"Devil-may-care" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... and, more important, he knew it now; he had the incensed, futile, malevolent, devil-may-care feeling of being beaten. He bitterly invited Fate not to stop at half-measures but to come on and do her worst. And Fate, with that mysterious responsiveness which often distinguishes her movements, came on. 'Of course! I might have expected it!' John exclaimed savagely, ...
— Leonora • Arnold Bennett
... ugly, devil-may-care set of fellows they were! Their uniforms set off their figures to advantage. Their faces showed they were eager for the fight. Their bayonets were fixed, for they had been ordered to take the works by a bayonet charge. When they got through the trees, their formation was completely ...
— Ben Comee - A Tale of Rogers's Rangers, 1758-59 • M. J. (Michael Joseph) Canavan
... score of them, with Amy in the lead, Amy laughing and jubilant and devil-may-care! And Clint, protesting, still a bit faint and pale, but immeasurably happy, was lifted to willing shoulders from where, a little vaguely, he looked down upon a sea of frantically cheering youths who waved maroon-and-grey ...
— Left Tackle Thayer • Ralph Henry Barbour
... she somehow held him in suspicion, nevertheless liked him. In certain moods he possessed that dash and devil-may-care air which pleases most women, providing the ...
— The Doctor of Pimlico - Being the Disclosure of a Great Crime • William Le Queux
... York in the midsummer seems like the gay Upper servant who rules with the mistress away. She entertains friends from all parts of the earth; Her streets are alive with a fictitious mirth. She flaunts her best clothes with a devil-may-care Sort of look, and her parks wear a riotous air. There is something unwholesome about her at dusk; Her trees, and her gardens, seem scented with musk; And you feel she has locked up the door of the ...
— Three Women • Ella Wheeler Wilcox
... admiral and vice-admiral, appointed partly by the owner, and partly by the skippers of the vessels. The devil-may-care spirit was always a great factor with the men. The admiral directed operations by flags in the daytime and by rockets at night, thus indicating what the fleet was to do and where they were to fish. Generally he had the fastest boat, and the cutters, hunting for the fleet always lay just astern ...
— A Labrador Doctor - The Autobiography of Wilfred Thomason Grenfell • Wilfred Thomason Grenfell
... when neighbors or customers "treated" him in the village, and he felt he had taken all the whisky that cloves would conceal, he took a five-cent cigar instead of a drink. He did not particularly like the smoking of it, but there was a certain devil-may-care recklessness in going down the street with a lighted cigar in his teeth, which had all the more fascination for him because of its manifest danger. He felt at these times that he was going the pace, and that it is well our women do not know of all the wickedness ...
— In the Midst of Alarms • Robert Barr
... He had a devil-may-care bearing, his cap on one side, his hands stuck in the front pockets of his ...
— Wintry Peacock - From "The New Decameron", Volume III. • D. H. Lawrence
... 'em!" Logan had finally lost the devil-may-care attitude, but that fact was small consolation ...
— Tight Squeeze • Dean Charles Ing
... has an adorable disregard for laws and things. He's just a big, irresponsible boy—and yet, he makes you feel as if he always knew exactly what to do and how to do it. And he is brave, too, with a reckless, devil-may-care sort of bravery that takes no thought of cost or consequences. He knew, when he let go his bridle reins, that he couldn't swim a stroke—and he smiled and didn't care. And he's gentle and considerate, too." She remembered the look in his eyes when he said: "You are cold," ...
— The Texan - A Story of the Cattle Country • James B. Hendryx
... in his hand, and bringing back to his memory the handsome face and devil-may-care expression of his tutor, remembers how the joke had widened, and reached its height when, at forty years of age, old Wynter had flung up his classes, leaving them all plante la as it were, and declared his intention of starting life anew and making a pile for himself ...
— A Little Rebel - A Novel • Margaret Wolfe Hungerford
... following characters:—Conn, the Shaughraun, a reckless, devil-may-care, true-hearted young vagabond, who is continually in a scrape from his desire to help a friend and his love of fun; his mother, Mrs. O'Kelly; his sweetheart, Moya Dolan, niece of ...
— Practice Book • Leland Powers
... full of devil-may-care, as if he shrugged his shoulders at a loss at cards, and in that second it fell upon her standing ...
— The Maid of the Whispering Hills • Vingie E. Roe
... French followed, a word or two of Italian. The waiters parted and this American stepped out. I had expected to see him taller, but his power was in the weight of his shoulders, the easy swing of his drunken progress down the aisle. The devil-may-care was in him—in his handsome, laughing, wild eyes—the look of a child mad with the promise of a ...
— The Blue Wall - A Story of Strangeness and Struggle • Richard Washburn Child
... one the charming blunders of the past have been set to rights. Highways are no longer the casual folderols of adventure, but the reposeful and efficient arteries of traffic. The roofs of the town are no longer a rumble of idiotic hats cocked at a devil-may-care angle. Windows no longer wink lopsidedly at one another. Doorways and chimneys, railings and lanterns have changed. Cobblestones and dirt have ...
— A Thousand and One Afternoons in Chicago • Ben Hecht
... the mantel-shelf, who were represented as in one eternal state of weariness from the waist upwards; and hummed a fragment of a song. It was a Bacchanalian song, something about a Sparkling Bowl. He sang it with an assumption of a Devil-may-care voice, that made his face a thousand times more meagre and ...
— The Cricket on the Hearth • Charles Dickens
... squandered no sympathy where they knew none was needed. To the discerning, though they had never known another man who won or lost with equal gusto in the game, who when he met fortune or misfortune "treated those two impostors just the same," Jim Kendric was exactly what he appeared to be, a devil-may-care sort of fellow who had infinite faith in his tomorrow and who had ...
— Daughter of the Sun - A Tale of Adventure • Jackson Gregory
... for certain different types of humanity to eat or drink in each other's presence. In brief, there was obviously only one dining-room, and not a series of dining-rooms classified according to castes. Mr. Prohack, free, devil-may-care and original, said ...
— Mr. Prohack • E. Arnold Bennett
... young resentment she laughed at the way in which he drawled this out, and with a swift sweep her boyish eyes took in again his compelling devil-may-care charm. She was a tenderfoot, but intuition as well as experience taught her that he was unusual enough to be one of ten thousand. No young Greek god's head could have risen more superbly above the brick-tanned column of the neck than this close-cropped curly one. Gray eyes, deep ...
— Wyoming, a Story of the Outdoor West • William MacLeod Raine
... gamecock like this. He had all the advantage of the first move. He was an expert and could drive his first throw into the youth's heart. But at bottom he was a coward and lacked the nerve, if not the inclination, to kill. If he took up that devil-may-care challenge he must fight it out alone. Moreover, as his furtive glance went round the ring of faces, he doubted whether a rope and the nearest telegraph pole might not be his fate if he went the limit. Sourly he accepted ...
— Bucky O'Connor • William MacLeod Raine
... he is coming in! He had still that defiant, devil-may-care step, that haughty, insolent look, as if the whole world were full of his lackeys, that repellent beauty, for his features were as vacant as they ...
