"Frigidity" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... question of the Carlyle domestic relations, and his impression of Mrs. Carlyle was that she was "a hard unlovable woman." As, however, it is on record that he once, while excitedly explaining some point of mystical philosophy, put down Mrs. Carlyle's hot kettle on the hearthrug, any frigidity that he may have observed in her manner may possibly find a natural explanation. His partisanship in the Carlyle affair, which was characteristically headlong and human, may not throw much light on that ...
— Robert Browning • G. K. Chesterton
... especially because the cold of the water penetrates their bodies and so they generally all die from haemorrhages, oppression of the chest caused by staying such long stretches of time without breathing; and from dysentery caused by the frigidity. 40. Their hair, which is by nature black, changes to an ashen colour like the skin of seals, and nitre comes out from their shoulders so that they resemble human monsters of some species. 41. With this insupportable toil, or rather, ...
— Bartholomew de Las Casas; his life, apostolate, and writings • Francis Augustus MacNutt
... upon instruments of music, ranged around the walls. One girl at the organ is graceful; another with a tambourine has a sort of Bassarid beauty. But the group of Apollo, Pegasus, and a Muse upon Parnassus, is a failure in its meaningless frigidity, while few of these subordinate compositions show power of ...
— Sketches and Studies in Italy and Greece, Complete - Series I, II, and III • John Symonds
... October was opening with a most blustering and wintry aspect. In one sense, however, the character of the season had changed; the dry, equal cold, that was generally supportable, having been succeeded by tempests that were sometimes a little moist, but oftener of intense frigidity. Of course the equinox was past, and there were more than twelve hours of sun. The great luminary showed himself well above the northern horizon; and though his circuit described an arch that did not promise soon to bring him near the zenith at ...
— The Sea Lions - The Lost Sealers • James Fenimore Cooper
... patience, severe conscientiousness, and imperturbable frigidity in a style that was pure, though somewhat prolix, that History of Florence, virtually a history of Italy, which from its first appearance was hailed as a classic and has remained one. His history is altogether that of a statesman; he passed his life among prominent public affairs, being Governor ...
— Initiation into Literature • Emile Faguet
... would be needless to dwell upon the traits of his character. To those who are not, we can say that his were feelings founded upon interest-moving in the foremost elements of secession-arbitrary, self-willed, and easily swayed by prejudice-a man known to the public and the bar for his frigidity, bound in his own opinions, and yielding second to the wishes and principles of none-fearful of his popularity as a judge, yet devoid of those sterling principles which deep jurists bring to their aid when considering important questions, where ...
— Manuel Pereira • F. C. Adams
... of the system in Paris may be described simply as extreme frigidity and extraordinary accuracy. M. Vauthrot, the chorus-master, excelled in both these qualities. He was a man whom I could not help regarding as hostile to me, because I had never been able to win from him a single expression of ...
— My Life, Volume II • Richard Wagner
... with a sudden change from frigidity to fondness. "I am not unmindful of my promises; there is nothing better to myself than to keep them, nothing worse than to break them. Beaumanoir is now without reproach, and you can visit it without fear of aught but the ghosts in ...
— The Golden Dog - Le Chien d'Or • William Kirby
... added intensity because this one was Lucetta. She depicted his impassioned manner; beheld the indecision of both between their lothness to separate and their desire not to be observed; depicted their shaking of hands; how they probably parted with frigidity in their general contour and movements, only in the smaller features showing the spark of passion, thus invisible to all but themselves. This discerning silent witch had not done thinking of these things ...
— The Mayor of Casterbridge • Thomas Hardy
... two books, and the poor man looked so hungry for something to read that I couldn't resist sharing my 'goodies.' He will see that I'm a countrified little thing in spite of my fine feathers, and won't be shocked at my want of rigidity and frigidity; so don't look dismal, and I'll be prim and proper all the rest of the way,—if I ...
— A Modern Cinderella - or The Little Old Show and Other Stories • Louisa May Alcott
... in the afternoon he arrived at the widow Keswick's gate. He had looked for a stormy reception, in which the thunder-bolts of rage should burst around him, and he was surprised, therefore, to be received with the frigidity of the North Pole. ...
— The Late Mrs. Null • Frank Richard Stockton
... answer, he could only leave her, and her failure to ask him to write hurt as much as the frigidity of the leave-taking. ...
— The Dude Wrangler • Caroline Lockhart
... lifting the skirt of his dinner-jacket with his hands and rising on his spurs like a bantam cock. I left her to him for a moment and went over to say a civil word to the Misses Bostock of South Shields. I regret to say I noticed a certain frigidity in their demeanour. The well-conducted man in South Shields does not go out one night with a revolver tucked away in the pocket of his dress-suit, and turn up the next evening with a striking-looking lady with bronze hair. Such goings-on are seen on the stage in ...
— Simon the Jester • William J. Locke
... persisted in the prayer to be received at Fawley, stating that his desire for a personal interview was now suddenly become special and urgent; that it not only concerned himself, but affected his benefactor. By return of post Darrell replied with curt frigidity, repeating, with even sternness, his refusal to receive Lionel, but professing himself ready to attend to all that his kinsman might address to him by letter. "If it be as you state," wrote Darrell, with his habitual irony, "a matter that relates to myself, I claim, ...
— What Will He Do With It, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... approached him respectfully and handed him a dinner napkin. Francis took it, but with the most distant and curt politeness. The next day an interview took place between Bourbon and the king, in reference to the position of the latter as captive. In this Francis displayed the same frigidity of manner as before, while he was all cordiality with Pescara, Bourbon's fellow in command. The two leaders claimed Francis as their own captive, but Lannoy, to whom he had surrendered, had him embarked for Naples, and instead of taking him there, sent him ...
— Historical Tales, Vol. 6 (of 15) - The Romance of Reality. French. • Charles Morris
... child, you need not leave Madison Hall unless you wish to do so." Mrs. Weatherbee's frigidity had miraculously vanished. A gleam of kindly purpose ...
— Jane Allen: Right Guard • Edith Bancroft
... lengthy poem, generally written in heroic or blank verse. These tours de force were supported by minute efforts in miniature-painting, by touch applied to touch, and were often monuments of industry, but they were apt to lack personal interest, and to suffer from a general and deplorable frigidity. They were infected with the faults which accompany an artificial style; they were monotonous, rhetorical and symmetrical, while the uniformity of treatment which was inevitable to their plan ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 8, Slice 2 - "Demijohn" to "Destructor" • Various
... say nothing of a less metaphysical cause, and was evidently vastly contented with herself, with her company, and with the general promise of destiny. Her daughter was less overtly jubilant, and distributed her greetings with impartial frigidity. She had never been so beautiful. Dressed simply in vaporous white, relieved with half a dozen white roses, the perfection of her features and of her person and the mysterious depth of her expression seemed to glow with the white light of a splendid pearl. She recognized no ...
