LIFELESSLY • DICTIONARY ONE.COM • Definition of Lifelessly

... popular fiction did, indeed, enjoy larger single successes than Bulwer-Lytton did, but none of them, not Dickens himself, was so uniformly successful. Everything he wrote sold as though it were bread displayed to a hungry crowd. Even his poetry, so laboriously and lifelessly second-hand, always sold. He did not know what failure was; he made money by Devereux; even The New Timon went into many editions. To earn what was required, however—and in these early years he seems to have made L3000 his minimum of needful return—to live in the insane style which ...

— Some Diversions of a Man of Letters • Edmund William Gosse

... talk. I knew M'ma would be angry, but it just seemed as if I couldn't think of it then. And we talked of the things we liked, you know, the sort of house we both liked—not like other people's houses!" Charlotte's plain young face had grown bright with the recollection, but now her voice sank lifelessly again. "But M'ma made me promise never to speak to him again, and of course I ...

— The Heart of Rachael • Kathleen Norris