"Impecunious" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... and resumed his seat as a lady entered—a stranger to him. At first glance he guessed she might be the wife of some impecunious musician, come to plead for restitution of an instrument. Such things happened now and again on Monday mornings; nor was the mistake without excuse in Miss Sally's attire. When travelling without her maid she had a way of putting on anything handy, and in the order more or less ...
— True Tilda • Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch
... observed the Lady Yolande coldly, "that I hear our lords returning." And in the eloquent silence a score of fair young minds slowly assimilated the profound truth (as fresh to-day as eight hundred years ago) that Satan finds some mischief still for the impecunious demobilised. ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 158, March 10th, 1920 • Various
... corpses are placed until the carrion crows and the vultures pick the skeleton perfectly clean; the dry bones are then cast into a common receptacle in the tower. The guebre communities of Persia are too impecunious or too indifferent to keep up the ever-burning-fires nowadays; the fires of Zoroaster, which in olden and more prosperous times were fed with fuel night and day, are now extinguished forever, and the scattering survivors of this ancient form ...
— Around the World on a Bicycle V1 • Thomas Stevens
... masters and men. His effort was to plant intact in Maryland a feudal order. He would be Palatine, the King his suzerain. In Maryland the great planters, in effect his barons, should live upon estates, manorial in size and with manorial rights. The laboring men—the impecunious adventurers whom these greater adventurers brought out—would form a tenantry, the Lord Proprietary's men's men. It is true that, according to charter, provision was made for an Assembly. Here were to sit "freemen of the province," that is to ...
— Pioneers of the Old South - A Chronicle of English Colonial Beginnings, Volume 5 In - The Chronicles Of America Series • Mary Johnston
... ridiculously mistaken if he supposes the ugliness to be normal. A kind of dogged comradeship—I can find no better word for it—is what commonly unites the labouring man and his wife; they are partners and equals running their impecunious affairs by mutual help. I was lately able to observe a man and woman after a removal settling down into their new quarters. It was the most ordinary, matter-of-fact affair in the world. The man, uncouth ...
— Change in the Village • (AKA George Bourne) George Sturt
... with Mr. Higginson he was impecunious; but that, to Straker's mind, was just what gave him, with the other things, his indomitable distinction. Reggy's distinction stood straight and clean, naked of all accessories. An impecuniousness so unexpressed, so delicate, so patrician could never have ...
— The Return of the Prodigal • May Sinclair
... proclaimed immediately after the betrothal, and a month later Herr Weigand, in his capacity of son-in-law, could take possession of the same garret which he had inhabited as an impecunious guest. This arrangement, however, was not a permanent one. An inn was to be rented for the young couple—with her ...
— The Indian Lily and Other Stories • Hermann Sudermann
... He had hired one of the numerous private palaces, the Palazzo Costi, situated on a broad thoroughfare near the point where the Ponte St. Angelo connects Rome proper with that transtiberine suburb known as the Leonine City or Trastavere. The impecunious Roman nobility were ever ready to let their palaces to titled foreigners of wealth, and Ali, acting for the Count, had experienced no difficulty in procuring for his master an abode that even a potentate might have envied him. It was a ...
— Monte-Cristo's Daughter • Edmund Flagg
... arm chairs and willow rockers scattered about the room. A long library table took up considerable space at one end of the room, and conveniently near it were rows of book shelves, lined with special books required by the Overton curriculum of study, which, in price, were out of reach of the more impecunious students, and were in such constant demand at the library that their temporary possession often ...
— Grace Harlowe's Return to Overton Campus • Jessie Graham Flower
... by the perfidy, the defalcation, the dishonesty, or neglect of any one of a hundred thousand subordinates utterly unknown to the President of the United States, not to say the eternal worriment by a vast host of impecunious friends and old military subordinates. Even as it is, I am tortured by the charitable appeals of poor distressed pensioners; but as President, these would be multiplied beyond human endurance. I remember well the experience ...
— McClure's Magazine, January, 1896, Vol. VI. No. 2 • Various
... purity of nature serve to call out the latent malignity of Guido and the slumbering chivalry of Caponsacchi. Without her, the one might have remained a "petit maitre priestling;" the other merely a soured, cross-grained, impecunious country squire: Rome would have had no tragedy to talk about, nor we this book to read. It is in Pompilia that all the threads of action meet: she is the heroine, as neither Guido nor Caponsacchi can be ...
— An Introduction to the Study of Browning • Arthur Symons
... the question. In a few hours she must decide what her future life would be—the petted, pampered mistress of Willard Brockton, wealthy member of the New York Stock Exchange, or the wife of John Madison, an interesting but impecunious newspaper reporter. If she married this man, it meant that she must relinquish immediately everything she loved—her sumptuous apartment on Riverside Drive, her automobile, her beautiful gowns, and gay little midnight champagne suppers in good company. Her life henceforth would be dreadfully prosaic ...
— The Easiest Way - A Story of Metropolitan Life • Eugene Walter and Arthur Hornblow
... street breaks out into an eruption of automobile stores, found herself suddenly hungry, opposite a restaurant whose entire front was a sheet of plate glass. On the other side of this glass, at marble-topped tables, apparently careless of their total lack of privacy, sat the impecunious, lunching, their every mouthful a spectacle for the passer-by. It reminded Jill of looking at fishes in an aquarium. In the center of the window, gazing out in a distrait manner over piles of apples ...
