"Stuffy" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... troubles, the ship went steadily on. During the second night, after leaving Auckland, the wind began to blow pretty fresh, and the hatch was closed. It felt very close and stuffy below, that night. The light went out, and the rats had it all their own way. On the following day, it was impossible to go on deck without getting wet through, so we were forced to stick down below. The rolling of the ship ...
— A Boy's Voyage Round the World • The Son of Samuel Smiles
... engagement to Winnie he took the trouble to get up before noon, and descending the basement stairs, make himself pleasant to Winnie's mother in the breakfast-room downstairs where she had her motionless being. He stroked the cat, poked the fire, had his lunch served to him there. He left its slightly stuffy cosiness with evident reluctance, but, all the same, remained out till the night was far advanced. He never offered to take Winnie to theatres, as such a nice gentleman ought to have done. His evenings were occupied. His work was in a way political, he told Winnie once. She would have, he warned ...
— The Secret Agent - A Simple Tale • Joseph Conrad
... crowded, stuffy hall, A frantic shouter, greater duffer, A mob more prone to stamp and bawl, Noise, suffocation still ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 104, April 15, 1893 • Various
... with a headache, having first ordered them to take their picture books and sit quietly in the parlour as good children should on a Sabbath afternoon. So they had noisily pretended to obtain the picture books and then quietly tiptoed out into the backyard, which was not so stuffy as the parlour. ...
— Merton of the Movies • Harry Leon Wilson
... usual. It was stiflingly hot there, after the cool breeze which blew off the moor on the hillside; the air was thick with smoke and dust, and, as Maggie turned into the alley where she was to leave her child, she felt how close and stuffy it was. ...
— A Pair of Clogs • Amy Walton
... escorted Grace Stepney to the cab it was felt to be fitting she should take, though she lived but a street or two away; and Miss Bart and Gerty found themselves almost alone in the purple drawing-room, which more than ever, in its stuffy dimness, resembled a well-kept family vault, in which the last corpse had just been ...
— House of Mirth • Edith Wharton
... admitted. "It was, after all, nothing to do with me. I see you have cleared your cupboard out. I can assure you that it was a terribly stuffy place with all those clothes of yours ...
— The Governors • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... the woes of Ireland and sat round the stuffy lobby, awaiting Nan Brent's next move. When he saw her at the cashier's window paying out, he concealed himself behind a newspaper, and watched her covertly as the clerk gave instructions to the head porter regarding the disposition ...
— Kindred of the Dust • Peter B. Kyne
... down the skylight, and there was the devoted Martin busy cording cowhide trunks belonging to the deceased whose white beard and hooked nose were the only parts I could make out in the dark depths of a horrible stuffy bunk. ...
— Victory • Joseph Conrad
... at the stuffy appearance of those same knapsacks. Evidently some of the boys' fond mothers or older sisters entertained a healthy fear that their darling might fare badly at meal time; and they had been cooking doughnuts, as well as various other delicacies ...
— The Banner Boy Scouts on a Tour - The Mystery of Rattlesnake Mountain • George A. Warren
... him in the year Eighteen Hundred Fifty-nine, in token of a running high jump—the world's record at the time, or not, as the case may be. Haeckel is essentially an out-of-door man, as opposed to the philosopher who works in a stuffy room, and grows round-shouldered over his microscope. "I may entrust laboratory analyses to others, but there is one thing I will never let another do for me, and that is take my daily ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great - Volume 12 - Little Journeys to the Homes of Great Scientists • Elbert Hubbard
... spirited Proprietor of an opposition Casino, where there is a small theatre, in its way a perfect gem. Here all the "Stars" of any magnitude make their appearance on visiting Royat. As a "Baigneur de Royat" puts it, in a local journal, the Compagnie Brocard cannot consider their stuffy little room ("le petit etouffoir") where theatrical performances are given as a real theatre. It is a pity that M. SAMIE and La Compagnie Brocard cannot, like the "birds in their little nests," agree. But as to Theatres and spectacles, ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 93, September 24, 1887 • Various
... keep you waiting, ma'am, but—" He held the doors open and the two ladies entered the stuffy, unlighted hall. ...
— From the Housetops • George Barr McCutcheon
... her hat in the cloak room. It was a small stuffy place, and the day was unusually sultry, so that Dorothy felt dizzy there, trying to find her hat—and trying to find—Oh! what was the matter? She could not see! Oh, if some ...
— Dorothy Dale • Margaret Penrose
... to the coast, I went by coach. This held six inside and two by the driver. Three of the inside passengers sat with backs to the horses, the others facing them. My coach was full, and stifling hot and stuffy it was before we had done with it. Of the five others two were fat priests, and for twenty hours my place was between them. But in one way I had my revenge: I carried my loaded rifle between my knees, and a pistol in my belt. The dismay, the terror, the panic, the ...
— Tracks of a Rolling Stone • Henry J. Coke
... lessen sorrow is to make a lot of it. The way to endure a painful crisis is to insist very much that it is a crisis; to permit people who must feel sad at least to feel important. In this the poor are simply the priests of the universal civilization; and in their stuffy feasts and solemn chattering there is the smell of the baked meats of Hamlet and the dust and echo of the funeral games ...
— What's Wrong With The World • G.K. Chesterton
... room-mates or devouring the newspaper, which is his only form of recreation and his only bit of excitement. At 5 he will go out for a short stroll down College-street or around College-square. This is his one piece of exercise, if such you can call it. At dusk he returns to his ill-lighted, stuffy room and continues his work, keeping it up, with a short interval for his evening meal, until he goes to bed, the hour of bed-time depending upon the proximity of his examination. A very large percentage when they actually sit for their examinations ...
