"Inscrutable" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... the auctioneer, was even more inscrutable. He had been to the Oddfellows' excursion on the train the week before and to the Conservative picnic the week before that, and had decided not to go on this trip. In fact, he had not the least intention ...
— Sunshine Sketches of a Little Town • Stephen Leacock
... might hear. Her own tone on the subject was uniform: she kept it on record to a degree slightly irritating that Mr. Dormer had been unforgettably—Peter particularly noted "unforgettably"—kind to her. She never mentioned Julia's irruption to Julia's brother; she only referred to the portrait, with inscrutable amenity, as a direct consequence of this gentleman's fortunate suggestion that first day at Madame Carre's. Nash showed, however, such a disposition to dwell sociably and luminously on the peculiarly interesting character of what he called ...
— The Tragic Muse • Henry James
... a little cross, hurried home. M. Noirol had not teased her today, but he had been inscrutable and tiresome, and he had made her feel uneasy. She opened the front door, and went at once to her father's study, pausing for a moment at the sound of voices within. She recognized, however, that it was her cousin, Tom Craigie, who was speaking, and without more delay she entered. Then in ...
— We Two • Edna Lyall
... in time, and next moment Hamish Gorm lay stretched on the turf, muttering Gaelic oaths and tearing at the sod with his dirk in an impotent rage. Sir Robert looked down at the prostrate man with his inscrutable smile. ...
— A Daughter of Raasay - A Tale of the '45 • William MacLeod Raine
... attentions; but old Sechard was obdurate as ever. When she saw him turn the same cold eyes on her, the same look that the Cointets had given her, and Petit-Claud and Cerizet, she tried to watch and guess old Sechard's intentions. Trouble thrown away! Old Sechard, never sober, never drunk, was inscrutable; intoxication is a double veil. If the old man's tipsiness was sometimes real, it was quite often feigned for the purpose of extracting David's secret from his wife. Sometimes he coaxed, sometimes ...
— Lost Illusions • Honore De Balzac
... not unnoticed. He was watched: suspicions beginning to unfold, he took alarm, and one evening escaped; but not without previously informing the partner of his crimes which way he intended to flee. Several pursued; but the inscrutable will of Providence blinded their search, and I was doomed to behold ...
— Dreams, Waking Thoughts, and Incidents • William Beckford
... dealt with him at some length. He was a peculiar man—of sixty-five about—iron gray, hard-faced, obstinate, and uncommunicative. He used to keep the ship loafing at sea for inscrutable reasons. Would come on deck at night sometimes, take some sail off her, God only knows why or wherefore, then go below, shut himself up in his cabin, and play on the violin for hours—till daybreak perhaps. In fact, he spent most of his time day or night playing ...
— The Shadow-Line - A Confession • Joseph Conrad
... my son, behold, behold This iron man, my enemy and thine, This politic sovereign, lying at our feet, With blood-bespatter'd robes, and chaplet shorn! Inscrutable as ever, see, it keeps Its sombre aspect of majestic care, Of solitary thought, unshared resolve, Even in death, that countenance austere! So look'd he, when to Stenyclaros first, A new-made wife, I from Arcadia came, And found ...
— Poetical Works of Matthew Arnold • Matthew Arnold
... whole house (except some inscrutable holes, into which the family creeps), of respectable people, who never took lodgers until this juncture. Their furniture, however, is of the true lodging-house pattern, sofas and chairs which have no possibility of repose in them; rickety tables; an old piano and old music, with "Lady Helen ...
— Passages From the English Notebooks, Complete • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... Oxford friends, among whom was a tall Scotch professor who was a brilliant and quick talker. Tamaitai took no part in the rapid thrust and parry of the talk, but sat silently looking from one to another with her great dark eyes. Their comment on her long afterwards was that she was the most inscrutable person they had ever met. As we drove home after the party I asked Tamaitai: 'What did you think of the talk?' There was a brief silence—then: 'I didn't understand a single word of it, they talked so fast,' ...
— The Life of Mrs. Robert Louis Stevenson • Nellie Van de Grift Sanchez
... enlarged policy, the equity and wisdom of the measure. Whatever, therefore, may be the fate of its authors, I have no fear that it will produce to this country every blessing of commerce and revenue; and by extending a generous and humane government over those millions whom the inscrutable dispensations of Providence have placed under us, in the remotest regions of the earth, it will consecrate the name of England among the noblest of the nations." While this bill was pending in the commons, the East India Company and the city of London presented strong petitions against ...
— The History of England in Three Volumes, Vol.III. - From George III. to Victoria • E. Farr and E. H. Nolan
... became inscrutable in a moment, and her eyes turned as it were indifferently to the window. A week ago she might have replied that Denis was obviously "smitten"; but four days of almost total neglect and really formidable rivalry are hard to forgive, even when ...
— Too Old for Dolls - A Novel • Anthony Mario Ludovici
... offering her finished work to Mistress Mary. The angels in heaven never rejoiced more greatly over the one repentant sinner than the tired shepherdesses over their one poor ewe lamb, as she stood there with quivering hands and wet eyes, the first sense of conscious victory written on her inscrutable brow, and within the turbid, clouded brain the memory of a long struggle, and a hint, at least, of the glory she ...
— Marm Lisa • Kate Douglas Wiggin
... depriving it of its strongest defence, reason. In this respect, nearly all unsophisticated nations resemble each other, appearing to offer spontaneously, by a feeling creditable to human nature, that protection by their own forbearance, which has been withheld by the inscrutable wisdom of Providence. Wah-ta-Wah, indeed, knew that in many tribes the mentally imbecile and the mad were held in a species of religious reverence, receiving from these untutored inhabitants of the forest respect and honors, instead of the contumely and neglect that it is their fortune to meet ...