— The Little Warrior - (U.K. Title: Jill the Reckless) • P. G. Wodehouse
... to be told what had brought the elder artist into such an impecunious condition. His face with its unnatural flush showed that his habits had been ...
— Chester Rand - or The New Path to Fortune • Horatio Alger, Jr
... well-born, if slightly impoverished, gentleman who lived on the Eastern Shore, and whose chief source of income was the hiring out to his friends and acquaintances of just such likely young darkies as Todd—a custom common to the impecunious ...
— Kennedy Square • F. Hopkinson Smith
... of that "simple and obvious system of natural liberty" that always engaged his best affections, has in great measure ceased to operate as a routine of natural liberty, in fact; particularly in so far as touches the fortunes of the common man, the impecunious mass of the people. De jure, of course, the competitive system and its inviolable rights of ownership are a citadel of Natural Liberty; but de facto the common man is now, and has for some time been, feeling the pinch of it. It is law, and doubtless it is good law, grounded in immemorial ...
— An Inquiry Into The Nature Of Peace And The Terms Of Its Perpetuation • Thorstein Veblen
... comfortably in her chair, and presently smiled a welcome on a youngish-looking man with a fair moustache who came forward and sat down beside her, talking to her in low, tender and confidential tones. He was the very impecunious colonel of one of the regiments then stationed in Cairo, and as he never wasted time on sentiment, he had been lately thinking that a marriage with a widowed peeress who had twenty thousand pounds a year in her own right might not be a "half bad" arrangement for him. So ...
— Ziska - The Problem of a Wicked Soul • Marie Corelli
... were empty, dark, and deserted; the shopkeepers chatted among themselves. Towards two o'clock in the afternoon the Palais began to fill; at three, men came in from the Bourse, and Paris, generally speaking, crowded the place. Impecunious youth, hungering after literature, took the opportunity of turning over the pages of the books exposed for sale on the stalls outside the booksellers' shops; the men in charge charitably allowed ...
— A Distinguished Provincial at Paris • Honore de Balzac
... "There are no hospitals for impecunious litigants; it is assumed that only persons of means have a right to go to law. Of course, if we knew the man and the circumstances we might be able to help him; but, for all we know to the contrary, he may ...
— The Vanishing Man • R. Austin Freeman
... reconciled to the new order of things, but for his daughter's sake he held his peace. Then, too, though he never forgave John Britton for having married his daughter, yet John Britton as a man whose wealth exceeded even his own was an altogether different person from the ambitious but impecunious lover of thirty years before. He had never forgiven Darrell for being John Britton's son, but mingled with his long-cherished animosity was a secret pride in the splendid physical and intellectual manhood of this sole representative of ...
— At the Time Appointed • A. Maynard Barbour
... friends, was called to the bar, I'd an appetite fresh and hearty. But I was, as many young barristers are, An impecunious party. ...
— The Complete Plays of Gilbert and Sullivan - The 14 Gilbert And Sullivan Plays • William Schwenk Gilbert and Arthur Sullivan
... swallowed them all in his boyhood, and now, having a keen dramatic faculty, is extremely clever at playing upon them by the arts of the actor and stage manager. Withal, he is no spoiled child. Poverty, ill-luck, the shifts of impecunious shabby-gentility, repeated failure as a would-be author, humiliation as a rebuffed time server, reproof and punishment as an incompetent and dishonest officer, an escape from dismissal from the service so narrow ...
— The Man of Destiny • George Bernard Shaw
... ago, as the youngest of the pretty Wilde sisters, she had, in the romantic fervour of her youth and in spite of the opposition of her parents, made a love match with a handsome, impecunious young dabbler in "stocks." "Sophy is a creature of sentiment," her friends had urged in extenuation of a marriage which was not then considered in a brilliant light, but to the surprise of everybody, after the single venture ...
— The Wheel of Life • Ellen Anderson Gholson Glasgow
... entirely without means. His father had died, and left him nothing, and his 'Macbeth' had not won the L300 premium at the British Gallery. His aristocratic friends had temporarily deserted him, but the Hunts assisted him with the ready liberality of the impecunious. John lent him small sums of money, while Leigh offered him a plate at his table till Solomon was finished, and initiated him into the mysteries of drawing and ...
— Little Memoirs of the Nineteenth Century • George Paston
... been a heathen, I couldn't have helped wishing well to a noble, handsome woman like Helen Markson. I tried to speak in a very low tone, but Mrs. Markson seemed to understand what I said, for she favored me with a look more malevolent than any I had ever received from my most impecunious debtor; the natural effect was to wake up all the old Adam there was in me, and to make me long for what ...
— Romance of California Life • John Habberton
... gray vein, which is brought out by polish on the cornice and balustrade, as a relief to the unpolished surface elsewhere displayed. There is no inscription; but visitors are usually told about Mrs. Charlotte Hart, the apparently impecunious pew-opener at the church, who surprised her friends by dying worth close upon L3,000, and by leaving L600 to the restoration fund. A new pulpit happened to be wanted at the time, and the bequest was applied in ...
— Bell's Cathedrals: The Priory Church of St. Bartholomew-the-Great, Smithfield • George Worley
... visits only every other circuit. Frank began pretty well, getting some little work in London, and perhaps nearly enough to pay the cost of his circuit out of the county in which the cathedral was situated. But he began life after that impecunious fashion for which the Greystocks have been noted. Tailors, robemakers, and booksellers gave him trust, and did believe that they would get their money. And any persistent tradesman did get it. He did not actually hoist ...