— A Hungarian Nabob • Maurus Jokai
... any of this particular thing anywhere. To almost anybody, for instance, except a very great milksop or a pedant of construction, Charles O'Malley with its love-making and its fighting, its horsemanship and its horse-play, its "devilled kidneys"[23] and its devil-may-care-ness, is a distinctly delectable composition; and if a reasonable interval be allowed between the readings, may be read over and over again, at all times of life, with satisfaction. But the fact of the author's change remains not the less historically and symptomatically important, ...
— The English Novel • George Saintsbury
... fact, the theatre, which can only expect to prosper, in a pecuniary sense, by pandering to the tastes of the people, continually recurs to the annals of thieves and banditti for its most favourite heroes. These theatrical robbers; with their picturesque attire, wild haunts, jolly, reckless, devil-may-care manners, take a wonderful hold upon the imagination, and, whatever their advocates may say to the contrary, exercise a very pernicious influence upon public morals. In the Memoirs of the Duke of Guise upon the ...
— Memoirs of Extraordinary Popular Delusions - Vol. I • Charles Mackay
... smiling more amicably than ever. "That's business. Bedad, there's where you commercial men have the pull. You go straight to the point and stick there. Ah, when I look at ye, I can't help thinking of your son. The same intelligent eye, the same cheery expression, the same devil-may-care manner and dry humour—" ...
— The Firm of Girdlestone • Arthur Conan Doyle
... that agony, in spite of the heartrending pathos of her pale wan face, and through the anguish of seeing her tears, the ruling passion—strong in death—the spirit of adventure, the mad, wild, devil-may-care ...
— El Dorado • Baroness Orczy
... ranch story of Montana which centers around the fact that the leader of the "Lightfoot Rustlers" and the likeable but devil-may-care brother of the hero are one and the same. Cullum is a "big" ...
— Barbarians • Robert W. Chambers
... brilliant teeth, ostensibly in delight at her dear uncle's escape, and her whole expression was animated and amused. Her companion was a soldierly looking young Englishman, with a heavy moustache and a large nose. A certain devil-may-care look about his face was attractive as he sat carelessly watching us. I noticed his long stirrups and the curb rein hanging loose, while he held the snaffle, and concluded he was a cavalry officer. Isaacs bowed low to the lady and wheeled his horse. She replied by a nod, indifferent ...
— Mr. Isaacs • F. Marion Crawford
... celebrated life-size portrait of her in the costly riding-habit which was one of the many gifts of her royal lover. Sir Oswald, with his amazing technique, has managed to convey that suggestion of determination and resolution, one might almost say obstinacy, lying behind the gay, devil-may-care roguishness of her bewitching glance. Her slim, girlish figure he has portrayed with amazing accuracy, also the beautiful negligent manner in which she invariably carried her hunting-crop; her left hand is lovingly caressing the head of her faithful hound, Roger, who, Raymond Waffle informs ...
— Terribly Intimate Portraits • Noel Coward
... backed and sidled away from the ladies, and kept peering hither and thither to see whether the Governor's footmen had set out green tables for whist. Their features were full and plump, some of them had beards, and in no case was their hair curled or waved or arranged in what the French call "the devil-may-care" style. On the contrary, their heads were either close-cropped or brushed very smooth, and their faces were round and firm. This category represented the more respectable officials of the town. In passing, ...
— Dead Souls • Nikolai Vasilievich Gogol
... got it. Everything was SOP. The ship wasn't taut, she was tight! And she wasn't happy. There was none of the devil-may-care spirit that marks crews in the Scouting Force and separates them from the stodgy mass of the Line. Every face I saw on my trip to the skipper's cabin was blank, hard-eyed, and unsmiling. There was none of the human noise ...
— A Question of Courage • Jesse Franklin Bone
... camelopards and elephants by scores. In short, they have trodden with a bold disdainful step all the high-roads and by-roads of our wondrous planet, displaying, in every quarter of the compass, the daring and devil-may-care spirit of their youth and the spleen of their mature age, as well as the yellow guineas from their long ...
— Le Morvan, [A District of France,] Its Wild Sports, Vineyards and Forests; with Legends, Antiquities, Rural and Local Sketches • Henri de Crignelle
... and surveyed her work sympathetically yet professionally. The effect of the white cloth riding aslant over the round glasses and academic countenance was wonderfully rakish and devil-may-care. ...
— Queed • Henry Sydnor Harrison
... means of directing its course or bringing it with certainty and safety back to a landing place? It was a hard question, and it is interesting to note that it was answered not by a soldier or sailor, not by an adventurer, or devil-may-care spirit, but by a grave and learned professor of physical science, Pilatre de Rozier. Presently he was joined in his enterprise by a young man of the fashionable world and sporting tastes, the Marquis d'Arlandes. Aristocratic Paris took up aviation in the last days of the eighteenth century, ...
— Aircraft and Submarines - The Story of the Invention, Development, and Present-Day - Uses of War's Newest Weapons • Willis J. Abbot
... as mongrel, as tough, and as scarred as Scrap, he carried his wiry body with a devil-may-care assurance, in which Scrap may have recognized a kindred spirit. He decided in a flash. He made a dart and fell in abreast the sergeant of Company K. Muldoon saw and growled ...
— The Junior Classics Volume 8 - Animal and Nature Stories • Selected and arranged by William Patten
... are crying out for an absent Cadgerboy; the woman at the street corner is weeping for her Coffintop, and will not be comforted. We settle down with a rollicking ease into our seats (for we are a bold, devil-may-care race, the C's of Battersea), and an oath is administered to us in a totally inaudible manner by an individual resembling an Army surgeon in his second childhood. We understand, however, that we are to well and truly try the case between our sovereign ...
— Tremendous Trifles • G. K. Chesterton
... humanised them. Of a surety, the last part Bertie dreamed of playing was that of a teacher to any mortal thing. Yet—here in Africa—it might reasonably be questioned if a second Augustine or Francois Xavier would ever have done half the good among the devil-may-care Roumis that was wrought by the dauntless, listless, reckless soldier, who followed instinctively the one religion which has no cant in its brave, simple creed, and binds man to man in links that are as true as steel—the religion ...
— Wisdom, Wit, and Pathos of Ouida - Selected from the Works of Ouida • Ouida
... of a young lady modeller, and which certainly showed she had towered above her material. The Spanish Marauder swaggered along in helmet, breast-plate, doublet and hose, a hare and pheasant slung jauntily over his shoulder, and his jolly, devil-may-care face, that had evidently smelt powder, full of an arrogant self-satisfaction. The Chiron was a strong piece of anatomical modelling. The ancient centaur, indeed, looked very wise and very noble, and the horse into which he merged was ...
— Cleo The Magnificent - The Muse of the Real • Louis Zangwill
... 'Geebung Advocate' or 'Mudgee Budgee Chronicle', and live there. He was about the same build as the Lachlan, but stouter, and had something the same kind of eyes; but he was ordinarily as careless and devil-may-care as the ...