— The Deerslayer • James Fenimore Cooper
... of Kant's education and character can make intelligible to us the restraint he exercised in making supernatural postulates. All he asserted was his inscrutable moral imperative and a God to reward with the pleasures of the next world those who had been Puritans in this. But the same principle could obviously be applied to other cherished imaginations: there is no superstition which it ...
— The Life of Reason • George Santayana
... with eyes which seemed to be starting from his head; the little girl's smile abruptly faded, and, seizing her trowel, she made off without turning to look again in my direction, with an air of obedience, inscrutable and sly. ...
— Swann's Way - (vol. 1 of Remembrance of Things Past) • Marcel Proust
... souls of the most hardened villains and thereby renders them often instruments of justice upon themselves; so that it seems not virtue only is its own reward, but vice also brings upon itself those torments which it ought to feel. Thus Providence ordereth, with inscrutable wisdom, that every man should feel happiness or misery according as his own demeanour serves. But it is now time that ...
— Lives Of The Most Remarkable Criminals Who have been Condemned and Executed for Murder, the Highway, Housebreaking, Street Robberies, Coining or other offences • Arthur L. Hayward
... a queer woman, Will. The inscrutable ways of Providence were not in it with hers. She hated me, but she wouldn't let go of me; seemed to be her idea that shaking one man was enough and she wouldn't let me make her a widow a second time. By George, I couldn't shake her—I had ...
— Otherwise Phyllis • Meredith Nicholson
... patience, Tom! Who, that had beheld thee, for three summer weeks, poring through half the deadlong night over the jingling anatomy of that inscrutable old harpsichord in the back parlour, could have missed the entrance to thy secret heart: albeit it was dimly known to thee? Who that had seen the glow upon thy cheek when leaning down to listen, ...
— Life And Adventures Of Martin Chuzzlewit • Charles Dickens
... the hand of nation against nation, of government against government? No: it was the fanaticism of creed, and the fury of dogmatism. Nations and governments rose to propagate their manner to worship God, and their own mode to believe the inscrutable mysteries of eternity; but nobody has yet raised a finger to punish the sacrilegious violation of the moral laws of Christ, nobody ever stirred to claim the fulfilment of the duties of Christian morality toward nations. There is much speaking about the separation ...
— Select Speeches of Kossuth • Kossuth
... deeper than looks." But the effect of the resemblance was sufficient to make it impossible for him to offer any empty phrases of cheer and consolation. After a long time the hopeless, dazed expression slowly faded from the young man's face; in its place came a calm, inscrutable look. The irresponsible boy was dead; the man had been born—in rancorous bitterness, but in ...
— The Second Generation • David Graham Phillips
... by tiny folk, living out their timid, inscrutable lives around him. A water-rat, passing bright-eyed upon his lawful occasion, paused on the border of the stream to consider the stranger, and was lost to view. A stagnant pool among some reeds caught the reflection of the sunset and changed on the instant ...
— Uncanny Tales • Various
... gate of the Memorial Well at Cawnpore: 'These are they which came out of great tribulation.' We, too, have come out of great tribulation, happily with our lives—and more. The decrees of fate are indeed inscrutable." ...
— The Wings of the Morning • Louis Tracy
... poetical quotations. The authority, however, is seldom given, and inverted commas are conspicuous by their absence. It can hardly be imagined that all this poetry is by the writer of the book. In one instance he quotes a well-known verse by ASHBY-STERRY, without acknowledgment, in which, for some inscrutable reason, he has introduced a rugged final line which effectually mars the ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 98, February 1, 1890 • Various
... all the inscrutable saints, this thing should have happened at Sloanehurst, is more than I can say! Jumping angels! Now, let me tell you ...
— No Clue - A Mystery Story • James Hay
... speech. Many a voluble, glib boy, who has been appointed the orator of the occasion, fails utterly, disappoints public expectation, and sits down with an uncomfortable mantle of failure upon his shoulders. Therefore, the ways of shyness are inscrutable. Many a woman who has never known what it is to be bashful or shy has, when called upon to read a copy of verses, even to a circle of intimate friends, lost her voice, and has utterly broken down, to her own and her ...
— Brave Men and Women - Their Struggles, Failures, And Triumphs • O.E. Fuller
... from between his lips, and stared at it dazedly. He looked at the girl, and the clear grey eyes were watching him with an inscrutable expression. ...
— Dope • Sax Rohmer
... date of the creation, predictions of the end of all things; the great lapses of time, the strange mutations of the globe were unfolded with the voluminous leaf, as it turned over; and though the soul might slumber with an hieroglyphic veil of inscrutable mysteries drawn over it, yet it was in a slumber ill-exchanged for all the sharpened realities of sense, wit, fancy, or reason. My father's life was comparatively a dream; but it was a dream of infinity and eternity, of death, the resurrection, and a judgement ...
— English Critical Essays - Nineteenth Century • Various
... know more than I think I know myself, and all that I think I know myself may be abridged to the simple rescript, I know nothing. The wisest of us reck not whence we came or whither we go; the human mind is unable to conceive the eternal in either direction; the soul of man inscrutable even to himself. ...
— Marse Henry, Complete - An Autobiography • Henry Watterson
... Castlewood, and caused him to turn to the one true church. No saints ever come to you." And Harry Esmond, because of his promise to Father Holt, hiding away these treasures of faith from T. Tusher, delivered himself of them nevertheless simply to Father Holt; who stroked his head, smiled at him with his inscrutable look, and told him that he did well to meditate on these great things, and not to talk of them except ...
