"Shabby" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... note, pulled the prince out of the well, gave him his shabby clothes, and put on the prince's rich dress. Then having changed armor and ...
— Stories to Read or Tell from Fairy Tales and Folklore • Laure Claire Foucher
... boy of fourteen, stood in front of the shabby brick building, on Nassau street, which has served for many years as the New York post office. In front of him, as he stood with his back to the building, was a small basket, filled with ordinary letter envelopes, each ...
— Paul the Peddler - The Fortunes of a Young Street Merchant • Horatio Alger, Jr.
... expected her to return in a shabby, or even needy, condition, and now they had stories of delightful weeks at a hotel in San Francisco, and beheld their poor shipwrecked neighbor dressed more handsomely than they had ever seen her, and with a new trunk standing in the lower hall ...
— The Adventures of Captain Horn • Frank Richard Stockton
... speaks of "factitious altruism"; with this "altruism of the Procrusteans" who would reduce every one to the simple life-she has "little patience." "Thousands of people seem to be infected with the idea that by doing more themselves they bestow leisure on others; that by wearing shabby clothes they somehow make it possible for others to dress better- though they thus admit tacitly that leisure and elegance are not evil things. Or perhaps-though Heaven forbid they should be right!-they merely think that by refusing nightingales' tongues ...
— Problems of Conduct • Durant Drake
... in Lincoln's Inn Fields, nigh to the Duke's Theatre and the Portugal ambassador's chapel. Tom Esmond, who had frequented the one as long as he had money to spend among the actresses, now came to the church as assiduously. He looked so lean and shabby, that he passed without difficulty for a repentant sinner; and so, becoming converted, you may be sure took his uncle's ...
— Henry Esmond; The English Humourists; The Four Georges • William Makepeace Thackeray
... humble tomb would look but shabby 'Mid the sculptured shrines of that gorgeous Abbey. Besides, in the place They say there's not space To bury what wet-nurses call 'a Babby.' Even 'rare Ben Jonson,' that famous wight, I am told, is interr'd there bolt upright, In just such a posture, beneath his bust, As Tray used to sit ...
— Notes and Queries, Number 210, November 5, 1853 • Various
... very centre, the innermost temple of all this ceaseless parturition. In a corner of the hall, near a door, waited a small crowd of embossed women, young and middle-aged, sad, weary, unkempt, lightly dressed in shabby shapeless clothes, and sweltering in the summer heat; a few had babies in their arms. In the doorway two neatly attired youngish women, either doctors or students, held an animated and interminable conversation, staring absent-mindedly at the attendant crowd. A pale ...
— Leonora • Arnold Bennett
... again, the maid said, "I shall ride upon Falada and you may have my horse instead;" so she was forced to give up her horse, and soon afterwards to take off her royal clothes, and put on her maid's shabby ones. ...
— My Book of Favorite Fairy Tales • Edric Vredenburg
... the Rector, and sat heavily down in the easy-chair opposite to that from which the Squire had risen. He was a big man, with a big face, clean shaven except for a pair of abbreviated side whiskers. He had light-blue eyes and a mobile, sensitive mouth. His clothes were rather shabby, and except for a white tie under a turned-down collar, not clerical. His voice, coming from so massive a frame, seemed thin, but it was of a pleasant tenor quality, and went well with the mild and attractive expression of his face. All the parishioners of Kencote liked the ...
— The Squire's Daughter - Being the First Book in the Chronicles of the Clintons • Archibald Marshall
... eyebrows and looked at him in surprise. The name came as a shock. She knew of Mr. Crocker, of course, but she wanted Oliver to describe him. Surely, she thought, with a sudden sense of alarm, the boy has not fallen in love with the daughter of that shabby old man. ...
— The Fortunes of Oliver Horn • F. Hopkinson Smith
... slim, and her gown was shabby, turned back at the throat as if she suffered from the heat; and her hair was cropped, lying in little tendrils of gold on her neck, curling thickly about her ears and her brow. Her cheeks were quite pale, and there was a pinched look about the lips, dark shadows under ...
— The Black Cross • Olive M. Briggs
... spicy breezes from Ceylon's isle. The cathedral is of elegant design. Its photograph is more imposing than Notre Dame, and a Latin inscription tells us that it is the Gate of Heaven. But a near approach reveals a shabby structure, and the pewless interior is made hideous by paintings and images which certainly must be caricatures. A few genuine works of art imported from Italy alone relieve the mind of the visitor. Excepting a few houses on the ...
— The Andes and the Amazon - Across the Continent of South America • James Orton
... Castro Duro. In the station they saw groups of peasants. The travellers with their baggage went out of the station. There were two shabby ...
— Caesar or Nothing • Pio Baroja Baroja
... gratification, without regard for the comfort of others, generally find out the real uses of money when it is too late. Though by nature generous, these thriftless persons are often driven in the end to do very shabby things. They waste their money as they do their time; draw bills upon the future; anticipate their earnings; and are thus under the necessity of dragging after them a load of debts and obligations, which seriously affect their actions as ...
— How to Get on in the World - A Ladder to Practical Success • Major A.R. Calhoon
... it, plain and deep as the broad arrow of the king, these characteristics—manifest fraternal unity, plain unselfish unworldliness, habitual unbroken devotion, gladness which had in it the solemnity of Heaven, and a transparent simplicity of life and heart, which knew nothing of by-ends and shabby, personal motives or distracting duplicity of purpose—do you not think that the Lord would add to you daily such as should be saved? Or, to put it into other words, wherever there is a little knot of men obviously held together by a living Christ, and obviously manifesting in their ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture: The Acts • Alexander Maclaren
... little theatre, and by a poor strolling company. Again I saw the well-remembered face, with the painted cheeks and the crisp beard. He looked up at me and smiled; and yet he had been hissed off only a minute before—hissed off from a wretched theatre, by a miserable audience. And to-night a shabby hearse rolled out of the town-gate. It was a suicide—our painted, despised hero. The driver of the hearse was the only person present, for no one followed except my beams. In a corner of the churchyard the ...
— What the Moon Saw: and Other Tales • Hans Christian Andersen
... hired trap, with its driver drowsing in the sunlight. As she looked, she saw the man from whom she had just parted come rather slowly down the steps and get into the shabby conveyance. His hat-brim hid the upper part of his face, but she saw the stern set of his jaw, the bronzed pallor ...
— A Manifest Destiny • Julia Magruder
... Chinaman. "How much money will the great stranger pay for a meal for his illustrious stomach in Si Wafang's miserable hut? Forty kasch, forty kasch the noble son of the Rising Sun must pay for a shabby meal in Si ...
— Banzai! • Ferdinand Heinrich Grautoff
... years that separated the first visit of Dickens and the first visit of Thackeray had wrought many changes. Thackeray, too, came to New York from Boston, but in his case it was the matter of one unbroken train journey, in the course of which he reread the "Shabby Genteel Story" of a dozen years before. Dickens's transatlantic trip had consumed nineteen days. The "Canada," which carried Thackeray, made the crossing in thirteen. In New York Thackeray stayed at the Clarendon Hotel, on the corner of Fourth Avenue and Eighteenth ...
