"Stuffy" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... two groups of Philadelphia Orchestra subscribers—the Friday afternoon crowd, consisting largely of stuffy dowagers, and the Saturday night clientele, composed mostly of persons genuinely ...
— The World's Great Men of Music - Story-Lives of Master Musicians • Harriette Brower
... our own till we had contemptuously got used to them. It was a red-brick Ohio town, and the trees made it damp, and it smelled of rotten apples. The country wasn't like our lakes and prairie. There were small stuffy corn-fields and ...
— Main Street • Sinclair Lewis
... in the way I should much prefer to remain here," said Harry, "and if we are going to be shot I had rather have it done on deck than in a stuffy cabin." ...
— A Voyage with Captain Dynamite • Charles Edward Rich
... No. Thats just it: Ive no business to do. Do you know what my life is? I spend my days from nine to six—nine hours of daylight and fresh air—in a stuffy little den counting another man's money. Ive an intellect: a mind and a brain and a soul; and the use he makes of them is to fix them on his tuppences and his eighteenpences and his two pound seventeen and tenpences and see how much they come to at the end of the day and take care that no ...
— Misalliance • George Bernard Shaw
... are good for nothing, because they drink a lot of tea, talk a lot in stuffy rooms, ...
— Note-Book of Anton Chekhov • Anton Pavlovich Chekhov
... destined to be my uncle's deathbed. There is a background of the Pyrenees, of blue hills and sunlit houses, of the old castle of Luzon and a noisy cascading river, and for a foreground the dim, stuffy room whose windows both the religieuse and hostess conspired to shut, with its waxed floor, its four-poster bed, its characteristically French chairs and fireplace, its champagne bottles and dirty basins and used towels and packets of ...
— Tono Bungay • H. G. Wells
... a crowded stuffy hall he faced what was at the start almost a menacing crowd. Yet as he addressed them you would have thought that he had known every man and woman in the assembly all their lives. The easy, intimate, frank manner ...
— The War After the War • Isaac Frederick Marcosson
... belonging to visiting country people stood hitched in two long rows. The meeting in the bank was not held until four o'clock, when the banking business was at an end for the day. It had been a hot, stuffy afternoon and a storm threatened. For some reason the whole town had an inkling of the fact that a meeting was to be held on that day, and in spite of the excitement caused by the coming of the circus, it was in everybody's mind. From the very beginning of his upward journey in life, Steve Hunter ...
— Poor White • Sherwood Anderson
... certain day Back in the times of long ago— A stuffy old estaminet Under the great peaks fledged with snow; The Spring that set our hearts rejoicing As up the serried mountains' bar We climbed our tortuous way Rolls-Roycing From Gap ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 153, October 31, 1917 • Various
... a guest!" she spluttered down there in the dark. "That woman might have set out a little milk for me. It would have tasted good, after my long ride in that stuffy basket." Miss Kitty couldn't help thinking what a fine home she had had at Farmer Green's and how good Mrs. Green ...
— The Tale of Miss Kitty Cat - Slumber-Town Tales • Arthur Scott Bailey
... room exhales an odor for which there is no name in the language, and which should be called the odeur de pension. The damp atmosphere sends a chill through you as you breathe it; it has a stuffy, musty, and rancid quality; it permeates your clothing; after-dinner scents seem to be mingled in it with smells from the kitchen and scullery and the reek of a hospital. It might be possible to describe it if some one should discover a process ...
— Father Goriot • Honore de Balzac
... crazy, and it is evident to me now that it led to the revolution in domestic policy by which he began to encourage any acquaintance with other young people as much as he had previously discouraged it. He saw that I could not be allowed to spend my whole time in a little stuffy room making solemn and ridiculous imitations of Papers read before the Linnaean Society. He was grieved, moreover, at the badness of my pictures, for I had no native skill; and he tried to teach me his ...
— Father and Son • Edmund Gosse
... lives of prospective mothers, when, in every up-to-date hospital delivery-room, all these life-saving facilities are freely provided? Here in the modern hospital, the mothers from small homes and apartments, the mothers who live in stuffy basements, as well as those from the average home in the average neighborhood, can come with the assurance of receiving the best possible care and attention. Every woman who can arrange or afford it, should plan to avail herself of the benefits, comforts, quietness, ...
— The Mother and Her Child • William S. Sadler
... which lasted ten days, was uneventful except for some rough weather when Stevenson found his cabin most stuffy and uncomfortable. He was not really ill, however, and spent much of the time finishing a tale called "The Story of a Lie," while his table played "Bob Jerry with the ink bottle." On his arrival ...
— The Life of Robert Louis Stevenson for Boys and Girls • Jacqueline M. Overton
... movements, now pleased Therese, who experienced strange relief in observing this poor, broken-up creature, and had made a friend of her. She loved to see her at her side, smiling with her faint smile, more dead than alive, and bringing into the shop the stuffy odour of the cemetery. When the blue eyes of Suzanne, transparent as glass, rested fixedly on those of Therese, the latter experienced a beneficent chill in ...
— Therese Raquin • Emile Zola
... work to have to set on a high stool, to dot and carry one, and to scribble away all day. I could not stand it. It would kill me. It was bad enough to have to go to school, and then we had a good many play-hours; but in these stuffy, musty, dark offices, I have heard that they have only half-an-hour for dinner, and work away till ten o'clock at night. That sort of life would ...
— Dick Cheveley - His Adventures and Misadventures • W. H. G. Kingston
... name, a sort of music. This was odd, because the name, as a name, was far from being a favourite of his. Until that moment childish associations had prejudiced him against it. It had been inextricably involved in his mind with an atmosphere of stuffy schoolrooms and general misery, for it had been his misfortune that his budding mind was constitutionally incapable of remembering who had been Queen of England at the time of the Spanish Armada—a fact that had caused a good deal of friction ...
— Uneasy Money • P.G. Wodehouse
... is stuffy in the steerage where the second-classers sleep, For there's near a hundred for'ard, and they're stowed away like sheep, — They are trav'lers for the most part in a straight 'n' honest path; But their linen's rather scanty, an' there isn't any bath — Stowed away like ewes and ...
