"Shabby" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... through an exposure of the tricks of their rulers, the "Machiavellian" spirit designates the policy of intrigue that prevailed all through the sixteenth century, and infected even some of the best of the public men of that age. Louis was mean-looking, shabby in his dress, with a cunning aspect; in his whole deportment and character, in sharp contrast with the chivalrous princes, Philip and Charles of Burgundy. If he was vindictive, he was perhaps not more cruel than others; but he was ungenial, ...
— Outline of Universal History • George Park Fisher
... and lodging might be obtained within. There was no look of well-being or wealth anywhere; the few equipages in the streets had seen hard service; the people who walked were either plainly dressed or shabby genteel; about the doors of the principal hotels there were groups of men who wore, most of them, dispirited or anxious faces. Ten years later the whole aspect of the place was changing, but at this time it was passing through a period of natural fatigue and poverty, and was not an inspiring ...
— In Connection with the De Willoughby Claim • Frances Hodgson Burnett
... railway trains; of arrivals at strange places in the dark night; of departures in the early dawn, half awake—but always happy so long as the familiar arms held her weary little body and there was the shabby old coat on which to pillow her brown curls. A jumbled remembrance of towns and country villages; of kind unknown women who looked compassionate and murmured over her in a dozen different languages. It had all been ...
— The Shadow of the East • E. M. Hull
... fleet out of water if the ships ever came within range of those heavy guns. But the ships did not come within range of the guns for many months. They contented themselves with lying at the Head of the Passes, and stopping all intercourse with the outer world, until New Orleans began to get shabby and ragged and hungry, and the pleasure-parties came less often to the forts, and the gay young soldiers saw their uniforms getting old and tattered, but knew not where to get the ...
— The Naval History of the United States - Volume 2 (of 2) • Willis J. Abbot
... shades of Mount Vernon, and to prefer the simple employments of the farm, where he might behold, in the words of the "judicious Hooker," "God's blessing spring out of our mother earth," above the glory of arms, and the fleeting shadows and shabby splendors ...
— Discourse of the Life and Character of the Hon. Littleton Waller Tazewell • Hugh Blair Grigsby
... of Richard and Cicely, Duke and Duchess of York. There are two pretty tombs for them and their uncle Duke of York in the church, erected by order of Queen Elizabeth. The church has been very fine, but is now intolerably shabby; yet many large saints remain in the windows, two entire, and all the heads well painted. You may imagine we were civil enough to the Queen of Scots, to feel a feel of pity for her, while we stood on the very spot where she was put to death; my companion,(312) ...
— The Letters of Horace Walpole Volume 3 • Horace Walpole
... talking and waiting for breakfast to be announced they were joined by a singular figure. It was that of a white man in rather shabby ducks and crowned, as was M. Desplaines, with a huge, white pith helmet. Over one shoulder he carried a green butterfly net and under one arm he had tucked a tin box. Round his waist was a leather belt from which hung, in addition ...
— The Boy Aviators in Africa • Captain Wilbur Lawton
... artist's studio, a poor, shabby little place, with a latticed window facing the north. There was nothing in the furnishing or arrangement of the room to suggest successful work, or even artistic taste. A few tarnished gold frames leaned ...
— The Guinea Stamp - A Tale of Modern Glasgow • Annie S. Swan
... The Senora had taken her morning chocolate and fallen asleep. When Isabel awakened her, she opened her eyes with a sigh, and a look of hopeless misery. These pallid depressions attacked her most cruelly in the morning, when the room, shabby and unfamiliar, gave both her memory, and anticipation ...
— Remember the Alamo • Amelia E. Barr
... a coat also and a warm pair of trousers," said the stranger in a rough voice. He bent down to loosen the shabby boot from his right foot, and as he did so something fell out of the pocket of his coat. An unconscious motion of his own raised foot struck this small object and tossed it into the middle of the heap of shoes ...
— The Lamp That Went Out • Augusta Groner
... had seen it. It was cold and also stuffy. It was ugly and shabby and stiff. Three tired girls sat there, two trying to read by a strangled gaslight overhead; one trying to entertain a caller in a social fiction of privacy at the other end ...
— The Forerunner, Volume 1 (1909-1910) • Charlotte Perkins Gilman
... Laura; "she can afford to dress well. The girls, the Miss Grants, have graceful, easy manners, just the kind of manners I should like to have; but I can't say I thought much of their dress. I am sure those muslins must have been washed several times. In fact, they were decidedly shabby. I think it odd and old-fashioned of them always to ...
— Fated to Be Free • Jean Ingelow
... the country's fate, yet there appears to have been no supernatural obstacle to its removal from the Province House. In 1760 Sir Francis Bernard, who had been' governor of New Jersey, was appointed to the same office in Massachusetts. He looked at the old chair, and thought it quite too shabby to keep company with a new set of mahogany chairs and an aristocratic sofa which had just arrived from London. He therefore ordered it to be ...
— Grandfather's Chair • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... in the spring, Maisie went down to her people in Yorkshire to recover from the jolly time she had had. The convalescent soldiers had all gone, and Wyck Manor, rather worn and shabby, was Wyck ...
— Anne Severn and the Fieldings • May Sinclair
... saw a Rabbi, The prince of the shabby, In a gale of wind playing the screamer, Till we plumped him o'erboard, Towed along by a cord, For a bath at ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 61, No. 378, April, 1847 • Various
... a heavy, shabby old Landsturm soldier came round the corner, and the Cockney prisoner treated him almost as though he were a ...
— The Land of Deepening Shadow - Germany-at-War • D. Thomas Curtin
... anything else. He was dressed in a rusty black frock-coat and pantaloons, unbrushed, and worn so faithfully that the suit had adapted itself to the curves and angularities of his figure, and had grown to be an outer skin of the man. He had shabby slippers on his feet. His hair was black, still unmixed with gray, stiff, somewhat bushy, and had apparently been acquainted with neither brush nor comb that morning, after the disarrangement of the pillow; and as to a night-cap, Uncle Abe ...
— Sketches and Studies • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... as Puck harnessed to labour might do. They were probably as mischievous, as shirking, as exasperating as boys have ever known how to be, but those little unwilling slaves of art in the Middle Ages make an appeal to the imagination more vivid than that of the shabby ...
— The Tapestry Book • Helen Churchill Candee
... gentleman in a red velvet vest had a quarrel with a shabby looking fellow who had been reading Fliegende Blaetter for the last two hours; he would begin over and over again at the very beginning, and break out into convulsions of laughter every time he came ...
— The Goose Man • Jacob Wassermann
... accent of a man of the world, four feet high—a pocket edition, so to speak, in shabby binding. The brown legs hung, the next instant, over the tallest of the trunks. The skilful whistling was resumed at once; our appearance and the boy's present occupation were mere interludes, we were made to understand; his real business, that afternoon, was to do ...
— In and Out of Three Normady Inns • Anna Bowman Dodd
... you for a young man of pluck. I'm disappointed. You will pardon me, my dear fellow; but I can't help regarding your conduct as rather shabby." ...
— The Young Lieutenant - or, The Adventures of an Army Officer • Oliver Optic
... the whole aspect of the streets was changed. Every few yards one met men in khaki and putties. This cloth looks fairly smart when it is new and the buttons and badges are burnished; but, after a very few weeks at the front, khaki uniforms become as shabby as possible. No one who is going into the firing line has any wish to draw the enemy's fire by the glint of his buttons or his shoulder-badges, and so these are either removed or left to tarnish. Nor does khaki—at any rate the "drill" variety—improve its beauty ...
