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More "Shrinking" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... led to form their conjectures as to the cause of this sudden break in her trance of anguish. She had up till that moment, with the instinctive aversion which mourners only know, and which we have formerly alluded to in the case of Martha, been shrinking from facing the gladsome light of heaven, caring not to look abroad on the blight of an altered world. But the few words her sister uttered, and which the other auditors manifestly had not comprehended, ...
— Memories of Bethany • John Ross Macduff
... weeks ago, she had charged me to burn all that she had written to me, and as yet I had not done so, shrinking from the sharp unreasonable pain with which we bury the beloved dead. But the time of my mourning was accomplished. I tore the paper into fragments and ...
— Cecilia de Noel • Lanoe Falconer
... spending her time with elderly ladies who talked of moral obligations, and social demands, and civic consciences. The duties of her married life which had promised such interesting responsibilities, and wonderful opportunities for aiding the Doctor in his great work, seemed to be shrinking into the dull task of keeping herself and the children out of his way, preserving a tomb-like silence in the house, and entertaining ...
— A Romance of Billy-Goat Hill • Alice Hegan Rice
... acute, receptive temperament—capable of highest joy and keyed for exquisite pain. Haunted with the prophetic vision of quick-coming death, and with the hectic desire to get their work done, they often toiled the night away and were surprised by the rays of the rising sun. Both were shrinking yet proud, shy but bold, with a tenderness and a feminine longing for love that earth could not requite. At times mad gaiety, that ill-masked a breaking heart, took the reins, and the spirits of ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great - Volume 14 - Little Journeys to the Homes of Great Musicians • Elbert Hubbard
... resemblance (which is as much as one can expect) to the scene which had been in my sleep before me. But sleeping I had seen roaring torrents; waking, I beheld a quiet stream. The little river, as blue as ever, and shrinking from all thoughts of wrath, showed nothing in its pure gaze now but a gladness to refresh and cool. In many nicely sheltered corners it was full of soft reflection as to the good it had to do; and then, in silver and golden runnels, on it went to do it. And the happy voice ...
— Erema - My Father's Sin • R. D. Blackmore
... a great deal about Gerald; he was interested in many things, and not least in himself; he was not troubled by that shrinking sense of his own worthlessness—with the feeling of being not an individual, but a part of a community—which is so characteristic of mediaeval writers, and led them often to omit to mention ...
— Mediaeval Wales - Chiefly in the Twelfth and Thirteenth Centuries: Six Popular Lectures • A. G. Little
... discouragement, it stared back.—What if the deepest thing, the thing which alone lasted, the thing which, therefore, you were bound in the end to accept, to submit to, was just darkness, sorrow, loneliness of worn body and shrinking spirit, by the shore of a cold, dumb, and ...
— Deadham Hard • Lucas Malet
... likes not only to be mothered but he likes to play the father. Let his wife be a daughter to him; let her be capable of shrinking, so to say, into small space, becoming little and confident and appealing and calling forth every protective impulse of her ...
— Woman and Womanhood - A Search for Principles • C. W. Saleeby
... Steel, including Forging, Hardening, Tempering, Annealing, Shrinking, and Expansion; also the Case-Hardening of Iron. By George Ede, employed in the Royal Gun Factories Department, Woolwich Arsenal. First American, from Second London Edition. New York. D. Appleton & Co. 12mo. ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 13, No. 80, June, 1864 • Various
... out of the old road into the main-travelled one, and presently passed the old Thayer house. A woman's figure fled hurriedly up the yard into the house as they approached. There was a curious shrinking look about her as she fled, her very clothes, her muslin skirts, her light barege shawl, her green bonnet, seemed to slant away before the eyes of the two women ...
— Pembroke - A Novel • Mary E. Wilkins Freeman
... not, of course, in Horikawa's confession. But the dread of it was there. The valet had come to fear Shibo. He was convinced in his shrinking heart that the man meant to get rid of him. It was under some impulse of self-protection that he had ...
— Tangled Trails - A Western Detective Story • William MacLeod Raine
... not of caprice, and pardon my irresolution, when you find me shrinking with terror from the promise I have made, and no longer either able or willing to perform it. The reproaches of your family I should very ill endure; but the reproaches of my own heart for an action I can neither approve nor defend, would be still ...
— Cecilia vol. 2 - Memoirs of an Heiress • Frances (Fanny) Burney (Madame d'Arblay)
... whip, but it did not fall on poor, timid, shrinking Will. For Mr. Bobbsey snatched it away from the angry farmer's hand and flung ...
— The Bobbsey Twins on a Houseboat • Laura Lee Hope
... corporal punishment is important. It is no use roughly smacking a shrinking, sensitive child. And yet, if a child is too shrinking, too sensitive, it may do it a world of good cheerfully to spank its posterior. Not brutally, not cruelly, but with real sound, good-natured exasperation. And let the adult take the full ...
— Fantasia of the Unconscious • D. H. Lawrence
... three girls had now come close enough to see the blood also, and except for Betty, Pony would everlastingly have disgraced herself. There are many persons in the world whom the sight of blood fills with a strange shrinking and terror that is almost like faintness, and Polly was one of them. Now she wanted to run away, she even turned to fly, when her friend caught hold of her. "Don't be utterly stupid, Polly, you have done a foolish trick and you've got to face the music, ...
— The Camp Fire Girls at Sunrise Hill • Margaret Vandercook
... laws, with which no volitions, natural or supernatural, interfere. These being the three stages, the discovery of which as a series necessarily passed through by human thought in its progress towards maturity, constitutes one of Comte's chief glories, I almost tremble at my own audacity, shrinking from the sound myself am making, when by inexorable sense of duty constrained to declare that the grand discovery is after all merely that of a distinction ...
— Old-Fashioned Ethics and Common-Sense Metaphysics - With Some of Their Applications • William Thomas Thornton
... because of systemic problems and disruptions in socialist-style economic relations and technological links with the former USSR and China. The leadership has insisted on maintaining its high level of military outlays from a shrinking economic pie. Moreover, a serious drawdown in inventories and critical shortages in the energy sector have led to increasing interruptions in industrial production. Abundant mineral resources and hydropower have formed the basis of industrial development since World ...
— The 1997 CIA World Factbook • United States. Central Intelligence Agency.
... the dock by our Consul General, John Goodnow, and his wife, with their elegantly liveried coachman, and was taken to the consulate, and, after a fine tiffin (lunch), we started for the walled city. A shrinking horror seized me as if I were at the threshold of the infernal regions as we crossed the draw bridge over the moat and entered the narrow gate of the vast city of more than a million souls. Immediately ...
— An Ohio Woman in the Philippines • Emily Bronson Conger
... over his face, surprise followed by a growing scorn. It came to him in a flash that Stephen Tolman, the boy he had looked up to as a sort of idol, was a coward, a coward! He was afraid! It seemed impossible. Why, Steve was always in the thick of the football skirmishes, never shrinking from the roughness of the game; he was a fearless hockey player, a dauntless fighter. Coward was the last name one would have thought of applying to him. And yet here he sat cowering before the just result of ...
— Steve and the Steam Engine • Sara Ware Bassett
... woman's heart, even while from day to day she was meditating murder,—while she was telling herself that it would be a worthy deed to cut off from life one whose life was a bar to her own success,—even then revolted from the shrinking stealthy step, from the low cowardice of the hidden murderer. To look him in the face and then to slay him,—when no escape for herself would be possible, that would have in it something that was almost noble; something at any rate bold,—something that would not shame ...
— Lady Anna • Anthony Trollope
... princess, and shrinking behind her as if to escape the gaze of the courtiers, or rather warriors, who crowded the platform, came a girl of about nineteen summers, the companion of Hafrydda. Branwen was a complete contrast to her friend in complexion. She ...
— The Hot Swamp • R.M. Ballantyne
... appropriate heroic gestures, "white, secret, maiden flower, hear us! Discover thyself, O shrinking flower, and thou shalt be kissed by the ...
— Love Eternal • H. Rider Haggard
... some splendid cricket, but their deeds Were not colossal, and our own brave Tennant Proved himself all as good a man as they. * * * * * Through them we greet our Mother. In their coming, We shake our dear old England by the hand And watch space dwindling, while the shrinking world Collapses into nothing. Mark me well, Matter as swift as swiftest thought shall fly, And space itself be nowhere. Future Tinleys Shall bowl from London to our Christ Church Tennants, And all the runs for all the stumps be made In flying baskets ...
— Samuel Butler's Canterbury Pieces • Samuel Butler
... the room a woman whom Monsieur Loches had noticed waiting there. She was verging on old age, small, frail, and ill-nourished in appearance, poorly dressed, and yet with a suggestion of refinement about her. She stood near the door, twisting her hands together nervously, and shrinking from the gaze of the strange gentleman. The doctor began in an angry voice. "Did I not tell you to come and see me once every eight days? ...
— Damaged Goods - A novelization of the play "Les Avaries" • Upton Sinclair
... personal beauty—which no one else, with perhaps one or two exceptions among the older men, cared to take into account; or touched perhaps by some note in him, surprised in passing, of weariness or shrinking, as compared with the contemptuous tone of the College towards him. He showed his liking impetuously, boyishly, as his way was, and thenceforward during his University career Langham became his slave. He had no ambition for himself; his motto might have been that dismal one—'The ...
— Robert Elsmere • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... knew she had gone too far to recede, though she would willingly have delayed, in enjoyment of the present homage and shrinking from the future plunge away from all her protectors. Though the strong, manly will overpowered hers, and made her submit to the necessities of the case and fix a day early in July, she clung the more closely to her sisters, and insisted on being accompanied by Jane on going to London ...
— Beechcroft at Rockstone • Charlotte M. Yonge
... Maggie, in a tone of dread, shrinking away from him into the opposite corner; "I shall scream—I'm sure I shall! Oh, don't! I ...
— Tom and Maggie Tulliver • Anonymous
... these and many other difficulties, I firmly believe that Labrador is by far the best country in the world for the best kinds of sanctuary. The first time you're on a lee shore there, in a full gale, you may well be excused for shrinking back from the wild white line of devouring breakers. But when you actually make for them you find the coast opening into archipelagoes of islands, to let you safely through into the snug little "tickles," between island and mainland, where you can ride ...
— Animal Sanctuaries in Labrador • William Wood
... his keys; he went to his box, unlocked it, and took out a small paper package. Of the fifty pounds he had received from Ford about twenty remained: he had been poorer before, but hardly quite so hopeless. He scanned every horizon—all were barred. The thought of suicide, and with it the instinctive shrinking from it, came into his mind again. Suppose he took, that very night, an overdose of chloral? He tried to put the thought from him, and returned, a little dazed and helpless, to his chair. Had the critic in The Modern Review told ...
— Vain Fortune • George Moore
... judgments. Ellen could not attach dishonor to her father's motives or speeches. For long, however, something about him had troubled her, perplexed her. Fearfully she believed she was coming to some revelation, and, despite her keen determination to know, she found herself shrinking. ...
— To the Last Man • Zane Grey
... any siren's; so broad and fine are the countries; so strong and true are the friendships; so brave and kind are the men I meet—so beautiful the whole world of the Singing Mouse, that when it is over, and in a chill I start up, I scarce can bear the shrinking in of the walls, and the grayness of the once red fire, and my gold turned to earthenware, and my pictures turned to splotches. In my hand everything I touch feels awkward. A pen—a pen—to talk of that? If one could use it ...
— The Singing Mouse Stories • Emerson Hough
... necessities, and take the world's trade from our harbors, so superior to theirs, and they are always busy, and intermeddling in everybody's affairs; and we hate them—ah, how we do hate them!' In short, a certain leading class at the South, that which moulds and leads the hollow, shrinking, scared thing they called public opinion, have come to hate and detest everything distinctively New English, and finally to make the wicked, traitorous attempt to overturn the Government, which they know received ...
