"Prim" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... I to do, Frank? What am I to do? Think how desolate I am, how unfriended, how much in want of some one whom I can call a protector! I cannot have you always with me. You care more for the little finger of that prim piece of propriety down at the old dowager's than you do for me and all my sorrows." This was true, but Frank did not say that it was true. "Lord Fawn is at any rate respectable. At least, I thought he was so when I accepted ...
— The Eustace Diamonds • Anthony Trollope
... steep-pitched roof. There was a little paved courtyard in front, where the rose-bushes grew and clambered up to the windows of the upper story. Behind lay a little country garden, with its box-edged borders, shut in by damp, gloomy-looking walls. The prim, gray-painted street door, with its wicket opening and bell attached, announced quite as plainly as the official scutcheon ...
— The Jealousies of a Country Town • Honore de Balzac
... at length, at Mr. Mortmain's chambers, at eight o'clock in the evening. A few minutes before that hour, Messrs. Quirk and Gammon were to be seen in the clerk's room, in civil conversation with that prim functionary, who explained to them that he did all Mr. Mortmain's drafting—pupils were so idle; that Mr. Mortmain did not score out much of what he (the aforesaid clerk) had drawn; that he noted up Mr. Mortmain's new cases for him in the reports, ...
— Ten Thousand a-Year. Volume 1. • Samuel Warren
... de la Revolucin de Septiembre; i.e., 1868. The Revolution began on September 19, under the leadership of Generals Prim and Serrano, and Vice-Admiral Topete. It drove Queen Isabel II from the throne, and initiated a six-year period of violent change and innovation, which ended only with the accession of Isabel's son Alfonso ...
— Heath's Modern Language Series: Mariucha • Benito Perez Galdos
... into the lower end of Fifth Avenue, it seemed as if I were being gently floated along between the modest apartment-houses and old-fashioned dwellings, and prim, respectable churches, on the smooth current of Pierrepont's talk about his new-found picture. How often a man has cause to return thanks for the enthusiasms of his friends! They are the little fountains that run down from ...
— The Ruling Passion • Henry van Dyke
... was a sight to be seen—crumpled, infinitely prim, crow-footed like an ivied wall; but extraordinarily wise; with that tempered resolve which says, "I know Evil and I know Good, and dare be just to either." He was thinking profoundly; every one could see it. Best of the company before him Angioletto, ...
— Little Novels of Italy • Maurice Henry Hewlett
... was, however, pleased to hear that there was a young female in the house, as it would make the time pass away more agreeably; not that he expected much. Judging from the father, he made up his mind, as he took his clothes out of his valise, that she was very short, very prim, ...
— Snarley-yow - or The Dog Fiend • Frederick Marryat
... guest royally; so much that when we assembled the next mornin' for the inspection, the grey-faced man were shaky as a wet dog. But the Major were all set prim and dry, like the ...
— At a Winter's Fire • Bernard Edward J. Capes
... wood and sea-coal. Faggots, but not the treasonable kind! Try as he might, he could-get no farther with that pillar of the magistracy, my Lord Danly's friend, the beloved of Aldermen. He hated his solemn face, his prim mouth, his condescending stoop. Such a man was encased in proof armour of public esteem, and he heeded Mr. Lovel no more than ...
— The Path of the King • John Buchan
... a change I found in the religious house! no card-playing, for it had been forbidden to the scholars, and there was now nothing going on but reading and singing; divil a merry visage to be seen, but plenty of prim airs and graces; but the case of the scholars, though bad enough, was not half so bad as mine, for they could spake to each other, whereas I could not have a word of conversation, for the ould thaif of a rector had ordered them to send me to 'Coventry,' ...
— The Romany Rye - A Sequel to 'Lavengro' • George Borrow
... as one of your little feet in these places again.' She could feel the shears against her hair, and she was so scared she swore like he told her. And so she was that afraid of losin' her fine yellow hair afterward, knowin' Father McNally was a man that didn't make no idle threats, that she kept prim and proper—fur a half-breed." ...
— The Spenders - A Tale of the Third Generation • Harry Leon Wilson
... roof. The incentive to the celebration had come rather from those who had left North Dormer than from those who had been obliged to stay there, and there was some difficulty in rousing the village to the proper state of enthusiasm. But Miss Hatchard's pale prim drawing-room was the centre of constant comings and goings from Hepburn, Nettleton, Springfield and even more distant cities; and whenever a visitor arrived he was led across the hall, and treated to a glimpse of the group of girls ...
— Summer • Edith Wharton
... played a considerable part in his political education. He was influential with the Regency in Spain, which succeeded Queen Isabel when that sovereign became too malodorous to be longer tolerated, and he was the personal friend of the Regent, General Prim, whose motto, "More liberal today than yesterday, more liberal tomorrow than today," he was fond of quoting. He was present in Madrid at the time of General Prim's assassination and often told of how this wise patriot, recognizing the unpreparedness of the ...
— Lineage, Life, and Labors of Jose Rizal, Philippine Patriot • Austin Craig
... for dissipline I ever shipped with was Cap'n Tasker, of the Lapwing. He'd got it on the brain bad. He was a prim, clean-shaved man except for a little side-whisker, an' always used to try an' look as much like a naval officer ...
