"Pretentious" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... embellished it with a silk bandana of bright scarlet and with a large pair of silver spurs which had belonged to his uncle, and which he found in the saddle room of the barn. From the accoutrement in this room he also selected the most pretentious-looking saddle. It was a heavy stock saddle, with German silver mountings and saddle bags covered with black bear fur. A small red and black Navajo blanket served as a saddle pad and he found a fine Navajo bridle, ...
— The Blood of the Conquerors • Harvey Fergusson
... appears on p. 193 to give an idea of the fashion of the day; it is evident from the large looking glass which overhangs the sideboard that the fashion had now set in to use these mirrors. Some thirty or forty year later this mirror became part of the sideboard, and in some large and pretentious designs which we have seen, the sideboard itself was little better than a support for a huge glass in a ...
— Illustrated History of Furniture - From the Earliest to the Present Time • Frederick Litchfield
... no immediate reply. A tall mirror with pretentious golden frame hung opposite to her across the room. A few moments later, with a start, she suddenly pulled herself together, discovering that she had been gazing steadfastly ...
— The Purchase Price • Emerson Hough
... for "the Woman's Bible" by that very accomplished American woman and Biblical student, Mrs. Elizabeth Cady Stanton. They are a great deal more satisfactory than many of the comments upon the same texts that we have read in other and more pretentious Commentaries. Mrs. Stanton's interpretative remarks are shrewd and ...
— The Woman's Bible. • Elizabeth Cady Stanton
... the cities of a country, the countries of a vast continent, and encounter everywhere certain forms, identical, inevitable, exasperating by their repetition! How esthetics would gain by more simplicity! Instead of this luxury in job lots, all these decorations, pretentious but vapid from iteration, we should have an infinite variety; happy improvisations would strike our eyes, the unexpected in a thousand forms would rejoice our hearts, and we should rediscover the secret of impressing on a drapery or a piece of furniture ...
— The Simple Life • Charles Wagner
... shoddys. Purse-proud, affected, pretentious and ambitious, and even less fit for her position than her husband for his.—George William ...
— Character Sketches of Romance, Fiction and the Drama - A Revised American Edition of the Reader's Handbook, Vol. 3 • E. Cobham Brewer
... rocker, a cherry rocker, heavily upholstered. There was a walnut drop-head sewing-machine on which a pink saucer of some black liquid fly-poison stood. There was a "body Brussels" rug on the floor. Lastly, there was an oak sideboard, dusty, pretentious, with its mirror cut into small ...
— Poor, Dear Margaret Kirby and Other Stories • Kathleen Norris
... growths the Victorian Eucalyptus, which has not had time to become gaunt and straggling, the Norfolk Island pine, which grows superbly here, and the handsome Moreton Bay fig. But the chief feature of this road is the number of residences; I had almost written of pretentious residences, but the term would be a base slander, as I have jumped to the conclusion that the twin vulgarities of ostentation and pretence have no place here. But certainly for a mile and a half or ...
— The Hawaiian Archipelago • Isabella L. Bird
... South Gardens is an ornamental fountain of ample basins topped by a graceful mermaid, behind whose back a fish spouts up a single jet of water. These are formal fountains, but exceedingly harmonious. Without trying to be pretentious, they achieve an effect of ...
— The Jewel City • Ben Macomber
... changes in a community are very often unperceived; the focus of reality moves from one institution in the State to another, and almost imperceptibly. Sometimes the forms of institutions remain almost the same in all ceremonial aspects, and yet there will be one institution which under pretentious forms is only the husk of reality, and another which under a humble name is in fact the operative pivot of the social system. Constitutional writers have much to say about the estates of the realm, and a great ...
— Liberalism and the Social Problem • Winston Spencer Churchill
... The rather pretentious but extremely civilized house that stood alone in all its glory between the sea and the sixth hole was blazing with lights as they returned to it. The color had gone out of the sky and other twinkling eyes had appeared, ...
— Who Cares? • Cosmo Hamilton
... Hadley, shading his eyes and reading from a distance of fifty rods the pretentious sign of ...
— Ben's Nugget - A Boy's Search For Fortune • Horatio, Jr. Alger
... but it is sadly out of repair. Those pink tiles about the fireplace may be interesting to antiquaries; but I rather prefer the blue variety, as corresponding to the mental state in which their infinitely pretentious subjects and execrable ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. XII. September, 1863, No. LXXI. - A Magazine Of Literature, Art, And Politics • Various
... rather a large scale. They were at half a crown premium. He sold every one and put gold in his coffers. He converted in the same way all his other securities except consols. These were low, and he calculated they would rise in any general depreciation of more pretentious investments. He drew out his balance, a large one, from his London correspondent, and put his gold in his coffers. He drew a large deposit from the Bank of England. Whenever his own notes came into the bank, he withdrew them from circulation. "They may hop upon Hardie ...
— Love Me Little, Love Me Long • Charles Reade
... STRUCTURE IS BUILT UP.—It should be observed that each structure, however small, is usually built from the base up. Just the same as the more pretentious buildings are erected: First, the sill, then the floor supports, then the posts and top plates, with their connecting girders, ...
— Carpentry for Boys • J. S. Zerbe
... with a cloak that allows him plenty of light and ventilation, and is patched all colours of the rainbow; always laughing, and usually gibing at pretentious philosophers. ...
— Works, V1 • Lucian of Samosata
... aristocratic. The basement windows had pretty lace curtains, and the dining-rooms had beaufets in the corners, on which the glass and silver were arranged. The brass doorknobs and the name-plate shone like gold, and the iron railings of the stoops were finished with quite pretentious newels, that the children ...
— A Little Girl of Long Ago • Amanda Millie Douglas
... Norah out for runs to the Hut at Wisley, to the Burford Bridge Hotel, where the genial Mr. Hunt—one of the last remaining Bohemians of the days of the Junior Garrick Club—welcomed them; to the Wooton Hatch, or up to those more pretentious and less comfortable ...
— The Stretton Street Affair • William Le Queux
... one o'clock striking, and I promised old Charters that I would always be in bed by half-past eleven. Good night, my boy. By the way, you remember that your uncle Porson is coming to Seaview to-morrow from London, and that we are engaged to dine with him at eight. Fancy a man who could build that pretentious monstrosity and call it Seaview! Well, it will condemn him to the seventh generation; but in this world one must take people as one finds them, and their houses, too. Mind you lock the garden door when you ...
— Stella Fregelius • H. Rider Haggard
... seized eagerly at the opportunity of improving her style of living. The old Wales house was quite a pretentious edifice for those times. All the drawback to her delight was, that Grandma should have the southwest fire-room. She wanted to set up her high-posted bedstead with its enormous feather-bed in that, and have it for her fore-room. Properly, it was the fore-room, ...
