|
|
|
More "Banter" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... the door of the railway carriage until the last minute; she sent all manner of absurd messages, to the Great Horatio; she told Christine to be sure, to give him her love; she kept up a running fire of chaff and banter till the train started away, and a pompous guard told her to "Stand back, there!" and presently the last glimpse of Christine's pale little face and Jimmy's worried eyes had been swallowed up in the darkness ...
— The Second Honeymoon • Ruby M. Ayres
... show your liking by your knowledge. I thought every schoolboy knew the cuckoo-flower!" cried Adelaide, trying to seem natural and not bitter in her banter, ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, April, 1876. • Various
... English musicians, her banter about the provincial festivals had stung him. The word "provincial" rankled. If it applied to him, to his talent! If he were merely provincial and destined to remain so because of his ...
— The Way of Ambition • Robert Hichens
... said, with a kindly air of banter, "that the sight of Lilla Monti more than compensates you for that portion of the Neapolitan carnival which you lose by being here. But why you should wish me to behold this paragon of maidens I know not, unless you would have me ...
— Vendetta - A Story of One Forgotten • Marie Corelli
... Gentiles alike, used to poke fun at me over Mrs. Beaudesart; but the fact that they thought they knew my real standing, whereas they did n't, seemed to weigh so much in my favour as to make their banter anything but provoking. Yet my relations with the gentlewoman were painful enough. I'll tell you ...
— Such is Life • Joseph Furphy
... top hat or a morning suit in Monte Carlo," she said, furious at his banter. "Let us talk about somebody ...
— The Angel of Terror • Edgar Wallace
... ceased to joke and banter. The situation was serious. Some tried to smoke, but their parching thirst was thus only ...
— The Mintage • Elbert Hubbard
... her last adventure, which gave me endless opportunities to banter her, one would have thought I might have been on my guard as to what her real intentions were; but she managed to mislead me with an art of dissimulation quite admirable, and lulled me into a fatal security with regard to her intentions: for, one day, as I was joking ...
— Barry Lyndon • William Makepeace Thackeray
... Harry Blossom's banter came to a sudden ending, for, as red in the face as his brother, Dick Rover reached forward and thrust a banana he was eating into the tormenter's half open mouth. Harry gulped once or twice, then the fruit disappeared as ...
— The Rover Boys out West • Arthur M. Winfield
... But when, as if giving up the riddle in her dancing eyes and seemingly mocking smile, he appears about to lead her back into the ballroom, there is, at least so I like to read the music, a pretty little laugh, as much as to say, "Can't you read my real feelings under my mask of banter," a tender glance indicated by a retard on a charmingly expressive little turn of the melody—and she is ...
— The Pianolist - A Guide for Pianola Players • Gustav Kobb
... friends said, he was not inclined to pour out unmixed wine to those who asked for a sample out of mere curiosity. At length, in the epilogue to the "Romanzero," dated 1851, there appeared, amid much mystifying banter, a declaration that he had embraced Theism and the belief in a future life, and what chiefly lent an air of seriousness and reliability to this affirmation was the fact that he took care to accompany it with ...
— The Essays of "George Eliot" - Complete • George Eliot
... Libertines display at some Times, are inconsistent with the Ignorance, Folly and Stupidity they shew at others. It is impossible that Men of Parts, and the least Spirit, how much soever they were in the Wrong, could see themselves defeated, banter'd and exposed with so much Tranquility and Chearfulness; and I can't conceive how any, but egregious Coxcombs, without Sense of Shame, could behave as Alciphron and Lysicles do throughout your ...
— A Letter to Dion • Bernard Mandeville
... makes his main attacks on my logic and metaphysics. He says, that in writing his first book, he knew no characteristics of me, except that I was "a gentleman, a scholar, and a very indifferent metaphysician" At the risk of encountering yet more of banter and insult, I shall here quote what the third "Prospective Reviewer" says on this topic. (Vol. ...
— Phases of Faith - Passages from the History of My Creed • Francis William Newman
... drill. 'There never was a more awkward squad,' was his opinion, 'not a man, or even officer, of the party knew how to put a gun to his eye or had ever fired a shot.' A prominent figure on the Edward and Ann was a careless-hearted cleric, whose wit and banter were in evidence throughout the voyage. This was the Reverend Father Burke, an Irish priest. He had stolen away without the leave of his bishop, and it appears that he and Macdonell, {45} although of the same faith, were not ...
— The Red River Colony - A Chronicle of the Beginnings of Manitoba • Louis Aubrey Wood
... disappeared. Nana walked ahead, very stiff and still stupefied by her bad luck. Whenever she showed the lest unwillingness, a cuff from behind brought her back to the direction of the door. And thus they went out, all three of them, amid the jeers and banter of the spectators, whilst the orchestra finished playing the finale with such thunder that the trombones seemed to ...
— L'Assommoir • Emile Zola
... a little in that moment since Steve's eyes had left her face. Now she forgot her confusion—forgot to be annoyed, even at her father's clumsy banter. ...
— Then I'll Come Back to You • Larry Evans
... with a glad-hearted company flinging words of joyful banter across very tall steins. It is good to draw up to a country table at Christmas time with turkey and pumpkin-pies and old-fashioned puddings before you, and the ones you love about you. I have been deeply happy ...
— The River and I • John G. Neihardt
... new-found friends, unheeding for some moments their loose remarks and familiar banter. At length he shook off his abstraction, and surrendering himself to the coarse humours of his companions, soon eclipsed them all by the gusto of his slang and the mocking profligacy of his sentiments; for here he no longer played a part, or suppressed ...
— Lucretia, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... you were, Mr. Morrissy." There was a dangerous flush on Ben's cheeks, but the smoke was so dense that Morrissy failed to observe it. The men laughed again, accepting Ben's retort as a piece of banter. Ben went on doggedly: "I have in my pocket a permit to tear down the shops. Bennington gave it to me to produce. Look at it, if you doubt my word. There ...
— Half a Rogue • Harold MacGrath
... the stomach; he noticed his mistake, was greatly confused, turned red as a lobster, and hid both his hands in the same pocket of his dress coat. He advanced as if running the gauntlet, amid whispers and banter, feeling as ashamed of his dress coat as of a dishonourable deed; at last he met the eyes of Maciek, ...
— Pan Tadeusz • Adam Mickiewicz
... as, more or less depressed in their own proper environment, on excursions suddenly see themselves in their true light, irresistibly facetious. These funny gentlemen, mostly husbands, seated themselves near to large groups of indulgent women and kept up an exquisite banter directed at each other's personal defects, or upon the idiosyncrasies of any bachelor or spinster near. These funny gentlemen kept alluding to the excursion as the "Exertion." If the boat rolled a little they said, "Now, Mother, don't ...
— The Best Short Stories of 1917 - and the Yearbook of the American Short Story • Various
... become accustomed to the ceaseless banter of Burley's two comrades—a banter entirely American, and which at first she was unable to understand. But now all things American, including accent and odd, perverted humour, had become very dear to her. The clink-clank of the muleteer's big spurs always set her heart beating; the ...
— Barbarians • Robert W. Chambers
... not to appear annoyed by Lagardere's banter, which, indeed, in its simplicity vexed their simple natures greatly, the page rose to his feet and whispered softly to his rescuer, "I have a letter for you from ...
— The Duke's Motto - A Melodrama • Justin Huntly McCarthy
... other traditional paraphernalia of the Norwegian student. That great day had now come; Arnfinn sat at Inga's side playing with her white fingers, which lay resting on his knee, and covering the depth of his feeling with harmless banter about her "amusingly unclassical little nose." He had once detected her, when a child, standing before a mirror, and pinching this unhappy feature in the middle, in the hope of making it "like Augusta's;" and since then ...
— Tales From Two Hemispheres • Hjalmar Hjorth Boyesen
... expose it in all its inanity." (9/12.) By no means the least original feature of his work is this passionate and incisive argument, in which, with a remarkable power of dialectic, and at times in a tone of lively banter, he endeavoured to remove "this comfortable pillow from those who have not the courage to inquire into its fundamental nature." He attacked these "adventurous syntheses, these superb and supposedly philosophic deductions," all the more eagerly ...
— Fabre, Poet of Science • Dr. G.V. (C.V.) Legros
... spirit of banter the playwright and the star were left alone with the manuscript of the play. As he read on, Douglass was carried out of his own impassivity by the changes in the face before him. It became once more elusive, duskily mysterious in its lines. A reflective ...
— The Light of the Star - A Novel • Hamlin Garland
... 3d Bolingbroke wrote a letter to Dean Swift, in which he says, "The Earl of Oxford was removed on Tuesday; the Queen died on Sunday. What a world this is, and how does fortune banter us!" In other {48} words, Bolingbroke tells Swift that full success seemed within his grasp on Tuesday, and was suddenly torn away from him on Sunday. But the most characteristic part of the letter is a passage ...
— A History of the Four Georges, Volume I (of 4) • Justin McCarthy
... infinite spark on the floor before him, very depressed, he looked, and quite drunk—but Edith each time had averted her glance hurriedly. All that seemed long ago; her mind was passive now, her senses were lulled to trance-like sleep; only her feet danced and her voice talked on in hazy sentimental banter. ...
— Tales of the Jazz Age • F. Scott Fitzgerald
... the same tone of banter: "Knowing that you, fair lady, are ever thinking of me, and that my name is ever upon your fair lips in prayer, will spur me to renewed effort, for surely no cavalier ever had a more lovely mistress or a ...
— Quincy Adams Sawyer and Mason's Corner Folks - A Picture of New England Home Life • Charles Felton Pidgin
... learnt from him in some parts. The audience was not a pleasant one to face. It was the First Consul's habit to invite forty persons to dinner, and a hundred and fifty for the evening, and consequently to hear, criticise, and banter us without mercy" (Memoirs of Duchesse d'Abrantes, tome ...
— The Memoirs of Napoleon Bonaparte • Bourrienne, Constant, and Stewarton
... amusing incidents which beguile the tedium of the journey. Also they often lead to your picking up chance acquaintances. I have known one stone placed in a dimly lighted corridor of a train productive of much merriment and harmless banter. Being of considerable weight they do not readily respond to a playful kick, but having no sharp corners they are seldom responsible for serious ...
— Punch, Or The London Charivari, Vol. 146., January 21, 1914 • Various
... most "civilized" undertook to banter me on my non-appearance in the classic regions of Barnwell.—Bristed's Five Years in an Eng. Univ., ...
— A Collection of College Words and Customs • Benjamin Homer Hall
... and began to banter her. The gentleman who was sent to try the slipper looked earnestly at Cinderella, and, finding her very ...
— Boys and Girls Bookshelf (Vol 2 of 17) - Folk-Lore, Fables, And Fairy Tales • Various
... friends could not be surprised at his welcoming the English alliance when they had once done nothing but tax him with Anglomania, and had given him the nickname of Milord Risorgimento. He could easily have aroused enthusiasm if, instead of this banter, he had spoken the words of passionate earnestness in which he alluded to his part in the transaction in a letter to Mme. de Circourt. He felt, he said, the tremendous responsibility which weighed on him, and the dangers which might arise from the course adopted, but duty ...
— Cavour • Countess Evelyn Martinengo-Cesaresco
... not very often, he seems to have let spleen take the place of honest surliness, and so drifted into clumsy and ill-humoured banter, of a sort that gives a dreary shudder to one fresh from Voltaire. "So you have chosen for yourself a tender and virtuous mistress! I am not surprised; all mistresses are that. You have chosen her in Paris! To find ...
— Rousseau - Volumes I. and II. • John Morley
... with a humorous attitude toward the preacher or a quizzical treatment of his flock. He had not yet pardoned her "ways" along Main Street, on the occasion of one or two shopping excursions. She had not hesitated to banter the admiring young clerks that held their places behind those shop-fronts of galvanized iron in simulation of red brick and of cut limestone, and she had been startlingly free in her accosting of several ...
— Under the Skylights • Henry Blake Fuller
... sorry to say," answered the Vicar, accustomed to parry Mr. Toller's banter about his belief in the new medical light. "I am out of the way and he is ...
— Middlemarch • George Eliot
... laughing at him. S—— protested and explained that such would be the very last thing we should ever think of doing. The officer went on ahead quite unconvinced and in high dudgeon. That we should select one of the myrmidons of the All-Highest as a target for our banter was the offence of offences in his estimable conceit. When we reached the entrance to the field we had to pass a small office in which we were registered and we discovered the immature upstart loudly and excitedly dwelling upon the enormous indignity to which ...
— Sixteen Months in Four German Prisons - Wesel, Sennelager, Klingelputz, Ruhleben • Henry Charles Mahoney
... own hurried and unfinished declaration. It was true that he hadn't said half what he intended to say; it was true that she might have misunderstood it as the conventional gallantry of the situation, as—terrible thought!—the light banter of the habitual love-making American, to which she had been accustomed; perhaps even now she relegated him to the level of Greyson, and this accounted for her singular impassiveness—an impassiveness that certainly was singular now he reflected upon it—that might have been even contempt. ...
— A Phyllis of the Sierras • Bret Harte
... his path crossed people over whom he could not ride rough-shod. Generally she had accepted his classification of those who opposed him strongly as "blamed idiots"; sometimes with a little of her laughing banter, but usually, his superiority standing out sharp and clear when opposed to the dull Canaanites, endorsing his opinion. "I sort of wish," he went on, with that keen, wire-edged exasperation still sawing in his voice, "that you wouldn't have much to do with that chap. He isn't my kind of people. ...
— Sally of Missouri • R. E. Young
... sisters as well as by her Northern partners. The Old North State derided the pretensions of the commonwealths that flanked her on either side, and Georgia was not slow to give South Carolina as good as she sent. All this seemed to be harmless banter, but the rivalry was old enough and strong enough to encourage the hopes of the Union leaders that the Confederacy would split along state lines. The cohesive power of the Revolutionary war was not sufficiently strong to make the States sink their contributions ...
— The Creed of the Old South 1865-1915 • Basil L. Gildersleeve
... many pounds of cotton a certain man or woman was likely to pick within the working hours of a day, and he marked the clean and the trashy pickers; and the play of his two-colored temperament was seen in his jovial banter of the one and his harsh reprimand of the other. But to-day a hired man stood at the scales to see the cotton weighed. The Major walked abroad throughout the fields. As he drew near, the negroes hushed their songs and their swaggering talk. They bowed respectfully to him and to ...
— An Arkansas Planter • Opie Percival Read
... comedians asked many questions about his first experiences in Paris, and inquired mischievously whether he had brought his cloak, his purse, and his handkerchief home with him, to which de Sigognac joyfully answered in the affirmative. In this friendly banter he soon forgot his sombre thoughts, and asked himself whether he had not been the dupe of a hypochondriac fancy, which could see nothing anywhere but ...
— Captain Fracasse • Theophile Gautier
... thought this an exquisite piece of banter, for by the corner of his mouth I saw that ...
— The Caxtons, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... the peculiar style of banter to which he was sure to be subjected, whenever he went into company; and in a short time he abstained from visits, and devoted his time to perfecting himself in his nautical studies, and making diligent inquiries after vessels bound round Cape Horn. If ever you noticed ...
— An Old Sailor's Yarns • Nathaniel Ames
... heartily, and all the more because, as the thing often happened, I ought to have been on my guard; but never was, and was vexed both at the joke and at being surprised; then he returned to business. But princes must sometimes banter and amuse themselves with those whom they treat as friends. Nevertheless, in spite of his occasional banter, he entertained really sincere esteem and ...
— Marguerite de Navarre - Memoirs of Marguerite de Valois Queen of Navarre • Marguerite de Navarre
... badinage was witty and amusing in the extreme. Indeed, Mrs. Plumridge and I couldn't help laughing; but poor Squire Haycock's embarrassment was so intense that he ordered his carriage immediately, and took leave, venturing, however, at the very last, to shake me by the hand, and braving once again the banter of the inebriated Baronet. ...
— Kate Coventry - An Autobiography • G. J. Whyte-Melville
... difference of their ages was like another bond between them. Once, when twitted with the uncharitableness of his youth, Mr. Van Wyk, running his eye over the vast proportions of his interlocutor, retorted in friendly banter— ...
— End of the Tether • Joseph Conrad
... results. He was glad that Oliver had been found worthy enough to be admitted to such a circle. He loved, too, to hear his son's voice and watch the impression his words made on the room. As the evening wore on, and he listened to his banter, or caught the point of the jests that Oliver parried and heard his merry laugh, he would slip his hand under the table and pat his boy's knee with loving taps of admiration, prouder of him than ever. His own pleasures so absorbed him that he continued to sit almost silent, except ...
— The Fortunes of Oliver Horn • F. Hopkinson Smith
... in which the woman said this left no doubt in the man's mind of her meaning. She was not trifling with him now, he knew. In her low-voiced words he found no trace of banter, of sophistry, nor of aught that he might ...
— Carmen Ariza • Charles Francis Stocking
... interesting event in Haydn's career. In the course of some banter at the house of Rogers, Campbell the poet once remarked that marriage in nine cases out of ten looks like madness. Haydn's case was not the tenth. His salary from Count Morzin was only 20 pounds with board and lodging; he was ...
— Haydn • J. Cuthbert Hadden
... two worlds that met that day - The world of work and the world of play; And the grimy lads from the reeking shaft Nudged each other and grinned and chaffed. 'Got 'em all out!' 'A cousin of mine!' So ran the banter ...
— Songs of Action • Arthur Conan Doyle
... utilized to fight the battle of freedom of conscience in the matter of the observances of external religion. The Rehearsal Transposed, Mr. Smirke, or the Divine in Mode, and his Political Satires are masterpieces of lofty indignation mingled with grave and ironical banter. Among many others Edmund Waller showed himself an apt disciple of Horace, and produced charming social satires marked by delicate wit and raillery in the true Horatian mode; while the Duke of Buckingham, in the Rehearsal, utilized the dramatic parody to travesty the plays of Dryden. Abraham ...
— English Satires • Various
... men, the mothers and older women rather stiff, and usually hampered by at least one child, which they carry on their backs or on their hips, while another holds on to the garment which replaces our skirts. There is plenty of laughter and banter with the men, who look on unmoved at the efforts of the weaker sex, only rarely offering ...
— Two Years with the Natives in the Western Pacific • Felix Speiser
... filled with finely cut gold or silver paper, or perfumes, broken on head of young man, in friendly banter or challenge ...
— A Truthful Woman in Southern California • Kate Sanborn
... Versailles was at that very moment labouring to counteract Pitt's diplomatists. But though Fox censured the French treaty, which formed the leading topic of the king's speech, he voted for the address, a circumstance for which he received a little banter from the lips of the minister. Pitt remarked:—"I am happy that, notwithstanding the vehemence with which the right honourable gentleman has argued against the address, he is ready to vote for it. ...
— The History of England in Three Volumes, Vol.III. - From George III. to Victoria • E. Farr and E. H. Nolan
... my chap, you looks as if ye didn't much mind what come t'yer nose, I reckon. You looks an old poacher, you do. Tall ye what 'tis'!" He changed his banter to business, "That bird's mine! Now you jest hand him over, and sheer off, you dam young scoundrels! I know ye!" And he became exceedingly opprobrious, and uttered contempt of the ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... day, rascal, do you banter me? Sirrah, d'ye banter me? Speak, sirrah, where is he? for ...
— Love for Love • William Congreve
... daughter with a little quizzical sadness in his faded gray eyes. He began to perceive the drift of her banter. ...
— Flint - His Faults, His Friendships and His Fortunes • Maud Wilder Goodwin
... paper, in the New Monthly Magazine, is by no means novel; but the fine, cutting satire—the pleasant, lively banter on our vices and follies—which pervades every page of the article, is a set-off to the political frenzy and the literary lumber of other Magazines of the month. Each of them, it is true, has a readable paper, but one gem only contributes ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction - Vol. 19, Issue 529, January 14, 1832 • Various
... detect how much of conviction and how much of banter there was in his treatment of men engaged in the actual intellectual movement of our times. I found such to be the case in my own intercourse with him. He always attacked me in a bantering way, but, I thought, half in earnest too. Hence I never ...
— Life of Father Hecker • Walter Elliott
... drooping heads, aggrieved at being taken from the stable at this unwonted hour. In the pale-blue, kindly, woods-wise eyes of both the man and the boy shone the light of happy anticipation. They seemed too occupied and excited to make much response to the good-natured banter of their comrades, but grinned contentedly as they hastened their preparations for departure. The man was Steve Williams, best axe-man and stream-driver in the camp; the boy, young Steve, his eldest son, who was serving as "cookee," or assistant to the camp cook. The ...
— The Watchers of the Trails - A Book of Animal Life • Charles G. D. Roberts
... any courtier who fears God's anger more than the displeasure of his master. A pension, a title, a ribbon, are sufficient to make one forget the torments of hell and the pleasures of the celestial court. A woman's caresses expose him every day to the displeasure of the Most High. A joke, a banter, a bon-mot, make more impression upon the man of the world than all the grave notions of his religion. Are we not assured that a true repentance is sufficient to appease Divinity? However, we do not see that this ...
— Superstition In All Ages (1732) - Common Sense • Jean Meslier
... was like the tip of a rapier, searching him through for some iota of seriousness under this banter. ...
