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More "Whim" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... tolerably mild, To make a wash, would hardly stew a child; Has even been proved to grant a lover's prayer, And paid a tradesman once to make him stare; Gave alms at Easter, in a Christian trim, And made a widow happy, for a whim. Why then declare good-nature is her scorn, When 'tis by that alone she can be borne? Why pique all mortals, yet affect a name? A fool to pleasure, yet a slave to fame: Now deep in Taylor and the Book of Martyrs, Now ...
— Essay on Man - Moral Essays and Satires • Alexander Pope
... but played with the poker. It was so huge, owing to Gourlay's whim, that when it slid through his fingers it came down on the muffled hearthstone with a thud like ...
— The House with the Green Shutters • George Douglas Brown
... chose, "with no one to molest us or make us afraid." As a rule, we take such things as matters of course, but when one comes over here into Asia and into countries where the people have been cursed by corrupt governments, where innocent lives have been taken upon the mere whim of the government, where property has been confiscated with no better reason, and where men have had to die for their faiths:—when he, in short, comes into lands where the rights of neither life, property nor conscience have been respected, he is likely to prize his American ...
— Where Half The World Is Waking Up • Clarence Poe
... displays, with mock emphasis, of restitution to the downtrodden fairyhood, is an exotic, fair and slight bud, grafted into the sturdier indigenous stock. For let us fix but a steady look upon the thing itself, and what is there before us? a whim, a trick of the fancy, tickling the fancy. We are amused with a quaint calamity—a panic of caps and cloaks. We laugh—we cannot help it—as the pigmy assembly flies a thousand ways at once—grave councillors and all—throwing terrified somersets—hiding under stones, ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, No. CCCXLV. July, 1844. Vol. LVI. • Various
... perfect despot and tyrant, the lives of all his subjects, from the highest to the lowest, being in his power. When the whim seized him, he did not hesitate to kill as many as ...
— Great African Travellers - From Mungo Park to Livingstone and Stanley • W.H.G. Kingston
... the behest of one girl eighty men had to endure the discomfort of a storm at sea, and a great steel ship, straining and quivering, was flung into the perilous night. It seemed a misuse of power that, at a woman's whim, so many lives and so noble and costly a fabric could be risked—and risked for nothing. From the captain on the bridge, dripping in his oil- skins, to the coal-passers and firemen below who fed the mighty furnaces, to the cooks in the galley, the engineers, the electrician on duty, the lookout ...
— Love, The Fiddler • Lloyd Osbourne
... his words, but, in this fraction of time, a series of impressions swept through her brain with the continuity of a bird's flight. It was clear to her at once, that what prompted his insistence was not an ordinary curiosity, or a passing whim; in a flash, she understood that here, below the surface, something was at work in him, the existence of which she had not even suspected. She was more than annoyed with herself at her own foolish obtuseness; she had ...
— Maurice Guest • Henry Handel Richardson
... for that. I won't be able to work hard enough to show you how much I appreciate what you have done for me. But you don't understand. A woman, even a poverty-poor woman, if she be delicately born and reared, cannot go to another woman on a man's whim, and when she lacks even the barest necessities. I don't refuse to meet your friends. I shall love to, when I can be so dressed that I will not shame you. Until that times comes, if you are the gentleman you appear to be, you will ...
— The Harvester • Gene Stratton Porter
... point his plans had carried with but two minor frustrations: he was disappointed in not having been allowed to build a stockade, and he had been forced prematurely to show his hand to MacNair. The first was the mere accident of a woman's whim, and had been offset to a great extent in the construction ...
— The Gun-Brand • James B. Hendryx
... Clinton, more of his "wardrobe," as he called it, was brought ashore. For this he was indebted to the good-natured persistence of Harry, who, though amused at the vanity of the young man from Brooklyn, felt disposed to gratify him in a harmless whim. ...
— Facing the World • Horatio Alger
... and the flutter and whirr of great wings moving swiftly away from me into the heart of the jungle—the only clue to the author of this vocal tragedy. Once, a Pan of the woods tuned up his pipes—striking a false note now and then, as if it were his whim to appear no more than the veriest amateur; then suddenly, with the full liquid sweetness of his reeds, bursting into a strain so wonderful, so silvery clear, that I lay with mouth open to still the beating of blood in my ears, hardly breathing, that I might ...
— Edge of the Jungle • William Beebe
... nothing awaiting her attention. She was so free that there was no object in breakfasting, because there was no obligation demanding her strength. She was so free that whether she should go out or remain indoors depended merely upon the whim of the moment. There was for her ...
— The Triflers • Frederick Orin Bartlett
... Strickland at all. I racked my brain, but could in no way account for an action so contrary to my conception of him. It was not strange that he should so heartlessly have betrayed his friends' confidence, nor that he hesitated not at all to gratify a whim at the cost of another's misery. That was in his character. He was a man without any conception of gratitude. He had no compassion. The emotions common to most of us simply did not exist in him, and it was as absurd to blame him for not feeling them as for ...
— The Moon and Sixpence • W. Somerset Maugham
... the little girl. "Mother has often said she conna weel spare Alizon. An mayhap Mistress Nutter may knoa, that she con be very obstinate when she tays a whim into her head." ...
— The Lancashire Witches - A Romance of Pendle Forest • William Harrison Ainsworth
... rare common-sense and directness of speech, as of action; a transcendentalist above all, a man of ideas and principles,—that was what distinguished him. Not yielding to a whim or transient impulse, but carrying out the purpose of a life. I noticed that he did not overstate anything, but spoke within bounds. I remember, particularly, how, in his speech here, he referred to what his family had suffered in ...
— A Plea for Captain John Brown • Henry David Thoreau
... She knew how devoted Rex was to Greif, and she felt as though her future husband were to lose his best friend for a meaningless whim of the latter, in which she was involved against ...
— Greifenstein • F. Marion Crawford
... a very interesting type of person who uses weakness as a weapon to gain a purpose, not support. The tears of many women have long been recognized as potent in that warfare that goes on between the sexes; the melting of opposition to the whim or wish when this manifestation of weakness is used is an old story. The emotional display renders the man uncomfortable, it disturbs him, he fears to increase it lest the opponent become sick, his conscience reproaches him, and he yields rather than "make a fuss." Tears can be replaced ...
— The Foundations of Personality • Abraham Myerson
... soiled clothes (an instinctive sign of grief, as fine dresses are of joy), and shave their heads (doubtless done to make some difference from every- day times), accompanied with ceremonial purifications (what ancient people has not had some such whim?). 7. The system of Runda or forbidden meats; but every traveller has found this practice in South as in East Africa, and I noticed it among the Somal who, even when starving, will not touch fish nor fowl. Briefly, external resemblances ...
— Two Trips to Gorilla Land and the Cataracts of the Congo Volume 1 • Richard F. Burton
... whim. I was disgusted with London and society after my return from the front. Those who have been through this terrible war learn to see most things at their true worth, and the frivolity, the snobbishness, and the shams of London society at ...
— The Shrieking Pit • Arthur J. Rees
... unconsidered and foolish whim that they came to me, then?" he interrupted suddenly. "Had I not done enough for them to be of some account, por Dios? Is it that the hombres finos—the gentlemen—need not think as long as there is a man of the people ready to risk ...
— Nostromo: A Tale of the Seaboard • Joseph Conrad
... takes of his CHILDREN! He looks after our domestic as well as our public interests! It was a strange whim in old Fritz to offer each of his soldiers one of the factory ...
— Poems • George P. Morris
... the ruling powers realize that the time for such methods had passed. It was a case of sixteenth-century colonial methods fallen into fretful and frantic senility, so in all this wretched business it is doubtful whim to pity the more: the blind stupidity of the fossilized conservatives incontinently throwing an empire away, forfeiting their influence over a people whom they, by temperament and experience, should have been ...
— The Social Cancer - A Complete English Version of Noli Me Tangere • Jose Rizal
... Occasionally they were fantastic and cheerful. Clearly they reflected the thoughts which possessed him, but whether the music aided those thoughts, or whether the playing was simply the result of a whim or fancy was more than I could determine. I might have rebelled against these exasperating solos had it not been that he usually terminated them by playing in quick succession a whole series of my favourite airs as a slight compensation for the ...
— A Study In Scarlet • Arthur Conan Doyle
... love you and that you love me and nothing else should count," he pleaded impatiently. "Nothing else shall count. There is nothing you could do would make me love you less. You are practical and wise about all your plans. Why has this whim of Lucy's taken hold of you as it has? And it is only a whim; Lucy will want something else in six months. Oh, I cannot—cannot let you go. I'm so desolate without you—my whole life is yours—everything I do is for you. O Jane, my beloved, don't ...
— The Tides of Barnegat • F. Hopkinson Smith
... elasticity of my character. "Well, in the first place, I don't think my ideal would speak like that," said she. "He would be a harder, sterner man, not so ready to adapt himself to a silly girl's whim. But, above all, he must be a man who could do, who could act, who could look Death in the face and have no fear of him, a man of great deeds and strange experiences. It is never a man that I should love, but always the glories he had won; for they would be reflected upon me. Think of Richard ...
— The Lost World • Arthur Conan Doyle
... said carelessly, "you manage so cleverly that I am beginning to trust implicitly to your guidance and knowledge. But there is one thing that puzzles me. It must be more than a whim which makes you think that Herr Renwick will follow ...
— The Secret Witness • George Gibbs
... only a Whim: But I'll have every thing according to form—Therefore when you sign an Authentick Paper, drawn up by an able Lawyer, that I have your Leave to marry, the next Day makes me ...
— The Busie Body • Susanna Centlivre
... spake the lordly ocean: "You are sheen and steadfastness: I am sheen and motion, Gulfing argosies for whim, navies for ...
— An Anthology of Australian Verse • Bertram Stevens
... Anglo-French dictionary, he always used one in Anglo-Latin. The sense of a Latin or Greek word, he said, is better established, more surely fixed, more definite, less liable to capricious peculiarities of convention, than the vernacular words which the whim or ignorance of the lexicographer may choose. The reader composes his own vocabulary, and gains both correctness and energy.[25] However this may be, his knowledge of English was more accurate than is possessed by most French writers of our own day. Diderot's first work for the booksellers ...
— Diderot and the Encyclopaedists (Vol 1 of 2) • John Morley
... indeed, he was anxious to go. But, not being a morbid young man, he did not contemplate carrying a broken heart with him. Teresita was sweet and winsome and maddeningly alluring; he knew it, he felt it still. Indeed, he was made to realize it every time the whim seized her to punish Jack by smiling upon Dade. But she was as capricious as beauty usually is, and he knew that also; and after being used several times as a club with which to beat Jack into proper ...
— The Gringos • B. M. Bower
... N. wit, humor, wittiness; sense of humor; attic wit, attic salt; atticism[obs3]; salt, esprit, point, fancy, whim, drollery, pleasantry. farce, buffoonery, fooling, tomfoolery; shenanigan [U.S.], harlequinade &c. 599[obs3]; broad farce, broad humor; fun, espieglerie[Fr]; vis comica[Lat]. jocularity; jocosity, jocoseness[obs3]; facetiousness; ...
— Roget's Thesaurus
... without any recourse, since they dare not interpose that plea before the Audiencia, as it is so powerless to exercise its functions; consequently, to state the case in few words, the archbishop does whatever suits his whim, without there being any one to ...
— The Philippine Islands, 1493-1898—Volume 39 of 55 • Various
... I endure that for a whim? Who courts torment? Already they drew near with the cunning instruments. Let me say it, and what then? Nothing worse than torture. Let me not say it, and certainly torture. Oh, I was weaker than a child! my body ruled my spirit with its exhaustion and pain. Yet there was a certain satisfaction ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 11, Issue 67, May, 1863 • Various
... well that you declined," he said. "'Twas but a passing whim of mine, and ten minutes later I'd have been sorry for ...
— The Sun Of Quebec - A Story of a Great Crisis • Joseph A. Altsheler
... are near the governmental headquarters; but out a bit there's nothing, Monsieur—not the ghost of a road at all. We get along as best we can over hill and dale, over dwarf palms and mastic-trees. Ne'er a fixed change of horses, the stopping being at the whim of the guard, now at one farm, again ...
— Tartarin of Tarascon • Alphonse Daudet
... who are now, for the second time, raising this cry, know nothing of the crisis in which they are called on to act, or of the nation which they aspire to govern. All their opinions respecting this bill are founded on one great error. They imagine that the public feeling concerning Reform is a mere whim which sprang up suddenly out of nothing, and which will as suddenly vanish into nothing. They, therefore, confidently expect a reaction. They are always looking out for a reaction. Everything that they see, or that they hear, ...
— The Miscellaneous Writings and Speeches of Lord Macaulay, Vol. 4 (of 4) - Lord Macaulay's Speeches • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... disposed to think his such a case at all. It may be a mere whim of self-torment, or it may be spontaneous yielding to a genuine liking for the life he is living. What one human being likes cannot be realized by other ...
— The Unwilling Vestal • Edward Lucas White
... allus argy that a man Who does about the best he can Is plenty good enugh to suit This lower mundane institute— No matter ef his daily walk Is subject fer his neghbor's talk, And critic-minds of ev'ry whim Jest all git up ...
— The Wit and Humor of America, Volume VI. (of X.) • Various
... strange being—a creature of whims and caprices. There is nothing fixed or settled in his opinions or conduct. His inviting you to spend the summer with us was a whim: one that has astonished several who have not hesitated to express it. It is as likely on his return from his river place, that he will devour you with kindness as that he will meet you with the coldness he has manifested for some ...
— The Memories of Fifty Years • William H. Sparks
... time seem short to him, proposed as a kind of merry pastime that they should invent some artful scheme to make Benedick and Beatrice fall in love with each other. Claudio entered with great satisfaction into this whim of the prince, and Leonato promised them his assistance, and even Hero said she would do any modest office to help her cousin to a ...
— Tales from Shakespeare • Charles and Mary Lamb
... know that I shall pay my debts of every kind some sure day. That should satisfy your justice, but you are merciful for the moment, and you will spare until the time be come, until the corn is ripe in the ear. Why should I plead? It is foolish. Still, it is my whim, of which, perhaps, I shall be sorry tomorrow . . . Hark!" he added, and then shrugged his shoulders and smiled. There were sounds of hoof beats coming faintly to them. Father Corraine threw open the door of the other room of the hut, and ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker
... accursed, that frightful staircase of mishaps and crimes, which had brought it to a depth so low. Much, however, cares our fine fellow for all that! To him soul and Devil seem born for each other, insomuch that on the first temptation, for a whim, a desire, a passing fancy, the soul will throw itself at one stroke into so horrible ...
— La Sorciere: The Witch of the Middle Ages • Jules Michelet
... literary interests, to bear witness to the Shandy craze, but the attitude of the review is plainly indicative of its author's disbelief in any occasion for especial concern about Yorick in Germany. Sterne himself is mentioned as a fitful whim of British taste, and a German devotion to him is ...
— Laurence Sterne in Germany • Harvey Waterman Thayer
... I afraid of? Why, you don't know how to ride. Lord save us, what might happen! What whim is this has come over ...
— The Torrents of Spring • Ivan Turgenev
... and indeed an almost unique, example of this kind of sympathetic imagination in Shakespeare, who becomes so sensitive, sometimes, to the thought, the feeling, nay, the mere whim or habit of body of his characters, that we feel, to use his own words, as if "the dull substance of his flesh were thought." It is not in mere intensity of phrase, but in the fitness of it to the feeling, the character, or the situation, that this phase of the imaginative faculty gives witness ...
— The Function Of The Poet And Other Essays • James Russell Lowell
... in order to make the abnormal seem more shocking, or else it is a confession of frivolity, a confession that, as an idiot never learns to distinguish reality amid the phantasms of his brain, so we have never learned to distinguish true goods amid our extravagances of whim and passion. That true goods exist is nevertheless a fact of moral experience. "A thing of beauty is a joy for ever"; a great affection, a clear thought, a profound and well-tried faith, are eternal possessions. ...
— The Sense of Beauty - Being the Outlines of Aesthetic Theory • George Santayana
... hand, they show themselves insensible to all genuine illusion, that is, of entering vividly into the spirit of the fable: for them Ralph, however heroically and chivalrously he may conduct himself, is always Ralph their apprentice; and in the whim of the moment they take upon them to demand scenes which are quite inconsistent with the plan of the piece that has been commenced. In short, the views and demands with which poets are often oppressed by a prosaical public are very cleverly and ...
— Lectures on Dramatic Art and Literature • August Wilhelm Schlegel
... it is with human happiness— Each seeks his own according to his whim; One toils for wealth, one Fame alone can bless, One asks a quid—a quid is all ...
— Tobacco; Its History, Varieties, Culture, Manufacture and Commerce • E. R. Billings
... the old lady. "You're letting that weigh with you, I see. Don't do it! If it wasn't wise, don't you suppose that the last thing he could wish you to do would be to sacrifice yourself to a sick whim of his?" ...
— Annie Kilburn - A Novel • W. D. Howells
... it to. On this evening the King, glancing all around him, cast his eye upon me, and told the valet to give the candle to me. It was an honour which he bestowed sometimes upon one, sometimes upon another, according to his whim, but which, by his manner of bestowing it, was always coveted, as a great distinction. My surprise may be imagined when I heard myself named aloud for this office, not only on this but on many other occasions. It was not that there was any lack of people of consideration ...
— Marguerite de Navarre - Memoirs of Marguerite de Valois Queen of Navarre • Marguerite de Navarre
... had largely contributed to whitewashing and otherwise ornamenting the church, had taken it into her head that the soul of a favourite daughter had passed into a robin. The Dean and Chapter indulged her in the whim, and she was allowed to keep a kind of aviary in her private seat. 'Just by the high altar is a small pew hung with green damask, with curtains of the same, and a small corner cupboard painted, carved, and gilt, for birds in one corner.'[889] In Ripon Cathedral, some of the old tabernacle work of ...
— The English Church in the Eighteenth Century • Charles J. Abbey and John H. Overton
... has been guilty of any offence. The prosperous man of the world, who thinks himself entitled to use all his own for his own sole gratification, will hear of these things with incredulity, and pity Ellis and Nash as enthusiasts, who foolishly sacrifice themselves for a whim; but we greatly doubt if the worldling's proudest or most luxurious hour gives one-half the true satisfaction which these men enjoy in the midst of their ragged adherents, under the blessed hope of rescuing them from destruction in this world ...
— Chambers's Edinburgh Journal, No. 427 - Volume 17, New Series, March 6, 1852 • Various
... all fish of the ray kind, as well as against sharks; and whilst they devour with eager avidity the blubber of a whale or porpoise, a piece of skate would excite disgust. Our good natured Indian had been ridiculed by the sailors for this unaccountable whim, but he had not been cured; and it so happened, that the fish he had speared this morning were three small rays and a mullet. This last, being the most delicate, he presented to Mr. Westall and me, so soon as it was cooked; and then ...
— A Voyage to Terra Australis Volume 2 • Matthew Flinders
... infancy was a sine qua non. They especially wished that the child should be too young to have acquired tastes or habits of any kind, whether good or the reverse. They did not seek to gratify a mere whim of the moment,—simply to provide themselves with a plaything,—but hoped to aid in shaping a life of more than ordinary usefulness and worth. The doctor made answer that he would gladly do his best to find such a child as they wished, that he had no doubt of ultimate ...
— Lippincott's Magazine Of Popular Literature And Science, Old Series, Vol. 36—New Series, Vol. 10, July 1885 • Various
... Lana be asleep at this moment I do not know.... She tells me I have broke her heart—but yet will have none of me.... Tells me my duty lies elsewhere; that I shall make amends. How can a man make amends when his heart lies not in the deed?... Am I then to be fettered to a passing whim for all eternity? Does an instant's idle folly entail endless responsibility? Do I merit punishment everlasting for a silly amourette that lasted no longer than the July moon? Tell me, Loskiel, you who are called among us ...
— The Hidden Children • Robert W. Chambers
... his discourteous whim to keep them waiting in the back of the room until he had finished. They were offered no seats, but stood against the wall under the eye of the guard who had ...
— Steve Yeager • William MacLeod Raine
... chapters will have seen that it had not been called upon to make any exceptional effort to sap it of its reserve forces. In fact, it had simply been marched and countermarched along dusty tracks at the whim of a superior officer. Yet under this mild usage the column had arrived back at a base with 25 per cent of its animals useless and an equal proportion whose days of usefulness were numbered. The sole reason for this was the fact that the animals had never been trained to long distances ...
— On the Heels of De Wet • The Intelligence Officer
... his first hours in his expensive cot He never saw the tiniest viscount shot. In deference to his wealthy parents' whim The wildest massacres were kept from him. The wars that dyed Pall Mall and Brompton red Passed harmless o'er that one unconscious head: For all that little Long could understand The rich might still be rulers of the land. Vain are ...
— Poems • G.K. Chesterton
... ten years longer. In the year 1245, for his tardiness in joining the King's army in Wales, he was succeeded by the false-hearted Geoffrey de Mountmorres, who held the office till 1247. During the next twenty-five years, about half as many Justices were placed and displaced, according to the whim of the successive favourites at the English Court. In 1252, Prince Edward, afterwards Edward I., was appointed with the title of Lord Lieutenant, but never came over. Nor is there in the series of rulers we have numbered, with, perhaps, ...
— A Popular History of Ireland - From the earliest period to the emancipation of the Catholics • Thomas D'Arcy McGee
... of this sudden whim for an unpremeditated cup of tea at home she scarcely took the trouble to analyse. Yet, she was becoming conscious of a subtle and increasing exhilaration as she approached her house ...
— The Crimson Tide • Robert W. Chambers
... capricious philosopher would not live at Chiswick because it was too near town. Hume then got him a gentleman's house in the Peak of Derby, but Rousseau would not enter it unless the owner agreed to take board. Hume induced the owner to gratify even this whim, and Rousseau departed and established himself comfortably at Wootton in the Peak of Derby. Hume next procured for him a pension of L100 a year from the king. Rousseau would not touch it unless it were kept secret; the king agreed to keep it secret. Rousseau then would not have ...
— Life of Adam Smith • John Rae
... Strangest in this, that so soon as dawn had come, I, who had talked with God, crept out of the house like a rat leaving its hiding place—a creature scarcely larger, an inferior animal, a thing that for any passing whim of our masters might be hunted and killed. Perhaps they also prayed confidently to God. Surely, if we have learned nothing else, this war has taught us pity—pity for those witless souls that suffer ...
— The War of the Worlds • H. G. Wells
... she is beautiful; or, of the steamboat Benjamin Franklin, she is out of date. It were far better to use no gender in such cases. But if people will continue the practice of making distinctions where there are none, they must do it from habit and whim, and not ...
— Lectures on Language - As Particularly Connected with English Grammar. • William S. Balch
... Kulan Tith," he continued, "upon the occasion of your last visit to me, you were greatly taken with the charms and graces of my only daughter, Thuvia. You saw how I adored her, and later you learned that, inspired by some unfathomable whim, she had taken the last, long, voluntary pilgrimage upon the cold bosom of the mysterious Iss, ...
— Warlord of Mars • Edgar Rice Burroughs
... apparently a perfect understanding between them, and the master first glanced up and made sure of the position of the sun and the length of time he might allow for the trip home, before he decided to follow the whim of the wolf-dog. Then he turned Satan and cantered, with the piebald trailing, ...
— The Night Horseman • Max Brand
... stones, which will prevent the trickling of the embankment into the chamber; next with sweepings of dust, under which every vestige of the subterranean house disappears. It is now done: the Tachytes will come here no more. Other burrows will occupy her, distributed at the whim of her vagabond humour. ...
— More Hunting Wasps • J. Henri Fabre
... to all seeming a strange whim that caused Cardinal Mazarin, one day in the year 1653, to summon his nieces, daughters of his sister, Hieronyme Mancini, from their obscurity in Italy to bask in the sunshine of ...
— Love affairs of the Courts of Europe • Thornton Hall
... stepped meekly aside and Mrs. Mosby—Aunt Loraine—joined the group, giving him a momentary withering glance. She was an inexorable woman, an inch taller than Uncle Buzz, who stood five feet three, but she matched him whim for whim in her attire. Her hair looked black in the graying light; in reality it was splotched and streaked with a chestnut red, colour not so ill as misapplied. Her dress rustled as she swept forward and there were numberless faint ...
