"Blurred" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... sight That morn of Spring, When on the lonely height, The spirit paused to sing, Then through the air took flight Still lilting on the wing. And the shy bird, Who all had heard, Straightway began To practice o'er the lovely strain; Again, again; Though indistinct and blurred, He tried each word, Until he caught the last far sounds that fell Like the faint tinkles ...
— Southern Literature From 1579-1895 • Louise Manly
... memories Luke could recall was the big blurred impression of Nat's face bending over his crib of an evening. At first flat, indefinite, remote as the moon, it grew with time to more human, intimate proportions. It became the face of "brother," the black-haired, blue-eyed big boy who rollicked ...
— The Best Short Stories of 1917 - and the Yearbook of the American Short Story • Various
... posterity,—then he will fall into the treacherous pit of selfishness where Septimius's soul lies smothered. But this set of meanings runs imperceptibly into others, for the book is much like the cabalistic manuscript described in its pages: now it is blurred over with deceptive sameness, and again it brims with multifarious beauties like those that swim within the golden depth of Tieck's enchanted goblet. The ultimate and most insistent moral is perhaps that which brings it into comparison with Goethe's "Faust"; this, namely, that, in order to ...
— A Study Of Hawthorne • George Parsons Lathrop
... veiled with the snow and the sleet which had been falling all the time she had been in the theatre. She saw blurred lights flash past, and realised that the taxi was going at a good pace. She rubbed the windows and tried to look out after a while. Then she endeavoured to lower one, but without success. Suddenly she jumped up and tapped furiously at the window to attract the driver's attention. ...
— The Angel of Terror • Edgar Wallace
... invitations in that handwriting. I know it well, and so does Francesca, though it is blurred; and the reason for this, according to my way of thinking, is that it has been lying next the moist stems of flowers, and, unless I do her wrong, very near to somebody's warm heart ...
— Penelope's Progress - Being Such Extracts from the Commonplace Book of Penelope Hamilton As Relate to Her Experiences in Scotland • Kate Douglas Smith Wiggin
... failure to observe this precaution that so many of the shadow pictures show blurred outlines. It is with these pictures as with a shadow of the hand thrown on the wall—the nearer the hand is to the wall, the more distinct becomes the shadow; and this consideration makes Professor Wright doubt whether it will be possible, with the ...
— McClure's Magazine, Vol. 6, No. 5, April, 1896 • Various
... civility, he disfigured my papers, that no sooner came into his hands, but he fell upon them as a lion rampant, or the cat upon the poor cock in the fable, saying, Tu hodie mihi discerperis—so my papers came home miserably clawed, blotted, and blurred; whole sentences dismembered, and pages scratched out; several leaves omitted which ought to be printed,—shamefully he used my copy; so that before it was carried to the press, he swooped away the second part of the Life ...
— Curiosities of Literature, Vol. 3 (of 3) • Isaac D'Israeli
... weakened A woman's love to his own desire, It seemed to me that all hell were laughing In fiendish concert! I was their victim — And his, and hate's. And there was the struggle! As long as the earth we tread holds something A tortured heart can love, the meaning Of life is not wholly blurred; but after The last loved thing in the world has left us, We know the triumph of hate. The glory Of good goes out forever; the beacon Of sin is the light that leads us downward — Down to the fiery end. The road runs ...
— The Children of the Night • Edwin Arlington Robinson
... delivered a shrill-voiced, tear-blurred ultimatum to Brit. Either he must sell out and move to town, or she would take the children and leave him. Of towns Brit knew nothing except the post-office, saloon, cheap restaurant side,—and a barber ...
— The Quirt • B.M. Bower
... Priesthope drew into a year. A new element of misery was added to her life by the sight of Wentworth, and his visits were becoming frequent. His mere presence made acute once more that other memory, partially blurred, persistently pushed aside—the memory of Michael in prison. The figure of the duke had temporarily displaced that ...
— Prisoners - Fast Bound In Misery And Iron • Mary Cholmondeley
... behind the curtain; viewless, sightless; inconspicuous, unconspicuous^; unseen &c (see) &c 441; covert &c (latent) 526; eclipsed, under an eclipse. dim &c (faint) 422; mysterious, dark, obscure, confused; indistinct, indistinguishable; shadowy, indefinite, undefined; ill- defined, ill-marked; blurred, fuzzy, out of focus; misty &c (opaque) 426; delitescent^. hidden, obscured, covered, veiled (concealed) 528. Phr. full many a flower is born to blush ...
— Roget's Thesaurus of English Words and Phrases: Body • Roget
... dreary shroud Unwholesome, over it spread, And knowing the fog and the cloud In her people's heart and head Even as it lies for ever upon her coasts Making them dim and dreamy lest her sons should ever arise And remember all their boasts; For I know that the colourless skies And the blurred horizons breed Lonely desire and many words and brooding and ...
— Spirits in Bondage • (AKA Clive Hamilton) C. S. Lewis
... savage fails to recognise those limitations to his power over nature which seem so obvious to us. In a society where every man is supposed to be endowed more or less with powers which we should call supernatural, it is plain that the distinction between gods and men is somewhat blurred, or rather has scarcely emerged. The conception of gods as superhuman beings endowed with powers to which man possesses nothing comparable in degree and hardly even in kind, has been slowly evolved in the course ...
— The Golden Bough - A study of magic and religion • Sir James George Frazer
... in fear, I tried burnt sacrifice at the high altar: Where from the offering the fire god refused To gleam; but a dank humour from the bones Dripped on the embers with a sputtering fume. The gall was spirited high in air, the thighs Lay wasting, bared of their enclosing fat. Such failing tokens of blurred augury This youth reported, who is guide to me, As I to others. And this evil state Is come upon the city from thy will: Because our altars—yea, our sacred hearths— Are everywhere infected from the mouths Of dogs or beak of vulture that hath fed On Oedipus' unhappy slaughtered son. And then ...
— The Seven Plays in English Verse • Sophocles
... horse, while Mr. Pembroke, watching his broad back, desired to bury a knife in it. The desire passed, partly because it was unclerical, partly because he had no knife, and partly because he soon blurred over what had happened. To him all criticism was "rudeness": he never heeded it, for he never needed it: he was never wrong. All his life he had ordered little human beings about, and now he was equally magisterial to big ones: Stephen was a fifth-form lout whom, owing to some flaw in the regulations, ...
