"Veneer" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... a step annually. He must nibble like a frost-driven mouse to merely exist. So poor was the soil, that the clay came to the surface, and in wet weather a slip of the foot exposed it—the heel cut through the veneer of turf into the cold, dead, moist clay. Nothing grew but rushes. Every time a horse moved over the marshy land his hoof left deep holes which never again filled up, but remained the year through, now puddles, full of rain water, and now dry ...
— The Life of the Fields • Richard Jefferies
... of to-day but thwart the grand-children of that generation, even in a small matter, and mark their rancour. How bitter! how relentless! The Catholic spirit of half a century ago was not operated on by the literature of a nation that is daily losing even the veneer of Christianity. ...
— The Young Priest's Keepsake • Michael Phelan
... with indecision in her voice. "But there is that other—the one that ran away from us—there's something I don't like about her. Perhaps it's a slight veneer of hypocrisy." ...
— The Created Legend • Feodor Sologub
... the fancy. Another individual who was much exercised by our journey was Khwjeh Konstantin, a Syrian-Greek trader, son of the old agent of the convent, whose blue goggles and comparatively tight pantaloons denoted a certain varnish and veneer. It is his practice to visit El-Muwaylah once every six months; when he takes, in exchange for cheap tobacco, second-hand clothes, and poor cloth, the coral, the pearls fished for in April, the gold dust, the finds of coin, and whatever else will bring money. Such is the course ...
— The Land of Midian, Vol. 1 • Richard Burton
... of Mr. James Oppenheim, a young man for whom a metropolis is almost completely epitomized by the riveting-machine, the sweat-shop, and the slum. There we discover that this poet's vision has pierced straight through the city's veneer of ugly commonplace to the beauty shimmering beneath. In his eyes the sinewy, heroic forms of the builders, clinging high on their frail scaffoldings and nonchalantly hurling red-hot rivets through space, are so many young gods ...
— The Joyful Heart • Robert Haven Schauffler
... world. Romance, for that matter, never had existed and it was high time the stupid world was forcibly purged of its immemorial illusion. Life was and ever had been sordid, commonplace, ignoble, vulgar, immedicable; refinement was a cowardly veneer that was beneath any seeker after Truth, and Truth was all that mattered. Love was to laugh. Happiness was hysteria, and content the delusion of morons (a word now hotly racing "authentic"). As for those verbal criminals, "loyalty" ...
— Black Oxen • Gertrude Franklin Horn Atherton
... profoundness of mental quietude—I might say of consolation—that I had attained to during my wanderings, I could not help recognizing what a cruel, fatal part is played in the lives of all of us by irony. It is, with Frenchmen, a kind of veneer, worn even by the most unpretentious in place of whatever may be real in them; and where this outward seeming is absent, they are ...
— Library of the World's Best Literature, Ancient and Modern — Volume 11 • Various
... foremost merchants and operators in New York, and was already talked of for mayor. This success was the sort that fulfilled the rural idea of getting on in the world, whereas Philip's accomplishments, seen through the veneer of conceit which they had occasioned him to take on, did not commend themselves as anything worth while. Accomplishments rarely do unless they are translated into visible position or into the currency of the realm. ...
— Baddeck and That Sort of Thing • Charles Dudley Warner
... that I had dusted," she replied, "one of the feet touched the sofa lightly, when off dropped that veneer like a loose flake. I've been examining the sofa since, and find that it is a very bad piece of ...
— Trials and Confessions of a Housekeeper • T. S. Arthur
... one of our own rough crofters who had acquired so thin a veneer of civilization that it scarcely concealed the reality beneath. With a somewhat boisterous geniality he made instant friends with all of his former class in the neighborhood. With Val and myself he was not altogether at his ease. An abrupt awkwardness of manner, which we put down to shyness, ...
— Up in Ardmuirland • Michael Barrett
... Juans. He refuses to be inspected and criticised by the inquisitive sensation hunters of other nations. Money will not tempt him to commercialize his gaiety and regulate it to meet the morbid demands of the interloper. Hence the external aspect of sobriety. Hence the veneer of piety. Hence the sepulchral silence of the midnight thoroughfares. Hence the silence and the desolation which ...
— Europe After 8:15 • H. L. Mencken, George Jean Nathan and Willard Huntington Wright
... perfectly cool, sober and in my right mind at the moment he spoke, I had to concede that his voice was the most wonderful I had ever heard, and something in me made me resent it as well as the curious veneer that had spread over my friends at his entry upon the scene. There they stood and sat, six perfectly rational, fairly moral, representative free and equal citizens, cowed by the representative of something that they neither understood nor cared about, and it made me furious. ...
— The Heart's Kingdom • Maria Thompson Daviess
... his feet. There was no anger in his face—only a huge amusement. Rose-Marie, watching his expression, knew all at once that nothing she said would have the slightest effect upon him. His sensibilities were too well concealed, beneath a tough veneer of conceit, to be wounded. His soul seemed too well hidden ...
— The Island of Faith • Margaret E. Sangster
... a strange poem. It is so new that it is startling, but it has won. Listen to its strange swing, and see its stranger pictures. Through the thin veneer of a new civilization, back of the Christianized Negro race, the poet sees, under the inspiration of a missionary sermon delivered in a modern church, the race ...
