"Aloofness" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... he greeted her she saw the stiffness, the aloofness had gone from him. Kathleen had made him feel at home. He looked younger. There ...
— The Desert of Wheat • Zane Grey
... to Aunt Hannah or Uncle William could she speak of this thing that was troubling her. That they, too, understood, in a measure, she realized. But still she said no word. Billy was wearing a proud little air of aloofness these days that was heart-breaking to those who saw it and read it aright for what it was: loyalty to Bertram, no matter what happened. And so Billy pored over her chessboard feverishly, tirelessly, having ever before her longing eyes the dear ...
— Miss Billy Married • Eleanor H. Porter
... His aloofness freed him from the temptations of distraction. He knew no women. He did not put himself in the way of meeting them. He kept away from theatres. He sunk himself in a routine of labour which, viewed from the outside, seemed ...
— The Great God Success • John Graham (David Graham Phillips)
... that appeared on the screen was that of the President of the United States. "Your scheme worked, senator," he said without preamble. There was an aloofness, a coolness in his voice. Which was only natural, considering the heat of the debate ...
— Hail to the Chief • Gordon Randall Garrett
... was she that he could almost hear the velvet heart-throb of her,—the little fluttering swallow,—yet by some strange, persistent aloofness of her, some determinate virginity, not a fold of her gown, not an edge, not a thread, seemed to even so much as graze his knee, seemed to even so much as shadow his hand,—lest it short-circuit thereby the seething currents of their ...
— The White Linen Nurse • Eleanor Hallowell Abbott
... the aloofness of the British civilian very seldom proceed either from Indians of the upper classes or from the humbler folk. They generally proceed from the new, more or less Western-educated middle class whose attitude towards British ...
— Indian Unrest • Valentine Chirol
... liked him because of his dead-level indifference to his surroundings. French waiters and foreign food—he noticed them in his quick, amiable-looking fashion—but he was indifferent. Josephine was piqued. She wanted to pierce this amiable aloofness of his. ...
— Aaron's Rod • D. H. Lawrence
... nothing of city life. My father owned a sheep ranch in the Northwest, and there I grew up, roaming about as freely as the sheep themselves. I learned to ride and to shoot. Until I was a woman grown, I never took a needle in my hand. Perhaps it may seem strange to you, but out of this aloofness from feminine pursuits there grew up within me a sort of reverence for the feminine ideal. I felt a vague awe, such as I imagine strikes a man at sight of a rose-lined parasol, or a thimble laid on a pile of stitchery. It is this sense of the poetry of women's occupation which must give what ...
— Flint - His Faults, His Friendships and His Fortunes • Maud Wilder Goodwin
... wondered what this strange young man would have to say that Dickens and Hugo had not already said. That was the true marvel of it. No matter how many books one read, each was different, as each human being was different. Some had the dignity and the aloofness of a rock in the sea; and others were as the polished pebbles on the sands—one saw the difference of pebble from pebble only by close scrutiny. Ruth, without suspecting it, had fallen upon a fundamental truth: that each and every book fitted ...
— The Ragged Edge • Harold MacGrath
... through tiny openings we caught instant impressions of straight column trunks and transparent shadows. Miniature grass marshes jutted out from the bends of the little river. We idled along as with a homely rustic companion through the aloofness ...
— The Forest • Stewart Edward White
... whaleboat. To them it was a country of weird forms, strange animals, and untutored savages. If ever boat breasted the "foam of perilous seas in faery lands forlorn," it was this, and if ever its occupants realised the complete strangeness of their situation and their utter aloofness from the tracks of their fellowmen, it must have been on this cloudless moonlit summer night. There was hardly a stretch of the world's waters, at all events in any habitable zone, where they could have been farther away from all that they remembered with affection and hoped to see again. About ...
— The Life of Captain Matthew Flinders • Ernest Scott
... happened on the coast twenty miles through the fields from Yokohama, at Kamakura, that is to say, where the great bronze Buddha sits facing the sea to hear the centuries go by. He has been described again and again—his majesty, his aloofness, and every one of his dimensions, the smoky little shrine within him, and the plumed hill that makes the background to his throne. For that reason he remains, as he remained from the beginning, beyond all hope of description—as it ...
— Letters of Travel (1892-1913) • Rudyard Kipling
... early time are Giorgionesque, too, but with a difference. Here from the very beginning there are to be noted a majestic placidity, a fulness of life, a splendour of representation, very different from the tremulous sweetness, the spirit of aloofness and reserve which informs such creations as the Madonna of Castelfranco and the Madonna with St. Francis and St. Roch of the Prado Museum. Later on, we have, leaving farther and farther behind the Giorgionesque ideal, the overpowering force and majesty of ...
