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More "Conventional" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... their own dominions, and exciting much terror of rivalry in the minds of the kings of France themselves. Their badge, or impresa, was indicative of their rude power; a couple of knotted clubs, saltier-wise, help to support a somewhat conventional figure of the steel used for striking the flint to produce fire; the whole surmounted by the crown, and intended to indicate by analogous reflection the vigour of the ducal house. As a bold defiance, a rival house adopted ...
— Rambles of an Archaeologist Among Old Books and in Old Places • Frederick William Fairholt
... to the reign of terror in France, to the massacres of September, to the wholesale executions of conventional times; to find the mob insulting the victims, and the executioner himself adding personal affront to the disgusting ...
— Irish Race in the Past and the Present • Aug. J. Thebaud
... that the conventional "chirrup" (7) to quiet and "cluck" to rouse a horse are a sort of precept of the training school; and supposing any one from the beginning chose to associate soft soothing actions with the "cluck" sound, and harsh rousing actions ...
— On Horsemanship • Xenophon
... that which is faulty, at least in others. Locke was the first to call attention to general approval as an external mark of moral action, a hint which the Scottish moralists subsequently exploited. The objection that he reduced morality to the level of the conventional is unjust, for the law of opinion and reputation did not mean for him the true principle of morality, but only that which controls the majority of mankind—If anyone is inclined to doubt that commendation ...
— History Of Modern Philosophy - From Nicolas of Cusa to the Present Time • Richard Falckenberg
... by any conduct of His. Therefore, as in Judea of old, He would be careful of, even indulgent to, the usages of society, as long as they were innocent. He would never outrage the code of manners, however imperfect, however conventional, which this or any other civilised nation may have agreed on, to express and keep up respect, self-restraint, delicacy, of man toward man, of man toward woman, of the young ward the old, of the living toward the ...
— All Saints' Day and Other Sermons • Charles Kingsley
... moved. He wanted 'wisdom', and saw that Antisthenes had it to give. His aim in life was to do as his father had done, to 'deface the coinage', but on a much larger scale. He would deface all the coinage current in the world. Every conventional stamp was false. The men stamped as generals and kings; the things stamped as honour and wisdom and happiness and riches; all were base metal with lying superscriptions. All must ...
— Five Stages of Greek Religion • Gilbert Murray
... had their origin in the influence of potent libations acting on natures by no means warped by conventional thought, but which, under that influence, were stripped of the scanty robes they wore, and stood before the world naked in all the simplicity and ...
— Colonial Born - A tale of the Queensland bush • G. Firth Scott
... Griers in support of him. I may also mention that, for the last two or three days, Mlle. Blanche and De Griers had been making a great deal of the young Prince, under the very nose of the poor General. In short, the company, though decorous and conventional, was in a gay, familiar mood. But no sooner did the Grandmother appear than the General stopped dead in the middle of a word, and, with jaw dropping, stared hard at the old lady—his eyes almost starting out of his head, and his expression as spellbound as though he had just seen ...
— The Gambler • Fyodor Dostoyevsky
... Ellington whom we have seen making a forlorn pilgrimage under the trees. The young man had received a queer sort of nondescript education. All the Ellingtons for a generation or two back had gone in due course to Eton and Oxford, but no such conventional training was vouchsafed to the latest of the family. The hand of the private tutor had been heavy upon him, and he was brought up absolutely without a notion of what his own future might be. He had mooned ...
— The Romance of the Coast • James Runciman
... seemed so purely a personal and private misfortune, that he had never dreamed of its having any public interest. And even now he was a little ashamed of what he believed was his sensitiveness to mere conventional criticism, which, with the instinct of a proud man, he ...
— Clarence • Bret Harte
... to Henriette. M. Dubois, always a shrewd courtier and anxious to shew off at the expense of others, lost no time in introducing him as M. Dutillot, the French ambassador. My sweetheart gave the conventional bow. The horse being all right again, we proceeded on our road after thanking the gentlemen for their courtesy. Such an every-day occurrence could not be expected to have any serious consequences, but alas! the ...
— The Memoires of Casanova, Complete • Jacques Casanova de Seingalt
... allowed to the relations between man and man, this feeling attaches itself to those acts of universal utility or self-sacrifice, which are the products of our affections and sympathies, and which we term moral; while it may be, and often is, perverted, to give the same sanction to acts of narrow and conventional utility which are really immoral,—as when the Hindoo will tell a lie, but will sooner starve than eat unclean food; and looks upon the marriage of adult females as ...
— Contributions to the Theory of Natural Selection - A Series of Essays • Alfred Russel Wallace
... with the beauty and permanency of the old barns that one may see in his own country. He does this through his sincerity. He does not exaggerate an emotion to catch a public for the space of half an hour: he does not, in the more subtle way, affect a cynical or conventional disregard of the noble feelings and fine motives which do exist in man. It has been his business with patience and fidelity to seize, with skill to make enduring and comprehensible in words, the things ...
— Hilaire Belloc - The Man and His Work • C. Creighton Mandell
... in it was as an experiment worth trying, and that it was part of the great wave of inspired thought.... We had valuable discussion on these points. All Monday morning in the woods again. Afternoon, out with the drawing party; I felt the evils of the want of conventional refinement, in the impudence with which one of the girls treated me. She has since thought of it with regret, I notice; and by every day's observation of me will see that she ought not to have done it. In the evening a husking in the barn ... a most picturesque scene.... ...
— Hawthorne - (English Men of Letters Series) • Henry James, Junr.
... cotton cloth, of native weaving, in three colors—blue, red and black. The places around Huilotepec are indicated by their ancient hieroglyphs. Several personages of the ancient time are represented in the conventional manner commonly used in Zapotec writings before the Conquest. After eating, we placed the mapa against the wall, wrote out a description of it, and photographed it. Dismay now filled the soul of the agente, and the one principal whom he had summoned for advice. They talked long ...
— In Indian Mexico (1908) • Frederick Starr
... shouted he to a gruff Fleming, as he passed to and fro before the entrance to his prison-house; but the guard heeded him not. Dick listened; then, repeating his demand, muttered certain conventional expressions, not over-nice either in their form or application. He then began to sing, performing a series of cantabile movements in the most ludicrous manner possible; sometimes chanting a Miserere or an Ave, ...
— Traditions of Lancashire, Volume 2 (of 2) • John Roby
... can hardly fancy my cousin Dora changed into a fine lady, and fretting herself thin over the color of ribbon, or the trail of a skirt; and I am not surprised that she finds what is called "society" puzzling and wearisome. Your life, Dora, began upon too wide a plan to bear narrowing down into conventional limits now; and I feel through my own heart the thrill with ...
— Outpost • J.G. Austin
... Anderson's acting expressed itself in one statement—"she is cold." There could not be a greater error. That quality in Mary Anderson's acting—a reflex from her spiritual nature—which produced upon the conventional mind the effect of coldness was in fact distinction, the attribute of being exceptional. The judgment that she was cold was a resentful judgment, and was given in a spirit of detraction. It proceeded from an order of mind that can never be content with the existence of anything ...
— Shadows of the Stage • William Winter
... Now that the conventional barrier of respect which hedged me round has fallen, I can open my heart to you, dear boy. Though cased in the armor of gravity, this heart is full of tenderness and devotion, which have found no object, and which no woman has divined, not even she who, from her cradle, has been my destined ...
— Letters of Two Brides • Honore de Balzac
... this sarcasm is applicable to those teachers who talk so as to say nothing. A teacher ought, on the contrary, to speak only so as to be understood by the child. He ought to adapt himself to the child's capacity; to employ no useless or conventional expressions; his language ought to arouse curiosity ...
— Emile - or, Concerning Education; Extracts • Jean Jacques Rousseau
... length which inevitably challenges the decision of the bystander as to whether the wearer be fool or poet, but still long enough to fall a little carelessly round the head and so take off from the spruce conventional effect of the owner's irreproachable ...
— Miss Bretherton • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... downstairs into the room in which the corpse lay, and closed the door behind him. It was a very large room, overlooking the garden on the right side of the house. Somebody had lowered the Venetian blinds as a conventional intimation to the outside world that the house was one of mourning, and the room was almost dark. For nearly a minute Rolfe stood in silence, his hand resting on the knob of the door he had closed behind him. Gradually the outline of the ...
— The Hampstead Mystery • John R. Watson
... "It's conventional enough," he began. "Ghosts don't seem to have much originality. But it's firsthand, Jack, if that's what you want. I don't suppose any of you have ever heard me speak of my brother, Charles. He was my senior ...
— Lucy Maud Montgomery Short Stories, 1902 to 1903 • Lucy Maud Montgomery
... a somewhat peculiar character, who, coming unannounced to Oakdale, had at first been greatly misunderstood by the boys there, not a few of whom had fancied him an impostor and a fake Texan, mainly because of his quiet manners and conventional appearance; for these unsophisticated New England lads had been led, through the reading of a certain brand of Western literature, to believe that all Texans, and especially those who dwelt upon ranches, must be of the "wild and woolly" ...
— Rival Pitchers of Oakdale • Morgan Scott
... understanding as all SS men have to be, merely said aloud the conventional "Safe Flights," but Hanlon knew he would do everything he could to ...
— Man of Many Minds • E. Everett Evans
... protection of your husband's mother was, in effect, an avowal that you rejected the idea of being a widow to prolong the idea of being a wife; and the sin against your conventional state thus assumed is almost as bad as would have been a sin against the married state itself. If you had gone off when he died, saying, "Thank heaven, I am free!" you would, at any rate, have ...
— The Hand of Ethelberta • Thomas Hardy
... bachelor days was never quite of the conventional sort. The Cambuslang quarters certainly were not. The house was large and old-fashioned. Originally it had been two smallish houses: the two front doors still remained side by side, but only one was used. The rooms on the ground ...
— Fifty Years of Railway Life in England, Scotland and Ireland • Joseph Tatlow
... not too warmly, thinking that, from so old a friend as Vincent, these felicitations were cold and conventional. ...
— The Giant's Robe • F. Anstey
... she suffer, compared with her who wrote this revelation of a lifetime of pain, of bitter and torturing knowledge! She looked up at the picture on the wall, at the still, proud, emotionless face, the conventional, uninspired personality, behind which no one had seen, which had agonised alone till the last. With what tender yet pitiless hand had she laid bare the lives of her husband and her son! How had the neglected mother told the bitter truth of him to whom she had given birth! ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker
... facilities of intercourse will easily bring the States, of which the formation in that part of our territory can not be long delayed, within the sphere of our federative Union. In the meantime every obligation imposed by treaty or conventional stipulations ...
— United States Presidents' Inaugural Speeches - From Washington to George W. Bush • Various
... is a movement of unquestionable importance. Until the moment when public sincerity and the public passion for excitement is stimulated, the vague art interests of America will go on in their dry and conventional manner. The very acute discernment of Maurice Vlaminck that "intelligence is international, stupidity is national, art is local" is a valuable deduction to make, and applies in the two latter instances as admirably to America as to any other ...
— Adventures in the Arts - Informal Chapters on Painters, Vaudeville, and Poets • Marsden Hartley
... behind (that bay horse of John's never could walk with White Stockings), I could not help thinking how much I had misunderstood Captain Lovell's character. What a deal of feeling—almost of romance—there was under that conventional exterior which he wore before the world! I liked him so much more now I came to know him better. I was quite sorry when we had to wish him "good-night" and John and I rode thoughtfully home through the quiet ...
— Kate Coventry - An Autobiography • G. J. Whyte-Melville
... a protest against the theological idea that woman is the instrument of the Devil, who tempted man to his ruin. Very frank is the entire expression, all written by a Tess of the D'Urbervilles, a pure woman whom Fate had freed from the conventional, and who, wanting little and having nothing to lose, not even a reputation, was placed in a position where she ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great, Vol. 13 - Little Journeys to the Homes of Great Lovers • Elbert Hubbard
... The com-tech was answering the question Raf had almost forgotten that he had asked the moment before. Yes, the proper conventional reply. Soriki was not going to be caught out with any claim ...
— Star Born • Andre Norton
... those who felt that his lordship must speak at greater length than either of the counsel between whom he was to hold the scales. The address from the bench was much the shortest of the three. Less exhaustive than the conventional review of a complicated case, it was a disquisition of conspicuous clearness and impartiality. Only the salient points were laid before the jury, for the last time, and in a nutshell, but with hardly a hint of the judge's own opinion upon any one of them. The expression ...
— The Shadow of the Rope • E. W. Hornung
... Of conventional "education," considered as the memorisation of past records, however authoritative and classic, the decay is thus intelligible and plain, and the repetition of criticisms already adequately made need not therefore detain ...
— Civics: as Applied Sociology • Patrick Geddes
... if Scottish etiquette warranted anything more than a conventional reply, but he ventured to remark: "You certainly seemed to ...