— The History of Henry Esmond, Esq. • W. M. Thackeray
... photographs show that nearly the whole constellation is interwoven with faintly luminous coils. To behold the entry of the great nebula into the field even of a small telescope is a startling experience which never loses its novelty. As shown by the photographs, it is an inscrutable chaos of perfectly amazing extent, where spiral bands, radiating streaks, dense masses, and dark yawning gaps are strangely intermingled without apparent order. In one place four conspicuous little stars, better seen in a telescope than in the photograph on account of the blurring produced ...
— Curiosities of the Sky • Garrett Serviss
... than by mortal strength Can be sustained, their impotence, bow down Each spirit: and it cries: "O God, support My helplessness; unto Thy perfect will Do I resign my vain and evil hopes, My burdens; and Thy Will Be Done Forever." Thus, with arms folded on despairing breast, With head bowed to the inscrutable decree, They seek Him: and a sudden glory fills The humbled bosom; all His stars and thrones Shine down upon it; all His majesty Enters that lowly door, lifts up, sustains The sundered soul; and His beneficence With more than father-love enfolds the heart Joined to His own forever. ...
— Mr. Faust • Arthur Davison Ficke
... We fought against him, for our interest lay with the slave-dealing, but he scattered us like sheep. Yes, Gordon was a great man though, as you say, he was a Kaffir;" and the sheik sat in silence, meditating upon what seemed to him an inscrutable problem. ...
— The Dash for Khartoum - A Tale of Nile Expedition • George Alfred Henty
... unseen. Such keenness was unusual, and Claremont could not connect it with the slovenly productions that he had learnt to associate with the name of Foster. For a long time it was a vast enigma. At half term Foster's report consisted of one word, typically Claremontian—"Inscrutable." But manners always win in the end. Foster showed so much zeal, such an honest willingness to learn, that Claremont finally classed him as a hard-working, keen, friendly, but amazingly stupid boy. The Army class, which Foster honoured with his ...
— The Loom of Youth • Alec Waugh
... you must know him as well as if he were your brother. There is no man living who could keep himself dark for a week. No; I don't believe the most inscrutable of men, born and bred in diplomatic circles, could keep the secret of a solitary failing from the eyes of those who live under the same roof with him for seven days. It would leak out somehow—if not at breakfast, at dinner. Man is a communicative animal, and so loves talking ...
— Vixen, Volume II. • M. E. Braddon
... door, Larcher turned for a moment in passing out, and saw Davenport standing by the table, looking after him. What was the inscrutable expression—half amusement, half friendliness and self-accusing regret—which faintly relieved for a moment the indifference of the ...
— The Mystery of Murray Davenport - A Story of New York at the Present Day • Robert Neilson Stephens
... trembling mouth, he had become, I realised vaguely, a George with whom the General and I possessed hardly so much as an acquaintance. The man before me was a man whom Sally had invoked into being, and it seemed to me, as I watched them, that she had awakened in George, who had lost her, some quality—inscrutable and elusive—that she had never aroused in the man to whom she belonged. What this quality was, or wherein it lay, I could not then define. Understanding, sympathy, perception, none of these words covered it, yet it appeared to ...
— The Romance of a Plain Man • Ellen Glasgow
... accepted the situation with the patient and grim stolidity of a man who takes a blow dealt him by a Providence known by him to be inscrutable. What he had done to deserve it was beyond his comprehension. He silently hitched up his horses, and, for the first time in his life, drove into Fort Erie without any reasonable excuse for going there. He tied ...
— In the Midst of Alarms • Robert Barr
... fancy on Professor Hudson's part, and that of a good many people, that "the religious emotions" will survive the de-ethicising, depersonalising of the Deity, and that men will remain "deeply religious" even when it is recognised that the "Great Enigma," the "eternal and inscrutable energy," the "ultimate Reality" cannot be spoken of as "a Personal Creator, or an intelligent Governor of the universe." For our own part, we find it difficult to believe that such a forecast could have been framed by anyone ...
— Problems of Immanence - Studies Critical and Constructive • J. Warschauer
... betray himself, how is he recognized under this heavy overcast sky of the commencing plebeianism, by which everything is rendered opaque and leaden?—It is not his actions which establish his claim—actions are always ambiguous, always inscrutable; neither is it his "works." One finds nowadays among artists and scholars plenty of those who betray by their works that a profound longing for nobleness impels them; but this very NEED of nobleness is ...
— Beyond Good and Evil • Friedrich Nietzsche
... Grand," he again began, and again the pipe was laid down, for Robinson was much honoured. "I come here hot from a scene of domestic woe, which has robbed me of all political discretion, and made the paper duty to me an inscrutable mystery. The worthy Geese here assembled see before them a man who has been terribly injured; one in whose mangled breast Fate has fixed her sharpest dagger, and poisoned the blade before she fixed it." "No—no—no." "Hear—hear—hear." "Yes, my Grand; she poisoned ...
— The Struggles of Brown, Jones, and Robinson - By One of the Firm • Anthony Trollope
... a little, but Dolores said nothing. Then he began to look at her again, and while he spoke he steadily examined every detail of her appearance till his inscrutable gaze had travelled from her headdress to the points of her velvet slippers, and finally remained fixed upon her mouth in a way that disturbed her even more than the speech he made. Perez had ...
— In The Palace Of The King - A Love Story Of Old Madrid • F. Marion Crawford
... said the stout lady to her companion, "I warned you to be prepared for the worst. Bear up; do not make a scene before all these people. The ways of Providence are just and inscrutable. It is your own temper that was to blame. You should never have sent the poor man off to ...
— Allan and the Holy Flower • H. Rider Haggard
... Speed. O jest unseen, inscrutable, invisible, As a nose on a man's face, or a weathercock on a steeple! 125 My master sues to her; and she hath taught her suitor, He being her pupil, to become her tutor. O excellent device! was there ever heard a better, ...
