"Inflexibility" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... with me, young man," said my father, whose inflexibility always possessed the air of the most perfect calmness of self-possession. "Can not may be a more civil phrase than will not, but the expressions are synonymous where there is no moral impossibility. But I am not a friend to doing business ...
— Rob Roy, Complete, Illustrated • Sir Walter Scott
... the murdering scene, the obdurate inflexibility of purpose with which she drives on Macbeth to the execution of their project, and her masculine indifference to blood and death, would inspire unmitigated disgust and horror, but for the involuntary consciousness that it ...
— Characteristics of Women - Moral, Poetical, and Historical • Anna Jameson
... was a comparative stranger in Carleton, having but recently purchased the factories from the heirs of the previous owner; but he had been in charge long enough to establish a reputation for sternness and inflexibility in all ...
— Lucy Maud Montgomery Short Stories, 1896 to 1901 • Lucy Maud Montgomery
... what was called by Lord Lovat's friends, the "rascality" of the judges:—and again this unworthy Highlander was driven from his own country to seek safety in the land wherein his offences had received their pardon. The inflexibility of the justiciary lords, or their known integrity, form a fine incident in history; for the Scottish nation was at this period, ridden by Court faction, and broken down by recent oppression ...
— Memoirs of the Jacobites of 1715 and 1745 - Volume II. • Mrs. Thomson
... when a consciousness of what was due to religion stood most prominently forward. At such times she became severe and abstracted; and yet her occasional austerity could hardly be condemned by her subjects, when it led to that firmness and courage, and that inflexibility in the decrees of justice, for which she was so remarkable. If the grave historian has stamped her character with these attributes of heroism, what scope may not be allowed to the writer of historical fiction? ...
— Gomez Arias - The Moors of the Alpujarras, A Spanish Historical Romance. • Joaquin Telesforo de Trueba y Cosio
... cumulative emphasis, and his construction enabled him so to combine his materials as to secure this effect. He was intensely self-critical; and while almost without conceit concerning his own work, he had an accuracy of detached estimation that enabled him to stand by his own opinion with a proper inflexibility when his judgment convinced him that the ...
— The Autobiography of a Play - Papers on Play-Making, II • Bronson Howard
... statues, with unfaltering candor and good-humor. Here and there, doubtless, as he went, he took in a reef in his sail; but he was too adventurous a spirit to be successfully tamed, and he remained at most points the florid, rather strident young Virginian whose serene inflexibility had been the despair of Mr. Striker. All this was what friendly commentators (still chiefly feminine) alluded to when they spoke of his delightful freshness, and critics of harsher sensibilities (of the other sex) when they denounced his damned impertinence. His appearance enforced ...
— Roderick Hudson • Henry James
... insulting!" cried he, half to himself; and then, with a quick motion hastening to open the door for her, "Go, madam," he added, almost breathless with conflicting emotions, "go, and be your happiness unalterable as your inflexibility!" ...
— Cecilia vol. 2 - Memoirs of an Heiress • Frances (Fanny) Burney (Madame d'Arblay)
... of a sentence with a preposition, or other small particle, is in general undignified, though perhaps not otherwise improper. Hence the above-named inflexibility in the construction of that and as, sometimes induces an ellipsis of the governing word designed; and is occasionally attended with some difficulty respecting the choice of our terms. Examples: "The answer is always in the same case that the interrogative ...
— The Grammar of English Grammars • Goold Brown
... silent, when, ceasing to speak, she fixed on Bridgenorth her eyes, glistening with tears, with the eager anxiety of one whose life or death seemed to depend upon the answer to be returned. Even Bridgenorth's inflexibility seemed to be shaken; and his voice was tremulous, as he answered, "Madam, I would to God I had the present means of relieving your great distress, otherwise than by recommending to you a reliance upon Providence; and that you take heed to your spirit, that it murmur not under this ...
— Peveril of the Peak • Sir Walter Scott
... ear. For a moment, charmed with the loftiness of her discourse and the heroism of her soul, he was half persuaded to relent, and abjure his diabolical purpose. It was only by summoning up all the fierceness of his temper, all the impatience of his passions, and all the mistaken haughtiness and inflexibility of his purpose, that he could resist the artless enchantment. During the internal struggle, his countenance by no means answered to the simplicity of pastoral sentiments. It was now fierce, and now unprotected and despairing. Anon it was pale with envy, and anon it was flushed with the triumph ...