— With Methuen's Column on an Ambulance Train • Ernest N. Bennett
... hard ground of the yard. A couple of dish-towels followed, and then a broom and a scrubbing-brush—all tossed out in an angry, energetic way that scattered them in every direction. Then on the porch appeared the form of a small girl, poorly dressed in a shabby gingham gown, who danced up and down for a moment as if mad with rage and then, observing the washtub, gave it a kick which sent it rolling off the porch to join the ...
— Mary Louise in the Country • L. Frank Baum (AKA Edith Van Dyne)
... ring the bells of Heaven The wildest peal for years, If Parson lost his senses And people came to theirs, And he and they together Knelt down with angry prayers For tamed and shabby tigers And dancing dogs and bears, And wretched, blind pit ponies, And little ...
— The Advance of English Poetry in the Twentieth Century • William Lyon Phelps
... had, indeed, nearly always been whilst I drank to excess, was now exceedingly shabby, and it was with the greatest difficulty that I could manage to procure the necessaries of life. My wife became very ill. Oh! how miserable I was! Some of the women who were in attendance on my wife told me to get two quarts of rum. I procured it, and as it was in the house, ...
— Stories of Achievement, Volume III (of 6) - Orators and Reformers • Various
... difficult at first to see his point of view: she attributed it to an excessive pride, put into his head by Christophe, and she thought it ridiculous: was it not more natural between lovers to set no store by riches or poverty, and was it not rather shabby to refuse to be indebted to her when it would give her such great joy?... However, she threw herself in with Olivier's plans: their austerity and discomfort were the very things that brought her round, for she ...
— Jean-Christophe Journey's End • Romain Rolland
... to the infinite distress of all who pass by their open windows, at whatever hour! As the baths are frequented by the little court of Lucca, there is a residenza, a casino, and tables for play. There are two or three good hotels or tables-d'hotes, and there is a shabby little coffee-house, and a handful of Balzacs and Paul de Kocks at one circulating library. There is one butcher and one baker at each of the villages, privileged dispensers of their respective commodities. ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 62, Number 361, November, 1845. • Various
... a member of the fraternity of writers, I suppose I ought to yield a joyful assent to such remarks. It is flattering to the self-love of those who drive along Bellevue Avenue in a shabby hired vehicle to be told that they are personages of much more consequence than the heavy capitalist who swings by in a resplendent curricle, drawn by two matched and matchless steeds, in a six-hundred dollar harness. Perhaps they are. But I advise young men who aspire to serve their ...
— Captains of Industry - or, Men of Business Who Did Something Besides Making Money • James Parton
... of dirty days, and dark mornings, and shabby-looking fellows (he makes a gesture over his shoulder) we do have to be looking on when we have our sight, God help us, but there's one fine thing we have, to be looking on a grand, white, handsome girl, the like of you.... ...
— The Well of the Saints • J. M. Synge
... Alfaretta clung together, really afraid of the cabman who was now growing decidedly angry. He was a stranger to that city and had just embarked in a rather losing business, his outfit of horse and cab being a second-hand one and too shabby for ...
— Dorothy on a Ranch • Evelyn Raymond
... idle here, who will not listen to God or their conscience or even their instinct in the matter, who live comfortably apart from the evil places, and so hear only now and then a message from the dying wafted on the sable wings of cholera or typhus. Is it not shabby this, to shirk their share of the work and the trouble, and to leave it to be done by softer ...
— The Voyage Alone in the Yawl "Rob Roy" • John MacGregor
... doorway to let me go through first, he carried me off in his custody after all. As we crossed the quarter-deck two shabby individuals stepped forward and in mournful silence offered me business cards which I took from them without a word under his heavy eye. It was a useless and gloomy ceremony. They were the touts of the other ship-chandlers, and he placid at my ...
— 'Twixt Land & Sea • Joseph Conrad
... nothing to do but flop down on the shabby little couch and howl. So Della did it. Which instigates the moral reflection that life is made up of sobs, sniffles, and smiles, ...
— The Four Million • O. Henry
... rich. The shabby, delightful old rooms, the tumble-down appearance of the ancient house, the lack of luxuries proved it, but they were ...
— The Imaginary Marriage • Henry St. John Cooper
... of a necessary personal independence. This is the attitude expressed in Richard Blaker's novel, The Voice in the Wilderness. The story centres around the figure of Charles Petrie, popular playwright in London but known in Pelchester merely as a shabby fellow and to his family a singularly sarcastic and annoying father. Sarcasm was Petrie's one defence against the limp weight that was Mrs. Petrie His children would have been astonished to hear him called a charming man of the world, yet he was. It is probable that he never ...
— When Winter Comes to Main Street • Grant Martin Overton
... to gaze toward the door through which the man had disappeared. She could place him now, although his livery had been discarded for shabby clothes; she recalled him distinctly in ...
— The Strollers • Frederic S. Isham
... like a shabby trick," he said; "but still I do not think the creatures mean to do us any harm. And I don't feel myself being turned into a frog yet; ...
— The Tapestry Room - A Child's Romance • Mrs. Molesworth
... we have ordered SOME. Of course we wanted to take advantage of being in Paris—ladies always do. We have left the principal things till we go back. Of course that is the principal interest, for ladies. Mother said she should feel so shabby if she just passed through. We have promised all the people to be back in September, and I never broke a promise yet. So Mr. Ruck has got to ...
— The Pension Beaurepas • Henry James
... impression of destructive admission. Lily did not comprehend the extent of her advantage or she would have pursued it further. As it was she felt a little hurt as she entered the house. The table was set, but Mrs. Burns was nowhere to be seen. Calling her softly, the young girl passed through the shabby little living-room to the oven-like bedroom which opened off it, but no one was about. She stood for a moment shuddering at the wretchedness ...
— Other Main-Travelled Roads • Hamlin Garland
... turning into another street—narrower and more shabby than the first. "Lift your feet! I ain't got no time ...
— Nan Sherwood's Winter Holidays • Annie Roe Carr
... the grounds of Richmond Palace, and decorated with busts of her favourite philosophers. This letter of Pope seems extraordinary, and it is a little difficult to guess what inspired the suggestion contained in it. "This is but shabby advice," Croker has written, "considering the general tone of Pope's private correspondence, as well as his published satires, and seems peculiarly strange in the circumstances in which Gay himself ...
— Life And Letters Of John Gay (1685-1732) • Lewis Melville
... fairly to a stop, when, as it chanced, Brinsmead and Jack found close to them, mounted on a tall pack-horse, a personage who by the peculiar cut of his somewhat threadbare garments they took to be a humble student of divinity. He wore a shabby cassock and a shovel hat, sitting the animal on which he journeyed sideways with a book in his hand, making a reading-desk occasionally of a bale of some sort which towered above the horse's neck. Old Will at once entered into ...
— John Deane of Nottingham - Historic Adventures by Land and Sea • W.H.G. Kingston
... enjoyment it would have been the possibility of being waylaid by bandits, or set upon in some desolate pass by wild animals. But, alas, the nearest approximation to a bandit that fell in his way was some shabby, spiritless tramp who passed by on the further side without lifting an eyelid; and as for savage animals, he saw nothing more savage than a monkish chipmunk here and there, who disappeared into his stonewall convent the instant ...
— The Queen of Sheba & My Cousin the Colonel • Thomas Bailey Aldrich
... when she was through, and the rain had stopped for a time. Near the entrance to the house on the hill—a turn where she always had to drive slowly—a shabby man was standing—a bearded man with rounded shoulders ...
