"Disconcerting" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... eyes were blinded by the lustrous dazzle. Oh, well! It was all in the day's work, all in the difference between nineteen and thirty-nine, he told himself as patiently as he was able. And his mother at thirty-nine, he realized with disconcerting clearness, was infinitely older than Professor Mansfield's wife at sixty. Indeed, he sometimes wondered if she ever had been really young, ever really young enough to forget her heritage of piety in healthy, worldly zeal. ...
— The Brentons • Anna Chapin Ray
... ink and crayon ... reproduced in marvellous facsimile by Boussod, Valadon & Co.... unworthy the glories of facsimile reproduction, and imposing margin" ... while "the chief honours of the portfolio, however, belong to the publishers"—but are, disconcerting as I acknowledge it to be, themselves the lithographs from nature, drawn on the stone upon ...
— The Gentle Art of Making Enemies • James McNeill Whistler
... moments of revelation that Quita was troubled by a disconcerting sense of exchanging false coin for gold. She tried to free herself from his grasp; and the colour ...
— The Great Amulet • Maud Diver
... was humouring him. He guessed that she was determined to keep him at all costs. And he had a disconcerting glimpse of the depths of utter unscrupulousness that sometimes disclose themselves in the mind of a good and ...
— Buried Alive: A Tale of These Days • Arnold Bennett
... remained absolutely motionless, holding out the murderous-looking club, and looking at me interrogatively, as though unable to understand why I did not avail myself of his offer. Still more extraordinary, the crowd behind observed a solemn and disconcerting silence. I looked at the girl; to my amazement she appeared delighted with things generally—a poor, merry little creature, not more than fifteen or sixteen years of age. I decided to harangue the chiefs, and as a preliminary I gave them the universal ...
— The Adventures of Louis de Rougemont - as told by Himself • Louis de Rougemont
... be striking, but it was just this apparent infallibility that he resented. Why didn't she set up at once as a professional clairvoyant and eke out her little income more successfully? In purely private life such a gift was disconcerting; her divinations, her evasions disturbed at any ...
— Sir Dominick Ferrand • Henry James
... than impatient Westerners, but waiting just as anxiously; waiting with ear wide open to every rumour; waiting with an eye on every shadow—to know whether the storm is going to break or blow away. There is something disconcerting, startling, unseemly in being waited on by those who you know are in turn waiting on battle, murder, and sudden death. You feel that something may come suddenly at any moment, and though you do not dare to speak your thoughts to your neighbour, these thoughts are talking busily ...
— Indiscreet Letters From Peking • B. L. Putman Weale
... Chilenos, however, although satisfied of the friendly intentions of their visitors, were still a little nervous, for, despite the fact that none of the natives carried even so much as a knife, the wild appearance they presented was somewhat disconcerting to men who had never before come in contact with what they termed "savages." Fully one half of Malie's followers were men of such stature that the undersized though wiry Chilenos looked like dwarfs beside them; then, in addition to this, their immense "mops" ...
— John Frewen, South Sea Whaler - 1904 • Louis Becke
... disconcerting to him, "Blessing and hail, my Ry," he said in a low tone. He spoke in a strange language and with a voice rougher than his ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker
... still more disconcerting than the hotel, but the closer she came to the ride, the more resigned she became, for she began to relive the long hours of torture on the trip outward, during which she had endured clouds of dust and blazing heat. There were some disadvantages in the old stage, ...
— Cavanaugh: Forest Ranger - A Romance of the Mountain West • Hamlin Garland
... inherited all the subtle adaptability of her father's race, nothing of the cold and rigid narrowness of her mother's class. Price had feared that her lively mind might reveal disconcerting shallows, but these little voids were but the divine hiatuses of youth. He sometimes wondered just how strong her character was. There were times when she showed a pronounced inclination for the line of least resistance ... but her youth ... her ...
— The Avalanche • Gertrude Franklin Horn Atherton
... in Paris to have a salon if one knows how to give dinners. Some squares of Bristol board engraved by Stern and posted to good addresses, will attract with an almost disconcerting facility, a crowd of visitors who will swarm around a festive board like ...
— His Excellency the Minister • Jules Claretie
... hundred yards, having your rifle ready for instant use, and make for some point that will afford you cover when you get close up. In the case of a building, for instance, you would make for one of the corners. Such a maneuver would probably be disconcerting to anyone who might be lying in wait for you, and would be quite likely to cause them to show themselves sooner than they intended, and thus give you a chance to turn around and get away. If they fired on you while you were approaching at a run, they would ...
— Manual of Military Training - Second, Revised Edition • James A. Moss
... brought the lad to the Charing Cross Hotel. There, having taken his ticket and made all other necessary arrangements, he left him, returning himself to Essex by the evening train. Their farewell was somewhat disconcerting, at any rate to the ...
— Love Eternal • H. Rider Haggard
... her. A smile of patience and resignation, which soon was like a pained expression of weariness, crept across his handsome face. Yes, he was really handsome, though a little disconcerting, with his large eyes, which women must have adored, his drooping moustache, his tender, distant air. He seemed to be one of those gentle people who think too much and do evil. You would have said that he was above everything and capable of everything. Listening ...
— The Inferno • Henri Barbusse
... speak much at first, and he did not join in Roma's nervous laughter. Sometimes he looked at her with a steadfast gaze, which would have been disconcerting if it had not been so simple and childlike. At length he looked out of the window to where the city lay basking in the sunshine, and birds were swirling in the clear blue sky, and began ...
— The Eternal City • Hall Caine
... is so easy for one to get a supply of ready-made knowledge that it is hard to keep from applying it indiscriminately. We make incursions into our neighbor's affairs and straighten them out with a ruthless righteousness which is very disconcerting to him, especially when he has never had the pleasure of our acquaintance till we came to set him right. There is a certain modesty of conscience which would perhaps be more becoming. It comes only with the realization of practical ...
— By the Christmas Fire • Samuel McChord Crothers
... no end of caterpillars, and has not the slightest difficulty at all in distinguishing them with the naked eye from the leaves and plants among which they are lurking. But observe how promptly we crush and demolish this very inconvenient and disconcerting critic. The caterpillars he finds are almost all hairy ones, very conspicuous and easy to discover—'woolly bears,' and such like common and unclean creatures—and the reason they take no pains to conceal ...