— Carmen's Messenger • Harold Bindloss
... the most universal—the most powerful—of human passions, when venturing to offer our counsel and guidance to those of both sexes who, under its promptings, have resolved to become votaries of Hymen, but who, from imperfect knowledge of conventional usages, are naturally apprehensive that at every step they take, they may render themselves liable to misconception, ...
— Routledge's Manual of Etiquette • George Routledge
... Catherwood found herself on the way, of her own free will, to that Richmond from which she had recently escaped with so much trouble. There was no reason, real or conventional, why she should not go, as the precious pass from the Secretary removed all danger; and there in Richmond was Miss Grayson, the nearest of her blood. Helen removed the ...
— Before the Dawn - A Story of the Fall of Richmond • Joseph Alexander Altsheler
... depression. "Once it was a profitable trade; all the pictures required used to be wrought and purchased in the land. But now the majority of the clergy buy them ready-made from Europe. That the Franks have a pretty, life-like trick is undeniable; yet I think our ancient style, stiff and conventional as they call it, is far more reverent. There is no one left to practise it, nowadays, except myself, and here and there a ...
— The Valley of the Kings • Marmaduke Pickthall
... Princesse which certainly was about her, and her especial devotion to Orleans, both to the city and the duke. A shadow of a supposed child of our own Queen Mary has also appeared in history, quite without warrant or likelihood. It is a little conventional and well worn even in the way of romance, yet there are certain fanciful ...
— Jeanne d'Arc - Her Life And Death • Mrs.(Margaret) Oliphant
... "Philosophie Zoologique," {235a} said truly that Lamarck's theory had never yet had the honour of being seriously discussed. It never has—not at least in connection with the name of its propounder. To mention Lamarck's name in the presence of the conventional English society naturalist has always been like shaking a red rag at a cow; he is at once infuriated; "as if it were possible," to quote from Isidore Geoffroy St. Hilaire, whose defence of Lamarck is one of the best things in his ...
— Luck or Cunning? • Samuel Butler
... prominence and her mother's popularity, had shared in the best opportunities. Moreover, Washington had never been so crowded with interesting men and women, and yet scarcely a day passed when Bettina did not whisper to herself that nothing could make her enjoy a conventional society existence. It was only because of the universal absorption in the war at the present time that society had become more endurable. But to continue the life indefinitely demanded ...
— The Campfire Girls on the Field of Honor • Margaret Vandercook
... on to the building that seemed to belong to the place; a long two-story adobe building with the conventional two-story gallery running along the entire front, and with the deep-set, barred windows that are also typically Mexican. Every town in the adobe section of the southwest has a dozen or so buildings almost exactly like this one. The door ...
— Starr, of the Desert • B. M Bower
... varying degrees at different times tried to paint like the Byzantine or Greek artists, but without quite the same success. So long as there was no need for an artist to paint anything but the old well-established subjects, and so long as people desired them to be painted in the old conventional manner, there was little reason why any painter should try to be original and paint what was not wanted. But in the thirteenth century a ...
— The Book of Art for Young People • Agnes Conway
... to its eligibility in a mere worldly point of view. Your ancient historical title is, (to speak as a man of the world,) much more than an equivalent for my daughter's expectations. But it is not, as I said before, as a highly eligible, conventional marriage that I most desire it, but as a marriage that I feel sure will secure the happiness of yourself and my daughter, whom I shall, nevertheless, be very proud to see, some day, Duchess of Hereward. Come, now, I never saw a gallant young man hesitate ...
— The Lost Lady of Lone • E.D.E.N. Southworth
... terms of extravagant praise, he bent his soul and mind low before her, licking the dust under her feet, abased and yet rejoicing as a Templar before the image of Baphomet. He exulted more especially in the knowledge that there was nothing of the conventional or common in his ecstasy; he was not the fervent, adoring lover of Tennyson's poems, who loves with passion and yet with a proud respect, with the love always of a gentleman for a lady. Annie was not a lady; the Morgans had ...
— The Hill of Dreams • Arthur Machen
... she said dreamily. "She is stiff and conventional, and it has never even occurred to her that anyone can disagree with her views, and still have a glimmering of right, but, at least, she is sincere. If one could burrow deep enough beneath the surface, she'd ...
— The Lady of the Basement Flat • Mrs. George de Horne Vaizey
... retired to the bald deserts of feminine society, was usually his time of triumph. His mental stays were then unfastened. He could breathe forth his stories freely. His wittiest jokes, nude, no longer clad in the shadowy garments of more or less conventional propriety, danced like bacchanals through the conversation, and kicked up heels to fire even the weary men of society. He expanded into fantastic anecdote, and mingled many a bon mot with the blue spirals of his mounting cigarette smoke. But to-night Mr. Smith's gentle, "I never ...
— The Green Carnation • Robert Smythe Hichens
... As long as those men were talking about what they knew, they were trustworthy, and I believed them; but when they said it was now "cold weather," I saw that they had traveled outside of their sphere of knowledge and were floundering. I believe that in India "cold weather" is merely a conventional phrase and has come into use through the necessity of having some way to distinguish between weather which will melt a brass door-knob and weather which will only make it mushy. It was observable that brass ones were in use while I was in Calcutta, ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... "I am not conventional. I should not dream of marrying unless I found a young lady who possessed everything that I ...
— The White Morning • Gertrude Atherton
... descend from great things to smaller—from the huge leviathan city to one mansion far removed from the noise and bustle of conventional life, we way imagine the sort of desolation that reigned through Bannerworth Hall, when, for the first time, after nearly a hundred and fifty years of occupation, it was deserted by the representatives of that family, so many members of which had lived and ...
— Varney the Vampire - Or the Feast of Blood • Thomas Preskett Prest
... age—Dolly—was the most commonplace member of the family. Her character seemed to be set on absolutely conventional lines, and the whole family, with the exception of her father, who did not concern himself with such mundane things, secretly hoped that she would marry a young parson who had lately "made friends with her." As is often the case with that type of young woman, Dolly was feckless about money, and ...
— What Timmy Did • Marie Adelaide Belloc Lowndes
... the chauffeur should be provided with a long coat of goat or wolf-skin, or some other suitable protection against the cold and wind. During the summer months, the chauffeur usually wears gray or brown cords, developed in the conventional style. His cap ...
— Book of Etiquette • Lillian Eichler
... what is and what is not disreputable in this conventional world. It is not considered disreputable to cringe to the vices of a court, or to accept a pension wrung from the industry of the nation, in return for base servility. It is not considered disreputable to take tithes, intended for the ...
— Peter Simple and The Three Cutters, Vol. 1-2 • Frederick Marryat
... more—much more—is now demanded of him than formerly. But to those possessed of what is known as the Instinct of the Theatre, or Scenic Instinct, the gestures and attitudes of the operatic stage, being largely conventional, are soon acquired. Scenic accomplishments are undoubtedly necessary to the stage-singer, but his mimetic studies should not preclude him from making himself a thorough master of the vocal side of his art. There is a difference between ...
— Style in Singing • W. E. Haslam
... that such affectation is the most genuine nature in a clever boy. Unluckily it became so ingrained in Pope as to survive his youthful follies. Pope complacently indulges in elaborate paradoxes and epigrams of the conventional epistolary style; he is painfully anxious to be alternately sparkling and playful; his head must be full of literature; he indulges in an elaborate criticism of Statius, and points out what a sudden fall that author makes at one place ...
— Alexander Pope - English Men of Letters Series • Leslie Stephen
... his leave, remembering that he had already out-stayed the conventional limits of a call; and he was pleased when Mrs. Heron showed some warmth of interest in his future movements, and expressed a wish to see him again very soon. Her words showed either ignorance or languid neglect of the usages of society, but they did not offend him. He wanted to come again. ...
— Under False Pretences - A Novel • Adeline Sergeant
... particular letter to be apprehended by the ear, and thus a particular stroke may be the cause of the idea of a particular letter!—Quite so, we reply, but on this explanation the real is known through the real; for both stroke and conventional power of symbolisation are real. The case is analogous to that of the idea of a buffalo being caused by the picture of a buffalo; that idea rests on the similarity of picture and thing depicted, and that similarity is something real. Nor can it be said (with a ...
— The Vedanta-Sutras with the Commentary by Ramanuja - Sacred Books of the East, Volume 48 • Trans. George Thibaut
... conventional garb. There was only the bronzing upon his fair brow and firm cheeks to suggest the open air life that was his. His slim, powerful figure was full of an ease which caught and held, and pleased Elvine van Blooren's fancy, and awoke in her more material mind something of the dreams which had driven ...
— The Forfeit • Ridgwell Cullum
... to all the maritime world, was at this time obliged to smother her resentment; only simply expostulating with Russia. But the want of the consent of a power of such decided maritime superiority as that of Great Britain, was an insuperable obstacle to the success of the Baltic Conventional Law of Neutrality; and it was abandoned in 1793 by the naval powers of Europe, as not sanctioned by the existing law of nations, in every case in which the doctrines of that code did not rest upon ...
— The Laws Of War, Affecting Commerce And Shipping • H. Byerley Thomson
... close of the thirteenth century that figure painting began to assume so perfect a condition as to require some elaborate suggestion of landscape background. Up to that time, if any natural object had to be represented, it was done in an entirely conventional way, as you see it upon Greek vases, or in a Chinese porcelain pattern; an independent tree or flower being set upon the white ground, or ground of any color, wherever there was a vacant space for it, without the smallest attempt to imitate the ...
— Lectures on Architecture and Painting - Delivered at Edinburgh in November 1853 • John Ruskin
... or on her fellow workers. Nor could she be a social worker—I know of more than one woman who lost her position with social or philanthropic institutions as soon as it was discovered that she did not live up strictly to the conventional code of sex morality. Nor could she be ...
— Woman - Her Sex and Love Life • William J. Robinson
... then, so much with conventional people?" he demanded. "For me it has no significance in relation to feeling. If you would only look at me instead of down at those small hands, then you would not be able to tell me these ...
— The Point of View • Elinor Glyn
... the conventional mode of greeting a skunk,—and instead of hurling a stone in its direction and fleeing, place, if the opportunity present itself, bits of meat in its way evening after evening, and you will soon learn that there is nothing vicious in ...
— The Log of the Sun - A Chronicle of Nature's Year • William Beebe
... find had no minds to think, and no hearts to feel for suffering humanity. Many of them attempted to lionise him, while others paid him the most fulsome compliments, both being things that he particularly disliked. The ordinary conventional dinner-party, where a man is condemned to take in a lady with whom he has nothing in common, and next to whom he must sit for a couple of hours or so eating and drinking things which do not agree with him, was to Gordon a special object ...
— General Gordon - A Christian Hero • Seton Churchill
... British Government, inspired by missionary influence and a general Christian sentiment, branded them as infamous and made them crimes. But now even the native sentiment of the better classes in India is greatly changed by these higher influences, and the conventional morality is rising above the teachings of the national religion. Widow-burning and infanticide belong almost wholly to the past. Child-marriage is coming into disrepute, and caste, though not destroyed, is crippled, and its preposterous assumptions ...
— Oriental Religions and Christianity • Frank F. Ellinwood
... the zigzags, the zigzags themselves and the rosettes are ornamented with a patterning of large leaves, while the moulding below the zigzags and the cornice, or string-course, above them are covered with conventional designs, the interstices between them being filled in with very beautiful adaptations of lesser ...
— The Seven Great Monarchies Of The Ancient Eastern World, Vol 7. (of 7): The Sassanian or New Persian Empire • George Rawlinson
... of his success which he did hear would have rendered him a proud and happy painter,—but if he was, all that can be said was that he certainly did not look it. He accepted the most effusive tributes with the same ghastly and conventional smile; from feminine glances of unutterable gratitude and admiration he turned away with an inarticulate mumble and an averted eye; at times he almost seemed to be suppressing a squirm. If expression is any index to the thoughts, he was neither grateful ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 102, April 9th, 1892 • Various
... alienated Byron from his native land, because that great genius rebelled against the monotony, dullness, and pettiness of his country. It was Puritanism, too, that forced some of England's freest women into the conventional lie of marriage: Mary Wollstonecraft and, later, George Eliot. And recently Puritanism has demanded another toll—the life of Oscar Wilde. In fact, Puritanism has never ceased to be the most pernicious factor in the domain of ...
— Anarchism and Other Essays • Emma Goldman
... upper-arm, and shoulder pressure. He called my attention to his tone. Tone! He made every individual wire jangle, and I trembled for my smooth, well-kept action. Then he began the B-minor Ballade of Liszt. Now, this particular piece always exasperates me. If there is much that is mechanical and conventional in the Thalberg fantasies, at least they are frankly sensational and admittedly for display. But the Liszt Ballade is so empty, so pretentious, so affected! One expects that something is about to occur, but it never comes. There are the ...
