"Elusive" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... club. One night, as Helen was chatting of a young an from Boston who had teased her by following her around until every one was calling him "Helen's little lamb," Mary gradually became aware of an elusive scent in ...
— Mary Minds Her Business • George Weston
... long. He was squatting in the moss, a bone in his mouth, sucking at the shreds of life that still dyed it faintly pink. The sweet meaty taste, thin and elusive almost as a memory, maddened him. He closed his jaws on the bones and crunched. Sometimes it was the bone that broke, sometimes his teeth. Then he crushed the bones between rocks, pounded them to a pulp, and swallowed ...
— Love of Life - and Other Stories • Jack London
... Automation, University of California, opened his talk with the general observation that networked information constituted a difficult and elusive topic because it is something just starting to develop and not yet fully understood. LYNCH contended that creating genuinely networked information was different from using networks as an access or dissemination vehicle and was more sophisticated and more subtle. He invited ...
— LOC WORKSHOP ON ELECTRONIC TEXTS • James Daly
... white bed, in a low ceilinged room, white painted. There were other beds, vacant. A uniformed male nurse puttered around. There was an elusive green tinge to the light that poured in through ...
— Astounding Stories, May, 1931 • Various
... last day! That was ominous. It sounded like monomania. So ghostly and elusive! I began to suspect my American ally of being a ...
— Miss Cayley's Adventures • Grant Allen
... Joan floated after the elusive ball. Sylvia watched her with a light breaking over her ...
— The Shield of Silence • Harriet T. Comstock
... he is increasing at a much greater rate than the European. Hence you have an inevitable conflict. Race lies at the root of the South African trouble and the racial reconciliation that Rhodes and Botha set their hopes upon remains an elusive quantity. ...
— An African Adventure • Isaac F. Marcosson
... people were at least shaped and coloured into dainty imitation of existing facts. So far as he helped on the substitution, he was a benefactor to all mankind. And yet, it would have been good to bare his hands and arms, and with them grasp and wrestle with the naked facts, elusive facts, despite their ruggedness. Nevertheless, he bravely smothered his desires. He even, and to himself, professed to ignore the way they multiplied, after an afternoon in the society of Professor Opdyke. However, ignore ...
— The Brentons • Anna Chapin Ray
... writer who will take him off my hands—you, for instance. You can have Bonetti for a Christmas present, with my compliments. I'm through with him; but as for Miss Andrews, she has been so confoundedly elusive that she has aroused my deepest interest, and I couldn't give her up if I wanted to. I never encountered a heroine like her in all my life before, and the one object of my future career will be to catch her finally in the meshes of a romance. Romance will come into her life some ...
— A Rebellious Heroine • John Kendrick Bangs
... youth! whose tongue affords Such railing eloquence, and war of words. Studious thy country's worthies to defame, Thy erring voice displays thy mother's shame. Elusive of the bridal day, she gives Fond hopes to all, and all with hopes deceives. Did not the sun, through heaven's wide azure roll'd, For three long years the royal fraud behold? While she, laborious in delusion, spread The ...
— The Odyssey of Homer • Homer, translated by Alexander Pope
... I am carrying you off in the most bare-faced fashion," she began, motioning him to a seat by her side, "but really you are such an elusive person, and only this morning, in the midst of that awful thunder of bombs, when we stood on the roof and looked at London breaking out into flames, I couldn't help thinking—remembering, I mean—how short a time it is since you and I were face to face with the other horror and you ...
— The Kingdom of the Blind • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... keep them out. Others, however, would give infinite trouble. Fancy Noah occupied in a wild-goose chase, or selecting specimens from a wasps' or hornets' nest, or giving assiduous chase to a vigilant and elusive ...
— Bible Romances - First Series • George W. Foote
... kind, waiting all along the stream, just as there always are when a man is young and fairly good to look upon. And there were the different, and far more dangerous, "other women," who wait at the whirlpools for a man who has that elusive but distinctly felt magnetism which some personalities exert, seemingly with indifference, and quite apart from any effort or intent. But John Derby lashed his heart to the mast of hard work and resolutely turned his eyes and ears from the sirens. And so he saw the years stretching on, always ...
— The Title Market • Emily Post
... our luck, the real grind of the whaleman's life was taking hold of us now. It was work—hard, bone labor—if we "had luck," and it was likewise work if we missed and rowed hour after hour after an elusive sperm or, at the end of the day, had to row empty ...
— Swept Out to Sea - Clint Webb Among the Whalers • W. Bertram Foster
... other hand the tentative, hesitating, ambiguous hypotheses of Physical Science, transforming themselves afresh with every new discovery, seem, when the portentous mystery of Life's real secret confronts us, to be equally remote and elusive. ...
— The Complex Vision • John Cowper Powys
... for, and all the thousands of objects and subjects have dropped into their places in the exhibition with the precision of machinery, little adapted as some of them are to such treatment. Very impalpable and elusive things had to submit themselves to inspection and analysis, and have their elements tabulated like a tax bill or a grocery account. All human concerns were called on to be listed on the muster-roll and stand shoulder to shoulder on ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science - Vol. XVII, No. 102. June, 1876. • Various
... strongest arm; My charwoman is full of charm; I chose her, not for strength of arm But for her strange, elusive charm. ...
— More Toasts • Marion Dix Mosher
... never before been called a Rube—to his face, at least. The audacity took his breath; and when he opened his mouth for scathing speech, Pink was not there. He had slipped away, like a slim, elusive shadow, and the sheriff did not even know the exact direction of his going. There was nothing for it ...
— Rowdy of the Cross L • B.M. Sinclair, AKA B.M. Bower
... sixty-eight roads to heaven, of which but one is the true way, although here and there a by-path offers experimental variety to the restless and bold. The true way for the man in the woods to attain the elusive best of his wilderness experience is to go as light as possible, and the by-paths of departure from that principle lead only to the slightly increased carrying possibilities of open-water ...