— Imogen - A Pastoral Romance • William Godwin
... went into the unknown,—a way so wide and terrible that we may not follow it even in thought. We live alone with majestic forces,—forests greater than an empire, unmapped waters, and strange, savage men. We are pygmies; yet, if we have spirit we can grow into some measure of the greatness and inflexibility around us. Monsieur, when you asked me—what you asked me now—you were thinking of France and its standards. Of little, tidy, hedged-in France. You were not—— Oh, monsieur, I am sorry you asked me that ...
— Montlivet • Alice Prescott Smith
... for a sin and shame. For more than twelve long years I have borne it in my memory, and could now reproduce it as freshly as if it were still before my eyes. Of all modes of death, methinks it is the ugliest. Her wet garments swathed limbs of terrible inflexibility. She was the marble image of a death-agony. Her arms had grown rigid in the act of struggling, and were bent before her with clenched hands; her knees, too, were bent, and—thank God for it!—in the attitude of prayer. Ah, that rigidity! ...
— The Blithedale Romance • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... enraged, as a man, have been the main data upon which the estimate of his bearing and character has been predicated. He was irascible and quick in his temper, and when angered was violent in words and manner. It was at such moments that the stern inflexibility of his will was manifest; and his passion towered in proportion to provocation. But in private life and social intercourse he was bland, gentle, and conciliating. His manner was most polished and lofty in society, ...
— The Memories of Fifty Years • William H. Sparks
... taking this important vote, in which, I suspect, we should have been unanimous, the commodore and Capt. Hutchinson came on board to inquire into the cause of the dispute; and this lucky, and well timed visit, saved our credit; and established the Yankee character for inflexibility, beyond all doubt or controversy. These two worthy gentlemen soon discovered that Mr. O. had made representations not altogether correct. They therefore ordered the hatches to be taken off, and proper bread to be served out, and so the ...
— A Journal of a Young Man of Massachusetts, 2nd ed. • Benjamin Waterhouse
... useless. The old man opposite him had a manner as deft and unassuming as his own; it masked a cynical inflexibility of ...
— The Second Class Passenger • Perceval Gibbon
... and appropriate expression, had he said, "let us slide," for we were going down an inclined plane with perfect ease. The compass indicated that we were moving in a southeasterly direction. The flow of lava had never turned to the right or the left. It had the inflexibility of a ...
— A Journey to the Centre of the Earth • Jules Verne
... aware must be a work of time; but the first step was to deserve her esteem, and to begin by conducting myself towards her, and her father, with perfect sincerity and openness. The more I was convinced of my father's inflexibility, the more desperate I knew my circumstances were, the more I was bound not to mislead by false appearances. They would naturally suppose that I should inherit my father's fortune—I knew ...
— Tales & Novels, Vol. IX - [Contents: Harrington; Thoughts on Bores; Ormond] • Maria Edgeworth
... was of sufficient moment to justify a revision of the system. There is abundant reason, nevertheless, to suppose that immaterial as these objections were, they would have been adhered to with a very dangerous inflexibility, in some States, had not a zeal for their opinions and supposed interests been stifled by the more powerful sentiment of selfpreservation. One State, we may remember, persisted for several years in refusing her concurrence, ...
— The Federalist Papers
... belong to the Antediluvian Epoch. Whooping-cough, measles, scarlet fever, and croup are comparatively modern inventions. They and the doctors came in after the flood; and the gracious law of compensation, in its rigorous inflexibility, sets these over against the superior civilization of our golden age. At a time when the court-dress of our ancestors was composed of fig-leaves, or of imperfectly dressed skins—nothing like the Astrachans of the nineteenth century—it would certainly have been very inconvenient to coddle ailing ...
— Punchinello, Vol.1, No. 4, April 23, 1870 • Various
... stars at sea from the latitude of Iceland to near the equator at Elmina. Though yet longer baffled by the skepticism which knew not how to comprehend the clearness of his conception, or the mystic trances which sustained his inflexibility of purpose, or the unfailing greatness of his soul, he lost nothing of his devotedness to the sublime office to which he held himself elected from his infancy by the promises of God. When, half resolved to withdraw from Spain, traveling on foot, he knocked at the gate of the monastery ...
— Christopher Columbus and His Monument Columbia • Various
... gave of this inflexibility was in 1620, when he gained a lawsuit against a priest named Meunier. He caused the sentence to be carried out with such rigour that he awoke an inextinguishable hatred in Meunier's mind, which ever after burst forth on the ...
