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More "Fussy" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... had to admit that probably all these things were really good for me. But it got to where everything I did was something that was good for me—and that was bad. Hell, it isn't natural for a young fellow just out of college to live like a fussy old man of seventy with a grudge against the undertaker. Life ...
— Inside John Barth • William W. Stuart
... ravening animal, did not talk. Almost the only conversation was between the owner and the native servants, who waited at table abominably and were noisily reprimanded, and argued back. Each reprimand increased their inefficiency and insolence. Natives detest a fussy, noisy white man. ...
— The Ivory Trail • Talbot Mundy
... in his upper story, dusted, and carried down and up with his own hands. Thus at the bedside stood a real Chippendale table, with a real Delft vase upon it, filled with such roses as had survived the rain. A drop of water had been spilt upon the table from the vase, and there was something almost fussy in the way that Langholm ...
— The Shadow of the Rope • E. W. Hornung
... away. But the squint spied a friend, ran to her, and there was a great deal of whispering and sniggering. Presently the pair came sauntering up and sat down; and after some artificial humming and hawing the newcomer began to talk, in a loud and fussy manner, about certain acquaintances of hers called Tweedledum and Tweedledee. Both the fat girl and the squint "split" with laughter. Laura sat with her hands locked one inside the other; there was no escape for her, for she did not know where to go. But when the third girl ...
— The Getting of Wisdom • Henry Handel Richardson
... was not a man of ideas, his merits as a creator—as a realiser of types—were supreme. Many of his dramatis personae no doubt became old-fashioned in a sense; but who can deny the truth to life of the Kirk Elder, the slavey, the policeman, the fussy City man, the diner-out, the waiter (did he not invent "Robert"?), the cabman, the hen-pecked husband, the drunkard, the gillie, the Irish peasant, the schoolboy, and the Mrs. Brown of Arthur Sketchley's prosaic muse? The wealth of his limited fancy, and his power of resolving it into well-ordered ...
— The History of "Punch" • M. H. Spielmann
... they were not capable of doing—except taking reasonable care of their invalids! They either fussed about too much, or else they did not fuss about at all. They all began by doing the right thing: they all ended by doing the wrong. The fussy ones had fits of apathy, when the poor irritable patients seemed to get a little better; the negligent ones had paroxysms of attentiveness, when their invalids, accustomed to loneliness and neglect, seemed to become rather worse ...
— Ships That Pass In The Night • Beatrice Harraden
... murder and ourselves, and one that would need some explanation. Bear in mind that I've kept myself posted in those murders through the newspapers, and also by collecting a certain amount of local gossip. Now—you've a certain somewhat fussy and garrulous old gentleman ...
— Ravensdene Court • J. S. (Joseph Smith) Fletcher
... the few persons who happened to be in the quiet upper reaches of the Rue Bienfaisance at half-past eight o'clock the next evening came to see a fat, fussy, red-faced Englishman in a gray frock-coat, white spats, and a shining topper, followed by a liveried servant with a hat-box in one hand and a portmanteau in the other, so conspicuous, the pair of them, that they couldn't ...
— Cleek, the Master Detective • Thomas W. Hanshew
... fifteen years old, there was a white man or two, but colored leaders mostly got about a thousand colored people to start for the West walking. Warren had sisters and brothers who started on this trip. Warren had some fussy brothers, his mother was afraid would get in jail. They kept her uneasy. They shipped their "stuff" by boat and train. He never saw them any more but he heard from them in Louisiana. Louisiana had a bad name ...
— Slave Narratives: A Folk History of Slavery in the United States - Volume II. Arkansas Narratives. Part I • Work Projects Administration
... Reform? Oh! just a fad,— Its advocates, in fact, as bad As those who want Cremation. A set of foolish, fussy fools Whose misplaced ardour nothing cools— ...
— Punch, Or The London Charivari, VOL. 100. Feb. 28, 1891 • Various
... they be retained, for "Them's got programs on, and you'll need 'em." On the broad pavement, excited little groups of boys read and reread the announcements amid running choruses of approving comment. Now and then, a fussy, important matron bustled past with a four-or five-year-old following in her wake. Around the door, a baker's dozen of boys with shaggy hair and sadly worn clothes besought the more prosperous of the grown-ups, "Take us in, Mister [or "Missis" as the ...
— A Son of the City - A Story of Boy Life • Herman Gastrell Seely
... the desk. Forrester, though he supposed some people might be fussy about it, could see no objection whatever to the term Aphrodisiacs. A wild thought dealing with Spheres of Influence strayed into his mind, ...
— Pagan Passions • Gordon Randall Garrett
... Dordogne whenever the Duchess gives a pay-up party to the stuffy people Lili Estradina won't be bothered with, there are days when I never lay eyes on Paul, and barely have time to be waved and manicured; but, apart from that, Raymond's really much nicer and less fussy than he was." ...
— The Custom of the Country • Edith Wharton
... need not expect to enjoy the frills of a private room and special nurses and think the doctor will take care of you for a nominal fee; there is no reason why he should. Having a baby is not a disease, and you will not need to have fussy care. ...
— The Good Housekeeping Marriage Book • Various
... of the postage department. Fussy little brute. Won't leave you alone. Always trying to catch you on the hop. There's one thing, though. The work in the postage is pretty simple. You can't make many mistakes, if you're careful. It's mostly entering ...
— Psmith in the City • P. G. Wodehouse
... early that, in the whole stretch of rollicking, tumbling, buoyant waters between bank and bank, only one piece of river-craft could be seen. This pushed onward, cleaving through the little billows in the teeth of the morning breeze. It was a tiny naphtha launch—a horrid, fussy, smoking little thing, cutting through breeze and water, and diffusing a scent of oil and greased iron in the pure and radiant air. A white bird on the bank looked at it, and rose with a startled note of alarm, and a flight of lovely-salmon-coloured colleagues followed. The others merely looked ...
— Six Women • Victoria Cross
... her when I'm not about. So I want a lady, young, and English; and I should like her to be a bit of a sportswoman, don't you know. I mean," he added in careful explanation, "I should like her to be cheerful and good-natured, and not fussy about the things that ...
— The Admirable Tinker - Child of the World • Edgar Jepson
... person or one fussy about the edge of her skirt; neither of which she ever considered. She didn't like to sit in a corner and be hugged—even that she could now assert with a degree of knowledge—but it wasn't because she was shocked. Nothing, she told herself gravely, shocked her; only ...
— Linda Condon • Joseph Hergesheimer
... dear Davy!" Janet was laughing above her inclination to cry. "I do believe you are right. I'm going to pay particular attention to the little fussy things. Dear knows! if I do them all well, I'll have little time for discontent." She stood up—she and Davy were in the living room, while Mark was doing duty aloft—and flung her strong, young arms ...
— Janet of the Dunes • Harriet T. Comstock
... a dislike to each other at their first meeting; and it grew with further acquaintance. To Mike, Mr. Downing was all that a master ought not to be, fussy, pompous, and openly influenced in his official dealings with his form by his own private likes and dislikes. To Mr. Downing, Mike was simply an unamiable loafer, who did nothing for the school and apparently ...
— Mike • P. G. Wodehouse
... night without speculating as to possible romantic adventures on the car, on the street, everywhere. They were not quite approved by the rest of the Front Office staff; their color was not all natural, their clothes were "fussy." Both wore enormous dry "rats," that showed through the thin covering of outer hair, their stockings were quite transparent, and bows of pink and lavender ribbon were visible under their thin shirt-waists. It was known ...
— Saturday's Child • Kathleen Norris
... snobbishness is now so completely out of fashion that nobody cares. You are modern enough to laugh at it; I am not; and I still continue faithful to my Classons and Cuyps and Vetchens and Suydams; and to all that they stand for in Manhattan—the rusty vestiges of by-gone pomp and fussy circumstance—the memories that cling to the early lords of the manors, the old Patroons, and titled refugees—all this I still cling to—even to their shabbiness and ...
— The Firing Line • Robert W. Chambers
... fidgets continually is not to be admired for anything beyond its ceaseless efforts to be doing. Ben Jonson once said: "A busy woman is a fearful nuisance," and it's more than likely that he had in mind some fussy dame whose nervous fingers were everlastingly picking at things and ...
— The Woman Beautiful - or, The Art of Beauty Culture • Helen Follett Stevans
... fussy pomposity of the Queen's jubilee, the voice of the thinkers has not been entirely silent. The utter failure of her reign to present a single noble thought or impulse, a single evidence of sympathy with the immense mass of suffering, ...
— Buchanan's Journal of Man, August 1887 - Volume 1, Number 7 • Various
... music?" asked his mistress, knitting as she spoke. "He came from Germany; there's where you get the best singers. Some canaries won't sing before company and some won't sing alone; they are fussy,—I call it pernickitty. Why, I had one with a voice like a flute; but I happened to buy some new wall-paper, and she didn't like the looks of it, and after that she never would sing ...
— Jimmy, Lucy, and All • Sophie May
... Mr. Follingsbee was forward, fussy, and advisory, in his own peculiar free-and-easy fashion; and Mrs. Follingsbee was instructive and patronizing to the very last degree. Lillie had bewailed in her sympathizing bosom John's unaccountable and most singular moral Quixotism in regard to the wine question, and been ...
— Pink and White Tyranny - A Society Novel • Harriet Beecher Stowe
... simpler and more satisfactory than threshing and splashing about as I do. It seems so fussy and foolish and futile. I wish—that is, sometimes I wish—that I had learned to amuse myself in some less violent and ...
— The Great God Success • John Graham (David Graham Phillips)
... very fussy as usual, and told many amusing anecdotes regarding her journey, and also gave an immense amount of good advice to both Everard and Isabel, for which of ...
— Isabel Leicester - A Romance • Clotilda Jennings
... way within the garden-gate there is a circular temple of Grecian architecture, beneath the dome of which stands a marble statue of the good Doctor, very well executed, and representing him with a face of fussy activity and benevolence: just the kind of man, if luck favored him, to build up the fortunes of those about him, or, quite as probably, to blight his whole ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 10, Number 60, October 1862 • Various
... on missionary health. It does not purpose to instruct you in the rules of hygiene. Rather it inquires into attitudes. Is the missionary to be as particular as he can about everything (fussy, some may call it), or should his faith be great enough so that he overlooks the rules of the doctors? Or perhaps, are there times when the one attitude is desirable, ...
— Have We No Rights? - A frank discussion of the "rights" of missionaries • Mabel Williamson
... suave and pompous. I longed for a fussy practitioner who would have got over the ...
— Uncle Silas - A Tale of Bartram-Haugh • J.S. Le Fanu
... cause. They considered that the methods he pursued in the management of the house were the outcome of a naturally malignant disposition. This was, however, not the case. There is no reason to suppose that Mr Kay did not mean well. But there is no doubt that he was extremely fussy. And fussiness—with the possible exceptions of homicidal mania and a taste for arson—is quite the worst characteristic it is possible for a house-master ...
— The Head of Kay's • P. G. Wodehouse
... never believed there was any foundation for these silly reports, but, if any special formalities were prescribed, Mr. Chamberlain brushed them aside, and simply conducted himself with quiet, easy grace, always calm and self-possessed, and never fussy or ...