— The Forest • Stewart Edward White
... Midsummer Night's Dream: in which the artistic prominence was given to Oberon and Titania, or in other words to Bruno and herself. Set in dreamy and exquisite scenery, and moving in mystical dances, the green costume, like burnished beetle-wings, expressed all the elusive individuality of an elfin queen. But when personally confronted in what was still broad daylight, a man looked ...
— The Wisdom of Father Brown • G. K. Chesterton
... that Mr. Croyden had no more to say about the elusive Bernard, for he came to an ...
— The Story of Porcelain • Sara Ware Bassett
... emphasize the thrill of excited bewilderment they felt, a gorgeous brimstone butterfly sailed carelessly past before their eyes and vanished among the pools of sunlight by the forest edge. Its presence added somehow to the elusive and difficult nature of their search. Its flamboyant beauty was ...
— The Extra Day • Algernon Blackwood
... cannot drag people into the wilds and then bore them to death," she said. What she most enjoyed was to scintillate to a company of two or three, and fascinate them all into a desire for a tete-a-tete, and then, when with difficulty one had secured this privilege, to be elusive and tantalize him to death. To passion she was a complete stranger, and won all her games because with her great beauty she was ...
— Halcyone • Elinor Glyn
... and comity had no interest for him whatever. The valley breeze, the glory of the blue Virginia sky, the far-stretching lines of hills that caught and led the eye like sea billows; the dark green of shrubbery, the slope of upland meadows, and that elusive, vanishing gleam of white,—before such things as these the splendor of empire and the might of armies were unworthy of ...
— The Port of Missing Men • Meredith Nicholson
... Law of Nature so often made in the history of ethical speculation has furnished but a vague and elusive norm. He who makes it is apt to fall back upon the moral intuitions with which he is furnished, and to pack a greater or less number of them into his notion of Natural Law. [Footnote: See SIR HENRY ...
— A Handbook of Ethical Theory • George Stuart Fullerton
... away from the butt of his .45. It came away faster than it had gone for it. Guns had appeared suddenly in the Texan's two hands. His draw had been so swift that nobody had caught the elusive movement. ...
— Kid Wolf of Texas - A Western Story • Ward M. Stevens
... about him, stiff with cold, he noticed that a half-moon had sailed up above the peaks. Its elusive light lay upon the slope, but ledge and stone seemed less distinct than their shadows, which were black as ebony. After that he commenced a struggle with himself, for, numbed as he was, he did not want to move, which is one of the ...
— The Gold Trail • Harold Bindloss
... somewhere. She was one of those beings whose rich magnetism of face and personality brings them close to you, not only for the present, but also for the past, one of those people who are apt to make you feel that you have known them before, forever, a feeling that flowers into elusive fragrances, suggestions, reminiscences, flown on the first stir of a ...
— Sally of Missouri • R. E. Young
... Lakes, Basque and other foreign shepherds may be found tending their flocks, and prospectors, with queer little pack-burros, who climb the mountains seeking the elusive gold, as they did in the ...
— The Lake of the Sky • George Wharton James
... perhaps, is his exquisite artistry (in which he learned much from Keats). His appreciation for sensuous beauty, especially color, is acute; his command of poetic phraseology is unsurpassed; he suggests shades of, feeling and elusive aspiration with, marvelously subtile power; his descriptions are magnificently beautiful, often with much detail; and his melody is often the perfection of sweetness. Add the truth and tenderness of his emotion, and it results that he is one of the finest and most moving ...
— A History of English Literature • Robert Huntington Fletcher
... shall find.' We hunt after all other good, and at the best we get it in part or for a time, and when possessed, it is not as bright as when it shone in the delusive colours of hope and desire. If you follow other good, and are drawn after the elusive lights that dance before you, and only show how great is the darkness, you will not reach them, but will be mired in the bog. If you follow after God's face, it will make a sunshine in the shadiest places of life here. ...
— Expositions Of Holy Scripture - Volume I: St. Luke, Chaps. I to XII • Alexander Maclaren
... early as September, in the year of 1870, the newly emancipated had awakened to the perception of the commercial advantages of freedom, and had begun to lay snares to catch the fleet and elusive dollar. Those controversialists who say that the Negro's only idea of freedom was to live without work are either wrong, malicious, or they did not know Little Africa when the boom was on; when every little African, fresh from ...
— The heart of happy hollow - A collection of stories • Paul Laurence Dunbar
... the boy's schoolbook and was looking at the writing on the flyleaf again. Then he raised his head, eyes narrowing on the boy as though searching for some elusive memory connected with him—with his name in the Latin book—perhaps with the writing, which, somehow, had stirred in him, once more, the same odd and uncomfortable sensation which he had experienced when he first ...
— Blue-Bird Weather • Robert W. Chambers
... quite beyond our power to ascertain or even to guess; but if—to say it once more—the action of matter on matter, the "how" of chemical combinations, eludes us, shall we complain because the action of mind on mind, spirit on spirit, is no {216} less elusive? The final test—whether, e.g., a mother's prayer that her absent son may be preserved from the snare of some great temptation, is able to work a change in his mind—is, as we said above, the test of experience; ...
— Problems of Immanence - Studies Critical and Constructive • J. Warschauer
... which seemed to wax and wane, to quiver almost to darkness and then to burn more clearly. It was like a dreamer's pulse, fluttering, pausing, leaping, in accord with his vision. And as I gazed at the sphere, I fancied I could see within it strange, elusive shapes, which changed and merged and faded from moment to moment, and yet grew always clearer and more suggestive. I bent forward, straining my eyes to see them better, to ...
