"Unromantic" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... moribund—if, indeed, it has not already passed away; and with it we are losing one of the most ennobling qualities in our nature. We pride ourselves nowadays in living in a 'matter-of-fact' age, by which we mean a practical, unromantic age. But is it a matter for so much pride after all? Granted that the benefits which have accrued to mankind during the past century and a half are worth all the Romance in the world; but is the relegation of Romance to the domain of History a sine ...
— The Book-Hunter at Home • P. B. M. Allan
... of Yankee character began before either of these artists was known; Lowell's Bigelow Papers first reflected it; Mrs. Stowe's Old Town Stories caught it again and again; Mrs. Harriet Prescott Spofford, in her unromantic moods, was of an excellent fidelity to it; and Mrs. Rose Terry Cooke was even truer to the New England of Connecticut. With the later group Mrs. Lily Chase Wyman has pictured Rhode Island work-life with truth pitiless to the beholder, and full of that tender humanity for the ...
— Henry James, Jr. • William Dean Howells
... and his home in 1900 was, in the unromantic procedure of our self-conscious days, of the nature of a triumph. He was formally welcomed by the Lotus Club, and, of course, as delicately as might be, he was praised for his honesty. His reply to compliment was a generous recognition of social virtue, which renders easier such an ...
— Stories of Authors, British and American • Edwin Watts Chubb
... whole of my little world within being canted to half a right angle, and a ridiculous distortion of every single thing in my bedroom was the result. The humiliating sensation of being aground on hard unromantic mud is tempered by the ludicrous crooked appearance of the contents of your cabin and by the absurd sensation of sleeping in a corner with everything askance except the lamp flame, which, because it burns upright, looks most awry of all, and incongruously ...
— The Voyage Alone in the Yawl "Rob Roy" • John MacGregor
... based on medieval ideals gradually lost their worth. They were not in relation to the altered facts of life; they had become an empty convention which could be turned to very unromantic uses. The movement for the emancipation of women was not consciously or directly a movement of revolt against an antiquated chivalry. It was rather a part of the development of civilization which rendered chivalry antique. Medieval romantic love implied in ...
— The Task of Social Hygiene • Havelock Ellis
... voices of the two speakers were hushed, or were replaced by the gentle but unromantic music of the nose; and save when the church bells tolled the hour and the watchman called it, all was silent at the house of John Sedley, Esquire, of Russell Square, ...
— Vanity Fair • William Makepeace Thackeray
... of nature's doing. A Mexican with a knife was solely responsible. Yet, worse than all of these disappointments is the fact that his name was not Gerald Van Alstyne. No, indeed. The Leading Man owned to the plain, homely, unromantic patronymic of Bob McGraw. The only thing romantic and—er—literary about Bob McGraw was his Roman-nosed mustang, Friar Tuck—so called because he had been foaled and raised on a wooded range near ...
— The Long Chance • Peter B. Kyne
... the mannerisms of that time. This very point was brought up recently in conversation with an artist, who in referring to one of the most successful costume balls ever given in New York—the crinoline ball at the old Astor House—spoke of how our unromantic Wall Street men fell to the spell of stocks, ruffled shirts and knickerbockers, and as the evening advanced, were quite themselves in the minuette and polka, bowing low in solemn rigidity, leading their lady with high arched arm, grasping her pinched-in waist, and swinging her beruffled, ...
— Woman as Decoration • Emily Burbank
... the commonplace and (to his mind) unromantic irritated him; but an instinct of good manners, that was not the least of his charm, compelled him to humour her. Once she sat for a whole hour in a dark cellar that smelt of tallow where a couple of men were engaged in making those enormous candles that ...
— The Tragic Bride • Francis Brett Young
... to say, Captain Guy swore a good deal, and became perfectly unheroic and inelegant and unromantic. But his oaths had more effect upon his unruly followers than his protests, and they sat looking at him in a half-sullen, half-shamefaced manner, and would have probably succumbed to his influence had not attention ...
— Stories by English Authors: England • Various
... Frank went out. Jim and Sorry, the two unpicturesque cowboys of whom Lorraine had complained to the cat, had already departed with pick and shovel to their unromantic task of digging post holes. Each carried a most unattractive lunch tied in a flour sack behind the cantle of his saddle. Lorraine had done her conscientious best, but with lumpy, sourdough bread, cold bacon and currant jelly of that kind which is ...
— Sawtooth Ranch • B. M. Bower
... desires. But she seemed unattuned, and coyly refrained from showing her face. He undertook to loiter gracefully, knowing himself to be the target of many eyes, but found it extremely hard to refrain from sitting on the curb, a manifestly unromantic attitude for a love-lorn swain. He swore grimly that, if usage required a suitor to make an exhibition of himself before the entire neighborhood, he would do the job thoroughly. It did not cheer him to reflect ...
— The Ne'er-Do-Well • Rex Beach
... think they will, though?' asked Jacker McKnight dubiously. He had found his parents very unromantic people, who took a severely commonplace view of things, and retained unquestioning faith in the strap as a means ...
— The Gold-Stealers - A Story of Waddy • Edward Dyson
... you wouldn't say this time, Delia. It sounds so unromantic. If you'd only put it into French—cette fois—it sounds so much better. Cette fois. (Parentally.) When one's daughter has just returned from an expensive schooling in ...
— Belinda • A. A. Milne
... thorough-going invention was not suited to Smollett's genius. The result is, that while uninteresting as a novel of contemporary manners, Fathom has an interest of its own in that it reveals a new side of its author. We think of Smollett, generally, as a rambling storyteller, a rational, unromantic man of the world, who fills his pages with his own oddly-metamorphosed acquaintances and experiences. The Smollett of Count Fathom, on the contrary, is rather a forerunner of the romantic school, who has created ...
— The Adventures of Ferdinand Count Fathom, Complete • Tobias Smollett
... not occur for several years after that simple and platonic passion just described: for though they may talk of youth as the season of romance, it has always appeared to me that there are no beings in the world so entirely unromantic and selfish as certain young English gentlemen from the age of fifteen to twenty. The oldest Lovelace about town is scarcely more hard-hearted and scornful than they; they ape all sorts of selfishness and rouerie: they aim ...