— A Tale of One City: The New Birmingham - Papers Reprinted from the "Midland Counties Herald" • Thomas Anderton
... where Angel and Devil alike fear to tread. At least, that is the old and orthodox conception of the clerical profession, and although it might be sometimes foolishly and conceitedly pushed to extremes by other men, there was nothing in Ringfield of the mere fussy moralist and pulpit egoist. After all, as he entered the house and, guided by the voice of its owner, found his way to the room looking on the dusty country road, he saw nothing very terrible, only a thinnish, fair, middle-aged man, wearing a black skull-cap and clad in a faded and greasy but rather ...
— Ringfield - A Novel • Susie Frances Harrison
... remove those grievances. The suspicion, however, did exist among those who like to ignore the obvious and magnify the remote, and throughout the negotiations the hand of Great Britain was weakened, as her adversary had doubtless calculated that it would be, by an earnest but fussy and faddy minority. ...
— The War in South Africa - Its Cause and Conduct • Arthur Conan Doyle
... some acquaintances in Switzerland. Luckily her trustee and would-be lover, Bill Chester, proposed to come out and join the party there. That was something to look forward to, for Sylvia was very fond of him, though he sometimes made her angry by his fussy ways. Chester had not approved of her going to Paris by herself, and he would certainly have shaken his head had he known of yesterday's visit ...
— The Chink in the Armour • Marie Belloc Lowndes
... Macgregor here with his schooner, you would hear of no more troubles in Samoa. That is what we want; a man that knows and likes the natives, qui paye de sa personne, and is not afraid of hanging when necessary. We don't want bland Swedish humbugs, and fussy, footering German barons. That way the maelstrom lies, and we shall soon be ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 25 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... interest had sparkled in her eyes when Gordon's fussy little attorney had mentioned the name of his client, but it had been Dick's genial manner of boyish comradeship that had really warmed Miss Underwood to him. She did not like many people, but when she gave her heart to a friend it was ...
— A Daughter of the Dons - A Story of New Mexico Today • William MacLeod Raine
... by the fussy and incompetent Earl of Loudon, 1756-57, whom Franklin likened to Saint George on the sign-posts, "always galloping but never advancing." He gathered twelve thousand men for the recapture of Louisburg, but exaggerated reports of the French strength frightened him from the attempt. ...
— History of the United States, Vol. I (of VI) • E. Benjamin Andrews
... taking up my quarters in the chapar-khana, a party of Persian travellers appear upon the scene, and with them a fussy little man in big round spectacles and semi-European clothes. Scarcely have they had time to alight and seek out quarters than the little man makes his appearance at my menzil door in all the glory of a crimson velvet dressing-cap and blue slippers, and beaming gladsomely through his moon-like ...
— Around the World on a Bicycle Volume II. - From Teheran To Yokohama • Thomas Stevens
... without charm, though approval may have been lacking here and there, and at the first crossing Alice suffered what she might have accounted an actual injury, had she allowed herself to be so sensitive. An elderly woman in fussy black silk stood there, waiting for a streetcar; she was all of a globular modelling, with a face patterned like a frost-bitten peach; and that the approaching gracefulness was uncongenial she naively made too evident. ...
— Alice Adams • Booth Tarkington
... makeshift washstand. It should be made of a sizeable drygoods box, with shelves, and the top padded and covered to match the drapery. The mirror which hangs over it may be draped, or simply framed in white enamel, gold, or whatever blends with the room. Overdraping not only looks fussy, but means additional bother and care. The drapery is thrown over a frame ...
— The Complete Home • Various
... a small sallow man, with rather an agitated fussy manner, and eyes that never seemed to be looking at you. He was neat, almost dapper, in his dress, and was rather like the ...
— Memoirs of Arthur Hamilton, B. A. Of Trinity College, Cambridge • Arthur Christopher Benson
... rendering aid to America, which Franklin would not believe, or could not see. Nor were the relations of Adams very pleasant with the veteran Franklin himself, whose merits he conceived to be exaggerated, and of whom it is generally believed he was envious. He was as fussy in business details as Franklin was easy and careless. He thought that Franklin lived too luxuriously and was too fond of the ...
— Beacon Lights of History, Volume XI • John Lord
... must be heated by pipes from the kitchen or other fires; and, with the provision for fresh air never forgotten, this simple device will invariably secure pure and well-oxygenated air for breathing. "Fussy and expensive," may be the comment; but the expense is less than the average yearly doctor's bill, and the fussiness nothing that your own hands must engage in. Only let heads take it in, and see to it that no neglect is allowed. In a southern ...
— The Easiest Way in Housekeeping and Cooking - Adapted to Domestic Use or Study in Classes • Helen Campbell
... hard, bright eyes, and seemed to have a quite impersonal interest in our struggle to keep afloat amid the battering seas. In addition to the Cape pigeons an occasional stormy petrel flashed overhead. Then there was a small bird, unknown to me, that appeared always to be in a fussy, bustling state, quite out of keeping with the surroundings. It irritated me. It had practically no tail, and it flitted about vaguely as though in search of the lost member. I used to find myself wishing it would find its tail and have done with ...
— South! • Sir Ernest Shackleton
... stupid—so very dull, Mr. Gusher. We only endure it, you know. And there are so few nice people in it—so very few we care about associating with," resumed this fat, fussy woman, giving her head a toss and extending her hands. "A few, a very few nice people have come up from the city—we find them very agreeable society, quite a relief. We intend to set up a residence in the city. ...
— The Von Toodleburgs - Or, The History of a Very Distinguished Family • F. Colburn Adams
... I had to—when folks are so wrapped up in their business. There, with Susan's compliments! Susan's the heifer you rounded up for me in the ditch. I know she made you a lot of work, tracking holes in your banks you're so fussy about. Do you really think ...
— In Exile and Other Stories • Mary Hallock Foote
... Wynell (the authority for Godfrey's being 'master of a dangerous secret') did expect to meet Godfrey at dinner, and, knowing the fears to which Godfrey often confessed, might himself have originated, by his fussy inquiries, the rumour that Sir Edmund was missing. The wild excitement of the town might add 'murdered by Papists,' and the rumour might really get into a letter from London of Saturday night, reaching Tixall by Monday morning. North says: 'It was in every one's ...
— The Valet's Tragedy and Other Stories • Andrew Lang
... exactly the same thing. And here, again, "The Logicians" seem to me to take much too humble a position. When they are putting the final touches to the grouping of their Proposition, just before the curtain goes up, and when the Copula——always a rather fussy 'heavy father', asks them "Am I to have the 'not', or will you tack it on to the Predicate?" they are much too ready to answer, like the subtle cab-driver, "Leave it to you, Sir!" The result seems to be, that ...
— Symbolic Logic • Lewis Carroll
... Lady Torrington, a fussy little woman, her hostess of the night before, on her way down the room stopped and shook hands ...
— The Evil Shepherd • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... worry you," said Trimmer. "They listen more out of habit than anything else. If you're fussy we'll go ...
— Sjambak • John Holbrook Vance
... thus informed by the officer whose wards we were. He was a fussy, quick-tempered, withal kind-hearted little fellow, and kept dashing in and out of the room, really perplexed over housing accommodations for the night. The spy-hunters had been successful in their work of rounding up their victims from all over the country and corralling ...
— In the Claws of the German Eagle • Albert Rhys Williams
... A meeting of the creditors was called, at which H. H. Rogers was present, representing Clemens. For the most part the creditors were liberal and willing to agree to any equitable arrangement. But there were a few who were grumpy and fussy. They declared that Mark Twain should turn over his copyrights, his Hartford home, and whatever other odds and ends could be discovered. Mr. Rogers, discussing the ...
— Mark Twain, A Biography, 1835-1910, Complete - The Personal And Literary Life Of Samuel Langhorne Clemens • Albert Bigelow Paine
... once were inclined to be fussy; You turned at inferior rye; You moped at a dubious vintage And shrieked if the ...
— Nonsenseorship • G. G. Putnam
... imperfections whereby time has set the glory of his seal upon the gospels as well as upon all other aged things, not for twenty generations will they resume that ineffable and inviolable aspect which our fussy meddlesomeness will have disturbed. Let them alone. It is as they stand that ...
— The Fair Haven • Samuel Butler
... has no personal vices of the baser sort. He is moderate in the satisfaction of his appetites, whether for food or wine. He is no debauchee, no voluptuary, no gambler. He is faithful to old friends and comrades. He has high ideals, and is not ashamed of them. He is neither indolent nor fussy; neither a cynic, nor an intriguer, nor a fool; he is neither wrong-headed nor stubborn; he is honest and sincere to a degree that does him honour as a man, if it has sometimes proved perilous and blameworthy ...
— William of Germany • Stanley Shaw
... Mrs. Carleton's dressing-room, as her son had called it, looked very pleasant when they got there. It was well lighted and warmed and something answering to curtains had been summoned from its obscurity in store-room or garret and hung up at the windows,—"them air fussy English folks had made such a pint of it," the landlord said. Truth was, that Mr. Carleton as well as his mother wanted this room as a retreat for the quiet and privacy which travelling in company as they did they could have nowhere else. Everything ...
— Queechy • Susan Warner
... Swinburne and Mark Twain. He reads manuscripts, including his own—and including mine. He refuses manuscripts, though he did accept one of mine. He tells authors what they ought to do and ought not to do. He is marvellously and terribly particular and fussy about the format of the books issued by his firm. Questions as to fonts of type, width of margins, disposition of title-pages, tint and texture of bindings really do interest him. And misprints—especially ...
— When Winter Comes to Main Street • Grant Martin Overton
... on very smoothly with them all the year. Rose was lazy but not dirty and Sam was careful but not fussy, and then there was Melanctha to come in every day and help ...
— Three Lives - Stories of The Good Anna, Melanctha and The Gentle Lena • Gertrude Stein
... o'clock we were quit of Genoa; the last lean, blue-chinned official had left our decks; the last fruitseller had been beaten off with bucketsful of water and left cursing us from his boat; the last passenger had come aboard at the last moment—a fussy graybeard who kept the big ship waiting while he haggled with his boatman over half a lira. But at length we were off, the tug was shed, the lighthouse passed, and Raffles and I leaned together over the rail, watching our shadows on the ...
— The Amateur Cracksman • E. W. Hornung
... really happy—for happy I believe they are—that slavery is not an evil; and the great evil is, as I always supposed, in the effect upon the whites. The few Southern gentlemen that I know interest me from their courtesy, agreeable manners, and ready speech. They also strike me as childlike and fussy. I catch myself feeling that I am the man and they are women; and I see this even in the captain of a steamer. Then they all like to talk sentiment—their ...
— Maria Mitchell: Life, Letters, and Journals • Maria Mitchell
... but the cure was a man of firm mind; their efforts to recapture his attention were futile. For the music of Charm's foreign voice was in his ear. Worship of the cloth is not a national, it is a more or less universal cult, I take it. It is in the blood of certain women. Opposite the two fussy, jealous bourgeoises, were others as importunate and aggressive. They were of fair, lean, lank English build, with the shifting eyes and the persistent courage which come to certain maidens in whose lives there is but one fixed and certain fact—that of having missed the ...
