"Coquetry" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... impassioned, indeed, would they become, that the lady hardly felt herself safe in their company at such times, notwithstanding that she was a brave and buxom damsel, not easily put out, and with a daring spirit of humour in her composition, if not of coquetry. ...
— A Group of Noble Dames • Thomas Hardy
... city life to a home in which she would bid him welcome. He behaved with a due amount of caution, and did not give the young lady any reason to suspect the state of the case yet awhile. Marian was perfectly devoid of coquetry, and had no idea that this gentleman's constant presence at the cottage could have any reference to herself. He liked her uncle; what more natural than that he should like that gallant soldier, whom Marian adored as the first of mankind? And it was out of his ...
— Fenton's Quest • M. E. Braddon
... course, she felt like lashing herself for having felt like that and for having replied, in a spirit of pure coquetry, in a voice of ...
— The Real Adventure • Henry Kitchell Webster
... wanted it enough, you could get in," she said perversely, with an alluring coquetry in her mien. ...
— Tiverton Tales • Alice Brown
... contrary, it renders them vain, haughty, and unfeeling, demanding universal admiration, and jealous of all who have any claim to share it with them; regardless of the pain they inflict on those whose affections they have seduced, or glorying in the victims of their coquetry, they will find this coveted beauty the source of shame and mortification. Then will the bright tint of this admired flower turn to a sickly and disgusting hue, and the late beauteous ...
— The Flower Basket - A Fairy Tale • Unknown
... old men who offered these last suggestions chuckled with malicious enjoyment, and two of the old women mumbled with their toothless gums as though tasting sweet morsels; but the third drew herself up with a kind of grotesque coquetry. ...
— The Ward of King Canute • Ottilie A. Liljencrantz
... had troubled her. Masterful and masculine to an eminent degree, the timid doubts and fears of a young girl were things he could not recognize. He had no point in his own nature with which they came in contact, so that he should sympathize with them. He knew the whole fence and foil of coquetry, the signs of silent flattery, the sweet language of womanly self-conscious love, whether wooing or being won; but the fluttering misgivings of youth and absolute inexperience were dark to him. All of which he felt conscious ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science - February, 1876, Vol. XVII, No. 98. • Various
... expected this. She was going to have her hands full, it was plain. She scarcely wondered now at her discovery of two evenings before. And then she glanced slyly across the room again, and took it all in once more,—Mollie, bewitching in all the novelty of her small effort at coquetry; Chandos, leading her on, and evidently enjoying the task he ...
— Vagabondia - 1884 • Frances Hodgson Burnett
... not to blame. There was no false play on either side; he is as much above the meanness of coquetry, as—I must say it—as I am. His thoughts were all along taken up with you, even while he talked, and laughed, and quarrelled with me. While I, so strong in the belief that worlds could not shake my ...
— Marriage • Susan Edmonstone Ferrier
... which was nothing less than his falling in love, for the second time in his life. He met, saw, and was conquered by Elizabeth Newton, the daughter of a wheelwright, at Ashton, a small hamlet close to Helpston. She was but a plain girl, but possessed of all the arts of coquetry; and though John Clare did not care much for her at first, she gradually entangled him into fervent affection, or what he held to be such. It was not Platonic love, by any means, like that for sweet Mary Joyce; and less so on the part of the lass than on that of her lover. John, ...
— The Life of John Clare • Frederick Martin
... however, instinct decided for her that any approach to coquetry would be a mistake, if she sought to make a good impression at the beginning. It was with an air of amiable candor, then, that she said, "Monsieur desire to speak with me?" She added helpfully, "I ...
— The Woman in Black • Edmund Clerihew Bentley
... close up to the throat or low. It is, however, in bad taste to wear them very low on the shoulders and bosom: in youth, it gives evidence of the absence of that modesty which is one of its greatest attractions; and in maturer years it is the indication of a depraved coquetry, which checks the admiration ...
— The Jewish Manual • Judith Cohen Montefiore
... she said, simply, frankly and with no touch of a coquetry that had been harshly at discord with time ...
— The Lion's Skin • Rafael Sabatini
... equal justice, draw the characters of the women there, from those which he might meet with on board the ships in one of the naval ports, or in the purlieus of Covent-Garden and Drury-Lane. I must however allow, that they are all completely versed in the art of coquetry, and that very few of them fix any bounds to their conversation. It is therefore no wonder that they have obtained ...
— A General History and Collection of Voyages and Travels, Volume 14 • Robert Kerr
... there was something she wished to say. She would not deny her love, her great love for him. She realized that she had loved him from the first. Her resistance had been part of her illness—it was not coquetry, he must not think that. Now her eyes were opened and her heart was singing with joy. She was the happiest woman in the world at the thought that she ...
— Possessed • Cleveland Moffett
... fever mist, gathering round the ramparts, hid the city from view. Shiraz has been called the "Paris of Persia," from the cheerful, sociable character of its people as compared with other Persian cities; also, perhaps, partly from the beauty and coquetry (to use no other term) of ...
— A Ride to India across Persia and Baluchistan • Harry De Windt
... gallant citizens—not won against the Phoenician and the Mede, like those of Cimon, but by the ruin of a city united with ourselves in amity and origin." The ready minister replied to the invective of Elpinice by a line from Archilochus, which, in alluding to the age and coquetry of the lady, probably answered the oratorical purpose of securing the laugh on his own ...
— Athens: Its Rise and Fall, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... noicer to have two beaux to your string?" As he thus wittily expressed himself, the gentleman took off his cap, and thrust his fingers through a very curling and comely head of hair; the young lady looked at him with evident coquetry, and said, "How you ...
— Night and Morning, Volume 2 • Edward Bulwer Lytton
... that a woman may be able to keep a cook, may be finely educated, may possess the sentiment of coquetry, may have the right to pass whole hours in her boudoir lying on a sofa, and may live a life of soul, she must have at least six thousand francs a year if she lives in the country, and twenty thousand if she lives at Paris. These two financial limits will suggest to you ...
— Analytical Studies • Honore de Balzac
... health, to great advantage; and as she moved among her guests; her tall, slender form, so full of dignity, she was the "observed of all observers." Her winning smile, so dangerous to those gallants in attendance who had never realized the true sense of coquetry, was unusually fascinating, and every one who had been honored by Miss Winnie's notice, pronounced her decidedly the belle of the season; but as they turned to the gentle creature at her side, their thoughts gradually assumed a different cast,—unconsciously the mind ...
— Natalie - A Gem Among the Sea-Weeds • Ferna Vale
... he, 'is trying to play me a trick.—She hides her face and pretends to be a fright, while the coquetry of her manners and the perfect ease of her conversation convince me that she cannot be otherwise than beautiful.—What, the owner of that superb voice and that elegant form, ugly? Impossible! Now I can easily guess her object in trying to play off this little piece of ...
