"Indelicacy" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... tainted with vagueness as this inquiry could only be. My presumptuous dream of taking him into my own service had died away: my service wasn't worth his being taken into. My offer could only be to help him to find another place, and yet there was an indelicacy, as it were, in taking for granted that his thoughts would immediately be fixed on another. I had a hope that he would be able to give his life a different form—though certainly not the form, the frequent result of such bereavements, of his setting up a little shop. That would have been dreadful; ...
— Some Short Stories • Henry James
... illumined stare. "Do you suppose I'd ever touch a cent of your father's money?"—a speech not rankly hypocritical, inasmuch as the young man, who made his own discriminations, had never been guilty, and proposed to himself never to be, of the indelicacy of tugging at his potential father-in-law's purse-strings with his own hand. He had talked to Mr. Dosson by the hour about his master-plan of making the touchy folks themselves fall into line, but had never dreamed this man would subsidise him as an interesting ...
— The Reverberator • Henry James
... difference between any two men in the world, than there often is between the same man, a lover, and a husband?—And now, my generous advisers, be pleased to continue silent. You cannot answer me fairly. And besides, wot ye not the indelicacy of an early present, which you are not ...
— The History of Sir Charles Grandison, Volume 4 (of 7) • Samuel Richardson
... went out he watched Sally with close and what he imagined was unobtrusive attention while she ate, and though he was aware of the indelicacy of his scrutiny, he was relieved to find that she did nothing that was actually repugnant to him. There was a certain daintiness about the girl, and her frank appreciation of the good things set before her only amused him. She was ...
— Masters of the Wheat-Lands • Harold Bindloss
... frailty, refinement, fastidiousness, discrimination, sensitiveness; dainty, tidbit, junket. Antonyms: indelicacy, coarseness, indiscrimination. ...
— Putnam's Word Book • Louis A. Flemming
... sweetheart. But I don't see why I shouldn't help you. Still, if you don't see it so...." He sighed, and brought his hands together and bowed over them. His eyes passed deliberately over her matronly body, as if he knew his thoughts about her were so delicate that no suspicion of indelicacy could arise out of his contact with her. "Poor little Miss Marion," he murmured in an undertone, and wheeled about and padded to the door. He turned there and stood, his body neckless and sloping like a seal's, ...
— The Judge • Rebecca West
... made acquainted with this interesting intelligence was the Honourable Miss Delmar, and her nephew took upon himself to make the communication. At first the honourable spinster bridled up with indignation, wondered at the girl's indelicacy, and much more at her demeaning herself by marrying a private marine. Captain Delmar replied, that it was true that Ben was only a private, but that every common soldier was a gentleman by profession. It was true that Bella Mason might have done better—but she was his aunt's servant, and Keene ...
— Percival Keene • Frederick Marryat
... profession of the press, a change of politics is an infringement of the point of honor, and a man must FIGHT as well as apostatize. A very curious table might be made, signalizing the difference of the moral standard between us and the French. Why is the grossness and indelicacy, publicly permitted in England, unknown in France, where private morality is certainly at a lower ebb? Why is the point of private honor now more rigidly maintained among the French? Why is it, as it should be, a moral disgrace for a Frenchman to go into debt, and no disgrace for ...
— The Paris Sketch Book Of Mr. M. A. Titmarsh • William Makepeace Thackeray
... you, but I have not time. Brussels is a beautiful city. The Belgians hate the English. Their external morality is more rigid than ours. To lace the stays without a handkerchief on the neck is considered a disgusting piece of indelicacy. ...
— Selected English Letters (XV - XIX Centuries) • Various
... Chief Custodian's attention is again devoted wholly to the Person of Importance. Feeling that to persist in overhearing their conversation would be an indelicacy, the Heroic Explorer politely leaves the room, and establishes himself on a chair in a gloomy passage outside, where he wiles away the time by rehearsing in his imagination how he will tell off the ...
— The Worst Journey in the World, Volumes 1 and 2 - Antarctic 1910-1913 • Apsley Cherry-Garrard
... this theory he is as thoroughly in the wrong. By refined taste he signifies an avoidance of immodesty of style. Beaumont and Fletcher, Rochester, Dean Swift, wrote under monarchies—their pruriencies are not excelled by any republican authors of ancient times. What ancient authors equal in indelicacy the French romances from the time of the Regent of Orleans to Louis XVI.? By all accounts, the despotism of China is the very sink of indecencies, whether in pictures or books. Still more, what can we think of a writer who says, that "the ancients have not left ...
— Athens: Its Rise and Fall, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... be thereafter broken without violating what should be sacred in our nature. How finely is the true Shakespearian scene contrasted with Dryden's vulgar alteration of it, in which a mere ludicrous psychological experiment, as it were, is tried—displaying nothing but indelicacy without passion. ...
— Shakespeare, Ben Jonson, Beaumont and Fletcher • S. T. Coleridge
... immediate neighbourhood of it? Might she not, very probably, fall in with them? And would not that be exceedingly disagreeable? Would she not have all the appearance of having followed them purposely from motives of jealousy? Would not her presence be unwelcome? Would there not be something of indelicacy even in thus following one who evidently preferred being ...