— Gunman's Reckoning • Max Brand
... replied, and there was a little tinge of banter, if not of sarcasm, as well as a good deal of seriousness in her voice: "And suppose, in one of the Indian villages through which you might pass, a sun or ghost dance, or even the ceremony of the devil worship or dog feast might be going on, who knows but you might be persuaded to ...
— Oowikapun - How the Gospel Reached the Nelson River Indians • Egerton Ryerson Young
... began again upon a vein of foolish banter, for the amusement of the Sheriff and his guests, all being now ...
— Robin Hood • J. Walker McSpadden
... reluctant farewell; and being entirely loyal to her own husband, she felt not the slightest jealousy of Vera Farlow; in fact, as she went upstairs that evening she was wondering whether it might not be possible to turn the scheme, which she had once propounded more or less in a spirit of banter, into an accomplished fact. It would be a good thing for Jimmy, a good thing for Vera, and, perhaps most important of all, it would annoy May Marlow and Mrs. Fenton intensely. Ethel went to bed to dream ...
— People of Position • Stanley Portal Hyatt
... ceremonys, this night being the eve of Christmas, at the Queen's chapel. But it being not begun I to Westminster Hall, and there staid and walked, and then to the Swan, and there drank and talked, and did banter a little Frank, and so to White Hall, and sent my coach round, I through the Park to chapel, where I got in up almost to the rail, and with a great deal of patience staid from nine at night to two in the morning, in a very great ...
— Diary of Samuel Pepys, Complete • Samuel Pepys
... a good humour, and when Dirk Stroeve came up and sat down with us he attacked him with ferocious banter. He showed a skill I should never have credited him with in finding the places where the unhappy Dutchman was most sensitive. Strickland employed not the rapier of sarcasm but the bludgeon of invective. The attack was so unprovoked that Stroeve, ...
— The Moon and Sixpence • W. Somerset Maugham
... bitterness, under the shock of what Fleeming would so sensitively feel - the death of a whole family of children. Yet it was gone upon like a holiday jaunt. I read in Colonel Fergusson's letter that his schoolmates bantered him when he began to broach his scheme; so did I at first, and he took the banter as he always did with enjoyment, until he suddenly posed me with the question: 'And now do you see any other jokes to make? Well, then,' said he, 'that's all right. I wanted you to have your fun out first; now we can be serious.' And then with ...
— Memoir of Fleeming Jenkin • Robert Louis Stevenson
... it, passed it to Irene. The latter ought to have realized it was not her own property, but unfortunately didn't. She calmly appropriated the bunch, and distributed it in portions to those nearest her. Peachy's cheeks flamed. She was a hot-tempered little soul underneath her gay banter. ...
— The Jolliest School of All • Angela Brazil
... had difficulty in keeping their buggy in sight. Sometimes Bartley stopped long enough for them to come up, and then, after a word or two of gay banter, was off again. ...
— A Modern Instance • William Dean Howells
... interfere with their privilege of becoming boys. So I suppose we must attribute it to something or other in human nature. Meanwhile, there stands the new-comer, surrounded by a circle of his new associates, who forthwith proceed to frighten, and to banter, and to make a fool of him, to the extent of their wit. Some address him with mock politeness, others with fierceness; and so they conduct him in solemn procession across the Agora to the Baths; and as they approach, they dance about him like madmen. But this was to be the end of his trial, ...
— Harvard Classics Volume 28 - Essays English and American • Various
... days?' said Robert, more than half inclined to banter his wife. Then he fell into meditation as Catherine made no answer. 'I believe with men of that sort,' he said at last, 'relations to women are never more than half-real—always more or less literature—acting. Langham is tasting an experience, to be bottled ...
— Robert Elsmere • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... say," replied Maud; but though it was couched in a tone of banter, the smile that accompanied this pertinent remark seemed to ...
— M. or N. "Similia similibus curantur." • G.J. Whyte-Melville
... of her the eyes of the old woman moistened and grew dimmer than age had made them; she smiled still, but the smile had the sweetness of a blessing in it, and no longer the kindly banter of humour. "You love him, my little one?" she said, in ...
— Stories By English Authors: France • Various
... banter in Rosco's manner, yet this was associated with an air and tone of such calm decision that the mate felt curiously uncomfortable. He obeyed orders, however, promptly, and stood with a pistol in each hand. It must have been a tantalising position, for, had they been cocked, he could have blown ...
— The Madman and the Pirate • R.M. Ballantyne
... every one said it is a present from the justice, and the marriage is already agreed upon. Marietta solemnly declared to all her companions that she would rather plunge to the bottom of the sea than marry the justice, but the maidens continued to banter her all the more, saying: "Oh, how blissful it must be to repose in the shadow of his nose!" ...
— The Broken Cup - 1891 • Johann Heinrich Daniel Zschokke
... answered me, ignoring the criticisms of the others as to his marksmanship and hunting prowess. All that day and all the next the men let no opportunity pass to guy Pete about his lost caribou, and on the whole he took the banter very good-naturedly, but once confided to me that "if those boys get up early, maybe they see caribou too and try how much ...
— The Long Labrador Trail • Dillon Wallace
... frequently he was filled with a desire to stand outside the red-and-white striped walls of the tent-house and listen unseen. Inside there was always cheer: at night the crackle of fire and the glow of light, the happy laughter of the gentle-hearted Scotchwoman, and the affectionate banter of her "big mountain man," who looked more like a brigand than the luckiest and most contented husband in the mountains—the luckiest, quite surely, with the one exception of his brother Clossen, who had, by some occult strategy or other, induced a sweet-faced and aristocratic ...
— The Hunted Woman • James Oliver Curwood
... the next morning there was a little banter on the subject of painting. Could not the distinguished painter remain over one day and give his hosts ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great, Volume 4 (of 14) - Little Journeys to the Homes of Eminent Painters • Elbert Hubbard
... replied Palmer, in the same grave tone, which might have passed for banter, had Jack ever bantered. "I'll maintain and prove it. I don't see how he can be otherwise. It is as necessary for a man to be a gentleman before he can turn highwayman, as it is for a doctor to have his diploma, ...
— Rookwood • William Harrison Ainsworth
... family of children. Yet it was gone upon like a holiday jaunt. I read in Colonel Fergusson's letter that his schoolmates bantered him when he began to broach his scheme; so did I at first, and he took the banter, as he always did, with enjoyment, until he suddenly posed me with the question: "And now do you see any other jokes to make? Well, then," said he, "that's all right. I wanted you to have your fun out first; now we can be serious." And then with a glowing ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson, Volume 9 • Robert Louis Stevenson
... as thine To stir my brain a bit. When 'round this hearth of mine Friends sit and banter wit, She'll shape a well-turned phrase, a subtle jest ...
— Pipe and Pouch - The Smoker's Own Book of Poetry • Various
... he may have had of passing unobserved. She was glad of the opportunity to show the company that she was on familiar terms with a man so well known, and she had on her tongue what she regarded as a piece of banter quite in keeping with his ...
— Unleavened Bread • Robert Grant
... very cruel in him, but he deliberately took her chin in his hands, and gently but firmly turned her face up to his. Then, as he kissed the shamed eyes and furiously blushing cheeks, he dropped the tone of banter and said, with moist eyes, in a voice of ...
— A Love Story Reversed - 1898 • Edward Bellamy
... hand slowly round his wrist, and I noticed that Juggroo immediately changed the subject. This, as I afterwards learned, is the invariable Nepaulese custom of showing anger. They grasp the wrist as I have said, and it is taken as a sign that, if you do not discontinue your banter, ...
— Sport and Work on the Nepaul Frontier - Twelve Years Sporting Reminiscences of an Indigo Planter • James Inglis
... surpassing ability. The cross-examination of a foreign artist, employed by the Duke to repaint some portraits of the Cornaro family by Titian, is said to have been one of the finest things on record. The sly and pungent humour, and the banter with which the counsel derided and laughed down this witness, were inimitable. The printer won his case; but he eventually consented to remove his steam presses from the neighbourhood, on the Duke paying him a certain sum to be determined by ...
— Men of Invention and Industry • Samuel Smiles
... all fools is the one that is afraid to take a dare; and the Twins were—well, let us say they were not yet wide enough awake to know what they were doing. At any rate, they could not stand the banter of B.J., and had soon joined him ...
— The Dozen from Lakerim • Rupert Hughes
... folk. Since the day of its foundation by Chalkidian colonists, its inhabitants had preserved their Hellenic traditions intact. The vintage, for example, was celebrated with an extravagance of obscene banter, which scandalized Philip II.'s viceroy in the sixteenth century.[85] During the period of Bruno's novitiate, the ordinances of the Council of Trent for discipline in monasteries were not yet in operation; and it is probable that throughout ...
— Renaissance in Italy, Volumes 1 and 2 - The Catholic Reaction • John Addington Symonds
... by the feel of the snow. The tingling air was filled with familiar man-sounds—the resonant stroke of axes, and the long crash of falling trees, the metallic rattle of chains, the harsh rasp of saws, and the good-natured calls of men in rude banter; sounds that rang little and thin through the mighty silence ...
— The Promise - A Tale of the Great Northwest • James B. Hendryx
... narrative of the frenzy of Mr. John Dennis," published in the Miscellanies of Pope, Swift, and Arbuthnot, and said to have been written by Pope, is a grave banter on his usual violence. It professes to be the account of the physician who attended him at the request of a servant, who describes the first attack of his madness coming on when "a poor simple child came to him from the printers; the boy had no sooner entered ...
— Calamities and Quarrels of Authors • Isaac D'Israeli
... changed the key with his last words; to that point I declare the whole passage might have gone for banter before the keenest eyes and the sharpest ears in Europe. I alone could know what a duel the two men were fighting behind their smiles. I alone could follow the finer shades, the mutual play of glance and gesture, the subtle tide of covert ...
— Mr. Justice Raffles • E. W. Hornung
... the sight of Austin and Viviette moving as familiars in a joyous world as remote from him as Neptune. Mrs. Ware kept Katherine Holroyd engaged in mild talk of cooks and curates, while the other two maintained their baffling conversation, half banter, half serious, on a bewildering number of topics, and poor Dick remained as dumb as the fish and cutlets he was eating. He sat at the head of the table, Mrs. Ware at the foot. On his right hand sat Katherine Holroyd, on his left Viviette, and between her and his mother was Austin. ...
— Viviette • William J. Locke
... insist I must keep, as conclusion, And which, you'll at once see, is Mr. Magan's;—a Most cruel and dark-designed extravaganza, And part of that plot in which he and my Aunt are To stifle the flights of my genius by banter. ...
— The Complete Poems of Sir Thomas Moore • Thomas Moore et al
... you. I'm a plain man, as you know, Polly, and my dinner isn't such a big affair as yours, by a long way. And I'm not thirsty either, so I'll leave Mark to drink his wine in peace and come along with you into the drawing-room—or salon, is it you call it?' he added, with good-humoured banter. ...
— Sarah's School Friend • May Baldwin
... not as yet told his love to Vaura, a great dread mastering him lest he had not won her love, for her merry banter and kind sisterly manner led him to fear her heart, that he coveted beyond all that earth could give, was not for him, but he told himself he must speak, and that soon, for longer suspense was more than he could endure; he hoped that her sympathetic nature might tell in his favour, ...
— A Heart-Song of To-day • Annie Gregg Savigny
... in the printed work. Dr. Grainger, or some of his friends, it should seem, having become sensible that introducing even Rats in a grave poem, might be liable to banter. He, however, could not bring himself to relinquish the idea; for they are thus, in a still more ludicrous manner, periphrastically exhibited in his poem ...
— Life Of Johnson, Vol. 2 • Boswell, Edited by Birkbeck Hill
... first sight, in the juxtaposition, like farce after tragedy; and indeed, in many parts of his poem, he is not only what he seems, but follows his saturnine countryman with a peculiar propriety of contrast, much of his liveliest banter being directed against the absurdities of Dante's theology. But hasty and most erroneous would be the conclusion that he was nothing but a banterar. He was a true poet of the mixed order, grave as well as gay; had a reflecting mind, a susceptible ...
— Stories from the Italian Poets: With Lives of the Writers, Volume 1 • Leigh Hunt
... and strawberry-less to the tennis court. The players had just ceased action, and the gentlemen were putting on their coats. Harold procured his, and thrust his arms into it, while we were attacked on all sides by a flood of banter. ...
— My Brilliant Career • Miles Franklin
... her father in affectionate banter, then, with a wave of her hand and a bright nod to ...
— The Early Bird - A Business Man's Love Story • George Randolph Chester
... His eyes belied the banter of his words. They shone as the eyes of a fighter meeting odds. There was something leonine about him at the moment, something of the primitive animal roused from ...
— Greatheart • Ethel M. Dell
... I cannot but transcribe, from his excellent work, a distinguished passage in support of the Christian Revelation. After shewing, in decent but strong terms, the unfairness of the INDIRECT attempts of modern infidels to unsettle and perplex religious principles, and particularly the irony, banter, and sneer, of one whom he politely calls 'an eloquent historian', the ...
— The Journal of a Tour to the Hebrides with Samuel Johnson, LL.D. • James Boswell
... itself for the prophet, to say, "Before the child, born seven hundred years hence, shall distinguish between good and evil, the land which thou abhorrest shall be forsaken of both her kings," which would be a banter, instead of ...
— The Grounds of Christianity Examined by Comparing The New Testament with the Old • George Bethune English
... slightly with eagerness. Had he eaten and drunk enough? They had kept their promises, he said. They would keep them all. The water had been cool—and presently he, Manuel-del-Popolo, would accompany with his guitar and his voice the last moments of his victim. Bursts of laughter punctuated his banter. Ah! that Manuel, that Manuel! Some actually swore in admiration. But was Castro really at his ease? Was it not good to eat and drink? Had he quite returned to life? But, Caramba, amigos, what neglect! The caballero who has honoured us must smoke. They shouted in high glee: "Yes. Smoke, ...
— Romance • Joseph Conrad and F.M. Hueffer
... incentive to enter the realms of the blessed. A character apart, incomprehensible alike to the warm-blooded Frenchmen with whom he associated and to his own passionate countrymen, he maintained his peculiarity tranquilly, undisturbed by the banter of his friends and the admonitions of his father, who in view of his heir's childlessness regarded his younger son's temperament with growing uneasiness as ...
— The Shadow of the East • E. M. Hull
... speech he poked rare fun at the dinner-debating members who were so ready to participate in the festivities of the society and so lax in attending the discussions. He not only did this with delicious banter and pointed sarcasm; but, with an audacious touch all his own, he coupled the toast with the name of one member present. This brought the ruffled gentleman up on to his legs, and, smarting under Mr. Chamberlain's ironical philippics, he tried to pay back "our young friend" for what he ...
— A Tale of One City: The New Birmingham - Papers Reprinted from the "Midland Counties Herald" • Thomas Anderton
... useless to take one precaution unless the whole are taken," laughed the sphinx-like fellow whose cheerful banter had so successfully passed ...
— Mademoiselle of Monte Carlo • William Le Queux
... polish, on the other hand she possessed the native haughtiness of good birth, and that indescribable something which may be called "pedigree." So, on Monday her turn would come. And, moreover, the Marquise knew that as soon as people learned that the stranger was her cousin, they would suspend their banter and look twice before ...
— Lost Illusions • Honore De Balzac
... man who had been talking vehemently for many hours together. His prominent, heavy-lidded eyes rolled sideways amorously and languidly, the bedclothes were pulled up to his chin, and his dark smooth moustache covered his thick lips capable of much honeyed banter. ...
— The Secret Agent - A Simple Tale • Joseph Conrad
... my part I was a little melancholy or so, thinking of my catastrophe,—that is, of my play's catastrophe; and so, said Sedley, winking at Rochester, 'Our friend is sorrowful.' 'Truly,' said I, seeing they were about to banter me,—for you know they were arch fellows,—'truly, little Sid' (we called Sedley Sid), 'you are greatly mistaken;'—you see, Morton, I was thus sharp upon him because when you go to court you will discover that it does not do to take without giving. And then Rochester said, looking ...
— Devereux, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... her brother, who held the even tenor of his way, whatever he felt—never obtrusive and never negligent. He treated Bessie like the girl of sense she was, with courtesy, but without compliments or any idle banter; and Bessie certainly began to enjoy his society. He improved on acquaintance, and made the hours pass much more pleasantly at Brentwood when he was there than they passed in his absence. This was promising. The evening's dinner-party ...
— The Vicissitudes of Bessie Fairfax • Harriet Parr
... spirit with clever imitations of the style and affectations of familiar poets. They are witty; they are humorous; they are good-natured; and they are artistic and extraordinarily clever. His satirical banter shown in these verses—most of which are real poems as well as parodies—has been classed as "refined common-sense," and "the exuberant playfulness of a powerful mind and tender and manly nature." It contains also independent literary skits and ...
— Library of the World's Best Literature, Ancient and Modern, Vol. 7 • Various
... young men, the mothers and older women rather stiff, and usually hampered by at least one child, which they carry on their backs or on their hips, while another holds on to the garment which replaces our skirts. There is plenty of laughter and banter with the men, who look on unmoved at the efforts of the weaker sex, only rarely offering a ...
— Two Years with the Natives in the Western Pacific • Felix Speiser
... the romances cannot be works of literary art. If a young man wants only to advertise his own smartness, he will not produce a beautiful thing. And if a statesman out of office wishes to amuse himself by alternate banter and laudation of the very society which he has led and which looks to him as its inspiration, the result will be infinitely entertaining, but not a great work of art. Disraeli therefore with literary gifts of a very high order never used them ...
— Studies in Early Victorian Literature • Frederic Harrison
... might have lived and died, and been none the worse for her reclusion, had she not leaned more than half out of her window in the Vicolo one bright April morning of her sixteenth year, to exchange lively banter with a friend below, and been seen by Messer Alessandro del Dardo, who within the cuirass of Sub-Prefect of Padua nourished the heart of an approved Poet; been seen of him for the miracle of young beauty she ...
— Little Novels of Italy • Maurice Henry Hewlett
... moment you are back in the United States. You see American jitneys scooting through the jungle; you watch five-ton American tractors hauling heavy loads along the sandy roads; you hear American slang and banter on all sides, and if you are lucky enough to be invited to a meal you get American hot cakes with real American maple syrup. The air tingles ...
— An African Adventure • Isaac F. Marcosson
... presented to the eye which, except at the time of the Restoration, have usually been veiled. Love is in this novel the subject of many discussions, and so it was in heroic romances, but while it was spoken of there with decency and dignity, it is never mentioned in "English Adventures" but in a tone of banter and raillery. The discourses about this passion recall Suckling's ideas much more than those of Madeleine de Scudery. "Pardon me, madam, Wilmore reply'd, if I think you mistake the case, for I never said I was for a siege in Love: that is the dull method of those countries ...
— The English Novel in the Time of Shakespeare • J. J. Jusserand
... whilst his great-grandfather and other shepherds were tending their flocks on the subjected plains below, a troop of these Christians broke loose from the dark caverns in the mountains, where they are chained, and began to abuse and banter the shepherds, because they did not say, "There are three Gods." The shepherds withstood the temptation and the terror of their countenances, although they, the shepherds, exceedingly quaked. The Christians, in their rage against the shepherds professing ...
— Travels in the Great Desert of Sahara, in the Years of 1845 and 1846 • James Richardson
... is really schoolboy humour belatedly prolonged. Vituperation is the schoolboy's idea of friendly banter. The schoolboy does not so much consider the feelings of his victim as his companions' need for amusement. But I am sure that the tendency nowadays is, somehow or other, to prolong the hobbledehoy days. There is so much more organisation of everything at schools that ...
— The Silent Isle • Arthur Christopher Benson
... of him, was mildly scornful of his Philistine outlook. He cared nothing for books, and the only form of art that appealed to him was the musical comedy. She treated him as a rule with pleasant banter and refused to take him seriously. It required a good deal of energy to keep their friendship on a light footing, for she knew that he had been in love with her since he was eighteen. She could not help feeling flattered, though on her side there was no more than ...
— The Explorer • W. Somerset Maugham
... cheerfully. "Very well, see you to-morrow. Meanwhile, be good. Flee the giddy lure. Go home to your little bed and sleep sweet." There was seriousness under his good-natured banter. "Come along and I'll see you as far as ...
— Swirling Waters • Max Rittenberg
... Castle, in the Body of the Goal, and to Chain him down to two large Iron Staples in the Floor; the Concourse of People of tolerable Fashion to see him was exceeding Great, he was always Chearful and Pleasant to a Degree, as turning almost every thing as was said into a Jest and Banter. ...
— The History of the Remarkable Life of John Sheppard • Daniel Defoe
... This banter did him good, especially as he saw Emily smiling; so he relaxed his knit brow, condescended to look less like Giant Blunderbore, soon became marvellous chatty, and ate up two French rolls, an egg, some anchovies, a round ...
— The Complete Prose Works of Martin Farquhar Tupper • Martin Farquhar Tupper
... Manin's banter was interrupted by a bugle-call. Down the street came perhaps two hundred mounted troops. They wheeled into San Rafael Street at a gallop and disappeared in the direction ...
