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More "Exasperating" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... nothing more exasperating to the mind of a man than to find all his kindness and favour slighted; neither is the Lord Jesus so provoked with anything, as when sinners abuse his means of grace; if it be barren and fruitless under my gospel; if it turn my grace into wantonness, if after digging ...
— The Works of John Bunyan • John Bunyan
... retorted the Dame with exasperating coolness. "Nicholas Snyders is not himself when at the bidding of a pretty-faced doll he flings his money out of the window with both hands. He is a creature bewitched, and I am sorry for him. She'll fool you for the sake of her friends till you haven't a cent left, ...
— The Soul of Nicholas Snyders - Or, The Miser Of Zandam • Jerome K. Jerome
... in my mind let me advise women who have married disgusting men to seek whatever shelter the law may give them rather than adopt her persistently cold and aloof manner. I hardly wonder that her husband found her a little exasperating. We all know Mr. W.E. NORRIS as a novelist who can be trusted not only to tell an intriguing story, but also to construct it irreproachably. But here, I think, he has penalised himself with the materials he has chosen. However he sets bravely to work to wipe off his handicap, and ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 156, May 21, 1919. • Various
... proposal through him rather than the usual channel, and again asked to see me, but I declined to give any other answer, adding that you and the French Ambassr. could make the most Confidential as well as Official Communications[619]." This rebuff was not regarded as final, though exasperating, by Lindsay, nor by the Confederate agents, all being agreed that Napoleon was about to take an active hand in their favour. Lindsay returned to Paris accompanied by Mason, and on April 18 had still another conversation ...
— Great Britain and the American Civil War • Ephraim Douglass Adams
... having begun to sting him he leaves the honey and rushes to revenge himself. And as he seeks to be revenged on all those that sting him, he is revenged on none; in such wise that his rage is turned to madness, and he flings himself on the ground, vainly exasperating, by his hands and feet, the foes against which he ...
— The Notebooks of Leonardo Da Vinci, Complete • Leonardo Da Vinci
... to its position in a new outpost line, and we proceeded to dig positions with such effect that by nightfall 500 yards of trench were ready for occupation. Barbed wire and extra tools were brought up from Bardawil station by tired camels, and tired camels are if possible more exasperating than fresh camels, especially to tired men. On the 29th the Commander-in-Chief rode round our new line, which was by this time in good order, and the spear-head had again been pushed a mile or two nearer the Promised Land. It was at Salmana we received instructions issued by G.H.Q. and ...
— The Fifth Battalion Highland Light Infantry in the War 1914-1918 • F.L. Morrison
... got rid of the committee of exasperating buffoons, he was now prolonging breakfast far beyond the usual hour. The meal was over at last; and still he felt disinclined to move. Those people had disquieted his composure with their mephitic rant about philanthropy; they had almost succeeded in spoiling his morning. And now ...
— South Wind • Norman Douglas
... 84th battery. All day the Boer snipers clung to the column, as they had done to French's cavalry in the same district. Mere route marches without a very definite and adequate objective appear to be rather exasperating than overawing, for so long as the column is moving onwards the most timid farmer may be tempted into long-range fire from the flanks or rear. The river was reached and the Boers driven from a position which they had taken up, but their signal fires brought mounted ...
— The Great Boer War • Arthur Conan Doyle
... and what not. He is put aside; but in the next act we see the poison at work in Elsa's mind. She and her unknown husband are left alone, and, as Nietzsche observed, they sit up too late. Elsa, with all the exasperating pertinacity of an illogical, curious woman, persists in questioning Lohengrin, getting nearer and nearer to the vital matter, until at last she can restrain herself no longer. In fancy she sees the swan returning to carry off her lover; and, wholly terrified, she asks, "Who ...
— Wagner • John F. Runciman
... smile, and bow, to a mad bull, in hopes of a reciprocation of politeness. When among wild beasts, if they menace you, be a wild beast. Neither is it unlikely that this was the view taken by Allen. For, besides the exasperating tendency to self-assertion which such treatment as his must have bred on a man like him, his experience must have taught him, that by assuming the part of a jocular, reckless, and even braggart barbarian, he would better sustain himself against bullying turnkeys than by submissive quietude. ...
— Israel Potter • Herman Melville
... in its face; its rigour is civil and gentle, tempered with pity for the faults and errors which it disliketh, with the desire of their amendment and recovery whom it reprehendeth. It would inflict no more evil than is necessary; it would cure its neighbour's disease without exasperating his patience, troubling his modesty, or impairing his credit. As it always judgeth candidly, ...
— Sermons on Evil-Speaking • Isaac Barrow
... preparing had been retarded; for Greifenstein was a man of habit in everything, incapable of weariness in the performance of what he considered to be his duty, and Clara's really strong health might have carried her through half a lifetime of exasperating stagnation. Indeed, if things altered at all after the conversation about her state, the change was for the better. A fictitious calm descended upon the old house, and a certain gentleness found its way into the relations of the couple which was agreeable to both. With Clara this was the ...
— Greifenstein • F. Marion Crawford
... or three of the Society group, there are now thriving colonies of these insects, who promise ere long to supplant altogether the aboriginal sand-flies. They sting, buzz, and torment, from one end of the year to the other, and by incessantly exasperating the natives materially obstruct the benevolent labours ...
— Typee - A Romance of the South Sea • Herman Melville
... dhotie or loin cloth, and possibly a snake basket or two. He is a poor man or "gareeb admi" and looks it. He starts a whine in the hope of getting an audience through sympathy. If he does not whine he assumes an air of superiority that is somewhat exasperating. At sleight-of-hand he is far below the level of the average European performer. He spoils his art by the continual diving into his bag ostentatiously to dig out the bone of a cow or an antiquated "dolly," of the rag doll type. If only he would do his little tricks away from his impedimenta ...
— Indian Conjuring • L. H. Branson
... will be fairies rather than devils—malicious little spirits, who blight the growing corn; stop the butter from forming in the churn; pinch the sluttish housemaid black and blue; and whose worst act is the exchange of the baby from its cot for a fairy changeling;—beings of a nature most exasperating to thrifty housewife and hard-handed farmer, but nevertheless not irrevocably prejudiced against humanity, and easily to be pacified and reduced into a state of fawning friendship by such little attentions ...
— Elizabethan Demonology • Thomas Alfred Spalding
... of business, for George found heavy debts in existence—mortgages on the pits and so forth—when he succeeded. But as the head of a household Sir William showed extraordinary tenacity and spirit in the defence of his petty cash; and the exasperating extravagance of the wife whom, in a moment of infatuation, he had been cajoled into marrying, intensified and embittered a ...
— Sir George Tressady, Vol. I • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... marry a Ward Must come to me for my accord: So in my court I sit all day, Giving agreeable girls away, With one for him - and one for he - And one for you - and one for ye - And one for thou - and one for thee - But never, oh never a one for me! Which is exasperating, ...
— Songs of a Savoyard • W. S. Gilbert
... agreed. That was the exasperating thing. Always hard to believe, perhaps, until after all the cries of wolf the wolf came; until after nineteen harmless flares the twentieth revealed to the watching enemy the figure of a man above the wheat, when a crackling chorus of bullets would suddenly break the silence of night ...
— My Year of the War • Frederick Palmer
... which led me a pretty dance at the mouth of Patapedia. He came to the fly just at dusk, rising very softly and quietly, as if he did not really care for it but only wanted to see what it was like. He went down at once into deep water, and began the most dangerous and exasperating of all salmon-tactics, moving around in slow circles and shaking his head from side to side, with sullen pertinacity. This is called "jigging," and unless it can be stopped, the ...
— Little Rivers - A Book Of Essays In Profitable Idleness • Henry van Dyke
... never occurred to you," she said, with that exasperating coldness of the voice, "that I was equal to the situation. I suppose you thought Mr. Grimes had only to beckon and I would joyfully answer. I'll have you know, Monty Brewster, right now, that I am quite able to choose my friends, and to handle them. Mr. Grimes has character and I like him. He has ...
— Brewster's Millions • George Barr McCutcheon
... scenes, its subject; the paper it's printed on, the type, the binding. But above all, I like its heroine. I think Pauline de Fleuvieres the pearl of human women—the cleverest, the loveliest, the most desirable, the most exasperating. And also the most feminine. I can't think of her at all as a mere fiction, a mere shadow on paper. I think of her as a living, breathing, flesh-and-blood woman, whom I have actually known. I can see her before me now—I can see her eyes, full of mystery and mischief—I can see her ...
— The Cardinal's Snuff-Box • Henry Harland
... each. You must begin at the right volume, or you'll be sorry. You see, they never really end, although every volume is supposed to be complete in itself. They leave off at the most exciting point, and are continued in the next volume. I call that a pretty good idea, but it's rather exasperating if you begin at the last book. You'll enjoy this lot. I'm ...
— In the Midst of Alarms • Robert Barr
... thousand of his people would have to be extricated from the province and carried to the coast. After many and exasperating discussions, Stanley refused to wait longer, and Emin, who had become nearly blind, brought away with him about five hundred persons. The expedition then, over a southeasterly route, made ...
— Great Men and Famous Women. Vol. 6 of 8 • Various
... probably might have been publicly scourged for it, had the rulers chosen to moderate their vengeance. But he "meant to be prosecuted for treason, not for felony," to use the words of a modern offender. He therefore commenced the most exasperating attacks on all the powerful, calling them hypocrites and whited sepulchres and vipers' brood; and denouncing upon them the "condemnation of hell." He was successful. He had both enraged the rulers up to the point of thirsting for his ...
— Phases of Faith - Passages from the History of My Creed • Francis William Newman
... nature suffer in a year or two. Came out in her narrative, link by link, the gentle delicious complacency of the first period, the chill airs that soon ruffled it, the glowing hopes, the misgivings that dashed them; then the diminution of confidence, more complexing and exasperating than its utter loss; the alternations of joy and doubt, the fever and the ague of the wounded spirit; then the gusts of hatred followed by deeper love; later still, the periodical irritation at hopes long ...
— Love Me Little, Love Me Long • Charles Reade
... Benton's narrative of it is at once the most amusing and the most affecting piece of gossip which our political annals contain. Randolph, as the most unmanageable of members of Congress, had been for fifteen years a thorn in Mr. Clay's side, and Clay's later politics had been most exasperating to Mr. Randolph; but the two men loved one another in their hearts, after all. Nothing has ever exceeded the thorough-bred courtesy and tender consideration with which they set about the work of putting one another to death; and their joy was unbounded when, after the second fire, each discovered ...
— Famous Americans of Recent Times • James Parton
... us the horse-teams came in, and went on, top-heavy with stores for "inside"; but the "Macs" were now thinking of the dry stages ahead, and were travelling at the exasperating rate of about four miles a day, as they "nursed the bullocks" through the good ...
— We of the Never-Never • Jeanie "Mrs. Aeneas" Gunn
... death or the youth for whom I languish can alone end my tortures. If thou art, then, as wise as I hold thee to be, bestow such counsel and help on me as may lighten my anguish, or, at least, abstain from exasperating it by censuring that to which my soul, unable to act differently, is inclined ...
— La Fiammetta • Giovanni Boccaccio
... princess— Tattiana finds in loneliness. Together moments one or two They sat, but conversation's flow Deserted Eugene. He, distraught, Sits by her gloomily, desponds, Scarce to her questions he responds, Full of exasperating thought. He fixedly upon her stares— She calm ...
— Eugene Oneguine [Onegin] - A Romance of Russian Life in Verse • Aleksandr Sergeevich Pushkin
... nevertheless, notwithstanding, and but," said the Kid with exasperating calmness, "you won't get a price on him. I can quote some myself. The voice of wisdom ...
— Old Man Curry - Race Track Stories • Charles E. (Charles Emmett) Van Loan
... confused thoughts the exasperating consciousness that it was nonsense to be frightened, or even disturbed; that, in truth, nothing whatever had happened. But he could not lay hold of it to any comforting purpose. Some perverse force within him insisted on raising new phantoms in his path, and directing his ...
— The Market-Place • Harold Frederic
... disappeared in the "extension" without another word. I followed my little guide, who was perhaps more actively curious, but equally unresponsive. To my various questions he simply returned a smile of exasperating vacuity. But he never took his eager eyes from me, and I was satisfied that not a detail of my appearance escaped him. Leading the way behind the house to a little wood, whose only "clearing" had been effected by decay or storm, he stood silently apart while I picketed ...
— Colonel Starbottle's Client and Other Stories • Bret Harte
... was also tired, should grow more cheerful. His thoughts kept harping upon Ferrand: "This must be something like what he described to me, tramping on and on when you're dead-beat, until you can cadge up supper and a bed." And sulkily he kept on ploughing through the mud with glances at the exasperating Crocker, who had skinned one heel and was limping horribly. It suddenly came home to him that life for three quarters of the world meant physical exhaustion every day, without a possibility of alternative, and that as soon as, for some cause beyond control, they failed thus to exhaust themselves, ...
— Forsyte Saga • John Galsworthy
... heaven. Out of gratitude to his Christian soldiers, he published an edict, in which he confessed himself indebted for his delivery to the shower obtained, PERHAPS, by the prayers of the Christians;[8] and more he could not say without danger of exasperating the pagans. In it he forbade, under pain of death, any one to accuse a Christian on account of his religion; yet, by a strange inconsistency, especially in so wise a prince, being overawed by the opposition ...
— The Lives of the Fathers, Martyrs, and Principal Saints - January, February, March • Alban Butler
... breakfast. My inquiries for refreshments are met with importunities of bin bacalem, from five hundred of the rag-tag and bobtail of the frontier, the rowdiest and most inconsiderate mob imaginable. In their eagerness and impatience to see me ride, and their exasperating indifference to my own pressing wants, some of them tell me bluntly there is no bread; others, more considerate, hurry away and bring enough bread to feed a dozen people, and one fellow contributes a couple of onions. Pocketing the onions and some of the bread, I mount ...
— Around the World on a Bicycle V1 • Thomas Stevens
... D'Annunzio, Shaw, or Claudel, it may be said that Ibsen was their better. Since Mozart, music has just kept her nose above the slough of realism, romance, and melodrama. Music seems to be where painting was in the time of Courbet; she is drifting through complex intellectualism and a brilliant, exasperating realism, to arrive, I hope, at greater purity.[26] Contemporary painting is the one manifest triumph of the young age. Not even the oldest and wisest dare try to smile it away. Those who cannot love Cezanne and ...