— In the Days When the World Was Wide and Other Verses • Henry Lawson
... said Matt, as his eyes rested on a particularly beautiful bit of picturesque scenery. "How can people stick in the stuffy city when there is so much like this going to ...
— Young Auctioneers - The Polishing of a Rolling Stone • Edward Stratemeyer
... House. The contest, which at first sight seemed unequal, was not in reality so, Tough McCarty and Cheyenne Baxter being an unusually strong battery, while the infield, with Butsey White at first, the White Mountain Canary at second, Stuffy Brown short-stop and the Coffee-colored Angel at third, quite outclassed the invaders. The trouble was in the outfield—where the trouble in such contests are ...
— The Varmint • Owen Johnson
... gratitude in his heart as there should have been. He did not ask Ned to sit down until he had explained with his accustomed simplicity that he had something of importance to say. Then Riatt let him lead the way to one of those remote and stuffy sitting-rooms in which all hotels abound. He saw at once that Hickson found it difficult to say what he had come to say, but Riatt was in no humor this ...
— Ladies Must Live • Alice Duer Miller
... beginning to feel the strain. His temples were throbbing from the retained breath and the water pressure, and his head felt big and stuffy. It was aching, too. Joe had placed outside the tank an alarm clock with big figures so he could keep track of the time. Three minutes and a half had passed, and Joe knew that every second, from now on, would be agony for him, agony ...
— Joe Strong, the Boy Fish - or Marvelous Doings in a Big Tank • Vance Barnum
... It was dark and somewhat stuffy. His head felt oppressed as under a weight. There sounded in ...
— The Created Legend • Feodor Sologub
... papa! Surely you will not leave me alone? There will be plenty of room now. The air of Fulham will be better for your work than those stuffy, dark, ...
— Ralph the Heir • Anthony Trollope
... it are to think 'e'll be a corpse some day," she chirped cheerily to herself, "tho' of course bein' a great swell in 'is own place, 'e'll 'ave a nice airy vault, which 'ud be far more comfortable than a close, stuffy grave, even tho' it 'as a tombstone an' vi'lets over it. Ah, now! Who are you, impertinence?" she broke off, as a stout man in a light suit of clothes crossed the road and rang the bell, "a-pullin' at the bell as if it were ...
— The Mystery of a Hansom Cab • Fergus Hume
... trawlers vigorously sweeping for him astern and ahead. And when E14 had burrowed and bumped and scraped through six hours of blind death, she found the Sea of Marmara crawling with craft, and was kept down almost continuously and grew hot and stuffy in consequence. Nor could she charge her batteries in peace, so at the end of another hectic, hunted day of starting them up and breaking off and diving—which is bad for the temper—she decided to quit those infested waters near ...
— Sea Warfare • Rudyard Kipling
... to get to work, whether here or anywhere else; it is 100 per cent better in this interesting old town doing for ourselves in the Convent than waiting in the stuffy hotel at Dublin. There is any amount to see—miles of our Transport going through the town with burly old shaggy English farm-horses, taken straight from the harvest, pulling the carts; French Artillery Reservists being taught to work the ...
— Diary of a Nursing Sister on the Western Front, 1914-1915 • Anonymous
... sigh Gloria tossed her cigarette out the open door and prepared to follow it; then they had passed under the screaming sign, under the wide portal, and up by a stuffy elevator into this unsung ...
— The Beautiful and Damned • F. Scott Fitzgerald
... the door. The two princesses and her lady in waiting remained still until she had left the table. Then they fell in behind her, and the little procession moved to the stuffy, boudoir, for coffee. But Hilda slipped her arm around her sister's waist, and the touch ...
— Long Live the King • Mary Roberts Rinehart
... nor the childish laughter, nor all the tiny steps that glided over the polished floors. For a moment, as she sat on the edge of a great red-silk couch, taking from the plate presented to her the first sherbet of her life, she suddenly thought of the dark stairway, of her parents' stuffy little rooms, and it produced upon her mind the effect of a distant country ...
— Fromont and Risler, Complete • Alphonse Daudet
... prey frum 'em An' to hook this nice spoon o' good fortin' away frum 'em, 120 An' they might ha' succeeded, ez likely ez not, In lickin' the Demmercrats all round the lot, Ef it warn't thet, wile all faithful Wigs were their knees on, Some stuffy old codger would holler out,—'Treason! You must keep a sharp eye on a dog thet hez bit you once, An' I aint agoin' to cheat my constitoounts,'— Wen every fool knows thet a man represents Not the fellers thet ...
— The Complete Poetical Works of James Russell Lowell • James Lowell
... and we took refuge in the cellars beneath the Town Hall. So far as I could gather, the remaining inhabitants of Antwerp must have assembled about this neighborhood, groups taking refuge in small and stuffy cellars, where developments were anxiously awaited. There must have been hundreds of people sheltered underground, and they included the Mexican and Dominican Consuls. Why these stayed I do not know, as none of their people were left behind. They were the only ...
— The New York Times Current History of the European War, Vol 1, Issue 4, January 23, 1915 • Various
... say I disliked the nights at the hospital exceedingly. It was insufferably hot and stuffy in the little room, and the window, only about 2 feet above the ground, had to be left open. The sentries, about six in number—doubled, as I understood, on my account—lay and lounged on the stoep outside. Instead of feeling them anything of a protection, I should have been ...
— South African Memories - Social, Warlike & Sporting From Diaries Written At The Time • Lady Sarah Wilson
... received with due ceremony and regaled with suitable fare. And afterwards the Governor took Daisy for a stroll through the tents, and, having thus done his duty handsomely, handed her over to Dick; but she and Dick found the tents stuffy and crowded, and sat down under the trees and enjoyed themselves very much, until Mr. Puttock espied them and came up to them, accompanied by ...
— Half a Hero - A Novel • Anthony Hope
... "My! what a stuffy place," exclaimed Louise, as they emerged into the light of day. "I cannot understand why it is necessary to have these moving picture theatres so gloomy ...
