"Prettiness" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... hours and a half to the accident of that happening!—he had joyously mentioned that he was trying to buy out another man's berth upon that boat. It wasn't so much his wanting to come that was droll—teasing sprites of girls with peach-blossom prettiness are not unwonted to the thunder of pursuing feet—but the frank and cheery way he had of announcing it. Not many men had the courage of their desires. Not any men that little Miss Arlee had yet met had the frankness of such courage. And because all women love the adventurous ...
— The Palace of Darkened Windows • Mary Hastings Bradley
... not want to shoot a woman, especially not a young woman of a certain prettiness. So they let her go, when she swore that she would never return to England. But they did not trust her. She is under observation now! Your home is watched, my dear Mrs. Widdicombe, and I dare say there is a man on guard outside ...
— The Cup of Fury - A Novel of Cities and Shipyards • Rupert Hughes
... first appeared in 1765, accompanied by observations which have been generally appended to subsequent editions. These observations have commonly borne the character of feebleness and affectation; they have a sort of pedantic prettiness, which is somewhat repulsive, but they do not want ingenuity, or justness of criticism. Part of them, at least, had previously appeared in the Monthly Review, probably written by Langhorne. Langhorne was not deficient himself in poetical genius, but is principally remembered by a single beautiful ...
— The Poetical Works of William Collins - With a Memoir • William Collins
... she had reckoned. As they rode along a swift, overpowering infatuation for Dora Marshall grew upon him. He felt something like a flame rising within him, burning him, bewildering him with its intensity. She seemed all at once to possess every attribute of the angels, from mere prettiness her face took on a radiant beauty which dazzled him, and when she spoke her lightest word held him breathless. As the mountain towers above the foothills, so, of a sudden, she towered above all ...
— 'Me-Smith' • Caroline Lockhart
... the modern landscape-painter, who is apt to think that difficulty overcome and science well displayed can take the place of what is, after all, the one excuse and breath of art—charm. A little further, and he will regard charm in the light of an unworthy sacrifice to prettiness, and the omission of a tedious passage as ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 16 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... formula to Mr. Wiles's interview. He dashed at once in medias res. "Gashwiler knows a woman that, he says, can help us against that Spanish girl who is coming here with proofs, prettiness, fascination, and what not! You ...
— The Story of a Mine • Bret Harte
... a prettiness we very much dislike—alter one word, and it would be voluptuous—nor do we hesitate to call the passage a puling one altogether, and such as ought to be expunged from ...
— Recreations of Christopher North, Volume 2 • John Wilson
... and finely pencilled were his eyebrows. He was growing up fast, and his teeth were a little decayed and blackened,[100] which gave a peculiar beauty to his smile, and the prettiness of his appearance only served to increase her regret; and with a profound pensiveness she returned to ...
— Japanese Literature - Including Selections from Genji Monogatari and Classical - Poetry and Drama of Japan • Various
... on the warts blown into the glass globe, hugging her knees in their sturdy ribbed stockings, her smooth brown hair enhancing her clean kind of prettiness, Lilly gazed ...
— Star-Dust • Fannie Hurst
... home town, even though his name did appear in heavy block type in the Social Register. But she went only once. She made a mistake. She had that day helped to costume a sister of one of the men. She happened now to mention that sister's prettiness. ...
— Winner Take All • Larry Evans
... prince of verse, Make something like a Tragedy in Erse; Under dark Allegory's flimsy veil Let them with Ogilvie spin out a tale Of rueful length; Let them plain things obscure, Debase what's truly rich, and what is poor Make poorer still by jargon most uncouth; With ev'ry pert, prim prettiness of youth Born of false Taste, with Fancy (like a child Not knowing what it cries for) running wild, With bloated style, by affectation taught, With much false colouring, and little thought, With phrases strange, and dialect decreed By ...
— English Satires • Various
... woman with a thin prettiness devoted to experiments in religious cults, illnesses, and scandal-bearing, shook her finger at Carol and trilled, "You're a naughty one! I don't believe you appreciate the honor, when you got into the Jolly ...
— Main Street • Sinclair Lewis
... dark and aquiline, and made a foil for Peggy's blond prettiness. Peter thought her a step above Peggy in the cultural sense, and only learned afterward that as she was not very well off, Peggy was using her as a rung in the social ladder. Mordaunt, Peter didn't fancy, ...
— The Vagrant Duke • George Gibbs
... rather—in a strange garret, roamed the Tiffany home and entertained her who would listen. He warmed to Kate especially, and that household fairy, in her flights between errands of mercy, played him with all the prettiness of her coquetry. At luncheon he quite lost his embarrassment and responded to the advances of three friendly humans. Yes ma-am, he had been glad to learn that Bertram was doing well in the city. He had five sons, all ...
— The Readjustment • Will Irwin
... herself with watching him eat the next course while she toyed with it. As a woman, food meant little to her; she was concerned more with the prettiness of its serving; but Osborn was avidly hungry and ...
— Married Life - The True Romance • May Edginton
... the freshness of her youth, experiencing nothing which resembled love. Other women dominated him then with the seduction of their artifices and refinements, but here, in his loneliness, seeing Margalida surrounded by the brown and rural prettiness of her companions, beautiful as one of those white goddesses which inspire religious veneration among peoples of coppery skin, he felt the dementia of desire, and all his acts were absurd, as if he ...
— The Dead Command - From the Spanish Los Muertos Mandan • Vicente Blasco Ibanez
... and carefully covered, attracted the eye and inspired reverie. It lacked, no doubt, the grace which a fitting dress can bestow; but to a connoisseur the non-flexibility of her figure had its own charm. Eugenie, tall and strongly made, had none of the prettiness which pleases the masses; but she was beautiful with a beauty which the spirit recognizes, and none but artists truly love. A painter seeking here below for a type of Mary's celestial purity, searching womankind for those proud modest eyes which Raphael divined, ...
— Eugenie Grandet • Honore de Balzac
... looked at the door, and, so doing, got a chance to observe the minister, who was standing beside the flower-table talking to Ellen Dix. Fanny Dodge was busily arranging some flowers, with her face averted. Ellen Dix was very pretty, with an odd prettiness for a New England girl. Her pale olive skin was flawless and fine of texture. Her mouth was intensely red, and her eyes very dark and heavily shaded by long lashes. She wore at the throat of her white dress a beautiful coral brooch. ...