— Indian Unrest • Valentine Chirol
... free—free in every sense of the word. You have no responsibility except what you impose on yourself; no board bills to pay; nobody to please but your own little self. You've got the clean, wide land for a bedroom, and the sky for its ceiling, instead of a stuffy little ten-by-ten chamber. Do you know that you look fifty per cent better for these few days of living in the open—the way every normal being likes to live? You're getting some color in your cheeks, and ...
— North of Fifty-Three • Bertrand W. Sinclair
... carrying each vase, when filled, to the drawing-room—a painful apartment, crowded with knick-knacks until it resembled a bazaar stall, with knobby and unsteady bamboo furniture and much drapery of a would-be artistic nature. It was stuffy and airless. Cecilia wrinkled her pretty nose as she entered. Mrs. Rainham held pronounced views on the subject of what she termed the "fresh-air fad," and declined to let London air—a smoky commodity at best—attack her cherished carpets; with the result that Cecilia breathed freely only in ...
— Back To Billabong • Mary Grant Bruce
... living room, stuffy because of the characteristically closed windows, but marked by a neatness of its appointments for which the gipsy appearance of Mrs. Duveen had not prepared them. There were several unframed drawings in pastel and water-colour, of birds and animals, upon the walls, and above the little mantelshelf ...
— The Orchard of Tears • Sax Rohmer
... you at once." Cressey's genuineness was a sufficient apology. "I'm a little stuffy to-day. Bachelor dinner last night. What are you doing here? ...
— Success - A Novel • Samuel Hopkins Adams
... rather stuffy and the bed was damp as I was perspiring freely; and consequently I was not ...
— Indian Ghost Stories - Second Edition • S. Mukerji
... now prefers out-of-doors to a stuffy room on summer days," replied Anne, calmly, but watching the effect of ...
— Polly of Pebbly Pit • Lillian Elizabeth Roy
... these things myself. My uncle Jeanbernat used to forbid me to go to church. "Silly girl," he'd say to me, "why do you want to go to a stuffy building when you have got a garden to run about in?" I grew up quite happy and contented. I used to look in the birds' nests without even taking the eggs. I did not even pluck the flowers, for fear of hurting the plants; and you know ...
— Abbe Mouret's Transgression - La Faute De L'abbe Mouret • Emile Zola
... galloping claustrophobia before it's over, anyway," said Multhaus morosely as he followed Mike down the hallway in the direction from which Snookums had come. "Darkness and stuffy air touch off that ...
— Unwise Child • Gordon Randall Garrett
... The cliff presented a striking effect, rising white and shining in the bright sunlight, slightly veiled by the tall trees and creepers, the leaves of which shimmered in the hot noontide haze. The dark entrance to the caves, stuffy as it was, and obstructed by the curious framework of rattans on which the nest-hunters sleep and cook and stow their arms, was a pleasant relief to the heat and glare without. Still more welcome was the sight of the coolies bringing ...
— The Last Voyage - to India and Australia, in the 'Sunbeam' • Lady (Annie Allnutt) Brassey
... brave and kind. To help an unknown, friendless beggar like that, when you should have turned him over to the police! Makes me feel a bit stuffy. They left me for dead. ...
— The Drums Of Jeopardy • Harold MacGrath
... from Newcastle to Bergen, from Bergen to Torneo, from Torneo to Petrograd is a tiresome business. There is much waiting at Custom-houses, disarrangement of trains and horses and meals, long wearisome hours of stuffy carriages and grimy window-panes. Bohun I suspect suffered, too, from that sudden sharp precipitance into a world that knew not Discipline and recked nothing of the Granta. Obviously none of the passengers on the boat from Newcastle had ever heard of Discipline. They clutched ...
— The Secret City • Hugh Walpole
... James. "He's been hard at it, day and night, in that stuffy office. He could stand any amount of work out in the open. But this being cooped up indoors and grinding all the time at those ...
— Out of the Primitive • Robert Ames Bennet
... not do what Mr. Ferry proposed, if you think the house can't be lived in? Put up a tent in the grove and bring Sally there as soon as she's fit for it. She'd get strong twice as fast as in that stuffy flat!" ...
— Strawberry Acres • Grace S. Richmond
... the Tribune, there is no softening that fact, but his "Moses" glorifies it. The simple truthfulness of its noble work wins the heart and the applause of every visitor, be he learned or ignorant. After wearying one's self with the acres of stuffy, sappy, expressionless babies that populate the canvases of the Old Masters of Italy, it is refreshing to stand before this peerless child and feel that thrill which tells you you are at last in the presence of the real thing. This is a human child, this is ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... of the monk's grewsome discourse, Orion turned away with a shudder. The curse with which the patriarch had threatened him recurred to his mind; he could have fancied that the hot, stuffy, incense-laden air of the church was full of flapping daws and hideous bats. Deadly horror crept over him; but then, suddenly, the rebound came of youthful vigor, longing for freedom and joy in living; a voice within cried out: "Away with coercion and chains! Winged spirit, ...
— Uarda • Georg Ebers
... waiters busy over washing up the crockery and setting in order their plates and wine glasses, seeing their calm and cheerful faces, Levin felt an unexpected sense of relief as though he had come out of a stuffy room into the fresh air. He began walking up and down, looking with pleasure at the waiters. He particularly liked the way one gray-whiskered waiter, who showed his scorn for the other younger ones and was jeered at by them, was teaching ...