— Roderick Hudson • Henry James
... attitude, which only the young man's self-absorption prevented him from noticing. If he had been less jubilant, he must have felt the unnatural aloofness of the other man's bearing; but even had he done so, he would doubtless have attributed it to Cortlandt's well-recognized frigidity. ...
— The Ne'er-Do-Well • Rex Beach
... innocence, or the crosses of love. What he does best, he soon ceases to do. He no sooner begins to move than he counteracts himself; and terror and pity, as they are rising in the mind, are checked and blasted by sudden frigidity.' In all this, our critic seems more bent on maintaining the equilibrium of his style than the consistency or truth of his opinions.—If Dr. Johnson's opinion was right, the following observations on Shakespeare's ...
— Characters of Shakespeare's Plays • William Hazlitt
... the unmarried daughter of a noble house, about fifty at this time, and luckily—or unluckily—for Priscilla, a great lover of much food and its resultant deep slumbers) would bow in her turn in as stately a manner as her bulk permitted, and with a frigidity so pronounced that in any one less skilled in shades of deportment it would have resembled with a singular completeness a sniff of scorn. Her frigidity was perfectly justified. Was she not a hochgeboren, a member of an ancient house, of luminous ...
— The Princess Priscilla's Fortnight • Elizabeth von Arnim
... job he filled were located in the medieval notion of the physical appearance of hell. By day the environment was heat and torment. By night—lunar night, of course, and lunar day—it was frigidity and horror. Once in two weeks Earth-time a rocketship came around the horizon from Lunar City with stores for the colony deep underground. Pop received the stores and took care of them. He handed over the product of the mine, to be forwarded to Earth. The rocket went away again. ...
— Scrimshaw • William Fitzgerald Jenkins
... grouped under the different reforms which, according to him, the human dilemma demands. And so on! These tendencies, while they should not be resisted too much, since they give character to observation and redeem it from the frigidity of mechanics, should be resisted to a certain extent. For, whatever they may be, they favour the growth of sentimentality, the protean and indescribably ...
— The Author's Craft • Arnold Bennett
... Manor was not a very brilliant affair. Stafford did not appear, pleading that it was a Friday, and a strict fast for him. Kate was distinctly out of temper, and treated the company in general, and Eugene in particular, with frigidity. Everybody felt that the situation was somewhat strained, and in consequence the pleasant flow of personal talk that marks parties of friends was dried up at its source. The discussion of general topics was found to be ...
— Father Stafford • Anthony Hope
... regions of the Far West, backed up seemingly by all the powers of nature—to try and cramp the energies of the party, and arrest their labours; but, neither the severity of the weather, nor the languor which the excessive frigidity of the atmosphere produced— although it sent them to sleep of a night after their day's toil, without the necessity of an opiate—were sufficient to deter ...
— Picked up at Sea - The Gold Miners of Minturne Creek • J.C. Hutcheson
... aristocratic drawl," and his pronunciation was archaic. Like other high-bred people of his time, he talked of "cowcumbers" and "laylocks," called a woman an "'ooman," and was "much obleeged" where a degenerate age is content to be obliged. The frigidity of his address and the seeming stiffness of his manner, due really to an innate and incurable shyness, produced even among people who ought to have known him well a totally erroneous notion of his character and temperament. To ...
— Collections and Recollections • George William Erskine Russell
... large, bald head, bony and shining; and under the great dome of his skull his face, yellow, with deep lines in it, looked very small. He was quiet and exceedingly polite. He spoke with the accent of New England, and there was about his demeanour a bloodless frigidity which made me ask myself why on earth he was busying himself with Charles Strickland. I had been slightly tickled at the gentleness which Mrs. Strickland put into her mention of her husband's name, ...
— The Moon and Sixpence • W. Somerset Maugham
... spite of the earthy and mouldy smell, it was conscientiously clean. There was not a speck of dust anywhere; the old yellowish-white paint was spotless; the windows shone. But there was a sort of frigidity in the perfect order and repair which repelled her, and she left her things tossed about, as if to break the ice of this propriety. In several places, within and without, she found marks of the faithful hand of Bolton in economical patches ...
— Annie Kilburn - A Novel • W. D. Howells
... seat by the fire, where his damp clothing would gradually dry, and forthwith called for "Dixie." And hardly was the stirring melody well under way before the girls were keeping time with toes and fingers, and a general animation was replacing the temporary frigidity induced by Jerry's advent. Jerry really played surprisingly well, and on a stormy day such an accomplishment stands its possessor in ...
— Peggy Raymond's Vacation - or Friendly Terrace Transplanted • Harriet L. (Harriet Lummis) Smith
... literature. From this brilliant medley of reality and romance, of wit and pathos, of fantasy and observation, was born that new art, complex in thought, various in expression, which gives a semblance of frigidity to perfection itself. An indefatigable ...
— The Great English Short-Story Writers, Vol. 1 • Various
... feared as much." Nevertheless, Alec did not object to that confession. He knew that anything was better then frigidity. "Why haven't you told me when I have ...
— Tess of the d'Urbervilles - A Pure Woman • Thomas Hardy
... Sometimes, indeed, we contrived to get ourselves asked to the houses of high and mighty entertainers, where we ate the finest French dishes and drank the oldest vintages, and fortified ourselves sensibly and snugly in that way against the frigidity of the company. Of these repasts I have no hard words to say; it is of the dinners we gave ourselves, and of the dinners which people in our rank of life gave to us, ...
— A Rogue's Life • Wilkie Collins
... Anne of Beaujeu and the Breton Marshal de Rieux both claimed the wardship of the young Duchess, for whose hand the widower Maximilian was already a prominent suitor. Now up to this point Henry had refused to adopt a hostile attitude towards France, and had treated overtures from Maximilian with frigidity. But in six months' time he was concluding alliances both with Brittany ...
— England Under the Tudors • Arthur D. Innes
... her daughter, however, were not at home; and on the next day after, repeating his visit, Winterbourne again had the misfortune not to find them. Mrs. Walker's party took place on the evening of the third day, and, in spite of the frigidity of his last interview with the hostess, Winterbourne was among the guests. Mrs. Walker was one of those American ladies who, while residing abroad, make a point, in their own phrase, of studying European society, and she ...
— Daisy Miller • Henry James
... came back on the first day hoping to find it stored full of the afternoon sun's warmth, but found that the camerera had opened the windows and closed the shutters in our absence so that our parlor was of a frigidity which no glitter of the electric light could temper. The halls and public rooms were chill in anticipation and remembrance of any cold outside, but in otir parlor there was a hole for the sort of stove which we saw in the reading-room, ...
— Familiar Spanish Travels • W. D. Howells
... Davis's Strait is the wild, extensive, and uncivilized country of Labrador. Its coast was first discovered by the Portuguese navigators; but the frigidity of its climate is such, that no settlements of any importance have ever been fixed upon its shores. Even the extent of the country has been but imperfectly ascertained; for all the knowledge we have hitherto obtained respecting ...