— An Alabaster Box • Mary E. Wilkins Freeman and Florence Morse Kingsley
... restaurant where delicatessen foods and tempting savories were served by Fraeuleins. Helen Barlow was one of the jolliest of these, and her plump prettiness and long flaxen braids of hair suited well the white kerchief and laced bodice ...
— Patty's Summer Days • Carolyn Wells
... tell why, Charmian felt that there was a dawning of hope in her sky. Her depression seemed to lift a little. She was conscious of her youth, of her grace and charm, her prettiness, her intelligence. She was able to put a little ...
— The Way of Ambition • Robert Hichens
... wonderful. He never remembered to have seen such eyes—clear, dark blue-grey with fine shading of eyelash on the lower as well as the upper lid. Unquestionably they surpassed all ordinary standards of prettiness. Were glorious, yet curiously embarrassing; too in their seriousness, their intent impartial scrutiny—under which last, to his lively vexation, the young ...
— Deadham Hard • Lucas Malet
... cantonments—a Euclidian nightmare of bare boards, black roofs and ditches, making grim vistas of straight lines. This is the architecture of Need in contradistinction to the architecture of Greed, symbolized in the shop-window prettiness of those sanitary suburbs of our cities created by the real estate agent and the speculative builder. Neither contain any ...
— Architecture and Democracy • Claude Fayette Bragdon
... statuettes in the world. They were frequently copied by Desiderio and his entourage. One of the little heads in the Vanchettoni Chapel at Florence is likewise animated by a similar exemplar. There is something girlish about them, a pursuit of prettiness which is no doubt the source of their singular attraction, and which invests them with an irresistible charm. The San Giovannino, also in the Vanchettoni, is a more concrete version of childhood, but is by ...
— Donatello • David Lindsay, Earl of Crawford
... the colonial schoolboys' weaknesses. At the Melbourne Grammar School the boys have studies which they in a certain way appreciate; but they are quite content with the bare floor and walls, and would despise the little attempts at comfort and prettiness which an English boy makes. The latter's pride in his study would be quite incomprehensible to the colonial, who not unnaturally imbibes his ideas from the rough-and-ready mode of living in his home. As for uniformity in dress, he would be a bold ...
— Town Life in Australia - 1883 • R. E. N. (Richard) Twopeny
... thinking he had not done full justice to her face. It was spirited and really intelligent, he decided, though its prettiness was as yet open to question. He perceived what hitherto he had missed: that she had hair and eyes quite worthy of consideration. Black as night the former was, and fine and rebellious, with little curling wisps about her ears and neck. The eyes were ...
— The House of Toys • Henry Russell Miller
... she had been an engaging five-year-old, and she had charming childish mannerisms for him alone. He pacified her when she fretted and complained, and was eagerly grateful when her mood was serene. Her prettiness and her little spoiled airs, Martie realized surprisedly, were full of ...
— Martie the Unconquered • Kathleen Norris
... the light from the sunset fallin' through the mornin'-glorys wus a fallin' over her, till I declare, I never see any thing look so pretty in my hull life. And there was some thin' more, fur more than prettiness in her ...
— Sweet Cicely - Or Josiah Allen as a Politician • Josiah Allen's Wife (Marietta Holley)
... you would probably observe in whatever room you might meet him. And he knew how to talk, and had in him something which justified talking. He was no butterfly or dandy, who flew about in the world's sun, warmed into prettiness by a sunbeam. Crosbie had his opinion on things,—on politics, on religion, on the philanthropic tendencies of the age, and had read something here and there as he formed his opinion. Perhaps he might have done better in ...
— The Small House at Allington • Anthony Trollope
... without the uproar that drowns his music. What a pity that he does not know how miserable he is! There is a parrot, too, calling out, "Pretty Poll! Pretty Poll!" as we pass by. Foolish bird, to be talking about her prettiness to strangers, especially as she is not a pretty Poll, though gaudily dressed in green and yellow! If she had said "Pretty Annie!" there would have been some sense in it. See that gray squirrel at the door of the fruit-shop ...
— Twice Told Tales • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... easy, almost mannish way ... slab-figured ... built more like a boy than a young woman dangerously near the old maid. She too wore bloomers. Her face was tanned. It was too broad and placid for either prettiness or beauty, but a mischievous tilt to the nose and large calm hazel eyes kept her this side ...
— Tramping on Life - An Autobiographical Narrative • Harry Kemp
... Marner had passed away, and Polly became the head of her uncle's house. Two years had passed, and so far Mary Powlett showed no signs of leaving the house, which, even the many women in the village, who envied her for her prettiness and neatness and disliked her for what they called her airs, acknowledged that she managed well. But it was not from lack of suitors. There were at least half a dozen stalwart young croppers who would gladly have paid court to her had there been the ...
— Through the Fray - A Tale of the Luddite Riots • G. A. Henty
... she appeared on the paper," returned Kathleen unconcernedly. "She is very pretty, isn't she? But prettiness alone doesn't count for much on a newspaper. Can she make good? That is the question. She imagines that journalism is her vocation, but I am afraid she is going to be sadly disillusioned. She seems to ...
— Grace Harlowe's Third Year at Overton College • Jessie Graham Flower
... little woman in the delicately featured style of sandy prettiness, and exceedingly talkative and good-natured. The rapid tongue, though low and modulated, jarred painfully on Rachel's feelings in the shaded staircase, and she was glad to shut the door of the temporary nursery, when Mrs. ...
— The Clever Woman of the Family • Charlotte M. Yonge
... rather BLOND, with an inclination to yellow; a very fair and delicate yellow, at all events, and within the limits of the poetical. She had regular features of the order properly called handsome, in distinction to prettiness or piquancy; being well proportioned to one another, large, rather than otherwise, but without coarseness, and more harmonious than interesting. Her nose was the handsomest of the kind I ever saw; and I have known her both smile ...