— Continental Monthly, Vol. 4, No 3, September 1863 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy • Various
... sleep in the grass, Feed upon apples red, and strawberries, And choose each pleasure that my fancy sees; Catch the white-handed nymphs in shady places, To woo sweet kisses from averted faces,— Play with their fingers, touch their shoulders white Into a pretty shrinking with a bite As hard as lips can make it: till agreed, A lovely tale of human life we'll read. And one will teach a tame dove how it best May fan the cool air gently o'er my rest; Another, bending o'er her nimble tread, Will set a green robe floating round her head, And still will dance ...
— Poems 1817 • John Keats
... as well that you know whom you are up against," he said as he held her with his hand heavy on her shrinking shoulder. ...
— Judith of Blue Lake Ranch • Jackson Gregory
... appealed to by the coarse sympathy with physical pain: the rags that covered the sores, the tainted corruption of the ulcers, are brought to bear, not so much on the mind as on the nerves; and when the hero is represented as shrinking with corporeal agony—the blood oozing from his foot, the livid sweat rolling down the brow—we sicken and turn away from the spectacle; we have no longer that pleasure in our own pain which ought to be the characteristic of true tragedy. It is idle to vindicate this error ...
— Athens: Its Rise and Fall, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... stepped from the boat and came up the beach toward them. It was very beautiful, and in its hand it carried a great bunch of shining bubbles, fastened to a stick by parti-colored ribbons, just as Teddy had seen Italians carrying balloons, only these bubble-balloons were growing and shrinking and changing every moment, just as though ...
— The Counterpane Fairy • Katharine Pyle
... fellow's eye was upon me. I could observe him prying, endeavouring to search and probe me. But I came too well prepared. Instead of shrinking from the encounter, my brow contracted increasing indignation; and my voice grew louder, as I stood forth the champion of chaste virginity and sanctimonious wedlock!—The scene, in the very critical sense of the phrase, was ...
— Anna St. Ives • Thomas Holcroft
... tottered through the mob, looking every one beseechingly in the face, as if in search of some chance consolation, some lost hope; modest young girls returning from long and late labor to a cheerless home, and shrinking more tearfully than indignantly from the glances of ruffians, whose direct contact, even, could not be avoided; women of the town of all kinds and of all ages—the unequivocal beauty in the prime of her ...
— The Works of Edgar Allan Poe - Volume 5 (of 5) of the Raven Edition • Edgar Allan Poe
... of his pitifully frail body, could never fight for old Bannister on gridiron, diamond, or track, and they tremendously admired him for working for his college and for the redemption of Thor. Timorous and shrinking by nature, whenever his Alma Mater, or a friend, needed him the Human Encyclopedia fought down his painful timidity and came ...
— T. Haviland Hicks Senior • J. Raymond Elderdice
... "Uncle Tom's Cabin," the stories told me by fugitive slaves, the scarred backs I afterwards saw by dozens among colored recruits, did not impress me as did that hour in the jail. The whole probable career of that poor, wronged, motherless, shrinking child passed before me in fancy. It seemed to me that a man must be utterly lost to all manly instincts who would not give his life to overthrow such a system. It seemed to me that the woman who could tolerate, much less defend it, could not herself be ...
— Women and the Alphabet • Thomas Wentworth Higginson
... the Kodak," muttered the witness, shrinking into cover, and scarcely breathing lest his hiding-place should ...
— Lines in Pleasant Places - Being the Aftermath of an Old Angler • William Senior
... fighting for his king and country. Death was a debt which every man owed, and must pay; and that now was as well as another time." I was much pleased and edified with the maxims of this sea-philosopher, who endured the amputation of his left hand without shrinking, the operation being performed (at his request) by me, after Mackshane, who was with difficulty prevailed to lift his head from the deck, had declared there was a necessity for his ...
— The Adventures of Roderick Random • Tobias Smollett
... corpse in burial clothes just lifted from its coffin and placed stiffly upright in a sitting position. Involuntarily Cardinal Bonpre, as he made the usual necessary genuflections, thought, with a shrinking interior sense of horror at the profanity of his own idea, that the Holy Father as he then appeared, might have posed to a painter of allegories, as the frail ghost of a dead Faith. For he looked so white and slender and fragile and transparent,—he ...
— The Master-Christian • Marie Corelli
... There was, perhaps, something in the scene that invited them to silence and reverie. Clodius, shading his eyes from the burning sky, was calculating the gains of the last week; and the Greek, leaning upon his hand, and shrinking not from that sun—his nation's tutelary deity—with whose fluent light of poesy, and joy, and love, his own veins were filled, gazed upon the broad expanse, and envied, perhaps, every wind that bent its pinions towards ...
— The Last Days of Pompeii • Edward George Bulwer-Lytton
... at it, Deerslayer," returned the girl with emphasis, still shrinking with a woman's sensitiveness from a direct offer of her hand, "and can say, from the bottom of my heart, that I would rather trust my happiness to a man whose truth and feelings may be depended on, than to a false-tongued and false-hearted wretch that had chests of gold, and houses ...
— The Deerslayer • James Fenimore Cooper
... on him that Heritage had been right. He only played with life. That imbecile image was a mere spectator, content to applaud, but shrinking from the contact of reality. It had been all right as a provision merchant, but when it fancied itself capable of higher things it had deceived itself. Foolish little image with its brave dreams and its swelling words from Browning! All make-believe of the feeblest. ...
— Huntingtower • John Buchan
... at long intervals, and burned behind grimy glasses with the sickly light of oil, and by this wavering glimmer Salisbury could make out the shadowy and vast old houses of which the street was composed. As he passed along, hurrying, and shrinking from the full sweep of the rain, he noticed the innumerable bell-handles, with names that seemed about to vanish of old age graven on brass plates beneath them, and here and there a richly carved penthouse overhung ...
— The House of Souls • Arthur Machen
... ragged in place of round, as though the soft metal had been rent open and bent backwards. Then the two men looked at each other, and the hot fury that for a moment flushed Seaforth to the temples, passed and left him with a curious vindictive coldness and a faint shrinking from the touch of the murderous lead. Okanagan's eyes were very steady, but there was a little glow down ...
— Alton of Somasco • Harold Bindloss
... a shrinking gesture and, turning away, sat down at the foot of the long couch. "I am the same—always the same," she answered in ...
— The Wheel of Life • Ellen Anderson Gholson Glasgow
... vanishing oasis of happy literary celebrity. Ah! the Sahara of letters is full of bleaching bones that tell where many of your sex as well as of mine fell and perished miserably, even before the noon of life. Ambitious spirit, come, rest in peace in the cool, quiet, happy, palm-grove that I offer you. My shrinking violet, sweeter than all Paestum boasts! You cannot cope successfully with the world of selfish men and frivolous, heartless women, of whom you know absolutely nothing. To-day I found a passage which you had marked in one ...
— St. Elmo • Augusta J. Evans
... filled the room, and Seaton turned towards the bar. That two-hundred-pound mass of copper was shrinking visibly, second by second, so vast were the forces being drawn from it, and the searing, blinding light would have been intolerable but for the protective color-filters of his helmet. Tremendous flashes of lightning ripped and ...
— Skylark Three • Edward Elmer Smith
... the Fleering frumpe.] Or when we giue a mocke with a scornefull countenance as in some smiling sort looking aside or by drawing the lippe awry, or shrinking vp the nose; the Greeks called it Micterismus, we may terme it a fleering frumpe, as he that said to one whose wordes he beleued not, no doubt Sir of that. This fleering frumpe is one of the Courtly graces ...
— The Arte of English Poesie • George Puttenham
... Three Wise Men. They did not bring their gifts as a joke, but as an awful oblation. It never entered into the heads of the saints and scholars, the poets and painters, of the Middle Ages. Looking back across the years, they saw in that dark and ungarnished manger only a shrinking woman, a brooding man, and a child born to sorrow. The philomaths of the eighteenth century, looking back, saw nothing at all. It is not the least of the glories of the Victorian Era that it rediscovered Christmas. It is not the least of the mistakes of the Victorian Era that it supposed Christmas ...
— A Christmas Garland • Max Beerbohm
... should certainly admire the skill and humour with which he has patched together, or invented where seemly, the story of lanky ABE, with his axeman's skill, his immense physical strength, his poor head for shopkeeping, his passion for books, his lean purse and "shrinking pants," his wit, courage and resource. A romance of reasonable interest and plausibility is woven round young Lincoln's story. Perhaps Mr. BACHELLER makes his hero speak a little too sententiously at times, and certainly some of his other folk say queer things, such as, "What so vile as a ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 159, November 17, 1920 • Various
... are thinking, our fathers would think; From the death we are shrinking, our fathers would shrink; To the life we are clinging, they also would cling—But it speeds from us all like a bird ...
— Lincoln's Yarns and Stories • Alexander K. McClure
... not know that I had done so terribly wrong," moaned the girl, shrinking back from those angry, fiery eyes that glowered down so fiercely ...
— Pretty Madcap Dorothy - How She Won a Lover • Laura Jean Libbey
... lay spread over the white valley, and the freshening gusts drove the powdery snow before them, and sent little stabs of pain through John's shrinking body. Yet how glad he was to find himself again between those familiar hedges, to see the church-tower in front of him, the long hill to his right! His heart swelled at once with longing and satisfaction. During his Frampton job, and in the infirmary, ...
— Bessie Costrell • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... means David Madoc. He was a descendant of Owen Tudor, Lord of Hereford and Whittington. This chief had three sons; the second married a daughter of the Prince of North Wales, half a century before the Conquest, and was ancestor of David ap Madoc; Dai-Madoc, in course of time, shrinking into Daimoc, or Dymoke. Burke says that the John Dymoke who married Margaret de Ludlow, granddaughter of Philip de Marmion, was a knight of ancient Gloucestershire ancestry, and there is a village of Dymock, near Gloucester. A Welsh origin ...
— Records of Woodhall Spa and Neighbourhood - Historical, Anecdotal, Physiographical, and Archaeological, with Other Matter • J. Conway Walter
... unclean, covered with vermin like some of the saints. Whenever the Brother had wounded him by some words of excessive coarseness, or by some over-hasty churlishness, he would blame himself for his refinement, his innate shrinking, as if these were really faults. Ought he not to be dead to all the weaknesses of this world? And this time also he smiled sadly as he thought how near he had been to losing his temper at the Brother's roughly put lesson. It was pride, it seemed to him, seeking to work his perdition by ...
— Abbe Mouret's Transgression - La Faute De L'abbe Mouret • Emile Zola
... neither thought nor heard. His eyes were close to a window of thick glass. Below him was a shrinking, ...
— Astounding Stories of Super-Science, June, 1930 • Various
... faintly, shrinking a little beneath the intentness of his look. "How—how do you ...
— Outside Inn • Ethel M. Kelley
... he said; and at that word "mate" I seemed to feel a curious shrinking from him; but it passed ...
— Brownsmith's Boy - A Romance in a Garden • George Manville Fenn
... shrinking, joins his hands: with hangdog mien) O cold! O shivery! It was your ambrosial beauty. Forget, forgive. Kismet. Let me off this once. (He offers the ...
— Ulysses • James Joyce
... to take the situation lightly then—this curious situation of the "freed" American wife, with or without children, drifting through Europe, aimless, and generally better off when friendless. But she began to be sorry for the type. Instead of shrinking from Gertie in the presence of the discerning compatriots, as she was at first inclined to do, she made it a point to be seen with her, championing the sisterhood of loneliness. There were moments when this ...
— The Letter of the Contract • Basil King
... thrown away his crutch. Some one plucked at his sleeve, but Madison gave no heed—again his arm was pulled, and he turned to look into Pale Face Harry's face. The other's countenance was gray, the eyes full of a shrinking, terrified light. ...
— The Miracle Man • Frank L. Packard
... be borne in perpetual recollection, that we are in no small danger of shrinking from a faithful maintenance of those testimonies which are unpopular with the world, as well as of not seeing our own neglect of duty, while censuring the zeal or supposed indiscretion of others. Besides, if this ...
