"Bungled" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... Below, both became cooler, for the task in hand must not be bungled. On one of the trucks they dragged a torpedo forward, fitting it in ...
— The Submarine Boys' Lightning Cruise - The Young Kings of the Deep • Victor G. Durham
... so smoothly from her lips? To her knowledge she had never deliberately lied before. She would have supposed that, because of this fact, falsehood would come difficult to her, that she would have bungled, hesitated, stammered. But it was the reverse that had been the case. The facility with which she had uttered the lie was what now began to disturb and to alarm her. It argued some sudden collapse of her whole system of ...
— A Man's Woman • Frank Norris
... throwing down the skull of a man over whom the tired executioners had evidently bungled badly, "I'm glad I didn't serve the old kings of Mur. But the same game goes on in a small way to-day in Africa, for when I was campaigning on the West Coast I came across it not a fortnight old, only there they had buried the ...
— Queen Sheba's Ring • H. Rider Haggard
... brings and the injury to the firm and to Mr. Eggleston, for I don't forget he's my partner. I didn't think it would end in ruin. I bungled it badly, maybe." ...
— Colonel Carter's Christmas and The Romance of an Old-Fashioned Gentleman • F. Hopkinson Smith
... back to his seat, sobbing with the hysterical weakness of a sick man. "He's bungled the business, Colonel," he said bitterly. "Oh, God! If you had only let ...
— The Plow-Woman • Eleanor Gates
... forth and held out to me a clean silk handkerchief. Now a person who did not know M. Paul, who was unused to him and his impulses, would naturally have bungled at this offer—declined accepting the same—et cetera. But I too plainly felt this would never do: the slightest hesitation would have been fatal to the incipient treaty of peace. I rose and met the handkerchief half-way, received it with decorum, ...
— Villette • Charlotte Bronte
... Atelier in Paris. Mlle. de Peyronnet must be imagined seated in the fateful chair, dreading the pain but hoping for the relief of an extraction. But, as Tacitus said, that morning she saw all things cross and terrible. The dentist, instead of doing his work deftly, bungled it, or else it was the fault of the patient's jaw. At any rate, the tooth broke off in the forceps, and the dentist had to confess to his patient that all the pain he had given her was useless. He had left in the root! "Ah, mademoiselle," ...
— The Adventure of Living • John St. Loe Strachey
... impossible to say whether these oppositions were inevitable or whether they were indications that Hull-House had somehow bungled at its task. Many times I have been driven to the confession of the blundering Amiel: "It requires ability to make what we seem agree with ...
— Twenty Years At Hull House • Jane Addams
... not be bungled," he said sternly. Then, to Jean, "and you are to see that it is not bungled. If this Victor makes one false move, ...
— The Boy Allies in the Trenches - Midst Shot and Shell Along the Aisne • Clair Wallace Hayes
... high seas; but the Admiralty maintained that some of these men are officers in the German Army and are now receiving officers' pay. I think that that is probably true. Nevertheless, the Admiralty had bungled the case badly and Sir Edward simply rode over them. They have a fine quarrel among themselves and we got all we ...
— The Life and Letters of Walter H. Page, Volume II • Burton J. Hendrick
... instant the world and everything in it had narrowed to the two of us. The intensity was unbearable. I rose abruptly and turned away. I felt suddenly far out of my depth. Confusedly and furiously I felt that I had bungled things, that here was something in life so strange I could do nothing with it. What a young fool I was to have thought she could ever care for a fellow like me! I felt she must be smiling. Despairingly I turned ...
— The Harbor • Ernest Poole
... bungled it," Lady Carey said thoughtfully. "I will go back to him. There's that idiot of a partner of mine. I must go and pretend to ...
— The Yellow Crayon • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... construction took a further prodigious leap, as the sentence showed him the grand and simple motive of her being. It had been his own as well, though he had stupidly bungled it in his search to find something big enough to seem worth doing. She, he divined, found neighbours everywhere, losing no time. He had known a few rare, exquisite souls who lived for others, but here, close beside him at last, was one of ...