— In and Out of Three Normady Inns • Anna Bowman Dodd
... grown up round the feud; but if anyone had had patience to examine it to the bottom he would probably have found the long and short to be that Mr Bickers, being unhappily endowed with a fussy disposition and a sour and vindictive temper, had incurred the displeasure of the boys of his rival's house, and not being the man to smooth away a bad impression, had aggravated it by resenting keenly what he considered to be ...
— The Master of the Shell • Talbot Baines Reed
... just because the women got wrought up over tenement-house an' fire laws an' truck like that. Yes sir, they're out seein' Whitewater this minut, or will be if you can't divert their minds. Call 'em off, George, if you can. Get 'em fussy ...
— The Sturdy Oak - A Composite Novel of American Politics by Fourteen American Authors • Samuel Merwin, et al.
... clear evening in late summer as the Elizabeth Ann, of Pembray, scorning the expensive aid of a tug, threaded her way down the London river under canvas. The crew were busy forward, and the master and part-owner—a fussy little man, deeply imbued with a sense of his own importance and cleverness—was at the wheel chatting with the mate. While waiting for a portion of his cargo, he had passed the previous week pleasantly enough with some relatives in Exeter, ...
— Many Cargoes • W.W. Jacobs
... disparagement to her sex by this—far from it; she referred to a manly man as compared with an unmanly one, and she thought, for one moment, rather disparagingly about the salute which her Samuel's bald pate had given to the door that morning. Probably she failed to think of the fussy manner in which she herself had assaulted the superintendent of police, for it is said that ...
— Dusty Diamonds Cut and Polished - A Tale of City Arab Life and Adventure • R.M. Ballantyne
... and shops were flowering into light and the sense of night and lateness was very strong. After they were seated in the tram a certain interval of silence came between them and then Lady Harman laughed and Mr. Brumley laughed—there was no longer any need for him to be energetic and fussy—and they began to have that feeling of adventurous amusement which comes on the further side of desperation. But beneath the temporary elation Lady Harman was a prey to grave anxieties and Mr. Brumley could not help thinking he had made ...
— The Wife of Sir Isaac Harman • H. G. (Herbert George) Wells
... been deprived of their offices or sent into exile in consequence of their duels, when M. de Bouteville, of the house of Montmorency, who had been previously engaged in twenty-one affairs of honor, came to Paris to fight the Marquis of Beuvron on the Place Royale. The Marquis's second, M. de fussy d'Amboise, was killed by the Count of Chapelles, Bouteville's second. Beuvron fled to England. M. de Bouteville and his comrade had taken post for Lorraine; they were recognized and arrested at Vitry-le- Brule and brought ...
— A Popular History of France From The Earliest Times - Volume V. of VI. • Francois Pierre Guillaume Guizot
... fellow, you are rather too dainty and fussy for a very successful wooer," he said. "It's beautiful on paper, and absurd in life. We have a bit of private business to discuss. We will go inside, sir, I think. I will soon release you." ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... stream, by his generation, had grown much vitiated: it was pure warriorism in Claudius Gothicus, and even in Constantius Chlorus; it was warriorism refined with subtlety and cruelty in Constantine I; it was mere fussy treacherous cruelty in the Spider-Octopus,—and sensual brutality in Julian's brother Gallus. The vices of the latter may indicate how great a self-conqueror the ...
— The Crest-Wave of Evolution • Kenneth Morris
... worse. Master Vallance chewed the cud of country-side gossip. He reminded himself that not so very far away the King had set up his standard at Nottingham and summoned all loyal souls to his banner; that not so very far away in Cambridge, a fussy gentleman, a Mr. Cromwell, member for that place, had officiously pushed the interests of the Parliament by raising troops of volunteers and laying violent hands upon the University plate. Master Vallance tickled his chin and tried ...
— The Lady of Loyalty House - A Novel • Justin Huntly McCarthy
... me!" said the fussy old gentleman, "why can't you stop—I don't want to hear you cry. Here," continued he, fumbling ...
— The Garies and Their Friends • Frank J. Webb
... felt the warmth of the welcoming. The girls, one and all, had ever so many things to say to him. They all hunted, and they all wanted him to look at horses for them. Lady Eardham was more matronly than ever, and at the same time was a little fussy. She would not leave him among the girls, and at last succeeded in getting him off into a corner of the back drawing-room. "Now, Mr. Newton," she said, "I am going to show you that I put ...
— Ralph the Heir • Anthony Trollope
... I want a room fixed up for me as good as yours,—but not so dinky-fussy. I'll pick out the things myself. You needn't think you own the whole shooting-match, Miss Dotty-Doodles! I just guess Brother Bob home on his vacation will come in for his share of attention! You won't be neglected, I'll look ...
— Two Little Women • Carolyn Wells
... into the corridor, walked along the carpeted flagstones, and cast a practiced eye around him as he walked. These old castles were difficult to keep clean, and my lord the Count was fussy about nitre collecting in the seams between the stones of the walls. All appeared quite in order, which was a good thing. My lord the Count had been making a night of it last evening, and that always made him the more peevish in the morning. Though he always woke at the Angelus, he did ...
— The Eyes Have It • Gordon Randall Garrett
... like shaving-mugs and equally thick. Golden-oak chairs of mid-Chautauquan patterns, with backs of saw-mill Heppelwhite; chairs of cane and rattan with fussy scrolls and curlicues of wicker, the backs set askew. Reed tables with gollops of wicker; plain black wooden tables that were like kitchen tables once removed; folding-tables that may have been suitable to card-playing, ...
— The Innocents - A Story for Lovers • Sinclair Lewis
... such as intelligent men enjoy, being composed of two Egyptian boys and three fussy old ladies. One of them was immensely stout, wore a bright green cap, with half-a-pint of scarlet cherries bobbing on her brow. She talked on all subjects, and handed round an album full of her own poems on all occasions. The second must have been a sister of 'Mr. T.'s Aunt,' so grim and incoherent ...
— Shawl-Straps - A Second Series of Aunt Jo's Scrap-Bag • Louisa M. Alcott
... family completed the party, which was confined to the Molyneux's set. The chaplain was strangely nervous, fussy, and important: it seemed as if the possession of some weighty secret that he was eager, yet afraid to divulge, had disturbed his phlegmatic complacency. He took the first opportunity of beseeching Miss Tresilyan to be allowed to act as her escort: ...
— Sword and Gown - A Novel • George A. Lawrence
... man of considerable character and attainments. Who would guess it who read all these trivial comments, these catalogues of what he had for dinner, these inane domestic confidences—all the more interesting for their inanity! The effect left upon the mind is of some grotesque character in a play, fussy, self-conscious, blustering with women, timid with men, dress-proud, purse-proud, trimming in politics and in religion, a garrulous gossip immersed always in trifles. And yet, though this was the day-by-day man, the year-by-year man was a very different person, a devoted civil ...
— Through the Magic Door • Arthur Conan Doyle
... the trainer. "Albert. He's a honest hoss is Fo'-Pound-the-Second, only that fussy as to who he has about him. That's the way with bottle-fed uns. They gets spoiled and gives 'emselves airs. Albert's his lad, and Monkey's been about him since he was a foal. Sometimes he'll work for one, and sometimes ...
— Boy Woodburn - A Story of the Sussex Downs • Alfred Ollivant
... introduction of steam-launches into use for our large English yachts adds quite a new feature to every grand regatta. Here again, however, the French navy led the way, and England follows somewhat tardily. The French fleet at the Cherbourg review, some years ago had a swarm of these fussy little creatures buzzing about the great anchored iron-clads. English steam-launches were built to carry each a gun, and so they are bluff and slow. Our Admiralty declined to allow a race between these and the French ...
— The Voyage Alone in the Yawl "Rob Roy" • John MacGregor
... was good enough," said Mr. St. Clair, "you're too fussy about trifles, Isabel. Come, children, scurry off to bed, you'll get no beauty sleep to-night, ...
— Patty Fairfield • Carolyn Wells
... short side whiskers, a chunky, fussy, and hot-tempered man, but whether Madge Pemberton had managed him, or whether he'd worn her out, I couldn't make up my mind about the likelihood. I sat a while talking with him, and watching Madge McCulloch, his daughter, lay ...
— The Belted Seas • Arthur Colton
... be a picnic. This word tickled one of the drunken officers so much, that suddenly he let his loose legs relapse and clapped his spurs into his animal, which reared horribly, and in the end sent him on the ground. I thought I should die of laughter. Then everybody became more and more fussy, because they were afraid of L——, but, fortunately, the general started off ahead, muttering to himself, and we rode after him like some procession. It seemed to me very absurd, and at that point I lost all confidence in the success of the expedition. Everyone had become too ...
— Indiscreet Letters From Peking • B. L. Putman Weale
... things, quietly, without parade or press-agenting, all the energy in her, and she had no reserve left for play. War work seemed to mean something to Sophie besides write-ups in the society column and pictures of her in sundry poses. These things besides, surrounded her with all sorts of fussy people, both male and female, and through this cordon Thompson seldom broke for confidential talk with her. When he did Sophie baffled him with her calm detachment, a profound and ever-increasing reserve—as ...
— Burned Bridges • Bertrand W. Sinclair
... member of the party to land was a tall young man in white ducks, while directly behind came another elderly man with a very high forehead and a fussy, ...
— Tarzan of the Apes • Edgar Rice Burroughs
... hands of his friends" then, and couldn't get away; and it must be said he didn't seem to feel very bad over the situation. The storm of cheers and the sight of tall Abraham (six feet and four inches) at the head of the marching column, before the fussy little chap in brass buttons who was quite ready, caused a quick stampede even among the boys who intended to vote for the little fellow. One after another they rushed for a place in "Captain Abe's" line as though to be first to fall in was to win ...
— Our American Holidays: Lincoln's Birthday • Various
... was none the worse; and those who were well enough enjoyed his discomfiture immensely. Going into Salle III where there were shouts of laughter (the convalescents were sent to that room) I saw a funny sight. One little man, who was particularly fussy and grumpy (and very unpopular with the other men in consequence), slept near the stove, which was an old-fashioned coal one with a pipe leading up to the ceiling. The concussion had shaken this to such an extent that accumulations ...
— Fanny Goes to War • Pat Beauchamp
... happen if you let the children carry any of the flowers!" cried Aunt Lolly, who was a dear, fussy little old lady. "They'll drop them on their toes, or spill the dirt on ...
— Daddy Takes Us Skating • Howard R. Garis
... there is not to be a fuss," Ethel said at last, when St. Pancras' clock was striking two: "for I always thought that a fussy wedding would be horrid. You see, Lesley, I have dressed up so often in white satin and lace, as a bride, or a girl in a ballroom, or some other character not my own, that I feel now as if there would be no reality for me in a wedding if I did not wear rather every-day clothes. In a bride's ...