— Giant Hours With Poet Preachers • William L. Stidger
... passionate admiration for good breeding, and a consuming envy of the lucky unconscious possessors of it. Since ten years old, he had been possessed by the great desire to be acknowledged a gentleman. There was nothing of vulgar veneer about this. It was the real interior thing he wanted; that invisible yet perfectly palpable hall-mark which without explanations or credentials, classified you. His profession had not brought him in contact more than very infrequently with people of this sort, and his personal interests never could ...
— The Real Adventure • Henry Kitchell Webster
... idealism; often he is not. But let a great convulsion touching moral questions occur, and the result always shows how close to the surface is his idealism. And the fact that so frequently he puts over it a thick veneer of materialism does not affect its quality. The truest approach, the only approach in fact, to the American character is, as Viscount Bryce has so ...
— A Dutch Boy Fifty Years After • Edward Bok
... and legal disabilities known by our fathers and forefathers. "What is there to check our dash forward?" we would ask with Father Vaughan. "Absolutely nothing, but ourselves, nothing but what we term prudence." Prudence! thin veneer, hardly able to conceal our ...
— Catholic Problems in Western Canada • George Thomas Daly
... initial lap of our voyage, perhaps the less said the better. As always is the case when monotony begins to wear away the veneer of civilization, character quirks came to the surface, cliques formed among the passengers, and gossip and personalities ...
— The Long Voyage • Carl Richard Jacobi
... searchlight's unearthly arm that was swinging through space stops and falls on us, and we find that the tangle of uprooted and sunken posts and shattered framing is populous with dead soldiers. Quite close to me, the head of a kneeling body hangs on its back by an uncertain thread; a black veneer, edged with clotted drops, covers the cheek. Another body so clasps a post in its arms that it has only half fallen. Another, lying in the form of a circle, has been stripped by the shell, and his back and belly are laid bare. Another, outstretched on the edge of the ...
— Under Fire - The Story of a Squad • Henri Barbusse
... the super-amphitheater, filled with those whose emotions lie next to the surface and whose pores have not been closed over with a water-tight veneer, burst into its ...
— Humoresque - A Laugh On Life With A Tear Behind It • Fannie Hurst
... the thin veneer hood of the airplane, and disclosed a very small four-cylindered rotary pneumatic engine of bewitching simplicity and lightness, which a baby could have held ...
— Around the World in Ten Days • Chelsea Curtis Fraser
... aristocrats and there are plebs," said Gilbert, "and they won't mingle. That's all about it. I believe that the majority of the working people are different from us, not only in their habits ... that's nothing ... just the veneer ... but in their nature. We've been achieved somehow ... evolution and that sort of thing ... because they needed people to look after them and direct them and control them. We're as different from working people as a race-horse is from a cart-horse. Things that ...
— Changing Winds - A Novel • St. John G. Ervine
... calm way in which he sometimes alluded to his present circumstances, without a trace of bitterness or fretfulness, amazed her. In old days she would have put it down to "good breeding—good manners," some superficial veneer of good society of which she thoroughly approved; but she had seen too much of the seamy side of "good society" now to be able to accept this explanation of his calmness. It was not want of sensitiveness, she was sure ...
— Brooke's Daughter - A Novel • Adeline Sergeant
... comparatively little criticism, are more vitiated at heart, more cold-blooded and deliberate in their evil. One may form a base character, but maintain an outward respectability; but let him not be very complacent over the decorous and conventional veneer which masks him from the world. If one imagines that he can corrupt his own soul and make it the abiding-place of foul thoughts, mean impulses, and shrivelling selfishness, and yet go forward very far in God's universe without meeting overwhelming disaster, ...
— A Knight Of The Nineteenth Century • E. P. Roe
... love. Breed allers tells. You may be low-born and nothing will 'ide it—not all the dress and not all the, by way of, fine manners. It's jest like veneer—it peels off at a minute's notice. But breed's true to the core; it wears. Alison, it ...
— Good Luck • L. T. Meade
... getting them to timber size and quality. The other trees are removed over a period of several years, so that you finally have only the 200 high quality crop trees left. The reason I suggest starting the pruning when the trees are six inches in diameter, is that that is the size of the veneer core left after the veneer manufacturer has turned the log for the thin sheet of furniture veneer. Remove the limbs and improve the quality so you get a 16-foot log free of limbs and knots. That is what the ...
— Northern Nut Growers Association Report of the Proceedings at the Forty-Second Annual Meeting • Northern Nut Growers Association
... enter the atelier of the gentleman who pleased his clients by ingeniously simulating the grain of walnut; and though he had seen the old oaken ambry kicked out contemptuously into the farmyard, serving perhaps the necessities of hens or pigs, he would not apprentice himself to the masters of veneer. He paced up and down the room, glancing now and again at his papers, and wondering if there were not hope for him. A great thing he could never do, but he had longed to do a true thing, to ...
— The Hill of Dreams • Arthur Machen
... the cocked-hat pressingly invited us to pay a visit to the Commissaire du Quartier. That formidable functionary received us with the customary French-polished veneer of urbanity which, as a rule, constitutes the suaviter in modo of the higher class of Gallic officials. He read us a severe lecture, however, upon the alleged impropriety of our conduct; and when I ventured to protest that it was not ...
— A Stable for Nightmares - or Weird Tales • J. Sheridan Le Fanu
... work. A discussion arose in our compartment as to what constituted politeness. One gentleman defined it as ceremonious manners, the result of early training; while another objected that that was only the veneer of manners, as all true politeness arose from the heart. I listened awhile and then spoke across the seat to a decent, dejected looking man with a little bundle beside him tied up in a blue and ...
