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More "Aloofness" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... was nothing sentimental, hinted at or implied, in the correspondence. Whatever the faults of Sidney's romantic visions were, they did not tend to precocious flirtation. The Plainfield boys, attracted by her beauty and repelled by her indifference and aloofness, could have told that. She never expected to meet John Lincoln, nor did she wish to do so. In the correspondence ...
— Lucy Maud Montgomery Short Stories, 1905 to 1906 • Lucy Maud Montgomery
... the subject of the "sanctions" which France threatened to apply. The Bavarian is too lethargic, slow, and easy-going to be readily frightened—in temperament he has little in common with the high-spirited, nervous Prussian. Bavarians spoke of Germany and Germany's war-debt with an aloofness as of neutrals. It did not trouble them deeply. They were sceptical as to France's ability to collect a huge indemnity. The fifty per cent tax they regarded as an absurdity. "It is possible to ruin Germany, but it is not possible to enslave her," ...
— Europe—Whither Bound? - Being Letters of Travel from the Capitals of Europe in the Year 1921 • Stephen Graham
... unconscious—a challenge to the senses. And yet he recognized with an almost prayerful gratitude that it was something paramount to physical lure, which beckoned him along the path of love. Into the more genuine and intimate recesses of her life, where the soul keeps its aloofness, she had given him only keyhole glimpses, but they had been such glimpses as kindled his eagerness and awakened his hunger for exploration. There had been candid indications reenforced by a dozen subtler things that her ...
— The Tyranny of Weakness • Charles Neville Buck
... figure has an appearance of rugged health, of great nervous strength held in reserve. His square-jawed, large-featured face retains an eager boyish enthusiasm in spite of its prevailing expression of thoughtful, preoccupied aloofness. His crisp dark hair is graying at the temples. EDWARD BIGELOW is a large, handsome man of thirty-nine. His face shows culture and tolerance, a sense of humor, a lazy unambitious contentment. CURTIS is reading an article in some scientific periodical, seated by the table. ...
— The First Man • Eugene O'Neill
... for she had been slow in answering his frequent letters, while her own had been brief and non-commital. They contained hardly a suggestion of that warmth and intimacy which he had known in her presence. Her last letter, now quite old, had added to this impression of aloofness and rendered him somewhat timid as the time for meeting her approached. He re-read it for the hundredth time as the train ...
— The Net • Rex Beach
... aloofness creeping over her, and, having a very wholesome sense of humor, smiled as she recognized the feeling ...
— The Early Bird - A Business Man's Love Story • George Randolph Chester
... Republic, therefore, in an ethnological sense, is one of the most interesting problems of the American Continent. The old Spanish aristocratic aloofness traditional on the part of the pure whites will take many generations entirely to break down, and the increased communication between the Republic and the citizens of the United States will probably reinforce the white races with a new element of ...
— Mexico • Charles Reginald Enock
... they ought to try to bring me into the conversation. As they were all talking about a cotillion of the previous night, I shouldn't have been able to shine. I gazed out of the window, with middle-class aloofness. Presently the talk drifted on to the topic of bicycles. But by this time it was too late for me ...
— Seven Men • Max Beerbohm
... courtesy to the guest, standing before him, while Amalia deliberately withdrew. Indeed, it actually seemed to Casanova that from those pale, half-parted lips, from the smooth brow crowned with light-brown hair now restored to order, there emanated an aroma of aloofness and purity. Rarely had he had this feeling with regard to any woman; nor had he had it in the case of Marcolina when they were within four walls. A devotional mood, a spirit of self-sacrifice knowing nothing ...
— Casanova's Homecoming • Arthur Schnitzler
... fulfil all his social duties in the province punctiliously as before. He was not found cheerful company: "a man who has seen suffering; a man not like other people; he has something to be melancholy about." Even the pride and disdainful aloofness for which he had been so detested four years before was now ...
— The Possessed - or, The Devils • Fyodor Dostoyevsky
... things, they broke down the barriers and tore away the veils; but Thyrsis had never breathed a word about matters of sex to any living creature. He pondered and guessed, but no one knew his thoughts; and this was a crucial thing, the secret of much of his aloofness. ...
— Love's Pilgrimage • Upton Sinclair
... Pagratide and Benton had seated themselves in the dining-room that evening, Arab servants secluded a corner table, close to their own, behind mushrabieh screens. The party for whom this distinguished aloofness had been arranged made its entrance through an unseen door, but the voices indicated that several were at table there. The waiter who served this table apart might have testified that one was an Englishman, ...
— The Lighted Match • Charles Neville Buck
... the village, his refuge from boyhood onward in any hour of trouble. There was space here, and air, and solitude. It was a diversion that was almost a form of consolation to be in touch with the wood's teeming life. Moreover, the trees, with their stately aloofness from mortal cares, their strifelessness and strength, shed on him a kind of benediction. From long association, from days of bird's-nesting in spring, and camping in summer, and nutting in autumn, and snow-shoeing in winter, he knew them almost as individual personalities—the great white oaks, ...
— The Side Of The Angels - A Novel • Basil King
... a sudden to the ribands she had disturbed in Cherry's lap, and for the first time in her life, till now so proudly above such matters in its aloofness, she yearned over fineries. If such as those could admit her into the company of such as this! She thought enviously of that pale pink, even of the yellows and reds she had seen in Bugletown, since such deep tones seemed to the taste ...
— The White Riband - A Young Female's Folly • Fryniwyd Tennyson Jesse
... was unavoidable between them, however. When one stranger has a splendidly preserved blonde wife and the other a splendidly preserved brunette wife, both of whom have won social prominence by years of hard fighting and aloofness, there remains nothing for the two men but to follow the lead, especially when directly under ...
— The Best American Humorous Short Stories • Various
... large and solemn; and on the other side, as it were in opposition, the young, dark, slim girl with her rather wiry black hair, and her straight, prominent eyebrows, and her extraordinary expression of uncompromising aloofness. ...
— Hilda Lessways • Arnold Bennett
... and weeks that followed, Percival maintained an attitude of rigid but courteous aloofness. Only on occasions when it was necessary to consult with Ruth and her aunt on matters pertaining to the "order of the day" did he relax in the slightest degree from the position he had ...
— West Wind Drift • George Barr McCutcheon
... the moment when the issue of this struggle would be decided. The air was filled with their chill breath. The struggle round the bed was at its height. On one side doctors, nurses, the father, the mother—on the other that still, ironic Figure, in His very aloofness so strong, in His ...
— Fortitude • Hugh Walpole
... marine officer of the 'Blonde,' was a reserved and taciturn man. He was quiet and gentlemanlike, always very neat in his dress; rather severe, still kind to his men. His aloofness was in no wise due to lack of ideas, nor, I should say, to pride - unless, perhaps, it were the pride which some men feel in suppressing all emotion by habitual restraint of manner. Whether his SANGFROID was constitutional, or that nobler kind of courage which feels and masters timidity ...
— Tracks of a Rolling Stone • Henry J. Coke
... America. That he gained such a hearing was due not alone to his immense ability, and to a style carefully modeled on the conversation of business men with each other, but to his cool moderation and evident aloofness from party as party. He dissected each like a man of science: party was to him a tool and not a religion. He gibed at the Tories; but the Tories forgave him because he was half a Tory at heart,—he utterly distrusted popular instincts and was afraid of ...
— Library Of The World's Best Literature, Ancient And Modern, Vol 3 • Various
... existence, between the proud joy of living and ascetic hostility to life, in two brothers of the house of Medici, Lorenzo and Girolamo, who are suitors for the hand of one and the same woman. The following novel, His Royal Highness (1909), shows how a prince, educated in aloofness from life, is saved from a living death through love for an American heiress. Finally, there appeared only last year a masterpiece in the most exquisite style, the narrative Death in Venice (1913). It is a heart-felt confession, taking as its theme the chilling apprehension of approaching ...
— The German Classics of the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries - Masterpieces of German Literature Vol. 19 • Various
... thinking of her sister's admiration for the officer. She was speculating as to what might happen with Fyles stationed here in Rocky Springs. Would her beautiful sister finally yield to his very evident admiration, or would she still keep that barrier of aloofness against him? She wondered. And, wondering, there came the memory of what Fyles's coming would ...
— The Law-Breakers • Ridgwell Cullum
... sufficed to light a fatal star in his sky, and to induce in him, when, as now, he found himself in her vicinity, an attitude towards the rest of the world that justified his mother's employment of the verb to "mooch" (a word that may be taken as implying a moody and furtive aloofness). ...
— Mount Music • E. Oe. Somerville and Martin Ross
... two, looking as if possibly one might see a hill if one got to the other side, will instantly give me intense delight because the shadow, the hope of the hills is in them." Both lovers showed the same disdain of the mere climber. Javelle's Alpine memories record his sense of aloofness from the general type of ...
— Mountain Meditations - and some subjects of the day and the war • L. Lind-af-Hageby
... grim unhandsome city which boasts of its riches and still accepts with smug content its rows upon rows of ugly architecture, to sit dreaming, then, of red-tiled roofs, of cloud-caressed hills, of terraced vineyards, of cypresses in their dark aloofness, is not out of the natural order of things; but that into this idle and pleasant dream there should enter so divine a voice, living, feeling, pulsing, this was not ...
— The Lure of the Mask • Harold MacGrath
... A certain aloofness on Alix's part caused him to hesitate. Something in her manner following upon the visit of the Blythes invited speculation. She was as pleasant as ever, yet he sensed a subtle change that warned him of defeat if he attempted to storm the citadel. His confidence was slightly shaken,—but ...
— Quill's Window • George Barr McCutcheon
... so fearless a front, the little woman drew up suddenly at sight of the boy, and, entrenching herself behind the doctor, began to swing by his coat-tails, and to take furtive glances at the stranger in silence and aloofness. ...
— The Eternal City • Hall Caine
... he greeted her she saw the stiffness, the aloofness had gone from him. Kathleen had made him feel at home. He looked younger. There was color ...
— The Desert of Wheat • Zane Grey
... force, a real presence, like Mr Gladstone or Mr Bright; he spake not with the words of "a great soul greatly stirred"; yet there was something in his polished and logical sentences that gave Eloquent a doubtless quite erroneous sense of his personality, and of a certain aloofness in his attitude. He never called into council the "bits" from Mr Herbert Spencer in order to find majestic language in which to express the ordinary ...
— The Ffolliots of Redmarley • L. Allen Harker
... deluded by his silence and aloofness; but she was unable to devise means to circumvent him. Constant fear of his power to crush lurked near her day and night. Conscious of her weakness, but eager to have done with the strife, sometimes she longed for the enemy to advance. At first, she distrusted and despised the son, but his ...
— Jane Cable • George Barr McCutcheon
... sight to make out what Sir George's bride might be like. She looked for a moment at the small, elegant person in the corner,—at the sheaf of nodding rosebuds on the hat—the bracelets—the pink cheeks under the dainty veil,—looked with a curious aloofness, as though from a great distance. Then, evidently, another thought struck her like a lash. She ceased to see or think of Letty. Her ...