— Old Fogy - His Musical Opinions and Grotesques • James Huneker
... the stage where two young officers of Houssas sat primly side by side on the verandah sipping their coffee. Neither spoke, and the seance might have ended with the conventional "Good night" and that punctilious salute which Bones invariably gave, and which Hamilton as punctiliously returned, but for the apparition of a dark figure which crossed the broad space of parade ground hesitatingly as though not certain of his way, and finally came with dragging feet through ...
— Bones - Being Further Adventures in Mr. Commissioner Sanders' Country • Edgar Wallace
... "kinship" and "alliance" express two radically distinct ideas, and rest, for both the privileges and the obligations involved in them, upon foundations essentially different. The former represents a natural relation, the latter one purely conventional,—even though it may result from the feelings, the mutual interests, and the sense of incumbent duty attendant upon the other. In its very etymology, accordingly, is found implied that sense of constraint, of an artificial bond, that may prove a source, not only of strength, ...
— The Interest of America in Sea Power, Present and Future • A. T. Mahan
... station itself; for good manners come like an instinct to those on whom the world smiles. Insensibly she acquired self-possession and the smoothness of society; and if her child-like playfulness broke out from all conventional restraint, it only made more charming and brilliant the great heiress, whose delicate and fairy cast of beauty so well became her graceful abandon of manner, and who looked so unequivocally ladylike to the eyes that rested on Madame Devy's blondes ...
— Alice, or The Mysteries, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... this particular variety of triangle "A Bachelor Husband" will particularly interest, and strangely enough, without one shock to the most conventional minded. ...
— Captain Scraggs - or, The Green-Pea Pirates • Peter B. Kyne
... Diego, who stripped the clothing from those too ill to defend themselves. Perhaps a reason for this superiority may be found in the fact that these tribes were entirely naked, and had no desire for any conventional covering. They serenaded their new friends so loudly that sleep or rest was impossible, and offered their most delicious food and free use of canoes. They ate seeds, fruit, fish, locusts; hunted rabbit, hare, and deer; ...
— A Truthful Woman in Southern California • Kate Sanborn
... Cole, who had one or two pupils when he died, there was no competent landscape painter who accepted pupils, nor perhaps one who was capable of teaching. Drawing masters there were here and there, mostly in the conventional style adapted to the seminaries for young ladies. Inman, the leading portrait painter of the day, had taken pupils, but his powers did not extend to the treatment of landscape, and my sympathies did not go beyond it. I applied ...
— The Autobiography of a Journalist, Volume I • Stillman, William James
... latest works was his excellent modern novel, 'Det Gar An' (It's All Right), a forerunner of the "problem novel" of the day. It is an attack upon conventional marriage, and pictures the helplessness of a woman in the hands of a depraved man. Its extreme views ...
— Library of the World's Best Literature, Ancient and Modern, Vol. 1 • Charles Dudley Warner
... She spoke a few conventional words of farewell and departed. Outside on the pavement she stood for a moment, looking carefully around. There was no sign of Richardson anywhere! She stepped into the carriage and leaned back in ...
— The Malefactor • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... or embodiment, has been a temporary residence only, which she has entered, lived in awhile, and made her exit from, leaving the substance, so far as I have been concerned, a corpse, worse luck! Now, there is no spiritualistic nonsense in this—it is simple fact, put in the plain form that the conventional public are afraid of. So ...
— The Well-Beloved • Thomas Hardy
... concerned with one of them; but a rough-and-ready critic imagines that it is all the same so long as nature is handled at all, and fails to draw the needful distinction between modes of handling her. But these modes are many; I will mention four of them now: there is the conventional way of handling nature, there is the faithful way of handling nature, there is the Greek way of handling nature, there is the magical way of handling nature. In all these three last the eye is on the object, but with a difference; in the faithful way of handling nature, ...
— Celtic Literature • Matthew Arnold
... in preserving his gravity at thus undertaking charge of an art school. At first he confined himself to sketching, from the models, with a burnt stick on the white paper, and in seeing that his pupils did the same. Their drawing had hitherto been purely conventional. They had always drawn a man in a certain way, not because they saw him so, but because that was the way in which they had been taught to draw him; and he had great difficulty in getting them to depart altogether ...
— By Right of Conquest - Or, With Cortez in Mexico • G. A. Henty
... pillows, mattresses and blankets. The frame work of the bed was also of the Chinese blackwood and carried, especially on the posts that held the roof-like canopy, finely executed carvings with the chief motive the conventional dragon devouring the sun. By the side stood a chest of drawers completely covered with carvings setting forth religious pictures. Four comfortable easy chairs completed the furniture, save for the low oriental throne ...
— Beasts, Men and Gods • Ferdinand Ossendowski
... habits and condescending airs were little calculated to win over her young affections, or fire her with gratitude for the anxiety displayed by this guardian to form her manners and cultivate her intellect. Nay, the result was rather to implant in her a premature dislike and distrust for conventional ideals. From the standard of culture and propriety, from the temptations of social rank and wealth held up for her preference, she instinctively turned to the simple, unrestrained affection of the despised mother, and the greater freedom ...
— Famous Women: George Sand • Bertha Thomas
... be a man, he shall furnish and pay for such conventional morning, afternoon and evening clothes as are customarily worn by civilians of the present day in this country, together with wigs and footwear necessarily appurtenant thereto. All other wigs, footwear, costumes, clothes, appurtenances and "properties," including those peculiar ...
— The Art of Stage Dancing - The Story of a Beautiful and Profitable Profession • Ned Wayburn
... classical method of education, by preference the study of natural science. Hence a realistic tendency—often verging upon the harsh and the crude—became the prevailing tone. Girls, sick of the idleness and the conventional frivolities of social life, eagerly devoted themselves to scientific pursuits, both as students at the new academies, and as subscribers to the courses of lectures which were getting into vogue. The very antagonists of the more extreme "emancipatory" ...
— The Contemporary Review, Volume 36, September 1879 • Various
... which is very rare, she adorns her dress with a lace collar, but without other ornament. Her working dress is usually a long gray linen or blue flannel blouse, reaching nearly from head to foot. She has learned that the conventional tight dress of women is not conducive to great mental or physical power. She is small in stature, with dainty hands and feet, blue eyes, and a noble ...
— Lives of Girls Who Became Famous • Sarah Knowles Bolton
... outbreak of new houses and a new sanded road, which alarmed me, being in the mind for birds and solitude, and I kept the high white road which goes round the summit of the cliffs. Woody Bay is beginning to be popular in the summer months among those less conventional folk who like to live off the beaten track during their holidays, and are not frightened by long distances or difficulties of access, but it is still quite a tiny place and has not yet suffered that exploitation of the picturesque which has ...
— Lynton and Lynmouth - A Pageant of Cliff & Moorland • John Presland
... was not at ease with the musician or with her during dinner-time and the time that elapsed before the beginning of the music. Involuntarily I followed each of their gestures and looks. The dinner, like all dinners, was tiresome and conventional. Not long afterward the music began. He went to get his violin; my wife advanced to the piano, and rummaged among the scores. Oh, how well I remember all the details of that evening! I remember how he brought the violin, how he opened the box, ...
— The Kreutzer Sonata and Other Stories • Leo Tolstoy
... mental as well as physical luxury in relaxation of rule and precept, permitting us a simplicity which sometimes, I think, becomes something less harmless. There is luxury in letting go of that live wire which keeps us all keyed to one conventional monotone in the North. I let go—for a moment—to-night. You let go when you said 'Calypso.' You couldn't have said it in New York; I couldn't have heard you, there.... Alas, Ulysses, I should not have heard you anywhere. But I did; and I answered.... Say good night to me, now; won't ...
— The Firing Line • Robert W. Chambers
... was the chief actor in the foregoing scenes. The Signor Gradenigo was born with all the sympathies and natural kindliness of other men, but accident, and an education which had received a strong bias from the institutions of the self-styled Republic, had made him the creature of a conventional policy. To him Venice seemed a free state, because he partook so largely of the benefits of her social system; and, though shrewd and practised in most of the affairs of the world, his faculties, on the subject of the political ethics of his country, were possessed of a rare and accommodating ...
— The Bravo • J. Fenimore Cooper
... part of them, are the frequent synonyms so characteristic of Old English poetry. These synonymous expressions are known as "kennings." They are not to be thought of as occasional metaphors employed at the whim of the poet; they had, in most cases, already received a conventional meaning. Thus the king was always spoken of as "ring giver," "protector of earls," or "bracelet bestower." The queen was the "weaver of peace"; the sea the "ship road," or "whale ...
— Old English Poems - Translated into the Original Meter Together with Short Selections from Old English Prose • Various
... think that any of us will ever forget what they have done?" Regis replied. He turned toward the window and smiled rather tentatively at the man who stood there; motionless since his first conventional gesture of politeness: ...
— The Planet Savers • Marion Zimmer Bradley
... easily carried out, when some such period is universally recognized. And so, what we may loosely term a "week," has been employed in many ancient nations. The Aztecs, using a short month of 20 days, divided it into four quarters of 5 days each. The Egyptians, using a conventional month of 30 days, divided it into 3 decades; and decades were also used by the Athenians, whose months were alternately of 29 and ...
— The Astronomy of the Bible - An Elementary Commentary on the Astronomical References - of Holy Scripture • E. Walter Maunder
... The conventional prejudices that shackle the movements of members of the higher classes in Britain are scarcely recognised in Canada; and a man is at liberty to choose the most profitable manner of acquiring wealth, without the fear of ridicule ...
— Life in the Clearings versus the Bush • Susanna Moodie
... right I reserved—the right of breaking with you when I please. Advanced views, Julia, involve advanced duties: you cannot be an advanced woman when you want to bring a man to your feet, and a conventional woman when you want to hold him there against his will. Advanced people form charming friendships: conventional people marry. Marriage suits a good deal of people; and its first duty is fidelity. Friendship suits some people; and its first duty ...
— The Philanderer • George Bernard Shaw
... of hatred against England in Germany is responsible for a new form of greeting which has displaced the conventional formulas of salutation and farewell: "God punish England!" ("Gott strafe England!") is the form of address, to which the reply is: "May God ...
— New York Times Current History: The European War, Vol 2, No. 1, April, 1915 - April-September, 1915 • Various
... full riding-breeches, close-fitting at the knee, leggings, a high-buttoned waistcoat, and a coat with the conventional short cutaway tails. The hat is an alpine or a derby, and the tie the regulation stock. These, with riding-gloves and a riding-crop, constitute the regular riding-dress for ...
— The Book of Good Manners • W. C. Green
... representative of his country on the Supreme Council, in which capacity he is even more important than as Ambassador, represents a new strain in American politics. His mental habits bewilder the President, shock the proper and somewhat conventional Secretary of State, and throw such repositories of national divinity as Senators Lodge and ...
— The Mirrors of Washington • Anonymous
... sudden and disconcerting entrance. The young woman came into the room breathless, eager-eyed, and white to the lips. She drew herself up by the door, and made a poor pathetic effort to compose herself, to frame her plea in conventional words; but she was too ...
— The Gold-Stealers - A Story of Waddy • Edward Dyson
... were a few small tables. In the centre people walked to and fro. At the bottom, at the end opposite the door, was a long table furnished with benches, which occupied the whole width of the wall, behind which sat the "bureau." "Sitting" is merely the conventional term. The "bureau" did not "sit;" like the rest of the Assembly it was on its feet. The secretaries, M.M. Chapot, Moulin, and Grimault wrote standing. At certain moments the two Vice-Presidents mounted on the benches ...
— The History of a Crime - The Testimony of an Eye-Witness • Victor Hugo
... by pressing delicacies on his guests, by topical small-talk, and by earnest inquiries after members of their families not yet old enough to appear at social functions, managed to convey to them that this dinner was being run on strictly conventional lines. ...
— The Wind in the Willows • Kenneth Grahame
... Capetown I had followed the trail of Cecil Rhodes, which like the man himself, is distinct. It is not the succession of useless and conventional monuments reared by a grateful posterity. Rather it is expressed in terms of cities and a permanent industrial and agricultural advance. "Living he was the land," and dead, his imperious and constructive spirit goes marching on. The Rhodes impress is everywhere. ...
— An African Adventure • Isaac F. Marcosson
... dull gold hair; her clothing followed the fashions obediently, but her fashion of dressing her hair did not vary, and the smooth parting, the carved ripples along her brow became her, though they did not become her stiffly conventional attire. Her face, though almost classic in its spaces and modelling, lacked in feature the classic decision and amplitude, so that the effect was rather that of a dignified room meagrely furnished. For these deficiencies, however, Miss Jakes's eyes might well be accepted ...
