"Self-contained" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... still remained an old-world protest against the big clock in the tower over the gymnasium that set the time for the clanging school bell. Situated in the midst of beautiful scenery, the large grounds formed a little self-contained kingdom, shut off from the rest of the world: the numerous tennis courts and the playing fields provided ample space for outdoor sports; the home farm supplied milk, butter, and eggs; the kitchen garden grew the fruit and vegetables; while a small sanatorium in a breezy corner ...
— The Nicest Girl in the School - A Story of School Life • Angela Brazil
... Divine self-existence as a perfection of life, and the Divine self-exertion in the realizing a Godlike perfection of life in the world. Holiness as an attribute of the Divine Being is His pure and inviolably self-contained personality in its absolute perfection. Hence it is that in holiness, as the absolute unity and purity of the Divine Being and working, all the attributes of Divine revelation centre. And so holiness, as expressive of the Being of God, qualifies ...
— Holy in Christ - Thoughts on the Calling of God's Children to be Holy as He is Holy • Andrew Murray
... hard for men of our day to understand. "To comprehend it," says Lea, "we must picture to ourselves a stage of civilization in many respects wholly unlike our own. Passions were fiercer, convictions stronger, virtues and vices more exaggerated, than in our colder and self-contained time. The age, moreover, was a cruel one.... We have only to look upon the atrocities of the criminal law of the Middle Ages to see how pitiless men were in their dealings with one another. The wheel, ...
— The Inquisition - A Critical and Historical Study of the Coercive Power of the Church • E. Vacandard
... with Hortense Dufresnoy progressed slowly as, ever, and not even the Froissart incident went far towards promoting it. Absorbed in her studies, living for the intellect only, too self-contained to know the need for sympathy, she continued to be, at all events for me, the most inaccessible of God's creatures. And yet, despite her indifference, I loved her. Her pale, proud face haunted me; her voice haunted me. I thought ...
— In the Days of My Youth • Amelia Ann Blandford Edwards
... suspended in the chaos of which the Master interprets the meaning. Tinsley, bowed down with the laurels of both hemispheres, raises himself to yet nobler heights in his capacity of a devoted chef. It is almost unbelievable! And yet men write of the Master as cold, aloof, self-contained. Such characters do not elicit the joyous and unswerving devotion which Lavalle commanded throughout life. Truly, we have changed very little in the course of the ages! The secrets of earth and sky and the links that bind them, we felicitate ourselves we ...
— Actions and Reactions • Rudyard Kipling
... energy of her throbbing mills; the searching appraisal of her resources; the marshalling of all her genius of trade conquest. Dominating all this is the kindling idea of a self-contained empire, linked with the slogan: "Home Patronage of Home Product." The war found her unprepared to fight; she is determined that peace shall see her fit for ...
— The War After the War • Isaac Frederick Marcosson
... Thompkins, disclosing her teeth in an inscrutable smile that the moonbeams made more strange than it actually was. "Like to know how I know? Sure you'd like to know, Mrs. Simplicity?" Her beads rattled above Audrey's insignificant upturned nose. "Isn't a yacht the queerest little self-contained state you ever visited? It's as full of party politics as Massachusetts; and that's some. Well, I didn't use all my medicine you gave me. Didn't need it. So I've shared it with him. I got the empty packet with all ...
— The Lion's Share • E. Arnold Bennett
... Indian agent at the reservation, should have accepted the services of this unpromising specimen as "striker." It was a seven-weeks' wonder that Downs kept the pact, and sober as a judge, from the hour he joined the Bugologist to the night that self-contained young officer was sent crashing into his beetle show under the impact of Wren's furious fist. Then came the last pound that broke the back of Downs' wavering resolution, and now had come—what? The sergeant and party rode back from Dick's to tell Captain ...
— An Apache Princess - A Tale of the Indian Frontier • Charles King
... much more power you would have over men if you were more emotional, more spontaneous, more human? Who gives you credit for self-control? No one. They say you are self-contained—a very different idea. They say you are cold. Now, I don't care what I do. I follow every impulse. I must follow them. I had to come here this evening. I had to tell you about Reckage. The landlord was odious. ...
— Robert Orange - Being a Continuation of the History of Robert Orange • John Oliver Hobbes
... friendly, but not intimate. They never had had a dispute, they never were confidential with each other; in truth, they were both reserved and silent men, and, probably, respected each other the more for being so self-contained. There was a private feeling in Coulson's heart which would have made a less amiable fellow dislike Philip. But of this the latter was unconscious: they were not apt to exchange many words in the room which they ...
— Sylvia's Lovers — Complete • Elizabeth Cleghorn Gaskell
... he remembers the copy-book at school, no doubt, with its large-text aphorism, "Silence is wisdom;" and thinking in an easy obedience to gain credit from mankind by acting on that questionable sentence, the result is what you perpetually see—a self-contained, self-satisfied, selfish, and reserved young puppy. Hint to such an incommunicative comrade, that the fashion now is coming about, to talk and show your wisdom; not to sit in shallow silence, hiding hard your folly; soon shall you loosen the flood-gates of his speech; and society will even thank ...
— The Complete Prose Works of Martin Farquhar Tupper • Martin Farquhar Tupper
... looked exactly as memory had pictured him—plain of feature, distinguished in bearing, grave, self-contained, yet with that lurking light in his eyes which showed that humour lay beneath. Claire smiled at him across the table, and asked ...
— The Independence of Claire • Mrs. George de Horne Vaizey
... been lifted beyond the fireside or domestic circle; that the sunny, tendriled hair and pink ears had never inclined to anything but whispered admiration; and that the graceful, lithe, erect figure, so independent and self-contained, had been satisfied to lean only upon his arm for support. He was conscious that this had been in his mind when he first saw her; he was equally conscious that she was more bewilderingly fascinating to him in her present inaccessible intelligence ...
— Sally Dows and Other Stories • Bret Harte
... that he is a good boy now," explained Mary proudly. Guthrie ejaculated "Sonny boy!" and held out his arms. The baby, bearing no malice, tumbled into them, and was at once occupied with his father's watch-chain. The three subsided upon two cane chairs, looking, as Mary keenly comprehended, like a self-contained family. ...