— The Earlier Work of Titian • Claude Phillips
... individuality does so with the profound conviction that its peculiar ideal is nobler than that which the cosmopolitan spirit suggests—that this ideal is so precious to it that its loss would be as the loss of the soul, and that it could not be realized without an aloofness from, if not an actual indifference to, the ideals which are spreading so rapidly over Europe. Is it possible for any nationality to make such a defense of its isolation? If not, let us read Goethe, Balzac, Tolstoi, men so much greater than ...
— Imaginations and Reveries • (A.E.) George William Russell
... is not usually associated with reason," he observed. "But in Robert's case there is a reason, or so it seems to me. I have not seen him for many years, but during my recent close association with him I was struck by two things: the solitary aloofness of his mind, and his overwhelming pride—pride in the family name. These two traits in his character coloured all his actions. In the first place, he disliked opening his mind to anybody, but the stronger influence, his family pride, overcame his habitual secretiveness when he thought it necessary ...
— The Moon Rock • Arthur J. Rees
... wood above the village, his refuge from boyhood onward in any hour of trouble. There was space here, and air, and solitude. It was a diversion that was almost a form of consolation to be in touch with the wood's teeming life. Moreover, the trees, with their stately aloofness from mortal cares, their strifelessness and strength, shed on him a kind of benediction. From long association, from days of bird's-nesting in spring, and camping in summer, and nutting in autumn, and snow-shoeing in winter, he knew ...
— The Side Of The Angels - A Novel • Basil King
... course, bore himself through this with a proper aloofness, as did his wife and Mrs. Effie, but I heard the Mixer booming salutations right and left. It was Cousin Egbert, however, who most embarrassed me by the freedom of his manner with these persons. He shook hands warmly with at least a dozen of them and these hailed ...
— Ruggles of Red Gap • Harry Leon Wilson
... heath. How often, and for how profound a reason, does he not show us to ourselves, not as we or our fellows see us, but out of the continual observation of humanity which goes on in the wary and inquiring eyes of birds, the meditative and indifferent regard of cattle, and the deprecating aloofness and inspection of sheep? ...
— Figures of Several Centuries • Arthur Symons
... Mrs. Grant, large and solemn; and on the other side, as it were in opposition, the young, dark, slim girl with her rather wiry black hair, and her straight, prominent eyebrows, and her extraordinary expression of uncompromising aloofness. ...
— Hilda Lessways • Arnold Bennett
... when years and reason have asserted their influence we are apt to regard with a survival of our childish awe the wandering 'diviners and wicked heathens' who roam about the country, living in a mysterious aloofness from their fellow-men. Scores of theories have been propounded as to the origin of the Gipsy race, whence they sprang, and how they came to be so largely scattered over three of the four quarters of the globe. Opinion, following in the wake of the learned ...
— Gipsy Life - being an account of our Gipsies and their children • George Smith
... to the general run of her sex. She had been brought up in an out-of-the-way place in which the modern novel, the fashionable pastime of flirtation, were not known; and her secluded life in the lonely dale had deepened that sense of aloofness from the world, that indifference to the sentiment which lurks in most girls' bosoms. This tall, handsome man who had stepped into her life and shared the secret of her father's strange affliction, weakness, was nothing more to her than one of the other tourists whom she sometimes chanced to see ...
— At Love's Cost • Charles Garvice
... cottage was a quaint, old-fashioned place on the side of Battle Hill, looking down upon the maples of Sickle Street. The grounds were rather spacious, and the house stood well back from the street, establishing an aloofness that had never been noticed before. A low stone wall guarded the lawn and rose-garden, and there was an iron gate at the bottom of the slope. The front porch was partly screened by "Dutchman's Pipe" vines. With the advent of the tenant, smart Japanese sun-curtains ...
— Anderson Crow, Detective • George Barr McCutcheon
... didn't get. As long as any one else was by—her mother, or Miss French in charge of the twins—she and Portia chatted easily, on the best of terms. But, left alone with her—as it seemed to Rose she actually took pains not to be—Portia's manner took on that old ironic aloofness that had always silenced her when she was a girl. She made at last a resolute ...
— The Real Adventure • Henry Kitchell Webster
... experiences, and have been insatiable in her demands for petting. Why did she seem crushed and silent as to details? Honor had said the shock would account for her shaken and hysterical state; but it did not explain her strange aloofness. ...
— Banked Fires • E. W. (Ethel Winifred) Savi
... Craig to Latisan. The latter's aloofness, which he had displayed ever since he first appeared to her that day, his present peculiar relationship to the affair, his insistence that he must serve alone, made her problem more complex. Her vivid yearning was ...
— Joan of Arc of the North Woods • Holman Day
... want to put you out none," said the applicant gently. His voice was extremely gentle, and there was about him all the shrinking aloofness of the naturally timid. The deputy looked him over with quiet amusement—slender fellow with the gentlest brown eyes—and then with a quick side glance invited the crowd to get in on ...