— Anna Karenina • Leo Tolstoy
... Minister, Mr. Marsh, though suffering with a lame foot, took me in charge, and in due course of time I was presented to King Victor-Emmanuel. His Majesty received me informally at his palace in a small, stuffy room—his office, no doubt—and an untidy one it was too. He wore a loose blouse and very baggy trousers; a comfortable suit, certainly, but not at all conducing to ...
— Memoirs of Three Civil War Generals, Complete • U. S. Grant, W. T. Sherman, P. H. Sheridan
... world to the flower-show, and were received with due ceremony and regaled with suitable fare. And afterwards the Governor took Daisy for a stroll through the tents, and, having thus done his duty handsomely, handed her over to Dick; but she and Dick found the tents stuffy and crowded, and sat down under the trees and enjoyed themselves very much, until Mr. Puttock espied them and came up to them, accompanied ...
— Half a Hero - A Novel • Anthony Hope
... of your brother—and Grace," said Millie. "They've been married only two weeks now, and they're in a stuffy hall bedroom and eating with all the other boarders. Think what our flat would mean to them; to be by themselves, with eight rooms and their own kitchen and bath, and our new refrigerator and the gramophone! It would be heaven! It would be a ...
— The Lost Road • Richard Harding Davis
... Stuffy Pete took his seat on the third bench to the right as you enter Union Square from the east, at the walk opposite the fountain. Every Thanksgiving Day for nine years he had taken his seat there promptly at 1 o'clock. For every time he had done so things had happened to him—Charles Dickensy ...
— The Trimmed Lamp and Others • O Henry
... upon a puzzling word as if it were an unclassified insect. It was a lovely beckoning day out-of-doors. The children felt like captives; there was something that provoked rebellion in the droning voices, the buzzing of an early wild bee against the sunlit pane, and even in the stuffy familiar odor of the place,—the odor of apples and crumbs of doughnuts and gingerbread in the dinner pails on the high entry nails, and of all the little gowns and trousers that had brushed through junipers and young pines on their ...
— A Country Doctor and Selected Stories and Sketches • Sarah Orne Jewett
... getting sometimes a minor engagement at some minor music- hall, sometimes a temporary job as secretary-valet-companion to a roving invalid, dining now and then on plovers' eggs and asparagus at one of the smarter West End restaurants, at other times devouring a kipper or a sausage in some stuffy Edgware Road eating-house; always seemingly amused by life, and always amusing. It is possible that somewhere in such heart as he possessed there lurked a rankling bitterness against the hard things of life, or a scrap of gratitude towards the one or two friends who had helped ...
— When William Came • Saki
... naturally, and your image actually kept Will away for a clear five seconds. I thought what a help it would be to be with you, and afterwards I made the suggestion of an Australian trip on literary business to Aunt Eliza, but it was no good. She is deeply engaged just now in driving batches of stuffy relatives in a stuffy brougham—luckily there's no room for me in it—to still stuffier garden parties. And, besides, I don't feel that I can take any desperate step of that kind until the Irrevocable has been written in ...
— Lady Bridget in the Never-Never Land • Rosa Praed
... governess, and a walk at that early hour was of itself a pleasure to Celestina. She had not been inside the Rectory since the Vane family had replaced old Dr. Bunton and his wife, and scarcely was the door open when the little girl noticed a difference. The old, heavy, stuffy furniture was gone, and though it was still plain, the house looked lighter and brighter. The schoolroom was a nice little room looking towards the sea; there was a good strong table with a black oil-cloth cover and ...
— The Rectory Children • Mrs Molesworth
... The stuffy court room is packed to overflowing. The fat, one-eyed bailiff is perspiring to no purpose. He cannot make the throng "sit down." In fact every one who has anything to do with the pickets perspires to no purpose. Judge Mullowny ...
— Jailed for Freedom • Doris Stevens
... merely background, and ought to be kept in its place. I am no enemy of music, George. The air in a room should be melodious, for the same reason that it should be faintly pleasing to the olfactory sense, and neither hot nor stuffy. Just as the walls should be delightfully coloured and softly lit, and the refreshments pleasant and at the moment of need. But surely we meet for human intercourse. When I go to see people I go to see the people—not to hear a hired boy play the ...
— Select Conversations with an Uncle • H. G. Wells
... were unreal, Madame and Ciccio and the rest. Ciccio was just a fantasy blown in on the wind, to blow away again. The real, permanent thing was Woodhouse, the semper idem Knarborough Road, and the unchangeable grubby gloom of Manchester House, with the stuffy, padding Miss Pinnegar, and her father, whose fingers, whose very soul seemed dirty with pennies. These were the solid, permanent fact. These were life itself. And Ciccio, splashing up on his bay horse and green cloth, he was a mountebank ...
— The Lost Girl • D. H. Lawrence
... precarious living as best he may from the garbage boxes, and spread pestilence from house to house, but the setter, the collie, and the St. Bernard are choked into insensibility with a wire noose, hurled into a stuffy cage, and with the thermometer at ninety in the shade, are dragged through the blistering city, as a sop to that Cerberus of the law which demands for its citizens safety from dogs, and pays no attention to the ...
