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More "Perfunctory" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... masses Who trusted their bones more to mail and cuirasses)— All borne by the throng Who are marching along To the square of the Dom with processional song, With the flaring of dips, And bending of hips, And the chanting of hundred perfunctory lips; And some good little boys Who had come up from Neuss And the Quirinuskirche to show off their voice: All march to the square Of the great Dom, and there File right and left, leaving alone and quite bare A covered sedan, ...
— Complete Poetical Works of Bret Harte • Bret Harte
... will console me for a lot," I heard him say quite heartily to Raffles. But Camilla's comment was altogether perfunctory; indeed, I wondered that so sophisticated a person did not affect some little enthusiasm. She seemed more interested, however, in the crowd than in the cricket. And ...
— Mr. Justice Raffles • E. W. Hornung
... softly forward and kissed him, in a shy, perfunctory manner; and then good-natured Tom shook his hand, and Philip followed suit; after which Mrs. Faringfield embraced him somewhat stiffly, and I gingerly held his fingers a moment, and my mother ...
— Philip Winwood • Robert Neilson Stephens
... was a real national monarchy, and the power of the king appeared to be distinctly in the ascendant. Parliament was fast becoming a purely formal and perfunctory body. ...
— A Political and Social History of Modern Europe V.1. • Carlton J. H. Hayes
... numberless institutions. It seems to be regarded by the best judges as, on the whole, the best school history of the United States yet published. It was written and not simply compiled. The author did not take it for granted that a history of our country must be a perfunctory work made up from previous histories and merely iterating an old set of facts, ideas, and stories. The book is a panorama of the leading events of our history, with their causes and results clearly traced. Attention ...
— The Beginner's American History • D. H. Montgomery
... lines of communication. This plan was ultimately carried out on a large scale, and was the necessary condition of Sherman's Atlanta campaign of 1864. Taken as a whole, Halleck's instructions to Burnside presented no definite objective, and were a perfunctory sort of introduction to his new command, which raises a doubt whether the organization of a little army in the Department of ...
— Military Reminiscences of the Civil War V1 • Jacob Dolson Cox
... was his embarrassed greeting. Then, with attempt at jocularity for which he later could have kicked himself: "I'm just in time to see you home, and head off hobgoblins and hoboes." No wonder the two walked the faster and gave but perfunctory replies. ...
— Lanier of the Cavalry - or, A Week's Arrest • Charles King
... text, 'Stolen waters are sweet, and bread eaten in secret is pleasant'; and it would be hard to define how much Gillian's satisfaction was owing to the sense of benevolence, or to the pleasure of eluding Aunt Jane, when, after going through her chapter of Katharine Ashton, in a somewhat perfunctory manner, she hastened away to Miss White's office. This, being connected with the showroom, could be entered without passing through the gate with the inscription—-'No admittance except on business.' Indeed, the office had a private door, which, at Gillian's signal, was always opened to her. ...
— Beechcroft at Rockstone • Charlotte M. Yonge
... was a great success, but justice compels me to say that Thackeray was not a good editor. As he would have been an indifferent civil servant, an indifferent member of Parliament, so was he perfunctory as an editor. It has sometimes been thought well to select a popular literary man as an editor; first, because his name will attract, and then with an idea that he who can write well himself will be a competent judge of the writings of others. The first may sell a magazine, but will ...
— Thackeray • Anthony Trollope
... tales represent the social life of mediaerval Egypt, and he selects a period approaching the close of the fifteenth century as the probable date of collection, though some of the tales are, he believes, rather later" (p. 189). Mr. Lane's studies upon the subject were painfully perfunctory. He distinctly states (Preface, p. xii.) that "the work was commenced and completed by one man," or at least that "one man completed what another commenced." With a marvellous want of critical acumen ...
— Supplemental Nights, Volume 6 • Richard F. Burton
... that of the other, sending a nameless shiver through her. Later on in the evening, when they were introduced to one another by the Baroness Bockhorst, in the middle of the crowd, they merely exchanged an inclination of the head. And that perfunctory salutation had been repeated on the rare occasions on which Maria Ferres had ...
— The Child of Pleasure • Gabriele D'Annunzio
... distinct troubles. One was his sweetheart's attitude toward him, and the other was the increasing weakness of his father. Molly Culpepper's letters seemed to be growing sad; also they were failing in their length and frequency—the young man felt that they were perfunctory. His father's letters showed a physical breakdown. His handwriting was unsteady, and often he repeated himself in successive letters. The sister wrote about her father's weakness, and seemed to think he was working ...
— A Certain Rich Man • William Allen White
... away toward dimness dimmer than that of the great hall, in the direction of that wing where rooms had been assigned him. A little rustle of pleased anticipation ran through the petticoats of the room. Interest ceased to be perfunctory and became genuine. This was more fun than doctrine, after all. Who wouldn't be gratified at the chance of meeting an astral body—at least in a crowd? Alone, in a dark room, at midnight, it ...
— Jewel Weed • Alice Ames Winter
... the fault of the fat oily priest, I know not. But the sposalizio struck me as tame and cheerless, the mass as irreverent and vulgarly conducted. At the same time there is something too impressive in the mass for any perfunctory performance to divest its symbolism of sublimity. A Protestant Communion Service lends itself more easily to degradation ...
— New Italian sketches • John Addington Symonds
... through the usual ceremony, announcing that he was most happy, etc., in the perfunctory style that a million other men follow every day. Then he took the chair that was offered him, and gave an order for his ...
— A Black Adonis • Linn Boyd Porter
... one be touched in some vital corner in one's nature, and the high, faultless impartiality is gone. In proportion as Richard's interest in Lali had grown, the universal quality of his sympathy had declined. Man is only man. Not that his benefactions as lord-bountiful in the parish had grown perfunctory, but the calm detail of his interest was not so definite. He was the same, yet ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker
... inspiration." Even while boyishly exhaling this enthusiasm he was also divesting himself of certain bundles whose contents seemed to imply that he had brought his dinner with him,—the youthful Mrs. Harcourt setting the table in a perfunctory, listless way that contrasted oddly with her husband's ...
— A First Family of Tasajara • Bret Harte
... for weapons," he said casually, while he himself made a few perfunctory passes over my pockets. No weapons being found, he said, "Let him go. We've done damage ...
— In the Claws of the German Eagle • Albert Rhys Williams
... scholarly care that will make the edition one that is a joy to possess. His introductory Memoir, of some eighty pages in length, is a valuable addition to the many appraisements of Cowper that these later years have seen. It is no mere perfunctory 'introduction' but a piece of sound biographical work.... Dr. Frazer has given us two volumes that are ...
— The Belief in Immortality and the Worship of the Dead, Volume I (of 3) • Sir James George Frazer
... not give her daughter the usual perfunctory and barely tolerated kiss. At the bottom of her torpid, selfish soul she was bitterly hurt and disappointed, as those people always are who have hurt and disappointed others their whole lives, and only a glimmer of hope that Beatrice's determination might have softened made her hesitate at the door ...
— The Native Born - or, The Rajah's People • I. A. R. Wylie
... saluted in a perfunctory manner and rode toward San Antonio. The three Texans went slowly back to the Alamo. Ned walked behind the two men. He hoped that the confidence of Major Morris was justified. He knew Santa Anna too well. He believed that the ...
— The Texan Scouts - A Story of the Alamo and Goliad • Joseph A. Altsheler
... were riding three and three, the Regent being in the middle of the first rank on a splendid iron-grey charger. He had come from a review in Windsor Park with which he had been able to combine the monthly perfunctory visit to his mother and sisters. He was in a hussar uniform, extremely fantastic, the same in which he afterwards asserted that he had commanded one of the cavalry divisions at Waterloo. He wore a diamond belt, which is not quite according to the regulations of the service. A diamond ...
— Patsy • S. R. Crockett
... THERE was nothing perfunctory in the administration of the "Two Rokuhara" (Ryo-Rokuhara) in Kyoto. The northern and the southern offices were presided over by the most prominent members of the Hojo family, men destined to fill the post of regent (shikkeri) subsequently in Kamakura. Thus, when Hojo Yoshitoki died suddenly, ...
— A History of the Japanese People - From the Earliest Times to the End of the Meiji Era • Frank Brinkley and Dairoku Kikuchi
... an account of which The Night is mainly occupied, so far as it goes. There are many lively pictures in it, with light sketches of expression and attitude; but on the whole it has not so many distinctly quotable passages as the other parts of the poem. The perfunctory devotion of the cavalier and the lady continues throughout, and the same ironical reverence depicts them alighting from their carriage, arriving in the presence of the hostess, sharing in the gossip of the guests, supping, and sitting down at those games of chance with which every fashionable house ...
— Modern Italian Poets • W. D. Howells
... taken up with descriptions of the regular sights and "objects of interest," which we often feel to be rather perfunctory and a little in the style of the traditional tourist's diary. They abound in charming touches, and every reader of Transformation will remember the delightful colouring of the numerous pages in that novel, which are devoted to the pictorial aspects of Rome. But we are unable ...
— Hawthorne - (English Men of Letters Series) • Henry James, Junr.
... be your debtor, Or write a mere perfunctory letter; For letters, so it seems to me, Our careless quintessence should be, Our real nature's truant play When Consciousness looks t'other way; Not drop by drop, with watchful skill, Gathered in Art's deliberate still, But life's insensible completeness Got as the ripe grape gets its sweetness, ...
— The Complete Poetical Works of James Russell Lowell • James Lowell
... it. His own opportunity came and departed unnoted, it would not waken him from his dreams of some untold wealth that would fall into his lap. So he grows discouraged and envies those whom he should emulate, and he bandages his arm and chloroforms his energies, and performs his duties in a perfunctory way, or he passes through life, just ...
— The Majesty of Calmness • William George Jordan
... undoubting heartiness which in these days is really refreshing. He believes in the Old Testament, and doubts not that riches and honors are the rewards of right-doing. And in this, too, there is a vast deal of truth; and it is truly delightful to find one who affirms it, not with perfunctory drawl, but with hearty human zest, a little ...
— Atlantic Monthly,Volume 14, No. 82, August, 1864 - A Magazine Of Literature, Art, And Politics • Various
... the required promise none too graciously. But his effort at perfunctory thanks stuck in his throat; nor did Desmond appear to expect them. With a brief reassurance in respect of his own silence he turned back into the Mess; and there, so far as externals ...
— Captain Desmond, V.C. • Maud Diver
... conversation with Monsieur Jesen—the friend of mademoiselle's friend. He glanced up, but his greeting was almost perfunctory. Kendricks looked keenly at the man who was leaning back in his padded seat. The eyes of Monsieur Jesen were a little more bloodshot now. He had spilt wine down the front of his waistcoat, cigar ash upon his coat-sleeve. He was by no means an inviting person ...
— The Mischief Maker • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... what is called society, but of the kind known in these circles, doubtless, as interesting. Nearly everybody in this gallery, in fact, is of the interesting sort. At once it is apparent that there is nothing of the perfunctory here. Art is vital. Art is earnest. The atmosphere is tense. The young women are clad in a manner giving much freedom to the movement of their bodies. They walk with a stride. Their clothes are not of the mode of the Avenue, but they have—how shall I say? To twist ...
— Walking-Stick Papers • Robert Cortes Holliday
... many unuttered and unutterable thoughts on both sides to make intercourse easy or agreeable. All they could achieve was to be sorry for each other, in a measure to respect each other, and to make up by an enforced, slightly perfunctory, good will for what they lacked in the ...
— The Side Of The Angels - A Novel • Basil King
... silence, during which Mrs. Ballinger, with a perfunctory hand, rearranged the skilfully grouped literature at which her distinguished guest had not so much as glanced; then Miss Van Vluyck tartly pronounced: "Well, I can't say that I consider Osric Dane's departure ...
— Xingu - 1916 • Edith Wharton
... advantage to the prostitute chiefly because it gives her patron a false sense of security. Even the most elaborate and painstaking examination—and such is not bestowed upon the prostitute—may fail to detect a woman's lurking infectiousness; the perfunctory, routine examination actually made affords but a feeble protection to the patron. Moreover, at the first cohabitation after such examination she may acquire disease which she may transmit to every subsequent patron, until it is perhaps discovered ...