— CELEBRATED CRIMES, COMPLETE - URBAIN GRANDIER—1634 • ALEXANDRE DUMAS, PERE
... from taking the step he so strongly disapproved. He had, in fact, made this threat as a last effort to save her from a union that would, inevitably, lead to unhappiness. But having made it, his stubborn and offended pride caused him to adhere with stern inflexibility to his word. ...
— The Lights and Shadows of Real Life • T.S. Arthur
... outside the Embassy to catch one glimpse of the strong, stern, thoughtful face of the man who had come with his legions to assist France in the great hour of need. They talked to each other about the inflexibility of his character, about the massive jaw which, they said, would bite off Germany's head. They cheered in the English manner, with a "Heep! heep! hooray!"—when they caught sight for the first time of the khaki uniforms of English officers on the steps of the ...
— The Soul of the War • Philip Gibbs
... of Reproduction have much to do with determining pen methods they become important factors for consideration. While their waywardness and inflexibility are the cause of no little distress to the illustrator, the limitations of processes cannot be said, on the whole, to make for inferior standards in drawing, as will be seen by the following rules which they impose, and for which a strict regard ...
— Pen Drawing - An Illustrated Treatise • Charles Maginnis
... was no ordinary man to succumb to the fascinations of a woman. She had experienced his obstinacy, and knew the inflexibility of his nature. His determination was a rock against which she had been broken too many times not to know its strength. For a moment she despaired, then courage came to her again, thrusting away the doubts that crowded ...
— The Sheik - A Novel • E. M. Hull
... farewell blessing on the several tribes (Ch. 33). Make a list of what shall come to each tribe. (6) The names, location and purpose of the cities of refuge and the lessons for today to be drawn from them and their use. (7) The inflexibility of ...
— The Bible Book by Book - A Manual for the Outline Study of the Bible by Books • Josiah Blake Tidwell
... age; her painters founded new schools of art, and vied with the Italian masters; her theologians gave rise to controversies which brought all churches and their champions within the scene of conflict; and her pulpit orators acquired a celebrity which, in spite of the inflexibility of the language, was second only to that enjoyed by the most renowned preachers of France ...
— History of Rationalism Embracing a Survey of the Present State of Protestant Theology • John F. Hurst
... firm in his belief that the crime had been committed by Bucholz, and being a man of stern inflexibility of mind, and of a determined disposition, he was resolved that justice should be done and the guilty ...
— Bucholz and the Detectives • Allan Pinkerton
... apparently. This was the Weekly Dispatch, a paper that in those days was scarcely thought to be proper reading for young people. He read it, however, with avidity, and there is no doubt that it had much to do with forming his political character, and in laying the foundation of the sturdy inflexibility with which he held to his political principles. One of his early friends says, "He liked the Weekly Dispatch. The politics, being racy, had a great attraction for him, and he used ...
— Personal Recollections of Birmingham and Birmingham Men • E. Edwards
... of learning and piety which this prelate enjoyed in common with so many of his clerical contemporaries, he added an extraordinary earnestness in the promotion of Christian knowledge, and a courageous inflexibility on points of professional duty, imitated by few and excelled by none. His manly spirit disdained that slavish obsequiousness by which too many of his episcopal brethren paid homage to the narrow prejudices and state-jealousies of an imperious mistress, and it soon became evident that ...
— Memoirs of the Court of Queen Elizabeth • Lucy Aikin
... activity of his mental processes delighted her while he questioned her. After the slovenly methods of Madame, after the loose reasoning and the muddled thinking of all the women she met in the course of her work, there was a positive pleasure in following the exactness and inflexibility of his logic. His reasoning was orderly, neat, elastic, without loose ends or tangled skeins to unravel, and she felt again, while she listened to him, the confidence which had come to her as soon as she ...
— Life and Gabriella - The Story of a Woman's Courage • Ellen Glasgow
... informed him, speaking with an unexampled severity of tone, that he was on no account to think of going to the office as usual, but was to wait at home until his father's return—and then hurried from the room. The fact was, that Mrs. Thorpe distrusted her own inflexibility, if she stayed too long in the presence of her penitent son; but Zack could not, unhappily, know this. He could only see that she left him abruptly, after delivering an ominous message; and could only place the gloomiest ...
— Hide and Seek • Wilkie Collins
... in the way of the actual redress of wrong. The increasing complexity of human action as civilization advanced outstripped the efforts of the law. Sometimes ancient custom furnished no redress for a wrong which sprang from modern circumstances. Sometimes the very pedantry and inflexibility of the law itself became in individual cases ...
— History of the English People, Volume II (of 8) - The Charter, 1216-1307; The Parliament, 1307-1400 • John Richard Green
... had no children, and her most tender affections were concentrated upon her husband and her brother. The scruples which caused the latter to forswear matrimony grieved her deeply, for, knowing the inflexibility of his character, she was sure that no one in the world could make him ...
— Serge Panine • Georges Ohnet
... what she thinks she wants, but when the builder has followed her plans she is far from satisfied with the result. She is used to material which puckers and stretches in her clothing; she cannot understand the inflexibility of wood and stone. The remedy is for high-school girls, probably even grammar-school pupils as well, to have along with their drawing some problems in house-planning and ...
— The Cost of Shelter • Ellen H. Richards
... drinking bouts in the not so very distant past. But—two months before—Jim had startled Links and horrified his priest by marrying Kitty Muckevay of the gold-red hair. Kitty had a rare measure of good sense but was a Protestant of Ulster inflexibility. She had taken Jim in hand to reform him, and for sixty days he had not touched a drop! Moreover he had promised Kitty to keep out of mischief on this day of days. All that morning he had worked among the horses in Downey's ...
— The Preacher of Cedar Mountain - A Tale of the Open Country • Ernest Thompson Seton
... began his studies for the life of Ingres, which appeared in 1867, he found many letters of the artist, which enabled him to follow the latter through the various phases of his life: to know the changes of his temper, the inflexibility of his character; his emotions day by day; his momentary discouragements, his great will-power; the heroic efforts he made to reach the heights; his ideas on art, his opinions of others as well as himself: and thanks to these documents, he was enabled to reproduce ...
— Library Of The World's Best Literature, Ancient And Modern, Vol. 5 • Various
... all sorts, and resolved not to yield, determined to cut short all useless supplications, which would only make him lose precious time. He said, therefore, with a grave, severe, and almost solemn air, which showed the inflexibility of his determination: "Listen to me, wife—and you also, my son—when, at my age, a man makes up his mind to do anything, he knows the reason why. And when a man has once made up his mind, neither wife nor child can alter it. I have resolved to do my duty; ...
— The Wandering Jew, Complete • Eugene Sue
... the journey. He had acquired considerable experience of the privations to be encountered, but refused to comply with the wishes of Colonel Gawler, the Governor, to abandon the expedition as hopeless, and return to Adelaide. Indeed, with characteristic inflexibility—almost approaching to obstinacy—he resolved to attempt the western route along the shore of the Great Bight—a journey which, only a few months before, he ...
— Explorations in Australia • John Forrest
... 'they will do for an Irishman;' and the prisoner was strung up by them accordingly. It is a savage legend which deserves to be remembered in justice to the audacity of the nameless peasant. Probably invented to glorify a renowned Englishman's inflexibility, it illustrates at all events the temper in which the war was waged. Ferocity to Irishmen was accounted policy and steadfastness. Every advantage was taken of the superiority of English steel and ordnance. Writing in 1603 for the information of King James, Ralegh ...
— Sir Walter Ralegh - A Biography • William Stebbing
... attention in his preface to the use of representative themes, an illustration of which was also noted in "The Redemption." The first one, consisting of four notes, presenting a sequence of three major seconds, is intended to express "the terror inspired by the sense of the inflexibility of justice and, in consequence, by that of the anguish of punishment. Its sternness gives expression both to the sentences of divine justice and the sufferings of the condemned, and is found in combination throughout the whole ...
— The Standard Oratorios - Their Stories, Their Music, And Their Composers • George P. Upton
... flexibility, suppleness, pliancy, limberness, ductility, malleability. Antonyms: inflexibility, rigidity. See inflexibility. ...
— Putnam's Word Book • Louis A. Flemming
... myself: either God himself, being omnipresent, is the cause of everything—even of every thought and volition of mine—and so in a sense offers prayers to himself through me, or, if my will is independent of God's will, it implies arrogance and a doubt as to the inflexibility as well as the perfection of the divine determination to believe that it can be influenced by human appeals. When not quite seventeen years old I went to Goettingen University. During the next eight years I seldom saw the home ...
— The German Classics of The Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, Vol. X. • Kuno Francke
... the army, and his patronage being almost unlimited, it was natural, they say, that he should be received with cheers. From a lieutenant up to a general, all are dependent on his favor for promotion. At all events, his austerity and inflexibility have been relaxed, and he has made popular speeches wherever he has gone. I hope good fruits will ensue. But he returns to find the people here almost in a state of starvation in the midst of plenty, brought on by the knavery or ...
— A Rebel War Clerk's Diary at the Confederate States Capital • John Beauchamp Jones
... are necessary; he understands that it is necessary to begin afresh, since the usual result has not been attained. He is then capable of reflection, and the series of acts which he accomplishes are not ordained with such inflexibility that it is impossible for him to modify them in order to ...
— The Industries of Animals • Frederic Houssay
... Puritans, whose cloaks were of the most formal cut, and whose hats emulated the steeple of St. Paul's; Levellers, with firm steps, wrinkled and over-hanging brows, and hard unchanging features, all denoting inflexibility of purpose and decision of character; Cavaliers, whose jaunty gait was sobered, and whose fashionable attire was curtailed in consideration that such bravery would be noticed and reproved by the powers that ...
— The Buccaneer - A Tale • Mrs. S. C. Hall
... his friend, Sir Roderick Murchison. To the stern dictates of duty, alone, has he sacrificed his home and ease, the pleasures, refinements, and luxuries of civilized life. His is the Spartan heroism, the inflexibility of the Roman, the enduring resolution of the Anglo-Saxon—never to relinquish his work, though his heart yearns for home; never to surrender his obligations until he can write ...
— How I Found Livingstone • Sir Henry M. Stanley
... affini.[84] It is necessary to be on one side or the other—individualist or socialist. There is no middle ground. And I am constantly growing more and more convinced that the only serviceable tactics for the formation of a socialist party likely to live, is precisely that policy of theoretical inflexibility and of refusing to enter into any "alliance" with partiti affini, as such an alliance is for socialism only a "false placenta" for a fetus that ...
— Socialism and Modern Science (Darwin, Spencer, Marx) • Enrico Ferri
... Grotius continue in Holland was so great, that his friend's inflexibility gave him much uneasiness. He wanted him to make application to the Prince of Orange, and, after obtaining his consent, to write to those in power, asking permission to stay in the Country: but this was precisely the step to which Grotius had the ...
— The Life of the Truly Eminent and Learned Hugo Grotius • Jean Levesque de Burigny
... art have no more affecting lesson for us than this. They teach us to abide by our spontaneous impression with good-humored inflexibility then most when the whole cry of voices is on the other side. Else to-morrow a stranger will say with masterly good sense precisely what we have thought and felt all the time, and we shall be forced to take with shame our own opinion ...
— The Evolution of Expression Vol. I • Charles Wesley Emerson
... and steals his Mississippi bonds (engraving), i. 21; efforts to save his life, inflexibility of the ...
— Memoirs of Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds • Charles Mackay
... ordered his three friends to go away. They obeyed at once, and scarcely had they left by one door than the curtain of the other was raised, and the monk, pale, immovable, solemn, appeared on the threshold. When he perceived him, Lorenzo dei Medici, reading in his marble brow the inflexibility of a statue, fell back on his bed, breathing a sigh so profound that one might have supposed it ...
— The Borgias - Celebrated Crimes • Alexandre Dumas, Pere
... unless he and they had been in the nicest mechanical relations and unison, it is curious to consider that the spirit of the man was in moral accordance or interchange with nothing around him. This indeed he had confided to his lost nephew, before the occasion for his present inflexibility arose. ...
— The Mystery of Edwin Drood • Charles Dickens
... importance. With unerring discrimination, she drew the exact line between vivacity and satire, true religion and its semblance. She saw through and pitied those who, pluming themselves on the faults of others, and imparting to the outward man the ascetic inflexibility of the inner one, would fain propagate on all sides their rigid creed, forbidding the more favoured commoners of nature even to sip joy's chalice. If not a saint, however, but a fair, confiding, and ...
— A Love Story • A Bushman
... look at the body. Under the pure white sheet a quilted counter-pane had been placed, for now, more than ever, Aunt Ann had need of warmth; and, the pillows removed, her spine and head rested flat, with the semblance of their life-long inflexibility; the coif banding the top of her brow was drawn on either side to the level of the ears, and between it and the sheet her face, almost as white, was turned with closed eyes to the faces of her brothers and sisters. In its extraordinary peace the face was stronger ...
— Forsyte Saga • John Galsworthy
... Dinah always called her young mistress, even after her marriage, found it easier to submit than contend; and so Dinah had ruled supreme. This was the easier, in that she was perfect mistress of that diplomatic art which unites the utmost subservience of manner with the utmost inflexibility ...
— Uncle Tom's Cabin • Harriet Beecher Stowe
... inflexibility and censoriousness. His account of his father makes one believe in the fatality of heredity. Born of old nonconformist stock, the elder Spencer was a man of absolute punctuality. Always he would step out of his way ...