— The Seventh Man • Max Brand
... them well in those days when by the publication of the Studies in the Renaissance (1873) their author had just become famous. I recall very clearly the effect of that book, and of the strange and poignant sense of beauty expressed in it; of its entire aloofness also from the Christian tradition of Oxford, its glorification of the higher and intenser forms of esthetic pleasure, of "passion" in the intellectual sense—as against the Christian doctrine of self-denial and renunciation. It was a gospel that both stirred and scandalized Oxford. The bishop ...
— A Writer's Recollections (In Two Volumes), Volume I • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... half of dollars. She was plainly a visitor like himself, not at all identified with the inner life of the household. He fancied, moreover, that she in no way desired to be thus identified. She seemed to carry herself with a deliberate aloofness underlying her surface amiability. Then he had spoken his few words with her, once or twice, he had got this effect of stony reserve close beneath her smile and smooth words. True, this might mean only that she felt herself out of her element, just as ...
— The Market-Place • Harold Frederic
... war was the normal condition, the warrior was the normal pillar of the state. In how great a proportion of the time that history describes, war was the normal condition and peace the abnormal, few realize now in our country, because of the aloofness of the present generation from even the memory of war. Our last great war ended in 1865; and since then only the light and transient touch of the Spanish War has been laid upon us. Even that war ended seventeen years ago and since then only the distant rumblings of ...
— The Navy as a Fighting Machine • Bradley A. Fiske
... preserve of the well-to-do, and when one thinks of how greatly this is valued it seems a pity that it is not open to the talents, to the industry, to the enthusiasm of all the young of both sexes. But one exception I must make to the aloofness of people with degrees and professions from the preventible evils of the world, and that is in the profession that is the longest and the most exacting—the medical profession. The women doctors whom I have met in Adelaide, Melbourne, and Sydney have ...
— An Autobiography • Catherine Helen Spence
... communicating his willingness to be of use to Murchison, and Lorne felt all his old friendliness rise up in him as he cordially accepted the offer. It was made with British heartiness, it was thoroughly meant. Lorne was half-ashamed in his recognition of its quality. A certain aloofness had grown in him against his will since Hesketh had prolonged his stay in the town, difficult to justify, impossible to define. Hesketh as Hesketh was worthily admirable as ever, wholesome and agreeable, as well turned out by his conscience as he was ...
— The Imperialist • (a.k.a. Mrs. Everard Cotes) Sara Jeannette Duncan
... Annie again, but a fretted and outraged sense of Annie's coolness and aloofness, and a somewhat similar impression from Leslie's manner, when they met in Fifth Avenue one day, was always in her mind. They could drop her as easily as they had picked her up, these high-and-mighty Melroses! ...
— The Beloved Woman • Kathleen Norris
... Pan had carried on his pretense of aloofness from Lucy, apparently blind to the wondering appeal in her eyes. Long ago he had forgiven her. Yet he waited, divining surely that some day or night when an opportune moment came, she would voice the question ...
— Valley of Wild Horses • Zane Grey
... let us try and consider how our economic arrangements would strike a disinterested intelligence that looked at them freshly for the first time. Let us take some matter of primary economic importance, such as the housing of the population, and do our best to criticize it in this spirit of personal aloofness. ...
— New Worlds For Old - A Plain Account of Modern Socialism • Herbert George Wells
... would have found him dumb. Upper-most in his mind was a dream in which Joan had peeped down at him from a balloon that went ever and ever higher—like the Isle of Delight that was always—receding. He had sensed in her to-night that aerial aloofness he had felt when he blocked old Adam out from his dream of love. Liebestraum! The stabbing pain ...
— Kenny • Leona Dalrymple
... magnetism in a superlative degree in spite of her deliberate aloofness, Clavering had, of course, been conscious from the first. Had not every male first-nighter been conscious of it? There was a surfeit of beauty in New York. A stranger, even if invested with mystery, must possess the one irresistible magnet, combined with some unusual quality of looks, to ...
— Black Oxen • Gertrude Franklin Horn Atherton
... with Ali Partab, who looked sleepy, but still more ashamed of his unmilitary dishabille. Rosemary McClean glanced left and right—forgot about the awning and the custom which decrees aloofness—ignored the old woman's waving arm and Ali Partab's frown, and rode ...
— Rung Ho! • Talbot Mundy
... alone, loving the sunny warmth and thinking of the brother who had made her pleasure possible. Her secret mental attitude toward him was marked by a certain aloofness and a quietly judicial estimate which she did her best to conceal from her mother. It had cost her not a little effort, too, to keep this attitude from developing into stern censorious judgment. Just now it ...
— The Fate of Felix Brand • Florence Finch Kelly
... suavity to the muscular male body and restoring it to its proper place among the sinuous lines and broken curves of Nature. That the landscape was adapted from a copper-plate of Lucas van Leyden signifies nothing. It serves the soothing purpose which sensitive nerves, irritated by Michelangelo's aloofness from all else but thought and naked ...