— Sisters • Ada Cambridge
... sufficiently popular with the Wheelwrights to have made her a welcome guest. They admitted her cleverness, but they considered her hard, unsympathetic, and abrupt in manner. We know that she was self-contained and homesick, pining for her native moors. This was not evident to a girl of ten, the youngest of the Wheelwright children, who was compelled to receive daily a music lesson from Emily in her play-hours. When, however, Charlotte came back to ...
— Charlotte Bronte and Her Circle • Clement K. Shorter
... dishes; but she was thought irresponsible, and Aurelia, needing somebody to lean on (having never enjoyed that luxury with the gifted Lorenzo), leaned on Hannah. Hannah showed the result of this attitude somewhat, being a trifle careworn in face and sharp in manner; but she was a self-contained, well-behaved, dependable child, and that is the reason her aunts had invited her to Riverboro to be a member of their family and participate in all the advantages of their loftier position in the world. It was several years since Miranda and Jane ...
— Rebecca of Sunnybrook Farm • Kate Douglas Wiggin
... of Catenac seemed to irritate Mascarin so much, that calm, and self-contained as he usually was, he pulled off his cap and dashed ...
— Caught In The Net • Emile Gaboriau
... apply to the Maori—at any rate to the unspoiled Maori. As seen by the early navigators, his life was one of regular, though varied and not excessive toil. Every tribe, in most ways every village, was self-contained and self-supporting. What that meant to a people intelligent, but ignorant of almost every scientific appliance, and as utterly isolated as though they inhabited a planet of their own, a little reflection ...
— The Long White Cloud • William Pember Reeves
... charming town in the world. It is one of the neat cities: trim, small, packed, self-contained. A good woman in early middle age, careful of her dress, combined, orderly, not without a sober beauty—such a woman on her way to church of a Sunday morning is not more pleasing than Delft. It is on the verge of monotony, yet still ...
— Hills and the Sea • H. Belloc
... a man so serious, so self-contained, and not yet three days emancipated from a routine of drudgery, should stand rubbing his chin in the street, in a ...
— Mugby Junction • Charles Dickens
... traversing street after street, the direction always trending toward the river—until finally she halted before what appeared to be, as nearly as he could make out in the almost total darkness of the ill-lighted street, a small and tumble-down, self-contained dwelling that bordered on what seemed to be an unfenced store yard of some description. He drew his breath in sharply. She had halted—waiting for him to come up with her. She was waiting for him—WAITING for him! It seemed as though he drank of some strange, ...
— The Adventures of Jimmie Dale • Frank L. Packard
... strongly;[3] not with any ardent affection or ultimate hope; but with a resolute and continent energy of will, as knowing that for failure there was no consolation, and for sin there was no remission. And the Greek architecture rose unerring, bright, clearly defined, and self-contained. ...
— The Crown of Wild Olive • John Ruskin
... damage the case they were in," Carse continued. "The whole device seemed self-contained. It means just one thing: special protection. Since the mechanism for invisibility survived the crashing of the dome, we may be sure that the brain machine did too. And more than that: we may assume that there was ...
— The Bluff of the Hawk • Anthony Gilmore
... sartain, colonel!" piped Weasel, a self-contained mite of a fellow, who was still at work upon his glass, filled at the last general treat, although every one else had finished so long ago that they were growing thirsty again—"don't be too sartain. Them detectives bunked at my shanty ...
— Romance of California Life • John Habberton
... to the first is: a social and industrial system based on small, self-contained, largely self-sufficing units, where supply follows demand, where production is primarily for use not profit, and where in all industrial operations some system will obtain which is more or less that of the guilds of the Middle Ages. I should ...
— Towards the Great Peace • Ralph Adams Cram
... Self-contained and unembarrassed, I awaited at the Tuileries The issue, for I trusted the Nation's Common Sense; And although the rowdy Faubourgs tried a few of their Tom-fooleries, My soldiers soon let ...
— Punchinello, Vol. 1, Issue 10 • Various
... could hardly believe his eyes. Could this passionate, thoroughly aroused woman be his cold, self-contained daughter? He could not understand, as so many cannot, that such natures when aroused are tenfold more intense than those whom little things excite. A long and peculiar train of circumstances, a morbid and overwrought physical condition, led to this outburst from Christine, which was as much ...
— Barriers Burned Away • E. P. Roe
... Rogers Clark stood in the centre of the square, under the flag to whose renown he had added three stars. Straight he was, and square, and self-contained. No weakening tremor of exultation softened his face as he looked upon the men by whose endurance he had been able to do this thing. He waited until the white smoke of the last gun had drifted away on the breeze, until the ...
— The Crossing • Winston Churchill
... his brother in appearance, but his face was sterner and his eyes keener. He had been made a bold, determined man by the pressure of harsher circumstances. He shook his brother by the hand in self-contained fashion. ...
— The Eagle's Heart • Hamlin Garland
... left fatherless and all but friendless in childhood; he had been bred among men who regarded his very existence as a danger to the State; his words had been watched, his looks noted, his friends jealously withdrawn. In such an atmosphere the boy grew up silent, wary, self-contained, grave in temper, cold in demeanour, blunt and even repulsive in address. He was weak and sickly from his cradle, and manhood brought with it an asthma and consumption which shook his frame with a constant cough; his face was sullen and bloodless, ...
— History of the English People, Volume VI (of 8) - Puritan England, 1642-1660; The Revolution, 1660-1683 • John Richard Green
... must be either very dull of heart and mind, or self-contained and of self-control beyond the common. But whatever the heart might be, no one ever took the eyes for the eyes of a fool. They were keen, alert, perpetually on guard. There is a letter extant—it was indeed a dear friend who wrote it—which mocks at Harry for his "curst stand-and-deliver ...
— The Highwayman • H.C. Bailey
... Indeed he seemed a different man. His old swagger and roaring bluster disappeared; he drank less, diced less, blasphemed less, and stormed less than in the old days before the halt at Penrith; but rode, a silent, thoughtful figure, so self-contained and of so godly a mien as would have rejoiced the heart of the sourest Puritan. The wild tantivy boy had vanished, and the sobriquet of "Tavern Knight" was ...