— Aunt Jane's Nieces Out West • Edith Van Dyne
... upper deck, was low, upheld by immense timbers, and the apartment, nearly square, was dimly flooded by the sparse light sifting down through the single hatch-opening above, so that, in spite of its large dimensions, it had a cramped and stuffy appearance. The vast butt of the mainmast arose directly in front of me, and, upon a narrow bench surrounding it, a dozen soldiers were lounging, while near the entrance to the passageway, scarcely more than a shadow in that dimness, stood a sentry, ...
— Prisoners of Chance - The Story of What Befell Geoffrey Benteen, Borderman, - through His Love for a Lady of France • Randall Parrish
... in tones of deep commiseration, "on a soft, thick cushion of moss—much more comfortable, I imagine, than hard, flat rocks. And the nice warm sun is shining on me—it must be rather chilly in the woods to-day. And there is a breeze blowing from the Big Horn—old rocks are always damp and stuffy in the shade. And I am looking away out over the Hills—I hope some people enjoy the sight ...
— The Claim Jumpers • Stewart Edward White
... scarcely wider than a cell was assigned to each boy. It was locked at night; but holes were cut in the door so that the fresh air might come in. This, at least, was the theory. Practically, however, the little cell must have been very stuffy, for the windows in the halls were shut tight in order that the health of the pupils might not be injured by currents ...
— Lafayette • Martha Foote Crow
... of hostility. He merely needed to call to mind the story of the woman whose youth he had made into a waste place and a prison to be made aware of the fact that it was quite impossible to stand in his presence and breathe easily. The air of the room in which Carovius chanced to be was heavy, stuffy, depressing. ...
— The Goose Man • Jacob Wassermann
... Found my rooms stuffy. Like country, sleighing, skating, ice yachting, don't you know. Fine air, healthy. Think I'll buy a place up the ...
— Tin-Types Taken in the Streets of New York • Lemuel Ely Quigg
... window is opened a whiff of fresh air from the fields enters a stuffy room, so a whiff of youthfulness, energy, and confidence of success reached Kutuzov's cheerless staff with the galloping advent of ...
— War and Peace • Leo Tolstoy
... of roses became much more pronounced, yet I sat at my post by the open window as though wanting fresh air, for the big sleeping-car was very stuffy, the heating apparatus being on. At last we moved out again, and I breathlessly waited for Duperre to hand me something to toss out to Tracy who was ready with the three signal lights beside ...
— The Golden Face - A Great 'Crook' Romance • William Le Queux
... shrugged his shoulders, heaved a sigh, and went out. As he crossed the entry he said: "You might clear up here, Nikita . . . there's an awfully stuffy smell." ...
— The Horse-Stealers and Other Stories • Anton Chekhov
... of the big stores, and it sort of scared me—everything so stuffy and heaped up, and such a lot of people. I don't get down to Baltimore very often, you see. I do most of my buying right in Frederick, but I'd broke my disker, and if you send, it's maybe weeks before ...
— O. Henry Memorial Award Prize Stories of 1921 • Various
... The stuffy court room is packed to overflowing. The fat, one-eyed bailiff is perspiring to no purpose. He cannot make the throng "sit down." In fact every one who has anything to do with the pickets perspires to no purpose. Judge Mullowny takes his seat, looking at once grotesque and menacing ...
— Jailed for Freedom • Doris Stevens
... amount of charcoal as we can afford does not warm a room very much, so all the windows are closed tightly to prevent any cold air coming in. This also prevents the fumes of the burning charcoal from escaping, so naturally the air gets very stuffy, and many suffer from headaches or fall into a ...
— Pictures of Jewish Home-Life Fifty Years Ago • Hannah Trager
... for their banquet; as many as could find room squeezing themselves on to the two short forms on either side of the table, and the remainder camping out wherever they could find room on the chairs, window-ledge, and a small sofa. At the close of a summer day the place was decidedly hot and stuffy, and the first thing everybody did was to pull off their coats and blazers and ...
— Soldiers of the Queen • Harold Avery
... in her bedroom, as stuffy and disorderly a room as could have been found in all Kennington Road. Moggie, the general, was only allowed to enter it in the occupant's presence, otherwise who knew what prying and filching might go on? She paid a very low rent, ...
— The Town Traveller • George Gissing
... poking her head out from the upper berth of the stuffy little state-room assigned to Mrs. Fisher, Mrs. Henderson, Phronsie, and herself; "was anything ever so delicious as this boat? —and to think, Mamsie,"—here Polly paused to add as impressively as if the idea had never been voiced before,—"that ...
— Five Little Peppers Abroad • Margaret Sidney
... prominent feature, and know that in a day or two it will be raw and blistered and burning. I think, in a comfortable inn at night, of the miseries of those who are trying to sleep in damp hay, or on hard boards of chalets, at once cold and stuffy and haunted by innumerable fleas. I congratulate myself on having a whole skin and unfractured bones, and on the small danger of ever breaking them over an Alpine precipice. But yet I secretly know that these consolations are ...
— English Prose - A Series of Related Essays for the Discussion and Practice • Frederick William Roe (edit. and select.)
... about these things myself. My uncle Jeanbernat used to forbid me to go to church. "Silly girl," he'd say to me, "why do you want to go to a stuffy building when you have got a garden to run about in?" I grew up quite happy and contented. I used to look in the birds' nests without even taking the eggs. I did not even pluck the flowers, for fear of hurting the plants; and ...
— Abbe Mouret's Transgression - La Faute De L'abbe Mouret • Emile Zola
... him mount some steps and he felt that he had entered the stuffy atmosphere of a closed room. Then someone removed the bandage. He was in a room of sinister aspect and in the midst of a rather ...
— The Secret of the Night • Gaston Leroux
... scarcely the place one would choose in which to spend a summer's day; for, though they reach unto the heavens, they are, like most of their kind, somewhat stuffy, the dust of the great city in all their nooks and corners, and the noise of the crowded life penetrates ...