— Art • Clive Bell
... over at Catherine's. Not an unusual occurrence with me, but on a more than usually important mission. I needn't note down how I achieved it. Am I likely to forget my impotent speeches? Still, she had given me plenty of excuse for supposing she liked me, and I said so. And then Catherine laughed her exasperating little laugh that always dries up all sentiment on the spot, and makes my blood boil with anger. "I like you?" she repeated mockingly; "not at all! not in the least! What can ...
— The Argosy - Vol. 51, No. 4, April, 1891 • Various
... exasperating future, as a scrawny woman with an eternal grievance. Too, she thought Pete to be a very fastidious person concerning the appearance ...
— Maggie: A Girl of the Streets • Stephen Crane
... the earth more nearly than any other heavenly body. Its diameter is within 120 miles of the earth's diameter. The exasperating fact about Venus, however, is that it is shrouded in deep banks of clouds and vapors which make it impossible for us to secure any definite facts about it. The atmosphere about Venus is so dense that ...
— Lectures in Navigation • Ernest Gallaudet Draper
... and invited her soul. Her glorious ash-gold hair, whose habit of crinkling from the roots was so exasperating to contemporaries of her own sex, swept loose over the pillows, charmingly framing ...
— V. V.'s Eyes • Henry Sydnor Harrison
... 'Under the exasperating effect of these petty grievances your people forget what they owe to the United States. They lose sight of the danger of alienating their best friend. In the Boxer War, when Peking was captured by a combined force of eight foreign ...
— The Awakening of China • W.A.P. Martin
... being more than exasperating, Mrs. Cricklander thought, as they went through the park. Not content with Lord Freynault, who was plainly devoted to her, she kept every now and then looking back at John Derringham with some lively sally, and although he was being particularly agreeable to herself, he responded ...
— Halcyone • Elinor Glyn
... opportunity that was mine to fulfil the destiny of my sex and at the same time become the wife of the man she had long wished me to marry. The power of money was dear to her. She understood it well, and my failure to appreciate it properly was peculiarly exasperating to her. Discussion was useless. It never got farther than where it started. If I said that which I wanted much to say, it would merely mean hearing again what I did not want to hear. Concerning the pursuit of a happy livelihood we were ...
— People Like That • Kate Langley Bosher
... do so, for the daring and successful rescue of the prisoner under sentence of death stirred the city of Liege to its very depths. To the people it was an example of courage and self-sacrifice joined to determined and skilful leadership; to the Germans it was most exasperating evidence of their inability to crush this people notwithstanding their many and varied methods of repression. The affair was hushed up by the governor so far as he was able to do so, but it eventually became known that it had been the cause of a violent altercation between him and ...
— Two Daring Young Patriots - or, Outwitting the Huns • W. P. Shervill
... peculiarly exasperating effect upon men of a different type; and Willis became the butt of the more old-fashioned critics, who vied with each other in inventing opprobrious epithets to shower upon the head of this young puppy of journalism. ...
— Little Memoirs of the Nineteenth Century • George Paston
... are fair scholars, firm friends, and good planners; they make few mistakes, and succeed pretty well in all they do. Order does not make a genius; but a genius without order is exasperating when he is a man, and is only pardoned for his want of order when he is a boy because he is expected to do better each day. Begin with orderly habits; next day try order in thought; and then will follow naturally ...
— The True Citizen, How To Become One • W. F. Markwick, D. D. and W. A. Smith, A. B.
... George. I've told all the Blackstable people that I've forgiven her and that Sir Herbert has written to say he wants to make my acquaintance. And I've got a new dress on purpose to go to the wedding. Oh! she's a cruel and exasperating thing, George; I never liked her. You were ...
— Orientations • William Somerset Maugham
... on sardonically, "you know that too. You know that I loathe and detest life—that I hate the morning because it begins a new day. Oh, I am bored to extinction, you know all that, you most exasperating woman. I hate"—he suddenly seemed to see that he was giving her pain, and the next words were muttered to himself—"no, I love ...
— Great Possessions • Mrs. Wilfrid Ward
... could only see the faces of the two ladies on the front seat, and his eyes expressed, from time to time, rather painful thoughts. Forced, by her position, to let herself be looked at, Beatrix constantly avoided meeting the young man's eyes, and practised a manoeuvre most exasperating to lovers; she held her shawl crossed and her hands crossed over it, apparently plunged ...
— Beatrix • Honore de Balzac
... sensitive to all that was exasperating in the condition and by no means indisposed to support the just complaints of our injured citizens, I still deemed it my duty, for the preservation of important American interests which were directly involved, ...
— A Compilation of the Messages and Papers of the Presidents - Section 3 (of 3) of Volume 8: Grover Cleveland, First Term. • Grover Cleveland
... beside us with a sudden terrifying plunge and splashed straight at the canoe. Only the quickest kind of work saved us. Simmo swung the bow off, with a startled grunt of his own, and I paddled away, while the bull, mistaking us in the dim light for the exasperating cow that had been calling and hiding herself for a week, followed after us into ...
— Wood Folk at School • William J. Long
... "cow-puncher" to recognise in Mr. D—— an ancient enemy, and make a vicious attack upon him with blank cartridges and much pomp and circumstance. Still it had no permanent effect on Mr. D——. Badinage could not wither him nor cussing stale his infinite variety. With all his exasperating traits, he had an impassable child-like faith in his doings and a soothing influence that made one smile when one wanted ...
— Red Saunders' Pets and Other Critters • Henry Wallace Phillips
... "Miss Wiseacre" had not so much as made an assertion,—only asked a question. However, the Leaflanders must be excused, because they were quite beside themselves with terror, and, moreover, a question is sometimes more exasperating than fire and sword. ...
— Our Young Folks, Vol 1, No. 1 - An Illustrated Magazine • Various
... so exasperating to me as the idea that the natives of this country have no sense of humor and no faculty for mirth. This phase of their character is well understood by those whose fortune or misfortune it has been to live among them day in and day out at their homes. I don't believe I ever heard ...
— Indian Boyhood • [AKA Ohiyesa], Charles A. Eastman
... given, and had to be brought back with the whip, the other dogs looking disgusted meanwhile, like honourable gentlemen at a cad who won't play fair. Angelica, shouting and laughing, made as much noise in her way as the dogs did in theirs, and the din was deafening; an exasperating kind of din too, not incessant, but intermittent, now swelling to a climax, now lulling, until there seemed some hope that it would cease altogether, then bursting out again, whip cracking, dogs howling and barking, feet scampering, ...
— The Heavenly Twins • Madame Sarah Grand
... he answered in that superior manner which is so exasperating at times. "I got that note from Lanning for the purpose of getting the man to tell ...
— The Master Detective - Being Some Further Investigations of Christopher Quarles • Percy James Brebner
... red-hot coins from the nippers of a pair of tongs. It was not that Mac Tavish lacked the spirit of charity, but that he wanted every man to know to the full the grand and noble goodness of the Morrisons, and be properly grateful, as he himself was. Dow's complacency in his hallucination was exasperating! ...
— All-Wool Morrison • Holman Day
... that the offer was overbold," he replied, with a self-complacency that made his profession of humility exasperating. "If all the skates is off, I will, by Miss Wilson's order, carry them and the camp-stool ...
— An Unsocial Socialist • George Bernard Shaw
... agreed upon, settled a vexatious quarrel over our Northeastern boundary, it overthrew the British claim to exercise the right of search, and it established the right of property in slaves on an American vessel driven by stress of weather into a British port. But the treaty did not settle the exasperating controversy over the fisheries on the North Atlantic coast or the disputed Northwestern boundary. When the treaty finally reached the Senate, it was debated for several weeks in executive session, Mr. Benton leading a strong opposition to it. Near the close of the debate Mr. ...
— Perley's Reminiscences, Vol. 1-2 - of Sixty Years in the National Metropolis • Benjamin Perley Poore
... herself so unamiable and unloveable as during the next two days. She hardly addressed her husband and she flounced about the room and tossed her head and hummed music-hall ditties (which she had caught from Saidie) under her breath, and altogether comported herself in the most exasperating fashion. ...
— If Only etc. • Francis Clement Philips and Augustus Harris
... bow of the wretched riverine steamer Honda, Padre Jose de Rincon gazed with vacant eyes upon the scenery on either hand. The boat had arrived from Barranquilla that morning, and was now experiencing the usual exasperating delay in embarking from Calamar. He had just returned to it, after wandering for hours through the forlorn little town, tormented physically by the myriad mosquitoes, and mentally by a surprising eagerness to reach his destination. He could account for the latter only ...
— Carmen Ariza • Charles Francis Stocking
... life and passion. Compared to the experience of, say, Bossuet, how much wider was Augustin's! And with all that, a quivering sensitiveness which is again like our own—the sensitiveness of times of intense culture, wherein the abuse of thought has multiplied the ways of suffering in exasperating the desire for pleasure. "The soul of antiquity was rude and vain." It was, above all, limited. The soul of Augustin is tender and serious, eager for certainties and those enjoyments which do not betray. It ...
— Saint Augustin • Louis Bertrand
... "It's simply exasperating," she exclaimed, "to see a young fellow of his inches absorbed in American antiquities when the honor and liberty of America are at stake. Then, at times, he permits such an expression of sadness to come into his big black eyes! He is distant enough, but ...
— An Original Belle • E. P. Roe
... fulfilled my highest expectations, I remember being struck with the kindly look of his eyes, and indeed they did not belie his nature, for he always treated me with great kindness, patience and indulgence, which is somewhat remarkable considering my age, and how exasperating I must have been sometimes. I soon began to regard him as a never-failing fount of wisdom, and as one who could answer any question one liked to put to him. Of this latter fact I was not slow to take advantage. I plied him with every kind of question my imaginative young brain could ...
— Alfred Russel Wallace: Letters and Reminiscences Vol 2 (of 2) • James Marchant
... for whatever he did that was out of place. During a great many years the young prince suffered from what is called technically otitis media, namely, a disease of the middle ear, very painful, exasperating and even somewhat humiliating to endure, and which he must have inherited in some extraordinary way from his great-uncle, King William IV. of Prussia, who died insane. There are certainly some traits of resemblance between this hapless monarch and the present occupant ...
— The Secret Memoirs of the Courts of Europe: William II, Germany; Francis Joseph, Austria-Hungary, Volume I. (of 2) • Mme. La Marquise de Fontenoy
... to assist in picking up the prostrate correspondence. But Traveler was beforehand with him. Warning the priest, with a low growl, not to interfere with another person's business, the dog picked up the letters in his mouth, and carried them by installments to his master's feet. Even then, the exasperating Winterfield went no further than patting Traveler. Father Benwell's endurance reached its limits. "Pray don't stand on ceremony with me," he said. "I will look at the newspaper ...
— The Black Robe • Wilkie Collins
... "Well, almost anything short of a hurricane would be better than these exasperating calms. The swell seems to have risen a bit since I ...
— The Pirate Slaver - A Story of the West African Coast • Harry Collingwood
... family were imprisoned for reading the Bible with their friends in their own house; when monks swarmed everywhere, gross and dirty; when, at the centers of power, the Jesuits had it all their own way,—as they generally do when the final exasperating impulse is needed to bring on a revolution. All old abuses of the church were at their highest flavor. So far as ceremonial was concerned, nothing could be more gorgeous than the services at St. Peter's as conducted by Pope Pius IX. For such duties no one ...
— Autobiography of Andrew Dickson White Volume II • Andrew Dickson White
... that the orders of the day should not be postponed, which he supported in a spirited address, mainly on the ground of the great inconvenience that must be suffered from the postponement of the Corn Bill. The motion of the Secretary of State would produce a long, exciting, and exasperating debate. Time would be lost—for what? To advance one stage of a measure which it was avowedly not the intention of the government to press at the present moment. Sir William concluded with a very earnest appeal to Lord George ...
— Lord George Bentinck - A Political Biography • Benjamin Disraeli
... thought without following out any one of them to its conclusion, are characteristic of this type of definitions. They are as devoid of vitality as a long drawn-out yawn, and their want of logic is exasperating. The merest tyro can see that one can profess the principles they embody without being a Jew. There are many sects that would heartily subscribe to all of them. Universalists, Deists, Theists, Unitarians, and even Ethical Culturists hold these doctrines. As matters stand at present, these sects ...
— The Menorah Journal, Volume 1, 1915 • Various
... where they touched or lifted the contents with a mocking hand, and at times carried the joke so far as to have some of the things removed. But they helped put them back with a smile for the odd taste of the Government. I do not suppose that an exasperating duty was ...
— Imaginary Interviews • W. D. Howells
... thought of criticizing the moon as their pastor. He belonged to the course of nature, like markets and toll-gates and dirty bank-notes; and being a vicar, his claim on their veneration had never been counteracted by an exasperating claim on their pockets. Some of them, who did not indulge in the superfluity of a covered cart without springs, had dined half an hour earlier than usual—that is to say, at twelve o'clock—in order to have time for ...
— Scenes of Clerical Life • George Eliot
... to silence him; representing to him how far he was wandering from the subject they came to talk upon; how indecent it was to insult a man in his own house, especially, after arriving on purpose to conclude a reconciliation with him. All Bissy could say simply had the effect of exasperating the Marechal, and of making him vomit forth the most extravagant insults that insolence ...
— The Memoirs of Louis XIV., His Court and The Regency, Complete • Duc de Saint-Simon
... the King, lightly, and with the exasperating air of a man softening a snub; "what delightful weather we are having! You must find your official robes warm, my Lord. I designed them for your ...
— The Napoleon of Notting Hill • Gilbert K. Chesterton
... uttered a wild prolonged roar. Martin, who wished to entice the beast on to solid ground, where he could grapple with him better than in the midst of this unknown morass, and also, by way of provocation, cracked his long whip loudly. Maddened still more by this exasperating sound, the wild beast arose from his resting-place and rushed upon the horseman, who immediately turned his horse and fled out of the swamp, enticing ...
— A Hungarian Nabob • Maurus Jokai
... retorted Hampton, with exasperating coolness, his revolver's muzzle held steady; "but, just the same, it's got to be done. I know you far too well to take chances on your gun. ...
— Bob Hampton of Placer • Randall Parrish
... state of warfare and hostility; that the recall of the French Minister from Madrid would contribute to this result, for both in the Cortes and the Andalusian Junta expressions would be uttered offensive to the French Government, and misrepresentations would be made which would have the effect of exasperating the parties and of widening the breach; and that there being no agent of France at Madrid to furnish explanations and destroy the effect of the misrepresentations, there would be a constant correspondence ...