— A Siren • Thomas Adolphus Trollope
... Rochester, 'a man whom the Muses were fond to inspire, but ashamed to avow,' showed his 'beautiful face,' as it was called; and chimed in with that wit for which the age was famous. The frequenters at Wallingford House gloried in their indelicacy. 'One is amazed,' Horace Walpole observes, 'at hearing the age of Charles II. called polite. The Puritans have affected to call everything by a Scripture' name; the new comers affected to call everything by its ...
— The Wits and Beaux of Society - Volume 1 • Grace Wharton and Philip Wharton
... dropping the robe and seizing the card: "Mrs. Arthur J. Gibby! Well, upon my word, this is impudence. It's not only impudence, it's indelicacy. And I had always thought she was the very embodiment of refinement, and I've gone about saying so. Now I shall have to take it back. The idea of a lady sending a bath-robe to a gentleman! What next, I wonder! What right ...
— The Daughter of the Storage - And Other Things in Prose and Verse • William Dean Howells
... pretence, that he was sheltered by the superior grossness of Ariosto and La Fontaine, of Prior and of Fielding, is nihil ad rem, if it is not insincere. When Murray (May 3, 1819) charges him with "approximations to indelicacy," he laughs himself away at the euphemism, but when Hobhouse and "the Zoili of Albemarle Street" talked to him "about morality," he flames out, "I maintain that it is the most moral of poems." He looked upon his great work as a whole, and he knew that the "raison d'etre of his song" ...
— The Works of Lord Byron, Volume 6 • Lord Byron
... every where, but I have a great aversion to monks, those drones in the political hive, whose whole study seems to be to make themselves as useless to the world as possible. Think too of the shocking indelicacy of many of them, who make it a point of religion to abjure linen, and wear their habits till they drop off. How astonishing that any mind should suppose the Deity an enemy to cleanliness! the Jewish religion was hardly any ...
— The History of Emily Montague • Frances Brooke
... more; He did not, in the first place, like to humble himself so far as to ask her counsel; then he had not courage to confess those debts and embarrassments which he had hitherto concealed. All that his mother had suggested about the indelicacy of requiring or accepting great sacrifices from a woman whom, though he esteemed, he could not love—the horror of retirement with such a companion—the long years tete-a-tete—all these ideas combined, ...
— Tales and Novels, Vol. V - Tales of a Fashionable Life • Maria Edgeworth
... impurity; uncleanness &c. (filth) 653; immodesty; grossness &c. adj.; indelicacy, indecency; impudicity[obs3]; obscenity, ribaldry, Fescennine, smut, bawdry[obs3], double entente, equivoque[Fr]. concupiscence, lust, carnality, flesh, salacity; pruriency, lechery, lasciviency[obs3], lubricity; Sadism, sapphism[obs3]. incontinence, ...
— Roget's Thesaurus
... beside myself. I accused her of indelicacy. She made the same accusation against me, and the dispute broke out. In her words, in the expression of her face, of her eyes, I noticed again the hatred that had so astonished me before. With a brother, friends, my father, I had occasionally quarrelled, but never had there been between us this ...
— The Kreutzer Sonata and Other Stories • Leo Tolstoy
... the Original,—held forth at his Master's Commands those Hands to be whipt, which Hector was hereafter to feel. The Indelicacy of which Image we have avoided applying to ...
— The Lovers Assistant, or, New Art of Love • Henry Fielding
... expect the storm to last more than a day or so. They seldom did, at this time of the year. He had drawn the gloomy picture merely in an attempt to force Miss Wharton to realize the indelicacy of her position. He had thought she would have exhibited perturbation. Instead, she was ...
— The Trail Horde • Charles Alden Seltzer
... every species of wit written in distant times and in dead languages, appears with many disadvantages to present readers, from their ignorance of the manners and customs alluded to and exposed; but the grosness, the rudeness, and indelicacy of the ancients, will, notwithstanding, sufficiently appear, even from the sentiments of such critics as Cicero and Quintilian, who mention corporal defects and deformities as proper ...
— Essays on Wit No. 2 • Richard Flecknoe and Joseph Warton
... man was deeply moved by this frank, artless confession. He knew there was not a grain of indelicacy or boldness in it; it was simply a truthful expression of a pure and noble nature, the spontaneous outburst of a holy affection responding to the sacred love of his own heart, and the avowal aroused ...
— His Heart's Queen • Mrs. Georgie Sheldon
... it, and indeed she scarcely understood it. He explained that it was prompted by the intense interest he felt in Miss Verena; but that scarcely made it more comprehensible, such a sentiment (on his part) being such a curious mixture. He had a sort of enamel of good humour which showed that his indelicacy was his profession; and he asked for revelations of the vie intime of his victims with the bland confidence of a fashionable physician inquiring about symptoms. He wanted to know what Miss Chancellor meant to do, because if she didn't mean to do anything, ...
— The Bostonians, Vol. I (of II) • Henry James
... Persian domestic life, and would unhesitatingly have granted me a peep in person had such a thing been possible. Imagine the ordinary costume of an opera-bouffe artist, shorn of all regard for the difference between real indecency and the suggestiveness of indelicacy permissible behind the footlights, and we have the every-day costume of the Persian harem. In the dreamy eventide the lord of the harem usually betakes himself to that characteristic institution of the East and proceeds to drive dull care away by smoking ...