— Threads of Grey and Gold • Myrtle Reed
... holding it limply in her left hand amid the soft disorder of the counterpane. It had come to her, an intolerably pathetic messenger and accuser, out of the exacerbating frowsiness of the Cedars. Yesterday afternoon care-ridden Sarah Gailey was writing it, with sighs, at the desk in her stuffy, uncomfortable bedroom. As Hilda gazed at the formation of the words, she could see the unhappy Sarah Gailey writing them, and the letter was like a bit of Sarah Gailey's self, magically and disconcertingly projected into the spacious, laughing home of the Orgreaves, and into the mysterious new ...
— Hilda Lessways • Arnold Bennett
... fine fettle. As he saw the sun rise he shouted, laughed, yodeled, leaped, and danced. No more review, no more criticisms to do! It was spring and there was once more the music of the heavens and the earth, the most beautiful of all. No more dark concert rooms, stuffy and smelly, unpleasant people, dull performers. Now the marvelous song of the murmuring forests was to be heard, and over the fields like waves there passed the intoxicating scents of life, breaking through the crust of the earth ...
— Jean-Christophe, Vol. I • Romain Rolland
... greengrocer's shop!" he commanded peremptorily. "It is abominably stuffy down here. We can't have the port-holes filled up ...
— The Honorable Percival • Alice Hegan Rice
... about her, nor the childish laughter, nor all the tiny steps that glided over the polished floors. For a moment, as she sat on the edge of a great red-silk couch, taking from the plate presented to her the first sherbet of her life, she suddenly thought of the dark stairway, of her parents' stuffy little rooms, and it produced upon her mind the effect of a distant country which she ...
— Fromont and Risler, Complete • Alphonse Daudet
... entrance to a mews; the back rooms all look into a mews: we shall have the eternal noise and smell of a mews. My wife's rest will be broken by the carriages rolling in and out. The hall is fearfully small and stuffy. The rent is abominably high; and what is ...
— A Simpleton • Charles Reade
... waters. Feeling very shaky, the Ingletons managed to dress, and tottered on deck. Everard and Mr. Stacey, both looking pale, though they assured every one that they were all right, found comfortable chairs for the ladies, and tucked them up snugly with rugs. After the long hours in the stuffy cabin it was delightful to sit in the sunshine and watch the gray, racing water. Here and there in the distance could occasionally be seen the funnels of far-away steamers, and then there was much excitement and focussing of opera-glasses and telescopes. They wondered if other vessels had been ...
— The Princess of the School • Angela Brazil
... they went on talking for a while. At last the custodian appeared, hot and out of breath, with heads of lettuce under his arms and a bunch of scarlet tomatoes in his hand, and they were admitted into the small, stuffy collection of paintings, where they gained only the vaguest impression of the yellow thunder-clouds and black waters of old Vernet, but on the contrary told each other with considerable detail of their lives and the happenings during all the years since ...
— Mogens and Other Stories - Mogens; The Plague At Bergamo; There Should Have Been Roses; Mrs. Fonss • Jens Peter Jacobsen
... her," said Mrs. Stobell, rejoining the group. "What with losing that nice, airy bunk and getting that nasty, stuffy stateroom, I don't feel ...
— Dialstone Lane, Complete • W.W. Jacobs
... he knew that she was much on deck after midnight, he was studious to keep out of her way. The tedium of stopping in a stuffy stateroom, when the spell of restlessness was on him, waiting for the sounds of his neighbour's return before he might venture forth, was nothing; anything were preferable to figuring as the innocent bystander at another encounter between ...
— The False Faces • Vance, Louis Joseph
... were confined nearly altogether to a small "pin-cushion" cactus, growing a little larger as we travelled south. And always in the mornings when out of the deep canyons the moist, pungent odour of the sage greeted our nostrils. It is inseparable from the West. There is no stuffy germ-laden air there, out in the sage; one is glad to live, simply to breathe it in and ...
— Through the Grand Canyon from Wyoming to Mexico • E. L. Kolb
... big pillars three feet through that reach to the roof. We sleep upstairs; there are ten rooms; but there is no place to sit and toast your shins. Can't see a fire in the house and it is as hot and stuffy as hell; got one of them hot-air things down in the cellar; she shore eats up the coal. There are no whippoorwills and no hoot owls, but lots of crows and jay birds and meadow larks. I like to hear that little, yaller-chested feller whistle from the pasture gatepost. Far off to the south, ...
— Chit-Chat; Nirvana; The Searchlight • Mathew Joseph Holt
... eve of battle! I am writing this in a stuffy little hotel room and I don't dare stop whistling for a minute. You could cover my courage with a postage stamp. In the morning I sail for the Flowery Kingdom, and if the roses are waiting to strew my path it is more than they have done here for the past few years. When the train pulled out ...
— Lady of the Decoration • Frances Little
... misguided creatures who enjoy the bracing ozone of the balsam-laden air. To Smith the pungent sap of the evergreen tree was a poor substitute for the stimulating essence of greenback, the cologne of greasy bills, and it would take a big pile of them to make the room "stuffy" enough to have him raise the window. When it came to drawing nigh to money, Mr. Smith was ...
— Cupid's Middleman • Edward B. Lent
... really and truly undergone a very respectable quantity of suffering. I once saw one of these pious cargoes put ashore on the coast of Cyprus, where they had touched for the purpose of visiting (not Paphos, but) some Christian sanctuary. I never saw (no, never even in the most horridly stuffy ballroom) such a discomfortable collection of human beings. Long huddled together in a pitching and rolling prison, fed on beans, exposed to some real danger and to terrors without end, they had been tumbled about for many wintry weeks in the chopping seas of the Mediterranean. ...