— Two Gentlemen of Verona - The Works of William Shakespeare [Cambridge Edition] [9 vols.] • William Shakespeare
... your constructions are too easy-going, too conjectural, too much dominated by prepossessions and the 'will to interpret.' The alleged sources or determinants for this dream may or may not have played the parts you assign to them; the mystery of the matter must remain inscrutable. But what your methods, so plausible in effect, certainly do show is how easy it may be to confabulate an explanation that goes no deeper than a phrenological reading of cranial bumps or than a seance ...
— The Journal of Abnormal Psychology - Volume 10
... more art, as if there had been "treatment," of the consummate sort, in his every shade and salience. The revulsion, for our friend, had become, before he knew it, immense—this drop, in the act of apprehension, to the sense of his adversary's inscrutable manoeuvre. That meaning at least, while he gaped, it offered him; for he could but gape at his other self in this other anguish, gape as a proof that he, standing there for the achieved, the enjoyed, the triumphant life, couldn't be faced in his triumph. Wasn't the ...
— The Jolly Corner • Henry James
... face. She is thrilling with the consciousness of growing power and prosperity. As she stands upright, full-statured and equal among the people of the earth, breathing the keen air and looking out upon the expanded horizon, she understands that her emancipation came because through the inscrutable wisdom of God her honest purpose was crossed, and her brave ...
— Standard Selections • Various
... not merely that mechanism is a hypothesis, but that it is a wrong hypothesis. Events do not come as if mechanism brought them about; they come, at least in the organic world, as if a magic destiny, and inscrutable ungovernable effort, were driving ...
— Winds Of Doctrine - Studies in Contemporary Opinion • George Santayana
... rose from his place and made his way to the end of the counter, next to Fairfax and nearest Francis. He addressed the former. There was an inscrutable smile upon his lips, ...
— The Evil Shepherd • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... great annual fair was about to be held. In the saloon my companions from Trondhjem were two young Frenchmen, bent, like myself, upon visiting the North Cape, and an Austrian, attached to the Court at Vienna, who, for some inscrutable reason, was fired with the same ambition. We made a very cheery company, and I was able to cast off all editorial cares in the society of these people, to whom English politics were of no account. The weather, after leaving Trondhjem, was for some days positively frightful. ...
— Memoirs of Sir Wemyss Reid 1842-1885 • Stuart J. Reid, ed.
... affect all the rest. Like a magnetism, the karma is transmitted from form to form, from phenomenon to phenomenon, determining conditions by combinations. The ultimate mystery of the concentrative and creative effects of karma the Buddhist acknowledges to be inscrutable; but the cohesion of effects he declares to be produced by tanha, the desire of life, corresponding to what Schopenhauer called the "will" to live. Now we find in Herbert Spencer's "Biology" a curious parallel for this idea. He explains the transmission ...
— Kokoro - Japanese Inner Life Hints • Lafcadio Hearn
... and the uproar of applause had somewhat subsided, Starr turned to her father her face aglow, her lashes still dewy with tears. Her father had been silent and absorbed. His face was inscrutable now. He had a way of masking his emotions even to those who ...
— Lo, Michael! • Grace Livingston Hill
... make this reply, and was looking straight at her as the number dropped from his lips. It did not disturb her set smile, but in some inscrutable way all meaning seemed to leave that smile, and she forgot to drop her hand which had been stretched out in ...
— Room Number 3 - and Other Detective Stories • Anna Katharine Green
... popular party, was placed in that high and awful rank in which he now is. The fortunes of his country, we had almost said, the fates of the world, were placed in his wardship—we sink in prostration before the inscrutable dispensations of Providence, when we reflect in whose wardship the fates of the ...
— Harper's New Monthly Magazine, Volume 1, No. 2, July, 1850. • Various
... Tall and handsome and distinguished-looking—dark, melancholy, inscrutable eyes—melting, musical, sympathetic voice—yes, the very hero of her dreams stood before her in the flesh. He could not have more closely resembled her ideal if he had been ...
— Anne Of The Island • Lucy Maud Montgomery
... of war. Hoofs thundered, swords flashed, men yelled, and arrows shot through the great cloud of dust that rose suddenly as from an explosion. In the front of the charge the Italian and the Norman rode side by side, the inscrutable black eyes and the calm olive features beside the Norman's terrible young figure, with its white glowing face and fair hair streaming on the wind, and wide, deep eyes like blue steel, and the quivering nostrils of the man born ...
— Via Crucis • F. Marion Crawford
... in proper fashion. Lewis bowed, and, lifting his hat, passed on. Burr, as they parted, fell for just a half-moment into thought, his face suddenly inscrutable, as ...
— The Magnificent Adventure - Being the Story of the World's Greatest Exploration and - the Romance of a Very Gallant Gentleman • Emerson Hough
... and the little train rattled down the canon. Miss Milbrey stood in the door of the car, and Percival watched her while the glistening rails that seemed to be pushing her away narrowed in perspective. She stood motionless and inscrutable to the last, but still looking steadily toward him—almost wistfully, it seemed to ...
— The Spenders - A Tale of the Third Generation • Harry Leon Wilson
... and reserved, and never talked with the other patients. His bearing expressed an inscrutable calm and an apparently quite natural pride. For days together he would favor no one with a glance. He would walk up and down the garden, very slowly, gazing scornfully at the flowers and trees, and ...
— The German Classics, v. 20 - Masterpieces of German Literature • Various
... secret connected with his uncle's death lay hidden back of the limpid innocence of those dark, shadowed eyes? She was one of those women who are forever a tantalizing mystery to men. What was she like behind the inscrutable, charming ...