— Sir George Tressady, Vol. I • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... expressive of I knew not what hidden emotion seemed to pass for one moment over her aristocratic features as she read it. But it vanished instantaneously, and she turned to me with her previous air of haughty and imperturbable aloofness. ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 156, April 23, 1919 • Various
... automatically, and descended to the fire-lit space that held Cytherea in her mocking, her becoming, aloofness. In the brightly illuminated room beyond the hall Helena and Gregory were playing parchesi—Gregory firmly grasped the cup from which he intently rolled the dice; Helena shook the fair hair from her eyes and, it immediately developed, moved a pink ...
— Cytherea • Joseph Hergesheimer
... very coldness and aloofness stirred desire in the man, and she shrank as she saw a spark of passion kindling in his eyes. It was merely passion, she felt, for she recognised that there was a strain of ...
— Hawtrey's Deputy • Harold Bindloss
... Nicodemus. He stood among the people, regarding the scene with eyes of detachment. As always in a crowd, an odd sense of impersonality possessed him, of aloofness; in it he was forgetful of his own presence, of his own corporeality; became as a Mind seeking out its own. Here and there he was recalled by a man's greeting; here and there also a woman spoke. Everywhere he was hailed cheerily, as ...
— Nicanor - Teller of Tales - A Story of Roman Britain • C. Bryson Taylor
... repeated thinly, as if satirizing the condition implied by those commonplace, assuaging words. He had, in his flight from society, sought simply peace. John Woolfolk now questioned all his implied success. He had found the elemental hush of the sea, the iron aloofness of rocky and uninhabited coasts, but he had never been able to still the dull rebellion within, the legacy of the past. A feeling of complete failure settled over him. His safety and freedom amounted to this—that life had broken ...
— Wild Oranges • Joseph Hergesheimer
... conjunction with what shallower thought is apt to regard as being in antagonism to it. He declares Himself to be 'a just (righteous) God and a Saviour.' So then, if we would rightly conceive of His righteousness, we must give it a wider extension than that of retributive justice or cold, inflexible aloofness from sinners. It impels God to be man's saviour. And with similar enlarging of popular conceptions there follows: 'In the Lord is righteousness and strength,' and therefore, 'In the Lord shall all the seed of Israel be justified (declared ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture - Isaiah and Jeremiah • Alexander Maclaren
... rank, but untutored, unsophisticated, uncouth. Dreiser, within his limits, belongs to this sabot-shod company of the elect. One thinks of Conrad, not as artist first, but as savant. There is something of the icy aloofness of the laboratory in him, even when the images he conjures up pulsate with the very glow of life. He is almost as self-conscious as the Beethoven of the last quartets. In Dreiser the thing is more intimate, more disorderly, more a matter of pure feeling. He gets ...
— A Book of Prefaces • H. L. Mencken
... would deliver faithfully his message to Bill Holmes, she had given her word. That was one great advantage, considered Ramon, in dealing with those direct, uncompromising natures. She might torment him with her aloofness and her reticence, but once he had won her to a full confidence and submission he need not trouble himself further about her loyalty. She would tell Bill Holmes—and, what was vastly more important, she would do it secretly; he had not dared to speak of that, but ...
— The Heritage of the Sioux • B.M. Bower
... later she emerged with Ali Partab, who looked sleepy, but still more ashamed of his unmilitary dishabille. Rosemary McClean glanced left and right—forgot about the awning and the custom which decrees aloofness—ignored the old woman's waving arm and Ali Partab's frown, and rode toward ...
— Rung Ho! • Talbot Mundy
... hair within the hood hung dank on her neck. Slowly, oh so slowly, she drew back the hand, and with it the packet; so slowly, and yet so resolutely, being put to it, that when the dreaded flash surprised her, and she saw his harsh swarthy face, steeped in the mysterious aloofness of sleep, within a hand's breadth of hers, not a muscle of her arm moved, ...
— Count Hannibal - A Romance of the Court of France • Stanley J. Weyman
... propensities, and even when years and reason have asserted their influence we are apt to regard with a survival of our childish awe the wandering 'diviners and wicked heathens' who roam about the country, living in a mysterious aloofness from their fellow-men. Scores of theories have been propounded as to the origin of the Gipsy race, whence they sprang, and how they came to be so largely scattered over three of the four quarters of the globe. Opinion, following in the wake of the learned ...
— Gipsy Life - being an account of our Gipsies and their children • George Smith
... his fastidiousness, playing the out-of-town lad to a girl who took everything and gave nothing in return. It was absurd, fantastic. He was Gilbert Palgrave, the man who picked and chose, for whose attentions many women would give their ears, who stood in satirical aloofness from the general ruck; and as he held Joan in his arms and made sporadic efforts to dance whenever there was a few inches of room in which to do so, using all his ingenuity to dodge the menace of the elbows and feet of people who pushed ...
— Who Cares? • Cosmo Hamilton
... necessary psychic conditions. There was that about her—a sort of atmosphere. That quaint archaic French of hers—King Arthur and the round table and Merlin; it seemed to recreate it all. An artful minx, that is the only explanation. But while she was looking at you, out of that curious aloofness of hers—" ...
— Malvina of Brittany • Jerome K. Jerome
... notebooks. I was surprised at this sudden coolness, but looked upon it as infra dig, "pour un jeune homme de bonne maison" to curry favour with a mere Crown student of an Operoff, and so left him severely alone—though I confess that his aloofness hurt my feelings. On one occasion I arrived before him, and, since the lecture was to be delivered by a popular professor whom students came to hear who did not usually attend such functions, I ...
— Youth • Leo Tolstoy
... that its peculiar ideal is nobler than that which the cosmopolitan spirit suggests—that this ideal is so precious to it that its loss would be as the loss of the soul, and that it could not be realized without an aloofness from, if not an actual indifference to, the ideals which are spreading so rapidly over Europe. Is it possible for any nationality to make such a defense of its isolation? If not, let us read Goethe, Balzac, Tolstoi, men so much greater than any we can ...
— Imaginations and Reveries • (A.E.) George William Russell
... was an "Act" which defined the policy of the signatory powers toward Morocco. The Senate, in ratifying the Act, asserted that its action was not to be considered a departure from our traditional policy of aloofness from European questions. ...
— The United States Since The Civil War • Charles Ramsdell Lingley
... behind. He followed, and then Beverly, more venturesome and vastly more interested than the others, rode recklessly after. Quinnox was questioning the laconic Ravone when she drew rein. The vagabonds seemed to evince but little interest in the proceedings. They stood away in disdainful aloofness. No sign of recognition passed ...
— Beverly of Graustark • George Barr McCutcheon
... It may be that that peculiarity of the French genius, which, despite its unsurpassed and almost unmatched literary faculty, has prevented it from contributing any of the very greatest masterpieces to the literature of the world, has communicated to them this aloofness, this, as it may almost be called, provincialism. But some such note there is in them, and it may be that the immense stretch of time during which they were worse than ...
— The Flourishing of Romance and the Rise of Allegory - (Periods of European Literature, vol. II) • George Saintsbury
... her in quick surprise, then made the mistake of letting himself smile at her frosty aloofness instead of being crestfallen by it. She happened to look round and catch that smile before he could extinguish it. Her petulance hardened instantly ...
— A Texas Ranger • William MacLeod Raine
... grown accustomed to the deadness of it, liked this change from Indian Tom's cabin. He liked his wallow of soft sand during the day, and he liked still more the aloneness and the aloofness of their ramparted stronghold when the cool of evening came. He did not, of course, understand just what their escape from Cassidy had meant, but instinct was shrewdly at work within him, and no wolf could have guarded the place more carefully than he. ...
— The Country Beyond - A Romance of the Wilderness • James Oliver Curwood
... by the faculty of the University of Munich, which there entertains the eminent scientists who constantly visit the city. No orchestra arouses the baser passions with "Wiener Blut." The place has calm, aloofness, intellectuality, aristocracy, distinction. It was the scene foreordained for ...
— Europe After 8:15 • H. L. Mencken, George Jean Nathan and Willard Huntington Wright
... Maurice no longer felt its peace. Remote as it was, cloistered in the rolling moors, the cry of the child penetrated to it, making it the very centre, the very core of all things hideous and terrible. Even the silence of the village, its aloofness from the world, became hateful to Maurice. For they seemed to emphasise and to concentrate the voice that pierced more keenly in silence, that sounded more ...
— Tongues of Conscience • Robert Smythe Hichens
... for the evening. The people of Littlefield, puzzled, perhaps a little piqued, by the aloofness of his manner, rarely invited him to their houses in anything but his professional capacity, though they called upon his services in and out of season; and Sir Richard Wayne and Mr. Carey, the gentle, courtly Vicar of the parish, were the only two men with whom he ...
— Afterwards • Kathlyn Rhodes
... European affairs that the typical citizen could not imagine any cataclysm on the other side of the Atlantic so engrossing as to engage the active participation of his country. The whole course of American history had deepened the general feeling of aloofness from Europe and heightened the effect of the advice given by the first President when he warned the country to avoid entangling alliances. In the early nineteenth century the United States was a country apart, for in the days when there was neither steamship nor telegraph ...
— Woodrow Wilson and the World War - A Chronicle of Our Own Times. • Charles Seymour
... excitement of his news had for a moment thawed her, but a dignified aloofness showed again in her manner. "If you want to see father you'll find him in the ...
— Brand Blotters • William MacLeod Raine
... injured foes escaping, turning doubtful battle into victory. But no; these commonplaces of to-day and of all time were swamped by the Fighting Instructions. It will be seen in the sequel what a disastrous moral influence Lestock's aloofness exercised upon a few timid captains, and not improbably upon the entire subsequent course and worst errors of ...
— Types of Naval Officers - Drawn from the History of the British Navy • A. T. Mahan
... favourite, as he well deserved to be, and his beautiful wife was regarded with a fervent admiration, which her very aloofness had served to heighten. Other ladies might call round at cottage doors, and talk intimately concerning book clubs, and Dorcas societies, but no one expected such condescension from Mrs Geoffrey Hilliard. She whizzed along in her great green ...
— The Love Affairs of Pixie • Mrs George de Horne Vaizey
... exceedingly congenial soul. He was an old Confederate colonel—was Elliot, but although we had served on opposite sides of the sad war of a few years back, the common bond of nationality that is always strongest beyond the confines of one's own land prevented us from feeling any aloofness toward each other on this account. To me Colonel Elliot was an American, and a mighty decent specimen of an American at that—a friend in need. And to Colonel Elliot also I was an American, and one needing assistance. We seldom spoke of our ...
— Arizona's Yesterday - Being the Narrative of John H. Cady, Pioneer • John H. Cady
... than they are to a republican magistrate charged with the welfare of millions of people distributed over a vast continent. Office seekers apparently regard themselves as a privileged class with a right of personal access to the President, and any appearances of aloofness or reserve on his part gives sharp offense. The exceptional force of such claims of privilege in the United States may be attributed to the participation which members of Congress have acquired in the appointing ...