— Brooke's Daughter - A Novel • Adeline Sergeant
... was fussy and self-important At the university—Balliol was his college—he was regarded as a coming man, likely to make his mark in the world. This made him more fussy and more self-important. When he became a recognised authority on Near Eastern affairs he became pompous and ...
— Lady Bountiful - 1922 • George A. Birmingham
... more crafts arrived, a large triplane, and a dirigible balloon. There were many visitors to the ground, and Tom, Ned and Mr. Sharp were kept busy answering questions put by those who crowded into their tent. Toward the close of the day a fussy little Frenchman entered, and, making his way to where Tom ...
— Tom Swift and his Airship • Victor Appleton
... the opinion of most of my men friends that such half-concealed encouragements, such evasions and drawings back are a necessary part of the love-play—the woman's unconscious testing of the fussy male. There is one friend, a doctor, who tells me that the woman's dissimulation of her own inclination has come to be a secondary sexual characteristic, a manifestation of the operation of sexual selection, diluted, perhaps, and altered by civilisation, but an ...
— The Truth About Woman • C. Gasquoine Hartley
... communicated with his god. It was surely a great step in advance when all the Elohims were combined into one Supreme Elohim that was everywhere present and ruled the world. Instead of dozens of little gods, jealous, jangling, fearful, fretful, fussy, boastful, changing walking-sticks to serpents, or doing other things quite as useless, it was a great advance to have one Supreme Being, dispassionate, a God of Love and Justice, "with whom can be no variation, neither ...
— Little Journeys To The Homes Of Great Teachers • Elbert Hubbard
... and rising wealth. The last may, and does have the best of it, in the mere physical part of the strife; but in the more moral, if such a word can be used, the quiet ascendency of better manners and ancient recollections is very apt to overshadow the fussy pretensions of the vulgar aspirant, who places his claims altogether on the all-mighty dollar. It is vain to deny it; men ever have done it, and probably ever will defer to the past, in matters of this sort—it being much with us, ...
— Afloat And Ashore • James Fenimore Cooper
... apart, or peered out earnestly through the smoke drifts, while their commitments to Libby Prison were made out; anxious and wan women, of every sphere in life, besieged the clerk preparing "protection papers;" while a fussy official, of higher grade, gave assurance to every one that guards should be placed about their homes. For the deserted women of Richmond dreaded not only the presence of the victorious enemy, but also ...
— Four Years in Rebel Capitals - An Inside View of Life in the Southern Confederacy from Birth to Death • T. C. DeLeon
... has been described as a mental quicksand. There is something in the atmosphere which makes the most industrious man contentedly idle. Here the nervous, irritable, fussy individual, who for years has never known what rest meant, and who has fidgeted when he could not work, finds himself relaxing, against his will, into a condition of what a celebrated statesman described as "innocuous desuetude." The balminess of the ...
— My Native Land • James Cox
... little, square, pale, flat-faced, good-natured-looking, fussy man, with very intelligent eyes, yet great credulity of ...
— The Works of Lord Byron: Letters and Journals, Volume 2. • Lord Byron
... said she supposed there were doctors in Sunderland who would do her more good than I should. She doesn't seem to be able to understand why I should want to go. She says it's fussy." ...
— A Pair of Clogs • Amy Walton
... down the hall in a state of general excitement. A corpulent colored man, dressed in the garb of a beadle,—a large staff in his right hand, a cocked hat on his head, and broad white stripes down his flowing coat, stands midway between the parlor doors. He is fussy enough, and stupid enough, for a Paddington beadle. Now Madame Flamingo looks scornfully at him, scolds him, pushes him aside; he is only a slave she purchased for the purpose; she commands that he gracefully touch his ...
— Justice in the By-Ways - A Tale of Life • F. Colburn Adams
... way. You've lived too soft. You need something to wake you up to the real hardships that men have to go through. Then you won't be so fussy over little things. Perhaps I've talked plainer to you than I should; but I believe in going after a fellow with a club before his face rather than a knife behind his back. Now let's open those windows so the fresh air can blow through, build a ...
— Jim Spurling, Fisherman - or Making Good • Albert Walter Tolman
... merchants probably think I'm too fussy about shopping. I'm afraid I bore Mr. Dashaway and ...
— Main Street • Sinclair Lewis
... so glad," she said in a relieved tone. "I suppose I seem fussy, but now and then the problem of help gets to be a regular nightmare. Once or twice lately I've been afraid I was making a terrible mess of things, and might, after all, have to accept one of the offers I've had for the ...
— Shoe-Bar Stratton • Joseph Bushnell Ames
... to expect that private Members, howsoever fussy by nature, would restrain themselves and permit public business to go forward. Member for North-West Lanarkshire does not take that view of his duty. Here is a day on which eyes of nation are with exceptional intensity and anxiety fixed on House of Commons. What ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 150, January 12, 1916 • Various
... elicited. For what really the House wanted to learn was the great enigma which had been kept for seven long years—in spite of protests, hypocritical appeals, and, ofttimes, tedious remonstrance from over-zealous and over-fussy friends. ...
— Sketches In The House (1893) • T. P. O'Connor
... something fussy about such a traveller, though robbers undoubtedly were to be feared, even in the eighteenth century,[405] and though inns were undoubtedly dirty. A repugnance to dirt and discomfort is justifiable ...
— English Travellers of the Renaissance • Clare Howard
... three of these steamships are together down the harbor, their white volleys of smoke often present quite a lively picture of a naval engagement. The little puffing pilot-boats have a trick of getting in the way of us ferry-voyagers, like fussy custom-house officers among the newly-landed passengers from the ocean-ferries. There is generally a tug, perhaps with a slow convoy, to be waited for or circumnavigated ere the "slip" can be entered. And they run so close in-shore that the pilot ...
— Lippincott's Magazine, November 1885 • Various
... it was with him a general rule to find fault with her about everything. He did not spare her his reproaches on a multitude of subjects; all day long he was worrying her about small trifles with which he should have had nothing to do. It is a mistake to suppose that a man can not be brutal and fussy at the same time. M. de Talbrun was proof ...
— Jacqueline, v3 • Th. Bentzon (Mme. Blanc)
... unless I inspect them personally. These are the patients who try one's soul, Babe. I would rather deal with Asiatic cholera than with one fussy old woman with a digestion. They eat hot bread and fried steak, and then ...
— Phebe, Her Profession - A Sequel to Teddy: Her Book • Anna Chapin Ray
... however, did exist among those who like to ignore the obvious and magnify the remote, and throughout the negotiations the hand of Great Britain was weakened, as her adversary had doubtless calculated that it would be, by an earnest but fussy and ...
— The War in South Africa - Its Cause and Conduct • Arthur Conan Doyle
... could not expect a little brook to be noisy, fussy, energetic. If it were not lazy, it would be ...
— Fisherman's Luck • Henry van Dyke
... I suppose it does hurt, and I ought to be sorry. But I'm not. I'm glad of it. I wish her face would stay that way all winter! She's so fussy about her looks she won't put her nose out of her room till she's pretty again. Oh, Billy Boy, I wish ...
— The Long Shadow • B. M. Bower
... OF BARBARISM.—Amid the fussy pomposity of the Queen's jubilee, the voice of the thinkers has not been entirely silent. The utter failure of her reign to present a single noble thought or impulse, a single evidence of sympathy with the immense mass ...
— Buchanan's Journal of Man, August 1887 - Volume 1, Number 7 • Various
... his looks, eh? Yer powerful fussy. He ain't the best lookin' feller I ever did see, but ...
— Rodney, the Ranger - With Daniel Morgan on Trail and Battlefield • John V. Lane
... dear. I've got my own ways, you see. I'm a fussy old fellow. And I've got my servant—my blackamoor. He'd frighten all the neighbours. And you'd fuss yourself, thinking I wasn't comfortable. I'll come up to-morrow afternoon and stay on to dinner, if you like. And just leave the boy to me a bit. Good night, ...
— Great Uncle Hoot-Toot • Mrs. Molesworth
... It was Mr. Weatherley who appeared. Mr. Weatherley was distinctly fussy and there was some return of his ...
— The Lighted Way • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... truth! but not the sober-faced, pompous, dignified Hector of the household of M. le Comte de Cambray, but a red-visaged, excited, fussy Hector, who for the moment seemed to have forgotten where he was, as well as the etiquette which surrounded the august personality of his master. He certainly contrived to murmur a humble if somewhat hasty apology, when he found himself confronted at the door by Mme. la ...
— The Bronze Eagle - A Story of the Hundred Days • Emmuska Orczy, Baroness Orczy
... alone in the schoolroom near the closed door of the little room whence the scenes were lit, she felt herself in a vast space. The ceilings and walls seemed to disappear. She wanted a big scene, something quiet and serious—quite different from the fussy little absurdities they had been rushing through all the evening. A statue... one of the Germans. "You think of something this time," she said, pushing the group of ...
— Pointed Roofs - Pilgrimage, Volume 1 • Dorothy Richardson
... a fad,— Its advocates, in fact, as bad As those who want Cremation. A set of foolish, fussy fools Whose misplaced ardour nothing cools— A nuisance to ...
— Punch, Or The London Charivari, VOL. 100. Feb. 28, 1891 • Various
... burlesque creature impresses me always with a sense of unreality, of incongruity, of strange happening, like a jesting clown in a procession of monks, like a strain of low comedy in the sober religious drama of early New England Puritan life; so out of place, so unreal is this fussy, pompous, restless tithingman, with his fantastic wand of office fringed with dangling foxtails,—creaking, bustling, strutting, peering around the quiet meeting-house, prodding and rapping the restless boys, waking the drowsy sleepers; for they slept ...
— Sabbath in Puritan New England • Alice Morse Earle
... that they might have acquired a sufficient stock of bankers and mechanics by this time, and be able possibly to discover a vacancy for a public-school man with a fairish knowledge of the world and some other things—one who, moreover, had himself served in a cranky and fussy Government Department and, though working in another sphere, had been thanked officially for certain labours—once by the Admiralty, twice by the Board of Trade; and anyway, hang it! one was not so infernally venerable as all ...
— Alone • Norman Douglas
... caused the damp, grey foliage to smile once more with aniseed and red raspberry, and to sparkle with the gold of their mildew. Also, there came hovering about us goldfinches with their little red-hooded crests, and fussy tomtits in their cravats of yellow, while a nimble, dark, blue woodpecker scaled the stem of an apple tree. And everywhere, yellow leaves fluttered to earth, and, in doing so, so closely resembled birds as to make it not always easy to distinguish whether a leaf or ...
— Through Russia • Maxim Gorky
... colonel will very likely be some fussy individual who magnifies his own importance, and who will send a squad of volunteers to escort me, and I want to avoid that. These officers always stick by each other; they're bound to. I want to go alone with Stoliker. I have a score to ...
— In the Midst of Alarms • Robert Barr
... world. The very carts and vans and cabs that Wellington Street poured out incessantly upon the bridge seemed ripe and good in her eyes. A traffic of copious barges slumbered over the face of the river-barges either altogether stagnant or dreaming along in the wake of fussy tugs; and above circled, urbanely voracious, the London seagulls. She had never been there before at that hour, in that light, and it seemed to her as if she came to it all for the first time. And this great ...