— Around the World on a Bicycle V1 • Thomas Stevens
... "I never saw anything like the indelicacy of that young man," said she. "You're running up a pretty long bill, ...
— Superseded • May Sinclair
... strangely distorted under the flickering gas-flares—old Pallet the ironmonger repent. He went to the form of repentance, a bench reserved for such exhibitions, and slobbered out his sorrow and disgust for some sexual indelicacy—he was a widower—and I can see now how his loose fat body quivered and swayed with his grief. He poured it out to five hundred people, from whom in common times he hid his every thought and purpose. And it is a fact, it shows ...
— In the Days of the Comet • H. G. Wells
... the chiefly stature and of celebrated beauty; Bingham admits she was "beautiful for a Polynesian"; and her husband cherished her exceedingly. He had the indelicacy to frame and publish an especial law declaring death against the man who should approach her, and yet no penalty against herself. And in 1809, after thirty-four years of marriage, and when she must have been nearing fifty, an island Chastelard, of the name of Kanihonui, was found to be her lover, ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 18 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... the old, weatherbeaten farmhouse on the hill above town—and in his official capacity they felt, too, that he might venture a few tentative inquiries at least, which, coming from any one else, might have savored of indelicacy. ...
— Once to Every Man • Larry Evans
... place for you, child, and if you can bear with an old woman's company for a while I think I can find you something to do." That evening Helen left for England with the duchess, a piece of "ingratitude, indelicacy, and shameless snobbery," which Miss de Laine was never weary of dilating upon. "And to think I introduced her, though ...
— Tales of Trail and Town • Bret Harte
... Van Vluyck, on the verge of disapproval; and Mrs. Plinth protested: "I understood there was to be no indelicacy!" ...
— Xingu - 1916 • Edith Wharton
... covered and excused a certain indelicacy and callousness in the statement of the Leading Gentleman, albeit the fair young man appeared annoyed at it. His British blood and instincts became predominant when the killing and eating of a fellow-creature were on the tapis—the ...
— Driftwood Spars - The Stories of a Man, a Boy, a Woman, and Certain Other People Who - Strangely Met Upon the Sea of Life • Percival Christopher Wren
... human system to rebel as it is apt to in our dry, high-strung America. His pupil's appetite would come back. Hearty meals of robust cheese and sausages would be craved with an honest, clamorous hunger that meant foolish indelicacy here ...
— Villa Elsa - A Story of German Family Life • Stuart Henry
... "You'll have to pardon my seeming indelicacy, but—" He coughed behind his hand. "That might bring about a very unhappy relationship between my family and yours. Had ...
— Rope • Holworthy Hall
... what makes you think I'd be guilty of the indelicacy of letting two outfits pay me for ...
— The Monk of Hambleton • Armstrong Livingston
... required to answer the questions that would be asked of him. Now, there would have been nothing simpler than for the Rabbis to admit honestly that these offensive passages existed, that they had been written perhaps in moments of passion in a less enlightened age, that they recognized the indelicacy of insulting the religion of the country in which they lived, and that therefore such passages should henceforth be deleted. But instead of adopting this straightforward course, which might have put an end for ever to attacks on the book they held ...
— Secret Societies And Subversive Movements • Nesta H. Webster
... self-confidence, he had almost forgotten her position, and his own indirect relation to it. Then had come that unlucky note from Mellor; his grandfather's prompt reply to it; his own ineffective protest; and now this tongue-tiedness—this clumsy intrusion—which she must feel to be an indelicacy—an outrage. ...
— Marcella • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... 'Who can say why the votaries of science, though eminently kind in their social relations, are so angular of character? In my analysis of the scientific nature, I am constrained to associate with it (as compared with that of men who are more Christians than scientists) A CERTAIN HARDNESS, OR RATHER INDELICACY OF FEELING. They strike me as being ... coolly indifferent to ...
— An Ethical Problem - Or, Sidelights upon Scientific Experimentation on Man and Animals • Albert Leffingwell
... apartments, in the disguise of male attire. I was accustomed to perform in that dress, and the prince had seen me, I believe, in the character of the Irish Widow. To this plan I decidedly objected. The indelicacy of such a step, as well as the danger of detection, made me shrink from the proposal. My refusal threw his Royal Highness into the most distressing agitation, as was expressed by the letter which I received on ...
— Beaux and Belles of England • Mary Robinson
... it is to judge accurately of the feelings of others. Mr Harding, as he came to close the letter, in his heart condemned his daughter for indelicacy, and it made him miserable to do so. She was not responsible for what Mr Slope might write. True. But then she expressed no disgust at it. She had rather expressed approval of the letter as a whole. She had given it to him to ...
— Barchester Towers • Anthony Trollope
... a nasty shock, but hardly for so nasty a one as this. There was an indelicacy about it which went far beyond the bounds of thoughtless conventionality. That such an appeal should be made to her, and in such a way, savoured of danger. Her woman's intuition gave her the guard, and at once she spoke, smilingly ...
— The Man • Bram Stoker
... came, and Miss Melvyn received Mr Morgan's hand and name with all the fortitude she could assume; but her distress was visible to all, even to Mr Morgan, who was so little touched with it that it proved no abatement to his joy; a symptom of such indelicacy of mind as increased ...
