"Prim" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... same room in which the first act had been given. In a low rocker sat a spinster of uncertain age, very prim as to attitude and attire, her face partially concealed by a profusion of corkscrew curls that dangled from her temples. She appeared to be absorbed in reading, while there were piles of books on the table at her side, on chairs, and were also strewn promiscuously ...
— Katherine's Sheaves • Mrs. Georgie Sheldon
... printed pages, and Roger Williams even to-day looms up with all the more power because we have become "rather fatigued by the monotony of so vast a throng of sages and saints, all quite immaculate, all equally prim and stiff in their Puritan starch and uniform, all equally automatic and freezing." It is most comfortable to find anyone defying the rigid and formal law of the time, whether spoken or implied, and we have positive "relief in the ...
— Anne Bradstreet and Her Time • Helen Campbell
... kept utter silence; but, had she been a little sharper, she would have grasped that it was the silence of amazement. After the prim sonatinas that had gone before, Thalberg's florid ornaments had a shameless sound. Her performance, moreover, was a startling one; the forte pedal was held down throughout; the big chords were crashed and banged with all the strength a pair of twelve-year-old arms ...
— The Getting of Wisdom • Henry Handel Richardson
... of the households generally that I propose to speak. Let the reader accompany me in imagination to a rather prim-looking brick mansion, situated on the principal street, but at some distance back, being separated from it by a front yard. Between this yard and the fence, ran a prim-looking hedge of very formal cut, being cropped in the most careful manner, ...
— The Sea-Witch - or, The African Quadroon A Story of the Slave Coast • Maturin Murray
... of their tether. Already they had learnt to go hungry, and they were beginning to learn to go cold. Tobacco, the last thing the sober man foregoes among his comforts, had been given up some time ago by Bunting. And even Mrs. Bunting—prim, prudent, careful woman as she was in her way—had realised what this must mean to him. So well, indeed, had she understood that some days back she had crept out and bought him a packet ...
— The Lodger • Marie Belloc Lowndes
... Hutton Her last dress has put on; Her fine lessons forgotten, She died, as the dunce died: And prim Betsy Chambers, Decay'd in her members, No longer remembers ...
— The Works of Charles and Mary Lamb IV - Poems and Plays • Charles and Mary Lamb
... also. "It's an artistic disarray," she explained. "It's hard work because I've slipped into the habit of being prim and precise, and I had to bend a pin intentionally. Four girls already have warned me about my hair falling down. It worries me a lot and yet it doesn't give the same effect as yours. Does yours feel loose ...
— Beatrice Leigh at College - A Story for Girls • Julia Augusta Schwartz
... him upstairs and we had got seated in my private room, when the maid knocked at the door to say that the housekeeper wished to speak with me, and on going out, and closing the door behind me, I found her on the landing, a prim little flinty person with quick eyes, thin lips and an ...
— The Woman Thou Gavest Me - Being the Story of Mary O'Neill • Hall Caine
... of Miss Patricia? I'm afraid of her. The night we came home she met us in the hall, looking so tall and severe in her black gown, with those prim little bunches of gray curls on each side of her face, that I went under a chair. Then I thought I must have misjudged her, for there were tears in her eyes when she kissed the children, and I heard her whisper as she turned away, "poor little motherless lambs!" Still I have seen so many people ...
— The Story of Dago • Annie Fellows-Johnston
... open her little gate, hung crookedly in a very compact and prim spruce hedge, she stopped in amazement and said, "Well, ...
— Lucy Maud Montgomery Short Stories, 1902 to 1903 • Lucy Maud Montgomery
... surpris'd the darling rent: Where yawn'd the frieze is now become a doubt; And glory, at one entrance, quite shut out.(12) He scorns Florello, and Florello him; This hates the filthy creature; that, the prim: Thus, in each other, both these fools despise Their own dear selves, with undiscerning eyes; Their methods various, but alike their aim; The sloven and the fopling are the same. Ye whigs and tories! thus it fares ...
— The Poetical Works of Edward Young, Volume 2 • Edward Young
... Richmond had met no one so interesting and amusing as this frank-minded young woman from America. "Young woman" was how he thought of her; she didn't correspond to anything so prim and restrained and extensively reserved and withheld as a "young lady "; and though he judged her no older than five and twenty, the word "girl" with its associations of virginal ignorances, invisible purdah, and trite ideas newly discovered, seemed ...
— The Secret Places of the Heart • H. G. Wells
... the handkerchiefs, she shut the wardrobe and turned the key. She went first to her own small, prim room to restore stolen property to its rightful place, and then she descended towards the kitchen with the other handkerchief. Giving it to her mother, and concealing her triumph beneath a mask of wise, long-suffering benevolence, she would say: "I've found ...
— Hilda Lessways • Arnold Bennett
... and often have I seen the old house shining with lights across its whole broadside of windows, and gay with the sound of a dozen French violins. The garden, now a wilderness, was the pride of the island. Its prim arbors, its spring and spring-house, its flowerbeds, where, with infinite pains, a few hardy plants were induced to blossom; its cherry-tree avenue, whose early red fruit the short summer could scarcely ripen; its annual ...
— Castle Nowhere • Constance Fenimore Woolson
... structure of the understanding rising out of the moral and spiritual nature. Then follows a section on Children, which explodes not a few educational fallacies, and propounds certain articles of faith and practice wholesome for these times, though it will probably wear a prim and quakerish aspect to the admirers of Jean Paul's famous tractate[10] on the same theme. The concluding paper in this series, entitled The Life Poetic, is the liveliest, if not the most valuable of the six: it ...
— Chambers' Edinburgh Journal - Volume XVII., No 422, New Series, January 31, 1852 • Various
... into the lower end of Fifth Avenue, it seemed as if I were being gently floated along between the modest apartment-houses and old-fashioned dwellings, and prim, respectable churches, on the smooth current of Pierrepont's talk about his new-found picture. How often a man has cause to return thanks for the enthusiasms of his friends! They are the little fountains that run down from the hills to refresh the ...
— The Ruling Passion • Henry van Dyke
... faire." The shock came not from the blow delivered, but from the blow received. With the effect of a schoolmaster entering the play-room of his pupils was that blow administered. Women pulled down their sleeves and laid prim hands against their ruffled side locks. Men looked at their watches. There was nothing of the effect of a brawl about it; it was purely the still panic produced by the sound of the ax of the fly cop, Conscience hammering at the gambling-house doors ...
— The Trimmed Lamp • O. Henry
... The yards of the houses were only separated by a green hedge, with no gate, so that Cecy spent two-thirds of her time at Dr. Carr's, and was exactly like one of the family. She was a neat, dapper, pink-and-white-girl, modest and prim in manner, with light shiny hair, which always kept smooth, and slim hands, which never looked dirty. How different from my poor Katy! Katy's hair was forever in a snarl; her gowns were always catching on nails and tearing "themselves"; and, in spite of her age and size, ...