— Junior Classics, V6 • Various
... belt. He did not come into the dining room or take regular meals, claiming to be sufficiently nourished by the raw wheat he masticated so industriously. We had not noticed him especially—no one took much notice of pretentious faddists—but on going around to the back door for the chicken-feed one evening Bonico and I recognized the wheat-muncher bending over the salver eagerly picking up whatever bits and pieces he could find to eat. He was so engaged in this employ that we did not disturb him but quietly slipped away ...
— My Friends at Brook Farm • John Van Der Zee Sears
... drove near the address and then proceeded on foot. The street was a prominent one, the block one of the best, the house almost pretentious. She glanced at her memorandum again to see if she was mistaken. Perhaps the woman was a domestic; probably she was, for the name on the door was Stillings. It occurred to her that she had heard that name before—but where? ...
— The Quest of the Silver Fleece - A Novel • W. E. B. Du Bois
... ugly enough to cause tears, it is pretentious, it is in bad taste, and the singers churn up a margarine of rancid tones. I do not go there then as I go to St. Severin and St. Sulpice, to admire there the art of the old 'Praisers of God,' to listen, even if they are incorrectly given, ...
— En Route • J.-K. (Joris-Karl) Huysmans
... mal y pense," I put "Honi soit qui mal y danse" in the same shield. Hardly any one in the German audience saw the joke—nothing more than that it was a druckfehler (printer's error). The rehearsals were in my salon, and we had great amusement over them. The second ballet was more pretentious, and was danced in one of the largest theaters in Berlin. It was called the "Enchanted Castle." A parvenu buys an ancestral castle, and on his arrival there falls asleep in the great hall, filled ...
— The Sunny Side of Diplomatic Life, 1875-1912 • Lillie DeHegermann-Lindencrone
... the kerosene oil stove. These range all the way from the modest two-burner table stove to the pretentious six-burner type with insulated oven and porcelain finish. Gasoline burning ranges are also to be had on this order. The initial cost of even the most elaborate oil or gasoline stove is considerably less than for one designed ...
— If You're Going to Live in the Country • Thomas H. Ormsbee and Richmond Huntley
... themselves, I can tell you. Of course, they have the adulation of the Academical taverns, and their fair hostesses. But what a bore it is! I speak from experience, for I have let myself be dragged there occasionally. I can say with old Rehu, "That's a thing I have seen." Silly pretentious women have favoured me with ill-digested scraps from magazine articles, coming out of their little beaks like the written remarks of characters in a comic paper. I have heard fat, good natured Madame Ancelin, a woman as stupid ...
— The Immortal - Or, One Of The "Forty." (L'immortel) - 1877 • Alphonse Daudet
... came to his aid, for in the pension where he was living, thirty women were stopping. He saw them at all meals, between meals, and all about, idle, gossiping, pretentious, longing for pleasure. "There were learned ladies who left the Saturday Review behind them on the chairs; there were literary ladies, young ladies, beautiful ladies." When he saw their care-free, idle life, with concern he asked himself: ...
— Plays: Comrades; Facing Death; Pariah; Easter • August Strindberg
... me to be on the alert for quarters, I espied a rather pretentious homestead, cosily placed in a natural shelter half-way up the hillside. This proved to be Mr. Edward Henty's. He was not at home, but Mrs. Henty happily was. Young, ladylike, beautiful, she received me with that high courtesy which sets one at once at ease by the flattering impression that in these ...
— Personal Recollections of Early Melbourne & Victoria • William Westgarth
... fall into the hands of a logical old radical workman, for example, who tore you to pieces, mentally speaking, with a shake or two of his big teeth, and calmly informed you that in his opinion you were nothing more than a very empty-headed, pretentious, ignorant young woman—perhaps even, after the plain-spoken vocabulary of hie kind, a regular downright minx ...
— Philistia • Grant Allen
... to understand and appreciate everything. And our art, in its turn, does not overlook this opportunity. It becomes disorganized, sporadic, whimsical, and experimental. The crudity we are too distracted to refine, we accept as originality, and the vagueness we are too pretentious to make accurate, we pass off as sublimity. This is the secret of making great works on novel principles, and ...
— The Sense of Beauty - Being the Outlines of Aesthetic Theory • George Santayana
... Quite a pretentious theatre of stone is in course of erection just opposite the little Plaza de Mejia Mora. The dozen large stone pillars of the facade were already in place, and there are other evidences that when finished it will be a spacious and elegant ...
— Aztec Land • Maturin M. Ballou
... A pretentious and smartly written work abounding in mistakes, contradictions, and misrepresentations of historical truth. It was, however, popular in the Middle Ages on account of its brevity and its rhetorical style. Florus is useful in giving ...
— Helps to Latin Translation at Sight • Edmund Luce
... had lied to him. Lied from first to last, deliberately and consummately, over each separate thing and over all the pretentious silliness and waste of it. Norah declared that it was so, and it looked like it. And more than anything it showed where my poor Viola had got to. It was so unlike her to lie, so unlike her to stand aside, where you would ...
— The Belfry • May Sinclair
... the Paganini of the Humboldt Hotel. A naval character. His ecstasy upon hearing of the coming of the author to the Bar. Suggestion of a strait-jacket for him. "The only petticoated astonishment on this Bar". First dinner at the log cabin. Ned's pretentious setting of the pine dining-table. The Bar ransacked for viands. The bill of fare. Ned an accomplished violinist. "Chock," his white accompanist. The author serenaded. An unappreciated "artistic" gift. A ...
— The Shirley Letters from California Mines in 1851-52 • Louise Amelia Knapp Smith Clappe
... remarkable for the best analysis that I have yet seen of the causes that led to the disaster of Caporetto. The pages in which Mr. TREVELYAN paints the portrait of a typical Italian soldier, home sick and perplexed, are likely to be borrowed by many more pretentious historians of the War for years ...
— Punch, Volume 156, 26 March 1919 • Various
... Giddings, who lived in a fine house on Shadynook Hill, to assist him in the flying. Thrown together by their mutual love for mechanics, and being in the same classes all through high-school, Paul and Bob had formed a strong attachment for each other, although the latter's home was far more pretentious than the former's, since Paul's mother was a widow in only moderately comfortable circumstances, while Bob's father was the editor and owner of the Daily Independent, one of the leading evening newspapers of ...
— Around the World in Ten Days • Chelsea Curtis Fraser
... did like the beggar. I couldn't stand his infernal manner. But it never occurred to me that he was a bad hat. I merely thought him a pretentious young ass who didn't know ...
