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Frigid   Listen
adjective
Frigid  adj.  
1.
Cold; wanting heat or warmth; of low temperature; as, a frigid climate.
2.
Wanting warmth, fervor, ardor, fire, vivacity, etc.; unfeeling; forbidding in manner; dull and unanimated; stiff and formal; as, a frigid constitution; a frigid style; a frigid look or manner; frigid obedience or service.
3.
Wanting natural heat or vigor sufficient to excite the generative power; impotent.
Frigid zone, that part of the earth which lies between either polar circle and its pole. See the Note under Arctic.






Collaborative International Dictionary of English 0.48








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"Frigid" Quotes from Famous Books



... which there is none more absurd should the wife prove obdurate. And prove obdurate his wife did. She was to be moved neither by threat nor by pleading. It was, you will notice, a comedy situation; husband not perhaps amorous so much as the thwarted possessor of the unpossessable—wife frigid and a maid, as far, at least, as the husband was concerned, and her weeping eyes turned yearningly elsewhere. A comedy situation, yes, and at this distance almost farcical—but for certain ...
— She Stands Accused • Victor MacClure

... effort to detain him, half suspecting that she had appeared at a strenuous moment. When the barrister had departed (Mary had just extended to him the tips of her frigid fingers), and Eve's polite inquiries after Lady Garnett's health ...
— A Comedy of Masks - A Novel • Ernest Dowson and Arthur Moore

... seemed about the same age, and were certainly past their first youth; still they looked bright and cheerful, and evidently troubled themselves but little about the advancing years. Lady Waterham was somewhat frigid in her manner, and as she slightly rose and pointed Mr. Smith to a chair, he became conscious that he had forgotten the exact words in which he had intended to commence the conversation. This led to a slight pause, ...
— A Child of the Glens - or, Elsie's Fortune • Edward Newenham Hoare

... 'im now." Mrs. Allen stood in the doorway, quite erect and cold in her bearing, and there was no one but the deluded man who failed to detect her frigid tone of offended ownership. "This is his sleepin'-time; if he wakes now he'll fret all night, an' Mr. Allen has to git his rest or he can't git up early an' do ...
— Dixie Hart • Will N. Harben

... recalled the thrill of his heart when it had whispered "Katherine, the loved of thy youth, may yet be thine!" And then that Katherine rose before him, not as she now swept the earth, with haughty step and frigid eye and disdainful lip, but as—in all her bloom of maiden beauty, before the temper was soured or the pride aroused—she had met him in the summer twilight, by the trysting-tree, broken with him the golden ring of faith, ...
— The Last Of The Barons, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton

... OF THE CUCUMBERS.—This family is not known in the frigid zone, is somewhat rare in the temperate, but in the tropical and warmer regions throughout the world they are abundant. They are most plentiful in the continent of Hindostan; but in America are not near so plentiful. Many of the kinds supply useful articles ...
— The Book of Household Management • Mrs. Isabella Beeton

... silk, swam majestically into the lounge, bowed with a certain frigid and deferential surprise to the early guest, and proceeded to an inquiry into dust. In a moment she called, sharp ...
— Clayhanger • Arnold Bennett

... wrong word at many other times. Such persons are simply unconscious of the fact that there are other words of kindred meaning from which they might choose; as the United States surveyors of Alaska found "the shuddering tenant of the frigid zone" wrapping himself in furs and cowering over a fire of sticks with untouched coal-mines beneath ...
— English Synonyms and Antonyms - With Notes on the Correct Use of Prepositions • James Champlin Fernald

... heaven knows what value I placed upon this brief look. It appeared for the moment to me that I had won her, won everything. I bravely forged ahead until I was quite insistently under the eye of Lady Mary, and then she again looked toward me, but it was a look so repelling and frigid that it went through me as if I had been a paper ring in the circus. I slunk away through the crowd, my thoughts busy with trying to find out what ...
— The O'Ruddy - A Romance • Stephen Crane

... arbitrary power, but have lost their meaning, and now signify merely its cruel exercise; because such a use of it has been proved by the experience of the world, to be inseparable from its possession—words now frigid with horror, and never used even by the objector without feeling a ...
— The Anti-Slavery Examiner, Omnibus • American Anti-Slavery Society

... integrity of his intentions. Confound the fellow, what a cold feeler and cautious stepper he is! Strange that the two leaders should make themselves so personally obnoxious as they do by their manners and behaviour. Nevertheless John Russell, though frigid and forbidding to strangers, is a more amiable man with his friends; but the other has no friends. I have more than once remonstrated on the impolicy of Lord John's carelessness in his treatment of people, and I had an instance of ...
— The Greville Memoirs (Second Part) - A Journal of the Reign of Queen Victoria from 1837 to 1852 - (Volume 1 of 3) • Charles C. F. Greville

... over him in her quiet way. She never resisted his authority, however harshly enforced; and often stood between him and his victims, diverting his resentment without appearing to oppose his will. If there existed in his frigid breast one sentiment of kindness for any human creature, I think it ...
— The Monctons: A Novel, Volume I • Susanna Moodie

... all; his heart was "opened," whether for good or for bad, whether by good influences or by good and bad mixed. He was not conscious of convincing reasons, but he took what came to hand, he embraced what was offered, he felt and he acted. Again, a man is brought up among Unitarians, or in the frigid and worldly school which got a footing in the Church during last century, and has been accustomed to view religion as a matter of reason and form, of obligation, to the exclusion of affectionateness and devotion. He falls among persons of what is called an Evangelical cast, and finds his heart ...
— Prose Masterpieces from Modern Essayists • James Anthony Froude, Edward A. Freeman, William Ewart Gladstone, John Henry Newman and Leslie Steph

... "Mrs. Maitland," he went on more slowly as if carefully weighing every word, "belongs to a large and growing class of women in whom, to speak frankly, sex seems to be suppressed. She is a very handsome and attractive woman—you have seen her? Yes? You must have noticed, though, that she is really frigid, cold, intellectual." ...
— The Dream Doctor • Arthur B. Reeve

... intention of making war upon the United States, and reproached governor Harrison for having marched against his people during his absence. The agent made a long speech to him, presenting reasons why he should now become the friend and ally of the United States. To this harangue, Tecumseh listened with frigid indifference, made a few general remarks in reply, and then with a haughty air, left the council-house, and took his departure for Malden, where he joined the ...
— Life of Tecumseh, and of His Brother the Prophet - With a Historical Sketch of the Shawanoe Indians • Benjamin Drake

... large acquaintance and various familiarities, we set open our gates to the invaders of most of our time; we expose our life to a quotidian ague of frigid impertinences which would make a wise man tremble ...
— Pearls of Thought • Maturin M. Ballou

... the battle of Jena they took down the Column of Rossbach,[5] but that was erected to commemorate the victory, and this the death of the hero. I feel like Johnson—'far far from me and my friends be that frigid philosophy which can make us pass unmoved over any scenes which have been consecrated by virtue, by valour, or by wisdom'—and I strained the eyes of my imagination to see all the tumult of this famous battle, in which Bonaparte had been ...
— The Greville Memoirs - A Journal of the Reigns of King George IV and King William - IV, Volume 1 (of 3) • Charles C. F. Greville

... carried her antipathy to such an extent that she tolerated but few fires in her University Place establishment in New York, as she seriously objected to the uncleanness caused by the dust and ashes! No matter how cold her house nor how frigid the day, she never seemed to suffer but, on the contrary, complained that her home was overheated. Her guests frequently commented upon "the nipping and eager air" which Shakespeare's Horatio speaks of, but it made no ...
— As I Remember - Recollections of American Society during the Nineteenth Century • Marian Gouverneur

... has been considered by many the most moral part of the United States, there are two thousand divorces per year. And in Massachusetts, the headquarters of steady habits, there is one divorce to every fourteen marriages. The State of Maine, considered by many almost frigid in proprieties, has in one year four hundred and seventy-eight divorces. In Vermont swapping wives is not a rare transaction. In Connecticut there are women who boast that they have four or five times been divorced. Moreover, our boasted ...
— The Wedding Ring - A Series of Discourses for Husbands and Wives and Those - Contemplating Matrimony • T. De Witt Talmage