— Stubble • George Looms
... was, as we have said, a rambling sort of structure. Ramifying from a solid centre, which gave the notion of a founder well to do in the world, additions, without any architectural pretensions to fitness, were stuck on here and there, as whim or necessity suggested or demanded, and a most incongruous mass of gables, roofs, and chimneys, odd windows and blank walls, was the consequence. According to the circumstances of the occupants who inherited the property, ...
— Handy Andy, Volume One - A Tale of Irish Life, in Two Volumes • Samuel Lover
... an hour of this mode of progress, he struck in toward the beach, disembarked in ankle-deep waters, slung the rifle over his shoulder by its strap and, pushing the dory off, abandoned it to the whim of the sea. ...
— The False Faces • Vance, Louis Joseph
... man. The encysted child developed until it reached years of virility, until those later Oxford days in which Hogg encountered it; then, bursting at once from its cyst and the university, it swam into a world not illegitimately perplexed by such a whim of the gods. It was, of course, only the completeness and duration of this seclusion—lasting from the gate of boyhood to the threshold of youth—which was peculiar to Shelley. Most poets, probably, like most saints, are prepared for ...
— Shelley - An Essay • Francis Thompson
... old Ocean, affects us moderns with astonishment at the extraordinary thoroughness of all the ancient Roman feats of engineering; had this high road across the Bay been intended to serve any useful purpose, instead of merely to satisfy the passing whim of a selfish tyrant, we could have had no choice but to admire the marvellous speed of the artificers and the completeness of the ...
— The Naples Riviera • Herbert M. Vaughan
... later the painting was delivered by a porter from the auction room. But Lanyard was in his bath at the time and postponed examining his doubtful prize till he had dressed for dinner. For, though it was his whim to dine in his rooms alone, and though he had no fixed plans for the evening, Lanyard was too thoroughly cosmopolitan not to do in Cockaigne as ...
— Red Masquerade • Louis Joseph Vance
... had thought——She bowed to kismet and strangled her feelings as she had so many times before. And so after a shake of the hand, Mr. Middleton left her, left her to learn as the idol of Mr. Crayburn's life, with every whim gratified, that the first American she had known ...
— The Strange Adventures of Mr. Middleton • Wardon Allan Curtis
... old Dede Antanas; Jurgis would have had him rest too, but he was forced to acknowledge that this was not possible, and, besides, the old man would not hear it spoken of—it was his whim to insist that he was as lively as any boy. He had come to America as full of hope as the best of them; and now he was the chief problem that worried his son. For every one that Jurgis spoke to assured him that it was a ...
— The Jungle • Upton Sinclair
... of Hamburg an event occurred which occasioned considerable irritation in the public mind, and might have been attended by fatal consequences. From some whim or other the General ordered the gates to be closed at seven in the evening, and consequently while it was broad daylight, for it was in the middle of spring; no exception was made in favour of Sunday, and on that day a great number of the inhabitants who had been walking ...
— The Memoirs of Napoleon Bonaparte • Bourrienne, Constant, and Stewarton
... the chapel was in full swing. A roar of voices raised in a marching hymn swept out to the deserted street. Dean's lips curved contemptuously for a moment. Then the whim came to him to finish his night's amusement by a sarcastic enjoyment of the revivalist service. He would go inside and watch other people ...
— Swirling Waters • Max Rittenberg
... States are being wooed. Ever since the Western powers' hope of speedy decisive blows on the part of Russia have shriveled up, they would like to lure the Japanese Army, two to four hundred thousand men, to the Continent. What was scoffed at as a whim of Pinchon and Clemenceau now is unveiled as a yearning of those at the head ...
— New York Times Current History; The European War, Vol 2, No. 2, May, 1915 - April-September, 1915 • Various
... means to indulge every whim and fancy she'll spend everything she has before she is fairly grown. She's too young to understand and she has been brought up so far in an irresponsible fashion. Generosity ...
— A Little Girl in Old Boston • Amanda Millie Douglas
... there is so much to refresh one in the reasonable transparency of Hooker, representing thus early the tradition of a classical clearness in English literature, anticipated by Latimer and More, and to be fulfilled afterwards in Butler and Hume. But then, in recompense for that looseness and whim, in Sir Thomas Browne for instance, we have in those "quaint" writers, as they themselves understood the term (coint, adorned, but adorned with all the curious ornaments of their own predilection, provincial [126] ...
— Appreciations, with an Essay on Style • Walter Horatio Pater
... tells? To repeat it all would require years and days; for year by year it is telling the old stories, sometimes short ones, sometimes long ones, according to its whim; it tells of old times, of ...
— What the Moon Saw: and Other Tales • Hans Christian Andersen
... to the twentieth century author, notwithstanding its apparent caprice, has always been governed by immutable laws. But these laws were not recognised in the benighted epoch in which we happen to live at present. On the contrary, Fashion is thought a whim, a sort of shuttlecock for the weak-minded of both sexes to make rise and fall, bound and rebound with the battledore called—social influence. But it will interest a great many people to learn that Fashion assumed the dignity of a ...
— The Strand Magazine, Volume V, Issue 30, June 1893 - An Illustrated Monthly • Various
... is the rock nuthatch, an appellation that is most appropriate, for its chosen haunts are rocky cliffs, over the faces of which it scuttles in the most approved nuthatch fashion, head up or down, as the whim seizes it, clinging with its sharp claws to the chinks, ledges, protuberances, and rough surfaces of the rocky walls. A little larger than its European cousin, its markings are quite similar. In Syria it is common as far north as the southern shores of the Black Sea. Although somewhat shy, it ...
— Our Bird Comrades • Leander S. (Leander Sylvester) Keyser
... feel sometimes as if you yourself had been merely a puppet worked by some secret and unseen hand to bring terrible events to a terrible issue. But puppets themselves have passions. They will bring a new plot into what they are presenting, and twist the ordered issue of vicissitude to suit some whim or appetite of their own. To be entirely free, and at the same time entirely dominated by law, is the eternal paradox of human life that we realise at every moment; and this, I often think, is the only explanation possible of your nature, ...
— Oscar Wilde, Volume 2 (of 2) - His Life and Confessions • Frank Harris
... consult me! Of course I could stop any further contribution on her part, but consideration for your readers (?) prevents that—to say nothing of her determination to continue—so I have therefore consented to her odd whim, on the condition that in future I "edit" her contributions;—I need hardly assure you that I shall confine my "editing" strictly to these limits, and that your own Editor need be under no apprehension ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 103, November 12, 1892 • Various
... sake of being sociable—I knew that much. The big idea was to get next to Marcus T. Runyon and thresh out a certain proposition on a face-to-face basis. And if he chucked that overboard because of a whim, we stood to lose. ...
— The House of Torchy • Sewell Ford
... I thought: why, now, any blackguard, any whippersnapper, any shattered ancient can take any one of these women to himself for a minute or for a night, as a momentary whim; and indifferently, one superfluous time more—the thousand and first—profane and defile in her that which is the most precious in a human being—love... Do you understand—revile, trample it underfoot, pay for the ...
— Yama (The Pit) • Alexandra Kuprin
... at supper concerning those that are said to bewitch or have a bewitching eye, most of the company looked upon it as a whim, and laughed at it. But Metrius Florus, who then gave us a supper, said that the strange events wonderfully confirmed the report; and because we cannot give a reason for the thing, therefore to disbelieve the relation was absurd, since there are a thousand things ...
— Essays and Miscellanies - The Complete Works Volume 3 • Plutarch
... larger import than the good pleasure of the Queen; or the wisdom of holding the Queen and the Prince Royal in a fortress, when the land is not at war—as if her own people might not be trusted with her life. But the argument did not touch the Council—not more than the whim of us—of Venice"—he spoke bitterly. "Before, ...
— The Royal Pawn of Venice - A Romance of Cyprus • Mrs. Lawrence Turnbull
... chroma[2] of our sensations, and not attempting to describe them by the indefinite and varying colors of natural objects. The system now to be considered portrays the three dimensions of color, and measures each by an appropriate scale. It does not rest upon the whim of an individual, but upon physical measurements made possible by special color apparatus. The results may be tested by any one who comes to the problem with "a clear mind, a good eye, and a fair supply ...
— A Color Notation - A measured color system, based on the three qualities Hue, - Value and Chroma • Albert H. Munsell
... subject of discussion for many days. He had purchased a wonderful pair of pistols as a gift for a young friend. How it had happened that one had been loaded none knew; it was just possible that he had been seized with the whim to load it himself—at all events, it had gone off in his hands. An inch—nay, half an inch—to the right, and Madame Villefort, who flew downstairs at the sound of the report, would only have found a ...
— "Le Monsieur De La Petite Dame" • Frances Hodgson Burnett
... motive for this strange course of the Senate; before even suspecting that it grew out of any concealed hate toward the whole measure and was indeed a trick to defeat it. Whoever, in either House, gratifies some personal whim to the extent of defeating or even postponing this measure will incur the gravest responsibility. We exhort every man who professes himself a friend of liberty to drop all undue attachment to any form of words and to co-operate, heartily, earnestly, with the great ...
— Reminiscences of Sixty Years in Public Affairs, Vol. 2 • George S. Boutwell
... as one of the old poplars," I said to myself as some whim made me go down the steps and out into the garden, along the walks with their budding borders of narcissus and peonies, down through Nickols' sunken garden to the two oldest of all the poplars that now seemed to be standing sentinel to prevent any raid from me on the little ...
— The Heart's Kingdom • Maria Thompson Daviess
... M. Chebe had succeeded in gratifying his latest whim. For three months past he had been living at his famous warehouse on the Rue du Mail, and a great sensation was created in the quarter by that shop without merchandise, the shutters of which were taken down in the morning and put up ...
— Fromont and Risler, Complete • Alphonse Daudet
... next morning, through some whim of Sergeant Corney's, who insisted that the Minute Boys should be the first to make an appearance, and I left the barracks fully expecting to find a scene of ...
— The Minute Boys of the Mohawk Valley • James Otis
... more.' Now, Mrs. E. had always enjoyed seeing her husband smoke; it had often proved a powerful sedative to him when wearied with the cares of life, and the numberless irritations of his trying vocation, and therefore she replied, 'Nonsense, you will soon repent of that whim. I shall get two ounces as usual, and I know you'll smoke it.' 'I shall never touch it again,' was his firm reply, and ever after ...
— The Hero of the Humber - or the History of the Late Mr. John Ellerthorpe • Henry Woodcock
... and so elusive as never to get within the grasp of my mind's eye; just a woman whom I had endowed with every grace; whose kindly spirit shone through eyes, now brown, now blue, now black, according to my latest whim; who ofttimes worn, or perhaps feigning weariness, rested on my shoulder a little head, crowned with a glory of hair sometimes black, and sometimes golden or auburn, and not infrequently red, a dashing, ...
— The Soldier of the Valley • Nelson Lloyd
... it was a whim, and nobody could persuade her to lay it aside; whereat the young man laughed, but ...
— The Violet Fairy Book • Various
... of other unreasonable realities which fill the path of the evolutionist with never-quenched enthusiasm, will extend far beyond the colors of two tropical birds. They will have something to do with flowers and with bright butterflies, and we shall know why our "favorite color" is more than a whim, and why the Greeks may not have been able to distinguish the full gamut of our spectrum, and why rainbows are so narrow to our eyes in comparison ...
— Edge of the Jungle • William Beebe
... government. Imperial whims, it was said, override grave economic considerations. In recent years, however, a change seems to have taken place in public opinion, and some people now venture to assert that this so-called Imperial whim was an act of far-seeing policy. As by far the greater part of the goods and passengers are carried the whole length of the line, it is well that the line should be as short as possible, and that branch lines should be constructed ...
— Railway Adventures and Anecdotes - extending over more than fifty years • Various
... the way of a trap-door, announcing the speedy opening of the seventh vial, which he carried in his vest-pocket; but, which, instead of containing gunpowder, was supposed to be charged with laudanum. A strange, apostolic whim having seized him, he had left Neskyeuna for Nantucket, where, with that cunning peculiar to craziness, he assumed a steady, common-sense exterior, and offered himself as a green-hand candidate for the Jeroboam's whaling voyage. They engaged him; but straightway upon the ship's ...
— Moby Dick; or The Whale • Herman Melville
... doing. But Martie hoped that he would not. The one possible stumbling-block in her path would be Wallace's objection; the one thing of which she would not allow herself to think was that he MIGHT, by some hideous whim, decide to accompany them. Thinking of these things, she went about the process of house-cleaning and packing. The beds, the chairs, the china and linen and blankets must bring what they could. ...
— Martie the Unconquered • Kathleen Norris
... with a stealthy glance at the Magic Skin. It hung there before him, fastened down upon some white material, surrounded by a red line accurately traced about its prophetic outlines. Since that fatal carouse, Raphael had stifled every least whim, and had lived so as not to cause the slightest movement in the terrible talisman. The Magic Skin was like a tiger with which he must live without exciting its ferocity. He bore patiently, therefore, with the ...
— The Magic Skin • Honore de Balzac
... be able to get away in unquestioned possession of his treasure. True, the suggestion that they lunch together at Eugene's had been his.... But he had forgotten the engagement, if ever he had meant to keep it, if the notion had been more than a whim of the moment with him. And O'Hagan had told her by telephone that Maitland had left his rooms at one o'clock—in ample time to meet her ...
— The Brass Bowl • Louis Joseph Vance
... and storms; Tete Rouge's was bloated by sherry cobblers and brandy toddy. Henry talked of Indians and buffalo; Tete Rouge of theaters and oyster cellars. Henry had led a life of hardship and privation; Tete Rouge never had a whim which he would not gratify at the first moment he was able. Henry moreover was the most disinterested man I ever saw; while Tete Rouge, though equally good-natured in his way, cared for nobody but himself. Yet we would not have ...
— The Oregon Trail • Francis Parkman, Jr.
... of worship that proved, as it was bound to prove, disastrous. It seems to have been Henry Fox's deliberate belief that the best way to bring up a spirited, gifted, headstrong child was to gratify every wish, surrender to every whim, and pander to every passion that ebullient youth could feel. The anecdotes of the day teem with tales of the fantastic homage that Fox paid to the desires and moods of his imperious infant. He made him his companion while he was still ...
— A History of the Four Georges and of William IV, Volume III (of 4) • Justin McCarthy and Justin Huntly McCarthy
... my loves go further—to Story, and Dance, and Hymn, The lover of all in a sun-sweep is fool to whim - Is swayed like a river-weed as the ripples run!" - "Nay, wight, thou sway'st not. These are but phases ...
— Poems of the Past and the Present • Thomas Hardy
... on the prettiest neck conceivable, and her shapely little shoulders and her shapely little arms came decidedly but pleasantly out of a softness and sparkle of white and silver and old rose. She talked what sounded like innocent commonplaces a little spiced by whim, though indeed each remark had an exploratory quality, and her soft blue eyes rested ever and again upon Billy's white tie. It seemed she did so by the merest inadvertency, but it made the young man wish he had after all borrowed a black one from Benham. ...
— The Research Magnificent • H. G. Wells
... almost carte blanche, having at one vacillatory period of his Prime Ministership been talked by her into some agreement with her own plans. And in regard to money he would say to himself that he ought not to interfere with any whim of hers on that score, unless he thought it right to crush the whim on some other score. Half what he possessed had been hers, and even if during this year he were to spend more than his income,—if he were to double or even treble ...
— The Prime Minister • Anthony Trollope
... chary of letting her lover discover how much she admired him. She never once held an idea in opposition to any one of his, or insisted on any point with him, or showed any independence, or held her own on any subject. His lightest whim she respected and obeyed as law, and if, expressing her opinion on a matter, he took up the subject and differed from her, she instantly threw down her own opinion as wrong and untenable. Even her ambiguities and espieglerie were but media of the same manifestation; ...
— A Pair of Blue Eyes • Thomas Hardy
... and dainty, for whom no one had been good enough—should have fallen thus easily to the careless attraction of a man to whom she was nothing, nothing but a piece of prettiness to be bought as cheaply as possible and treasured not at all. Some whim of inspiration had moved him. He had obeyed his Muse. And he had been ready—he had been ready—even to offer her life in sacrifice to his idol. She did not count with him in the smallest degree. He had ...
— The Tidal Wave and Other Stories • Ethel May Dell
... in no hurry. He had not yet worked out an explanation for the strange whim that had sent him home after an absence of thirteen years and he wanted time to study over it. His lips took on a satiric curl as he meditated, riding slowly down into the valley. It was inexplicable, ...
— The Boss of the Lazy Y • Charles Alden Seltzer
... dance of the soil here, the dance of the blood. And in the tarantella each of the dancers seemed governed by his own sweet will, possessed by a merry, mad devil, whose promptings he followed with a sort of gracious and charming violence, giving himself up joyously, eagerly, utterly—to what? To his whim. Was the tarantella an allegory of life here? How strangely well Maurice had danced it on that first day of their arrival. She felt again that sense of separation which brought with it ...
— The Call of the Blood • Robert Smythe Hichens
... Marina and Venice,'" was the scornful answer, "but Venice first. Splendor and gifts and the pleasing of every whim, if he could but guess it—gold for her asking, and her palace no better than a cross for her dwelling; for the one thing she needeth for her peace and life he ...
— A Golden Book of Venice • Mrs. Lawrence Turnbull
... her that there was no whim of hers but should be gratified, the fancy took her that, if she might find apt means, she would, before she died, make her love and her resolve known to the King: wherefore one day she besought her father to cause Minuccio d'Arezzo, to come to her; which Minuccio, was a singer and ...
— The Decameron, Vol. II. • Giovanni Boccaccio
... first and second mates, and a crew of six able-bodied sailors and one gaunt youth whose sole knowledge of navigation had been gained on an Atlantic City catboat. Her destination was vague—Panama perhaps, possibly a South American port, depending on the weather and the whim ...
— The After House • Mary Roberts Rinehart
... said she had authority— The Lady Blanche: much profit! Not one word; No! though your father sues: see how you stand Stiff as Lot's wife, and all the good knights maimed, I trust that there is no one hurt to death, For our wild whim: and was it then for this, Was it for this we gave our palace up, Where we withdrew from summer heats and state, And had our wine and chess beneath the planes, And many a pleasant hour with her that's gone, Ere you were born to vex us? Is it kind? Speak to her I say: is ...
— The Princess • Alfred Lord Tennyson
... manners!" he exclaimed. "You are here at my pleasure. It was no whim, my carrying you off. After you left I went to the manor, where I tried to forget you. But nights of revelry—why should I not confess it?—could not efface your memory." His voice unconsciously sank to unreserved ...
— The Strollers • Frederic S. Isham
... She knew better than to attempt to excuse or explain. She had heard about the Society and she knew publicity would spell ruin and starvation. She had got herself into an appalling mess. Being caught—there you were. But that this evil-reputationed swell should actually have been awakened by some whim to notice and follow her up was "past her," as she would have ...
— The Head of the House of Coombe • Frances Hodgson Burnett
... best of men that be; * And oh, thou lord of learning, grace and fair humanity, Thee-wards I come because my way of life is strait to me: * O help! and let me not despair thine equity to see. Deign thou redress the wrong that dealt the tyrant whim of him * Who better had my life destroyed than made such wrong to dree. He robbed me of my wife Su'ad and proved him worst of foes, * Stealing mine honour 'mid my folk with foul iniquity; And went about to take my life before ...
— The Book of the Thousand Nights and a Night, Volume 7 • Richard F. Burton
... as Marcone the goldsmith. He was a most excellent craftsman and a very good fellow to boot, high-spirited and frank in all his ways. My father would not let him give me wages like the other apprentices; for having taken up the study of this art to please myself, he wished me to indulge my whim for drawing to the full. I did so willingly enough; and that honest master of mine took marvellous delight in my performances. He had an only son, a bastard, to whom he often gave his orders, in order to spare me. My liking for the art was so great, or, I may truly say, my natural bias, both one ...
— The Autobiography of Benvenuto Cellini • Benvenuto Cellini
... passage very tedious; but the boats were constantly out, chasing the vessels along shore, and Jack usually asked to be employed on this service; indeed, although so short a time afloat, he was, from his age and strength, one of the most effective midshipmen, and to be trusted, provided a whim did not come into his head; but hitherto Jack had always been under orders, and had always ...
— Mr. Midshipman Easy • Frederick Marryat
... strange whim: why, the poor girl never opened her lips to me on the subject of religion during her life; nor, if I saw that she attempted it, would I permit her. I am no theologian, papa, and detest polemics, because I have always heard that those who are most ...
— Willy Reilly - The Works of William Carleton, Volume One • William Carleton
... you here At infinite cost and trouble; you have had An hour of insight and experience New and instructive to you; your best friend Has found eternal bliss: and now you turn, And just because your uttermost crazy whim Is not quite satisfied with what he grasped Thankfully, you revert, with sorry taste, To my old careless generous remarks. I do not think your friends at home would ...
— Mr. Faust • Arthur Davison Ficke
... up the last of his gay song-birds and put an end to their carnival. The poker game, however, was still in progress at the big round table. Already numerous early risers were hurrying in to fortify themselves against the raw day just breaking, and among these last-named, by some evil whim of fate, chanced to be the man for whom Sam Kirby had so patiently waited. The fellow had not come seeking trouble—no one who knew the one-armed gambler's reputation sought trouble with him—but, learning that Kirby was still awake and ...
— The Winds of Chance • Rex Beach
... show their contempt for the Hindu social order, as this ornament was formerly forbidden to the lower castes. Under native dynasties any violation of a rule of this kind would have been severely punished by the executive Government, but in British India the Chamar women can indulge their whim with impunity. It was also a rule of the sect not to accept cooked food from the hands of any other caste, whether Hindu or Muhammadan, but this has fallen into abeyance since the famines. Another method by which the Satnamis show their contempt for the Hindu religion ...
— The Tribes and Castes of the Central Provinces of India—Volume I (of IV) • R.V. Russell
... again in Drury Lane Court, now disappeared. Most likely it was the latter, if any of these neighbourhoods, though it is all hearsay now, though formerly one of the "stock sights" of the "Lady Guide Association," who undertook to gratify any reasonable whim of the inquisitive American. ...
— Dickens' London • Francis Miltoun
... and even something of lassitude; through an ease of manners sometimes sinking into effeminate softness, sometimes bordering upon licentious effrontery,—his eye thoughtful, yet wandering, seemed to announce that the mind partook but little of the whim of the moment, or of those levities of ordinary life over which the grace of his manner threw so peculiar a charm. His brow was, perhaps, rather too large and prominent for the exactness of perfect symmetry, ...
— Devereux, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... fate of cities, yes; but how of my fate, and that of those we love? Are we all to be ruined, and perhaps slaughtered, to satisfy your whim, girl?" ...
— Elissa • H. Rider Haggard
... I forgive him everything!—[Aloud.] But, Sir, when I take a whim in my head, I don't value money. I'll give you as much for that as for all ...
— The School For Scandal • Richard Brinsley Sheridan
... taking out a little phial from his waistcoat pocket, dropped a dose from it into a wine-glass and forced it between the man's lips. "Don't make an ass of yourself, Nigel. The shot you fired was nothing—the mere whim of a man, whose brain had been fired by champagne and who wasn't therefore ...
— The Riddle of the Frozen Flame • Mary E. Hanshew
... shared with him his student life,—who bore with him the dreary desolation of the siege without complaint,—this slender blue-eyed girl whom he was so quietly fond of, whom he teased or caressed as the whim suited, who sometimes made him the least bit impatient with her passionate devotion to him,—could this be the same Sylvia who lay weeping there ...
— The King In Yellow • Robert W. Chambers
... Frederick, 'and must press you for a plain and straightforward answer. Is what you have just said only a mere whim of the moment, occasioned by your being out of humour and irritated, or is it your serious intention, and one that you ...
— The Life And Adventures Of Nicholas Nickleby • Charles Dickens
... subject of our sketch was not disposed to undertake an enterprise and then abandon it. She had trials of other kinds, to bear. The surgeons afforded her few or no facilities for her work; and evidently expected that her whim of nursing would soon be given over. Then came the general order for the removal of volunteer nurses from the hospitals; this she evaded by enrolling herself as nurse, and drawing army pay, which she distributed to the men. For nearly a year ...