— The Life of Michelangelo Buonarroti • John Addington Symonds
... to Lesley, and received very tender replies; but even then she felt a vague dissatisfaction with the girl's letters. They were full of a wistfulness which she could not understand: she felt that something remote had crept into them, some aloofness for which she could not account. And as Captain Harry Duchesne happened to come across her one day, and inquired very particularly after Miss Brooke, she induced him to promise to call on Lesley when he was in London, and to report to her all that Lesley ...
— Brooke's Daughter - A Novel • Adeline Sergeant
... wonder and, through that which the being of each expressed, each was shaken by the same inward thrill. Sometimes they simply sat and gazed at each other like happy amazed children scarcely able to translate their own delight. Their very aloofness from the world—its unawareness of their story's existence made for the perfection of ...
— Robin • Frances Hodgson Burnett
... a dense purple vapour indicated feelings of more than usual vigour. When this cleared away it left his outer form unchanged indeed, but the affable condescension of his manner was merged into one of dignified aloofness. ...
— Kai Lung's Golden Hours • Ernest Bramah
... most communities can be changed neither to harm nor to help them, have consequently ceased to consider the danger of losing their support of great import. The Democratic party, moreover, has continued almost unswervingly its attitude of aloofness from the Negro. The onesidedness of the Negro vote has been declared by some Negroes to be the cause of its non-importance. With this political view some few of them have allied themselves with the ...
— The Journal of Negro History, Volume 5, 1920 • Various
... although deferential and courteous, had nevertheless some quality of aloofness in it to which she was unused and which she was quick to recognise. The smile, faded from her face. She seemed suddenly ...
— The Evil Shepherd • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... friend, Miss Sinclair, in her relations with the man Spenser Gray. Spenser Gray, it seemed, had been behaving oddly. Ardent towards Miss Sinclair almost to an embarrassing point in the early stages of their acquaintance, he had suddenly cooled; at a recent lunch had behaved with a strange aloofness; and now, at this writing, had vanished altogether, leaving nothing behind him but an abrupt note to the effect that he had been compelled to go abroad and that, much as it was to be regretted, he and she would probably ...
— A Damsel in Distress • Pelham Grenville Wodehouse
... lovely girls were there. Whom would he meet? What should he see? A sudden kindness toward others poured through Terry Hollis. After all, every man might be a treasure to him. A queer choking came in his throat when he thought of all that he had missed by his contemptuous aloofness. ...
— Black Jack • Max Brand
... servitude had slipped by in an enervating monotony. With his quiet ways, tactful temper and air of kindly aloofness, he was popular with the more sensible boys, while the others left him in peace, as he did them. But there was one exception; Henri de Grizolles, a handsome young savage, proud of his aristocratic name, which he scribbled in big letters on his light trousers, ...
— The Aspirations of Jean Servien • Anatole France
... is Baby, a dainty elfin Dresden-china little creature of five, as fair as an angel and as deep as a well. The boys are but shallow, sparkling pools compared with this little girl with her self-repression and dainty aloofness. You know the boys, you never feel that you quite know the girl. Something very strong and forceful seems to be at the back of that wee body. Her will is tremendous. Nothing can break or even bend it. Only ...
— Danger! and Other Stories • Arthur Conan Doyle
... red brick walls against which fruit trees were trained and partly by a laurel hedge with a wood behind it. It was my habit to sit and write there under an aged writhen tree, gray with lichen and festooned with roses. The soft silence of it— the remote aloofness—were the most perfect ever dreamed of. But let me not be led astray by the garden. I must be firm and confine myself to the Robin. The garden shall be another story. There were so many people in this garden—people ...
— My Robin • Frances Hodgson Burnett
... friend, my friend, I would my tongue could cry as my heart cries— Turn back from darkness before the hour has struck! Even yet may mercy fold you. God is great And tender; and perhaps His love may clasp Even your aloofness, if at last your heart Calls in repentance to Him. O Faust, Faust, Sink your vain pride of spirit—kneel to Him— Beseech His mercy ere it is ...
— Mr. Faust • Arthur Davison Ficke
... women in one house. But the ranchmen themselves, with two or three exceptions, were content to be solicitous at long range—an abstention that relieved and at the same time troubled Huntington. He was not eager to talk with his neighbors about that episode at the post-office, but their aloofness filled him with uneasiness. Well, let them wait! They would hear from him again, and so ...
— The Heart of Thunder Mountain • Edfrid A. Bingham
... technical words were invented to give aloofness and seeming precision to philosophic and scientific discussion. Aristotle was the first to use words incomprehensible to the average citizen. It was in these conditions that the possibilities of human criticism first showed themselves. The primitive ...
— The Mind in the Making - The Relation of Intelligence to Social Reform • James Harvey Robinson
... their frank enjoyment of the steaming liquid, gulped down to the cheerful accompaniment of a running stream of intimate gossip, while all the time that quiet figure lay on the narrow bed—motionless, silent, wrapped in the strange and immense aloofness ...
