"Secretive" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... cousin Samuel was not precisely a charming person. Bigoted, tireless, secretive, this cunning manipulator of political passions followed many tortuous paths. His ability for adroit misstatement of an adversary's position has been equaled but once in our history. But to the casual reader of his four volumes, Samuel Adams seems ever to be breathing the liberal ...
— The American Spirit in Literature, - A Chronicle of Great Interpreters, Volume 34 in The - Chronicles Of America Series • Bliss Perry
... a glorious love-match? He knew that woman, ever the mysterious sex, was capable any time of unguessed mystery. Did her frank comradeliness with Grandison token merely frank comradeliness and childhood contacts continued and recrudesced into adult years? or did it hide, in woman's subtler and more secretive ways, a beat of heart and return of feeling that might even out- balance what Sonny's ...
— On the Makaloa Mat/Island Tales • Jack London
... men—jitsumyo; [8] and, oddly enough, a girl's name and a man's are in no instance written together. To judge by all this ideographic testimony, lovers in Japan—or at least in Izumo—are even more secretive than in our Occident. The enamoured youth never writes his own jitsumyo and his sweetheart's yobi-na together; and the family name, or myoji, he seldom ventures to inscribe. If he writes his jitsumyo, then he contents himself with whispering the yobi-na of his sweetheart to the gods and to the ...
— Glimpses of an Unfamiliar Japan - First Series • Lafcadio Hearn
... the Yukon, a sparrow nests. Yet one can hardly associate sparrows with marshes, for they seem out of place in houseless, treeless, half-submerged stretches. These are the haunts of the shyer, more secretive birds. Here the ducks, rails, bitterns, coots,—birds that can wade and swim, eat frogs and crabs,—seem naturally at home. The sparrows are perchers, grain-eaters, free-fliers, and singers; and they, of all birds, are the friends and neighbors ...
— Roof and Meadow • Dallas Lore Sharp
... this memorandum in a wild scene of woods and hills where we have come to visit a waterfall. I never saw finer or more copious hemlocks, many of them large, some old and hoary. Such a sentiment to them, secretive, shaggy, what I call weather-beaten, and let-alone—a rich underlay of ferns, yew sprouts and mosses, beginning to be spotted with the early summer wild flowers. Enveloping all, the monotone and liquid gurgle from the hoarse, impetuous, copious fall—the greenish-tawny, darkly ...
— Our Friend John Burroughs • Clara Barrus
... close-cropped, so close that it showed the lean, wolfish line of his jaw. All his features were of striking sharpness. His eyes, of a singularly brilliant blue, were yet cold and pale. The brow had a serious, thoughtful cast; long furrows sloped down the cheeks. It was a strange, secretive face, full of a power that Shefford had not seen in another man's, full of intelligence and thought that had not been used as Shefford had known them used among men. The face mystified him. It had so much more than the strange aloofness so characteristic ...
— The Rainbow Trail • Zane Grey
... after occasional voyages, where Robin More still drowsed over his books; where Alan Donn still hunted and fished and golfed, haler at five and fifty than a boy in his early twenties; and where his mother sat and did beautiful broidery, dumbly, inimically, cold as a fish, secretive as a badger, there he would meet the women of the Antrim families, women who knew of the disaster of his marriage, and they would look approvingly at his firm face and smiling, steady eyes, and they would say: "A man, thon! He could be a good friend. You could trust ...
— The Wind Bloweth • Brian Oswald Donn-Byrne
... decisive step till his father's death. But he began to be well known for his "gentlemanly" ideas to many persons of high position in Petersburg, with whom he strenuously kept up connections. He was secretive and self-contained. Another characteristic: he belonged to that strange section of the nobility, still surviving in Russia, who set an extreme value on their pure and ancient lineage, and take it too seriously. At the ...
— The Possessed - or, The Devils • Fyodor Dostoyevsky
... secured a big stretch of the field close to the claim pegged out by Mike and Josh Peetree, and they were thought to have possession of the most profitable part of the alluvial deposit, but worked their claims with great caution, and were as secretive as so many mopokes, so that the whites really had no idea what their ground was like, excepting such as the experienced miners could gather from the general trend of the richer wash dirt. Extraordinary stories of the success ...
— In the Roaring Fifties • Edward Dyson
... dreadful to see how she sank under that, how she cringed before him, her anger gone, her colour gone, the light fled from her eyes—eyes grown suddenly secretive. It was a minute, it seemed a minute at least, before she could frame a word, a single word. Then, "What do you know?" she whispered. But for the wall against which she leant, she must ...
— The Long Night • Stanley Weyman
... But as a matter of fact, it has a far greater value; for while repeating his purpose to practise writing—"to acquire facility and elegance in the expression" of his thought—it gives an introspective glimpse into the naturally secretive mind, revealing an intense desire, if not for the "flesh pots of Egypt," at least for such creature and intellectual comforts as would enable him and those close to him "to bask themselves in the warm sunshine of the brief day." This paper is ...