— Over the Sliprails • Henry Lawson
... wintry morn, And the mist on the Cotswold hills, Where I once heard the blast of the huntsman's horn, Not far from the seven rills. Jack Esdale was there, and Hugh St. Clair, Bob Chapman and Andrew Kerr, And big George Griffiths on Devil-May-Care, And—black Tom Oliver. And one who rode on a dark-brown steed, Clean jointed, sinewy, spare, With the lean game head of the Blacklock breed, And the resolute eye that loves the lead, And the quarters massive and square— A tower of strength, with ...
— Poems • Adam Lindsay Gordon
... title, or in whatever capacity, the worthy Father had great influence over his parish, and there was a free-and-easy way with him, even in doing the most solemn duties, which agreed wonderfully with the devil-may-care spirit of Paddy. Stiff and starched formality in any way is repugnant to the very nature of Irishmen; and I believe one of the surest ways of converting all Ireland from the Romish faith would be found, if we could only manage to have her ...
— Handy Andy, Vol. 2 - A Tale of Irish Life • Samuel Lover
... match, he surveyed him critically. Paying no attention to his chief's scrutiny, the Secret Service agent contemplated the luxurious appointments of the limousine with satisfaction and puffed contentedly at his cigarette. His air of breeding was unmistakable, but the devil-may-care sparkle in his gray-blue eyes redeemed an otherwise expressionless face from being considered heavy. The spirits of the Herr Chief of the Secret Service rose. His recollection and judgment was still good; his agent, by men and women, ...
— I Spy • Natalie Sumner Lincoln
... dwarf, exulting in his project, 'that I'll be a bachelor, a devil-may-care bachelor; and I'll have my bachelor's hall at the counting-house, and at such times come near it if you dare. And mind too that I don't pounce in upon you at unseasonable hours again, for I'll be a spy upon you, and come and go like a mole ...
— The Old Curiosity Shop • Charles Dickens
... inconsistency of great minds—he laboriously twirled heavenwards in the French fashion. It was, in fact, the guileless Alphonse's chief tribulation that, however industriously he cultivated that devil-may-care upward sweep, the sparse ornament to his upper lip invariably drooped downwards again before long. In the sunny land of France it is held that the mustache worn "en croc" not only confers upon its possessor an air of distinction, but renders that happy individual particularly ...
— Dross • Henry Seton Merriman
... proof of his identity, had mentioned the two very circumstances which the old Squire had referred to in his posthumous letter. He had admitted that he had gone to the bad in London in company with a youth named Fastnet. The news of his death had reached England from abroad. Besides, the reckless, devil-may-care tone of the epistle more than ever convinced the younger brother that this was no fraudulent claimant, but the honest growl of an outcast who little guessed what his name was worth to him. Otherwise, why should he ...
— Roger Ingleton, Minor • Talbot Baines Reed
... very respectable tailor, and whose harmless ambition it was to make the wild slip of his blood a respectable tailor in his turn. Never was the saying "Like father, like son" more astonishingly belied. Young John Porteous would have nothing to do with the tailor's trade. He was dissipated, he was devil-may-care; there was nothing better to be done with him than to ship him abroad into the military service of some foreign State, the facile resource in those days for getting rid of the turbulent and the troublesome. John Porteous went into foreign service; he entered the corps known as the ...
— A History of the Four Georges, Volume II (of 4) • Justin McCarthy
... the ride, Mr. Wrenn laughed aloud. With a comfortable feeling on the side toward the fire he stuck his slight legs straight out before the old-time settle, looked devil-may-care, made delightful ridges on the sanded floor with his toe, and clapped a pewter pot on his knee with a small emphatic "Wop!" After about two and a quarter tankards he broke out, "Say, that peddler guy there, don't he look like he was a gipsy—you ...
— Our Mr. Wrenn - The Romantic Adventures of a Gentle Man • Sinclair Lewis
... any other country in the world could produce such a slangy, jollying, devil-may-care host as these vociferous American soldiers. How he longed to ...
— Tom Slade on a Transport • Percy Keese Fitzhugh
... remarkable transformation was going on. The minister's grave, rugged, and deeply lined face smoothed itself and shed ten years at least; in the eyes that I had seen wet with noble tears a laughing devil now lurked, while his strong mouth became a loose-lipped, devil-may-care one. His head with its aureole of bushy, grizzled hair set itself jauntily upon one side, and from it and from his face and his whole great frame breathed a wicked jollity ...
— To Have and To Hold • Mary Johnston
... devil-may-care way does not trouble to persecute or oppress; his tolerant spirit, aided by the splendid devotion of a few great men, has, in the words of Seeley, built up a glorious free Empire "in a ...
— War Letters of a Public-School Boy • Henry Paul Mainwaring Jones
... trust to a broken reed, lean on a broken reed. Adj. rash, incautious, indiscreet; imprudent, improvident, temerarious; uncalculating^; heedless; careless &c (neglectful) 460; without ballast, heels over head, head over heels; giddy &c (inattentive) 458; wanton, reckless, wild, madcap; desperate, devil-may-care. hot-blooded, hotheaded, hotbrained^; headlong, headstrong; breakneck; foolhardy; harebrained; precipitate, impulsive. overconfident, overweening; venturesome, venturous; adventurous, Quixotic, fire eating, cavalier; ...
— Roget's Thesaurus of English Words and Phrases: Body • Roget
... fluffy, impatient, perched near by or made little short circles over and back. They awaited the remains of the dinner. Bob Stratton and a devil-may-care giant by the name of Nolan constructed a joke wherewith to amuse the interim. They cut a long pole, and placed it across a log and through a bush, so that one extremity projected beyond the bush. Then ...
— The Blazed Trail • Stewart Edward White
... Jack Gardner had made since his sojourn in the East could have seen him at that moment, they would not have recognized in the coldly stern, keen-eyed copper magnate, the happy-go-lucky, devil-may-care Jack, of their acquaintance. The almost tragic occurrences of the evening had brought the real Jack Gardner to the surface, and he was for the moment again the dauntless young miner who had fought ...
— The Last Woman • Ross Beeckman
... shame to me if I were not so strong, considering the free, open-air, devil-may-care life I've led. Why, I was doing man's work at an age when most boys are wondering when they're going to be taken out of knickerbockers. I'd been half round the world before I was fifteen, and had ...
— A Bid for Fortune - or Dr. Nikola's Vendetta • Guy Boothby
... all this with a sort of exaggerated devil-may-care negligence, and as though he did me great honour by talking to me so, because it showed that he considered me the same sort of exalted Nihilistic being as himself, to whom death was a matter of ...
— The Idiot • (AKA Feodor Dostoevsky) Fyodor Dostoyevsky
... a rough place. No mining hamlet in the placer gulches of California, nor any backwoods village I ever saw, approached it in picturesque, devil-may-care abandon. It was a lawless draggle of wooden huts and houses, built in crooked lines, wrangling around the boggy shore of the island for a mile or so in the general form of the letter S, without the slightest subordination to the points of the compass or to building ...
— Travels in Alaska • John Muir
... surplice-maker's assistant; two ladies who sported moral characters of various depths of shade, according to their company, nicknamed "Bower o' Bliss" and "Freckles"; some horsey men "in the know" of betting circles; a travelling actor from the theatre, and two devil-may-care young men who proved to be gownless undergraduates; they had slipped in by stealth to meet a man about bull-pups, and stayed to drink and smoke short pipes with the racing gents aforesaid, looking at their ...