— The Gloved Hand • Burton E. Stevenson
... logs where the daubing had fallen out; the moon glittered in its great yellow eyes. A frog was leaping along the open space about the rude step at Augusta's feet. A clump of mullein leaves, silvered by the light, spangled by the dew, hid him presently. What an elusive glistening gauze hung over the valley far below, where the sense of distance was limited by the sense of sight!—for it was here only that the night, though so brilliant, must attest the incomparable lucidity of daylight. She could not even distinguish, amidst those soft sheens of ...
— The Riddle Of The Rocks - 1895 • Charles Egbert Craddock (AKA Mary Noailles Murfree)
... hothouse of missionary effort. No one familiar with the school would have found the record complete without the stressing of this element at once its motive and its life. Few could have so well defined that elusive but forceful ...
— The Journal of Negro History, Volume 3, 1918 • Various
... completely under Government control. If the State can monopolize the manufacture and sale of spirits, as Russia has done, if it can, after the manner of Great Britain, control the making and sale of such a small, elusive substance as saccharin, it is ridiculous to suppose that it cannot keep itself fully informed of the existence of such elaborated machinery as is needed to make a modern rifle barrel. And it demands a very minimum of alertness, good faith, and good intentions for the various ...
— New York Times Current History: The European War, Vol 2, No. 1, April, 1915 - April-September, 1915 • Various
... same peculiar distinction which had first attracted me, was as yet wholly immature. But in the face itself there were signs of a coming change. Wherein it might lie I could not tell, but it was there, an intangible and wholly elusive thing. I think that a certain fear of it and what it might mean oppressed me with the sense of coming trouble. I was more fully conscious then than ever before of the moral responsibility of our ...
— The Master Mummer • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... friend and accomplice of Sixteen-String Jack, once the most famous woman in England, and still after a weary stretch at Botany Bay the strangest of companions, the most buxom of spinsters. Her beauty was elusive even in her triumphant youth, and middle-age had neither softened her traits nor refined her expression. Her auburn hair, once the glory of Covent Garden, was fading to a withered grey; she was never tall enough to endure an encroaching stoutness with equanimity; her dumpy figure made you ...
— A Book of Scoundrels • Charles Whibley
... practical duty of biography, and this is also the most difficult. It is a great deal easier to hunt a family from tombstone to tombstone back to the time of Henry II. than to catch and realise and put upon paper that most nameless and elusive of ...
— Robert Browning • G. K. Chesterton
... of Genoa, and as the gold and purple of autumn suits the grand antiquity of Rome. The beauty of Venice, like the spring, touches the soul and moves it to desire; it frets and tortures the inexperienced heart like the promise of a coming bliss, mysterious but not elusive. Everything in it is bright, and everything is wrapt in a drowsy, tangible mist, as it were, of the hush of love; everything in it is so silent, and everything in it is kindly; everything in it is feminine, from its name upwards. It has well been given the name of 'the fair city.' ...
— On the Eve • Ivan Turgenev
... must seek it, says Mr. Parker, in the "Absolute Religion" which animates every form of religion, and is equally found in all. I know the chatters about this incessantly; but when I attempt thus to "hunt the one in the many," as Plato would call it.—to seek the elusive unity in the infinite multiform,—to discover what it is which equally embalms all forms, from the Christianity of Paul to the religion of the "grim Calmuck," I acknowledge myself as much at loss as Martinus in endeavoring to catch the abstraction of a Lord Mayor; Mr. Parker, on the other ...
— The Eclipse of Faith - Or, A Visit To A Religious Sceptic • Henry Rogers
... four of us hunted for that elusive but useful article. Miss Harding found it in a tuft of grass, and I stood and stupidly watched her while she put it in place, adjusted the collar and tied ...
— John Henry Smith - A Humorous Romance of Outdoor Life • Frederick Upham Adams
... again changed, and with a mischievous, elusive smile she bade him go. Inert and musing, he wandered at random through the lights and shadows of the city streets, with a wistful look in his eyes and just the shadow of a pang ...
— Amarilly of Clothes-line Alley • Belle K. Maniates
... had been fired at from ambush, and two of them had been killed. They had ridden into and dispersed various gatherings in the darkness, but only to have them re-form in other places. The enemy was still shadowy, elusive; it was apparently saving its ammunition. It did little shooting, but reports of the firing of farmhouses and of buildings in small, unprotected towns began to come ...
— A Poor Wise Man • Mary Roberts Rinehart
... as I stooped to recover the elusive vegetable, "who's been sp'iling of your noo coat, ...
— Peregrine's Progress • Jeffery Farnol
... it may, I hated John Claverhouse. Not that he had done me what society would consider a wrong or an ill turn. Far from it. The evil was of a deeper, subtler sort; so elusive, so intangible, as to defy clear, definite analysis in words. We all experience such things at some period in our lives. For the first time we see a certain individual, one who the very instant before we did not dream existed; and ...
— Moon-Face and Other Stories • Jack London
... regarded her across the small table with perfectly apparent satisfaction. Nothing bucolic here; a dark and gypsy beauty which glowed and kindled beside the fainter types about them, a wholly modish smartness, an elusive something to which he could not put a name, which gave him always the sense of glad pursuit. There had been in his early attitude, as she had divined, just a trifle of the King and the Beggar Maid, the ...
— Jane Journeys On • Ruth Comfort Mitchell
... everything worst, in the growth of English power, possessed him to the exclusion of all less essential qualities. He was the subduer amazed by improbable defiance. He had never seen himself in such a situation it was as though a British admiral on his ironclad found himself mocked by some elusive little gunboat, newly invented by the condemned foreigner. His intellect refused to acknowledge the possibility of discomfiture; his soul raged mightily against the hint of bafflement. Humour would not come to his aid; the lighter elements of race were ousted; he was solid insolence, ...
— The Crown of Life • George Gissing
... right. In the right aisle are paintings (modern) looking like frescoes, and representing the preaching of St. Denis, by Galand; and the history of Ste. Genevive—her childhood, recognition by St. Germain l'Auxerrois, miracles, etc., delicate and elusive works, by Puvis de Chavannes. The paintings of the South Transept represent episodes in the early history of France. Chronologically speaking, they begin from the east central corner. Choir, Death of Ste. Genevive, and Miracles before her Shrine, by Laurens. ...