— The Life of Lord Byron • John Galt
... the last time Geoffrey saw her. She had lost her fresh cream and rose prettiness, but had gained something in place of it, and though her pale blue eyes were too deeply sunk, her face had acquired strength and dignity. She was, as he had always found her, perfectly self-possessed. With a quick glance, which expressed appeal ...
— Thurston of Orchard Valley • Harold Bindloss
... settled the matter for her. "What a sweetly pretty basket!" she exclaimed. She had noticed it in Huldah's hands, and been attracted by its prettiness. "It is too dainty to put that clumsy parcel into. ...
— Dick and Brownie • Mabel Quiller-Couch
... the fact that she could not eat him. Other men before Lopez have had to pick up what courage they could in their attacks upon women by remembering that fact. She had flirted with him in a very pleasant way, mixing up her prettiness and her percentages in a manner that was peculiar to herself. He did not know her, and he knew that he did not know her;—but still there was the chance. She had thrown his wife more than once in his face, after the fashion of women when they are wooed by married men since ...
— The Prime Minister • Anthony Trollope
... that conservative orifice, a little pair of lips at once plump and pinched, that looked, when closed, as if they could not open wider than to swallow a gooseberry or to emit an "Oh, dear, no!" which probably had been thought to give the finishing touch to the aristocratic prettiness of the Lady Emmeline Atheling as represented, forty years before, in several Books of Beauty. Madame de Cintre's face had, to Newman's eye, a range of expression as delightfully vast as the wind-streaked, cloud-flecked distance on a Western ...
— The American • Henry James
... was right in his obscure perception of Mr. Bradshaw's feeling while he was making his phrases. That gentleman was, in another moment, to have the tingling delight of showing the grand creature he had just begun to tame. He was going to extinguish the pallid light of Susan's prettiness in the brightness of Myrtle's beauty. He would bring this young man, neutralized and rendered entirely harmless by his irrevocable pledge to a slight girl, face to face with a masterpiece of young womanhood, and say to him, not in words, but as plainly as speech could ...
— The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. (The Physician and Poet not the Jurist)
... a girl like that, who has no manner, no talk, no intelligence; who has nothing to recommend her but an awkward, babyish prettiness! Dangerous to me? No, no! If there is danger at all, I have to dread it from the sculptor's daughter. I don't mind confessing that I am anxious to see Maddalena Lomi. But as for Nanina, she will simply be of use to me. All I know already ...
— After Dark • Wilkie Collins
... lady was pleased to give herself airs upon learning of my sister's illness, as, That she would not be sorry for it; for now she should look upon herself as the prettiest woman in England.—She meant only, I suppose, as to outward prettiness, brother! ...
— Pamela (Vol. II.) • Samuel Richardson
... ravishing a kiss, got his ears smartly boxed the next moment. I don't know precisely what was Miss Maria's function in the economy of the household; I can fancy her setting the table, and adding touches of neatness and prettiness; dusting the ornaments and fine china on the shelves of the whatnot; straightening the frames of the pictures on the walls; and, in her less romantic moments, hemming towels or sheets, or putting up preserved fruits. I know she ...
— Hawthorne and His Circle • Julian Hawthorne
... hardly satisfy one reader; and we are convinced by Mr. Towle's work that, whatever other species of literature may demand the exercise of a childish imagination,—a weak fancy easily caught with the prettiness as well as the pomp of words,—a slender philosophy incapable of grasping the true significance of events,—a logic continually tripped upon its own rapier,—and a powerful feeling for anti-climax, with no small sentiment for solecism,—History, ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 17, No. 103, May, 1866 • Various
... very ugly and cross-grained, but a good worker and very thrifty. Yrsi, on the other hand, is pretty and sweet-tempered, but lazy and heedless, and wants a husband so as to avoid working. Jealously the two watch each other's attempts to catch Uli, who is drawn now to Yrsi's prettiness, now to Stini's thrift. Their jealousy finally becomes so furious that Uli begins to cool off, which only makes them the more eager. Yrsi plans a master-stroke: she uncovers the liquid manure-pit, and Stini tumbles into it. When she is finally ...
— The German Classics of The Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, Vol. VIII • Various
... everybody must like the pretty French Madonna in the middle of it, with her head a little aside, and her nimbus switched a little aside too, like a becoming bonnet. A Madonna in decadence she is, though, for all, or rather by reason of all, her prettiness, and her gay soubrette's smile; and she has no business there, neither, for this is St. Honore's porch, not hers; and grim and grey St. Honore used to stand there to receive you,—he is banished ...
— Our Fathers Have Told Us - Part I. The Bible of Amiens • John Ruskin
... quick, coarse laugh. She had been hurrying across the Avenue towards the nearest bridge when she saw him; now she came up to him with a hideous jest. David saw her face full, caught the ghastly suggestions of it—its vice, its look of mortal illness wrecking and blurring the cheap prettiness it had once possessed, and beneath all else the fierceness of the hunted creature. His whole being rose in repulsion; he waved her away, and she went, still laughing. But his guilty mind went with her, making of her infamy the ...
— The History of David Grieve • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... plump, rosy-cheeked woman with a motherly smile. Agnes was a fair, slim schoolgirl, as tall as her mother, with a sweet face and a promise of peach blossom prettiness in the years to come. The arrival of a summer boarder was a great event in ...
— Lucy Maud Montgomery Short Stories, 1896 to 1901 • Lucy Maud Montgomery
... Isabella's charming phrases, fresh, but almost melancholy, and the female chorus in two divisions, and in imitation, with a suggestion of the Moorish coloring of Spain. Here the terrifying music is softened to gentler hues, like a storm dying away, and ends in the florid prettiness of a duet wholly unlike anything that has come before it. After the turmoil of a camp full of errant heroes, we have a picture of love. Poet! I thank thee! My heart could not have borne much more. If I could not here and there pluck the daisies of a French ...
— Gambara • Honore de Balzac
... fantasias, recapitulations, and codas; there are fugues, with counter-subjects, strettos, and pedal points; there are passacaglias on ground basses, canons ad hypodiapente, and other ingenuities, which have, after all, stood or fallen by their prettiness as much as the simplest folk-tune. Wagner is never driving at anything of this sort any more than Shakespeare in his plays is driving at such ingenuities of verse-making as sonnets, triolets, and the like. And this is why he is so easy for ...