— Fighting the Traffic in Young Girls - War on the White Slave Trade • Various
... softly smiled at those touching words, "Sad intelligence." It was only the perfunctory regret of the shark-like lawyer, and the secretly rejoicing heirs. "This is not a case where the one who goes is happier than the one that's left behind," mused Hawke. "I must settle matters rapidly with Ram Lal, for if the will leaves the ...
— A Fascinating Traitor • Richard Henry Savage
... the danger that actors will be content with a rather slurred and perfunctory recitation of lines that have no bearing on the action but are just inserted for ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 147, July 22, 1914 • Various
... case, Mrs. Merston certainly concealed any excess of pleasure very effectually. She greeted her with a perfunctory smile, and told her it was very good of her to come but she would soon wish she hadn't. She was looking very worn and tired, but she assured Sylvia somewhat sardonically that she was not feeling any worse than usual. The heat and the drought ...
— The Top of the World • Ethel M. Dell
... This new, polite formula for leave-taking originated among the officers and men in the field, but you hear it on all sides now, uttered with a sincerity and earnestness that is peculiarly impressive. The new style of saying "good-bye" has at least the merit of being no longer a perfunctory piece of rhetoric. ...
— New York Times Current History: The European War, Vol 2, No. 1, April, 1915 - April-September, 1915 • Various
... "Triumph of Isis," had an academic flavor. These we may pass over, as foreign to our present inquiries. So, too, with most of his annual laureate odes, "On his Majesty's Birthday," etc. Yet even these official and rather perfunctory performances testify to his fondness for what Scott calls "the memorials of our forefathers' piety or splendor." Thus, in the birthday odes for 1787-88, and the New Year ode for 1787, he pays a tribute to the ancient minstrels and to early laureates like Chaucer and Spenser, and celebrates ...
— A History of English Romanticism in the Eighteenth Century • Henry A. Beers
... pitiful remnant, of the splendid designs of Henry was to so arrange matters that the contingent should be feebly commanded, and set on foot in so dilatory a manner that the petty enterprise should on the part of France be purely perfunctory. The grandees of the kingdom had something more important to do than to go crusading in Germany, with the help of a heretic republic, to set up the possessory princes. They were fighting over the prostrate dying ...
— The Rise of the Dutch Republic, 1555-1566 • John Lothrop Motley
... below. What had I to do with those grown-up sermons? Men's talk is babble to a child, as much as children's to a man. The wind that blew past my ears meant as much, and sounded better. Or what were the prayers to me, or the singing? This perfunctory, formal early piety of mine had much influence, long afterward, by natural reaction. Nothing can better shadow forth the weariness of those weekly jornadas del muerto than the fact that I found now and then an oasis of delight in pious stories for children, out of the Sabbath-school ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 18, No. 108, October, 1866 • Various
... there, shake out the saddle blanket and tenderly adjust it. Whistling carelessly I swing up the saddle. Dandy Jim flinches pitifully when it rests upon him and reaches swiftly round to bite my arm off. I think this is quite perfunctory on his part. He must have learned long since that he will never really bite any one's arm off. His neck is not ...
— Ma Pettengill • Harry Leon Wilson
... open part in the Talleth, and they sat book in hand, and from time to time they raised their voices with the congregation. They showed no reverence except that they did not talk or laugh loudly. They were like the children, their neighbors,—just as restless, just as uninterested, just as perfunctory. Well, they were clearly the poorer and the more ignorant part of the community. They came here and sat through the service because they were ordered so to do; because, like Passover, and the Feast of Tabernacles, and the Fast of Atonement, it was ...
— Library Of The World's Best Literature, Ancient And Modern, Vol 4 • Charles Dudley Warner
... doting old parent decides that he will be a bird and back the middle thimble, and the next moment I hear the son exclaim, evidently referring to the rook, "No, 'e's got it; no, 'e's got it. Cheer up! Cheer up!" with a perfunctory concern that is but a poor disguise for indecent exultation. I am not suggesting, by the way, that birds are in the habit of dropping their "h's"—but this one does. There are times when he is so elated by his parent's ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 156, May 28, 1919. • Various
... little purple box which was the cause of my horror lay somewhere concealed amid the airy puffs and ruffles that rose and fell so rapidly over her heaving breast. Could her eye rest on mine, even in this cold and perfunctory manner, if the drop which could separate us for ever lay concealed over her heart? She knew that I loved her. From the first hour we met in her aunt's forbidding parlour in Thirty-sixth Street she had recognised my passion, however perfectly I had succeeded in concealing ...
— Room Number 3 - and Other Detective Stories • Anna Katharine Green
... smile became perfunctory as he looked down at her. 'Mrs. Berrington has made such an amusing ...
— A London Life; The Patagonia; The Liar; Mrs. Temperly • Henry James
... slackened them and flung themselves (with a crescendo of decorous delirium) from side to side again, and over; alighting on their feet in a curtseying posture and with the left arm extended in a little perfunctory gesture of demonstration to the audience, as much as to say, "There you are, and ...
— The Combined Maze • May Sinclair
... substantially inconclusive on the chief points at issue, because European questions intervening had diverted the attention of both France and Great Britain from America and from India; and the exhaustion of both had led to a perfunctory compact, in which the underlying contention was substantially ignored in order to reach formal agreement. That the French conquest of Madras, in India, was yielded in exchange for Louisburg and Cape Breton Island, which the American colonists had won for England, typifies concisely the status ...
— Types of Naval Officers - Drawn from the History of the British Navy • A. T. Mahan
... great case. By no other method could be acquired a tithe of the commonly known facts regarding its past history; hence the impossibility of attempting to deal fully in a few pages with this great church, even in a perfunctory manner. The most that can be safely ventured upon, is to recount some of ...
— The Cathedrals of Northern France • Francis Miltoun
... moment another power seemed to dominate the ship. The men no longer moved listlessly, or slunk along the deck with perfunctory limbs; a feverish haste and eagerness possessed them; the boat was quickly loaded, and the mysterious debarkation completed in rapidity and silence. This done, the fog once more appeared to rise from the water and softly encompass the ship, until she seemed to be obliterated ...
— The Crusade of the Excelsior • Bret Harte
... to Gian Bellino, but to Cima. The preferred type of the elder master is more passionate, more human. Our own Incredulity of St. Thomas, by Cima, in the National Gallery, shows, in a much more perfunctory fashion, a Christ similarly conceived; and the beautiful Man of Sorrows in the same collection, still nominally ascribed to Giovanni Bellini, if not from Cima's own hand, is at any rate from that of an artist dominated by his influence. ...
— The Earlier Work of Titian • Claude Phillips
... and embellishments to the Old Louvre were by no means perfunctory, but he saw possibilities greater than he was able to perform with the means at hand. He first razed the central tower, or donjon, and scarce before the departure of his royal guest, was already dreaming of replacing the entire fabric with another which ...
— Royal Palaces and Parks of France • Milburg Francisco Mansfield
... Leslie off in the morning with a perfunctory good-bye while cold anger and suspicion seethed in her. And later she put on her hat and went home to lay the situation before her mother. Mrs. Wheeler was out, however, and she found only ...
— The Breaking Point • Mary Roberts Rinehart
... about Chinatown, except the authorities, and their interference is but perfunctory. The yellow men, after all, are, as Prologue to "Pagliacci" observes, but men like you, for joy or sorrow, the same broad heaven above them, the same wide world before them. They are but men like you, though the sanitary officials ...
— Nights in London • Thomas Burke
... citizen of Paris."[311] The most regrettable latitude of all, judging by theoretic standards of translation, was the careless freedom which writers of this group were inclined to appropriate. Anthony Munday, to take an extreme case, translating Palmerin of England from the French, makes a perfunctory apology in his Epistle Dedicatory for his inaccuracies: "If you find the translation altered, or the true sense in some place of a matter impaired, let this excuse answer in default in that case. A work so large is sufficient to tire so simple ...
— Early Theories of Translation • Flora Ross Amos
... been brought very low, for his once manly voice was weak and his tones were desponding. Never before, perhaps, was prayer offered in a more familiar or less perfunctory manner. ...
— The Crew of the Water Wagtail • R.M. Ballantyne
... had been a hard one and the strain on the horses more than ordinary, his examination now was so perfunctory that the squadron gaped; the troopers signaled with their eyes as he passed, little more than glancing at each horse. Almost before his back had vanished at the stable entrance, wonderment burst ...
— Winds of the World • Talbot Mundy
... of: "No intern, no intern," swelled up. The local burgomaster came to us. His first words, and in good English, too, were: "Have something to eat." We did. And then more cigars. The police were a splendid lot of men. They loaded us down with gifts and asked perfunctory questions for their records. One of them, H. Letema, of ——, took us to his home, where his comely wife and daughter loaded the table with good things; while he brought out more cigars. He showed us to a bed-room before we understood where he was taking us. We refused, ...
— The Escape of a Princess Pat • George Pearson
... into the restaurant. Gabe offered him the choice of various tables; he selected one which commanded a view of the entrances and ordered a perfunctory "Scotch." Nervous and anxious, he was more troubled than he cared to admit even to himself. Fortunately, there were not many people in the cafe; and his gaze, wandering about the place, soon halted ...
— Jane Cable • George Barr McCutcheon
... Perfunctory regrets were offered by the others, already engrossed in their new hands; Vaux glanced unhappily at the tall, steaming glass, which had been untouched when he left, but which was now merely half full. Then, ...
— In Secret • Robert W. Chambers
... few rounds they danced in silence, and then Philip said, in a perfunctory way: "You're ...
— Patty's Social Season • Carolyn Wells
... tells his story frankly and forcibly. Burke, however, was not a rich man, and was at one of the most exciting periods of his political career. His party was at last fighting its way to power by means of the general resentment against the gross mismanagement of their antagonists. A perfunctory discharge of the duty of charity would have been pardonable; but from the moment when Crabbe addressed Burke the poor man's fortune was made. Burke's glory rests upon services of much more importance to the world at large ...
— Hours in a Library - New Edition, with Additions. Vol. II (of 3) • Leslie Stephen
... the sentry saluted her, though that part of the formalities of admission was purely perfunctory, for every one at the ...
— The Romance of Elaine • Arthur B. Reeve
... now cleared for action, the convention adopted a platform. This was composed largely of a summary of the achievements of the party and denunciation of the opposition. Most of the planks were abstract or perfunctory, or expressed in such a way as not to commit the party seriously. Harper's Weekly, a Republican periodical, regretted the character of the platform and remarked that such documents are expected ...
— The United States Since The Civil War • Charles Ramsdell Lingley
... her share of natural vanity, was too impatient to do more than cast a perfunctory glance at her reflected self. At this period of her life when a drive in a hired cab was enough of a novelty to give her pleasure, a day such as the one that lay before her filled ...
— The Getting of Wisdom • Henry Handel Richardson
... They were fond of one another. The barrier slowly rising between them was not yet cemented by lack of affection on either side, but rather by lack of belief in the other's affection. Helen imagined Thorpe's interest in her becoming daily more perfunctory. Thorpe fancied his sister cold, unreasoning, and ungrateful. As yet this was but the vague dust of a cloud. They could not forget that, but for each other, they were alone in the world. Thorpe delayed his departure from day to day, making all the preparations he possibly ...
— The Blazed Trail • Stewart Edward White
... to her explanation: "How's Van Horn?" he asked casually. "And Stone?" he added, with undiminished interest. "All well," was his echo to her perfunctory answers. "Say, Belle, was Jim Laramie ...
— Laramie Holds the Range • Frank H. Spearman
... intellectual phase of trained power—apprehension of what one is doing as exhibited in consequences—is not possible without interest. Deliberation will be perfunctory and superficial where there is no interest. Parents and teachers often complain—and correctly—that children "do not want to hear, or want to understand." Their minds are not upon the subject precisely because it does not touch them; it does not enter into their concerns. ...