— A Prisoner in Fairyland • Algernon Blackwood
... "I don't know whither this pretence of yours is designed to lead you, but I know well whither it will lead myself— namely, with this hoe of mine, to complete the work which I bungled in Florence. And to the achievement of that I shall instantly proceed, unless you get up from your polluted knees and tell me your real and ...
— The Fool Errant • Maurice Hewlett
... in my pocket. I had my fingers on it as I trudged along, and was saying to myself, 'Why not here? In the name of common sense, why not here? Why not here and now?'— when a leveret, that had somehow bungled its footing on the high bank above, came tumbling down, not three yards ahead of us. The poor little brute picked itself up, half-stunned, caught sight of us, and made a bolt up the path ahead. From this side to that ...
— Foe-Farrell • Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch
... tremor. Hawks could be trained to pursue carriers, but the doves had a fair start and might be able to get away. The two birds of prey which the men brought were moreover not the type of hawk used especially to hunt pigeons, but young falcons or tercels. The men bungled in handling them; they evidently belonged to the castle, not to the troop. When they finally rose into the air, Pere Azuli, the veteran blue pigeon, and Rien-du-Tout, the little dun-colored stray Peirol had trained, were almost out of sight. The luckless ...
— Masters of the Guild • L. Lamprey
... Armada—it seems strange that he should return to the scene of his past exploits to die. He was with Hawkins in the campaign of 1595 against Spain in the New World. Things had not gone well. He had not approved of Hawkins's plans of attack, and the venture was being bungled. Sick of the equatorial fever, or of chagrin from failure, Drake died off Porto Bello in the fifty-first year of his age. His body {167} was placed in a leaden coffin, and solemnly committed to that sea where he had ...
— Vikings of the Pacific - The Adventures of the Explorers who Came from the West, Eastward • Agnes C. Laut
... glittering, scornful ranks for her black-blooded, much-condemned husband, or of keeping her own, now that she bore his name. True, her marriage had, probably, made possible her younger sister's exceptional and unhoped-for match. But Michael himself felt that he had sadly bungled a most important affair. Perceiving his wife's uselessness for his purpose, all the little admiration he had ever had for the fragile girl changed speedily into an angry despite. For the moment, he put her and his social ambitions away together, and ...
— The Genius • Margaret Horton Potter
... Jimmy scornfully. "Can't I do everything that he could have done? And more. A bonehead like Jerry would have been certain to have bungled the thing somehow. I know him well. A good fellow, but in matters requiring intellect and swift thought dead from the neck up. It's a very lucky thing he is out of the running. I love him like a brother, but his dome is of ivory. This job requires ...
— Piccadilly Jim • Pelham Grenville Wodehouse
... was rather ominous, and I feared I had bungled. Yet my meaning should have been transparent even to a child. To make sure she had ...
— A Virginia Scout • Hugh Pendexter
... morning on the stage drilling my "corps" as usual. One most refractory spirit, to whom but a few words were entrusted, and who bungled even those, I was endeavouring to train ...
— The Confessions of Harry Lorrequer, Vol. 2 • Charles James Lever
... wandering flirtations its varying governments in different centuries have carried on with Ravenna, or Naples, or Florence. You can imagine no Residenz for Austria but the Kaiserstadt,—the gemuthlich Wien. But there are other capitals where men have arranged things and consequently bungled them. The great Czar Peter slapped his imperial court down on the marshy shore of the Neva, where he could look westward into civilization and watch with the jealous eye of an intelligent barbarian the doings of his betters. Washington is another specimen of the cold-blooded ...
— Castilian Days • John Hay
... in the road, looking after her retreating figure. He had bungled. If he had begun in the right way, she would have been compelled to listen. What could he do to obtain a hearing? After two years of silence he could not wonder at her refusal to listen ...