... a frigid inclination of the head. His discouraging manner made me begin to feel a little uneasy. I ventured to ask if he had arrived at a conclusion yet. "Permit me to consult with my colleague before I answer you," said the impenetrable man. I roused Lucilla. She again inquired for Oscar. I said I supposed ...
— Poor Miss Finch • Wilkie Collins

... morning came in frigid and gray. The unseasonable numerals which the meteorologist recorded in his tables might have provoked a superstitious lover of better weather to suppose that Monsieur Danny, the head imp of discord, had been among ...
— The Grandissimes • George Washington Cable

... in his tone a frigid contempt. It was obvious that to him Blanche Stroeve was only a unit to be added to the statistical list of attempted suicides in the city of Paris during the current year. He was busy, and could waste no more time on ...
— The Moon and Sixpence • W. Somerset Maugham

... existence bears each and all of us with a strong, steady sweep from the tropic lands of sunny childhood, enameled with verdure and gaudy with bloom, through the temperate regions of manhood and womanhood, fruitful or fruitless as the case may be; on to the often frigid, lonely shores of old age, snow-crowned and ice-veined; and individual destinies seem to resemble the tangled drift on those broad gulf billows, strewn on barren beaches, stranded upon icebergs, some to be scorched under equatorial heats, some to perish by polar perils; ...
— The Gentleman from Everywhere • James Henry Foss

... the six steps at the entrance, and were received in the hall by two tall footmen with the most dignified and imposing air. This hall had formerly been a vast, frigid apartment, with bare stone walls. These walls were now covered with admirable tapestry, representing mythological subjects. The Cure dared scarcely glance at this tapestry; it was enough for him to perceive that the goddesses who wandered ...
— L'Abbe Constantin, Complete • Ludovic Halevy

... I explained, "are on the Vedian side, three on the Satronian side, though they are always polite to each other. But it is a frigid politeness and I was anticipating the dinner tonight as a frightful trial. I fancy your presence will ensure its passing off comfortably. Entedius Hirnio will be here, too. His estates are beyond Vediamnum and he has never ...
— Andivius Hedulio • Edward Lucas White

... seemed, too, as if his mother were resolved that he should taste the full bitterness of the moral, for she looked at him fixedly as the blush died from her cheeks; but her heart was too touched by his look of pain, and in a moment she had kissed him on the cheek, after the frigid and ...
— Donahoe's Magazine, Volume 15, No. 2, February 1886 • Various

... adjutant, fixing a frigid gaze on the rookie, "you may as well tell me all you know ...
— Uncle Sam's Boys in the Ranks - or, Two Recruits in the United States Army • H. Irving Hancock

... drawing-room some time before its announcement, and as the old man introduced the two latter, Reilly's bow was courteous and gentlemanly, whilst that of the baronet, who not only detested Reilly with the hatred of a demon, but resolved to make him feel the superiority of rank and wealth, was frigid, supercilious, and offensive. Reilly at once saw this, and, as he knew not that the baronet was in possession of his secret, he felt his ill-bred insolence the more deeply. He was too much of a gentleman, however, and too well acquainted with the principles ...
— Willy Reilly - The Works of William Carleton, Volume One • William Carleton

... had grown extremely frigid, but Colonel Stacey's welcome to his old campaigning comrade smoothed the General's ruffled mind. He was a bluff, grizzled man of sixty, with a scarlet countenance and a white head so closely cropped ...
— VC — A Chronicle of Castle Barfield and of the Crimea • David Christie Murray

... sensibly, according to my own definition of the word, and I absolutely refuse to leave my tub behind," replied the paymaster, in a frigid tone. ...
— At War with Pontiac - The Totem of the Bear • Kirk Munroe and J. Finnemore

... struggling to maintain it. This brigand who had unwittingly committed suicide by his daring act had accomplished more than he perhaps had realized. I could envisage our weapons, useless from lack of power. The air in our buildings turning fetid and frigid: ourselves forced to the helmets. A rush out to abandon the camp and escape. The buildings exploding—scattering into a litter on the ledge like a child's broken toy. The treasure abandoned, with the brigands coming up and loading ...
— Astounding Stories of Super-Science, June, 1930 • Various

... custom regulates our sense of honor. The claque is an institution so openly recognized in French theatres that the proudest dramatic or lyric temple in Paris would not know what to do without it. Even the classic Theatre Francais and the frigid Odeon, which are in great part supported by the government, and about which hangs the purest odor of high art, have each a regularly organized claque, which is paid to applaud, and which holds its rehearsals with the same solemnity that the players do, in order to introduce at the proper moment ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science Volume 15, No. 89, May, 1875 • Various

... and alterations of the currents of air in the higher regions of the atmosphere. They occur when the air is extremely calm and the heavens are quite serene, and are much more common under the tropics than in the temperate and frigid zones. I have seen this phenomenon on the Andes, almost under the equator, at an elevation of 15,920 feet, and in Northern Asia, in the plains of Krasnojarski, south of Buchtarminsk, so similarly developed, that we must regard the influences producing ...
— COSMOS: A Sketch of the Physical Description of the Universe, Vol. 1 • Alexander von Humboldt

... presence, and she said it, not with the air of one asking permission as had been her custom before the Frank Metcalf incident, but as one having the right to dispose of her own time. Only once did her aunt break the frigid air of offended dignity she had assumed. One morning she followed Clara to the front door, and as she watched her go down the steps from the front porch to the walk that led to the street, called to her. Some faint recollection of a time ...
— Poor White • Sherwood Anderson

... that nobody, except a few elderly persons, any longer delights in them? The notices which Sully-Prudhomme's death awakened in the Paris Press were either stamped with the mark of old contemporary affection, or else, when they were not abusive, were as frigid as the tomb itself. "Ses tendresses sucrees, sirupeuses, sont vaines en effet," said a critic of importance! Indeed, it would appear so; and where ...
— Some Diversions of a Man of Letters • Edmund William Gosse

... Shakespeare and Burns, Milton had the misfortune to spend his childhood in a large city. Again, while increasing age seemed to impose no limitations on Shakespeare's genius, his touch being as delicate in The Tempest as in his first plays, Milton's style, on the other hand, grew frigid and devoid of imagery toward the ...
— Halleck's New English Literature • Reuben P. Halleck

... President Harrison's apparent coldness may not be ascribed to an absorption in his duties that made him unintentionally neglectful of the little amenities of polite usage, they never even having occurred to him. Despite his cold exterior and frigid manner, it may have been he was sympathetic at heart. When the Tracey homestead was destroyed by fire, which resulted in the death of several persons, including the daughter, and finally resulted in the death of Mrs. Tracey, President ...
— Fifty Years of Public Service • Shelby M. Cullom

... he especially refers, but even in its more pleasant aspects of summer. Shakspeare likens the wind in this shifting to an individual who pays his addresses in succession to two fair ones—first he wooes the North, but in courting that frigid beauty a difference takes place, whereupon he turns his back upon her and courts the fair South. You will observe the lines are specially applied ...
— Notes and Queries, Number 206, October 8, 1853 • Various

... were strong; Their slaves were willing, and their reign was long: Till shame regain'd the post that sense betray'd, And virtue call'd oblivion to her aid. Then, crush'd by rules, and weaken'd, as refin'd, For years the pow'r of tragedy declin'd; From bard to bard the frigid caution crept, Till declamation roar'd, while passion slept; Yet still did virtue deign the stage to tread, Philosophy remain'd, though nature fled. But forced, at length, her ancient reign to quit, ...
— Dr. Johnson's Works: Life, Poems, and Tales, Volume 1 - The Works Of Samuel Johnson, Ll.D., In Nine Volumes • Samuel Johnson

