"Disreputable" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... before it at last, pulling a left-over winter tam over rebellious curls which she had made no attempt to subdue. She had buttoned herself hastily into the dress she had taken off last, a tumbled organdy, and thrown a disreputable polo coat over it, white like the cap, but of more prehistoric date, but on her slender person these incongruous garments had acquired a harmony of their own, and become a costume somehow. It might not have withstood a long or critical inspection, but it was not ...
— The Wishing Moon • Louise Elizabeth Dutton
... party leaders of that day. George Clinton countenanced, if he did not absolutely advise, the deliberate disfranchisement of hundreds of voters in 1792 that he might continue governor. A few years later, in 1816, methods quite as disreputable and unscrupulous were practised, that Republicans might continue to control the Council of Appointment. Hamilton's suggestion involved no concealment, as in the case of the Manhattan Bank, which Jay approved; no violation of law, as in the Otsego election case, which Clinton approved; no deliberate ...
— A Political History of the State of New York, Volumes 1-3 • DeAlva Stanwood Alexander
... calculating each day's march, a fortnight from that time upon the chief place at the Hague. D'Artagnan recommended his men to go in couples, as they liked best, from sympathy. He himself selected from among those with the least disreputable look, two guards whom he had formerly known, and whose only faults were being drunkards and gamblers. These men had not entirely lost all ideas of civilization, and under proper garments their hearts would beat again. D'Artagnan, not to ...
— Ten Years Later - Chapters 1-104 • Alexandre Dumas, Pere
... delirium, gentlemen, raving delirium," cried the captain of police; "look at him: drunk, at this time of night, in the company of a disreputable woman, with the blood of his father on his ...
— The Brothers Karamazov • Fyodor Dostoyevsky
... be fine, clean, and well-fitted. It is better to wear a coarse or threadbare coat than a disreputable shirt. The better taste and finer instincts of the ladies will require no hint in reference to their "most intimate appareling." True taste, delicacy, and refinement regards the under clothing as scrupulously as that ...
— How To Behave: A Pocket Manual Of Republican Etiquette, And Guide To Correct Personal Habits • Samuel R Wells
... grappling-hooks - must transport them on his clothing; for it is thus that these tramps have planned to get away from the parent plant in the hope of being picked off, and the seeds dropped in fresh colonizing ground; travelling in the disreputable company of their kinsmen the beggar-ticks and Spanish needles, the burdock burs, ...
— Wild Flowers, An Aid to Knowledge of Our Wild Flowers and - Their Insect Visitors - - Title: Nature's Garden • Neltje Blanchan
... long had my suspicions, and yesterday I wormed it all out from a disreputable looking fellow, who came here to ask for ...
— Caught In The Net • Emile Gaboriau
... why she should be so afraid of this sharp-tongued woman when she hadn't been really afraid of the disreputable tramp. She wondered why she couldn't burst forth with her story, which certainly was a strange one, as sure of sympathy here as she would have been with Aunt Eunice. Perhaps that dear, if dignified, old lady had returned, and if so she would ...
— The Brass Bound Box • Evelyn Raymond
... women, beyond all question, played a supreme part. And finally one came to the plebeian clergy whom Pierre studied with curiosity, a collection of wretched, grimy, half-naked priests who like famished animals prowled around in search of masses, and drifted into disreputable taverns in the company of beggars and thieves. However, he was more interested by the floating population of foreign priests from all parts of Christendom—the adventurers, the ambitious ones, the believers, ...
— The Three Cities Trilogy, Complete - Lourdes, Rome and Paris • Emile Zola
... Sir William boldly, "a disreputable drunken loafer who never did an honest day's work in his life." Which had the merit of truth, and, he thought, ...
— The Best British Short Stories of 1922 • Various
... bestowed. The sofa, which appeared to affect her aesthetic sense most keenly, was certainly a dilapidated article. Having but three legs, it leaned in a loafing way against the wall, and its rags of horsehair and protruding springs gave it a most trampish and disreputable appearance. The chairs were solid, for the smith had bound them in iron clamps. And the carpet?—Well, I pitied it. It was threadbare and transparent. Yet, when I looked around, I felt no feminine scorn. They all appealed ...
— My New Curate • P.A. Sheehan
... moved that the commencement of the operation of the act should be postponed to fifteen months, instead of six, after its passing, as proposed by government; and Lord Ellenborough moved a clause to empower the governor and two-thirds of the council to suspend any member guilty of unworthy and disreputable conduct. Both these amendments were agreed to, and the bill afterwards was read a third time. A bill introduced by Lord John Russell for the sale of the Canada clergy reserves also subsequently passed, without much opposition, ...
— The History of England in Three Volumes, Vol.III. - From George III. to Victoria • E. Farr and E. H. Nolan
... acknowledged it to be no worse on his part than a mistake, had to them been cruelly severe. Suddenly to be told that they were servants to such a one as Cousin Henry,—servants to such a man without any contract or agreement on their part;—to be handed over like the chairs and tables to a disreputable clerk from London, whom in their hearts they regarded as very much inferior to themselves! And they, too, like Mr Griffith and the tenants, had been taught to look for the future reign of Queen Isabel ...