— Mr. Pat's Little Girl - A Story of the Arden Foresters • Mary F. Leonard
... answer, nother; and thinkin' he didn't onderstand English, she tried him in Italian, and then in broken French, and then bungled out a little German; but no, still no answer. He took no more notice of her and her mister, and senior, and mountsheer, and mynheer, than if he never heerd them titles, but jist ...
— The Attache - or, Sam Slick in England, Complete • Thomas Chandler Haliburton
... mainland. Buchanan wavered; decided to yield to them on this last point; ultimately, on the last day of 1860, yielded instead to severe pressure from Black, and decided to reinforce Anderson on Fort Sumter. The actual attempt to reinforce him was bungled; a transport sent for this purpose was fired upon by the South Carolina forces, and returned idle. This first act of war, for some curious reason, caused no excitement. The people of the North were intensely ...
— Abraham Lincoln • Lord Charnwood
... to blame, if nature threw my body In so perverse a mould? yet when she cast Her envious hand upon my supple joints, Unable to resist, and rumpled them On heaps in their dark lodging, to revenge Her bungled work, she stampt my mind more fair; And as from chaos, huddled and deformed, The god struck fire, and lighted up the lamps That beautify the sky, so he informed This ill-shaped body with a daring soul; And, making less than man, he made ...
— The Works of John Dryden, Vol. 6 (of 18) - Limberham; Oedipus; Troilus and Cressida; The Spanish Friar • John Dryden
... sciences is purposely attainable by men, that the defect of natural parts may be supplied by the help of acquired: as if it were probable that nature, which had been so exact and curious in the mechanism of flowers, herbs, and flies, should have bungled most in her masterpiece, and made man as it were by halves, to be afterward polished and refined by his own industry, in the attainment of such sciences as the Egyptians feigned were invented by their god Theuth, as a sure plague and punishment to mankind, being so far from augmenting ...
— In Praise of Folly - Illustrated with Many Curious Cuts • Desiderius Erasmus
... only one shoe of that pair, my dear captain! We're a distrustful flock, we birds of prey. Come along! Why sit there sulking, like a spoiled child? You've made an ass of yourself, following me to Paris; sadly though you bungled that job in London, I gave you credit for more wit than to poke your head into the lion's mouth here. But—admitting that—why not be graceful about it? Here am I, amiably treating you like an equal: you might at ...
— The Lone Wolf - A Melodrama • Louis Joseph Vance
... coolness and self-confidence without his equal anywhere. We all adored him, for he never snubbed youngsters, or made light of their doings. If, during practice, a fellow bowled, batted, or fielded well, Steel took care to encourage him; but if any one played carelessly, or bungled, Steel scowled, and that unlucky man's name disappeared for a season from the list of candidates for a place in ...
— Parkhurst Boys - And Other Stories of School Life • Talbot Baines Reed
... "You bungled, you fool kids!" he said in disgust, "and Huldah, what did you want to let on to mudder for that he thought we was hers? You ought to have torn up the note he left and just said he'd put twenty-five thousand ...
— Our Next-Door Neighbors • Belle Kanaris Maniates
... telegram—reply paid—asking him to fix a day. The answer named a day of the week and a day of the month which did not agree; whereupon Mr. Knowles wrote by the safer medium of the post for an explanation, thinking that the post-office clerks must have bungled the message, and received ...
— The Life and Letters of Thomas Henry Huxley Volume 3 • Leonard Huxley
... For I myself have had my doubts, now and then, I may tell you. The horrible doubt that I may have bungled my life for ...
— John Gabriel Borkman • Henrik Ibsen
... this very person who had created the furore at the meeting. Who was he? How did he get in? Why were proper steps not taken to safeguard the room against all possibilities of this nature? Bah! Anderson had bungled the thing from the start. He was a boy sent on ...