— Mary Minds Her Business • George Weston
... is a shabby fellow! It never could have been the intention of Sir William, but that you should have had seven hundred pounds a year neat money; for, when he made the will, the Income Tax was double to what it is at present; and the estate which ...
— The Letters of Lord Nelson to Lady Hamilton, Vol II. - With A Supplement Of Interesting Letters By Distinguished Characters • Horatio Nelson
... Ring. Even the Sorcerer's cry, "New lamps for old lamps !"—a prime point—is paralleled in the Tale of the Fisherman's Son,[FN218] where the Jew asks in exchange only old rings and the Princess, recollecting that her husband kept a shabby, well-worn ring in his writing-stand, and he being asleep, took it out and sent it to the man. In either tale the palace is transported to a distance and both end with the death of the wicked magician and the hero and heroine living happily together ...
— The Book of the Thousand Nights and a Night, Volume 10 • Richard F. Burton
... own steps. It was she alone who held the clue to the labyrinth, who could thread a way through the confusions and contradictions of his past; and her soul rejected the thought that his future could ever escape from her. She dropped down into his shabby college armchair and hid her face in the papers on ...
— Sanctuary • Edith Wharton
... naturedly chaffed her about it, speaking of it as an amusing joke. She had to bear this without wincing, and worse still, she had to play the hypocrite so far as to reply in the same jesting tone, joining in turning the laugh on the poor, shabby mob captain, when she knew in her heart it ought to be ...
— The Duke of Stockbridge • Edward Bellamy
... that she must not be an unnecessary expense to him; and this idea had not been counteracted by any appearance of luxury or lavish expenditure in her London home. The furniture, except in her own room, was heavy, old-fashioned, and decidedly shabby. Her father seemed to work very hard. He had already promised her a maid; and Lesley could not bear to ask him for anything else. ...
— Brooke's Daughter - A Novel • Adeline Sergeant
... which are more like palaces, than the country retreat of bourgeois. The prospect from the highest part of the road, a league or two from Lyons, is so extensive, so picturesque, and so enchantingly beautiful, that, impatient as I was to enter into the town, I could not refrain stopping at a little shabby wine-house, and drinking coffee under their mulberry-trees, to enjoy the warm day, the cooling breeze, and the noble prospects ...
— A Year's Journey through France and Part of Spain, 1777 - Volume 1 (of 2) • Philip Thicknesse
... for her walk a long blue coat in place of the mackintosh. It was shabby, but becoming; and her dark hair was tucked into a close-fitting cap of the same blue as the cloak. She knew what was due to happen at half-past eight, and though grateful to Mr. Balm of Gilead, dreaded the result ...
— Winnie Childs - The Shop Girl • C. N. Williamson
... fine house in Lincoln's Inn Fields, nigh to the Duke's Theatre and the Portugal ambassador's chapel. Tom Esmond, who had frequented the one as long as he had money to spend among the actresses, now came to the church as assiduously. He looked so lean and shabby, that he passed without difficulty for a repentant sinner; and so, becoming converted, you may be sure took his uncle's priest for ...
— Henry Esmond; The English Humourists; The Four Georges • William Makepeace Thackeray
... Mrs. Tulliver's movement, as she drew her into the parlor automatically, without reflecting that it was hardly kind to take her among so many persons in the first painful moment of arrival. The tall, worn, dark-haired woman was a strong contrast to the Dodson sisters as she entered in her shabby dress, with her shawl and bonnet looking as if they had been hastily huddled on, and with that entire absence of self-consciousness which belongs to keenly felt trouble. Maggie was clinging to her arm; and Mrs. Moss seemed to ...
— The Mill on the Floss • George Eliot
... of strength, just as in the case of women they are apt to regard paint as evidence of beauty. Now Wilde was so in love with style that he never realized the danger of biting off more than he could chew: in other words, of putting up more style than his matter would carry. Wise kings wear shabby clothes, and leave the gold lace ...
— Oscar Wilde, Volume 2 (of 2) - His Life and Confessions • Frank Harris
... with the smell of tobacco, and notwithstanding the warmth of the June day, all the windows were tightly closed. Its occupant, a lank man with a smooth but wizened face, straight white hair and dark, piercing eyes, was in accord with his surroundings,—shabby, unkempt, with cigarette ash down the front of his coat, his collar none too clean, ...
— The Profiteers • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... drove four or five particular friends who lived at Stevens' Hotel, and therefore, we suppose, were the partners of his glory in his victory over his Majesty's household troops. Lord Marylebone was the universal subject of conversation. Pursuits which would have devoted a shabby Earl of twelve or fifteen thousand a year to universal reprobation, or, what is much worse, to universal sneers, assumed quite a different character when they constituted the course of life of this fortunate youth. He was a delightful young man. So unaffected! No super-refinement, no false delicacy. ...
— The Young Duke • Benjamin Disraeli
... in the habiliments of shabby gentility in that bare little room with the American flag over the door and portraits of two or three notable advocates of World Peace and the American League of Neutrality on the wall, had all the outward suggestion of the small town disciple of Socialism from the orthodox viewpoint. His manner ...
— The Treasure Trail - A Romance of the Land of Gold and Sunshine • Marah Ellis Ryan
... a shabby black morning coat and vest; the braid that bound these garments was a little loose in places; his collar was chosen from stock and with projecting corners, technically a "wing-poke"; that and his tie, which was new and loose and rich in colouring, had been selected to encourage ...
— The History of Mr. Polly • H. G. Wells
... Sangster mean by taking such an attitude? It was like his infernal cheek. It was no business of his if he chose to get engaged to Christine and half a dozen other girls at the same time. Anyone would think he had done a shabby trick by asking her to marry him; anyone would think that there had been something disgraceful in having done ...
— The Second Honeymoon • Ruby M. Ayres
... began to appear in succession, your mother retired, left off her smart dressing (she had previously been a smart dresser), and her dark ringlets (which had previously been flowing), and haunted your father late of nights, lying in wait for him, through all weathers, up the shabby court which led to the back door of the Royal Old Dust-Bin (said to have been so named by George the Fourth), where your father was Head. But the Dust- Bin was going down then, and your father took but little,—excepting from ...
— Somebody's Luggage • Charles Dickens
... of one hundred and fifty million dollars in settlement of the case. The General writes at great length as to exactly in what proportion the money should be divided among the heirs. The thing is so near a culmination that he is greatly exercised over his shabby appearance. ...
— True Stories of Crime From the District Attorney's Office • Arthur Train
... had referred to the "rules of the establishment." Nearer and nearer the edge of the abyss the years had pushed them, and now if something did not happen—something— something—even the increasingly shabby small house in town would become a thing of the past. And what then? Could any one wonder she said to herself that she could have beaten Joan furiously. It would not matter to any one else if they dropped out of the ...
— T. Tembarom • Frances Hodgson Burnett
... him of his mother twice. All that remained of her was her wedding ring, which, drawn from his father's cash-box, he wore on his little finger. With bitterness amid his joy he took the train once more, and saw the lights of the town's shabby inn blink good-bye ...
— The Nest Builder • Beatrice Forbes-Robertson Hale
... the contract. If I were pretty, my ambition would have been to be an adventuress; but an adventuress with no adventures would be a little flat. I might have the worst intentions, but I should never have the chance of carrying them out. So I try to be as much as possible like Thackeray's shabby companion ...
— Love's Shadow • Ada Leverson
... had a rough, dishevelled look, which corresponded with the soiled and untidy appearance of her dress. Her gown and mantle were of rich stuff, but torn and stained in many places; and her gloves and boots were shabby to the very last degree, while her bonnet, of cheap and tawdry materials, had at any rate the one merit of being fresh and new. Altogether she was an odd figure to be seen in a country place; and Janetta wondered greatly whence she came, and ...