— Fifth Avenue • Arthur Bartlett Maurice
... splendor. The grounds were laid out, planted, and adorned with all the beauty that taste, wealth, and skill could produce. Orchards and vineyards were set out. Conservatories and pineries were erected. The negroes' squalid log-huts were replaced with neat stone cottages, and the shabby wooden ...
— Ishmael - In the Depths • Mrs. E. D. E. N. Southworth
... had a small, shabby-looking box before him on the ground, with a box of blacking on one side of it, and several shoe-brushes upon the other. Holding another brush in his hand, he politely seconded his verbal invitation by gracefully flourishing the brush in ...
— Israel Potter • Herman Melville
... fifty," said she, "instead of eight hundred! Well, that is rather shabby. But still, Papa, you'll have the dear ...
— Barchester Towers • Anthony Trollope
... voice fell, like music that makes giddy the dim brain, faint with intoxication of keen joy." I watched those delicate hands he spread about him through the air; the tender, sensitive lips, the light blue eyes that glowed. I noted the real strength in the face,—a sort of nobility it was—his shabby suit of grey, his tie never caught properly in the collar, the frayed cuffs, and the enormous boots he wore even in London—"policeman boots" as we used to call ...
— The Centaur • Algernon Blackwood
... flaming red riband, that glared in cruel mockery at the shabby gittern, she contrived to add, "I have a brother in the Ironsides, and he said he thought they were bound for Hampton Court; but it might have been ...
— The Buccaneer - A Tale • Mrs. S. C. Hall
... Minnesota-born Carol was not an intimate of the prairie villages. Her father, the smiling and shabby, the learned and teasingly kind, had come from Massachusetts, and through all her childhood he had been a judge in Mankato, which is not a prairie town, but in its garden-sheltered streets and aisles of elms is ...
— Main Street • Sinclair Lewis
... and good shoes are items of dress not to be disregarded by the woman who wishes to look well dressed. Shabby gloves are ruinous to a ...
— Mother's Remedies - Over One Thousand Tried and Tested Remedies from Mothers - of the United States and Canada • T. J. Ritter
... stars, one of the most brilliant is Sirius, or the Dog-star, which it is calculated gives just one-twenty-millionth part of the light of the sun, or about as much as that of a farthing rushlight. It would seem that such a shabby degree of brilliancy was hardly worth having; but when it is remembered that it takes three years to come, it really seems hardly worth while to travel so far to so ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Volume 1, Complete • Various
... the unseen: in a moment the stair below was half-filled with them. The tenants above opened their doors and came down. Others came in from the street and were pushed up by those who came behind them. The stair and entrance were presently filled with people, all shabby, and almost all dirty—men and women, young and old, good and bad, listening to the voice of the singing lady, as she ...
— Weighed and Wanting • George MacDonald
... fire. He opens the door and peeps into the lobby, listening to the wag-at-the-wall clock. All seems serene, and he turns on the light. We see him clearly now. He is JOHN SHAND, age twenty-one, boots muddy, as an indignant carpet can testify. He wears a shabby topcoat and a cockerty bonnet; otherwise he is in the well- worn corduroys of a railway porter. His movements, at first stealthy, become almost homely as he feels that he is secure. He opens the bag and takes out a bunch of keys, a small paper parcel, and a black implement that ...
— What Every Woman Knows • James M. Barrie
... estate have I fallen!" soliloquized Wellington Bunn, wiping his heated brow. He was wearing a slouch hat, instead of his beloved silk one, and was attired in shabby garments, as befitted his character of a farmhand. "The idea of a man who has played the immortal Shakespearean characters falling so low as to consort with wild bulls. Ah, it ...
— The Moving Picture Girls at Oak Farm - or, Queer Happenings While Taking Rural Plays • Laura Lee Hope
... is," said Peter, "but it isn't French. I know that." Then he saw what it was that the crowd had for its centre. It was a man—the man, Peter did not doubt, who had spoken in that strange tongue. A man with long hair and wild eyes, with shabby clothes of a cut Peter had not seen before—a man whose hands and lips trembled, and who spoke again as ...
— The Railway Children • E. Nesbit
... garnished with dilapidated hurdles which appeared to have served for former punishments. These vehicles kept to the middle of the road. On each side marched a double hedge of guards of infamous aspect, wearing three-cornered hats, like the soldiers under the Directory, shabby, covered with spots and holes, muffled in uniforms of veterans and the trousers of undertakers' men, half gray, half blue, which were almost hanging in rags, with red epaulets, yellow shoulder belts, short sabres, ...
— Les Miserables - Complete in Five Volumes • Victor Hugo
... and a ladies' race, in which six fair pedestrians took part. The spectacle of nine burly, bearded Boers urging their asinine steeds to top speed by shout and spur provoked quite as much honest laughter as any theatrical farce ever excited. We on the grand stand were but a shaggy and shabby audience, but we were in excellent spirits and cheered with tremendous gusto the enterprising jockey who won this remarkable "Derby." Shabby as we were, we subscribed L115 in prizes. After the sports I have just described the company retired to a little ...
— My Reminiscences of the Anglo-Boer War • Ben Viljoen
... to mount her horse again, the one that was called Falada, the waiting-maid said: "Falada is more suitable for me, and my nag will do for thee," and the princess had to be content with that. Then the waiting-maid, with many hard words, bade the princess exchange her royal apparel for her own shabby clothes; and at length she was compelled to swear by the clear sky above her, that she would not say one word of this to any one at the royal court, and if she had not taken this oath she would have been killed ...
— The Junior Classics, Volume 1 • Willam Patten
... of her new home. She could not yet acquiesce sufficiently in the fact to mount the long flight of steps that led from the walk to the front door. She looked on up the street, which ran straight as a bowling-alley between two rows of shabby brick houses,—all low, small, mean, unmistakably cheap,—thrown together for little people to live in. West Laurence Avenue was drab and commonplace,—the heart, the crown, the apex of the commonplace. And the girl knew it.... The April breeze, fluttering carelessly through the tubelike ...
— One Woman's Life • Robert Herrick
... hotel, passing through the bar, he saw that old Brevald, as ever in his shabby blue overalls, was standing there. Because he was Ethel's father he had a desire to speak to him, so he went in, nodded and, ordering his own drink, casually turned and invited the old man to have one with him. They chatted for a few minutes of ...
— The Trembling of a Leaf - Little Stories of the South Sea Islands • William Somerset Maugham
... such a connection—had known the ludicrous surprise, the convulsion of inward disgust and contempt, that seized upon many of the persons who were present,—had guessed what a sudden flash of light it threw on the Dutch gilding, the pinchbeck, the shabby, perking pretension belonging to certain social layers,—so inherent in their whole mode of being, that the holiest offices of religion cannot exclude its impertinences,—the good man would have given his marriage-fee ...
— The Professor at the Breakfast Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes (Sr.)
... sweet in grown-up things, and she thinks I look sweet in mine. She comes into my bed at nights, and we talk for hours. The house is right in the middle of the town, in a dingy old square, where the trees look more black than green. It is ugly and shabby, but there is plenty of room, which is a good thing, for I am sure it is needed. The doctor sits in his consulting-room all the morning seeing patients, who wait their turn in the dining-room, and if ...