— A Visit To The United States In 1841 • Joseph Sturge
... may be not only the dreaded enemy who ends life, but also the friend who brings relief from all conflict, strife and effort. Death may, therefore, well express a shrinking from adaptation and reality, and as such may symbolize one of the most deep-seated yearnings of the human soul. But from time immemorial man has associated with this yearning another one, one which, without the adaptation ...
— Benign Stupors - A Study of a New Manic-Depressive Reaction Type • August Hoch
... left us?" she murmured, shrinking nearer to the iron shield which Courtenay seemed to think ...
— The Captain of the Kansas • Louis Tracy
... them together (or twist them) so as to have the gold on the outside, and then fill any cavity with it. Since adopting the above combination I have almost abandoned amalgam. This is recommended on account of its density, ease of insertion, capacity for fine finish, non-conducting and non-shrinking qualities, and compatibility with tooth-substance. Those who have not used it will be surprised at the rapidity with which it can be manipulated. It may be employed in any cavity not exposed to view, also in crown, buccal, and approximal fillings ...
— Tin Foil and Its Combinations for Filling Teeth • Henry L. Ambler
... had been where the race question was relatively negligible. Her mother's way of putting it jarred on her; yet the hungry craving she felt at this time for a touch of companionship with a girl of her own age, her longing for the beloved Ellen of her childhood, overbore all shrinking. That afternoon she brought the cards down in her hand, and, full of an unwelcome timidity, made her way to the side door of the Kendrick house and rapped. Mrs. Kendrick answered and received her with a certain thin cordiality that suggested reservations. The fact was that Ellen was having ...
— Stories from Everybody's Magazine • 1910 issues of Everybody's Magazine
... same person who had passed him on the stairs. The new-comer took up the candle and approached the bed. The old man's face was turned to the pillow; but he lay so still, and his breathing was so inaudible, that his sleep might well, by that hasty, shrinking, guilty glance, be mistaken for the repose of death. The new-comer drew back, and a grim smile passed over his face: he replaced the candle on the table, opened the bureau with a key which he took from his pocket, and loaded himself with several rouleaus ...
— Zanoni • Edward Bulwer Lytton
... not weep to see Thy walls defaced, thy mouldering shrines removed By British hands, which it had best behoved[ec] To guard those relics ne'er to be restored:— Curst be the hour when from their isle they roved, And once again thy hapless bosom gored, And snatched thy shrinking Gods to ...
— The Works of Lord Byron, Volume 2 • George Gordon Byron
... me enter the cloister, then?" he asked, a look of distaste and shrinking upon his face; for the quiet, colourless life (as it seemed to him) of those who entered the service of the Church was little to the taste of the ardent boy. But John's answer was a bright smile and a decided negative; whereupon Raymond breathed ...
— In the Days of Chivalry • Evelyn Everett-Green
... to herself! No woman whose judgment is well-balanced, and whose womanly-nature is finely strung, but will regard the path to the rostrum with shrinking and dismay. Either the desire to save and help her fellow-creatures, "plucking them out of the fire," if need be, is so strong upon her as to overmaster all fear of man; or else the necessities and claims of ...
— Elizabeth Fry • Mrs. E. R. Pitman
... of a Greek slave, by our countryman Powers, which was to be seen a few days since at a print-shop in Pall Mall. I went to look at it. The statue represents a Greek girl exposed naked for sale in the slave-market. Her hands are fettered, the drapery of her nation lies at her feet, and she is shrinking from the public gaze. I looked at it with surprise and delight; I was dazzled with the soft fullness of the outlines, the grace of the attitude, the noble, yet sad expression of the countenance, ...
— Letters of a Traveller - Notes of Things Seen in Europe and America • William Cullen Bryant
... condition, and she was more frightened of him than she had been of Dennin in the thick of the struggle. She could not believe that this raging beast was her Hans, and with a shock she became suddenly aware of a shrinking, instinctive fear that he might snap her hand in his teeth like any wild animal. For some seconds, unwilling to hurt her, yet dogged in his desire to return to the attack, Hans dodged back and forth. But she resolutely ...
— Love of Life - and Other Stories • Jack London
... so much does the opposite part increase; that is: in proportion as the length of the part d a diminishes the normal size so does the opposite upper part increase beyond its [normal] size. The navel does not change its position to the male organ; and this shrinking arises because when a figure stands on one foot, that foot becomes the centre [of gravity] of the superimposed weight. This being so, the middle between the shoulders is thrust above it out of it perpendicular line, and this line, which forms the central line of the ...
— The Notebooks of Leonardo Da Vinci, Complete • Leonardo Da Vinci
... him with little shocks of shrinking and dismay. Yet, though he affected to laugh, he knew that he was beginning to feel more than uneasy, and that strange forces were tugging with a thousand invisible cords at the very centre of his being. ...
— Three John Silence Stories • Algernon Blackwood
... done that the fascinated throng could not at first understand what had happened to the executioner, who sprang into the air, screamed, and stood clawing and plucking at the arrow while his bow hung dripping with blood, yet nailed to his shrinking palm. ...
— The Hidden Children • Robert W. Chambers
... very painful shrinking at his heart. If the old man went away to live with his daughter in the country, his home would be lost to him, and he would have to go out into the great city again alone, with nobody to love. He could get his living now in a respectable manner, and there was no fear of his being driven ...
— Alone In London • Hesba Stretton
... of trivial ceremonies, with which he had been received. He had been friendly, though the Cranford ladies had been cool; he had answered small sarcastic compliments in good faith; and, with his manly frankness, had overpowered all the shrinking which met him as a man who was not ashamed to be poor. And, at last, his excellent masculine common sense and his facility in devising expedients to overcome domestic dilemmas had gained him an extraordinary place ...
— The Bed-Book of Happiness • Harold Begbie
... then, without speaking, he continued up the stairs. The difficulties of his position were increasing; it was something new to be assailed from the bosom of his own family. He felt that he was being very unfairly used, but he had no intention of shrinking from his duty as a husband and father, even if its discharge should bring pain ...
— The Homesteaders - A Novel of the Canadian West • Robert J. C. Stead
... woman, meantime? Let me tell the truth: motherhood became her so well that she was brazen from the very beginning. No delicacy, no pretty shame, no shrinking—she gloried in the growing fact. When she was brought to bed she made a quick recovery; she insisted upon a devout churching, an elaborate christening of the doubtful son (whereat, if you will believe me, no other than ...
— Little Novels of Italy • Maurice Henry Hewlett
... it had been her resolution, her strength, not her weakness, that had gained the victory. Chafe as Theodora might, she could not rid herself of the consciousness that the sister of that underbred attorney—that timid, delicate, soft, shrinking being, so much her junior—had dared to grapple with her fixed determination, and had gained an absolute conquest. 'Tyrant!' thought Theodora, 'my own brother would have left me alone, but she has made him let her interfere. She means ...
— Heartsease - or Brother's Wife • Charlotte M. Yonge
... crying, 'Senza Moccolo! Senza Moccolo!'; low balconies full of lovely faces and gay dresses, struggling with assailants in the streets; some repressing them as they climb up, some bending down, some leaning over, some shrinking back—delicate arms and bosoms—graceful figures—glowing lights, fluttering dresses, Senza Moccolo, Senza Moccoli, Senza Moc-co-lo-o-o-o!—when in the wildest enthusiasm of the cry, and fullest ecstasy of the sport, the Ave Maria rings from the church steeples, and ...
— Pictures from Italy • Charles Dickens
... winter quarters. He would not give his enemies, he said, the least chance of outstaying him. All success, wrote the Marquis of Marignano, was due to the Emperor's resolution to keep the field. Charles vexed the fiery Buren by shrinking from a general engagement, because he knew that his combinations would break up the league without the risk of a battle. But when once danger really pressed, ill as he was, he marched across Germany, and followed fast upon the Elector's heels until ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Volume 9 • Various
... border outside blooming in a patch of sunshine close against the old grey house. At first there seemed to me to be no visible difference between them, but after a minute, I saw that the second one was gentler and smaller, with a softer smile and a more shrinking manner. ...
— The Romance of a Plain Man • Ellen Glasgow
... an instant through the boiling foam, though the blue stripe of a sailor's jacket, or a red rag of a flag would do all our hearts good, we are not allowed to have it; it would make us too comfortable, and prevent us from shivering and shrinking as we look, and the artist, with admirable intention, and most meritorious self-denial, expresses his piece of wreck with a dark, cold brown. Now we think this aim and effort worthy of the highest praise, and we only ...
— Modern Painters Volume I (of V) • John Ruskin
... as to whether she had acted right. If the dress had required the money set apart for the poor she would have been perfectly clear about it, but she knew it need not have done so. Would her vanity have been gratified? Decidedly not—admiration of her face was so distasteful to her proud shrinking bashfulness, that she felt it like an insult when reported to her, and could almost have wished not to be so handsome, if it had not been more agreeable to an artist-like eye to see a tolerable physiognomy in the glass, when obliged to look ...
— The Two Guardians • Charlotte Mary Yonge
... miserable, my dear," he says hastily, dreading a scene with all the shrinking of his cowardly nature. "I won't say anything to vex you again. I was ...
— When the Birds Begin to Sing • Winifred Graham
... be the matter!" exclaimed by aunt, shrinking from me, and following with her frightened eyes the direction of mine. My breath was coming in short, quick gasps now, and my excitement was almost ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... this shrinking soul to a more universal acceptance. What! does it aspire to the All, and yet deny by its revolt and inner protest the justice of Law. From sorrow we shall take no less and no more than from our ...
— AE in the Irish Theosophist • George William Russell
... stood there, wide eyes seeing nothing, and in her shrinking ears only the terrible reiteration of her ...
— The Gay Rebellion • Robert W. Chambers
... Margot, she was too completely exhausted to realise relief; she knew only a shrinking from the light, from the strange watching face; a deathly sensation as of falling from a towering height, before darkness and oblivion overpowered her, and she lay stretched ...
— Big Game - A Story for Girls • Mrs. George de Horne Vaizey
... in terror, as Lomaque spoke his last words—looked round, and saw her husband recoil before the signature on the arrest order, as if the guillotine itself had suddenly arisen before him. Her brother felt her shrinking back in his arms, and trembled for the preservation of her self-control if the terror and suspense of the arrest lasted ...
— After Dark • Wilkie Collins
... little bunch of them in Colorado who have failed to command the same attention in politics that their money imposes upon the social world, so they rush into type and get themselves interviewed and asked to speak when they come East, all by way of proving their sensitive and shrinking nature. I don't agree with the suffragists, not a little bit, but I can fraternize with them; they are sincere, but none of the 'Antis' for me; never saw one yet who wasn't either a snob or so narrow-minded that a toothpick would look like ...
— An American Suffragette • Isaac N. Stevens
... inadequate sanitation facilities; increasing levels of soil salinity; industrial pollution; excessive pesticides; part of the basin of the shrinking Aral Sea suffers from severe overutilization of available water ...
— The 2000 CIA World Factbook • United States. Central Intelligence Agency.
... household in the parsonage next morning. Reuben rebelled in heart, in face, and in action against the tediously long prayer of the parson, though the old gentleman's spirit was writhing painfully in his pleadings. The aunt was more pious and austere than ever. Adele, timid and shrinking, yet with a beautiful and a trustful illumination in her eye, that for days, and weeks, and months, lingered in the memory ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 17, No. 100, February, 1866 • Various
... these days?" he asked her, atoning to himself for the momentary shrinking that she ...
— A Fountain Sealed • Anne Douglas Sedgwick
... sake, quit!" exclaimed Vandover in great alarm, twisting off the window-seat and shrinking back out of sight into the room. "Quit, Charlie; you don't want to insult a girl that way." Geary looked at him over his shoulder in some surprise, and was about to answer when he turned to the window again and exclaimed, grinning and ...