— Democracy and Education • John Dewey
... of grey flannel and wheeled my boxes away on a little truck, and after a while a master came down and showed us, in a perfunctory manner, over the more presentable quarters of the school. My brother was anxious to get away, because he had not been emancipated long enough to find the atmosphere of dormitories and class-rooms agreeable. I was naturally interested, in my new environment, but the ...
— The Ghost Ship • Richard Middleton
... Grenville's political opponents, many of whom were afterwards to figure as the champions of the colonists, at first saw its momentousness as little as he. They offered to his proposal only the most perfunctory sort of opposition, less than they habitually offered to all his measures, ...
— A History of the United States • Cecil Chesterton
... pressure, although there are tolerably accurate instrumental technics, and yet, as Henderson points out, it is just this increased general venous pressure which is often detrimental. Therefore the perfunctory use of such drugs as nitrite of amyl and the other nitrites may not be in the least indicated when, for example, the venous pressure depends upon inability of the right heart to perform its functions, and the drug needed ...
— Glaucoma - A Symposium Presented at a Meeting of the Chicago - Ophthalmological Society, November 17, 1913 • Various
... Musgrave chatted away about his neighbours, his boys' club, his new organ, his bishop, his work. I used to think him rather a proser; how I blessed his prosing now! I took long walks with him; he asked a few perfunctory questions about my books, but otherwise he was quite content to prattle on, like a little brook, about all that was in his mind, and he was more than content if I asked an occasional question or assented courteously. Then we had ...
— The Altar Fire • Arthur Christopher Benson
... the beautiful system of Berkeley should have appeared in an unspiritual age, when religion was mundane and perfunctory, and the free spirit, where it stirred, was romantic and wilful. For that system was essentially religious: it put the spirit face to face with God, everywhere, always, and in everything it turned experience into a divine language for the monition and expression ...
— Some Turns of Thought in Modern Philosophy - Five Essays • George Santayana
... performed with a formal, perfunctory style calculated to impress the audience with the importance of the preacher rather than the words he was speaking. The audience was very quiet, having the air of reserving judgment for ...
— A Voice in the Wilderness • Grace Livingston Hill
... his Covenant—the draft of which was contributed by the British—and the President, giving way to them on matters said to affect their countries' vital interests. How smoothly this method worked when great issues were not at stake may be inferred from the perfunctory way in which it was decided that the Kaiser's trial should take place in London. A few days before the Treaty was signed there was a pause in the proceedings of the Supreme Council during which the secretary was searching for ...
— The Inside Story Of The Peace Conference • Emile Joseph Dillon
... Great Little Books. As surely as the magnet swings towards the pole will the Great Little Books take her to the Great Big Books. She will be drawn on and up in her reading, and will have cultivated a love for reading which is far more important than perfunctory knowledge ...
— A Girl's Student Days and After • Jeannette Marks
... The circumstance that, waking from a deep sleep at night in the midst of a forest, he had spoken aloud a name that he had not in memory and hardly had in mind did not arouse an enlightened curiosity to investigate the phenomenon. He thought it odd, and with a little perfunctory shiver, as if in deference to a seasonal presumption that the night was chill, he lay down again and went to sleep. But his sleep ...
— Can Such Things Be? • Ambrose Bierce
... Addison," he said, having greeted Isobel in a perfunctory fashion which I assumed to be accounted for by my unwelcome presence. "The men of your Fleet Street tribe have conspired to hang ...
— The Green Eyes of Bast • Sax Rohmer
... called loudly for mercy, the judge interrupted him to say that he was taking too much upon himself, that he was, in fact, instructing the judge in his duties, which was a piece of presumption on his part. The other was quick to make a humble apology and to bring his perfunctory address to a conclusion. The judge, in addressing the prisoner, said he had been unable to discover any extenuating circumstances in the case. The fact that he had a wife and family dependent on him ...
— Dead Man's Plack and an Old Thorn • William Henry Hudson
... the Orange laboratory, with its machine shop, chemical-room, and general experimental department. While it is only in use during his sojourn there, and carries no extensive corps of assistants, the work done in it is not of a perfunctory nature, but is a continuation of his regular activities, and serves to keep him in touch with the progress of experiments at Orange, and enables him to give instructions for their variation and continuance ...
— Edison, His Life and Inventions • Frank Lewis Dyer and Thomas Commerford Martin
... dropped into a chair, seeming not loath to tell those things she had, while Nancy leaned back and listened duteously for a perfunctory ten minutes. Her thoughts ran ahead to Allan—and to Bernal—as children will run little journeys ahead ...
— The Seeker • Harry Leon Wilson
... original idea was a good one, but it was never properly carried out. Observing that the S.P.R. had made many investigations in a perfunctory and absurd manner by sending somebody to a haunted house for a couple of nights and then writing an utterly worthless report, he desired in this case a continuous investigation extending over a considerable period. He ought, therefore, to have employed a couple of intelligent ...
— The Alleged Haunting of B—— House • Various
... discovery, but not what might have been expected had their real design been acquisition. Peron censured Baudin because he examined part of the west coast before proceeding to the unknown south; and when at length Le Geographe did sail north, the work done there was very perfunctory. Baudin himself was no fighting man; nor was there with the expedition a military engineer or any officer capable of reporting upon strategic situations, or competent to advise as to the establishment of a fort or a colony. Captain Hamelin and Lieutenant ...
— Terre Napoleon - A history of French explorations and projects in Australia • Ernest Scott
... with content and superscription, it was all glaringly conspicuous. The initials seemed to stand out like headlines, but Farquaharson was without suspicion and he saw only one more paper in which his interest was most perfunctory. The whole issue had narrowed now, Eben realized with a tension of fear which brought out sweat beads on the pasty white of his face, to the hairbreadth narrowness of one question. Would Stuart see the initials or would they escape ...
— The Tyranny of Weakness • Charles Neville Buck
... Just a brief little ceremony, and perfunctory. We all got that impression. The General has decorated so many dying men. And this one seemed so nearly dead. He seemed half-conscious. Yet the General might have put a little more feeling into it, not made it quite so perfunctory. Yet he's done this thing so many, many times before. ...
— The Backwash of War - The Human Wreckage of the Battlefield as Witnessed by an - American Hospital Nurse • Ellen N. La Motte
... become the custom of sending wedding presents that it is perhaps necessary to remind those who really desire to do the correct thing, that a perfunctory service, or gift, or courtesy has no intrinsic value, and the omission of it would often be far more satisfactory than ...
— The Etiquette of To-day • Edith B. Ordway
... not satisfied when some moralist says, "Be good and you will be happy." The kind of happiness that comes from a perfunctory goodness is a thing which I cannot understand, and which I certainly do not want. If I work and play and serve and employ, making up the fabric of a busy life, if I attain a very real happiness, I am tormented by the desire to know why I am doing it, and I am not satisfied with the answer I usually ...
— The Untroubled Mind • Herbert J. Hall
... followed filled the shepherd poet with absolute amazement. When Metas of Corinth had made his bow and withdrawn to half-hearted and perfunctory applause, there appeared upon the stage, amid the wildest enthusiasm upon the part of the audience, a most extraordinary figure. He was a short fat man, neither old nor young, with a bull neck and a round, heavy face, which ...
— The Last Galley Impressions and Tales - Impressions and Tales • Arthur Conan Doyle
... eating a perfunctory dinner in the dining-room, Mrs. Gorman and Dan wrangled in the kitchen, but Molly sat in the playground of the school, with Tim O'Neill, the culprit, facing her, and a circle of grinning ...
— Grey Town - An Australian Story • Gerald Baldwin
... President requested him "to learn during his tour, as far as possible, the feelings and intentions of the citizens of the Southern States towards the National Government,"—a request with which the general complied in a perfunctory manner, giving merely the impressions formed in the rapid journey of a few days. He left Washington on the 27th of November and passed through Virginia "without conversing or meeting with any of its citizens." ...
— Twenty Years of Congress, Volume 2 (of 2) • James Gillespie Blaine
... we give the glory of our scientific discoveries to God, in any real, honest, and practical sense? There may be some official and perfunctory talk of God's blessing on our endeavours; but there seems to be no real belief in us that God, the inspiration of God, is the very fount and root of the endeavours themselves; that He teaches us these great ...
— Sermons on National Subjects • Charles Kingsley
... thought he saw the figure of a strange man walking over the road; Lemuel knew that he was strange by the formality of the clothes. He wore a hard straw hat, collar and diamond-pinned tie, and a suit with a waistcoat. At first Doret's interest was perfunctory, but as the other drew nearer his inspection changed to a painful absorption. Suddenly his attitude grew tense; he had the appearance of a man gazing at an enthralling but dangerous spectacle, such—for example—as a wall that might topple ...
— The Happy End • Joseph Hergesheimer
... piano accompaniment of much ingenuity. The fantasial nature of the work lies principally in its development, which is remarkably lyrical, various melodies being built up beautifully on fractions of the main subjects. There is nothing perfunctory, and the work is full of art and appeal. Gilchrist is one of our most polished composers contrapuntally, but has been here in a ...
— Contemporary American Composers • Rupert Hughes
... Brutus to toss more wood upon the fire, leaned back for a while, holding his glass to the light of the flames, and turned to me again with his cool, perfunctory smile. ...
— The Unspeakable Gentleman • John P. Marquand
... absently in a tone of perfunctory dryness. His throat was parched, his head seemed to waver. But he was beginning to comprehend that Long-Hair, for some inscrutable reason of his own, was desirous of making a friendship between them. ...
— Alice of Old Vincennes • Maurice Thompson
... came the minister's perfunctory congratulations. When he called her "Mrs. Marsh," Rosemary instinctively looked toward Madame, then laughed and blushed when she understood. Madame took the girl into her arms as she came down from the altar. "Dear daughter!" she ...
— Master of the Vineyard • Myrtle Reed
... indeed, would it be to relate the events of one sad day which culminated in her declaiming at night, with far more than perfunctory warmth, and in a voice scarce dry ...
— The Lions of the Lord - A Tale of the Old West • Harry Leon Wilson
... and did what he could to show himself responsive. With the portrait began the period of a less perfunctory relation between them. They had talks sometimes that Aurora declared, without trace of envy, were 'way above ...
— Aurora the Magnificent • Gertrude Hall
... insatiable curiosity, from his fourteenth year onward he was permitted to roam almost at will over the whole expanse of literature. He composed little beyond his school exercises, which themselves bear signs of having been written in a perfunctory manner. At this period he had evidently no heart in anything but his reading. Before leaving Shelford for Aspenden he had already invoked the epic muse for ...
— Life and Letters of Lord Macaulay • George Otto Trevelyan
... attracted the attention of Flaxman the sculptor, who advised that he should "not be cramped with lessons in drawing; let his genius," he said, "follow its own bent, and he will astonish the world." This advice was so far followed, that we believe we are justified in saying that beyond the ordinary perfunctory drawing lessons obtained at school, he received no other artistic education during the rest of his life. His father, the "profound Shakesperian scholar" and "perfect gentleman," so little encouraged ...
— English Caricaturists and Graphic Humourists of the Nineteenth Century. - How they Illustrated and Interpreted their Times. • Graham Everitt
... imp had gone, I made a few perfunctory daubs at my work, but was so thoroughly out of humour, that it took me the rest of the afternoon to undo the damage I had done, so at last I scraped my palette, stuck my brushes in a bowl of black soap, and strolled into the smoking-room. I really believe ...
— The King In Yellow • Robert W. Chambers
... issued his satire in blank verse, entitled The Steel Glass, a little volume which holds an important place in the development of our poetical literature. To this satire a copy of eighteen congratulatory verses was prefixed by 'Walter Rawely of the middle Temple.' These lines are perfunctory and are noticeable only for their heading 'of the middle Temple.' Raleigh positively tells us that he never studied law until he found himself a prisoner in the Tower, and he was probably only a passing lodger in some portion of the Middle Temple in 1576. On October 7, 1577, ...