— The Heart of Una Sackville • Mrs. George de Horne Vaizey
... into the shabby hired brougham, and when the door was closed upon them and the driver had whipped up his horse, he followed it into the Kensington Road. The traffic was so congested that the horse had to move at a walking pace, ...
— The Foolish Lovers • St. John G. Ervine
... to be civil to strangers as any man; but then they must be strangers of merit. I would no more be at the pains to bestow wit (if I had any) on a French play, than I would be at the cost to bestow cloaths on every shabby Frenchman that comes over." Here we have Racine put in his proper place; what claim had he to be considered "a stranger of merit"? True, some crabbed English critics seem to have taken his part against the translator, and, incredible ...
— The English Novel in the Time of Shakespeare • J. J. Jusserand
... treachery, I am none the less aware that I have contrived to be a traitor. Of course one vows one will never write another line; but I do not suppose I shall keep the vow. I reply shortly, eating all the dirt I can collect; and I shall try to forget it too; though it is a shabby end ...
— The Altar Fire • Arthur Christopher Benson
... battle of life when once his primitive condition is disturbed by the wonder-working whites. Bent wire represents a cheap and effective substitute for fish-hooks of pearl-shell, which cost so much in skill and time, and ever so shabby and worn a blanket more comfortable and to the purpose than the finest beaten out of the bark ...
— The Confessions of a Beachcomber • E J Banfield
... something that suddenly changed my ideas. 'What was this something?' you are all asking, I see. It was a china cup in a shop window we were passing, a perfect match it seemed to me of the unfortunate one still lamenting its fate by rattling its bits in my pocket! It was a shabby little old shop, of which there were a good many in the town, filled with all sorts of curiosities, and quite in the front of the window, as conspicuous as if placed there on purpose, stood the cup. I darted forward to beg my father to let me wait a moment, but just then, curiously enough, he had ...
— Grandmother Dear - A Book for Boys and Girls • Mrs. Molesworth
... down, the Wanderer helped himself from my flask. Then, with majesty, he observed, "You marvel to see me so shabby? Sir, you must know that I wear my clothes till they are falling to pieces. I deny myself everything but the booze, and I never start on that till I've handed my daughter—bless her!—the best part of the money. I made a promise to a saint, ...
— The Chequers - Being the Natural History of a Public-House, Set Forth in - a Loafer's Diary • James Runciman
... replied, carefully removing his goloshes, and hanging his shabby coat on a nail, he went into the room from whence issued the ...
— Virgin Soil • Ivan S. Turgenev
... that my visiting her does not prejudice me further with the Board, sir?" I ventured to say. "You can take that for granted," the Duke said. So that afternoon I called at No. 29, Bloomsbury Street, and in a shabby back room of a gloomy, smoke-begrimed lodging-house I found my father and Mrs. Smith-Lessing. He was lying upon a horsehair sofa, apparently dozing. She was gazing negligently out of the window, and drumming ...
— The Betrayal • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... generous hospitality. It was not so with some of the others, however; and Count Bismarck was particularly unfortunate, being billeted in a very small and uncomfortable house, where, visiting him to learn more fully what was going on, I found him, wrapped in a shabby old dressing-gown, hard at work. He was established in a very small room, whose only furnishings consisted of a table—at which he was writing—a couple of rough chairs, and the universal feather-bed, this time made on the ...
— Memoirs of Three Civil War Generals, Complete • U. S. Grant, W. T. Sherman, P. H. Sheridan
... little creature, so serious, yet so bright and jolly, and always so delicate in his way with them. They all liked him, and he adored them. Polly he felt he belonged to. Then Connie, with her mane of red hair, her face of apple-blossom, her murmuring voice, such a lady in her shabby black frock, ...
— Sons and Lovers • David Herbert Lawrence
... at home all the day of the festival of the Holy Countenance by reason of the solemn anniversary which occurred at that time, but she shut herself up the following day also. When the old servant (old inside and out) in his shabby livery, who acted as butler, crept into her room, and asked at what time "the eccellenza would take her airing on the ramparts"—the usual drive of the Lucchese ladies—when they not only drive, but draw up under the plane-trees, ...
— The Italians • Frances Elliot
... and young Louis di Vernon, still very much of a boy despite the down upon his lip and the manly assurance achieved by almost seven years hard soldiering, leaned back in the shabby arm chair and looked questioningly at his host across the table. Since his escape from the old Provost, he had often heard tales of Haym Salomon's great wealth, the magnificent sums he had lent ...
— The New Land - Stories of Jews Who Had a Part in the Making of Our Country • Elma Ehrlich Levinger
... indescribable resemblance to David Elginbrod that had so attracted him. The man was very tall. Six-foot. Hugh felt dwarfed beside him; for he had to look right up, as he passed, to see his face. He was dressed in loose, shabby black. He had high and otherwise very marked features, and a dark complexion. A general carelessness of demeanour was strangely combined with an expression of reposeful strength and quiet concentration of will. At how much of this ...
— David Elginbrod • George MacDonald
... on at the lamentations of the women. A large circle had gathered around my mother, who was the only good reader among them, to listen to the story of the cruel destruction. Sitting on humble stools, in stocking feet, shabby clothes, and dishevelled hair, weeping in chorus, and wringing their hands, as if it was but yesterday that the sacred edifice fell and they were in the very dust and ashes of the ruin, the women looked to me enviously wretched ...
— The Promised Land • Mary Antin
... the officer is a shabby-looking boy, whose seat is by the right jamb of the jail door. Of all boys just old enough to feel their oats, this boy is the most commonplace. His parents would be likely to have no sanguine hopes of his reaching the presidency; for his head indicates latent dementia, ...
— The Life, Crime and Capture of John Wilkes Booth • George Alfred Townsend
... or caravans, and a hundred of them had done so now to a caravan, if we had not prevented them by our arrival. This is a small town, short of which we passed a great tank full of wild fowl. The 15th ten c. to Pimelegom, a shabby aldea. At the end of the fourth coss we passed Sarampore, or Sarangpoor, a great town with a castle on its south side, and a handsome town-house. Here are manufactured much good cotton cloth ...
— A General History and Collection of Voyages and Travels, Vol. VIII. • Robert Kerr
... Stain in weathering does not become shabby like paint; but the surfaces assume weather beaten grays, very soft and harmonious, and varying slightly according to the original hue. The Stain may be renewed at any time with little trouble or expense, as the natural hues which nature gives in ...
— The Bay State Monthly, Volume 3, No. 6 • Various
... eyes were still closed. And this was my first work as a student of the law—a brave beginning, the agent of a noble design. I found the place without having to make inquiry, and a wretched hut it was. The woman was shabby and two ragged children were lying on the floor. I gave her the twenty dollars—I did more, I gave her a part of the money which Perdue had given me. I explained that her husband had worked overtime and that the State, ...