— Ann Veronica • H. G. Wells
... to the rock as they traced it downward, stepping cautiously from ledge to ledge and from slippery stone to stone. At times a stone plunged into the mist beneath them, and Vane grasped the girl's arm and held out a steadying hand, but he was never fussy nor needlessly concerned. When she wanted help, it was offered at the right moment; but that was all. Had she been alarmed, her companion's manner would have been more comforting than persistent solicitude. ...
— Vane of the Timberlands • Harold Bindloss
... he communicated with his god. It was surely a great step in advance when all the Elohims were combined into one Supreme Elohim that was everywhere present and ruled the world. Instead of dozens of little gods, jealous, jangling, fearful, fretful, fussy, boastful, changing walking-sticks to serpents, or doing other things quite as useless, it was a great advance to have one Supreme Being, dispassionate, a God of Love and Justice, "with whom can be no variation, neither shadow that is cast ...
— Little Journeys To The Homes Of Great Teachers • Elbert Hubbard
... in Liverpool, which he amiably, termed "a picture among paint," he observed to him on the occasion of their first meeting: "Paint things exactly as they are. I always do. Young men think they should paint like this or that painter. Be quite simple; no fussy foolishness, you know; and don't try to be what they call 'strong.' When a picture 'smells of paint,'" he said slowly, "it's what ...
— Whistler Stories • Don C. Seitz
... gang of stevedores, their laboring bodies steaming in the sharp air, could handle the muddle, the numerous cases and crates were hauled aboard the vessel we have noticed and lowered into her capacious holds by a rattling, fussy cargo winch. The shouts of the freight handlers and the sharp shrieks of the whistle of the boss stevedore, as he started or stopped the hoisting engine, all combined to form a picture as confused as ...
— The Boy Aviators' Polar Dash - Or - Facing Death in the Antarctic • Captain Wilbur Lawton
... character and attainments. Who would guess it who read all these trivial comments, these catalogues of what he had for dinner, these inane domestic confidences—all the more interesting for their inanity! The effect left upon the mind is of some grotesque character in a play, fussy, self-conscious, blustering with women, timid with men, dress-proud, purse-proud, trimming in politics and in religion, a garrulous gossip immersed always in trifles. And yet, though this was the ...
— Through the Magic Door • Arthur Conan Doyle
... last may, and does have the best of it, in the mere physical part of the strife; but in the more moral, if such a word can be used, the quiet ascendency of better manners and ancient recollections is very apt to overshadow the fussy pretensions of the vulgar aspirant, who places his claims altogether on the all-mighty dollar. It is vain to deny it; men ever have done it, and probably ever will defer to the past, in matters of this sort—it being much with ...
— Afloat And Ashore • James Fenimore Cooper
... "but he had a sort of fussy irritable way that old gentlemen sometimes have and I somehow got it fixed in my mind that he was old. As a matter of fact, he was about forty-five, he may ...
— The Clue of the Twisted Candle • Edgar Wallace
... not at home to welcome the new-comer, nor could he be present at high tea. When he returned, towards nine o'clock, he found Polly with a very red face, and so full of fussy cares for her guest's comfort—her natural kindliness distorted to caricature—that she had not a word for him. One look at Miss Tilly explained everything, and his respects duly paid he retired to the surgery, to indulge a smile at Polly's expense. Here Polly soon joined him, Tilly, fatigued by ...
— Australia Felix • Henry Handel Richardson
... great circle that was spread beneath his eyes were none of those toiling specks that tell of a Hunt in labour. The check was brief; the hurrying hounds, busy as ants, cast themselves right and left forward, combining in fussy groups, that would suddenly disintegrate as if by an access of centrifugal force; crowding each other jealously along the top of a bank, flopping into the patches of bog, snuffing greedily at the orange stems of the bracken. Soon, reiterated squeals from a leading ...
— Mount Music • E. Oe. Somerville and Martin Ross
... or that she was seducing him from his work, while she would just sit numbed until the enchantment came again. Without it there were moments when he seemed just ridiculous with his masses of papers, and Mr Clott, and his fussy insistence on being a great artist.... It was a keen pleasure to her to bring him back suddenly to physical things like food and clothes and to care for him. Sometimes he would forget everything except food and clothes, and then she lived ...
— Mummery - A Tale of Three Idealists • Gilbert Cannan
... him? Oh, no! A fussy busy-body! He knows so many ways of making himself unpleasant that everybody is afraid of him. It's just a game for the likes of him, making trouble for everybody. I must be off now! Mustn't keep work waiting, you know! I'll drop in again to-morrow ...
— The Post Office • Rabindranath Tagore
... recalled. He accepted that reality as a proof, scarcely needed, of the already established shallowness of his own nature—a brawling stream always ready to rave round any little impediment in its path; a mere miniature of the torrent, with no resolute strength or purpose in it, but full of a fussy vivacity and self-importance which he could most heartily and bitterly despise. All his life long the same futile story repeated: the same headlong impetuosity, the same want of steadfast force, the same absence of control. And yet, even in the depth of self-reproach, ...
— Despair's Last Journey • David Christie Murray
... one does, always," he remarked placidly. "I sometimes think that accounts for a good deal! There's a man, now—see that fussy little fellow getting out of his motor ...
— The Strange Cases of Dr. Stanchon • Josephine Daskam Bacon
... steps on the gravel walk, a fussy, fidgety little woman appeared from the room beyond, and stopped in astonishment at sight of the giant coming up the steps. Before she had a chance to express her surprise, however, he spoke, addressing the panting child fanning herself with ...
— Tabitha at Ivy Hall • Ruth Alberta Brown
... revenges itself by haunting us and upsetting whatever we undertake. Instead of giving to the problem of Judaism the careful deliberation that it requires, we get busy with a thousand and one things, whereby we hope to escape the need of concentrated attention. We have become fussy and fidgety. We are divided into committees and sub-committees. In place of clearness of thought we have a confusion of tongues. Our case illustrates the truth which Pascal enunciated, that most of the evils in the world can be traced to the inability ...
— The Menorah Journal, Volume 1, 1915 • Various
... don't want any fussy old freaks with false fronts and shawls. They'd expect to be read aloud to and waited on within an inch of their lives. I'd like some babies to take down to dig and paddle. Do say you'll ...
— The Spanish Chest • Edna A. Brown
... of light, of fire, candle, and moon, mixed in with monstrous shadows and commonplace figures—some meaningless countenance surmounting a satin whose every shining thread is distinguishable, and the pattern of whose lace trimming could be copied for a fashion plate; he is, in short, a fussy, loud individual, with money to buy and some out-of-the-way ...
— Continental Monthly , Vol. 5, No. 6, June, 1864 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy • Various
... them beyond platitudes which he has not tested. In the story of Mary and Martha, which is a very mysterious one, it is quite clear that Martha was rebuked, not for being hospitable, but for being fussy; but it is not at all clear what Mary was praised for—certainly not for being useful. She was not praised for visiting the sick, or for attending committees, but apparently for doing nothing—for sitting still, ...
— The Silent Isle • Arthur Christopher Benson
... and contemptuous disdain of public opinion. But the inconsistency may very well be one solely in appearance. It may well happen that the avoidance of all companionship with the stereotyped social surfaces of life, the ignorance—really, the happy and hieratic ignorance—of what "people" in the fussy sense, are supposed to be saying and doing, may actually help the poet to come more fruitfully and penetratingly to what lies under the surface, to what is essential and permanent and notable in the solid earth of human character. Hence, I think it not improbable that the poetry ...
— Some Diversions of a Man of Letters • Edmund William Gosse
... not expect to enjoy the frills of a private room and special nurses and think the doctor will take care of you for a nominal fee; there is no reason why he should. Having a baby is not a disease, and you will not need to have fussy care. ...
— The Good Housekeeping Marriage Book • Various
... any bishop to order Madame Eglentyne to give up her dogs, she could not even be parted from them on a pilgrimage, though they must have been a great nuisance in the inns, especially as she was so fussy about their food. ...
— Medieval People • Eileen Edna Power
... next morning in solitary state, contrived to maintain the adopted attitude until the front gates were safely passed. Then she relaxed and looked out of the brougham windows with a fussy brightness more consonant to the joys of impending union with the Miss Minetts and the day's impending trip. She made no further effort to secure Damaris' participation in the social and educational advantages which it promised. ...
— Deadham Hard • Lucas Malet
... servant to other functions, the decent performance of which was utterly beyond the range of an illiterate man. Many of our readers may be acquainted with the witty satire in which, with a perpetual side glance at the fussy self-importance visible in Bishop Burnet's History, Pope writes 'the Memoirs of P.P., Clerk of this Parish.' With what delightful complacency this diligent representative of his class speaks of taking rank among 'men right worthy of their calling, of a clear and sweet voice, and ...
— The English Church in the Eighteenth Century • Charles J. Abbey and John H. Overton
... His friends were the best Englishmen alive; the club which Johnson established bore on its roll the most illustrious names in the country; at the home of the Thrales Johnson tasted and appreciated all that was best in the home life of the time. He had a devoted friend in the person of a fussy, fantastic, opinionated, conceited little Scotch gentleman, Mr. James Boswell of Auchinleck, who clung to his side, treasured his utterances, cherished his sayings, and made himself immortal in immortalizing his hero. It is good to remember that ...
— A History of the Four Georges and of William IV, Volume III (of 4) • Justin McCarthy and Justin Huntly McCarthy
... Cornford, widow of the late Archibald Reynolds Cornford, Pepperharrow Road, Hants. All Torrence knows of the subsequent proceedings is what he got in official reports of Uncle Bash's death from the consul-general at Tokyo. He was buried over there and the life-insurance companies were rather fussy about the legal proof, Torry says. Whether the widow expects to come to America ultimately or will keep moving through the Orient marrying husbands and burying them is a dark mystery. If she should turn ...
— Lady Larkspur • Meredith Nicholson
... honest and straightforward bit of criticism, if we examine it closely: and, firstly, as to its author? Is there not something very characteristic in its general tone, something dimly sketching a shadowy outline of a kindly, fussy, busy, querulous old man, much given to tiny minuti, acareful copier with a clean pen, indefatiguable in collecting "contributions" to minor history; one jealous of all appearance of slight to his office, even to being moved to wrath with Master Speight for printing "Harolds" instead of ...
— Animaduersions uppon the annotacions and corrections of some imperfections of impressiones of Chaucer's workes - 1865 edition • Francis Thynne
... sheep at a fence, and replied laconically that they had come to see "the general himself"; it was evident that they were firmly determined. The unnatural shouting of the police ceased, and was quickly succeeded by deliberations, mysterious whispered instructions, and stern, fussy perplexity, which wrinkled the brows of the police officers. The head of the police preferred to await the arrival of the "governor himself." It was not true that he galloped to the spot with three horses at full speed, and began ...
