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More "Fretful" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... for a long while regarding the bright vacant courts of Heaven. "And what will you do now?" says Jurgen, aloud. "Oh, fretful little Jurgen, you that have complained because you had not your desire, you are omnipotent over Earth and all the affairs of men. What now is your desire?" And sitting thus terribly enthroned, the heart of Jurgen was as lead within him, and he felt old and very tired. "For I do ...
— Jurgen - A Comedy of Justice • James Branch Cabell
... a comely fold of wood on the mountain side, beckons and allures his imagination day after day, and is yet as inaccessible to his feet as the clefts and gorges of the clouds. The sense of distance grows upon him wonderfully; and after some feverish efforts and the fretful uneasiness of the first few days, he falls contentedly in with the restrictions of his weakness. His narrow round becomes pleasant and familiar to him as the cell to a contented prisoner. Just as ...
— Virginibus Puerisque • Robert Louis Stevenson
... Viscount Melville. See post, under Nov. 29, 1777. Boswell wrote to Temple on May 22, 1775:—'Harry Dundas is going to be made King's Advocate—Lord Advocate at thirty-three! I cannot help being angry and somewhat fretful at this; he has, to be sure, strong parts, but he is a coarse, unlettered, unfanciful dog.' Letters of Boswell, p. 195. Horace Walpole describes him as 'the rankest of all Scotchmen, and odious for that bloody speech that had fixed on him the nick-name ...
— Life Of Johnson, Vol. 2 • Boswell
... himself silently in the arm-chair beside the bed, and kept his soothing hold on her shoulder. The time had come when he went through all these accustomed acts of pacification as mechanically as a nurse soothing a fretful child. And once he had thought her weeping eloquent! He looked about him at the spacious room, with its heavy hangings of damask and the thick velvet carpet which stifled his steps. Everywhere were the graceful tokens of her presence—the vast lace-draped toilet-table strewn ...
— The Fruit of the Tree • Edith Wharton
... have someone to confide in right soon, he got me worked up to fever pitch. Now I've had to cool down. There isn't going to be any development. Our hair won't have to stand tip on end like the quills of the fretful porcupine. In so many words, Colon, it's all off, ...
— Fred Fenton Marathon Runner - The Great Race at Riverport School • Allen Chapman
... pressing it affectionately. She eagerly swallowed the medicines prescribed, as they were sweet; and one day, while a draught of manna was being prepared, which she thought too long delayed, she showed every sign of impatience, and threw herself from side to side like a fretful child; at last, throwing off the covering, she seized her physician by the coat with so much obstinacy that he was compelled to yield. The instant she obtained possession of the eagerly coveted cup she manifested ...
— The Private Life of Napoleon Bonaparte, Complete • Constant
... talking business with somebody, and all of a sudden the front half of the largest East Indian elephant in the world shoves three or four thousand pounds of herself in at that side door and begins waving her trunk around in the air, meanwhile uttering fretful, complaining sounds. I've lost two or three customers that way,' he says. 'They get right up and go away sudden,' he says, 'and they don't never come back no more, not even for their hats and umbrellas. They send ...
— From Place to Place • Irvin S. Cobb
... time the man sat smoking. Occasionally he turned his head to watch with keen eyes the fretful movements of a fly hovering above the water. Then a sudden dimple in the smooth surface of the stream arrested his attention. A few concentric ripples widened, travelled towards him, and were absorbed in the current. His lips curved ...
— Uncanny Tales • Various
... out in sudden, fretful admiration: "What a fellow you are, Dawes! What are you—I mean, what ...
— For the Term of His Natural Life • Marcus Clarke
... demeanour; and no fawning flattery of the elder could thaw away the wall of ice which the younger interposed between them. But with her son, the old lady had better success: he would listen to all she had to say, provided she could soothe his fretful temper, and refrain from irritating him by her own asperities; and I have reason to believe that she considerably strengthened his prejudice against me. She would tell him that I shamefully neglected the children, and even his wife did not attend to them as she ought; and that he must look after ...
— Agnes Grey • Anne Bronte
... in the habit of associating with nervous, irritable people, quit it until you grow strong in the power of concentration, because irritable, angry, fretful, dogmatic and disagreeable people will weaken what powers of ...
— The Power of Concentration • Theron Q. Dumont
... noted that in proportion as he waxed wealthy and fortunate, he grew pale, thin, and anxious. As his wife's popularity increased, he became fretful and impatient. The most uxorious of husbands, he was absurdly jealous. If he did not interfere with his wife's social liberty, it was because it was maliciously whispered that his first and only attempt was met by an outburst from Mrs. Brown that terrified him into silence. ...
— Selected Stories • Bret Harte
... resting against the dash, by the side of the young conductor, and evidently his intimate friend. The man wears a broad-brim white hat. Among the jam inside, near the door, a young Englishwoman, of the working class, with two children, has had trouble all the way with the youngest, a strong, fat, fretful, bright babe of fourteen or fifteen months, who bids fair to worry the mother completely out, besides becoming a howling nuisance to everybody. As the car tugs around Capitol Hill the young one is more demoniac than ever, and the flushed ...
— Birds and Poets • John Burroughs
... more life's fretful noise, Heed not here pale Envy's sting, Far from life's distempered joys; To the waters murmuring, To the shadows of the sky, To the moon that rides on high, To the glimpses of the night, We perform our airy rite, While care and pain, ...
— The Poetical Works of William Lisle Bowles, Vol. 1 • William Lisle Bowles
... studiously avoided. He is not an easy patient to deal with; he doesn't like people to go near him. I think, therefore, it will be well if even you do not see him. He seems to have an odd distrust of people, especially of women. It may be that he is fretful in his blindness, which is in itself so trying to a strong man. But besides, the treatment is not calculated to have a very buoyant effect. It is apt to make a man fretful to lie in the dark, and know that he has to do so for indefinite ...
— The Man • Bram Stoker
... He was a frail, fretful little creature, with a very red face just fading into yellow, about as much golden down on his little pate as would furnish a moth with plumage, and eyes like sloe-berries. It was fortunate rather than otherwise that he was so ailing for some weeks ...
— Jan of the Windmill • Juliana Horatia Ewing
... Limousine turned in under the wrought bronze portico of one of the palatial houses of upper Fifth Avenue. As the car stopped, the face of a woman of about forty appeared at its window. Her expression was one of fretful annoyance, as though the footman who had sprung off the box and hurried up the steps to ring the front doorbell had, in his haste, stumbled purposely. The look she gave him, as he held the door open for her to alight, ...
— The Title Market • Emily Post
... all this unnecessary rabble is helping to make everything horriblement cher. The price of things makes one's hair stand on end like the quills of the fretful porcupine. I can assure you that le moindre petit diner coute les yeux de la tete. Poor Bobbie Lacklands had a tragic experience yesterday. He said he quite unthinkingly dropped into that most recherche ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 156, Feb. 19, 1919 • Various
... with its legs in apparently inextricable intimacy; sharp elbows digging into the nicked and ink-stained bed of a counting-house desk; chin some six inches above the pages of a huge leather-covered ledger, hair rumpled and fretful, mouth doleful, ...
— The Day of Days - An Extravaganza • Louis Joseph Vance
... what 't is," whined Brida,—"anything 'bout a kitty. Oh, don't I wisht I had me own darlin' Popover right here in me arms!—Why don't yer begin?" urged the fretful voice, for Polly sat gazing ...
— Polly of the Hospital Staff • Emma C. Dowd
... The apprehensive and fretful may show, in varying degree, signs of either or all these conditions, according as ...
— Why Worry? • George Lincoln Walton, M.D.
... out of town a week yet," she said. "We're not half settled. Not having any one to help makes it harder; and the baby is rather fretful." ...
— A Mountain Woman and Others • (AKA Elia Wilkinson) Elia W. Peattie
... always is fretful, Unhappy, and cross, No matter what she may be doing, And cry-baby Belle Pleases nobody well ...
— Cole's Funny Picture Book No. 1 • Edward William Cole
... keep those children in a little better order," said the fretful voice. "And get me a drink of cold ...
— A Modern Cinderella • Amanda M. Douglas
... patience, gives a sudden jerk, and brings drawer and contents into the middle of the floor. His hostility to this unlucky piece of furniture increases every day, as if incensed that it does not grow better. He is like the fretful invalid who cursed his bed, that the longer he lay the harder it grew. The only benefit he has derived from the quarrel is that it has furnished him with a crusty joke, which he utters on all occasions. He swears that a French commode is the most ...
— The Crayon Papers • Washington Irving
... sacred books of the East, there is practically no reference to the kind of worry that is the bane and curse of our Occidental world. In conversation with the learned men of the Orient I find this same delightful fact. Indeed they have no word in their languages to express our idea of fretful worry. Worry is a purely Western product, the outgrowth of our materialism, our eager striving after place and position, power and wealth, our determination to be housed, clothed, and jeweled as well as our neighbors, and a little better if possible; in fact, it comes from our failure to know ...
— Quit Your Worrying! • George Wharton James
... little like that, also. He continued to cuss in a fretful, objectless way, even after Rabbit had stopped and waited for him with apology written in the very droop of his ears. When he had remounted, and the horse had settled again to his straight-backed, shuffling fox-trot, Starr would frequently think of something else to say upon the subject of fool horses ...
— Starr, of the Desert • B. M Bower
... managing his slaves either by force, fear, or fraud. We seldom called him "master;" we generally called him "Captain Auld," and were hardly disposed to title him at all. I doubt not that our conduct had much to do with making him appear awkward, and of consequence fretful. Our want of reverence for him must have perplexed him greatly. He wished to have us call him master, but lacked the firmness necessary to command us to do so. His wife used to insist upon our calling him so, but to no purpose. In ...
— The Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass - An American Slave • Frederick Douglass
... up thy soul;[101] freeze thy young blood; Make thy two eyes, like stars, start from their spheres; Thy knotted and combined locks to part, And each particular hair to stand on end,[102] Like quills upon the fretful porcupine:[103] But this eternal blazon[104] must not be To ears of flesh and blood.—List, list, O, list!— If thou didst ever thy ...
— Hamlet • William Shakespeare
... in his bearing he could not have shown much of it, though at his deeply sun-burned temples the thick, close-cut hair was silvery; for Austin said with amused and at the same time fretful emphasis: "How the devil you keep the youth" in your face and figure I don't understand! I'm only forty-five—that's scarcely eight years older than you are! And look at my waistcoat! And look at my hair—I mean where the confounded ebb ...
— The Younger Set • Robert W. Chambers
... alteration, if any, he do find in himself, and so may be usefull. On this occasion, Dr. Whistler told a pretty story related by Muffet, a good author, of Dr. Caius, that built Keys College; that, being very old, and living only at that time upon woman's milk, he, while he fed upon the milk of an angry, fretful woman, was so himself; and then, being advised to take it of a good-natured, patient woman, he did become so, beyond the common temper of his age. Thus much nutriment, they observed, might do. Their discourse was very fine; and if I should be put out ...
— Diary of Samuel Pepys, Complete • Samuel Pepys
... bearing was thereupon bestowed in the boot, I followed my cousin into the car, and a few minutes later we were at the mouth of the Adour. Here we left Ping beside Pong, and proceeded to join three figures on the horizon, apparently absorbed in the temper of a fretful sea. ...
— Jonah and Co. • Dornford Yates
... nodding earnestly. "But she was so fretful, she was always ailing; and it's better they should go when they get like that. But now we're soon going to get married again—when Father Lasse's ...