— The Tavern Knight • Rafael Sabatini
... maple sugar and red pepper had rid me of my cold, and with the return of strength, and the coming of confidence, full, joyous appreciation of wild environment and life made me unspeakably happy. And I noticed that my companions were in like condition of mind, though self-contained where I was exuberant. Wallace galloped his sorrel and watched the crags; Jones talked more kindly to the dogs; Jim baked biscuits indefatigably, and smoked in contented silence; Frank said always: "We'll ooze along easy like, for we've all the time there is." Which sentiment, ...
— The Last of the Plainsmen • Zane Grey
... to have kept house in Edinburgh," observed Francesca, looking up from "The Scotsman." "One can get a 'self-contained residential flat' for twenty pounds a month. We are such an enthusiastic trio that a self-contained flat would be everything to us; and if it were not fully furnished, here is a firm that wishes to sell a 'composite bed' for six pounds, and a 'gent's stuffed easy' for five. Added ...
— Penelope's Progress - Being Such Extracts from the Commonplace Book of Penelope Hamilton As Relate to Her Experiences in Scotland • Kate Douglas Smith Wiggin
... power of story-telling among the Provencals and their responsiveness as listeners. Daudet mentions the contrast to be observed between an audience of southerners and the stolid, self-contained attitude of a crowd in ...
— Frederic Mistral - Poet and Leader in Provence • Charles Alfred Downer
... Scotland: but it is I think justified by this change, which altered altogether the character of the history and the circumstances of the monarchs. Henceforward new agencies, new powers, were at work in the little proud and self-contained kingdom, which had maintained its independence and individuality so long. Torn asunder by rival influences, by intrigues incessant and profound, by that struggle between the old and the new which ...
— Royal Edinburgh - Her Saints, Kings, Prophets and Poets • Margaret Oliphant
... by the hand, but without speaking a syllable. They gazed intently on the polished and sable space to which he had directed their attention. Suddenly the surface assumed a new and singular appearance. It no longer simply reflected the objects placed before it, but, as if it had self-contained scenery of its own, objects began to appear within it, at first in a disorderly, indistinct, and miscellaneous manner, like form arranging itself out of chaos; at length, in distinct and defined shape and symmetry. It was thus that, ...
— Waverley Volume XII • Sir Walter Scott
... a different Amaryllis that the pretended Philadelphus faced now, from the one who had welcomed him on his arrival in Jerusalem months ago. Then she had been so cold and self-contained that it would have been effrontery to discuss her hopes with her. Now, with the avarice of love in her eyes, with wishfulness and defeat making their sorry signs on her face, she was a creature that even the humblest would ...
— The City of Delight - A Love Drama of the Siege and Fall of Jerusalem • Elizabeth Miller
... man, however slightly; you do not, And so can hardly share my expectation. But he has been, throughout these many years, So secretive, so self-contained, so deep In matters that I could not guess, that now, When he at last promises to proclaim Some strange discovery, I half believe It will be worth ...
— Mr. Faust • Arthur Davison Ficke
... there is not the slightest evidence. He was absent from the Hague at the time and wholly preoccupied with the sore necessities of the military position; and it is said that he was much affected at hearing the dreadful news. But his naturally cold and self-contained nature had been hardened in the school of adversity during the long years of humiliation which had been imposed upon him by John de Witt and his party. He had endured in proud patience awaiting the hour when he could throw off the yoke, and now that it had ...
— History of Holland • George Edmundson
... in the country did I know anything that afforded me a purer, more genuine joy than my meetings with this imperturbable, self-contained woman. We had rapidly come to confidential terms with one another, so that one day without consultation or emotion we said "Du" to each other—I do not even know whether it was she or I ...
— The German Classics of the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries - Masterpieces of German Literature Vol. 19 • Various
... cold, impersonal scrutiny as hard to bear as the Dago Duke's frank impudence as she swaggered to her seat at the end of the long dining-room and faced them. He was as different in his way from the men about him as the Dago Duke, yet he differed, too, from that conspicuous person. He seemed self-contained, reserved to the point of reticence, but with a quiet assurance of manner as pronounced as the other's effrontery. He was dressed in a blue flannel shirt and worn corduroys. His face was tanned but it was the sunburned face of an invalid. There were hollows in his cheeks and a tired look ...
— The Lady Doc • Caroline Lockhart
... said Warner, as he listened to the violent outbreak, so unusual on the part of the reserved and self-contained lad. "Here come ...
— The Sword of Antietam • Joseph A. Altsheler
... fairly knocked endwise; but Alicia was as well-poised and as self-contained as on that Thanksgiving morning in New York when she and old Henry had picked me up in their automobile—a trifle more stunning and a bit more determined, perhaps. Oh, she was a splendid creature in the first glory of her womanhood, a perfectly groomed and an utterly spoiled young ...
— Laughing Bill Hyde and Other Stories • Rex Beach
... brought with her a tall young woman with eyes of dark blue and hair of brown shot with gold wherever the firelight fell upon it. This girl showed a sinuous grace when she walked and she seemed to Prescott singularly self-contained. ...
— Before the Dawn - A Story of the Fall of Richmond • Joseph Alexander Altsheler
... instrument from the case, pulled out the legs of its self-contained tripod, then carried it to a spot near where he had estimated the first charge would be placed. The instrument was equipped with three movable rings to be set for the celestial equator, for the zero meridian, and for the right ...
— Rip Foster in Ride the Gray Planet • Harold Leland Goodwin
... the threshold. They were both men of a certain self-contained dignity of type; and when Lazarus opened wide the door, they stepped into the shabby entrance hall as if they did not see it. They looked past its dinginess, and past Lazarus, and The Rat, and Mrs. Beedle—THROUGH ...
— The Lost Prince • Frances Hodgson Burnett
... we reached the self-contained flat at the top of the house; then I begged Raffles to be quiet in a lower whisper than ...
— Mr. Justice Raffles • E. W. Hornung
... left the room he was apparently, in every respect, his usual self-contained self. However, it was not until the following morning that he so much as thought of the sheaf of papers lying unread in the drawer of Theodora ...
— Masters of Space • Edward Elmer Smith
... curious histories of the eastern Jews to some magazine. They are to be published separately, as they have been very successful; but I am glad this book is to be what he calls "self-contained." He is too good to be wasted ...