— The Longest Journey • E. M. Forster
... been written with an indelible pencil. The dampness had only blurred the writing instead of erasing it. Her attention thus engaged, she idly scrutinized more than the blurred lines. Her attitude as she sat there on the boulder slowly stiffened; her ...
— Ruth Fielding Down East - Or, The Hermit of Beach Plum Point • Alice B. Emerson
... the eve of sailing. There had been photographs of the chartered vessel, of Dr. Hunter and his instruments, and of his daughter, Helen, who acted as his secretary. She looked not at all like a scientist, Dan recalled. In fact, her face had seemed rather pretty, even in the blurred newspaper half-tone. ...
— Astounding Stories, July, 1931 • Various
... blurred as the crushing force of naked speed pasted him against the contour seat. Consciousness began to leave him, but not soon enough. For there, in the tortured imaginings of his pain-constricted brain, came the ugly black bird again, shrieking horribly and perching ...
— Heart • Henry Slesar
... the disciples could have seen that the essential childhood was meant, and not a blurred and half-obliterated childhood, the most selfish child might have done as well, but could have done no better than the one we have supposed in whom the true childhood is more evident. But when the child was employed as a manifestation, ...
— Unspoken Sermons - Series I., II., and II. • George MacDonald
... powder, and then upon the actual work. Carefully remove the tracing-paper; there should now be visible upon the surface of the material, in charcoal dust, a perfectly clear reproduction of the pattern. Should, however, the impression be blurred, it is quite easy to flick everything away with a duster and repeat the process. The causes of failure would most probably be that the perforations were too large or too far apart, or that there was some movement of either paper or material during the process. It is necessary ...
— Embroidery and Tapestry Weaving • Grace Christie
... himself. Or did he lodge with his master, a grammarian, who kept a boarding-house for the boys? Almost all these schoolmasters were pagan too. Is it wonderful that the Christian lessons of Monnica and the nurses at Thagaste became more and more blurred in Augustin's mind? Many years after, an old Madaura grammarian, called Maximus, wrote to him in a tone of loving reproach: "Thou hast drawn away from us"—a secta nostra deviasti. Did he wish to hint that at this time Augustin had glided ...
— Saint Augustin • Louis Bertrand
... dream-schools have risen, never wholly to perish,—the science of seers on the Chaldee's Pur-Tor, or in the rock-caves of Delphi, gasped after and grasped at by horn-handed mechanics to-day in their lanes and alleys. To the heart of the populace sink down the blurred relics of what once was the law of the secretest sages, hieroglyphical tatters which the credulous vulgar attempt to interpret. "WHAT WILL HE DO WITH IT?" Ask Merle and his Crystal! But the curtain descends! Yet a moment, there they are,—age and ...
— What Will He Do With It, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... with half A sob, like a belated laugh,— While cloyingly their blurred kiss closes, Sweet as the dew's lip ...
— Riley Love-Lyrics • James Whitcomb Riley
... in the mirror, but in order to see itself it must remain the prisoner of the mirror in which it sees itself, and the image which it sees therein is as the mirror distorts it; and if the mirror breaks, the image is broken; and if the mirror is blurred, ...
— Tragic Sense Of Life • Miguel de Unamuno
... image which might have stimulated reverence had become a fetish. There were voices crying in the wilderness against a worship that had poisoned into idolatry, but they were unheard. Progressively the real things of life were blurred and forgotten and the things that were so obviously real that they were unreal became the object and ...
— Towards the Great Peace • Ralph Adams Cram
... be one's recollection of the past, any attempt to recall the features of a beloved being shows them to one's vision as through a mist of tears—dim and blurred. Those tears are the tears of the imagination. When I try to recall Mamma as she was then, I see, true, her brown eyes, expressive always of love and kindness, the small mole on her neck below where the small hairs grow, her white embroidered ...
— Childhood • Leo Tolstoy
... the catalogue of mechanical devices which almost affects the mind with fatigue. Fifty years ago the ordinary citizen picked up his ideas of all that was going on in the world from a sorely-taxed news-sheet; and a very blurred idea he managed to get at the best. Poor folk had to do without the luxury of the news, and they were as much circumscribed mentally as though they had been cattle; we remember a village where even in 1852 the common people did not know who the Duke of Wellington ...
— Buchanan's Journal of Man, July 1887 - Volume 1, Number 6 • Various
... two sides look different; one side has certain little depressions as if it had been pricked with a pin, sometimes also some wavy streaks. Turn it round, and, looking at the other side, you still see these things, but blurred, as if seen through water, while the surface itself on this side looks smooth; what inequalities there are being projections rather than depressions. Now the side you first looked at is the side to cut on, and the side to paint on, and it is ...
— Stained Glass Work - A text-book for students and workers in glass • C. W. Whall
... Leroy dreamed of safety the earthquake was cradling its fire; the ground was growing hollow beneath his tread; but his ear was too dull to catch the sound; his vision too blurred to read the ...
— Iola Leroy - Shadows Uplifted • Frances E.W. Harper
... was over Mary Louise went into the library and, drawing a chair to where the light of the student lamp flooded her book, tried to read. But the words were blurred and her mind was in a sort of chaos. Mamma Bee had summoned Aunt Polly and Uncle Eben to her room, where she was now holding a conference with the faithful colored servants. A strange and subtle atmosphere of ...
— Mary Louise • Edith van Dyne (one of L. Frank Baum's pen names)
... that in France alone woman has had a vital influence on the development of literature; in France alone the mind of woman has passed like an electric current through the language, making crisp and definite what is elsewhere heavy and blurred; in France alone, if the writings of women were swept away, a serious gap would be made in ...
— The Essays of "George Eliot" - Complete • George Eliot
... is a likeness of no one of his subjects, and yet resembles them all, so we may turn the camera of history upon these Washingtons, as they flash up for a moment from the dim past, and hope to obtain what Professor Huxley calls a "generic" picture of the race, even if the outlines be somewhat blurred and indistinct. ...
— George Washington, Vol. I • Henry Cabot Lodge
... with them, however cunningly the artist may have used his skill to preserve them. The face is gone, and the memory of it. Some hearts may long to keep it engraven sharp and clear in their remembrance; but oh, when the "inward eye" comes to look for it how dull and blurred it lies there, like a forgotten photograph which has grown faded and stained ...