— The Possessed - or, The Devils • Fyodor Dostoyevsky
... now sorely disappointed in her boy, and made remarks to the effect that if she had looked after his bringing up instead of entrusting him to an indulgent grandmother, affairs at this time would not be in their present state. Parents are apt to be fussy: ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great - Volume 12 - Little Journeys to the Homes of Great Scientists • Elbert Hubbard
... ought to be vindictive and take every opportunity to put a crimp in the business for the owners. I envied the owners (we've all got a touch of that in our system), because they were rich and were making profits. I knew what their profits averaged. By calling fussy little strikes often enough I could have kept the profits close to the zero mark. Thus the men would be making wages out of the business and the owners would be making nothing. But I declined to let my actions be governed by envy. The Ten Commandments forbid covetousness. The Golden Rule also forbade ...
— The Iron Puddler • James J. Davis
... not an evil; and the great evil is, as I always supposed, in the effect upon the whites. The few Southern gentlemen that I know interest me from their courtesy, agreeable manners, and ready speech. They also strike me as childlike and fussy. I catch myself feeling that I am the man and they are women; and I see this even in the captain of a steamer. Then they all like to talk sentiment—their ...
— Maria Mitchell: Life, Letters, and Journals • Maria Mitchell
... she is fussy and loses her head, the work accumulates, I am slow, the boy is clumsy. There is a stimulus unsuspected in working to get a job done. Before this I had worked to make the time pass. Then no one took account of how much I did; the factory ...
— The Woman Who Toils - Being the Experiences of Two Gentlewomen as Factory Girls • Mrs. John Van Vorst and Marie Van Vorst
... is the best—walking length, and of good material. "Fussy" styles should not be chosen for street wear, and the hat or bonnet should be rather plain ...
— Social Life - or, The Manners and Customs of Polite Society • Maud C. Cooke
... had not cared very much for the latter end of his breakfast, as he was a light eater, and rather particular, "fussy" Step-hen called it, "which we will proceed to cancel by a heavy dose of dough. Give him my share, boys, and welcome. I've got too much respect for my poor stomach to cram ...
— The Boy Scouts' First Camp Fire - or, Scouting with the Silver Fox Patrol • Herbert Carter
... They resent the interference of laymen in matters purely professional. They resent such interference as would a reputable physician, a reputable lawyer, a reputable engineer. They resent officious patronage and "fussy" meddling. They resent all these things manfully, vigorously. But your true craftsman will not whine. If the conditions under which he works do not suit him, he will fight for their betterment, but ...
— Craftsmanship in Teaching • William Chandler Bagley
... time—and how careful we were about our clothes, and our amateur barbering. Terry, in particular, was fussy to a degree about the cut of his beard, and so critical of our combined efforts, that we handed him the shears and told him to please himself. We began to rather prize those beards of ours; they were almost our sole distinction ...
— Herland • Charlotte Perkins Stetson Gilman
... matter, friends, after all? The slow, the skilful, the dull, the clever, The snake-swift "swell" and the splashing 'ARRY, the puffing launch, and the trim outrigger, The calm canoest who hugs the timbers, the fussy punter who toils like a nigger, All will anon be well out in the cutting, the old gates shutting slowly behind them, And where are those who so shoved to the front? At the tail of the race you may presently find them. The G.O.M. (with ...
— Punch, Or The London Charivari, Vol. 100, May 23, 1891 • Various
... and gave one the idea of a set of fussy individuals who were superintending, or even bullying, their new neighbors, who appeared from amongst the ruins and debris of the ant city, carrying in their mouths certain oval bodies of a dirty-white color, and measuring each about one-third of an inch in length. Each of these bodies ...
— A Book of Natural History - Young Folks' Library Volume XIV. • Various
... in his uncle's house, he began to be comforted by his luxurious surroundings, the same bright fire burned that Honor loved to see and the easy chairs and soft rich carpet suggested satisfaction to the most discontented. A few minutes of fussy preparations and the gloomy twain were immersed in dry business. Apart from the monotonous scratching of their hurried pens there was but an occassional short remark uttered until the welcome sound of the tea-bell broke the spell of sullenness ...
— Honor Edgeworth • Vera
... lovely this afternoon. He agreed eagerly; and Lavinia wondered whether she had been clumsy. She simply couldn't imagine marrying Cesare Orsi, but she knew that such a match for Gheta was freely discussed, and she hoped that her sister would not make difficulties. She wouldn't have dresses so fussy as Gheta's—in figure, anyhow, she was perhaps her sister's superior—fine materials, simply cut, with a ruffle at the throat and hem, a satin wrap pointed at the back, with a ...
— The Happy End • Joseph Hergesheimer
... house, but quiet in the movements of all persons in the room; speaking, not in a whisper, but in a low and gentle voice; walking carefully, not in a silk dress nor in creaky shoes, but not on tiptoe, for there is a fussy sham quietness which disturbs the sick far more ...
— The Mother's Manual of Children's Diseases • Charles West, M.D.
... that, even before this era, when "old maids" were open to all kinds of insult, there were women brave enough to refuse to barter their souls for the animal comforts of food and shelter. Speaking about "old maids," by which term we mean now a prim, fussy person, it is well to remember that there are male "old maids" as well as female who remain so all through life; also that many "old maids" marry, and ...
— In Times Like These • Nellie L. McClung
... by the officer whose wards we were. He was a fussy, quick-tempered, withal kind-hearted little fellow, and kept dashing in and out of the room, really perplexed over housing accommodations for the night. The spy-hunters had been successful in their work of rounding up their victims from all over ...
— In the Claws of the German Eagle • Albert Rhys Williams
... opened and shut, and how often during the day, and the different ways in which it was opened for the various visitors. He knew Braun's step: he used to visualize the doctor coming back from his rounds, stopping in the hall, hanging up his hat and cloak, always with the same meticulous fussy way. And when the accustomed noises came up to him out of the order in which he had come to look for them, he could not help trying to discover the reason for the change. At meals he began mechanically to listen to the conversation. ...
— Jean-Christophe Journey's End • Romain Rolland
... seven o'clock the following morning, and were ready to start. Of course the gentlemen were very fussy about their equipments, and hung themselves all over with cartridges and bags of bullets and powder-flasks; then they had to take care that their tobacco-pouches and match-boxes were filled; and lastly, each carried a little flask of brandy or sherry, in case of being ...
— Station Life in New Zealand • Lady Barker
... a strict watch on all his movements those last few days, of course, and when I found he had given Candace a letter to mail, I told her I would look after it, and I brought it up to my room and read it, for I suspected just some such thing as he had done. He was very fussy about Betty and her rights, you remember, and he had always insisted that this was Betty's house, her mother's wedding present from the grandfather, and therefore not ours at all, except through Betty's bounty. I was determined that we should not be turned out of here, ...
— Exit Betty • Grace Livingston Hill
... Ch'un and Hsi Ch'un interposed with an ironic laugh, "what's the use of the hurry-scurry you're in the whole day long! Even when you're having your meals, or your tea, you're in this sort of fussy helter-skelter!" ...
— Hung Lou Meng, Book II • Cao Xueqin
... has surely good grounds. It is all very well for lazy and nervous people (like myself for instance) to retreat into tubs, and holes, and corners, anywhere out of the dust, and wonder within ourselves, "what all the fuss can be about?" The fussy people might have the best of it, if they know their end. Suppose they were to answer this March or May morning thus:—"Not bestir ourselves, indeed! and the spring sun up these four hours!—and this first of May, ...
— On the Old Road Vol. 1 (of 2) - A Collection of Miscellaneous Essays and Articles on Art and Literature • John Ruskin
... hitherto occasionally enjoyed the patronage of the wise Elector, Frederick of Saxony, for whom he painted the brilliant Adoration of the Magi in the Uffizi. He was soon to obtain that of Maximilian, but this genial and eccentric emperor proved a fussy patron, as quick to change his mind and to interfere with impossible demands and criticisms, as he was slow to pay and deficient in means for being truly generous. There are a certain number of letters which give a glimpse of Duerer's relations with his clients; ...
— Albert Durer • T. Sturge Moore
... their work by the fire. There was only one candle on the table, and they poked their heads so near the flame as they talked that she wondered the caps did not catch light, particularly Maria's, which was very high and fussy in front. Susan began to count the narrow escapes she had, but before she had got far she became so interested in the conversation that she gave ...
— Susan - A Story for Children • Amy Walton
... of which he expected to spend the evening with the Grays he found it not a little difficult to keep his mind upon his work with the Judge, and that gentleman seemed to him extraordinarily particular, even fussy, about having every fact brought to him painstakingly verified down to the smallest detail. When at last he was released, and he rushed home in his car to dress, he discovered that his spirits were dancing ...
— The Twenty-Fourth of June • Grace S. Richmond
... abandoned to pleasure, ever murmuring pleasant nothings and tossing light persiflage from table to table, is truly an interesting study of the lighter sides of life. One sits on a magnificent markee-covered, glass-enclosed terrace, overlooking the Thames with its ever-changing scenes of fussy ...
— The Secrets of the German War Office • Dr. Armgaard Karl Graves
... a bit of difference," Delia announced. "Frank has a steady beau now and they'll take the parlor. And then, I suppose, it'll be my turn. I shall just hate to be grown up and have long skirts on and do up my hair, and be so fussy about everything. When I think of that I wish ...
— A Little Girl in Old New York • Amanda Millie Douglas
... every important department should have had the misfortune to have her affairs entrusted to Ministers and officials who were childishly incompetent and ludicrously vindictive. Men of meagre mental calibre, who hold office under the Crown or anywhere else, are invariably fussy, pompous, overbearing, and stifling with conceit. This condition of things was in full swing during the Napoleonic regime and captivity, and that is the period we are concerned about. There does not appear to ...
— The Tragedy of St. Helena • Walter Runciman
... ways. These also the irascible redwing decided to be foes, flying about their heads threateningly, and never ceasing his doleful cries so long as they were in sight. I hoped his brown-streaked mate down in the marsh knew what a fussy and suspicious personage she had married, and would not be made anxious by his extravagances; but she too distrusted the bird gazers, adding her protests to his, and such an outpouring of "chacks" and other blackbird maledictions one—happily—is ...
— Upon The Tree-Tops • Olive Thorne Miller
... can have a right good time first, anyway, if you keep away from ugly things and fussy people. And I reckon you really go to Heaven afterwards if you haven't been ...
— The Cords of Vanity • James Branch Cabell et al
... interest in the failing health of his wife. No one replied to her remark, and Mrs. Bates continued: "It really used to make my heart ache to see the little forlorn thing sit there in the gallery, fixed up so old and fussy, and then to see her sister prinked out like a milliner's show window, a puckerin' and twistin', and if she happens to catch her sister's eye, I have actually seen her turn up her nose at her,—so—" and Mrs. Bates's nasal organ went up towards her eyebrows in imitation of the ...
— The English Orphans • Mary Jane Holmes
... putting the rest of her lecture aside for future use, said: "Well, if it's all settled, then I've no more to say. Probably I'm too fussy about what the town ...
— Money Magic - A Novel • Hamlin Garland
... that Miss Reston sent me a grand feather-boa—grey, in a present? I've aye had a notion o' a feather-boa, but I dinna ken how she kent that. And this is no' yin o' the skimpy kind; it's fine and fussy and soft ... Here, did the Lord send Miss Jean a present?... I doot he's aff for ...