— Rainbow's End • Rex Beach
... for pretending that he had known this, and he as good-humouredly accepted their banter. He drew a serious long breath of relief, however, when their backs were turned. It had gone off much ...
— The Market-Place • Harold Frederic
... was lost, however, on my host, who persisted. I did not want to give myself away, so, simulating a tone of light banter, I said: ...
— Margot Asquith, An Autobiography: Volumes I & II • Margot Asquith
... must not pretend to Banter: He knows my Tongue too well: (Aside.) No, Gardy, I have thought of a way will Confound him more than all I cou'd say, if I shou'd talk ...
— The Busie Body • Susanna Centlivre
... himself well in reserve and gave no outward indication of the deep emotion which stirred within him. At last the train came and from one of the long string of Pullmans, Gloria alighted. She kissed her brother and greeted Philip cordially, and asked him in a tone of banter how he enjoyed army life. Dru smiled and said, "Much better, Gloria, than you predicted I would." The baggage was stored away in the buck-board, and Gloria got in front with Philip and they were off. It was early morning and the dew was still on the soft mesquite grass, and as the ...
— Philip Dru: Administrator • Edward Mandell House
... Dimple understood all this banter, and she laughingly said, "Florence, we are like the birds that try to take the wrens' houses to live in. But now we have a nest of our own we won't do it any more, papa. Thank you so much. It is the most lovely surprise I ever had in all ...
— A Sweet Little Maid • Amy E. Blanchard
... the direction of the refreshment pavilion, where I was playfully let to know that I should purchase her bits of refreshment, coffee, plum-cake, an ice, things of that sort. Through it all she kept up a running fire of banter, from time to time presenting me to other women young and old who happened about us, all of whom betrayed an interest in my personality that was not unflattering, even from this commoner ...
— Ruggles of Red Gap • Harry Leon Wilson
... wear a top hat or a morning suit in Monte Carlo," she said, furious at his banter. "Let us talk about somebody else ...
— The Angel of Terror • Edgar Wallace
... Accustomed to play with the fears of others, he understood well enough the banter in Mr. Rogers's tone, and that he was being sauced in his own sauce. He read the menace in it too. ...
— The Adventures of Harry Revel • Sir Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch
... counsel given only as a matter of policy, and was not capable of being wilfully unjust. Palmerston, essentially superficial, delighted in banter, and knew how to divert grave opposition by playful levity; LINCOLN was a man of infinite jest on his lips, with saddest earnestness at his heart. Palmerston was a fair representative of the aristocratic liberality ...
— Memorial Address on the Life and Character of Abraham Lincoln - Delivered at the request of both Houses of Congress of America • George Bancroft
... too polite to speak, even in banter, of what he thought was the real cause of her politeness and silence. But he must end this state of overwhelmedness ...
— Susan Lenox: Her Fall and Rise • David Graham Phillips
... and conformed to his will in all things, and I venture to promise he will not be suffered to err. But let him avoid disputes about religion, they are seldom productive of any good; let him fortify his mind against banter and ridicule, it is no small degree of persecution. Yet, if he be determined to follow his Lord, he must expect to meet with it, and I know from experience it is hard to bear. I have found the safest way is to receive it in silence; for those who are disposed to ridicule ...
— The Power of Faith - Exemplified In The Life And Writings Of The Late Mrs. Isabella Graham. • Isabella Graham
... I never could find any Person compleatly Master of, it pleased me very much, to find this Author has made a large Essay, to prove there is really no such Power in Nature; and that the Pretenders to it are all Impostors, and put a Banter upon the World; for that it is impossible for any Man to oblige himself to forget a thing, since he that can remember to forget, and at the same time forget to remember, has an ...
— The Consolidator • Daniel Defoe
... Mary of Guise (who once treated him in a spirit of banter), he deals a stab at her name and fame. On all that concerns her personal character and political conduct, he is unworthy of credit when uncorroborated by better authority. Indeed Knox's spirit is so unworthy that for this, among other reasons, Archbishop Spottiswoode declined to ...
— John Knox and the Reformation • Andrew Lang
... His Majesty's health as soon as the cloth was removed; but they were by this time become so fond of wine that they would frequently remind me of the health in the middle of dinner by calling out King George Earee no Brittannee; and would banter me if the glass was not filled to the brim. Nothing could exceed the mirth and jollity of these people when ...
— A Voyage to the South Sea • William Bligh
... though I never really lost my confidence in his protection, if he would only drop the fantastic aspects that he delighted to assume. Sometimes, but much more rarely, he teased me with exasperating banter; and, inheriting from some of my progenitors a vindictive temper, I once retaliated severely. We were in the sitting-room with my father and some others, while I was tortured. The chancery-suit was just then approaching its most critical point, and, to inflict the cruellest stroke ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. XI., February, 1863, No. LXIV. • Various
... could be taking Venza now to Mars. I was glad to see her. She was diverting. Educated. Well-traveled. Spoke English with a colloquial, theatrical manner more characteristic of Great-New York than of Venus. And for all her light banter, I would rather put my trust in her than any Venus girl ...
— Astounding Stories of Super-Science, March 1930 • Various
... of a wagon transport and tries to get speed and form from Wall-Eye Buck, an ox that came in with the Klondike rush and hasn't rushed since. Johnson holds the ribbons well and bows acknowledgment when we find a prototype for him in Mulvaney, the tamer of elephants. He can afford to take our banter good naturedly, for he knows what lies before us on the Mosquito Portage and we ...
— The New North • Agnes Deans Cameron
... in light banter, they actually proceeded out onto the bosom of the milky flood without hearing any cry from the shore or seeing any one who took note of their departure. The pellucid and comforting light of the blinded sun grew warmer; the hum of industry in the town behind rose cheerfully ...
— The Mormon Prophet • Lily Dougall
... purse the riches of Colonel Grosvenor and the Principi di Monte Bianca, your father and mine, old fools! To tell the truth, I am badly in need of money, and, head of Bacchus! your appearance here is life to me, my dear Sonia. Life! I am a rich man. But," with a sudden scowl, dropping the mask of banter, "I do not understand these companions of yours." He eyed the group coldly. "What position in my household does this gentleman occupy?" ...
— The Lure of the Mask • Harold MacGrath
... the trick which forms the underplot, the ruse which was to make each think the other to be the lovelorn one, it is really they who win the day. Their feelings are not altered by this merry plot; they {167} are merely given a chance to drop the mask of banter and to express without confusion the love which had long been theirs. Thus the play which began with the silvery laughter of Beatrice ends in general mirth which is yet ...
— An Introduction to Shakespeare • H. N. MacCracken
... and banter the time passed until they were off Sandy Hook. The breeze, while brisk, was light enough to warrant carrying all sails, and a cloud of canvas soon billowed from aloft. One after another the sails were broken out on all three masts ...
— Doubloons—and the Girl • John Maxwell Forbes
... Chad, awed by the stern, solemn face, withdrew and, without a word to anybody, climbed into the loft and went to bed. He could hear every stroke on the floor below, every call of the prompter, and the rude laughter and banter, but he gave little heed to it all. For he lay thinking of Caleb Hazel and listening again to the stories he and the cattle-dealer had told him about the wonderful settlements. "God's Country," the dealer always called it, and such it must be, if what he and the master ...
— The Little Shepherd of Kingdom Come • John Fox
... gave sweetness to their labour, and the responsibilities devolving upon them imbued the sacred holiday with a meaning and charm that it had never had before for them. They bubbled over with importance and with the glory of it. A sister and a brother could not meet without a friendly banter. ...
— The heart of happy hollow - A collection of stories • Paul Laurence Dunbar
... long, old man," and he threaded his way past the rear of the brigade, not without some good-humoured banter at his dishevelled appearance. ...
— With Haig on the Somme • D. H. Parry
... and the confidence of his superiors; along with which, he gives himself up to the enjoyment of a pleasant contempt for all that immediately surrounds him. Pedantic /literati/, vain youngsters, every sort of narrowness and conceit, he banters rather than satirizes; and even his banter expresses no contempt. Just in the same way does he jest about his own condition, his misfortune, ...
— Autobiography • Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
... his purpose and his motives intelligible to the representatives of the Prussian people. He was taken for a mere bully and absolutist of the old type. His personal characteristics, his arrogance, his sarcasm, his habit of banter, exasperated and inflamed. Roon was no better suited to the atmosphere of a popular assembly. Each encounter of the Ministers with the Chamber embittered the struggle and made reconciliation more difficult. The ...
— History of Modern Europe 1792-1878 • C. A. Fyffe
... see what it is, and what we can do," said Farnham, and there was no longer any banter in ...
— The Bread-winners - A Social Study • John Hay
... when, as if giving up the riddle in her dancing eyes and seemingly mocking smile, he appears about to lead her back into the ballroom, there is, at least so I like to read the music, a pretty little laugh, as much as to say, "Can't you read my real feelings under my mask of banter," a tender glance indicated by a retard on a charmingly expressive little turn of the melody—and she is in ...
— The Pianolist - A Guide for Pianola Players • Gustav Kobb
... was idiot enough to let it be known that I was afflicted with an aristocratic name, and I had to hold this job against banter enough to drive a cow daft. Now my ...
— In the Roaring Fifties • Edward Dyson
... raft of one of his ideas, but one by one would grow numb and drop off into the waters of mental indifference. They had a nice sense of satire, and it was a delight for the American to indulge in an easy, inconsequential banter which was full of humour without being labelled funny; but it used to fill him with sorrow to see many of his best controversial subjects punctured by a lazily conceived play of words. He felt that, coming from the New World, he was in a position ...
— The Parts Men Play • Arthur Beverley Baxter
... begun his questioning merely in a spirit of banter, but as she stubbornly persisted in her refusals, he began to think that she really had had some ridiculous adventure, and was determined to find out what it was. So he set traps for her, and cross-questioned her, secretly amused at the ...
— The Little Colonel's Chum: Mary Ware • Annie Fellows Johnston
... heavy, vicious features of Riedermann. "Oh, anything you like. Perhaps it's because it's not pleasant to see white men landing at a quiet island like this with revolvers slung to their waists under their pyjamas; looks a bit too much like Bully Hayes' style for me," and then his tone of cool banter suddenly changed to that of studied insolence. "I say, Motley, I was talking about you just now to Taplin AND Nerida. Do you want to know what I was saying? Perhaps I had better tell you. I was talking about Tita ...
— By Reef and Palm • Louis Becke
... concerns the second problem,—How, and by what machinery, did the Oracles, in the days of their prosperity, conduct their elaborate ministrations? To this problem no justice at all is done by the school of Van Dale. A spirit of mockery and banter is ill applied to questions that at any time have been centres of fear, and hope, and mysterious awe, to long trains of human generations. And the coarse assumption of systematic fraud in the Oracles is neither ...
— Memorials and Other Papers • Thomas de Quincey
... Happy. The biggest ketch you ever seen in your life. It's ketch the Flying U outfit and squeeze the life out of it; that's the ketch." Andy's tone had in it no banter, but considerable earnestness. For, though Chip would no doubt convince the boys that the danger was very real, there was a small matter of personal pride to urge Andy into trying to convince, them himself, without aid from Chip or any ...
— The Flying U's Last Stand • B. M. Bower
... gravity. Speaking, though it be but by the windiest of fictions, to a nation, is not a man pledged to respectful language? speaking, though it is but by a chimera as wild as Repeal to a question of national welfare, a man is pledged to sincerity. Had he seven devils of mockery and banter within him, for that hour he must silence them all. The foul fiend must be rebuked, though it were Mahu and Bohu who should prompt him to buffoonery, when standing at the bar ...
— The Posthumous Works of Thomas De Quincey, Vol. 1 (2 vols) • Thomas De Quincey
... roved about for some time without aim, sometimes howling in at open doors and bolting, frequently heaping banter upon good-natured policemen, occasionally asking of mild old ladies the way to places he had never heard of, or demanding what o'clock it was of people who did not possess watches, and whistling most of the ...
— The Garret and the Garden • R.M. Ballantyne
... pardoned to a man who, in this portentous age of reticence and pose, was wholly free from solemnity, and when he heard or saw what was ludicrous was not afraid to laugh at it. Sir Robert Peel was an excellent hand at what our fathers called banter and we call chaff. A prig or a pedant was his favourite butt, and the performance was rendered all the more effective by his elaborate assumption of the grand seigneur's manner. The victim was dimly conscious that he was being ...
— Collections and Recollections • George William Erskine Russell
... beneath his chamber window and was injured fatally. Frischlin was considered one of the best Latin poets of post- classical times; but his genius was marred by his immoderate and bitter temper, which caused him to imagine that the gentle banter and jocular remarks of his acquaintances were insults to be repaid by angry invective and bitter sarcasm, ...
— Books Fatal to Their Authors • P. H. Ditchfield
... speaking of Greece, he only gave the substance of the article he had written for the Revue des Deux Mondes, as the paper was yet unpublished all the remarks were novel, and the anecdotes fresh and sparkling. The tone of light banter and raillery in which he described public life in Greece and Greek statesmen, might have lost some of its authority had any one remembered to count the hours the speaker had spent in Athens; and Nina was certainly indignant at the hazardous effrontery of the criticisms. It was not, then, without ...
— Lord Kilgobbin • Charles Lever
... of sincerity mingled with the banter in his voice, and Bunny was aware of a curious quality of reverence, of something sacred ...
— Charles Rex • Ethel M. Dell
... shown any tenderness Hugh Noland would have told him the real reason for wanting to get away, but something in the banter of being admonished to be a man took away the thing which made ...
— The Wind Before the Dawn • Dell H. Munger
... Daniel," muttered the inspector lightly. "Go on, little lawyer!" But for all this attempt at banter on his part, I imagined that I saw the beginning of a very natural anxiety to close the conversation. I therefore hastened with what I had yet to say, cutting my words short and almost stammering in ...
— The Woman in the Alcove • Anna Katharine Green
... et caetera, et caetera. Lucilla was among all the young people, in the full tide of fun, nonsense, banter, and repartee of a style new to her, but in which she was formed to excel, and there was such a black look when Honor summoned her after the meal, as impressed the awkwardness of enforcing authority among nearer relations; but it was in ...
— Hopes and Fears - scenes from the life of a spinster • Charlotte M. Yonge
... infare I braced me wi' pride, The broose I hae won, and a kiss o' the bride; And loud was the laughter good fellows among, As I uttered my banter or chorused my song; Dowie and dree are jestin and glee, When ...
— Library Of The World's Best Literature, Ancient And Modern, Vol 3 • Various
... phase—neither banter, nor fancy, nor unvarying coolness in the face of fire. He was all contrition and apology. Must she be the audience to some fresh exhibition ...
— Over the Pass • Frederick Palmer
... baron greeted him with merry banter, and then whispered to him that the regent was expecting him in her private room, where the leaders of the newly arrived musicians had already gone. As Wolf belonged to the "elect," he would conduct him to her Majesty before "the ...
— Uarda • Georg Ebers
... other little expedients, by which the arts of Quizzing and Banter flourish, practice will soon teach you. If it should be necessary to transcribe a dull passage, not very fertile in topics of humour and raillery; you may introduce it as a "favourable specimen of the ...
— An English Garner - Critical Essays & Literary Fragments • Edited by Professor Arber and Thomas Seccombe
... of Artemus Ward, apparently edited by Mr. John Camden Hotten (Chatto and Windus), this passage is accompanied with the following gloss: "Here again Artemus called in the aid of pleasant banter as the most fitting apology for the atrocious badness ...
— The Land of Contrasts - A Briton's View of His American Kin • James Fullarton Muirhead
... had no money left to bet as gentlemen bet, nor to back a well-heeled bird, nor to color my fancy for a horse. As for a mistress, or for those fugitive affairs of the heart which English fashion countenanced—nay, on which fashion insisted—I had no part in them, and brooked much banter from the gay world in consequence. It was not merely lack of money, nor yet a certain fastidiousness implanted, nor yet the inherent shrinking of my English blood from pleasure forbidden, for my Renault ...
— The Reckoning • Robert W. Chambers
... comrade, Ilse Westgard; she exchanged gossip and banter with the Cossacks, argued with them, laughed ...
— The Crimson Tide • Robert W. Chambers
... I hung back and took no share in the banter that was toward. But in the end—lured perhaps by the spirit in which I have shown that Chatellerault accepted it, and lulled by the wine which in common with my guests I may have abused—I came to utter words but for which this story never ...
— Bardelys the Magnificent • Rafael Sabatini
... do in honour of this international episode?' she asked. There was a slender vein of humour in Miss Ericson's character, and she occasionally exercised it gently at the expense of her friend's hobby. Mr. Sarrasin always enjoyed her mild banter hugely. Now, as ever, he paid it the tribute of ...
— The Dictator • Justin McCarthy
... opportunity, the former, among the foremost of whom were Piper and Bart, now crowded eagerly round the cattle, and, after rapidly passing their hands over the cow and each of the oxen a moment, and then stepping back, began to banter and bid. Not much time, however, was allowed them to do either; for the cattle, all at once, became unaccountably restless, at first backing and wheeling about in their confined space, and then wildly tossing up ...
— The Rangers - [Subtitle: The Tory's Daughter] • D. P. Thompson
... the air of the man with the brown eyes had been that of banter, of impish desire to harry and confuse by stilted language the ignorant stranger who had come ...
— The Landloper - The Romance Of A Man On Foot • Holman Day
... sharp sarcasm, now some aphorism heavy with meaning, which sticks to the memory, like a saying of Talleyrand's. His umbrae, who have put but little of allaying Tiber in their cups, grow boisterous and abusive, and having insulted nearly everybody at the table by coarse personal banter, the party breaks up, and we are glad to get out with flushed cheeks and dizzy head into the cool air of an early summer night—all the more, that for the last half-hour young Piso at our elbow has been importuning us with whispered specimens of his very rickety ...
— Horace • Theodore Martin
... and assiduously tends him while he quite recovers. When Jasper is restored, he lays a tender hand upon his nephew's shoulder, and, in a tone of voice less troubled than the purport of his words—indeed with something of raillery or banter in ...
— The Mystery of Edwin Drood • Charles Dickens
... of verses likes to have fun poked at them, even in the form of friendly banter, but Lady Mary seems to ...
— Lady Mary Wortley Montague - Her Life and Letters (1689-1762) • Lewis Melville
... a-laughing, and began to banter her. The gentleman who was sent to try the slipper looked earnestly at Cinderella, and, finding her very ...
— Boys and Girls Bookshelf (Vol 2 of 17) - Folk-Lore, Fables, And Fairy Tales • Various
... a strong prejudice toward Scotland, and several Scots, with their usual plentiful lack of wit, have so solemnly written it down. But the more sensible way is to conclude that the situation simply afforded opportunity for a little harmless banter. ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great, Volume 5 (of 14) • Elbert Hubbard
... These medicated draughts are often mentioned in Romances. The reader will recollect the banter upon them in Don Quixote, where the Knight of La enumerates to Sancho the cures which had been performed upon many valorous champions, covered with wounds. The Hindus, in their books on medicine, talk of drugs for the recovery ...
— Persian Literature, Volume 1,Comprising The Shah Nameh, The - Rubaiyat, The Divan, and The Gulistan • Anonymous
... not accustomed to have that remark taken seriously, still it usually provoked a laugh or a paragraph of sentimental banter. And he hated to be called fresh, except in a joking way. His charitable impulse died and ...
— Flappers and Philosophers • F. Scott Fitzgerald
... doubt the anomalous state of affairs existing between us, which turned all my attacks upon him, (and they were many, either open or covert) into the channel of banter or practical joke (giving pain while assuming the aspect of mere fun) rather than into a more serious and determined hostility. But my endeavours on this head were by no means uniformly successful, even ...
— The Works of Edgar Allan Poe - Volume 2 (of 5) of the Raven Edition • Edgar Allan Poe
... "Mon vieux!" "Mon cher!" Friends greet and banter as they pass. 'Tis sweet to see among the mass ...
— Poems • Alan Seeger
... print Elia's Postscript to his "Chapter on Ears," and his Answers to Correspondents. Indeed, I do not know but that they contain some of the most racy sentences Lamb ever wrote. At any rate, they do contain some delightful banter and "most ingenious nonsense." In their pleasantry, archness, and good-natured raillery, these two little articles of Elia's remind me of some of Addison's happiest papers in ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 12, No. 72, October, 1863 • Various
... few gifts which nature had denied to Luis de Leon. He was aware of this himself, to judge from his statement that he had nothing of the jester or scoffer in him.[161] But if Luis de Leon was relatively poor in humour, he had an abundant store of mordant sarcasm and a faculty for ironic banter, as Medina and Castro learned to their chagrin.[162] Pacheco's opinion of Luis de Leon's versatile talent is borne out by the scrap of evidence given at the trial by Francisco de Salinas—the sightless ...
— Fray Luis de Leon - A Biographical Fragment • James Fitzmaurice-Kelly
... expeditions in the October woods,—Alice declared that it was a whirl of dissipation. The fondness of Ruth, which was scarcely disguised, for the company of agreeable young fellows, who talked nothings, gave Alice opportunity for no end of banter. ...
— The Gilded Age, Complete • Mark Twain and Charles Dudley Warner
... evident that his banter had not pleased her. The same tone that is found agreeable in the town does not always prove welcome in the country. She motioned with her hand to the southward, and began to walk so fast that Richard could not ...