— Raleigh • Edmund Gosse
... religious education in the family as that of the development of the lives of religious persons, the place and value of the Bible will be evident. It will be used as a means of developing and directing lives. This will be quite different from a perfunctory use because our fathers used it or a use under the compulsion of the fear lest some strange evil should befall us, some ...
— Religious Education in the Family • Henry F. Cope
... breach than the observance. The post commander was about the only one to receive such recognition from his juniors, all others, as a rule, contenting themselves with a jovial "'Morning, Jack." "How are you, major?" and, possibly, an off-hand and perfunctory touch of the cap. Only among sticklers for military propriety like Leonard was the salute tendered to superiors. In nine cases out of ten it meant, when given, that personal relations were strained. Approaching the battalion commander Mr. Davies looked him straight in the eye and ...
— Under Fire • Charles King
... George's Hospital he suddenly became aware of Sir James Chide on the other side of the road. At sight of him, Marsham waved his hand, quickening his pace that he might come up with him. Sir James, seeing him, gave him a perfunctory greeting, and suddenly turned aside to hail a hansom, into which he jumped, and was carried promptly out ...
— The Testing of Diana Mallory • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... painfully, for perhaps an hour. They had tea. All the effort to talk was made by Sanchia, who broached the children— Philippa's three, Vicky's one—and got nothing but perfunctory enthusiasm in reply. Mrs. Percival was far too sincerely interested in herself to care for children. The sons-in-law proved a better subject. Here she could point a moral inwards. She extolled them highly—never was woman so blessed in her daughters' husbands. ...
— Rest Harrow - A Comedy of Resolution • Maurice Hewlett
... but, from the first, he found it out of the question to think it over carefully. How could he, when, within himself, he knew that his feeling for the profession laid down before him by ancestral tradition and by his mother's constant urgings: that his feeling for the ministry was a perfunctory affection, a wholly different matter from the passionate desire that throbbed within him at the thought of giving up his life to scientific study. To preach ancient beliefs that no human power could verify, or to work on steadily, helping to ...
— The Brentons • Anna Chapin Ray
... ablaze with zeal for the civil and political rights of the southern negro, heard the march of this exultant southern crusade with equanimity, with indifference, almost with sympathy. Perfunctory efforts were made in Congress to secure investigation of negro disfranchisement, but they evoked ...
— History of the United States, Volume 5 • E. Benjamin Andrews
... the tall figure of her fellow voyager near the steps and leaned forward to wave a perfunctory farewell to him. The car was creeping out toward the packed thoroughfare. It is possible that she expected him to dash among the chortling machines, at risk of life or limb, for a word or two at parting. If so, she was disappointed. He remained perfectly still, with uplifted ...
— The Prince of Graustark • George Barr McCutcheon
... although those who addressed the audience were eloquent enough, they were unprepared, and moreover, were conscious that their listeners were keeping one eye upon the door; in short, everybody present desired only to hear the two appointed speakers; so that the affair was most perfunctory. The minutes grew into hours, and these did not arrive. Mrs. Mason, Mrs. Bateman, even Mary Snow, were sent out to the platform to represent the woman's side, and although they were well received, the meeting broke up at eleven o'clock with a distinct sense of disappointment, not to say ...
— A Woman for Mayor - A Novel of To-day • Helen M. Winslow
... She made a perfunctory protest. It was, she knew, quite useless, and her heart was not in it. No words she used, no appeal she could make, would touch this man or change ...
— The Fighting Edge • William MacLeod Raine
... at her and waddled down the track toward the Hat Ranch. Arrived there, he introduced himself to the nurse and made a few perfunctory inquiries regarding the condition of her patient, after which, with many premonitory coughs, he ventured to outline his campaign as San Pasqual's official news censor. The nurse was not lacking in a sense of humor, and readily agreed ...
— The Long Chance • Peter B. Kyne
... thrust it toward the waiting lawyer, who, however, shook his head in refusal, and continued to move about the room rather restlessly. Demarest paid no attention to the other's invitation to a seat, but the courtesy was perfunctory on Gilder's part, and he hardly perceived the perturbation of his caller, for he was occupied in selecting and lighting a cigar with the care of a connoisseur. Finally, he spoke again, and now there was an infinite contentment in ...
— Within the Law - From the Play of Bayard Veiller • Marvin Dana
... platform. The chairman, Judge Henry D. Clayton of Alabama, treated the speakers as if they were his personal guests, assured them of all the time they desired and at the close of the hearing was photographed with Miss Addams and Mrs. Harper. Instead of listening in a perfunctory way the members of the committee showed much interest and asked many questions. Miss Jane Addams, first vice-president of the National American Suffrage Association, presided and in presenting her with words of highest praise Representative Taylor said ...
— The History of Woman Suffrage, Volume V • Ida Husted Harper
... geese on the East Coast," Almayer informed me, in a perfunctory mutter without a spark of faith, hope, or pride. Thereupon, with the same absence of any sort of sustaining spirit, he declared his intention to select a fat bird and send him on board for us not later ...
— A Personal Record • Joseph Conrad
... second of these tasks must not be held to be perfunctory, even though each new effort for Jerusalem proved that genuine acceptance of its saviour was increasingly improbable. As the denunciations of the older prophets ever left open a way of escape if Israel would return and seek the Lord, so the anticipation of rejection ...
— The Life of Jesus of Nazareth • Rush Rhees
... watched them as far as Fifth Avenue, then rapidly drawing on their shoes and stockings, scrambled down to the shrubbery and raced for the house. Through it they passed like a double whirlwind; feeble and perfunctory resistance was ...
— The Danger Mark • Robert W. Chambers
... man who wore a velvet skull-cap and who was smoking a Pittsburg stogie, met the farmer at the counter and the two exchanged perfunctory greetings. ...
— A Deal in Wheat - And Other Stories of the New and Old West • Frank Norris
... Orff, and that's her house over the rise of that land where you can see the chimblys." Mr. Gammon was perfunctory in that reply, but immediately his little blue eyes began to sparkle and he launched out into his troubles. "There's them that don't believe in witches. I know that! And they slur me and slander me. I know it. I ...
— The Skipper and the Skipped - Being the Shore Log of Cap'n Aaron Sproul • Holman Day
... was especially strong in mathematics, and prepared young men for Cambridge, it was thought that, as I was to go to Oxford, it would be better that I should study under an Oxford man. I never had the slightest natural bent for mathematics, though I did the tasks that were imposed upon me in a perfunctory manner, and with sufficient accuracy just ...
— Philip Gilbert Hamerton • Philip Gilbert Hamerton et al
... he cried in consternation and emotion, for under another name the murderer had been tried and sentenced, nor had his identity been established—the case was so clear, the defence had been perfunctory, and ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker
... of the minister; not merely to his personal worth, nor even to his popularity, for people who rather dislike a clergyman, and disapprove of his service, will say a louder Amen at his giving of thanks if his own feelings have a touch of fire, than they would to that of a more perfunctory parson whom they liked better. As is the heartiness of the priest, so is the heartiness of the people—with such strictness that one is disposed almost to credit some of it to actual magnetism. Response is no empty word in ...
— We and the World, Part I - A Book for Boys • Juliana Horatia Ewing
... of the failure of men to realise their obligations to society or to large social aggregates are to be found in the careless and perfunctory manner in which persons employed by government, or by corporations, or large companies, often perform their duties. If they were in the service of a private employer, they would at all events realise, even if they did not act on their conviction, that they ...
— Progressive Morality - An Essay in Ethics • Thomas Fowler
... club window. A constant reader of lady-novelists, I have always been hoping for this excitement, but somehow it has never come my way. I am beginning to suspect that it never will, and am inclined to regard it as a figment. Such conversation as I have heard in clubs has been always of a very mild, perfunctory kind. A social club (even though it be a club with a definite social character) is a collection of heterogeneous creatures, and its aim is perfect harmony and good-fellowship. Thus any definite expression ...
— Yet Again • Max Beerbohm
... promenade to the evening party, with an account of which The Night is mainly occupied, so far as it goes. There are many lively pictures in it, with light sketches of expression and attitude; but on the whole it has not so many distinctly quotable passages as the other parts of the poem. The perfunctory devotion of the cavalier and the lady continues throughout, and the same ironical reverence depicts them alighting from their carriage, arriving in the presence of the hostess, sharing in the gossip of the guests, supping, and sitting down ...
— Modern Italian Poets • W. D. Howells
... knowing that the future held nothing for them together. And for a time it had been a beautiful thing to do, until finally she was compelled to believe that he really was cured. His notes were more and more perfunctory, until, at last, they ceased altogether. Then, when she knew she had lost him, it seemed to her that she had condemned herself to a barren, fruitless life; that the best had been lived, and it only remained now to die. ...
— The Nine-Tenths • James Oppenheim
... would think that the men whose business it is to teach religious truth would see this and ask themselves the reason why. To an extent they do see it, but they never seem to think of blaming themselves for it except in a perfunctory kind of way. They talk about religious indifference, the need for better and more effective methods, and so on. The professional theologian rarely does even as much as this. He takes himself very seriously; sniffs and sneers at any suggestion of deviation from the accepted standards; ...
— The New Theology • R. J. Campbell
... faith in men who were conceived in a perfunctory manner, on a pragmatical system, so to speak; the wife receiving her husband in bed as she would a tedious guest at an afternoon tea. Only two flames uniting produce a third; but a flame and a name, or a flame and ...
— The Book of Khalid • Ameen Rihani
... our fellow-citizens care as much about literature as they care about aeroplanes or the programme of the Legislature. They do not ignore it; they are not quite indifferent to it. But their interest in it is faint and perfunctory; or, if their interest happens to be violent, it is spasmodic. Ask the two hundred thousand persons whose enthusiasm made the vogue of a popular novel ten years ago what they think of that novel now, and you will gather that they have utterly forgotten it, and that they would no more dream ...
— LITERARY TASTE • ARNOLD BENNETT
... glanced up and recognised the inevitable, rose to her feet, and, holding the hideous rag-doll she had been nursing, head down and dangling in one hand, she stood waiting till Dicky, after a few last perfunctory bellows, suddenly dried his eyes and held up a tear-wet face for his father to kiss. Then she presented her brow solemnly to her uncle, received a kiss, and vanished, led by the hand into a cabin on the port side of ...
— The Blue Lagoon - A Romance • H. de Vere Stacpoole
... was the agent for the French Minister, though nominally his visit was undertaken on purely scientific grounds. Jefferson's course in the matter was characteristic. Openly, he was endeavoring in a perfunctory manner to carry out Washington's policy of strict neutrality in the contest between France and England, but secretly he was engaged in tortuous intrigues against Washington and was thwarting his wishes, so far as he dared, in ...
— The Winning of the West, Volume Four - Louisiana and the Northwest, 1791-1807 • Theodore Roosevelt
... the Pythagoreans did not allow people to worship and pray to their gods by the way, but would have them go out from their houses direct, with their minds set upon the duty, and so Numa, in like manner, wished that his citizens should neither see nor hear any religious service in a perfunctory and inattentive manner, but, laying aside all other occupations, should apply their minds to religion as to a most serious business; and that the streets should be free from all noises and cries that ...
— Plutarch's Lives • A.H. Clough
... not what might have been expected had their real design been acquisition. Peron censured Baudin because he examined part of the west coast before proceeding to the unknown south; and when at length Le Geographe did sail north, the work done there was very perfunctory. Baudin himself was no fighting man; nor was there with the expedition a military engineer or any officer capable of reporting upon strategic situations, or competent to advise as to the establishment of a fort or a colony. Captain Hamelin and ...
— Terre Napoleon - A history of French explorations and projects in Australia • Ernest Scott
... some perfunctory objections on the part of Mrs. Home-Davis, who wished it put on record that she had been overruled by Mary's obstinacy. If undesirable incidents should happen, she wanted to say, "Mary would go by herself, without waiting for me. She's of age, and ...
— The Guests Of Hercules • C. N. Williamson and A. M. Williamson
... perfunctory, for the case seemed too easy to warrant his exertion. Still stimulated by the emotion aroused by her own speech and the sense of the righteousness of her cause, Katherine watched the jury go out with a fluttering hope. She still clung to hope when, after ...