— The Perfect Wagnerite - A Commentary on the Niblung's Ring • George Bernard Shaw
... and the young feet began to chirp again under our sun balcony. But there had been no sun in it since noon and presently a cold thin rain was falling and driving the promenaders under the arcades, where they were perhaps not unhappier for being closely massed. We missed the prettiness of the spectacle, though as yet we did not know that it was the only one of the sort we might hope to see in Spain, where women walk little indoors, and when they go out, drive and increase in the sort of loveliness which may be weighed and measured. Even ...
— Familiar Spanish Travels • W. D. Howells
... of peace she had been born in, had married into, and had never lost. Aggie was her eldest daughter, and she was a little vexed to think that she might have married five years ago if she hadn't been so particular. Meanwhile, what with her prettiness and her superiority, she was spoiling her younger sisters' chances. None of her rejected suitors had ever turned to Kate or Susie or Eliza. They were well enough, poor girls, but as long as Aggie was there they couldn't help looking plain. But as for ...
— The Judgment of Eve • May Sinclair
... which had consumed him to the bone. But extreme want, if long continued, eats up love when it has nothing else to eat. And when people are very long dying, the people they fret and trouble begin to think of that too often hypocritical prettiness of phrase called "a happy release." So the worn-out and half-famished wife did not care three straws for the dying husband, whom a year or two ago she had vowed to love and cherish in sickness and in health. But still she seemed to care, for she moaned, and pined, and wept, as the man's ...
— Night and Morning, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... beautiful and strong, he thought to himself, a fit mate for any man who loved strength and beauty in a woman, rather than prettiness and softness, and his admiration ...
— A Mating in the Wilds • Ottwell Binns
... unlike that of one of those women of the Restoration so familiar to us in half a hundred pictures. Not that Restoration levity and Restoration manners were chargeable to Miss Priscilla. She never forgot her parentage; but there were the same kind of prettiness, the same sideways look, the same simper about the lips, and there were the same flat unilluminated eyes. She had darkish brown hair, which fell in rather formal curls on her shoulder, and she was commonly thought to be "delicate." Like her sister and brother, she had never been to school, ...
— The Revolution in Tanner's Lane • Mark Rutherford
... have thought of nothing but the prettiness of the unhappy child. She gravely informed me that she forgave Marmaduke everything when she saw how he doted on it. Elinor has always shewn a disposition to ...
— The Irrational Knot - Being the Second Novel of His Nonage • George Bernard Shaw
... doesn't make any difference." She watched me again a moment through her veil, the texture of which gave her look a suffused prettiness. "Do you know him very ...
— The Patagonia • Henry James
... of the piquant order. A certain bright melancholy pervaded her; she possessed an untarnished, pale prettiness doomed to please. Her voice, when she spoke, dwarfed her theme. It was the voice capable of investing little subjects with a large interest. She sat at ease, bestowing her skirts with the little womanly touch, serene as if the begrimed ...
— Whirligigs • O. Henry
... throne whence expression has been ousted. So, with occasional irregularities, the path winds down the hill. Skill itself declines, and the sense of beauty runs thin. At the bottom, for what once was art—the expression of man's most holy emotions—smart tradesmen offer, at fancy prices, mechanical prettiness, ...
— Pot-Boilers • Clive Bell
... daughter. Well, they had not lied in one respect at least. She was a winner for looks. That was plain to be seen even from the crude newspaper reproduction. The girl was pretty. But what else did she have beside prettiness? That was the question. Did she have any of the rest of it—Laura's wit, her inimitable charm, her fire, her genius? Pshaw! No, of course she hadn't. Nature did not make two Laura LaRue's in one century. It was too ...
— Wild Wings - A Romance of Youth • Margaret Rebecca Piper
... on the scenery of the districts in which it occurs. The undulating downs and rounded coombs, covered with sweet-grassed turf, of our inland chalk country, have a peacefully domestic and mutton-suggesting prettiness, but can hardly be called either grand or beautiful. But, on our southern coasts, the wall-sided cliffs, many hundred feet high, with vast needles and pinnacles standing out in the sea, sharp and solitary enough ...
— Lay Sermons, Addresses and Reviews • Thomas Henry Huxley
... to be good-looking than to be good. He certainly was wonderfully handsome. People who did not like him, Philistines and college tutors, and young men reading for the Church, used to say that he was merely pretty; but there was a great deal more in his face than mere prettiness. I think he was the most splendid creature I ever saw, and nothing could exceed the grace of his movements, the charm of his manner. He fascinated everybody who was worth fascinating, and a great many ...
— Lord Arthur Savile's Crime and Other Stories • Oscar Wilde
... them, that makes me see them more distinctly. Speaking of pictures, the miniature of Anne of Cleves is here, on the faith of which Henry VIII. married her; also, the picture of the Infanta of Spain, which Buckingham brought over to Charles I. while Prince of Wales. This has a delicate, rosy prettiness. ...
— Passages From the English Notebooks, Complete • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... hint of what Mrs. Keith called swagger somewhat spoiled his bearing. She thought he allowed his self-confidence to be seen too plainly. The girl formed a marked contrast to him; she was short and slender, her hair and eyes were brown, while her prettiness, for one could not have, called her beautiful, was of an essentially delicate kind. It did not strike one at first sight, but grew upon her acquaintances. Her manner was quiet and reserved and she was plainly dressed in white, but when she turned and dismissed her companion ...
— The Intriguers • Harold Bindloss
... loved to domineer herself; but the moment that he suggested to her that there might be a quarrel, she was reduced to a prayer that he would not desert her. Such a friendship has charms for a young man, especially if the lady be pretty. As to Lizzie's prettiness, no man or woman could entertain a doubt. And she had a way of making the most of herself, which it was very hard to resist. Some young women, when they clamber over rocks, are awkward, heavy, unattractive, and ...
— The Eustace Diamonds • Anthony Trollope
... either to describe or remember. The Americans of the United States have had time to build and populate vast cities, but they have not yet had time to surround themselves with pretty scenery. Outlying grand scenery is given by nature; but the prettiness of home scenery is a work of art. It comes from the thorough draining of land, from the planting and subsequent thinning of trees, from the controlling of waters, and constant use of minute patches of broken land. In another hundred years or so, Rhode Island may be, perhaps, as pretty ...