— What Katy Did • Susan Coolidge
... to dinner. I scarcely think that the Spanish question was discussed at table. If the Duke of Gramont[35] labors to adduce proof that I did not stand aloof from and averse to the Spanish proposal, I find no reason to contradict him. I can no longer recall the text of my letter to Marshal Prim, which the Duke has heard mentioned; if I drew it up myself, about which I am equally uncertain, I should hardly have called the Hohenzollern candidature "une excellente chose": the expression is not natural to me. That I regarded ...
— The German Classics of The Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, Vol. X. • Kuno Francke
... Barlow was communing with himself. For the oval face with its olive skin, as fair as a Kashmiri girl's, was certainly beautiful. The black hair was smoothed back from a wide low forehead, after the habit of the Mahratti women; the prim simplicity of this seeming to add to the girlish effect. A small white-and-gold turban, even with its jauntiness, seemed just the very thing to check the austere simplicity. The girl's eyes, like Ajeet's, ...
— Caste • W. A. Fraser
... an old garden, filled with boxwood walks and flowers run wild. Very prim at one time it must have been; but, now that the war had helped the return to nature, it was ...
— The Tory Maid • Herbert Baird Stimpson
... was ordered by the city of Barcelona to accompany General Prim on his Algerian expedition, it was a milepost on ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great, Volume 4 (of 14) - Little Journeys to the Homes of Eminent Painters • Elbert Hubbard
... windows had still the original small panes; the mansarde roof, with its one dormer, was untouched. The little house had rather deep eaves; three windows above; two, and the front door, below. It wore a prim, old-fashioned air, a good deal softened and battered, however, by age, and it stood at the corner of two streets, both dingily quiet, and destined, no doubt, to be rebuilt before long in the general rejuvenation ...
— Lady Rose's Daughter • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... all the energy his normal digestion extracted from a wholesome omnivorous diet. When he did discover a bit of surplus energy, he worked it off in the society of his mother and of the conventional minds and prim teas she surrounded herself with. Result: A very nice young man, of whom no maid's mother need ever be in trepidation; a very strong young man, whose substance had not been wasted in riotous living; a very learned young man, with a Freiberg mining engineer's diploma and a B.A. sheepskin ...
— A Daughter of the Snows • Jack London
... that she never at any time had physical relationships with Rosenthal, who was a man of fragile organization and health. Sacher-Masoch united himself to Hulda Meister, who is described by the first wife as a prim and faded but coquettish old maid, and by the biographer as a highly accomplished and gentle woman, who cared for him with almost maternal devotion. No doubt there is truth in both descriptions. It must be noted that, as Wanda clearly shows, ...
— Studies in the Psychology of Sex, Volume 3 (of 6) • Havelock Ellis
... forward to seeing Bath with a curious kind of interest. I once knew one of those dear old English ladies whom one finds all the world over, with their prim little ways, and their gilt prayer-books, and lavender-scented handkerchiefs, and family recollections. She gave me the idea that Bath, a city where the great people often congregate, was more especially the paradise of decayed gentlewomen. There, ...
— The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. (The Physician and Poet not the Jurist)
... was given he rushed at Richter like a wild beast. You, my friend, who have never heard the whistle of sharp Schlager cannot know the song which a skilled arm draws from the blade. It was music that morning: You should have seen the noble's mighty strokes—'Prim und Second und Terz und Quart'. You would have marked how Richter met him at every blow. Von Kalbach never once took his eyes from the blue smoke from the bowl. He was terrible in his fury, and I shiver now to think how we of the Burschenschaft ...
— The Crossing • Winston Churchill
... cone slim slime froze cub cube glad glade these nod node snip snipe gaze met mete shot shote rise plat plate spin spine size flam flame plan plane wise shad shade strip stripe haze mop mope grim grime rose whit white twin twine daze sham shame prim prime those scrap scrape ...
— The Beacon Second Reader • James H. Fassett
... with every joy, tenderly with every grief; belonging to the quiet, simple, and innocent life, which, employ him anyhow, it was in his original nature to lead. But for this protecting art, under what prim disguises, amid what foggy social climates of class conventionality, would the worlds clerical, legal, mercantile, military, naval, or dandy, have extinguished this man, if any one of them had caught him in its snares! Where would then have been his frolicsome enthusiasm ...
— Hide and Seek • Wilkie Collins
... has worth so short a date, While villains ripen grey with time? Must thou, the noble, gen'rous, great, Fall in bold manhood's hardy prim Why did I live to see that day— A day to me so full of woe? O! had I met the mortal shaft That laid my ...
— Poems And Songs Of Robert Burns • Robert Burns
... "The prim coxcomb with an enormous bag, whose favours, like those of Hercules between Virtue and Vice, are contended for by two rival orange girls, gives an admirable idea of the dress of the day; when, if we may judge from this print, ...
— The Works of William Hogarth: In a Series of Engravings - With Descriptions, and a Comment on Their Moral Tendency • John Trusler
... have been the chief source of musical indulgence, and for many a long, weary year, hymns of praise, nasal in tone and dismal in tendency, have ascended from our prim forefathers to the throne ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol. 3, No. 1 January 1863 - Devoted To Literature And National Policy • Various
... knew him before we went away, and he called me by my first name as pat as you may please, and I didn't like it. And when he rolled up the towelling he crooked his little finger in such an affected, genteel, Miss Prim sort of way that it made his big fat hands look ridiculous. I don't know exactly what it was about him that irritated me so, but I couldn't bear him. And yet it seemed that he was so near being nice, ...
— Mary Ware's Promised Land • Annie Fellows Johnston
... stands beside her. He's a prim, Sententious sage. If she is bored by him, The lady doth not show it. But there's a furtive glancing of her eye Toward the entry. There comes ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 98, February 1, 1890 • Various
... objection that Mr. Warrington, in the above communication to his mother, showed some little hypocrisy and reticence in his dealings with that venerable person, I dare say, young folks, you in your time have written more than one prim letter to your papas and mammas in which not quite all the transactions of your lives were narrated, or if narrated, were exhibited in the most favourable light for yourselves—I dare say, old folks! you, in your time, were not altogether more candid. There ...
— The Virginians • William Makepeace Thackeray
... women of the New Forest, and sometimes among the girls of the district round Bordeaux. His whole appearance was feminine, and the unstable glance that he flashed from side to side spoke of vanity. He said to his companion, "Who is the prim virgin with the ...
— The Romance of the Coast • James Runciman
... novelty, were inexpressible. The daughter of Mr. Griskin, an eminent butcher in Clare-market, who had indeed from nature, the grace of being cross-eyed, now looked in ten thousand more various directions than she ever did before. Miss Prim, agitated in every limb, cracked her fan into twenty pieces. Miss Gawky, who had unfortunately been initiated by the chamber maid in the art of snuff-taking, plied her box with more zeal than ever. Miss Languish actually fainted, and was ...