— Counsel for the Defense • Leroy Scott
... damnatory epithet 'sentimental.' He therefore begins in the most prosaic fashion by an attempt to estimate the pecuniary and social advantages of the different courses open to him. These are in reality the Church and the Bar; although, by way of exhibiting the openness of his mind, he adds a more perfunctory discussion of the merits of the medical profession. Upon this his uncle, Henry Venn, had made a sufficient comment. 'There is a providential obstacle,' he said, 'to your becoming a doctor—you have not humbug enough.' The argument from these practical ...
— The Life of Sir James Fitzjames Stephen, Bart., K.C.S.I. - A Judge of the High Court of Justice • Sir Leslie Stephen
... discarded the use of the razor, and in their rough miners' garb—flannel shirts, moleskin pants, and slouch felt hats—there was nothing to distinguish them from the ordinary run of diggers at Hansen's Rush. They had, Vale knew, a supposedly paying claim, but worked it in a very perfunctory manner, and employed two "wages men" to do most of the pick and shovel work. Their esteemed American confrere was not with them this afternoon—one of them always remained about their claim and tent on some excuse, for it contained many little articles which, ...
— Tom Gerrard - 1904 • Louis Becke
... more or less perfunctory appearances in a local police court, known as the Central Court, where when arraigned he pleaded not guilty, and finally his appearance before the November grand jury, where, owing to the complicated nature of the charge drawn up against him ...
— The Financier • Theodore Dreiser
... was properly arranged. Indeed, he was a prisoner—taken in battle—though his name did not appear on the lists. So Vincent's sudden going was welcomed as a stroke of good fortune. The Atterburys, understanding the natural feelings of the family, made only perfunctory opposition. Olympia and Kate were to remain until their brothers' fates were decided. Vincent, who had been for weeks wildly impatient to return to the field, was divided in mind now—by joy and despair. He had put off and put off a last appeal to Olympia. He had not had an opportunity, or ...
— The Iron Game - A Tale of the War • Henry Francis Keenan
... in doubt. She had returned his perfunctory bow with a curt nod, and after a brief interval—during which she appeared to be making a communication that was received with joyous hilarity—she left her seat and ran across the room. ...
— Black Oxen • Gertrude Franklin Horn Atherton
... hearing my own name correctly given was only equaled by the admiration I also felt for my companion's complete and absolute assurance. Mr. Cullen and I exchanged a perfunctory handshake, which left me without any change ...
— An Amiable Charlatan • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... d'tat. Removal to Yale. New energy in study and reading. Influence of Emerson, Carlyle, and Ruskin. Yale in 1850. My disappointment at the instruction; character of president and professors; perfunctory methods in lower-class rooms; "gerund-grinding'' vs. literature; James Hadley—his abilities and influence, other professors; influence of President Woolsey, Professors Porter, Silliman, and Dana; absence ...
— Volume I • Andrew Dickson White
... strode forth to the mound, leaving the unfortunate Princeman to take his place by the side of Miss Stevens and give her an opportunity to sympathize with his poor maimed pitching hand, which, after a perfunctory moment of interest, she was too busy to do; for Jack Turner and Sam Turner, smiling across at each other in mutual confidence and esteem, proceeded to strike out the next three batters in succession, leaving men cemented to first and second bases, where they had ...
— The Early Bird - A Business Man's Love Story • George Randolph Chester
... faults he cannot be charged with the stupidity of his class, he must have known that he was talking nonsense. The truth is that as the official mouthpiece of the nation he was merely trying to excuse, in an official perfunctory way, the inexcusable behaviour of the nation ...
— Books and Persons - Being Comments on a Past Epoch 1908-1911 • Arnold Bennett
... of the latter speaker was evidently only polite and perfunctory. What, indeed, were the political convulsions of the Old World to the dwellers on this serene, ...
— The Twins of Table Mountain and Other Stories • Bret Harte
... kiss was chilly and perfunctory. "I also hope you will get well quickly, Dinah," she said, "as I believe Mr. Studley and his sister are staying on mainly on your account. Sir Eustace, I understand, is returning very shortly, and I have asked him to join ...
— Greatheart • Ethel M. Dell
... he got up to go, she bade him notice that she was always at home on Sundays, and would be glad that he should remember it. He made a rather cold and perfunctory reply. Inwardly he said to himself, "Why does she say nothing of Letty, whom she knows—and of our marriage—if ...
— Sir George Tressady, Vol. I • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... moment, and agreed that she did look shy, one might almost say frightened to death. Mrs. West rushed through the second verse of the song, bowed breathlessly, and ran down the steps of the stage and back to the refuge of the balcony, while the audience applauded with perfunctory politeness and called clamorously to the musicians to "Let ...
— Cinderella - And Other Stories • Richard Harding Davis
... the first, her blood boiling; the second she could not finish for her tears; the third dried her eyes with the fires of fierce resentment. It was not so much what they said; it was what they were obviously afraid to say. It was their circumlocution, their innuendo, their mild surprise, their perfunctory congratulations, their assumption of chivalry and their lack of its essence, that wounded and stung the subject of these effusions. As she raised her flushed face from the last of them, Mr. Steel stood before her once more, the incarnation of ...
— The Shadow of the Rope • E. W. Hornung
... besides including the index to the whole work, gives far too rapid a survey of momentous and familiar events to afford profit or satisfaction. One feels that, while the style retains its fluency, the tone has lost its warmth, and that much of the writing must have been perfunctory: the reading, at all events, cannot but be so. But scarcely any one, however well acquainted with the ground, can follow without pleasure and an enlargement of view Mr. Green's account of "Early England," "England ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Vol. XXVI., December, 1880. • Various
... desk we approached grinned amiably and kept it up till, in answer to his perfunctory question, "Sign off and on again?" my Captain answered, "No! Signing off for good." And then his grin vanished in sudden solemnity. He did not look at me again till he handed me my papers with a sorrowful expression, as if they had been my passports ...
— The Shadow-Line - A Confession • Joseph Conrad
... Those who resorted to the library were kept at arm's length, as it were, and the fewer there were who came, the better the grim or studious custodian was pleased. Every inquiry which broke the profound silence of the cloistered library was a kind of rude interruption, and when it was answered, the perfunctory librarian resumed his reading or his studies. The institution appeared to exist, not for the benefit of the people, but for that of the librarian; or for the benefit, besides, of a few sequestered scholars, like himself, and any wide popular ...
— A Book for All Readers • Ainsworth Rand Spofford
... John Steele saw nothing further, although he heard often, of Miss Jocelyn Wray. His business to the continent, whatever its nature, had seemed sufficiently important to authorize from him to her, in due process of time, a short perfunctory message regretting his inability to present himself at the appointed hour at Strathorn House. Whether the young girl found in the letter a vagueness warranting a suspicion that John Steele preferred the heavy duties ...
— Half A Chance • Frederic S. Isham
... prevent a regular and minute investigation, to introduce confusion and contest, to puzzle, perplex, and obumbrate; to teaze, fatigue, and disgust the inquirers, that the examination might be hurried over in a superficial and perfunctory manner; and the ministry, from this anarchy and confusion of materials, half explored and undigested, derive a general parliamentary approbation, to which they might appeal from the accusations of the people. A select committee would have probably examined some of the clerks of ...
— The History of England in Three Volumes, Vol.II. - From William and Mary to George II. • Tobias Smollett
... to be nothing at all original in the methods pursued by the great criminologist when confronted with this tableau of death and robbery. His remarks to the Inspector were few and perfunctory. He asked only a few languid questions of Macdougal and Lenora, who were summoned to ...
— The Black Box • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... winked at the barkeeper, slowly resumed a pair of immense, bulgy buckskin gloves, which gave his fingers the appearance of being painfully sore and bandaged, strode to the door without looking at anybody, called out, "All aboard," with a perfunctory air of supreme indifference whether the invitation was heeded, remounted his box, ...
— Mrs. Skaggs's Husbands and Other Stories • Bret Harte
... heavy, sportive interest in his pretty girl, but Julia could not realize their relationship sufficiently to permit of any liberties. She smiled an uneasy, perfunctory smile when George kissed her, and moved away from the arm he would have ...
— The Story Of Julia Page - Works of Kathleen Norris, Volume V. • Kathleen Norris
... must, however, be remarked that law always lags far behind social feeling and custom, and flagellation as a common punishment had fallen into disuse or become very perfunctory long before any change was made in the law, though it is not absolutely extinct, even by law, today. There is even an ignorant and retrograde tendency to revive it. Thus, even in severe Commonwealth days, the alleged whipping with rods of a servant-girl by her master, though ...
— Studies in the Psychology of Sex, Volume 3 (of 6) • Havelock Ellis
... informed her that during the night something had occurred to irritate Colonel Seth Pennington and startle him out of his customary bland composure. He greeted her politely but coldly, and without even the perfunctory formality of inquiring how she had passed the night, he came directly ...
— The Valley of the Giants • Peter B. Kyne
... daughter Nora, after a hurried and perfunctory knock, opened the study door vehemently, and put in ...
— Lady Connie • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... unexpected confidence, however, took its place. Mr. Carr having finished his coffee one morning, lingered a moment over his perfunctory paternal embraces, with the awkwardness of a preoccupied man endeavoring by the assumption of a lighter interest to veil ...
— Devil's Ford • Bret Harte
... a man of more robust fiber, he would have returned his portfolio to Mr. Wilson as early as 1916, for the President was writing notes to the belligerents and did not, even as a perfunctory courtesy, consult his Secretary of State; he made it only too patent he did not consider his advice worth asking. Mr. Lansing was too fond of his official prominence to surrender it easily, and that is another curious thing about ...
— The Mirrors of Washington • Anonymous
... said, with the real sympathy in the words made most obviously perfunctory by the tone. "What a world of possibilities there is masquerading behind that little word 'arrange.' Tell me more about it, Mr. Jastrow. How will ...
— A Fool For Love • Francis Lynde
... There was a perfunctory salute—a mere presenting of arms—and the blades swept round in a half-circle to their first meeting. But Rotherby, without so much as allowing his steel to touch his opponent's, as the laws of courtesy demanded, ...
— The Lion's Skin • Rafael Sabatini
... Anderson and Elizabeth were seated together in the Red Drawing Room. Mrs. Gaddesden, after a little perfunctory conversation with the new-comer, had disappeared on the plea of letters to write. The girl in white, the centre of a large party in the hall, was flirting to her heart's content. Philip would have dearly liked to ...
— Lady Merton, Colonist • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... for more than once she had talked about them; but the Terror, in a tone of somewhat perfunctory ...
— The Terrible Twins • Edgar Jepson
... much interested in discovering what he looked like and how he was dressed. I found that a general in war time goes to bed in his underclothes, like an ordinary private. The General got up and went outside and put the spy through a series of questions, but he did so in a very sleepy voice, and with a perfunctory manner which seemed to me to indicate that he was more concerned about getting back to bed than he was in saving the army from danger. He told the officer that it was too late then to carry on the business ...
— The Great War As I Saw It • Frederick George Scott
... sceptic and man of refined taste, a foe to all emotional scenes, sat with staring eyes and as if hypnotized, cutting a piece of fruit with the end of his fork into strips as thin as cigarette papers. The Governor, on the contrary, went through a pantomime expressive of perfunctory admiration, with exclamations of horror and compassion; while, in striking contrast to him, and not far away, Brahim Bey, the thunderbolt of war, in whom the reading of the article, followed by discussion after a substantial repast, had induced ...
— The Nabob, Volume 1 (of 2) • Alphonse Daudet
... they had been reduced to the simple forms of the lion, ox, eagle and angel, with no attribute except wings. All four reliefs are rectangular, about eighteen inches square. The ox is, of course, the least inspiring, and here as elsewhere is treated in a dry perfunctory manner. The oxen on the facade of Laon Cathedral offered some scope to the sculptor, being life-sized; but in a small relief the subject was not attractive. The lion is more vigorously treated. As a work of natural history he is better than the Marzocco, ...