— Falling in Love - With Other Essays on More Exact Branches of Science • Grant Allen
... breath and looked away. It was very hard to say what she intended, with him so close to her. His eloquent eyes, his tremulous lips were very disconcerting. ...
— Calvary Alley • Alice Hegan Rice
... was maddening. Compressed and concentrated, confined to a single sharp pang or two, but none the less in wait for him there on the Euston platform and lifting its head as that of a snake in the garden, was the disconcerting sense that "respect," in their game, seemed somehow—he scarce knew what to call it—a fifth wheel to the coach. It was properly an inside thing, not an outside, a thing to make love greater, not to make happiness less. They had met again for happiness, and he distinctly felt, during his ...
— The Wings of the Dove, Volume II • Henry James
... a convincing man in his way, whether upon the subject of reciprocity or apostolic succession, but John was plainly bored from the beginning, and though he offered no resistance, his repeated "I know that!" "That's what I said!" were more disconcerting than the most vigorous opposition. At daylight the editor left John, and he really had the headache that he had ...
— The Black Creek Stopping-House • Nellie McClung
... loss, and the absence and distance of my dear husband made me peculiarly wish to be unobserved. Peculiarly, I say; for never yet had the moment arrived in which to be marked had not been embarrassing and disconcerting to me, ...
— The Diary and Letters of Madame D'Arblay Volume 3 • Madame D'Arblay
... must have been disconcerting, Messire Merlin. Still, as you got your shadow back again, there was no great harm done. But why is it that such attendants follow some men while other men are permitted to live in decent solitude? It does not ...
— Jurgen - A Comedy of Justice • James Branch Cabell
... a soft and disconcerting plop upon the top of his head, cannonaded thence against the window-sill, and shot out into the night again. He came back with a start to his reality: that he had promised the children an Extra Day, that for twenty-four ...
— The Extra Day • Algernon Blackwood
... to use her young ardour and vitality to help his age. Such was the demand which she (as, according to her, he then reasoned it out) would in time have accused him, tacitly or not, of having made upon her. . . . And what would his own reflections have been? She is ready to use her disconcerting clairvoyance for these also; nay, she can do more, she can tell him the very moment at which he acted upon them in advance! For as they foreshadowed themselves, he had ceased to press gently her arm to his side—she remembers well the stopping of that tender pressure, ...
— Browning's Heroines • Ethel Colburn Mayne
... polished his armour until it was fit to blind his adversaries, tested the temper of every weapon, sharpened every blade, arranged them for immediate availment. In spite of the absorbing and disconcerting interests of the summer, he had followed in thought the mental processes of his enemies, kept a sharp eye out for their new methods of aggression. Themselves had had no more intimate knowledge of their astonishment, humiliation, and impotent ...
— The Conqueror • Gertrude Franklin Atherton
... understand that it might be a last good-bye. There was no room for equivocation in this crisis, and as he gazed up into the full and peaceful shade over his head, a flood of little memories, bound tendril-like by sounds, sights, and fragrances to his heart, swept him with disconcerting violence. ...
— The Roof Tree • Charles Neville Buck
... question with them whether a man who had himself so much to cover up would dare his blow; so that these vessels of rancour were in a manner afraid of each other. I judged that on the day the Pudneys should cease for some reason or other to be afraid they would treat us to some revelation more disconcerting than any of its predecessors. As I held Mrs. Saltram's letter in my hand it was distinctly communicated to me that the day had come—they had ceased to be afraid. "I don't want to know ...
— The Coxon Fund • Henry James
... very disconcerting about the stranger's conversation and again Stephen looked at him ...
— Steve and the Steam Engine • Sara Ware Bassett
... remarked Mr. Benton, "unfortunate and disconcerting, because, you see, Miss Ellen Webster has left ...
— The Wall Between • Sara Ware Bassett
... the fairy-land of idealism where only the miraculous seems a matter of course and every hint of what is purely natural is disregarded, for the truly natural still seems artificial, dead, and remote. New and disconcerting facts, which intrude themselves inopportunely into the story, chill the currents of spontaneous imagination and are rejected as long as possible for being alien and perverse. Perceptions, on the contrary, which can be attached to the old presences as confirmations or corollaries, ...
— The Life of Reason • George Santayana
... conversation between O'Flarety and the maid in the hallway was not reassuring. Jimmy decided to take a chance with the Italian mother, and as fast as he could, he streaked it toward the opposite door. The shrieks and denunciations that he met from this direction were more disconcerting than those of the Irish father. For an instant he stood in the centre of the room, wavering as to ...
— Baby Mine • Margaret Mayo
... was lapping a second supply, the Kansas shifted again with a disconcerting suddenness. The water in the cabin swirled across the floor as the ship was restored to an even keel. The movement dislodged the packet of letters. It fell, and Elsie rescued it a second time. Christobal watched her ...
— The Captain of the Kansas • Louis Tracy
... disconcerting to find Pepys no less impatient of The Merry Wives of Windsor. He expresses a mild interest in the humours of "the country gentleman and the French doctor." But he condemns the play as a whole. It is in his favour that his bitterest reproaches are aimed at the actors and ...
— Shakespeare and the Modern Stage - with Other Essays • Sir Sidney Lee
... though she was as composed as usual when she joined Mrs. Kinnaird, her thoughts were busy for some time afterward. The man, she admitted, had done no more than was warranted, but there was no disguising the fact that his supporting grasp had had a disconcerting effect on her. Then she dismissed the thoughts of that, and remembered with compassion how lean and worn he looked. There was also something that stirred her sympathy in the idea of his saddling himself with the care of ...
— The Gold Trail • Harold Bindloss
... Retz nodded sagely, with a quiet satisfaction in his own prevision, which to one less bold and reckless than the young clerk of Dulce Cor would have proved disconcerting. Then he propounded ...
— The Black Douglas • S. R. Crockett
... years had been escaping. The reason for this realization was Terry. He had been accustomed to think of himself as in the first flush of manhood, with all life's conquests still lying ahead; it was therefore a little disconcerting to be told, as a matter of course, that he had only four more years to go till he was forty. "I'll be there at the station to meet you," Terry had written him. And then, she had added laughingly, "Father orders me to say that he only gives ...
— The Kingdom Round the Corner - A Novel • Coningsby Dawson
... was demanded; in a clear, disconcerting flash, the situation was laid bare. Here was woman desiring the love of man; woman determined to reap her spoil. It was one issue in the deathless, relentless struggle—the struggle wherein the little Jacqueline ...