— The Eustace Diamonds • Anthony Trollope
... immediate wants; and it is plain that he constantly availed himself of their necessitous condition to effect bargains with them very advantageous to his own interests. Robert Daborne, the dramatist, for instance, appears to have been particularly impecunious, and he was, moreover, afflicted with a pending lawsuit; the sums he obtained for his plays from the manager were therefore very disproportionate and uncertain. His letters to Henslowe are urgent in solicitations for payment ...
— A Book of the Play - Studies and Illustrations of Histrionic Story, Life, and Character • Dutton Cook
... Prague as a royal and imperial residence. The castle had been repaired fitfully by one king or another as we have seen, and had been provided with strong towers chiefly used as dungeons, and had been allowed to fall into disrepair by the impecunious and extravagant John. The cathedral was probably in not much better case. We have seen glimpses of that sacred fane with its memories of royal saints and martyrs, how St. Wenceslaus built the first church on the site of ...
— From a Terrace in Prague • Lieut.-Col. B. Granville Baker
... have," he said at last, "an impecunious prince who marries an American heiress, as so many of them do. The girl begins life in Austria on one million dollars, say two hundred thousand pounds, and a case of diamonds said to be worth another two hundred thousand at least—probably ...
— Jennie Baxter, Journalist • Robert Barr
... worried because of the refusals of crews of vessels flying their flags to leave Tahiti, complaints of the police of the misconduct of their nationals, or appeals for assistance from impecunious or spendthrift tourists. It was an every-week happening for sailors of American vessels and of the New Zealand steamships to flee to the distant districts or to Moorea, to live in a breadfruit grove with dryads who ...
— Mystic Isles of the South Seas. • Frederick O'Brien
... much. I am glad you liked the doggerel: I have already had a liberal cheque, over which I licked my fingers with a sound conscience. I had not meant to make money by these stumbling feet, but if it comes, it is only too welcome in my handsome but impecunious house. ...
— Letters of Robert Louis Stevenson - Volume 2 • Robert Louis Stevenson
... and yet will expect and require others to pay him. No discount on tuition was made on higher classes, because their first classes furnished students with the means of paying for their tuition in the higher instruction, and of doing charity work besides. If the Primary students are still impecunious, it is their own fault, and this ill-success of itself leaves them unprepared to ...
— Rudimental Divine Science • Mary Baker Eddy
... been employed in arrogant commercialism. The Academy holds a hundred thousand pounds in trust, left by Mr. Chantry for the furtherance of art in this country; and this money is spent on the purchase of pictures by impecunious Academicians, and the collection formed with this money is one of the seven horrors of civilisation. The Academy has tolerated genius when it was popular, it has trampled upon genius when it was unpopular; and the business of the new art criticism is ...
— Modern Painting • George Moore
... usual thing for an impecunious young man to invest five thousand dollars in a single symphony concert, but there was one feature of the affair which was more unusual still; namely, the fact that the consummation of that same young man's hopes was complete. For two beatific hours on the evening ...
— Peak and Prairie - From a Colorado Sketch-book • Anna Fuller
... a German Count, if I remember rightly, and, like most German Counts, had not much money; and her father, as fathers will when proposed to by impecunious would-be sons-in-law, refused his consent. The Count then went abroad to try and make, or at all events improve, his fortune. He went to America, and there he prospered. In a year or two he came back, tolerably rich—to find, however, that he was too ...
— Diary of a Pilgrimage • Jerome K. Jerome
... too, drawn to one another by a conservative instinct at sight of Cornudet, talked money in a certain tone of contempt for the impecunious. Count Hubert spoke of the damage inflicted on him by the Prussians, of the losses which would result to him from the seizing of cattle and from ruined crops, but with all the assurance of a great landed proprietor, ten times millionaire, whom ...
— The Works of Guy de Maupassant, Vol. 1 (of 8) - Boule de Suif and Other Stories • Guy de Maupassant
... of some of them, suffered. Thus Randolph had not long been Secretary of State when Joseph Fauchet, the French Minister, produced some papers which could be construed as implying that Randolph had accepted money. Randolph was known to be impecunious, but his personal honor had never been suspected. Washington with characteristic candor sent Randolph the batch of incriminating letters. Randolph protested that he "forgave" the President and tried to exculpate himself in ...
— George Washington • William Roscoe Thayer
... a success, too. Her father's victory over the copper ring, her own adventures, which lost nothing in the telling, and her vivacious self-confidence, carried her into society with a whirl. Recently, her engagement to an impecunious peer was announced. ...
— The Captain of the Kansas • Louis Tracy
... Bingley Crocker was one that would have provided an admirable "instance" for a preacher seeking to instil into an impecunious and sceptical flock the lesson that money does not of necessity bring with it happiness. And poetry has crystallised his position in ...
— Piccadilly Jim • Pelham Grenville Wodehouse
... 1876, a man of venerable appearance, with white hair, worn long, and a patriarchal beard. He was a familiar figure in Washington, and well known among the public men of his day. A versatile and entertaining companion, by turns prosperous and impecunious, and an optimist always, Gardiner Hubbard became a really indispensable factor as the first advance agent of the ...
— The History of the Telephone • Herbert N. Casson
... her impecunious father might have spoken. He, the master of Wendover Abbey, to whom the possession of things that money could buy must needs be a dead certainty. But it was evidently a part of his character to make light of his wealth; assuredly a ...