— Donatello • David Lindsay, Earl of Crawford
... this plan worth trying, and for three-quarters of an hour the two boys were busy with the lower branches of various trees in the yard. Thus they managed to supply Whitey with a fair quantity of wet leaves, which he ate in a perfunctory way, displaying little of his earlier enthusiasm. And the work of his purveyors might have been more tedious if it had been less damp, for a boy is seldom bored by anything that involves his staying-out in the rain without protection. The drizzle ...
— Penrod and Sam • Booth Tarkington
... The senate had voted that the elections should not be held till the law was passed: that, in case of a tribunician veto, the whole question should be referred to them afresh. The law is introduced in a perfunctory manner: is vetoed, to the great relief of the proposers: the matter is referred to the senate. Upon that the senate voted that it was for the interest of the state that the elections should be held at the ...
— The Letters of Cicero, Volume 1 - The Whole Extant Correspodence in Chronological Order • Marcus Tullius Cicero
... should be established in all of the States and Territories. There is work enough for all, and the establishment of local surveys would greatly assist the general work prosecuted under the auspices of the government, and prevent it from falling into perfunctory channels. Its vigor and health will doubtless be promoted by all ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 484, April 11, 1885 • Various
... displayed her assortment of cotillion objects. She did her part ably. But Wilhelmine de Naarboveck gave but a perfunctory attention to this ...
— A Nest of Spies • Pierre Souvestre
... the board from place, and nothing was discovered behind it, he thanked her profusely, made a wholly perfunctory examination of ...
— A Husband by Proxy • Jack Steele
... he passed into the restaurant. Gabe offered him the choice of various tables; he selected one which commanded a view of the entrances and ordered a perfunctory "Scotch." Nervous and anxious, he was more troubled than he cared to admit even to himself. Fortunately, there were not many people in the cafe; and his gaze, wandering about the place, soon halted before the small alcove in the east end ...
— Jane Cable • George Barr McCutcheon
... at their snuffy nose—I thought I would rather claim kinship with the dogs than with the men! My sympathy was unreturned; in their eyes I was a creature light as air; and they would scarce spare me the time for a perfunctory caress or perhaps a hasty lap of the wet tongue, ere they were back again in sedulous attendance on those dingy deities, their masters- -and their masters, as like as not, damning ...
— St Ives • Robert Louis Stevenson
... interested in the case. They asked a few perfunctory questions and went away without making any effort ...
— The Secret Wireless - or, The Spy Hunt of the Camp Brady Patrol • Lewis E. Theiss
... no warmth into the lines—only a persistent jealousy and suspicion. Since midsummer these discrepancies in Gloria's correspondence had grown more and more noticeable. At first he had scarcely perceived them. He was so inured to the perfunctory "dearest" and "darlings" scattered through her letters that he was oblivious to their presence or absence. But in this last fortnight he had become increasingly aware ...
— The Beautiful and Damned • F. Scott Fitzgerald
... human chronicle of the same events. The Lives of the Poets, his greatest work, was composed with pain and difficulty when he was seventy years old; even it is but a quarry from which a reader may dig the ore of a sound critical judgment summing up a life's reflection, out of the grit and dust of perfunctory biographical compilations. There was hardly one of the literary coterie over which he presided that was not doing better and more lasting work. Nothing that Johnson wrote is to be compared, for excellence in its own manner, with Tom Jones or the Vicar of Wakefield or the Citizen of the ...
— English Literature: Modern - Home University Library Of Modern Knowledge • G. H. Mair
... enough situation, but neither the girl nor the young man was heavy-witted. Doris rose slowly, languidly, it seemed, and though aware that her eyes must betray her, turned and greeted Bullard in cool, even tones. The two men exchanged perfunctory nods. ...
— Till the Clock Stops • John Joy Bell
... to go for dinner; and, drawing aside into a small reception room to embrace and consider, they selected the Lafayette, because its Continental air assisted the illusion of their escape from all that was familiar and perfunctory. Their table, by a railing overlooking the sweep of the salle manger, was precisely placed for their happiness. It was so narrow that the heels of Savina's slippers were sharply pressed into his insteps; when her ...
— Cytherea • Joseph Hergesheimer
... given him the flower at breakfast. She grew what she could in the neglected garden; the plants in the miniature conservatory were also hers, though the doctor took a perfunctory interest in them, obviously on her account. It was obvious at least to Pocket Upton. He saw all these things, and what they meant. He was not without his little gifts of observation and deduction. He noticed the difference in Baumgartner's voice when he addressed his ...
— The Camera Fiend • E.W. Hornung
... an approaching tram-car and stepped out on the road to meet it. "Have you a more compassionate scheme ready?" I called after him. He made no answer, clambered on to the rear platform, and only then looked back. We exchanged a perfunctory wave of the hand. We also looked at each other, he rather angrily, I fancy, and I with wonder. I may also mention that it was for the last time. From that day I never set eyes on the Fynes. As usual the unexpected happened to me. It had nothing to do with Flora ...
— Chance - A Tale in Two Parts • Joseph Conrad
... looked round that cheerless room, reckoning its perfunctory pretense of comfort the forlornest mockery. To lodgings such as this he was condemned for life, to an interminable sequence of transient quarters, sordid or splendid, rich or mean, alike in this common quality of ...
— The False Faces • Vance, Louis Joseph
... sat trying to entertain Anabela. She talked a certain amount, but it was perfunctory and diluted. The nearest approach I made to speech was to formulate a sound like a clam trying to sing 'A Life on the Ocean Wave' at low tide. It seemed that Anabela's eyes did not rest upon me as often as usual. I had nothing with which to charm her ears. ...
— Roads of Destiny • O. Henry
... Hilbrook himself began to be lost in the name he had given the place; and except for the perfunctory mention of its founder in the ceremonies of Commencement Day, the university hardly remembered him as a man, but rather regarded him as a locality. He had, in fact, never been an important man in West Mallow, up to the time he had left it to seek his fortune ...
— A Pair of Patient Lovers • William Dean Howells
... spirit was no less a personage than Cardinal Richelieu, the great minister of Louis XIII. Official France was now really interested. Hitherto its interest, while profusely enough expressed, had been little more than perfunctory. With Richelieu as its sponsor a company was easily organized. Though by royal decree it was chartered as the Company of New France, it became more commonly known as the Company of One Hundred Associates; for it was a co-operative organization with one hundred members, ...
— The Seigneurs of Old Canada: - A Chronicle of New-World Feudalism • William Bennett Munro
... when, on the morning of her birthday, having presented her with a purse which he knew she had long coveted, he found himself thanked in a perfunctory and mechanical way. ...
— The Man with Two Left Feet - and Other Stories • P. G. Wodehouse
... his nodding plume; by his cold, perfunctory, as if sleepy mutters, "Possibly, possibly, puede ser." He retorted: "Your English generosity could wish your countrymen no better luck than that my Lugarenos, as your worship pleases to call them, should miss their way. They are hungry for loot—with ...
— Romance • Joseph Conrad and F.M. Hueffer
... Martin house party had been left at the Lodge in readiness and with perfunctory warmth of farewells the tired mountaineers were hastening either to ...
— The Innocent Adventuress • Mary Hastings Bradley
... message is faithful." Yet, the average man who sits in church and listens to the most impassioned appeal of the preacher, rarely considers the sermon personal. He finds himself saying, sometimes against his will, that the preacher is professional, that his plea is perfunctory, and so he goes out of church and says again, "No man seems to care for ...
— The Personal Touch • J. Wilbur Chapman
... in thought he saw the figure of a strange man walking over the road; Lemuel knew that he was strange by the formality of the clothes. He wore a hard straw hat, collar and diamond-pinned tie, and a suit with a waistcoat. At first Doret's interest was perfunctory, but as the other drew nearer his inspection changed to a painful absorption. Suddenly his attitude grew tense; he had the appearance of a man gazing at an enthralling but dangerous spectacle, such—for example—as a wall that might topple over, crushing anything ...
— The Happy End • Joseph Hergesheimer
... stood still and watched us. As we passed him the Sergeant yelled out with unaccustomed sharpness: "Eyes—Right!" We all turned our heads smartly to the right and he saluted with strained, affected precision. The Captain touched the peak of his cap in a perfunctory manner. He hardly seemed to be looking at us at all, but suddenly he spotted a man who was not holding his shovel ...
— Combed Out • Fritz August Voigt
... do?" the gentleman inside was saying with a sound of effort in his voice. The lady was not even at the pains to notice the perfunctory civility. ...
— The Magnetic North • Elizabeth Robins (C. E. Raimond)
... train had been vexatiously late. The little novelist had found it tedious to interchange inanities with the committee awaiting him at the Pullman steps. Nor had it amused him to huddle into evening-dress, and hasten through a perfunctory supper in order to reassure his audience at half-past eight precisely as to the unmitigated delight of which he ...
— The Certain Hour • James Branch Cabell
... little later that hints of this sort were having their effect on the multitude. Even the head of the great parade, with old John Burt, chief marshal, titupping to the grunt of brass horns, stirred only perfunctory applause. The shouts for Avon's stalwart fifty, with their mascot gander waddling on the right flank, were evidently confined to the Avon excursionists. Starks, Carthage, Salem, Vienna strode past with various evolutions—open order, fours by the right, double-quick, and all the rest, ...
— The Skipper and the Skipped - Being the Shore Log of Cap'n Aaron Sproul • Holman Day
... found a new friend, although at the time I thought Farrar's visit to me the accomplishment of a perfunctory courtesy to a man who had refused to take a case against him. It was very characteristic of Farrar not to mention this until he rose to go. About half-past eight he sauntered in upon me, placing his hat precisely on the rack, and we talked until ...
— The Crossing • Winston Churchill
... necessarily a concerted movement—if any one firm or two or three firms will make a business of introducing beautiful, useful trees of the nut-bearing group, they will open up a new group. People just haven't thought about it. They give an order for trees in a sort of perfunctory way, because ...
— Northern Nut Growers Association Report of the Proceedings at the Second Annual Meeting - Ithaca, New York, December 14 and 15, 1911 • Northern Nut Growers Association
... fallen. The theatres are all full, but not full of the sort of people who demand excellence. Perhaps it would be unfair to judge the opera by a performance of "Parsifal," that heavily over-dressed story of sentimental religiosity and pedestrian symbolism, but it was done in the most slatternly perfunctory style. The theatre was crowded. But it was a strangely mixed crowd. In lonely grandeur in one of the boxes were three Englishmen in evening dress. In the fifth row of the stalls was a servant-girl who kept asking her neighbours the time in the midst of Parsifal's ...
— Europe—Whither Bound? - Being Letters of Travel from the Capitals of Europe in the Year 1921 • Stephen Graham
... Colville back very soon. He had to stand by the sofa where she sat till Madame Uccelli found him and introduced him to another mother of daughters. Later he joined a group formed by the father of one of the dancers and the non-dancing husband of a dancing wife. Their conversation was perfunctory; they showed one another that they had no pleasure ...
— Indian Summer • William D. Howells
... journalism, and to show that women have failed in the treatment of them to reach even a moderate standard of competence. Look, for another instance, at the reports of weddings and society entertainments, all done after one execrable model, dull and perfunctory. ...
— Journalism for Women - A Practical Guide • E.A. Bennett
... well as the judges that his trial was a merely perfunctory formality. The verdict was decided ere it began, and, indeed, so eager was Megales to get the farce over with that several times he interrupted the proceedings ...
— Bucky O'Connor • William MacLeod Raine
... the little mouth and baby begins to cry, attracting the attention of the mother, or nurse, or little sister, who promptly, recognizing the trouble, pounces on the offending comforter, which has fallen to the floor, and with a perfunctory wipe replaces it in baby's mouth. It is done just as we have written it, many thousand times, and yet the problem of infant mortality is represented as a vexatious mystery. The newspapers solicit charitable ...