— The Letters of "Norah" on her Tour Through Ireland • Margaret Dixon McDougall
... liberal space to canoeing, and skilled boatbuilders were advertising canoes of various models and widely different material. I commenced interviewing the builders by letter and studying catalogues carefully. There was a wide margin of choice. You could have lapstreak, smooth skin, paper, veneer, or canvas. What I wanted was light weight and good model. I liked the Peterboro canoes; they were decidedly canoey. Also, the veneered Racines: but neither of them talked of a 20 pound canoe. The "Osgood folding canvas" did. But I had some knowledge of canvas boats. ...
— Woodcraft • George W. Sears
... counterfeits of faith in the world. Electroplate! veneer! They will inevitably fail in the last supreme test, if not before. James especially calls attention to the distinction between a living and a dead faith. It becomes us ...
— Love to the Uttermost - Expositions of John XIII.-XXI. • F. B. Meyer
... shady side of the educational process, the diffusion of elementary and superficial knowledge, of the veneer and polish which mask, until chipped-off, the raw and unpolished material lying hidden beneath them. A little learning is a dangerous thing because it knows all and consequently it stands in the way of learning ...
— Supplemental Nights, Volume 6 • Richard F. Burton
... again remark that any comparison between the condition of the English agricultural labourer and the French peasant proprietor is irrelevant and inconclusive. In the cottage of a small owner at Osse, for instance, we may discover features to shock us, often a total absence of the neatness and veneer of the Sussex ploughman's home. Our disgust is trifling compared with that of the humblest, most hard-working owner of the soil, when he learns under what conditions lives his English compeer. To ...
— In the Heart of the Vosges - And Other Sketches by a "Devious Traveller" • Matilda Betham-Edwards
... want dollars an' cents, an' that's what I want every time, dollars an' cents, an' not soft soap. Yes, it's dollars an'—cents—and not so-ft soa-p." Suddenly the dress-maker, borne high on a wave of hysteria, disclosing the innate coarseness which underlay all her veneer of harmless gentility and fine manners, raised a loud, shrill laugh, ending in a multitude of reverberations like a bell. There was about this unnatural metallic laughter something fairly blood-curdling in its disclosure of overstrained emotion. She laughed and laughed, while the ...
— The Debtor - A Novel • Mary E. Wilkins Freeman
... the exquisite privilege of basking in the smiles of that young Bostonian. But perhaps her chief delusion was the belief that she was an artist. She had learned all that Boston could teach of drawing, and this thin veneer had received a beautiful foreign polish abroad. Her friends pronounced her sketches really wonderful. Perhaps if Miss Sommerton's entire capital had been something less than her half-yearly income, she might have made a name for herself; ...
— One Day's Courtship - The Heralds Of Fame • Robert Barr
... his dismay not only at Barzil's wrecked being but at the dismal aspect of the interior, the worn rugs with their pieces of once bright material frayed and loose, the splitting veneer of an old chest of drawers and blistered mirror above a dusty iron grate. "You have got in among the rocks!" he exclaimed. "Still they tell me you've weathered the worst. Copper bound and oak ribs. Don't build ...
— Java Head • Joseph Hergesheimer
... know not what—something mysterious: dragons, emblems, symbolical figures. The sky is too glaring; the light crude, implacable; never has this old town of Nagasaki appeared to me so old, so worm-eaten, so bald, notwithstanding all its veneer of new papers and gaudy paintings. These little wooden houses, of such marvellous cleanly whiteness inside, are black outside, timeworn, disjointed and grimacing. When one looks closely, this grimace is to be found everywhere: ...
— Serge Panine • Georges Ohnet
... especially that suited to their nature, which they could properly assimilate. No great patience was ever exhibited by him toward those of his countrymen—the most repulsive characters in his stories are such—who would make of themselves mere apes and mimes, decorating themselves with a veneer of questionable alien characteristics, but with no personality or stability of their own, presenting at best a spectacle to make devils laugh and angels weep, lacking even the hothouse product's virtue of being good to ...
— The Social Cancer - A Complete English Version of Noli Me Tangere • Jose Rizal
... has changed his point of view. His whole mental attitude has undergone something of the nature of a revolution in the crucible of war. Up the "line," he saw things stripped to the buff, saw life and death in all their nakedness. The veneer of so-called civilization has been worn off, and the real man shows through. That, to my mind, is why friendships made amid the blood, mud, hunger, and grime of the trenches are friendships that will endure through life. It is there Man meets Man, and admires him. I have ...
— Through St. Dunstan's to Light • James H. Rawlinson
... chain from the warping mill or the linking machine is now taken to the beaming frame, and after the threads, or rather the small groups of threads, in the pin lease have been disposed in a kind of coarse comb or reed, termed an veneer or radial, and arranged to occupy the desired width in the veneer, they are attached in some suitable way to the weaver's beam. The chain is held taut, and weights applied to the presser on the beam while the latter ...
— The Jute Industry: From Seed to Finished Cloth • T. Woodhouse and P. Kilgour
... made of good Scotch granite, with a human heart beneath. The veneer of gentility had underneath it the pure gold of character. She seized the helm of the family ship with a heroic hand. She sailed steadily through a sea of troubles that often threatened to overwhelm her; the unaccustomed task of motherhood with its ...