... yurt—that is, of one of the wooden yurts of the settled Koraks—presents a strange and not very inviting appearance to one who has never become accustomed by long habit to its dirt, smoke, and frigid atmosphere. It receives its only light, and that of a cheerless, gloomy character, through the round hole, about twenty feet above the floor, which serves as window, door, and chimney, and which is reached by a round log ...
— Tent Life in Siberia • George Kennan

... Silent have been given. He had no confidants, except Waldeck and William Bentinck; and few could even guess at the hidden workings of that scheming mind or at the burning fires of energy and will-power beneath the proud and frigid reserve of a man so frail in body and always ailing. Very rarely could a born leader of men have been more unamiable or less anxious to win popular applause, but his whole demeanour inspired confidence and, ignoring the many difficulties and oppositions which thwarted him, he steadfastly ...
— History of Holland • George Edmundson

... from his ride the next day, he found Leonore reading the papers in the big hall. She gave him a very frigid "good-morning," yet instantly relaxed a little in telling him there was another long telegram for him on the mantel. She said nothing of his reading the despatch to her, but opened a new sheet of paper, and began to read its columns with much apparent interest. That particular ...
— The Honorable Peter Stirling and What People Thought of Him • Paul Leicester Ford

... frequent visitor in the family. When the marchioness first saw him, she treated him with great distinction, and at length made such advances, as neither the honor nor the inclinations of the count permitted him to notice. He conducted himself toward her with frigid indifference, which served only to inflame the passion it was meant to chill. The favors of the marchioness had hitherto been sought with avidity, and accepted with rapture; and the repulsive insensibility which she now experienced, roused all ...
— A Sicilian Romance • Ann Radcliffe

... greater staidness of demeanour than their brethren at the Ponte, thinking, perhaps, that the vicinity of the English chapel—a handsome structure, in the style of an ancient Venetian palace—may vindicate this assumption of decorum. There is but one hotel at the Villa—calm, dignified, and frigid; the remainder of a long rambling street of which the place is composed, consists entirely of lodging-houses, having gardens attached to each, where little children may be seen playing at the doors, ...
— Chambers's Edinburgh Journal, No. 431 - Volume 17, New Series, April 3, 1852 • Various

... take pride in disregarding, both in themselves and others. A thin-skinned man could not live an hour on ship-board. One would be torn raw unless he had the hide of an ox. A moment of natural feeling for home and friends, and then the frigid routine of sea-life returned. Jokes were made upon those who showed any interest in the expected news, and everything near and dear was made common stock for rude jokes and unfeeling coarseness, to which no exception could be taken ...
— Two Years Before the Mast • Richard Henry Dana

... of Dan's evident heat his tone was frigid, and its suggestion could no longer be ignored. Jim Thorpe, conscious of his innocence, was not the man to accept such innuendoes without protest. Suddenly his swift rising anger took hold of him, and the fiery protest which McLagan had intended to ...
— The One-Way Trail - A story of the cattle country • Ridgwell Cullum

... was shipped the following week, and with it went the cape for his show window. Abe himself superintended the packing, for business was dull in the firm's show-room. A particularly warm March had given way to a frigid, rainy April, and now that the promise of an early spring had failed of fulfillment cancelations were coming in thick and fast. Hence, Abe took rather a pessimistic ...
— Potash & Perlmutter - Their Copartnership Ventures and Adventures • Montague Glass

... again. He thought, as he sat at his desk, leaning his head on his right hand, that sea-air might do him good, and the idea of a visit to his sister at Deal flitted across his mind; but, remembering that he had for many years treated that sister with frigid indifference, and that he had dismissed her son Guy harshly and without sufficient reason from his employment a few years ago, he came to the conclusion that Deal was not a suitable locality. Then he thought of Margate and Ramsgate, and even ventured to contemplate the Scotch Highlands, but his ...
— The Lifeboat • R.M. Ballantyne

... the lack of giving tension to what is quiescent! The Penseroso also sits and meditates, but every muscle of the reposing limbs is alert. So, too, in the Moses, with all its exaggeration and melodrama, with its aspect of frigid sensationalism, which led Thackeray to say he would not like to be left alone in the room with it, we find every motionless limb imbued with vitality and the essentials of movement. The Moses undoubtedly springs from the St. John, transcending it as Beethoven ...
— Donatello • David Lindsay, Earl of Crawford

... end of the week the winter's frigid grip on the earth relaxed and a period of mild, almost balmy days followed. Under the noon-day sun the top ground even softened a little. The camps awoke, the rested men and horses fell upon their task with new spirit, ...
— The Iron Furrow • George C. Shedd

... fame which consists in being known not widely, but intimately. "To be content that time to come should know there was such a man, not caring whether they knew more of him, or to subsist under naked denominations, without deserts or noble acts," is, says Sir Thomas Browne, a frigid ambition. It is to some more specific memory that youth looks forward in its vigils. Old kings are sometimes disinterred in all the emphasis of life, the hands untainted by decay, the beard that had so often wagged in camp or senate ...
— Familiar Studies of Men & Books • Robert Louis Stevenson

... that forms a compromise between western smartness and eastern comfort, strode into the room and bore down on us. He invited us out into the corridor with an air that suggested we would better not refuse, and we filed out after him in an atmosphere of frigid disapproval. ...
— Affair in Araby • Talbot Mundy

... on systematic theology. Elaborate theories of atonement, justification, and grace were expounded on his authority, as if he had been a religious philosopher or theological professor like Origen and Thomas Aquinas. The name of the apostle came to be associated with angular and frigid disquisitions which were rapidly losing their connexion with vital religion. It has been left for the scholars of the present century to give us a picture of St. Paul as he really was—a man much nearer to George ...
— Outspoken Essays • William Ralph Inge

... longer popped; The daintiest dandies deigned to stare, And even the heads of women fair Were turned by the vision meeting them there. The stilts they sparkled and flashed and shone Like the tremulous lights of the frigid zone, Crimson and yellow and sapphire and green, Bright as the rainbows in summer seen; While the lady she strode along between With a majesty too supremely serene For anything but an American queen. A lady with jewels superb ...
— The Wit of Women - Fourth Edition • Kate Sanborn

... every individual they are led to acknowledge a trace of that universal and eternal plan on which God rules our race. This consideration may be taken as another prolific source of poetry which is opened in democratic ages. Democratic poets will always appear trivial and frigid if they seek to invest gods, demons, or angels, with corporeal forms, and if they attempt to draw them down from heaven to dispute the supremacy of earth. But if they strive to connect the great events they ...
— Democracy In America, Volume 2 (of 2) • Alexis de Tocqueville

... enthusiasm rather damped at this somewhat frigid greeting, and sorry in his heart he had not been allowed an opportunity of bidding farewell to ...
— The Adventures of a Three-Guinea Watch • Talbot Baines Reed

... description. The imagination of the reader is so well prepared for it by the previous lines, that it appears perfectly natural and pathetic. Placed as Gray has placed it, neither preceded nor followed by anything that harmonises with it, it becomes a frigid conceit. Woe to the unskilful rider who ventures on the ...
— The Miscellaneous Writings and Speeches of Lord Macaulay, Vol. 1 (of 4) - Contibutions to Knight's Quarterly Magazine] • Thomas Babington Macaulay

... wealth of heart which were the complements his own bleak nature required. Agnes Carillon, with her accurate, invariable beauty, had a prim disposition, wholesome enough for a man of strange, dark humours like David Rennes, but perilous always in its effect on any frigid or calculating mind. And Reckage was known to be supremely selfish. It seemed to Pensee that Sara had behaved very naturally, very touchingly, through the trying conversation on the subject of rising men and their ...
— Robert Orange - Being a Continuation of the History of Robert Orange • John Oliver Hobbes

... lamentable ignorance characterized the people. The dissenting sects were more religious, but were formal and cold. Their ministers preached, too often, a mere technical divinity, or a lax system of ethics. The Independents were inclined to a frigid Arminianism, and the Presbyterians were passing through the change from ultra Calvinism to ...
— A Modern History, From the Time of Luther to the Fall of Napoleon - For the Use of Schools and Colleges • John Lord