— Bred in the Bone • James Payn
... Captain's professions of friendship with no sign of suspicion. He read Dick's mind as an open book. He saw through his pretentions and the tragic purpose which underlay his good-natured banter. He knew instinctively that his movements were watched and moved with the utmost caution. For a time he found it impossible to visit the house on Church Hill. Detectives were on his heels the moment he turned his steps ...
— The Victim - A romance of the Real Jefferson Davis • Thomas Dixon
... as a friend), "Understand that I am already a Christian." Whereto he answered, "I will not believe it, nor will I rank you among Christians, unless I see you in the Church of Christ." The other, in banter, replied, "Do walls then make Christians?" And this he often said, that he was already a Christian; and Simplicianus as often made the same answer, and the conceit of the "walls" was by the other as often renewed. For he feared ...
— The Confessions of Saint Augustine • Saint Augustine
... for a fresh handkerchief. She would accompany Helen home, would manage to slip into the library alone, and put it partly under a book, so that it would appear to be hidden, and thus account for it not having been seen before; or better yet, she would catch it up playfully and banter Helen on her carelessness in leaving her love letters so exposed. This last seemed a very clever plan, and with her spirits quite elated, Juno drove around with Helen, finding no one in the parlor below, and felicitating herself upon the fact that Helen left her alone ...
— Family Pride - Or, Purified by Suffering • Mary J. Holmes
... methods of being a man. And, also, that nice attitude towards me was of quite a contagion, for all of the young ladies and gentlemen of the city of Hayesville became the same to me and all of the time my heart was warm and rejoiced at their affection shown in banter and jokes. ...
— The Daredevil • Maria Thompson Daviess
... drawled Colonel Adderly, a squatty man with an over-fed look on his bulging, red cheeks, "hang it, you don't expect Hamilton? The baby must be teething," and he added more chaff at the expense of my friend, who had been the subject of good-natured banter among club members for devotion to ...
— Lords of the North • A. C. Laut
... a moment of struggle with himself).—You must ask me what I did wish, because I do not now wish for anything. You have known her longer than I have, therefore I came to you as her friend and mine, and for answer you banter with me. In your eyes there shone hatred for me, although I have never wronged, you. Be the judge yourself! I would be more than right in asking you: What do you wish of me, if it were not for the reason (with pride) that it is immaterial to me. ...
— So Runs the World • Henryk Sienkiewicz,
... was tall, but his neck was bent; his corpulent body was supported by weak and slender legs: and his face, though well-formed, was lined and furrowed. But a vigorous spirit sparkled in the small, flashing eyes, and an expression of raillery, sly banter, and at times, even of irony, played around his remarkably full lips. The low, broad brow, the large and beautifully-arched head bespoke great mental power, and in the changing color of his eyes one seemed to read that neither wit nor passion ...
— Uarda • Georg Ebers
... were discussing the polo match. Miss Hitchcock's clear, mocking voice could be heard teasing her cousin Caspar on his performance that afternoon. The heavy young man, whose florid face was flushed with the champagne he had taken, made ineffective attempts to ward off the banter. Parker Hitchcock came to ...
— The Web of Life • Robert Herrick
... worldly matters. His other convictions Captain Whalley never intruded. The difference of their ages was like another bond between them. Once, when twitted with the uncharitableness of his youth, Mr. Van Wyk, running his eye over the vast proportions of his interlocutor, retorted in friendly banter— ...
— End of the Tether • Joseph Conrad
... man retorted pertly. "Everyone's doing this sort of thing now. Come along, dad. See the fun." He caught his father's arm and they re-entered, taking the stairs, this time, to the boxes above. From one came a man's laughing banter. "That's he," Frank whispered, Hastily he drew his half reluctant father into a vacant box. A waiter brought them beer, collected half a dollar and inquired if they wanted "Company." ...
— Port O' Gold • Louis John Stellman
... disporting themselves in the river while they lament the loss of their beautiful treasure. Siegfried, who has strayed from his companions in the chase, now appears, and they beg him for the ring upon his finger, at first with playful banter, and afterwards in sober earnest, warning him that if he does not give it back to them he will perish that very day. He laughs at their womanly wiles, and they vanish as his comrades appear. After the midday halt, Siegfried tells Gunther and his vassals the story of his life. In the midst ...
— The Opera - A Sketch of the Development of Opera. With full Descriptions - of all Works in the Modern Repertory • R.A. Streatfeild
... better. The Jews paid little attention to Wagner's arguments, but objected to his "personalities." Now, the reader must have observed that of all people practical jokers are those who can least tolerate a practical joke played at their own expense, and that those whose staple of conversation is banter or "chaff" become irascible the moment they are flicked with their own whip. For years Wagner had been the victim of unprovoked personal attacks in the Jew-controlled press, and some of the worst of these can be traced ...
— Richard Wagner - Composer of Operas • John F. Runciman
... little banter Nellie cries, "Pooh, pooh!" mamma looks pleased, and papa smiles gently. Then the fresh young voices of the brother and ...
— Trumps • George William Curtis
... ease—the kind that still preserves punctilio. The planter himself seemed to be the dynamo that generated the larger portion of the gaiety and wit. The younger ones at the board found it more than difficult to turn back on him his guns of raillery and banter. It is true, the young men attempted to storm his works repeatedly, incited by the hope of gaining the approbation of their fair companions; but even when they sped a well-aimed shaft, the planter forced ...
— Roads of Destiny • O. Henry
... who taught the use Of the bow and the spear, and sent the moose Into the Indian banter's hands; Glooskap who ...
— The Algonquin Legends of New England • Charles Godfrey Leland
... of Ceres and Bacchus, and afterwards fabled to have been invented by Iambe, the daughter of the King of Eleusis. Hence, also, came the jesting used in celebrating the rites of Ceres in Sicily, and the custom for people to post themselves on the bridge leading to Eleusis in Attica, and to banter and abuse those going to the festivals. The story of Iambe only marks the rural origin of the metre, and its connection with Ceres, the Goddess of Harvest. Eleusis was her chosen abode, and next in her favour was Paros; and here we accordingly find the first improvement made upon ...
— History of English Humour, Vol. 1 (of 2) - With an Introduction upon Ancient Humour • Alfred Guy Kingan L'Estrange
... a fog, the blue holders of a new line of rifle-pits close under the top of a bluff talked up to the grays in a trench on its crest. Gross was the banter, but at mention of ...
— Kincaid's Battery • George W. Cable
... was bothered, too, by the lump of ice in his glass of water. It was too large; it spun round and burned his nose when he tried to drink. He raged that Finkelstein was like that lump of ice. But he won through; he kept up his banter till they grew tired of the superlative jest and turned to the great ...
— Babbitt • Sinclair Lewis
... had always been. This feeling preyed on his poor mind, and when he joined the evening gathering in the village street he noted bitterly how contemptuously he was left out of the conversation by the others, how incapable he was of keeping pace with them in their laughing talk and banter. And, worst of all, how Marty was the leading spirit, bandying words and bestowing smiles and pleasantries all round, but never a word or a smile for him. He could not endure it, and so instead of smartening himself up after work and going for company to the village street, he would ...
— Dead Man's Plack and an Old Thorn • William Henry Hudson
... whole day, Saw her no more, altho' I linger'd there Till every daisy slept, and Love's white star Beam'd thro' the thicken'd cedar in the dusk. So home we went, and all the livelong way With solemn gibe did Eustace banter me. "Now," said he, "will you climb the top of Art; You cannot fail but work in hues to dim The Titianic Flora. Will you match My Juliet? you, not you,—the Master, Love, A more ideal Artist ...
— The Early Poems of Alfred Lord Tennyson • Tennyson
... I'll start at once." Fred dropped his banter. "I'll tell you what, Nancy. I may not be able to do much right off, but I'll promise you that he has a fair chance before ...
— The Calico Cat • Charles Miner Thompson
... his foot, "thinkest thou to banter me,—see!" As his foot shook the floor, the door opened, and a man with his arms bare, covered from head to foot in a black gown of serge, with his features concealed by a hideous mask, stood ominously at ...
— The Last Of The Barons, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... Lapierre's light banter acted as a tonic to the girl's nerves, harassed as they were by a month's travel through the fly-bitten wilderness. More—he interested her. He was different. As different from the half-breeds ...
— The Gun-Brand • James B. Hendryx
... with their privilege of becoming boys. So I suppose we must attribute it to something or other in human nature. Meanwhile, there stands the new-comer, surrounded by a circle of his new associates, who forthwith proceed to frighten, and to banter, and to make a fool of him, to the extent of their wit. Some address him with mock politeness, others with fierceness; and so they conduct him in solemn procession across the Agora to the Baths; and as they approach, they dance about him like madmen. But this was to ...
— Harvard Classics Volume 28 - Essays English and American • Various
... as it will, I do not see that Satan could have been at a Loss for some extraordinary Figure to have banter'd Mankind with, tho' this had not been thought of; but thinking of the Cloven-Foot first, and the Matter being indifferent, this took place, and easily rooted it self in the bewildred Fancy of the People, ...
— The History of the Devil - As Well Ancient as Modern: In Two Parts • Daniel Defoe
... nose in it, passed it to Irene. The latter ought to have realized it was not her own property, but unfortunately didn't. She calmly appropriated the bunch, and distributed it in portions to those nearest her. Peachy's cheeks flamed. She was a hot-tempered little soul underneath her gay banter. ...
— The Jolliest School of All • Angela Brazil
... This is like you. You banter me as you use to do. You make a Game of me. You joke upon me. You satyrize me. You treat me with a Sneer. I see how you jeer me well enough. You only jest with me. I am your Laughing-stock. I am laugh'd at by you. You make yourself merry with me. You make a meer ...
— Colloquies of Erasmus, Volume I. • Erasmus
... hearse and the mourning coach and drove off demurely through the town; but once a hundred yards or so beyond the turnpike, at such a pace that they overtook the rollicking cortege of the Alderman of Skinner's Alley upon the Dublin road, all singing and hallooing, and crowing and shouting scraps of banter at one another, in which recreations these professional mourners forthwith joined them; and they cracked screaming jokes, and drove wild chariot races the whole way into town, to the terror of the divine, whose presence they forgot, and whom, though he shrieked from the window, they ...
— The House by the Church-Yard • J. Sheridan Le Fanu
... said Schilsky. It was plain that banter of this kind was not disagreeable to him; at the same time he was just at the moment too engrossed, to have more than half an car for what was said. With his short-sighted eyes close to the paper, he was listening with all his might to some harmonies that his fingers played on the table. When, ...
— Maurice Guest • Henry Handel Richardson
... this, began to banter me on my abstemiousness, and to urge me to do more justice to the wine, which ...
— Wilson's Tales of the Borders and of Scotland, XXII • various
... "Don't banter me," she said, wounded at what appeared to be his flippancy. He did not mind the entreaty, but the tone with its delicate note of pathos was like a reproach. He could not explain; he could not tell her that he had penetrated her mood ...
— The Awakening and Selected Short Stories • Kate Chopin
... obtained. Molly looked more like a stately young empress than an impecunious doctor's daughter as she floated into the room, to be embraced and complimented by the Lavender Lady and to receive a generous meed of admiration, seasoned with a little gentle banter, ...
— The Hermit of Far End • Margaret Pedler
... plain woman; but there was no envy in her, and she took the keenest pleasure in Margaret's comeliness. It was almost with maternal pride that she watched each year add a new grace to that exceeding beauty. But her common sense was sound, and she took care by good-natured banter to temper the praises which extravagant admirers at the drawing-class lavished upon the handsome girl both for her looks and for her talent. She was proud to think that she would hand over to Arthur Burdon a woman whose character she had helped to form, and whose loveliness ...
— The Magician • Somerset Maugham
... They were warned by a man whom they met that hostile Indians were lurking in the neighborhood. Still they went on, forgetting their danger in the enjoyment of shooting ducks. Finally, however, one of the party said he would not go further, and the other joined him. This led Radisson to banter them, saying that he would go ahead and kill game ...
— French Pathfinders in North America • William Henry Johnson
... apologists of the Calvinistic faith, which Kennedy upheld without stint. The Conversations add little to what we already know of Byron's religious opinions; nor is it easy to say where he ceases to be serious and begins to banter, or vice versa. He evidently wished to show that in argument he was good at fence, and could handle a theologian as skilfully as a foil. At the same time he wished if possible, though, as appears, in vain, to get some light on a subject with regard to which in his graver moods he was often ...
— Byron • John Nichol
... window and was injured fatally. Frischlin was considered one of the best Latin poets of post- classical times; but his genius was marred by his immoderate and bitter temper, which caused him to imagine that the gentle banter and jocular remarks of his acquaintances were insults to be repaid by angry invective and bitter sarcasm, with which his ...
— Books Fatal to Their Authors • P. H. Ditchfield
... dealt at the store and frequented the hotel did so for her sake, and she was willing to extend her father's trade. In fact, she helped to manage both businesses as cleverly as she managed the customers. Her charm was largely physical, but she used it with caution. One might indulge in banter, and Sadie had a ringing laugh that young men liked, but there were limits that few who knew her overstepped. One or two had done so, but had been rebuked in a way they wished to forget. Sadie had the tricks of an accomplished coquette, ...
— The Girl From Keller's - Sadie's Conquest • Harold Bindloss
... getting to like Mr Solomon, and Mrs Solomon grew more kind to me every day. The men about the garden, too, were all very civil to me, and beyond a little bit of good-humoured banter from them now and then I ...
— Brownsmith's Boy - A Romance in a Garden • George Manville Fenn
... social equality by the camp fire, he said.... And where was all Lady Bridget's vaunted socialism if she jibbed at such a simple illustration of the first principles of socialism? Of course, Bridget had taken his banter in good part, and with a pretty grimace had told him she would get out a consignment of the stuff her Aunt Eliza gave at Christmas to the old men in their Irish village and ...
— Lady Bridget in the Never-Never Land • Rosa Praed
... poet's vindictive memory, marked him down for elevation to the throne of Dulness which was rendered vacant by the deposition of King Tibbald."[16] There is a rumour that Gay, in revenge for Cibber's banter of "Three Hours After Marriage," personally chastised the actor-dramatist,[17] but there is nothing definitely known about this. Anyhow, Gay was so irritated by the failure of this play that he did not produce anything at a theatre during ...
— Life And Letters Of John Gay (1685-1732) • Lewis Melville
... call him—Lambert?" thought Richard. "Absurd! That was only banter on the part of his companions. I wonder whether I shall ever see ...
— The Queen's Scarlet - The Adventures and Misadventures of Sir Richard Frayne • George Manville Fenn
... little room at the rear of the court-house: of whom the first to greet our Chairman was Lord Rattley. Lord Rattley, a peer with very little money and a somewhat indecorous past, rarely honours the Tregantick bench by attending sessions; but for once he was here, and at once started to banter Sir ...
— Corporal Sam and Other Stories • A. T. Quiller-Couch
... cheers and huzzas for almost half an hour. The master of the sloop was amazed beyond expression, and declared he thought we had heard of the success of our arms eastward before, and had sought to banter him."[593] At night there was a grand bonfire and universal festivity ...
— Montcalm and Wolfe • Francis Parkman
... Under all this banter Serviss perceived the pulse of an interest which laid hold on the most secret hopes and fears of the youngest and shook the eldest with an elemental dread and longing. It was as if the flood-gates of a sea of doubt and ...
— The Tyranny of the Dark • Hamlin Garland
... While he continued his banter she served him and attempted to serve Kate behind the curtains. By persistent, almost despairing pantomime, Kate dissuaded her from this. But at that moment the front door opened again, a brisk greeting was called out and a heavy tread crossed the ...
— Laramie Holds the Range • Frank H. Spearman
... some aphorism heavy with meaning, which sticks to the memory, like a saying of Talleyrand's. His umbrae, who have put but little of allaying Tiber in their cups, grow boisterous and abusive, and having insulted nearly everybody at the table by coarse personal banter, the party breaks up, and we are glad to get out with flushed cheeks and dizzy head into the cool air of an early summer night—all the more, that for the last half-hour young Piso at our elbow has been importuning us with whispered specimens of his very rickety elegiacs, and trying ...
— Horace • Theodore Martin
... speed; it has nothing whatever to do with football. We want the grand dribbling run with the ball at the toe, the smart passing and middling of the Association, and we will enjoy it." Such good-natured banter went on at first between two opposing interests, but by and by the difference culminated ...
— Scottish Football Reminiscences and Sketches • David Drummond Bone
... display at some Times, are inconsistent with the Ignorance, Folly and Stupidity they shew at others. It is impossible that Men of Parts, and the least Spirit, how much soever they were in the Wrong, could see themselves defeated, banter'd and exposed with so much Tranquility and Chearfulness; and I can't conceive how any, but egregious Coxcombs, without Sense of Shame, could behave as Alciphron and Lysicles do throughout your Dialogues. They are Fellows without Feeling or Manners. If among Gentlemen ...
— A Letter to Dion • Bernard Mandeville
... married friends live in respectable comfort. Still, the ladies, living in the bush, get to know its more primitive ways, though they may not experience them themselves. So, our domestic arrangements, though made the occasion for a great deal of banter and fun, were neither unexpected nor novel to our lady visitors. But the banquet that was provided for them made them open their eyes indeed. It was something altogether new to the bush. Such a miracle of catering! such marvellous unheard of cookery! It surpassed anything any one of them ...
— Brighter Britain! (Volume 1 of 2) - or Settler and Maori in Northern New Zealand • William Delisle Hay
... not been sure, by a certain good-humored twinkle in the large eye, that all this banter was sure, in the long run, to turn out a cash concern, he might have been somewhat out of patience; as it was, he laid down a greasy pocket-book on the cotton-bales, and began anxiously studying over certain papers in it, the young man standing ...
— Uncle Tom's Cabin • Harriet Beecher Stowe
... met emissaries from other forms, bent on a like errand, and exchanged a brisk banter as they ...
— A Popular Schoolgirl • Angela Brazil
... a sample of life at Temple Camp for seven days past. Those who were not given to jollying and banter had fallen back on checkers and dominos and other wild sports. A few of the more adventurous and reckless made birchbark ornaments, while those who were in utter despair for something ...
— Tom Slade's Double Dare • Percy Keese Fitzhugh
... him. The pleasures of the epicure afforded him more satisfaction, and his table was famous among his peers. He soon wearied of wine; the discomfort caused by intoxication seemed to him too large a price to pay for the enjoyment of drinking. This caused his guests to banter him about his moderation, and allude to the historic drinking-horn of gigantic size, which, as the chronicles of the House attested, his ancestors used to drain at their banquets, though in those days the Burgundy was far from its present perfection, and Canary had not yet ...
— How Women Love - (Soul Analysis) • Max Simon Nordau
... clinging to the raft of one of his ideas, but one by one would grow numb and drop off into the waters of mental indifference. They had a nice sense of satire, and it was a delight for the American to indulge in an easy, inconsequential banter which was full of humour without being labelled funny; but it used to fill him with sorrow to see many of his best controversial subjects punctured by a lazily conceived play of words. He felt that, coming from the New World, he was in a position to give ...
— The Parts Men Play • Arthur Beverley Baxter
... record. A youth named Wigg, scanning with attentive eye the bodily size of Rolf, and smitten with great wonder thereat, proceeded to inquire in jest who was that "Krage" whom Nature in her beauty had endowed with such towering stature? Meaning humorously to banter his uncommon tallness. For "Krage" in the Danish tongue means a tree-trunk, whose branches are pollarded, and whose summit is climbed in such wise that the foot uses the lopped timbers as supports, as if leaning on a ladder, and, gradually advancing to the higher parts, finds the shortest ...
— The Danish History, Books I-IX • Saxo Grammaticus ("Saxo the Learned")
... time to time in their chairs, they bitterly insulted each other with the utmost good-nature, taking unerring aim at faults and riddling personalities with the quaint and cynical humour of a newspaper office. Throughout this banter, it was strange to note how infrequently the men smiled, particularly when ...
— Active Service • Stephen Crane
... up toward the eleventh story in the elevator she rehearsed her opening scene with Hilmer. She decided to take her cue flippantly. She would banter him at first and gradually veer to more serious topics... But once she stood in his rather austere inner shrine of business, she decided against subterfuges. He had stepped into the main office, the boy who ...
— Broken to the Plow • Charles Caldwell Dobie
... the appearance in Lamb's essay of the phrase "young masters" makes it clear enough what Hazlitt is referring to, but that either man should have taken the matter very seriously is hard to believe. It is easier to look upon Hazlitt's expression as banter of the same kind that Lamb allowed himself in connection with the essay on "Guy Faux" alluded to in the present sketch. This subject had been proposed by Lamb, as we are informed in "Of Persons One Would Wish to Have Seen," and had been written up by Hazlitt in ...
— Hazlitt on English Literature - An Introduction to the Appreciation of Literature • Jacob Zeitlin
... really do think that he has uncommon bad taste," said Lucy, with a reality in her voice differing much from the tone of banter she ...
— Framley Parsonage • Anthony Trollope
... whether you forgive him or not, Rachel," said Sir William, whose idea of carrying off the situation was to indulge in the time-honoured banter suitable to those about ...