— The Cleveland Era - A Chronicle of the New Order in Politics, Volume 44 in The - Chronicles of America Series • Henry Jones Ford
... untutored savages. If ever boat breasted the "foam of perilous seas in faery lands forlorn," it was this, and if ever its occupants realised the complete strangeness of their situation and their utter aloofness from the tracks of their fellowmen, it must have been on this cloudless moonlit summer night. There was hardly a stretch of the world's waters, at all events in any habitable zone, where they could have been farther away from all that they remembered with affection and hoped to see again. About ...
— The Life of Captain Matthew Flinders • Ernest Scott
... guidance in realism, its purpose in spirituality. The search for truth and the desire for beauty were the twin ideals he strove to attain. The keenness of this pursuit saved him from the blemish of egoism which aloofness from his surroundings would otherwise have forced upon him. For his character presented the anomaly, peculiar to the Renaissance, of a lofty idealism coupled in action with {xxi} irresponsibility of duty. He ...
— Thoughts on Art and Life • Leonardo da Vinci
... silent, under the picture of his great-grandmother, only breaking through his reverie from time to time to ask or answer a question. Was he pondering the sale of the great-grandmother, or did he simply know that his silence and aloofness were picturesque, that they compelled other people's attention, and made him the centre of things more effectively than more ordinary manners could have done? In recalling him the girl had an impatient sense of something commanding; of ...
— Helbeck of Bannisdale, Vol. I. • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... travelers. He had expressed his trunks direct, and traveled with two suitcases and an umbrella. His journey, since his boat swung out into Massachusetts Bay, had been spent in gloomy speculations, and two young women booked for Baltimore wrongly attributed his reticence and aloofness to a grievous disappointment ...
— The Port of Missing Men • Meredith Nicholson
... with humorous intentness upon the spinning wheel. Even amongst that crowd of beautiful women she possessed a certain individual distinction. She not only looked what she was—an Englishwoman of good birth—but there was a certain delicate aloofness about her expression and bearing which gave an added charm to a personality which seemed to combine the two extremes of provocativeness and reserve. One would have hesitated to address to her even the chance remarks which pass so easily ...
— Mr. Grex of Monte Carlo • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... own persons being loaded with heavy ornaments. They brought children afflicted with skin- diseases, and asked for ointment, and on hearing that I was hurt by a fall, seized on my limbs and shampooed them energetically but not undexterously. I prefer their sociability to the usual chilling aloofness of ...
— Among the Tibetans • Isabella L. Bird (Mrs Bishop)
... It is not worth while. A trifle, just a trifle—Christmas, you know—must do the proper thing!" He mumbled vaguely the while he collected his hat and gloves, the aloofness in Claire's attitude making it impossible to prolong the interview; but as he held out his hand in farewell, his self-possession returned. He laughed meaningly, ...
— The Independence of Claire • Mrs. George de Horne Vaizey
... wine-glasses, and some dry biscuits of a truly early Victorian dryness. This ghostly hospitality was duly dispensed, and Luccia, who seldom drinks anything but tea, instead of sipping her sherry with a lady-like aloofness, drained her glass with a sudden devil-may-care abandon, and, to the evident amazement even of the furniture, held it out to be refilled. Such pagan behaviour had never disgraced that scandalized drawing-room before. And when ...
— Vanishing Roads and Other Essays • Richard Le Gallienne
... with enthusiastic approbation by everybody except Aunt Polly. Aunt Polly said, privately, to Pollyanna, that it was all very good and well and desirable that John Pendleton should have gotten out of the sour, morose aloofness that had been his state for so many years, but that it did not necessarily follow that it was equally desirable that he should be trying to turn himself into a twenty-year-old boy again; and that was what, in her opinion, he seemed to be doing now! Publicly she contented herself with saying ...
— Pollyanna Grows Up • Eleanor H. Porter
... and based upon eternal decrees of Fate and Jove. But neither was he duped, as Virgil was, into mistaking the blood-bought empire of the Caesars for the return of Saturn's reign. Sometimes a minor poet, just by reason of his aloofness from the social trend of his time, may also escape its limitations, and sound some notes which remain forever true to what is unchanging in the human heart. I believe ...
— The Elegies of Tibullus • Tibullus
... them to the club for luncheon. Sorry I shall be kept here until late in the afternoon. I will put you in a cab." And he led the way to the elevator. As always he was kind and considerate. But in his equable manner was there also some touch of coldness, of aloofness from this wife, who had taken this curious opportunity to come into ...
— Together • Robert Herrick (1868-1938)
... knowledge and wisdom. He was invited to Athens during a plague to purify the city, on which occasion he performed certain mysterious rites with the effect that the plague ceased. The story afforded Goethe a subject for a drama entitled "Das Epimenides Erwachen," "in which he symbolises his own aloofness from the great cause of the Fatherland, the result of want of faith in the miraculous power that resides in an ...
— The Nuttall Encyclopaedia - Being a Concise and Comprehensive Dictionary of General Knowledge • Edited by Rev. James Wood
... him quite a new realisation of the mystery connected with the whole feline tribe, but especially with that common member of it, the domestic cat—their hidden lives, their strange aloofness, their incalculable subtlety. How utterly remote from anything that human beings understood lay the sources of their elusive activities. As he watched the indescribable bearing of the little creature mincing along the strip of carpet under his eyes, coquetting with the powers ...
— Three John Silence Stories • Algernon Blackwood
... behind his chair. Thomas was in wait there still. Down here he seemed to raise a wall of aloofness between himself and her, to wear a magnificent air, all cold and haughty, that was quite foreign to the nursery. As she passed him, she dimpled up at him saucily. But it failed to slack the starchy tenseness of ...
— The Poor Little Rich Girl • Eleanor Gates
... Montepulciano, in nearly all the hill towns of Umbria and Tuscany. But their landscape is often tragic and austere, while this is always suave. City and country blend here in delightful amity. Neither yields that sense of aloofness ...
— Sketches and Studies in Italy and Greece, Complete - Series I, II, and III • John Symonds
... in the water to the bone itself, though from a practical point of view he made a lamentable mistake, was aesthetically justified. No "orb," as Tennyson said, is a "perfect star" while we walk therein. Aloofness is essential to the Beatific Vision. If we entered its portals Heaven would no ...
— Impressions And Comments • Havelock Ellis
... reader may say that the position we take tends to strengthen that exclusiveness, that narrowness, that aloofness with which he has always charged the Church of Rome. But we would ask our dissenting brethren, can it be otherwise? Truth is indivisible and unchangeable. Were the unity of the Church Universal to exist only in the Church of the future we would have to conclude that there was a time ...
— Catholic Problems in Western Canada • George Thomas Daly
... Lady Dawn—to her pale aloofness. She wasn't like this—she was different from all other women. It was ridiculous that he should be so sure that she was different when his only proof was a portrait, quite certainly idealized. He began to argue with himself again as to whether he ought to seek her out and endanger ...
— The Kingdom Round the Corner - A Novel • Coningsby Dawson
... la petite!" she cried. And the epithet—"little one"—was a light to Celia. Till now, upon these occasions, with her black ceremonial dress, her air of aloofness, her vague eyes, and the dignity of her carriage, she had already produced some part of their effect before the seance had begun. She had been wont to sail into the room, distant, mystical. She had her audience already expectant ...
— At the Villa Rose • A. E. W. Mason
... his fat arms to demonstrate his aloofness from fancies. 'Well, we want a new handy lad,' he said; 'and this peripatacious young chap comes strolling along just as Bella wants milking. The Gabbitual one says he's all right.' This is an elaborate ...
— The Record of Nicholas Freydon - An Autobiography • A. J. (Alec John) Dawson
... that Henry Callandar was not quite as other men, had come an intense, delicious shyness; the aloofness of the maiden who feels love near yet cannot, through her very nature, take one step to ...
— Up the Hill and Over • Isabel Ecclestone Mackay
... individuals lacked ambition, others were reluctant to accept responsibility, and again others preferred to retain the close company of the friends of their section—promotion resulting in a mild form of aloofness and isolation, a condition which the exercise of authority ...
— The 28th: A Record of War Service in the Australian Imperial Force, 1915-19, Vol. I • Herbert Brayley Collett
... deities Amen-Ra and Hathor. More especially it was the funerary chapel of Thothmes I. His tomb was excavated, not in the Dra' Abu-l-Negga, which was doubtless now too near the capital city and not in a sufficiently dignified position of aloofness from the common herd, but at the end of the long valley of the Wadiyen, behind the cliff-hill above Der el-Bahari. Hence the new temple was oriented in the direction of his tomb. Immediately behind the temple, on the other side of the hill, is the tomb which was discovered by Lepsius ...
— History Of Egypt, Chaldaea, Syria, Babylonia, And Assyria In The Light Of Recent Discovery • L.W. King and H.R. Hall
... felt the intellectual superior of the ignorant aristocracy. This feeling gave her an assurance which impressed people. The men worshipped her beauty and aloofness; but she never felt in the least moved in their company. She accepted their homage as a tribute due to women and found it impossible to respect these lackeys who jumped up and stood ...
— Married • August Strindberg
... Hence it is, from the perpetual activity of attention required on the part of the reader; from the rapid flow, the quick change, and the playful nature of the thoughts and images; and above all from the alienation, and, if I may hazard such an expression, the utter aloofness of the poet's own feelings, from those of which he is at once the painter and the analyst; that though the very subject cannot but detract from the pleasure of a delicate mind, yet never was poem less dangerous on a moral account. Instead of doing as Ariosto, and as, still more offensively, ...
— Biographia Literaria • Samuel Taylor Coleridge
... the gracious condescension of the elderly, and the frank curiosity of the young—only a discerning few had made any real headway with this attractive, oddly disconcerting child of another continent; this creature of queer reserves and aloofness and passionate pride of race. The friendliest were baffled by her incomprehensible lack of social instinct, the fruit of India's purdah system. Loyal wives and mothers who 'adored' their children—yet spent most of their ...
— Far to Seek - A Romance of England and India • Maud Diver
... although deferential and courteous, had nevertheless some quality of aloofness in it to which she was unused and which she was quick to recognise. The smile, faded from her face. She seemed suddenly not quite ...
— The Evil Shepherd • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... that this one young man was first taken out of himself and his quiet home surroundings, first became interested in the convivialities of life. In those days, to be quite frank about it, a certain settled staidness of demeanour, a decided aloofness from the outside world, marked many religious households. A book of unexceptional moral tone, and probably containing what was known as "definite teaching," was the main relaxation after working hours—that, and an occasional meeting and some ...
— One Young Man • Sir John Ernest Hodder-Williams
... what Paul needed, and though he had all the week avoided the party—there were three men—now he gladly greeted them. Barclay, totally unable to account for Paul's sudden recension from his aloofness, nevertheless secretly rejoiced. He greatly admired Verdayne, and had felt rather hurt at his keeping quite so much to himself. With a wisdom beyond his usual capabilities, however, he refrained from making any comment ...
— High Noon - A New Sequel to 'Three Weeks' by Elinor Glyn • Anonymous
... and for how profound a reason, does he not show us to ourselves, not as we or our fellows see us, but out of the continual observation of humanity which goes on in the wary and inquiring eyes of birds, the meditative and indifferent regard of cattle, and the deprecating aloofness and ...