— Franklin Kane • Anne Douglas Sedgwick
... dinner was a pleasant and rather conventional meeting, and yet the more it is dwelt upon the more significant it becomes. Starting from almost the same point, with somewhat similar handicaps, we two had "arrived," though at widely separated goals. Each of our courses was characteristically American, and each was in demonstration—for ...
— A Daughter of the Middle Border • Hamlin Garland
... refreshing solace of tea and basking in the mild spring air wafted to me through my opened windows, the telephone bell rang. Arising promptly, I went to where the instrument is affixed to the wall and responded to the call in the conventional manner by placing the receiver to my ear, applying my lips to the transmitter and uttering the word "Halloa!" twice, or possibly thrice repeated. Over the wire then a female voice spoke, enquiring if this were Doctor Fibble? Upon my stating ...
— Fibble, D. D. • Irvin Shrewsbury Cobb
... celebrated by a dinner in her honour, a very fine dinner which opened with clear turtle soup and ended with her favourite ice and a birthday cake of gigantic proportions, decorated with ornate chocolate roses and tiny incandescent lamps in place of the conventional age-enumerating candles, cable-ship birthday cakes being eminently scientific and up-to-date. Other people may have had birthdays en route, for we were away from Manila many weeks, but none were acknowledged; modesty doubtless constraining those older than Half-a-Woman from making a too ostentatious ...
— A Woman's Journey through the Philippines - On a Cable Ship that Linked Together the Strange Lands Seen En Route • Florence Kimball Russel
... worldly, who never compromised himself by an ungentlemanly action, and never was guilty of a manly one; to lie smilingly asleep—for even sleep, working but little change in his dissembling face, became with him a piece of cold, conventional hypocrisy—we follow in the steps of two slow travellers on foot, ...
— Barnaby Rudge • Charles Dickens
... sore trial to her parents, in that she had failed to fit into the conventional ways of polite society. Once she had shocked all Neuilly by donning man's attire and riding horseback astride. A worthy priest who had been her tutor had found her tongue too sharp for his comfort, ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great, Volume 4 (of 14) - Little Journeys to the Homes of Eminent Painters • Elbert Hubbard
... Vavasor from his study of the dog-fish. His nature was a poetic one, though much choked with the weeds of the conventional and commonplace, and he had seen and felt something of what Hester intended. But he was not alive enough to understand hate. He was able to hate and laugh. He could not feel the danger of hate as Hester, for hate is death, and it ...
— Weighed and Wanting • George MacDonald
... of dawn was in the sky when our party slipped back over the parapet and stood to arms on the banquette and yawned out the conventional hour when soldiers await the attacks which so often begin ...
— The Red Horizon • Patrick MacGill
... of bejewelled women, tastefully dressed in the soft tinted silks they so much affect, with the long graceful veils falling to the feet. This is the only head covering worn in a carriage or on the street. The men, however, usually wear the conventional European dress, but on ceremonial occasions a white costume is required, with a ...
— Travels in the Far East • Ellen Mary Hayes Peck
... Morris excelled. He educated the popular taste by bringing forth the beauties of the simpler forms of the floral and vegetable world; he delighted especially in displaying the acanthus in varied conventional forms. Every rug he designed bears witness to his enthusiasm for harmony. Too aesthetic, some critics declare him to have been; but no one can deny the importance of his creations, for England needed to be awakened to a knowledge of her own inability to appreciate artistic ...
— Rugs: Oriental and Occidental, Antique & Modern - A Handbook for Ready Reference • Rosa Belle Holt
... gothic, and the spelling of words is not the same. Further, Stichter was possessed of some imagination and decorated his title-page with a map of a part of the island, showing ranges of hills, a harbor or mouth of a river, with conventional soundings, and two towns or settlements. As each of these issues contains only eight pages of text, the first London part only was known to the publishers. The third Dutch edition was put out by Joannes Naeranus, at Rotterdam, and in ...
— The Isle Of Pines (1668) - and, An Essay in Bibliography by W. C. Ford • Henry Neville
... slipped in when a space needed filling. There were also certain lovely ladies who might at one time play the role of attendant at a feast al fresco, at another time a character in an allegory. The weaver's hand was a little conventional when he began to execute the Raphael cartoons, but during the three years required for their execution he lost all restriction and was ready for the ...
— The Tapestry Book • Helen Churchill Candee
... impracticable and difficult to get on with, and their antiquated notions are perpetually contrasting and conflicting with the established prejudices of polite and well-organized society—sometimes even checking the same for an instant in its easy, conventional flow. They won't see that of all ways of spending time and thought, the most absurdly unprofitable is to waste them on a memory. Yet—O mine excellent friend and cynical preceptor! to whom, for sage instruction, ...
— Sword and Gown - A Novel • George A. Lawrence
... not cut, or carve, or in any way shape his gun-stock to his imagination. The stock is as smooth and as plain as polished wood can be. There is a sort of speckling on the barrels, and there is a conventional design on the lock-plate; conventional, indeed, in the most blase sense of the word—quite blase and worn out, this scratch of intertwisted lines, not so much as a pheasant even engraved on the lock-plate; it is a mere killing machine, this gun, and ...
— Field and Hedgerow • Richard Jefferies
... once given cannot be recalled, even from the best motives, without subjecting the one who recalls it to the charge of being either ignorant or regardless of all conventional rules of politeness. Some years ago a lady who had been invited with her husband to a musical entertainment given at the house of an acquaintance for a mutual friend of the inviter and the invited, received, after having accepted the invitation, a note requesting her not to come, on the ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Volume 11, No. 24, March, 1873 • Various
... overcome his deliberate resolves. She rather hoped that in spite of his promise he would venture to cross the border so that she could see and be near him, if only for a day or for an hour. The possibility frightened and yet pleased her. The conventional woman within her frowned, but her outlaw heart beat ...
— Heart of the Sunset • Rex Beach
... of the skin, redeemed the face and gave it distinction.(3) Why did precise, complacent Miss Todd pick out so strange a man for her mate? The story that she married him for ambition, divining what he was to be—like Jane Welsh in the conventional story of Carlyle—argues too much of the gift of prophecy. Whatever her motive, it is more than likely that she was what the commercialism of to-day would call an "asset." She had certain qualities that her husband lacked. For one, she had that intuition for the main chance ...
— Lincoln • Nathaniel Wright Stephenson
... the kiss is our strongest weapon, but we must take care not to dull it. Do not forget that its value is only relative, purely conventional. It continually changes according to circumstances, the state of expectancy and the ecstasy of the mind. I will call attention to ...
— Maupassant Original Short Stories (180), Complete • Guy de Maupassant
... this, laying ground-lines for the future; forgetting Adelaide and the suitability which had hitherto been such an important factor in his calculations; forgetting his horror of Pepita, whose daughter Leam was, and his contempt for weak, fusionless Mr. Dundas, who was her father; forgetting the conventional demands of his class, intolerant of foreign blood; forgetting all but the words which said that Alick was her best friend here, and doubted his (Edgar's) ever being so good to her as that other had been. It was on his heart now to convince ...
— Lippincott's Magazine, Vol. XVII, No. 99, March, 1876 • Various
... Conventional religion had passed Daylight by. He had lived a sort of religion in his square dealing and right playing with other men, and he had not indulged in vain metaphysics about future life. Death ended all. He had always believed ...
— Burning Daylight • Jack London
... climbing up its steep hill, is reached. The church, a landmark for many miles, was built by Lord Eldon in 1880. It was designed by Street in Early English. With its severe and lofty tower the exterior has a coldly conventional aspect not altogether pleasing. Inside, the large amount of Purbeck marble employed gives a touch of colour which, to a certain extent, relieves the austerity. Not far away is the older church built in Perpendicular ...
— Wanderings in Wessex - An Exploration of the Southern Realm from Itchen to Otter • Edric Holmes
... amiability could extend; but their heart is undoubtedly no longer their own. I am therefore on my guard against being deceived by it, and I fancy these ladies love to please so well, that they are even angry with those who respond to the attentions which are so lavishly showered on them, with conventional ...
— Queen Hortense - A Life Picture of the Napoleonic Era • L. Muhlbach
... this Jargon, a conventional language similar to the Lingua Franca of the Mediterranean, the Negro-English-Dutch of Surinam, the Pigeon English of China, and several other mixed tongues, dates back to the fur droguers of the last century. Those mariners whose ...
— Dictionary of the Chinook Jargon, or, Trade Language of Oregon • George Gibbs
... gayety was rising to its height. It may be a very trivial matter, yet it is certain that fancy dress gives a peculiar charm, freedom, and brightness to festivities of the kind; and men who in the ordinary mournful black evening-suit would be taciturn of speech and conventional in bearing, throw off their customary reserve when they find themselves in the brilliant and becoming attire of some picturesque period when dress was an art as well as a fashion; and not only do they look their best, but they somehow manage to put on "manner" with costume, and to become courteous, ...
— Ziska - The Problem of a Wicked Soul • Marie Corelli
... unduly fond of women. If, however, we examine each one of the separate espousals we shall find that he did not enter into it lightly, and that he broke it off unwillingly. His ardent temperament, therefore, was checked by a certain rational or conventional propriety, so that he was by no means a loose liver, as many would ...
— Famous Affinities of History, Vol 1-4, Complete - The Romance of Devotion • Lyndon Orr
... the Greek fails to convince us that Asclepius heard the prayer with which it concludes, is still flatter in English, because we have no words of salutation which correspond at once in etymological meaning and in conventional usage to the Greek. The English reader who cares to understand a piece so little worth his attention, will obligingly bear in mind that the Greek word represented here by Joy and Rejoice roughly answered in Lucian's time ...
— Works, V2 • Lucian of Samosata
... nowhere without discovering tables prettily decorated with flowers, and bearing hundreds of little pure white china plates, loaded with nothing but sandwiches. All varieties of opinion were consulted. People of ordinary tastes, who liked to know what they were eating, could choose conventional beef or ham, encased in thin slices of bread of a delicate flavor quite new to them. Other persons, less easily pleased, were tempted by sandwiches of pate de fois gras and by exquisite combinations of chicken and truffles, reduced to a creamy pulp which clung to the ...
— The Black Robe • Wilkie Collins
... all that mass of glowing colour the two young figures seated on the grey old tomb stood out conspicuously. The man was in conventional hunting-dress: red coat, white stock, black hat, white breeches, and top- boots. The girl was one of the richest, most glowing, and yet withal daintiest figures the eye of man could linger on. She was in ...
— The Man • Bram Stoker
... at a little distance, to begin with. Yes, the gate-posts at the garden gate are as good as anything. Draw the outline as accurately as you can, but remember there is no outline in nature, and that the outline in drawing is simply conventional; represent—which means present again, or re-present—the shadows as well as you can. Notice is the shadow under the cap of the post deeper than that of the side. Then let it be re-presented so on your paper. Do this honestly, as well as you can. Keep it to compare with what you do next ...
— How To Do It • Edward Everett Hale
... egotism, she found herself modifying her first unfavorable estimate of him. His quick eager speech, his mobile mouth, his mop of dark hair, his white restless hands, his long-lashed near-sighted eyes, these contributed a personality which had in it nothing commonplace or conventional. ...
— Mistress Anne • Temple Bailey
... account of her Shakespeare and of the Aldine Poets to a judicious catechist, and of many another book with a story besides; even of her Hume, Gibbon, Goldsmith, and Rollin, and of her Scott, perennially delightful. She was, in fact, no dunce, though she had not been disciplined in the conventional routine of education; and as for training in the higher sense, she could not have grown into a more upright or good girl under any guidance, than under that of her tender ...
— The Vicissitudes of Bessie Fairfax • Harriet Parr
... arrangements with the eye of a mistress of the house, she straightened the line of some plates, gave a touch of distinction to the flowers scattered over the table in a conventional disorder; then she went to the sideboard, where the major-domo had left a china pot filled with flowers. With a slight shrug, the Baroness carried the pot to its usual place—a marble column at the further end ...
— Messengers of Evil - Being a Further Account of the Lures and Devices of Fantomas • Pierre Souvestre
... narratives, they are everywhere intermingled with little elegant pieces of the lyrical kind.' In short, he could not trust that large child, the people of England, to take its dose of powder without the conventional treacle. To vary the metaphor, his famous Folio Manuscript he regarded as a Cinderella, and in his capacity as fairy godmother refused to introduce her to the world without hiding the slut's uncouth attire under fine raiment. To which ...
— Ballads of Romance and Chivalry - Popular Ballads of the Olden Times - First Series • Frank Sidgwick
... opened a mission among the slum children of a very poor section of Chicago. She began her work by gathering a number of dirty, unkempt children of the street into the neat mission room. Then, instead of preaching or praying or something of the conventional sort at the first, she brought in and set on a table a large beautiful calla lily, bewitching in its ...