— Seeing Europe with Famous Authors, Volume 3 • Various
... reflected in his voice, apparent to the ears of the animal world, apparent to Collins only in the different way in which his subconscious mind reacted to his howl. Collins, having once defined Breed's note, its sound so identical with that of the wolf howl yet so dissimilar in the elusive feeling which accompanied it, had no further doubt that he could thereafter identify Breed by ...
— The Yellow Horde • Hal G. Evarts
... at just estimates has only made the attempt the more engrossing, as those will attest who have tracked through the mass of conflicting histories the story of the elusive lady who gave the name of Madama to the exquisite villa which ...
— Romance of Roman Villas - (The Renaissance) • Elizabeth W. (Elizbeth Williams) Champney
... footsteps," said the stranger respectfully. "A misbegotten goat-track enticed this person from his appointed line by the elusive semblance of an avoided li. Is there, within your enlightened knowledge, the house of one Shen Yi, who makes a feast to-day, positioned about this inauspicious region? It is further described as fronting on a ...
— Kai Lung's Golden Hours • Ernest Bramah
... resentment of the lonesomeness: the late afternoon, when the air is quite still, had come; yet there rested—somewhere—on the quiet day, a faint, pleasant, woody smell. It came to the editor of the "Herald" as he climbed to the top rail of the fence for a seat, and he drew a long, deep breath to get the elusive odor more luxuriously—and then ...
— The Gentleman From Indiana • Booth Tarkington
... little lonely after the old stage rumbled away. The Talented One turned whimsically to Amelia for company. She tried to imagine her, as the little old woman did, but in vain. She could not conjure up the sweet, elusive face, the hair, the eyes, the grave little mouth of Amelia. The little old woman had taken away with her love, the key. She must have taken Amelia away with her, too, the girl thought, smiling at her own fancy. So, for company, she must wait until Loraine and Billy ...
— Four Girls and a Compact • Annie Hamilton Donnell
... enemy was at Chauvigny, situated some twenty miles higher up the Vienne. Edward at once started in pursuit, only to find that the French had retired before him to Poitiers, eighteen miles due west of Chauvigny. Careless of his convoy, he hurried across country in the hope of catching the elusive enemy, but was only in time to fight a rear-guard skirmish at a manor named La Chaboterie, on the road from Chauvigny to Poitiers, on September, 17. That night the English lay in a wood hard by the scene of action, ...
— The History of England - From the Accession of Henry III. to the Death of Edward III. (1216-1377) • T.F. Tout
... except just this one curious fact. She dreamed of running water. Somehow it was fitting that she should. There was a kind of resemblance; running water was, in a way, an image of her. She seemed in her nature to be as clear and fresh; yet she was as elusive; and when she laughed, her laugh had a music as light ...
— Running Water • A. E. W. Mason
... gentians on some sparkling October day, we can but repeat Bryant's thoughts and express them prosaically who attempt description. In dark weather this sunshine lover remains shut, to protect its nectar and pollen from possible showers. An elusive plant is this gentian, which by no means always reappears in the same places year after year, for it is an annual whose seeds alone perpetuate it. Seating themselves on the winds when autumn gales shake them from out of the home wall, these little hairy scales ride afar, and those that are so ...
— Wild Flowers, An Aid to Knowledge of Our Wild Flowers and - Their Insect Visitors - - Title: Nature's Garden • Neltje Blanchan
... He would teach them that red-tape and officialism could only blunder blindly on at the heels of his elusive and lightfooted wariness. If they were bound to hold him down and delegitimatize him and keep him a pariah and a revolter against order, he would show them what he, alone, could do ...
— Phantom Wires - A Novel • Arthur Stringer
... we are to understand that this conception cannot be explained in other terms. Substance must be posited, and there we must leave it. The demonstration of the last-quoted proposition, the 11th, is elusive, and I must pass it by, merely observing that the objection that no idea involves existence, and that consequently the idea of God does not involve it, is not a refutation of Spinoza, who might rejoin that it is impossible not ...
— Pages from a Journal with Other Papers • Mark Rutherford
... the gorgeous sunset, that made him think of Helen May just because it was beautiful and because she would probably be gazing up at the crimson and gold and all the other elusive, swift-changing shades that go to make a barbaric sunset. Sure, she would be looking at it, unless she was still talking to that man, he thought jealously. It fretted him that he did not know who the fellow was. So he turned his thoughts away ...
— Starr, of the Desert • B. M Bower
... living clod, what captive thing, Could up toward God through all its darkness grope, And find within its deadened heart to sing These songs of sorrow, love, and faith, and hope? How did it catch that subtle undertone, That note in music heard not with the ears? How sound the elusive reed so seldom blown, Which stirs the soul or melts the heart ...
— The Upward Path - A Reader For Colored Children • Various
... dimpled, shadowed by the faithful Fred; Jane Andrews, neat and sensible and plain; Ruby Gillis, looking her handsomest and brightest in a cream silk blouse, with red geraniums in her golden hair; Gilbert Blythe and Charlie Sloane, both trying to keep as near the elusive Anne as possible; Carrie Sloane, looking pale and melancholy because, so it was reported, her father would not allow Oliver Kimball to come near the place; Moody Spurgeon MacPherson, whose round face and objectionable ears were as round and objectionable ...
— Anne Of The Island • Lucy Maud Montgomery
... over the bay. A dying gleam of sunset broke through a cloud and fell across her hair. For a moment she seemed the spirit of the shore personified—all its mystery, all its uncertainty, all its elusive charm. ...