— Stories of Achievement, Volume IV (of 6) - Authors and Journalists • Various
... a cooler moment, I hasten to blab the whole simplicity of it, to blab on Roscoe and the other navigators and the rest of the priesthood, all for fear that I may become even as they, secretive, immodest, and inflated with self-esteem. And I want to say this now: any young fellow with ordinary gray matter, ordinary education, and with the slightest trace of the student-mind, can get the books, and charts, and instruments and teach himself navigation. Now ...
— The Cruise of the Snark • Jack London
... across the office. There seemed to be more or less mystery about this man who had provoked all those curses from the secretive ...
— The Landloper - The Romance Of A Man On Foot • Holman Day
... immediate comment; secretive she might have to be, but to a deliberate pretence she would not stoop. So she did not even say, "Indeed!" but merely, after a pause, "You are something of a botanist yourself, then, Mrs. Woodgate?" For they had been talking ...
— The Shadow of the Rope • E. W. Hornung
... "We're somewhat secretive—yes, sir," Tom replied. "That is only because we regard the method we are going to use as being mainly the concern of the A., G. & N. M. No ...
— The Young Engineers in Arizona - Laying Tracks on the Man-killer Quicksand • H. Irving Hancock
... but that they produce fertile seed only when pollen from another plant is carried to them. Yet how difficult they make dining for their benefactors! The bumblebee, which can reach the nectar, but not lap it conveniently, often "gets square" with the secretive blossom by nipping holes through its spur, to which the hive bees and others hasten for refreshment. We frequently find these punctured flowers. But hive and other bees visiting the blossom for pollen, some rubs off against their breast when they depress the two middle petals, ...
— Wild Flowers, An Aid to Knowledge of Our Wild Flowers and - Their Insect Visitors - - Title: Nature's Garden • Neltje Blanchan
... course," said Mrs. Gilbert with meticulous carelessness, "Gloria never makes me her confidante. She's very secretive. Between you and me"—she bent forward cautiously, obviously determined that only Heaven and her nephew should share her confession—"between you and me, I'd like to see ...
— The Beautiful and Damned • F. Scott Fitzgerald
... dreadful suggestion," she said. "No such idea ever occurred to me. Secretive I thought Susan might be, but immoral, never. I must forget you ever thought that. Let's talk about something less painful. Perhaps you would like to tell ...
— Miss Mapp • Edward Frederic Benson
... back, "it is none of my business. But I warn you, Mr. Berwin, that others are more curious than I am. Several times people have been known to be in your house while you were absent, and your mode of life, secretive and strange, does not commend itself to the householders in this neighbourhood. If you persist in giving rise to gossip and scandal, some busybody may bring the police ...
— The Silent House • Fergus Hume
... optical instruments of a certain Bressieux, then in Paris, who had for two years been chief workman in that line for Descartes. They were anxious to make him a present of some good glass from London, because he was rather secretive about his workmanship, and such a present would go a great way towards ...
— The Life of John Milton, Volume 5 (of 7), 1654-1660 • David Masson
... Tampering. He had the greatest possible esteem for Mrs. Fisher, but he did at times find her a little difficult. She liked him, he was sure, and she was in a fair way, he felt, to become a client, but he feared she would be a headstrong and secretive client. She was certainly secretive, for though he had been skilful and sympathetic for a whole week, she had as yet given him no inkling of what was so evidently ...
— The Enchanted April • Elizabeth von Arnim
... "Dobbin, dear old secretive Dobbin, what difference does it make to you whether you feel the guiding hand or not? You know when the courtship begins, the brisk drives about town to all points of interest, to the pond, the poorhouse, and the cemetery; you know how the courtship progresses, the long drives in the country, the ...
— Two Thousand Miles On An Automobile • Arthur Jerome Eddy
... and steady and not too comical, both had a certain kind of expression, now—like amused and secretive gorillas. Frank wasn't sure whether he got the meaning of this or not, but right then he felt sort of sympathetic ...
— The Planet Strappers • Raymond Zinke Gallun
... you to know that I have wit enough to contrast your secretive manner with Maillot's willingness to talk, and to draw ...
— The Paternoster Ruby • Charles Edmonds Walk
... Pat McCormick. "Mac," with his grim, set face and his silent, secretive habits, fitted perfectly to Peter's conception of a dynamiter. Also "Mac" was Peter's personal enemy; "Mac" had just returned from his organizing trip in the oil fields, and had been denouncing Peter and gossiping about him in the various radical groups. "Mac" was the ...
— 100%: The Story of a Patriot • Upton Sinclair
... was a living, sentient thing now, secretive, shrouding the secret that lay beyond ...