— Woman's Work in the Civil War - A Record of Heroism, Patriotism, and Patience • Linus Pierpont Brockett
... art, that the Erichtheas, Circes, and Medeas, of whom old histories, I am told, are full, were not to be compared to her. She congealed the clouds when she pleased, and covered the face of the sun with them; and when the whim seized her, she made the murkiest sky clear up at once. She fetched men in an instant from remote lands; admirably relieved the distresses of damsels who had forgot themselves for a moment; enabled widows to console ...
— The Exemplary Novels of Cervantes • Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra
... outlives the necessity from which, it sprang; power to control others awakens and gratifies self-love, and habit makes it strong. Thus need gives place to whim; thus do prejudices and opinions ...
— Emile - or, Concerning Education; Extracts • Jean Jacques Rousseau
... all the results of later scholarship on the matters of origins and interpretations. Its bibliographies and extended commentaries make it invaluable. The story of Phaethon is usually thought of as a warning against presumption, conceit, whim, self-will. It was probably invented in the first place to account for the extremely hot ...
— Children's Literature - A Textbook of Sources for Teachers and Teacher-Training Classes • Charles Madison Curry
... concluded. "She only, amongst us all, has the art even to seem superior: but as to being unsuspicious, inexperienced, &c., Dr. John need not distract himself about that. However, this is just his whim, and I will not contradict him; he shall be humoured: his angel shall ...
— Villette • Charlotte Bronte
... Raman and the great gods who dwell there, pluck his name and seed from the land and let him sit bound at the feet of his foe." Most inscriptions end with invocations of the same kind, for, in the words of Menant: "it was not mere whim which impelled the kings of Assyria to build so assiduously. Palaces had in those times a destination which they have no longer in ours. Not only was the palace indeed the dwelling of royalty, as the inscriptions have it,—it was also the BOOK, which each sovereign began at his ...
— Chaldea - From the Earliest Times to the Rise of Assyria • Znade A. Ragozin
... like fiends, and cost me several good men that I could ill spare. Your gratitude, therefore," and I thought I detected an echo of something very like scorn in his voice, "is due solely to my boy Pedro, whose whim of saving you I did not even then care to thwart. But enough of this; you are my guest, and may, if you will, become my friend. I hope your ...
— The Pirate Slaver - A Story of the West African Coast • Harry Collingwood
... specially necessary to him; he absolutely could not get on without her—and to the end she always carried out every whim of the sick man, though sometimes she could not bring herself to answer at once for fear the sound of her voice should betray her inward anger. Thus he lingered on for two years and died on the first day of May, when he had been brought out on to the balcony into the sun. ...
— A House of Gentlefolk • Ivan Turgenev
... Constance," he said. "I fear the world gives me too much credit. I have nothing to do with this whim of Adrien's save to pay out the salaries for the company. The management is his—or rather, perhaps, I should say, Miss Lester's; and I am not answerable for its failure or its successes. I believe, too, he is about to give the ...
— Adrien Leroy • Charles Garvice
... transitory as that of the wandering tribes of Arabia. Many of these Indian tribes were composed of a few families under the domination of a chief who went out from his kindred as Abraham did, and planted his tents where fancy led him, and moved at his whim or with his game. Every one of the Indian tribes that had been driven by the white man from the east and the south chose his camping and hunting grounds in the region of the O-hi-o, often driving away a weaker tribe. Their contests with white men had given them some knowledge ...
— Recollections of Forty Years in the House, Senate and Cabinet - An Autobiography. • John Sherman
... major, and another old fellow, laughing and playing off jokes on each other,—one tying a ribbon upon the other's hat. One had been a trumpeter to the major's troop. Walking about town, we knocked, for a whim, at the door of a dark old house, and inquired if Miss Hannah Lord lived there. A woman of about thirty came to the door, with rather a confused smile, and a disorder about the bosom of her dress, as if she had been disturbed while nursing her child. ...
— Passages From The American Notebooks, Volume 1 • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... remarkable ability as cooks. Frank was a little Canadian Frenchman, and Charley was English. Both, in the parlance of the road, were "floaters"; that is to say, no locality ever knew them long; the earth was their floor, the sky their ceiling—and their god was Whim. Naturally our trip had appealed to them, and one month in Benton had aggravated that ...
— The River and I • John G. Neihardt
... grant the king a divorce from his first wife in order that he might marry a younger and prettier woman. But a permanent change in the religious convictions of a whole people cannot fairly be attributed to the whim of even so despotic a ruler as Henry. There were changes taking place in England before the revolt similar to those which prepared the way in Germany ...
— An Introduction to the History of Western Europe • James Harvey Robinson
... whispered philippics to illustrate the evils of the autocratic form of government. Imperial whims, it was said, over-ride grave economic considerations. In recent years, however, a change seems to have taken place in public opinion, and some people now assert that this so-called Imperial whim was an act of far-seeing policy. As by far the greater part of the goods and passengers are carried the whole length of the line, it is well that the line should be as short as possible, and that branch lines should be constructed to the towns lying to the right and left. Evidently ...
— Russia • Donald Mackenzie Wallace
... Fish, twelve sombre and inexplicable souls who sucked a lean milk from the almost literally bare rock upon which a mysterious populatory force had begotten them. They had become a race apart, these twelve men of Fish, like some species developed by an early whim of nature, which on second thought had abandoned ...
— Tales of the Jazz Age • F. Scott Fitzgerald
... Bald-faced Pony." On many an occasion he owed his life to the fleetness of his mare. But his vengeance was never satisfied: it was always active, and thirsting for the blood of the American patriot. The whim of the officer to possess McGirth's mare was a foolish one at best. It was the cause of ...
— Stories Of Georgia - 1896 • Joel Chandler Harris
... no longer able to speak, but he could still hear and see. At these words he turned his head toward Don Juan with a violent wrench. His neck remained twisted like that of a marble statue doomed by the sculptor's whim to look forever sideways, his staring eyes assumed a hideous fixity. He was dead, dead in the act of losing his only, his last illusion. In seeking a shelter in his son's heart he had found a tomb more hollow than those which men dig for their dead. His hair, ...
— International Short Stories: French • Various
... seemed clear, and then again it would die away, according to the whim of the night air. But Tony was accustomed to judging such things. He presently made up his mind that the dip of paddles was getting continually closer; and that one boat at least was ascending the river, crossing from side to side, ...
— Chums in Dixie - or The Strange Cruise of a Motorboat • St. George Rathborne
... this is urged on the score of aesthetics, the ready reply will be,—"Oh, we can't give time here in America to go into niceties and French whim-whams!" But the French mode of doing almost all practical things is based on that true philosophy and utilitarian good sense which characterize that seemingly thoughtless people. Nowhere is economy a more careful study, ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 14, No. 86, December, 1864 • Various
... helpless cat fitting an arrow to his bow that he might dispatch the beast that otherwise must die of starvation; but even as he drew back the shaft a sudden whim stayed ...
— The Beasts of Tarzan • Edgar Rice Burroughs
... how she could avoid sitting down with this handsome young man in the presence of his knife and fork, and, not knowing what to say to the servants, had devised the plan of abandoning the situation and ordering breakfast, as a sudden whim, 'in ...
— The Immortal - Or, One Of The "Forty." (L'immortel) - 1877 • Alphonse Daudet
... I did so, and we held it for three months. We had our victuals dress'd, and brought to us regularly by a woman in the neighborhood, who had from me a list of forty dishes to be prepar'd for us at different times, in all which there was neither fish, flesh, nor fowl, and the whim suited me the better at this time from the cheapness of it, not costing us above eighteenpence sterling each per week. I have since kept several Lents most strictly, leaving the common diet for that, and that for the common, abruptly, without the least inconvenience, ...
— The Autobiography of Benjamin Franklin • Benjamin Franklin
... she had worn Christmas day. She was greatly changed. Her hair was neatly combed. The wild look had left her eyes. She was like one whose back is relieved of a heavy burden. Her lips moved as she scattered little red squares of paper into the grave. I suppose they thought it a crazy whim of hers—they who saw her do it. I thought that I understood the curious bit of symbolism and so did the schoolmaster, who stood beside me. Doubtless the pieces of paper ...
— The Light in the Clearing • Irving Bacheller
... were of a different character, and, instigated by whim, liquor, an evil temper, hatred to the African race, or a desire to get an impossible amount of work, acted the part of tyrants and oppressors, and made the slaves feel that they were trodden beneath ...
— Jack in the Forecastle • John Sherburne Sleeper
... nothing for one instant tempt you to whisper, to smile, to do aught that would grieve the Holy Spirit. Others speak of a want of respect for the aged, and especially for parents, as a fault of young women. "How often is the kind advice a father and mother set aside, just because it goes against some whim or fancy of their own! A desire on the part of a young lady to live in the fashion, to be well-dressed at all hours and ready for callers—how much toil and sacrifice often fall to a good mother from such an ambition!" ...
— Girls: Faults and Ideals - A Familiar Talk, With Quotations From Letters • J.R. Miller
... Greek—an unfitness in the idea of marble fauns, and satyrs, and even Olympian gods, lugged in under the oaken roof and the painted light of an odd, old Norman hall. But Methley, abounding in Homer, really loved him (as I believe) in all truth, without whim or fancy; moreover, he had a good deal ...
— Eothen • A. W. Kinglake
... been a vague, undefined creature to me—just a woman, and so elusive as never to get within the grasp of my mind's eye; just a woman whom I had endowed with every grace; whose kindly spirit shone through eyes, now brown, now blue, now black, according to my latest whim; who ofttimes worn, or perhaps feigning weariness, rested on my shoulder a little head, crowned with a glory of hair sometimes black, and sometimes golden or auburn, and not infrequently red, a dashing, daring red. Sometimes she was slender and elf-like, ...
— The Soldier of the Valley • Nelson Lloyd
... power to gratify thy slightest whim," resumed the demon, "to possess the power to transport thyself at will to any clime, however distant—to be able to defy the machinations of men and the combination of adverse circumstances, such as have plunged thee into this dungeon—to ...
— Wagner, the Wehr-Wolf • George W. M. Reynolds
... to, my darling Tamara, I have nothing against your whim. Only what for? This will not help the dead person and will not make her alive. Only sentimentalism alone will come out of it ... But very well! Only, however, you know yourself that in accordance with your ...
— Yama (The Pit) • Alexandra Kuprin
... his father-in-law. And, strangely enough, Mme. la Marquise de Firmin-Latour acquiesced and aided her father in his determination. Whether it was the Jewish blood in her, or merely obedience to old Mosenstein's whim, it were impossible to say. Certain it is that out of the lavish pin-money which her father gave her as a free gift from time to time, she only doled out a meagre allowance to her husband, and although she had everything she wanted, M. le Marquis on his side had often less than ...
— Castles in the Air • Baroness Emmuska Orczy
... and his face flushed. "Why, Doctor, my whole career as a Christian minister depends upon the mere whim of these people, who are moved by such a spirit as this. No matter what motives may prompt my course they have the power to prevent me from doing my work. This is one of the strongest and most influential churches ...
— The Calling Of Dan Matthews • Harold Bell Wright
... laugh. "Well, church concerts are hardly to be compared with the stage, Polly. And please look in your mirror and remember that I am I and you are you. But of course you realize that if you will go on with this whim of yours, I am not going to let you live in any place by yourself. You would be sure to get ill or something dreadful might happen. No, I shall beg you every minute till the time comes, not to do what you must know would worry your mother. But if you still persist, why, you are coming right here ...
— The Camp Fire Girls in the Outside World • Margaret Vandercook
... home late at night. And if the physique of the man was bracing, his conversation, unless he happened to be suffering from one of his occasional fits of depression, was still more so. Its freshness, raciness and eccentric whim no pen could describe. There is a kind of humour the delight of which is that while you smile at the pictures it draws, you smile quite as much or more to think that there is a mind so whimsical, crotchetty, and odd as to draw them. This was ...
— The Life of George Borrow • Herbert Jenkins
... the pages of the best comedies, we are almost transported to another world, and escape from this dull age to one that was all life, and whim, and mirth, and humour. The curtain rises, and a gayer scene presents itself, as on the canvas of Watteau. We are admitted behind the scenes like spectators at court, on a levee or birthday; but it is the court, the gala-day of wit and ...
— Hazlitt on English Literature - An Introduction to the Appreciation of Literature • Jacob Zeitlin
... the reasons already given, but for others, geographical, ethnical, and climatic, which exist even in the present day, and which make its selection an outrage on common-sense. Was it not, we are asked, a most extraordinary whim which induced a Russian to found the capital of his Slavonic empire among the Finns, against the Swedes—to centralize the administration of a huge extent of country in its remotest corner—to retire from Poland and Germany on the ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Volume 12 • Editor-In-Chief Rossiter Johnson
... right, with, for reward, the hope of Pratscha-Paramita, the peace that is beyond all knowledge and which Nirvana provides. That peace is—or was—the complete absence of anything, extinction utter and everlasting, a state of absolute non-existence which no whim of ...
— The Lords of the Ghostland - A History of the Ideal • Edgar Saltus
... and listen awhile, If ever you wished to smile, Or hear a true story of old, Attend to what I now unfold! 'Tis of a lad whose fame did resound Through every village and town around, For fun, for frolic, and for whim, None ever was to equal him, And his name was Arthur O'Bradley! O! rare Arthur O'Bradley! wonderful Arthur O'Bradley! ...
— Ancient Poems, Ballads and Songs of England • Robert Bell
... the night, and with the dreams and fancies of the night. Would he, then, confess to himself that which he would confess to no other? Or was it merely some passing whim—some slight underchord of sentiment struck amidst the careless joy of a young man's holiday—that had led him up into the silent region of trees and moonlight? The scene around him was romantic enough, but he certainly had not the features ...
— Macleod of Dare • William Black
... expository books on that poet have to be purchased, all of which are duly consigned to the topmost shelves when the soreness of the fit is past. There is also a tendency to purchase, because on the chance opening of a book you light on something that pleases the whim of the moment. It is a thousand to one that when you have bought the book you will not find another item worth perusing in the entire contents. This tendency to buy a book in a panic may be neutralised ...
— Literary Tours in The Highlands and Islands of Scotland • Daniel Turner Holmes
... go so far when I began. It was mostly a whim. But the idea gradually possessed me, and at last it seemed to me that I was a real Napoleon. I used to wake from the dream for a moment, and I tried to stop, but something in my blood drove me on—inevitably. You were all good to me; you nearly all believed in me. Lagroin came—and ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker
... up-stairs was quite uncertain. If she was gone to "clean" herself, as she called it, the process might be a very long one, and a good hour might be at my disposal; but I could not count upon that. In the drawing-room below sat my jailer and enemy, who might take a whim into her head, and come up to see her prisoner at any instant. It was necessary to be very quick, very decisive, ...
— The Doctor's Dilemma • Hesba Stretton
... happier? He who gets his wish often suffers a sharper disappointment than he who loses it. "So taeuscht uns also bald die Hoffnung, bald das Gehoffte," says the great pessimist, and Fate is never more ironical than when she humors our whim. Doddridge alone, who had thrown himself confidingly into the arms of the Destinies, had obtained their ...
— Stories by American Authors, Volume 8 • Various
... changed that her altered appearance rarely escaped remark. Defiant, reckless, almost hysterical, her unnatural gaiety could not cloak her anxiety nor all her artifice disguise it. If she had told the truth, it would have been to admit a position, not only of humiliation but of danger. A whim, by which she would have amused herself, had created a situation from which she could not escape. She loved Alban and had not won his love. The subtle antagonist against whom she played had turned her weapons adroitly and caught her in the deadly meshes of ...
— Aladdin of London - or Lodestar • Sir Max Pemberton
... to do what you wish, it would be a caprice, a mere whim. In displaying such an impatient humor I show my whole court that I have no control over my own feelings. Do not people already say that I am dreaming of the conquest of the world, but that I ought previously to begin by achieving ...
— Louise de la Valliere • Alexandre Dumas, Pere
... appearance even at his own funeral. Marie Louise loved him dearly, but she feared his prejudices. She had an abject terror of offending him, because she felt that she owed everything she had, and was, to the whim of his good grace. Gratitude was a passion with her, and it doomed her, as all passions do, good or bad, to the penalties human beings pay for every excess of virtue or vice—if, indeed, vice is anything but an immoderate, ...
— The Cup of Fury - A Novel of Cities and Shipyards • Rupert Hughes
... to announce the death of the late chieftain of that name. Matiamvo is the hereditary title, muata meaning lord or chief. The late Matiamvo seems, from the report of these men, to have become insane, for he is said to have sometimes indulged the whim of running a muck in the town and beheading whomsoever he met, until he had quite a heap of human heads. Matiamvo explained this conduct by saying that his people were too many, and he wanted to diminish ...
— Missionary Travels and Researches in South Africa - Journeys and Researches in South Africa • David Livingstone
... Unask'd, they ne'er leave off. Just such a one Tigellius was, Sardinia's famous son. Caesar, who could have forced him to obey, By his sire's friendship and his own might pray, Yet not draw forth a note: then, if the whim Took him, he'd troll a Bacchanalian hymn, From top to bottom of the tetrachord, Till the last course was set upon the board. One mass of inconsistence, oft he'd fly As if the foe were following in full cry, While oft he'd stalk with a majestic gait, Like Juno's ...
— The Satires, Epistles, and Art of Poetry • Horace
... the ordinary rules of life or the accustomed paths of men be expected to control him? They could not and did not. And here he was pursuing her, seeking her out with his eyes, grateful for a smile, waiting as much as he dared on her every wish and whim. ...
— The Titan • Theodore Dreiser
... excuse for himself except in his carrying her off. That might have worked all right, if he could have kept his temper. He let his mind stray back over what might have been; suppose he had accepted Logan's following her up here as just what it was—the whim of a man in love with Marjorie. Suppose he had believed that Pennington could kiss his wife's hand without meaning any harm; suppose, in fine, that he had believed in Marjorie's desire and intention to do right, even if she had been a coward for ...
— I've Married Marjorie • Margaret Widdemer
... evident that he would not attempt to be familiar. No longer was he the free lance rider of the plains who had been at liberty to exchange words with her as suited his whim; here was the man who had been given a job, and there stood his employer; he would not be likely to step over that line, and his ...
— The Range Boss • Charles Alden Seltzer
... grow used to it. Oh, don't mind; it is a whim of the rajah's, and you will soon have leave to go. We never shall. There, hark! what did ...
— The Rajah of Dah • George Manville Fenn
... was sometimes her good luck. But she always had to walk one way or the other. It was a greater luxury than slavery could afford, to allow a black slave-mother a horse or a mule, upon which to travel twenty-four miles, when she could walk the distance. Besides, it is deemed a foolish whim for a slave-mother to manifest concern to see her children, and, in one point of view, the case is made out—she can do nothing for them. She has no control over them; the master is even more than the mother, in all matters touching the fate of her child. Why, then, ...
— My Bondage and My Freedom • Frederick Douglass
... preached, as the counteraction of the doctrine of love, when that pules and whines. I shun father and mother and wife and brother when my genius calls me. I would write on the lintels of the door-post, Whim. I hope it is somewhat better than whim at last, but we cannot spend the day in explanation. Expect me not to show cause why I seek or why I exclude company. Then again, do not tell me, as a good man did to-day, of my obligation to put all poor men in good situations. Are they my poor? I tell thee thou foolish philanthropist that I grudge ...
— Essays, First Series • Ralph Waldo Emerson
... of which he had much right to be proud, it being well known in the legal profession that one's fees are in direct proportion to his ability to weep. Judge Bradley could always weep at the right time before a Jury, and this facility won him many a case. Through no idle whim had public sentiment, even after the incident of the substitute, confirmed him in his position as the ...
— The Girl at the Halfway House • Emerson Hough
... On one occasion he actually fired his revolver at a wooden-legged man, who proved to be a harmless tradesman canvassing for orders. We had to pay a large sum to hush the matter up. My brother and I used to think this a mere whim of my father's, but events have since led us to change ...
— The Sign of the Four • Arthur Conan Doyle
... she knows a lot. Why, Chess, she's having the loveliest things made, if they are mourning, and the sisters, they ask her about everything they order—to wear, I mean. And, just think! Mrs. Schuyler never wears any jewels but pearls! It's a whim, you know, or it was her husband's whim, or something, but anyway, she has oceans of pearls, and no ...
— Vicky Van • Carolyn Wells
... the great palm gardens of the oasis they had seen far off were close upon them. From the desert they looked both shabby and superb, as if some millionaire had poured forth money to create a Paradise out here, and, when it was nearly finished, had suddenly repented of his whim and refused to spend another farthing. The thousands upon thousands of mighty trees were bounded by long, irregular walls of hard earth, at the top of which were stuck distraught thorn bushes. These walls gave the rough, ...
— The Garden Of Allah • Robert Hichens
... restored his exultation, and his mother's words became a buzz of flies which he had left behind. The sky was dreamy blue; the sandhills rose against it shapely like the backs and flanks of couchant lions. The red roof of the Mission on its ridge seemed placed there by some childish whim—a thing incongruous. As Iskender fixed his gaze on it, he saw a figure coming thence with speed—a figure in dark Frankish clothes beneath the red tarbush, which he recognised as that of Asad son of Costantin. A minute ...
— The Valley of the Kings • Marmaduke Pickthall
... his dignity. The rumor of all these traffickings and these uncertainties rekindled in Henry VIII., King of England, a fancy for placing himself once more in the ranks; but his agent, Richard Pace, found the negotiations too far advanced and the prices too high for him to back up this vain whim of his master's; and Henry VIII. abandoned it. The diet had been convoked for the 17th of June at Frankfort. The day was drawing near; and which of the two parties had the majority was still regarded as, uncertain. Franz von Sickingen appeared in the outskirts of Frankfort ...
— A Popular History of France From The Earliest Times - Volume IV. of VI. • Francois Pierre Guillaume Guizot
... excited state she would have torn up her best dress with equal readiness. She was elated with her success in the cricket field—what the Scotch call "fey"; and so long as she gratified her present whim, she had no thought at all for ...
— The New Girl at St. Chad's - A Story of School Life • Angela Brazil
... neighborhood they chanced to visit. Their assumed character changed with their changing opportunities or necessities. They were squads of Kansas militia, companies of "peaceful emigrants," or gangs of irresponsible outlaws, to suit the chance, the whim, or the need ...
— Abraham Lincoln: A History V1 • John G. Nicolay and John Hay
... plunged into them. His only rule was not to be misled by the spelling. That was no guide anyhow. He avoided every recognised phrase in the language and mispronounced everything in order that he shouldn't be suspected of ignorance, but whim. ...
— The History of Mr. Polly • H. G. Wells
... seemed most expedient to carry on the methods of its former chief. But Mohbrinck considered that to do so would make him appear an officer without military distinction or views of his own. He posed as having studied to a nicety every little whim and peculiarity of the major-general commanding the brigade, and had made up his mind that at the review his regiment should have no fault found with it, not even if for months everything more important should be set aside in ...
— 'Jena' or 'Sedan'? • Franz Beyerlein
... you—my researches (those who know me will do me the justice to admit that when I have an end in view, I do not count them)—my researches have not discovered an answer. It was a whim of Fashion, and Fashion is the one goddess more capricious ...
— The Companions of Jehu • Alexandre Dumas, pere
... in this immediate neighborhood for any such natural purpose as induces people to build them on other sites. Even our hotel, at which we now arrived, could not be said to be a natural growth of the soil; it had originally been a whim of one of the Grand Dukes of Tuscany,—a hunting-palace,—intended for habitation only during a few weeks of the year. Of all dreary hotels I ever alighted at, methinks this is the most so; but on first arriving I merely followed the waiter to look at ...
— Passages From the French and Italian Notebooks, Complete • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... recently with a beggar who studied me, because it appeared to be my whim to help him with a coin. Back of his temples was a great story—sumptuous drama and throbbing with the first importance of life. He did not tell me that story, and I could not draw it from him. Rather he told me the story that he fancied I would want. There was a whine in it. He chose to act, and ...
— Child and Country - A Book of the Younger Generation • Will Levington Comfort
... your mental powers in wishes. Don't dissipate your energies by trying to satisfy every whim. Concentrate on doing something really worth while. The man that sticks to something is ...