— Lucy Maud Montgomery Short Stories, 1896 to 1901 • Lucy Maud Montgomery
... too dim for her to see it face to face. Its mere possibility dissolved the instant she focused it to get the truth behind it. It was too utterly elusive, made, protaean. Under the attack of even a minute's concentration the very meaning of it vanished, melted away. The idea lay really behind any words that she could ever find, beyond the touch of ...
— The Man Whom the Trees Loved • Algernon Blackwood
... which over 8 million died. In World War II, German and Soviet armies were responsible for some 7 to 8 million more deaths. Although final independence for Ukraine was achieved in 1991 with the dissolution of the USSR, democracy remained elusive as the legacy of state control and endemic corruption stalled efforts at economic reform, privatization, and civil liberties. A peaceful mass protest "Orange Revolution" in the closing months of 2004 forced the authorities to overturn a rigged presidential election and to allow a new ...
— The 2008 CIA World Factbook • United States. Central Intelligence Agency.
... little wooden gate, and searched for its elusive latch, a man came out of the garden, wheeling sharply about the hedge that, until this, had hidden him; and simultaneously, I was aware of the mingled odour of bad tobacco and of worse whiskey. Well, she would have done with such people soon! I threw open the gate, and stood aside to ...
— The Cords of Vanity • James Branch Cabell et al
... is not easy to find the exact words by which to differentiate the traditional teacher from the artist teacher. There is an elusive quality in the artist teacher which is not easily reduced to or described by formal words. We know that the one is an artist teacher and that the other is not. The formal examination may not be able to discover the artist teacher, but there is a sort of knowledge ...
— The Vitalized School • Francis B. Pearson
... by observation, by experiment, by deduction. They know that the great generalizations of science—the theories of the indestructibility of matter, of gravitation, of the conservation of energy—are but counters of mind exchanged in default of elusive realities. They know that the pressure of research has reduced many of the lesser generalizations and theories to a fluid and amorphous state. "Immutable" laws have been turned into faulty conclusions, hastily drawn and readily abandoned before the advance of new facts. The fixity of the elements ...
— Mountain Meditations - and some subjects of the day and the war • L. Lind-af-Hageby
... whole length of the main and top masts lay upon the larboard rail and over the side, held in that position by the gear, attached to them. This was all that I could distinguish, and of this only the most elusive glimpse was to ...
— The Frozen Pirate • W. Clark Russell
... breach of the stipulation of the Treaty, which required that reparation for colonial wrongs should be sought by peaceable arbitration. Clarendon had recognized fully that such reparation was due, and had instructed Downing to offer it. The elusive tactics of De Witt, and the armed intervention of De Ruyter, frustrated Clarendon's efforts for a ...
— The Life of Edward Earl of Clarendon V2 • Henry Craik
... slighted wedding-clothes than for her daughter. Charlotte had not shed a tear when she took them out of the chest and shook off the sprigs of lavender which she had laid over them; but it seemed to her that she could smell that faint elusive breath of lavender across the meeting-house when Sylvia came in, and the rustle of her bridal-gown was as loud in her ears as if ...
— Pembroke - A Novel • Mary E. Wilkins Freeman
... with that elusive shadow of a smile, "It doesn't matter," and as I rose to leave, "Buenos dias, senor," and he turned ...
— Zone Policeman 88 - A Close Range Study of the Panama Canal and its Workers • Harry A. Franck
... told, even when he has forgotten the name of the teller, or never knew it. It would indeed be difficult to find an instance of a more abiding confidence in human nature—even in anonymous human nature. And this is the end of the tale of the Arcadian Mr. Gorman and his elusive friend, the bright young ...
— Theodore Roosevelt and His Times - A Chronicle of the Progressive Movement; Volume 47 in The - Chronicles Of America Series • Harold Howland
... replied Dillon, apparently much gratified at the success of his proposal. "I had her at work getting evidence against a ladies' poolroom in Forty-seventh Street—an elusive place that we've never been able to ...
— Guy Garrick • Arthur B. Reeve
... Come the little children of the wood. From ecstasy to ecstasy the year mounts upward. Up from the south come the odor-laden winds, Angels and ministers of life, Dropping seeds of fruitfulness Into the bosoms of flowers. Elusive, alluring secrets hide in wood and hedge Like the first thoughts of love In the breast of a maiden; The witchery of love is in rock and tree. Across the pasture, star-sown with daisies, I see a young girl—the ...
— The Song of the Stone Wall • Helen Keller
... suggest?" asked King, twisting at his scrubby little mustache. But if be wished to convey the impression of a man at his wits'end, he failed signally. "I? Nothing! She's the most elusive individual in Asia! One person in the world knows where she is, unless she has an accomplice. My information's negative. I know ...
— King—of the Khyber Rifles • Talbot Mundy
... is writing an essay on "A Day in Church," in competition for a university scholarship. He gets on finely until he pauses for lack of a word. For nearly an hour he searches for this elusive thing, until suddenly he is told that the allotted time is up, and he has lost! Barrie may ...
— The Art of Public Speaking • Dale Carnagey (AKA Dale Carnegie) and J. Berg Esenwein
... of officers, on November 11th, to determine the best course to pursue. The decision was unanimous to return to the Point of Pines and renew the search for the elusive Puerto de Monterey, which they believed they had left behind. This was at once acted upon, and the command took up the march in the afternoon of that day, returning by the route of its coming, and on the 27th camped in sight of the Point of Pines at a little lake of muddy water. They had ...
— The March of Portola - and, The Log of the San Carlos and Original Documents - Translated and Annotated • Zoeth S. Eldredge and E. J. Molera
... silence. The stained light from some high window caught her veil in meshes of rose and violet—fairy colours, witnessing the elusive, fairy, invincible truth of ...
— Romance Island • Zona Gale
... largely in studying up on Avalon, going over and over again anything known about the elusive Tommy Paine, and playing Battle Chess and bickering ...