— Max • Katherine Cecil Thurston
... a small book of little courtship tales. You never saw a volume of its size, more packed with love, which is shown leaping walls, laughing at locksmiths and generally making the world go round in its proverbial fashion. The pace of the revolutions may be found a little disconcerting. You will perhaps be inclined to amend the title and call the collection "Love on Short Leave," to mark the regularity with which the respective heroes and heroines fall into each others' arms at the end of every dozen ...
— Punch, Volume 156, 26 March 1919 • Various
... Major Hymen—I allude to character rather than to stature—had undoubtedly postponed a military manoeuvre on finding it likely to clash with the Millennium, an event so incalculable and conceivably so disconcerting to the best-laid plans: and, indeed, for something like forty-eight hours the Major was in two minds about writing to Captain Pond and hinting ...
— The Mayor of Troy • Sir Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch
... again pressed on her broad bosom, and with fresh tears I was thanked for my kindness in chaperoning her daughter on her matrimonial adventure; an adventure which would have subjected her to much criticism had I not been along. Also Mr. Thorne. The unexpectedness of these thanks was disconcerting and, with an expression that was hardly appreciative of the pose she was assuming, I finally rescued myself from her arms and, drawing off, looked at her for explanation. Mrs. Swink is not a person I ...
— People Like That • Kate Langley Bosher
... entered a new competitor upon the stage of the world, and his advent of necessity was disconcerting and annoying to the earlier comers. But is there reason to suppose that, from that moment, German policy was definitely aiming at empire, and was prepared to provoke war to achieve it? Strictly, no answer can be given ...
— The European Anarchy • G. Lowes Dickinson
... Thirteen suddenly appearing out of nowhere, and sitting itself calmly down in the middle of the Spaceport was somewhat disconcerting to the Spaceport officials. Especially since at the very moment it appeared, and even afterward, they continued to have visual and laser contact with its image, over three ...
— Subjectivity • Norman Spinrad
... to catch a glint in her eyes. It was unexpected and disconcerting. He had been imagining that she was merely over-indulged; but the glint warned him that Barbara would make a bad enemy, cruel perhaps and unscrupulous certainly. The next moment she was again like a child, grown haggard with fatigue; and he gave her a slice ...
— The Education of Eric Lane • Stephen McKenna
... rather solemn and self-satisfied environment. Mr. Mifflin, the head of the house, even formally thanked Page "for the hearty human way in which you take hold of life." Mr. Ellery Sedgwick, the present editor of the Atlantic, has described the somewhat disconcerting descent of Page upon the editorial ...
— The Life and Letters of Walter H. Page, Volume I • Burton J. Hendrick
... he was wholly himself, having confidence in whatever mode of procedure his own thought approved, he had begun using methods that the politicians found disconcerting. The second conference with the Senators was an instance. Returning in the same mood in which they had left him, with no suspicion of a surprise in store, the Senators to their amazement were confronted by the Cabinet—or most of it, Seward being absent.(11) The Senators were put out. This simple ...
— Lincoln • Nathaniel Wright Stephenson
... Longstreth rose white as her dress. The young women present stared in astonishment, if they were not equally perturbed. There were cowboys present who suddenly grew intent and still. By these things Duane gathered that his appearance must be disconcerting. He was panting. He wore no hat or coat. His big gun-sheath showed plainly ...
— The Lone Star Ranger • Zane Grey
... her dark beautiful eyes on him with a gaze that was almost disconcerting while searching her mind for ...
— The Motor Maids at Sunrise Camp • Katherine Stokes
... former times. He was roughly dressed, and, though scrupulously neat and shaven, looked, I am sure, fifteen years my senior. He touched his whip, and the mare plunged down the avenue at a pace too disconcerting to allow either of us to speak for a few moments, and we were at least a mile away before her swinging ...
— Lippincott's Magazine, Vol. 22, November, 1878 - of Popular Literature and Science • Various
... were calling on the Rieslings at the Arms. It was a speculative venture to call on the Rieslings; interesting and sometimes disconcerting. Zilla was an active, strident, full-blown, high-bosomed blonde. When she condescended to be good-humored she was nervously amusing. Her comments on people were saltily satiric and penetrative ...
— Babbitt • Sinclair Lewis
... some entirely unimportant occurrence—say, an invitation to a golf foursome which his duties forbid him to accept—a trifle, a nothing, comes along and brings about the explosion, in a fashion excessively disconcerting to the onlooker, and he exclaims, acidly, ...
— The Plain Man and His Wife • Arnold Bennett
... trudge at the tail of the column. She dared to cast one shy, disconcerting little glance at Dave—and he suddenly felt he would burst into flame and consume himself utterly ...
— The Furnace of Gold • Philip Verrill Mighels
... along the walls, looking over the tops of their spelling-books at the newcomer. In the farther corner two were kicking at each other as opportunity offered, looking very angry, but not daring to cry. My next discovery was terribly disconcerting. Some movement drew my eyes to the floor; there I saw a boy of my own age on all-fours, fastened by a string to a leg of the table at which the dame was ironing, while—horrible to relate!—a dog, not very big but very ugly, and big enough to be frightened at, lay under the table watching ...
— Ranald Bannerman's Boyhood • George MacDonald
... bathe even oftener; still all of them have more or less parasites in their hair and frequently apply lime juice in order to kill them. A young woman, whom I remembered as one of two who had danced for the kinematograph, had considerable charm of manner and personal attraction; it was a trifle disconcerting to find my belle a little later hunting the fauna of her lover's head. Her nimble fingers were deftly expert in the work and her beloved was visibly elated over the ...
— Through Central Borneo: - An Account of Two Years' Travel in the Land of Head-Hunters - Between the Years 1913 and 1917 • Carl Lumholtz
... climb, she thought, with a boyish grin—far easier than many she had achieved successfully when the need of a solitary ramble became imperative. But the East was inconvenient for solitary ramble; native servants had a disconcerting habit of lying down to sleep wherever drowsiness overcame them, and it was not very long since she had slid down from her balcony and landed plumb on a slumbering bundle of humanity who had roused ...
— The Sheik - A Novel • E. M. Hull
... predicament. As a faint chilliness from the window affected my back I drew my overcoat up to my shoulders as a counterpane. Through a gap between the red curtains of the window I could see a star blazing. It passed behind the curtain with disconcerting rapidity. The universe was swinging and whirling ...