— Damon and Delia - A Tale • William Godwin
... tongue are the songs and legends of Robin Hood and his merry outlaws, which have charmed readers young and old for more than six hundred years. These entertaining stories date back to the time when Chaucer wrote his "Canterbury Tales," when the minstrel and scribe stood in the place of the more prim ...
— Bulfinch's Mythology • Thomas Bulfinch
... in a few minutes by a prim, dignified little lady, ridiculously like Mr. Pengarth, whom he called sister, and she Miss Rachael. Juliet walked down ...
— The Malefactor • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... need not go to her house; we will wait for her here in the Ceramicus. I should think it is near her hour for coming back from the Academy, and taking her walk in the Poecile; she is very regular; to be sure, here she comes. Do you see the orderly, rather prim lady there, with the kindly look in her eyes, and the slow ...
— Works, V1 • Lucian of Samosata
... where she was plainly the dunce and the black sheep, a misery to herself and all concerned, hating everyone and disliked by all. To the little maiden of the Bush, only half tamed as yet, the London school-room and walks in the park were penance in themselves, and the company of three steady prim girls, in the idealess state produced by confinement to a school-room, and nothing but childish books, was as distasteful to her as she was shocking to them, and her life was one warfare with them and with their Fraulein. The only person she seemed able to endure was Nessy Horsman, ...
— My Young Alcides - A Faded Photograph • Charlotte M. Yonge
... Martha, don't be so frightfully prim! I don't intend to break Rule No. I. Of course I love Betty. As a matter of fact, I have loved her before any of you set eyes on her. She is my very own cousin, and but for father's strong influence would never have ...
— Betty Vivian - A Story of Haddo Court School • L. T. Meade
... just now was a sight to be seen—crumpled, infinitely prim, crow-footed like an ivied wall; but extraordinarily wise; with that tempered resolve which says, "I know Evil and I know Good, and dare be just to either." He was thinking profoundly; every one could see it. Best of the company ...
— Little Novels of Italy • Maurice Henry Hewlett
... Artist, whose undying name With classic Rogers shall go down to fame, Be this thy crowning work! In my young days How often have I with a child's fond gaze Pored on the pictured wonders thou hadst done: Clarissa mournful, and prim Grandison! All Fielding's, Smollett's heroes, rose to view; I saw, and I believed the phantoms true. But, above all, that most romantic tale Did o'er my raw credulity prevail, Where Glums and Gawries wear mysterious things, That serve at once for jackets and for wings. Age, that enfeebles ...
— The Works of Charles and Mary Lamb (Vol. 6) - Letters 1821-1842 • Charles and Mary Lamb
... he had looked forward through a dull, disappointing day to an evening with Felicite Delord. She was expecting him—she would be greatly disappointed. He sighed a second time, for he was far from happy. Life seemed to be one long constant worry over money matters and Myra Nell. Being a prim, orderly man, he intensely disliked searching for mislaid articles, but he began a systematic hunt; for, knowing Myra Nell's peculiar irresponsibility, he was prepared to find the missing slipper anywhere between the hammock on the front gallery and the kitchen ...
— The Net • Rex Beach
... are green on the Linden tree, And flowers are bursting on the lea; There is the daisy, so prim and white, With its golden eye and its fringes bright; And here is the golden buttercup, Like a miser's chest with the gold heap'd up; And the stitchwort with its pearly star, Seen on the hedgebank from afar; And there is the primrose, sweet, though wan, And the ...
— Country Walks of a Naturalist with His Children • W. Houghton
... know that we had a girls' school as close to us as the school for boys. The garden, equally large with the other, affords no sign whatever of any provision for juvenile recreation; but is entirely laid out with prim grass-plots, gravel-walks, shrubs, and flowers, after the usual suburban style. During five months we have not once had our attention drawn to the premises by a shout or a laugh. Occasionally girls may be observed sauntering along the paths with ...
— Woman and Womanhood - A Search for Principles • C. W. Saleeby
... is better to be born in America than in—most places," she said, with a half glance at the prim square outside. "It gives you a point of view that is—splendid." In hesitating this way before her adjectives, she always made her listeners doubly attentive to what she had to say. "And having been deprived of so much that ...
— A Daughter of To-Day • Sara Jeannette Duncan (aka Mrs. Everard Cotes)
... prim-faced thing," she said to her Aunt Clara, "I'd rather have this room, that looks toward their house. But if I don't like her,—and I'm just about sure I won't,—I'd rather have my room on the ...
— Two Little Women • Carolyn Wells
... little beast; She's seen at many a fete and feast. She's spiteful, sly and double-faced, Exceeding prim, exceeding chaste. And while a soft, sleek smile she wears, Her ...
— The Wit and Humor of America, Volume III. (of X.) • Various
... denizens of the old building, it will suffice out of a large household to mention the prim, respectable, and capable Ames, and Mrs. Allen, a buxom and cheerful person, who relieved the lady of some of her household cares. The other six servants in the house bear no relation to the events of the ...
— The Valley of Fear • Arthur Conan Doyle
... was reconciled when little Miss Sharp was made to quit the carriage, and mount up beside him—when he covered her up in one of his Benjamins, and became perfectly good-humoured—how the asthmatic gentleman, the prim lady, who declared upon her sacred honour she had never travelled in a public carriage before (there is always such a lady in a coach—Alas! was; for the coaches, where are they?), and the fat widow with the brandy-bottle, took their ...
— Vanity Fair • William Makepeace Thackeray
... other differing Effects on Mary-golds, Prim-roses, and fresh Madder (265.) with an Admonition, that these Salts may have differing Effects in the changing of the tinctures of ...
— Experiments and Considerations Touching Colours (1664) • Robert Boyle
... "Bah! I'm mad to write to Everard Grey like this. He would laugh and call me a poor little fool." I tore the half-finished letter to shreds, and consigned it to the kitchen fire. I substituted a prim formal note, merely thanking him for the books and magazine he had sent me. To this I never received an answer. I heard through his letters to grannie that he was much occupied. Had been to Brisbane and ...
— My Brilliant Career • Miles Franklin
... Railroad had been completed ; Grant had been elected President of the United States; Egypt had been flooded with savans: the Cretan rebellion had terminated ; a Spanish revolution had driven Isabella from the throne of Spain, and a Regent had been appointed: General Prim was assassinated; a Castelar had electrified Europe with his advanced ideas upon the liberty of worship; Prussia had humbled Denmark, and annexed Schleswig-Holstein , and her armies were now around Paris; the "Man of Destiny" was a prisoner at Wilhelmshohe; the ...