— The Golden Calf • M. E. Braddon
... the required sum from his own pocket rather than allow Antoinette to see her husband's telegram. He even sent more than was necessary, muttering to himself: "The poor devil may have some bills to settle before he can get away, and in any event she must not be disappointed because her impecunious husband lacks a few dollars. I fancy the poor artist will be amazed to find himself suddenly raised from poverty to affluence, for little Lory's income will be enormous and he will have seven years, at least, to enjoy it unrestrained. I hope," he added thoughtfully, as he drove back to his office, ...
— Mary Louise Solves a Mystery • L. Frank Baum
... impecunious young man, and, the other day, on seeing this Advertisement in the Times, I was seized with a wild desire to "at once secure above reward." Said I to myself, "I have 'wealthy and influential friends.' There is my cousin's ...
— Punch, Or The London Charivari, Volume 102, April 2, 1892 • Various
... education had combined to deprive her of any adaptability to the new order of things; and she rejected the idea that "a lady should transact business", with the same contemptuous indignation that would have greeted a proposition to wear "machine-sewed garments", that last resort of impecunious plebeianism. However unwelcome Leo had found this assumption of the grave duties of mature womanhood, she met the responsibility unflinchingly, and gathered very firmly the reins transferred to her fair hands ...
— At the Mercy of Tiberius • August Evans Wilson
... of all she and her dear ones went through, enables us to see almost with our own eyes how the invasion of America appears to the impecunious invader. It is thus "a human document" of considerable value, as well as a promissory note of future performance. The quick senses of the child, her keen powers of observation and introspection, her impressionability both to sensations and complex emotions—these ...
— From Plotzk to Boston • Mary Antin
... his waistcoat was embroidered and adorned with diamond buttons, his trousers were tight, and his name, with those of three or four other European financiers, made it alternately possible or impossible for impecunious empires and kingdoms to raise money in England, France and Germany. In matters of business, in the East, the Jew fears the Greek, the Greek fears the Armenian, the Armenian fears the Persian, and the Persian fears only Allah. One reason ...
— The Primadonna • F. Marion Crawford
... want one. I had a feeling that, if I took one, and he lost a ball in these impecunious times of mine, I'd murder him. Saw you at the fifth hole. ...
— Dangerous Days • Mary Roberts Rinehart
... First Act, when prancing steeds, with secondhand park-hack saddles, at quite half-a-crown an hour, are brought in, and, on a striking tableau of bold but impecunious warriors refusing to mount, the ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 100, April 25, 1891 • Various
... the dashing correspondent at Nashville was conspicuously "well-connected." Also, that he belonged to the stirring New South and had put money in his purse. Hortense's contempt for the semi- rustic and impecunious Cope became boundless. ...
— Bertram Cope's Year • Henry Blake Fuller
... Jones heartily. "That advertisement counts for nothing. Professional kidnappers do not select the sons of impecunious ministers for their prey. Nor do they give addresses through which they may be found. You can dismiss the advertisement as a blind; ...
— Average Jones • Samuel Hopkins Adams
... distinguishing characteristics are that the wings are transparent and have no cases or covers, there was a formidable army. I refer to the common little fly. There was the house fly, the horse fly, the dangerous blue-bottle, the impecunious blow fly, the indefatigable buzzer, and others. One's delicate skin got beset with flies: they got in one's ears, in one's eyes, up one's nose, down one's throat, in one's coffee, in one's bed; they bade fair to devour one within an hour or two, and brought forth inward curses ...
— Across China on Foot • Edwin Dingle
... An impecunious speculator once flooded a town with handbills and posters containing this announcement: "Your Uncle is coming." The streams of passers-by looked at the bill boards and wondered what it meant. The speculator rented the theatre, ...
— Gov. Bob. Taylor's Tales • Robert L. Taylor
... all the beasts in the Central Park collection is the larger of the two grizzly bears. From the easy way in which he takes life, he reminds one of a successful politician, who had worked his way up from being a slim and impecunious "repeater" to the position of Alderman, or Custom House official, and President of the Fat Men's Club. There is a drunken leer in this beast's eye, an inebriate roll in all his movements, that lead one mechanically to peer into the ...
— Punchinello, Vol. 2, No. 36, December 3, 1870 • Various
... encounters. The path of the next wooer would doubtless be easier. But that lucky man did not put in an appearance. Miss Comstock jealously guarded the approaches to her treasure with greater discretion than ever before. She made no effort to prepare for her an alliance with an impecunious scion of the minor Continental nobility such as she arranged later for Sadie Paul. She said that she could think of no one good enough for her dear Adelle, and anyway the girl was altogether too young ...
— Clark's Field • Robert Herrick
... at it, eh? Upon my soul-spoiling the brat like that! You'd no business to, my dear chap-a lovely baroque pearl—" he protested, with the half-apologetic tone of the rich man embarrassed by too costly a gift from an impecunious friend. ...
— The Glimpses of the Moon • Edith Wharton
... an impecunious Subaltern was not a catch, But the Boffkins knew that Minnie mightn't make ...
— Departmental Ditties and Barrack Room Ballads • Rudyard Kipling
... gone through every penny he ever had, publishing rotten verses in fancy bindings. No, we're an impecunious lot. My mother's always been awfully good to us, I must say. That is, up to now. Since her marriage, of course——" he ...