— City Crimes - or Life in New York and Boston • Greenhorn
... jeunes premieres of the capital. She has been justly called the most loveable actress upon the French stage; so graceful, so soft and womanly, displaying alternately such genuine feeling and nature, and such arch coquetry of manner; always such great freshness of style. We were pleased to see her properly appreciated during her last visit to London, both by press and public. Trained to the stage from so early an age—although not, as Mademoiselle ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, No. CCCLXXVI. February, 1847. Vol. LXI. • Various
... hand touched his arm. He looked into Ellen Lessing's upturned face and discovered anew that it was a face to hold the attention of a man. But there was no coquetry in it. Instead, he saw a stirred look in eyes which struck him suddenly as singularly like those of the child he had just shown her, "black, ...
— Red Pepper Burns • Grace S. Richmond
... alpaca, wild as to his hair, gay as to his feet, but, withal, the scholarly gentleman complete, and not a day older or younger, apparently, than when Honor had last seen him, nine years since, in bondage then to the child playing at coquetry, as now to the coquette playing at childhood. It was curious, Honor thought, to see how, though so much more uncouth and negligent than Robert, the indefinable signs of good blood made themselves visible, while they were wanting in one as truly the Christian ...
— Hopes and Fears - scenes from the life of a spinster • Charlotte M. Yonge
... transition; nevertheless, both have a share in this story. A company of French dancers appeared in Mexico, a twentieth-rate ballet, and the chief danseuse was a little French damsel, remarkable for the shortness of her robes, her coquetry, and her astonishing pirouettes. On the night of a favourite ballet, Mademoiselle Pauline made her entree in a succession of pirouettes, and poising on her toe, looked round for approbation, when a sudden ...
— Life in Mexico • Frances Calderon De La Barca
... morning everything went wrong again. Whether it was merely coquetry, or whether she was angry at their hunting the emus, or whether she for a time preferred Cecil's company, I know not; but she, during the next week, neglected Sam altogether, and refused to sit beside him, making a most tiresome show of being ...
— The Recollections of Geoffrey Hamlyn • Henry Kingsley
... Broken Straw, Witch Hazel and Colored Daisy—"Your folly and coquetry have broken the spell ...
— The Handy Cyclopedia of Things Worth Knowing - A Manual of Ready Reference • Joseph Triemens
... meditatively. "Why?" she murmured, with an accent which took all tinge of coquetry from ...
— House of Mirth • Edith Wharton
... half-caste child, the lisping chee-chee, or Eurasian, grandiloquently so called, much given to sentimental minstrelsy, juvenile polkas, early coquetry, and early beer, hot curries, loud clothes, bad English, and fast pertness. I never think of them without recalling a precocious ballad-screamer of eight years who was flourished indispensably at every ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 1, No. 5, March, 1858 • Various
... dimpled into a smile and flushed to her low, white forehead, on which the soft hair was smoothly parted before it broke into sunny curls about the temples. She exhaled an atmosphere of gentleness mixed with a saintly coquetry, which produced an impression at once human and divine, such as one receives from the sight of a rose in a Bible or a curl in the hair of a saint. The judge looked at her warmly, sighing half ...
— The Voice of the People • Ellen Glasgow
... a very small, sweet, almost infantile voice. It was frightened, yet with a certain coquetry in it. This small Hungarian girl had met with very few looks and words in her whole life which were not admiring. In spite of her poor estate she had the power of the eternal feminine, and she used it knowingly, but quite artlessly. She knew exactly how to speak to her "Mr. Captain," ...
— The Debtor - A Novel • Mary E. Wilkins Freeman
... doesn't answer—too absorbed, and I can't hear that idiot—found he hasn't scored so much after all, and gone off in a huff, I expect. So much the better! What a time she is over this, and how quiet she keeps! I wish I knew whether it was coquetry or—shall I turn round and see? No, I must be perfectly indifferent. And she did laugh at me. I distinctly saw her. Still, if she's sorry, this would be an excellent opportunity for—(Aloud.) Miss PRENDERGAST! ...
— Punch, Or The London Charivari, Vol. 101. October 3rd, 1891 • Various
... be opened. We must show to it that this woman, whom it worships as a chaste Lucretia, as a beautiful saint, is nothing but a very pretty lady with a well-developed form, endowed with little mind, but much coquetry, and who, so far from being a saint, has a very human heart, and has had many an adventure. If M. Lange is willing to write in this strain, I will pardon him.[20] Tragedy must be sometimes transformed into a farce, that the stupid people ...
— Napoleon and the Queen of Prussia • L. Muhlbach
... his affection was returned. On one occasion, a detachment of French soldiers was quartered in Thun for a short time, and a sub-lieutenant, who had in some way been made acquainted with her, was smitten with the charms of the pretty Swiss. I suppose, like some of her sex, she had a spice of coquetry in her composition, and now, possessing two lovers, she had a good opportunity to practise it. Paul Lindhorst, however, was of too earnest a nature to bear this new conduct from the dearest object of his heart with composure, neither was it his disposition to suffer ...
— The International Monthly Magazine, Volume 5, No. 1, January, 1852 • Various
... relaxed but she did not shift her gaze. "You forget. It was not planned—by me." On rare occasions Mary Louise could slip from her matter-of-fact self into coquetry and back again before one realized. It was like the play of a lightning shuttle, so quick that one rarely caught the flash of the back stroke. Joe had erred before. He ...
— Stubble • George Looms
... he said so gravely that the woman beside him knew that life and death were balanced with her words: "tell me, when you said that day last autumn by the well that you never intended to marry, was it just a girl's coquetry or was there some deeper reason for ...
— 'Way Down East - A Romance of New England Life • Joseph R. Grismer
... the vast cravat engulfing the chin, the gaiters, the metal buttons on the greenish coat,—all these reminiscences of Imperial fashions were blended with a sort of afterwaft and lingering perfume of the coquetry of the Incroyable—with an indescribable finical something in the folds of the garments, a certain air of stiffness and correctness in the demeanor that smacked of the school of David, that recalled Jacob's ...
— Poor Relations • Honore de Balzac
... after long hatred on Lady Douglas's part and contemptuous indifference on the queen's, that the two women were face to face; therefore the queen, with that instinctive impulse of coquetry which urges women, in whatever situation they find themselves, to desire to be beautiful, above all for women, made a sign to Mary Seyton, and, going to a little mirror fastened to the wall in a heavy Gothic frame, she arranged ...
— CELEBRATED CRIMES, COMPLETE - MARY STUART—1587 • ALEXANDRE DUMAS, PERE
... Mart's babies, and summoned in sundry little waifs from the neighborhood, and had games and romps and laughter and merry voices. Later in the week there was a dinner at which the Cranstons and some fort friends appeared; there was a mistletoe bough that night and not a little coquetry and merriment, for Wells had invited the library girls and numerous young men to be present, and the customs of Old England were reproduced with characteristic American exaggeration. That mistletoe bough remained suspended from its chandelier, a reminder of the joys of the ...
— A Tame Surrender, A Story of The Chicago Strike • Charles King
... really controversial—a bit. It's quite personal!" She was the most extraordinary girl; she could speak such words as those without the smallest look of added consciousness coming into her face, without the least supposable intention of coquetry, or any visible purpose of challenging the young ...