— Tangled Trails - A Western Detective Story • William MacLeod Raine
... one phrase—how descriptive it is of the form and whiteness of a shoulder, the supple fulness of the arm's muscle, the brightness of eyes increased by kohl! Scent is burning on silver dishes, and through the fumes appear the subdued colours of embroidered stuffs and the inscrutable traceries of bronze lamps. Or, maybe, the scene passes on a terrace overlooking a dark river. Behind the domes and minarets a yellow moon dreams like an odalisque, her hand on the circle of her breast; and through the torrid silence of the garden, through the odour of over-ripe ...
— Memoirs of My Dead Life • George Moore
... him! Here was Selpdorf laying his plans deeply and with consummate skill, while this pretty clever daughter of his was ready to give him away because a heavy dragoon of the favoured race smiled at her across a breakfast table. Pah! The ways of Providence are inscrutable; it remains for mortal men to do what they may to turn them into ...
— A Modern Mercenary • Kate Prichard and Hesketh Vernon Hesketh-Prichard
... and the means by which they are brought about, are mysterious and inscrutable. John Dounce had led this life for twenty years and upwards, without wish for change, or care for variety, when his whole social system was suddenly upset and turned completely topsy-turvy—not by an earthquake, or some other dreadful convulsion of nature, as the reader ...
— Sketches by Boz - illustrative of everyday life and every-day people • Charles Dickens
... higher laws of our being, with the result that we are going against the great current of the Divine Order of things. Is it any wonder, then, that we find the strugglings, the inharmonies, the sufferings, the fears, the forebodings, the fallings by the wayside, the "strange, inscrutable dispensations of Providence" that we behold on every side? The moment we bring our lives into harmony with the higher laws of our being, and, as a result, into harmony with the current of the Divine Order of ...
— What All The World's A-Seeking • Ralph Waldo Trine
... powerful Deity, dwelling, according to common belief, above the human circle; or, as others define her, she is a substantial protection, presiding over the particular destinies of individuals, and feigned by the ancient theologians to be the daughter of Justice, looking down from a certain inscrutable eternity upon all terrestrial ...
— The Roman History of Ammianus Marcellinus • Ammianus Marcellinus
... With this inscrutable artifice, Toby withdrew to purchase the viands he had spoken of, for ready money, at Mrs. Chickenstalker's; and presently came back, pretending he had not been able to find them, at first, ...
— The Chimes • Charles Dickens
... Indians on the great plains laid himself down to die, and his frozen body was not found until after fourteen days of diligent search. After my dear wife and I had read the story, and talked and wept about his death, so sad, so mysterious, so inscrutable, she said to me, "Where were you during that week?" The journal was searched, and we were not a little startled at finding that the race for life we have in this chapter described was in all probability on the same day as that ...
— By Canoe and Dog-Train • Egerton Ryerson Young
... their prisoners had been removed La Boulaye paced the narrow limits of the kitchen with face inscrutable and busy mind. He recalled what Suzanne had said touching her betrothal to Ombreval, whom she looked to meet at Treves. This miserable individual, then, was the man for whose sake she had duped him. ...
— The Trampling of the Lilies • Rafael Sabatini
... idly shifted a piece of paper over the notes on his blotting-pad. His face was inscrutable. She could not tell whether her statement had startled him or not. For all the change in his expression she might have merely remarked that the weather was fine. Had it been any one else he would have said that before the day was out he expected a dozen or more people to tell him that they ...
— The Grell Mystery • Frank Froest
... one's eyes in Venice is happiness enough, and generous observers find it hard to keep an account of their profits in this line. Everything the attention touches holds it, keeps playing with it—thanks to some inscrutable flattery of the atmosphere. Your brown-skinned, white-shirted gondolier, twisting himself in the light, seems to you, as you lie at contemplation beneath your awning, a perpetual symbol of Venetian "effect." The light here is in fact ...
— Italian Hours • Henry James
... a coach,' Whitmonby resumed, 'I heard a comely dame of the period when summers are ceasing threatened by her husband with a divorce, for omitting to put sandwiches in their luncheon-basket. She made him the inscrutable answer: "Ah, poor man! you will go down ignorant to your grave!" We laughed, and to this day I ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... suspense which, before every decisive resolve, oppresses even the hearts of heroes, appeared now for a moment to overshadow the great mind of Gustavus Adolphus. "If we decide upon battle," said he, "the stake will be nothing less than a crown and two electorates. Fortune is changeable, and the inscrutable decrees of Heaven may, for our sins, give the victory to our enemies. My kingdom, it is true, even after the loss of my life and my army, would still have a hope left. Far removed from the scene of action, defended by a powerful ...
— The History of the Thirty Years' War • Friedrich Schiller, Translated by Rev. A. J. W. Morrison, M.A.
... heritage. But if the Sire God in His inscrutable providence should call your son to His holy side, what provision have you made for so mighty a fortune? ...
— The Path of the King • John Buchan
... or properties, it is revealed to us slowly and with much difficulty, and these subtle properties—the deep affinities and molecular arrangements—- are the mysteries rightly so called. Mind in itself is also intelligible; a pleasure is as intelligible as would be any transmutation of it into the inscrutable essence that people often desiderate. It is one of the facts of our sensibility, and has a great many facts of its own kindred, which makes it ...
— Practical Essays • Alexander Bain
... reached the house, the quadrille which had opened the party was finishing. Don Roberto was making a sweeping bow to Tiny, whose face wore an inscrutable expression. Magdalena was about to step through the window, but Trennahan guided her to the door, and they entered the room without attracting attention. There were some forty people present. With the exception of the Yorbas, ...
— The Californians • Gertrude Franklin Horn Atherton
... ask too much," she replied. Then, raising to mine a face which inscrutable eyes, flushed cheeks, and smiling lips combined to render perfectly bewitching, she added, "What should you think if I said that it ...