— The Mysterious Affair at Styles • Agatha Christie
... favourites, and royal commissions were issued to take inventories of ecclesiastical property. During the years 1551 and 1552 the churches were stripped of their valuables, and the church plate, chalices, copes, vestments, and altar cloths, were disposed of to provide money for the impecunious members of the council. ...
— History of the Catholic Church from the Renaissance • Rev. James MacCaffrey
... fell on the man—theatre tickets, carriages if it rained, and often a bit of supper after. If a youth asked a girl to dance the cotillion, he was expected to send a bouquet, sure to cost between twenty and twenty-five dollars. What a blessed change for the impecunious swell when all this went out of fashion! New York is his paradise now; in other parts of the world something is still expected of him. In France it takes the form of a handsome bag of bon-bons on New Year's Day, if he ...
— Worldly Ways and Byways • Eliot Gregory
... never naturalized. If he was not naturalized, his widow has no standing in the court where the suit has been brought. In that case, it belongs to the Federal Court, and his widow and orphan, as well as the impecunious lawyer who has taken the widow's case on a contingent fee, will not have the means nor the fortitude to begin action ...
— The Transgressors - Story of a Great Sin • Francis A. Adams
... jaunty self-confidence. But that element of strength was lacking; nay, more, he felt in his heart that it could never be replaced. He was no longer the acute, blustering, effusive Verity, who in one summer's afternoon had secured a rich partner and forced an impecunious sailor to throw away a worn-out ship. The insurance held good, of course, and there simply must be some sort of tidings of the Andromeda to hand before the end of September. Yet things had gone wrong, desperately wrong, ...
— The Stowaway Girl • Louis Tracy
... the devil. His fixed idea was that none of his daughters should ever be carried off by a fortune-hunter. The two older girls apparently escaped this danger by making fairly wealthy matches. But Alice—come away! why should she take up with this impecunious painter? He was good-looking and had the gift of the gab, but what was that worth? If he would come into the sugar-business, where a place was waiting for him, and make good there, it would be all right. Otherwise, ...
— The Valley of Vision • Henry Van Dyke
... hers, this audacious youth, though not of Washington Street; impecunious, and hence negligible; moreover somewhat notorious of late for a too vivid behavior: the distant bowing acquaintance of many years. This till the moment of indiscretion last May; when, encountering his dashing attractions in the ...
— V. V.'s Eyes • Henry Sydnor Harrison
... the world we all move in—require it quite as much? Mr. Vanderbank, I'm assured, has no means of his own at all, and if he doesn't believe in impecunious marriages it's not I who shall be shocked at him. For myself I simply despise them. He has nothing but a poor official salary. If it's enough for one it would be little for two, and would be still less for half a dozen. They're ...
— The Awkward Age • Henry James
... words, the note-issuing business would once more have to be regulated on banking principles and controlled by the price asked, for advances, instead of expressing the helplessness and improvidence of an impecunious and invertebrate Government. In this manner the new departure might be a convenient halfway-house on the way from chaos back to sanity. But probably it is too revolutionary and goes too straight in the teeth of the Bank of England's privilege to receive much practical consideration; ...
— War-Time Financial Problems • Hartley Withers
... Holmes. "They'll spend their time looking for some impecunious member of the smart set who might have done the job. They always try to find the sensational clew first, and by day after to-morrow morning four or five poor but honest members of the four-hundred will find when they read the morning papers that they are under surveillance, ...
— R. Holmes & Co. • John Kendrick Bangs
... that his defects permitted. An outspoken giber, he made numberless epigrams on a friend to his face; but would defend him, if absent, with courage and loyalty. He laughed at everything, even at his own career. Always impecunious, he yet lived, like all men of his calibre, plunged in unspeakable indolence. He would fling some word containing volumes in the teeth of folk who could not put a syllable of sense into their books. He lavished promises that he never fulfilled; he made a pillow ...
— The Magic Skin • Honore de Balzac
... restaurant. From that time forward the life of the two brothers was settled. They continued to live in the room in the Rue Royer Collard, whither they returned every evening; the one glowing and radiant from his hot fire, the other with the depressed countenance of a shabby, impecunious teacher. Florent still wore his old black coat, as he sat absorbed in correcting his pupils' exercises; while Quenu, to put himself more at ease, donned his white apron, cap, and jacket, and, flitting about in front of the stove, amused himself by baking some dainty in the oven. Sometimes they ...
— The Fat and the Thin • Emile Zola
... had acquired, I kept my head above water for about eighteen months. Very soon, however, my financial distress became known, with the result that I was no longer so cordially received as I had been either in Dunchester or in London. The impecunious ...
— Doctor Therne • H. Rider Haggard
... but eaten by moth, perched in this wilderness of trumpery, presided over by an Angora cat, Madame Popinot's pet, restored to her no doubt with all the graces of life by some impecunious naturalist, who thus repaid a gift of charity with a perennial treasure. Some local artist whose heart had misguided his brush had painted portraits of M. and Madame Popinot. Even in the bedroom there were embroidered pin-cushions, landscapes in cross-stitch, ...
— The Commission in Lunacy • Honore de Balzac
... and he had not concerned himself as yet with any thoughts as to her poverty and his own somewhat impecunious position as his father's heir, but with three sisters to be provided for out of the revenues of the impoverished estate. He was man of the world enough to know that this dowry would do much to smooth his path when the time should come for making ...