— Where the World is Quiet • Henry Kuttner
... pain the sullen, secretive girl had turned instinctively to the one person who had been uniformly gentle and kind to her throughout all her trouble. Nothing that Amy had done or said, had turned Ruth from her; and the barriers of girl's nature and of her evil passions were ...
— Ruth Fielding in Moving Pictures - Or Helping The Dormitory Fund • Alice Emerson
... tossing out the sixty thousand pounds' worth of bonds to Tracy, who was waiting with his three warning lights, failed because of old Blumenfeld's sleeplessness, but it was substituted by a far more secretive yet simple plan—one never even dreamed of by the astute police attached to the Paris, Lyons and Mediterranean Railway. It being daylight at Lyons, the blinds ...
— The Golden Face - A Great 'Crook' Romance • William Le Queux
... loveliness, that the one seems almost to include the others. Where the meadows are the fairest, there the rivers gleam and sparkle in the summer sun of memory. The Isis, stately stream, proud of the great oarsmen she has taught, and of historic boats that she has borne; the Cherwell, winding, secretive, alluring, willow-girt, whispering of men and maidens, and of the dream days of ambitious youth. Each river has its bridge. The mightier stream, as is most fitting, spanned where for centuries the road has passed from Oxford into Berkshire; ...
— Oxford • Frederick Douglas How
... changed—for the time being at least—Helen's nature. From a frank, open-hearted, loving girl she became suspicious, morose and secretive. The first words she heard held her spell-bound—an unintentional eavesdropper. And what she heard made her determined to appear to her unkind relatives quite as they expected her ...
— The Girl from Sunset Ranch - Alone in a Great City • Amy Bell Marlowe
... to be room, me dear, for I've come to stay. How dare you be ill by yourself? It's a bad effect London has had on you to make you so close and secretive. You! Who yelled the roof down if you as much as scratched your finger! We ...
— The Love Affairs of Pixie • Mrs George de Horne Vaizey
... Vienna, had a better perspective than Boston then afforded. Even Mr. Norton, Lowell's dear friend and associate upon the North American Review, thought in 1862 that the President was timid, vacillating, and secretive, and, what now seems a queerer judgment still, that he wrote very poor English. But if the editors of the North American showed a typical Anglo-Saxon reluctance in yielding to the spell of a new ...
— Modern American Prose Selections • Various
... seated at a desk before him, a thin-featured, thin-haired man of forty, with the crumpled-up eye-corners peculiar to the face that masks a circuitous and secretive mind. It was a face full of that weary concern, that alert indifferency, which is companion to the spirit of repeated compromise. It was far from an open face: it seemed to betray only two things, ...
— Stories from Everybody's Magazine • 1910 issues of Everybody's Magazine
... clothes with him as I did with Clara; he's too big, but one way or other I'll save him," said Cap, to herself. She said it to no one else, for the more difficult the enterprise the more determined she was to succeed, and the more secretive she grew ...
— Capitola the Madcap • Emma D. E. N. Southworth
... secretive person who vaguely refers to "a certain party" when he has occasion to speak of another is the exact opposite of ...
— How to Analyze People on Sight - Through the Science of Human Analysis: The Five Human Types • Elsie Lincoln Benedict and Ralph Paine Benedict
... returned promptly. "I'm never secretive against you, Anstey, old man and the only reason I don't talk at once is that I don't know just what I want to say. But remember—-8.15. By that time I think I shall have solved myself into ...
— Dick Prescott's Second Year at West Point - Finding the Glory of the Soldier's Life • H. Irving Hancock
... where writing-paper was supplied gratis. "Couldn't have come ashore after I left him: he'd paid his bill at the Rest and his bag was aboard. Must have had this in his pocket all the time; might just as well have handed it to me—with instructions not to open it—and saved the stamp. What a secretive old ...
— The White Wolf and Other Fireside Tales • Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch
... might direct suspicion to you. In this way we may work all summer without detection. The Border Legion will become mysterious and famous. It will appear to be a large number of men, operating all over. The more secretive we are the more powerful the effect on the diggings. In gold-camps, when there's a strike, all men are mad. They suspect each other. They can't organize. We shall have them helpless.... And in short, if it's as rich a strike as looks due here in ...
— The Border Legion • Zane Grey
... apprehended defeat at the hands of the unofficial majority in the legislative Councils. But the Indian public remained generally in ignorance of the extent to which the influence of the Indian representatives made itself felt, either for good or for evil, on Government. The bureaucracy, more secretive in India than elsewhere, had never realised the importance of guiding public opinion, or, a fortiori, the necessity of keeping it informed if you wish to guide it. The politicians, on the other hand, preferred to make capital out of those questions on which they failed to make any ...
— India, Old and New • Sir Valentine Chirol
... survived; he could not write the simplest words correctly, and his speech was a brusque medley of slang, jargon, dialect and profanity. It was said of him that he could swear more forcibly, variously and frequently than any other man of his generation. Like the Astors, he was cynical, distrustful, secretive and parsimonious. He kept his plans entirely to himself. In his business dealings he was never known to have shown the slightest mercy; he demanded the last cent due. His close-fistedness was such a ...