— Travels in North America, From Modern Writers • William Bingley
... clubhouse is not an official establishment, but one intended for luxurious accommodation, and that it would have admitted of much more florid embellishment. At the same time, although we quarrel with the frigidity of the exterior, we do not question the warmth of its kitchens, or the potency of its cellars; neither do we affect any knowledge of the latter—nay, not even enough to weave into ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction - Volume 12, No. 334 Saturday, October 4, 1828 • Various
... character, but which I believe I should never have discovered had I not endeavored to take the place of the public towards him, and judge of him as I have seen them judge of others: I mean an apparent frigidity of manner which I feared the world would consider as the evidence of a cold ...
— Discourse of the Life and Character of the Hon. Littleton Waller Tazewell • Hugh Blair Grigsby
... That great lady, having expected to find that Molly had, acting on her advice, abandoned Mrs. Delaport Green, was quite disappointed in the girl when she met them still together in London, and so she extended her frigidity to both of them. ...
— Great Possessions • Mrs. Wilfrid Ward
... to herself. For a moment, even the knowledge of his presence had escaped her. Hamel, however, did not realise that fact. He welcomed her confidence as a sign of relaxation from the frigidity of her ...
— The Vanished Messenger • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... judgment, combined with scientific accuracy, were always distinctive of Florentines. To such an extent did these qualities determine their treatment of the arts that acute critics have been found to tax them—and in my opinion justly—with hardness and frigidity.[30] Brunelleschi in 1425 designed the basilica of S. Lorenzo after an original but truly classic type, remarkable for its sobriety and correctness. What he had learned from the ruins of Rome he here applied in obedience to his own artistic instinct. S. Lorenzo ...
— Renaissance in Italy Vol. 3 - The Fine Arts • John Addington Symonds
... insignificance by the side of this girl's ride on the ice cream freezer. If the young man had exhibited foresight, and had a side saddle buckled on to the ice cream freezer, the experience would have been robbed of much of its frigidity, or if there had been a thick blanket under the saddle, but he failed to take even ...
— Peck's Sunshine - Being a Collection of Articles Written for Peck's Sun, - Milwaukee, Wis. - 1882 • George W. Peck
... besetting weaknesses of his oratory, was an eloquent, impressive and convincing addition to the great argument on the Irish question. Giving himself a certain freedom—departing from the over-severe self-restraint which he so often imposes upon himself—abandoning the frigidity of manner which conceals from so many people his warmth of heart and of temper, he spoke with a go, a fire and a force of attack not very common with him. Above all things the speech gave the impression of one who spoke from the inside—who knew the subjects of which he was talking, ...
— Sketches In The House (1893) • T. P. O'Connor
... 'contemporaries'. Milton did not escape it; and it was adduced with virulence against Gray and Collins. We now hear no more of it, not that their poems are better understood at present, than they were at their first publication; but their fame is established; and a critic would accuse him self of frigidity or, inattention, who should profess not to understand them: but a living writer is yet sub judice; and if we cannot follow his conceptions or enter into his feelings, it is more consoling to our pride to consider him as lost beneath, than as soaring above, us. If any man expect ...
— The Life of Samuel Taylor Coleridge - 1838 • James Gillman
... sudden and awful death presented him an early copy, and I never lost faith in my own senses until I saw him sit down and go to reading it in cold blood—saw him open the book, and heard him read these following lines, with the same inflectionless judicial frigidity with which he always read his charge to the jury, or administered ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... terrifies by its length, complexity, frigidity, and above all by its novelty," he said to Jay and Madison, who met by appointment in his library. "Clinton, in this State, has persuaded his followers that it is so many iron hoops, in which they would groan and struggle for the rest of their lives. To defeat him and this pernicious ...
— The Conqueror • Gertrude Franklin Atherton
... enemy. Here was Pitt's most serious blunder. At the outset of the struggle, and throughout its course, he scorned those tactful arts and melodramatic ways which win over waverers and inspire the fainthearted. Here he showed himself not a son of Chatham, but a Grenville. The results of this frigidity were disastrous. All Frenchmen and many Britons believed that he went out of his way to assail a peaceful Republic in order to crush liberty abroad and at home. History has exposed the falseness ...
— William Pitt and the Great War • John Holland Rose
... in which the Southern character has been predominant, and contrast the genial courtesy, the warm and graceful freedom of that region, with what they call (though I utterly disagree with them) the frigidity of our Northern manners, and the Western plainness of the President. They have a conscientious, though mistaken belief, that the South was driven out of the Union by intolerable wrong on our part, and that we are responsible ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 10, No. 57, July, 1862 - A Magazine Of Literature, Art, And Politics • Various
... formality and frigidity; at the home is ease and enjoyment. The children of the home make breaks and we love them for it; it's ...
— Evening Round Up - More Good Stuff Like Pep • William Crosbie Hunter
... their languid bodies to the stifled music of unwilling slaves. And while daylight seems modestly contending with the vulgar glare within, there appears among the pale revellers a paler ghost, who, having stalked thrice up and down the hall, preserving the frigidity and ghostliness of the tomb, answering not the questions that are put to him, and otherwise deporting himself as becometh a ghost of good metal, is being taken for a demon of wicked import. Now he pauses at the end of the hall, faces ...
— Justice in the By-Ways - A Tale of Life • F. Colburn Adams
... building, and the shuffling of feet on the outer steps. The light of his fire had evidently been seen, and like a beacon had attracted some wandering and possibly intoxicated mariner with American papers. The consul walked into the hall with a sudden righteous frigidity of manner. It was one thing to be lounging in one's own office on the Sabbath day, and quite another to be ...
— A Protegee of Jack Hamlin's and Other Stories • Bret Harte
... in a glow of triumph; satisfied, notwithstanding her frigidity, that he had compassed his immediate aim, which was that she might not be able to dismiss from her thoughts him and his persevering desire for the shadow of her face during the next four-and-twenty-hours. And his confidence was ...
— A Laodicean • Thomas Hardy
... have been so weak as to think of marrying Burleigh in self-defence, and she punished him by an indifference of manner which approached frigidity; until one of the evening journals copied a bitter attack upon him from the leading newspaper of his State, when she relented and permitted him to console himself in her presence. And although, as the weeks passed and she saw Senator North from the gallery of the Senate only, or for ...
— Senator North • Gertrude Atherton
... dreaded her as a rival. The attitude of coldness and reserve that the young girl had adopted in her intercourse with Marien, her stepmother could see, was no evidence of coquetry. She showed, in her behavior to the friend of the family, a freedom from embarrassment which was new to her, and a frigidity which could not possibly have been assumed so persistently. No! what struck Madame de Nailles was the suddenness of this transformation. Jacqueline evidently took no further interest in Marien; she had apparently no longer any affection ...