— Nell, of Shorne Mills - or, One Heart's Burden • Charles Garvice
... putting on her hat and cloak to return home when the call-boy came to the dressing-room door to say that the stage manager was waiting to see her. With a little catch, in her breath, and then with a tightening of the heart-strings, she followed him to the stage manager's office. It was a stuffy place over the porter's lodge, approached by a flight of circular iron stairs and lumbered with many kinds of ...
— The Christian - A Story • Hall Caine
... of the sitting-room seemed overclouded with shabbiness and untidiness. To Natalya everything looked and smelt like the things in her bag. And there in a stuffy cradle a baby wrinkled its ...
— Ghetto Comedies • Israel Zangwill
... from whom we hardly expected such a lesson, namely Professor Sigmund Freud. He has now broadened his conception of sexual craving or libido into a general principle of attraction or concretion in matter, like the Eros of the ancient poets Hesiod and Empedocles. The windows of that stuffy clinic have been thrown open; that smell of acrid disinfectants, those hysterical shrieks, have escaped into the cold night. The troubles of the sick soul, we are given to understand, as well as their cure, after all ...
— Some Turns of Thought in Modern Philosophy - Five Essays • George Santayana
... door was closed and fastened behind him and almost before he had taken his lungs full of the clean night air (for the house had been hot and stuffy), a shadow came slouching across the lawn in the moonlight. Peter joined the man at once and they walked around the house, while Peter questioned him as to the number of men and their disposition about the place. ...
— The Vagrant Duke • George Gibbs
... bigamy instead of burglary, and the other time it was to have certain portions of Mr. Yollop's testimony read to them. Immediately upon retiring an amicable and friendly discussion took place in the crowded, stuffy little jury room. Eight men lighted black cigars, two lighted their pipes, one joyously, almost ravenously resorted to a package of "Lucky Strikes," while the twelfth man announced that he did not smoke. He had been obliged to give it ...
— Yollop • George Barr McCutcheon
... Lecture Room—a dismal, stuffy, ill-lighted little theatre—I may refer to two meetings unconnected with foreign politics which I remember in it. One was in 1857, when the Dissenters of Newcastle had revolted against the domination of the Whig clique, and at the general election ...
— Memoirs of Sir Wemyss Reid 1842-1885 • Stuart J. Reid, ed.
... imagine the mysterious gleam of yellow windows veiled behind a drift of intermingled smoke and steam. Listen, also, to the clang of bells, the throb and puff of the engines, and the shrill shriek of their whistles. Or peer into the station-shed, made stuffy by the breath of many loiterers; and contrast their death in life with the life in death of those others who loiter through eternity beneath the gravestones of the cemetery. I can imagine being happy with all this (and even ...
— The Unpopular Review, Volume II Number 3 • Various
... time I went into the parlor, which room was then occupied by the young men and young women. It was ever so much pleasanter out-of-doors than in this somewhat gloomy and decidedly stuffy parlor; but as these people were guests at a quilting party, they knew it was proper to enjoy themselves within the house to which they had ...
— The House of Martha • Frank R. Stockton
... TALKING?' said Cyril. 'What I want is for something to happen. It's awfully stuffy for a chap not to be allowed out in the evenings. There's simply nothing to do when you've got ...
— The Phoenix and the Carpet • E. Nesbit
... wearing a very hot and stuffy pillow buttoned under his coat and thrust down into his trousers, represented the world-renowned Fat Man from Spoonville. His was rather a difficult role to fill gracefully, because the squashy pillow would persist in bulging out between his trousers and his coat in a most indecent ...
— Hepsey Burke • Frank Noyes Westcott
... of a picture is not the pleasure which it imparts, as the last speaker seemed to think, but the pain. The sooner the public got that fact into its thick head the better would it be for those artists who were not so clay-souled as to allow stuffy conventions to interfere with ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 152, June 6, 1917 • Various
... was sad, and did not want to go away from the beauty and the spring evening into the stuffy train; or perhaps he, like me, was unaccountably sorry for the beauty, for himself, and for me, and for all the passengers, who were listlessly and reluctantly sauntering back to their compartments. As we passed the station window, at which a pale, red-haired telegraphist with upstanding ...
— The Schoolmistress and Other Stories • Anton Chekhov
... shameful and degrading for a man of my age to sit in a stuffy room and compete with a typewriting-machine," I said. "What has that to do with the ...
— The House with the Mezzanine and Other Stories • Anton Tchekoff
... forty minutes' run from New York, and had specialized in the domestic sciences and basket ball; and on attaining her majority had taken up a course or two at Columbia, rather more to put off the evil day of assuming the responsibility of the stuffy, stately old house in Washington Square than because she ever expected to make any use of her superfluous education. She was conceded by every one to be her aunt's heir, but old Miss Winslow died intestate, very suddenly in Nancy's twenty-third year; and the beneficiaries of this ...
— Outside Inn • Ethel M. Kelley
... never noticed that: his eye and his ear and his mind were all equally slow to appreciate clashings of any kind. He was rather aloof from comparison and criticism, but not on principle. He had no principles—at least no original ones, just the ordinary stuffy old principles of decency and all that. He never turned his eyes inward, as far as the passer-by could see; he lived a breezy life outside himself. He never tried to make a fine Kew of himself; he never propounded riddles to his ...
— This Is the End • Stella Benson
... and unkempt appearance. The atmosphere of the sitting-room was stuffy and redolent of stale tobacco smoke. Wrayson's first action was ...
— The Avenger • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... house of Othello and the house of Desdemona, and the prisons in the ducal palace; and three nights you've taken us to the Piazza as soon as the Austrian band stopped playing, and all the interesting promenading was over, and those stuffy old Italians began to come to the caffes. Well, I can tell you that's no way to amuse a young girl. We must do something for her, or she will die. She has come here from a country where girls have always had the ...
— A Fearful Responsibility and Other Stories • William D. Howells
... her heavy veil come aboard. She, too, preferred to remain on deck, cold as it was, to going into the stuffy cabin. Janice was warmly dressed and the morning was clear. When the Constance Colfax got under way again she watched the few twinkling lights of Polktown and the stars overhead fade out as the sky grew rosy above ...