— Great Fortunes from Railroads • Gustavus Myers
... was Helen quiet of disposition, but strangely secretive on certain subjects. For instance, she seldom said anything about her home or relatives. She lived in Villa Park, a small town midway between Westmoreland and Hollyhill. Her father was dead, and, when not at school, she ...
— Campfire Girls in the Allegheny Mountains - or, A Christmas Success against Odds • Stella M. Francis
... Willa glanced up quickly, but she could not meet his eyes. "She is very secretive, you know, and jealous of the old legends which to her form the sacred history of her beloved country. Suppose you tell me the ...
— The Fifth Ace • Douglas Grant
... aware," he observed calmly, "that I have ever been unduly secretive so far as you are concerned. During the last few months, however, of our life together, you must remember that you chose to receive on terms of friendship a person whom ...
— Mr. Grex of Monte Carlo • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... to yourself, please. The boys have been doing a little research, and it's clear these unidentified flying objects people have been seeing come from Swamp Creek. That points to the old mansion, especially since Mr. Merlin is so secretive about himself. We decided to get up before the people at the mansion were likely to be about, and look the place over. If it looks promising, we'll try keeping an eye ...
— The Flying Stingaree • Harold Leland Goodwin
... parts of Russia behave, as though by agreement, precisely in the same way as this young man, and in all these cases the government has adopted the same timorous, undecided, and secretive course of action. Some of these men are sent to the lunatic asylum, some are enrolled as clerks and transferred to Siberia, some are sent to work in the forests, some are sent to prison, some are fined. And at this very ...
— The Kingdom of God is within you • Leo Tolstoy
... managed. The only regrettable thing will be the death of two—two brilliant detectives. It may interest you to know that you will be found dead—shot—which will account for my having waited for you in vain at Whiteladies to-night. You have helped me greatly by being secretive to-day and not arriving here until after dark. Your death will be a nine days' wonder, but it will be a mystery which will ...
— The Master Detective - Being Some Further Investigations of Christopher Quarles • Percy James Brebner
... briefly, while disclosing nothing at variance with or unfindable in his published speeches. Of some of them he repeated apposite slices; to others he referred for further enlightenment as to his views on imperial federation. Really he was neither secretive nor newly informative. The Premier of Canada at any time is governed, much as I have endeavored to show how the electors are, by that natural, instinctive course of the general loyal Canadian mind, which constitutes "the situation" and controls Governmental ...
— New York Times Current History; The European War, Vol 2, No. 2, May, 1915 - April-September, 1915 • Various
... bathroom, requesting that doors be locked, or wish to play in a bedroom securely away from mother and the caretaker. Under no circumstances should this be allowed. Let the child early learn that good wholesome play in the open is better than secretive misdemeanor behind ...
— The Mother and Her Child • William S. Sadler
... and wrong. The kleptomaniac is generally recognized as being a well-defined class of the insane. Most of the shop-lifters are women. This is especially a female crime. It is useless to explain why. It is not a daring crime; it is secretive in its nature; it requires more stealth than courage; it especially appeals to women on account of their taste for the finery exhibited at stores. The kleptomaniac, however, is generally a rich or influential woman. She steals something she does not need, and she is therefore held ...
— Crime: Its Cause and Treatment • Clarence Darrow
... "Commissioner So-and-So has the matter in hand—refer to him." And so, when a new danger appeared on the distressed horizon, Amir Khan and a hundred thousand massed horsemen, Captain Barlow was sent to consult with the Resident. That was the way; a secretive, trusty, brave man, for in India the written page ...
— Caste • W. A. Fraser
... for a time, but after a wrangle he gave up the ticket, intending to take it from Tommy when primed with the necessary tale. So they parted until evening, and Tommy returned to Elspeth, secretive but elated. For the rest of the day he was in thought, now waggling his head smugly over some dark, unutterable design and again looking a little scared. In growing alarm she watched his face, and at last she slipped upon her knees, but he had her up at ...
— Sentimental Tommy - The Story of His Boyhood • J. M. Barrie
... turn without seeing a girl working for dear life to attract the man she wants; if she can't secure him, some other man; and in lieu of him, any man at all, in preference to none. Life shows us woman on the age-old quest every day, everywhere we go; why be so secretive about it? Why not say honestly what we want, and take it if we can get it? At any rate, that is the most important thing inside my sunbonnet. ...
— A Daughter of the Land • Gene Stratton-Porter
... had grown so familiar that every eye and ear was on the strain, and finger upon trigger, as tree, shrub, and grassy clump was expected momentarily to develop into a foe. The secretive nature of these people made our position at times more painful and exciting, as we knew that at any moment they might come close to us in the darkness, and almost before the alarm could be given, dash up to the ...