— A True Friend - A Novel • Adeline Sergeant
... and fifty," said she, "instead of eight hundred! Well, that is rather shabby. But still, Papa, you'll have the dear ...
— Barchester Towers • Anthony Trollope
... drive you down to Hepburn to the Justice, and get it done there. I'll do whatever you say." His eyes fell under the merciless stare she continued to fix on him, and he shifted his weight uneasily from one foot to the other. As he stood there before her, unwieldy, shabby, disordered, the purple veins distorting the hands he pressed against the desk, and his long orator's jaw trembling with the effort of his avowal, he seemed like a hideous parody of the fatherly old man she ...
— Summer • Edith Wharton
... employers, and the strange kind of service I was doing them, when I preferred my fancy to their business; and I forgot even that Uma was no true wife of mine, but just a maid beguiled, and that in a pretty shabby style. But that is to look too far on. I will come to ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 17 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... "It was shabby to say I would not aid him, and God help me, it was not true. I won't leave him, though he marries a blackamoor," thought George ...
— The World's Greatest Books, Vol VIII • Arthur Mee and J.A. Hammerton, Eds.
... dissimilarities, at the same time watching the crowd which came and went by, always, as it seemed, on errands of antagonistically snatching something from somebody, and never giving anything to anybody, that his name was called before he heard it. On his at length responding, he was shown by a miserably shabby and underpaid stipendiary Philanthropist (who could hardly have done worse if he had taken service with a declared enemy of the human ...
— The Mystery of Edwin Drood • Charles Dickens
... the Trial Men In a suit of shabby grey; A cricket cap was on his head, And his step seemed light and gay; But I never saw a man who looked So wistfully ...
— Poems • Oscar Wilde
... and she set to work in earnest. She used to go out early in the morning, and not return until late in the evening, and then she looked pale and tired, as one whose energies had been overtasked all the day; but she had found no gold-mine. The scanty meals were even scantier than before, and her shabby mourning was getting shabbier and duller. She was evidently hard-worked for very little pay; and their condition was not improved, only sustained by her exertions. Things seemed to be very bad with them altogether, and with ...
— Chambers's Edinburgh Journal, No. 451 - Volume 18, New Series, August 21, 1852 • Various
... person noticed the happy little girl who sat quite alone in the running track, dividing her eager attention between the game and the violets which she wore pinned to her shabby, ...
— Betty Wales Freshman • Edith K. Dunton
... deep sigh of indifference, and turning, walked slowly away. She wore a rather shabby frock of tomato-coloured chiffon, and as she went down the room one of her greatest charms appeared to striking advantage—the lazy, muscular grace of her movements. She walked like an American Indian youth of some superior tribe, and ...
— The Halo • Bettina von Hutten
... to Hawk-Eye, "I believe I will stay in the cave to-day, it is such a lot of work to start a new fire every day, and I can keep this one burning. Besides, the Twins must have new skins pretty soon. Those fox-furs they are now wearing are getting shabby. I will cure the deer-skin we brought home ...
— The Cave Twins • Lucy Fitch Perkins
... of the hotel were not to be changed by the shabby conduct of one mean-minded person. When the Club prepared to retire for the night they were taken to some rooms opening in to each other. Five waiters led the way; one waiter to each man, and each carried a pair of tall wax-candles. Mr. Figgs's waiter took him to his ...
— The Dodge Club - or, Italy in 1859 • James De Mille
... veiled face was wholly averted now, and Miss Hitty studied her shrewdly. She noted that the black gown was well-worn, and had, indeed, been patched in several places. The shoes which tapped impatiently on the floor were undeniably shabby, though they had been carefully blacked. Against the unrelieved sombreness of her gown. Miss Evelina's hands were singularly frail and transparent. Every line of her body was eloquent of weakness and ...
— A Spinner in the Sun • Myrtle Reed
... shabby, vulgar, mean-looking cur I ever beheld: in one word, a tyke. He had not one good feature except his teeth and eyes, and his bark, if that can be called a feature. He was not ugly enough to be interesting; his color black and white, his shape leggy and clumsy; altogether ...
— Spare Hours • John Brown
... him over. What a lank and shabby youth he was to carry in his voice that ring of authority. "What's the answer to our getting off here?" ...
— The Trumpeter Swan • Temple Bailey
... psalms, love-poems, an undigested hotch-potch of exalted and questionable sentiments, of communal and egoistic aspirations of the highest order. It was a wonderful liturgy, as grotesque as it was beautiful—like an old cathedral in all styles of architecture, stored with shabby antiquities and side-shows and overgrown with moss and lichen—a heterogeneous blend of historical strata of all periods, in which gems of poetry and pathos and spiritual fervor glittered and pitiful records of ancient persecution ...
— Children of the Ghetto • I. Zangwill
... walked rapidly toward the buggy. Palmerston followed with her satchel. She gave him a preoccupied "Thank you" as he assisted her to a seat and shielded her dress with the shabby robe. ...
— The Wizard's Daughter and Other Stories • Margaret Collier Graham
... down again. At the bottom of the pit-valley they found the metal projection, so like a mighty steering wheel. Sadau's torch lay there, extinguished, and Parr still carried a radium lighter in the pocket of his shabby shorts. He ...
— The Devil's Asteroid • Manly Wade Wellman
... shabby-looking box before him on the ground, with a box of blacking on one side of it, and several shoe-brushes upon the other. Holding another brush in his hand, he politely seconded his verbal invitation by gracefully flourishing the ...
— Israel Potter • Herman Melville
... 1839 and 1840. In the latter of those years The Shabby Genteel story also came out. Then in 1841 there followed The History of Samuel Titmarsh and the Great Hoggarty Diamond, illustrated by Samuel's cousin, Michael Angelo. But though so announced in Fraser, there were no illustrations, ...
— Thackeray • Anthony Trollope
... you know, my dear, and young Milbrey will think me shabby if he doesn't have first go; but I'll be impartial; Milbrey shall take her in, and Mauburn shall be at her other side, and may God have mercy on her soul! These people have so much money, I hear, it amounts to financial embarrassment, but with those two chaps for the girl, and Avice Milbrey for ...
— The Spenders - A Tale of the Third Generation • Harry Leon Wilson
... with Nollekens, at Rome, in 1760, and they were extremely intimate. Barry took the liberty one night when they were about to leave the English coffee-house, to exchange hats with him; Barry's was edged with lace, and Nollekens' was a very shabby plain one. Upon his returning the hat the next morning, he was requested by Nollekens to let him know why he left him his gold-laced hat. "Why, to tell you the truth, my dear Joey," answered Barry, "I fully expected assassination last night; and I was to have been known by my laced hat." Nollekens ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction - Volume 12, No. 338, Saturday, November 1, 1828. • Various
... you at Bath's fair Habby, Saint Bart he treated like a son— And wasn't it uncommon shabby To do what you have went ...
— Ballads • William Makepeace Thackeray
... tower, however vaunted and admired by the French themselves, looks to an unprejudiced eye mean and shabby; and principally from its being made of wood, which ill accords with the apparent solidity of the rest of ...
— Architectural Antiquities of Normandy • John Sell Cotman
... are. I didn't notice it, though, until we came here into this bright Rome. We seem to have come all at once into spring sunshine and the atmosphere of new clothes; and, Betty, I believe I do feel shabby. I know you have been thinking the same thing, too; for everybody else seems to have new spring dresses, and they are so fresh and pretty that ours look doubly worse. Oh, dear!" and ...