— Heartsease - or Brother's Wife • Charlotte M. Yonge
... police had succeeded in suppressing all communication between the detained members of the Rue St. Claude den and the head office—which he shrewdly suspected to be situated in London. So confident were the group in the self-contained properties of each of their branches that the raid of any one establishment meant for them nothing more than a temporary financial loss. Failing the clue supplied by the draft on Paris, the case, so far as he was concerned, indeed, must have terminated with the ...
— The Yellow Claw • Sax Rohmer
... Cassandra's nodding plumes seeming to accentuate her expressions of peace and good will. While our Quaker lady was stepping off gaily, her late tormentor now her willing captive, Lydia, usually so quiet and self-contained, suddenly collapsed upon the nearest seat and went off in a violent attack of hysterics. One of the Austrian women rushed off for a glass of water, while the countesses ministered to her, in true story-book fashion, having with them a bottle of sal volatile which seems ...
— In Chteau Land • Anne Hollingsworth Wharton
... refused to believe any good of the self-contained, reticent stranger. The nephew of somebody's brother-in-law, who lived in Lexington Avenue, was one. He had been promised, by the cousin of somebody else, the position of clerk with Otto Kling, and although Otto had never heard of it, he WOULD have heard ...
— Felix O'Day • F. Hopkinson Smith
... founding of Massachusetts was preeminently a self-conscious movement, the work of able and resolute men who brought an unquenchable moral enthusiasm to the support of a clearly defined purpose. They had counted the cost and made their choice; and every instinct of proud and self-contained men disposed them to minimize the difficulties which they encountered in the New World and to exaggerate those which they had overcome in the Old. Having staked their judgment on the wisdom of the ...
— Beginnings of the American People • Carl Lotus Becker
... really to have kept house in Edinburgh," observed Francesca, looking up from the Scotsman. "One can get a 'self-contained residential flat' for twenty pounds a month. We are such an enthusiastic trio that a self-contained flat would be everything to us; and if it were not fully furnished, here is a firm that wishes to sell a 'composite bed' for six pounds, and a 'gent's stuffed easy' for five. Added ...
— Penelope's Experiences in Scotland • Kate Douglas Wiggin
... I think, one of the strangest little "banquets" I ever sat down to. Every one travels more or less "self-contained" in the Saloniki area, and whenever a party is thrown together the joint supplies are commandeered for the common good. The mess menu was a simple one of soup, tinned salmon, rice, and cheese, but by the time M. Venizelos's hamper had yielded ...
— World's War Events, Volume III • Various
... land-route to our Eastern and Australian Empire? If it is to be shunted, then the explorations of the last three hundred years have been in vain. The dreams of some of the greatest statesmen of past times are reduced to dreams, and nothing more. The strength given by this glorious self-contained route, from the old country to all the new countries, is wasted. On the other hand, if those who now govern inherit the great traditions of the past; if they believe in Empire; if they are statesmen—then, ...
— Canada and the States • Edward William Watkin
... said Mr. Grayson, courteously, and Harley at once acted upon the invitation. Mrs. Grayson, at the same moment, came from the inner room, quiet and self-contained, and ...
— The Candidate - A Political Romance • Joseph Alexander Altsheler
... a tight-fisted hand at the grindstone, Scrooge! a squeezing, wrenching, grasping, scraping, clutching, covetous, old sinner! Hard and sharp as flint, from which no steel had ever struck out generous fire; secret, and self-contained, and solitary as an oyster. The cold within him froze his old features, nipped his pointed nose, shrivelled his cheek, stiffened his gait, made his eyes red, his thin lips blue; and spoke out shrewdly in his grating voice. A frosty rime was on his head, and on ...
— Short Story Writing - A Practical Treatise on the Art of The Short Story • Charles Raymond Barrett
... and vigorous, a judgment sound and well-poised, a calm and self-contained temper, which impelled him to the right and restrained him from the wrong, and a moral sense which guided and controlled his purposes and his actions along the path of absolute rectitude, he lived a life adorned by noble virtues and filled with noble deeds. Gentle but firm, decided, ...
— Memorial Addresses on the Life and Character of William H. F. Lee (A Representative from Virginia) • Various
... sat a man of his own age, clean-shaven and sharp-featured. He had calm, somewhat cold, gray eyes, a deliberate, self-contained manner of speaking, and a pallid, dry complexion that suited with his thin features. His dress was plain, although it was thoroughly neat. He had no flowered satin waistcoat; but something in his bearing told you that he was a man who had no anxiety about the narrow ...
— The Story of a New York House • Henry Cuyler Bunner
... companion or I seen a more charming, a more varied household, an establishment more self-contained, more complete in all things from vegetables to brains. No need to leave the place for anything. Yet if one wished to look about the country, there was the motor, and there were the saddle horses in the stable—all of them members of old Virginian families—and there were ...
— American Adventures - A Second Trip 'Abroad at home' • Julian Street
... sweetest in my condition is that I feel that I understand her but that she will never understand me; not because she is inferior: on the contrary she ought not to understand me. She is happy, she is like nature: consistent, calm, and self-contained; and I, a weak distorted being, want her to understand my deformity and my torments! I have not slept at night, but have aimlessly passed under her windows not rendering account to myself of what was happening to me. On the 18th our company started on a raid, and I spent three ...
— The Cossacks • Leo Tolstoy
... range of the Altai Mountains and the desert of Gobi cut off her thinly peopled province of Eastern Siberia from the Chinese Empire; while in the remote East her shores verged upon ice-bound and inhospitable seas. Hers was thus an extraordinarily isolated and self-contained empire, except on the side of Europe; and even on the side of Europe she was more inaccessible than any other state, being all but land-locked, and divided from Central Europe by a belt of ...
— The Expansion of Europe - The Culmination of Modern History • Ramsay Muir
... self-contained and rather detached manner of the old courtier, mingled with the straight-forward self-possession of the old soldier thoroughly accustomed to dealing with men in difficult moments, threw in a word or ...
— December Love • Robert Hichens
... was quiet and self-contained—too old for his years by far. Which always carries its own punishment. Had a Subaltern, or a Tea- Planter's Assistant, or anybody who enjoys life and has no care for tomorrow, done what he tried to do not a soul would have cared. But when Peythroppe—the estimable, virtuous, economical, quiet, ...