— The Mission of Janice Day • Helen Beecher Long
... and damp and stuffy now, and filled with unpleasant odors, for it had been unoccupied since early in July. But soon Abel had a roaring fire in the stove, and the things in from the boat, and Mrs. Abel had the room aired, ...
— Bobby of the Labrador • Dillon Wallace
... Mr. Marsh, though suffering with a lame foot, took me in charge, and in due course of time I was presented to King Victor-Emmanuel. His Majesty received me informally at his palace in a small, stuffy room—his office, no doubt—and an untidy one it was too. He wore a loose blouse and very baggy trousers; a comfortable suit, certainly, but not at all conducing to an ideal kingliness ...
— Memoirs of Three Civil War Generals, Complete • U. S. Grant, W. T. Sherman, P. H. Sheridan
... beautiful it all is! What a lovely world God made when He made—this!" Toni stood on the steps with arms outstretched, like some young priestess of a pagan faith welcoming the sun. "And why do we lie asleep in stuffy beds when all the birds and flowers have been ...
— The Making of a Soul • Kathlyn Rhodes
... Beetle, you aren't stuffy about anything, are you?" said McTurk, handing over the coppers. His tone was serious, for though Stalky often, and McTurk occasionally, manoeuvred on his own account, Beetle had never been known to do so in all the history of ...
— Stalky & Co. • Rudyard Kipling
... back through the stuffy atmosphere, as black as ink now, to the counter. The voice of Mrs Verloc, standing in the middle of the shop, vibrated after him in that blackness ...
— The Secret Agent - A Simple Tale • Joseph Conrad
... one aim of the desperate efforts of six days of toil. Neither rain nor hail, nothing makes any difference, nothing will prevent them from going out, from closing behind them the door of the deserted workshop, of the stuffy little lodging. But when the springtime is come, when the May sunshine glitters on it as this morning, and it can deck itself out in gay colours, then indeed Sunday is the ...
— The Nabob • Alphonse Daudet
... of sweet peas and ten pounds of blackberries, we knew that the finest garden in Winnipeg had been rifled to do us pleasure. Now, I dearly love flowers and fruit, as I did the giver, but ten pounds of great, fat blackberries and an armful of sweet peas in a cramped stuffy Pullman caused my heart to resound in the minor chords. We rallied again and again to demolish the fruit as we voyaged, and sat with one foot on top of the other to avoid crushing the lovely pea blossoms as we fidgeted about, but the ...
— A Woman Tenderfoot • Grace Gallatin Seton-Thompson
... air after the stuffy atmosphere of the jail hit him hard. It sent the potent fumes of the whisky to his head, and by the time he had reached the end of the alley he was staggering perceptibly. He vaguely realized his condition and the peril it implied, ...
— The Monk of Hambleton • Armstrong Livingston
... in answer to her prayer that the rain came down in such torrents that for two days the roads were impassable? Cecily was inclined to think so. Anyhow, Joyce and Abigail, growing tired of the stuffy inn parlour while the torrents descended, and having nothing to do, seeing that the day was the Sabbath, and therefore scrupulously observed without doors in Puritan Beverley, strolled through the Minster, ...
— A Book of Quaker Saints • Lucy Violet Hodgkin
... "The smoking-room is stuffy, and my dancing days are over. No; I proposed to take exercise after that big dinner, and then to sit in a chair and fall asleep. But," he added, and his voice grew interested, "how did you know that it was I? You never ...
— Benita, An African Romance • H. Rider Haggard
... can do in this present session—no indeed I wouldn't. Now, here—I don't altogether like this. That insignificant secretary of legation is—why, she's smiling on him as if he—and now on the Admiral! Now she's illuminating that, stuffy Congressman from Massachusetts—vulgar ungrammatcal shovel-maker—greasy knave of spades. I don't like this sort of thing. She doesn't appear to be much distressed about me—she hasn't looked this way once. All right, my bird of Paradise, if it suits you, go on. But I think I know ...
— The Gilded Age, Part 4. • Mark Twain (Samuel Clemens) and Charles Dudley Warner
... In the middle of the night she awoke and lay for hours tossing and unhappy in the stuffy little room. The clock struck one, two, three. At last she gave a great sigh, and cuddling Miranda in her arms turned over, with ...
— The Christmas Angel • Abbie Farwell Brown
... of a singular change in the atmosphere. In the narrow, cavernous, obviously subterraneous little passage we had just left the air had been humid, chill, and dank, with an unpleasant earthy odour. Here it was dry and stuffy, as if heated artificially. So intense was the blackness that I seemed almost to feel it. There was a dull thump. Turning, I saw that the cadaverous man had shut this door too. Just as I was wondering why he took such precautions ...
— The Four Faces - A Mystery • William le Queux
... sense the home of the individual occupant, almost the shell of his or her mind, there will be something narrow and despotic in the house-rules if this is not allowed. Yet, even individuality of taste and expression must scrupulously follow sanitary laws in the furnishing of the bedroom. "Stuffy things" of any sort should be avoided. The study should be to make it beautiful without such things, and a liberal use of washable textiles in curtains, portieres, bed and table covers, will give quite ...
— Principles of Home Decoration - With Practical Examples • Candace Wheeler
... What I like in nature is a cultivated field, where men can work in the free open air, where there is quiet and repose—no turmoil, no strife, no tumult, no fearful roar or struggle for mastery. I do not like the crowded, stuffy workshop, where life is slavery and drudgery. Give me the calm, cultivated land of waving grain, ...
— The Works of Robert G. Ingersoll, Volume VIII. - Interviews • Robert Green Ingersoll
... a most delightful idea to all the party. The hospitable cottage had plenty of rooms, although many of these were but attics beneath the thatched roof, none too light or commodious. In summer they might have been too warm and stuffy to be agreeable sleeping places, but in the cooler autumn they would be good enough for hardy young folks brought up ...