— The Power of Concentration • Theron Q. Dumont
... not a self-centred girl, and at any other time she would have been surprised at the encouragement given to this new whim of hers by her half-brother; she would have sought some underlying cause, for George Trent—who was her mother's son by a first marriage—was nearly five years older than she, and rather piqued himself upon influencing her ...
— The Castle Of The Shadows • Alice Muriel Williamson
... paper should sink, and guineas should swim, May appear to some folks a ridiculous whim; But before they condemn, let them hear this suggestion: In pun making, gravity's ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol. 6, No. 6, December 1864 - Devoted To Literature And National Policy • Various
... retail gossip, I think that readers of this treatise ought to be made aware of the fact (if, indeed, they do not already know it) that a polyp is really neither one thing nor another in matters of gender. One day it may be a little boy polyp, another day a little girl, according to its whim or practical considerations of policy. On gray days, when everything seems to be going wrong, it may decide that it will be neither boy nor girl but will just drift. I think that if we big human cousins of the little polyp were to follow the example set by these lowliest of God's creatures ...
— Love Conquers All • Robert C. Benchley
... features for a few seconds as he re-read the curt, almost savage denial, by his father of the "couple of thousand" asked for. "A fool to resign his commission in the Service and go into a thing he knew nothing about, merely to humour the fantastic whim of a woman of fashion who will, no doubt, now sheer very clear of ...
— The Ebbing Of The Tide - South Sea Stories - 1896 • Louis Becke
... more full of occupation and less of rapture and sweet isolated intimacy than Dick could have wished, but it was much to watch the color come and go on her cheek in her moments of excitement, to fulfil every capricious whim of her who had been starved in her feminine hunger of caprice, to punctuate the rush of life by celestial moments when she rested a tired but bewildering head against his shoulder and listened silently with drooping lids to all he had to say, to feel that he could ...
— Jewel Weed • Alice Ames Winter
... He knew that the Padre's threat had been no idle one, but he meant to forestall its operation. The Padre was away to his home by now. Nothing that he could do could operate until the morning, when these men were sober. He had got this night, at least, in which to satisfy his evil whim. ...
— The Golden Woman - A Story of the Montana Hills • Ridgwell Cullum
... an empty whim! Don't listen to her, Albert, and above all things, don't let Mazarin drag you down. Keep constantly in your mind that he has had his day, and will never return to power. Last of all, remember you are always welcome in the Rue Crillon, ...
— My Sword's My Fortune - A Story of Old France • Herbert Hayens
... Parmenides, and that Menecrate will be made by force more happy than he wishes to be; for we shall give him a wife by whom he is loved, and take from him one by whom he is hated. Moreover, things being so, even if he refuses to subject his whim to his reason, he can wish to come to blows with Thrasimede alone, and would have nothing to ask of Philistion; besides which, his sentiments will change as soon as Thrasimede is Arpalice's husband. One often fights ...
— A History of the French Novel, Vol. 1 - From the Beginning to 1800 • George Saintsbury
... in a sense pathetic, in this sudden steady diligence from the man of desultory habits, who had never written but by whim, whose finger had always been lifted to catch the lightest literary airs. Here, at last, was the firm trade wind, and the satisfaction of steady and methodical progress. The qualified success of the "Tales of a Traveler" had led him to feel that his vein was running out. ...
— Washington Irving • Henry W. Boynton
... human creed. Friendship, as we know it, will largely cease to exist. Friends will be those who can be cowed into truculence or bought. There will be no truth, justice, equity, in our meaning. Only the will or whim of the Emperor. His State Church, with its worship of Him, ...
— Villa Elsa - A Story of German Family Life • Stuart Henry
... a whim of mine always to wear linen," I responded. "I am not a rheumatic subject. And, besides, I have no time ...
— The International Spy - Being the Secret History of the Russo-Japanese War • Allen Upward
... whole realm of national religion and policy. The obstacles which he encountered in (p. 428) prosecuting his suit for a divorce from Catherine of Aragon were the first check he experienced in the gratification of a personal whim, and the effort to remove those impediments drew him on to the world-wide stage of the conflict with Rome. He was ever proceeding from the particular to the general, from an attack on a special dispensation to an attack on the dispensing power of the Pope, and ...
— Henry VIII. • A. F. Pollard
... stranger. When he afterwards recalled that impulse to unsolicited and inexplicable frankness which had very important results for him, it seemed to him—as it seems to everyone in such cases—that it was merely some silly whim that seized him: yet that burst of frankness, together with other trifling events, had immense consequences for him and for all ...
— War and Peace • Leo Tolstoy
... for the Minnesota massacres, by the Sioux, in 1862-'3, quite apart from the aboriginal cruelty and ferocity of the Indian nature. We all know that the carnal Indian man is a bad enough fellow at the best, and capable of dreadful crimes and misdemeanors, if only to gratify his whim or the caprice of the moment. And when he is bent upon satiating his revenge for some real or imaginary wrong, I would back him in the horrible ingenuity of his devices for torture, in the unrelenting malice of his vengeance, ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol. 6, No 2, August, 1864 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy • Various
... this palace gave him audience as usual in her blue-and-white morning-room, from the ceiling of which, from the centre of a painting, "The Nuptials of Venus and Vulcan," her own youthful face smiled down, her husband having for a whim instructed the painter to depict the goddess in her likeness. It smiled down now on a little shrunken lady huddled deep in an easy-chair. Only her dark eyes kept some of their old expressiveness, and her voice an echo of its ...
— Shining Ferry • Sir Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch
... as the idealist and poet whose inspiration has kindled so many souls; as the romancer who has given an atmosphere to the hard outlines of our stern New England; as that unique individual, half college-graduate and half Algonquin, the Robinson Crusoe of Walden Pond, who carried out a school-boy whim to its full proportions, and told the story of Nature in undress as only one who had hidden in her bedroom could have told it. I need not lengthen the catalogue by speaking of the living, or mentioning the women whose names ...
— Ralph Waldo Emerson • Oliver Wendell Holmes
... course I could stop any further contribution on her part, but consideration for your readers (?) prevents that—to say nothing of her determination to continue—so I have therefore consented to her odd whim, on the condition that in future I "edit" her contributions;—I need hardly assure you that I shall confine my "editing" strictly to these limits, and that your own Editor need be under no apprehension as to my usurping his place,—ably as I should, ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 103, November 12, 1892 • Various
... unshackled, let us to the road Which holds enchantment round each hidden bend, Our course uncompassed and our whim its end, Our feet once ...
— Poems of West & East • Vita Sackville-West
... about affairs outside, and Zaphnath must have been at the bottom of an edict which was shortly issued. Nothing that I remember in Kem better illustrated the absolute power of the Pharaoh and the unrestrained enforcement of his merest whim. The edict referred to the scarcity of bread and the multitude of foreigners who were flocking to the city to secure it, and provided (ostensibly for the good of the Kemish people) that no man in the city of Kem should give bread or any sort of food to any but the members ...
— Pharaoh's Broker - Being the Very Remarkable Experiences in Another World of Isidor Werner • Ellsworth Douglass
... swinging and squeaking. He straightened himself out, slowly descended the tree, and set off along the top of the fence toward the farmyard. Never before had it occurred to him to visit the farmyard; but now that the moon had put the madness into his head, he acted upon the whim without a moment's misgiving. Unlike the rest of the wild kindreds, he stood little in awe of either the works ...
— The Watchers of the Trails - A Book of Animal Life • Charles G. D. Roberts
... man ought to love a woman more than she loves him. It ought to be enough for him if she lets him give her everything she wants in the world. He ought to serve her like the old knights—give up his whole life to satisfy some whim of hers; and it's her part, if she likes, to be cold and distant. ...
— The Pit • Frank Norris
... I shall try to pacify and reduce them by gentle means, since they themselves have offered such means and have sent a representative to treat for peace. I have accordingly agreed to what they desire; yet, since they are Indians, who when they take a whim cannot be restrained from trying to gratify it, I have little confidence that they will keep their promises, since there is no holding them to account except so far as fear will oblige them to it. Still, it seems that this year they have not made any piratical expeditions to ...
— The Philippine Islands, 1493-1898: Volume XIV., 1606-1609 • Various
... name, by the way, is Anne Wentworth) outside the house, but indeed might as well endeavour to stifle a promising scandal as such beauty! However, she arrived a week later with her meagre outfit. 'Twas an odd whim, I own. ...
— The Ladies - A Shining Constellation of Wit and Beauty • E. Barrington
... extraordinary, he is not quite sure that he had any motive for it at all, which his memory can trace. The whole of this is a period of a year and a half; and here is a man who keeps his account upon principles of whim and vagary. One would imagine he was guessing at some motive of a stranger. Why he came to take bonds for money not due to him, and why he enters some and not others,—he knows nothing of these things: he begs them not to ask about it, because it will ...
— The Works of the Right Honourable Edmund Burke, Vol. X. (of 12) • Edmund Burke
... is not wisdom but a whim of mine which causes me to be graciously minded!" she cried. "Think you that Liane ...
— Priestess of the Flame • Sewell Peaslee Wright
... the veteran of ninety-two by Mr. Babbage[469] at twenty-nine. This excellent volume contains James Gregory, Des Cartes, Halley, Barrow, and the optical writings of Huyghens, the Principia of the undulatory theory. It also contains, by the sort of whim in which such men as Maseres, myself, and some others are apt to indulge, a reprint of "The great new Art of weighing Vanity,"[470] by M. Patrick Mathers, Arch-Bedel to the University of St. Andrews, ...
— A Budget of Paradoxes, Volume I (of II) • Augustus De Morgan
... serpent's open mouth contained the exhaust pipe. If the New Orleans alarmed the population of the Ohio Valley, the sensation caused among the red children of the Missouri at the sight of this gigantic snake belching fire and smoke must have thoroughly satisfied the whim of its designer. ...
— The Paths of Inland Commerce - A Chronicle of Trail, Road, and Waterway, Volume 21 in The - Chronicles of America Series • Archer B. Hulbert
... very little like a snake. It is thin, shrunken, faded, papery, and there is no terror in it. Then, too, it is dark in the cavity of the nest, consequently the skin could not serve as a scarecrow in any case. Hence, whatever its purpose may be, it surely is not that. It looks like a mere fancy or whim of the bird. There is that in its voice and ways that suggests something a little uncanny. Its call is more like the call of the toad than that of a bird. If the toad did not always swallow its own cast-off skin, the bird would ...
— Ways of Nature • John Burroughs
... shall be called Tamar;" and he carried his point, although Mrs. Margaret made many objections, saying it was not a Christian name, and therefore not proper for a child who was to be brought up as a Christian. However, as Mr. Dymock had given up his whim of learning the business of a smith since the adventure which has been so fully related, and had forgotten the proposed experiment of turning up the whole moor round the Tower with his new-fangled plough,—that plough having ceased to be an object of desire to him as soon as ...
— Shanty the Blacksmith; A Tale of Other Times • Mrs. Sherwood [AKA: Mrs. Mary Martha Sherwood]
... till that wretched Marneffe was dead; and I agreed, and forgave her for having admitted the attentions of Hulot. Whether the devil had her in hand I don't know, but from that instant that woman has humored my every whim, complied with all my demands—never for one moment has she given me cause to ...
— Cousin Betty • Honore de Balzac
... suffered. Like you, I loved, not a pure, noble girl, yet a girl fair to look upon. For three years I was at her feet, a slave to her every whim; when, one day she suddenly deserted me who adored her, to throw herself in the arms of a man who despised her. Then, like you, I wished to die. Neither threats nor entreaties could induce her to return to me. Passion never reasons, ...
— File No. 113 • Emile Gaboriau
... was the only one Mrs. Caldwell ever heard of, for Aunt Grace Mary got the use of her pony carriage next day, by telling Uncle James her mamma had sent Caroline to say she particularly wished her to take Beth to see her. Uncle James, to whom any whim of Lady Benyon's was wisdom, ordered the carriage for them himself; and, as they drove off together, Aunt Grace Mary remarked to Beth, "I think I managed that very cleverly; don't you?" Naturally estimable women are forced into habits of dissimulation ...
— The Beth Book - Being a Study of the Life of Elizabeth Caldwell Maclure, a Woman of Genius • Sarah Grand
... speak to me of manors, or of money, as if for fifty wills, or five hundred fathers, I would ever profit by a parent's whim to rob my sister of her portion. As if I would not rather lie in the cold grave, than that my sister should have a wish ungratified, which I had power to gratify, much less that she should narrow down the ...
— Graham's Magazine Vol. XXXII No. 2. February 1848 • Various
... said to be a whim of the Tzar Ivan the Terrible to see how many distinct chapels could be erected under one roof in a given space of ground, so that services could be performed at one time without ...
— A Journey in Russia in 1858 • Robert Heywood
... antagonist, the external world, to their whims and emotions, the surer he is to be denounced as blind to the very distinction on which his whole work is built. Far from ignoring idiosyncrasy, will, passion, impulse, whim, as factors in human action, I have placed them so nakedly on the stage that the elderly citizen, accustomed to see them clothed with the veil of manufactured logic about duty, and to disguise even his own impulses from himself ...
— Mrs. Warren's Profession • George Bernard Shaw
... his manner to admiring strangers. These contrasted displays must have been particularly exasperating to his longsuffering family. After his second wife's death his boy, whom he persisted by a mere whim in educating at home, ran away in conventional style and, as if disgusted with the amenities of civilisation, threw himself, figuratively speaking, into the sea. The daughter (the elder of the two children) ...
— Chance - A Tale in Two Parts • Joseph Conrad
... I saw him tangled in her toils, A shame, said I, if she adds just him 10 To her nine-and-ninety other spoils, The hundredth for a whim! ...
— Dramatic Romances • Robert Browning
... best to console the irate woman. It was just a passing whim of Rafael's! Boys will be boys! You've got to let them have a good time now and then! What do you expect with a handsome fellow like that and from the best family in the region! And the cynical old man, accustomed to easy conquests in the suburbs, blinked maliciously, taking it for granted that ...
— The Torrent - Entre Naranjos • Vicente Blasco Ibanez
... forgotten his very existence till I discerned the queer contrast between his black coat and his snow-white head, and the equally curious contrast between the clerical amplitude of his person, and the most unclerical wit, whim, and petulance of his eye. I shook hands with him very heartily; and on the Catholic question we immediately fell, regretted Evans, triumphed over Lord George Beresford, and abused the Bishops. [These allusions refer to the ...
— Life and Letters of Lord Macaulay • George Otto Trevelyan
... of discomfort, sprung in part from the gloomy passageway, paused before the door his grandfather had had the unaccountable whim of entering last night. The detective took a key from his pocket and inserted it ...
— The Abandoned Room • Wadsworth Camp
... the display by the heroine of 'Comedy and Tragedy' of quickly changing emotions and accomplishments. She acts because circumstances really call upon her to act, and not because the showman pulls the strings of his puppet as the whim of the moment may suggest. The question is, how far Miss Anderson is able to realize for us the mental agony and the characteristic self-command of such a woman as Clarice in such a state as hers. The answer, as given on Saturday ...
— Mary Anderson • J. M. Farrar
... to spurn. He thought of little but Canadian farms, And heeded not Rebellion's loud alarms, [Footnote: The Rebellion of 1837.] Which his old master pointed out to him, To put a stop to such a foolish whim. Yet it caused them sincerest grief of heart From all kind friends and relatives to part, Without a prospect of beholding more Each much-loved face, on dear ...
— The Emigrant Mechanic and Other Tales In Verse - Together With Numerous Songs Upon Canadian Subjects • Thomas Cowherd
... was nothing but the whim of a moment. But its pessimism cut deeper than he imagined: and Olivier, with his subtle perception, felt it intuitively. Beneath the Mooch of their acquaintance there was another different Mooch, who was in many ways exactly the opposite. His apparent nature was the result ...
— Jean Christophe: In Paris - The Market-Place, Antoinette, The House • Romain Rolland
... replied Krantz;—"but still you must yield to my whim, and take the gold. If I am wrong, and we do arrive safe, you know, Philip, you can let me have it back," observed Krantz, with a faint smile—"but you forget, our water is nearly out, and we must look out for a rill on the coast to obtain a ...
— The Phantom Ship • Captain Frederick Marryat
... during the voyage, Neeland felt free to lounge about where he listed, saunter wherever the whim of the moment directed his casual steps. The safety of the olive-wood box was no longer on his mind, the handle no longer in his physical clutch. He was at liberty to stroll as carelessly as any boulevard flaneur; and he ...
— The Dark Star • Robert W. Chambers
... always enjoyed seeing her husband smoke; it had often proved a powerful sedative to him when wearied with the cares of life, and the numberless irritations of his trying vocation, and therefore she replied, 'Nonsense, you will soon repent of that whim. I shall get two ounces as usual, and I know you'll smoke it.' 'I shall never touch it again,' was his firm reply, and ever after kept ...
— The Hero of the Humber - or the History of the Late Mr. John Ellerthorpe • Henry Woodcock
... opportunity to put forward, in the most authoritative places, the demands of the workers for political, social, and economic reform. The whole is a struggle for democracy, both political and industrial, that is by no means founded merely on whim or caprice. It has gradually become a religion, an imperative religion, of millions of workingmen and women. Chiefly because of their economic subjection, they are striving in the most heroic manner to make their voice heard in those places where the rules of the game ...
— Violence and the Labor Movement • Robert Hunter
... two years in which she has associated with girls of her own age have benefited her greatly. I feel as though I could not bear to give her up now. Moreover, this idea of claiming his child may be merely a whim on the part of her father. He is liable to forget ...
— Grace Harlowe's Senior Year at High School - or The Parting of the Ways • Jessie Graham Flower
... to be a long and varied one. It would imply a considerable knowledge of modern languages and of the classics; a liking for mathematics and physics, especially all that related to electricity and magnetism; a fancy for the occult sciences, if there is any propriety in coupling these words; and a whim for odd and obsolete literature, like the Parthenologia of Fortunius Licetus, the quaint treatise 'De Sternutatione,' books about alchemy, and witchcraft, apparitions, and modern works relating to ...
— The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. (The Physician and Poet not the Jurist)
... had openly proposed to him that they should spend a few weeks in Paris for the gratification of any praiseworthy intention of her own, or of any harmless whim, he would have unhesitatingly refused, and opposed any number of objections to the proposition; but she had introduced the subject in its most favorable light, and was sure ...
— Fairy Fingers - A Novel • Anna Cora Mowatt Ritchie
... There's no need for my brother to be so upset. One must be firm and take things calmly. And I'm afraid, too, he'll introduce a lot of his fantastic notions in the bringing up of his children and indulge their every whim. ...
— Savva and The Life of Man • Leonid Andreyev
... This was a day eagerly expected by Dempster, Erskine, and I, as it was fixed as the period of our gratifying a whim proposed by me: which was that on the first day of the new Tragedy called Elvira's being acted, we three should walk from the one end of London to the other, dine at Dolly's, & be in the Theatre at night; & as the Play would probably be bad, and as Mr. David Malloch, the Author, who ...
— Critical Strictures on the New Tragedy of Elvira, Written by Mr. David Malloch (1763) • James Boswell, Andrew Erskine and George Dempster
... a few evenings later, Faraday again saw Miss. Ryan. On the first of these occasions this independent young lady was dressed simply in a high-necked gown and a hat. This evening with her habitual disregard of custom and convention, some whim had caused her to array herself in full gala attire, and, habited in a gorgeous costume of white silk and yellow velvet, with a glimmer of diamonds round the low neck, she was startling ...
— The Spinner's Book of Fiction • Various
... Indian thought, restless and speculative as it is, hardly ever concerns itself with the design, object or end of the world. The notion of [Greek: Telos] plays little part in its cosmogony or ethics[135]. The Universe is often regarded as a sport, a passing whim of the divine Being, almost a mistake. Those legends which describe it as the outcome of a creative act, generally represent the creator as moved by some impulse to multiply himself rather than as executing some deliberate if mysterious plan. Legends about ...
— Hinduism and Buddhism, Vol I. (of 3) - An Historical Sketch • Charles Eliot
... a hundred years before Mr. Ellison's coming of age, there had died, in a remote province, one Mr. Seabright Ellison. This gentleman had amassed a princely fortune, and, having no immediate connections, conceived the whim of suffering his wealth to accumulate for a century after his decease. Minutely and sagaciously directing the various modes of investment, he bequeathed the aggregate amount to the nearest of blood, bearing the name of Ellison, who should be alive at ...
— The Works of Edgar Allan Poe - Volume 2 (of 5) of the Raven Edition • Edgar Allan Poe
... vice," she said, "is oddity. For instance, I do not mix up affections with politics; let us talk politics,—business, if you will,—the rest can come later. However, it is not really oddity nor a whim that forbids me to mingle ill-assorted colors and put together things that have no affinity, and compels me to avoid discords; it is my natural instinct as an artist. We women have politics ...
— Bureaucracy • Honore de Balzac
... hope I should be willing to give up a mere whim for the pleasure of those I love so well. But this is not a whim; it is ...
— Small Means and Great Ends • Edited by Mrs. M. H. Adams
... and mostly occur in highly-wrought situations, or they are used to convey a vivid sense of something exquisite in art or nature. We give one or two instances of these little eddies of song set like gems in the prose. Their introduction seems due to whim or caprice, but really is due to profound study of the situation, as if the tale-teller felt suddenly compelled to break into the rhythmic strain. The prose ripples and rises to dancing measure when the King of the Age, wandering in a lonely palace, comes ...
— Supplemental Nights, Volume 6 • Richard F. Burton
... four-poster, with a lowboy and dresser to match, and was papered and carpeted in accordance with these, its chief ornaments. Newmark bathed in the adjoining bathroom, shaved carefully between the two wax lights which were his whim, and dressed in what were then known as "swallow-tail" clothes. Probably he was the only man in Monrovia at that moment so apparelled. Then calmly, and with all the deliberation of one under fire of a hundred eyes, he proceeded ...
— The Riverman • Stewart Edward White
... but she did not believe in the new order of things; and her eyelids and the corners of her mouth showed it. Mrs. Megilp admired; thought it lovely for Asenath just now; but of course not a thing to count upon, or to expect generally. In short, they treated it all as a whim; a coincidence of whims. Asenath, although she would not trouble herself about the "ifs away back," had a spirit of looking forward which impelled her to argue against and ...
— The Other Girls • Mrs. A. D. T. Whitney
... only choice lay between killing and being killed. But to deliberately engage in a cold-blooded duel with a man against whom I had no grudge, and to incur the obligation of killing or being killed merely to gratify the whim of a savage monarch, was quite another matter, and one that, to confess the simple truth, I had no fancy for. Yet how to escape the dilemma I knew not, though it was forcibly borne in upon me that it would ...
— Through Veld and Forest - An African Story • Harry Collingwood
... of Hooker, representing thus early the tradition of a classical clearness in English literature, anticipated by Latimer and More, and to be fulfilled afterwards in Butler and Hume. But then, in recompense for that looseness and whim, in Sir Thomas Browne for instance, we have in those "quaint" writers, as they themselves understood the term (coint, adorned, but adorned with all the curious ornaments of their own predilection, provincial [126] ...
— Appreciations, with an Essay on Style • Walter Horatio Pater
... Restoration comedy have a prosaic, cold-blooded profligacy that disgusts. Charles Lamb, in his ingenious essay on "The Artificial Comedy of the Last Century," apologized for the Restoration stage, on the ground that it represented a world of whim and unreality in which the ordinary laws ...
— Brief History of English and American Literature • Henry A. Beers
... would remark that it is not a prudent plan For any culinary gent to flout his fellow-man; And, if a colleague can't agree with his peculiar whim, To wait on that same colleague, and trip ...
— Punch, Vol. 99., July 26, 1890. • Various
... in the power of love, notwithstanding all the warnings he had received about Zalika's foreign birth, and the seal which her erratic education had stamped upon her character. But he had now to learn that she had never loved him; that it was the whim of the hour, or, more probably, the fleeting passion of a moment, which had made her throw herself into his arms. And she saw in him only an uncomfortable companion, who spoiled all her pleasure in life ...
— The Northern Light • E. Werner
... to this woman who was almost a stranger. When he afterwards recalled that impulse to unsolicited and inexplicable frankness which had very important results for him, it seemed to him—as it seems to everyone in such cases—that it was merely some silly whim that seized him: yet that burst of frankness, together with other trifling events, had immense consequences for him and ...