— The Fitz-Boodle Papers • William Makepeace Thackeray
... two thumbs in—say anybody else's one thumb. My Samoans said it could not be, there were not enough bones; I put the two pieces of skull together, and at last convinced them. Whereupon, in a flash, they found the not unromantic explanation. This poor brave had succeeded in the height of a Samoan warrior's ambition; he had taken a head, which he was never destined to show to his applauding camp. Wounded himself, he had crept here into the bush ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 25 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... Mission, as when we beached our boats for the first time, riding over the breakers with shouting Kanakas, the three small hide-traders lying at anchor in the offing. But now we are the only vessel, and that an unromantic, sail-less, spar-less, engine-driven hulk! ...
— Two Years Before the Mast • Richard Henry Dana
... being crunched by Mickie, feathers and all. The menu of the Chinese—with its ducks' eggs salted, sharks' fins and tails, stewed pups, fowls' and ducks' tongues, fricasseed cat, rat soup, silkworm grubs, and odds and ends generally despised and rejected—is pitifully unromantic when set against the generous ...
— The Confessions of a Beachcomber • E J Banfield
... prosaic, unromantic mind, Hal. You just like to write newspaper articles, and type letters, and smother ...
— Winding Paths • Gertrude Page
... one more when we see him afterwards in the town, marching along with a flat-footed shambling tread, holding an umbrella in front of him in his clenched fist (as all french priests hold it),—a figure as unromantic-looking as ungraceful. ...
— Normandy Picturesque • Henry Blackburn
... the most commonplace, humdrum, unromantic existence imaginable. Teas and dances, dances and teas, clubs and theatres, theatres and clubs, motors and yachts, yachts and motors. It was horrible, and I can't help thinking it was all my dear old governor's fault. He had no consideration ...
— Officer 666 • Barton W. Currie
... the boy's introduction to war was going to be as unromantic as anyone could want, short of being thrown cold and untrained into a major battle. They must be prepared for a bad time until they made it out of the Union lines and ...
— Ride Proud, Rebel! • Andre Alice Norton
... of the sea beyond the lesser island of the Spotted Horses. And he knew, too, the issue of the disappearance of the moon, the desperate plight into which the sluggish bank of black cloud might plunge a man. As a matter of unromantic fact he desired greatly to decline a passage of Anxious ...
— Harbor Tales Down North - With an Appreciation by Wilfred T. Grenfell, M.D. • Norman Duncan
... even as they are totally unlike those of the Midsummer Night's Dream. Herrick's pieces are extraordinary combinations of the idea of 'King of Shadows', with a reality fantastically sober: the poems are steeped in moonlight. In Drayton all is clear day, or the most unromantic of nights; though everything is charming, there is no attempt at idealization, little of the higher faculty of imagination; but great realism, and much play of fancy. Herrick's verses were written by Cobweb and Moth together, Drayton's by Puck. Granting, however, the ...
— Minor Poems of Michael Drayton • Michael Drayton
... end of the year. John Ball, however, had not altogether lost his time, and had played the part of middle-aged lover better than might have been expected from one the whole tenor of whose life was so thoroughly unromantic. He did manage to make himself pleasant to Miss Mackenzie, and so far ingratiated himself with her that he won much of her confidence in regard to ...
— Miss Mackenzie • Anthony Trollope
... among the antagonists were Spain and England. The ambition of Spain was measureless; she desired not only the mastery of America and its riches, but the empire of the world, the leadership in commerce, and the ownership of the very gates of Heaven. England sought land and trade; she was practical and unromantic, but strong and daring; and in her people, unlike the Spanish, were implanted the seeds of human freedom. She had not as yet the prestige of Spain; but men like Francis Drake and Sir Walter Raleigh went far to win it; moreover, the star of Spain had already begun to ...
— The History of the United States from 1492 to 1910, Volume 1 • Julian Hawthorne
... Oh, you're so horribly unromantic! But, LAVENDER, couldn't we get one of those gondolas and go about. It would be so lovely to be in one again, and fancy ourselves back in dear ...
— Punch, Or The London Charivari, Volume 102, January 30, 1892 • Various
... unromantic as it may sound to say so, was inexpressibly comforting to those weak women and poor little May, all of them having passed a wretched sleepless night, cooped up in the close confined covered-in space ...
— The Pirate Island - A Story of the South Pacific • Harry Collingwood
... of the family may seem unromantic, prosaic, materialistic; but we must not suppose that because of it the Romans failed to experience the tenderest and sweetest affections of the human heart. The letters of Cicero himself show how tenderly even Romans could love wife and children. Although they distrusted and combatted as dangerous ...
— The Women of the Caesars • Guglielmo Ferrero
... rich veins of musical beauty. This source of anxiety may, perhaps, be thought to resemble that of the philosophers of Laputa, who feared lest the sun should be burnt out. It was, however, connected with the best feature in my character, and the only good point to be found in my very unromantic and in no way honourable distress. For though my dejection, honestly looked at, could not be called other than egotistical, produced by the ruin, as I thought, of my fabric of happiness, yet the destiny of mankind in general was ever in my thoughts, and could not be separated from my own. ...
— English Prose - A Series of Related Essays for the Discussion and Practice • Frederick William Roe (edit. and select.)
... think they call it a 'group' or a 'coterie' or something. Setting at Lon's desk she was, toying petulantly with horrid old pens and blotters, and probably bestowing glances of disrelish from time to time round the grimy office where her scrubby little husband toiled his days away in unromantic squalor. ...
— Somewhere in Red Gap • Harry Leon Wilson
... the bright gleam—and there is in this little picture a whole agreeability of colour. His landscapes in general are, however, very strange; rather eccentric than natural in colour, yet preserving the intended atmospheric effect by an idealism of colouring not quite in keeping with the unromantic commonness ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 62, Number 385. November, 1847. • Various
... asked. It seemed to him little short of ludicrous that Judy should buy a new dress because she was going to be married to him; but in the presence of a custom so firmly entrenched behind the traditions of respectability, he knew that protest would be useless. Judy would check out her unromantic person in wedding finery because finery was ...
— The Miller Of Old Church • Ellen Glasgow
... spectre in the following narrative could not be photographed, attempts being usually made in a light which required prolonged exposure. Efforts to touch it were failures, nor did it speak. On the other hand, it did lend itself, perhaps unconsciously, to one scientific experiment. The story is unromantic; the names are ...