— How I Found Livingstone • Sir Henry M. Stanley
... the word? though I believe it somewhat of the newest. Now, poor I have no skill in these matters! If I see a pretty fellow, I care not who knows it; I like a jest, a laugh, tempered with all rightful modesty. I do not prim my mouth, tutor my eyes into sobriety, nor say Amen, like old Will's Macbeth, to those who say 'God bless us!' I laugh my laugh, and look my look, and say my say, though I am youngest, and, by God's grace, wildest of his Highness the ...
— The Buccaneer - A Tale • Mrs. S. C. Hall
... two sorts; Gall-Berry-Tree, bearing a black Berry, with which the Women dye their Cloaths and Yarn black; 'tis a pretty Ever-green, and very plentiful, growing always in low swampy Grounds, and amongst Ponds. We have a Prim or Privet, which grows on the dry, barren, sandy Hills, by the Sound side; it bears a smaller sort than that in England, and grows into a round Bush, very beautiful. {Yaupon.} Last of Bushes, (except ...
— A New Voyage to Carolina • John Lawson
... of the testy Victorian tetrarchs are gone now or decayed into boarding-houses, but the Eathorne Mansion remains virtuous and aloof, reminiscent of London, Back Bay, Rittenhouse Square. Its marble steps are scrubbed daily, the brass plate is reverently polished, and the lace curtains are as prim and superior as William Washington ...
— Babbitt • Sinclair Lewis
... mansion the room known as the library is on the ground floor in a wing of the main building. As rooms have a way of doing, it expresses unmistakably the character of its tenant. There is a book-case, with a few spick-and-span books standing in prim, cold rows behind the glass doors—which are always locked. The key is somewhere, no doubt. There are no pictures on the walls, save a fancy calendar—presented with the compliments of the Judge's banker, a crayon portrait of the Judge's father—in ...
— The Calling Of Dan Matthews • Harold Bell Wright
... a small matter—a common little word of three letters. In all the messages sent him by the schoolma'am, it was the precise, school-grammar wording of them which had irritated him most and impressed him insensibly with the belief that she was too prim to be quite human. The Happy Family had felt all along that they were artists in that line, and they knew that the precise sentences ever carried conviction of their truth. Weary mopped his perspiring face upon a white silk handkerchief and ...
— The Lonesome Trail and Other Stories • B. M. Bower
... of her chamber with papers in her hair, nor in that worst of dis-illusions,—a morning wrapper. At half-past eight every morning Mrs. Mervale was dressed for the day,—that is, till she re-dressed for dinner,—her stays well laced, her cap prim, her gowns, winter and summer, of a thick, handsome silk. Ladies at that time wore very short waists; so did Mrs. Mervale. Her morning ornaments were a thick, gold chain, to which was suspended a gold watch,—none of those fragile dwarfs of mechanism that ...
— Zanoni • Edward Bulwer Lytton
... the little drawing-room and found Miss Grayson, sitting in prim and dignified silence, in front of the feeble fire that burned on the hearth. It looked to Prescott like the same fire that was flickering there when first he came, but he believed ...
— Before the Dawn - A Story of the Fall of Richmond • Joseph Alexander Altsheler
... not see the prim English lady whom Perlet was acting with such ludicrous effect, nor hear the English-French that had filled the house with roars of laughter; instead of all this, he beheld himself hurrying from the Rue Richer, hailing ...
— Library of the World's Best Mystery and Detective Stories • Edited by Julian Hawthorne
... probably &c. adj.; belike[obs3]; in all probability, in all likelihood; very likely, most likely; like enough; odds on, odds in favor, ten &c. to one; apparently, seemingly, according to every reasonable expectation; prim facie[Lat]; to all appearance &c. (to the eye) 448. Phr. the chances, the odds are; appearances are in favor of, chances are in favor of; there is reason to believe, there is reason to think, there ...
— Roget's Thesaurus
... autumn of 1868 the throne of Spain had been vacant in consequence of a revolution in which General Prim had been the leading actor. It was not easy to discover a successor for the Bourbon Isabella; and after other candidatures had been vainly projected it occurred to Prim and his friends early in 1869 that a suitable candidate might be found in Prince Leopold of Hohenzollern-Sigmaringen, ...
— History of Modern Europe 1792-1878 • C. A. Fyffe
... thought, if he had not felt, with all the bitterness of a conscious fool, that he had missed his true destiny. Sara possessed the warmth and 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 ...
— Robert Orange - Being a Continuation of the History of Robert Orange • John Oliver Hobbes
... posts. It leaned far to the side on one wheel and a splintered hub. Down the hill a broken wheel was bounding; while, on the dusty road, four women—one tall and angular in a yellow duster, one little and weazened, arrayed in a prim gray traveling suit, a weeping maiden of uncertain age, and a portly dame of ponderous proportions, dressed not in a duster but a very dusty black silk—were pulling themselves up. Near by three little tots were howling vigorously, yet ...
— The Transformation of Job - A Tale of the High Sierras • Frederick Vining Fisher
... to which he replied rather importantly, "Of course, Ma," and about keeping his fresh suit clean; but Mrs. Trevor said nothing to Dot, because, there was no need, for she was about the most prim, neat little creature that ever lived. And, now she paced along by her brother's side, carrying two sticks with iron hooks at their ends, with which she walked in her precise measured way, as if they were wands, while the Skipper ...
— The Little Skipper - A Son of a Sailor • George Manville Fenn
... the mother who had adopted him and went to his own people. His Own People," she repeated slowly. "Do you understand that?" The class sat stolidly silent. Desire's eye rested again upon the little girl with the prim mouth. ...
— The Window-Gazer • Isabel Ecclestone Mackay
... looking down into what he thought at the moment was the sweetest, saddest little face he had ever seen. It was dark with sunburn, in contrast with the prim white drill dress the girl wore, and her cheeks were tinged with a healthy color which might have been a reflection of the rosy tint of the ribbon about her neck. But it was the quiet, dark brown eyes, half wistful and wholly sad, and the slight droop at the ...
— The Night Riders - A Romance of Early Montana • Ridgwell Cullum
... a bit of abrupt hillside of impoverished soil, yet where the sky-line is divided in a picture of many panels by the trees, you should not try to perch thereon a prim Dutch garden of formal lines; neither should you, to whom a portion of fertile level plain has fallen, seek to make it picturesque by a tortuous maze of walks, curving about nothing in particular and leading nowhere, for of such is not nature. Either situation will develop the skill, though in different ...
— The Garden, You, and I • Mabel Osgood Wright
... of changing horses in mid-stream, yet most unluckily they were caught by a sudden flood. At the end of June it was announced in Madrid that Leopold of Hohenzollern, son of the Roumanian prince, had accepted the crown of Spain that had been secretly offered to him by Marshal Prim; and the news, M. Ollivier says, startled all France like the bursting of a bomb. It had always, we must remember, been a cardinal maxim of French statesmanship that the maintenance of a preponderant influence in Spain was essential to the security of France; while, on the ...