— The Matador of the Five Towns and Other Stories • Arnold Bennett
... Bodo of Floersheim and his fair daughter Adeline. The maiden's beauty, no less than her father's wealth, attracted suitors in plenty from the neighbouring strongholds, but the spirit of love had not yet awakened in her bosom and each and all were repulsed with disconcerting coldness and indifference, and they left the schloss vowing that the ...
— Hero Tales and Legends of the Rhine • Lewis Spence
... going to have some casualties, but the only one we had was one man who got a scratch in the arm with a piece of shrapnel. At 5.15 we decided to come back via a trench, as the shelling was still going on. All got back safely. But it is most disconcerting—one cannot go out on a little job like that in the afternoon without having the wind put up us vertical! I had tea and dinner. Then to bed. I felt very hot and could not get to sleep. Allen returned from a working party at 10.15 p.m. There was a strafe on at 10.30; ...
— At Ypres with Best-Dunkley • Thomas Hope Floyd
... parodist of the woods, and there is ever a mischievous, bantering, half-ironical undertone in his lay, as if he were conscious of mimicking and disconcerting some envied songster. Ambitious of song, practicing and rehearsing in private, he yet seems the least sincere and genuine of the sylvan minstrels, as if he had taken up music only to be in the fashion, or not ...
— Bird Stories from Burroughs - Sketches of Bird Life Taken from the Works of John Burroughs • John Burroughs
... girl's but had that retrospective expression that suggests far-away thoughts or an utter lack of interest in one's surroundings. They never looked at but through one. The effect of Carg's eyes was distinctly disconcerting. ...
— Aunt Jane's Nieces Out West • Edith Van Dyne
... him the bread. "You're a cowboy, aren't you?" was the disconcerting question that accompanied ...
— The Happy Family • Bertha Muzzy Bower
... Glenby the next morning after my paternal interview with Sara, intending to have a frank talk with Betty and lay the foundations of a good understanding on both sides. Betty was a sharp child, with a disconcerting knack of seeing straight through grindstones; she would certainly perceive and probably resent any underhanded management. I thought it best to tell her plainly that I was going to ...
— Further Chronicles of Avonlea • Lucy Maud Montgomery
... orthodox Simla fashion. It looked as if the owner of the place had named it as a duty towards his tenant, the board was so new, and in that case the reflection presented itself that the tenant might have cooperated to call it something else. It was disconcerting somehow to find that our dove had perched, even temporarily, in Amy Villa. Nor was it soothing to discover that the small white object stuck in the corner of the board was Mr. ...
— The Pool in the Desert • Sara Jeannette Duncan
... in precisely the same attitude that he had assumed when first placed in the bunk; indeed, the two men agreed that, so far as they could see, he had not moved a limb from that moment. While they stood there together, discussing the man's disconcerting condition, faint rustling, as of garments, outside the cabin door, accompanied by light footsteps upon the companion ladder, apprised them of the fact that Miss Trevor was moving, and had gone on deck; whereupon Leslie went out and followed her. He found her standing just to windward ...
— Dick Leslie's Luck - A Story of Shipwreck and Adventure • Harry Collingwood
... of his offer was a bit disconcerting. Raish was rather sorry that he had not said five. However, to do him justice, the transaction was more or less what he would have called "chicken-feed stuff." Mr. Pulcifer was East Wellmouth's leading broker in real estate, in cranberry bog ...
— Galusha the Magnificent • Joseph C. Lincoln
... mouth was sensuous yet firm, with hard, full lips. Leaden pouches hung beneath heavy-lidded eyes set at a noticeable angle. The eyes themselves were as black as night and as lightless; the rays of the lamp struck no gleam from them; in spite of this they were compelling, masterful, and disconcerting. ...
— Red Masquerade • Louis Joseph Vance
... got through the rest of that day happily enough, such was the load off my mind and hands, but for an extraordinary and most disconcerting note received late at night from Raffles himself. He was a man who telegraphed freely, but seldom wrote a letter. Sometimes, however, he sent a scribbled line by special messenger; and overnight, evidently in the train, he had scribbled this one to post in the small ...
— A Thief in the Night • E. W. Hornung
... tone of his voice brought the quick colour to her cheeks; it was so wonderful, so disconcerting to be looked at and spoken to in that way. She caught her breath and wondered if it were not a dream after all. "Dear," another of those deep, searching looks, "this is a big, primitive country and we do things in a most summary way out here sometimes. You must tell me if I go ...
— The Man of the Desert • Grace Livingston Hill
... disconcerting lady gave my thoughts a boldness they had otherwise wanted. For two days the image of Catriona had mixed in all my meditations; she made their background, so that I scarce enjoyed my own company without ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 11 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... thought himself able to be the breadwinner for both mother and sister, was in reality nothing but an unskilled laborer, whose services for the present commanded but slight remuneration. The discovery was not only disconcerting but galling. It was bad enough to have Marie enter the mill. But his mother——! To think of his mother, at her ...
— The Story of Silk • Sara Ware Bassett
... boys this was a turn of events unexpected and most disconcerting. Not for a moment did they really want her to accept their dare. Why, whoever heard of a girl doing such a thing? The very thought scandalized them deeply. Indeed, they would stop her if they could, ...
— The Hickory Limb • Parker Fillmore
... regular young beauty, that of some divine Greek mask over-painted say by Titian, she more and more appeared to him—this offered air was that of the gods themselves: she might have been, with her long rustle across the room, Artemis decorated, hung with pearls, for her worshippers, yet disconcerting them by having, under an impulse just faintly fierce, snatched the cup of gold from Hebe. It was to him, John Berridge, she thus publicly offered it; and it was his over-topping confrere of shortly before who ...
— The Finer Grain • Henry James
... La Mothe, very ill at ease, and flushing as youth will in the shame of its pride. It was almost as disconcerting as being found out ...
— The Justice of the King • Hamilton Drummond
... took a turn round a shrub. I thought that I would just have a look behind it, and advanced, expecting that I should be able to catch a sight of the elephant's tail. As it happened, however, I met his trunk coming round the corner. It is very disconcerting to see an elephant's trunk when you expect to see his tail, and for a moment I stood paralyzed almost under the vast brute's head, for he was not five yards from me. He too halted, threw up his trunk and trumpeted preparatory to a charge. I was in for it now, for I could ...