— War and Peace • Leo Tolstoy
... her health to the company. There was in the place a gay fellow half fuddled, who offered to jump in, and swore, though he liked not the liquor, he would have the toast. He was opposed in his resolution; yet this whim gave foundation to the present honour which is done to the lady we mention in our liquors, who has ever since been called a ...
— The Palmy Days of Nance Oldfield • Edward Robins
... wedding invitations, are expected to acknowledge them as soon as received, and never fail to accept, unless for some very good reason. Guests invited to the house, or to a marriage feast following the ceremony, should not feel at liberty to decline from any whim or caprice. ...
— Our Deportment - Or the Manners, Conduct and Dress of the Most Refined Society • John H. Young
... a dainty plant is the Ivy green, That creepeth o'er ruins old! Of right choice food are his meals, I ween, In his cell so lone and cold. The wall must be crumbled, the stone decayed, To pleasure his dainty whim; And the mouldering dust that years have made, Is a merry meal for him. Creeping where no life is seen, A rare old ...
— The Pickwick Papers • Charles Dickens
... cooking of eggs and bacon below ... an early breakfast for Paul, for he had been taken by a whim that he must work in the mine over the hill for a few weeks in order to earn some money ... for he was a miner, as well as a puddler in the mills ... he worked in coal mines privately run, not yet taken into the trust. He often had to lie on his side in a shallow place, working the ...
— Tramping on Life - An Autobiographical Narrative • Harry Kemp
... the doctor answered. "And yet treat it as a whim of mine and answer my question. Supposing ...
— The Illustrious Prince • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... choking again—I taxed myself with it, "Esther, now, you know you are!"—when he feigned to say this slightly, as if it were a whim instead of a thoughtful tenderness. But I gave the housekeeping keys the least shake in the world as a reminder to myself, and folding my hands in a still more determined manner on the basket, looked ...
— Bleak House • Charles Dickens
... infinitely richer and more appropriate; and as to the popular judgment, how should that be on the decline? In America,—where common wealth makes common entrance, and the lines are not so clearly drawn between the unskilful many and the judicious few,—managers will always make concessions to the whim and folly of the hour. But we see no cause for discouragement, so long as dramas are set forth with the conscientious accuracy that has marked the latest productions of "Hamlet" and "Richelieu," and while hushed and delighted audiences, drawn from every ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 17, No. 103, May, 1866 • Various
... respects his scruples, and reveres his character. For proof thereof, I did not cease urging on Harry his careless promise, that our union should have our father's blessing on it; and the good pastor falling in with my whim, prevailed on Mr. Truelocke to remarry us very privately in the little church I spoke of, he himself assisting. 'Twas a foolish fancy, I wot, but I was not easy till I had it gratified. And it is now my constant hope that ...
— Andrew Golding - A Tale of the Great Plague • Anne E. Keeling
... if this is urged on the score of aesthetics, the ready reply will be,—"Oh, we can't give time here in America to go into niceties and French whim-whams!" But the French mode of doing almost all practical things is based on that true philosophy and utilitarian good sense which characterize that seemingly thoughtless people. Nowhere is economy a more ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 14, No. 86, December, 1864 • Various
... of dung, On once a flock-bed, but repaired with straw, With tape-tied curtains never meant to draw, The George and Garter dangling from that bed Where tawdry yellow strove with dirty red, Great Villiers lies! Alas! how changed from him, That life of pleasure, and that soul of whim, Gallant and gay in Cliveden's proud alcove, The bower of wanton Shrewsbury and love; There, victor of his health, of fortune, friends, And fame, the ...
— Theological Essays and Other Papers v2 • Thomas de Quincey
... Lumley, "so you have joined us at last; better late than never. You're but just in time. I thought you would soon get over that foolish whim of yours, which you mentioned in your letter to me, of leaving the service, just after you had passed, and had such good chance of promotion. What could have ...
— The Settlers in Canada • Frederick Marryat
... the present time. We see in Pienza how the most active-minded and intelligent man of his epoch, the representative genius of Italy in the middle of the fifteenth century, commanding vast wealth and the Pontifical prestige, worked out his whim of city-building. The experiment had to be made upon a small scale; for Pienza was then and was destined to remain a village. Yet here, upon this miniature piazza—in modern as in ancient Italy the meeting-point of civic life, the forum—we find a cathedral, ...
— New Italian sketches • John Addington Symonds
... coward; the imagination was set on fire of hell; every human feeling was sought to be suppressed; love was considered infinitely sinful; pleasure was the road to eternal fire, and God was supposed to be happy only when his children were miserable. The world was governed by an Almighty's whim; prayers could change the order of things, halt the grand procession of nature; could produce rain, avert pestilence, famine, and death in all its forms. There was no idea of the certain; all depended upon divine pleasure—or displeasure, rather; ...
— Lectures of Col. R. G. Ingersoll, Volume I • Robert Green Ingersoll
... is as I have said: the thing which will give you the MOST pleasure, the most satisfaction, in any moment or FRACTION of a moment, is the thing you will always do. You must content the Master's LATEST whim, whatever it may be. ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... Sloane Street was amazed to witness the exodus of the three thousand odd. The closure was attributed to a whim of Hugo's for celebrating some obscure anniversary in his life. Many hundreds of persons were inconvenienced, and the internal economy of scores of polite homes seriously deranged. The evening papers found a paragraph. ...
— Hugo - A Fantasia on Modern Themes • Arnold Bennett
... the rout of her dusk South hair, And saw the sleeping gipsy there; And snatched and snapped it in swift child's whim, With—"Keep it, long ...
— Poems • Francis Thompson
... often found Lalie tied to the foot of the iron bedstead; it was an idea of the locksmith's, before going out, to tie her legs and her body with some stout rope, without anyone being able to find out why—a mere whim of a brain diseased by drink, just for the sake, no doubt, of maintaining his tyranny over the child when he was no longer there. Lalie, as stiff as a stake, with pins and needles in her legs, remained ...
— L'Assommoir • Emile Zola
... To gratify that old whim of his about the red shawl, his doting foster-mother made him little crimson frocks; and as he wandered over the downs in his red dress and a white pinafore, his yellow hair flying in the breeze, his chin up, his black ...
— Jan of the Windmill • Juliana Horatia Ewing
... The whim of painting the eggs and sending them to the sisters had come to him as a sort of apology to them for his exhibition of temper, and he had no idea that his name, so palpable to his artist eye, would escape their observation as it did. He expected his gift and its ...
— A Flock of Girls and Boys • Nora Perry
... committed, brought mischief enough upon them, and had very near been the ruin of the whole colony. The three new associates began, it seems, to be weary of the laborious life they led, and that without hope of bettering their circumstances; and a whim took them that they would make a voyage to the continent from whence the savages came, and would try if they could not seize upon some prisoners among the natives there, and bring them home, so as to make them do the laborious part of the ...
— The Life and Adventures of Robinson Crusoe (1808) • Daniel Defoe
... a considerable knowledge of modern languages and of the classics; a liking for mathematics and physics, especially all that related to electricity and magnetism; a fancy for the occult sciences, if there is any propriety in coupling these words; and a whim for odd and obsolete literature, like the Parthenologia of Fortunius Licetus, the quaint treatise 'De Sternutatione,' books about alchemy, and witchcraft, apparitions, and modern works relating to Spiritualism. With these were the titles of novels and now and then of books of poems; but it may ...
— The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. (The Physician and Poet not the Jurist)
... noted you of late," continued my father, "and I have observed that your old studies are grown distasteful to you; and I have talked with Roland, and I see that your desire is deeper than a boy's mere whim. And then I have asked myself what prospect I can hold out at home to induce you to be contented here, and I see none; and therefore I should say to you, 'Go thy ways, and God shield ...
— The Caxtons, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... no one could quite account for his presence at Revonde at the present moment. He was supposed to be attached in some indefinite way to the Legation, but he described himself as a bird of passage, whose appearance in the European capital simply meant whim or pleasure, for he was growing old and lazy and could not be brought to account for his wanderings, which he assured those who ventured to enquire were chiefly undertaken in search of health. ...
— A Modern Mercenary • Kate Prichard and Hesketh Vernon Hesketh-Prichard
... his plans had carried with but two minor frustrations: he was disappointed in not having been allowed to build a stockade, and he had been forced prematurely to show his hand to MacNair. The first was the mere accident of a woman's whim, and had been offset to a great extent in the construction of the ...
— The Gun-Brand • James B. Hendryx
... the romancer who has given an atmosphere to the hard outlines of our stern New England; as that unique individual, half college-graduate and half Algonquin, the Robinson Crusoe of Walden Pond, who carried out a school-boy whim to its full proportions, and told the story of Nature in undress as only one who had hidden in her bedroom could have told it. I need not lengthen the catalogue by speaking of the living, or mentioning the women whose names ...
— Ralph Waldo Emerson • Oliver Wendell Holmes
... girl at home she was allowed to do precisely what she liked—neither father nor mother, relatives (with one exception) nor friends ever thwarted her; and when she married it was the same: her husband bowed down to her, and was always ready to indulge her every wish and whim. ...
— Werwolves • Elliott O'Donnell
... supreme at Belmont. With a docile old general and a niece so young, she had less resistance to encounter than, perhaps, her ardent soul would have relished. Fortunately for the general it was only now and then that Aunt Becky took a whim to command the Royal Irish Artillery. She had other hobbies just as odd, though not quite so scandalous. It had struck her active mind that such of the ancient women of Chapelizod as were destitute of letters—mendicants and the like—should learn ...
— The House by the Church-Yard • J. Sheridan Le Fanu
... blacksmith working for the Paradise Co., was making some repairs about the surface of the air shaft, and among his tools was a bar of steel an inch square, and 8 or 10 feet long, which was thrown across the shaft, and while working at the whim wheel he slipped and struck this bar which fell to the bottom of the shaft, 100 feet deep and the blacksmith followed. When the other workmen went down to his assistance they found that the bar of steel had stuck upright ...
— Death Valley in '49 • William Lewis Manly
... shown any interest in scenery, and Alan stared at her for a moment with a puzzled look. If Henry de Hauteville had been likely to join her at Culoz he could have understood this whim of hers; but de Hauteville was safely lodged by this time in the nearest Swiss canton, and not at all likely to intercept their journey. He did her bidding, however, without comprehension of her reasons, as he had done many a time before. Again, he was discomfited by her behavior in the ...
— Name and Fame - A Novel • Adeline Sergeant
... offence at her having thus put him off. He believes it to have been but a whim of his sweetheart—the caprice of a woman, who has been so much nattered and admired. He knows, that, like the Anne Hathaway of Shakespeare, Helen Armstrong "hath a way" of her own. For she is a girl of no ordinary character, but ...
— The Death Shot - A Story Retold • Mayne Reid
... angrily. As he spoke he looked at the piece of paper and felt again how strange and foreign to him the whole nature of woman was. The risks that they would take! The foolish mad things that they would do to satisfy some caprice or whim! ...
— The Cathedral • Hugh Walpole
... racked my brain, but could in no way account for an action so contrary to my conception of him. It was not strange that he should so heartlessly have betrayed his friends' confidence, nor that he hesitated not at all to gratify a whim at the cost of another's misery. That was in his character. He was a man without any conception of gratitude. He had no compassion. The emotions common to most of us simply did not exist in him, and it was as absurd to blame him for not ...
— The Moon and Sixpence • W. Somerset Maugham
... in female beauty, and in the disposition and colours of dress, are borrowed from a very questionable model, his labours in adorning the figure-head are apt to produce strange monsters. I once heard of a captain who indulged his boatswain in this whim of representing his absent love as far as the king's allowance of paint could carry the art; and it must be owned, that, as the original Dulcinea owed her roses to the same source, the representation ...
— The Lieutenant and Commander - Being Autobigraphical Sketches of His Own Career, from - Fragments of Voyages and Travels • Basil Hall
... men shed, wrung from the heart as if it were its blood. He had never been sent to school, lest he should meet with mortification. He had had various tutors, trained to show, rather than to exact, respect; one succeeding another, at his own whim and caprice. His natural quickness, and a very strong, hard, inquisitive turn of mind, had enabled him, however, to pick up more knowledge, though of a desultory and miscellaneous nature, than boys of his age generally possess; and his roving, independent, out-of- door existence had served ...
— Night and Morning, Volume 1 • Edward Bulwer Lytton
... of all this natural glory, is scarcely a mile long, and narrow. It may be vivid blue and steel-blue and milky-blue, and half a dozen shades of green and pink all within twice as many minutes, according to the whim of the breeze, the changing atmosphere, and the clouding of the sun. Often it suggests nothing so much as a pool of dull-green paint. Or it may present a reversed image of mountains, glaciers, and sky in their own coloring. Or at sunset it ...
— The Book of the National Parks • Robert Sterling Yard
... himself sincere); but his understanding is the dupe and slave of his momentary, violent, and irritable humours. He does not adopt an opinion 'deliberately or for money,' yet his conscience is at the mercy of the first provocation he receives, of the first whim he takes in his head: he sees things through the medium of heat and passion, not with reference to any general principles, and his whole system of thinking is deranged by the first object that strikes his fancy or sours his ...
— Table-Talk - Essays on Men and Manners • William Hazlitt
... with Bossuet's controversial writings, and was speedily converted by them to the Roman Catholic faith. The apostasy of a gentleman-commoner would of course be for a time the chief subject of conversation in the common room of Magdalene. His whim about Arabic learning would naturally be mentioned, and would give occasion to some jokes about the probability of his turning Mussulman. If such jokes were made, Johnson, who frequently visited Oxford, was very likely to hear ...
— Life Of Johnson, Vol. 2 • Boswell, Edited by Birkbeck Hill
... from its surroundings as to suggest rather the handicraft of man than a whim of Nature, it looms up at the entrance to the Narrows, a symmetrical column of solid grey stone. There are no similar formations within the range of vision, or indeed within many a day's paddle up and down the coast. Amongst all the wonders, the natural beauties that ...
— Legends of Vancouver • E. Pauline Johnson
... world coming to? And the ban on the familiar tongue! English? She despised it. German? She detested it. But to be allowed to speak in French, that alone made conversation tolerable. And this new mad whim! Oh, yes; the signora was truly mad ...
— The Lure of the Mask • Harold MacGrath
... with sparkling eyes, "I'm sure he's worth a lot more than some of the fellows who have always had every whim gratified. Now, which street? You'll have to tell me. I'm ashamed to say I don't know this part of town very well. Isn't it pretty down here? This house? What a wonderful clematis! I never saw such a ...
— The Search • Grace Livingston Hill
... In spite of his real ability and his freedom from the more outbreaking faults, Jerry had been progressing steadily toward utter worthlessness, by the simple but effective method of always obeying the whim of the moment. The old grandmother with whom he lived had long before given up all attempt to control the boy, who was generally good-natured when allowed to do exactly as he pleased. Jerry enjoyed himself, ...
— Peggy Raymond's Vacation - or Friendly Terrace Transplanted • Harriet L. (Harriet Lummis) Smith
... peculiar. It would require an inspired psychologist to deal successfully with them. And when ordinary fellows like you and me attempt to cope with their idiosyncrasies the result is bungling. Most women are moody and whimsical. This is some passing whim of your wife, due to some cause or causes which you and I needn't try to fathom. But it will pass happily over, especially if you let her alone. Send her around ...
— The Awakening and Selected Short Stories • Kate Chopin
... of it; I am willing to work any number of years; I have decided, and I am not to be frightened from my purpose. I am poor, I can barely buy the necessary materials, much less the books, but I will be an artist yet. I have decided, sir; it is no new whim; it has been a bright dream to me all my life, and I am determined to ...
— Macaria • Augusta Jane Evans Wilson
... thought, what did it matter? it wasn't his book, except in name. 'I think it's excellent,' he said, 'excellent; and, by the way, Mr. Fladgate,' he added, 'I should like to change the nom de plume: it's a whim of mine, perhaps, but there's another I've been thinking lately ...
— The Giant's Robe • F. Anstey
... himself out, slowly descended the tree, and set off along the top of the fence toward the farmyard. Never before had it occurred to him to visit the farmyard; but now that the moon had put the madness into his head, he acted upon the whim without a moment's misgiving. Unlike the rest of the wild kindreds, he stood little in awe of either the works or the ways ...
— The Watchers of the Trails - A Book of Animal Life • Charles G. D. Roberts
... cried, looking up through her wind-tossed hair, "'tis joy to me! Lay you down and rest a while and trust the boat to me." And seeing how quick she was to meet each send of the seas (that were already running high) glad enough was I to humour her whim, and clambered forward again. And there (having nought better to do) I set about rigging a rough awning athwart the bows, with canvas and a stout spar, which methought should keep out the spray and any chance sea that might break ...
— Black Bartlemy's Treasure • Jeffrey Farnol
... said. "This is like you. I took this up as a whim as well as a stubborn belief; but somehow that poor little ignorant fellow, with his rough ways, seems to be rousing warmer feelings towards him, and, please God, we'll make a man of him of whom we ...
— Quicksilver - The Boy With No Skid To His Wheel • George Manville Fenn
... virtue, without naming its possessor! Still, you know me too well, to believe that I shall be frightened out of free, or even caustic remark, by any critique of the papers, or by any dignified frown of the literary coteries of the city.... This LORGNETTE of mine will range very much as my whim directs. In morals, it will aim to be correct; in religion, to be respectful; in literature, modest; in the arts, attentive; in fashion, observing; in society, free; in narrative, to be honest; in advice, to be sound; in satire, to be hearty; and in general character, ...
— International Weekly Miscellany, Vol. 1, No. 2, July 8, 1850 • Various
... points. He was a little, pursy, pompous, passionate semicircular somebody, with a red nose, a thick scull, (sic) a long purse, and a strong sense of his own consequence. With the best heart in the world, he contrived, through a predominant whim of contradiction, to earn for himself, among those who only knew him superficially, the character of a curmudgeon. Like many excellent people, he seemed possessed with a spirit of tantalization, which might easily, ...
— The Works of Edgar Allan Poe - Volume 3 (of 5) of the Raven Edition • Edgar Allan Poe
... the former villainy they had committed, brought mischief enough upon them, and had very near been the ruin of the whole colony. The three new associates began, it seems, to be weary of the laborious life they led, and that without hope of bettering their circumstances: and a whim took them that they would make a voyage to the continent, from whence the savages came, and would try if they could seize upon some prisoners among the natives there, and bring them home, so as to make them do the laborious part ...
— The Further Adventures of Robinson Crusoe • Daniel Defoe
... and last demand of Art is that it shall give us the artist's best. Art is the mintage of the soul. All the whim, foible, and rank personality are blown away on the winds of time—the ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great, Volume 6 - Subtitle: Little Journeys to the Homes of Eminent Artists • Elbert Hubbard
... gave a start as this soliloquy progressed. He had wondered once or twice what had become of the prisoners taken aboard the brig. That attempted escape of Job's had cost dear in human life it seemed. And his own deliverance had been the mere whim of a mad-man! He shuddered and thanked God fervently for the fortune that ...
— The Black Buccaneer • Stephen W. Meader
... and anybody else's pleasure to his own whim or amusement,—for he was intrinsically the most selfish of men,—Captain Armytage had hitherto contrived never to succeed in any undertaking. He considered himself the victim of unprecedented ill-fortune, forgetting that he had himself been his own ...
— Cedar Creek - From the Shanty to the Settlement • Elizabeth Hely Walshe
... you like a passing whim when Ljot was begging for your consent? To me it seemed that she ...
— Modern Icelandic Plays - Eyvind of the Hills; The Hraun Farm • Jhann Sigurjnsson
... Peter retorted. "Assemble again at your peril! The authority which rules you is derived not from the whim of a few ignorant malcontents." Alas! the seed of the American Idea had never germinated in Peter's soldierly bosom; and when the West India Company learned of the dialogue, they spluttered with indignation. "The people be d——d." was the sense ...
— The History of the United States from 1492 to 1910, Volume 1 • Julian Hawthorne
... were passing the house that used to belong to that strange book-lover and recluse, Beckford. I looked up at the blank windows, and thought of that curious, self-centred life in the past, surrounded by every luxury, able to indulge every whim; and then I looked at my companion's pale, tortured face, and thought of the life he had elected to lead in the hope of saving one whom duty bound him to honour. After all, which life was the most worth living—which was the most ...
— Derrick Vaughan—Novelist • Edna Lyall
... is it with the great, With whom the whim doth always run, That Heaven all creatures doth create For their behoof beneath the sun— Count they four feet, or two, or none. If one should dare the fact dispute, He's straight set down a stupid brute. Now, grant it so,—such lords among, What should be done, or said, or sung? At ...
— The Fables of La Fontaine - A New Edition, With Notes • Jean de La Fontaine
... the antagonist began to grow more weak. Fewer bullets ripped the air, and finally, when the men slackened to learn of the fight, they could see only dark, floating smoke. The regiment lay still and gazed. Presently some chance whim came to the pestering blur, and it began to coil heavily away. The men saw a ground vacant of fighters. It would have been an empty stage if it were not for a few corpses that lay thrown and twisted into fantastic shapes upon ...
— The Red Badge of Courage - An Episode of the American Civil War • Stephen Crane
... this and to the way of it I am going to call an old writer for whom, be it whim or not, I have an almost 18th century reverence—Longinus. No one exactly knows who he was; although it is usual to identify him with that Longinus who philosophised in the court of the Queen Zenobia and was by her, in her ...
— On The Art of Reading • Arthur Quiller-Couch
... You know I shall be with you, darling, and haven't you often said that you were perfectly happy wherever I was?" And darling will begin a weak argument in favor of her little unreasonable, sentimental whim represented by "Europe," although she sees that your mind is made up. But you have seen her weaken at your smooth talk, and you give her some more; and if that doesn't do, why, you kiss her, and then she's gone. And before you leave her she has assured you that she ...
— From a Girl's Point of View • Lilian Bell
... thank you for the admirable manner in which you have done the book-backs in my room. I feel personally obliged to you, I assure you, for the interest you have taken in my whim, and the promptitude with which you have completely ...
— The Letters of Charles Dickens - Vol. 1 (of 3), 1833-1856 • Charles Dickens
... self-will—or some other of the same brood of enemies to man's success in laudable undertakings; and of which ignorance is the chief, and may be regarded as the prolific source of all the others. In this case, undoubtedly, as in others, some are opposed from a mere notion of opposition, or from a mere whim; others again, simply to agree with, or differ from, some, who are either in favor or opposed; whilst some must oppose whatever they themselves do not originate;—and, others again, have no doubt been led honestly to entertain ...
— Address delivered by Hon. Henry H. Crapo, Governor of Michigan, before the Central Michigan Agricultural Society, at their Sheep-shearing Exhibition held at the Agricultural College Farm, on Thursday, • Henry Howland Crapo
... inflicting the double suffering of privation and of over-supply, there could then no longer be any need of these powerful fleets which ruin, and these great armies which crush them; the peace of the world could no more be compromised by the whim of a Thiers or a Palmerston, and wars would cease, from want of resources, motives, pretexts, and ...
— Sophisms of the Protectionists • Frederic Bastiat
... years if he carries the day to-night. I've got a consultation at Decker's—the old lady is dying. It's no sort of use dragging a tired man out there; I can't do her any good; but they will have it. I'm at the beck and call of every whim. Isn't that dinner ready? I wish I had time to change my boots! They are wet through. My head aches horribly. Brake telegraphed me to get down to Stock Street before two o'clock to save what is left of that Santa Ma ...
— The Gates Between • Elizabeth Stuart Phelps
... hers would be at once granted by him, she knew also that the falcon was renowned as the finest bird throughout the countryside, as well as being the joy and pride of his master's heart. But the boy was fretful and restless, and, fearing to thwart his whim lest his life should depend on it, the poor mother promised to go and ask for the falcon on ...
— The Children's Longfellow - Told in Prose • Doris Hayman
... floor. In these the suffering sick were jolted, jerked, and halted for hours at a time, while the scorching sun danced through the van's open sides and the mosquito-flies bit their damnedest. But nowadays one travels in luxury and sleeping-berths, with ever-ready nurses eager to wait upon every whim. ...
— Cavalry of the Clouds • Alan Bott
... the matter without further discussion. But in this he was disappointed. There had to be a long correspondence with long arguments and protestations from Henriette's father and from his own mother. It seemed such a singular whim. Everybody persisted in diagnosing his symptoms, in questioning him about what the doctor had said, who the doctor was, how he had come to consult him—all of which, of course, was very embarrassing to George, who could not see why they ...