— Cobwebs and Cables • Hesba Stretton
... German plans. But we were then so small a proportion of the whole, with our hundred and twenty thousand men, and we have become since so accustomed to count in millions, that perhaps our part in the "miracle of the Marne" is sometimes in danger of becoming a little blurred in the popular English—and American—conception of the battle. Is not the truth rather that we had a twofold share in it? It was Von Kluck's miscalculation as to the English strength that tempted him to his eastward march; it was the quality of the British force and leadership, when Sir ...
— Towards The Goal • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... the IMT transit lock beneath one of the sprawling ranch houses showed in the vague light spreading out of the big scanning plate in an upper wall section. The plate framed an unimpressive section of the galaxy, a blurred scattering of stars condensing toward the right, and, somewhat left of center, a ...
— Gone Fishing • James H. Schmitz
... I had pitched into space, with equal suddenness did I emerge from the fog, out of which I shot like a projectile from a cannon into clear daylight. My speed was so great that I could see nothing about me but a blurred and indistinct sheet of smooth and frozen snow, that rushed past ...
— Pellucidar • Edgar Rice Burroughs
... steeled her to still further persistence, and she afterward remembered, always a little shamefaced, that she had wept and clung to his arm and wept still again, before she melted and bent him from his official determination. She saw, through blurred and misty eyes, his hand go out and touch an electric button at his side. She saw him write three lines on a sheet of paper, an attendant appear, and heard an order briefly and succinctly given. She had ...
— Phantom Wires - A Novel • Arthur Stringer
... was a low, harsh murmur, growing steadily into a loud roar as a train dashed past us in the darkness. Holmes swept his light along the window-sill. It was thickly coated with soot from the passing engines, but the black surface was blurred ...
— The Adventure of the Bruce-Partington Plans • Arthur Conan Doyle
... nine o'clock when he awoke the following morning. The storm had not lifted; the colorless clouds were still letting down a fine, vapory rain that blurred everything. As soon as he had breakfasted, Lynde went to Mrs. Denham's rooms. She answered his knock in person and invited him by a silent gesture to enter the parlor. He saw by the drawn expression of her countenance that she ...
— The Queen of Sheba & My Cousin the Colonel • Thomas Bailey Aldrich
... flash of bursting shells. I stood on the slag heap, staring at this curtain of smoke, hour after hour, dazed by the tumult of noise and by that impenetrable veil which hid all human drama. There was no movement of men to be seen, no slaughter, no heroic episode—only through rifts in the smoke the blurred edges of slag heaps and pit-heads, and smoking ruins. German trenches were being battered in, German dugouts made into the tombs of living men, German bodies tossed up with earth and stones—all that was ...
— Now It Can Be Told • Philip Gibbs
... turned away again. A sudden mist blurred the sunset splendour, the bronze and purple iridescence of the sea. Paul ...
— Captain Desmond, V.C. • Maud Diver
... stood where he was, looking about him in the blurred light of the lamp over his head. He almost expected Tavish to creep out from some dark corner; he half expected to see him move from under the dishevelled blankets in the bunk at the far end of the room. It was a big room, twenty feet from end to end, ...
— The Courage of Marge O'Doone • James Oliver Curwood
... corrected for colour is still imperfect. If rays pass through all parts of it, those which strike it near the edge will be refracted more than those near the centre, and a blurred focus results. This is termed spherical aberration. You will be able to understand the reason from Figs. 113 and 114. Two rays, A, are parallel to the axis and enter the lens near the centre (Fig. 113). These meet in one plane. Two other rays, B, strike the lens very ...
— How it Works • Archibald Williams
... nevertheless, the love which good women feel for the man that is both weaker and stronger than themselves—it was so she might have read her own past, if the high passion of this ultimate moment had not blurred it. ...
— The Mating of Lydia • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... ready to retire a servant brought him a note. It was damp, as though it had been splashed with water, and when the detective had read it and had noted Viola's signature, he knew that her tears had blurred the writing. ...
— The Golf Course Mystery • Chester K. Steele
... smell of gingerbread and pies, hot from the Saturday baking. Outside, the snow clung to the trees, but the wintry sun shining through the shelf of yellow chrysanthemums by the window, made dancing summer shadows on the clean white floor. He was looking at the quilt through blurred eyes now. How many, many nights she had spread it over him and tucked him snugly in, and softly kissed his eyelids down, before she carried away the lamp. It came over him all in a swift rush, with a sudden cold sense of desolation, that she could never do that again! never any more! The light ...
— The Quilt that Jack Built; How He Won the Bicycle • Annie Fellows Johnston
... the bend of the river driven by paddles in hands that were wonderfully skilled. They were about to pass out of view behind the grey wall of stone which lined the waterway. The figure of the girl in the prow of the hindmost boat was blurred and indistinct. Marcel had eyes for nothing else. He raised his fur cap and waved it slowly to and fro. And as he waved he thought he detected a similar movement in the boat. He could not be sure at the distance. But he believed. ...
— The Heart of Unaga • Ridgwell Cullum
... it until the type grew blurred. What did it mean? He asked himself that a thousand times. What did it mean? He sought his room and locked the door, striding up and down with agitation, the cablegram clenched in his hand. He was beside himself, triumphant and yet in a fever of misgiving. Was it not perhaps a coincidence—not an ...
— Love, The Fiddler • Lloyd Osbourne
... under side of a melon, changing slowly to an opaline hue; then imperceptibly succeeded a blush of shell-pink, presently shot with radial bars of dusky red; and now every object above the horizon stood vividly revealed through the limpid air—soon to be blurred, distorted, or entirely withdrawn from view. In the favourable interval of ten or fifteen minutes, I saw Poondoo homestead, six or eight miles ahead. In the intermediate distance appeared a moving dot, which, as I was travelling at a walk, ...
— Such is Life • Joseph Furphy
... atmosphere. These schools do, upon the whole, encourage physical courage; but they do not merely discourage moral courage, they forbid it. The ultimate result of the thing is seen in the egregious English officer who cannot even endure to wear a bright uniform except when it is blurred and hidden in the smoke of battle. This, like all the affectations of our present plutocracy, is an entirely modern thing. It was unknown to the old aristocrats. The Black Prince would certainly have asked that any knight who had the courage to lift his crest among his enemies, should also ...