— Sea Urchins • W. W. Jacobs
... the deacon says to his friend, who is a tall, prim, sedate-looking man, apparently about forty, "I pity Marston; I pity him because he is a noble-hearted fellow. But, after all, this whispering about the city may be only mother Rumour distributing her false tales. Let us hope it is all rumour and scandal. Come, ...
— Our World, or, The Slaveholders Daughter • F. Colburn Adams
... that prim little cap. Tie up your hair with black ribbon, and put on a blouse. Then you will be ...
— Little Folks (July 1884) - A Magazine for the Young • Various
... I'd have to be very prim and proper in England," said Gipsy, looking serious, "but I didn't know things were as bad as that. I'll begin to wish I hadn't come here. Oh dear! we were going right through to Chicago if we hadn't been shipwrecked, ...
— The Leader of the Lower School - A Tale of School Life • Angela Brazil
... that the "Rape of the Lock" is better worth reading and really more helpful than magazine metaphysics. Anyhow, it is certain that the training which the Misses Ponsonby had received, although it may have made them starched, prim, and even uninteresting, had an effect upon their character not altogether unwholesome, and prevented any public crying for the moon, or any public charge of injustice against its ...
— Catharine Furze • Mark Rutherford
... for long. The next moment an exceedingly astonished, irate cat was taking an unusual amount of exercise in the prim little garden, urged cheerily on by a small, curly dog, whose three legs seemed quite as effective as most dogs' four. While down the path from the house came Miss Jane and Miss Susan, also stout, elderly, and unaddicted to overmuch exercise, anxious for their cat, anxious ...
— Patricia • Emilia Elliott
... clean, and its aspect was prim and sober, as was indeed that of the whole city. Men in wide-brimmed hats and wide-skirted coats of sombre hue walked the streets, and talked earnestly together at the corners; whilst the women, for the most part, passed on their way with lowered eyes, and hoods drawn modestly ...
— French and English - A Story of the Struggle in America • Evelyn Everett-Green
... bailiff, or head-keeper or something, who would die of apoplexy if either of you did anything so lowering. You may be allowed to ride, Norah, but it won't be an Australian scurry—you'll have to be awfully prim and proper, and have a groom trotting behind you. With a top-hat." He beamed upon ...
— Captain Jim • Mary Grant Bruce
... disturbed. We have had for some years in this household a housekeeper—one Sarah, with whose second name I have never attempted to burden my memory. She is a woman of a severe and forbidding aspect, prim and demure in her bearing, very impassive in her nature, and never known within our experience to show signs of any emotion. As I sat alone at my breakfast—Mrs. Challenger is in the habit of keeping ...
— The Poison Belt • Arthur Conan Doyle
... suburbs of a town in the Midlands are, one would suppose, as hideous as human half-wittedness could invent or endure. But they are different. They are complete; they are, in their way, compact; rounded and finished with an effect that may be prim or smug, but is not raw. The surroundings of them are neat, if it be in a niggling fashion. But American ugliness is not complete even as ugliness. It is broken off short; it is ragged at the edges; ...
— Gilbert Keith Chesterton • Maisie Ward
... her character deteriorated and Trelawny's judgment grew more acute. Her corners grew more brutally protuberant beneath the tissue of glamour cast over them by a name. To her also Trelawny's purse was open; but long before the quarrel over "Queen Mab" his generous spirit had begun to groan under her prim banality, and to express itself in ungenerous backbitings. His final estimate he imparted to Claire when he was seventy-eight years old, and it remains for those who dislike ...
— Pot-Boilers • Clive Bell
... the office Mr. Scalper has reached the letter of a correspondent which appears to give him particular pleasure, for he delineates the character with a beaming smile of satisfaction. To the unpractised eye the writing resembles the prim, angular hand of an elderly spinster. Mr. Scalper, however, seems to think ...
— Literary Lapses • Stephen Leacock
... believe in the immortality of the soul: the characters which he can never learn to comprehend, are precisely those in which dwell the intuitions of the infinite. He piques himself upon the precision of his language, not perceiving it has gained this boasted prim exactitude at the expense of breadth and depth. All honor to the savant! but let him keep the lamp of spontaneity ever burning in his soul. By its light the savage and the woman divine God; without it, he may weigh creation—and 'find ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol. 4, No. 5, November, 1863 • Various
... be found scattered up and down our country churchyards—'uncouth rhymes,' as Gray calls them, yet full of the sombre philosophy of life. They are fast becoming illegible, worn out by the rain that raineth every day, and our prim, present-day parsons do not look with favour upon them, besides which—to use a clumsy phrase—besides which most of our churchyards are now closed against burials, and without texts ...