— Jude the Obscure • Thomas Hardy
... these with divided relish, and learning the news which had transpired since we sailed. The river here opened into a broad and straight reach of great length, which we bounded merrily over before a smacking breeze, with a devil-may-care look in our faces, and our boat a white bone in its mouth, and a speed which greatly astonished some scow boatmen whom we met. The wind in the horizon rolled like a flood over valley and plain, and every tree bent to the blast, and ...
— A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers • Henry David Thoreau
... name, from childhood, is one to make a girl thrill. What then the actual thing, the uniform, invested somehow with chivalry and courage, the clean-cut athletic young man, somber and fascinating with his intent eyes, his serious brow, or his devil-may-care gallantry, the compelling presence of him that breathes of his sacrifice, of his near departure to privation, to squalid, comfortless trenches, to the fire and hell of war, to blood and agony and death—in ...
— The Desert of Wheat • Zane Grey
... haystacks had been geometrically correct in their dimensions —so square and firm and exact that sections might be sliced off them like cheese, and doors and windows might be carved in them; but these French haystacks were devil-may-care haystacks wearing tufts on their polls like headdresses. The windmills had a rakish air; and the scarecrows in the truck gardens were debonair and cocky, tilting themselves back on their pins the better to enjoy the view and fluttering their ...
— Europe Revised • Irvin S. Cobb
... tattered, smoke-stained apology for a once White Ensign, and they were men-of-war, very much men-of-war. They had been at the game for nearly twenty-four months, and, through long practice, they elbowed their way in and out of the traffic with all the fussy, devil-may-care assertiveness of ...
— Stand By! - Naval Sketches and Stories • Henry Taprell Dorling
... bed-chamber, which was immediately over the back door, in the hope that those dear, tender, dark eyes, were surveying me from behind the curtains. I flourished my little cane, loitered to pick a primrose, and sang one of our devil-may-care choruses in order to insult this English beast, and to show my love how little I cared for danger when it stood between her and me. The creature was abashed by my fearlessness, and so, pushing open the back door, I was able to enter the farmhouse ...
— The Last Galley Impressions and Tales - Impressions and Tales • Arthur Conan Doyle
... tanned by wind and sun you had the impression that his skin would feel like leather if you could affect the impertinence to test it by the sense of touch. Not that you would like to encourage this bit of impudence after a look into his devil-may-care eyes; but you might easily imagine something much stronger than brown wrapping paper and not quite so passive as burnt clay. His clothes fit him loosely and yet were graciously devoid of the bagginess which characterises ...
— Truxton King - A Story of Graustark • George Barr McCutcheon
... be my master, then. I couldn't pay my way home if they'd take me as freight," replies the lieutenant, in the downright and devil-may-care style which is one of his several pronounced characteristics. "Of course," he continues presently, "I would like to look in on the mother again; she's getting on in years now and isn't over and above strong, but she has no cares or worries to speak of; she don't know ...
— Marion's Faith. • Charles King
... showed the back part of a head thatched with short yellow hair, which had broken into innumerable curls of painful tightness. On his ruddy cheeks a sparse, sandy beard was making a timid debut. Add to this a weak, good-natured mouth, a pair of devil-may-care blue eyes, and the fact that the man was very drunk, and you have a pre-Raphaelite portrait—we may as well say at once—of Mr. Larry O'Rourke of Mullingar, County Westmeath, and late of the United ...
— Humorous Masterpieces from American Literature • Various
... decedent to Rohutu noa-noa in the reva or clouds above the mountain of Temehani unauna, in the island of Raiatea. The ordinary people could seldom afford the fees demanded by the priest, and had to be satisfied with a denial of this Mussulman Eden reserved for the festive and devil-may-care Arioi, as ordinary people perforce abstain from intoxicants in America while the rich drink their ...
— Mystic Isles of the South Seas. • Frederick O'Brien
... dead,—some had been murdered and some killed in action, which, together with the half-famished wretches whom we had saved from burning, contributed in making it a scene which was well-calculated to shake a stout heart, as was proved in the instance of one of our sentries, a well known "devil-may-care" sort of fellow. I know not what appearances the burning rafters might have reflected on the neighbouring trees at the time, but he had not been long on his post before he came running into the piquet, and swore, by all the saints in the calendar, that he saw six dead Frenchmen advancing upon ...
— Adventures in the Rifle Brigade, in the Peninsula, France, and the Netherlands - from 1809 to 1815 • Captain J. Kincaid
... looked up, stopped the pencil, and said, "Thank you very much, old fellow. There's no other boy in the house would have done it for me but you or Arthur. I can see well enough," he went on, after a pause, "all the best big fellows look on me with suspicion; they think I'm a devil-may-care, reckless young scamp. So I am—eleven hours out of twelve, but not the twelfth. Then all of our contemporaries worth knowing follow suit, of course: we're very good friends at games and all that, but not a soul of them but you and Arthur ever tried to break through the crust, and see whether there ...
— Tom Brown's Schooldays • Thomas Hughes
... arts upon these two men! And, Alice, the crudest thing you could do would be to forgive me! I couldn't bear it. I flirted with Mr. Congdon; not only that but I took advantage of his distress over his father's efforts to estrange you two to counsel him to lead a reckless, devil-may-care existence. And I tried the same thing on Mr. Bennett, only he was much more susceptible than your husband and took me more seriously. I want you, one and all, to be sure that I ...
— Blacksheep! Blacksheep! • Meredith Nicholson
... off to the mines, of course, as soon as I could get there, and I made piles of money, especially at first. And I was probably the most hot-headed, reckless, devil-may-care young rascal on the whole Coast. I made many enemies and had many a narrow escape, as most everybody did in ...
— Emerson's Wife and Other Western Stories • Florence Finch Kelly
... than that," added Morgan. "There is a sort of drift-wood of adventure and devil-may-care-ism that civilization throws in advance of itself; but that isn't so bad as the slag it manufactures in ...
— Baddeck and That Sort of Thing • Charles Dudley Warner
... tell you, of all the scapegrace, devil-may-care, never-do-well, neck-or-nothing boys that ever lived or died in this world, that Roland Bayard is the very worst! I am sorry young Force has anything to ...
— Her Mother's Secret • Emma D. E. N. Southworth
... Maxwell these beautiful troops. They will only be eating their heads off here, with summer coming up and the desert getting as dry as a bone. The Lancashire men especially are eye-openers. How on earth have they managed to pick up the swank and devil-may-care airs of crack regulars? They are Regulars, only they are bigger, more effective specimens than Manchester mills or East Lancashire mines can spare us for the Regular Service in peace time. Anyway, no soldier need wish to see a finer lot. On ...
— Gallipoli Diary, Volume I • Ian Hamilton
... sir,' said Hill, a jaunty, devil-may-care looking fellow, with a sallow, sickly face, evidently the result of excess and dissipation.' If the young gentleman will tell me where he stops. I will call for him ...