— The Arbiter - A Novel • Lady F. E. E. Bell
... enjoyment, amusement in each other, in a hundred things outside of their work. They act like men and women, not like a painting machine; if they experience impulses and emotions they don't entirely stifle 'em. They have time and leisure to foregather, laugh, be silly, discuss, banter, flirt, make love, and cut up all the various harmless capers that humanity is heir to. That's what you mean, but you don't realise it. And you think, and they think, that my solemn and owlish self-suppression is drying me up, squeezing out of ...
— The Common Law • Robert W. Chambers
... marched on, but hearing nothing of General Williams, and knowing the strength of the position, did not attack. He had a brass band with him, which he made play "Dixie," in the hope that it would lure the enemy out; but this strategical banter was treated with profound indifference. General Williams had marched on the north side of the Holston river to Rogersville, and thence to Greenville, where we met him upon our return next day. His command was about two thousand strong, but a part of it badly armed, and his ammunition ...
— History of Morgan's Cavalry • Basil W. Duke
... exactly defined, as it consists in a fitness, a propriety of words, actions, and even looks, adapted to the infinite variety and combinations of persons, places, and things. It is a mode, not a substance; for what is good-breeding at St. James's, would pass for foppery or banter in a remote village; and the homespun civility of that village would be ...
— The Young Gentleman and Lady's Monitor, and English Teacher's Assistant • John Hamilton Moore
... their banter the old windmill, perhaps because it was the only thing stirring, held them and sobered their thoughts as it would not have done elsewhere. Perhaps they felt a sort of consciousness of its lonely position and fancied it to be something ...
— Roy Blakeley in the Haunted Camp • Percy Keese Fitzhugh
... filled with a desire to stand outside the red-and-white striped walls of the tent-house and listen unseen. Inside there was always cheer: at night the crackle of fire and the glow of light, the happy laughter of the gentle-hearted Scotchwoman, and the affectionate banter of her "big mountain man," who looked more like a brigand than the luckiest and most contented husband in the mountains—the luckiest, quite surely, with the one exception of his brother Clossen, who had, by some occult strategy or other, induced ...
— The Hunted Woman • James Oliver Curwood
... To arrest. I'll roast the dab; I'll arrest the rascal.—Also to jeer, ridicule, or banter. He stood the roast; he was the butt.—Roast meat clothes; Sunday or holiday-clothes. To cry roast meat; to boast of one's situation. To rule the roast; to ...
— 1811 Dictionary of the Vulgar Tongue • Captain Grose et al.
... up from the company, but Betsy Dan, who cared not at all for Don's banter, contented herself with pushing out her lower lip at him with scorn, in that indescribable manner natural to ...
— The Man From Glengarry - A Tale Of The Ottawa • Ralph Connor
... to have realized it was not her own property, but unfortunately didn't. She calmly appropriated the bunch, and distributed it in portions to those nearest her. Peachy's cheeks flamed. She was a hot-tempered little soul underneath her gay banter. ...
— The Jolliest School of All • Angela Brazil
... Hadria about a thousand topics in which they were both interested, there had been nothing personal in their conversation. He was disposed, at times, to treat her in a spirit of affectionate banter. ...
— The Daughters of Danaus • Mona Caird
... high rostra a report comes down, And like a chilly fog, pervades the town: Each man I meet accosts me "Is it so? You live so near the gods, you're sure to know: That news about the Dacians? have you heard No secret tidings?" "Not a single word." "O yes! you love to banter us poor folk." "Nay, if I've heard a tittle, may I choke!" "Will Caesar grant his veterans their estates In Italy, or t'other side of the straits?" I swear that I know nothing, and am dumb: They think me deep, miraculously mum. And so my day between my fingers slips, While fond ...
— The Satires, Epistles, and Art of Poetry • Horace
... undesirable and to-be-let-alone. Pete, while possessing a workable sense of humor, was intense—somewhat quick on the trigger, so to speak. The frequent roughings he experienced served to steady him, and also taught him to distinguish the tentative line between good-natured banter ...
— The Ridin' Kid from Powder River • Henry Herbert Knibbs
... Mark Twain, Robert J. Burdette and George Cable, and for a while my gentlest and cheeriest of friends, Bill Nye, joined with me and made the dusty detested travel almost a delight. We were constantly playing practical jokes on each other or indulging in some mischievous banter before the audience. On one occasion, Mr. Nye, coming before the foot-lights for a word of general introduction, said, 'Ladies and gentlemen, the entertainment to-night is of a dual nature. Mr. Riley and I will speak ...
— The Complete Works • James Whitcomb Riley
... to say, you think I have sense enough to love you," said Fanny, still in a tone of banter. "We part as friends, however, and if you insist on coming to call upon my sister, Mrs Barton, of course I cannot help it, only do not for a moment suppose that ...
— The Ferryman of Brill - and other stories • William H. G. Kingston
... disqualified for it by nature."[23] "I have refrained, as much as human frailty will permit, from all satirical composition,"[24] he said. For satire he seems to have substituted that kind of "serious banter, a style hovering between affected gravity and satirical slyness," which has been pointed out as characteristic of him.[25] Washington Irving noticed a similar tone in all his familiar conversations about local traditions ...
— Sir Walter Scott as a Critic of Literature • Margaret Ball
... of laughing. He was a singular man in all respects; he might not have been quite in earnest, but that the short, hard, rapid manner in which he shot out these cinders of principles, as if it were done by mechanical revolvency, seemed irreconcilable with banter. ...
— Little Dorrit • Charles Dickens
... the man I am to marry!" she said in a voice from which the girlish banter had gone forever. It was the voice of a woman in arms to ...
— The Place Beyond the Winds • Harriet T. Comstock
... Travels in Peru has been quoted as exhibiting exaggeration in the description of the condor surpassing anything that can be laid to Polo's charge here; but that is, in fact, only somewhat heavy banter directed against our traveller's own narrative. (See Travels in Various Parts ...
— The Travels of Marco Polo, Volume 2 • Marco Polo and Rustichello of Pisa
... naive enough to renew his banter. She took her seat on the corner sofa, and looked straight into his face: "Do we really intend to remain friends, Daniel?" ...
— The Goose Man • Jacob Wassermann
... the buts," said Oliver, smiling, and just then, piqued by his companion's banter, he would have crossed had the ...
— Fire Island - Being the Adventures of Uncertain Naturalists in an Unknown Track • G. Manville Fenn
... the good-humoured and merry banter of the young man to his more serious elder brother, who stood by his side, waiting for her greeting. She held out her hand to him, and he took it, bowing respectfully, but holding it warmly in a clasp that brought a deepened colour to the cheeks ...
— Grace Darling - Heroine of the Farne Islands • Eva Hope
... lined the shore, where peasants in bright-coloured shirts and vests lounged. After much haggling and good-humoured banter, Sanine hired one of the little boats. Ivanoff was a deft and powerful oarsman, and the boat shot forward across the water like a living thing. Sometimes the oars touched reeds or low-hanging branches which for a long while after such contact trembled ...
— Sanine • Michael Artzibashef
... sup with him that night. At midnight Don Juan and his friends are making merry when a knock is heard at the door and the stone guest enters. Don Juan, who does not lose his bravery even in the presence of the supernatural, plays the host, maintaining his air of insulting banter. At the end of the evening the guest departs, offering to repay the hospitality the following night if Don Juan will visit his tomb at midnight. Though friends try to dissuade him, Don Juan fearlessly accepts the invitation. At the ...
— El Estudiante de Salamanca and Other Selections • George Tyler Northup
... two rustic fellows, meeting in a glade, gossip about their neighbour, Aegon, who has gone to try his fortune at the Olympic games. After some random banter, the talk turns on the death of Amaryllis, and the grief of Battus is disturbed by the roaming of his cattle. Corydon removes a thorn that has run into his friend's foot, and the conversation comes back to matters of ...
— Theocritus, Bion and Moschus rendered into English Prose • Andrew Lang
... a forest on the banks of the Rhine. The three Rhine-maidens are disporting themselves in the river while they lament the loss of their beautiful treasure. Siegfried, who has strayed from his companions in the chase, now appears, and they beg him for the ring upon his finger, at first with playful banter, and afterwards in sober earnest, warning him that if he does not give it back to them he will perish that very day. He laughs at their womanly wiles, and they vanish as his comrades appear. After the midday halt, Siegfried tells Gunther and his vassals the story of his life. ...
— The Opera - A Sketch of the Development of Opera. With full Descriptions - of all Works in the Modern Repertory • R.A. Streatfeild
... alone of all those present did I spare my banter. This was the old seneschal, Miriani. He stood at his post by the buffet, and ever and anon he would come forward to replenish Messer Ramiro's cup in obedience to ...
— The Shame of Motley • Raphael Sabatini
... or detectives; but to save his life he could not have kept from doing it. At last he scratched his hand on the pin which was doing duty for the button he had lost in his scuffle with Sleeny. "Ah!" he said to himself, with humorous banter, "it won't do to be married in a ...
— The Bread-winners - A Social Study • John Hay
... the value of an artistic performance to see how the actor managed to manipulate his instruments with his clean, bare toes—and that despite the pitching of the vessel—meanwhile, in the best of humour, uttering the wittiest remarks as bite after bite disappeared down his throat. He began to banter Hahlstroem and Achleitner, sometimes in rather caustic fashion, while exchanging glances with Frederick, as if he thought vastly more of him than of the other two men, who soon withdrew from his ...
— Atlantis • Gerhart Hauptmann
... friends loved to tease and banter one another and oftentimes an outsider might have thought from their conversation that they had lost their tempers. Such, however, was never the case. They knew one another too well and all had too much sense for any such foolishness. In particular ...
— The Go Ahead Boys and the Treasure Cave • Ross Kay
... sobriquet was "the little giant," and it fitted well—a man of stalwart proportions oddly "sawed off." His voice was vibrant and sonorous, his mien compelling. It was no great speech, a few sentences of compliment to the city and of good-natured banter of the political foes among whom he found himself; but it was ex pede Herculem, a leader red-blooded to the finger-tips. I treasure the memory of this brief touch into which I once came with Douglas for I have come to think more ...
— The Last Leaf - Observations, during Seventy-Five Years, of Men and Events in America - and Europe • James Kendall Hosmer
... in, hossy?" asked Calvin. He flicked hossy on the ear, but his tone was not the usual one of friendly banter. Hossy shook ...
— The Wooing of Calvin Parks • Laura E. Richards
... kitchen came the muffled clatter of earthenware and occasionally a harsh, loud voice; it was the hour of relaxed discipline in the kitchen, where amid the final washing-up and much free discussion and banter, Florrie was recommencing her career on a grander basis. Hilda closed the door very quietly. When she had closed it and was shut in with George Cannon ...
— Hilda Lessways • Arnold Bennett
... keep ever with their likes"—his star was at its zenith. Then indeed, all rules were suspended; no point of order suggested—"The man and the hour had met." His marvellous narratives of quaint incidents and startling experiences, his brilliant repartee, sallies of wit, banter, and badinage have rarely been heard since the days of the Round Table or the passing of "the Star ...
— Something of Men I Have Known - With Some Papers of a General Nature, Political, Historical, and Retrospective • Adlai E. Stevenson
... welcoming the English alliance when they had once done nothing but tax him with Anglomania, and had given him the nickname of Milord Risorgimento. He could easily have aroused enthusiasm if, instead of this banter, he had spoken the words of passionate earnestness in which he alluded to his part in the transaction in a letter to Mme. de Circourt. He felt, he said, the tremendous responsibility which weighed on him, and the ...
— Cavour • Countess Evelyn Martinengo-Cesaresco
... affair, have revealed her anxiety to her brother, who held the even tenor of his way, whatever he felt—never obtrusive and never negligent. He treated Bessie like the girl of sense she was, with courtesy, but without compliments or any idle banter; and Bessie certainly began to enjoy his society. He improved on acquaintance, and made the hours pass much more pleasantly at Brentwood when he was there than they passed in his absence. This was promising. The evening's dinner-party would ...
— The Vicissitudes of Bessie Fairfax • Harriet Parr
... heap; but his jest failed. The earnestness and devout emotion of the boy to the vision of reality which his imagination, aided by the hues of sunset, had thus exalted, were too much for the gross spirit of banter, and the speaker shrank back into his dust-hovel, and affected to be very assiduous in his work as the day was drawing ...
— Harper's New Monthly Magazine, Volume 1, No. 4, September, 1850 • Various
... thou think, that after all this pains, that I have been at to get an answer to my question, that thou canst banter me with such sham stuff as this? Hold the candle to his face that we may see his ...
— State Trials, Political and Social - Volume 1 (of 2) • Various
... hour they spent upon the water's edge was largely one of sentimental banter between merry maid and enamored man, in which Edwin reached the conclusion that his charmer could give cards to the jolliest little "jollier" in Baltimore. She asked him about his past and present girl friends, and pouted deliciously when ...
— The Mermaid of Druid Lake and Other Stories • Charles Weathers Bump
... of uneasiness behind the banter of his tone which her quick ear instantly detected. She looked up sharply and in a second, as if at a touch of magic, the laughter all died out of ...
— The Odds - And Other Stories • Ethel M. Dell
... Dweller as a messenger, a scientific dove from their Ark?" I chose to overlook the banter ...
— The Moon Pool • A. Merritt
... at her over the three checks he was pinning together. He liked to play at a rough game of banter with her. He flattered himself that he had made her harsher than she was when she first came to him; that he had got off a little of the sugar-coating Harsanyi always put ...
— Song of the Lark • Willa Cather
... cannot be works of literary art. If a young man wants only to advertise his own smartness, he will not produce a beautiful thing. And if a statesman out of office wishes to amuse himself by alternate banter and laudation of the very society which he has led and which looks to him as its inspiration, the result will be infinitely entertaining, but not a great work of art. Disraeli therefore with literary ...
— Studies in Early Victorian Literature • Frederic Harrison
... Bessy rode alone. But the icy touch of the thought slipped from Justine's mind as she bent above the tea-tray, gravely measuring Cicely's milk into a "grown-up" teacup, hearing the confidential details of the child's day, and capping them with banter ...
— The Fruit of the Tree • Edith Wharton
... horse to and fro in front of his men, in order to banter me. I concluded to accept his challenge. I turned and galloped toward him for fifty yards, and he rode toward me about the same distance. Both of us rode at full speed. When we were only thirty yards apart I raised my ...
— An Autobiography of Buffalo Bill (Colonel W. F. Cody) • Buffalo Bill (William Frederick Cody)
... accidental kindness touched him so much that sometimes he did not venture to speak in order not to betray the unsteadiness of his voice. He remembered the bitterness of his life at school, the humiliation which he had endured, the banter which had made him morbidly afraid of making himself ridiculous; and he remembered the loneliness he had felt since, faced with the world, the disillusion and the disappointment caused by the difference between what it promised to his active imagination and what it gave. ...
— Of Human Bondage • W. Somerset Maugham
... of science and character shall be openly insulted in the midst of the many useful services he is daily paying to the publick. Was it ever heard, even in Turkey or Algiers, that a state-astrologer was banter'd out of his life by an ignorant impostor, or bawl'd out of the world by a pack of villanous, deep-mouth'd hawkers? Though I print almanacks, and publish advertisements; though I produce certificates under the ministers and church-wardens hands I am alive, and ...
— The Bickerstaff-Partridge Papers • Jonathan Swift
... him, but the particular reason for that heliotropism on the part of his feminine neighbors was that he was an easy man for a woman to ask. Being asked, he always served her in a spirit of masculine banter and then went away as if he had enjoyed the joke. Thus she could be grateful for his neighborly turn without feeling herself under any painful state of obligation. Naturally his custom grew. One moment he ...
— The Wrong Woman • Charles D. Stewart
... work, was the ideal hand at receiving deputations. Some Ministers scold or snub or harangue, but he let the spokesmen talk their full, listened patiently, smiled pleasantly, said very little, treated the subject with gravity or banter as its nature required, paid the introducing member a compliment on his assiduity and public spirit, and sent them all away on excellent terms with themselves and highly gratified by their intelligent ...
— Collections and Recollections • George William Erskine Russell
... there is a pleasing relish on the curb at his discomfort, yet it must not be assumed that all the humor on the street rises from misadventure. Rather, it arises from a general acceptance of the day and a feeling of common partnership in the storm. The policeman in his rubber coat exchanges banter with a cab-driver. If there is a tangle in the traffic, it comes nearer to a jest than on a fairer day. A teamster sitting dry inside his hood, whistles so cheerily that he can be heard at the farther sidewalk. Good-naturedly he sets his tune as ...
— Chimney-Pot Papers • Charles S. Brooks
... reference to those conversational expedients which pander to gaiety in the form of scandal; they are called among us banter and badinage. Laughter, mirth and gaiety is their purpose, and we meet with them generally in society and high life. Among the heathen, jesting was counted a virtue, and therefore received the title "eutrapelia" by Aristotle. But Paul calls it a vice ...
— Epistle Sermons, Vol. II - Epiphany, Easter and Pentecost • Martin Luther
... the silence of the night. A big moth that had singed its wings at the lights flew about, thumping against the walls. This fluttering distress and the smothered sobs of the Queen were the only sounds to be heard; she knew how to meet rage and violence, but was powerless before this scoffing banter, so foreign to her sincere nature; it found her unarmed, like the valiant soldier who expects straight blows and feels only the harassing stings of insects. Seeing her break down, Christian thought her vanquished, and to complete his victory ...
— Library of the World's Best Literature, Ancient and Modern — Volume 11 • Various
... to take no risks, and got down and walked wisely and safely, amid the laughter and good-humoured banter of the elect, across the gulf. Most, however, showed their confidence in their swains, and at the same time trebled their anxieties, by keeping their seats and allowing their horses to be ...
— Carette of Sark • John Oxenham
... classed himself as an Academic, exclaims in one place that he is afraid the Stoics are the only philosophers, and whenever he is combating Epicureanism his language is that of a Stoic. Some of Vergil's most eloquent passages seem to be inspired by Stoic speculation. Even Horace, despite his banter about the sage, in his serious moods borrows the language of the Stoics. It was they who inspired the highest flights of declamatory eloquence in Persius and Juvenal. Their moral philosophy affected the world through Roman law, the great masters of which were brought up under its influence. So all ...
— A Little Book of Stoicism • St George Stock
... it. Allaha it shall be, without a meddling Ramabai; back to the gurus who love you so!" He dropped his banter. "You call me a murderer. I admit it. I have killed the man who was always throwing his benefits into my face, who brought me up not as a companion but as a plaything. He is dead. I slew him. After the first, what are two or three ...
— The Adventures of Kathlyn • Harold MacGrath
... eyes and seemingly mocking smile, he appears about to lead her back into the ballroom, there is, at least so I like to read the music, a pretty little laugh, as much as to say, "Can't you read my real feelings under my mask of banter," a tender glance indicated by a retard on a charmingly expressive little turn of the melody—and she is ...
— The Pianolist - A Guide for Pianola Players • Gustav Kobb
... not always concord; as I have intimated, he took a pleasure in frightening me, though I never really lost my confidence in his protection, if he would only drop the fantastic aspects that he delighted to assume. Sometimes, but much more rarely, he teased me with exasperating banter; and, inheriting from some of my progenitors a vindictive temper, I once retaliated severely. We were in the sitting-room with my father and some others, while I was tortured. The chancery-suit was just then approaching its most critical point, ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. XI., February, 1863, No. LXIV. • Various
... to repeat. Suffice it to say that, whilst his great-grandfather and other shepherds were tending their flocks on the subjected plains below, a troop of these Christians broke loose from the dark caverns in the mountains, where they are chained, and began to abuse and banter the shepherds, because they did not say, "There are three Gods." The shepherds withstood the temptation and the terror of their countenances, although they, the shepherds, exceedingly quaked. The Christians, in their rage against the shepherds professing ...
— Travels in the Great Desert of Sahara, in the Years of 1845 and 1846 • James Richardson
... him away from the walls. But Richard, for this present whim of his, chose out a companion devil as heedless as himself, Mercadet namely, his brown Gascon captain, of like proportions, like mettle, like foolhardiness; and with him made the daily round, never omitting an exchange of grim banter with Saint-Pol. It was terrible to see him, without helm on his head, or reason in it, canter within ...
— The Life and Death of Richard Yea-and-Nay • Maurice Hewlett
... rather quiet during the evening. Ward had appointed him to order the dinner, and he had attended to this duty without mingling much in the conversation. When Ward asked him why he did not join the banter, he said: ...
— The Boys' Life of Mark Twain • Albert Bigelow Paine
... and reserves. The chief has little or no influence with his followers during the fight, though on account of his personal prowess he is looked up to as a pillar of strength and would, no doubt, if given the opportunity, or if the abuse and banter were extreme, engage in a hand-to-hand encounter. Numerous cases of this kind ...
— The Manbos of Mindano - Memoirs of the National Academy of Sciences, Volume XXIII, First Memoir • John M. Garvan
... biggest ketch you ever seen in your life. It's ketch the Flying U outfit and squeeze the life out of it; that's the ketch." Andy's tone had in it no banter, but considerable earnestness. For, though Chip would no doubt convince the boys that the danger was very real, there was a small matter of personal pride to urge Andy into trying to convince, them himself, without aid from ...
