"Tentative" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... steel pen trade, which has since grown to such enormous dimensions, was only in a tentative condition. Josiah Mason, in conjunction with Perry, of The Morning Chronicle newspaper, was experimenting, and two brothers, named respectively John and William Mitchell, were actually making, by a tedious method, a fairly good article. They were assisted in their ...
— Personal Recollections of Birmingham and Birmingham Men • E. Edwards
... Hawthorne, who died in the second and fourth years of the war, respectively. The final and authoritative history of the struggle has not yet been written, and cannot be written for many years to come. Many partial and tentative accounts have, however, appeared, among which may be mentioned, on the northern side, {555} Horace Greeley's American Conflict, 1864-66; Vice-president Wilson's Rise and Fall of the Slave Power in America, and J. W. Draper's American Civil War, 1868-70; on the ...
— Brief History of English and American Literature • Henry A. Beers
... was still grey-hued, the world still colourless and mysterious, the house a long black bulk against a slowly lightening sky. Only the earliest sparrows were twittering; in the trees only the most wakeful rooks were uttering tentative caws. The outburst of joy and life and music which would attend the sun's rising was ...
— The Wild Geese • Stanley John Weyman
... the value of psychological principles in the interpretation of educational phenomena. But I also recognize that the science of psychology is a very young science, and that its data are not yet so well organized that it is safe to draw from them anything more than tentative hypotheses which must meet their final test in the crucible of practice. Some day, if we work hard enough, psychology will become a predictive science, just as mathematics and physics and chemistry and, to a certain extent, biology, are predictive sciences ...
— Craftsmanship in Teaching • William Chandler Bagley
... who was suddenly awakened at what he judged to be the middle of the night. And the manner of his awakening was this. He seemed to be dreaming that he was buying a new pair of shoes and, after having tried on several tentative pairs in a shop, the salesman, who was attired in the full regalia of a cowboy, gave Dick's left foot a sharp kick as if to indicate that he should remove the ...
— The Boy Ranchers in Death Valley - or Diamond X and the Poison Mystery • Willard F. Baker
... of the musicians now leaned together for a moment. The violins wailed in sad search for the accord, the assistant instrument less tentative. All at once the slack shoulders straightened up firmly, confidently, and then, their feet beating in unison upon the floor, their faces set, stern and relentless, the three musicians fell to the work and reeled off ...
— The Girl at the Halfway House • Emerson Hough
... turned out. Throughout the sultry hours he held his position, not daring to move his men save to drive back tentative advances on the part of the enemy, which he knew were designed to cover the movements of their artillery. He could not press his attack home, far less penetrate to the guns, and the range of his musketry would of course be hopelessly inadequate when Chand ...
— The Path to Honour • Sydney C. Grier
... quivering over the western wave in the falls of his tuneful voice. You shall hear it while the day is yet dark in the folds of the morning twilight,—a weak, faint, preliminary "whoo! whoo!" uncertain and tentative, then a trill or two of awakened assurance, and then, with a confident, courageous gush and glory of soul, he flings aside all minor considerations, and dashes con amore into the very middle of things. I am not musical, and cannot give you his notes ...
— Gala-days • Gail Hamilton
... resumed, gathering her draperies about her with a tentative hint of leave-taking: "I may go home and tell him that you will not ...
— Sanctuary • Edith Wharton
... intended to ask her several questions; but she was gone, and the road before them plainly led to the low-roofed cabin, and loosely built barn with straw and daylight showing through its cracks, the newly planted poplar-trees above the thatched earth cellar, and all the signs of a tentative home in ...
— In Exile and Other Stories • Mary Hallock Foote
... MM. Meilhac and Halevy wrote together was a book for M. Offenbach; and it was possibly the good fortune of this operetta which finally affirmed the partnership. Before the triumph of the Belle Helene in 1864 the collaboration had been tentative, as it were: after that it was as though the articles had been definitely ratified—not that either of the parties has not now and then indulged in outside speculations, trying a play alone or with an outsider, but this was without prejudice to the ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Vol. XXVI., December, 1880. • Various
... eyes intent upon the enchanted space within. He wore a suit of blue jeans evidently made in the domestic circle. He scanned each member of Congress who went in or out, and his expression was a combination of furtive eagerness and tentative appeal. ...
— In Connection with the De Willoughby Claim • Frances Hodgson Burnett
... her carriage one day to greet Dosia, and to ask her, with a tentative semblance of her old effusion, to come and make her a visit—an effusion which immediately died down into complete non-interest, on Dosia's polite refusal; and the incident was not especially heart-racking at the time, ...
— McClure's Magazine, Vol 31, No 2, June 1908 • Various
... what it might, peradventure, accomplish did seem to penetrate,[6] although ever so vaguely, the minds of those then in authority. It was organized under pressure from the West as was natural, and under circumstances to which meagre and tentative reference has already been made in the first volume of this work.[7] In the main, the circumstances were such as developed out of the persistent refusal of General McCulloch to cooeperate with ...
— The American Indian as Participant in the Civil War • Annie Heloise Abel
... Duplication of the Hexahedron, demonstrated geometrically to all the Universities and all the Academies of Europe.[2] There are innumerable verses, French and Italian, in all stages, occasionally attaining the finality of these lines, which appear in half a dozen tentative forms: ...
— Figures of Several Centuries • Arthur Symons
... more. The first movement expressed a sombre and virile struggle, the Romance a memory full of passionate but sad desire, followed by a slow uplifting, faltering and tentative, towards the distant dawn. Out of this a clear and melodious phrase developed itself with splendid modulations. The sentiment was very different from that which animated Bach's Adagio; it was more human, more earthly, more elegiacal. A breath of Beethoven ...
— The Child of Pleasure • Gabriele D'Annunzio
... one man for another—fruit of the ineradicable sex antagonism which so often colours the judgments men pass on women and women on men. Then had come love, against which he had striven in vain, and gradually, out of love, had grown a new tentative belief which the pitiful culmination of the Raynham episode had ...
— The Lamp of Fate • Margaret Pedler
... report a bill for the emancipation of all slaves in the District of Columbia. This measure prohibited the bringing of slaves into and selling them out of the District except in the case of those temporarily serving persons representing slave-holding States. It made provision for a tentative system of apprenticeship and the eventual emancipation of children born of slave mothers after January 1, 1850. It further provided for the manumission of slaves by the Government of the United States with compensation to the owners who might make application therefor, for the return of fugitive ...
— The Journal of Negro History, Volume 7, 1922 • Various
... already made up a tentative list. He named four: first, Farrell Kennedy, who was in town, and said nobody should go if he didn't; Frank Elpaso, the Texan; the Englishman, Tommie Meggeson; and Wickwire, if he could be located—any one of them, Lefever knew, could ...
— Nan of Music Mountain • Frank H. Spearman
... after careful study of all data attainable, may be considerably increased. The mere collection of facts, however, cannot be prosecuted to advantage without predetermined rules of judgment, nor can they be classified at all without the adoption of some principle which involves a tentative theory. More than a generation ago Baader noticed that scientific observers only accumulated great masses of separate facts without establishing more connection between them than an arbitrary and imperfect classification; ...