— The Hermit of Far End • Margaret Pedler
... of the French genius, which, despite its unsurpassed and almost unmatched literary faculty, has prevented it from contributing any of the very greatest masterpieces to the literature of the world, has communicated to them this aloofness, this, as it may almost be called, provincialism. But some such note there is in them, and it may be that the immense stretch of time during which they were worse than unknown—misknown—has ...
— The Flourishing of Romance and the Rise of Allegory - (Periods of European Literature, vol. II) • George Saintsbury
... very coldness and aloofness stirred desire in the man, and she shrank as she saw a spark of passion kindling in his eyes. She recognized that there was a ...
— Masters of the Wheat-Lands • Harold Bindloss
... is not necessary to expose this falsity in its crude and most violent forms. For we may find it expressed in an almost academic way, with philosophical aloofness, a show of nice reasoning, and a kind of Epicurean sweetness in a Romanes lecture delivered by Mr. Arthur James Balfour and published under the title Criticism and Beauty. It is worth while to study so responsible a writer, for ...
— Personality in Literature • Rolfe Arnold Scott-James
... left alone in their company had a sense of empty benches. Mrs. Vulcany once remarked that Miss Harleth was too fond of the gentlemen; but we know that she was not in the least fond of them—she was only fond of their homage—and women did not give her homage. The exception to this willing aloofness from her was Miss Arrowpoint, who often managed unostentatiously to be by her side, and talked to ...
— Daniel Deronda • George Eliot
... all new to Mary Fortune, this stern and barren country; and its people were new to her, too. The women, for some reason, had regarded her with suspicion and her answer was a patrician aloofness and reserve. When the day's work was done she took off her headband and sat reading in the lobby, alone. As for the men of the hotel, the susceptible young mining men who passed to and fro from Gunsight, they found her pleasant, but ...
— Rimrock Jones • Dane Coolidge
... to the humanitarianism of their law, and, in keeping with other nations, showed a tendency to restrict divine favours within the limits of their own land, and to maintain throughout their history an attitude of aloofness and repellent isolation which even amounted to intolerance towards other races. In early days, however, the obligation of hospitality was regarded as sacred.[23] Nor must we forget that, whatever may have been the Jewish practice, the promise enshrined in their revelation involves the unity ...
— Christianity and Ethics - A Handbook of Christian Ethics • Archibald B. C. Alexander
... some people." There an aloofness in his tone that did not encourage further remarks, but the young stranger was evidently not thin-skinned, or else he loved ...
— Cloudy Jewel • Grace Livingston Hill
... of trains through long hours, the change from one to another at small junctions, the day and night in a stage coach whose springs seemed to have lost resiliency, and the discourse of two drummers, Hebraic, the chill aloofness of a supercilious mining expert new to the district, and the heated discussions of two drill runners, veterans, off to a new field, and celebrating the journey with a demijohn. The latter were union men, and long after lie was tired of their babel they broached a conversation ...
— The Plunderer • Roy Norton
... its riches and still accepts with smug content its rows upon rows of ugly architecture, to sit dreaming, then, of red-tiled roofs, of cloud-caressed hills, of terraced vineyards, of cypresses in their dark aloofness, is not out of the natural order of things; but that into this idle and pleasant dream there should enter so divine a voice, living, feeling, pulsing, this was ...
— The Lure of the Mask • Harold MacGrath
... the United States naturally led to a high degree of animosity and unfriendly charges against the Missouri Synod. Her attitude of certainty and conviction in the doctrines which she championed was branded and denounced as "intolerance," "bigotry," "narrow-mindedness," "exclusiveness," "aloofness," "pride," "Pharisaism," etc. In his Problems and Possibilities Dr. Gerberding wrote: "We have often said that this body of Lutherans, more than all others, has saved the Germans of the Middle West from being swamped in materialism ...
— American Lutheranism - Volume 2: The United Lutheran Church (General Synod, General - Council, United Synod in the South) • Friedrich Bente
... eyes suggested suffering. Undoubtedly she had suffered. To the sympathetic observer, this would have been obvious; but to the calculating mind of Mrs. Bishop it presented itself in the form of a social aloofness which she was morbidly quick ...
— Sally Bishop - A Romance • E. Temple Thurston
... end he saw with some dismay that the old man had managed to make enemies among the emigrants by his aloofness. The sea was very smooth, these days, and, under smiling skies the steerage-deck was swarming. The stewardess announced that but one of all the seasick passengers, a young English girl, was left in the infirmary; the only ...
— The Old Flute-Player - A Romance of To-day • Edward Marshall and Charles T. Dazey
... meal with the Misses Bartlett was an ordeal he never forgot. Their formal aloofness and evident dismay at his presence were enough in themselves to embarrass him; but combined with the necessity of choosing the right knife and fork, of breaking his bread properly, and of removing his spoon from his coffee-cup, they were quite overpowering. During his two years in the ...