— The Loudwater Mystery • Edgar Jepson
... Well, it seems no time since we left, and here we are back agin," said Melindy, glancing up at the grand facade of "Sunnybank," which looked as pretentious as its neighbors on the ...
— Marguerite Verne • Agatha Armour
... moment to give this fellow a few strong proofs of the fact that any farm-hand was wise to take such a stand against the labor organization. Leaving the fellow gaping and staring after him, Kurt crossed the street to enter another hotel. It was more pretentious than the first, with a large, well lighted office. There were loungers at the tables. Kurt walked to the desk. A man leaned upon his elbows. He asked Kurt if he wanted a room. This man, evidently the proprietor, was a German, ...
— The Desert of Wheat • Zane Grey
... didn't give a fig to have anybody else know it. To his intimate friends, who were few, and to the many with whom he would pass the time of day, he was as common in word and manner as the average householder with nothing more pretentious in life than the earning ...
— Campfire Girls in the Allegheny Mountains - or, A Christmas Success against Odds • Stella M. Francis
... the ordinary run of novels because it is more amusing, less pretentious and not so long. About as long as the ordinary novel might be if only novelists would omit superfluities. Just the right length."—N. ...
— Margarita's Soul - The Romantic Recollections of a Man of Fifty • Ingraham Lovell
... point to them, as they will to me, and say, 'See, what a ghastly failure! See how feeble after all, are these pretentious women of the new order, who begin by denying the sufficiency of the life assigned them, by common consent, and end by failing in that and in the other which they aspire to. What has become of all the ...
— The Daughters of Danaus • Mona Caird
... think herself clever and successful, to hold her head high amongst her schoolmates. Whereas now, if she tried to talk of art or books, she was hotly aware that everything she said was, in John's eyes, pretentious or absurd. He was comparing her with others all the time, with men and women—women especially—in whose presence he felt himself as diffident as she did in his. He was thinking of ladies in velvet dresses and diamonds, who could talk wittily of pictures and theatres and books, who ...
— Fenwick's Career • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... horse-rearer at Athens, and living a gay and merry life, wore his hair closely shaven at Lacedaemon, and washed in cold water, and attired himself in a threadbare cloak; while in Thrace he fought[374] and drank; and at Tissaphernes' court lived delicately and luxuriously and in a pretentious style; and thus curried favour and was popular with everybody by imitating their habits and ways. Such was not the way however in which Epaminondas or Agesilaus acted, for though they associated with very many men and states and different modes of life, they maintained ...
— Plutarch's Morals • Plutarch
... down again in his arm-chair, and stared at his bare feet planted firmly on the floor. But he saw, not his feet, but the ugly spectre of love, that hideous, damnable ghost, that most pretentious of all pretensions. She had lived with the ghost till she had become pale like a ghost. In the picture of "Progress," which he loved, there was a glow, a glory of light, raying out to a far horizon. It would be putting a shoulder to the wheel to set ...
— Bella Donna - A Novel • Robert Hichens
... exclusively upon their inebriety, and who take good care not to imperil it by too long a relapse into the mortifying self-revelations of soberness! And what wrong has been done to the honored name of humor by these pretentious rascals! We do not love Falstaff because he is drunk; we do not admire Becky Sharp because she is wicked. Drunkenness and wickedness are things easy of imitation; yet all the sack in Christendom could ...
— Masterpieces Of American Wit And Humor • Thomas L. Masson (Editor)
... the suggestion that no one was eligible for membership who was not white enough to show blue veins. The suggestion was readily adopted by those who were not of the favored few, and since that time the society, though possessing a longer and more pretentious name, had been known far and wide as the "Blue Vein Society," and its ...
— The Wife of his Youth and Other Stories of the Color Line, and - Selected Essays • Charles Waddell Chesnutt
... its healthful development. Many good things have resulted from these gifts, but some vastly important matters have been utterly neglected. We have seen excellent small colleges transformed by gifts into pretentious and inadequate shams called "universities"; we have seen great telescopes given without any accompanying instruments, and with no provision for an observatory; magnificent collections in geology given to institutions which had no professor in that science; beautiful ...
— Autobiography of Andrew Dickson White Volume II • Andrew Dickson White
... a dreary village to any one accustomed to the world, but in a letter written about this time, Lincoln speaks of it as a place where there was a "good deal of flourishing about in carriages" —a town of some pretentious to elegance. It had a population of 1500. The county contained nearly 18,000 souls, of whom 78 were free negroes, 20 registered indentured servants, and six slaves. Scarcely a perceptible trace of color, ...
— Abraham Lincoln: A History V1 • John G. Nicolay and John Hay
... were passed, and they stopped at a pretentious, many-windowed, Queen Anne house. Ruth ran lightly up the steps, her ...
— Other Things Being Equal • Emma Wolf
... course, the townspeople, as the custom of such places is, have recorded many a marvelous cure, ranging all the way from headache to hydrophobia. But still the town was of little importance save locally. The petty ruler, with a title longer than his income, lived in the pretentious castle, beguiling the time by smoking cheap cigars or ordering on banquets whose piece de resistance consisted of Gebratene Gans und Kartoffeln, the unlucky bird being tribute in kind from the farmyard of some peasant subject living in a miserable ...
— Bidwell's Travels, from Wall Street to London Prison - Fifteen Years in Solitude • Austin Biron Bidwell
... better than the tent in which E. A. Partridge and his brother slept through their first star-strewn winter nights on the open prairie—more pretentious than the tent and assuredly not so cold. The two boys were proud of it, even though they were fresh from civilization—from Simcoe County, Ontario, where holly-hocks topped the fences of old-fashioned flower gardens in summer and the houses had shingles on top to keep out ...
— Deep Furrows • Hopkins Moorhouse
... travellers wonder where the stones came from to build it, seeing no lack in the road or field,—from the time we enter on trim, well-kept Massachusetts, the panorama shifts with ever new interest and beauty. We leave the pretentious brick houses, or the glaring white ones, which mark the uncultivated taste of the American Switzerland, and enter for the first time regions impressed with the necessary element of fine landscape, maturity. With and under the old ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. XII. September, 1863, No. LXXI. - A Magazine Of Literature, Art, And Politics • Various
... reports to the cities North and South. The name of this new man, Grant, spelled trouble. People were beginning to talk much about him, and already some suspected that there was more in the back of his head than in those of far better known and far more pretentious northern generals in the east. None at least could dispute the fact that he was now the ...