— A Description of Millenium Hall • Sarah Scott
... low that we really blush to name it;" while the "Sunday Times" and a number of provincial papers of some slight account in their day professed astonishment at the absence of grossness, partisanship, profanity, indelicacy, and malice from its pages. "It is the first comic we ever saw," said the "Somerset County Gazette," "which was not vulgar. It will provoke many a hearty laugh, but never call a blush to the most delicate cheek." They vied with each other in their vocabulary ...
— The History of "Punch" • M. H. Spielmann
... could I have forgotten? He was so nice, so charming to me," she went on, modestly and with feeling. But when I thought to myself what must actually have been the rude greeting (which, she made out, had been so charming), I, who knew my father's coldness and reserve, was shocked, as though at some indelicacy on his part, at the contrast between the excessive recognition bestowed on it and his never adequate geniality. It has since struck me as one of the most touching aspects of the part played in life by these idle, painstaking women that they devote all their generosity, ...
— Swann's Way - (vol. 1 of Remembrance of Things Past) • Marcel Proust
... purpose of report and consultation. It was for Maisie's education in short that, as she often repeated, she closed her door—closed it to the gentlemen who used to flock there in such numbers and whom her husband's practical desertion of her would have made it a course of the highest indelicacy to receive. Maisie was familiar from of old with the principle at least of the care that a woman, as Mrs. Beale phrased it, attractive and exposed must take of her "character," and was duly impressed with the rigour of her stepmother's ...
— What Maisie Knew • Henry James
... to have said it, he felt now that he had spoken; a sense of the indelicacy, the shamefulness, seemed to alienate him from all high concern in the matter, and to leave him a mere self- convicted eavesdropper. His face flamed; the wavering hopes, the wavering doubts alike died in his heart. He had fallen below the ...
— A Foregone Conclusion • W. D. Howells
... smoking room and the drawing room are shadowy things, and she knew very well that he was held in a somewhat curious respect by men, as a person to whom it was impossible to tell a story in which there was any shadow of indelicacy. The ways of the so-called man of world seemed in his presence as though they must be the ways of some creature of a different and a lower stage of existence. A young man whom he had once corrected ...
— The Illustrious Prince • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... if his private behaviour as a man had been as unobjectionable as his conduct as a sovereign. Hitherto he had remained under the same roof with Queen Catherine, but with that indelicacy which was the singular blemish on his character, he had maintained her rival in the same household with the state of a princess,[333] and needlessly wounded feelings which he was bound to have spared to the utmost which his duty permitted. The circumstances of the case, if ...
— The Reign of Henry the Eighth, Volume 1 (of 3) • James Anthony Froude
... She hadn't encouraged me, when I spoke to her as we were leaving Boston, to go on with the history of my acquaintance with this gentleman; and yet now, unexpectedly, she appeared to imply—it was doubtless one of the disparities mentioned by Mrs. Nettlepoint—that he might be glanced at without indelicacy. ...
— The Patagonia • Henry James
... was consoling himself for his long purgatory in England, by miscellaneous licentiousness. Philip was gross alike in all his appetites; bacon fat was the favourite food with which he gorged himself to illness;[495] his intrigues were on the same level of indelicacy, and his unhappy wife was forced to know that he preferred the society of abandoned women of the ...
— The Reign of Mary Tudor • James Anthony Froude
... only be tolerated when we at last admit that the sole and sufficient reason why people should be granted a divorce is that they want one. Then there will be no more reports of divorce cases, no more letters read in court with an indelicacy that makes every sensitive person shudder and recoil as from a profanation, no more washing of household linen, dirty or clean, in public. We must learn in these matters to mind our own business and not impose our individual notions of propriety ...
— Getting Married • George Bernard Shaw
... you have Philosophy enough to be capable of bearing the Mention of your Faults. Your Papers which regard the fallen Part of the Fair Sex, are, I think, written with an Indelicacy, which makes them unworthy to be inserted in the Writings of a Moralist who knows the World. I cannot allow that you are at Liberty to observe upon the Actions of Mankind with the Freedom which you seem to resolve ...
— The Spectator, Volume 2. • Addison and Steele
... some remark by some commentator to some such effect as this: that it would be somewhat difficult to excuse the unwomanly violence of this demand. Doubtless it would. And doubtless it would be somewhat more than difficult to extenuate the unmaidenly indelicacy of Jeanne Darc. ...
— A Study of Shakespeare • Algernon Charles Swinburne
... manifests the usual superfluous anxiety of her kind not to be called strong-minded. She is prettily indignant at the thought of female physicians: there is nothing improper in having diseases, but to cure them would be indelicacy indeed. Girls out of work, who wish for places in shops, are only "patriotic young ladies who desire to fill all the lucrative situations at present occupied by young men." She would even banish Bridget from ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 14, No. 83, September, 1864 • Various
... of which, sent to the duke of Buckingham, have particular merit, both for the archness of the turns, and the acuteness of the observations. He gives his lordship a humorous description of some of the Germans, their excessive drunkenness; their plodding stupidity and ostensive indelicacy; he complains that he has no companion in that part of the world, no Sir Charles Sedleys, nor Buckinghams, and what is still worse, even deprived of the happiness of a mistress, for, the women there, he says, ...