— What's Wrong With The World • G.K. Chesterton
... He knew my disposition before he married me, and has no right to treat me as he does. If it were only Ernest I could bring myself to 'obey' him, for I love him very devotedly; but as to being dictated to by all his relatives, I never will! Beulah, burn this blurred letter; don't let anybody know how drearily I am situated. I am too proud to have my misery published. To know that people pitied me would kill me. I never can be happy again, but perhaps you can help me to be less miserable. Do write to me! Oh, how ...
— Beulah • Augusta J. Evans
... perhaps unconsciously. Her standard of values began to shift and change. Sometimes the dollar-mark grew blurred in her mind's eye, and shaped itself into letters that spelled such words as "truth" and "honor" and now and then just "kindness." Let us make a likeness of one who hunts the moose or elk in some mighty wood. He sees a little dell, mossy and embowered, where a rill trickles, babbling ...
— The Trimmed Lamp • O. Henry
... low. After all, she thought, it was no trick to ride him. In that gait he was dangerous, for a fall meant death; but he ran so smoothly that riding him was easy and certainly glorious. He went so fast that the wind blinded her. The trail was only a white streak in blurred gray. She could not get her breath; the wind seemed to whip the air away from her. And then she felt the lessening of the tremendous pace. Sage King had run himself out and the miles were behind her. Gradually her sight became clear, and as the hot and wet horse slowed down, satisfied ...
— Wildfire • Zane Grey
... calm of love was to be succeeded by love's tumult and agony. A strangeness was creeping over Margot. It was as if she took a thin veil in her hands, and drew it over and all around her, till the outlines I had known were slightly blurred. Her disposition, which had been so clear cut, so sharply, beautifully defined, standing out in its innocent glory for all men to see, seemed to withdraw itself, as if a dawning necessity for secrecy had arisen. A thin crust of reserve began to subtly overspread her every act and expression. ...
— The Return Of The Soul - 1896 • Robert S. Hichens
... film on the window through which the street lamps showed blurred and indistinct, and he rubbed the pane clear with the tips of his fingers (he described every action to T. B. ...
— The Secret House • Edgar Wallace
... brutally; and she stood, white and gasping, staring at him with large, frightened eyes. The sheep-walk was but a tiny threadlike track: the slope of the shingle on either side was very steep: below them lay the valley; distant, lifeless, all blurred by the evening dusk. She looked about her helplessly ...
— Victorian Short Stories • Various
... the box. There seemed to have been some writing on a piece of paper that was tacked on the box, but the writing was blurred by the sea water and could ...
— Six Little Bunkers at Cousin Tom's • Laura Lee Hope
... marvelous eyesight, my young friend," he remarked. "To me everything seems blurred ...
— The Moving Finger • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... something which should satisfy alike his heart and reason. Instead of gaining the one thing, it seemed to him that all had been lost. His present existence was as focusless as an eye after its lens has been extracted. His past had been opaque, his future would be permanently blurred. And for what good had been all the pain? It would have been far better, far more sane, if he had clung stoutly to the flaming horns of his hereditary Calvinism. Infinitely better to feel their scorching touch than to drift into a state of apathy past any feeling! And Brenton ...
— The Brentons • Anna Chapin Ray
... long laughed my master to himself at the discovery. What cared he for rats? He pulled his chair back to the table, and buried himself in his book for the next three hours, until his lamp began to burn low, and the letters on the pages grew blurred and dim, and the rats had scuffled back by the way they came, and my flagging hands ...
— The Adventures of a Three-Guinea Watch • Talbot Baines Reed
... it all meant: he even turned the mare's head round to see whither Editha was going. She had already reached the railing and gate in front of the cottage; the next moment she had lifted the latch, and Sir Marmaduke could see her blurred outline, through the rising mist, walking quickly along the flagged path, and then he heard her peremptory knock at the ...
— The Nest of the Sparrowhawk • Baroness Orczy
... one of the alleys, which widened as it receded, he could see a part of the lamplit terrace where a sentry silently paced, and beyond that a corner of the town with interlacing street-lights. But all around him the young trees stood mystically blurred in the dim shine; and in the stock-still quietness the ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 7 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... had dropped it that morning. In the glorious reaction of the sunshine after the downpour, with its moist warm smells, bespanglement of greenery, and inspiriting touch of rain-washed air, the parks and palaces of the imagination glowed with a livelier iris, and their blurred beauties shone out again with fresh blush and palpitation. As I sped along to the tryst, again I accompanied my new comrade along the corridors of my pet palace into which I had so hastily introduced her; and on reflection I began to see that ...
— Dream Days • Kenneth Grahame
... half atone for their theatricality, have been made use of by Silius, but find only a feeble echo in his lifeless verse. Nothing stands out sharply defined; the epic lacks impetus and has no salient points; outlines are blurred in an unpoetic haze. The history of Tacitus has been described as history 'seen by lightning flashes'. Such should be the history of historical epic. In its stead Silius presents us with a confused welter of archaistic battle, ...
— Post-Augustan Poetry - From Seneca to Juvenal • H.E. Butler
... jutting spurs form many a bay, cove and estuary. It was in the small hours of a night of misty moonlight that our eyes, stretched wide with the new wonder of beholding classic ground, first caught sight of this smooth expanse gleaming pallidly amid the dark, blurred outlines of the landscape and trees. The monotonous noise and motion of the train had put our fellow-travelers to sleep, and when it gradually ceased they did not stir. There was no bustle at the little station where we stopped; a few drowsy figures stole silently by in the dim ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science Vol. XV., No. 85. January, 1875. • Various
... of another woman, and till he was indeed she meant to keep it. "He is only promised to her yet, and he was promised first to me," she said for salve to conscience; and meanwhile the picture grew so blurred with conscious tears, and perhaps with unconscious kisses, that it might have been his or another's: Miss Frarnie herself, had she seen it, could not have ...
— Not Pretty, But Precious • John Hay, et al.
... off, they struck into the portage. Even with a snow-blurred trail, the Boy's vivid remembrance of the other journey gave them the sustaining sense that they were going right. The Colonel was working off the surprising stiffness with which he had wakened, and they were ...
— The Magnetic North • Elizabeth Robins (C. E. Raimond)
... close to his and he saw that her lips were quivering, her eyes blurred with tears. Her veil was white with the snow, like a bride's. She dragged at his hand, and he followed her dumbly, their footsteps echoing, a soft patter across the marble ...