... dinner-time, so that that meeting also should be over. 'She won't like him, I know,' she murmured, with a recollection of a scene at school when a visitor had been presuming in Horatia's opinion, and she had rather surprised her companions by the frigid air she assumed. 'He'll offend her, and she will say something, and, oh dear! I'm sure there will be a scene,' ...
— Sarah's School Friend • May Baldwin

... documents, about a truck-load, that he could lay hands on, and went down to Central India with his notion hot in his head. He began his book in the land he was writing of. Too much official correspondence had made him a frigid workman, and he must have guessed that he needed the white light of local color on his palette. This is a dangerous paint ...
— The Works of Rudyard Kipling One Volume Edition • Rudyard Kipling

... carpet of snow on which the sabots of the villagers had outlined a narrow path, leading from the outer steps to the iron gate. Inside, fires blazed on all the hearths, which, however, did not modify the frigid atmosphere of the rudely-built ...
— Serge Panine • Georges Ohnet

... chortles of merriment, profound merriment, for you don't laugh idly at Harry Champion. His gaiety is not the superficial gaiety of the funny man who makes you laugh but does nothing else to you. He does you good. I honestly believe that his performance would beat down the frigid steel ramparts that begird the English "lady." His songs thrill and tickle you as does the gayest music of Mozart. They have not the mere lightness of merriment, but, like that music, they have the deep-plumbing gaiety of the love of life, for ...
— Nights in London • Thomas Burke

... and so I felt dreadfully nervous when she began to say that our bill at the house had gone unpaid too long and that we must pay her at once what we owed her. It took some time before Uncle William understood what she was talking about, but when he did he became dreadfully frigid and polite. He said, "Let me understand clearly, madame, just what it is that you wish to say: do I apprehend that you are saying that my account here for our maintenance is now due and payable?" Mrs. O'Halloran said yes, she was. And Uncle said, "Let me endeavour to grasp your meaning exactly: ...
— The Hohenzollerns in America - With the Bolsheviks in Berlin and other impossibilities • Stephen Leacock

... the count in the most frigid tones; "Ali has many faults mixed with most excellent qualities. He cannot possibly serve you as a pattern for your conduct, not being, as you are, a paid servant, but a mere slave—a dog, who, should he fail ...
— The Count of Monte Cristo • Alexandre Dumas, Pere

... which he assigned to it is of such vast dimensions as to require no less that 3,065 years for the completion of its circuit; and to carry the body describing it at each revolution to fourteen times the distance from the sun of the frigid Neptune. Thus, when it last visited our neighbourhood, Achilles may have gazed on its imposing train as he lay on the sands all night bewailing the loss of Patroclus; and when it returns, it will perhaps be to shine upon the ruins of empires ...
— A Popular History of Astronomy During the Nineteenth Century - Fourth Edition • Agnes M. (Agnes Mary) Clerke

... polished and keen? This Attic style of controversy finely contrasts with the tasteless and fierce invective of the Warburtonians, although one of them is well known to have managed too adroitly the cutting instrument of irony; but the frigid malignancy of Hurd diminishes the pleasure we might find in his skill. Warburton ill concealed his vexation in the contempt he vented in a letter to Hurd on this occasion. "All you say about Lowth's pamphlet breathes the purest spirit ...
— Calamities and Quarrels of Authors • Isaac D'Israeli

... ideas and standards of his fellows as over intercollegiate jealousies; and, as he left the college distantly alone, the college sought him out, elected him to clubs which he seldom attended and to banquets which he overlaid with baffling and frigid aloofness. ...
— The Education of Eric Lane • Stephen McKenna

... spurred him on to astounding atrocities of the needle and acid. This diabolism, this worship of Satan and his works, are sincere in the etcher. A relic of rotten Romanticism, it glows like phosphorescent fire during his last period. The Church has in its wisdom employed a phrase for frigid depravity of the Rops kind, naming it "morose delectation." Morose Rops became as he developed. His private life he hid. We know little or nothing of it save that he was not unhappy in his companionships or choice of friends. ...
— Promenades of an Impressionist • James Huneker

... and beautiful in Italy, he declared Granada to be the loveliest of them all; for Venice was devoid of landscape and surrounded only by sea; Milan lay in a flat stretch of monotonous plain; Florence might boast her hills, but they made her winter climate frigid, while Rome was afflicted by unwholesome winds from Africa and such poisonous exhalations from the surrounding marshes that few of her citizens lived to old age. Such, to eyes sensitive to Nature's charms and to ...
— De Orbe Novo, Volume 1 (of 2) - The Eight Decades of Peter Martyr D'Anghera • Trans. by Francis Augustus MacNutt

... both wind and rain. An anecdote offers itself to my pen on this subject, which will exhibit the frigid indifference of the colonists of Louisiana towards every thing that interests humanity. Being on a visit at a plantation on the Mississippi, I walked out one fine evening in winter, with some ladies and gentlemen, who had accompanied me from the town, and the planters at whose house we were ...
— The Journal of Negro History, Volume 2, 1917 • Various

... running over, the Daphnis of Gessner. It neither on the one hand leaves behind it the laws of criticism, and mixes together the different stages of civilization; nor on the other will it perhaps be found frigid, uninteresting, and insipid. The prevailing opinion of Pastoral seems to have been, that it is a species of composition admirably fitted for the size of an eclogue, but that either its nature will not ...
— Imogen - A Pastoral Romance • William Godwin

... given a plenty of the very best advice to his friends? Who has not preached, and who has practiced? To be sure, you, madam, are perhaps a perfect being, and never had a wrong thought in the whole course of your frigid and irreproachable existence: or you, sir, are a great deal too strong-minded to allow any foolish passion to interfere with your equanimity in chambers or your attendance on 'Change; you are so strong that you don't want any sympathy. We don't give you any, then; we keep ours for the humble ...
— The History of Pendennis, Vol. 2 - His Fortunes and Misfortunes, His Friends and His Greatest Enemy • William Makepeace Thackeray

... He went on to document them with exactitudes. He teamed up with a meteorologist to explain the distribution of rainfall in spite of lack of frigid and torrid air masses. Cal's doubt was not appeased. Weather prediction was about on a par with race-horse handicapping, and easy to ...
— Eight Keys to Eden • Mark Irvin Clifton

... With frigid glance I pierced him through. He squirmed and changed his tune. Said he: "I will be frank with you: I lend ...
— A Nonsense Anthology • Collected by Carolyn Wells

... "makes a futile attempt semi-weekly to beat his brains out with a club; and every successive failure encourages him to try again; the only effect being a temporary decapitation of his family; and I believe this is the night on which he periodically turns a frigid eye ...
— Queechy, Volume II • Elizabeth Wetherell

... battlements, the village height of Montefalco—the 'ringhiera dell' Umbria,' as they call it in this country. By daylight, the snow on yonder peaks is clearly visible, where the Monti della Sibilla tower up above the sources of the Nera and Velino from frigid wastes of Norcia. The lower ranges seem as though painted, in films of airiest and palest azure, upon china; and then comes the broad green champaign, flecked with villages and farms. Just at the basement of Perugia winds ...
— Sketches and Studies in Italy and Greece, Second Series • John Addington Symonds

... another. Some absurd suspicion that you were in love with Lucy Dashwood piqued her vanity, and the anxiety to recover a lapsing allegiance led her to suppose herself attached to you, and made her treat all my advances with the most frigid indifference or wayward caprice; the more provoking," continued he, with a kind of bitterness in his tone, "as her father was disposed to take the thing favorably; and, if I must say it, I felt devilish spooney ...
— Charles O'Malley, The Irish Dragoon, Volume 2 (of 2) • Charles Lever

... fossil tipsy-cake The sponge each morn appeared; The bath, if plenished over-night, Was frozen ere the morning light, And more that frigid water-ache Than unwashed days I feared, Now while the milder zephyrs shake Once more the winter's might, My sponge, my bath, by loss endeared, Shall dree no more a lonely weird; And as young ducks to water take, Shall ...
— Punch, Or The London Charivari, Vol. 100., Jan. 24, 1891. • Various