— Sign Language Among North American Indians Compared With That Among Other Peoples And Deaf-Mutes • Garrick Mallery
... Dick received his managers and foremen. But not for a quarter of an hour after that did he get rid of his show manager, Mr. Pitts, with the tentative make-up of the catalogue for the first annual stock-sale on the ranch. By that time Mr. Bonbright was on hand with his sheaf of telegrams, and the lunch-hour was at hand ere ...
— The Little Lady of the Big House • Jack London
... buildings that raised themselves here and there out of the huddling bazaar looked trivial, childish enterprises in the simple revelation of the morning. A cold silence was abroad, which a crow now and then vainly tried to disturb with a note of tentative enterprise, forced, premature. It announced that the sun would probably rise, but nothing more. In the little dark shops of the wood-carvers an occasional indefinite figure moved, groping among last night's tools, or an old woman in ...
— The Pool in the Desert • Sara Jeannette Duncan
... anything else. She added, "Everything is at sixes and sevens in the flat. There wouldn't be standing-room." A sudden thought flashed upon her, which, because it was sudden and in keeping with her character, she put into tentative words. "You're more at home here than anywhere else. You were almost born here. You've played about here ever since you were a child. You first met Peter here. He proposed to you here, and you rejected him here. He's proposed here again, and ...
— The Daughter of the Storage - And Other Things in Prose and Verse • William Dean Howells
... She made tentative efforts at remonstrating with him. Her father, whom she saw now and then, said that Edward was much too generous to his tenants; the wives of his brother officers remonstrated with her in private; his large subscriptions made it difficult for their husbands to keep up with ...
— The Good Soldier • Ford Madox Ford
... morning I had a tentative plan for stirring him to action. I was elaborating it on the way downtown in my electric. It shows how badly Anita was crippling my brain, that not until I was almost at my office did it occur to me: "That was a tremendous luxury Roebuck indulged ...
— Ainslee's, Vol. 15, No. 6, July 1905 • Various
... plans. He heard the echo of Fadeaway's sneering laugh in the fury of the wind. He told himself that he had been duped and that he deserved it. Lacking physical strength to carry him through to a place of tentative safety, he gave up, and credited his sudden regret to true repentance rather than to weakness. He would return to the Concho, knowing that his brother would forgive him. He wept as he thought of his attitude of the repentant ...
— Sundown Slim • Henry Hubert Knibbs
... new mission to Austria; and Mr. Hutchison had scarcely entered the Turkish department of the Bebek Seminary, when the failure of his wife's health required a return to the United States. The mission of the Rev. James L. Merrick to the Persian Mohammedans, in 1834, was little more than a tentative exploration of the ...
— History Of The Missions Of The American Board Of Commissioners For Foreign Missions To The Oriental Churches, Volume II. • Rufus Anderson
... it often happens that even where our touch seems to ourselves delicate and precise, a mind not initiated in our self-chosen method of abbreviation finds only impenetrable obscurity. It is then in the tentative condition of mind just indicated that the spirit of art comes in, and enables a man so to clothe his thought in lucid words and fitting imagery that strangers may know, when they see it, all that it is, and how he came by it. Although, therefore, the praise of friends ...
— Recollections of Dante Gabriel Rossetti - 1883 • T. Hall Caine
... but I believe that the road to love is more swiftly traversed. Of what avail are words spoken with the lips when hearts listen and respond? What sweetness in the glance of a woman who begins to attract you! At first it seems as though everything that passes between you is timid and tentative, but soon there is born a strange joy, and echo answers the voice of love; the thrill of a dual life is felt. What a touch! What a strange attraction! And when love is sure of itself and recognizes fraternity ...
— The Confession of a Child of The Century • Alfred de Musset
... tentative question which she did not understand, they returned to the question of her dress, which holds such an important place in the entire interrogatory. If she were allowed to hear mass as she wished, having been all this time deprived of religious ordinances, did not she think it would be ...
— Jeanne d'Arc - Her Life And Death • Mrs.(Margaret) Oliphant
... as if to himself rather than to us, and he accompanied them abstractedly with tentative, prelusive chords, which gradually grew into the most strangely moving music I have ...
— A Day with Felix Mendelssohn Bartholdy • George Sampson
... on social questions which was initiated or endured by the senate, shows the tentative attitude adopted by the nobility in their dealings with the people, and proves either a statesmanlike view of the needs of the situation or the entire lack of a proud consciousness of their own immunity from attack. Even had they possessed the ...
— A History of Rome, Vol 1 - During the late Republic and early Principate • A H.J. Greenidge
... A tentative knock at the door. The figure on the bed did not stir. Another knock, louder this time. Emma McChesney sat up with a start. She shivered as she became conscious of the icy December air pouring into the little room. She rose, walked to the window, closed it with a bang, and opened ...
— Roast Beef, Medium • Edna Ferber
... his tentative romance. She had passed his window and disappeared into the fog, and there was a reasonable doubt of her ever returning from it. The Singer in the Fog; thus he would write it down in his book of memories and sensibly turn the page. Once down-town he would countermand his order, and ...
— The Lure of the Mask • Harold MacGrath
... of pink hawthorn hedges we were in the midst of young forest trees. Why is it that a forest is always a surprise in France? Is it that we have such a respect for French thrift, that a real forest seems a waste of timber? There are forests and forests; this one seemed almost a stripling in its tentative delicacy, compared to the mature splendor of Fontainebleau, for example. This forest had the virility of a young savage; it was neither dense nor vast; yet, in contrast to the ribbony grain fields, and to ...
— In and Out of Three Normady Inns • Anna Bowman Dodd
... music room was near enough for her to hear and become familiar with the works of the best composers—at least to acquire the familiarity that passed for appreciation in the social world in which she was vaguely trying to set a tentative and aspiring foot. She absorbed the educating influence of art wares, of costly and dainty fabrics, of adornments that are ...
— The Trimmed Lamp and Others • O Henry
... of weed attacked a city you utter an absurdity. I think everyone was aware of the fantastic discrepancy between statement of the event and the event itself. So innocent and ridiculous the grass looked as it made its first tentative thrust at the urban nerves; the green blades sloped forward like some prettily arranged but unimaginative corsage upon the concrete bosom of the street. You could not believe those fragile seeming strands would resist the impress of a careless boot, much less the entire arsenal of military ...
— Greener Than You Think • Ward Moore
... to this young American lady; and yet she would not admit to herself that he was any way in the wrong. She would entertain no suspicion of him. She would have no jealousy in her heart, for how could jealousy exist with a perfect faith? And so she had repeatedly reasoned herself out of these tentative feelings, and resolved that she would do neither her husband nor Mrs. Lorraine the injustice of being vexed with them. So it was now. What more natural than that Frank should recommend to any friend the duets ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Vol. XII. No. 30. September, 1873 • Various
... Lord Warburton her own duty was to hold her tongue. It was difficult to interrogate without appearing to suggest; Pansy's supreme simplicity, an innocence even more complete than Isabel had yet judged it, gave to the most tentative enquiry something of the effect of an admonition. As she knelt there in the vague firelight, with her pretty dress dimly shining, her hands folded half in appeal and half in submission, her soft eyes, raised and fixed, full of the seriousness of the situation, ...