— The Greville Memoirs - A Journal of the Reigns of King George IV and King William - IV, Volume 1 (of 3) • Charles C. F. Greville
... Jane and himself the sympathy was perfect. And in despite of scruple he would before long have obeyed the natural impulse of his heart, had it not been that still graver complications declared themselves, and by exasperating his over-sensitive pride made him reckless of the pain he gave to others so long as his own self-torture ...
— The Nether World • George Gissing
... Undoubtedly that's what he was. A dark, immovable irritation at everybody lived in him. He always used to place himself, as it were, like a dead weight in the center of things, and wrathfully say, 'I, I, I.' There was something bourgeois in this, low, and exasperating." She smiled, and again took in everybody ...
— Mother • Maxim Gorky
... was neither gracious nor lovely, but nothing softer than its iron hand could have done its necessary work. The Puritan character was narrow, intolerant, and exasperating. The forefathers were very "sour" in the estimation of Morton and his merry company at Mount Wollaston. But for all that, Bradstreet and Carver and Winthrop were better forefathers than the gay Morton, and the Puritan spirit is doubtless the ...
— Literary and Social Essays • George William Curtis
... he had never spoken to a creature in the boarding-house, though he had been an inmate of it for six weeks. For the rest, he was clever and intelligent, with frank, honest, boyish ways, which I liked, even though they were sometimes rather exasperating. ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, October, 1877, Vol. XX. No. 118 • Various
... said Herennia, smiling with an exasperating deliberation. "And then it has all come out in ...
— A Friend of Caesar - A Tale of the Fall of the Roman Republic. Time, 50-47 B.C. • William Stearns Davis
... sometimes gives a rough answer, and at other times plays a little with her questioner as if in contempt. "By the Blessed Mary, I know not!" is evidently an outburst of impatience at the exhausting, exasperating folly of some of these questions, and this will be further visible in future sittings. It seems very likely that the reference to Poitiers, which was an excellent suggestion, commending itself to ...
— Jeanne d'Arc - Her Life And Death • Mrs.(Margaret) Oliphant
... expected to find a member of the great European brotherhood just there in a little town in the heart of Sweden, and, taken unawares, fell an easy prey. However, they do not invariably succeed in that way: sometimes, if their officiousness is excessive, their English very exasperating and the traveler a little fractious as well as tired, they get the tables turned on them. A lady just arrived at Genoa, when halfway to the hotel with one of these persuasive personages snatched her bag out of his hand and walked into ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science Vol. XV., No. 85. January, 1875. • Various
... his exasperating coolness, "I propose that each do his best. I don't suppose you want any baby play. I don't. I invite you to hit me as often and as hard as you can. I'm going to do the same ...
— Brave Tom - The Battle That Won • Edward S. Ellis
... favoured being indeed if you feel prepared, and are able at the right time to call to your standard thoughts that will aid you in that supreme effort. It happens too often that your trumpet call is unheeded. It is most perplexing and exasperating that just at the moment when you need your memory and a nice sense of discrimination, these faculties take to themselves wings and fly away. The facts you have garnered with such infinite trouble invariably fail ...
— Story of My Life • Helen Keller
... out his threat. Now, when she realised he was determined, she had one wild thought of flying to the club and warning her son. A moment's consideration put that idea out of the question. She called the serving-maid, who came, as it seemed to the anxious woman, with exasperating deliberation. ...
— Revenge! • by Robert Barr
... seemed to find no inconvenience in a room-temperature of eighty degrees, and have been nigh frozen to death in open-air drives in which the same individuals seemed perfectly comfortable. Men appear at the theatre in orthodox evening dress, while the tall and exasperating hats of the ladies who accompany them would seem to indicate a theory of street toilette. From New York to Buffalo I am whisked through the air at the rate of fifty or sixty miles an hour; in California I travelled ...
— The Land of Contrasts - A Briton's View of His American Kin • James Fullarton Muirhead
... and there were lights in the temple of Khamon. They thought of Hamilcar. Where was he? Why had he forsaken them when peace was concluded? His differences with the Council were doubtless but a pretence in order to destroy them. Their unsatisfied hate recoiled upon him, and they cursed him, exasperating one another with their own anger. At this juncture they collected together beneath the plane-trees to see a slave who, with eyeballs fixed, neck contorted, and lips covered with foam, was rolling on the ground, and beating the soil with his limbs. Some one cried out that he ...
— Salammbo • Gustave Flaubert
... she was pleased and flattered by an older man's apparent admiration of Nina; and that she would further the girl's first definite affair in every way that lay in her power. It was maddening; it was exasperating beyond words. An honest warning would have merely flattered her with its implication of her importance; ah, no, Isabelle and Harriet might try to hold the child back—but Granny knew girl nature better than either ...
— Harriet and the Piper - (Norris Volume XI) • Kathleen Norris
... itself as though for a spring upon some prey, at once tempting and exasperating. In one short fortnight the inbred and fated antagonism between the two natures had developed itself—on Fanny's side—to the point of hatred. In the depths of her being she knew that Diana had yearned to love ...
— The Testing of Diana Mallory • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... bringing you back at the wrong; they either allow you far too little time to examine the castle or the ruin, or they leave you planted in front of it for periods that outlast curiosity. They are perverse, capricious, exasperating. It was a question of our having but an hour or two at Loches, and we could ill afford to sacrifice to accidents. One of the accidents, however, was that the rain stopped before we got there, leaving behind it a moist mildness of temperature and a cool and lowering sky which were ...
— A Little Tour in France • Henry James
... immediately alarmed by the guilt and danger of domestic rebellion. The extirpation of idolatry might have been justified by the established principles of intolerance: but the hostile sects, which alternately reigned in the Imperial court were mutually apprehensive of alienating, and perhaps exasperating, the minds of a powerful, though declining faction. Every motive of authority and fashion, of interest and reason, now militated on the side of Christianity; but two or three generations elapsed, before their victorious influence was universally felt. The religion which had so long ...
— The History of The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire - Volume 2 • Edward Gibbon
... and the younger ladies retired to their cells in good order. But the Raven, excited by the jocund hour, continued to rustle and patter about the warm room in a state of inexpressible hilarity, most exasperating to the others, who desired to sleep. Not content with upsetting the fire-irons occasionally, singing to the cat, and slamming the furniture about, this restless bird kept appearing first at one cell door with a conundrum, then ...
— Shawl-Straps - A Second Series of Aunt Jo's Scrap-Bag • Louisa M. Alcott
... because it exactly describes her, was very good for the first few weeks, after which we began to know her. She is not a convert in any sense of the term. She is just a very wilful, truthful, exasperating, fascinating little Oriental. ...
— Things as They Are - Mission Work in Southern India • Amy Wilson-Carmichael
... were thought of; even the operations of the Trigonometrical Survey,[12] which were then making a great noise in Central India, where their fires were seen every night burning upon the peaks of the highest ranges, were supposed to have had some share in exasperating the Deity; and the services of the most holy Brahmans were put in requisition to exorcise the peaks from which the engineers had taken their angles, the moment their instruments were removed. In many places, to the great annoyance ...
— Rambles and Recollections of an Indian Official • William Sleeman
... because they are not as sensitive as other races to the magic of beauty in either nature or art. But I found traveling and living with such apparently unsympathetic creatures exasperating to a degree, and I did not wonder that the European whose lot had been cast in the interior, sometimes, on emerging into Western civilization, appears eccentric to his own countrymen. But ...
— Across China on Foot • Edwin Dingle
... something strangely exasperating, as well as strangely wearying, in these uncommanded evolutions. It is bitter to return to infancy, to be supported, and directed, and perpetually set upon your feet, by the hand of some one else. ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 16 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... and, of course, there was always the danger of the masts going over the side at any moment. I and my two boat-keepers kept them off as best we could with oars and boat-hooks; but to be constantly at it became exasperating, since there was no reason why we should not leave at once. We could not see those on board, nor could we imagine what caused the delay. The boat-keepers were swearing feebly, and I had not only my share of the work, but also had to keep at it two men who showed a constant inclination ...
— Youth • Joseph Conrad
... the platform were listening eagerly to the conversation; he felt that he was attracting too much attention. But there was no help for it. He could not go forward on this single-track railroad until the exasperating freight had reached ...
— Chasing an Iron Horse - Or, A Boy's Adventures in the Civil War • Edward Robins
... Pringle in his most complacent tones. "I want to talk about myself, always, Stella May Vorhis; we've come thirty miles and I've heard Christopher Foy, Foy, Foy, all the way! It's exasperating! It's sickening!" ...
— The Desire of the Moth; and The Come On • Eugene Manlove Rhodes
... the cheering thought," I said snappily. Aunt Emmeline helped herself to a sandwich, and blinked with exasperating forbearance. ...
— The Lady of the Basement Flat • Mrs. George de Horne Vaizey
... sir,' Rosenheim remarked. 'You bet!' was the terse response. 'May I inquire the cause of your concern?' Rosenheim continued placidly. With a most exasperating air of willingness to please, the stranger rejoined: 'Why, I jest took a simple pleasure, sir, in seeing an amachoor like you talking French about a little thing I painted here in Cedar Street.' For a moment Rosenheim was ...
— The Collectors • Frank Jewett Mather
... trial. By this time the prepossession of the common people in her favour had risen to such a pitch of enthusiasm, that the most palpable truths which appeared on the other side, had no other effect than that of exasperating them to the most dangerous degree of rage and revenge. Some of the witnesses for Squires, though persons of unblemished character, were so intimidated, that they durst not enter the court; and those who had resolution enough to give evidence in her behalf, ...
— The History of England in Three Volumes, Vol.II. - From William and Mary to George II. • Tobias Smollett
... to tell. In Chicago once again, I spent a most exasperating two days trying to inform the F.B.I., the police, or anyone who would listen to me. My fingers couldn't dial the correct phone number, and at the crucial moment each time I grew tongue-tied. My last attempt was a letter ...
— The Gallery • Roger Phillips Graham
... his son might attain such a distinguished position, M. Violette's father, a watch-maker in Chartres, had sacrificed everything, and died penniless. The Silvio Pellico official, during these exasperating and tiresome hours, sometimes regretted not having simply succeeded his father. He could see himself, in imagination, in the light little shop near the cathedral, with a magnifying-glass fixed in his eye, ready to inspect some farmer's old "turnip," and suspended over his bench thirty ...
— A Romance of Youth, Complete • Francois Coppee
... been very exasperating and interfering. Tempers had grown short. Twice running she had complained about the dreadful noise the pensionnaires made at seven o'clock in the morning. 'Nong pas creer comme ca!' she called, running down the passage in her dressing-gown and bursting angrily into their rooms ...
— A Prisoner in Fairyland • Algernon Blackwood
... nightmare; which had filled his soul with dread and shame—the meeting between his father and Nastasia Philipovna. He had often tried to imagine such an event, but had found the picture too mortifying and exasperating, and had quietly dropped it. Very likely he anticipated far worse things than was at all necessary; it is often so with vain persons. He had long since determined, therefore, to get his father out of the way, anywhere, before his marriage, in order to ...
— The Idiot • (AKA Feodor Dostoevsky) Fyodor Dostoyevsky
... It, one suspects, must have had much to do with the evocation of what is called the Oxford spirit—that gentlest spirit, so lingering and searching, so dear to them who as youths were brought into ken of it, so exasperating to them who were not. Yes, certainly, it is this mild, miasmal air, not less than the grey beauty and gravity of the buildings, that has helped Oxford to produce, and foster eternally, her peculiar race ...
— Zuleika Dobson - or, An Oxford Love Story • Max Beerbohm
... foremen to our herds. My outfit received the news in anything but a cheerful mood. The monotony of the long drive had made the men restless, and the delay of a single day in being finally relieved, when looked forward to, was doubly exasperating. It had been over six months since we left the ranch in Medina, and there was a lurking suspicion among a number of the boys that the final decision would be against our cattle and that they would be thrown back on our hands. There was a general anxiety among us ...
— The Outlet • Andy Adams
... and snubbing curiosity. I think the others, since I had borne the brunt of the ordeal, sympathized with me, for they were silent. I stared at our visitors in some perplexity; and then in the most exasperating manner they turned away and ran across our ground to a huge hollow stump near the forest path and began ...
— Aliens • William McFee
... Gallery in London has looked at the picture in which he represents several young ladies as nymphs, voluminously draped, hanging gar- lands over a statue, - a picture suffused indefinably with the Anglican spirit, and exasperating to a mem- ber of one of the Latin races. It is an odd chance, therefore, that has led him into that part of France where Protestants have been least bien vus. This is the country of the dragonnades of Louis XIV. and of the pastors of the desert. From the garden of the Peyrou, at ...
— A Little Tour in France • Henry James
... and unknown before. Man's blended duty and interest, in such a case, are to try to see the interior beauty and essential kindness of his fate, to adorn it and embrace it, fomenting his resignation with the sweet lotions of faith and peace, not exasperating his wounds with the angry pungents of suspicion, alarm, and complaint. At the worst, amidst all our personal disappointments, losses, and decay, "the view of the great universal whole of nature," as Humboldt says, "is reassuring and consolatory." If the boon of a future immortality be not ours, ...
— The Destiny of the Soul - A Critical History of the Doctrine of a Future Life • William Rounseville Alger
... morning's mail, heralded by a rather vague cablegram the week before. To be brief, Mr. Bowen recently had been named as joint executor of the will, together with Sir John Allencrombie, of London, W.C., one time neighbour of the late Mr. Skaggs. A long and exasperating cablegram had touched somewhat irresolutely upon the terms of the will, besides notifying him that one of the heirs resided in Boston. He was instructed to apprise this young man of his good fortune. This he delayed in doing until after he had obtained ...
— The Man From Brodney's • George Barr McCutcheon
... she had lubricated her conscience withal, regarding her desires and intentions, were shown up at precisely their true value, and a very discreditable spectacle they made. Nothing is more exasperating after a failure than to be stared out of countenance by the unworthy means we have employed. During her progress up-stairs to the dressing-room, and brief stay there, Cornelia had ample leisure to review her thoughts ...