— The Continental Monthly , Vol. 2 No. 5, November 1862 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy • Various
... the tree I have mentioned, leaned there, and I saw there was much blood upon his face which he essayed to wipe away with the cuff of his coat. Now, upon his whole person, from the crown of his unkempt head down to his broken, dusty boots, there yet clung that air of jaunty, devil-may-care rakishness which I had seen, ...
— The Broad Highway • Jeffery Farnol
... He was devil-may-care in his manner as he listlessly turned over his morning mail, thrusting his pistol back into the bank portmanteau. The sight of the familiar case recalled to him his ...
— The Midnight Passenger • Richard Henry Savage
... feature. His restless, nervous eyes were slightly bloodshot, and there was a constant twitching about his lips. But as he pushed back the shutter and leaned carelessly against the sill, there was an easy grace in his figure and a devil-may-care light in his eyes that would have stirred the heart of a maiden less susceptible than the one who smiled upon him from between ...
— Sandy • Alice Hegan Rice
... represented a little girl with long bleached tresses and a rather sour face. His legs were much swollen, and he could hardly walk. Carlier, undermined by fever, could not swagger any more, but kept tottering about, still with a devil-may-care air, as became a man who remembered his crack regiment. He had become hoarse, sarcastic, and inclined to say unpleasant things. He called it "being frank with you." They had long ago reckoned their percentages on trade, including in them ...
— Tales of Unrest • Joseph Conrad
... pause. "Island? Oh! that was forty years ago, when us lost t' old Manxman on t' Red Island Shoals." And the wanderlust of Uncle Rube's British blood, stirred by this leap back over the passing years, made him once more a bouncing, devil-may-care sailor lad. The sign of tears had vanished from his cheeks as he rose, and, gently laying the little figure in her old corner on the settle, leisurely lit his pipe. Like that of Nathaniel Hawthorne's ...
— Labrador Days - Tales of the Sea Toilers • Wilfred Thomason Grenfell
... "Points of Humour." Examples of this "genius" might be cited by the thousand. Look only at the famous "Sketch Book;" its recent republication has placed it within the reach of every one of our readers. Look at the Sprig of Shelalegh, the rollicking, whiskey drinking, fighting, devil-may-care expression he has thrown into that piece of wood; turn to the sheet wherein he has recorded his Recollections of the Court of Common Pleas, and study the group of lawyers' and witnesses' faces therein contained. There is "genius" for you, ...
— English Caricaturists and Graphic Humourists of the Nineteenth Century. - How they Illustrated and Interpreted their Times. • Graham Everitt
... the Third Hussars of Conflans—the very regiment of which I was afterwards colonel—were mounting their horses at the door. On the steps stood their officer, a slight, pale young man, who looked more like a young priest from a seminary than a leader of the devil-may-care rascals ...
— The Exploits Of Brigadier Gerard • Arthur Conan Doyle
... him for this occasion, like the manager of a theatre who is uneasy about the debut of his principal actor; he feared lest the vulgar habits of this devil-may-care life should crop up to the surface of the newly-fledged banker. "Talk as little as you can," he said to him. "No banker ever gabbles; he acts, thinks, reflects, listens, weighs. To seem like a banker you ...
— Rise and Fall of Cesar Birotteau • Honore de Balzac
... Tobe Cullum's disastrous practical joke had become on a sudden case-hardened, as it were. The consumptive pallor had miraculously disappeared from his cheeks and the homesick look from his eyes. He bore the merciless chaffing at Bishop's with devil-may-care good-nature, and he besought Mrs. Cullum, almost with tears in his eyes, to "let ...
— Southern Lights and Shadows • Edited by William Dean Howells & Henry Mills Alden
... for Steve that mine were speedy legs. When I got there his face was grey and mottled, like an old man's, and his mouth had a weak droop, very unlike devil-may-care Steve. The two had pawed up the ground for rods around in the fight; the deer's horns, beneath where the man gripped them, were wet with the blood of his torn palms. Steve's knees, arms, and head were trembling ...
— Red Saunders' Pets and Other Critters • Henry Wallace Phillips
... and ran up to Paris, where we stayed at the Ritz. The Count proved a devil-may-care fellow, with plenty of friends in the French capital. When with the latter he treated me as a servant; when ...
— The Count's Chauffeur • William Le Queux
... sublimity to this—that if they be tempted, they can take the warm life of a man. To the contagionist, filled as he is with the dread of final causes, having no faith in destiny nor in the fixed will of God, and with none of the devil-may-care indifference which might stand him instead of creeds—to such one, every rag that shivers in the breeze of a plague-stricken city has this sort of sublimity. If by any terrible ordinance he be forced to venture forth, ...
— Eothen • A. W. Kinglake
... good. He felt a little drunk, not enough to impede his mental processes but enough to give him a fine devil-may-care indifference to what happened next. So it was only the spray Paula had given him—it still made his body feel better and removed his shock and worry and made everything seem suddenly ...
— The Stars, My Brothers • Edmond Hamilton
... the man on the bed had his hands bound. Bending down, he recognized the face of Gordon. Beaten and bruised and gaunt from hunger it was, but the eyes still gleamed with the same devil-may-care smile. ...
— A Daughter of the Dons - A Story of New Mexico Today • William MacLeod Raine
... that led Jeremy to behave as he did are uncertain. It may have been something to do with the general boredom of the afternoon, it may have been that he felt pity for the bedraggled aspect of the animal—most probable reason of all, was that devil-may-care independence flung up from the road, as ...
— Jeremy • Hugh Walpole
... no means so confounded as his captain: he was thirty years older than the latter, and in the course of fifty years of military life had learned to look on the most dangerous enemy, or the most beautiful woman, with the like daring, devil-may-care determination to conquer. ...
— Catherine: A Story • William Makepeace Thackeray
... Rita. Don't be so stuck up. It won't hurt you to be kissed." Doug was a bold, devil-may-care youth, who spoke his mind freely upon all occasions. He was of enormous size, and gloried in the fact that he was the neighborhood bully and very, very "tough." Doug would have you know that Doug would ...
— A Forest Hearth: A Romance of Indiana in the Thirties • Charles Major
... The man laughed gaily and drew himself up. So handsome a man could surely be forgiven a broken omelette and some charcoal, if only for the sake of his gay blue eyes, his curling brown hair, and his devil-may-care air of prosperity. He looked at the Senorita and laughed in the manner of a man who had never yet failed to "get on" with women. He folded his arms with fine, open gestures, and stood looking with approving nods upon his own handiwork. He was without the shadow of the trailing ...
— Tomaso's Fortune and Other Stories • Henry Seton Merriman
... success—a brilliant, blinding success—but it stuck at the very moment when it should have rushed forward. It was no one's fault if you understand. It was sheer luck. It just didn't "come off"—and only just. But a man with dash, a devil-may-care sort of leader, could have cut right across on Sunday, August the 8th, and brought off a ...
— At Suvla Bay • John Hargrave
... by a flaring red handkerchief around his head and the haft of a knife protruding from his waistband. The rowers behind him, though of varying degrees of swarthiness and height, all had the same sinewy build, the same bold stare, the same devil-may-care insolence of manner; and though none but the lookout wore the piratical red around his brow, more than one knife hilt showed at their waists. The steersman, whose copper-brown skin and flat face betokened a ...