— Vandover and the Brute • Frank Norris
... visually it had not grown larger. Instead, there was only a steady dwindling. A dwindling of great Saturn, with its gorgeous, luminous rings came next. These approaching planets, seeming to shrink! Because, with Lee's expanding viewpoint, everything in the vast scene was shrinking! Great distances here, in relation to the giant globe, were dwindling! These millions of miles between Saturn and Jupiter had shrunk into thousands. And then were ...
— The World Beyond • Raymond King Cummings
... of observations have related the pineal to muscle function, inviting comparison of it with the thymus. There is a singular muscle shrinking and deforming disease, known as progressive muscular dystrophy, hitherto a complete and unsolved mystery. Newer studies of the pineal in this disease during life by means of the X-ray have shown it calcified, that is, buried in lime salts, which signifies put out of business. Recently thus ...
— The Glands Regulating Personality • Louis Berman, M.D.
... round from behind the house, walking rapidly. Since dinner he had been off somewhere, alone, having it out with himself, perhaps shrinking, most of all, from this first exposure to his parents. Such an ordeal is it for us to reveal what we really are to those who have known us longest ...
— The Reign of Law - A Tale of the Kentucky Hemp Fields • James Lane Allen
... place to another in shrinking fear of detection. In each one my experience was repeated until I believe I began to wear the air of ...
— The Blue Wall - A Story of Strangeness and Struggle • Richard Washburn Child
... been in uttering them. But she had not figured on herself as an instrument in furthering the hope to the point of actual realisation. What could be more incongruous, more theatric,—yes, more bizarre, than her attitude at this moment? It seemed impossible that this shrinking, inert heap at her side was a living thing; a woman who had slain a fellow creature, and that creature the man who had been her husband for six years. It seemed utterly beyond sense or reason that she should be helping this murderess to escape, that she should be showing ...
— The Hollow of Her Hand • George Barr McCutcheon
... air appeared to me to have grown ten times more sultry than it was an hour before. The pavement seemed literally to burn under my feet: and the sky had that heavy leaden look, 'dark as if the day of doom hung o'er Nature's shrinking head;' which produces a feeling of intolerable oppression. When I reached my lodgings it was beginning to rain. I threw open the window of my room, and then flung myself on my bed in a state which baffles ...
— Ellen Middleton—A Tale • Georgiana Fullerton
... we are thinking our fathers would think; From the death we are shrinking our fathers would shrink; To the life we are clinging our fathers would cling; But it speeds for us all, like a bird ...
— The Life and Public Service of General Zachary Taylor: An Address • Abraham Lincoln
... of consulting her mother. But she knew Mme. Favoral's shrinking timidity, and that she was as incapable of giving any advice as to make her will prevail. She would be frightened; she would approve all; and, at the first alarm, ...
— Other People's Money • Emile Gaboriau
... days his strength had been magnificent, and even lions and tigers quailed before him. But old age was creeping on, which the other buffaloes realized only too quickly. His massive shoulders and sturdy limbs were shrinking a little, while his tough, thick skin was now almost hairless, except for his mane and a thin fringe on his ...
— Rataplan • Ellen Velvin
... and turned pale—but it was only for a moment. The high spirit that was in her rose brightly in her eyes, and faced him without shrinking. ...
— My Lady's Money • Wilkie Collins
... I—I thought, after all, I'd go to the dance," she said, in rather a timid voice, shrinking ...
— Lonesome Land • B. M. Bower
... summer Wally came back on leave: a changed Wally, with grim lines where there had once been only merry ones in his lean, brown face. He did not want to come to Homewood; only when begged to come did he master the pitiful shrinking he felt from ...
— Captain Jim • Mary Grant Bruce
... lightning that purifies the dense atmosphere, and, glancing for an instant, reveals the keenest light known to men. So the old year sings to me as it goes crowned with crystals and snow-drops to its end. Without shrinking, without sorrow, it folds its white garment around unwithered limbs, and submits gracefully to the past. Nature regards it with that calm face whereon no emotions are written, but a wise serenity forever sits. This year, too, is to many lonely hearts a redeemer; and no heavens will be darkly ...
— Early Letters of George Wm. Curtis • G. W. Curtis, ed. George Willis Cooke
... brooch which had been the gift of the bridegroom, diamond earrings and necklace, and the collar and insignia of the Garter. She looked well in her natural agitation, for, indeed, she was a true woman at such a moment. She was shy and a little shrinking as became a bride, and her eyes were swollen with recent tears—an illustration of the wise old Scotch proverb, "A greetin' (weeping) bride's a happy bride." Here were no haughty indifference, no bold assurance, ...
— Life of Her Most Gracious Majesty the Queen V.1. • Sarah Tytler
... declare to us, if we will but listen to them; but that our present position is not that for which God designed us, and that to rest satisfied with it is not a yielding to an unavoidable necessity, but the indolently or madly shrinking from the effort which would ...
— The Christian Life - Its Course, Its Hindrances, And Its Helps • Thomas Arnold
... person of a very different order. She was a girl apparently between fifteen and sixteen, her figure as yet undeveloped, her dresses a little too short. Her face was small and white, her mouth had a most pathetic droop, and in her eyes—wonderful, deep blue eyes—there was a curious look of shrinking fear, beneath which flashed every now and then a gleam of positive terror. Her dark hair was arranged in a thick straight fringe upon her forehead, and in a long plait behind, after the schoolgirl fashion. Notwithstanding ...
— The Master Mummer • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... rush of confused emotion. A love for her aunt, desire to help her, and at the same time shrinking as though she saw the whole house which had been, from the first, unhappy to her was now diseased and evil and rotten. The hot life in her body told her against her moral will that she must escape, and her soul, moving in her and speaking to ...
— The Captives • Hugh Walpole
... constructed of good material. If not, however, in a few days you may be disappointed to find that it is becoming leaky. Then the best remedy is to cover the whole boat with unbleached muslin, sewed at the ends and tacked along the gunwales. Then tighten it by shrinking and finally give it at least three coats of a mixture of varnish and paint. This will doubtless stop the leaking entirely and will add but little to ...
— The Boy Mechanic: Volume 1 - 700 Things For Boys To Do • Popular Mechanics
... words were out of her mouth, she saw that she had made a terrible mistake. Mrs. Gurley's face, which had been smiling, froze to stone. She looked at her arm as though the hand had bitten her, and Laura's sudden shrinking did not move her, to whom seldom ...
— The Getting of Wisdom • Henry Handel Richardson
... was a little boy, he lived in the odour of spices, which were kept upon his father's shop-shelves. He was a highly-spiced little boy and man, although the most timid and shrinking. His ...
— Pictures Every Child Should Know • Dolores Bacon
... and omissions of trivial ceremonies, with which he had been received. He had been friendly, though the Cranford ladies had been cool; he had answered small sarcastic compliments in good faith; and with his manly frankness had overpowered all the shrinking which met him as a man who was not ashamed to be poor. And, at last, his excellent masculine common sense, and his facility in devising expedients to overcome domestic dilemmas, had gained him an extraordinary place as authority among the Cranford ladies. He himself ...
— Cranford • Elizabeth Cleghorn Gaskell
... pillow and the bed, slightly pressing down the latter with her other hand. For an instant she fancied that the sleeper's breathing stopped, and her heart gave a great bound. But the breathing went on the next instant—if it had stopped—and dreading the return of the lightning, shrinking from being revealed so near him, and in that act—for which the darkness seemed more fitting—she groped farther, and touched something. Then, as her fingers closed upon it and grasped it, and his breath rose hot to her burning cheek, she knew that the ...
— Count Hannibal - A Romance of the Court of France • Stanley J. Weyman
... Sheemah, left alone within the lodge, Waited and waited, with a shrinking heart, Thinking each rustle was his sister's step, Till hope grew less and less, and then went out, And every sound was changed from hope to fear. Few sounds there were:—the dropping of a nut, The squirrel's chirrup, and the jay's harsh scream, Autumn's sad remnants of blithe Summer's cheer, ...
— The Complete Poetical Works of James Russell Lowell • James Lowell
... burthens laid on them by the Spaniards. They came to them naked, their Privities only vail'd, their Shoulders loaden with food; only covered with a Net, they laid themselves quietly on the ground, and shrinking in their Bodies like poor Wretches, exposed themselves to their Swords: Thus being all gathered together in ther Yards, some of the Spaniards Armed held the doors to drive them away if attempting to approach, and others with Lances and Swords Butcher these Innocents ...
— A Brief Account of the Destruction of the Indies • Bartolome de las Casas
... "Oh, yes!" I answered, shrinking back into my corner-seat. He remained upon the step, with his arm over the window-frame, while the train moved on at a slackened pace for a few minutes, and then pulled up, but at no station. Before me lay a dim, dark, indistinct scene, with little specks of light twinkling here and there ...
— The Doctor's Dilemma • Hesba Stretton
... last time, I thought, my fingers erred over its familiar chords. A thrill of horrid exultation possessed me, such as the fell Tiberius may have experienced when he bade his men hurl the shrinking form of a soft-limbed ...
— Library Of The World's Best Literature, Ancient And Modern, Vol. 5 • Various
... originally in his business still appears on his inventory as representing the net surplus of his assets over his liabilities. If a currency were undergoing rapid inflation, a fixed amount of invested money would represent a shrinking stock of capital goods. This stock would last always, but would grow smaller by a true standard of measurement. All that we are at present interested in knowing is that practical usage treats capital as a permanent fund of productive ...
— Essentials of Economic Theory - As Applied to Modern Problems of Industry and Public Policy • John Bates Clark
... between grimly clinching teeth, yet that baffled effort, almost superb, to rise and battle still—a form magnificent in its proportions, yet helpless through wounds and weakness. Not the form Blake thought to see, of shrinking, delicate, dainty woman, but that of the furious warrior who thrice had dared him on the open field—the red brave well known to him by sight and deed within the moon now waning, but, only within the day gone by, revealed ...
— A Daughter of the Sioux - A Tale of the Indian frontier • Charles King
... the bank upon which we were, a volley burst upon them before which they wavered and swerved backward a few paces, as here and there a man reeled and staggered or sank to the earth. There was no panic—not a back turned—only that instinctive shrinking which Life sometimes feels when Death unexpectedly thrusts out his ghastly face through the smoke of battle. A color-bearer sprang forward with the battle-flag. He halted beside me and rested the end ...
— In The Ranks - From the Wilderness to Appomattox Court House • R. E. McBride
... desert with dunes; broad, flat intensely irrigated river valleys along course of Amu Darya, Syr Darya (Sirdaryo), and Zarafshon; Fergana Valley in east surrounded by mountainous Tajikistan and Kyrgyzstan; shrinking Aral Sea in west ...
— The 2004 CIA World Factbook • United States. Central Intelligence Agency
... similarity to the symptoms of the Indian or Russian cholera has existed: the collapse—the deadly coldness with a clammy skin—the irritability of the stomach, and prodigious discharge from the bowels of an opaque serous fluid (untinged with bile in the slightest degree)—with a corresponding shrinking of flesh and integuments—the pulseless and livid extremities—the ghastly aspect of countenance and sinking of the eyes—the restlessness so great, that the patient has not been able to remain for a moment in any one position—yet, with all this, nobody ...
— Letters on the Cholera Morbus. • James Gillkrest
... having fastened my own animal to the nearest tree, first picked up his hat, intending to clap it on his head; but either he considered his head unfit for a hat, or the hat, in its present condition, unfit for his head; for shrinking away the one, he took the other from my hand, and ...