— The Book of Dreams and Ghosts • Andrew Lang
... outlived that particular phase of romantic moral reform which he had been taught by Maria White. But in other men and women bred in that old New England of the eighteen-forties, the moral fervor knew no restraint. Garrison, although in many respects a most unromantic personality, was engaged in a task which gave him all the inspiration of romance. A romantic "atmosphere," fully as highly colored as any of the romantic atmospheres that we are accustomed to mark in literature, surrounded as with a luminous mist the figures of the New England transcendentalists. ...
— The American Mind - The E. T. Earl Lectures • Bliss Perry
... the story of the achievements of the New England mariners on all the oceans of the globe. Little danger from tempest was encountered here. The natural perils to navigation were but an ignoble and unromantic kind—the shifting sand-bar and the treacherous snag. Yet, in the early days, when the flatboats were built at Cincinnati or Pittsburg, with high parapets of logs or heavy timber about their sides, and manned not only with men to work the sweeps and ...
— American Merchant Ships and Sailors • Willis J. Abbot
... girl's name and address written on the egg which is relegated to cold storage for twenty years, then to be discovered by a love-lorn man who seeks out the writer, who by this time has at least one unromantic husband and ...
— Writing the Photoplay • J. Berg Esenwein and Arthur Leeds
... this unromantic English sailor had a gleam of Don Quixote in him. On this pleasant summer morning he was waiting alone, under easy sail, outside a hostile port, strongly fortified and full of armed vessels, waiting for an enemy's ship bigger than himself to come out and fight him. He had sent in the previous ...
— Deeds that Won the Empire - Historic Battle Scenes • W. H. Fitchett
... is just the thing for your taste, I would not for worlds disturb you; but if you should ever tear yourself away from the groves and fountains of Allington, we shall be delighted to welcome you here, though you will find us very unromantic ...
— The Small House at Allington • Anthony Trollope
... heard of again; at least, I never found out who she was. It was very funny and very unromantic; but it laid me up for a few weeks, and my arm doesn't grow strong as fast as it should, so I have to be careful of it. No swimming or golf for me, this year. Meanwhile, I am waiting to hear of a buxom damsel who lacks ...
— Phebe, Her Profession - A Sequel to Teddy: Her Book • Anna Chapin Ray
... youth, and had been incapable of loving twice. It never struck them—which was actually the case—that she had been incapable of loving once; and that her single-blessedness was due to no unforgotten love-story, but to the unromantic fact that among her score of lovers she had never found a man for whom she seriously cared. In a delicate and ladylike fashion she had flirted outrageously in her time; but she had always broken hearts so gently, ...
— The Farringdons • Ellen Thorneycroft Fowler
... orchestra in a boulevard theatre, and a music master in several young ladies' boarding-schools, a post for which his face particularly recommended him. He was entirely dependent upon his earnings. Running about to give private lessons at his age! —Think of it. How many a mystery lies in that unromantic situation! ...
— Poor Relations • Honore de Balzac
... discomfited her admirer by sallies which were tipped with wit and reached their mark unerringly.[295] Did she know that just such treatment—strange paradox—won, while it at times wounded, the heart of the unromantic Westerner? ...
— Stephen A. Douglas - A Study in American Politics • Allen Johnson
... American and indulged in a rosy picture of herself as the owner of a mine—a gold mine—coal was too unromantic. She saw herself in a short skirt and a sombrero superintending the exertions of a number of dusky workers who were loading neat little gold bars on the backs of ...
— Across the Mesa • Jarvis Hall
... the plain of Kossovo where old Serbian culture was prostrated before the onrush of the Turk, and whence Serbia has drawn all its legends and heroes; possibly the most unromantic looking spot in all Europe, save only Waterloo. Here, far to the left, was Mahmud's tomb:—Mahmud the great victor, stabbed the day before the battle, and dying as he saw his armies victorious. History contains no keener ...
— The Luck of Thirteen - Wanderings and Flight through Montenegro and Serbia • Jan Gordon
... It was all so unromantic, so unemotional, so utterly different from the scene she had pictured when she imagined what "breaking her engagement" would be like. Then she had always thought of herself as dissolving in tears on the ...
— Life and Gabriella - The Story of a Woman's Courage • Ellen Glasgow
... Caleb Brent's cottage, take Nan Brent in his arms and kiss her, since he had heard Nan Brent's voice apply to the young laird of Port Agnew a term so endearing as to constitute a verbal caress, his practical and unromantic soul had been ...
— Kindred of the Dust • Peter B. Kyne
... laconic productions, of no earthly interest to anyone but the unromantic writers, one formal note soliciting a generous subscription to an hospital fund, two postal cards, one begging his patronage towards the tailoring department of an up-town dry goods store, and the other notifying him of a meeting of prominent citizens to be held in ...
— Honor Edgeworth • Vera
... Unimaginative and unromantic though he was, what visions must sometimes have swept through the brain of that simple farmer as he gazed down upon the broad shining river or beyond at the clustered Maryland hills glorified by the descending sun. Perchance in those visions he saw a youthful envoy ...
— George Washington: Farmer • Paul Leland Haworth
... found the clue to her, but he would not believe that she was so simple as that. In the two days that followed, days of the greatest discomfort, disappointment and disorder, his mind never left her for a moment. His diary for these four days is very short and unromantic. ...
— The Dark Forest • Hugh Walpole
... that night with one of the men who had destroyed the mystery of Mongolia. In 1916, Coltman and his former partner, Oscar Mamen, had driven across the plains to Urga, the historic capital of Mongolia. But most unromantic and incongruous, most disheartening to a dreamer of Oriental dreams, was what I learned a few days later when the awakening had really come—that among the first cars ever to cross the desert was one purchased by the Hutukhtu, the Living Buddha, the God ...
— Across Mongolian Plains - A Naturalist's Account of China's 'Great Northwest' • Roy Chapman Andrews
... League, but as Honorary Secretary he retained control. To assure his position he applied for Royal Letters Patent and legalized his name of Savelli, Finally, he plunged into the affairs of Fish Palaces Limited, and learned the many mysteries connected with that outwardly unromantic undertaking. ...
— The Fortunate Youth • William J. Locke
... such an episode by a strong conviction that it does not usually occur at such times. And I trust that my fairest reader, who remembers that, in a real crisis, it is always some uninteresting stranger or unromantic policeman, and not Adolphus, who rescues, ...