— Maiwa's Revenge - The War of the Little Hand • H. Rider Haggard
... than I used to be in such matters; but I do not remember having met any woman in society with manners more nearly perfect than Mrs. Courtney's. Ethel Leigh used to be, upon occasion, painfully abrupt and disconcerting; and her movements and attitudes, though there was abundant native grace in them, were often careless and unconventional. Of course, I do not forget that niceties of deportment, without sound qualities of mind and heart to back them, are of trifling value; but the two kinds of attraction ...
— David Poindexter's Disappearance and Other Tales • Julian Hawthorne
... was cordial and in its cadence rang so disconcerting a finality that try as he might Carl could not repress a conviction that in spite of his suave promises his new-found friend did not really ...
— Carl and the Cotton Gin • Sara Ware Bassett
... vanished from the House. This was immediately followed by the stampede of the rest of the House—for by half-past eight everybody was famished with hunger—and the Chamber was left empty, silent, and dim, with a suddenness that was startling, disconcerting, and a little disillusioning. And then it was that the strongest proof was given of the effect ...
— Sketches In The House (1893) • T. P. O'Connor
... I was summoned suddenly to his presence. I found him, as usual, bent over his work, which he did not intermit, but merely motioned me to be seated. Presently he put away his papers from him, and turned round upon me. One of the disconcerting things about him was the fact that his thought had a peculiarly compelling tendency, and that while he read one's mind in a flash, his own thoughts remained very nearly impenetrable. On this occasion he commended me for my work and my relations with ...
— The Child of the Dawn • Arthur Christopher Benson
... And the disconcerting strangeness of it was in this: that though she was no longer the woman child, yet with one flash of her gold-curtained eyes had she reduced me to my ancient schoolboy clumsiness. She was a woman, but, I was again an awkward, stammering boy, rebelliously declining to believe that a ...
— The Boss of Little Arcady • Harry Leon Wilson
... which enlivened the evening hour before bedtime. Mary Winsor of Haverford, Pennsylvania, was the master prayer-maker. One night it was a Baptist prayer, another a Methodist, and still another a stern Presbyterian prayer. The prayers were most disconcerting to the matron for the "regulars" became almost hysterical with laughter, when they should be slipping into sleep. It was trying also to sit in the corridor and hear your daily cruelties narrated to God and punishment asked. This is what happened to the embarrassed warden and ...
— Jailed for Freedom • Doris Stevens
... one with more apprehension than Cromwell. His life was at stake. The Levellers had threatened to make him pay with his head the forfeit of his intrigues with Charles; and the flight of that prince, by disconcerting their plans, had irritated their former animosity. On the ...
— The History of England from the First Invasion by the Romans - to the Accession of King George the Fifth - Volume 8 • John Lingard and Hilaire Belloc
... 'long-shore batteries near this Traverse, at the lower end of the island of Orleans, while the rest kept ceaseless watch to seaward, anxiously scanning the offing, day after day, to make out the colours of the first fleet up. No one knew what the French West India fleet would do; and there was a very disconcerting chance that it might run north and slip into the St Lawrence, ahead of Saunders, in the same way as the French reinforcements had just slipped in ahead of Durell. Presently, at the first streak of dawn on the 23rd of June, a ...
— The Father of British Canada: A Chronicle of Carleton • William Wood
... as Hatty said afterwards, "swept from the room"—my Uncle Charles offering her his arm, and assuring her, with a most disconcerting look over his shoulder at us, that he would do his very ...
— Out in the Forty-Five - Duncan Keith's Vow • Emily Sarah Holt
... petticoat and the pink cotton jacket—which, instead of being neatly buttoned over at the neck, fell loosely open, disclosing the girl's throat, firm and round as a pillar—and so on till they reached her face; then suddenly drooped before the disconcerting gaze of another pair of eyes, very ...
— North, South and Over the Sea • M.E. Francis (Mrs. Francis Blundell)
... the last words in evident distress. Bertie's face had grown quite serious, even stern. He was looking at her with a directness which for the first time in their acquaintance she found disconcerting. ...
— The Knave of Diamonds • Ethel May Dell
... nor less, and take you straight home; so you'll be so good as immediately and favourably to consider it!"—Strether, face to face with Chad after the play, had sounded these words almost breathlessly, and with an effect at first positively disconcerting to himself alone. For Chad's receptive attitude was that of a person who had been gracefully quiet while the messenger at last reaching him has run a mile through the dust. During some seconds after he had spoken Strether felt as if HE had made some such exertion; he was not ...
— The Ambassadors • Henry James
... . that wallabies are 'the women of the native race' cannot but be disconcerting to the well-regulated colonial mind." [He adds a footnote]: "It is on record that a journalistically fostered impression once prevailed, to high English circles, to the effect that a certain colonial Governor exhibited immoral tendencies by living on an island in the midst ...
— A Dictionary of Austral English • Edward Morris
... more complicated and disconcerting were the problems set to Don Luis Perenna himself! Not to mention the denunciation in the anonymous article, there had been, in the short space of forty-eight hours, no fewer than four separate attempts to kill him: by the iron curtain, by poison, ...
— The Teeth of the Tiger • Maurice Leblanc
... feebly. "Oh, Con! Say, I gotter see a feller here. Say!" as his friend looked back at him with disconcerting doubt written on every feature. "Say, Con!—reelly, truly ...
— McClure's Magazine, Vol. 31, No. 1, May 1908 • Various
... as though he were insulting the visitor by his request, and with the detective's disconcerting eyes fixed upon his face was more than ...
— The Sins of Severac Bablon • Sax Rohmer
... regardless of the storm, for his usual walk about his estate. He went out, and Mrs. Beecham turned to her household duties. Miss Marjorie and Tom were alone, standing before the blazing fire in the hall. There was still that disconcerting twinkle of ...
— Tom of the Raiders • Austin Bishop
... and in a very disconcerting way, were the glimpses of English life one sees reproduced so faithfully here and there in Canada. The whole of the past rushed back on him so overpoweringly that he was for the moment unnerved. The acute feeling of course soon became mitigated; but it was the beginning of a ...
— The Man • Bram Stoker
... feigned to be convinced—but that, as Granice now perceived, was simply to get him to expose himself, to entrap him into contradictions. And when the attempt failed, when Granice triumphantly met and refuted each disconcerting question, the lawyer dropped the mask suddenly, and said with a good-humoured laugh: "By Jove, Granice you'll write a successful play yet. The way you've worked this all out is ...