— Barbara's Heritage - Young Americans Among the Old Italian Masters • Deristhe L. Hoyt
... It had happened to him, being a favourite trustee of his relations and friends, to visit the offices of some of the first legal firms in Lincoln's Inn Fields. You entered these lairs by a dirty door and a dirty corridor and another dirty door. You were interrogated by a shabby clerk who sat on a foul stool at a foul desk in a foul office. And finally after an interval in a cubby hole that could not boast even The Anti-Vaccination Record, you were driven along a dirtier passage into a dirtiest room whose windows were obscured by generations of ...
— Mr. Prohack • E. Arnold Bennett
... Dauvit's shop when I entered to-day, a seedy-looking whiskered man with a threadbare coat and extremely dirty linen. Shabby genteel would be ...
— A Dominie in Doubt • A. S. Neill
... confidence restored, when in the doorway sounded a virile voice, gaily humming, and they became aware of a tall young man, red-headed, anything but handsome, flushed and perspiring from the sunny road; his open jacket showed a blue cotton shirt without waistcoat, in his hand was a shabby straw hat, and thick dust covered his boots. One would have judged him a tourist of the noisier class, and his rather loud 'Good morning!' as he entered the room seemed a serious menace to privacy; on the other hand, ...
— The House of Cobwebs and Other Stories • George Gissing
... days Ali received these forced benevolences from all parts. He sat, covered with rags, on a shabby palm-leaf mat placed at the outer gate of his ruined palace, holding in his left hand a villainous pipe of the kind used by the lowest people, and in his right an old red cap, which he extended for the donations of the passers-by. ...
— CELEBRATED CRIMES, COMPLETE - ALI PACHA • ALEXANDRE DUMAS, PERE
... curious of all episodes of this kind is the use made of Ovid's "fusca Cypassis." If Mrs. Grundy could be supposed ever to have read the Amores, the mere sight of the name of that dusky handmaid—to whom Ovid behaved, by his own confession, in such an exceedingly shabby as well as improper fashion—would make her shudder, if not shriek. But La Calprenede's Cypassis, though actually a maid of honour to Julia, as her original was a handmaid to Corinna, is of unblemished morality, flirted ...
— A History of the French Novel, Vol. 1 - From the Beginning to 1800 • George Saintsbury
... stoop of her rooming house they lingered. A honey-colored moon hung like a lantern over the block-long row of shabby-fronted houses. On her steps and to her fermenting fancy the shadow of an ash can sprawled like ...
— The Best Short Stories of 1915 - And the Yearbook of the American Short Story • Various
... of smooth talk"—the one art whereof he was master—to get free advertising. Also there were groceries to buy and odds and ends of elastic, fancy crepe, paper muslin and the like for repairing the shabby costumes. The others remained on board, Eshwell and Tempest to guard the boat against the swarms of boys darting and swooping and chattering like a huge flock of impudent English sparrows. An additional—and the chief—reason for Burlingham's keeping the ...
— Susan Lenox: Her Fall and Rise • David Graham Phillips
... us!" said I; but Miss C. can never forgive the mother or child; and she clapped her hands for joy one day when we saw the shutters up, bills in the windows, a carpet hanging out over the balcony, and a crowd of shabby Jews about the steps—giving token that the reign of Mrs. Stafford Molyneux was over. The pastry-cooks and their trays, the bay and the gray, the brougham and the groom, the noblemen and their cabs, were all gone; and the tradesmen ...
— The Christmas Books • William Makepeace Thackeray
... within, Who with jovial din Gave themselves up to all kinds of sin! Ha! that is a convent! that is an abbey! Over the doors, None of your death-heads carved in wood, None of your Saints looking pious and good, None of your Patriarchs old and shabby! But the heads and tusks of boars, And the cells Hung all round with the fells Of the fallow-deer. And then what cheer! What jolly, fat friars, Sitting round the great, roaring fires, Roaring louder than they, With their strong wines, And their concubines, ...
— The Complete Poetical Works of Henry Wadsworth Longfellow • Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
... letter dated 1785 and addressed to his children tells us all that we know of his school-days; though it is said, too, that he distinguished himself in mathematics. "If you only knew," the reminiscent father of a family exclaims in this letter, "in what shabby lodging, in what a dark and chilly closet, I was mewed up at your age; with what severity I was treated; how I was fed and dressed!" Already his powers of observation, that were so to distinguish him, were quickened by ...
— Letters from an American Farmer • Hector St. John de Crevecoeur
... the chair behind a broad flat-top desk by the window. This was the queer little throne from which all business problems were viewed. It was from the shabby old chair—with a broad window behind—that all business judgments were delivered. Did an outport merchant want credit in any large way, it was from the opposite chair—with the light falling full in his face through the broad window—that he put the case to Sir Archibald. Archie sat down ...
— Billy Topsail & Company - A Story for Boys • Norman Duncan
... bordered and edged with common green bordering paper, and destitute of skirting. Two small windows without pulleys, one of which was thrown up and fastened by a piece of notched wood, looked towards the camp of the 53d Regiment. There were window-curtains of white long-cloth, a small fire-place, a shabby grate and fire-irons to match, with a paltry mantelpiece of wood, painted white, upon which stood a small marble bust of his son. Above the mantelpiece hung the portrait of Maria Louisa, and four or five of young Napoleon, one of which was embroidered by the ...
— Memoirs of Napoleon Bonaparte, Complete • Louis Antoine Fauvelet de Bourrienne
... general public ought to know that he had arrived. It was a cold morning in December. "So he arrayed himself in a long linen duster, buttoned up from knees to collar, put an old straw hat on his head, and taking a shabby book under one arm and a palm-leaf fan in his hand, he marched all the way down Clark Street, past the City Hall, to the office. Everywhere along the route he was greeted with jeers or pitying words, as his appearance excited the mirth or commiseration of the passers-by. When ...
— Stories of Authors, British and American • Edwin Watts Chubb
... so much, and rapidly read what else she could see. She saw that the figure she was admiring was dressed but indifferently; the black silk had certainly seen its best days, if it was not exactly shabby; no ornaments whatever were worn with it. The fashion of garments at that day was, as I have remarked, very trying to any but a good figure, while it certainly showed such a one to advantage. Betty knew her own figure ...
— A Red Wallflower • Susan Warner
... low-minded, base, abject, groveling, dishonorable, shabby, scurvy, servile, menial, undignified, unbecoming, disingenuous; obscure, ignoble, plebeian, inglorious, undistinguished, vulgar; penurious, illiberal, sordid, miserly, stingy, mercenary parsimonious, ungenerous; midway, average, moderate, middle, medium, mediocre; intermediate, ...
— Putnam's Word Book • Louis A. Flemming
... old Tom, cocked jauntily on the spicey bay and see what a different Tom he is to what he was last night. Instead of a battered, limping, shabby-looking little old man, he is all alive and rises to the action of his horse, as though they were all one. A fringe of grey hair protrudes beneath his smart velvet cap, which sets off a weather-beaten but keen and expressive face, lit up with little piercing black eyes. See how chirpy ...
— Mr. Sponge's Sporting Tour • R. S. Surtees
... examined it curiously; spread it out on the floor, then arranged it on his shoulders. It felt comfortable; but was the only shabby thing the Prince had ever ...
— The Little Lame Prince - Rewritten for Young Readers by Margaret Waters • Dinah Maria Mulock
... to her knowledge set eyes on the shabby, lank, loosely-put-together figure sitting opposite her, with its small freckled face and big grey eyes almost disappearing under a smashed-down wet-weather hat, and she gazed at her a moment without answering. ...