— 'Lizbeth of the Dale • Marian Keith
... could read, and no forks were used for meals. We call ourselves civilised now, yet some who consider themselves such, seem to entertain a desire to return to barbarism. Human nature, in truth, is the same in all ages, and what is called culture is only a thin veneer. Nothing but to be made partaker of the Divine nature will implant the ...
— The White Lady of Hazelwood - A Tale of the Fourteenth Century • Emily Sarah Holt
... her lamp again and looked round on the appointments of the room, as if she wished Westover to note them, too: the drab wallpaper, the stiff chairs, the long, hard sofa in haircloth, the high bureau of mahogany veneer. ...
— Henry James, Jr. • William Dean Howells
... roughly enough in corduroy and miner's half-leg boots, but these were of the most expensive material and cut. His cold gray eye and thin lips denied the manner of superficial heartiness he habitually carried. If one scratched the veneer of good nature it was to find a hard selfishness that went to ...
— A Texas Ranger • William MacLeod Raine
... ice-saw, and all the work with ice, The work and tools of the rigger, grappler, sail-maker, block-maker, Goods of gutta-percha, papier-mache, colors, brushes, brush-making, glazier's implements, The veneer and glue-pot, the confectioner's ornaments, the decanter and glasses, the shears and flat-iron, The awl and knee-strap, the pint measure and quart measure, the counter and stool, the writing-pen of quill or metal, the ...
— Leaves of Grass • Walt Whitman
... was in great part an accumulation begun with the wedding gifts; though some of it was older, two large patent rocking-chairs and a footstool having belonged to Mrs. Adams's mother in the days of hard brown plush and veneer. For decoration there were pictures and vases. Mrs. Adams had always been fond of vases, she said, and every year her husband's Christmas present to her was a vase of one sort or another—whatever the clerk showed him, marked at about twelve or fourteen dollars. The pictures were some of them ...
— Alice Adams • Booth Tarkington
... speech, in the darkest corner of the room. McEwan had not noticed her protest, it had all happened so instantaneously. He followed Stefan's direction, and faced the canvas expectantly. There was a long silence. Mary, watching, saw the spruce veneer of metropolitanism fall from their guest like a discarded mask—the grave, steady Highlander emerged. Stefan's moment of malice had flashed and died—he stood biting his nails, already too ashamed to glance in Mary's direction. At last McEwan turned. ...
— The Nest Builder • Beatrice Forbes-Robertson Hale
... vastly polite to each other during what remained of the conversation, far more ceremoniously so than we should have been likely to be had there been any solid liking on either side under the thin veneer of friendliness. ...
— The House by the Lock • C. N. Williamson
... much heartburning amongst the older Royalist nobility, and to engage the attention and compel the anxiety even of Clarendon himself. The Chancellor had to steer his course amidst a very hotbed of popular excitement, and of Court factions and intrigues, but thinly covered by a veneer of ...
— The Life of Edward Earl of Clarendon V2 • Henry Craik
... of the Apes the expedition was in the nature of a holiday outing. His civilization was at best but an outward veneer which he gladly peeled off with his uncomfortable European clothes whenever any reasonable pretext presented itself. It was a woman's love which kept Tarzan even to the semblance of civilization—a condition for which familiarity had bred contempt. He hated the shams and the hypocrisies ...
— Tarzan and the Jewels of Opar • Edgar Rice Burroughs
... going to stay to dinner," observed Keziah, trying to maintain the veneer of manners she had ...
— Susan Lenox: Her Fall and Rise • David Graham Phillips
... p. 30 f., pl. 40. Numismatic evidence exhibits a similar readiness on the part of local Syrian cults to adopt the veneer of Hellenistic civilization while retaining in great measure their own individuality; see Hill, "Some Palestinian Cults in the Graeco-Roman Age", in Proceedings of the British Academy, ...
— Legends Of Babylon And Egypt - In Relation To Hebrew Tradition • Leonard W. King
... ache in Jimmie Dale's brain—a sense of some deadly, remorseless thing that seemed to be constantly creeping closer to him, clutching at him—to smother him, to choke him. There was something absolutely fiendish, terrifying, in the veneer of ...
— The Adventures of Jimmie Dale • Frank L. Packard
... rather simple little soul under her casing of Parisian veneer, and was often innocently surprised at the potency of her own charm. That men, big men and wise men, were inclined to take her artful artlessness at its surface value was a continual revelation to her. Like Rachael, she had gone to bed the night before in a profoundly thoughtful frame of mind, ...
— The Heart of Rachael • Kathleen Norris
... The Mysteries of Udolpho, like the unscrupulous uncle in Godwin's Cloudesley, may well have been descended from the wicked uncle of the folk tale. The cruel stepmother is disguised as a haughty, scheming marchioness in The Sicilian Romance. The ogre drops his club, assumes a veneer of polite refinement and relies on the more gentlemanlike method of the dagger and stiletto for gaining his ends. The banditti and robbers who infest the countryside in Gothic fiction are time honoured figures. Travellers in Thessaly in Apuleius' Golden Ass, like the fugitives in Shelley's Zastrozzi ...
— The Tale of Terror • Edith Birkhead
... noteworthy—unpleasantly so, I am obliged to add. One was red-faced and obese; the other was tall, thin, and wiry, and showed as many seams in his face as a blighted apple. Neither of the two had anything to recommend him either in appearance or address, save a certain veneer of polite assumption as transparent as it was offensive. As I listened to the forced sallies of the one and the hollow laugh of the other, I was glad that I was large of frame and strong of arm, and used to ...