— Cousin Henry • Anthony Trollope
... had cast off when the work of fighting fire was begun, had been tossed about, trampled on, or scorched until they could no longer be called serviceable, and, half-clothed, dirty and disreputable-looking generally as they were, they started wearily for the town in search of rest, and, what was quite ...
— Ralph Gurney's Oil Speculation • James Otis
... much to his taste. It was "runaway stuff"; nervous and sensuous; it opened up too many vistas, philological and social, for his positive mind to assimilate with comfort. Those particles alone—there was something ambiguous, something almost disreputable, in their jocund pliability, their readiness to lend themselves to improper uses. But Latin—ah, Latin was different! Even at his preparatory school, where he was known as a swot of the first water, he had displayed ...
— South Wind • Norman Douglas
... resentment, refused to do any thing about it; but the rest of us said, that it was always customary in America, when we left a house, or a room we hired, to leave it clean, and it was ever deemed disreputable to leave an apartment dirty. The officers of the ship tried to make them, and began to threaten them, but they persisted in their refusal, and every attempt to force them was fruitless. I do not myself wonder that ...
— A Journal of a Young Man of Massachusetts, 2nd ed. • Benjamin Waterhouse
... gentleman with manners the reverse of polite. He could scarcely contain his outraged feelings when it came to the question of the solicitor. "I can have no connection with such a case," he said firmly, and I again retired, feeling quite disreputable. ...
— A Girl Among the Anarchists • Isabel Meredith
... fare, and lived on young peas, asparagus, eggs, milk, and fruit, with just a little bread and butter—not enough to agitate Mr. Hoover. I never had had as much asparagus as I really wanted before. I wore an old smock and a disreputable hat, and I pruned and dug in my garden till I was tired, and then I lay on the terrace and watched the waves endlessly gather and glide and spread. Counting sheep jumping over a wall is nothing to compare with waves ...
— The Smiling Hill-Top - And Other California Sketches • Julia M. Sloane
... faces, and the rays of the sinking sun brightened every nook and corner. It was a good-sized room, and on three sides of it—except where a space was left for the window—trunks and boxes were neatly stacked to the ceiling. Dust and cobwebs lent a disreputable and ruinous effect ...
— The Cryptogram - A Story of Northwest Canada • William Murray Graydon
... one of the guests remarked,—a shabby old man, in a wig, and such a dirty, ragged, disreputable dressing-gown that I should have been quite surprised at him, only one never IS surprised in ...
— Roundabout Papers • William Makepeace Thackeray
... no one not in the confidence of the managers of these places would readily credit to what an extent the public masquerade-balls of Paris are the peculiar possession of the blousard. The gaping crowds of English and Americans who go to the disreputable Jardin Mabille and the like resorts in summer to gaze at what they imagine is a scene of French revelry, do not know that the cancan-dancer there is paid for his jollity. The men who dance at the Jardin Mabille ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Vol. 15, - No. 90, June, 1875 • Various
... cajoleries were not often successful, yet often enough to keep the sporting instinct alive and active, and a great deal oftener than F—'s equally disreputable endeavours: it being a tradition with the staff that F—' had sworn by all his gods to get in an article which would force the printer to flee the country. I need scarcely say that the tradition was groundless, ...
— From a Cornish Window - A New Edition • Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch
... York City has disclosed conditions and led to conclusions in line with the foregoing inferences. The Negro population was solidly segregated into a few assembly districts, thereby confining the respectable to the same neighborhoods with the disreputable. This population is made up mainly of young persons and adults of the working period of life, attracted to the city largely from the South and the West Indies, principally by the thought of better industrial and ...
— The Negro at Work in New York City - A Study in Economic Progress • George Edmund Haynes
... purpose to draw Annie out he said, rather banteringly, "Miss Walton, I am astonished that so good a man as your father should have as an ardent friend the profane and disreputable character that I found living in the cottage opposite on the day of ...
— Opening a Chestnut Burr • Edward Payson Roe
... committee of one," she resumed, "to say that the Ladies' Aid Society have voted unanimously that they want you to preach on hell. The Church is goin' to rack and ruin, and we ain't goin' to stand it no longer. Even the disreputable characters will walk right in and stay all through the sermon—Andy Rogers and the rest. And I was particularly requested to ask whether you wished to have us understand that you approve of Andy Rogers ...
— A Spinner in the Sun • Myrtle Reed
... uneasiness. They will catch the fret and fever of the nineteenth century soon enough. I have heard several of our ministers say that it is chiefly men of disreputable characters who are made the subjects of violence ...
— Iola Leroy - Shadows Uplifted • Frances E.W. Harper
... not composed of a fourth part of the population, or a hundredth part of the respectability of the village. The resolutions he described as being the work of presuming boys, who swagger of time immemorial; of strangers who had lived but a brief time in the county; and of a few disreputable persons who, bent on construing liberty entirely on their own side, interposed against palpable rights and sacred family feelings their gossiping facts, their grasping rapacity, and their ruthless ...
— James Fenimore Cooper - American Men of Letters • Thomas R. Lounsbury
... innocent and well-meaning people without the faintest shadow of warning, and as Mr. Bethany himself said, evil birds do come home to roost, and often out of a clear sky, as it were. But there, every fresh solution that occurs to me only makes the thing more preposterous, more, I was going to say, disreputable—I mean, of course, to the outside world. And we have our duties to perform to them too, I suppose. Why, what can we say? What plausible account of ourselves have we? We shall never be able to look anybody in the face again. I can only—I am ...