— The Lives of the Poets of Great Britain and Ireland (1753) - Vol. III • Theophilus Cibber
... down in a spacious mansion. All the family of both sexes, with all the strangers who arrive, often lodge in the same room. In that case the under garments are never taken off, and no consciousness of impropriety or indelicacy of feeling is manifested. A few pins stuck in the wall of the cabin display the dresses of the women and the hunting shirts of the men. Two small forks or bucks-horns fastened to a joist are indispensable articles for the support of the rifle. A loose floor ...
— A New Guide for Emigrants to the West • J. M. Peck
... that in their compositions, however satirical or familiar they may be, their verses are entirely free from the licentiousness which disfigures similar productions in India; and that if deficient in imagination and grace, they are equally exempt from grossness and indelicacy. ...
— Ceylon; an Account of the Island Physical, Historical, and • James Emerson Tennent
... also give the truth as to the alleged abuse of confidence, of which, according to others, I was guilty in respect to the Emperor. A simple statement of the mistake which gave rise to this falsehood, I trust, will clear me of every suspicion of indelicacy; but if it is necessary to add other proofs, I could obtain them from those who lived nearest to the Emperor, and who were in a condition to both know and understand what passed between us; and lastly, I invoke fifty ...
— The Private Life of Napoleon Bonaparte, Complete • Constant
... an indelicacy in you to observe such things. You should be ignorant of them, and I can't think who is so... so unfeeling as to inform you. But since you are informed, at least you should be modestly blind to things that take place outside ...
— Scaramouche - A Romance of the French Revolution • Rafael Sabatini
... the holy state with either reluctance or lukewarm indifference? when every body, with half a head, knows that matrimony is the "hoc erat in votis," the grand object of all your wishes. Strange! that the laws of female modesty should decree it absolute indelicacy for a girl candidly to show her preference for a particular individual before the rest of his sex. Strange! that modern mothers should uniformly caution their daughters against marrying for love, as the most dangerous rock in their ...
— An Old Sailor's Yarns • Nathaniel Ames
... bench, making it creak, an uneasy feeling coming over him. Close as Isom was, and hard-handed and mean, Joe felt that there was a certain indelicacy in his wife's discussion of his traits with ...
— The Bondboy • George W. (George Washington) Ogden
... and at which no consideration shall ever induce him to look. But Mr. Watson reflects upon people who have been human enough to read them when he compares such a proceeding on his own part (were he able to be guilty of it) to the indelicacy of 'listening at a keyhole or spying over a wall.' This is not a just illustration. The man who takes upon himself the responsibility of being the first to open such intimate letters, and adds thereto the infinitely greater responsibility of publishing them in so attractive a form that he who runs ...
— The Bibliotaph - and Other People • Leon H. Vincent
... classical attainments, and quite above such ridiculous sensitiveness. In language it is the same thing. There are certain words which are never used in America, but an absurd substitute is employed. I cannot particularise them after this preface, lest I should be accused of indelicacy myself. I may, however, state one little circumstance which will fully prove the correctness of ...
— Diary in America, Series One • Frederick Marryat (AKA Captain Marryat)
... charlatans, who for want of perseverance, having failed in private careers, in situations where one is watched too closely and too nicely weighed in the balance, have selected roles in which the want of scrupulousness and discretion is a force instead of a weakness; to their indelicacy and impudence the doors of a public career stand wide open.—Such is the august personage into whose hands, according to the theory, I am called upon to surrender my will, my will in full; certainly, ...
— The Origins of Contemporary France, Volume 4 (of 6) - The French Revolution, Volume 3 (of 3) • Hippolyte A. Taine
... the Sunday Chronicle.—"On the whole I congratulate Mrs Braby on her book . . . it is the only book on the subject of Modern Marriage that has not made me feel rather ill . . . frank, without the slightest indelicacy, and bold without the least impertinence . . . a real contribution towards the solution of an intolerably ...
— Modern marriage and how to bear it • Maud Churton Braby
... an object to rival the tenuity of the finest India muslin, machinery could easily accomplish it. But that spider-web fabric is carried so nearly to transparency, that the Emperor Aurengzebe is said to have reproved his daughter for the indelicacy of her costume while she wore seven thicknesses of it. She might have worn twelve hundred yards without burdening herself with more than a pound weight; what she did wear did not, probably, weigh two ounces. The Chinese and Japanese have ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. II, No. 8, June 1858 • Various
... the word. The utterance harks back to the golden age; the gesture is trumped up by the passion of the hour, or dictated by the master of the hula, to whom the real meaning of the old bards is ofttimes a sealed casket. Whatever indelicacy attaches in modern times to some of the gestures and contortions of the hula dancers, the old-time hula songs in large measure were untainted with grossness. If there ever were a Polynesian Arcadia, and if it were possible ...
— Unwritten Literature of Hawaii - The Sacred Songs of the Hula • Nathaniel Bright Emerson
... circumstances, was so utterly inconceivable, that I stood bewildered with my hand in his. It is a piece of rudeness to stare at anybody, and it is an act of indelicacy to stare at a gentleman. I committed both those improprieties. And I said, as if in a dream, "What does ...
— The Moonstone • Wilkie Collins
... repulsive, but the bedroom fairly shocked with the very indelicacy of untidiness. Jerome felt an actual modesty about entering this room, in which so many disclosures of the closest secrets of the flesh were made. The very dust and discolorations of the poor furnishings, the confined ...