— The Flying U's Last Stand • B. M. Bower
... notes, is academic banter, that of a university man, who is mocking the notes of learned editors. This humour is not the humour of Dickens, who, however, may very well have written the Introduction to Cruikshank's version. ...
— The Valet's Tragedy and Other Stories • Andrew Lang
... "civilized" undertook to banter me on my non-appearance in the classic regions of Barnwell.—Bristed's Five Years in an Eng. Univ., ...
— A Collection of College Words and Customs • Benjamin Homer Hall
... worked, Auguste and Rose, and how cheerfully they worked! One could hear her singing, and him whistling, at it all day. Yet they seemed to have abundant leisure to exchange a deal of pleasantry and harmless banter. Auguste was a Swiss, and a bigoted Protestant, and never lost an opportunity of holding forth on the superiority of the reformed religion. If he thought the family were out of hearing, he would grow very animated and declamatory. But Rose, who also had hopes, though perhaps faint, ...
— Tracks of a Rolling Stone • Henry J. Coke
... along the road with a comfortable foot, a full stomach and in the midst of friends! Steve had never known greater joy than that moment held. They were a "happy-go-lucky" family he had fallen in with,—and for the first time in his life he was in the midst of the merry banter of children. The mountain folk of remote regions lack a sense of humour, and Steve had grown up entirely alone, the cabins of Hollow Hut being scattered, so he sat through the afternoon in a maze of delight. There were snickers and giggles, punching in the ribs ...
— The Boy from Hollow Hut - A Story of the Kentucky Mountains • Isla May Mullins
... take her the least bit seriously—he never did. Her occasional courtship of him had been always so light and airy, so dispassionately epigrammatic, that he looked on it as mere whimsical banter and rather good amusement. She had plagued him into consenting to that kiss on the forehead which she gave him each time they met, referring to it constantly as an advantage won by hard effort. The circumstance of their first meeting ...
— Cleo The Magnificent - The Muse of the Real • Louis Zangwill
... this new Abjuration, Did banter the lawful King of this great Nation: Who call'd God's anointed a foolish old Prig, Was both a base and unmannerly Whigg: But since he is Dead No more shall be said, For he in Repentance has laid down his Head; So ...
— Wit and Mirth: or Pills to Purge Melancholy, Vol. 5 of 6 • Various
... "square-head" to his competitors from northern Europe. The word "Boche" cannot be translated by anything except "Boche," any more than our word "Wop," meaning an Italian, can be turned into French. The same attitude, half banter, half race contempt, lies at the heart ...
— A Volunteer Poilu • Henry Sheahan
... vain for some airy nothing with which to answer his nonsense. I never have had the gift of repartee. I can talk well enough about subjects that interest me when I am conversing with some one whom I know well, but the frothy persiflage, the light banter that forms the conversation's stock in trade of so many women, is an alien ...
— Revelations of a Wife - The Story of a Honeymoon • Adele Garrison
... met civility and obedience now where formerly he had earned but ridicule and opposition. So long as he worked hard himself the cowboys endured. The subtle change in him seemed of sterner stuff. The talk, as usual, centered round the stock subjects and the banter and gossip of ranch-hands. Wade selected an interval when there was a lull in the conversation, and with eyes that burned under the shadow of his broad-brimmed sombrero he ...
— The Mysterious Rider • Zane Grey
... the thick one, lorgnetting the graceful Constance with a fishy eye as the temporary flower girl joyously greeted Ashley Loring and Val Russel and Bruce Townley, pinned bouquets upon them and exchanged laughing banter with them. ...
— Five Thousand an Hour - How Johnny Gamble Won the Heiress • George Randolph Chester
... conversation, carried on in low tones, had passed under cover of noisy mirth, snatches of song, banter, and gigglings; nobody paid heed to the two men talking in a corner. Yet the stranger lowered his voice to a ...
— The Secret of the Tower • Hope, Anthony
... Courtenay laughed too, and a little friendly banter was carried on between them, while the curate stood by feeling rather out ...
— The Autobiography of a Slander • Edna Lyall
... women rather stiff, and usually hampered by at least one child, which they carry on their backs or on their hips, while another holds on to the garment which replaces our skirts. There is plenty of laughter and banter with the men, who look on unmoved at the efforts of the weaker sex, only rarely ...
— Two Years with the Natives in the Western Pacific • Felix Speiser
... And then the banter ceased, for the sergeant's men passed through the swing gate, and to Waller's great relief he was able to make his way back to the hall, very silent now as he went over the day's proceedings, and thought ...
— The New Forest Spy • George Manville Fenn
... Birdsell with round-eyed steady stare. He was a superb type of man. It gave Bradley a feeling of awkwardness to stand beside him and a consciousness of stupidity to listen to their banter, but Ida dismissed Cargill and Birdsell summarily and walked home with Bradley. He was not keenly perceptive enough to see that Ida put Birdsell off with a brusqueness ...
— A Spoil of Office - A Story of the Modern West • Hamlin Garland
... first experiences in Paris, and inquired mischievously whether he had brought his cloak, his purse, and his handkerchief home with him, to which de Sigognac joyfully answered in the affirmative. In this friendly banter he soon forgot his sombre thoughts, and asked himself whether he had not been the dupe of a hypochondriac fancy, which could see nothing anywhere but ...
— Captain Fracasse • Theophile Gautier
... sister who told me that Mary was engaged to be married. But I had noticed for some days how the neighbors went out of their way to accost her upon our walks; to banter her kindly, to shake hands with her, to wag their heads and look chin-chucks even if they gave none. Her face wore a beautiful mantling red for hours at a time. And instead of being made more sedate ...
— The Spread Eagle and Other Stories • Gouverneur Morris
... the present company of course excepted—many people, perhaps most people, are as infants. They have little sense of humor. They don't like jokes. Raillery in writing annoys and offends them. The coarseness apart, I think I have met very, very few women who liked the banter of Swift and Fielding. Their simple, tender natures revolt at laughter. Is the satyr always a wicked brute at heart, and are they rightly shocked at his grin, his leer, his horns, hoofs, and ears? Fi donc, le vilain monstre, with his shrieks, and his capering crooked ...
— Roundabout Papers • William Makepeace Thackeray
... der Stucken, Walter Damrosch, and Adolf Neuendorff. Maretzek was seventy-six years of age at the time of his death, and he had grown old, if not gracefully, at least good-naturedly. He did not quarrel with his fate, but even when he spoke of its buffetings it was in a tone of pleasant banter and with a twinkle in his eyes. His manner of accepting what the world brought him was illustrated at a meeting which I had with him in the season of 1883-84—the first of the Metropolitan Opera House. It was on ...
— Chapters of Opera • Henry Edward Krehbiel
... room, and, as one after another of the men glanced up from the table, they saw standing in the doorway a man of such malignant aspect that his look fell across the company like a menace. The swing of their banter slowed suddenly; it was as if the cold of a new-turned grave had struck across the June sunshine checking their roughshod fun. None of them had the hardihood to joke with a man that stood in the shadow of death; and hate and murder looked from the eyes of the man in the doorway and looked ...
— Judith Of The Plains • Marie Manning
... to talking of the scholars who had sat here and there, Miss Ludington began gently to banter Ida about this and that boyish sweetheart, and divers ...
— Miss Ludington's Sister • Edward Bellamy
... deferential manner that rendered him universally popular among the ladies of the families of his artist friends. She would sit smilingly by when the conflicts of the morning were sometimes renewed, for she saw with satisfaction that Anna at least was certainly impressed with Cuthbert's arguments and banter, and afforded very feeble aid to Mary Brander in her defence ...
— A Girl of the Commune • George Alfred Henty
... Martin cheerfully. "Very well, see you to-morrow. Meanwhile, be good. Flee the giddy lure. Go home to your little bed and sleep sweet." There was seriousness under his good-natured banter. "Come along and I'll see you ...
— Swirling Waters • Max Rittenberg
... you offer me," Montalvo said, with a return to his hateful banter. Then he added, "That offer might be considered were it not for the abominable laws which you have here. In practice it would be almost impossible for you to hand over any large sum, much of which is represented by ...
— Lysbeth - A Tale Of The Dutch • H. Rider Haggard
... since her husband mastered the wealth of frozen pay streaks, and she was tired. She rested against his great breast like a slender flower against a wall, replying lazily to Malemute Kid's good-natured banter, and stirring Prince's blood strangely with an occasional sweep of her deep, dark eyes. For Prince was a man, and healthy, and had seen few women in many months. And she was older than he, and an Indian besides. But she was different from all native wives he had met: she had traveled—had ...
— The Son of the Wolf • Jack London
... was inclined to be very critical and openly judged everyone, from the minister to her own father and mother. She was constantly calling Louis to account for his failings, and one of Mrs. Douglas's daily crosses was due to the habit Helen had of provoking Louis, partly in a spirit of banter, partly because Louis offended the girl's nice feelings about certain customs and courtesies in polite society. There were great possibilities in Helen for a rich and rare womanhood, but many a hard fight ahead for her in the overcoming, and many humiliations ...
— The High Calling • Charles M. Sheldon
... not a great privilege, Monsieur, to be an Englishman?" she began with polite banter. "You are the conquerors, the millionaires; yours are the palaces, and the high and honorable places! But you, Monsieur, you are not too proud to patronize our ...
— The Young Seigneur - Or, Nation-Making • Wilfrid Chateauclair
... foes should thus depart forever far away from my abode." Those about him made merry over Henry III., a refugee at Bordeaux, deserted by the English and plundered by the Gascons. "Hold! hold! said Louis; "turn him not into ridicule, and make me not hated of him by reason of your banter; his charities and his piety shall exempt him from all contumely." The Count of La Marche lost no time in asking for peace; and Louis granted it with the firmness of a far-seeing politician and ...
— A Popular History of France From The Earliest Times - Volume II. of VI. • Francois Pierre Guillaume Guizot
... us return to Piero Torrigiani, who, with my drawing in his hand, spoke as follows: "This Buonarroti and I used, when we were boys, to go into the Church of the Carmine, to learn drawing from the chapel of Masaccio. [1] It was Buonarroti's habit to banter all who were drawing there; and one day, among others, when he was annoying me, I got more angry than usual, and clenching my fist, gave him such a blow on the nose, that I felt bone and cartilage go down like biscuit ...
— The Autobiography of Benvenuto Cellini • Benvenuto Cellini
... yclept Fun—known by his broad grin, by his loud tone, and by his rude banter. Head foremost forcing himself in, came he, and brought with him a heap of coarse caricatures, and they ...
— Helen • Maria Edgeworth
... conscious of the power of his intellect, and he liked to bring it to bear on what was before him; he liked to probe things to the bottom, and see how far his companion in conversation was able to go; but ready as he was with either argument or banter he never, unless provoked, forced the proof of his power on others. For others, indeed, of all classes and characters, so that they were true, he had nothing but kindness, geniality, forbearance, the ready willingness to ...
— Occasional Papers - Selected from The Guardian, The Times, and The Saturday Review, - 1846-1890 • R.W. Church
... is best expressed by just that abrupt and insignificant monosyllable!" he cried, his solemnity swept away by a mood of extravagant banter. "Now, you know, since we have elected a professional baseball player to the mayor's office, I foresee great possibilities unfolding in municipal affairs. I rather anticipate that the city fathers will seek recreation from their arduous labours ...
— The Mayor of Warwick • Herbert M. Hopkins
... feel—the death of a whole family of children. Yet it was gone upon like a holiday jaunt. I read in Colonel Fergusson's letter that his schoolmates bantered him when he began to broach his scheme; so did I at first, and he took the banter, as he always did, with enjoyment, until he suddenly posed me with the question: "And now do you see any other jokes to make? Well, then," said he, "that's all right. I wanted you to have your fun out first; now we can be serious." And then ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson, Volume 9 • Robert Louis Stevenson
... rhythm, Prior ease, Praed buoyancy and banter; What modern bard would learn from ...
— In the Name of the Bodleian and Other Essays • Augustine Birrell
... While this disgusting banter was going on I observed a planter ride up to one of the brokers and whisper for some time in his ear. The planter was a bad but unmistakable likeness of my friend Moore, worked over, so to speak, with a loaded ...
— In the Wrong Paradise • Andrew Lang
... George began his sapping and mining operations with great vigor. He made Aun' Sheba sit down and give directions for supper, which he and his two colored men carried out. Mrs. Bodine was the only one who would jest with him, and he had a word of banter with her; and a cheery word for every one as ...
— The Earth Trembled • E.P. Roe
... Aytoun, Ferrier, Glassford Bell, and others—perhaps none, not even Hogg, recognised the grace of the Muse which (in my poor opinion) Mr. Stoddart possessed. His character was not in the least degree soured by neglect or fretted by banter. Not to over-estimate oneself is a virtue very rare among poets, and certainly does not lead to public triumphs. Modesty is apt to accompany the sense of humour which alleviates life, while it is an almost ...
— The Death-Wake - or Lunacy; a Necromaunt in Three Chimeras • Thomas T Stoddart
... to take one precaution unless the whole are taken," laughed the sphinx-like fellow whose cheerful banter had so successfully passed them through the ...
— Mademoiselle of Monte Carlo • William Le Queux
... velvet, and his big eyes under their bowed brows sought out the author and smiled at her with a genuine pledge of loyalty which no lizard could ever have given forth as he glided richly into his archaic banter with Miss Herne. ...
— Blue-grass and Broadway • Maria Thompson Daviess
... outdid her, though his work was of a different order. And she was surprised to behold that the less food he had, the harder he worked. On occasion, in a casual sort of way, when she thought hunger pinched hardest, she would send him in a loaf of new baking, awkwardly covering the act with banter to the effect that it was better than he could bake. And again, she would send one of her toddlers in to him with a great pitcher of hot soup, debating inwardly the while whether she was justified in taking it from the mouths of her ...
— Martin Eden • Jack London
... we saunter Yirr, fancy barks, awa' we canter Uphill, down brae, till some mishanter, Some black bog-hole, Arrests us, then the scathe an' banter ...
— The Complete Works of Robert Burns: Containing his Poems, Songs, and Correspondence. • Robert Burns and Allan Cunningham
... reproached and insulted by insolent pedants and ballad-making poets for employing foreigners and being a foreigner himself, I confess myself moved by it to remind our nation of their own original, thereby to let them see what a banter they put upon themselves, since—speaking of Englishmen ab origine—we are really ...
— English Literature, Considered as an Interpreter of English History - Designed as a Manual of Instruction • Henry Coppee
... native haughtiness of good birth, and that indescribable something which may be called "pedigree." So, on Monday her turn would come. And, moreover, the Marquise knew that as soon as people learned that the stranger was her cousin, they would suspend their banter and look twice ...
— Lost Illusions • Honore De Balzac
... it, but they play the game fairly. There is no poaching, no snares are laid for the unwary, and if harm is done it is because people have misunderstood them. The man flirts because he loves {38} to say pretty things to a woman. He revels in an interchange of banter and repartee which makes her eyes sparkle and his pulses beat the faster. The girl flirts out of the abundance of her joyous vitality. She suits herself to the companion of the hour. She knows nothing of the tender passion, she is not taking life quite seriously yet, but she has the ...
— The Etiquette of Engagement and Marriage • G. R. M. Devereux
... he would degenerate into the laughing stock of the community the instant he began to carry out the terms of the will and reconstruct the wall. She could hear now the taunts and jests of the townsfolk. Some of them would speak in good-humored banter, some with premeditated malice; but their ...
— The Wall Between • Sara Ware Bassett
... that an affair of the heart was forward. And 'twas true; 'twas safely to be predicted, indeed, in season and out, of the fool of our harbor: for what with his own witless conjectures and the reports of his mates, made in unkind banter, his leisure was forever employed in the unhappy business: so that never a strange maid came near but he would go shyly forth upon his quest, persuaded of a grateful issue. 'Twas heroic, I thought, and by this, no less than by his attachment, ...
— The Cruise of the Shining Light • Norman Duncan
... the country's money for what we do not ourselves perform. These traits of his were regarded as characteristics hopeful rather than the reverse; none of his friends and relatives foresaw danger in them. He was a capital boy for his elders to trot out and banter. ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... no resentment at their banter, sensing that it was kindly. He liked them. He liked the great, mysterious basement. He felt precisely like another Aladdin. No magical smoke had gone up, and no stone had been lifted. Yet here he was in a ...
— The Rich Little Poor Boy • Eleanor Gates
... witty dogs, thought I to myself, trying to make the best of the matter, for I saw it would not do to resent what they said; they can't mean any harm, though they are certainly very impudent; so I tried to laugh off their banter, but as soon as ever I could, I put down my name and ...
— Redburn. His First Voyage • Herman Melville
... indescribable something which may be called "pedigree." So, on Monday her turn would come. And, moreover, the Marquise knew that as soon as people learned that the stranger was her cousin, they would suspend their banter and look ...
— Lost Illusions • Honore De Balzac
... moment as the burly Bull came down the room. Had he done so five minutes sooner Freckleton might have found himself single- handed. But already his genial banter had told among the more susceptible of his hearers, and he could count at any rate on fair play. For the rest, he ...
— Follow My leader - The Boys of Templeton • Talbot Baines Reed
... him, I kill him," Pete answered me, ignoring the criticisms of the others as to his marksmanship and hunting prowess. All that day and all the next the men let no opportunity pass to guy Pete about his lost caribou, and on the whole he took the banter very good-naturedly, but once confided to me that "if those boys get up early, maybe they see caribou too and try how much ...
— The Long Labrador Trail • Dillon Wallace
... Principi di Monte Bianca, your father and mine, old fools! To tell the truth, I am badly in need of money, and, head of Bacchus! your appearance here is life to me, my dear Sonia. Life! I am a rich man. But," with a sudden scowl, dropping the mask of banter, "I do not understand these companions of yours." He eyed the group coldly. "What position in my household does this gentleman occupy?" ...
— The Lure of the Mask • Harold MacGrath
... once." Fred dropped his banter. "I'll tell you what, Nancy. I may not be able to do much right off, but I'll promise you that he has a fair chance before ...
— The Calico Cat • Charles Miner Thompson
... clothes, I do believe," said Goethe, with his usual banter, in the evening when a little company had gathered in the parlors. Felix sat on his teacher's knee, with his arms around the old man's neck, girl-like. "Does he play?" continued Goethe, going ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great - Volume 14 - Little Journeys to the Homes of Great Musicians • Elbert Hubbard
... Hitchcock's clear, mocking voice could be heard teasing her cousin Caspar on his performance that afternoon. The heavy young man, whose florid face was flushed with the champagne he had taken, made ineffective attempts to ward off the banter. Parker Hitchcock came ...
— The Web of Life • Robert Herrick
... ear, and smiled as he thought how easy it would be to stroll down the road to where the singing girl was, and accost her pleasantly: "So he's in Holland, is he? That's the queer and foolish place for him to be, and I here!" There would be banter, quick and smart as a whip, a scuffle, a clumsily placed kiss, laughter, another scuffle, and a kiss that found its mark somehow, then a saunter together down the scented loaning while the June moon rode ...
— The Wind Bloweth • Brian Oswald Donn-Byrne
... goes on to say that even the best professional actors might have learnt from him in some parts. The audience was not a pleasant one to face. It was the First Consul's habit to invite forty persons to dinner, and a hundred and fifty for the evening, and consequently to hear, criticise, and banter us without mercy" (Memoirs of Duchesse d'Abrantes, tome ...
— Memoirs of Napoleon Bonaparte, Complete • Louis Antoine Fauvelet de Bourrienne
... millionaires!" interrupted Henry gaily; "then we could get wood in abundance, and perhaps," he added, looking slyly over to the stove where some bread-soup was in preparation for their very temperate repast, "some better fare for dinner. But," he continued in a tone of humorous banter, which he frequently adopted, and pushing back his chair a few paces as he spoke, "while you superintend the household concerns, and give the necessary orders to the cook, I will withdraw into my study. Now, what would I not write if only pen, paper, and ink, were ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine - Volume 57, No. 352, February 1845 • Various
... 'move' (to use a Platonic expression) will 'shut him up.' He has reached the stage of framing general notions, and in this respect is in advance of Cephalus and Polemarchus. But he is incapable of defending them in a discussion, and vainly tries to cover his confusion with banter and insolence. Whether such doctrines as are attributed to him by Plato were really held either by him or by any other Sophist is uncertain; in the infancy of philosophy serious errors about morality might ...
— The Republic • Plato
... of that?" She did not answer, for in this masquerade banter she had somehow been growing unhappy. "Shall I prove to you that you have seen me before? You dare ...
— A Fearful Responsibility and Other Stories • William D. Howells
... to them after his daily visit, and lying on the grass, his arms crossed behind his head, and a big cigar between his lips, would gently banter everybody. Tea came at five o'clock, and then Mrs. Decie appeared armed with a magazine or novel, for she was proud of her literary knowledge. The sitting was suspended; Harz, with a cigarette, would move between the table and the picture, drinking his tea, putting a touch ...
— Forsyte Saga • John Galsworthy
... him—Lambert?" thought Richard. "Absurd! That was only banter on the part of his companions. I wonder whether I shall ...