— The Lost Treasure of Trevlyn - A Story of the Days of the Gunpowder Plot • Evelyn Everett-Green
... Samuel de Champlain made in the wilderness three hundred years ago, has become one of the last refuges of the romantic dream and the courtly illusion, still haunted by the shades of impecunious young noblemen with velvet cloaks and feathered hats and rapiers at their hips; of delicate, high-spirited beauties braving the snowy wildwood in their silks and laces; of missionary monks, tonsured and rope-girdled, ...
— Days Off - And Other Digressions • Henry Van Dyke
... scene disclosed Mrs. Hardup, a widow lady, lamenting her lack of means, and regretting that her son, Augustus, should have engaged himself to Isabella, a charming but utterly impecunious damsel. She cheered up, however, when the young people came in bearing a letter; for it was from Uncle Cashbags, their rich relation, announcing that he was coming that very day to have lunch with them. Mavis, as the diplomatic widow, with grey hair and tortoise-shell-rimmed ...
— Monitress Merle • Angela Brazil
... home that evening after attending one of the weekly sessions at the Colophon Club, where he had reluctantly contributed the sum of fifty-seven dollars to relieve the immediate needs of certain impecunious persons gathered there about a green-baize-covered table in a remote corner of the card room, he perceived by the light of an adjacent street lamp that someone was sitting upon the top of the steps leading to his ...
— By Advice of Counsel • Arthur Train
... perceive how much more worthy I am of her admiration than that shabby de Sigognac. Oh, yes! she'll be sure to come round, in spite of her obstinate affectation of such ferocious virtue, and her tiresome, Platonic love for her impecunious suitor. Yes, my little beauty, your portrait shall figure in one of those oval frames ere long. I think I'll have you painted as chaste Diana, descended from the sky, despite her coldness, to lavish sweet kisses on Endymion. You shall ...
— Captain Fracasse • Theophile Gautier
... brief married life. To this lady William's aunt immediately offered her house as a home, and promised to take care of her child's education and provide for its future. This offer was gratefully accepted by the bereaved and impecunious widow, who, with her child, soon became domiciled beneath the roof of the uncle and ...
— Bucholz and the Detectives • Allan Pinkerton
... with the sale accomplished and he rich beyond his wildest dreams, he was precisely the same man in bearing, manner, and speech that he had been in his impecunious days in Bedford Place. He was rich then—in hopes, in plans, in the reality of his dreamland. He was no richer now. The check in his pocket made ...
— Colonel Carter of Cartersville • F. Hopkinson Smith
... see it all very vividly now. It was in the summer time and about seven years ago. I was practising at the time down in the little town of Bradford. It was a small and primitive place, just the location for an impecunious medical man, recently out ...
— The heart of happy hollow - A collection of stories • Paul Laurence Dunbar
... of talk in the city about the marriage. The people said they did not know what Jordan could be thinking of. They were convinced that he was in desperate financial straits if he would marry his daughter to an impecunious musician. ...
— The Goose Man • Jacob Wassermann
... diuert from deepest care. Nash was notoriously impecunious all through his life, and probably reference is here made to some bounty received at the hands of Lord Southampton (see Introduction). What patronage meant at times is gleaned from Florio's dedication of The Worlde of Wordes ...
— The Choise of Valentines - Or the Merie Ballad of Nash His Dildo • Thomas Nash
... thoughts to piece out the theatrical robes and blank verse eloquence of playwrights who only received for their best accepted works from five to twenty pounds; proprietors and stage managers driving hard bargains with these brilliant, bacchanalian and impecunious bohemians. ...
— Shakspere, Personal Recollections • John A. Joyce
... of Erin in the shape of an impecunious Irish nobleman, who enlisted on the same day with Polson and whose uniform was tried on ...
— VC — A Chronicle of Castle Barfield and of the Crimea • David Christie Murray
... lighted in that cavernous kitchen, but it remained dark, mercifully leaving the dirt half unseen. A joint of mutton, cold and mangled, was discernible, however, when Henrietta descended to put her impecunious case before the landlady and, gazing at it, the girl saw also her opportunity. Mrs. Banks had no culinary imagination, but Henrietta found it rising in herself to an inspired degree and there and then she offered herself as cook in ...
— THE MISSES MALLETT • E. H. YOUNG
... an interval of repose with compassionate but impecunious American friends in Paris—that Miss Viner had been drawn into the turbid current of Mrs. Murrett's career. The impecunious compatriots had found Mrs. Murrett for her, and it was partly on their account (because they were such dears, and so unconscious, poor confiding things, of ...
— The Reef • Edith Wharton
... through his unintentional eavesdropping was something of a revelation. In his mild conjectures as to Crowheart's opinion of him it never had occurred to him that it considered him anything more interesting than an impecunious semi-invalid or possibly a homeseeker taking his own time to locate. But a hold-up! a loafer! a lazy cheap-skate! Van Lennop shook with silent laughter. A skinflint too mean to buy a drink! He had no notion ...
— The Lady Doc • Caroline Lockhart
... Neither of us saw the situation nakedly at first—it was sicklied o'er with Quixotic foolishness. You see, you had the advantage of me. Your governor was a gentleman. He says, 'Very well, if you won't go to Cambridge, if you refuse to enter the Church as the younger son of a blue-blooded but impecunious baronet should, and to step into the living which is fattening for you, then I must refuse to take any further responsibility for your future. Here is a thousand pounds; it is the money I had set aside for your college course. Use it for your musical tomfoolery if you insist, and then—get what ...