— Pelle the Conqueror, Complete • Martin Andersen Nexo
... sport. These they are, and usually they are nothing more. The player does not bleed to death in consequence; he simply goes on with the game. Military men, of course, understand this, but nations are too apt to be fretful as though some strange thing had happened ...
— Story of the War in South Africa - 1899-1900 • Alfred T. Mahan
... heaven, and there admitted among the blessed to enjoy an especial portion of happiness according to their faith. To this the angels replied, that such are indeed received into heaven; but when they are made sensible of the sphere of conjugial love there, they become sad and fretful, and then, some of their own accord, some by asking leave, and some from being commanded, depart and are dismissed, and when they are out of that heaven, a way is opened for them to their consociates, who had been in a similar state of life in the world; and ...
— The Delights of Wisdom Pertaining to Conjugial Love • Emanuel Swedenborg
... Infant School may be regarded in the light of a combination of the school and nursery, the art of pleasing, forms a prominent part in the system; and as little children are very apt to be fretful, it becomes expedient to divert as well as teach there. If children of two years old and under are not diverted, they will naturally cry for their mothers: and to have ten or twelve children crying in the school, it is very obvious ...
— The Infant System - For Developing the Intellectual and Moral Powers of all Children, - from One to Seven years of Age • Samuel Wilderspin
... of the herd were now in a state of pitiable dejection, and pressed closely together as if under a sense of common misfortune. For the most part they stood at rest in a compact body, fretful and uneasy. At intervals one more impatient than the rest would move out a few steps to reconnoitre; the others would follow at first slowly, then at a quicker pace, and at last the whole herd would rush off furiously to renew the often-baffled ...
— Sketches of the Natural History of Ceylon • J. Emerson Tennent
... grey day seemed a long one to those who, for various reasons, were waiting anxiously for the darkness; the court people fretful and on their mettle, the townsfolk suspicious, [151] Duke Carl full of amorous longing. At her distant cottage beyond the hills, Gretchen kept herself ready for the trial. It was expected that certain great ...
— Imaginary Portraits • Walter Horatio Pater
... which they had been accustomed, edicts of silence were more ineffectual than ever, and yawns became painfully frequent. Every one's temper fell into an uncomfortable state of annoyance and irritation; Miss Morley, instead of her usual quiet, piteous way of reproving, was fretful; Caroline was sharp; Clara sometimes rude like the boys, sometimes cross with them; even Marian was now and then tormented into a loss of temper, when there was no obtaining the quiet which she, more than the others, needed in order to learn ...
— The Two Guardians • Charlotte Mary Yonge
... served, to be admired. Middle age is the time to reverse engines, the time to love, to serve, to give rather than to receive. Marion had not learned that elementary lesson of life. We all recognise them at sight, the nervous, fretful faces of the middle-aged men and women who want to be loved. And love knows them, too, ...
— The Lowest Rung - Together with The Hand on the Latch, St. Luke's Summer and The Understudy • Mary Cholmondeley
... usual thing the first clothes are made too small. The sleeves are too short as well as too small around. There is nothing more uncomfortable than a tight sleeve. Everyone of our readers knows that, and we recall one poor little fellow who kept up a fretful cry until we took the scissors and cut the tightly stretched sleeve up to and including the arm hole. He then relaxed and went to sleep. Sleeves should be made two inches longer than they are needed at first, and it ...
— The Mother and Her Child • William S. Sadler
... wind is moaning In a lonely, fretful mood, Through the lofty spreading branches Of the elm and cottonwood. Where the willows hide the fordway With their fringe of lighter green, Is the dam, decayed and broken, Where the beavers once have been. On the ...
— Nancy MacIntyre • Lester Shepard Parker
... her character stands out in noble contrast to his. She does adopt the boy, and brings him to live with her in spite of all; and when St. John is unnaturally peevish at its childish squalling, Isola bears his fretful animadversions with a patient dignity that touches the hearts of all ...
— Modern Women and What is Said of Them - A Reprint of A Series of Articles in the Saturday Review (1868) • Anonymous
... possessed those qualities of leadership that bind party and friends by ties of unflinching services, he might have reaped the reward his ambition so ardently craved; but his peculiar temper unfitted him for such a career. Jealous, fretful, sensitive, and suspicious, he was as restless as his eloquence was dazzling, and, although generous to the poor, his political methods savoured of selfishness, making enemies, divorcing friends, and darkening his ...
— A Political History of the State of New York, Volumes 1-3 • DeAlva Stanwood Alexander
... slave herself to death for those she loved; but she was old for work, and the 'ache,' as she called it, had got into her bones. She had slept on the floor for two nights, and her poor old back was tired, and her head muddled with the confusion and her mistress's fretful fussiness. Biddy could have worked well if any one had told her exactly what to do, but between one order and another—between Mr. Cyril's impatience and Miss Mollie's incapable, youthful zeal—she was just 'moithered,' as ...
— Lover or Friend • Rosa Nouchette Carey
... new house before going to the Hornbys' for the rest of the day. John ceased to be fretful, and by the time for leaving had arrived, Elizabeth had forgotten that he had ever been so. That evening Aunt Susan was told of the engagement, and having divined its arrival, she was able to hide any misgivings she had about it. Besides, not having anything upon ...
— The Wind Before the Dawn • Dell H. Munger
... fair and bewitching, which lit up the student's face with its reflection, while the other, dark and lowering from its deep and gloomy appearance, shed a cloud of despondency and sadness upon the thoughtful brow, leaving thereon an expression that was fretful and annoying. ...
— Marguerite Verne • Agatha Armour
... small, and were clad in buff-coloured silk stockings, and little womanish bronze-leather slippers. Two rings adorned his white delicate hands, the value of which even my inexperienced observation detected to be all but priceless. Upon the whole, he had a frail, languidly-fretful, over-refined look—something singularly and unpleasantly delicate in its association with a man, and, at the same time, something which could by no possibility have looked natural and appropriate if it ...
— The Woman in White • Wilkie Collins
... on working for him as long as we can get along together all right, which it seems like from appearances that ought to be always. But after he gives up being circuit judge on account of him getting along so in age he gets sort of fretful by reasons of him not having much to do any more and most of his own friends having died off on him. When the State begins going Republican about once in so often, he says to me, kind of half joking, he's a great mind to pull up stakes and move off and go live somewheres ...
— When Winter Comes to Main Street • Grant Martin Overton
... however, watched the service door at the end of the long hall with fretful eyes. "That piece," she confided to Harkness, the moment not being so important as to still her grumbling, "said she wouldn't come in. And when I told her she could just choose t'wixt this and the door she said she wouldn't dress up, anyways. Impertinent chit! Thinks ...
— Red-Robin • Jane Abbott
... therefore, that it is a recommendation, rendering their milk fitter for younger children than it would otherwise have been. It produces, however, quite a contrary effect; it much impairs the milk, which will be found to disagree with the child, rendering it at first fretful,—after a time being vomited up, and productive of frequent watery dark ...
— The Maternal Management of Children, in Health and Disease. • Thomas Bull, M.D.
... He had repeated these words over and over again, and somehow under the heat of his ardor and longing for his native land this hackneyed phrase took on its real and dreadful value. In the sudden sweep of this vital remembrance, Claire Robson rose for a moment above the fretful drip of circumstance.... Blood-red Dawn!... She threw herself back upon ...
— The Blood Red Dawn • Charles Caldwell Dobie
... become the resentful and fretful appeal of the victim of plot and circumstance. All the savage brutality had been eliminated; the sneer, the truculent attempts to browbeat, the pitiful swagger, the cynical justification, all were gone. It was really the man himself now, normally scared and repentant; ...
— The Fighting Chance • Robert W. Chambers
... pledging himself to Mercy, he became thoughtful and rather fretful; for he was still most averse to go to Hernshaw, and yet could hit upon no other way; since to employ an agent would be to let out that he had committed bigamy, and so risk his own ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 18, No. 105, July 1866 • Various
... business of yours! I wish you would let me alone!' broke out Dolores, in a fretful fright lest any one should guess that she had anything on ...
— The Two Sides of the Shield • Charlotte M. Yonge
... yawned, and smiled, and almost as if lit with that thin last sunshine seemed the smile that passed for an instant across the reverie of his shadowy face. He drew a hand wearily over his eyes. 'What has he been saying now?' he inquired like a fretful child. ...
— The Return • Walter de la Mare
... being petted by every one. Mamma and papa had tried all sorts of things to amuse and do her good; for she was their only little daughter, and they loved her very dearly. But nothing pleased her long; and she lounged about, pale and fretful, till Aunt Laura came. Daisy called her "Wee" when she was a baby, and couldn't talk plainly; and she still used the name because it suited the cheery little aunt ...
— Aunt Jo's Scrap-Bag VI - An Old-Fashioned Thanksgiving, Etc. • Louisa M. Alcott
... In languid dejection or fretful repinings did the unhappy beauty therefore consume the tedious hours, while her husband sought alternately to soothe with fondness he no longer felt, or flatter with hopes which he knew to be groundless. To his father alone could he now ...
— Marriage • Susan Edmonstone Ferrier
... laziness! No wonder old Sampson won't keep you longer than the holidays if you're no smarter than that. Goodness, if I don't settle that boy!"—as the sound of fretful crying came ...
— Lucy Maud Montgomery Short Stories, 1905 to 1906 • Lucy Maud Montgomery
... tone and shuffled off. The atmosphere of tenseness was unmistakable now. Sally could feel it. The world of the theatre is simply a large nursery and its inhabitants children who readily become fretful if anything goes wrong. The waiting and the uncertainty, the loafing about in strange hotels in a strange city, the dreary rehearsing of lines which had been polished to the last syllable more than a week ago—these things had sapped the nerve of the Primrose Way company ...
— The Adventures of Sally • P. G. Wodehouse
... supervision. There is nowhere to go, nothing to do, nothing to read, nothing to talk about. She has nothing to do but to lie in a steamer chair and to think of home. Most women break down under it very quickly; they lose appetite and flesh and grow fretful or melancholy. But to a woman who loves her home and is employed, provincial life here is a boon. Remember that for an expenditure of forty or fifty dollars a month the single woman can maintain an establishment ...
— A Woman's Impression of the Philippines • Mary Helen Fee
... and it was with all his heart; a fair riddance! for there was no bearing the house with such an ill-natured wife:—her sister Polly was worth a thousand of her!—I am heartily sorry for their unhappiness. But could she think every body must bear with her, and her fretful ways?—They'll jangle on, I reckon, till they are better used to one another; and when he sees she can't help it, why he'll bear with her, as husbands generally do with ill-tempered wives; he'll try to make himself happy abroad, and leave her to quarrel with ...
— Pamela (Vol. II.) • Samuel Richardson
... the closed pianoforte, and her music on the top—the songs he loved best; she had actually left Mendelssohn there to be seen—a very bait to awaken his passion. She thought she actually saw the fretful impatience with which he threw the music aside and walked to the ...
— Lord Kilgobbin • Charles Lever
... I be sure?" I asked fretfully, for grief as often makes men fretful as illness. "I did not ask ...
— The Doctor's Dilemma • Hesba Stretton
... sick-room swiftly and noiselessly, put the nun through a strict cross-examination with the fretful sharpness of a person disturbed in her night's rest. Then she went into the sitting-room where Philippus was on the point of pledging Paula in his second cup of wine, while she stood before him with dishevelled hair and robe ungirt. All this was an offence against ...