— The Luck of Roaring Camp and Other Tales • Bret Harte
... invitation General Birch Reynardson, of Holywell Park—a visit full of romance, as narrated by Mr. Martin, a beautiful young lady, governess to the General's children, having to all appearances fallen desperately in love with the poet at first sight. The only unromantic incident of the day was the customary dinner at the servants' table. Clare's biographer, with excusable warmth, says that his local patrons, however much they might differ on other subjects, held that the true place of a poet was among footmen and kitchen maids. But it should ...
— Life and Remains of John Clare - "The Northamptonshire Peasant Poet" • J. L. Cherry
... glory of the regiment, the knowledge of which makes the recruit blow his chest out another inch and straightway purchase out of his pay spurs that jingle more musically when he goes abroad than the miserable things served out by an unromantic Government. Other legends there are in this regiment, and once Baden-Powell and his great friend, Captain MacLaren (known to the officers as "The Boy," to the men as "The Little Prince"), set about compiling its history; but for some reason or another ...
— The Story of Baden-Powell - 'The Wolf That Never Sleeps' • Harold Begbie
... mouth of the tunnel. The popular commonplace that science, steam, and travel must always be unromantic and hideous, was not proven at this spot. On either slope of the deep cutting, green with long grass, grew drooping young trees of ash, beech, and other flexible varieties, their foliage almost concealing the actual railway which ran along the bottom, its thin ...
— A Laodicean • Thomas Hardy
... names—what d'ye think? The Pope has sanctioned Railway Bills! And so the lofty Aventine, And your six other famous hills Will soon look down upon a 'Line.' Oh! if so be that hills could turn Their noses up, with gesture antic, Thus would the seven deride and spurn A Roman work so unromantic: 'Was this the ancient ...
— Scientific American magazine Vol 2. No. 3 Oct 10 1846 • Various
... the last scene in the tragic part of my unromantic experience. One of the artful dodgers, having transformed himself into an angel of light (in my hearing, not in my sight), informed me, at about eight o'clock in the evening, that, though my destruction ...
— Continental Monthly, Volume 5, Issue 4 • Various
... of those unfortunate girls who cannot glance over the garden wall without being accused of stealing peaches, or else she had too thoroughly got people's backs up during the first week at sea, for everyone looked cold-eyed at her romance and called it unromantic names. There were continual little undercurrents of gossip going on about her beneath the otherwise pleasant surface of everyday life. April did not talk gossip nor listen to it, but she was vaguely aware of it. Except for this, she would have been the ...
— Blue Aloes - Stories of South Africa • Cynthia Stockley
... roots high above the tide. Between wood and wave lay powdered sandstone of lively yellow, mixed with bright white quartz and debris of pink shells. Upon the classic shores of Greece I should have thought of Poseidon and the Nereids; but the lovely scene was in unromantic Africa, which breeds no ...
— Two Trips to Gorilla Land and the Cataracts of the Congo Volume 1 • Richard F. Burton
... to advance the argument that glasses are unromantic. They are not. I know, because I wear them myself, and I am a singularly romantic figure, whether in my rimless, my Oxford gold-bordered, or the plain gent's spectacles which I wear in the privacy ...
— A Wodehouse Miscellany - Articles & Stories • P. G. Wodehouse
... Coulson declared heartily. "It was a cleverly worked job, but there was no mystery about it. Some chap went for him because he got riding about like a millionaire. A more unromantic figure than Hamilton Fynes never breathed. Call him a crank ...
— The Illustrious Prince • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... was continued round towards her belly, and as unlike the young cunts I had seen as possible. Those seemed to be but little indents. That the delicate ladies of the novels should have such divisions seemed curious, ugly, and unromantic. My sensuous temperament was developing, I saw females in all their poetry and beauty, but suppose that my physical forces had not kept pace with my brain, for I have no recollection of a cock-stand, when thinking about ladies; and fucking never entered ...
— My Secret Life, Volumes I. to III. - 1888 Edition • Anonymous
... regarding himself in an immense mirror that topped the fireplace, and thinking that despite the stylishness of his accoutrement he presented the appearance of a rather tousled and hairy person of unromantic middle-age, when, in the glass, he saw the gilded door open and a woman enter the room. He did not move,—only stared at the image. He knew the woman intimately, profoundly, exhaustively, almost totally. He knew her as one knows the countryside in which one has grown up, where every feature of the ...
— Mr. Prohack • E. Arnold Bennett
... not unromantic feeling, that of wandering about a strange town at midnight, and the effect increases as, leaving the place, I turn down a little by-street—the Rue de Guise—closed at the end by a beautiful ...
— A Day's Tour • Percy Fitzgerald
... melancholy picture of Katrina's condition most satisfyingly complete. But when we sought eagerly for such details, Katrina, with shameless indifference to dramatic possibilities, painted for us an unromantic, matter-of-fact old German, kind to her when he remembered her existence, but submerged in his library and in scientific research. We further learned that they ate five meals a day at Katrina's home, with "coffee" and numerous accompaniments ...
— Many Kingdoms • Elizabeth Jordan
... the parcel was opened. It contained a morocco case, lined with dark blue satin and velvet—an unromantic and prosaic expression of as truly high and noble feeling as ever found a vent in more poetic ways—and on the ...
— Brooke's Daughter - A Novel • Adeline Sergeant
... Pelleas and the Lady of the Lake, and many others. Nor is this lack compensated by the stories of the incestuous (though on neither side consciously incestuous, and on the queen's quite innocent) adventure of Arthur with his sister Margause, of the exceedingly unromantic wooing of Morgane le Fee, and of the warlock-planned intercourse of King Ban ...
— The Flourishing of Romance and the Rise of Allegory - (Periods of European Literature, vol. II) • George Saintsbury
... Uninteresting and unromantic these things may be, but they were most important to us. We were only sorry the supply was not larger. While we never stinted ourselves, or cut the allowance of food, the amount was growing smaller every ...
— Through the Grand Canyon from Wyoming to Mexico • E. L. Kolb
... It was dreadfully unromantic, but Minnie did not fall into a decline. She is alive and well at this moment. Life may be over, and yet we may live functionally through long stagnant years. Life is not a calendar of dates, but of feelings. Minnie will live a calm, chastened life. ...
— The Hunted Outlaw - Donald Morrison, The Canadian Rob Roy • Anonymous
... "Oo-boo-boo" was the parent of all the many species, and that it belongs to the discreetly valorous class that "vites" and flies away, and lives to "vite" another day, he might have achieved renown of a more popular kind than is the reward of the unromantic naturalist who discovers merely ...