— In the Name of the Bodleian and Other Essays • Augustine Birrell
... Prendendo la campagna lento lento Su per lo suol che d'ogni parte oliva. Un'aura dolce senza mutamento Avere in se, mi feria per la fronte, Non di piu colpo che soave vento: Per cui le fronde tremolando pronte Tutte quante piegavano alla parte U'la prim' ombra gitta il santo monte; Non pero dal loro esser dritto sparte Tanto, che gli augelletti per le cime Lasciasser d'operare ogni lor arte; Ma con piena letizia l'ore prime Cantando ricevieno intra le foglie Che tenevan bordone ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 20, No. 118, August, 1867 • Various
... been our next-door neighbors, and she has never been inside the house. Nor he either, for that matter, except once when it took fire, you know, and he came in with that funny little chemical engine tucked under his arm, and took off his hat in the same prim, polite way that he takes it off when he talks to Sibyl, and said, 'If you'll excuse me offering advice, Miss Hopkins, it is not necessary to move anything; it mars furniture very much to move it at a fire. ...
— Different Girls • Various
... to dinner wearing a pale green frock with a prim fichu of chiffon and lace. Terry had already arrived and was in the drawing-room, standing on the hearthrug with his back ...
— Love of Brothers • Katharine Tynan
... let them have one day in which they can howl and racket and frolic to their hearts' content. A holiday isn't a holiday without plenty of freedom and fun; and they shall have full swing once a week," Mrs. Bhaer used to say, when prim people wondered why banister-sliding, pillow-fights, and all manner of jovial games were allowed under the once ...
— Little Men - Life at Plumfield With Jo's Boys • Louisa May Alcott
... voice that asked the question, and Judith looked up with a smile. Her mother's cousin stood in the doorway—a prim little old spinster, who had been their guest for several days. Like Marguerite, she, too, had come back to her native village after an absence of four years, but not to her father's house. She was all alone in the ...
— Mildred's Inheritance - Just Her Way; Ann's Own Way • Annie Fellows Johnston
... and loved in that brief month in Paris, I cherish tenderer memories. Prim little Pauline Deschapelles! How clearly I can still see the respectable brass plate on the door of your little flat—"Mademoiselle Deschapelles—Modes et Robes;" and indeed the "modes et robes" were true ...
— The Quest of the Golden Girl • Richard le Gallienne
... with agitation. Monsieur Fardet stamped about with a guttural rolling of r's, glancing angrily at his companions as if they had in some way betrayed him; while the fat clergyman stood with his umbrella up, staring stolidly with big, frightened eyes at the camel-men. Cecil Brown curled his small, prim moustache, and looked white, but contemptuous. The Colonel, Belmont, and the young Harvard graduate were the three most cool-headed and resourceful members ...
— The Tragedy of The Korosko • Arthur Conan Doyle
... a more melancholy place than the street in which you have lived; than the house, now curtainless and weather-stained, you knew prim, and full of happy human creatures; than the "banquet-hall deserted:" than the empty chair; than the bed where Death found ...
— The Cockaynes in Paris - 'Gone abroad' • Blanchard Jerrold
... restaurant outside; and it was but the work of a moment after taps to tack a blanket over the window, light the gas, and bring out a dilapidated pack of cards for a game of California Jack or draw-poker; or to convert the prim pine table into a billiard-table, with marbles for balls, with which the ownership of many a collar, neckerchief, shirt, and other articles of none too plentiful wardrobes, were decided in a twinkling, while the air of the crowded room grew thick and stifling ...
— The Bay State Monthly - Volume 1, Issue 4 - April, 1884 • Various
... his eye every morning when he opened the door of his bedroom; it was there when he came home late at night, and seemed to be sitting up for him, in the reproachful, feminine fashion. When he was writing his letters, there it was, with a prim, furtive air of looking on. It was not like a mere slipper; it had traits and an individuality of its own; there were moments when the jet beads in the buckle sparkled with a sort of intelligence. Sitting at night, reading under the drop-light, Lynde often ...
— The Queen of Sheba & My Cousin the Colonel • Thomas Bailey Aldrich
... then admiration. He had never heard its like, nor did he feel any offense. The daughter, too, stood by, pursing her prim lips, and evidently approving. Colonel Winchester was motionless like a statue, while the infuriated man shook his fist at him and launched imprecations. But his face had turned white and Dick saw that he was ...
— The Rock of Chickamauga • Joseph A. Altsheler
... impatience, or anger. He toddles if his steps are short, uneven, and unsteady, like those of a child. He waddles if his movement is ungainly, with a duck-like swaying from side to side. He shuffles if he drags his feet with a scraping noise. He minces if he takes short steps in a prim, precise, or affectedly nice manner. He strolls or saunters if he goes along in an easy, aimless, or idle fashion. He rambles if he wanders about, with no definite aim or toward no definite goal. He meanders if he proceeds slowly and perhaps ...
— The Century Vocabulary Builder • Creever & Bachelor
... didn't she let him see her laughing and dancing like that? Why didn't she? She'll come down all prim and staid for him and he'll never dream what she really is like. Oh, how can she be so blind? I don't know how to stand it! And I don't know what to do! Why isn't there some one to tell me what I ...
— The Precipice • Elia Wilkinson Peattie
... himself one of those lightning flashes from the eyes of his boy, and doubly afraid to introduce his son anywhere, to show him anything that might bring upon him the reproach of doing harm to Pippo. His house, which had been very decent and orderly in the late Lord St. Serf's time, became almost prim in the terror Phil had lest they should say that it ...