— The Return • Walter de la Mare
... should exceedingly well know that it was lost. And yet our leading theologians are to be applauded and set in high places for condescending to such sharp practice as would be despised even by a disreputable attorney, as too transparently shallow to be of the smallest use ...
— The Fair Haven • Samuel Butler
... waiting some time in vain for the birds to appear, we examined the nest before us, we found that it held two thrush eggs and one of the cowbird. The impertinence of this disreputable bird in thrusting her plebeian offspring upon the divine songster, to rear at the expense of her own lovely brood, was not to be tolerated. The dirty speckled egg looked strangely out of place among the gems that belonged to the nest, and I removed it, careful not to touch ...
— Upon The Tree-Tops • Olive Thorne Miller
... clean, fresh paper of enormous value is going out to be spread all over the country, another stream of soiled, torn and altogether disreputable-looking paper is flowing back ...
— Business Hints for Men and Women • Alfred Rochefort Calhoun
... the great secrets of her force, whether it be a mountain or a soul that she would fashion. We must believe that sooner or later there will come a time in which silence shall have its dues, moderation be crowned king of speech, and melodramatic, spectacular, hysterical language be considered as disreputable as it is silly. But the most discouraging feature of the disease is its extreme contagiousness. All physicians know what a disastrous effect one hysterical patient will produce upon a whole ward in a hospital. We remember hearing a young physician once give a most amusing account of a woman ...
— Bits About Home Matters • Helen Hunt Jackson
... Mrs. Veal.[4] When, in 1720, he undertook to write the life of the popular fortune-teller, Duncan Campbell—a puff which illustrates almost better than anything else Defoe's extraordinary ingenuity in putting a respectable face upon the most disreputable materials—he had another proof of the avidity with which people run to hear marvels. He followed up this clue with A System of Magic, or a History of the Black Art; The Secrets of the Invisible World disclosed, or a Universal History of Apparitions; and a humorous History ...
— Daniel Defoe • William Minto
... clerk, though sagacious patrons had sent him to Eton in his fifteenth year. The Oxford professor of Arabic, Joseph White (1746-1814), was son of a poor weaver in the country and a man of reputation for learning, although now remembered only for a rather disreputable literary squabble. Robert Owen and Joseph Lancaster, both sprung from the ranks, were leaders in social movements. I have already spoken of such men as Watt, Telford, and Rennie; and smaller names might be added in literature, science, ...
— The English Utilitarians, Volume I. • Leslie Stephen
... till of late years, writing for fortune was rather than otherwise regarded as disreputable, writing for fame was never so accounted. But even than for fame Lady Nairn had a higher motive. She knew that the minstrels of ruder times had composed, and, through the aid of the national melodies, transmitted to posterity strains ill fitted to promote the interests ...
— The Modern Scottish Minstrel, Volumes I-VI. - The Songs of Scotland of the Past Half Century • Various
... to risk it, and closing the door, struck one against the wall. It flared up, and shading it with my hand I cast a hasty glance round the garage. The bicycle was leaning against a shelf just beyond me, and on a nail above it I saw an old disreputable-looking cap. I pounced on it joyfully, for it was the one thing I needed to complete my disguise. Then, wheeling the bicycle past the car, I blew out the match and reopened ...
— A Rogue by Compulsion • Victor Bridges
... that a woman is dignified by a name, the only one so mentioned in the book of Leviticus. This is probably due to the fact that the son's character was so disreputable that he would reflect no lustre on his father's family, and so on his maternal ancestors rested his disgrace. If there had been anything good to tell of him, reference would no doubt have been made ...
— The Woman's Bible. • Elizabeth Cady Stanton
... intended to marry or to teach; but having done all these things he still found the world a merry place enough. He played the piano a little and sang Italian songs in an odd falsetto and roamed over the ship in disreputable corduroys, which he had preserved from his student days in Paris, making himself thoroughly at home in ...
— One Woman's Life • Robert Herrick
... very sympathetic. She looked at a great number of rings, toying with them in voluptuous hesitation. She enjoyed fingering them. At last she chose one. The gold band on her finger frightened her. It made her feel a strange, different person, rather disreputable and quite unlike herself. ...
— Balloons • Elizabeth Bibesco
... bony, with close-cropped hair. De Morny used to laugh behind his back at the way he said le peuple souverain, and said he knew as little about the sovereign people as about the pronunciation. He spoke English well, for he had lived for some years an exile in Leicester Square,—the disreputable French quarter of London; this accomplishment was of great service to him ...
— France in the Nineteenth Century • Elizabeth Latimer
... here from Nineveh last night with the most disreputable crowd I ever traveled with. They were human buzzards flocking to the scene ...
— The Johnstown Horror • James Herbert Walker
... to adopt different tactics. Since my child was to be reared in the midst of murderers and thieves, I, too, would haunt their abodes. I became a street-singer, dancer, what you will. I wear rags now and solicit alms. I haunt the most disreputable cabarets in the lowest slums of Paris. I listen and I spy; I question every man, woman, and child who might afford some clue, give me some indication. There is hardly a house in these parts that I have not visited and whence I have not been kicked out as an importunate beggar or worse. ...