— Ultima Thule • Dallas McCord Reynolds
... relations to his Maker, or to his fellow-man. Unlike the farmer, whose interest lies in the control of animal or plant growth, or the mechanic, who controls and molds the forces and conditions of inanimate nature, the minister has to do with that most delicate and elusive subject of all—the human soul. His business is to tune the individual soul instrument so that it will harmonize with the musical vibrations of the Infinite Will; and to bring about such a relationship between the different instruments in his little group that ...
— Church Cooperation in Community Life • Paul L. Vogt
... fairly stiff climbs to the brow of High Shale Point. Columbus hurried along ahead of her as if he had made up his mind to reach the top at all costs. But Juliet had no intention of mounting to the summit of the frowning cliff that night. She had a vagrant desire to track that elusive scent, but even that, it seemed was not to be satisfied, and at length she stopped again and sent a ...
— The Obstacle Race • Ethel M. Dell
... asleep, and without undressing threw herself on the vacant cot next to mine. In the lamplight that shone from the passageway full on her face, I saw, as I peeped above the rough blanket, that the new-comer was no common type of waif and stray. There was an elusive charm in the glimpse of profile and in the delicate aquiline features, a certain suggestion of beauty, were it not for the white, drawn look that enveloped them like a death-mask. As I was gazing furtively at her she turned on her ...
— The Long Day - The Story of a New York Working Girl As Told by Herself • Dorothy Richardson
... believe would become a disease if you pursued it long enough, and leave you an analyticomaniac, or some such horror. Myriad bits of ordnance are continually pouring in and pouring out, and the object is to track them, and balance them, and pursue every elusive atom from start to finish. It may be expendible, like paint, or non-expendible, like an anvil. You feel despairingly that a pound of paint, born at Kimberley, and now at Mafeking, is disappearing somewhere and ...
— In the Ranks of the C.I.V. • Erskine Childers
... than that the man who is just awakening to a consciousness of that elusive entity the mind should confuse it with that breath which is the most striking outward and visible sign that distinguishes a living man from a ...
— An Introduction to Philosophy • George Stuart Fullerton
... I love most is the stealing in of night, when the sky takes on that strange elusive purple; when eyes turn to the evening star and marvel at its brightness; when the Eiffel Tower becomes a strange, shadowy stairway yearning in impotent ...
— Ballads of a Bohemian • Robert W. Service
... heart. It is like the light coming through blue stained glass, Yet not quite like it, For the blueness is not transparent, Only translucent. Her soul's light shines through, But her soul cannot be seen. It is something elusive, whimsical, tender, wanton, infantile, wise And noble. She wears, Monsignore, a blue garment, Made in the manner of the Japanese. It is very blue — I think that her eyes have made it more blue, Sweetly staining it As the pressure ...
— Main Street and Other Poems • Alfred Joyce Kilmer
... for me To contemplate with less concern The crumbling realm awaiting us Than his that was beyond return, A dawning on the dust of years Had shaped with an elusive light Mirages of remembered scenes That were no longer for ...
— The Three Taverns • Edwin Arlington Robinson
... close fighting with Sir Redvers Buller's army, and even to make an actual assault on the defences of Ladysmith, and so suffered far heavier losses than could otherwise have been inflicted on so elusive an enemy in ...
— London to Ladysmith via Pretoria • Winston Spencer Churchill
... to make a musical telegraph—a telegraph with a piano key-board, so that many messages could be sent at once over a single wire? Unknown to Bell, there were several dozen inven-tors then at work upon this problem, which proved in the end to be very elusive. But it gave him at least a starting-point, and he forthwith commenced his quest ...
— The History of the Telephone • Herbert N. Casson
... those who have loved deeply but have found in the very heart of that love a baffling sense of inevitable personal isolation. Sometimes the difficulty arises from the extreme subtlety of the thought. "Evelyn Hope," the simplest of poems in expression, presents novel and elusive ideas. Mr. Chesterton ingeniously ascribes Browning's obscurity to "intellectual humility," to an assumption that his readers were in possession of a native endowment and an acquired intellectual wealth on a par with his own; but the ...
— Selections from the Poems and Plays of Robert Browning • Robert Browning
... the shadowy essence of a wish, A fond desire which floats before our eyes; With lurid aberration, feverish,— We clutch the shadow which elusive, flies; Though at our grasp the mocking fancy flees, Hope still ...
— Mountain idylls, and Other Poems • Alfred Castner King
... in the desert, none worse and many better. Troop days were all right; squadron days were not bad; regimental days were tolerable at times; but brigade and divisional manoeuvres were inventions of the devil. On these latter occasions elusive white flags, the skeleton enemy, appeared and disappeared. Scouts reported them here, then there. The mounted men advanced in open order, all except the front line smothered in a fog of dust. Infantry toiled and sweated after them. The maligned staff viewed ...
— The Tale of a Trooper • Clutha N. Mackenzie
... to me, a vision of a gently decaying town left stranded by the stream of civilisation, flowing past to busy Havre. Some lines from "Henry the Fifth" made elusive music in my brain, mixed with a discussion of carburetters, explosion chambers, and sparking-plugs. At Lillebonne, Winston deigned to break short his string of motor technicalities and point out the position of the Roman theatre, almost the sole treasure ...
— The Princess Passes • Alice Muriel Williamson and Charles Norris Williamson
... spearing desperately at an elusive potato as the train jerked and jolted over the rails at sixty miles an hour, "to see how often you can raise your coffee cup without spilling the ...
— The Outdoor Girls in the Saddle - Or, The Girl Miner of Gold Run • Laura Lee Hope
... lived so long. His hair was fair, as was his skin under its sun tan. He was unusually light on his feet and possessed a wiry strength Raf could testify to. But there was that disconcerting habit of mind reading and other elusive differences. ...