— The Jucklins - A Novel • Opie Read
... have had me fondle her there in the golden castle on the mammoth's shabby back, before the city streets packed with curious people. She had little enough appetite for privacy at any time. But for the life of me I could not do it. The Gods know I was earnest enough about my task, and They know also how ...
— The Lost Continent • C. J. Cutcliffe Hyne
... moment the sense of contrast, thus provoked, had carried him far—out of the Westmoreland night, back to London, and his shabby studio in Bernard Street. There, throned on a low platform, sat Madame de Pastourelles; and to her right, himself, sitting crouched before his easel, working with all his eyes and all his mind. The memory of her was, as it were, physically stamped upon his sight, ...
— Fenwick's Career • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... that all this multitude made me feel extremely shabby and unworthy. I was unshaven and unkempt; I had brought no razor; I had a coarse beard over my mouth. On earth I have always been inclined to despise any attention to my person beyond a proper care for cleanliness; ...
— The First Men In The Moon • H. G. Wells
... great deal for just one glimpse of the Boston of your day," replied Dr. Leete. "No doubt the cities of that period were rather shabby affairs. If you had the taste to make them splendid, which I would not be so rude as to question, the general poverty resulting from your extraordinary industrial system would not have given you ...
— The World's Greatest Books—Volume 14—Philosophy and Economics • Various
... which it was his special desire that I should get rid, by an introduction to society here, before I make my regular debut in England. Well, then, if I go out, I must dress. Mrs. Cholmondeley is turned shabby, and will give nothing more; it would be too hard upon uncle to make him pay for all the things I need: that you can't deny—that agrees with your own preachments. Well, but SOMEBODY who heard me (quite by chance, I assure you) complaining to Mrs. ...
— Villette • Charlotte Bronte
... you haven't a decent snuff-box," Beatrice observed, with an eye on the enamelled wooden one, cheap and shabby, from which ...
— The Cardinal's Snuff-Box • Henry Harland
... like a neglected railway embankment, on which no train had ever rolled within memory of man. Groups of sturdy fishermen would emerge upon the sky, walk along for a bit, and sink without haste. Their brown nets, like the cobwebs of gigantic spiders, lay on the shabby grass of the slope; and, looking up from the end of the street, the people of the town would recognise the two Carvils by the creeping slowness of their gait. Captain Hagberd, pottering aimlessly about his cottages, would raise his head to see how they ...
— To-morrow • Joseph Conrad
... a lank and shabby youth he was to carry in his voice that ring of authority. "What's the answer to our getting ...
— The Trumpeter Swan • Temple Bailey
... clearly nothing to do but flop down on the shabby little couch and howl. So Della did it. Which instigates the moral reflection that life is made up of sobs, sniffles, and smiles, ...
— The Four Million • O. Henry
... so many flannel shirts we may be rich by-and-by. I should give mother a new bonnet first of all, for I heard Miss Kent say no lady would wear such a shabby one. Mrs. Smith said fine bonnets didn't make real ladies. I like her best, but I do want ...
— Aunt Jo's Scrap-Bag VI - An Old-Fashioned Thanksgiving, Etc. • Louisa M. Alcott
... nor the anger of Madame Odinska had any power to change the sentence. While the Mother Superior calmly pronounced her decree, she was taking the measure of this stout foreigner who appeared in behalf of Jacqueline, a woman overdressed, yet at the same time shabby, who had a far from well-bred or aristocratic air. "Out of consideration for Madame de Talbrun," she said, "the convent consents to keep Mademoiselle de Nailles a few days longer—a few weeks perhaps, until she can find some ...
— Jacqueline, Complete • (Mme. Blanc) Th. Bentzon
... was heard upon the floor, and back came Tiny Tim before another word was spoken, escorted by his brother and sister to his stool beside the fire; and while Bob, turning up his cuffs, as if, poor fellow, they were capable of being made less shabby, compounded some hot mixture in a jug with gin and lemons, and stirred it round and round, and put it on the hob to simmer; Master Peter and the two ubiquitous young Cratchits went to fetch the goose, with which they soon returned ...
— Knickerbocker, or New-York Monthly Magazine, March 1844 - Volume 23, Number 3 • Various
... were there, standing one upon the other, so as to make more space in the small room, and on the rather shabby rug by the fireplace a woman was kneeling with her back ...
— The Phantom Lover • Ruby M. Ayres
... iron, and make trivets, knitting needles, bodkins, and such trifles. Their dress is extremely shabby; they shave their chins, but indulge a great length of hair, which they seldom disturb ...
— A Historical Survey of the Customs, Habits, & Present State of the Gypsies • John Hoyland
... Now that your head is clear you'd better think over my offer. It will at least provide you with a more decent coat and wig than those you're wearing. A young man should dress smartly. What's his life worth to him unless women look kindly upon him? Do you expect they care for a shabby gallant?" ...
— Madame Flirt - A Romance of 'The Beggar's Opera' • Charles E. Pearce
... two north of west, had blown the sky clear of all cloud save a light fleck or two which went swiftly down the heavens. There was a young moon halfway up the sky, and as the home- farer caught sight of it, tangled in the branches of a tall old elm, he could scarce bring to his mind the shabby London suburb where he was, and he felt as if he were in a pleasant country place—pleasanter, indeed, than the deep country was as he had ...
— News from Nowhere - or An Epoch of Rest, being some chapters from A Utopian Romance • William Morris
... to gaze, and his mind's eye conjured up the contrast of his slovenly, shabby home, with all its neglected appurtenances! No trim garden at Rood Hall, no scent from odorous orange blossoms. Here poverty at least was elegant—there, how squalid! He did not comprehend at how cheap a rate the ...
— The International Magazine, Volume 2, No. 2, January, 1851 • Various
... that you would never marry," he cried, angrily; "you have pledged your word that I should be your sole heir, and I swear that you shall not give me the go-by in any such shabby fashion." ...
— True Love's Reward • Mrs. Georgie Sheldon
... ambitions were not mine. Its pleasures pleased me not. With not five of its five million inhabitants dared I speak heart to heart. Judith had gone out of my life. My aunts and cousins regarded me as beyond the moral pale. Mrs. McMurray was still unaware of my return to England. I confess to shabby treatment of my kind friend. I know she would have flown to aid Carlotta in her troubles; but would she have understood Carlotta? Reasoning now I am convinced that she would: in those days I did ...
— The Morals of Marcus Ordeyne • William J. Locke
... daylight was coming on in the East. He was dumped on the ground long enough to permit his captor to lock the door securely. Then the submarine boy was lifted once more, carried around the corner of the house and dumped in the bottom of a shabby old delivery wagon. A canvas was pulled over him, concealing him from any chance passer. Then the mulatto ran around to the seat, picking up the reins and starting ...
— The Submarine Boys and the Middies • Victor G. Durham
... John looked at his shabby suit, his dusty, worn shoes. Unconsciously he tugged at his coat tail because of an instinctive fear that the patch was showing. An idea of waiting outside until the fete was ...
— Spring Street - A Story of Los Angeles • James H. Richardson
... Justice, and get it done there. I'll do whatever you say." His eyes fell under the merciless stare she continued to fix on him, and he shifted his weight uneasily from one foot to the other. As he stood there before her, unwieldy, shabby, disordered, the purple veins distorting the hands he pressed against the desk, and his long orator's jaw trembling with the effort of his avowal, he seemed like a hideous parody of the fatherly old man she had ...