— Figures of Several Centuries • Arthur Symons
... big collie noted this aloofness. And he came to an irresolute halt. For a moment, he stared after the two vanishing runaways; his plumed tail swaying ever so little, in groundless expectation of an invitingly glance or yelp from Lady. Then, tail and crest adroop, he turned slowly ...
— Further Adventures of Lad • Albert Payson Terhune
... staring at her a little longer, as if he could not believe his ears. The red blood slowly mounted to his forehead. She returned his gaze with the same look of almost wistful pity, in which there was an aloofness, a coldness, that showed him as nothing else had ever done the extent of her estrangement from himself. Somehow he felt as though she had struck him on the lips. He walked away from her without another word, ...
— Name and Fame - A Novel • Adeline Sergeant
... The aloofness from political partisanship has been faithfully maintained by the successors of Queen Victoria, and great as the royal influence may be in the social life of the wealthier classes, it is certain that no such influence operates in the casting of votes by the people at Parliamentary ...
— The Rise of the Democracy • Joseph Clayton
... make some sort of compromise? Or at least couldn't you cut your—prayers short so he can get in an hour or two of his favorite pleasure after—after duty well done?" As I spoke I had come to the edge of the steps and thus stood alone above him, looking down on him with a kind of cool aloofness as if he belonged to another world, while I heard all of his recent converts grouped back of me ...
— The Heart's Kingdom • Maria Thompson Daviess
... pale— An Indian aloofness lones his brow; He has lived a thousand years Compressed in battle's pains and ...
— John Marr and Other Poems • Herman Melville
... the most important thing in the world. Unfortunately, in their isolation they are apt, like the rest, to come on the parish. Theirs is no vulgar provincialism; but in its lack of receptivity, its too willing aloofness from foreign influences, its tendency to concentrate on a mediocre and rather middle-class ideal of honesty, it is, I suspect, typically British. There is nothing Tennysonian about these men, nothing Kiplingesque; their art is neither meretricious nor conceited; ...
— Pot-Boilers • Clive Bell
... natural hunger of a young man to talk to a young woman; and, moreover, it is a severe strain for a man to be living under the same roof with the girl he loves and not to be on terms of friendship with her. But Maggie maintained her aloofness. She spoke only when she was pressed into it, and her speech was usually no more than a "yes" or a "no," or a ...
— Children of the Whirlwind • Leroy Scott
... quality of aloofness from other men and their ways of thinking, which made it impossible for him to be the exponent of a system or the founder of a school, made him a peculiarly interesting friend. In homely phrase, you never knew where to have him; he was always breaking out ...
— Fifteen Chapters of Autobiography • George William Erskine Russell
... conflict with different political systems; the many indirect, subtle, far-reaching ways in which the world and the Church interacted upon each other in all the great departments of speculation, art, industry, social and political life. A certain aloofness and coldness of judgment in dealing with sacred subjects was the reproach which was most frequently brought against him. As he himself said, he wrote rather as an historian than a religious instructor, and he dealt with his ...
— Historical and Political Essays • William Edward Hartpole Lecky
... possession of an ancestral hall in England. It was not so much the good American's reverence for ancestors that inspired the longing to consort with the ghosts of an ancient line, as artistic appreciation of the mellowness, the dignity, the aristocratic aloofness of walls that have sheltered, and furniture that has embraced, generations and generations of the dead. To mere wealth, only his astute and incomparably modern brain yielded respect; his ego raised its goose-flesh at the sight of rooms ...
— The Bell in the Fog and Other Stories • Gertrude Atherton
... will you when once you have seen it. Though many houses, palaces and churches have been rebuilt or added, I should say that the Mala Strana has always preserved a certain independence, a conservative aloofness, from other quarters of the capital. From little glimpses, from snatches of conversation and chance remarks, I am inclined to the idea that the aborigines of the Mala Strana, while admitting the existence of other parts of Prague, such as the Old Town, yet do not consider ...
— From a Terrace in Prague • Lieut.-Col. B. Granville Baker
... are always afraid that someone may ask them to put up a car-window, and who, if requested to perform such a menial service, silently point to the button that calls the porter. Larry wore this air of official aloofness even on the street, where there were no car-windows to compromise his dignity. At the end of his run he stepped indifferently from the train along with the passengers, his street hat on his head and his conductor's cap in an alligator-skin bag, went ...
— My Antonia • Willa Cather
... mail-service was abominable, and that her letter had never reached me. But the young fellow who two years ago had wandered about the Green Chalybeate with her had become, now, as unreal as she. I glimpsed the couple, with immeasurable aloofness, as phantoms flickering about the mirage of a brook, throwing ghostly bread crumbs ...
— The Cords of Vanity • James Branch Cabell et al
... afternoon she had had to acknowledge that there was something wrong with Dick. No. Between Dick and herself. There was a formality in his speech to her, an aloofness that seemed to ignore utterly their new intimacy. He was there, but he was miles away from her. She tried hard to feel indignant, ...
— The Breaking Point • Mary Roberts Rinehart
... the ringing of the church bells, quite alone in Walderhurst's study, following the Service and reading the Collects and Lessons. The room used to seem so beautifully still, even Berkeley Square wearing its church-hour aspect suggested devout aloofness ...
— Emily Fox-Seton - Being The Making of a Marchioness and The Methods of Lady Walderhurst • Frances Hodgson Burnett
... on the edge of the celery garden, embowered in forest trees, is the vine-covered cabin, Slabsides. What a feeling of peace and aloofness comes over one in looking up at the encircling hills! The few houses scattered about on other rocks are at a just comfortable distance to be neighborly, but not too neighborly. Would one be lonesome ...
— Our Friend John Burroughs • Clara Barrus
... soft contours. Huge rocks pile up—one great perpendicular surface adding five hundred feet to the height—into spires and domes for all the world like some vast cathedral which taunts the soul with its aloofness. If, on some sunshiny afternoon you look up from the camp and see a ghost-moon hanging, no more than a foot above the highest spire, you must surely be "citified" if you do not pause to drink in its ...
— The Lake of the Sky • George Wharton James
... themselves, with two or three exceptions, were content to be solicitous at long range—an abstention that relieved and at the same time troubled Huntington. He was not eager to talk with his neighbors about that episode at the post-office, but their aloofness filled him with uneasiness. Well, let them wait! They would hear from him ...
— The Heart of Thunder Mountain • Edfrid A. Bingham
... the house stood in tragic aloofness from its surroundings; just outside the bedroom window grew a cedar, low, thick, covered with snow except where a bough had been broken off for decorating the house; here owing to the steepness the snow slid off. The spot looked like a wound in the side of the Divine ...
— Bride of the Mistletoe • James Lane Allen
... blow which it had received. I have already mentioned that this young lady's attitude toward me had completely changed from the moment when I saved her brother's life; her frosty and almost insolent aloofness had entirely disappeared, giving place to a frank and cordial friendliness of disposition rivalling that of her mother, which I admit was mightily agreeable to me. In short, I believed her to be intensely grateful for what ...
— The First Mate - The Story of a Strange Cruise • Harry Collingwood
... Craig to Latisan. The latter's aloofness, which he had displayed ever since he first appeared to her that day, his present peculiar relationship to the affair, his insistence that he must serve alone, made her problem more complex. Her vivid yearning was to give all into Latisan's keeping, but she did not dare ...
— Joan of Arc of the North Woods • Holman Day
... been that this very aloofness of stupidity appealed to him as a thing to conquer, but, anyway, he got an arm about her waist, and went on praising her with ridiculous emphasis. She allowed him to squeeze, and she allowed him to praise, and when he pressed her glass upon her she sipped at it with ...
— Despair's Last Journey • David Christie Murray
... there was the same indefinite barbaric look as characterized her father. Her face was lovely, dark and proud in expression, but there was an aloofness about it which puzzled the English girl. Donna Inez might have belonged to a race populating another planet of the solar system. She had large black, melting eyes, a straight Greek nose and perfect mouth, a well-rounded chin and magnificent hair, dark and glossy ...
— The Green Mummy • Fergus Hume
... be of use to Murchison, and Lorne felt all his old friendliness rise up in him as he cordially accepted the offer. It was made with British heartiness, it was thoroughly meant. Lorne was half-ashamed in his recognition of its quality. A certain aloofness had grown in him against his will since Hesketh had prolonged his stay in the town, difficult to justify, impossible to define. Hesketh as Hesketh was worthily admirable as ever, wholesome and agreeable, as well turned out by his conscience ...
— The Imperialist • (a.k.a. Mrs. Everard Cotes) Sara Jeannette Duncan
... rifle butt first in the snow. He walked over to it; Hazel followed. When he stood, with the rifle slung in the crook of his arm, she tried again to break through this silent aloofness which cut her more deeply than any harshness of speech could ...
— North of Fifty-Three • Bertrand W. Sinclair
... standpoint dependence denotes a power rather than a weakness; it involves interdependence. There is always danger that increased personal independence will decrease the social capacity of an individual. In making him more self-reliant, it makes him more self-sufficient; it may lead to aloofness and indifference. It often makes an individual so insensitive in his relation to others as to develop an illusion of being really able to stand and act alone, an unnamed form of insanity which is responsible ...
— Creative Impulse in Industry - A Proposition for Educators • Helen Marot
... to this old-world order of great men. For men of the type in question can be great, at any rate in low-level society. The so-called medicine man is a leader, perhaps even the typical leader, of primitive society; and, just because he is, by reason of his calling, addicted to privacy and aloofness, he certainly tends to be more individual, more of a "character," than the general run ...
— Anthropology • Robert Marett
... Kitty, Mason's life and Little Jim's had no point of meeting. Six years later, when he returned to Links, Jimmy was discovering great possibilities in the stables of the Inn. Mason often called at the bar-room where he had once been the ruling figure, and was received with cold aloofness. But he was used to that; his calling had hardened him to any amount of human scorn. He still found a kindred spirit, however, in the stable man, Watsie Hall, and these two would often "visit" in the feed room, which ...
— The Preacher of Cedar Mountain - A Tale of the Open Country • Ernest Thompson Seton
... the faces as they passed!—sensual, cynical, cold faces, faces of utter carelessness, faces full of pride and aloofness. But there were some so different—earnest faces, keen faces, faces sensitive and spiritual. Oh, the pathos of it all! How our hearts went out to these, whose eager wistfulness marked them out as truly religious and ...
— Lotus Buds • Amy Carmichael
... in her aloofness from mundane affairs: Taou Yuen in whispering silk, her grandfather's rotund tones, Laurel and Camilla and her mother, were distant, immaterial. In the evening she sat on the front steps, a web of white, dreamily ...
— Java Head • Joseph Hergesheimer
... it. When the wise man, the devotee of truth, first makes his appearance, his authority is acknowledged because he has renounced himself. As witness of the universal being he purges himself of whatever is peculiar to his own individuality, or even to his human nature. In the aloofness of his meditation he escapes the cloud of opinion and prejudice that obscures the vision of the common man. In short, the element of belief dependent upon the thinker himself is the dross which must be refined away in order to ...