— Bressant • Julian Hawthorne
... at this time combined to make this escape peculiarly exasperating to the Confederates. In obedience to repeated appeals from the Richmond newspapers, iron bars had but recently been fixed in all the prison windows for better security, and the guard had been considerably reinforced. The columns of these ...
— Famous Adventures And Prison Escapes of the Civil War • Various
... of low degree who lived in the salons of Paris, apparently on a footing of equality with the high noblesse, and who were now and then reminded, it may have been by a hardly perceptible, yet not on that account less exasperating, feudal smile, of the great and ignominious inequality which lay between them. And when the canaille roturiere took the liberty of beheading that high noblesse, it was done less to inherit their property than ...
— The German Classics of The Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, Vol. VI. • Editor-in-Chief: Kuno Francke
... clever—yes, she had spoken cleverly, he would admit that; as she had appeared in her parlour that afternoon, a graceful, courteous, self-possessed home person; as he had seen her in Mr. Huggins's old surrey, with her exasperating, non-committal, cool little nod. But why, oh, why, in the name of the flaming rendezvous of lost and sizzling souls couldn't a woman with her qualities also have just one grain—only one single little grain!—of the ...
— Counsel for the Defense • Leroy Scott
... and exasperating situation. He changed his earlier view that Congress should not put itself in the position of wrangling with the executive over the armed-merchantmen issue. If divided counsels there were in Congress regarding ...
— The Story of the Great War, Volume V (of 8) • Francis J. (Francis Joseph) Reynolds, Allen L. (Allen Leon)
... mornings, with the accustomed care and regularity. But with these details Mrs. Cullum's wifely attentions ended. She remained absolutely deaf to any remark addressed to her by her husband, looking through and beyond him when he was present with a steady, unseeing gaze, which was, to say the least, exasperating. All necessary communication with him was carried on by means of the children. "Minty," she would say at the breakfast-table, "ask your pa if he wants another cup of coffee"; or at night, "Temp'unce, tell your pa that Buster has shed a shoe"; or, "Sue, ...
— Southern Lights and Shadows • Edited by William Dean Howells & Henry Mills Alden
... Events have occurred which have not improved his temper, and in more in stances than one he has not been allowed to have his own way. To be thwarted in this reasonable desire was always very injurious to the old gentleman; and resistance became doubly exasperating when gout, age, loneliness, and the force of many disappointments combined to weigh him down. His stiff black hair began to grow quite white soon after his son's death; his-face grew redder; his hands trembled more and more as he poured out ...
— Vanity Fair • William Makepeace Thackeray
... but he lets us clearly see that however ineffectual it may have been there was honesty of purpose underlying it. In the medley of confusion which prevailed we were lucky to have in Colonel WARD as senior British officer a man who was not afraid to shoulder his responsibility. Under conditions so exasperating that anyone might have been excused if he had been overwhelmed with anger and bewilderment he was resolved to uphold our prestige. Upon the Bolshevist horrors in Siberia he does not dwell, but he ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Volume 158, April 21, 1920 • Various
... 'They struck it out either critically as too ludicrous, or politically as too exasperating. I care not which. It was their business. If an architect says, I will build five stories, and the man who employs him says, I will have only three, the employer is to decide.' 'Yes, Sir, (said I,) in ordinary cases. But should ...
— Life Of Johnson, Vol. 2 • Boswell
... death by people who don't know its meaning, I would have added that he was a votary of the kultur of his race. His ideal, I suppose, was more the Renaissance virtu than our milk-and-water virtue. He made me feel that I was a worm. In short, he was a very interesting, provocative and exasperating humbug, and his very existence seemed to me sufficient reason for turning Aliens into a book which would shed a flickering light upon the ...
— Aliens • William McFee
... Mr Benden was in the exasperating position of the Persian satraps, when they could find no occasion against this Daniel. He was angry with the Bishop for releasing Alice at his own request, angry with the neighbouring squires, who had promoted the release, angry with Roger Hall ...
— All's Well - Alice's Victory • Emily Sarah Holt
... events of our history, have left it upon record, that these two several sermons, much contrary, doubtless, to the intention of the worthy divines by whom they were delivered, had a greater effect in exasperating, than in composing, the disputes betwixt the two factions. Under such evil auspices, and with corresponding forebodings on the mind of Lady Peveril, the day of festivity at ...
— Peveril of the Peak • Sir Walter Scott
... path; only they are not inflammatory. But to have people go out from the faith of their fathers with malice aforethought and their eyes open—well, that is not exactly what I mean either. That is a sorrowful, but not necessarily an exasperating thing. What I mean is this: I see people Orthodox from their cradles, (and probably only from their cradles, certainly not from their brains,) who think it is something pretty to become Unitarianistic. They ...
— Gala-days • Gail Hamilton
... The exasperating robbery of their trap line had gone on irregularly all winter, but the thief was clever enough or ...
— Rolf In The Woods • Ernest Thompson Seton
... month. The strong population now on this gold-field had perhaps rendered it necessary twice a month. Only in October, I recollect they had come out three times. Yet, "the traps are out" was annoying, but not exasperating. Not exasperating, because John Bull, 'ab initio et ante secula', was born for law, order, and safe money-making on land and sea. They were annoying, because, said John, not that he likes his money more than his belly, but he hates the bayonet: I ...
— The Eureka Stockade • Carboni Raffaello
... labour not being forthcoming. These requests had usually to be met by lengthy and involved "returns" which very few people understood and which served no useful purpose except to temporarily alleviate the strain. As a rule the exasperating situation was restored next day. Nor was the necessity for the work at first apparent to the men. They thought they came to fight with the bullet and bayonet only. But enlightenment came and one experienced miner voiced it, after a solid week on excavating, when he ...
— The 28th: A Record of War Service in the Australian Imperial Force, 1915-19, Vol. I • Herbert Brayley Collett
... this interview. His sisters had asked him to reason with her, as they had often appealed to him before in their well-meant but tactless efforts to correct her faults, but she had evinced an accession of reasonableness that made him uneasy. She had changed from the impulsive, exasperating young creature he knew into an anxious, depressed woman in a mackintosh, whom he did not know at all! He breathed hard for a few minutes, angry at his sisters for bringing this situation to pass. It was absurd to ...
— Otherwise Phyllis • Meredith Nicholson
... cigarette with care and lit it with deliberation. He had learned everything that he wanted to know; the conversation was beginning to grow tiresome; and he found the boy's careless self-confidence increasingly exasperating. ...
— Captivating Mary Carstairs • Henry Sydnor Harrison
... sullen and swelling with rage and off his equilibrium, is henceforth hard to win back or talk over. And so people who reprove ought to be especially careful on this point, and not to leave them too soon, nor break off their conversation and intercourse with their acquaintances at the exasperating and ...
— Plutarch's Morals • Plutarch
... yellow buildings themselves rise to overshadowing height. Like soldiers on dress parade they stand, relentlessly regular and uniform, block after block, and their walled lanes, straight and similar and uncharacteristic, cross and weave themselves into a stiff, right-angled check, exasperating and profitless, unrelieved by a hint at variation of outline, by a picturesque eave or gable, or ...
— A Midsummer Drive Through The Pyrenees • Edwin Asa Dix
... angry shake, on which she toppled over among the fallen stones with an exasperating limpness, and ...
— The History of David Grieve • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... an exchange of surprised glances between the culprits. Neither Steve nor Tom were quarrelsome, nor had they had more than a boy's usual share of fist battles, but the bullying speech and attitude of the round-faced youth was so uncalled for and exasperating that Steve's temper got the better of ...
— Left End Edwards • Ralph Henry Barbour
... previous day, I treat myself to a perfect fit of indigestion in the morning by watching the carts arrive here laden with all sorts of good things. On such mornings as those I love my vegetables more than ever. Ah! the exasperating part, the rank injustice of it all, is that those rascally Philistines really eat ...
— The Fat and the Thin • Emile Zola
... stories left unfinished because of the death of the writer in mid course can only be at best an uncomfortable, exasperating legacy to his admirers. But by a thrice happy chance this is not the case with the two novels upon which the late HENRY JAMES was engaged at the time of his fatal illness. This good fortune comes from the fact that it was the writer's habit "to ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 153, Nov 21, 1917 • Various
... housecleaning to do before you depart—just move and nothing more. Just dump a little outfit into a canoe and then paddle away from all your tiresome environment, and travel wherever your heart dictates, and then settle down where not even an exasperating neighbour could find you. What would you give to live such a ...
— The Drama of the Forests - Romance and Adventure • Arthur Heming
... quietly amused by the patronage of a woman whose right to bestow it consisted apparently in an acquaintance with English people of station, and some proficiency at bridge; but by and by her condescension grew wearisome, and finally exasperating. Miss Weston, however, could not have been expected to recognize this. She was a tall, pale woman, with a coldly formal manner and some ...
— The Gold Trail • Harold Bindloss
... quick temper, and Kitty's manner was most exasperating. Under ordinary circumstances the ladylike Nora would have hated climbing trees, but now all was forgotten in her fierce desire to lay hold of the daring, exasperating little Kitty and to force her secret out of her. ...
— Red Rose and Tiger Lily - or, In a Wider World • L. T. Meade
... country. On the other hand, the attempt to make an epitome of the various methods in use at the more important colleges would result in the presentation of a succession of unrelated statements drawn from catalogues which would be hardly less exasperating to the reader than it would be for him to follow, successively, the outlines as presented in the catalogues themselves. Various summaries of these outlines have been made, and to these the ...
— College Teaching - Studies in Methods of Teaching in the College • Paul Klapper
... an eventless journey from New York to Miami, from Miami to Fort Coquina; but from there through an absolutely pathless wilderness as far as I could make out, the journey had been exasperating. ...
— Police!!! • Robert W. Chambers
... find her as exasperating as the cicalas on my roof; and when I am alone at home, side by side with this little creature twanging the strings of her long-necked guitar, in front of this marvelous panorama of pagodas and mountains,—I am overcome by a sadness full ...
— Madame Chrysantheme • Pierre Loti
... the work had been at first, Stevens had never slackened his pace, and after a time, as his facilities increased, the exasperating setbacks decreased in number and severity and his progress became faster and faster. Large as the "Forlorn Hope" was, space was soon at a premium, for their peculiarly-shaped craft became a veritable factory, housing a variety of machinery ...
— Spacehounds of IPC • Edward Elmer Smith
... thinking he had done enough, he took up a novel and began to read. Emily was bitterly offended. She sat in a corner, a picture of deep misery; and whenever he spoke to Mrs. Bentley, he thought she would burst into tears. It was exasperating to be the perpetual victim of such folly; and, pressed by the desire to talk to Mrs. Bentley about the book he was reading, he suggested that she should come with him to the meet. The Harriers met for the first time that season at not ...
— Vain Fortune • George Moore
... Schoenberg striving to emulate Strauss in the field of the symphonic poem; striving, however, in vain. For it has none of Strauss's glitter and point, and is rather dull and soggy. The great, bristling, pathetic climax is of the sort that has become exasperating and vulgar, rather than exciting, since Wagner and Tchaikowsky first exploited it. On the whole, the work is much less "Pelleas et Melisande" than it is "Pelleas und Melisanda." And the other works of this period, more brilliantly made and more opulently colored though they ...
— Musical Portraits - Interpretations of Twenty Modern Composers • Paul Rosenfeld
... vagaries, recondite trash, and all. He was always getting away from Farquharson, but, then, he was unfailingly bound to come back to him. We had only to wait and catch the solid grains that now and then fell in the winnowing of that unending stream of chaff. It was a tedious and exasperating process, but it had its compensations. At times Leavitt could be as uncannily brilliant as he was dull and boresome. The conviction grew upon me that he had become a little demented, as if his brain had been tainted by the sulphurous fumes exhaled by the smoking crater above his head. His mind ...
— The Best Short Stories of 1920 - and the Yearbook of the American Short Story • Various
... widowed mother, her impoverished but amiable relatives, and her own refined, intellectual, and accomplished self, she shrank still more and strove to silence him,—a difficult matter. She had, however, a trait that proved simply exasperating to a man of Elmendorf's calibre,—a faculty of listening in absolute silence where she did not desire to confirm or approve,—and when he had spent much breath and nearly half an hour in descanting upon his impressions of the demoralizing tendencies of military associations ...
— A Tame Surrender, A Story of The Chicago Strike • Charles King
... code message to which he had omitted to give her the key. His one hope was that he might reach home before sundown. The cab which he chartered at the other end of the railway journey bore him with what seemed exasperating slowness along the country roads, which were pink and mauve with the flush of the sinking sun. His aunt was putting away some unfinished jams and ...
— Reginald in Russia and Other Sketches • Saki (H.H. Munro)
... Queen with a jewel worth 250l. to induce her 'to make the Bishop,' that is to say, to appoint to the see of Salisbury, now vacant, a man who would consent to the alienation of such rich Church lands as the manors of Sherborne and Yetminster. John Meeres, afterwards so determined and exasperating an enemy of Raleigh's, was now[5] appointed his bailiff, and Adrian Gilbert a sort of general ...
— Raleigh • Edmund Gosse
... in the cold security of undoubted triumph inflicts the most horrible revenge upon his enemy, not from any mistaken notion of inducing him to repent of a perseverance in enmity, but with the alleged design of exasperating him to deserve new torments. Milton has so far violated the popular creed (if this shall be judged to be a violation) as to have alleged no superiority of moral virtue to his God over his Devil. And this bold ...
— A Defence of Poetry and Other Essays • Percy Bysshe Shelley
... most spiritual, poetical, and recreative part of it. Nothing of the kind has ever been tried in London. The crashing peals of a dozen large bells banged violently with clapper instead of softly struck with hammer, the exasperating dong, or ding, dong, of the Ritualist temple over the way, or the hoarse, gong-like roar of Big Ben—that is all we know about bells in London, and no form of church discipline could be more ferocious. Bell noise and bell music ...
— A Day's Tour • Percy Fitzgerald
... minute I saw more clearly things as they are. I saw you giving the nicest dinners in Chicago, and scurrying through Europe, buying a dozen pictures here and there, building a great house, or perhaps, tired of Chicago, trying your luck in New York; but always pressing on, seizing this exasperating life, and tenaciously sucking out the rich enjoyments thereof! For the gold ...
— Literary Love-Letters and Other Stories • Robert Herrick
... included me in his bow—that was all. All my little day-dream of growing self-complacency was shattered, scattered; the old feeling of soreness, smallness, wounded pride, and bruised self-esteem came back again. I felt a wild, angry desire to compel some other glance from those eyes than that exasperating one of quiet indifference. I felt it like a lash every time I encountered it. Its very coolness and absence of emotion stung ...