— The Tenant of Wildfell Hall • Anne Bronte
... complain that, in America, Science is preceding Art; that is inevitable. As yet there is a shrinking even from pure science,—that is, from all science which is not directly marketable; and while this is so, art must be still further postponed. We have hitherto valued science for its applications, natural history as a branch of agriculture, mathematics for the sake of ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 20, No. 122, December, 1867 • Various
... special etiquette of the military class, and he was early made to know that the little sword in his girdle was neither an ornament nor a plaything. He was shown how to use it, how to take his own life at a moment's notice, without shrinking, whenever the code of his class might ...
— Kokoro - Japanese Inner Life Hints • Lafcadio Hearn
... slaughter and offer sacrifice (1Samuel xiv. 34 seq.); and, even in cases where priests are present, there is not a single trace of a systematic setting apart of what is holy, or of shrinking from touching it. When David "entered into the house of God and did eat the shew-bread, which it is not lawful to eat save for the priests, and gave also to them that were with him" (Mark ii. 26), this is not represented in 1Sam. xxi. as illegitimate when those who eat are sanctified, ...
— Prolegomena to the History of Israel • Julius Wellhausen
... sensible man of nearer sixty than fifty years, sat in the cottage, hearing all that his parishioners could tell him and using his eyes. He saw the centre-piece of all surmise, a shrinking, pale slip of a girl, by the look of her not more than fifteen or sixteen years old. She was not emaciated by any means, seemed to be well nourished, and was quite as vigorous as any child of that age who could have been pitted against her. Her surroundings cowed her, he judged. To Dryhope she ...
— Lore of Proserpine • Maurice Hewlett
... huge water-fowl rising from the sea. Her course was westward and upward, like the eagle with his face turned toward the palace of the sun. At first the lights in the city of Baltimore became more numerous and distinct, as intervening objects were surmounted and overlooked. Next they began to fade, shrinking down into twinkling points like fireflies, until they disappeared. Forests, hills, and mountains followed after, as our altitude was increased, blending together like a hazy landscape, until, on passing above ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 4, No. 25, November, 1859 • Various
... post by the window. Her mind was bruised between two conflicting feelings—a dumb longing for someone to caress and comfort her, someone who would meet her pain with a bearing less hard and wooden than Bridget's—and at the same time, a passionate shrinking from the bare idea of comfort and sympathy, as something not to be endured. She had had a kind letter from Sir William Farrell that morning. He had spoken of being soon in London. But she did not know that she could bear to see him—unless he ...
— Missing • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... employment, and who set up in needless shops as a method of eking out the savings upon which they count. They contrive to make sixty or seventy per cent, of their expenditure, the rest is drawn from the shrinking capital. Essentially their lives are failures, not the sharp and tragic failure of the labourer who gets out of work and starves, but a slow, chronic process of consecutive small losses which may end if the individual is exceptionally fortunate in an impoverished ...
— The History of Mr. Polly • H. G. Wells
... you could rely upon lovers for retirement. But nowadays their role seems to be a bold ostentation of their condition. They rely upon other people to do the timid, shrinking part. Society, in America, is arranged principally for their convenience; and whatever portion of the landscape strikes their fancy, they preempt and occupy. All this goes upon the presumption that romantic love is really the only important interest ...
— Fisherman's Luck • Henry van Dyke
... where we stood we could see their faces plainly as they turned and looked at each other with the moonbeams pouring over them. Was it fancy that made her look like a wraith, and he like some handsome demon given to haunting churchyards? Or was it only the sternness of his air, and the shrinking timidity of hers, which made him look so dark and ...
— The Old Stone House and Other Stories • Anna Katharine Green
... tutor—his silence, his melancholy, his personal beauty—which no one else, with perhaps one or two exceptions among the older men, cared to take into account; or touched perhaps by some note in him, surprised in passing, of weariness or shrinking, as compared with the contemptuous tone of the College towards him. He showed his liking impetuously, boyishly, as his way was, and thenceforward during his University career Langham became his slave. He had no ambition for himself; his motto might have been that dismal ...
— Robert Elsmere • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... his parents, that young bride, and you, Bearer of much bereavement, woman true, And patriotic QUEEN! We hear the courage striking through the pain, As always in your long, illustrious reign, Which shrinking ne'er ...
— Punch, Or The London Charivari, Vol. 102, February 6, 1892 • Various
... climbed the crest of the hill, sat down, laid his hat on the grass, and slipped his long sensitive fingers backward over his shining hair. Neither man spoke at first; their friendship put them at ease. Nor did the one notice the shrinking and dread which ...
— The Choir Invisible • James Lane Allen
... she said softly. 'It must be terrible to be feared—to meet always with doubt and shrinking where you look for confidence ...
— In the Roaring Fifties • Edward Dyson
... belongings, for she was a woman of sentiment, and she felt the child should not be parted from this gift of his dying mother. But at length, when a knowledge of writing made it possible for him to read the letters, he was possessed with a feeling of shrinking from doing so, as one might shrink from opening a message from ...
— The Dreamer - A Romantic Rendering of the Life-Story of Edgar Allan Poe • Mary Newton Stanard
... Conelets large, subterminal, or on young trees often pseudolateral. Cones indehiscent, from 9 to 14 cm. long, short-pedunculate, ovoid-conical or subcylindrical; apophyses dull pale nut-brown, rugose, shrinking much in drying and exposing the seeds, prolonged and tapering to a more or less reflexed tip, the umbo inconspicuous; seeds large, wingless, the ...
— The Genus Pinus • George Russell Shaw
... in forty years of carnage the fighting propensities had glutted themselves. A reaction followed, and in the early years of Henry VIII. the statutes were growing obsolete, and the "unlawful games" rising again into favour. The younger nobles, or some among them, were shrinking from the tilt-yard, and were backward on occasions even when required for war. Lord Surrey, when waiting on the Border, expecting the Duke of Albany to invade the northern counties, in 1523, complained of the growing "slowness" of the young lords "to be at such journeys,"[67] ...
— The Reign of Henry the Eighth, Volume 1 (of 3) • James Anthony Froude
... still and saws wood," said Lincoln "He don't talk a great deal, but he fights. I can't help feeling hopeful to-night, for it seems to me we have the enemy in a fix. You've heard me talk of the shrinking quadrilateral, which is the rebel States, as I see ...
— The Path of the King • John Buchan
... Boston, where the governor John Indicot, and the deputy governor Richard Billingham, being both present, it was told him, 'Unless you will renounce your religion, you shall surely die.' But instead of shrinking, he said with an undaunted courage, 'Nay, I shall not change my religion, nor seek to save my life; neither do I intend to deny my Master; but if I lose my life for Christ's sake, and the preaching of ...
— The Emancipation of Massachusetts • Brooks Adams
... striking resemblance to something that certainly did not seem like a rock, but which, after some deliberation, he found to look very much like a shrinking Southern negro, forced into the ranks to supply the place of a citizen of Massachusetts. Everybody might not be able to see this, but Mr. P. thought he perceived ...
— Punchinello, Vol. 2, No. 27, October 1, 1870 • Various
... able to take the situation lightly then—this curious situation of the "freed" American wife, with or without children, drifting through Europe, aimless, and generally better off when friendless. But she began to be sorry for the type. Instead of shrinking from Gertie in the presence of the discerning compatriots, as she was at first inclined to do, she made it a point to be seen with her, championing the sisterhood of loneliness. There were moments when this association might not have ...
— The Letter of the Contract • Basil King
... Tongue's breast and her long lashes still wet with tears. The baker, his face crimson with heat and streaked with rivulets of perspiration, looked up at us grimly through a sort of mist. I waited for him to spring to his feet and throw himself like a lion on my shrinking form; but, instead of doing so, he pressed his arms closer round Rosalie and smiled—yes, by Jove, smiled—and, if you'll take the word of a retired master mariner, winked, with a peculiar, tender and calfish expression that in anybody else ...
— Wild Justice: Stories of the South Seas • Lloyd Osbourne
... story—his shrinking from the message given him. We know not why; but perhaps from faint-hearted fear, or from a sense of his unworthiness and unfitness for the task. His own words about God as long-suffering seem to suggest another reason, that he feared to go with ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture - St. Matthew Chaps. IX to XXVIII • Alexander Maclaren
... more out of him. Evidently he referred, however, to a condition of shrinking in the population, a circumstance which he did ...
— Allan and the Holy Flower • H. Rider Haggard
... the waitresses brought in fish and wine, and Jiurozayemon pressed Chobei to feast with him; and thinking to annoy Chobei, offered him a large wine-cup,[23] which, however, he drank without shrinking, and then returned to his entertainer, who was by no means so well able to bear the fumes of the wine. Then Jiurozayemon hit upon another device for annoying Chobei, and, hoping ...
— Tales of Old Japan • Algernon Bertram Freeman-Mitford
... Stephen Smith on his left. The white daylight on his right side gleamed faintly in, and was toned to a blueness by contrast with the yellow rays from the candle against the wall. Elfride, timidly shrinking back, and nearest the entrance, received most of the light therefrom, whilst Stephen was entirely in candlelight, and to him the spot of outer sky visible above the steps was as a steely blue patch, ...
— A Pair of Blue Eyes • Thomas Hardy
... cooler times of the year. But for under wear, in the hotter seasons and climates, wool has certain disadvantages. It is likely to be rough and tickling to most skins, which makes it uncomfortable, especially in warm weather. It is also difficult and troublesome to wash woolens without shrinking them; and, as soon as they do shrink, not only do they become uncomfortably tight, but the natural pores in them which make them so valuable close up, and they become almost air-tight. Finally, when loaded with perspiration, woolens easily become offensive, ...
— A Handbook of Health • Woods Hutchinson
... O Company Of darkened Russia, watching long in vain, Now shall you see the cloud of Russia's pain Go shrinking ...
— A Treasury of War Poetry - British and American Poems of the World War 1914-1917 • Edited, with Introduction and Notes, by George Herbert Clarke
... wandered out in her habit down the slope to the moat, crossed the bridge, glancing at the thin ice and the sedge that pierced it, and came up into the private garden. She knew she could hear the sounds of wheels from there, and had an instinctive shrinking from being at the ...
— The King's Achievement • Robert Hugh Benson
... but output declined by an average of 4%-5% annually during 1989-95 because of systemic problems and disruptions in socialist-style economic relations and technological links with the former USSR and China. The leadership has insisted on maintaining its high level of military outlays from a shrinking economic pie. Moreover, a serious drawdown in inventories and critical shortages in the energy sector have led to increasing interruptions in industrial production. Abundant mineral resources and hydropower have formed the basis of industrial development since ...
— The 1996 CIA Factbook • United States. Central Intelligence Agency.
... at once a powerful impression on the people at large, when breaking through all the established rules of caste, he assumed the privileges of a Brahman, and throwing away the splendour of his royal position, travelled about as a beggar, not shrinking from the defiling contact of sinners and publicans. Though when we now speak of Buddhism, we think chiefly of its doctrines, the reform of Buddha had originally much more of a social than of a religious character. Buddha swept away the web with ...
— Chips From A German Workshop - Volume I - Essays on the Science of Religion • Friedrich Max Mueller
... maintaining that crimes of the imagination may be punished with death;[4]—The detector of Vulgar Errors, and the most humane of physicians,[5] giving the casting weight to the vacillating bigotry of Sir Matthew Hale;[6]—Hobbes, ever sceptical, penetrating and sagacious, yet here paralyzed, and shrinking from the subject as if afraid to touch it;[7]—The adventurous explorer, who sounded the depths and channels of the "Intellectual System" along all the "wide watered" shores of antiquity, running after witches ...
— Discovery of Witches - The Wonderfull Discoverie of Witches in the Countie of Lancaster • Thomas Potts
... effect produced therefore was that of a broadcloth sleeve, carefully brought around two slender shoulders, and a handsome manly countenance leaning a little towards a blushing maiden's face. Worse than all, he too happened to look into the glass at the same moment, and our eyes in shrinking from one another's glance met under an awkward circumstance. He looked steadily at Amey Hampden in mirrorland, and then said in a very conventional tone, turning his ...