— Room Number 3 - and Other Detective Stories • Anna Katharine Green
... look at the life of a tree. Like Topsy "it growed;" it was not planted by man. Those vast pine forests, extending for miles and miles, actual mines of wealth, are a mere veneer to granite rocks. That is the wonderful part of it all, granite is the basis, granite distinctly showing the progress of ...
— Through Finland in Carts • Ethel Brilliana Alec-Tweedie
... One sometimes sees in antique fragments ivory or silver eyeballs, and hair and eyelashes made separately in thin strips and coils of metal; while occasionally the depression of the edge of the lips is sufficient to give rise to the opinion that a thin veneer of copper was applied to ...
— Arts and Crafts in the Middle Ages • Julia De Wolf Addison
... breakfast Lady Brigit studied this simple woman who was to be her mother-in-law. Madame Joyselle was, socially speaking, absolutely unpresentable, for she had remained in every respect except that of age what she had been born—a Norman peasant. She had acquired no veneer of any kind, and looked, as she stood with her plump hands folded contentedly on her apron-band, much less a lady than Mrs. ...
— The Halo • Bettina von Hutten
... instant, Olive paused, astonished at the change which had come over her companion. His clerical veneer had fallen from him; the man beneath was singularly human, likable, and as simple as Dolph ...
— The Brentons • Anna Chapin Ray
... spirits, daemons, and the thousand powers of darkness abide with us still, though to-day they go by different names, for there is no man in this smug, complacent age of ours, but carries within him a power of evil greater or less, according to his intellect. Scratch off the social veneer, lift but a corner of the very decent cloak of our civilization, and behold! there stands the Primal Man in all his old, wild savagery, and with the devil leering upon his shoulder. Indeed, to-day as surely as in the dim past, we are all possessed of a devil great or small, weaker ...
— The Broad Highway • Jeffery Farnol
... well-nigh seemed as if his sinews cracked with the violent effort at self-control. Oh! how she loved him, when she felt in him the passionate lover, the wild, untamed creature that he was at heart, on whom the frigid courtliness of manner sat but as a thin veneer. This was his own real personality, and there was little now of the elegant and accomplished gentleman of fashion, schooled to hold every emotion in check, to hide every thought, every desire save that ...
— The Elusive Pimpernel • Baroness Emmuska Orczy
... result of ignorance and of bad social arrangements, and that therefore it may be eradicated by knowledge and by social change. I admit that for many of these adult dwellers in the slums there is no hope. Poor victims of a civilisation that hides its brutality beneath a veneer of culture and of grace, for them individually there is, alas! no salvation. But for their children, yes! Healthy surroundings, good food, mental and physical training, plenty of play, and carefully chosen ...
— Annie Besant - An Autobiography • Annie Besant
... carven tranquillity, heart and spirit were deeply stirred. For all Nevil's skill in editing the tale of Roy's championship, she had read his hidden thoughts as unerringly as she had divined Mrs Bradley's curiosity and faint hostility beneath the veneer of good manners, not yet imparted ...
— Far to Seek - A Romance of England and India • Maud Diver
... It is not that they are good or bad,—generally they are both; it is that they are beautifully, terribly human. They mostly lack the pettiness that so often fatally limits their sex and quite as much, they lack the veneer that obscures the broad lines of character. And it is natural to add, while thinking of Hardy's women, that, unlike almost all the Victorian novelists, he has insisted frankly, but in the main without offense, on woman's involvement ...
— Masters of the English Novel - A Study Of Principles And Personalities • Richard Burton
... with the mask thrown off, a true daughter of a race in which the sensuous enjoyment of the moment took precedence of taste or sentiment or any of the higher emotions. Her few months of boarding-school, her brief association with white people, had evidently been a mere veneer over the underlying negro, and their effects had slipped away as soon as the intercourse had ceased. With the monkey-like imitativeness of the negro she had copied the manners of white people while she ...
— The House Behind the Cedars • Charles W. Chesnutt
... The veneer of our vaunted civilization is, at the best, thin, and every man, in whose veins runs red blood, has within him pent-up volcanic forces which require but little awakening to produce a soul-shattering upheaval. Donald knew that his being shouted aloud for battle—why, he ...
— 'Smiles' - A Rose of the Cumberlands • Eliot H. Robinson
... tears always aroused in me, not the angel, but the brute. For five years I had been married to a descendant of the Blands and the Fairfaxes, and yet, as I stood there, held at bay, in the midst of those sobbing women, the veneer of refinement peeled off from me, and the raw strength of the common man showed on the surface, and triumphed again as it had triumphed over the frightened ...
— The Romance of a Plain Man • Ellen Glasgow
... The logs remain in this box from three to four hours, when they are ready for use. This steaming not only removes the bark, but moistens and softens the entire log. From the steam box the log goes to the veneer lathe. It is here raised, grasped at each end by the lathe centers, and firmly held in position, beginning to slowly revolve. Every turn brings it in contact with the knife, which is gauged to a required thickness. As the log revolves the inequalities of its ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 286 - June 25, 1881 • Various
... Burnam when they came down-stairs to breakfast. It did justice to me and not too much injustice to him. They read it together, their two heads plunged deeply into the paper so that I could not watch their faces. But I could see the sheet shake, and I noticed that their social veneer was not as yet laid on so thickly that they could hide their real terror and heart-ache when ...