— Damaged Goods - A novelization of the play "Les Avaries" • Upton Sinclair
... weary land," I unaccountably felt the influence of those very superstitious fears and terrors which I was so anxious to combat in my fellow-travellers. I then soliloquized to myself, "What a poor creature is man, how weak, how miserable! how exposed to every whim and folly which a credulous mind can invent!" Thus soliloquizing, I got within the mysterious precincts of the Great Mountain Rock, in the course of three-quarters of an hour. I had, however, still more fear of the living than the ...
— Travels in the Great Desert of Sahara, in the Years of 1845 and 1846 • James Richardson
... freedom from all petty whim and prejudice set Spinoza apart as a marked man. Withal he was eminently religious, and the reference to him by Novalis as "the God-intoxicated man" seems especially applicable to one ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great Philosophers, Volume 8 • Elbert Hubbard
... pretend to explain this whim of Loman's. It may have been his conscience which prompted it. For a mean person nearly always detests an honest one, and the more open and generous the one is, the meaner the other feels in his ...
— The Fifth Form at Saint Dominic's - A School Story • Talbot Baines Reed
... physician, 'it is only a whim of mine, and every one must be allowed some whims: but good ...
— Knickerbocker, or New-York Monthly Magazine, March 1844 - Volume 23, Number 3 • Various
... does not please me. But, under existing circumstances, with my application pending, you know it was impossible to deny the marchioness her whim." ...
— The International Magazine, Volume 2, No. 2, January, 1851 • Various
... word if I had accused honest Cardillac, the pattern of piety and virtue, of an attempted murder? What if the sword of justice had turned its point against me?" "That would not have been possible," said De Scuderi, "your birth—your rank"—— "Oh! remember Marshal de Luxembourg, whose whim for having his horoscope cast by Le Sage brought him under the suspicion of being a poisoner, and eventually into the Bastille. No! by St. Denis! I would not risk my freedom for an hour—not even the lappet of my ear—in the power of that madman La Regnie, who only too ...
— Weird Tales, Vol. II. • E. T. A. Hoffmann
... his tears your heart to beguile, But never you mind—he's laughing all the while; For little he cares, so he has his own whim, And weeping or laughing are all one to him. His eye is as keen as the lightning's flash, His tongue like the red bolt quick and rash; And so savage is he, that his own dear mother Is scarce more safe in his ...
— The Complete Poems of Sir Thomas Moore • Thomas Moore et al
... should; for when one begins to reflect why one don't like the country, I believe one grows near liking to reflect in it. I feel very often that I grow to correct twenty things in myself, as thinking them ridiculous at my age; and then with my spirit of whim and folly, I make myself believe that this is all prudence, and that I wish I were young enough to be as thoughtless and extravagant as I used to be. But if I know any thing of the matter, this is all flattering myself. I grow older, and love my follies less-if ...
— The Letters of Horace Walpole, Volume 1 • Horace Walpole
... acquaintances, the humorous sagacity of Essington struck him as the most astonishing thing he had ever known. He felt, in fact, much like a village youth watching his first conjuring performance, and while the whim lasted (a period which Essington put down as probably six weeks) he would have gone the length of paying a bill or ordering a ...
— Count Bunker • J. Storer Clouston
... course of rapid questions and reluctant answers; "I am happier than I was, because I now understand more clearly your opinion of me. You think me unsteady: easily swayed by the whim of the moment, easily tempted, easily put aside. With such an opinion, no wonder that. But we shall see. It is not by protestations that I shall endeavour to convince you I am wronged; it is not by telling you that my affections are steady. My conduct shall speak for me; absence, distance, ...
— Persuasion • Jane Austen
... her Grace would have been brought up a hang-dog thief and a poor drab, with all their beauty," went on Sir Christopher. "Ecod, thou hast done well, Clo, the task 'twas thy whim ...
— His Grace of Osmonde • Frances Hodgson Burnett
... bonds, keeping a smiling mien as of one whose day's work is done; in short, in what subtle fashion you may, do you and your helpers add to that assurance that I myself shall give him. Do your part well and there will be reward, for I have at heart a whim that I would gratify.' So we went into ...
— Sir Mortimer • Mary Johnston
... QUEEN is with us, to evince Imperial sympathy unfailing; And pleasant to our genial PRINCE This proof that all seems now plainsailing; With his great purpose. Some sneered, "Whim!" But general shouts now drown their sneering. A special salvo's due to him Amidst to-day's exuberant cheering. Hail the Imperial Institute! And hail the patient Prince promoter! The man who's neither cynic brute, Nor phrase-led ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 104, May 13, 1893 • Various
... Governor in his chamber at the State-House with his hat on, a cigar in his mouth, and his feet upon the stove. Domestic service, in spite of the proverb, was not seldom an inheritance, nor was household peace dependent on the whim of a foreign armed neutrality in the kitchen. Servant and master were of one stock; there was decent authority and becoming respect; the tradition of the Old World lingered after its superstition had passed away. There was an aristocracy such as is healthful in a well-ordered ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 20, No. 121, November, 1867 • Various
... in the bower was at intervals, as the desire moved the performers and bodily force allowed. The himene went on continuously, varying with the inspiration of the dancer or the whim of the accordion-player. They snatched this instrument from one another's hands as the mood struck them, and among the natives, men and women alike had facility in its playing. Pepe of Papara, and Tehau of Papeari, their eyes flashing, their bosoms rising and falling tumultuously, ...
— Mystic Isles of the South Seas. • Frederick O'Brien
... good condition as I am, and as, I hope you are, M. Morrel, and this day and a half was lost from pure whim, for the pleasure of going ashore, ...
— The Count of Monte Cristo • Alexandre Dumas, Pere
... will of the devil, who has been my curse and shall be thine! Ay, ay, look not at me! It is true. Thinkest thou that I have brought thee up in solitude without cause? Thinkest thou that I have hidden thee like a miser his treasure, in the dark, unseen places, for a whim? Son, I have suffered as I pray thou mayst not have to suffer, and I have within my heart a serpent of hatred whose sting I would thou couldst feel." He paused, biting his lip as though the pain he described was actual and physical. "Go not among the Unbelievers!" he continued ...
— The Native Born - or, The Rajah's People • I. A. R. Wylie
... believed, got rid of all the traces of the savages outside the tent. When I found the arrows sticking inside it in my bed, it did not occur to me that it would be equally necessary to get rid of them. The whim seized me of keeping them as a memorial of my escape. Instead, however, of concealing them under the bed, I arranged them in the form of a star on the tent covering just above my head, and every time I looked at them I felt grateful that they were ...
— Dick Onslow - Among the Redskins • W.H.G. Kingston
... concession for the first three years that would be all he'd want for his simple needs of living in a swell marble house in Spokane, with a private saloon and hired help to bring him his breakfast in bed and put on another record and minister to his lightest whim. Buck Devine said he'd be able to throw his own good money right and left if he could get the ivory privilege, which is made from the horns of the elephant and is used for many useful purposes; and one of the other boys ...
— Ma Pettengill • Harry Leon Wilson
... concern to the honor of the country that those who had shed their blood and those who had given their treasure for its defense, should have their claims upon the national justice placed beyond the whim, or the caprice, or the malice of an accidental majority in Congress. Nor would it have been wise to leave open to those who in the conflict of arms had lost their slaves, the temptation to besiege ...
— Twenty Years of Congress, Volume 2 (of 2) • James Gillespie Blaine
... Usenet by Landon Curt Noll and friends. The overall winner is whoever produces the most unreadable, creative, and bizarre (but working) C program; various other prizes are awarded at the judges' whim. C's terse syntax and macro-preprocessor facilities give contestants a lot of maneuvering room. The winning programs often manage to be simultaneously (a) funny, (b) breathtaking works of art, and (c) horrible examples of how *not* ...
— The Jargon File, Version 4.0.0
... remember," she answered, softly. "It was when you were so sympathetic with my foolish whim that I felt we ...
— The Vanishing Man • R. Austin Freeman
... Just a whim. I asked her same question, when I was last to Newton, an' she said 't was to save the price of a licence she reckoned, though in his way of life he might have got matrimony cheap as any man. But theer 't is. Her 's bin gude as a ...
— Children of the Mist • Eden Phillpotts
... Booker Washington in founding and carrying to a successful issue the most complete educational scheme of this age, or any other, stands the man himself. He is one without hate, heat or prejudice. No one can write on the lintels of his doorpost the word, "Whim." He is half-white, but calls himself a Negro. He sides with the disgraced and outcast black woman who gave him birth, rather than with the respectable white man ...
— Little Journeys To The Homes Of Great Teachers • Elbert Hubbard
... reason to fear needle pricks. In short, Louise was one of those fickle birds of passage who from fancy, and often from necessity, make for a day, or rather a night, their nest in the garrets of the students' quarter, and remain there willingly for a few days, if one knows how to retain them by a whim ...
— Bohemians of the Latin Quarter • Henry Murger
... now we come to the temper cry—that lusty, strong outburst of the cry of disappointment when he finds that all of a sudden people have stopped jumping and dancing for his every whim. The baby is not to blame. We began something we could not keep up, and he—the innocent recipient of all our indulgences—is in no sense at fault. It is most cruel to encourage these habits of petty indulgence, ...
— The Mother and Her Child • William S. Sadler
... desire for art was mere wayward naughtiness. However, after Tom had threatened to burn the house down if he was not allowed to go to an art-school, and had carried out his threat so far as to set fire to a bale of cotton-goods in the cellar, Mr. Knight yielded to the whim for the sake of peace and a low temperature. He expansively predicted ultimate disaster for Tom. But at the age of eighteen and a half, Tom, with his habit of inconvenience, simply fell into a post as designer to a ...
— A Great Man - A Frolic • Arnold Bennett
... said I to him; of passports We never had the whim. Strong ones I believe it would need To recall, to our side of the limit, Subjects of Pluto King of the Dead: But, from the Germanic Empire Into the gallant and cynical abode Of Messieurs your pretty Frenchmen,—A jolly and beaming air, Rubicund ...
— History of Friedrich II. of Prussia, Vol. XI. (of XXI.) • Thomas Carlyle
... holding them in equal honor; in hope of the Nirvana, the Hindoos moved on patient as ever in the rayless paths of Brahm; the beautiful Greek mind, in pauses of philosophy, still sang the heroic gods of Homer; while in Rome nothing was so common and cheap as gods. According to whim, the masters of the world, because they were masters, carried their worship and offerings indifferently from altar to altar, delighted in the pandemonium they had erected. Their discontent, if they were discontented, was with the number of gods; for, after borrowing all the divinities of the ...
— Ben-Hur: A Tale of the Christ • Lew Wallace
... then, from these answers the inquisitor proceeds to put new questions, and is on the watch for the slightest contradiction; there he fastens his line; and, let the poor devil lose his self-possession, say too much here, or too little there, or, Heaven knows from what whim or other, let him withhold some trifling circumstance, or at any moment give way to fear—then we're on the right track, and, I assure you, no beggar-woman seeks for rags among the rubbish with more care than such a fabricator of rogues, from trifling, crooked, disjointed, misplaced, misprinted, ...
— Egmont - A Tragedy In Five Acts • Johann Wolfgang Von Goethe
... needed; for the English inhibitive instinct does not seem to exist in Rosscullen. Just as Nora's liking to miss a meal and stay out at the Round Tower is accepted as a sufficient reason for her doing it, and for the family going to bed and leaving the door open for her, so Broadbent's whim to go out for a late stroll provokes neither hospitable remonstrance nor surprise. Indeed Aunt Judy wants to get rid of him whilst she makes a bed for him on the sofa. So off he goes, full fed, happy and enthusiastic, to ...
— John Bull's Other Island • George Bernard Shaw
... with him till summer. Then, next fall, if I really want to go on with it, I am to go to Philadelphia to study there. Hope will be shocked, and Hu will make all manner of fun of me, I know. I do hope you and Billy will stand by me, Ted, and believe it is not a schoolgirl whim, but a real wish to find some work ...
— Phebe, Her Profession - A Sequel to Teddy: Her Book • Anna Chapin Ray
... the latter. "Attachment to the graves of his fathers," is an agreeable fiction—unfortunately, only a fiction.[13] He has always been nomadic, without the pastoral habits which the word supposes: a mere wandering savage, without purpose or motive, beyond the gratification of the temporary want, whim, or passion, and void of everything deserving ...
— Western Characters - or Types of Border Life in the Western States • J. L. McConnel
... counter! Mine host, here, seems a little bewildered;—but he has been anxious, I find, for poor Mary, and 'tis national in him to blend eccentricity with kindness. John Bull exhibits a plain, undecorated dish of solid benevolence; but Pat has a gay garnish of whim around his good nature; and if, now and then, 'tis sprinkled in a little confusion, they must have vitiated stomachs, who are not pleased with ...
— John Bull - The Englishman's Fireside: A Comedy, in Five Acts • George Colman
... of wine, and his hair crown'd, Touching his harp as the whim came on him, And praised and spoil'd by master and by guests, Almost as much as the ...
— Theocritus, Bion and Moschus rendered into English Prose • Andrew Lang
... the curse of these roads. Somebody is always driving recklessly." Lorelei smiled at memory of the miles they had covered so swiftly; but she saw that he was serious and in a sour temper. "One risks his life on the whim of some drunken idiot the moment he enters a motor-car. Now for a telephone." A terse question to his man served to ...
— The Auction Block • Rex Beach
... was nothing more than a crumpled ball of paper, and raised his arm to fling it away. Then suddenly his lips relaxed in a smile and a light of relief sprang into his eyes. It was all nonsense, of course—just some foolish, woman's whim or fancy, some ridiculous idea she had got into her head which five minutes' talk between them would dispel. He had been a fool to take it seriously. He unclenched his hand and smoothed out the crumpled sheet of paper. Tearing it into very small pieces, he tossed them into the garden ...
— The Vision of Desire • Margaret Pedler
... affectionately of my mother whom she had not seen for many years. Aunt Lucinda was busily employed at the ironing-board, but looked often to see that her mother's wants were all supplied; nothing could exceed the affection and care she seemed to bestow upon her aged parent, indulging every whim, so that the old lady hardly can realize that she is old and almost helpless. We were soon seated at the supper table, and they all must have had the idea that I had brought with me from Elmwood a most unheard-of appetite, ...
— Walter Harland - Or, Memories of the Past • Harriet S. Caswell
... to laugh at his friend. He was funny, he was pathetic, so prone to be cast down one moment and the next raised aloft to the skies, according to the whim of the capricious young lady. Many times Pan had ridden and worked with a boy ...
— Valley of Wild Horses • Zane Grey
... your own home, and I will take you whither you will. I will be a servant to minister to every whim; all the world shall be a Paradise to you; you shall have every joy that wealth, and love, and sweet friends can procure for you,—if you will obey me in one thing." Lady Anna, still crouching upon ...
— Lady Anna • Anthony Trollope
... the Protagorean school among us, humoring his whim, produced a work on art. In this he declares that he has very little gift in aesthetics, and asserts himself a dialectician, and we cannot deny his power in logic while he regards things from a proper stand-point. ...
— Delsarte System of Oratory • Various
... unmercifully berated that he had dragged his family to the country, destroying their happiness and spending all his money for—what, for what? Just to gratify a whim, a boyish illusion. ...
— Watch Yourself Go By • Al. G. Field
... promptings of his own superior wisdom, rather than the suggestions of the intriguers about him. The adroit De Rosny thus softly insinuated to the flattered monarch that the designs of France were the fresh emanations of his own royal intellect. It was the whim of James to imagine himself extremely like Henry of Bourbon in character, and he affected to take the wittiest, bravest, most adventurous, and most adroit knight-errant that ever won and wore a crown ...
— The Rise of the Dutch Republic, 1555-1566 • John Lothrop Motley
... mood of life. It is no whim By which life's Giver wrecks a broken heart. Death is life's reticence. Still audible to him, The hushed ...
— Poems with Power to Strengthen the Soul • Various
... "you manage so cleverly that I am beginning to trust implicitly to your guidance and knowledge. But there is one thing that puzzles me. It must be more than a whim which makes you think that Herr Renwick ...
— The Secret Witness • George Gibbs
... unity, and the thinker is impatient of squinting and side-glances while all eyes should be turned together to the same. Thought is growing agreement, and that in which the race cannot meet me is some whim or notion, a personal crotchet, not a cosmic and eternal truth. Genius is freedom from all oddity, is Catholicity,—and departure from it so much departure in me from Nature and myself. We say a man is original, if he lives at first, and not at ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 13, No. 76, February, 1864 • Various
... insisted that Agnes' child should be raised as a white child, and the secret of his birth effectually concealed. At first, Mr. Le Croix thought it was a passing whim that she would soon forget; that the child would amuse and interest her for awhile; and then she would tire of him as she had of other things; such as her birds, her squirrel, and even her Shetland pony. ...
— Minnie's Sacrifice • Frances Ellen Watkins Harper
... refusal to touch it, was at first thought singular by Clara; but she soon ceased to observe the omission, and the servant soon learned in no case to present him the decanter. George Manley, however, could not tolerate Haley's temperate habits, because he thought his abstinence a mere whim, and bantered him upon it whenever occasion offered. At last, he aroused Clara's mind into opposition, and incited her to make an effort to induce ...
— The Lights and Shadows of Real Life • T.S. Arthur
... uncertain light, threw up an arm and waved it in a circle. Instantly the whole tribe vanished. It was as if a puff of wind had blown them; or as if they had been figures thrown on a screen by a magic lantern and suddenly switched off at the performer's whim. Then the chief continued forward, we marching ...
— The Ivory Trail • Talbot Mundy
... choice tidbits to the child at bedtime, or between meals, when she ought not to eat anything, much less such hearty food. When the little child sees the good things, she, of course, wants them, and having been humored in every whim, she must still be, she thinks, especially when she is ill. A problem then is here presented which I may help to solve for them. Jennie and I are growing very fond of each other, and she will do some things for me which she will not do for others who have ...
— A Woman who went to Alaska • May Kellogg Sullivan
... off they set, in double chase, For such was fortune's whim, The Farmer rode to hunt the stag, And ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction - Vol. 14, Issue 393, October 10, 1829 • Various
... parents are his perennial debtors in gratitude. He is unconventional in everything, in his dress, in his way of living, in his opinions and judgments, but he parades none of these, reducing them to neither a whim nor a hobby. He passed some years in the Dutch Indies, travelled all over Europe, knows more of Greek, Latin, and antiquities than anybody else, and is as thoroughly scientific as any University professer. But ...
— Dutch Life in Town and Country • P. M. Hough
... Some whim or fancy pleases every eye; For talents premature 'tis now the rage: In Music how great Handel would have smil'd T' have seen what crowds are raptur'd with a child! A Garrick we have had in little Betty— And now we're told we have ...
— The Complete Poetical Works of Samuel Taylor Coleridge - Vol I and II • Samuel Taylor Coleridge
... resolution, and the subject of our sketch was not disposed to undertake an enterprise and then abandon it. She had trials of other kinds, to bear. The surgeons afforded her few or no facilities for her work; and evidently expected that her whim of nursing would soon be given over. Then came the general order for the removal of volunteer nurses from the hospitals; this she evaded by enrolling herself as nurse, and drawing army pay, which she distributed to the men. For nearly a year ...
— Woman's Work in the Civil War - A Record of Heroism, Patriotism, and Patience • Linus Pierpont Brockett
... Coventry and Birmingham, drink, and what not—for, though a hard man, John Hayes had learned to spend his money pretty freely on himself and her—having had all her wishes gratified, it was natural that she should begin to find out some more; and the next whim she hit upon was to be restored to her child. It may be as well to state that she had never informed her husband of the existence of that phenomenon, although he was aware of his wife's former connection with the Count,—Mrs. Hayes, in their matrimonial ...
— Catherine: A Story • William Makepeace Thackeray
... like that, and yet is happy enough. It depends so much on the man. Many a man adores his wife and is very good to her, and yet cannot bear that she should seem to settle anything without consulting his whim. And Philip Compton had never been what might be called an easy-going man. It was right of Elinor to give no answer till she knew what he would like. The dreadful thing was that she expressed no pleasure in her mother's proposal, scarcely looked as ...
— The Marriage of Elinor • Margaret Oliphant
... these habits of conduct, so produced, had in human life? What has been the net result of the process? At first sight a generalized answer seems impossible. All sorts of chance causes bring about local alterations in morals. The momentary dominance of an impulse ordinarily weak, the whim of a ruler, the self-interest of classes, superstitious interpretation of omens, the attribution of some success to a prior act which may have had nothing to do with it such accidental and irrational sources of ...
— Problems of Conduct • Durant Drake
... judgment and responsibility. He learns through obedience to value various kinds of authority, and eventually to choose his authorities; his final authority being his conscience or principle, not impulse or whim. He learns also by questioning the principle of obedience to persons, and comes to guide his conduct by principle or conscience, and not by custom ...
— Your Child: Today and Tomorrow • Sidonie Matzner Gruenberg
... There were no signs of a struggle in the garden, nor had there been the slightest noise to attract the attention of the waiting maid. It was not impossible, after all, that she had slipped away of her own accord, possessed of a sudden whim or impulse. ...
— Truxton King - A Story of Graustark • George Barr McCutcheon
... confessed. "He comes and goes as the whim seizes him, and I very seldom know where he is. One week it is whiting and another codling. Lately he seems to have shown some ...
— The Zeppelin's Passenger • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... that even if the clever thief or thieves had heard of Van Vreck's whim, no attempt would be made to dispose of the spoil to him. The elderly millionaire, though one of the most eccentric men living, was known as ...
— The Second Latchkey • Charles Norris Williamson and Alice Muriel Williamson
... stared, their little hearts made glad by novelty and colour. Great was the surprise of the older folk, who said, 'It is a new thing in the world when so great a show as this comes out of the accustomed track of shows to erect its tent in our small town!' Yet so it was; from some whim of the manager, or of some one who had the ear of the manager, the thing ...
— A Dozen Ways Of Love • Lily Dougall
... and she was vastly entertained. She's a woman of infinite spirit and she likes other women to have spirit too. She's not without romance—and I wouldn't give a thank-you for her if she were. If you'd run off out of restlessness or a mere whim or fit of temper, I doubt if she'd troubled about you further; but love—that was another thing altogether. Oh, and your courage in escaping from that dissolute rascal—that captured her. My dear, Queensberry's Duchess is your friend. She's as desirous as I am that you should be Polly ...
— Madame Flirt - A Romance of 'The Beggar's Opera' • Charles E. Pearce
... far different, a far more stirring vision, and to such the deeper causes of the Terror are revealed. For they behold a vast multitude, stained with care, haggard, forlorn, striving, dying, toiling even to their death, that the passing whim of a tyrant may be gratified. Louis commanded; Versailles arose, a palace of rare delight for princes and nobles, for wits and courtly prelates, for grave philosophers and ladies frail as fair. A palace and a hell, a grim monument to regal egoism, created to minister to the inflated vanity of a ...
— History of the French Revolution from 1789 to 1814 • F. A. M. Mignet
... merry little rumble. I think she knew we were going back to the Professor. Bock careered mightily along the wayside. And I had much time for thinking. On the whole, I was glad; for I had much to ponder. An adventure that had started as a mere lark or whim had now become for me the very gist of life itself. I was fanciful, I guess, and as romantic as a young hen, but by the bones of George Eliot, I'm sorry for the woman that never has a chance to be fanciful. Mifflin was in jail; aye, but he ...
— Parnassus on Wheels • Christopher Morley
... heart restrained her. So Alice lived, quiet, affectionate, but undemonstrative, as was natural after the trials she had passed. Insensibly she became "the angel in the house"; mother and son felt drawn to her by an irresistible attraction. By every delicate kindness, by attention to every wish and whim, by glances full of admiration and tenderness, both showed the power which her beauty and goodness exerted. And, truly, she was worthy of the homage. The younger men who saw her were set aflame at once, or sighed afar in despair; while the elderly felt an unaccountable ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 3, No. 18, April, 1859 - [Date last updated: August 7, 2005] • Various
... urgency of her summons and decided that she spoke thus conventionally to gain time. On another occasion he might have humoured such a whim, but to-night it goaded him almost beyond endurance. Surely they had passed ...