— Quiet Talks with World Winners • S. D. Gordon
... little book 'The Curse of Education,' I trust that I shall not be misunderstood to disparage culture. The term 'education' is used, for want of a better word, to express the conventional mode of teaching and bringing up children, and of educating youth in this and other civilized countries. It is with education systems, with the universal method of cramming the mind with facts, and particularly ...
— The Curse of Education • Harold E. Gorst
... them on the back, he is systematically pursuing that object";[32] and again, "There was concluded in {222} exactly a fortnight a treaty, to negotiate which had taxed the inventive genius of the Foreign Office, and all the conventional methods of diplomacy, for the previous ...
— British Supremacy & Canadian Self-Government - 1839-1854 • J. L. Morison
... around Madrid. Dressed in the manner of the peasants, on his head a montera, a species of leathern helmet, with jacket and trousers of the same material, and mounted on Sidi Habismilk, he looked so unlike the conventional missionary that the housewife may be excused who mistook him ...
— The Life of George Borrow • Herbert Jenkins
... his country, and his family in France, after having made his fortune in the Soudan, entirely upon her account. He described her to me as the "gazelle of the desert, that was contented and happy in its native sands, but would die in the atmosphere of conventional civilisation." ...
— Wild Beasts and their Ways • Sir Samuel W. Baker
... uncharitable or malevolent; far from it. They discuss a frailty as a board of physicians might a malady, and without the slightest thought of imputing blame to "the patient." They have now and then a hard word for an unfortunate husband, but even him they treat rather as one ignorant of conventional usages and the ways of the polite world, than as a man radically ...
— Cornelius O'Dowd Upon Men And Women And Other Things In General - Originally Published In Blackwood's Magazine - 1864 • Charles Lever
... to foster the implementation of human rights, fundamental freedoms, democracy, and the rule of law; to act as an instrument of early warning, conflict prevention, and crisis management; and to serve as a framework for conventional arms ...
— The 2008 CIA World Factbook • United States. Central Intelligence Agency.
... have always been the careful, painstaking writers, the men who are always taken so seriously by their fellow craftsmen. It seems to be the unconventional man who is so rare—I mean the honestly unconventional man, who has to express himself in his own big way because the conventional way isn't big enough, because ne ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... inferred in my answer to your first question. The truth is, that in experiments which have been made, it is shown that to have the widest part of a steamer near the stern, gives lines to a hull which has less resistance than if made in the conventional way." ...
— The Wonder Island Boys: The Mysteries of the Caverns • Roger Thompson Finlay
... little books, of two of which the author was Mrs. Pilkington, who had already written several successful stories for young ladies. Her "Biography for Girls" contains various novelettes, in each of which the heroine lives the conventional life and dies the conventional death of the period, and receives a laudatory epitaph. They are remarkable only as being devoid of any interest. Her "Biography for Boys" does not appear to have attained the same popularity as that for girls. A third book, "The Juvenile Biographers," ...
— Forgotten Books of the American Nursery - A History of the Development of the American Story-Book • Rosalie V. Halsey
... the others off at Idlewild. He knew they'd expect him to and, since it would be the last conventional gesture he'd have to make, he might as well conform to their notions of what ...
— The Most Sentimental Man • Evelyn E. Smith
... national deliverance. Without the conventional "I take my pen in hand," or other rigmarole—which being translated means, "I am not quite ready to begin just now, but will very soon"—the writer states directly, and in ten or twenty words, all ...
— Around The Tea-Table • T. De Witt Talmage
... for an artistic success. What, however, he gave to all who came in touch with him, was a strong sense of the richness and greatness of life and all its issues. He taught us to approach it with no preconceived theories, no fears, no preferences. He had a great mistrust of conventional interpretation and traditional explanations. At the same time he abhorred controversy and wrangling. He had no wish to expunge the ideals of others, so long as they were sincerely formed rather than ...
— Father Payne • Arthur Christopher Benson
... dislike me?" he began his catechism. "Could you like me enough to think of me as a husband, if we'd met in a conventional, ...
— The Lion's Mouse • C. N. Williamson and A. M. Williamson
... capacities of enjoyment, suffering, and action,—he necessarily sees also that this SELF is exclusive proprietor of the body in which it dwells, its organs, their powers, faculties, &c.... Inasmuch as artificial and conventional property exists, there must be natural property also; for nothing can exist in art ...
— What is Property? - An Inquiry into the Principle of Right and of Government • P. J. Proudhon
... appropriation; most of them are exquisite, and many undoubtedly Shakespeare's; some I have said probably by another hand. Critically speaking too, not one of all the one hundred and fifty-four is of the conventional and elaborate fourteen-liner sort, with complicated rhymes; but each is a lyrical gem of three four-line stanzas closed by a distich. Milton's eighteen are all of the more artificial Petrarchian sort; which Wordsworth has diligently made his ...
— My Life as an Author • Martin Farquhar Tupper
... up a defence for this way of writing. The dramatists of the latter part of the seventeenth century are not, according to him, to be tried by the standard of morality which exists, and ought to exist in real life. Their world is a conventional world. Their heroes and heroines belong, not to England, not to Christendom, but to an Utopia of gallantry, to a Fairyland, where the Bible and Burn's justice are unknown, where a prank which on this earth would be rewarded ...
— Critical and Historical Essays Volume 2 • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... question, how, under so variable a standard, both natural and conventional, of every thing almost that can be received for a test or a presumption of manhood, shall we seize upon any characteristic feature, sufficiently universal to serve a practical use, as a criterion of the ...
— Autobiographic Sketches • Thomas de Quincey
... a spot shaded by the bushes, thinking over these things; but it was not long before I had got into my bathing costume. I thought of you, my pious friend, as I was buttoning the neck and the wrists of this conventional garment. How many times have you not helped me to execute this little task about which I was so awkward. Briefly, I entered the water and was about to strike out when the sound of the marchioness's ...
— Monsieur, Madame and Bebe, Complete • Gustave Droz
... fleet—excepting one battleship and two cruisers in dry dock—were lying off the dockyard, while the Mikasa was easily distinguishable, even to a stranger, from the fact that she was flying the Admiral's flag. I noticed also that her stem-head was decorated with a gilded conventional representation of the open chrysanthemum, the Imperial crest. The Admiral was in his cabin, I was informed, when I got aboard, but I was kept waiting nearly an hour before I was admitted to his presence, for ...
— Under the Ensign of the Rising Sun - A Story of the Russo-Japanese War • Harry Collingwood
... the rage of baffled desire. Aside from momentary resentment at Elise's first interview with Firmstone, the fact had made little impression on him. As Pierre ruled his household, even so he intended to rule his own, and, according to Morrison's idea of the conventional, a temporary trifling with another man was one of the undeniable perquisites of an engaged girl. Morrison had been too sure of himself to feel a twinge of jealousy, rather considering such a course of action, when not too frequently indulged, an additional tribute to his own personality. What ...
— Blue Goose • Frank Lewis Nason
... the typical minister of to-day would have had very scant welcome in the rude pulpits of the days of which we write. His elegant attire, conventional manners, written sermons, and new theology, would have been sadly out of place in the camp-meeting times, for be it remembered that Cartwright called things by their right names. He gave forth no uncertain sound. His ...
— Something of Men I Have Known - With Some Papers of a General Nature, Political, Historical, and Retrospective • Adlai E. Stevenson
... Rose had taken Europe captive, and had since dominated European poetry in all departments, and especially in the department of love-making. "Dangier" and his fellow-phantoms fled before the dawn of the new poetry in England, and the depressing influences of a common form—a conventional stock of images, personages, and almost language—disappeared. No doubt there was conventionality enough in the following of the Petrarchian model, but it was a less stiff and uniform conventionality; it allowed and indeed invited the ...
— A History of English Literature - Elizabethan Literature • George Saintsbury
... contacts, they had grown accustomed to minor self-exposures—and Hilda more so than George Cannon; Hilda was too impatient and impulsive not to tear, at increasingly frequent intervals, the veil of conventional formality. ...
— Hilda Lessways • Arnold Bennett
... a keen sportsman, and dearly loved a day with his gun. As a boy, on his own Highland hills, he had been addicted to sporting a good deal without the formality of a licence, and the absolute freedom from conventional trammels in the wild North was a source of much gratulation to him. Perhaps he enjoyed his outings all the more that he was a stern disciplinarian—so deeply impressed with a sense of duty that he would neither allow himself nor his ...
— The Walrus Hunters - A Romance of the Realms of Ice • R.M. Ballantyne
... fast-rising star in the psychic world—was ushered into the study at Prolands, the Hampstead residence of Montague Faull. The room was illuminated only by the light of a blazing fire. The host, eying him with indolent curiosity, got up, and the usual conventional greetings were exchanged. Having indicated an easy chair before the fire to his guest, the South American merchant sank back again into his own. The electric light was switched on. Faull's prominent, clear-cut features, ...
— A Voyage to Arcturus • David Lindsay
... case as two hundred years later and one hundred ago. When the eighteenth century closed, Wordsworth, Coleridge, Scott and Southey were men approaching more or less closely, thirty years of age. Landor, Hazlitt, Lamb and Moore were at least, and some of them well, past the conventional "coming of age"; De Quincey, Byron and Shelley were boys and even Keats was more than an infant. In the first mentioned of these groups there was still very marked eighteenth-century idiosyncrasy; in the second some; and it was by no means absent ...
— A Letter Book - Selected with an Introduction on the History and Art of Letter-Writing • George Saintsbury
... time that Mary had been away, seemed to have worked quite a change in her manner towards me, she seemed to have grown suddenly shy and reserved, and the first night even neglected to give me the usual conventional kiss, and when she retired herself, was very careful to put out the light before ...
— Forbidden Fruit • Anonymous
... to gather, and soon the double parlor held an assemblage of twenty-five or thirty persons. They formed a picturesque group: conventional but graceful in dress; animated in movement; full of good-natured laughter, but quite un-American in the beautiful modulation of their speaking tones; chiefly noticeable, however, to a stranger, in the vast variety of ...
— The Quest of the Silver Fleece - A Novel • W. E. B. Du Bois
... and the mother is usually happily wed to the father of her child. The North Russian villager is an assiduous gossip, but an incident of this kind receives no more attention as an item of news that if its chronology had been thoroughly conventional by ...
— The History of the American Expedition Fighting the Bolsheviki - Campaigning in North Russia 1918-1919 • Joel R. Moore
... marked in the Kalevala, where the heroes sometimes pray to the gods in conventional Christian phraseology, and at other times try to compel their assistance by invocations and spells. This stage is also seen in the strange travesty of the Nativity in the last Runo of the Kalevala; and indeed, one of the older writers says that the favourite ...
— The Hero of Esthonia and Other Studies in the Romantic Literature of That Country • William Forsell Kirby
... some woman unknown; he is supported thereafter by sufficiently suggestive remittances, and he passes through a Bohemian boyhood and a more normal though still intriguing early struggle and fluctuating love-story to eventual success, always with the glamour of conventional romance about him, only to turn out nobody in particular in the end. Congratulations! One was horribly afraid he would be compelled to be at least the acknowledged heir to a title. Quite apart from this, too, Oriel (FISHER UNWIN) is after an unassuming fashion one of the most easily and happily ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 156, Apr 2, 1919 • Various
... lately admitted into their confederacy, the Delawares of the Susquehanna, the Mohegans, and several kindred bands, all had their representatives at the meeting. The conferences lasted nineteen days, with the inevitable formalities of such occasions, and the weary repetition of conventional metaphors and long-winded speeches. At length, every difficulty being settled, the Governor of Pennsylvania, in behalf of all the English, rose with a wampum belt in his hand, and addressed the tawny congregation ...
— Montcalm and Wolfe • Francis Parkman
... slightly firm and prominent, receding with decided yet exquisite curves to the full white throat. Her cheeks had a transparent fairness, in which the color came and went instead of lingering in any conventional place and manner; her hair was too light to be called brown and too dark to be golden, but was shaded like that on which the sunlight falls in one of Bougereau's pictures of "Mother and Child;" and it rippled away from a broad low brow in natural waves, half hiding ...
— A Face Illumined • E. P. Roe
... At least a promising beginning would be made toward a more effective social control, if the mass of conscientious women were once thoroughly convinced that a knowledge of local vice conditions was a matter of civic obligation, if the entire body of conventional women, simply because they held the franchise, felt constrained to inform themselves concerning the social evil throughout the cities of America. Perhaps the most immediate result would be a change in the attitude toward prostitution on the part of elected officials, responding to that of their ...
— A New Conscience And An Ancient Evil • Jane Addams
... was that the institution of caste was not artificial or conventional, but that it began with the simple division of freemen and slaves, which we find among all ancient nations. This division, as he supposes, existed among the Hindus before they settled in India. It became positive law after their emigration from the northern mountains into India, and was ...