— The Eugenic Marriage, Vol 2 (of 4) - A Personal Guide to the New Science of Better Living and Better Babies • W. Grant Hague
... breakfast, following a perfunctory medical inspection—so perfunctory that one youth who, having been a medical student, and knowing well that he had a finely-developed feverish cold, with a high temperature, and not wishing to embarrass his fellow-passengers, placed in his mouth ...
— Back To Billabong • Mary Grant Bruce
... men for Cambridge, it was thought that, as I was to go to Oxford, it would be better that I should study under an Oxford man. I never had the slightest natural bent for mathematics, though I did the tasks that were imposed upon me in a perfunctory manner, and with sufficient accuracy ...
— Philip Gilbert Hamerton • Philip Gilbert Hamerton et al
... that she was his and that he defied anyone to question his right of possession. It appeared to me, as I afterward learned was the fact, that I was witnessing the most primitive of marriage ceremonies. The assembled members of the tribe looked on and listened in a sort of dull and perfunctory apathy, for the speaker was by far the mightiest of ...
— The Land That Time Forgot • Edgar Rice Burroughs
... much more than this scientific and dutiful soldier; there was at bottom of Moltke's nature a fine sense of proportion, an artistic vein, and, not the least element, a Christian philosophy of life just as far removed from mere perfunctory indifferentism as from cocksure dogmatic bigotry and self-sufficiency. We have striking evidence of this in the Trostgedanken, the Consolatory Thoughts on the Earthly Life and a Future Existence, which he laid down as the last literary ...
— The German Classics of The Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, Vol. X. • Kuno Francke
... better service to the community and one more worthy of pecuniary remuneration when she stays at home and minds her children than when she goes out charing and leaves them to the chances of the street or to the perfunctory care of a neighbour. In proportion as we realize the force of this argument, we reverse our view as to the nature of public assistance in such a case. We no longer consider it desirable to drive the mother out to her charing work if we possibly can, nor do we consider her ...
— Liberalism • L. T. Hobhouse
... a duty and a pleasure to assist the boy in any way I can," said the colonel in perfunctory form. "But first come in, have some breakfast, and then we'll talk it over. I'll have to apologize for Miss Price. I'm afraid she's abed yet," said he, opening the door, showing his visitor ...
— The Bondboy • George W. (George Washington) Ogden
... a perfunctory protest. It was, she knew, quite useless, and her heart was not in it. No words she used, no appeal she could make, would touch this man or ...
— The Fighting Edge • William MacLeod Raine
... doing enough to amount to anything. He oughtn't to! But if it would make him any happier he should have his make-believe—yes, and without knowing it was make-believe. Doing things that were of no value to any one was so disheartening. She knew. Like perfunctory ...
— Southern Lights and Shadows • Edited by William Dean Howells & Henry Mills Alden
... so, he, Wesley Thompson, twenty-five years of age and a minister of the gospel, was deeply in debt—unless he denied the justice of giving value for value received. He had received much; he had returned nothing except perfunctory thanks. And what had he to give? Even to him, transcendent as was his faith that the glory of man was but the reflected glory of God, that faith was not a commodity ...
— Burned Bridges • Bertrand W. Sinclair
... word and the hidden thought—how they conflict! After six months the correspondence was more or less perfunctory on his part, and at eight it had ...
— Jennie Gerhardt - A Novel • Theodore Dreiser
... for rabbit as an article of diet, and he had only bought the rabbit because the rabbit happened to be going past his door (in the hands of a hawker) that morning. His perfunctory purchase of it showed how he had lost interest in life and meals since Helen's departure. And lo! she had transformed a minor part of it into something wondrous, luscious, and unforgettable. Ah, she was ...
— Helen with the High Hand (2nd ed.) • Arnold Bennett
... we talked for an hour about the news of the world, from whaling in the South Pacific to dog-driving in Arctic Asia, and from Weston's walk across the North American continent to Karakozef's attempt to assassinate the Tsar. But it was, on our side at least, a perfunctory conversation. The news of the complete success of the Atlantic cable was as unexpected as it was disheartening, and it filled our minds to the exclusion of everything else. The world would have no use for an overland telegraph-line through Alaska and Siberia if it already ...
— Tent Life in Siberia • George Kennan
... out the saddle blanket and tenderly adjust it. Whistling carelessly I swing up the saddle. Dandy Jim flinches pitifully when it rests upon him and reaches swiftly round to bite my arm off. I think this is quite perfunctory on his part. He must have learned long since that he will never really bite any one's arm off. His neck is not ...
— Ma Pettengill • Harry Leon Wilson
... the masses Who trusted their bones more to mail and cuirasses)— All borne by the throng Who are marching along To the square of the Dom with processional song, With the flaring of dips, And bending of hips, And the chanting of hundred perfunctory lips; And some good little boys Who had come up from Neuss And the Quirinuskirche to show off their voice: All march to the square Of the great Dom, and there File right and left, leaving alone and quite bare A covered sedan, Containing—so ...
— Complete Poetical Works of Bret Harte • Bret Harte
... with a perfunctory bow, but recollect little else, for now that my time was so near, a numbness seemed to cloud my brain and I could think only that this little copse, full of the grey mist of dawn, was perhaps the last object ...
— Peregrine's Progress • Jeffery Farnol
... superstitious, and repeated to himself the cabalistic formula: "Losin's seekin's, findin's keepin's"—presumed to be of great efficacy in such cases—with religious fervor. He had laboriously reached the end of the veranda when he noticed the open window of Louise's room, and stopped as a perfunctory duty to look in. And then Richelieu Sharpe stood for an instant utterly confounded and aghast at this crowning proof of the absolute infamy and sickening ...
— A Phyllis of the Sierras • Bret Harte
... which often enter the streams at concentrated points, that the streams can no longer digest them without help. Too often, in the face of uncontrolled human increase and expansion, that help has either been denied them or has been weak and perfunctory. The result is plain enough now in the sorry mess of sick or dead or dying waters that we Americans have on our hands, the heritage of having kept on taking them for granted long after we had bred ourselves out of the right ...
— The Nation's River - The Department of the Interior Official Report on the Potomac • United States Department of the Interior
... each would feel for a French ship. My friends readily conceived my plan." His ships in the Mediterranean, in 1803, "are the best commanded and the very best manned" in the navy. So his frequent praise of others in his despatches and letters has none of the formal, perfunctory ring of an official paper; it springs evidently from the warmest appreciation and admiration, is heartfelt, showing no deceptive exterior, but the true native fibre of the man, full of the charity which is kind and thinketh no evil. It was not always so toward those above him. Under the timid and ...
— The Life of Nelson, Vol. I (of 2) - The Embodiment of the Sea Power of Great Britain • A. T. (Alfred Thayer) Mahan
... parrot?" echoed Cai, genuinely surprised; for, in his experience, this bird was remarkable, if at all, for an obese lethargy. It could talk, to be sure. Now and again it would ejaculate "Scratch Polly," or "Polly wants a kiss," in a perfunctory way; but on the whole he had never known a more comfortable or a less ...
— Hocken and Hunken • A. T. Quiller-Couch
... assigned to a career. In truth, up to that time he had thought very little of the future and made no plans. He realized in a vague sort of way that some time he would engage in business; therefore, upon receipt of the paternal edict he merely looked bored, shrugged, and with a perfunctory, "Yes, sir," quit ...
— The Promise - A Tale of the Great Northwest • James B. Hendryx
... and other prominent Imperialists have, of course, defended their master; but their apologies, it is felt, were somewhat perfunctory and half-hearted. In allusion to the lamented demise of the Dowager Empress, it was pointed out that pity and loyalty alike should forbid trampling on a Ruler bowed down by repeated domestic bereavements; and attempts were made to enlist sympathy for the Imperial Orphan. These, however, ...
— The Casual Ward - academic and other oddments • A. D. Godley
... to undertake many things that having commenced he afterwards abandoned, and the probability is that as soon as he saw exactly how he could solve any difficulty which presented itself, he put on one side the merely perfunctory ...
— Leonardo da Vinci • Maurice W. Brockwell
... Weald, of course, but as the ship swam onward through emptiness he went through it again. The last medical inspection had been only perfunctory. Twelve years earlier—instead of three—a Med Ship had landed on Weald. There had been official conferences with health officials. There was a report on the birth-rate, the death-rate, the anomaly-rate, and a breakdown of all reported communicable diseases. But that ...
— Pariah Planet • Murray Leinster
... nameless shiver through her. Later on in the evening, when they were introduced to one another by the Baroness Bockhorst, in the middle of the crowd, they merely exchanged an inclination of the head. And that perfunctory salutation had been repeated on the rare occasions on which Maria Ferres had ...
— The Child of Pleasure • Gabriele D'Annunzio
... coming to live in New York," March said, looking over at Fulkerson, who had been watching his interview with the perfunctory smile of sympathy that people put on at the meeting of old friends. "I want to introduce you to my friend Mr. Fulkerson. He and I are going into a literary ...
— Henry James, Jr. • William Dean Howells
... reminded of you by acts of filial thoughtfulness, by words of sympathy in my hard battle of life when I am present, or by genial letters when absent? I have spent three hot days in the city seeking chiefly your interest, and a more mechanical, perfunctory thing never existed than your kiss of greeting to-night. There was as much feeling in it as in the quarter that I handed to the stage-driver. I have spent thousands on your education, but you don't sing for me, you don't read to me, you never think of soothing ...
— A Young Girl's Wooing • E. P. Roe
... for that cold, perfunctory salutation, had been one of indifference amounting to contempt. He despised her, then; he hated her. She had brought him to a terrible position. Ah, well, he would be sorry for her when he learned her reason, and he would be more ...
— A Little Traitor to the South - A War Time Comedy With a Tragic Interlude • Cyrus Townsend Brady
... mind that he never heard the accustomed warning sound which announces that the Museum is about to close. Hidden behind an altar as he was, in his distant, shadowed corner, the guardian of the room never saw him as he cast a last perfunctory glance about the place before departing till the Saturday morning; for the morrow was Friday, the Mohammedan Sabbath, on which the Museum remains shut, and he would not be called upon to attend. So he ...
— Smith and the Pharaohs, and Other Tales • Henry Rider Haggard
... and diverted more acutely the more we remain at a fixed task. That it is not mental "fatigue" so much as distraction that prevents us from persisting at work is evidenced in the longer time we can stick to work that really interests us than to tasks in which we have only a perfunctory or compulsory interest. The college student who is "too dead tired" to stay up studying trigonometry will, though in the same condition, stay up studying football strategy, rehearsing for a varsity show, or getting out the next ...
— Human Traits and their Social Significance • Irwin Edman
... facetiae in the "Oxford Sausage" and his "Triumph of Isis," had an academic flavor. These we may pass over, as foreign to our present inquiries. So, too, with most of his annual laureate odes, "On his Majesty's Birthday," etc. Yet even these official and rather perfunctory performances testify to his fondness for what Scott calls "the memorials of our forefathers' piety or splendor." Thus, in the birthday odes for 1787-88, and the New Year ode for 1787, he pays a tribute to the ancient minstrels and to early ...
— A History of English Romanticism in the Eighteenth Century • Henry A. Beers
... assistant to the prosecutor was perfunctory and ineffective. The charge of the judge was neutral. The jury left the room, and were out eight and one-quarter minutes. As they filed in, the foreman sent a triumphant telepathic message to David before he quietly ...
— David Dunne - A Romance of the Middle West • Belle Kanaris Maniates
... the Noakeses, the contortionist and two or three rather engaging acrobats. As for the women of the company, he had but little to do with them, except in the most perfunctory way. He was always polite, gallant and agreeable, and they made much over him when the opportunity presented itself. They were warm-hearted and demonstrative, sometimes to such an exaggerated degree that he was ...
— The Rose in the Ring • George Barr McCutcheon
... did not talk much. By-and-bye, he was tired, and remounted his donkey, but we still kept side by side, Innocentina sending at intervals a perfunctory cry of "Fanny-anny," from a distance, by way of keeping the small brown ane ...