— Tales Of Men And Ghosts • Edith Wharton
... brighter for being polished by decency. In scenes of gaiety he never broke into the regard that was due to the presence of equal, or superior characters, tho' inferior actors played them; he filled the stage, not by elbowing and crossing it before others, or disconcerting their action, but by surpassing them in true and masterly touches of nature; he never laughed at his own jest, unless the point of his raillery upon another required it; he had a particular talent ...
— The Lives of the Poets of Great Britain and Ireland (1753) - Vol. III • Theophilus Cibber
... encouraging "Ta-ra-ta-ta" was begun, but just at the critical point, and when we were all most prayerfully hoping against hope, as it were, that this time he would round the dangerous curves of it gracefully and come to a grand finish, there was a most disconcerting and disheartening squeak. It was pathetic, ghastly. As one man we wilted. What would Culhane say to that? We were not long in doubt. "Great Christ!" he shouted, looking back and showing a countenance so black that it was positively terrifying. ...
— Twelve Men • Theodore Dreiser
... taken place, applied to the new Grand-Duchy. It is necessary here to explain what took place in some detail, for this arbitrary wrenching of Luxemburg from its historical position as an integral part of the Netherlands was to have serious and disconcerting consequences in ...
— History of Holland • George Edmundson
... like that of a man who is dying of thirst. He went on with a disconcerting change of tone. He was trying to speak more vigorously, more firmly; but the result was like some talking mechanism uttering words without shading them properly. "I suppose you are willing to marry her?" ...
— Children of the Desert • Louis Dodge
... was that he never tried to conceal it. He looked at it with surprise and discussed it with disconcerting frankness. He was no more abashed in learning new and better ways of conducting himself than he would have been in learning a new language. He laughed good-humoredly at his mistakes and seldom committed the same one ...
— Quin • Alice Hegan Rice
... would be late for her classes. Throughout the day she worked with the deepest concentration, but she could not keep down the knowledge that Eileen would have things to say, possibly things to do, when they met that evening, for Eileen was capable of disconcerting hysteria. Previously Linda had remained stubbornly silent during any tirade in which Eileen chose to indulge. She had allowed herself to be nagged into doing many things that she despised, because she would not assert herself against apparent injustice. But since she had ...
— Her Father's Daughter • Gene Stratton-Porter
... of her remains? Her general appearance is transformed by her clothes and the way in which she wears her hair; her voice and gestures are softer; but all this minute and complex change is but the subtle effect of events, the disconcerting effect of an influence that has laid itself upon her nature without altering it in any way. And this is what really causes my uneasiness. She is changed, ...
— The Choice of Life • Georgette Leblanc
... Taylor refused to have the matter made personal, as Zora had a disconcerting way of ...
— The Quest of the Silver Fleece - A Novel • W. E. B. Du Bois
... this observation was greeted might have been disconcerting to anybody but Anthony Robeson, but he ...
— The Indifference of Juliet • Grace S. Richmond
... Germans just now are beginning to realise that I always told them the truth and treated them fairly, a procedure, I admit, far more disconcerting and disturbing to them than the most subtle wiles and moves of ...
— Face to Face with Kaiserism • James W. Gerard
... heard him whisper, hoarsely. He recognized him as Shope. The light coming up through the scuttle illuminated the foremast above Trask's head in a manner disconcerting. Trask ducked down under ...
— Isle o' Dreams • Frederick F. Moore
... Hugh Alston that he had not read the letter aright; it was so amazing, so disconcerting, that he felt bewildered. What on earth is wrong? he thought, then he took the letter to the better light at ...
— The Imaginary Marriage • Henry St. John Cooper
... himself against you. But a man who puts up the shutters in front of his virtues and faults bothers me most terribly, and I always seem to be bumping my head against something invisible whenever I see him, which is a most disconcerting performance. ...
— Godfrey Marten, Undergraduate • Charles Turley
... flagellation does not always answer, and when one of the victims yawns and the other asks a matter-of-fact questions it is disconcerting even to an accomplished operator. However, Barber gallantly ...
— Reginald Cruden - A Tale of City Life • Talbot Baines Reed
... walked toward the door. He felt that he might not trust himself to answer her. For the first time since coming to manhood he felt that tears might at any moment come into his eyes. Grief for the loss of Janet surged through him disconcerting and engulfing him. ...
— Windy McPherson's Son • Sherwood Anderson
... So I decided to stop drinking and keep sound. I noticed that a good many men of the same age as myself and the same habits as myself were beginning to show signs of wear and tear. A number of them blew up with various disconcerting maladies and a number more died. Soon after I was forty years of age I noticed I began to go to funerals oftener than I had been doing—funerals of men between forty and forty-five I had known socially and convivially; that these funerals occurred quite regularly, ...
— Cutting It out - How to get on the waterwagon and stay there • Samuel G. Blythe
... when he will." The sage's eyes twinkled. "My rule of seclusion is not for my own comfort, but for that of others. Worldly people do not like the candor which shatters their delusions. Saints are not only rare but disconcerting. Even in scripture, they ...
— Autobiography of a YOGI • Paramhansa Yogananda
... its origin in more celestial regions. At one moment he spoke in the deepest bass, and the next in the highest tenor, these different tones sometimes succeeding each other with a rapidity which was singularly disconcerting, and which strangers found so perplexing that it was with difficulty they could believe two different persons were not addressing them in such varied notes. Yet, with all this eccentricity, his conversation was so well worth listening ...
— The Letter-Bag of Lady Elizabeth Spencer-Stanhope v. I. • A. M. W. Stirling (compiler)
... frequency. Their health and spirits are as precarious as their easily extinguished candles. Yet these exquisitely sensitive, well-bred heroines alienate our sympathy by their impregnable self-esteem, a disconcerting trait which would certainly have exasperated heroes less perfect and more human than Mrs. Radcliffe's Theodores and Valancourts. Their sorrows never rise to tragic heights, because they are only passive sufferers, and the ...
— The Tale of Terror • Edith Birkhead
... worse. We are floating on a sea of beneficence, in which it is impossible for us to sink. But though one could not easily drown in the Dead Sea, one might starve. And when goodness is of too great specific gravity it is impossible to get on in it or out of it. This is disconcerting to one of an active disposition. It is comforting to be told that everything is completely good, till you reflect that that is only another way of saying that nothing can be made any better, and that there is no use ...