— The Loyalist - A Story of the American Revolution • James Francis Barrett
... disagreeable, but none can doubt its historical necessity. From this point of view the very defectiveness of the Roman poetry, which cannot be denied, may be explained and so may in some degree be justified. It is no doubt pervaded by a disproportion between the trivial and often bungled contents and the comparatively finished form; but the real significance of this poetry lay precisely in its formal features, especially those of language and metre. It was not seemly that poetry in Rome was principally in the hands of schoolmasters and foreigners and was chiefly translation ...
— The History of Rome (Volumes 1-5) • Theodor Mommsen
... At last Mr. Granger mounted the pulpit and began to read his sermon, of which the text was, "But the greatest of these is charity." Geoffrey noticed that he bungled over some of the words, then suddenly remembered Beatrice had told him that she had written the sermon, and was all attention. He was not disappointed. Notwithstanding Mr. Granger's infamous reading, and his habit of ...
— Beatrice • H. Rider Haggard
... he bungled sadly—his hearing suddenly failing as well as his memory, there was a dead stop. In vain the prompter, the scene-shifter, the candle-snuffer, as loud as they could, and much louder than they ...
— Tales and Novels, Vol. VII - Patronage • Maria Edgeworth
... animals myself over in the Peninsula, but not having had any advice I guess I bungled the job somewhat. Anyhow, they said down in St. Louis, where I sent my bunch, that they were misfits, and I suppose it must have been so, if a fellow was to judge from the size of the check they sent on. Since then I've been told that ...
— Canoe Mates in Canada - Three Boys Afloat on the Saskatchewan • St. George Rathborne
... "Bungled!" Deacon's face cleared. "That's what Dr. Nicholls said about her on the road, the day I bucked out. I remember the ...
— O. Henry Memorial Award Prize Stories of 1920 • Various
... handsome—at least, not like Dr. Bentley. He isn't so wonderful as Don; but I think that he is more understanding. He seemed to realize just how I felt this morning, and he was as sweet and considerate as a woman when I bungled things awfully in the operating room. The head nurse gave me a deserved call down, however, and it was perhaps just as well that she did, for my mind needed to be 'brought back.' Only my body was in the hospital, ...
— 'Smiles' - A Rose of the Cumberlands • Eliot H. Robinson
... mine, and of the wonderful effect by which the darkness of Westminster Hall was suddenly illuminated by an ingenious arrangement of sconces that caught fire and carried on the message of light with great rapidity. The heralds in whose hands the ceremonial arrangements lay bungled their business badly, causing fierce heartburnings by confusions in precedence, and displaying a lamentable ignorance of the names and the whereabouts of many wearers of stately and ancient titles. When the ...
— A History of the Four Georges and of William IV, Volume III (of 4) • Justin McCarthy and Justin Huntly McCarthy
... next. He bungled through the Latin in a grating, irresolute sort of way, with several false quantities, for each of which the next boy took him up. Then he began to construe;—a frightful confusion of nominatives without verbs, accusatives translated as ablatives, and adverbs turned into prepositions, ...
— Eric, or Little by Little • Frederic W. Farrar
... bungled our lives, made grave mistakes, it's better to abide by them courageously than defy—well, ...
— Joyce of the North Woods • Harriet T. Comstock
... a dozen people who can be trusted to help me kidnap Beatty and smuggle her over the Canadian frontier. I bungled the thing once. I don't mean ...
— Marriage a la mode • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... was the only thing we bungled. We fixed the hour a little too late, and I was seen by Miss Harvey's uncle, walking across the bridge with ...
— The Case of Jennie Brice • Mary Roberts Rinehart
... faced it down, he jammed it through, that young chap did—and was funny, oh, as funny as you can think, for hours, in front of hundreds of people. He never missed a cue, never bungled a line, and all the time seeing, up there in the light-housekeeping rooms, in the last room of them all, how she lay, in ...