— Summer • Edith Wharton
... time that the American was a nervous, excitable individual who now and then took on tremendous fits of work in which he hustled and bustled everybody around him, but he had never seen him quite so excited and eager as now. The discovery at that shabby hotel which they had just quitted seemed to have acted on him like the smell of powder on an old war-horse; he appeared to be ...
— The Rayner-Slade Amalgamation • J. S. Fletcher
... narrow street hard by the Haymarket, and his companion knocked at a lowly door, which was opened by a sombre-looking man in a shabby suit of clothes. ...
— Tom Tufton's Travels • Evelyn Everett-Green
... him. He looked very elegant to her in his frock coat and gray trousers. She was filled with pride at the thought of how close and dear he was to her. She wished that the folk about her realized that she and her shabby father were intimate with the hero of ...
— Lydia of the Pines • Honore Willsie Morrow
... grotesque entablature, and betaken itself elsewhere! Nowadays the paint and plaster are peeling off the columns, and its door is padlocked. Happily—although a melancholy warning to the educated—it remains a source of pride to the peasant, who loves his shabby temple as the Romans do the marble ...
— A War-time Journal, Germany 1914 and German Travel Notes • Harriet Julia Jephson
... visited the hospital, the boy with the crooked leg was just leaving; but his leg was not crooked any longer; his face was bright and healthy, and safely buttoned up in his coat he carried a shabby old pocket book, in which lay a withered flower, with one word written underneath in ...
— Soap-Bubble Stories - For Children • Fanny Barry
... the bitterest of her life. With love outside—calling in the evening and fluting in the bower, and ever (as she thought) occupied with her image even when farther apart—she had little fault to find with the shabby interior of her home. Now that love was lost, she sat with her father, oppressed and cold as it had been a vault. Even in his preoccupation he could not fail to see how ill she seemed that morning: it appeared ...
— Doom Castle • Neil Munro
... laurel from her brows and lifted it up to the golden head of the man whose laugh she had caught. "My Saxon god!" she murmured, so low that none heard her save him, and then, leaving the crown on his head, she turned and walked away. She went home to the shabby house in Craven street, which was still her home, and before she slept she whispered to Miss Juliet, "I ...
— Lippincott's Magazine, Vol. 22, August, 1878 • Various
... forty minutes ride by rail. You saw the town before anything was done and in early spring. You would not know it now. It is green where it was brown, clean where it was dirty, trim where it was shabby. It begins to look like a great park, and the cottages are really ornamental, as well as comfortable. Our homes are to overlook the town and face the park at its broad end—you know it is triangular ...
— Joyce's Investments - A Story for Girls • Fannie E. Newberry
... play the piano, so far as to be able to accompany himself thereon. He sang to himself when he was travelling, and often murmured favourite airs when people around him were talking. He had lessons from an old Italian, a little, withered, shabby creature, who was not very proud of his pupil. 'He is a talent,' said the Signor, 'and he will amuse himself; good for a ballad at a party, but a musician? no!' and like all mere 'talents' Frank failed ...
— Clara Hopgood • Mark Rutherford
... just as the clock struck twelve. At once the coachman and footmen turned back into rats and mice, and the coach into a pumpkin; and when the sisters came home a little later, there was Cinderella, dressed in her old shabby frock, sitting in her usual place amongst ...
— Favorite Fairy Tales • Logan Marshall
... him to drive home," she said, with a firm voice, and a smile which if anyone care to understand, let him read Spenser's fortieth sonnet. And so they parted. The coachman took the queer shabby un-London-like man for a fortune teller his lady was in the habit of consulting, and paid homage to his power with the handle of his whip as he drove away. The schoolmaster returned to his room, not to his Plato, not even to Saul of Tarsus, but ...
— The Marquis of Lossie • George MacDonald
... series of striking exemplifications both in Europe and America since the war began. Were there such a thing as a Socialist propaganda in existence, were the so-called socialistic organisations anything better than a shabby little back-door into contemporary politics, those demonstrations would be hammering at the mind of everyone. It may be interesting to recapitulate some ...
— What is Coming? • H. G. Wells
... the inmates are in keeping; of the passengers in the street a sad proportion are dingy and shabby; but just when these are putting you off your guard, there will pass you a woman—more likely two or ...
— Old Creole Days • George Washington Cable
... homely black teapot and willow-patterned plates, though the two cups of rare Indian porcelain were not unworthy of it. The furniture was the same mixture of the ordinary and the choice, either worn and shabby, or such as would suit a virtuoso, but the whole arranged with taste and care that made the effect bright, pleasant, and comfortable. Lord Ormersfield stood on the hearth-rug waiting. His face was that of one who had learnt to wait, more considerate than acute, and bearing the ...
— Dynevor Terrace (Vol. I) - or, The Clue of Life • Charlotte M. Yonge
... I remember, the 13th day of April, 1920, that the first Government Lethal Chamber was established on the south side of Washington Square, between Wooster Street and South Fifth Avenue. The block which had formerly consisted of a lot of shabby old buildings, used as cafes and restaurants for foreigners, had been acquired by the Government in the winter of 1898. The French and Italian cafes and restaurants were torn down; the whole block was enclosed by a gilded iron railing, ...
— The King In Yellow • Robert W. Chambers
... like rosebuds which have a loveliness of their own; but the young man was struck by the boyish mixture of shyness and bluntness with which she greeted him, and attracted by the great eyes which gazed at him from under Robin's shabby cap. When he and Horace went to the Blakes' he amused himself idly enough with the school-girl, while his cousin flirted with Addie. He laughed one day when Mrs. Blake was unusually troubled about Lottie's apparel, and said something about "a sweet ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, October, 1877, Vol. XX. No. 118 • Various
... Gregory and Sir John Mandeville were clothed in indigo velvet. John of Salisbury had a silk coat and long girdle, and most of the Arabians were in tawny silk ornamented with white roses and wreaths of foliage. Some bindings are noticed as being in fine condition, and others as being shabby or faded. The clasps are minutely described. They would catch a visitor's eye as the books lay flat on the shelves: and we suppose that the librarian intended to show the best way of knowing the books apart rather than to ...
— The Great Book-Collectors • Charles Isaac Elton and Mary Augusta Elton
... pretty Francine, "how nice and shabby you look! You will do admirably to stand by a poor girl—so poor that she has hardly a bridesmaid. I hope you are as indigent as you were at Carlsruhe." Upon this I felt very fatherly, and clasped her waist from behind as I kissed ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science Vol. XV., No. 85. January, 1875. • Various
... is a shabby fellow! It never could have been the intention of Sir William, but that you should have had seven hundred pounds a year neat money; for, when he made the will, the Income Tax was double to what it is at present; and the estate which it is paid from is increasing ...