— Uarda • Georg Ebers
... own; over anxious of the good opinion of others; bent upon getting the credit of industry, honesty, and prudence? all these are temptations of this world. Are we discontented with our lot, or are we over attached to it, and fretful and desponding when God recalls the good He has given? ...
— Parochial and Plain Sermons, Vol. VII (of 8) • John Henry Newman
... miladi of her tryst and beg her to come out and see the star, but when she found her not only indifferent, but fretful, she refrained and was glad presently that she had this delicious secret to herself. But there was a great mystery. Sometimes the star was different. Instead of being golden, it was a pale blue, and then almost red. Was it that way ...
— A Little Girl in Old Quebec • Amanda Millie Douglas
... was fretful. It had even a touch of indignation as though the speaker charged her husband with the draughts. Mrs. Hooper was a woman between forty and fifty, small and plain, except for a pair of rather fine eyes, which, in her youth, while her cheeks were still pink, and the obstinate lines of her ...
— Lady Connie • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... of preparation downstairs, her mother's low, fretful voice and her father's high and strained one joined in a heated argument, and they started still deep in it, for her father did not call a good-night to Judith. The street door shut, and she was alone in the house. Carriage wheels creaked out of the yard and there was no returning sound of ...
— The Wishing Moon • Louise Elizabeth Dutton
... an-angered, the blood rushed back to her heart, and she was whiter than a lamb at the shearing, and her lips like white threads. Then would the light shoot and spin in her eyes, and her nostrils suck in and out, like those of a fretful horse. And she was fierce after the manner of a man rather than of a maid. Moreo'er, she was full a year younger than the Lady Patience; but she looked it not; rather did her ladyship look full two years younger than Mistress Marian. And I loved them both, and tried as a Christian ...
— A Brother To Dragons and Other Old-time Tales • Amelie Rives
... in a letter-of-credit that my father earned from the fretful pig, and much more in cash that I won at poker from the pashas. When that's gone I've got to go to work and earn my living. Meanwhile your salary is a hundred a week and all you need to boost Gilman ...
— The Red Cross Girl • Richard Harding Davis
... on the sons of Lir when they heard that, for they thought it the same as to be living people again, to be talking with their friends and their companions on Loch Dairbhreach, in comparison with going on the cold, fretful sea of the ...
— Gods and Fighting Men • Lady I. A. Gregory
... insists on her suckling it herself. You ask my advice on this matter; and, to give it you frankly, I really think that Mr ——'s demand is unreasonable, as his wife's constitution is tender, and her temper fretful. A true philosopher would consider these circumstances; but a pedant is always throwing his system in your face, and applies it equally to all things, times and places, just like a taylor who would make a coat out of his own head, without any regard to ...
— Letters of the Right Honourable Lady M—y W—y M—e • Lady Mary Wortley Montague
... her with the manner of a fretful child. And presently, as she talked, the cloud lifted from his gray, haggard face, and he grew calm. Soon, when she made some smiling remark, he even smiled back at her with the ...
— Helen of the Old House • Harold Bell Wright
... out the sentence; in itself the fragment, sharply uttered, peevish and fretful, conveyed more than enough. "You wouldn't let him have what he wanted; so what's the use of making it any worse? He swallowed his disappointment; but if you're getting ready to ...
— Stories from Everybody's Magazine • 1910 issues of Everybody's Magazine
... withdrawing his eyes from the space above my head. "And why do we stay in it when there are such glorious paradises to go to? Hawaii now. If you really want divine laziness—sun and warmth and the absence of all fretful ambition—you should go to the South Seas. You can't get it anywhere else. I remember when I was ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 156, Feb. 5, 1919 • Various
... Jones, in a fretful tone, when the children displayed their wealth before him, "I can get enough when I am over the mountains, if I have missed ...
— The American Family Robinson - or, The Adventures of a Family lost in the Great Desert of the West • D. W. Belisle
... will blab—it's the nature o' the beast—that stupid little much-divorced animal that married him—" he glared at two innocent young shoppers who were passing, "Gad, women are such sophisticated cows nowadays—" Spring always made him wretched, spring always made him fretful, spring always sent him off for the woods somewhere, any woods so long as it was woods. He pondered over whether he could get away Friday or would have to wait till Saturday morning, and eventually decided on Saturday, consulting a memorandum book scowlingly as he did so, jotting ...
— Little Miss By-The-Day • Lucille Van Slyke
... opened her eyes wide and wider, looking round the room no longer in fear, but in a sort of wonder. Her gaze rested an instant on my face, she drew her arm from round my neck and rose to her feet, pushing away my arm. There she stood for a moment with a strange, fretful, ashamed look on her face. She tossed her head, flinging her hair back behind her shoulders. I had taken her hand and still held it; now ...
— The King's Mirror • Anthony Hope
... in a scallop effect on either side, and upon reaching the crest he fights with it and wrestles with it until he makes it stand erect in a feather-edged design. I can tell by his expression that he is pleased with this arrangement. He loves to send his victims forth into the world tufted like the fretful cockatoo. He likes to see surging waves of hair dash high on a stern and rockbound head. His sense of the artistic demands such ...
— Cobb's Anatomy • Irvin S. Cobb
... by fretful women, sweating under his burden, he was happy; he could not account for it and did not attempt to, but he knew it. He ...
— The Landloper - The Romance Of A Man On Foot • Holman Day
... not sure of sorrow; And joy was never sure; Today will die tomorrow; Time stoops to no man's lure; And love, grown faint and fretful With lips but half regretful Sighs, and with eyes forgetful Weeps ...
— Null-ABC • Henry Beam Piper and John Joseph McGuire
... you,—that from the Drachenfels and its six brother felsen, eastward, trending to the north, there runs and spreads a straggling company of gnarled and mysterious craglets, jutting and scowling above glens fringed by coppice, and fretful or musical with stream; the crags, in pious ages, mostly castled, for distantly or fancifully Christian purposes;—the glens, resonant of woodmen, or burrowed at the sides by miners, and invisibly tenanted farther, underground, by ...
— Our Fathers Have Told Us - Part I. The Bible of Amiens • John Ruskin
... the situations very good: it amused me very well, and was exceedingly well acted. Glengall came to me afterwards to get criticisms on his play. I told him some of the faults, and he was not in the Sir Fretful line, but took it all very thankfully. At Roehampton on Sunday; Byng, Sir Robert Wilson, Sharpe,[16] and Luttrell. There is a joke of Luttrell's about Sharpe. He was a wholesale hatter formerly; having a dingy complexion, ...
— The Greville Memoirs - A Journal of the Reigns of King George IV and King William - IV, Volume 1 (of 3) • Charles C. F. Greville
... could a tale unfold whose lightest word Would harrow up thy soul, freeze thy young blood, Make thy two eyes like stars start from their spheres, The knotted and combined locks to part, And each particular hair to stand on end Like quills upon the fretful porcupine." ...
— Honor Edgeworth • Vera
... had cultivated so assiduously and achieved so successfully. Not a muscle of her face changed when she saw Jerrie, but she closed Maude's door quickly, and stepping into the hall, offered the tips of her fingers, as she said, in a fretful, rather than ...
— Tracy Park • Mary Jane Holmes
... so great and so merry that the little Brownlee girl, having tucked her fretful mother up in bed, stole out to the garden fence and watched the doings with all a child's wistful eyes. David Allan, who happened to drift out that way, found her there and they visited over the fence. It took David quite a while to tell her ...
— Green Valley • Katharine Reynolds
... whose black eyes fixed themselves on her mother in a momentary contentment; but, at the first movement, she began again her fretful ...
— Forsyte Saga • John Galsworthy
... night, Miss Mattie was partially awake and inclined to be fretful. "The strength is gone out of my medicine," she grumbled, "and it ain't time to take more. I've got to set here and be deprived of my sleep until ...
— Flower of the Dusk • Myrtle Reed
... the fretful comment of the adventurer. "I have too much at stake to be drowned like a rat in a trap! You must send me up first if it becomes ...
— Tom Swift and his Undersea Search - or, The Treasure on the Floor of the Atlantic • Victor Appleton
... seemed a spell upon the Lewis family. Mrs. Lewis didn't say one cross or fretful word; indeed, she had no cause, for in Kitty's heart there was a strange, new feeling of love for her mother, of longing to please and give her comfort; and never was mother waited on with a more quiet care than ...
— Tip Lewis and His Lamp • Pansy (aka Isabella Alden)
... "A night of fretful passion may consume All that thou hast of beauty's gentle bloom; And one distempered hour of sordid fear Prints on thy brow the ...
— The Woman Beautiful - or, The Art of Beauty Culture • Helen Follett Stevans
... present day need of knowledge concerning a certain contagion of emotions. Strong feeling sometimes vibrates that which is hostile and selfish. One fretful, scolding woman can upset a neighborhood, to ...
— The Colored Girl Beautiful • E. Azalia Hackley
... been led out for her was a wiry, dapple-gray mare of impatient blood. I knew the correct thing to do, and while I feared that I could not perform the service successfully, I determined to try. So as she walked towards the fretful mare which a negro was with difficulty restraining, I stepped forward, doffed my hat, and with "Permit me, Miss Salome," I bent, and hollowed my hand for the reception of her foot. With the naturalness and grace of a queen she placed the sole upon my palm, and I lifted her to the spring ...
— The Love Story of Abner Stone • Edwin Carlile Litsey
... animal—the fruit of their labor would without doubt have been pronounced satisfactory; yet only in a visual sense could he have been called animal. So far as concerned temperament he was merely a fretful peri locked up in a cage of flowers—for how in the name of all creation had it been possible for Miss Sallie and Miss Veemie, sole proprietresses of this male machine, to make him ...
— Where the Souls of Men are Calling • Credo Harris
... along. Its gray, dirty waves are beaten up by a light, chilly wind, and chase the black barges with a puny, fretful, sinister fury, falling back from their dark, wet sides with a hiss of baffled hatred. Yes, ...
— The Collaborators - 1896 • Robert S. Hichens
... looked on all his associates as wretches of depraved taste and narrow notions. Their conversation was, therefore, fretful and waspish, their behaviour brutal, their merriment bluntly sarcastick, and their seriousness gloomy and suspicious. They were totally ignorant of all that passes, or has lately passed, in the world; unable to discuss any question of religious, ...
— The Works of Samuel Johnson - Volume IV [The Rambler and The Adventurer] • Samuel Johnson
... fretful contortion, and obeyed. So it went on all the morning, Ethel's eagerness checked by Miss Winter's dry manner, producing pettishness, till Ethel, in a state between self-reproach and a sense of injustice, went up to prepare for dinner, ...
— The Daisy Chain, or Aspirations • Charlotte Yonge
... was in a perpetual ferment, and no comforting spirit spoke quietness to his soul—no stout heart strengthened his—no lively intelligence animated his own to worthy doings. He was very cross and fretful, and knew himself to be so that particular evening—worried and in want of rest. What a chance, if perhaps he found Nettie, whose very provocations were somehow more interesting than other people's most agreeable and tranquillising ...
— The Doctor's Family • Mrs. (Margaret) Oliphant
... declared Flossie, who seemed bound to start a dispute. Perhaps she was so tired that she was fretful. ...
— The Bobbsey Twins at School • Laura Lee Hope
... taken on board the war-ship Bellerophon. Louis XVIII. was brought back to Paris. Napoleon, by the agreement of the allies, was conveyed to the island of St. Helena, where he remained, a fretful captive, until his death (May 5, 1821). Ney escaped, but was captured, condemned, and shot (Dec. 7, 1815). France engaged to pay a war indemnity of seven hundred million francs. Its boundaries ...