— Studies in Literature and History • Sir Alfred Comyn Lyall
... grain, relieved here and there by a mass of black woodland, or a red farm-house and barns clustered against a hill-side, just over a wooden spire in the shallow valley, about which were gathered a few white houses, giving signs of life thrice a day in tiny threads of smoke rising from their prim chimneys; and over all, the pallid skies of New England, where the sun wheeled his shorn beams from east to west as coldly as if no tropic seas mirrored his more fervid glow thousands of miles away, and the chilly moon beamed with irreproachable whiteness across ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. IV, No. 22, Aug., 1859 • Various
... example which I quote because it is so absurd. The rooms I live in were owned by a prim old woman who for more than twenty years was my landlady. She and I were great friends, indeed she tended me like a mother, and when I was so ill nursed me as perhaps few mothers would have done. Yet while I was watching on the Road suddenly she came by, and with horror ...
— The Mahatma and the Hare • H. Rider Haggard
... kept away. He had even left two of her letters—the rather formal letters which had come to mean so very much in his life—unanswered. A fortnight had gone by, and then there had reached him a prim little note from Mrs. Pomeroy, asking him why he had not been to see them lately. There was a postscript: "If you do not come soon, you will not see my daughter. She has not been well, and we are thinking of sending her up to Scotland, to ...
— Defenders of Democracy • The Militia of Mercy
... praying for." During his breakfast he recalled the fact that Madge was uncommonly well dressed. "She hasn't in externals," he thought, "the provincial air that one might expect, although her ideas are not only provincial, but prim, obtained, no doubt, from some goody-good books that she has read in the remote region wherein she has developed so remarkably. She has some stilted ideal of womanhood which she is seeking to attain, and the more unnatural the ideal, the more attractive, ...
— A Young Girl's Wooing • E. P. Roe
... dramatists Thucydides and Homer, was the refusal to allow me to walk or hunt with Xenophon, and to saunter through his kitchen or his grounds. And all because I could not show the requisite grammatical ticket. Could anything be more fascinating than the tale of Xenophon's prim yet most lovable young wife, or the glorious picture of the boy and girl lovers with ...
— The Adventure of Living • John St. Loe Strachey
... valley, which was the heart of the town, and then they drew up before a very old brick house which stood on the summit of the hill. It had green blinds and a fanlight over the front door, and a brick walk running from the front steps to the street, bordered on each side by a box hedge in a prim, Ladies' Garden effect like one sees in the illustrations of ...
— The Camp Fire Girls Do Their Bit - Or, Over the Top with the Winnebagos • Hildegard G. Frey
... and prim in her gray dress, so like her old correct self, that I could not think of anything but her mental attitude, which did not, by the way, seem much like mental depression. Yet I was aware that I ...
— Stories in Light and Shadow • Bret Harte
... to face over the threshold—Clytemnestra, of a matronly circumference, yet with a certain prim consciousness of herself, which despite the gray hair and the excellent maturity of her face, was unmistakably maidenish—Clytie of the eyes always wise to another's needs and beaming with ...
— The Seeker • Harry Leon Wilson
... girls' door was open; for the girls were afraid of robbers, and left their bed-room door wide open at night, as a natural and obvious means of self-defence. The girls slept together; and the frill of the pale sister's prim little night-cap was buried in the other one's ...
— Melchior's Dream and Other Tales • Juliana Horatia Ewing
... Though prim regularity, and "parterres embroidered like a petticoat," were in his time in high vogue, yet his pages shew his enlarged views on this subject, and the magnificent ideas he had formed, by surrounding them by rural enclosures, ...
— On the Portraits of English Authors on Gardening, • Samuel Felton
... alone: I am not thine. [1] Prim Creed, with categoric point, forbear To feature me my Lord by rule and line. Thou canst not measure Mistress Nature's hair, Not one sweet inch: nay, if thy sight is sharp, Would'st count the strings upon ...
— Select Poems of Sidney Lanier • Sidney Lanier
... a while she said in a prim little voice, which she adopted now and then when she wanted to ...
— A Sweet Girl Graduate • Mrs. L.T. Meade
... room a spirit of gaiety prevailed. The eager faces of the boys and girls smiled at the faculty, sitting in prim rows on the stage; the faculty smiled back. There was stirring music until the last pupil had found her place. Then, just as Dr. Caton, the dignified principal, rose to his feet, a boy whom Jerry from her corner recognized as Dana King, leaped to the front, threw both arms wildly ...
— Highacres • Jane Abbott
... and ragged walls, and the rusty ribs fallen from the fireplace, are all that meet your eyes, but I see a round, unsteady, waxcloth-covered table, with four books lying at equal distances on it. There are six prim chairs, two of them not to be sat upon, backed against the walls, and between the window and the fireplace a chest of drawers, with a snowy coverlet. On the drawers stands a board with coloured marbles for the game of solitaire, and I have only to open the drawer with the loose handle to bring out ...
— A Window in Thrums • J. M. Barrie
... there's no use of your trying to make a prim Puritan maiden of me. Zeb doesn't fight like a deacon, and I can't love like one. Ha! ha! ha! to think that great soldier is afraid of little me, and nothing else! It's too ...
— Taken Alive • E. P. Roe
... the big, prim old Howe house sits Madam Howe. She is called Madam to distinguish her from her daughter-in-law, Mrs. George Howe. She is a regal old lady of eighty-three and spends most of her time in her room up-stairs where are gathered the wonderful ...
— Green Valley • Katharine Reynolds
... men who proudly take their place As sages of the human race, Lack they the simple skill To settle such a will?' This said, he undertook himself The task of portioning the pelf; And straightway gave each maid the part The least according to her heart— The prim coquette, the drinking stuff, The drinker, then, the farms and cattle; And on the miser, rude and rough, The robes and lace did Aesop settle; For thus, he said, 'an early date Would see the sisters ...
— The Fables of La Fontaine - A New Edition, With Notes • Jean de La Fontaine
... vast smuggled commerce has ever found passage to the mainland, and scarce a boatman or passenger lands at Algeciras from Gibraltar but carries somewhere on his person as much tobacco as he may hope to conceal with safety. Algeciras, with its fair white houses, its prim church, and sleepy quay, where the blue waters lap and sparkle in innocent sunlight, is, it is to be feared, a town of small virtue and the habitation of scoundrels. For this is the stronghold of those contrabandistas whom song and legend ...
— In Kedar's Tents • Henry Seton Merriman
... some strange way with himself. Merged, not with the man he was to-day, but with the Hugh Elwyn of thirty years back, who, as a lonely only child, had lived so intensely secret, imaginative a life, peopling the prim alleys of Hyde Park with fairies, imps, tricksy hobgoblins in whom he more than half believed, and longing even then, as ever after, for the unattainable, never carelessly happy as his father and mother believed ...