— The Queen's Scarlet - The Adventures and Misadventures of Sir Richard Frayne • George Manville Fenn
... having roved about for some time without aim, sometimes howling in at open doors and bolting, frequently heaping banter upon good-natured policemen, occasionally asking of mild old ladies the way to places he had never heard of, or demanding what o'clock it was of people who did not possess watches, and whistling most of the time with irritating intensity—our little hero at ...
— The Garret and the Garden • R.M. Ballantyne
... emissaries from other forms, bent on a like errand, and exchanged a brisk banter as they ...
— A Popular Schoolgirl • Angela Brazil
... with a jabber of strange terms, a bright smile and ready banter, and I could see that he was to be a quick favourite. I envied him for his ease of manner, a thing I could never compass. ...
— The Trail of '98 - A Northland Romance • Robert W. Service
... tried, or pretended to try, to wheel his barrow, which was full of gravel, over Davy's toes. The said toes were sticking quite bare through great holes in an old pair of woman's boots. Then he began to tease him rather roughly. But Davy took all his banter with just the same complacency and mirth with which he had received the ...
— Adela Cathcart, Vol. 1 • George MacDonald
... front room, pushing the others ahead of him. Turning at the door to throw another banter at his guest, he faced an ...
— The Return of Blue Pete • Luke Allan
... first impulse was to shame her adversary out of her warlike attitude with a little biting banter. Curling her lip, she said not very relevantly to the topic in hand, "They've telt me yer ...
— The Shadow of a Crime - A Cumbrian Romance • Hall Caine
... program with Mark Twain, Robert J. Burdette and George Cable, and for a while my gentlest and cheeriest of friends, Bill Nye, joined with me and made the dusty detested travel almost a delight. We were constantly playing practical jokes on each other or indulging in some mischievous banter before the audience. On one occasion, Mr. Nye, coming before the foot-lights for a word of general introduction, said, 'Ladies and gentlemen, the entertainment to-night is of a dual nature. Mr. Riley and I will speak alternately. First I come out and talk until I get tired, then ...
— The Complete Works • James Whitcomb Riley
... was injured fatally. Frischlin was considered one of the best Latin poets of post- classical times; but his genius was marred by his immoderate and bitter temper, which caused him to imagine that the gentle banter and jocular remarks of his acquaintances were insults to be repaid by angry invective and bitter sarcasm, with which ...
— Books Fatal to Their Authors • P. H. Ditchfield
... through gate No. 3. You can read your ticket when you get on the train; you'll have time enough before you reach Chicago. Good luck on your ranch," he added in a kindly banter. ...
— Bob Chester's Grit - From Ranch to Riches • Frank V. Webster
... He is He: and if He slay me, I will laugh raillery at His Sword, and banter Him to His face: for His Sword is sharp Mercy, and His poisons kill my death. Fear not, therefore, little flock of Man! but take my comfort to your heart to-night, and my sweets to your tongue: for though ...
— The Purple Cloud • M.P. Shiel
... tried to check her by sarcasm—a banter that stung where it lit. But when she would not be checked, when she followed him into his study, wailing and accusing, a whirlwind of rage developed in the man, and he denounced her with a violence and a brutality which presently cowed her. She ran shivering upstairs ...
— The Mating of Lydia • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... regimental depot in England. It was evident that his lack of learning would prove a barrier to promotion. He found that much of the leisure hitherto devoted to athletic sports must be given to study. Behind "sported oak," while dust accumulated on boxing-glove and foil—neither the banter of his brother officers nor his love for athletics inducing him to break the resolution—he bent to his work with a fixity of purpose that augured ...
— The Story of Isaac Brock - Hero, Defender and Saviour of Upper Canada, 1812 • Walter R. Nursey
... warn the Princess that if the man were not a maniac he was more dangerous, she asked him bluntly if her husband had constituted him her dragon, and thereafter in half contemptuous banter she gave him the ...
— Romance of Roman Villas - (The Renaissance) • Elizabeth W. (Elizbeth Williams) Champney
... joke and banter. The situation was serious. Some tried to smoke, but their parching thirst was thus only aggravated—they threw their ...
— The Mintage • Elbert Hubbard
... which forms the underplot, the ruse which was to make each think the other to be the lovelorn one, it is really they who win the day. Their feelings are not altered by this merry plot; they {167} are merely given a chance to drop the mask of banter and to express without confusion the love which had long been theirs. Thus the play which began with the silvery laughter of Beatrice ends in general mirth which is yet ...
— An Introduction to Shakespeare • H. N. MacCracken
... privilege of becoming boys. So I suppose we must attribute it to something or other in human nature. Meanwhile, there stands the new-comer, surrounded by a circle of his new associates, who forthwith proceed to frighten, and to banter, and to make a fool of him, to the extent of their wit. Some address him with mock politeness, others with fierceness; and so they conduct him in solemn procession across the Agora to the Baths; and as ...
— Harvard Classics Volume 28 - Essays English and American • Various
... of New South Wales, meaning banter, chaff, fun at another's expense. (See quotation, 1845.) Prior to 1870 the word was much in use on the stations in New South Wales. About 1870 Victorian farmers' sons took shearing work there, and brought back the word with them. It was ...
— A Dictionary of Austral English • Edward Morris
... During this little banter Nellie cries, "Pooh, pooh!" mamma looks pleased, and papa smiles gently. Then the fresh young voices of the brother and sister mingle ...
— Trumps • George William Curtis
... boys up to the curbstone brokers, adored Miss Merriam. When they paid their checks they wooed her with every wile known to Cupid's art. Between the meshes of the brass railing went smiles, winks, compliments, tender vows, invitations to dinner, sighs, languishing looks and merry banter that was wafted pointedly back ...
— Strictly Business • O. Henry
... times are the cause of many amusing incidents which beguile the tedium of the journey. Also they often lead to your picking up chance acquaintances. I have known one stone placed in a dimly lighted corridor of a train productive of much merriment and harmless banter. Being of considerable weight they do not readily respond to a playful kick, but having no sharp corners they are seldom responsible for serious ...
— Punch, Or The London Charivari, Vol. 146., January 21, 1914 • Various
... different from that which has been established through official channels and documents"; and Lord Rosebery, while he recognized the importance of the incident, seeking to minimize its effects by an attitude of banter. The treatment of the incident by the House of Commons as a whole gave considerable satisfaction in Germany, where all efforts were directed to showing malevolent hostility to Germany on the part of ...
— William of Germany • Stanley Shaw
... spoil your wife's business, Hill—she's likely to need it," he said, with cruel official banter. "Come here, Mrs. Hill," he said, ...
— The Hampstead Mystery • John R. Watson
... like a saying of Talleyrand's. His umbrae, who have put but little of allaying Tiber in their cups, grow boisterous and abusive, and having insulted nearly everybody at the table by coarse personal banter, the party breaks up, and we are glad to get out with flushed cheeks and dizzy head into the cool air of an early summer night—all the more, that for the last half-hour young Piso at our elbow has been importuning us with whispered ...
— Horace • Theodore Martin
... recognition, long struggle, and ultimate success; also of his occasional critical intolerance. Commander-in-chief of the "red artillery," he sets too little store on the graceful yet sometimes decisive charges of the light brigades of literature. He feels nothing but contempt for the banter of men like Jerrold; despises the genial pathos of Lamb; and salutes the most brilliant wit and exquisite lyrist of our century with the Puritanical comment, "Blackguard Heine." He deified work as he deified strength; and so often stimulated his imitators to attempt ...
— Thomas Carlyle - Biography • John Nichol
... say next? But hold, I am not here to banter words with you. Will you enter the King's service, and fight his battles under Prince Rupert?" demanded ...
— Hayslope Grange - A Tale of the Civil War • Emma Leslie
... whom the first to greet our Chairman was Lord Rattley. Lord Rattley, a peer with very little money and a somewhat indecorous past, rarely honours the Tregantick bench by attending sessions; but for once he was here, and at once started to banter Sir Felix on ...
— Corporal Sam and Other Stories • A. T. Quiller-Couch
... at her a moment in comic dismay. Really this country girl was growing too much for him in his game of banter. ...
— Opening a Chestnut Burr • Edward Payson Roe
... women a good deal worse than the men; and they all returned together to Holly Street, where a meal had been prepared in the front parlours, the landlady having generously placed them at the disposal of her lodgers for the occasion. There was a good deal of banter and side jokes were bandied about from one to another; which was galling to young Chetwynd, and made him devoutly thankful that none of his own companions and friends were present. When at last Bella rose from the table to change her gown for the pale grey he himself had ...
— If Only etc. • Francis Clement Philips and Augustus Harris
... At last, with much banter and yet care, Elaine selected one that was indeed a beauty and was about to snap it on her dainty wrist, when the ...
— The Exploits of Elaine • Arthur B. Reeve
... their cloaks and capes, and the men, following their example, took off their coats and sat in their shirt-sleeves. Whereupon ensued much banter of a not particularly edifying kind respecting the garments which each person would like to remove—which showed that the innuendo of French farce is not so unknown to the upright, honest Englishman as ...
— Liza of Lambeth • W. Somerset Maugham
... had brightened up every one's wit; and a great deal of excellent humor was expended upon the perplexities of mine host and his housekeeper, by certain married gentlemen of the company, who considered themselves privileged in joking with a bachelor's establishment. From this the banter turned as to what quarters each would find, on being thus suddenly billeted in so ...
— Tales of a Traveller • Washington Irving
... appear in the printed work. Dr. Grainger, or some of his friends, it should seem, having become sensible that introducing even Rats in a grave poem, might be liable to banter. He, however, could not bring himself to relinquish the idea; for they are thus, in a still more ludicrous manner, periphrastically exhibited in his poem ...
— Life Of Johnson, Vol. 2 • Boswell, Edited by Birkbeck Hill
... difficulty in keeping their buggy in sight. Sometimes Bartley stopped long enough for them to come up, and then, after a word or two of gay banter, was off again. ...
— A Modern Instance • William Dean Howells
... capacity, was always the Man. His very geographical situation was sufficient to turn the mind towards him, but the particular reason for that heliotropism on the part of his feminine neighbors was that he was an easy man for a woman to ask. Being asked, he always served her in a spirit of masculine banter and then went away as if he had enjoyed the joke. Thus she could be grateful for his neighborly turn without feeling herself under any painful state of obligation. Naturally his custom grew. One moment he would be mending a yoke ...
— The Wrong Woman • Charles D. Stewart
... the name for the last sheaf is Boba (Old Woman), answering to the Polish name Baba. The Boba is said to sit in the corn which is left standing last. The person who binds the last sheaf or digs the last potato is the subject of much banter, and receives and long retains the name of the Old Rye-woman or the Old Potato-woman. The last sheaf—the Boba—is made into the form of a woman, carried solemnly through the village on the last harvest-waggon, and drenched ...
— The Golden Bough - A study of magic and religion • Sir James George Frazer
... increase upon us, the town," says the Gentleman's Magazine for January 1752, "has been lately entertained with a kind of farcical performance, called 'The Old Woman's Oratory,' conducted by Mrs. Mary Midnight and her family, intended as a banter on Henley's Oratory, and a puff for ...
— The Letters of Horace Walpole, Volume 2 • Horace Walpole
... laughingly pointed out the Cardinal to him, and reproached him for not having better instructed the worthy prelate for the honour of the Sacred College. The nuncio understood French very well, but spoke it very badly. This banter and the innocent air with which I gave it, without appearing to notice his demonstrations, created such a fortunate diversion, that nobody else was thought of; more especially as the poor cardinal more and more caused amusement while continuing the ceremony, during which ...
— Marguerite de Navarre - Memoirs of Marguerite de Valois Queen of Navarre • Marguerite de Navarre
... the frivolous young thing that her father's banter indicated. She had a train of admirers, never thinning from year to year, to be certain, for it had been the regular fate of adolescent male Shelbyville to get itself tangled up in love with Alice Price ever since her high-school days. Many of the youngsters soon outgrew the affection; but ...
— The Bondboy • George W. (George Washington) Ogden
... an undertone across to Naismith, while Dick and the girls were in the thick of exclamatory and giggling banter, "here's some stuff for that article of yours, if you touch upon the Big House. I've seen the servants' dining room. Forty head sit down to it every meal, including gardeners, chauffeurs, and outside help. It's ...
— The Little Lady of the Big House • Jack London
... vigorous than the powerful monarch at his side. Amasis was tall, but his neck was bent; his corpulent body was supported by weak and slender legs: and his face, though well-formed, was lined and furrowed. But a vigorous spirit sparkled in the small, flashing eyes, and an expression of raillery, sly banter, and at times, even of irony, played around his remarkably full lips. The low, broad brow, the large and beautifully-arched head bespoke great mental power, and in the changing color of his eyes one seemed to read that neither wit nor passion were ...
— Uarda • Georg Ebers
... to discuss abominable soup in Calais, had we not?" continued Blakeney in the same tone of easy banter, "and wine that I vowed was vinegar. Monsieur... er... Chaubertin... no, no, I beg pardon... Chauvelin... Monsieur Chauvelin and I quite agreed upon that point. The only matter on which we were not quite at one ...
— The Elusive Pimpernel • Baroness Emmuska Orczy
... by her Northern partners. The Old North State derided the pretensions of the commonwealths that flanked her on either side, and Georgia was not slow to give South Carolina as good as she sent. All this seemed to be harmless banter, but the rivalry was old enough and strong enough to encourage the hopes of the Union leaders that the Confederacy would split along state lines. The cohesive power of the Revolutionary war was not sufficiently strong to make the States sink their contributions to the ...
— The Creed of the Old South 1865-1915 • Basil L. Gildersleeve
... hurried and unfinished declaration. It was true that he hadn't said half what he intended to say; it was true that she might have misunderstood it as the conventional gallantry of the situation, as—terrible thought!—the light banter of the habitual love-making American, to which she had been accustomed; perhaps even now she relegated him to the level of Greyson, and this accounted for her singular impassiveness—an impassiveness that certainly was ...
— A Phyllis of the Sierras • Bret Harte
... escape. A drunken man came into the congregation and sat on the end of a bench near the door. He had caroused the whole night before and presently began to nod. As he nodded and bent forward, the sheep came along by the door and seeing the man moving his head up and down, took it as a banter and backed and then sprang forward, and gave the sleeper a severe jolt right on the head, and over he tilted him. The whole congregation laughed outright and I joined in ...
— The Kentucky Ranger • Edward T. Curnick
... because no one had as yet touched it. Wise people said that when she did fall in love sparks would fly. Hitherto her friendships with men, whatever the men in question may have wished, had existed upon a basis of good-natured banter and prowess in games. Men were absolutely necessary to Miss Blythe to play games with, because women who could "give her a game" were rare as ivory-billed woodpeckers. It was even thought by some, as an instance, ...
— IT and Other Stories • Gouverneur Morris
... struggle with himself).—You must ask me what I did wish, because I do not now wish for anything. You have known her longer than I have, therefore I came to you as her friend and mine, and for answer you banter with me. In your eyes there shone hatred for me, although I have never wronged, you. Be the judge yourself! I would be more than right in asking you: What do you wish of me, if it were not for the reason (with pride) that it is immaterial to me. ...
— So Runs the World • Henryk Sienkiewicz,
... "Do you not want to catch some more canaries?" said she. "I suspect," said I, "that you would like to have ours escape." "Perhaps," said she, "that would be a relief to you from your present embarrassment." Then I saw that all this was banter. She wished to teaze me a little. The truth is, I have two fine singing canaries and a mocking-bird. Some of my pro-slavery friends delight to pester me about them. They say that they mean to issue a habeas corpus, and ...
— The Sable Cloud - A Southern Tale With Northern Comments (1861) • Nehemiah Adams
... accustomed to have that remark taken seriously, still it usually provoked a laugh or a paragraph of sentimental banter. And he hated to be called fresh, except in a joking way. His charitable impulse died ...
— Flappers and Philosophers • F. Scott Fitzgerald
... was riding his horse back and forth in front of his men, as if to banter me, and I concluded to accept the challenge. I galloped toward him for fifty yards and he advanced toward me about the same distance, both of us riding at full speed, and then, when we were only about thirty yards apart, I raised my rifle and fired; his horse fell to the ground, having ...
— The Great Salt Lake Trail • Colonel Henry Inman
... so subsiding in his chair, his nephew gently and assiduously tends him while he quite recovers. When Jasper is restored, he lays a tender hand upon his nephew's shoulder, and, in a tone of voice less troubled than the purport of his words—indeed with something of raillery or banter in it—thus addresses him: ...
— The Mystery of Edwin Drood • Charles Dickens
... message from God? And how useless was it to Ahaz, as well as absurd in itself for the prophet, to say, "Before the child, born seven hundred years hence, shall distinguish between good and evil, the land which thou abhorrest shall be forsaken of both her kings," which would be a banter, instead of ...
— The Grounds of Christianity Examined by Comparing The New Testament with the Old • George Bethune English
... first interview with the Ghost. Perceiving at once how important it was that Marcellus, at all events, should not suspect the grave revelations that had been made, although they had been sufficient to have paralyzed one of less courage and resolution than himself, he outwits his companions by banter, treating the apparition with intentional and grotesque disrespect and jocularity at a moment when an irresolute mind would have been terrified ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Vol. 1-20 • Various
... he only gave the substance of the article he had written for the Revue des Deux Mondes, as the paper was yet unpublished all the remarks were novel, and the anecdotes fresh and sparkling. The tone of light banter and raillery in which he described public life in Greece and Greek statesmen, might have lost some of its authority had any one remembered to count the hours the speaker had spent in Athens; and Nina was certainly indignant at the hazardous ...
— Lord Kilgobbin • Charles Lever
... ladies pretty and graceful, being, with all his sly satire, evidently fond of the sex, the juvenile portion at least. Surely, a Compliment so uniform and tasteful must more than outweigh his teasing and banter with the amiable subjects ...
— The Atlantic Monthly , Volume 2, No. 14, December 1858 • Various
... (Mercier, iii. 163.) to the number of some hundred and thirty-three. Of various calibre; from your Cheniers, Gorsases, Camilles, down to your Marat, down now to your incipient Hebert of the Pere Duchesne; these blow, with fierce weight of argument or quick light banter, for the Rights of man: Durosoys, Royous, Peltiers, Sulleaus, equally with mixed tactics, inclusive, singular to say, of much profane Parody, (See Hist. Parl. vii. 51.) are blowing for Altar and Throne. As for Marat the People's-Friend, ...
— The French Revolution • Thomas Carlyle
... of talk was a sample of life at Temple Camp for seven days past. Those who were not given to jollying and banter had fallen back on checkers and dominos and other wild sports. A few of the more adventurous and reckless made birchbark ornaments, while those who were in utter despair for something to do ...
— Tom Slade's Double Dare • Percy Keese Fitzhugh
... all her approaches with a banter, and had suffered her to get hold of his hand; but at the mention of the piece of silver, he hemmed, looked grave, and turning to us, asked if we had not better continue our walk. "Come, my master," said the girl archly, "you'd ...
— Bracebridge Hall • Washington Irving
... usual "chaff" or banter allowed even to modest women when shopping, and—many a true word ...
— The Book of the Thousand Nights and a Night, Volume 1 • Richard F. Burton
... indignation a quiver underlay Ann's voice. Her nerves had been wrought up to a high pitch by the afternoon's events, and she felt unequal to parrying Tony's customary banter. ...
— The Vision of Desire • Margaret Pedler
... With light banter the scouts left Mr. Gilroy where the trails diverged,—they to cross the crest and invite the boys over for supper the next day, and Mr. Gilroy to go home to find ...
— Girl Scouts in the Adirondacks • Lillian Elizabeth Roy
... This seems to be a banter upon Mr. Whiston's book intituled, "Praelectiones Physicae Mathematicae; sive Philosophia clarissimi Newtoni Mathematica illustrata, 1710"; wherein he explained the Newtonian philosophy, which now began to grow into vogue. Both Addison and Steele, however, ...
— The Tatler, Volume 1, 1899 • George A. Aitken
... converse, colloquy, conference, confabulation, chat, parley, causerie, parlance, confab; dialogue, interlocution; soliloquy, monologue; palaver, buncombe, blarney, blandishment, flattery, flummery; chaff, banter, raillery, persiflage, badinage, asteistn; chatter, babble, chit chat, gibberish, jargon, twaddle, fustian, moonshine, hanky-panky, jabbering, ...
— Putnam's Word Book • Louis A. Flemming
... notice the cleverest and most charming were always proud. Not because he was an earl—nobility was plentiful enough at Edinburg then—but because he was himself. It was a pleasure just to sit beside him, and to meet his pleasantness with cheerful chat, gay banter, or affectionate earnestness. ...
— A Noble Life • Dinah Maria Mulock Craik
... George took their rough banter in excellent part. He sipped his beer, and grinned like a cat at his own expense. But after the guffaws had subsided, he said, "Thee's not told un about that five pound yet, ...
— Jan of the Windmill • Juliana Horatia Ewing
... put down the carriage-window, and, leaning his arms upon it, put his head out. He flung some good-humoured banter at some of the nearest men, and two or three responded. But the majority of the faces were lowering and fierce, and the horses ...