— Star Born • Andre Norton
... beginning to be astir with the boom of bees, and the fluttering journeys of those busy householders, the robins. The high, soft grass made the most comfortable of school benches; an upturned box served excellently for a desk; and here Kirk struggled with the elusive, unseen shapes of A. B. C.—and conquered them! His first completed manuscript was a letter to his mother, and Phil, looking at it, thought all the toil worth while. The letter had taken long, but Felicia had not helped him ...
— The Happy Venture • Edith Ballinger Price
... And as she lifted her eyes Mackenzie saw that they were as blue as asters on an October morning, and that her hair was a warm reddish-brown, and that her face was refreshingly pure in its outline, strong and haughty and brown, and subtly sweet as the elusive perfume of a wild rose of ...
— The Flockmaster of Poison Creek • George W. Ogden
... charge of effeteness. There were contradictory rumours as to whether his house had ever been visited by the polizia; but it was a legible fact that his name was on the window, and it was understood that he was not without elusive contrivances in the event of the authorities declaring war ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... enchantment for the eyes of the metaphysician in this play of light, these nameless interfulgent colours which appear flimsy as the play of thought? For the glowing floating haze is made of nothing—of lines, of gleam, of unregulated splendour. And all this triumph of fluctuating light and elusive colour is quenched with the sun, smoulders into darkness, even as ideas in the obscure depths ...
— Saint Augustin • Louis Bertrand
... in each of these fascinating little tales; something elusive and subtle in every one, something quaint or surprising, which catches the fancy and gives a sense of satisfaction like that felt when one discovers a rare flower in an unexpected place. I predict that "The Odd Number" will soon be found ...
— The Danvers Jewels, and Sir Charles Danvers • Mary Cholmondeley
... you spend your treasures of patience nightly; and often without result. I sympathize with your woes, for I, who am as concerned as you about my daily bread, I also doggedly spread my net, the net for catching ideas, a more elusive and less substantial prize than the Moth. Let us not lose heart. The best part of life is not in the present, still less in the past; it lies in the future, the domain ...
— The Life of the Spider • J. Henri Fabre
... delights crowd into his mind. The gliding, falling coasters on the hills, the passing sleighs with niches on the runners for his feet, the flying snowballs, the sliding-places, the broad, tempting ice, all whirl through his mind in a delightful panorama, and he hurries out to catch the elusive flakes in his outstretched hands and to shout aloud in the gladness of his heart. And the black squirrel becomes a boy with the first snow. What a pity he cannot shout! There is a superabundant joy and life in his long, graceful bounds, when ...
— The Ontario Readers - Third Book • Ontario Ministry of Education
... that moment leisurely tying his white neckwear in his bed-chamber at Villa Cardross. And sometimes he whistled, tentatively, as though absorbed in mentally following an elusive air; sometimes he resumed a lighted cigarette which lay across the gilded stomach of a Chinese joss, sending a thin, high thread of smoke to the ceiling. He had begun his collection with one small idol; there were now nineteen, and ...
— The Firing Line • Robert W. Chambers
... knowing well the anguish of suffering that awaited her. The desolation and loneliness made her unhappy in a vague and not very comprehensible fashion, but she did not suffer actively. That would come later when return became imperative. Till then she flitted to and fro, intangible as gossamer, elusive as the snow. She wondered what Apollo would say if he could see her thus. Even he would fail to catch her now. She pictured the strong arms closing upon her, and clasping—emptiness. That thought made her a little cold, ...
— Greatheart • Ethel M. Dell
... head again his eye caught the shimmer of the quicksilver,—that pool of merry antic metal that had so delighted him an hour before. In a few moments Concho was again disporting with it; chasing it here and there, rolling it in his palms and laughing with boy-like glee at its elusive freaks and fancies. "Ah, sprightly one,—skipjack,—there thou goest,—come here. This way,—now I have thee, little one,—come, muchacha,—come and kiss me," until he had quite forgotten the defection of his companions. And even when he shouldered his sorry pack, he was fain to carry his ...
— The Story of a Mine • Bret Harte
... great glee set upon the unfortunate man, tumbled him over, and gave him an hilarious but hearty drubbing. I looked at the Saint in astonishment. His muscles were relaxed in a grin, and I had another flash of elusive recollection of his face. But ere I could fix it, ...
— Dreamers of the Ghetto • I. Zangwill
... elusive and in the air. In an outburst of passion Lamennais exclaims: "But what! Shall we, losing all hope, shut our eyes and plunge into the voiceless depths of a universal scepticism? Shall we doubt that we think, that we feel, that we are? Nature does ...
— Tragic Sense Of Life • Miguel de Unamuno
... once too much caste and too much contact. We do not wish to find servants or scrubs in our sisters, nor do we wish at all times even to see our sisters. There must be elbow-room for mood and temperament, as well as high walls of defence. The social element is too shy and elusive, and will not, like a monkey, perform on demand; therefore our plan abjures all these poetic organizations, which have a great deal of cant and very little good companionship; it has no sentimentalism to offer, proposing an association of purses rather than ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 17, No. 102, April, 1866 • Various
... sound a theme or motive that voiced man's domination over the primeval forces of the universe, and urged him to the endurance of stress, and great endeavour. It was, for the most part, vague and elusive; but there were times when it rang exultingly through the subtly harmonious din, reminding him ...
— The Cattle-Baron's Daughter • Harold Bindloss
... said Kew, "that I must leave you by the ten something. I must leave you to sniff without my help, like bloodhounds, along the trail of the elusive Jay. But I won't bid any one a fervent good-bye, because I daresay I shall be back again on leave for lack of anything else to do in three weeks' time, if we can't get across the Channel. In that case I'll meet you one day next month—say at Land's End or the ...
— This Is the End • Stella Benson
... end in the galley, for food which survived until its arrival on the table, though not allowed much time for further mishap, often ended in a disagreeable mass on the floor or, tossed by a lurch of more than usual suddenness, entered an adjoining cabin. From such localities the elusive piece de ...