— The League of the Scarlet Pimpernel • Baroness Orczy
... you said all that you thought, perhaps you would remind me that a woman of whom nobody knows anything is always held to be disreputable. That girl, no doubt, has her decent belongings. I ...
— John Caldigate • Anthony Trollope
... went up on the hurricane deck and joined him, and till near on sundown the pair of them sat there giving forth music alternately. There was a fine contrast between them. The disreputable doctor deliberately forgot everything of the past, and lived only for the reckless present; the shipmaster had got his wife and children always filling half his memory, and was in a constant agony lest he should fail to properly provide for them. And as a consequence Clay's music was always of ...
— A Master of Fortune • Cutcliffe Hyne
... young Miss in New-Haven, who will soon wear a silk gown of her own make. Such noble industry ought to be written in letters of gold. May the ladies profit by the example—and may it soon be esteemed disreputable, by both ladies and gentlemen, to wear any thick silk but of ...
— The Olden Time Series: Vol. 2: The Days of the Spinning-Wheel in New England • Various
... all-fired 'dead-eyes' an' points warnin' at me while he ogled me with them gummy red rims o' his. An', sez he, 'You light right out o' here sharp, Arizona; the place fer you scum's down in the bunkhouse. An' I'm not goin' to have any skulkin' up here, telling disreputable yarns to my gal.' I wus jest beginnin' to argyfy. 'But,' sez I. An' he cut me short wi' a curse. 'Out of here!' he roared. 'I give you ten minutes to git!' Then she, Miss Dianny, bless her, she turned ...
— The Night Riders - A Romance of Early Montana • Ridgwell Cullum
... the choir for many years, and sits with perfect unconcern, telling her beads at the foot of the great reading-desk that stands out in the middle and is never used. Great ladies crowd in through the gate when Raimondi's hymn is to be sung, and disreputable artists make sketches surreptitiously during the benediction, without the slightest pretence at any devotion that I can see. The lights shine out more brightly as the day wanes, and the incense curls up as the little boys swing ...
— A Roman Singer • F. Marion Crawford
... return that Dempsey, his sub, would be glad to see him at the Ford. Handing his rod to the man he set off in the direction of the crossing in question, to become aware, as he approached it, of a disreputable figure propped up against a tree ...
— My Strangest Case • Guy Boothby
... absurd because they were new and untried. One would not gather from his correspondence with Frances Wright that this was the notorious Fanny Wright whom the world chose to consider, as its way is, a disreputable and probably wicked woman, inasmuch as she proposed some radical changes in its social relations which she thought would be a gain. He gave much attention to popular education, and all the influence he could command was devoted, ...
— James Madison • Sydney Howard Gay
... skin, and there seemed no shelter. At last I discovered a wretched wine-shop; but the woman who kept it said there was no fire and no food. Then I grew very cross. I explained with heat that I had money; it is true I was bedraggled and disreputable, but when I showed some coins, to prove that I could pay for what I bought, she asked unwillingly what I required. I ordered a brasero, and dried my clothes as best I could by the burning cinders. I ate a scanty meal of eggs, and comforted myself with the thin wine of the leaf, sufficiently ...
— The Land of The Blessed Virgin; Sketches and Impressions in Andalusia • William Somerset Maugham
... having held the highest offices in the Republic. On the mother's side he was the grandson of Scipio Africanus. His father, after a distinguished career as a soldier in Spain and Sardinia, had attempted reforms at Rome. He had been censor, and in this capacity he had ejected disreputable senators from the Curia; he had degraded offending Equites; he had rearranged and tried to purify the Comitia. But his connections were aristocratic. His wife was the daughter of the most famous of them, Scipio Africanus the Younger. He had been himself in antagonism with the tribunes, and had ...
— Great Men and Famous Women. Vol. 5 of 8 • Various
... Kant's "Critic," and a few other trifles not usually familiar to sub-Freshmen, and took my departure, very much pleased at having entered on a life where my favourite reading did not really seem to be quite silly or disreputable. I remember, however, being very much surprised indeed at finding that the other students, in whom I expected to encounter miracles of learning, or youth far superior to myself in erudition and critical knowledge, did not quite ...
— Memoirs • Charles Godfrey Leland
... had a lover, and a sister who was very disreputable It rather adds than otherwise to the romance of the affair,—the idea that this pretty little elf has no right whatever to the asylum which she has ...
— Passages From the French and Italian Notebooks, Complete • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... greater numerical force—in the Vigilance rank and file. It is against reason and sense to expect that in a body of five thousand men, there will be none who are not good and honorable; that there will be no base and disreputable characters, no rogues and scoundrels. Therefore it was not strange that of the Committee's entire force, so many were of the vile stamp, notorious gold-dust "operators," who robbed the honest miner of his "Pile," by bare-faced ...
— The Vigilance Committee of '56 • James O'Meara
... appointment. He wished them 'Good morning' in an awkward hesitating undertone as if he were doubtful how his greeting would be received. Sweater nodded slightly, but Rushton ignored him altogether and Nimrod passed on looking and feeling like a disreputable cur that had just ...