— Memories and Studies • William James
... greater story in which it is enshrined and with which it is interwoven, the story of that other snare in which my Lord Viscount Wellington took the French, goes on. This story is the history of the war in the Peninsula. There you may pursue it to its very end and realise the iron will and inflexibility of purpose which caused men ultimately to bestow upon him who guided that campaign the singularly felicitous and fitting sobriquet ...
— The Snare • Rafael Sabatini
... of this family, bound together by the force of religious ties, by the inflexibility of its customs, by one solitary emotion, that of avarice, a passion which was now as it were its compass, Elisabeth was forced to commune with herself, instead of imparting her ideas to those around her, for she felt herself ...
— Bureaucracy • Honore de Balzac
... be set apart for daily meditating and reasoning upon them, attended by earnest supplication for the impressing influences of the Holy Spirit. The mind must thus be drilled to reflection upon them till they become principles of action, so vital and permanent, that a shape and inflexibility shall be given to the moral sensibilities, which no wear of time or circumstances ...
— The Faithful Steward - Or, Systematic Beneficence an Essential of Christian Character • Sereno D. Clark
... has? The heart of him is of the true Prophet cast. "He lies there," said the Earl of Morton at his grave, "who never feared the face of man." He resembles, more than any of the moderns, an old Hebrew Prophet. The same inflexibility, intolerance, rigid, narrow-looking adherence to God's truth, stern rebuke in the name of God to all that forsake truth: an old Hebrew prophet in the guise of an Edinburgh minister of the sixteenth century. We are to take him for ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Vol. 1-20 • Various
... to establish the law of the celibacy of the clergy, and to take the patronage of ecclesiastical dignities out of the hands of the laity. He was eminently qualified for this undertaking by the severity of his manners, and the inflexibility of his resolution to accomplish ...
— Lives of the Necromancers • William Godwin
... voice of the fanatical soul belonging to the Grand-master of Ceremonies and Captain General of the Bodyguard at the Headquarters of the Legitimist Court, now detached on a special mission. He was all fidelity, inflexibility, and sombre conviction, but like some great saints he had very little body to keep all ...
— The Arrow of Gold - a story between two notes • Joseph Conrad
... although his early military services, and her frequent visits to the family of her sister, and subsequent establishment at its head, had prevented their ever meeting, still she was familiar with his domestic virtues, and well knew that the rigid inflexibility for which his public acts were distinguished formed no part of his reputation in private life. He was known in Virginia as a consistent but just and lenient master; and she felt a kind of pride in ...
— The Spy • James Fenimore Cooper
... and loaded with brushwood, lashed out with its hoofs at a negro, who at once began to batter it passionately with a pole, and a long line of sneering camels confronted them, treading stealthily, and turning their serpentine necks from side to side as they came onwards with a soft and weary inflexibility. In the distance there was a vision of a glaring market-place crowded with moving ...
— The Garden Of Allah • Robert Hichens
... of Wellington is not a man of an excitable temperament. His mind is of a cast too martial to be easily moved; but, notwithstanding his habitual inflexibility, I cannot help thinking that, when he heard his Roman Catholic countrymen (for we are his countrymen) designated by a phrase as offensive as the abundant vocabulary of his eloquent confederate could supply,—I cannot help thinking that he ...
— The American Union Speaker • John D. Philbrick
... every moment found it more and more difficult to control herself. Never in all her life before had she been so relentlessly, harshly accused. In trying to conceal her emotion she only gave herself the appearance of rigid inflexibility. ...
— The Governess • Julie M. Lippmann
... looked much thinner and older. I saw him very near, and once through my glass; the resemblance to Branwell struck me forcibly—it is marked. He is not ugly, but very peculiar; the lines in his face show an inflexibility, and, I must add, a hardness of character which do not attract. As he stood near me, as he looked at me in his keen way, it was all I could do to stand my ground tranquilly and steadily, and not to recoil as before. It is no ...
— Charlotte Bronte and Her Circle • Clement K. Shorter
... week. She wore also a large, loose, dark-coloured wrapper, which came well up round her neck, and which was not buoyed out, as were her dresses in general, with an under mechanism of petticoats. It clung to her closely, and added to the inflexibility of her general appearance. And then she had encased her feet in large carpet slippers, which no doubt were comfortable, but which struck her visitor as being strange and unsightly. "Do you find a difficulty in getting your people together ...
— Framley Parsonage • Anthony Trollope |