— Mass' George - A Boy's Adventures in the Old Savannah • George Manville Fenn
... remarked, "seems to have been what you might call a secretive sort of person. Nobody appears to know anything about him. I remember when he was staying here before that he had no callers, and seemed to spend most of his time sitting in ...
— The Illustrious Prince • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... together and compared notes and decided that the boys were "real mean, so now!" To pay Chet and Lance and Billy Long for being so secretive about the person they suspected of having caused the injury to the stranger Saturday evening, the three girls went alone that Sunday afternoon to the hospital to ...
— The Girls of Central High Aiding the Red Cross - Or Amateur Theatricals for a Worthy Cause • Gertrude W. Morrison
... bear. Whether or not his knife was meant for me, I can not say. Nor have I sufficient proof openly to accuse him, but of this much I am convinced. Themar's presence near the camp of Miss Westfall is, in the face of your peculiar and secretive errand, ominously significant." ...
— Diane of the Green Van • Leona Dalrymple
... greatness, as did also the private mansions, which preserved a kind of mystery behind their high-walled gardens and massive double doors. There was one such which I never passed at night without thinking of the Sieur de Maletroit's door. The streets were narrow, tortuous, and secretive, with many blind alleys and dark closes, and it required no great effort of the imagination—especially at night when not a light showed—to call to mind the ambuscades and adventures with the watch which they must have witnessed ...
— Leaves from a Field Note-Book • J. H. Morgan
... influence of Horace Walpole and Wyat. It was backed by a rookery of old and enormous elms. It was approached on one side by a fine avenue of limes, and was otherwise surrounded by gardens with gray walls or secretive laurel hedges. Here was a water tank in the form of a Strawberry Hill chapel. Here was a greenhouse unaltered since the days of George II. Everywhere, though everything was antique, there were signs of punctilious care, and morning by morning a bevy of female villagers would be raking the gravel ...
— Memoirs of Life and Literature • W. H. Mallock
... because stranded, and then, just because his corn twinges, or it may be the gout, what execrations, and, dear me, to hear him talk of money, taking out his leather purse and grudging even the smallest silver coin, secretive and suspicious as an old peasant woman with all her lies. Strange paralysis and constriction—marvellous illumination. Serene over it all rides the great full brow, and sometimes asleep or in the quiet spaces of the night you might fancy that ...
— Jacob's Room • Virginia Woolf
... her work, and her eager interest in this little knot of people whose lives she had shaped was more possessive than ever. Hurd, indeed, was often silent and secretive; but she put down her difficulties with him to our odious system of class differences, against which in her own way she was struggling. One thing delighted her—that he seemed to take more and more interest in the labour questions she discussed with him, and in that ...
— Marcella • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... mysterious and secretive on that point," Dulcie answered. "I asked him to tell me what the car was like, if he had any idea whose it was. He said it was a grey car, but he wouldn't tell me more than that. He said he believed he had 'hit the line,' ...
— The Four Faces - A Mystery • William le Queux
... Vladimir Nicholaievitch, who was naturally compelled to curry favour with the Father, and consequently sometimes visited him even against his inclination, no doubt. He was a long, rather narrow-faced, bearded man, with a pair of deep-set eyes and a secretive air, subtle by temperament, and keenly alive to his own interests as well ...
— The Minister of Evil - The Secret History of Rasputin's Betrayal of Russia • William Le Queux
... it be? I'm not a leper, and she—she's no longer in love!' Why should he be put to the shifts and the sordid disgraces and the lurking defeats of the Divorce Court, when there she was like an empty house only waiting to be retaken into use and possession by him who legally owned her? To one so secretive as Soames the thought of reentry into quiet possession of his own property with nothing given away to the world was intensely alluring. 'No,' he mused, 'I'm glad I went to see that girl. I know now what I want most. If only Irene will come back I'll ...
— Forsyte Saga • John Galsworthy
... negotiable; and the impulse I had towards self-deception, to sustained and consistent self-devotion, disturbed and detached and pointless as it was at that time, he had indeed a sort of admiration for but no sympathy. Like many fantastic and ample talkers he was at bottom secretive, and he gave me a series of little shocks of discovery ...
— Tono Bungay • H. G. Wells
... is strange; but he is a secretive Dutchman by nature. He specializes in prying into the ...
— Astounding Stories of Super-Science September 1930 • Various
... anxious curiosity and the same commonness, not to say vulgarity of interest, and the book was certainly unique in one respect, and that was the absolute sincerity of the author with himself. Montaigne is conscious that we are looking over his shoulder, and Rousseau secretive in comparison with him. The very fact of that sincerity of the author with himself argued a certain greatness of character. Dr. Hickes, who attended Pepys at his deathbed, spoke of him as 'this great man,' and said he knew no one who died so greatly. ...