— The Enchanted April • Elizabeth von Arnim
... right," grumbled Frank. "Well, you are shabby. I haven't had a companion for years now; and as soon as I've got one, you want to take ...
— The Rajah of Dah • George Manville Fenn
... and administer the sacrament, he is certain to arouse the animosity, not only of orthodox church members, but of members of the community who are lax in their church duties. Goldsmith illustrates this kind of feeling when, in "She Stoops to Conquer," he makes one of the "several shabby fellows with punch and tobacco" in the alehouse say, "I loves to hear him, the squire sing, bekeays he never gives us nothing that's low," and another responds, "O, damn anything that's low." The AntiMormon feeling was intensified and broadened by the aggressiveness with which the Mormons ...
— The Story of the Mormons: • William Alexander Linn
... Citadel, and Christ Church spire. But I must rest. I'll enter yonder inn." She stepped forward toward a shabby looking tavern a few doors off, where a crowd of garrulous soldiers were grouped about the door. Too weary to observe any one, Leah staggered into the forlorn, miserably furnished reception-room of the Good Cheer House, and called for food and lodging ...
— Leah Mordecai • Mrs. Belle Kendrick Abbott
... then the General's behaviour strengthened her in her belief that he was not to blame for the shabby way in which ...
— The Petticoat Commando - Boer Women in Secret Service • Johanna Brandt
... inns was such as he hardly could pick up in these days of the free use of the feet. But in those days everybody who was anybody rode. And even now, there might be cold welcome to a shabby-looking pedestrian without a knapsack. Pastor Moritz had his Milton in one pocket and his change of linen in the other. From some inns he was turned away as a tramp, and in others he found cold comfort. Yet he could be proud of a bit of practical wisdom drawn by ...
— Travels in England in 1782 • Charles P. Moritz
... to the last, because Lady Monica told us it was to be done first," said Pilar sagely; so we wandered through the shabby aisles of Rag Fair, Pilar hoping against hope to unearth a treasure; because, did not a man once pick up, for a song, a Greco worth a fortune, and did not one always find something at least amusing in the Rag Fair of Madrid? ...
— The Car of Destiny • C. N. Williamson and A. M. Williamson
... possessed him; there was room in him only for a dogged determination to realize it, to trample down such obstacles as might arise to keep him from his goal. And obstacles enough there were, for many years of waiting and disappointment lay before him—years during which, a shabby and melancholy figure, laughed at and scorned, mocked by the very children in the streets, he "begged his way from court to court, to offer to princes the discovery of a world." And here again was his true greatness—that he did not ...
— American Men of Action • Burton E. Stevenson
... capital had about all it could do to haul provisions and forage for the army, so it was difficult to get clothing from home. We were a rather ragged lot, while the uniforms of the officers looked shabby from the dust and mud of the valley and the trenches around Richmond. Our few brief months in winter quarters had not added much, if any, to our appearance. By some "underground" road, Captain Jno. K. Nance, of the Third, had ...
— History of Kershaw's Brigade • D. Augustus Dickert
... was a shabby business, but Dabney would have convinced himself, by now, that he was the genius he wanted people to ...
— Operation: Outer Space • William Fitzgerald Jenkins
... Middleton School who approached her in popularity. She was clever without being a scrap conceited, and was extremely good-natured, doing her work for the pleasure of doing it and not because she wanted to outstrip a schoolfellow. She was conscientious too, and would have scorned to do a mean or shabby thing; but she was hopelessly untidy, careless to a fault, late for school half her days, getting into countless scrapes and getting out of them as best she could—the butt of her class as well as the favorite, always true to herself ...
— Wild Kitty • L. T. Meade
... must look her very best, so she asked for an extra half hour at noon. She would wear her new thin waist with the very low neck, for the girls had told her that she looked "too sweet for anything" in that. Her silk skirt was shabby but it would never do to wear her serge, even if it were new, when she rode with Mrs. King. As she put on the high-heeled slippers, she noticed that they were much run over, but they would have to do. It took her a long, long time to fix her hair just ...
— Fireside Stories for Girls in Their Teens • Margaret White Eggleston
... lower seat, on the west side, on which was likewise placed a rather shabby blue satin sitting-rug, with a back-cushion; and upon perceiving Tai-y come in she urged her at once to sit on the ...
— Hung Lou Meng, Book I • Cao Xueqin
... chandler as George Rasmussen, whose farewell letter he had received in Southampton. He was dressed in a shabby cap and dressing-gown belonging to a confectioner long dead, whom he had known when a boy. Mysterious as it all was, there was yet something natural in this meeting with his friend. The little shop was alive with goldfinches. "They are the goldfinches," ...
— Atlantis • Gerhart Hauptmann
... houses, where the character and peculiarities of the humbler classes of Parisians are best to be studied. Returning, after dark, from an expedition of this kind, I was surprised by a violent shower in a shabby street of the Faubourg St Antoine, and took refuge under a doorway. Immediately opposite to me was the wretched shop of a traiteur, in whose dingy window a cloudy white bowl of mashed spinach, a plate of bouilli, dry as a deal plank, and some triangular fragments of pear, stewed with cochineal ...
— Tales from Blackwood, Volume 7 • Various
... disappear in a way truly marvellous, leaving the backwoods soldiers who were to have benefited by them "as ragged as ever." The petitioners complained that the undisciplined militia quartered among them, who on their arrival were "in the most shabby and wretched state," and who had "rioted in abundance and unaccustomed luxury" at the expense of the Creoles, had also maltreated and insulted them; as for instance they had at times wantonly shot the cattle merely to try their rifles. "Ours was the ...
— The Winning of the West, Volume Three - The Founding of the Trans-Alleghany Commonwealths, 1784-1790 • Theodore Roosevelt
... patent-leathers, do people say, in an exasperatingly astonished tone, "Can that woman write books?" Why not, pray? Does a fragment of genius corrupt the aesthetic sense? Is writing a hardening process? Must you wear shabby boots and carry a baggy umbrella just because you can write? Not a bit of it. Little as some of you men may think it, literary women have souls, and a woman with a soul must, of necessity, love laces and ruffled petticoats, and high heels, and rosettes. ...
— From a Girl's Point of View • Lilian Bell
... a capricious couple who played their friends a very shabby trick. The invitations had been issued for a Wednesday, and at the last moment they decided to be married on the Tuesday morning. They went quietly to church in the early hours, left the town separately ...
— The Etiquette of Engagement and Marriage • G. R. M. Devereux
... stooping figure in a shabby, black frock-coat, the figure of a man who wore a dilapidated bowler pressed down upon his ears, who had a greasy, Semitic countenance, with a scrubby, curling, sandy colored beard, sparse as the vegetation of a desert, appeared at ...
— The Yellow Claw • Sax Rohmer
... bare apartment running along one side of the house, and boasting three tall windows, through which the sun poured in on a shabby carpet and ink-stained tables. Everything looked well worn and, to a certain extent, dilapidated, yet there was an air of cheerful comfort about the whole which is not often found in rooms of the kind. Mrs Asplin revelled in ...
— About Peggy Saville • Mrs. G. de Horne Vaizey
... time, my son. I warn't brought up to the law. What I was thinking is this: we three working chaps in our shabby clothes are rich men ...
— To Win or to Die - A Tale of the Klondike Gold Craze • George Manville Fenn
... payments—and then began the task of stocking it and of planning just what was best to do with each paddock. The house, left bare and clean by the last owners, was in good repair, save that the dingy white painting of the exterior, and the varnished pine walls and ceilings within were depressing and shabby. Mr. Linton decided that his house-warming present to Tommy should be a coat of paint for her mansion, and soon it looked new—dark red, with a gleaming white roof, while the rooms were painted in pretty fresh colours. "Won't Tommy get a shock!" chuckled Bob gleefully. The dinginess of ...