— Merely Mary Ann • Israel Zangwill
... belonging to it—especially and peculiarly the Cafe Procope—-was of the choicest Quartier Latin flavor in the time of which I write; in the pleasant, careless, impecunious days of my youth. A cheap and highly popular restaurateur named Pinson rented the old theatre. A costumier hung out wigs, and masks, and debardeur garments next door to the restaurateur. Where the fatal tumbril used to labor past, the frequent omnibus now rattled gayly by; and the pavements ...
— In the Days of My Youth • Amelia Ann Blandford Edwards
... laziness and shiftlessness, each received a hundred dollars outright. The Whalens, always with both hands metaphorically outstretched for alms, were loud in their praises of Miss Flora's great kindness of heart; but the Davises (Mrs. Jane Blaisdell's impecunious relatives) had very visible difficulty in making Miss Flora understand that gifts bestowed as she bestowed ...
— Oh, Money! Money! • Eleanor Hodgman Porter
... pounds—the extreme limit fixed in the correspondence; or rather he would pay, he would pay and sue him for damages. He would go to Jobling and Boulter and put the matter in their hands. He would ruin the impecunious beggar! And suddenly—though what connection between the thoughts?—he reflected that Irene had no money either. They were both beggars. This gave him ...
— Forsyte Saga • John Galsworthy
... wages to shame a laborer, who had learned how much more one got for his money at Louis's than at the white-tiled American places further down town. It stood for ten years, this Hotel Marseillaise, the hope of the impecunious. How many careers did it preserve, how many old failures from the wreckage of Kearney Street did ...
— The Readjustment • Will Irwin
... straits. The riddle is easily solved. Chopin was open-handed and not much of an economist: he spent a good deal on pretty trifles, assisted liberally his needy countrymen, made handsome presents to his friends, and is said to have had occasionally to pay bills of his likewise often impecunious lady-love. Moreover, his total income was not so large as may be supposed, for although he could have as many pupils as he wished, he never taught more than five hours a day, and lived every year for several months in the country. And then there is one other ...
— Frederick Chopin as a Man and Musician - Volume 1-2, Complete • Frederick Niecks
... elected without opposition as his successor by an arrangement among the ruling families. Place was disgusted at the distribution of 'bread and cheese and beer,' and resolved to find a truly popular candidate. In the general election which soon followed at the end of 1806 he supported Paull, an impecunious adventurer, who made a good fight, but was beaten by Sir J. Hood and Sheridan. Place now proposed a more thorough organisation of the constituency, and formed a committee intended to carry an independent candidate. Sir Francis Burdett, a typical country gentleman of no great brains ...
— The English Utilitarians, Volume II (of 3) - James Mill • Leslie Stephen
... music; she held the score in her hand and followed it note by note. She was studying music, and her mother, who was the Archduchess, was watching her. But now and then, when her mother's eyes were glued to the stage, Hilda stole a glance at the upper balconies where impecunious young officers leaned over the rail and gazed at ...
— Long Live the King • Mary Roberts Rinehart
... urgently needed by a class of persons unprepared in rudimentary education, and whose immediate aim must be that of the mechanic and the farmer—to whom the classics, theology and the sciences, in their extremely impecunious state, are unequivocable abstractions. There will be those who will denounce me for taking this view of collegiate and professional preparation; but I maintain that any education is false which is unsuited to the condition and the prospects of the student. To educate ...
— Black and White - Land, Labor, and Politics in the South • Timothy Thomas Fortune
... the employment of a corrupted version of his name. It is of course untrue that Fastolfe was ever the intimate associate of Henry V when Prince of Wales, who was not his junior by more than ten years, or that he was an impecunious spendthrift and gray-haired debauchee. The historical Fastolfe was in private life an expert man of business, who was indulgent neither to himself nor his friends. He was nothing of a jester, and was, in spite of all imputations to the contrary, ...
— Inns and Taverns of Old London • Henry C. Shelley
... would be naught save kindliness, only she cannot bring herself to tolerate Punch and Judy; Short and Codlin, the Punch and Judy men; the little misused servant, whom Dick Swiveller in his grandeur creates a marchioness; and the magnificent Swiveller himself, prince among the idle and impecunious, justifying by his snatches of song, and flowery rhetoric, his high position as "perpetual grand-master" among the "Glorious Apollers,"—all these, making allowance perhaps for some idealization, were personages of Dickens' own time. But ...
— Life of Charles Dickens • Frank Marzials
... the situation admitted that violent methods had been used so to intimidate the Negroes as to compel them to vote according to the dictation of the whites. It was also learned that the bulldozers concerned in dethroning the non-taxpaying blacks were an impecunious and irresponsible group themselves, led by men of ...
— A Century of Negro Migration • Carter G. Woodson
... encased in low calf shoes with steel buckles. I noticed, too, that his face was angular and humorous; his eyes keen and merry by turns; his hair of the colourless brown one sees among fisherfolk whose lives are spent in the sun and rain. I saw, too, that he was impecunious, for the front edges of his cassock were frayed and three buttons missing, not to be wondered at, I said to myself, as I remembered that the stone church, like the village it ...