— August First • Mary Raymond Shipman Andrews and Roy Irving Murray
... Mr. Pattieson," continued the lady; "you have, as I may say, basted up your first story very hastily and clumsily at the conclusion; and, in my trade, I would have cuffed the youngest apprentice who had put such a horrid and bungled spot of work out of her hand. And if you do not redeem this gross error by telling us all about the marriage of Morton and Edith, and what became of the other personages of the story, from Lady Margaret down to Goose-Gibbie, I apprise you that ...
— Old Mortality, Complete, Illustrated • Sir Walter Scott
... control of taxation and legislation was not inconsistent with Imperial Union, but essential to it. Grattan and his Irish friends, ignorant of the true solution, honestly thought, in the intoxication of the moment, that they had solved the problem so disastrously bungled for America. The facts of ethnology and geography seemed to have been recognized. Ireland and England, united by a Crown which both reverenced, stood together, like Britain and the Dominions of to-day, ...
— The Framework of Home Rule • Erskine Childers
... more at rest when he left her and walked to his rooms. He carried the regret of a protector of England who had bungled his task and let the wards of his suspicion break loose. The fault was not his, but he would never escape the reproach. He had no taste for taking revenge on the young woman. It would not salve his pride to visit on her pretty head the thwarted ...
— The Cup of Fury - A Novel of Cities and Shipyards • Rupert Hughes
... the only tinshop and put me in charge he changed my life and endangered my disposition. The tinsmith left the county and I was left with the tools and the material, the only tinsmith in Humboldt County. How I struggled and bungled! I could make stovepipe by the mile, but it was a long time before I could double-seam a copper bottom onto a tin wash-boiler. I lived to construct quite a decent traveling oilcan for a Eureka sawmill, but such triumphs come through mental anguish and burned ...
— A Backward Glance at Eighty • Charles A. Murdock
... society itself that forces us to use these underhanded means? What would have happened if I had not acted secretly? Everybody would have wanted to have a hand in the undertaking; the whole thing would have been divided up, mismanaged and bungled. There is not a single man in the town except myself who is capable of directing so big an affair as this will be. In this country, almost without exception, it is only foreigners who have settled here who have the aptitude for big business schemes. ...
— Pillars of Society • Henrik Ibsen
... appearance and manner the previous evening had nearly convinced her that he was in no financial difficulties whatever—that her father and Mr. Arnault were either mistaken or else were deceiving her. "If the latter is the case," she had thought, "they have so bungled as to enable me to test the truth of their words within ...
— A Young Girl's Wooing • E. P. Roe
... that this was not going to be the conventional massacre by any means. The First had scored an unconverted try five minutes after the kick-off, and it was after this that the Second began to get together. The school back bungled the drop out badly, and had to find touch in his own twenty-five, and after that it was anyone's game. The scrums were a treat to behold. Payne was a monument of strength. Time after time the Second had the ball out to their ...
— Tales of St. Austin's • P. G. Wodehouse
... everywhere was ignorance and confusion. Lord John Drummond's hopeful scheme for seizing Edinburgh Castle (September 8) was quieted pulveris exigui jactu, "the gentlemen were powdering their hair"—drinking at a tavern—and bungled the business. The folly of Government offered a chance: in Scotland they had but 2000 regulars at Stirling, where "Forth bridles the wild Highlandman." Mar, who promptly occupied Perth, though he had some 12,000 broadswords, continued till the end ...
— A Short History of Scotland • Andrew Lang
... attraction apparently lay in being one of the few males of her acquaintance whom Sara did not find it fatally easy to bring to heel. Anyhow, after marriage she quickly grew bored to death of him; so much so that it required an attempt (badly bungled) by another woman to get Euan to elope with her, and a providential collapse of the very unwilling Lothario, to bring about that happy ending that my experience of kind Mr. NORRIS has taught me to expect. I may add that he has never done anything more quietly entertaining than the frustrated ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Volume 158, April 28, 1920 • Various
... blossomed out into superb manhood, with burning activities and indefatigable powers. But it had found itself without materials for work. Of the scholastic philosophy and the chivalric poetry of the Middle Ages there remained but little that could be utilized: the few bungled formulae, the few half-obsolete rhymes still remaining, were as unintelligible, in their spirit of feudalism and monasticism and mysticism, as were the Angevin English and the monkish Latin in which they were written to these men of the ...