— Eothen • A. W. Kinglake
... crossing the mountains I had felt rather chilly and had been wearing a light racing coat. But after the lamps were lighted the compartment became very hot and stuffy, and I found the coat uncomfortable. So I stood up, and, after first slipping the strap of the bag over my head, I placed the bag in the seat next me and pulled off the racing coat. I don't blame myself ...
— In the Fog • Richard Harding Davis
... and pulled a half-broken cigar out of a side pocket. Mashurina gave him a light, and without exchanging a single word, or so much as looking at one another, they began sending out long, blue puffs into the stuffy room, already ...
— Virgin Soil • Ivan S. Turgenev
... charge; but he had seen a good deal of them. They looked to him like convicts; or manikins—moving to the pull of the hour-string. They were incessantly being loaded, unloaded, made to march; cooped in small, stuffy places—chained. ...
— Son of Power • Will Levington Comfort and Zamin Ki Dost
... his room, narrow and stuffy as a prison-cell, Yourii found life as dreary as ever, and his little love-episode seemed to him ...
— Sanine • Michael Artzibashef
... up two flights of stairs to a room which seemed close and stuffy to her, although in English eyes it might be deemed comfortable and even luxurious. But padded arm-chairs and couch, eider-down silken-covered quilts, cushions, curtains, and carpets, were things ...
— Brooke's Daughter - A Novel • Adeline Sergeant
... with any peevishness from Gaga; although, the causes of her hysteria having been removed, she was not likely to repeat the failure of that other restless night. A heaviness hung upon her as the day wore on; a kind of thick readiness for sleep. She yawned over her work. The workroom seemed stuffy, the day unusually long. The nervous strain of the past few days was reacting, and even Sally's vitality was shaken by the consequences of her successive excitements. When tea-time came she was relieved. But there had been no news of Gaga, or from him: not even a message through Miss ...
— Coquette • Frank Swinnerton
... I shan't think much of your taste. I'll put up the parasol and tuck it into the ropes—so!—that you may feel nice and private if anyone passes. Now then, how's that? Isn't that comfy? Isn't that an improvement on the stuffy little study?" ...
— Tom and Some Other Girls - A Public School Story • Mrs. George de Horne Vaizey
... anxious thoughts the freedom of the halls until daybreak. And these thoughts, which had become like invisible presences to the girl, wandered up and down the dim staircase, where the lowered lights awaited George's return, invaded the drawing-room, filled with stuffy red velvet chairs, so like crouching human beings in the darkness, and even thronged about her threshold, ready to spring inside at the instant when George should open the door. While her fire burned ...
— Life and Gabriella - The Story of a Woman's Courage • Ellen Glasgow
... having been made one of the two "stablemen" of my sub-division, a post which was to last for a week, and kept me in constant attendance on the horses down below; so that I might just as well have been in a very stuffy stable on shore, for all I saw of the run down Channel. My duty was to draw forage from the forward hold (a gloomy, giddy operation), be responsible with my mate for the watering of all the horses in my sub-division—thirty in number, for preparing their feeds and "haying ...
— In the Ranks of the C.I.V. • Erskine Childers
... o'clock just as he was leaving the great building with all its harrowing sights, sounds, and smells, a peremptory telephone call from one of the younger surgeons of the city summoned him back into the stuffy office again. ...
— The White Linen Nurse • Eleanor Hallowell Abbott
... Kitten picked himself up and looked about him, he found himself in a place that he had never seen before, although he had lived all his life in the house. It was a very small stuffy fusty room, with boards, and rafters, and cobwebs, ...
— The Great Big Treasury of Beatrix Potter • Beatrix Potter
... cooler, and my brother might get some sleep. She tries to be good and patient with us both, and it really does soothe her when my brother can sit by her, and talk in his cheerful droll way; but he can stay but a very short time. He has to rush back to his horrid stuffy office, and then she frets after him and says, 'But what right have I to such a son?' and she begins ...
— The Long Vacation • Charlotte M. Yonge
... similar one. If some following sentence should be, "Though not wider, it yet presents a more imposing appearance than its neighbors, because the door is placed at one side, thus making room for a single wide display window instead of two stuffy, narrow ones," a detail has been added which, though not changing the general outline, makes the picture clearer and at the same time emphasizes the distinguishing ...
— Composition-Rhetoric • Stratton D. Brooks
... the Frascati is a novelty; it is all so open and, though there are plenty of staffers about, not in the least stuffy. It would take a considerable crowd to overcrowd the place and to demoralise the troops of well-disciplined waiters, all under the eye of the ever-vigilant generalissimo of the forces, who in his white waist-coat, ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Volume 103, December 3, 1892 • Various
... was clear and the sea was much smoother. The sun shone bright and warm; more people came on deck, rejoicing that they could live in the vigor of the open rather than in their stuffy state rooms. The two seasick elders thought it wiser to remain quietly in their berths for another day, so Chester and Elder Malby had the day to themselves. As the accident of the night before became known to the passengers, it was the ...
— Story of Chester Lawrence • Nephi Anderson
... with a certain tone of irony in his voice, "that you think I am a mere society butterfly. What do you think I care for all the scented drawing-rooms in the world, for polo, for Hurlingham, for a stuffy reception in some great house in town? Nothing—nothing! Give me the open prairie land, the tall, brown grass, the open sky, the joy of the weary body that has ridden hard ...
— High Noon - A New Sequel to 'Three Weeks' by Elinor Glyn • Anonymous
... dismally, and I sat in the stuffy cabin, either peering at the country through the window or talking with a young Dutchman, the only other traveller. At one village a boy was engaged in house-cleaning by immersing the furniture, piece by piece, ...