— The Bostonians, Vol. II (of II) • Henry James
... call arrant coquetry, such as even Camilla never indulged in. The girl kept out of his way—was absolutely chill and repelling half the evening—throwing herself at the officers from Backsworth, till at last Frank obtained a waltz, and after ...
— The Three Brides • Charlotte M. Yonge
... automobile! . . . Julio at first had supposed her like all the others who were languishing in his arms, following the rhythmic complications of the dance, but he soon found that she was very different. Her coquetry after the first confidential words, but increased his admiration. He really had never before been thrown with a woman of her class. Those of his first social period were the habituees of the night restaurants paid for their ...
— The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse • Vicente Blasco Ibanez
... pretty tightly strained, but most of them contain a capital hit and are usually founded on the facts. It is a well authenticated fact that the beaver has but one mate; and, that they live together a loving couple, as if husband and wife. As to their liaisons, coquetry, flirting and so forth, doubtless the society in some parts of the human family will bear a faithful resemblance in these respects also. As an example of industry the world will look in vain for a better one than is afforded by the little beaver of the Western Rivers. Look at ...
— The Life and Adventures of Kit Carson, the Nestor of the Rocky Mountains, from Facts Narrated by Himself • De Witt C. Peters
... banquets, and, since the women were present in quite the same capacity as the performers who were hired to appear later on the stage, they did not allow the moments to drag. A bohemian spirit prevailed; the ardor of the men, lashed on by laughter, coquetry, and smiles, rose quickly; wine flowed, and a general intimacy began. Introductions were no longer necessary, the talk flew back and forth along the rim of the ...
— The Auction Block • Rex Beach
... towards him. Simplicity verges on coquetry. Was she flirting? he said to himself. No forcible translation of favour into suspicion was able to uphold such a theory. The performance had been too well done to be anything but real. It had the ...
— A Pair of Blue Eyes • Thomas Hardy
... anything more than friendship between them. But she changed all this as she put her hand upon the look of the door. She would be honest to him—honest and true. She was, in truth, glad to see him, and he should know it. What cared she now for the common ways of women and the usual coyness of feminine coquetry? She told herself also, in language somewhat differing from that which Doodles had used, that her filly days were gone by, and that she was now a trained mare. All this passed through her mind as her hand was ...
— The Claverings • Anthony Trollope
... alarmed at the appearance of a handsome stranger on the opposite side, dropped their garments (I should say garment, to be quite-correct) over their limbs, which their occupation exposed somewhat too freely, and, with a shrill exclamation of 'Eh, sirs!' uttered with an accent between modesty and coquetry, sprang off ...
— Waverley • Sir Walter Scott
... assured himself that the one thing which, more than anything else, would make him cease to love her, would be her refusal to abandon the habit of lying. "Even from the point of view of coquetry, pure and simple," he had told her, "can't you see how much of your attraction you throw away when you stoop to lying? By a frank admission—how many faults you might redeem! Really, you are far less ...
— Swann's Way - (vol. 1 of Remembrance of Things Past) • Marcel Proust
... that every curve was emphasized. I suppose this effect was the result of the Spanish mode rather than of individual sophistication; just as the succession of lazy poses and bendings were the result of a racial feminine instinct rather than of conscious personal coquetry. Certainly we four red-shirted tramps were poor enough game. Nevertheless, whatever the motive, the effect was certainly real enough. She was alluring rather than charming, with her fan and her rebosa, her veiled glances, her ...
— Gold • Stewart White
... day, she was not late by coquetry, but because she had changed her dress at the last minute, and because she was afraid of letting him think her eager. She saw him at once standing under the colonnade, looking by no means imperturbable, and marked the change in his face when he ...
— Forsyte Saga • John Galsworthy
... to my nostrils, as I held the braid. Who could the woman be who brought that costly fragrance into a deserted farmhouse? For so exquisite and unique a fragrance could only be the work of a master perfumer. There was youth in that vigorous hair, coquetry in the individual perfume, panic in her useless sacrifice of the braid I held; yet strangest self-possession in the telling of that fanciful ...
— The Thing from the Lake • Eleanor M. Ingram
... And so she had been thrown upon her own resources, with the excellent result that she had grown up with a mind untainted by any worldly thought. And now, when this man came to her with his version of the old, old story, she knew no coquetry, knew how to exercise no coyness or other blandishment. She made no pretense of any sort. She loved him, so what else was there to do but ...
— The Night Riders - A Romance of Early Montana • Ridgwell Cullum
... of soft material that are the usual wear of common adult Utopian women; they are both dark and sallow, and they affect amber and crimson in their garments. Their faces strike me as a little unintelligent, and there is a faint touch of middle-aged coquetry in their bearing that I do not like. Yet on earth we should consider them women of exceptional refinement. But the botanist evidently sees in this direction scope for the feelings that have wilted a little under my inattention, and he begins that petty intercourse of a word, of a slight civility, ...
— A Modern Utopia • H. G. Wells
... believed she did not love Malicorne; whilst, on the contrary, in reality she did. Malicorne repeated to her so often his protestation of indifference, that she finished, sometimes, by believing him; and then she believed she detested Malicorne. If she tried to bring him back by coquetry, Malicorne played the coquette better than she could. But what made Montalais hold to Malicorne in an indissoluble fashion, was that Malicorne always came cram full of fresh news from the court and the city; Malicorne always brought to Blois a fashion, a secret, or a perfume; that Malicorne never ...
— Ten Years Later • Alexandre Dumas, Pere
... said, as we went up the steps. When we reached the portico she shook my arm a little, as if my looks were importunate; for though her eyes were lowered she knew that I saw only her. Then she said, with a charming air of pretended impatience, full of grace and coquetry, "Come, why don't you look ...
— The Lily of the Valley • Honore de Balzac
... two? The utmost thing of practical value she could do was to buy a new, gay dressing-gown and a pair of high-heeled slippers. And Andrew, conscious of waning beauty, overlooked it in the light of her new and unsuspected coquetry. Where once the slattern lolled about the little salon, now moved an attractively garbed and tidy woman. Instead of the sloven, he found a housewife who made up in zeal for lack of experience. The patriotic soldier's mate replaced the indifferent ...
— The Mountebank • William J. Locke
... seen the capricious diva on the stage or in Parisian salons can form little idea of the proprietress of Cabrières. No shade of coquetry blurs the clear picture of her home life. The capped and saboted peasant women who waited on us were not more simple in their ways. Several times during the meal she left her seat to inquire after the comfort of some ...
— The Ways of Men • Eliot Gregory
... very dark hair swept back over her temples with something near trimness in the extent to which it was withheld from being fluffy. It may be that this approach to trimness, which was, after all, only a sort of coquetry with trimness, is the true key to the mystery of the vision of the lady who appeared to Joe. Let us say that she suppressed everything that went beyond grace; that the hint of floridity was abhorrent to her. "Trim" is ...
— The Conquest of Canaan • Booth Tarkington
... open—the play of Othello, you will have some idea of what followed—I mean of my motives—my actions, thank God! were less reprehensible. There was another cadet ambitious of the vacant situation. He called my attention to what he led me to term coquetry between my wife and this young man. Sophia was virtuous, but proud of her virtue; and, irritated by my jealousy, she was so imprudent as to press and encourage an intimacy which she saw I disapproved and regarded with suspicion. ...