— The Pathless Trail • Arthur O. (Arthur Olney) Friel
... tiny wine-glasses, and some dry biscuits of a truly early Victorian dryness. This ghostly hospitality was duly dispensed, and Luccia, who seldom drinks anything but tea, instead of sipping her sherry with a lady-like aloofness, drained her glass with a sudden devil-may-care abandon, and, to the evident amazement even of the furniture, held it out to be refilled. Such pagan behaviour had never disgraced that scandalized drawing-room before. And when to her action she added ...
— Vanishing Roads and Other Essays • Richard Le Gallienne
... I saw was Starlight being brought in, handcuffed, between two troopers, and looking as if he'd ridden a long way. He was just as easy-going and devil-may-care as ever. He said to one ...
— Robbery Under Arms • Thomas Alexander Browne, AKA Rolf Boldrewood
... wondered, since he dared not even show it? And, meantime, through the vast room, a sheet of burning sunlight, falling straight from the window panes, unchecked by any blind, spread with the flow of molten gold over all the broken-down furniture, whose devil-may-care shabbiness it ...
— His Masterpiece • Emile Zola
... wasn't pink now; her color had turned to ashy yellow and her heart to ashes of roses. Girard could face the wind of the North, but a crying woman on a ship at anchor, whose rusty chains groaned to the dismal screech of tugging cordage, undid him. A lesser man—a devil-may-care fellow—could have met the issue. Girard, practical, sensible, silent, was no mate for prettiness, plump and pink. He should have wedded a widow, who could have passed him a prehensile hawser and taken his ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great, Volume 11 (of 14) - Little Journeys to the Homes of Great Businessmen • Elbert Hubbard
... while we follow him on his way up-town, it may be just as well for us to note that up to this precise moment our devil-may-care, still rather handsome Mr. Dalton, with the drooping eyelids and cold, hard lips, had entirely failed to grasp the idea that, in so far as public and private morals were concerned, he had in the last thirty minutes fallen to the ...
— Felix O'Day • F. Hopkinson Smith
... bent old hags picking over refuse; at the faces which, as he passed, made some special human appeal to him—faces blurred with drink, faces pallid with under-feeding, faces worn into masks by the tension of trouble, faces sweetened by resignation, faces aglow with devil-may-care glee...he looked, as it were, into the pulsing heart of something which had scarcely seemed alive to ...
— The Market-Place • Harold Frederic
... before, Frenchy McAllister had changed his identity from a happy-go-lucky, devil-may-care cow-puncher and became a machine. The grief that had torn his soul was not of the kind which seeks its outlet in tears and wailing; it had turned and struck inward, and now his deliberate ferocity was icy and devilish. ...
— Hopalong Cassidy's Rustler Round-Up - Bar-20 • Clarence Edward Mulford
... thrust an unlighted cigar between his teeth, and descended the steps, to all outward appearance the same reckless, audacious Hampton as of old. Mrs. Guffy smiled happily from an open window as she observed the square set of his shoulders, the easy, devil-may-care smile upon his lips. ...
— Bob Hampton of Placer • Randall Parrish
... air service who knew less of flying than they had learned through the medium of hard knocks; they were determined from the very beginning to get to France; and they were the most care-free, reckless, adventurous, devil-may-care bunch of stem-winders that had ever plagued and embarrassed the service by the simple procedure of being gathered ...
— Aces Up • Covington Clarke
... facts then. You deny that a youth of one character can be transformed into a man of an opposite character. Now then—yes, I have it. There's the founder of La Trappe, and Ignatius Loyola; in boyhood, and someway into manhood, both devil-may-care bloods, and yet, in the end, the wonders of the world for anchoritish self-command. These two examples, by-the-way, we cite to such patrons as would hastily return rakish young waiters upon us. 'Madam, or sir—patience; patience,' we say; 'good madam, or sir, would you discharge forth your cask of ...
— The Confidence-Man • Herman Melville
... new prisoners, the first we had seen in a long time, were brought in from Sherman's army. They were plump, well-conditioned, well-dressed, healthy, devil-may-care young fellows, whose confidence in themselves and in Sherman was simply limitless, and their contempt for all Rebels and especially those who terrorized ...
— Andersonville, complete • John McElroy
... one day that the hangman was to give the rope to five fellows, the most popular and devil-may-care rakes and roysterers in the whole town. Beppo was up very early that morning, and at the first streak of light had dropped himself over the wall into the town ditch, and was away for the open country and the free air of the hills; for he knew that neither at home nor in the streets ...
— The Blue Moon • Laurence Housman
... hair, a warm flush of pink in her cheeks, the features and outline of an old Grecian goddess, but with more of Juno than of Venus, for she might perhaps err a little upon the side of opulence. There was a challenge and defiance dancing in those dark devil-may-care eyes of hers which might have roused a more cold-blooded man than her companion. Her dress was simple and dark, but admirably cut. She was clever enough to know that a pretty woman should concentrate attention upon herself, and a plain one divert it ...
— A Duet • A. Conan Doyle
... grizzled giant with a head rugged enough to have been carelessly chipped from stone; a bragging candidate claiming everybody's notice; a square-shouldered fellow surging through the crowd like a stranger; an open-faced, devil-may-care young gallant on fire with moonshine; a skulking figure with brutish mouth and shifting eyes. Indeed, every figure seemed distinct; for, living apart from his neighbor, and troubling the law but little in small matters of dispute, the mountaineer preserves independence, and keeps the edges of ...
— A Cumberland Vendetta • John Fox, Jr.
... unconcerned, indifferent, heedless, inattentive, regardless, lax, incautious, remiss, inconsiderate, nonchalant, neglectful, unwary, imprudent, indiscreet, improvident, reckless, desultory, perfunctory, devil-may-care, slovenly, ...
— Putnam's Word Book • Louis A. Flemming
... guns of the main deck, and about the spar-deck battery forward of the main-mast, sat five hundred lusty sailors on the white decks around their mess-cloths, bolting hot pea soup after their grog, and chatting and laughing in a devil-may-care sort of a strain, as if the grub was good and the timbers sound, as they were, of the stanch frigate beneath them. No noise, no confusion, but just as polite and courteous, in their honest, seamanlike way, as half a legion of French dancing-masters, they whacked ...
— Captain Brand of the "Centipede" • H. A. (Henry Augustus) Wise
... nothing but a tumultuous crowd of men and women, and some one in their midst, earnestly talking to them. As my comrade advanced, this person came forward and proved to be no stranger. He was an old grizzled sailor, whom Toby and myself had frequently seen in Nukuheva, where he lived an easy devil-may-care life in the household of Mowanna the king, going by the name of 'Jimmy'. In fact he was the royal favourite, and had a good deal to say in his master's councils. He wore a Manilla hat and a sort of tappa morning gown, sufficiently ...
— Typee - A Romance of the South Sea • Herman Melville
... in, and he scrambled out of the boat and came towards her. He was wearing a low-necked shirt; his face and neck were tanned by the sun, as were the arms, bare to the elbow. Without doubt he was a handsome man, and the bold, devil-may-care expression on his face did not make him the less attractive. Kathleen knew that many a girl in the district, well-to-do and not bad looking, would have welcomed the ...