— The Portrait of a Lady - Volume 2 (of 2) • Henry James
... suitors, who had brought her perhaps more glory than any other. She was impatient to be rid of him. Like her mother Earth, having occupied her time for lo! these several years in the building of an ideal from such unpromising materials as were then at hand, she was ready to sweep those tentative makings—confessed failures now that she found the type she really wanted—swiftly, ruthlessly to the ...
— Judith of the Cumberlands • Alice MacGowan
... emancipated our masses from the tutelage of the cacique: in short, all the achievements of democracy of which we are so justly proud would not yet be beautiful realities and we would not be able to enjoy their mature fruits as we now do, if we had been compelled to feel our way and make many tentative steps instead of at once entering fully upon our social and political life. We have to move quickly and anticipate the aspirations of the feminine masses, which are as yet vague, in order to save us the agitation which otherwise is sure to come and the justice of which ...
— The Woman and the Right to Vote • Rafael Palma
... separate trial of juvenile delinquents was strongly advocated by the council. Miss Clark and Mr. C. H. Goode were particularly keen on the introduction of Children's Courts. In this reform South Australia led the world, and in the new Act of 1896, after six years of tentative work, it became compulsory to try offenders under 18 at the Children's Court in the city and suburbs, and in the Magistrate's room in the country. The methods of organization and control vary in the different States of the ...
— An Autobiography • Catherine Helen Spence
... no satisfactory response to this tentative remark; but it was from no objection any longer in her mind to such a relation in the abstract. She had not yet at all consented with herself to abandon the faith of her father, but she did not see, and indeed it were hard for any one in her ...
— Paul Faber, Surgeon • George MacDonald
... could not but admire her beauty and her readiness, thought that her tone was a little too hard, and that in her excess of aplomb she pushed self-possession to the verge of self-assertion. Rosy, in fact, entered society not with the tentative step and slow advance of one who cautiously feels an unaccustomed way, but by a single confident and intuitive leap. As she stood there beside her mother, dressed in a pale yellow gown and playing carelessly with her bunch of red roses, she shifted any ...
— With the Procession • Henry B. Fuller
... totally incurious. He had lived a sort of animal life of food and sleep, and later on of small tentative excursions around the room on legs that shook when he walked. The snows came and almost covered the cabin, and David had read a great deal, and talked at intervals. David had tried to fill up the gap in his mind. That was how he learned that David was his father's brother, and ...
— The Breaking Point • Mary Roberts Rinehart
... Boer leaders had made a succession of tentative suggestions, each of which had been put aside by the British Government. Their first had been that they should merely concede those points which had been at issue at the beginning of the war. This was set aside. The second was that they should be allowed to consult their friends in Europe. This ...
— The Great Boer War • Arthur Conan Doyle
... of this tentative synopsis, the playwright consulted his watch. Already the incident of the condemnable bandbox had eaten up much invaluable time. He would see himself doomed to unending perdition if he would submit to ...
— The Bandbox • Louis Joseph Vance
... this nor that of those beings divine, But each and the whole—an essence of all the Nine; With tentative foot she neared to my halting-place, A pensive smile on her sweet, small, ...
— Poems of the Past and the Present • Thomas Hardy
... friend Byles the butcher was plainly audible tapping at the back door. So it had to go into the world, one part (as it does seem to me) alive, one part merely galvanised: no work, only an essay. For a man of tentative method, and weak health, and a scarcity of private means, and not too much of that frugality which is the artist's proper virtue, the days of sinecures and patrons look very golden: the days of professional literature very hard. ...
— Letters of Robert Louis Stevenson - Volume 2 • Robert Louis Stevenson
... manner was doubtful and unpleasant, the atmosphere of the room was chilled, and John said in a tentative manner, "I will now ride to Hatton Hall. Mother is expecting me, I know. Come with me, Jane, and I will order the victoria. It is a lovely afternoon for ...
— The Measure of a Man • Amelia Edith Huddleston Barr
... career in his professional capacity as a Reader that we have here to do. Until he had formally and avowedly assumed that position, his labours in this way were, as a matter of course, in no respect whatever systematised. They were uncertain, and in one sense, as the sequel shewed, purely tentative or preliminary. They yielded a world of delight, however, and did a world of good at the same time; while they were, unconsciously to himself, preparing the way effectually—that is, by ripening his powers and perfecting his skill ...
— Charles Dickens as a Reader • Charles Kent
... to picnics, or of my concocting prize poems, my mental life at Oxford was far from being a life of idleness. On the contrary, from my second year of residence onward I was constantly engaged in tentative sketches of a book in which I hoped some day to give a comprehensive picture of the moral and intellectual condition to which my Oxford experiences had by that time raised or reduced me. That book was The New Republic, with regard to which ...
— Memoirs of Life and Literature • W. H. Mallock
... Her first tentative efforts at going to the field were cautious and beset with difficulties. Through the long Peninsula campaign as each transport brought its load of suffering men, with the mud of the Chickahominy and the gore of battle baked hard upon them like the shells of turtles, ...
— Woman's Work in the Civil War - A Record of Heroism, Patriotism, and Patience • Linus Pierpont Brockett
... phrase of "the swinish multitude," applied to mobs, was then in every body's mouth; and, accordingly, after my brother had recovered from his first astonishment at this audacious mutiny, he made us several sweeping bows that looked very much like tentative rehearsals of a sweeping fusillade, and then addressed us in a very brief speech, of which we could distinguish the words pearls and swinish multitude, but uttered in a very low key, perhaps out of some lurking consideration ...
— Autobiographic Sketches • Thomas de Quincey
... mystic freemasonry between the discriminating guests of the Lotus. Perhaps they were drawn one to another by the fact of their common good fortune in discovering the acme of summer resorts in a Broadway hotel. Words delicate in courtesy and tentative in departure from formality passed between the two. And, as if in the expedient atmosphere of a real summer resort, an acquaintance grew, flowered and fructified on the spot as does the mystic plant of the conjuror. For a few moments they stood on a balcony upon ...
— The Voice of the City • O. Henry
... progress of the work, and was consulted about several small changes from the original, tentative plans. He agreed to them, and then, as it was only a question of waiting until his craft was done, he decided to call on some of his friends ...
— Dick Hamilton's Airship - or, A Young Millionaire in the Clouds • Howard R. Garis
... herds. This contributed much to his material support and quickened his social and intellectual movement. After a time, when he remained in one place a sufficient time to harvest a short crop, he began agriculture in a tentative way, while his chief concern was yet with flocks and herds. He soon became permanently settled, and learned more fully the art of agriculture, and then entered the permanent agricultural stage. It was during this period that he made the most rapid advances in {39} ...
— History of Human Society • Frank W. Blackmar
... available for great depths. Moreover, the proper location of a shaft so as to work economically extension of the ore-bodies is a matter of no certainty, and therefore shafts of speculative mines are tentative in any event. ...