— Guy Mannering • Sir Walter Scott
... A letter from Miss Howe to Clarissa falls into his hands; which, had it come to her's, would have laid open and detected all his designs. In it she acquits Clarissa of prudery, coquetry, and undue reserve. Admires, applauds, blesses her for the example she has set for her sex, and for the credit she has done it, by her conduct ...
— Clarissa, Volume 5 (of 9) • Samuel Richardson
... your painstaking work; is it a coquetry? It does not seem labored. What I find difficult is to choose out of the thousand combinations of scenic action which can vary infinitely, the clear and striking situation which is not brutal nor forced. As for style, I attach less importance to it ...
— The George Sand-Gustave Flaubert Letters • George Sand, Gustave Flaubert
... sweetened by the womanly wish to please; her hair is trimmed, and curled, and brushed with exquisite neatness; and her whole dress arranged with that nice attention to the becoming, the suitable both in form and texture, which would be called the highest degree of coquetry, if it did not deserve the better name of propriety. Never was such a transmogrification beheld. The lass is really pretty, and Ned Miles has discovered that she is so. There he stands, the rogue, close at her ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, Vol. 12, - Issue 345, December 6, 1828 • Various
... with Mrs. Bleecker of this and that, striving the while to catch Lana Helmer's eye. For not only did her coquetry with Boyd make me uneasy, knowing them both as I did, but on my own account I desired to speak to her in private when opportunity afforded. Alone and singly either of these people stood in no danger from the outer world. Pitted against each other, what their ...
— The Hidden Children • Robert W. Chambers
... to rational conviction. The first aspect of the guest-chamber had inspired him with a joyous credulity. It wooed him with its large and welcoming light, its four walls were golden white and warm, and in all its details he had found unmistakable evidences of design. There was an overruling coquetry in the decorative effects, in the minute little arrangements for his comfort. A finer hand than any housemaid's must have heaped that blue china bowl with roses, laid out that writing-table, and chosen the books in the shelf beside the bed. A woman ...
— The Return of the Prodigal • May Sinclair
... master might refine a little in these speculations, which he had drawn from what he observed himself, or had been told him by others; however, I could not reflect without some amazement, and much sorrow, that the rudiments of lewdness, coquetry, censure, and scandal, should have ...
— Gulliver's Travels - into several remote nations of the world • Jonathan Swift
... little that is known it seems probable that the number of such tokens is not great,—even the kiss is by no means general! We can only be sure of a universal tendency to approach and to touch one another, and of a disposition to self exhibition and coquetry as probably instinctive and of the special forms which these tendencies take under the influence of imitation and tradition as secondary causes. Caressing contact may then be regarded as play when it is an end ...
— A Preliminary Study of the Emotion of Love between the Sexes • Sanford Bell
... to her wishes, offered his arm to lead her into the pleached walks of the illuminated garden. Angelique rose, gathered up her rich train, and with an air of royal coquetry took his arm and accompanied the Intendant on a promenade down the ...
— The Golden Dog - Le Chien d'Or • William Kirby
... de Medici," a slender young girl with a small delicate head, not a goddess like her sister of Milo, but a perfect mortal and the work of some Praxiteles fond of "hetairae," at ease in a nude state and free from that somewhat mawkish delicacy and bashful coquetry which its copies, and the restored arms with their thin fingers by Bernini, seem to ...
— Seeing Europe with Famous Authors, Volume 7 - Italy, Sicily, and Greece (Part One) • Various
... that coquetry which somehow or other is in the heart of every young girl, "I have often been sorry that I am not able to read, but never so much so as when your housekeeper brought me your letter. I kept the paper in my hands, which spoke to other people, and ...
— The Black Tulip • Alexandre Dumas (Pere)
... ostrich plumes, thy shoes with their heels of mother-of-pearl, that serve to increase thy stature; thy glittering diamonds, the scent of thy hair, the tint of thy nails,—all the artifices of thy coquetry shall disappear, and missiles shall be found wherewith ...
— Herodias • Gustave Flaubert
... heart must have told her ere this how dear she was to him, and it was no egotism or conceit that prompted him to the belief that she would not show such pleasure in his coming if he were utterly indifferent to her. Coquetry was something Nellie Bayard seemed deficient in; she was frank and truthful in every look ...
— 'Laramie;' - or, The Queen of Bedlam. • Charles King
... her voice, while still full of coquetry, was urgent, and I think we both noted for the first time how white of face she was, and how wearily her eyes shone. The Frenchman, ever ready in such courtesies, was the first to ...
— When Wilderness Was King - A Tale of the Illinois Country • Randall Parrish
... of the house into the glowing sunset and spring weather of our landing, I stopped, amazed, in the gravelled walk of our garden, because of the incredible beauty of the maid, now first revealed in bloom, and because of her modesty, which was yet slyly aglint with coquetry, and because of the tender gravity of her years, disclosed in the first poignant search of the soul I had brought back from my long journeying. I thought, I recall, at the moment of our meeting, that laboring in a mood of highest exaltation God had of the ...
— The Cruise of the Shining Light • Norman Duncan
... unconcern, making braids of her hair, and breathing with more ease, and using her eyes well the while. The piercing look of the padre was the only one she faltered under, and that of Gonzalvo she met in elusive coquetry. ...
— The Flute of the Gods • Marah Ellis Ryan
... literal man, found no warrant for fresh hope in any of the not very significant words which he repeated to himself as he rode home up the valley of the Blent. He suffered under modesty; it needed more than coquetry to convince him that he exercised any attraction over the rich and brilliant (brilliance also is a matter of comparison) Miss Iver, on whose favor Mr Tristram waited and at whose side Major Duplay ...
— Tristram of Blent - An Episode in the Story of an Ancient House • Anthony Hope
... 1695. It is not clear whether she was married, or whether the name Bicknell was taken to distinguish her from her sister, Mrs. Young, who was also an actress. We first hear of her acting in 1706; she took parts in which sauciness and coquetry were the chief features. Her last recorded appearance was on the 2nd of April, 1723; and she died in May. She signed a petition "M. Bicknell"; probably her name was Margaret, her mother's name. Steele alludes to ...
— The Tatler, Volume 1, 1899 • George A. Aitken
... great love, the love that poets sang, and privileged and tortured beings lived and died of, that love had its own superior expressiveness, and the sure command of its means. The petty arts of coquetry were no farther from it than the numbness of the untaught girl. Great love was wise, strong, powerful, like genius, like any other dominant form of human power. It knew itself, and what it wanted, and ...
— The Glimpses of the Moon • Edith Wharton
... and I went, after seeing her 'Rosiere de Salency,' with the most favourable disposition, but I could not like her.... And from time to time I saw, or thought I saw, through the gloom of her countenance a gleam of coquetry. But my father judges of her much more favourably than I do. She evidently took pains to please him, and he says he is sure she is a person over whose mind he could gain ...