— Penny Plain • Anna Buchan (writing as O. Douglas)
... her relief, and said she was feeling blue because Harry would not be present! Just before the hour for the party Lucy descended to the parlor, where her father was reading, in order, as she said, to let him see whether her dress were fussy enough to suit him. He approved her taste, and after asking if Lizzie, too, were dressed in the same manner, resumed his paper. Ere long the covered sleigh stood at the door, and in a few moments Lucy and Lizzie were in Anna Graham's dressing-room, ...
— Homestead on the Hillside • Mary Jane Holmes
... sure, it was with him a general rule to find fault with her about everything. He did not spare her his reproaches on a multitude of subjects; all day long he was worrying her about small trifles with which he should have had nothing to do. It is a mistake to suppose that a man can not be brutal and fussy at the same time. M. de Talbrun was proof ...
— Jacqueline, v3 • Th. Bentzon (Mme. Blanc)
... before them," said he, glancing ruefully at his rotundity, and chuckling wheezily at his own little joke. Last of all came Headingly, slight and tall, with the student stoop about his shoulders, and Fardet, the good-natured, fussy, ...
— The Tragedy of The Korosko • Arthur Conan Doyle
... epoch here opens itself to us. In this case, also, we shall gain the conviction that a true genius takes the liveliest interest in the fate of his own nation, and does not occupy himself with distant, abstruse problems (such as fussy metaphysicians would fain philosophise into 'Hamlet'), whilst the times are going out of joint. The greatest Englishman remained, in the most powerful drama of his, within the sphere of the questions that agitated his ...
— Shakspere And Montaigne • Jacob Feis
... is an expensive and fussy piece of work, too. It must be accurately done, and done by men who are experienced in that special kind of work. One misprint will cause a discord and throw the music out of sale. Of course if a song turns out to be popular, a small fortune is often reaped from it; but ...
— Paul and the Printing Press • Sara Ware Bassett
... served to deepen in him the conviction that his influence on the men against the evils which were their especial snare was as the wind against the incoming tide, beating in from the North Sea. He could make a ripple, a certain amount of fussy noise, but the tide of temptation rolled steadily onward, unchecked ...
— The Sky Pilot in No Man's Land • Ralph Connor
... glad Gwalior was a success. I think a good native state is the most satisfactory kind of Government for India in many ways; but (a) so few are really good, if you go behind the scenes and think of such fussy things as security of life and property, taxation and its proportion to benefits received, justice and administration, education, freedom of the subject, and so on. (b) It spells stagnation and the abandonment of the hope of training the mass of the people to responsibility; ...
— Letters from Mesopotamia • Robert Palmer
... hen sitting upon eggs or leading about a brood of little pheasants. This gentleman was more sad than joyous, for he could not take his handkerchief from his pocket without bringing out the corpse of a baby pheasant with it—one that had been trodden to death by a too fussy foster-mother. I owe him a debt for having led me a charming walk by moonlight to see a dolmen—the largest and best preserved of all those I had already seen in Southern ...
— Two Summers in Guyenne • Edward Harrison Barker
... little creek whose shallow waters flowed through lovely meadows where boneset plants were white with bloom and giant eupatorium lifted its rosy heads. A red-headed flicker flew screaming from a field as they passed, and a fussy wren scolded at them from a ...
— Amanda - A Daughter of the Mennonites • Anna Balmer Myers
... apology for a once White Ensign, and they were men-of-war, very much men-of-war. They had been at the game for nearly twenty-four months, and, through long practice, they elbowed their way in and out of the traffic with all the fussy, devil-may-care assertiveness of His ...
— Stand By! - Naval Sketches and Stories • Henry Taprell Dorling
... wife that the husband should learn the true value of things—his own dignity, his position, and even his secondary position by her side as manageress. But, if she be wise, she will not make this too apparent. Directly the voice gets too loud, the tone too commanding, and the manner too fussy, the unhappy man begins to suspect that he is being "managed," and in nine cases out of ten sinks into utter imbecility, or breaks away like an obstinate pig. Both these symptoms are bad, and perhaps the first is the worst. No true woman can love and reverence ...
— Brave Men and Women - Their Struggles, Failures, And Triumphs • O.E. Fuller
... truth, though not in the clearest style, the more the lawyer sifted her testimony, the clearer and more evident its truthfulness and point became; until there seemed at length nothing to do but acquit the prisoner. But courts of law are proverbially fussy, and now the State's Attorney was doing his best to invalidate the testimony of ...
— The Missing Bride • Mrs. E. D. E. N. Southworth
... them, and she had treated Nan to the aforesaid hugs; "for you were so brave, darling, and actually took the wind out of my sails!" exclaimed the enthusiastic Phillis. "Miss Drummond is not so bad, after all, is she, in spite of her dowdiness and fussy ways?" ...
— Not Like Other Girls • Rosa N. Carey
... which he carried in his breast pocket, young Shotwell could inform any grand lady or any pompous or fussy gentleman what was the "asking price" of any particular residence marked for sale upon the diagrams of ...
— The Crimson Tide • Robert W. Chambers
... life have been put aside that she may be "entertained." Elaborate meals are planned; there is a straining after hospitality which defeats its own purpose and makes the visitor uncomfortable, because the hostess has so manifestly incommoded herself. The fussy hostess puts too ...
— Mother's Remedies - Over One Thousand Tried and Tested Remedies from Mothers - of the United States and Canada • T. J. Ritter
... said Aunt Marjorie in her fussy tones. "Judy, I hope Hilda is not going to encourage you in silly sentimental talk of that kind. You say your heart aches with pleasure. Really, my dear, I have no patience to listen to you. I should like to know what a ...
— A Young Mutineer • Mrs. L. T. Meade
... kind of vague idea that Smithson would call to-day. He was so fussy about those tickets for the Metzikoff recital. I hate pianoforte recitals, and I detest that starched old duchess, but I suppose I shall have to take you there—or poor Smithson will be miserable,' said Lady Kirkbank, watching Lesbia keenly over ...
— Phantom Fortune, A Novel • M. E. Braddon
... been made up and may appear any minute in its place. The sunshine beating through the glass roof, the heat of travel, the dust of the station, the moving carriages with their various colours, the shouts of railway officials, the recurring panics of fussy passengers, begin to affect the nerves. Conversation becomes broken, porters are beset on every side with questions they cannot answer, rushes are made on any empty carriages within reach, a child is knocked ...
— Kate Carnegie and Those Ministers • Ian Maclaren
... your brown eyes for being so sharp, my pretty Sally," said the man who had just entered, whilst worthy Mr. Jellyband came bustling forward, eager, alert and fussy, as became the advent of one of the most favoured ...
— The Scarlet Pimpernel • Baroness Orczy
... for it so happens that Colonel Fitz-James is known to be an epicure, to be fussy and finical about all things pertaining to the table, and what is worse takes no pains to disguise it, and in consequence is considered an undesirable dinner guest by the most experienced housekeepers in the regiment. All this ...
— Army Letters from an Officer's Wife, 1871-1888 • Frances M.A. Roe
... up to the Alethea's side, discharged a fussy inspector on the brigantine's deck, and panted impatiently until he, the examination concluded without delay, was ...
— The Black Bag • Louis Joseph Vance
... of this fashion in phrasing for several years, I have come to the conclusion that the plain "Sir" of former times,—which, to the "well-brought-up" child, was a practical application of the Fifth Commandment,—is much to be preferred to the fussy elaboration of personal address that has superseded it. Indications at present are, that the old-fashioned "Sir" and "Madam" are coming into their own again, among ...
— Etiquette • Agnes H. Morton
... almost a uniform—skirt and blouse. But she had secretly sewed for herself another sort of dress—house-dresses for the afternoon, of inexpensive, but delicate and light-colored fabrics, made a little "fussy." These she never wore. Old Mrs. Bray never wore fussy clothes; and it had not been Nell's way. The gray-and-lavender challis had been in the nature of an experiment. Old Mrs. Bray was plainly pleased; but she rarely wore it. She said ...
— The Best Short Stories of 1919 - and the Yearbook of the American Short Story • Various
... if bent on tormenting her. "You had lost your bright color to be sure, but there was something very winsome in your face and eyes, and manner; and he might better have married you than the sharp-eyed, sharp-tongued, fussy Martha Craig, who, like the Martha of old, is troubled about many things, and leads the minister a stirred up kind ...
— Bessie's Fortune - A Novel • Mary J. Holmes
... as he had me feelin' like I ought to be led out and shot at sunrise, the old Major comes bustlin' in fussy. I could have ...
— The House of Torchy • Sewell Ford
... Meantime, a fussy, talkative man was endeavouring to impress the rapidly collecting crowd with the advisability of their entering all together and approaching the ...
— Dark Hollow • Anna Katharine Green
... read and thought enough to deduce that the only vital interest in life after one's secret happiness—which one would not dare spread out too thin if one could in this American life—is necessary work well done. And that is quite different from those fussy interests and fads we create or take up for the sake of thinking ...
— The Avalanche • Gertrude Franklin Horn Atherton
... when he and the other members left for the ceremony the anxious Boswell was committed to the hospitality of Lady Di, whose "charming conversation" was not entirely adequate to keep up his spirits. In a short time, however, the glad tidings of his election came, and the fussy little Scotsman hurried off to the place of meeting to be formally received. It is impossible to read without a smile the swelling sentences with which he closes his narrative. He was introduced "to such a society as can seldom be found. Mr. Edmund Burke, whom I then saw for the first time, ...
— Inns and Taverns of Old London • Henry C. Shelley
... shop appeared invitingly before him, denuded as it was by wartime. A sign in English said: "Tea." Walking in, he sat down in a fussy little parlor where the tables had red cloths, and a print, in pinkish and greenish colors, hung in the middle of the imitation brocade paper of each wall. Under a print of a poster bed with curtains in front of which eighteen to twenty people bowed, with the title of "Secret d'Amour," sat three ...
— Three Soldiers • John Dos Passos
... did not; but I sent Shawn Keogh with the ass cart for to bear him home. (Trying cupboards which are locked.) Well, isn't he a nasty man to get into such staggers at a morning wake? and isn't herself the divil's daughter for locking, and she so fussy after that young gaffer, you might take your death with drought and ...
— The Playboy of the Western World • J. M. Synge
... it, and I don't mean to, but it's so much easier to get along if you ain't very fussy about being exactly true. I used to tell 'em because I was afraid of father and Nicolo, and now I do sometimes because the boys laugh at me. I know it's bad, but I forget," and Nat looked much ...
— Little Men - Life at Plumfield With Jo's Boys • Louisa May Alcott
... pleasantly, that as this was the first country of Europe that I had seen, it was impossible for me to judge what particular trait distinguished its nobility. While I was saying this, a little fussy woman, wearing a showy dress and lace mantilla, came up to us and called Miss Eaton ...