— The Princess Passes • Alice Muriel Williamson and Charles Norris Williamson
... to dates, instead of an active young diplomatist who, to respond to her call, had had to hew his way through a very jungle of engagements! "Please don't come till thirtieth." That was all. Not the shadow of an excuse or a regret; not even the perfunctory "have written" with which it is usual to soften such blows. She didn't want him, and had taken the shortest way to tell him so. Even in his first moment of exasperation it struck him as characteristic that she should not have padded her postponement with a fib. Certainly her moral angles ...
— The Reef • Edith Wharton
... reiterated such opinions long after their practical futility had become manifest. Indeed, it was a matter of common knowledge that negro suffrage had been undone by force and fraud; hardly more than a perfunctory denial of the fact was ever made in Congress, and meanwhile it was a source of jest and anecdote among members of all parties behind the scenes. Republican members were bantered by Democratic colleagues upon the way in which provision for Republican party advantage ...
— The Cleveland Era - A Chronicle of the New Order in Politics, Volume 44 in The - Chronicles of America Series • Henry Jones Ford
... Things?—But who will teach these new sciences or open the eyes of the child to the beauties around him? Not everyone can do it. It will require a master. Teaching "at" these things in a dull, perfunctory way will do no good. It would be better to leave them untaught. We have, everywhere, too much "attempting" to teach and not enough teaching, too much seeming and not enough being, too much appearance and ...
— Rural Life and the Rural School • Joseph Kennedy
... write again. I made some perfunctory remark which he entirely ignored. Just then I was called away. He watched my ...
— The Great Secret • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... living men, all Frenchmen but two or three, may have sufficed during the past score of years to change the public mind in this matter, I am not ready to say; but, surely, it has not been the general thought that sculpture is anything more than an expensive and perfunctory way of doing one's duty to a great occasion or a great man. This, however, is temporary. The good sculpture exists and will be recognized. So ...
— The American Architect and Building News, Vol. 27, Jan-Mar, 1890 • Various
... Calhoun excused himself hastily and went striding away down the canyon; and Wilhelmina, after a perfunctory return to the house, slipped out and ran up to her lookout. Not a word that he had said about the rush to Blackwater was in any way startling to her; she had seen every dust-cloud, marked each automobile as it rushed past, and even noted the ...
— Wunpost • Dane Coolidge
... long for a successful review. Moreover, it was conducted upon an entirely different principle than any previous review; by restricting its attention to the most important works of each quarter, it gave extensive critiques of only a few books in each number and thus avoided the multitude of perfunctory notices that had made previous reviews so dreary ...
— Early Reviews of English Poets • John Louis Haney
... sympathies—hideous slavery —hideous alike in the recollection of the past, the contemplation of the present, and the anticipation of the future. I wish two things— 1. That you would write a work on the subject less "sketchy and perfunctory," as you call it, so that any one not versed in English law and procedure might be able to understand it and appreciate it thoroughly. 2nd. That you would, when relieved from your present office, come out as our law member of council, to press your views on our ...
— A Journey through the Kingdom of Oude, Volumes I & II • William Sleeman
... benediction, came the minister's perfunctory congratulations. When he called her "Mrs. Marsh," Rosemary instinctively looked toward Madame, then laughed and blushed when she understood. Madame took the girl into her arms as she came down from the altar. "Dear daughter!" she said. "Truly my ...
— Master of the Vineyard • Myrtle Reed
... nothing perfunctory in the administration of the "Two Rokuhara" (Ryo-Rokuhara) in Kyoto. The northern and the southern offices were presided over by the most prominent members of the Hojo family, men destined to fill the post of regent (shikkeri) subsequently in Kamakura. Thus, when Hojo Yoshitoki died suddenly, ...
— A History of the Japanese People - From the Earliest Times to the End of the Meiji Era • Frank Brinkley and Dairoku Kikuchi
... imagination, the musicians played their latest inspirations, the raconteur told his newest story. They called each other and the better known among the guests by their names, and joked mutual weaknesses, eliminating from these gatherings every shade of a perfunctory performance. ...
— The Ways of Men • Eliot Gregory
... Rogers, lighted their pipes and settled themselves on the lee side of the deck, just forward of the fore- rigging, where they maintained a sort of perfunctory look-out on the lee-bow ...
— The Missing Merchantman • Harry Collingwood
... this excitement, but somehow it has never come my way. I am beginning to suspect that it never will, and am inclined to regard it as a figment. Such conversation as I have heard in clubs has been always of a very mild, perfunctory kind. A social club (even though it be a club with a definite social character) is a collection of heterogeneous creatures, and its aim is perfect harmony and good-fellowship. Thus any definite expression of opinion by any member is regarded as dangerous. The ideal clubman is he who looks ...
— Yet Again • Max Beerbohm
... tolerable disguise in itself, while the emblem of the forked lightning, worked in gold thread upon his left sleeve, vouched for his sacerdotal character as a member of the inferior priesthood. The Doomsmen whom he encountered looked at him with indifference, a very few saluted him with a perfunctory respect. It was plain that his appearance awakened neither interest nor distrust, and during the course of his walk he was enabled to add materially to his stock of knowledge about ...
— The Doomsman • Van Tassel Sutphen
... cup, and sat down at the table. After the simple repast was over, she led the still reluctant (constitutionally reluctant) twins up the staircase and put them, shrieking, on a bed; left the room, locking the door behind her in a perfunctory sort of way as if it were an everyday occurrence, crouched down on the rug outside, and, leaning her head back against the wall, took her doll from under her skirt, for this was her playtime, her ...
— Marm Lisa • Kate Douglas Wiggin
... the prayer of the great assembly does not always find a fitting voice. It is sometimes arid and formal; it is sometimes palpably insincere and perfunctory, alas for our human disabilities and infirmities! The power of the leader to forget himself, to gather up into his heart the common needs of those who are listening, and pour them out before God, is sometimes wanting. Not ...
— The Church and Modern Life • Washington Gladden
... Powhatan's order, and a perfunctory shout rose from the savage throng, who were always quick to echo their Chief's commands. Captain Smith, bewildered by the sudden turn of affairs, was helped to rise, led to the beaming girl, and told that ...
— Ten American Girls From History • Kate Dickinson Sweetser
... at the missionary clergy of old times. No doubt in mediaeval times so much stress was laid upon the mere perfunctory performance of the ministerial act, as apart from careful teaching of the meaning and purport of the act, that the mediaeval missionary is so far not a very safe model ...
— Life of John Coleridge Patteson • Charlotte M. Yonge
... peace and quietness infinitely soothing to the spirit. People passed and repassed us. We knew they knew who we were. The old gentlemen, indeed, bowed to us with stately uncoverings of the head; the rest regarded us with the sort of impersonal and perfunctory interest one bestows upon uninteresting passing strangers. Nobody spoke to us, though the eyes of the young men were not unaware of ...
— A Woman Named Smith • Marie Conway Oemler
... novel, The Roll Call (HUTCHINSON), is a continuation of the Clayhanger series to the extent that its hero, George Cannon, is the stepson of Edwin, who himself makes a perfunctory appearance at the close of the tale. The scene is, however, now London, where we watch George winning fame and fortune, quite in the masterful Five-Towns manner, as an architect. The change is, I think, beneficial. That quality of unstalable astonishment, native ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 156, Feb. 5, 1919 • Various
... wondering from whom it was. It was postmarked from a city several miles away, and the firm, decided, rather peculiar handwriting was strange to me. I had no correspondents. After Father's death I had received a few perfunctory notes of condolence from distant relatives and family friends. They had hurt me cruelly, for they seemed to exhale a subtle spirit of congratulation on my being released from a long and unpleasant martyrdom of attendance on an invalid, that quite ...
— Lucy Maud Montgomery Short Stories, 1909 to 1922 • Lucy Maud Montgomery
... of his words were nothing but the perfunctory babble of the surface while the depths remained paralyzed. He turned away, and bent over a chair. Tess followed him to the middle of the room, where he was, and stood there staring at him with eyes that did not weep. Presently ...
— Tess of the d'Urbervilles - A Pure Woman • Thomas Hardy
... hundreds of feet below us was a comparatively open patch of ground—an abandoned yam plantation, and just as we were about to resume our journey, we saw two Manu Mea appear. Keeping perfectly quiet, we watched them moving about, scratching up the leaves, and picking at the ground in an aimless, perfunctory sort of manner with their heavy, thick bills. The natives told me that they were searching, not for yams, but for a sweet berry called masa'oi, upon ...
— The Call Of The South - 1908 • Louis Becke
... had received special attention at the hands of his squire expressed his gratitude by a special reward. The word "gratuity" itself indicates that the little gift was once simply a spontaneous act of thoughtfulness. It has degenerated into a perfunctory habit, but it should not be so. Excellent service deserves a recompense just as slip-shod service does not. And no one has a right to spoil a waiter (or any one else) by tipping him for inefficient ...
— The Book of Business Etiquette • Nella Henney
... fresh anxieties in her mind. She had paid the most perfunctory attention to the few words Janet had said about Dempsey's call at the farm, two nights before. She understood at the time that he had come to chatter about the murder, and was very glad that she had been out ...
— Harvest • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... Mr. Beaton, and I am sure you know just how much or how little you mean by coming here. You are either interested in one of these young girls or you are not. If you are, I have nothing more to say. If you are not—" Mrs. Mandel continued to smile, but the smile had grown more perfunctory, and it had ...
— Henry James, Jr. • William Dean Howells
... York to see her mother. Mrs. Manstey, perhaps, might have joined her daughter in the West, but they had now been so many years apart that they had ceased to feel any need of each other's society, and their intercourse had long been limited to the exchange of a few perfunctory letters, written with indifference by the daughter, and with difficulty by Mrs. Manstey, whose right hand was growing stiff with gout. Even had she felt a stronger desire for her daughter's companionship, Mrs. Manstey's increasing infirmity, which caused her to dread the ...
— The Early Short Fiction of Edith Wharton, Part 1 (of 10) • Edith Wharton
... that moment, and with perfunctory interest in his guest, invited him to examine the splendid collection of ...
— The Fifth String, The Conspirators • John Philip Sousa
... mandioca under his own guayaba-tree. Yet feeling ran so high that he was hardly safe from the vengeance of the partisans of Cardenas, so that he found himself once more obliged to summon the militia of the province, and lead them to a perfunctory campaign against the Payaguas. These Indians the earlier historians of the conquest, Barco de la Centenera and Rui Diaz de Guzman, describe as river-pirates, almost living in canoes, and dashing out on any passing Spanish ...
— A Vanished Arcadia, • R. B. Cunninghame Graham
... person. Rudd, I can't allow you to be impulsive in this way. You're irritated by the delay and by last night: you're bored to be obliged to entertain a girl when you wish to read the paper; you're anxious to get down to the Capitol to see those men; all you feel is a perfunctory politeness for the McNaughtons' friend. Kindly remember these facts, Rudd, and don't make a fool of yourself gambolling on the green, instead of sustaining the high dignity of your office." So reasoned the Governor secretly, ...
— The Militants - Stories of Some Parsons, Soldiers, and Other Fighters in the World • Mary Raymond Shipman Andrews
... to decay. At one time, no doubt, the house had formed a nest for the petite amie of some rich Parisian, but now the owner of the property was only too glad to sell it at any price, and without asking any but the most perfunctory questions of the man who had offered to buy. In the solitude of the ruined villa, Matheson had been pursuing his scientific research at such times as he could snatch from his financial business. He had been leading ...
— Swirling Waters • Max Rittenberg
... irregularity of the girl's letters and hurt by their want of frankness. Knowing that John Middleton had not approved of Elsie's father marrying her, she began to fear lest he be trying to turn his niece against her. Now she had written to protest against the perfunctory letters, which, instead of allowing her to share in any way in ...
— Elsie Marley, Honey • Joslyn Gray
... adequate medical attention. He had often been shocked at the callousness with which so many of the heroes of romance dash blithely into the next adventure—though those whom they have seriously injured lie on all sides of them as thick as autumn leaves—with only the most perfunctory consideration of these victims; sometimes, indeed, with no thought ...
— The Cruise of the Jasper B. • Don Marquis
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