"Trimness" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... Florent also had to relate how matters had gone in the fish market that day. He gradually grew less frigid, and began to taste the happiness of a well-regulated existence. There was a well-to-do comfort and trimness about the light yellowish dining room which had a softening influence upon him as soon as he crossed its threshold. Handsome Lisa's kindly attentions wrapped him, as it were, in cotton-wool; and mutual ...
— The Fat and the Thin • Emile Zola
... Rose Millar's professional notions as to the human figure being left easy and untrammelled! Rose was a pattern of decorous neatness and trimness compared to Hester; indeed, Rose was appalled by the total absence of order and ceremony, not to say of embellishment, in her friend's toilet. Hester abandoned herself permanently to deshabilles. She appeared ...
— A Houseful of Girls • Sarah Tytler
... summer-house, where it was the custom of the gentlemen of the family to dine and take their coffee. Everywhere there was an air of wealth and comfort, but yet to an English eye there was a want of neatness and trimness in all the arrangements, ...
— Lippincott's Magazine, Vol. 22, September, 1878 • Various
... out, from hat to boot in the most approved Oxford bandbox-cut of trimness and prettiness. Sheffield was turning into the High Street, when Reding stopped him: "It always annoys me," he said, "to go down High Street in a beaver; one is sure to ...
— Loss and Gain - The Story of a Convert • John Henry Newman
... mind warms up, when I think what a home that woman made of our house from the very first day she moved into it. The great, large, airy parlor, with its ample bow-window, when she had arranged it, seemed a perfect trap to catch sunbeams. There was none of that discouraging trimness and newness that often repel a man's bachelor-friends after the first call, and make them feel,—"Oh, well, one cannot go in at Crowfield's now, unless one is dressed; one might put them out." The first thing ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 13, No. 75, January, 1864 • Various
... presently eat and drink, and sithence talk a little. And he drew nigh to help her off her horse, but she suffered him not, and lighted down of herself; but if she suffered not his hand, his eyes she must needs suffer, as he gazed greedily on the trimness of her feet and legs in her ...
— The Water of the Wondrous Isles • William Morris
... from time to time since their first meeting had jarred upon his orderly mind was forgotten; and all that Mr. Carmyle could remember was the brightness of her eyes, the jaunty lift of her chin, and the gallant trimness of her. Her gay prettiness seemed to flick at him like a whip in the darkness of wakeful nights, lashing him to pursuit. And quietly and methodically, like a respectable wolf settling on the trail of a ...
— The Adventures of Sally • P. G. Wodehouse
... truth, felt thoroughly at her ease there. By degrees she became accustomed to this nook of greenery, and looked forward to her afternoon visit with the longing of a child. What charmed her most in this garden was the exquisite trimness of the lawn and flower beds. Not a single weed interfered with the symmetry of the plants. Helene spent her time there, calmly and restfully. The neatly laid out flower beds, and the network of ivy, the withered ...
— A Love Episode • Emile Zola
... which the old man had lamented; and I saw with pleasure that my old enemies the "Gothic" cast-iron bridges had been replaced by handsome oak and stone ones. Also the banks of the forest that we passed through had lost their courtly game-keeperish trimness, and were as wild and beautiful as need he, though the trees were clearly well seen to. I thought it best, in order to get the most direct information, to play the innocent about Eton and Windsor; but Dick volunteered his knowledge to me as we lay in Datchet ...
— News from Nowhere - or An Epoch of Rest, being some chapters from A Utopian Romance • William Morris
... and who moves heavily under the burden of himself,—such a man is a doleful and disagreeable object. But if he have vivacity enough to pervade all his earthiness, and bodily force enough to move lightly under it, and if it be not too unmeasured to have a trimness and briskness in it, then it is good and ...
— Passages From The American Notebooks, Volume 2. • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... the very flower of impudence. I would rather go a mile about than pass before his battery. I feel wronged by him, and yet unutterably ashamed. There must be great force in the man to produce such an effect. There is nothing of the customary squalidness of beggary about him, but remarkable trimness and cleanliness. A girl of twenty or thereabouts, who vagabondizes about the city on her hands and knees, possesses, to a considerable degree, the same characteristics. I think they hit their victims the more effectually from being below ...