— The First Violin - A Novel • Jessie Fothergill
... Various pretensions were asserted in a highhanded manner by the Roman Catholic bishops in their epistolary communications; and their literary organs spared the Protestants of England no bitterness of invective, to which the most exasperating polemics could give expression. ...
— The History of England in Three Volumes, Vol.III. - From George III. to Victoria • E. Farr and E. H. Nolan
... "Bible Defense of Slavery" and was going upstairs three steps at a stride, when I came upon Camille and Estelle. My aim was to get Harry's revolver to him before he should have the exasperating surprise of finding Gholson armed, and to contrive a pretext for so doing; and happily a word from the two sisters gave me my cue. With the fire-arms of both officers I came downstairs and out ...
— The Cavalier • George Washington Cable
... with his exasperating pertinacity, "it is of course interesting to know the truth. It would perhaps be still more interesting to know what Herr Renwick has to say in regard to ...
— The Secret Witness • George Gibbs
... above the noise of stamping horses and the clash of arms their bold challenge scornfully hurled at the enemy. In the second (in C minor), on the other hand, the mind of the composer turns from one depressing or exasperating thought to another—he seems to review the different aspects of his country's unhappy state, its sullen discontent, fretful agitation, and uncertain hopes. The manly Polonaise in A major, one of the simplest (not easiest) compositions of Chopin, is the most popular of his polonaises. ...
— Frederick Chopin as a Man and Musician - Volume 1-2, Complete • Frederick Niecks
... soon demolish Boulogne, it deserved consideration whether the lower town should stand, as not being defensible; the council ordered him to return to England in order to represent his sentiments more fully upon those points, and the Earl of Hertford was immediately sent over in his room. This exasperating the Earl of Surry, occasioned him to let fall some expressions which favoured of revenge and dislike to the King, and a hatred of his Councellors, and was probably one cause of his ruin, which soon after ensued. The Duke of Norfolk, who discovered the growing power of the Seymours, and the ...
— The Lives of the Poets of Great Britain and Ireland (1753) - Volume I. • Theophilus Cibber
... Abigail down without the dime, and with instructions to threaten the man with immediate arrest and imprisonment. And Abigail went down and scolded the man with the more vigor that she herself had been scolded all day on account of the headache. And so Pedro just grinned at her in his exasperating furrin way, and played on until he got good and ready to go. Then he went, and the old lady sat down and wrote that letter, and gave it to Abigail ...
— Jersey Street and Jersey Lane - Urban and Suburban Sketches • H. C. Bunner
... touched by the moonbeams. These were the lights and spires of Tripoli, a Moorish town then best known as a haunt and stronghold of the pirates of the Mediterranean. All was silence, all seemingly peace. The vessel—the ketch, to give it its nautical name—moved onward with what seemed exasperating slowness, scarcely ruffling the polished waters of the bay. The hours passed on. The miles lagged tardily behind. The wind fell. The time crept towards midnight. The only life visible in the wide landscape was that of ...
— Historic Tales, Vol. 1 (of 15) - The Romance of Reality • Charles Morris
... dolefully comic—"she repeatedly left this deponent imprisoned in the house for hours under lock and key!" What a situation for a foaming mariner, accustomed to roam the vastness of the majestic, the free, the uncontrollable deep! Probably the next arraignment is still more exasperating. "She kept a servant to act as a spy and treat this deponent with disrespect." With the lapse of years, and with the peculiar hue which strife assumes in its backward prospective, his once happy-home and connubial comforts ...
— Danger! A True History of a Great City's Wiles and Temptations • William Howe
... Fizzer left us the horse-teams came in, and went on, top-heavy with stores for "inside"; but the "Macs" were now thinking of the dry stages ahead, and were travelling at the exasperating rate of about four miles a day, as they "nursed the bullocks" through ...
— We of the Never-Never • Jeanie "Mrs. Aeneas" Gunn
... very exasperating, but that was all I could get out of him. When I ask for details he ...
— Somewhere in Red Gap • Harry Leon Wilson
... that his son might attain such a distinguished position, M. Violette's father, a watch-maker in Chartres, had sacrificed everything, and died penniless. The Silvio Pellico official, during these exasperating and tiresome hours, sometimes regretted not having simply succeeded his father. He could see himself, in imagination, in the light little shop near the cathedral, with a magnifying-glass fixed in his ...
— A Romance of Youth, Complete • Francois Coppee
... like this better," Sicardot remarked, as he observed the flight of the other adherents. "Those cowards were exasperating me at last. For more than two years they've been speaking of shooting all the Republicans in the province, and to-day they wouldn't even fire a halfpenny cracker ...
— The Fortune of the Rougons • Emile Zola
... certainly he was too self-possessed and cold. There was none of the fire of youth, none of the swiftness of the soldier, in this young officer. His kindness was cold, and cruel cold; his deliberation exasperating. And perhaps it was from this character, which is very much the opposite of my own, that even in these days, when he was of service to me, I approached him with suspicion ...
— St Ives • Robert Louis Stevenson
... incidents that sowed the seeds of personal animosities; preparing the way for that dreadful convulsion which was near at hand. At the very time when the witchcraft frenzy broke out, they were in the crisis of an exasperating conflict with Topsfield, occasioned by a wrong done them by the General Court. This requires to be explained, as it can be, by a collation ...
— Salem Witchcraft, Volumes I and II • Charles Upham
... had decided that an immediate marriage was the only solution; and having put his hand to the plough, did not decline even when it became obviously necessary that it should be a secret marriage. To a man of his somewhat stormily candid and casual disposition this necessity of secrecy was really exasperating; but every one with any imagination or chivalry will rejoice that he accepted the evil conditions. He had always had the courage to tell the truth; and now it was demanded of him to have the greater courage to tell a lie, and he told it with perfect cheerfulness and ...
— Robert Browning • G. K. Chesterton
... have brought you something on which you may exercise your ingenuity." He began, with exasperating deliberation, to untie the string which bound his parcel; he is one of those persons who would not cut a knot to save their lives. The process occupied him the better part of a quarter of an hour. Then he held out the contents ...
— The Lock And Key Library - Classic Mystery And Detective Stories, Modern English • Various
... a triumph in the humiliation, and a tenderness in the strife. This was what she had been expecting, and what she had not got. To be lectured because the lecturer saw her in the cold morning light of open-shuttered disillusion was exasperating. He had not finished, either. He continued in a more ...
— Far from the Madding Crowd • Thomas Hardy
... divinity student at Andover, where certain members of his class were accustomed to meet together to criticize each other. The person to suffer criticism sits in silence, while the rest of the company, each in turn, tell him his faults, with, I judge, an astonishing and often exasperating plainness of speech. Here is the account given ...
— The Communistic Societies of the United States • Charles Nordhoff
... the head wind opposed them, exasperating, tireless in its resistance, never lulling for a single instant. At the moment it seemed more than could be borne. Near one o'clock it did them a great despite, for at that hour the trail came to a broad ...
— The Silent Places • Stewart Edward White
... Most exasperating, however, from the red man's point of view was the insatiable demand of the newcomers for land. In the years 1803, 1804, and 1805 Harrison made treaties with the remnants of the Miami, Eel River, Piankeshaw, and Delaware tribes—characterized by him as "a body of the most depraved wretches ...
— The Old Northwest - A Chronicle of the Ohio Valley and Beyond, Volume 19 In - The Chronicles Of America Series • Frederic Austin Ogg
... to enter into all the Psychological details which marked the course of my passion for the Countess, and to explain to you more fully the attraction of curiosity which she offered me more and more every day. It was getting exasperating, and the more so, as she resisted me as stoutly as the shyest of innocents could have done, but at the end of a month of mad Satanism, I saw what her game was. Do you know what she had thought of? She meant ...
— The Works of Guy de Maupassant, Volume III (of 8) • Guy de Maupassant
... and applied himself in good earnest to obtain legal recognition of his title. In the first place, the birth of Ercole, and the extraordinary honours paid to the child and his mother on this occasion, had the effect of exasperating Isabella of Aragon, and exciting new and bitter rivalry between herself and Beatrice. Gian Galeazzo, sunk in idle pleasures and debauchery, had long ceased to take any interest in the government of Milan, or to show the least wish to assert himself. He was recognized ...
— Beatrice d'Este, Duchess of Milan, 1475-1497 • Julia Mary Cartwright
... and assist at the ceremony of dawn; it is well if for no other purpose than to disarm the intolerance of the professional early riser who, were he in a state of perfect health, would not be the wandering victim of insomnia, and boast of it. There are few small things more exasperating than this early bird with the worm of his conceit in ...
— Ponkapog Papers • Thomas Bailey Aldrich
... grow more obstinate the harder we try, while other things we have forgotten and are trying to recall generally yield themselves to our efforts. Moreover, in other cases of forgetfulness we never experience that peculiar and most exasperating feature of name-forgetfulness,—the feeling that we know the word perfectly well all the time. This last fact, indeed, seems to show that we have not forgotten the name at all, but have simply lost the ...
— Lippincott's Magazine, December, 1885 • Various
... the native quarter a tom-tom throbbed, persistent, exasperating as the voice of conscience. Somewhere in the distance a dog barked restlessly, at irregular intervals. And at a point between tom-tom and dog a couple of parrots ...
— The Way of an Eagle • Ethel M. Dell
... by the fatigue of this sleep in a hot bath, and for an hour or two I walk about before a white canvas, with the intention to draw something. But mind, eye, and hand are all empty. I am no longer a painter! This futile effort to work is exasperating. I summon my models; I place them, and they give me poses, movements, and expressions that I have painted to satiety. I make them dress again and let them go. Indeed, I can no longer see anything new, and I suffer from this as if I were ...
— Strong as Death • Guy de Maupassant
... Jim able to forget the girl and free himself from this exasperating unhappiness which almost maddened his mother, still she must always afterward remember with bitterness the girl who ...
— The Crimson Tide • Robert W. Chambers
... inauspicious. The animosities between the Girondins and the Mountain were becoming every day more furious and deadly. In the midst of this appalling storm of rage and hate and terror, Condorcet—at one moment wounding the Girondins by reproaches against their egotism and personalities, at another exasperating the Mountain by declaring of Robespierre that he had neither an idea in his head nor a feeling in his heart—still pertinaciously kept crying out for the acceptance of his constitution. It was of no avail. The revolution of the second of June came, and swept the Girondins out ...
— Critical Miscellanies (Vol. 2 of 3) - Essay 3: Condorcet • John Morley
... Harper's Ferry and "old Brown" until one of the party "thinks he has a nibble" and begs for silence, which at once supervenes out of respect for the momentous interests hanging in the balance. When the excitement is over the frivolous Bagby takes advantage of the relief from suspense to make an exasperating pun, after the manner of a newspaper man, and "Billy Ivins swears he will kill ...
— Literary Hearthstones of Dixie • La Salle Corbell Pickett
... already told you," he said, looking back, "that I am going to make another attempt to satisfy that exasperating ...
— Unleavened Bread • Robert Grant
... would have to capitulate. He had been prodigal of the lives of his soldiers as long as he thought a military good was to be gained by the sacrifice; but he was sparing of their blood in a hopeless cause, and weary of exasperating the enemy by an obstinate yet ...
— Chronicle of the Conquest of Granada • Washington Irving
... over the windlass, and, before anything could be done, the pointer to which the end of the chain was attached had been torn from the bolts, and our best ground-tackle was lost overboard. It was an exasperating accident. ...
— The Home of the Blizzard • Douglas Mawson
... would have proved very difficult to take by the ordinary methods of war, and could only have been subdued with great loss of life and expenditure of treasure. Ferdinand assailed it by a less costly and more exasperating method. Granada subsisted on the broad and fertile vega or plain surrounding it, a region marvellously productive in grain and fruits and rich in cattle and sheep. It was a cold-blooded and cruel system adopted by the Spanish monarch. He assailed the city through the vega. Disregarding ...
— Historical Tales - The Romance of Reality - Volume VII • Charles Morris
... worshipping a paper hoarding of that kind, and doing patiently everything they are told to do therein. Anyhow, it is only in this way that I can account for all these expensive miseries of matrimony. I can't understand a woman in full possession of her faculties deliberately exasperating the man she has to live with—I suppose all men submit to it under protest—for these stale and stereotyped ...
— Select Conversations with an Uncle • H. G. Wells
... Tilly! The uplifted arm that had partially hidden the player's face was lowered. What—what—it was not Tilly, but—but—that girl! How did she come there? A glance at Will's face drawn up into a most exasperating grin, at Will's eyes darting forth gleams of fun, was ...
— A Flock of Girls and Boys • Nora Perry
... suspicion. Scepticism had been born into the world, almost more hateful than heresy, because it had the manners of good society and contented itself with a smile, a shrug, an almost imperceptible lift of the eyebrow,—a kind of reasoning especially exasperating to disputants of the old school, who still cared about victory, even when they did not about the ...
— Among My Books - First Series • James Russell Lowell
... including the chief, though he was noncommittal, were bitter about this expert-commissioner law. If a good road-bed had been surveyed, the engineers knew more about it than any one else. They were the pioneers of the work. It was exceedingly annoying and exasperating to have a number of men travel leisurely in trains over the line and criticize the labors of engineers who had toiled in heat and cold and wet, with brain and heart in the task. But ...
— The U.P. Trail • Zane Grey
... up from day to day at the present time are plentiful, and (except for the fortunate finder) exasperating enough. But if we go back to a period when there were no auctions, no organised book depots, no newspapers, no railways and other such facilities, and men lived practically in separate communities, there can be no feeling of astonishment ...
— The Book-Collector • William Carew Hazlitt
... words, took over the money, smiling the while. "I'll readily," he retorted, "comply with your wishes and have done; for what's the use of exasperating you!" ...
— Hung Lou Meng, Book I • Cao Xueqin
... which she had lubricated her conscience withal, regarding her desires and intentions, were shown up at precisely their true value, and a very discreditable spectacle they made. Nothing is more exasperating after a failure than to be stared out of countenance by the unworthy means we have employed. During her progress up-stairs to the dressing-room, and brief stay there, Cornelia had ample leisure to review her thoughts and deeds during the latter months of her life. What a waste of time, opportunity, ...