— The Ragged Trousered Philanthropists • Robert Tressell
... revulsion, she saw the deformed man squatting close to her, his chuddah-draped head lodged upon his knees. He did not stir at her coming though she felt convinced that he was aware of her, aware probably of everything that passed within a considerable radius of his disreputable person. His dark face, lined and dirty, half-covered with ragged black hair that ended in a long thin wisp like a goat's beard on his shrunken chest, was still turned to the east as though challenging the sun that was smiting ...
— The Lamp in the Desert • Ethel M. Dell
... received accounts of her progress. They sent her a Christmas present annually, and her neat little letter of thanks was handed round for everybody to read. Poor Susannah Maude was the daughter of very disreputable parents; she had been rescued from a travelling caravan at the age of ten, and the authorities at the Alexandra Home had done their best to obliterate her past life from her memory. When she reached school-leaving ...
— For the Sake of the School • Angela Brazil
... the incipient twentieth century than the drawing together of currents of thought and action before remote or hostile. The Parnassians were an exclusive sect, the symbolists an eccentric and often disreputable coterie; Claudel, D'Annunzio, Rudyard Kipling, speak home to throngs of everyday readers, are even national idols, and our Georgians contrive to be bought and read without the least surrender of what is most poetic in their poetry. And ...
— Recent Developments in European Thought • Various
... strain. It is nonsense to pretend that we shall get the fine flower of the cottage population to board pauper children; we shall induce respectable inferior people living in healthy conditions to take care of an inferior sort of children rescued from unhealthy disreputable conditions—that is all. The average inherent quality of the resultant adults will be about ...
— Mankind in the Making • H. G. Wells
... reputation such a woman had in the world might prove injurious to his mistress, more especially from the particular intimacy there seemed to exist between them: whereupon, in the tone of a guardian rather than a lover, he took upon him to chide her for the disreputable company she kept. Miss Jennings was haughty beyond conception, when once she took it into her head; and as she liked Miss Price's conversation much better than Talbot's, she took the liberty of desiring him "to attend to his ...
— Marguerite de Navarre - Memoirs of Marguerite de Valois Queen of Navarre • Marguerite de Navarre
... a short interval of selfrestraint, into debauchery which all Christian divines condemn as sinful, and which, in an elderly man married to an agreeable young wife, is regarded even by people of the world as disreputable. Lady Dorchester had returned from Dublin, and was again the King's mistress. Her return was politically of no importance. She had learned by experience the folly of attempting to save her lover from the destruction to which he was running headlong. She therefore ...
— The History of England from the Accession of James II. - Volume 2 (of 5) • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... pulled it up over her forehead, and you wouldn't believe the difference it made. We found some wild strawberries, and ate them for lunch, and I wreathed the leaves round her head, and when her fingers were nicely stained with the juice, and she looked thoroughly disreputable, I held out the little looking-glass on my chatelaine, and gave her a ...
— The Heart of Una Sackville • Mrs. George de Horne Vaizey
... him no. By that time it was after eleven. But Mr. Bowdoin made a rapid calculation of the distance (it never would have occurred to him to take a hack; carriages, in his view, were meant for women, funerals, and disreputable merrymakers), and hastened down ...
— Pirate Gold • Frederic Jesup Stimson
... died in 1775. She became the mistress of the house. Her father formed disreputable connections. Late in that year her future husband, Roland de la Platiere, presented himself, with a letter from a friend of her girlhood. He was forty years old; he was a student; his form was awkward and his manners were stiff; ...
— Brave Men and Women - Their Struggles, Failures, And Triumphs • O.E. Fuller
... save him from fighting in fighting days; and even in these days, in which broils and personal encounters are held to be generally disreputable, it saves the wearer from certain remote dangers to which other men are liable. And the reverse of this is also true. It would probably be hard to extract a first blow from the whole bench of bishops. And deans as a rule are more sedentary, more quiescent, more given to sufferance ...
— Is He Popenjoy? • Anthony Trollope
... for a circumstance which has puzzled me exceedingly. That very brig, the William, belongs to my friends, Hodge, Podge, and Company, of Liverpool; and I am sure they would have consigned her to me, had they intended her to come here. Here she came, however, consigned to a Jew, a man of very disreputable character; and I understand that she discharged but a very small part of her cargo. We must try and find out what has become of it, and see if Captain Hudson can identify any portion of it. When I sent down to inquire about her, I found that she had sailed again, and, it was reported, ...
— Salt Water - The Sea Life and Adventures of Neil D'Arcy the Midshipman • W. H. G. Kingston
... out, he saw Edgar walking lazily beside the mare, who nodded her white-starred forehead as she dragged the clanking load of coal. The young farmer's face lighted up as he saw his friend. Edgar was good-looking, with dark, warm eyes. His clothes were old and rather disreputable, and ...
— Sons and Lovers • David Herbert Lawrence
... magazines and in the newspapers. They popularised what the college professors had been thinking. Owing to this consensus of influences opposition to pro-Ally orthodoxy became intellectually somewhat disreputable, and when a final decision had to be made this factor counted with unprecedented and overwhelming force. College professors headed by a President who had himself been a college professor contributed more effectively to ...