— The Marriage of Elinor • Margaret Oliphant
... Tell me, ye prim adepts in Scandal's school, Who rail by precept, and detract by rule, Lives there no character, so tried, so known, So deck'd with grace, and so unlike your own, That even you assist her fame to raise, Approve by envy, and ...
— The School For Scandal • Richard Brinsley Sheridan
... professed a keener interest in his grave—was a matter of universal astonishment. Her dress was a triumph of tactful discretion, sensible, but not too "touristy"'—Miss Winchelsea had a great dread of being "touristy"—and her Baedeker was carried in a cover of grey to hide its glaring red. She made a prim and pleasant little figure on the Charing Cross platform, in spite of her swelling pride, when at last the great day dawned, and she could start for Rome. The day was bright, the Channel passage would be pleasant, and all the omens ...
— The Country of the Blind, And Other Stories • H. G. Wells
... and directed my attention to a middle-aged, angular-looking woman, whose strong, sharp-featured face betokened a prim spinster, probably at the head of a girls' school, or engaged in some clerical work. However, as I passed her on my way to leave the train I noticed a wedding-ring on her hand, and heard her say to her companion, "No; I think a woman's sphere ...
— The Gold Bag • Carolyn Wells
... on in this life, day by day, I become more of a bewildered child; I cannot get used to this world, to procreation, to heredity, to sight, to hearing, the commonest things are a burthen. The prim, obliterated, polite surface of life, and the broad, bawdy and orgiastic—or maenadic—foundations, form a spectacle to which no habit reconciles me. R. ...
— The Varieties of Religious Experience • William James
... stylish, to suit the prim Eudora, who felt keenly how she must suffer by comparison with her sister's waiting maid. Even unsuspicious Anna saw the point, and smiling archly asked "what she could do to make ...
— Bad Hugh • Mary Jane Holmes
... chance this afternoon, and Mrs. Walker, the vicar's wife, with two of her countless daughters, had come by invitation. Mrs. Walker was a middle-aged, careworn, rather prim-looking woman. Lady Engleton was handsome. Bright auburn hair waved back in picturesque fashion from a piquant face, and constituted more than half her claim to beauty. The brown eyes were bright and vivacious. The mouth was seldom ...
— The Daughters of Danaus • Mona Caird
... scales and exercises was given to the master's playing. He was fond of Weber's "Invitation to the Waltz," and he played it with force and precision and the utmost delicacy. Mr. Timm had a pale, smooth, sharp face, a rather prim manner, and a quick, modest gait. He was most simple-hearted, and loved a joke; and his fun was all the more effective from his very sober face and his lisp. It was his wife who was long the most efficient actress at Mitchell's ...
— From the Easy Chair, vol. 1 • George William Curtis
... the later version of this Reading was said about the prim person in cloth boots, who unsuccessfully attempted all through the evening to make a joke. Of him the readers of "Pickwick" will very well remember it to have been related that he commenced a long story about a great public character, whose name he had ...
— Charles Dickens as a Reader • Charles Kent
... woman whose elegant form and manners make her as lovely as the moon and as beautiful as light. The rapid and constant motion of the foliage of the poplar and the aspen reminds him of some nervous and excitable person who is never quiet or easy for a moment. The prim spruce-tree suggests to him some person of formal habits and primness of dress. The symmetrical maple and pine remind him of some quiet and dignified character who is well balanced and rounded at every point. The patriarchal tree which has outlived all its companions ...
— The Road and the Roadside • Burton Willis Potter
... as the old Butler had promised, the four dog dishes, heaping to the brim, loomed in prim line upon the kitchen ...
— Peace on Earth, Good-will to Dogs • Eleanor Hallowell Abbott
... this girl on whom he had bestowed the priceless boon of his society for life? How did he know what she was—he could not find the exact adjective to express his meaning, but he knew what he meant. Was she worthy of the boon? That was what it amounted to. All his life he had had a prim shrinking from the section of the feminine world which is connected with the light-life of large cities. Club acquaintances of his in London had from time to time married into the Gaiety Chorus, and Mr. Carmyle, though ...
— The Adventures of Sally • P. G. Wodehouse
... was wholly without interest, through a country entirely flat, and looking wretchedly brown and barren. There were rows of trees, very slender, very prim and formal; there was ice wherever there happened to be any water to form it; there were occasional villages, compact little streets, or masses of stone or plastered cottages, very dirty and with gable ends and earthen roofs; and a succession of this same ...
— Passages From the French and Italian Notebooks, Complete • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... gay garden, With prim geraniums pied, And spreading yew trees, old, unchanging Tho' men ...
— The Second Book of Modern Verse • Jessie B. Rittenhouse
... representing a reasoned and intellectual reaction, mainly suggested and influenced by the French. The group of contributors was a peculiarly mixed one with only one thing in common. And that was a conscious effort to repudiate the sugary airs and prim ...
— Modern British Poetry • Various
... later, Mademoiselle de Corandeuil appeared, and with a prim air seated herself beside ...