— The Doctor's Daughter • "Vera"
... looked thoughtful; the old lawyer was grave and listened silently. Patsy, her arms still around the shrinking form of the child, looked pleadingly at her uncle. Beth's eyes were moist and ...
— Aunt Jane's Nieces Abroad • Edith Van Dyne
... in this as in other fields of activity. The task is a great one and underlies the task of dealing with the whole industrial problem. But the fact that it is a great problem does not warrant us in shrinking from the attempt to solve it. At present we face such utter lack of supervision, such freedom from the restraints of law, that excellent men have often been literally forced into doing what they deplored because otherwise they were left at the mercy of unscrupulous ...
— State of the Union Addresses of Theodore Roosevelt • Theodore Roosevelt
... G served as subject, that the illusion was emphatically stronger when the open and filled spaces were presented simultaneously and adjacent. In this instance, the illusion was doubtless a combination of two illusions—a shrinking of the open space, on the one hand, and a lengthening of the filled space on the other hand. Binet says, in his studies on the well-known Mueller-Lyer illusion, that he believes the illusion, in its highest effects at any rate, to be due ...
— Harvard Psychological Studies, Volume 1 • Various
... My mind went to Venza, back there on the asteroid. The wandering little world was already shrinking to a convex surface beneath us. Venza, with her last unknown play, gone to failure. Had I missed my cue? Whatever my part, it seemed now that I must have horribly ...
— Brigands of the Moon • Ray Cummings
... little cow of most placid disposition. Nothing disturbs her placidity, incites her to hurry, or bewilders her. Cure the dove of its timidity and shrinking and you will have a good prototype of Parilla, who, taking life easily and affably, is fat and amiable. When she brought home her firstborn, mooing plaintively, he, big and fat for his age, walked into the byre as a matter of course. Here was the first evidence ...
— Tropic Days • E. J. Banfield
... she had gone too far to recede, though she would willingly have delayed, in enjoyment of the present homage and shrinking from the future plunge away from all her protectors. Though the strong, manly will overpowered hers, and made her submit to the necessities of the case and fix a day early in July, she clung the more closely to her sisters, ...
— Beechcroft at Rockstone • Charlotte M. Yonge
... perceptible; the intervals of rest long and frequent. An untimely slide as the chance gaze of the observer is directed to the spot, betrays that here is the centre of independent life and motive. The dwarf, unkempt weeds cloak a meek, weak, shrinking crab, whose frail claws and tufted legs are breeched with muddy moss, and whose oddly-shaped body is obscured by parasitic vegetation and realistic counterfeits thereof. Inspection, however critical, makes no satisfactory definition between the real and the ...
— The Confessions of a Beachcomber • E J Banfield
... their dollar affairs. I longed to mount a chair and tell them how they had been duped, but my role called for different lines. It was my part to feign satisfaction and my duty to keep every cent invested in our enterprise from shrinking a mill. I pumped as much enthusiasm into my speech ...
— Frenzied Finance - Vol. 1: The Crime of Amalgamated • Thomas W. Lawson
... as one of the greatest applications of Christian principle, that one finds it difficult or impossible to forgive. The zeal of some of the modern clergy is open to a certain not unnatural suspicion: in view of their shrinking authority and the growing indifference of the world to dogma and ritual, they have been forced to take up these new and ...
— The War and the Churches • Joseph McCabe
... if it took an hour to give Jennie a tattered apron. With some disappointment he noticed that except at rare intervals, and only when Tom was at home, he was no longer invited to the house. He had always been a timid, shrinking fellow where a woman was concerned, having followed the sea and lived among men since he was sixteen years old. During these earlier years he had made two voyages in the Pacific, and another to the whaling-ground in the Arctic seas. ...
— Tom Grogan • F. Hopkinson Smith
... fright lest he should guess right too soon; shrinking away, as she held the basket toward him; curling up her pretty shoulders; stopping her ear with her hand, as if by so doing she could keep the right word out of Toby's lips; and laughing softly the ...
— A Budget of Christmas Tales by Charles Dickens and Others • Various
... brand-new incarnation of Louis Neville? The delightful indifference, fascinating absent-mindedness and personal neglect of the other phase? Would he be god enough to be less to her, now? Man enough to be more than other men? For a moment she had a little shrinking, a miniature panic lest this man turn too much like other men. But she let her eyes rest on him, and knew he would not. Whatever Protean changes might yet be reserved for her to witness, she came to the conclusion that this man was a man apart, different, and would not ...
— The Common Law • Robert W. Chambers
... People, most intolerant in religion, believing intensely in royal prerogative, thoroughly convinced of his regal as well as his personal infallibility, loathing that inductive method of thought which was already leading the English nation so proudly on the road of intellectual advancement, shrinking from the love of free inquiry, of free action, of daring adventure, which was to be the real informing spirit of the great British nation; abhorring the Puritans—that is to say, one-third of his subjects—in whose harsh, but lofty nature he felt instinctively that popular freedom was enfolded—even ...
— The Rise of the Dutch Republic, 1555-1566 • John Lothrop Motley
... above all, to the Saviour's final malediction, as the Judge of mankind. It is the design of Christ to establish an interest in the world; and this is to be maintained, not by fear, but by firmness: not by temporal compliances, but by holy resistance; not by sloth, inactivity, and shrinking into a corner, but by "putting on the whole armour of God." Not to be for Christ is to be against him—neutrality is enmity—a refusal to enlist under his banners is disloyalty, rebellion, ...
— Female Scripture Biographies, Vol. I • Francis Augustus Cox
... cows does not produce as much butter as a Devonshire dairy of fifty. Some "necessary" cruelty is involved in the stockman's business, however humane he may be. The system is one of terrorism, and from the time that the calf is bullied into the branding pen, and the hot iron burns into his shrinking flesh, to the day when the fatted ox is driven down from his boundless pastures to be slaughtered in Chicago, "the fear and dread ...
— A Lady's Life in the Rocky Mountains • Isabella L. Bird
... trembling, shrinking from the spoiler's hand, Far, far away, thy children leave the land. Ill fares the land, to hastening ills a prey, Where ...
— Native Life in South Africa, Before and Since • Solomon Tshekisho Plaatje
... is it that in his quality of Sage Emerson always haunted the perilous altitudes of Transcendentalism, 'seeing nothing under him but the everlasting snows of Himalaya, the Earth shrinking to a Planet, and the indigo Firmament sowing itself with daylight stars.' He never thinks it beneath his dignity to touch a point of minor morals, or to say a good word for what he somewhere calls subterranean prudence. Emerson values mundane circumspection as ...
— Critical Miscellanies, Vol. 1, Essay 5, Emerson • John Morley
... the wherewithal for his pleasures at the gaming table, shaded his eyes from the burning sky, and calculated the gains of the past week. He was one of the many who found it easy to enrich themselves at the expense of his companion. The Greek, leaning upon his hand, and shrinking not from that sun, his nation's tutelary deity, with whose fluent light of poesy and joy and love his own veins were filled, gazed upon the broad expanse, and envied, perhaps, every wind that bent its pinions toward the shores ...
— The World's Greatest Books, Vol VI. • Various
... frame to horseback; and prone to imitate the somewhat recluse habits which German rulers introduced within the court: he was disposed to candle-light pleasures and cockney diversions; to Marybone and the Mall, and shrinking from the athletic and social recreations which, like so much that was manly and English, were confined almost to the English squire pur et simple after the Hanoverian accession; when so much degeneracy for a while obscured the English character, debased its tone, enervated its best ...
— The Wits and Beaux of Society - Volume 1 • Grace Wharton and Philip Wharton
... not a flower adorned the windows. Over the door, by way of sole adornment, the Mormon Eye was rudely sculptured; I had been brought up to view that emblem from my childhood; but since the night of our escape, it had acquired a new significance, and set me shrinking. The smoke rolled voluminously from the chimney-top, its edges ruddy with the fire; and from the far corner of the building, near the ground, angry puffs of steam shone snow-white in the ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 5 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... behind him. As he stood upon the threshold, his heart gave a sudden leap. Mr. Weatherley was sitting in his accustomed chair, but his attitude and expression were alike unusual. He was like a man shrinking under the whip. And Fenella—he was quick enough to catch the look in her face, the curl of her lips, the almost wicked flash of her eyes. Yet in a moment ...
— The Lighted Way • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... There is no property of any species, even the properties that constitute the specific definition, that is not a matter of more or less. If, for example, a species be distinguished by a single large red spot on the back, you will find if you go over a great number of specimens that red spot shrinking here to nothing, expanding there to a more general redness, weakening to pink, deepening to russet and brown, shading into crimson, and so on, and so on. And this is true not only of biological species. It is true of the mineral ...
— A Modern Utopia • H. G. Wells
... lovely whiteness of his changed weed, The Prince perceived well, and long admired; Toward the forest marched he on with speed, Resolved, as such adventures great required; Thither he came whence shrinking back for dread Of that strange desert's sight the first retired, But not to him fearful or loathsome made That forest was, but ...
— Jerusalem Delivered • Torquato Tasso
... outside the door, upon the veranda, shrinking from the raw winter wind. Relievedly she noticed Dan's tall form, when he swung ...
— Tess of the Storm Country • Grace Miller White
... on Broadway, one will frequently see, in some shabbily dressed individual, who, with his hat drawn down close over his eyes, is evidently shrinking from the possibility of being recognized, the man who but a few weeks ago was one of the wealthiest in the city. Then he was surrounded with splendor. Now he hardly knows where to get bread for his ...
— The Secrets Of The Great City • Edward Winslow Martin
... by the shoulders and stared into his face with an intentness that made the young fellow fancy that the fierce, black orbs confronting him were burning holes in his brain. For two minutes, that seemed two full hours, the gaze was concentrated upon him. Windybank felt his body shrinking into a smaller compass under the fascination. His breath came thickly, his knees trembled, and his heart laboured in ...
— Sea-Dogs All! - A Tale of Forest and Sea • Tom Bevan
... the pure and the defiled, were there. A poor washerwoman who in a moment of weakness has pawned the garments entrusted to her care, that she might venture upon a "row" of which she had dreamed, comes shrinking down with a pale, frightened face, and the bitterness of despair in her heart. She has lost. What then? She has no friend from whom she can borrow enough money to redeem the clothing, and if it is not taken home she may be arrested as a thief and sent to prison. She goes away, and ...
— Cast Adrift • T. S. Arthur
... Autumn fills thy lap with leaves, Or Winter, yelling through the troublous air, Affrights thy shrinking train, ...
— The Home Book of Verse, Vol. 3 (of 4) • Various
... Cleansing Water at his hand, Which must assoil the soul within From every stain of Adam's sin. The Infant eyes the mystic scenes, Nor knows what all this wonder means; And now he smiles, as if to say "I am a Christian made this day;" Now frighted clings to Nurse's hold, Shrinking from the water cold, Whose virtues, rightly understood, Are, as Bethesda's waters, good. Strange words—The World, The Flesh, The Devil— Poor Babe, what can it know of evil? But we must silently adore Mysterious truths, and not explore. Enough for him, in after-times, When he shall read ...
— The Works of Charles Lamb in Four Volumes, Volume 4 • Charles Lamb
... within the stanchions of the doorway to protect James I. of Scotland, till his murderers shattered the frail barrier; and that sublimest narrative of woman's devotion, Gertrude Van der Wart at her husband's execution. It is possible that all these women may have been timid and shrinking, before the hour of trial; and every emergency, in peace or war, brings out some such instances. At the close of the troubles of 1856, in Kansas, a traveller chanced to be visiting a lady in Lawrence, who, in opening ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. II., November, 1858., No. XIII. • Various
... and the skiff, which had long since been swamped, dashed itself to pieces against the stern. Then the Reindeer towered above them on a mountain of water. Joe caught himself half shrinking back, for it seemed she would fall down squarely on top of them; but the next instant she dropped into the gaping trough, and they were looking down upon her far below. It was a striking picture—one Joe was destined never ...