— Jerome, A Poor Man - A Novel • Mary E. Wilkins Freeman
... solemnity which inaugurated him as such. Of this inconsistency and impropriety Talleyrand was well aware; but audacity on one side, and endurance and submission on the other, had so often disregarded these considerations before, that he saw no indelicacy or impertinence in the proposal. His master had, however, the gratification to see at his levee, and in his wife's drawing-room, the Ambassadors of Spain, Naples, Portugal, and Bavaria, who laid at the Imperial and royal feet the Order decorations of their own Princes, ...
— Marguerite de Navarre - Memoirs of Marguerite de Valois Queen of Navarre • Marguerite de Navarre
... about that just now," I demanded, gripping my preacher by the hand and forcing him with me out of the way of the passers-by, whose glance upon us would have seemed an indelicacy when we were discussing so precious a thing as my ...
— John Splendid - The Tale of a Poor Gentleman, and the Little Wars of Lorn • Neil Munro
... managers, who regard the existence of the Censor as valuable to them, because it frees them from responsibility and enables them to gratify the taste of the prurient prude, the person who revels in and blushes at the indelicacy of his ...
— Our Stage and Its Critics • "E.F.S." of "The Westminster Gazette"
... possessed the advantage of fitting any variety of size or figure, completed the attire. The buttons that should have confined the dress in front were generally absent, and the ladies were not bashful at their loss, but exposed their bosoms without any consciousness of indelicacy. There was no peculiarity in the arrangement of the hair, but each head was tied up in a cloth, either white or some gaudy colour, which, once gay, had been sobered in its hues by dirt. In spite of this neglected exterior, the women had remarkably ...
— Cyprus, as I Saw it in 1879 • Sir Samuel W. Baker
... You have been guilty of indelicacy—of unwomanliness. Do you consider that costume a proper ...
— The Man of Destiny • George Bernard Shaw
... to be quite certain that she was going to the Poppits, and Miss Mapp forgave and forgot about the worsted until she had found out. She could never quite manage the indelicacy of saying "Godiva," whatever Mrs. Plaistow's figure and age might happen to be, but always addressed her as "Diva," very affectionately, whenever they were on ...
— Miss Mapp • Edward Frederic Benson
... the padres have made a Spanish swell out of him without spoiling the Brant grit, either! Come, now; you're not afraid that Susy's style will suffer from HIS companionship. 'Pon my soul, she might borrow a little of his courtesy to his elders without indelicacy. I only wish she had as sincere a way of showing her respect for you as he has. Did you notice that he really didn't seem to see anybody else but you at first? And yet you never were a friend to ...
— Susy, A Story of the Plains • Bret Harte
... Velasquez. That he, like Sargent, has been benefited and inspired by the sublime art of the Spaniard there is no doubt, but there is nothing in the charge that he is an imitator of Velasquez, save the indelicacy of the suggestion. ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great, Volume 6 - Subtitle: Little Journeys to the Homes of Eminent Artists • Elbert Hubbard
... confidence they all have in his truth, straightforwardness, and sincerity. He delights in the society of men of the world and in a life of gaiety and pleasure. He is very easily amused, and particularly with jokes full of coarseness and indelicacy; the men with whom he lives most are tres-polissons, and la polissonnerie is the ton of his society. But his aides-de-camp and friends, while they do not scruple to say everything before and to him, always treat him with attention and respect. The Duke and the Duchess live upon the best ...
— The Greville Memoirs - A Journal of the Reigns of King George IV and King William - IV, Volume 1 (of 3) • Charles C. F. Greville
... snaky, black eye, that at times shone like a dark-lantern in a jeweller-shop at midnight, betokened the accomplished scoundrel within. But in his conversation there was no trace of evil; nothing equivocal; he studiously shunned an indelicacy, never swore, and chiefly abounded in passing puns and witticisms, varied with humorous contrasts between ship and shore life, and many agreeable and racy anecdotes, very tastefully narrated. In short—in a merely psychological point of view, at least—he was a charming blackleg. Ashore, ...
— White Jacket - or, the World on a Man-of-War • Herman Melville
... story, and Louisa was rather troubled. So I thought the shortest way was to go straight to Countess Olenska and explain—by the merest hint, you know—how we feel in New York about certain things. I felt I might, without indelicacy, because the evening she dined with us she rather suggested ... rather let me see that she would be grateful for guidance. And ...
— The Age of Innocence • Edith Wharton
... to a successful issue that difficult case in the family of the Sultan of Mingrelia (you will observe that I use a fictitious name). I can assure you, Lord Embleton, that polygamy presents problems almost insoluble; problems of extreme delicacy—or indelicacy.' ...
— The Disentanglers • Andrew Lang
... Tatyana down from their pedestals, but Pushkin remains unhurt. Pisarev is the grandfather and father of all the critics of to-day, including Burenin—the same pettiness in disparagement, the same cold and conceited wit, and the same coarseness and indelicacy in their attitude to people. It is not Pisarev's ideas that are brutalizing, for he has none, but his coarse tone. His attitude to Tatyana, especially to her charming letter, which I love tenderly, seems to me simply abominable. The critic has the foul aroma ...
— Letters of Anton Chekhov • Anton Chekhov
... they took away all these arms; but could they have had the indelicacy to leave some behind in order to be able to justify the impious and sacrilegious robbery they were meditating. This would be odious but not impossible ...