— The Home of the Blizzard • Douglas Mawson
... some likeness," she mused, "only the voice is much gentler, more truly musical. It must be that is the elusive suggestion, and Miss Boyd is wild over Shakespeare. It shall be my purpose to prevent her from being an actress, unless she can stand in the ...
— The Girls at Mount Morris • Amanda Minnie Douglas
... takes effort. The pictures and the sculpture of the alcoves and the half-dome tell their own story. Here is no elusive mysticism, no obscure symbolism to be dug out with the help of guidebooks, like a hard lesson. The treasures of the Seasons are on the surface, glowing ...
— The Jewel City • Ben Macomber
... has never been persuaded to hold it. Possibly it is because men feel so keenly the elusiveness of women that they grow weary in the quest of the real Herself. But, says Browning, they must not grow weary in it. Elusive though she be, her lover must not leave her uncaptured. For if love is the greatest adventure, it is also the longest. We cannot come to an end of it—and, if we were wise, should not desire so ...
— Browning's Heroines • Ethel Colburn Mayne
... distinguish between originality and singularity.[12] The contradiction of a common prejudice, which always passes for paradox, is often such only in appearance. It is true that an ingenious person may take advantage of the elusive nature of language to play tricks with the ordinary understanding, but it is equally true that words of themselves have a way of imposing on the uninquiring mind and passing themselves off at an inflated value. No process is more familiar than that by which words in the course of a long life ...
— Hazlitt on English Literature - An Introduction to the Appreciation of Literature • Jacob Zeitlin
... herself and her hostels seriously, and think that it mattered how she worked for them and what they became. She tried to give all the attention her children's upbringing, her husband's ailments and the general demands of her household left free, to this complex, elusive, puzzling and worrying matter. Instead of thinking that these hostels were just old hostels and that you start them and put in a Mrs. Pembrose and feel very benevolent and happy and go away, she had come to realize partly ...
— The Wife of Sir Isaac Harman • H. G. (Herbert George) Wells
... ghosts rested on their oars. They could watch the glimmering canvas of the brig and see what her procedure might be. Soon she filled away and forsook the attempt to find the boat. Blackbeard had wisdom enough to avoid blundering about and putting the brig aground in a chase so elusive as this. ...
— Blackbeard: Buccaneer • Ralph D. Paine
... wonderful how elusive rest is. You may search for it all your days and grow gray and haggard, and sit down in the evening of life with the vampires circling about you and be forced to confess, "I have not found rest!" You may retire from business and say, "I will spend my declining years in peace," but ...
— The Heart-Cry of Jesus • Byron J. Rees
... which I had entered and left caused me considerable curiosity. Kemsley was one of those free, bluff, open-hearted, open-handed, men. He was never secretive, never elusive. I could only account for his curious, mystifying actions by the fact that the reputation of a woman was at stake—that he was acting for ...
— The Sign of Silence • William Le Queux
... under a divot,' whatever that may be, and they really did make her look like five out of any six women one meets in the street. Fur coats are very levelling things. Later on when I get her to London we'll see what can be done. Jean needs careful dressing to bring out that very real but elusive beauty of hers. I persuaded her in the meantime to get a soft cloth coat made with a skunk collar and cuffs.... She was so funny about under-things. I wanted her to get some sets of crepe-de-Chine things, but she was adamant. She didn't ...
— Penny Plain • Anna Buchan (writing as O. Douglas)
... the more convinced I become that the most fascinating persons in this world are those elusive souls whom we know perfectly well but whom we never, as children say, "get to meet." They slip out of countries, or towns—or rooms even,—just before we arrive, leaving us with an inexplicable ...
— Little Miss By-The-Day • Lucille Van Slyke
... o'clock before Wallie began to wonder what they would have for supper. They were not making fast time, for his horse stumbled badly and the pack-horses, both old and stiff, travelled slowly, so at three o'clock the elusive mountains seemed as far away as when they ...
— The Dude Wrangler • Caroline Lockhart
... am happy." To Jack, these three words, never spoken, but somewhere within him articulate and peremptory, these three words almost overwhelmed him with their significance. He trembled for this treasure, so elusive, so transitory, perhaps, so surely ill deserved; he grew humble with the thought of his own unworthiness, and, though no believer in the ordinary sense, he began to feel the first stirring of religion. When Fetuao, with sweet shame, laid her head against his shoulder and told ...
— Wild Justice: Stories of the South Seas • Lloyd Osbourne
... apprehend all simultaneously,[79] instead of being forced laboriously to trace them out one by one in succession. It is this very faculty of "fourfold vision" which gives to these books their ever-changing atmosphere of suggestion, elusive and magical as the clouds and colours in a sunset sky, which escape our grasp in the very effort to study them. Hence, for the majority even of imaginative people, who possess at the utmost "double vision," they are difficult ...
— Mysticism in English Literature • Caroline F. E. Spurgeon
... the earliest chroniclers of war recorded their observations, strategists and generals have been tantalized and confounded by the elusive goal of destroying the adversary's will to resist before, during, and after battle. Today, we believe that an unusual opportunity exists to determine whether or not this long-sought strategic goal of affecting ...
— Shock and Awe - Achieving Rapid Dominance • Harlan K. Ullman and James P. Wade
... in their dining room of too-carved oak, twin shadow-boxed paintings of Fruit and Fish, the cut-glass punch bowl with the hooked-on cups, the cotton palm, casually rigid velour drapes, the elusive floor bell, they huddled, these two, whose eyes were branded with the scars of what they had looked upon, and a slow, a vast anger began to rise in Mosher, as if the blood in his throat were choking him, and a surge of it, almost purple, rose out of ...
— The Vertical City • Fannie Hurst
... there was still an elusive fog that he did not try to shake off, accepted apparent ...
— The Eternal Wall • Raymond Zinke Gallun |