— That Affair Next Door • Anna Katharine Green
... in the direction whence he had come but straight over the top of the windfall. Ignorant of the pitfalls concealed by the mantel of creepers he hurried on his course, only to break through the thin veneer and plunge headlong into a black abyss; then he realized the treacherous nature ...
— The Black Phantom • Leo Edward Miller
... he cried. "Je voolay veneer avec voo!" And ere the girl could protest, he had dismounted, turning the wall-eyed one's nose southward, and had delivered a resounding whack upon the rump of ...
— Barbarians • Robert W. Chambers
... a veneer," declared Stephanie, with a slighting little laugh. "You'll find plenty of raw backwoods underneath, ready to crop up when she's off her guard. You should have heard her ...
— For the Sake of the School • Angela Brazil
... expression of their faces: the girl's turned toward her companion's like an empty plate held up to be filled, while the man lounging at her side already betrayed the encroaching boredom which would presently crack the thin veneer of his smile. ...
— House of Mirth • Edith Wharton
... man of an alert Yankee type, with waxed blond mustache and eye-glasses; he was evidently to be classed among those who have exchanged their country honesty for a veneer of city knowingness. ...
— Meadow Grass - Tales of New England Life • Alice Brown
... for excitement. Some of them were educated women, delicately nurtured, and it seemed strange that they should find an interest in such gruesome proceedings. Yet, with a kind of reversion to the savage instincts of former days, they had gathered with the rest. After all, civilisation is only a veneer, and the old, elementary, savage feelings lie dormant in ...
— The Day of Judgment • Joseph Hocking
... reared so sharply that a little more and like a sling the fragile vehicle would have sent everybody in it flying far away. At this, furious with one of those plebeian rages which in women of her kind shatter all the veneer of their luxury, she dealt the Nabob two stinging lashes with her whip, which left little trace on his tanned and hardened face, but which brought there a ferocious expression, accentuated by the short nose which had turned white and was ...
— The Nabob • Alphonse Daudet
... there to improve upon his work for her, and he loved the room, the outlook from its windows; he was very proud of the furniture he had made. There was no paper-thin covering on her chairs, bed, and dressing table. The tops, seats, and posts were solid wood, worth hundreds of dollars for veneer. ...
— The Harvester • Gene Stratton Porter
... sailing, the captain was a true landsman, and when under pressure his thin nautical veneer slipped off him, and his language was ...
— The End of the Rainbow • Marian Keith
... mistake," stuttered Mrs. Jasher, now at bay and looking dangerous. Her society veneer was stripped off, and the adventuress pure and simple ...
— The Green Mummy • Fergus Hume
... particularly interesting to outsiders. During the morning Scaife gave his farewell "brekker"[39] at the Creameries; a banquet of the Olympians to which John received an invitation. He accepted because Desmond made a point of his so doing; but he was quite aware that beneath the veneer of the Demon's genial smile lay implacable hatred and resentment. The breakfast in itself struck John as ostentatious. Scaife's father sent quails, a la Lucullus, and other delicacies. Throughout the meal the talk was of the coming war. At that time most of the Conservative papers pooh-poohed ...
— The Hill - A Romance of Friendship • Horace Annesley Vachell
... scientific management and method before the world at large. As a matter of fact it is only when one secures a position behind the scenes in Germany, to come into close contact with the Hun as he really is, when he has been stripped of the mask and veneer which he assumes for parade and to impress his visitors, that the hollowness of the Teuton pretensions is laid bare in all its ...
— Sixteen Months in Four German Prisons - Wesel, Sennelager, Klingelputz, Ruhleben • Henry Charles Mahoney
... the inclination nor the time to undertake a more thorough investigation. The popularity of certain speculative views is due entirely to the easy food which they provide for our curiosity. They save us much long and often irksome study; they impart a veneer of general knowledge. There is nothing that achieves such immediate success as an explanation of the riddle of the universe in a word or two. The thinker does not travel so fast: content to know little so that he ...
— Bramble-bees and Others • J. Henri Fabre
... indication. Instead, she turned—swiftly, Houston thought—and mounted her horse. A moment later, she trotted past him, and again he greeted her, to be answered by a nod and a slight movement of the lips. But the eyes had been averted. Barry could see that the thinnest veneer of politeness had shielded something else as she spoke to him,—an expression of ...
— The White Desert • Courtney Ryley Cooper
... Metella, which is composed of Parian marble, we see the first example in Rome of the use of ornaments in marble upon the outside of a building; an example that was afterwards extensively followed, for all the tombs of a later age on the Appian Way had their exteriors sheathed with a veneer of marble. The beautiful sarcophagus which contained the remains of the noble lady for whom this gigantic pile was erected, and which is now in the Farnese Palace, was also formed of this material. ...
— Roman Mosaics - Or, Studies in Rome and Its Neighbourhood • Hugh Macmillan
... of use to the State, and to train others to be of use to the State (and not only of use to themselves), should be, and indeed is, the aim of every truly civilized man. Unless it be so, his civilization is a mere veneer, ready to wear off at the first rub, and he himself a parasite ...
— A Surgeon in Belgium • Henry Sessions Souttar
... the secret of this spirit hand as follows: The hand is prepared by concealing in the wrist a few soft iron plates, the wrist being afterwards bound with black velvet as shown in Fig. 1. The board is hollow, the top being made of thin veneer (Fig. 2). A small magnet, A, is connected to a small flat pocket lamp battery, B. The board is suspended by four lengths of picture-frame wire ...