— Studies in love and in terror • Marie Belloc Lowndes
... saw Bailie Duke seated at his ease in a large armchair. At his right sat Bailie Thomson—a man with a forbidding face, whom I had often of late seen in the company of Carver Kinlay. At Mr. Duke's left hand was the schoolmaster, prim and businesslike as I had often seen him look in the school when anything of importance was pending, such as a class examination. Near him sat Lieutenant Fox, looking very handsome in his naval uniform, and very much at his ease. The only other person in the room was Dr. Linklater, who smiled a ...
— The Pilots of Pomona • Robert Leighton
... This sober Flemish interior expresses my mistress's character almost as well as her own apartment used to do. I always experienced a chill, a sense of formality, when the door was opened, and while I stood waiting for her in the prim drawing-room. Every chair was in its appointed place, large, gilt-edged, illustrated books lay upon the tables.... There was not much light in her rooms; heavy curtains clung about the windows, and tapestries covered the walls. In the passage ...
— Memoirs of My Dead Life • George Moore
... for it the fire with the wind behind. 'Which things are a parable,' he said, his ugly sunburnt face twitching curiously, his eyes quite handsome, nay, even splendid with honest scorn. He was shaking his fist towards the prim little dorp that we had left behind over the ridges. 'No doubt but ye are the people,' he said, 'ye that have made the freedom of England and the franchise of Jesus of no effect by your tradition your sacrosanct tradition. What's the good of the frowsy old ...
— Cinderella in the South - Twenty-Five South African Tales • Arthur Shearly Cripps
... prim white house set back from the street, Catherine's buoyancy suffered a collapse. She had been inside that house, calling, with her mother, but to go there—or anywhere—on a begging errand! Here Algernon's long familiarity with rebuffs proved ...
— The Wide Awake Girls in Winsted • Katharine Ellis Barrett
... good himself that he has to pry into other people's business and get them in wrong. It beats me how he ever got to be a captain—a prim ...
— The Search • Grace Livingston Hill
... together and sat with prim, pure face, white and pink and cold as a Christmas rose, her hands in her silk gloves folded on her lap, her dark eyes all vague, abstracted in a sort ...
— The Rainbow • D. H. (David Herbert) Lawrence
... as the doctors call it, narvous. But when I was out—oh, what a change I found in the religious house! no card-playing, for it had been forbidden to the scholars, and there was now nothing going on but reading and singing; divil a merry visage to be seen, but plenty of prim airs and graces; but the case of the scholars, though bad enough, was not half so bad as mine, for they could spake to each other, whereas I could not have a word of conversation, for the ould thaif of a rector had ordered ...
— The Romany Rye - A Sequel to 'Lavengro' • George Borrow
... Nussey recalls the elderly, prim Miss Branwell about ten years later than her first arrival in Yorkshire. But it is always said of her that she changed very little. Miss Nussey's striking picture will pretty accurately represent the maiden lady of forty, who, from ...
— Emily Bront • A. Mary F. (Agnes Mary Frances) Robinson
... words were lost in the laughter of the King and Cardinal at the unblushing avowal of the small, prim-faced maiden. ...
— The Armourer's Prentices • Charlotte M. Yonge
... in Kensington one must be very well-to-do, particularly if one would be on the "drawing room floor." "I like these rooms very much," I said to a prim person there, ...
— Walking-Stick Papers • Robert Cortes Holliday
... art and shocking to man's aesthetic feelings. Now from the first Fan had spontaneously written a small hand, with fine web-like lines and flourishes, which gave it a very curious and delicate appearance; for, unlike the sloping prim Italian hand, it was all irregular, and the longer curves and strokes crossed and recrossed through words above and beneath, so that, while easy enough to read, at first sight it looked less like writing than an intricate pattern on the paper, as if a score of polar gnats had been figure-skating ...
— Fan • Henry Harford
... course, quite back to the time when the Hyde Street hill had been in an opulent heyday, but the flavor of its quality had trickled through to his generation. This was the section where his mother had languished in the prim gloom of her lamp-shaded parlor before his father's discreet advances. The house was gone ... replaced by a bay-windowed, jig-sawed horror of the '80s, but the garden still smiled, its quaint fragrance reenforced at the proper season by the belated blossoms ...
— Broken to the Plow • Charles Caldwell Dobie
... household which consisted of an elderly uncle and aunt, and a middle-aged governess, Leo Gordon had never known intimate association with younger people; and while her nature was gentle and tranquil, she gradually imbibed the grave and rather prim ideas which were in vogue when Miss Patty was the reigning belle of her county. Although petted and indulged, she had not been spoiled, and remained singularly free from the selfishness usually developed in the character ...
— At the Mercy of Tiberius • August Evans Wilson
... a sight so gay and so uproarious, That all the world is up in arms, and ready for a fight. The roads are so clogg'd, that they beggar all description now, With lads and lasses, prim'd and grogg'd for bang-up fun and glee; Here's carts and gigs, and knowing prigs all ready to kick up a row, And ev'ry one is anxious to obtain a place to see; Here's a noted sprig of life, who sports his tits and clumner too, And there is Cribb and Gully, Belcher, ...
— Real Life In London, Volumes I. and II. • Pierce Egan
... as he sat there moodily, and knowing what he was capable of I scented trouble in store for Charlotte. Rosa I was not so sure about; she sat demurely and upright, and looked far away into the tree-tops in a visionary, world-forgetting sort of way; yet the prim purse of her mouth was somewhat overdone, and her ...
— The Golden Age • Kenneth Grahame
... yet considered the spiritual significance of slang? The dictionaries inform us that "slang is a conversational irregularity of a more or less vulgar type;" but that is not all. The prim definition refers merely to words, but I am rather more interested in considering the mental attitude which is indicated by the distortion and loose employment of words, and by the fresh coinages which seem to spring up every hour. I know of no ...
— The Ethics of Drink and Other Social Questions - Joints In Our Social Armour • James Runciman
... child for sale; so she combs his little locks, puts on his new osnaburgs, arranges his nice white collar about his neck, and makes him look so prim. And then she ties a piece of black ribbon about his neck, giving him the bright appearance of a school-boy on examination-day. The little girl's feelings seem as much elated as would be a mother's at the prospect of her child gaining ...
— Our World, or, The Slaveholders Daughter • F. Colburn Adams
... told him that he was to dine with the maid; but he could not complain in words, since my own guest, the mistress, was hardly more attractive. When our preparations were complete I could not help laughing: the two prim little tables, one in the parlor and one in the anteroom, and Simpson disapprovingly going back and forth ...
— Stories by American Authors (Volume 4) • Constance Fenimore Woolson
... every part of the world. I was one who could never be still, nor settle down to a quiet existence. After I came to own my own ship there is hardly a port from Archangel to Australia which I have not entered. I was rough and wild and free, but there was one at home, sir, who was prim and white-handed and soft-tongued, skilful in little fancies and conceits which women love. This youth by his wiles and tricks stole from me the love of the girl whom I had ever marked as my own, and who up to ...