— Back To Billabong • Mary Grant Bruce
... opaque water. Behind the wall is a garden, out of which the long arm of a white June rose—the roses of Venice are splendid—has flung itself by way of spontaneous ornament. On the other side of this small water- way is a great shabby facade of Gothic windows and balconies— balconies on which dirty clothes are hung and under which a cavernous-looking doorway opens from a low flight of slimy water- steps. It is very hot and still, the canal has a queer smell, and the ...
— Italian Hours • Henry James
... and so eager and capable of enjoyment. It is impossible for those whose office carries them behind the scenes, in the midst of the festive and fashionable crowd which throngs the stately rooms of the Academy, not to think of the poor lodging and the shabby studio, and the easel, the rejected picture, the subject of so much labour, the spring of so many hopes, which was expected to win bread, if not fame, for the painter." Perfectly true, but oh, how pathetic! to those, like myself, ...
— The Confessions of a Caricaturist, Vol 2 (of 2) • Harry Furniss
... says, as how as amost all on 'em lived at their warious shops and warehouses, and so mostly walked. There was, it seems, a few ramshackel old coaches, called Ackney Coaches—coz, they was all maid at Ackney, I suppose—all drorn by two ramshackel old Osses, and with werry shabby old drivers with wisps of stror round their shabby old hats. Then some brite Genus went and inwented Cabs, and they soon cut out the Ackney Coaches, which all went back to Ackney, and was never seen no more. And then, sum ewen briter Genus ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 103, October 29, 1892 • Various
... slender woman, in a shabby suit dated some six years ago, came to meet Julia listlessly. Her listlessness, however, was only bodily, for into her eyes some eager spirit had leapt and her hands went out involuntarily. They were engulfed in Julia's well-shaped large ...
— Married Life - The True Romance • May Edginton
... brown hair on her square peasant's skull was smoothly combed. Zwanziger, the freckled shop-assistant, was busy unpacking books. Theresa greeted her sister with apparent friendliness, but she did not leave her place. She stretched out her hand across the ink-stand, and observed Marian's shabby appearance—the worn shawl, the old-fashioned little cloth bonnet with its black velvet ribbands meeting in a ...
— The Goose Man • Jacob Wassermann
... heard some one in the outer office inquiring for him. Then his door was opened, and a stranger entered, an old man in shabby clothes, leaning on a cane. He was breathing heavily, apparently from the exertion of climbing the steps at the entrance, and he was no sooner in the room than he fell into a violent fit ...
— Burnham Breaker • Homer Greene
... elderly man of shabby-genteel appearance and polite address. Miles did not quite like the look of him. In the circumstances, however, and with a strangely desolate feeling of loneliness creeping over him, he did not see his way to reject a ...
— Blue Lights - Hot Work in the Soudan • R.M. Ballantyne
... saving for years to buy a clarionet. A woman comes in quest of a divorce. When he has listened to her story he asks twenty dollars advance fee. Then he persuades her to go back home—and hands the money back. There is a splendid climax. The old lawyer stands in the doorway of his shabby office looking out into the night. "Well," he sighs, "maybe I couldn't play the darned thing anyway!" If the lawyer had not been just what he was there would have been no playlet. But vital as the indissoluble ...
— Writing for Vaudeville • Brett Page
... very civil and very persistent, and persistent in vain. How he came to be a creditor was not easy to see, for Iden's coat was a pattern of raggedness, his trousers bare at the knee, and his shabby old hat rotten. But somehow or other there was a five-pound ...
— Amaryllis at the Fair • Richard Jefferies
... Peter, raising the spear he held; and poising it after the fashion he had learned from the Malays, he seemed about to hurl it at the little mahout, whose head and shoulders he could see plainly now just beyond Rajah's shabby little tail. "You dare to say another word, and I will pin you where you sit, like the miserable little beetle you are! Now then.—Here, steady, Rajah!—Hold tight, Mister Archie! I am coming to you; but just you make a show of that other spear. You needn't get up, but make believe ...
— Trapped by Malays - A Tale of Bayonet and Kris • George Manville Fenn
... least one more effort to learn something, and to this end I adopted strategy when next the youth came to my cell. I had noticed that he was a handsome fellow, about the size and age of Carthoris. And I had also noticed that his shabby trappings but illy comported with his dignified ...
— The Gods of Mars • Edgar Rice Burroughs
... The day had been quite warm, and the road was dry and dusty. He found Lincoln just emerging from the depot. He had on a thin suit of summer clothes, his coat being a linen duster, much soiled. His whole appearance was decidedly shabby. He carried in his hand an old-fashioned carpet-sack, which added to the oddity of his appearance. Major Wilcox says if it had been anybody else he would have been rather shy of being seen in his company, because of the awkward and unseemly appearance he presented. Lincoln immediately began ...
— The Every-day Life of Abraham Lincoln • Francis Fisher Browne
... were there, standing one upon the other, so as to make more space in the small room, and on the rather shabby rug by the fireplace a woman was kneeling with her back ...
— The Phantom Lover • Ruby M. Ayres
... suddenly to their glory of blossom, not like rosebuds which have a loveliness of their own; but the young man was struck by the boyish mixture of shyness and bluntness with which she greeted him, and attracted by the great eyes which gazed at him from under Robin's shabby cap. When he and Horace went to the Blakes' he amused himself idly enough with the school-girl, while his cousin flirted with Addie. He laughed one day when Mrs. Blake was unusually troubled about Lottie's ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, October, 1877, Vol. XX. No. 118 • Various
... with a girl of about Wyn's age—a girl who was a total stranger to the captain of the Go-Ahead Club. The stranger was rather poorly dressed. She wore shabby gloves, and a shabby hat, and shabby shoes. Besides, both her dark frock and the hat were "ages ...
— Wyn's Camping Days - or, The Outing of the Go-Ahead Club • Amy Bell Marlowe
... this time, though there is no record of the exact date—and it was in a shabby home in a humble town where dates made little ...
— The Cup of Fury - A Novel of Cities and Shipyards • Rupert Hughes
... paying. Yes; but I maintain that he was induced to do so by fraud. Well informed in all things, the devil must have known that my friend would gain nothing by his visit to futurity. The whole thing was a very shabby trick. The more I think of it, the more detestable the ...
— Enoch Soames - A Memory of the Eighteen-nineties • Max Beerbohm
... around them. They seem so out of place among it, in their somber, everlasting green, like poor relations at a rich man's feast. It is such a weather-beaten old green dress. So many summers' suns have blistered it, so many winters' rains have beat upon it—such a shabby, mean, old dress; it is the ...
— Evergreens - From a volume entitled "Idle Thoughts of an Idle Fellow" • Jerome K. Jerome
... man. Alive, it was so colorless and uninteresting in expression that not one person in a hundred would turn to take a second look at him nor dream of the orgies of dissipation his years could recount. Withal, he had the shabby, run-down appearance as of a ...
— Winning the Wilderness • Margaret Hill McCarter
... before the hearth, indifferent to all that happened in this shabby room, for the sight of this fire had made him see another and kindlier fire, in another and kindlier world. These people did not notice his growing restlessness, his furtive glances, his panting breaths, the burning ...