— Volume 1 • Anthony Trollope
... at twenty, but at twenty-eight her prettiness had immensely increased; she had really become a beauty of a particularly troubling type. She had long, deep blue eyes, clearly-cut features, hair of that soft, fine light brown just tinged with red called by the French chatain ...
— Tenterhooks • Ada Leverson
... girls. They are often very pretty; not so pretty as people say in the magazines, but pretty enough. The magazines rather overdo that; they make a mistake. I have seen no great beauties, but the level of prettiness is high, and occasionally one sees a woman completely handsome. (As a general thing, a pretty person here means a person with a pretty face. The figure is rarely mentioned, though there are several good ones.) The level of prettiness is high, but ...
— The Point of View • Henry James
... his anger returned. But as his eyes fell upon her delicately colored but tranquil face, her well-shaped figure, coquettishly and spotlessly cuffed, collared, and aproned, and her clear blue but half-averted eyes, he again underwent a change. She certainly was very pretty—that most seductive prettiness which seemed to be warmed into life by her consciousness of himself. Why should he take her or himself so seriously? Why not play out the farce, and let those who would criticise him and think his acceptance of the work degrading understand that it was only an affair of gallantry. ...
— A Protegee of Jack Hamlin's and Other Stories • Bret Harte
... gravel-path that parted the rows of graves. In the course of my wanderings I had learned to speak French as fluently as most Englishmen, and when the priest came near me I said a few words in praise of the view, and complimented him on the neatness and prettiness of the churchyard. He answered with great politeness, and we ...
— The Queen of Hearts • Wilkie Collins
... a rich carpet was on the floor; the furniture was luxurious though not showy, and there was plenty of it. So there was plenty of works of art, in home and foreign manufacture. Comfort, elegance, prettiness, all around; and through the clear glass of the long windows the evergreen oaks on the lawn showed like guardians of the place. I stood at one of them, with the pressure of that joy and sorrow filling ...
— Daisy • Elizabeth Wetherell
... "reformed" in the direction of restriction from the uncomely, the forced and the sensational, and in favor of the beautiful, the becoming and the divine. Nevertheless, it is the inevitable consequence of a prescription of this kind to run into mere prettiness and tuneful emptiness. Protection is a failure in art. The spirit must have freedom, or it will never take its grandest flights. And it is altogether possible that the needed corrective will presently be discovered of itself, through ...
— A Popular History of the Art of Music - From the Earliest Times Until the Present • W. S. B. Mathews
... house, but full of prettiness. Bessie Fairfax had never seen anything so like a picture as the drawing-room, gay with flowers, perfumed, airy, all graceful ease and negligent comfort. From a wide-open glass door a flight of steps descended to the rose-garden, now in its beauty. Paintings, mirrors decorated the ...
— The Vicissitudes of Bessie Fairfax • Harriet Parr
... in her aunt's forbidding parlour in Thirty-sixth Street she had recognised my passion, however perfectly I had succeeded in concealing it from others. Inexperienced as she was in those days, she had noted as quickly as any society belle the effect produced upon me by her chill prettiness and her air of meek reserve, under which one felt the heart break; and though she would never openly acknowledge my homage, and frowned down every attempt on my part at lover-like speech or attention, I was as sure that she rated my feelings at their real value as that she was the dearest, yet ...
— Room Number 3 - and Other Detective Stories • Anna Katharine Green
... muscles and the gain in artistic development. This latter point, indeed, needs special consideration, for there seems no doubt that the continued use of such small objects for design leads to accuracy and prettiness rather ...
— Froebel's Gifts • Kate Douglas Wiggin
... remain wholly unrepresented in Fine Art, because unfelt by ourselves; and that the only vestiges of a likeness to it should be in some of the more subtle passages of caricatures, popular (and justly popular) as much because they were the only attainable reflection of the prettiness, as because they were the only sympathizing records of the humors, of English girls and boys. Of our oil portraits of them, in which their beauty is always conceived as consisting in a fixed simper—feet not more than two inches long, and accessory grounds, pony, and groom—our ...
— On the Old Road Vol. 1 (of 2) - A Collection of Miscellaneous Essays and Articles on Art and Literature • John Ruskin
... signify these fantastic designs and figures, these monkey-like genuflexions; this wilderness of sign and symbol, this elaborate abasement, this theatrical show of exaltation? This an improvement on the old dignified simplicity? Do you tell me that childishness, and prettiness, and pettiness, are valid substitutes for a genuine, ...
— Punchinello, Vol. 1, No. 8, May 21, 1870 • Various
... in its strength and breadth of light and shade, and a Correggio in its delicacy of sentiment and refined beauty of coloring. He was not often so fortunate in his Parmese efforts. They are usually marked by a timidity and an attempt at prettiness inconceivable in the haughty and impulsive master of the ...
— Castilian Days • John Hay
... it. The glare striking up from the stage beneath her gave a burnish of copper to her hair and a warm light to her face. She seemed of a fragile figure and with features regular and delicate. Drake received a notion of unimpressive prettiness and turned his attention to the stage. When the lights were raised again in the auditorium, he noticed that Fielding was in the box talking to a gentleman with white hair, and that Mallinson was seated by the ...
— The Philanderers • A.E.W. Mason
... school was like the advance of a conquering hero. Although she had just entered this fall she was already one of the most popular girls in school. She had that fair, delicate prettiness which invariably appeals to boys, and an open, unaffected manner which endeared her to the girls. Beside her very lovable personality she had a background which was almost certain to insure popularity to a girl. She was rich and lived in a great house on a fashionable avenue; she ...
— The Camp Fire Girls at School • Hildegard G. Frey
... her lack of youthful prettiness. With unerring instinct as a child, she had chosen her riding clothes to show off in. Now these same clothes formed the basis of her system. By day she was always in tailored frocks of the strictest simplicity. They were linen, or silk, or wool, made after the same model. Slim, tight skirt; ...