— Principles of Mining - Valuation, Organization and Administration • Herbert C. Hoover
... spinsterdom—or with the divorce habit and plutocratic iniquity in general, or with the probable benefits of converting clergymen to Christianity, or with how much more than she knows a desirable mother will tell her children—finds the book's tentative explorer, just now, amply equipped with prejudices, whether acquired by second thought or second hand, concerning the book's topic. As endurability goes, reading the book rises forthwith almost to the level of an afternoon-call where there is gossip about the neighbors ...
— The Certain Hour • James Branch Cabell
... maiden's hand in marriage, to a rich and handsome suitor; a valuable franchise to a rich corporation, by an alderman; absolution to an impenitent king, by a priest, and so forth. Refusals are graded in a descending scale of finality thus: the refusal absolute, the refusal condition, the refusal tentative and the refusal feminine. The last is called by ...
— The Devil's Dictionary • Ambrose Bierce
... New Comedy arose out of a mere negation, the abolition, viz., of the old political freedom, we may easily conceive that there would be an interval of fluctuating, and tentative efforts to supply its place, before a new comic form could be developed and fully established. Hence there may have been many kinds of the Middle Comedy, many intermediate gradations, between the Old and the New; and this is the opinion of some men of ...
— Lectures on Dramatic Art - and Literature • August Wilhelm Schlegel trans John Black
... illustrated by the brilliant researches of Halley on cometary orbits. It necessitated, however, a long train of tedious calculations, and, in consequence, was not much used, astronomers generally preferring to attain the same end by a tentative process. In the year 1780, Laplace communicated to the Academy of Sciences an analytical method for determining the elements of a comet's orbit. This method has been extensively employed in France. Indeed, previously to the appearance of Olber's method, about the ...
— Biographies of Distinguished Scientific Men • Francois Arago
... to be. He whose talk at Kelmscott had been of ‘Blessed Damozels’ and ‘Roman Widows’ and the like, talked now of the wanderings of Ulysses, of ‘The Ancient Mariner,’ of ‘Sir Patrick Spens,’ and even of ‘Arthur Gordon Pym’ and ‘Allan Gordon.’ And on hearing a friend recite some tentative verses on a great naval battle, he looked about for sea subjects too; and it was now, and not later, as is generally supposed, that he really thought of the subject of ‘The White Ship,’ a subject ...
— Old Familiar Faces • Theodore Watts-Dunton
... by law, but they lived on the lands of Arii and Raatira, and were seldom evicted. They had the fruits of their labor with a tithe or so for their masters; they left to their children their accumulations, tentative, but actual, and their service was pleasant; more in the nature of gifts than rent. The Manahune could not rise above his caste except by the rare nomination of the king, but they could become Teuteu Arii, or servants of an Arii, and might ...
— Mystic Isles of the South Seas. • Frederick O'Brien
... one another with that detached confidence which proved they were mutually unknown. I also, but without approaching them, stared in the direction of the Green. I saw nothing but the narrow street which widened to the Park. Some few people were standing in tentative attitudes, and all looking in the one direction. As I turned from them homewards I received an impression of silence and ...
— The Insurrection in Dublin • James Stephens
... scarcely hearing the girl's words. At her announcement of going to the island he began to make tentative plans to accompany her. There might be a lot he could do. And she sure needed help. He wondered if he could offer his assistance ...
— El Diablo • Brayton Norton
... sent around to the shipyard. My boys'll fix it up." He made a note on another piece of paper. "If we live through this, I'm going to have a couple of supra-atmosphere ships in service on this planet.... Now, general; I have a tentative set-up. We're going to need the Elmoran for patrol work south and east of Konkrook, and the Gaucho and Bushranger to the north and north-east, based on Kankad's. We'll keep the Aldebaran at Kankad's, ...
— Ullr Uprising • Henry Beam Piper
... tentative step forward and managed not to fall. He stepped back again and looked at Bill scornfully. "I wasn't even in the gutter," he said. ...
— The Impossibles • Gordon Randall Garrett
... recommend me to the Times Square subway station. You get into any train with that delicious sensation of breathless uncertainty as to where exactly you are going to be conveyed. To approach an official is sheer folly, as any tentative question is quickly calculated to work him up into a frenzy of rage and violence, while to ask your fellow passengers is equally useless as they are generally as dazed as you are. The great thing is to keep calm and ...
— Terribly Intimate Portraits • Noel Coward
... Timid tentative rifts and wedges of blue had ventured back into the cold gray sky, and a stout-hearted robin or two heralded spring. One morning coming from mass I saw in the thin watery sunshine the painted wings of the Red Admiral flash by, and I welcomed him as one welcomes the long-missed ...
— Slippy McGee, Sometimes Known as the Butterfly Man • Marie Conway Oemler
... take up the foil with a tentative turn of the wrist, lunging at thin air. His zest for the game has gone; but the skill lingers, and at times he is tempted to show the younger blades a pass or two. These were veteran fencers with a skill of their own, which ...
— With Edged Tools • Henry Seton Merriman
... slowly but surely being forced to lay down what she had prized most in her womanhood and another who, slowly but surely, also became aware that hers was the prize in her turn, and thrust forward a tentative hand to grasp it. If I am at all right in this notion, then it is plain that feelings slight and faint, although not non-existent in ordinary homes, might be intensified in such a family as ours, and that a new and great impulse would have been imparted to them by such ...
— The King's Mirror • Anthony Hope
... apparent that preparations were in progress for an event of importance. Paperhangers and cleaners came and went, consultations were held daily concerning new rugs and curtains. Miss Enid and Miss Isobel gave tentative orders and Madam promptly countermanded them. Workmen were engaged and dismissed and reengaged. The door to the room at the head of the stairs, which he knew to be Eleanor's, now stood open, revealing ...
— Quin • Alice Hegan Rice
... her; she played with them, capriciously, touching one here, one there, with tentative finger to see them explode in a ...
— Barbarians • Robert W. Chambers
... free by 1826, and Greece achieved complete independence in 1830, when the Russian troops, in order to coerce the Turks, occupied part of Bulgaria and advanced as far as Adrianople. Bulgaria, being nearer to and more easily repressed by Constantinople, had to wait, and tentative revolts made about this time were put down with much bloodshed and were followed by wholesale emigrations of Bulgars into Bessarabia and importations of Tartars and Kurds into the vacated districts. The Crimean War and the short-sighted ...
— The Balkans - A History Of Bulgaria—Serbia—Greece—Rumania—Turkey • Nevill Forbes, Arnold J. Toynbee, D. Mitrany, D.G. Hogarth
... their intelligence displayed itself in realms to which he was almost disconcertingly a stranger. Even Madame Belot, holding a stalwart, brown-fisted baby on her arm, could comment on her husband's work with a discerning aptness of phrase which made his own appreciation seem very trite and tentative. He might be putting up with the Belots, but it was quite as likely, he perceived, that they might be putting up with him. He realized, in this world of the Belots, the significance, the laboriousness, the high level of vitality, and ...