— A Book of Sibyls - Miss Barbauld, Miss Edgeworth, Mrs Opie, Miss Austen • Anne Thackeray (Mrs. Richmond Ritchie)
... gracious salute to us all, and, glancing at me with a spice of coquetry, to which she was evidently not unaccustomed, was pleased to observe, that I was ...
— The Ghost Ship - A Mystery of the Sea • John C. Hutcheson
... contemplating Hilda's work with great interest and delight, mixed with the painful sympathy that the picture excited. "Everywhere we see oil-paintings, crayon sketches, cameos, engravings, lithographs, pretending to be Beatrice, and representing the poor girl with blubbered eyes, a leer of coquetry, a merry look as if she were dancing, a piteous look as if she were beaten, and twenty other modes of fantastic mistake. But here is Guido's very Beatrice; she that slept in the dungeon, and awoke, betimes, to ascend the scaffold, And now that you have done it, Hilda, can you interpret ...
— The Marble Faun, Volume I. - The Romance of Monte Beni • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... bear rather—in a strange garret, roamed the Tiffany home and entertained her who would listen. He warmed to Kate especially, and that household fairy, in her flights between errands of mercy, played him with all the prettiness of her coquetry. At luncheon he quite lost his embarrassment and responded to the advances of three friendly humans. Yes ma-am, he had been glad to learn that Bertram was doing well in the city. He had five sons, all doing well. He'd risked letting Bert try college, ...
— The Readjustment • Will Irwin
... by whom she was accompanied was not so tall, and of a much slighter form; her limbs delicately moulded, and her features more attractive than beautiful. There was that about her whole demeanour which is expressively termed coquetry, not the coquetry of action, but of feeling: her eyes were dark and brilliant, her mouth full and pouting; and the nose was only saved from vulgarity by that turn, to describe which we are compelled to use a foreign term—it was un ...
— The Buccaneer - A Tale • Mrs. S. C. Hall
... attacking some town in the wars of the Fronde. The breach was scarcely practicable, and the best of the besieging army had recoiled from it with great loss. The Black Mousquetaires stood by in all the coquetry of scarf, and plume, and fringed scented gloves, laughing louder at each repulse of the Linesmen. The soldiers heard them and gnashed their teeth. At last there was a murmur, and then a shout—'En avant les Gants Glaces!' They wanted to see 'the swells' beaten too. Then ...
— Guy Livingstone; - or, 'Thorough' • George A. Lawrence
... musically! and nodded her little head at me with an air of sublimated coquetry that would have done ...
— She • H. Rider Haggard
... with him, any evidence of a personal interest, or only a young girl's enjoyment of her new position in the world? That she liked him he was sure. Did she, was she beginning in any degree to return his passion? He could not tell, for guilelessness in a woman is as impenetrable as coquetry. ...
— Baddeck and That Sort of Thing • Charles Dudley Warner
... right-minded persons most justly condemn. At least, that a young beauty should torture a man with alternate liking and indifference; allure, dismiss, and call him back out of banishment; practise arts to please upon him, and ignore them when rebuked for her coquetry—these are surely occurrences so common in young women's history as to call for no special censure; and if on these charges Miss Newcome is guilty, is she, of all her sex, ...
— The Newcomes • William Makepeace Thackeray
... she was exquisitely beautiful. Fair-haired, with a complexion of dazzling purity, large expressive eyes, delicate but commanding features, she had a singular fascination of look and gesture, and a winning, almost childlike, simplicity of manner. Without feminine artifice or commonplace coquetry, she seemed to bewitch and subdue at a glance men of all ranks, ages, and pursuits; kings and cardinals, great generals, ambassadors and statesmen, as well as humbler mortals whether Spanish, Italian, French, or Flemish. The Constable, an ignorant man who, as the King averred, could ...
— The Rise of the Dutch Republic, 1555-1566 • John Lothrop Motley
... in the vicinity of Forbes Gurney. Why, she could scarcely say. It was not coquetry. She just drew near, talked to him of stage work and her plays and her ambitions. She sketched him as she had Cowperwood and others, and one day Cowperwood found three studies of Forbes Gurney in her note-book idyllicly done, a note of ...
— The Titan • Theodore Dreiser
... There were possibilities in the child-and it seemed a pity that no strong guiding hand led the way on a road like hers, which had so many turnings. She was only an overgrown child as yet, flat chested, slender, almost a boy, and yet redeemed to femininity by an unconscious coquetry which she could no more control than she could the warm flush of her blood; a child indeed, full of quick impulses ...
— Madcap • George Gibbs
... lived a lady neighbor, Who had two daughters, beautiful as lilies on a stem; And he asked that one of them be given him in marriage— He did not care which one it was, but left the choice to them. But, oh, the terror that they felt, their efforts to evade him, With careless art, with coquetry, with wile and stratagem! ...
— On the Tree Top • Clara Doty Bates
... luxurious complexion, her clear, honest voice, and all else that made me feel both happy and forlorn in her company. Nor would she, aware as she undoubtedly was of the meaning of my look or smile, hesitate to respond to them by some legitimate bit of coquetry. In short, we often held converse in that language of smiles, glances, blushes, pauses, gestures, which is the gesture language of sex across the ...
— The Rise of David Levinsky • Abraham Cahan
... black-headed bonnet pins out of her draped pincushion. On her head there was a cap of lace trimmed gayly with purple ribbons, and beneath this festive adornment, a fringe of false curls, still brown and lustrous, lent a ghastly coquetry to her mummied features. In the square of sunshine, between the gauze curtains at the window, a green parrot, in a wire cage, was scolding viciously while it pecked at a bit of sponge-cake from its mistress's hand. At the time ...
— The Romance of a Plain Man • Ellen Glasgow
... found entertainment in the study of her particular pose, as it seemed to him. If it were not a pose, then her husband was a short-sighted fool and he had no patience with him. The time was past for childish innocence and folly. Coquetry was very captivating, but to play with fire was dangerous, and if he mistook not, she would some day arrive at an understanding of human nature when it was too late to save her self-respect. Her beauty appealed to his artistic sense, but he had no ...
— Banked Fires • E. W. (Ethel Winifred) Savi
... simple. They are masculine—and in their actions you never get a trace of coyness, hesitancy, affectation or trifling coquetry. They have nothing to conceal: they look at you out of frank, open eyes. They know the pains of earth too well to dance nimbly through life and laugh the hours away. They are sober, serious, earnest, but not grim. Their ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great, Volume 4 (of 14) - Little Journeys to the Homes of Eminent Painters • Elbert Hubbard
... for his mother made it a kind of punishment for his quarrel with Neil, that he should remain in London while she visited at Penrhyn Park, where she met with Lady Jane McPherson, whom she admired greatly, and with Daisy, whom she detested for the bold coquetry, which manifested itself so plainly after the arrival of Lord Hardy, that even Mrs. Smithers' sense of propriety was shocked, and she began to look forward with pleasure to the day when her house would be freed from the ...