— Serge Panine • Georges Ohnet
... stiff salon with glass doors, prim furniture, and an elaborately ornamental French clock. It was silent, of course. One wonders sometimes whether ornamental French Ormolu clocks have any works, or are solid throughout. For no one has ever seen ...
— The Incomplete Amorist • E. Nesbit
... let me alone: I am not thine. [1] Prim Creed, with categoric point, forbear To feature me my Lord by rule and line. Thou canst not measure Mistress Nature's hair, Not one sweet inch: nay, if thy sight is sharp, Would'st count the strings upon ...
— Select Poems of Sidney Lanier • Sidney Lanier
... quiet, sleek, old creature, and was so prim, that her friends called her an old maid; and some of them even said that she was an old cat, but they were the people who were not asked to her nice tea parties. When she gave a tea party, she sent her page ...
— A Apple Pie and Other Nursery Tales • Unknown
... dozens of strange, prim houses to puzzle up the streets. The street-signs, another innovation, were truly needed. Of old it had been enough to say "down toward the depot," "out by the McCormick place," "next to the Presbyterian church," "up around the schoolhouse," or "down by the lumber yard." But now ...
— The Boss of Little Arcady • Harry Leon Wilson
... she began to disengage her hand from his—loosened the slim fingers one by one, all the while watching him sideways with prim lips pursed and ...
— The Crimson Tide • Robert W. Chambers
... our own age with that of Pericles, and congratulate themselves on the reawakening of the feeling of patriotism: I remember a parody on the funeral oration of Pericles by G. Freytag,[9] in which this prim and strait-laced "poet" depicted the happiness now experienced by sixty-year-old men.—All pure and simple caricature! So this is the result! And sorrow and irony and seclusion are all that remain for him who has seen more ...
— We Philologists, Volume 8 (of 18) • Friedrich Nietzsche
... place is a suburb of the second city in Ireland, and one of the most beautiful spots about the town. What a prim, bustling, active, green-railinged, tea-gardened, gravel-walked place would it have been in the five-hundredth town in England!—but you see the people can be quite as happy in the rags and without the paint, and I hear a great deal more heartiness and affection from these children than from their ...
— Seeing Europe with Famous Authors - Vol. II Great Britain And Ireland, Part Two • Francis W. Halsey
... a fair fight; one feels it. Poor little prim Common Sense, with her defiant, turned-up nose and her shrill giggle and her innate vulgarity. And against her the stillness of the night, and the music of the ages, and the beating of ...
— Malvina of Brittany • Jerome K. Jerome
... the South; but before childhood was over I watched the quick, luxuriant growth of flowers through the brief summer of a northern clime. The Canterbury-bell, so like a prim, pretty maiden, the dahlia, that stately dame always in court costume of gorgeous velvet, remind me of those well-kept beds where not a leaf or flower was allowed to grow awry; and in one ancient garden the imagination of a child found wings for many an airy flight. The town ...
— Aunt Jane of Kentucky • Eliza Calvert Hall
... many directions. A sweet breath came from its parterres of mingled hyacinths and jonquils that hid themselves every moment in black shadows of lagustrums and laurestines. Here, in severe order, a pair of palms, prim as mediaeval queens, stood over against each other; and in the midst of the garden, rising high against the sky, appeared the pillared veranda and immense, four-sided roof of an old French colonial villa, as it stands ...
— Dr. Sevier • George W. Cable
... ubi omne quod de mea mihi occupatione displicebat, se patenter ostenderet, et cuncta qu infligere dolorem consueverant, congesta ante oculos licenter venirent. Ibi itaque cum afflictus valde et diu tacitus sederem, dilectissimus filius meus Petrus diaconus adfuit, mihi a primvo juventutis flore amicitiis familiariter obstrictus, atque ad sacri verbi indagationem socius. Qui gravi excoqui cordis languore me intuens, ait: Num quidnam tibi aliquid accidit, quod plus te solito mror tenet? Cui inquam: Mror, Petre, quem quotidie patior, ...
— Anglo-Saxon Literature • John Earle
... it to you. Do you see that plumber's shop next to the corner saloon?" I pointed to the Avenue whose ceaseless stream of humanity flows past Our Square without ever sweeping us into its current. "That was once a tea-shop. It was started by a dear little, prim little old maiden lady. The saloon was run by Tough Bill Manigan. The little old lady had a dainty sign painted and hung it up outside her place, 'The Teacup.' Tough Bill took a board and painted a sign and hung it up outside his place; 'The Hiccup.' The dear little, prim little old maiden ...
— From a Bench in Our Square • Samuel Hopkins Adams
... and every breadth of her skirts always fell in straight, precise folds. From bonnet-strings to shoe-laces there was never a wrinkle or a spot. But the Little Colonel felt no awe. She had discovered that under that prim exterior was a heart thoroughly in sympathy with all her childish joys and griefs, and in consequence the two had become warm friends. Lloyd stood beside the rocking-chair, where she had seated Mrs. Brewster, and waved a big fan so vigorously that the bonnet-strings fluttered, and a lock ...