— Outline of Universal History • George Park Fisher
... for weeks past had seen from a distance, though they had not yet visited them, did not seem to have any strong feeling on the subject as they trotted through the grove of palm-trees. Mr. Damer had not yet escaped from his wife, who was still fretful from the ...
— An Unprotected Female at the Pyramids • Anthony Trollope
... busy all the morning with Barkins and Smith, going from one to the other, to sit with them and give them what news I could, both looking rather glum when I went away, for they were feverish and fretful from their wounds. But I promised to return soon with news of the men, who were all together in a cool, well-ventilated part of the 'tween-decks, seeming restful and patient, the doctor having been ...
— Blue Jackets - The Log of the Teaser • George Manville Fenn
... do any more to-day," cried Bracy. "I can't bear it. You only make me fretful because I can't be ...
— Fix Bay'nets - The Regiment in the Hills • George Manville Fenn
... he was right to go. I could understand his doing that. He is not like us, and would have been fretful here, wanting that which I could not give him. He became worse from day to day, and was silent and morose. I am glad he went. But, mamma, for his sake I wish that this ...
— The House of Heine Brothers, in Munich • Anthony Trollope
... properly and logically ordered, is neat, compact, clearly defined, and covers the whole ground. I desire to recommend it to such as find the other systems too difficult, exacting, and irksome for the uses of this fretful ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... father went: in the interval between the ceremony of our marriage and his departure, she had remained at home, occupying her old place by her father, and bed by her sister's side: he as kind as ever, but the women almost speechless among themselves; Aunt Lambert, for once, unkind and fretful in her temper; and little Hetty feverish and strange, and saying, "I wish we were gone. I wish we were gone." Though admitted to the house, and forgiven, I slunk away during those last days, and only saw my wife for ...
— The Virginians • William Makepeace Thackeray
... substitute for a heart because his son could not or would not play the superfine gentleman—on the paternal model, and then came the news of his death, when only thirty-six. What was a still greater shock to the lordly father, now deaf, gouty, fretful, and at outs with the world, his informant reported that she had been secretly married for several years to Young Hopeful, and was left penniless with two boys. Lord Chesterfield was above all things a practical philosopher, ...
— The PG Edition of Chesterfield's Letters to His Son • The Earl of Chesterfield
... could do these things because he was a rare colt, stronger than ever colt before was at his age, and for a time the mare suffered his antics with a look of pleased toleration. But as he kept it up, and as she was getting her first real sustenance since the day of his coming, she at length became fretful and sounded a low warning. But this the colt did not heed. Instead he wheeled suddenly and plunged directly toward her, bunting her sharply. Nor did the single bunt satisfy him. Again and again he attacked her, plunging in and ...
— Bred of the Desert - A Horse and a Romance • Marcus Horton
... preacher," she said, with a flickering smile about her fretful lips; and she rose, brushing some lifeless strands of hair behind her ears, and pulling down her sleeves, which were rolled above ...
— John Ward, Preacher • Margaret Deland
... any danger?" asked little Liza in a fretful tone. She was standing with head averted from the bowl which was in her mother's hands, with ...
— The Shadow of a Crime - A Cumbrian Romance • Hall Caine
... him saluted as the favorite of the emperor and the idol of the crowd, and thence had believed unbounded happiness must be his never-varying lot, would have been astonished to know how many things there were which rankled painfully in his heart, and, for the moment, made him discontented and fretful. ...
— Continental Monthly, Volume 5, Issue 4 • Various
... Jameson's Raid. That was not the voice which had spoken to her in broken tones of love on the day Ian first dined with her after her marriage—that fateful, desperate day. This was a voice which had a cheerless, fretful note, a savage something in it. Presently they two would meet, and she knew how it would be—an outward semblance, a superficial amenity and confidence before their guests; the smile of intimacy, when there was no intimacy, and ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker
... time, though she was more devoted than ever to her sick sister, she was soft and bright to nobody else. She did not complain, but she thought that things had been very hard with her; and when people repine their troubles do not make them kinder, but the brave grow stern and the soft grow fretful. ...
— Countess Kate • Charlotte M. Yonge
... man in the world.' Cold as he was, and wretched as he declared himself to be, he was not wholly unsusceptible of attachments. He revered the memory of Hoyle, as he was himself an admirable and imperturbable whist-player, and he chuckled with delight at a fretful and impatient adversary. He adored King Herod for his massacre of the innocents; and if he hated one thing more than another, it was a child. However, he could hardly be said to hate anything in particular, because he disliked everything in general; ...
— Sketches by Boz - illustrative of everyday life and every-day people • Charles Dickens
... take her too! I won't run any risks at all with her! It would be simply wicked to take such a small child into danger." But there was a fretful desperation in the tone, as of one long accustomed to ...
— The Mating of Lydia • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... The Hastings fishermen, for example, often say boco for plenty, and frap to strike; while in the Rye neighbourhood, where the Huguenots were strongest, such words as dishabil meaning untidy, undressed, and peter grievous (from petit-grief) meaning fretful, are still used. ...
— Highways & Byways in Sussex • E.V. Lucas
... our inability to keep up with the speed of the main party, but I pointed out that we could not expect to do the same as fresh men—the other eight had only put on the sledge harness for the first time on December 10: Scott agreed, but seemed worried and fretful. However that may be, we got into the lunch camp first of the three sledges, to have our short-lived triumph turned to disaster by a very poor show after the meal—Scott was much disappointed and ...
— South with Scott • Edward R. G. R. Evans
... in, I think without much judgement, or the judgement I expected from him, and already they have evaded the necessity of bringing people into the Exchequer with their bills to be paid there. Sir G. Carteret is titched—[fretful, tetchy]—at this, yet resolves with me to make the best use we can of this Act for the King, but all our care, we think, will not render it as it should be. He did again here alone discourse with me about my Lord, and is ...
— Diary of Samuel Pepys, Complete • Samuel Pepys
... of peace and of prayer," Dalaber had once said to Freda, describing the lodging to her. "You seem to feel it and to breathe it in the very air. However worn and anxious, fretful or irate, you are when you enter, a hush of peace descends upon your spirit, like the soft fluttering of the wings of a dove. Your burden falls away; you know not how. You go forth refreshed and strengthened in the inner man. Your ...
— For the Faith • Evelyn Everett-Green
... much everything costs. They are not able, therefore, to pay cheerfully for any future good. If it is not given to them at once they feel that they have a grievance. For friendly cooeperation they are not prepared. They must have their own way or they will not play the game. Their fretful complaints are like those of the children in the old-time market-places: "We have piped unto you and you have not danced, we have mourned unto you and you have ...
— Humanly Speaking • Samuel McChord Crothers
... about seven miles from where we started, we found ourselves checked by precipitous rocks jutting into the stream, and were obliged once more to make preparations for crossing it. Instead of a deep and quiet reach, however, the Morumbidgee here expanded into a fretful rapid; but it was sufficiently shallow to admit of our taking the drays over, without the trouble of unloading them. There was still, however, some labour required in cutting down the banks, and the men were fully occupied until after ...
— Two Expeditions into the Interior of Southern Australia, Complete • Charles Sturt
... his face anxious, his voice fretful. "There can be no retreat for me, gentlemen. Though many that we depended upon are not here to join us, yet let us remember that Heaven is on our side, and that we are come to fight in the sacred cause of religion and a nation's ...
— Mistress Wilding • Rafael Sabatini
... forget and wound the hearts of your children with frowns and the dagger of cruel words, and sometimes with a blow? Do you sometimes, in your own peevishness, and your own meanness, wish yourself away from their fretful cries and noisy sports? Then think that to-morrow may ripen the wicked wish; tomorrow death may lay his hand upon a little fluttering heart and it will be stilled forever. 'Tis then you will miss the sunbeam and the sweet little flower that reflected heaven ...
— Gov. Bob. Taylor's Tales • Robert L. Taylor
... hitherto untouched by remedies, and beyond the comprehension of the old Northwold surgeon, Mr. Walby. As yet, however, the idea of peril had not presented itself to Louis, though he was perfectly sensible. Severe pain and illness were new to him; and though not fretful nor impatient, he had not the stoicism either of pride or of physical indifference, put little restraint on the expression of suffering, and was to an almost childish degree absorbed in the present. He was always considerate and grateful; ...
— Dynevor Terrace (Vol. I) - or, The Clue of Life • Charlotte M. Yonge
... to say at supper. She sat by her father and ate her muffins like a very hungry, tired child—like a very cross child, Gypsy thought. Joy's face was always pale and fretful; in the bright lamplight now, after the exhaustion of the long journey, it ...
— Gypsy's Cousin Joy • Elizabeth Stuart Phelps
... not till the next day when the house was tolerably quiet, and Molly, rather fretful and grumbling, had helped Judith down to her place by the fire, that she ventured the question, "Molly, you have not a bit more of that pretty wall-paper you gave ...
— The Carbonels • Charlotte M. Yonge
... Fashion; and even Blue Books Take a heavy-wing'd flight, and grow busy as rooks; And the postman (that Genius, indifferent and stern, Who shakes out even-handed to all, from his urn, Those lots which so often decide if our day Shall be fretful and anxious, or joyous and gay) Brings, each morning, more letters of one sort or other Than Cadmus, himself, put together, to bother The heads of Hellenes;—I say, in the season Of Fair May, in May Fair, there can be ...
— Lucile • Owen Meredith
... and peevishness of our times are chiefly attributable to tea and coffee. The digestive organs of confirmed coffee drinkers are in a state of chronic derangement which reacts on the brain, producing fretful and lachrymose moods. The snappish, petulant humor of the Chinese can certainly be ascribed to their immoderate ...
— Science in the Kitchen. • Mrs. E. E. Kellogg
... give her a guitar lesson. Now Mike himself was a sad musician, and the sound of him fandangoin' uncertainly up and down the fretful spine of that instrument was a tribulation I'd put up with on account of friendship, pure and simple, but when that discord-lovin' lady cliff-dweller set all evenin' in our tent and scraped snake-dances out of them catguts with a fish-bone, I pulled my freight and ...
— Laughing Bill Hyde and Other Stories • Rex Beach
... However, they were taken out of the cupboard by some friends of theirs—friends, indeed! who care as much about them as I do for the sea-serpent; but who happened, at the moment, to find it necessary to play at soldiers, to amuse their fretful children, who didn't know what they wanted, and, what was worse, would have it—and so the Bulls got back to Rome. And at Rome they are any thing but safe to stay, as you'll find, my dear, ...
— Harper's New Monthly Magazine, Vol. 2, No. 8, January, 1851 • Various
... declared, half fretful, half amused. "You're features aren't so very much alike—except the eyes, they are—and your hair's darker. But you move and carry yourself and turn your head as she did. And that position you're in now—why I've seen her in it ...
— Tristram of Blent - An Episode in the Story of an Ancient House • Anthony Hope
... "Some in a letter-of-credit that my father earned from the fretful pig, and much more in cash that I won at poker from the pashas. When that's gone I've got to go to work and earn my living. Meanwhile your salary is a hundred a week and all you need to boost Gilman and the Order of the Crescent. ...
— The Red Cross Girl • Richard Harding Davis
... whose aspect was always a shock to those who connected her with the two Margarets whose name she bore. She had inherited her father's heavy mould of feature and dark complexion, and the black eyes had neither sparkle in themselves nor relief from the colour of the sallow cheek; the pouting lips were fretful, the whole appearance unhealthy, and the dark bullet-shaped head seemed too large for the thin bony little figure. Worn, fagged, and aged as Flora looked, she had still so much beauty, and far more of refinement and elegance, as to be a painful foil and contrast to the child ...