— The Boy Mechanic: Volume 1 - 700 Things For Boys To Do • Popular Mechanics
... for centuries, both being of the old stock of the isle. The influx of 'kimberlins,' or 'foreigners' (as strangers from the mainland of Wessex were called), had led in a large measure to its discontinuance; but underneath the veneer of Avice's education many an old-fashioned idea lay slumbering, and he wondered if, in her natural melancholy at his leaving, she regretted the changing manners which made unpopular the formal ratification of a betrothal, according to the precedent ...
— The Well-Beloved • Thomas Hardy
... naturally from that to become angry. It seems a fatality of campers along a wild trail, like explorers in an unknown land, to be prone to fight. If there is an explanation of this singular fact, it must be that men at such time lose their poise and veneer of civilization; in brief, they go back. At all events we had it hot and heavy, with the center of attack gradually focusing on Jones, and as he was always losing something, naturally we united ...
— Tales of lonely trails • Zane Grey
... an Irishman with an English veneer, and, to borrow the Kalewala formula, is neither the best nor the worst of tourists. In range of mind and breadth of culture he is not to be compared with Mr. Dicey, who was in America at the same time, and whose letters we hope soon to see published in a collected form; but he ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 11, No. 65, March, 1863 • Various
... embellishment as well as to fulfill the practical requirements of daily use. Inasmuch as rubble used in this manner becomes merely an aggregate in a concrete wall, the consistent thing to do is to consider it as such and give the wall an outside finish or veneer of rough plaster. This fact was recognized and often acted upon by the early Philadelphia builders wherever the stone readily available did not make an attractive wall. A few of the best examples extant serve to indicate that houses of ...
— The Colonial Architecture of Philadelphia • Frank Cousins
... The veneer ceilings are considered as much superior to cloth as cloth was to the roof-ceiling. They are remarkably chaste, and so solid and substantial that but little decoration is necessary to produce a pleasing effect. ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 315, January 14, 1882 • Various
... we mean by vocational education something more than this, just as we mean by cultural education something more than a veneer of language, history, pure science, and the fine arts. In the former case, the practical problems of life are to be lifted to the plane of fundamental principles; in the latter case, fundamental principles are to be brought down to the ...
— Craftsmanship in Teaching • William Chandler Bagley
... headed Abbot, but one who was a warrior before he turned a monk. 'Tis but a few years since, that the Abbot Ambrose stood at the right hand of the Emperor as Baron von Stern, and it is known that the Abbot's robes are but a thin veneer over the iron knight within. His hand, grasping the cross, still itches for the sword. The fighting Archbishop of Treves has sent him to Monnonstein for no other purpose than to leave behind him the ruins of Grunewald, and his first ...
— The Strong Arm • Robert Barr
... of witnesses he tackled with the same uncompromising lack of veneer which had characterised his remarks on the money question. "Witnesses to character and so forth must be found," he said, "the more authentic and reputable the better, but at all costs they must be procured. Whom ...
— A Girl Among the Anarchists • Isabel Meredith
... better will find that they have great delicacy of feeling, and will be struck by the politeness they show a stranger, and by the kind and obliging way in which they treat each other. It must be admitted that this is often enough only a veneer, under which all sorts of hatred, malice, and all uncharitableness are hidden, just as among civilized people; still, the manners of the crudest savages are far superior to those of most of the ...
— Two Years with the Natives in the Western Pacific • Felix Speiser
... coronary cushion secrete the horn tubules forming the wall, and the papillae of the perioplic ring secrete the varnish-like veneer of thin horn covering the outside surface of ...
— Diseases of the Horse's Foot • Harry Caulton Reeks
... masters), was taken away by Mrs. Lyndsay on a visit to the old Marchioness of Montfort. Matilda, who was to come out the next year, was thus almost exclusively with Arabella, who redoubled all her pains to veneer the white deal, and protect with ormolu its feeble edges—so that, when it "came out," all should admire that thoroughly fashionable piece of furniture. It was the habit of Miss Fossett and her pupil ...
— What Will He Do With It, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... more, it shattered at one stroke the brittle casing of self-command with which centuries of civilization had sought to veneer the Slav. In a trice a woman whose existence neither of them had suspected was revealed, a fury incarnate flew at the dismayed prince, clawing, tearing, raining blows upon his face and bosom. Overcome by surprise, blinded, ...
— Red Masquerade • Louis Joseph Vance
... sense, a condition which is far from existing in the Anglo-Saxon Republic of the United States, where brusque assertion of even the meanest authority is evident, in the present development of that country. Nor is it to be supposed that Mexican politeness is a mere veneer, or mask, to be put on and off as occasion dictates, for it arises from native kindliness—a species of ...
— Mexico • Charles Reginald Enock
... men of thirty or forty, or even fifty, with intelligent and tired faces that have lost the Spring of youth. Here and there you will even see venerable greybeards suffering from rheumy coughs who ought to be at home; and though occasionally there is a lithe youngster in European clothes with the veneer he acquired abroad not yet completely rubbed off, the total impression is that of oldish men who have reached years of maturity and who are as representative of the country and as good as the country is in a position to-day to provide. No one ...