— Tante • Anne Douglas Sedgwick
... description I can give of its essential aim, so far as I have seen the processes (which were tentative and initial), is this. The masses represented by filled bookcases are set one in front of another; and, in order that access may be had as it is required, they are set upon trams inserted in the ...
— On Books and the Housing of Them • William Ewart Gladstone
... fiction in the United States were tentative and lacking in originality. At the close of the eighteenth century, Charles Brockden Brown began the career of the first American novelist with "Wieland." His pecuniary necessities and the slight encouragement offered at that time to American authors ...
— A History of English Prose Fiction • Bayard Tuckerman
... Rosalie was her obviously absolute unconsciousness of the fact that it was entirely natural and proper that her resources should be in her husband's hands. He had, indeed, even in these early days, made a tentative effort or so in the form of a suggestive speech; he had given her openings to give him an opening to put things on a practical basis, but she had never had the intelligence to see what he was aiming at, and he had found himself almost ...
— The Shuttle • Frances Hodgson Burnett
... education, will be amended and not repealed. The endowment of the brewers will continue, and my Lords Bass, Burton and the rest will merely await future opportunities to plunder the British public. In short, little constructive legislation, even of that mild and tentative character one might expect from a Liberal party, made up of capitalistic units can be expected after the ten years of corrupt and extravagant rule of ...
— Mother Earth, Vol. 1 No. 1, March 1906 • Various
... the day there had crept, with the approach of evening, that heartening crispness which heralds the advent of autumn. Already, in the valley by the ninth tee, some of the trees had begun to try on strange colours, in tentative experiment against the coming of nature's annual fancy dress ball, when the soberest tree casts off its workaday suit of green and plunges into a riot of reds and yellows. On the terrace in front of the club-house an occasional withered leaf fluttered down on the table ...
— The Clicking of Cuthbert • P. G. Wodehouse
... Already Sir Hamilton Seymour, the British Ambassador at St. Petersburg, had been sounded by the Czar. It was on that occasion that Nicholas uttered the historic phrase that "the sick man was dying," meaning the Ottoman Empire. It was then, too, that tentative offers were made to England to let her take Egypt and the island of Candia, provided Russia could make herself mistress of ...
— A History of the Nineteenth Century, Year by Year - Volume Two (of Three) • Edwin Emerson
... the moment, the subject dropped, but the imp of mischief still flickered defiantly in the golden-brown eyes, and when, after dinner was over, Maria brought in the coffee, Ann threw out a tentative remark which instantly achieved its nefarious purpose of loosening the springs of ...
— The Vision of Desire • Margaret Pedler
... distinguished from the sex-glands or gonads themselves, are known as secondary sex characters. To put our statement in the paragraph above in another form, the primary and secondary sex do not always correspond in all details. We shall find as we proceed that our original tentative definition of sex as the ability to produce in the one case sperm, in the other eggs, is sometimes difficult to apply. What shall we say of a sterile individual, which produces neither? The problem is especially embarrassing when the primary and secondary sex do not correspond, ...
— Taboo and Genetics • Melvin Moses Knight, Iva Lowther Peters, and Phyllis Mary Blanchard
... bring settlers in a rush; and to this end they published proposals in England and Barbados offering lands on liberal terms and providing for a large degree of popular self-government. A group of Barbadians promptly made a tentative settlement at the mouth of the Cape Fear River; but finding the soil exceedingly barren, they almost as promptly scattered to the four winds. Meanwhile in the more southerly region nothing was done beyond ...
— American Negro Slavery - A Survey of the Supply, Employment and Control of Negro Labor as Determined by the Plantation Regime • Ulrich Bonnell Phillips
... "At the proper time I should be prepared to bring you evidence that tentative proposals were made by Japan to both England and France, asking what would be their attitude, should she provide them with half a million men and undertake transport, if at the conclusion of the war she desired a settlement ...
— The Pawns Count • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... somewhat less than the amounts here given. (2) Children as a rule may be considered as having "moderate muscular exercise," and it may easily be understood that the 14-year-old boy eats as much as his father who is engaged in business or professional occupation, both requiring, according to the tentative standard, 0.8 of the food needed by a man with moderate muscular work. (3) It is not assumed that any housewife will find it convenient to follow exactly the proportions suggested in the menus. The purpose is to show her about what amounts and proportions of food materials ...
— Public School Domestic Science • Mrs. J. Hoodless
... exercises over the high school, so that few of them do work that fits for advanced training or is thought best by technical faculties. In most of its current narrow forms, manual training will prove to be historically, as it is educationally, extemporized and tentative, and will soon be superseded by broader methods and be forgotten and obsolete, or cited only as a low point of departure from which future progress ...
— Youth: Its Education, Regimen, and Hygiene • G. Stanley Hall
... did not immediately respond to the lady's advances. They were probably too shy, too tentative, to attract Rochester's attention. It is probable, also, that there were plenty of beautiful women about the Court, more mature, more practised in the arts of coquetry than Frances, and very likely not at all 'blate'—as Carr and his master would put it—in showing themselves ...
— She Stands Accused • Victor MacClure
... of an Australian literature which, though delightfully redolent of the land whence it sprang, nevertheless possesses the universal note which makes it a truly human product. Many years ago one of the most gifted of Irish-Australian singers, "Eva"' of the Nation, voiced a tentative plaint: ...
— The Glories of Ireland • Edited by Joseph Dunn and P.J. Lennox
... Great Britain marched since the Spring of last year—how much nearer is she to the end? One can but answer such questions in the most fragmentary and tentative way, relying for the most part on the opinions and information of those who know, those who are in the van of action, at home and abroad, but also on one's own personal impressions of an incomparable scene. And every day, ...
— Towards The Goal • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... is seldom anything shy and tentative, anything obscure and gradual about the approaches of the London Spring. Spring is always in a hurry there, for she knows that she has but a short time before her; she has to make an impression and make it at once; so she works careless of delicacies and shades, ...
— Superseded • May Sinclair
... tentative step forward. In winter he was welcomed always to the fire, but in summer they said he brought in flies. Now no one seemed to notice him, though he was a big fellow and red. He took another step into the room, his eyes fastened longingly on the boy's flushed face. Suddenly his long tail ...
— Frank of Freedom Hill • Samuel A. Derieux
... receive much wider use. Following along somewhat the same pattern, suggested schedules have been proposed for the hickories and butternuts. These should receive further consideration and adoption, if approved at least on a tentative basis. A schedule for Persian walnuts is very much needed as indicated by the recent contest in which confusion occurred related to there being no recognized standards of evaluation. With the Persian ...
— Northern Nut Growers Association Report of the Proceedings at the 43rd Annual Meeting - Rockport, Indiana, August 25, 26 and 27, 1952 • Various
... is to intermediate between the modern laboratory psychology and the problems of economics: the psychological experiment is systematically to be placed at the service of commerce and industry. So far we have only scattered beginnings of the new doctrine, only tentative efforts and disconnected attempts which have started, sometimes in economic, and sometimes in psychological, quarters. The time when an exact psychology of business life will be presented as a closed and perfected system lies very far distant. But the ...