— Grey Town - An Australian Story • Gerald Baldwin
... who, on the pavement before the house in Park Crescent, threw the satin slipper at the departing carriage. He had been very hearty and booming all the time, the human presentment of a devil-may-care lion out for a jaunt, and his great laugh thundering cheerily above the clatter of talk had infected the heterogeneous gathering. Unconsciously dull eyes sparkled and pursy lips vibrated into smiles. So gay a wedding reception I have never attended, and ...
— Jaffery • William J. Locke
... Duplessis with an insolent air which made the gray moustache of his Eminence curl with ire. Treville understood admirably the war method of that period, in which he who could not live at the expense of the enemy must live at the expense of his compatriots. His soldiers formed a legion of devil-may-care fellows, perfectly ...
— The Three Musketeers • Alexandre Dumas, Pere
... they may continue to be vocal instruments. No one who has heard him only as a "minstrel" can have any conception of the exquisite mournfulness, the agonizing pathos, which the negro voice is capable of expressing; nor, we may fairly add, of the wild, devil-may-care jollity; but this last is more truly represented on the stage, the invariable adjuncts of caricature not only contributing to stimulate the comedian, but broadening the effect of his voice on the hearer. Why is it that we always have caricature in negro delineations—that we never have any simple ...
— Lippincott's Magazine, Vol. 22, November, 1878 - of Popular Literature and Science • Various
... smoking on the quay of Buyukdere. He sees them all go by, from the gay French secretary of embassy, puffing at a cigarette as he hurries from one visit to the next, to the neat and military German diplomat, landing from his steam launch on his return from the palace; from the devil-may-care English youth in white flannel to the graceful Turkish adjutant on his beautiful Arab horse; from the dark-eyed Armenian lady, walking slowly by the water's edge, to the terrifically arrayed little Greek dandy, with a spotted waistcoat and a thunder-and-lightning tie. He sees them all: the Levantine ...
— Paul Patoff • F. Marion Crawford
... understood. His long-tried nerves and courage and strength had never yielded this wonderful buoyancy and sense of loftiness. He was Casey—Casey who had let all the gang run for shelter from the Sioux while he had remained for one last and final drive at a railroad spike. But the cool, devil-may-care indifference, common to all his comrades as well as to himself, was not the strongest factor in the Casey of to-day. Up out of the rugged and dormant soul had burst the spirit of a race embodied in one man. Casey was his own ...
— The U.P. Trail • Zane Grey
... a dangerous experiment, and even Mercedes' little spark of Yankee "devil-may-care" burned very low after it, although the only thing that went wrong at the Dana's that year was that the hens laid soft-shelled eggs, which trouble was soon remedied by mixing a powder with their feed, which powder Madre Moreno herself supplied, ...
— The Beautiful Eyes of Ysidria • Charles A. Gunnison
... completely shroud the new hollows in Daniels' cheeks. His long, black, uncombed hair, sagged down raggedly across his forehead, hanging almost into his eyes; the eyes themselves were sunk in such formidable cavities that Byrne caught hardly more than two points of light in the shadows. All the devil-may-care insouciance of Buck Daniels was quite, quite gone. In its place was a dogged sullenness, a hang-dog air which one would not care to face of a dark night or in a lonely place. His manner was that of a man whose back is against the wall, who, having ...
— The Night Horseman • Max Brand
... my portrait beside his own, where you may see both of them to-day in that glorious fresco of the School of Athens, the serious inspired face of the young maestro cheek by cheek with the coarser features of his laughing, devil-may-care friend; and I prize more highly that testimony of his esteem than all the other ...
— Romance of Roman Villas - (The Renaissance) • Elizabeth W. (Elizbeth Williams) Champney
... worked hard and lived ordinary middle-class respectable lives, and some few bachelors of quiet habit, the rest were a lively set indeed, by no means free from inclinations to coarse conviviality and many of them spendthrift, reckless and devil-may-care. At pay-day, which occurred monthly, most of these merry wights, after receiving their pay, betook themselves to the Midland Tap or other licensed house and there indulged, for the remainder of the afternoon, in abundant ...
— Fifty Years of Railway Life in England, Scotland and Ireland • Joseph Tatlow
... a heartbreaking attempt at devil-may-care cheerfulness] I ain't miserable. [He sits down again, and stretches his legs in an attempt ...
— Major Barbara • George Bernard Shaw
... for the first, Israel had been struck by the dismally devil-may-care gestures of the moulders. But hardly had he himself been a moulder three days, when his previous sedateness of concern at his unfortunate lot, began to conform to the reckless sort of half jolly despair expressed by the others. The truth indeed ...
— Israel Potter • Herman Melville
... after which Toby Crackit, seeming to abandon as hopeless any further effort to maintain his usual devil-may-care swagger, turned to Chitling ...
— Oliver Twist • Charles Dickens
... heart—put there by the recollection of the jewels—an indescribable bitterness, a desperate cynicism that urged him to strike out, careless of friend or foe. Who could say what would happen to him when he left here? A flash of spring madness, then to go forth devil-may-care. ...
— The Drums Of Jeopardy • Harold MacGrath
... devil-may-care lines on and on, lifting the crew to the work and to the chorused emphasis of "Whiskey for ...
— The Mutiny of the Elsinore • Jack London
... I not been seeing Tavistock every day. He continued to wear his devil-may-care air; but I observed that he was aging swiftly—and I knew what that meant. Fighting all day to prevent breaks in the crucial stocks; planning most of the night how to prevent breaks the next day; watching the reserve resources of "The Seven" melt away. Those reserves ...
— The Deluge • David Graham Phillips
... not at all clear, he was confessing to himself; in spite of his assumed indifference, he was embarrassed by the focused stares of Dow and Mac Tavish. He wondered what sudden, devil-may-care whimsy was this that was galloping him away from business and politics and every other sane subject! He was conscious that there was in him a freakish and juvenile hankering ...
— All-Wool Morrison • Holman Day
... leaning over the bulwarks, and his ruddy face was pale, and his look of devil-may-care gayety ...
— The Heart's Highway - A Romance of Virginia in the Seventeeth Century • Mary E. Wilkins
... and bidding a not unfriendly good-bye at the shore. The temper of adventure is deeply ingrained in the new romance as in the old; the very word adventure is saturated with a sentiment very congenial to us both for better and worse; it quickens the hero in us and flatters the devil-may-care. ...
— Recent Developments in European Thought • Various
... you had better use a little sense, Gordon. I dare say I am exaggerating the danger. But when you go around with that jaunty, devil-may-care way of yours, the men think you are looking for trouble—and ...
— The Yukon Trail - A Tale of the North • William MacLeod Raine
... the stars, the wandering of the moon, the coming and going of the sun, the crooning of the river, the shout of the big, manly, devil-may-care winds, the boom of the ...
— The River and I • John G. Neihardt
... he is always good-humoured. On the contrary, "Gentleman Jim," as they call him, has lost much of the rollicking, devil-may-care recklessness that earned his nickname, and is often morose now—sometimes even fierce and ...