— The Guns of Shiloh • Joseph A. Altsheler
... through the meadow that morning in the hope of finding familiar things, and indulging in old memories. The country roads had been widened and improved, and many of the farm-houses had given way to more or less pretentious "places." Motors whirled past him. The hill that he remembered as a veritable mountain was a mere rise in the straightened road over which a fast car plunged at full speed, covering him with dust and leaving behind a sickening odor. He struck off into a wood-lot; here and in the pastures ...
— Together • Robert Herrick (1868-1938)
... restaurant is not a large pretentious place, elaborately decorated, but there is something in the atmosphere which is not tangible but which we yet can sense. Who are all these people? and if each told his own story, how tremendously interesting it might be! Unconsciously, you know that the atmosphere is ...
— Reno - A Book of Short Stories and Information • Lilyan Stratton
... construction crews on the railroad from the attacks of predatory Indians seeking game in their ancient hunting-grounds. A few huts in the sagebrush, a half-dozen miners' shacks under the butte to the south, and one or two rather pretentious frame houses in process of construction completed what was Little Missouri; but Little Missouri was not the only outpost of civilization at this junction of the railroad and the winding, treacherous river. On the eastern bank, ...
— Roosevelt in the Bad Lands • Hermann Hagedorn
... shown in the pretentious titles which he assumed and in the gorgeous pomp with which he was accompanied on public and even on private occasions. On August 15th, after bathing in the porphyry font in which the emperor Constantine had been baptized, he was crowned with seven crowns representing ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Volume 07 • Various
... Falworth's day was one of the more pretentious and commodious of the palaces of the Strand. It took its name from having been from ancient times the London inn which the tributary Kings of Scotland occupied when on their periodical visits of homage to England. Now, during this time ...
— Men of Iron • Ernie Howard Pyle
... conformity, this lineal servility, is increased by a frequent looseness in the endings of lines, some of which on every page, and many on some pages, have—contrary to all good usage—the superfluous eleventh syllable. Milton never allows himself this liberty, nor Mr. Tennyson in epic verse so little pretentious as "Idyls of the King." Nor do good blank-verse translators give in to it. Cowper does not in his Iliad, nor Lord Derby, nor Mr. Bryant in his version of the fifth book of the Odyssey, nor Mr. Carey ...
— Essays AEsthetical • George Calvert
... man we shall find that he does not care two straws for the axioms or deductions, but that he does want to know what the Massachusetts or English courts are likely to do in fact. I am much of this mind. The prophecies of what the courts will do in fact, and nothing more pretentious, are what ...
— The Path of the Law • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr.
... food for laughter. Lucien pleaded a defective memory and excused himself. When he reappeared, nobody took the slightest notice of him; every one was chatting or busy at the card-tables; the poet's aureole had been plucked away, the landowners had no use for him, the more pretentious sort looked upon him as an enemy to their ignorance, while the women were jealous of Mme. de Bargeton, the Beatrice of this modern Dante, to use the Vicar-General's phrase, and looked at him ...
— Two Poets - Lost Illusions Part I • Honore de Balzac
... Hebraic and his last Gallic, he was, we may take it, a thoroughly British soul, for he called it Richmond Hill to remind him of England. The people of New York used to gossip excitedly over the small fortune he spent on those grounds, the house was the most pretentious that the neighbourhood had boasted up to that time. Of course the Warren place was much farther north, and this particular locality was only just ...
— Greenwich Village • Anna Alice Chapin
... abundance, the embarrassing presence in the hive of three or four hundred males, from whose ranks the queen about to be born shall select her lover; three or four hundred foolish, clumsy, useless, noisy creatures, who are pretentious, gluttonous, dirty, coarse, totally and ...
— The Life of the Bee • Maurice Maeterlinck
... except as the preparation for work, is worth almost nothing;—sometimes it is worth infinitely less than nothing; and becomes, little conscious of playing such a fatal part, the general summary of pretentious nothingnesses, and the chief of all the curses the Posterity of Adam are liable to in this sublunary world! Would you discover the Atropos of Human Virtue; the sure Destroyer, "by painless extinction," of Human Veracities, Performances, ...
— Latter-Day Pamphlets • Thomas Carlyle
... studios in which motion pictures are taken are expensive and pretentious affairs. An immense building of glass, with all the properties and stage-settings of a regular theatre, is required. The Bronx Park studio of the Edison company cost at least one hundred thousand dollars, while ...
— Edison, His Life and Inventions • Frank Lewis Dyer and Thomas Commerford Martin
... it is remembered, that the simple form of Tannhaeuser was composed in the years 1843 and 45 in and near Dresden, at a time, when there were neither means nor taste in Germany for such scenes, as those, which excited Wagner's brain. Afterwards success has rendered Wagner bolder and more pretentious and so he endowed the person of Frau Venus with more dramatic power, and thereby threw a vivid light on the great attraction, she exercises on Tannhaeuser. The decorations are by far richer and a ballet of ...
— The Standard Operaglass - Detailed Plots of One Hundred and Fifty-one Celebrated Operas • Charles Annesley
... of the Ginini was known as a castello, it was more in the nature of a comfortable and pretentious villa. It had dignity, however, and drowsed upon a commanding eminence fronted by a splendid terraced lawn which one beheld through clumps of flowering shrubs and well-tended trees. Here and there among the foliage gleamed statuary, ...
— The Net • Rex Beach
... nowadays, and the love of luxury is so intense that no one knows at night what he may do—or, rather, what he won't do—the next day. And last, but not least, the people who ought to be despised are so numerous that contempt is an impossibility. A Parisian who happened to be so absurdly pretentious as to refuse to shake hands with such of his acquaintances as were not irreproachable characters, might walk for hours on the Boulevards without finding an occasion to take his ...
— The Count's Millions - Volume 1 (of 2) • Emile Gaboriau
... with the hydra of evil. No longer are there happy and accomplished men; we are candidates, indeed, for heaven, but on earth galley-slaves, and we row away our life in the expectation of harbour. It seems possible that this perfecting of which we are so proud is nothing else but a pretentious imperfection. ...
— The World's Greatest Books, Vol IX. • Edited by Arthur Mee and J.A. Hammerton
... afternoon Lord Curryfin was entreated to deliver in the theatre his lecture on Fish; he readily complied, and succeeded in amusing his audience more, and instructing them as much, as any of his more pretentious brother lecturers could have done. We shall not report the lecture, but we refer those who may be curious on the subject to the next meeting of the Pantopragmatic Society, under the presidency of Lord Facing-both-ways, and the vice-presidency ...
— Gryll Grange • Thomas Love Peacock
... all, made a slight inclination of the head to the whole company at once, and passed on haughtily. I think, by the manner in which he received other ladies, that he would have shown more politeness to these if Madame la Duchesse had not been there, making her visit too pretentious. He affected even not to inquire which she was, or to ask the name of any of the others. I was nearly an hour without quitting him, and unceasingly regarding him. At last I saw he remarked it. This rendered me more discreet, lest he should ask who I was. As he was ...