... have been the last time for his dropping my acquaintance. Mr. Sheridan I have no longer any ambition to be noticed by; and Mr. Burke, at this place, I am afraid I have already displeased, so unavoidably cold and frigid did I feel myself when he came here to me formerly. Anywhere else, I should bound forward to meet him, with respect, ...
— The Diary and Letters of Madam D'Arblay Volume 2 • Madame D'Arblay

... "How frigid and cold it seems here. Why, there is such a desolate, unsocial feeling I should not live out half my days if I had to remain in such a place. Have I ...
— Dawn • Mrs. Harriet A. Adams

... and de Moche seemed to take the cue, for after a few more remarks to Inez he withdrew as gracefully as he could, with a parting interchange of frigid formalities with Lockwood. It did not take much of a detective to deduce that both of the young men might have agreed on one thing, though that caused the most serious of differences between them—their estimation of ...
— The Gold of the Gods • Arthur B. Reeve

... canvas on which he had painted Christian, from where it was leaning, face inwards, against the wall, and put it on an easel. He had not looked at it since the day of conflict, and he told himself that he was now regarding it with the frigid ...
— Mount Music • E. Oe. Somerville and Martin Ross

... during the journey home through the fragrant September air, I paid as much attention to my role of calm friendliness as any actress would to a first night appearance. Remembering Lillian's advice to make the transition gradual from the frigid courtesy of my former meetings with Grace Draper to the friendly warmth we had planned for our campaign, I adopted the manner one would use to a casual but ...
— Revelations of a Wife - The Story of a Honeymoon • Adele Garrison

... but he likewise has her derelictions: for more loquacious than ample, and less discriminating styles than eager to accumulate descriptions, he is at an early period exhausted by the superlatives lavished on inferior claims, and forced into frigid rhapsodies and astrologic nonsense to do justice to the greater. He swears by the divinity of M. Agnolo. He tells us that he copied every figure of the Capella Sistina and the stanze of Raffaelle, ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine - Volume 54, No. 338, December 1843 • Various

... letter with a frigid glance at me as if to say he believed not a word of the story, and mechanically ...
— Kilgorman - A Story of Ireland in 1798 • Talbot Baines Reed

... world, turned aside because of her beauty. Julius Caesar, whose legions trampled the conquered world from Canopus to the Thames, capitulated to her, and Mark Antony threw a fleet, an empire and his own honor to the winds to follow her to his destruction. Disarmed at last before the frigid Octavius, she found her peerless body measured by the cold eye of her captor only for the triumphal procession, and the friendly asp alone spared her ...
— Cleopatra • Jacob Abbott

... she herself had been when she was betrothed to her departed Vito, and she was thereby much comforted as to Marietta's condition. But she said nothing, after Marietta had coldly repelled her first attempt to talk of the marriage, though she forgave her mistress's frigid order to be silent, telling herself that no right-minded young girl could possibly be natural and sweet tempered under the circumstances. She was more than compensated for what might have seemed harshness, by something that looked very much like a concession. ...
— Marietta - A Maid of Venice • F. Marion Crawford

... growing upon the north side of the tree trunk. Each hundred feet of elevation in a given latitude makes from one to two days difference in time of blooming of plants. The character of the vegetation of a region is an index to its climate. Certain plants are adapted to frigid regions, others to temperate, and still others to tropical areas. Some plants are adapted to humid sections, while others are admirably adjusted to desert conditions. A knowledge of these differences in plants ...
— Boy Scouts Handbook - The First Edition, 1911 • Boy Scouts of America

... was Dr. Robertson, well known as the historian of Charles V., and as the author of other historic works. The chair of Belles Lettres was filled by the accomplished Dr. Hugh Blair, whose lectures remain one of the best samples of the correct and elegant, but narrow and frigid style, both of sentiment and criticism, which then flourished throughout Europe, and nowhere more than in Edinburgh. Another still greater ornament of the University was Dugald Stewart, the Professor of Moral Philosophy, whose works, ...
— Robert Burns • Principal Shairp

... with frigid dignity, "I was speaking of Virginie. Love cannot be made to order, I know. I know, too, that you can be trusted. We will forget all this. I will not let Augustine marry before Virginie.—Your interest will ...
— At the Sign of the Cat and Racket • Honore de Balzac

... affecting the result which have not previously received so much attention, Professor Very has arrived at a different opinion; and actual observation has shown that there is very little indication of frost outside the frigid zones. Even in the polar regions it is at times evidently warmer than at the earth's poles, because during the spring and summer the snow-caps upon Mars not only melt more rapidly, but melt to a much greater extent than our polar caps do. In 1894 the southern polar ...
— To Mars via The Moon - An Astronomical Story • Mark Wicks

... not likely to have designed infants to be suckled by other women than their own mothers, nor that they should be banished from the society of those who are most concerned in their well-being, from the cheerful hearth and wise affectionate converse of home, to the frigid discipline of colleges and convents and ...
— Rousseau - Volumes I. and II. • John Morley

... if the north-and-south lines were to be strengthened the world over, as the occupied and exploited north temperate zone reaches north toward the frigid zone, now grown warmer by the very opening of the lands to the sun and the long burning of coal, and south toward the tropics, now made more habitable by the new knowledge of tropical medicine, and even across the tropics to the sister temperate ...
— The French in the Heart of America • John Finley

... sorts of love that one does not know to whom to address oneself for a definition of it. The name of "love" is given boldly to a caprice lasting a few days, a sentiment without esteem, gallants' affectations, a frigid habit, a romantic fantasy, relish followed by prompt disrelish: people give this name to a ...
— Voltaire's Philosophical Dictionary • Voltaire

... he is such fifty-one weeks out of the fifty-two. All through the frigid winter season, despite the lure of California limiteds or Havana liners, he holds hard in that den of his, with its floor and walls of sanitary tiling and its ceiling of white enamel, and hews—or grinds rather, for Sandford is a ...
— A Breath of Prairie and other stories • Will Lillibridge

... recall that pathetic scene when Caroline presented herself at the door of Westminster Abbey to demand admission, on the day of her husband's coronation, to be received by the frigid words, "We have no instructions to allow you to pass"; and we can see her as, "humiliated, confounded, and with tears in her eyes," she returned sadly to her carriage, the heart crushed within her. Less than three weeks later, seized by a grave and mysterious ...
— Love affairs of the Courts of Europe • Thornton Hall

... plans in life, when the lure of a new love adventure summoned? Women, always women. For them he had again and again cast everything to the winds; sometimes for women who were refined, sometimes for women who were vulgar; for passionate women and for frigid women; for maidens and for harlots. All the honors and all the joys in the world had ever seemed cheap to him in comparison with a successful night upon ...
— Casanova's Homecoming • Arthur Schnitzler

... de Berny a correspondence with "his beautiful angel," as he called the Princess, whom he chose to consider a prisoner and a victim; while she, wearied to death with the frigid monotony and sepulchral gaieties of the archiducal court, which she openly called her "dungeon" diverted herself with the freaks and fantasies of her royal adorer, called him in very ill-spelled letters "her chevalier, her heart, her all the world," and ...
— The Rise of the Dutch Republic, 1555-1566 • John Lothrop Motley

... between them and the first apostles; between their writings and the sublime, inspired teaching of the divine Word. If, after reading Paul, Peter, or John, we turn to Tertullian, Irenaeus, or Cyprian, we instinctively realize that we have, so to speak, been transferred from sunny Italy to frigid Siberia. We are conscious of a change to another era, and to another country. Notwithstanding the fact that we find numerous familiar objects, we know that we are moving in another atmosphere amid ...
— The Last Reformation • F. G. [Frederick George] Smith

... cold from under his feathers, opened the door into the hall and listened. She was playing, not practicing, and the music was the barcarolle from the "Tales" of Hoffmann. Standing in the doorway in his night attire, his chest open to the frigid morning air, his face upraised to the floor above, he hummed the melody in ...
— The Street of Seven Stars • Mary Roberts Rinehart