— The Sign Of The Red Cross • Evelyn Everett-Green
... that there must undoubtedly be an opening somewhere, because the air in the vault was comparatively pure and fresh; at least it had not the dead, stale, stuffy smell of air confined in a hermetically-sealed chamber. But Frobisher pointed out that the door by which they had entered, although an excellent fit, did not butt up against the jambs so closely as to exclude the air altogether; yet he acknowledged that the air in the vault certainly ...
— A Chinese Command - A Story of Adventure in Eastern Seas • Harry Collingwood
... went indoors, into the rather stuffy, overcrowded living-room, that was too cosy and too warm. The son followed last, standing in the doorway. The father talked to me. Maggie put out the tea-cups. The mother ...
— Wintry Peacock - From "The New Decameron", Volume III. • D. H. Lawrence
... hot and stuffy; the clerks in the coach are asleep, and the Slave of the Ray is near to follow them. Tim slides open the aft colloid and reveals the curve of the world—the ocean's deepest purple—edged with fuming and intolerable gold. Then the Sun rises and ...
— With The Night Mail - A Story of 2000 A.D. (Together with extracts from the - comtemporary magazine in which it appeared) • Rudyard Kipling
... entered Mr. Vetch's office with the best will in the world to please him, and to master the principles of legal practice and procedure; but I found it hard to reconcile myself to the atmosphere of a stuffy room filled with musty tomes, and to the unvarying round of desk work—copying from morning to night agreements, deeds and other documents bristling with a jargon ...
— Humphrey Bold - A Story of the Times of Benbow • Herbert Strang
... steamboats, just as the other day, when we motored, I pitied people in stuffy black trains," said Miss Rivers. "But I don't pity the people on lighters and barges. Don't they look delightful? I should love to live on that one with the curly-tailed red lion on the prow, and the green house ...
— The Chauffeur and the Chaperon • C. N. Williamson
... melancholy. Here she was shut up in her bedroom, which was stuffy from the afternoon sun that had been pouring into it, instead of out in the cool garden, and all because ...
— The Enchanted April • Elizabeth von Arnim
... can't go in those clothes. Hera would object quite violently, I'm afraid. She's awfully stuffy about such things." ...
— Pagan Passions • Gordon Randall Garrett
... small and stuffy and in this warm weather made Dick perspire freely. But without waiting to make certain that the men were really gone, he commenced to work upon his bonds and the ...
— The Rover Boys on Treasure Isle - or The Strange Cruise of the Steam Yacht. • Edward Stratemeyer (AKA Arthur M. Winfield)
... found solace and delight, as countless thousands have done, in his Ovid. The world of books and of reading is apt to seem stuffy, the favoured home of the moody spirit, a lair to which a dirty and ragged Magliabechi retreats, a palace where a Beckford gloats solitary over his treasures—a world whence we often desire to escape, since we ...
— Old English Libraries, The Making, Collection, and Use of Books • Ernest A. Savage
... of lodgers the Bryants stowed themselves away in any odd corners. At this time Lydia occupied a large cupboard—by courtesy called a small room—close to their stuffy little back parlor. Lisle would go to the yard behind the house, which was common to two or three besides No. 13, and with one foot on a projecting bit of brick-work could get his hand on the ...
— Lippincott's Magazine, Vol. 22, September, 1878 • Various
... I want to do," says the college student. "I want to play tennis every afternoon; but what I do is to sit in a stuffy room and study." ...
— Outwitting Our Nerves - A Primer of Psychotherapy • Josephine A. Jackson and Helen M. Salisbury
... down to the coast, I went by coach. This held six inside and two by the driver. Three of the inside passengers sat with backs to the horses, the others facing them. My coach was full, and stifling hot and stuffy it was before we had done with it. Of the five others two were fat priests, and for twenty hours my place was between them. But in one way I had my revenge: I carried my loaded rifle between my knees, and a pistol in my belt. The dismay, the terror, the panic, the protestations, ...
— Tracks of a Rolling Stone • Henry J. Coke
... good ventilation at night it is almost impossible to enter into restful slumbers in a stuffy room. ...
— Maintaining Health • R. L. Alsaker
... second-rate railroad," was Dave's comment, as they seated themselves in the stuffy coach and had the door locked upon them. Then the train moved off at a slow rate of speed that was tantalizing to both. With half a dozen stops, it took them nearly an hour to reach Christiania, only eighteen miles away. Looking ...
— Dave Porter in the Far North - or, The Pluck of an American Schoolboy • Edward Stratemeyer
... attractive as can be. I shouldn't wonder if we made a lot of money, for we shall be so original and ingenious. People are so stupid in this world. I always feel I could do things so much better myself. Who wants to go to a stuffy old bazaar in the Mission Room? No one does! They go from a sense of duty. Mother groans and says, 'Oh dear, if I could only give a subscription and be done with it! More cosies and chairbacks! I've a drawerful already!' And bazaar things are hideous! Father gave me ten shillings to ...
— A Houseful of Girls • Mrs. George de Horne Vaizey
... Gaga; although, the causes of her hysteria having been removed, she was not likely to repeat the failure of that other restless night. A heaviness hung upon her as the day wore on; a kind of thick readiness for sleep. She yawned over her work. The workroom seemed stuffy, the day unusually long. The nervous strain of the past few days was reacting, and even Sally's vitality was shaken by the consequences of her successive excitements. When tea-time came she was relieved. But there had been no news of Gaga, or from ...
— Coquette • Frank Swinnerton
... hurried away from the ground as rapidly as possible, and soon reached the Hotel de France. It was small, stuffy, and rather close, but, to people in our half-frozen condition, the big Canadian stove was a blessing beyond words. O'Halloran seemed like an habitue of the place, judging by the way he button-holed the landlord, and by the success with which he obtained "somethin' warrum" for the company. ...
— The Lady of the Ice - A Novel • James De Mille
... that these were excellent qualities in a landlady, and then, somewhat mollified, she led the way through a steamy passage into a stuffy bedroom. It had one window, looking out into an air-shaft filled with lines of fluttering garments and a network of fire-escapes. A slat-bed, a bureau, a washstand with a noseless pitcher, and a much-spotted Brussels carpet completed the furnishings, ...