— Psychology and Industrial Efficiency • Hugo Muensterberg
... also told a different story from one he had told before to a certain official who now was present. He seemed rather mixed on a number of points, and this is all the more significant because he had been heartily afraid of being adjudged insane. Our diagnosis at this time was purely tentative as far as exact diagnosis was concerned. We stated that in our opinion he was an aberrational type and the practical point was that he should neither be allowed to go out in the community, nor be sent to a penitentiary, but rather to an institution for observation and perhaps for long detention. ...
— Pathology of Lying, Etc. • William and Mary Healy
... with the charm of untouched ingenuousness—that exquisite moment (a moment, and no more) when simplest thought and simplest word seek each other unconsciously, and blend in sweetest music. At four years old Hughie had forgotten his primitive language. The father regretted many a pretty turn of tentative speech, which he was wont to hear with love's merriment. If a toy were lost, a little voice might be heard saying, 'Where has that gone now to?' And when it was found again—'There is it!' After a tumble one day, Hughie was cautious in running. 'I shall ...
— The Whirlpool • George Gissing
... A partial and tentative programme of our Annual Meeting has been prepared. Times are provided for open discussion or the "free parliament." But it is deemed necessary to secure some able writers and speakers to prepare reports and deliver addresses on ...
— The American Missionary — Vol. 48, No. 10, October, 1894 • Various
... his former hero since the meeting by the model of Jerusalem. Having inadvertently witnessed Phillotson's tentative courtship of Sue in the lane there had grown up in the younger man's mind a curious dislike to think of the elder, to meet him, to communicate in any way with him; and since Phillotson's success in obtaining at least her promise had become known to Jude, he had frankly ...
— Jude the Obscure • Thomas Hardy
... Women, squatting in front of their huts, began to pound away at the rice or maize that would form the evening meal, girls were collecting their water pots preparatory to a walk down to the river, and enterprising goats made tentative forays through gaps in the ill-kept fences of neighbouring garden plots; their hurried retreats showed that here at least someone was keeping alert and wakeful vigil. Behind a hut perched on a steep hillside, just opposite to the rest-house, two boys were splitting wood ...
— The Unbearable Bassington • Saki
... increasing the efficiency of weapons and of all the appliances of war, as well as for adding to the comfort and securing the health of the soldier. Every imaginable instrument of usefulness in any of the operations of the camp, or the march, or the field of battle, has been the subject of tentative ingenuity, such as none but Yankees could display. The musket, the carbine, the pistol, have been constructed upon numberless plans, apparently with every possible modification. The cartridge has been covered with copper, impervious to water, instead of paper, and has its own fulminate attached ...
— Continental Monthly, Vol. III, No IV, April 1863 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy • Various
... of Mr. Brennan pere, but a commander cannot well accept the advice of his subordinates. But Nathan was once more beyond the power of speech, and it was Morris Mogilewsky who asked for and obtained permission to walk on God's green earth. With little spurts of running and tentative jumps to test its spring, they crossed Peacock Lawn to the grateful shade of the trees at its further edge and there disposed themselves upon the ground and ate their luncheon. Nathan Spiderwitz waited until Sadie had finished and then entrusted ...
— Little Citizens • Myra Kelly
... occurs) is said to be vitiated by ambiguity.[1689] By ascertainment (of faults and merits), called Sankhya, is meant the establishment, by elimination, of faults or merits (in premises and conclusions), adopting tentative meanings.[1690] Krama or weighing the relative strength or weakness of the faults or merits (ascertained by the above process), consists in settling the propriety of the priority or subsequence of the words employed in a sentence. This is the meaning attached to the word Krama ...
— The Mahabharata of Krishna-Dwaipayana Vyasa, Volume 3 - Books 8, 9, 10, 11 and 12 • Unknown
... Nothing can here be added to the tentative conjectures of Foerster regarding the nature of these ...
— Four Arthurian Romances - "Erec et Enide", "Cliges", "Yvain", and "Lancelot" • Chretien de Troyes
... window-bench; four men, including Charley Jake the hedge- carpenter, Elijah New the parish-clerk, and John Pitcher, a neighbouring dairyman, the shepherd's father-in-law, lolled in the settle; a young man and maid, who were blushing over tentative pourparlers on a life-companionship, sat beneath the corner-cupboard; and an elderly engaged man of fifty or upward moved restlessly about from spots where his betrothed was not to the spot where she was. Enjoyment was pretty general, and ...
— Wessex Tales • Thomas Hardy
... more uncivilised than he is. And I saw that very thing happen to him, four or five weeks ago, out on Goolumbulla." Thompson paused experimentally, then continued, "Yes, I saw him put-through, till he must have felt a lot too tall in proportion to his cleverness." Another tentative pause. "But it took the very pick of uncivilisation to do it." A prolonged pause, while Thompson languidly filled and lit his pipe. Still the dignified indifference of the camp remained unruffled. Thompson might tell his yarn, or keep it to himself. ...
— Such is Life • Joseph Furphy
... at. Socrates maintains his character of a 'know nothing;' but the boys have already learned the lesson which he is unable to teach them, and they are free from the conceit of knowledge. (Compare Chrm.) The dialogue is what would be called in the language of Thrasyllus tentative or inquisitive. The subject is continued in the Phaedrus and Symposium, and treated, with a manifest reference to the Lysis, in the eighth and ninth books of the Nicomachean Ethics of Aristotle. As in other writings of Plato (for example, ...
— Lysis • Plato
... intellect, which, previously to the weighing and measuring of this or that, begins by assaying the weights, measures, and scales themselves; that fulfilment of the heaven-descended 'nosce teipsum', in respect to the intellective part of man, which was commenced in a sort of tentative broadcast way by Lord Bacon in his 'Novum Organum', and brought to a systematic completion by Immanuel Kant in his 'Kritik der reinen Vernunft, der Urtheilskrajt, und ...
— The Literary Remains Of Samuel Taylor Coleridge • Edited By Henry Nelson Coleridge
... sufficiently to write to Mr Brandram, he set out, accompanied by Antonio, "determined to trust, as usual, in the Almighty and to venture." Physical ailments, however, did not in any way cause him to forget why he had come to Santander, and before leaving he made tentative arrangements with the booksellers of the town as to what they should do in the event of his being able to send ...
— The Life of George Borrow • Herbert Jenkins
... was a most intimate presence to the Man. It grew in the very midst of his Garden of Eden. It had a magical virtue, which his tentative science could only explain by chance analogies and assimilations. Attractive and beloved and worshipped by reason of its many gifts to mankind—its grateful shelter, its abounding fruits, its timber, and other invaluable products—why should it not become the natural emblem of the female, to whom ...
— Pagan & Christian Creeds - Their Origin and Meaning • Edward Carpenter
... to look after you, anyhow; but I shouldn't care to have to work for both of us." This was tentative. ...