— Jacqueline, v2 • Th. Bentzon (Mme. Blanc)
... Saturday morning Louis by a fine frigidity would have tried to show to the obtuse Axon that he resented such demeanour towards himself on the part of an Axon, assuming as it did that the art-director of the works was one of the servile crew that scuttled about in terror if the ferocious Horrocleave happened to sneeze. But to-day ...
— The Price of Love • Arnold Bennett
... moisture in the air is small, the refrigerating process continues until frost is produced, and many a moonlight night in spring destroys half or even the whole of the fruit of a new season. Moonlight, therefore, frequently involves the idea of frigidity. With us, whose climate is comparatively cold, the change from the burning, blasting, or blighting heat of day, or sun-up, to the cold of a clear night, or sun-down, is not very great, but within ...
— Moon Lore • Timothy Harley
... keep your engagement," she told him, and he could feel the instant frigidity which returned to her tone. A zero-like wave seemed to come right through the transmitter of the telephone and chill the perspiration of his brow into ...
— The Early Bird - A Business Man's Love Story • George Randolph Chester
... against us both, there was in her temper something so gentle, meek, and unupbraiding, that even the sense of injustice lost its sting, and one could not help loving the softness of her character, while one was most chilled by its frigidity. Anger, hope, fear, the faintest breath or sign of passion, never seemed to stir the breezeless languor of her feelings; and quiet was so inseparable from her image that I have almost thought, like that people described ...
— Devereux, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... household; the butler made a profound bow to the captain; the footmen forgot their usual smirk when he alighted. Captain Delmar was ushered in solemn silence into the drawing-room, and his aunt, who had notice of his arrival received him with a stiff, prim air of unwonted frigidity, with her arms crossed before her on her white ...
— Percival Keene • Frederick Marryat
... truthfulness and honesty. In fact their virtues in this respect are something phenomenal. The same cannot be said, however, for their sexual morals, which, as a rule, are the contrary of good. Even a short stay among the hyperboreans causes one to smile at Lord Kames's "frigidity of the North Americans," and at the fallacy of Herder who says, "the blood of man near the pole circulates but slowly, the heart beats but languidly; consequently the married live chastely, the women almost require ...
— The First Landing on Wrangel Island - With Some Remarks on the Northern Inhabitants • Irving C. Rosse
... complained that Europe took little note of or interest in this conference, and among the delegates of some of the Latin American states—representatives of all of which were present—Europe was blamed for frigidity to thoughts of arbitration. But the world grows wiser slowly, and Spanish-America not more rapidly. Important matters which occupied the attention of the Congress were the questions of some standardising of Spanish-American Custom-house methods, ...
— Mexico • Charles Reginald Enock
... once upon a time to Madame de Maintenon, who consulted him about her defects, "You are good towards those for whom you have liking and esteem, but you are cold so soon as the liking leaves you; when you are frigid your frigidity is carried rather far, and, when you begin to feel mistrust, your heart is withdrawn too brusquely from those to ...
— A Popular History of France From The Earliest Times - Volume V. of VI. • Francois Pierre Guillaume Guizot
... that morning and would take up matters at once. Nine o'clock was set for the hearing, which would take place in the quartermaster's office. Consultations were being held among the two factions, and the only ray of light was the reported frigidity of the special officer. He was such a superior personage that ordinary mortals felt a chill radiating from his person on their slightest approach. His credentials were from the War Department and were such ...
— The Outlet • Andy Adams
... people's matters, and St. Paul, in his letter to the Thessalonians and to Timothy, gives them a sharp dig, and the good housewife will be on the lookout for them, and never return their calls, and treat them with coldest frigidity. For this reason, better keep house as soon as possible. Some people are opposed to them, but I thank God for what are called flats in these cities. They put a separate home within the means of nearly ...
— The Wedding Ring - A Series of Discourses for Husbands and Wives and Those - Contemplating Matrimony • T. De Witt Talmage
... rooms went there; my aunt sitting at the head of the table, with an early morning air of being en famille that she wore at no other time of day. It was not a matter of garments, for she was not the woman to wear a peignoir; but lay, I supposed, in her manner, which did not begin to assume frigidity until several watches ...
— The Inheritors • Joseph Conrad
... hesitated a veil of darkness seemed to fall upon me. Utter cold, a frigidity as of outer space, lanced into my brain. My senses reeled under the assault. Desperately, blind and sick and giddy, I called on the reserve strength Lhar had given me. Then ...
— Where the World is Quiet • Henry Kuttner
... of the subtlest ornaments of style, and even when fulfilling no particular purpose is capable of imparting a luxuriant and somewhat rococo richness to the verse. The effect, however, is frequently one of unrelieved frigidity, as in ...
— Pastoral Poetry and Pastoral Drama - A Literary Inquiry, with Special Reference to the Pre-Restoration - Stage in England • Walter W. Greg
... interested. A rush of colour warmed her cheeks. The frigidity of her manner vanished as ...
— The Traitors • E. Phillips (Edward Phillips) Oppenheim
... pen of Miss Hoffman. The informal "Exchange Comment" is a charitable and generally delightful department, whose anonymity we rather regret. The Editorial pages are brilliant in their justification of the United's sunny spirit, as contrasted with the National's forbidding frigidity. ...
— Writings in the United Amateur, 1915-1922 • Howard Phillips Lovecraft
... "you say that because you belong to the most favored nations. You might not think him so genial if you saw the frigidity with which he receives ...
— Flint - His Faults, His Friendships and His Fortunes • Maud Wilder Goodwin
... Utterly unabled in nature, by reason of frigidity, to perform the duties, or any the least office of ...
— Epicoene - Or, The Silent Woman • Ben Jonson
... reckon friendship. In theory, the standard is raised too high; we ought not, however, to wish it much lower. The honest sensibilities of ingenuous nature should not be checked by the over-cautious maxims of political prudence. No advantage, obtained by such frigidity, can compensate for the want of those warm effusions of the heart into the bosom of a friend, which are doubtless among the most exquisite pleasures. At the same time, however, it must be owned, that they often by the inevitable lot of humanity, make ...
— Sketches of the Fair Sex, in All Parts of the World • Anonymous
... almost smiled. For this lapse of duty to her church and to herself, however, she atoned at once by a sudden frigidity. Turning away she studied a huge tapestry that hung on their left as they entered. This tapestry extended almost across the room, forming a screen to a ...
— The Pines of Lory • John Ames Mitchell
... I felt that a man had the right to some slight display of tenderness from the woman who had borne him. Her frigidity wounded me. It wounded me the more in comparison with the affectionate clasp of old Gervasio's arms. With a knot in my throat I passed from the sunlight of the courtyard into the gloom of the gateway, and out again beyond, upon the drawbridge. ...
— The Strolling Saint • Raphael Sabatini
... usual general audiences to refuse to be moved by unworthy pleas and misrepresentations, to accord approval only to the best speakers and the soundest arguments. But surely in a class of public speakers any such tricks and schemes should be received with stolid frigidity. Nothing is so damaging to appeals to prejudice, spread-eagleism, and fustian bombast as an ...