— M. or N. "Similia similibus curantur." • G.J. Whyte-Melville
... I rose and played my part with all necessary discretion. While ridding Mr. T—— of his overcoat, I stole a look at his face. It is not a handsome one, but it boasts of a gay, devil-may-care expression which doubtless makes it dangerous to many women, while his manners are especially attractive, and his voice the richest and most persuasive that I ever heard. I contrasted him, almost against my will, ...
— The Golden Slipper • Anna Katharine Green
... had a TIMBRE, a peculiar, devil-may-care passion which produced a very thrilling effect upon her audience. She got up when she had finished in a dead silence and was half-way across the room before the applause burst out. There was a little ...
— Lady Bridget in the Never-Never Land • Rosa Praed
... whitewashed, and covered already with the multiform vagaries whether of master or pupils,—caricatures and demigods, hands and feet, torsos and monsters, and Venuses. The rude creations, all mutilated, jarring, and mingled, gave a cynical, mocking, devil-may-care kind of aspect to the sanctum of art. It was like the dissection-room of the anatomist. The boy's sketch was more in harmony with the walls of the studio than the canvas of the master. His nymph, accurately drawn, from the undressed proportions of the model, ...
— Lucretia, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... though it is not a pleasant experience it has some charms and many uses. It wakes a man up, shows him the real world again, and makes him know his own value once more. So I started for New York in rather a devil-may-care spirit, without the slightest chance of doing the business in comfort. And my misfortunes began ...
— A Tramp's Notebook • Morley Roberts
... immediately began pervading South Harvey, Foley and Magnus, and when the strikers lined up before the gates and doors of their former working places at seven o'clock that morning they met a brown line of youths—devil-may-care young fellows out for a lark, who liked to prod the workmen with their bayonets and who laughingly ordered the strikers to stop trying to keep the strike-breakers from going to work. The strikers were bound by their pledges to the Trades Council ...
— In the Heart of a Fool • William Allen White
... upon politics. I knew that Mr. Fox was already near the head of the King's party, and that he had just received a substantial reward at his Majesty's hands; and I went not far to guess that every one of these easy-going, devil-may-care macaronies was a follower or sympathizer with Lord North's policy. But what I heard was a revelation indeed. I have dignified it by calling it politics. All was frankness here amongst friends. There was no attempt made to gloss over ugly transactions with a veneer of morality. For this much ...
— The Crossing • Winston Churchill
... battle. "But boys," he added, "first wait till I adthress the meeting," and he made for the opening in the canvas through which the outside platform was reached. Stump oratory and a free fight were just the two temptations which Donovan was wholly unable to resist; it was with a face radiant with devil-may-care delight that he burst through the opening, followed by all the rest (who felt that the matter was out of their hands, and must go its own way after the Irishman), and rolling to the front of the outside platform, rested one hand on the rail, and waved the other ...
— Tom Brown at Oxford • Thomas Hughes
... by this incident, Lanyard followed his natural enemy into the dining-room with an air as devil-may-care as one could wish and so impressive that the maitre-d'hotel abandoned the detective to the mercies of one of his captains and himself hastened to seat Lanyard and take ...
— The Lone Wolf - A Melodrama • Louis Joseph Vance
... black, and his face strongly marked, and of the precise color of two small rivulets of tobacco-juice that escaped from the corners of his mouth. He had an easy, self-possessed manner, and a careless, devil-may-care way about him, that showed he had measured his powers, and was accustomed to "rough it" with the world. He wore a broadcloth coat of the fashion of some years ago, but his waistcoat and nether garments of the ...
— Among the Pines - or, South in Secession Time • James R. Gilmore
... in his gray eyes. Sandy was not old—a little short of thirty—but he was generally mature, suggesting deliberation of mind if not of action. This morning youth was his, rollicking, devil-may-care youth that showed in his walk, the set of his shoulders, ...
— Rimrock Trail • J. Allan Dunn
... finger tips. Yet he was conscious that, in spite of the man's graceful ease and friendly smile, he did not like Flatray. He would not ask for a better man beside him in a tight pinch; but he could not deny that something sinister which breathed from his sardonic, devil-may-care face. ...
— Brand Blotters • William MacLeod Raine
... Molyneux was a devil-may-care, sporting squire, with the sins of his class to his account. He drank, and gambled, and rioted, and oppressed his people that they might supply his pleasures; nor was that all, for he had sent the daughter of honest people in shame and ...
— An Isle in the Water • Katharine Tynan
... yet, even in the face of time-worn contradictions apparent to the most superficial and credulously minded, pretty, distracting Bessie Van Ashton had begun to cast her eyes in the direction of Dick Yankton, the handsome, open-handed, devil-may-care son of nature who regarded the world of fashion to which she belonged with about as much concern as he did ...
— When Dreams Come True • Ritter Brown
... favorite stanza is unrivalled for painting dream-pictures and rendering dream-music, but less available for pure narration; Chaucer's seven-line stanza, so delicately balanced upon that fourth, pivotal line, can paint a picture and tell a story too; Byron's ottava rima has a devil-may-care jauntiness, borrowed, it is true, from his Italian models, but perfectly fitted to Byron's own mood; the rhymed couplets of Pope sting and glitter like his antitheses, and the couplets of Dryden have their "resonance like a great bronze coin thrown down on marble"; each great ...
— A Study of Poetry • Bliss Perry
... God's country, within twenty miles of the place where he was born, the wanderer laid him down again, and in spite of raid and foray, whisky and poker-cards, wear-and-tear, hard times, and hardest test of all, sudden fortune, he was much the same impulsive, honest, generous, devil-may-care boy who had left ...
— Red Saunders • Henry Wallace Phillips
... yellow-and-black striped gowns, were preparing for the feats. They were behind the two women and at the far end of the garden. Mrs. Plumston and Kalora would have to move to the other side of the tree in order to witness the exhibition. This fact gave the devil-may-care ...
— The Slim Princess • George Ade
... they were located over an inexhaustible, subterranean lake of oil, and Oilville, city of tents and shacks, within a month had acquired the recklessness, the devil-may-care air of a mining camp, or the Pennsylvania oil fields. * * * Then there was a pause in the work, for the experts decided that the new oil which spouted forth in such vast quantities was too heavy and malodorous ...
— The California Birthday Book • Various
... horrible, and yet—as long as I live I will be glad to have lived those few short days. I learned to know men—big, strong men in action—what they will do—and what they will not do. The Texan with his devil-may-care ways that masked the real character of him. And you, darling—the real you—who had always remained hidden beneath the veneer of your culture and refinement. Then suddenly the veneer was knocked off and for the first time in your life the fine fibre of ...
— Prairie Flowers • James B. Hendryx
... a male trio, too, that claimed some attention. They represented to the life merry, devil-may-care vagabonds, and so well did they act their parts that one would have supposed they had just been picked up on the miry highway outside. They deemed it, of course, strictly within their privileges to get drunk with all due speed,—an endeavor in which they ...
— A Little Garrison - A Realistic Novel of German Army Life of To-day • Fritz von der Kyrburg |