— The Way of an Eagle • Ethel M. Dell
... to Rome with them. She managed it all so well, saying nothing at first of their intended journey, but making herself very agreeable to her son. She brought to him all the flattering things said of them. She studied every little whim, wish, or caprice. She put him on a pedestal and made an idol of him. She was all that was gay, amiable, pleasant and kind. She made herself not only his friend and companion, but everything else in the world to him. ...
— A Mad Love • Bertha M. Clay
... of women, who years ago wore the large, flaring back, felt hat, knew they were following the whim of a woman known to the half-world as Cora Pearl? Not pretty, but of a very beautiful figure, and English by birth, she was, one might say, of course, a good horse-woman. She banqueted late one night—so late that dawn was greying the windows and ...
— Stage Confidences • Clara Morris
... and not disposed to show the satisfaction I felt on this point, I, yielding to the whim of the moment, took up the subject as though I considered myself aggrieved rather than benefited by what had been done. "Yes—thanks to you, I am. Crimsworth turned me off at a minute's notice, owing to some interference of yours at a public ...
— The Professor • (AKA Charlotte Bronte) Currer Bell
... knew you cruel before," said Adelaide quietly. "Why should you destroy the poor fellow's happiness, as well as Leam's chances, for a mere passing whim? You surely are not going to repeat with the daughter the father's original mistake ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Vol. XVII. No. 101. May, 1876. • Various
... his thumb-nail, and smiled at me sidelong. I drew myself up with dignity to repudiate his proposal, but at that instant there came to me—who can say what it was?—a whim, a nudge from the thumb of Providence, a momentary ...
— The Second Class Passenger • Perceval Gibbon
... You and I, Hortebise, have indulged our every whim, and have spent gold like water, while our friend garnered his harvest and stored it away. But poor Catenac has no expensive tastes, nor does he care for women or the pleasures of the table. While we indulged in every pleasure, he lent out his money at usurious ...
— Caught In The Net • Emile Gaboriau
... whom the shameful confession of his marriage must be made—Miss Muller. That was the result, he thought, of his absurd whim of loitering about Berry town. When he had met Maria Muller before, he had no reason to think she cared a doit whether he was married or single. Now—McCall's color changed, alone as he was, with shame and annoyance. With all his experience of life and of women, he had as little ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science - Vol. XI, No. 27, June, 1873 • Various
... all the giving! I've never told you, Esteban, but I'm quite rich." Holding the man away, she smiled into his eyes. "Yes, richer than I have any right to be. I had no need to come to Cuba; it was just the whim of an irresponsible, spoiled young woman. I gave a huge amount of money to the New York Junta and that's why I was allowed ...
— Rainbow's End • Rex Beach
... hostess made for her guests' entertainment and amusement they patronised or ignored with equal nonchalance, according to individual whim; they commanded breakfasts for all hours of the morning, and they lunched at home and dined abroad, or reversed the order, or sought all their meals in the homes of neighbouring friends, quite without notice or apology. Such was the modish manner of that summer of 1915—a sedulous avoidance ...
— Nobody • Louis Joseph Vance
... saw that this was more than a passing whim, he called Sir Ralph to the rescue, Beechy and I jumped out, and the car was pushed to one side. Then, with all of us standing round, he proceeded to search for the mischief. Apparently nothing was wrong. The engine was cool; the ...
— My Friend the Chauffeur • C. N. Williamson and A. M. Williamson
... before he entered, speaking softly to the officer for fear of being heard in the princess's chamber. 'To convince you,' said he, 'that there is neither presumption, nor whim, nor youthful conceit in my undertaking, I leave it to your own desire whether I should cure the princess in your presence, or where we are, without going ...
— Fairy Tales From The Arabian Nights • E. Dixon
... been made to him, but Master Brown, who had recommended him, and who did not at all like the prospect of a strange woodward, came to expostulate with him for throwing away such a chance for a mere whim, telling Patience she was a sensible wench and ought to persuade her brother to see what was for his own good and the good of all, holding ...
— Under the Storm - Steadfast's Charge • Charlotte M. Yonge
... "It was a whim, I think. Just a desire to see a few foreign countries before he settled down to live the ...
— A Maker of History • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... the embers reflectively. "'T is folly to want her," he said finally, as he rose and began the removal of his coat, "now that ye need not her money; but she's enough to tempt any man with blood in his veins, and I can afford the whim. Keep that blood in check, however, till ye have her fast; and do not frighten her as ye have done. To think of Lord Clowes, cool enough to match any man, losing his head over a whiffling bit of woman-flesh! What devil's baits ...
— Janice Meredith • Paul Leicester Ford
... cater to her whims. I resolved to be more considerate of her in the future. But my native caution made me make a reservation. I would yield to her wishes whenever my self-respect would let me do so. I had a shrewd notion that a person who would cater to every whim of my husband's mother would be little better than ...
— Revelations of a Wife - The Story of a Honeymoon • Adele Garrison
... has not, and neither has he that seriousness of our middle-class, which is, as I have often said, the great strength of this class, and may become its salvation. Why, a man may hear a young Dives of the aristocratic class, when the whim takes him to sing the praises of wealth and material comfort, sing them with a cynicism from which the conscience of the veriest Philistine of our industrial middle-class would recoil in affright. And ...
— Culture and Anarchy • Matthew Arnold
... evil. They have but to put out their little finger and enforce the Rubrics, and then the whole controversy would be at an end.... I knew there was something else, yes! He said we need not fast! But Cambridge men are always peculiar, they always have some whim or other; he ought to have been at Oxford, and we should have made a man of him. He has many good points, but he runs theories, and rides hobbies, and ...
— Loss and Gain - The Story of a Convert • John Henry Newman
... shadowy of all footholds, that of the whim of a populace, had already given way under him. His enemies knew it, and were exulting in their triumph. He knew it himself, and stood up, calmly defiant, ready for any event, if only he succeeded in snatching her beautiful head from the ready embrace ...
— I Will Repay • Baroness Emmuska Orczy
... Martha, I beg of you—get up, dress yourself. It is for your own sake I ask it, for your comfort, for your own welfare. What would become of you if, for a caprice, a stupid whim, we should ...
— The Nabob • Alphonse Daudet
... about his past, nor even about his present life, nor from what source he derived his fortune,—obviously a large one, inasmuch as he was able to gratify his every whim and lived in the greatest luxury whenever he visited America,—nor where he resided when at home, nor where was the port from which his schooner hailed, and none would have ventured to question him upon any of these points so little disposed was he to be communicative. He was not the kind of man ...
— Facing the Flag • Jules Verne
... arrival in Bagdad, I beg you to do me the honour to sup with me, and repose yourself at my house for this night, after the fatigue of your journey." He then told him his custom of entertaining the first stranger he met with. The caliph found something so odd and singular in Abou Hassan's whim, that he was very desirous to know the cause; and told him that he could not better merit a civility, which he did not expect as a stranger, than by accepting the obliging offer made him; that he had only to lead the way, and he was ready ...
— The Arabian Nights Entertainments vol. 3 • Anon.
... substitute the word foreigner, or of foreign extraction. For perhaps it may appear, that the excellence we find in these Horses depends totally on the mechanism of their parts, and not in their blood; and that all the particular distinctions and fashions thereof, depend also on the whim and caprice ...
— A Dissertation on Horses • William Osmer
... short, she had such an Ascendancy over him, that he didn't scruple in publick to own her as his Wife. When she had secur'd him thus far in her Toils, she never conceal'd her Power, but play'd the Part of a perfect Humourist. She indulg'd herself in every Whim that came in her Head, without Fear of being brow-beat. In the first Place, She insisted that the Chief Magus, who was old and gouty, should dance a Saraband before her; and upon his modest Refusal to comply with so preposterous a Request, she persecuted him without Mercy: ...
— Zadig - Or, The Book of Fate • Voltaire
... tutor. Soon after this, the young man fell in with Bossuet's controversial writings, and was speedily converted by them to the Roman Catholic faith. The apostasy of a gentleman-commoner would of course be for a time the chief subject of conversation in the common room of Magdalene. His whim about Arabic learning would naturally be mentioned, and would give occasion to some jokes about the probability of his turning Mussulman. If such jokes were made, Johnson, who frequently visited Oxford, was very likely to hear of them.' Though Gibbon's Autobiography ends with the year 1788, ...
— Life Of Johnson, Vol. 2 • Boswell, Edited by Birkbeck Hill
... on the three sledges belonging to my party are sufficiently interesting to be set out at length below. Most of the items were included in the impedimenta of all our parties, but slight variations were necessary to meet particular stances or to satisfy the whim of an individual. ...
— The Home of the Blizzard • Douglas Mawson
... I alone than shapes of epic greatness are stationed around me, and serve my Spirit the office which is equivalent to a King's body-guard.... I live more out of England than in it. The Mountains of Tartary are a favorite lounge, if I happen to miss the Alleghany ridge, or have no whim ...
— The Joyful Heart • Robert Haven Schauffler
... of Art is that it shall give us the artist's best. Art is the mintage of the soul. All the whim, foible, and rank personality are blown away on the winds ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great, Volume 6 - Subtitle: Little Journeys to the Homes of Eminent Artists • Elbert Hubbard
... times to use their flails against the crowd. Room had to be made for the masters of Rome, the wealthy and the idle, who threw sesterces about for the gratification of their smallest whim, as a common man would shake ...
— "Unto Caesar" • Baroness Emmuska Orczy
... strong expression of opinion. The rose will win. It does not look so now. To all appearances, this is the age of the chrysanthemum. What this gaudy flower will be, daily expanding and varying to suit the whim of fashion, no one can tell. It may be made to bloom like the cabbage; it may spread out like an umbrella—it can never be large enough nor showy enough to suit us. Undeniably it is very effective, especially in masses of gorgeous color. ...
— Baddeck and That Sort of Thing • Charles Dudley Warner
... bosom. But I cannot like the Quakers (as Desdemona would say) "to live with them." I am all over sophisticated—with humours, fancies, craving hourly sympathy. I must have books, pictures, theatres, chit-chat, scandal, jokes, ambiguities, and a thousand whim-whams, which their simpler taste can do without. I should starve at their primitive banquet. My appetites are too high for the salads which (according to Evelyn) Eve dressed for the ...
— The Works of Charles and Mary Lamb, Volume 2 • Charles Lamb
... the ledge, but keep inside the grotto that had given them such well-timed shelter. Some sulky savage, disappointed at not getting their scalps, might take it into his head to return and hurl down into the hole another shower of stones. Such a whim was probable to ...
— The Lone Ranche • Captain Mayne Reid
... and the rustic bench invited him more than the bustling hotel and the prospect of a dreary dinner. But he forced himself to his tub and evening clothes, and once more dined alone. The fixed habits of a lifetime are not to be lightly set aside for some passing whim. ...
— High Noon - A New Sequel to 'Three Weeks' by Elinor Glyn • Anonymous
... was wondring what this profusion of Learning would end in, WILL. told us that Jack Freelove, who was a Fellow of Whim, made Love to one of those Ladies who throw away all their Fondness [on [2]] Parrots, Monkeys, and Lap-dogs. Upon going to pay her a Visit one Morning, he writ a very pretty Epistle upon this Hint. Jack, says he, ...
— The Spectator, Volume 2. • Addison and Steele
... lurched, groped for a support, then fell to his knees. The hot drops turned to red globules in the snow as he kept crawling, gasping, "Oh, God! Won't somebody come to me?" The dog walked beside him as he dragged himself along, perplexed and wondering at this whim ...
— The Fighting Shepherdess • Caroline Lockhart
... Jerry found himself looking ahead, questioning the future. In spite of his real ability and his freedom from the more outbreaking faults, Jerry had been progressing steadily toward utter worthlessness, by the simple but effective method of always obeying the whim of the moment. The old grandmother with whom he lived had long before given up all attempt to control the boy, who was generally good-natured when allowed to do exactly as he pleased. Jerry enjoyed himself, kept busy in his ...
— Peggy Raymond's Vacation - or Friendly Terrace Transplanted • Harriet L. (Harriet Lummis) Smith
... sent to a friend; otherwise I'm reluctant to take the life of flowers for a whim. Wild flowers, I mean. I am not sentimental about garden flowers: they are cultivated for decoration, grown ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... was made, how many have lived and suffered, and died, unlettered and unsung—snatched by a tyrant's whim from life to death, in the glory of the sun, in the gloom of night, in blood and flame, and torment? Indeed, their ...
— The Broad Highway • Jeffery Farnol
... go out to rodeo work; indeed, he was anxious to go. But, not being a morbid young man, he did not contemplate carrying a broken heart with him. Teresita was sweet and winsome and maddeningly alluring; he knew it, he felt it still. Indeed, he was made to realize it every time the whim seized her to punish Jack by smiling upon Dade. But she was as capricious as beauty usually is, and he knew that also; and after being used several times as a club with which to beat Jack into proper humility (and always seeing very clearly that ...
— The Gringos • B. M. Bower
... Eve there had been a dance at Piping Tree, and because she had danced twice with Gay (who had ridden over in obedience to a whim), Abel had parted from her in anger. For the first time she had felt the white heat of his jealousy, and it had aroused rebellion, not acquiescence, in her heart. Jonathan Gay was nothing to her (though he called her his cousin)—he had openly shown his preference for Blossom—but she insisted ...
— The Miller Of Old Church • Ellen Glasgow
... his seat, and his ankles encircled by hard wood. "Now, Dacre!" he exclaimed, enthusiastically, "fasten the bolts, and leave me for ten minutes." Like a courteous host Lord Dacre complied with the whim of his guest, and having placed it beyond his power to liberate himself bade him 'farewell' for ten minutes. Intending to saunter along the lane and return at the expiration of the stated period, Lord Dacre moved away, and falling into ...
— A Book About Lawyers • John Cordy Jeaffreson
... that, as often happens throughout life, and I am a living proof of it, our Failures prove to be the best Successes: for certainly if my boyish whim had been granted, and I had thereafter taken habitually to such aeronautical flights, at once perilous and unsettling, that young Carthusian would scarcely have stood before you this day as ...
— My Life as an Author • Martin Farquhar Tupper
... raft and left Dawson for the head-waters of the Tanana) the men and dogs were sitting on the crest of a cliff which fell away, straight down, to naked bed-rock three hundred feet below. John Thornton was sitting near the edge, Buck at his shoulder. A thoughtless whim seized Thornton, and he drew the attention of Hans and Pete to the experiment he had in mind. "Jump, Buck!" he commanded, sweeping his arm out and over the chasm. The next instant he was grappling with Buck on the extreme edge, while Hans and Pete were dragging ...
— The Call of the Wild • Jack London
... and colour. Great was the surprise of the older folk, who said, 'It is a new thing in the world when so great a show as this comes out of the accustomed track of shows to erect its tent in our small town!' Yet so it was; from some whim of the manager, or of some one who had the ear of the ...
— A Dozen Ways Of Love • Lily Dougall
... and we held it for three months. We had our victuals dress'd, and brought to us regularly by a woman in the neighborhood, who had from me a list of forty dishes, to be prepar'd for us at different times, in all which there was neither fish, flesh, nor fowl, and the whim suited me the better at this time from the cheapness of it, not costing us above eighteenpence sterling each per week. I have since kept several Lents most strictly, leaving the common diet for that, and that for the common, abruptly, without the least ...
— Autobiography of Benjamin Franklin • Benjamin Franklin
... grandmother will often bring choice tidbits to the child at bedtime, or between meals, when she ought not to eat anything, much less such hearty food. When the little child sees the good things, she, of course, wants them, and having been humored in every whim, she must still be, she thinks, especially when she is ill. A problem then is here presented which I may help to solve for them. Jennie and I are growing very fond of each other, and she will do some things for me which she ...
— A Woman who went to Alaska • May Kellogg Sullivan
... look—here's a whole benchful accounted for at one swoop." Still Jemmy did not reply. The sunbeam drifting between the benches before him fell on a little patch of earth—a patch collected by one of the slaves whose comrades, humouring his whim, had brought him a handful or two in their pockets whenever they returned from shore. Upon this patch of earth were sunk the prints of a pair of feet, far apart; and between these footprints glimmered two lines of green, with two other lines ...
— The Blue Pavilions • Sir Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch
... to New York and study for the stage. It isn't a whim—it's what I've wanted most to do ever since I was a little girl. I may not have any great talent, but Papa Claude thinks I have. So does Captain Phipps. To have to wait a whole year until I'm ...
— Quin • Alice Hegan Rice
... women accustomed to gratify every whim and caprice, will find it hard, at first, to cut down their various unnecessary expenses, and will feel it a great self-denial to live in a smaller house than they have been accustomed to, with less expensive furniture, less company, less costly clothing, fewer servants, ...
— The Art of Money Getting - or, Golden Rules for Making Money • P. T. Barnum
... by the man whom last night she had thought——She bowed to kismet and strangled her feelings as she had so many times before. And so after a shake of the hand, Mr. Middleton left her, left her to learn as the idol of Mr. Crayburn's life, with every whim gratified, that the first American she had known was ...
— The Strange Adventures of Mr. Middleton • Wardon Allan Curtis
... coffee. "Coffee? No!" he snapped at her. A few moments later he came to his senses and found himself smoking fast and hard. He heartily damned this fellow Sloane for breaking into the family and asking poor Laura to risk her whole life—just for his own selfish pleasure, his whim! Yes, "whim" was the very word for it! Laura's attitude, too! Did she look at it seriously? Not at all! Quite plainly she saw her career as one long Highland fling and dance, with this Harry boy as her partner! Who had he danced with in his past? The fellow's ...
— His Family • Ernest Poole
... olde poore man Was ever in suspect of her marriage: For ever deem'd he, since it first began, That when the lord *fulfill'd had his corage,* *had gratified his whim* He woulde think it were a disparage* *disparagement To his estate, so low for to alight, And voide* her as soon as ...
— The Canterbury Tales and Other Poems • Geoffrey Chaucer
... middle-aged Belgian of wealth, was as merry a nobleman as ever set forth to seek the pleasures of life. His board was known as the most bountiful, his home the cheeriest and most hospitable, his horses the best bred in all Brussels. He loved his wife and indulged her every whim, and she adored him. Theirs was a home in which the laugh seldom gave way to the frown, where happiness dwelt undisturbed and merriment kept the rafters twitching. With them the two London women were to stop until after the wedding. Saxondale was to ...
— Castle Craneycrow • George Barr McCutcheon
... depended on the whim of this man. He might one day find Loewestein dull, or the air of the place unhealthy, or the gin bad, and leave the fortress, and take his daughter with him, when Cornelius and Rosa would ...
— The Black Tulip • Alexandre Dumas (Pere)
... of being dry and bald, I have confined myself to telling accurately what has happened, my greatest ambition being to leave no one the chance of misrepresenting, as his whim, fancy, or passion may dictate, facts in which I am so deeply interested. Let those note them who, after my time, have to defend my memory should it ...
— Punch, Or The London Charivari, Vol. 100., Jan. 24, 1891. • Various
... circumstances under which they met were so ludicrous or dramatic; it is that they were so commonplace. It seems, on looking back, the oddest chance in the world that first brought them together, the merest whim of chance, the veriest freak of circumstance; and yet how all life has taken its colour and drawn its enrichment from that casual meeting! They happened to enter the same compartment of a railway train; ...
— Mushrooms on the Moor • Frank Boreham
... in the morning," she said, and looked from one to the other of their blank faces. "You look as if it were a shock, instead of a surprise," she added. "I did not tell you at first, as it would seem only a whim. But he has told me I have reason for the whim, and that I should ...
— That Girl Montana • Marah Ellis Ryan
... but it was not Fouche's police. Fouche saw the absurdity of interfering with trifles. I recollect that immediately after the creation of the Legion of Honour, it being summer, the young men of Paris indulged in the whim of wearing a carnation in a button-hole, which at a distance had rather a deceptive effect. Bonaparte took this very seriously. He sent for Fouche, and desired him to arrest those who presumed thus to turn the new order into ridicule. Fouche merely ...
— Memoirs of Napoleon Bonaparte, Complete • Louis Antoine Fauvelet de Bourrienne
... of the great wholesale furrier in Ludgate Hill, the largest house of the kind in the world, with a branch in New York and another in Quebec or Montreal. He had been called to the bar to please a whim of his father's. ...
— The Martian • George Du Maurier
... for her Highness in some whim had insulted him with his origin, caused pork to be removed from before him at table, or injured him in some such silly way; and he had a violent animosity to the old Baron de Magny, both in his capacity of Protestant, and because the latter in some haughty mood had publicly ...
— Barry Lyndon • William Makepeace Thackeray
... that they must apologize for being laborers, and beg for an opportunity to earn a living in some one's employ. One of the saddest facts, and most threatening of disaster in these present commercial conditions, is the common desire to be employed, to get a job, dependent on the whim of another, instead of a determination to direct one's own labor and be the manager of one's own business. The sound educational development is wanting in the daily occupation of the hired laborer, and there is a loss of manhood that ...
— Usury - A Scriptural, Ethical and Economic View • Calvin Elliott
... ever do—because some don't. Many, indeed! I reckon there never was a woman yet outside of a feeb' home that didn't believe she could be an A. No. 1 siren if she only had the nerve to dress the part; never one that didn't just ache to sway men to her lightest whim, and believe she could—not for any evil purpose, mind you, but just to show her power. Think of the tender hearts that must have shuddered over the damage they could and actually might do in one of them French bathing suits like you are said to witness in Paris and ...
— Somewhere in Red Gap • Harry Leon Wilson
... gone, with good-natured indulgence of Father's whim, and studied at a training school, with one eye on her books and the other watching for Dick to come up the street. And when she brought home her despised diploma, there was a diamond ring on the hand that placed it on her father's desk. That ...
— The End of the Rainbow • Marian Keith
... I believe the most worldly minded mother would be ready to yield. It is only when the daughter has combated her parents all the time that they believe her to be unreasonable and obstinate and deserving of coercion. The point is, that she must make her stand for a principle and not for a whim. ...
— Girls and Women • Harriet E. Paine (AKA E. Chester}
... suddenly quitted her, and walked, in much disorder, about the room. But soon recovering some composure, from the assistance of pride, "Pardon, madam," he said, "a trial such as no man can be vindicated in making. I have indulged a romantic whim, which your better judgment disapproves, and I receive but the ...
— Cecilia vol. 3 - Memoirs of an Heiress • Frances (Fanny) Burney (Madame d'Arblay)
... It may be guessed by the suspicious that at first the intention was that Lord Falconbridge should seem to be visiting France for his own curiosity or pleasure, the Protector only taking advantage of his whim, and that letters 1 and 2 were then drafted, but that afterwards it was thought better to send Lord Falconbridge on an avowed embassy of congratulation in Cromwell's own name, and letters 3 and 4 were then substituted. Perhaps, however, there was no duplicity in the affair ...
— The Life of John Milton, Volume 5 (of 7), 1654-1660 • David Masson
... set, in double chase, For such was fortune's whim, The Farmer rode to hunt the stag, And ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction - Vol. 14, Issue 393, October 10, 1829 • Various
... ironical, and had a rather biting humour; he could not fail to please. He began to be seen everywhere, directly he had received his commission as an officer. He was much admired in society, and he indulged every whim, even every caprice and every folly, and gave himself airs, but that too was attractive in him. Women went out of their senses over him; men called him a coxcomb, and were secretly jealous of him. ...
— Fathers and Children • Ivan Sergeevich Turgenev
... Lafayette's Carriage, flaring with lights, rolls this moment through the inner Arch of the Carrousel,—where a Lady shaded in broad gypsy-hat, and leaning on the arm of a servant, also of the Runner or Courier sort, stands aside to let it pass, and has even the whim to touch a spoke of it with her badine,—light little magic rod which she calls badine, such as the Beautiful then wore. The flare of Lafayette's Carriage, rolls past: all is found quiet in the Court-of-Princes; sentries ...
— The French Revolution • Thomas Carlyle
... know.... She tells me I have broke her heart—but yet will have none of me.... Tells me my duty lies elsewhere; that I shall make amends. How can a man make amends when his heart lies not in the deed?... Am I then to be fettered to a passing whim for all eternity? Does an instant's idle folly entail endless responsibility? Do I merit punishment everlasting for a silly amourette that lasted no longer than the July moon? Tell me, Loskiel, you who are called among us ...