— Chips from a German Workshop - Volume IV - Essays chiefly on the Science of Language • Max Muller
... of magnetic attraction into the Homeric style and manner of treatment, and became mere echoes of the Homeric voice: in a word, Homer had so completely exhausted the epic genre, that after him further efforts were doomed to be merely conventional. Only the rare and exceptional genius of Vergil and Milton could use the Homeric medium without loss of individuality: and this quality none of the later epic poets seem to have possessed. Freedom from the domination of the great tradition could only be found by seeking ...
— Hesiod, The Homeric Hymns, and Homerica • Homer and Hesiod
... a particularly large concern, the coal-yard which Hawkins honored by his patronage was much like other coal-yards. The high walls of the storage bins rose from the sidewalk, and there was the conventional arch for the wagons, and the little, dingy ...
— Mr. Hawkins' Humorous Adventures • Edgar Franklin
... Chesterfield's rule—that his dinner party, himself included, should not fall below the number of the Graces—nor exceed that of the Muses. In the whole economy of his household arrangements, and especially of his dinner parties, there was something peculiar and amusingly opposed to the usual conventional restraints of society; not, however, that there was any neglect of decorum, such as sometimes occurs in houses where there are no ladies to impress a better tone upon the manners. The invariable routine was this: ...
— Narrative And Miscellaneous Papers • Thomas De Quincey
... he could do—nothing. Except, yes, of course—that was obvious, as obvious as any other plain duty. Through his selfishness it had a beginning; in spite of his selfishness it should have an end. That went without saying. No more walks or rides. In a conventional way, perhaps—but nothing deliberate, designed—and never alone together. Gossip about flippant married women was bad enough, but that it should concern itself with an unprotected creature like Madeline was monstrous, incredible. He strode fiercely into the road ...
— The Pool in the Desert • Sara Jeannette Duncan
... may even make a very good theoretical defense for it, from a certain point of view. But on the whole, architecture on that principle becomes uninteresting. You very soon tire of it. It is a mask rather than a countenance, and tends to the production of a dull uniformity of conventional design. ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 633, February 18, 1888 • Various
... the newly wedded pair had received the exhortation, Aristide, darting to the altar-rail, caught Jean up in his arms, and, to the consternation of the officiating clergy, the verger, and Anne's conventional friends, ...
— The Joyous Adventures of Aristide Pujol • William J. Locke
... yearning for our common birthplace appealed to me strongly. I was very much inclined to think that in spite of the horrible life she led she was a good girl. To hold this sort of opinion about a woman of her kind seemed to be an improper thing to do. I knew that according to the conventional idea concerning women of the street they were all the most hideous creatures in the world in every respect. So I would tell myself that I must consider her, too, one of the most hideous creatures in the world in every respect. But I did not. For I knew ...
— The Rise of David Levinsky • Abraham Cahan
... bride screamed fearfully at the mocking words, and cut the conventional phrase in two as with a razor; then fled to her own room and tore off her wreath, her veil, her pearls, and had already strewed the room, when Mrs. Dodd, with a foot quickened by affection, burst in and ...
— Hard Cash • Charles Reade
... actual phrase, the "actions in accord with that right," rested on the basis of civil, positive law, and could therefore be controlled by legal decisions. The right was sacred, its exercise was purely conventional. Thus every man has a right to property; he can never by any possible means divest himself of it, for it is rooted in the depths of his being, and supported by his human nature. But this right appears especially to be something internal, intrinsic. For him to exercise it—that is to say, to ...
— Mediaeval Socialism • Bede Jarrett
... art critic has condescended to notice, and it will enable him the better to understand and appreciate the soundness of his criticism. No one, we are told, owed less than Richard Doyle "did to those who had gone before him; and if this rendered his works less elaborate and conventional, it gave them a freshness and originality which might have been hampered if he had been forced into conformity with the accepted canons of the professional studio."[187] The writer of the article from which we have quoted would seem to have ...
— English Caricaturists and Graphic Humourists of the Nineteenth Century. - How they Illustrated and Interpreted their Times. • Graham Everitt
... that woman is subject to the same laws as himself; secondly, because the course of human evolution has reversed the psychology of the sexes, attributing to women the psychological results of masculine sexuality. This is the origin of the conventional lies which by a sort of social suggestion have intimidated women. They have, in appearance at least, accepted the rule of shame imposed on them by men, but only custom inspires the modesty for which they ...
— Studies in the Psychology of Sex, Volume 1 (of 6) • Havelock Ellis
... would seldom fail of mutual understanding, their attention being exclusively directed to the expression of thoughts by the means of comprehension and reply equally possessed by both, without the mental confusion of conventional sounds ...
— Sign Language Among North American Indians Compared With That Among Other Peoples And Deaf-Mutes • Garrick Mallery
... of his own, while he scoffed at conventional elegance. Thus, he could not bear to hear the sound of his own steps, the grit of gravel; and therefore never willingly walked in the road, but in the grass, on mountains and in woods. His senses were acute, and he remarked that by night every dwelling-house gives out bad air, like a slaughter-house. ...
— The Best of the World's Classics, Restricted to Prose, Vol. IX (of X) - America - I • Various
... lift and were shot up to the next floor, nothing being said on the way except a conventional word or two about the motoring weather. "I came in a friend's car—I'll tell you all about it," Mrs. Bal added as she led the ...
— The Heather-Moon • C. N. Williamson and A. M. Williamson
... verse, to be entombed, without hope of resurrection, in a mass of them. Cowley is generally instanced as a wonder of precocity. But his early insipidities show only a capacity for rhyming and for the metrical arrangement of certain conventional combinations of words, a capacity wholly dependent on a delicate physical organization, and an unhappy memory. An early poem is only remarkable when it displays an effort of reason, and the rudest verses in which we can trace some conception of the ends of poetry, are worth all the miracles ...
— The Works of Edgar Allan Poe - Volume 1 (of 5) of the Raven Edition • Edgar Allan Poe
... the house into a dancing-saloon with primitive sleeping-accommodation attached. It will last six months, your dancing craze. Then you will want the house transformed into a swimming-bath, or a skating-rink, or cleared out for hockey. My idea may be conventional. I don't expect you to sympathise with it. My notion is just an ordinary Christian house, not a gymnasium. There are going to be bedrooms in this house, and there's going to be a staircase leading to them. It may strike ...
— They and I • Jerome K. Jerome
... who gallantly and conspicuously maintain an all-round superiority in the society to which I myself hereditarily belong, namely, the Lower Orders; but their appearances are like angels' visits—in the obvious, as well as in the conventional but remoter sense. I can count no less than three men of this stamp among my ten thousand acquaintances. When the twofold excellence of such ambidexters is not stultified by selfishness, you have in them a realised ...
— Such is Life • Joseph Furphy
... Thomas Tyler," said the detective. He certainly didn't look the conventional detective, but Bentley knew instantly that he wasn't the conventional detective. "I work on the unusual cases. If you hadn't sent in your name I wouldn't have seen you, which means that as soon as you leave here you are to forget my name ...
— The Mind Master • Arthur J. Burks
... "I suppose I'm conventional," said Barbara. "And from the description you have given me of the boat, I'm sure the poor child will be utterly miserable, and she'll ruin her hands and her ...
— Jaffery • William J. Locke
... again, and sit as the hero of a fancy picture, bought at the Academy by the flattered parents. There is a grove, a flock of toy sheep, drapery in the grand style, a mahogany Satyr taking a thorn out of the little pink foot of a conventional nudity—poor survivals of the Titianesque. But the head is an obvious portrait, and a happy one; far more like the real boy, so tradition says, than the generalized chubbiness of the ...
— The Life of John Ruskin • W. G. Collingwood
... that carried this speech was so fresh, clear, and sweet that I am afraid Courtland thought little of its bluntness or its conventional transgressions. But it brought him his own tongue quite unemotionally and quietly. "I don't know what was in that note, Miss Dows, but I can hardly believe that Major Reed ever put my present felicity quite in ...
— Sally Dows and Other Stories • Bret Harte
... man. English has been so much affected by extraneous, alien, and discordant influences, so much mixed with foreign ingredients, so much overloaded with adventitious appendages, that it is to most of those who speak it, in a considerable degree, a conventional and arbitrary symbolism. The Anglo-Saxon tongue has a craving appetite, and is as rapacious of words, and as tolerant of forms, as are its children, of territory and of religions. But in spite of its power of assimilation, there is much of the speech of England which has never become ...
— Choice Specimens of American Literature, And Literary Reader - Being Selections from the Chief American Writers • Benj. N. Martin
... one of them will make her say him yea; then the spice of originality about her is refreshing, also having had so much of the companionship of Lady Esmondet, she is a woman of common-sense and of the world, no mere conventional doll. Had Haughton not been blind and have married my friend what a paradise the Hall would have been to me? Until Vaura married I must always remember that contingency. 'Tis absurd of dear Lady Esmondet wishing me to range myself, she knows my resolve not ...
— A Heart-Song of To-day • Annie Gregg Savigny
... of Phaestus. A Papyrus Manuscript. A Prehistoric Egyptian Grave. A Hatchet of the Early Stone Age. Arrowheads of the Later Stone Age. Early Roman Bar Money. Various Signs of Symbolic Picture Writing. Mexican Rebus. Chinese Picture Writing and Later Conventional Characters. Cretan Writing. Egyptian and Babylonian Writing. The Moabite Stone (Louvre, Paris). Head of a Girl (Musee S. Germain, Paris). Sketch of Mammoth on a Tusk found in a Cave in France. Bison painted on the Wall of a Cave. Cave ...
— EARLY EUROPEAN HISTORY • HUTTON WEBSTER
... are the first to possess me. It's queer, all the same. Directly I set eyes on you I wanted you. Quite suddenly I felt I must have you. I felt it somehow. What? I should find it very hard to say. Oh, I didn't stop to think. With your conventional, stiff, frigid manners, and your appearance, like a curly-haired little wolf, you pleased me, that was all! And now I could not do without ...
— A Mummer's Tale • Anatole France
... I'm thrilled to death about the Cosmic Express! If we could go to Venus, to a new life on a new world, and get away from all this hateful conventional society—" ...
— The Cosmic Express • John Stewart Williamson
... an elephant becomes hopelessly separated from his own herd, he is not permitted to attach himself to any other. He may browse in the vicinity, or frequent the same place to drink and to bathe; but the intercourse is only on a distant and conventional footing, and no familiarity or intimate association is under any circumstances permitted. To such a height is this exclusiveness carried, that even amidst the terror and stupefaction of an elephant corral, when an individual, detached from his own party ...
— Sketches of the Natural History of Ceylon • J. Emerson Tennent
... priest of Heliopolis. She is dressed in a long, white smock, in which there is no indication of folds. On her head is a wig, from under which, in front, her own hair shows. Her flesh is yellow, the conventional tint for women, as brownish red was for men. Her eyes ...
— A History Of Greek Art • F. B. Tarbell
... of the monastery, when the place was in possession of the monks. It was here that the community stored up the grain, which they received as ground-rent from their vassals; for, with the prudence belonging to their order, all their conventional revenues were made payable in kind, and hence, as the present proprietor loved to tell, came the name of Monkbarns. To the remains of the bailiff's house, the succeeding lay inhabitants had made various additions in proportion to the accommodation ...
— The Antiquary, Complete • Sir Walter Scott
... Russian character is his lack of practical force—the paralysis of his power of will. The national character among the educated classes is personified in fiction, in a type peculiarly Russian; and that may be best defined by calling it the conventional Hamlet. I say the conventional Hamlet, for I believe Shakespeare's Hamlet is a man of immense resolution and self-control. The Hamlet of the commentators is as unlike Shakespeare's Hamlet as systematic theology is unlike the Sermon on the Mount. The hero of the orthodox Russian novel is ...
— Essays on Russian Novelists • William Lyon Phelps
... Budh-gaya, where under the bo tree Buddha attained to enlightenment, and S[a]rn[a]th, where he began his preaching. Yet the worship at neither place to-day is Buddhist. At the scene of Gautama's enlightenment, where he became Buddha or Enlightened, one of the conventional statues of Buddha is actually marked and worshipped as Vishnu, the Hindu deity, the Preserver in the Hindu triad. Even at that most holy shrine of Buddhism, Hinduism has supplanted it, for popular Hinduism offered salvation, while ...
— New Ideas in India During the Nineteenth Century - A Study of Social, Political, and Religious Developments • John Morrison
... this that Labai wrote to the Pharaoh to exculpate himself, though his language, in spite of its conventional submissiveness, could not have been very acceptable at the Egyptian court. In one of his letters he excuses himself partly on the ground that even "the food of his stomach" had been taken from him, partly that he had attacked ...