— The Little Colonel's House Party • Annie Fellows Johnston
... perfect host. He had the right word for everybody; his infectious conviviality made them all straightway at their ease. The overdressed native ladies, the priests and officials moving about in prim little circles, were charmed with his affable manner "so different from most Englishmen"; likewise that flock of gleeful tourists who had suddenly turned up, craving for admission without a single letter of introduction between them, ...
— South Wind • Norman Douglas
... Ireland had soldiers for the world. Don Patricio, Don Miguel, Don Carlos, Don Tadeo took the place of Patrick, Michael, Charles, and Thadeus. O'Hart gives a list of sixty descendants of the "Wild Geese" in places of honor in Spain. General Prim was a descendant of the Princes of Inisnage in Kilkenny. An O'Donnell was Duke of Tetuan and field marshal of Spain. Ambrose O'Higgins, born in county Meath, Ireland, was the foremost Spanish soldier in Chile and Peru; Admiral Patricio Lynch was one of its ...
— The Glories of Ireland • Edited by Joseph Dunn and P.J. Lennox
... natural science. One of these was Ainsworth, who afterwards published his travels in Assyria; he was a Wernerian geologist, and knew a little about many subjects. Dr. Coldstream was a very different young man, prim, formal, highly religious, and most kind-hearted; he afterwards published some good zoological articles. A third young man was Hardie, who would, I think, have made a good botanist, but died early ...
— The Life and Letters of Charles Darwin, Volume I • Francis Darwin
... see the prim English lady whom Perlet was acting with such ludicrous effect, nor hear the English-French that had filled the house with roars of laughter; instead of all this, he beheld himself hurrying from the Rue Richer, hailing a cab ...
— Melmoth Reconciled • Honore de Balzac
... might have seen forty years or sixty; except for her snowy hair, time seemed to have forgotten her. Her dress was a near approach to the Quaker garb of the followers of Penn. Everything about her was of softest gray; but the face, framed by the prim Quaker bonnet, was as fair as an infant's, and with a child's soft colouring in the cheeks that had not yet lost the charming curves of young womanhood. She looked like a creature whom Life had loved so well that Time had not been permitted ...
— Against Odds - A Detective Story • Lawrence L. Lynch
... protected by brass wire-netting, to which hangs his thermometer just where he originally placed it. The house has been little if any altered since he was carried to his last resting-place. He is described by those who knew him as "a little thin, prim, upright man," a quiet, unassuming, but very observing country parson, who occupied his time in watching and recording the habits of his parishioners, quadruped as well as feathered. At the end of the garden is still kept his sun-dial, the ...
— England, Picturesque and Descriptive - A Reminiscence of Foreign Travel • Joel Cook
... they did not think him past praying for." During his breakfast he recalled the fact that Madge was uncommonly well dressed. "She hasn't in externals," he thought, "the provincial air that one might expect, although her ideas are not only provincial, but prim, obtained, no doubt, from some goody-good books that she has read in the remote region wherein she has developed so remarkably. She has some stilted ideal of womanhood which she is seeking to attain, and the more unnatural the ideal, ...
— A Young Girl's Wooing • E. P. Roe
... the suns of Palestine, and whose heart has been warmed in the company of the tender and beautiful Rebecca, sit down contented for life by the side of such a frigid piece of propriety as that icy, faultless, prim, niminy-piminy Rowena? Forbid it fate, forbid it poetical justice! There is a simple plan for setting matters right, and giving all parties their due, which is here submitted to the novel-reader. Ivanhoe's history MUST have had a continuation; and it is this which ...
— Burlesques • William Makepeace Thackeray
... made him picture his Cousin Eleanor as a prim young person, with sharp elbows and a pinched nose and stringy hair. She would be lifeless and oppressively good-mannered, he felt certain. All the ill success of the last three days seemed to be behind his sudden determination to have none of her. But Cousin Jasper, having once conceived the idea, ...
— The Windy Hill • Cornelia Meigs
... look now, Polly?" And across the wax-cloth Tilly pushed a copybook, in which she had laboriously inscribed a prim maxim the requisite number ...
— Australia Felix • Henry Handel Richardson
... it. Fifteen minutes after his vocal organs had been thus renewed, LEOPOLD was in a condition to see things in an entirely new light, and hesitated no longer to write the following note to General PRIM: ...
— Punchinello Vol. 1, No. 21, August 20, 1870 • Various
... the newspaper without dread and sickness of suspense, came the telegram saying that Tom was wounded; and without so much as asking Miranda's leave, she packed her trunk and started for the South. She was in time to hold Tom's hand through hours of pain; to show him for once the heart of a prim New England girl when it is ablaze with love and grief; to put her arms about him so that he could have a home to die in, and that was all;—all, but ...
— The Flag-raising • Kate Douglas Wiggin
... in the air—had been hearing all about me. Beside her glass of stout and ale, she looked a little less prim and defiant. But she was still on company manners. She sat delicately, on the extreme edge of a chair, by the side of, not facing, her plate of bread, cheese and pickles; approached them; mopped up, so to speak, a mouthful and a gulp; ...