— Public Speaking • Clarence Stratton
... notice the intense frigidity that can be expressed in a "my dear!" The coldest, cruellest husband we ever knew once impressed this fact on our childish fancy, by our always hearing him call his wife thus. Poor, pale, broken-hearted creature! He "my ...
— Olive - A Novel • Dinah Maria Craik, (AKA Dinah Maria Mulock)
... unanimous doubt? call it what you will. She might perhaps guess, but she did not suffer it to perplex her for more than a few moments. Throwing aside the extreme diffidence that marked her entree, and the perturbation that resulted from the frigidity of the spectators, she wound herself up to the condition of fearless independence for which she is constitutionally and morally remarkable, and with a look of superb indifference and conscious power she commenced the opening of her aria. In one minute the crowd, ...
— Great Singers, Second Series - Malibran To Titiens • George T. Ferris
... Carter without moving a muscle. Shaw looked round helplessly.—"And you would enjoy the fun—wouldn't you?" he said with slow bitterness. Carter's distant non-committal smile quite overwhelmed him by its horrid frigidity. Extreme despondency replaced the proper feeling of racial pride in the primitive soul of the mate. "My God! What luck! What have I done to fall amongst that lot?" he groaned, sat down, and took his big grey head in his hands. Carter drew aside ...
— The Rescue • Joseph Conrad
... Orphans, and poor Lady Augusta had been forced to see that whatever fire and enthusiasm her protege could display in tracking down the orphans' dishonest butcher, his respect where she was concerned verged on frigidity. ...
— Robert Orange - Being a Continuation of the History of Robert Orange • John Oliver Hobbes
... nice-looking young one (who was Captain Graham-Reece). The Admiral gave him a friendly nod—Lady Jane a nod that almost amounted to a cut direct. But the divine Julia gave him a look and a smile that were warm enough to make up for much maternal frigidity. ...
— The Martian • George Du Maurier
... ultimately gave her name to the place of punishment precious to the Calvinistic mind. And because the Norseman very much disliked the bitter, cruel cold of the long winter, his heaven was a warm, well-fired abode, and his place of punishment one of terrible frigidity. Somewhere on the other side of the Tweed and Cheviots was the spot selected by the Celt of southern Britain. On the other hand, the eastern mind, which knew the terrors of a sun-smitten land and of a heat that was torture, had for a hell a fiery place ...
— A Book of Myths • Jean Lang
... my fur-lined sealskin coat," said the colored man to himself as he felt the chill night air, that seemed to increase in frigidity along about eleven o'clock. He went to the cabin to get his overcoat, and, returning on deck prepared to spend the rest of his hour of watch in ease and comfort. He stretched out on the bench in the conning tower, noted ...
— Under the Ocean to the South Pole - The Strange Cruise of the Submarine Wonder • Roy Rockwood
... the dining-room, late as usual, her frigidity was not especially marked. On the contrary, her face rippled into one smile after another, and seizing Blake by both hands, ...
— The Net • Rex Beach
... dexterity; but as he always indulged himself in the utmost possible latitude of sail, he was occasionally upset by a sudden gust, and was indebted to his skill in the art of swimming for the opportunity of tempering with a copious libation of wine the unnatural frigidity introduced into his stomach by the extraordinary intrusion of water, an element which he had religiously determined should never pass his lips, but of which, on these occasions, he was sometimes compelled to swallow no inconsiderable quantity. This circumstance alone, of the ...
— Headlong Hall • Thomas Love Peacock
... feelings."[260] Lombroso and Ferrero, again, while admitting that the sexual feelings might be either heightened or depressed in hysteria, referred to the frequency of what they termed "a paradoxical sexual instinct" in the hysterical, by which, for instance, sexual frigidity is combined with intense sexual pre-occupations; and they also pointed out the significant fact that the crimes of the hysterical nearly always revolve around the sexual sphere.[261] Thus, even up to the time when the conception of hysteria which absolutely ...
— Studies in the Psychology of Sex, Volume 1 (of 6) • Havelock Ellis
... intrusted the class to an assistant, and descended to the reception room. She had never seen Pansy's guardian before (the executor had brought the child); and this extraordinary creature, whose visit she could not deny, might be ruinous to school discipline. It was therefore with an extra degree of frigidity of demeanor that she threw open the door of the reception room, and entered majestically. But to her utter astonishment, the colonel met her with a bow so stately, so ceremonious, and so commanding that she stopped, ...
— Trent's Trust and Other Stories • Bret Harte
... as a Grand Seigneur with a paramount "Jus Primis Noctis." True, the majority of men are abashed in the presence of innocence and deal gently with it,—but others follow in a repellent way their instinct of possession. Any neurologist of experience has cases where sexual frigidity and neurasthenia in a woman can be traced back to the shock of that ...
— The Nervous Housewife • Abraham Myerson
... give me the greatest pleasure to communicate. I have much to say of the climate of the planet; of its wonderful alternations of heat and cold, of unmitigated and burning sunshine for one fortnight, and more than polar frigidity for the next; of a constant transfer of moisture, by distillation like that in vacuo, from the point beneath the sun to the point the farthest from it; of a variable zone of running water, of the people themselves; of their manners, customs, and political institutions; of their peculiar physical ...
— The Works of Edgar Allan Poe - Volume 1 (of 5) of the Raven Edition • Edgar Allan Poe
... rows of spectators. Lastly she took in the Promenade, in which she stood. She surveyed the Promenade with a professional eye. It instantly shocked her, not as it might have shocked one ignorant of human nature and history, but by reason of its frigidity, its constraint, its solemnity, its pretence. In one glance she embraced all the figures, moving or stationary, against the hedge of shoulders in front and against the mirrors behind—all of them: the programme girls, the cigarette girls, the chocolate girls, the cloak-room ...
— The Pretty Lady • Arnold E. Bennett
... tone of polite frigidity. "And since you place conditions on his welcome to your house, permit me to remark that I prefer his acquaintance to yours." ...
— Out of the Primitive • Robert Ames Bennet
... the very great company of lords and ladies and fashionable persons who thronged the town, and appeared in every public place, filled George's truly British soul with intense delight. They flung off that happy frigidity and insolence of demeanour which occasionally characterises the great at home, and appearing in numberless public places, condescended to mingle with the rest of the company whom they met there. One night at a party given by the general of the division to which George's regiment ...
— Vanity Fair • William Makepeace Thackeray
... head slowly and looked round at Aubrey,—then recovering his composure, sat down and pretended to turn over some documents on the table, but Aubrey went on undeterred by his aspect of frigidity, "How dare you, I say? The God in Man! Do you realize the stupendous meaning of such a phrase? Do you not see that it means A DIVINE LIFE PALPITATING THROUGH EVERY ATOM OF CREATION? A Force so great, so pure and majestic, so absolute in Its working for good, and yet so deliberate in ...