— A Wanderer in Holland • E. V. Lucas
... that time, what with the stale cookin' and bilge water scents that was comin' from the stuffy cabin, and this charmin' mood that old Spiller was in, I was gettin' restless. "Say, Chunk," I breaks in, "you may be enjoyin' this, all right; but I've got enough. It's me for ...
— Odd Numbers - Being Further Chronicles of Shorty McCabe • Sewell Ford
... in a beautiful grove of trees," Knight explained, "and that setting and the boys' voices in the open air and all—well, it has spoiled me for stuffy meeting-houses. Can't you all come up and stay over next Sunday?" His glance and the eyes of all the We are Sevens were fastened anxiously on ...
— Blue Bonnet's Ranch Party • C. E. Jacobs
... couldn't be expected to live forever, and it would be a good thing to have someone in charge of the Estate who wouldn't let it get to looking so rusty that riffraff dared to make fun of it. For George had lately undergone the annoyance of calling upon the Morgans, in the rather stuffy red velours and gilt parlour of their apartment at the hotel, one evening when Mr. Frederick Kinney also was a caller, and Mr. Kinney had not been tactful. In fact, though he adopted a humorous tone of voice, in expressing his, sympathy for people who, through the city's poverty in hotels, were ...
— The Magnificent Ambersons • Booth Tarkington
... paper shades filled with pin holes the only protection against him. Large companies of flies, too, arrived daily, and evidently came to stay; the butter turned to oil; eatables grew unpalatable; the whole house seemed stuffy ...
— Divers Women • Pansy and Mrs. C.M. Livingston
... this superb tradition, born to such a pride of race, From the doggy flair that tells you what a lineage you can trace You will draw, I trust, a solace for the strange and alien scene Where you undergo purgation in a stuffy quarantine. ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 159, September 15, 1920 • Various
... A cold stuffy smell came out of the darkness of the unused room. Barton struck a match, and, seeing a candle on the table, lit it The room had been left as it was when last it was tenanted. On the table were an empty bottle, two tumblers, ...
— The Mark Of Cain • Andrew Lang
... of evening thickened in the stuffy cabin room while the conversation went on. Father Beret presently lifted a puncheon in one corner of the floor and got out a large bottle, which bore a mildewed and faded French label, and with it a small iron ...
— Alice of Old Vincennes • Maurice Thompson
... was stuffy and crowded to its utmost limit, and Mr. Polly's skies were dark with the sense of irreparable acts. Everybody seemed noisy and greedy and doing foolish things. Miriam, still in that unbecoming hat—for presently they had to ...
— The History of Mr. Polly • H. G. Wells
... read dime novils. father dont cair. i dont cair much so long as father dont stop me. of course Cele cood read mine after i had got throug them, but Cele wont do that. she is two good for this wirld. it is funny. Cele is as stuffy as a bull dog but she has got a new England consciense, so father says, and if mother tells her not to read dime novils she woodent do it to saive her life. but if Cele thougt it was rong to read dime novils mother and father cood lam time out of her but they coodent maik her read them. she ...
— Brite and Fair • Henry A. Shute
... try to restore the victims to life; only one recovered sufficiently to be released, and Prince brought it in again, quite dead, five minutes later. I shut the little casement window, but the room became so hot and stuffy, and suspicious fumes of stale beer and tobacco began to assert their presence, so that I found myself obliged to open it again. Sometimes the victim's bones were crunched close to my ear, and I found more than one feather in my hair in the morning. Never was any ...
— Station Amusements • Lady Barker
... can, so that the air may get into every nook and corner. Never keep an unused room shut up. You know what a stagnant pool is like—no fresh water runs through it, it is green and slimy, and full of insects and dead things; you would not care to bathe in it. Well, still and stuffy air in a house is very much worse, only, unluckily, its dangers cannot be seen, but they are there lying in ambush for the ignorant person. Disease germs, poisonous gases, mildew, insects, dust, and dirt have it all their own way in stale, ...
— How Girls Can Help Their Country • Juliette Low
... disliking her vivacity. It was then that I began to take note of the furnishing of the room which, when I considered it, was so peculiarly not in the manner of the familiar English farm-house. Instead of the plush suite, the glass bell shades, the round centre table, and all the other stuffy misconceptions so firmly established by the civilisation of the nineteenth century, I discovered the authentic marks of the old English aesthetic—whitewashed walls and black oak. And the dresser, the settles, the oblong table, the rush-bottomed chairs, the big chest ...
— The Jervaise Comedy • J. D. Beresford
... a hot day, and now as the hour of twilight was approached it began to be close and stuffy in the rooms, so Master Martin led his eminent guest into the cool and spacious parlour-kitchen. For this was the name applied at that time to a place in the houses of the rich citizens which, although furnished as a kitchen, was never used as such—all kinds of valuable utensils and other necessaries ...
— Weird Tales, Vol. II. • E. T. A. Hoffmann
... or the bit of garden tucked in between two high walls—it was here, under the tent of sky rather than beneath the stuffy roofs, that the village lived, talked, quarrelled, bargained, worked, and more ...
— In and Out of Three Normady Inns • Anna Bowman Dodd
... palaces, diamonds and silver sleigh-bells play an important part, to say nothing of that journalistic trump card, the Secret Police! I wish one of these imaginative scribes could spend a winter evening (as I have so often done) in a stuffy hotel reading-room, with a Times five days old, wondering whether the Russians will ever provide a theatre sufficiently attractive to tempt a stranger out of doors after nightfall. In summer it is less dismal; there are gardens and restaurants, dancing gipsies and Hungarian ...