— Quin • Alice Hegan Rice
... many indirect, subtle, far-reaching ways in which the world and the Church interacted upon each other in all the great departments of speculation, art, industry, social and political life. A certain aloofness and coldness of judgment in dealing with sacred subjects was the reproach which was most frequently brought against him. As he himself said, he wrote rather as an historian than a religious instructor, and he dealt with his subject chiefly in its temporal, social, and political aspects. ...
— Historical and Political Essays • William Edward Hartpole Lecky
... and Jeanne were crossing the room together. Only the very tips of her fingers rested upon his coat-sleeve, and there was a marked aloofness about her walk and the carriage of her head. He was saying something to her to which she seemed to be paying the scantiest of attention. Her head was thrown back, and in her eyes was a great weariness. Suddenly, just as they reached the entrance, they saw her whole ...
— Jeanne of the Marshes • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... inquired, with manifest disdain. Mary turned to the maid, who now entered in response to the bell she had sounded a minute before. "Fanny, will you ask Miss Lynch to come in, please?" Then she faced the lawyer again, with an aloofness of manner that was contemptuous. "Really, Mr. Irwin," she drawled, "why don't you take ...
— Within the Law - From the Play of Bayard Veiller • Marvin Dana
... "straightness" for a gathering mesh of deceit. Attached to his name was an unsavoury reputation of card-playing for high stakes, of drinking too much, although not to the extent of actual drunkenness; and the character had alienated from him the friendship of serious men, and evoked a disapproving aloofness in the manner of his instructors. At the moment when he most needed help those who were best fitted to give it sedulously avoided his company, and in this first moment of meeting Darsie was tempted to ...
— A College Girl • Mrs. George de Horne Vaizey
... Burleigh did not admire gushing, demonstrative women, and a gushing wife would have wearied him inexpressibly. He felt an attraction in Bessie's aloofness, and said again, "She is worth the pains she will cost to win: a few years will mature her fine intelligence and make of her a perfect companion. I admire her courageous simplicity; there is a great deal in her character to ...
— The Vicissitudes of Bessie Fairfax • Harriet Parr
... la petite!" she cried. And the epithet—"little one"—was a light to Celia. Till now, upon these occasions, with her black ceremonial dress, her air of aloofness, her vague eyes, and the dignity of her carriage, she had already produced some part of their effect before the seance had begun. She had been wont to sail into the room, distant, mystical. She had her audience already expectant of mysteries, prepared for marvels. Her work was already half done. ...
— At the Villa Rose • A. E. W. Mason
... the end of the wide forest path. Central African natives are never obese— comic papers to the contrary notwithstanding. Nevertheless, M'tela was a large man, amply built, his muscles overlaid by smoother, softer flesh. He possessed dignity without aloofness, a rare combination, and one that invariably indicates a true feeling of superiority. As he moved forward he glanced lazily and good-humouredly to right and left at his people, in the manner of a genial grown-up among small ...
— The Leopard Woman • Stewart Edward White et al
... power rather than a weakness; it involves interdependence. There is always danger that increased personal independence will decrease the social capacity of an individual. In making him more self-reliant, it makes him more self-sufficient; it may lead to aloofness and indifference. It often makes an individual so insensitive in his relation to others as to develop an illusion of being really able to stand and act alone, an unnamed form of insanity which is responsible for a large part of the remediable ...
— Creative Impulse in Industry - A Proposition for Educators • Helen Marot
... his immovability. There was something about him like a giant rock. She got the impression that one might dash against him forever and hurt no one but oneself. It was a trait new to her among American men, whom she generally found too yielding where women were concerned. This man had an aloofness, too, that was curiously disconcerting. He made no approaches; he took no liberties. If he showed anything that resembled a personal sentiment toward her, it was dislike. Making that reflection and using that word, she was almost startled. A woman had sometimes ...
— The Street Called Straight • Basil King
... 2 A.M. nightly by the faculty of the University of Munich, which there entertains the eminent scientists who constantly visit the city. No orchestra arouses the baser passions with "Wiener Blut." The place has calm, aloofness, intellectuality, aristocracy, distinction. It was the scene foreordained for the hatching of ...
— Europe After 8:15 • H. L. Mencken, George Jean Nathan and Willard Huntington Wright
... amusing, how she deceived herself—for the harmless self- deceptions of us chronic mummers are always amusing. The fact was, this melting and inviting mood had far more of nature and sincerity in it than there had been in her icy aloofness. Icy aloofness, except in the heroines of aristocratic novels, is a state of mind compatible only with extreme stupidity or with some one of those organic diseases that sour the disposition. Never had ...
— The Fashionable Adventures of Joshua Craig • David Graham Phillips
... way of expressing their aloofness from the revolution and, at the same time, their readiness to defend that revolution against anybody who attacks it from outside. Lenin, talking to me about the general attitude of the peasants, said: "Hegel ...