— Diary of Samuel Pepys, Complete • Samuel Pepys
... lemon—the surprising but agreeable compound accidentally invented by Nellie on the previous day at the pier buffet. The little thing must have spent a part of the previous afternoon in preparing it, and she must have put the package in the post at Crewe. Secretive and delightful little thing! After his recent experience beyond the bay he had imagined himself to be incapable of ever eating again, but it was not so. The lemon gave a peculiar astringent, appetising, settling quality to the chocolate. And he ate even with gusto. The result ...
— The Card, A Story Of Adventure In The Five Towns • Arnold Bennett
... interesting men of the age, and his character has been drawn by many hands; but Machiavelli, who was an envoy at his court in 1507-8, reveals the secret of his many failures when he describes him as a secretive man, without force of character—ignoring the human agencies necessary to carry his schemes into effect, and never insisting on the ...
— The Prince • Niccolo Machiavelli
... on to another valley. Would it have been warmer than this? Oh, Marchese, I don't like you when you are subtle and secretive. It reminds me that we are of different countries—as different as the north can be from the south. Do tell me what is really in your mind. Why do you hate this valley? Why has coming into it tied your tongue, and made you look as if you ...
— The Castle Of The Shadows • Alice Muriel Williamson
... while. I feel sort of drawed to her. But she won't have no truck with me... nor nobody.... She hain't never left nothin' layin' around her room that a body could git any idee about her from. Secretive, I ...
— Youth Challenges • Clarence B Kelland
... say a word to her about it." However, she was conscious of no evil motive; it was simply because she was naturally secretive. She looked ...
— Jane Field - A Novel • Mary E. Wilkins Freeman
... glared upon all the besiegers, till his pock-marked face grew white as leprosy, and every spot in his secretive eye faded out in the glitter of ...
— Bohemian Days - Three American Tales • Geo. Alfred Townsend
... a secretive devil," said I. "What's the book about? Tell an old friend. Get it off your mind. It ...
— Jaffery • William J. Locke
... with the hope of Sunday ice-cream; while the boys, experiencing some solace in that they were finally out where a person could at least scratch himself if he had to, yet oppressed by the decorous necessities of the day, marched along, furtively planning, behind imperturbably secretive countenances, various means for the later ...
— The Conquest of Canaan • Booth Tarkington
... and huddled against its foundations had cramped themselves into ledges and boulders like men making their last stand in a mountain battle. The streets were tunnels, with vistas of long, dark stone stairways running up and down into mystery. Here and there above secretive doorways were beautiful carvings set into the thick stone walls, relics of the castle's decorations. At sharp corners were tiny shops with dark interiors, and strange assortments of golden oranges, big pearly onions, ruby beets, and bright green, peasant pottery in low-browed windows ...
— The Guests Of Hercules • C. N. Williamson and A. M. Williamson
... feverish activity suddenly spread through the house. They met and passed each other, hurrying, troubled, secretive; the servants stumbled and quarrelled in their purposeless haste. To Belden, quieting when he could, sternly optimistic everywhere, at heart heavy and uncertain, it seemed that the one anchor of their hopes was this calm, clear-eyed woman in her ...
— In The Valley Of The Shadow • Josephine Daskam
... artists, oftentimes oracular personages, dangerous of approach by outsiders having opinions (such must generally expect a direct snubbing, polite indifference, or silent scorn), knowing much but not everything, no single one infallible, highly honorable as members of a guild, secretive as doctors or lawyers, chary of talking shop to the uninitiated, hardworking, conscientious, half luring, half scoffing at the glorious visions of the creative imagination granted them chiefly of all men, wonder workers, world reformers, ...
— Continental Monthly , Vol. 5, No. 6, June, 1864 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy • Various
... walked to the back of the hall to telephone, Katherine, an anxious figure, a secretive one, beckoned Bobby to the library. He went with her, wondering ...
— The Abandoned Room • Wadsworth Camp
... instructions of Brighton-Pomfrey—he had now experimented ignorantly and planlessly with one or two narcotics and sleeping mixtures that friends and acquaintances had mentioned in his hearing. For the first time in his life he became secretive from his wife. He knew he ought not to take these things, he knew they were physically and morally evil, but a tormenting craving drove him to them. Subtly and insensibly his character was being undermined by ...
— Soul of a Bishop • H. G. Wells
... at Carlisle, and wondered if she possibly had refused Mr. Canning, and, if so, why Mr. Canning had skipped back just to stay over Sunday and not go near her, and why Cally was so mysterious and secretive all of a sudden. She always told Cally every single thing about her affairs, reporting in detail what was "the most" each man said to her, and always bringing her their letters to read, even Mr. Dudley's, ...
— V. V.'s Eyes • Henry Sydnor Harrison
... and there, the staring R, the blazoned arms looked down on a vacant floor. Only on a little stool by the farther door, sat a quiet-faced man in black, who read, or pretended to read, in a little book, and never looked up. One of those men, blind, deaf, secretive, who fatten in ...