— A Village of Vagabonds • F. Berkeley Smith
... and peppery farce is one of the cleanest and most hilariously amusing plays of recent years. It is the story of ambitious but impecunious youth. "Doc" Hampton, without a patient, "Stocksie," a lawyer devoid of clients, and "Chub" Perkins, a financier without capital, are in a bad way. In fact, they are broke and it is a real problem for them actually ...
— The Ghost of Jerry Bundler • W. W. Jacobs and Charles Rock
... my spirit seemed to sink lower and lower as I neared the place; for it was terrible to think of those whom I had left, if not in affluence, at least in a comfortable position in life, brought down to so sad and impecunious a state, suffering real poverty, and with the home of so many years now in the ...
— The Golden Magnet • George Manville Fenn
... Lowell's periodical, "The Pioneer," which lived only through the first three months of that year, contained "The Hall of Fantasy," in the February, and "The Birthmark," in the March number. "The Democratic Review," which was still edited by O'Sullivan, a warm friend though editorially impecunious, received the remaining tales and sketches with a few exceptions. It published them as follows: in 1843, "The New Adam and Eve," February; "Egotism, or The Bosom Serpent," March; "The Procession of Life," April; ...
— Nathaniel Hawthorne • George E. Woodberry
... the North. To force payment from the generous but insolvent debtor—to obtain liquidation from the Southern planter—was really the soulless and mercenary object of the craven Northerners. Let the common people of England look to this. Let the improvident literary hack, the starved impecunious Grub Street debtor, the newspaper frequenter of sponging- houses, remember this in their criticisms of the ...
— The Luck of Roaring Camp and Other Tales • Bret Harte
... flattering her and making her presents, and encouraging Jimmie to talk of his wonderful ideas. Moreover, he gave him plainly to understand that, once Virginia and he were married, the shipping clerk's impecunious days would be over and a comfortable berth would be awaiting him in his office at a salary commensurate with ...
— Bought and Paid For - From the Play of George Broadhurst • Arthur Hornblow
... regions. It is a very equitable arrangement, for it is only the rich man who can save money in this way, while his poorer neighbor, who has no country-seat to which he may escape, must pay to the uttermost farthing. The system stimulates the impecunious to become wealthy and helps the rich to become richer. It is, therefore, ...
— An American Politician • F. Marion Crawford
... castle, a short hour's ride, "An impecunious old lady lived, two marriageable and impecunious daughters beside, "Whom Bluebeard had seen and at love's highest pitch "Sent to say he would marry, he didn't care which! "Sent to say he would marry, ...
— Bluebeard • Kate Douglas Wiggin
... aside as indecorous at this acute stage of the tragedy, but which, nevertheless, were able to exercise a mildly consoling influence in the background. He would be spared the anxieties of early and impecunious marriage, his professional career would not be weighted by family cares, the whole world was once more open before him, and the slate clean. These were considerations which could not prudently be overlooked, though it would ...
— The Nebuly Coat • John Meade Falkner
... view of the river. This first house was burnt down, but he erected another, where he lived in some state and in great comfort, displaying his jewels and pictures to his admiring neighbours, and showing kindness to impecunious nephews. ...
— Memoirs of Napoleon Bonaparte, Complete • Louis Antoine Fauvelet de Bourrienne
... estimated at 100,000) largely exceeding that of the whole Boer population. Although the first result of the working of the gold mines and the growth of the towns had been to swell the revenues of the previously impecunious Republic, President Kruger and the Boers generally were alarmed at seeing a tide of aliens from the British colonies and Europe and the United States, most of them British subjects, and nearly all speaking English, rise up around and threaten to submerge them. They proceeded to defend themselves ...
— Impressions of South Africa • James Bryce
... poor, a. indigent, impecunious, needy, poverty -stricken, straitened, necessitous, penniless, eleemosynary; emaciated, skinny, lean, spare, meager, bony, gaunt, thin, haggard, scrawny, angular, peaked, rawboned, pinched; inferior, mean, shabby, seedy, tacky, worthless; barren, sterile, effete infecund, inarable, ...
— Putnam's Word Book • Louis A. Flemming
... heartlessness. It was not very gratifying to think of what might be in store for them if all memories were as short as Brewster's. Old Mrs. Ketchell changed her will, and two nephews were cut off entirely; a very modest and impecunious grandson of Joseph Garrity also was to sustain a severe change of fortune in the near future, if the cards spoke correctly. Judge Van Woort, who was not expected to live through the night, got better immediately after hearing some one in the sick-room whisper that Montgomery Brewster ...
— Brewster's Millions • George Barr McCutcheon
... it had been the custom of the Imperial Court to worship at the great shrine of Ise and to offer suitable gifts. This ceremony was long suspended, however, on account of continuous wars as well as the impecunious condition of the Court. Under the sway of the Oda and the Toyotomi, fitful efforts were made to renew the custom, but it was left for the Tokugawa to re-establish it. The third shogun, Iemitsu, petitioned the Court in that sense, and assigned an estate ...
— A History of the Japanese People - From the Earliest Times to the End of the Meiji Era • Frank Brinkley and Dairoku Kikuchi
... Little was slightly intoxicated. By that mysterious faculty, whereby the confirmed drunkard, although absolutely impecunious, nevertheless manages to keep soaked, while other thirsty men can get nothing, he had obtained rum. And Meshech it was who, proceeding in that spirit of frankness engendered by the bottle, now brought about the solution of a misunderstanding, that ...
— The Duke of Stockbridge • Edward Bellamy |