— A Poor Man's House • Stephen Sydney Reynolds
... to her house; we will wait for her here in the Ceramicus. I should think it is near her hour for coming back from the Academy, and taking her walk in the Poecile; she is very regular; to be sure, here she comes. Do you see the orderly, rather prim lady there, with the kindly look in her eyes, and ...
— Works, V1 • Lucian of Samosata
... would be when she should look on triumphantly to see her husband die. He had played the widower in sight of all Edinburgh, and now it would be seen how great was the lie, and nobody could dispute that the widowhood was hers. She hoped that he would turn his prim figure and formal face her way, that she might make him, too, an easy bow, showing how she despised the hypocrite, and how completely he had failed in breaking her spirit. She hoped she should be in good looks at that time, not owning the power of her enemies by ...
— The Billow and the Rock • Harriet Martineau
... there we found her spruce and prim with her best black silk bonnet, something in shape like a coal-scuttle, her stick in her hand, and her shoes on her feet. We drove up the chair in fine style. There were several cottages close by, and the neighbors came out to see ...
— Young Folks Treasury, Volume 3 (of 12) - Classic Tales And Old-Fashioned Stories • Various
... experience of the older generation out West would have suspected the pride, the affection, the delight hiding behind Martha Skeffington's prim and formal welcome, or that it was not indifference but the unfailing instinct of a tender heart that made her say, after a very few minutes: "Adelaide, don't you think Dory'd like to ...
— The Second Generation • David Graham Phillips
... me to tell her that he would be in that afternoon. I did so, and she was very much delighted—ran and told the other members of the household. She seated herself in the parlor and would look at her clothes and brush them and sit in as prim a position as possible. She seemed to want to look her best. Her kindergarten teacher tried to coax her to go to her room; she said, "Oh no, Mr. —— is coming to see me," and would ask impatiently when I thought he would come. She acted the same when alone or with others. She was very jealous, ...
— A Preliminary Study of the Emotion of Love between the Sexes • Sanford Bell
... have "raked in golden barley," Like the great Fleet Street "Cock." Their jealous jeremiads, sour and snarly, PARTLET'S prim feelings shock. "Luck! Not at all: but the ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 98, January 25th, 1890 • Various
... came in with a rustle of garments suggestive of Sunday. Even in his confusion Mr. Opp was aware that there was something unusual in her appearance. Her hair, ordinarily drawn taut to a prim knot at the rear, had burst forth into curls and puffs of an amazing complexity. Moreover, her change of coiffure had apparently affected her spirits, for she, too, was flurried and self-conscious and glanced continually at the clock ...
— Mr. Opp • Alice Hegan Rice
... is not at all as you and I had imagined it to be. There is no high wall around it as there is at Fort Trumbull. It reminds one of a prim little village built around a square, in the center of which is a high flagstaff and a big cannon. The buildings are very low and broad and are made of adobe—a kind of clay and mud mixed together—and the walls are very thick. At every window are ...
— Army Letters from an Officer's Wife, 1871-1888 • Frances M.A. Roe
... the players each contribute a letter toward the spelling of a word, their object being never to be the one to complete it, but to force the next player to do so. Thus (with four players) the first player may say "p," and the next, thinking of "prim," may say "r," and the next, also thinking of "prim," may say "i." But the fourth player, running his thoughts quickly over possible words beginning with "pri," may light upon "prism" and say "s." This saves her, but puts the first player in danger, ...
— What Shall We Do Now?: Five Hundred Games and Pastimes • Dorothy Canfield Fisher
... The prim little lady, who had been standing beside Mrs. Ford, appeared not to hear the gentleman's question, but turned with an air of ...
— Dorothy on a Ranch • Evelyn Raymond
... she gladdened the pride of Francis by choosing him as her partner. Betty and Billy mutually chose each other. Mrs. Kingdon selected a newcomer. Agatha and the "other girl" asked their particular friends, and the cook spitefully "sat it out." Pen had to follow the prim little steps learned by Francis at a city dancing school the winter before, and Sleepy Sandy thoughtfully timed his tune thereto and shortened the number. Then Jo started for the belle of the ball, but a youth ...
— Penny of Top Hill Trail • Belle Kanaris Maniates
... as before—when he did not ignore him altogether. If Amy had but been rescued by him, George F. Pearson, instead of by this Bertram Cope, and if she had been snatched from a disorderly set of breakers at the foot of those disheveled sandhills instead of from the prim, prosy, domestic edge of Churchton—well, wouldn't the affair have been better set and better carried off? In such case it might have been picturesque and heroic, ...
— Bertram Cope's Year • Henry Blake Fuller
... Enid sat prim and straight on a chair at the foot of his bed. Her flowered organdie dress was very much like the bouquet she had brought, and her floppy straw hat had a big lilac bow. She began to tell Claude about her father's several attacks of erysipelas. He listened but absently. ...
— One of Ours • Willa Cather
... Town, that no Man teaches a Jigg like him, that she has seen him rise six or seven Capers together with the greatest Ease imaginable, and that his Scholars twist themselves more ways than the Scholars of any Master in Town: besides there is Madam Prim, an Alderman's Lady, recommends a Master of her own Name, but she declares he is not of their Family, yet a very extraordinary Man in his way; for besides a very soft Air he has in Dancing, he gives them a particular Behaviour at a Tea-Table, ...