— Humanly Speaking • Samuel McChord Crothers
... coyly up at him. "You know, Lord Henry, you really are a little disconcerting. You are one of those people who make one feel one ought to have done better ...
— Too Old for Dolls - A Novel • Anthony Mario Ludovici
... insinuation in her voice. Without a definite word being spoken, the hearer was informed that good music, real music, music worthy the name, was a thing that no sane person would expect to hear at Mrs Willoughby's "At Homes." She was really the most terrifying and disconcerting of old ladies, and Claire heartily repented the impulse which had brought her to her side. A pretty thing it would be if she were left alone on this sofa for ...
— The Independence of Claire • Mrs. George de Horne Vaizey
... compounded and torn asunder by all the principal conflicting forces of a period of historic transition. He was a victim of the manifold division of impulses, the ill-related patchwork of impressions, and the disconcerting refractions of vision, which characterized his contemporaries. It is in the fact that he united in himself the principal factors which made up the complexion of his age, to an extraordinary degree, that he has his strongest claim upon the sympathetic and studious ...
— The German Classics of The Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, Vol. VII. • Various
... much the representative of the law as ever, and am I to connive at such outrages under my own windows because the chief offender is something of a handsome young gentleman who has the tact to apologise for a disturbance in my domestic affairs that must, as he puts it, be disconcerting to a man at my age? A man of my age—there's France!—toujours la politesse, if you please! At ...
— Doom Castle • Neil Munro
... different generation. Mr. Farange was still older—that Maisie perfectly knew; and it brought her in due course to the perception of how much more, since Mrs. Beale was younger than Sir Claude, papa must be older than Mrs. Beale. Such discoveries were disconcerting and even a trifle confounding: these persons, it appeared, were not of the age they ought to be. This was somehow particularly the case with mamma, and the fact made her reflect with some relief on her not having gone with Mrs. Wix into ...
— What Maisie Knew • Henry James
... jarring and piercing. The muffled sounds in London are due partly to the wooden and asphalt pavements, which deaden the sounds. London must be soothing to the New Yorker, as the noise of New York is at first disconcerting to the Londoner.—Outlook. ...
— Composition-Rhetoric • Stratton D. Brooks
... looked away from the disconcerting brown eyes and down at her hand, against his shoulder, her own little hand, with the careful manicure and the dull polish that was all her mother permitted; bare of rings, though Norah had given her ...
— The Wishing Moon • Louise Elizabeth Dutton
... hour or two, there came a sudden shift in the wind. It was presaged by a calm, so that the deadly chlorine gas rose straight up instead of being blown over the American lines. And then, with a suddenness that must have been disconcerting to the Huns, the gas was blown ...
— The Khaki Boys Over the Top - Doing and Daring for Uncle Sam • Gordon Bates
... wish Dolly would be in the Jack Frost song and wear a red dress just like Susie's!" challenged Hannah Straight Tree, disconcerting her companion with the piercing gaze ...
— Big and Little Sisters • Theodora R. Jenness
... crown his efforts; anyway, as we shall see later on, this conversation of the governor with his subordinate led to a very surprising event which amused many people, became public property, moved Yulia Mihailovna to fierce anger, utterly disconcerting Andrey Antonovitch and reducing him at the crucial moment to a state of ...
— The Possessed - or, The Devils • Fyodor Dostoyevsky
... disconcerting. A deliberate and dastardly attempt had been made upon my life; but with what motive? The young woman, whose face was familiar, had, I recollected, asked most distinctly whether I was Doctor Boyd—a fact which showed that the trap had ...
— The Seven Secrets • William Le Queux
... claim were advanced the arguments which had already been used with effect in England, that the oath had been extorted from the barons by force, and that on his death-bed Henry had released them from it; but more than this, Stephen's advocates suddenly sprang on their opponents a new and most disconcerting argument, one which would have had great weight in any Church court, and which attacked both their claims at once. Matilda could not be the rightful heir, and so the oath itself could not be binding, ...
— The History of England From the Norman Conquest - to the Death of John (1066-1216) • George Burton Adams
... impressionability of the eye to its particular order of beauty. To the average man color—as color—has nothing significant to say: to him grass is green, snow is white, the sky blue; and to have his attention drawn to the fact that sometimes grass is yellow, snow blue, and the sky green, is disconcerting rather than illuminating. It is only when his retina is assaulted by some splendid sunset or sky-encircling rainbow that he is able to disassociate the idea of color from that of form and substance. Even the artist is at a disadvantage in this respect, when compared with the musician. ...
— Architecture and Democracy • Claude Fayette Bragdon
... Causses, it was a little modern Babylon—a corner of Paris, a bit of boulevard and bustle, but with such narrow accommodation, and with such limited means of locomotion at disposal, the prospect of a stay here in bad weather was, to say the least of it, disconcerting. I prepared in any case for a start, made my tea, performed my toilet, and packed my bag as briskly as if a bright sun were shining, which true enough it was, although ...
— The Roof of France • Matilda Betham-Edwards
... few boat-loads of Tagalog soldiers came down from Luzon, and landed on the open north coast two miles from the town. The valiant Capizenos had dug some trenches on the beach and had thrown up a breastwork there, and they went out to fight for Spain and Visaya. They fired two rounds without disconcerting the Tagalogs very much, and then, having no more ammunition, they "all ran home again," as my informant naively described it. The Tagalogs took possession of the town, and the Visayans lived in fear and trembling. Nearly all women, both wives and young girls, carried daggers in fear of assault ...
— A Woman's Impression of the Philippines • Mary Helen Fee
... I burst out as loud as I could, with a boy's pleasure in disconcerting the inquisitive passer-by. She turned suddenly round to go away, waving her hand at me; at that moment Sora Lodovica swung the shrine-lamp back into its place. A stream of light fell across the street. I felt myself grow quite cold; the face of the woman outside ...
— Hauntings • Vernon Lee
... they began to fall away from him. Now, as he stood here on the bustling platform, it was as if they had all disappeared—been left somewhere behind him outside the station. With the two large bags which the porter was looking after—both of a quite disconcerting freshness of aspect—and the new overcoat and shining hat, he seemed to himself a new kind of being, embarked upon a voyage ...