— The Captain of the Pole-Star and Other Tales • Arthur Conan Doyle
... pri'mate, the highest dignitary of a church; pri'macy; prim'ary; primer; prime'val (Lat. n. ae'vum, an age); prim'itive; primogen'itor (Lat. n. gen'itor, a begetter); primogeniture (Lat. n. genitu'ra, a begetting), the exclusive right of inheritance which in English law belongs to the eldest son or daughter; primor'dial (Lat. ...
— New Word-Analysis - Or, School Etymology of English Derivative Words • William Swinton
... palace, that loomed so large in his imagination, was a house built of the soft stone of the country, mellowed by time. It looked dismal enough from the street, and inside it was extremely plain; there was the usual provincial courtyard—chilly, prim, and neat; and the house itself was sober, almost convent-like, ...
— Two Poets - Lost Illusions Part I • Honore de Balzac
... the lightness of the latter emerged first. George Selwyn, hearing some people at Arthur's t'other night lamenting the distracted state of the country, joined in the discourse, with the whites of his eyes and his prim mouth, and fetching a deep sigh, said, "Yes, to be sure it is terrible! There is the Duke of Newcastle's faction, and there is Fox's faction, and there is Leicester-house! between two factions and one faction ...
— The Letters of Horace Walpole, Volume 2 • Horace Walpole
... Emmy entered the prim drawing-room where he had been waiting for her, the picture of pretty flower-like misery, her delicate cheeks white, a hunted look in her baby eyes. A great pang of pity went through the man, hurting him physically. She gave him a limp hand, and sat down on a ...
— Septimus • William J. Locke
... his fate is bad enough; a famous good breakfast his prim body of an aunt gave us. But harkee, Mr. Revelation, if the youth must die secundum arlem, let it be under a gentleman's directions, and my advice is, that you never trust that skeleton of yours among ...
— The Spy • James Fenimore Cooper
... superintending three or four young sempstresses who were making shirts for the gentlemen of the garrison. Emlyn was among them, and sprang up looking as if white seams were not half so congenial as nutting in the gulley, but she looked prettier than ever, as the little dark curls burst out of the prim white cap, she sniffed the flowers with ecstasy, and her eyes danced with delight that did Stead's heart good to see. He needed it, for to stand there hat in hand before so many women all staring at him filled him with utter confusion, so that he could scarcely see, and stumbled ...
— Under the Storm - Steadfast's Charge • Charlotte M. Yonge
... (as he jestingly called it) consisted of the girl, two spinsters (Prudence and Angelina Jedson), prim and doubtful of the world, and the young man who appeared to be considerably the worse for the alcohol he ...
— The Ragged Edge • Harold MacGrath
... Mrs. Black, nor did the meandering of the silver river through its narrow valley. But she took an honest pride in her own freshly painted white house with its vividly green blinds, and in her front yard with its prim rows of annuals and thrifty young dahlias. As for Miss Lydia Orr's girlish rapture over the view from her bedroom window, so long as it was productive of honestly earned dollars, Mrs. Black was disposed ...
— An Alabaster Box • Mary E. Wilkins Freeman and Florence Morse Kingsley
... covetous eyes on this snug corner, and her fingers itched to make it bright and cosy with chintz curtains and bowls of flowers, and a shelf or two of old china. The musty farm parlour, looking out on to a prim, cheerless garden imprisoned within high, blank walls, was not a room that lent itself readily either ...
— Beasts and Super-Beasts • Saki
... most indecent fooling; why every genius does not look out upon life and the world with the same eyes and find the same method to record what he sees. Some men can only marvel with Louis Stevenson at the wide contrast between the "prim obliterated polite face of life" and its "orgiastic foundations"; others are only reconciled to it by the humour in the contrast or by the pity invoked by its victims. What makes the genius is just the fact ...
— Nights - Rome, Venice, in the Aesthetic Eighties; London, Paris, in the Fighting Nineties • Elizabeth Robins Pennell
... seen the sea; and when the billowing fields and neat hedges changed to chalky downs, a sudden whiff of salt on the air blowing through a half-open window made her heart leap. She nearly cried, "The sea!" but controlled herself because of her prim fellow-passengers. ...
— The Guests Of Hercules • C. N. Williamson and A. M. Williamson
... walked with prim, small steps. She had a little three-cornered shawl on her shoulders, and an old-fashioned bonnet was tied under her chin. Her perfectly cold, serene face glanced now and then ...
— A Bunch of Cherries - A Story of Cherry Court School • L. T. Meade
... in the other stockings. Some of them Julia had no use for, such as silk for dresses, China crape shawls and fans, but they were just the things for his Grandmothers, who, after this, sat beside the fireplace, very prim and fine, in stiff silk gowns, with China crape shawls over their shoulders, and Chinese fans in their hands, and queer shoes on their feet. Julia liked their presents just as well as he did his own, and probably the ...
— The Pot of Gold - And Other Stories • Mary E. Wilkins
... Cushendhu had said about his family, and he on the last leg of the mountain. That he was his father's son puzzled him more than that he was his uncles' nephew, for there was little mention of his father in the house. At the dead man's name his prim Huguenot mother from Nantes pursed her mouth, and in her presence even his uncles were uncomfortable, those great, gallant men. All he knew was that his father, Colquitto Campbell, had been a great Gaelic poet, ...
— The Wind Bloweth • Brian Oswald Donn-Byrne
... coldly at the girl's vivid, colorless face, framed in its soft brown curls. Her own youth had been prim and narrow, and she felt that she almost hated this girl whose expressive features gave promise of remarkable personality and abundant joy ...
— Marjorie Dean High School Freshman • Pauline Lester
... trays looked somewhat out of place on the prim dressing-table, but Patty thought them a decided improvement. Then she unwrapped her mother's portrait, and placed it ...
— Patty Fairfield • Carolyn Wells
... swear, have "raked in golden barley," Like the great Fleet Street "Cock." Their jealous jeremiads, sour and snarly, PARTLET'S prim feelings shock. "Luck! Not at all: but the ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 98, January 25th, 1890 • Various
... looked round, and her eyes fell upon the last of the photograph-albums—the one she had yawned over. She picked it up, propped it on her knees, and, lying back against the cushions, turned the pages over. These were all children, prim children with tidy hair and solemn faces. Mollie stopped at the picture of a girl dressed in a wide-skirted, sprigged-muslin frock. Her hair fell in plump curls from beneath a broad-brimmed hat with long ribbons floating over one shoulder. ...
— The Happy Adventurers • Lydia Miller Middleton
... Then Lawrence looked up, gave a sickly smile, and bade the doctor an incoherent good-morning. Dr. Parley was sombre and impressive. He seldom smiled. An imperturbable gravity possessed him from the prim black-satin cockade on his three-cornered hat to the silver buckles on his square-toed shoes. In his right hand he carried a gold-headed cane which he wielded as solemnly as a pontiff might wield a sceptre, ...