— Tropic Days • E. J. Banfield
... matter of cold unromantic fact, and one which very ardent, impossible lovers regard almost in the light of a desecration. As the prosaic side of life has to be faced, it is very necessary that money matters should find a place in the ...
— The Etiquette of Engagement and Marriage • G. R. M. Devereux
... through slowly with a surprised expression upon his face. He remembered. He remembered the thing as a bald discovery, and without a touch of emotion. With all the achromatic clearness, the unromantic ...
— Love and Mr. Lewisham • H. G. Wells
... slopes of his nose. He was not fat but he was exceedingly well fed; his cheeks were pads, and the unroughened hand which lay helpless upon the khaki-colored blanket was slightly puffy. He seemed prosperous, extremely married and unromantic; and altogether unromantic appeared this sleeping-porch, which looked on one sizable elm, two respectable grass-plots, a cement driveway, and a corrugated iron garage. Yet Babbitt was again dreaming of the fairy child, a dream ...
— Babbitt • Sinclair Lewis
... it was not a just criticism of mine. One part of the subject you have certainly omitted. You do not tell us how much there often is of physical disorder in despair. I dare say you will think it a coarse and unromantic mode of looking at things; but I must confess I agree with what Leigh Hunt has said somewhere, that one can walk down distress of ...
— Friends in Council (First Series) • Sir Arthur Helps
... after all, their sentimental relations did undergo an imperceptible development, as subtle as that which led in the first place to their union. This union had its original promptings in a not unromantic chain of circumstances. Of vulgarity or sordidness it had nothing. Had Elodie been free it would never have entered Andrew's head not to marry her, and she would have married him offhand. Lackaday insists on our remembering this vital fact. Sincere affection drew them together. ...
— The Mountebank • William J. Locke
... room with much gnashing of teeth and other stage indications of distress, finally settling down into a chair before the table, on which he would place and replace a packet of letters and a wisp of unromantic-looking hair. Then he would take the little silver pistol from his breast, and, after the usual soliloquy of "To be or not to be," or something equally to the purpose, would point it at his temples just as the landlady came bursting into the room, begging him for all sakes not to "ruin ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume V, Number 29, March, 1860 - A Magazine Of Literature, Art, And Politics • Various
... their courtship, if such it might be termed, ran an uneventful course. I had almost said unromantic. But who shall tell where is fancy bred or wherein romance consists? Whenever Plooie saw the drabbled little worker busy on a doorstep, he would cross over and open the conversation according ...
— From a Bench in Our Square • Samuel Hopkins Adams
... Jay back to Number Eighteen Mabel Place, Brown Borough. Chloris gave an unromantic snort and sat with unnecessary clumsiness upon Jay's toe. So Jay returned, falling suddenly out of the music of the sea into the band-of-hopeful music of distant Boy ...
— This Is the End • Stella Benson
... thing, this medieval palace, standing in stately beauty in the midst of the hideous, ugly uniformity of the most modern, unromantic and materialistic city of ...
— The Root of Evil • Thomas Dixon
... and unromantic as these that Wordsworth filled the canvas of his longest poem. Judged by ordinary standards the Excursion appears an epic without action, and with two heroes, the Pastor and the Wanderer, whose characters ...
— Wordsworth • F. W. H. Myers
... funeral always is, even when the departed one is an ordinary and undistinguished man. How much more when he has taken an honourable part in many a glorious field of battle! And how much more yet, when, as in this case, he has fallen on the field of unromantic duty, done with faithfulness, and ...
— The French Prisoners of Norman Cross - A Tale • Arthur Brown
... He had changed his clothes, and appeared in his accustomed business suit; its neat creases and quiet colour made him again the responsible, unromantic lawyer I had known, and took away the last vestige of dramatic oddity from the situation. It all seemed natural ...
— Margarita's Soul - The Romantic Recollections of a Man of Fifty • Ingraham Lovell
... had resolved itself into an unromantic routine—like extracting the last penny for her wool that was possible, shipping on favorable markets, acquiring advantageous leases, discharging incapable herders and hiring others, eliminating waste and unnecessary expenditures, studying range conditions ...
— The Fighting Shepherdess • Caroline Lockhart
... had started in life with this name, too, but, passing into the possession of an unromantic Yankee at Albany, had been re-christened Eli—a name which he loathed yet perforce retained when Mr. Stewart bought him. He was a drunken, larcenous old rascal, but as sweet-tempered as the day is long, and many's ...
— In the Valley • Harold Frederic
... truth must be told—and every word of this narrative of my life is of the most sacred veracity—my passion for Nora began in a very vulgar and unromantic way. I did not save her life; on the contrary, I once very nearly killed her, as you shall hear. I did not behold her by moonlight playing on the guitar, or rescue her from the hands of ruffians, as Alfonso does Lindamira in the novel; but ...
— Barry Lyndon • William Makepeace Thackeray
... unromantic ending to this experience that, forgetful of the consequences of what he did, he finally became sensible of the irksomeness of his standing position, and sat down, with his back to the rock, that he might enjoy it all without fatigue ...
— Two Boys in Wyoming - A Tale of Adventure (Northwest Series, No. 3) • Edward S. Ellis
... done nothing. I am only an unromantic gentleman, hiding from a romantic lady who is in ...
— An Unsocial Socialist • George Bernard Shaw
... started in the tone of a novel of manners and experience briefly treated, this defect might be lessened and our mystery seem to inhere in life. The tone of the age, its movement, the mingling of races and classes in the dollar hunt, the fiery and not quite unromantic struggle for existence with its changing trades and scenery, and two types in particular, that of the American handy-man of business and that of the Yankee merchant sailor—we agreed to dwell upon at some length, and make the woof to our not very ...
— The Wrecker • Robert Louis Stevenson and Lloyd Osbourne
... uncertain; but whether Madame Hanska, with one of Balzac's novels in her hand, recognised him at once and rushed towards him joyously, or whether, as another story goes, she was at first disenchanted by his unromantic appearance and drew back, matters little.[*] In either case, according to Balzac's letter to his sister written on his return to Paris, they exchanged their first kiss under the shade of a great oak in the Val de Travers, and swore ...
— Honore de Balzac, His Life and Writings • Mary F. Sandars
... money than words. Another opera composer of the time was Reinhard Keiser. He married a woman who, with her wealth and her voice, rescued his operatic ventures from bankruptcy. These make a rather sordid and unromantic group. ...