— Bessie's Fortune - A Novel • Mary J. Holmes
... flow of conversation; but it is a fact capable of an amiable interpretation that ladies are not the worst disposed toward a new acquaintance of their own sex because she has points of inferiority. And Maggie was so entirely without those pretty airs of coquetry which have the traditional reputation of driving gentlemen to despair that she won some feminine pity for being so ineffective in spite of her beauty. She had not had many advantages, poor thing! and ...
— The Mill on the Floss • George Eliot
... girl, the daughter of a rich general, who could speak three languages, gave away all that her rich brother sent her, and lived like the simplest working girl, and dressed not only simply, but poorly, paying no heed to her appearance. This trait and a complete absence of coquetry was particularly surprising and therefore attractive to Maslova. Maslova could see that Mary Pavlovna knew, and was even pleased to know, that she was handsome, and yet the effect her appearance had on men was not at all pleasing ...
— Resurrection • Count Leo Tolstoy
... be expected only from an artist, and not from a pupil. Therefore, with more advanced pupils, I take up in my lessons, in connection with a sonata by Beethoven, a nocturne or waltz by Chopin, and a piece by St. Heller or Schulhoff, Henselt, C. Meyer, &c. Elegance and polish, a certain coquetry, nicety, delicacy, and fine shading cannot be perfected in the study of a sonata by Beethoven; for which, however, the latter pieces present much greater opportunities. Besides this, variety is ...
— Piano and Song - How to Teach, How to Learn, and How to Form a Judgment of - Musical Performances • Friedrich Wieck
... person most unpleasantly affected by the course which this affair had taken. He could no longer conceal from himself the fact that he was as much m love as a dignified Virginian could be. With him, at all events, she had shown no coquetry, nor had she ever either flattered or encouraged him. But Carrington, m his solitary struggle against fate, had found her a warm friend; always ready to assist where assistance was needed, generous with her money in any ...
— Democracy An American Novel • Henry Adams
... stolid male, and olive-skinned, bright-eyed, supple female, accorded him. Surfeited for the time of the luxury of the limitless plain, Riel took rest; and then a girl with the lustrous eyes of Normandy began to smile upon him, and to besiege his heart with all her mysterious force of coquetry. He was not proof; and the hunter soon lay entangled in the meshes of the brown girl of the plains. In the autumn of 1843 he married her. Her name was Julie de Lagimodiere, a daughter ...
— The Story of Louis Riel: The Rebel Chief • Joseph Edmund Collins
... presented an attractive blending of simplicity and archness. It was something like an outline of Greuze touched up by Gavarni. All her youthful attractions were cleverly set off by a toilette which, although very simple, attested in her that innate science of coquetry which all women possess from their first swaddling clothes to their bridal robe. Louise appeared besides to have made an especial study of the theory of attitudes, and assumed before Rodolphe, who examined her with the artistic eye, a number of seductive poses. Her neatly shod feet were of ...
— Bohemians of the Latin Quarter • Henry Murger
... which she could not yet wholly subdue lent her an air of girlish timidity. All in all, Barine was a charming creature, who bewitched men by her vivacity, her grace, and her exquisite voice, not by coquetry and pertness. That she possessed unusual mental endowments Cleopatra did not believe. Barine had only one advantage ...
— Uarda • Georg Ebers
... This is innocent coquetry and perhaps said to test my self-restraint, which is equal to the occasion. An impatient admirer might ...
— Alone • Norman Douglas
... chocolate, which was extremely well frothed. Candide could not help making encomiums upon their beauty and graceful carriage. "The creatures are well enough," said the senator. "I make them my companions, for I am heartily tired of the ladies of the town, their coquetry, their jealousy, their quarrels, their humors, their meannesses, their pride, and their folly. I am weary of making sonnets, or of paying for sonnets to be made, on them; but, after all, these two girls begin to ...
— Classic French Course in English • William Cleaver Wilkinson
... afternoon, being in the residential quarter, he noticed a well-dressed young girl walking before him in company with a delicate looking boy of seven or eight years. Something in the carriage of her graceful figure, something in a certain consciousness and ostentation of coquetry toward her youthful escort, attracted his attention. Yet it struck him that she was neither related to the child nor accustomed to children's ways, and that she somewhat unduly emphasized this to the passers-by, particularly those of ...
— Trent's Trust and Other Stories • Bret Harte
... waking him. Then he entered upon such explanations as he was able to give. Pere Maurice, sitting upon his three-legged stool in the doorway, listened gravely to him, and, although he was ill pleased with the result of the expedition, when Germain, after describing the widow's system of coquetry, asked his father in-law if he had time to go and pay court to her fifty-two Sundays in the year with the chance of being dismissed at the end of the year, the old man replied, nodding his head in token of assent: "You are not wrong, Germain; that couldn't be." And again, ...
— The Devil's Pool • George Sand
... a cure; it was merely a temporary drug for our vanity," he rejoined gaily. "It didn't cure me, so you could hardly regard it as a remedy for Mrs. Stribling's complaint. I imagine coquetry is a more obstinate malady even than priggishness, and, Heaven knows, I tried hard enough ...
— One Man in His Time • Ellen Glasgow
... while yet he was amused, by the evident coquetry the girl displayed, collecting around her a whole bevy of young fellows, for each of whom she seemed to have some gay speech, some attractive look or action. In a few minutes young Griffiths of Bodowen ...
— The Doom of the Griffiths • Elizabeth Gaskell
... made their cottage a resting-place after the fatigues of hunting, and requested a draught of milk from her hands to allay his thirst, or a bunch of roses from her little flower plot to adorn his waistcoat, Elinor answered his demands with secret mistrust and terror; although, with the coquetry so natural to her sex, she could not hate him for the amiable weakness ...
— Mark Hurdlestone - Or, The Two Brothers • Susanna Moodie
... much finer than that bonnet with its silken facings! She tied the wide strings underneath her chin in a great, flaring bow, and peeped forth from the cavernous depths of the arched "poke" with quite unconscious coquetry, flirting, with the keenest relish and most completely childish pleasure with the charming creature whom she saw reflected on the little ...
— In Old Kentucky • Edward Marshall and Charles T. Dazey
... folds on her back, and she had both hands in the pockets of a black apron which she was flapping up and down on her dark red skirt. The other, a short, dark creature, whose face was still red from having been scrubbed with soap, was enveloped as to her head, with the coquetry of a fishwoman, in a white knitted hood ...
— Germinie Lacerteux • Edmond and Jules de Goncourt
... A reproving finger was shaken at him with the archest coquetry. "If you talk that way I shan't give you another cup of tea, no matter how hard you beg. But where was I? Oh, yes, I was telling you that Mr. Oldham so often discussed business ...
— The Silver Butterfly • Mrs. Wilson Woodrow
... Cesarini brought to Ferrers the answer he had received from Maltravers. Lumley had rightly foreseen that the high spirit of Ernest would conceive some indignation at the coquetry of Florence in beguiling the Italian into hopes never to be realised, and that he would express himself openly and warmly. He did so, however, with more ...