— Euphorion - Being Studies of the Antique and the Mediaeval in the - Renaissance - Vol. I • Vernon Lee
... make very little money and depend for his income upon winning about three good criminal prosecutions a year; the rest of his time to be spent reading up criminal psychology and taking his aunt to see pictures. The commonplace scene-shifter who places behind people the scenery of real life has bungled Sir Henry, thereby robbing him of much interest. What a net a man with his classic patience and enormous ferret instinct for minutiae could have woven about some cunning but once too often embezzler! Instead we have Drayton, K.C., pushing himself methodically through a series of legal metamorphoses, ...
— The Masques of Ottawa • Domino
... with various engagements, numerous tasks, constant labour, little businesses, many of them with their own attendant anxiety, it is easy to say that there is no time to do anything that one wants to do, and to feel that the matters themselves will be handled amiss and bungled. But if one can only keep the mind off, or distract it by work, or beguile it by a book, a walk, a talk, how easily the thread spins off the reel, how quietly one comes to harbour on the Saturday evening, with everything done ...
— Where No Fear Was - A Book About Fear • Arthur Christopher Benson
... one never really knows one's ground, and one may make mistakes occasionally. But then one's mistakes sometimes turn out assets in the long-run: if we had never bungled away our American colonies we might never have had the boy from the States to teach us how to wear our hair and cut our clothes, and we must get our ideas from somewhere, I suppose. Even the Hooligan was ...
— Reginald • Saki
... Festubert, Neuve Chapelle, Loos, and all minor attacks which led to little salients, were but experimental adventures in the science of slaughter, badly bungled in our laboratories. They had no meaning apart from providing those mistakes by which men learn; ghastly mistakes, burning more than the fingers of life's children. They were only diversions of impatience in the monotonous routine of trench ...
— Now It Can Be Told • Philip Gibbs
... as you have, to such luxuries as a straw bed; and I doubt whether you ever went hungry to bed as I have done many and many a time, for in the days when my father hoped to make an armourer of me I was sent off supperless whenever I bungled a job or neglected his instructions. I wonder what the earl can want you for in ...
— Wulf the Saxon - A Story of the Norman Conquest • G. A. Henty
... you fool?" cried his cousin, "you lose more than I. You've bungled it worse than even I did. If you had a spark of feeling, you would be shaking in your boots with vexation. But I'll tell you one thing—I'll have that eight hundred pound—I'll have that and go to Swan River—that's mine, anyway, and your friend must have forged to cash it. Give ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 7 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... Hervey laughed. "No, my troubles are about merit badges. I've bungled the whole thing up. When a fellow goes after the Eagle award, he ought to have a manager, that's what I say. He ought to have a manager to plan things out for him. I tried to manage my own campaign and now ...
— Tom Slade on Mystery Trail • Percy Keese Fitzhugh
... and each term explained. How troops were set in battle, how a siege Was ordered and conducted. She complained Because he bungled at the fall of Liege. The curious names of parts of forts she knew, And aired with conscious pride her ravelins, And counterscarps, and lunes. The day drew on, And his dead fish's fins In the hot sunshine turned a mauve-green hue. At last Gervase, guessing ...
— Men, Women and Ghosts • Amy Lowell
... contrary, he distinctly stated his approval of the scheme developed in the bill introduced by Senator Davis and passed by Congress. Reconstruction, as it was actually conducted later on, was wretchedly bungled, and was marked chiefly by bitterness in disputation and by clumsiness in practical arrangements, which culminated in that miserable disgrace known as the regime of the "carpet-baggers." How far Lincoln would have succeeded ...