— The Trial - or, More Links of the Daisy Chain • Charlotte M. Yonge
... occasion he spoke too favourably, he never spoke unfavourably but with justice. This is among the indications of orderly and elevated minds; and here stands the barrier that separates them from the common and the waste. Is a man to be angry because an infant is fretful? Is a philosopher to unpack and throw away his philosophy, because an idiot has tried to overturn it on the road, and has pursued ...
— Imaginary Conversations and Poems - A Selection • Walter Savage Landor
... close circle round the ship. Clouds hung low, running before the wind, and bringing intermittently little dashes of rain that seemed still further to compress the walls of horizon. The sea was not what could be called rough, but merely choppy and fretful, with short waves that would not have troubled a larger craft. The steamer proved to be a small, undistinguished dingy-looking boat, more like a commercial tramp than a government vessel. An officer, apparently the ...
— A Rock in the Baltic • Robert Barr
... Mummy?" A rather fretful little voice interrupted the speaker, as Molly pressed closely to her side. "What's me and Rosa going to do? There isn't any beds and the bench is ...
— Afterwards • Kathlyn Rhodes
... Harrenburn, hurrying with breathless haste to avert some catastrophe that was about to happen somewhere to some one; now, that he was intently painting a picture of the corpse of a beautiful young lady—terribly oppressed by nervousness, and a fretful sense of incapacity most injurious to the success of his labours—when suddenly, O horror! he beheld the body move, then rise, in a frightful and unnatural manner, stark upright, and with opened lips, but rigidly-clenched ...
— Chambers's Edinburgh Journal, No. 454 - Volume 18, New Series, September 11, 1852 • Various
... before the two friends met in George's room. George was in low spirits, nervous and fretful. It was plain to see his friend's protest had come too late to be of much use, for he had grown more and more worn every day; and the additional hours spent in bed had only been a source of worry and vexation. Jim, on the other hand, was doing his best to keep up, not his own spirits only, ...
— The Adventures of a Three-Guinea Watch • Talbot Baines Reed
... For a long time I was only dimly conscious of it, in a puzzled way, in myself. Why was it that my spirit stood no longer on the heights? Why did the moonlight look cold and metallic? Why had the rushing sound of the river got on my nerves, like the monotonous crying of a fretful child? Why did our frequent silences no longer tingle with a meaning which there was no need to express in words? Why was my brain empty of impressions as a squeezed sponge of water? Why, in fact, though ...
— The Princess Passes • Alice Muriel Williamson and Charles Norris Williamson
... left alone—to meet that crisis most fatal to wedded happiness, the discovery of the first deceit Captain Rothesay sat silent, with averted face; Sybilla was weeping—not that repentant shower which rains softness into a man's heart, but those fretful tears which ...
— Olive - A Novel • Dinah Maria Craik, (AKA Dinah Maria Mulock)
... and Florence were neither fretful nor dissatisfied; they were never disrespectful, perhaps because Mrs. Ledwith demanded less of deferential observance than of a kind of jolly companionship from her daughters; a go-and-come easiness in and out of what they called their home, but which was rather the trimming-up ...
— Real Folks • Mrs. A. D. T. Whitney
... shrouded darkness of the elbow of the veranda. Street noises died. The smell of damp came out. Occasionally a motor-car sped by, or a passer-by, each step clear on the asphalt. The song of crickets grated against the darkness. An infant in the right-side house raised a fretful voice once or twice, and then broke into a sustained and coughy fit of crying. Lights flashed up in the windows, silhouettes moving across drawn shades. Then silence again. The university clock, a mile out, chimed twelve, and finally ...
— Humoresque - A Laugh On Life With A Tear Behind It • Fannie Hurst
... droning chant of the chapel. I had before found the exercises of the cloister wearisome; they now became intolerable. The dull round of duties wore away my spirit; my nerves became irritated by the fretful tinkling of the convent bell; evermore dinging among the mountain echoes; evermore calling me from my repose at night, my pencil by day, to attend to some tedious and mechanical ceremony ...
— Tales of a Traveller • Washington Irving
... childhood's happy laugh—the laugh that fills the eyes with light and every heart with joy! O, rippling river of laughter; thou art the blessed boundary line between beasts and men, and every wayward wave of thine doth drown some fretful fiend of care. O, Laughter, rose-lipped daughter of joy, there are dimples enough in thy cheek to catch and hold and glorify ...
— Lectures of Col. R. G. Ingersoll - Latest • Robert Green Ingersoll
... the manner of a fretful child. And presently, as she talked, the cloud lifted from his gray, haggard face, and he grew calm. Soon, when she made some smiling remark, he even smiled back at her with the affectionate companionship ...
— Helen of the Old House • Harold Bell Wright
... children, the world would cry out astonished. I know a little girl, ten years old, of nervous temperament, whose whole physical condition is disordered, and seriously, by her mother's habitual atmosphere of rude fault-finding. She is a sickly, fretful, unhappy, almost unbearable child. If she lives to grow up, she will be a sickly, fretful, unhappy, unlovely woman. But her mother is just as much responsible for the whole as if she had deranged her system by feeding her ...
— Bits About Home Matters • Helen Hunt Jackson
... make up for the loss of the little gestures, the little touches, the little ways, we shall never through all eternity know again? Ah! those reluctances and hesitations, over now, quite over now! Ah! those fretful pleadings, those strange withdrawals, those unheeded protests; nothing, less than nothing, and mere memories! When the life of the senses invades the affections of the heart—then, then, mon enfant, comes the ...
— Visions and Revisions - A Book of Literary Devotions • John Cowper Powys
... began to doubt her lover that she was now occasionally fretful and uneasy. No; the idea to doubt him never reached her, but nevertheless she felt that things were not quite as ...
— The Macdermots of Ballycloran • Anthony Trollope
... the nursery, and did her best to comfort Jessie, but the poor child was languid and fretful, and could hardly put away the thought of ...
— Chatterbox, 1906 • Various
... me who it is?" she retorted, in an impatient, fretful tone, not having the discernment to see that he wished to prepare her for what was coming. "Can't you speak, Jan, if he won't? People have no right to come, dressed up in other people's clothes and faces, to frighten us to death. He ought to ...
— Verner's Pride • Mrs. Henry Wood
... the herd were now in a state of pitiable dejection, and pressed closely together as if under a sense of common misfortune. For the most part they stood at rest in a compact body, fretful and uneasy. At intervals one more impatient than the rest would move out a few steps to reconnoitre; the others would follow at first slowly, then at a quicker pace, and at last the whole herd would rush off furiously to renew the often-baffled ...
— Sketches of the Natural History of Ceylon • J. Emerson Tennent
... her was unimpaired, and that her heart was yet her own, he ceased his exhortations, and turned the discourse to subjects more gay and general, judiciously cautious neither by tedious admonitions to disgust, nor by fretful solicitude to alarm her. He did not quit her till the evening was far advanced, and then, in returning to his own house, felt all his anxieties and disappointments recompensed by the comfort this long and satisfactory conversation ...
— Cecilia Volume 1 • Frances Burney
... long dust-coat. He had pushed up his motor-goggles and was wiping his forehead with a limp handkerchief. His round, fat face, with pursed-up lips and wide-open light-blue eyes, bore the expression of a fretful child. On his left was a lean, thin-faced fellow with a black mustache who looked scared and nervous. There was no sign of the third person who had been in the car, and even at this crucial moment Buck found time ...
— Shoe-Bar Stratton • Joseph Bushnell Ames
... vague sense that there was a broader, grander kind of life possible to womanhood; a life as different from her own as the broad river that lost itself in the sea was different from the placid mill-stream that bounded her father's orchard. But she had no sick fretful yearning for that wider life. To win her father's affection, to see her brother restored to his abandoned home—these were her girlish dreams ...
— The Lovels of Arden • M. E. Braddon
... white priests, and veiled girls, with a cold averted eye. Lucy looked back with a pang to Marinata, and to the indulgent pleasure that Eleanor had once taken in all the many-coloured show of Catholicism. Now she was always weary, and often fretful. It struck Lucy too that she was more restless than ever. She seemed to take no notice of the present—to be always living in the future—expecting, listening, waiting. The gestures and sudden looks that expressed ...
— Eleanor • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... as she grew, she grew worse; for she never tried to grow better. She became more and more peevish and fretful every day—dissatisfied not only with what she had, but with all that was around her, and constantly wishing things in general to be different. She found fault with every thing and everybody, and all that happened, and grew ...
— A Double Story • George MacDonald
... intellect and the development of noble sentiments is as essential for the perfection of the one, as of the other, fretful, envious, malicious, ill humoured feelings must never be indulged by those who value their personal appearance, for the existence of these chronic maladies of ...
— The Jewish Manual • Judith Cohen Montefiore
... for Douglas a period of much anxiety, days of fretful restlessness, sleepless nights full of vague and shadowy dejection. Emily de Reuss was ill, too ill to see him or any one. All callers were denied. Daily he left flowers and messages for her—there was no response ...
— The Survivor • E.Phillips Oppenheim
... to complete failure. The messengers set out at eleven o'clock at night, and Herkimer thought they would surely reach the fort by three in the morning. But he waited in vain the whole night through; no sound of cannonade disturbed the quiet air. As the hours crept by his officers became fretful and impatient; in the end they declared for an immediate advance, denouncing Herkimer as a faltering coward. At length the old man, sorely against his will, gave the order to march. The relief party streamed through the forest with disordered ranks. In the meantime Brant's Indians had ...
— The War Chief of the Six Nations - A Chronicle of Joseph Brant - Volume 16 (of 32) in the series Chronicles of Canada • Louis Aubrey Wood
... seat and began awkwardly coaxing the fretful child to drink, the Cubans voiced their appreciation of the picture. They were courteous, they did not laugh; nevertheless, the sight of their eccentric, irascible, rebellious El Demonio tamely nursing a child in the fire-light filled them ...
— Rainbow's End • Rex Beach
... wrinkled old Nokomis Nursed the little Hiawatha, Rooked him in his linden cradle, Stilled his fretful wail by saying, 'Hush! the naked bear ...
— The Child and Childhood in Folk-Thought • Alexander F. Chamberlain
... rolls uneasy, Very fretful, for he hears, Near at hand, the shout of battle, And the din of ...
— Among the Millet and Other Poems • Archibald Lampman
... Nursed the little Hiawatha, Rocked him in his linden cradle, Bedded soft in moss and rushes, Safely bound with reindeer sinews; Stilled his fretful wail by saying, "Hush! the Naked Bear will hear thee!" Lulled him into slumber, singing, "Ewa-yea! my little owlet! Who is this, that lights the wigwam? With his great eyes lights the wigwam? Ewa-yea! ...
— The Song Of Hiawatha • Henry W. Longfellow
... down, dear. I can't get Aggy out of my arms a minute. It's nearly supper time, and I havn't been able even to put the kettle on the fire. She's very fretful." ...
— The Lights and Shadows of Real Life • T.S. Arthur
... lovely Peggy's foe, Such sweetness would relent her; As blooming spring unbends the brow Of surly, savage Winter. Detraction's eye no aim can gain, Her winning pow'rs to lessen; And fretful Envy grins in vain ...