— The Master-Christian • Marie Corelli
... icy towards this man; but frigidity had no effect whatever on the exuberant spirits of ...
— A Woman Intervenes • Robert Barr
... Her beauty and absence, her kindness and cruelty, her disdain and inconstancy, produce no correspondence of emotion. His poetical account of the virtues of plants, and colours of flowers, is not perused with more sluggish frigidity. The compositions are such as might have been written for penance by a hermit, or for hire by a philosophical rhymer, who had only heard of another sex; for they turn the mind only on the writer, whom, without thinking on ...
— Lives of the Poets, Vol. 1 • Samuel Johnson
... the Church ought to be a great home circle of fathers, mothers, brothers, and sisters. That would be a very strange home circle where the brothers and sisters did not know each other, and where the parents were characterised by frigidity and heartlessness. The Church must be a great family group—the pulpit the fireplace, the people all gathered around it. I think we sometimes can tell the people to stay out by our church architecture. People come in and find things angular and cold and stiff, and they go away never ...
— T. De Witt Talmage - As I Knew Him • T. De Witt Talmage
... zero which men had measured by anticipation, but never yet experienced—by a simple system of producing within the air-tight suits a temperature sufficiently elevated to counteract the effects of the frigidity without. By means of long, flexible tubes, air could be continually supplied to the wearers of the suits, and by an ingenious contrivance a store of compressed air sufficient to last for several hours was provided for each suit, so that in case of necessity the wearer could throw ...
— Edison's Conquest of Mars • Garrett Putman Serviss
... reiterated examples of poets in the delirium of the frenzy of attachment or in the abasement of rejection invoking ardent sympathetic constellations or the frigidity of the satellite ...
— Ulysses • James Joyce
... shop still underneath the old apartment, with the tin labels stuck in the kosher meat, and there was Gideon, the fat, genial butcher, flourishing his great carving-knife as of yore, though without that ancient smile of brotherly recognition. Gideon's frigidity chilled him; it was an inauspicious omen, a symptom ...
— Ghetto Comedies • Israel Zangwill
... landlord: 'You possibly have not such a large assemblage of visitors here, on this somewhat forbidding evening, that you quite forget how this couple arrived, and what the lady wore?' His tone of addressing the landlord had in it a quiet frigidity that was ...
— A Group of Noble Dames • Thomas Hardy
... ceremoniously provided for—with an outbreak of talk between him and Eleanor, or between him and Benecke, more eager, animated and interesting than before. But Lucy had no part in it. It was not the early neglect and incivility of the villa; it was something infinitely colder and more wounding; the frigidity of disillusion and resentment, of kindness rebuffed ...
— Eleanor • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... dinner, she evinced an icy frigidity. She made no offers to serve Florent, but several times remarked: "It's very strange what an amount of bread we've ...
— The Fat and the Thin • Emile Zola
... impatient frigidity, "whatever we may call the day it was forty-eight hours ago, and in forty-eight hours more than damned Englishman will have run his head into a noose, from which, an I mistake not, he'll not find ...
— The Elusive Pimpernel • Baroness Emmuska Orczy
... circumstances of this transgressing pair, and well consider in what manner nature must operate, when thus powerfully excited, and if they are not rendered totally incapable of any soft sensations, by an uncommon frigidity of constitution, they will cease either to wonder at, or too cruelly condemn, the effects of ...
— Life's Progress Through The Passions - Or, The Adventures of Natura • Eliza Fowler Haywood
... Under Susan's uncompromising frigidity Miss Dorothy's stammering tongue came to a ...
— Dawn • Eleanor H. Porter
... "The work burns"; and, while it is practically certain that the writer knew the Scudery romances, the contrast of this "burning" quality becomes so striking as almost to justify, comparatively if not positively, the accusations of frigidity and languor which have been somewhat excessively brought against the earlier performances. There is not the passion of Atala—it would have been out of place: and there is not the soul-dissection of Rene, for there is nothing morbid enough to ...
— A History of the French Novel, Vol. 2 - To the Close of the 19th Century • George Saintsbury
... cold that Charity froze also, and set her maid to packing. Mrs. Noxon's frigidity was a terrifying example of what she was to expect. She returned to New York on the first train. Jim was ...
— We Can't Have Everything • Rupert Hughes
... If you like to expose yourself to ridicule, it is no affair of mine." The lady's manner was a happy mixture of frigidity and crossness. David stood benumbed, and Lucy, having emptied her flower-pot, glided indoors without taking any farther ...
— Love Me Little, Love Me Long • Charles Reade
... had become quite familiar with the artists and writers who frequented the house. Thus it was only in the presence of something extremely insulting that she again showed herself the last of the Vaugelades, and would all at once draw herself up and display haughty contempt and frigidity. ...
— Fruitfulness - Fecondite • Emile Zola
... from that of the Community. Every community has its errors in its laws. No human laws, how skilfully soever framed, but give to a national character defects as well as merits, merits as well as defects. Craft, selfishness, cruelty to the subdued, inhospitable frigidity to neighbours, make the defects of the Spartan character. But," added Alcman, with a kind of reluctant anguish in his voice, "the character has its grand virtues, too, or would the Helots not be the masters? ...
— Pausanias, the Spartan - The Haunted and the Haunters, An Unfinished Historical Romance • Lord Lytton
... The frigidity and dryness of the exclamation Littleton ascribed to Selma's intuitive enmity to the ...
— Unleavened Bread • Robert Grant
... department at Washington. It stated that the bearer was a Federal attorney sent out to investigate the Smelter City Coal Claims and any other matters bearing on the contests of the Holy Cross. The letter was couched—Wayland thought—with peculiar frigidity, as though he and not the coal claimants were the guilty party to an undecided contest. Then he glanced back at the bearer: an incredibly young and inexperienced youth—not more than twenty-two or three, barely out of a ...
— The Freebooters of the Wilderness • Agnes C. Laut
... you?' he inquired with eager concern. Of late, owing to the capricious frigidity of Millicent's attitude towards him, he had been much less a frequenter of Leonora's house, and he was no longer privy ...
— Leonora • Arnold Bennett
... committee. By this time an animus in regard to the election had been created strong enough to bring out the men on both sides, and to produce heat, when otherwise there might only have been a warmth or, possibly, frigidity. The Whig Marquises and the Whig Barons came forward, and with them the liberal professional men, and the tradesmen who had found that party to answer best, and the democratical mechanics. If Melmotte's ...
— The Way We Live Now • Anthony Trollope
... sense of feeling, the latter prevailed, and justice yielded to mercy. Had a Bligh or an Edwards been placed in his situation it is to be feared that, judging from their former conduct, passion in the one, and frigidity in the other, would most likely have consigned the criminal to captivity in irons, and the innocent and helpless family, solely dependent on him, to misery and destruction—and yet, in so doing, they would not have deviated from their strict ...