— The Long Day - The Story of a New York Working Girl As Told by Herself • Dorothy Richardson
... a stuffy little den. Well, we will stop for it, and if you want to consult him afterward, ...
— Floyd Grandon's Honor • Amanda Minnie Douglas
... over here you play cards all night in stuffy rooms and eat too many sauces." Harrigan had read this somewhere, and he was pleased to think that he ...
— The Place of Honeymoons • Harold MacGrath
... amongst the anciens militaires frequenting a certain little cafe full of flies when one stuffy afternoon "that poor General Feraud" let out suddenly a volley of ...
— The Point Of Honor - A Military Tale • Joseph Conrad
... swiftly, carrying each vase, when filled, to the drawing-room—a painful apartment, crowded with knick-knacks until it resembled a bazaar stall, with knobby and unsteady bamboo furniture and much drapery of a would-be artistic nature. It was stuffy and airless. Cecilia wrinkled her pretty nose as she entered. Mrs. Rainham held pronounced views on the subject of what she termed the "fresh-air fad," and declined to let London air—a smoky commodity at best—attack her cherished carpets; with the result ...
— Back To Billabong • Mary Grant Bruce
... harm done to the young by frequently spending their afternoons and evenings in hot, stuffy, overcrowded halls shrinks into insignificance, though serious enough ...
— Mental Defectives and Sexual Offenders • W. H. Triggs, Donald McGavin, Frederick Truby King, J. Sands Elliot, Ada G. Patterson, C.E. Matthews
... that Rose spent at home the girls were together most of the morning. After Constance, well wrapped up, had practised in the cold drawing-room, where economy forbade fires till the afternoon, she sped across to Rose in the little stuffy parlour where Mr. Rollstone liked to doze over his newspaper to the lullaby of their low-voiced chatter. Often they walked together, and were sometimes joined by Herbert, who on these occasions always showed that he knew how to behave ...
— That Stick • Charlotte M. Yonge
... short distances, but it is comparatively expensive and, as no change of position is possible, one soon becomes tired sitting in the fixed attitude. In pity to your coolies, you walk up-hill and you are exposed to inclement weather unless you hire a covered chair. This, however, is not only hot and stuffy, but it makes people think you an aristocrat, as only officials or the rich use such chairs in the country, though in cities they are a common means of conveyance. Besides, I had travelled in a chair in Korea and I wished to try something else ...
— An Inevitable Awakening • ARTHUR JUDSON BROWN
... am where you left me. I am in the same rooms—dull, stuffy, inconvenient—you know all about them. I breathe quantities of bad air every day, and see a hundred things that distress me. I go three nights a week to the room in Lucraft's Row; struggle with the young barbarians of the slums, and am content if I see but a few signs of ...
— The Quest of the Simple Life • William J. Dawson
... of evening thickened in the stuffy cabin room while the conversation went on. Father Beret presently lifted a puncheon in one corner of the floor and got out a large bottle, which bore a mildewed and faded French label, and with it a small iron cup. There was just light enough left to show a brownish ...
— Alice of Old Vincennes • Maurice Thompson
... lack of exercise, and over-eating, and nobody has ever bettered his conclusion. Even contagious colds will not be taken if the bodily resistance is kept at par. More fresh air, less grip. Avoid people who have colds, and keep out of badly ventilated rooms. Stuffy street cars are responsible for half the hard colds, not because people get chilled, but because the air is foul. And when you have a cold keep away from the baby. If the baby takes a cold, let it have medical ...
— Mother's Remedies - Over One Thousand Tried and Tested Remedies from Mothers - of the United States and Canada • T. J. Ritter
... with the old-fashioned porch and low-studded rooms, though the sleeping-rooms seemed a little stuffy ...
— The Peterkin Papers • Lucretia P Hale
... sun. In a few moments he had forgotten why he was looking, and abandoned himself as he always did to the sweetness of the silence. That strange place—standing erect, perilously balanced on the top of a post—was meet for dreams. Coming from the ugly alley, stuffy and dark, the sunny gardens were of a magical radiance. His spirit wandered freely through these regions of harmony, and music sang in him; they lulled him and he forgot time and material things, and was only concerned to miss none of ...
— Jean-Christophe, Vol. I • Romain Rolland
... very easy to understand, you see, for it was just three and three, three upstairs rooms over three downstairs ones. But there was rather a nice little entrance hall, or closed-in porch, and the passages were pretty wide. So it did not seem at all a poky or stuffy house though it was so small. Indeed, one could scarcely fancy a 'Windy Gap Cottage' anything but fresh and ...
— My New Home • Mary Louisa Molesworth
... was as easy to be placated as to be stirred to anger; and when Flint urged him to come into the stuffy little office and partake of a lemonade with the addition of a stronger fluid from a bottle in Flint's room, he forgot his wrath or drowned it in the cooling drink, and at length parted in kindliness, only bidding his patient wear cabbage-leaves in his hat, ...
— Flint - His Faults, His Friendships and His Fortunes • Maud Wilder Goodwin
... closely, and rapped softly here and there, listening intently for a hollow sound. Standing on a chair, she felt all along the mouldings and window-casings, taking unto herself much dust in the process. She spent half an hour in the stuffy closet, investigating the shelves and recesses, then she got down on her rheumatic old knees and crept laboriously over the carpet, systematically taking it breadth by breadth, and paying special attention to that section of it which was under ...
— At the Sign of the Jack O'Lantern • Myrtle Reed
... as fond of the fly conveyance as of the open carriage; for, in the first place, it was usually very full and stuffy; and, in the second, very little of the country could ...
— Aunt Judy's Tales • Mrs Alfred Gatty
... been concerned in intrigue before, and it did not agree with our simple lives. I could feel myself deteriorating, morally and intellectually. I had a desire to beat the Precious Ones (who were certainly well behaved for children shut up in two stuffy rooms) or better still to set the house afire, and run amuck killing and slaying down four flights of stairs—to do something very terrible in fact—something deadly and horrible and final that would put an end forever to this melancholy haunt of Tuesday ...