— The Cruise of the Dazzler • Jack London
... out, leaving a heavy deposit of the material which forms the duplicate record. Numerous ingenious inventions have been made by Edison providing for a variety of rapid and economical methods of duplication, including methods of shrinking a newly made copy to facilitate its quick removal from the mold; methods of reaming, of forming ribs on the interior, and for many other important and essential details, which limits of space will not permit of elaboration. Those mentioned above are ...
— Edison, His Life and Inventions • Frank Lewis Dyer and Thomas Commerford Martin
... occupied that the door opened softly, without any preliminary knock, and the wife stepped noiselessly into the room. The anxiety that beset her was painfully apparent in her bearing and in the expression of her face. Her form seemed drooping, as if under shrinking apprehension of some blow about to fall. The eyes of amber, usually so deep and radiant, were dulled now, as if by many tears; the rich scarlet of the lips' curves was bent downward mournfully. She stood just within the doorway for a brief space, watching intently the man who was so busy over ...
— Making People Happy • Thompson Buchanan
... sometimes they were dry, and there were anxious hours when we were not sure of water for ourselves, still less for the horses. One well near a salt lake was rather brackish. This lake is a landmark in the entire region round; it seems to be slowly shrinking, and many caravans camp here to collect the salt, which is taken south. The weather, too, had changed; the days were hotter and dryer, but the nights were ...
— A Wayfarer in China - Impressions of a trip across West China and Mongolia • Elizabeth Kendall
... last vigor to the deep, dark cells Of the dim wood. The keen, two-bladed Moon Of Falling Leaves roll'd up on crested mists And where the lush, rank boughs had foiled the sun In his red prime, her pale, sharp fingers crept After the wind and felt about the moss, And seem'd to pluck from shrinking twig and stem The burning leaves—while groan'd the shudd'ring wood. Who journey'd where the prairies made a pause, Saw burnish'd ramparts flaming in the sun, With beacon fires, tall on their rustling walls. And when the vast, horn'd ...
— Old Spookses' Pass • Isabella Valancy Crawford
... library, as if her chief anxiety was that the attention of its occupants should not be excited. Mr. Fox was delighted, though the angry flush was a little puzzling. But if Edith permitted that she would permit more, and if her only shrinking was lest others should see and know at present, that could soon be overcome. These thoughts passed through his mind while the incensed girl hastily obtained what she wished. But she, feeling that her cheeks were too hot to return immediately to ...
— What Can She Do? • Edward Payson Roe
... timid child, shrinking from everything like reproof or punishment, stood aghast at the mischief ...
— Elsie's New Relations • Martha Finley
... composers in the public prints; the enthusiastic adulation of society and the great world not unnaturally followed the brilliant, joyous, sparkling, witty Italian, who was a far better subject for London lionizing than his sickly, sensitive, shrinking, and rather soured German competitor for ...
— Records of a Girlhood • Frances Anne Kemble
... echo of her heart, Pure as the mountain-snows: Celestial transports round her play, And softly, sweetly die away. She smiles! and where is now the cloud That blacken'd o'er thy baleful reign? Grim darkness furls his leaden shroud, Shrinking from her glance in vain. Her touch unlocks the day-spring from above, And lo! it visits man with beams ...
— Poems • Samuel Rogers
... much as having one's peace upset. How foolish to be so agitated and talk of having been robbed of everything. Fritzing's mind, she feared, that large, enlightened mind on whose breadth and serenity she had gazed admiringly ever since she could remember gazing at all, was shrinking to dimensions that would presently exactly match the dimensions of Creeper Cottage. She went upstairs disheartened and tired, and dropping down full length on her sofa desired Annalise to ...
— The Princess Priscilla's Fortnight • Elizabeth von Arnim
... sensation his charge was making, would put no check upon him; but the more shrinking Douglas was not so well pleased. Still, seeing that no offence was given, but rather the contrary, he possessed his soul in patience, devoutly wishing, however, that it was time for the close of the performance, which, under these circumstances, afforded him no ...
— Uncle Rutherford's Nieces - A Story for Girls • Joanna H. Mathews
... into a bustling life of cheerful rashness and great expectations. In 1864 a few tents were pitched on the place; in 1865 one of the largest towns in New Zealand was to be seen. Wood and canvas were the building materials—the wood unseasoned pine, smelling fresh and resinous at first, anon shrinking, warping, and entailing cracked walls, creaking doors, and rattling window-sashes. Every second building was a grog-shanty, where liquor, more or less fiery, was retailed at a shilling a glass, and the traveller might hire ...
— The Long White Cloud • William Pember Reeves
... sounded like a sigh, burst from Lucy's breast as she closed this letter. She had, with humility and shrinking, yet with a certain resolution, disclosed to her husband that when the occasion occurred she must do her duty according to her father's will, whether it pleased him or not. She had steeled herself ...
— Sir Tom • Mrs. Oliphant
... intent on the caldron. All along that disk the light was already broken, here and there flickering up, here and there dying down; the six lamps in that half of the circle still twinkled, but faintly, as stars shrinking fast from the dawn of day. But it was not the fading shine in that half of the magical ring which daunted my eye and quickened with terror the pulse of my heart; the Bush-land beyond was on fire. From the background of the forest ...
— The Lock and Key Library • Julian Hawthorne, Ed.
... our rifles. They laughed derisively, as much as to say, "Oh, they will do us no harm, we know that." Never were they more mistaken in their lives, and it was the last mistake they ever made. We let them come on without shrinking. ...
— Dick Onslow - Among the Redskins • W.H.G. Kingston
... hot-headed, red-legged, short-kilted, stirring, a bit of a bully, a loud talker, a dour lad with his head and his fists. This boy beside him made him think of neither man nor boy, but of his sister Jennet, who died in the plague year, a wide-eyed, shrinking, clever girl, with a nerve that a harsh word ...
— Gilian The Dreamer - His Fancy, His Love and Adventure • Neil Munro
... their heads. This seen, Apollo, from his Actian height, Pours down his arrows; at whose winged flight The trembling Indians and Egyptians yield, And soft Sabaeans quit the wat'ry field. The fatal mistress hoists her silken sails, And, shrinking from the fight, invokes the gales. Aghast she looks, and heaves her breast for breath, Panting, and pale with fear of future death. The god had figur'd her as driv'n along By winds and waves, and scudding thro' the throng. Just opposite, sad Nilus opens wide ...
— The Aeneid • Virgil
... love of Heaven, have done!" cried Yellow Brian, shrinking before her, and yet with anger in his face. "Are you crazed, woman? Drogheda has fallen; O'Neill must join with the royalists, and never shall I ride into the west. Be off, for I ...
— Nuala O'Malley • H. Bedford-Jones
... with him, and what might not come of it! Seeing that she had kept silent so long, however, it seemed to him more than probable that she had lost all care about him, and if let alone would say nothing. Thus he reasoned, lost in his selfishness, and shrinking from the thought of looking the disreputable creature in the eyes. Yet the awful consciousness haunted him that, if she had fallen into drunken habits and possibly worse, it was his fault, and the ruin of the once lovely creature lay at ...
— Salted With Fire • George MacDonald
... dominions, electorates, and principalities in Germany, were secured by the constitutions of the empire, as well as by fair and equal alliances with their co-estates; whereas Hanover stood solitary, like a hunted deer avoided by the herd, and had no other shelter but that of shrinking under the extended shield of Great Britain: that the reluctance expressed by the German princes to undertake the defence of these dominions, flowed from a firm persuasion, founded on experience, that England would ...
— The History of England in Three Volumes, Vol.II. - From William and Mary to George II. • Tobias Smollett
... action, felt intuitively the meaning of it, and in Bosomer's sudden change of front. The outlaw was keen, and he had expected a shrinking, or at least a frightened antagonist. Duane knew he was neither. He felt like iron, and yet thrill after thrill ran through him. It was almost as if this situation had been one long familiar to ...
— The Lone Star Ranger • Zane Grey
... face; coarse originally, and, in addition to the faults of nature, it now bore the plainest traces of hard living. As soon as he perceived Waymark and his companion, he fixed them with his eyes, and scarcely looked away as long as they remained in the room. The girl seemed shrinking under this gaze, though she sat almost with her back to him. She ceased talking, and, as soon as she saw that Waymark had finished, made a sign to him to pay quickly (with a sovereign she pushed across the table) and let them be gone. They rose, accordingly, and left. The man watched ...
— The Unclassed • George Gissing
... That the length and the breadth and the sweep of the marshes of Glynn Will work me no fear like the fear they have wrought me of yore When length was fatigue, and when breadth was but bitterness sore, And when terror and shrinking and dreary unnamable pain Drew over me out of the merciless miles of the plain, — Oh, now, unafraid, I am fain to face The vast sweet visage of space. To the edge of the wood I am drawn, I am drawn, Where the gray beach glimmering runs, as a belt of the ...
— Sidney Lanier • Edwin Mims
... fortresses with cannon stolen from national arsenals. They sent out secret agents to Europe, they had their secret allies in the Free States, their conventions transacted all important business in secret session;—there was but one exception to the shrinking delicacy becoming a maiden government, and that was the openness of the stealing. We had always thought a high sense of personal honor an essential element of chivalry; but among the Romanic races, by which, as the wonderful ethnologist of "De ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 7, No. 44, June, 1861 • Various
... The nation has been unable to achieve any substantial improvement in export earnings because of falling prices for many of its major commodity exports. For rice, traditionally the most important export, the drop in world prices has been accompanied by shrinking markets and a smaller volume of sales. In 1985 teak replaced rice as the largest export and continues to hold this position. The economy is heavily dependent on the agricultural sector, which generates ...
— The 1992 CIA World Factbook • United States. Central Intelligence Agency.
... trained to the minute, May well be around when the trouble begins, But you seldom will find he is in it; For they let him alone when they know he is there For any set part in the ramble, To pick out the one who is shrinking and soft And not quite attuned to ...
— It Can Be Done - Poems of Inspiration • Joseph Morris
... country of four hundred thousand inhabitants was to be swept clean and left naked and profitless to the invader. Under Hermione's window, as she gazed up and down the street, jostled the army of fugitives, women old and young, shrinking from the bustle and uproar, grandsires on their staves, boys driving the bleating goats or the patient donkeys piled high with pots and panniers, little girls tearfully hugging a pet puppy or hen. But few strong men were seen, ...
— A Victor of Salamis • William Stearns Davis
... in his easy-chair, watching with a breaking heart that shrinking of the features that comes with death; Pons looked so worn out with the day's exertions, that ...
— Poor Relations • Honore de Balzac
... — had we not better wait until next week, Josiah?" questioned Mrs. Stanhope timidly. She was a pale, delicate woman of forty, of a shrinking nature, easily ...
— The Rover Boys at School • Arthur M. Winfield
... everything at once; so I will not say that Emma soon learned to take delight in dusting and sweeping. But bear in mind that that woman is the most queenly, who uses her wisdom and her strength for the benefit of those around her, shrinking from no duty that she should perform, but doing it ...
— The King's Daughter and Other Stories for Girls • Various
... aloft. By the corral gate Buck Devine drooped cravenly above his damaged saddle; at the door of the bunk house Sandy Sawtelle tottered precariously on one foot, his guitar under his arm, a look of guilty horror on his set face. By the stable door stood the incredibly withered Jimmie Time, shrinking a vast dismay. ...
— Somewhere in Red Gap • Harry Leon Wilson
... without any further discourse. Henderson, at length, ventured to put over his hand towards the corner in which his companion sat; but it no sooner came in contact with her person, than he felt her shrinking, as it were, from his very touch. With his usual complacent confidence, however, in his own powers of attraction and strongly impressed, besides, with a belief in his knowledge of the sex, he at once imputed all this to caprice on the behalf of Mave, or rather to that ...