— The Eventful History Of The Mutiny And Piratical Seizure - Of H.M.S. Bounty: Its Cause And Consequences • Sir John Barrow
... account of him, she must have liked him; but knowing what she did, she could and would not: looking at him something as Madame Cottin's Matilde first looked at Malek Adel, and not suffering herself to lose any of her horror. For the first day or two her frigidity was something wonderful, as she found him inclined to make attempts to cultivate her acquaintance; but she thoroughly succeeded in repelling him. He left off trying to talk to her; and one day when they ...
— The Two Guardians • Charlotte Mary Yonge
... letter out and Steve accepted it. And Ross watched him all the time as he drew the note from its cover and perused it. The moment of shock had passed, and the fierce light in Steve's eyes had died out, leaving in its place a stony frigidity which gave the other a feeling of unutterable regret. He would have been thankful for some passionate outburst, some violent display. He felt it would have been more natural, and he would have known better how to deal with it. But there was none. Steve ...
— The Heart of Unaga • Ridgwell Cullum
... back again, or I will marry another;" Pompey beseeches her to wait only till the death of Sylla, whom he dare not offend: after this there is no need to mention the low scoundrel Perpenna. The tendency to this frigidity of soul was perceptible in Corneille, even at an early period of his career; but in the works of his old age it ...
— Lectures on Dramatic Art - and Literature • August Wilhelm Schlegel trans John Black
... uomini arditi e facinorosi, as they were somewhat euphemistically called. At any rate, it is clear that Michelangelo's precipitate departure and vehement refusal to return were occasioned by more pungent motives than the Pope's frigidity. This has to be noticed, because we learn from several incidents of the same kind in the master's life that he was constitutionally subject to sudden fancies and fears of imminent danger to his person from an ...
— The Life of Michelangelo Buonarroti • John Addington Symonds
... her personality most attractive. She has been very successful in Wagnerian roles, makes a superb Elsa, and, in the "Meistersinger," an ideal Eva. During her early years on the stage her extreme calmness amounted almost to aggravating frigidity, but with time she has thawed. She may well be considered a conscientious artist ...
— For Every Music Lover - A Series of Practical Essays on Music • Aubertine Woodward Moore
... of Washington and his entourage gave deep offense. Both by disposition and by calculation the President cultivated a certain official etiquette. His receptions were formal to the point of frigidity. He received his visitors "with a dignified bow, while his hands were so disposed as to indicate that the salutation was not to be accompanied with shaking hands." His figure clad in black velvet was most impressive. His hair was powdered ...
— Union and Democracy • Allen Johnson
... attaining her majority. Freda had once met him before, and liked him. He was now particularly friendly in his manner to her, but when he spoke to her across one intermediate person, she could only answer him in monosyllables. Every one silently remarked her absence of mind and unusual frigidity. ...
— Gladys, the Reaper • Anne Beale
... well known to exist; prominent examples being Augustus and Livia; Napoleon and Josephine. It is also a well-known fact that frigidity is a cause of barrenness. A short separation of husband and wife is often salutary in ...
— The Four Epochs of Woman's Life • Anna M. Galbraith
... an inexpressible feeling of exultation that I drove off with her. At last we were alone together, and would be so for hours. The frigidity which had grown up within her during the last two months might possibly be relaxed now under the influence of this closer association. My heart beat fast. I talked rapidly about every thing. In my excitement I also drove rapidly at first, but finally I had sufficient ...
— The Lady of the Ice - A Novel • James De Mille
... them." This last sentence is the one I allude to; and were it not for fear of appearing too fanciful I should say that these few words were, to the initiated mind, an unconscious expression of the lonely frigidity which characterised most attempts at social recreation in the New England world some forty years ago. There was at that time a great desire for culture, a great interest in knowledge, in art, in aesthetics, together with a very scanty supply of the materials ...
— Hawthorne - (English Men of Letters Series) • Henry James, Junr.
... congeals, during sleep, into solid ice. Harding escaped any ill effects, but in truth, although I have said little about physical sufferings, most of that journey was terrible work. I got into a way at last of classifying the various stages of frigidity on departure from a stancia, and this was their order: (1) the warm; (2) the chilly; and (3) the glacial. The first stage of comparative comfort was due to the effect of a fire and warm food and generally lasted for two or three ...
— From Paris to New York by Land • Harry de Windt
... the Senora, drawing herself together as though she had received an electric shock; the pleased and animated expression of her face changing suddenly to one of utmost frigidity. "I never could understand why people considered that Indian good looking," and her black eyes snapped as she turned to resume her work, plainly betraying the jealousy aroused. Senora Sanchez, knowing her sister's temper only too well, hastened to ...
— When Dreams Come True • Ritter Brown
... favorable comment his comely appearance created, he seemed to be filled with indifference; while with me, as I warmed into high enthusiasm over certain well-defined representatives of the angelic sex, coolness, growing to statuesque frigidity, would develop in the object of my devotions, and the beauty whose charms had bedeviled me into insomnia and wild-eyed desperation became related to me thereafter as the angel surmounting the tombstone that marked the resting place of ...
— Cupid's Middleman • Edward B. Lent
... against his stomach. If the conflict had taken place there in the garden, while the fire of the insult was yet scorching him, he could have fought it out with good will; but now the night air seemed chiller and chiller, and its frigidity crept into his nerves: he doubted of the steadiness of his aim, bethought himself that the darkness was detrimental to accurate shooting, and wondered whether Senor Freeman would think it necessary to fight across a handkerchief. He could not help regretting, ...
— The Golden Fleece • Julian Hawthorne
... worn but that it slipped occasionally aside, and revealed glimpses of the volcanic passion that raged beneath. Jeanne was not for a moment deceived; and Marie de la Tour, the first time she again saw him, perceived with woman's intuitive quickness through all his assumed frigidity of speech and demeanour, that his sentiments towards her, so far from being subdued by the mortifying repulse they had met with, were more vehemently passionate than ever! He was a man, she felt, to be feared and shunned; and very earnestly did she ...
— Chambers's Edinburgh Journal, No. 459 - Volume 18, New Series, October 16, 1852 • Various
... stuffed the document into the bosom of her dress. "There will be no duplicate." The frigidity of her tones would have congealed the blood of an ordinary rascal. But ...
— The Princess Elopes • Harold MacGrath
... and unless it was given to him by the officers he was more than likely to take it without the prescribed permission. When burghers without such written permits reached their homes they were not received by their wives with the customary cordiality, and the air of frigidity which encompassed them soon compelled them to return to the field. The Boer women despised a coward, or a man who seemed to be shirking his duty to his country, and, not unlike their sisters in countries of older civilisation, they possessed ...