— The Insurrection in Paris • An Englishman: Davy
... indelicacy comes in. She went out riding with me, which was entirely her own suggestion, and as we were coming home through some meadows she made a quite unnecessary attempt to see if her pony would jump a rather messy sort ...
— Reginald • Saki
... vestment; and a stocking a stocking, though it does reach up the leg, and not a silk hose; and a garter a garter, though it is above the calf, and not an elastic band or a hose suspender. A really modest woman was never squeamish. Fastidiousness is the envelope of indelicacy. To see harm in ordinary words betrays a knowledge, and not ...
— Nature and Human Nature • Thomas Chandler Haliburton
... of property, avoid using another's dwelling until it is abandoned by its proprietor, and no reproach of indelicacy can be addressed to the Gobius minutus, a fish which lives on our coasts at the mouth of rivers. The female lays beneath overturned shells, remains of Oysters, or Cardium shells. The valve is buried ...
— The Industries of Animals • Frederic Houssay
... such vulgarity! such indelicacy!" cried Mrs. Ramshorn, while the parson was still occupied with the sherry. "Not content with talking about himself in the pulpit, he must even talk about his wife! What's he or his wife in the house of God? When his ...
— Paul Faber, Surgeon • George MacDonald
... guarded against everything and everybody, and has to hear misplaced and exaggerated praises of himself, and censures equally inappropriate, which are intolerable when the man is sober, and, besides being intolerable, are published all over the world in all their indelicacy and wearisomeness when he ...
— Phaedrus • Plato
... did not realize the evil effects of their law against faithless wives,—its glaring indelicacy, and brutalizing influence on the minds of the young; but it was of a piece with their exclusion of church-music and other amenities of civilization. Was it through a natural attraction for the primeval granite that they landed on the New England coast? Their severe self- discipline was certainly ...
— The Life and Genius of Nathaniel Hawthorne • Frank Preston Stearns
... Johnny ain't lying, mebbee it's Cressy McKinstry that Seth's huntin' round, and knowin' that she's always runnin' after you"—he stopped, and reddening with a newborn sense that his fatal truthfulness had led him into a glaring indelicacy towards the master, hurriedly added: "I mean, sir, that mebbee it's Uncle Ben he's jealous of, now that he's got rich enough for Cressy to hev him, and knowin' he comes to ...
— Cressy • Bret Harte
... of our recently declared love for each other, any mention of Hilda's below-stairs passion for the "young master" seemed to me a blatant indelicacy. Almost it might have a quality of pluming and boasting, a gross acceptance ...
— We Three • Gouverneur Morris
... interview of it between the rich Englishman and herself. With regard to the dinner, I shall only report that it justified Captain Peterkin's boast, in some degree at least. The wine was good, and the conversation became gay to the verge of indelicacy. Usually the most temperate of men, Romayne was tempted by his neighbors into drinking freely. I was unfortunately seated at the opposite extremity of the table, and I had no opportunity ...
— The Black Robe • Wilkie Collins
... appears. Everything is expected of the husband, and he is accorded no definite place in return. He leaves the house at 8.30. When he returns, at five, if his wife is entertaining a man at tea, it would be considered the height of indelicacy for him to intrude upon them, for his arrival would cast a chill on the conversation. When a couple dine out, the husband is always la bête noire of the hostess, no woman wanting to sit next to a married man, if she ...
— The Ways of Men • Eliot Gregory
... further fact that he became an advocate of Suffrage. In his "Life and Times" he says: "I could not meet her [Mrs. Stanton's] arguments except with the shallow plea of 'custom,' 'natural division of duties,' 'indelicacy of woman's taking part in politics,' 'the common talk of woman's sphere,' and the like, all of which that able woman brushed away by those arguments which no man has yet successfully refuted." Mr. Douglass might have called ...
— Woman and the Republic • Helen Kendrick Johnson
... to a father or a friend in whom you may unreservedly confide. Soft and delicate in manners as a lady, none could ever presume in his presence to say a word or do an act tinged with rudeness, still less indelicacy. Kind and patient with all who come to him, he is especially considerate with his clergy. To them he is just in his decisions, wise in his counsels and exhortations, ever anxious to aid them in their difficulties. Tender and lenient as ...
— Donahoe's Magazine, Volume 15, No. 1, January 1886 • Various
... The indelicacy and want of all consideration for the feelings of his father, so obvious in his heartless allusion to a fact which could only result from that father's death, satisfied the old man that any reformation in his son was for the present hopeless, and even Lady ...
— The Black Baronet; or, The Chronicles Of Ballytrain - The Works of William Carleton, Volume One • William Carleton
... with as much aversion, as if they had been so many plague-spots on the whole work, instead of passing them over in silence, as so much blank paper, or leaves of a bookseller's catalogue; especially, as no one pretended to have found in them any immorality or indelicacy; and the poems, therefore, at the worst, could only be regarded as so many light or inferior coins in a rouleau of gold, not as so much alloy in a weight of bullion. A friend whose talents I hold in the ...
— Biographia Literaria • Samuel Taylor Coleridge
... sense of shame has begun to invade the privacy of our brain. We feel that to answer that letter now would be an indelicacy. Better to pretend that we never got it. By and by Bill will write again and then we will answer promptly. We put the letter back in the middle of the heap and think what a fine chap Bill is. But he knows we love him, so it doesn't ...