— Ernest Maltravers, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... to her whole relations, from first to last, with Ladislaw. It is not easy to conceive anything more touchingly beautiful than these, more perfectly in harmony with her whole nature. Of anything approaching either coquetry or prudery she is incapable. The utter absence of all self-consciousness, whether of external beauty or inward loveliness; the ethereal purity, the childlike trustfulness, the instinctive recognition ...
— The Ethics of George Eliot's Works • John Crombie Brown
... thinking. "Do you want me to call him in?" she said quietly, but without the least trace of archness or coquetry. "Would you rather he were here—or shall we go out now and meet him? I'll say you just came ...
— Cressy • Bret Harte
... seat—Amy Lawrence bending eagerly forward and gazing with her beautiful eyes alight with sympathy, interest and frank liking in search of the sorely disappointed young officer. "There he is!" she cried, though too far away for him to hear, and then, with no more thought of coquetry than a kitten, with no more motive in the world than that of conveying to him an idea of her sorrow, her sympathy, her perhaps pardonable and exaggerated indignation at what she deemed an act of tyranny on part of his commander, with ...
— Found in the Philippines - The Story of a Woman's Letters • Charles King
... said Isabel, softly. Then she added with frankness utterly free from coquetry, "I like ...
— Old Rose and Silver • Myrtle Reed
... of coquetry she had ever deliberately displayed; and at the same instant she became aware that something new had been suddenly awakened in her—something which stole like a glow through her veins, exciting her with ...
— The Danger Mark • Robert W. Chambers
... it is odds I shall never see you more." She said it without hesitation and without coquetry, for her upbringing had been simple and natural in an atmosphere different far from that in which had been reared the courtly women he had known. "You will return to Paris and the great world, and I shall live out ...
— St. Martin's Summer • Rafael Sabatini
... shoulders. This little detail will show the care which she gave to her person; it was her pride to rejoice the eyes of the old baron. What a charming, delicate attention! When you see a woman displaying in her own home the coquetry which most women spend on a single sentiment, believe me, that woman is as noble a mother as she is a wife; she is the joy and the flower of the home; she knows her obligations as a woman; in her soul, in her tenderness, you will find her outward ...
— Beatrix • Honore de Balzac
... began. She had stopped just within the door, her body and her face stiff with repression, her teeth closed hard and the white lights flashing sharply in the pale, clean blue of her eyes. Her bearing was full of the strange coquetry of anger and of fear, the stiffness, the bridling, the suggestive movement underneath the rigidness of forced control, all the queer ways the passions have to ...
— Three Lives - Stories of The Good Anna, Melanctha and The Gentle Lena • Gertrude Stein
... attained the object of her wishes. She had finally reached it by bribery and intrigue, by hypocritical tenderness, by the resignation of her maiden modesty and womanly honor, and by all the arts of coquetry. ...
— The Daughter of an Empress • Louise Muhlbach
... plain; and the young lady was amused by it after the manner of her sex. Being very downright himself, Mr. Holt had no idea how much admiration is required to fill the measure of a proposal of marriage in a red-coat's resolve, or how much harmless coquetry lies dormant in ...
— Cedar Creek - From the Shanty to the Settlement • Elizabeth Hely Walshe
... Probably five years afterwards. By that time he must have got tired of his desert and she of her coquetry.' ...
— Correspondence & Conversations of Alexis de Tocqueville with Nassau William Senior from 1834 to 1859, Vol. 2 • Alexis de Tocqueville
... was speaking of grave matters, and many of her friends are in adversity. But you could not help seeing (both Robert and I saw it) that in all she said, even in her kindness and pity, there was an under-current of scorn. A scorn of pleasing she evidently had; there never could have been a colour of coquetry in that woman. Her very freedom from affectation and consciousness had a touch of disdain. But I liked her. I did not love her, but I felt the burning soul through all that quietness, and was not disappointed in George Sand. When we rose to go I could not help saying, ...
— The Letters of Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Volume II • Elizabeth Barrett Browning
... these girls, there had been manifested an expression of mingled curiosity, coquetry and banter on Vaudrey's appearance in their midst. His presence in the manager's box had been noticed and his coming to the greenroom expected. Every one had hurried thither. Sulpice was pointed out. He was the cynosure of all eyes. On the divans beneath the mirror, some young, well-dressed, ...
— His Excellency the Minister • Jules Claretie
... her face again and again from his too ardent gaze; now bending her supple waist from side to side in time with the passionate music; now closing her eyes languorously; now opening them wide and smiling at him tenderly over the top of her fan, a graceful accomplice to her pretty coquetry. At last she surrenders to the wooing, the happy pair dancing away together while the music plays faster and faster until at last it stops with a great crash, that, we trust, not being symbolical of infelicity in wedlock. The dance was very well ...
— A Woman's Journey through the Philippines - On a Cable Ship that Linked Together the Strange Lands Seen En Route • Florence Kimball Russel
... be heartless coquetry if it were I. I hope Lieutenant Reginald Stanford, of Stanford Royals, will like it when he comes. Sir Ronald Keith is over head and ears in love with her, and she knows it, and is drawing him on. A more cold-blooded flirtation no ...
— Kate Danton, or, Captain Danton's Daughters - A Novel • May Agnes Fleming
... consisted each of a cat and a monkey, fantastically draped, in some preposterously sentimental conjunction. They exhibited a certain sameness of motive, and illustrated chiefly the different phases of what, in delicate terms, may be called gallantry and coquetry; but they were strikingly clever and expressive, and were at once very perfect cats and monkeys and very natural men and women. I confess, however, that they failed to amuse me. I was doubtless not in a mood to ...
— The Madonna of the Future • Henry James
... letter proved that Randolph had intruded on her acquaintance, and she had objected from coyness or coquetry; and that when he persisted, she was so enraged that she flew into a passion and wilfully ...
— Vicky Van • Carolyn Wells
... his weather-beaten domino, always, he just displays, with a sort of tragic coquetry, the toe of a stout and serviceable marble boot. And this, I have begun to believe, is all that I shall ever see of him. Else might I not be writing about him; for else had he not so haunted me. If I knew myself destined to see him—to see him steadily ...
— And Even Now - Essays • Max Beerbohm
... possesses one more attraction, because she flatters man's vanity. I do not know whether Aniela is conscious of this, or whether it be her womanly instinct. Maybe she has heard so much about me from my aunt that she deems every word I say an oracle. She is decidedly not without coquetry. To-day I asked her what she wished for most in life. She answered, "To see Rome;" then her eyelashes fell, and she looked indescribably pretty. She sees that I like her, and it makes her happy. Her coquetry is charming, ...
— Without Dogma • Henryk Sienkiewicz
... and when she laughed disclosed two rows of pearl between her rose-colored lips. She was indeed a charming girl, round and dimpled as a child, fresh and gay as a bird, with every gesture graceful, though she was a little espiegle and coquettish. Her coquetry, however, was naive and chaste, of a kind which in many women is but the amiable manifestation of a sentiment of benevolence, and an innocent ...