— Bressant • Julian Hawthorne
... be interested, sir,' Rosenheim remarked. 'You bet!' was the terse response. 'May I inquire the cause of your concern?' Rosenheim continued placidly. With a most exasperating air of willingness to please, the stranger rejoined: 'Why, I jest took a simple pleasure, sir, in seeing an amachoor like you talking French about a little thing I painted here in Cedar Street.' For a moment Rosenheim was too indignant to speak, then he burst out with: 'It's an infernal ...
— The Collectors • Frank Jewett Mather
... replied, with the same exasperating coolness he had shown after his first exclamation, "I wish I could say that, but it ain't ...
— Cowmen and Rustlers • Edward S. Ellis
... torches blazing here was an exasperating spectacle to Ernst Ortlieb, who with wise caution and love of order insisted that nothing but lanterns should be used to light his house, which contained inflammable wares of great value; but other things disturbed his composure, already ...
— Uarda • Georg Ebers
... when domestic helps are apt to be exasperating in the extreme, and a word of rebuke or remonstrance is like a match to a can of gunpowder; the powder is apt to go off, and the girl just as likely, and both leave an unpleasantness behind them. Queer, too, that both are apt to go off at the most ...
— Miss Dexie - A Romance of the Provinces • Stanford Eveleth
... well at first, these failures were exasperating to a man of Rizzo's temper—the more so that the little Queen had refused to prepare another letter of dismissal required of her; and Rizzo, the stronger in wrath and insolence because his faith in his star was somewhat less, had set forth himself ...
— The Royal Pawn of Venice - A Romance of Cyprus • Mrs. Lawrence Turnbull
... reference to statistical reports. Some of the estates and homesteads of the oldest and most reputable white families, who had put every thing info the scales of Confederate rebellion, fell into the possession of ex-slaves. Such a spectacle was not only unpleasant, it was exasperating, to the whites. But so long as the Republican governments gave promise of success there was but little or no manifestation of displeasure on the part of the whites. Just as soon, however, as they became the masters ...
— History of the Negro Race in America from 1619 to 1880. Vol. 2 (of 2) - Negroes as Slaves, as Soldiers, and as Citizens • George Washington Williams
... that is to say, to appoint to the see of Salisbury, now vacant, a man who would consent to the alienation of such rich Church lands as the manors of Sherborne and Yetminster. John Meeres, afterwards so determined and exasperating an enemy of Raleigh's, was now[5] appointed his bailiff, and Adrian Gilbert a sort of general overseer of ...
— Raleigh • Edmund Gosse
... ask for his heart. Such gifts are exasperating. One does not know what to do with them. Can't he—poor Fred—love me as I love him, and leave ...
— Jacqueline, v2 • Th. Bentzon (Mme. Blanc)
... once an exasperating and a pathetic figure. She—for it is generally the mother—is so undeniably influenced by her love that one can sympathize with her anxiety, yet the confidant of her child, or the unconcerned observer is exasperated as he clearly sees ...
— Quit Your Worrying! • George Wharton James
... which I received these instructions was, no doubt, rather exasperating: for they were delivered in perfect sincerity; but I believed a person who could plan the turning of her fits of passion to account, beforehand, might, by exerting her will, manage to control herself tolerably, even while under their influence; and I did not wish ...
— Wuthering Heights • Emily Bronte
... had gone to the front seat, where they were squeezed into a remarkably small space. Anette sat leaning forward, her chin propped in her left hand and the right lightly resting on Lee's knee. A loose board in the shed kept up an exasperating clatter. A match flared and Willard lighted a cigarette. It was curious about Alice—only in the last year, and for no reason Lee could discover, had she done things such as this. Perhaps, with no children, and the money Warner had accumulated comparatively lately, ...
— Cytherea • Joseph Hergesheimer
... Tension and Relaxation, of Shivering and Heat, of Agitation and Sinking; insomuch, that we were obliged constantly to endeavour at the expulsion of the noxious Ferments lodged in the primae Viae, or dispersed through the whole Mass of Blood, without exasperating them at the same time; or to correct and lessen their Action, without weakening the Patient. We ought, for Example, to vomit or purge without irritating or exhausting; to procure a free Perspiration or Sweating, without too much animating or inflaming; to fortify without ...
— A Succinct Account of the Plague at Marseilles - Its Symptoms and the Methods and Medicines Used for Curing It • Francois Chicoyneau
... we shall beg at the feet of each and every individual voter of each and every one of the thirty-eight States, native and foreign, white and black, educated and ignorant, you doom us to incalculable hardships and sacrifices and to most exasperating insults and humiliations. I pray you, therefore, save us from the fate of working and waiting for our freedom until we shall have educated the masses of men to consent to give their wives and sisters equality of rights ...
— The History of Woman Suffrage, Volume IV • Various
... irritation followed by requests from the Division for explanations as to labour not being forthcoming. These requests had usually to be met by lengthy and involved "returns" which very few people understood and which served no useful purpose except to temporarily alleviate the strain. As a rule the exasperating situation was restored next day. Nor was the necessity for the work at first apparent to the men. They thought they came to fight with the bullet and bayonet only. But enlightenment came and one experienced miner voiced it, after a solid week on excavating, when he said "I have just ...
— The 28th: A Record of War Service in the Australian Imperial Force, 1915-19, Vol. I • Herbert Brayley Collett
... sang Hermione, coming up very kindly, and glancing slowly over Gudrun's father and mother. It was a trying moment, exasperating for Gudrun. Hermione was really so strongly entrenched in her class superiority, she could come up and know people out of simple curiosity, as if they were creatures on exhibition. Gudrun would do the same herself. But she resented being in the position ...
— Women in Love • D. H. Lawrence
... convulsively, closed his eyes, and lay to all appearance dead. The town below, which had been watching progress, came running up. We removed the halter; the animal lay quiet. The pity of the by-standers was maddening; their remarks exasperating. "Poor little mule, he dies;" they pointed to his rubbed sides,—"Ah, poor creature! What a heavy load! How thin he is." It is certain that the best mule in the town was in far worse condition, and as for food, Chontal had ...
— In Indian Mexico (1908) • Frederick Starr
... you to buy a new one at once," said Sir George Ker, in a way that was singularly exasperating to ...
— All on the Irish Shore - Irish Sketches • E. Somerville and Martin Ross
... her friends fell into divers contradictions during the course of the trial. By this time the prepossession of the common people in her favour had risen to such a pitch of enthusiasm, that the most palpable truths which appeared on the other side, had no other effect than that of exasperating them to the most dangerous degree of rage and revenge. Some of the witnesses for Squires, though persons of unblemished character, were so intimidated, that they durst not enter the court; and those who had resolution enough to give evidence ...
— The History of England in Three Volumes, Vol.II. - From William and Mary to George II. • Tobias Smollett
... to him like the light of a shrine; he might kneel and adore from afar, but he might not approach. The goddess had come to him like the moon to Endymion. He knew nothing, not even if he were welcome. Each visit was the same as the preceding. A sweet but exasperating changelessness reigned in that drawing-room—that pretty drawing-room where mother and daughter sat in sweet naturalness, removed from the grossness and meanness of life as he knew it. Neither illicit whispering nor affectation of reserve, ...
— Mike Fletcher - A Novel • George (George Augustus) Moore
... Perhaps some rough Latin sailor, as is the way today in calm weather when there is no work to be done, began to howl out one of those strange, endless songs which have been sung down to us, from ear to ear, out of the primeval Aryan darkness,—loud, long drawn out, exasperating in its unfinished cadence, jarring on the refined Greek ear, discordant with the actor's finely measured tones. In sudden rage at the noise—so it must have been—those delicate idlers sprang up and ran down ...
— Ave Roma Immortalis, Vol. 1 - Studies from the Chronicles of Rome • Francis Marion Crawford
... you are sleeping on a bed in the open air, foretells that you will have delightful experiences, and opportunity for improving your fortune. For you to see negroes passing by your bed, denotes exasperating circumstances arising, which will interfere with ...
— 10,000 Dreams Interpreted • Gustavus Hindman Miller
... policy of the king, would doubtless have inaugurated a golden age for his country, but for the aggressive meddling of French diplomacy in the quarrels between the princes of Cochin China and Cambodia; by which exasperating measure Siam is in the way to lose one of her richest possessions, [Footnote: Cambodia.] and may in time become, herself, the brightest and most costly jewel in the crown ...
— The English Governess At The Siamese Court • Anna Harriette Leonowens
... that the direct and unmitigated manner of depreciating the reputation, not merely of Jane Arrowsmith, but of Mrs. Wynyard, a personal friend of Miss Martineau's to whom she professes great obligations, could not be otherwise than exasperating to a woman of her generous temper, and this just in the crisis of her gratitude for her restoration to life and enjoyment by the means (as she considers it) of this friend. Not that I feel at all convinced of her having ...
— The Letters of Elizabeth Barrett Browning (1 of 2) • Frederic G. Kenyon
... women and their daughters' daughters) this gauze has been withheld and without semblance of such apology they have been frankly trodden under the feet of men. They are and have been objected to, apparently for reasons peculiarly exasperating to reasoning human beings. When in this world a man comes forward with a thought, a deed, a vision, we ask not, how does he look,—but what is his message? It is of but passing interest whether or not the messenger is beautiful or ugly,—the message is the thing. This, which is axiomatic among ...
— Darkwater - Voices From Within The Veil • W. E. B. Du Bois
... bearing despatches from General Massena to the citizen First Consul; but it seemed to me you were a fine lot of victims! Only, my poor friends, you will have to bid farewell to all that for the present; disagreeable, unlucky, exasperating, no doubt, but the House of ...
— The Companions of Jehu • Alexandre Dumas
... and arduous search; one that was infinitely difficult and exasperating; and full of pathos to the sympathetic man who watched him in silence. Mr. Hilton could not understand his movements as he felt his way about the room, opening drawers and armoires, now and again stooping down and feeling along ...
— The Man • Bram Stoker
... made a bonne bouche with which to close the feast. Interest in the subject rose to fever heat before October. Pulpit, press and fireside were occupied with its discussion. The most effective, and at the same time, exasperating opposition, came from the pulpit, but there was also vigorous help from the same quarter. The Catholic Bishop preached a series of sermons and lectures, in which he fulminated all the thunders of apostolic and papal revelation against ...
— History of Woman Suffrage, Volume III (of III) • Various
... has been doing,' interposed Lavvy, over the maternal shoulder, 'ever since we got up this morning. It's all very well to laugh, Bella, but anything more exasperating ...
— Our Mutual Friend • Charles Dickens
... a waste of time to fight against that assumption of injured innocence—that impregnable feminine redoubt—and when the enemy once gets fairly behind it one might as well raise the siege. I think it the most amusing, exasperating and successful defense and counter attack in the whole science of war, and every woman has it at her finger-tips, ready ...
— When Knighthood Was in Flower • Charles Major
... succeeded in doing so, a triumph of this nature should suddenly be thrust into his face with blunt brutality, and based upon a style of music which he might feel justified in regarding as poor. He probably found it no less exasperating that Devrient, whose gifts he acknowledged, and who was his own devoted admirer, should now so openly and loudly sound my praises. These thoughts were dimly shaping themselves in my mind, when Mendelssohn, by a very remarkable statement, drove me, almost with violence, to adopt this interpretation. ...
— My Life, Volume I • Richard Wagner
... little better than rough door-mats sewed up and stuffed, with head, tail, and legs attached, and just enough of life infused to make them move! No, the wild ass of the prairie is a large powerful, swift creature. He has the same long ears, it is true, and the same hideous, exasperating bray, and the same tendency to flourish his heels; but for all that he is a very fine animal, and often wages successful warfare with ...
— The Dog Crusoe and His Master - A Story of Adventure in the Western Prairies • Robert Michael Ballantyne
... skilful with both axe and rifle, were expert backwoodsmen, but without physical strength, very childish and ignorant, vindictive, narrow, and so extremely clannish and tenacious of their own opinions that they were always an exasperating element to be reckoned with, in any public matter. We saw also a compact little group of dark small men, with bright eyes and quick manners. They held close together and chattered like a lot of magpies. McNally, ...
— Gold • Stewart White
... across the way. They were gathered there, waiting for me to come back, and received me with loud and mocking ahems! and respectfully sympathetic toots on a tin horn, kept for that purpose. Its voice had a mournful strain in it that was especially exasperating. But when, without paying any attention to them, I busied myself with the wire at once, and kept at it right along, they scented trouble, and consulted anxiously among themselves. My story finished, I went out and sat on my own stoop and said ahem! in my turn in as many aggravating ...
— The Making of an American • Jacob A. Riis
... which may perhaps never be wholly allayed. A Government, then, with this vast army, must always be in a difficulty. Lord Canning—lord anybody else—cannot turn his attention to anything but this wearing, exasperating question of how money is to be got for the next quarter to pay this army. He cannot turn his attention in any way to reforms, and I am convinced that this House must insist upon the Government reducing its army, whatever be the risk. A large army will render it impossible ...
— Speeches on Questions of Public Policy, Volume 1 • John Bright
... roused by the boldness of the city magistrates, who dared to favour the Saxon escutcheon and banners so openly? It seemed to her exasperating, punishable insolence. But perhaps in his greatness he did not grudge this distinction to a guest so much his inferior, and it was only the gout again inflicting its pangs upon his poor ...
— Uarda • Georg Ebers
... node it is worth remarking that the coughing node may appear at any point on the cords. It shows first at one point and then at another. The node caused by vocal weakness or abuse of the natural powers, however, displays an exasperating, and sometimes puzzling, affinity for particular portions of the vocal cords. It is generally found protruding from the anterior and middle third on one or the other side of the glottic opening, or on both, in chronic ...
— The Voice - Its Production, Care and Preservation • Frank E. Miller
... humbled, Napoleon turned his attention to Venice. Venice had been behaving in a most exasperating fashion, and the conqueror felt that the time had come to take the proud City of the Sea ...
— Mr. Bonaparte of Corsica • John Kendrick Bangs
... his strips of bacon on it, and set it in the oven; which is a very good way of cooking breakfast bacon, as Bud well knew. Cash then took down the little square baking pan, greased from the last baking of bread, and in that he fried his hot cakes. As if that were not sufficiently exasperating, he gave absolutely no sign of being conscious of the frying pan any more than he was conscious of Bud. He did not overdo it by whistling, or even humming a tune—which would have given Bud an excuse ...