— Frank of Freedom Hill • Samuel A. Derieux
... successful; blonde, guipure, and all descriptions of lace, no matter how discoloured, are restored to their original whiteness. With the apparel of men, the same advantages are obtained, silk, cashmere, velvet, and other waistcoats that many would throw aside as totally spoiled, or too shabby to be worn any longer, by being sent to M. Bonneau, are returned, having the appearance of being quite new. His establishment, at No. 17, Rue Lepelletier, just facing the French Opera, is well known to many English families; but having ...
— How to Enjoy Paris in 1842 • F. Herve
... reader, that we shall ask him to be content with our assurance that these disgraceful attempts to injure a literary opponent and former friend assume severally the form of direct misstatement, suppression of the truth, prevarication, and cunning perversion; the manner and motive throughout being very shabby.[F] The purpose of all these attacks upon Mr. Dyce is not only to wound and disparage him, but to secure for the writer a reputation for superior sagacity and antiquarian learning; and we regret that ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 8, No. 47, September, 1861 • Various
... wizened, with a face as yellow as parchment, and a long, hooked nose, and eyes set in a mass of wrinkles. His clothes did not fit him particularly well, and were ill cut, and his hat was decidedly shabby. He walked along peering through his glasses as if he were shortsighted, and occasionally even feeling his way with a cane which he carried. When he saw Gwen he hastened towards her ...
— The Youngest Girl in the Fifth - A School Story • Angela Brazil
... iron hooping, which vibrated when the door was opened, and set the bell ringing to attract attention. The interior fittings were of the most simple fashion; common deal counters with thin oaken tops; shabby drawers and shelves all round; one or two antiquated brass sconces for candles; a railed-off desk, near the window; and that was all. In this place, almost alone and unassisted, the old man made his money. I copy the following from "Maunder's Biographical Dictionary:" "In conjunction ...
— Personal Recollections of Birmingham and Birmingham Men • E. Edwards
... empty afternoon, too, was much to his taste. The man adored auctions. To his mind a most delectable flavour of discreet scandal inhered in such collections of shabby properties from anonymous homes. Nothing so piqued his imagination as some well-worn piece of furniture—say an ancient escritoire with ink stains on its green baize writing-bed (dried life-blood of love letters long since dead!) and all its pigeon-holes ...
— Red Masquerade • Louis Joseph Vance
... not afraid of muddying his shoes, because they were so shabby that a little mud could not make them look worse. He sat on the wall and laughed as he saw the girls try to cross the puddle without wetting ...
— Princess Polly's Gay Winter • Amy Brooks
... ensign in a cavalry regiment when I first met my little darling. We were quartered at a stupid seaport town, where my pet lived with her shabby old father, a half-pay naval officer; a regular old humbug, as poor as Job, and with an eye for nothing but the main chance. I saw through all his shallow tricks to catch one of us for his pretty daughter. I saw all the pitiable, contemptible, palpable traps he set for us big dragoons to walk ...
— Lady Audley's Secret • Mary Elizabeth Braddon
... with itself;—or, more likely, we did not trouble simply because it saved so much more trouble not to. No woman would have to be taught by Ibsen or anybody else how to live her own life, were she willing to live it in shabby clothes. It is not an easy thing to do, I know. I share the weakness of most women in feeling it a disgrace, or a misfortune, to be caught in the wrong clothes in the right place. But that year in Rome I had not outgrown ...
— Nights - Rome, Venice, in the Aesthetic Eighties; London, Paris, in the Fighting Nineties • Elizabeth Robins Pennell
... avenues and streets the taxicabs now turned. Then a distinctly shabby looking part of Paris was unfolded to the gaze ...
— Dave Darrin on Mediterranean Service - or, With Dan Dalzell on European Duty • H. Irving Hancock
... sew ever so many flannel shirts we may be rich by-and-by. I should give mother a new bonnet first of all, for I heard Miss Kent say no lady would wear such a shabby one. Mrs. Smith said fine bonnets didn't make real ladies. I like her best, but I do want a ...
— Aunt Jo's Scrap-Bag VI - An Old-Fashioned Thanksgiving, Etc. • Louisa M. Alcott
... like the Burlington, an agent for everything ... circus, music-hall, theater ... artistes formed in a week ... white flesh at famine salaries. There were all sorts of people there, a moving heap of frayed velvet and shabby plush. Lily passed by with great dignity. Next, she came to the big agent, with offices in Berlin and London ... the ting-ting of telephones, the tick-tack of typewriters all day ... business pure and simple, an exchange ...
— The Bill-Toppers • Andre Castaigne
... that Mien-yaun's poem was a versified narration of his own experiences. There was the romantic youth, the beautiful maiden, the obdurate papa, the villanous mother-in-law, and the shabby public. This discovery augmented its popularity, and ten editions were disposed of in ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 3, No. 20, June, 1859 • Various
... humble little kitchen. In fact, the kitchen of your poor clerk, Bob Cratchit. Bob, with his fifteen shillings a week—with his wife and six children—with his shabby clothes and his humble, shabby manners—Bob, with his little four-roomed house, and his struggle to keep the wolf from the door. The Ghost of the Christmas ...
— The White Christmas and other Merry Christmas Plays • Walter Ben Hare
... Ferrari, that tall, black-bearded, middle-aged banker Pietro Zuccari, whom I had seen at their palazzo. They walked as far as the Piazza San Ferdinando and entered the Gambrinus, where they sat at a little table eating ices, while he talked to her very confidentially. As I idled outside in a shabby suit and battered straw hat which I had bought, I saw this great Italian banker gesticulating ...
— The Golden Face - A Great 'Crook' Romance • William Le Queux
... force a confession had to be abandoned. Water and bread, water without bread, bread without water, no water and no bread, the preacher, Stoffel, Habakkuk, Juffrouw Laps, tears, the rod—all in vain. Walter was not the boy to betray Glorioso. This was what he had found so shabby of Scelerajoso, who had to pay the ...
— Walter Pieterse - A Story of Holland • Multatuli
... society had its own social habits. If he did not take this well-meant advice, he must justify himself by his own method. He made up his mind to go to the next meeting of the medical society. His clothes were a trifle shabby, but as the meeting was in the evening, he could go in his evening dress—drop in casually, as it were, from an evening entertainment. That silly bit of pride, however, angered him with himself. He went in his shabby everyday suit. The experience was the most uncomfortable ...
— The Web of Life • Robert Herrick
... inauspiciously for our ascent to Taormina; but the attendants of the excursion are already making a great noise, without which nothing can be done in either of the two Sicilies. A supply of shabby donkeys are brought and mounted, and, once astride, we begin to ascend, the poor beasts tottering under our weight, and by their constant stumbling affording us little inclination to look about. It takes about three-fourths of an hour of this donkey-riding to reach the old notched wall ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, No. CCCXLV. July, 1844. Vol. LVI. • Various
... appearance besides was not sufficiently distinguished for me to be well served, and in France post-horses feel the whip in proportion to the favorable opinion the postillion has of his temporary master. By paying the guides generously thought I should make up for my shabby appearance: this was still worse. They took me for a worthless fellow who was carrying orders, and, for the first time in my life, travelling post. From that moment I had nothing but worn-out hacks, and I became the sport of the postillions. I ended as I should have begun ...
— The Confessions of J. J. Rousseau, Complete • Jean Jacques Rousseau
... A shabby trick was perpetrated by the friends of John W. Angell, which was certainly anything but "angelic," and which ought to consign the parties who committed it ...
— History of Woman Suffrage, Volume III (of III) • Various
... out. It seemed to me that concealment was no longer possible. She staged at me in bewilderment. I had forgotten my beard, my spectacles and shabby clothes. ...
— The Great Secret • E. Phillips Oppenheim |