— The Memoirs of Louis XIV., His Court and The Regency, Complete • Duc de Saint-Simon
... completed had his life not been sacrificed. In spite of the simplicity and lightness of the little play here given, there is more shrewd philosophy in old David Pirnie, and more real humanity in his family, than is to be found portrayed in many pretentious social dramas and difficult psychological novels. It is admirable on the stage, as was shown by the Provincetown Players last winter. In the memorial performance for Harold Chapin in London, the author's little son appeared in the part ...
— The Atlantic Book of Modern Plays • Various
... half-hidden mansion. Whether in street or suburb, Leamington may fairly be called beautiful, and, at some points, magnificent; but by and by you become doubtfully suspicious of a somewhat unreal finery: it is pretentious, though not glaringly so; it has been built with malice aforethought, as a place of gentility and enjoyment. Moreover, splendid as the houses look, and comfortable as they often are, there is a nameless something about them, betokening ...
— Our Old Home - A Series of English Sketches • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... enters the St Lawrence a little above Quebec. Here preparations were at once made for the winter's sojourn. Cannon were brought ashore from three of the ships. A strong fort was constructed, and the little settlement received the pretentious name Charlesbourg Royal. The remaining part of the month of August 1541 was spent in making fortifications and in unloading the ships. On September 2 two of the ships, commanded by Mace Jalobert, Cartier's brother-in-law and companion of the preceding voyage, and Etienne ...
— The Mariner of St. Malo: A Chronicle of the Voyages of Jacques Cartier • Stephen Leacock
... would consist of simple implements, weapons, and ornaments. Following after the trade would be found the smelter with his tools, and, where the conditions were favorable, local manufactories would be set up. But this home industry would not prevent importation of more pretentious articles from abroad. This would account for the rich collections of shields, swords, and golden cups found in Denmark ...
— The Prehistoric World - Vanished Races • E. A. Allen
... humblest amongst us may have experienced things, and may have seen them at such close quarters, that the recording of them may prove of use and value to the thinker. But to write a confession of one's faith cannot but be regarded as a thousand times more pretentious, since it takes for granted that the writer attaches worth, not only to the experiences and investigations of his life, but also to his beliefs. Now, what the nice thinker will require to know, above all else, is the kind of ...
— Thoughts out of Season (Part One) • Friedrich Nietzsche
... citizens, and stocks and a whipping-post were set up. Saw mills and grist mills were in operation; fulling mills held an important position, and shortly afterwards the production of iron became considerable. The first meeting-house was completed in 1770. The most pretentious dwelling-house was "The Long House," owned by Colonel Williams. The first appropriation for schools was twenty-two pounds ...
— Bay State Monthly, Volume II. No. 4, January, 1885 - A Massachusetts Magazine • Various
... characterization is of the sharpest; original ideas pile upon each other and succeed each other without ado. The score of Boris, slim as it is, is a treasure house of inventions, of some of the most perfect music written for the theater. Few operatic works are musically more important, and yet less pretentious. And "Khovanchtchina," fragmentary though it is, is almost no less full of noble and lovely ideas. These fragments, melodies, choruses, dances are each of them real inventions, wonderful pieces caught up in nets, the rarest sort of beauties. A deep, rich glow plays over these melodies. ...
— Musical Portraits - Interpretations of Twenty Modern Composers • Paul Rosenfeld
... be a king, and a nation's idol. Presently he caught sight, at a distance, of a couple of his ragged Offal Court comrades—one of them the lord high admiral in his late mimic court, the other the first lord of the bedchamber in the same pretentious fiction; and his pride swelled higher than ever. Oh, if they could only recognise him now! What unspeakable glory it would be, if they could recognise him, and realise that the derided mock king of the slums and back alleys was become a real King, with illustrious dukes and princes for ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... stony of countenance, 'and I take you out as much as I can. Mr. Fitz Wilson has seven hundred a year. I could give you—say three; and surely with a thousand a year two young people might live in very good style—even in these pretentious days.' ...
— The Golden Calf • M. E. Braddon
... Boston. Much better than Hail Columbia was the Star Spangled Banner, the words of which were composed by Francis Scott Key, a Marylander, during the bombardment by the British of Fort McHenry, near Baltimore, in 1812. More pretentious than these was the once celebrated ode of Robert Treat Paine, Jr., Adams and Liberty, recited at an anniversary of the Massachusetts Charitable Fire Society. The sale of this is said to have netted its author over $750, but it is, notwithstanding, a very wooden ...
— Brief History of English and American Literature • Henry A. Beers
... Cheng remonstrated, "can be called by whatever name one chooses; anything is good enough; but who's it who has started this kind of pretentious name!" ...
— Hung Lou Meng, Book I • Cao Xueqin
... by a comparison of the chickadee with the brown thrush. The thrush, or, as he is sometimes profanely styled, the thrasher, is the most pretentious, perhaps I ought to say the greatest, of New England songsters, if we rule out the mocking-bird, who is so very rare with us as scarcely to come into the competition; and still, in my opinion, his singing seldom produces the effect of really ...
— Birds in the Bush • Bradford Torrey
... De Crespigny House. She went, instead, to a much less pretentious school, kept by a family of four sisters, for whom the dry bones of teaching had been clothed with life. The house was perched on a high, windy cliff. The sisters, Miss Stella and Miss Clara, Miss Lucy and Miss Marianne, did their own teaching, and did it in a perfectly unconventional way to the ...
— Mary Gray • Katharine Tynan
... him a young man of about thirty, dressed in somewhat pretentious style and wearing eyeglasses. He was tall and thin, and ...
— Driven From Home - Carl Crawford's Experience • Horatio Alger
... instinct with character. Buildings become to him like living creatures. The streets tell him tales. For him, the house-fronts are written over with hieroglyphics which, to the passing crowd, are either unseen or without meaning. Fallen grandeur, pretentious gentility, decent poverty, the infamy that wears a brazen front, and the crime that burrows in darkness—he knows them all at a glance. The patched window, the dingy blind, the shattered doorstep, the pot of mignonette on the garret ledge, are to him as significant as the ...
— In the Days of My Youth • Amelia Ann Blandford Edwards
... and as the time for it approached the [Page 138] queerest lot of toboggans gradually collected. The greater number were roughly made from old boxes and cask staves, but something of a sensation was caused when the canny Scottish carpenter's mate arrived with a far more pretentious article, though built from the same material. In secret he had devoted himself to making what was really a very passable sledge, and when he and his companion secured themselves to this dark horse, the result of the race was considered a foregone conclusion. But ...