— Poems And Songs Of Robert Burns • Robert Burns
... search the brambles for stray hips, or locks of wool the sheep had not left there willingly; men and women even worse off had been there before them, and they came home at night, tired out and footsore, only to hear Zitza's fretful cry for food, and the constant chatter of Meister Hans, croaking for his own share ...
— Our Young Folks—Vol. I, No. II, February 1865 - An Illustrated Magazine for Boys and Girls • Various
... of Dexie to cause so much annoyance!" was her fretful comment. "I am quite sure I shall have the headache, for the way she slammed that door was enough to upset the strongest nerves. I thought of going to the concert myself if I finished my book in time, but it seems my fate to be robbed of all pleasure. Why don't you use your authority, Clarence, ...
— Miss Dexie - A Romance of the Provinces • Stanford Eveleth
... distance no sign of age. His lines were gracefully full, his bearing had still the alertness of youth. One must have come as near as Billy Brue now came to detect the marks of time in his face. Not of age—merely of time; for here was no senility, no quavering or fretful lines. The grey eyes shone bright and clear from far under the heavy, unbroken line of brow, and the mouth was still straight and firmly held, a mouth under sure control from corner to corner. A little had the years ...
— The Spenders - A Tale of the Third Generation • Harry Leon Wilson
... sleepy faces began going below; a young and very beautiful lady, the one who had been so angry with the Customs officers at Volotchisk, stopped before Shamohin and said with the expression of a naughty, fretful child: ...
— The Darling and Other Stories • Anton Chekhov
... still appeared the same impassible, precise, and grave man, he showed himself at home more fretful than an old maid, —nervous, agitated, and subject to the oddest whims. After remaining three or four days without opening his lips, he would begin to speak upon all sorts of subjects with amazing volubility. Instead of watering ...
— Other People's Money • Emile Gaboriau
... quiet, but it kept whispering to the children. It wanted to know why there was no altar, no fire, no incense, and became so excited and fretful and tiresome that four at least of the party of five wished deeply that it ...
— The Phoenix and the Carpet • E. Nesbit
... Keane was a bright-eyed, curly-haired maiden of fifteen, wild as an antelope, and as full of fun and frolic as any one of her pet kittens. Their mother was an invalid, seldom able to leave her couch;—not a fretful invalid, you must understand, but a sweet, gentle, unselfish woman, who bore her pain and weakness without a murmur, so that those she loved might be spared pain on her account. Mr. Goldthwaite often said that Mrs. Keane's life was the best sermon he had ever ...
— Thankful Rest • Annie S. Swan
... get out, and he grew rather fretful sometimes, even with Christie. It was very dull for him sitting alone all day; and he had nothing to comfort him, not even his old friend the organ. And when Christie came home at night, if the store of pence was not so large as usual, poor old Treffy ...
— Christie's Old Organ - Or, "Home, Sweet Home" • Mrs. O. F. Walton
... lately Stella's form display'd The beauties of the gay brocade, The nymphs, who found their power decline, Proclaim'd her not so fair as fine. 'Fate! snatch away the bright disguise, And let the goddess trust her eyes.' Thus blindly pray'd the fretful fair, And Fate, malicious, heard the prayer; But brighten'd by the sable dress, As Virtue rises in distress, Since Stella still extends her reign, Ah! how shall Envy soothe her pain? The adoring Youth and envious Fair, Henceforth ...
— Poetical Works of Johnson, Parnell, Gray, and Smollett - With Memoirs, Critical Dissertations, and Explanatory Notes • Samuel Johnson, Thomas Parnell, Thomas Gray, and Tobias Smollett
... humorist in "Humphrey Clinker"; of a fretful temper, yet generous and kind, who has a sister, MISS TABITHA, an ungainly maiden at forty-five, and of ...
— The Nuttall Encyclopaedia - Being a Concise and Comprehensive Dictionary of General Knowledge • Edited by Rev. James Wood
... animal centres, it lets loose all the passions, and gives them more or less of unlicensed dominion over the man. It excites anger, and when it does not lead to this extreme, it keeps the mind fretful, irritable, dissatisfied and captious.... And if I were to take you through all the passions, love, hate, lust, envy, avarice and pride, I should but show you that alcohol ministers to them all; that, paralyzing ...
— Grappling with the Monster • T. S. Arthur
... finally turned in for a forenoon nap, I was busier plottin' out just how it ought to be done than I was at makin' up lost sleep. I ain't one of them that can romp around all night, though, and then do the fretful toss on the hay for very long after I've hit the pillow. First thing I knew, I was pryin' my eyes open to find that it's almost 1:30 P.M., and with the sun beatin' straight down on the deck overhead I don't need to turn on any steam heat in ...
— Wilt Thou Torchy • Sewell Ford
... had lost my place in the class, I came home discouraged and fretful. I went to my mother's chamber. She was paler than usual, but she met me with the same affectionate smile that always welcomed my return. Alas! when I look back through the lapse of thirteen years, I think my heart must have been stone not to have been melted ...
— De La Salle Fifth Reader • Brothers of the Christian Schools
... again to be so naughty. The good tempered Julia readily forgave her, and for a few days after this misfortune Fanny behaved much better than usual. However, as ill habits are very difficult to be overcome, she soon relapsed into her former fretful and passionate ways; indeed, she made the family so uncomfortable that her mother determined to send her from home, and for that purpose wrote to a relation, entreating her to take the care of Fanny for some time, and try if ...
— A Week of Instruction and Amusement, • Mrs. Harley
... we are poor—VERY POOR," said he, "for we are neither contented nor thankful. We ask for more than we possess, and, because it is not given, we are fretful and impatient. Yes, yes—we, not the ...
— Home Lights and Shadows • T. S. Arthur
... all. Be careful what you say about those near you, as a thoughtless remark to a friend in too loud a tone may cause a real heartache. Many a weary mother has been pained by hearing complaints of a fretful child, whose crying most probably distresses her more than any one else. Instead of saying, "Why will people travel with babies?" remember that it is sometimes unavoidable, and do not disfigure your face by a frown at the disturbance, ...
— St. Nicholas Magazine for Boys and Girls, Vol. V, August, 1878, No 10. - Scribner's Illustrated • Various
... she was very active and merry and displayed an abundant fund of good health and spirits. She early learned to talk and walk and was considered an unusually bright and precocious girl. Her earliest months gave a hint of her love for music. If fretful or peevish with weariness or ill-health she could soon be pacified by a gentle song from her father as he carried her ...
— Camilla: A Tale of a Violin - Being the Artist Life of Camilla Urso • Charles Barnard
... Fortune in vain. She will have nought to do with his addresses, and it would be just as foolish to afflict oneself because of an eclipse of the sun or moon, as to be grieved on account of the changes which Fortune is pleased to cause. Many other writers speak in the same fretful strain. There is now work in the vast field of literature for all who have the taste, ability, and requisite knowledge; and few authors now find their books fatal to them—except perhaps to their reputation, when they deserve the critics' censures. The writers ...
— Books Fatal to Their Authors • P. H. Ditchfield
... saw such laziness! No wonder old Sampson won't keep you longer than the holidays if you're no smarter than that. Goodness, if I don't settle that boy!"—as the sound of fretful crying came ...
— Lucy Maud Montgomery Short Stories, 1905 to 1906 • Lucy Maud Montgomery
... labors of the household is the killing of conversation. There is perhaps no more general weakness in the average American family than glumness! The silent newspaper-reading father, the worried watchful mother, the surly boy, the fretful girl, these are characters typical in both town and country. In one of Mrs. Daskam Bacon's lively tales, "Ardelia in Arcadia," the little heroine is transplanted from a lively, chattering, sweltering New York street to the maddening silence of an overworked farmer's table. She stands it as long as ...
— The Business of Being a Woman • Ida M. Tarbell
... the combination prevented Daniel from napping. Nerves were a new acquisition of Serena's; at least she had never been conscious of them until recently. Now, however, they were becoming more and more in evidence. She was fretful and impatient of trifles, and the least contradiction or upset of her plans was likely to bring on fits of hysterical weeping. It was so in this case. Daniel, trotting for smelling salts and extra pillows and the hot water bottle, was not too calm himself. His plans, the plans founded upon John ...
— Cap'n Dan's Daughter • Joseph C. Lincoln
... but of a most humane and benevolent heart, which showed itself not only in a most liberal charity, as far as his circumstances would allow, but in a thousand instances of active benevolence. He was afflicted with a bodily disease which made him often restless and fretful; and with a constitutional melancholy, the clouds of which darkened the brightness of his fancy, and gave a gloomy cast to his whole course of thinking. We therefore ought not to wonder at his sallies of impatience and passion at any time, especially when ...
— Library Of The World's Best Literature, Ancient And Modern, Vol. 5 • Various
... patience is still tried in waiting for the action of Congress on my bill. With so much at stake you may easily conceive how tantalizing is this state of suspense. I wish to feel right on this subject; not to be impatient, nor distrustful, nor fretful, and yet to be prepared for the worst. I find my funds exhausting, my clothing wearing out, my time, especially, rapidly waning, and my affairs at home requiring some little looking after; and then, if I should after all be disappointed, the alternative looks dark, and to human ...
— Samuel F. B. Morse, His Letters and Journals - In Two Volumes, Volume II • Samuel F. B. Morse
... had not been able to hide an harassed frown that day under his usual vigor of speech and look. It became more palpable after this; his voice, when he did speak, was fretful, irritable,—his lips compressed; he stopped at a village-well to drink, as ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 11, Issue 67, May, 1863 • Various
... earnestly. "But she was so fretful, she was always ailing; and it's better they should go when they get like that. But now we're soon going to get married again—when Father Lasse's found somebody ...
— Pelle the Conqueror, Complete • Martin Andersen Nexo
... over, Mrs Juno said to Jove, to whose arm she clung as they trudged home along the snowy paths: 'Fritz dear, Christmas is a good time for new resolutions, and I've made one never to be impatient or fretful with my beloved husband again. I know I am, though you won't own it; but Laurie's fun had some truth in it, and I felt hit in a tender spot. Henceforth I am a model wife, else I don't deserve the dearest, best man ever born'; and being in a dramatic mood, ...
— Jo's Boys • Louisa May Alcott
... misspelled; it was unpunctuated; it was almost illegible; it was fretful in tone, and selfish in sentiment. It was not, I fear, even original in the story of its woes. It was the harsh recital of poverty, of suspicion, of mean makeshifts and compromises, of low pains and lower longings, of sorrows that were degrading, of a ...
— Tales of the Argonauts • Bret Harte
... in the school-room and in the nursery; and children—left to their own devices—accept it with wonderful courage and sagacity. If we allow to their souls some noble and free expansion, they may be trusted to divert themselves from that fretful self-consciousness which the nurse calls naughtiness, and the doctor, nerves. A little wholesome neglect, a little discipline, plenty of play, and a fair chance to be glad and sorry as the hours swing by,—these ...
— Americans and Others • Agnes Repplier
... very bad indeed; but for the last fortnight he had been decidedly worse, and his heart and hopes were sinking, though he would not own it to himself, and that and the pain made his spirits fail so, that he had been more inclined to be fretful than any time ...
— Friarswood Post-Office • Charlotte M. Yonge
... utter weariness and pain, Betty's fear left her and all the tenderness and passionate desire for service that had made her such a wonderful little "hand" with ill and fretful babies in her old home at Pineville came ...
— Betty Gordon in the Land of Oil - The Farm That Was Worth a Fortune • Alice B. Emerson
... known a quieter thing than ships, Nor any dreamers steeped in dream as these, For all that they have tracked disastrous seas, And winds that left their sails in flagging strips; Nothing disturbs them now, no stormy grips That once had hurt their sides, no crash or swell, Nor can the fretful harbour quite dispel This quiet that they ...