— Looking Backward - 2000-1887 • Edward Bellamy
... inscrutable gray glance roved over her, noting her beauty and her sweetness, and the soul of him ...
— Kindred of the Dust • Peter B. Kyne
... smiled dutifully. Victoria sat silent. Her silence checked Mrs. Penfold's flow, and brought her back, bewildered to realities; to the sad remembrance of Lydia's astonishing and inscrutable behaviour. Whereupon her manner and conversation became so dishevelled, in her effort to propitiate Lady Tatham without betraying either herself or Lydia, that the situation grew ...
— The Mating of Lydia • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... wondered what was the nature of those documents, and why the gang desired to obtain possession of them. But it was all a mystery, inscrutable and complete. And I ...
— The Count's Chauffeur • William Le Queux
... her maid with her," said Sir Charles, almost stammering, and looking at Gertrude, whose expression was inscrutable. ...
— An Unsocial Socialist • George Bernard Shaw
... unknown man. Better were it that mere earthly historians should lower such pretensions, and, aiming only at some picture of the thing acted, which picture itself will be but a poor approximation, leave the inscrutable purport of them an acknowledged secret.' 'Some picture of the thing acted.' Here we behold the task of the historian; nor is it an idle, fruitless task. Science is not the only, or the chief source of knowledge. ...
— Obiter Dicta - Second Series • Augustine Birrell
... "who wished she could poison him." [Footnote: W. D. Howells' Memoirs.] It is to be hoped that he saw something of his sister Elizabeth again, the last remnant of his mother's household, who for some inscrutable reason had never ...
— The Life and Genius of Nathaniel Hawthorne • Frank Preston Stearns
... soul that sinned and suffered and passed to its appointed place so long ago? A few "facts," some "circumstances"—which, if we may believe the dictum of Mr. Baron Legge, cannot lie; and yet she remains for us dark and inscrutable as in her portrait, where she sits calmly in her cell, preparing her false Account for the misleading of future generations. Like her French "parallel," Marie-Madeleine de Brinvilliers, like that other Madeleine of Scottish fame, she leaves us but a catalogue of ambiguous ...
— Trial of Mary Blandy • William Roughead
... his Oriental face was inscrutable. The lad wondered what was lurking at the back of that strong brain. He was shrewd enough himself to know that it was not always the generals on the battlefield who best understood the condition of a state at war, and often the ...
— The Shades of the Wilderness • Joseph A. Altsheler
... open to praise or blame as it was forty-one years ago: is it necessary to search out what somebody or other,—not improbably a jealous adherent of Macready, 'the only organizer of theatrical victories', chose to say on the subject? If the characters are 'abhorrent' and 'inscrutable'—and the language conformable,—they were so when Dickens pronounced upon them, and will be so whenever the critic pleases to re-consider them—which, if he ever has an opportunity of doing, apart from the printed copy, I can assure you is through no motion of mine. ...
— Life and Letters of Robert Browning • Mrs. Sutherland Orr
... small, insignificant Irishman," so some one has described him. Is he small? I dare say he is, but one never notices it. One notices only the long face still further lengthened by a beard, the domed forehead, the bright eyes, very inscrutable usually, very sympathetic when he chooses to make them so; and when he speaks, a soft voice, quiet and even-toned but often indistinct. Not given to demonstrativeness, he appears the same under all conditions—silent when depressed, silent too ...
— Sir Robert Hart - The Romance of a Great Career, 2nd Edition • Juliet Bredon
... life, the one thing wonderful, to which he scarce clung with a finger. From his jarred nerves there came a strong sentiment of coming change; whether good or ill he could not say: change, he knew no more—change, with inscrutable veiled face, approaching noiseless. With the feeling, came the vision of a concert room, the rich hues of instruments, the silent audience, and the loud voice of the symphony. 'Destiny knocking at the door,' he thought; drew a stave on the plaster, ...
— The Ebb-Tide - A Trio And Quartette • Robert Louis Stevenson and Lloyd Osbourne
... communing with himself on board ship in the quietude of the night. It was because he was so terribly alone. This inscrutable man never felt more alone than when surrounded by his dogs. They were socially ...
— Peter and Wendy • James Matthew Barrie
... others they are necessary,—but the duties are all compulsive. When we marry, the choice is voluntary, but the duties are not matter of choice: they are dictated by the nature of the situation. Dark and inscrutable are the ways by which we come into the world. The instincts which give rise to this mysterious process of Nature are not of our making. But out of physical causes, unknown to us, perhaps unknowable, arise moral duties, which, ...
— The Works of the Right Honourable Edmund Burke, Vol. IV. (of 12) • Edmund Burke
... looks;—even her most extravagant suitor, in absence, could not dream an image of her so charming as he found herself when he saw her again. Thus, seeing Julia again was always a discovery. And this glance over her shoulder as she left a room—not a honeyed glance but rather inscrutable, yet implying that she thought of the occupant, and might continue to think of him while gone from him—this was one of those ways of hers that experience could never drill ...
— Gentle Julia • Booth Tarkington
... he sees the people smile and grows angry when they grow angry. Now and then appears an inscrutable genius who finds out what is brewing in their brains and brings it to a head. He is the epoch maker. Such an one was that little Corsican, who gave a stagnant pool the storm it needed, until he became overfed and ...
— The Last Shot • Frederick Palmer
... turning up in that unexpected way, though she could not have told herself when it would have been natural to expect him. This attitude, at Mellows, was left to the servants, most of them inscrutable and incommunicative and erect in a wisdom that was founded upon telegrams—you couldn't speak to the butler but he pulled one out of his pocket. It was a house of telegrams; they crossed each other a dozen times an hour, coming and ...