— The Voyages of Captain Scott - Retold from 'The Voyage of the "Discovery"' and 'Scott's - Last Expedition' • Charles Turley
... powers were so limited by the conditions under which he had to act that to a large extent public interests had to drift along without direction and management. In some degree, the situation resembled that which existed in the Holy Roman Empire when a complicated legalism kept grinding away and pretentious forms of authority were maintained, although, meanwhile, there was actual administrative impotence. Striking evidence of the existence of such a situation is found in ...
— The Cleveland Era - A Chronicle of the New Order in Politics, Volume 44 in The - Chronicles of America Series • Henry Jones Ford
... 1865 Uncle Tom built him a tolerably pretentious home on the top of the mountains—the house on one side of the road and the stables on the other and swung a gate across the road from the house to the stables. I believe some historians say that Uncle Dick Wooten continued to live ...
— The Second William Penn - A true account of incidents that happened along the - old Santa Fe Trail • William H. Ryus
... station: and on the other side of this road, what was of old the daintiest intricacy of its solitude is changed into a straight, and evenly macadamised carriage drive, between new houses of extreme respectability, with good attached gardens and offices—most of these tenements being larger—all more pretentious, and many, I imagine, held at greatly higher rent than my father's, tenanted for twenty years at Herne Hill. And it became matter of curious meditation to me what must here become of children resembling my poor ...
— The Crown of Wild Olive • John Ruskin
... members and of outsiders with ideas of their excellence and grandeur. Their high-sounding titles have already been adverted to as involving the sin of profaneness; but they serve equally well to illustrate the pretentious character of the associations which employ them. Almost every officer among the Masons has some great title. There is the Grand Tyler, Grand Steward, Grand Treasurer, Grand Secretary, Grand Chaplain, and Grand Master. The Lodge itself is grand, and, of course, every thing and every ...
— Secret Societies • David MacDill, Jonathan Blanchard, and Edward Beecher
... he quietly observed, "without meaning to put forward any pretentious claims to originality, but by simply turning to account some advantages that have never before befallen contemplative mortal eye, why not construct a little hypothesis of our own regarding the nature of these grooves and the causes that gave them birth? ...
— All Around the Moon • Jules Verne
... reference is no doubt to a pretentious construction that had been built for the rich and over-proud Timotheus, the son of Conon. He was a clever general of great integrity; when the 'Plutus' was produced, he ...
— The Eleven Comedies - Vol. I • Aristophanes et al
... had meanwhile discovered the wine-drinking peasants of France and Italy: he had discovered what were left of the old-fashioned inns of England where cider or beer are drunk by the sort of Englishmen he had come to love best—the poor. In his revolt against that dreary and pretentious element that he most hated in the middle classes he had come to feel that the life of the poor, as they themselves had shaped it when they were free men, was the ideal. And that ideal included moderate drinking, ...
— Gilbert Keith Chesterton • Maisie Ward
... over the ridge from the schoolhouse, and who was blessed with the largest wife, the largest family, and the most pretentious farm in the county, had kinsfolk somewhere in Illinois. Through these relatives of the Ozark farmer Miss Susan Wakefield had learned of the needs of the Elbow Rock school, and so, finally, had come into the hills. It was the influential Tom who secured for her the modest position. ...
— The Re-Creation of Brian Kent • Harold Bell Wright
... one-storied house with a red porch, and a great sweet-brier bush thereby; while up the hill-side behind stretched a high picket fence, enclosing huge trees, part of the same brook I had crossed here dammed into a pond, and a chicken-house of pretentious height and aspect,—one of those model institutions that are the ruin of gentlemen-farmers and the delight of women. I had to go into the farm-kitchen for the poultry-yard key. The door stood open, and I stepped in cautiously, lest I should come unaware upon some domestic scene not intended to ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 1, Issue 2, December, 1857 • Various
... manufactured by pettifogging artists over here, and compare it with the corresponding English publication to realise how wretchedly flat, flabby, and insipid is the character of most of our productions. This supposed home of drawing shows really no trace of it, and our most pretentious pictures show as little as any. In these little English designs nearly every object is treated with the amount of interest it demands; landscapes, sea-pieces, costumes, incidents of war, all these are delightful, done with ...
— The Mind of the Artist - Thoughts and Sayings of Painters and Sculptors on Their Art • Various
... fastness. The long log-cabin of the Cove-Millses, where room had been added to room in a straight line, until it looked like the side of a log fort, peeped from its pines across at the clearing where the hardly more pretentious home of Darby Stanley was set back amid a little orchard of ragged peach-trees, and half hidden under a great wistaria vine. But though the two places lay within rifle shot of each other, they were almost as completely ...
— The Burial of the Guns • Thomas Nelson Page
... It recognises individuals who call themselves kings or magistrates (however tyrannical and usurping), as Powers ordained of God: it does not recognize nations as Communities ordained of God, or as having any power and authority whatsoever, as against pretentious individuals. To obey a king, is strenuously enforced; to resist a usurping king, in a patriotic cause, is not contemplated in the New Testament as under any circumstances an imaginable duty. Patriotism has no recognised existence in the Christian records. ...
— Phases of Faith - Passages from the History of My Creed • Francis William Newman
... the General Office of the Pacific and Southwestern Railroad. Large though it was, it nevertheless, was not pretentious, and during his visits to the city, Presley must have passed ...
— The Octopus • Frank Norris
... clearly manifest in our political fabric. In the latter sphere, hypocrisy is doubly odious, in that while undermining the confidence of the people in law, justice, and government, it places far greater power in the hands of pretentious individuals than would be tolerated were it not for their profession of superior virtue, and thus enables persons who are of small moral stature, or who through defective training and unfortunate ...
— The Arena - Volume 4, No. 24, November, 1891 • Various
... Nature to avoid feeling a little envious. Beevor had work to do in the world: even if it chiefly consisted in profaning sylvan retreats by smug or pretentious villas, it was still work which entitled him to consideration and respect in the eyes of ...
— The Brass Bottle • F. Anstey
... the Bureau des Affaires Etrangeres, and charged a fee of ten franca for the signature of the foreign minister. Too old a traveller to be entrapped into the payment of so heavy a fine upon my vanity, I strongly repudiated any more pretentious title than that of simple workman; and after a tough struggle succeeded in carrying off the necessary visa at an outlay of two francs. The journey, by diligence, from Paris to Boulogne, cost twenty-seven francs; I lost a clear six francs in changing my French savings ...