— The Love Affairs of Great Musicians, Volume 2 • Rupert Hughes
... said, "I myself live in the most primitive condition of society! I pay a tribute for life.... Ah! no, monsieur; it is not to the Camorra that I pay. It is quite unromantic. I think my secretary carries it in his books as a pension to an ...
— The Sleuth of St. James's Square • Melville Davisson Post
... contempt in the dust of the mountain road. And had she not made his humiliation complete by begging Charley's interference between him and his enemy? He would go home and send her back the handkerchief she had given him. But here the unromantic reflection that although he had washed it that very afternoon in the solitude of his own cabin, he could not possibly iron it, but must send it "rough dried," ...
— Frontier Stories • Bret Harte
... monograph upon the subject of the nationality of the Hobo Empire," the 'Windy Duke' broke in, "and therein I shall enlarge upon my theory that the life of a tramp requires more independence and more address than any profession I know. I find that usually those who adopt this unromantic gypsy career are the men who will not drop to the level of the horde below them and who consequently take to the life of the road in protest against the usage of an ill-arranged social state. That, for example, is the condition of my ...
— The Boy With the U.S. Census • Francis Rolt-Wheeler
... guns that were once on its parapets are gone, the garrison is gone, gone far out on the trench lines beyond the hills. The Vauban citadel is now a place where bread is baked, where wounded men are occasionally brought, where live the soldiers and officers whose important but unromantic mission it is to keep the roads through the town open, to police the ashes of the city, to do what remains of the work that once fell to the ...
— They Shall Not Pass • Frank H. Simonds
... long narrative poems on unromantic subjects. Dauber (1912) contains some of his best lines and its story is the most poetic. This poem follows the fortunes of a poor youth who, wishing to be a painter of ships, went to sea to study his mode at first hand. Masefield describes, with much power, the young artist's ambition, his ...
— Halleck's New English Literature • Reuben P. Halleck
... hour we had reached Pitt Street, a quiet little backwater just beside one of the briskest currents of London life. No. 131 was one of a row, all flat-chested, respectable, and most unromantic dwellings. As we drove up we found the railings in front of the house lined by a ...
— The Return of Sherlock Holmes - Magazine Edition • Arthur Conan Doyle
... words "with you" formed themselves in my heart. I know not what folly I might have spoken had not the conversation been interrupted by Gazen, who called out in his unromantic style, ...
— A Trip to Venus • John Munro
... it, too? It would be monstrous—disloyal and unromantic not to. I won't listen to a word more on that score, please. And the rest follows, doesn't it? We are marrying because we love each other and believe we can help each other, and I am sure one of the reasons why we love each other is that we both have enthusiasm ...
— The Law-Breakers and Other Stories • Robert Grant
... could not help owning that such a house in so remote a place might be a great convenience to visitors like herself. She took the matter quietly, however, returning Emily's gay look with one somewhat rueful, and saying, "Ah, dear girl, all very mundane and unromantic, but depend upon it the house has proved a blessing often to poor wanderers in bleak weather over these wild hills; and we ourselves may find it not so unpleasant by and by when Paul has spread our luncheon in the parlor, and we look out of its little ...
— The International Monthly, Volume 3, No. 1, April, 1851 • Various
... you are a sensible young man!" laughed Mrs. Leland; "but it was very unromantic to be so heavy as to break the limb ...
— Elsie's children • Martha Finley
... that so soon? Why, Kit, you unromantic girl, you ought to be thinking of your lover and not your clothes," said Rose, amused yet rather scandalized ...
— Rose in Bloom - A Sequel to "Eight Cousins" • Louisa May Alcott
... unromantic, most of the boys thought, for an Indian without bows and arrows could not be very different from a white man. Still, something wonderful would undoubtedly come ...
— Harper's Young People, October 26, 1880 - An Illustrated Weekly • Various
... some letters, and looked up from one with a twitching face and a curious droop of the eyelids. "Miss Wishart is all right," he said. "My aunt says that she is none the worse, but that Stocks has caught a tremendous cold. An unromantic ending!" ...
— The Half-Hearted • John Buchan
... mustache, and drawing down over his eyes the brim of a rusty plug hat, he thrust fat hands into the pockets of his shabby trousers and lounged against the polished pillar even more energetically than before: if that were possible. An unromantic, apathetic figure, fitting so naturally into his surroundings as to demand no second look even from the most observant; yet one seeming to possess a magnetic attraction for the eyes of the hall-boy of the apartment ...
— The Brass Bowl • Louis Joseph Vance
... mother were persons with nothing whatever remarkable about them. Both had been handsome. My mother was pretty, my father good-looking yet. I loved them both dearly. It had never entered my head to do otherwise than love them, but the love which made the star and the poetry of my quiet and unromantic life was that I bore to Adelaide, my eldest sister. I believed in her devotedly, and accepted her judgment, given in her own peculiar proud, decided way, upon every topic on which she chose to express it. She was one-and-twenty, and I used to think I could lay down ...
— The First Violin - A Novel • Jessie Fothergill
... mean to compliment you, for I spoke but the truth, I shall not accept the penalty. Now," he went on, "unromantic as it may sound, I own that I am hungry, and I am sure that my four followers are also, for we have ridden far and fast, and have not stopped, save to bait our horses and snatch a mouthful while they ate, since daybreak. In truth the news ...
— Won by the Sword - A Story of the Thirty Years' War • G.A. Henty
... many sorrowful friends behind them. Even William, the bell-ringer and purveyor of hot batter-cakes at Mrs. Haley's hotel, walked to the railroad station to see them safely off. General Garwood accompanied them to Atlanta; and though the passenger depot in that pushing city is perhaps the most unromantic spot to be found in the wide world—it is known as the "Car-shed" in Atlantese—it was there that he found courage to inform Miss Eustis that he purposed to visit Boston during the summer in search not only of health, but of happiness; and Miss Eustis admitted, with a reserve both ...
— Free Joe and Other Georgian Sketches • Joel Chandler Harris
... in this town," said Beechy, when Mr. Barrymore slowed down before an imposing glass-fronted hotel with gorgeous ornamentations of iron and a wonderful gateway. "After what we've come from, Lecco does look unromantic and prosaic, though I daresay this hotel is nice and will give us a ...