— The Black Prophet: A Tale Of Irish Famine • William Carleton
... emperor or of myself, if we support our aunt in a just cause."[226] At the same time, formal complaints were made by Charles of the personal treatment of Queen Catherine, and the clouds appeared to be gathering for a storm. Yet here, too, there was an evident shrinking from extremities. A Welsh gentleman had been at Brussels to offer his services against Henry, and had met with apparent coldness. Sir John Hacket wrote, on the 15th of December, that he was assured by well-informed persons, that so long ...
— History of England from the Fall of Wolsey to the Death of Elizabeth. Vol. II. • James Anthony Froude
... no, it is not nearly so bad as that," she replied, with a smile. "I cannot really say that it is either painful or disagreeable to me to recall it, for I cannot exactly apply either of those words to the thing itself. All that I feel is a sort of shrinking from the subject, strong enough to prevent my ever alluding to it lightly or carelessly. Of all things, I should dislike to have a joke made of it. But with you I have no fear of that. And you trust me, don't you? I don't mean as to truthfulness only; ...
— Four Ghost Stories • Mrs. Molesworth
... monsieur," she pleaded, a curious shrinking in her very voice. "Do not touch me, monsieur. You do not know—you do ...
— Bardelys the Magnificent • Rafael Sabatini
... us not to esteem courage; for courage is at once the defense against attack of all our possessions and the source, in personal initiative and aggressive action, of newer and larger life. And any shrinking that we may feel against the sternness of the struggle is quenched both by the hero's example and by our recognition of its necessity. Since we are not participants of it, our protest would be futile, and even if we played a part in it, we should be as foolish as we should ...
— The Principles Of Aesthetics • Dewitt H. Parker
... expecting, and mentally shrinking from, just that. Now that it was out, however, he felt relieved. He gave another ...
— The Edge of the Knife • Henry Beam Piper
... narrowly, the rider noted his nervous glance, and his shrinking, dreading manner. Harlan's eyes gleamed with suspicion, and in a flash he was off the black and standing before Laskar, ...
— 'Drag' Harlan • Charles Alden Seltzer
... dialect-literature of the last half-century, from Vinje down to Garborg. Aasen continued to enlarge and improve his grammars and his dictionary. He lived very quietly in lodgings in Christiania, surrounded by his books and shrinking from publicity, but his name grew into wide political favour as his ideas about the language of the peasants became more and more the watch-word of the popular party. Quite early in his career, 1842, he had begun to receive a stipend to enable him to give his entire ...
— Project Gutenberg Encyclopedia
... reduced circumstances, for we have, now but twenty francs each, left, to take us to Paris. Our boots, too, after serving us so long, begin to show signs of failing in this hour of adversity. Although we are somewhat accustomed to such circumstances, I cannot help shrinking when I think of the solitary napoleon and the five hundred miles to be passed. Perhaps, however, the coin will do as much as its great namesake, and achieve for us a Marengo ...
— Views a-foot • J. Bayard Taylor
... Henry's nervousness again, but it troubled him none the less. He himself was so fearless, so careless of danger, so eager for adventure that he could not understand his son's shrinking ...
— Changing Winds - A Novel • St. John G. Ervine
... by woman's truth made dear, That leans upon itself and knows no fear, And yet a name a shrinking girl might wear, With girlish ease, devoid of thought and care. And she is worthy of this name so true— This girl with thoughtful eyes of darkest hue, This maiden stepping o'er the golden line That separates the child from woman divine. Not yet she feels the longing, vague unrest That ever ...
— Love or Fame; and Other Poems • Fannie Isabelle Sherrick
... parent, and his voice was sad and stern, "I detest the slang you're using; will you never, never learn that correct use of our language is a thing to be desired? All your common bughouse phrases make the shrinking highbrow tired. There is nothing more delightful than a pure and careful speech, and the man who weighs his phrases always stacks up as a peach, while the guy who shoots his larynx in a careless slipshod way looms up as a selling plater, people ...
— Rippling Rhymes • Walt Mason
... she impartially to them both. Then she, too, seemed to shrink before a possible answer. She even laughed an evasive sort of laugh. "I guess you don't mean anything," said she, but her face wore still the expression of shrinking horror. ...
— Stories by Modern American Authors • Julian Hawthorne
... somehow that she was a thing to be protected. He hailed a carriage, and she made no protest—all the time under his lee, so needful of protection. It was a shock when they came into the lights of Marseilles to find a proud, grave woman there and not a shrinking, wide-eyed child.... Her face, poised for flight, like a bird's wing; the beautiful, half-opened mouth, the hands, the little feet in their shoes. She was like some beautiful shy deer. And somewhere hovered disaster, like a familiar spirit.... And ...
— The Wind Bloweth • Brian Oswald Donn-Byrne
... though he were stung even to death. His cheeks were flushed, and then as suddenly livid. He seemed to have grown smaller in his chair, to be shrinking away as though I had ...
— The Great Secret • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... poor girl, who had been a sort of humble companion of the deceased, as a subject upon whom she could at all times expectorate her bad humour. She was for form's sake dragged into the room by the deceased's favourite female attendant, where, shrinking into a corner as soon as possible, she saw with wonder and affright the intrusive researches of the strangers amongst those recesses to which from childhood she had looked with awful veneration. This girl was regarded with an unfavourable ...
— Guy Mannering • Sir Walter Scott
... on the ground as he spoke; for Edith, shrinking and unsoftened towards him, held no lap to receive it; and Hilda, to whom Edward had been speaking in a low voice, advanced to the spot and struck the jewel with her staff under the hoofs of the ...
— Harold, Complete - The Last Of The Saxon Kings • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... started back from the iron in sudden rousing from his brooding silence, fear and hate convulsing his snarling face, shrinking back against the timber of the hitching rack as far as he could withdraw, where he stood with shoulders hunched about his neck, savage as a chained wolf. He began to writhe and kick as Morgan laid hold of his neck to hold him steady for the ...
— Trail's End • George W. Ogden
... dispel all doubt as to the identity, the majestic lady suddenly tore aside her veil, and disclosed to the trembling, shrinking Agnes, features already too ...
— Wagner, the Wehr-Wolf • George W. M. Reynolds
... her mother's frigid kiss of farewell hurting her more poignantly than her drastic punishment of an hour before. For Dinah was intensely sensitive, keenly susceptible to rebuke and coldness, and her warm heart shrank from unkindness with a shrinking that was actual pain. ...
— Greatheart • Ethel M. Dell
... Countess of Buchan stood within one of those deep embrasures we have noticed, at times glancing towards the youthful group with an earnestness of sorrowing affection that seemed to have no measure in its depth, no shrinking in its might; at others, fixing a long, unmeaning, yet somewhat anxious gaze on the wide plain and distant ocean, ...
— The Days of Bruce Vol 1 - A Story from Scottish History • Grace Aguilar
... that beef is rare, and can't help thinking That the old fable of the Minotaur— From which our modern morals rightly shrinking Condemn the royal lady's taste who wore A cow's shape for a mask—was only (sinking The allegory) a mere type, no more, That Pasiphae promoted breeding cattle, To make the ...
— Don Juan • Lord Byron
... quickly than Lord Lynwood could have expected. Jack thought he had never seen anybody quite like Aunt Betty—he had not known that any such existed. He had made up his mind to tell the truth about himself to Estelle's aunt, but now that he saw her he did not feel the shrinking he had anticipated. 'She would understand,' was the way he ...
— Chatterbox, 1906 • Various
... we are thinking, our fathers would think; From the death we are shrinking from, they too would shrink; To the life we are clinging to, they too would cling; But it speeds from the earth like a ...
— Poems Every Child Should Know - The What-Every-Child-Should-Know-Library • Various
... girl, shrinking back from the strange gleam that shone from the woman's eyes, as she made this remark, while her thoughts flew, with the speed of light and with a yearning so intense that it turned her white as snow, to Royal Bryant, ...
— The Masked Bridal • Mrs. Georgie Sheldon
... to any one claim—instinct, reason, conscience, whatever it is—the ultimate power cuts the knot, and tells you unfailingly where your real life lies. That is the real failure, when owing to some habit, some dread, some shrinking, you do not follow your real life. That, it seems to me, is where the old unflinching doctrines of sin and repentance have done harm. The old self-mortifying saints, who thought so badly of human nature, and who tore themselves to pieces, resisting wholesome impulses—celibate saints ...
— Father Payne • Arthur Christopher Benson
... there was not the least disagreeable smell proceeding from it; though the climate is one of the hottest, and Tee had been dead above four months. The only remarkable alteration that had happened, was a shrinking of the muscular parts and eyes; but the hair and nails were in their original state, and still adhered firmly; and the several joints were quite pliable, or in that kind of relaxed state which happens to persons who faint suddenly. Such were Mr Anderson's ...
— A General History and Collection of Voyages and Travels, Volume 16 • Robert Kerr
... not Falstaff; he is overcome by wine and difficulties as that amazing knight never was; but it is a sad soul which does not roar with Toby in his revels; shout with laughter over the duel which he arranges between the shrinking Viola and the foolish, vain Sir Andrew; and shake in sympathy with his glee over Malvolio's plight when that unlucky man is beguiled into thinking Olivia loves him, and into appearing before her cross-gartered and wreathed in the ...
— An Introduction to Shakespeare • H. N. MacCracken
... admiration. But when some glories of the autumn yet remain, and e'er stern winter has usurped the sway,—one wide-wide field of death and desolation is all that's left for man to ponder over;—fading flowers, trembling and shrinking in the raw cold blast;—half naked trees, that day by day present a more weird aspect—fields still green, but stripped of every gem;—whilst still some russet warbler may be heard chirping in sorrow and distress, ...
— Yorksher Puddin' - A Collection of the Most Popular Dialect Stories from the - Pen of John Hartley • John Hartley
... little debate, that between equals would have been called complimentary, he proposed to me the Presidency of the Council of Finance. But I had good reasons for shrinking from this office. I saw that disordered as the finances had become there was only one remedy by which improvement could be effected; and this was National Bankruptcy. Had I occupied the office, I should have been too strongly tempted to urge this view, and carry it out, but ...
— Marguerite de Navarre - Memoirs of Marguerite de Valois Queen of Navarre • Marguerite de Navarre
... this at last, for the sake of the warmth and the human companionship around the blazing hearth-fires in the parlors. They got a room with a stove in it, so that he could write; and there was a pensive, fleeting coziness in it all, with the shrinking numbers in the vast dining-room grouped at two or three tables for dinner, and then gathered in the light of the evening lamps over the evening papers. In these conditions there came, if not friendship, an intensification of acquaintance, such as is ...
— The Story of a Play - A Novel • W. D. Howells
... last he understood the girl, and as he thought of her shrinking aloofness standing guard over her eager longing for friends—for affection, something hot and wet blurred his eyes. He was scarcely conscious that the man, who had taken to himself the name with which he had become hatefully familiar during his ...
— An Alabaster Box • Mary E. Wilkins Freeman and Florence Morse Kingsley
... rational judgment in comparison with the emotional, affective, contemplative parts of man, which underlies the various forms of religious mysticism. If you look closely into our present mood, it is seen to be the product mainly and above all of a shrinking deference to the status quo, not merely as having a claim not to be lightly dealt with, which every serious man concedes, but as being the last word and final test of truth and justice. Physical science ...
— On Compromise • John Morley
... Shrinking further behind the cedars he proposed to reconnoitre a little before making himself known. He observed that she was attired in a dark, close-fitting costume suitable for rambling among the hills. At first he thought that ...
— Opening a Chestnut Burr • Edward Payson Roe
... having been constructed of the green trees of the forest, cut down and sawed into boards by the bands of the soldiers, they were considerably given to shrinking and warping, thus leaving many a yawning crevice. Stuffing the cracks with cotton batting, and pasting strips of paper over them, formed the employment of many ...
— Wau-bun - The Early Day in the Northwest • Juliette Augusta Magill Kinzie
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