— The Works of Rudyard Kipling One Volume Edition • Rudyard Kipling
... without forcing themselves into the limelight or seizing every opportunity to air their opinions. Now that Spargo met him in the flesh he proved to be pretty much what the journalist had expected—a rather cold-mannered, self-contained man, who looked as if he had been brought up in a school of rigid repression, and taught not to waste words. He showed no more than the merest of languid interests in Spargo when Breton introduced him, and his face was quite expressionless when Spargo brought to an end his brief explanation ...
— The Middle Temple Murder • J.S. Fletcher
... difference in the progress of the two animals—the one awkward, and seeming as if running on stilts; the other compact, muscular, and self-contained, evidently possessing double the endurance with an equal ...
— Off to the Wilds - Being the Adventures of Two Brothers • George Manville Fenn
... distinct characters quite out of the ordinary. One came out of a piece of newly cleared ground, making a wide detour to avoid the snakes. He was an old, hollow-cheeked man, with a drawn and characterful brown face. He had a sort of self-contained quaintness and rough humor impossible to describe; a certain cynical earnestness that puzzled one. "The niggers were jealous of me over on the other place," he said, "and so me and the old woman begged this piece of woods, and I cleared it up myself. Made nothing for two years, but I reckon I've ...
— The Souls of Black Folk • W. E. B. Du Bois
... I could turn and live with animals, they are so placid and self-contained I stand and look at them long and long. They do not sweat and whine about their condition, They do not lie awake in the dark and weep for their sins, No one kneels to another, nor to one of his kind that lived thousands of years ...
— AE in the Irish Theosophist • George William Russell
... then greeted her exactly as at home she would have greeted Dr. Llewellyn or Captain Stewart; by rising upon her hind legs, placing her forepaws upon Mrs. Vincent's shoulders and nestling her magnificent head into the amazed woman's neck as confidingly as a child would have done. A less self-contained woman would have been frightened half to death. Miss Sturgis came near swooning but Mrs. Vincent just gathered the great dog into her arms as she would have gathered one of ...
— Peggy Stewart at School • Gabrielle E. Jackson
... cool and self-contained, could not withhold an execration. His small eyes glittered, his face swelled with rage; for a moment he was within a little of an explosion. Of what mad, what insensate folly, unworthy of a schoolboy, ...
— The Long Night • Stanley Weyman
... the world to the homes of her friends had filled her with a yearning for freedom and for independence, for a greater range of thought and action. Her artistic studies had served to foster an unrest she struggled against bravely and to conceal which she became daily more self-contained. Her reserve was like a barrier about her. She was sweet and gentle to all around her, but a little aloof and very silent. To the other girls she had been a heroine of romance, puzzling mystery surrounded her; to the Nuns an enigma. The Mother Superior, ...
— The Shadow of the East • E. M. Hull
... gained this grand epitome of knowledge: Each human being has a heart and soul, And self is but an atom of the whole. I hold he is best learned and most wise Who best and most can love and sympathize. Book-wisdom makes us vain and self-contained; Our banded minds go round in little grooves; But constant friction with the world removes These iron foes to freedom, and we rise To grander heights, and, all untrammelled, find A better atmosphere and clearer skies; ...
— Maurine and Other Poems • Ella Wheeler Wilcox
... not an athlete in any rational sense of the term. He is a wiry emaciated being whose little muscles are strung like whipcord; but it is strange to dignify him as an athlete. If he once rises above nine stone in weight, his life becomes a sort of martyrdom; but, abstemious and self-contained as he is, we can hardly give him the name which means so much to all healthy Englishmen. For some time each day the wondrous specimen of manhood must stew in a Turkish bath or between blankets; he tramps ...
— The Ethics of Drink and Other Social Questions - Joints In Our Social Armour • James Runciman
... series is to meet the needs of students who are either unable or unwilling to attend classes in subjects which they wish to study. No effort has been spared to make the books self-contained. It is taken for granted that no help is available other than that to be found in the pages of the various volumes, and it is hoped that this help will be sufficient to enable the most isolated student to give himself a thorough ...
— Not Like Other Girls • Rosa N. Carey
... appreciate the cellular theory, the most important element in our science, it is necessary to understand in the first place that the cell is a UNIFIED ORGANISM, a self-contained living being. When we anatomically dissect the fully-formed animal or plant into its various organs, and then examine the finer structure of these organs with the microscope, we are surprised to find that all these different parts are ultimately ...
— The Evolution of Man, V.1. • Ernst Haeckel
... the causes of our depression are due to speculation, inflation of securities and real estate, unsound foreign investments, and mismanagement of financial institutions, yet our self-contained national economy, with its matchless strength and resources, would have enabled us to recover long since but for the continued dislocations, shocks, and setbacks ...
— State of the Union Addresses of Herbert Hoover • Herbert Hoover
... become cringing and pliable, until working ever in the same routine from day to day he seemed to have sunk into a soulless machine rather than a man. No great question had ever stirred him. At the end of this snug century, self-contained in his own narrow circle, it seemed impossible that any of the mighty, primitive passions of mankind could ever reach him. Yet birth, and lust, and illness, and death are changeless things, and when one of these harsh facts springs ...
— Round the Red Lamp - Being Facts and Fancies of Medical Life • Arthur Conan Doyle
... peculiar distaste for national integrations and boundaries of any kind between men. The new civilisation which the world is preparing for, and which the war seems divinely ordained to hasten to us, will have little to do with tightly bound and self-contained peoples. In fact, such nations furnish in themselves an explosive force for disruption. Little more than material vision is now required to perceive most of the nations of lower Europe gathered like crones about a fire hugging the heat to their knees, ...
— Child and Country - A Book of the Younger Generation • Will Levington Comfort
... looked at Wiggins. Her face was still deathly pale, her hands twitched the folds of her dress convulsively, and her eyes had a glassy stare that was almost terrible. It could be no common thing that had caused such deep emotion in one who was usually so self-contained. ...
— The Living Link • James De Mille
... struggle broke through upon his face. For the first time, it occurred to Sharlee, as she looked at the new markings about his straight-cut mouth, that this old young man whom she had commonly seen so matter-of-fact and self-contained, might be a person of stronger emotions than her own. After all, what did she really know ...
— Queed • Henry Sydnor Harrison
... lay in the fact that France, to a very great extent, is a self-contained, self-supporting land, which England distinctly is not; and another reason undoubtedly was that the French, being more frugal and careful than their British or their American brethren ever have been, make culinary use of a great deal of healthful provender which the English-speaking races throw ...