— The Van Dwellers - A Strenuous Quest for a Home • Albert Bigelow Paine
... is feeble and dying, will it all grow awful to me? Suddenly—shall I long to creep into some old, old corner of England or Italy—and feel round me close walls, and dim small rooms, and dear, stuffy, familiar streets that thousands and thousands of ...
— Lady Merton, Colonist • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... long been out, but the odour of low-test kerosene still hung about the closed living-room where the same four people sat in council. No effort had as yet been made to put the place to rights, and in consequence it was stuffy and disordered and proportionately depressing. The mound of cigarette stumps which Craig had builded the night before lay unsightly and evil of odour on the table. The faded rag carpet was littered with the tobacco he ...
— Where the Trail Divides • Will Lillibridge
... the dinner-table, she realized, with an excitement which was not disagreeable, that something much more prolonged and serious might lie before her. Accomplished modern, as she knew him to be in most things, he was going to be "stuffy" and "stupid" in some. Lord Donald's proceedings in the matter of Lady Preston evidently seemed to him—she had been made to feel it—frankly abominable. And he was not going to ask the man capable of them within his own ...
— Helena • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... if the "show" would never end. Chagrin and resentment overcame her. What had possessed her to come to this hot, stuffy place with Thomas, instead of reading French in her peaceful, pleasant sitting-room with Austin? Why didn't Austin show more eagerness to be with her, anyway? She liked to be with him—ever and ever so much—didn't see half so much of him as she wanted to. There ...
— The Old Gray Homestead • Frances Parkinson Keyes
... customs of ancient times and those of to-day. Like the modern women of Bagdad and Mosul, the Chaldaean women of old preferred an existence in the open air, in spite of its publicity, to a seclusion within stuffy rooms or narrow courts. The heat of the sun, cold, rain, and illness obliged them at times to seek a refuge within four walls, but as soon as they could conveniently escape from them, they climbed up on to their roof to pass the greater part ...
— History Of Egypt, Chaldaea, Syria, Babylonia, and Assyria, Volume 3 (of 12) • G. Maspero
... chimney it was time for him to move on. So William James was led by instinct from the crowded highways to the dim border-lands of human experience. He preferred to dwell in the debatable lands. With a quizzical smile he listened to the dignitaries of philosophy. He found their completed systems too stuffy. He loved the wildernesses of thought where shy wild things hide—half hopes, half realities. They are not quite true now,—but they may ...
— Humanly Speaking • Samuel McChord Crothers
... was not in his office, so they sat down to wait in the stuffy room where dusty books and papers sprawled and spilled over desk, table and the top of a big black safe. Algernon attached himself to a grimy magazine, having first jotted down Miss Ainsworth's gift in his ever-present note-book. Catherine, looking about her, soon found herself ...
— The Wide Awake Girls in Winsted • Katharine Ellis Barrett
... other things, the things he was made to do. Going out to Manchuria—that began it. He ought never to have been sent there. Then—five years on that abominable paper. Think how he slaved on it. You don't know what it was to him. To have to sit in stuffy theatres and offices; to turn out at night in vile weather; to have to work whether he was fit ...
— The Creators - A Comedy • May Sinclair
... or two on board was regular pandemonium and most uncomfortable for the men. Four officers and 140 other ranks from the second line had joined us at Devonport and we were very overcrowded. Each man had a stuffy and inaccessible bunk and a place at a table in the steerage saloon for meals, which had to be served in three relays owing to the numbers on board. This meant either very perfect time keeping or very ...
— The Fife and Forfar Yeomanry - and 14th (F. & F. Yeo.) Battn. R.H. 1914-1919 • D. D. Ogilvie
... idea was dangerous. It isn't a good thing, if you want to be contented with your lot, to think of rose-gardens in a stuffy city library o' Saturdays; especially when where you were brought up rose-gardens were one of the common necessities of life; and more especially when you are tired almost to the crying-point, and have all the week's big sisters back of it dragging on you, and all its little sisters to come worrying ...
— The Rose Garden Husband • Margaret Widdemer
... what," she sneered. "While you are sitting at home, overeating and oversleeping and getting fat in mind and body, I shall be on the broad highway, walking between hedgerows of flowering—flowering—well, between hedgerows. While you sleep in stuffy, upholstered rooms I shall lie in woodland glades in my sleeping-bag and see overhead the constellation of—of what's its name. I shall talk to the birds and the birds will ...
— More Tish • Mary Roberts Rinehart
... so, you're not standing on one spot like a sailor in a crow's nest, waiting for something to happen; you're in the saddle, riding from point to point all day long, sometimes when there is a trail and sometimes when there isn't, out in the real woods, not in poky, stuffy city streets. You know, Fred, I can't stand the city; I always feel as ...
— The Boy With the U. S. Foresters • Francis Rolt-Wheeler
... little. Remember this trunk must not go in the hold of the ship. Have it marked "Wanted" and "This end up." I will lie with my head this way. I'll put the shears in here, and I can cut another hole from the inside if it gets too stuffy. ...
— The Ghost Breaker - A Melodramatic Farce in Four Acts • Paul Dickey
... see, Dick [he read], I ought to have cut you; but I felt too crazy—everything seems so jolly at home, even this stuffy old London. Of course, I wanted to talk to you badly—there are heaps of things one can't say by letter—but I should have been sorry afterwards. I told mother. She said I was quite right, but I don't think she took it in. Don't you feel that the only thing that really matters is ...
— Forsyte Saga • John Galsworthy
... in which the experiments took place was an isolated one, connected with the laboratory of experimental physiology, and belonged to that part of the university set aside for Bottazzi's exclusive use. Nothing could have been further from the ordinary stuffy back parlor of the 'materializing medium.' No women were present, and no outsider; as you see, conditions were as nearly perfect as the ingenuity of Bottazzi and his assistants ...
— The Shadow World • Hamlin Garland |