— With the Boer Forces • Howard C. Hillegas
... effort which may be made, through parochial Church Councils or otherwise, to develop the spirit of fellowship in a congregation. There is very often about Anglican Church worship a stiffness and frigidity which badly needs to be broken down. Appropriated seats, where they exist, are a particular curse, and anything which can be done in the way of abandoning chosen seats, even if "bought and paid for," to strangers in the interests of charity is a real piece of Christian service. ...
— Religious Reality • A.E.J. Rawlinson
... understand, my dear Claude, that I met these advances with a frigidity of manner that left no doubt ...
— Monsieur, Madame and Bebe, Complete • Gustave Droz
... it,—mind, I don't ask you to—you can come along and you'll find this shack still standin'. That, too, is up to you. Meanwhiles, Joe Bloc'll slep right here. Guess you'll be startin' out crackin' nuts to-morrow morning. There's just one thing I'd like to say before partin', Jim," he added, his frigidity thawing slightly. "I'm a cattleman first an' last. It's meat and drink an' pocket-money to me. My calibre don't cut any figure when there's cattle stealin' doing. As sure as St. Patrick got busy with the snakes, I'd help to hang the last ...
— The One-Way Trail - A story of the cattle country • Ridgwell Cullum
... however, must always prefer the keener but more wholesome frigidity of his own clime. There, the external gloom and bleakness of a severe winter day enhance our in-door comforts, and we do not miss sunny skies when greeted with sunny looks. If we then see no blooming flowers, we see blooming faces. But ...
— Flowers and Flower-Gardens • David Lester Richardson
... and him, and the world he abused, and destiny into the bargain. And she cared less about the probation; but she craved for liberty. With a frigidity that astonished her, she marvelled at the act of kissing, and at the obligation it forced upon an inanimate person to be an accomplice. Why was she not free? By what strange right was it that she was ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... anything strained in the situation, that my sympathy was honest and open. But when they suggested that I introduce them to some of the women teachers from Michigan, and I declined the responsibility as gently as I could, the frigidity of their injured pride made me momentarily abject. They drifted away and hung about with expectancy printed on their faces—that and a mingled hate and defiance of the glittering uniforms which quite absorbed all feminine attention and left their ...
— A Woman's Impression of the Philippines • Mary Helen Fee
... brighter. At midnight, when the Earth was full, it would be bright enough for any activity. Actually, the human beings on Luna were nearly nocturnal in their habits, because it was easier to run moon-jeeps in frigidity and keep men and machines warm enough for functioning, than it was to protect them against the more-than-boiling heat of ...
— Operation: Outer Space • William Fitzgerald Jenkins
... not understand you," I said, with marked frigidity. "The lady I speak of lived and died under the old regime of noblesse oblige. I am not so well versed in modern social forms of ...
— Vendetta - A Story of One Forgotten • Marie Corelli
... move on her part roused Mr Dombey, whose eyes were fixed on Paul. After patting him on the head, and pressing his small hand again, he took leave of Doctor Blimber, Mrs Blimber, and Miss Blimber, with his usual polite frigidity, and walked out ...
— Dombey and Son • Charles Dickens
... recovered his poise his dignity asserted itself and he sat down and assumed an attitude that suggested the frigidity of a statue on an ice-cake. He checked Governor North with an impatient flap of the hand. "You have had your innings ...
— All-Wool Morrison • Holman Day
... task was to approach, it could be only successful at the end; for indeed Mr. Faringfield, with all his external frigidity, could refuse Phil nothing. In giving his consent, which perhaps he had been ready to do long before Phil had been ready to ask it, he made no allusion to Phil's going to England. He purposely ignored the circumstance, I fancy, that in consenting to the ...
— Philip Winwood • Robert Neilson Stephens
... her. A clear line of difference divided like a tangible fence her experience within this maze of motion from her experience without it. Her beginning to dance had been like a change of atmosphere; outside, she had been steeped in arctic frigidity by comparison with the tropical sensations here. She had entered the dance from the troubled hours of her late life as one might enter a brilliant chamber after a night walk in a wood. Wildeve by himself would have been merely an agitation; Wildeve ...
— The Return of the Native • Thomas Hardy
... this work with so much application, I cannot but have some degree of parental fondness." But in his conclusion he tells us, "I dismiss it with frigid tranquillity, having little to fear or hope from censure or from praise." I deny the doctor's "frigidity." This polished period exhibits an affected stoicism, which no writer ever felt for the anxious labour of a great portion of life, addressed not merely to a class of readers, but ...
— Literary Character of Men of Genius - Drawn from Their Own Feelings and Confessions • Isaac D'Israeli
... to endure the hardship of being at the bank by nine o'clock, and made the best of it by claiming in consequence an utter immunity from the petite norale of the breakfast-table. Never did he lose a moment in helping anybody. Even the little Saffy he allowed with perfect frigidity to stretch out a very long arm after the butter—except indeed it happened to cross his plate, when he would sharply rebuke her breach of manners. It would have been all the same if he had not been going ...
— Weighed and Wanting • George MacDonald
... thought. "By some hocus-pocus, Miss Rose has made his acquaintance during those three weeks, and helped the slow time to pass. He did not tell her he was her sister's lover, hence the present frigidity. The long morning rides are accounted for now. I wonder"—he looked at pretty Rose—"I wonder if the matter will ...
— Kate Danton, or, Captain Danton's Daughters - A Novel • May Agnes Fleming
... excess of sentiment, in the other the contrary vice of frigidity, and a premeditated and ...
— Epic and Romance - Essays on Medieval Literature • W. P. Ker
... as ashes, for for all those millions we would not have given an ounce of fish-meal. Clark grumbled something about their being meteor-stones, whose ferruginous substance had been lured by the magnetic Pole, and kept from frictional burning in their fall by the frigidity of the air: and they quickly ceased to interest our sluggish minds, except in so far as they obstructed ...
— The Purple Cloud • M.P. Shiel
... frigidity of Miss Aldclyffe's morning mood was overcome by the look of sick and blank despair which the carelessly uttered words had produced upon Cytherea's face. She sank back into a chair, and buried her face in ...
— Desperate Remedies • Thomas Hardy
... three kinds of impotency—viz., that which proceeds from frigidity; that which is caused by sorcery (ligature or point-tying), and that which proceeding from some defect of conformation is properly designated as impotentia coeundi. The different lends of impotency may be thus classed—1. Those which are ...
— Aphrodisiacs and Anti-aphrodisiacs: Three Essays on the Powers of Reproduction • John Davenport
... the purest. Stricken low in her thirteenth year, she had grown no older in mind. Although she was now three-and-twenty, she was still a child, a child of thirteen, who had retired within herself, absorbed in the bitter catastrophe which had annihilated her. You could tell this by the frigidity of her glance, by her absent expression, by the haunted air she ever wore, unable as she was to bestow a thought on anything but her calamity. And never was woman's soul more pure and candid, arrested as it had been in its development. She had had no other romance in life save that tearful farewell ...
— The Three Cities Trilogy, Complete - Lourdes, Rome and Paris • Emile Zola |