— The Crisis in Russia - 1920 • Arthur Ransome
... steps past the long blank wall on his way to the chicken-run and piggery that stood at the bottom of the meadow. The three children were perched at their accustomed look-out, and their range of sight did not seem to concern itself with Octavian's presence. As he became depressingly aware of the aloofness of their gaze he also noted a strange variegation in the herbage at his feet; the greensward for a considerable space around was strewn and speckled with a chocolate-coloured hail, enlivened here and there with gay tinsel-like wrappings or the glistening mauve of crystallised violets. ...
— The Toys of Peace • Saki
... that expressed the atmosphere of aloofness, the air of being suddenly walled around and set apart, that now marked the impulsive and social Corrie. It was with him when he came down to the dreary dinner, an ...
— From the Car Behind • Eleanor M. Ingram
... was a noticeable woman, a woman of temperament, not beautiful exactly, but with a stateliness about her, an aloofness. The more I studied her face, with its thin sensitive lips and commanding, almost imperious eyes, the more there seemed to be something peculiar about her. She was dressed very simply in black, but it was the simplicity that ...
— The War Terror • Arthur B. Reeve
... her aback. She laughed, a little breathlessly, to hide her discomposure, and scarce knew how to answer him, scarce knew whether she took pleasure or offense in his daring encroachment upon that royal aloofness in which she dwelt, and in which her Spanish rearing had taught her she must ...
— The Historical Nights Entertainment, Second Series • Rafael Sabatini
... in mind; here are men to whom painting is the most important thing in the world. Unfortunately, in their isolation they are apt, like the rest, to come on the parish. Theirs is no vulgar provincialism; but in its lack of receptivity, its too willing aloofness from foreign influences, its tendency to concentrate on a mediocre and rather middle-class ideal of honesty, it is, I suspect, typically British. There is nothing Tennysonian about these men, nothing Kiplingesque; their art is neither meretricious nor conceited; but it reminds ...
— Pot-Boilers • Clive Bell
... of I knew not what hidden emotion seemed to pass for one moment over her aristocratic features as she read it. But it vanished instantaneously, and she turned to me with her previous air of haughty and imperturbable aloofness. ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 156, April 23, 1919 • Various
... The whole business had hitherto appeared to me a trifle unreal, at any rate my own connection with it. I had been docilely obeying orders, but my real self had been standing aside and watching my doings with a certain aloofness. But that hour in the Tube station had brought me into the serum, and I saw the affair not as Bullivant's or even Blenkiron's, but as my own. Before I had been itching to get back to the Front; now I ...
— Mr. Standfast • John Buchan
... awe upon the Adelaide and its presiding genius, beholding in it the fine essence of New England neatness and in him a small, thin, nervous, insignificant- looking "colored gemman," who gazed past the sides of their faces with cold aloofness. Often, neighbors, passing the impressive entrance, heard from the lower regions of the building the sound of a high chuckle, deepening rapidly to a contralto gurgle, and then broadening out into a long, rich, velvety laugh as smooth as a flowing stream. ...
— Many Kingdoms • Elizabeth Jordan
... beyond I came again to a cluster of buildings, close to the corner of the crossroads, sheltered, homelike, inviting in a large natural bluff of tall, dark-green poplars. Those first two houses had had an aristocratic aloofness—I should not have liked to turn in there for shelter or for help. But this was prosperous, open-handed, well-to-do middle class; not that conspicuous "moneyedness" that we so often find in our new west when people have made their ...
— Over Prairie Trails • Frederick Philip Grove
... "Pieta" (Dead Christ) of the Florence Accademia, and the wonderful and most impressive "Crucifixion" of S. Maria Maddalena de' Pazzi (Florence) was commissioned by Pietro Pucci in 1493, though it was not completed till April of 1496. Unsurpassed here is the master in the solemnity, the sense of aloofness from earthly things, which he conveys to us in these six figures—the Crucified, with as spectators His mother, the beloved disciple, and kneeling saints, seen against the wide stretch of such an Umbrian background as we may see from Perugia or Cortona or Assisi; and next in importance to this masterpiece ...
— Perugino • Selwyn Brinton
... in the few days since his subterfuge had permitted him to speak to her. He had met her father and found himself liking the tall, silent man who went about the simple affairs of his life with such compelling dignity and courteous aloofness. Brunell had even invited him to his little shop and shown him with unsuspecting enthusiasm his process for making the maps which were sold ...
— The Crevice • William John Burns and Isabel Ostrander
... men and women, is a God before whom there must be awe and reverence, and not a flippant scouting of the ancient ideals. Man, who is so tried by temptation and scourging of the spirit, is a creature to be loved, appreciated, understood; not a being to whom shall be shown arrogance, aloofness, and pride. The university that makes snobs of its graduates has not yet entered ...
— The Warriors • Lindsay, Anna Robertson Brown
... taken into the outlaw band by Haydon, Deveny had exhibited fits of a sullen moroseness that had kept his closest friends from seeking his companionship. Those friends were few, for Deveny's attitude toward his men had always been that of the ruthless tyrant; he had treated them with an aloofness that had in it a contempt which they could not ignore. More—he was merciless, and had a furious temper which found its outlet in ...