— Passages From the English Notebooks, Complete • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... frosty dawn, when the sun rose red-rimmed over the barrens, he noted a new trimness in his escort. They rode in line, and they rode before and behind him, so that his captivity was made patent. On a ridge far to the west he saw a great castle, and he knew the palace of Houlagou. His guess had been right; he had been brought ...
— The Path of the King • John Buchan
... when all the wildness of this little world will be overrun and tamed into the trimness of a civilized parterre; when the last trail will have been trodden, the mystery of the last forest bared, and the last of the savage peoples penned into a League of Nations to die of unnatural peace. What will our children do then, I wonder, for ...
— The Journal of Negro History, Volume 7, 1922 • Various
... about—but how did he know? He was still on the porch this morning. Equally real was the catbird on the hedge as we came down toward the station. She—we call her so, for there was unmistakable ladyhood in her delicately tailored trimness—she bickered at us in a cheerful way, on top of those bushes which were so loaded with the night's rainfall that they shone a blurred cobweb gray in the lifting light. Her eye was also dark and polished and ...
— Pipefuls • Christopher Morley
... trimness about the old bunk-house. The clearing had been cleaned up and made neat, the grass cut, some vines set out and trained up limply about the door, and the windows shone with Mom ...
— A Voice in the Wilderness • Grace Livingston Hill
... often mended, and the coat, of the same hue, was pitiably white in the seams, while the original buff of the waistcoat and knee breeches had faded to a whitey brown. But the erect soldierly carriage of the wearer, and that neatness and trimness in details, which military experience renders habitual, made this frayed and time-stained uniform seem almost elegant, as compared with the clothes that hung slouchily upon the men around him. Their faces were rough, and unshaven, their hair unkempt, their ...
— The Duke of Stockbridge • Edward Bellamy
... commands a splendid view of the city, Mr. Henry Vincent, a young American, was lounging. Judging by his appearance he was a college graduate, or, to speak more definitely, a graduate of Harvard; for he had that jaunty walk and general trimness of attire which are the traditional attributes of the academical denizens of Cambridge. He swung his arms rather more than was needed to assist locomotion, and betrayed in an unobtrusive manner a consciousness of being well dressed. His face, which was not without fine ...
— Ilka on the Hill-Top and Other Stories • Hjalmar Hjorth Boyesen
... excellent feeling and with some hilarity. Mamie, in a plush Gainsborough hat and a gown of wine-coloured silk, sat, an apparent queen, among her rude surroundings and companions. The dusky litter of the cabin set off her radiant trimness: tarry Johnson was a foil to her fair beauty; she glowed in that poor place, fair as a star; until even I, who was not usually of her admirers, caught a spark of admiration; and even the captain, who was in no courtly ...
— The Wrecker • Robert Louis Stevenson and Lloyd Osbourne
... suburb in themselves, and a very pleasant suburb too. Many middle-class families in England might be glad to own such a home, a semi-detached cottage or villa standing in a pretty garden with flowers and trees and plots of turf. Some of the cottages are models of trimness and taste, others of course are less well kept, a few have a neglected appearance. The general aspect, however, is one of thrift and prosperity, and it must be borne in mind that each dwelling and ...
— In the Heart of the Vosges - And Other Sketches by a "Devious Traveller" • Matilda Betham-Edwards
... classic-looking copper candle-sticks, were set in a row under each key. The predominating cleanliness of the room made a striking contrast to the usual state of such places. This one was as neat as a bit of genre; there was a charming trimness about the blue coverlet, the cooking pots and furniture. The mistress of the house rose and came to me. She seemed to be about forty years of age; sorrows had left their traces on her features, and weeping had dimmed her eyes. I deferentially mentioned the ...
— The Magic Skin • Honore de Balzac |