— The Letters of Lord Nelson to Lady Hamilton, Vol II. - With A Supplement Of Interesting Letters By Distinguished Characters • Horatio Nelson
... passing through the shabby familiar square, I brushed against a withered old man tottering down the street under a load of yarn. It was piled on a wheelbarrow which his feeble hands could not have raised but for the rope of yarn that supported it from his shoulders; and though Auld ...
— Auld Licht Idylls • J. M. Barrie
... Caroline abandons her shabby dress and appears in a splendid one. She is at the Deschars': every one compliments her upon her taste, upon the richness of her materials, upon her lace, ...
— Analytical Studies • Honore de Balzac
... first to enter, thinking that he must be mistaken. He thought of little Jacquemin, dainty and neat as if he had just stepped out of a bandbox, and his disdainful remarks upon the races of Enghien, where the swells no longer went. It was not possible that he lived here in this wretched, shabby place. ...
— Serge Panine • Georges Ohnet
... she was through, and the rain had stopped for a time. Near the entrance to the house on the hill—a turn where she always had to drive slowly—a shabby man was standing—a bearded man with rounded shoulders ...
— Mary Minds Her Business • George Weston
... has cancelled all my anxieties. I did not suspect you in earnest. Modest again! Because I don't do a very shabby thing, it seems, I 'don't fear your competition.' If it were reduced to an alternative of preference, I should dread you, as much as Satan does Michael. But is there not room enough in our respective regions? Go on—it will soon be my turn to forgive. To-day I dine with Mackintosh and Mrs. Stale—as ...
— Life of Lord Byron, Vol. II - With His Letters and Journals • Thomas Moore
... morning, Gabriel sped home. His own hunger made his heart ache for the little dog, and when he entered the cottage he was glad to see that his stepmother was preparing the evening meal, while his father bent, as usual, over a shabby, ink-stained desk, absorbed in ...
— Jewel's Story Book • Clara Louise Burnham
... painting at the rather shabby house of Rossetti in Portland Street, he was introduced to Rossetti's favorite model—a young woman of rare grace and beauty. Rossetti had painted her picture as "The Blessed Damozel," leaning over the ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great, Volume 5 (of 14) • Elbert Hubbard
... frost. The doctor, as he started in his carriage for Davie's house, drew his robes closely about him and scowled at the fierceness of the blast; but Davie, riding far ahead, his elbows flying wildly up and down, did not know that he had forgotten to fasten his shabby overcoat. Crouched by the silent loom, he clutched helplessly at the hit and miss as Elizabeth went down into that ...
— Life at High Tide - Harper's Novelettes • Various
... playing golden trumpets and violins—one adorable little fellow in the cove above the grand piano struggling with a 'cello twice as high as himself, and Carin painted the history of love in eight panels upon the walls of the old ballroom, whose frescoes were shabby enough, so I am told, when ...
— A Village of Vagabonds • F. Berkeley Smith
... looked deserted. It was a shabby old clapboard house; the architecture of the prosperous farmer of seventy-five years ago. The grounds were spacious but the space was filled with scrub weeds. A picket fence surrounded the weeds with uncertain ...
— The Fourth R • George Oliver Smith
... that shabby," muttered Billy. "Just as I was a taking all this trouble. Here, you, sir, shy ...
— Mother Carey's Chicken - Her Voyage to the Unknown Isle • George Manville Fenn
... was sitting on the area steps watching Cousin Jennie iron, when the tall figure in her shabby black hat and veil, which she invariably wore, came up the outer steps. Hanny ran to ...
— A Little Girl of Long Ago • Amanda Millie Douglas
... had been shabby at their best, were at their worst now, and, altogether, she was a figure neither attractive ...
— In Connection with the De Willoughby Claim • Frances Hodgson Burnett
... Coretti; and he sprang out, weighed the fagots, took the money, ran to a corner to enter the sale in a shabby old account-book, and returned to his work, saying, "Let's see if I can finish that sentence." And he wrote, travelling-bags, and knapsacks for soldiers. "Oh, my poor coffee is boiling over!" he exclaimed, and ran to the stove ...
— Cuore (Heart) - An Italian Schoolboy's Journal • Edmondo De Amicis
... was as much as I could bear. Yesterday, the fifth, we walked off by eleven o'clock to visit Mrs. Decatur, who lives at Georgetown, which is separated from Washington only by a little creek, across which there is a shabby enough tumble-down looking wooden bridge. There is so thick a fog that we could not see three yards before us, "quite English weather," as our friends here tell us, but not disagreeable to my mind as it was very mild. At the door of Mrs. Decatur's house we met General Van ...
— A Portrait of Old George Town • Grace Dunlop Ecker
... was that I told my London boys about them, using one's experiences as illustrations; till suddenly it struck me that this was shabby Christianity. Why shouldn't these town cagelings share our holidays? Thirteen accompanied me the following summer. We had three tents, an old deserted factory, and an uninhabited gorge by the sea, all to ourselves on the Anglesea coast, among people who spoke only Welsh. Thus ...
— A Labrador Doctor - The Autobiography of Wilfred Thomason Grenfell • Wilfred Thomason Grenfell
... failure. He was abstractedly courteous to servants, and he would not, you felt, have given even to an emperor his undivided attention. For the rest, the former wastrel had turned miser, and went noticeably shabby as a rule, but this morning he was trimly clothed, for he was returning homeward ...
— Gallantry - Dizain des Fetes Galantes • James Branch Cabell
... her hands and with brown nimble fingers found and readjusted the pin that affixed a shabby felt hat to her hair. Then she folded her arms and looked at the tips of ...
— Otherwise Phyllis • Meredith Nicholson
... come to my circus—and better than you have been there—you ought to have paid the proper price for a private performance. What do you mean by treating a public servant, like me, with your infernal aristocratic looks, as if I was dirt under your feet, after such shabby doings as ...
— Hide and Seek • Wilkie Collins
... charity closely. He was a man of medium size, with a pair of small eyes, and a turnup nose. His dress was extremely shabby, and he had the appearance of one who was on bad terms with fortune. There was nothing striking about his appearance, yet Carl regarded him with surprise and wonder. Despite the difference in age, he bore a remarkable resemblance to his ...
— Driven From Home - Carl Crawford's Experience • Horatio Alger
... early days of her married life, Dinah had effected some alterations which had made the house at La Baudraye a very pleasant residence. She turned a spacious forecourt into a formal garden, pulling down wine-stores, presses, and shabby outhouses. Behind the manor-house, which, though small, did not lack style with its turrets and gables, she laid out a second garden with shrubs, flower-beds, and lawns, and divided it from the vineyards by a wall hidden under creepers. She also made everything ...
— Parisians in the Country - The Illustrious Gaudissart, and The Muse of the Department • Honore de Balzac
... answered it she saw a pleasant-faced, smartly clad woman with a child in a neat, if shabby, boy's suit of blue serge, belted blouse over shrunken knickerbockers. She knew at once that they had come to look at the vacant apartment on ...
— Mary Rose of Mifflin • Frances R. Sterrett
... double bed stood straight out into the room. The two candles were on a long table. There were a few chairs, and a chest of drawers bearing a gilt-framed mirror. Everything was in perfect order, and the valise had been unpacked. On the table, locked, lay the shabby portfolio containing Casanova's papers. There were also some books which he was using in his work; writing ...