— Eating in Two or Three Languages • Irvin S. Cobb
... understand that he had a heavy account to settle with his Creator; wherefore Dick learned to loathe his God as intensely as he loathed Mrs. Jennett; and this is not a wholesome frame of mind for the young. Since she chose to regard him as a hopeless liar, but an economical and self-contained one, never throwing away the least unnecessary fib, and never hesitating at the blackest, were it only plausible, that might make his life a little easier. The treatment taught him at least the power ...
— The Light That Failed • Rudyard Kipling
... desk Miss Gussie Fink seemed a shade cooler, more self-contained, and daisylike than ever. From somewhere at the back of her head she could see that Heiny was avoiding her desk and was using the services of the checker at the other end of the room. And even as the poison of this was ...
— Buttered Side Down • Edna Ferber
... Tristan?" More than ever it seems like the atmosphere of a dream closing down upon him, a dream in which they move, projecting incredible things. But he has perfectly seized her meaning, and even in a dream a man acts in character. Pale and self-contained, he hands her his unsheathed sword, and his voice shows a first tinge of emotion as he speaks the name of Morold, whom, it would almost seem, she had loved. "If Marold was so dear to you, again take up the sword, and drive it surely ...
— The Wagnerian Romances • Gertrude Hall
... his hand on mine and gripped it so firmly that I looked at him with astonishment He was a cold, self-contained man, making no friends, never talking about himself, doing his duty as mate of the Venus as a seaman should do it, and never giving any one—even myself, with whom he was more open than any other man—any encouragement to ask him why he, a highly educated and ...
— Susani - 1901 • Louis Becke
... week after the funeral of my poor friend Humphrey Challoner that I paid my first regular visit of inspection to his house. I had been the only intimate friend of this lonely, self-contained man and he had made me not only his sole executor but his principal legatee. With the exception of a sum of money to endow an Institute of Criminal Anthropology, he had made me the heir to his entire estate, including his museum. The latter bequest was unencumbered by any conditions. I could keep ...
— The Uttermost Farthing - A Savant's Vendetta • R. Austin Freeman
... manager in disgust. "If these Herringport tabbies had the toothache they would register only polite anguish—in public. They are the most insular and self-contained and self-suppressed women I ever saw. These Down-Easters! They could walk over fiery ploughshares and only ...
— Ruth Fielding Down East - Or, The Hermit of Beach Plum Point • Alice B. Emerson
... the self-contained and steadfast Francis—the future Admiral of the Fleet; who was born in April 1774, and divided in age from Henry by their sister Cassandra. He must have spent some time at home with his sisters, after their return from school, ...
— Jane Austen, Her Life and Letters - A Family Record • William Austen-Leigh and Richard Arthur Austen-Leigh
... mulatto woman, with whom he lived in this part of his extraordinary dual existence, nursed and cared for him with such rude attentions as the surroundings afforded. In the wanderings of his mind the same duality of life followed him. Now and then he would appear the calm, sober, self-contained, well-ordered member of a peaceful society that his friends in his far-away home knew him to be; at other times the nether part of his nature would leap up into life like a wild beast, furious and gnashing. At the one time he talked evenly and clearly of peaceful things; at the other time ...
— Howard Pyle's Book of Pirates • Howard I. Pyle
... Douglas residence in Minnesota Block.[647] In contrast to these functions dominated by a thoroughly charming personality, the formal precision of the receptions at the White House was somewhat chilling and forbidding. President Buchanan, bachelor, with his handsome but somewhat self-contained niece, was not equal to this social rivalry.[648] Moreover, the cares of office permitted the perplexed, wearied, and timid executive no respite day ...
— Stephen A. Douglas - A Study in American Politics • Allen Johnson
... to her brother's greater astonishment, the usually self-contained Claire Standish burst into ...
— Black Caesar's Clan • Albert Payson Terhune
... something to yourself, lad. All your young life you've been too self-contained and exclusive in your habits. 'The noblest study of mankind is man.' It would broaden you to go into politics for a time, and do much to develop your character and relieve the monotony ...
— Aunt Jane's Nieces at Work • Edith Van Dyne
... prudent reference to resources which seemed ever to be expected and never to arrive. Nevertheless, under the vines in front of some inn at Genzano or Albano, Ibsen would duly be discovered, placid and dreamy, always self-sufficient and self-contained, but not unwilling to exchange, over a flask of thin wine, commonplaces with a Danish friend. It was at Ariccia, in one of these periods of villegiatura, during the summer and autumn of 1865, that Brand, which had long been under considerature, suddenly took ...
— Henrik Ibsen • Edmund Gosse
... opera before all Paris; and she said it so seriously that I, knowing her desire to make people talk, trembled lest she should execute her threat. In spite of her real passion she was never meditative, self-contained, or reverent, like Henriette; on the contrary she was insatiable as a sandy soil. Madame de Mortsauf was always composed, able to feel my soul in an accent or a glance. Lady Dudley was never affected by ...
— The Lily of the Valley • Honore de Balzac
... to search all England," said he, "I don't suppose you could find a household more self-contained or freer from outside influences. Whole weeks would pass, and not one of them go past the garden gate. The professor was buried in his work and existed for nothing else. Young Smith knew nobody in the neighbourhood, and lived very much as his employer did. The two women had nothing to take them ...
— The Return of Sherlock Holmes • Arthur Conan Doyle
... recovering, was still far from well. Slingsby was dull for the same reason, and also because he felt his passion to be hopeless. Lewis was dull because he knew Nita's circumstances to be so very sad; and Lawrence was dull because—well, we are not quite sure why he was dull. He was rather a self-contained fellow, and couldn't be easily understood. Of the whole party, Antoine alone was not dull. Nothing could put him in that condition, but, seeing that the others were so, he was grave, ...
— Rivers of Ice • R.M. Ballantyne
... an all-metal room is that it's impossible to hide a self-contained bug in it that will be of any use. A small, concealed broadcaster can't broadcast any farther than the walls, so any bug has to have wires leading out of ...