— Abraham Lincoln, Vol. II • John T. Morse
... there are no customs here," he retorted. "At least, I should have said so, this morning. Now I am not so sure." Then he laughed. "I've bungled that horribly, Miss Mellen. What I meant was that you have given me a very good ...
— On the Firing Line • Anna Chapin Ray and Hamilton Brock Fuller
... that the foot-pavement rocked beneath him; and thinking that he might perhaps lessen his sufferings by walking, he went straight on through the vegetables again. He lost himself among them. He went along a narrow footway, turned down another, was forced to retrace his steps, bungled in doing so, and once more found himself amidst piles of greenery. Some heaps were so high that people seemed to be walking between walls of bundles and bunches. Only their heads slightly overtopped these ramparts, ...
— The Fat and the Thin • Emile Zola
... bag, she looked up, and her satisfaction slumped abruptly into perturbation. Tom was leaning back against the corral rails, with his arms folded—and just why must he lift his eyebrows and smile like Lance? She was going to hand him the bag, but her fingers bungled and she dropped it in the six-inch dust ...
— Rim o' the World • B. M. Bower
... happened to be not far from the point where he passed through, and saw him plainly. For one so young, he displayed remarkable coolness and courage when in the immediate presence of death. The manner of his execution was wretchedly bungled, in some way, and the whole thing was to me indescribably repulsive. In the crisis of the affair there was a sudden clang of military arms and accouterments in the line not far from me, and looking in that direction I saw that a soldier in the front rank had ...
— The Story of a Common Soldier of Army Life in the Civil War, 1861-1865 • Leander Stillwell
... singing, and I still sit on, in the absolute silence, unconscious—unaware of any thing round me; living only in my thoughts, and with a resolution growing ever stronger and stronger within me. I will not tell her! I will never tell any one. I, that have hitherto bungled and blundered over the whitest fib, will wade knee-deep in falsehoods, before I will ever let any one guess the disgrace that has happened to me. Oh that, by long silence, I could wipe it out of my own heart—out of the ...
— Nancy - A Novel • Rhoda Broughton
... done! Lucrezia Borgia could not have bungled less! He lay doubled up in the chair, with a long Genoese dagger buried in his heart, and it was I who had ...
— A Monk of Cruta • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... speaker, and the little he did say was a good deal bungled. Still there was a manly ring about his speech which pleased the better disposed section of his audience, some of whom did not even belong to ...
— The Willoughby Captains • Talbot Baines Reed
... and he tried to remind him of their former meeting. Under any circumstances it would have been difficult for him to talk of memories so intimate; now it was torture for him. He bungled his sentences, could not find words, said absurd things which made him blush. Hassler let him flounder on and never ceased to look at him with his vague, indifferent eyes. When Christophe had reached the end of his story, Hassler went on rocking his knee in silence for a moment, as though ...
— Jean-Christophe, Vol. I • Romain Rolland
... stories which have become almost classic. Sharply contrasted in particular characteristics, they have lived as vivid personalities for future college generations in the memories of those students, "who studied syllogisms under the noble Whedon, who polished Greek roots for the elegant Agnew, who bungled metaphysics to the despair of the learned Ten Brook, who murdered chemistry under the careful Douglas whose experiments never failed, and who calculated eclipses of the moon from the desk of Williams, the paternal." ...
— The University of Michigan • Wilfred Shaw
... meantime, Foster had studied his game. The man made some clever strokes, but bungled others. He was not steady enough, but on the whole Foster imagined he meant to let him win. For all that, he did not think the other was playing a common trick with the object of leading him on. The amount of the stake was not large enough ...
— Carmen's Messenger • Harold Bindloss
... force of character he gained the command of our respect. Though we agreed on deck that he had bungled his story, it impressed us; we felt less able to cope with him, and less willing to encounter ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith |
