"Fretfulness" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... guilelessness, an almost heroic truthfulness, devoted fidelity, a dove-like tranquillity of mind, and that abiding, reposeful trust in God which is equal to all trials, and can never be taken by surprise. Her voice was soft and soothing, her motions singularly free from clumsiness or fretfulness, her manners so beautifully blended of unaffected humility, patience, and self-respect as to command, in cheerful reciprocity, the deference they tendered; in which respect she was a severe ordeal to the sham gentlemen and ladies who had the honor ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 18, No. 105, July 1866 • Various
... there, including Crusoe. Crusoe it was who had given warning of my danger. Like a wise little dog, when I ignored his admonitions he had run home. At first his uneasiness and troubled barking had got no notice. Once or twice the Scotchman, worried by his fretfulness, had ordered him away. Then across his preoccupied mind there flashed a doubt. He laid down his tools and spoke to the animal. Instantly Crusoe dashed for the rocks, barking and crying with eagerness. But the path was closed, the tide was hurrying in, and Crusoe whined pitiably ...
— Spanish Doubloons • Camilla Kenyon
... Defiance had fallen into disuse, and the habit of respect and affection had softened her and lessened her pride; there was more devotional temper, and a greater desire after a religious way of life. It might be that her fretfulness was the effect of an uneasiness of mind, which was more hopeful than her previous fierce self-satisfaction, and that her aberrations were the last efforts of old evil habits to re-establish their grasp by custom, when her heart ...
— Hopes and Fears - scenes from the life of a spinster • Charlotte M. Yonge
... ex-prizefighter, sailor, lumberman and adventurer who had thrown in his lot with Cumberland Ludlow, the sportsman, when both were in the full flush of middle age. His limp, the result of an epoch-making fight in an Australian mining camp, was emphasized by severe rheumatism, and the fretfulness of old age was heightened by his shortness ...
— Who Cares? • Cosmo Hamilton
... when she tried to meet its focus, it went behind her as though it pierced the solidity of her body and the walls in the contemplation of a far-removed shining image. Her disturbance grew to the inclusion of a degree of fretfulness at his unbroken silence, his apparent absorption in whatever his ...
— Linda Condon • Joseph Hergesheimer
... discretion are equally apparent in the advice he tenders to Lord Temple, upon the necessity of resigning his office into the hands of his successor, instead of throwing it up with an "appearance of fretfulness and intemperance." The contrast between the temperaments of these distinguished men is frequently felt throughout this Correspondence, in the traits of calm, practical wisdom which will be found on the one side, ...
— Memoirs of the Courts and Cabinets of George the Third - From the Original Family Documents, Volume 1 (of 2) • The Duke of Buckingham and Chandos
... mood of passing fretfulness or impatience that I resolve to go and seek my fortune in Australia. As I feel now, believing you are displeased with me, I have no heart to go further into the question of my own selfish interests, ...
— Lord Kilgobbin • Charles Lever
... Jerusalem not to weep; could open paradise to the dying thief, and the door of John's home to the reception of His mother. Few things betray the presence of His peace more than the absence of irritability, fretfulness, and feverish haste, which expend ...
— Love to the Uttermost - Expositions of John XIII.-XXI. • F. B. Meyer
... and fragrance fell on him as her cool touch did that last time. The heart throbs choked him then; he was choking again. 'Water, mother—a drink!' and something wet his lips and trickled down his throat, not cool and sweet as the rippling water he longed for, and he turned away with sickly fretfulness; but a new strength thrilled through his limbs. He opened his eyes; a face, battle-stained, but tear-wet like a ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol 6, No 5, November 1864 - Devoted To Literature And National Policy • Various
... Heart!)—Stille, Mein Wille! (Still, My Will!) "The patient and uncomplaining manner," writes Dr. Wyman, "in which the most agonizing pains which it has ever been my lot to witness were borne—with no repining, no murmur, no fretfulness, but quiet, peaceful submission to endure and suffer—will not soon be forgotten." At eleven o'clock, when the doctor left, I sent the nurse away for a couple of hours rest and took her place by the sick-bed. Lizzy, who had already begun to feel the ...
— The Life and Letters of Elizabeth Prentiss • George L. Prentiss
... stated that, in her experience, American drivers as a class were marked by the merciful temper which accompanies genius, and their perfection in their art, their fertility of resource, and the gentleness with which they treated female fears and fretfulness, were exemplary. ...
— The Paths of Inland Commerce - A Chronicle of Trail, Road, and Waterway, Volume 21 in The - Chronicles of America Series • Archer B. Hulbert
... go farther off. She was convinced that neither Ansdore nor Ellen could exist, at least decorously, without her, and she must be within easy reach of both. The fortnight between the booking of her room and her setting out she spent in mingled fretfulness and swagger. She fretted about Ansdore, and nearly drove her carter and her looker frantic with her last injunctions; she fretted about Ellen, and cautioned Mrs. Tolhurst to keep a strict watch over her—"She's not to go up to late dinner at Great Ansdore without you fetch her home." ...
— Joanna Godden • Sheila Kaye-Smith
... most absurd enormous book?(559) The best thing in it is a bon-mot of Lord Pembroke.(560) "The more one learns of Johnson, the more preposterous assemblage he appears of' strong sense, of the lowest bigotry and prejudices, of pride, brutality, fretfulness, and vanity; and Boswell is the ape of most of his faults, without a grain of his sense. It is the story of a mountebank ...
— Letters of Horace Walpole, V4 • Horace Walpole
... and severer discipline of training have not been entirely forgotten; or that incidents which in ordinary health would be productive of no demonstration whatever, may lead, in moments of temporary illness, to fretfulness and anger. The knowledge of this infirmity led to the popular belief recorded by PHILE, that the elephant had two hearts, under the respective influences of which it evinced ferocity of gentleness; subdued by the one to habitual tractability and obedience, ...
— Sketches of the Natural History of Ceylon • J. Emerson Tennent
... characteristics in Vauvenargues. Perhaps if his life had been passed in less severe circumstances, this fine susceptibility might have become fanciful and morbid. As it was, he loved his friends with a certain patient sweetness and equanimity, in which there was never the faintest tinge of fretfulness, caprice, exacting vanity, or any of those other vices which betray in men that excessive consciousness of their own personality, which lies at the root of most of the obstacles in the way of an even and humane life. His nature had such depth and quality that the perpetual ...
— Critical Miscellanies (Vol 2 of 3) - Essay 1: Vauvenargues • John Morley
... slumber which is, or soon will be, morbid in its character. I have known myself cases not a few, where, by the very nicest gradations, and by steps too silent and insensible for daily notice, the utmost harmony and reciprocal love had shaded down into fretfulness and petulance, purely from too easy a life, and because all nobler agitations that might have ruffled the sensations occasionally, and all distresses even on the narrowest scale that might have reawakened the solicitudes of love, by opening necessities for sympathy—for counsel—or ...
— The Uncollected Writings of Thomas de Quincey, Vol. 2 - With a Preface and Annotations by James Hogg • Thomas de Quincey
... that, should they pass for very knowing men upon all other accounts, yet their very calumnies and reviling language would bespeak them at the greatest distance from philosophy imaginable. For emulation can never enter that godlike consort, nor such fretfulness as wants resolution to conceal its own resentments. Aristodemus then subjoined: Heraclides, you know, is a great philologist; and that may be the reason why he made Epicurus those amends for the poetic din (so, that party style poetry) and for the fooleries of Homer; or else, it may be, it ...
— Essays and Miscellanies - The Complete Works Volume 3 • Plutarch
... to burn. Instead, however, of setting the other wood on fire, they only grew dimmer and dimmer themselves; and he said to himself, "I knew they would not burn." Then he sat down upon a log, in a sad state of fretfulness and dissatisfaction. ...
— Caleb in the Country • Jacob Abbott
... out at the drawing-room window, the very window at which Lucy Tempest had sat that night and watched the yew-tree, came Sibylla, fretfulness in the lines of her countenance, complaint in the tones of ...
— Verner's Pride • Mrs. Henry Wood
... gutter-scribbler in 1810 made charges of plagiarism from him against Scott, he furnished Southey with the means of clearing him from all share in the matter (Lockhart, iii. 293; Southey's Life and Correspondence, iii. 291). But there is a suspicion of fretfulness even in the Preface to Christabel; and the references to Scott's poetry (not to himself) in the Table Talk, etc., are almost uniformly disparaging. It is true that these last ...
— Sir Walter Scott - Famous Scots Series • George Saintsbury
... assembled patriot officials, to give their evidence. Beyond them, leaning against the wall, addressed by no one, and speaking to no one, stood the superintendent, Danville. Doubt and suspense were written in every line of his face; the fretfulness of an uneasy mind expressed itself in his slightest gesture—even in his manner of passing a handkerchief from time to time over his face, on which the perspiration was gathering ...
— After Dark • Wilkie Collins
... was very ill, and Lily's pale cheeks, heavy eyes, and failing voice, might have reminded her that two sick persons were a heavy charge upon a girl of seventeen, without the addition of her caprices and fretfulness. And how was it that the kind-hearted, affectionate Emily never thought of all this? It was because she had been giving way to selfishness for nineteen years; and now the contemplation of her own sufferings ...
— Scenes and Characters • Charlotte M. Yonge
... to wait for in those days. She had gone to Lobelia's home with her; for, on coming to herself, the invalid had still clung to her new friend, with a persistency strange in one so timid and fearful. Convalescence came, with its unwilling fretfulness, its fits of unreason. Still Lobelia clung to Grace, and no one else could make her listen and obey. The nurse laughed, and said she might as well go, and leave her diploma with Miss Wolfe; yet stayed, for the two worked together in pleasant ...
— Peggy • Laura E. Richards
... intervals, often denied even a half-holiday, let alone an adequate one, unable to afford suitable domestic assistance, often with poor housing or domestic arrangements, and completely exhausted with the incessant round of cleaning, cooking, and the strain of the inevitable fretfulness of a ...
— Report of the Committee of Inquiry into the Various Aspects of the Problem of Abortion in New Zealand • David G. McMillan
... dreamed in an ivory-white bowl set on the writing-table of ruddy-brown wood. It caught the gilt of the boy's fair hair and turned it into brightest gold, until, despite the white weariness of his face, the pale fretfulness of his eyes, he looked like some angel in a church window designed by Burne-Jones, some angel a little blase from the injudicious conduct of its life. He frankly admired himself as he watched his reflection, occasionally changing ...
— The Green Carnation • Robert Smythe Hichens
... obtaining the quiet which she, more than the others, needed in order to learn a lesson properly. Each day Lionel grew more unruly, chiefly from the want of occupation, leading the other two along with him; and each day the female portion of the party grew more inclined to fretfulness, as they felt their own helplessness. It even came to consultations between Miss Morley and Caroline whether they must not really tell of the boys: but the evil day was always put ...
— The Two Guardians • Charlotte Mary Yonge
... over-liberally from the good jar? What if not even now have I departed wholly from thee? What if this very mutability of mine is a just ground for hoping better things? But listen now, and cease to let thy heart consume away with fretfulness, nor expect to live on thine own terms in a realm ...
— The Consolation of Philosophy • Boethius
... little Benoni back to Rusha, not without some sounds of fretfulness from the baby, but the pigs had to be shut up and fed, and the other evening work of the farmyard done; and it was not till all this was over, and Patience had disposed of the milk in the cool cellars, that the father could ...
— Under the Storm - Steadfast's Charge • Charlotte M. Yonge
... ordinary conversation, as did some of the fanatics of the Commonwealth. Others have represented it as a perpetual austerity, an investiture of our family circles with all the hues of the sepulchre, and a flinging upon the face of society the frown of a rebuking fretfulness, which would make the good of an archangel evil spoken of in this censorious world. But the scriptural holiness which believers long for, and which the Church is to spread through the land, is not ...
— The Wesleyan Methodist Pulpit in Malvern • Knowles King
... influences of climate or weather, occur repeatedly and at brief intervals throughout his correspondence. This is a factor in his career which should not be lost to mind; for on the one hand it explains in part the fretfulness which at times appears, and on the other brings out with increased force the general kindly sweetness of his temper, which breathed with slight abatement through such depressing conditions. It enhances, too, the strength of purpose that trod bodily weakness ...
— The Life of Nelson, Vol. I (of 2) - The Embodiment of the Sea Power of Great Britain • A. T. (Alfred Thayer) Mahan
... enviable dogs they are! Round, and round, and round they go,—Mundell's ox, that drives his cotton mill, is their exact prototype—without an idea or wish beyond their circle; fat, sleek, stupid, patient, quiet, and contented; while here I sit, altogether Novemberish, a damn'd melange of fretfulness and melancholy; not enough of the one to rouse me to passion, nor of the other to repose me in torpor; my soul flouncing and fluttering round her tenement, like a wild finch, caught amid the horrors of winter, and newly ...
— The Letters of Robert Burns • Robert Burns
... truth expressed himself very plainly to Mr. Warburton; but with so much indiscreet fretfulness that the discreet private secretary had not told it even to the Duchess. "This kind of thing argues a want of cordiality that may be fatal to us," Sir Orlando had said somewhat grandiloquently to ...
— The Prime Minister • Anthony Trollope
... had been so terrified by the cries of the multitude against the 'pretender,' and still more at the sight of the sea, that she had gone into transports of fright, implored to go home, and perhaps half wilfully, become useless, so that the weaning already commenced had to be expedited, and the fretfulness of the poor child had been one of the troubles for some days. However, he seemed on his return to have forgotten his troubles, and Anne had him in her arms nearly all ...
— A Reputed Changeling • Charlotte M. Yonge
... they had orders not to quit me, and nothing was wanting for my amusement, when I was in a condition to take any, so much good company being around me, and that at a time when convalescents of this malady experience all the weariness and fretfulness of it. At the end of my illness I was bled and purged once, after which I lived as usual, but in ...
— The Memoirs of Louis XIV., His Court and The Regency, Complete • Duc de Saint-Simon
... every case;—to win and encourage the indications of affection; to check retaliation or revenge; to subdue the violence of passion or inordinate desire;—to keep under every manifestation of self-will;—and to soothe down and banish every appearance of fretfulness and bad temper. In short, she trains her young charge to feel and to practise all the amiable and kindly affections of our nature, encouraging and commending him in their exercise;—while, on the contrary, she prevents, discourages, reproves, ...
— A Practical Enquiry into the Philosophy of Education • James Gall
... did we quit our camp, where so much anxiety of mind and fretfulness had been suffered, not heeding a furious rain, which, after drenching us all night, might have somewhat damped our ardor for the march under other circumstances. The road for the first mile led over reddish ground, and was drained by gentle slopes falling ...
— How I Found Livingstone • Sir Henry M. Stanley
... see without being seen. Mrs. Lessways' thin, wrinkled face, bordered by her untidy but still black and glossy hair, was upturned from below in an expression of tragic fretfulness. It was the uncontrolled face, shamelessly expressive, of one who thinks himself unwatched. Hilda moved silently to descend, and then demanded in a low tone whose harsh self-possession was a reproof to that ...
— Hilda Lessways • Arnold Bennett
... house with the favourite, an earthenware spittoon, a leaden inkpot, and a commercial ledger. In the last, lying on his belly, he writes from day to day the uneventful history of his reign; and when thus employed he betrayed a touch of fretfulness on interruption with which I was well able to sympathise. The royal annalist once read me a page or so, translating as he went; but the passage being genealogical, and the author boggling extremely in his version, I own I have been sometimes better entertained. ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 18 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... symptoms of chronic indigestion (dyspepsia) in children? Disturbed sleep, tired, grinding teeth, fretfulness, loss of weight and flesh, gas in the stomach and bowels, pain in the bowels, bloated bowels, constipation or loose bowels with mucus in the stools, foul breath, coated tongue, poor appetite, capricious appetite. Some may ...
— Mother's Remedies - Over One Thousand Tried and Tested Remedies from Mothers - of the United States and Canada • T. J. Ritter
... of fretfulness, but with disdainful calm, he criticised and censured the proceedings against himself as a violation of the laws of the land and of the first principles of justice, discussing them as lucidly and steadily as if they had ...
— The Rise of the Dutch Republic, 1555-1566 • John Lothrop Motley
... had been becoming more and more querulous for the last hour. Poor Lisbeth was suffering from a strange conflict of feelings. Her joy and pride in the honour paid to her darling son Adam was beginning to be worsted in the conflict with the jealousy and fretfulness which had revived when Adam came to tell her that Captain Donnithorne desired him to join the dancers in the hall. Adam was getting more and more out of her reach; she wished all the old troubles back again, for then it mattered more to Adam what ...
— Adam Bede • George Eliot
... reported in a spirited and characteristic manner. We find ourselves introduced into the presence of the men who, during twenty eventful years, swayed the destinies of Europe. Their wit and their folly, their fretfulness and their merriment, are exposed to us. We are admitted to overhear their chat, and to watch their familiar gestures. It is interesting and curious to recognise, in circumstances which elude the notice ...
— Critical and Historical Essays Volume 2 • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... his general indifference to fate. Good lessons these, all of them. If by the game we learn some of them our time on the green earth has not been wasted. If we rise from the table having learned only fretfulness and self-pity ...
— The Second Thoughts of An Idle Fellow • Jerome K. Jerome
... heavy battles against Nature, it will still always be needed to furnish the background of sanity, serenity, and cheerfulness to life, to give moral elasticity to our disposition, to round off the wiry edge of our fretfulness, and make us good-humored and easy to approach. Weakness is too apt to be what the doctors call irritable weakness. And that blessed internal peace and confidence, that acquiescentia in seipso, as Spinoza used to ...
— A Book of Exposition • Homer Heath Nugent
... Sabbath day," she said, hiding her fretfulness behind conscientious scruples, as all of us are ready to do. "I hope it wasna your ain thouchts and words you were sae ta'en up wi'; but I'm feared it was. You wadna hae staid sae ...
— A Daughter of Fife • Amelia Edith Barr
... kindles many great fires would be withheld; and, great as are the evils and sufferings caused by war, they are not as great, probably, as those originating in impatience and want of temper. The fretfulness of human life, it seems not hard to believe, is a greater evil, and destroys more happiness, than all the bloody scenes of the battle-field. The evils of war have generally something to lighten the burden of them in a sense of necessity, or of rights or honour invaded; but there is nothing of ...
— Friends and Neighbors - or Two Ways of Living in the World • Anonymous
... urge them. But at home all masks are thrown aside, and the true proportions of the man appear. Here he can find his actual moral standard, and measure himself accordingly. If he is irritable, here breaks forth his repressed fretfulness. If he is selfish, here are the sordid tokens. If he passes in any way for more than he is worth, here you may detect the counterfeit in the ring of his natural voice and the superscription of his undisguised life. No, the ...
— Humanity in the City • E. H. Chapin
... lies upon his shelf a household treasure. There he finds depicted himself—his own works and his own ways. There he finds a cordial for his drooping spirits, nutriment for his wearied strength. Burns is his brother—his helper in time of need, when fretfulness and impatience are replaced with placidity by his strains, or of a sudden with a mounting joy. And far oftener than they who know not our peasantry would believe, before their souls awakened from torpor he is a luminous and benign presence in the dark hut; for, ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 56, Number 347, September, 1844 • Various
... proper duties to attend my sister Jane for a day or two, had on one occasion treated her harshly, if not brutally; and as this ill treatment happened within three or four days of her death, so that the occasion of it must have been some fretfulness in the poor child caused by her sufferings, naturally there was a sense of awe and indignation diffused through the family. I believe the story never reached my mother, and possibly it was exaggerated; but upon me the effect ...
— Autobiographic Sketches • Thomas de Quincey
... are not old or broken, Ruth. You have grown more beautiful. This great sorrow has smoothed from your face every line of fretfulness and worry, and lighted it with the mystery and pathos of an unearthly beauty. It shines from your heroic soul until your whole being has come into harmony with it. I loved you in the ...
— The One Woman • Thomas Dixon
... you so little pleasure to look at her, that she seldom had common justice done her, but had generally hitherto passed for a little insignificant plain girl, though her very face was so altered since she was grown good natured, and had got the better of that foolish fretfulness she used to be possessed of, that she appeared from her good-humoured smiles quite a different person; and, with a mild aspect, thus began ...
— The Governess - The Little Female Academy • Sarah Fielding
... something perpetually to say that was interesting of this or that. He answered every question the general wanted solved in the cleverest manner; and, in short, he so won upon the old man's heart, that he became quite attached to him. The evenings, once so heavy, and spent in a sort of irritable fretfulness, became quite delightful to him: nor were they less delightful to others. At last, things came to that pass that the wearisome backgammon was given up, and reading aloud took its place. The ladies worked and read in turns, Edgar taking double tides, and Mr. St. Leger doing a little, which he insisted ...
— Harper's New Monthly Magazine, Volume 1, No. 3, August, 1850. • Various
... all Charlie's whims and fancies, and in all his pain and fretfulness, and through fits of silence and sensitiveness, he had never a better friend than Isaac Irvine. Indeed the bee-master was one of those men (to be found in all ranks) whose delicate tenderness might not be guessed from the size and roughness ...
— We and the World, Part I - A Book for Boys • Juliana Horatia Ewing
... look at one another as if this fretfulness were one of the worst signs, and we had quite expected it. We say nothing for a little as we sit down to work; but uneasily, as if we have something on our minds. Presently I rise, and, going into the bedroom, motion to Almond as I go. ...
— Bog-Myrtle and Peat - Tales Chiefly Of Galloway Gathered From The Years 1889 To 1895 • S.R. Crockett
... cried, peering past Marcia to Hayden who followed, almost obscured by his great package. She stretched out a hand for him to take, not disarranging her pose by rising and thus spoiling the composition. "Marcia, you're dreadfully late, as usual," a touch of fretfulness in her voice. ...
— The Silver Butterfly • Mrs. Wilson Woodrow
... book was in her lap, but her thoughts were far away. Her face still wore its sad and somewhat wistful look; yet there was gradually dawning upon it the sense of repose and rest. Her sisters noted the old fretfulness and restlessness had gone out of her tones, and whilst Elfie wondered, Agatha rejoiced that trouble had not hardened or ...
— The Carved Cupboard • Amy Le Feuvre
... how many annoyances have you caused your mother, do you suppose, by fretfulness and peevishness in word and deed, night and day, since you were a little boy? How much sorrow and ...
— The Memorabilia - Recollections of Socrates • Xenophon
... while a sort of childish fretfulness made her thus resolve, she was breathing hurriedly, and straining her ears to catch a repetition of the summons. It is difficult to be convinced of the death of one whom we have deemed another self. The knocking was now renewed in slow and regular strokes, apparently given ...
— The Wives of The Dead - (From: "The Snow Image and Other Twice-Told Tales") • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... O pen, which art the voice of my discontent, your spluttering is like this outburst of unmanly fretfulness and futile rage! O paper, whose flat surface typifies the dull level of my life, your greasy unwillingness to receive the ink is emblematic of the ...
— Birds of Prey • M. E. Braddon
... with some slight childish indisposition, and Sylvia was obliged to have recourse to a never-failing piece of amusement; namely, to take the child into the shop, when the number of new, bright-coloured articles was sure to beguile the little girl out of her fretfulness. She was walking along the high terrace of the counter, kept steady by her mother's hand, when Mr. Dawson's market-cart once more stopped before the door. But it was not Mrs. Brunton who alighted now; it was a very smartly-dressed, very pretty young ...
— Sylvia's Lovers, Vol. III • Elizabeth Gaskell
... souls is the rest which David found, when he listened to the voice of God speaking by the lips of Abigail; the true and divine rest of heart and peace of mind—rest and peace from the inward storm of fretfulness, suspicion, jealousy, pride, wrath, revenge, which blackens the light of heaven to a man, and turns to gall and wormwood every blessing which ...
— True Words for Brave Men • Charles Kingsley
... the discomfort experienced, there is likely to be a change of disposition, irritability of temper, fretfulness and peevishness; a tendency to an irascibility all out of proportion to the real provocation. In many cases there is dizziness, and frequently noises in the head, ringing in the ears, spots before the eyes, twitching of the ...
— The People's Common Sense Medical Adviser in Plain English • R. V. Pierce
... lake, into which if a stone be thrown, a tempest suddenly rises; and near this lake, though invisible to men, is the porch of the palace of daemons. In a town adjacent to this mountain, named Junchera, lived one Peter de Cabinam. Being one day teazed with the fretfulness of his young daughter, he, in his impatience, suddenly wished that the devil might take her; when she was immediately borne away by the spirits. About seven years afterwards, an inhabitant of the same city, passing by the mountain, met a man, who complained ...
— Minstrelsy of the Scottish Border, Vol. II (of 3) • Walter Scott
... questions to herself, all of which began with why and how. And Johanna was again beset by the fear that Ephie was sickening for an illness, for the child would pass from bursts of rather forced gaiety to fits of real fretfulness, or sink into brown studies, from which she wakened with a start. But if, on some such occasion, Johanna said to her: "Where ARE your thoughts, Ephie?" she would only laugh, and answer, with a hug: "Wool-gathering, ...
— Maurice Guest • Henry Handel Richardson
... exacting now; but the gentle passiveness that assented to all things, the forgetfulness of the trifles of the day, and the pleased dwelling on scenes and events of long ago, were far more painful to her children than her fretfulness had ever been. ...
— Shenac's Work at Home • Margaret Murray Robertson
... see how "oaks from acorns grow." Mrs. McKenzie's fretfulness on account of her husband's patriotism led to the formation of a society that will make rapid strides towards the front rank of the army now at work for the amelioration of the ...
— Town and Country, or, Life at Home and Abroad • John S. Adams
... the elder anxiously regarding her. Primrose had been fretful ever since hearing from her mother-in-law of Miss Le Pettit's visit of the day before, and of the unaccountable interest the heiress had shown in that faggot of a Loveday, and by now her fretfulness had assumed the size of an indisposition. In vain did Mrs. Lear try and cosset and comfort her with potions both hot and cool; Primrose knew well that beneath the kindness of the farmer's wife lurked the feeling ...
— The White Riband - A Young Female's Folly • Fryniwyd Tennyson Jesse
... characteristic; the large mixed families of the numerous wives live together harmoniously, and the gift of a kraal to one member is acknowledged by all the rest. Revenge, violence, and passion are to be found among them, but not fretfulness and quarrelsomeness. ...
— Pioneers and Founders - or, Recent Workers in the Mission field • Charlotte Mary Yonge
... important of these criticisms have come from within the ranks of the Socialist movement itself, and have been widely exploited as portending the disintegration of the Socialist movement. Inter alia, it may be remarked here that a certain fretfulness of temper characterizes most of the critics of Socialism. Strict adherence to the letter of Marx is pronounced as a sign of intellectual bondage of the movement and its leaders to the "Marxian fetish," and, on the other hand, ...
— Socialism - A Summary and Interpretation of Socialist Principles • John Spargo
... the bench, does stick out his toe a little beyond the prescribed line. Or suppose Jimmy crowds up to him a little too closely, and feeling that he can't breathe as freely as he wishes, gives him a hunch; or suppose Betty, during a temporary fit of fretfulness, induced by long setting in one posture, or overcome with the heat of a midsummer afternoon, or the sweltering temperature of a room where an old-fashioned box stove has been converted into a furnace; suppose Betty gives her seat-mate a sly pinch to make her move to a more tolerable distance, ...
— Mrs Whittelsey's Magazine for Mothers and Daughters - Volume 3 • Various
... theology The screws are started up in everything. Of course, I don't apologize for Grace. I think she might have done more prudently Than introduce her troubles here to-night, But, after all, we do not know the cause That stirs her fretfulness. ...
— Bitter-Sweet • J. G. Holland
... authority was thus taken off from me, I had a vivid discernment of intolerable moral difficulties inseparable from the doctrine. First, that every sin is infinite in ill-desert and in result, because it is committed against an infinite Being. Thus the fretfulness of a child is an infinite evil! I was aghast that I could have believed it. Now that it was no longer laid upon me as a duty to uphold the infinitude of God's retaliation on sin, I saw that it was an immorality to teach that ...
— Phases of Faith - Passages from the History of My Creed • Francis William Newman
... the rough and the smooth together, and make the best of it. I think it will be an experience for you, and a wholesome change from too much luxury. But mind"—and his strong, dark face looked very determined—"I want no grumbling and no fretfulness. If you think you've any real, genuine pioneer spirit in you, come. If you're in doubt about it, stay behind, and go to Norway and ...
— The Rhodesian • Gertrude Page
... room Major Lovell proved a wonderfully patient and skillful nurse; but there were times when all his bright cheeriness could not smooth the furrows in the invalid's brow, or take away the fretfulness ...
— Probable Sons • Amy Le Feuvre |