— Mabel's Mistake • Ann S. Stephens
... not head of Richards', as Johnstone had been longer in that form, and was consequently senior to him. Johnstone was, however, small and slightly built, and cared little for rowing, cricket, or football. He had gained his place in the Sixth by sheer hard work rather than by talent. He was fussy and irritable, with a strong sense of the importance of his position as a Sixth town boy and head of Richards'. Between him and Frank there was no cordiality, for it irritated him that the latter was upon ...
— Captain Bayley's Heir: - A Tale of the Gold Fields of California • G. A. Henty
... matter; and the fact that he could at last let himself go deepened his sense of the sympathy and the understanding that had always existed between him and Lois. He hated fuss; and his other sisters were tiresomely fussy and maddeningly disingenuous. In half an hour Lois had learned all she cared to know of the family history. She merely dipped into the bin, brought up a handful of wheat, blew away the chaff, eyed the remaining kernels with a sophisticated ...
— Otherwise Phyllis • Meredith Nicholson
... the first few days after the delivery, she was fussy with the nurse so that two in succession had to be discharged. On the fifth day she woke up and seeing a nurse lying on the couch beside her bed thought the latter was colored. On the seventh day she had a dream in which she thought she "nearly died ...
— Benign Stupors - A Study of a New Manic-Depressive Reaction Type • August Hoch
... party was good enough," said Mr. St. Clair, "you're too fussy about trifles, Isabel. Come, children, scurry off to bed, you'll get no ...
— Patty Fairfield • Carolyn Wells
... other picture to finish, which he hoped to get ready in time to be a New Year's present, since Olga had insisted on Lucia's being done first. He had certainly secured an admirable likeness of her, and there was in it just all that his stippled, fussy representation of Lucia lacked. "Bleak December" and "Yellow Daffodils" and the rest of the series lacked it, too: for once he had done something in the doing of which he had forgotten himself. It ...
— Queen Lucia • E. F. Benson
... barmaid in white apron and lovely collar and cuffs stood in the doorway, ready to serve the thirsty. The red-coated driver pulled in on the tavern side, and men in neckerchiefs, hobnailed shoes, blue woolen stockings and knee-breeches made fussy haste to water the horses. Old Brick-Dusty climbed down to see a man in the tavern, and the Michigan contingent and Colonel Littlejourneys slid down the other side and went into Wythburn Church. There isn't another church in England so peculiar and so interesting. A pew is marked sacred to ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great, Volume 5 (of 14) • Elbert Hubbard
... Again it was dull, with an incipient drizzle as we started out at six o'clock. The fish were now rising, at any rate, in my pool. At the very entrance to it, which was, in fact, the connecting run from The Rocks, I killed, after a fussy tussle and plenty of leaping out of the water, a grilse of 4 lb.; and we had barely rowed out into the stream when a fish of 6 lb. or 7 lb. leaped head and tail out of the water at my fly without touching it. The overcast character of the evening ...
— Lines in Pleasant Places - Being the Aftermath of an Old Angler • William Senior
... enough offers," Mrs. Klein answered. She laid the rug over the porch railing. "But she's a fussy stubborn girl." She sat in her chair. "You a ...
— The Mighty Dead • William Campbell Gault
... you know, I've none of the fussing, baby-tending, herb-tea-making recommendations of Aunt Sally, and divers others of the class commonly called useful. Indeed, to tell the truth, I think useful persons are commonly rather fussy and stupid. They are just like the boneset, and hoarhound, and catnip—very necessary to be raised in a garden, but not ...
— The May Flower, and Miscellaneous Writings • Harriet Beecher Stowe
... seemed to see his father as a pathetic cheated simpleton, and to hear the innumerable children of his sister crying for food; he remembered that in the old Bursley days he had always distrusted John Stanway, that conceited fussy imposing young man of twenty-two whom his father had taken into partnership and utterly believed in. He forgot that he had hated his father, and his mind was obsessed by a sentimental ...
— Leonora • Arnold Bennett
... hand, and a small yellow cane which was the pride of his heart in the other. Willy had a little harmless, childish dandyism about him which his mother rather encouraged. "I'd rather he'd be this way than the other," she said when people were inclined to smile at his little fussy habits. "It won't hurt him any to be nice and particular, if ...
— The Pot of Gold - And Other Stories • Mary E. Wilkins
... real little home—to take care of," said Bel. "Not fine, nor fussy; but real sweet and pleasant. Sunny windows and flowers, and a pretty carpet, and white curtains, and one of those chromos of little round, yellow chickens. A best china tea-set, and a real trig little kitchen; pies to make for Sundays and Thanksgivings; just enough work to do in the mornings, and ...
— The Other Girls • Mrs. A. D. T. Whitney
... his attention were futile. For the music of Charm's foreign voice was in his ear. Worship of the cloth is not a national, it is a more or less universal cult, I take it. It is in the blood of certain women. Opposite the two fussy, jealous bourgeoises, were others as importunate and aggressive. They were of fair, lean, lank English build, with the shifting eyes and the persistent courage which come to certain maidens in whose lives there is but one fixed and certain fact—that of having missed ...
— In and Out of Three Normady Inns • Anna Bowman Dodd
... as were their ancestors on both sides. My mother was uniformly religious, but not fussy about it. I have seen her intensely happy, but never heard her shout. Her religion was a deep, smooth, current without fluctuation. My father was religious more by spells, but still he never went to extremes, and could never "get religion" at the altar, in the Methodist fashion. This ...
— Autobiography of Frank G. Allen, Minister of the Gospel - and Selections from his Writings • Frank G. Allen
... a sweeping curtsey and vanished, and Mr Martin stood for some time in his deserted parlour feeling far more uncomfortable than he liked to confess. He was methodical and fussy, but he was by no means an ill-natured man. He thought Mrs Potts most impertinent, but her news distressed him. After reflecting for a few moments, he went across to the fireplace, and pulled his bell sharply. After a ...
— Dickory Dock • L. T. Meade
... as the young moving picture operator looked to her for confirmation. "I'm not a bit fussy," she added. "I've done harder things than crawl on my hands and knees out of an ...
— The Moving Picture Girls Snowbound - Or, The Proof on the Film • Laura Lee Hope
... King of Ts'u is a sage, and understands the Great Way (tao)." On the other hand, only fifty years before this, when in 538 Ts'u, with Tsin's approval, first tried her hand at durbar work, the king was horrified to hear from a fussy chamberlain (evidently orthodox) that there were six different ways of receiving visitors according to their rank; so that Ts'u's ritual decorum could not have been of very long standing. The following year ...
— Ancient China Simplified • Edward Harper Parker
... his habits and ways of doing business. A swift reader and a surprisingly swift writer, he was always occupied, and was skilful in using even the scraps and fragments of his time. No pressure of work made him fussy or fidgety, nor could any one remember to have seen him ...
— William Ewart Gladstone • James Bryce
... snatch a hurried meal out of a tin can, drink unboiled water and walk or ride in the sun without a pith hat or an umbrella. Some foreigners who ought to know better are careless about these things and good-naturedly chaff one who is more particular. But while one should not be unnecessarily fussy, yet if he is courageous enough to be sensible, he will not only preserve his health, but be physically benefited by his tour, while the heedless man will probably be floored by dysentery or even if he escapes that scourge will reach his destination so worn out that he must take days or perhaps ...
— An Inevitable Awakening • ARTHUR JUDSON BROWN
... of surpassing beauty, rhythmical and eloquent as the music of the spheres, if it might only be given to a man to read it. There was an absence, too, of all attempt at feminine self-glorification which he did not analyse but thoroughly appreciated. There was no fussy amplification of hair, no made-up smiles, no affectation either in her good humour or her anger, no attempt at effect in her gait, in her speech, or her looks. She seemed to him to be one who had something within ...
— The American Senator • Anthony Trollope
... waiting for her, with the precious "Michael" struggling to free himself from his coverings. Hawkes soon had a cab alongside. He helped Peg into it: then she stretched out her arms and O'Farrell opened the sail-cloths and out sprang "Michael," dusty and dirty and blear-eyed, but oh! such a happy, fussy, affectionate, relieved little canine when he saw his beloved owner waiting for him. He made one spring at her, much to the lawyer's dignified amazement, and began to bark at her, and lick her face and hands, and jump on and roll ...
— Peg O' My Heart • J. Hartley Manners
... distrustful, fussy, and suspicious, to an extent that he had never been before. It was with the most insulting precautions that he examined every Sunday his wife's accounts. He took a look at the grocer's, and settled it himself every month: he had the ...
— Other People's Money • Emile Gaboriau
... look very happy over this, for they both hated any fuss. But when they got into the big kitchen they found it was all right. The miller's wife was not a fussy person at all, and they were at home with the old lady in a minute. The little girl was sitting beside the fire in a big chair. She looked very pale, but was ...
— The Wolf Patrol - A Tale of Baden-Powell's Boy Scouts • John Finnemore
... British reformers, how could Pitt and Grenville look on the philanthropic professions of Maret as anything but a snare, and Miles as his dupe? Miles had ever been officious. Clearly the time had come to stop his fussy advances to an unofficial agent, which Lebrun might once more ascribe to Pitt's ...
— William Pitt and the Great War • John Holland Rose
... few days which elapsed before the due arrival of official permission for X. to leave the jungle, it might have been observed that he was changed. The hitherto sedate individual became fussy and worried, and members of The Community agreed that he was "journey-proud"—a happy expression used by one of the neighbouring Malay potentates when wishing to describe his feelings at a time of emerging from the security of his own retreat. But there was much to do—clothes ...
— From Jungle to Java - The Trivial Impressions of a Short Excursion to Netherlands India • Arthur Keyser
... inclined to see danger where there is none," returned the aunt. "I would not for the world be as anxious and fussy about my children as you are about yours. Besides, I think it quite right to let their father's relatives do for them when they are ...
— Elsie's children • Martha Finley
... offices of the law firm, Mr. O'Brien, a short, fussy, albeit comfortable-looking little person, greeted all the members of the family and the various heirs and assigns with a hearty handshake. He had been personal counsel to Archibald Kane for twenty years. He ...
— Jennie Gerhardt - A Novel • Theodore Dreiser
... those who had been kind to him (such as his publisher, Mr. John Murray for instance) to show that no one could be more loyal or more grateful than he who has been depicted as the incarnation of all that is spiteful, fussy, and mean. There is no need for the world to be told here that the author of "Lavengro" is a delightful writer, and one who is more sure than most authors of his time to win that little span of life which writing men call "immortality." ...
— The Romany Rye - A Sequel to 'Lavengro' • George Borrow
... exile in consequence of their duels, when M. de Bouteville, of the house of Montmorency, who had been previously engaged in twenty-one affairs of honor, came to Paris to fight the Marquis of Beuvron on the Place Royale. The Marquis's second, M. de fussy d'Amboise, was killed by the Count of Chapelles, Bouteville's second. Beuvron fled to England. M. de Bouteville and his comrade had taken post for Lorraine; they were recognized and arrested at Vitry-le- Brule and brought back to Paris; and the king immediately ordered Parliament ...
— A Popular History of France From The Earliest Times - Volume V. of VI. • Francois Pierre Guillaume Guizot
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