— A Spaceship Named McGuire • Gordon Randall Garrett
... to realise that there is anything but shop-windows in Bond Street, but I like to think that, up there in those upper storeys which one never sees, there does dwell a self-contained little community to whom Bond Street is merely the village street, down which the housewives pass gossiping each morning to the greengrocer's or the fishmonger's and never purchase any ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 159, December 15, 1920 • Various
... was the English conception of education as a private and voluntary and religious affair and no business of the State; so self-contained were the English as a people; and so little did they know or heed the progress made in other lands, that the arguments for national action encountered tremendous opposition from the Conservative elements, and often were opposed even by Liberals. The ...
— THE HISTORY OF EDUCATION • ELLWOOD P. CUBBERLEY
... pine seems to me so unfamiliar and self-contained. In approaching it, we feel as if in the presence of a superior being, and begin to walk with a light step, holding our breath. Then, perchance, while we gaze awe-stricken, along comes a merry squirrel, chattering and laughing, to break the spell, ...
— The Mountains of California • John Muir
... tax a man like Doddridge. Those were the cruel days of dear posts and "private opportunities;" and a letter needed to contain matter enough to fill a little pamphlet; and when some cosy country clergyman, who could sleep twelve hours in the twenty-four, or some self-contained dowager, who had no charge but her maid and her lap-dog, insisted on long missives from the busiest and greatest of their friends, they forgot that a sermon had to be laid aside, or a chapter of the Exposition suspended in their favor; or that a man, who had seldom leisure to talk ...
— The International Monthly, Volume 3, No. 1, April, 1851 • Various
... very different effect upon its two hearers. Corona was as nearly angry as her self-contained nature would permit; but, although he did not allow his feelings to betray him, the bishop was delighted. Now they must all go, and that ...
— The Associate Hermits • Frank R. Stockton
... of those undemonstrative, self-contained men in whom some of the coloured, cautious metaphysicians find a congenial soul. Therefore is he a compendium of much out-of-the-way ...
— Tropic Days • E. J. Banfield
... Miss Whitmore, the self-contained young medical graduate, blinked rapidly and found urgent need of tucking in wind-blown, brown locks, with her back to the tall cow-puncher who had unwittingly dropped his mask for an instant. She took off J. G.'s old hat, turned it clean around twice and ...
— Chip, of the Flying U • B. M. Bower
... he endeavored to say something to them Mrs. Morris moved toward him. Isabel took a step or two more in the direction of the Winslow elm and its inviting bench, but then she also turned. She was of a moderate feminine stature and perfect outline, her step elastic, her mien self-contained, and her face so young that a certain mature tone in her mellow voice was often the cause of Ruth's fond laughter. As winsome, too, she was, as she was beautiful, and "as pink as a rose," said the old-time soldier to himself, as he came down his ...
— Bylow Hill • George Washington Cable
... hat on the back of his head, and looked straight before him: walking in a self-contained way as if there were nothing in the streets to claim his attention. His mouth was such a post-office of a mouth that he had a mechanical appearance of smiling. We had got to the top of Holborn Hill before I knew that it was merely a mechanical appearance, ...
— Great Expectations • Charles Dickens
... more than half covered with winter's snow, I came across the nest of a ptarmigan near a drift and at an altitude of thirteen thousand feet above sea-level. The ptarmigan, with their home above tree-line, amid eternal snows, are wonderfully self-reliant and self-contained. The ouzel, too, is self-poised, indifferent to all the world but his brook, and showing an appreciation for water greater, I think, than that of any other landsman. These birds, the ptarmigan and the ...
— Wild Life on the Rockies • Enos A. Mills
... was because Mike had been born for this world in which now for the first time he found himself, that he suffered from none of this embarrassment; perhaps, too, it was some half-conscious instinct of his own gifts that made him quite self-contained in the presence of acknowledged distinction, so self-contained that you might have thought he had no reverence. As he had passed across the stage, he had eyed that mysterious behind-the-scenes rather with the eye of a future stage-manager, than of a youth ...
— Young Lives • Richard Le Gallienne
... value of confession varies with individual temperaments; for many it is high. There are few so self-contained and self-sufficient that they do not seek to express their emotions to others. It is not surprising that the gregarious human creature should find confession a restorative and a solace. Human beings are not only natively responsive to the emotions of others, but by nature ...
— Human Traits and their Social Significance • Irwin Edman
... serious ordeal for quiet, self-contained Bobby Clyffurde—an Englishman, remember—with all an Englishman's shyness of emotion, all an Englishman's contempt of any display of sentiment. Here was this beautiful girl—whom he loved with all the passionate ardour of his virile, manly ...
— The Bronze Eagle - A Story of the Hundred Days • Emmuska Orczy, Baroness Orczy
... Grecian gluts me with its perfectness Unanswerable as Euclid, self-contained, The one thing finished in this hasty world. But ah! this other, this that never ends, Still climbing, luring fancy still to climb, As full of morals, half divined, as life, Graceful, grotesque, with ever new surprise Of hazardous caprices, sure to please, Heavy as nightmare, ...
— The Cathedrals of Northern France • Francis Miltoun
... his lips and sat up in his chair like an old hound who hears the view-halloa. He waved his hand to the sofa, and our palpitating visitor with his agitated companion sat side by side upon it. Mr. Mortimer Tregennis was more self-contained than the clergyman, but the twitching of his thin hands and the brightness of his dark eyes showed that they shared ...
— The Adventure of the Devil's Foot • Arthur Conan Doyle
... enough for his needs," said he, nodding to the palmer. "These groans betoken a good degree of pain; though the young fellow is evidently a self-contained sort of nature, and does not let us know all he feels. It promises well, however; keep him in bed and quiet, and within a day or two ...
— Doctor Grimshawe's Secret - A Romance • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... in the great fight with disease and death," said Frank gravely. "I wish I could feel as sure of our ultimate success as I do of your being perfectly calm and self-contained in ...
— In the Mahdi's Grasp • George Manville Fenn
... muscular passion, succulent manhood, naked-handed grip of his work. But when he wants to die, by all means let him hunt out a town in the valley of Pennsylvania or Virginia: Nature and man there are so ineffably self-contained, content with that which is, shut in from the outer surge, putting forth their little peculiarities, as tranquil and glad to be alive as if they were pulseless sea-anemones, and after a while going back to the Being whence they came, ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 11, Issue 67, May, 1863 • Various
... lost countenance, brazen as she was. Everybody stared at her and her husband, and seemed dying of laughter. M. le Prince looked at the scene from behind the King, and inwardly laughed at his malicious trick. This amusement lasted throughout all the ball, and the King, self-contained as he usually was, laughed also; people were never tired of admiring an invention so, cruelly ridiculous, and spoke of it for ...