— Patriarchal Palestine • Archibald Henry Sayce
... she was congratulated on all sides, and petted by the hostess, and she and John were left ostentatiously alone in a smaller drawing-room after dinner, and there was not a grain of excitement in the whole conventional thing! ...
— The Price of Things • Elinor Glyn
... born deaf, so far as it is recognizable by his eye. In the look and the features of his mother he reads her mood. But he very early becomes quiet and develops for himself, "out of unconscious gesticulation, the gesture language, which at first is not conventional, nay, is not in the strict sense quite a sign-language, but a mimetic-plastic representation of the influences experienced from the external world," since the deaf-mute imitates movements perceived, and the attitude of persons and the position of objects. Upon this pantomime alone rests ...
— The Mind of the Child, Part II • W. Preyer
... native songs. I have always found that the words of these songs were either the repetition of some such phrase as this, or a set of words referring to the recent adventures or experiences of the singer or the present company's little peculiarities; with a very frequent chorus, old and conventional. ...
— Travels in West Africa • Mary H. Kingsley
... a dazzling white; the outside shutters, or jalousies, were green. In the yard, which was kept scrupulously neat, were flowers and plants of every description which flourishes in South Louisiana. Within doors the appointments were perfect after the conventional type. The softest carpets and rugs covered the floors; rich and tasteful draperies hung at doors and windows. There were paintings, selected with judgment and discrimination, upon the walls. The cut glass, the silver, the heavy damask which daily appeared upon the ...
— The Awakening and Selected Short Stories • Kate Chopin
... have been loud applause in any other assembly upon the conclusion of such an impassioned if verbally conventional an harangue; but these Asiatics who heard Paul Boriskoff, who watched the tears stream down his hollowed cheeks and beheld the face uplifted as in ecstasy, had no applause to give him. Had not they also suffered as he had suffered? What wrong of his had not ...
— Aladdin of London - or Lodestar • Sir Max Pemberton
... itself. Homer was, of course, professedly admired by all, but more admired than imitated. Epic poetry was out of fashion and we find many epigrams of this period—some by Callimachus—directed against the "cyclic" poets, by whom were meant at that time those who were always dragging in conventional and commonplace epithets and phrases peculiar to epic poetry. Callimachus was in accordance with the spirit of the age when he proclaimed "a great book" to be "a great evil", and sought to confine poetical activity within the narrowest ...
— The Argonautica • Apollonius Rhodius
... vessel of the western tribes, Fig. 468, a, would have served equally well. The specimen given in b is from Arkansas. As a rule, however, such vessels cannot be traced to their originals, since by copying and recopying they have varied from the parent form, tending always toward uniform conventional shapes. ...
— Origin and Development of Form and Ornament in Ceramic Art. • William Henry Holmes
... sources there is the fund of information possessed by public men and the "well-informed" of various grades. Unfortunately this is rarely accessible, or only under conventional restrictions. Here and there I have been able to make use of it without any breach of trust; and to those who have enlightened my darkness I am very grateful. The illumination, I know, is only partial; but I hope ...
— The Development of the European Nations, 1870-1914 (5th ed.) • John Holland Rose
... Little girls having spent their half-crowns on themselves, at once meet members of the destitute class, and, having nothing to give them, are plunged into remorse; little boys creeping into the larder to steal jam, eat soft soap by mistake and never are greedy again; and so forth. All the conventional images and morals are employed. The whole book is one long and emphatic division of sheep from goats. 'The Journal' is not perhaps exciting, but it reflects the quieter family life of a century ago, and incidentally portrays the thorough ...
— Forgotten Tales of Long Ago • E. V. Lucas
... we rode together, John lagging a good deal behind (that bay horse of John's never could walk with White Stockings), I could not help thinking how much I had misunderstood Captain Lovell's character. What a deal of feeling—almost of romance—there was under that conventional exterior which he wore before the world! I liked him so much more now I came to know him better. I was quite sorry when we had to wish him "good-night" and John and I rode thoughtfully home through the quiet streets. I thought my cousin's manner was altered too, ...
— Kate Coventry - An Autobiography • G. J. Whyte-Melville
... that was certain; so we stopped at Chartier, three miles down the river from Pittsburg, and sent on our portly bag of conventional traveling clothes by express to Cincinnati, where we intend stopping for a day. This leaves us in our rough boating costumes for all the smaller towns en route. What we may lose in possible social embarrassments, we gain in ...
— Afloat on the Ohio - An Historical Pilgrimage of a Thousand Miles in a Skiff, from Redstone to Cairo • Reuben Gold Thwaites
... a recent addition to Maud's inner circle. She had interested herself in him some two months back in much the same spirit as the prisoner in his dungeon cell tames and pets the conventional mouse. To educate Albert, to raise him above his groove in life and develop his soul, appealed to her romantic nature as a worthy task, and as a good way of filling in the time. It is an exceedingly moot point—and one which his associates ...
— A Damsel in Distress • Pelham Grenville Wodehouse
... relation. There is, perhaps, more Indian blood in New England than is generally supposed, and the earlier inhabitants of that section were probably less exclusive toward the aborigines than is assumed in conventional history. Comer's Diary deals, it is true, with the early part of the eighteenth century, but the conditions it minutely and no doubt faithfully describes, must have existed substantially in ...
— The Land We Live In - The Story of Our Country • Henry Mann
... came forward to meet him, and having plied him, for five minutes, with questions concerning his entire family, he added that conventional phrase with which one passer-by addresses another concerning the object of his journey: "So you are taking a little trip in this part of ...
— The Devil's Pool • George Sand
... slates, imagine that all these slates have been gilt, and that some have been adorned with gold tassels instead of the usual sponge, and into each let there be introduced a dome, a camel, a palm-tree, or any other conventional ...
— Modern Painting • George Moore
... possible; it was indeed the very object of this connection to find a clear, national, and popular form of expression for the new state. From ancient times there stood on the Capitol the statues of those seven kings, whom the conventional history of Rome was wont to bring on the stage; Caesar ordered his own to be erected beside them as the eighth. He appeared publicly in the costume of the old kings of Alba. In his new law as to political ...
— The History of Rome (Volumes 1-5) • Theodor Mommsen
... the original work, monetary pounds were expressed as an italicized "l." after the number. For the text version, I am using the more conventional L100 form for clarity. ...
— The Greville Memoirs (Second Part) - A Journal of the Reign of Queen Victoria from 1837 to 1852 - (Volume 1 of 3) • Charles C. F. Greville
... of woods, a little paradise for birds and bird lovers, where, if anywhere, he could be studied. There is some propriety in applying to him the strange epithet "squealing," I must allow, for the bird has a peculiar voice, nasal enough for the conventional Brother Jonathan; but "sapsucker" is, in the opinion of many who have studied his ways, undeserved. Dr. Merriam, even while admitting that the birds do taste the sap, says positively, "It is my firm belief that their chief object in making ...
— Little Brothers of the Air • Olive Thorne Miller
... live by touch," he said. "If two people can't communicate fully and sufficiently by the feelers they are not in the same sphere and have no common language. But speech is absurd. Why, every phrase, and nearly every word, has a conventional value." ...
— Love and Lucy • Maurice Henry Hewlett
... aroused at dawn by the rattle of incessant rifle fire rolling along Bester's Ridge from end to end. Up to that time no big guns had spoken on either side, and people came out of their houses slowly, in sulky humour at having their rest disturbed before the conventional hour for shelling to begin. While they listened to the continuous crackling as of damp sticks in a huge bonfire, few among them realised that the sounds indicated anything more serious than a Boer demonstration which would fizzle ...
— Four Months Besieged - The Story of Ladysmith • H. H. S. Pearse
... unusual sort. "Characters" in the Five Towns are generally either very grim or very jolly, either exceptionally shrewd or exceptionally simple; and they nearly always, in their outward aspect, depart from the conventional. Chadwick was not thus. Aged fifty or so, he was a portly and ceremonious man with an official gait. He had been a policeman in his youth, and he never afterwards ceased to look like a policeman in plain clothes. The authoritative mien of the policeman refused ...
— The Matador of the Five Towns and Other Stories • Arnold Bennett
... what Reade does in that one book. He takes the reader by the hand, and he leads him away into the Middle Ages, and not a conventional study-built Middle Age, but a period quivering with life, full of folk who are as human and real as a 'bus-load in Oxford Street. He takes him through Holland, he shows him the painters, the dykes, ...
— Through the Magic Door • Arthur Conan Doyle
... profusion of ball-flower ornament in the moulding. The finial is very heavy, though beautifully wrought to represent birds and foliage. At the spring of the arch is the very curious figure of a devil. Two pinnacles[28] at the sides have most grotesque faces at the corners instead of the conventional foliage. This idea has been adopted in the decoration of the tomb-recesses in the ...
— Bell's Cathedrals: The Abbey Church of Tewkesbury - with some Account of the Priory Church of Deerhurst Gloucestershire • H. J. L. J. Masse
... the hem of the garment, being richly ornamented with embroidery in heavy gold thread. This garment was confined at the waist by a massive belt of solid gold composed of square placques hinged together, and each elaborately sculptured with conventional representations of the sun. Over this was worn a long cloak, dyed blue, also woven of vicuna wool, but without ornament of any description. Their heads were bare, and the lobe of each ear was pierced and distended to receive a gold medallion nearly four inches in diameter, also ...
— Harry Escombe - A Tale of Adventure in Peru • Harry Collingwood
... dressing, but many of the other men had done so, and he determined that for her sake he must play the game at least to that extent. Byrd added the scorn of the artist to the constitutional dislike of the average American for conventional evening dress. His, however, was as little conventional as possible, and while he nervously adjusted it he could not help recognizing that it was exceedingly becoming. He tore a tie and destroyed two collars, however, before the result satisfied him, and his nerves ...
— The Nest Builder • Beatrice Forbes-Robertson Hale
... hasty step backward, impelled to it by the fierce anger blazing from those stern gray eyes. But now he paused, and, for the only time on record, discovered the conventional language of polite society inadequate to express ...
— Bob Hampton of Placer • Randall Parrish
... said he. "You can read better'n I can." And so Wid accepted Sim's conventional fiction, knowing he could neither read ...
— The Sagebrusher - A Story of the West • Emerson Hough
... mellowest fruit from Peacock's tree, was, like most mellow fruit, not matured hastily. In saying this I do not refer to the long period—exactly a generation in the conventional sense—which intervened between Crotchet Castle of 1831 and this of 1861. For we know as a matter of fact, from the preface to the 1856 edition of Melincourt, that Peacock was planning Gryll Grange at a time considerably nearer to, but still some years ...
— Gryll Grange • Thomas Love Peacock
... draughtsman of the school set a caricature in circulation, labelled, to prevent mistakes, with the schoolmaster's name. An immense bell-crowned hat, and a long, pointed, swallow-tailed coat showed that the artist had in his mind the conventional dandy, as shown in prints of thirty or forty years ago, rather than any actual human aspect of the time. But it was passed round among the boys and made its laugh, helping of course to undermine the master's authority, as "Punch" or the "Charivari" takes the dignity out of an obnoxious ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 5, No. 28, February, 1860 • Various
... bishop in 1816. There was no place for such talents as those of Malthus, who ultimately became professor at Haileybury. Wakefield had the misfortune of not being able to cover his heterodoxy with the conventional formula. Porson suffered from the same cause, and from less respectable weaknesses; but it seems that the university had no demand for services of the great scholar, and he did nothing for his L40 a year. Milner ...
— The English Utilitarians, Volume I. • Leslie Stephen
... friend of the well-known poet Richard Barnefield, who though too young in 1578 to have been of the University coterie of euphuists, shows definite traces of their affectation in his works. The conventional illustrations from an "unnatural natural history" abound in his Affectionate Shepherd[69] (1594), and he repeats the jargon about marble and showers[70] which we have seen in Lyly, Watson and Kyd. Again in his Cynthia (1594) there is a distinct reference to the ...
— John Lyly • John Dover Wilson
... we may almost suppose it. Starvation is so monotonous a misery that a gift of personal diagnosis might easily lend attraction to poisoned food as an alternative, if one may be permitted a melodramatic simile in a case which Alicia kept conventional enough. She did not even abate the usual number of Duff's invitations to dinner, when there was certainly nothing to repay her for regarding him across a gulf of flowers and silver and a tide of conversation about the season's paper-chasing except the impoverished complexion which people ...
— Hilda - A Story of Calcutta • Sara Jeannette Duncan
... comprehensive statements of the medieval translator's theory as may aid in the interpretation of detail. Such statements are few, generally late in date, and, even when not directly translated from a predecessor, are obviously repetitions of the conventional rule associated with the name of Jerome and adopted in Anglo-Saxon times by Alfred and Aelfric. An early fifteenth-century translator of the Secreta Secretorum, for example, carries over into English the preface of the Latin translator: "I have ...