— The Black Cross • Olive M. Briggs
... the wind. The spot where his random blow had struck still gleamed transparent jet. He dragged the blackened brush through a vessel of clear water, then brandished it like the madman Mata thought him. With the soft tuft of camel hair he blurred against the peak pale, luminous vapor of new cloud. Turning, twisting sidewise, this way, then that, the yielding implement, he seemed to carve upon the silk broad silver planes of rock, until there rose up a self-revealing ...
— The Dragon Painter • Mary McNeil Fenollosa
... as she dared, following the blurred streak of gray that was the road, and taking the bumps with utter recklessness. Already the yellow rim of the moon was peering over the horizon to her right, and by its light she found the road that turned abruptly toward the Rio Grande, a mile or more distant. The ...
— Heart of the Sunset • Rex Beach
... Forward on the raft was heard a woman's shrill laugh, followed by the deeper laugh of a man. Their figures, blurred by the mist, were nearly invisible to Sergei, who, however, watched them curiously. The man appeared as a tall figure, standing with legs wide apart, holding a pole, and half turned toward a shorter woman's figure, leaning ...
— Creatures That Once Were Men • Maxim Gorky
... morning)—could read writing as well as either you or I. So what does he do, on obtaining the nosegay, but examine it well. The stalks of the flowers were tied up with slips of matting in wet moss. Pierre undid the strings, unwrapped the moss, and out fell a piece of wet paper, with the writing all blurred with moisture. It was but a torn piece of writing-paper, apparently, but Pierre's wicked mischievous eyes read what was written on it,—written so as to look like a fragment,—'Ready, every and any night at nine. All ...
— My Lady Ludlow • Elizabeth Gaskell
... under the control of a steady imagination, which will not be hurried, and will not tell the bearing of things till the right time comes. The vivid effect of the Saga, if it be studied at all closely, will be found to be due to this steadiness of imagination which gives first the blurred and inaccurate impression, the possibility of danger, the matter for surmises and suspicions, and then the clearing up. Stated generally in this way, the rule is an elementary one, but it is followed ...
— Epic and Romance - Essays on Medieval Literature • W. P. Ker
... from the letter the landscape was blurred for a time. But soon he wondered at the new splendour of the day, the sweetness of the air, the mellow music of the meadow-lark. A new glory was upon sky and earth and a new ...
— The Prospector - A Tale of the Crow's Nest Pass • Ralph Connor
... Had once a glimmering window overhung With honeysuckle wet with evening dew. Along the path tall dusky dahlias grew, And shadowy hydrangeas reached and swung Ferociously; and over me, among The moths and mysteries, a blurred bat flew. ...
— The Three Taverns • Edwin Arlington Robinson
... they were remarkably engaging.... He had lost a great deal. For what? He couldn't—as usual—answer; but the memory of Savina, stronger than Fanny, metaphorically took Helena's arms away from his neck and blurred the image of Gregory. "Have you said your prayer?" he asked absent-mindedly making conversation. Oh, yes, he was informed, they did that with Martha. "I'll say mine again," Gregory volunteered. Again—a picture of a child, in a halo of innocence, praying ...
— Cytherea • Joseph Hergesheimer
... just as puzzling to him. He had vague memories of people with whom he felt no affinity except as vaguely nostalgic memories—Sam Baker's mother, his father, the blurred faces of friends he had known. And, at times, there were faint tinges of the terror Sam had known that night when a quick light flashed down from nowhere and he was abducted into a world too strange and terrible to be real. Yet it ...
— Ten From Infinity • Paul W. Fairman
... gazing from the window pane, Dimmed and blurred with heavy plashes of the fast descending rain, While thoughts chiming with the hour my weary brain are passing through, Till the shadows of the evening on ...
— The Poetical Works of Mrs. Leprohon (Mrs. R.E. Mullins) • Rosanna Eleanor Leprohon
... I was born out of my mother—the giants of circumstance. And you would judge me by my acts! But can you not look within? Can you not understand that evil is hateful to me? Can you not see within me the clear writing of conscience, never blurred by any wilful sophistry, although too often disregarded? Can you not read me for a thing that surely must be common as ...
— Stories By English Authors: Germany • Various
... aloud while I take my ease, looking at the pastel portrait which hangs just opposite the window. On the glass which entombs the picture I see the gently moving and puffing reflection of the fidgety window curtains, and the face of that glazed portrait becomes blurred with broken streaks and all kinds ...
— Light • Henri Barbusse
... door opened and shut. He turned. There, with her back to the door, stood Kitty. Her aspect startled him to his feet. She looked at him, trembling—her little face haggard and white, with a touch of something in it which had blurred its youth. ...
— The Marriage of William Ashe • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... have told you much of that day, after the first wonderful moment of getting home. It was a day of blurred memories. The new-comers had to wander through the house where every big window stood open to the sunlight, and every room was gay with flowers; and from every window it was necessary to look out at the ...
— Back To Billabong • Mary Grant Bruce
... panted down and came to rest in the dull yellow glow of the field lights. A new world here. The field was flat, caked ooze, cracked and hardened. It sloped upward from the shore toward where, a quarter of a mile away, I could see the dull lights of the settlement, blurred by the ...
— Astounding Stories of Super-Science September 1930 • Various
... mother, and the Memoirs of General Grant for my father, with intent to suitably record and celebrate my entrance into literature. For the first time in her life, my mother was able to wear a silk dress, and she wrote, soon after, a proud and grateful letter saying things which blurred my eyes and put a lump into my throat. If only I could have laid the silk in her lap, and caught the light of her ...
— A Son of the Middle Border • Hamlin Garland
... chiefly in Holland, to a few other books for which there was a large demand, the Latin grammar of Donatus, for example, and a guide-book to Rome known as the Mirabilia Urbis Romae. But at best this method was extremely unsatisfactory; the blocks soon wore out, the text was blurred and difficult to read, ...
— The Age of the Reformation • Preserved Smith
... the blind, and saw with a dull acquiescence that the brightness of the May had fled. The wind was high—he heard it fly past, moaning. In the watery sky, the round sun loomed silver-pale and blurred. To his fevered eye it ...
— Merely Mary Ann • Israel Zangwill
... and casual words reassured her. She looked and admired, though the sea was grey and the shore all blurred with rain. ...
— The Rocks of Valpre • Ethel May Dell
... sometimes by the flashlight of a first meeting, than when the perception is blurred ...