— The Approach to Philosophy • Ralph Barton Perry
... It is the aloofness of straight lines from all the fuss and flurry of variety that gives them this calm, infinite expression. And their value as a steadying influence among the more exuberant forms of a composition is very great. The Venetians ...
— The Practice and Science Of Drawing • Harold Speed
... follows happened on the coast twenty miles through the fields from Yokohama, at Kamakura, that is to say, where the great bronze Buddha sits facing the sea to hear the centuries go by. He has been described again and again—his majesty, his aloofness, and every one of his dimensions, the smoky little shrine within him, and the plumed hill that makes the background to his throne. For that reason he remains, as he remained from the beginning, beyond all hope of description—as ...
— Letters of Travel (1892-1913) • Rudyard Kipling
... sort of man you are, I won't have you for a husband," Cicily declared, quietly. There was an air of aloofness about her that was more disturbing than had been a display of passion. "If that's your idea of marriage, we'd be better apart, for it isn't mine. No, you're not my husband," She stood up, slowly drew the wedding-ring from her finger, and laid ...
— Making People Happy • Thompson Buchanan
... family-size portmanteau. We looked so much the typical American tourists that we felt ashamed of ourselves, not because of our nationality, but because we revealed so plainly, to all the world military, our non-military antecedents. We bore the hallmark of fifty years of neutral aloofness, of fifty years of indifference to the business of national defense. What makes the situation amusing as a retrospect is the fact that we were traveling on third-class military passes, as befitted our rank as eleve-pilotes and soldiers of the ...
— High Adventure - A Narrative of Air Fighting in France • James Norman Hall
... she inquired, with manifest disdain. Mary turned to the maid, who now entered in response to the bell she had sounded a minute before. "Fanny, will you ask Miss Lynch to come in, please?" Then she faced the lawyer again, with an aloofness of manner that was contemptuous. "Really, Mr. Irwin," she drawled, "why don't you take ...
— Within the Law - From the Play of Bayard Veiller • Marvin Dana
... white hair, keen eyes and pale, aquiline features of the Earl of Wyvelstoke. At sight of me he closed the book and rose, and in stern features, in every line of his slender, shabby figure was a stately aloofness that chilled me. ...
— Peregrine's Progress • Jeffery Farnol
... he understood the girl, and as he thought of her shrinking aloofness standing guard over her eager longing for friends—for affection, something hot and wet blurred his eyes. He was scarcely conscious that the man, who had taken to himself the name with which he had become ...
— An Alabaster Box • Mary E. Wilkins Freeman and Florence Morse Kingsley
... of the early time are Giorgionesque, too, but with a difference. Here from the very beginning there are to be noted a majestic placidity, a fulness of life, a splendour of representation, very different from the tremulous sweetness, the spirit of aloofness and reserve which informs such creations as the Madonna of Castelfranco and the Madonna with St. Francis and St. Roch of the Prado Museum. Later on, we have, leaving farther and farther behind the Giorgionesque ideal, the overpowering ...
— The Earlier Work of Titian • Claude Phillips
... much of my anxiety during the winter if I had learned sooner that such aloofness as mine was no novelty to the procurator, that he had, among his most valued subordinates, a man even more unsociable than I, and even more highly esteemed and more sedulously pampered. This was the celebrated and regretted Spaniard, Mercablis, ...
— Andivius Hedulio • Edward Lucas White
... hearing and seeing all the time. After that, one is beginning to be a rather big girl and one has seen books and newspapers, and overheard scraps of things from servants. If one is brought up in a convent and allowed to read nothing but literature selected by nuns, a degree of aloofness from knowledge may be counted upon—though even convent schools, it is said, encounter their difficulties in ...
— The Head of the House of Coombe • Frances Hodgson Burnett
... was a new aloofness about him. Clara was very gentle, almost loving. But he treated her distantly, with a touch of contempt. She sighed, continuing to be gentle. He ...
— Sons and Lovers • David Herbert Lawrence
... contact with whom would be pollution. There is in many respects a strange correspondence between the Jewish social code of twenty centuries ago and that of Hinduism to-day—the same haughty mien and abjectness of spirit—the aloofness of pride and the cringing meanness of social bondage—representing the two extremes of society. Christ also turned His face like a flint against this mean artificial classification of men. He had a burning ...
— India, Its Life and Thought • John P. Jones
... of intercourse with the west is attested by Roman, Jewish, Nestorian and Mohammedan settlements, but on the other hand the Brahmans of Malabar are remarkable even according to Hindu standards for their strictness and aloofness. As I have pointed out elsewhere, the want of chronology in south Indian literature makes it difficult to sketch with any precision even the outlines of its religious history, but it is probable that Aryan religion came first in ...
— Hinduism and Buddhism, An Historical Sketch, Vol. 3 (of 3) • Charles Eliot
... liquid, gulped down to the cheerful accompaniment of a running stream of intimate gossip, while all the time that quiet figure lay on the narrow bed—motionless, silent, wrapped in the strange and immense aloofness of the dead. ...
— The Hermit of Far End • Margaret Pedler
... one day to find that the Big Blue, while he retained his own Available Lady in the corner-box, had also annexed the box and wife that belonged to himself, and a desperate battle followed. The only spectators were the two wives, but they maintained an indifferent aloofness. Arnaux fought with his famous wings, but they were none the better weapons because they now bore twenty records. His beak and feet were small, as became his blood, and his stout little heart could not make up for his lack of weight. The battle went against him. His wife sat unconcernedly ...
— Animal Heroes • Ernest Thompson Seton
... freedom impelled, and independence inspired, and nationality exalted, a world supergovernment is contrary to everything we cherish and can have no sanction by our Republic. This is not selfishness, it is sanctity. It is not aloofness, it is security. It is not suspicion of others, it is patriotic adherence to the things which made us ...
— U.S. Presidential Inaugural Addresses • Various
... little maid seemed surprised at this; however, she had her instructions, and so did not hesitate. She opened the door, stood aside for them to enter, and then followed them in. It was Nora's dressing-room, a place of soft colors, of cool aloofness, and as Bat Scanlon breathed the air of it, with its delicate suggestion of scent, he had a feeling that he was venturing too far; he felt that his act was almost profanation. Through an open door at one end he caught ...
— Ashton-Kirk, Criminologist • John T. McIntyre
... little body. Small to the point of appearing diminutive, and lacking all assertion in manner and bearing, she was nevertheless such a lady that she easily dominated all who approached her, and produced, quite against her will I am sure, an impression of aloofness seasoned with kindness, which made her a most surprising and entertaining study to the analytic observer. Her position as nominal mistress of an establishment already accounted one of the finest in Washington,—the real owner, Reuben Moore, ...
— The Filigree Ball • Anna Katharine Green
... the men of action who are doing the rough work of the world. Critics are the object of his fiercest denunciation. "A cynical habit of thought and speech, a readiness to criticise work which the critic himself never tries to perform, an intellectual aloofness which will not accept contact with life's realities—all these are marks, not, as the possessor would fain think, of superiority, but of weakness.... It is not the critic who counts; not the man who points out how the strong man stumbles, or where the doer of ...
— Four Americans - Roosevelt, Hawthorne, Emerson, Whitman • Henry A. Beers
... coffee." The cook assumed an air of aloofness, as if the entire affair were totally foreign to any interest or concern of hers. Laura dismissed her, saying that she ...
— The Pit • Frank Norris
... to Aunt Hannah or Uncle William could she speak of this thing that was troubling her. That they, too, understood, in a measure, she realized. But still she said no word. Billy was wearing a proud little air of aloofness these days that was heart-breaking to those who saw it and read it aright for what it was: loyalty to Bertram, no matter what happened. And so Billy pored over her chessboard feverishly, tirelessly, having ever before her longing eyes the dear ...
— Miss Billy Married • Eleanor H. Porter
... His aloofness freed him from the temptations of distraction. He knew no women. He did not put himself in the way of meeting them. He kept away from theatres. He sunk himself in a routine of labour which, viewed from the outside, seemed ...
— The Great God Success • John Graham (David Graham Phillips)
... that appeared on the screen was that of the President of the United States. "Your scheme worked, senator," he said without preamble. There was an aloofness, a coolness in his voice. Which was only natural, considering the heat of the debate ...
— Hail to the Chief • Gordon Randall Garrett
... was she that he could almost hear the velvet heart-throb of her,—the little fluttering swallow,—yet by some strange, persistent aloofness of her, some determinate virginity, not a fold of her gown, not an edge, not a thread, seemed to even so much as graze his knee, seemed to even so much as shadow his hand,—lest it short-circuit thereby the seething currents of their ...
— The White Linen Nurse • Eleanor Hallowell Abbott
... the aloofness of the British civilian very seldom proceed either from Indians of the upper classes or from the humbler folk. They generally proceed from the new, more or less Western-educated middle class whose attitude towards British ...
— Indian Unrest • Valentine Chirol
... liked him because of his dead-level indifference to his surroundings. French waiters and foreign food—he noticed them in his quick, amiable-looking fashion—but he was indifferent. Josephine was piqued. She wanted to pierce this amiable aloofness of his. ...
— Aaron's Rod • D. H. Lawrence
... nothing of city life. My father owned a sheep ranch in the Northwest, and there I grew up, roaming about as freely as the sheep themselves. I learned to ride and to shoot. Until I was a woman grown, I never took a needle in my hand. Perhaps it may seem strange to you, but out of this aloofness from feminine pursuits there grew up within me a sort of reverence for the feminine ideal. I felt a vague awe, such as I imagine strikes a man at sight of a rose-lined parasol, or a thimble laid on a pile of stitchery. It is this sense of the poetry of women's occupation which must give what ...
— Flint - His Faults, His Friendships and His Fortunes • Maud Wilder Goodwin
... wondered what this strange young man would have to say that Dickens and Hugo had not already said. That was the true marvel of it. No matter how many books one read, each was different, as each human being was different. Some had the dignity and the aloofness of a rock in the sea; and others were as the polished pebbles on the sands—one saw the difference of pebble from pebble only by close scrutiny. Ruth, without suspecting it, had fallen upon a fundamental truth: that each and every book fitted ...
— The Ragged Edge • Harold MacGrath
... through tiny openings we caught instant impressions of straight column trunks and transparent shadows. Miniature grass marshes jutted out from the bends of the little river. We idled along as with a homely rustic companion through the aloofness ...
— The Forest • Stewart Edward White
... whaleboat. To them it was a country of weird forms, strange animals, and untutored savages. If ever boat breasted the "foam of perilous seas in faery lands forlorn," it was this, and if ever its occupants realised the complete strangeness of their situation and their utter aloofness from the tracks of their fellowmen, it must have been on this cloudless moonlit summer night. There was hardly a stretch of the world's waters, at all events in any habitable zone, where they could have been farther away from all that they remembered with affection and hoped to see again. About ...
— The Life of Captain Matthew Flinders • Ernest Scott
... happened on the coast twenty miles through the fields from Yokohama, at Kamakura, that is to say, where the great bronze Buddha sits facing the sea to hear the centuries go by. He has been described again and again—his majesty, his aloofness, and every one of his dimensions, the smoky little shrine within him, and the plumed hill that makes the background to his throne. For that reason he remains, as he remained from the beginning, beyond all hope of description—as it ...
