained nor paved, it won't do in hot weather; and I shall migrate 'up country' to a Dutch village. Mrs. J-, who is Dutch herself, tells me that one may board in a Dutch farm-house very cheaply, and with great comfort (of course ...
— Letters from the Cape • Lady Duff Gordon
... he was too conscious of his deformity, and he felt awkward and clumsy with women; but he did not know what else this outburst could mean. Fanny Price, in the dirty brown dress, with her hair falling over her face, sloppy, untidy, stood before him; and tears of anger rolled down her cheeks. She was repellent. Philip glanced at the door, instinctively hoping that someone would come in and put an ...
— Of Human Bondage • W. Somerset Maugham
... a snowy afternoon, and in the raw ash-coloured light she thought he looked more changed than at the theatre. She remarked, too, that his clothes were worn and untidy, his gloveless hands soiled and tremulous. None of the degrading signs of his infirmity were lacking; and she saw at once that, while in the early days of the habit he had probably mixed his drugs, so that ...
— The Fruit of the Tree • Edith Wharton
... cousins—although his wife was constantly urging him to do so. It was, to Madame Duburg, a terrible thing that her boys—instead of being always tidy and orderly, and ready, when at home, to accompany her for a walk—should come home flushed, hot, and untidy, with perhaps a swelled cheek or a black eye, from the effects of a blow from a ...
— The Young Franc Tireurs - And Their Adventures in the Franco-Prussian War • G. A. Henty
... an exhibitioner so far as regards his education, and a mimic where social gifts were concerned, had all the aggressive bumptiousness of the successful man who has wit enough to perceive his shortcomings. In his ill-chosen tourist clothes, untidy collar and badly arranged tie, he presented a contrast to his companion of which he seemed, in ...
— Nobody's Man • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... dilapidated chair in the untidy office he had occupied for nearly thirty years, sat Asa Culkin, popularly known as "Judge" Culkin. Justice of the peace, sheriff, attorney-at-law, and three times Mayor of Laketon, he was still a controlling factor in ...
— Astounding Stories of Super-Science February 1930 • Various
... studio—alone with his misery and his anguish. He had scarcely tasted food since morning, much to the distress of Alphonse. He looked a mere wreck of his former self—haggard and unshaven, with hard lines around his weary eyes. He had not changed his clothes, and they were wrinkled and untidy. Across the polished floor was a perceptible track, worn by hours of restless striding to and fro. Now, after waiting impatiently for Victor Nevill, and wondering why he did not come, Jack had tried to nerve himself ...
— In Friendship's Guise • Wm. Murray Graydon
... face, and feet, and stood and waited on him while he ate, like any Arab woman, and gloried in so doing. But at Damascus she led a semi-European life. She blackened her eyes with kohl, and lived in a curiously untidy manner. But otherwise she was not in the least extraordinary at Damascus. But what was incomprehensible to me was how she could have given up all she had in England to live with that dirty little black—or nearly so—husband. I could understand ...
— The Romance of Isabel Lady Burton Volume II • Isabel Lady Burton & W. H. Wilkins
... her exquisite self! Even after a two days' journey Charmion looked elegant. I believe she would look well groomed on a desert island. Some women seem born with this gift. It wasn't given to me. I can be untidy on the slightest provocation! ...
— The Lady of the Basement Flat • Mrs. George de Horne Vaizey
... was concealed under a heavy veil, but the man seemed to recognize her at once, for he started up and gave a muttered execration as he caught sight of his untidy appearance in ...
— A Noble Woman • Ann S. Stephens
... "As we have been bowling along, my mind has unconsciously been dwelling on Jane Austen. Think of it, sir, only one hundred years ago and no railroads. Have we really lost or gained? Marvelous girl, that, sir. Masterpiece of literature when she was twenty-one, and no background but an untidy English village. You've heard of Jane Austen, ...
— Best Short Stories • Various
... on deck, and found as he took us about amongst the crew of seven men, all wearing petticoat canvas trousers, that the big lugger was very dirty and untidy, wanting in paint, and with the deck, or pont as the skipper called it, one litter of baskets, packages, and uncoiled ropes. On the other hand she seemed to be very long and well shaped, and her masts, which were thick and short, had large yards and tremendous sails, which ...
— Devon Boys - A Tale of the North Shore • George Manville Fenn
... going to have your bath first, or your breakfast?" asked Wiggleswick, putting his untidy gray ...
— Septimus • William J. Locke
... faded rose, that seemed to have blown too soon. Her breasts were sunken, her hair untidy like that of a neglected child, and her ...
— The Road to Damascus - A Trilogy • August Strindberg
... she loved the whole place; the bit of ill-kept tangled garden, with its untidy lawn and weed-covered beds, in which a few standard rose-trees strove to find a permanent home; she loved the dark and mysterious park, the rusty gate, that wood with its rich carpet which varied as each season ...
— The Nest of the Sparrowhawk • Baroness Orczy
... the conscientiousness of a naked heathen of the lowest caste, who walks over the roofs of the cars and is supposed to fill them from a pig skin suspended on his back. You furnish your own towel and the most untidy stranger in the compartment usually wants to borrow it, having forgotten to bring one himself. You acquire merit in heaven, as the Buddhists say, by loaning it to him, but it is a better plan to carry two towels, in order to be prepared for ...