— Flint - His Faults, His Friendships and His Fortunes • Maud Wilder Goodwin
... owners, determines, for the most part, the shape into which their theories will be moulded. Now, De Foe was above the ordinary standard, in so far as he did not, like most of us, see things merely as a blurred and inextricable chaos; but he was below the great imaginative writers in the comparative coldness and dry precision of his mental vision. To him the world was a vast picture, from which all confusion was banished; everything was definite, clear, and precise as in a photograph; ...
— Hours in a Library, Volume I. (of III.) • Leslie Stephen
... finally lost in the distance, as it is on clear, frosty nights. So with the sounds of horses' hoofs, stumbling on the rough bridle-track through the "saddle", the clatter of hoof-clipped stones and scrape of gravel down the hidden "siding", and the low sound of men's voices, blurred and speaking in monosyllables and at intervals it seemed, and in hushed, awed tones, as though they carried a corpse. To practical eyes, grown used to such a darkness, and at the nearest point, the passing blurrs would have suggested two riders on bush hacks leading a third ...
— Over the Sliprails • Henry Lawson
... answered Derrick, though with a slight hesitation in his voice as he thought of the one place he had not been quite sure of. This was where the plan had been somewhat blotted and blurred, so that he could not see whether or not two lines joined each other. Having made up his mind that they ought to be joined, he had thus drawn them on his tracing. It was such a small thing that he did not consider it worth mentioning. Thus, without meaning to make a false statement, ...
— Derrick Sterling - A Story of the Mines • Kirk Munroe
... who has indulged in ballooning knows fully well. On a clear summer's day I have been able to see the ground beneath with perfect distinctness from a height of 4,500 feet, yet when the craft had ascended a further two or three hundred feet, the panorama was blurred. A film of haze lies between the balloon and the ground beneath. And the character of this haze is continually changing, so that the aerial observer's task is rendered additionally difficult. Its effects are particularly notice able when one attempts to photograph the view unfolded below. ...
— Aeroplanes and Dirigibles of War • Frederick A. Talbot
... actually congratulating the Navigator on our escape, and I had just told the gun's crew to cease firing at the blurred outlines on the port quarter from which the random shells still came, when there was a sheet of yellow flame and a jar which threw me against the signalman. The latter had been standing near the conning-tower hatch, ...
— The Diary of a U-boat Commander • Anon
... little heart in a round, plump body knew that it was he; knew, therefore, that her destiny was come, and, most extraordinary of all, in the shape of her good father's literary bureau! Yet what shock there was next day, when the hero of her dreams came to her with his ordinary pale-gray eyes, blurred somewhat and ...
— The Ape, the Idiot & Other People • W. C. Morrow
... dabbling in amateur photography, and every amateur must take "action" pictures with his first camera. It is a natural desire to attain to the hardest before understanding how to reach it. The result is one of two things: either a blurred moving object and a clear background, or a clear moving object and a blurred background. Both suggest speed, but only one is a good picture of the object one attempted to photograph. In the first case ...
— The Art of Lawn Tennis • William T. Tilden, 2D
... to you, boys, although that is a difficult matter, for the writing is uneven and much blurred. On one part of the sheet there is a blot of blood — the blood, I presume — of the poor fellow who was trying to ...
— The Rover Boys in the Jungle • Arthur M. Winfield
... Lapelle. It was then that Kenneth noticed that his eyes were slightly blurred and his voice a trifle thick. He ...
— Viola Gwyn • George Barr McCutcheon
... of it, "I look on the message of December, 1823, as forming a bright page in our history. I will neither help to erase it nor tear it out; nor shall it be by any act of mine blurred or blotted. It did honor to the sagacity of the government, and I will not diminish that honor. It elevated the hopes and gratified the patriotism of the people over these hopes. I will not bring a mildew, nor will I put that ...
— The Bay State Monthly, Volume 3, No. 1 • Various
... greatly touched at his kindness in coming. He looked considerably older than his age; his hair had grown thin and grey about his temples, and the sharp birdlike outline of his face and features seemed blurred and indeterminate. His creed too, and his whole manner of looking at things of faith, seemed to have undergone a similar process. The ...
— By What Authority? • Robert Hugh Benson
... suddenly became icy cold, and a frightful, hideous terror seized and gripped me so hard, that the machine, slipping from my palsied hands, fell to the ground with a crash. The next instant something—for the life of me I knew not what, its outline was so blurred and indefinite—alighted on the open space in front of me with a soft thud, and remained standing as bolt upright as a cylindrical pillar. From afar off, there then came the low rumble of wheels, which momentarily ...
— Scottish Ghost Stories • Elliott O'Donnell
... early air, Full excellent was morning: whether deep The snow lay keenly white, and shrouds of hail Blurred the grey breaker on a long foreshore, And swarming plover ran, and wild white mews And sea-pies printed with a thousand feet The fallen whiteness, making shrill the storm; Or whether, soothed of sunshine, throbbed and hummed The mill atween ...
— Poems by Jean Ingelow, In Two Volumes, Volume II. • Jean Ingelow
... In the light of a street lamp we read "Laburnum Villa" upon the gate-post of one of them. The occupants had evidently retired to rest, for all was dark save for a fanlight over the hall door, which shed a single blurred circle on to the garden path. The wooden fence which separated the grounds from the road threw a dense black shadow upon the inner side, and here it was that ...
— The Return of Sherlock Holmes • Arthur Conan Doyle
... hideous question once and dared not lift his head. He felt her coming nearer. The guard halted. His eyes were blurred. He could see nothing. ...
— The Man in Gray • Thomas Dixon
... down on us. The low clouds, torn In the stark branches of the riven pines, Blurred the white rockets that from dusk till morn Traced the wide curve of ...
— Poems • Alan Seeger
... volition we do not turn to the twilight region where all outlines are blurred and indistinct. We fix our attention upon those instances in which the phenomena are clearly and strongly marked. They are most clearly marked where desire does not, at once and unimpeded, discharge itself in action, but where action is deferred, and a struggle takes ...
— A Handbook of Ethical Theory • George Stuart Fullerton
... the Indian and the buffalo. The railway reached out across the Great American Desert. The border became blurred and was rubbed out. The desert was dotted with homes. Towns began to grow up about the water-tanks and to bud and blow on ...
— The Last Spike - And Other Railroad Stories • Cy Warman
... Ascalon were blurred as if she looked on them through a rain-drenched pane when Rhetta faced again to go her way alone, the marshal's badge clutched in her hand. Remorse was roiling in her breast; the corrosive poison of regret for too much said, depressed ...