— Ships in Harbour • David Morton
... vernacular as Air, Hazybrook, Betoon, Arm-in-tears, Ballyhool (occasionally Belial), Poperingy, and Kassel. The fairest of these is Cassel. For Cassel is set upon a hill which rises from the interminable plain, salient and alluring as a tor in Somerset, and seems to say to the fretful wayfarer, "Come unto Me all ye that are weary, and I will give you rest." For upon the hill of Cassel the air is sweet and fresh, the slopes are musical with a faint lullaby of falling showers, as the wind plays among the birches and the poplars, and over all there is a great peace. The motor-lorries ...
— Leaves from a Field Note-Book • J. H. Morgan
... see how I can get ready soon. The baby is fretful, and I'm all worn out between broken rest and worry. Won't you take ...
— A Young Girl's Wooing • E. P. Roe
... sure of sorrow; And joy was never sure; Today will die tomorrow; Time stoops to no man's lure; And love, grown faint and fretful With lips but half regretful Sighs, and with eyes forgetful Weeps that ...
— Null-ABC • Henry Beam Piper and John Joseph McGuire
... you from the first there is no remedy. Our hopes are lost: lost by one miserable trifler, ignorant, fretful, fitful - who will have disappeared to-morrow, who ...
— Prince Otto • Robert Louis Stevenson
... and the fretful whining winds that came down from the north chilled the Dream. The winds whispered of the coming of the Snow King, and the river grumbled as it listened. Big Ivan kept out of the way of Poborino, the smith, and Yanansk, the baker. The Dream was still with him, but ...
— The Best Short Stories of 1915 - And the Yearbook of the American Short Story • Various
... now and to-morrow—when the souls of men were sick, When wives were fickle or fretful or the bills were falling thick, When the youth was minded to marry and the maiden withheld consent, Heeding the words of NIMROD, they packed their ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 159, September 8th, 1920 • Various
... and himself, and no longer in that vein of incidental adventure in which he had begun. He thought, too, of the fretful invalid who lay in the next room to his, whose money had created his business and made his ...
— Ann Veronica • H. G. Wells
... was the fretful comment of the adventurer. "I have too much at stake to be drowned like a rat in a trap! You must send me up first if it becomes ...
— Tom Swift and his Undersea Search - or, The Treasure on the Floor of the Atlantic • Victor Appleton
... last, and came to know him very well; and then I discovered how the nervousness, the bashfulness, the mauvaise honte, which made him so shy and retiring in private, stood him in wonderful stead on the stage. The nervous man became the fretful and capricious tyrant of mock tragedy; the bashful man warmed at the foot-lights with passion and power. The manner which in society was a drawback and a defect became in the pursuit of his art a charm and an excellence. ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 13, No. 80, June, 1864 • Various
... dance, nor in the three successive dances did Maitland appear. The precious moments were slipping by. Patricia was becoming more and more anxious and fretful at the non-appearance of her hero. Also, Hugh began to notice and detect a lagging ...
— To Him That Hath - A Novel Of The West Of Today • Ralph Connor
... into yet finer lines, closely- set lips drooping out into lines of fretful impatience, sunken eyes beneath overhanging brows. She studied them one by one, until, struck by her silence, the old man looked up ...
— The Fortunes of the Farrells • Mrs. George de Horne Vaizey
... No, she cannot imagine; and that is the trouble. If she could, all would be righted. It is quite probable that she is a far more anxious, self-sacrificing, hard-working mother than the neighbor, whose children are rosy and frolicking and affectionate and obedient; while hers are pale and fretful and selfish ...
— Bits About Home Matters • Helen Hunt Jackson
... the brilliancy of deathless romance. Was he, Guy Beausire de Fontenelle no better, no nobler, no higher, in his desires and ambitions than Miraudin? What was he doing with the three lilies emblazoned on his escutcheon? He thought with a certain fretful impatience of Sylvie, of her captivating grace, her tender eyes, her sweet laughter, and sweeter smile. She had seemed to him a mere slight creation of the air and the moonbeams,—something dainty ...
— The Master-Christian • Marie Corelli
... chin by a diamond that sparkled in the dim greenish light of the drawing-room; the feathers of the hat were unusually large and drooping; they curled heavily round the thin neck and long, hollow-eyed face, so that its ivory whiteness, its fatigue, its fretful beauty were framed in and emphasized by them; her bloodless hands lay upon her lap, and the folds of the sweeping dress drawn round her showed her slenderness, or rather her emaciation. Two years before this date Madeleine Verrier ...
— Marriage a la mode • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... athwart, transverse, intersecting; adverse, baffling, contrary, perverse; petulant, peevish, cynical, surly, unamiable, inaffable, crabbed, crusty, captious, fractious, churlish, vixenish, querulous, fretful, choleric, touchy, waspish, morose, sullen, ill-natured, irascible acrimonious, ...
— Putnam's Word Book • Louis A. Flemming
... taking the hint, Master Putnam, like a dutiful husband, who really loved his somewhat peevish and fretful wife, acknowledged by his silence in the future that the Harmons were much superior to any family that could not boast of possessing a minister and an island; the latter ...
— Dulcibel - A Tale of Old Salem • Henry Peterson
... it will not be the refreshing sleep of health. When the stomach is filled beyond the proper medium, it induces a similar kind of heaviness to that arising from opiates and intoxicating liquors; and instead of awakening refreshed and lively, the child will be heavy and fretful. By the time that children begin to run about, the increase of their exercise will require an increase of nourishment: but those who overload them with food at any time, in hopes of strengthening them, are very much deceived. No prejudice is equally ...
— The Cook and Housekeeper's Complete and Universal Dictionary; Including a System of Modern Cookery, in all Its Various Branches, • Mary Eaton
... from his shoe with a certain matter-of-fact grace characteristic of him, Mr. Poynter, who had been invisible all day, arrived in the camp of the enemy. Diane saw with a fretful flash of wonder that he was immaculate as usual. She saw too that the minstrel was annoyed and that he dropped the volume of Herodotus into his pocket with ...
— Diane of the Green Van • Leona Dalrymple
... are fretful and irritating, for all that. But I see, hard of heart as you are, my chance of beating hemp, or drawing out flax into marvellous coarse thread, affects you as little as my condemnation to coif and pinners, instead of beaver and cockade; so I will spare myself the fruitless ...
— Rob Roy, Complete, Illustrated • Sir Walter Scott
... book from a bookcase fitted in there—but this last rarely, because Mr Smith used to declare "I am no reader" with something like pride in his low tones. Very often after kissing her good-night on the forehead he would treat her to some such fretful remark: "It's like being in jail—'pon my word. I suppose that man is out there waiting for ...
— Chance - A Tale in Two Parts • Joseph Conrad
... complaint must of course be beneficial to yours?' It was in vain you pleaded your being perfectly well,—your detesting the medicine,—your being certain it would not agree with you—none of the apologies were received as valid. You might be warm, pathetic or sulky, fretful or patient, grave or serious in testifying your repugnance, but you were equally a doomed man; escape was impossible. Your host was in his turn eloquent,—authoritative,—facetious, —argumentative,—precatory,—pathetic, above all, pertinacious. No guest was known to escape ...
— Political Pamphlets • George Saintsbury
... when he was hungry. She knew that he was never fretful after he had eaten a good meal. So her feet twinkled across the cellar floor and she ...
— The Tale of Miss Kitty Cat - Slumber-Town Tales • Arthur Scott Bailey
... this afternoon," replied Jerome, in the tone with which he might have pacified a fretful child. There was ...
— Jerome, A Poor Man - A Novel • Mary E. Wilkins Freeman
... very sake of peevishness, because they know not the pain of denial. As I have not much more time to speak, I would, with my last breath, recommend discontented people to travel; but if they should come back in the same fretful condition, well, let them ...
— A Yacht Voyage to Norway, Denmark, and Sweden - 2nd edition • W. A. Ross
... said, with gratifying conviction. "And you're—you're a trump, you know. I'm ashamed of acting like such a boor. If you'll bear with me I'll try from now on to be more like a man and less like a fretful ghost." ...
— Many Kingdoms • Elizabeth Jordan
... unwittingly established itself, Ward C was crying itself to sleep. Not that it knew what it was crying about, it being merely a matter of atmosphere and unstrung nerves; but that is cause enough to turn the mind of a sick child all awry, twisting out happiness and twisting in peevish, fretful feelings. ...
— The Primrose Ring • Ruth Sawyer
... other half with matters still more absorbing and exciting. Even now his mind was in a perpetual ferment, and no comforting spirit spoke quietness to his soul—no stout heart strengthened his—no lively intelligence animated his own to worthy doings. He was very cross and fretful, and knew himself to be so that particular evening—worried and in want of rest. What a chance, if perhaps he found Nettie, whose very provocations were somehow more interesting than other people's most agreeable and tranquillising efforts, all alone and at leisure! ...
— The Doctor's Family • Mrs. (Margaret) Oliphant
... through her; she opened her eyes wide and wider, looking round the room no longer in fear, but in a sort of wonder. Her gaze rested an instant on my face, she drew her arm from round my neck and rose to her feet, pushing away my arm. There she stood for a moment with a strange, fretful, ashamed look on her face. She tossed her head, flinging her hair back behind her shoulders. I had taken her hand and still held it; now ...
— The King's Mirror • Anthony Hope
... hand; but when Mistress Marian was an-angered, the blood rushed back to her heart, and she was whiter than a lamb at the shearing, and her lips like white threads. Then would the light shoot and spin in her eyes, and her nostrils suck in and out, like those of a fretful horse. And she was fierce after the manner of a man rather than of a maid. Moreo'er, she was full a year younger than the Lady Patience; but she looked it not; rather did her ladyship look full two years younger than Mistress Marian. And I loved ...
— A Brother To Dragons and Other Old-time Tales • Amelie Rives
... have no alternative, just as Beaumaroy had none. Yet while she put on her mackintosh, it was very wet and misty, got out her car, and lit her lamps, her face was still fretful and her mind disturbed. For now, as she looked back on it, Beaumaroy's conversation with her at Old Place seemed just a prelude to this summons, and meant to prepare her for it. Perhaps that too was pardonable diplomacy, ...
— The Secret of the Tower • Hope, Anthony
... especially, no one can doubt about. When first he saw St. Mark's, he threw up his arms in wonder, and then, clasping them round Wilson's neck (she was carrying him), he kissed her in an ecstasy of joy. And that was after a long day's journey, when most other children would have been tired and fretful. But the sense of the beautiful is certainly very strong in him, little darling. He can't say the word 'church' yet, but when he sees one he begins to chant. Oh, he's a true Florentine in ...
— The Letters of Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Volume II • Elizabeth Barrett Browning
... shouted with his tiny thin voice, and enjoyed it all immensely, and rained cakes and biscuits on both the poodle and its master. Lolo crumped the pastries with willing white teeth, and Moufflou did no less. Then they got up to go, and the sick child on the couch burst into fretful lamentations ...
— Children's Literature - A Textbook of Sources for Teachers and Teacher-Training Classes • Charles Madison Curry
... voyagers turned their eyes a new creation seemed to bloom around. No signs of human thrift appeared to check the delicious wildness of Nature, who here reveled in all her luxuriant variety. Those hills, now bristled like the fretful porcupine, with rows of poplars (vain upstart plants! minions of wealth and fashion!), were then adorned with the vigorous natives of the soil—the lordly oak, the generous chestnut, the graceful elm—while here and ...