— 'Drag' Harlan • Charles Alden Seltzer
... of his country. The knowledge of this provoked many jests among the boy's friends and caused him no slight embarrassment. It conspired with the shyness and reserve, which were innate in him, to win him from the outset a reputation for pride and aloofness. If he had not been forced to mix with those of his own age, and if he had not resolutely set himself to overcome this feeling, he might have grown into a student and a recluse. Both at school and ...
— Victorian Worthies - Sixteen Biographies • George Henry Blore
... in certain poises of head it suggested tragic sorrow. Or it might have been her wavy hair. Or even just that pointed chin stuck out a little, resentful and not particularly distinguished, doing away with the mysterious aloofness of her fragile presence. But any way at a given moment Anthony must have suddenly seen the girl. And then, that something had happened to him. Perhaps nothing more than the thought coming into his head that this was "a ...
— Chance - A Tale in Two Parts • Joseph Conrad
... not pause to observe how certainly this deficiency in humor and in the delineation of ordinary human feeling is connected with a recluse, a solitary, and to some extent an unsympathizing life. If we combine a certain natural aloofness from common men with literary habits and an incessantly studious musing, we shall at once see how powerful a force is brought to bear on an instinctively austere character, and how sure it will be to develop the peculiar tendencies of it, both good and evil. It was to no purpose that ...
— Harvard Classics Volume 28 - Essays English and American • Various
... softening had vanished out of Geoffrey Stonor's face. In its stead the look of aloofness that few dared brave, the warning 'thus far and no farther' stamped on ...
— The Convert • Elizabeth Robins
... she did not come, and the singing seemed suddenly a bitter mockery to Harold, who sought to solace himself with his pictures. The second week wore away and Jack came, but by that time the image of the girl had taken such aloofness of position in Harold's mind that he dared not ask about her, ...
— The Eagle's Heart • Hamlin Garland
... that special noise may be called when the world like a hound "gives tongue" and announces that the quarry in some form of genius is at bay, is apt to increase its clamour in proportion to the aloofness of the pursued animal,—and Innocent, who saw nothing remarkable in remaining somewhat secluded and apart from the ordinary routine of social life so feverishly followed by more than half her sex, was ...
— Innocent - Her Fancy and His Fact • Marie Corelli
... retirement; reclusion, recess; snugness &c. adj.; delitescence[obs3]; rustication, rus in urbe[Lat]; solitude; solitariness &c. (singleness) 87; isolation; loneliness &c. adj.; estrangement from the world, voluntary exile; aloofness. cell, hermitage; convent &c. 1000; sanctum sanctorum[Lat]. depopulation, desertion, desolation; wilderness &c. (unproductive) 169; howling wilderness; rotten borough, Old Sarum. exclusion, excommunication, banishment, exile, ostracism, proscription; cut, ...
— Roget's Thesaurus • Peter Mark Roget
... house went up to an accompaniment of scenes in which only the proprietor was irate. Osmond Orgreave could not be ruffled; he could not be deprived of his air of having done a favour to Darius Clayhanger; his social and moral superiority, his real aloofness, remained absolutely unimpaired. The clear image of him as a fine gentleman was never dulled nor distorted even in the mind of Darius. Nevertheless Darius 'hated the sight' of the house ere the house was roofed in. But this did not diminish his pride in the house. He wished he had never 'set ...
— Clayhanger • Arnold Bennett
... lost in her aloofness from mundane affairs: Taou Yuen in whispering silk, her grandfather's rotund tones, Laurel and Camilla and her mother, were distant, immaterial. In the evening she sat on the front steps, a web of white, dreamily intent ...
— Java Head • Joseph Hergesheimer
... city—when all the bright, gorgeous, rose-blooming South was waiting for them with open arms? 'Open arms'! Apparently it was only 'climates' that were allowed any such privileges with girls like Cornelia. Yet, after all, wasn't it just exactly that very quality of serene, dignified aloofness that had attracted him first to Cornelia among the score of ...
— Molly Make-Believe • Eleanor Hallowell Abbott
... seemed surprised at this; however, she had her instructions, and so did not hesitate. She opened the door, stood aside for them to enter, and then followed them in. It was Nora's dressing-room, a place of soft colors, of cool aloofness, and as Bat Scanlon breathed the air of it, with its delicate suggestion of scent, he had a feeling that he was venturing too far; he felt that his act was almost profanation. Through an open door at one end he caught a glimpse of a white bed; but it was ...
— Ashton-Kirk, Criminologist • John T. McIntyre
... "I have to thank you, sir, for your courtesy to my niece." He had assumed an air of reserve, of distinct aloofness, despite his studied politeness. Bryce stepped forward with extended hand, which the Colonel grasped in a manner vaguely suggestive of that clammy-palmed creation of Charles Dickens—Uriah Heep. Bryce was tempted to squeeze ...
— The Valley of the Giants • Peter B. Kyne |