— Germany, The Next Republic? • Carl W. Ackerman
... Scottish nobleman, shot at his own door a poor fencing-master, who had accidentally put out their master's eye several years before in a contest of skill. The two men were hung opposite the Whitefriars gate in Fleet Street. This disreputable and lawless nest of river-side alleys was called Alsatia, from its resemblance to the seat of the war then raging on the frontiers of France, in the dominions of King James's son-in-law, the Prince Palatine. Its roystering ...
— Old and New London - Volume I • Walter Thornbury
... right have I, an entire stranger, to come blundering along like a June beetle and disturb your rest? You did not look forward to associations with night editors and like disreputable people when you chose this sheltered nook of the world, and nestled under Mrs. Yocomb's wing. You have ...
— A Day Of Fate • E. P. Roe
... and complete unconsciousness. One cannot imagine a modern ecclesiastic conversing with a Magdalen in terms of ordinary civility, unless she was in a very high social position indeed, or blending with disreputable characters without a dramatic sense of condescension and much explanatory by-play. Those who profess modern religion do but follow in these matters a course entirely compatible with what has survived of the authentic teachings of Christ, when they ...
— God The Invisible King • Herbert George Wells
... as she noticed the stranger. "I can not understand why your father persists in having such disreputable-looking men visit him in his home," she confided to ...
— El Diablo • Brayton Norton
... when I go to sleep, and think that there isn't a thief or a policeman on the whole continent, and only a few harmless homicides, as you call them, that wouldn't hurt a fly, and not a person hungry or cold, and no poor and no rich, and no servants and no masters, and no soldiers, and no—disreputable characters, it seems as if I was going to wake up in the morning and find myself on the Saraband and ...
— Through the Eye of the Needle - A Romance • W. D. Howells
... her bag worse than she had in the bureau drawer. Everything came out—purse, tickets, gloves, handkerchief, the tiniest little looking-glass, a letter or two, a silver thimble, two coughdrops stuck together, a sample of ribbon which she had failed to match, a most disreputable ...
— Betty Gordon at Mountain Camp • Alice B. Emerson
... morning (April 15) all hands were astir. The sun soon shone brightly and we spread out our wet gear to dry, till the beach looked like a particularly disreputable gipsy camp. The boots and clothing had suffered considerably during our travels. I had decided to send Wild along the coast in the 'Stancomb Wills' to look for a new camping-ground, and he and I discussed the details of the journey while eating our breakfast of hot seal steak and blubber. ...
— South! • Sir Ernest Shackleton
... Tom on the way to the gymnasium. Tom was a disreputable looking object. His upper lip had been cut and had swollen to almost twice its normal size, and he had lost half an inch of skin from one cheek. When he smiled, which he did as Steve grabbed him by the arm, the effect ...
— Left End Edwards • Ralph Henry Barbour
... took on the relaxed sullenness of those about him; curiously, in an instant he seemed more bedraggled, more disreputable, hopeless. ...
— The Happy End • Joseph Hergesheimer
... the light switch and turned it on. Carrots, lips drawn tight, was bent over in the judo hold Scotty had on him. Rick found a few old pieces of overstuffed furniture, too disreputable to have been moved or sold, and he and Jerry ...
— Smugglers' Reef • John Blaine
... time elapsed before Marion increased his disreputable score to a brigade of more respectable proportions, with which he struck such quick and telling blows from all sides on the British and Tories, that no nest of hornets could have more dismayed a marauding party of boys. The swamps of the Pedee were his head-quarters. ...
— Historic Tales, Vol. 1 (of 15) - The Romance of Reality • Charles Morris
... places of the city, for two days, the brigands had been slaughtering every man his enemy among the Government officers, some of them indeed disreputable and sorry fellows, others respectable. They killed with musket-shot, and if the fallen gave signs of life they reloaded their arms in the sight of the people and the soldiers and fired them afresh, or else put an end to their victims with their ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Vol. 17 • Charles Francis Horne
... the deference due to the friend of a god Midas treated this disreputable old pedagogue, and for ten days and nights on end he feasted him royally. On the eleventh day Bacchus came in search of his preceptor, and in deep gratitude bade Midas demand of him what he would, because he had done Silenus honour when to dishonour ...
— A Book of Myths • Jean Lang
... in persecuting Friend Hopper and Barney Corse convinced the public, by their subsequent disreputable career, that they were not men whose ...
— Isaac T. Hopper • L. Maria Child
... are loyal to ancient hats and disreputable old friends and to some women. But they are always ...
— 'Oh, Well, You Know How Women Are!' AND 'Isn't That Just Like a Man!' • Irvin Shrewsbury Cobb
... with an impatience of her simplicity which it was difficult to restrain, was reading the letter, in which he perceived a very different intention from any divined by Miss Wodehouse. The billet was disreputable enough, written in pencil, and ...
— The Perpetual Curate • Mrs [Margaret] Oliphant
... educational immigration, a few Northern men were drawn into public affairs, less by choice than by necessity of the situation. With these mingled a different class, men who had been disreputable hangers-on of the army or the Freedmen's Bureau, or who had come for the sole purpose of plunder. It was a very mixed company of whites and blacks that made up the conventions and then filled the legislative halls and the ...
— The Negro and the Nation - A History of American Slavery and Enfranchisement • George S. Merriam
... say that as a boy he was a very mean one, saucy, quarrelsome, and wicked, liked horse-racing and card-playing—both alike disreputable in those times. In early manhood he "experienced religion" and joined the Old-School Baptist Church, of which his parents were members, and then all his bad habits seem to have been discarded. He stopped swearing and Sabbath-breaking, ...