— Trail's End • George W. Ogden
... scarcer, and so did the passengers. Dark came on and objects were blurred, though Tartarin walked on for half an hour more, when he stopped, for it was night. A moonless night, too, but sprinkled with stars. On the highroad there was nobody. The hero concluded that lions are not stage-coaches, and would not of their own choice ...
— Tartarin of Tarascon • Alphonse Daudet
... the scattered sheep might not be found, And long and loud that gentle maid did weep, Till in her blurred sight the hills went round, And, circling far, field, wood, and stream did sweep; And on the ground the miserable Bopeep Fell and forgot her troubles in ...
— Poems • William D. Howells
... the value of conduct is paramount; but he who lacks intellectual culture, whatever else he may be, is narrow, awkward, unintelligent. The mirror of his soul is dim, the motions of his spirit are sluggish, and the divine image which is himself is blurred. ...
— Education and the Higher Life • J. L. Spalding
... thickly covered with short yellow hair inclined to be curly, and who was dressed in a white frock with an almost artful blue bow in the front. As Mrs. Mansfield came in the child was holding up to Heath a small naked doll of a rather blurred appearance, and was uttering some explanatory remarks in the uneven but arresting voice that seems peculiar ...
— The Way of Ambition • Robert Hichens
... which are the faithful guardians, the active monitors of our duty, the true supporters of all liberal and manly morals. We have not been drawn and trussed, in order that we may be filled, like stuffed birds in a museum, with chaff and rags, and paltry, blurred shreds of paper about the rights of man. We preserve the whole of our feelings still native and entire, unsophisticated by pedantry and infidelity. We have real hearts of flesh and blood beating in our bosoms. We fear God; we look ...
— The Works of the Right Honourable Edmund Burke, Vol. III. (of 12) • Edmund Burke
... with shade, and then she was happiest of all. But sometimes she brought with her hateful things, tasks and tools, useless, awkward, bungling, sharp weapons, that hurt her tender fingers, long cords that she pulled aimlessly back and forth, huge books with harsh names, that blurred her dear eyes and gloomed her bright face. First we tried to shame and then to woo her away from them, but some invisible old dragon stood over her, and forced her on; and so we learned at length to watch and wait till the hated task was over. Thereby we learned ...
— Our Young Folks, Vol 1, No. 1 - An Illustrated Magazine • Various
... amazed horse propped on its forefeet and came to so dead a stop that Nigel was shot forward on to its neck and hardly held himself by his hair-entwined hand. Ere he had slid back into position the moment of danger had passed, for the horse, its purpose all blurred in its mind by this strange thing which had befallen, wheeled round once more, trembling in every fiber, and tossing its petulant head until at last the mantle had been slipped from its eyes and the chilling darkness had melted into the ...
— Sir Nigel • Arthur Conan Doyle
... look," said Hugh, resolutely turning to the pages. Lady Tennys leaned weakly against the counter and looked through blurred eyes at the racing lines of ink. Hugh rapidly ran his fingers through the list, passing dozens of passengers they had known. As the finger approached the "R's" it moved more slowly, more tremblingly. "Reed—Reyer—Ridge!" "Hugh Ridge, Chicago, ...
— Nedra • George Barr McCutcheon
... to get a blurred impression of portraits, busts, Bull surfaces, and rich or ancient bindings—with views through the long windows of the traffic on the Seine—when a little old lady appeared in a doorway at the farther end of the room. He knew she was a little old ...
— The Street Called Straight • Basil King
... heart. It was in crossing the Prison Yard that I saw him. His hair had turned white. He was prematurely old. His chest had caved in. His cheeks were sunken. His hands shook as with palsy. He tottered as he walked. And his eyes blurred with tears as he recognized me, for I, too, was a sad wreck of what had once been a man. I weighed eighty-seven pounds. My hair, streaked with gray, was a five- years' growth, as were my beard and moustache. ...
— The Jacket (The Star-Rover) • Jack London
... no mistake this time—that was no opossum. There came the stealthy step again; and now, as they lay silent, the glass-door was pushed gently open, showing the landscape beyond. The gibbous moon was just rising over the forest, all blurred with streaky clouds, and between them and her light they could see the figure of a man, standing ...
— The Recollections of Geoffrey Hamlyn • Henry Kingsley
... just three impressions; and, whereas the blurred marks were at the side, these three pointed straight from the middle of the glass doors to the drive. They were quite clearly defined, and all three were the impressions made by a woman's small, arched, ...
— At the Villa Rose • A. E. W. Mason
... discreetly evasive. He objected to pursuing the subject, and raised a new issue. The sketch that followed of the interview between Micky and the Man was a good deal blurred by constant India-rubber, but its original could be inferred from it—probably as follows, any omissions to conciliate public censorship being indicated by stars. Micky ...
— When Ghost Meets Ghost • William Frend De Morgan
... white waves leaping, lashing, and tumbling together in that confusion of troubled waters, which nautical men call a "cross-sea." A dreary, dismal night on Calais sands: faint moonshine struggling through a low driving scud, the harbour-lights quenched and blurred in mist. Such a night as bids the trim French sentry hug himself in his watch-coat, calmly cursing the weather, while he hums the chorus of a comic opera, driving his thoughts by force of contrast ...
— M. or N. "Similia similibus curantur." • G.J. Whyte-Melville
... some, don't she? Never mind, MY ballast 'll keep her on an even keel. Trunk made fast astern? All right! Say! you might furl some of this spare canvas so's I can take an observation as we go along. Don't go so fast that the scenery gets blurred, will you? It's been some time since I made this cruise, and I'd rather like to keep ...
— Cy Whittaker's Place • Joseph C. Lincoln
... Cockburnspath (Coppath, the natives call it) at sixty miles the hour, so we must be quick to get any part of the night firmly impressed. There is faint moonlight through low clouds (the night for flighting duck), the land blurred, and you can hardly see the farmer's handiwork on the stubbles; there are trees and a homestead massed in shadow, with a lamp-lit window, lemon yellow against the calm lead-coloured sea, and a soft broad band of white shows straight down the coast where the surf ...
— From Edinburgh to India & Burmah • William G. Burn Murdoch
... as he watched them. He smiled, but at the same time something like a tear blurred his eloquent and magnetic eye for a moment. "Brave boys," he murmured, "we were made for ...