— Cabin Fever • B. M. Bower
... man of the streets and the market-place, who talked rather more incessantly than the rest, and apparently with less right. He did not testify to the truth, but pleaded ignorance in extenuation of an exasperating habit of asking questions. There was, however, a humor and a method in his innocence that arrested attention. He was a formidable adversary in discussion from his very irresponsibility; and he was especially successful with the more ...
— The Approach to Philosophy • Ralph Barton Perry
... occurrence with me, but on a more than usually important mission. I needn't note down how I achieved it. Am I likely to forget my impotent speeches? Still, she had given me plenty of excuse for supposing she liked me, and I said so. And then Catherine laughed her exasperating little laugh that always dries up all sentiment on the spot, and makes my blood boil with anger. "I like you?" she repeated mockingly; "not at all! not in the least! What can you ...
— The Argosy - Vol. 51, No. 4, April, 1891 • Various
... we have allowed ourselves to collapse on our haversacks at the foot of the stacked rifles—stacks that form on the call of the whistle with feverish haste and exasperating delay, through our blindness in that atmosphere of ink-dawn reveals itself, extends, and acquires the domain of Space. The walls of the Shadow crumble in vague ruin. Once more we pass under the grand panorama of the day's unfolding upon the ...
— Under Fire - The Story of a Squad • Henri Barbusse
... institution, and the impression made upon Newman's gloomily-irritated gaze by the fresh-looking, windowless expanse behind which the woman he loved was perhaps even then pledging herself to pass the rest of her days was less exasperating than he had feared. The place suggested a convent with the modern improvements—an asylum in which privacy, though unbroken, might be not quite identical with privation, and meditation, though monotonous, might be of a cheerful cast. And yet he knew the case was ...
— The American • Henry James
... sustained perhaps but for a line or two at a time, and making the reader regret its sudden cessation. But the main quality of these poems is that of extraordinary grasp and insight, uttered with an uneven vigor sometimes exasperating, seemingly wayward, but really unsought and inevitable. After all, when a thought takes one's breath away, a lesson on grammar seems an impertinence. As Ruskin wrote in his earlier and better days, "No weight nor mass nor beauty of execution can outweigh one ...
— Poems: Three Series, Complete • Emily Dickinson
... received the official stamp in open court by a jury of his peers. The man whose imprudences and self-indulgences have made his liver slothful, his stomach rebellious, and wrecked his constitution in other ways, may—probably does—become an exasperating little tyrant, full of all manner of petty selfishness, which saps the comfort of others, as acid vapors corrode metals, but does that make him a 'scoundrel?' Opinions vary. His much enduring feminine ...
— The Red Acorn • John McElroy
... by-way lined with dwellings singularly Old-Worldish, even for London. He seemed to know it subjectively, to have retained a memory of it from another existence: as the stage setting of a vivid dream, all forgotten, will sometimes recur with peculiar and exasperating intensity, in broad daylight. The houses, with their sloping, red-tiled roofs, unexpected gables, spontaneous dormer windows, glass panes set in leaded frames, red brick facades trimmed with green shutters and doorsteps of white stone, each sitting back, sedate and self-sufficient, ...
— The Black Bag • Louis Joseph Vance
... years ago, an exasperating, soft-headed boy brought a colossal fortune into the Ring. I never pitied him much; I only longed to see him placed in the hands of a good schoolmaster who knew how to use a birch. This piteous wretch, with his fatuous airs of sharpness, ...
— The Ethics of Drink and Other Social Questions - Joints In Our Social Armour • James Runciman
... shed more blood IF HE HAD HAD A GRAVEYARD OF HIS OWN. These statements are unworthy a moment's attention. Mr. Twain or any other foreigner who did such a thing in Jerusalem would be mobbed, and would infallibly lose his life. But why go on? Why repeat more of his audacious and exasperating falsehoods? Let us close fittingly with this one: he affirms that "in the mosque of St. Sophia at Constantinople I got my feet so stuck up with a complication of gums, slime, and general impurity, that ...
— The $30,000 Bequest and Other Stories • Mark Twain
... was pleased and flattered by an older man's apparent admiration of Nina; and that she would further the girl's first definite affair in every way that lay in her power. It was maddening; it was exasperating beyond words. An honest warning would have merely flattered her with its implication of her importance; ah, no, Isabelle and Harriet might try to hold the child back—but Granny knew girl nature ...
— Harriet and the Piper - (Norris Volume XI) • Kathleen Norris
... just too sorry to keep you, mon cher Bracondale," Mrs. McBride said, presently, suddenly opening the adjoining door a few inches, "but it is a quite exasperating hat which has delayed me. I can't get the thing on at the angle ...
— Beyond The Rocks - A Love Story • Elinor Glyn
... room opened. It opened slowly, noiselessly, obviously. With exasperating precautions Mrs. Austen entered. The taste of benedictine was still in her mouth and, ...
— The Paliser case • Edgar Saltus
... round the point, he found himself instantly engaged with a light battery of four or six guns, doubtless the same we had seen in the distance. The Milton was within two hundred and fifty yards. The Connecticut men fought then: guns well, aided by the blacks, and it was exasperating for us to hear the shots, while we could see nothing and do nothing. The scanty ammunition of our bow gun was exhausted, and the gun in the stern was useless, from the position in which we lay. In vain we moved the men from side ...
— Army Life in a Black Regiment • Thomas Wentworth Higginson
... sounds better!" said Pringle in his most complacent tones. "I want to talk about myself, always, Stella May Vorhis; we've come thirty miles and I've heard Christopher Foy, Foy, Foy, all the way! It's exasperating! It's sickening!" ...
— The Desire of the Moth; and The Come On • Eugene Manlove Rhodes
... And by this means the varying phases of the struggle are traced almost step by step, through the preachings of John Knox and the early image-breaking outrages, to the comparative lull of the reign of James the First of England, and thence again from the renewed exasperating of opposition by the shifty and infatuated Martyr King to the climax of the "Killing Time" under the younger of his sons. Few incidents of really primary or representative importance are omitted, and the skill shown by the ...
— Ringan Gilhaize - or The Covenanters • John Galt
... and beautiful song, "Kathleen Mavourneen," was the bugler of our Battery, and he was the heartless wretch who used to persecute us that way. To be waked up and hauled out about day dawn on a cold, wet, dismal morning, and to have to hustle out and stand shivering at roll call, was about the most exasperating item of the soldier's life. The boys had a song very expressive of a soldier's feelings when nestling in his warm blankets, he heard the malicious bray of that ...
— From the Rapidan to Richmond and the Spottsylvania Campaign - A Sketch in Personal Narration of the Scenes a Soldier Saw • William Meade Dame
... that exasperating one known as "the first two weeks," when coaches are continually upon the border of insanity and players wonder dumbly if the game is worth the candle. To-day Joel, one of a squad of unfortunates, was relearning ...
— The Half-Back • Ralph Henry Barbour
... away! How many cares, how many anxieties! How many hatreds have I inspired, how many exasperating complications have I known! And all this with no other result than great moral and physical exhaustion, and a deep feeling of discouragement as to what may happen in the future,—disgust, too, as I think ...
— France in the Nineteenth Century • Elizabeth Latimer
... mold adhering to my boots made it heavy walking; moreover, the novelty had now worn off. The horses also did not work as smoothly as at the commencement: they seemed to have something on their minds, for at the end of every furrow they would turn and stare at me in the most exasperating manner. ...
— A Crystal Age • W. H. Hudson
... standard subjects, and might have been printed in a manual of polite topics and creditable opinions. She had no desire to astonish a man of whom she had heard nothing particular. It was all the more exasperating to see and hear Hinze's reception of her well-bred conformities. Felicia's acquaintances know her as the suitable wife of a distinguished man, a sensible, vivacious, kindly-disposed woman, helping her husband with graceful apologies ...
— Impressions of Theophrastus Such • George Eliot
... not calculated to attract the over-sensitive. Garrison's rampant and impersonal egotism was good politics, but bad taste. Wendell Phillips did not hesitate upon occasion to deal in personalities of an exasperating kind. One sees a certain shrinking in Emerson from the taste of the Abolitionists. It was not merely their doctrines or their methods which offended him. He at one time refused to give Wendell Phillips his hand because ...
— Emerson and Other Essays • John Jay Chapman
... comin' to make us a visit, Fletcher?" said Obed, with an exasperating smile. "It's just as well as if we had gone home with you. We shall be together anyway, and I know you value ...
— In A New World - or, Among The Gold Fields Of Australia • Horatio Alger
... timidly, of the sheriff, who had looked at him with a slow wink, then formed his mouth into an egg-shaped aperture and held it so an exasperating while, as if he meant to whistle. The sheriff's clownish behavior nettled Joe, for he was at a loss to understand ...
— The Bondboy • George W. (George Washington) Ogden
... years, he assured Beardsley, men learned to value law and order in art, as in the state, at their worth; and, more and more inspired by his theme, as was his way, he grew preposterously wise and irritating, and he talked himself so successfully into every exasperating virtue of age that I could not wonder at the fierceness with which Beardsley turned upon him and denounced him roundly as conventional and academic and prejudiced and old-fashioned and all that to youth is most odious and that to Bob, when not ...
— Nights - Rome, Venice, in the Aesthetic Eighties; London, Paris, in the Fighting Nineties • Elizabeth Robins Pennell
... spirit was neither gracious nor lovely, but nothing softer than its iron hand could have done its necessary work. The Puritan character was narrow, intolerant, and exasperating. The forefathers were very "sour" in the estimation of Morton and his merry company at Mount Wollaston. But for all that, Bradstreet and Carver and Winthrop were better forefathers than the gay Morton, and the Puritan spirit is doubtless the moral influence of modern civilization, both in ...
— Literary and Social Essays • George William Curtis
... Dick, with an affectionate sweetness as exasperating as it was moving. "It only excites you. Come on out and have a tramp. We could motor ...
— Old Crow • Alice Brown
... way they twang on their harp of a thousand strings. At breakfast, this morning, when Jack passed me the corn-bread, I said innocently, 'Why, what have we here?' 'It is manna that fell in the night,' answered Jack, with an exasperating snicker. 'You didn't know mutton, but I thought, being a Sunday-school teacher, you would know something about manna.' (N.B.—He alludes to that time I took the infant class for Miss Jones, and they all ran out to ...
— A Summer in a Canyon: A California Story • Kate Douglas Wiggin
... Chesapeake Bay an exasperating delay occurred, for 15 there were not sufficient vessels to transport the army over the water, and for a time the success of the whole expedition was threatened. But Washington was in no mood to be blocked by obstacles of this sort. If his ...
— Story Hour Readings: Seventh Year • E.C. Hartwell
... silence him; representing to him how far he was wandering from the subject they came to talk upon; how indecent it was to insult a man in his own house, especially, after arriving on purpose to conclude a reconciliation with him. All Bissy could say simply had the effect of exasperating the Marechal, and of making him vomit forth the most extravagant insults that ...
— The Memoirs of Louis XIV., His Court and The Regency, Complete • Duc de Saint-Simon
... palm red-hot coins from the nippers of a pair of tongs. It was not that Mac Tavish lacked the spirit of charity, but that he wanted every man to know to the full the grand and noble goodness of the Morrisons, and be properly grateful, as he himself was. Dow's complacency in his hallucination was exasperating! ...
— All-Wool Morrison • Holman Day
... everything too hard. This is a very exasperating man to meet because fortune usually favours him. Either he flukes immoderately or he does not leave well. He is usually a hearty fellow with no sense of shame. Perhaps he says "Sorry;" but he adds, ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 156, Feb. 19, 1919 • Various
... the greedy juryman, speaking under the exasperating influence of hunger—"by what right does Mr. Westerfield's family dare to suppose that a barmaid may not be a perfectly ...
— The Evil Genius • Wilkie Collins
... largest fish was farther to the west. The breeze lulled. We could not fly the kite except with the motion and direction of the boat. It was exasperating. When we got close the kite flopped down into the water. Captain Dan used language. We ran back, picked up the kite. It was soaked, of course, and would not fly. While Dan got out a new kite, a large silk one which ...
— Tales of Fishes • Zane Grey
... a saloon and hither the old man hurried. Mary had given him the number of the stage 'phone, and he called it. Despite the coldness of the afternoon, perspiration burst out and beaded his forehead as he waited—only to hear the exasperating voice of the operator announce, "Busy." Three times this was repeated and while he waited, pacing frenziedly back and forth, he sought, after each successive failure, to allay the jump and tremor of his shocked nerves with whiskey, and he ...
— Destiny • Charles Neville Buck
... destroy a poor man's character, and rob him of his bread. I do not state this on my own authority, I got it from a French physician of fame and repute—a man who was born in Paris, and had practiced there all his life. And he said that he spoke not merely from common knowledge, but from exasperating personal experience. ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... out, and the exasperating part of it was that up to a certain point he was so very right. Grant him his premises and his conclusions were sound enough, nor could I, seeing that he was already ordained, join issue with him about his premises as I should certainly have done if I had had a chance of doing ...
— The Way of All Flesh • Samuel Butler
... a Universalist, and Dante was a Catholic Calvinist. There was a determined optimism about Hunt, and a buoyancy as of a cork or other light body, sometimes a little exasperating to men of less sanguine temperament.[22] He ends by protesting that Dante is a semi-barbarian and his "Divine Comedy" too often an infernal tragedy. "Such a vision as that of his poem (in a theological point of ...
— A History of English Romanticism in the Nineteenth Century • Henry A. Beers
... she-hypocrite. The second, a "Mariee," with a long white veil, kneeling at a prie-dieu in her chamber, holding her hands plastered together, finger to finger, and showing the whites of her eyes in a most exasperating manner. The third, a "Jeune Mere," hanging disconsolate over a clayey and puffy baby with a face like an unwholesome full moon. The fourth, a "Veuve," being a black woman, holding by the hand a black little girl, and the twain studiously surveying an elegant French monument, set up in a ...
— Villette • Charlotte Bronte
... insect pests (excepting, perhaps, harvest bugs) are so utterly unendurable as the "little, busy, thirsty fly." It seems odd, too, as he neither stings nor bites, that he should be so objectionable; but his tickly method of walking over your nose or down your neck, and the exasperating pertinacity with which he refuses to take "no" for an answer when you flick him delicately with a handkerchief, but "cuts" and comes again, maddens you until you rise, bloody-minded in your wrath, and, seizing the nearest sledgehammer, fall upon the brute as he sits twiddling his legs in a sunny ...