— My Friend the Chauffeur • C. N. Williamson and A. M. Williamson
... unromantic ending to a most weird story, with every surrounding at hand, every element ready except the actual ghost himself! A happy ending. Stay, now it is over, I almost wish the ending had been less happy and ...
— Through Finland in Carts • Ethel Brilliana Alec-Tweedie
... to feel from a certain knowledge that the devil's clutches were spread immediately behind, to seize and carry him to perdition. His impetuosity, however, was all in vain; not even an echo reverberated through the cold and empty walls, but, on the contrary, every peal was followed by a most unromantic and ...
— Fardorougha, The Miser - The Works of William Carleton, Volume One • William Carleton
... that Malvine had sixty thousand thalers in cash as her dowry, and would inherit double that sum. Her modest, quiet, amiable disposition made him drift into a strong attachment; her appearance was sufficiently womanly and charming, and her steady, practical views on things, utterly unromantic an unenthusiastic, harmonized entirely with his own. It was refreshing for him to hear her chatter about people and things with the calm good sense of a Philistine, especially in a society where the bombastic and exaggerated ...
— The Malady of the Century • Max Nordau
... "It would be dreadfully unromantic to fall in love with a soiled invisible, wouldn't it," said Miss Archer, with an expressive ...
— Wired Love - A Romance of Dots and Dashes • Ella Cheever Thayer
... him in wonder. If ever there was a man who seemed unromantic, it was he, heavy and prosaic and so shy that he was visibly agitated even in bowing ...
— The Plum Tree • David Graham Phillips
... a tough old Sergeant Major, with twenty-seven years' service with our Artillery all over the world, an utterly unromantic person. He and I were bringing back my working party on the 10th of August from Versa to Rubbia in a lorry. The men were singing loudly, and greeted an Italian sentry on Peteano bridge with cheerful cries of "Buona sera, ...
— With British Guns in Italy - A Tribute to Italian Achievement • Hugh Dalton
... one reason among so many, I love this mystic morning light. It has a strange power of revealing the beauty that is hidden from us by the coarser beams of the full day. These worn men and women, grown so foolish looking, so unromantic; these artisans and petty clerks plodding to their monotonous day's work; these dull-eyed women of the people on their way to market to haggle over sous, to argue and contend over paltry handfuls of food. In this magic morning light the disguising body becomes transparent. They have grown beautiful, ...
— Idle Ideas in 1905 • Jerome K. Jerome
... of the little one's diet were useless. Indigestion was unromantic (in the mother's judgment), and "nerves" were highly ...
— The Secret of a Happy Home (1896) • Marion Harland
... it seemed almost impossible that he, Freddie Kirby, native of Kansas, unromantic aviator, should have been the one to discover this relic of an unknown, lost race. Yet the cylinder of gold ...
— Astounding Stories of Super-Science, December 1930 • Various
... my strictest of vegetarian friends should permit us to bow in the House of Rimmon. One day while crossing a bay I noticed some seals popping up their heads out of the water beyond the ice edge. I had a fine leading dog bearing the unromantic name of Podge, and pure white in colour. But he was an excellent water dog, trained not only to go for birds, but to dive under water for sunken seals. Owing to their increasing fat in winter, seals as a rule float, though they invariably sink in summer. On this particular ...
— A Labrador Doctor - The Autobiography of Wilfred Thomason Grenfell • Wilfred Thomason Grenfell
... bookseller's, a friendly schoolmaster took up a new volume of Mr. Swinburne's and told me that it was by the new great poet. How wonderful that little incident made the world for me! Real poets actually existing in this unromantic to-day! If you had told me of a mermaid, or a wood-nymph, or of the philosopher's stone as apprehensible wonders, I should not have marvelled more. While a single poet existed in the land, who could say that the kingdom of Romance was all let out in building lots, or that the steam whistle ...
— Prose Fancies • Richard Le Gallienne
... the strain of the unhealthy excitement. Every "haunted" house in St. Petersburg and the neighboring villages was dissected, plank by plank, and its foundations dug up and ransacked for hidden treasure—and not by boys, but men—pretty grave, unromantic men, too, some of them. Wherever Tom and Huck appeared they were courted, admired, stared at. The boys were not able to remember that their remarks had possessed weight before; but now their sayings ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... with the poetical associations of our excursion: a gentle mist hung like a veil over hills and groves, giving a dreamy aspect to Nature, and rendering the places we intended to visit creations of fancy rather than actual facts. Very unromantic personages, however, answered our inquiries for Annesley, which reassured us of its reality. Byron's "Dream" had rendered the scenery familiar to ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 13, No. 76, February, 1864 • Various
... the convent where she had been educated, all proper views, negative and positive, on the subject of marriage; nor must we give to a girl who was probably still too much of a child, too much of an unromantic little woman of the world, undeserved pity on account of degradation which she had most probably, as yet, not sufficient moral nerve to appreciate. Her husband was old, he was ugly, he was not attractive; he may have been tiresome and rather loathsome ...
— The Countess of Albany • Violet Paget (AKA Vernon Lee)
... houri peeping over the balustrades of the caravanserai, (called by vulgar men the Bricklayers' Arms)—no Saices to help John Hostler to change horses; but dulness, uniformity, and most tiresome and unromantic safety. England, we are sorry to confess it, is not the land of stirring adventures or hair-breadth 'scapes—a railway coach occasionally blows up; a blind leader occasionally bolts into a ditch; a wheel comes occasionally into dangerous collision ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, No. CCCXXXVI. October, 1843. Vol. LIV. • Various
... season there were three happy people, at least, in this war-wilderness of suffering. The newly wedded pair went off for a honeymoon, whose promise of indefinite length was eventually cut short by an unromantic War Office. Oliver returned to his regiment in France and Peggy to the Deanery, where she sat among her wedding presents and ...
— The Rough Road • William John Locke
... house, and that the convenience of its site enabled one on quitting it, to escape at once, and privately, either to the solitary beach, or to the glades and groves of the wide park which stretched behind,—I could not help indulging the belief that the unceremonious and not unromantic noble had himself selected his place of retirement, and that, in so doing, the gallant of a stately court was not perhaps undesirous of securing at well-chosen moments a brief relaxation from the heavy honours of country homage; or that the patron ...
— Devereux, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... as my deliberate opinion, that there is nothing more dangerous than for a man almost to forget a lady who has shown him favor. If he can quite forget her—and will be so unromantic—why, let him, and perhaps small harm done. But almost—That leaves him at the mercy of every generous self-reproach. He is ready to do anything to prove that she was every second ...