... straightforward manner impressed the banker favorably, and he now became less frigid ...
— The Boy Broker - Among the Kings of Wall Street • Frank A. Munsey

... maintained a frigid attitude toward the world throughout the evening. Inwardly she longed to be gay like the others, but prudery and short-sightedness, the fruits of her training, prevailed, effectually debarring her from all enjoyment and leaving her cold and isolated ...
— When Dreams Come True • Ritter Brown

... step, a gentleman of the horse, and armed servants riding before and behind her. And, but that it was unpleasant to see Lady Castlewood's face, it was amusing to watch the behavior of the two enemies: the frigid patience of the younger lady, and the unconquerable good-humor of the elder—who would see no offence whatever her rival intended, and who never ceased to smile and to laugh, and to coax the children, and to pay compliments to every man, woman, child, ...
— The History of Henry Esmond, Esq. • W. M. Thackeray

... morality), and of the farce. Of La Coche, what has been said of the long sacred poems may be said, except that here we go back to the actual subject of the models, not on the whole with advantage: while in the minor pieces the same word plays and frigid ...
— The Tales Of The Heptameron, Vol. I. (of V.) • Margaret, Queen Of Navarre

... young ladies are yearning for sensations: but yet the north is better than the south of Russia, in spring at any rate. In our part nature is more melancholy, more lyrical, more Levitanesque; here it is neither one thing nor the other, like good, sonorous, but frigid verse. Thanks to my palpitations I haven't drunk wine for a week, and that makes the ...
— Letters of Anton Chekhov • Anton Chekhov

... beside a black, burnt hut, an island of the snow, Each head in frigid torpor bent toward the saddle bow; They paused, and of that sturdy troop—that thousand banded men— At one unmeditated glance ...
— A Book of Golden Deeds • Charlotte M. Yonge

... assume. It is what each of us may experience in himself. Our freedom, in the very movements by which it is affirmed, creates the growing habits that will stifle it if it fails to renew itself by a constant effort: it is dogged by automatism. The most living thought becomes frigid in the formula that expresses it. The word turns ...
— Creative Evolution • Henri Bergson

... at him a look of black hatred. This became a tense, silent plea for justice as it moved up for a moment to the Maestro's face, and then it settled back upon its first object in frigid accusation. ...
— Americans All - Stories of American Life of To-Day • Various

... their health should be careful to adapt their clothing to the state of the climate, and the season of the year. Whatever be the influence of custom, there is no reason why our clothing should be such as would suit an inhabitant of the torrid or the frigid zones, but of the state of the air around us, and of the country in which we live. Apparel may be warm enough for one season of the year, which is by no means sufficient for another; we ought therefore neither to put off our winter garments ...
— The Cook and Housekeeper's Complete and Universal Dictionary; Including a System of Modern Cookery, in all Its Various Branches, • Mary Eaton

... the penny toys of the Strand. Mention was again made of his supposed mission to the Vatican, and a picture drawn of the bewilderment of the Holy Father, roused from contemplation of the eternal to contemplation of jumping pasteboard, and the frigid gestures of people from the world ...
— The Folly Of Eustace - 1896 • Robert S. Hichens

... leaf, A tale from cobweb's volume hoary Of this Sangrado in his glory, Many will recollect the story. Edward Barry, grave J.P., Sometimes was given to a spree, Which interfered with the precision Of magisterial decision. So Edward Barry jumped the hedge And took the frigid temperance pledge; But soon the Justice of the Peace Found himself often ill at ease; Pains through his gastric regions ran, Too hard even for a temperance man. Then Barry M.D., in a trice, Gave Barry J.P. an advice, After a careful diagnosis, Which placed him on a ...
— Recollections of Bytown and Its Old Inhabitants • William Pittman Lett

... cold, a. cool, chilly; frigid, gelid, icy; nipping, bleak, raw, frosty, freezing; unresponsive, phlegmatic, passionless, chilling, stoical, ...
— Putnam's Word Book • Louis A. Flemming

... Then indeed she had lost her head, had sung and danced and made merry, till some trifling accident had provoked her mother's untempered wrath and a sound boxing of ears had quite sobered her enthusiasm. She had fared forth finally upon the adventure with tearful eyes and drooping heart, her mother's frigid kiss of farewell hurting her more poignantly than her drastic punishment of an hour before. For Dinah was intensely sensitive, keenly susceptible to rebuke and coldness, and her warm heart shrank from unkindness with a shrinking that was ...
— Greatheart • Ethel M. Dell

... strangers in her pretty home—how he could arrange matters with Mr. Ferdinand, how he could apologise to a lady whom he had never yet seen for appearing at her house with two uninvited guests, how he could get rid of the Sagittariuses when the horrible night watch should be at an end and the frigid winter dawn be near. But his mind refused to work. His brain was a blank, containing nothing except, perhaps, a vague desire for sudden death. Mr. Sagittarius did not disturb his contemplation ...
— The Prophet of Berkeley Square • Robert Hichens

... she did what she believed she intended to do that afternoon she would have to be cold to Craven in the future. With her temperament it would be impossible to continue her friendship with Craven if she were going to marry Sir Seymour. She knew that. But she did not know how frigid, how almost brusque, ...
— December Love • Robert Hichens

... dinner—he would find little to say to University dons; and as for his wife"—she could not forbear a secret smile at the thought of the poor dear woman, with her voluble affectionateness and her gowns of all colors, beside the stately, frigid, perfectly dressed, and unexceptionably—mannered Miss Gascoigne—"whether or not Mrs. Ferguson is invited to the series of parties that you are planning, I shall go and see her, and she shall come to see me, as often as ...
— Christian's Mistake • Dinah Maria Mulock Craik

... work. The same thing has happened to the most vigorous of essayists, Macaulay, and the most vigorous of romancers, Dickens, because we live in a time when mere vigour is considered a vulgar thing. The same idle and frigid reaction will almost certainly discredit the stateliness and care of Tennyson, as it has discredited the recklessness and inventiveness of Dickens. It is only necessary to remember that no action can be discredited by ...
— Varied Types • G. K. Chesterton

... all its shapes the language of the imagination and the passions, of fancy and will. Nothing, therefore, can be more absurd than the outcry which has been sometimes raised by frigid and pedantic critics for reducing the language of poetry to the standard of common sense and reason; for the end and use of poetry, "both at the first and now, was and is to hold the mirror up to nature", seen through ...
— English literary criticism • Various

... refined, we see them reflecting into the penal arrangements of the other world the leading features of their earthly experience of natural, domestic, judicial, and political evils. The hells of the inhabitants of the frigid zones are icy and rocky; those of the inhabitants of the torrid zones are fiery and sandy. Are not the poetic process and its sophistry clear? Nastrond, the hell of the Northmen, is a vast, hideous and grisly ...
— The Destiny of the Soul - A Critical History of the Doctrine of a Future Life • William Rounseville Alger

... on the contrary something quite human and changeable, not to say womanish,—a creature of moods, of caprices, of cross purposes; gloomy and downcast to-day, and all light and joy to-morrow; caressing and tender one moment, and severe and frigid the next; one day iron, the next day vapor; inconsistent, inconstant, incalculable; full of genius, full of folly, full of extremes; to be read and understood, not by rule, but by subtle signs and indirections,—by a look, a glance, a presence, ...
— Locusts and Wild Honey • John Burroughs

... said Estelle, and her voice was frigid in tone. "I have never been in Portland in my life," and she ...
— The Moving Picture Girls in War Plays - Or, The Sham Battles at Oak Farm • Laura Lee Hope

... pleased my father, sir," she spoke with frigid dignity, "to tell me that you are some day perchance to be my husband. The fulfilment lies with the gods. But to-day the strategus Democrates knows our customs too well to thrust himself upon an Attic gentlewoman who finds herself alone save ...
— A Victor of Salamis • William Stearns Davis