— Modern India • William Eleroy Curtis
... from the window with a sigh of pity for the miserable creatures below. His glance strayed over the untidy kitchen which bore all the marks of the most extreme poverty and he gave another sigh of pity for the man who had been brought so low in the last days of his life, the man whom he had known in the time of ...
— The Alchemist's Secret • Isabel Cecilia Williams
... render the round hat, with the straight-projecting brim, less ugly; but their invention carried them no further than to surround it, at one time, with a deep ruff of ribands, or they crushed it into an untidy rumble-tumble shape; at another, they let copious streamers float from the crown down their backs; or again, they gave it a monstrous pitch up behind. There is this to be said in their excuse—they hardly knew what parasols and umbrellas ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine - Volume 57, No. 352, February 1845 • Various
... buns for the children. He was a good father—such a good father. He was gold. The mother was also gold, but she was cross. One got a smack from her sometimes, a dig in the ribs, or a twist of an ear. She does not like to have the house untidy. She does not allow the children to play "fathers and mothers." She forbids Abramtzig to pick up the pieces of cardboard that have fallen to the floor, and Moshetzig to steal the paste from his father, and Dvairke to make bread of sand and ...
— Jewish Children • Sholem Naumovich Rabinovich
... a deep, mocking bass; and Rita Irvin lying, a pallid wraith of her once lovely self, upon the untidy bed, stirred slightly—her lashes quivering. Her eyes opened and stared straightly upward at the low, dirty ceiling, horror growing ...
— Dope • Sax Rohmer
... expected him to bring anyone home in this sudden manner, and she could not help wishing that he had told her beforehand of his intention. It being Monday, she had been very busy all day and she was conscious that she was rather untidy in her appearance. Her long brown hair was twisted loosely into a coil behind her head. She blushed in an embarrassed way as the ...
— The Ragged Trousered Philanthropists • Robert Tressell
... and was on a visit to a family of daughters with this object. The fair one, of whom he was partially enamoured, one day entered the room in which he was seated with her dress partially unpinned, and her hair untidy: he never went back. You may say, such a fellow was "not worth a pin;" but he was really a shrewd fellow, and afterwards made a good husband. He judged of women as of men—by little things; and he ...
— Thrift • Samuel Smiles
... vans, carts, trolleys, cyclists, motors, and a marvelling crowd—loafers, women, nurse-maids, shopping women, children, venturesome hobble-dehoys—gathered behind his gingerly moving feet. The hoardings were untidy everywhere with the tattered election paper. A babblement of voices surged about him. One sees the customers and shopmen crowding in the doorways of the shops, the faces that came and went at the windows, ...
— The Food of the Gods and How It Came to Earth • H.G. Wells
... walked into the spacious, low-ceilinged, bright place, presences long past seemed to fill it intolerably. Brock and Hugh, little chaps, roared in untidy and tumultuous from football, or came, decorous and groomed, handsome, smart little lads, to be presented to guests. Her own Hugh, her husband, proud of the beautiful new house, smiled from the hearth to her as he had smiled twenty-six years back, ...
— Joy in the Morning • Mary Raymond Shipman Andrews
... frightened girl, she took her by the arm, on the side to which the blister had been applied, and by one vigorous movement whirled her out into the middle of the floor, abusing her all the time for dirty and untidy habits. There she left her. My informant says, Maria hardly spoke, except to beg some of the more indignant girls to be calm; but, in slow, trembling movements, with many a pause, she went down-stairs at last,—and was punished ...
— The Life of Charlotte Bronte - Volume 1 • Elizabeth Gaskell
... are three things that my notable sister holds in especial abhorrence,—untidy housekeeping, sentimental demonstrations between married people, and crying babies; and here they all were in an avalanche, overwhelming, not only herself, but a most prepossessing young man, who, for all I knew, was viewing me with a critic's eye, as ...
— Homes And How To Make Them • Eugene Gardner
... him: "Why can't you say it's in the house—in my office? Stretton's going to take it into Caraquet; there's no sense in making a mystery to him. Come on, Stretton, and have a look at it now!" He stuck his fat little arm through mine, and we went back to the house by the back door and Charliet's untidy kitchen. It was the shortest way, and it was not till afterwards that I remembered it was not commanded by the window in his office, like the front way. I was not keen on going; later I had a sickly feeling that it was because I had a presentiment of seeing something I did not want to see. Then ...
— The La Chance Mine Mystery • Susan Carleton Jones
... pretty, thrifty little woman, with a mass of rather untidy fair hair. She was still in the tea-gown which, apparently, she had been wearing all the day, whilst her foot-gear consisted of a pair of Japanese slippers; and yet the whole effect was charming, possibly because she was entirely unaffected ...
— People of Position • Stanley Portal Hyatt
... redeemed Boswell's absurdities. He succeeded on the whole in his aim, for the figure that more or less distinctly emerges from the litter of his workshop is lovable; but in spite of all Lincoln's melancholy, the dreariness of his life, sitting with his feet on the table in his unswept and untidy office at Illinois, or riding on circuit or staying at ramshackle western inns with the Illinois bar, cannot have been so unrelieved as it is in Mr. Herndon's presentation. And Herndon overdid his part. He ferreted out ...
— Abraham Lincoln • Lord Charnwood |