— Casanova's Homecoming • Arthur Schnitzler
... forbade. He was in white, the sleeve and breast of his painting jacket smeared with many colours; he had a camp-stool and an easel and looked, she could not help feeling, much more like a real artist than she did, hunched up as she was on a little mound of turf, in her shabby pink gown and that hateful garden hat with last year's dusty ...
— The Incomplete Amorist • E. Nesbit
... speak, but the room was wheeling about him. As he raised his trembling hand to his eyes, a shadow fell across the doorway, and Margaret came in. Tired, shabby, laden with bundles, she stood blinking at him a moment; and then, with a sudden cry of tenderness and pity, she was on her ...
— Poor, Dear Margaret Kirby and Other Stories • Kathleen Norris
... central tower, however vaunted and admired by the French themselves, looks to an unprejudiced eye mean and shabby; and principally from its being made of wood, which ill accords with the apparent solidity of the ...
— Architectural Antiquities of Normandy • John Sell Cotman
... at last into a shabby street, recognizable even in the twilight of the scattered lamps as being a place for cheap lodging-houses. There was a light burning in the second-floor windows of No. 19; but all the rest of the front was in darkness. ...
— The Doctor's Dilemma • Hesba Stretton
... artist George, with the blond Greek head, And the startling creeds, and the loose cravat; There was splenetic journalistic Fred, Of the sharp retort and the shabby hat; ...
— Pipe and Pouch - The Smoker's Own Book of Poetry • Various
... unconditional as death? And how could they know that the winners of so rich a prize should be mourned, should be wetted with tears, should be placed in the ground with the strutting pomp of grief? Knowing nothing at all of things like this, how could they know that this shabby burying-ground upon which they had strayed was so unlike that one which, in clear sight some distance away, was ordered in walks and drive-ways and ornamented with hedges, and fountains, and statues, and rare plants, and costly monuments—ah, ...
— The Ape, the Idiot & Other People • W. C. Morrow
... long double row of houses called the Almendral: towards the south it rises in the direction of the hills. Two clefts or chasms (quebradas) divide this part of the town into three separate parts consisting of low, shabby houses. These three districts have been named by the sailors after the English sea terms Fore-top, Main-top, and Mizen-top. The numerous quebradas, which all intersect the ground in a parallel direction, are surrounded ...
— Travels in Peru, on the Coast, in the Sierra, Across the Cordilleras and the Andes, into the Primeval Forests • J. J. von Tschudi
... wear a wreath of laurel for the same purpose.... Mr Clinton wore small side-whiskers, but was otherwise clean-shaven, and the lack of beard betrayed the weakness of his mouth; his teeth were decayed and yellow. He was always dressed in a black tail-coat, shiny at the elbows; and he wore a shabby, narrow black tie, with a false diamond stud in his dickey. His grey trousers were baggy at the knees and frayed at the edges; his boots had a masculine and English breadth of toe. His top hat, of antiquated shape, was kept carefully brushed, but always looked as if it were ...
— Orientations • William Somerset Maugham
... then, when alone in his shabby bedroom, reading a dull book, or duly preparing to retire, far in the dim recesses of heart and brain a faint pain became apparent—if it could still be called pain, this vague ghost of anger stirring in the ashes of dead years—and at such moments he thought of Graylock, and of another; ...
— Between Friends • Robert W. Chambers
... all. For a moment I failed to realise and then it all came back, my enormity and the pressing need of an abject apology to Sir Richard. I pulled an embroidered bell rope until the butler came. He came in perfectly cheerful and indescribably shabby. I asked him if Sir Richard was up, and he said he had just gone down, and told me to my amazement that it was twelve o'clock. I asked to be shown in to Sir Richard at once. He was in his smoking-room. "Good morning," he said cheerfully ...
— Tales of Wonder • Lord Dunsany
... Shabby gentility has nothing so characteristic as its hat. There is always an unnatural calmness about its nap, and an unwholesome gloss, suggestive of a ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. II, No. 8, June 1858 • Various
... she inventoried impressions of the room and its contents.—Cool, first—blue walls, blue carpet, blue upholstering of sofa and of chairs. Not worn or shabby, but so graciously faded by sun and air, that this—decoratively speaking—most perilous of colours became innocuous, in a way studious, in keeping with a large writing-table occupying the centre of the picture, laden with manuscripts and with books. ...
— Deadham Hard • Lucas Malet
... of her rooming house they lingered. A honey-colored moon hung like a lantern over the block-long row of shabby-fronted houses. On her steps and to her fermenting fancy the shadow of an ash can sprawled like ...
— The Best Short Stories of 1915 - And the Yearbook of the American Short Story • Various
... ministerial hat much the worse for wear. These articles he suspended from a nail, so that they looked as if a very poor lean divine had hung himself there. Then he sat down, and took his turn at staring. 'I do not bury the dead,' he remarked after a moment, as if convinced that the two shabby hunters before him could have ...
— Castle Nowhere • Constance Fenimore Woolson
... justice—the intuitive feminine justness that is so much rarer than a reasoned impartiality. Circumstances had tragically combined to develop this instinct into a conscious habit. She had seen more than most girls of the shabby side of life, of the perpetual tendency of want to cramp the noblest attitude. Poverty and misfortune had overhung her childhood and she had none of the pretty delusions about life that are supposed to be the crowning grace of girlhood. This very competence, which gave her a touching ...
— The Touchstone • Edith Wharton
... see the day when he is old, and stale, and shabby, when, like us, they could come out to meet him as he walks across the meadow with a mantle of dew wrapped round him, and a garland of paling rose-clouds, that an hour ago were crimson, about ...
— Nancy - A Novel • Rhoda Broughton
... drawing-room. It was a room which had been built, too, of quaint shape, made up of nooks and corners and recesses, and with dark oak beams stretching right across the ceiling. The furniture was all old-fashioned, and of different periods; but the general effect was harmonious, though a trifle shabby. Paul knew it well! Many an evening he had come in to tea there, after a cigar and a chat with the old Major, and lounged in that low chair by Mrs. Harcourt's side. But it scarcely seemed like ...
— A Monk of Cruta • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... did so he gave a slight exclamation, and stood looking beyond. The door opened into a vaulted ante-chamber, as high as a chapel and paved with red tiles; and into this antechamber a lady had just been admitted by a servant, a lad in shabby livery, who was now ushering her toward the apartment in which our friends were grouped. The gentleman at the door, after dropping his exclamation, remained silent; in silence too the lady advanced. He gave her no further audible greeting and offered her no hand, ...
— The Portrait of a Lady - Volume 1 (of 2) • Henry James
... many of the students in the National Gallery had left off work and were refreshing themselves with lunch and conversation. There was one old worker who had not stirred from his place, but he had put down his brush, and had taken from his pocket a small book, which was like its owner—thin and shabby of covering. He seemed to find pleasure in reading it, for he turned over its pages with all the tenderness characteristic of one who loves what he reads. Now and again he glanced at his unfinished copy of the beautiful portrait of Andrea del Sarto, and once his ...