— Under the Red Robe • Stanley Weyman
... close to her thin face walked across the state to Tarrytown. Several times during the five years after leaving Lem's scow she walked to Tarrytown, returning only when she had seen the little boy, to take up her squatter life in her father's hut. So secretive was she that no one had been taken into her confidence; neither had she interfered with her child in any way. Never once, hitherto, had her senses left her on those long country marches toward the east; but often when she turned backward she would ...
— From the Valley of the Missing • Grace Miller White
... a crook; his face is hard, stern, bigoted, secretive, but honest. Yet if he didn't do it himself what was he trying to tell when death cut off his wind? If he did it, where did he hide the plunder? Here in this house? His family must have known every nook ...
— A Woman Named Smith • Marie Conway Oemler
... exaggerations of misdoings, though he registered the knowledge he guessed at for future guidance. It was against Ishmael's nature to be expansive, and if he had been so on that occasion he would probably never have felt so easy with the Parson again. As it was, he began, in his secretive way, to copy Boase at all points that seemed good to him, doing things of his own initiative which he would have rebelled from being told. When the Parson got him a pony at fair-time, Ishmael soon gathered ...
— Secret Bread • F. Tennyson Jesse
... handsome species, with plumage of glossy brown, yellowish buff, black and white; length seven inches. They are very shy and secretive, and are probably more common than generally supposed. Their nesting habits are the same as those of the preceding. Their eggs are of a rich buff color, speckled in the form of a wreath about the large end, with reddish brown. They are relatively narrower than those of other Rails. ...
— The Bird Book • Chester A. Reed
... diminished and her severity increased. "Oh, if you want the whole story," she said, "you'd better have it and have done; that is, so far as I know it myself. There are certain ins and outs that I don't know even yet, for Rufus can be very secretive if he likes. Well then, yes, he did come back, and he brought Mr. Knight with him. They were washed up by a great wave that dropped 'em high and dry near the quay. Mr. Knight was half drowned, and Rufus ...
— The Tidal Wave and Other Stories • Ethel May Dell
... are your instructions. Then, that is all except'—here Midmore half rose, but Mr. Sperrit's little grey eyes held his large brown ones firmly—'except about Rhoda Dolbie, Mrs. Werf's maid. I may tell you that we did not draw up your aunt's last will. She grew secretive towards the last—elderly people often do—and had it done in London. I expect her memory failed her, or she mislaid her notes. She used to put them in her spectacle-case.... My motor only takes eight minutes to get to the station, Mr. Midmore ... but, as I was saying, whenever ...
— A Diversity of Creatures • Rudyard Kipling
... so secretive," Frank said. "You have a straight out and out theory of that night's work, and you won't tell me ...
— Boy Scouts in the Canal Zone - The Plot Against Uncle Sam • G. Harvey Ralphson
... Parliament called him Vladimir Ulianov, and that's what he called himself. He had proved to be reticent, secretive, deceitful, diligent, and utterly unhuman. His lower lip was shaped as though something dripped from it. Blood, perhaps. His eyes were brown and not entirely unattractive. But God makes the eyes; the mouth is ...
— The Crimson Tide • Robert W. Chambers
... quite make out. It always seemed as though it was something that Mr. Morris wanted. At first I got the notion that it was something that he wanted to buy and which Mr. Hume refused to sell; but later I changed my mind. There seemed to be more to it than appeared on the top. Both were very secretive about it." ...
— Ashton-Kirk, Investigator • John T. McIntyre
... I said in an appealing tone. I feared that his secretive instincts would get the better of him, and he would delay giving his reasons, out of the pure love of mystification that was inherent in the old fellow's nature. I was too anxious to be patient; but my appeal ...
— The War Trail - The Hunt of the Wild Horse • Mayne Reid
... a bad tool, at once stubborn and secretive, cunning enough to recognise and to resent handling, thickheaded and vain enough to blunder ruinously. And Elmur found at the last and most important moment that for some unexplained reason he had lost the ...
— A Modern Mercenary • Kate Prichard and Hesketh Vernon Hesketh-Prichard
... Grimm was repeating, "I've had to be pretty shrewd and secretive. For it wouldn't do to let either of them suspect too soon. And I flatter myself they didn't. Here's my notion. I made up in my mind to keep Katje in the family. I'm a rich man. And so I've had to guard against young fellows who would dangle around after a girl for her money. ...
— The Return of Peter Grimm - Novelised From the Play • David Belasco
... getting away from business even in the country and pointing at the half dozen telephones on top of the big flat desk with a derisive gesture while detailing to Oliver the fondness that Sargent Piper has for secretive private wires and the absurd precautions he takes to keep them intensely private. "Why he went and had all his special numbers here changed once just because I found out one of them by mistake and called him up on it for a joke—the ...