— The Cricket • Marjorie Cooke
... fingers extended, and whom the old mountebank fitted with gloves and with a halo formed of his knives which were as sharp as razors, and which he planted close to her, was his wife. She might have been a woman of forty, and must have been fairly pretty, but with perverse prettiness, an impudent mouth, a mouth that was at the same time sensual and bad, with the lower lip too thick for the thin, dry ...
— The Works of Guy de Maupassant, Volume II (of 8) • Guy de Maupassant
... prettiness was queen at Enville Court, might be seen in Rachel's complacent smile. She opened the closet door about ...
— Clare Avery - A Story of the Spanish Armada • Emily Sarah Holt
... open-mouthed, as though we were staring at a fairy-book. There, before us, coming down from the black rocks above, leaping from step to step of the stone, were three young girls; but, aye, the queerest sort that ever tantalized a man with their prettiness. You may well ask, the night being inky dark, how we managed to see them at all; but let me tell you that they carried good rosin torches in their hands, and the wild light, all gold and crimson against the rocks, shone as bright as a ship's flare and as far. Never have I seen such a thing, ...
— The House Under the Sea - A Romance • Sir Max Pemberton
... wearing her mannish garb this morning, but divided skirts of corduroy and a white waist with a bit of bright color at the neck. Her white sombrero was the only masculine touch about her, and that rather added to her quick, dark prettiness. ...
— The Duke Of Chimney Butte • G. W. Ogden
... habit of painting mere fashionable pictures, pretty portraits and the like, which yield money, but can never give fame. Do that, and your talent is lost and thrown away. Be patient, wait, reflect, chasten your taste by study, and wean yourself from that hankering after prettiness and dandyism. Leave such tricks to those who care but for gold, and propose yourself a higher aim, the never-dying laurels of a Titian or ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine - Volume 62, No. 384, October 1847 • Various
... saw you had no pretensions to prettiness, as there's not a girl up these parts worth wasting a man's affections on, and I was building great hopes on you. But I'm a great admirer of ...
— My Brilliant Career • Miles Franklin
... order and quality of the room's furnishings. The appointments were rich and costly. The same glance had secured cognizance of the lady's appearance. She was small and scarcely past twenty. Her face possessed the title to a winsome prettiness, now obscured by (you would say) rather a fixed melancholy than the more violent imprint of a sudden sorrow. Upon her forehead, above one eyebrow, was a livid bruise, suffered, the physician's eye told him, within the ...
— Rolling Stones • O. Henry
... had come to the house, ran her thoughts rapidly over the members of the household, and came to the conclusion that it must be the governess, Miss Manning, who had dared to closet herself with Mr. Carlyle. This unlucky governess was pretty, and Miss Carlyle had been cautious to keep her and her prettiness very much out of her brother's sight; she knew the attraction he would present to her visions, or to those of any other unprovided-for governess. Oh, yes; it was Miss Manning; she had stolen in; believing she, Miss Carlyle, was safe for the night; but she'd just unearth my lady. ...
— East Lynne • Mrs. Henry Wood
... I am speaking Flavia was a slight, graceful woman of forty years or thereabouts, retaining much of the brilliant prettiness which served her for beauty, and conspicuous always for her extremely bright eyes. She was of the type of women who live ...
— Don Orsino • F. Marion Crawford
... town, but a nostalgia for open spaces and free wanderings had been always with him. He had come to hate the city with its hard walled-in ways and its dirty air, and also the eastern country-side with its little green prettiness surrounded by fences. He longed for a land where one can see for fifty miles, and not a man or a house. He thought that alkaline dust on his lips ...
— The Blood of the Conquerors • Harvey Fergusson
... face, low-browed, deep-eyed, full-lipped. Here was none of smiling prettiness, for these eyes were grave and thoughtful, these lips, despite their soft, voluptuous curves, were firmly modelled like the rounded chin below, and, in all the face, despite its vivid youth, was a ...
— The Definite Object - A Romance of New York • Jeffery Farnol
... rose, threw off his velvet and lace, and designedly let his thoughts turn to Arenta. "She is pretty beyond all prettiness," he said softly as he moved about, "She dances well, talks from hand to mouth, and she gave me one sweet glance; and I think if she has gone so far— she might go further." At this reflection he smiled again, and lifting a decanter ...
— The Maid of Maiden Lane • Amelia E. Barr
... the old king. I can, however, quite imagine the irritation the sharp chirrup-chirrup of this little squirrel would cause to an invalid, for there is something particularly ear-piercing about it; but their prettiness and familiarity make up in great measure for their noisiness. They are certainly a nuisance in a garden, and I rather doubt whether they are of any use, as McMaster says, "in destroying many insects, especially white ants, beetles, both in their perfect and larval state," &c. He adds: ...
— Natural History of the Mammalia of India and Ceylon • Robert A. Sterndale
... pine-trees on the hills, and made the graceful little valley, but art and exquisite taste have increased the apparent size of the small plot of ground, and filled it with beauty. It is a gem of a place with a character of its own, although its prettiness suggests some foreign Spa. Groups of people, having taken the water, were strolling about the graveled paths, sitting on the slopes overlooking the pond, or wandering up the glen to the tiny ...
— Baddeck and That Sort of Thing • Charles Dudley Warner
... women. He conjured up in his mind all the evil that he knew of her, and persuaded himself that she was a little jade, and, being conscious that he loved her, he believed that he loved her merely because of her extreme prettiness. This reason seemed to him a sound one; but on analysing it he perceived that it explained nothing; that he loved the girl not because she was exceedingly pretty, but because she was pretty in a certain uncommon fashion of her own; that he loved her for that which was incomparable and ...
— A Mummer's Tale • Anatole France
... than Ruskin that a style so stiff with ornament was likely to produce all manner of faults. In overloading his sentences with jewelry he frequently obscures the sense; his beauties often degenerate into mere prettiness; his sweetness cloys. His free indulgence of the emotions, often at the expense of the intellect, leads to a riotous extravagance of superlative. But, above all, his richness distracts attention from matter to manner. In the case of an author so profoundly in earnest, this could not but be unfortunate; ...