— The Indiscretion of the Duchess • Anthony Hope
... arranged everything so that he could place his hands readily upon it, found that he had half an hour to spare. He said to himself: "Miss Ludolph is wrong. I shall leave the house for a short time. I am a most unromantic individual; for, no matter what or how I feel, I do get hungry. But I am sure Miss Brown's coffee and sandwiches would choke me. I have already swallowed too much from her to care for any more, ...
— Barriers Burned Away • E. P. Roe
... leper becomes a rich Pharisee; the woman becomes a Dame aux Camellias; and nothing is said about money and the poor. The woman washes the feet of Jesus with her tears and dries them with her hair; and he is reproached for suffering a sinful woman to touch him. It is almost an adaptation of the unromantic Matthew to the Parisian stage. There is a distinct attempt to increase the feminine interest all through. The slight lead given by Mark is taken up and developed. More is said about Jesus's mother and her feelings. Christ's following of women, just mentioned by Mark to account for their ...
— Preface to Androcles and the Lion - On the Prospects of Christianity • George Bernard Shaw
... kinds, and hundreds of singing birds were let free, thus giving the appearance of a forest glade in summer-time. There is no evidence that this crypt was appropriated to any special use in former times, but to-day it serves the useful, if unromantic, purpose of a kitchen for preparing the mayoralty banquet on the historic ...
— Memorials of Old London - Volume I • Various
... know him and I don't, but that's how it strikes a stranger." He turned on his heel and paced the veranda thoughtfully. "And, after all, the burden of the actual, daily unromantic toil falls on the shoulders of the men out here, and not on his own. He enjoys all the privileges of recommendation without responsibility, and we—well, perhaps, when you've seen a little more of India you'll understand. To begin with, our death rate's five times higher ...
— The Works of Rudyard Kipling One Volume Edition • Rudyard Kipling
... Unromantic enough, but beyond all conception wonderful. I stood at the east end of Bourke Street, not a year ago, looking at the black swarming masses, which thronged the broad thoroughfare below. All the town lay at my feet, and the sun was going down beyond the distant ...
— The Recollections of Geoffrey Hamlyn • Henry Kingsley
... and then—the young damsels having eaten with the most unromantic heartiness—the whole school scattered: some to walk toward "town;" others to stroll by the brook, at the foot of the hill; others ...
— The Last of the Foresters • John Esten Cooke
... a small cut and force it to bleed enough to look like a bullet wound—which doesn't usually bleed much, anyway. Slow down heartbeat and respiration till their ordinary senses couldn't detect them. Near-total muscular relaxation, including even those unromantic aspects of death which are so rarely mentioned. ...
— The Sensitive Man • Poul William Anderson
... and it is unnecessary to mention the sex, had given a sigh, and regretted that nineteenth century life was so prosaic and unromantic. Clearing his throat, quite as much to pre-empt the pause as to articulate the better, ...
— The Honorable Peter Stirling and What People Thought of Him • Paul Leicester Ford
... cloths. And oh, the lovely articles! Everything it seemed that fingers could make, useful or ornamental, from handsomely dressed dolls to pincushions, from white aprons with lace and ribbon bows on the dainty pockets down to unromantic holders. Everybody laughed and chatted and were as ...
— A Little Girl in Old New York • Amanda Millie Douglas
... was her photograph that you kindly brought for my guidance. I ought to have mentioned, perhaps, that I once had the honour of being engaged to her—until you (no doubt from the highest motives) invested my little gift of song with a flavour of unromantic ridicule. That ridicule I am now enabled to repay, with interest calculated ...
— The Talking Horse - And Other Tales • F. Anstey
... dropped down on me, as it were, from heaven! I hadn't the slightest idea of such luck—and hadn't any pretensions to it. But the girl has taken a liking to me, and her mother wants to get her married. It's ugly—unromantic—but there are the facts. If you cared for me really, I shouldn't think you would want ...
— The Limit • Ada Leverson
... a motherly embrace, the old lady bustled away to stir up her maid and wakt John from his first nap with the smell of coffee. a most unromantic but satisfying perfume to all the weary watchers in ...
— A Garland for Girls • Louisa May Alcott
... or something, makes a fellow mighty unromantic, too. Perhaps it was the thin blue wood-smoke from the field-stoves, and the smell of the hot coffee and the victuals the waiters are carrying about, some to the tent where the bare tables are for the canvasmen, ...
— Back Home • Eugene Wood
... when she happened to cast her eyes to the far-off meadows beneath. Her head grew suddenly giddy, and she could not divest herself of the idea, that one false step would send her to the plains below. Here was a most ridiculous and unromantic position: she neither dared to advance nor retreat; and she stood grasping a ledge of the rocky wall in an agony of cowardice and irresolution. At this critical moment, the mother of the run-away child returned panting from the higher ledge ...
— Flora Lyndsay - or, Passages in an Eventful Life • Susan Moodie
... woman the colonial marriage, with its fixed rules of courtship, the permission to court, the signed contract and the dowry, seems decidedly commonplace and unromantic; but, after all, this is not a true conclusion. The colonists loved as ardently as ever men and women have, and they found as much joy, and doubtless of as lasting a kind, in the union, as we moderns find. Many bits of proof might be cited. Hear, for instance, ...
— Woman's Life in Colonial Days • Carl Holliday
... "Fairyland," as the islet had been named by Ailie—a name that was highly, though laughingly, approved of by the men. The ocean and sky presented that mysterious co-mingling of their gorgeous elements that irresistibly call forth the wonder and admiration of even the most unromantic and matter-of-fact men. It was one of Ailie's peculiarly beloved skies. You could not, without much consideration, have decided as to where was the exact line at which the glassy ocean met the clear sky, and it was almost impossible to tell, ...
— The Red Eric • R.M. Ballantyne
... perfectly quiet and everyday kind of vanity, but vain from centre to circumference and entire surface. He (one cannot exactly say "tries," but) is brought into the possibility of trying love of various kinds—illegitimate-romantic, legitimate-not-unromantic, illegitimate-professional but not disagreeable, illegitimate-conventional. Nothing ever "comes off" in a really satisfactory fashion. He is "exposed" (in the photographic-plate sense) to all, or nearly all, the influences of a young man's life in ...
— A History of the French Novel, Vol. 2 - To the Close of the 19th Century • George Saintsbury |