— From Paris to New York by Land • Harry de Windt
... woman very soon began to yawn. It was to be judged that the stuffy air of the car made her dozy. She kept her eyes open with an effort, her head lolling in spite of her drowsy efforts to hold it straight, yet all the while bearing herself after the fashion of one determined not ...
— Sundry Accounts • Irvin S. Cobb
... in the hymns. Rail, the baker's assistant, who had once been a steady attendant at Revivalist meetings, led off with a Moody and Sankey hymn, and the crew followed, bawling at the top pitch of their lungs, with now and then some suggestion of a tune. The little stuffy cabin rang with the noise. It burst upwards through the companion-way, loud and earnest and plaintive, and the winds caught it and carried it over the water, a thin and appealing cry. After the hymn Weeks prayed aloud, and extempore and most ...
— Ensign Knightley and Other Stories • A. E. W. Mason
... he met Miss Fancourt in Bond Street, at a private view of the works of a young artist in "black-and-white" who had been so good as to invite him to the stuffy scene. The drawings were admirable, but the crowd in the one little room was so dense that he felt himself up to his neck in a sack of wool. A fringe of people at the outer edge endeavoured by curving forward their backs and presenting, below them, a still more convex surface ...
— The Lesson of the Master • Henry James
... all my heart: it's a quiet sort of brotherhood that I want, and not too many rules. In fact, it is laws I want, and not rules, and to feel the laws rather than to know them, I can't help feeling that Newman spent too much of his time in the law-court, pleading and arguing: and it's stuffy in there! But he will remain for ever one of those figures whom the world will love, because it can pity him as well as admire him. Newman goes to one's head, you know, or to one's heart! And I expect that it was exactly what he wanted to do all ...
— Father Payne • Arthur Christopher Benson
... No. Thats just it: Ive no business to do. Do you know what my life is? I spend my days from nine to six—nine hours of daylight and fresh air—in a stuffy little den counting another man's money. Ive an intellect: a mind and a brain and a soul; and the use he makes of them is to fix them on his tuppences and his eighteenpences and his two pound seventeen and ...
— Misalliance • George Bernard Shaw
... youth he had made into a waste place and a prison to be made aware of the fact that it was quite impossible to stand in his presence and breathe easily. The air of the room in which Carovius chanced to be was heavy, stuffy, depressing. ...
— The Goose Man • Jacob Wassermann
... The balei was very stuffy, and little light or air could enter, so I continued my journey, arriving later in the afternoon at Beringan, where a tiny, but clean, pasang-grahan awaited us. It consisted mainly of four small bamboo stalls, in which there was room for all of us to sleep, ...
— Through Central Borneo: - An Account of Two Years' Travel in the Land of Head-Hunters - Between the Years 1913 and 1917 • Carl Lumholtz
... been pent up in cities," it ran. "The stuffy synagogue has been field and forest to them. But then there is more beauty in a heaven visioned by a congregation of worshipers than in the bluest heaven sung by the minstrel of landscapes. They are not worshipers. They are poets. It is not God they are speaking to. It is ...
— The Rise of David Levinsky • Abraham Cahan
... Watkins some hours later on the call of the calendar, looking quite vaguely as if he had never heard of the case before, round Part I, which was as usual crowded, hot, stuffy and smelling of unwashed linen and prisoners' lunch. "People versus Mathusek? What do you want done with this case, ...
— By Advice of Counsel • Arthur Train
... kind. He added to Captain Wilson—it seemed necessary to excuse himself to Captain Wilson—that the action of his heart always became more disordered if he mixed himself up with people who suffered from activity. The deck of the Ida was no place for him. The cabins were stuffy and the clamour of the donkey engine made him restless. He went ashore. Smith, who was a wonderfully sympathetic man, led him to a high balcony, well shaded, pleasantly airy. There Mr. Donovan established himself on a deck chair. He smoked ...
— The Island Mystery • George A. Birmingham
... Simon Yakovlevich (the young man had already managed to inform his neighbours that he was called Simon Yakovlevich Horizon) tired and irritated the passengers a trifle, just like the buzzing of a fly, that on a sultry summer day rhythmically beats against a window pane of a closed, stuffy room. But still, he knew how to raise their spirits: he showed tricks of magic; told Hebrew anecdotes, full of a fine humour of their own. When his wife would go out on the platform to refresh herself, he would tell such things that ...
— Yama (The Pit) • Alexandra Kuprin
... tiptoed tensely to the first floor. Once Sid imagined that he saw the fat man hiding in a nook in the hall where the evening gloom lay deepest, and they raised eery echoes through the house in their panic-stricken flight back to the top of the stairway. Past the fearsome corner again, through the stuffy kitchen where a ray of gas-light from the next house fell upon the tall, cylindrical water boiler and gave them a second fright, and out into the blessed freedom of the back yard. There they broke for the railroad ...
— A Son of the City - A Story of Boy Life • Herman Gastrell Seely
... the right side of the heart, after the age of forty." "I hold that the breathing of impure air is a fruitful source of disease of the right side of the heart occurring after middle age. How many people ignorantly favour its occurrence by confining themselves to closely shut, non-ventilated, stuffy, sitting rooms, in which the carbonic acid has accumulated to a poisonous degree in the air they respire! How are these evil results to be prevented? The simple answer is, let the rooms in which you live be effectively ventilated by an incoming current of fresh air, and so arranged ...