— Letters of Travel (1892-1913) • Rudyard Kipling
... early time are Giorgionesque, too, but with a difference. Here from the very beginning there are to be noted a majestic placidity, a fulness of life, a splendour of representation, very different from the tremulous sweetness, the spirit of aloofness and reserve which informs such creations as the Madonna of Castelfranco and the Madonna with St. Francis and St. Roch of the Prado Museum. Later on, we have, leaving farther and farther behind the Giorgionesque ideal, the overpowering force and majesty of ...
— The Earlier Work of Titian • Claude Phillips
... individuality does so with the profound conviction that its peculiar ideal is nobler than that which the cosmopolitan spirit suggests—that this ideal is so precious to it that its loss would be as the loss of the soul, and that it could not be realized without an aloofness from, if not an actual indifference to, the ideals which are spreading so rapidly over Europe. Is it possible for any nationality to make such a defense of its isolation? If not, let us read Goethe, Balzac, Tolstoi, men so much greater than ...
— Imaginations and Reveries • (A.E.) George William Russell
... is not usually associated with reason," he observed. "But in Robert's case there is a reason, or so it seems to me. I have not seen him for many years, but during my recent close association with him I was struck by two things: the solitary aloofness of his mind, and his overwhelming pride—pride in the family name. These two traits in his character coloured all his actions. In the first place, he disliked opening his mind to anybody, but the stronger influence, his family pride, overcame his habitual secretiveness when he thought it necessary ...
— The Moon Rock • Arthur J. Rees
... wood above the village, his refuge from boyhood onward in any hour of trouble. There was space here, and air, and solitude. It was a diversion that was almost a form of consolation to be in touch with the wood's teeming life. Moreover, the trees, with their stately aloofness from mortal cares, their strifelessness and strength, shed on him a kind of benediction. From long association, from days of bird's-nesting in spring, and camping in summer, and nutting in autumn, and snow-shoeing in winter, he knew ...
— The Side Of The Angels - A Novel • Basil King
... course, bore himself through this with a proper aloofness, as did his wife and Mrs. Effie, but I heard the Mixer booming salutations right and left. It was Cousin Egbert, however, who most embarrassed me by the freedom of his manner with these persons. He shook hands warmly with at least a dozen of them and these hailed ...
— Ruggles of Red Gap • Harry Leon Wilson
... heath. How often, and for how profound a reason, does he not show us to ourselves, not as we or our fellows see us, but out of the continual observation of humanity which goes on in the wary and inquiring eyes of birds, the meditative and indifferent regard of cattle, and the deprecating aloofness and inspection of sheep? ...
— Figures of Several Centuries • Arthur Symons
... Mrs. Grant, large and solemn; and on the other side, as it were in opposition, the young, dark, slim girl with her rather wiry black hair, and her straight, prominent eyebrows, and her extraordinary expression of uncompromising aloofness. ...
— Hilda Lessways • Arnold Bennett
... when years and reason have asserted their influence we are apt to regard with a survival of our childish awe the wandering 'diviners and wicked heathens' who roam about the country, living in a mysterious aloofness from their fellow-men. Scores of theories have been propounded as to the origin of the Gipsy race, whence they sprang, and how they came to be so largely scattered over three of the four quarters of the globe. Opinion, following in the wake of the learned ...
— Gipsy Life - being an account of our Gipsies and their children • George Smith
... to the general run of her sex. She had been brought up in an out-of-the-way place in which the modern novel, the fashionable pastime of flirtation, were not known; and her secluded life in the lonely dale had deepened that sense of aloofness from the world, that indifference to the sentiment which lurks in most girls' bosoms. This tall, handsome man who had stepped into her life and shared the secret of her father's strange affliction, weakness, was nothing more to her than one of the other tourists whom she sometimes chanced to see ...
— At Love's Cost • Charles Garvice
... cottage was a quaint, old-fashioned place on the side of Battle Hill, looking down upon the maples of Sickle Street. The grounds were rather spacious, and the house stood well back from the street, establishing an aloofness that had never been noticed before. A low stone wall guarded the lawn and rose-garden, and there was an iron gate at the bottom of the slope. The front porch was partly screened by "Dutchman's Pipe" vines. With the advent of the tenant, smart Japanese sun-curtains ...
— Anderson Crow, Detective • George Barr McCutcheon
... didn't get. As long as any one else was by—her mother, or Miss French in charge of the twins—she and Portia chatted easily, on the best of terms. But, left alone with her—as it seemed to Rose she actually took pains not to be—Portia's manner took on that old ironic aloofness that had always silenced her when she was a girl. She made at last a resolute ...
— The Real Adventure • Henry Kitchell Webster
... experiences, and have been insatiable in her demands for petting. Why did she seem crushed and silent as to details? Honor had said the shock would account for her shaken and hysterical state; but it did not explain her strange aloofness. ...
— Banked Fires • E. W. (Ethel Winifred) Savi
... want to put you out none," said the applicant gently. His voice was extremely gentle, and there was about him all the shrinking aloofness of the naturally timid. The deputy looked him over with quiet amusement—slender fellow with the gentlest brown eyes—and then with a quick side glance invited the crowd to get in on ...
— The Seventh Man • Max Brand
... them well in those days when by the publication of the Studies in the Renaissance (1873) their author had just become famous. I recall very clearly the effect of that book, and of the strange and poignant sense of beauty expressed in it; of its entire aloofness also from the Christian tradition of Oxford, its glorification of the higher and intenser forms of esthetic pleasure, of "passion" in the intellectual sense—as against the Christian doctrine of self-denial and renunciation. It was a gospel that both stirred and scandalized Oxford. The bishop ...
— A Writer's Recollections (In Two Volumes), Volume I • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... half of dollars. She was plainly a visitor like himself, not at all identified with the inner life of the household. He fancied, moreover, that she in no way desired to be thus identified. She seemed to carry herself with a deliberate aloofness underlying her surface amiability. Then he had spoken his few words with her, once or twice, he had got this effect of stony reserve close beneath her smile and smooth words. True, this might mean only that she felt herself out of her element, just as ...
— The Market-Place • Harold Frederic
... war was the normal condition, the warrior was the normal pillar of the state. In how great a proportion of the time that history describes, war was the normal condition and peace the abnormal, few realize now in our country, because of the aloofness of the present generation from even the memory of war. Our last great war ended in 1865; and since then only the light and transient touch of the Spanish War has been laid upon us. Even that war ended seventeen years ago and since then only the distant rumblings of ...
— The Navy as a Fighting Machine • Bradley A. Fiske
... preserve of the well-to-do, and when one thinks of how greatly this is valued it seems a pity that it is not open to the talents, to the industry, to the enthusiasm of all the young of both sexes. But one exception I must make to the aloofness of people with degrees and professions from the preventible evils of the world, and that is in the profession that is the longest and the most exacting—the medical profession. The women doctors whom I have met in Adelaide, Melbourne, and Sydney have ...
— An Autobiography • Catherine Helen Spence
... communicating his willingness to be of use to Murchison, and Lorne felt all his old friendliness rise up in him as he cordially accepted the offer. It was made with British heartiness, it was thoroughly meant. Lorne was half-ashamed in his recognition of its quality. A certain aloofness had grown in him against his will since Hesketh had prolonged his stay in the town, difficult to justify, impossible to define. Hesketh as Hesketh was worthily admirable as ever, wholesome and agreeable, as well turned out by his conscience as he was ...
— The Imperialist • (a.k.a. Mrs. Everard Cotes) Sara Jeannette Duncan
... Annie again, but a fretted and outraged sense of Annie's coolness and aloofness, and a somewhat similar impression from Leslie's manner, when they met in Fifth Avenue one day, was always in her mind. They could drop her as easily as they had picked her up, these high-and-mighty Melroses! ...
— The Beloved Woman • Kathleen Norris
... Pan had carried on his pretense of aloofness from Lucy, apparently blind to the wondering appeal in her eyes. Long ago he had forgiven her. Yet he waited, divining surely that some day or night when an opportune moment came, she would voice the question ...
— Valley of Wild Horses • Zane Grey
... let us try and consider how our economic arrangements would strike a disinterested intelligence that looked at them freshly for the first time. Let us take some matter of primary economic importance, such as the housing of the population, and do our best to criticize it in this spirit of personal aloofness. ...
— New Worlds For Old - A Plain Account of Modern Socialism • Herbert George Wells
... would have found him dumb. Upper-most in his mind was a dream in which Joan had peeped down at him from a balloon that went ever and ever higher—like the Isle of Delight that was always—receding. He had sensed in her to-night that aerial aloofness he had felt when he blocked old Adam out from his dream of love. Liebestraum! The stabbing pain ...
— Kenny • Leona Dalrymple
... magnetism in a superlative degree in spite of her deliberate aloofness, Clavering had, of course, been conscious from the first. Had not every male first-nighter been conscious of it? There was a surfeit of beauty in New York. A stranger, even if invested with mystery, must possess the one irresistible magnet, combined with some unusual quality of looks, to ...
— Black Oxen • Gertrude Franklin Horn Atherton
... with Ali Partab, who looked sleepy, but still more ashamed of his unmilitary dishabille. Rosemary McClean glanced left and right—forgot about the awning and the custom which decrees aloofness—ignored the old woman's waving arm and Ali Partab's frown, and rode ...
— Rung Ho! • Talbot Mundy
... alone, loving the sunny warmth and thinking of the brother who had made her pleasure possible. Her secret mental attitude toward him was marked by a certain aloofness and a quietly judicial estimate which she did her best to conceal from her mother. It had cost her not a little effort, too, to keep this attitude from developing into stern censorious judgment. Just now it ...
— The Fate of Felix Brand • Florence Finch Kelly
... suavity to the muscular male body and restoring it to its proper place among the sinuous lines and broken curves of Nature. That the landscape was adapted from a copper-plate of Lucas van Leyden signifies nothing. It serves the soothing purpose which sensitive nerves, irritated by Michelangelo's aloofness from all else but thought and naked ...
— The Life of Michelangelo Buonarroti • John Addington Symonds
... to Lesley, and received very tender replies; but even then she felt a vague dissatisfaction with the girl's letters. They were full of a wistfulness which she could not understand: she felt that something remote had crept into them, some aloofness for which she could not account. And as Captain Harry Duchesne happened to come across her one day, and inquired very particularly after Miss Brooke, she induced him to promise to call on Lesley when he was in London, and to report to her all that Lesley ...
— Brooke's Daughter - A Novel • Adeline Sergeant
... wonder and, through that which the being of each expressed, each was shaken by the same inward thrill. Sometimes they simply sat and gazed at each other like happy amazed children scarcely able to translate their own delight. Their very aloofness from the world—its unawareness of their story's existence made for the perfection of ...
— Robin • Frances Hodgson Burnett
... a dense purple vapour indicated feelings of more than usual vigour. When this cleared away it left his outer form unchanged indeed, but the affable condescension of his manner was merged into one of dignified aloofness. ...