— Our Friend John Burroughs • Clara Barrus
... degraded led, by natural association, to the degradation of those forms of labor most frequently delegated to the slave. By this means free labor became gradually to be considered more and more disreputable, and self-support to be considered less and less honorable. The necessities of slavery, as well as the constantly growing pride of class, tended very rapidly toward the subversion of free thought and free speech; so that, even with the white man of any and every class, the right to hold and ...
— Bricks Without Straw • Albion W. Tourgee
... hat, with 'billard' and 'estaminet' written on his flaccid face, is a favourite study with him; the unshaven jowl, the waist tied with a string, the boots which pad the Quadrant pavement, this dingy and disreputable being exercises a fascination over Mr. Punch's favourite artist. We trace, too, in his work a prejudice against the Hebrew nation, against the natives of an island much celebrated for its verdure and its wrongs; these ...
— English Caricaturists and Graphic Humourists of the Nineteenth Century. - How they Illustrated and Interpreted their Times. • Graham Everitt
... this," said Clay, laughing. "I got that medal and that star for serving in the Nile campaign, under Wolseley. After I left Egypt, I went up the coast to Algiers, where I took service under the French in a most disreputable organization known as ...
— Soldiers of Fortune • Richard Harding Davis
... numerals than men. They must bear their idiosyncrasies or their professions written on a placard about their neck, like the scenery in Shakespeare's theatre. The precepts of economy have pierced into the lowest ranks of life; and there is now a decorum in vice, a respectability among the disreputable, a pure spirit of Philistinism among the waifs and strays of thy Bohemia. For lo! thy very gravediggers talk politics; and thy castaways kneel upon new graves, to discuss the cost of the monument and grumble at ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. XXII (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... he was directed to the "headquarters," a disreputable lounging-room in an abandoned store on the outskirts of the town. There were papers and magazines scattered about; socialistic journals and many newspapers printed in German, Russian, and Italian. The place smelled of stale tobacco smoke and unwashed clothing. But the organization ...
— Jim Waring of Sonora-Town - Tang of Life • Knibbs, Henry Herbert
... substitute. If indeed Nature thus works by illusions and justifies the lying means by the benevolent end, it is hard to believe in a moral government of the universe, or to hope that an "absolute morality"—righteousness for its own sake—will be the outcome of such disreputable methods. But till the illusion of "absolute morality" is strong enough to take care of itself, and has passed from the professors to the populace, it is plainly for the interest and happiness of individuals and of society to hold fast ...
— The Faith of the Millions (2nd series) • George Tyrrell
... his brother's way." The influence of every man who is amenable to altruistic motives is needed against liquor, to counteract its lure; we must create a strong public sentiment and make it unfashionable and disreputable to drink. Happily the tide of liquor-drinking, which has been rising rapidly in the last half- century, owing to the increase in prosperity, the great influx of immigrants from liquor-drinking countries, and the stimulation of the trade by the highly organized liquor industry, has at ...
— Problems of Conduct • Durant Drake
... disreputable about eating sandwiches on the grass," he assured her; and indeed, when they spread their simple provision out under the great pines back of the Trianon, she seemed to agree with him, eating with a hearty appetite, ...
— Short Stories of Various Types • Various
... been noted in his morals. With the scandal and bad example of that and certain inclinations in the administration of justice, and complaints from persons to whom he has failed to return money which he received from them to invest in merchandise or to pay to them here, he has become as disreputable as in other matters of his own private affairs. Since he allows one of his sons, the eldest one here, called Don Atanasio de Legazpi, to live so licentious a life, it is said of him that his father is making amends for the fault of his son's bad rearing. He endures ...
— The Philippine Islands, 1493-1898: Volume XVIII, 1617-1620 • Various
... will believe it?—To say, that a person of your known steadiness and punctilio was over-persuaded when you gave him the meeting, how will that sound?—To say, you were tricked out of yourself, and people were given credit to it, how disreputable!—And while unmarried, and yet with him, the man a man of such a character, what would it not lead ...
— Clarissa, Volume 3 (of 9) • Samuel Richardson
... likely "used in its primary signification, and in the sense in which we still apply it to troops in the pay of a state, foreign to their own." I cannot help thinking, that by the designation mercenary was implied something more disreputable than that merely of "one who, having no settled cure, was at liberty to be 'hired;'" and in this I am borne out by Chaucer, no mean authority, who, in his well-known picture of the parson, in the Prologue to the Canterbury Tales, amongst ...
— Notes and Queries, 1850.12.21 - A Medium of Inter-communication for Literary Men, Artists, - Antiquaries, Genealogists, etc. • Various
... police had surprised the card playing community with whom we had spent the evening at Boulogne, and that the much-bejeweled old landlady had been sent to prison for the offense of keeping a gambling-house. It was suspected in the town that the General was more or less directly connected with certain disreputable circumstances discovered by the authorities. In any case, he had retired from ...
— The Black Robe • Wilkie Collins
... and the peculiar look which betrays the haunted soul gradually became visible in the young widower's eyes, doubts arose and reports circulated which cast strange reflections upon the tragic end of his mistaken marriage. Stories of the disreputable use to which the old grotto had been put were mingled with vague hints of conjugal violence never properly investigated. The result was his general avoidance not only by the social set dominated by his high-minded father, but by his own less reputable coterie, ...