— International Miscellany of Literature, Art and Science, Vol. 1, - No. 3, Oct. 1, 1850 • Various
... once, but coquettishly pretended to be absorbed in the conversation of those about her. She too had been married a year and more, but her figure had not lost its elegance, and she was very handsome. Her coquetry was partly fear. Estenega's power was felt alike by innocent girls and chaste matrons. There were few scandals in those days; the women of the aristocracy were virtuous by instinct and rigid social laws; but, how it would be hard to tell, Estenega had acquired the reputation ...
— The Doomswoman - An Historical Romance of Old California • Gertrude Franklin Horn Atherton
... and religion always rank second to politics Kings only desire to be obeyed when they command Laws will only be as so many black lines on white paper Love-affair between Mademoiselle de la Valliere and the King Madame de Montespan had died of an attack of coquetry Not show it off was as if one only possessed a kennel That Which Often It is Best to Ignore Violent passion had changed to mere friendship When women rule their reign is always stormy and troublous Wife: property or of furniture, useful to his house Won for himself a great ...
— Widger's Quotations from The Court Memoirs of France • David Widger
... Picking a small, gold case from a heap of baubles at her side, she drew therefrom a cigarette, lighted it, with that innate coquetry that was her bane, and believed that Ivan did not see how the match trembled. After three puffs she suddenly turned her great eyes on the ...
— The Genius • Margaret Horton Potter
... sorrow, complete happiness, are all despotic principles that reign over spaces devoid of production; they insist on being solitary; they stifle all that is not themselves. Vandenesse was not a woman, and none but women know the art of varying happiness; hence their coquetry, refusals, fears, quarrels, and the all-wise clever foolery with which they put in doubt the things that seemed to be without a cloud the night before. Men may weary by their constancy, but women never. Vandenesse was too thoroughly kind ...
— A Daughter of Eve • Honore de Balzac
... and looking up with rapture at her father's gradually brightening face, Raphael could not help stealing glance after glance, and was surprised to find them returned with a bright, honest, smiling gratitude, which met full-eyed, as free from prudery as it was from coquetry.... 'A lady she is,' said he to himself; 'but evidently no city one. There is nature—or something else, there, pure and unadulterated, without any of man's additions or beautifications.' And as he looked, he began to ...
— Hypatia - or, New Foes with an Old Face • Charles Kingsley
... King of Cyprus, in his Prise d'Alexandrie; the Voir dit relates in varying verse and prose the course of his sexagenarian love for a maiden in her teens, Peronne d'Armentieres, who gratified her coquetry with an old poet's adoration, and ...
— A History of French Literature - Short Histories of the Literatures of the World: II. • Edward Dowden
... intellect was capacious. His early prepossessions were on the side of popular rights. He knew the whole beauty and value of the system which he attempted to deface. He was the first of the Rats, the first of those statesmen whose patriotism has been only the coquetry of political prostitution, and whose profligacy has taught governments to adopt the old maxim of the slave-market, that it is cheaper to buy than to breed, to import defenders from an Opposition than to rear them in a Ministry. He was the first Englishman to whom a peerage ...
— Critical and Historical Essays Volume 1 • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... to pay attention to her toilet. She recalled the remark of that passer-by: "Pretty, but badly dressed," the breath of an oracle which had passed beside her and had vanished, after depositing in her heart one of the two germs which are destined, later on, to fill the whole life of woman, coquetry. Love ...
— Les Miserables - Complete in Five Volumes • Victor Hugo
... another—not a sister; in the happy days gone by, You'd have known her by the merriment that sparkled in her eye; Too innocent for coquetry,—too fond for idle scorning,— Oh! friend, I fear the lightest heart makes sometimes heaviest mourning; Tell her the last night of my life (for ere the moon be risen My body will be out of pain—my soul be out of prison), I dreamed I stood with her, and saw the yellow sunlight shine ...
— The American Union Speaker • John D. Philbrick
... regretted her defection, and now, recalling her, the other women seemed insipid, their childish graces and monotonous coquetry disgusting him. ...
— Against The Grain • Joris-Karl Huysmans
... support of that consciousness I can bear a good deal of the coquetry of public opinion, which has her caprices, and must have her way. Miseri, quibus intentata nitet! I, too, have had my holiday of popularity in Ireland. I have even heard of an intention to erect a statue.[15] ...
— The Works of the Right Honourable Edmund Burke, Vol. VI. (of 12) • Edmund Burke
... and cease to care for one another. Polygamy is frequent, polyandry also occurs, and there are many cases of absolute profligate promiscuity. We shall, indeed, find the suggestion of all the sexual sins of humanity, every form of coquetry, of love-battles, jealousy and the like. There are as well many examples of monogamic unions lasting for the lives of the partners. This is especially the case with birds. Among the higher mammals polygamy is most common, but permanent unions are formed, especially among the anthropoid apes. Thus ...
— The Truth About Woman • C. Gasquoine Hartley
... veritable anthropoidal Don Juan among his fellows, when turned loose in a village commences making violent love to the wives and sweethearts of the resident monkeys. The faithless fair, ever ready for coquetry and flirtation, flattered beyond measure by the attentions of the gallant stranger, forsake their first loves by the wholesale, and bask shamelessly in the sunshine of his favor. The result is that the outraged males, afraid to ...
— Around the World on a Bicycle Volume II. - From Teheran To Yokohama • Thomas Stevens
... being that she had borne no children. She shared her husband's voyaging, kept the ship's accounts, was known to all on board as "The Bos'un," and when battened under hatches in foul weather spent her time in trimming the most wonderful bonnets. Her coquetry stopped short at bonnets. To-day indeed—the weather being warm—in lieu of bodice she had slipped on a grey alpaca ...
— Shining Ferry • Sir Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch
... had enchanted him, though, like all Frenchmen, he was a passionate worshipper of the beautiful. The sweet soul in her eyes had touched his heart. Her ignorance had done more to strengthen it than anything she could have done. There was not a spark of coquetry in her whole nature. She listened to his poetic speeches, wondering but believing—wondering how they could be true of her, yet trusting him and all the world too seriously to accuse him of ...
— Theo - A Sprightly Love Story • Mrs. Frances Hodgson Burnett
... upon the feelings of my fellow-creatures, I would—I know not what I would not endure. Mother," I continued, "mother, if ever you see me for one instant forget myself, and by word or sign approach the borders of what is termed coquetry, promise me faithfully you will on the instant prevent farther intercourse, you will not hesitate one moment to tell me of it; even though in your eyes it may appear but earnest or animated conversation. Mother, promise me this," I repeated, for I felt carried so far beyond ...
— The Mother's Recompense, Volume I. - A Sequel to Home Influence in Two Volumes. • Grace Aguilar
... Her coquetry vanished. Her smile fled with it. Her pretty pose was abandoned. Mrs. T. A. Buck, wife, gave way to Emma McChesney Buck, business woman. She stiffened a little, as though bracing ...
— Emma McChesney & Co. • Edna Ferber
... were bursting with the secret that he was teaching them to rig a little ship that was to astonish mamma on her first coming downstairs, and to be named after the baby; while Blanche did all the coquetry with him, from which Margaret abstained. The universal desire was for mamma to see him, and when the time came, she owned that papa's swan had not ...
— The Daisy Chain, or Aspirations • Charlotte Yonge |