— Early Theories of Translation • Flora Ross Amos
... that the subject had long been a familiar decoration of conventual refectories before the time when Lionardo brought his profound knowledge of external human nature, and his unsurpassed powers of executive art, to bear on a subject which had before been treated in the dry, conventional, inanimate manner of the Middle Ages. The leading features of the traditional picture are retained: the long table, the linen cloth, the one-sided arrangement of the figures, the classic drapery, and the general form and design of the ...
— Notes and Queries, Number 187, May 28, 1853 • Various
... is a man without a God, and the peculiarity of his character lies in a constant realization of the fact that he is absolutely free from every form or principle of faith, every conventional tie, every duty founded on aught save the most natural instincts. He revels in this freedom; it is to him like magic armor, making him invulnerable to shafts which reach all around him—nay, which render him supremely indifferent ...
— Continental Monthly, Vol. III, No IV, April 1863 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy • Various
... Dick! Whoop! Oh, boy! Come a-runnin'!" and the young rancher beat a tattoo with his heels on the sides of his steed, and raced down the slope toward two other lads who, like himself, were attired in conventional western costume. Old Billee pulled his steed to a halt and ...
— The Boy Ranchers in Camp - or The Water Fight at Diamond X • Willard F. Baker
... standing almost as still as a finger post. It was that of a big man in rough shooting-clothes, bareheaded, and with tousled curly hair that gave him a rather wild look. On a nearer approach this first more fantastic impression faded; in a full light the figure took on more conventional colors, as of an ordinary gentleman who happened to have come out without a hat and without very studiously brushing his hair. But the massive stature remained, and something deep and even cavernous about the setting of ...
— The Man Who Knew Too Much • G.K. Chesterton
... have betrayed more than conventional impassivity, for Evarin smiled. "Now you know, Rakhal, why I am called Toymaker. Is it not strange—the masterpriest of Nebran, a maker of Toys, and the shrine of the Toad God a ...
— The Door Through Space • Marion Zimmer Bradley
... through the woods, turned at the call, and putting her hands in trumpet shape to her lips, answered as do school girls and boys when out of reach of the more conventional ...
— The Motor Girls Through New England - or, Held by the Gypsies • Margaret Penrose
... humming down the narrow private road at forty-five miles an hour. That was Tommy Reames' way. He looked totally unlike the conventional description of a scientist of any sort—as much unlike a scientist as his sport roadster looked unlike a scientist's customary means of transit—and ordinarily he acted quite unlike one. As a matter of fact, most of the people Tommy associated ...
— Astounding Stories of Super-Science January 1931 • Various
... many years, and indeed is still, in some parts of New England, a highly conventional gift to a mother with a young babe. Mrs. Deming must have made many of these cushions. One of her manufacture still exists. It is about five inches long and three inches wide; one side is of white silk stuck around the edge with old-fashioned ...
— Diary of Anna Green Winslow - A Boston School Girl of 1771 • Anna Green Winslow
... helped the author toward a Poem Game theory. He agrees that neither the dancing nor the chanting nor any other thing should be allowed to run away with the original intention of the words. The chanting should not be carried to the point where it seeks to rival conventional musical composition. The dancer should be subordinated to the natural rhythms of English speech, and not attempt to incorporate bodily all the precedents of ...
— Chinese Nightingale • Vachel Lindsay
... not yet extinct, that the manliest thing a man can do is to take his life in his hand, pay the woman he loves the highest tribute in his power by offering her his heart and name, and giving her the definite word that may be the touchstone to reveal to herself her own feeling. In our conventional life women must move behind a mask in a world of uncertainties. What wonder that many of them learn in their defensive position to play a game, and sometimes experiment upon the honest natures of their admirers! But even this ...
— Baddeck and That Sort of Thing • Charles Dudley Warner
... many suggestions on the part of friends who were anxious to teach their small children something of the marvels of the heavens, but found it exceedingly difficult to get hold of a book wherein the intense fascination of the subject was not lost in conventional phraseology—a book in which the stupendous facts were stated in language simple enough to be read aloud to ...
— The Children's Book of Stars • G.E. Mitton
... with tolerable cheerfulness, though in the same street, where they occupy the garrets of a house, resides, in an elegant hotel, a man who was once their groom, but who is now a tribune, and has within these last twelve years, as a conventional deputy, amassed, in his mission to Brabant and Flanders, twelve millions of livres. He has kindly let my friend understand that his youngest daughter might be received as a chambermaid to his wife, being informed that she has a good education. All the four daughters are good musicians, good ...
— The Memoirs of Napoleon Bonaparte • Bourrienne, Constant, and Stewarton
... of his resentment at restraint he saw no reason why he should differentiate between old Mr Bennett and the conventional banns-forbidding father of the novelettes with which he was accustomed to sweeten his hours of idleness. To him, till Katie explained the intricacies of the position, Mr Bennett was simply the proud millionaire who would not hear of ...
— The Man with Two Left Feet - and Other Stories • P. G. Wodehouse
... himself so loftily. Mrs. Birtwell did not like the advanced position to which her husband carried her, but she yielded to his weak love of notoriety and social eclat as gracefully as possible, and did her best to cover his too glaring violations of good taste and conventional refinement. In this she was ...
— Danger - or Wounded in the House of a Friend • T. S. Arthur
... and conventional statesmanship have very evidently broken down in Europe. They have made a disastrous failure of the work with which they were intrusted. They did not and could not prevent the war because they knew and used only the old formulas. They had no tools ...
— The New York Times Current History of the European War, Vol. 1, January 9, 1915 - What Americans Say to Europe • Various
... incident. They made way respectfully for the manager, but looked somewhat wonderingly upon his companion, probably questioning what could be her interest in the event. Dalton pushed through the press, keeping her close in his wake. But once within the door no conventional barriers were interposed. The gloomy distance and silence attendant upon the last hours of the great were not in the way of friendly sympathy, or unfriendly intrusion, here. The back door stood wide open, and people came and went, while ...
— Joyce's Investments - A Story for Girls • Fannie E. Newberry
... ivory and ebony carried all before it. The Italian work of this kind is often most beautifully engraved, but less accurate than that produced in France. The later Italian marquetry does not lose decorative effect though the figure drawing becomes very conventional, and the curves of ornament are often cut with a mechanical sweep. A good deal of it is in only two colours, a return to the simplicity ...
— Intarsia and Marquetry • F. Hamilton Jackson
... Gertrude or Adele, and his young rivalry with Johnny McComas for her favor; telling how Johnny won over Raymond the privilege of carrying her books to school, and how, in the end, he won Gertrude or Adele herself from Raymond, and married her. Fiddlesticks! Please put all such conventional procedures out of your head, and take what I am prepared to give you. The school was a boys' school. There was no Gertrude or Adele—as yet—any more than there was an Elsie. Raymond kept to his books and indulged in no juvenile philanderings. Forget ...
— On the Stairs • Henry B. Fuller
... and prudence. But a regulation which determines who shall and who shall not be recognized as members of the Church of Christ, involves a vital question, the importance of which cannot be overrated, and which must be determined by Divine Revelation, and not by mere conventional rules. ...
— The Story of My Life - Being Reminiscences of Sixty Years' Public Service in Canada • Egerton Ryerson
... run wild, run savage, tearing its way out in primitive, untamed fashion, I mean," continued the doctor, striving to make himself clear to a mind bounded by conventional thought and knowledge; "for the desire to possess, remember, may easily become importunate, and, embodied in this animal form of the Subtle Body which acts as its vehicle, may go forth to tear in pieces all ...
— Three More John Silence Stories • Algernon Blackwood
... to have in order to possess such cars, with their attendant footman and chauffeur; but that income, whatever it was, became her ideal. Money! Lots of money! With money you could have comfort. When she said that, and was warned by conventional wiseacres that money did not produce happiness, she sneered at the timid ones. "Bet I'd be happy," she said. "What's happiness?" She wondered what it was. For her it had been oblivion in Toby's arms. It was so no longer. That was not all she desired. It was not by any means ...
— Coquette • Frank Swinnerton
... that she did not return the conventional "Oh, WOULD you?" Instead, she corrected him with a laugh—"Not a trunk, but my trunk; I've no other—" and then added briskly: "You'd better first see to getting your own ...
— The Reef • Edith Wharton
... not prim. She knew too much of the world to be easily shocked, in the old conventional sense. Besides, her Bleary Street work had brought her into contact with girls who had gone to the bad, and she had not found them different from other girls. ...
— The Dust Flower • Basil King
... remembered what Conrad Lagrange had said about her fad. But after so frankly exhibiting herself before him, dressed as she was in a gown that was deliberately planned to advertise her physical charms, to be particular about baring her shoulders in a conventional costume—! ...
— The Eyes of the World • Harold Bell Wright
... dog or a horse belonging to Althea, and you hit Althea. That was her way. The incident went out of my mind till this morning. Other incidents, too. One thinks pretty quick at times. Again, this scoundrel hit me on the raw. Boyce never wrote to us. Sent us through his mother a conventional word of condolence. Edith and I were hurt. That was one of the things that made me speak so angrily of him when he wouldn't ...
— The Red Planet • William J. Locke
... besides, an invincible objection to owing or borrowing. (Resembling Jean in his knowledge of the wild, he was curiously different in most other ways, having a good deal of sentiment and a keen, almost conventional sense of honor.) ...
— Jan - A Dog and a Romance • A. J. Dawson
... my throat of a huskiness which prevented speech. "Hump," he said slowly, "you can't do it. You are not exactly afraid. You are impotent. Your conventional morality is stronger than you. You are the slave to the opinions which have credence among the people you have known and have read about. Their code has been drummed into your head from the time you lisped, and in spite of your philosophy, and of what I have taught you, ...
— The Sea-Wolf • Jack London
... Because it's too cold for them? Oh, dear, no: on sunny days in early English spring, when the thermometer doesn't rise above freezing in the shade, you will see both the honey-bees and the great black bumble as busy as their conventional character demands of them among the golden cups of the first timid crocuses. Give the bee sunshine, indeed, with a temperature just about freezing-point, and he'll flit about joyously on his communistic errand. But bees, one must remember, have ...
— Science in Arcady • Grant Allen
... they were, throughout gave occasional utterance to highly moral observations which Latin grammarians have preserved for us. This curious mixture may be explained or contrasted at pleasure; perhaps it was only a conventional habit. ...
— Initiation into Literature • Emile Faguet
... greeting roused him. He bared his head and bent low to the speaker in a deeper homage than that of conventional courtesy. ...
— The Mystery of a Turkish Bath • E.M. Gollan (AKA Rita)
... would-be old English is more amusing than culpable; but the author's philosophy of the unseen, as expounded by Amine or Krantz, is both weak and tiresome, and his religious discourses, coloured by prejudice against the Romanists, are conventional and unconvincing. The closing scene ...
— The Phantom Ship • Captain Frederick Marryat
... etiquette; but he and Sir William were alone, and he followed his instincts. Once he frankly asked his grandfather of a matter of form, of which he was uncertain the evening before. The thing was done so naturally that the conventional mind of the baronet was not disturbed. The Belwards were notable for their brains, and Sir William saw that the young man had an unusual share. He also felt that this startling individuality might make ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker
... of themselves. I remember spending two or three discouraging weeks with Andersen's story of the "Adventures of a Beetle." I passed through times of great depression, because all the little creatures, beetles, ear-wigs, frogs, etc., behaved in such a conventional way, instead of displaying the strong individuality which Andersen had bestowed upon them that I began to despair of presenting ...
— The Art of the Story-Teller • Marie L. Shedlock
... convention usually signifies an assembly of persons met for some benevolent, political, or ecclesiastical purpose. It also signifies a treaty, or agreement between nations; and such agreement or contract, though made without a formal meeting, is deemed conventional. ...
— The Government Class Book • Andrew W. Young
... are obliged to go long distances to school, are often greatly perplexed to know what to put up for the noonday lunch which shall be both appetizing and wholesome. The conventional school lunch of white bread and butter, sandwiches, pickles, mince or other rich pie, with a variety of cake and cookies, is scarcely better than none at all; since on the one hand there is a deficiency of food material which can ...
— Science in the Kitchen. • Mrs. E. E. Kellogg
... hands, unless it be that it is shoddy? Yet the man who would stand well in the eyes of society must not whisper a word against pharisaism; for the Pharisee is a highly respectable person, and observes the proprieties; he typifies the conventional righteousness and ...
— Robert Burns - Famous Scots Series • Gabriel Setoun
... sat down to dinner. There were one or two murmurs of conventional regret when Miss Heredith explained the reason of Mrs. Heredith's vacant place, but the majority of the London guests—particularly the female portion—recognized the illness as a subterfuge and ...
— The Hand in the Dark • Arthur J. Rees
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