— Sir George Tressady, Vol. I • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... delight she never once looked toward the beach, and I maintained the banter with such success all unconsciously she sipped coffee from the china cup, ate fried evaporated potatoes, and spread marmalade on her biscuit. But it could not last. I saw the surprise that came over her. She had discovered the china plate from which she was eating. ...
— The Sea-Wolf • Jack London
... cancel the preceding paragraphs. Is not any savor of banter out of place in the reception we are bound to accord to an alleged solution of the unthinkable problem which underlies creation and man's position therein? If the impulse which first controlled us is not denied expression, it is because it implies at once the worst that ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 15, No. 88, February, 1865 • Various
... when, one fine morning, her tailor died, and my quixotic friend announced his intention of marrying her, dans les delais legaux, the squire protested. I think I read the whole correspondence, and I remember that in the beginning the elder man took the tone of paradox and banter. 'Behave dishonourably, my dear fellow. I have winked at your mistress heretofore, because boys will be boys; but it is the man who marries. And, anyhow, a woman is so much more interesting in a false position.' ...
— Grey Roses • Henry Harland
... to gayer topics, and the two soon fell into their wonted tone of banter. "Tell me, Renee," said Denoisel, "have you never felt, I won't say love, but ...
— The World's Greatest Books, Vol IV. • Editors: Arthur Mee and J.A. Hammerton
... for its subtlety and inoffensive humor was the pleasantry with which young Philip Yorke (afterwards Lord Hardwicke), answered Sir Lyttleton Powys's banter on the Western Circuit. An amiable and upright, but far from brilliant judge, Sir Lyttleton had a few pet phrases—-amongst them, "I humbly conceive," and "Look, do you see"—which he sprinkled over his judgments and colloquial talk with ridiculous profuseness. Surprised at Yorke's ...
— A Book About Lawyers • John Cordy Jeaffreson
... at Phil more closely. She seemed preoccupied and her contributions to their banter were perfunctory and spiritless. When they were established in the living-room, Phil crouched on a stool by the fire. Concealment and dissimulation were so wholly foreign to her nature that it was with difficulty that she resisted an impulse to blurt out the whole thing. ...
— Otherwise Phyllis • Meredith Nicholson
... tone of banter: "Knowing that you, fair lady, are ever thinking of me, and that my name is ever upon your fair lips in prayer, will spur me to renewed effort, for surely no cavalier ever had a more lovely mistress or a ...
— Quincy Adams Sawyer and Mason's Corner Folks - A Picture of New England Home Life • Charles Felton Pidgin
... fifteen or twenty other guests, and after a few minutes of light social banter a bell will ring and the players will take their places. At your table will be Mrs. F. Jamison Dollings (your partner) and Mr. and Mrs. Theodore Watts. Mrs. Dollings (Sept. 6, 1880) is considered one of the most expert "bridge" players in the city, while Mr. Watts has one of the largest ...
— Perfect Behavior - A Guide for Ladies and Gentlemen in all Social Crises • Donald Ogden Stewart
... "Mon cher!" Friends greet and banter as they pass. 'Tis sweet to see among the mass ...
— Poems • Alan Seeger
... his new-found friends, unheeding for some moments their loose remarks and familiar banter. At length he shook off his abstraction, and surrendering himself to the coarse humours of his companions, soon eclipsed them all by the gusto of his slang and the mocking profligacy of his sentiments; for here he no longer played a part, or suppressed his grosser instincts. That ...
— Lucretia, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... to satirical banter, that tendency of the French to mingle irony with the most serious sentiments, and he had often unintentionally made her sad, without knowing how to understand the subtle distinctions of women, or to discern the border of sacred ground, as he ...
— Strong as Death • Guy de Maupassant
... remained silent, rallying spasmodically with gay banter to the Inspector's chatter, or answering at random, but always falling silent again, and altogether was so unlike himself that Mandy fell to wondering, then became watchful, then anxious. At length the Inspector himself ...
— The Patrol of the Sun Dance Trail • Ralph Connor
... young women was Ibla, daughter of Malek, the son of Zoheir. Ibla, fair as the full moon, was somewhat younger than Antar. She was accustomed to banter him in a familiar way, feeling that he was her slave. "And you," she said to him, "you, born so low, how dared you kill the slave of a prince? What provocation can you have against him?" "Mistress," replied Antar, "I struck that slave because he deserved it, for he had ...
— Oriental Literature - The Literature of Arabia • Anonymous
... would be proud to speak. There is music as the audience rustles and murmurs into its place with eager expectation. Then there is a prayer. Then Mr. Choate, the president of the day, with his customary felicity and sparkling banter, speaks of the origin of the ancient and mysterious brotherhood. "And now," he says, in ending, "I introduce to you him who, whenever and wherever he speaks, is the orator of the day." Mr. Phillips rises, and buttons his frock-coat across his white waistcoat as ...
— From the Easy Chair, vol. 1 • George William Curtis
... simple old father, as the girl tripped away in hot haste to seek for it; "I forbid you to make such a guy of yourself. You must not take my little banter, darling, in such a matter-of-fact way, or I must hold ...
— Springhaven - A Tale of the Great War • R. D. Blackmore
... ribaldry, the spirit of the time has substituted a bourgeois good-humor which respects the family circle, and haunts the kitchen-stairs; for the biting jeer, intended to make some victim uncomfortable, it gives the sarcastic or sprightly banter, not unconscious of an effort at moral amelioration; for the sententious sagacity, and humorous enjoyment of the nature of man, it gives bright thoughts and a humanitarian sympathy. But, on the whole, the intellectual personality is nearly ...
— The Poetical Works of Thomas Hood • Thomas Hood
... Under the seeming banter of her tone lurked real resentment. But he, with a smile—partly due to a finger too much Scotch—only answered, in a ...
— The Air Trust • George Allan England
... not, I must confess;) "What gives a cold, cures a cold, and pays the doctor's bill?" Not short enigmas lightly disentangled; Hard nuts you'll have to crack, fresh made, new-fangled; And if you cannot guess them all instanter, Your head will be struck off—I do not banter. You'll have to answer rightly in a twink; Your head once off, you'll have ...
— Turandot: The Chinese Sphinx • Johann Christoph Friedrich von Schiller
... you a twist?" the Cossacks would banter him. And Tikhon, purposely writhing and making faces, pretended to be angry and swore at the French with the funniest curses. The only effect of this incident on Tikhon was that after being wounded ...
— War and Peace • Leo Tolstoy
... with a desire to stand outside the red-and-white striped walls of the tent-house and listen unseen. Inside there was always cheer: at night the crackle of fire and the glow of light, the happy laughter of the gentle-hearted Scotchwoman, and the affectionate banter of her "big mountain man," who looked more like a brigand than the luckiest and most contented husband in the mountains—the luckiest, quite surely, with the one exception of his brother Clossen, who ...
— The Hunted Woman • James Oliver Curwood
... called out a blessing to her, as it is the custom among travellers, and asked how far he still had to go to reach the large city. Then she got up and came to him, beautifully her wet mouth was shimmering in her young face. She exchanged humorous banter with him, asked whether he had eaten already, and whether it was true that the Samanas slept alone in the forest at night and were not allowed to have any women with them. While talking, she put her left foot on his right one and made ...
— Siddhartha • Herman Hesse
... guests. Sadie Dean, much to the others' surprise—and perhaps to her own—disclosed an intimate knowledge of the most fascinating games; and these games, with Jamie's stories and Jerry's good-natured banter, kept every one in gales of laughter until supper and the generous distribution of presents from the laden tree sent the happy guests home with ...
— Pollyanna Grows Up • Eleanor H. Porter
... but some stupid something that she hated yet could not repress trembled her lips, robbed her tone of its banter. "What's up?" she said. "Why, you would say something was up if you'd just been shot plump out of a ...
— Once Aboard The Lugger • Arthur Stuart-Menteth Hutchinson
... two best brokers, there was a deficit in his premium returns which he could not overcome. And certainly his melancholy countenance did not attract business; it was a bold placer indeed who tried with quip and banter to secure Mr. Cuyler's acceptance of a doubtful risk. His world was awry, and all who ran might read it. His brow became unpleasantly corrugated, his smile a thing of the past. If Mr. O'Connor had wanted evidence ...
— White Ashes • Sidney R. Kennedy and Alden C. Noble
... spight of this new Abjuration, Did banter the lawful King of this great Nation: Who call'd God's anointed a foolish old Prig, Was both a base and unmannerly Whigg: But since he is Dead No more shall be said, For he in Repentance has laid down his Head; So I wish each Lady, who in mournful Tone is, In Charity Grieve ...
— Wit and Mirth: or Pills to Purge Melancholy, Vol. 5 of 6 • Various
... et caetera. Lucilla was among all the young people, in the full tide of fun, nonsense, banter, and repartee of a style new to her, but in which she was formed to excel, and there was such a black look when Honor summoned her after the meal, as impressed the awkwardness of enforcing authority among ...
— Hopes and Fears - scenes from the life of a spinster • Charlotte M. Yonge
... results obtained. Molly looked more like a stately young empress than an impecunious doctor's daughter as she floated into the room, to be embraced and complimented by the Lavender Lady and to receive a generous meed of admiration, seasoned with a little gentle banter, from Miles Herrick. ...
— The Hermit of Far End • Margaret Pedler
... me. I do but speak in banter. It has been said that a good woman, fitly mated, grows doubly good; but how often have we seen a bad man mated to a good woman turned into a good man? Why, I myself was not wholly good till I married my ...
— Modern Eloquence: Vol III, After-Dinner Speeches P-Z • Various
... approaching tow and then rose to the surface, dripping, like some uncouth sea-monster. Armed with a revolver and a megaphone, and with pleasurable anticipation in his heart, the Oberleutnant emerged from the conning-tower with a view to a little preliminary banter with these detested and unarmed English before administering a coup de grace. He was just in time to see a stout, ungainly man tumbling aft along the deck from the wheel-house of the tug. Raising a booted leg with surprising agility, the stout man kicked off the shackle ...
— The Long Trick • Lewis Anselm da Costa Ritchie
... Lyndhurst, who conducted his case with surpassing ability. The cross-examination of a foreign artist, employed by the Duke to repaint some portraits of the Cornaro family by Titian, is said to have been one of the finest things on record. The sly and pungent humour, and the banter with which the counsel derided and laughed down this witness, were inimitable. The printer won his case; but he eventually consented to remove his steam presses from the neighbourhood, on the Duke paying him a certain sum to be determined by ...
— Men of Invention and Industry • Samuel Smiles
... to the ceaseless banter of Burley's two comrades—a banter entirely American, and which at first she was unable to understand. But now all things American, including accent and odd, perverted humour, had become very dear to her. The clink-clank of the muleteer's big spurs always set her heart ...
— Barbarians • Robert W. Chambers
... way before the important purpose I had formed, and to which the banter now recalled me. So fair an opportunity might never offer again. In the vicissitudes of a soldier's life, the chance of to-day should not be disregarded—to-morrow may bring change either in the scene or the circumstances; and I was skilled enough ...
— The War Trail - The Hunt of the Wild Horse • Mayne Reid
... their mode of advance and moved only in the night. All day they lay close in the depth of the forest, sleeping, lounging, smoking tobacco of their own raising, and beguiling the hours, no doubt, with the shallow banter and obscene jesting with which knots of Indians are wont to amuse their leisure. At twilight they embarked again, paddling their cautious way till the eastern sky began to redden. Their goal was the rocky promontory where Fort Ticonderoga was long afterward built. ...
— Pioneers Of France In The New World • Francis Parkman, Jr.
... but Furneaux had erred three times in as many seconds. He had switched on the light prematurely, and his ready banter had warned the parricide that a well-built scheme was crumbling to irretrievable ruin. Moreover, he had underrated the nervous forces of the man thus trapped and outwitted. Fenley knew that when his feet touched the ...
— The Strange Case of Mortimer Fenley • Louis Tracy
... it off with banter. It was understood that the President should not be told—and that I should not tell him—of my talk with Mr. Sandford. Colonel Lamont undertook to arrange an audience with Mr. Cleveland for me. "You had better wait," he said, "until ...
— Under the Prophet in Utah - The National Menace of a Political Priestcraft • Frank J. Cannon and Harvey J. O'Higgins
... untrustworthy person who would make him ultimately miserable. I'll remind him that her beauty is no deeper than he sees it. But that Caroline there, admirable girl, seething with affection in a figure warranted against time or accident—" her expression brought his banter to an end. He studied her seriously, revolved what she had said. She was right about Myrtle, who was undoubtedly a vain and silly little fish. His father's immoderate admiration for her had puzzled him as well as the elder sister. He remembered that ...
— The Three Black Pennys - A Novel • Joseph Hergesheimer
... full of girls, who were beguiling the time with jokes and banter and lively chatter. Lettice, Ruth, and Dorothy soon mingled in the crowd, and forgot all about their Irish companion until the voice of Vivian ...
— The New Girl at St. Chad's - A Story of School Life • Angela Brazil
... both sides are needed to make the life of a married pair serene and happy. I know that the demand is a heavy one; but, ah, when it is adequately met, is not the gain worth all the sacrifices a thousand times over? There may be petty and amusing differences of opinion, quiet banter, and an occasional grave conflict of judgment; but, so long as three central requirements—confidence, generosity, and unselfishness—are met, there can be no serious break in the procession of placid, happy days. ...
— Side Lights • James Runciman
... the same grave tone, which might have passed for banter, had Jack ever bantered. "I'll maintain and prove it. I don't see how he can be otherwise. It is as necessary for a man to be a gentleman before he can turn highwayman, as it is for a doctor to have his diploma, ...
— Rookwood • William Harrison Ainsworth
... to his competitors from northern Europe. The word "Boche" cannot be translated by anything except "Boche," any more than our word "Wop," meaning an Italian, can be turned into French. The same attitude, half banter, half race contempt, lies at the heart ...
— A Volunteer Poilu • Henry Sheahan
... day's journey, for she had softened in comfortable cabins during the many days since her husband mastered the wealth of frozen pay streaks, and she was tired. She rested against his great breast like a slender flower against a wall, replying lazily to Malemute Kid's good-natured banter, and stirring Prince's blood strangely with an occasional sweep of her deep, dark eyes. For Prince was a man, and healthy, and had seen few women in many months. And she was older than he, and an Indian besides. But she was different from ...
— The Son of the Wolf • Jack London
... what he knows to be right, and ready to maintain it against all odds, especially of such enemies as banter or ...
— Menhardoc • George Manville Fenn
... these letters, the constant comparison between the two peoples, with many a gibe at the English, but always turning to their advantage, the preference given to the philosophical system of Newton over that of Descartes, lastly the attacks upon religion concealed beneath the cloak of banter—all this was more than enough to ruffle the tranquillity of Cardinal Fleury. The book was brought before Parliament; Voltaire was disquieted. "There is but one letter about Mr. Locke," he wrote to M. de Cideville; "the only philosophical matter ...
— A Popular History of France From The Earliest Times - Volume VI. of VI. • Francois Pierre Guillaume Guizot
... because of a rumour that Bad Rufe Tolliver might come back, and because of Devil Judd's anger at their attempt to capture young Dave, grew wary and rather pacificatory: and so, beyond a little quarrelling, a little threatening and the exchange of a harmless shot or two, sometimes in banter, sometimes in earnest, nothing had been done. Sternly, however, though the Falins did not know the fact, Devil Judd continued to hold aloof in spite of the pleadings of young Dave, and so confident was the old man in the balance of ...
— The Trail of the Lonesome Pine • John Fox, Jr.
... of pasquinades in prose and verse. Lord Falkland has practically put himself at {82} the head of the Tory party, said Howe, and as a political opponent he shall have no mercy. A flood of Rabelaisian banter was poured upon the head of the unhappy nobleman. He was attacked in his pride, his tenderest place. It is impossible not to wish that Howe had shown more moderation. He had, of course, precedent on his side. Nothing which he wrote was so bad as the language of Queen Elizabeth to ...
— The Tribune of Nova Scotia - A Chronicle of Joseph Howe • W. L. (William Lawson) Grant
... of the railway carriage until the last minute; she sent all manner of absurd messages, to the Great Horatio; she told Christine to be sure, to give him her love; she kept up a running fire of chaff and banter till the train started away, and a pompous guard told her to "Stand back, there!" and presently the last glimpse of Christine's pale little face and Jimmy's worried eyes had been swallowed up in ...
— The Second Honeymoon • Ruby M. Ayres
... finger vaguely in the direction of Hoddon Grey. And as he spoke all the softness which had gradually penetrated his conversation with Arthur through all his banter, disappeared. His aspect became in a ...
— The Coryston Family • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... or blandishments until he went in too, with a pike; while Jasper's broncos, which were considerably less than half-tamed, backed round and round in rings when I attempted to re-harness them. Still, with laughter and banter we started again, and worked on until daylight faded and the stars twinkled out one by one above the dewy prairie. The scent of wild peppermint hung heavy in the cool air, which came out of the north exhilarating like wine, while the birch twigs sang strange songs to us as we drove the ...
— Lorimer of the Northwest • Harold Bindloss
... artisans,—all and each of them are nothing else but science.' 'You are munificent indeed,' said Socrates; 'for when asked for one thing, you have given many.' I almost think," continued Harrington, "that, if Socrates were here, he would do what I should not presume to do,—banter you in a somewhat similar way. He would say, that, having asked what a miracle was, Mr. Fellowes told him that half a dozen things were miracles, but did not tell him what every miracle was; that is, never told him what made all miracles such. Suffer me ...
— The Eclipse of Faith - Or, A Visit To A Religious Sceptic • Henry Rogers
... an interesting event in Haydn's career. In the course of some banter at the house of Rogers, Campbell the poet once remarked that marriage in nine cases out of ten looks like madness. Haydn's case was not the tenth. His salary from Count Morzin was only 20 pounds with board and lodging; he was not making anything substantial ...
— Haydn • J. Cuthbert Hadden
... the banter, but he smiled feebly in response to the jovial tone, and after a time babbled a good deal in a faint little voice about a train of steam-cars, exponent of a distant civilization, that with a roar of wheels and clangor of machinery and scream of whistles and clouds of smoke went ...
— The Ordeal - A Mountain Romance of Tennessee • Charles Egbert Craddock
... Trojans fought for a mere shadow, formed by the Gods out of clouds and wind. In the "Cyclops" of Euripides, a satirical drama, the cynical giant is allowed to speak of Helen in a strain of coarse banter. Perhaps the essay of Isocrates on Helen may be regarded as a kind of answer to the attacks of several speakers in the works of the tragedians. Isocrates defends Helen simply on the plea of her beauty: "To Heracles Zeus ...
— Helen of Troy • Andrew Lang
... gasped once more. The eyes of the guest, contemptuous, amused, seeing through him, were fixed upon him. And he himself had furnished the lily-handed stranger with the information that he had been stigmatized "Em'ly" in the banter of his associates, until he had taken up arms, as it were, to repress ...
— The Phantoms Of The Foot-Bridge - 1895 • Charles Egbert Craddock (AKA Mary Noailles Murfree)
... himself that he had been used to Lucy's banter, but during his moody spell of days past he had forgotten how to take her or else ...
— Wildfire • Zane Grey
... have I took a glass of water. Several of my friends looked inquiringly at me and one asked: "On the wagon?" This attracted the attention of the entire group to my glass of water. I came in for a good deal of banter, mostly along the line that it was time I went on the wagon. This was varied with predictions that I would stay on from an hour to a day or so. I didn't like that talk, but I bluffed it out—weakly, to be sure. ...
— Cutting It out - How to get on the waterwagon and stay there • Samuel G. Blythe
... Thus by the Cam we meet again; And, as in wilder sterner days, We shared the ocean's dreary ways In fellowship of single aim, I never doubt we'll do the same By sunny Cam in happier times; And therefore, if through these my rhymes Some gentle banter slyly flits, Forgive me, Sirs—and call ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 156, May 28, 1919. • Various
... the sentiment she inspired, but her children observed it, and it provoked them to irreverent mirth. Galen was the predestined butt of Mabel and Archie; and secure in their mother's virtuous obtuseness, and in her worshipper's timidity, they allowed themselves a latitude of banter that sometimes turned their audience cold. Dredge meanwhile was going on obstinately with his work. Now and then he had queer fits of idleness, when he lapsed into a state of sulky inertia from which even Lanfear's admonitions could not rouse him. Once, ...
— Tales Of Men And Ghosts • Edith Wharton
... ill-success of her last adventure, which gave me endless opportunities to banter her, one would have thought I might have been on my guard as to what her real intentions were; but she managed to mislead me with an art of dissimulation quite admirable, and lulled me into a fatal security with regard to her intentions: for, one day, as I was joking her, and asking her ...
— Barry Lyndon • William Makepeace Thackeray
... hands, stretched our through the gratings in their cell-doors, clasped in frantic entreaty before his very eyes, it was particularly remarkable. Indeed, Mr Dennis appeared to think it an uncommon circumstance, and to banter himself upon it; for he thrust his hat on one side as some men do when they are in a waggish humour, sucked the head of his stick with a higher relish, and smiled as though he would say, 'Dennis, you're a rum dog; you're a queer ...
— Barnaby Rudge • Charles Dickens
Copyright © 2024 Free-Translator.com
|
|
|