— Kai Lung's Golden Hours • Ernest Bramah
... most communities can be changed neither to harm nor to help them, have consequently ceased to consider the danger of losing their support of great import. The Democratic party, moreover, has continued almost unswervingly its attitude of aloofness from the Negro. The onesidedness of the Negro vote has been declared by some Negroes to be the cause of its non-importance. With this political view some few of them have allied themselves with the ...
— The Journal of Negro History, Volume 5, 1920 • Various
... friend, Miss Sinclair, in her relations with the man Spenser Gray. Spenser Gray, it seemed, had been behaving oddly. Ardent towards Miss Sinclair almost to an embarrassing point in the early stages of their acquaintance, he had suddenly cooled; at a recent lunch had behaved with a strange aloofness; and now, at this writing, had vanished altogether, leaving nothing behind him but an abrupt note to the effect that he had been compelled to go abroad and that, much as it was to be regretted, he and she would probably ...
— A Damsel in Distress • Pelham Grenville Wodehouse
... lovely girls were there. Whom would he meet? What should he see? A sudden kindness toward others poured through Terry Hollis. After all, every man might be a treasure to him. A queer choking came in his throat when he thought of all that he had missed by his contemptuous aloofness. ...
— Black Jack • Max Brand
... servitude had slipped by in an enervating monotony. With his quiet ways, tactful temper and air of kindly aloofness, he was popular with the more sensible boys, while the others left him in peace, as he did them. But there was one exception; Henri de Grizolles, a handsome young savage, proud of his aristocratic name, which he scribbled in big letters on his light trousers, ...
— The Aspirations of Jean Servien • Anatole France
... is Baby, a dainty elfin Dresden-china little creature of five, as fair as an angel and as deep as a well. The boys are but shallow, sparkling pools compared with this little girl with her self-repression and dainty aloofness. You know the boys, you never feel that you quite know the girl. Something very strong and forceful seems to be at the back of that wee body. Her will is tremendous. Nothing can break or even bend it. Only ...
— Danger! and Other Stories • Arthur Conan Doyle
... red brick walls against which fruit trees were trained and partly by a laurel hedge with a wood behind it. It was my habit to sit and write there under an aged writhen tree, gray with lichen and festooned with roses. The soft silence of it— the remote aloofness—were the most perfect ever dreamed of. But let me not be led astray by the garden. I must be firm and confine myself to the Robin. The garden shall be another story. There were so many people in this garden—people ...
— My Robin • Frances Hodgson Burnett
... friend, my friend, I would my tongue could cry as my heart cries— Turn back from darkness before the hour has struck! Even yet may mercy fold you. God is great And tender; and perhaps His love may clasp Even your aloofness, if at last your heart Calls in repentance to Him. O Faust, Faust, Sink your vain pride of spirit—kneel to Him— Beseech His mercy ere it is ...
— Mr. Faust • Arthur Davison Ficke
... women in one house. But the ranchmen themselves, with two or three exceptions, were content to be solicitous at long range—an abstention that relieved and at the same time troubled Huntington. He was not eager to talk with his neighbors about that episode at the post-office, but their aloofness filled him with uneasiness. Well, let them wait! They would hear from him again, and so ...
— The Heart of Thunder Mountain • Edfrid A. Bingham
... technical words were invented to give aloofness and seeming precision to philosophic and scientific discussion. Aristotle was the first to use words incomprehensible to the average citizen. It was in these conditions that the possibilities of human criticism first showed themselves. The primitive ...
— The Mind in the Making - The Relation of Intelligence to Social Reform • James Harvey Robinson
... of the French genius, which, despite its unsurpassed and almost unmatched literary faculty, has prevented it from contributing any of the very greatest masterpieces to the literature of the world, has communicated to them this aloofness, this, as it may almost be called, provincialism. But some such note there is in them, and it may be that the immense stretch of time during which they were worse than unknown—misknown—has ...
— The Flourishing of Romance and the Rise of Allegory - (Periods of European Literature, vol. II) • George Saintsbury
... is not necessary to expose this falsity in its crude and most violent forms. For we may find it expressed in an almost academic way, with philosophical aloofness, a show of nice reasoning, and a kind of Epicurean sweetness in a Romanes lecture delivered by Mr. Arthur James Balfour and published under the title Criticism and Beauty. It is worth while to study so responsible a writer, for ...
— Personality in Literature • Rolfe Arnold Scott-James
... left alone in their company had a sense of empty benches. Mrs. Vulcany once remarked that Miss Harleth was too fond of the gentlemen; but we know that she was not in the least fond of them—she was only fond of their homage—and women did not give her homage. The exception to this willing aloofness from her was Miss Arrowpoint, who often managed unostentatiously to be by her side, and talked to ...
— Daniel Deronda • George Eliot
... all new to Mary Fortune, this stern and barren country; and its people were new to her, too. The women, for some reason, had regarded her with suspicion and her answer was a patrician aloofness and reserve. When the day's work was done she took off her headband and sat reading in the lobby, alone. As for the men of the hotel, the susceptible young mining men who passed to and fro from Gunsight, they found her pleasant, but ...
— Rimrock Jones • Dane Coolidge
... to the humanitarianism of their law, and, in keeping with other nations, showed a tendency to restrict divine favours within the limits of their own land, and to maintain throughout their history an attitude of aloofness and repellent isolation which even amounted to intolerance towards other races. In early days, however, the obligation of hospitality was regarded as sacred.[23] Nor must we forget that, whatever may have been the Jewish practice, the promise enshrined in their revelation involves the unity ...
— Christianity and Ethics - A Handbook of Christian Ethics • Archibald B. C. Alexander
... some people." There an aloofness in his tone that did not encourage further remarks, but the young stranger was evidently not thin-skinned, or else he loved ...
— Cloudy Jewel • Grace Livingston Hill
... of trains through long hours, the change from one to another at small junctions, the day and night in a stage coach whose springs seemed to have lost resiliency, and the discourse of two drummers, Hebraic, the chill aloofness of a supercilious mining expert new to the district, and the heated discussions of two drill runners, veterans, off to a new field, and celebrating the journey with a demijohn. The latter were union men, and long after lie was tired of their babel they broached a conversation ...
— The Plunderer • Roy Norton
... its riches and still accepts with smug content its rows upon rows of ugly architecture, to sit dreaming, then, of red-tiled roofs, of cloud-caressed hills, of terraced vineyards, of cypresses in their dark aloofness, is not out of the natural order of things; but that into this idle and pleasant dream there should enter so divine a voice, living, feeling, pulsing, this was ...
— The Lure of the Mask • Harold MacGrath
... the United States naturally led to a high degree of animosity and unfriendly charges against the Missouri Synod. Her attitude of certainty and conviction in the doctrines which she championed was branded and denounced as "intolerance," "bigotry," "narrow-mindedness," "exclusiveness," "aloofness," "pride," "Pharisaism," etc. In his Problems and Possibilities Dr. Gerberding wrote: "We have often said that this body of Lutherans, more than all others, has saved the Germans of the Middle West from being swamped in materialism ...
— American Lutheranism - Volume 2: The United Lutheran Church (General Synod, General - Council, United Synod in the South) • Friedrich Bente
... eyes suggested suffering. Undoubtedly she had suffered. To the sympathetic observer, this would have been obvious; but to the calculating mind of Mrs. Bishop it presented itself in the form of a social aloofness which she was morbidly quick ...
— Sally Bishop - A Romance • E. Temple Thurston
... end he saw with some dismay that the old man had managed to make enemies among the emigrants by his aloofness. The sea was very smooth, these days, and, under smiling skies the steerage-deck was swarming. The stewardess announced that but one of all the seasick passengers, a young English girl, was left in the infirmary; the only ...
— The Old Flute-Player - A Romance of To-day • Edward Marshall and Charles T. Dazey
... meal with the Misses Bartlett was an ordeal he never forgot. Their formal aloofness and evident dismay at his presence were enough in themselves to embarrass him; but combined with the necessity of choosing the right knife and fork, of breaking his bread properly, and of removing his spoon from his coffee-cup, they were quite overpowering. During his two years in the ...
— Quin • Alice Hegan Rice
... many indirect, subtle, far-reaching ways in which the world and the Church interacted upon each other in all the great departments of speculation, art, industry, social and political life. A certain aloofness and coldness of judgment in dealing with sacred subjects was the reproach which was most frequently brought against him. As he himself said, he wrote rather as an historian than a religious instructor, and he dealt with his subject chiefly in its temporal, social, and political aspects. ...
— Historical and Political Essays • William Edward Hartpole Lecky
... and Jeanne were crossing the room together. Only the very tips of her fingers rested upon his coat-sleeve, and there was a marked aloofness about her walk and the carriage of her head. He was saying something to her to which she seemed to be paying the scantiest of attention. Her head was thrown back, and in her eyes was a great weariness. Suddenly, just as they reached the entrance, they saw her whole ...
— Jeanne of the Marshes • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... inquired, with manifest disdain. Mary turned to the maid, who now entered in response to the bell she had sounded a minute before. "Fanny, will you ask Miss Lynch to come in, please?" Then she faced the lawyer again, with an aloofness of manner that was contemptuous. "Really, Mr. Irwin," she drawled, "why don't you take ...
— Within the Law - From the Play of Bayard Veiller • Marvin Dana
... "straightness" for a gathering mesh of deceit. Attached to his name was an unsavoury reputation of card-playing for high stakes, of drinking too much, although not to the extent of actual drunkenness; and the character had alienated from him the friendship of serious men, and evoked a disapproving aloofness in the manner of his instructors. At the moment when he most needed help those who were best fitted to give it sedulously avoided his company, and in this first moment of meeting Darsie was tempted to ...
— A College Girl • Mrs. George de Horne Vaizey
... Burleigh did not admire gushing, demonstrative women, and a gushing wife would have wearied him inexpressibly. He felt an attraction in Bessie's aloofness, and said again, "She is worth the pains she will cost to win: a few years will mature her fine intelligence and make of her a perfect companion. I admire her courageous simplicity; there is a great deal in her character to ...
— The Vicissitudes of Bessie Fairfax • Harriet Parr
... the end of the wide forest path. Central African natives are never obese— comic papers to the contrary notwithstanding. Nevertheless, M'tela was a large man, amply built, his muscles overlaid by smoother, softer flesh. He possessed dignity without aloofness, a rare combination, and one that invariably indicates a true feeling of superiority. As he moved forward he glanced lazily and good-humouredly to right and left at his people, in the manner of a genial grown-up among small ...
— The Leopard Woman • Stewart Edward White et al
... power rather than a weakness; it involves interdependence. There is always danger that increased personal independence will decrease the social capacity of an individual. In making him more self-reliant, it makes him more self-sufficient; it may lead to aloofness and indifference. It often makes an individual so insensitive in his relation to others as to develop an illusion of being really able to stand and act alone, an unnamed form of insanity which is responsible for a large part of the remediable ...
— Creative Impulse in Industry - A Proposition for Educators • Helen Marot
... his immovability. There was something about him like a giant rock. She got the impression that one might dash against him forever and hurt no one but oneself. It was a trait new to her among American men, whom she generally found too yielding where women were concerned. This man had an aloofness, too, that was curiously disconcerting. He made no approaches; he took no liberties. If he showed anything that resembled a personal sentiment toward her, it was dislike. Making that reflection and using that word, she was almost startled. A woman had sometimes ...