— The Hidden Children • Robert W. Chambers
... these humours so familiar and easy to him is a strange discovery in the midst of all the tragic circumstances of his life and reign. The union of the most delicate poetry and romance with that genial whim and fancy is unusual enough: but it is still more unusual to find the stern Justiciar, avenger of blood and redresser of wrong, the reconstructer of a distracted country, capable not only of the broad fun of the rustic ballad-maker, but of so tolerant and ...
— Royal Edinburgh - Her Saints, Kings, Prophets and Poets • Margaret Oliphant
... Valley of Diamonds, Mr. Hood's volume is almost unexceptionably good, whatever he may have rejected; and one of the best, if not the best, article in the whole work, has been contributed by the editor himself. Associated as Mr. Hood's name is with "whim and oddity," we, however, looked for more quips, quirks, and quiddities than he has given us, which we should have hailed as specially suited to the approaching festive season, and from their contrast with the contents of similar ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, Vol. 12, - Issue 340, Supplementary Number (1828) • Various
... was not wanted, but he must needs begin setting a bad example to the donkey, telling him as plainly as one animal could tell another that he did not mean to be caught, and, as "evil communications corrupt good manners," the donkey took the same whim into his great rough ash-grey head, and galloped after the pony as hard as he could. It was of no use to say, "come then," or "coop—coop—coop," for both of the four-footed beasts seemed to have ...
— Hollowdell Grange - Holiday Hours in a Country Home • George Manville Fenn
... loving, hoar, spake the lordly ocean: "You are sheen and steadfastness: I am sheen and motion, Gulfing argosies for whim, navies ...
— An Anthology of Australian Verse • Bertram Stevens
... watching her friend as he passed her towards the opposing bank. The old man lay with his eyes closed. As soon as he knew that he was dying he had closed his eyes, that the dead orbs might not stare into the faces of the living. It had been a whim of his for years. He would leave the house decent when his lease was up. And the will kept pressing down the lids which it would soon have ...
— Alec Forbes of Howglen • George MacDonald
... so produced, had in human life? What has been the net result of the process? At first sight a generalized answer seems impossible. All sorts of chance causes bring about local alterations in morals. The momentary dominance of an impulse ordinarily weak, the whim of a ruler, the self-interest of classes, superstitious interpretation of omens, the attribution of some success to a prior act which may have had nothing to do with it such accidental and irrational sources of morals, and the resulting ...
— Problems of Conduct • Durant Drake
... of restitution to the downtrodden fairyhood, is an exotic, fair and slight bud, grafted into the sturdier indigenous stock. For let us fix but a steady look upon the thing itself, and what is there before us? a whim, a trick of the fancy, tickling the fancy. We are amused with a quaint calamity—a panic of caps and cloaks. We laugh—we cannot help it—as the pigmy assembly flies a thousand ways at once—grave councillors and all—throwing terrified somersets—hiding under stones, ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, No. CCCXLV. July, 1844. Vol. LVI. • Various
... impertinence and lack of taste to decline her friendship, tacitly, of course, but quite definitely. She had never been in love with him. If she had been she would have been more definite with him. But he had attracted her a good deal; and she always resented even the crossing of a whim. Something in his personality and something in his physique had appealed to her, a strangeness and height, an imaginativeness and remoteness which features and gesture often showed in despite of his intention. He was not like everybody. It would have been interesting ...
— The Way of Ambition • Robert Hichens
... answered briefly to the murmurs: "It is unadvisable to oppose my whim for writing in wine; who knows but I might exchange it for a fancy to write in blood? Bring hither the vadmal, thrall, and we will lose ...
— The Thrall of Leif the Lucky • Ottilie A. Liljencrantz
... could not. Again desperately she pressed her hand to her throat. How would he take it? She wondered. Would he regard it as a mere childish whim? Or would he see that he was dealing with a woman, and a desperate woman ...
— The Rocks of Valpre • Ethel May Dell
... we were. And while I made a mock in my heart of their high-flown sentiments—or thought I did—I laughed no less at the folly which had led me to dream, even for a moment, that I could, at my age, go back—go back and risk all for a whim, a scruple, the fancy of a ...
— Under the Red Robe • Stanley Weyman
... authoritative places, the demands of the workers for political, social, and economic reform. The whole is a struggle for democracy, both political and industrial, that is by no means founded merely on whim or caprice. It has gradually become a religion, an imperative religion, of millions of workingmen and women. Chiefly because of their economic subjection, they are striving in the most heroic manner to make their voice heard in those places where the rules of the game of life are decided. ...
— Violence and the Labor Movement • Robert Hunter
... "Oh, some whim of the poor soul's. Now get a bit of paper and draw up a paragraph as I shall tell you. But ...
— The Mayor of Casterbridge • Thomas Hardy
... walls of dung, On once a flock-heel, but repaired with straw, With tape-tied curtains never meant to draw, The George and Garter dangling from that bed Where tawdry yellow strove with dirty red, Great Villiers lies—alas! how changed from him, That life of pleasure, and that soul of whim! Gallant and gay, in Cliveden's proud alcove, The bower of wanton Shrewsbury and love; Or just as gay at council, in a ring Of mimic statesmen and their merry King. No wit to flatter left of all his store! No fool to laugh at, which he ...
— The Age of Pope - (1700-1744) • John Dennis
... plagued by Gregory's speculations touching the boy's fate and recriminations touching his own selfishness. On the other hand, however, the journey daunted him. He was not a man to sacrifice his creature comforts, and to be asked to sacrifice them to a mere whim, a shadow, added weight to his inclination ...
— The Tavern Knight • Rafael Sabatini
... were near at hand, and Duncan was all eager to make his way to their side. Hawk-eye so far humoured his whim as to consent to his visiting the encampment disguised as ...
— The Worlds Greatest Books - Vol. II: Fiction • Arthur Mee, J. A. Hammerton, Eds.
... arm and waved it in a circle. Instantly the whole tribe vanished. It was as if a puff of wind had blown them; or as if they had been figures thrown on a screen by a magic lantern and suddenly switched off at the performer's whim. Then the chief continued forward, ...
— The Ivory Trail • Talbot Mundy
... affair just for the sake of being sociable—I knew that much. The big idea was to get next to Marcus T. Runyon and thresh out a certain proposition on a face-to-face basis. And if he chucked that overboard because of a whim, we ...
— The House of Torchy • Sewell Ford
... it seemed to the waiting throngs that several ordinary days had passed since they left their sagging canvas cots at daybreak to stand attendant upon the whim of chance. They gathered in the blazing sun in front of the office of the paper, looking in at Editor Mong, who seemed more like a quack doctor that morning than ever before, with his wrinkled coat-sleeves pushed above his elbows and his cuffs ...
— Claim Number One • George W. (George Washington) Ogden
... sing 360 Through whose heart in such an hour Beats no march of conscious power, Sweeps no tumult of elation! 'Tis no Man we celebrate, By his country's victories great, 365 A hero half, and half the whim of Fate, But the pith and marrow of a Nation Drawing force from all her men, Highest, humblest, weakest, all, For her time of need, and then 370 Pulsing it again through them, Till the basest can no longer cower, Feeling his soul spring up divinely tall, Touched but in passing by her mantle-hem. ...
— The Vision of Sir Launfal - And Other Poems • James Russell Lowell
... to whom the shameful confession of his marriage must be made—Miss Muller. That was the result, he thought, of his absurd whim of loitering about Berry town. When he had met Maria Muller before, he had no reason to think she cared a doit whether he was married or single. Now—McCall's color changed, alone as he was, with shame and annoyance. ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science - Vol. XI, No. 27, June, 1873 • Various
... library to the reader. If this takes a hundred or more volumes a day, he is to have them; but to give him the right to throw a library into confusion by "browsing around," is to sacrifice the rights of the public to prompt service, to the whim of one man. Those who think that "browsing" is an education should reflect that it is like any other wandering employment, fatal to fixity of purpose. Like desultory reading of infinite periodicals, it tends rather to dissipate ...
— A Book for All Readers • Ainsworth Rand Spofford
... quiet confidence. He stepped close to her. "You are my slave, do you understand?—bought in the market-place as I might buy me a mule, a goat, or a camel—and belonging to me body and soul. You are my property, my thing, my chattel, to use or abuse, to cherish or break as suits my whim, without a will that is not my will, holding your very life at ...
— The Sea-Hawk • Raphael Sabatini
... long beard he was playfully stroking and, eyeing me with elfish gravity, seemed to ponder the question as if some comprehension of its importance had found entrance into his small brain. Annoyed at the doctor's whim, yet trusting to the child's intuition, I waited with inner anxiety for what those small lips would say, and felt an infinite relief, even if I did not show it, when he finally uttered a faint "Yes," and hid his face ...
— The Millionaire Baby • Anna Katharine Green
... "Well, church concerts are hardly to be compared with the stage, Polly. And please look in your mirror and remember that I am I and you are you. But of course you realize that if you will go on with this whim of yours, I am not going to let you live in any place by yourself. You would be sure to get ill or something dreadful might happen. No, I shall beg you every minute till the time comes, not to do what you must know would worry your mother. But if you ...
— The Camp Fire Girls in the Outside World • Margaret Vandercook
... pride of the goddess of love must often have hung its head. For her love was a thing that Adonis could not understand. He held her "Something better than his dog, a little dearer than his horse," and wondered at her whim to follow his hounds through brake and marsh and lonely forest. His reckless courage was her pride and her torture. Because he was to her so infinitely dear, his path seemed ever bestrewn with dangers. But when she spoke to him with anxious warning and ...
— A Book of Myths • Jean Lang
... as well," said the fisherman, who saw little use in books. He might have humoured Tiny in what he looked upon as a most extraordinary whim, but he never remembered seeing such a thing as a book in Fellness all the years he had known the place. People might have books, some of them, at least, but they were not of much use to fisher-folks, ...
— A Sailor's Lass • Emma Leslie
... skipper had not an idea what he meant, and he looked at him with an ironical twinkle in his dark eyes. Perhaps just because the skipper was so gross and dull a man the whim seized ...
— The Trembling of a Leaf - Little Stories of the South Sea Islands • William Somerset Maugham
... plain, homely Mrs. Brown a leader of fashion and a model of expensive elegance?—here are all the appliances and means in abundance. Within these enchanted lines Madame B. may be made "beautiful for ever!" Every appetite, every variety of whim, the cravings of the gourmet and the dreams of the sybarite, may be gratified to the utmost. A spendthrift might spend a handsome patrimony within these limits, nor, at the end of his time, would he call to mind a taste he had not been able ...
— The Cockaynes in Paris - 'Gone abroad' • Blanchard Jerrold
... way of a consultation? Here were Counsel, Solicitor and Client: the Serjeant gave up a portion of his valuable time and, further, the junior counsel was summoned specially from his chambers to supply his "advice and opinion." Mr. Pickwick ought surely to have to pay for his whim. And the bill of costs that these "sharks" of attornies sent in! It was astonishingly moderate. For writ, service of subpoenas, hunting up evidence, consultation, fees to counsel, fees for the day, retainers, etc.,—the sum of 120 pounds was all ...
— Bardell v. Pickwick • Percy Fitzgerald
... employee. The service of more than one important company has been made intolerable for men of spirit and creative ability by the arrogant and dominating spirit of the management. The men who continue to sacrifice their individuality to the whim or the arbitrary rule of their superiors, in time lose their ambition and initiative; and the organization declines to a level of routine, mechanical efficiency only one remove ...
— Increasing Efficiency In Business • Walter Dill Scott
... of silence. Some of the people gasped, as they had done when they saw Tad waving the Confederate flag at the window. But the band, loyal even to a mere whim (as they then thought it) of "Father Abraham," started the long-forbidden tune, and the President, bowing, retired, with little Tad, within the White House. Those words, "Give us 'Dixie,' boys," were President Lincoln's ...
— The Story of Young Abraham Lincoln • Wayne Whipple
... changed from him, That life of pleasure and that soul of whim: Gallant and gay, in Cliveden's proud alcove, The bower of wanton Shrewsbury ...
— Lectures on the English Poets - Delivered at the Surrey Institution • William Hazlitt
... and politicians, saw the reason and the necessity of reform. The hero of a victorious war, at the height of his popularity, his party in undisputed and seemingly indisputable supremacy, made the attempt. Congress, good-naturedly tolerating what it considered his whim of inexperience, granted money to try an experiment. The adverse pressure was tremendous. "I am used to pressure," said the soldier. So he was, but not to this pressure. He was driven by unknown and incalculable currents. He was enveloped in whirlwinds of sophistry, ...
— American Eloquence, Volume IV. (of 4) - Studies In American Political History (1897) • Various
... with Moliere in genius, or even near him. The "Gambler" is admirably done; but it is the only comedy in which Regnard attempted character. He drew from his experience. Moliere was so skilful a moral anatomist that he required only a whim or a weakness to construct a consistent character. This wonderful man found the French comic stage occupied by a few stock personages, imported from Spain and Italy. The elders were fathers or uncles, rich, miserly, and ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 15, No. 92, June, 1865 • Various
... answered him with sharp words, for this was a scheme after his own heart. "What, Thor!" he said. "Would you lose your hammer and keep Asgard in danger for so small a whim. Look, now: if you go not, Thrym with his giants will come in a mighty army and drive us from Asgard; then he will indeed make Freia his bride, and, moreover, he will have you for his slave under the power of his hammer. How like you this picture, brother of the thunder? Nay, Heimdal's plan ...
— Myths That Every Child Should Know - A Selection Of The Classic Myths Of All Times For Young People • Various
... chords were sonorous and melancholy. Occasionally they were fantastic and cheerful. Clearly they reflected the thoughts which possessed him, but whether the music aided those thoughts, or whether the playing was simply the result of a whim or fancy was more than I could determine. I might have rebelled against these exasperating solos had it not been that he usually terminated them by playing in quick succession a whole series of my favourite airs as a slight compensation for the ...
— A Study In Scarlet • Arthur Conan Doyle
... forninst me, wid a—a—candelabbrum in my hand, for you to pick your cards out av, must I not see nor feel? Av coorse I du! Up my back, an' in my boots, an' in the short hair av the neck—that's where I kape my eyes whim I'm on duty an' the reg'lar wans are fixed. Know! Take my word for it, sorr, ivrything an' a great dale more is known in a rig'mint; or fwhat wud be the use av a Mess Sargint, or a Sargint's wife ...
— Indian Tales • Rudyard Kipling
... Varney young Percival strolled on as the whim directed him. Turning down the Haymarket, he gained the colonnade of the Opera House. The crowd there was so dense that his footsteps were arrested, and he leaned against one of the columns in admiration of the various galaxies in view. In front blazed ...
— Lucretia, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... there in a silence which I did not break, the memory of her wrongs brought the crimson to her cheeks and the anger to her eyes. Suddenly she burst forth passionately: "The King is the King! What is a subject's will to clash with his? What weighs a woman's heart against his whim? Little cared he that my hand held back, grew cold at the touch of that other hand in which he would have put it. What matter if my will was against that marriage? It was but the will of a girl, and must be broken. All my world was with the King; I, who stood alone, was but a woman, young and untaught. ...
— To Have and To Hold • Mary Johnston
... salmon he caught, and trifling presents received. A small portable harp, of elegant workmanship, (adorned with "real silver," so ran the tale,) was the companion of his moonlight wanderings. He had a whim of serenading those who had never heard of a "serenade," but were not the less sensible of a placid pleasure at being awakened by soft music in some summer sight. The simple mountain cottagers, whose slumbers he thus broke or soothed, often ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Vol 58, No. 357, July 1845 • Various
... come in over the ice for the first time last winter. The other women felt that she was a bird of passage, that the frozen Arctic could be no more than a whim to her. They deferred a little to her because she knew the great world—New York, Vienna, London, Paris. Great names fell from her lips casually and carelessly. She referred familiarly to princes and famous statesmen, as if she had gossiped with them tete-a-tete over the teacups. ...
— The Yukon Trail - A Tale of the North • William MacLeod Raine
... Logic flow from one source: the forces that produce the one produce the other. {250} When walking along the street, thinking of the blue sky or the fine spring weather, I may either smile at some grotesque whim which occurs to me, or I may suddenly catch an intuition of the solution of a long-unsolved problem, which at that moment was far from my thoughts. Both notions are shaken out of the same reservoir,—the reservoir ...
— The Will to Believe - and Other Essays in Popular Philosophy • William James
... sunlit or shaded, best accomplishes its destined course. The officer is almost as powerless as the soldier to choose his opportunity or his place. Military glory may depend on a thousand things,—the accident of local position, the jealousy of a rival, the whim of a superior. But the merit of having done one's whole duty to the men whose lives are in one's keeping, and to the nation whose life is staked with theirs,—of having held one's command in such a state, that, if at any given moment it was not performing the most brilliant achievement, it might ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 14, No. 83, September, 1864 • Various
... well, it is as I have said: the thing which will give you the MOST pleasure, the most satisfaction, in any moment or FRACTION of a moment, is the thing you will always do. You must content the Master's LATEST whim, whatever it may be. ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... literary evolutionists who, in their whim of seeing in every original writer a copy of some predecessor, have declared that Hawthorne is derived from Tieck, and Poe from Hoffmann, just as Dickens modelled himself on Smollett and Thackeray followed in the footsteps ...
— Lippincott's Magazine, October 1885 • Various
... lord swarm the deck of the Kincaid, and in his terror lest Tarzan pursue and capture him he had stumbled on deep into the jungle, only to fall at last into the hands of one of the savage cannibal tribes that had felt the weight of Rokoff's evil temper and cruel brutality. Some strange whim of the chief of this tribe saved Paulvitch from death only to plunge him into a life of misery and torture. For ten years he had been the butt of the village, beaten and stoned by the women and children, cut and slashed and disfigured by the warriors; a ...
— The Son of Tarzan • Edgar Rice Burroughs
... is whom we give you. What a madcap you are never to listen to anything but your own foolish whim. ...
— The Impostures of Scapin • Moliere (Poquelin)
... eagerness of desire to realise the promises that had been given of complete victory, what would he have done? What would Elisha have done if he had had the quiver in his hand? This king smites three perfunctory taps on the floor, and having done what will satisfy the old man's whim, and what in decency he had to do, he stops, as if weary of the whole performance. So the prophet bursts out in indignation on his dying bed—'Thou shouldst have smitten five or six times; then hadst thou conquered utterly. Now thou shalt conquer but thrice.' A strange ...
— Expositions Of Holy Scripture - Volume I: St. Luke, Chaps. I to XII • Alexander Maclaren
... hate will, of course, succeed Christian love as the human creed. Friendship, as we know it, will largely cease to exist. Friends will be those who can be cowed into truculence or bought. There will be no truth, justice, equity, in our meaning. Only the will or whim of the Emperor. His State Church, with its worship of Him, will grow ...
— Villa Elsa - A Story of German Family Life • Stuart Henry
... Fang, Beauty Smith was a veritable, if terrible, god. He was a mad god at best, but White Fang knew nothing of madness; he knew only that he must submit to the will of this new master, obey his every whim ...
— White Fang • Jack London
... Thoreau is daily winning recognition as possessing some of the very highest qualities of thought and utterance, in a degree scarcely rivalled in contemporary literature. In spite of whim and frequent over-refining, and the entire omission of many important aspects of human life, these wondrous merits exercise their charm, and we value everything which lets us into the workshop of so rare a mind. These letters, most of which ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 16, No. 96, October 1865 • Various
... against its appearance even at his own funeral. Marie Louise loved him dearly, but she feared his prejudices. She had an abject terror of offending him, because she felt that she owed everything she had, and was, to the whim of his good grace. Gratitude was a passion with her, and it doomed her, as all passions do, good or bad, to the penalties human beings pay for every excess of virtue or vice—if, indeed, vice is anything but an immoderate, ...
— The Cup of Fury - A Novel of Cities and Shipyards • Rupert Hughes
... in those days. He grew arrogant and boastful, and strutted in his power like a man in liquor with the vain knowledge that he could increase the population of a state or a group of states, or he could shrivel the prosperity of a section of the country by his whim. For by changing a freight rate he could make wheat grow, where grass had nourished. By changing the rate again, he could beckon back the wilderness. And yet, how small was his power; here beside him, cherished as the ...
— A Certain Rich Man • William Allen White
... Richard, whose fate I must sigh at; Alas, that such frolic should now be so quiet! What spirits were his! what wit and what whim! Now breaking a jest, and now breaking a limb; Now wrangling and grumbling to keep up the ball, 55 Now teasing and vexing, yet laughing at all! In short, so provoking a devil was Dick, That we wish'd him full ...
— The Complete Poetical Works of Oliver Goldsmith • Oliver Goldsmith
... tragi-comedy, and he was opposed to a mixture of types. In tragedy, so he had reasoned in his essay upon 'Naive and Sentimental Poetry', raisonnement is out of place; in comedy, pathos. Lessing had yielded to the 'whim' of mixing the two. If, therefore, it was desired to make an acceptable stage-play out of 'Nathan' it would be advisable to modify it in the direction of tragedy by reducing its raisonnement, or else to make it more like comedy by reducing its pathos. In other words, theory had given Schiller ...
— The Life and Works of Friedrich Schiller • Calvin Thomas
... in my life," said the old gentleman, depositing the glass upon the table, after draining it of its contents—"never more surprised than when I received your letter, in which you stated your intention of going to the North to live. A more ridiculous whim it is impossible to conceive—the idea is perfectly absurd! To leave a fine old place like this, where you have everything around you so nice and comfortable, to go north, and settle amongst a parcel of strange Yankees! ...
— The Garies and Their Friends • Frank J. Webb
... thin, shrunken, faded, papery, and there is no terror in it. Then, too, it is dark in the cavity of the nest, consequently the skin could not serve as a scarecrow in any case. Hence, whatever its purpose may be, it surely is not that. It looks like a mere fancy or whim of the bird. There is that in its voice and ways that suggests something a little uncanny. Its call is more like the call of the toad than that of a bird. If the toad did not always swallow its own cast-off skin, the bird would probably ...
— Ways of Nature • John Burroughs
... had—even although pushed without ceremony through a door—behaved with perfect confidence, for he knew that, whatever her whim or her sense of humor, or her impudence, Yasmini would not fail him in the pinch. Even she, whose jest it is to see men writhe under her hand, has to own somebody her master, and though she would giggle at the notion of fearing any one man, or any dozen, ...
— Winds of the World • Talbot Mundy
... "It's just a whim," broke in Curtis, who did not feel like explaining at the moment that he was choosing a quiet old inn in a side street because he had been born there! Nevertheless, his words held that ring of decision, of finality in judgment, which invariably forms part of the ...
— One Wonderful Night - A Romance of New York • Louis Tracy
... Sylvia, who shared with him his student life,—who bore with him the dreary desolation of the siege without complaint,—this slender blue-eyed girl whom he was so quietly fond of, whom he teased or caressed as the whim suited, who sometimes made him the least bit impatient with her passionate devotion to him,—could this be the same Sylvia who lay weeping there in ...
— The King In Yellow • Robert W. Chambers
... beautiful butterfly hovering over a flower-bed—her eye caught by every novelty. She never asked the price of anything: and Lady Kirkbank informed them, in confidence, that she was a great heiress, with a millionaire grandmother who indulged her every whim. Other high born young ladies, shopping upon fixed allowances, and sorely perplexed to make both ends meet, looked with eyes ...
— Phantom Fortune, A Novel • M. E. Braddon
... sure, offered herself a sacrifice to the whims of the sick girl, whose worst whim was having no wish that could be ascertained, and who now, after two days of her mother's devotion, was cast upon her own resources ...
— Widger's Quotations from the Works of William Dean Howells • David Widger
... doctor answered. "And yet treat it as a whim of mine and answer my question. Supposing ...
— The Illustrious Prince • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... from which all that splendor springs. To-morrow it will be Mrs. O'Finnigan's grandchildren who will look down from their yellow wheels at the peanut and apple stands, and wonder how persons can be so vulgar as to buy candy in the streets. It is a whim of Mrs. Grundy's, who is all whimsey. She will not let us buy a piece of simple candy at the corner, but she will allow us to drag a silk dress over the garbage of the pavement. 'Tis a whimsical sovereign. But we are so carefully ...
— From the Easy Chair, vol. 1 • George William Curtis
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