— Selections From the Works of John Ruskin • John Ruskin
... contributed something to the table decorations, but no one had seen them all assembled and they all paid themselves and each other compliments on the prettiness of the various parts and Della and Dorothy on the effectiveness of ...
— Ethel Morton's Holidays • Mabell S. C. Smith
... that the moment loomed before him he weakened; he usually did when he came close to the girl. Not that her beauty overwhelmed him, for though she had a portion of energetic good-health and freckled prettiness, he had chosen her as an Indian chooses flint for his steel; one could strike fire from Betty Neal. When he was far away he loved her without doubt or question and his trust ran towards her like a river setting towards the ocean because he knew that her heart was as big and as true as the heart ...
— The Seventh Man • Max Brand
... kill time this pleasant afternoon, sauntering aimlessly through the wet grounds. Very pretty and coquettish she looked, with that crimson petticoat showing under her dark silk dress; that jockey-hat and feather set jauntily on her sunshiny curls; but her prettiness was only vanity and vexation of spirit to Rose. Where was the good of pink-tinted cheeks, soft hazel eyes, auburn curls, and a trim little foot and ankle, when there was no living thing near to see and admire? ...
— Kate Danton, or, Captain Danton's Daughters - A Novel • May Agnes Fleming
... with a slightly foreign accent, which gave a little prettiness to her speech. 'I was never told so. But nobody ever told me anything ...
— The Way We Live Now • Anthony Trollope
... fashion somewhat as French does to English etching. We have the dash and the chic with skates which Frenchmen show with the etching-needle, and the Canadian, on the other hand, is apt to decline into the mere prettiness which is the ...
— Lost Leaders • Andrew Lang
... down upon her, a slight, slender girl with bedraggled dress and disheveled hair, her face, pale and quiet, a little stern in sleep, and her long, dark lashes lying on her cheek, he seemed to see her fragility, her prettiness, her femininity as never before. But for him she might at that very moment have been a broken, ruined girl lying back in that cabin of the Blands'. The fact gave him a feeling of his importance in this shifting of her destiny. ...
— The Lone Star Ranger • Zane Grey
... sometimes, though I can hide them better than he can; and this morning I was in the wrong key for the idyllic peace and prim prettiness of Broek-in-Waterland. I should have liked better to be out on a meer in Friesland, in a stiff breeze; but since it had to be Broek, I ...
— The Chauffeur and the Chaperon • C. N. Williamson
... ever be unkind to her; but he knew that in marriage kindness was not enough. He looked at Lemuel, serious, thoughtful, refined in his beauty by suffering; and then his eye wandered to Statira's delicate prettiness, so sweet, so full of amiable cheerfulness, so undeniably light and silly. What chiefly comforted him was the fact of an ally whom the young thing had apparently found in Lemuel's mother. Whether that grim personage's ignorant pride in her son had been satisfied ...
— The Minister's Charge • William D. Howells
... darksome cottage floor. And yet a russet gown, torn and soiled with the child's rude play, made a picture of her just as perfect. Pearl's aspect was imbued with a spell of infinite variety; in this one child there were many children, comprehending the full scope between the wild-flower prettiness of a peasant-baby, and the pomp, in little, of an infant princess. Throughout all, however, there was a trait of passion, a certain depth of hue, which she never lost; and if in any of her changes, she had grown ...
— The Scarlet Letter • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... gained in dignity and prettiness by the lapse of five years, and she was now very beautifully and richly and simply dressed. Her fair hair had been done in some way that made it seem softer and more abundant than it was in my memory, ...
— The New Machiavelli • Herbert George Wells
... went to the door again, to lean and peer up and down the street with that great anxiety and trouble in her face that made it old, and distorted the faint trace of lingering prettiness out of it as if it had ...
— Trail's End • George W. Ogden
... stop in the first stage! It is certain that Mr. Southard's music pleased, and that some of the most critical of the audience were roused to a real enthusiasm. And it is to be borne in mind that the music is cast in a grand mould; it has no prettiness; it is either great in itself, or wears the semblance of greatness. On the whole, we are inclined to think that the "Diarist" in Dwight's "Journal of Music" was not extravagant in saying that no first ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 1, No. 5, March, 1858 • Various
... purpose you stand for. But before you can do that, you've got to stand for some deep purpose. It's no good faking one up. You won't take a woman in, not really. Even when she chooses to be taken in, for prettiness' sake, it ...
— Fantasia of the Unconscious • D. H. Lawrence
... These three—Apollo, Diana, and Pallas—were the gods of all that was nobly, purely, and wisely lovely; but the Greeks also believed in powers of ill, and there was a goddess of beauty, called Venus (Aphrodite). Such beauty was hers as is the mere prettiness and charm of pleasure—nothing high or fine. She was said to have risen out of the sea, as the sunshine touched the waves, with her golden hair dripping with the spray; and her favourite home was in myrtle groves, where she drove her car, drawn by doves, attended by the three Graces, and by multitudes ...
— Aunt Charlotte's Stories of Greek History • Charlotte M. Yonge
... mothers love to behold, fondly deeming that no baby ever so splashed or so kicked before; saw him arrayed in his pretty blue-braided frock, and dainty lace-bedizened cambric pinafore. What a wealth of finery and prettiness had been lavished upon the little mortal, who would have been infinitely happier dressed in rags and making mud-pies in a gutter, than in his splendid raiment and well-furnished nursery; an uninteresting nursery, ...
— The Lovels of Arden • M. E. Braddon
... think if he began paying her compliments? What had come over him, anyway? He had seen women with violet-blue eyes in more countries than one; beautiful women with every enhancement which breeding and wealth could bestow. It must have been sheer surprise in discovering any attribute of prettiness at all about so uncompromisingly homely a girl as ...
— Anything Once • Douglas Grant
... Government, nor the Times could silence the born backbiters of greatness. Cowards, startled at the sight of courage, were alert with jealousy. Pleasure-seekers, stung in the midst of comfort, sniffed with depreciation. Culture, in pursuit of prettiness, passed by with artistic indifference. The narrow mind attributed motives and designs. The snake of disguised concupiscence sounded its rattle. That refined and respectable women should go on such an errand—how could propriety ...