— A London Life; The Patagonia; The Liar; Mrs. Temperly • Henry James
... mouth and looked inscrutable. She was unwilling to divulge what had passed in the study, and Lettice's curiosity had ...
— The New Girl at St. Chad's - A Story of School Life • Angela Brazil
... not getting much comfort out of his friend, who was too much preoccupied to attend to what he was saying, and only mechanically assented at intervals to the proposition that it was an inscrutable dispensation that the will and the power should so seldom go together. He heard all Armine's fallen castles about chapels, schools, curates, and sisters, as in a dream, really not knowing whether they were or were not to be. And with all his desire to be useful, he never ...
— Magnum Bonum • Charlotte M. Yonge
... pinched, yet not pointed, showed scarcely any nostril, and might as well have been made of wood, for any meaning it betrayed. Her eyebrows were short, wide, rugged, and irregular, though very black; the cast-down eyes, of course, so far inscrutable. ...
— Sea and Shore - A Sequel to "Miriam's Memoirs" • Mrs. Catharine A. Warfield
... burning desire to be of use, and, like most embryo reformers, she had a poor taste in dress. She wore her tail at an aimless angle, without chic; her markings were all lopsided. But her soul was ardent, and her life was always directed by some rather inscrutable theory or other. As a puppy she had been an inspired optimist, with legs like strips of elastic clumsily attached to a winged spirit. Later she had adopted a vigorous anarchist policy, and had inaugurated what was probably known in her set as the "Bite at Sight ...
— This Is the End • Stella Benson
... with the thoughts that they are leaving their home and loved friends and neighbors, perhaps forever, their hearts filled with forebodings of danger and misfortune, cast only wakeful eyes upon the darkened plain or up to the inscrutable stars that are shining with marvelous brightness in the azure firmament. Far into the night they wake and watch, silently weeping until nature is exhausted, and a sleep, troubled ...
— Woman on the American Frontier • William Worthington Fowler
... James, who had finished stropping his claws and was now enjoying a friction massage against his leg, and began to brood on the inscrutable way ...
— Uneasy Money • P.G. Wodehouse
... represents with the countless aeons of animal and vegetable life which have preceded, and surround, and will in all probability succeed it—and not a word of all this from the Being who gave and supported their life, calling it out of the abyss for inscrutable and useless ends—to minister, as the theologians tell us, to the wants and animal ...
— Memoirs of Arthur Hamilton, B. A. Of Trinity College, Cambridge • Arthur Christopher Benson
... the airy speculations, of the new sectaries. The author of a celebrated dialogue, which has been attributed to Lucian, whilst he affects to treat the mysterious subject of the Trinity in a style of ridicule and contempt, betrays his own ignorance of the weakness of human reason, and of the inscrutable ...
— The History of The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire - Volume 2 • Edward Gibbon
... but in some way she made him understand that the porcupine was above all law, and not to be trifled with even by the lords of the wilderness. Very sulkily he lay down again, and the porcupine went on chiselling hemlock bark, serenely unconscious of the anger in the inscrutable yellow eyes that watched him ...
— The Watchers of the Trails - A Book of Animal Life • Charles G. D. Roberts
... last two months, Patrick's face seemed to have grown more waxen, worn a little finer, and now, as he sat quietly watching the slender figure on the opposite side of the hearth, it wore a curious, inscrutable expression, as though he were mentally balancing the pros and cons ...
— The Hermit of Far End • Margaret Pedler
... parquet on either side of it. Exactly along the central line of the carpet Nina tripped, languorously, like an automaton, and exactly over her head glittered the line of electric sparks. The corridor and the journey seemed to be interminable, and Nina on some inscrutable and mystic errand. At length she moved aside from the religious line, went into a service cabinet, and emerged with a small bunch of pass-keys. No. 107 was Lionel Belmont's sitting-room; No. 102, his bedroom, was ...
— Tales of the Five Towns • Arnold Bennett
... name of artistic writing; but every modification of the value of a word by the place it fills must be distinguished with extreme clearness. Give us fewer nouns, verbs, and adjectives, with almost inscrutable shades of meaning, and let us have a greater variety of phrases, more variously constructed, ingeniously divided, full of sonority and learned rhythm. Let us strive to be admirable in style, rather than curious ...
— The Works of Guy de Maupassant, Volume VIII. • Guy de Maupassant
... entertaining points in connection with spiders are their concentration of energy, their amazing rapidity of action, and their inscrutable methods ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 1082, September 26, 1896 • Various
... at will a Japanese liveliness of expression or become a mask of Indian gravity, surveyed the speaker with inscrutable eyes. ...
— The Strange Case of Mortimer Fenley • Louis Tracy
... soak the earth on that day—and the formidable artillery that had swept the plateau of Austerlitz, the vales of Marengo, the cemetery of Eylau, was rendered useless for the time being because up in the inscrutable kingdom of the sky a cloud had chosen to burst—or had burst by the will of God—and water soaked the soft, spongy soil of Belgium and the wheels of artillery wagons sank axle-deep in ...
— The Bronze Eagle - A Story of the Hundred Days • Emmuska Orczy, Baroness Orczy
... drawled the words, and he was suave and cool, and his face was inscrutable, but a bitterness in his tone gave the lie to all ...
— The Border Legion • Zane Grey
... its evil the scheme Was framed with omnipotent hand, Though the battle of men was a dream That they could but half understand. Can the purpose of God pass by him? Nay; it was sure, and was wrought Under inscrutable powers: Bravely the two armies fought And left the land, that was greater than they, ...