— A Holiday in the Happy Valley with Pen and Pencil • T. R. Swinburne
... guide as well as servant, but you can get "bearers" with lesser accomplishments for almost any wages, down as low as $2 a month. But they are not only worthless; they actually imperil your soul because of their exasperating ways and general cussedness. You often hear that servants are cheap in India, that families pay their cooks $3 a month and their housemen $2, which is true; but they do not earn any more. One Swede girl will do as much work as a dozen ...
— Modern India • William Eleroy Curtis
... of criticizing the moon as their pastor. He belonged to the course of nature, like markets and toll-gates and dirty bank-notes; and being a vicar, his claim on their veneration had never been counteracted by an exasperating claim on their pockets. Some of them, who did not indulge in the superfluity of a covered cart without springs, had dined half an hour earlier than usual—that is to say, at twelve o'clock—in order to have time for their long walk ...
— Scenes of Clerical Life • George Eliot
... returned Mr. Bowers, with sad but unconquerable conviction; "because ye're both, so to speak, in a line o' idees and business that draws ye together,—to lean on each other and trust each other ez pardners. Not that YE are ezakly her ekal," he went on, with a return to his previous exasperating naivete, "though I've heerd promisin' things of ye, and ye're still young, but in matters o' this kind there is allers one ez hez to be looked up to by the other,—and gin'rally the wrong one. She looks up to you, Mr. Editor,—it's part of her po'try,—ez she looks ...
— A Sappho of Green Springs • Bret Harte
... simply exasperating. You've been reading Nietzsche till you haven't got any sense of moral proportion left. May I ask if you are governed by ...
— Reginald • Saki
... Senor Parker?" Pablo laughed briefly, lightly, mirthlessly, his cacchination carefully designed to convey the impression that he considered the question extremely superfluous. With exasperating deliberation he drew forth his little bag of tobacco and a brown cigarette paper; he smiled as he dusted into the cigarette paper the requisite amount of tobacco. With one hand he rolled the cigarette; while wetting the flap with his garrulous tongue, he gazed out upon the San Gregorio as one ...
— The Pride of Palomar • Peter B. Kyne
... 'Queen Caroline agitation,' proposed to buy the house adjoining the Chancellor's residence in Hamilton Place, and to fit it up for the habitation of that not altogether meritorious lady. Such an arrangement would have been an humiliating as well as exasperating insult to a lawyer who, as long as the excitement about the poor woman lasted, would have been liable to affront whenever he left his house or looked through the windows facing Hamilton Place. The same mob that delighted in hallooing ...
— A Book About Lawyers • John Cordy Jeaffreson
... Lancers, with two Canadian guns and four of the 84th battery. All day the Boer snipers clung to the column, as they had done to French's cavalry in the same district. Mere route marches without a very definite and adequate objective appear to be rather exasperating than overawing, for so long as the column is moving onwards the most timid farmer may be tempted into long-range fire from the flanks or rear. The river was reached and the Boers driven from a position which they had taken up, but their signal fires brought ...
— The Great Boer War • Arthur Conan Doyle
... of exasperating the people against their governours, of raising discontent, and exciting murmurs in a time of general danger, and of attempting to represent wise and salutary measures, which have received the approbation of the whole ...
— The Works of Samuel Johnson, Vol. 10. - Parlimentary Debates I. • Samuel Johnson
... to run the gauntlet of these fierce and fearless sea-wolves. The wealth of the Indies was really a possession of doubtful value. It attracted pirates as honey draws flies. When these pirates turned a part of their spoils over to kings who were not friendly to Spain, it was particularly exasperating. ...
— Days of the Discoverers • L. Lamprey
... 'How exasperating you people are!' cried Mrs. Crowley. 'I wanted to throw myself in her arms and have a good cry on the platform. You have ...
— The Explorer • W. Somerset Maugham
... devoted nature suffer in a year or two. Came out in her narrative, link by link, the gentle delicious complacency of the first period, the chill airs that soon ruffled it, the glowing hopes, the misgivings that dashed them; then the diminution of confidence, more complexing and exasperating than its utter loss; the alternations of joy and doubt, the fever and the ague of the wounded spirit; then the gusts of hatred followed by deeper love; later still, the periodical irritation at hopes long deferred, and still gleams of bliss between the paroxysms, so that now, as the vulgar ...
— Love Me Little, Love Me Long • Charles Reade
... Carringer agreed. The bills made a considerable pile upon the table. Carringer threw, and his starving heart beat violently as the pale stranger took up the dice-box with exasperating deliberation. Hours seemed to pass before he threw, but at last the dice rattled on to the table, and the pale stranger had won. The winner sat staring at the dice, and then he leaned slowly back in his chair, settled himself with seeming comfort, raised ...
— The Best British Short Stories of 1922 • Edward J. O'Brien and John Cournos, editors
... more exasperating? We ran up another question, I do not know what, but we waited in vain for the answering flutter, and the hospital ship Princess of Wales rolled ...
— The Relief of Mafeking • Filson Young
... the interpretation of the cryptogram before the conclusion of the passage upon which we were then engaged. No sooner, therefore, were we fairly at sea than I devoted myself in grim and serious earnest to my quest for the key that was to unlock the secrets of the exasperating cipher. The document consisted, as the reader will remember, entirely of long, unbroken rows of figures—with the exception of a rather singular sketch in the midst of the text, which I took to be a representation of the island whereon the treasure was said to have been secreted, as viewed from ...
— The Cruise of the "Esmeralda" • Harry Collingwood
... was that ten thousand of his people would have to be extricated from the province and carried to the coast. After many and exasperating discussions, Stanley refused to wait longer, and Emin, who had become nearly blind, brought away with him about five hundred persons. The expedition then, over a southeasterly route, made its way ...
— Great Men and Famous Women. Vol. 6 of 8 • Various
... and you are a favoured being indeed if you feel prepared, and are able at the right time to call to your standard thoughts that will aid you in that supreme effort. It happens too often that your trumpet call is unheeded. It is most perplexing and exasperating that just at the moment when you need your memory and a nice sense of discrimination, these faculties take to themselves wings and fly away. The facts you have garnered with such infinite trouble invariably fail you ...
— Story of My Life • Helen Keller
... and had to be brought back with the whip, the other dogs looking disgusted meanwhile, like honourable gentlemen at a cad who won't play fair. Angelica, shouting and laughing, made as much noise in her way as the dogs did in theirs, and the din was deafening; an exasperating kind of din too, not incessant, but intermittent, now swelling to a climax, now lulling, until there seemed some hope that it would cease altogether, then bursting out again, whip cracking, dogs howling and barking, feet scampering, Angelica ...
— The Heavenly Twins • Madame Sarah Grand
... distrusted his soundness on the currency question. Yet if he abandoned free silver it was doubtful if he could hold the West. For months his friends, steered by Hanna, who spent his own money freely, endeavored to keep the tariff in the foreground, while the candidate preserved a discreet and exasperating silence upon the dominant issue ...
— The New Nation • Frederic L. Paxson
... standing in solemn treaty relations with us as a unit in our nationality! What did England suppose had become of our Northern manhood, of the spirit of which she herself once felt the force? There was something alike humiliating and exasperating in this implied advice from her, that we should tamely and unresistingly submit to a division of continent, bays, and rivers, according to terms defiantly and insultingly proposed by those who had ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 8, Issue 49, November, 1861 • Various
... had roused his curiosity about Lois, and then she had said to herself: "You think you're going to see her to-night, but you just aren't." Such, according to George, was Irene Wheeler the illustrious. He reflected on the exasperating affair until he had undressed and got into bed. But as soon as he had put out the light Marguerite appeared before him, and at the back of her were the examiners for the ...
— The Roll-Call • Arnold Bennett
... fresh and ingenuous young stranger had been "chucked" like others until they met his kindly, tolerant, and even superior eyes, and were puzzled. Meanwhile Barker, who had that sublime, natural quality of abstraction over small impertinences which is more exasperating than studied indifference, after his brief hesitation passed out unconcernedly through the swinging mahogany doors into the blowy street. Here the wind and rain revived him; the bank and its curt refusal were forgotten; he walked onward with only a smiling memory of his partner as in the old days. ...
— The Three Partners • Bret Harte
... it if you went down on your bended knees an' swore it, not save I seed Sam with my own eyes, an' even then I'd have a doubt," said Tom, grinning in the most exasperating way. "Why, look there, now, at the skipper on the poop, as right as ninepence! If he'd been in the state you say, an' were so orfully frightened, an' had seed Sam's sperrit, as you wants to make me swallow, do you think he'd look so ...
— The Island Treasure • John Conroy Hutcheson
... dreary from a tiresome journey; but the dreariness did not last. Mrs. Dodge had provided a home-made banquet, and the happy company sat down to it, twenty strong, or more. Then the thing happened which always happens at large dinners, and is always exasperating: everybody talked to his elbow-mates and all talked at once, and gradually raised their voices higher, and higher, and higher, in the desperate effort to be heard. It was like a riot, an insurrection; it was an intolerable volume of noise. ...
— Chapters from My Autobiography • Mark Twain
... happened to be just about right for a good picture of the front; Will hoped those drifting clouds would not come along in an exasperating way, as so often happens in the experience of every amateur ...
— The Outdoor Chums at Cabin Point - or The Golden Cup Mystery • Quincy Allen
... being declared to be in order, you receive a new "pass" for the Army Corps in which you have been arrested. The moment you venture into another Army Corps, even if you return into that from which you were first released, arrest follows and the whole exasperating rigmarole has to be repeated. The Army Corps are as arbitrarily defined as anything to be found ...
— Sixteen Months in Four German Prisons - Wesel, Sennelager, Klingelputz, Ruhleben • Henry Charles Mahoney
... Out of gratitude to his Christian soldiers, he published an edict, in which he confessed himself indebted for his delivery to the shower obtained, PERHAPS, by the prayers of the Christians;[8] and more he could not say without danger of exasperating the pagans. In it he forbade, under pain of death, any one to accuse a Christian on account of his religion; yet, by a strange inconsistency, especially in so wise a prince, being overawed by the opposition of the senate, he had not the courage to abolish ...
— The Lives of the Fathers, Martyrs, and Principal Saints - January, February, March • Alban Butler
... stronger ground of complaint; she had NERVES! The word used to be strung out in pronouncing it, with a curve of the lips, as "ner-erves". I don't remember that she herself ever mentioned them; that was the exasperating part of it. She would never say a word; she would just close her thin lips tight, and wear a sort of ill look, as if she were in actual pain. She used to go up-stairs, and shut the door and windows tight, and go to bed, and have mustard-plasters on her temples and the back of her neck; ...
— The Burial of the Guns • Thomas Nelson Page
... I saw you giving the nicest dinners in Chicago, and scurrying through Europe, buying a dozen pictures here and there, building a great house, or perhaps, tired of Chicago, trying your luck in New York; but always pressing on, seizing this exasperating life, and tenaciously sucking out the rich enjoyments thereof! For the gold has entered ...
— Literary Love-Letters and Other Stories • Robert Herrick
... world to understand why, when Dr. Leslie was anything but prone to gossip, Marilla should have been possessed of such a wealth of knowledge of her neighbors' affairs. Strange to say this wealth was for her own miserly pleasure and not to be distributed, and while she often proclaimed with exasperating triumph that she had known for months some truth just discovered by others, she was regarded by her acquaintances as if she were a dictionary written in some foreign language; immensely valuable, but of no practical use to ...
— A Country Doctor and Selected Stories and Sketches • Sarah Orne Jewett
... platform were listening eagerly to the conversation; he felt that he was attracting too much attention. But there was no help for it. He could not go forward on this single-track railroad until the exasperating freight had reached ...
— Chasing an Iron Horse - Or, A Boy's Adventures in the Civil War • Edward Robins
... destiny of my sex and at the same time become the wife of the man she had long wished me to marry. The power of money was dear to her. She understood it well, and my failure to appreciate it properly was peculiarly exasperating to her. Discussion was useless. It never got farther than where it started. If I said that which I wanted much to say, it would merely mean hearing again what I did not want to hear. Concerning the pursuit of a happy livelihood we were ...
— People Like That • Kate Langley Bosher
... not one who was inclined to be querulous, still now on occasion, he could be. He began by asking questions concerning his wife's appearance—irritating little whys which are so trivial and yet so exasperating and discouraging to a woman. Why didn't she get a mauve hat nearer the shade of her dress? Why didn't she go out more? Exercise would do her good. Why didn't she do this, and why didn't she do that? He scarcely noticed that he was doing this; ...
— The Financier • Theodore Dreiser
... and her adorable head poised upon a body much too well made. She is too tender, too complex, too intelligent. She has a way of mischievously caressing you with her eyes one moment and giving an old comrade like myself a platonic little pat on the back the next, which is exasperating. As a friend I adore her, but to fall in love with her! Ah, non, merci! I have had a checkered childhood and my full share of suffering; I wish some peace in my old age. At sixteen one goes to the war of love blindly, but at forty ...
— A Village of Vagabonds • F. Berkeley Smith
... recrudescence of all that was most hateful to her should take place? Moreover, now as always, just that modicum of truth underlay Smyth's exaggerated accusations and perverted statements which made them as difficult to combat as they were exasperating to listen to. For a minute or so Poppy could not trust herself to speak, lest she should give way to foolish invective. His looks, manner, intonation, the phrases he employed were odiously familiar to her. She fought as in a malicious dream, to which the squalor of the surrounding ...
— The Far Horizon • Lucas Malet
... attack of fever. My work necessitated my being in camp for some months between Pakpattan and Mubarakpur—a desolate sandy stretch of country as every one who has had the misfortune to go there may know. My coolies were neither more nor less exasperating than other gangs, and my work demanded sufficient attention to keep me from moping, had I been inclined ...
— Indian Tales • Rudyard Kipling
... authority. An ounce of sympathy would have done more to commend the doctrine than a ton of dogmatic self-confidence. 'Hear it, and know thou it for thyself.' Take it into thy mind. Take it into thy mind and heart, and take it for thy good. It was a frosty ending, exasperating in its air of patronage, of superior wisdom, and in its lack of any note of feeling. So, of course, it set Job's impatience alight, and his next speech is more desperate than his former. When will well-meaning comforters learn not to rub salt into wounds ...
— Expositions Of Holy Scripture - Volume I: St. Luke, Chaps. I to XII • Alexander Maclaren
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