— Essays in Rebellion • Henry W. Nevinson
... prettiness, with a mouth like Cupid's bow, a tiny tip-tilted nose, eyes gold-brown to match her hair, a color like crushed roses in ...
— Character Sketches of Romance, Fiction and the Drama, Vol 1 - A Revised American Edition of the Reader's Handbook • The Rev. E. Cobham Brewer, LL.D.
... face (literally speaking, too, for "Harrie" kissed her) with a merry-looking, pretty woman, of a style a little too prononcee perhaps, for her features were on a similar mould to Major Harper's. Still, there could be no doubt as to the prettiness, and the airy, youthful aspect—younger, perhaps, than her years. Agatha was perfectly astounded to find in this gay "Harrie" the wife of the grave and middle-aged ...
— Agatha's Husband - A Novel • Dinah Maria Craik (AKA: Dinah Maria Mulock)
... fast finale, and went to their supper. Then came an interval of talk and laughing, of making new friends or stabbing delicately old enemies. Also and further much primping in the dressing-room. Dancing steadily through a temperature of 98 in the shade plays hob with some sorts of prettiness. But as dew fell and lighted lanterns went up about the arbor and throughout the grove, supper was very welcome. There was hot coffee for everybody, likewise milk, likewise lemonade, with buttered biscuit, chicken, ham, and barbecue. Chicken-loaf ...
— Dishes & Beverages of the Old South • Martha McCulloch Williams
... 1880 my father left London, and went to live at Harting, a village in Sussex, but on the confines of Hampshire. I think he chose that spot because he found there a house that suited him, and because of the prettiness of the neighborhood. His last long journey was a trip to Italy in the late winter and spring of 1881; but he went to Ireland twice in 1882. He went there in May of that year, and was then absent nearly a month. This journey ...
— Autobiography of Anthony Trollope • Anthony Trollope
... Her prettiness, indeed, was chiefly in slender plumpness and bloom. But it served her purpose as no classic mould would have done. She did not overestimate it. But she was probably better satisfied with it than ...
— Southern Lights and Shadows • Edited by William Dean Howells & Henry Mills Alden
... to throw up her engagement and return to Italy. Mme. Vestris having seceded, and Caradori being for some time unable to perform, it became necessary to engage a young singer, the daughter of the tenor Garcia, who had sung here for several seasons.... Her extreme youth, her prettiness, her pleasing voice, and sprightly, easy action as Rosina in 'Il Barbiere,' in which part she made her debut, gained her general favor." Chor-ley recalls the impression she made on him at this time in more precise and emphatic terms: "From the first ...
— Great Singers, Second Series - Malibran To Titiens • George T. Ferris
... stir. It is a powerful work of strong colour, broad design and intense sentiment, astounding in its parti-pris of reducing the values to the greatest simplicity. One can feel in it the artist's preoccupation with rediscovering the rude frankness of Hals and Goya, and his aversion against the prettiness and false nobility of the school. This famous Olympia which occasioned so much fury, appears to us to-day as a transition work. It is neither a masterpiece, nor an emotional work, but a technical experiment, very ...
— The French Impressionists (1860-1900) • Camille Mauclair
... he grudgingly acknowledged. "But even so?" the ingrate added, as he turned away, and let himself drop back into his lounging-chair. "My dear good woman, no amount of prettiness can disguise the fundamental banality of things. Your fireflies—St. Dominic's beads, if you like—and, apropos of that, do you know what they call them in America?—they call them lightning-bugs, if you can believe me—remark the difference between southern euphuism and western bluntness—your ...
— The Cardinal's Snuff-Box • Henry Harland
... systematically reads the great writers, be they ancient or modern, whom the consent of ages has marked out as classics: typical, immortal, peculiar teachers of our race? Alas! the Paradise Lost is lost again to us beneath an inundation of graceful academic verse, sugary stanzas of ladylike prettiness, and ceaseless explanations in more or less readable prose of what John Milton meant or did not mean, or what he saw or did not see, who married his great-aunt, and why Adam or Satan is like that, or ...
— English Prose - A Series of Related Essays for the Discussion and Practice • Frederick William Roe (edit. and select.)
... simultaneously. Clarence, who had forgotten his momentary irritation, and had recovered his old happiness in her presence, was nevertheless conscious of some other change in her than that suggested by the lengthened skirt and the later and more delicate accentuation of her prettiness. It was not her affectation of superiority and older social experience, for that was only the outcome of what he had found charming in her as a child, and which he still good-humoredly accepted; nor was it her characteristic exaggeration ...
— Susy, A Story of the Plains • Bret Harte
... to-day. You were a child of seventeen, the darling of a noble house, and an actor—yes, and not even a pre-eminent actor—a gross, poor posturing vagabond, just twice your age, presumed to love you. What child would not amuse herself with such engaging toys? Vivacity and prettiness and cruelty are the ordinary attributes of kittenhood. So you amused yourself. And I submitted with clear eyes, because I could not help it. Yes, I who am by nature not disposed to underestimate my personal importance—I submitted, ...
— The Certain Hour • James Branch Cabell
... and Elizabeth a long succession of laborious days, that hardened their hands, wove strange threads of some new and sterner substance into the soft prettiness of their lives, and drew grave lines and shadows on their faces. The bright, convenient ways of the former life had receded to an inaccessible distance; slowly they learnt the lesson of the underworld—sombre and laborious, vast and pregnant. There were many little ...
— Tales of Space and Time • Herbert George Wells
... and surprise with which he saw her again—tall and slight, and very beautiful—no, not beautiful, perhaps, if you go to rule and compass, and Greek trigonometrical theories; but there was an indescribable prettiness in all her features, and movements, and looks, higher, and finer, and sweeter than all the canons ...
— The House by the Church-Yard • J. Sheridan Le Fanu
... of happiness was visible upon her face. Never had she appeared more beautiful. Her features were remarkable for prettiness rather than what is called beauty. Their fault, if fault it be, lay in a certain excess of grace.... The ideal virgin is the transfiguration of a face like this. Deruchette, touched by her sorrow and love, seemed to have caught that higher and more holy ...
— What Great Men Have Said About Women - Ten Cent Pocket Series No. 77 • Various |