— The Works of Rudyard Kipling One Volume Edition • Rudyard Kipling
... unceasing delight. Julia had been bewildered and heartsick when she turned to The Alexander, but she had never in her life known such an aching loneliness as had been Miss Toland's fate for many years. To such a nature the solitary years in Paris, the solitary return to California, the tentative and unencouraged approaches to her nieces, all made a dark memory. Rich as she was, independent and popular as she was, Miss Toland's life had brought her nothing so sweet as this young thing, to teach, to dominate, to correct, and to watch and delight in, too. As Julia's grammar and ...
— The Story Of Julia Page - Works of Kathleen Norris, Volume V. • Kathleen Norris
... recognized it as the best means of securing a wife to his mind, for courting on a moonlit, shadowy road was far more satisfactory than in the bosom of the young woman's family. Not that he was bent on matrimony, but rather on several years of agreeable preparation for it, proposing to make tentative acquaintances, both ...
— Without a Home • E. P. Roe
... Neo-Impressionism by saying that it has lacked cohesion, that Pointillism in particular has led painting into an aimless path. It has been wrong to see in Impressionism too exclusive a pretext for technical researches, and a happy reaction has set in, which leads us back to-day, after diverse tentative efforts (amongst others some unfortunate attempts at symbolist painting), to the fine, recent school of the "Intimists" and to the novel conception which a great and glorious painter, Besnard, imposes upon the Salons, where the elect draw inspiration from him. We can here ...
— The French Impressionists (1860-1900) • Camille Mauclair
... suggestion. Nevertheless, although their determination was unabated, at the end of six months little had been done beyond the building of a wagon road and the importation of new machinery for the working of the lead. The peculiarity of their design debarred any tentative or temporary efforts; they wished the whole settlement to spring up in equal perfection, so that the first stage-coach over the new road could arrive upon the completed town. "We don't want to show up in a 'b'iled shirt' and a plug ...
— Openings in the Old Trail • Bret Harte
... Anyhow the sluice boxes were molested no more forever. But it was impossible to repress the abounding energies of such a nature as his, and he continued, possibly from habit, the tortuous courses which he had pursued for profit of Mr. Bentley. After a few tentative and resultless undertakings in the way of highway robbery—if one may venture to designate road-agency by so harsh a name—he made one or two modest essays in horse-herding, and it was in the midst of a promising enterprise of this character, and just ...
— The Collected Works of Ambrose Bierce, Vol. II: In the Midst of Life: Tales of Soldiers and Civilians • Ambrose Bierce
... for long occupied my attention," he wrote, "and, in a tentative way, a good deal has been done. But we have reached a point where little more progress can be made without a decision on the main issues. The question is, whether British colonisation is to be undertaken ...
— Lord Milner's Work in South Africa - From its Commencement in 1897 to the Peace of Vereeniging in 1902 • W. Basil Worsfold
... which this line was to pass is described as surpassing in its difficulties the conception of any European. It consists of impervious forests, steep ravines, and dismal swamps. A survey for the line was impossible, and a tentative process would have broken the spirit of the best men. I therefore arranged a plan of operations founded on a determination of the absolute latitudes and the difference of longitudes of the two extremities. The difference of longitudes was determined ...
— Autobiography of Sir George Biddell Airy • George Biddell Airy
... thing of overwhelming interest in the wilderness, and such a woman as this drew every eye in the brigade to feast upon her beauty, each according to the nature of the man, either furtively, with tentative admiration, or openly, with ...
— The Maid of the Whispering Hills • Vingie E. Roe
... afford year after year to be distracted with the tentative scepticism of essayists and reviewers. In a healthy condition of public opinion such a book as Bishop Colenso's would have passed unnoticed, or rather would never have been written, for the difficulties with which it deals would have been long ago met and disposed of. When questions ...
— Froude's Essays in Literature and History - With Introduction by Hilaire Belloc • James Froude
... revived the idea that foreign settlement on some portion of the continent was contemplated. just as the appearance of Baudin's expedition at the commencement of the century expedited the colonisation of Tasmania, and prompted a tentative occupation of Port Phillip, so the renewed activity of the French in the South Seas during the years 1820 to 1826, was the immediate cause of the foundation of the Swan River Settlement (1829), the nucleus of the present ...
— Terre Napoleon - A history of French explorations and projects in Australia • Ernest Scott
... expands into the dome of heaven with its eternal fires, and bids us turn to the third of the ancient sages whose speculations are aiding our steps in this tentative study. ...
— Nature Mysticism • J. Edward Mercer
... most impressive, the power of sound, with the first rudiments of modulation! That all languages designate the melody of birds as singing (though according to Blumenbach man only sings, while birds do but whistle), demonstrates that it has been felt as, what indeed it is, a tentative and prophetic prelude of something yet to come. With this conjoin the power and the tendency to acquire articulation, and to imitate speech; conjoin the building instinct and the migratory, the monogamy of several species, and the pairing of almost all; and we shall have collected ...
— Hints towards the formation of a more comprehensive theory of life. • Samuel Taylor Coleridge
... the chairs, squatted, and bent his shoulders down till his hands closed on the rope. He shifted his feet slightly, tautened his muscles with a tentative pull, then relaxed again, questing for a perfect adjustment of all the levers of ...
— Burning Daylight • Jack London
... approximately the above program—professional preparation for all teachers in the high school and that along the four lines suggested. But the movement has gone much farther than suggested by my statement. The results are found in something more authoritative and more permanent than tentative agreement among educational leaders, or even among educational institutions. The law-making bodies of the land have taken a part, and by legal enactment have required about what I have suggested. The State of North Dakota, ...
— On the Firing Line in Education • Adoniram Judson Ladd
... as they sighed and turned to toil anew, The Seraph hailed them with observance due; And after some fit talk of higher things Touched tentative on mundane happenings. This they permitting, he, emboldened thus, Prolused of humankind promiscuous. And, since the large contention less avails Than instances observed, he told them tales—Tales of the shop, the bed, the court, the street, Intimate, ...
— A Diversity of Creatures • Rudyard Kipling
... mind to something like actual shrinking from these relatives and their ways. The porch boards gave under even her weight. Some of them were broken. The steps were decrepit, too. The pump handle was tied down, she found, when she put a tentative hand upon it. ...
— Janice Day at Poketown • Helen Beecher Long
... replied good-heartedly to this tentative question of mine; "glad to hev ye along o' me, seeing as how we both hev ben a-prospectin' the line ...
— The Island Treasure • John Conroy Hutcheson
... flushed face and neck of the smaller girl, and a tentative touch upon her wrist, assured Ruth of that last fact. Amy seemed burning up with fever. Ruth had never seen a case of scarlet fever, but she feared ...
— Ruth Fielding in Moving Pictures - Or Helping The Dormitory Fund • Alice Emerson
... but welcome and instructive. You say well that I take up that attitude because I have no known public, am alone under the heavens, speaking into friendly or unfriendly space; add only, that I will not defend such attitude, that I call it questionable, tentative, and only the best that I, in these mad times, could conveniently hit upon. For you are to know, my view is that now at last we have lived to see all manner of Poetics and Rhetorics and Sermonics, ...