— Stories By English Authors: London • Various
... bookseller, and was rising from his chair, when the door opened. A middle-aged, Jewish-looking man, wrapped to the chin in a shabby ulster and carrying a suit-case, stood on the threshold, and regarded ...
— Corporal Sam and Other Stories • A. T. Quiller-Couch
... door, revealing a little room in which books and papers mingled oddly with the bedroom furniture and the tools and bench of his craft. There were two windows with shabby red curtains. On nails hung a few odd garments, one of which, the doublet anciently pierced by the fanatic's dagger, merely served as a memento, though not visibly older than the rest of his wardrobe. "Who puts a mediocre article into a costly envelope?" ...
— Dreamers of the Ghetto • I. Zangwill
... thought that was mighty funny. In a couple of minutes the boat came alongside and I heard someone say, "Pst" very quiet like. I went and looked over the rail and there I saw a fellow all alone in a rowboat. I couldn't see him very well, but I could see he had on an old hat and was pretty shabby. ...
— Roy Blakeley's Adventures in Camp • Percy Keese Fitzhugh
... known to men must be liable to a few such misfortunes. Who is not ashamed to accept, I have said, having lately been there and thoroughly enjoyed myself? But I did not put myself in the way of having to cut my throat, on which account I felt, as I came out, that I had been somewhat shabby. I was ashamed in that I had not put a few napoleons down on the table. Conscience had prevented me, and a wish to keep my money. But should not conscience have kept me away from all that happiness for which I had not paid? I had not thought of it before I went to Monte Carlo, but ...
— Mr. Scarborough's Family • Anthony Trollope
... tragedy. I've seen the magnificent ancient palace of the Wolfburghs. It is a flat! In the very house where I went to-day. The third story flat just under the attics where the poor Joneses daub portraits. I passed the open doors and I saw the shabby old tables and chairs and the princesses—two fat old women in frowzy wrappers, and their hair in papers, eating that soup of pork and cabbages and raisins—the air was thick with the smell! And that is ...
— Frances Waldeaux • Rebecca Harding Davis
... it. Picture to yourselves, gentle readers, a little flaxen-haired man, with a little turn-up red nose and long red moustaches. A pointed Persian cap with a crimson cloth crown covered his forehead right down to his eyebrows. He was dressed in a shabby yellow Caucasian overcoat, with black velveteen cartridge pockets on the breast, and tarnish silver braid on all the seams; over his shoulder was slung a horn; in his sash was sticking a dagger. A raw-boned, hook-nosed ...
— A Sportsman's Sketches - Volume II • Ivan Turgenev
... December days, That wolf-like steal into his chamber drear:— Lo! the assassins that I fear for him! Each day he tightens by one hole his belt: That poor nose—tinted like old ivory: He has retained one shabby suit ...
— Cyrano de Bergerac • Edmond Rostand
... he, gaily, this Coat can't be very old, however long I may have worn it. I'll rub on in it still; and your Mother and you will have the more Money for copper-coloured Clokes. But don't, at any Time, let your Father get shabby, Children. I would never be threadbare nor unclean. Let my Habitt be neat and spotless, my Bands well washed and uncrumpled, as becometh a Gentleman. As for my Sword in the Corner, your Mother may send ...
— Mary Powell & Deborah's Diary • Anne Manning
... once, when Whistler and his chum ran out of the cabin to look about, they saw a number of familiar figures approaching along the rock-strewn shore. These newcomers were as shabby and bedraggled as themselves, and it ...
— Navy Boys Behind the Big Guns - Sinking the German U-Boats • Halsey Davidson
... mechanic's surroundings and outlook, and having to fend for himself in the miry ways of the great city. Like David Copperfield, he had formed a very early acquaintance with debts and duns, and been initiated into the mysteries and sad expedients of shabby poverty. Like David Copperfield, he had been made free of the interior of a debtor's prison. Poor lad, he was not much more than ten or eleven years old when he left Chatham, with all the charms that were ever after to live so brightly in his recollection,—the gay military pageantry, ...
— Life of Charles Dickens • Frank Marzials
... as she went in, and put out again with the clumsy heap of netting towering at her feet. The thing she meant to do was stupendous for a girl to attempt alone, but she was going to attempt it. The shabby old net had lain in its corner, useless, for two years. Now it should be used—she, Judith Lynn would use it! She was glad as she pulled seaward again that she had thrown in two scoops—perhaps when the time came Blossom could make out ...
— Judith Lynn - A Story of the Sea • Annie Hamilton Donnell
... He entered the shabby room, and found a poor old woman, lying on a miserable bed. The room was bare and cheerless except for the bright fire burning in the small stove, beside which lay a neat pile of wood. The doctor did what he could to ease ...
— Stories Worth Rereading • Various
... time he held his straw hat in his hand and affected a great and almost gloomy gravity. He seemed very changed, and she observed, too, that his clothes in reality were not at all elegant, but positively shabby. Suddenly she could not help picturing him tenderly embracing her sister-in-law, ...
— Bertha Garlan • Arthur Schnitzler
... was nothing unusual about O'Malley, unless it was the contrast of the light blue eyes with the dark hair. Never, I think, did I see him in anything but that old grey flannel suit, with the low collar and shabby glistening tie. He was of medium height, delicately built, his hands more like a girl's than a man's. In towns he shaved and looked fairly presentable, but once upon his travels he grew beard and moustache and would forget for weeks to have his hair cut, ...
— The Centaur • Algernon Blackwood
... shabby clothes and a bad bonnet, like Mrs. Platt, and have to go to all the funerals in town! How horrid! Oh, Scott, do be some other kind of a man. A minister's wife can't dance anything but the Virginia reel, nor play anything more than muggins. Why can't you be a dentist, if ...
— The Brentons • Anna Chapin Ray
... emblematic dove; the rain-storm; the glimpse of the woman sewing in one of the windows. There is also a passage containing a sketch of the personage who served as the groundwork for Old Moody. "An elderly ragamuffin, in a dingy and battered hat, an old surtout, and a more than shabby general aspect; a thin face and a red nose, a patch over one eye, and the other half drowned in moisture. He leans in a slightly stooping posture on a stick, forlorn and silent, addressing nobody but fixing his one moist eye on you with a certain intentness. He is a man who has been in decent ...
— Hawthorne and His Circle • Julian Hawthorne
... favourites in my sitting-room. He saw my delight as I put them on some empty shelves, but the next day he said that he wanted a stuffed dog there, and that he thought my books, especially as they were shabby, had better go upstairs. ...
— The Autobiography of Mark Rutherford • Mark Rutherford
... while all Paris was ringing with the news that the twenty-two unfortunate Girondists were to be executed next morning, I found myself standing in a shabby passage beside the river, under the shadow of the great cathedral of ...
— Kilgorman - A Story of Ireland in 1798 • Talbot Baines Reed
... painful silence. George rose, and walking to the mantel-piece, looked down at the hearth and tapped the ironwork with his foot. He would fain have made the best of what he ruefully recognized to be a shabby situation by treating it jocosely; but her grave, grieved demeanor forbade. Yet he ...
— The Law-Breakers and Other Stories • Robert Grant |