— The Spectator, Volumes 1, 2 and 3 - With Translations and Index for the Series • Joseph Addison and Richard Steele
... successful revolution inaugurated by Prim is worth relating, as it deals with an episode of Spanish politics which is repeated almost every other year with slender variations. The play is the same; the scene and the dramatis personae are merely shifted. One of the stereotyped military risings was ...
— Romantic Spain - A Record of Personal Experiences (Vol. II) • John Augustus O'Shea
... But somehow he has never thought of sending me back my shabby old Gibbon. And that was the way with my Montaigne—gone. And here were two editions of Gulliver. I lent one to a nephew of the Harringtons and the other to a rather prim young lady from Boston who impressed me as having had too much Emerson. My Shelley is gone. My 'Rousseau's Confessions' is also gone." And Cooper smiled ...
— The Patient Observer - And His Friends • Simeon Strunsky
... revered, but that the gods which he deemed golden were in reality made of baser metal. He never, as I have said, complained of his father to me, and his only other friends were, like himself, staid and prim, of evangelical tendencies, and deeply imbued with a sense of the sinfulness of any act of insubordination to parents—good young men, in fact—and one cannot blow off steam to a good ...
— The Way of All Flesh • Samuel Butler
... half-naivete, half-jest which Mlle. de Scudery's Norman shrewdness[203] would hardly have allowed. There is also much more of the supernatural in these books than in hers, and the characters are much less prim. Roxana, who, of course, is meant to be naughty, actually sends a bracelet of her hair to Oroondates! which, however, that faithful lover of another ...
— A History of the French Novel, Vol. 1 - From the Beginning to 1800 • George Saintsbury
... joined in a few minutes by a prim, dignified little lady, ridiculously like Mr. Pengarth, whom he called sister, and she Miss Rachael. Juliet walked down ...
— The Malefactor • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... Calabra), known as the "Pino della Sila"—it is found over this whole country, and grows to a height of forty metres with a silvery-grey trunk, exhaling a delicious aromatic fragrance. In youth, especially where the soil is deep, it shoots up prim and demure as a Nuremberg toy; but in old age grows monstrous. High-perched upon some lonely granite boulder, with roots writhing over the bare stone like the arms of an octopus, it sits firm and unmoved, deriding the tempest and flinging fantastic limbs into the air—emblem ...
— Old Calabria • Norman Douglas
... greatest—theme of poetry, but to one which this poet had not yet tried—to Love. Let it be remembered that the thought has the cast of a strictly pessimist quietism—that the style aims, if it aims at any single thing, at the reproduction of the simpler side of classicalism, at an almost prim and quakerish elegance, a sort of childlike grace. There is, however, by no means any great austerity in the tone: on the contrary, the refrain ...
— Matthew Arnold • George Saintsbury
... the defiles of Taff Vawr and Taff Vach, bringing down old apple-faced farmers and their wives, who were told of a power and a speed that would alter everything, and do away with horses altogether. Prim, cosy, apple-faced people, innocent and primitive, little thought ye then of the changes which the clanking monster was to yield; how Grey Dobbin would see flying by a mass of wood and iron, thousands of tons of weight, bearing ...
— Railway Adventures and Anecdotes - extending over more than fifty years • Various
... in Christ Church idealizes in form and color the spirit of this noble woman, without attempting portraiture. A real likeness of Miss Cooper, as she appeared in her ripest years, would recall a sweet face framed in dangling curls, a manner somewhat prim, but always gentle and placid, a figure slight and spare, with a bonnet and Paisley shawl that are all but essential to the resemblance. She would best be represented in the midst of orphan children whom she catechises for the benefit of ...
— The Story of Cooperstown • Ralph Birdsall
... arrange therein the day's floral offerings. A sweet and crushed mixture they were, pansies, clove-pinks, mignonette, bleeding hearts, bachelors' buttons, all short stemmed and minus any saving touch of green, but true love offerings for all that. Wordless gifts most of them, prim little bunches, hot from tight clasping in chubby hands, shyly and swiftly deposited on "Teacher's desk" when the back of that divinity was turned. The blue bowl took kindly to them all, and as the girl's clever fingers settled ...
— Up the Hill and Over • Isabel Ecclestone Mackay
... night and scolded above half of it, is quite beautiful. Yet she looks as neat and as ready to welcome the Captain at breakfast-time as if she had been asleep in the Queen's bed all night. My dear! you could never laugh at her prim little curls or her pink bows again if you saw her as I have done." I could only feel very penitent, and greet Miss Jessie with double respect when I met her next. She looked faded and pinched; and her lips began to quiver, as if she was very weak, when she spoke of her ...
— Cranford • Elizabeth Cleghorn Gaskell
... see him in such a plight as this was altogether beyond their experience. He was prim and precise in every detail of his clothes, and his sense of personal dignity was very strong. Neatness was a passion with him, and, in his regulated bachelor existence, this had grown upon him ...
— The Rushton Boys at Rally Hall - Or, Great Days in School and Out • Spencer Davenport |