— Mince Pie • Christopher Darlington Morley
... its original licence under his auspices. Most of our early plays, being written in a coarse age, and designed for the amusement of a promiscuous and vulgar audience, were dishonoured by scenes of coarse and naked indelicacy. The positive enactments of James, and the grave manners of his son, in some degree repressed this disgraceful scurrility; and, in the common course of events, the English stage would have been gradually delivered from this reproach by the increasing influence of decency and taste.[6] But Charles ...
— The Dramatic Works of John Dryden Vol. I. - With a Life of the Author • Sir Walter Scott
... friend can do, sometimes when it would be impossible for a man himself to do himself justice with others. Some things, needful to be said or done under certain circumstances, cannot be undertaken without indelicacy by the person concerned, and the keen instinct of a friend should tell him that he is needed. A little thoughtfulness would often suggest things that could be done for our friends, that would make them feel that the tie which binds us ...
— Friendship • Hugh Black
... of an over-brimming goblet. Kenyon saw that she was in one of those moods of elevated feeling, when the soul is upheld by a strange tranquility, which is really more passionate and less controllable than emotions far exceeding it in violence. He felt that there would be indelicacy, if he ought not rather to call it impiety, in his stealing upon Hilda, while she was thus beyond her own guardianship, and surprising her out of secrets which she might afterwards bitterly regret betraying to him. Therefore, ...
— The Marble Faun, Volume II. - The Romance of Monte Beni • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... those surrounding him were in the secret. Thereby she made a spectacle of her mother's father—made herself and him the sport of curious eyes. For who could help watching them—every movement, every word? There was a kind of indelicacy ...
— Lady Rose's Daughter • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... had come, or even, already, just as it was coming, that it turned on, as if she had moved an electric switch, the very brightest light of his own very reasons. There she was, in all the grossness of her native indelicacy, in all her essential excess of will and destitution of scruple; and it was the woman capable of that ignoble threat who, his sharper sense of her quality having become so quite deterrent, was now making for him a ...
— The Finer Grain • Henry James
... desert in which there was nothing to nourish him—was that his error amounted to positive wrongdoing. She was moreover so acquainted with quite another sphere of usefulness for him that her having suffered him to insist almost convicted her of indelicacy. Why hadn't she stopped him off with her first impression of his purpose? She could do so now only by the allusion she had been wishing not to make. "Do you know I don't think you're doing very right?—and as a thing ...
— The Wings of the Dove, Volume II • Henry James
... in drinking in the morning upon an empty stomach, with his coachman, at a grog-shop on the corner. When the pretty Baroness des Nenuphars blushed up to her ears because someone spoke the word "tea-spoon" before her, and she considered it to be an unwarrantable indelicacy—nobody knows why—it is assuredly not our young friend who will suspect that, in order to pay the gambling debts of her third lover, this modest person had just ...
— A Romance of Youth, Complete • Francois Coppee
... much apparent indelicacy and grossness are encountered; but it must be remembered for whom she was writing, the condition of morality and the taste of the public at that time, and that she aimed faithfully to depict the society that lay before her ...
— Women of Modern France - Woman In All Ages And In All Countries • Hugo P. Thieme
... necessary to claim the privilege of thinking for myself. The noble Karl of Glencairn, to whom I owe more than to any man, does me the honor of giving me his strictures: his hints, with respect to impropriety or indelicacy, I ...
— The Complete Works of Robert Burns: Containing his Poems, Songs, and Correspondence. • Robert Burns and Allan Cunningham
... resided there forty years ago 'with a little Spanish Wife, but no pupils.' Carlyle would name him with a sort of sneer in the Life of Sterling; {184} could not see that any such notice was more than needless, just after Edgeworth's Death. This is all a little Scotch indelicacy to other people's feelings. But now Time and his own Mortality soften him. I have been looking over his Letters to me about Cromwell: the amazing perseverance and accuracy of the Man, who writes so passionately! In a letter of about 1845 or 6 he says he has burned at least ...
— Letters of Edward FitzGerald in Two Volumes - Vol. II • Edward FitzGerald
... unjust; but it was by no means unnatural; and precisely what Leigh Hunt is himself in the weekly practice of doing to other people without the same excuse. Leigh Hunt has now spoken out so freely to the public on the subject, that there can be no indelicacy in talking of it, in as far as ...
— Famous Reviews • Editor: R. Brimley Johnson
... library. It was decided to give him an exact education and send him to one of the large schools, where he should have the advantage of discipline and the opportunity of desirable friendships; but the prejudice against his birth was an obstacle—life would have been made impossible by the indelicacy and cruelty of the high-born and Christian lads. He was finally sent to a school where he found himself the superior of his masters; even there he was taunted with his birth; and he was taken home to work with his father and with tutors, where, conscious of his powers and full ...
— Great Men and Famous Women. Vol. 4 of 8 • Various
... would keep to anything except the point. That, whatever its nature, she avoided as she would an indelicacy. ...
— My Friend the Chauffeur • C. N. Williamson and A. M. Williamson
... please, don't!" she said. And William King winced at his own clumsiness; her reticence made him feel as if he had been guilty of an impropriety, almost of an indelicacy. ...
— The Awakening of Helena Richie • Margaret Deland |