— The Correspondence of Thomas Carlyle and Ralph Waldo Emerson, - 1834-1872, Vol. I • Thomas Carlyle and Ralph Waldo Emerson
... there are common elements of likeness. Raphael and Titian are distinguished by an opulence of form and a luxuriance of color which reveal supreme technical accomplishment in a fertile land under light-impregnated skies. The rigidity and restraint of Van Eyck and Memling suggest the tentative early efforts of the art of a sober northern race. To a thoughtful student of these pictures sooner or later the question comes, Whence are these likenesses ...
— The Gate of Appreciation - Studies in the Relation of Art to Life • Carleton Noyes
... many of his ideas baffle me entirely. I doubt whether any one understands him all over, so to speak; and I am sure that he would himself be the first to see that this must be, and to confess that things which he himself has not yet thought out clearly, had yet to be mentioned and have a tentative place assigned them in his philosophy. Many of us are profusely original, in that no man can understand us—violently peculiar ways of looking at things are no great rarity. The rarity is when great peculiarity of vision ...
— A Pluralistic Universe - Hibbert Lectures at Manchester College on the - Present Situation in Philosophy • William James
... You are very kind. Also, you are wise. Wise, because into my clumsy little Personal you read nothing that was not there. You knew it immediately for what it was—the timid tentative clutch of a shy man at the skirts of Romance in passing. Believe me, old Conservatism was with me when I wrote that message. He was fighting hard. He followed me, struggling, shrieking, protesting, ...
— The Agony Column • Earl Derr Biggers
... statement of what is deemed possibly true, assumed and reasoned upon as if certainly true, with a view of reaching truth not yet surely known; especially, in the sciences, a hypothesis is a comprehensive tentative explanation of certain phenomena, which is meant to include all other facts of the same class, and which is assumed as true till there has been opportunity to bring all related facts into comparison; if the hypothesis explains all the facts, it is regarded as verified; till then it is ...
— English Synonyms and Antonyms - With Notes on the Correct Use of Prepositions • James Champlin Fernald
... many an hour of suffering to the lad, and brought down upon his little head severe punishments from his preceptors and parents. But in vain they admonished and threatened. The child demanded proofs; and if proofs were not at hand, his acceptance of the mooted teaching was but tentative, generally only an outward yielding to his beloved mother's inexorable insistence. Many the test papers he returned to his teachers whereon he had written in answer to the questions set, "I am taught to reply thus; but in my heart I do not believe it." ...
— Carmen Ariza • Charles Francis Stocking
... knocked her tentative little knock at the door. "Come in, mother," Elma cried, starting up in her surprise; and her mother, much wondering, turned the handle ...
— What's Bred In the Bone • Grant Allen
... mice make their way interestedly in and out of sleeping forms, investigate with deliberate intent the contents of your pack, or perchance make a tentative nibble at an odd toe or so. If anything digestible is found in an overcoat pocket the exasperating rodents do not enter by the obvious pocket-flap, but CHEW their way in ...
— Norman Ten Hundred - A Record of the 1st (Service) Bn. Royal Guernsey Light Infantry • A. Stanley Blicq
... inevitable degeneration and decay—inevitable because it was prescribed by the nature of the universe. We have only an imperfect knowledge of the influential speculations of Heraclitus, Pythagoras, and Empedocles, but we may take Plato's tentative philosophy of history to illustrate the trend and the prejudices of Greek thought on this subject. The world was created and set going by the Deity, and, as his work, it was perfect; but it was not immortal and had in it the seeds of decay. The period of its duration is 72,000 solar ...
— The Idea of Progress - An Inquiry Into Its Origin And Growth • J. B. Bury
... merely luck, there is always some talent in it." Talent here denoting intelligence and will in action. In all sciences except those called exact, this happy guessing plays a large part, and in none more than in medicine, which is truly a tentative art, founded upon likelihood, and is therefore what we call contingent. Instead of this view of the healing art discouraging us from making our ultimate principles as precise, as we should make our observations, it should urge us the more to this; for, depend upon it, that guess ...
— Spare Hours • John Brown
... ultra-Republican party which afterwards became formidable under the name of THE LEVELLERS. All the while, however, there was also a quiet formation, in some of the superior and more educated minds of the Army, of sentiments essentially Republican, but more reserved and tentative in the style of their Republicanism. Among these minds too it had become a question whether a mere settlement with the King even on the basis of the Nineteen Propositions would suffice, and whether the hour had not come for organic changes ...
— The Life of John Milton Vol. 3 1643-1649 • David Masson
... often contemplated the state of matrimony, and had made more than one tentative essay in that direction. She had walked out with three or four sprigs of the Ailesworth bourgeoisie in her time, and the shadow of middle-age had crept upon her before she realised that however pliant her disposition, her lack of physical charm put her at the mercy of the first bright-eyed rival. ...
— The Wonder • J. D. Beresford
... civil war has seriously damaged Lebanon's economic infrastructure, cut national output by half, and all but ended Lebanon's position as a Middle Eastern entrepot and banking hub. Following October 1990, however, a tentative peace has enabled the central government to begin restoring control in Beirut, collect taxes, and regain access to key port and government facilities. The battered economy has also been propped up by a financially sound banking system and resilient small- ...
— The 1993 CIA World Factbook • United States. Central Intelligence Agency.
... commemorative medals, of neat outline but dull reference; a classic monument or two, things of the first years of the century; things consular, Napoleonic, temples, obelisks, arches, tinily re-embodied, completed the discreet cluster; in which, however, even after tentative reinforcement from several quaint rings, intaglios, amethysts, carbuncles, each of which had found a home in the ancient sallow satin of some weakly-snapping little box, there was, in spite of the due proportion of faint poetry, ...
— The Golden Bowl • Henry James
... question of drawing back, but I remember very plainly that I was a little aghast, for he was much taller and broader than I, and I had, into the bargain, a very bad cause to defend. But we had hardly exchanged the first tentative blows before I felt overwhelmingly superior. The poor cub! He had not the slightest notion how to fight. From my everyday school life in Copenhagen, I knew hundreds of tricks and feints that he had never learnt, and as soon as I perceived this I flung him into the ditch like ...
— Recollections Of My Childhood And Youth • George Brandes
... it is possible to convey. Insensibly emotion crept into their intercourse, sunning itself openly and pleasantly at last when Helen's modernity was not too near. Insensibly their interest drifted from the wonderful associations about them to their more intimate and personal feelings. In a tentative way information was supplied; she spoke allusively of her school, of her examination successes, of her gladness that the days of "Cram" were over. He made it quite clear that he also was a teacher. ...
— Twelve Stories and a Dream • H. G. Wells
... the tentative varsity eleven lining up against the scrub. With all his heart Andy longed to get into this, but for days he sat on the bench and watched others being called before him. But he did not ...
— Andy at Yale - The Great Quadrangle Mystery • Roy Eliot Stokes
... recognize no authority as the ground of tentative action, a doubt, a suspicion of truth ought to be ground enough for putting ...
— Unspoken Sermons - Series I., II., and II. • George MacDonald |