— Second Book of Tales • Eugene Field
... have had experience of the older generation out West would have suspected the pride, the affection, the delight hiding behind Martha Skeffington's prim and formal welcome, or that it was not indifference but the unfailing instinct of a tender heart that made her say, after a very few minutes: "Adelaide, don't you think Dory'd like to ...
— The Second Generation • David Graham Phillips
... both like it. I feel a little unusual in it—but I'll settle down. I have been a trifle prim in dress." ...
— The Man Thou Gavest • Harriet T. Comstock
... back to it, smiled in enjoying recognition of the thin, high academic note, the prim finish of the inflection. It reminded her of a man she knew who "did" curates beautifully. Arnold walked past her with his quick, humble, clerical gait, and it amused her to think that he bent over Alicia's hand as if he would ...
— Hilda - A Story of Calcutta • Sara Jeannette Duncan
... while their women-folk cackled like human geese. "Wie schoen!" "Colossal!" "Entzueckend!" "Reizend!" Nothing but incessant and weary adjectives! I turned with relief to the "Barmherzige Schwester," a prim and silent little figure in neat blue cotton gown, black apron, and white kerchief pinned over her ...
— A War-time Journal, Germany 1914 and German Travel Notes • Harriet Julia Jephson
... suspense, came the telegram saying that Tom was wounded; and without so much as asking Miranda's leave, she packed her trunk and started for the South. She was in time to hold Tom's hand through hours of pain; to show him for once the heart of a prim New England girl when it is ablaze with love and grief; to put her arms about him so that he could have a home to die in, and that was all;—all, ...
— The Flag-raising • Kate Douglas Wiggin
... unconsciously laid aside her fan, lifted her mantilla from her head with both hands, and, drawing it around her shoulders and under her lifted chin, had crossed it over her bosom with a certain prim, automatic gesture, as if it had been the starched kerchief of some remote Puritan ancestress. With her arms still unconsciously crossed, she stooped rigidly, picked up her fan with three fingers, as if it had been a prayer-book, and, with a slight inclination of her bared head, with its accurately ...
— The Crusade of the Excelsior • Bret Harte
... continued to call him Father Madeleine, and that was what was most adapted to make him smile. In proportion as he mounted, throve, invitations rained down upon him. "Society" claimed him for its own. The prim little drawing-rooms on M. sur M., which, of course, had at first been closed to the artisan, opened both leaves of their folding-doors to the millionnaire. They made a thousand ...
— Les Miserables - Complete in Five Volumes • Victor Hugo
... might be no check upon the private conversation of her lord and lady, now came forward; and as she made her reverential curtsy, the Earl could not help smiling at the contrast which the extreme simplicity of her dress, and the prim demureness of her looks, made with a very pretty countenance and a pair of black eyes, that laughed in spite of their ...
— Kenilworth • Sir Walter Scott
... they came to was a little white house with green shutters and a slate roof. It stood in a prim little garden, and down each side of the neat path were large stone vases for flowers to grow in; but all ...
— The Phoenix and the Carpet • E. Nesbit
... of its weaknesses. But meanwhile, they overlook the fact, that not the woman Elizabeth, but the Virgin-queen, the royal heroine, is the theme of admiration. Not the petty virtues, the pretty sensibilities, the cheap charity, the prim decorum, which modern flatterers dwell upon, degrading royalty, while they palaver its possessor, but Britannia's sacred majesty, enshrined in chaste and lofty womanhood. Our ancestors paid their compliments to sex or ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction - Vol. 17, No. 483., Saturday, April 2, 1831 • Various
... main purpose of this book to unfold the wonderful story of the plant, and to fill in the details of the gap from tree to thread, and to trace the many changes through which the beautiful downy cotton wool passes before it arrives in the prim looking state of thread ready alike for the sewing machine or ...
— The Story of the Cotton Plant • Frederick Wilkinson
... had everything "fixed" by that hour, including herself presumably, for she had put on a gray dress which she usually wore when shopping in the county town, adding a prim collar and cuffs. A pearl-encircled brooch, the wedding gift of Seth, and a solitaire ring next to her wedding ring, with a locket containing her children's hair, accented her position as a proper wife and mother. At a quarter to nine she had finished tidying ...
— Trent's Trust and Other Stories • Bret Harte
... happened last night but I am afraid mother will tell him when she sees him to-day. It would not surprise me if they bury the hatchet and join hands and try to make a good little girl out of me. I think he is quite a prim young man. He spent the night at Striker's and I saw him there. I must say he is good-looking. He is so good-looking that nobody would ever suspect that he is related to me." She signed herself, "Your loving ...
— Viola Gwyn • George Barr McCutcheon
... trim, having a square of green lawn in front and another in back enclosed with a rail fence, gay flowers in the corners, rubber plants in pots on the porch, and grape arbor down one side of the back yard. Inside, rust-colored mohair overstuffed chairs and davenport look prim with white, crocheted doilies, a big clock with weights stands in one corner on an ornately carved table, and several enlarged framed photographs hang on the wall. The other two rooms are the combined kitchen and dining room, and a bedroom with a heatrola in it "to warm an ...
— Slave Narratives: A Folk History of Slavery in the United States From Interviews with Former Slaves: The Ohio Narratives • Works Projects Administration
... Harriet, do take off that bonnet, and let me see thee as thou art really; with thy hair about thy face. So." Peggy reached over and untied the bow as she spoke, then removed the prim little bonnet from her cousin's head. "How beautiful thee is," she commented gazing at the maiden with admiring eyes. "I think thee grows more so every time I see thee. That bonnet ...
— Peggy Owen and Liberty • Lucy Foster Madison
... therein the day's floral offerings. A sweet and crushed mixture they were, pansies, clove-pinks, mignonette, bleeding hearts, bachelors' buttons, all short stemmed and minus any saving touch of green, but true love offerings for all that. Wordless gifts most of them, prim little bunches, hot from tight clasping in chubby hands, shyly and swiftly deposited on "Teacher's desk" when the back of that divinity was turned. The blue bowl took kindly to them all, and as the girl's clever fingers settled and arranged the glowing chaos it seemed that with their crushed fragrance ...
— Up the Hill and Over • Isabel Ecclestone Mackay
... ungainly in her behaviour, and such a laughing hoyden! Pastorella had with him the allowance of being blameless; but what was that towards being praiseworthy? To be only innocent is not to be virtuous! He afterwards spoke so much against Mrs. Dipple's forehead, Mrs. Prim's mouth, Mrs. Dentifrice's teeth, and Mrs. Fidget's cheeks that she grew downright in love with him; for it is always to be understood that a lady takes all you detract from the rest of her sex to be a gift to her. In a word, things went so far that I was dismissed. ...
— Isaac Bickerstaff • Richard Steele |