— The Street Called Straight • Basil King
... 2 A.M. nightly by the faculty of the University of Munich, which there entertains the eminent scientists who constantly visit the city. No orchestra arouses the baser passions with "Wiener Blut." The place has calm, aloofness, intellectuality, aristocracy, distinction. It was the scene foreordained for the hatching of ...
— Europe After 8:15 • H. L. Mencken, George Jean Nathan and Willard Huntington Wright
... amusing, how she deceived herself—for the harmless self- deceptions of us chronic mummers are always amusing. The fact was, this melting and inviting mood had far more of nature and sincerity in it than there had been in her icy aloofness. Icy aloofness, except in the heroines of aristocratic novels, is a state of mind compatible only with extreme stupidity or with some one of those organic diseases that sour the disposition. Never had ...
— The Fashionable Adventures of Joshua Craig • David Graham Phillips
... way of expressing their aloofness from the revolution and, at the same time, their readiness to defend that revolution against anybody who attacks it from outside. Lenin, talking to me about the general attitude of the peasants, said: "Hegel ...
— The Crisis in Russia - 1920 • Arthur Ransome
... steps past the long blank wall on his way to the chicken-run and piggery that stood at the bottom of the meadow. The three children were perched at their accustomed look-out, and their range of sight did not seem to concern itself with Octavian's presence. As he became depressingly aware of the aloofness of their gaze he also noted a strange variegation in the herbage at his feet; the greensward for a considerable space around was strewn and speckled with a chocolate-coloured hail, enlivened here and there with gay tinsel-like wrappings or the glistening mauve of crystallised violets. ...
— The Toys of Peace • Saki
... that expressed the atmosphere of aloofness, the air of being suddenly walled around and set apart, that now marked the impulsive and social Corrie. It was with him when he came down to the dreary dinner, an ...
— From the Car Behind • Eleanor M. Ingram
... was a noticeable woman, a woman of temperament, not beautiful exactly, but with a stateliness about her, an aloofness. The more I studied her face, with its thin sensitive lips and commanding, almost imperious eyes, the more there seemed to be something peculiar about her. She was dressed very simply in black, but it was the simplicity that ...
— The War Terror • Arthur B. Reeve
... her aback. She laughed, a little breathlessly, to hide her discomposure, and scarce knew how to answer him, scarce knew whether she took pleasure or offense in his daring encroachment upon that royal aloofness in which she dwelt, and in which her Spanish rearing had taught her she must ...
— The Historical Nights Entertainment, Second Series • Rafael Sabatini
... in mind; here are men to whom painting is the most important thing in the world. Unfortunately, in their isolation they are apt, like the rest, to come on the parish. Theirs is no vulgar provincialism; but in its lack of receptivity, its too willing aloofness from foreign influences, its tendency to concentrate on a mediocre and rather middle-class ideal of honesty, it is, I suspect, typically British. There is nothing Tennysonian about these men, nothing Kiplingesque; their art is neither meretricious nor conceited; but it reminds ...
— Pot-Boilers • Clive Bell
... of I knew not what hidden emotion seemed to pass for one moment over her aristocratic features as she read it. But it vanished instantaneously, and she turned to me with her previous air of haughty and imperturbable aloofness. ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 156, April 23, 1919 • Various
... The whole business had hitherto appeared to me a trifle unreal, at any rate my own connection with it. I had been docilely obeying orders, but my real self had been standing aside and watching my doings with a certain aloofness. But that hour in the Tube station had brought me into the serum, and I saw the affair not as Bullivant's or even Blenkiron's, but as my own. Before I had been itching to get back to the Front; now I ...
— Mr. Standfast • John Buchan
... awe upon the Adelaide and its presiding genius, beholding in it the fine essence of New England neatness and in him a small, thin, nervous, insignificant- looking "colored gemman," who gazed past the sides of their faces with cold aloofness. Often, neighbors, passing the impressive entrance, heard from the lower regions of the building the sound of a high chuckle, deepening rapidly to a contralto gurgle, and then broadening out into a long, rich, velvety laugh as smooth as a flowing stream. ...
— Many Kingdoms • Elizabeth Jordan
... beyond I came again to a cluster of buildings, close to the corner of the crossroads, sheltered, homelike, inviting in a large natural bluff of tall, dark-green poplars. Those first two houses had had an aristocratic aloofness—I should not have liked to turn in there for shelter or for help. But this was prosperous, open-handed, well-to-do middle class; not that conspicuous "moneyedness" that we so often find in our new west when people have made their ...
— Over Prairie Trails • Frederick Philip Grove
... "Pieta" (Dead Christ) of the Florence Accademia, and the wonderful and most impressive "Crucifixion" of S. Maria Maddalena de' Pazzi (Florence) was commissioned by Pietro Pucci in 1493, though it was not completed till April of 1496. Unsurpassed here is the master in the solemnity, the sense of aloofness from earthly things, which he conveys to us in these six figures—the Crucified, with as spectators His mother, the beloved disciple, and kneeling saints, seen against the wide stretch of such an Umbrian background as we may see from Perugia or Cortona or Assisi; and next in importance to this masterpiece ...
— Perugino • Selwyn Brinton
... in the few days since his subterfuge had permitted him to speak to her. He had met her father and found himself liking the tall, silent man who went about the simple affairs of his life with such compelling dignity and courteous aloofness. Brunell had even invited him to his little shop and shown him with unsuspecting enthusiasm his process for making the maps which were sold ...
— The Crevice • William John Burns and Isabel Ostrander
... men and women, is a God before whom there must be awe and reverence, and not a flippant scouting of the ancient ideals. Man, who is so tried by temptation and scourging of the spirit, is a creature to be loved, appreciated, understood; not a being to whom shall be shown arrogance, aloofness, and pride. The university that makes snobs of its graduates has not yet entered ...
— The Warriors • Lindsay, Anna Robertson Brown
... taken into the outlaw band by Haydon, Deveny had exhibited fits of a sullen moroseness that had kept his closest friends from seeking his companionship. Those friends were few, for Deveny's attitude toward his men had always been that of the ruthless tyrant; he had treated them with an aloofness that had in it a contempt which they could not ignore. More—he was merciless, and had a furious temper which found its outlet in ...
— 'Drag' Harlan • Charles Alden Seltzer
... of his country. The knowledge of this provoked many jests among the boy's friends and caused him no slight embarrassment. It conspired with the shyness and reserve, which were innate in him, to win him from the outset a reputation for pride and aloofness. If he had not been forced to mix with those of his own age, and if he had not resolutely set himself to overcome this feeling, he might have grown into a student and a recluse. Both at school and ...
— Victorian Worthies - Sixteen Biographies • George Henry Blore
... in certain poises of head it suggested tragic sorrow. Or it might have been her wavy hair. Or even just that pointed chin stuck out a little, resentful and not particularly distinguished, doing away with the mysterious aloofness of her fragile presence. But any way at a given moment Anthony must have suddenly seen the girl. And then, that something had happened to him. Perhaps nothing more than the thought coming into his head that this was "a ...
— Chance - A Tale in Two Parts • Joseph Conrad
... not pause to observe how certainly this deficiency in humor and in the delineation of ordinary human feeling is connected with a recluse, a solitary, and to some extent an unsympathizing life. If we combine a certain natural aloofness from common men with literary habits and an incessantly studious musing, we shall at once see how powerful a force is brought to bear on an instinctively austere character, and how sure it will be to develop the peculiar tendencies of it, both good and evil. It was to no purpose that ...
— Harvard Classics Volume 28 - Essays English and American • Various
... softening had vanished out of Geoffrey Stonor's face. In its stead the look of aloofness that few dared brave, the warning 'thus far and no farther' stamped on ...
— The Convert • Elizabeth Robins
... she did not come, and the singing seemed suddenly a bitter mockery to Harold, who sought to solace himself with his pictures. The second week wore away and Jack came, but by that time the image of the girl had taken such aloofness of position in Harold's mind that he dared not ask about her, ...
— The Eagle's Heart • Hamlin Garland
... that special noise may be called when the world like a hound "gives tongue" and announces that the quarry in some form of genius is at bay, is apt to increase its clamour in proportion to the aloofness of the pursued animal,—and Innocent, who saw nothing remarkable in remaining somewhat secluded and apart from the ordinary routine of social life so feverishly followed by more than half her sex, was ...
— Innocent - Her Fancy and His Fact • Marie Corelli
... retirement; reclusion, recess; snugness &c. adj.; delitescence[obs3]; rustication, rus in urbe[Lat]; solitude; solitariness &c. (singleness) 87; isolation; loneliness &c. adj.; estrangement from the world, voluntary exile; aloofness. cell, hermitage; convent &c. 1000; sanctum sanctorum[Lat]. depopulation, desertion, desolation; wilderness &c. (unproductive) 169; howling wilderness; rotten borough, Old Sarum. exclusion, excommunication, banishment, exile, ostracism, proscription; cut, ...
— Roget's Thesaurus • Peter Mark Roget
... house went up to an accompaniment of scenes in which only the proprietor was irate. Osmond Orgreave could not be ruffled; he could not be deprived of his air of having done a favour to Darius Clayhanger; his social and moral superiority, his real aloofness, remained absolutely unimpaired. The clear image of him as a fine gentleman was never dulled nor distorted even in the mind of Darius. Nevertheless Darius 'hated the sight' of the house ere the house was roofed in. But this did not diminish his pride in the house. He wished he had never 'set ...
— Clayhanger • Arnold Bennett
... lost in her aloofness from mundane affairs: Taou Yuen in whispering silk, her grandfather's rotund tones, Laurel and Camilla and her mother, were distant, immaterial. In the evening she sat on the front steps, a web of white, dreamily intent ...
— Java Head • Joseph Hergesheimer
... city—when all the bright, gorgeous, rose-blooming South was waiting for them with open arms? 'Open arms'! Apparently it was only 'climates' that were allowed any such privileges with girls like Cornelia. Yet, after all, wasn't it just exactly that very quality of serene, dignified aloofness that had attracted him first to Cornelia among the score of ...
— Molly Make-Believe • Eleanor Hallowell Abbott
... seemed surprised at this; however, she had her instructions, and so did not hesitate. She opened the door, stood aside for them to enter, and then followed them in. It was Nora's dressing-room, a place of soft colors, of cool aloofness, and as Bat Scanlon breathed the air of it, with its delicate suggestion of scent, he had a feeling that he was venturing too far; he felt that his act was almost profanation. Through an open door at one end he caught a glimpse of a white bed; but it was ...
— Ashton-Kirk, Criminologist • John T. McIntyre
... "I have to thank you, sir, for your courtesy to my niece." He had assumed an air of reserve, of distinct aloofness, despite his studied politeness. Bryce stepped forward with extended hand, which the Colonel grasped in a manner vaguely suggestive of that clammy-palmed creation of Charles Dickens—Uriah Heep. Bryce was tempted to squeeze ...
— The Valley of the Giants • Peter B. Kyne
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