— The Art of Living in Australia • Philip E. Muskett (?-1909)
... to stand in an office window, idly watching passing ships, and longing to be at sea. It was quite another thing to awaken without foreknowledge, in a stuffy and careening berth, on a strange ship that was plowing through a storm, possessed of a wounded head and a gadabout stomach, and be informed casually by a grinning gnome that he was fleeing the law—that ...
— Fire Mountain - A Thrilling Sea Story • Norman Springer
... of TALKING?' said Cyril. 'What I want is for something to happen. It's awfully stuffy for a chap not to be allowed out in the evenings. There's simply nothing to do when you've ...
— The Phoenix and the Carpet • E. Nesbit
... brought a friend, who was as mad about old books and first editions, as he; a stuffy, elderly thing, who had never seen Lord Mountstuart's treasures before. As both were perfectly daft on the subject, they must have kept me lying there an hour, while they fussed about from one glass-protected book-case to another, murmuring admiration of ...
— The Powers and Maxine • Charles Norris Williamson
... the meanwhile—changed rulers, landmarks, systems, and ideas; not so my old acquaintance, the Feder! There's the dirty waiter flourishing his dirtier napkin; and there's the long low-ceilinged table-d'hote room, stuffy and smoky, and suffocating as ever; and there are the little grinning coteries of threes and fours round small tables soaking their rolls in chocolate, and puffing their "Cavours," with faces as innocent of soap ...
— Cornelius O'Dowd Upon Men And Women And Other Things In General - Originally Published In Blackwood's Magazine - 1864 • Charles Lever
... heavily on our hands. We felt the inevitable reaction from the first few days of excitement, and also missed the comforts and ease to which we had been accustomed in former hot seasons. The barracks were close and stuffy, and the officers, in place of the luxury of their bungalows and their pleasant mess, had to ...
— A Narrative Of The Siege Of Delhi - With An Account Of The Mutiny At Ferozepore In 1857 • Charles John Griffiths
... that small service to the child of her parent.... Dear Harriet, if you will come to Switzerland this summer, nothing but some insuperable impediment shall prevent my meeting you there. If you are "old and stiff," I am fat, stuffy, puffy, and old; and you are not of such proportions as to break a mule's back, whereas if I got on one I should expect it to cast itself and me down the first convenient precipice, only to avoid carrying ...
— Records of Later Life • Frances Anne Kemble
... utterance of this name in the prim, archaic, stuffy little back-parlour, Meshach raised the curtain on the last act of a drama which had slumbered for fifteen years, since the death of William Twemlow, and which the principal actors in it had long thought to be concluded ...
— Leonora • Arnold Bennett
... care!" the object of her solicitation retorted. "I won't wear a hat—they're hot and stuffy and ...
— Rosemary • Josephine Lawrence
... Mrs. Heald's passed in irritation and discomfort, and after dinner he stood at the window, his brain full of Maggie—her graces, her fascinating cunning, and all her picturesqueness. He knew nothing yet of his passion, nor did he think he could not bear to lose her until he went from the stuffy cottage towards his studio thinking of his portrait of her. He wanted to muse on the little eyes as he had rendered them. He saw the faults in the drawing hardly at all, and his pain softened and almost ceased when he took up the violin, but when he put it down the ...
— Spring Days • George Moore
... "If Mr. Thurston had not been of such tireless nature, I might have found leisure to admire the beauty of this most entrancing coast scenery, instead of puzzling over weary figures in a particularly stuffy saloon." ...
— Thurston of Orchard Valley • Harold Bindloss
... simply longing to get to work, whether here or anywhere else; it is 100 per cent better in this interesting old town doing for ourselves in the Convent than waiting in the stuffy hotel at Dublin. There is any amount to see—miles of our Transport going through the town with burly old shaggy English farm-horses, taken straight from the harvest, pulling the carts; French Artillery Reservists being taught ...
— Diary of a Nursing Sister on the Western Front, 1914-1915 • Anonymous
... that much out here," she went on ruminatingly. "The hotel where Mr. Dane sent me—it's nice enough, in its way, but very stuffy as regards the people—is twice as expensive as it would be in ...
— The Cinema Murder • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... was the answer from the western girl. "I'd rather eat in the open than in the stuffy dining-room ...
— Dave Porter At Bear Camp - The Wild Man of Mirror Lake • Edward Stratemeyer
... figure work so easily that one may say safety is to be found only in the most delicate relief. To make figures look round is to make them look stuffed. That stuffy images are to be found in mediaeval church work is only too true. In Gothic art one finds this quaint, perhaps, but it is perilously near the laughable. The point of the ridiculous is plainly overpassed in English ...
— Art in Needlework - A Book about Embroidery • Lewis F. Day
... delay took the necessary steps to procure rope and other stores. On returning to the port the Governor received them with the greatest kindness and hospitality, and as they sat in the cool dining-room in the castle, they agreed that it was a perfect paradise compared with their stuffy little cabin when the noonday sun was striking ...
— The Three Midshipmen • W.H.G. Kingston
... next morning, he could not help thinking that it would be great fun if the French were to arrive before he returned. The thought of a year or two passed in a stuffy office in London was not an agreeable one; while, were he to stay with the Bedouins, he might have a life of excitement and adventure. No doubt they and the other tribes would all fight against the invaders; impelled in the first ...
— At Aboukir and Acre - A Story of Napoleon's Invasion of Egypt • George Alfred Henty |