... offered, it should be borne in mind that the views defended by religious writers are, or should be, all-important in their eyes. They could not be expected to view with equanimity the destruction in many minds of "theology, natural and revealed, psychology, and metaphysics;" nor to weigh with calm and frigid impartiality arguments which seemed to them to be fraught with results of the highest moment to mankind, and, therefore, imposing on their consciences strenuous opposition as a first duty. Cool judicial impartiality in them would have been a sign perhaps of intellectual gifts, but ...
— On the Genesis of Species • St. George Mivart

... the danger I ran,' Polycarp remarked with frigid irony, 'and came into the flat with the intention of protecting me. May I ask how ...
— Hugo - A Fantasia on Modern Themes • Arnold Bennett

... long in reading and Mrs Lucas folded them up slowly and thoughtfully. She felt that she had to make a swift decision that called into play all her mental powers. On the one hand it was "up to her" to return a frigid reply, conveying, without making any bones about the matter, that she had no interest in nameless Gurus who might or might not be Brahmins from Benares and presented themselves at Daisy's doors in a penniless condition without clear knowledge whether ...
— Queen Lucia • E. F. Benson

... elsewhere, though we need not here speculate upon the cause. Pope's 'Essay on Man' is the expression in verse of the dominant theology of the Deists and their opponents, which was beginning to be condemned as dry and frigid. A desire for something more 'sentimental' shows itself in Young's 'Night Thoughts,' in Hervey's 'Meditations,' and appears in the religious domain as Methodism. The literary historian has to trace the rise of the same tendency ...
— Hours in a Library, Volume I. (of III.) • Leslie Stephen

... them gratefully. It might have been so different, she thought; she might have flung herself on the mercy of people who would have been suspicious and frigid, or of others who would have treated her with familiarity and curious questioning. These people were pleasantly matter-of-fact; glad to help, but plainly anxious to show her that they considered her affairs ...
— Back To Billabong • Mary Grant Bruce

... all the country stretching away from the north pole on all sides for many degrees south, and buy Greenland and Iceland at the best figure you can get now while they are cheap. It is my intention to move one of the tropics up there and transfer the frigid zone to the equator. I will have the entire Arctic Circle in the market as a summer resort next year, and will use the surplusage of the old climate, over and above what can be utilized on the equator, to reduce the temperature of opposition resorts. But I have said enough to ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain

... portmanteau when he goes away. Ah! George, George! One day will come when he won't go away," groaned Mountain, who, of course, always returned to the subject of which she was forbidden to speak. Meanwhile Mr. George adopted towards his mother's favourite a frigid courtesy, at which the honest gentleman chafed but did not care to remonstrate, or a stinging sarcasm, which he would break through as he would burst through so many brambles on those hunting excursions in which he and Harry Warrington rode so constantly ...
— The Virginians • William Makepeace Thackeray

... her fears with a frigid pleasantry. She scrutinised his face, always singularly hard to read, but beyond the expression of strained suffering which it bore, it revealed nothing; his manner was respectful, but more peremptory than ...
— Captain Mansana and Mother's Hands • Bjoernstjerne Bjoernson

... intelligence form together an instrument of exquisite sensibility whereby the perceptions of his inmost soul are hourly tortured, delighted, caught up into ecstasy, torn and crushed by jealousy and fear, or plunged into the frigid ...
— The Witch of Prague • F. Marion Crawford

... The most thrilling words that can be uttered at sea—words which chill the hearers for a moment and then are followed by a wild feeling of excitement which pervades more than runs through a ship, awakening it as it were with one great throb from frigid silence to excited life. In this instance, as Frank Murray made his spring, his words seemed to be echoed by Tom May in a deep roar as he too sprang upon the rail, from which he leaped, throwing his hands on high as he described ...
— Hunting the Skipper - The Cruise of the "Seafowl" Sloop • George Manville Fenn

... alone, I have something to say to you," she began. The frigid silence which met her words made her task the harder; the atmosphere of the room was eloquent of antagonism. With an effort she continued: "I don't know what you all think of me—I haven't tried to think—but I'm worse—oh! ever so much ...
— Sparrows - The Story of an Unprotected Girl • Horace W. C. Newte

... more than her words, shut Peter up. The cloak saved the situation during a few frigid seconds. But as a situation it had become strained. The only hope for the future was to go now. And Peter went. He went straight back to Sea Gull Manor ...
— Winnie Childs - The Shop Girl • C. N. Williamson

... hand to his forehead at all seasons, as if pain never gave him a moment's respite, a habit that recalled his travels and made him interesting. He was on visiting terms with the authorities—the general in command, the prefect, the receiver-general, and the bishop but in every house he was frigid, polite, and slightly supercilious, like a man out of his proper place awaiting the favors of power. His social talents he left to conjecture, nor did they lose anything in reputation on that account; then when people began to talk about him and wish to know ...
— Lost Illusions • Honore De Balzac

... could spend the summer with me! How you would rejoice in the heat, to me so hateful and intolerable! To persons of your temperament, I suppose hell, instead of the popular idea of fire and brimstone, presents some such frigid horror as poor Claudio's: "thrilling ...
— Records of Later Life • Frances Anne Kemble

... work till most of those whom I wished to please have sunk into the grave, and success and miscarriage are empty sounds; I therefore dismiss it with frigid tranquillity, having little to fear or hope from censure ...
— The Glory of English Prose - Letters to My Grandson • Stephen Coleridge

... by, which shows it perfectly. Becky had made an earlier appearance at Gaunt House; she had dined there, near the beginning of her social career, and had found herself in a difficulty; there came a moment when she had to face the frigid hostility of the noble ladies of the party, alone with them in the drawing-room, and her assurance failed. In the little scene that ensues the charming veil of Thackeray's talk is suddenly raised; there is Becky seated at the piano, Lady Steyne listening in a dream of old memories, the other ...
— The Craft of Fiction • Percy Lubbock

... know, we are quite glad she is going to be married at last," Lady Emily said in a confidential tone to Clarissa; "for she has kept up a kind of frigid atmosphere at home that I really believe has helped to frighten away all our admirers. Men of the present day don't like that sort of thing. It went out of fashion in England with King Charles I., I think, and in France with Louis XIV. You know how badly the royal household behaved coming home ...
— The Lovels of Arden • M. E. Braddon

... vast reputation has flown, Through the torrid, the frigid, and temperate zone; The wretch, just expiring, springs healthy and strong From his bed at one touch ...
— English Caricaturists and Graphic Humourists of the Nineteenth Century. - How they Illustrated and Interpreted their Times. • Graham Everitt

... everything. He had entirely surrendered, had opened his soul, as transparent as crystal. And this notwithstanding that he had vowed in past days that he would keep his secret locked within him. He had smothered his love under his frigid Castilian demeanor. And now, suddenly, like a child, on the first chance meeting with that woman, he had allowed himself to be drawn into a confession that he had ...
— His Excellency the Minister • Jules Claretie

... point—when it begins to expand. This only exception to the general law of fluids is of greater importance in the economy of nature than most persons are conscious of. As the cold season advances in the temperate and frigid zones, the water in our lakes and rivers is reduced to the temperature of forty degrees; but at this point, by a beneficent provision of an All-wise Providence, the upper substratum becomes specifically ...
— Popular Education - For the use of Parents and Teachers, and for Young Persons of Both Sexes • Ira Mayhew

... She was frigid and self-possessed. He had half expected some expression of apology for the wrong she had done him, but she entirely ignored that. But that Fairfield had himself well in hand he would have openly resented the snub inflicted on him. It ...
— The Grell Mystery • Frank Froest

... Diana's chaff. He knew quite well she was right. He was a man, or a bear if she preferred it, with two faces; but the trouble was that she should so thoroughly have grasped the fact. He had only intended to show one face, the uninviting, frigid one; and yet unconsciously she had won from him more than ...
— The Rhodesian • Gertrude Page

