"Trimness" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... themselves, and a very pleasant suburb too. Many middle-class families in England might be glad to own such a home, a semi-detached cottage or villa standing in a pretty garden with flowers and trees and plots of turf. Some of the cottages are models of trimness and taste, others of course are less well kept, a few have a neglected appearance. The general aspect, however, is one of thrift and prosperity, and it must be borne in mind that each dwelling and plot of ground are the ...
— In the Heart of the Vosges - And Other Sketches by a "Devious Traveller" • Matilda Betham-Edwards
... had aged but little. He had worn just such a mustache when he went away. Perhaps his eyes were changed: for the moment she thought that they were, and the change repelled her and estranged her. His mouth was not quite right, either; his form, though powerful, had lost some of its youthful trimness. ...
— The Snowshoe Trail • Edison Marshall
... you descend, the gardens, village, and river near below. There is a peculiar charm in these steep woods, where the tops of some trees are level with the eye, while the branches of others are overhead. As the paths go down the slope they lose their garden-like trimness among bracken and brambles. An oak fence separates the grounds of Pembroke Lodge from the ...
— Lady John Russell • Desmond MacCarthy and Agatha Russell
... theory has all the completeness of the thought of the middle ages, which had a complete answer to everything, be it in heaven or in hell or in nature. There is a trimness about it, with its instantaneous present, its vanished past, its non-existent future, and its inert matter. This trimness is very medieval and ...
— The Concept of Nature - The Tarner Lectures Delivered in Trinity College, November 1919 • Alfred North Whitehead
... better to be rich in a big way. Sometimes the very bigness and richness oppressed him. He found himself burdened by the splendor of the mansions at which he made his morning calls. He hated the sleekness of the men in livery who preceded him up the stairs, the trimness of the maids waiting on the threshold of hushed boudoirs. Disease and death in these sumptuous palaces seemed divorced from reality as if the palaces were stage structures, and the people in them were actors who would presently walk out into ...
— Mistress Anne • Temple Bailey
... of the famous Roman villas which commands a splendid view of the city, Mr. Henry Vincent, a young American, was lounging. Judging by his appearance he was a college graduate, or, to speak more definitely, a graduate of Harvard; for he had that jaunty walk and general trimness of attire which are the traditional attributes of the academical denizens of Cambridge. He swung his arms rather more than was needed to assist locomotion, and betrayed in an unobtrusive manner a consciousness of being well dressed. His face, which was not without fine ...
— Ilka on the Hill-Top and Other Stories • Hjalmar Hjorth Boyesen
... out, from hat to boot in the most approved Oxford bandbox-cut of trimness and prettiness. Sheffield was turning into the High Street, when Reding stopped him: "It always annoys me," he said, "to go down High Street in a beaver; one is sure to meet ...
— Loss and Gain - The Story of a Convert • John Henry Newman
... behold an extensive common irregularly decorated with prickly gorse or fern and thistle, but surely no man of taste would admire nature in this wild and dishevelled state in a little suburban garden. Symmetry, elegance and beauty, (—no sublimity or grandeur—) trimness, snugness, privacy, cleanliness, comfort, and convenience—the results of a happy conjunction of art and nature—are all that we can aim at within a limited extent of ground. In a small parterre we ...
— Flowers and Flower-Gardens • David Lester Richardson
... to the rich green bosses that grow in deep velvet? And there again is another matter not clear to me. One calls them 'velvet' because they are all brought to an even surface at the top. Our own velvet is reduced to such trimness by cutting. But how is the moss trimmed? By what scissors? Carefullest Elizabethan gardener never shaped his yew hedge more daintily than the moss fairies smooth these soft rounded surfaces of green and gold. And just fancy the difference, if they were ragged! If the fibres ...
— Proserpina, Volume 1 - Studies Of Wayside Flowers • John Ruskin
... the meaning of the whole design. The avenue had no object but to lead to it, the little lawn no purpose but to receive it. Doubly strange, therefore, did it seem that these should be kept up in all their trimness, that suffered ...
— Graham's Magazine Vol XXXII No. 1 January 1848 • Various
... be ashamed about—but how did he know? He was still on the porch this morning. Equally real was the catbird on the hedge as we came down toward the station. She—we call her so, for there was unmistakable ladyhood in her delicately tailored trimness—she bickered at us in a cheerful way, on top of those bushes which were so loaded with the night's rainfall that they shone a blurred cobweb gray in the lifting light. Her eye was also dark and polished and lucid, like a bead of ink. It also had the same ...
— Pipefuls • Christopher Morley
... attention to the point of land jutting into the water on the north side not inaptly called the toe of Therapia, and a boat, turning the point, bore down with speed toward the sail-covered stand. There were four rowers in it; yet its glossy sides and air of trimness were significant of a seventh competitor for some reason behind time. The black flag at the prow and the black uniform of the oarsmen confirmed the idea. The hand of the Princess was on the signal rope; ...
— The Prince of India - Or - Why Constantinople Fell - Volume 2 • Lew. Wallace
... her way toward it through the evening rain and mist. It was a pretty place, with a quaint picturesqueness. A hedge, which was a marvel of trimness, surrounded the garden, ivy clung to the walls and gables, and fancifully clipped box and other evergreens made a modest greenery about it, winter though it was. At her first glance at this garden Joan felt something ...
— That Lass O' Lowrie's - 1877 • Frances Hodgson Burnett
... was one of those rare young women whose appearance is not to be described. One can, of course, put it down that she was tall; beautifully tall, with the trimness of a young pine, deep bosomed, with limbs full-rounded, fairly tingling with the life and strength of perfect womanhood; and it may be said that her face was a face to go with one through the years, and ...
— The Shepherd of the Hills • Harold Bell Wright
... further listen to that ailment described in its symptoms by a grinning, bearded giant of the woods was a bit past the comprehension of the injured man. He had half expected the girl to say "them" and "that there", though the trimness of her dress, the smoothness of her small, well-shod feet, the air of refinement which spoke even before her lips had uttered a word should have told him differently. As for the giant, Ba'tiste, ...
— The White Desert • Courtney Ryley Cooper
... that they had been cut for no other legs, his coat set to his shoulders with gentlemanly ease. Only his rather greasy sombrero, with its weighty leather band, and the bulging revolvers under his coat seemed out of place in the general trimness ...
— The Rustler of Wind River • G. W. Ogden
... that was not pale but yellow. This complexion seemed to bespeak an irritable temper and violent passions. His hair, already silvered, and carefully dressed, seemed to furrow his head with streaks of black and white alternately. The trimness of this head spoiled the resemblance I had remarked in the Count to the wonderful monk described by Lewis after Schedoni in the Confessional of the Black Penitents (The Italian), a superior creation, as it seems ...
— Honorine • Honore de Balzac
... majestic figure, puts the ring on the Virgin's finger. Some of it was hard and formal enough; the flowers on Joseph's rod might have been made of china; the slim figure of the disappointed suitor, breaking his staff, had an unpleasing trimness; and the companions of the Virgin were models of feeble serenity. But the great new octagonal temple in the background,—an empty place it seemed—for the open doors gave a glimpse of shadowy ranges—the shallow steps, the stone volutes, the low hills behind, with ...
— Beside Still Waters • Arthur Christopher Benson
... sithence talk a little. And he drew nigh to help her off her horse, but she suffered him not, and lighted down of herself; but if she suffered not his hand, his eyes she must needs suffer, as he gazed greedily on the trimness of her feet and legs in her sliding from ...
— The Water of the Wondrous Isles • William Morris |