— The Golden Slipper • Anna Katharine Green
... some slighting mention of him for not sending her money enough: what is the effect of all this upon the men? The foreigners; there are plenty of them here every season; I wonder there are so few this time: instead of one decent Frenchman like Le Roi, you usually find half-a-dozen disreputable ones; Englishmen many, not always of the best sort; Germans, Russians, and Spaniards, occasionally: they all are inclined to look upon her—especially considering her belligerent attitude towards ...
— The International Monthly, Volume 2, No. 4, March, 1851 • Various
... station and fortune, the world persisted in looking rather coldly upon Clavering, and strange suspicious rumors followed him about. He was blackballed at two clubs in succession. In the house of commons, he only conversed with a few of the most disreputable members of that famous body, having a happy knack of choosing bad society, and adapting himself naturally to it, as other people do to the company of their betters. To name all the senators with whom Clavering consorted, would be invidious. We may mention only a few. There was Captain Raff, ...
— The History of Pendennis, Vol. 2 - His Fortunes and Misfortunes, His Friends and His Greatest Enemy • William Makepeace Thackeray
... reproach at the worst felon who ever sat in the prisoners' dock. I speak no hyperbole, but simple truth. We are very ready to draw in our minds a distinction between respectable sins—human imperfections we call them, perhaps—and disreputable vices, such as theft and murder; but there is no such distinction in fact. Many a thief is a better man than many a clergyman, and miles nearer to the gate of the kingdom. The heavenly order goes upon other principles than ...
— Thomas Wingfold, Curate • George MacDonald
... his eyes at this cool proposal, but we prevailed upon him to seek the permission of the Admiral-Superintendent, who, a good deal to my surprise, proved to be quite pliable. Cary's reputation for discretion must be very high in the little village where he lives if it is able to guarantee so disreputable a scribbler as Bennet Copplestone! The Admiral, fortunately, had not read any of my Works before they had been censored. When printed in Cornhill ...
— The Lost Naval Papers • Bennet Copplestone
... "I am going to pay a call at a disreputable-looking news-shop, just where I am pointing. You can't bring the car there, as the street is too narrow. You might follow me on foot and ...
— The Pawns Count • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... pretty pretext! Was it to benefit the poor that that odious Countess Strahlberg made all those disreputable grimaces? I have seen kermesses got up by actresses, and, upon my word, they were ...
— Serge Panine • Georges Ohnet
... stranger, about forty years of age, with black hair and shaggy beard and eyebrows. He was seedily dressed, and altogether looked to be a disreputable character. ...
— True to Himself • Edward Stratemeyer
... was saying. "He always eats. And when I take him for a walk in the park, he digs up bones that other dogs have buried, and carries them home with him. We look very disreputable." The Crown Prince laughed with delight, but just then Nikky saw Hedwig, and his own ...
— Long Live the King • Mary Roberts Rinehart
... league and a half from the city, D'Artagnan, finding that in his impatience he had set out too soon, stopped to give the horses breathing time. The inn was full of disreputable looking people, who seemed as if they were on the point of commencing some nightly expedition. A man, wrapped in a cloak, appeared at the door, but seeing a stranger he beckoned to his companions, and two men who were drinking in the inn went out ...
— Twenty Years After • Alexandre Dumas, Pere
... toward her. An odor of food filled the air, causing nostrils to dilate, mouths to water, and jaws to contract painfully. The scorn of the ladies for this disreputable female grew positively ferocious; they would have liked to kill her, or throw, her and her drinking cup, her basket, and her provisions, out of the coach into the ...
— Maupassant Original Short Stories (180), Complete • Guy de Maupassant
... disreputable and obviously unscathed, Sally's brief alarm died away, leaving in its place the old feeling of impatient resentment. In addition to her other grievances against him, he had apparently ...
— The Adventures of Sally • P. G. Wodehouse
... the high morality of the new commonwealths dedicated to righteousness. But even the Puritans and Cavaliers were merely human, and crime would enter in spite of all efforts to the contrary. Bold adventurers, disreputable spirits, men and women with little respect for the laws of man or of God, crept into their midst; many of the immigrants to the Middle and Southern Colonies were refugees from the streets and prisons of London; some of the indented servants had but crude notions of morality; sometimes, ...
— Woman's Life in Colonial Days • Carl Holliday
... breaking when I found myself in the street, and as I emerged from the slightly disreputable neighborhood where I had passed the night I felt sure that a glance in the mirror would show me up a haggard, white-haired wreck. The air was wonderfully reviving, though, and I felt a subtle change stealing over me. An odd, pricking sensation, like one's foot awakening from ...
— The Statesmen Snowbound • Robert Fitzgerald
... taken it, he fell asleep once more, and when he woke again, it was in the middle of the night. The lamp was nearly burned out: it had a long, red, disreputable nose, that spoke of midnight hours and exhausted oil. The old lady was dozing in her chair. The clock had just struck something, for the sound of its bell was yet faintly pulsing in the air. He sat up, and looked out into the ...
— Warlock o' Glenwarlock • George MacDonald |