... think of leaving you in this dismal spot to wait for a dubious carryall," offered Mr. Stevens, but with frigid politeness. "You are quite welcome to ride with ...
— The Early Bird - A Business Man's Love Story • George Randolph Chester

... ardent bachelors who are going homeward along the same road as a pretty young woman always do take of that circumstance, came forward to assure Fancy—with a total disregard of Dick's emotions, and in tones which were certainly not frigid—that he (Shiner) was not the man to go to bed before seeing his Lady Fair safe within her own door—not he, nobody should say he was that;—and that he would not leave her side an inch till the thing was ...
— Under the Greenwood Tree • Thomas Hardy

... impatiently, "Max, the politico-economic system we have today is an outgrowth of what went earlier. The welfare state, the freezing of the status quo, the Frigid Fracas between the West-world and the Sov-world, industrial automation until useful employment is all but needless—all these things were to be found in embryo more than ...
— Mercenary • Dallas McCord Reynolds

... a frigid silence during which the three ladies, sinking for a time their differences, eyed him with every sign of strong disapprobation, Mrs. Banks giving vent to a sniff which disparaged the whole race ...
— A Master Of Craft • W. W. Jacobs

... the music of the groves, the music of the heart, Would barter for the city's din, the frigid tones of art? The virtues flourish fresh and fair, where rural waters glide. They shrink and wither, droop and die, where rolls that ...
— The Modern Scottish Minstrel, Volume II. - The Songs of Scotland of the past half century • Various

... of Jesuits came to the colony. They received a rather frigid welcome from the colonists, but the Recollets, convinced that they were making very slow advance in so large a field, opened their convent to them, and assisted them in getting headquarters of their own. And the church in Quebec began to take ...
— A Little Girl in Old Quebec • Amanda Millie Douglas

... and its indifference to regular forms were at an end. Mrs. Rothesay could no longer indulge her laziness—no breakfasting in bed, and coming down in curl-papers. The long gossiping visits of her thousand-and-one acquaintances subsided into frigid morning calls, at which the grim phantom of the husband frowned from a corner and suppressed all idle chatter. Sybilla's favourite system of killing time by half-hours in various idle ways, at home and abroad, ...
— Olive - A Novel • Dinah Maria Craik, (AKA Dinah Maria Mulock)

... but to the entire body of circuiteers—barristers as well as officers of court.[34] Wishing to keep his official expenditure down to the lowest possible sum, a certain sheriff for Cumberland—called in 'A Northern Circuit,' Sir Frigid Gripus Knapper—directed his under-sheriff not to give white gloves on the occasion of a maiden assize at Carlisle, and also through the mouth of his subordinate, declined to pay the officers of the circuit certain customary fees. To put the innovator ...
— A Book About Lawyers • John Cordy Jeaffreson

... with its flourish of trumpets and its general hurrah-boys. But he is unmoved by the apostrophe to the "Evening Star" from the same opera. For this, in passing through the piano-player, is almost reduced to a frigid astronomical basis. The singer is no longer Scotti or Bispham, but Herschel or Laplace. The operator may pump and switch until he breaks his heart—but if he has any real musical instinct, he will surely grow to feel a sense of lack in this ...
— The Joyful Heart • Robert Haven Schauffler

... chairs, with their worn embroidered backs and seats; a tall thin bookcase; a haircloth sofa with a griffin at either end mounting savage guard over an erect pillow; a thick hearth-rug; and two easy-chairs with cushioned arms and two little old ladies, the one quaint and frigid—she had once loved and had had a successful rival; the other quaint and sweet—she had loved too, and had lost her lover in the depths of ...
— Lippincott's Magazine, Vol. 22, August, 1878 • Various

... setting. She acknowledged my introduction to her with the slightest possible inclination of her head, and thereafter ignored my existence for the rest of the evening. And her brother's greeting of me was equally frigid. ...
— The First Mate - The Story of a Strange Cruise • Harry Collingwood

... Marius thought he was discerning and of a sensitive honor. He thought it evident that Jean Valjean had slain Javert, and had slain Monsieur Madeleine, whose fortune he has offered as Cossette's marriage portion. Poor Jean Valjean! You a murderer, a marauder—you! Marius acts with frigid honor. Valjean will not live with Marius and Cossette, being too sensitive therefor, perceiving himself distrusted by Marius, but comes to warm his hands and heart at the hearth of Cossette's presence; and he is stung when he sees no fire ...
— A Hero and Some Other Folks • William A. Quayle

... shoved his hands deeper into his pockets and spat out the cold stump of his cigarette. It was Barbee's natural way to swing along with his hat far back, so that he might see the stars. Now his hat brim was dragged low, and for Barbee the stars were only less remote and frigid than a certain ...
— The Desert Valley • Jackson Gregory

... would ache for him. Sometimes he would be young almost as he used to be. She knew that he was only young for her. He was young because he loved her. She had never seen him so with Mary. Sometimes he would be formal and frigid. He talked to her as a man talks to a woman he is determined to keep at a distance. She hated Steven then, as passion hates. He had come before now in a downright bad temper and was the old, irritable Steven ...
— The Three Sisters • May Sinclair

... already given," Lady Kingsland said, with frigid hauteur. "My jointure house is to be fitted up. Before you return from your honey-moon I will have quitted Kingsland Court with my daughter. Permit Mildred and me to retain our present apartments unaltered until that time; then the future Lady Kingsland can have the old ...
— The Baronet's Bride • May Agnes Fleming

... Hermas was conscious of a certain irritation, a resentful anger against the calm, frigid scrutiny of the eyes that followed him everywhere, like a pair of spies, peering out over the smiling mouth and the ...
— The Blue Flower, and Others • Henry van Dyke

... with Flagg, however, Croswell encountered angry criticism from the Radicals and frigid approval from some Conservatives. His candidacy plainly impaired the high respect which his conduct and abilities had brought him. It was a mistake from every point of view; but, once committed to such a course his Conservative friends persevered, giving him finally sixty-six ...
— A Political History of the State of New York, Volumes 1-3 • DeAlva Stanwood Alexander

... engraver. Gracious and dignified in sensuousness he always remained even when, as at this middle stage of his career, the vivifying shafts of poetry no longer pierced through, and transmuted with their vibration of true passion, the fair realities of life. He could never have been guilty of the frigid and calculated indecency of a Giulio Romano; he could not have cast aside all conventional restraints, of taste as well as of propriety, as Rubens and even Rembrandt did on occasion; but as Van Dyck, the child of Titian almost as much as he was ...
— The Later works of Titian • Claude Phillips

... you think, Duplessis? Will any insult to France put a drop of warm blood into the frigid veins ...
— The Parisians, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton

... out for himself, he must excuse her, if she forbade her child from sharing it. Under present circumstances, his alliance could but be declined by the Beauchamp family, she said, with her stateliest air. And the next minute, as Everett held her hand, and said good-bye, she melted again from that frigid dignity, and, looking into the frank, manly, yet gentle face of the ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 5, No. 28, February, 1860 • Various

... out through the Narrows and so on out to sea passed the Tarsus, carrying the moving picture players. The day was cold, and a storm threatened, but soon the frigid winter of the North would be left behind. This was a comforting thought to all, though Alice declared that she ...
— The Moving Picture Girls Under the Palms - Or Lost in the Wilds of Florida • Laura Lee Hope

... he instinctively lifted his hand to remove his hat, but did not do so, and, saying "Goodnight," again in a frigid voice, departed with visible stiffness from that house, ...
— Penrod • Booth Tarkington

... is the parergon of each noble fire Of neighbour worlds to be the nightly starre, But their main work is vitall heat t' inspire Into the frigid spheres that 'bout them fare, Which of themselves quite dead and barren are. But by the wakening warmth of kindly dayes, And the sweet dewie nights they well declare Their seminall virtue in due courses raise Long hidden shapes and life, to their ...
— Democritus Platonissans • Henry More



Words linked to "Frigid" :   frigidity, Frigid Zone, frigidness, North Frigid Zone, cold, unloving, arctic, frosty, glacial, icy, wintry



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