— Young People's Pride • Stephen Vincent Benet
... those that go mad, like yours!' 'Lor', miss,' said Farmer Hendry, 'he haven't been pastured here for three weeks. I keep him six mile away. There ben't nothing but gentle cows in the home medder.' But I didn't think that you knew, you secretive person! I dare say you planned the whole thing in advance, in order to take advantage ...
— A Cathedral Courtship • Kate Douglas Wiggin
... the girl, with the secretive instinct of self-reliance hiding the unhappiness his abrupt question set ...
— Susan Lenox: Her Fall and Rise • David Graham Phillips
... Knowing his secretive and tortuous nature, this sudden zeal for openness seemed almost unnatural. He began by unrolling his own blanket, inside of which appeared a miscellaneous collection of articles. I remember among them a spare pair of very dirty trousers, ...
— Allan and the Holy Flower • H. Rider Haggard
... somewhat meaninglessly to one another), but because the group display on the whole, all round, a greater amount of intelligence, of cleverness, and of adaptability to circumstances than any other birds, including even their cunning and secretive rivals, the ravens, the jackdaws, the crows, ...
— Science in Arcady • Grant Allen
... I tell you, I'd give years of my life to be able to do what all entomologists are wild to do—study the depths of a termite mound. God! What wouldn't I give for the privilege of shrinking to ant-size, and roaming loose in that secretive-looking ...
— The Raid on the Termites • Paul Ernst
... of Cold Spring Coulee. For a month he never left the ranch unless business compelled him to do so, and his return was speedy, his eyes anxious until he knew that all was well. After that his confidence returned. He grew more secretive, more self-assured, more at ease with his guilt. He looked the Wishbone men squarely in the eye, and it seldom occurred to him that he was a thief; or if it did, the word was but a synonym for luck, with shrewdness behind. Sometimes he regretted his timidity. Why three calves only? ...
— Lonesome Land • B. M. Bower
... of the race, which loves intelligence. Christophe met financiers there, engineers, newspaper proprietors, international brokers, slave-dealers of a sort from Algiers—the men of affairs of the Republic. They were clear-headed and energetic, indifferent to other people, smiling, affable, and secretive. Christophe felt sometimes that behind their hard faces was the knowledge of crime in the past, and the future, of these men gathered round the sumptuous table laden with food, flowers, and wine. They were almost all ugly. But the women, taken as a whole, were quite brilliant, ...
— Jean Christophe: In Paris - The Market-Place, Antoinette, The House • Romain Rolland
... sentimentalist in art than Mr. Abbey had been. He was quiet, undemonstrative, alert, and wholly willing to let the public dictate the course of the establishment. Outwardly he was always calm, urbane, neither communicative nor secretive. I sat behind him during all the years of his divided and undivided directorship, and never failed of a pleasant greeting, no matter what the expression of The Tribune had been on the morning of the day. He accepted congratulations ...
— Chapters of Opera • Henry Edward Krehbiel
... in lighting his pipe, had shown his face. At the thought of a warm engine-room and the company of his fellow creatures, David's heart leaped with pleasure. He advanced quickly. And then something in the appearance of the tug, something mysterious, secretive, threatening, caused him to halt. No lights showed from her engine-room, cabin, or pilot-house. Her decks were empty. But, as was evidenced by the black smoke that rose from her funnel, she was awake and awake to some purpose. David stood uncertainly, ...
— The Red Cross Girl • Richard Harding Davis
... not step out of my place without occasion; but I see how much evil has flowed in the past to all of your noble house from that unhappy and secretive fault of reticency, and the papers on which I venture to call your attention are family papers, and ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition, Vol. XII (of 25) - The Master of Ballantrae • Robert Louis Stevenson
... his spirit there returned the old haunting pangs—the memory of Allie Lee, the despairing doubts of life or death for her. Beyond the camp loomed the dim hills, mystical, secretive, and unchangeable. If she were out there among them, dead or alive, to know it would be a blessed relief. It was this horror of ...
— The U.P. Trail • Zane Grey
... excitement, cowed the Cuban. Never had he been able to penetrate into his fellow-conspirator's thoughts. But that Cecil should have talked loosely of so vital, so terrible a secret? No. The grave itself was not more secretive than that quiet schemer, of whom nothing ever seemed to be known. And to a negro boy! ...
— Plotting in Pirate Seas • Francis Rolt-Wheeler
... regarding a dusty and dirty old house in that part of the Heights in Brooklyn whence all that is fashionable had not yet taken flight, a house of mystery, yet not more mysterious than its owner in his secretive comings and goings in the affairs of men of a generation beyond his time. Further than the facts that he was reputed to be very wealthy and led, in the heart of a great city, what was as nearly like the life of a hermit as possible, I knew little or nothing, "What ...
— Master Tales of Mystery, Volume 3 • Collected and Arranged by Francis J. Reynolds |