— A Tramp's Wallet - stored by an English goldsmith during his wanderings in Germany and France • William Duthie
... traveled very little in this country, and knew few places out of the State where he could be comfortable with his family till the affair blew over. The Tescherons spent their summers at the quiet village of Stukeville, where they had a comfortable country house; it was not pretentious, but it was beautifully situated on a knoll, overlooking the neighboring lake, and from the broad verandas a glimpse of the distant, more densely inhabited portion of the town might be obtained. But it was not possible to fly to Stukeville, because that is situated ...
— Cupid's Middleman • Edward B. Lent
... admitted to be genuine. "No," they will tell you, "it is not merely superficial resemblance. I don't know what it is, but I feel sure," etc. These witnesses are more frequently right than the more pretentious professional expert. The former trust to the instantaneous impressions which they receive when papers are handed to them; the latter too often give their attention to the merely superficial features of chirography without getting beyond the more obvious resemblances and ...
— Disputed Handwriting • Jerome B. Lavay
... the village are the little smithy of the Hudson's Bay Company and the pretentious buildings of their establishment. At the other gibbous horn of this Athens of the Athabasca rise the steeples and convent-school of the Roman Church, with the free-trading-post of Colin Fraser. Midway between is the little Church of England, and higher up and farther back ...
— The New North • Agnes Deans Cameron
... the sentence of death been carried out at once, and a new start made with more prudent people? The school in which as a day scholar I passed nine years of my life was more literary than many which were more pretentious. Needlework was of supreme importance, certainly, but during the hour and a half every day, Saturday's half-holiday not excepted, which was given to it by the whole school at once (odd half-hours ...
— An Autobiography • Catherine Helen Spence
... an elevated standpoint. In his eminently careful essays the author has furnished material for study such as might be vainly looked for in a more pretentious book."—Morning Post. ...
— Gipsy Life - being an account of our Gipsies and their children • George Smith
... was formerly considered by the majority of persons to be a dull and uninteresting study, abounding with dry details of small general interest, which, when not pompously pretentious, were, in the other extreme, of trifling insignificance, has, by a better acquaintance with its true position as the handmaid of history, become so popular that most English counties have societies especially devoted ...
— Rambles of an Archaeologist Among Old Books and in Old Places • Frederick William Fairholt
... he rolled off with Peter, explaining that he would take the lad to his own door. Nat wondered not a little where that door was, and he would have been overwhelmed with amazement had he known that portals no less pretentious than those of the Coddington mansion itself opened to receive his chum. Very wide open indeed were they thrown when the car bringing Peter and his father turned into the long avenue leading to the house. How glad Peter's mother was to see him, and how satisfied she was with the witchcraft ...
— The Story of Leather • Sara Ware Bassett
... Cherryvale prided itself that it was not "new-fangled." It was not nearly so pretentious in appearance as was the Presbyterian church. Missy, in her heart, preferred stained-glass windows and their glorious reflections, as an asset to religion; but at night services you were not ...
— Missy • Dana Gatlin
... sometimes over a small stretch of rough or hilly shoreland, but usually through heavy growths of hemlock, white pine, oak, and other trees more or less characteristic of the country. Here and there along the way was a cottage, or summer house of more pretentious proportions, usually constructed near the water or some distance up on the side of the hill-shore, with a kind of terrace-walk leading down to ...
— Campfire Girls at Twin Lakes - The Quest of a Summer Vacation • Stella M. Francis
... never cherished any other design. He was of all creatures the least presuming or pretentious. The father was Legitimist to the very marrow; the son half Buonapartist, half republican. The father and son had quarrelled about these differences of opinion sometimes in a pleasantly disputatious manner; but no political disagreement could lesser the love between these two. Gustave loved ...
— Charlotte's Inheritance • M. E. Braddon
... accommodating themselves with stools or blocks of wood sawed for the purpose. Meals were prepared in a few moments at the broad fireside, where a huge crane aided the mother in swinging her kettles on or off the blazing fire. In every pretentious home there was a loom for the weaving of cotton and woolen cloth for family or neighborhood consumption; and late at night the steady thump of the beam proclaimed the industry of the busy housewife as she put in the last threads of ...
— Expansion and Conflict • William E. Dodd
... of Alick, the more, it must be owned, you learned to despise him. His natural talents were of no use either to himself or others; for his character had degenerated like his face, and become pulpy and pretentious. Even his power of persuasion, which was certainly very surprising, stood in some danger of being lost or neutralised by over-confidence. He lied in an aggressive, brazen manner, like a pert criminal ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition - Vol. 2 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... the men, who could not but expect some of the amenities of civilisation in a place of whose military importance they had heard so much. At the western end was an ancient fort, now in ruins from a bombardment by our monitors, one or two more pretentious houses with plaster fronts, and the mosque whose white minaret, though not of any great height, we had seen through a gap in the sand hills from many miles to westward. But most of the buildings were single-roomed, ...
— The Fifth Battalion Highland Light Infantry in the War 1914-1918 • F.L. Morrison
... at the Franklin House on the old Pioneer road were the most pretentious of the year. Feminine loveliness in silks and cameos gathered from every section. General Sutter and his officers sometimes were there, and the Spanish grandees brought to them the lovely, star-eyed beauties ...
— Down the Mother Lode • Vivia Hemphill
... too, of large—even too large—Government buildings, brick-built, pretentious, without beauty of form. But, however ugly in itself a building may be in Trinidad, it is certain, at least after a few years, to look beautiful, because embowered among noble flowering timber trees, like those that fill 'Brunswick Square,' and surround ...
— At Last • Charles Kingsley
... me up the narrow, steep stairway, whose ceiling almost touched my head as I climbed up after him. On the first floor the landlord, in festal raiment, intercepted us, introduced himself in English (which he spoke with pretentious inaccuracy), and, barring my further ascent, took possession of me, and led the way to his best parlour, as if it were entirely unbecoming for his tenant to receive ...
— Ghetto Comedies • Israel Zangwill
... and shabby entrance brought it quite within the colonel's income, and as the rent was not payable in advance, and the landlord patient, he had surrounded himself not only with all the comforts but with many of the luxuries of a more pretentious home. In this he was assisted by his negro servant Chad,—an abbreviation of Nebuchadnezzar,—who was chambermaid, cook, butler, body-servant, and boots, and who by his marvelous tales of the magnificence of "de old fambly place in Caartersville" ...
— Colonel Carter of Cartersville • F. Hopkinson Smith
... home of great wealth, where it would have gone against his inmost grain to have seemed to court liking. If anything, his orders had been more curt, his concessions fewer, his whole treatment of the case on simpler lines than it might have been in almost any less pretentious home with ...