— The Cruise of the Jasper B. • Don Marquis
... far between. The spirit of approaching dawn lent a faint tinge of colour to the lonely sweeps of white mist drifting slowly above the flat dark fields, and, settling down over the dykes, it commenced to unravel and piece together the ghostly confusion of dim blurred shadows and grossly exaggerated reflections crowding on the smooth, oily surface of the water, until they began to assume a definite shape. I could almost imagine that I was gazing at one of Tingue's early-morning landscapes, so unmistakably Dutch was the scene. Having got thus far no speculations ...
— 'Brother Bosch', an Airman's Escape from Germany • Gerald Featherstone Knight
... Percival stopped and looked at Walter, he saw that his words had wounded him to the heart, and knew well why the boy's lines were blurred and blotted, when he showed them up with a ...
— St. Winifred's - The World of School • Frederic W. Farrar
... my glimpses of hope. And, sweetheart, when you do come to me, it shall be for ever!" There was something in the intonation of the last sentence—I felt its sincerity myself—some implied yearning for a promise, that made her beautiful eyes swim. The glorious stars in them were blurred as she answered with a fervour which seemed to me ...
— The Lady of the Shroud • Bram Stoker
... and looked with eyes that seemed blurred with impalpable flaws at a world in which even the spring buds were wilted, the sunlight metallic and the shadows ...
— The History of Mr. Polly • H. G. Wells
... not easy, for the scene was confused. Also shock and sorrow have blurred its recollection in my mind. I remember Maqueda and Orme falling into each other's arms before everybody. I remember her drawing herself up in that imperial way of hers, and saying, as she pointed to the ...
— Queen Sheba's Ring • H. Rider Haggard
... Primus before, and in between the time you were told how to do it you had peeled twenty or thirty potatoes, got two scratch breakfasts, swept the Mess tent and kept that field kitchen from going out, it's quite possible your mind would be a little blurred. Mine was. When the time came, I put the methylated in the little cup at the top, lit it, and then pumped with a will. The result was a terrific roar and a sheet of flame reaching almost to the roof! Never having seen one ...
— Fanny Goes to War • Pat Beauchamp
... was wrong. Patty tried to fix her attention on "The Daisy Chain", which she had just begun to read, but the description of the large family made her think of her own, and she felt so wretchedly homesick and miserable that big drops blurred her eyes and fell down on to the pages of her book. She was wiping them up carefully with her pocket handkerchief when the door opened suddenly, and ...
— The Nicest Girl in the School - A Story of School Life • Angela Brazil
... crawling red and brown blotches that meant cattle and sheep. Beyond the hill, and through the opening in the ellipse, we could see to another new country of hills and meadows and forest groves. In this clear air they were microscopically distinct. No blue of atmosphere nor shimmer of heat blurred their outlines. They ...
— African Camp Fires • Stewart Edward White
... from green Floridian vales I heard, Soft as the sea-moan when the waves are slow; Sweeter than melody of brook or bird, Keener than any winds that breathe or blow; A magic music out of memory stirred, A strain that charms my heart to overflow With such vast yearning that my eyes are blurred. Oh, song of dreams, that I no more shall know! Bewildering carol without spoken word! Faint as a stream's voice murmuring under snow, Sad as a love forevermore deferred, Song of the arrow from the Master's bow, Sung in ...
— Hunting with the Bow and Arrow • Saxton Pope
... blurred," he said, at last; "I can't make it out. But th' man who made that track wasn't far off. Couldn't you make trail of him? He must have been between you an' me ...
— The Silent Places • Stewart Edward White
... pouring into one chasm after another, drifting in all directions, here a mere transparent veil drawn across the violet hills, there a golden splendour as of some smaller sun shining on a green little world. At one moment the whole vast scene was blurred and blotted with chill winter mist; soon a break was visible, and far away we gazed on a span of serene amethystine sky, barred with lines of bright gold. Not one, but a dozen, horizons—a dozen heavens—seemed there, ...
— In the Heart of the Vosges - And Other Sketches by a "Devious Traveller" • Matilda Betham-Edwards
... two-wheeled Arab cart, drawn by a moth-eaten old mule, was ready for my conveyance to Gafsa. In this instrument of torture were spent the hours from 7.30 a.m. to 4.30 p.m., memories of that ride being blurred by the physical discomfort endured. Over a vast plateau framed in distant mountains we were wending in the direction of a low gap which never came nearer; the road itself was full of deep ruts that caused exquisite agony as ...
— Fountains In The Sand - Rambles Among The Oases Of Tunisia • Norman Douglas
... oaks of Dodona heard; And every wood-note bids me burst asunder The bonds that hold me from the leaf-hid bird. I quaff thee, O Nepenthe! Ah, the wonder Grows, that there be who buy their wealth, their ease By damning serfs to cities, hot and blurred, Far from thy ...
— The Air Trust • George Allan England
... grandmamma." She shook back the soft curls with a little sigh. "It's queer and old, and funny—some of the words. And the writing is blurred and yellow. Look." She held up ...
— Unfinished Portraits - Stories of Musicians and Artists • Jennette Lee
... look at me in her unseeing gentle way. Her glance was by no means stupid; it beamed out soft and diffuse as the moon beams upon a landscape—quite differently from the scrutinising inspection of the stars. You were drowned in it, and imagined yourself to appear blurred. And yet this same glance when turned upon Christian Falk must have been as efficient as the searchlight ...
— Falk • Joseph Conrad
... sympathetic chorus. This song is rude enough, and seems in measure founded upon the Church chant. It is in the minor key, and consists ordinarily of two phrases, ending in a screaming monotone, prolonged until the breath of the singer fails, and often running down at the close into a blurred chromatic. No sooner is one strain ended than it is suddenly taken up again in the prestissimo time and "slowed" down to the same dismal conclusion. Heard near, it is deafening and disagreeable. But when ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 3, No. 18, April, 1859 - [Date last updated: August 7, 2005] • Various
... (Undine had noticed that they were all more or less cousins) or a more personal feeling, her observer was unable to decide; just as the tone of the young man's reply might have expressed the open avowal of good-fellowship or the disguise of a different sentiment. All was blurred and puzzling to the girl in this world of half-lights, half-tones, eliminations and abbreviations; and she felt a violent longing to brush away the cobwebs and assert herself as the dominant figure ...
— The Custom of the Country • Edith Wharton |