— The Fight For The Republic in China • Bertram Lenox Putnam Weale
... with the physical squalor of the Orient to a greater degree than any city in the Levant. Though it has assumed the outward appearance of a well-organized and fairly well administered municipality since its occupation by the Allies, one has but to scratch this thin veneer to discover that the filth and vice and corruption and misgovernment which characterized it under Ottoman rule still remain. Barring a few municipal improvements which were made in the European quarter of Pera and in the fashionable ...
— The New Frontiers of Freedom from the Alps to the AEgean • Edward Alexander Powell
... through shell holes filled with putrid water, amongst most depressing conditions, I saw a working party returning to their billets. They were wet through and wrapped up with scarves, wool helmets, and gloves. Over their clothes was a veneer of plastered mud. They marched along at a slow swing and ...
— "Crumps", The Plain Story of a Canadian Who Went • Louis Keene
... snubbing her; all the women followed her example, shunning the mistress of Calyste du Guenic. [Beatrix.] In short the Marquise d'Espard was one of the most snobbish people of her day. Her disposition was sour and malevolent, despite its elegant veneer. ...
— Repertory Of The Comedie Humaine, Complete, A — Z • Anatole Cerfberr and Jules Franois Christophe
... the instrument second-hand for five pounds at a farm sale. Its wiry jingle spoke of evolution from harpsichord or spinet to the modern instrument; its yellow keys, from which the ivory in some cases was missing, and its high back, stained silk front, and fretted veneer indicated age; while above the keyboard a label, now growing indistinct, set forth that one "William Harper, of Red Lion Street, Maker of piano-fortes to his late Majesty" was responsible for the instrument very early ...
— Children of the Mist • Eden Phillpotts
... conditions certain undesirable tendencies and instincts and to strengthen through exercise those that are desirable; and even then when a crisis comes, the old, hereditary instinct is apt to break through its thin veneer and actually frighten the individual at the unexpected strength it reveals. Slap any man in the face and see what chance his life-long education has against the old barbarous instinct for fighting. But notwithstanding ...
— Parent and Child Vol. III., Child Study and Training • Mosiah Hall
... is culture?" she asked suddenly, as later in the afternoon Mrs. Everidge sat beside her hammock. "Is Louis right? Is it just the veneer of education and travel ...
— A Beautiful Possibility • Edith Ferguson Black
... thing that Sydney had done, and he was not so hardened as to have done it without a blush. Yet so admirably does our veneer of civilization conceal the knots and flaws beneath it that he went to sleep in the genuine belief that he had saved his sister from a terrible danger, and the name of Campion from the degradation ...
— Name and Fame - A Novel • Adeline Sergeant
... He could, it was believed, outrun the deer; out-eat and out-drink everyone at the banquet; strike down flying game unerringly; tame the wildest steed, and ride 120 miles in a day. Twenty-two nations obeyed him, and he could speak the dialect of each. A veneer of Greek refinement was spread thinly over the savage animalism of the man. [Sidenote: Pseudo-civilisation of his court.] He was a virtuoso, and had a wonderful collection of rings. He maintained Greek poets and historians, and offered prizes for singing. He had shrewdness enough ...
— The Gracchi Marius and Sulla - Epochs Of Ancient History • A.H. Beesley
... He had lost his smile, and his face was contracted with worry. The girl's story had impressed him more than he had cared to own, and there was much of the human in him, in spite of the diplomat's veneer. Then the name "Atheson" sounded insistently in his ears and, momentarily, he felt that he was almost grasping the clue as he ...
— Charred Wood • Myles Muredach
... which near the end of his New York career led him to think that he was the opera, and that he might dictate policies to the manager and the directors back of him. So in the eyes of the judicious there were ragged holes in his shining veneer long before his career in New York came to a close. The preparation of "Siegfried" for performance led to an encounter between him and Mr. Seidl, in which the unamiable side of his disposition, and the shallowness of his artistic nature were disclosed. At the dress rehearsal, when alone on the stage, ...
— Chapters of Opera • Henry Edward Krehbiel
... all time, nor could we account for the gross impoliteness that is often met with in recent years. The Japanese themselves deplore the changes that have taken place. They testify that the older forms of politeness were an integral element of the feudal system and were too often a thin veneer of manner by no means expressive of heart interest. None can be so absolutely rude as they who are masters of the forms of politeness, but have not the kindly heart. The theory of "impersonality" does not satisfactorily account for the old-time ...
— Evolution Of The Japanese, Social And Psychic • Sidney L. Gulick
... to attempt to judge the actual natures of people by their clothes, houses, religious faith, political affiliations, prejudices, dialect, etiquette or customs. These are only the veneer laid on by upbringing, teachers, preachers, traditions and other forces of suggestion, and it is a veneer so thin that trifles scratch ...
— How to Analyze People on Sight - Through the Science of Human Analysis: The Five Human Types • Elsie Lincoln Benedict and Ralph Paine Benedict
... Hellenised, but their rulers were to some extent the heirs, albeit hybrid heirs, to Greek civilisation. They spoke Greek and worshipped at Greek shrines, and as they were in turn subjugated by the forebears of the Kushan Empire, they imparted to the conquerors something of their own Greek veneer. In the second century of our era Kanishka carried his victorious arms down to the Gangetic plain, where Buddhism still held its own in the region which had been its cradle; and, according to one tradition, he carried off from Pataliputra a famous ...
— India, Old and New • Sir Valentine Chirol |