— Red Pepper Burns • Grace S. Richmond
... Lavater should see it, he would say: 'That is the portrait of a puffed-up, quaint, powerful genius, who imagines himself something important, and who is nothing! The likeness of a bombastic fellow, with an empty head behind the pretentious brow, and meaningless phrases on the ...
— Old Fritz and the New Era • Louise Muhlbach
... surroundings, which they breathe and which colors them—dyes them in the wool. However skilless, they cannot help reproducing, any more than water poured from an old ink-bottle can help coming out more or less black; although, if sufficiently pretentious, they can monstrously caricature, especially if they begin with the modest time-worn admission that they are more familiar with the marling-spike than with the pen. But even the caricature born of pretentiousness ...
— From Sail to Steam, Recollections of Naval Life • Captain A. T. Mahan
... be sure, is a pure stream, which affected writers never have and never can trouble. Each age has flung into the limpid waters its pretentious archaisms and euphuisms, but nothing has remained on the surface to perpetuate these futile attempts and impotent efforts. It is the nature of the language to be clear, logical, and vigorous. It does not lend itself ...
— The Works of Guy de Maupassant, Volume VIII. • Guy de Maupassant
... assist them in regulating their breath. The line is contracted from two of Sophocles's, and Longinus's point is that the extravagance of Cleitarchus is not that of a strong but ill-regulated nature, but the ludicrous straining after grandeur of a writer at once feeble and pretentious. ...
— On the Sublime • Longinus
... why Conrad never tackled a straight-out story of adultery under Christianity, the standard matter of all our more pretentious fiction and drama. I was curious to see what his ethical agnosticism would make of it. The conclusion I came to at first was that his failure marked the limitations of his courage—in brief, that he hesitated to go against the orthodox axioms and assumptions ...
— A Book of Prefaces • H. L. Mencken
... were named after cities standing upon the banks of the rivers which they were to defend—Cairo, Carondelet, Cincinnati, Louisville, Mound City, Pittsburg, St. Louis. They, with the Benton, formed the backbone of the river fleet throughout the war. Other more pretentious, and apparently more formidable, vessels, were built; but from thorough bad workmanship, or appearing too late on the scene, they bore no proportionate share in the fighting. The eight may be fairly called the ships of the line of battle ...
— The Gulf and Inland Waters - The Navy in the Civil War. Volume 3. • A. T. Mahan
... house, and making lavish use of white paint in decorating his buildings and grounds. He succeeded, but I cannot help thinking that if he had put the money that useless concrete work cost into shrubbery and vines, it would have made his place twice as attractive. I dislike pretentious adornments to the farm, especially where the rest of the place doesn't measure up to them. Like Senator Blaine, who, at the time the Queen Anne style of architecture became popular, on being asked why he did not have his old fashioned house Queen Anned, replied ...
— Trees, Fruits and Flowers of Minnesota, 1916 • Various
... pretentious about the place; it was a rambling, lazy-looking house built largely of native stone, stretching its length comfortably in the shade of the big maples. Perrin, Vic's man-of-all-work, came hurrying out of the house to greet ...
— The Infra-Medians • Sewell Peaslee Wright
... this does not form a necessary appendage to the hot-air bath, it is yet a feature that must be provided in the least pretentious of public establishments. Ever since, and long before, Cicero observed, in a letter to his brother Quintus, "Latiorem piscinam voluissem ubi jactata brachia non offenderentur," men who have taken the hot-air bath have loved the ample plunge. ...
— The Turkish Bath - Its Design and Construction • Robert Owen Allsop
... prince, the little son of the Contessa - and see the people bowing with profound respect. I breathe the faint, fine perfume of frankincense and lavender exhaling from my mother's clothes. And I recollect my sensation of calm and pride at the meals with the heavy pretentious plate, the great bouquets of roses, the violet hose of the clergy who were our guests, the ...
— The Bride of Dreams • Frederik van Eeden
... crystallizations—as preparation for a THEORY OF TYPES of morality. To be sure, people have not hitherto been so modest. All the philosophers, with a pedantic and ridiculous seriousness, demanded of themselves something very much higher, more pretentious, and ceremonious, when they concerned themselves with morality as a science: they wanted to GIVE A BASIC to morality—and every philosopher hitherto has believed that he has given it a basis; morality ...
— Beyond Good and Evil • Friedrich Nietzsche
... going forth! In their days the sprawling suburbs of Victorian times with their vile roads, petty houses, foolish little gardens of shrub and geranium, and all their futile, pretentious privacies, had disappeared: the towering buildings of the new age, the mechanical ways, the electric and water mains, all came to an end together, like a wall, like a cliff, near four hundred feet in height, abrupt and ...
— Tales of Space and Time • Herbert George Wells
... upon a time, despatched a pretentious octavo, in the Edinburgh, with a critique, one paragraph in length; that achievement is matched by the disposal of a work in the Courier and Enquirer, as follows, by ingeniously employing the opening ...
— The Book of Anecdotes and Budget of Fun; • Various
... class of New Jersey farm houses of this type were built of squared and hammered red sand-stone, laid up in regular courses, and in many instances the character of the work differed on all sides, the front being the most finely finished. And in many of the most pretentious of these houses, brick was substituted for the front, ...
— Woodward's Country Homes • George E. Woodward
... were in the house of Mr. and Mrs. Peter Conant, very pleasant people who seemed to be old friends of Mamma Bee and Gran'pa Jim. It was a cosy house, not big and pretentious, and Mary Louise liked it. Peter Conant and Gran'pa Jim had many long talks together, and it was here that the child first heard her grandfather called "Colonel." Others might have called him that before, but she had not heard ...
— Mary Louise • Edith van Dyne (one of L. Frank Baum's pen names)
... village, which now swept into view as they rounded the spur of a hill. The village consisted of some five hundred huts surrounding a central stockade, which enclosed a small group of buildings of considerably more pretentious character than the ordinary huts, and which Dick and Grosvenor at once conjectured must be the royal palace and its dependencies. This conjecture was confirmed upon their arrival at the village, for at the gateway of the stockade the cavalcade halted, and 'Mpandula, ...
— The Adventures of Dick Maitland - A Tale of Unknown Africa • Harry Collingwood
... occasion require it, I counted upon this cane quite as much as upon my revolver, for, innocent and inoffensive as it looked, it was capable of most deadly execution. I had chosen it in preference to many other more pretentious weapons which had suggested themselves to me. It consisted of a small, flexible steel wire hardly bigger than the blade of a foil, surmounted by a good-sized lead ball, and the whole covered with a closely woven fabric. By grasping the cane by its lower end a tremendously heavy ...
— The Darrow Enigma • Melvin L. Severy |