— Marguerite de Navarre - Memoirs of Marguerite de Valois Queen of Navarre • Marguerite de Navarre
... guise of warfare that morality always presents itself to Browning. It is not a mere equilibrium of qualities—the measured, self-contained, statuesque ethics of the Greeks, nor the asceticism and self-restraint of Puritanism, nor the peaceful evolution of Goethe's artistic morality: it is valour in the battle of life. His code contains no negative commandments, ...
— Browning as a Philosophical and Religious Teacher • Henry Jones
... opposed to the fiercer struggle for subsistence in the glaciated lake and forest belt of the north. Similar distinctions of climate and national temperament exist in the two sections of Germany. The contrast between the energetic, enterprising, self-contained Saxon of the Baltic lowland and the genial, spontaneous Bavarian or Swabian is conspicuous, though the only geographical advantage possessed by the latter is a warmer temperature attended by a sunnier sky. He contains ...
— Influences of Geographic Environment - On the Basis of Ratzel's System of Anthropo-Geography • Ellen Churchill Semple
... his poise, his natural repression. Still water runs deep, they say; and a glacial cap may conceal subterranean fires. Trite similes, I grant you—but, ah, how true. The good Lord help those phlegmatics who can stand by unmoved when a self-contained man reveals the anguish of his soul in one passionate outburst. Could the fury that quivered in his voice have wreaked itself on the bison and the men we followed, the stench of their blasted carcasses would have reached high heaven. But the bison surrounded us impassively, bore us ...
— Raw Gold - A Novel • Bertrand W. Sinclair
... traditions of close formations, vast cavalry charges, and other things which will not fit into modern warfare. Braver men do not exist, but it is the bravery of men who have been taught to lean upon each other, and not the cold, self-contained, resourceful bravery of the man who has learned to fight for his own hand. The British have had the teachings of two recent campaigns fought with modern weapons—that of the Tirah and of South Africa. Now that the reserves have joined the colors there are few regiments ...
— New York Times, Current History, Vol 1, Issue 1 - From the Beginning to March, 1915 With Index • Various
... enthusiasm. To aspire, that was the secret of life. Thinking thus, Mr. Heard began to understand the bibliographer's feeling for Mrs. Meadows. She lived for her child—he for his work. They were alike; calm and self-contained, both of them; incapable of illusions, of ...
— South Wind • Norman Douglas
... turned and looked; even within the tranquil presence-chamber of the spirit where two beings, Incarnate God and all but Discarnate Man, were locked in embrace, a certain mental process went on. Yet all was still as apart from him as a lighted stage and its drama from a self-contained spectator. In the material world, now as attenuated as a mirage, events were at hand; but to his soul, balanced now on reality and awake to facts, these ...
— Lord of the World • Robert Hugh Benson
... Lamb is read, as he surely deserves to be, as a whole—letters and poems no less than essays—these notes of fantasy and artificiality no longer dominate. The man Charles Lamb was far more real, far more serious, despite his jesting, more self-contained and self- restrained, than Hazlitt, who wasted his life in the pursuit of the veriest will-o'-the-wisps that ever danced over the most miasmatic of swamps, who was never his own man, and who died, like Brian de Bois Gilbert, 'the victim of contending passions.' ...
— Obiter Dicta - Second Series • Augustine Birrell
... man beside him, Edmund Howard, whose name was a by-word for cynicism, who had never, until he had met Stafford Orme, gone an inch out of his self-contained way to please or benefit a fellow-man, was the slave of the young fellow's imperious will, and though he made burlesque complaint of his bondage, did not in his heart ...
— At Love's Cost • Charles Garvice
... like ticklish business," George Melville told himself, "and Don, though usually self-contained, is hot enough of temper, at a time like this, to make matters pretty bad for ...
— The Submarine Boys' Trial Trip - "Making Good" as Young Experts • Victor G. Durham
... adventurous drives; again camp stayed for some time in the same place. Bob amused himself tramping up and down the river, reviewing the operations. Occasionally Roaring Dick, in his capacity of river boss, accompanied the young fellow. Why, Bob could not imagine, for the alert, self-contained little riverman trudged along in almost entire silence, his keen chipmunk eyes spying restlessly on all there was to be seen. When Bob ventured a remark or comment, he answered by a grunt or a monosyllable. The grunt or the monosyllable was never sullen or hostile or contemptuous; ...
— The Rules of the Game • Stewart Edward White
... throne are in marked contrast. The one with the shield, on the left, is as monumental as one of Bramante's creations, the old gentleman with the beard, on the right, is mincing and has no shoulders. Solomon himself appears as a young man of dark complexion, in an attitude of self-contained determination; the way his hands rest on the sides of the throne is very expressive. His drapery is cast in curious folds of a zig-zag character, following the lines of the composition, whilst the dresses of the other personages fall in broad masses to the ground. The light and shade are cleverly ...
— Giorgione • Herbert Cook
... fresh spring air, and labourers plodding to their work, and loaded wains of odorous hay and dewy garden-stuff were lumbering along the quiet country roads, and the new-born day had altogether the innocent look appropriate to its tender youth,—when the detective stepped out on the platform, calm, self-contained, and resolute, as brisk and business-like in his manner as any traveller in that train, and with no distinctive stamp upon him, however slight, that marked him as ...
— Henry Dunbar - A Novel • M. E. Braddon
... understand, Mr. Harthouse,' she returned, after some indecision: she had been more or less uncertain, and troubled throughout the conversation, and yet had in the main preserved her self-contained manner; 'you will understand that if I tell you what you press to know, it is not by way of complaint or regret. I would never complain of anything, and what I have done I do not ...
— Hard Times • Charles Dickens*
... pettiness, the coolness of sentiment and warmth of impulse, were all spontaneous and unaffected, and as much the outcome of her own position as of the position of the aristocracy to which she belonged. She was wholly self-contained; she put herself proudly above the world and beneath the shelter of her name. There was something of the egoism of Medea in her life, as in the life of the aristocracy that lay a-dying, and would not so much as raise ...
— The Thirteen • Honore de Balzac |