— Dreams and Days: Poems • George Parsons Lathrop
... diaphragm only, but of the whole man from head to heel. The present Editor, who laughed indeed, yet with measure, began to fear all was not right: however, Teufelsdroeckh composed himself, and sank into his old stillness; on his inscrutable countenance there was, if anything, a slight look of shame; and Richter himself could not rouse him again. Readers who have any tincture of Psychology know how much is to be inferred from this; and that no man who has once heartily and wholly laughed ...
— Sartor Resartus, and On Heroes, Hero-Worship, and the Heroic in History • Thomas Carlyle
... the interposition of night, or by the superposition of the paternal hickory, he would resume the meditation, next day, precisely where he left off, going on, and on, and on, in one profound and inscrutable think. It was a common remark in the neighbourhood that "If Tony Rollo didn't let up, he'd think his ridiculous white head off!" And on divers occasions when the old man's hickory had fallen upon that fleecy globe with unusual ardour, Tony really did ...
— Cobwebs From an Empty Skull • Ambrose Bierce (AKA: Dod Grile)
... feather, and I knew that the old turfite was right. The Ring is a close body, and I have only known about four men who ever managed to beat the confederacy in the long run. There is one astute, taciturn, inscrutable organizer whom the bookmakers dread a little, because he happens to use their own methods; he will scheme for a year or two if necessary until he succeeds in placing a horse advantageously, and he usually brings off his coup just at the time when ...
— The Ethics of Drink and Other Social Questions - Joints In Our Social Armour • James Runciman
... his side—as tall as he—and looked at him curiously. It was as though she were seeking to discover from his face how much his opinion of her had altered. But if so, she was disappointed. His face was inscrutable. ...
— The Survivor • E.Phillips Oppenheim
... immediately issued orders that every person of suspicious appearance should be watched more closely than ever, the night patrols were doubled, and spies were employed daily in procuring intelligence of Abellino; and yet all was in vain. Abellino's retreat was inscrutable. ...
— The Bravo of Venice - A Romance • M. G. Lewis
... more than ever struck by the old adage that the ways of Providence are inscrutable, and past finding the right berth. We had gone out to the back part of the car, and stood in our stocking feet on the cold zinc floor for a couple or three minutes, looking out upon the beautiful Michigan landscape and waterscape, as the train passed Michigan ...
— Peck's Sunshine - Being a Collection of Articles Written for Peck's Sun, - Milwaukee, Wis. - 1882 • George W. Peck
... laughed; laughed at our jealousy, our fears, our precautions, as she laughed at our hankering flame. Not a laugh that reassured us, though; an inscrutable, enigmatic laugh, that might have covered a multitude of sins. She had taken to calling us collectively Loulou. 'Ah, le pauv' Loulou—so now he has the pretension to be jealous.' Then she would be interrupted by a ...
— Grey Roses • Henry Harland
... were at once sent for, made a minute search, assisted by the peasants, but discovered nothing. In the same way, the examining-magistrates, after a close inquiry lasting for several days, found no clue capable of throwing the least light upon this inscrutable tragedy. On the contrary, the investigations only led to further ...
— The Confessions of Arsene Lupin • Maurice Leblanc
... whole body slightly sidewise, the better to face him. The soft silk fell in new lines about her, defining new curves. Her red lips smiled softly, and her eyes were dark and inscrutable. ...
— The Leopard Woman • Stewart Edward White et al
... Canada's development and not speak of Mr. Mackenzie and Mr. Mann would be as difficult as Mr. Dick's efforts to tell his story without mentioning the unfortunate Charles I. William Mackenzie is the Cecil Rhodes of Canada—gentle, kindly, almost retiring in his manner, and with a glance as inscrutable as the sea. Beginning as a school-teacher, he early threw aside the ferule and the chalk, to get into the world of action. In his time he has built shacks, kept a country store, and run a saw-mill. Three things come ...
— The New North • Agnes Deans Cameron
... all that are born of women. The difference of circumstance is merely costume. I am tasting the self-same life,—its sweetness, its greatness, its pain, which I so admire in other men. Do not foolishly ask of the inscrutable, obliterated past what it cannot tell,—the details of that nature, of that day, called Byron or Burke;—but ask it of the enveloping Now. . . . Be lord of a day, and you can put up your ...
— Memories and Studies • William James
... her, as, with the points of a stiff, sharp pair of scissors, she picked out holes for some inscrutable ornamental purpose, in a piece of cambric. An operation which, taken in connexion with the bushy eyebrows and the Roman nose, suggested with some liveliness the idea of a hawk engaged upon the eyes of a tough little ...
— Hard Times • Charles Dickens*
... the Inscrutable could Anglesea ever have been tempted to marry such a woman? Was he drunk, I wonder?" whispered Abel Force to ...
— Her Mother's Secret • Emma D. E. N. Southworth
... way to Kew, By the river old and gray, Where in the Long Ago We laughed and loitered so, I met a ghost to-day, A ghost that told of you - A ghost of low replies And sweet, inscrutable eyes Coming up from Richmond ...
— Poems by William Ernest Henley • William Ernest Henley
... Colonel John Hamilton; the batteries did good service as cavalry in the summers of 1869 and 1870; and all was working, as I thought, in a highly satisfactory manner so long as I remained in command of that department. But after I went to California, for some inscrutable reason the school was broken up and the batteries ...
— Forty-Six Years in the Army • John M. Schofield
... ought to follow faith, and not precede it nor impair it. For faith and love excel here most of all, and work in hidden ways in, this most holy and transcendent sacrament. The eternal and immeasurable God of infinite power does great and inscrutable things in heaven and in earth, and there is no finding out of His wonderful works. If the works of God were such that they could easily be seized by human reason, they would not deserve to be called ...
— The Worlds Greatest Books, Volume XIII. - Religion and Philosophy • Various |