— Knickerbocker's History of New York, Complete • Washington Irving
... hypocrisy of Joseph has its ulterior legitimate ends, but his brother's professions of a good heart centre in downright self-satisfaction) must be loved and Joseph hated. To balance one disagreeable reality with another, Sir Peter Teazle must be no longer the comic idea of a fretful old bachelor bridegroom, whose teasings (while King acted it) were evidently as much played off at you, as they were meant to concern any body on the stage,—he must be a real person, capable in law of sustaining ...
— The Works of Charles and Mary Lamb, Volume 2 • Charles Lamb
... the Great Prompter's hand shall ring Down the last curtain upon earth and sea, All the Good Mimes will have eternity To praise their Author, worship love and sing; Or to the walls of Heaven wandering Look down on those damned for a fretful d——, Mock them (all theologians agree On this reward for virtue), laugh, ...
— The Collected Poems of Rupert Brooke • Rupert Brooke
... respect to show him that our case was quite different; but he was so ignorant of our manners and customs that he took everything by the wrong handle. He ended the conversation very abruptly and rudely, and referred me to the Queen. I found her Majesty in a fretful mood, and all I could get out of her was a promise to hear the chapter upon this affair, without whose consent—I had declared I could not ...
— Marguerite de Navarre - Memoirs of Marguerite de Valois Queen of Navarre • Marguerite de Navarre
... Not so poor Hilda. The mistress of the mansion slept far less than any of those who obeyed her orders. She invariably retired long after the household were in bed, rose early, and probably seldom obtained more than an hour's continuous sleep. On this evening her child had been somewhat fretful, and Bertha insisted on carrying the little fellow off to sleep in her room with her grandson, Ronald Morton. Hilda had reluctantly consented to the arrangement, and frequently awoke with a start of terror on missing her little companion from her side. At length she had fallen into a comparatively ...
— Ronald Morton, or the Fire Ships - A Story of the Last Naval War • W.H.G. Kingston
... the inscrutable relation between the seen and the eternal, of which music alone unlocks the gate by inarticulate expression, has never had an articulate utterance from a poet before 'Abt Vogler'. This is of a higher order of composition, quite nobler, than the merely fretful rebellion against the earthly condition imposed here below upon heavenly things, seen in 'Master Hughes' {of Saxe-Gotha}. In that and other places, I am not sure that persons of musical ATTAINMENT, as distinguished from musical SOUL AND SYMPATHY, do not rather find a professional ...
— Introduction to Robert Browning • Hiram Corson
... working for him as long as we can get along together all right, which it seems like from appearances that ought to be always. But after he gives up being circuit judge on account of him getting along so in age he gets sort of fretful by reasons of him not having much to do any more and most of his own friends having died off on him. When the State begins going Republican about once in so often, he says to me, kind of half joking, he's a great ...
— When Winter Comes to Main Street • Grant Martin Overton
... common sense of most shall hold a fretful realm in awe, And the kindly earth shall slumber, ...
— Imaginary Interviews • W. D. Howells
... these virtuosos looked on all his associates as wretches of depraved taste and narrow notions. Their conversation was, therefore, fretful and waspish, their behaviour brutal, their merriment bluntly sarcastick, and their seriousness gloomy and suspicious. They were totally ignorant of all that passes, or has lately passed, in the world; unable to discuss any question of religious, political, or military knowledge; equally strangers ...
— The Works of Samuel Johnson - Volume IV [The Rambler and The Adventurer] • Samuel Johnson
... Mrs. Staines; for some time she had been uneasy, fretful, and like a person with a weight on ...
— A Simpleton • Charles Reade
... in the very grasp of death, did this faith fail him. He kept, in the midst of a fretful, slothful, wailing world, where prophets like Carlyle and Ruskin were as impatient and bewildered, as lamenting and despondent, as the decadents they despised, the temper of his Herakles in Balaustion. He left us that temper ...
— The Poetry Of Robert Browning • Stopford A. Brooke
... not good form in Morovenia for a husband or father to discuss his home life, or to show enthusiasm on the subject of mere woman; but the Count, prompted by a fretful desire to dispose of his rapidly maturing offspring, often remarked to the high-born young gentlemen of his acquaintance that Kalora was a most remarkable girl and one possessed of many charms, leaving them to infer, if they cared to ...
— The Slim Princess • George Ade
... weary of my life here, and wish, if I can, to find a new one. I go out into the world, dissevered from every link which binds me to the hateful past, to seek another home and another fortune. Forgive me if I have been fretful, capricious, changeable. You should forgive me, for you know why I have been so. You know the secret which is ...
— Lady Audley's Secret • Mary Elizabeth Braddon
... foolish as to expect to find a pleasant taste in physic, but she expects that it will be of service to her; and she would rather have a bitter taste in her mouth for a few moments, than endure days, weeks, and months of pain and sickness. As peevish, fretful tempers often bring disease on the body, so a patient, even temper not only lessens all suffering, but helps to cure the diseases of the body; Miss Emma, therefore, will perhaps in a short time regain her health, and should such an event happen, what joy it will give to ...
— The Bad Family and Other Stories • Mrs. Fenwick
... betake himself to the schoolroom and employ his idle time in making it nearly impossible for Ada and Phyllis to learn, by talking, laughing, teasing the canary, overturning everything in pursuing wasps, making Emily fretful by his disobedience, and then laughing at her, and, in short, proving his right to the title he had given himself at the end of the only letter he had written since he first went to school, and which he had subscribed, 'Your affectionate ...
— Scenes and Characters • Charlotte M. Yonge
... had drunk enough only to make him fretful, he leaned with his elbow surlily upon the table, began to quarrel with the landlord, and swore that he had not of late treated him like a gentleman. To which the landlord coolly replied, "That as long as he had paid like a gentleman, he had been treated like one, ...
— The Parent's Assistant • Maria Edgeworth
... devoted than ever to her sick sister, she was soft and bright to nobody else. She did not complain, but she thought that things had been very hard with her; and when people repine their troubles do not make them kinder, but the brave grow stern and the soft grow fretful. ...
— Countess Kate • Charlotte M. Yonge
... I never heard it without thinking of her. Many and many a time had she sung me to sleep with that tune. I had scarlet fever when I was five years old, and my mother had nursed me through it, and when I was weary and fretful she would sing to me—my pretty fair-haired mother. Even as I sat before my easel I could see her, as she sat at the foot of my bed, with the sunshine streaming upon her through the half-darkened window, ...
— Christie, the King's Servant • Mrs. O. F. Walton
... his way, and before Jerton had had time to assimilate his information he found his whole attention centred on an angry-looking lady who was making loud and fretful-seeming inquiries ...
— Beasts and Super-Beasts • Saki
... that in proportion as he waxed wealthy and fortunate, he grew pale, thin, and anxious. As his wife's popularity increased, he became fretful and impatient. The most uxorious of husbands, he was absurdly jealous. If he did not interfere with his wife's social liberty, it was because it was maliciously whispered that his first and only attempt was met by an outburst from Mrs. Brown that terrified ...
— Selected Stories • Bret Harte
... minutely, and nobility has neither bench nor joint-stool for them in the vestibule. During the whole course of your life, have you ever seen one among this, our King James's breed of curs, that either did not curl himself up and lie snug and warm in the lowest company, [81] or slaver and whimper in fretful quest of the highest. ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine - April 1843 • Various
... to every Scottish custom, or be laughed at—"Will ye hae some jeel? Oh fie, oh fie!"—his flighty imagination quite cramped, and be obliged to study Corpus Juris Civilis and live in his father's strict family; is there any wonder, sir, that the unlucky dog should be somewhat fretful? Yoke a Newmarket courser to a dung cart, and I'll lay my life on't he'll either caper or kick most confoundedly, or be as stupid and restive as an old battered post-horse.' Among the many clubs of the time Boswell instituted a jovial society called the Soaping Club ...
— James Boswell - Famous Scots Series • William Keith Leask
... allowance of praise, if I would afford him occasion, &c.; but he must do what he thinks his duty, &c.! I laugh to think of the effect my reply will produce upon Hogg. How it will make every bristle to stand on end like quills upon the fretful porcupine!"—Life and Correspondence of Robert Southey, edited by his Son, vol. iv., p. 93. ...
— The Modern Scottish Minstrel, Volume II. - The Songs of Scotland of the past half century • Various
... particular evening when Sarah had been instructed to put a hot-water bottle in his bed, Henry's tone, in greeting his aunt, had been curt, fretful, peevish, nearly cantankerous. 'Don't worry me!' he had irascibly protested, well knowing that his good aunt was guiltless of the slightest intention to worry him. Here was a problem, an apparent contradiction, in ...
— A Great Man - A Frolic • Arnold Bennett
... had set out to stroll down Rotten Row, as he often did on the way home, designing to nod to anybody that he knew. It had turned out a somewhat barren expedition. No one of any consequence had met his eye; and it was with a certain almost fretful longing for distraction that in Kensington Gardens he came on an old man feeding birds out of a paper bag. The birds having flown away on seeing him, he approached the feeder ...
— Forsyte Saga • John Galsworthy
... it is right?" Wilford asked, for now that the time drew near when the little crib at home would be empty, the nursery desolate, with no fretful, plaintive wail to annoy and worry him, he began to feel that after all that cry was not so very vexing as he had imagined it to be; that he might miss it when it was gone, and wish back the little creature which had been ...
— Family Pride - Or, Purified by Suffering • Mary J. Holmes
... still hour between the night and day; I saw the answering tides, green robed and gray, Turn to her with a low contented sigh; Marching with silent feet they passed me by, For the white moon had taught them to obey, And scarce a wavelet broke in fretful spray, As they went forth to kiss the ...
— An Anthology of Australian Verse • Bertram Stevens
... operating room. The hospital was a very large place, and there were a great many odours she did not like. She hated herself for being so silly about things! Through the open door she saw many faces: white faces, thin faces, faces drawn with pain, faces robbed of hope, faces fretful, and faces indifferent, and she caught sight of one girl whose very happy eyes looked out from a face which bore the record of much pain. A story easy to read: she had been very ill, but now she was getting well. ...
— The Glory Of The Conquered • Susan Glaspell
... the circuit that it makes by that restraining force which holds it to the pillar of the sun. Loose but the bond an instant, and it flies in wild, tangential flight, to shatter other worlds. The very bondage that we curse, and seek, in fretful mood, to break and burst, may keep us to the orbit that is traced, by overruling wisdom, for our good. We gravitate towards duty, though we sweep with errant course along the outer marge of the bare area of its tightened cord. Let but the wise restraint be rudely broke, and through life's ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 17, No. 104, June, 1866 • Various
... his kind offices without speaking; but after a few minutes he turned his head from him with a fretful, impatient, "There, that'll do," and stretched out his hand for his crutches. Georgie brought them to him, and helped him to get upon them. But poor Alick had severely sprained his shoulder in trying to save himself as he fell, and ...
— The Old Castle and Other Stories • Anonymous
... His provisions were exhausted; he had eaten nothing since last night, and he felt excited and fretful. He said to himself: "If to-day my enemy is not delivered into my hands, I must go out into the open and seek him at all risks, at all costs." It was a dominant idea now. Nothing ...
— The Devil's Garden • W. B. Maxwell
... after a time by a moaning of troubled breathing and a fretful stirring in the bed. He went across. Aaron's eyes were ...
— Aaron's Rod • D. H. Lawrence
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