— The Market-Place • Harold Frederic
... her husband the impression of having been consulted, and to put her victory as far as possible on the footing of a compromise. It was also rather a relief to be able to discuss the matter out of range of Joan's disconcerting tongue and observant eyes. ...
— When William Came • Saki
... unpleasant, not to say disconcerting happenings, and the colonel, taking counsel with himself, determined to kill ...
— Jack O' Judgment • Edgar Wallace
... Peter informed him. "Violet objects very much to these abrupt separations. This week, too, I was shooting at Saxthorpe, and I had also several other engagements of a pleasant nature. Besides, I have reached that age when I find it disconcerting to be called out of bed in the middle of the night to answer a long distance telephone call, and told to embark on a White Star liner leaving Liverpool early the next morning. It may be your idea of a pleasure trip. It ...
— Peter Ruff and the Double Four • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... Serb, the enmity of the Magyar is disconcerting. By crossing the Danube, Serbia has become genuinely part of Europe; she has turned her back on the Balkans and the eternal strife on barren empty hills. The new Serbia can afford to forget and forgive Bulgaria, ...
— Europe—Whither Bound? - Being Letters of Travel from the Capitals of Europe in the Year 1921 • Stephen Graham
... cornices of Victoria Street, are the antithesis of the extraordinary variety to be found in Park Lane, High Street Kensington, Maida Vale and Cheyne Walk. This last reveals, between Blantyre and Tite streets, the whole social order of England and the most disconcerting divarications of design. In it meet democracy, plutocracy, and aristocracy, artist and artisan, trade and tradition, philosophy and philistinism, publicans and publicists, connoisseurs and confidence men, sin and sincerity. It is not proposed to introduce the reader to ...
— An Ocean Tramp • William McFee
... wall. Madge, too fully absorbed in the gay scene before her to see just where she was going, collided with a young woman, who, accompanied by two young men, was coming from the opposite direction. Before she could apologize an unpleasant voice broke upon the ears of the houseboat party with disconcerting distinctness. ...
— Madge Morton's Secret • Amy D. V. Chalmers
... of the corner of his eye he peeped at her. But wasn't she perched entrancingly on that dragoon saddle, wasn't she, though? The richly heavy coils of burnished copper had loosened, and they were very disconcerting in their suggestion of flowing wealth. If they would but fall about her shoulders! And the lace from the slanting hat brim, and the velvet patch near the dimple—the velvet patch called an assassin. And—what dress was that? Flowered calico? Yes, and light blue. His cheeks burned as of one surprised ...
— The Missourian • Eugene P. (Eugene Percy) Lyle
... early age. This makes the transition to literature so fatally easy. Facilis descensus Averni! To paint, one must at least know how to mix colours and handle a brush; to compose, one must be familiar with the meaning of strayed spiders' legs on curious parallel bars, and there are strange disconcerting rumours of "orchestration." But to produce literature you have simply to dip pen in ink or open your mouth and see what God will give you. Hence particularly the flood of novels, hence the low position ...
— Without Prejudice • Israel Zangwill
... through the next day to set his snares, the Harn was prepared to test his snakeproof pants. They held, which was disconcerting to the Harn, but it was a hard creature to convince, once thoroughly aroused. Ed was not too sure of how well the pants would stand up to persistent assault himself. After the third ambush, he took to spraying suspicious looking ...
— Cat and Mouse • Ralph Williams
... was far from being the school of discretion and good manners that Paragot frequented in his youth, but such was his personal influence that when he reappeared in his usual place no one dared allude to the disconcerting incident. Paragot had recovered from the chastened mood and was gay, Rabelaisian, and with great gestures talked of all subjects under heaven. One of the International Exhibitions was in prospect and ...
— The Beloved Vagabond • William J. Locke
... Norton and Wargrave rode the same animal; and Frank, unused to this form of locomotion, took a tight grip as the long-legged beast rose from the ground in unexpected jerks and set off at a jolting walk that shook its riders painfully. Then it broke into a trot equally disconcerting but finally settled into an easy canter that was as comfortable a motion as its previous paces had been spine-dislocating. The route lay at first over a space of desert which was unpleasant, for the sand was blown in clouds by a high wind, almost a gale. But the camels were fast ...
— The Jungle Girl • Gordon Casserly
... it not for the almost inevitable high roast and frequently the disconcerting chicory addition, coffee in France might be an unalloyed delight—at least this is how it appears to American eyes. One seldom, if ever, finds coffee improperly brewed in France—it ...
— All About Coffee • William H. Ukers
... fancy of Sinfi's, Miss Wynne," said he, "and a very disconcerting one to me; but I feel that it must be yielded to. Whatever can be done to serve or even gratify Sinfi Lovell, it is my duty ...
— Aylwin • Theodore Watts-Dunton
... anxious to meet the bunch myself," he admitted; and led the way back to Estra. The Venusian looked at him with no change of expression, although there was something very disconcerting in the precocious wisdom of his eyes. Their very kindliness and serenity gave him an appearance of superiority, such as only aggravated the ...
— The Lord of Death and the Queen of Life • Homer Eon Flint
... Mrs Clinton prepared for him. He was more silent than ever, but when he spoke it was in biblical language; and always hovered on his lips the enigmatical smile, and his eyes always had the strange, disconcerting look. Mrs Clinton perseveringly made him take his medicine, but she lost faith in its power when, one night at twelve, Mr Clinton brought home with him a very dirty, ragged man, who looked half-starved ...
— Orientations • William Somerset Maugham
... With a disconcerting chuckle Radicofani suited his action to the word, and busied himself with preparations for the journey, taking care, however, as he strode from ante-room to bed-chamber to keep his prisoner constantly in ...
— Romance of Roman Villas - (The Renaissance) • Elizabeth W. (Elizbeth Williams) Champney
... psychology of fear would do the rest. And yet—what was it? As the minutes dragged along, fight it as he would, a distinct depression, a panicky sort of uneasiness, was settling down upon him. The darkness, in a most unpleasant and disconcerting way, seemed to be ...
— The Further Adventures of Jimmie Dale • Frank L. Packard
... from an early gallop. His pale cheeks were slightly flushed, and his eyes were bright. He had been riding hard to escape from disconcerting thoughts. He looked in at the study, and found Aynesworth with a mass of correspondence ...
— The Malefactor • E. Phillips Oppenheim |
